Even if I accept that analogy, there are limits to what you personally can do to retrieve stolen property. Making yourself out to look like a law enforcement official and proceeding to act like said official would be outside of those limits.
Except what they're doing isn't a citizen's (note the apostrophe) arrest. In almost every state statute covering citizen's arrests, one of the requirements is that you turn over the arrested person to law enforcement for prosecution. The concept isn't that any joe citizen on the street can start executing his own style of vigilante justice, but rather that in cases where a police officer is not present a private citizen may act to prevent the carrying out of a crime - but as soon as is feasible the arrestee should be turned over to actual law enforcement.
What the RIAA is doing in this case is harassing people who happen to be breaking the law, and I think the way in which they are choosing to pursue is of dubious legality. I wouldn't be surprised if they find themselves on the other end of a lawsuit in the near future over this.
And for those who think money should be spent on real research that could actually solve some of the problems we've created on this planet instead of just throwing our collective arms up and saying "oh well, we fucked Earth up, but we'll get it right on Mars", I urge you to write to your representatives and tell them to stop wasting more money on a discretionary "research" program that has big geek sex appeal but yields few actual long term benefits.
Part of me wants to agree with your "setting out for greener pastures" argument, but I'm not quite there. Maybe because it's not quite so simple as just packing up and moving on. Some people have roots that make just moving a bit more difficult. Besides, while it sounds like SV may be an extreme case, this is something that is happening everywhere. I'm from Phoenix, and lots of people move there every year because of lower cost of living, climate (they come for the nice winters, not really knowing what the summers are like...), lifestyle, whatever, but find it's a damn hard place to find a halfway decent paying job. I think that's part of the reason a lot of people don't stay long (although those that leave are still outnumbered by those who keep coming).
One thing that could be a definite sticking point though is the health insurance. It sounds like his wife has a pretty serious (and expensive) condition if she has to carry around an oxygen supply, and switching employers could leave them up the creek if they can't get coverage due to it being a pre-existing condition. Packing up could guarantee that they would be FAR worse off.
But then they'd have had to kill everyone, because everyone would be saying "The Apple APL license", and the only thing that's worse than redundancy is alliterative redundancy (yes, that was intentional).
Even worse is that it expands to "Apple Apple Public License", unless they were really going for the geeks in which case APL would stand for "APL Public License".
Normally, I wouldn't want to break/. decorum by actually having a civil conversation, but damn if I'm not impressed by the tone of your reply, especially given that mine was a bit...condescending.
Anyhow, it's all good - you just managed to hit a sore spot of mine. I've done a lot of work (paid and volunteer) with lower income and international non-profit organizations and it really gets me when people extrapolate based on their own life situation and automatically assume that it's the norm. It seems to be an especially prevalent attitude amongst my fellow (U.S.) Americans (must be part of that whole living in the "wealthiest country in the history of the world" thing) as well as a lot of posters on/., who I would (perhaps mistakenly) generalize as being a rather privileged lot in that they appear to have higher than average incomes to be able to afford all their nifty toys or they have parents who do. Most of the rest of the world and even the rest of the U.S. live a much different life.
Getting back to the point though, this seems to me like a lot of the other new electronics products as of late (the tablet P.C. comes immediately to mind) to be yet another solution in search of a problem, and it doesn't even seem to do that very well. Personally, the thing that tends to excite me the most in personal electronics these days is more of the convergence thing - being able to do the same thing with less toys, with a handful of tight very specialized items for specific situations where convergence makes less sense. So an iPod or mp3 player makes perfect sense to me, as it's a very well defined product that fits a very specific need. I could see it possibly benefiting from a little bit of convergence, i.e. adding some PDA functionality or a color screen with a picture viewer, but I don't really see it working with a video type player. Even the PDA functionality is a bit worthless IMHO - PDA and cell phones are a much more sensible combination.
As far as video players go, what would I see as the killer app? It already (sort of) exists - laptops. With the smaller laptops, you already have pretty much all you need - viewable but not too big of a screen, a DVD drive, even a hard drive if you want to view recorded video from a PVR or such. But even with the best laptops, the battery life is less than stellar. What I would envision is a laptop with the ability to boot into a special "video player" mode, able to turn down the processor and only utilize those portions of the system needed for DVD or other video playback and dramatically extend the battery life. I'll admit to not being an engineer so I may be talking out of my ass, but it seems logical to me that if you're booting up with a stripped down video player OS and basically only enough processor and memory power to play back video, you could get much better battery life although playing video off of your hard drive may kill some or all of that. Plus you'd have one less thing to carry around.
That's great if you're buying it for use with a PC that doesn't have a firewire port, but totally irrelevant if you're using it with a Mac - it's just an extra cable you don't need.
I can't help but agree with the iPod mini - this sounds like a good product with a bad pricing strategy, much like the great but overpriced Cube of yesteryear.
My prediction is that it will sell OK, but nowhere near spectacular, as once you make the decision to spend $250 for a mp3 player, you might as well add that extra $50 and get the regular iPod and the other 11 gigs of storage. Although, to be fair, if Apple is going after the $199 256 mb flash market, then they're already convincing them to spend an extra $50 - so maybe they're figuring that's the tipping point, as they couldn't be convinced to spend the extra $100 for the low end iPod? Sounds plausible, but it also sounds to me that they're banking on the iPod name to sell these things since now you're also competing at the same price point as the other less elegant but higher capacity HD based players as well. Time will tell, but I'm guessing you'll see the same capacity (or maybe even higher) mini in 6 months for $200.
Most people have 3+ computers in their homes nowadays. High-bandwidth connectivity is becoming widely available.
I would like to see some support for this statement. Unless you're counting every home device that has a processor in it as a "computer" (i.e., you're car is a computer), then this statement is pulled out of your butt. I had difficulty quickly finding recent stats online, but the 2000 U.S. census had 51% of households having at least ONE computer at home, a bare majority (source, download the first report). Even given that this number has increased in the last 4 years, has it increased substantially enough that the number of people with 3+ computers is 50.1% or more? I find that highly doubtful. And mind you, this is just for the U.S.
Don't even get me started on how limited the availability of broadband is in most of the world...
Of course, you probably didn't mean to include everybody in your "most people" statement. Probably what you meant is "most people of upper middle class income living in highly industrialized countries" or "most white people" or "most slashdot readers". Now this would be more correct, as well as identifying the demographic most likely to buy a product like this. But it also glosses over the fact that most people in the world are not as privileged as yourself (or me for that matter, though I only have 1 (functioning) computer at home - guess that means I'm deprived by your standards). So get a little perspective on how most of the world really lives before making asinine statements like that.
Only works with the new iPods with dock connectors, though.
And unless they've managed to fix the less than sluggish transfer speeds, it barely even works with those. You'd be better off taking that $99 and putting it towards buying an extra CF card or two.
Now you'll probably call me elitist again, but you'll be just as wrong as you were the first time.
No, you'll still be just as elitist as you were the first time.
It is elitist to state that if you don't know how the internals of the system work or if you are not willing to figure it out then you are not willing to use it. What you are saying is that linux is a system for programmers, developers, sysadmins, and those who have nothing better to do in their life (like maybe get a job and earn money) than sit around figure out how their computer works.
I know a lot of really smart people who know next to nothing about their computers beyond how to use the GUI and how to run the applications that they need to. They don't know jack about recompiling kernels or editing config files or whatever. And it's not that they don't know about these things because they are dumb or because they're not curious: it's because they are curious about other things, and they are spending their time pursuing those things. But because they don't meet you're definition of whose special enough to use linux, you're want to put up big walls and lock them out.
Well, you can go fuck yourself. Put up your stupid walls. People like me will go and build the siege engines to let those unclean barbarians into you little city. And I'm not saying I do this out of spite. I do it because I think that people should be able to enjoy the benefits of systems like Linux without having to know everything about how it works. Some people have more important things to do with their lives.
There is nothing wrong with that, but you can't say that rendering frameworks didn't exist prior to WebCore because there were several.
I'm not saying that other rendering engines didn't already exist (i.e., gecko, KHTML), but rather there wasn't a framework for one included with the system before Apple released WebCore. So whatever choice Omni had made regarding which rendering engine to use, either their own or somebody else's, it would have required a not insignificant amount of programming time to be spent on the renderer itself.
The Omni Group finally realized that they were trying to master too many disciplines and they were spending time re-inventing the wheel.
I'm guessing they already knew this. As has been pointed out elsewhere, these guys are NeXT coders from wayback, and code re-use for quick development being such an important part of the whole NeXTStep/OpenStep/Cocoa system. I think the only thing stopping them prior to Safari and WebCore is that the frameworks didn't exist to allow them to just make use of the system HTML renderer (what were they going to do, use the renderer from the pre-Panther Help viewer? Talk about slow and buggy...). So once Apple got the frameworks in place they used it, focusing on their coding efforts on the parts of the application that were different instead of wasting time on what was the same.
Maybe, maybe not, but I think restrictions would be greater than they are now without the Second Amendment. With the situation as it is, both states and the federal government have passed a number of restrictions on firearms, with some upheld and some struck down by the Supremes. So the lack of a ban on guns is not necessarily due to a lack of trying.
Personally, I'm torn by the whole gun debate: I despise guns and I think the world would be better without them, but like nukes and the whole justification for MAD policies, unilateral disarmament doesn't strike me as such a bright thing and mutual disarmament seems like a no go. But then again somebody has to make the first move if we're ever going to get anywhere, and unlike nation-states who at least have some facade of legitimacy, are you going to trust criminals in negotiations? So maybe we all just agree that some level of guns in society is inevitable and instead focus on not glamorizing violence and encouraging non-violent dispute resolution and things like that, but then how do you do that? Government censorship? Consumer boycotts? Public school programs?
2. Yes I have been called a "hippie", and by better people than you. While I don't take it as an insult, I don't think it's an entirely accurate label either. I prefer to be called a socialist.
3. I have owned a car in the past and I do know how to drive one, my job does require that I drive a company vehicle from time to time (I do not include driving in the scope of employment driving for myself as well, I'm not, I'm driving for my employer), and aside from a few tickets back in my reckless youth (I haven't had a ticket in over ten years, and I got rid of my car about 3 years ago). I simply do not own one now because I do not need one. When I do, usually for things like road trips, moving stuff, whatever, I rent one. I find that since I do not need a car on a daily (or even usually monthly) basis, there is no need for me to own one and it's much cheaper.
I don't view a car as a status symbol or a must have item, it's a tool with it's proper usage. It would probably be overkill for you to take a jet to work, and it would be overkill for me to drive to school (I'm a law student about 1.5 miles), to the grocery store (.5 miles) to work (maybe 2 blocks) or most other places I need to go as they are similarly located. And while I live in a city, it's not exactly one of those burgeoning eastern transit oriented metropolises - I live in Arizona, one of the more hostile to non-car driver states to live in.
I wasn't debating whether or not the law is "silly" (although I do not think it is, although it's not perfect either). I was just noting that the things you listed would be allowed by the law as they are "vehicle information display[s]" allowed under Subsection (b)(1). I was simply pointing out that the statute allows for them therefore contrary to your "you're automatically breaking the law because your car has a computer in it..." comment, the statute specifically exempts such things from its scope.
The interesting one though is the stereo display - I guess you could say it's a "vehicle information display" but I think that would be stretching it. I would chalk this up to the law being badly written, not it's purpose being bad, but you're free to disagree on that point.
Only that were it not for the constitutional protection of the right to own a gun, then one could make a number of reasonable arguments why they should be banned (i.e., if the number of people who use guns to kill people or the number of people killed with guns is >X, then guns are now more of a burden than a benefit to society and should be banned). So if the purpose of the analogy is to support not banning cell phones (or at least not while driving), then comparing it to something that legally can not be banned and pointing out "see, we don't ban handguns and cell phones are much more useful" is misleading: we don't ban handguns because legally we cannot (at least without the extreme difficulty of passing a Constitutional amendment), not necessarily because there are not good reasons to. The unique status of gun ownership rights inserts enough of a difference that you can't really compare the two.
(I hope everyone realizes that they will be breaking the law anyways, because there is a computer embedded in your car, under the dash usually, that controls braking, fuel economy and many other things)
If you had actually read the article and not the badly summarized/. headline, you would realize that the aim of the law is not to restrict computer usage, but VIDEO DISPLAYS: the digest title for the section of the Vehicle Code being amended is "AB 301, Reyes. Vehicles: video displays.". Can't be much clearer than that. And there are a number of exceptions for displays that are specifically driving aids so no, your in-dash speedometer, tachometer, gas gauge, et al, no matter how high-tech and digital, are not in violation of the statute.
And I'm making the assumption that most people are like you and think they can multi-task and be safe, but are really just being full of themselves and are not honest enough to recognize their own limits. And when suddenly challenged, they pull themselves up even higher on their horse and begin denouncing everybody else and decreeing who should and should not be allowed to procreate.
So how's this: I don't trust you to drive safely. It appears to me that you care more about your gadgets and tricked out engine than you do about what's really important when driving, which is getting from point A to point B safely and efficiently. I don't drive, I either walk or ride my bike (and no I'm not 15, I'm almost 30. I don't have a need for a car so I don't have one). You in your 1000's of pounds of metal are a threat to me, and anything that you are doing that detracts from the safe operation of your vehicle increases that threat. THis law isn't for your benefit, because really if you want to act like a stupid shit and kill yourself, more power to you. This law is to protect me and everybody else from you. Deal with it.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. You may have just restored my faith in humanity. This is one of the most insightful thing I have read on/. in ages, and one of the best analogies as well. You are to be commended, sir.
To go a little further, it's much easier for me if I'm walking down the street to avoid another pedestrian who is obviously distracted or acting otherwise strangely, but once you're in a car, you can't even easily tell that the driver in front of you is looking at a laptop, reading a book, dialing their phone, or whatever. You lose the ability to easily foresee and avoid a potentially dangerous situation (aside from not driving altogether).
If anything, my only complaint about this law is that it is too specific. It should have been something like:
1. The driver's only responsibility is to drive the car. 2. Doing anything that distracts from this responsibility is an infraction of this law. 3. Section (2) includes the activities of all passengers in the car as well as the driver himself.
Issue the tickets and let the court's figure it out on a case by case basis. If you want to be explicit, make a list of some activities that would be considered distracting but make it clear that it's not inclusive. I'm not generally a fan of common law in cases like this, but it seems to me that this is just such a potentially expansive area (why laptops and not books? and so on...) that to have to go back to the legislature every single time a new potentially distracting gadget comes on the market is ludicrous. If you want more flexibility in the law so that all you self proclaimed "excellent drivers" and "exceptional multi-taskers" aren't getting pulled over needlessly, maybe make it a secondary infraction (i.e., they can't pull you over for talking on a cell phone, but if they pull you over for speeding and it's obvious you were talking on a cell phone, then they can ticket you for that as well).
The laws for slower traffic keep right are rarely enforced
Wrong. In most situations, "slower traffic keep right" isn't a law but a social custom (note that I said in *most* situations. This obviously excludes those in which there is a posted sign). So while it's rude to drive slower in the left lane and likely to make you very unpopular, it's not a traffic infraction per se.
Never mind that in most states, the slower traffic keep right laws apply whether you're exceeding the speed limit or not.
The generic law you're referring to is obstructing traffic, and it can be enforced if you're driving in the right lane as well (although it's *very* unlikely to be unless you're *really* going under the speed limit). If you're familiar with Critical Mass bike rides (where a large number of people "spontaneously" meet up and go on a bike ride together, generally tying up traffic along their route (it's a civil disobedience/direct action/protest thing)), when they're broken up by police that's usually what they're ticketed with. And I've known people who have gotten tickets as well even when driving simply because they weren't keeping up with the traffic flow.
This argument is like saying that "well, some people who buy handguns won't use them to murder people. but some will! so we should ban all handguns"... except that using a cell phone is perhaps more useful than using a handgun to the average person.
Bad analogy - owning a gun is explicitly a constitutional right, but owning a cellphone or driving a car has no similar protection. There's not a whole lot beyond the potential electoral consequences stopping the government from banning either. although I think it's unlikely a state could ban driving (a barrier to interstate trade) - it would probably have to be a federal law - though they could get otherwise "creative" by raising the standard for getting and keeping a driver license (which would be a good idea IMHO) or since states and local governments fund and plan most roads, they could make driving very inconvenient by cutting funding or planning that eliminates (or at least reduces) the need to drive - kind of like they currently treat riding a bike, walking, or taking mass transit, but reversed.
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What the RIAA is doing in this case is harassing people who they claim happen to be breaking the law, ...
I can't argue with your correction. In fact, i think it makes my point even stronger.
Even if I accept that analogy, there are limits to what you personally can do to retrieve stolen property. Making yourself out to look like a law enforcement official and proceeding to act like said official would be outside of those limits.
Except what they're doing isn't a citizen's (note the apostrophe) arrest. In almost every state statute covering citizen's arrests, one of the requirements is that you turn over the arrested person to law enforcement for prosecution. The concept isn't that any joe citizen on the street can start executing his own style of vigilante justice, but rather that in cases where a police officer is not present a private citizen may act to prevent the carrying out of a crime - but as soon as is feasible the arrestee should be turned over to actual law enforcement.
What the RIAA is doing in this case is harassing people who happen to be breaking the law, and I think the way in which they are choosing to pursue is of dubious legality. I wouldn't be surprised if they find themselves on the other end of a lawsuit in the near future over this.
And the Constitution being amendable makes it someday possible even if it looks currently to be unlikely.
Or haven't you seen Demolition Man?
And for those who think money should be spent on real research that could actually solve some of the problems we've created on this planet instead of just throwing our collective arms up and saying "oh well, we fucked Earth up, but we'll get it right on Mars", I urge you to write to your representatives and tell them to stop wasting more money on a discretionary "research" program that has big geek sex appeal but yields few actual long term benefits.
Part of me wants to agree with your "setting out for greener pastures" argument, but I'm not quite there. Maybe because it's not quite so simple as just packing up and moving on. Some people have roots that make just moving a bit more difficult. Besides, while it sounds like SV may be an extreme case, this is something that is happening everywhere. I'm from Phoenix, and lots of people move there every year because of lower cost of living, climate (they come for the nice winters, not really knowing what the summers are like...), lifestyle, whatever, but find it's a damn hard place to find a halfway decent paying job. I think that's part of the reason a lot of people don't stay long (although those that leave are still outnumbered by those who keep coming).
One thing that could be a definite sticking point though is the health insurance. It sounds like his wife has a pretty serious (and expensive) condition if she has to carry around an oxygen supply, and switching employers could leave them up the creek if they can't get coverage due to it being a pre-existing condition. Packing up could guarantee that they would be FAR worse off.
But then they'd have had to kill everyone, because everyone would be saying "The Apple APL license", and the only thing that's worse than redundancy is alliterative redundancy (yes, that was intentional).
Even worse is that it expands to "Apple Apple Public License", unless they were really going for the geeks in which case APL would stand for "APL Public License".
Normally, I wouldn't want to break /. decorum by actually having a civil conversation, but damn if I'm not impressed by the tone of your reply, especially given that mine was a bit...condescending.
/., who I would (perhaps mistakenly) generalize as being a rather privileged lot in that they appear to have higher than average incomes to be able to afford all their nifty toys or they have parents who do. Most of the rest of the world and even the rest of the U.S. live a much different life.
Anyhow, it's all good - you just managed to hit a sore spot of mine. I've done a lot of work (paid and volunteer) with lower income and international non-profit organizations and it really gets me when people extrapolate based on their own life situation and automatically assume that it's the norm. It seems to be an especially prevalent attitude amongst my fellow (U.S.) Americans (must be part of that whole living in the "wealthiest country in the history of the world" thing) as well as a lot of posters on
Getting back to the point though, this seems to me like a lot of the other new electronics products as of late (the tablet P.C. comes immediately to mind) to be yet another solution in search of a problem, and it doesn't even seem to do that very well. Personally, the thing that tends to excite me the most in personal electronics these days is more of the convergence thing - being able to do the same thing with less toys, with a handful of tight very specialized items for specific situations where convergence makes less sense. So an iPod or mp3 player makes perfect sense to me, as it's a very well defined product that fits a very specific need. I could see it possibly benefiting from a little bit of convergence, i.e. adding some PDA functionality or a color screen with a picture viewer, but I don't really see it working with a video type player. Even the PDA functionality is a bit worthless IMHO - PDA and cell phones are a much more sensible combination.
As far as video players go, what would I see as the killer app? It already (sort of) exists - laptops. With the smaller laptops, you already have pretty much all you need - viewable but not too big of a screen, a DVD drive, even a hard drive if you want to view recorded video from a PVR or such. But even with the best laptops, the battery life is less than stellar. What I would envision is a laptop with the ability to boot into a special "video player" mode, able to turn down the processor and only utilize those portions of the system needed for DVD or other video playback and dramatically extend the battery life. I'll admit to not being an engineer so I may be talking out of my ass, but it seems logical to me that if you're booting up with a stripped down video player OS and basically only enough processor and memory power to play back video, you could get much better battery life although playing video off of your hard drive may kill some or all of that. Plus you'd have one less thing to carry around.
That's great if you're buying it for use with a PC that doesn't have a firewire port, but totally irrelevant if you're using it with a Mac - it's just an extra cable you don't need.
OK, $49 for the whole suite.
But how about for those of use who still only need iTunes and iPhoto? Will they continue to be free downloads? I'm guessing iTunes will, but iPhoto?
I can't help but agree with the iPod mini - this sounds like a good product with a bad pricing strategy, much like the great but overpriced Cube of yesteryear.
My prediction is that it will sell OK, but nowhere near spectacular, as once you make the decision to spend $250 for a mp3 player, you might as well add that extra $50 and get the regular iPod and the other 11 gigs of storage. Although, to be fair, if Apple is going after the $199 256 mb flash market, then they're already convincing them to spend an extra $50 - so maybe they're figuring that's the tipping point, as they couldn't be convinced to spend the extra $100 for the low end iPod? Sounds plausible, but it also sounds to me that they're banking on the iPod name to sell these things since now you're also competing at the same price point as the other less elegant but higher capacity HD based players as well. Time will tell, but I'm guessing you'll see the same capacity (or maybe even higher) mini in 6 months for $200.
Most people have 3+ computers in their homes nowadays. High-bandwidth connectivity is becoming widely available.
I would like to see some support for this statement. Unless you're counting every home device that has a processor in it as a "computer" (i.e., you're car is a computer), then this statement is pulled out of your butt. I had difficulty quickly finding recent stats online, but the 2000 U.S. census had 51% of households having at least ONE computer at home, a bare majority (source, download the first report). Even given that this number has increased in the last 4 years, has it increased substantially enough that the number of people with 3+ computers is 50.1% or more? I find that highly doubtful. And mind you, this is just for the U.S.
Don't even get me started on how limited the availability of broadband is in most of the world...
Of course, you probably didn't mean to include everybody in your "most people" statement. Probably what you meant is "most people of upper middle class income living in highly industrialized countries" or "most white people" or "most slashdot readers". Now this would be more correct, as well as identifying the demographic most likely to buy a product like this. But it also glosses over the fact that most people in the world are not as privileged as yourself (or me for that matter, though I only have 1 (functioning) computer at home - guess that means I'm deprived by your standards). So get a little perspective on how most of the world really lives before making asinine statements like that.
Only works with the new iPods with dock connectors, though.
And unless they've managed to fix the less than sluggish transfer speeds, it barely even works with those. You'd be better off taking that $99 and putting it towards buying an extra CF card or two.
Now you'll probably call me elitist again, but you'll be just as wrong as you were the first time.
No, you'll still be just as elitist as you were the first time.
It is elitist to state that if you don't know how the internals of the system work or if you are not willing to figure it out then you are not willing to use it. What you are saying is that linux is a system for programmers, developers, sysadmins, and those who have nothing better to do in their life (like maybe get a job and earn money) than sit around figure out how their computer works.
I know a lot of really smart people who know next to nothing about their computers beyond how to use the GUI and how to run the applications that they need to. They don't know jack about recompiling kernels or editing config files or whatever. And it's not that they don't know about these things because they are dumb or because they're not curious: it's because they are curious about other things, and they are spending their time pursuing those things. But because they don't meet you're definition of whose special enough to use linux, you're want to put up big walls and lock them out.
Well, you can go fuck yourself. Put up your stupid walls. People like me will go and build the siege engines to let those unclean barbarians into you little city. And I'm not saying I do this out of spite. I do it because I think that people should be able to enjoy the benefits of systems like Linux without having to know everything about how it works. Some people have more important things to do with their lives.
There is nothing wrong with that, but you can't say that rendering frameworks didn't exist prior to WebCore because there were several.
I'm not saying that other rendering engines didn't already exist (i.e., gecko, KHTML), but rather there wasn't a framework for one included with the system before Apple released WebCore. So whatever choice Omni had made regarding which rendering engine to use, either their own or somebody else's, it would have required a not insignificant amount of programming time to be spent on the renderer itself.
The Omni Group finally realized that they were trying to master too many disciplines and they were spending time re-inventing the wheel.
I'm guessing they already knew this. As has been pointed out elsewhere, these guys are NeXT coders from wayback, and code re-use for quick development being such an important part of the whole NeXTStep/OpenStep/Cocoa system. I think the only thing stopping them prior to Safari and WebCore is that the frameworks didn't exist to allow them to just make use of the system HTML renderer (what were they going to do, use the renderer from the pre-Panther Help viewer? Talk about slow and buggy...). So once Apple got the frameworks in place they used it, focusing on their coding efforts on the parts of the application that were different instead of wasting time on what was the same.
Maybe, maybe not, but I think restrictions would be greater than they are now without the Second Amendment. With the situation as it is, both states and the federal government have passed a number of restrictions on firearms, with some upheld and some struck down by the Supremes. So the lack of a ban on guns is not necessarily due to a lack of trying.
Personally, I'm torn by the whole gun debate: I despise guns and I think the world would be better without them, but like nukes and the whole justification for MAD policies, unilateral disarmament doesn't strike me as such a bright thing and mutual disarmament seems like a no go. But then again somebody has to make the first move if we're ever going to get anywhere, and unlike nation-states who at least have some facade of legitimacy, are you going to trust criminals in negotiations? So maybe we all just agree that some level of guns in society is inevitable and instead focus on not glamorizing violence and encouraging non-violent dispute resolution and things like that, but then how do you do that? Government censorship? Consumer boycotts? Public school programs?
1. Yes I live in the city.
2. Yes I have been called a "hippie", and by better people than you. While I don't take it as an insult, I don't think it's an entirely accurate label either. I prefer to be called a socialist.
3. I have owned a car in the past and I do know how to drive one, my job does require that I drive a company vehicle from time to time (I do not include driving in the scope of employment driving for myself as well, I'm not, I'm driving for my employer), and aside from a few tickets back in my reckless youth (I haven't had a ticket in over ten years, and I got rid of my car about 3 years ago). I simply do not own one now because I do not need one. When I do, usually for things like road trips, moving stuff, whatever, I rent one. I find that since I do not need a car on a daily (or even usually monthly) basis, there is no need for me to own one and it's much cheaper.
I don't view a car as a status symbol or a must have item, it's a tool with it's proper usage. It would probably be overkill for you to take a jet to work, and it would be overkill for me to drive to school (I'm a law student about 1.5 miles), to the grocery store (.5 miles) to work (maybe 2 blocks) or most other places I need to go as they are similarly located. And while I live in a city, it's not exactly one of those burgeoning eastern transit oriented metropolises - I live in Arizona, one of the more hostile to non-car driver states to live in.
I wasn't debating whether or not the law is "silly" (although I do not think it is, although it's not perfect either). I was just noting that the things you listed would be allowed by the law as they are "vehicle information display[s]" allowed under Subsection (b)(1). I was simply pointing out that the statute allows for them therefore contrary to your "you're automatically breaking the law because your car has a computer in it..." comment, the statute specifically exempts such things from its scope.
The interesting one though is the stereo display - I guess you could say it's a "vehicle information display" but I think that would be stretching it. I would chalk this up to the law being badly written, not it's purpose being bad, but you're free to disagree on that point.
Only that were it not for the constitutional protection of the right to own a gun, then one could make a number of reasonable arguments why they should be banned (i.e., if the number of people who use guns to kill people or the number of people killed with guns is >X, then guns are now more of a burden than a benefit to society and should be banned). So if the purpose of the analogy is to support not banning cell phones (or at least not while driving), then comparing it to something that legally can not be banned and pointing out "see, we don't ban handguns and cell phones are much more useful" is misleading: we don't ban handguns because legally we cannot (at least without the extreme difficulty of passing a Constitutional amendment), not necessarily because there are not good reasons to. The unique status of gun ownership rights inserts enough of a difference that you can't really compare the two.
(I hope everyone realizes that they will be breaking the law anyways, because there is a computer embedded in your car, under the dash usually, that controls braking, fuel economy and many other things)
/. headline, you would realize that the aim of the law is not to restrict computer usage, but VIDEO DISPLAYS: the digest title for the section of the Vehicle Code being amended is "AB 301, Reyes. Vehicles: video displays.". Can't be much clearer than that. And there are a number of exceptions for displays that are specifically driving aids so no, your in-dash speedometer, tachometer, gas gauge, et al, no matter how high-tech and digital, are not in violation of the statute.
If you had actually read the article and not the badly summarized
And I'm making the assumption that most people are like you and think they can multi-task and be safe, but are really just being full of themselves and are not honest enough to recognize their own limits. And when suddenly challenged, they pull themselves up even higher on their horse and begin denouncing everybody else and decreeing who should and should not be allowed to procreate.
So how's this: I don't trust you to drive safely. It appears to me that you care more about your gadgets and tricked out engine than you do about what's really important when driving, which is getting from point A to point B safely and efficiently. I don't drive, I either walk or ride my bike (and no I'm not 15, I'm almost 30. I don't have a need for a car so I don't have one). You in your 1000's of pounds of metal are a threat to me, and anything that you are doing that detracts from the safe operation of your vehicle increases that threat. THis law isn't for your benefit, because really if you want to act like a stupid shit and kill yourself, more power to you. This law is to protect me and everybody else from you. Deal with it.
Thank You, Thank You, Thank You. You may have just restored my faith in humanity. This is one of the most insightful thing I have read on /. in ages, and one of the best analogies as well. You are to be commended, sir.
To go a little further, it's much easier for me if I'm walking down the street to avoid another pedestrian who is obviously distracted or acting otherwise strangely, but once you're in a car, you can't even easily tell that the driver in front of you is looking at a laptop, reading a book, dialing their phone, or whatever. You lose the ability to easily foresee and avoid a potentially dangerous situation (aside from not driving altogether).
If anything, my only complaint about this law is that it is too specific. It should have been something like:
1. The driver's only responsibility is to drive the car.
2. Doing anything that distracts from this responsibility is an infraction of this law.
3. Section (2) includes the activities of all passengers in the car as well as the driver himself.
Issue the tickets and let the court's figure it out on a case by case basis. If you want to be explicit, make a list of some activities that would be considered distracting but make it clear that it's not inclusive. I'm not generally a fan of common law in cases like this, but it seems to me that this is just such a potentially expansive area (why laptops and not books? and so on...) that to have to go back to the legislature every single time a new potentially distracting gadget comes on the market is ludicrous. If you want more flexibility in the law so that all you self proclaimed "excellent drivers" and "exceptional multi-taskers" aren't getting pulled over needlessly, maybe make it a secondary infraction (i.e., they can't pull you over for talking on a cell phone, but if they pull you over for speeding and it's obvious you were talking on a cell phone, then they can ticket you for that as well).
The laws for slower traffic keep right are rarely enforced
Wrong. In most situations, "slower traffic keep right" isn't a law but a social custom (note that I said in *most* situations. This obviously excludes those in which there is a posted sign). So while it's rude to drive slower in the left lane and likely to make you very unpopular, it's not a traffic infraction per se.
Never mind that in most states, the slower traffic keep right laws apply whether you're exceeding the speed limit or not.
The generic law you're referring to is obstructing traffic, and it can be enforced if you're driving in the right lane as well (although it's *very* unlikely to be unless you're *really* going under the speed limit). If you're familiar with Critical Mass bike rides (where a large number of people "spontaneously" meet up and go on a bike ride together, generally tying up traffic along their route (it's a civil disobedience/direct action/protest thing)), when they're broken up by police that's usually what they're ticketed with. And I've known people who have gotten tickets as well even when driving simply because they weren't keeping up with the traffic flow.
This argument is like saying that "well, some people who buy handguns won't use them to murder people. but some will! so we should ban all handguns"... except that using a cell phone is perhaps more useful than using a handgun to the average person.
Bad analogy - owning a gun is explicitly a constitutional right, but owning a cellphone or driving a car has no similar protection. There's not a whole lot beyond the potential electoral consequences stopping the government from banning either. although I think it's unlikely a state could ban driving (a barrier to interstate trade) - it would probably have to be a federal law - though they could get otherwise "creative" by raising the standard for getting and keeping a driver license (which would be a good idea IMHO) or since states and local governments fund and plan most roads, they could make driving very inconvenient by cutting funding or planning that eliminates (or at least reduces) the need to drive - kind of like they currently treat riding a bike, walking, or taking mass transit, but reversed.