Vast overreactions to just about every stimulus, based entirely on the general public perception of reality.
That is exactly right. And that is exactly why the founders of this country were explicit in having a bicameral legislature that would not be driven to (over)react quickly to every twist in the road. Sadly, the folks elected to those august bodies don't seem to recognize this feature of their position and try to knee-jerk to everything that the media is reporting.
With direct democracy we wouldn't have politicians as we have today.
Sadly, even with "direct democracy", we'd still have politicians just like we have today. They'ed be called "administrators", and their laws would be called "administrative rules", and it would be even harder to get rid of them than the current style of politician.
In fact, we've already got administrators making administrative rules.
... not the corporations, because they wouldn't get a vote in the issues affecting the real live humans.
Corporations currently do not get to vote in the issues affecting anything, and yet I assume you are trying to say that they would no longer have any power in the process because they would no longer have such a vote.
They would still have employees, and they's still have access to advertising, and with a populace that is being expected to vote intelligently on anything that comes up (but not having a clue about most of the stuff), they'd have a lot more sheep to influence with those ads.
Right now, a Senator who sees an ad by some corporation trying to forward some law is more likely to follow the counsel of his staff than
that ad. That's why he hires them. Sheeple won't
have a staff.
Re:why not direct democracy
on
Public Net-work
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Why? When the majority of people want a certain action to be taken then that is what will be voted for. How is this bad?
It's called "the tyranny of the majority".
Once upon a time, a majority of people thought that owning slaves was ok. I'm not sure that it still isn't that way, at least in some parts of the country. Is it ok to pass laws making slavery ok, or would that be bad?
In some parts of the country, a majority of people think that killing fags is a fun thing to do on a Saturday night. Would you allow them to vote in a law making it legal?
At one point, a majority of people thought it was quite acceptable to round up all the citizens of Oriental descent and pack them into concentration camps.
On Sept. 12, 2001, I bet you would have found a clear majority of people that would have voted "yes" on a law that deported every person with a
middle eastern heritage. (My God! Who'd serve us the Slurpees?) And before you say "that's unconstitutional", remember that it takes only a 2/3 majority to change that.
Yes, those are gross examples, but it's not hard to find more realistic ones. Here in Oregon we have citizen initiatives. Get enough people to sign a petition and you can get just about anything on a ballot and voted on. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it is good in the short term
but bad in the long.
For example, several years ago we voted a rollback and limit on property taxes. Instead of this resulting in an actual limitation in taxes, it resulted in:
Dramatic increases in assesed value for property, thus putting the actual dollar amount for taxes back to what they used to be.
Weasly politicians who sneak new taxes into anything they can, so they don't have to think about cutting budgets. (We pay a 5% tax on water, not to fund water related things, but for the city general fund. It's called a 'franchise fee', so it isn't a tax. Really. It isn't.)
A legislature that sits on its ass letting the problem of funding things get out of hand, hoping that the next initiative will fix things for them.
Most of the majority doesn't understand things well enough to know which way to vote on them. They vote with their emotions. (Politicians count on this -- Our Veritable Senator Wyden tried defeating our Veritable Senator Smith with a commercial that claimed that Smith had killed a kid, because a teenage worker had died in an accident at one of Smith's companies. How this relates to Smith's abilities as a Senator, nobody
really knows.)
Hell, one of the initiatives we had on a recent ballot, where there were about 'leventy-dozen things, was whether we should allow non-dentists to fit false teeth. Sheesh, who the hell knows if this is good or bad?
Why is that when the general populace votes for a president...
This is a myth. There is no popular vote for the President. There is no country-wide vote that the people participate in. There are state-by-state votes which are used, in most cases, to select a handful of Electors, who then cast the actual votes for the President. They don't even have to vote for the candidate they were elected to vote for!
As I recall, it wasn't too long ago that one state, NM I believe, didn't have a statewide vote for Electors, they were appointed by the Senate. The Constitution does not mandate how the Electors are elected.
You should read the Constitution sometime. All of it. It's a real eye-opener when you then compare it to what is going on now.
[Hydrogen] also tends to be less volatile than gasoline.
Ummm, excuse me, but you are wrong. The vapor pressure of gasoline at room temperature is a considerable amount below atmospheric. The vapor pressure of hydrogen at anything above a few degrees Kelvin is atmospheric pressure. In simpler words, hydrogen is lots lots lots more volatile than gasoline, and the fact that cars will be using gaseous hydrogen but liquid gasoline proves it.
Most people assume that hydrogen is disproportionately dangerous because of the Hindenburg disaster.
While there is currently a "science" of trying to prove why the Hindenberg crashed, which includes a marvelous graphical demonstration of how flammable the covering material allegedly was, hygrogen is hardly innocent in that disaster.
The televised demonstration, where a piece of the original material was stretched between the legs of a Jacob's ladder, was less than impressive. A small part of the fabric burned; the rest of it self-extinguished.
The truth is, it may have been the fabric covering the dirigible that ignited first, but had the gas not been flammable, the craft would have survived. A lighter than air craft can easily lose its outside covering and still fly (unlike an airplane, where the lift is due to the outside covering), but if the gas ignites, you are toast.
Literally.
I've been to Seattle. They've got several wireless TV stations. KING-TV does a lot more than one program a month, as I recall, although the other network outlets may be more limited.
I even heard from someone who was there more recently that they've now installed indoor plumbing in most of their larger public buildings. Someday I'll have to hitch up the wagon and go see if indoor is really that much better.
His "Internet thing", which is a poor euphemism for "lie", came during an on-camera appearance, live. I saw it. Words from the horses mouth. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, and you didn't
have a defense for, he neither took the initiative
nor was in a position to take any initiative concerning the creation of the Internet. Other people beat him to it.
...he looked for other places with similar problems and found Love Canal.
The problem with claiming credit for this is that other people found Love Canal before he did.
Please stop trying to hand-wave away the truth. There are too many people who heard him say these things to be successful in denying it, at least until we're all dead and all that's left are the historical revisionists.
Ah ha, ah ha, ha. Ahem. You do know the whole "invented the internet" is a lie, right?
That's the point of the joke.
And its not Gore's.
Yes, dear, it is. The debate where he said it was televised live, and I was watching it. I heard the
words come out of his mouth. Along with the crap about his discovery of Love Canal and how Love Story was based on him and Tipsy.
Al neither "took the initiative" nor was he in a position to take any initiative when the Internet was being created. He wasn't elected to anything until after the people who really did take the initiative had already beat him to creating it.
He MAY have coined the term "information superhighway", but putting a cute name on something is hardly creating it.
Is it still legal if they say "I'm calling from XYZ and I was hoping you would be interested in the following prerecorded sales notification"
Yes. It is illegal in this state to use automatic
dialing and announcement devices. This is almost certainly why scammers who use such devices in this state never identify themselves nor do they leave a phone number to call them at, they require someone to "press 1" to talk to a salesperson.
Furthermore, they must "explain" certain things within the first thirty seconds, and that word implies a sentient listener -- you cannot explain something to a telephone answering machine, and certainly NOT while it is still playing the outgoing message. (I've tried. No matter how many times I try to explain why it should not answer calls from telescum, it simply does not understand.)
Unfortunately, the same scum who ignore current laws and play messages into my machine will ignore the Federal law and continue to do it, since they have almost zero chance of being caught at it by anyone who would report them. I suspect the predictive dialers are even programmed to pass the call to a recording if they detect an answering machine, and to a human if they detect a human, just to limit the possibility of getting caught at this, although I have gotten the message played at me when I have answered.
I'm confused. This means that half the people that buy products from telemarketers will sign up and therefore prevent themselves from buying new products?
Telemarketers profit from finding suckers they can con. Every person who answers a telemarketing call is a potential sucker, and a potential sale.
An interesting con at one time was a company called "The Telephone Company", who would call unsuspecting suckers, pretend to be the telephone company, and sell them extra services (like long distance).
Another con is to call a business and to pretend to be their regular supplier of some product, like copier toner. They'll say that the "regular shipment" is ready, and is it ok to send it over? If the flunky answering the phones says "yes", they get a truckload of toner at inflated prices and a whopping bill.
The most active scammers calling me are the "Disney vacation" morons, who don't identify the company but imply they are part of the Disney Corp. They aren't, but I'm not supposed to be smart enough to know that.
The scammers will adapt. I've already started getting calls from scammers who tell me the name of their company (which I've never heard of) which they are required to do by law, who then tell me that I've probably never heard of them because they are the parent company for... and then rattle off a list of big-name hotels, rental car companies, and restaurants. This pretense is to get them around the "existing business relationship" exclusion of the do-not-call list, since it is almost certain that either the victim has been to one of the restaurants or hotels, or won't know that one of the family hasn't been.
A give-away clue to the fact that these people are con artists is that, once you agree to buy what it is they are selling, they will offer to send a courier to pick up the check (and maybe deliver the goods). They tell you this is for your benefit since it saves you time and effort of mailing a check; in reality, it saves them from a potential mail-fraud conviction (and from you wising up and cancelling the transaction within the three days you have under the law).
No, it doesn't. Caller ID does not stop the assholes who call and play prerecorded messages
into my answering machine, making me waste time
trying to find any real messages, nor does it prevent the phone from ringing. And I'll point out that those assholes who play the messages NEVER identify themselves as required by law -- they are required to tell me who they are and that they are selling something within the first 30 seconds, and they don't. Unfortunately, because the phone company has sold them service which deliberately shows up as "unavailable" on the caller ID, I can't sic the Attorney General on them.
Telemarketers have no first amendment right to harass me in my own home, period.
Since we got call waiting ALL of it has been eliminated!
Call waiting has nothing to do with stopping telemarketing.
This assumes that in some way it might be "normal" for a plane to be flying on the edge of such a soft wall anyways. It wouldn't.
You aren't a pilot, are you? If you were, you'd know that there is no reason for a plane not to be flying just outside a "restricted" area. If you are restricted from flying just outside a restricted area, then that, too, is a restricted area, and you would be prohibited from flying just outside that airspace, too. (And the FARs effectively remove any restricted airspace when there is an emergency.)
It seems evident to me that resistance to adoption of this sort of idea is nothing more than paranoia that must resort to the invention of exceptional circumstances in order to demonstrate the presence of danger or unreliability,...
Yes, it is evident to me that you are not only not a pilot, but are quite unfamiliar with how systems fail in aircraft and the safety issues involved. "They shouldn't be there" is not an answer, because there is no reason they shouldn't be there. These situations are not hypothetical, they actually happen. That "autopilot disable" button is not there because some engineer thought it might come in handy, it is there because autopilots failed and aircraft crashed and people died and the NTSB said "this is a problem". The reason that TCAS does not take control of the aircraft is because TCAS is sometimes WRONG about what it tells the pilot to do -- fatally wrong. Any automated system that controls the airplane must have a way to shut it off, because it WILL break, and people will die because of the advanced "safety". If you can shut it off, it's worthless for the alleged purpose. Like I said, it WOULD accomplish one thing, but there's already a way of accomplishing this, so it isn't necessary.
I'd say that four airplanes in ten years is pretty exceptional, and all this hysteria looking for extreme solutions to such a problem are just ridiculous.
As for the meaning of "airport beacon" mentioned by others, well, that's what the airport beacon is. A rotating light. If they had meant "VOR" or "other navigation systems", I assume they would have written that. As it stands, VORs are not airport-exclusive, so if you think they mean VORs, do you think they meant only those that are located at airports?
Putting people inside a few tonnes of metal and sending them up where nature didn't intend is extremely dangerous and, in all probability, will kill people.
Yep, and that is why this hysteria for perfect safety is dangerous. It makes people think 1) it is possible, and 2) it is worth any cost to achieve.
When you take off in that shiny new Airbus, how much control do you think the flight crew are going to have if someone overlooked a bug in the control software that is all that links their cabin controls to the physical surfaces?
None. And such a problem is why an Airbus crashed a few years ago. One engine failed, and because the engine controls were cross-wired, the crew shut down the good engine instead of the bad.
This is not an excuse to create even more systems that can fail in magical and fatal ways. There are currently NO systems (that I know of) that take control of the airplane away from the pilot deliberately -- and any that do MUST have shut-offs for when they fail.
One moment, you're perfectly legal, happily following a designated flight path and no threat to anyone. The next, you're a terrorist weapon...
No, there are no "designated flight paths" that have such a problem. You will not legally received a clearance to fly through airspace that cannot be flown through. If you receive one, you will start programming the route into your shiny new GPS and it will tell you there is a problem, and you'll ask for a different clearance. You may choose a path that takes you there, but it will not be designated for you.
but I think generalisations like "any sane pilot will oppose it" are going too far.
I think any pilot who sees such a system, and thinks that it is ok for the aircraft to deliberately take control of the airplane away from him when his and his passenger's lives may most depend on him being able to maneuver is, by definition, insane.
If it's a choice between this and "OK, if you cross that line, an automatic missile system is going to fire on you instead" then I know which I'd take.
Then it's a good thing that there will never be such an automated missle system, isn't it? You no longer have to choose between two stupid situations, you can deal with reality.
It is extremely dangerous. It will kill people, if created as described in the article.
...unless both planes are right on the limit of the wall,...
No, as long as one plane is on the edge and needs to turn into the wall to get away from a conflict, it is dangerous.
As it stands, the computers in two aircraft nearing collision have a chat and decide on the two optimal vectors, and then move the planes along those vectors automatically...
I'm sorry, but this is a very poor description of the TCAS system. First of all, you assume both aircraft are so equipped. What if one of the planes is a small Cessna -- it has no TCAS. Second, even if they "chat", the only resolution may be for one plane to turn into a "soft wall". Third, they do NOT move anything automatically. They issue a warning and tell the pilot what to do. It is the pilot's responsibility to decide if that is the best course of action.
When you create a system like this, you have to imagine the likely failure modes, and then imagine the new failure modes it introduces. Like, "pilot MUST turn into a wall to avoid a collision with another aircraft, cannot, and they hit". Like, system breaks and puts the aircraft into a hard left bank.
You cannot install such a system in an aircraft safely without having a means of disabling it. One example of this concept is the autopilot. The autopilot has small motors that move the controls to keep the plane level and straight (if that it what it has been told to do). Sometimes, rarely, this system goes bonkers. Pilots find themselves fighting an autopilot that wants to climb, and the autopilot is usually stronger. The result is a stall/spin/crash/death. That's why there is a button, usually on the yoke right near the pilot's finger, that disables the autopilot. At the first sign of trouble, he holds that button, and then has time to figure out what is happening and reach over to the panel to turn the autopilot off. To have it otherwise would result in a pilot needing both hands just to overpower the autopilot and having no hands free to turn it off.
That aircraft should not be near the wall off area's anyway,...
I'm sorry, but airspace is either restricted or it isn't. There is no rule that says you cannot fly "near restricted airspace", only that you cannot fly into it. There will be aircraft near it, there will be aircraft that are allowed to fly into it (Police and medical helicopters, e.g., and probably news media).
And what is this nonsense about switching to "airport beacons" if an attempt at blocking the GPS is detected? Airport beacons are those white and green rotating lights -- the only navigation information they provide is to help the pilot find an airport at night. They won't help keep an airplane out of a "soft walled" area.
This is a bad idea. Any sane pilot will oppose it, unless it can be shut off instantly, and if it can be shut off, it is worthless. The only value it would have is to keep innocent pilots from wandering into such an area by accident, and they aren't a threat anyway, and there are already GPS units on the market that will sound an alert to wake them up.
Can someone who has some experience with this system comment on the issues when loading Linux on this box? For example, X support for 1440x900 and this graphics chip, ethernet and firewire chip support, etc.
I've got a user who is looking for a large display "portable" system, and since I'm the one who has to put Linux on it, I want to know whether I'd run into many gotchas if I suggested this one.
The sharing of spectrum demonstrated by wi-fi and cell phones conclusively demonstrate that specturm can be shared with little loss of quality.
Wi-fi does not share spectrum with cell phones.
Cell phones do not share spectrum with anyone else. They are fully licensed and coordinated.
Wi-fi in the 2.4GHz band shares spectrum with all sorts of other items, including wireless video transmitters, microwave ovens, and amateur radio operators. Any of the latter three can and do make the former item useless. Sharing of spectrum is a nice idea, but it has not been demonstrated to have "little loss of quality".
...you're more than welcome to swim, walk, or jog to your chosen destination without endangering the rest of us.
Sir, I've never been a danger to anyone else, despite having previously always travelled with a/GASP/ Swiss army knife in my pocket and probably a screwdriver or two on my keychain. In fact, now that I am allegedly disarmed, I am unable to help solve a problem were it to arise. Nothing safer than a whole box full of unarmed people and one person who has smuggled on a weapon, huh?
It is your pathetic fear of everyone else who happens to want to travel the same place you do that is the problem. Your being too afraid to fly without trying to take away everyone else's freedoms (which our founding fathers did say were endowed by Our Creator -- if you were created by anything less than God, that's your problem) is the reason why YOU should be swimming, walking, or whatever else, instead of flying. Your fear is not my problem, and I resent your attempts at making it so.
Nice, but you have your analogy all wrong. Maybe if you said something like "it would require all drivers to blow into a mandatory breathalyzer before starting the ignition",...
There are all sorts of causes of deaths in automobiles. If you truly want to prevent deaths (i.e., "if we'd save just ONE life...") then you ban them altogether. That would save lots of lives. And ban hot dogs. And just about everything else. No swimming, no diving, no boating, no autos, no flying, no walking, no showers. The list is endless.
Don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind in the slightest if that was a legal requirement for anyone driving, anywhere.
I'd like to know a few things, first. Things like, what happens after you blow into the breathalizer? I assume your plan includes an undefeatable interlock so the ignition won't start if the level is above X. Who picks what level X is? What happens when you drive from one state to another, and X is lower in the second state than in the first, and you're above the new limit? Does the car shut itself off at the state line?
What happens when there is an emergency, and you are either.01 above the level or the device is broken, and lives are at stake?
What happens when the drunk has his sober pal blow into the device for him? Or he pays a homeless person $5 to blow for him. Or he takes a balloon and uses the air from that?
Perhaps you are not familiar with a plan that was going to make it a requirement for trucks to have governors installed so they could not go faster than 55 MPH. People die when speeding trucks go out of control, you know. That sounds like a great plan, right?
Well, someone pointed out that sometimes it is a good thing that a truck can go faster than 55, like when it needs to get out of the way of some other truck or car. And then someone else pointed out the difficulty of enforcing this law, since it is trivial to tinker with any such governor. So it isn't a law.
Likewise, I don't particularly care if someone sees me naked,
Here's the ubiquitous "I don't need MY civil liberties, so I'll support taking them away from others" argument. If you don't mind people seeing you naked, that's nice for you. It says nothing about whether other people have a right not to be seen that way. I don't swim, dive, boat, or take showers. It's ok with me if all of those activities are banned in the search for fewer deaths. Ok? Did I pick your favorite hobby, yet?
Nobody is saying you can't fly, just that you'll be subject to a little more security before getting on the plane.
Unfortunately, that is a erronious statement. A "sense" of security is different than real security. Having a goverment droid search my carry-on looking for nasty things like nail clippers, just to find a vending machine near the gate that sells nail clippers and disposable razors, proved that to me.
Just for the sake of arguement, I'm curious what your solution would be,
Solution to what? Invasive, meaningless activities that don't improve security? Why, stop them, of course. Adjust the metal detectors so they don't trigger on the metal in a zipper. Don't waste time wanding people's feet when the floor has so much rebar in it that the buzzer always goes off anyway. Stuff that I'd think was common sense.
Perhaps you're suggesting they just put everyone on planes without any screening at all,
I guess if you can't understand why "security at any price" is an unreasonable position, you'll pretend that the only other option is "no security at all" and think you've won the argument.
If you want to hop in your car and drive anywhere in the country, no one is trying to stop you. You still have the right of free travel.
May I point out two similar arguments which have taken place, one just recently?
Of course you still have the right to an abortion, but if the government won't help you pay for it, then do you really have the right? After all, poor people won't be able to have them, so their "right" is being taken away if you ban goverment funding.
Of course you still have the right to look at pron, but unless you can afford your own computer and network connection, you can't look at it, because the publicly funded library (funded with your money too) is installing blocking software to keep you from doing so.
Now, I'm not advocating either side of either issue, just pointing out the parallelism of the arguments.
Is it really "freedom" if you are restricted from doing it? Is limiting the only mode of travel that can accomplish the task in a reasonable amount of time still leaving you "free"?
What if they were used to stop people from blowing up planes and killing people?
Yeah, it's like so many people are blowing up planes today. Four groups in what, ten years?
A single person not being killed because one of these machines caught someone before they had the chance to get on a plane makes it all worthwhile in my books.
I'm sorry, but this is lunacy. By this argument, we'd immediately ban the automobile. Think of how many people die because of them today. If we'd save just ONE life by banning them... and hot dogs (people do choke to death on them, you know. If we save just one life...
Besides, I seriously doubt there would be any way to record/save the images created on the machines so it's not like a screener would be grabbing them and posting them on the net or anything.
Huh? That's right, computers never have any means of saving images. Just how do you think they are going to train the people to run these, keep a stock of different kinds of bombs on hand, or keep a stock set of saved pictures of people carrying said bombs?
And how will they review a suspicious image -- make the person stand in the picture booth until they decide? Nice, clue him in that he's being scrutinized so he sets the bomb off in the middle of the line.
A screener could be looking at thousands, or tens of thousands of people a day -
Oh, of course, invasion of privacy is ok as long as it happens to lots of people.
Here's what you should be thinking about. That fellow mentioned in the summary, the ShoeBomber? He wasn't just passing through security at Orly, he was actually IN POLICE CUSTODY WEARING HIS SHOE BOMBS the day before he got on the plane. They let him go. Fancy hardware simply cannot replace common sense, but then, we're talking about people who idolize Jerry Lewis.
So, what you're telling us is, even if the patent on the method expires soon, the trademark on the word will still belong to the peanut butter company, so you still can't legally include support for it? Or you can support it, you just can't say you do?
I'm so confudes.
(Actually, I'll say "JIF" when I also start saying "JRAPHIC".)
Re:Linux, BSD. How about Minix?
on
My Visit to SCO
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Will they be going after Professor Tanenbaum as well?
What, SCO thinks they have the patent on Christmas trees?
Nobody cares about these people, because they can't afford to donate to political campaigns.
But the companies that advertise on broadcast TV do, and the people who don't buy cable do buy other things.
Anybody else think that selling off the public TV spectrum would be a sneaky way for the govt. to create a nice big new revenue stream for the big media providers?
The FCC is already counting on this spectrum being a new revenue stream for the government. This is not "glass half empty", this is "counting chickens before they hatch".
The FCC is counting on this spectrum being freed up in 2006 when they've told TV broadcasters that they must go dark on their analog channels. I'm expecting a VERY LARGE response from the public, who has a VERY LARGE investment in analog TV equipment, when they realize that they'll have to buy a whole new set of televisions if they want to keep watching Amazing Race 12 and Survivor Montana. And an even larger response when these same people find out they no longer have any free TV at all because DTV signals aren't available in their area.
Perhaps the cable companies will find a few new customers by providing the DTV to analog conversions for those who don't want to buy new TVs or don't live in an area with DTV, but the cable market is pretty much saturated, and they don't cover a large part of the country (the same places where there isn't DTV coverage, too).
I don't expect to see this spectrum free up for a very long time, if ever.
Slashdot Mirror
That is exactly right. And that is exactly why the founders of this country were explicit in having a bicameral legislature that would not be driven to (over)react quickly to every twist in the road. Sadly, the folks elected to those august bodies don't seem to recognize this feature of their position and try to knee-jerk to everything that the media is reporting.
Sadly, even with "direct democracy", we'd still have politicians just like we have today. They'ed be called "administrators", and their laws would be called "administrative rules", and it would be even harder to get rid of them than the current style of politician.
In fact, we've already got administrators making administrative rules.
Corporations currently do not get to vote in the issues affecting anything, and yet I assume you are trying to say that they would no longer have any power in the process because they would no longer have such a vote.
They would still have employees, and they's still have access to advertising, and with a populace that is being expected to vote intelligently on anything that comes up (but not having a clue about most of the stuff), they'd have a lot more sheep to influence with those ads.
Right now, a Senator who sees an ad by some corporation trying to forward some law is more likely to follow the counsel of his staff than that ad. That's why he hires them. Sheeple won't have a staff.
It's called "the tyranny of the majority".
Once upon a time, a majority of people thought that owning slaves was ok. I'm not sure that it still isn't that way, at least in some parts of the country. Is it ok to pass laws making slavery ok, or would that be bad?
In some parts of the country, a majority of people think that killing fags is a fun thing to do on a Saturday night. Would you allow them to vote in a law making it legal?
At one point, a majority of people thought it was quite acceptable to round up all the citizens of Oriental descent and pack them into concentration camps.
On Sept. 12, 2001, I bet you would have found a clear majority of people that would have voted "yes" on a law that deported every person with a middle eastern heritage. (My God! Who'd serve us the Slurpees?) And before you say "that's unconstitutional", remember that it takes only a 2/3 majority to change that.
Yes, those are gross examples, but it's not hard to find more realistic ones. Here in Oregon we have citizen initiatives. Get enough people to sign a petition and you can get just about anything on a ballot and voted on. Sometimes this is good. Sometimes it is good in the short term but bad in the long.
For example, several years ago we voted a rollback and limit on property taxes. Instead of this resulting in an actual limitation in taxes, it resulted in:
- Dramatic increases in assesed value for property, thus putting the actual dollar amount for taxes back to what they used to be.
- Weasly politicians who sneak new taxes into anything they can, so they don't have to think about cutting budgets. (We pay a 5% tax on water, not to fund water related things, but for the city general fund. It's called a 'franchise fee', so it isn't a tax. Really. It isn't.)
- A legislature that sits on its ass letting the problem of funding things get out of hand, hoping that the next initiative will fix things for them.
Most of the majority doesn't understand things well enough to know which way to vote on them. They vote with their emotions. (Politicians count on this -- Our Veritable Senator Wyden tried defeating our Veritable Senator Smith with a commercial that claimed that Smith had killed a kid, because a teenage worker had died in an accident at one of Smith's companies. How this relates to Smith's abilities as a Senator, nobody really knows.)Hell, one of the initiatives we had on a recent ballot, where there were about 'leventy-dozen things, was whether we should allow non-dentists to fit false teeth. Sheesh, who the hell knows if this is good or bad?
Why is that when the general populace votes for a president ...
This is a myth. There is no popular vote for the President. There is no country-wide vote that the people participate in. There are state-by-state votes which are used, in most cases, to select a handful of Electors, who then cast the actual votes for the President. They don't even have to vote for the candidate they were elected to vote for!
As I recall, it wasn't too long ago that one state, NM I believe, didn't have a statewide vote for Electors, they were appointed by the Senate. The Constitution does not mandate how the Electors are elected.
You should read the Constitution sometime. All of it. It's a real eye-opener when you then compare it to what is going on now.
Ummm, excuse me, but you are wrong. The vapor pressure of gasoline at room temperature is a considerable amount below atmospheric. The vapor pressure of hydrogen at anything above a few degrees Kelvin is atmospheric pressure. In simpler words, hydrogen is lots lots lots more volatile than gasoline, and the fact that cars will be using gaseous hydrogen but liquid gasoline proves it.
Most people assume that hydrogen is disproportionately dangerous because of the Hindenburg disaster.
While there is currently a "science" of trying to prove why the Hindenberg crashed, which includes a marvelous graphical demonstration of how flammable the covering material allegedly was, hygrogen is hardly innocent in that disaster.
The televised demonstration, where a piece of the original material was stretched between the legs of a Jacob's ladder, was less than impressive. A small part of the fabric burned; the rest of it self-extinguished.
The truth is, it may have been the fabric covering the dirigible that ignited first, but had the gas not been flammable, the craft would have survived. A lighter than air craft can easily lose its outside covering and still fly (unlike an airplane, where the lift is due to the outside covering), but if the gas ignites, you are toast. Literally.
I even heard from someone who was there more recently that they've now installed indoor plumbing in most of their larger public buildings. Someday I'll have to hitch up the wagon and go see if indoor is really that much better.
His "Internet thing", which is a poor euphemism for "lie", came during an on-camera appearance, live. I saw it. Words from the horses mouth. Unfortunately, as I pointed out, and you didn't have a defense for, he neither took the initiative nor was in a position to take any initiative concerning the creation of the Internet. Other people beat him to it.
The problem with claiming credit for this is that other people found Love Canal before he did.
Please stop trying to hand-wave away the truth. There are too many people who heard him say these things to be successful in denying it, at least until we're all dead and all that's left are the historical revisionists.
That's the point of the joke.
And its not Gore's.
Yes, dear, it is. The debate where he said it was televised live, and I was watching it. I heard the words come out of his mouth. Along with the crap about his discovery of Love Canal and how Love Story was based on him and Tipsy.
Al neither "took the initiative" nor was he in a position to take any initiative when the Internet was being created. He wasn't elected to anything until after the people who really did take the initiative had already beat him to creating it.
He MAY have coined the term "information superhighway", but putting a cute name on something is hardly creating it.
Yes. It is illegal in this state to use automatic dialing and announcement devices. This is almost certainly why scammers who use such devices in this state never identify themselves nor do they leave a phone number to call them at, they require someone to "press 1" to talk to a salesperson.
Furthermore, they must "explain" certain things within the first thirty seconds, and that word implies a sentient listener -- you cannot explain something to a telephone answering machine, and certainly NOT while it is still playing the outgoing message. (I've tried. No matter how many times I try to explain why it should not answer calls from telescum, it simply does not understand.)
Unfortunately, the same scum who ignore current laws and play messages into my machine will ignore the Federal law and continue to do it, since they have almost zero chance of being caught at it by anyone who would report them. I suspect the predictive dialers are even programmed to pass the call to a recording if they detect an answering machine, and to a human if they detect a human, just to limit the possibility of getting caught at this, although I have gotten the message played at me when I have answered.
Telemarketers profit from finding suckers they can con. Every person who answers a telemarketing call is a potential sucker, and a potential sale.
An interesting con at one time was a company called "The Telephone Company", who would call unsuspecting suckers, pretend to be the telephone company, and sell them extra services (like long distance).
Another con is to call a business and to pretend to be their regular supplier of some product, like copier toner. They'll say that the "regular shipment" is ready, and is it ok to send it over? If the flunky answering the phones says "yes", they get a truckload of toner at inflated prices and a whopping bill.
The most active scammers calling me are the "Disney vacation" morons, who don't identify the company but imply they are part of the Disney Corp. They aren't, but I'm not supposed to be smart enough to know that.
The scammers will adapt. I've already started getting calls from scammers who tell me the name of their company (which I've never heard of) which they are required to do by law, who then tell me that I've probably never heard of them because they are the parent company for ... and then rattle off a list of big-name hotels, rental car companies, and restaurants. This pretense is to get them around the "existing business relationship" exclusion of the do-not-call list, since it is almost certain that either the victim has been to one of the restaurants or hotels, or won't know that one of the family hasn't been.
A give-away clue to the fact that these people are con artists is that, once you agree to buy what it is they are selling, they will offer to send a courier to pick up the check (and maybe deliver the goods). They tell you this is for your benefit since it saves you time and effort of mailing a check; in reality, it saves them from a potential mail-fraud conviction (and from you wising up and cancelling the transaction within the three days you have under the law).
Two million con-artists out of work? Boo hoo.
No, it doesn't. Caller ID does not stop the assholes who call and play prerecorded messages into my answering machine, making me waste time trying to find any real messages, nor does it prevent the phone from ringing. And I'll point out that those assholes who play the messages NEVER identify themselves as required by law -- they are required to tell me who they are and that they are selling something within the first 30 seconds, and they don't. Unfortunately, because the phone company has sold them service which deliberately shows up as "unavailable" on the caller ID, I can't sic the Attorney General on them.
Telemarketers have no first amendment right to harass me in my own home, period.
Since we got call waiting ALL of it has been eliminated!
Call waiting has nothing to do with stopping telemarketing.
You aren't a pilot, are you? If you were, you'd know that there is no reason for a plane not to be flying just outside a "restricted" area. If you are restricted from flying just outside a restricted area, then that, too, is a restricted area, and you would be prohibited from flying just outside that airspace, too. (And the FARs effectively remove any restricted airspace when there is an emergency.)
It seems evident to me that resistance to adoption of this sort of idea is nothing more than paranoia that must resort to the invention of exceptional circumstances in order to demonstrate the presence of danger or unreliability, ...
Yes, it is evident to me that you are not only not a pilot, but are quite unfamiliar with how systems fail in aircraft and the safety issues involved. "They shouldn't be there" is not an answer, because there is no reason they shouldn't be there. These situations are not hypothetical, they actually happen. That "autopilot disable" button is not there because some engineer thought it might come in handy, it is there because autopilots failed and aircraft crashed and people died and the NTSB said "this is a problem". The reason that TCAS does not take control of the aircraft is because TCAS is sometimes WRONG about what it tells the pilot to do -- fatally wrong. Any automated system that controls the airplane must have a way to shut it off, because it WILL break, and people will die because of the advanced "safety". If you can shut it off, it's worthless for the alleged purpose. Like I said, it WOULD accomplish one thing, but there's already a way of accomplishing this, so it isn't necessary.
I'd say that four airplanes in ten years is pretty exceptional, and all this hysteria looking for extreme solutions to such a problem are just ridiculous.
As for the meaning of "airport beacon" mentioned by others, well, that's what the airport beacon is. A rotating light. If they had meant "VOR" or "other navigation systems", I assume they would have written that. As it stands, VORs are not airport-exclusive, so if you think they mean VORs, do you think they meant only those that are located at airports?
Yep, and that is why this hysteria for perfect safety is dangerous. It makes people think 1) it is possible, and 2) it is worth any cost to achieve.
When you take off in that shiny new Airbus, how much control do you think the flight crew are going to have if someone overlooked a bug in the control software that is all that links their cabin controls to the physical surfaces?
None. And such a problem is why an Airbus crashed a few years ago. One engine failed, and because the engine controls were cross-wired, the crew shut down the good engine instead of the bad.
This is not an excuse to create even more systems that can fail in magical and fatal ways. There are currently NO systems (that I know of) that take control of the airplane away from the pilot deliberately -- and any that do MUST have shut-offs for when they fail.
One moment, you're perfectly legal, happily following a designated flight path and no threat to anyone. The next, you're a terrorist weapon ...
No, there are no "designated flight paths" that have such a problem. You will not legally received a clearance to fly through airspace that cannot be flown through. If you receive one, you will start programming the route into your shiny new GPS and it will tell you there is a problem, and you'll ask for a different clearance. You may choose a path that takes you there, but it will not be designated for you.
but I think generalisations like "any sane pilot will oppose it" are going too far.
I think any pilot who sees such a system, and thinks that it is ok for the aircraft to deliberately take control of the airplane away from him when his and his passenger's lives may most depend on him being able to maneuver is, by definition, insane.
If it's a choice between this and "OK, if you cross that line, an automatic missile system is going to fire on you instead" then I know which I'd take.
Then it's a good thing that there will never be such an automated missle system, isn't it? You no longer have to choose between two stupid situations, you can deal with reality.
No, as long as one plane is on the edge and needs to turn into the wall to get away from a conflict, it is dangerous.
As it stands, the computers in two aircraft nearing collision have a chat and decide on the two optimal vectors, and then move the planes along those vectors automatically...
I'm sorry, but this is a very poor description of the TCAS system. First of all, you assume both aircraft are so equipped. What if one of the planes is a small Cessna -- it has no TCAS. Second, even if they "chat", the only resolution may be for one plane to turn into a "soft wall". Third, they do NOT move anything automatically. They issue a warning and tell the pilot what to do. It is the pilot's responsibility to decide if that is the best course of action.
When you create a system like this, you have to imagine the likely failure modes, and then imagine the new failure modes it introduces. Like, "pilot MUST turn into a wall to avoid a collision with another aircraft, cannot, and they hit". Like, system breaks and puts the aircraft into a hard left bank.
You cannot install such a system in an aircraft safely without having a means of disabling it. One example of this concept is the autopilot. The autopilot has small motors that move the controls to keep the plane level and straight (if that it what it has been told to do). Sometimes, rarely, this system goes bonkers. Pilots find themselves fighting an autopilot that wants to climb, and the autopilot is usually stronger. The result is a stall/spin/crash/death. That's why there is a button, usually on the yoke right near the pilot's finger, that disables the autopilot. At the first sign of trouble, he holds that button, and then has time to figure out what is happening and reach over to the panel to turn the autopilot off. To have it otherwise would result in a pilot needing both hands just to overpower the autopilot and having no hands free to turn it off.
That aircraft should not be near the wall off area's anyway,...
I'm sorry, but airspace is either restricted or it isn't. There is no rule that says you cannot fly "near restricted airspace", only that you cannot fly into it. There will be aircraft near it, there will be aircraft that are allowed to fly into it (Police and medical helicopters, e.g., and probably news media).
And what is this nonsense about switching to "airport beacons" if an attempt at blocking the GPS is detected? Airport beacons are those white and green rotating lights -- the only navigation information they provide is to help the pilot find an airport at night. They won't help keep an airplane out of a "soft walled" area.
This is a bad idea. Any sane pilot will oppose it, unless it can be shut off instantly, and if it can be shut off, it is worthless. The only value it would have is to keep innocent pilots from wandering into such an area by accident, and they aren't a threat anyway, and there are already GPS units on the market that will sound an alert to wake them up.
I've got a user who is looking for a large display "portable" system, and since I'm the one who has to put Linux on it, I want to know whether I'd run into many gotchas if I suggested this one.
Wi-fi does not share spectrum with cell phones.
Cell phones do not share spectrum with anyone else. They are fully licensed and coordinated.
Wi-fi in the 2.4GHz band shares spectrum with all sorts of other items, including wireless video transmitters, microwave ovens, and amateur radio operators. Any of the latter three can and do make the former item useless. Sharing of spectrum is a nice idea, but it has not been demonstrated to have "little loss of quality".
Sir, I've never been a danger to anyone else, despite having previously always travelled with a /GASP/ Swiss army knife in my pocket and probably a screwdriver or two on my keychain. In fact, now that I am allegedly disarmed, I am unable to help solve a problem were it to arise. Nothing safer than a whole box full of unarmed people and one person who has smuggled on a weapon, huh?
It is your pathetic fear of everyone else who happens to want to travel the same place you do that is the problem. Your being too afraid to fly without trying to take away everyone else's freedoms (which our founding fathers did say were endowed by Our Creator -- if you were created by anything less than God, that's your problem) is the reason why YOU should be swimming, walking, or whatever else, instead of flying. Your fear is not my problem, and I resent your attempts at making it so.
There are all sorts of causes of deaths in automobiles. If you truly want to prevent deaths (i.e., "if we'd save just ONE life...") then you ban them altogether. That would save lots of lives. And ban hot dogs. And just about everything else. No swimming, no diving, no boating, no autos, no flying, no walking, no showers. The list is endless.
Don't know about you, but I wouldn't mind in the slightest if that was a legal requirement for anyone driving, anywhere.
I'd like to know a few things, first. Things like, what happens after you blow into the breathalizer? I assume your plan includes an undefeatable interlock so the ignition won't start if the level is above X. Who picks what level X is? What happens when you drive from one state to another, and X is lower in the second state than in the first, and you're above the new limit? Does the car shut itself off at the state line?
What happens when there is an emergency, and you are either .01 above the level or the device is broken, and lives are at stake?
What happens when the drunk has his sober pal blow into the device for him? Or he pays a homeless person $5 to blow for him. Or he takes a balloon and uses the air from that?
Perhaps you are not familiar with a plan that was going to make it a requirement for trucks to have governors installed so they could not go faster than 55 MPH. People die when speeding trucks go out of control, you know. That sounds like a great plan, right? Well, someone pointed out that sometimes it is a good thing that a truck can go faster than 55, like when it needs to get out of the way of some other truck or car. And then someone else pointed out the difficulty of enforcing this law, since it is trivial to tinker with any such governor. So it isn't a law.
Likewise, I don't particularly care if someone sees me naked,
Here's the ubiquitous "I don't need MY civil liberties, so I'll support taking them away from others" argument. If you don't mind people seeing you naked, that's nice for you. It says nothing about whether other people have a right not to be seen that way. I don't swim, dive, boat, or take showers. It's ok with me if all of those activities are banned in the search for fewer deaths. Ok? Did I pick your favorite hobby, yet?
Nobody is saying you can't fly, just that you'll be subject to a little more security before getting on the plane.
Unfortunately, that is a erronious statement. A "sense" of security is different than real security. Having a goverment droid search my carry-on looking for nasty things like nail clippers, just to find a vending machine near the gate that sells nail clippers and disposable razors, proved that to me.
Just for the sake of arguement, I'm curious what your solution would be,
Solution to what? Invasive, meaningless activities that don't improve security? Why, stop them, of course. Adjust the metal detectors so they don't trigger on the metal in a zipper. Don't waste time wanding people's feet when the floor has so much rebar in it that the buzzer always goes off anyway. Stuff that I'd think was common sense.
Perhaps you're suggesting they just put everyone on planes without any screening at all,
I guess if you can't understand why "security at any price" is an unreasonable position, you'll pretend that the only other option is "no security at all" and think you've won the argument.
May I point out two similar arguments which have taken place, one just recently?
- Of course you still have the right to an abortion, but if the government won't help you pay for it, then do you really have the right? After all, poor people won't be able to have them, so their "right" is being taken away if you ban goverment funding.
- Of course you still have the right to look at pron, but unless you can afford your own computer and network connection, you can't look at it, because the publicly funded library (funded with your money too) is installing blocking software to keep you from doing so.
Now, I'm not advocating either side of either issue, just pointing out the parallelism of the arguments.Is it really "freedom" if you are restricted from doing it? Is limiting the only mode of travel that can accomplish the task in a reasonable amount of time still leaving you "free"?
Yeah, it's like so many people are blowing up planes today. Four groups in what, ten years?
A single person not being killed because one of these machines caught someone before they had the chance to get on a plane makes it all worthwhile in my books.
I'm sorry, but this is lunacy. By this argument, we'd immediately ban the automobile. Think of how many people die because of them today. If we'd save just ONE life by banning them... and hot dogs (people do choke to death on them, you know. If we save just one life...
Besides, I seriously doubt there would be any way to record/save the images created on the machines so it's not like a screener would be grabbing them and posting them on the net or anything.
Huh? That's right, computers never have any means of saving images. Just how do you think they are going to train the people to run these, keep a stock of different kinds of bombs on hand, or keep a stock set of saved pictures of people carrying said bombs?
And how will they review a suspicious image -- make the person stand in the picture booth until they decide? Nice, clue him in that he's being scrutinized so he sets the bomb off in the middle of the line.
A screener could be looking at thousands, or tens of thousands of people a day -
Oh, of course, invasion of privacy is ok as long as it happens to lots of people.
Here's what you should be thinking about. That fellow mentioned in the summary, the ShoeBomber? He wasn't just passing through security at Orly, he was actually IN POLICE CUSTODY WEARING HIS SHOE BOMBS the day before he got on the plane. They let him go. Fancy hardware simply cannot replace common sense, but then, we're talking about people who idolize Jerry Lewis.
So, what you're telling us is, even if the patent on the method expires soon, the trademark on the word will still belong to the peanut butter company, so you still can't legally include support for it? Or you can support it, you just can't say you do?
I'm so confudes.
(Actually, I'll say "JIF" when I also start saying "JRAPHIC".)
What, SCO thinks they have the patent on Christmas trees?
Well, I'm one of the 5 percent.
I got to the bottom of the copy of the EULA and found it was written in French. I don't read French. I'm assuming that the statement "Si le logiciel vous a été concédé sous licence par Microsoft ou l'une de ses filiales à 100 %, ..." means something like "I promise Microsoft 100% of my future income...".
I wonder how many people never read all the way to the bottom to see that they've agreed to something they can't read?
It's not rocket science.
But the companies that advertise on broadcast TV do, and the people who don't buy cable do buy other things.
Anybody else think that selling off the public TV spectrum would be a sneaky way for the govt. to create a nice big new revenue stream for the big media providers?
The FCC is already counting on this spectrum being a new revenue stream for the government. This is not "glass half empty", this is "counting chickens before they hatch".
The FCC is counting on this spectrum being freed up in 2006 when they've told TV broadcasters that they must go dark on their analog channels. I'm expecting a VERY LARGE response from the public, who has a VERY LARGE investment in analog TV equipment, when they realize that they'll have to buy a whole new set of televisions if they want to keep watching Amazing Race 12 and Survivor Montana. And an even larger response when these same people find out they no longer have any free TV at all because DTV signals aren't available in their area.
Perhaps the cable companies will find a few new customers by providing the DTV to analog conversions for those who don't want to buy new TVs or don't live in an area with DTV, but the cable market is pretty much saturated, and they don't cover a large part of the country (the same places where there isn't DTV coverage, too).
I don't expect to see this spectrum free up for a very long time, if ever.
Which answers the perrenial question "is that a hard drive in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"