Wow, what a hackneyed piece of garbage that blog post is. Just the first paragraph is loaded:
aimed at protecting the intellectual property of hard-working Americans, U.S. business and the American public from the harm that necessarily flows from the purchase of counterfeit products.
Crammed into this phrase, we have that vague and presumptuous term "intellectual property", the implication that it is in danger with those words "protecting" and "harm", and that it is something virtuous and precious and essential to our national character with such bits as "hard-working Americans" and "American public". And finally, because "intellectual property" isn't broad enough already, she mentions "counterfeit products". How can people twist their brains around this trash? Does she actually believe what she wrote?
Later, there's even a "think of the children" appeal! Yes, yes, Jerry Sandusky thought of the children too.
I don't want to enact policy through the tax code. Congress loves to mess up the tax code with all sorts of giveaways. They think they can dodge public wrath with that bit of legerdemain. Just close the loopholes, simplify the tax code. But let's not go all the way to a flat tax. Why are you emphasizing specifics? I'll give you a specific: the 15% rate on stocks. What's so special about stocks that they should enjoy a special tax rate lower than everything else? Nothing! Take that out of the tax code, and have income from stocks be taxed the same as any other income.
Instead of taxing after the fact, I'd far rather nip our successful fraud or bully in the bud. Give shareholders more say in the governance of companies, then perhaps we wouldn't see such outrageous pay for upper management. As it is, management does all they can to sideline shareholders. Typically, we only get to vote on people to represent us, never on specific measures. Nor do we get a chance to chose who shall be on the ballot. We are not presented with any information whatsoever about the people we are voting on, nor are we presented with a choice of people, it's only up or down on each solitary candidate.
The reputation of "regulation" has been thoroughly smeared. Let's put it another way:
Rules and policing are necessary.
Without rules, it will be chaos. And without relatively corruption free policing, crime will be rampant. Who benefits the most from the lack of rules and policing, and therefore wants "regulation" to have a bad reputation? The strongest. Even better when the strongmen can manipulate or force rules onto everyone else via the government, while exempting themselves. And get the sheep to blame it all on the government. One way to stop it is to cripple the government's power, but then the government won't have the power to restrain these strongmen, or do much anything else necessary or useful. I don't like the alternative of maintaining eternal vigilance against corruption, but I prefer that to having a government so weak and compromised that it cannot police the stock markets or anything else. The US tried that in its beginning, with the Articles of Confederation, and it didn't work well.
Does stop people claiming it was made by themselves
Neither copyright law nor GPL stop plagiarism. They are about the right to copy, not misrepresentation or fraud. It's a common misconception that copyright stops plagiarism. It can be used against plagiarism, yes, rather like using tax evasion against drug dealers. Copyright extremists use this misunderstanding to further their own agenda of extorting money from us all for our own art and science.
I find the GPL idea of charging for distribution naive. The Internet has made distribution into a trivial problem, with negligible costs. Have to change to some other method.
Hatred of successful people? You strongly equate success with wealth, do you? And you don't discriminate on how wealth is achieved? Doesn't matter to you whether a person succeeded through inspiration and honest hard work, or through dumb luck, or through bribery of public officials, suppression of dissent, lies and fraud whitewashed as clever marketing, and accidents arising from negligence and recklessness dismissed as Acts of God? It's that last category that deserves the hate. How about success and wealth through holding the world economy hostage, you know, Too Big To Fail?
They're mental bloat. I like my environment to stick to business, and be snappy, minimalist and light. I don't want even a 0.1 second delay between mashing a button and the response. 3D effects slow things down.
I especially don't want the cute animations no matter how fast the computer and graphics are. What do 3D effects and animations tell you that you don't already know? You watch your desktops be rendered on a spinning cube during a switch if that's what turns you on. Me, I just want it to switch. Instant switch, no fuss. I can bounce back and forth far quicker that way. Can be useful for comparing two windows. Most of the feedback animations provide is distracting, or at best merely useless. Animations are the blinking text of the GUI world. If they could figure out useful things to say with animations, I'd embrace them.
I use LXDE right now. On low end computers, such as my aging Asus eee 901, turning off the font hinting and anti-aliasing gives a noticeable boost in performance. The main menu comes up just a little faster. Of course the default fonts look horrible without that, but if I change to fixed (or terminal, or maybe monospace), it looks fine.
I also use Adblock to cut down on all the annoying flashing and animation advertisers love to splatter all over websites. Haven't accomplished much with a minimalist desktop environment if a bad website can ruin it. I'm glad Mozilla has figured out that screen space is valuable, and dumped the status bar in Firefox for a nice little popup triggered by hovering over a link, and added the option to hide the menu bar. Used to use add-ons for that, now I don't have to.
That's a nice idea, and I would guess most drivers do that almost unconsciously. But if the yellow is too short, you'll get it wrong, and will run the red. Why make drivers sweat over that? That's how we get rear end collisions. It's so much easier for all concerned just to make the yellow a tiny bit longer. There's plenty of other things to worry about when driving, why burden drivers with that too, when it is so unnecessary, so easy to avoid by making that yellow longer? A traffic light should never require a driver to make a hard stop, never be too short for a heavy truck. Cities have shown by their actions that they are more interested in revenue, and will neglect and even reduce safety in pursuit of money.
There are many remedies for a problem intersection. Can change lanes, signs, and the order of operation. And of course, the timing. Red light cameras should be the last resort, undertaken only after all other measures have failed. Instead, they are often deliberately implemented first, for revenue. Let's not fix the bad timing, let's instead make money off it! Maybe we should implement a red light toll system. To shorten that red, just wave your toll tag at a handy nearby sensor. Whichever direction has paid the most gets the green soonest!
There have been studies done on this. The Texas DOT did one. What they've found is that in most places, once the yellow is set to an appropriate length (and 1 second per every 10 mph of speed limit is not long enough), so few red light violations occur that the cameras aren't worth having. Lengthening the yellow is by far the safest measure to take. Everyone has more time to evaluate the situation. The routine driving situation I hate the most is the light that turns yellow when I'm 3 to 4 seconds away from the intersection. Got to make a split second judgment on whether I can stop in time, and whether the vehicle behind me can also. You don't have time to think about it, have to decide immediately whether to apply the brakes. Can't easily change your mind. A little bit more time on that helps a great deal, and lowers everyone's stress. The idea that people will become habituated to the longer yellows and will run the reds just as much as before is a popular one, especially with the camera vendors, but it is bunk. That's also been studied, and that's what they've found.
Plano, Texas is running a red light camera program. They claim they use a standard of 4.0 seconds for the yellow duration for a 40 mph zone. But they cheat by omission. I checked one intersection with a 40 mph speed limit and a camera, and it is 3.9 seconds. I read elsewhere that 3.9 seconds is a default setting, and if the city has never adjusted the lights, then that's what they will be. And if Plano thinks they have made money off of me, they are mistaken. I don't shop there now. They've already lost more in sales tax revenue than they gained with that ticket they nailed me with.
They've used that lame lie before, about not understanding what they're doing. But Congress has plenty of support for these nutty positions. That's why I think we have little choice but to wait for the older generation to pass on. We can't convince them, can't reason with them, and can't buy them. While we wait, just ignore their silly laws as much as is convenient. Pirate with a will! Yank their chains, and enjoy watching them scramble and scream about the supposed evils of copying. I'm guessing that 40 years from now, these laws will look about as ridiculous as Nixon's idea of imposing price controls during the early 70s. Today, most understand that was a really dumb idea. It took the Nixon administration's efforts to thoroughly discredit it.
I use Java as little as possible, and still run into these kinds of problems. I run Arch Linux, which right now has an openjdk6 and a jdk7-openjdk package. There was a a package based on Sun's Java, but it seems to be gone. Really annoying to have to switch between packages to get various Java apps to run, or to find that none of them work.
This sort of thing is one reason I've stayed away from Java. It's general distrust of anything that could be proprietary, no matter how open it seems. It's not even whether Sun or Oracle ever intended evil. Looks to me that it's more of a problem that the owning organization isn't capable of maintaining the product, and not because they aren't big enough-- I would guess Python, PHP, and Perl all have smaller teams-- but perhaps because they've been too controlling, or because the corporate environment has a negative impact on the competence and commitment of whomever they get to work on it. Bureaucracy. When something is broken, nobody is responsible. All languages have some backward compatibility issues, but Java is a league of its own.
There can be a catch on the trading. Some energy companies want to buy from you at wholesale, and sell back to you at retail. If that doesn't sound unreasonable, they also want to route all your energy through their meters, so even if you immediately use the energy you just generated, you still get to pay the difference between wholesale and retail.
Of course! Power corrupts. America is all about limiting power. We have a long history of distrusting what power does to people. Got to watch them, make sure they do their jobs and do them fairly.
One of the more troubling things that many people accept is this idea that secrecy is important or necessary for formulating public policy. It's always the opposite. We have better policy when issues are in the open, when there is vigorous opposition, and when it is hard for someone to anonymously slip in a little graft. Security is routinely abused to cover up things the public has a right and an interest in knowing. What dismayed me the most about 9/11 was the realization that the terrorists had handed the forces of corruption a golden opportunity to not just cover themselves, but introduce all kinds of new ways to thieve at whole new levels. The New Economy gave way to the New Military Industrial Security Complex.
How dare anyone negotiate something like ACTA in secret? How dare oil producers cite "trade secrets" as an acceptable reason for not disclosing what's in fracking fluid? And how dare anyone hold back any information during an ongoing disaster? Well, they dare. They're still trying to protect their own selfish interests even at the cost of lives! There are always some who will behave that way if no one is watching, if there are no restraints. Recently I read that the Fed loaned trillions to banks during the bailout. TARP was small change compared to that. Only now are we finding this out because the Fed tried to keep everyone in the dark. Lately, the SEC has been better at helping financial fraudsters cover their tracks, rather than exposing and stopping them as they are supposed to do. We light up our streets at night to discourage burglary, robbery, and other petty crimes. But we aren't so good at lighting up dealings. It's rather amazing and sad the amount of attention Wikileaks got. It seems a lot of people have a lot to hide.
My anecdote is from the small company end of the spectrum. We had developers who didn't appreciate enough that development and testing should not be done on production systems. To them, development was more important than anything else, and keeping that on separate machines from production and backups was a luxury our limited budget could not justify, or so they felt. This "developers, developers, developers" philosophy even lead them to the insane decision that the production database should not have passwords! Our DBA protested strenuously, but he was overruled. Passwords would slow the developers down, and their time was the company's most valuable resource. They also had a crazy update system in place: 1) take down web site 2) wipe out current version 3) build new version on the production boxes (took about 20 minutes) 4) install new version, then 5) bring web site back up and pray that it all worked because if it didn't, going back would involve digging out the old version and building that all over again. Then there were usually a few more steps 6) discover and fix bugs on the fly, then 7) lean on the system administrators to copy those emergency patches to their emails so they could merge them back into the revision control system.
You can see this one coming a mile off, I'm sure. One day, the database vanished. At first, we thought we'd been hacked. Then one of our developers fessed up. He meant to wipe out and reload a test database, but he accidentally pointed his script at the production database. And just like that we went down. One DROP DATABASE sql command. While our developers were comprehending that the slave database and RAIDs could not help with this kind of problem, our DBA was scrambling. We found out that another developer had turned off the jury rigged daily backup process a week ago, because he needed more space. All that day, the developers and managers were forced to sit and sweat. No point doing any development work if the company was dead. They certainly deserved it. By the end of the day, through heroic effort our DBA had managed to restore enough of the database from the last backup and the logs to get us back online. Took several weeks to fix all the inconsistencies in the data.
They roasted him for making that mistake-- afterwards. Everyone was too scared to indulge in that during the crisis. But we pointed out that was only the last straw, that such a mistake should never have been possible. I changed the whole installation system. I made the box with the code repositories do the builds, automatically, and only if new code had been checked in, and changed from a model of logging into that and pushing out an update to a target box, to a model of logging into the target system and pulling in a new build. And I kept the old version around in another directory. Once all the software was in place, switching versions was as easy as "apachectl stop; mv currentdir olddir;mv newdir currentdir; apachectl start", and was so fast the web site was down for less than 1 second.
And yet, even after that dramatic day application development was still king. Their power was trimmed a bit, nothing more. The production database got passwords. But they still did not fully appreciate the importance of system administration, still looked upon that as janitorial work, scripting as not real programming, software installation as an afterthought. This attitude worked in our favor in one way though. I could avoid coding mere scripts in the proprietary language they were using. Had to make do with shell scripting, because if I'd done something like pull out Perl, that would have elevated the script to a program, and then they would have insisted it be done in the proprietary language and a "real" developer be assigned to maintain it.
Was he really ordered to delete his blog? More likely the reporter got the facts wrong. The story makes much more sense if the court merely ordered him to take it down. Once it has gone public, deleting information can be near impossible. Either the story is inaccurate, or both the judge and the blogger are stupid. The judge, for thinking that deleting public information is within anyone's power, and that such an order is not hugely overreaching and unlawful censorship, and the blogger for not having a local copy.
The individual conditions don't have to be rare. Only need a few dozen relatively uncommon conditions for life to be extremely rare. 10 filters, each with a 1/10 chance, equals 1 in 10 billion.
Thousands of advanced civilizations by now? I don't see that "the rules" require that at all. Just look right here at home in our own solar system. 8 planets, and only 1 has life. Though to be fair, we aren't absolutely certain of that, and we're still checking.
We know that the Earth satisfies a whole host of conditions that taken together are highly unlikely. We are in the habitable zone of the galaxy, that is, not so close to the center that we are bombarded with deadly radiation, nor so far away that we have no elements heavier than helium. We are also the right distance from our star for water. We are part of a double planet, and that really does stabilize Earth's rotation. Some people shrug that off, saying life is tough and would have developed anyway. On the contrary, life is very fragile, and needs all the stability it can get. The magnetic field is also important, though I suspect that's actually rather common. But anything less than 100% still cuts down the numbers. Our star is well-behaved, not prone to flaring up and bathing the Earth with deadly radiation or heat. Our gas giants shield us from many impacts. There's no doubt much more. Figure all that into the Drake Equation, and the odds of life developing could easily be 1 in 100 billion or lower, which would mean that if we are alone in the galaxy, we shouldn't be surprised.
Every industry covers up problems. Today, a big part of that effort is a fool's game of suppressing science. "Doubt is our product". Have you forgotten the time Big Tobacco testified to Congress, and every one of those bastards made the patently untrue and ridiculous claim that tobacco was not addictive? No one believed them, but no one roasted them for that. They had far too much success with that blatant Big Lie strategy, and believe you me, the rest of the business world took note. Didn't take long for Big Oil to start pumping out their own "science" to confuse the public about Global Warming/Climate Change. All the easier when you're telling a lie that people want to hear. Fox News excels at that. We have political gridlock because we can't agree on the basic facts. We can't even diagnose our problems anymore, no one agrees on what they are. Naturally, in such an environment many of the proposed cures are wrongheaded. And some like it that way, think they can get away with clever manipulations, and make a killing. When no one has any idea what's right, they're only too happy to just tell us. Why did the economy crash in 2008? Oh well, stuff happens, right? Wrong, we know why. Wall Street's greed and lies. We can whitewash it by calling it a bubble in housing, but the facts are that many people were encouraged to lie about their finances, enticed into homes. Then further lies were fed to investors to get them to buy these repackaged toxic mortgages. And it all blew up, as it eventually must. Madoff was hardly the only scoundrel, just the most outrageous. Nuclear proponents are not above this, despite the uniquely destructive dangers of their business.
When they go too far, there's a big accident, millions of dollars of damage and perhaps thousands of deaths, and then a cleanup and investigation. And most times, we find it wasn't circumstances beyond our control, it was someone doing something they shouldn't, taking too big a risk to save too little money, taking a reckless gamble. A bad bet, and they talk themselves into it by underestimating the risks and consequences of disaster, and overestimating the benefits, and figuring if it does go wrong, they can blame someone else. Even blame it on God. Stuff happens. They rationalize it all away. That's what happened at Deepwater Horizon. Just human nature. We can tolerate that for most industries. But not nuclear. That's what scares me about nuclear power. It's so dangerous we can't afford business as usual. No one is going to make a powerful or dirty bomb from fly ash. Fukushima has everyone scared now, and that's good. But it won't last. If we keep on using nuclear power, we will see another disaster. Technology is not the problem with nuclear power. Human nature is the problem.
You shouldn't have to send a counter notice, ever. That's one of the things that's so awful about the DMCA and related ilk. Takedown provisions circumvent due process in the eagerness to harass anyone accused of circumventing copyright. They are routinely abused to harass the innocent. They can be kept too busy defending themselves from accusation spam to do anything else like provide services to customers.
I didn't think OPEN was going to be any good. After skimming it, I know it's no good.
Be a bit more discriminating in your criticisms. Electric drive is awesome. It's way, way better than ICE. No gears, no hunting around for sweet spots in the RPM/torque characteristics, smoother power, far quieter, instantly starts, much more durable, simpler, cheaper, smaller, lighter, needs much less maintenance, and no smelly, polluting, unhealthy exhaust from a tailpipe. Railroads have been using diesel electric engines for decades, for many of those reasons. Having personally used an electric mower (plugin, no battery), I don't want to go back to the combustion engine mower. The advantages are so worth the big disadvantage of being tied to an extension cord. I've worked out ways to cope with that; it's not that bad.
The batteries are the problem with it all. The gas tank is by far the simpler, cheaper, faster, and more durable energy storage method. If we ever get batteries or fuel cells sorted out, the combustion engine will very quickly become a quaint relic of the past.
Or perhaps we could figure a way to electrify our roads. Works for subways.
Here we go again. What's with you nuclear apologists always trotting out the number of deaths to show why you think that nuclear power is safe? Number of deaths is NOT a good measure of safety. If we instead talk of land rendered unreclaimable, nuclear is the worst. Thanks to just 2, just 2 accidents, hundreds of sq km of land is unfit and unsafe for decades, and perhaps centuries. No other power generation method, not even filthy old coal, has done that. People can flee. Land can't.
That's why I always create these 2 directories on Windows installations: "C:\Software" and "C:\Hardware". I change "Program Files" to "Software" in every installer that gives the user that option. Except driver software goes in Hardware. Quick way to sort out what I've installed from what something else installed. And it fits in 8 characters, in case that old limit is ever an issue.
Big Oil is certainly all that. Why should nuclear be any different? They are more careful, I'll give them that much. But they are still not above cutting corners to save a few cents. You can excuse Fukushima as the result of an earthquake and tsunami. I don't. They should have known, and they could have known such large tsunamis could hit. It could have been built to take what happened, but that would have cost more money. It could have been located further inland. Instead, they chose to stick their heads in the sand, and hoke up a few studies claiming that it couldn't happen when they couldn't just conveniently ignore the whole issue. They skimped on the precautions and just hoped it would never happen.
You're right, no amount of mere spin could fool us into forgetting all the evil Microsoft has done. OOXML. DRM, especially Vista's DRM. Trying to squash Ogg Vorbis. IE. J. The Microsoft Tax. But I also remember that MS has sometimes done good. MSDOS 5 and 6 were good. Microsoft could rehabilitate themselves. All they have to do is change their attitudes and business methods. (I know, ha ha ha.) Stop trying to monopolize everything. Stop trying to destroy competition with unfair practices. Stop trying to lock in everyone.
And I am wondering whether this change to Ask Slashdot goes far enough. If the comments here are that good, perhaps a wiki format with restrictions on who can make edits would be better?
Many of the sorts of things I ask search engines often return hits from Slashdot. On a few occasions I've found my own comments in which I asked the same thing I searched! For instance, I'd still like a mechless car radio that can play Ogg Vorbis files from an SD card or USB stick. And which has Radio Data System, and without costing over $150. No such thing seems to exist, with or without RDS, at any price, at least, not in the US. When I've searched for this, some of the hits are my own comments here on Slashdot. Guess no one else wants that. Have to go the docking route, or use the audio in jack.
Nuclear power plant operators are criminally reckless organizations who skimp on maintenance, safety, and disaster preparation, and who suppress valuable scientific experiments that might uncover problems with their business, in pursuit of their greed.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, what a hackneyed piece of garbage that blog post is. Just the first paragraph is loaded:
aimed at protecting the intellectual property of hard-working Americans, U.S. business and the American public from the harm that necessarily flows from the purchase of counterfeit products.
Crammed into this phrase, we have that vague and presumptuous term "intellectual property", the implication that it is in danger with those words "protecting" and "harm", and that it is something virtuous and precious and essential to our national character with such bits as "hard-working Americans" and "American public". And finally, because "intellectual property" isn't broad enough already, she mentions "counterfeit products". How can people twist their brains around this trash? Does she actually believe what she wrote?
Later, there's even a "think of the children" appeal! Yes, yes, Jerry Sandusky thought of the children too.
I don't want to enact policy through the tax code. Congress loves to mess up the tax code with all sorts of giveaways. They think they can dodge public wrath with that bit of legerdemain. Just close the loopholes, simplify the tax code. But let's not go all the way to a flat tax. Why are you emphasizing specifics? I'll give you a specific: the 15% rate on stocks. What's so special about stocks that they should enjoy a special tax rate lower than everything else? Nothing! Take that out of the tax code, and have income from stocks be taxed the same as any other income.
Instead of taxing after the fact, I'd far rather nip our successful fraud or bully in the bud. Give shareholders more say in the governance of companies, then perhaps we wouldn't see such outrageous pay for upper management. As it is, management does all they can to sideline shareholders. Typically, we only get to vote on people to represent us, never on specific measures. Nor do we get a chance to chose who shall be on the ballot. We are not presented with any information whatsoever about the people we are voting on, nor are we presented with a choice of people, it's only up or down on each solitary candidate.
The reputation of "regulation" has been thoroughly smeared. Let's put it another way:
Rules and policing are necessary.
Without rules, it will be chaos. And without relatively corruption free policing, crime will be rampant. Who benefits the most from the lack of rules and policing, and therefore wants "regulation" to have a bad reputation? The strongest. Even better when the strongmen can manipulate or force rules onto everyone else via the government, while exempting themselves. And get the sheep to blame it all on the government. One way to stop it is to cripple the government's power, but then the government won't have the power to restrain these strongmen, or do much anything else necessary or useful. I don't like the alternative of maintaining eternal vigilance against corruption, but I prefer that to having a government so weak and compromised that it cannot police the stock markets or anything else. The US tried that in its beginning, with the Articles of Confederation, and it didn't work well.
Does stop people claiming it was made by themselves
Neither copyright law nor GPL stop plagiarism. They are about the right to copy, not misrepresentation or fraud. It's a common misconception that copyright stops plagiarism. It can be used against plagiarism, yes, rather like using tax evasion against drug dealers. Copyright extremists use this misunderstanding to further their own agenda of extorting money from us all for our own art and science.
I find the GPL idea of charging for distribution naive. The Internet has made distribution into a trivial problem, with negligible costs. Have to change to some other method.
Hatred of successful people? You strongly equate success with wealth, do you? And you don't discriminate on how wealth is achieved? Doesn't matter to you whether a person succeeded through inspiration and honest hard work, or through dumb luck, or through bribery of public officials, suppression of dissent, lies and fraud whitewashed as clever marketing, and accidents arising from negligence and recklessness dismissed as Acts of God? It's that last category that deserves the hate. How about success and wealth through holding the world economy hostage, you know, Too Big To Fail?
They're mental bloat. I like my environment to stick to business, and be snappy, minimalist and light. I don't want even a 0.1 second delay between mashing a button and the response. 3D effects slow things down.
I especially don't want the cute animations no matter how fast the computer and graphics are. What do 3D effects and animations tell you that you don't already know? You watch your desktops be rendered on a spinning cube during a switch if that's what turns you on. Me, I just want it to switch. Instant switch, no fuss. I can bounce back and forth far quicker that way. Can be useful for comparing two windows. Most of the feedback animations provide is distracting, or at best merely useless. Animations are the blinking text of the GUI world. If they could figure out useful things to say with animations, I'd embrace them.
I use LXDE right now. On low end computers, such as my aging Asus eee 901, turning off the font hinting and anti-aliasing gives a noticeable boost in performance. The main menu comes up just a little faster. Of course the default fonts look horrible without that, but if I change to fixed (or terminal, or maybe monospace), it looks fine.
I also use Adblock to cut down on all the annoying flashing and animation advertisers love to splatter all over websites. Haven't accomplished much with a minimalist desktop environment if a bad website can ruin it. I'm glad Mozilla has figured out that screen space is valuable, and dumped the status bar in Firefox for a nice little popup triggered by hovering over a link, and added the option to hide the menu bar. Used to use add-ons for that, now I don't have to.
That's a nice idea, and I would guess most drivers do that almost unconsciously. But if the yellow is too short, you'll get it wrong, and will run the red. Why make drivers sweat over that? That's how we get rear end collisions. It's so much easier for all concerned just to make the yellow a tiny bit longer. There's plenty of other things to worry about when driving, why burden drivers with that too, when it is so unnecessary, so easy to avoid by making that yellow longer? A traffic light should never require a driver to make a hard stop, never be too short for a heavy truck. Cities have shown by their actions that they are more interested in revenue, and will neglect and even reduce safety in pursuit of money.
There are many remedies for a problem intersection. Can change lanes, signs, and the order of operation. And of course, the timing. Red light cameras should be the last resort, undertaken only after all other measures have failed. Instead, they are often deliberately implemented first, for revenue. Let's not fix the bad timing, let's instead make money off it! Maybe we should implement a red light toll system. To shorten that red, just wave your toll tag at a handy nearby sensor. Whichever direction has paid the most gets the green soonest!
There have been studies done on this. The Texas DOT did one. What they've found is that in most places, once the yellow is set to an appropriate length (and 1 second per every 10 mph of speed limit is not long enough), so few red light violations occur that the cameras aren't worth having. Lengthening the yellow is by far the safest measure to take. Everyone has more time to evaluate the situation. The routine driving situation I hate the most is the light that turns yellow when I'm 3 to 4 seconds away from the intersection. Got to make a split second judgment on whether I can stop in time, and whether the vehicle behind me can also. You don't have time to think about it, have to decide immediately whether to apply the brakes. Can't easily change your mind. A little bit more time on that helps a great deal, and lowers everyone's stress. The idea that people will become habituated to the longer yellows and will run the reds just as much as before is a popular one, especially with the camera vendors, but it is bunk. That's also been studied, and that's what they've found.
Plano, Texas is running a red light camera program. They claim they use a standard of 4.0 seconds for the yellow duration for a 40 mph zone. But they cheat by omission. I checked one intersection with a 40 mph speed limit and a camera, and it is 3.9 seconds. I read elsewhere that 3.9 seconds is a default setting, and if the city has never adjusted the lights, then that's what they will be. And if Plano thinks they have made money off of me, they are mistaken. I don't shop there now. They've already lost more in sales tax revenue than they gained with that ticket they nailed me with.
They've used that lame lie before, about not understanding what they're doing. But Congress has plenty of support for these nutty positions. That's why I think we have little choice but to wait for the older generation to pass on. We can't convince them, can't reason with them, and can't buy them. While we wait, just ignore their silly laws as much as is convenient. Pirate with a will! Yank their chains, and enjoy watching them scramble and scream about the supposed evils of copying. I'm guessing that 40 years from now, these laws will look about as ridiculous as Nixon's idea of imposing price controls during the early 70s. Today, most understand that was a really dumb idea. It took the Nixon administration's efforts to thoroughly discredit it.
I use Java as little as possible, and still run into these kinds of problems. I run Arch Linux, which right now has an openjdk6 and a jdk7-openjdk package. There was a a package based on Sun's Java, but it seems to be gone. Really annoying to have to switch between packages to get various Java apps to run, or to find that none of them work.
This sort of thing is one reason I've stayed away from Java. It's general distrust of anything that could be proprietary, no matter how open it seems. It's not even whether Sun or Oracle ever intended evil. Looks to me that it's more of a problem that the owning organization isn't capable of maintaining the product, and not because they aren't big enough-- I would guess Python, PHP, and Perl all have smaller teams-- but perhaps because they've been too controlling, or because the corporate environment has a negative impact on the competence and commitment of whomever they get to work on it. Bureaucracy. When something is broken, nobody is responsible. All languages have some backward compatibility issues, but Java is a league of its own.
There can be a catch on the trading. Some energy companies want to buy from you at wholesale, and sell back to you at retail. If that doesn't sound unreasonable, they also want to route all your energy through their meters, so even if you immediately use the energy you just generated, you still get to pay the difference between wholesale and retail.
Of course! Power corrupts. America is all about limiting power. We have a long history of distrusting what power does to people. Got to watch them, make sure they do their jobs and do them fairly.
One of the more troubling things that many people accept is this idea that secrecy is important or necessary for formulating public policy. It's always the opposite. We have better policy when issues are in the open, when there is vigorous opposition, and when it is hard for someone to anonymously slip in a little graft. Security is routinely abused to cover up things the public has a right and an interest in knowing. What dismayed me the most about 9/11 was the realization that the terrorists had handed the forces of corruption a golden opportunity to not just cover themselves, but introduce all kinds of new ways to thieve at whole new levels. The New Economy gave way to the New Military Industrial Security Complex.
How dare anyone negotiate something like ACTA in secret? How dare oil producers cite "trade secrets" as an acceptable reason for not disclosing what's in fracking fluid? And how dare anyone hold back any information during an ongoing disaster? Well, they dare. They're still trying to protect their own selfish interests even at the cost of lives! There are always some who will behave that way if no one is watching, if there are no restraints. Recently I read that the Fed loaned trillions to banks during the bailout. TARP was small change compared to that. Only now are we finding this out because the Fed tried to keep everyone in the dark. Lately, the SEC has been better at helping financial fraudsters cover their tracks, rather than exposing and stopping them as they are supposed to do. We light up our streets at night to discourage burglary, robbery, and other petty crimes. But we aren't so good at lighting up dealings. It's rather amazing and sad the amount of attention Wikileaks got. It seems a lot of people have a lot to hide.
My anecdote is from the small company end of the spectrum. We had developers who didn't appreciate enough that development and testing should not be done on production systems. To them, development was more important than anything else, and keeping that on separate machines from production and backups was a luxury our limited budget could not justify, or so they felt. This "developers, developers, developers" philosophy even lead them to the insane decision that the production database should not have passwords! Our DBA protested strenuously, but he was overruled. Passwords would slow the developers down, and their time was the company's most valuable resource. They also had a crazy update system in place: 1) take down web site 2) wipe out current version 3) build new version on the production boxes (took about 20 minutes) 4) install new version, then 5) bring web site back up and pray that it all worked because if it didn't, going back would involve digging out the old version and building that all over again. Then there were usually a few more steps 6) discover and fix bugs on the fly, then 7) lean on the system administrators to copy those emergency patches to their emails so they could merge them back into the revision control system.
You can see this one coming a mile off, I'm sure. One day, the database vanished. At first, we thought we'd been hacked. Then one of our developers fessed up. He meant to wipe out and reload a test database, but he accidentally pointed his script at the production database. And just like that we went down. One DROP DATABASE sql command. While our developers were comprehending that the slave database and RAIDs could not help with this kind of problem, our DBA was scrambling. We found out that another developer had turned off the jury rigged daily backup process a week ago, because he needed more space. All that day, the developers and managers were forced to sit and sweat. No point doing any development work if the company was dead. They certainly deserved it. By the end of the day, through heroic effort our DBA had managed to restore enough of the database from the last backup and the logs to get us back online. Took several weeks to fix all the inconsistencies in the data.
They roasted him for making that mistake-- afterwards. Everyone was too scared to indulge in that during the crisis. But we pointed out that was only the last straw, that such a mistake should never have been possible. I changed the whole installation system. I made the box with the code repositories do the builds, automatically, and only if new code had been checked in, and changed from a model of logging into that and pushing out an update to a target box, to a model of logging into the target system and pulling in a new build. And I kept the old version around in another directory. Once all the software was in place, switching versions was as easy as "apachectl stop; mv currentdir olddir;mv newdir currentdir; apachectl start", and was so fast the web site was down for less than 1 second.
And yet, even after that dramatic day application development was still king. Their power was trimmed a bit, nothing more. The production database got passwords. But they still did not fully appreciate the importance of system administration, still looked upon that as janitorial work, scripting as not real programming, software installation as an afterthought. This attitude worked in our favor in one way though. I could avoid coding mere scripts in the proprietary language they were using. Had to make do with shell scripting, because if I'd done something like pull out Perl, that would have elevated the script to a program, and then they would have insisted it be done in the proprietary language and a "real" developer be assigned to maintain it.
Was he really ordered to delete his blog? More likely the reporter got the facts wrong. The story makes much more sense if the court merely ordered him to take it down. Once it has gone public, deleting information can be near impossible. Either the story is inaccurate, or both the judge and the blogger are stupid. The judge, for thinking that deleting public information is within anyone's power, and that such an order is not hugely overreaching and unlawful censorship, and the blogger for not having a local copy.
The individual conditions don't have to be rare. Only need a few dozen relatively uncommon conditions for life to be extremely rare. 10 filters, each with a 1/10 chance, equals 1 in 10 billion.
Thousands of advanced civilizations by now? I don't see that "the rules" require that at all. Just look right here at home in our own solar system. 8 planets, and only 1 has life. Though to be fair, we aren't absolutely certain of that, and we're still checking.
We know that the Earth satisfies a whole host of conditions that taken together are highly unlikely. We are in the habitable zone of the galaxy, that is, not so close to the center that we are bombarded with deadly radiation, nor so far away that we have no elements heavier than helium. We are also the right distance from our star for water. We are part of a double planet, and that really does stabilize Earth's rotation. Some people shrug that off, saying life is tough and would have developed anyway. On the contrary, life is very fragile, and needs all the stability it can get. The magnetic field is also important, though I suspect that's actually rather common. But anything less than 100% still cuts down the numbers. Our star is well-behaved, not prone to flaring up and bathing the Earth with deadly radiation or heat. Our gas giants shield us from many impacts. There's no doubt much more. Figure all that into the Drake Equation, and the odds of life developing could easily be 1 in 100 billion or lower, which would mean that if we are alone in the galaxy, we shouldn't be surprised.
Every industry covers up problems. Today, a big part of that effort is a fool's game of suppressing science. "Doubt is our product". Have you forgotten the time Big Tobacco testified to Congress, and every one of those bastards made the patently untrue and ridiculous claim that tobacco was not addictive? No one believed them, but no one roasted them for that. They had far too much success with that blatant Big Lie strategy, and believe you me, the rest of the business world took note. Didn't take long for Big Oil to start pumping out their own "science" to confuse the public about Global Warming/Climate Change. All the easier when you're telling a lie that people want to hear. Fox News excels at that. We have political gridlock because we can't agree on the basic facts. We can't even diagnose our problems anymore, no one agrees on what they are. Naturally, in such an environment many of the proposed cures are wrongheaded. And some like it that way, think they can get away with clever manipulations, and make a killing. When no one has any idea what's right, they're only too happy to just tell us. Why did the economy crash in 2008? Oh well, stuff happens, right? Wrong, we know why. Wall Street's greed and lies. We can whitewash it by calling it a bubble in housing, but the facts are that many people were encouraged to lie about their finances, enticed into homes. Then further lies were fed to investors to get them to buy these repackaged toxic mortgages. And it all blew up, as it eventually must. Madoff was hardly the only scoundrel, just the most outrageous. Nuclear proponents are not above this, despite the uniquely destructive dangers of their business.
When they go too far, there's a big accident, millions of dollars of damage and perhaps thousands of deaths, and then a cleanup and investigation. And most times, we find it wasn't circumstances beyond our control, it was someone doing something they shouldn't, taking too big a risk to save too little money, taking a reckless gamble. A bad bet, and they talk themselves into it by underestimating the risks and consequences of disaster, and overestimating the benefits, and figuring if it does go wrong, they can blame someone else. Even blame it on God. Stuff happens. They rationalize it all away. That's what happened at Deepwater Horizon. Just human nature. We can tolerate that for most industries. But not nuclear. That's what scares me about nuclear power. It's so dangerous we can't afford business as usual. No one is going to make a powerful or dirty bomb from fly ash. Fukushima has everyone scared now, and that's good. But it won't last. If we keep on using nuclear power, we will see another disaster. Technology is not the problem with nuclear power. Human nature is the problem.
What?! Innocent until proven guilty!
You shouldn't have to send a counter notice, ever. That's one of the things that's so awful about the DMCA and related ilk. Takedown provisions circumvent due process in the eagerness to harass anyone accused of circumventing copyright. They are routinely abused to harass the innocent. They can be kept too busy defending themselves from accusation spam to do anything else like provide services to customers.
I didn't think OPEN was going to be any good. After skimming it, I know it's no good.
Be a bit more discriminating in your criticisms. Electric drive is awesome. It's way, way better than ICE. No gears, no hunting around for sweet spots in the RPM/torque characteristics, smoother power, far quieter, instantly starts, much more durable, simpler, cheaper, smaller, lighter, needs much less maintenance, and no smelly, polluting, unhealthy exhaust from a tailpipe. Railroads have been using diesel electric engines for decades, for many of those reasons. Having personally used an electric mower (plugin, no battery), I don't want to go back to the combustion engine mower. The advantages are so worth the big disadvantage of being tied to an extension cord. I've worked out ways to cope with that; it's not that bad.
The batteries are the problem with it all. The gas tank is by far the simpler, cheaper, faster, and more durable energy storage method. If we ever get batteries or fuel cells sorted out, the combustion engine will very quickly become a quaint relic of the past.
Or perhaps we could figure a way to electrify our roads. Works for subways.
"Other"? Nuclear is not renewable.
Here we go again. What's with you nuclear apologists always trotting out the number of deaths to show why you think that nuclear power is safe? Number of deaths is NOT a good measure of safety. If we instead talk of land rendered unreclaimable, nuclear is the worst. Thanks to just 2, just 2 accidents, hundreds of sq km of land is unfit and unsafe for decades, and perhaps centuries. No other power generation method, not even filthy old coal, has done that. People can flee. Land can't.
That's why I always create these 2 directories on Windows installations: "C:\Software" and "C:\Hardware". I change "Program Files" to "Software" in every installer that gives the user that option. Except driver software goes in Hardware. Quick way to sort out what I've installed from what something else installed. And it fits in 8 characters, in case that old limit is ever an issue.
Do you have anything to back up yours?
Big Oil is certainly all that. Why should nuclear be any different? They are more careful, I'll give them that much. But they are still not above cutting corners to save a few cents. You can excuse Fukushima as the result of an earthquake and tsunami. I don't. They should have known, and they could have known such large tsunamis could hit. It could have been built to take what happened, but that would have cost more money. It could have been located further inland. Instead, they chose to stick their heads in the sand, and hoke up a few studies claiming that it couldn't happen when they couldn't just conveniently ignore the whole issue. They skimped on the precautions and just hoped it would never happen.
You're right, no amount of mere spin could fool us into forgetting all the evil Microsoft has done. OOXML. DRM, especially Vista's DRM. Trying to squash Ogg Vorbis. IE. J. The Microsoft Tax. But I also remember that MS has sometimes done good. MSDOS 5 and 6 were good. Microsoft could rehabilitate themselves. All they have to do is change their attitudes and business methods. (I know, ha ha ha.) Stop trying to monopolize everything. Stop trying to destroy competition with unfair practices. Stop trying to lock in everyone.
And I am wondering whether this change to Ask Slashdot goes far enough. If the comments here are that good, perhaps a wiki format with restrictions on who can make edits would be better?
Many of the sorts of things I ask search engines often return hits from Slashdot. On a few occasions I've found my own comments in which I asked the same thing I searched! For instance, I'd still like a mechless car radio that can play Ogg Vorbis files from an SD card or USB stick. And which has Radio Data System, and without costing over $150. No such thing seems to exist, with or without RDS, at any price, at least, not in the US. When I've searched for this, some of the hits are my own comments here on Slashdot. Guess no one else wants that. Have to go the docking route, or use the audio in jack.
Nuclear power plant operators are criminally reckless organizations who skimp on maintenance, safety, and disaster preparation, and who suppress valuable scientific experiments that might uncover problems with their business, in pursuit of their greed.