Here's a fun hobby of mine. Open up Limewire, select documents, search for "resume.doc". Watch in shock and awe at the stupidity of people as resume after resume appears.
"Member of Cuban government 1970-2005. Speaking of which, due to the recent health problems of our beloved leader, Fidel Castro, I wish to move some of my personal assets out of the country as insurance against any political instability that might arise. To do this I require a bank account out of country to receive this money. If you have such a bank account, and wish to receive a sizable compensation for your troubles, please email your banking details, social security number, name, address and phone number..."
The XAML construct is also very intelligently designed, as it is more than just a graphical description format, as it has inherent events and animations, where Display PDF (or SVG as some like to compare) is inherently a static graphical format with no concept of advanced layers, animations, hit testing, events, etc.
Your statement about SVG is factually incorrect. SVG not only has declarative animation, but also programmability through Javascript, and SVG groups combined with filters allow any kind of layering mode imaginable.
So basically, Silverlight is a bit like SVG, only tied to a convicted monopolist and notorious malefactor. Oh, and Firefox implements SVG + Javascript off the shelf with no need for plugins.
I wonder how long nearly meaningless elections will continue to make people believe that they actually have some kind of voice in their government?
Forever. It's a pleasant lie, a bit like "I will start dieting just after I've eaten this pack of chips". And bad things only happen to terrorists, sexual offenders, and other such people; never mind that peeing in the bushes sn a "sexual offense" nowadays, you can't very well stand up to them without being a bleeding-heart liberal fool at best and a terrorist child molester at worst.
That's the fun part about being "though on crime": it lets you to label all your opponents as criminal sympthasizers. Whip people to a frenzy, and you can get them to root for anything, just as long as they feel tough and righteous doing so.
Perhaps you didn't see the 5th word in the summary: "Pirated microchips based on stolen blueprints..."
The summary does, indeed, contain an error. I know, it is almost inconceivable, Slashdot being world-famous for the high standards of its editors.
Actually, since gang violence only becomes a problem in certain social conditions and since in our current social model money equals power, this is exactly so.
Oh dear God, it's frightening that any sane person believes this. I suppose you would advocate locking up the rich victim of any gang violence. Or why just victims - why not all people over a certain level of wealth - let's lock them up? There was a gang shooting downtown; better arrest the mayor.
There are no gang shootings downtown here in Finland, and no other kind of significant gang-related violent activity. So either we Finns are fundamentally better people than Americans, or our social structure discourages this kind of behavior. Those are the logical alternatives
As for your strawman:
I didn't say that victims of gang violence should be locked up. Where did you get that idea ?
The victims of gang violence tend to be members of other gangs or random passersby. The rich people typically live apart from gang-infested neighborhoods, and as such are less, not more, likely to be victims than the poor.
If gang violence arises from social conditions, as seems likely, then it is indeed the fault of those who created these conditions. In capitalist societies, that means the wealthy. Can you show any actual errors in this logic, rather than make up absurd propositions and "presuming" I advocate them ?
If there are shootings downtown significantly often, then that hints that the mayor might not be quite up to his task of managing the city, and perhaps should be replaced.
As much as people on Slashdot tend to want patent reform, I only see an occasional few advocate total removal of patents and copyrights. Has there ever been a "controlled experiment" (as much as that is possible) comparing a "totally free market" to one with the "rule of law" including patents and copyrights, such that we can compare the rates of innovation in this society?
Wild West comes to mind, as does early American history generally. Arguably, it was the freedom from patents and copyrights which allowed fast progression of industry and culture back then, since the enterpreneurs could newest technologies from Europe without having to pay anyone anything. Of course the same lawlessness allowed some pretty nasty abuses of people in general and workers in particular.
The fact that this country would even talk about being okay with indefinite incarceration without charge and torture (let alone actually allowing or making it fucking policy) is disgusting and unbelevable and would have never been possible without this scheme.
Millions of slaves, many of which belonged to those very founding fathers who wrote your constitution, might disagree.
The simple fact of the matter is that the US has always had a shining outside and rotten core. This is understandable: the reason oppression exists in the first place is that it is profitable to the oppressor, at least in the short term. Your founding fathers threw out their oppressors, true; but they were merely human, and thus unable to resist the temptation to become oppressors themselves.
Indiands, blacks and communists; it is merely that the powers that be have run out of other targets, so it is time for Joe Average to feel the boot on his face. Unfortunate for Joe, but hardly unexpected, given the history of the United States and the difference between its ideals in speeches and reality.
In this case, I think they're fighting a losing battle. I mean, seriously... who's going to believe that an offshore bank isn't involved in helping its clients evade tax?
A better question is: why would they want anyone believe that ? Don't they have more to gain if word gets out that being a client of Julius Baer helps you evade taxes ? It's free advertizing.
After all, it's not like it's possible to have a good reputation when you're a banker: sooner or later someone can't pay back a debt, at which point you either take their house and evict them or go banckrupt, either immediately or as soon as shady people smelling an opportunity start taking loans they have no intention of paying back. Damned if you do, banckrupt if you don't. The only winning move is not to play.
OK, so somehow you have made the leap that the fault of theft is the owner.
What theft ? The issue talked about here is copying of blueprints, not theft.
And gang violence is the fault of the wealthy.
Actually, since gang violence only becomes a problem in certain social conditions and since in our current social model money equals power, this is exactly so. You can't simultaneously wield power and disclaim responsibility from social problems.
Executive salaries and chip prices are determined by market forces.
So is the popularity of pirated products. Places like the Pirate Bay exist because there is a demand for them, as do cheap cloned chips. Gotta love the real free market, free from copyrights and patents, with prices nearing the marginal cost of production asymptotically, and sometimes even reaching it; but for some reason, the so-called pro-free market people tend to start crying "regulate ! Copyrights ! Patents !" at that point:(.
I'd be interested to see results from pre-CFS kernels.
And I'd love to see how the last -ck patchset compares. CFS began as a politics-driven copy of RSDL, so it would be nice to see which actually performs better. Just to conclude that particular flamefest...
Those that beckon to strengthen the Cuban economy are perceived by the US as ignorant dupes, serving to undermine the security of the United States. And it has been perceived that way for the last 40 years (so people don't think this is a Bush-ism). By in large, those that are in a hurry to open trade with Cuba are usually completely lost as to what it means to national security.
Does the strenght of Cuban economy actually matter ? There is no way Cuba is going to launch a succesfull invasion on the US on its own, no matter how strong its economy; and if it is used as a stronghold by another power, it again doesn't matter.
If anything, having ties of trade to the US would make Cuba less likely to allow another country to attack its trading partner through it...
First off I'd like to say, that simply being frustrated by a condition that is out of your control (dumbass - or dumas;) driving slow in front of ya) is not something that reflects on maturity or not.
Giving in to that frustration when in control of half a ton of moving steel, however, does mean you can't be trusted with it. It's road rage, not road frustration.
I was also talking about avoiding collisions. What is your point there? (confused)
I got the impression that you were talking about collision survival equipment - seatbelts, airbags and so on.
Also, driving faster does not risk other people's lives.
Yes, it does: you have more kinetic energy, less time to react to problems, harder time of making accurate perceptions...
If you are driving faster and others are not, then your braking will not affect anyone. If you are traveling faster than the speed of traffic then where is this magic shockwave?
The cars behind you can't wait to see how hard you're braking before hitting their own. They see your braking light, they have to hit theirs, or risk collision if you're braking harder than they guessed. The cars behind them do the same, and there you have it. A completely mundane, non-magical shockwave.
what is wrong with people driving faster for their own benefit?
The danger it causes to others.
Are you saying all lanes would go faster if they all go the same speed (because such a concept is impossible at best anyway).
In all likelihood, yes. It is, after all, the whole design idea behind highways, motorways and such: separate traffick streams going to different directions from each other, so that the cars close to each other have as little speed difference as possible between them, and you can rise speeds.
Driving at a steady speed is at best, unrealistic. Nobody can drive at the same speed all the time or we wouldn't have stoplights/stop signs, or turns for that matter. 6billion commuters are not flying airplanes to beeline to their destination. Lets be real here.
You don't see many stoplights or stop signs in multi-lane highways, do you ? And it's not the question of driving at a constant speed, it's the question of driving smoothly, rather than the jerky full forward/full stop style. Coast to the red light, and it might change before you reach them, allowing you to drive through without stopping, for example. It's the jerkiness which causes the shockwave and the jam, not speed change in itself.
Commuter trains go 100MPH? What trains (maglev excluded) are you thinking of? Mass and velocity concerns come to mind here.
Finnish commuter trains - the newer models, anyway - have information displays showing messages, the next station and current speed. The typical speed between stops is around 160km/h, or 100mph. Of course they could be lying.
Mass isn't really important to an electric train, since each wheel on each car can have its own motor, causing total available engine power - and thus acceleration - to scale with the size of the train. The choke point becomes the power grid, then.
No, you've got it backwards. Acceleration is a change in velocity. If the Earth is orbiting the sun, it is changing velocity (because it is constantly changing direction and not traveling in a straight line), and therefore is experiencing acceleration.
But it is traveling at a straight line. In reality both Earth and Sun are simply following a straight path at constant speed through curved spacetime. Since they are following a straight path at constant speed, their velocity is not changing, and thus they are not experiencing acceleration. It just seems like they are being accelerated for us due to our limited perceptive ability.
Gravity in general relativity isn't a force; it is a change in the definition of "straight".
The general theory of relativity follows from the idea that you cannot distinguish between the force due to acceleration and the force due to gravity. If you are standing up in a closed elevator experiencing 1 G, is that because the Earth is pulling on you, or is it because the elevator is accelerating "up" at 10 m/s? It doesn't matter: if you shine a light beam across the elevator, it will bend "down" no matter what is causing the "downward" force.
And if the elevator is orbiting the Earth or the Sun, you will experience no force (0G), and will thus conclude that you aren't experiencing acceleration.
Umm? Since when were speed limits in the interest of safety? People don't even test things for safety up to the speeds we drive let alone a false feeling of safety people have.
I'm talking about avoiding collisions, you know...
Yes, not accurate is exactly what I mean. However, I for one, do not need to be screwed over by traffic because some douche wants to drive just the speed limit which caused the last 3 miles of cars after him to slow to a crawl....causing me to be held up another 10-20 minutes. This same behavior incites road rage, and creates more traffic on the roads.
Kindly explain how driving at steady speed at just the speed limit causes cars behind to slow to a "crawl" ? Or did you mean that the speed limit itself is a crawling speed ?
As for road rage, it is a clear sign that the person in question is not mature enough to drie a car and should thus lose his license. Throwing temper tantrums like a little kid just because you have to wait is ridiculous.
So yeah, get rid of the bottleneck of the feedback, and offer a method to increase performance (speed) and the issue will be gone. problem solved. Don't like driving 80+ on a 55mph highway? Get off the road/out of the way.
I always drive the rightmost lane unless I have a specific reason to drive another one, such as an upcoming turn or overtaking someone.
If you drive 80+ on a 55mph highway, you will almost certainly cause just the kind of shockwaves that are described here, since you can't keep that speed steady, but will have to hit the brakes occasionally, and then the jam starts. Not to mention that you are also endangering other road users with your blatant disregard of traffick rules and need to be fined until you cry. You saving 10-20 minutes is not justification for endangering other people's lives.
It isn't your road, so it isn't your rules either. It is a public road and public rules - laws, in other words. If you don't want to obey them, then you get off the road, or at least stop complaining about people who do obey them.
Instead, we have people driving in the passing lane like that. This article highlights that pretty well as does the last time such a solution was shown. Simple example that has existed for a while is the autobahn. You ever seen traffic on it? I haven't.
The simple solution is to take the train. Commuter trains typically go around 100mph and aren't affected by the rush hour; if anything, the train system is more effective when the number of passenger is high. Highways, autobahns and other single-passenger vechile passageways are fine as long as the number of people using them is small. They are not a good solution for getting massive numbers of people from one place to another fast. They simply do not scale.
Some kind of hybrid road/rail system would be ideal: first you drive your car to the nearest rail onramp, once it is on the rail the rail computer takes over and gets you to the offramp nearest to your destination, and then you drive the rest of the way yourself. This would combine the good sides of trains - speed and scalability - with the good side of cars - the independence from public transit schedules and routes.
I realize you're joking, but relativity doesn't let you get away with that. Being in orbit, we're experiencing detectable acceleration, meaning we're not "sitting still", regardless the perspective.
From what I've understood, the whole General Relativity is based on the idea that being in freefall (orbit) means that you're not experiencing acceleration. If we weren't in orbit but rather used rocket boosters to stay stationary relative to the Sun, then we would experience acceleration.
You do realize that speed limits are not accurate, right? The only reason they are there is to monetize away your driving privileges that they granted to you in the first place.
The reason speed limits are there is to make roads safer. They are needed because people get used to and start feeling safe at any speed after driving it for a while, a phenomenom known as "speed blindness". Any particular speed limit may or may not be too fast or slow - I presume that this is what you meant by "not accurate" - but the limits in general are both neccessary and desirable.
I, for one, do not wish to die in the morning traffick because some speed freak can't be bothered to get up on time.
DST seems like a pain. However, after I moved to Japan, I realized how nice it actually is. The sun coming up at 4am is not a cool thing. Makes sleeping in virtually impossible.
Ever heard of curtains ?
Besides, here in Finland, you go to work before sunrise and home after sunset. Not that the Sun is usually visible during daytime, either. Now that global warming has taken snow from the ground, this place makes Hades seem like a carnival.
So don't complain that Sun rises before you do where you live.
You should go back and watch Star Trek TNG, learn some starfleet ideals. Picard was absolutely right not to return Hugh with a disease to exterminate the Borg. Yes they were a threat to the human race, but genocide is never an acceptable solution.
It is perfectly acceptable to wipe out an invading army, which the Borg are, unless of course one is more inclined to think of them as a kind of disease which infects and kills everything it comes into contact with.
Would you wipe out a species to ensure your own survival? Murder? Starfleet wouldn't, and neither would I.. these are ideals worth dying for.
But are them worth sacrificing others for ? Your entire species ? Potentially countless species ?
Besides, Stafleet did wipe out the Dominion Founders, and also watched and did nothing while entire worlds died, due to some misguided neo-darwinistic semi-religious idealism. Star Trek is not a bright future: it looks all shiny and nice on the surface, but is in fact considerably more vicious and merciless than our current Western culture. Understandable, I suppose, since we are currently without any realistic competition, while the Starfleet is faced with equal counterparts, but still...
There's some serious xenophobia going on here and it's hard not to sympathize with the cylons, especially the Six is custody who's constantly told that she's a worthless pile of bolts..
Xenophobia refers to the unreasonable fear of unknown. Fearing something which is trying to kill you, everyone you know or care about, in fact your entire species, is quite reasonable, IMHO.
Besides, telling someone they're "worthless" is hardly particularly heinous abuse; I went through much worse in school.
as if I'm supposed to sympathize with the humans? They're more vicious than the cylons..
That's why I prefer trash fantasy, where evil is clearly marked as such by being ugly:). You never have to wonder about who to root for in LotR, D&D or Conan the Barbarian.
Scifi has this unfortunate tendency to "realism" (actually naturalism, or exaggerating the worst qualities of reality), which usually results in every character being such an utter shithead you start wishing they'd all just die. Not that all fantasy is better either; in Wheel of Time, for example, I started rooting for the Dark One midway through, due to every character being an obsessive-compulsive control freak.
Maggie Thatcher was notorious for existing on three to four hours a night and she wasn't exactly an underachiever. Much as I loath and detest her I'd be proud to have her level of achievement.
Wasn't Thatcher against a welfare state and labor unions and for privatization ? I wonder if there's a connection between that and being chronically sleep-deprived ?
Why is accountability for your own actions ever a problem?
"You were hiding jews in your house ? Prepare to die !"
Accountability means that you are accountable to someone. That someone can easily abuse his powers; Hell, even the finnish police, the police of the state repeatedly voted the least corrupt in the world, began abusing the kiddie porn filter immediately after it was implemented. There is no authority worth the trust accountability requires.
Unfortunately, in Real Life, accountability is a neccessity. While it inevitably leads to abuses, lack of it means us violent monkeys live up to our murderous nature and rape, kill and loot each other. That's why we have governments, nation-states and courts of law.
However, it is impossible to murder anyone in the Internet. It is just as impossible to rape them, or cut a single hair from their heads. It is impossible to even rob them - altought it is possible to spy on them enough to gain access to their online accounts, which is one of the reasons why I don't have any. In fact it is impossible to do anything except say something nasty to them.
So, why would we need accountability in the Internet ? Who, exactly speaking, is actually being hurt by the spam, botnets or porn ? No one.
No, this "accountability online" is simply a guise for tracking down the people who leak nasty secrets of politicians and corporations, in order to punish them and thus cause a chilling effect. Internet and especially the anonymous protocols working on top of it - such as Tor and Freenet - are every politicians worst nightmare: an information propagation channel they can't block. "The truth shall set you free", so is it any wonder that every overlord in history has tried to prevent it from getting out ?
A democratic society - indeed, any free society - needs an anonymous communication channel with no accountability of what you say. If that is also useful for criminals, then that is simply the price you have to pay. The alternative is freedom of speech a la Soviet Russia: you are free to pee on Lenin's statue while shouting "down with communism", but you'll be sent to a Siberian labor camp for it.
As a matter of fact, I'm seriously considering starting an ISP in Utah that advertises G-Rated content filters now! The demand is obviously there, so why hasn't anyone done this yet?!?!?
Because it is impossible to guarantee them 100% effective. Even if you block everything except your hand-picked whitelist, you still can't be 100% sure that no hacker has cracked them and posted Goatse and Harlequin Baby there. Nor can you be certain that the webmaster hasn't let the domain subscription lapse, at which point it can and propably will be seized by advertizing spam farmer scum, who might well decide to post pornographic advertizements there. Finally, this is all assuming that you never make errors in classification of content, from the point of view of the receiver of tis service.
If you advertize G-Rated content filter, and they let through X-rated content even by accident, you'll get a lawsuit, and rightly so - after all, you failed to live up to your end of the bargain. And no, "best effort" is not sufficient; a leaky filter is useless, and could and propably should be considered fraud, since you advertized something you either knew or should had known was impossible to deliver.
So that's why no one has done this yet: it is impossible, and the potential gains are nowhere near the cost of effort required to even try.
OF course the parts of the middle east that block so many things would not cooperate, but who cares?
How are muslims having their weird hangups any different than Americans having their weird hangups ? Why should anyone care about the latter but not the former ?
You're worried about getting the world to agree, but I'm looking for a way to easily customize what I let my kids see, that will also satisfy those who want to see nothing.
Fuck your kids.
Now should Slashdot go to the XXX domain ?
Besides, the domain name approach does not let one to customize what their kids get to see. In fact it is a hindrance to that goal. Suppose I'm OK with letting my kids see nudity, but not violence ? Do we also make a.gore top-level domain ? And what if there is a homemade violent movie with sex scenes; which domain should its homepage go; in other words, which one takes priority ?
No, the real solution is to have each page or domain contain semantic information about all the topics contained within. Well, actually, the real solution is to stop being so ridiculously hysteric about kids seeing something disagreeable to the parent; they aren't going to die from it. That, however, isn't going to happen, and the accurate content description approach has the added advantage of making searching easier, so go for it.
The crazy people you are talking about are already having an impact. In clumsy destructive ways. Let them block everything nude if they really really want to do that, so long as I am given the obvious tools to raise my kids. It doesn't matter that you're right. They are still going to mucke verything up if we don't find a way to make everyone get what they want, and I think that's possible.
It isn't possible, actually. The pro-censorship people don't want to merely avoid seeing anything they disagree with, they want to keep anyone else from seeing it too. This is absolutely incompatible with my desire to see something they disagree with. There is no way I can simultaneously both be free from their control and under it.
It would take absolute omnipotence - being able to circumvent the laws of logic - to give everyone what they want, since those goals conflict logically. It is unclear whether even God's power would be sufficient for that; for mere mortals, it is certainly impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
"Member of Cuban government 1970-2005. Speaking of which, due to the recent health problems of our beloved leader, Fidel Castro, I wish to move some of my personal assets out of the country as insurance against any political instability that might arise. To do this I require a bank account out of country to receive this money. If you have such a bank account, and wish to receive a sizable compensation for your troubles, please email your banking details, social security number, name, address and phone number..."
Your statement about SVG is factually incorrect. SVG not only has declarative animation, but also programmability through Javascript, and SVG groups combined with filters allow any kind of layering mode imaginable.
So basically, Silverlight is a bit like SVG, only tied to a convicted monopolist and notorious malefactor. Oh, and Firefox implements SVG + Javascript off the shelf with no need for plugins.
There are no features in any Turing complete language which couldn't be added to any other.
Forever. It's a pleasant lie, a bit like "I will start dieting just after I've eaten this pack of chips". And bad things only happen to terrorists, sexual offenders, and other such people; never mind that peeing in the bushes sn a "sexual offense" nowadays, you can't very well stand up to them without being a bleeding-heart liberal fool at best and a terrorist child molester at worst.
That's the fun part about being "though on crime": it lets you to label all your opponents as criminal sympthasizers. Whip people to a frenzy, and you can get them to root for anything, just as long as they feel tough and righteous doing so.
The summary does, indeed, contain an error. I know, it is almost inconceivable, Slashdot being world-famous for the high standards of its editors.
There are no gang shootings downtown here in Finland, and no other kind of significant gang-related violent activity. So either we Finns are fundamentally better people than Americans, or our social structure discourages this kind of behavior. Those are the logical alternatives
As for your strawman:
Wild West comes to mind, as does early American history generally. Arguably, it was the freedom from patents and copyrights which allowed fast progression of industry and culture back then, since the enterpreneurs could newest technologies from Europe without having to pay anyone anything. Of course the same lawlessness allowed some pretty nasty abuses of people in general and workers in particular.
Millions of slaves, many of which belonged to those very founding fathers who wrote your constitution, might disagree.
The simple fact of the matter is that the US has always had a shining outside and rotten core. This is understandable: the reason oppression exists in the first place is that it is profitable to the oppressor, at least in the short term. Your founding fathers threw out their oppressors, true; but they were merely human, and thus unable to resist the temptation to become oppressors themselves.
Indiands, blacks and communists; it is merely that the powers that be have run out of other targets, so it is time for Joe Average to feel the boot on his face. Unfortunate for Joe, but hardly unexpected, given the history of the United States and the difference between its ideals in speeches and reality.
A better question is: why would they want anyone believe that ? Don't they have more to gain if word gets out that being a client of Julius Baer helps you evade taxes ? It's free advertizing.
After all, it's not like it's possible to have a good reputation when you're a banker: sooner or later someone can't pay back a debt, at which point you either take their house and evict them or go banckrupt, either immediately or as soon as shady people smelling an opportunity start taking loans they have no intention of paying back. Damned if you do, banckrupt if you don't. The only winning move is not to play.
What theft ? The issue talked about here is copying of blueprints, not theft.
Actually, since gang violence only becomes a problem in certain social conditions and since in our current social model money equals power, this is exactly so. You can't simultaneously wield power and disclaim responsibility from social problems.
So is the popularity of pirated products. Places like the Pirate Bay exist because there is a demand for them, as do cheap cloned chips. Gotta love the real free market, free from copyrights and patents, with prices nearing the marginal cost of production asymptotically, and sometimes even reaching it; but for some reason, the so-called pro-free market people tend to start crying "regulate ! Copyrights ! Patents !" at that point :(.
Just make sure that that next town is Washington, and it'll be an improvement :).
And I'd love to see how the last -ck patchset compares. CFS began as a politics-driven copy of RSDL, so it would be nice to see which actually performs better. Just to conclude that particular flamefest...
Does the strenght of Cuban economy actually matter ? There is no way Cuba is going to launch a succesfull invasion on the US on its own, no matter how strong its economy; and if it is used as a stronghold by another power, it again doesn't matter.
If anything, having ties of trade to the US would make Cuba less likely to allow another country to attack its trading partner through it...
Giving in to that frustration when in control of half a ton of moving steel, however, does mean you can't be trusted with it. It's road rage, not road frustration.
I got the impression that you were talking about collision survival equipment - seatbelts, airbags and so on.
Yes, it does: you have more kinetic energy, less time to react to problems, harder time of making accurate perceptions...
The cars behind you can't wait to see how hard you're braking before hitting their own. They see your braking light, they have to hit theirs, or risk collision if you're braking harder than they guessed. The cars behind them do the same, and there you have it. A completely mundane, non-magical shockwave.
The danger it causes to others.
In all likelihood, yes. It is, after all, the whole design idea behind highways, motorways and such: separate traffick streams going to different directions from each other, so that the cars close to each other have as little speed difference as possible between them, and you can rise speeds.
You don't see many stoplights or stop signs in multi-lane highways, do you ? And it's not the question of driving at a constant speed, it's the question of driving smoothly, rather than the jerky full forward/full stop style. Coast to the red light, and it might change before you reach them, allowing you to drive through without stopping, for example. It's the jerkiness which causes the shockwave and the jam, not speed change in itself.
Finnish commuter trains - the newer models, anyway - have information displays showing messages, the next station and current speed. The typical speed between stops is around 160km/h, or 100mph. Of course they could be lying.
Mass isn't really important to an electric train, since each wheel on each car can have its own motor, causing total available engine power - and thus acceleration - to scale with the size of the train. The choke point becomes the power grid, then.
But it is traveling at a straight line. In reality both Earth and Sun are simply following a straight path at constant speed through curved spacetime. Since they are following a straight path at constant speed, their velocity is not changing, and thus they are not experiencing acceleration. It just seems like they are being accelerated for us due to our limited perceptive ability.
Gravity in general relativity isn't a force; it is a change in the definition of "straight".
And if the elevator is orbiting the Earth or the Sun, you will experience no force (0G), and will thus conclude that you aren't experiencing acceleration.
I'm talking about avoiding collisions, you know...
Kindly explain how driving at steady speed at just the speed limit causes cars behind to slow to a "crawl" ? Or did you mean that the speed limit itself is a crawling speed ?
As for road rage, it is a clear sign that the person in question is not mature enough to drie a car and should thus lose his license. Throwing temper tantrums like a little kid just because you have to wait is ridiculous.
I always drive the rightmost lane unless I have a specific reason to drive another one, such as an upcoming turn or overtaking someone.
If you drive 80+ on a 55mph highway, you will almost certainly cause just the kind of shockwaves that are described here, since you can't keep that speed steady, but will have to hit the brakes occasionally, and then the jam starts. Not to mention that you are also endangering other road users with your blatant disregard of traffick rules and need to be fined until you cry. You saving 10-20 minutes is not justification for endangering other people's lives.
It isn't your road, so it isn't your rules either. It is a public road and public rules - laws, in other words. If you don't want to obey them, then you get off the road, or at least stop complaining about people who do obey them.
The simple solution is to take the train. Commuter trains typically go around 100mph and aren't affected by the rush hour; if anything, the train system is more effective when the number of passenger is high. Highways, autobahns and other single-passenger vechile passageways are fine as long as the number of people using them is small. They are not a good solution for getting massive numbers of people from one place to another fast. They simply do not scale.
Some kind of hybrid road/rail system would be ideal: first you drive your car to the nearest rail onramp, once it is on the rail the rail computer takes over and gets you to the offramp nearest to your destination, and then you drive the rest of the way yourself. This would combine the good sides of trains - speed and scalability - with the good side of cars - the independence from public transit schedules and routes.
From what I've understood, the whole General Relativity is based on the idea that being in freefall (orbit) means that you're not experiencing acceleration. If we weren't in orbit but rather used rocket boosters to stay stationary relative to the Sun, then we would experience acceleration.
The reason speed limits are there is to make roads safer. They are needed because people get used to and start feeling safe at any speed after driving it for a while, a phenomenom known as "speed blindness". Any particular speed limit may or may not be too fast or slow - I presume that this is what you meant by "not accurate" - but the limits in general are both neccessary and desirable.
I, for one, do not wish to die in the morning traffick because some speed freak can't be bothered to get up on time.
Ever heard of curtains ?
Besides, here in Finland, you go to work before sunrise and home after sunset. Not that the Sun is usually visible during daytime, either. Now that global warming has taken snow from the ground, this place makes Hades seem like a carnival.
So don't complain that Sun rises before you do where you live.
It is perfectly acceptable to wipe out an invading army, which the Borg are, unless of course one is more inclined to think of them as a kind of disease which infects and kills everything it comes into contact with.
But are them worth sacrificing others for ? Your entire species ? Potentially countless species ?
Besides, Stafleet did wipe out the Dominion Founders, and also watched and did nothing while entire worlds died, due to some misguided neo-darwinistic semi-religious idealism. Star Trek is not a bright future: it looks all shiny and nice on the surface, but is in fact considerably more vicious and merciless than our current Western culture. Understandable, I suppose, since we are currently without any realistic competition, while the Starfleet is faced with equal counterparts, but still...
Xenophobia refers to the unreasonable fear of unknown. Fearing something which is trying to kill you, everyone you know or care about, in fact your entire species, is quite reasonable, IMHO.
Besides, telling someone they're "worthless" is hardly particularly heinous abuse; I went through much worse in school.
That's why I prefer trash fantasy, where evil is clearly marked as such by being ugly :). You never have to wonder about who to root for in LotR, D&D or Conan the Barbarian.
Scifi has this unfortunate tendency to "realism" (actually naturalism, or exaggerating the worst qualities of reality), which usually results in every character being such an utter shithead you start wishing they'd all just die. Not that all fantasy is better either; in Wheel of Time, for example, I started rooting for the Dark One midway through, due to every character being an obsessive-compulsive control freak.
Wasn't Thatcher against a welfare state and labor unions and for privatization ? I wonder if there's a connection between that and being chronically sleep-deprived ?
Then would you mind opening my coffin ? I can't rest forever, I have to go check my e-mail.
"You were hiding jews in your house ? Prepare to die !"
Accountability means that you are accountable to someone. That someone can easily abuse his powers; Hell, even the finnish police, the police of the state repeatedly voted the least corrupt in the world, began abusing the kiddie porn filter immediately after it was implemented. There is no authority worth the trust accountability requires.
Unfortunately, in Real Life, accountability is a neccessity. While it inevitably leads to abuses, lack of it means us violent monkeys live up to our murderous nature and rape, kill and loot each other. That's why we have governments, nation-states and courts of law.
However, it is impossible to murder anyone in the Internet. It is just as impossible to rape them, or cut a single hair from their heads. It is impossible to even rob them - altought it is possible to spy on them enough to gain access to their online accounts, which is one of the reasons why I don't have any. In fact it is impossible to do anything except say something nasty to them.
So, why would we need accountability in the Internet ? Who, exactly speaking, is actually being hurt by the spam, botnets or porn ? No one.
No, this "accountability online" is simply a guise for tracking down the people who leak nasty secrets of politicians and corporations, in order to punish them and thus cause a chilling effect. Internet and especially the anonymous protocols working on top of it - such as Tor and Freenet - are every politicians worst nightmare: an information propagation channel they can't block. "The truth shall set you free", so is it any wonder that every overlord in history has tried to prevent it from getting out ?
A democratic society - indeed, any free society - needs an anonymous communication channel with no accountability of what you say. If that is also useful for criminals, then that is simply the price you have to pay. The alternative is freedom of speech a la Soviet Russia: you are free to pee on Lenin's statue while shouting "down with communism", but you'll be sent to a Siberian labor camp for it.
Because it is impossible to guarantee them 100% effective. Even if you block everything except your hand-picked whitelist, you still can't be 100% sure that no hacker has cracked them and posted Goatse and Harlequin Baby there. Nor can you be certain that the webmaster hasn't let the domain subscription lapse, at which point it can and propably will be seized by advertizing spam farmer scum, who might well decide to post pornographic advertizements there. Finally, this is all assuming that you never make errors in classification of content, from the point of view of the receiver of tis service.
If you advertize G-Rated content filter, and they let through X-rated content even by accident, you'll get a lawsuit, and rightly so - after all, you failed to live up to your end of the bargain. And no, "best effort" is not sufficient; a leaky filter is useless, and could and propably should be considered fraud, since you advertized something you either knew or should had known was impossible to deliver.
So that's why no one has done this yet: it is impossible, and the potential gains are nowhere near the cost of effort required to even try.
How are muslims having their weird hangups any different than Americans having their weird hangups ? Why should anyone care about the latter but not the former ?
Fuck your kids.
Now should Slashdot go to the XXX domain ?
Besides, the domain name approach does not let one to customize what their kids get to see. In fact it is a hindrance to that goal. Suppose I'm OK with letting my kids see nudity, but not violence ? Do we also make a .gore top-level domain ? And what if there is a homemade violent movie with sex scenes; which domain should its homepage go; in other words, which one takes priority ?
No, the real solution is to have each page or domain contain semantic information about all the topics contained within. Well, actually, the real solution is to stop being so ridiculously hysteric about kids seeing something disagreeable to the parent; they aren't going to die from it. That, however, isn't going to happen, and the accurate content description approach has the added advantage of making searching easier, so go for it.
It isn't possible, actually. The pro-censorship people don't want to merely avoid seeing anything they disagree with, they want to keep anyone else from seeing it too. This is absolutely incompatible with my desire to see something they disagree with. There is no way I can simultaneously both be free from their control and under it.
It would take absolute omnipotence - being able to circumvent the laws of logic - to give everyone what they want, since those goals conflict logically. It is unclear whether even God's power would be sufficient for that; for mere mortals, it is certainly impossible.