The point of "speed traps" is that you can be going the speed limit one moment, and they set up a situation where you can't POSSIBLY - at least not without risking a serious wreck - slow down to the new limit in time, or else you're on a road switch and the new limit is posted "down the road."
Likewise with the yellow-light timing; they shorten it enough, and even people who couldn't possibly stop (at least, again, not without risking someone running into them from behind) get caught mid-intersection anyways. I've measured yellow times as short as 1.75 seconds in my area on a 40mph road.
In some US states, the police officers are "certified to estimate speed", usually with a bullshit claim that these guys are accurate to within 3mph or so. So they can lie their asses off if they see out-of-town/out-of-state plates and stickers, claim they "estimated" you at 10 over the limit, and just write the tickets all fucking day. No radar gun, no certification that the radar gun is calibrated properly, just their corrupt lying word against yours, and a judge in their pocket since his pay is coming from the traffic fine revenue pot too.
It's like operating a "toll road", they just pull people over at random, lie their asses off, and collect fines/fees/etc. And again, who's going to stop them - the police?
Among other things, it says that traffic fine quotas are explicitly forbidden in most jurisdictions (USA).
And who the fuck is ever going to catch them doing it? The police?
No, they have "spoken but unwritten" quotas. All the law forbids is actually writing a quota down. It doesn't forbid the local government making a budget based on an expected yearly dollar-amount in fines, and then holding the police department responsible for either making quota or having their budget cut. Nor does it forbid them from writing the cops up for "insufficient zeal in traffic enforcement" (actual words they use on the reviews) for failing to meet the unwritten quota.
Again, I ask - who's going to report them or enforce it. The police? Yeah right - protest a quota policy and watch how fast no police department will ever hire you again, because you don't play ball with the corrupt policies. Anyone honest enough to not write fraudulent tickets is never going to move up the ladder, only the dirty ones ever get promoted.
When there's a freeway underpass the city over from mine where they sit on quota day (and it's pretty fucking obvious it's quota day, no time else do you have 10 pigs parked in the underpass breakdown lane waiting in one spot) trading turns on who gets to pull the next guy over on the radar-gun spotter's call until they have all made quota, in a zone where they pull a speed limit 45-25-45-25-45 trick?
The locals all know - unless they forget or are brand new teen drivers - to do no more than 30 through that entire zone, because if you get up to 45, there's no way you can hit the brakes and get down to 25 in that distance without locking your brakes and risking a skid.
It also helps that the locals all have "flood zone" stickers on their cars that serve the "spoken" purpose of allowing them to be in the area during voluntary-evacuation times, but also let the local corrupt pigs know EXACTLY who's from out-of-city for ticketing purposes. I've actually sat in traffic court and watched a city resident get his ticket dropped after a sidebar conversation with the judge about how it was a brand new car and his flood-zone ticket hadn't yet been issued to him.
So I say no, they're ALL corrupt. No "visibility bias" about it.
It's not about safety. It's about money. Speed traps are designed to trick people into a spot where revenue generation occurs.
There's a spot I know of ~100 miles north of me where a highway marked at 65 off-ramps onto another highway marked at 60. The change in speed isn't marked at the top of the ramp, however, but 3 miles down the road instead. Local sheriffs LOVE to sit at the top of the hill and watch for people doing 65-70, who don't know about the speed change, and then cite them tickets.
Likewise, my city has a bunch of redlight cameras. And non-coincidentally, right after installing them, someone noticed they could issue a lot more fines if they shortened the yellow light time, despite every available study showing that safety is improved with longer yellow times. They are now getting sued and it's going up to the state supreme court because they shortened the things to.25 seconds below the state required timing in order to beef up ticket revenue, AND they made them "civil fines" rather than actual ticket infractions to try to get around a state law prohibiting cities from getting more than a certain percentage of their funding from traffic fines (a law, ironically enough, passed because of certain little shit-pot one-stoplight towns that were running traffic scams left and right and getting 80-90% of their revenue from issuing insane tickets to out-of-towners).
Of course, the major problem here is that police - pretty much all of them - are corrupt. They start them on traffic duty, set a ticket quota, tell them to issue tickets by hook or by crook. If they don't meet quota, they get their income screwed with, they don't get a chance at overtime hours, or they get lousy performance reviews. By the time they graduate from issuing traffic tickets any semblance of honor, integrity, or respect for the general population has long ago been trained out of them in favor of the "fuck it, ticket them, cuff them, they're all guilty of something anyways" attitude.
Show me an honest cop today, and I'll show you a flying pig doing cartwheels next to a unicorn.
Fatal flaw... you have to prop up several dozen shithole african dictatorships to get your hand on that much titanium, and even then, it runs out pretty fucking fast.
The problem is, HFCS-55 fails to trigger the satiety reflex properly. And the vast majority of items it's put into are items that already aren't so great for you.
Soda/pop is particularly bad because it combines multiple known agents: caffeine (diuretic), carbonic acid (makes the tissues of mouth and throat feel dry), sodium chloride (ever drink salt water? Notice how it doesn't help you quench thirst?), and HFCS-55 rather than actual sugar to bypass satiety reflex. "Diet" sodas are even worse; nutrasweet dries out the mouth tissues in an action very similar to the carbonic acid, for a "double whammy."
The end result being that you can guzzle a 64-ounce Big Gulp down, feel yourself needing to pee, and at the same time still feel thirsty right after you finish the damn thing. Or in other words: go ahead. Drink your weight in nectar, lardo.
If China wants to try to kill anonymous access, that's all the more reason our laws should say no logging, no tracking, EVER.
And fuck the MafiAA and the fascists, who are the only ones who think differently.
As for traditional media channels - let's face it, they failed us a long time ago. The simpering, fawning "yay Obama" types in 2008 were just the most blatant, but most of the world has seen that kind of behavior for years - chinese media, iranian media, russian pravda, BBC, and pretty much everything else.
Never forget: if you have a wikipedia admin at your back, you can get away with murder. If you were a friend of a now-wikipedia admin, never fear, they will make sure your entry glows.
Take Frank Zeidler, communist former mayor of Milwaukee, and look at how the Wikipedia article glows. The reason is that one of his "friends", a wikipedia administrator named Orangemike, patrols the article with a vengeance and has no qualms about banning anyone who tries to un-POV the article. He even went so far as to make ridiculous false sockpuppet allegations and still somehow became an administrator in wikipedia's corrupt system.
Nevermind [[WP:OWN]] problems. Orangemike is a corrupt scumwad and since he's supported by other corrupt scumwad admins, he gets away with it.
One is a physical act of claiming space and victory. It exists for a long period of time and goes beyond being merely "speech." Painting a rude slogan on the side of the building may be speech; planting a religious center there is not.
The other is a brief act that, once the fire is out, is done. Replace "shitty little book written by a 7th century pedophile" with "flag" and see if the argument against "book burning" changes at all for you. Then think about why. And remember why as disgusting as some of us may find the act, the US has never, ever managed to pass a constitutional amendment to ban the constitutionally protected act of speech that is the burning of a symbol.
It's more like 1/2, or at least 1/3, of the world's Muslims.
Hell, even in a "westernized" country like Britain, it turns out that over 40% of British Muslims are willing to tell a phone interviewer that they support violence in the name of Islam, and over 60% of them think there should be laws to persecute anyone who says anything negative about their scummy little death cult.
Now count up the number who think like that in the brainwashed "kingdoms" where it's illegal to be anything but Muslim, and where they will burn little girls alive in a building fire rather than let them out into public with their hair uncovered.
And if you believe that, you betray your lack of intelligence and education.
"Al-Ilah", father of Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Al-Manat, moon deity of the Quraish tribe of the pagan Meccans, namesake of Abd'Al'Ilah who was the father of a guy named Mohammed, would like a word with you.
Welcome to the difference between the western world, and the Islamic world.
Western world: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." Islamic world: "Die for insulting our moon god!"
I suppose we should add "...unless some backwards 7th century scumwad threatens to carbomb us" to the Western side though.
Seriously though, this is getting ridiculous. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out a couple columns ago, " As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter..."
Feisal Rauf, Muslim Brotherhood member, Hamas stooge, etc... has just gone down the line of every other Imam before him in this regard. If you didn't think his whole big speech last night wasn't simply threatening violence if he doesn't get his way, then you're not thinking clearly.
I could also offer a nicely formatted treatise comparing Mohammed point-by-point to scum like Warren Jeffs and L. Ron Hubbard and David Koresh as well, but that'll keep for another day.
As opposed to the US, where the companies DO conspire, and when caught simply buy off the judge or buy off some legislators or "regulators" to claim that it's not "really" collusion, or else just buy up whole local areas for "exclusive" provisioning.
I remember when Warner Cable ran Viacom Cable out of my hometown and got a monopoly in the county. Ads with a king declaring "I declare Warner Cable for my entire kingdom", and then hiking the rates by $40/month because what was someone going to do - go to a competitor? Switch back to over-the-air, where you could get maybe 3 stations and possibly the local barely-1000-watt PBS with a ton of snow in the picture on a REALLY clear day?
That still doesn't explain why those fucking X10 Camera pop-up ads were stalking me seemingly EVERYWHERE.
Or why now it's those fucking Netflix popunders. I swear to god, if I ever meet someone from Netflix's marketing department, they better have a good explanation...
USB was introduced in 1995. It was present - STANDARD - on every machine and motherboard a year later when I was comparing prices. The iMac G3 wasn't released until 1998.
Yes, there were other ports on those machines. There were other ports on the iMac G3 as well, a pair of firewire ports that went to... uhm... a few crappy, barely-even-apple-compatible cameras, and maybe a few specially designed keyboards that worked better with a standard MIDI interface anyways.
To claim that a shitty little closed-box unit with a hockey-puck mouse, crappy OS (System 8... gah that makes me want to puke just thinking about it) and that barely could hold 1% of the computer market somehow "created the market for USB peripherals" is just fucking stupid.
If it wasn't for Apple, PCs would probably still have RS232 and floppy drives. Again, Apple let the way there, replacing/removing obsolete technology whilst the rest of the industry were too scared to be different.
Oh please, pull the other one.
Unused ports die when their time is up. Seen a gameport off an audio board lately? Nope. Why? USB. Seen a firewire port lately, despite all that Apple did to try to hype it up over USB? Nope. GUESS WHY. No computer uses floppies any more because they don't have enough capacity. Heck, most computers have a DVD burner rather than CD-only for the same reason. If you really need to use a floppy, you can get a USB floppy drive for $5.
Apple doesn't "lead" the market. They produce a proprietary, closed-scale system that has a small enough market share that virus writers don't give a crap about infecting it and then claim it's "secure." And they sell it to people who have too much money and not enough common sense to compare prices on similar hardware.
If you have the money like the MafiAA does, you TOO can buy incredibly asstarded laws to protect your illegal monopoly price-gouging and put those uppity little "artists" back in their rightful slave-labor places in shitty little countries like the Czech... or UK... or USA...
Does a guy with a blog who occasionally posts a video of his cat acting stupid, and has a google ad just to try to defray a bit of the hosting costs, count as "for profit"?
Welcome to the land of weasel words. MPEG-LA has previously proven that their promises are worth less than the paper they were written on right before MPEG-LA wiped their asses with the aforementioned promises.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm... you're joking, right?
Pay attention. The most House ever gets is a "God sent us to you" bit. The whole "he works in mysterious ways" thing.
The episode with the nun was hilarious that way.
If only it were that easy.
The point of "speed traps" is that you can be going the speed limit one moment, and they set up a situation where you can't POSSIBLY - at least not without risking a serious wreck - slow down to the new limit in time, or else you're on a road switch and the new limit is posted "down the road."
Likewise with the yellow-light timing; they shorten it enough, and even people who couldn't possibly stop (at least, again, not without risking someone running into them from behind) get caught mid-intersection anyways. I've measured yellow times as short as 1.75 seconds in my area on a 40mph road.
In some US states, the police officers are "certified to estimate speed", usually with a bullshit claim that these guys are accurate to within 3mph or so. So they can lie their asses off if they see out-of-town/out-of-state plates and stickers, claim they "estimated" you at 10 over the limit, and just write the tickets all fucking day. No radar gun, no certification that the radar gun is calibrated properly, just their corrupt lying word against yours, and a judge in their pocket since his pay is coming from the traffic fine revenue pot too.
It's like operating a "toll road", they just pull people over at random, lie their asses off, and collect fines/fees/etc. And again, who's going to stop them - the police?
Among other things, it says that traffic fine quotas are explicitly forbidden in most jurisdictions (USA).
And who the fuck is ever going to catch them doing it? The police?
No, they have "spoken but unwritten" quotas. All the law forbids is actually writing a quota down. It doesn't forbid the local government making a budget based on an expected yearly dollar-amount in fines, and then holding the police department responsible for either making quota or having their budget cut. Nor does it forbid them from writing the cops up for "insufficient zeal in traffic enforcement" (actual words they use on the reviews) for failing to meet the unwritten quota.
Again, I ask - who's going to report them or enforce it. The police? Yeah right - protest a quota policy and watch how fast no police department will ever hire you again, because you don't play ball with the corrupt policies. Anyone honest enough to not write fraudulent tickets is never going to move up the ladder, only the dirty ones ever get promoted.
When there's a freeway underpass the city over from mine where they sit on quota day (and it's pretty fucking obvious it's quota day, no time else do you have 10 pigs parked in the underpass breakdown lane waiting in one spot) trading turns on who gets to pull the next guy over on the radar-gun spotter's call until they have all made quota, in a zone where they pull a speed limit 45-25-45-25-45 trick?
The locals all know - unless they forget or are brand new teen drivers - to do no more than 30 through that entire zone, because if you get up to 45, there's no way you can hit the brakes and get down to 25 in that distance without locking your brakes and risking a skid.
It also helps that the locals all have "flood zone" stickers on their cars that serve the "spoken" purpose of allowing them to be in the area during voluntary-evacuation times, but also let the local corrupt pigs know EXACTLY who's from out-of-city for ticketing purposes. I've actually sat in traffic court and watched a city resident get his ticket dropped after a sidebar conversation with the judge about how it was a brand new car and his flood-zone ticket hadn't yet been issued to him.
So I say no, they're ALL corrupt. No "visibility bias" about it.
It's not about safety. It's about money. Speed traps are designed to trick people into a spot where revenue generation occurs.
There's a spot I know of ~100 miles north of me where a highway marked at 65 off-ramps onto another highway marked at 60. The change in speed isn't marked at the top of the ramp, however, but 3 miles down the road instead. Local sheriffs LOVE to sit at the top of the hill and watch for people doing 65-70, who don't know about the speed change, and then cite them tickets.
Likewise, my city has a bunch of redlight cameras. And non-coincidentally, right after installing them, someone noticed they could issue a lot more fines if they shortened the yellow light time, despite every available study showing that safety is improved with longer yellow times. They are now getting sued and it's going up to the state supreme court because they shortened the things to .25 seconds below the state required timing in order to beef up ticket revenue, AND they made them "civil fines" rather than actual ticket infractions to try to get around a state law prohibiting cities from getting more than a certain percentage of their funding from traffic fines (a law, ironically enough, passed because of certain little shit-pot one-stoplight towns that were running traffic scams left and right and getting 80-90% of their revenue from issuing insane tickets to out-of-towners).
Of course, the major problem here is that police - pretty much all of them - are corrupt. They start them on traffic duty, set a ticket quota, tell them to issue tickets by hook or by crook. If they don't meet quota, they get their income screwed with, they don't get a chance at overtime hours, or they get lousy performance reviews. By the time they graduate from issuing traffic tickets any semblance of honor, integrity, or respect for the general population has long ago been trained out of them in favor of the "fuck it, ticket them, cuff them, they're all guilty of something anyways" attitude.
Show me an honest cop today, and I'll show you a flying pig doing cartwheels next to a unicorn.
Fatal flaw... you have to prop up several dozen shithole african dictatorships to get your hand on that much titanium, and even then, it runs out pretty fucking fast.
The problem is, HFCS-55 fails to trigger the satiety reflex properly. And the vast majority of items it's put into are items that already aren't so great for you.
Soda/pop is particularly bad because it combines multiple known agents: caffeine (diuretic), carbonic acid (makes the tissues of mouth and throat feel dry), sodium chloride (ever drink salt water? Notice how it doesn't help you quench thirst?), and HFCS-55 rather than actual sugar to bypass satiety reflex. "Diet" sodas are even worse; nutrasweet dries out the mouth tissues in an action very similar to the carbonic acid, for a "double whammy."
The end result being that you can guzzle a 64-ounce Big Gulp down, feel yourself needing to pee, and at the same time still feel thirsty right after you finish the damn thing. Or in other words: go ahead. Drink your weight in nectar, lardo.
Given that no cop in the USA is non-corrupt any more? This is completely expected.
I'm actually surprised they didn't beat the poor guy in the costume up, just for the fun of it.
If China wants to try to kill anonymous access, that's all the more reason our laws should say no logging, no tracking, EVER.
And fuck the MafiAA and the fascists, who are the only ones who think differently.
As for traditional media channels - let's face it, they failed us a long time ago. The simpering, fawning "yay Obama" types in 2008 were just the most blatant, but most of the world has seen that kind of behavior for years - chinese media, iranian media, russian pravda, BBC, and pretty much everything else.
Maybe you need a proper education in darksucker theory.
Also, the existence of magic smoke.
And don't forget applied phlebotinum.
Never forget: if you have a wikipedia admin at your back, you can get away with murder. If you were a friend of a now-wikipedia admin, never fear, they will make sure your entry glows.
Take Frank Zeidler, communist former mayor of Milwaukee, and look at how the Wikipedia article glows. The reason is that one of his "friends", a wikipedia administrator named Orangemike, patrols the article with a vengeance and has no qualms about banning anyone who tries to un-POV the article. He even went so far as to make ridiculous false sockpuppet allegations and still somehow became an administrator in wikipedia's corrupt system.
Nevermind [[WP:OWN]] problems. Orangemike is a corrupt scumwad and since he's supported by other corrupt scumwad admins, he gets away with it.
One is a physical act of claiming space and victory. It exists for a long period of time and goes beyond being merely "speech." Painting a rude slogan on the side of the building may be speech; planting a religious center there is not.
The other is a brief act that, once the fire is out, is done. Replace "shitty little book written by a 7th century pedophile" with "flag" and see if the argument against "book burning" changes at all for you. Then think about why. And remember why as disgusting as some of us may find the act, the US has never, ever managed to pass a constitutional amendment to ban the constitutionally protected act of speech that is the burning of a symbol.
It's more like 1/2, or at least 1/3, of the world's Muslims.
Hell, even in a "westernized" country like Britain, it turns out that over 40% of British Muslims are willing to tell a phone interviewer that they support violence in the name of Islam, and over 60% of them think there should be laws to persecute anyone who says anything negative about their scummy little death cult.
Now count up the number who think like that in the brainwashed "kingdoms" where it's illegal to be anything but Muslim, and where they will burn little girls alive in a building fire rather than let them out into public with their hair uncovered.
Well they're all full of crap anyways.
The pedophile-worshiping Mohammedians are just more full of crap than most.
And if you believe that, you betray your lack of intelligence and education.
"Al-Ilah", father of Al-Lat, Al-Uzza, and Al-Manat, moon deity of the Quraish tribe of the pagan Meccans, namesake of Abd'Al'Ilah who was the father of a guy named Mohammed, would like a word with you.
Welcome to the difference between the western world, and the Islamic world.
Western world: "I may disagree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
Islamic world: "Die for insulting our moon god!"
I suppose we should add "...unless some backwards 7th century scumwad threatens to carbomb us" to the Western side though.
Seriously though, this is getting ridiculous. As Christopher Hitchens pointed out a couple columns ago, " As Western Europe has already found to its cost, local Muslim leaders have a habit, once they feel strong enough, of making demands of the most intolerant kind. Sometimes it will be calls for censorship of anything "offensive" to Islam. Sometimes it will be demands for sexual segregation in schools and swimming pools. The script is becoming a very familiar one. And those who make such demands are of course usually quite careful to avoid any association with violence. They merely hint that, if their demands are not taken seriously, there just might be a teeny smidgeon of violence from some other unnamed quarter ..."
Feisal Rauf, Muslim Brotherhood member, Hamas stooge, etc... has just gone down the line of every other Imam before him in this regard. If you didn't think his whole big speech last night wasn't simply threatening violence if he doesn't get his way, then you're not thinking clearly.
I could also offer a nicely formatted treatise comparing Mohammed point-by-point to scum like Warren Jeffs and L. Ron Hubbard and David Koresh as well, but that'll keep for another day.
Be careful.
He might accuse you of being "Enviroknot."
Delusional corrupt dickwad that he is...
As opposed to the US, where the companies DO conspire, and when caught simply buy off the judge or buy off some legislators or "regulators" to claim that it's not "really" collusion, or else just buy up whole local areas for "exclusive" provisioning.
I remember when Warner Cable ran Viacom Cable out of my hometown and got a monopoly in the county. Ads with a king declaring "I declare Warner Cable for my entire kingdom", and then hiking the rates by $40/month because what was someone going to do - go to a competitor? Switch back to over-the-air, where you could get maybe 3 stations and possibly the local barely-1000-watt PBS with a ton of snow in the picture on a REALLY clear day?
You're counting on Wikipedia for your sources?
Sorry. [[BETTER CITATION FROM SOMETHING REMOTELY ACCURATE NEEDED]].
And irony of ironies, putting that into "wikipedia-sarcasm" format causes Slashdot's braindead filter to think it's "yelling."
That still doesn't explain why those fucking X10 Camera pop-up ads were stalking me seemingly EVERYWHERE.
Or why now it's those fucking Netflix popunders. I swear to god, if I ever meet someone from Netflix's marketing department, they better have a good explanation...
You're joking.
USB was introduced in 1995. It was present - STANDARD - on every machine and motherboard a year later when I was comparing prices. The iMac G3 wasn't released until 1998.
Yes, there were other ports on those machines. There were other ports on the iMac G3 as well, a pair of firewire ports that went to... uhm... a few crappy, barely-even-apple-compatible cameras, and maybe a few specially designed keyboards that worked better with a standard MIDI interface anyways.
To claim that a shitty little closed-box unit with a hockey-puck mouse, crappy OS (System 8... gah that makes me want to puke just thinking about it) and that barely could hold 1% of the computer market somehow "created the market for USB peripherals" is just fucking stupid.
If it wasn't for Apple, PCs would probably still have RS232 and floppy drives. Again, Apple let the way there, replacing/removing obsolete technology whilst the rest of the industry were too scared to be different.
Oh please, pull the other one.
Unused ports die when their time is up. Seen a gameport off an audio board lately? Nope. Why? USB.
Seen a firewire port lately, despite all that Apple did to try to hype it up over USB? Nope. GUESS WHY.
No computer uses floppies any more because they don't have enough capacity. Heck, most computers have a DVD burner rather than CD-only for the same reason. If you really need to use a floppy, you can get a USB floppy drive for $5.
Apple doesn't "lead" the market. They produce a proprietary, closed-scale system that has a small enough market share that virus writers don't give a crap about infecting it and then claim it's "secure." And they sell it to people who have too much money and not enough common sense to compare prices on similar hardware.
Translated more simply:
If you have the money like the MafiAA does, you TOO can buy incredibly asstarded laws to protect your illegal monopoly price-gouging and put those uppity little "artists" back in their rightful slave-labor places in shitty little countries like the Czech... or UK... or USA...
What does "free" mean?
Does a guy with a blog who occasionally posts a video of his cat acting stupid, and has a google ad just to try to defray a bit of the hosting costs, count as "for profit"?
Welcome to the land of weasel words. MPEG-LA has previously proven that their promises are worth less than the paper they were written on right before MPEG-LA wiped their asses with the aforementioned promises.
We can make oil, but it's not economical, at least not for use as a fuel.
We're actually closer to making economically viable, algae-produced "oil" than we are to making economically viable, safe-to-use hydrogen...