I would say, let them instate speeding-for-funds and then, after a few years, contest it in court, claiming the road safe for anyone at 90mph is also safe enough for you.
And then hope they do the right thing and allow 90mph for everyone, but also mandate regular safety checks for all vehicles and drivers every 1 or 2 years.
Safe cars and healthy drivers can prevent more accidents than lowering the speed limit by half.
Are people in the Land of the Free truly thinking "The state could be liable for allowing people to do X?"
Have I drunk the Kool-Aid? What happened?
Is the state liable when people - die after drinking 10 liters of alcohol bought from the supermarket? - die after jumping from a bridge that has a guardrail that was lower than 3m? - die after shooting themselves in the head with an officially-licensed firearm? - die after shooting themselves in the head with an unlicensed firearm? - die after being shot in the head by a mugger owning an illegal firearm?
Since when is the state liable for not preventing stupid people from doing stupid things?
If that was even remotely possible, I'd rather sue the state and all state officials and law enforcement officers when anyone gets mugged, beaten or shot anywhere. After all, it was the state's fault for not putting a policeman there.
They drive 90mph. For our friends from outside the North Americas, that is 145km/h. The mind boggles at this blistering speed that is only a bit below the sound barrier.
Come on. Speed limits are usually set much lower than what could be safely driven on most parts of the road. Maybe this is because of a different culture of unattentive driving, driving-while-texting, driving while drunk or similar things in each county. Or maybe this driving-while-x-thing is a result, rather than a cause of road traffic that is so much too slow for a given road that driving there simply undersaturates the normal healthy brain?
Being forced to drive a perfectly made, perfectly straight, perfectly empty road with a joke for a speed limit can be painful, almost physically. Just go to a completely empty, perfect, straight street somewhere around and try to discipline yourself driving 75% of the speed limit for that road. Keep it up for ten minutes and you'll know what I mean.
Over here - guess, where I live - we routinely drive maybe 200-210km/h (130mph) in everyday situations, or whatever the cars themselves reach. There are cars that go faster, but it's actually pretty rare to see someone doing 250. Compared with the rest of the world, our speed limits - the lack of them - look like insanity, but for whatever reasons, crashes and damages in loss of life on these unlimited sections of our road network are only a fraction of all accidents in total, especially when compared to the distance covered by drivers on these roads. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Crash_evaluation
On the other hand, I've never heard of people driving on the Autobahn WHILE TEXTING. With you driving "incredibly dangerous" 90mph while Porsches, BMW and Mercedes could come crashing in from behind doing 60mph MORE, writing text messages is unthinkable. Speedy BMW and Mercedes are surprisingly survivable, slower vehicles with inattentive drivers aren't.
I would say, speed as a root cause of accidents is severely overestimated. Speed increases an accident's damage, it doesn't cause it. Intersections do that, overwhelmingly. On clear stretches of road - freeways - it's all about expectations the drivers have about other driver's speeds and behavior. What I said about texting also applies to pulling in and out of lanes. Over here, on our A-class freeways, people that pull out of their lane without looking back are quickly punished by a 2-ton piece of Bavarian steel hitting them at a differential speed of 100km/h. They learn that on their second day in driving school. Some do anyway, of course we also have our share of idjits, but thankfully, it's still very rare.
As long as we, the people, look towards the government for all our personal needs, personal safety, personal income, personal food, personal shelter, we WILL be treated as cattle, because we ARE.
If we depend on The State to do everything for us, The State can and will do everything, for or against us.
Less than half the German population actually earns pays more taxes than they receive in benefits, dole, pensions, support. 1998 was the last Federal election where the majority of voters were net-tax-payers, everything from had more net-tax-receiving voters in the majority.
We are cattle. We wanted the benefits, the regular feeding, the rancher-provided shelter, the dependable frame of life. When there were elections, we always voted for Bigger Staters, for expanding our stables, expanding our food, strenghtening the fences.
We always thought we could have perfect social security for no tradeoff, ridiculed all opinions to the contrary as neocon idiots, real freedom was always claimed to be identical to the situation in Somalia, and all that. When we go to the abbatoirs, we can't say we weren't warned.
A rag tag resistance can and will hinder the might of any army that happens to fight them.
That has not only happened in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising where civilian Jews held their part of the city for months against the German war machine, but also in Poland and France in general.
Polish resistance in occupied Poland tied up one or two Wehrmacht DIVISIONS, not to mention disrupting countless supply convoys and hindering general progress of establishing the German's position in Poland and against the Soviets.
French resistance was similarly successful, tying up sizeable portions of German forces
Hard to know what their difference was, as we cannot simply replay history without them, but I think it is generally agreed upon by historians, that both force's efforts for intelligence alone brought victory much easier and quicker for the Allied forces. Without the resistance, it would've taken more Allied lives, more Allied resources - it would've taken much more than a few hundred tanks to offset that.
Also Finland: the entire Finnish army was more a rag tag band of resistance against the Soviets, not only hindering them, but actually winning the war. An impressive feat, considering the Soviets eventually squashed even the Germans like a bug.
And we shouldn't forget US vs. Britain, Afghans vs. Soviet Union and countless other events, where rag tag forces blasted sizeable armies out of their boots.
The fascist army took away all the guns, but I'm sure there were a lot of fascists killed by gun owners in the process.
Trying to fight a fascist government as a civilian with some small arms stashed is very hard and probably ends up badly. Fighting a fascist government without guns is impossible and always ends in death.
Hitler didn't rearm the GERMANS, he re-armed the German ARMY. That is the first major difference to consider.
Second: the Nazis in 1938 1) completely disarmed Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and anyone that was "untrustworthy" to the gun control authorities, which hit of course communists, intellectuals and people showing a faint idea of resistance. 2) disallowed innocent civilians from carrying a usable weapon 3) allowed Nazi Party officials and members of their organization to *freely* carry guns without any permit at all.
I think that can be called a three-pronged approach to the Nazis ultimate goals, can it?
Disarm Jews, disallow civilians from carrying guns, allow SS members to own and carry guns without any permit at all.
We know how well that worked out towards the Final Solution.
Mexico also has strict laws against murder AND the highest murder rate last year.
Sometimes, prohibiting something may not be the most workable solution, but allowing it. Especially in cases where millions are already doing it while it is still illegal.
Unless you plan on allowing murder, since a few thousand are doing it every year, I suggest starting with allowing the use of a substance people eat and smoke out of their own a million times a year. And with that, we allow also production and sales, we are not schizos.
A law that is broken by everyone needs to go. And I pray they start with the drug laws BEFORE everyone breaks the murder law.
And please don't tell me modern art, music and culture could have evolved the way they did without recreational drug use. I don't care about "the children" for that reason alone, because I can not and will not protect everyone's children from all dangers. This is not anyone's responsibility but their parent's and no one but them can ever hope to fulfill that but them.
The liquor store on the corner sells hard spirits. 40%, 80%, you name it. One small bottle would kill a child. We sell it to adults only. If anyone gives it to a kid that dies, they go to jail for the rest of their lives.
The gas station sells highly flammable, toxic liquids. A kid could easily burn or kill themselves with that stuff. We sell it to adults only, same deal. We also have cars, power tools, gas-fired stoves, sharp knives, open fireplaces, barbecue pits and lawn darts. And somehow we only outlawed the lawn darts because they looked like kid's toys, instead of entire generations of kids surviving them.
Anyhow, I will absolutely resist outlawing things that have a purpose for adults for the reason that they're dangerous to kids. I am not a kid, I will protect my own kids from danger and I cannot accept if people want to transform the world into a padded cell that is safe for kids.
If free men own guns and slaves don't, free men can definitely grow plants in their own backyards and eat them.
Guys in that F1 car - go three times your speed - in a vehicle less than half the weight of your vehicle - with equipment costing more than three decades of your current income - after months of full-time training by professionals - on a dedicated, near-perfect road - always wearing a five-point harness and a HANS device - are disallowed from using electronic supports because of FIA regulation - still have regular hard crashes. - still occasionally die in horrible ones.
As you said, the friction in a locked-up wheel slide is much lower than the friction with the wheel still rolling. Which is correct and the reason why steering a locked-up wheel is so damn hard and requiring "finesse".
But how can the car stop faster if it's wheels experience significantly lower friction?
A good driver cannot ever hope to lock and unlock the brakes with full force faster than the ABS computer.
Claiming to be able to do otherwise would win the "hubris of the millenium" prize.
A proper ABS computer and system can not only lock and unlock the wheels within milliseconds (which would be suboptimal anyway) but keep the whole car at THE maximum brake power that is physically possible while keeping the vehicle able to steer - during the whole process, on all surfaces, at 4am, after a 10-hour work shift in the factory, with no startle response, not scared to fully apply all power available.
Maybe I've just never met a "good" driver by your standards, but chances are the guy in that car sliding into you wasn't one, either.
Please don't blame it on the ABS if you're approaching the intersection too fast for the given road condition. This would only show you're probably not a good driver and/or unaware of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Airbags and 3-point seatbelts are the compromises we made to accommodate those stubborn suicidal maniacs refusing to buckle up at all.
I mean, people are actually refusing to wear a helmet on motorcycles at highway speeds, even if it increases their chance to survive a crash tenfold.
No chance in Hell we could make those idjits wear a 5-point harness, let alone a HANS device. Never ever. People are too lazy to move their finger 2cm / 1 inch to user their turn signal.
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you
on
Child Porn As a Weapon
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· Score: 1
Child porn if the girl is 17, and allowed porn if she is 18.
Nice.
On her birthday, it's acceptable and legal, one day before, it is a major, pound-me-in-the-ass prison felony.
Yeah. Girls just magically turn into women on their birthday at midnight.
That's the an offensive rebuttal, because all kinds of people do and collect all kinds of weird stuff.
You don't put photos on Facebook your mother wouldn't approve of, but that doesn't mean you don't KEEP photos your mother and grandmother wouldn't dare to look at.
If your life is entirely PG-13, then fine for you. Mine isn't, and I don't want to change that. I still don't want to have someone rummaging around my stuff EVER.
I don't store anything like that on my work computer of course. Only complete utter morons would store anything beyond the absolutely necessary things on anything related to business. (wife's phone number on the company phone, so you can call her easily if the private phone's battery went down etc.)
If you truly don't need to see that docx file that was just sent to you then you either have illiterate or malleable clients, clients deep in the bowels of enterprisey IT or no clients.
If you have no clients, either you are the one handing out the money to contractors - or you pay in welfare checks anyway.
User friendliness or GUI doesn't suffice. Unless it runs not any office suite, but "Microsoft Office", it's a dead duck for many businesses.
Switching the OS would be almost trivial compared to re-training all those MS Office aficionados to Open Office or similar. I'm sure there's a way to run it eg. with WINE, but with enterprisey IT departments being as defensive, paranoid, old-school as we know them, it won't be given a chance. A one-time cost of 100 bucks per notebook for that Windows license will be shrugged off as peanuts, as long as the tried-and-tested potpourri of that enterprisey software runs without anyone thinking twice.
The "Vista is bad" mantra is usually repeated by people that probably have never used it for a prolonged period of time.
Companies usually didn't roll out that one, so enterprisey experience base isn't that solid at all.
Having used and tinkered with Vista for a year at home with XP for being the standard at work for almost a decade now, I feel someway qualified to say that it didn't seem it wasn't even half the abomination it was declared to be.
Vista was not a stroke of genius, not incredibly fast, but it wasn't *that* awful. XPSP2 and SP3 bluescreened a few times per year on my Thinkpad, Vista didn't even bluescreen once. XP drivers worked reasonably well with Vista, on 32bit of course. Boot times of my stock Vista Business was about half than that of the heavily modded XP installation of my employer's notebook and decreased to about 40 seconds after migration to an SSD.
Windows 7 seems to be much faster than Vista and the same machine that had 40s boot time there now has 20s with Win7-64, with the GUI being more responsive and snappier.
But the real reason to not get too much behind on upgrading is user experience: switching from XP to Vista feels differently, but not a whole lot. Switching from Vista to Win7 is also noticeable with the GUI and interface, but with even less differences than before. But switching from XP to 7 is quite a jump. The UI and input metaphors feel completely alien if you never used Vista in between. Users will like the speed, but ask things like "Where's the search button?" or "What have they done to my Control Panel?".
Regular users can't switch easily from a 1960's Caprice to an all-electric Chevy Volt if they've never used a model in between them.
Big X has a high failure rate when it comes to IT projects, with X being any lumbering beast of an enterprise, office or agency.
They want standardization, homogeneity and identical software tools and IT workplaces for not one office, one city, one branch but the entire multinational group of companies.
Any project involving more than 300 clients is hard or ridiculously expensive. Projects trying to make a one-size-fits-all tool for 100.000 employees of a multinational corporation or agency is financial suicide.
But watch CIOs keep talking about synergy effects and purported savings in the billions for the group when in reality, all they manage to achieve is IT tools set in stone for decades, with change procedures filling entire floors if printed out and grinding the whole thing into a permanent halt from which there is no way but burning millions to get out. Relying on Monolithic IT means betting the farm for large companies and agencies and some will fail spectacularly by doing that.
Let me introduce you to the heretical idea of sunk costs.
Having erroneously paid big bucks for something that turned out to be crap is no reason to keep eating shit all day.
If *Quality Control* software is crashing every few hours and holding back the whole company on upgrades, despite being ridiculously expensive, IT or procurement will have to stand up to some rather unpleasant questions some day anyway.
If I earned a million bucks a day by using IE6, I would sure as Hell put half a million aside for upgrading to the next version of that browser or even migrate to a browser I can upgrade independently from the core operating system.
Eating all you earn and not planning one or two years ahead is a mistake that even in prehistoric times happened only once per tribe.
Either way, no one is forcing the IT department to stay at the bleeding edge. It may be profitable to do so, because usually, newer systems have some perks the older ones did not. But staying half a decade behind on current issues is not prudent, but paranoid.
That doesn't apply to real-time systems, systems of major criticality and systems with human lives at stake, but for regular office systems, holding back on upgrades forever is not prudent but complacent and possibly paranoid. Some day in the future, even Big Bank, SCADA and mission control systems WILL need to be upgraded. How will paranoid IT departments handle *that* if they never dared to upgrade even a single notebook in the least important offices? How will they gain any experience with the new stuff?
We all like to rave about prudence and ultra-mission-criticality of our IT, but unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.
Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible is reason enough. A browser is a must-have piece of software nowadays and if you absolutely depend on a specific version of a specific product line, you're doing things wrong in the first place.
As IE6 is absolutely not available on any new version of Windows, it's effectively holding back all significant upgrades on the core operating system. Without updates to the operating system, the entire IT landscape is not only severely hobbled for innovation, but thoroughly insecure on major issues.
Don't allow yourself to fall prey to the illusion that software upgrades are an entirely voluntary - or useless - effort. In the best possible scenarios, holding back upgrades is saving a few percent of the cost and postponing the rest of upgrade expenditures. In friendly real-world scenarios, it's not saving any, merely postponing all upgrade costs. In any case, it's very very likely that during decade-long upgrade holdouts, IT department will lose it's edge and sharpness, get complacent and behind on the current state-of-the-art. And with that, the whole company will lose its pace.
Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking and upgrading from any older version is financial disaster.
Just because you CAN use old equipment until it literally falls apart, it doesn't mean it's the most sensible or cost-effective option to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
They are revealing the truth in speed limits.
I would say, let them instate speeding-for-funds and then, after a few years, contest it in court, claiming the road safe for anyone at 90mph is also safe enough for you.
And then hope they do the right thing and allow 90mph for everyone, but also mandate regular safety checks for all vehicles and drivers every 1 or 2 years.
Safe cars and healthy drivers can prevent more accidents than lowering the speed limit by half.
Are people in the Land of the Free truly thinking "The state could be liable for allowing people to do X?"
Have I drunk the Kool-Aid? What happened?
Is the state liable when people
- die after drinking 10 liters of alcohol bought from the supermarket?
- die after jumping from a bridge that has a guardrail that was lower than 3m?
- die after shooting themselves in the head with an officially-licensed firearm?
- die after shooting themselves in the head with an unlicensed firearm?
- die after being shot in the head by a mugger owning an illegal firearm?
Since when is the state liable for not preventing stupid people from doing stupid things?
If that was even remotely possible, I'd rather sue the state and all state officials and law enforcement officers when anyone gets mugged, beaten or shot anywhere. After all, it was the state's fault for not putting a policeman there.
They drive 90mph. For our friends from outside the North Americas, that is 145km/h. The mind boggles at this blistering speed that is only a bit below the sound barrier.
Come on. Speed limits are usually set much lower than what could be safely driven on most parts of the road. Maybe this is because of a different culture of unattentive driving, driving-while-texting, driving while drunk or similar things in each county. Or maybe this driving-while-x-thing is a result, rather than a cause of road traffic that is so much too slow for a given road that driving there simply undersaturates the normal healthy brain?
Being forced to drive a perfectly made, perfectly straight, perfectly empty road with a joke for a speed limit can be painful, almost physically. Just go to a completely empty, perfect, straight street somewhere around and try to discipline yourself driving 75% of the speed limit for that road. Keep it up for ten minutes and you'll know what I mean.
Over here - guess, where I live - we routinely drive maybe 200-210km/h (130mph) in everyday situations, or whatever the cars themselves reach. There are cars that go faster, but it's actually pretty rare to see someone doing 250. Compared with the rest of the world, our speed limits - the lack of them - look like insanity, but for whatever reasons, crashes and damages in loss of life on these unlimited sections of our road network are only a fraction of all accidents in total, especially when compared to the distance covered by drivers on these roads. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autobahn#Crash_evaluation
On the other hand, I've never heard of people driving on the Autobahn WHILE TEXTING. With you driving "incredibly dangerous" 90mph while Porsches, BMW and Mercedes could come crashing in from behind doing 60mph MORE, writing text messages is unthinkable. Speedy BMW and Mercedes are surprisingly survivable, slower vehicles with inattentive drivers aren't.
I would say, speed as a root cause of accidents is severely overestimated. Speed increases an accident's damage, it doesn't cause it. Intersections do that, overwhelmingly. On clear stretches of road - freeways - it's all about expectations the drivers have about other driver's speeds and behavior. What I said about texting also applies to pulling in and out of lanes. Over here, on our A-class freeways, people that pull out of their lane without looking back are quickly punished by a 2-ton piece of Bavarian steel hitting them at a differential speed of 100km/h. They learn that on their second day in driving school. Some do anyway, of course we also have our share of idjits, but thankfully, it's still very rare.
As long as we, the people, look towards the government for all our personal needs, personal safety, personal income, personal food, personal shelter, we WILL be treated as cattle, because we ARE.
If we depend on The State to do everything for us, The State can and will do everything, for or against us.
Less than half the German population actually earns pays more taxes than they receive in benefits, dole, pensions, support. 1998 was the last Federal election where the majority of voters were net-tax-payers, everything from had more net-tax-receiving voters in the majority.
We are cattle. We wanted the benefits, the regular feeding, the rancher-provided shelter, the dependable frame of life. When there were elections, we always voted for Bigger Staters, for expanding our stables, expanding our food, strenghtening the fences.
We always thought we could have perfect social security for no tradeoff, ridiculed all opinions to the contrary as neocon idiots, real freedom was always claimed to be identical to the situation in Somalia, and all that. When we go to the abbatoirs, we can't say we weren't warned.
A rag tag resistance can and will hinder the might of any army that happens to fight them.
That has not only happened in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising where civilian Jews held their part of the city for months against the German war machine, but also in Poland and France in general.
Polish resistance in occupied Poland tied up one or two Wehrmacht DIVISIONS, not to mention disrupting countless supply convoys and hindering general progress of establishing the German's position in Poland and against the Soviets.
French resistance was similarly successful, tying up sizeable portions of German forces
Hard to know what their difference was, as we cannot simply replay history without them, but I think it is generally agreed upon by historians, that both force's efforts for intelligence alone brought victory much easier and quicker for the Allied forces. Without the resistance, it would've taken more Allied lives, more Allied resources - it would've taken much more than a few hundred tanks to offset that.
Also Finland: the entire Finnish army was more a rag tag band of resistance against the Soviets, not only hindering them, but actually winning the war. An impressive feat, considering the Soviets eventually squashed even the Germans like a bug.
And we shouldn't forget US vs. Britain, Afghans vs. Soviet Union and countless other events, where rag tag forces blasted sizeable armies out of their boots.
The fascist army took away all the guns, but I'm sure there were a lot of fascists killed by gun owners in the process.
Trying to fight a fascist government as a civilian with some small arms stashed is very hard and probably ends up badly. Fighting a fascist government without guns is impossible and always ends in death.
Hitler didn't rearm the GERMANS, he re-armed the German ARMY. That is the first major difference to consider.
Second: the Nazis in 1938
1) completely disarmed Jews, homosexuals, gypsies and anyone that was "untrustworthy" to the gun control authorities, which hit of course communists, intellectuals and people showing a faint idea of resistance.
2) disallowed innocent civilians from carrying a usable weapon
3) allowed Nazi Party officials and members of their organization to *freely* carry guns without any permit at all.
I think that can be called a three-pronged approach to the Nazis ultimate goals, can it?
Disarm Jews, disallow civilians from carrying guns, allow SS members to own and carry guns without any permit at all.
We know how well that worked out towards the Final Solution.
Sorry for not completely translating http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entwaffnung_der_deutschen_Juden for everyone, maybe the Google translations can be read...
Mexico also has strict laws against murder AND the highest murder rate last year.
Sometimes, prohibiting something may not be the most workable solution, but allowing it. Especially in cases where millions are already doing it while it is still illegal.
Unless you plan on allowing murder, since a few thousand are doing it every year, I suggest starting with allowing the use of a substance people eat and smoke out of their own a million times a year. And with that, we allow also production and sales, we are not schizos.
A law that is broken by everyone needs to go. And I pray they start with the drug laws BEFORE everyone breaks the murder law.
"100 years ago there was no way to internationally distribute drugs on a large scale."
Oh yes, there was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
And also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coca_cola#Coca_.E2.80.94_cocaine
And please don't tell me modern art, music and culture could have evolved the way they did without recreational drug use. I don't care about "the children" for that reason alone, because I can not and will not protect everyone's children from all dangers. This is not anyone's responsibility but their parent's and no one but them can ever hope to fulfill that but them.
The liquor store on the corner sells hard spirits. 40%, 80%, you name it. One small bottle would kill a child. We sell it to adults only. If anyone gives it to a kid that dies, they go to jail for the rest of their lives.
The gas station sells highly flammable, toxic liquids. A kid could easily burn or kill themselves with that stuff. We sell it to adults only, same deal. We also have cars, power tools, gas-fired stoves, sharp knives, open fireplaces, barbecue pits and lawn darts. And somehow we only outlawed the lawn darts because they looked like kid's toys, instead of entire generations of kids surviving them.
Anyhow, I will absolutely resist outlawing things that have a purpose for adults for the reason that they're dangerous to kids. I am not a kid, I will protect my own kids from danger and I cannot accept if people want to transform the world into a padded cell that is safe for kids.
If free men own guns and slaves don't, free men can definitely grow plants in their own backyards and eat them.
Guys in that F1 car
- go three times your speed
- in a vehicle less than half the weight of your vehicle
- with equipment costing more than three decades of your current income
- after months of full-time training by professionals
- on a dedicated, near-perfect road
- always wearing a five-point harness and a HANS device
- are disallowed from using electronic supports because of FIA regulation
- still have regular hard crashes.
- still occasionally die in horrible ones.
As you said, the friction in a locked-up wheel slide is much lower than the friction with the wheel still rolling. Which is correct and the reason why steering a locked-up wheel is so damn hard and requiring "finesse".
But how can the car stop faster if it's wheels experience significantly lower friction?
A good driver cannot ever hope to lock and unlock the brakes with full force faster than the ABS computer.
Claiming to be able to do otherwise would win the "hubris of the millenium" prize.
A proper ABS computer and system can not only lock and unlock the wheels within milliseconds (which would be suboptimal anyway) but keep the whole car at THE maximum brake power that is physically possible while keeping the vehicle able to steer - during the whole process, on all surfaces, at 4am, after a 10-hour work shift in the factory, with no startle response, not scared to fully apply all power available.
Maybe I've just never met a "good" driver by your standards, but chances are the guy in that car sliding into you wasn't one, either.
Please don't blame it on the ABS if you're approaching the intersection too fast for the given road condition. This would only show you're probably not a good driver and/or unaware of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
Airbags and 3-point seatbelts are the compromises we made to accommodate those stubborn suicidal maniacs refusing to buckle up at all.
I mean, people are actually refusing to wear a helmet on motorcycles at highway speeds, even if it increases their chance to survive a crash tenfold.
No chance in Hell we could make those idjits wear a 5-point harness, let alone a HANS device. Never ever. People are too lazy to move their finger 2cm / 1 inch to user their turn signal.
Child porn if the girl is 17, and allowed porn if she is 18.
Nice.
On her birthday, it's acceptable and legal, one day before, it is a major, pound-me-in-the-ass prison felony.
Yeah. Girls just magically turn into women on their birthday at midnight.
That's the an offensive rebuttal, because all kinds of people do and collect all kinds of weird stuff.
You don't put photos on Facebook your mother wouldn't approve of, but that doesn't mean you don't KEEP photos your mother and grandmother wouldn't dare to look at.
If your life is entirely PG-13, then fine for you. Mine isn't, and I don't want to change that. I still don't want to have someone rummaging around my stuff EVER.
I don't store anything like that on my work computer of course. Only complete utter morons would store anything beyond the absolutely necessary things on anything related to business. (wife's phone number on the company phone, so you can call her easily if the private phone's battery went down etc.)
Just came up on the /. homepage
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/08/06/150216/Child-Porn-As-a-Weapon
If you truly don't need to see that docx file that was just sent to you then you either have illiterate or malleable clients, clients deep in the bowels of enterprisey IT or no clients.
If you have no clients, either you are the one handing out the money to contractors - or you pay in welfare checks anyway.
User friendliness or GUI doesn't suffice. Unless it runs not any office suite, but "Microsoft Office", it's a dead duck for many businesses.
Switching the OS would be almost trivial compared to re-training all those MS Office aficionados to Open Office or similar. I'm sure there's a way to run it eg. with WINE, but with enterprisey IT departments being as defensive, paranoid, old-school as we know them, it won't be given a chance. A one-time cost of 100 bucks per notebook for that Windows license will be shrugged off as peanuts, as long as the tried-and-tested potpourri of that enterprisey software runs without anyone thinking twice.
The "Vista is bad" mantra is usually repeated by people that probably have never used it for a prolonged period of time.
Companies usually didn't roll out that one, so enterprisey experience base isn't that solid at all.
Having used and tinkered with Vista for a year at home with XP for being the standard at work for almost a decade now, I feel someway qualified to say that it didn't seem it wasn't even half the abomination it was declared to be.
Vista was not a stroke of genius, not incredibly fast, but it wasn't *that* awful. XPSP2 and SP3 bluescreened a few times per year on my Thinkpad, Vista didn't even bluescreen once. XP drivers worked reasonably well with Vista, on 32bit of course. Boot times of my stock Vista Business was about half than that of the heavily modded XP installation of my employer's notebook and decreased to about 40 seconds after migration to an SSD.
Windows 7 seems to be much faster than Vista and the same machine that had 40s boot time there now has 20s with Win7-64, with the GUI being more responsive and snappier.
But the real reason to not get too much behind on upgrading is user experience: switching from XP to Vista feels differently, but not a whole lot. Switching from Vista to Win7 is also noticeable with the GUI and interface, but with even less differences than before. But switching from XP to 7 is quite a jump. The UI and input metaphors feel completely alien if you never used Vista in between. Users will like the speed, but ask things like "Where's the search button?" or "What have they done to my Control Panel?".
Regular users can't switch easily from a 1960's Caprice to an all-electric Chevy Volt if they've never used a model in between them.
You can always save some bucks by postponing that oil change in your car. Until you have to change the entire engine because of that.
Big X has a high failure rate when it comes to IT projects, with X being any lumbering beast of an enterprise, office or agency.
They want standardization, homogeneity and identical software tools and IT workplaces for not one office, one city, one branch but the entire multinational group of companies.
Any project involving more than 300 clients is hard or ridiculously expensive. Projects trying to make a one-size-fits-all tool for 100.000 employees of a multinational corporation or agency is financial suicide.
But watch CIOs keep talking about synergy effects and purported savings in the billions for the group when in reality, all they manage to achieve is IT tools set in stone for decades, with change procedures filling entire floors if printed out and grinding the whole thing into a permanent halt from which there is no way but burning millions to get out. Relying on Monolithic IT means betting the farm for large companies and agencies and some will fail spectacularly by doing that.
Let me introduce you to the heretical idea of sunk costs.
Having erroneously paid big bucks for something that turned out to be crap is no reason to keep eating shit all day.
If *Quality Control* software is crashing every few hours and holding back the whole company on upgrades, despite being ridiculously expensive, IT or procurement will have to stand up to some rather unpleasant questions some day anyway.
If I earned a million bucks a day by using IE6, I would sure as Hell put half a million aside for upgrading to the next version of that browser or even migrate to a browser I can upgrade independently from the core operating system.
Eating all you earn and not planning one or two years ahead is a mistake that even in prehistoric times happened only once per tribe.
XPSP2 was not a browser upgrade.
Either way, no one is forcing the IT department to stay at the bleeding edge. It may be profitable to do so, because usually, newer systems have some perks the older ones did not. But staying half a decade behind on current issues is not prudent, but paranoid.
That doesn't apply to real-time systems, systems of major criticality and systems with human lives at stake, but for regular office systems, holding back on upgrades forever is not prudent but complacent and possibly paranoid. Some day in the future, even Big Bank, SCADA and mission control systems WILL need to be upgraded. How will paranoid IT departments handle *that* if they never dared to upgrade even a single notebook in the least important offices? How will they gain any experience with the new stuff?
We all like to rave about prudence and ultra-mission-criticality of our IT, but unless we're working for NASA, NORAD, Big Bank or Big Energy SCADA, it's self-aggrandizing paranoia to think upgrading from IE6 to IE8 will bring the enterprise down, financially or otherwise.
Software being too old, insecure and barely compatible is reason enough. A browser is a must-have piece of software nowadays and if you absolutely depend on a specific version of a specific product line, you're doing things wrong in the first place.
As IE6 is absolutely not available on any new version of Windows, it's effectively holding back all significant upgrades on the core operating system. Without updates to the operating system, the entire IT landscape is not only severely hobbled for innovation, but thoroughly insecure on major issues.
Don't allow yourself to fall prey to the illusion that software upgrades are an entirely voluntary - or useless - effort. In the best possible scenarios, holding back upgrades is saving a few percent of the cost and postponing the rest of upgrade expenditures. In friendly real-world scenarios, it's not saving any, merely postponing all upgrade costs. In any case, it's very very likely that during decade-long upgrade holdouts, IT department will lose it's edge and sharpness, get complacent and behind on the current state-of-the-art. And with that, the whole company will lose its pace.
Upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 is easy. Upgrading from XP to Windows 7 is a major undertaking and upgrading from any older version is financial disaster.
Just because you CAN use old equipment until it literally falls apart, it doesn't mean it's the most sensible or cost-effective option to do so.