What did you *think* the difference between 87, 89, and 93-octane "ethanol enriched" gasoline was? They might as well replace the word "Ethanol" with "Jack Daniels" in American gas stations.
Actually: second step, make the law so goddamn fucking obtuse that you can find some reason, at any time, to jail someone - the age-old phrase "they're always guilty of something."
Then you use the threat of "the law" as a method to make people live in fear. And they do. Most people's first thought after "hey that would be cool" is "nahh, it'd probably break some law." And small wonder huh?
You can ship 500 lbs of potassium nitrate across state lines if you call it fertilizer, but you can't mail 1 small ounce of it in a chemistry kit lest you be charged with "terrorism."
But then you knew that already and are fully aware that nobody is suggesting that every single vehicle be equipped with one.
You forgot the word "yet." The counterargument from these religious fundie assholes - and yes I HAVE heard them discussing this - is "well if you build them into every car, it'll be cheaper by economy of scale" and "it's just like requiring a seat belt and that's a safety device too."
These fuckers would love - just LOVE - to have the damn things loaded into every single car, and required to be checked up and maintenanced when you get your car emissions-tested.
One thing I am learning over and over from anyone who seriously rides motorcycles is that even one drink is enough to lower reaction time and impair your thought processes.
Being awake for 8 hours is enough to lower reaction time and impair your thought processes. Being awake for 16 hours is enough to lower reaction time and impair your thought processes 3x as much as having one drink.
Then again, I don't know too many assholes who weave in and out of traffic back and forth in large cars. I see guys on crotch-rockets take incredibly insane risks at 100+ mph weaving in and out of traffic or sliding up and down on/off ramps or wheeling through the breakdown lanes all the fucking time.
First step: get this put in for "DWI convicted" people.
Second step: get them made mandatory in all cars.
The prohibition assholes didn't give up when the 21st Amendment was passed to repeal Prohibition. They just wandered right in with "Blue Laws" and other assholish restrictions such as massive regulation on what alcohol can be imported (did you know you can't get any beer from Wisconsin imported into Texas unless you pass it through a national distributor in some other state like Colorado? Seems Texans are mighty uppity about their shitty-tasting mexican-style swill beers) or at what time of day on what day of the week it can be sold.
The "mandatory minimum 21 drinking age" - so you can fight and die and vote for your country at 18, but don't you dare taste even a drop of beer before 21 - was yet another of their little bits of insanity.
This is simply the next step. The goal is to make it so damn hard to sit down and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, or a couple beers with your bowling buddies (mmm, beer and Wii Bowling, good times), that prohibition is effectively back in even though it's been repealed.
And you can thank the fucking religious fundamentalists for that.
is one thing that bothers me. $70-125 to install and another $70-110 per month isn't cheap, especially on top of the major bump in car insurance that they already ate. Given that drunk driving convictions skew to lower income, this has real potential to put even first-time offenders into bankruptcy.
The fact that it triggers on as little as 1/3 of the legal limit is also troubling. Maybe they should trigger at slightly below the legal limit, but 1/3? They couldn't get convicted of a DWI at that number, and yet you're going to shut off their car?
I'm just waiting for the day when the "reenact prohibition" assholes get enough power to try to make these things mandatory in all cars. After all, if it "saves lives", why not make everyone blow into the damn box to start the car, and at random times?
Insert obligatory "won't someone think of the children" bullcrap here too.
You are operating under the assumption that programmers are sane.
Though I agree. Trying to determine in a given language the difference between =, ==, !=, , =!, =>, Regular Expressions can also be a real pain in the butt, mostly because tracing bug caused by a single typo can take fucking FOREVER. It's like trying to learn to program in a new language while simultaneously finding out that your new language can only be coded in egyptian hieroglyphics.
I would rather have seen a court ruling banning the prevention of jailbreak-type behavior, not just for phones, but for all consumer devices (game consoles, handheld items like e-book readers, etc).
The custom firmware setups for the PSP, for instance, are leaps and bounds ahead of the "official" firmware function-wise. PDF and image reader functions, improved video playback formats that the PSP firmware doesn't have (and in smaller space too), the ability to independently control the processor speed yourself rather than relying on sony's bitch firmware - at one point one CFW developer actually had a "save state" function that could enable completely shutting down the device (for improved battery life) and saving the system RAM to memory stick for resumption of an in-process game later.
This is why letting one party control both Congress and the White House is a bad idea.
Compare:
Jimmy Carter + Democrat Congress = OMGWTFBBQ, Worst President Ever (by most objective measures). Reagan + Democrat Congress = fairly sane, though occasionally crap from too far on one side or the other got through. George H Bush + Democrat Congress = pretty much a continuance of Reagan. Clinton + Democrat Congress = 2 years of OMG NO. Clinton + Republican Congress = 6 years of relative fiscal sanity, admittedly with the problem of several economic bubbles growing that only popped later. Bush + Republican Congress = call it what you will. If you want to blame current situation for Bush's problems, you have to be willing to blame the first 4 years (at least) of Bush's economic trouble on the popping of bubbles that built up on Clinton's watch.
Bush + Democrat Congress = fuck, policy-wise he was almost a Democrat anyways. Why they didn't try for "health reform" under him I'll never understand, he was a lame duck who basically didn't give a shit about domestic policy and couldn't be bothered to veto even the most worthless shit that crossed his desk.
Obama + Democrat Congress = mommy, where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?
The safest thing to hopefully happen come November is the Republicans taking back at least one of the two Congressional houses. Not that I want them to have total control any more than I want the Democrats to have total control, just that it means neither side will have total control.
- Obama administration having political appointees vetting FOIA requests intended for the Dept of Homeland Security, and making decisions on what can be released on the basis of political expediency...
The question of no "new" Gitmos - Yes, but the one we have isn't anywhere close to shut down. The question of "no new pointless, unwinnable wars have been started" - How many are we on the brink of still?
revealing the names of sources for military intelligence, and/or how the intelligence was acquired (as has been proven, knowing the "how" quickly leads to a very small list of "who" possibilities), will get undercover agents or informers killed by the enemy.
While he is undoubtedly better than the Cheney/Bush administration,
Really? So having Gitmo just as bad as it was is "better" than before?
Having more MafiAA-friendly policies than the Bush regime is "better" than before?
Gutting the part of the Justice Department that prosecutes abuse of law concerning monopolistic business practices, in order to ratchet up frivolous "civil rights" prosecutions, is "better" than before?
Ramping-up of "targeted killings" by the Obama administration is "better" than before?
Having a "state secrets" policy that treats FOIA requests like toilet paper and lets political staff vet them is "better" than before?
Doing nothing when North Korea runs missile tests is "better" than before?
Wasting money suing states that try to get a handle on the illegal alien problem, while simultaneously refusing to prosecute sanctuary cities (despite the fact that it is against federal law - 8 U.S. Code, sections 1324 and 1325; Immigration and Naturalization Act sections 274 and 275, Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA)) - that's somehow "better" than before?
I'd hate to see what you think would qualify as worse!
I'd hate to see what you think qualifies as worse than before. Really.
Say what you want about the Tea Party guys, there are plenty of kooks there just as there are plenty of kooks at Democrat rallies, but the "ooh only if we think it will make political hay for our side" behavior of much of the media is getting rather old. Digg "bury brigades" are old, stale news, from both sides.
it's a statement made by George Lucas himself during the making of the original Star Wars trilogy. Very relevant to the crapsacks that were the "prequel trilogy", which had basically no storyline and were filled with overdone, annoying special effects.
(1) That's unconstitutional. The New York Constitution does not grant such a power as "price fixing".
The court could certainly order that they retain only a certain percentage markup on their products for a given time, to be verified with inspectors double-checking their books.
(2) There's no need for such extremes. When the record companies were caught price-fixing CDs (thereby forming an illegal cartel), they were ordered by the courts to refund ~$25 to all their customers, so that erased any illicit profits they had earned.
You're joking right? That settlement was a COMPLETE FRAUD. Customers who had bought 5-6 dozen music CD's over a decade, at $10+ overcharge per CD, were ripped off with a measly $25 voucher to BUY MORE OVERPRICED PRODUCT. The MafiAA companies pocketed the rest, flipped the bird at the artists they regularly rip off, and laughed at how fucking stupid our legal system is.
(3) And then the free market was left to its own devices, and the cost of CDs plummeted from $13 to $9 within a year, since the cartel was no longer allowed to operate. The same will happen to LCDs too, after the price-fixing cartel is broken-up.
Have you seen the prices lately? Pretty fucking uniform - Walmart, Bestbuy, Amazon, all seem to have exactly the same price (or somewhere within 50 cents of each other) on every goddamn CD again, and new releases are hovering steadily around $18. It sounds more like the MafiAA cartel laid low for a few years and went right back to their old tricks again.
But why would we count that? We don't like her politics.
Speaking as a libertarian, her position on the first amendment - just to name ONE particular policy position she espouses - ought to have been enough to disqualify her.
But ah yes, if the Republicans had actually stood up for the first amendment, they would have been called "anti-woman" or some other stupid shit from Kagan's supporters. Sigh...
Slashdot Mirror
Blago is your standard corrupt Chicago politician.
Remember, this is same the city where the dead rise to vote on a yearly basis.
I used to catch his show all the time - PBS ran it right after Red Dwarf (and later, Chef) before they signed off for the night on Saturdays.
What precisely did you think that Justin Bieber, Miley Cyrus, the Jonas Brothers, etc... really were?
Perhaps this will help.
No, the RIAA is a classic case of where government SHOULD have stepped in and squished and illegal Mafia cartel long ago.
No, but it would be nice if we could deny the vote to those so mentally challenged that they can't successfully pass the first level...
Basically, we do this already.
What did you *think* the difference between 87, 89, and 93-octane "ethanol enriched" gasoline was? They might as well replace the word "Ethanol" with "Jack Daniels" in American gas stations.
Second step: jail everyone!
Actually: second step, make the law so goddamn fucking obtuse that you can find some reason, at any time, to jail someone - the age-old phrase "they're always guilty of something."
Then you use the threat of "the law" as a method to make people live in fear. And they do. Most people's first thought after "hey that would be cool" is "nahh, it'd probably break some law." And small wonder huh?
You can ship 500 lbs of potassium nitrate across state lines if you call it fertilizer, but you can't mail 1 small ounce of it in a chemistry kit lest you be charged with "terrorism."
But then you knew that already and are fully aware that nobody is suggesting that every single vehicle be equipped with one.
You forgot the word "yet." The counterargument from these religious fundie assholes - and yes I HAVE heard them discussing this - is "well if you build them into every car, it'll be cheaper by economy of scale" and "it's just like requiring a seat belt and that's a safety device too."
These fuckers would love - just LOVE - to have the damn things loaded into every single car, and required to be checked up and maintenanced when you get your car emissions-tested.
One thing I am learning over and over from anyone who seriously rides motorcycles is that even one drink is enough to lower reaction time and impair your thought processes.
Being awake for 8 hours is enough to lower reaction time and impair your thought processes.
Being awake for 16 hours is enough to lower reaction time and impair your thought processes 3x as much as having one drink.
A chronically sleep deprived person is essentially driving permanently drunk.
Then again, I don't know too many assholes who weave in and out of traffic back and forth in large cars. I see guys on crotch-rockets take incredibly insane risks at 100+ mph weaving in and out of traffic or sliding up and down on/off ramps or wheeling through the breakdown lanes all the fucking time.
First step: get this put in for "DWI convicted" people.
Second step: get them made mandatory in all cars.
The prohibition assholes didn't give up when the 21st Amendment was passed to repeal Prohibition. They just wandered right in with "Blue Laws" and other assholish restrictions such as massive regulation on what alcohol can be imported (did you know you can't get any beer from Wisconsin imported into Texas unless you pass it through a national distributor in some other state like Colorado? Seems Texans are mighty uppity about their shitty-tasting mexican-style swill beers) or at what time of day on what day of the week it can be sold.
The "mandatory minimum 21 drinking age" - so you can fight and die and vote for your country at 18, but don't you dare taste even a drop of beer before 21 - was yet another of their little bits of insanity.
This is simply the next step. The goal is to make it so damn hard to sit down and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner, or a couple beers with your bowling buddies (mmm, beer and Wii Bowling, good times), that prohibition is effectively back in even though it's been repealed.
And you can thank the fucking religious fundamentalists for that.
is one thing that bothers me. $70-125 to install and another $70-110 per month isn't cheap, especially on top of the major bump in car insurance that they already ate. Given that drunk driving convictions skew to lower income, this has real potential to put even first-time offenders into bankruptcy.
The fact that it triggers on as little as 1/3 of the legal limit is also troubling. Maybe they should trigger at slightly below the legal limit, but 1/3? They couldn't get convicted of a DWI at that number, and yet you're going to shut off their car?
I'm just waiting for the day when the "reenact prohibition" assholes get enough power to try to make these things mandatory in all cars. After all, if it "saves lives", why not make everyone blow into the damn box to start the car, and at random times?
Insert obligatory "won't someone think of the children" bullcrap here too.
So we get to see our childhood raped in 1080p this time, huh?
You are operating under the assumption that programmers are sane.
Though I agree. Trying to determine in a given language the difference between =, ==, !=, , =!, =>, Regular Expressions can also be a real pain in the butt, mostly because tracing bug caused by a single typo can take fucking FOREVER. It's like trying to learn to program in a new language while simultaneously finding out that your new language can only be coded in egyptian hieroglyphics.
I would rather have seen a court ruling banning the prevention of jailbreak-type behavior, not just for phones, but for all consumer devices (game consoles, handheld items like e-book readers, etc).
The custom firmware setups for the PSP, for instance, are leaps and bounds ahead of the "official" firmware function-wise. PDF and image reader functions, improved video playback formats that the PSP firmware doesn't have (and in smaller space too), the ability to independently control the processor speed yourself rather than relying on sony's bitch firmware - at one point one CFW developer actually had a "save state" function that could enable completely shutting down the device (for improved battery life) and saving the system RAM to memory stick for resumption of an in-process game later.
"DRM" and "Protection" are bullshit.
This is why letting one party control both Congress and the White House is a bad idea.
Compare:
Jimmy Carter + Democrat Congress = OMGWTFBBQ, Worst President Ever (by most objective measures).
Reagan + Democrat Congress = fairly sane, though occasionally crap from too far on one side or the other got through.
George H Bush + Democrat Congress = pretty much a continuance of Reagan.
Clinton + Democrat Congress = 2 years of OMG NO.
Clinton + Republican Congress = 6 years of relative fiscal sanity, admittedly with the problem of several economic bubbles growing that only popped later.
Bush + Republican Congress = call it what you will. If you want to blame current situation for Bush's problems, you have to be willing to blame the first 4 years (at least) of Bush's economic trouble on the popping of bubbles that built up on Clinton's watch.
Bush + Democrat Congress = fuck, policy-wise he was almost a Democrat anyways. Why they didn't try for "health reform" under him I'll never understand, he was a lame duck who basically didn't give a shit about domestic policy and couldn't be bothered to veto even the most worthless shit that crossed his desk.
Obama + Democrat Congress = mommy, where are we going and why are we in this handbasket?
The safest thing to hopefully happen come November is the Republicans taking back at least one of the two Congressional houses. Not that I want them to have total control any more than I want the Democrats to have total control, just that it means neither side will have total control.
and no NEW states secrets policy is more stringent than anything that came before
Uhm... reality check.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/02/congress-considers-rules-for-invoking-state-secrets.ars
- That new state secrets policy that is WAY more stringent than anything before.
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090313/1456154113.shtml
- The Obama admin claiming that the details of a copyright treaty are "state secrets."
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/02/10/obama
- Obama administration invoking "state secrets" FAR MORE OFTEN than the previous administration
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/07/foia-filtered
- Obama administration having political appointees vetting FOIA requests intended for the Dept of Homeland Security, and making decisions on what can be released on the basis of political expediency...
The question of no "new" Gitmos - Yes, but the one we have isn't anywhere close to shut down.
The question of "no new pointless, unwinnable wars have been started" - How many are we on the brink of still?
Or:
revealing the names of sources for military intelligence, and/or how the intelligence was acquired (as has been proven, knowing the "how" quickly leads to a very small list of "who" possibilities), will get undercover agents or informers killed by the enemy.
While he is undoubtedly better than the Cheney/Bush administration,
Really?
So having Gitmo just as bad as it was is "better" than before?
Having more MafiAA-friendly policies than the Bush regime is "better" than before?
Gutting the part of the Justice Department that prosecutes abuse of law concerning monopolistic business practices, in order to ratchet up frivolous "civil rights" prosecutions, is "better" than before?
Ramping-up of "targeted killings" by the Obama administration is "better" than before?
Having a "state secrets" policy that treats FOIA requests like toilet paper and lets political staff vet them is "better" than before?
Doing nothing when North Korea runs missile tests is "better" than before?
Wasting money suing states that try to get a handle on the illegal alien problem, while simultaneously refusing to prosecute sanctuary cities (despite the fact that it is against federal law - 8 U.S. Code, sections 1324 and 1325; Immigration and Naturalization Act sections 274 and 275, Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA)) - that's somehow "better" than before?
I'd hate to see what you think would qualify as worse!
I'd hate to see what you think qualifies as worse than before. Really.
Put another way:
There's no money in solving actual crimes. On the other hand, doing the dirty work of the MafiAA is a way to collect some kick-ass bribes.
What is odd is how it's all of a sudden a "big deal." Digg's had a group of left-wing Bury Brigades for years (as covered in 2007 by Wired and a number of other news organizations), but it wasn't a problem until now?
It's sort of like noticing this kind of thing going on, which seems to get missed. Or the fact that the guys with "Obama in a hitler mustache" signs at Tea Party rallies were actually Democrats of the Lyndon LaRouche cult.
Say what you want about the Tea Party guys, there are plenty of kooks there just as there are plenty of kooks at Democrat rallies, but the "ooh only if we think it will make political hay for our side" behavior of much of the media is getting rather old. Digg "bury brigades" are old, stale news, from both sides.
When he was first asked for the passwords he was still an employee.
You're leaving out the fact that the person asking for the passwords wasn't authorized to have them, by city policy.
Offtopic but what the hell:
it's a statement made by George Lucas himself during the making of the original Star Wars trilogy.
Very relevant to the crapsacks that were the "prequel trilogy", which had basically no storyline and were filled with overdone, annoying special effects.
(1) That's unconstitutional. The New York Constitution does not grant such a power as "price fixing".
The court could certainly order that they retain only a certain percentage markup on their products for a given time, to be verified with inspectors double-checking their books.
(2) There's no need for such extremes. When the record companies were caught price-fixing CDs (thereby forming an illegal cartel), they were ordered by the courts to refund ~$25 to all their customers, so that erased any illicit profits they had earned.
You're joking right? That settlement was a COMPLETE FRAUD. Customers who had bought 5-6 dozen music CD's over a decade, at $10+ overcharge per CD, were ripped off with a measly $25 voucher to BUY MORE OVERPRICED PRODUCT. The MafiAA companies pocketed the rest, flipped the bird at the artists they regularly rip off, and laughed at how fucking stupid our legal system is.
(3) And then the free market was left to its own devices, and the cost of CDs plummeted from $13 to $9 within a year, since the cartel was no longer allowed to operate. The same will happen to LCDs too, after the price-fixing cartel is broken-up.
Have you seen the prices lately? Pretty fucking uniform - Walmart, Bestbuy, Amazon, all seem to have exactly the same price (or somewhere within 50 cents of each other) on every goddamn CD again, and new releases are hovering steadily around $18. It sounds more like the MafiAA cartel laid low for a few years and went right back to their old tricks again.
I believe it is fairly obvious that they stopped representing "the people" and started representing instead "the corporations" a long time ago...
But why would we count that? We don't like her politics.
Speaking as a libertarian, her position on the first amendment - just to name ONE particular policy position she espouses - ought to have been enough to disqualify her.
But ah yes, if the Republicans had actually stood up for the first amendment, they would have been called "anti-woman" or some other stupid shit from Kagan's supporters. Sigh...