Even 20km is still well into the stratosphere. Water vapor is a MUCH more potent greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that has all the environmentalists' shorts in a bunch. (Yeah, I know, quantity is the issue, and the headline doesn't say exactly how much water they're planning to spray around up there.)
Perhaps the more interesting question is, "Where can I get my hands on the technology to spray water that far?" Because that would be WAY more awesome than the water pistols we had when I was a kid.
Heh. Sometimes. I do have install discs squirreled away for OSes that I haven't used in aeons. I'm pretty sure I still have at least one OS on a pair of 360K floppies. Currently, I'm pretty sure I do have an install disc for the OS version I'm actually using at the moment (because I had to install it on a new computer a couple of months ago), but that is not always the case. I don't think I ever had one for etch, for instance, because all my etch installs were upgraded sarge installs.
> I'm not sure I understand why one would insist upon having Vista installed in preference to 7.
One reason would be if for testing or support purposes you keep computers around with each major OS version, and the Vista one just died. If you have to support every major release that's less than fifteen years old, for instance, you can't NOT have a Vista system around. You wouldn't be able to do your job. For that matter, it is easy to imagine actually *needing* to maintain a WinMe install for this reason.
(Although, as a rule, people who maintain multiple OS releases for such purposes usually install all the software themselves, so they probably wouldn't need the OEM to do that. Also, in most cases they would probably run everything on the same hardware using VMs.)
When it comes to Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Obama is actually kind of middle of the road. Well, okay, left of center, but definitely not on the extreme edge. I mean, yes, he had (at the time it was awarded) never participated in anything that significantly promoted peace (unless you count delivering some speeches that criticized his political opponent's policies, but nearly all politicians do that as a matter of course). On the other hand he had, so far as I am aware, not done anything to actively promote an everlasting blood-feud of hostility, aggression, and attempted genocide, either. Some of the other recipients have been, depending on who you ask, "strong political activists" (if you believe in their cause) or "terrorists" (otherwise). Several of them had actively promoted the use of physical violence (in at least one case, suicide bombings directed against civilian targets) as a means to resolve political disputes. Some of them make Obama look like peace incarnate.
In practice, it's the poster child for completely meaningless politically-driven popularity contests, because the committee that hands it out is not even remotely concerned with giving the prize to people who actually merit it in the sense of contributing in any real way to, you know, peace.
I mean, yes, occasionally they hand out one that makes sense. Sure, Gorbachev, okay, I'll buy that, and there are a handful of others that are at least arguable.
But you can't read the whole list and then tell me with a straight face that the committee members are taking seriously the idea of only giving the award to people who have meaningfully contributed to peace. They give it to politicians who have never so much as participated in anything resembling a peace talk. They routinely give the thing to political activists, sometimes to extremely militant political activists of the "we will not discuss even the possibility of peace until our enemy surrenders unconditionally to our insane terms that deny them the right to exist and breathe oxygen" variety. At least one person has received it just for starting a charity fund, which was not in any way related to the promotion of peace. (If anything, the Medicine prize would have been more relevant on that one, but the dude was a politician, not a doctor.)
So yeah, the Nobel Peace Prize may be a real Nobel (and at well over a million smackers I'd certainly call it a real Prize), but it doesn't really consistently have anything to do with Peace.
Actually, a lot of newer residential installations in the US are using 30-amp breakers these days, although 20-amp ones are probably still more common, even in new installations. (Setups from the late twentieth century, however, often use 14-2 cable (instead of 12-2 or better) and so tend to have 15-amp breakers for everything except the dryer and range, because a heftier breaker wouldn't be a real great idea with that cabling. Heaven forfend you put a modern thousand-watt microwave oven on such a circuit, because it'll trip the breaker every time you turn around. And don't even get me started on old fusebox installations that you can find in nooks and crannies in the unfinished basements of older homes from the first half of the twentieth century, complete with pairs of non-cabled cloth-insulated wires [shudder] plastered right into the wall, without the benefit of junction boxes or conduit or even a second layer of insulation, running to ceramic standoffs, with no proper grounding anywhere...)
I have no idea what's prevalent in Europe. For all I know they could have speaker-wire-quality pre-WWI uninsulated lines running through the mortar between the foundation blocks and gnawed by dozens of generations of rats in one building and separate sixty-amp circuits run through proper conduit for each outlet in the building next door.
Billboards. Once you got the thing built, it would be cheap to make it update several times a day, so that for instance if it's a McDonald's billboard it could advertise Sausage McMuffins and hashbrowns and the new McPepperBacon special until 10:15, then switch over to Big Macs and cola and fries until 8pm, then switch over to advertising the late-night Drive-Thru hours. Anyone with even a small amount of imagination should be able to think of ways to apply the same idea to other lines of business. For that matter, you could run a different set of advertisements each day of the week if you want. Places that don't open until afternoon (pizza joints, etc.) could sublet morning use of their billboard to businesses that cater more to morning people (e.g., some hardware stores) or simply don't feel they need (or want to pay rent for) a billboard full-time.
Heck, just the fact that it would be easy to update your billboard every few days to give it a fresh look would be a big selling point for some kinds of advertisers.
I've been saying this for years. If the project is at *all* actively maintained, then anyone who develops against it is economically best off to contribute their changes back. If you don't contribute your changes back, then you have to maintain your patches and update them every time any change in the underlying code base causes them to break -- which happens often if the project is active at all. The more substantial your changes are, the faster they will bitrot and the harder they will be to maintain and the stronger your incentive will be to get them committed upstream ASAP. When do you want to contribute your patch upstream? As soon as it's ready. Today would be good. Yesterday would be just fine. Get that sucker in the repository stat, and let everybody *else* update *their* patches to accommodate what *I've* done, while I move on and do something else.
Restrictive share-alike licenses like the GPL are unnecessary. The various permissively-licensed projects (e.g., XOrg, the BSDs, and so on) are doing just fine. Code gets contributed back just fine. The very nature of what it means to maintain a proprietary fork argues against doing so, in a very practical way. The main-line upstream code base will always outpace you.
Granted, this wasn't always true. Back in the days of minicomputers and dumb terminals, when internet access only existed at a handful of sites and CVS had yet to be introduced, collaborative development moved much more slowly, and it was possible for a proprietary vendor to keep up with upstream changes. But those days are gone.
> The whole thing leaves me very disgusted with the civil law system.
Civil law isn't the problem. Common law is the problem. It doesn't matter what the law says. The lawyers can argue forever, dredging up and misapplying the history of every even marginally similar court case in the history of the Western world. If one judge or jury ever caves in to a sob story and steps away from what the law clearly intends, every case from then until the end of time can cite it as a legal precedent.
The intent of a common law system is to avoid having to endlessly recursively define things that everyone bloody well understands just fine -- if the law has always been understood a certain way, as having a certain intent, then lawyers aren't supposed to be able to fiddle around with semantic games and make loopholes out of thin air. In principle, this makes sense. In practice, however, the cure is worse than the disease. Each injustice becomes a stepping stone for lawyers to stand on while building further injustice.
> This is why commercial entities do a namecheck before choosing names
Sure. That's why nobody would ever try to market, for example, a car called Nova ("it doesn't go" in Spanish and possibly other Romance languages), a soft drink called "Pee Cola", or a mustard called Grey Poupon. (Heck, I think that last one was even perpetrated by native speakers of English.)
The -ano suffix (cognate to -an in English; both are sometimes preceded by i, sometimes not) gets used on (the Portuguese demonyms for) a number of nationalities, but it is far from universal. A number of them end in -es (with a macron thingydoo, or maybe it's a circumflex, over the e; cognate with -ese in English). Then you have ones like azeri (Azerbaijani) and afegão (Afghan) and canadense (Canadian), and probably a lot of others I don't know (I've only studied a tiny amount of the language).
Come to think of it, a similar situation obtains in English. Just considering state demonyms, wherein everyone shares the same linguistic heritage and there are no really foreign suffixes involved, we've got -an (Texan, Alaskan), -ian (Virginian, Floridian), -er (New Yorker, Rhode Islander), and some special forms (Hoosier - the only word I know for someone from Indiana, and I've lived there). Throw in cities and foreign places and you get suffixes like -i, -ani, -ese, -ine, -ite, -ic, -iot, -onian, -egian, and -ishman, not to mention special cases like "Dane", "Swede", "Spaniard", and "Breton".
Language is weird. That's probably why it fascinates me so much.
I lived here in 2008. (The last time I lived outside of Ohio was when I went to college in the mid nineties.)
I don't remember anything about any hurricane.
It's probably because I don't watch TV much. When you don't TV, things like hurricanes don't get your attention as easily. If we get a little rain, I usually just figure it's rain (something that happens very often here -- five days of rain in a week is not unusual in the summer time in Ohio), and I don't generally stop to think about whether there might possibly have been at some point in the storm's past a hurricane involved.
Actually, I highly recommend the practice of not watching television. It's remarkably calming. It's amazing how many ostensibly earth-shattering disasters you can completely fail to notice. Election years are also much more pleasant.
If there hadn't been a hurricane on the east coast, we might have gotten rain anyway. Rain is not exactly an unusual occurrence. It happens somewhere north of a hundred times a year. Granted, about half of those rainy days are in June most years, or at least it seems that way. Even in August, though, rain is not so unusual as to surprise anyone. It can just happen on any random day, without apparent cause, whether the meteorologists call for it or not. Whoopty doo.
Admittedly, said rain probably would've come in from the west under normal circumstances, instead of from the east and/or south, so I guess if you consider that a major disturbance in the weather, the hurricane has the power to totally turn our world upside-down. Or something.
That's nonsense. Images and text are two-dimensional content that you scroll through and read. They go together and (if the page is at all well designed) complement one another. The user scrolls through them together and views them together, at the user's pace. It actually works pretty well.
Video, on the other hand, has (one could even say it is dominated by) a time dimension that is at odds with the user's ability to read and scroll. This makes embedded video extremely inconvenient for the user, because the video is trapped in the context of a web page where it doesn't really fit -- it nearly ALWAYS takes a different amount of time to watch the video than it takes to view the surrounding page. Furthermore, videos don't need external captions and explanations like two-dimensional images so often do. Taking an image out of the context of the web page often makes it less interesting or harder to understand, but the same is not true of video. I have never seen an example of a video embedded in a web page where remaining in the context of the page added ANY value whatsoever to the video. Ever. In every single case I have ever seen, the video would have been just as informative and understandable and more convenient for the user if it were freed from the page and opened up in a video player app separate from the browser window.
(Yes, I realize this is not the most popular view. I also consider browser plugins like Java and Flash to be a fundamentally bad idea. I blame Netscape, although of course none of the major tech companies are entirely without fault when it comes to finding various ways to make the web harder to use. But Netscape also gave us window.open() and the blink tag, among other things, so their sins are particularly egregious.)
Yeah, no worries here, either. I live in central Ohio (close enough to the Mississippi/St.Lawrence continental divide that I've actually crossed it while walking the dog really -- yes, really), and I estimate that for a hurricane to get this far inland, this far north, and this far above sea level, not to mention crossing the entire Appalachian mountain system, with any significant punch left, the storm in question would have to be at least a category twelve, probably more like fifteen, on the scale where Katrina was a mere five. If that happens, keeping electronics operational will be the least of our worries. The whole eastern seaboard would be under more than a thousand feet of water.
Frankly, a severe blizzard in August is more likely.
The most common argument in favor that I've heard is "it's more open", which is of course nonsense. (XHTML is every bit as open as HTML5.)
The secondary argument is that it lets you do stupid junk like embed a video in a web page (instead of just linking to the video file and letting the user click it and open it in their preferred media player, like a sane person would prefer to do). This argument is at least coherent, in that HTML5 actually does provide said functionality; it just doesn't seem like a *positive* thing to me.
So, to me, HTML5 seems like a step in the wrong direction.
Oh, I see, you're a devoted speeder, and so to you this thread is mostly about the fact that he was going over the speed limit and got in trouble. Nevermind about the dual-cellphone-wielding insanity, that's barely worth dismissing.
You know what? I'm not even going to argue with you about the dangers of speeding. I'll just let the fines keep arguing with your wallet. They may not have convinced you yet, but they do seem to be getting your attention.
I'll grant you smoking. I was forgetting it because it doesn't cause very many _accidents_ (and because I'm not enough of an idiot to ever consider doing it), but yeah, it does cause pretty severe medical risk for a lot of people.
When I cross the street, however, I look up briefly to verify that there are no cars first. This makes it MUCH safer than driving. But yeah, if you cross the street blindfolded or staring at your feet or while reading a book, that would probably be more dangerous than driving (on the same street -- crossing a backwater speedbumped residential street blindfolded would probably not be as dangerous as driving downtown, but that's not a fair comparison).
I've never seen a subway platform. Off the top of my head, I don't even know where the nearest subway system is. The nearest one that I *know* about is clear the heck in New York City (or Washington DC -- I'm not sure which is closer). There might be a closer subway, but I don't know where it would be. There definitely aren't any in Ohio. Chicago has an el rather than a subway. I don't happen to know what Detroit has... (I'd do a Google search for subway near my location, but it would just find the restaurant chain.)
Diseases and domestic abuse are things that happen to you, not risks you take voluntarily. (There might be risks you take voluntarily that could lead to these things, but the only one I can think of that a lot of people do that's worse than driving is smoking, which we've already mentioned. Well, and overeating maybe.)
> In fact, stand in a hospital emergency room. Count the number of car > accident victims, versus the number of household accident victims.
Most emergency room visitors *should* have just gone to the doctor's office (if anything). You know what's more common there than household accidents? The common cold. Seriously. How dangerous is that? They go to the ER because they don't have to pay for it. (Then they wonder why conservatives think fully socialized medicine is a bad idea.)
> And remember that the media covers car crashes, but doesn't cover household accidents, so there's a huge visibility bias.
The media does cover household accidents from time to time, but usually only if they're bizarre or funny.
There's also, however, a large statistical gulf in the number of deaths and serious debilitating injuries that result. Care to guess which one is the big number? You know what, don't guess. Look it up. Are you over 75? If you're more than 75 years old, you're more likely to die of some other kind of accident, such as falling down while walking. (If you're over 85, you're *way* more likely to die of another kind of accident.) Even then, though, driving (or riding in the car) is still FAR more dangerous on a minute-by-minute basis than being at home or walking. Old people spend *WAY* more time at home than they spend on the road.
The other one, which is crash related (and I haven't entirely ruled out the possibility that an add-on could have been involved in triggering it), is much harder to reliably reproduce, but it happened to me three times in the relatively short time I was using 3.x, and it has never happened to me in the much longer time I've been using 2.0.
But it's bug 440093 that keeps me on 2.0.0.20. I cannot use a browser that has that behavior.
> I object to your comment about its being 'perfectly possible to live without a car'. > I am sure you're someone living in a major city with good, regular public transport
Actually, it's a good deal harder to live without a car in big cities, because you have to arrange your trips around the train or bus schedule. In small towns you can just walk everywhere -- a practice that has the added benefits of being cheaper and healthier. (Living in a small town is cheaper and healthier in other respects, as well...) Furthermore, it's not like you don't have any control over where you choose to live. This isn't some Marxist regime where you need permission from Big Brother before you can go anywhere. If your current location creates problems for you, stop whining and do something about it: move somewhere better. It ain't that big a deal.
> in some cases may make you lose your job
Yeah? So get a different one. *Most* jobs don't require you to drive.
If driving is a professional requirement for you, then you should learn definitely how to drive -- SAFELY. The last thing we need is professional drivers who don't know better than to pull stupid stunts like driving over the speed limit while using two cellphones at once. Shame on you! You of all people should know better, and I don't feel at ALL bad if doing something like that causes you to lose your driving-for-a-living job and have to get a different kind of job wherein you DON'T endanger the lives of everyone around you on a regular basis. That sounds like a good thing to me.
Personally I think five years (or until you turn 21, if you're under eighteen at the time) would be enough on the first offense, *PROVIDED* that it is made fully abundantly clear that any repetition of the offense, or any similar offense WILL definitely result in a totally permanent life-long driving ban forever and ever until death makes it irrevocably moot for your sorry deceased butt amen.
By "any similar offense" I mean driving while using a cellphone, driving while watching a movie or reading a book, driving while inebriated, driving while not having slept in over 24 hours, driving with your feet on the wheel and your hands on the pedals and head below the dash, driving while not taking the anti-seizure medication you're legally required to take in order to drive, doing anything described in the customer reviews for the Laptop Steering Wheel desk on Amazon, or anything of the sort -- all such behaviors should be legally equivalent. Driving 150% of the posted speed limit should also qualify.
Five years is long enough that anyone who thinks seriously about consequences won't risk it, and it's long enough to significantly get the attention of anyone who doesn't ordinarily think about consequences (or doesn't think they can get caught) and finds themselves getting caught doing it once -- five years will get their attention well enough that the threat of a permanent ban, made exceedingly clear, should be taken seriously.
The other problem that has to be solved, for it to have teeth, is that driving with your license revoked for said offenses currently doesn't carry nearly severe enough a penalty -- so people get their license taken away and then just drive anyway. To prevent that, it is necessary to levy prohibitive penalties against anyone who goes ahead and drives after their license has been revoked. I would vote for mandatory amputation of one limb on each occasion (teenagers who agree to attend a few dozen hours of safety classes could get off light on the first offense with the option to keep all their limbs and instead just get a forehead tattoo that looks like a large infected zit), but the courts would undoubtedly throw that out as "cruel and unusual", so we'd probably have to go with something boring and unimaginative like prison time instead.
> Driving is no where near as dangerous has dozens of other things that we do every year.
Maybe YOU test-pilot homemade rockets, climb the outsides of skyscrapers with no equipment or net, synthesize polyazides in your kitchen, sleep on the subway tracks six inches from the third rail, keep a hunk of polonium in your underwear drawer, combine creative anachronism and BASE jumping by launching yourself out of a trebuchet, and try to sneak onto military bases in Islamic countries wearing nothing but an extra-large star-of-David sash while hyperventilating nonstop through a harmonica and waving around an unloaded assault rifle.
But for most of us, riding in a motor vehicle on public roads is more dangerous, minute-by-minute, than anything else we do on anything resembling a regular basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Even 20km is still well into the stratosphere. Water vapor is a MUCH more potent greenhouse gas than the carbon dioxide that has all the environmentalists' shorts in a bunch. (Yeah, I know, quantity is the issue, and the headline doesn't say exactly how much water they're planning to spray around up there.)
Perhaps the more interesting question is, "Where can I get my hands on the technology to spray water that far?" Because that would be WAY more awesome than the water pistols we had when I was a kid.
Heh. Sometimes. I do have install discs squirreled away for OSes that I haven't used in aeons. I'm pretty sure I still have at least one OS on a pair of 360K floppies. Currently, I'm pretty sure I do have an install disc for the OS version I'm actually using at the moment (because I had to install it on a new computer a couple of months ago), but that is not always the case. I don't think I ever had one for etch, for instance, because all my etch installs were upgraded sarge installs.
> I'm not sure I understand why one would insist upon having Vista installed in preference to 7.
One reason would be if for testing or support purposes you keep computers around with each major OS version, and the Vista one just died. If you have to support every major release that's less than fifteen years old, for instance, you can't NOT have a Vista system around. You wouldn't be able to do your job. For that matter, it is easy to imagine actually *needing* to maintain a WinMe install for this reason.
(Although, as a rule, people who maintain multiple OS releases for such purposes usually install all the software themselves, so they probably wouldn't need the OEM to do that. Also, in most cases they would probably run everything on the same hardware using VMs.)
When it comes to Nobel Peace Prize recipients, Obama is actually kind of middle of the road. Well, okay, left of center, but definitely not on the extreme edge. I mean, yes, he had (at the time it was awarded) never participated in anything that significantly promoted peace (unless you count delivering some speeches that criticized his political opponent's policies, but nearly all politicians do that as a matter of course). On the other hand he had, so far as I am aware, not done anything to actively promote an everlasting blood-feud of hostility, aggression, and attempted genocide, either. Some of the other recipients have been, depending on who you ask, "strong political activists" (if you believe in their cause) or "terrorists" (otherwise). Several of them had actively promoted the use of physical violence (in at least one case, suicide bombings directed against civilian targets) as a means to resolve political disputes. Some of them make Obama look like peace incarnate.
> The peace prize is a real Nobel
On paper.
In practice, it's the poster child for completely meaningless politically-driven popularity contests, because the committee that hands it out is not even remotely concerned with giving the prize to people who actually merit it in the sense of contributing in any real way to, you know, peace.
I mean, yes, occasionally they hand out one that makes sense. Sure, Gorbachev, okay, I'll buy that, and there are a handful of others that are at least arguable.
But you can't read the whole list and then tell me with a straight face that the committee members are taking seriously the idea of only giving the award to people who have meaningfully contributed to peace. They give it to politicians who have never so much as participated in anything resembling a peace talk. They routinely give the thing to political activists, sometimes to extremely militant political activists of the "we will not discuss even the possibility of peace until our enemy surrenders unconditionally to our insane terms that deny them the right to exist and breathe oxygen" variety. At least one person has received it just for starting a charity fund, which was not in any way related to the promotion of peace. (If anything, the Medicine prize would have been more relevant on that one, but the dude was a politician, not a doctor.)
So yeah, the Nobel Peace Prize may be a real Nobel (and at well over a million smackers I'd certainly call it a real Prize), but it doesn't really consistently have anything to do with Peace.
Actually, a lot of newer residential installations in the US are using 30-amp breakers these days, although 20-amp ones are probably still more common, even in new installations. (Setups from the late twentieth century, however, often use 14-2 cable (instead of 12-2 or better) and so tend to have 15-amp breakers for everything except the dryer and range, because a heftier breaker wouldn't be a real great idea with that cabling. Heaven forfend you put a modern thousand-watt microwave oven on such a circuit, because it'll trip the breaker every time you turn around. And don't even get me started on old fusebox installations that you can find in nooks and crannies in the unfinished basements of older homes from the first half of the twentieth century, complete with pairs of non-cabled cloth-insulated wires [shudder] plastered right into the wall, without the benefit of junction boxes or conduit or even a second layer of insulation, running to ceramic standoffs, with no proper grounding anywhere...)
I have no idea what's prevalent in Europe. For all I know they could have speaker-wire-quality pre-WWI uninsulated lines running through the mortar between the foundation blocks and gnawed by dozens of generations of rats in one building and separate sixty-amp circuits run through proper conduit for each outlet in the building next door.
> I rather like the idea of e-wallpaper.
Billboards. Once you got the thing built, it would be cheap to make it update several times a day, so that for instance if it's a McDonald's billboard it could advertise Sausage McMuffins and hashbrowns and the new McPepperBacon special until 10:15, then switch over to Big Macs and cola and fries until 8pm, then switch over to advertising the late-night Drive-Thru hours. Anyone with even a small amount of imagination should be able to think of ways to apply the same idea to other lines of business. For that matter, you could run a different set of advertisements each day of the week if you want. Places that don't open until afternoon (pizza joints, etc.) could sublet morning use of their billboard to businesses that cater more to morning people (e.g., some hardware stores) or simply don't feel they need (or want to pay rent for) a billboard full-time.
Heck, just the fact that it would be easy to update your billboard every few days to give it a fresh look would be a big selling point for some kinds of advertisers.
Only problem is, paper's not very durable. They really should make it out of something sturdier, like thinly stretched specially cured leather.
I've been saying this for years. If the project is at *all* actively maintained, then anyone who develops against it is economically best off to contribute their changes back. If you don't contribute your changes back, then you have to maintain your patches and update them every time any change in the underlying code base causes them to break -- which happens often if the project is active at all. The more substantial your changes are, the faster they will bitrot and the harder they will be to maintain and the stronger your incentive will be to get them committed upstream ASAP. When do you want to contribute your patch upstream? As soon as it's ready. Today would be good. Yesterday would be just fine. Get that sucker in the repository stat, and let everybody *else* update *their* patches to accommodate what *I've* done, while I move on and do something else.
Restrictive share-alike licenses like the GPL are unnecessary. The various permissively-licensed projects (e.g., XOrg, the BSDs, and so on) are doing just fine. Code gets contributed back just fine. The very nature of what it means to maintain a proprietary fork argues against doing so, in a very practical way. The main-line upstream code base will always outpace you.
Granted, this wasn't always true. Back in the days of minicomputers and dumb terminals, when internet access only existed at a handful of sites and CVS had yet to be introduced, collaborative development moved much more slowly, and it was possible for a proprietary vendor to keep up with upstream changes. But those days are gone.
> The whole thing leaves me very disgusted with the civil law system.
Civil law isn't the problem. Common law is the problem. It doesn't matter what the law says. The lawyers can argue forever, dredging up and misapplying the history of every even marginally similar court case in the history of the Western world. If one judge or jury ever caves in to a sob story and steps away from what the law clearly intends, every case from then until the end of time can cite it as a legal precedent.
The intent of a common law system is to avoid having to endlessly recursively define things that everyone bloody well understands just fine -- if the law has always been understood a certain way, as having a certain intent, then lawyers aren't supposed to be able to fiddle around with semantic games and make loopholes out of thin air. In principle, this makes sense. In practice, however, the cure is worse than the disease. Each injustice becomes a stepping stone for lawyers to stand on while building further injustice.
> This is why commercial entities do a namecheck before choosing names
Sure. That's why nobody would ever try to market, for example, a car called Nova ("it doesn't go" in Spanish and possibly other Romance languages), a soft drink called "Pee Cola", or a mustard called Grey Poupon. (Heck, I think that last one was even perpetrated by native speakers of English.)
The -ano suffix (cognate to -an in English; both are sometimes preceded by i, sometimes not) gets used on (the Portuguese demonyms for) a number of nationalities, but it is far from universal. A number of them end in -es (with a macron thingydoo, or maybe it's a circumflex, over the e; cognate with -ese in English). Then you have ones like azeri (Azerbaijani) and afegão (Afghan) and canadense (Canadian), and probably a lot of others I don't know (I've only studied a tiny amount of the language).
Come to think of it, a similar situation obtains in English. Just considering state demonyms, wherein everyone shares the same linguistic heritage and there are no really foreign suffixes involved, we've got -an (Texan, Alaskan), -ian (Virginian, Floridian), -er (New Yorker, Rhode Islander), and some special forms (Hoosier - the only word I know for someone from Indiana, and I've lived there). Throw in cities and foreign places and you get suffixes like -i, -ani, -ese, -ine, -ite, -ic, -iot, -onian, -egian, and -ishman, not to mention special cases like "Dane", "Swede", "Spaniard", and "Breton".
Language is weird. That's probably why it fascinates me so much.
I lived here in 2008. (The last time I lived outside of Ohio was when I went to college in the mid nineties.)
I don't remember anything about any hurricane.
It's probably because I don't watch TV much. When you don't TV, things like hurricanes don't get your attention as easily. If we get a little rain, I usually just figure it's rain (something that happens very often here -- five days of rain in a week is not unusual in the summer time in Ohio), and I don't generally stop to think about whether there might possibly have been at some point in the storm's past a hurricane involved.
Actually, I highly recommend the practice of not watching television. It's remarkably calming. It's amazing how many ostensibly earth-shattering disasters you can completely fail to notice. Election years are also much more pleasant.
Sure, we might get a little rain. Potentially.
If there hadn't been a hurricane on the east coast, we might have gotten rain anyway. Rain is not exactly an unusual occurrence. It happens somewhere north of a hundred times a year. Granted, about half of those rainy days are in June most years, or at least it seems that way. Even in August, though, rain is not so unusual as to surprise anyone. It can just happen on any random day, without apparent cause, whether the meteorologists call for it or not. Whoopty doo.
Admittedly, said rain probably would've come in from the west under normal circumstances, instead of from the east and/or south, so I guess if you consider that a major disturbance in the weather, the hurricane has the power to totally turn our world upside-down. Or something.
That's nonsense. Images and text are two-dimensional content that you scroll through and read. They go together and (if the page is at all well designed) complement one another. The user scrolls through them together and views them together, at the user's pace. It actually works pretty well.
Video, on the other hand, has (one could even say it is dominated by) a time dimension that is at odds with the user's ability to read and scroll. This makes embedded video extremely inconvenient for the user, because the video is trapped in the context of a web page where it doesn't really fit -- it nearly ALWAYS takes a different amount of time to watch the video than it takes to view the surrounding page. Furthermore, videos don't need external captions and explanations like two-dimensional images so often do. Taking an image out of the context of the web page often makes it less interesting or harder to understand, but the same is not true of video. I have never seen an example of a video embedded in a web page where remaining in the context of the page added ANY value whatsoever to the video. Ever. In every single case I have ever seen, the video would have been just as informative and understandable and more convenient for the user if it were freed from the page and opened up in a video player app separate from the browser window.
(Yes, I realize this is not the most popular view. I also consider browser plugins like Java and Flash to be a fundamentally bad idea. I blame Netscape, although of course none of the major tech companies are entirely without fault when it comes to finding various ways to make the web harder to use. But Netscape also gave us window.open() and the blink tag, among other things, so their sins are particularly egregious.)
Yeah, no worries here, either. I live in central Ohio (close enough to the Mississippi/St.Lawrence continental divide that I've actually crossed it while walking the dog really -- yes, really), and I estimate that for a hurricane to get this far inland, this far north, and this far above sea level, not to mention crossing the entire Appalachian mountain system, with any significant punch left, the storm in question would have to be at least a category twelve, probably more like fifteen, on the scale where Katrina was a mere five. If that happens, keeping electronics operational will be the least of our worries. The whole eastern seaboard would be under more than a thousand feet of water.
Frankly, a severe blizzard in August is more likely.
In a word, no.
The most common argument in favor that I've heard is "it's more open", which is of course nonsense. (XHTML is every bit as open as HTML5.)
The secondary argument is that it lets you do stupid junk like embed a video in a web page (instead of just linking to the video file and letting the user click it and open it in their preferred media player, like a sane person would prefer to do). This argument is at least coherent, in that HTML5 actually does provide said functionality; it just doesn't seem like a *positive* thing to me.
So, to me, HTML5 seems like a step in the wrong direction.
Wake me up if it ever amounts to anything you don't need a microscope to see.
Oh, I see, you're a devoted speeder, and so to you this thread is mostly about the fact that he was going over the speed limit and got in trouble. Nevermind about the dual-cellphone-wielding insanity, that's barely worth dismissing.
You know what? I'm not even going to argue with you about the dangers of speeding. I'll just let the fines keep arguing with your wallet. They may not have convinced you yet, but they do seem to be getting your attention.
I'll grant you smoking. I was forgetting it because it doesn't cause very many _accidents_ (and because I'm not enough of an idiot to ever consider doing it), but yeah, it does cause pretty severe medical risk for a lot of people.
When I cross the street, however, I look up briefly to verify that there are no cars first. This makes it MUCH safer than driving. But yeah, if you cross the street blindfolded or staring at your feet or while reading a book, that would probably be more dangerous than driving (on the same street -- crossing a backwater speedbumped residential street blindfolded would probably not be as dangerous as driving downtown, but that's not a fair comparison).
I've never seen a subway platform. Off the top of my head, I don't even know where the nearest subway system is. The nearest one that I *know* about is clear the heck in New York City (or Washington DC -- I'm not sure which is closer). There might be a closer subway, but I don't know where it would be. There definitely aren't any in Ohio. Chicago has an el rather than a subway. I don't happen to know what Detroit has... (I'd do a Google search for subway near my location, but it would just find the restaurant chain.)
Diseases and domestic abuse are things that happen to you, not risks you take voluntarily. (There might be risks you take voluntarily that could lead to these things, but the only one I can think of that a lot of people do that's worse than driving is smoking, which we've already mentioned. Well, and overeating maybe.)
> In fact, stand in a hospital emergency room. Count the number of car
> accident victims, versus the number of household accident victims.
Most emergency room visitors *should* have just gone to the doctor's office (if anything). You know what's more common there than household accidents? The common cold. Seriously. How dangerous is that? They go to the ER because they don't have to pay for it. (Then they wonder why conservatives think fully socialized medicine is a bad idea.)
> And remember that the media covers car crashes, but doesn't cover household accidents, so there's a huge visibility bias.
The media does cover household accidents from time to time, but usually only if they're bizarre or funny.
There's also, however, a large statistical gulf in the number of deaths and serious debilitating injuries that result. Care to guess which one is the big number? You know what, don't guess. Look it up. Are you over 75? If you're more than 75 years old, you're more likely to die of some other kind of accident, such as falling down while walking. (If you're over 85, you're *way* more likely to die of another kind of accident.) Even then, though, driving (or riding in the car) is still FAR more dangerous on a minute-by-minute basis than being at home or walking. Old people spend *WAY* more time at home than they spend on the road.
The sneaky one is bug 440093.
The other one, which is crash related (and I haven't entirely ruled out the possibility that an add-on could have been involved in triggering it), is much harder to reliably reproduce, but it happened to me three times in the relatively short time I was using 3.x, and it has never happened to me in the much longer time I've been using 2.0.
But it's bug 440093 that keeps me on 2.0.0.20. I cannot use a browser that has that behavior.
> China, which is a major investor in telecommunications, ports and infrastructure in the country.'"
Umm, more to the point, "China, which like Pakistan also has tense border relations with India."
> I object to your comment about its being 'perfectly possible to live without a car'.
> I am sure you're someone living in a major city with good, regular public transport
Actually, it's a good deal harder to live without a car in big cities, because you have to arrange your trips around the train or bus schedule. In small towns you can just walk everywhere -- a practice that has the added benefits of being cheaper and healthier. (Living in a small town is cheaper and healthier in other respects, as well...) Furthermore, it's not like you don't have any control over where you choose to live. This isn't some Marxist regime where you need permission from Big Brother before you can go anywhere. If your current location creates problems for you, stop whining and do something about it: move somewhere better. It ain't that big a deal.
> in some cases may make you lose your job
Yeah? So get a different one. *Most* jobs don't require you to drive.
If driving is a professional requirement for you, then you should learn definitely how to drive -- SAFELY. The last thing we need is professional drivers who don't know better than to pull stupid stunts like driving over the speed limit while using two cellphones at once. Shame on you! You of all people should know better, and I don't feel at ALL bad if doing something like that causes you to lose your driving-for-a-living job and have to get a different kind of job wherein you DON'T endanger the lives of everyone around you on a regular basis. That sounds like a good thing to me.
Personally I think five years (or until you turn 21, if you're under eighteen at the time) would be enough on the first offense, *PROVIDED* that it is made fully abundantly clear that any repetition of the offense, or any similar offense WILL definitely result in a totally permanent life-long driving ban forever and ever until death makes it irrevocably moot for your sorry deceased butt amen.
By "any similar offense" I mean driving while using a cellphone, driving while watching a movie or reading a book, driving while inebriated, driving while not having slept in over 24 hours, driving with your feet on the wheel and your hands on the pedals and head below the dash, driving while not taking the anti-seizure medication you're legally required to take in order to drive, doing anything described in the customer reviews for the Laptop Steering Wheel desk on Amazon, or anything of the sort -- all such behaviors should be legally equivalent. Driving 150% of the posted speed limit should also qualify.
Five years is long enough that anyone who thinks seriously about consequences won't risk it, and it's long enough to significantly get the attention of anyone who doesn't ordinarily think about consequences (or doesn't think they can get caught) and finds themselves getting caught doing it once -- five years will get their attention well enough that the threat of a permanent ban, made exceedingly clear, should be taken seriously.
The other problem that has to be solved, for it to have teeth, is that driving with your license revoked for said offenses currently doesn't carry nearly severe enough a penalty -- so people get their license taken away and then just drive anyway. To prevent that, it is necessary to levy prohibitive penalties against anyone who goes ahead and drives after their license has been revoked. I would vote for mandatory amputation of one limb on each occasion (teenagers who agree to attend a few dozen hours of safety classes could get off light on the first offense with the option to keep all their limbs and instead just get a forehead tattoo that looks like a large infected zit), but the courts would undoubtedly throw that out as "cruel and unusual", so we'd probably have to go with something boring and unimaginative like prison time instead.
> Driving is no where near as dangerous has dozens of other things that we do every year.
Maybe YOU test-pilot homemade rockets, climb the outsides of skyscrapers with no equipment or net, synthesize polyazides in your kitchen, sleep on the subway tracks six inches from the third rail, keep a hunk of polonium in your underwear drawer, combine creative anachronism and BASE jumping by launching yourself out of a trebuchet, and try to sneak onto military bases in Islamic countries wearing nothing but an extra-large star-of-David sash while hyperventilating nonstop through a harmonica and waving around an unloaded assault rifle.
But for most of us, riding in a motor vehicle on public roads is more dangerous, minute-by-minute, than anything else we do on anything resembling a regular basis.