Yes, they are called ads. It's called "Slashdot costs a couple million to run per year" - "Not a whole lot of people donate money to Slashdot" - "Slashdot needs to put these ads up in order to survive" - "If you enjoy reading slashdot at all, just let the fsking ads load and don't look at em, this way you'll be able to read Slashdot a year from now".
You guys who complain about these ads all the time are fscking morons. It's just one little ad on the page that doesn't block your view of anything. The only time I've actually even looked at the ad was when it originally was put in place. I noticed it, said "Hey, theres an ad, interesting. The Slashdot people and support must be starting to feel the pressure of running a website that serves up several million hits a day. I think'll I'll let the ad load so that they can bring in some revenue, and I can keep reading Slashdot!" Now, I just scroll right into the comments and haven't even really noticed the ad since.
Pull the rods out of your asses, realize that everything in life is not free, that people need to bring in money to survive, and just let the fscking ads load. It won't hurt you unless you pay for bandwidth by the byte - and it'll help out Slashdot, you know, that place that you've downloaded thousands upon thousands of pages of articles, comments, and discussions from? For free.
Based off of his first sentence, it kinda seems either he hasn't slept in a long time or he isn't a native speaker.
There's nothing wrong with this person's first sentence.
Our (technically savvy) lawyer has advised my company that 'incidental resources' do not a work derive.
It is a not-uncommon practice in writing to place a verb (derive) after a noun (a work) to provide emphasis. I'm not exactly sure if this would work within a sentence, but I see this sort of use at the end of sentences quite often. Although, it does increase the chances of people becoming confused, as you just have demonstrated, heh. So, it is usually not used in news reporting, or journal articles, etc - but rather as a sort of cliche statement just to provide emphasis and to make sure the reader is paying attention.
In fact, there are several common phrases that use this setup. I can't remember any exactly, but one went along the order of "Something and something do not a something make." lol, how's that for generality?
I'm not sure if it is exactly proper english, but it for sure is useable english, and quite acceptable for daily use - not necessarily indicative of foreign background.
Even if you are wearing a seatbelt, if your SUV rolls over while going 70 mph down the highway - you're gonna get hurt. Although obviously not as serious as had you not been wearing your seat belt.
How about saying that everyone is just responsible for their own actions? You come across a hot beverage, therby you know it is hot. How hot is it exactly? Who knows. But you do know one thing - that the beverage is hot. So, you should take all precautions to keep the hot beverage in a contained environment until you can determine the severity of the temperature. So, the fact that she was even opening the beverage in between her legs indicates that it was her fault that her legs were burned with the beverage. Who could have stopped the beverage from being hot? Well, McDs and possibly the lady (she could have let it cool down). But who could have stopped the lady's legs from getting burnt? Just the lady. Her legs getting burnt was her fault. If an attendant had been serving/giving the beverage to the lady and spilled the beverage on the lady, then it would be McD's fault - but that's a whole other situation.
Ya know, you're sick of how people that "are ignorant of the fundamental facts of this case feel qualified to pronounce judgement upon it". Well, I'm sick of all these people who always want to blame the woes in their lives on other people, businesses, the government, aliens, the cat next door, etc.
It's one thing if you are driving down the highway and your tires blow out, and you roll your vehicle and get seriously injured... it's an entirely different thing if you spill a scolding hot beverage on yourself.
The spacecraft is extremely cold, with many of the temperature readings at the bottom of their scales.
It would be interesting to see the actual temperature readings from Pioneer. Considering the location of the satellite relative to any decent heat sources, I would imagine that the temps would be approaching 0 K. Anyone seen the numbers reported anywhere?
Forget the invisible case, that server must be using some invisible bandwidth. Only 10 comments so far when I clicked the link - 15 minutes to load the pics.
Does anyone know if there are similar floppy-sized firewalls that will allow you to use 2 internet connections in one machine (as well as the LAN connection, so 3 NICs total - or 2 NICs and a modem, etc). In order to use one connection as a backup in case the other connection fails. Or, even better yet, use both connections at all time and piggy-back the bandwidth. I've looked into trying to do this with just Win XP, but the only way I would be able to get anything to work was to just install all three NICs and alternately disable whichever connection I did not want to use. And my luck with Linux hasn't been great in the past, so I left it at that for now - whether you could set something up like that there, I am not sure. It would be really useful to be able to piggy-back the bandwidth of the two connections, and even more useful to do it off a similar floppy firewall setup that I've seen on some of these pages.
If you are really worried about it, get a backup connection going. I have a cable connection, a dsl connection, and a 56k modem connection. Although, I have hardly ever fallen back to the 56k connection - if I need it, it's there. And, with the way some rates are going nowadays, you can get a 56k connection from a local isp for no more than a couple bucks a month - I've seen advertisements for 4.99/month service. As well, whether your local isp has rates that low or not, you can see if there is a different money saver agreement available or just work something out with the people, where you would be allowed maybe 50 hours of connection time per year - just for backup purposes - at a reduced cost.
And depending on your location, you could prolly sign up for some additional services - satellite,etc. The only problem is if your power goes out, or you are using different services that all run across the same line and the line is taken out, etc.
Still, even being able to switch back and forth between cable and dsl, or even piggy-backing the bandwidth, is pretty nice during those peak usage times.
does anyone else think this guy is a complete, well, retard for spending 250 hours on this thing? that is utterly crazy. considering the simplicity of such a project I'm not sure how one could even drag that sort of thing out. I would image you could spend, at the absolute maximum, 1 day designing the thing in a cad program. then, with all of the measurements and such, you could spend another extremely long drawn-out day trying to achieve all of the random parts, and getting the specs to your friend to cut out the pieces. Then, you could spend another 2 or 3 days at max (again, if you drag your feet the whole way, and take 20x as much time as necessary to do anything) to assemble everything, and you are done, having spent at the absolute maxium, 5 days, maybe 6 if you drag everything out even more (just add another buffer day in there). and, I'm thinking of all of these days as weekend days where you can give a large portion of the time to these tasks.
All in all, you end up with a max of 6 days, working perhaps 10 to 15 hours each day on the specific tasks, for a total of 90 hours, mind you these are non-consecutive weekend days, etc. I could imagine that if you tried for the fastest time possible that you could minimize the work time, and maximize trips, etc for efficiency and end up only working on the project for 10 or hours and you would achieve the same product.
This guy really had to waste some time in there, it would be interesting to see an itemized list of how he spent time on this project.... (Day 15 - Went to work for 9 hours, thought about project during the day, +9 Hours to Project time):)
Heh, try plopping down 100k to 250k for a useable heli in good working condition. Not to mention all of the upkeep, training that I'm guessing you prolly don't have already, etc.
Besides, if so few people travel on the road (I'm not sure what the 5000 figure is - individual users, ? , but it sounds like you mean to say that not many people travel down it) then why does the road need repairs? Not to mention that you sound like you don't think the repairs even need to be made.
Still, if you do the math, you'll find out real fast that it is still really cheap for each person to use the road. Lets assume that only 5000 individual people use the road each year. The road costs a million to repair and rennovate (I'm sure the bridge was a big portion of that). And, lets assume that we want the repairs paid off within 10 years. So, multiply 10 years by those 5000 people to get 50000 individual travelers per year on the road. Divide 1 mil by 50 thousand and you get $20 per each individual person that travels on the road each year - not that much for a years commute on a single road. Works out to about 5 cents a day for traveling back and forth on that road. Quite a bit less than a heli. Even if you add up all of the miles of road you may travel, tolls would be a more efficient cost than... say, gas taxes. Where in places like Michigan you pay on the order of 32 cents per gallon (somewhere in that neighborhood) of gas in taxes while the roads are still some of the worst across the country.
Park Roads are a different story, they are funded by the money the park receives through the Department of the Interior, the park entrance fees, camp fees, sales in the park stores, etc. A toll system wouldn't effect them because they are part of the park, and the upkeep of the park. Not to mention that since they are "less-often-travelled out-of-the-way", then since hardly anyone drives on them, one of these roads could be placed down and wouldn't need any service work for even a 100 years (assuming it was built well in the first place). However, quite a few of these roads that seem to not be travelled on much do in fact get travelled on a lot. And, they could be sufficiently supported through tolls even if they should be placed on a toll system. But they won't since they are part of the park.
Sorry, I had to reply to this troll because some other people might actually think along these lines.
The people who use the roads should pay to keep the roads up. As far as poor people are concerned in a previous post, they should be living in a condition where they don't need to travel in a car that often. If they can't do that, then I dunno how they survive even owning a car and paying for the commute. Otherwise, why do they think they should get a free ride on everyone else's taxes to use the roads without paying for them (yes, they do pay taxes, but quite a bit less, besides the straight gas tax like in Michigan).
For the people who do live in the east and have had a chance to drive on toll roads, ever notice how nice and kept up they are? While it still only costs a few bucks to travel quite a decent distance along them.
The only situation that would cause problems would be trying to make extremely small, local roads toll roads. I would still probably agree to support Main St.s, downtown streets, and alleys through public taxes. But all county, state, and federal roads should be supported through a toll system - once there is an efficient enough way to implement a system.
Did anyone actually follow the link, read, and then take Marty's work serious at all?
Initially, I read the header:
Marty Beckerman is an 18-year-old humor and opinion columnist living in tropical Anchorage, Alaska. His award-winning writing has appeared most frequently in The Anchorage Daily News, though occasionally manages to pop up in finer national publications.
and thought, wow this is interesting, a young adult doing some actual work as a columist and apparently being successful... But then I actually read part of the body of his work labeled You Just Can't Lose when Jesus is on Your Cheerleading Squad.
After reading the first page of his column, I stopped and returned to the top of the page to make sure I read this correctly:
Beckerman's first book, Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity was published September 2000 on Infected Press.
What sort of crack addict book company would publish the crap this kid is writing... well Infected Press I guess, but the question was rather hypothetical, heh.
This kid is not a columnist, nor does this work represent that he is able to relay any sort of humor. Although, it appeared that he was attempting to do some sort of column with some investigative reporting included in order to back up... the... uh... opinions? or something I guess... that he had. The column started off ok, not of very high quality but decent enough to continue reading. But there are various points in the column when you can realize that this guy is actually just a jackass trying to rant a few loose viewpoints. Here, he starts off asking about the modesty in the cheerleader's dress, and then before the topic has even been finished he throws in an inflammable remark-type question that the guest responds to anyhow (Marty = MB, Guest = Rose):
MB: You dress more modestly?
Rose: Yes.
MB:
Rose: Right.
MB: They're like, knee-level instead of mid-thigh, or what?
Rose: No.
MB: By the way, how does Jesus tie into cheerleading again?
Where did this guy get his interviewing skills? Seems like he pulled them out of his ass. Note to self: Never pull interviewing skills out of Marty's ass, you can get better ones out of your own ass.
He then goes on to ask completely ridiculous questions in what apparently is supposed to be a semi-serious interview:
MB: Would you ever, like, consider taking one of the girls' pompoms and painting it green, and then setting it on fire so it would be like the Burning Bush or something?
Rose: No. We're not extremists.
MB: But that would be hilarious, wouldn't it?
Apparently, Rose thinks she is too good for my question.
This could maybe be classified under humor (section: lame) but what is it doing in an interview within an investigative opinion column? This is ridiculous.
The first page then ends with this portion of a second interview with the president of another Christian Cheerleading Organization:
"So obviously both cheerleading and religion have come under scrutiny and criticism over the years," I say. "How would you respond to people who might themselves say 'Death To All Cheerleaders And There Is No God?'"
"They would say what?" Coleman inquires.
"You heard me," I inform. "They would say cheerleading is worthless, and then go preach glorious Atheism."
"Anytime you get students involved in anything extracurricular, that's meaningful. You get them off the streets. Cheerleading is a character-builder, and there's a lot of positive things you can learn from athletics. As for faith, I think you have to walk the walk."
It's at this point in the conversation I realize I'm completely bored, and proceed to hang up the phone. Fuck walking.
You can finally sort of see where this kid is coming from: a place of no direction, morality, or ethics. He starts out with an inflammable question, hoping to get a repsonse he can poke at. But, when he is faced with some actual facts and serious views about life in the response, he cowers away and avoids all contact.
I gave this guy a tad of my attention, believing that he might have some serious views on things... boy was I wrong. Don't let this guy pull a fast one on you - don't read his column (and possibly any other columns). He is, simply put, a jackass not worth paying attention to.
Would be really interesting to see how that sort of situation would be dealt with. Mentioned that they would be given basic rights - I would guess to exist or whatnot. I would think that something along those lines wouldn't come around until true AI was actually developed and implemented.
You can try and generalize things over and try to not make exceptions anywhere, but you gotta face the facts: MS isn't just any old company anymore. Ask the average Joe Schmoe what sort of hardware they have in their box and they'll respond "Windows".
MS has involved themselves in so many people's lives so deeply that they deserve seperate treatment, mostly resulting from the monopoly they've achieved. All of the arguments about them "just being another company" don't fit anymore and they deserve seperate treatment accordingly. It doesn't matter that other people will argue that you can't punish them for just doing well in their market because they are approaching levels of influence in people's lives that only the government has had in the past.
I personally wouldn't even mind seeing seperate committees being designated to oversee MS operations internally. These people would serve as a check on MS in the same way that they are checks in congress, the military, public services, and every other section of the government - because these areas, sections, or whatnot have a large influence on people's lives, so the people need some control over the influences (although here you can easily argue that the government doesn't correctly represent the people, and I would agree with that partly, but that's a whole other discussion). The only problem I would see here is that I wouldn't want the government taking over enough control to stifle growth and development - that would be completely counterproductive to most anyone's goals.
MS and their Windows OS line have been turned into a public service, and they need to be treated accordingly - just as every other public service is.
Haha, yeh really. I'm entirely sure what the timing on the slashbacks are anyhow. All I notice is that there are one or more a week, sometimes even skipping a week.
As for the content though, I found this demographic poll rather interesting:
Holy Smokes! Go to the iFilm site and check out all of the SuperBowl commercials. Then, when you're done, check out the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or People for the Eating of Tasty Animals if you prefer - heheh) commercials that FOX refused to play. They are pretty damn funny, and blatant too.
In one of them, they suggested that when a lady left her house, the two cats that stayed home started 'making little kitties'. Their message in the end was to have your animals spay or neutered, which is a good thing in order to control pet populations, but their advertisement didn't leave anything to the imaginiation.
And then in another commercial, they suggested that everyone should have meat-free holidays. Lmao! How can you not have Turkey on Turkey Day? Pretty ridiculous.
There are four commercials in all, and they're funny. Although PETA does have some good arguments on some topics, and helps support some good movements in everyday life, they go way overboard quite often, and these commercials show exactly that. Enjoy!
Now, are the hearings just closed to the media, or close completely to the public. I would think that they couldn't be, and that they shouldn't be since they would be publicly involved. If so, there could be people that would attend the hearings with recording devices, and they could just anonymously release them into the public, where media producers could randomly pick them up and use them. Kind of like the undercover investigations some news sources produce.
Exactly what I was thinking when I read that post. If humans spread out onto more and more planets, what is stopping our population from growing on past these feable billions we have? On to trillions? On to trillions of trillions, quintillions, or quintillions of quintillions? I mean just thinking about this is kinda interesting. Imagine if the human race (and subsequent variants on differing planets) numbered in the 10^20 or 10^30 range? 1000000000000000000000000000000 people is a helluva lot of people, and once we have the technology to move between solar systems, the growth and expansion will reach beyond exponential growth (heh, kinda oxymoronic in a way). And just for kicks, think about the logistical nightmare of this, imagine trying to track all these people, etc. I would imagine that you wouldn't be able to contact/interact with all but the couple billion right around you, or on the planet you live on at that time (unless we formulate extremely more efficient means of identification and such). It's really interesting just to sit back and think about these sorts of things. And ultimately, this sort of thing will happen, it'll just take time; just as long as we aren't wiped out in the mean time by asteroids, pollution, or a massive plague - and as long as the rapture doesn't happen any time soon, heh.
It would be fun to just warp ahead into the future and see where we are and what we are doing in 1000 years, or even a hundred or couple hundred for that matter.
I thought that episode was really interesting. Giving a different spin on seeing exactly what was going on - really very cool. And the story for that one wasn't too bad. I think it was about the invisible force that was killing people, and it was somehow related to love or the lack of love I think. A very cool episode nonetheless.
Here in Michigan, my household signed up for MediaOne RoadRunner Cable before @Home was even out on the market. And, as far as I understand it, we were completely on MediaOne networks. However, that was a couple years ago. Since all of the buy outs and such, I'm not entirely sure who owns and runs our cable, although we do pay bills to Comcast currently. With the latest happenings with @Home, Comcast/MediaOne/Etc has decided to do some sort of move with all of its customers, no matter where they are located. True, some of the newly acquired customers have been put on @Home networks, and the necessity for a switch can be seen there, but there are many users that are on existing non-@Home networks already. As well, the speeds are relatively fine, and the service is working fairly well. With the new switch though, every single Comcast/MediaOne/Etc customer will be moving, and I am deeply concerned about the reliability and speeds of the new service, as people who have already switched (mandatory switch date is Dec 31st 2001) have been complaining about poor service and un-comprable speeds. Anyone else have some light they can shine on the situation or who has already gone through the switch and can describe their experiences?
And just as a rant, every single Comcast/MediaOne/Etc user will lose their existing email addresses provided by the isp and will be provided new addresses. The old addresses will cease to work on Dec 31st 2001 - this has posed an extremely huge problem for many customers who have sent their email addresses out on resumes, business cards, christmas cards, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they are called ads. It's called "Slashdot costs a couple million to run per year" - "Not a whole lot of people donate money to Slashdot" - "Slashdot needs to put these ads up in order to survive" - "If you enjoy reading slashdot at all, just let the fsking ads load and don't look at em, this way you'll be able to read Slashdot a year from now".
You guys who complain about these ads all the time are fscking morons. It's just one little ad on the page that doesn't block your view of anything. The only time I've actually even looked at the ad was when it originally was put in place. I noticed it, said "Hey, theres an ad, interesting. The Slashdot people and support must be starting to feel the pressure of running a website that serves up several million hits a day. I think'll I'll let the ad load so that they can bring in some revenue, and I can keep reading Slashdot!" Now, I just scroll right into the comments and haven't even really noticed the ad since.
Pull the rods out of your asses, realize that everything in life is not free, that people need to bring in money to survive, and just let the fscking ads load. It won't hurt you unless you pay for bandwidth by the byte - and it'll help out Slashdot, you know, that place that you've downloaded thousands upon thousands of pages of articles, comments, and discussions from? For free.
Geez.
Um.
Based off of his first sentence, it kinda seems either he hasn't slept in a long time or he isn't a native speaker.
There's nothing wrong with this person's first sentence.
Our (technically savvy) lawyer has advised my company that 'incidental resources' do not a work derive.
It is a not-uncommon practice in writing to place a verb (derive) after a noun (a work) to provide emphasis. I'm not exactly sure if this would work within a sentence, but I see this sort of use at the end of sentences quite often. Although, it does increase the chances of people becoming confused, as you just have demonstrated, heh. So, it is usually not used in news reporting, or journal articles, etc - but rather as a sort of cliche statement just to provide emphasis and to make sure the reader is paying attention.
In fact, there are several common phrases that use this setup. I can't remember any exactly, but one went along the order of "Something and something do not a something make." lol, how's that for generality?
I'm not sure if it is exactly proper english, but it for sure is useable english, and quite acceptable for daily use - not necessarily indicative of foreign background.
Even if you are wearing a seatbelt, if your SUV rolls over while going 70 mph down the highway - you're gonna get hurt. Although obviously not as serious as had you not been wearing your seat belt.
How about saying that everyone is just responsible for their own actions? You come across a hot beverage, therby you know it is hot. How hot is it exactly? Who knows. But you do know one thing - that the beverage is hot. So, you should take all precautions to keep the hot beverage in a contained environment until you can determine the severity of the temperature. So, the fact that she was even opening the beverage in between her legs indicates that it was her fault that her legs were burned with the beverage. Who could have stopped the beverage from being hot? Well, McDs and possibly the lady (she could have let it cool down). But who could have stopped the lady's legs from getting burnt? Just the lady. Her legs getting burnt was her fault. If an attendant had been serving/giving the beverage to the lady and spilled the beverage on the lady, then it would be McD's fault - but that's a whole other situation.
Ya know, you're sick of how people that "are ignorant of the fundamental facts of this case feel qualified to pronounce judgement upon it". Well, I'm sick of all these people who always want to blame the woes in their lives on other people, businesses, the government, aliens, the cat next door, etc.
It's one thing if you are driving down the highway and your tires blow out, and you roll your vehicle and get seriously injured
Oops, forgot to close off my italics. Sorry 'bout that.
Larry Lasher mentioned in the message:
The spacecraft is extremely cold, with many of the temperature readings at the bottom of their scales.
It would be interesting to see the actual temperature readings from Pioneer. Considering the location of the satellite relative to any decent heat sources, I would imagine that the temps would be approaching 0 K. Anyone seen the numbers reported anywhere?
Forget the invisible case, that server must be using some invisible bandwidth. Only 10 comments so far when I clicked the link - 15 minutes to load the pics.
Does anyone know if there are similar floppy-sized firewalls that will allow you to use 2 internet connections in one machine (as well as the LAN connection, so 3 NICs total - or 2 NICs and a modem, etc). In order to use one connection as a backup in case the other connection fails. Or, even better yet, use both connections at all time and piggy-back the bandwidth. I've looked into trying to do this with just Win XP, but the only way I would be able to get anything to work was to just install all three NICs and alternately disable whichever connection I did not want to use. And my luck with Linux hasn't been great in the past, so I left it at that for now - whether you could set something up like that there, I am not sure. It would be really useful to be able to piggy-back the bandwidth of the two connections, and even more useful to do it off a similar floppy firewall setup that I've seen on some of these pages.
That's why I'm not gonna subscribe to slashdot.
If you are really worried about it, get a backup connection going. I have a cable connection, a dsl connection, and a 56k modem connection. Although, I have hardly ever fallen back to the 56k connection - if I need it, it's there. And, with the way some rates are going nowadays, you can get a 56k connection from a local isp for no more than a couple bucks a month - I've seen advertisements for 4.99/month service. As well, whether your local isp has rates that low or not, you can see if there is a different money saver agreement available or just work something out with the people, where you would be allowed maybe 50 hours of connection time per year - just for backup purposes - at a reduced cost.
And depending on your location, you could prolly sign up for some additional services - satellite,etc. The only problem is if your power goes out, or you are using different services that all run across the same line and the line is taken out, etc.
Still, even being able to switch back and forth between cable and dsl, or even piggy-backing the bandwidth, is pretty nice during those peak usage times.
does anyone else think this guy is a complete, well, retard for spending 250 hours on this thing? that is utterly crazy. considering the simplicity of such a project I'm not sure how one could even drag that sort of thing out. I would image you could spend, at the absolute maximum, 1 day designing the thing in a cad program. then, with all of the measurements and such, you could spend another extremely long drawn-out day trying to achieve all of the random parts, and getting the specs to your friend to cut out the pieces. Then, you could spend another 2 or 3 days at max (again, if you drag your feet the whole way, and take 20x as much time as necessary to do anything) to assemble everything, and you are done, having spent at the absolute maxium, 5 days, maybe 6 if you drag everything out even more (just add another buffer day in there). and, I'm thinking of all of these days as weekend days where you can give a large portion of the time to these tasks.
All in all, you end up with a max of 6 days, working perhaps 10 to 15 hours each day on the specific tasks, for a total of 90 hours, mind you these are non-consecutive weekend days, etc. I could imagine that if you tried for the fastest time possible that you could minimize the work time, and maximize trips, etc for efficiency and end up only working on the project for 10 or hours and you would achieve the same product.
This guy really had to waste some time in there, it would be interesting to see an itemized list of how he spent time on this project.... (Day 15 - Went to work for 9 hours, thought about project during the day, +9 Hours to Project time)
Heh, try plopping down 100k to 250k for a useable heli in good working condition. Not to mention all of the upkeep, training that I'm guessing you prolly don't have already, etc.
Besides, if so few people travel on the road (I'm not sure what the 5000 figure is - individual users, ? , but it sounds like you mean to say that not many people travel down it) then why does the road need repairs? Not to mention that you sound like you don't think the repairs even need to be made.
Still, if you do the math, you'll find out real fast that it is still really cheap for each person to use the road. Lets assume that only 5000 individual people use the road each year. The road costs a million to repair and rennovate (I'm sure the bridge was a big portion of that). And, lets assume that we want the repairs paid off within 10 years. So, multiply 10 years by those 5000 people to get 50000 individual travelers per year on the road. Divide 1 mil by 50 thousand and you get $20 per each individual person that travels on the road each year - not that much for a years commute on a single road. Works out to about 5 cents a day for traveling back and forth on that road. Quite a bit less than a heli. Even if you add up all of the miles of road you may travel, tolls would be a more efficient cost than... say, gas taxes. Where in places like Michigan you pay on the order of 32 cents per gallon (somewhere in that neighborhood) of gas in taxes while the roads are still some of the worst across the country.
Park Roads are a different story, they are funded by the money the park receives through the Department of the Interior, the park entrance fees, camp fees, sales in the park stores, etc. A toll system wouldn't effect them because they are part of the park, and the upkeep of the park. Not to mention that since they are "less-often-travelled out-of-the-way", then since hardly anyone drives on them, one of these roads could be placed down and wouldn't need any service work for even a 100 years (assuming it was built well in the first place). However, quite a few of these roads that seem to not be travelled on much do in fact get travelled on a lot. And, they could be sufficiently supported through tolls even if they should be placed on a toll system. But they won't since they are part of the park.
Sorry, I had to reply to this troll because some other people might actually think along these lines.
The people who use the roads should pay to keep the roads up. As far as poor people are concerned in a previous post, they should be living in a condition where they don't need to travel in a car that often. If they can't do that, then I dunno how they survive even owning a car and paying for the commute. Otherwise, why do they think they should get a free ride on everyone else's taxes to use the roads without paying for them (yes, they do pay taxes, but quite a bit less, besides the straight gas tax like in Michigan).
For the people who do live in the east and have had a chance to drive on toll roads, ever notice how nice and kept up they are? While it still only costs a few bucks to travel quite a decent distance along them.
The only situation that would cause problems would be trying to make extremely small, local roads toll roads. I would still probably agree to support Main St.s, downtown streets, and alleys through public taxes. But all county, state, and federal roads should be supported through a toll system - once there is an efficient enough way to implement a system.
Did anyone actually follow the link, read, and then take Marty's work serious at all?
Initially, I read the header:
Marty Beckerman is an 18-year-old humor and opinion columnist living in tropical Anchorage, Alaska. His award-winning writing has appeared most frequently in The Anchorage Daily News, though occasionally manages to pop up in finer national publications.
and thought, wow this is interesting, a young adult doing some actual work as a columist and apparently being successful... But then I actually read part of the body of his work labeled You Just Can't Lose when Jesus is on Your Cheerleading Squad.
After reading the first page of his column, I stopped and returned to the top of the page to make sure I read this correctly:
Beckerman's first book, Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity was published September 2000 on Infected Press.
What sort of crack addict book company would publish the crap this kid is writing... well Infected Press I guess, but the question was rather hypothetical, heh.
This kid is not a columnist, nor does this work represent that he is able to relay any sort of humor. Although, it appeared that he was attempting to do some sort of column with some investigative reporting included in order to back up... the... uh... opinions? or something I guess... that he had. The column started off ok, not of very high quality but decent enough to continue reading. But there are various points in the column when you can realize that this guy is actually just a jackass trying to rant a few loose viewpoints. Here, he starts off asking about the modesty in the cheerleader's dress, and then before the topic has even been finished he throws in an inflammable remark-type question that the guest responds to anyhow (Marty = MB, Guest = Rose):
MB: You dress more modestly?
Rose: Yes.
MB:
Rose: Right.
MB: They're like, knee-level instead of mid-thigh, or what?
Rose: No.
MB: By the way, how does Jesus tie into cheerleading again?
Where did this guy get his interviewing skills? Seems like he pulled them out of his ass. Note to self: Never pull interviewing skills out of Marty's ass, you can get better ones out of your own ass.
He then goes on to ask completely ridiculous questions in what apparently is supposed to be a semi-serious interview:
MB: Would you ever, like, consider taking one of the girls' pompoms and painting it green, and then setting it on fire so it would be like the Burning Bush or something?
Rose: No. We're not extremists.
MB: But that would be hilarious, wouldn't it?
Apparently, Rose thinks she is too good for my question.
This could maybe be classified under humor (section: lame) but what is it doing in an interview within an investigative opinion column? This is ridiculous.
The first page then ends with this portion of a second interview with the president of another Christian Cheerleading Organization:
"So obviously both cheerleading and religion have come under scrutiny and criticism over the years," I say. "How would you respond to people who might themselves say 'Death To All Cheerleaders And There Is No God?'"
"They would say what?" Coleman inquires.
"You heard me," I inform. "They would say cheerleading is worthless, and then go preach glorious Atheism."
"Anytime you get students involved in anything extracurricular, that's meaningful. You get them off the streets. Cheerleading is a character-builder, and there's a lot of positive things you can learn from athletics. As for faith, I think you have to walk the walk."
It's at this point in the conversation I realize I'm completely bored, and proceed to hang up the phone. Fuck walking.
You can finally sort of see where this kid is coming from: a place of no direction, morality, or ethics. He starts out with an inflammable question, hoping to get a repsonse he can poke at. But, when he is faced with some actual facts and serious views about life in the response, he cowers away and avoids all contact.
I gave this guy a tad of my attention, believing that he might have some serious views on things... boy was I wrong. Don't let this guy pull a fast one on you - don't read his column (and possibly any other columns). He is, simply put, a jackass not worth paying attention to.
Would be really interesting to see how that sort of situation would be dealt with. Mentioned that they would be given basic rights - I would guess to exist or whatnot. I would think that something along those lines wouldn't come around until true AI was actually developed and implemented.
You can try and generalize things over and try to not make exceptions anywhere, but you gotta face the facts: MS isn't just any old company anymore. Ask the average Joe Schmoe what sort of hardware they have in their box and they'll respond "Windows".
MS has involved themselves in so many people's lives so deeply that they deserve seperate treatment, mostly resulting from the monopoly they've achieved. All of the arguments about them "just being another company" don't fit anymore and they deserve seperate treatment accordingly. It doesn't matter that other people will argue that you can't punish them for just doing well in their market because they are approaching levels of influence in people's lives that only the government has had in the past.
I personally wouldn't even mind seeing seperate committees being designated to oversee MS operations internally. These people would serve as a check on MS in the same way that they are checks in congress, the military, public services, and every other section of the government - because these areas, sections, or whatnot have a large influence on people's lives, so the people need some control over the influences (although here you can easily argue that the government doesn't correctly represent the people, and I would agree with that partly, but that's a whole other discussion). The only problem I would see here is that I wouldn't want the government taking over enough control to stifle growth and development - that would be completely counterproductive to most anyone's goals.
MS and their Windows OS line have been turned into a public service, and they need to be treated accordingly - just as every other public service is.
Haha, yeh really. I'm entirely sure what the timing on the slashbacks are anyhow. All I notice is that there are one or more a week, sometimes even skipping a week.
As for the content though, I found this demographic poll rather interesting:
Gender?
male 91%
female 9%
no response
Holy Smokes! Go to the iFilm site and check out all of the SuperBowl commercials. Then, when you're done, check out the PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or People for the Eating of Tasty Animals if you prefer - heheh) commercials that FOX refused to play. They are pretty damn funny, and blatant too.
In one of them, they suggested that when a lady left her house, the two cats that stayed home started 'making little kitties'. Their message in the end was to have your animals spay or neutered, which is a good thing in order to control pet populations, but their advertisement didn't leave anything to the imaginiation.
And then in another commercial, they suggested that everyone should have meat-free holidays. Lmao! How can you not have Turkey on Turkey Day? Pretty ridiculous.
There are four commercials in all, and they're funny. Although PETA does have some good arguments on some topics, and helps support some good movements in everyday life, they go way overboard quite often, and these commercials show exactly that. Enjoy!
Now, are the hearings just closed to the media, or close completely to the public. I would think that they couldn't be, and that they shouldn't be since they would be publicly involved. If so, there could be people that would attend the hearings with recording devices, and they could just anonymously release them into the public, where media producers could randomly pick them up and use them. Kind of like the undercover investigations some news sources produce.
Exactly what I was thinking when I read that post. If humans spread out onto more and more planets, what is stopping our population from growing on past these feable billions we have? On to trillions? On to trillions of trillions, quintillions, or quintillions of quintillions? I mean just thinking about this is kinda interesting. Imagine if the human race (and subsequent variants on differing planets) numbered in the 10^20 or 10^30 range? 1000000000000000000000000000000 people is a helluva lot of people, and once we have the technology to move between solar systems, the growth and expansion will reach beyond exponential growth (heh, kinda oxymoronic in a way). And just for kicks, think about the logistical nightmare of this, imagine trying to track all these people, etc. I would imagine that you wouldn't be able to contact/interact with all but the couple billion right around you, or on the planet you live on at that time (unless we formulate extremely more efficient means of identification and such). It's really interesting just to sit back and think about these sorts of things. And ultimately, this sort of thing will happen, it'll just take time; just as long as we aren't wiped out in the mean time by asteroids, pollution, or a massive plague - and as long as the rapture doesn't happen any time soon, heh.
It would be fun to just warp ahead into the future and see where we are and what we are doing in 1000 years, or even a hundred or couple hundred for that matter.
/.ed already? wow, sad.
I thought that episode was really interesting. Giving a different spin on seeing exactly what was going on - really very cool. And the story for that one wasn't too bad. I think it was about the invisible force that was killing people, and it was somehow related to love or the lack of love I think. A very cool episode nonetheless.
Does it really matter all the much? Most of the stuff spyware could obtain from my uses would be pretty useless anyhow.
Here in Michigan, my household signed up for MediaOne RoadRunner Cable before @Home was even out on the market. And, as far as I understand it, we were completely on MediaOne networks. However, that was a couple years ago. Since all of the buy outs and such, I'm not entirely sure who owns and runs our cable, although we do pay bills to Comcast currently. With the latest happenings with @Home, Comcast/MediaOne/Etc has decided to do some sort of move with all of its customers, no matter where they are located. True, some of the newly acquired customers have been put on @Home networks, and the necessity for a switch can be seen there, but there are many users that are on existing non-@Home networks already. As well, the speeds are relatively fine, and the service is working fairly well. With the new switch though, every single Comcast/MediaOne/Etc customer will be moving, and I am deeply concerned about the reliability and speeds of the new service, as people who have already switched (mandatory switch date is Dec 31st 2001) have been complaining about poor service and un-comprable speeds. Anyone else have some light they can shine on the situation or who has already gone through the switch and can describe their experiences?
And just as a rant, every single Comcast/MediaOne/Etc user will lose their existing email addresses provided by the isp and will be provided new addresses. The old addresses will cease to work on Dec 31st 2001 - this has posed an extremely huge problem for many customers who have sent their email addresses out on resumes, business cards, christmas cards, etc.