When the ambulance comes from behind, they can't force you to speed. Your speeding still breaks the spirit as well as the letter of the law.
As does failing to yield to an emergency vehicle displaying lights in most localities. There are plenty of situations where you simply have to choose the lesser of two evils, but most of the self-righteous don't pick up on that.
Bingo - it annoys the hell out of me that a Pakistani friend of mine was shot at on the highway shortly after 9/11, with bullets passing within inches of his 4-year old daughter and causing a fair bit of damage to his car, but the Orange County Sheriff's Office (FL) could not/would not bring the assailant to justice even though my friend was able to provide them with a plate number and they were able to determine that the vehicle was registered to a local business, and wasn't stolen. They sure can write up those speeding tickets for people going safely with the flow of traffic though, and the sheriff just got a budget increase so he could hire more officers, which brings his total to $153 million for a county of barely a million people. If I still lived in Orange County, I certainly wouldn't feel like I got $150 worth of police protection per year, especially when they can't seem to get attempted murderers off the street after being handed all the information they need.
It probably wouldn't bother me so much if they would take those officers running speed traps and put them someplace genuinely useful, like busy intersections where people die all the time because asshats are always running the stop lights.
Not always - in the U.S., the police often will park in places where you can't see them (behind bushes, etc.), and it's common for unmarked police cars to patrol the highways. That bright red Camaro or Mustang with $300 wheels and illegally dark tint on the windows might just be a local highway patrol unit. In many areas in the U.S., revenue from speeding tickets makes up a substantial part of the local government's operating budget, and the focus of law-enforcement in such areas concentrates on such revenue collection. It got so bad in Florida that the state eventually had to pass a law that said violators exceeding the limit by no more than 5 mph could not be fined (except in school zones), and even then, as long as it was less than 10 mph over the limit, the fine was only $25.00 (plus court costs and such that can add up to as much as $55.50 to the total - yeah, it's ridiculous).
I would say that the "something that needs to be done" is for the deaf people in question to take action themselves. Just because someone is deaf doesn't mean they're stupid, and the vast majority of deaf folks have the same critical thinking skills that anyone else does. I can't imagine that most deaf people are running to get their checkbooks when presented with unsolicited calls like that, and I would imagine that the relay operators have something like ANI where they could pass the calling number along to the recipient. With that information, the deaf recipient has everything they need to pursue action against the scammer themselves without the relay operator falling afoul of the law.
Now the question *I* wonder about - if I was receving such a call from a scammer, my replies to them would probably be fairly well laced with profanity - do the relay operators have to pass that along too?:-)
Publix also is entirely employee-owned and doesn't deal with this "loyalty card" crap to begin with. Translation - they don't charge you a penalty for not providing them with data on your purchases.
I think Publix is probably about the best supermarket chain I've shopped in, but I will say that Sainsbury's in England has by far the best store-brand potato chips.:-)
I'm guessing strontium aluminate - it glows for a much longer period of time than zinc sulfate.
It's a shame that tritium isn't more widely used in the US. The phosphor and glass container do a pretty good job of mopping up the radiation, and it's reasonably long-lived. Should the container break, the gas dissipates quickly, and because it's so light, it won't settle near the floor of an enclosed space in any real concentration.
So by effectively putting the UV strips inside the tube, you charge them up when the light is on. You'd have to cover the walls with UV strips to get the same effect outside the lamp.
You still won't get a comparable effect - the phosphor and glass envelope does a pretty good job of filtering the UV such that only a fraction is radiated out into the room. Having the phosphor inside the tube exposes it to a *much* higher UV level, and most phosphorescent compounds respond a whole lot better to UV than to visible light. Compare how much brighter a glow-in-the-dark item is after exposure to a UV-rich blacklight vs. a regular incandescent or fluorescent lamp.
+1 on that. I would imagine most of the boxes out at the agent stations can telnet into their respective GDS hosts, communicate with the local ATB devices, and not do much else. Check-in kiosks and such are usually locked down pretty tightly too.
How do you fight against stealth bombers that drop giant laser guided (shock and awe) mushroom cloud bombs in the middle of the night.
There's a tall, goofy-looking Saudi Arabian guy somewhere out there that's been doing just that for a number of years, and I don't really think we have the first idea where he is. We may not have legal access to grenades and such, but don't think for a moment that they would be totally unavailable - there are too many other interested parties out there that would be willing to fund/supply such an insurrection in the U.S., plus I'd imagine there would be plenty of members of the U.S. military that would refuse to fight against their countrymen, and would probably bring their toys to the party too.
Yeah I mean that might cover, I don't know, maybe my children who will live at least 75 years after I die hopefully.
But that defeats the purpose of the Copyright Clause - the idea is to encourage authors to create works by giving them a *temporary* monopoly on their works. Life + 70 gives the author a permanent monopoly from his perspective, and giving the copyright to the author's children when he dies cannot possibly encourage the creation of further works by said author, thus I believe the current state of copyright is outside the intended purpose as stated in the Constitution. I don't understand the concept that just because someone creates a work of art, their heirs should forever more be exclusively allowed to profit from it, aside from whatever monies were bequeathed to them that resulted from the use of the copyright by the original author. At what point does it stop? Should the author's great-great grandchildren have the same rights?
This whole bogus concept of "intellectual property" has opened up cans and cans of worms, and largely subverted the original purpose of copyright/patents. I think that it's ludicrous that even though Walt Disney died almost 40 years ago, neither I nor my children will likely be able to publish an original Mickey Mouse story. Disney has certainly profited handsomely from Mickey, so why is it so wrong that he now be returned to the public domain, where he properly belongs? For those that would claim, "but Mickey is a trademark!", I'd say that it's probably not a good idea to base your corporate identity on something that the law says you will eventually lose control over.
The decay of the radiation is obviously cubic over distance, but where most are held, right next to the eyes and brain, the radiation is quite strong. At certain times such as call initialization it's very strong, strong enough to light batteryless LED accessories popular on some phones.
It's strong enough such that when I have my cell phone within a foot or so of my old-school CRT display, I can tell when it's going to ring several seconds in advance because of the substantial disturbance of the monitor image.
I'm wondering why this is news though - it's been known for decades that RF is *not* good for your eyes and can contribute greatly to cataracts (that's why waveguides generally have all kinds of warnings about not looking into them), so I think a little common sense would probably go a long way here.
Oh, and I almost forgot - Australia will be changing the DST dates for 2006 to accommodate the Commonwealth Games, rather like they did in 2000 for the Olympics. Sheesh.
Of course, the countries of the world that do change their clocks don't change their clocks at the same time.
It gets even better - In Australia, some states don't observe DST at all, and of those that do, not all of them start and end it on the same dates (Yes Tasmania, I'm looking at you). Making things more interesting is that the Northern Territory and South Australia are only 30 minutes different from their eastern neighbors (but only SA observes DST), so for part of the year Adelaide is 30 minutes behind Brisbane, and for the remainder it's 30 minutes ahead since Queensland doesn't observe DST. That's fun to deal with when you're working with an airline check-in system where the host has to be able to determine what time it is at any arbitrary airport in the country. On the positive side, I've got that code written and debugged now, so to Congress all I have to say is "bring it on"!:-)
Good idea in theory, but not very practical for those who disconnect the telco at the demarc so they can have the VoIP service available on any jack in the house.
This is different then the Unix world where capacity planning is done so that expected peak CPU utilization is anywhere from 40-80%.
I don't think that's really "the Unix world" so much as "the client/server world" where the environment is such that you need a substantial amount of headroom to deal with any intense but short-lived spikes in your resource demands. Any time you spend big dollars on industrial-strength hardware to gain serious and continuous CPU and I/O capacity, you want to have maximum usage of that resource regardless of which OS it's running, otherwise you're wasting money.
I think most of the folks that have never been exposed to the mainframe world would benefit from working a while at a mainframe installation. I know my first time working with real hardware was a bit of an eye-opener.
While the color OLEDs look really cool in the rendered photos, I don't see why the keyboard wouldn't be equally practical with single-color panels (LCD, even).
Actually, for a large part of the U.S. that's subject to a lot of tornadic activity there aren't any sirens, and so we do in fact have to get that info via radio or TV.
Having said that, a good battery-powered radio is handy for such things, and learning about and paying occasional attention to the weather outside ("hmm, mesocyclone - better keep an eye on that...") helps too.
This happens to people where I work regularly - most people there are pretty security conscious, and when someone brain-farts and walks off leaving their machine unlocked for more than just a few minutes, they're as likely as not to come back to an open IM window with some kind of inappropriate message to a same-sex co-worker having been entered some time before by some anonymous party. Pretty much everyone does it, so the recipient of the message will usually make some kind of remark about the IM they received to the security-challenged party, with an admonishment to lock their machine in the future. It's kind of a self-correcting system, or will be until someone gets pissed off and calls the Compliance people.
Sounds rather like a similar situation where I worked - one of the field service guys pointed out to management that the new, shiny diode-pumped Nd:YAG machine the company had just introduced, even though it used less than a tenth of the power of the traditional lamp-pumped machines, was still substantially more expensive to operate because the company made such shitty (but still pricey) diode packs that they only got at most 1500 hours of life instead of the 10K hours that was advertised. You can buy a lot of electricity and a shitload of arc lamps for the thousands of dollars one of those packs cost. Management told him in no uncertain terms to STFU.
They've been doing the seasonal/annual passes for that long, but the single/multi-day passes only since January. Still, it's not really news, and I can't argue that point.
Disney had a lot to do with it, but it was backed by consumer advocates as well - the tickets only have a mag stripe on them, so at any non-Disney location there isn't an easy way to verify that the tickets actually were good for the number of days that were being sold, and more than a few people got ripped off by the scam artists.
Of course, Disney could spin this as "we're protecting the consumer", but anyone that's actually dealt with the company knows what it's really about.
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When the ambulance comes from behind, they can't force you to speed. Your speeding still breaks the spirit as well as the letter of the law.
As does failing to yield to an emergency vehicle displaying lights in most localities. There are plenty of situations where you simply have to choose the lesser of two evils, but most of the self-righteous don't pick up on that.
Bingo - it annoys the hell out of me that a Pakistani friend of mine was shot at on the highway shortly after 9/11, with bullets passing within inches of his 4-year old daughter and causing a fair bit of damage to his car, but the Orange County Sheriff's Office (FL) could not/would not bring the assailant to justice even though my friend was able to provide them with a plate number and they were able to determine that the vehicle was registered to a local business, and wasn't stolen. They sure can write up those speeding tickets for people going safely with the flow of traffic though, and the sheriff just got a budget increase so he could hire more officers, which brings his total to $153 million for a county of barely a million people. If I still lived in Orange County, I certainly wouldn't feel like I got $150 worth of police protection per year, especially when they can't seem to get attempted murderers off the street after being handed all the information they need.
It probably wouldn't bother me so much if they would take those officers running speed traps and put them someplace genuinely useful, like busy intersections where people die all the time because asshats are always running the stop lights.
Can you not see them from miles away?
Not always - in the U.S., the police often will park in places where you can't see them (behind bushes, etc.), and it's common for unmarked police cars to patrol the highways. That bright red Camaro or Mustang with $300 wheels and illegally dark tint on the windows might just be a local highway patrol unit. In many areas in the U.S., revenue from speeding tickets makes up a substantial part of the local government's operating budget, and the focus of law-enforcement in such areas concentrates on such revenue collection. It got so bad in Florida that the state eventually had to pass a law that said violators exceeding the limit by no more than 5 mph could not be fined (except in school zones), and even then, as long as it was less than 10 mph over the limit, the fine was only $25.00 (plus court costs and such that can add up to as much as $55.50 to the total - yeah, it's ridiculous).
I would say that the "something that needs to be done" is for the deaf people in question to take action themselves. Just because someone is deaf doesn't mean they're stupid, and the vast majority of deaf folks have the same critical thinking skills that anyone else does. I can't imagine that most deaf people are running to get their checkbooks when presented with unsolicited calls like that, and I would imagine that the relay operators have something like ANI where they could pass the calling number along to the recipient. With that information, the deaf recipient has everything they need to pursue action against the scammer themselves without the relay operator falling afoul of the law.
:-)
Now the question *I* wonder about - if I was receving such a call from a scammer, my replies to them would probably be fairly well laced with profanity - do the relay operators have to pass that along too?
Publix also is entirely employee-owned and doesn't deal with this "loyalty card" crap to begin with. Translation - they don't charge you a penalty for not providing them with data on your purchases.
:-)
I think Publix is probably about the best supermarket chain I've shopped in, but I will say that Sainsbury's in England has by far the best store-brand potato chips.
I'm guessing strontium aluminate - it glows for a much longer period of time than zinc sulfate.
It's a shame that tritium isn't more widely used in the US. The phosphor and glass container do a pretty good job of mopping up the radiation, and it's reasonably long-lived. Should the container break, the gas dissipates quickly, and because it's so light, it won't settle near the floor of an enclosed space in any real concentration.
So by effectively putting the UV strips inside the tube, you charge them up when the light is on. You'd have to cover the walls with UV strips to get the same effect outside the lamp.
You still won't get a comparable effect - the phosphor and glass envelope does a pretty good job of filtering the UV such that only a fraction is radiated out into the room. Having the phosphor inside the tube exposes it to a *much* higher UV level, and most phosphorescent compounds respond a whole lot better to UV than to visible light. Compare how much brighter a glow-in-the-dark item is after exposure to a UV-rich blacklight vs. a regular incandescent or fluorescent lamp.
+1 on that. I would imagine most of the boxes out at the agent stations can telnet into their respective GDS hosts, communicate with the local ATB devices, and not do much else. Check-in kiosks and such are usually locked down pretty tightly too.
I don't suppose you're with SITA?
How do you fight against stealth bombers that drop giant laser guided (shock and awe) mushroom cloud bombs in the middle of the night.
There's a tall, goofy-looking Saudi Arabian guy somewhere out there that's been doing just that for a number of years, and I don't really think we have the first idea where he is. We may not have legal access to grenades and such, but don't think for a moment that they would be totally unavailable - there are too many other interested parties out there that would be willing to fund/supply such an insurrection in the U.S., plus I'd imagine there would be plenty of members of the U.S. military that would refuse to fight against their countrymen, and would probably bring their toys to the party too.
Yeah I mean that might cover, I don't know, maybe my children who will live at least 75 years after I die hopefully.
But that defeats the purpose of the Copyright Clause - the idea is to encourage authors to create works by giving them a *temporary* monopoly on their works. Life + 70 gives the author a permanent monopoly from his perspective, and giving the copyright to the author's children when he dies cannot possibly encourage the creation of further works by said author, thus I believe the current state of copyright is outside the intended purpose as stated in the Constitution. I don't understand the concept that just because someone creates a work of art, their heirs should forever more be exclusively allowed to profit from it, aside from whatever monies were bequeathed to them that resulted from the use of the copyright by the original author. At what point does it stop? Should the author's great-great grandchildren have the same rights?
This whole bogus concept of "intellectual property" has opened up cans and cans of worms, and largely subverted the original purpose of copyright/patents. I think that it's ludicrous that even though Walt Disney died almost 40 years ago, neither I nor my children will likely be able to publish an original Mickey Mouse story. Disney has certainly profited handsomely from Mickey, so why is it so wrong that he now be returned to the public domain, where he properly belongs? For those that would claim, "but Mickey is a trademark!", I'd say that it's probably not a good idea to base your corporate identity on something that the law says you will eventually lose control over.
The decay of the radiation is obviously cubic over distance, but where most are held, right next to the eyes and brain, the radiation is quite strong. At certain times such as call initialization it's very strong, strong enough to light batteryless LED accessories popular on some phones.
It's strong enough such that when I have my cell phone within a foot or so of my old-school CRT display, I can tell when it's going to ring several seconds in advance because of the substantial disturbance of the monitor image.
I'm wondering why this is news though - it's been known for decades that RF is *not* good for your eyes and can contribute greatly to cataracts (that's why waveguides generally have all kinds of warnings about not looking into them), so I think a little common sense would probably go a long way here.
Oh, and I almost forgot - Australia will be changing the DST dates for 2006 to accommodate the Commonwealth Games, rather like they did in 2000 for the Olympics. Sheesh.
Of course, the countries of the world that do change their clocks don't change their clocks at the same time.
:-)
It gets even better - In Australia, some states don't observe DST at all, and of those that do, not all of them start and end it on the same dates (Yes Tasmania, I'm looking at you). Making things more interesting is that the Northern Territory and South Australia are only 30 minutes different from their eastern neighbors (but only SA observes DST), so for part of the year Adelaide is 30 minutes behind Brisbane, and for the remainder it's 30 minutes ahead since Queensland doesn't observe DST. That's fun to deal with when you're working with an airline check-in system where the host has to be able to determine what time it is at any arbitrary airport in the country. On the positive side, I've got that code written and debugged now, so to Congress all I have to say is "bring it on"!
Good idea in theory, but not very practical for those who disconnect the telco at the demarc so they can have the VoIP service available on any jack in the house.
My 8 y/o son would not have known about GTA except that it has been in the news lately. (Yep, an 8 y/o that watches the news)
Don't be so surprised when good parenting fosters an interest in the world outside of the consumer bubble advertisers would have us all live in.
No, I'm referring to the fact that the system doesn't look at the print at all. It looks at the shape and size of the entire first and second fingers.
Once again, they're not taking fingerprints.
They're not taking fingerprints.
This is different then the Unix world where capacity planning is done so that expected peak CPU utilization is anywhere from 40-80%.
I don't think that's really "the Unix world" so much as "the client/server world" where the environment is such that you need a substantial amount of headroom to deal with any intense but short-lived spikes in your resource demands. Any time you spend big dollars on industrial-strength hardware to gain serious and continuous CPU and I/O capacity, you want to have maximum usage of that resource regardless of which OS it's running, otherwise you're wasting money.
I think most of the folks that have never been exposed to the mainframe world would benefit from working a while at a mainframe installation. I know my first time working with real hardware was a bit of an eye-opener.
While the color OLEDs look really cool in the rendered photos, I don't see why the keyboard wouldn't be equally practical with single-color panels (LCD, even).
Actually, for a large part of the U.S. that's subject to a lot of tornadic activity there aren't any sirens, and so we do in fact have to get that info via radio or TV.
Having said that, a good battery-powered radio is handy for such things, and learning about and paying occasional attention to the weather outside ("hmm, mesocyclone - better keep an eye on that...") helps too.
This happens to people where I work regularly - most people there are pretty security conscious, and when someone brain-farts and walks off leaving their machine unlocked for more than just a few minutes, they're as likely as not to come back to an open IM window with some kind of inappropriate message to a same-sex co-worker having been entered some time before by some anonymous party. Pretty much everyone does it, so the recipient of the message will usually make some kind of remark about the IM they received to the security-challenged party, with an admonishment to lock their machine in the future. It's kind of a self-correcting system, or will be until someone gets pissed off and calls the Compliance people.
Sounds rather like a similar situation where I worked - one of the field service guys pointed out to management that the new, shiny diode-pumped Nd:YAG machine the company had just introduced, even though it used less than a tenth of the power of the traditional lamp-pumped machines, was still substantially more expensive to operate because the company made such shitty (but still pricey) diode packs that they only got at most 1500 hours of life instead of the 10K hours that was advertised. You can buy a lot of electricity and a shitload of arc lamps for the thousands of dollars one of those packs cost. Management told him in no uncertain terms to STFU.
They've been doing the seasonal/annual passes for that long, but the single/multi-day passes only since January. Still, it's not really news, and I can't argue that point.
who got that law passed then???
Disney had a lot to do with it, but it was backed by consumer advocates as well - the tickets only have a mag stripe on them, so at any non-Disney location there isn't an easy way to verify that the tickets actually were good for the number of days that were being sold, and more than a few people got ripped off by the scam artists.
Of course, Disney could spin this as "we're protecting the consumer", but anyone that's actually dealt with the company knows what it's really about.
Standing in line isn't particularly pleasant, but the overly warm weather does often encourage the lasses to wear less than they might ordinarily. ;-)
Not worth $60 a day, though.