When was the last time you looked at a citation for any sort of traffic offense? In Virginia at least there's there's a $62 "processing fee" on any vehicular offense you drive away from (I'm sure the ones that result in arrest are even worse) In other states it may have different names, including in PA, if I'm thinking back to high school correctly, a $1.50 charge to fund the "Judicial Computer Program"
Way back when, some well meaning semi-honest politician put the rule into place that fines go to some sort of general fund that pays for schools in poor areas or some such end.
However, politicians, as they always do, found a way to pervert the intent of the law, and hence on a $25 expired registration, $30 expired inspection, or $40 having a radar detector (my favorite), you pay a $62 processing fee. Want to guess where the processing charge goes to? (hint: it isn't to help poor kids learn to read)
In fact, when it comes to speeding, you have to be going 13mph over before the "fine" portion catches up with the "processing fee".
Now, a cynic might say that money the government forces you to pay it because you broke the law is a fine, no matter what they put on the slip of paper to get through that loophole.
I think (accurate) speed limits are necessary. I also think that entirely too often in the US speed limits are set for political reasons at a level significantly below what the road will support, often due to things like blanket state limits.
(how many times have you been on an interstate crossing state lines and the speed limit changes at the border? Did the road suddenly get more dangerous because you crossed an imaginary line?)
As long as the event of pulling someone over puts any amount of money into the local government's coffers, there will be incentive to use the laws for purposes of revenue. Plain and simple. Not to mention how much better "cracking down on speeders" sounds than raising taxes for officials who face reelection.
I'm too lazy to search for how many times the satellite dish wifi setup has been posted on slashdot, but suffice to say I had one on my roof 5 years ago after getting the idea from a web page that was itself a couple of years old. (even the actual useful link added on by the editor is from 2004)
It's not even a good writeup of the concept. Here's a summary of the "Genius": -Stick it on the end of the arm. -Electronics don't like water. -The sun is hot.
There's nothing genius about this. It's a rehash of something people have done for years, sans details.
Am I the only one who sees the logical progression of insurance companies getting better and better ad predicting cost differentials, etc. and passing it on to the consumer just leading to insurance eventually costing the same as the care would have, plus a % overhead for all the people whose job it was to bill you?
How about this - provide a picture on the site of two piles side by side, with a piece of tape in between them.
One could be the parts the reprap makes itself.
The other could be all the other parts that go into building a complete reprap.
And reign in whoever had the bright idea to go around calling the machine self-replicating. If it's a useful, well-designed rapid prototyper that can make lots of useful things, tout that. These untrue claims make me think you're about to sell me a set of chef's knives that never need sharpening* next.
*Aside from sharpening by common sharpening tools available at a kitchen store or hardware store.
I don't think it was a decade, but at least say, 5 years ago, I saw technology like you describe not on a futurist "one day" show like B2K, but on one of the home improvement shows ("Home Again", IIRC), where it was being installed in someone's house. I'm not sure why this warrants "news" status now.
I see you have a firm grasp of making statements with evidence to back them up, especially on slashdot.
Console games are increasingly moving to engines. They have been for some time. Take for instance the title this article's about - from wikipedia: "The game uses Rockstar's own RAGE game engine, which was previously used in Rockstar Table Tennis, in combination with the Euphoria game animation engine."
Games are no longer defined by the stunning graphical advancements made by one genius programmer. *Especially* games like the GTA series. Theirs was at least an in-house engine. The Unreal engine powers a ton of stuff these days. Do you really think every company goes out and reinvents the wheel every time as was common in the DOS era?
As console gaming becomes a bigger and bigger market, you're likely to see more of this. It lets games be produced more cheaply, keeping the need for a brilliant dev team on each one down, which companies like EA et al. love because it lets them lean on their devs more, as they're more replaceable than they were in the past.
I'd argue that GTA III was genre-defining in the same way say, SimCity was. I've certainly gone back and played it plenty.
In fact, if I have a capable console kicking around 10 years from now, I could see myself playing IV again, just as I've played Super Mario 64 through multiple times.
The game industry learned from the past mistakes of film and never let them reach that level. Also, all due respect to your angry unappreciated programmer 'tude, but frankly they're not.
They're just one piece of a big puzzle. This isn't the 80s when squeezing a few extra polygons on the screen meant the difference between 12 and 40. Most of the type of work that the "rock star" people did back in the day is now handled by Engineers at ATI and NVIDIA, with some finishing touches by the DX team. Lately, with shaders to be written and what not, it's coming back a bit, but on the big console games more times than not they're using an engine that has most of that done already. (if you want to laud someone for the looks of GTA, check the credits for rockstar's ping pong game)
I'd argue modellers/graphic artists are just as important, and on a game like GTAIV, story writers are a big piece of the picture.
They could have had anyone with a decent eastern-european sounding accent and good delivery voice Niko. It's the situations he was in that made the game interesting.
*note: this is coming from someone who makes a living writing software, so I'm not just tearing down people's contributions out of spite for the profession or anything.
Not gonna do it, since all I use my PC at home for these days is playing games (old ones, the only ones it can run very well), and I don't think MS has released Rise of Nations for OSX yet.
MADD was founded by parents who lost children to drunk drivers, back when the limit was approx. double what it is today, and people would routinely be pulled over with BAC's well over it, and get off with a slap on the wrist. The founder's child was killed by a habitual drunk driver.
It's since been hijacked by neo-prohibitionists, and many of the original members, including the founder herself, have quit in protest. They're now an anti-alcohol lobbying organization, plain and simple.
Make no mistake, they still use drunk driving as their banner and their children's corpses as shields, but they've long since accomplished all the organization's original goals. Now they focus on lowering the legal limits ever lower (despite the fact that nearly all accidents involving injuries attributable to alcohol involve BAC's in the mid-teens) getting nuisance laws passed, making it damn near impossible to defend yourself when accused of a DUI/DWI, and contributing to the evisceration of the 4th and 5th amendments.
Please go read up on MADD (*not* from their official site or press releases) If you think I'm mistaken.
First they left off 3G to save power, but the device was still using it, so they dropped other unnecessary features, like being able to use the phone at all. A focus group of fanbois came out in favor of the move.
Then why not just make it a damn tax and end the scapegoating? If every speed limit were set based on the natural speed of traffic, it might be reasonable to single people out for speeding, but I think everyone here can probably name at least one road near their house where the average speed is at least 10-15 mph over the limit and there's not a rash of fatal accidents.
It's a back-door tax, without the negative political consequences of calling it one. I wish they'd just admit it and make it apply to everyone. I'd gladly pay an extra 1 or 2k a year if it meant I gained 20mph on the highway without having to worry about a shakedown.
A religion generally starts off as one, does not have mandatory financial contributions (no matter how strongly they may *suggest* them) and was not founded by a guy who was previously on record as saying he should found a religion because that's where the money is. They also don't sue people who dare leave the fold.
Awarding a contract to more than one provider ensures they all have someone else to point the finger at when it breaks. Hell, you see this even with contracts that measure in the 10s of thousands rather than the 100's of millions.
He also ignores the fact that a throttling mechanism is already built into every DSL/Cable modem out there - the speed it's provisioned at. (incidentally, also the only place to implement any sort of effective dynamic throttling controls - anywhere else and users will find a way around it.)
If ISP's would just build their networks to handle the speeds they sell instead of running around with their hands in the air over the fact the 'net has finally evolved to the point where there are reasons for an individual subscriber to actually be sending data at something over the previous benchmark of orders of magnitude less than they receive, this might not be as much of a problem. Currently they come off sounding like a pissed off buffet owner when a NAAFA convention comes to town.
Also, calling net neutrality a "religion" is getting really, really old. Make your damn argument without resorting to silly name calling.
With the exception of Verizon, who does a similar lockdown deal with BREW, most phones have a J2ME VM on them and are quite capable of running just about anything.
I've got Gmail/Gmaps/Opera mini among others running on my plain old (non-smart) phone. They were all free and the only way my carrier impeded my installing them right over the air was with a single warning screen about installing 3rd party apps.
....available to all (all who already have or can afford to buy an intel mac with leopard) , and easy to program (to anyone who knows objective C) and port apps (so long as they don't do anything apple doesn't like, since they control the sole distribution channel) without using java which is all but a dead language (that happens to run on the majority of cell phones sold today, as opposed to ObjC which is apple's baby just as much as java is Sun's)
There are plenty of cities around the world that have extensive surveillance networks, the worst IMO being London. In DC, there's the network of microphones that were only supposed to be hooked up to gunshot detectors, but hey since they're already there let's use them to supplement our network of video cameras.
Google doesn't care what you do, and they don't have a real time view of it. Your local government may, and this is what we should be fighting against. 1984 and The Right to Read are old hat. Half the stuff described therein is commonplace today. We're onto the next level, where Enemy of the State and 24 are getting closer to reality.
-People lie. Spend a month on an online dating site and you'll figure out how to spot most of them.
-Fuck secret criteria. Listing an income requirement *is* somewhat crass. It's also completely legitimate, but be upfront about it. There's nothing in the world worse than a gold digger who thinks he/she isn't.
-A lot of these problems are trying to solve a problem (low response) the wrong way. People don't respond for a reason, and trying to give someone a poor rating because they didn't respond to someone who matched them on abstract criteria is silly. According to every female I've ever talked to who used an online dating site, most of the guys come on *way* too strong. Are you going to count every email someone gets against their rating, when the person who emailed 3 hours ago emails again to ask why you haven't responded? And then again tomorrow to say it's rude to ignore people? And then the next day to say if you don't respond soon you risk losing them?
-All the boilerplate stuff is just to try and narrow the field. There are plenty of times when someone who meets it isn't a good match, and plenty of times when someone who might fail on 2 or 3 items is a great match.
-Trying to apply scientific formulas to dating is a recipe for failure. The *only* one that works is: the more contacts you send out, the more you get back. However, if you're an asshole, illiterate, contact people who you blatantly aren't right for (if someone lists a desired age range as 25-30, and you're 45, don't waste your time), or feel the need to make blatant sexual overtures in the first email, sending out 50 vs 20 emails may just mean getting 2 responses vs 1. Quantity helps, but quality matters.
-Fake profiles are *not at all* hard to spot if you're not a moron. Guys - if you see 7 profiles with the same picture, consider them all fake. If some poor girl got her headshots stolen, sucks for her. Even if it's a unique profile, if it reads like it was written who bought the cheap english-russian dictionary, and they don't mention having just moved here from eastern europe, it's fake. People who grew up in a small town in PA don't frequently say they're "looking for the man who is caring and wants to make the serious relationship"
-There are two types of fake profiles: Those put up by services to entice people to joining, and those put up by scammers looking to hit you up with a hard luck story and get you to send them money. The former may someday be pressured out of existence. The latter never will, because scammers pay the same monthly fee as everyone else, and there's no reliable way to spot them until after they've already hit up dozens of people. (Psst....Bennett: they'll sign up for your mythical site too)
*rolls eyes* Online dating is not, and never will be perfect. If you go to a reputable site, however, it's pretty good, and improving all the time. Too much math will just confuse people and scare them away.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't be used to enrich the court?
When was the last time you looked at a citation for any sort of traffic offense? In Virginia at least there's there's a $62 "processing fee" on any vehicular offense you drive away from (I'm sure the ones that result in arrest are even worse) In other states it may have different names, including in PA, if I'm thinking back to high school correctly, a $1.50 charge to fund the "Judicial Computer Program"
Way back when, some well meaning semi-honest politician put the rule into place that fines go to some sort of general fund that pays for schools in poor areas or some such end.
However, politicians, as they always do, found a way to pervert the intent of the law, and hence on a $25 expired registration, $30 expired inspection, or $40 having a radar detector (my favorite), you pay a $62 processing fee. Want to guess where the processing charge goes to? (hint: it isn't to help poor kids learn to read)
In fact, when it comes to speeding, you have to be going 13mph over before the "fine" portion catches up with the "processing fee".
Now, a cynic might say that money the government forces you to pay it because you broke the law is a fine, no matter what they put on the slip of paper to get through that loophole.
I think (accurate) speed limits are necessary. I also think that entirely too often in the US speed limits are set for political reasons at a level significantly below what the road will support, often due to things like blanket state limits.
(how many times have you been on an interstate crossing state lines and the speed limit changes at the border? Did the road suddenly get more dangerous because you crossed an imaginary line?)
As long as the event of pulling someone over puts any amount of money into the local government's coffers, there will be incentive to use the laws for purposes of revenue. Plain and simple. Not to mention how much better "cracking down on speeders" sounds than raising taxes for officials who face reelection.
in the name of "keeping taxes low"
How is this a troll? This *isn't* news. 2003 called, they want their slashdot stories back:
http://mobile.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/09/19/0053233
I'm too lazy to search for how many times the satellite dish wifi setup has been posted on slashdot, but suffice to say I had one on my roof 5 years ago after getting the idea from a web page that was itself a couple of years old. (even the actual useful link added on by the editor is from 2004)
It's not even a good writeup of the concept. Here's a summary of the "Genius":
-Stick it on the end of the arm.
-Electronics don't like water.
-The sun is hot.
There's nothing genius about this. It's a rehash of something people have done for years, sans details.
Am I the only one who sees the logical progression of insurance companies getting better and better ad predicting cost differentials, etc. and passing it on to the consumer just leading to insurance eventually costing the same as the care would have, plus a % overhead for all the people whose job it was to bill you?
How about this - provide a picture on the site of two piles side by side, with a piece of tape in between them.
One could be the parts the reprap makes itself.
The other could be all the other parts that go into building a complete reprap.
And reign in whoever had the bright idea to go around calling the machine self-replicating. If it's a useful, well-designed rapid prototyper that can make lots of useful things, tout that. These untrue claims make me think you're about to sell me a set of chef's knives that never need sharpening* next.
*Aside from sharpening by common sharpening tools available at a kitchen store or hardware store.
I don't think it was a decade, but at least say, 5 years ago, I saw technology like you describe not on a futurist "one day" show like B2K, but on one of the home improvement shows ("Home Again", IIRC), where it was being installed in someone's house. I'm not sure why this warrants "news" status now.
I see you have a firm grasp of making statements with evidence to back them up, especially on slashdot.
Console games are increasingly moving to engines. They have been for some time. Take for instance the title this article's about - from wikipedia:
"The game uses Rockstar's own RAGE game engine, which was previously used in Rockstar Table Tennis, in combination with the Euphoria game animation engine."
Games are no longer defined by the stunning graphical advancements made by one genius programmer. *Especially* games like the GTA series. Theirs was at least an in-house engine. The Unreal engine powers a ton of stuff these days. Do you really think every company goes out and reinvents the wheel every time as was common in the DOS era?
As console gaming becomes a bigger and bigger market, you're likely to see more of this. It lets games be produced more cheaply, keeping the need for a brilliant dev team on each one down, which companies like EA et al. love because it lets them lean on their devs more, as they're more replaceable than they were in the past.
I'd argue that GTA III was genre-defining in the same way say, SimCity was. I've certainly gone back and played it plenty.
In fact, if I have a capable console kicking around 10 years from now, I could see myself playing IV again, just as I've played Super Mario 64 through multiple times.
The game industry learned from the past mistakes of film and never let them reach that level.
Also, all due respect to your angry unappreciated programmer 'tude, but frankly they're not.
They're just one piece of a big puzzle. This isn't the 80s when squeezing a few extra polygons on the screen meant the difference between 12 and 40. Most of the type of work that the "rock star" people did back in the day is now handled by Engineers at ATI and NVIDIA, with some finishing touches by the DX team. Lately, with shaders to be written and what not, it's coming back a bit, but on the big console games more times than not they're using an engine that has most of that done already. (if you want to laud someone for the looks of GTA, check the credits for rockstar's ping pong game)
I'd argue modellers/graphic artists are just as important, and on a game like GTAIV, story writers are a big piece of the picture.
They could have had anyone with a decent eastern-european sounding accent and good delivery voice Niko. It's the situations he was in that made the game interesting.
*note: this is coming from someone who makes a living writing software, so I'm not just tearing down people's contributions out of spite for the profession or anything.
And the DMCA has nothing to do with youtube unless they're responding to a takedown notice. You might be interested in reading these articles
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/24/mark_bunker_you_tube_account_axed/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/05/02/youtube_scientology_channel/
Where youtube rolls over and does tricks when an organization with some actual teeth throws its weight around.
Fuck that, I'm thinking about it, right now.
Not gonna do it, since all I use my PC at home for these days is playing games (old ones, the only ones it can run very well), and I don't think MS has released Rise of Nations for OSX yet.
Still, I'll think about it all I want.
MADD was founded by parents who lost children to drunk drivers, back when the limit was approx. double what it is today, and people would routinely be pulled over with BAC's well over it, and get off with a slap on the wrist. The founder's child was killed by a habitual drunk driver.
It's since been hijacked by neo-prohibitionists, and many of the original members, including the founder herself, have quit in protest. They're now an anti-alcohol lobbying organization, plain and simple.
Make no mistake, they still use drunk driving as their banner and their children's corpses as shields, but they've long since accomplished all the organization's original goals. Now they focus on lowering the legal limits ever lower (despite the fact that nearly all accidents involving injuries attributable to alcohol involve BAC's in the mid-teens) getting nuisance laws passed, making it damn near impossible to defend yourself when accused of a DUI/DWI, and contributing to the evisceration of the 4th and 5th amendments.
Please go read up on MADD (*not* from their official site or press releases) If you think I'm mistaken.
was the first thing that came to mind when I saw the headline.
First they left off 3G to save power, but the device was still using it, so they dropped other unnecessary features, like being able to use the phone at all. A focus group of fanbois came out in favor of the move.
A tireless few speeding is not reason to raise the limit. When it's set so only a tireless few bother to follow it, that's a reason.
Then why not just make it a damn tax and end the scapegoating? If every speed limit were set based on the natural speed of traffic, it might be reasonable to single people out for speeding, but I think everyone here can probably name at least one road near their house where the average speed is at least 10-15 mph over the limit and there's not a rash of fatal accidents. It's a back-door tax, without the negative political consequences of calling it one. I wish they'd just admit it and make it apply to everyone. I'd gladly pay an extra 1 or 2k a year if it meant I gained 20mph on the highway without having to worry about a shakedown.
A religion generally starts off as one, does not have mandatory financial contributions (no matter how strongly they may *suggest* them) and was not founded by a guy who was previously on record as saying he should found a religion because that's where the money is. They also don't sue people who dare leave the fold.
Awarding a contract to more than one provider ensures they all have someone else to point the finger at when it breaks. Hell, you see this even with contracts that measure in the 10s of thousands rather than the 100's of millions.
He also ignores the fact that a throttling mechanism is already built into every DSL/Cable modem out there - the speed it's provisioned at. (incidentally, also the only place to implement any sort of effective dynamic throttling controls - anywhere else and users will find a way around it.)
If ISP's would just build their networks to handle the speeds they sell instead of running around with their hands in the air over the fact the 'net has finally evolved to the point where there are reasons for an individual subscriber to actually be sending data at something over the previous benchmark of orders of magnitude less than they receive, this might not be as much of a problem. Currently they come off sounding like a pissed off buffet owner when a NAAFA convention comes to town.
Also, calling net neutrality a "religion" is getting really, really old. Make your damn argument without resorting to silly name calling.
Which phones are you referring to?
With the exception of Verizon, who does a similar lockdown deal with BREW, most phones have a J2ME VM on them and are quite capable of running just about anything.
I've got Gmail/Gmaps/Opera mini among others running on my plain old (non-smart) phone. They were all free and the only way my carrier impeded my installing them right over the air was with a single warning screen about installing 3rd party apps.
....available to all
(all who already have or can afford to buy an intel mac with leopard)
, and easy to program
(to anyone who knows objective C)
and port apps
(so long as they don't do anything apple doesn't like, since they control the sole distribution channel)
without using java which is all but a dead language
(that happens to run on the majority of cell phones sold today, as opposed to ObjC which is apple's baby just as much as java is Sun's)
There are plenty of cities around the world that have extensive surveillance networks, the worst IMO being London. In DC, there's the network of microphones that were only supposed to be hooked up to gunshot detectors, but hey since they're already there let's use them to supplement our network of video cameras.
Google doesn't care what you do, and they don't have a real time view of it. Your local government may, and this is what we should be fighting against. 1984 and The Right to Read are old hat. Half the stuff described therein is commonplace today. We're onto the next level, where Enemy of the State and 24 are getting closer to reality.
someone needs to check the article's math. How do they go from 8TB/s down to 300GBps?
-People lie. Spend a month on an online dating site and you'll figure out how to spot most of them.
-Fuck secret criteria. Listing an income requirement *is* somewhat crass. It's also completely legitimate, but be upfront about it. There's nothing in the world worse than a gold digger who thinks he/she isn't.
-A lot of these problems are trying to solve a problem (low response) the wrong way. People don't respond for a reason, and trying to give someone a poor rating because they didn't respond to someone who matched them on abstract criteria is silly. According to every female I've ever talked to who used an online dating site, most of the guys come on *way* too strong. Are you going to count every email someone gets against their rating, when the person who emailed 3 hours ago emails again to ask why you haven't responded? And then again tomorrow to say it's rude to ignore people? And then the next day to say if you don't respond soon you risk losing them?
-All the boilerplate stuff is just to try and narrow the field. There are plenty of times when someone who meets it isn't a good match, and plenty of times when someone who might fail on 2 or 3 items is a great match.
-Trying to apply scientific formulas to dating is a recipe for failure. The *only* one that works is: the more contacts you send out, the more you get back. However, if you're an asshole, illiterate, contact people who you blatantly aren't right for (if someone lists a desired age range as 25-30, and you're 45, don't waste your time), or feel the need to make blatant sexual overtures in the first email, sending out 50 vs 20 emails may just mean getting 2 responses vs 1. Quantity helps, but quality matters.
-Fake profiles are *not at all* hard to spot if you're not a moron. Guys - if you see 7 profiles with the same picture, consider them all fake. If some poor girl got her headshots stolen, sucks for her. Even if it's a unique profile, if it reads like it was written who bought the cheap english-russian dictionary, and they don't mention having just moved here from eastern europe, it's fake. People who grew up in a small town in PA don't frequently say they're "looking for the man who is caring and wants to make the serious relationship"
-There are two types of fake profiles: Those put up by services to entice people to joining, and those put up by scammers looking to hit you up with a hard luck story and get you to send them money. The former may someday be pressured out of existence. The latter never will, because scammers pay the same monthly fee as everyone else, and there's no reliable way to spot them until after they've already hit up dozens of people. (Psst....Bennett: they'll sign up for your mythical site too)
*rolls eyes* Online dating is not, and never will be perfect. If you go to a reputable site, however, it's pretty good, and improving all the time. Too much math will just confuse people and scare them away.