Laws fix nothing. I mentioned this in a similar thread a week or so ago, but the city of Orlando is trialling a red-light camera system, even though state law very clearly says they can't write a traffic ordinance that applies to anything already covered under state law, and red lights are most definitely covered under state law. The city doesn't care about the law, only the potential profits. What good are laws then?
Pass a law mandating a minimum yellow light time, and all the city will do will be to continue to issue administrative fines (since in a courtroom, these cases are non-starters, and the locality knows it) against people, and *might* drop cases against those who indicate they actually know the law.
And sometimes there's just a big unanswerable question mark over the decision. For instance, on my way to work, I had to wait at a red light while the turn lane had a green. Opposing traffic also had a red, and as it was a "T" intersection they had no turn lane at all. No reason whatsoever that straight-through traffic in the same direction should not have been green anytime the arrow was green as well.
And then there's the intersection on the same highway about three miles south of that one, where they have the traffic lights mounted on horizontal stalks so close to the stop line that you have to peek out from under your windshield in order to see them when stopped at the intersection. The visibility issue applies to all four directions no less, when rotating the fixtures 90 degrees clockwise would have placed the lights at the *far* side of the intersection, where they could be easily seen by all four directions of traffic.
I'll give a shout-out to Vitelity. I've run my Asterisk box at home through them for about three years now, and the reliability has been such that I hardly ever give them a thought. I don't think you can ask much more of a comms provider, and I definitely like being able to pick and choose services ala carte.
Skype has yet to offer anything interesting to me.
First: if you actually paid attention, they weren't discarding "every scrap" of technology by any means
I actually paid attention, thanks. I just don't accept the premise. I understand they hadn't gotten rid of *everything*. There's no indication that Adama's Raptor (along with the others) weren't sent on their way into the sun as well when their work was done. It still doesn't change the fact that almost everyone agreed to embark upon a very primitive way of life and with a bare minimum of consumables, and with little to no experience in true subsistence living. One would also assume they brought no weapons with them, in keeping with the stated objective of getting rid of their technology. That choice is going to come in particularly handy in the likely event the natives don't welcome them with open arms.
The finale was reasonably good, but I would have preferred the last scene to have been Adama on top of the hill next to Laura's grave. What follows after that, although necessary to explain the existence of the "imaginary" Gaius/Six characters, seemed awfully cheesy to me. I'm talking "Galactica 1980" cheesy. I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
On my wife's MacBook, the keyboard itself wasn't the problem, but rather the trackpad became totally unresponsive. Fortunately, I was able to find a new OEM top bezel for the MacBook for about $60 on eBay and installed it myself, which was much better than the $300 that the local Apple Store had quoted for a replacement bezel (it's an integrated unit, so there's not a separate SKU for just the trackpad). I'd also had the infamous "sudden power-off" issue that a lot of the early MacBooks suffered from but Apple flatly denied the existence of. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later Apple issued a firmware update for the SMC/PMU that fixed this supposedly non-existent problem, so I don't really count that as a hardware failure.
On the flip side though, since I bought my wife's MacBook in August of 2007, I've had to replace a battery and the keyboard (no, nothing was spilled on/in it:-)), and I also have had the power supply die in my dual-CPU Power Mac, which thus far I've not replaced because I'm not paying $200 for a proprietary sub-350 watt supply that for any other computer would cost $40. None of the other four machines that see regular use running Linux or Windows have had any problems of any sort in that same period of time.
I understand that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but my personal experience with post-iMac G3 Apple products is that they haven't been nearly as reliable as the machines I put together myself. My iPods, Apple IIs, and older Macs all keep going like a Timex watch though.
These are the same clueless bastards that reported the Columbia was going 18 times the speed of light during its fatal re-entry a few years back, so frankly it doesn't surprise me.
I can most certainly question the tech that took the fingerprint. I can ask questions of the people that were present during the time the fingerprint was taken. I can't do that with a camera ticket.
I notice that you continually ignore the fact that the localities that issue these tickets won't deal with them in court. Does it not matter that in my locality, it's a flagrant violation of state law for them to continue issuing them?
Because the camera is providing the testimony for which you're being accused. It's a lot easier to ask a ticketing officer questions in court than to have to track down the records for all of the fire dispatch calls on that day, or maintenance records for that particular traffic light, all of which may or may not exist or be accessible to the public. Also note that with cameras you usually don't even know you're being ticketed until you get the notice in the mail. When an officer pulls you over, you at least have the opportunity to begin making notes of the circumstances surrounding the event and are more likely to remember things. And of course there are situations in which the camera simply is wrong. It's happened where people have been ticketed when the light was quite clearly green in the camera footage, but the accused is still under the burden of dealing with it and getting it cleared up.
The fact still remains that these cases don't get heard in court because they're losers from the gate, and it's more important to me that the government abide by the law than it is that they make more money by providing an extremely dubious safety benefit. If a particular intersection is truly that unsafe, then there's no reason an officer can't be stationed there during the busy parts of the day, particularly the area where I live which has three separate law enforcement agencies that handle traffic cases, one of which is funded to the tune of more than $100 million/year for a metro area of only about a million people.
The 53% majority wasn't enough to stop the documented record number of filibusters by the Republican minority
The majority in the House wouldn't have had anything to do with a filibuster in the Senate. It still doesn't change the fact that Congress didn't even put up the appearance of trying to rein Bush in.
Questions about things that might be relevant to the situation but were not within sight of the camera. I've run lights before (safely) in order to allow emergency vehicles to pass, for instance. Or the occasional situation where the light obviously isn't working properly, and after sitting for five minutes in the middle of the night with no cross traffic, you decide to drive through.
In the United States we are guaranteed the right to face our accuser in court. This is why the *vast* majority of camera infractions are handled administratively outside the courtroom - the local government running them knows they'd have their cases thrown out in short order otherwise. Or to put it another way, they know they can't do it in keeping with the intent of the law, so they do an end-run around it. I personally believe jail time should be involved for government officials in those situations.
Since when do laws have anything to do with a city's implementation of a red-light camera system? The city of Orlando implemented one a few months ago, even though Florida Statutes 316.007 clearly states: "The provisions of this chapter shall be applicable and uniform throughout this state and in all political subdivisions and municipalities therein, and no local authority shall enact or enforce any ordinance on a matter covered by this chapter unless expressly authorized (emphasis mine). Traffic lights are explicitly and clearly covered under F.S. 316.075, and the city doesn't have the required authorization from the state, so they're flagrantly violating state law. Hell, the city won't even speak to me on the phone or return e-mails, so it looks like the only way to get any action taken on this is for me to run one of the lights late at night when there's no traffic, just so that I'd have standing to sue and hopefully get an injunction preventing the enforcement of the ordinance.
Just because state law tells a municipality they can't do something, doesn't mean they won't do it anyway. Laws are for us little people, not those in power.
It may take a while to figure it out, but there are people that can figure it out.
I never said people couldn't eventually figure the code out, but that doesn't do any good when it takes them three months to do so, and there's a deadline looming two weeks away. When I said "total cost", that includes lost opportunity costs, lost customer confidence, etc. in addition to immediate dollars and cents.
You shouldn't ever assume you're truly irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean your former employer won't incur some industrial-strength headaches in adapting to your absence.
Ever stop to think that might be because, oh, I dunno, you might be able to kill quite a lot of people with a rocket?
I'll bet money I can kill more people in less time with my car than any model rocket enthusiast can with anything at their disposal. Would you prefer to have the government hold our hand for gasoline purchases? A gallon of gas contains enough energy to cause some serious chaos, after all. Kerosene fueled the first stage of the most powerful rocket ever built - should we put that under the BATFE as well?
Welcome to the concept of freedom, which is inherently at odds with the concept of safety.
It was actually an FBI HRT sniper (Lon Horiuchi) that murdered Vicki Weaver, but that doesn't change the fact that the BATFE isn't much more than a group of thugs that feel they're above the law.
From my perspective there's still no justice in this case. If you or I overstep the bounds of what's legal, we go to jail and/or get fined. When a government agency oversteps their bounds, they just get told, "don't do that again". There needs to be some serious negative reinforcement there to prevent creative interpretations or sheer disregard of the law by those in power.
On what basis are you assuming he's Republican? He's just making an observation. You're absolutely right that Bush and his gang did their best to stretch the limits of government power, but he's also correct in saying that Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of their ilk will be doing the same damn thing. And don't forget a Democrat-controlled Congress was in power for the last two years of Bush's term and did exactly squat to mitigate his abuses.
Lust for power isn't limited to only Democrats or only Republicans.
if this brilliant code is more profitable to the company, then it is well worth the cost of hiring someone with adequate skills to untangle the spaghetti and with mental fortitude to work with the spaghetti's eccentric author.
In 20+ years of professional software development, I've yet to see a prima donna that is *so* much better than everyone else that it's worth putting up with the drama, and there are precious few that make it justifiable even from a strictly dollars-and-cents perspective. Team morale and productivity are factors to consider as well, and it doesn't do any good to have a star player if they're pissing off everyone else to the point that it's affecting their output.
There are certainly some truly gifted people out there, but I've yet to see one that's so gifted that I'd tolerate that kind of disruption to the team, and if they can't write clear, concise code, then they're frankly not that good. Steve Wozniak wrote some truly brilliant code for the Apple II *in assembly language*, but still managed to A.) write the code clearly and document it sufficiently, and B.) did it without being a total jerk to everyone.
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Laws fix nothing. I mentioned this in a similar thread a week or so ago, but the city of Orlando is trialling a red-light camera system, even though state law very clearly says they can't write a traffic ordinance that applies to anything already covered under state law, and red lights are most definitely covered under state law. The city doesn't care about the law, only the potential profits. What good are laws then?
Pass a law mandating a minimum yellow light time, and all the city will do will be to continue to issue administrative fines (since in a courtroom, these cases are non-starters, and the locality knows it) against people, and *might* drop cases against those who indicate they actually know the law.
And sometimes there's just a big unanswerable question mark over the decision. For instance, on my way to work, I had to wait at a red light while the turn lane had a green. Opposing traffic also had a red, and as it was a "T" intersection they had no turn lane at all. No reason whatsoever that straight-through traffic in the same direction should not have been green anytime the arrow was green as well.
And then there's the intersection on the same highway about three miles south of that one, where they have the traffic lights mounted on horizontal stalks so close to the stop line that you have to peek out from under your windshield in order to see them when stopped at the intersection. The visibility issue applies to all four directions no less, when rotating the fixtures 90 degrees clockwise would have placed the lights at the *far* side of the intersection, where they could be easily seen by all four directions of traffic.
If you're using Vonage, or Asterisk, or most other VOIP systems/providers, your phone calls are getting coordinated over SIP
There are an awful lot of us Asterisk folks that use IAX/IAX2 instead. *Far* better choice than SIP if it's offered by your provider.
I'll give a shout-out to Vitelity. I've run my Asterisk box at home through them for about three years now, and the reliability has been such that I hardly ever give them a thought. I don't think you can ask much more of a comms provider, and I definitely like being able to pick and choose services ala carte.
Skype has yet to offer anything interesting to me.
Ha! Did you get that from Brian Dunning? I hear that from him all the time.
I don't remember where I first heard it, but I certainly didn't come up with it myself. It's definitely something that's important to remember though.
First: if you actually paid attention, they weren't discarding "every scrap" of technology by any means
I actually paid attention, thanks. I just don't accept the premise. I understand they hadn't gotten rid of *everything*. There's no indication that Adama's Raptor (along with the others) weren't sent on their way into the sun as well when their work was done. It still doesn't change the fact that almost everyone agreed to embark upon a very primitive way of life and with a bare minimum of consumables, and with little to no experience in true subsistence living. One would also assume they brought no weapons with them, in keeping with the stated objective of getting rid of their technology. That choice is going to come in particularly handy in the likely event the natives don't welcome them with open arms.
The finale was reasonably good, but I would have preferred the last scene to have been Adama on top of the hill next to Laura's grave. What follows after that, although necessary to explain the existence of the "imaginary" Gaius/Six characters, seemed awfully cheesy to me. I'm talking "Galactica 1980" cheesy. I also didn't find the universal acceptance of the "hey, let's discard every scrap of technology and be cavemen!" idea to be realistic or practical in the least.
On my wife's MacBook, the keyboard itself wasn't the problem, but rather the trackpad became totally unresponsive. Fortunately, I was able to find a new OEM top bezel for the MacBook for about $60 on eBay and installed it myself, which was much better than the $300 that the local Apple Store had quoted for a replacement bezel (it's an integrated unit, so there's not a separate SKU for just the trackpad). I'd also had the infamous "sudden power-off" issue that a lot of the early MacBooks suffered from but Apple flatly denied the existence of. Interestingly enough, a few weeks later Apple issued a firmware update for the SMC/PMU that fixed this supposedly non-existent problem, so I don't really count that as a hardware failure.
On the flip side though, since I bought my wife's MacBook in August of 2007, I've had to replace a battery and the keyboard (no, nothing was spilled on/in it :-)), and I also have had the power supply die in my dual-CPU Power Mac, which thus far I've not replaced because I'm not paying $200 for a proprietary sub-350 watt supply that for any other computer would cost $40. None of the other four machines that see regular use running Linux or Windows have had any problems of any sort in that same period of time.
I understand that the plural of "anecdote" is not "data", but my personal experience with post-iMac G3 Apple products is that they haven't been nearly as reliable as the machines I put together myself. My iPods, Apple IIs, and older Macs all keep going like a Timex watch though.
These are the same clueless bastards that reported the Columbia was going 18 times the speed of light during its fatal re-entry a few years back, so frankly it doesn't surprise me.
They try not to have ice on the tank because it keeps breaking off and smashing tiles... that was the end of Columbia.
The Columbia accident was due to a piece of foam hitting the orbiter, not a piece of ice.
"The Inner Light" still is my favorite TNG episode, and the lighting design was fricking incredible.
I can most certainly question the tech that took the fingerprint. I can ask questions of the people that were present during the time the fingerprint was taken. I can't do that with a camera ticket.
I notice that you continually ignore the fact that the localities that issue these tickets won't deal with them in court. Does it not matter that in my locality, it's a flagrant violation of state law for them to continue issuing them?
Because the camera is providing the testimony for which you're being accused. It's a lot easier to ask a ticketing officer questions in court than to have to track down the records for all of the fire dispatch calls on that day, or maintenance records for that particular traffic light, all of which may or may not exist or be accessible to the public. Also note that with cameras you usually don't even know you're being ticketed until you get the notice in the mail. When an officer pulls you over, you at least have the opportunity to begin making notes of the circumstances surrounding the event and are more likely to remember things. And of course there are situations in which the camera simply is wrong. It's happened where people have been ticketed when the light was quite clearly green in the camera footage, but the accused is still under the burden of dealing with it and getting it cleared up.
The fact still remains that these cases don't get heard in court because they're losers from the gate, and it's more important to me that the government abide by the law than it is that they make more money by providing an extremely dubious safety benefit. If a particular intersection is truly that unsafe, then there's no reason an officer can't be stationed there during the busy parts of the day, particularly the area where I live which has three separate law enforcement agencies that handle traffic cases, one of which is funded to the tune of more than $100 million/year for a metro area of only about a million people.
The 53% majority wasn't enough to stop the documented record number of filibusters by the Republican minority
The majority in the House wouldn't have had anything to do with a filibuster in the Senate. It still doesn't change the fact that Congress didn't even put up the appearance of trying to rein Bush in.
Questions about things that might be relevant to the situation but were not within sight of the camera. I've run lights before (safely) in order to allow emergency vehicles to pass, for instance. Or the occasional situation where the light obviously isn't working properly, and after sitting for five minutes in the middle of the night with no cross traffic, you decide to drive through.
In the United States we are guaranteed the right to face our accuser in court. This is why the *vast* majority of camera infractions are handled administratively outside the courtroom - the local government running them knows they'd have their cases thrown out in short order otherwise. Or to put it another way, they know they can't do it in keeping with the intent of the law, so they do an end-run around it. I personally believe jail time should be involved for government officials in those situations.
People talk about red light cameras and speed traps as if they were some evil violation of the constitution.
When was the last time you could cross-examine a camera?
Since when do laws have anything to do with a city's implementation of a red-light camera system? The city of Orlando implemented one a few months ago, even though Florida Statutes 316.007 clearly states: "The provisions of this chapter shall be applicable and uniform throughout this state and in all political subdivisions and municipalities therein, and no local authority shall enact or enforce any ordinance on a matter covered by this chapter unless expressly authorized (emphasis mine). Traffic lights are explicitly and clearly covered under F.S. 316.075, and the city doesn't have the required authorization from the state, so they're flagrantly violating state law. Hell, the city won't even speak to me on the phone or return e-mails, so it looks like the only way to get any action taken on this is for me to run one of the lights late at night when there's no traffic, just so that I'd have standing to sue and hopefully get an injunction preventing the enforcement of the ordinance.
Just because state law tells a municipality they can't do something, doesn't mean they won't do it anyway. Laws are for us little people, not those in power.
It may take a while to figure it out, but there are people that can figure it out.
I never said people couldn't eventually figure the code out, but that doesn't do any good when it takes them three months to do so, and there's a deadline looming two weeks away. When I said "total cost", that includes lost opportunity costs, lost customer confidence, etc. in addition to immediate dollars and cents.
You shouldn't ever assume you're truly irreplaceable, but that doesn't mean your former employer won't incur some industrial-strength headaches in adapting to your absence.
Ever stop to think that might be because, oh, I dunno, you might be able to kill quite a lot of people with a rocket?
I'll bet money I can kill more people in less time with my car than any model rocket enthusiast can with anything at their disposal. Would you prefer to have the government hold our hand for gasoline purchases? A gallon of gas contains enough energy to cause some serious chaos, after all. Kerosene fueled the first stage of the most powerful rocket ever built - should we put that under the BATFE as well?
Welcome to the concept of freedom, which is inherently at odds with the concept of safety.
Agreed. We're already suffering enough from kids not developing an interest in science without the government doing more to inhibit it.
It was actually an FBI HRT sniper (Lon Horiuchi) that murdered Vicki Weaver, but that doesn't change the fact that the BATFE isn't much more than a group of thugs that feel they're above the law.
From my perspective there's still no justice in this case. If you or I overstep the bounds of what's legal, we go to jail and/or get fined. When a government agency oversteps their bounds, they just get told, "don't do that again". There needs to be some serious negative reinforcement there to prevent creative interpretations or sheer disregard of the law by those in power.
On what basis are you assuming he's Republican? He's just making an observation. You're absolutely right that Bush and his gang did their best to stretch the limits of government power, but he's also correct in saying that Obama, Pelosi, and the rest of their ilk will be doing the same damn thing. And don't forget a Democrat-controlled Congress was in power for the last two years of Bush's term and did exactly squat to mitigate his abuses.
Lust for power isn't limited to only Democrats or only Republicans.
if this brilliant code is more profitable to the company, then it is well worth the cost of hiring someone with adequate skills to untangle the spaghetti and with mental fortitude to work with the spaghetti's eccentric author.
In 20+ years of professional software development, I've yet to see a prima donna that is *so* much better than everyone else that it's worth putting up with the drama, and there are precious few that make it justifiable even from a strictly dollars-and-cents perspective. Team morale and productivity are factors to consider as well, and it doesn't do any good to have a star player if they're pissing off everyone else to the point that it's affecting their output.
There are certainly some truly gifted people out there, but I've yet to see one that's so gifted that I'd tolerate that kind of disruption to the team, and if they can't write clear, concise code, then they're frankly not that good. Steve Wozniak wrote some truly brilliant code for the Apple II *in assembly language*, but still managed to A.) write the code clearly and document it sufficiently, and B.) did it without being a total jerk to everyone.