She wasn't driving with the cup between her legs. She (stupidly) placed the cup between her legs to get the lid off, because the lid had melted onto the cup due to the extremely excessive heat. McDonald's had been warned it was much, much hotter than anything a human should drink.
She was found partially responsible due to her stupidity. But, as McDonald's was warned repeatedly to turn down the temperature and ignored the warnings, they were partially responsible, too. And then all she wanted was help with the medical costs. It was the jury that added the big extra award (which was taken away on appeal).
You don't get to be "private" in public, per se, but I do feel it is important that you be able to be "anonymous" in many cases.
"So, how can you be anonymous when you have a license plate?" you might ask.
Simple, there are 300 million people in the country and, at any given time, no one -cares- to read your plate and track where you are. If you commit a crime, or if someone with a similar car committed a crime, then sure, a police officer might see your car and check your plates. But, if they don't match, the officer will move on. The event is eventually forgotten and there is no "proof" that the event ever happened.
Cameras that record change that. 25 years from now, someone can go back to a camera and see who passed in front of it last night. This where anonymity is lost.
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Let's assume you go to church. Again, outside of the church itself -no one cares-. But, add a camera, and the government knows everyone who visted a certain mosque, ever. Or, they know everyone who attended mass last weekend.
In summary, yes, if there is reason to care, the government can already track you in public. But this takes the efforts of a human, which means it is rare, costly, and, most importantly, not permanent. Eliminate human involvement from the monitoring and it becomes routine, pervasive, and, worst of all, permanent.
>> Banning "dangerous things" is always a bad idea. I have a hammer. It can be used as a weapon. Should it be banned? The distinction between "tool" and "weapon" has nothing to do with the item.
How many people can you kill with that hammer before a policeman with his standard side arm stops you?
If you instead had an automatic assault rifle with a 50-round clip, how many people could you kill before a policeman with his standard side arm stops you?
If you had a small nuclear device, how many people could you kill before a policeman with his standard side arm stops you?
I think there's a good reason to ban some things that might be called "arms" today, but by no means were envisoned when the second amendment was written. You can have as many muzzle loading weapons as you want. Heck, you can even have handguns with 10 round clips. (I'm actually quite partial to shotguns myself.)
Certainly, any of those items could harm or kill 1, 2, 5, 10 people before the assailant is stopped. That's a risk we willingly choose to take. But when the assailant can kill 50+ people with ease, some consideration should be taken to restrict access to the means. (Within reason - something often lacking in any political debate.)
Theoretically, shooting nuclear waste into the sun would get rid of it, as the sun could break it down into component atoms that would mix in with the already-present radioactive soup. (Someone who has studied this aspect, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
However, the other aspect - getting the waste to the sun - makes this completely impossible. There is no method of launch that is safe enough to risk a large payload of nuclear waste. Perhaps - just perhaps - if we would build our nuclear plants on the moon, we could safely dispose of the waste of those plants by jettisoning. No way on earth.
Darn, why did I have to blow mod points on garbage last Friday when I could have used them here?
Parent poster has nailed this concept perfectly. It is impossible to have a pure, free market on services delivered to our homes via cable. Why? Because we limit the number of cables that can be pulled to the home. Even if a second company can pull cable, would you want your street torn up for the 3rd? The 4th? The 10th? No, if we let every company that wants to provide a home cable service the opportunity to pull their own wires, then the public would scream for regulation.
Instead, the cables going into the home have to be limited. This can be done by a private company, who might then open the lines to others. (Aka the electric grid in Texas after deregulation.) Or, it can be done by the community, if it feels that this is a necessary infrastructure for public funds.
The only problems occur when the community tries to provide services over the lines. Then, competition can be stifled. But if the lines are pulled and maintained by the city, and any company can offer services over those lines (paying the city for use of the lines, which covers the cost of maintenance and nothing more) then the best, realistic free market services are available.
Our company still has wash machines for a few products that can't use 'no clean' solder flux for whatever reason. Almost every product I've designed went through a de-ionized water wash at some point.
Contrary to any widespread notion, almost every electronics component can survive being completely immersed/soaked in water. (It can even be beneficial, like when washing off acidic flux residues, or perhaps interesting smells.)
What electronics cannot survive is being -powered- while wet, as the shorts could cause currents that could burn out semiconductors. So, make sure there are no batteries, or even charged capacitors, anywhere on the hardware.
Off-topic, but if you are at MIT, then perhaps your requests are routing through Internet 2? Just a thought. Try tracerouting to the site and see what you get.
You don't get to be "private" in public, per se, but I do feel it is important that you be able to be "anonymous" in many cases.
"So, how can you be anonymous when you have a license plate?" you might ask.
Simple, there are 300 million people in the country and, at any given time, no one -cares- to read your plate and track where you are. If you commit a crime, or if someone with a similar car committed a crime, then sure, a police officer might see your car and check your plates. But, if they don't match, the officer will move on. The event is eventually forgotten and there is no "proof" that the event ever happened.
Cameras that record change that. 25 years from now, someone can go back to a camera and see who passed in front of it last night. This where anonymity is lost.
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Let's assume you go to church. Again, outside of the church itself -no one cares-. But, add a camera, and the government knows everyone who visted a certain mosque, ever. Or, they know everyone who attended mass last weekend.
In summary, yes, if there is reason to care, the government can already track you in public. But this takes the efforts of a human, which means it is rare, costly, and, most importantly, not permanent. Eliminate human involvement from the monitoring and it becomes routine, pervasive, and, worst of all, permanent.
From 17 U.S.C. 1201, found somewhere on the internet (so you know its accurate):
(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. [...] [17 U.S.C.A. S 1201 et seq.].
(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).
----
I'm sure there are many interpretations of that law. But, if one owns the rights to a work, making a copy of that work does not infringe on the rights of the owner, and is thus a "noninfringing use" of the work.
Also, article (A) only applies to works protected under copyright law. As the owner of your work, you can just place your own pictures in the public domain. Then they aren't protected by copyright law, and the DMCA protections clearly don't apply, and you can circumvent all you want.
>> You're basically renting them.... You just don't get to keep it. More like leasing than renting, I guess.
You described it correctly - as the company that markets it would. However, unless I have to sign a lease agreement to take one of these home, my transaction to purchase it can be considered final. There's no law that stops me from buying a radio, or a camera, or a disposable camera, or a disposable digital camera, then taking it home and smashing it with a mallet. Or, from taking it home and scrapping it for parts.
The DMCA might (might**) prevent me from reverse engineering the encoding scheme on the memory to extract my pictures, but it certainly doesn't stop me from reusing the LCD screen.
** "might" is important. As the owner of the photographs I took, I have the rights to those pictures. It's not illegal to circumvent copy protections if you own the rights to copy the materials in question.
Of course, if they do make you sign a lease agreement when you get the camera, which could include a requirement that you not destroy the camera, or that you cannot claim ownership of the photos in their encoded form, all of this may be moot.
I'm amazed how you quoted parts of the article to completely misinterpret the meaning, while advancing your own agenda. Here is the core of his argument:
It's no accident the automakers churn out so many SUVs that break the 6K barrier. By doing so, these "trucks" (and that's how they're classified by the U.S. Department of Transportation) qualify for a huge federal tax break. If you claim you use a 3-ton truck exclusively for work, you can write it off immediately. All of it. Up to $100,000 (in fact, Congress raised the limit from $25,000 just last year). Heavy SUVs qualify for similar state tax breaks in California (up to $25,000) and elsewhere. These vehicles are also exempt from the federal "gas guzzler tax" because they're trucks. (And you probably know that many SUVs are exempt from the tougher gas mileage and safety standards of cars because they're classified as trucks, but that's another story.)
Tax advisers actually warn their clients to make sure they buy vehicles that are heavy enough to qualify for the tax breaks. Some offer helpful lists of which SUVs will tip the IRS's scales.
(California's Legislative Analyst's Office estimates the average L.A. driver pays $700 a year in vehicle repairs because of crummy roads.) Yet despite the increased road wear their vehicles cause, heavy SUV owners can take tax breaks that mean they pony up much less to the tax system that funds street maintenance.
As it stands now, big-SUV drivers have it both ways: They use their trucklike status when it benefits them, yet they ignore the more onerous restrictions that "real" truck drivers face.
So you can buy a monster truck/SUV if you want to, no problem, but you damn well better pay the same taxes I do to buy a vehicle, and you damn well better pay far, far more toward road repair than I do. And that is the common sense that most people seem to lack.
Re:Ah, the mandatory fscking stupid conspiracy the
on
Artificial Prion Created
·
· Score: 4, Funny
>> You know what? There's a medical name for that. It's called "Paranoia".
There are treatments for paranoia, but I know the world government is keeping the best of them hidden from us...;p
>> So if a user is "left out in the cold" because they choose not to utilize freely available information designed to help them... Am I supposed to feel sorry for them?
Freely available and convenient are two completely different things. For example, the departement of motor vehicles offers a walk-in counter to register your car, open Monday-Friday 8 to 5. It is freely available to all, but it isn't very convenient to folks who work during that time. Those people are "left out in the cold" because they choose to not use the resources available to them.
For people who hate reading for hours on end in front of their computer, perhaps due to back pain or eye strain, but also don't want to waste time printing an entire manual from web pages, purchasing one can be very convenient.
No, they aren't really "left out in the cold" because there are resources available on demand, over the internet, but they certainly aren't morons to prefer their information delivered in a different media, and not want to waste their own time moving data to that media.
As another example, are Star Wars fans who want the movies on DVD "left out in the cold"? They could have used video capture techniques with a DVD burner to produce DVD versions from their VHS tapes years ago, or they could have just captured them to watch on their PC. The quality isn't as good, and the hassle is higher, but the same is true with looking up data on the web or printing your own manual.
Linux is, alas, no where equal to Windows - yet. I use Xandros 2.0, one of the most polished, easy to install, easy to use Linux distributions. It's certainly useable, yes, and I like it; however, I would compare its ease-of-use and GUI refinements to that of Windows 3.11.
I think the next generation of Linux distributions might reach the useability level of Windows 95/98, and hopefully soon thereafter the useability of Win2k. At this point, they've reached the stage of "good enough", and it doesn't matter how much more Microsoft has improved its newer OSes since then - Linux useability and GUI will be "good enough" and people will be ready to adopt it for the other benefits.
Dude, that's stupid as shit. Hello? 2004? Spam? I don't give a crap about someone trying to contact me via an email address that is publically available. If they care that much to reach me, then can send me a letter - my physical address in the domain registration is accurate.
No, math is not an athletic sport. But it is still something to compete in and be proud of. I got a few nice trips and multiple days out of school in high school to travel for math competitions, and I wasn't particularly good at them.
What upsets me more, though, is how academic and athletic achievement are recognized so differently.
For example, a student athlete has their records published in the newspaper, the yearbook, and is recognized at student events. The student athletes that aren't as good don't get as much recognition, but their performances are public record as well.
Contrast this with schools that are having to eliminate 'A' and 'B' honor rolls, because publication of such rolls shows that everyone not on those lists are 'C' or below students.
So someone who's even marginally good at sports get to see their name in the paper, and get talked about at school, while those who are good at academics might get a note from the teacher with an extra smiley face sticker. No wonder academic instruction in the US is going downhill.
Yes, I agree. I have my own domain, with all default mail going to a "junk" folder.
You should start out by sending anything for "sales@domain.com" or "postmaster@domain.com" straight to bit bucket hell. I get plenty at those addresses, usually of the sort trying to sell me things to improve the visibility of my web business (I have no web business).
The most important part, though, is being able to -make up a new address for each person you give one to--. This is VERY important. If you buy tickets online, use "cinemark@domain.com" or whatever chain you use. If you give an email address to a restaurant, give them "tgifridays@domain.com", etc. This way, you can receive confirmation emails, coupons, etc., for as long as you want to, but if they won't abide by their removal policy, or if you get spam, you can shut them off and know exactly where it came from.
The same is true when you give your address out in person. It is harder to give out an obviously "made-up" address to a real person, but it can be done. Just use a random string of numbers and letters that means something to you, but looks like an old-style email address to them, i.e. "qrt045@domain.com" for the lady at the morgage office that said she would email you the paperwork.
I have yet to need to block an address that I've given out in this way, but I like having the flexibility to give out unique addresses to everyone without having to make 1,000 hotmail accouts before hand.
>> If his only transgression were for the love of the game, the world would have forgiven him quickly... the court of public opinion would have ruled in his favor.... If it's true that his views are against the people of Jewish faith and that he applauds the horror of 9-11, then the court of public opinion will rule against him if it hasn't already.
He sounds like a stupid jackhole with more ego than higher intellect (with the exception of chess), but I'm still glad the "court of public opinion" has no bearing whatsoever on how he will be tried or sentenced. He opinions on 9/11 or the Holocaust, as stupid as they may be, are still his to say, and they cannot be used to influence his prosecution in a criminal case unless he tries to use them in his defense.
I find it more telling, though, that we'll seek to retain a guy who played a game of chess in the wrong country, while letting one who defected to the wrong country, technically at war with us, then made propaganda films for them, be allowed safe passage just because he's sick. I hope to see consistency, one way or another.
Interestingly, I saw Simon and Garfunkel in concert in Dallas last Thursday. During one of the songs ("Cecilia") they whipped out - you guessed it - a Theremin.
The big screen over the stage just showed the musician's two hands hovering in the spotlight. All the folks around us in the audience were whispering "What is that?" while my wife and I were quite impressed. (It was one of the band members, not S or G playing it.)
For what it's worth, the Republican National Committee is running Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000, while the Democratic National Committee is running Apache on Linux.
As of this writing, November 5, 2003, the RNC has an uptime of 4.26 days (maximum of 39.04) and a 90-day moving average of 16.91. The DNC has an uptime of 445.02 days (also the maximum) and a 90-day moving average of 395.38 days.
>>>>Slashdotters were (rightfully) up in arms a few years back when Intel planned on embedding unique IDs into their Pentium III chips. Yet we blindly accept VINs and other intrusions into our privacy without question. Why?
>>Maybe, just maybe,/.ers see VINs as just a serial number on a car, not some sort of gov't tracking system devised by the Illuminati. I think most/.ers don't like SSNs (to use your other example), but they are way, WAY too entrenched to just rebel against. Pick your battles, as they say.
Now, if the government mandated that VINs be implanted in RFID chips, and then the government started installing readers on roadsides to record where I traveled, -then- I would be worried.
Databases that require a human to connect point A to point B (i.e. that car with me) don't bother me that much, because most humans have better things to do and the data isn't necessarily stored for all of time.
>> How the hell is it OOO's fault if the file is password protected?
It's not. It's OO.o's fault that it apparently cannot open password-protected Excel files, because this new competition apparently can. I assume both Excel and PlanMaker brought up windows, let the user enter the password, then displayed the file, while OO.o just errored out.
I really, really, tried to like OO.o's spreadsheet for Linux. I couldn't do it. I switched back to Excel (via Crossover Office) and am happy until something better comes along.
Nikola Tesla experimented with power transmission in many different forms. One of them (probably done more for show than anything else) was to transmit power across human skin, at frequencies high enough so that it would not penetrate the surface to cause burning.
If they do anything of the sort in their patent, we've got 100-year old prior art.
Slashdot Mirror
You know a company is great that:
1. Resizes your browser (overrides the nView desktop manager to maximize it across both monitors).
2. Refuses to let you in without Flash.
Eesh.
Mr Clueless,
She wasn't driving with the cup between her legs. She (stupidly) placed the cup between her legs to get the lid off, because the lid had melted onto the cup due to the extremely excessive heat. McDonald's had been warned it was much, much hotter than anything a human should drink.
She was found partially responsible due to her stupidity. But, as McDonald's was warned repeatedly to turn down the temperature and ignored the warnings, they were partially responsible, too. And then all she wanted was help with the medical costs. It was the jury that added the big extra award (which was taken away on appeal).
Thanks,
Cluebat
. Repost again...
You don't get to be "private" in public, per se, but I do feel it is important that you be able to be "anonymous" in many cases.
"So, how can you be anonymous when you have a license plate?" you might ask.
Simple, there are 300 million people in the country and, at any given time, no one -cares- to read your plate and track where you are. If you commit a crime, or if someone with a similar car committed a crime, then sure, a police officer might see your car and check your plates. But, if they don't match, the officer will move on. The event is eventually forgotten and there is no "proof" that the event ever happened.
Cameras that record change that. 25 years from now, someone can go back to a camera and see who passed in front of it last night. This where anonymity is lost.
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Let's assume you go to church. Again, outside of the church itself -no one cares-. But, add a camera, and the government knows everyone who visted a certain mosque, ever. Or, they know everyone who attended mass last weekend.
In summary, yes, if there is reason to care, the government can already track you in public. But this takes the efforts of a human, which means it is rare, costly, and, most importantly, not permanent. Eliminate human involvement from the monitoring and it becomes routine, pervasive, and, worst of all, permanent.
>> Banning "dangerous things" is always a bad idea. I have a hammer. It can be used as a weapon. Should it be banned? The distinction between "tool" and "weapon" has nothing to do with the item.
How many people can you kill with that hammer before a policeman with his standard side arm stops you?
If you instead had an automatic assault rifle with a 50-round clip, how many people could you kill before a policeman with his standard side arm stops you?
If you had a small nuclear device, how many people could you kill before a policeman with his standard side arm stops you?
I think there's a good reason to ban some things that might be called "arms" today, but by no means were envisoned when the second amendment was written. You can have as many muzzle loading weapons as you want. Heck, you can even have handguns with 10 round clips. (I'm actually quite partial to shotguns myself.)
Certainly, any of those items could harm or kill 1, 2, 5, 10 people before the assailant is stopped. That's a risk we willingly choose to take. But when the assailant can kill 50+ people with ease, some consideration should be taken to restrict access to the means. (Within reason - something often lacking in any political debate.)
Theoretically, shooting nuclear waste into the sun would get rid of it, as the sun could break it down into component atoms that would mix in with the already-present radioactive soup. (Someone who has studied this aspect, please correct me if I'm wrong.)
However, the other aspect - getting the waste to the sun - makes this completely impossible. There is no method of launch that is safe enough to risk a large payload of nuclear waste. Perhaps - just perhaps - if we would build our nuclear plants on the moon, we could safely dispose of the waste of those plants by jettisoning. No way on earth.
Darn, why did I have to blow mod points on garbage last Friday when I could have used them here?
Parent poster has nailed this concept perfectly. It is impossible to have a pure, free market on services delivered to our homes via cable. Why? Because we limit the number of cables that can be pulled to the home. Even if a second company can pull cable, would you want your street torn up for the 3rd? The 4th? The 10th? No, if we let every company that wants to provide a home cable service the opportunity to pull their own wires, then the public would scream for regulation.
Instead, the cables going into the home have to be limited. This can be done by a private company, who might then open the lines to others. (Aka the electric grid in Texas after deregulation.) Or, it can be done by the community, if it feels that this is a necessary infrastructure for public funds.
The only problems occur when the community tries to provide services over the lines. Then, competition can be stifled. But if the lines are pulled and maintained by the city, and any company can offer services over those lines (paying the city for use of the lines, which covers the cost of maintenance and nothing more) then the best, realistic free market services are available.
Our company still has wash machines for a few products that can't use 'no clean' solder flux for whatever reason. Almost every product I've designed went through a de-ionized water wash at some point.
Contrary to any widespread notion, almost every electronics component can survive being completely immersed/soaked in water. (It can even be beneficial, like when washing off acidic flux residues, or perhaps interesting smells.)
What electronics cannot survive is being -powered- while wet, as the shorts could cause currents that could burn out semiconductors. So, make sure there are no batteries, or even charged capacitors, anywhere on the hardware.
Off-topic, but if you are at MIT, then perhaps your requests are routing through Internet 2? Just a thought. Try tracerouting to the site and see what you get.
You don't get to be "private" in public, per se, but I do feel it is important that you be able to be "anonymous" in many cases.
"So, how can you be anonymous when you have a license plate?" you might ask.
Simple, there are 300 million people in the country and, at any given time, no one -cares- to read your plate and track where you are. If you commit a crime, or if someone with a similar car committed a crime, then sure, a police officer might see your car and check your plates. But, if they don't match, the officer will move on. The event is eventually forgotten and there is no "proof" that the event ever happened.
Cameras that record change that. 25 years from now, someone can go back to a camera and see who passed in front of it last night. This where anonymity is lost.
Let's assume you buy pr0n from a shop. Your license plate is visible to all who care to look, but again, -no one cares-. Now add a "911 cam" with a tape recorder, and, at a later date or with the use of more computers, the names of every person who ever visited the store can be retrieved. There goes your political career.
Let's assume you go to church. Again, outside of the church itself -no one cares-. But, add a camera, and the government knows everyone who visted a certain mosque, ever. Or, they know everyone who attended mass last weekend.
In summary, yes, if there is reason to care, the government can already track you in public. But this takes the efforts of a human, which means it is rare, costly, and, most importantly, not permanent. Eliminate human involvement from the monitoring and it becomes routine, pervasive, and, worst of all, permanent.
From 17 U.S.C. 1201, found somewhere on the internet (so you know its accurate):
(A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. [...] [17 U.S.C.A. S 1201 et seq.].
(B) The prohibition contained in subparagraph (A) shall not apply to persons who are users of a copyrighted work which is in a particular class of works, if such persons are, or are likely to be in the succeeding 3-year period, adversely affected by virtue of such prohibition in their ability to make noninfringing uses of that particular class of works under this title, as determined under subparagraph (C).
----
I'm sure there are many interpretations of that law. But, if one owns the rights to a work, making a copy of that work does not infringe on the rights of the owner, and is thus a "noninfringing use" of the work.
Also, article (A) only applies to works protected under copyright law. As the owner of your work, you can just place your own pictures in the public domain. Then they aren't protected by copyright law, and the DMCA protections clearly don't apply, and you can circumvent all you want.
>> You're basically renting them. ... You just don't get to keep it. More like leasing than renting, I guess.
You described it correctly - as the company that markets it would. However, unless I have to sign a lease agreement to take one of these home, my transaction to purchase it can be considered final. There's no law that stops me from buying a radio, or a camera, or a disposable camera, or a disposable digital camera, then taking it home and smashing it with a mallet. Or, from taking it home and scrapping it for parts.
The DMCA might (might**) prevent me from reverse engineering the encoding scheme on the memory to extract my pictures, but it certainly doesn't stop me from reusing the LCD screen.
** "might" is important. As the owner of the photographs I took, I have the rights to those pictures. It's not illegal to circumvent copy protections if you own the rights to copy the materials in question.
Of course, if they do make you sign a lease agreement when you get the camera, which could include a requirement that you not destroy the camera, or that you cannot claim ownership of the photos in their encoded form, all of this may be moot.
I'm amazed how you quoted parts of the article to completely misinterpret the meaning, while advancing your own agenda. Here is the core of his argument:
It's no accident the automakers churn out so many SUVs that break the 6K barrier. By doing so, these "trucks" (and that's how they're classified by the U.S. Department of Transportation) qualify for a huge federal tax break. If you claim you use a 3-ton truck exclusively for work, you can write it off immediately. All of it. Up to $100,000 (in fact, Congress raised the limit from $25,000 just last year). Heavy SUVs qualify for similar state tax breaks in California (up to $25,000) and elsewhere. These vehicles are also exempt from the federal "gas guzzler tax" because they're trucks. (And you probably know that many SUVs are exempt from the tougher gas mileage and safety standards of cars because they're classified as trucks, but that's another story.)
Tax advisers actually warn their clients to make sure they buy vehicles that are heavy enough to qualify for the tax breaks. Some offer helpful lists of which SUVs will tip the IRS's scales.
(California's Legislative Analyst's Office estimates the average L.A. driver pays $700 a year in vehicle repairs because of crummy roads.) Yet despite the increased road wear their vehicles cause, heavy SUV owners can take tax breaks that mean they pony up much less to the tax system that funds street maintenance.
As it stands now, big-SUV drivers have it both ways: They use their trucklike status when it benefits them, yet they ignore the more onerous restrictions that "real" truck drivers face.
So you can buy a monster truck/SUV if you want to, no problem, but you damn well better pay the same taxes I do to buy a vehicle, and you damn well better pay far, far more toward road repair than I do. And that is the common sense that most people seem to lack.
>> You know what? There's a medical name for that. It's called "Paranoia".
;p
There are treatments for paranoia, but I know the world government is keeping the best of them hidden from us...
>> So if a user is "left out in the cold" because they choose not to utilize freely available information designed to help them... Am I supposed to feel sorry for them?
Freely available and convenient are two completely different things. For example, the departement of motor vehicles offers a walk-in counter to register your car, open Monday-Friday 8 to 5. It is freely available to all, but it isn't very convenient to folks who work during that time. Those people are "left out in the cold" because they choose to not use the resources available to them.
For people who hate reading for hours on end in front of their computer, perhaps due to back pain or eye strain, but also don't want to waste time printing an entire manual from web pages, purchasing one can be very convenient.
No, they aren't really "left out in the cold" because there are resources available on demand, over the internet, but they certainly aren't morons to prefer their information delivered in a different media, and not want to waste their own time moving data to that media.
As another example, are Star Wars fans who want the movies on DVD "left out in the cold"? They could have used video capture techniques with a DVD burner to produce DVD versions from their VHS tapes years ago, or they could have just captured them to watch on their PC. The quality isn't as good, and the hassle is higher, but the same is true with looking up data on the web or printing your own manual.
Linux is, alas, no where equal to Windows - yet. I use Xandros 2.0, one of the most polished, easy to install, easy to use Linux distributions. It's certainly useable, yes, and I like it; however, I would compare its ease-of-use and GUI refinements to that of Windows 3.11.
I think the next generation of Linux distributions might reach the useability level of Windows 95/98, and hopefully soon thereafter the useability of Win2k. At this point, they've reached the stage of "good enough", and it doesn't matter how much more Microsoft has improved its newer OSes since then - Linux useability and GUI will be "good enough" and people will be ready to adopt it for the other benefits.
Dude, that's stupid as shit. Hello? 2004? Spam? I don't give a crap about someone trying to contact me via an email address that is publically available. If they care that much to reach me, then can send me a letter - my physical address in the domain registration is accurate.
No, math is not an athletic sport. But it is still something to compete in and be proud of. I got a few nice trips and multiple days out of school in high school to travel for math competitions, and I wasn't particularly good at them.
What upsets me more, though, is how academic and athletic achievement are recognized so differently.
For example, a student athlete has their records published in the newspaper, the yearbook, and is recognized at student events. The student athletes that aren't as good don't get as much recognition, but their performances are public record as well.
Contrast this with schools that are having to eliminate 'A' and 'B' honor rolls, because publication of such rolls shows that everyone not on those lists are 'C' or below students.
So someone who's even marginally good at sports get to see their name in the paper, and get talked about at school, while those who are good at academics might get a note from the teacher with an extra smiley face sticker. No wonder academic instruction in the US is going downhill.
Yes, I agree. I have my own domain, with all default mail going to a "junk" folder.
You should start out by sending anything for "sales@domain.com" or "postmaster@domain.com" straight to bit bucket hell. I get plenty at those addresses, usually of the sort trying to sell me things to improve the visibility of my web business (I have no web business).
The most important part, though, is being able to -make up a new address for each person you give one to--. This is VERY important. If you buy tickets online, use "cinemark@domain.com" or whatever chain you use. If you give an email address to a restaurant, give them "tgifridays@domain.com", etc. This way, you can receive confirmation emails, coupons, etc., for as long as you want to, but if they won't abide by their removal policy, or if you get spam, you can shut them off and know exactly where it came from.
The same is true when you give your address out in person. It is harder to give out an obviously "made-up" address to a real person, but it can be done. Just use a random string of numbers and letters that means something to you, but looks like an old-style email address to them, i.e. "qrt045@domain.com" for the lady at the morgage office that said she would email you the paperwork.
I have yet to need to block an address that I've given out in this way, but I like having the flexibility to give out unique addresses to everyone without having to make 1,000 hotmail accouts before hand.
>> If his only transgression were for the love of the game, the world would have forgiven him quickly... the court of public opinion would have ruled in his favor. ... If it's true that his views are against the people of Jewish faith and that he applauds the horror of 9-11, then the court of public opinion will rule against him if it hasn't already.
He sounds like a stupid jackhole with more ego than higher intellect (with the exception of chess), but I'm still glad the "court of public opinion" has no bearing whatsoever on how he will be tried or sentenced. He opinions on 9/11 or the Holocaust, as stupid as they may be, are still his to say, and they cannot be used to influence his prosecution in a criminal case unless he tries to use them in his defense.
I find it more telling, though, that we'll seek to retain a guy who played a game of chess in the wrong country, while letting one who defected to the wrong country, technically at war with us, then made propaganda films for them, be allowed safe passage just because he's sick. I hope to see consistency, one way or another.
Interestingly, I saw Simon and Garfunkel in concert in Dallas last Thursday. During one of the songs ("Cecilia") they whipped out - you guessed it - a Theremin.
The big screen over the stage just showed the musician's two hands hovering in the spotlight. All the folks around us in the audience were whispering "What is that?" while my wife and I were quite impressed. (It was one of the band members, not S or G playing it.)
Penguins for President?
The best part is at the end:
>>>>Slashdotters were (rightfully) up in arms a few years back when Intel planned on embedding unique IDs into their Pentium III chips. Yet we blindly accept VINs and other intrusions into our privacy without question. Why?
/.ers see VINs as just a serial number on a car, not some sort of gov't tracking system devised by the Illuminati. I think most /.ers don't like SSNs (to use your other example), but they are way, WAY too entrenched to just rebel against. Pick your battles, as they say.
>>Maybe, just maybe,
Now, if the government mandated that VINs be implanted in RFID chips, and then the government started installing readers on roadsides to record where I traveled, -then- I would be worried.
Databases that require a human to connect point A to point B (i.e. that car with me) don't bother me that much, because most humans have better things to do and the data isn't necessarily stored for all of time.
Grr. Time I fix having HTML formatting as default when logged in....
Much better..
>> How the hell is it OOO's fault if the file is password protected? It's not. It's OO.o's fault that it apparently cannot open password-protected Excel files, because this new competition apparently can. I assume both Excel and PlanMaker brought up windows, let the user enter the password, then displayed the file, while OO.o just errored out. I really, really, tried to like OO.o's spreadsheet for Linux. I couldn't do it. I switched back to Excel (via Crossover Office) and am happy until something better comes along.
Nikola Tesla experimented with power transmission in many different forms. One of them (probably done more for show than anything else) was to transmit power across human skin, at frequencies high enough so that it would not penetrate the surface to cause burning.
If they do anything of the sort in their patent, we've got 100-year old prior art.