More like the billions of times it was repeated over the course of 2 months, and the fact that absolutely no thought is put into all the infinite different variations.
That was actually exactly my point. How ironic that it was lost on you.
Step 1 used to always be a full sentence or paragraph, now people are just whoring and putting 3 words with no humor to them at all.
I was under the impression that funny mods resulted in no karma points. If I've been earning karma points for my funny posts, at least I've been clueless about it.
Personally, i think you're just pissed off because I get modded up more than you do. Of course, you post 5 times as much as I do, at least.
Linux Today Founder Calls for Boycott of Linux Today
...and I call for a boycott on stories about Linux Today.
I would have been a lot more receptive to this article if I hadn't had to sit through "Magazines Of Our Lives" here on slash a couple months ago over the whole domain/content/whatever business, which had all the maturity of a playground fight. Or if Slashdot wasn't accepting MS ads, and other ads that generally insult my intelligence, for that matter (I especially liked the 133t-speak ads about MySQL vs. PostgreSQL; the "you'll loose your job if you don't read ITManagersJournal!" scare ads trying to play on my fears surrounding job security are particularly offensive).
Every time I hear "fusion", I can't help but think of the restaurant which used to be near where I worked in Westchester county(NY). Not exactly your typical definition of "Fusion".
I know you all think that's really funny, but as someone who's done a fair amount of desktop support, I've cleaned many a keyboard/monitor and especially CPU by dusting with a can of air. Which has usually generated a huge plume of dust. Which I've certainly inhaled quite a bit of.
So pardon as I act a little more concerned than you, because this reads much like the stories from 60 year old guys with lung cancer who worked in asbestos plants and whatnot. "Sure, there was all this stuff flying around, but hey, we thought, 'its just dust'" etc.
building a dedicated music recording and editing computer that uses a CompactFlash card instead of a hard drive
Big problem with CompactFlash- you can kill the card. They have a very finite number of write cycles. It's in the millions, but you can burn through those VERY quickly if you aren't managing your writes. CompactFlash in a camera, for example, only sees sequential writes, so you can literally fill the card and erase it hundreds of thousands of times before it's zapped.
The same may be true when recording, but when you start talking about editing, things get messy. God help you if you put swap on the card.
CompactFlash also doesn't seem nearly fast enough for real time audio beyond maybe 1 or 2 channels.
Really, I don't see the point. Use a laptop; many modern laptop drives are so quiet you can barely hear them in a dead silent room, and if they're too noisy, run your cables into another room, or put a pillow or box over it, etc. You can buy a ton of memory at decent prices and use ramdisks if you're really concerned about HD noise.
I guess its just like illegal to open someone else's 1040 delivered to your mailbox - though USPS made a mistake - you have a moral, legal(?) obligation to put it back in the send to box.
That's if it wasn't addressed to you, and you open it. If it has your name and address on it, you're perfectly correct to open it; it is legally -your- mail. Email MUST be addressed to you to get to you, unless something gets REALLY screwed up, and you're not going to notice until you open the email, because unlike postal mail, you don't usually see the To: address until you open it.
Furthermore, email isn't like a physical letter; it doesn't remain sealed, you can't tell if it has been read, etc. People with the same street number and similar sounding roads get their mail delivered to me all the time; I toss it back in my mailbox. They probably can't even tell it was misdelivered, unless they were expecting it on a specific date.
Everyone has known for years the disclaimers are unenforceable; you can't enforce something you haven't agreed to or signed, period. What's to stop me from putting "You will give me $500 if you read this email" at the bottom of every email? We're talking basic contractual law here, folks.
Perhaps these are some of the reasons why diesel powered cars are making a comeback in the US
No, not really. It has more to do with skyrocketing gasoline costs and the fact that TDI technology is miles above the old diesels. It's quieter, more efficient, more powerful, the blocks are lighter thanks to superior materials, and TDI isn't nearly as sensitive to the cold- it doesn't even need the glowplugs above 40 or so degrees. The glowplug system is tied into the central locking, so when you approach the car and unlock the doors, it figures out if it's cold enough to need the glowplugs and starts warming them; as a result, the car's ready to go before you are, most of the time. Diesel is also much more prevalent now that there are a lot more diesels in pickups, vans, etc used by small businesses and non-fleet operators.
That addresses many of the concerns the public had about diesel- hard to find fuel, noisy, heavy, and a bitch in the cold.
A lot of people get hybrids wrong too, thinking it's all the hippies buying them. Dealers say that was true initially, now it's just regular commuters who want the most efficient car. Biodiesel is a boutique fuel aside from use in fleets in 2% mixes to replace sulfur in low-sulfur fuels.
Even a ten mp camera's picture isn't amazing if you really want to blow it up.[snip]you can make some pretty big pictures (small-medium poster size with 10mp--which is just about the max
Funny. I did an 18x20 print (pro lab, not inkjet) for a friend of a cropped photo off a 6.3mp Canon 10D.
It's gorgeous, and you're talking out of your ass, my friend.
Aren't most pros still using film, making the ammount of people willing to spend that much money on a CF card even smaller?
You are joking, right?
Any pro who hasn't gone digital by now is pretty much out of business and never will be in business again. Customers vastly prefer digital in most cases. Pros who claim they're faster/better with film are outright lying to save their own skins; digital offers instant previewing of composition, exposure, and focus (btw, don't buy a digital camera without a histogram mode in the review function!) Even in the studio, medium format and large format digital backs (one such company is Leaf, another is Capture1) are getting more and more common, with astounding image quality. Given how much MF/LF film costs, studio photographers LOVE digital backs.
When a 512MB card will hold 60+ 6+mp compressed RAW images (ie, straight from the CCD, no processing, far better than JPEG) and costs under $150, it pays for itself almost overnight...especially since you can't, with film, sit during a second or two's downtime and flip through what you've taken and blow away anything that's obviously not going to cut it. With film, you can't send the image across the world within minutes- with digital, it's pretty damn easy, as long as you have some internet connection (many photojournalist types have unlimited-transfer GSM phone accounts, just to be able to transfer images to the service bureau, although less time-sensitive stuff is done via fedex, either the CD-Rs or the memory cards themselves. Yes you can fedex film, but a)the photographer knows what's on it already, and b)within 10 seconds of it arriving via fedex you can be editing the images in photoshop- film, you've gotta wait at least an hour before you've got negatives).
This 12GB card isn't for photographers, I can virtually guarantee- they won't buy it, ignoring the absurd pricing. Many don't use anything larger than 1GB cards, for the simple reason that they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket- if a card fails, gets lost, stepped on, or accidentally erased, well...I'd rather have that be 1/4 of my shoot than ALL of my shoot.
Neowin has had the pleasure of talking to two prominent figures in the I.T. world. First, Ben Goodger, chief developer of the excellent browser Firefox, and secondly, Justin Frankel, creator of Winamp and many other products for Nullsoft.
Aside from occasionally coming up with some cute, trendy toy to piss off AOL, could someone explain how exactly Justin Frankel is "prominent" in the "IT world"?
New Scientist reports the creation of a 'smart bullet' that can be fired at a target and then transmit back informations via wireless connection. The range is 70m.
"Hey Bob, where's the smart bullet?"
"Let me check the computer...hmm, over...there, next to the coffee machine."
Seriously, what the hell use is a tracking device that's only good for 70 meters? Or did the poster use the wrong units, and it should have been 70 mi?
It's worse- the guy who started photo.net, one of the internet's oldest photography resource sites, hasn't uploaded a photo or posted in almost two years. But he's had time to write a blog almost every day. It reminds me of the "oo, shiny" phenomenon.
For all his talk of ideals, I think he just wanted to make money off it, like every other MIT professor, it seems. When it became clear phoot.net wasn't going to be making him rich with an IPO and all, he bailed- they set up some fruity corporation ("luminal path corporation"? Gimme a break) and he's a member of the board of directors.
Photo.net is rotting; no innovation, nobody's fixing problems with it, the columns are self-promoting drivel...hell, go into the lens database and there's 50 billion different versions of the same exact lens typed slightly differently because people didn't pick from existing lenses, and nobody has gone into the database to clean up the mess. So we have the "EF 50mm/1.8", the "50/1.8", the "50mm EF-S f1.8", etc.
on his own weblog
One does wonder exactly how an MIT CS professor became qualified to have a weblog on Harvard Law's website.
Seeing China take steps to help the world curb the scourge of junk email has me cheering all the way.
Now if we can only get them to do something about that pesky human rights problem, we'll be all set. You know, disappearing people, executing them for things like speaking against the government, no free press...
It'll be especially handy, since then if they need anyone from outside China to work in the office, people might actually want to, instead of being terrified of getting arrested for uttering the wrong word or failing to bribe the wrong guy, or telling someone about what's really going on in the world...and getting locked away in some (literal) shithole for the rest of eternity, with a little T&E(torture and execution) thrown in for fun.
Seriously, people- you go to China, there are lots of ways you can end up never being seen/heard from again. I wouldn't go there if you paid me to- I'd go to Iraq before I went to China.
Identification for the fire truck: "The house the smoke is coming from"
Hey smartass, try this on for size: "The house with the elderly woman who pushed her medi-alert pendant is..."
The elderly population has exploded- our fire/police departments spend more time running around answering medical calls like that than anything else...especially out in the countryside.
Being a former Worcester resident, I found this odd for three reasons:[snip]
Something is actually happening in Worcester.
That's not unusual. What's unusual is that they cancelled the MONSTER MONSTER MOOOOOONNNNSTEEEERRRRR truck show that SUNDAY SUNDAY SUUUUUUNNNNDAY to make room.
Oh, and before you ask, it's pronounced "Wuss-tah" not "Whore-sesster".
My favorites are "wust-er-shire"(it aint' the sauce, folks) and "wor-chest-her"/"wor-chester".
If this helps the 911 guys find my house better in case of an emergency, good for them. If it never happens, they've got a picture of a blue house with tan trim.
Someone please enlighten me as to how this could possibly be bad.
Well, for starters, what happens when your house isn't blue anymore with tan trim...and the fire truck drives past your house? Given how much of a pain in the ass it is to do the photos, do they honestly intend to update the DB constantly?
Out in western MA, they had a very easy solution to all this. The town gave out bright plastic signs with a picture of a fire truck and the street number of the house...and a little metal stake to hang it from. Instructions on where to place it relative to -your- driveway were given. This was done because many people don't have mailboxes(they have PO boxes in town), or they were confusingly located(ie across the street, at the end of a private driveway, etc).
Works perfectly. This is just some urban idiot who doesn't understand that the problem's already been solved- just not everyone has chosen to implement it.
I have yet to see really detailed coverage maps for cellular provided by the providers themselves;
I have yet to see coverage maps provided by the providers themselves which haven't listed the same areas as "coverage coming soon" for the last -ten years-.
Not to mention, aren't wildly optimistic about coverage. Pretty much all of them show every major interstate as a full-service coverage area, and that's utter bullshit, even between New York and Boston on I-84/684 and the Mass Turnpike.
A couple months ago, I came across a program with very little documentation that was a distributed key cracker/finder for some sort of DTV encryption key. It was being publicized by an anime group- with encrypted DTV, the fansub groups can't get high quality 'raw' versions to subtitle and re-encode.
If anyone has details or can find it, please reply...
No home mail server should be used to run a listserve with anything more than a hundred people or so.
Speak for yourself. For years I helped run a 2,000 member strong mailing list off a sun axil 320...first off an ISDN line, then home DSL.
Given the costs of hosting, we might very well be back on a home DSL line soon. We're now at 3,000 members and 12+ lists, with well over a gigabyte of text archives spanning 12+ years. 'Course, we also traded up to a P4 3ghz...
You can propably get there without any safety equipment.
Not if you don't want to meet a hydrogen sulfide(I think?) gas cloud that might come out of a vent at any second and wind up dead pretty much on the spot. Remember they said they're planning on the acidic fumes taking care of Dino? That sucker's active (the volcano, not Dino), and I remember a story about most of a team of volcanologists getting killed from that and a rock slide (of course, they ignored warning signs of an impending event, but still- you don't get anywhere near that close to an active volcano without at least a gas mask.
A cop on our block had his HDD crash and burn. [snip] but I was hoping for something a little more cop-like out of him, like maybe harassing the CEO on the street in front of the office.
You'll NEVER get something like that. Ever. Why? Because it would get you BOTH into a serious amount of shit- he could get fired for it, his town/city could get sued, etc. You'd certainly get fired.
What you will get is someone on the force to check on your house on their patrol while you're on vacation, or something similar like that. If he hadn't given you the gift, you could have asked for his business card. He may have scribbled his cell # on it, maybe not. Tuck it behind your license in your wallet. Next time you get pulled over (probably only in the same state, but you never know) be polite, and 'accidentally' give them both to the cop. Do not use it if you've done something colossally stupid/dangerous, and don't even think of trying it unless you got the card for this purpose (ie, not the card you got after hearing "thanks for the info, please call me if you think of any further details on that car that hit the little old lady").
It is NOT a get-out-of-jail-free card; it just says "I did something nice for a police officer and he/she is willing to vouch that I'm a decent guy". The cop calls the other cop, he promises to bust your chops about it, you're neighbors/you're a safe driver normally and a good guy, blah blah.
You get a warning for 70 in a 65, instead of a 85 in a 65. You may or may not get the card back, and it would be wise to not notice until he or she is gone. Just put whatever you get straight back into your wallet and thank them for the warning.
Currently my film "A Sound of Thunder" is being filmed in Czechoslovakia
[thinks back to last movie he watched in the theater, and the MPAA PR piece lecturing him about stealing food from Joe American Movie Worker's baby's mouth]
Slashdot Mirror
That was actually exactly my point. How ironic that it was lost on you.
Step 1 used to always be a full sentence or paragraph, now people are just whoring and putting 3 words with no humor to them at all.
I was under the impression that funny mods resulted in no karma points. If I've been earning karma points for my funny posts, at least I've been clueless about it.
Personally, i think you're just pissed off because I get modded up more than you do. Of course, you post 5 times as much as I do, at least.
All your basestation are belong to us?
Man, takes all the fun out of these jokes when it's so easy.
Super! Now I just have to downlo
[CONNECTION DROPPED, REMOTE SIDE 0WN3D]
Fairly unrelated, but has anyone else noticed that it usually takes about 10 times longer for an XP service pack or update to install versus win2k?
This is based on observations doing windows updates on similar spec machines, 20+ win2k boxen and a few XP boxen.
...and I call for a boycott on stories about Linux Today.
I would have been a lot more receptive to this article if I hadn't had to sit through "Magazines Of Our Lives" here on slash a couple months ago over the whole domain/content/whatever business, which had all the maturity of a playground fight. Or if Slashdot wasn't accepting MS ads, and other ads that generally insult my intelligence, for that matter (I especially liked the 133t-speak ads about MySQL vs. PostgreSQL; the "you'll loose your job if you don't read ITManagersJournal!" scare ads trying to play on my fears surrounding job security are particularly offensive).
Every time I hear "fusion", I can't help but think of the restaurant which used to be near where I worked in Westchester county(NY). Not exactly your typical definition of "Fusion".
The name: McWang's.
Yup. Half Irish pub, half chinese restaurant.
I know you all think that's really funny, but as someone who's done a fair amount of desktop support, I've cleaned many a keyboard/monitor and especially CPU by dusting with a can of air. Which has usually generated a huge plume of dust. Which I've certainly inhaled quite a bit of.
So pardon as I act a little more concerned than you, because this reads much like the stories from 60 year old guys with lung cancer who worked in asbestos plants and whatnot. "Sure, there was all this stuff flying around, but hey, we thought, 'its just dust'" etc.
Big problem with CompactFlash- you can kill the card. They have a very finite number of write cycles. It's in the millions, but you can burn through those VERY quickly if you aren't managing your writes. CompactFlash in a camera, for example, only sees sequential writes, so you can literally fill the card and erase it hundreds of thousands of times before it's zapped.
The same may be true when recording, but when you start talking about editing, things get messy. God help you if you put swap on the card.
CompactFlash also doesn't seem nearly fast enough for real time audio beyond maybe 1 or 2 channels.
Really, I don't see the point. Use a laptop; many modern laptop drives are so quiet you can barely hear them in a dead silent room, and if they're too noisy, run your cables into another room, or put a pillow or box over it, etc. You can buy a ton of memory at decent prices and use ramdisks if you're really concerned about HD noise.
That's if it wasn't addressed to you, and you open it. If it has your name and address on it, you're perfectly correct to open it; it is legally -your- mail. Email MUST be addressed to you to get to you, unless something gets REALLY screwed up, and you're not going to notice until you open the email, because unlike postal mail, you don't usually see the To: address until you open it.
Furthermore, email isn't like a physical letter; it doesn't remain sealed, you can't tell if it has been read, etc. People with the same street number and similar sounding roads get their mail delivered to me all the time; I toss it back in my mailbox. They probably can't even tell it was misdelivered, unless they were expecting it on a specific date.
Everyone has known for years the disclaimers are unenforceable; you can't enforce something you haven't agreed to or signed, period. What's to stop me from putting "You will give me $500 if you read this email" at the bottom of every email? We're talking basic contractual law here, folks.
No, not really. It has more to do with skyrocketing gasoline costs and the fact that TDI technology is miles above the old diesels. It's quieter, more efficient, more powerful, the blocks are lighter thanks to superior materials, and TDI isn't nearly as sensitive to the cold- it doesn't even need the glowplugs above 40 or so degrees. The glowplug system is tied into the central locking, so when you approach the car and unlock the doors, it figures out if it's cold enough to need the glowplugs and starts warming them; as a result, the car's ready to go before you are, most of the time. Diesel is also much more prevalent now that there are a lot more diesels in pickups, vans, etc used by small businesses and non-fleet operators.
That addresses many of the concerns the public had about diesel- hard to find fuel, noisy, heavy, and a bitch in the cold.
A lot of people get hybrids wrong too, thinking it's all the hippies buying them. Dealers say that was true initially, now it's just regular commuters who want the most efficient car. Biodiesel is a boutique fuel aside from use in fleets in 2% mixes to replace sulfur in low-sulfur fuels.
Funny. I did an 18x20 print (pro lab, not inkjet) for a friend of a cropped photo off a 6.3mp Canon 10D.
It's gorgeous, and you're talking out of your ass, my friend.
You are joking, right?
Any pro who hasn't gone digital by now is pretty much out of business and never will be in business again. Customers vastly prefer digital in most cases. Pros who claim they're faster/better with film are outright lying to save their own skins; digital offers instant previewing of composition, exposure, and focus (btw, don't buy a digital camera without a histogram mode in the review function!) Even in the studio, medium format and large format digital backs (one such company is Leaf, another is Capture1) are getting more and more common, with astounding image quality. Given how much MF/LF film costs, studio photographers LOVE digital backs.
When a 512MB card will hold 60+ 6+mp compressed RAW images (ie, straight from the CCD, no processing, far better than JPEG) and costs under $150, it pays for itself almost overnight...especially since you can't, with film, sit during a second or two's downtime and flip through what you've taken and blow away anything that's obviously not going to cut it. With film, you can't send the image across the world within minutes- with digital, it's pretty damn easy, as long as you have some internet connection (many photojournalist types have unlimited-transfer GSM phone accounts, just to be able to transfer images to the service bureau, although less time-sensitive stuff is done via fedex, either the CD-Rs or the memory cards themselves. Yes you can fedex film, but a)the photographer knows what's on it already, and b)within 10 seconds of it arriving via fedex you can be editing the images in photoshop- film, you've gotta wait at least an hour before you've got negatives).
This 12GB card isn't for photographers, I can virtually guarantee- they won't buy it, ignoring the absurd pricing. Many don't use anything larger than 1GB cards, for the simple reason that they don't want to put all their eggs in one basket- if a card fails, gets lost, stepped on, or accidentally erased, well...I'd rather have that be 1/4 of my shoot than ALL of my shoot.
Aside from occasionally coming up with some cute, trendy toy to piss off AOL, could someone explain how exactly Justin Frankel is "prominent" in the "IT world"?
"Hey Bob, where's the smart bullet?"
"Let me check the computer...hmm, over...there, next to the coffee machine."
Seriously, what the hell use is a tracking device that's only good for 70 meters? Or did the poster use the wrong units, and it should have been 70 mi?
It's worse- the guy who started photo.net, one of the internet's oldest photography resource sites, hasn't uploaded a photo or posted in almost two years. But he's had time to write a blog almost every day. It reminds me of the "oo, shiny" phenomenon.
For all his talk of ideals, I think he just wanted to make money off it, like every other MIT professor, it seems. When it became clear phoot.net wasn't going to be making him rich with an IPO and all, he bailed- they set up some fruity corporation ("luminal path corporation"? Gimme a break) and he's a member of the board of directors.
Photo.net is rotting; no innovation, nobody's fixing problems with it, the columns are self-promoting drivel...hell, go into the lens database and there's 50 billion different versions of the same exact lens typed slightly differently because people didn't pick from existing lenses, and nobody has gone into the database to clean up the mess. So we have the "EF 50mm/1.8", the "50/1.8", the "50mm EF-S f1.8", etc.
on his own weblog
One does wonder exactly how an MIT CS professor became qualified to have a weblog on Harvard Law's website.
Now if we can only get them to do something about that pesky human rights problem, we'll be all set. You know, disappearing people, executing them for things like speaking against the government, no free press...
It'll be especially handy, since then if they need anyone from outside China to work in the office, people might actually want to, instead of being terrified of getting arrested for uttering the wrong word or failing to bribe the wrong guy, or telling someone about what's really going on in the world...and getting locked away in some (literal) shithole for the rest of eternity, with a little T&E(torture and execution) thrown in for fun.
Seriously, people- you go to China, there are lots of ways you can end up never being seen/heard from again. I wouldn't go there if you paid me to- I'd go to Iraq before I went to China.
Hey smartass, try this on for size: "The house with the elderly woman who pushed her medi-alert pendant is..."
The elderly population has exploded- our fire/police departments spend more time running around answering medical calls like that than anything else...especially out in the countryside.
Something is actually happening in Worcester.
That's not unusual. What's unusual is that they cancelled the MONSTER MONSTER MOOOOOONNNNSTEEEERRRRR truck show that SUNDAY SUNDAY SUUUUUUNNNNDAY to make room.
Oh, and before you ask, it's pronounced "Wuss-tah" not "Whore-sesster".
My favorites are "wust-er-shire"(it aint' the sauce, folks) and "wor-chest-her"/"wor-chester".
Well, for starters, what happens when your house isn't blue anymore with tan trim...and the fire truck drives past your house? Given how much of a pain in the ass it is to do the photos, do they honestly intend to update the DB constantly?
Out in western MA, they had a very easy solution to all this. The town gave out bright plastic signs with a picture of a fire truck and the street number of the house...and a little metal stake to hang it from. Instructions on where to place it relative to -your- driveway were given. This was done because many people don't have mailboxes(they have PO boxes in town), or they were confusingly located(ie across the street, at the end of a private driveway, etc).
Works perfectly. This is just some urban idiot who doesn't understand that the problem's already been solved- just not everyone has chosen to implement it.
I have yet to see coverage maps provided by the providers themselves which haven't listed the same areas as "coverage coming soon" for the last -ten years-.
Not to mention, aren't wildly optimistic about coverage. Pretty much all of them show every major interstate as a full-service coverage area, and that's utter bullshit, even between New York and Boston on I-84/684 and the Mass Turnpike.
A couple months ago, I came across a program with very little documentation that was a distributed key cracker/finder for some sort of DTV encryption key. It was being publicized by an anime group- with encrypted DTV, the fansub groups can't get high quality 'raw' versions to subtitle and re-encode.
If anyone has details or can find it, please reply...
Speak for yourself. For years I helped run a 2,000 member strong mailing list off a sun axil 320...first off an ISDN line, then home DSL.
Given the costs of hosting, we might very well be back on a home DSL line soon. We're now at 3,000 members and 12+ lists, with well over a gigabyte of text archives spanning 12+ years. 'Course, we also traded up to a P4 3ghz...
Not if you don't want to meet a hydrogen sulfide(I think?) gas cloud that might come out of a vent at any second and wind up dead pretty much on the spot. Remember they said they're planning on the acidic fumes taking care of Dino? That sucker's active (the volcano, not Dino), and I remember a story about most of a team of volcanologists getting killed from that and a rock slide (of course, they ignored warning signs of an impending event, but still- you don't get anywhere near that close to an active volcano without at least a gas mask.
You'll NEVER get something like that. Ever. Why? Because it would get you BOTH into a serious amount of shit- he could get fired for it, his town/city could get sued, etc. You'd certainly get fired.
What you will get is someone on the force to check on your house on their patrol while you're on vacation, or something similar like that. If he hadn't given you the gift, you could have asked for his business card. He may have scribbled his cell # on it, maybe not. Tuck it behind your license in your wallet. Next time you get pulled over (probably only in the same state, but you never know) be polite, and 'accidentally' give them both to the cop. Do not use it if you've done something colossally stupid/dangerous, and don't even think of trying it unless you got the card for this purpose (ie, not the card you got after hearing "thanks for the info, please call me if you think of any further details on that car that hit the little old lady").
It is NOT a get-out-of-jail-free card; it just says "I did something nice for a police officer and he/she is willing to vouch that I'm a decent guy". The cop calls the other cop, he promises to bust your chops about it, you're neighbors/you're a safe driver normally and a good guy, blah blah.
You get a warning for 70 in a 65, instead of a 85 in a 65. You may or may not get the card back, and it would be wise to not notice until he or she is gone. Just put whatever you get straight back into your wallet and thank them for the warning.
[thinks back to last movie he watched in the theater, and the MPAA PR piece lecturing him about stealing food from Joe American Movie Worker's baby's mouth]
What's wrong with this (pardon the pun) picture?