I have a Harley with a five speed transmission. I've heard of a six speed upgrade, but thought those were just for bragging rights, as nobody would ever really need a sixth gear. And then I visited Texas. Now I'm saving up for one.
In any case, a sixth gear makes sense for economical i.e. gas-saving reasons.
There is that argument as well. (Although I'm told that an "overdrive" is not as efficient and may not yield any savings -- that the more efficient track is to make 6th gear 1:1 (as is 5th currently) and change the sprocket ratio. But I can only recite what I've read -- I'm really in over my head on this.)
If you've ever driven an older car, at speed, you'll understand why the speed limits were set where they are. Many feel very 'floaty' at 100 MPH, their brakes suck, and they weight too much. Cars now, even cheap ones, are much more capable of being controleled at those speeds. This still leaves the human factor, but on a highway it's minimized. They really should raise some speed limits.
Right, exactly. Speed limits tend to be weighted towards the lowest common denominator, both in equipment and skill set.
Whether the first three line up with the definition of "reckless" depends on his level of preparation, and the last one, although definitely a crime, can hardly be called reckless. The cops would surely charge him with something else for dousing his taillights.
I'm conflicted about this. Yes, he broke the law, and as pointed out, even collected the evidence to be used against himself.
But "reckless" is a matter of opinion, the definition being "without thinking or caring about the consequences of an action", and it wasn't clear that this was the case. One could argue (and in his position, I would, in court) that the degree of preparation involved (only some of which, undoubtedly, we have heard here) is proof positive that the participants very much were thinking and caring about the consequences of their actions.
I recall an article back in the seventies, may have been in an auto or men's magazine (I remember the graphic was a pantera overtaking a sedan at an extremely high rate of speed) about the ethics of speeding. As I recall, the author exceeded the speed limit by large margins on a regular basis, but he had commensurate skills, a car equipped for the job, and a set of ironclad rules. I don't remember all of them, but one was: If anything you do makes another driver deviate in any fashion, by flinching, braking, swerving or anything other than jaw dropping as you go by, you have lost. Find another hobby. Another was: What you're doing is illegal. When you get pulled over, and it *will* happen, take it like a man. Don't whine, don't try to get out of it, be courteous and respectful. There were other rules that I don't recall. The gist was, if you have decided to speed, you have a duty to do so in a way that doesn't make you a menace or an asshole.
As for "speed limits are posted to keep the public safe", yeah, that's what they always say. And back when we had a 55 mile per hour national speed limit, they said it then too. Did the populace at large suddenly become better drivers when the double nickel was repealed? Speed limits tend to be arbitrary, and at best, "safety" is measured as some government-set lowest-common-demoninator. Drug laws exist to keep us safe too, and that's working out swell.
I have a Harley with a five speed transmission. I've heard of a six speed upgrade, but thought those were just for bragging rights, as nobody would ever really need a sixth gear. And then I visited Texas. Now I'm saving up for one.
If you see an LED stoplight where a chunk of the LEDs seem out, or are blinking wildly, it is likely the circuit that supplies electricity to those LEDs, the LED driver circuit, is what is actually failing, not the LEDs themselves.
Ideally they can be swapped out and the light returned to service, but certainly does lower the hopes that cities had in installing them: to reduce replacement and maintenance costs.
Ok, so, I haven't seen the design... is there a driver for each individual LED? I ask because the failures I've documented with a camera (on my blog, which I am reluctant to share here lest it be slashdotted) are seemingly random, ragged patterns.
I agree, it's probably not the LED itself. I was leaning towards TCE expansion/contraction causing cracks in the circuit board.
But for whatever reason, they don't seem to be very robust. Which is a little odd as the technology should be practically bullet proof if designed correctly.
> 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?'
I'd posit that big government can no longer put a man on the moon. The amount of waste and cronyism in the process precludes success at a big venture like that. There was a time when we could do it, but that time has passed.
As the process becomes more and more broken, smaller and smaller tasks become impossible for the government to achieve.
At least the submitted articles are ran against a regEx to check if the URL contains "theonion" and other parody sites.
Which is what facebook doesn't do. Or why else would snopes have to debunk "news" that Obama in reality is a islamist communist hippie war-criminal who had his face surgically changed to avoid prosecution?
Wow, I haven't heard that one. My Facebook friends must be falling behind the hot issues of the day.
That the news you see on your facebook feed has to have been deemed important by one of your friends (or one of their friends) is a very good point. Where this breaks down is that your friends (or at least, *my* friends) will believe anything. Including that microwaved water will kill plants and that keying in your PIN backwards will call the police. Taken holistically, it creates a very bizarre picture of the world.
I think the real difference is that people can post pretty much anything to their Facebook news stream, including things that are blatantly, provably false. (Apparently it's part of the TOS for facebook users to post at least one tired old hoax a day or have your account suspended. Or be attacked by butt spiders. Or something.) At least what gets posted to Slashdot as news stories goes through some cursory editorial review, and comments that can't be backed up get called bullshit by other users. If we must draw parallels, I'd call Facebook "slashdot for idiots".
I don't really understand what they mean. Are they implying that there are entire pygmy tribes somewhere that spend their entire day on IRC? That somewhere there's a bunch of Tunisian goat-herders that only get their news through Usenet?
If this is the case, who cares, and why?
Well, it *does* seem like there's a whole tribe that have just now discovered every email forward since 1989. And they're all in my friends list.
Consider it this way: The very thing she was investigating was corruption in government, in one of the forms corruption takes. That being the case, it's not a stretch to imagine that she might run into corruption of other parts of government. She was investigating a branch of law enforcement. It would not be a stretch to imagine that she might run into collusion from other branches of law enforcement.
I absolutely agree that things should not be like this. That for something like this to happen is messed up at a very fundamental level. But that's why you have investigative reporting, and why some things need to be kept secret until a case can be made.
I did not read it as laying blame on the journalist, but recognizing that governments do this sort of thing, and the prudent person should protect themselves from same.
He's right about the spectrum of LEDs and it being displeasing.
Hm. Wasn't aware of that. I'll have to do some more research on that. I never really liked the light from CFLs, to tell you the truth. It makes me wonder if the millionaires promoting CFLs are actually, you know, using them. Besides in the servant's quarters, that is.
> I mean, seriously? What kind of journalist, investigating malfeasance by federal agencies, would have the names of her sources in plain text?
Or, even at her residence at all. I don't think she was thinking this through. It's the TSA for god's sake!
Now, the cool way to do it would be to have a set of bogus contacts in the clear at the residence, with the real list heavily encrypted and sitting on a server in Peru.
It's not just the monetary cost. Massive numbers of cheaply made CFLs in the hands of the populace practically guarantees that a significant number will help increase the mercury content in the local landfill. I know CFLs can be recycled, but who besides hippies actually do so? Most people will just tip them into the bin.
Alright, I'm taking a chance here. Anyone who tells me "you shouldn't feed the trolls" is probably right.
> Here, in the UK, the government, in unannounced programs, flooded the supermarkets with the new compact fluorescent bulbs at prices as low as 15 cents (yes, less than one quarter of one dollar). This ensured people changed over with no complaint. Thus, we British got to discover the REAL life of these bulbs, and the picture isn't pretty. It is a miracle when one of these bulbs makes it past one year. Many fail within months. Sure, this is better than the cheapo filament bulbs we were using, by maybe a factor of three to five, but the BS about YEARS of like was a blatant lie.
I sense some exaggeration here. In the US CFLs never got that cheap in any size that I've ever seen, even at the mass discount stores. That must have been some massive government subsidy.
CFLs went through "value engineering" sometime in the late nineties, to the point where in the US the ones you buy six or eight at a time in blister packs don't last any longer than incandescent bulbs. Two of the three original CFLs I bought in the mid-nineties are still working. The blister-pack CFLs tend to last one to three years. (On average -- I've found that if they last the first three months, they're probably good for a couple years.)
The problem is not the technology, it's the implementation. The bulbs that ma and pa kettle are most likely to buy are the ones least likely to perform up to spec.
But, hey, wait a minute -- you're saying that CFLs that last one year only, are still better than the filament bulbs you were using? So how long do your filament bulbs last? What kind of crap lightbulb industry do you have going in the UK?
On the LED spectrum issue, that sounds plausible enough to be a Facebook forward, but not quite plausible enough to be true. Citation needed.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a Harley with a five speed transmission. I've heard of a six speed upgrade, but thought those were just for bragging rights, as nobody would ever really need a sixth gear. And then I visited Texas. Now I'm saving up for one.
In any case, a sixth gear makes sense for economical i.e. gas-saving reasons.
There is that argument as well. (Although I'm told that an "overdrive" is not as efficient and may not yield any savings -- that the more efficient track is to make 6th gear 1:1 (as is 5th currently) and change the sprocket ratio. But I can only recite what I've read -- I'm really in over my head on this.)
I need to see "vanishing point" again.
If you've ever driven an older car, at speed, you'll understand why the speed limits were set where they are. Many feel very 'floaty' at 100 MPH, their brakes suck, and they weight too much. Cars now, even cheap ones, are much more capable of being controleled at those speeds. This still leaves the human factor, but on a highway it's minimized. They really should raise some speed limits.
Right, exactly. Speed limits tend to be weighted towards the lowest common denominator, both in equipment and skill set.
Whether the first three line up with the definition of "reckless" depends on his level of preparation, and the last one, although definitely a crime, can hardly be called reckless. The cops would surely charge him with something else for dousing his taillights.
Wow. Has the entire Slashdot community forgotten the concept of Managed Risk? Or does nobody teach that in school anymore?
I'm conflicted about this. Yes, he broke the law, and as pointed out, even collected the evidence to be used against himself.
But "reckless" is a matter of opinion, the definition being "without thinking or caring about the consequences of an action", and it wasn't clear that this was the case. One could argue (and in his position, I would, in court) that the degree of preparation involved (only some of which, undoubtedly, we have heard here) is proof positive that the participants very much were thinking and caring about the consequences of their actions.
I recall an article back in the seventies, may have been in an auto or men's magazine (I remember the graphic was a pantera overtaking a sedan at an extremely high rate of speed) about the ethics of speeding. As I recall, the author exceeded the speed limit by large margins on a regular basis, but he had commensurate skills, a car equipped for the job, and a set of ironclad rules. I don't remember all of them, but one was: If anything you do makes another driver deviate in any fashion, by flinching, braking, swerving or anything other than jaw dropping as you go by, you have lost. Find another hobby. Another was: What you're doing is illegal. When you get pulled over, and it *will* happen, take it like a man. Don't whine, don't try to get out of it, be courteous and respectful. There were other rules that I don't recall. The gist was, if you have decided to speed, you have a duty to do so in a way that doesn't make you a menace or an asshole.
As for "speed limits are posted to keep the public safe", yeah, that's what they always say. And back when we had a 55 mile per hour national speed limit, they said it then too. Did the populace at large suddenly become better drivers when the double nickel was repealed? Speed limits tend to be arbitrary, and at best, "safety" is measured as some government-set lowest-common-demoninator. Drug laws exist to keep us safe too, and that's working out swell.
I have a Harley with a five speed transmission. I've heard of a six speed upgrade, but thought those were just for bragging rights, as nobody would ever really need a sixth gear. And then I visited Texas. Now I'm saving up for one.
Man, no kidding. I had the same insurance company since 1989, had one injury accident (me who got injured) in 2010 and they promptly dropped me.
The good news is, I found I really could save money going with the lizard. Should have called them years ago.
If you see an LED stoplight where a chunk of the LEDs seem out, or are blinking wildly, it is likely the circuit that supplies electricity to those LEDs, the LED driver circuit, is what is actually failing, not the LEDs themselves.
Ideally they can be swapped out and the light returned to service, but certainly does lower the hopes that cities had in installing them: to reduce replacement and maintenance costs.
Ok, so, I haven't seen the design... is there a driver for each individual LED? I ask because the failures I've documented with a camera (on my blog, which I am reluctant to share here lest it be slashdotted) are seemingly random, ragged patterns.
I agree, it's probably not the LED itself. I was leaning towards TCE expansion/contraction causing cracks in the circuit board.
But for whatever reason, they don't seem to be very robust. Which is a little odd as the technology should be practically bullet proof if designed correctly.
Yes. I was thinking the same thing.
Kinda reminds me of drinking brandy to feel warmer.
"You're holding it wrong."
Our studies indicate this weapon is useless in warfare.
But has some real promise in domestic crowd control.
> 'If big government can put a man on the moon, why can't it put up a simple website without messing it up?'
I'd posit that big government can no longer put a man on the moon. The amount of waste and cronyism in the process precludes success at a big venture like that. There was a time when we could do it, but that time has passed.
As the process becomes more and more broken, smaller and smaller tasks become impossible for the government to achieve.
No. There IS editorial review.
At least the submitted articles are ran against a regEx to check if the URL contains "theonion" and other parody sites.
Which is what facebook doesn't do. Or why else would snopes have to debunk "news" that Obama in reality is a islamist communist hippie war-criminal who had his face surgically changed to avoid prosecution?
Wow, I haven't heard that one. My Facebook friends must be falling behind the hot issues of the day.
At least what gets posted to Slashdot as news stories goes through some cursory editorial review
You must be new here.
Point conceded. But it's all relative, right? I haven't yet seen the "giant radioactive fukushima squid" story wash up on Slashdot yet.
That the news you see on your facebook feed has to have been deemed important by one of your friends (or one of their friends) is a very good point. Where this breaks down is that your friends (or at least, *my* friends) will believe anything. Including that microwaved water will kill plants and that keying in your PIN backwards will call the police. Taken holistically, it creates a very bizarre picture of the world.
I think the real difference is that people can post pretty much anything to their Facebook news stream, including things that are blatantly, provably false. (Apparently it's part of the TOS for facebook users to post at least one tired old hoax a day or have your account suspended. Or be attacked by butt spiders. Or something.) At least what gets posted to Slashdot as news stories goes through some cursory editorial review, and comments that can't be backed up get called bullshit by other users. If we must draw parallels, I'd call Facebook "slashdot for idiots".
I don't really understand what they mean. Are they implying that there are entire pygmy tribes somewhere that spend their entire day on IRC? That somewhere there's a bunch of Tunisian goat-herders that only get their news through Usenet?
If this is the case, who cares, and why?
Well, it *does* seem like there's a whole tribe that have just now discovered every email forward since 1989. And they're all in my friends list.
Consider it this way: The very thing she was investigating was corruption in government, in one of the forms corruption takes. That being the case, it's not a stretch to imagine that she might run into corruption of other parts of government. She was investigating a branch of law enforcement. It would not be a stretch to imagine that she might run into collusion from other branches of law enforcement.
I absolutely agree that things should not be like this. That for something like this to happen is messed up at a very fundamental level. But that's why you have investigative reporting, and why some things need to be kept secret until a case can be made.
I did not read it as laying blame on the journalist, but recognizing that governments do this sort of thing, and the prudent person should protect themselves from same.
He's right about the spectrum of LEDs and it being displeasing.
Hm. Wasn't aware of that. I'll have to do some more research on that. I never really liked the light from CFLs, to tell you the truth. It makes me wonder if the millionaires promoting CFLs are actually, you know, using them. Besides in the servant's quarters, that is.
> I mean, seriously? What kind of journalist, investigating malfeasance by federal agencies, would have the names of her sources in plain text?
Or, even at her residence at all. I don't think she was thinking this through. It's the TSA for god's sake!
Now, the cool way to do it would be to have a set of bogus contacts in the clear at the residence, with the real list heavily encrypted and sitting on a server in Peru.
It's not just the monetary cost. Massive numbers of cheaply made CFLs in the hands of the populace practically guarantees that a significant number will help increase the mercury content in the local landfill. I know CFLs can be recycled, but who besides hippies actually do so? Most people will just tip them into the bin.
Alright, I'm taking a chance here. Anyone who tells me "you shouldn't feed the trolls" is probably right.
> Here, in the UK, the government, in unannounced programs, flooded the supermarkets with the new compact fluorescent bulbs at prices as low as 15 cents (yes, less than one quarter of one dollar). This ensured people changed over with no complaint. Thus, we British got to discover the REAL life of these bulbs, and the picture isn't pretty. It is a miracle when one of these bulbs makes it past one year. Many fail within months. Sure, this is better than the cheapo filament bulbs we were using, by maybe a factor of three to five, but the BS about YEARS of like was a blatant lie.
I sense some exaggeration here. In the US CFLs never got that cheap in any size that I've ever seen, even at the mass discount stores. That must have been some massive government subsidy.
CFLs went through "value engineering" sometime in the late nineties, to the point where in the US the ones you buy six or eight at a time in blister packs don't last any longer than incandescent bulbs. Two of the three original CFLs I bought in the mid-nineties are still working. The blister-pack CFLs tend to last one to three years. (On average -- I've found that if they last the first three months, they're probably good for a couple years.)
The problem is not the technology, it's the implementation. The bulbs that ma and pa kettle are most likely to buy are the ones least likely to perform up to spec.
But, hey, wait a minute -- you're saying that CFLs that last one year only, are still better than the filament bulbs you were using? So how long do your filament bulbs last? What kind of crap lightbulb industry do you have going in the UK?
On the LED spectrum issue, that sounds plausible enough to be a Facebook forward, but not quite plausible enough to be true. Citation needed.