When I was in my late teens I moved out of my parents' house and lived in a city whose police felt predatory, somewhat during the day, but especially after dark. Simple traffic stops would result in at least two units showing up half the time, and at night they were constantly racing around on the main streets, but never could be found in the actual neighborhoods. I've never been into drugs, never driven drunk, and at the time my vehicle was only six years old and in fairly good repair, but it felt like the police were actively looking for an excuse to pull me over. Literally within five miles were three other cities, and I never felt anywhere near as uncomfortable in those cities than I did in the one I lived in at the time.
I now live one city over, and there's a major state university here, but even with all of the youth hijinks and the college dropout slums a few miles from the school it still doesn't feel as predatory. Only time I was pulled over in this city I deserved it, and the officer was professional and civil even if he was firm in issuing me a citation. When pulled over in the previous city it always felt like the officers were just looking for excuses to get tough.
The choice of name of the Start button was poor, but the idea that a single button on one corner of the screen would give the user access to nearly every kind of function on the computer was not a bad one. Apple did it with the Apple menu. When the Start Menu was created, Microsoft's Windows Logo was not obviously a window, it was so stylized, so simply putting the icon by itself on the button wouldn't have helped those doing tech support explain to users how to get to that menu.
Those commercials for adult charm-bracelets, very-much overpriced mass-produced jewelry that husbands are supposed to purchase so their kids can give it to mom, are what I think of.
That, and the Irish serial killer from one of the Austin Powers movies...
Heh. It's actually fairly common to cook something one way until it's mostly done, then finish it another way so that it takes on the character of that second way of cooking. It can be a bit difficult to cook fowl on a grille without drying it out, so it's often baked and then finished in the grille to change the characteristics of the skin and to put the marks on.
Sounds like the grille at the KFC wasn't hot, so all you got was the carbon-buildup rubbed on to the outside of the already-cooked meat.
Yeah, the reflective raised markers are an evolution of the Botts design if I remember correctly. The actual round dots are pretty much obsolete now.
I'm actually not so worried about terrorism as I am people attempting to give themselves priority. In some cities there are already problems with non-emergency vehicles activating the sensors that change the traffic lights so that emergency vehicles get the right-of-way, I don't want people tricking self-driving cars into merging right or waiting. That's a matter of hacking your own car, not even theirs. I'm also worried about such means being used as vectors for car theft- root a car in-motion that you later want to steal, then find it after the driver has parked it and make it self-drive away to a collection point. Get a whole bunch of cars to meet there, load them on a trailer, then disable them so they don't report position and drive them away.
Yeah, they don't use the above-pavement versions in the northeast and other cold places, but a similar system could be packaged multiple different ways, including plow-friendly ones. It'd be harder to replace them or rearrange them, but since they have to cut grooves into the asphalt for the embedded ones anyway then it still wouldn't be harder to install them than the status-quo anyway.
I've been thinking about this for a long time. Early on I thought about embedding a cable in the road in the center of the lane for the cars to follow or in-between lanes, but those aren't easy to modify. using the lane markers themselves as ways to transmit information seems a lot more practical. One could even build similar RFID tech into portable construction barriers, with codes to override what's picked up from the normal lane markers when the area is rearranged for road construction. Could also create codes for emergency responders for traffic cones kept in police cars and fire trucks, so that they can route traffic around with an even higher priority than the construction ones.
I blame the newest distributions and projects. Older project, when the UNIX mentality was still in force, seemed to be named, to an extent, based on what the thing did. Early Linux distributions modeled themselves on commercial UNIX and followed suit for a long time. Also for a long time, code-names for distributions (like Lenny, Squeeze, Sid, etc) were short and simple, and not really necessary to know when there were other terms (unstable, testing, stable) to be used too.
Somehow the use of the code-name as something much more important has happened though, and I'm not entirely sure why. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and just confuses the point. To an extent I blame Ubuntu, they seem to be pretty bad with it, but a lot of other projects and distros are suffering the same thing.
Inevitably someone will invent new Bott's dots that install like the old ones that can be sighted by the lane tracking system, and contain directional flow, speed, lane number, and other information that can be passively interrogated by RFID, and when they need to be changed, they can be scraped up like existing ones are. Might not be good for urban city streets, but should be good for highways and freeways, and combined with object detection and tracking and a computer's ability to predict speed and direction changes of other cars and of objects, there shouldn't be much of a need for more than that.
I think it's a mistake for cars to communicate with each other. I don't trust programmers to write bug-free and exploit-free software to run on those cars, and I don't want someone's car lying about its speed or other characteristics such that it may cause me to crash.
Names used to be fairly intuitive, and even when they weren't completely intuitive their names were derived from their technical function. I'm thinking "context menu", "start menu", "task list", "quick-launch menu", and "system tray".
boiling != scrambling. Your analogy is safe for now.
Besides, like brute-force crypto, in some instances it may be possible to un-boil some aspect of the egg, but it appears to be an extremely expensive process carried out by only highly trained professionals and only workable in very specific circumstances, so it's very unlikely that it'll be commonplace in the total number of instances of boiled eggs or encrypted data.
There's a particular Wendy's that I won't eat at; they seem to have mastered this technique based on what I've been served between two pieces of bread.
There is no requirement for one to drive or to buy alcohol, and no ID requirement to rent a home, to perform some kinds of work, or to transact business with cash. There's no ID requirement to file your federal or state taxes, and one's social security card for the tax filing number doesn't cost anything and is issued at-birth. You don't even need that card to file taxes, though some states require that card, that was freely issued, to be presented when beginning most forms of employment so that the employer can file taxes.
It's possible to live a full life without resorting to criminality without ever having ID. It's not the kind of life that I want to live, but for those that want to live that way, who am I to tell them not to?
Until government-issue ID is completely free and requires almost no effort on the part of the individual to attain it, then the mandate for that ID in order to vote is a form of disenfranchisement. The right to vote predates the mandate to have ID.
I think that voting should be mandatory, and to get an exemption one needs to file to be a voting-equivalent of a conscientious objector.
I always found that there was a rough ratio of screen size to viewing distance, and it varied between conventional television viewing and "home theater" viewing. Those two have blurred in recent years with the advent of inexpensive large TVs, we we can err more toward the home theater size.
I have a 100" projector at 4:3. At 16:9 it's about 92" diagonal. We sit about eighteen feet from the screen. When I had smaller screens over the years we sat proportionately closer. I also have a 30" HD tube television, I sit about ten feet from it. When I had smaller televisions over the years I sat closer generally for movies, but for conventional television shows it could be further away. So, for a ratio, distance to viewing ratio seems to fall between 2:1 and 3.5:1 or me. I expect that most people are similar, based on my friends' setups.
I have computers running at 1920x1080 on both setups. The resolution is so high for the distance that I have to zoom-in the web browser to use it. Fonts are almost unreadable without walking up to the display. I don't think there would be a lot of practical advantage to increasing resolution on either setup, and remember, that's with a 92" screen in the mix. There is just no better viewable image for me. I'm also young enough that my eyes are still pretty good, for what that's worth.
We don't really buy new DVDs anymore unless it's for TV shows that just aren't available in better quality anyway, but I don't see a lot of benefit over Blu-Ray. Hell, I still have a ton of Laserdiscs and they're watchable on these setups.
For people that didn't want to pull out their laptop, or didn't have enough battery, it was some free entertainment.
Bingo. I don't think it's even so much about lack of ability to compare prices, I think it's like how children, while they eat their breakfast, will read the entire text on the packaging of the cereal box because it's the only option.
Before the ubiquity of portable electronic devices that could hold loads of content, there was an upper limit on how much content a person could bring them, and even then, the person had to have the foresight to plan for it. They had to bring paperback books or magazines of their own, and if they didn't, the only entertainment was the Skymall catalog in the seatback pocket. Read something enough and some random thing starts to seem neat, so they buy it out of boredom.
I suppose they are right about Amazon and the like in the sense that before, it was sometimes difficult to find the things in Skymall through other sellers, as most of them are catalog sellers and unless you knew who they were, you simply couldn't find them. Amazon makes it a lot easier to find part numbers and descriptions, and search engines allow one to find the same product through other catalogs, opening up the available options.
It's not the "dangerous clunkers" here that are so much the problem as the uninsured, who cause accidents and cannot pay for what they've done to other people. I'm starting to think that automatic impoundment should be the default when certain kinds of paperwork are not in order, like no insurance and no or suspended license, and that the car cannot be gotten out of impound without proof that the paperwork has now been corrected, and if the paperwork condition was discovered as a result of an accident investigation, the victim (the other driver) can petition to be awarded the vehicle as compensation for the damage they received if there's no insurance and no forthcoming reimbursement.
Driving isn't a right, it's a privilege. I've paid for that privilege my entire adult life, maintaining my registration, my insurance, and my license despite having no at-fault accidents. I expect others to do the same.
It's not so much that a problem happens once a year, it's that 20 or 30 things each fail once a year on their own, and many of them in-turn cause failures in other things, so if the Rube Goldberg of devices and processes that have to work each morning are interrupted partway through, it starts adding unnecessary stress to the individual. When each device operates independently of the rest then the failure of the coffee maker isn't that big of a deal, but if individual has spent a lot of money to make everything just work, and everything doesn't just work, it's aggravating and it sets the tone for the rest of the day.
Back when I was paid hourly, parking at work was a huge problem, and one was expected to park before clocking-in. The hourly employees were left angry every single morning due to this, and morale at the office was unnecessarily low. Worse, those that could address it were not hourly and had assigned, enforced parking, so it was not a problem for them. They never could understand why their employees were always in such a bad mood. It was a disconnect that has never been fixed.
I don't think that even the most efficient and simple electric circuit would be able to do anything meaningful with that small an amount of power. Maybe a wakeup circuit to bring up a long-sleeping computer that is powered from another source, but it may make more sense to just use something nuclear that provides sustained higher current for a long time.
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When I was in my late teens I moved out of my parents' house and lived in a city whose police felt predatory, somewhat during the day, but especially after dark. Simple traffic stops would result in at least two units showing up half the time, and at night they were constantly racing around on the main streets, but never could be found in the actual neighborhoods. I've never been into drugs, never driven drunk, and at the time my vehicle was only six years old and in fairly good repair, but it felt like the police were actively looking for an excuse to pull me over. Literally within five miles were three other cities, and I never felt anywhere near as uncomfortable in those cities than I did in the one I lived in at the time.
I now live one city over, and there's a major state university here, but even with all of the youth hijinks and the college dropout slums a few miles from the school it still doesn't feel as predatory. Only time I was pulled over in this city I deserved it, and the officer was professional and civil even if he was firm in issuing me a citation. When pulled over in the previous city it always felt like the officers were just looking for excuses to get tough.
The choice of name of the Start button was poor, but the idea that a single button on one corner of the screen would give the user access to nearly every kind of function on the computer was not a bad one. Apple did it with the Apple menu. When the Start Menu was created, Microsoft's Windows Logo was not obviously a window, it was so stylized, so simply putting the icon by itself on the button wouldn't have helped those doing tech support explain to users how to get to that menu.
Those commercials for adult charm-bracelets, very-much overpriced mass-produced jewelry that husbands are supposed to purchase so their kids can give it to mom, are what I think of.
That, and the Irish serial killer from one of the Austin Powers movies...
Heh. It's actually fairly common to cook something one way until it's mostly done, then finish it another way so that it takes on the character of that second way of cooking. It can be a bit difficult to cook fowl on a grille without drying it out, so it's often baked and then finished in the grille to change the characteristics of the skin and to put the marks on.
Sounds like the grille at the KFC wasn't hot, so all you got was the carbon-buildup rubbed on to the outside of the already-cooked meat.
Yeah, the reflective raised markers are an evolution of the Botts design if I remember correctly. The actual round dots are pretty much obsolete now.
I'm actually not so worried about terrorism as I am people attempting to give themselves priority. In some cities there are already problems with non-emergency vehicles activating the sensors that change the traffic lights so that emergency vehicles get the right-of-way, I don't want people tricking self-driving cars into merging right or waiting. That's a matter of hacking your own car, not even theirs. I'm also worried about such means being used as vectors for car theft- root a car in-motion that you later want to steal, then find it after the driver has parked it and make it self-drive away to a collection point. Get a whole bunch of cars to meet there, load them on a trailer, then disable them so they don't report position and drive them away.
Yeah, they don't use the above-pavement versions in the northeast and other cold places, but a similar system could be packaged multiple different ways, including plow-friendly ones. It'd be harder to replace them or rearrange them, but since they have to cut grooves into the asphalt for the embedded ones anyway then it still wouldn't be harder to install them than the status-quo anyway.
I've been thinking about this for a long time. Early on I thought about embedding a cable in the road in the center of the lane for the cars to follow or in-between lanes, but those aren't easy to modify. using the lane markers themselves as ways to transmit information seems a lot more practical. One could even build similar RFID tech into portable construction barriers, with codes to override what's picked up from the normal lane markers when the area is rearranged for road construction. Could also create codes for emergency responders for traffic cones kept in police cars and fire trucks, so that they can route traffic around with an even higher priority than the construction ones.
I don't think you're legitimate. You didn't say, "...blizzid heah." Too many uses of the letter R.
I blame the newest distributions and projects. Older project, when the UNIX mentality was still in force, seemed to be named, to an extent, based on what the thing did. Early Linux distributions modeled themselves on commercial UNIX and followed suit for a long time. Also for a long time, code-names for distributions (like Lenny, Squeeze, Sid, etc) were short and simple, and not really necessary to know when there were other terms (unstable, testing, stable) to be used too.
Somehow the use of the code-name as something much more important has happened though, and I'm not entirely sure why. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and just confuses the point. To an extent I blame Ubuntu, they seem to be pretty bad with it, but a lot of other projects and distros are suffering the same thing.
And what would you replace the status-quo with?
Inevitably someone will invent new Bott's dots that install like the old ones that can be sighted by the lane tracking system, and contain directional flow, speed, lane number, and other information that can be passively interrogated by RFID, and when they need to be changed, they can be scraped up like existing ones are. Might not be good for urban city streets, but should be good for highways and freeways, and combined with object detection and tracking and a computer's ability to predict speed and direction changes of other cars and of objects, there shouldn't be much of a need for more than that.
I think it's a mistake for cars to communicate with each other. I don't trust programmers to write bug-free and exploit-free software to run on those cars, and I don't want someone's car lying about its speed or other characteristics such that it may cause me to crash.
His name wasn't too bad, and worked fine as the owner of the bar on the Promenade...
Huh?
Where were we talking about open-source projects?
Charms bar? Continuum?
Names used to be fairly intuitive, and even when they weren't completely intuitive their names were derived from their technical function. I'm thinking "context menu", "start menu", "task list", "quick-launch menu", and "system tray".
Now they're just marketing doublespeak.
boiling != scrambling. Your analogy is safe for now.
Besides, like brute-force crypto, in some instances it may be possible to un-boil some aspect of the egg, but it appears to be an extremely expensive process carried out by only highly trained professionals and only workable in very specific circumstances, so it's very unlikely that it'll be commonplace in the total number of instances of boiled eggs or encrypted data.
There's a particular Wendy's that I won't eat at; they seem to have mastered this technique based on what I've been served between two pieces of bread.
That still doesn't mean that you're going to make good decisions.
There is no requirement for one to drive or to buy alcohol, and no ID requirement to rent a home, to perform some kinds of work, or to transact business with cash. There's no ID requirement to file your federal or state taxes, and one's social security card for the tax filing number doesn't cost anything and is issued at-birth. You don't even need that card to file taxes, though some states require that card, that was freely issued, to be presented when beginning most forms of employment so that the employer can file taxes.
It's possible to live a full life without resorting to criminality without ever having ID. It's not the kind of life that I want to live, but for those that want to live that way, who am I to tell them not to?
Oh I donno, how about being unconscious for approximately a third of one's day?
I don't know about you, but I'm not exactly at my best when I wake up, and definitely not when I'm woken up off-schedule.
Until government-issue ID is completely free and requires almost no effort on the part of the individual to attain it, then the mandate for that ID in order to vote is a form of disenfranchisement. The right to vote predates the mandate to have ID.
I think that voting should be mandatory, and to get an exemption one needs to file to be a voting-equivalent of a conscientious objector.
They were never called 'foobies' until they moved them to their own domain.
I always found that there was a rough ratio of screen size to viewing distance, and it varied between conventional television viewing and "home theater" viewing. Those two have blurred in recent years with the advent of inexpensive large TVs, we we can err more toward the home theater size.
I have a 100" projector at 4:3. At 16:9 it's about 92" diagonal. We sit about eighteen feet from the screen. When I had smaller screens over the years we sat proportionately closer. I also have a 30" HD tube television, I sit about ten feet from it. When I had smaller televisions over the years I sat closer generally for movies, but for conventional television shows it could be further away. So, for a ratio, distance to viewing ratio seems to fall between 2:1 and 3.5:1 or me. I expect that most people are similar, based on my friends' setups.
I have computers running at 1920x1080 on both setups. The resolution is so high for the distance that I have to zoom-in the web browser to use it. Fonts are almost unreadable without walking up to the display. I don't think there would be a lot of practical advantage to increasing resolution on either setup, and remember, that's with a 92" screen in the mix. There is just no better viewable image for me. I'm also young enough that my eyes are still pretty good, for what that's worth.
We don't really buy new DVDs anymore unless it's for TV shows that just aren't available in better quality anyway, but I don't see a lot of benefit over Blu-Ray. Hell, I still have a ton of Laserdiscs and they're watchable on these setups.
Bingo. I don't think it's even so much about lack of ability to compare prices, I think it's like how children, while they eat their breakfast, will read the entire text on the packaging of the cereal box because it's the only option.
Before the ubiquity of portable electronic devices that could hold loads of content, there was an upper limit on how much content a person could bring them, and even then, the person had to have the foresight to plan for it. They had to bring paperback books or magazines of their own, and if they didn't, the only entertainment was the Skymall catalog in the seatback pocket. Read something enough and some random thing starts to seem neat, so they buy it out of boredom.
I suppose they are right about Amazon and the like in the sense that before, it was sometimes difficult to find the things in Skymall through other sellers, as most of them are catalog sellers and unless you knew who they were, you simply couldn't find them. Amazon makes it a lot easier to find part numbers and descriptions, and search engines allow one to find the same product through other catalogs, opening up the available options.
It's not the "dangerous clunkers" here that are so much the problem as the uninsured, who cause accidents and cannot pay for what they've done to other people. I'm starting to think that automatic impoundment should be the default when certain kinds of paperwork are not in order, like no insurance and no or suspended license, and that the car cannot be gotten out of impound without proof that the paperwork has now been corrected, and if the paperwork condition was discovered as a result of an accident investigation, the victim (the other driver) can petition to be awarded the vehicle as compensation for the damage they received if there's no insurance and no forthcoming reimbursement.
Driving isn't a right, it's a privilege. I've paid for that privilege my entire adult life, maintaining my registration, my insurance, and my license despite having no at-fault accidents. I expect others to do the same.
It's not so much that a problem happens once a year, it's that 20 or 30 things each fail once a year on their own, and many of them in-turn cause failures in other things, so if the Rube Goldberg of devices and processes that have to work each morning are interrupted partway through, it starts adding unnecessary stress to the individual. When each device operates independently of the rest then the failure of the coffee maker isn't that big of a deal, but if individual has spent a lot of money to make everything just work, and everything doesn't just work, it's aggravating and it sets the tone for the rest of the day.
Back when I was paid hourly, parking at work was a huge problem, and one was expected to park before clocking-in. The hourly employees were left angry every single morning due to this, and morale at the office was unnecessarily low. Worse, those that could address it were not hourly and had assigned, enforced parking, so it was not a problem for them. They never could understand why their employees were always in such a bad mood. It was a disconnect that has never been fixed.
I don't think that even the most efficient and simple electric circuit would be able to do anything meaningful with that small an amount of power. Maybe a wakeup circuit to bring up a long-sleeping computer that is powered from another source, but it may make more sense to just use something nuclear that provides sustained higher current for a long time.