I don't debate for a minute that people get convicted for relatively minor infractions like speeding on the word of one policeman.
What I debate is that any policeman would say to a journalist that they believe the right to put someone in prison in their say so should be enshrined in law.
Yeah... Modern, and even then western power plants don't have COMBUSTIBLE material in the CORE.
Yes, I know all that. The point I was making is "I wonder how many will be paying attention to the "UNSAFE UNSAFE!!111" luddites - or for that matter, how many people with those views today will still have them when there is no realistic alternative?
I agree with the general thrust of your post - that there's a lot of power handed over to the police and the judicial system, and abuse of that power must be heavily punished...
Cops have fought in court for the right to lie.
But I can't believe any policeman would actively stand up and go on record saying that they can't see anything wrong with speaking complete bullshit to get someone punished.
(Quite a few senior police officers in the UK have bemoaned that they can't put people behind bars unless there's enough evidence, and there are lots of people they'd love to put away but can't owing to lack of evidence, but I don't recall ever hearing one crossing the line to say "therefore, we should be able to get people locked up purely because we say so" - though the way the UK is going that's probably only a matter of time).
On the whole, drug users do commit more crimes than non-drug users. I'll give you that.
On the other hand, poor people commit more crimes than rich people. Young people commit more crimes than old people.
Punish the crime and treat the addict.
Don't ignore illegal drug trafficking, regulate it.
Drug use and sale in and of itself should not be a crime.
You are assuming a number of things about drug addicts which I can tell you from having lived with one are frequently not true:
1. That the addict is aware of their addiction. 2. If aware of the addiction, that the addict is aware of the problems their addiction causes to them and those around them. 3. If aware of the problems, that the addict cares about any of them.
You can't usefully treat someone for drug addiction when they either don't recognise or don't care about their own situation.
How in the world can a person live in those conditions? Don't you need to do dry cleaning, buy groceries, get car repairs, etc. Do people take off work so they can do the weekly shopping? Makes no damn sense.
With great difficulty, the truth be told. Usually by grabbing 15 minutes at a quiet time during the working day - though obviously in a lot of jobs, this simply isn't an option.
Independent retailers are going to the wall all over the country, many of them don't seem to be able to figure out why. Here's a clue, guys: the supermarket's still open when I get home from work, you're not.
Is the OP serious about Ubuntu's port to ARM causing Intel to worry and Microsoft to follow suit?
Remember that Windows NT, upon which all modern versions of Windows are based, was originally available for a number of architectures.
Unless Microsoft are fantastically stupid, they'll have retained coding practises which make porting much of their work relatively straightforward and they'll have a bootstrapping procedure to go with it. They might need a new bootloader because they tend to be fairly architecture specific, but that's a tiny part.
And as for the end-user, the parent, I imagine that would come down to marketing. Convince the market that non-lego-certified is shit (i.e. old-skool megabloks) and people will buy the certified ones instead.
Except that nobody to my knowledge has ever successfully done this. The IT industry is actually quite a good example - it's full of certifications like USB 2, and logos that actually mean something - yet we still see cheap knock-off hardware without the certifications, without the logos in the shops that frankly should never have left the factory.
19-22 cents for a 4x2 brick isn't very inexpensive when you're talking about large bulk orders (tens of thousands).
I tried that, but you can only put 999 of any one item in your cart.
Now whether or not Lego would be prepared to negotiate on price if you literally are buying tens of thousands I don't know - but I do know that you'll seldom get the best available price if your needs are that extreme by looking on a website.
Most parents buy on price, not quality or brand name.
Really?
Most kids choose on brand name, association with something else they like (tie-ins with films or TV shows, for example) and possibly quality - one thing the human brain is very good at is pattern recognition, and expecting kids not to notice that the knock-off blocks never fit together properly is probably asking a bit much. Price seldom enters into the equation - particularly not if it's someone else's money.
Many kids are also extremely good at getting what they want.
Any idiot can figure out what specifications a block needs in order to interoperate with Lego. All you need is a few bricks and a reasonably accurate vernier gauge. Pushing an open standard would cost Lego money - and seeing as many aspects of their blocks don't benefit from any form of IP protection, they'd wind up being one certifier amongst many.
And besides which, when was the last time a particular certification made any difference to what people buy when they see a shelf full of toys? We're talking about individual parents here, not businesses who want to meet ISO standards.
Now, mass producing high quality blocks that last 20 years or more with no significant distortion or colour change - that's a little more tricky. And it's something that Lego have got pretty well worked out.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK I can't remember the last time I had a prescription drug that was dispensed in one of those small generic bottles by the pharmacist who had a dirty great tub of the pills round the back.
Most tablets these days seem to come packaged in push-through-foil type packaging.
I see Lego announcing a change in which country it resides in, to one more favorable towards corporations in trademark laws. That or outsourcing few plants to China to stay competitive.
99% of their plant is mechanised, from grey plastic chips coming in right the way through to coloured plastic blocks all neatly sorted and warehoused coming out. Not really the kind of thing that lends itself to Chinese mass production.
The days when Slashdot could shut down a site with proper hosting are long since past. Imaging it could shut down a properly managed ISP is preposterous.
Bugs in hard drive firmware are completely unexpected. We aren't talking about a nVidia driver here. Hard drives are expected to perform flawlessly when new.
Not, however, unknown. Maxtor had an issue on some drives circa 1990 (give or take a couple of years) which meant that if you had the read look-ahead cache enabled and you tried reading a file much larger than 192KB which was stored contiguously on the disk, it'd hang completely.
Apparently at the time such files weren't all that common on MS-DOS. However, on other systems where they were common, this was a big deal.
The proposed solution - if you can call it that - was to disable the look ahead cache.
>and I feel bad for him since even radio shack doesn't carry what it used to.
It's the same where I live ( the UK ) Radio shack are no longer interested in supplying components, just crap white goods. I can understand why though; whats the profit margin on a resistor? And have you ever stood in line behind the electronics buff who is buying 20 components, and takes half an hour?
Personally, I think they should install vending machines in Radio Shack for components. I might start using them again if they did!
That's quite impressive, particularly as Radio Shack don't exist in the UK. Their UK arm was called "Tandy", and they went out of business years ago.
If they're seriously proposing this as being used primarily for things like proof of age when buying alcohol with no means to confirm the validity of the card, how exactly are they going to protect against things like this?
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say it was OK, I said that it happens.
I don't debate for a minute that people get convicted for relatively minor infractions like speeding on the word of one policeman.
What I debate is that any policeman would say to a journalist that they believe the right to put someone in prison in their say so should be enshrined in law.
Yeah... Modern, and even then western power plants don't have COMBUSTIBLE material in the CORE.
Yes, I know all that. The point I was making is "I wonder how many will be paying attention to the "UNSAFE UNSAFE!!111" luddites - or for that matter, how many people with those views today will still have them when there is no realistic alternative?
And nuclear is clearly unsafe.
I wonder how unsafe it will be perceived as being when no other choice exists if you wish to preserve anything remotely close to a western lifestyle?
Yeah, and the Romans thought the Empire would last a thousand years.
It's still going. It converted to Christianity some time ago, and the head of it is no longer called "Caesar", instead he's called "The Pope".
Ok, am I the only one who read Lesbian Denny?
Thanks.
I administer a whole bunch of Linux servers and I'm never going to be able to get that out of my head.
I'm going to be ringing up hosting providers and asking if they support "Lesbian Denny".
I'm going to be emailing software vendors and asking if their product runs under "Lesbian Denny".
I'm going to be posting on mailing lists asking if anyone's succeeded in installing the latest build on "Lesbian Denny".
I agree with the general thrust of your post - that there's a lot of power handed over to the police and the judicial system, and abuse of that power must be heavily punished...
Cops have fought in court for the right to lie.
But I can't believe any policeman would actively stand up and go on record saying that they can't see anything wrong with speaking complete bullshit to get someone punished.
(Quite a few senior police officers in the UK have bemoaned that they can't put people behind bars unless there's enough evidence, and there are lots of people they'd love to put away but can't owing to lack of evidence, but I don't recall ever hearing one crossing the line to say "therefore, we should be able to get people locked up purely because we say so" - though the way the UK is going that's probably only a matter of time).
Haha, you're funny.
On the whole, drug users do commit more crimes than non-drug users. I'll give you that.
On the other hand, poor people commit more crimes than rich people. Young people commit more crimes than old people.
Punish the crime and treat the addict.
Don't ignore illegal drug trafficking, regulate it.
Drug use and sale in and of itself should not be a crime.
You are assuming a number of things about drug addicts which I can tell you from having lived with one are frequently not true:
1. That the addict is aware of their addiction.
2. If aware of the addiction, that the addict is aware of the problems their addiction causes to them and those around them.
3. If aware of the problems, that the addict cares about any of them.
You can't usefully treat someone for drug addiction when they either don't recognise or don't care about their own situation.
How in the world can a person live in those conditions? Don't you need to do dry cleaning, buy groceries, get car repairs, etc. Do people take off work so they can do the weekly shopping? Makes no damn sense.
With great difficulty, the truth be told. Usually by grabbing 15 minutes at a quiet time during the working day - though obviously in a lot of jobs, this simply isn't an option.
Independent retailers are going to the wall all over the country, many of them don't seem to be able to figure out why. Here's a clue, guys: the supermarket's still open when I get home from work, you're not.
Is the OP serious about Ubuntu's port to ARM causing Intel to worry and Microsoft to follow suit?
Remember that Windows NT, upon which all modern versions of Windows are based, was originally available for a number of architectures.
Unless Microsoft are fantastically stupid, they'll have retained coding practises which make porting much of their work relatively straightforward and they'll have a bootstrapping procedure to go with it. They might need a new bootloader because they tend to be fairly architecture specific, but that's a tiny part.
So when you drive home during rush hour all the stores are closed?
You've never lived in the UK, have you?
(clue: with the exception of supermarkets and some (mostly out of town) shopping centres, most shops shut around 5:30)
And as for the end-user, the parent, I imagine that would come down to marketing. Convince the market that non-lego-certified is shit (i.e. old-skool megabloks) and people will buy the certified ones instead.
Except that nobody to my knowledge has ever successfully done this. The IT industry is actually quite a good example - it's full of certifications like USB 2, and logos that actually mean something - yet we still see cheap knock-off hardware without the certifications, without the logos in the shops that frankly should never have left the factory.
19-22 cents for a 4x2 brick isn't very inexpensive when you're talking about large bulk orders (tens of thousands).
I tried that, but you can only put 999 of any one item in your cart.
Now whether or not Lego would be prepared to negotiate on price if you literally are buying tens of thousands I don't know - but I do know that you'll seldom get the best available price if your needs are that extreme by looking on a website.
Most parents buy on price, not quality or brand name.
Really?
Most kids choose on brand name, association with something else they like (tie-ins with films or TV shows, for example) and possibly quality - one thing the human brain is very good at is pattern recognition, and expecting kids not to notice that the knock-off blocks never fit together properly is probably asking a bit much. Price seldom enters into the equation - particularly not if it's someone else's money.
Many kids are also extremely good at getting what they want.
But what's the business benefit?
Any idiot can figure out what specifications a block needs in order to interoperate with Lego. All you need is a few bricks and a reasonably accurate vernier gauge. Pushing an open standard would cost Lego money - and seeing as many aspects of their blocks don't benefit from any form of IP protection, they'd wind up being one certifier amongst many.
And besides which, when was the last time a particular certification made any difference to what people buy when they see a shelf full of toys? We're talking about individual parents here, not businesses who want to meet ISO standards.
Now, mass producing high quality blocks that last 20 years or more with no significant distortion or colour change - that's a little more tricky. And it's something that Lego have got pretty well worked out.
I don't know about the US, but in the UK I can't remember the last time I had a prescription drug that was dispensed in one of those small generic bottles by the pharmacist who had a dirty great tub of the pills round the back.
Most tablets these days seem to come packaged in push-through-foil type packaging.
http://shop.lego.com/Product/?p=630
I see Lego announcing a change in which country it resides in, to one more favorable towards corporations in trademark laws. That or outsourcing few plants to China to stay competitive.
Have you seen any of the Gizmodo videos?
http://gizmodo.com/5022769/exclusive-inside-the-lego-factory
99% of their plant is mechanised, from grey plastic chips coming in right the way through to coloured plastic blocks all neatly sorted and warehoused coming out. Not really the kind of thing that lends itself to Chinese mass production.
The days when Slashdot could shut down a site with proper hosting are long since past. Imaging it could shut down a properly managed ISP is preposterous.
Fixed that for you.
Nah, they would be declared a terrorist nation, invaded, and all its citizens would be shipped off to Guantanamo. This would be a lot cheaper...
But at least they wouldn't be drowning.
(I'm going to Hell...)
Bugs in hard drive firmware are completely unexpected. We aren't talking about a nVidia driver here. Hard drives are expected to perform flawlessly when new.
Not, however, unknown. Maxtor had an issue on some drives circa 1990 (give or take a couple of years) which meant that if you had the read look-ahead cache enabled and you tried reading a file much larger than 192KB which was stored contiguously on the disk, it'd hang completely.
Apparently at the time such files weren't all that common on MS-DOS. However, on other systems where they were common, this was a big deal.
The proposed solution - if you can call it that - was to disable the look ahead cache.
And , more precisely , only integrate with each other :-)
You're quite correct, of course.
So, which F/OSS projects are working on a data and application agnostic specification for how office applications should interact with each other?
>and I feel bad for him since even radio shack doesn't carry what it used to.
It's the same where I live ( the UK )
Radio shack are no longer interested in supplying components, just crap white goods. I can understand why though; whats the profit margin on a resistor? And have you ever stood in line behind the electronics buff who is buying 20 components, and takes half an hour?
Personally, I think they should install vending machines in Radio Shack for components. I might start using them again if they did!
That's quite impressive, particularly as Radio Shack don't exist in the UK. Their UK arm was called "Tandy", and they went out of business years ago.
Are you thinking of Maplin?
Why spend resources on that when there are far too many other CMS systems out there already.
Because Microsoft's applications do something that most of the alternatives don't - integrate with each other.
If they're seriously proposing this as being used primarily for things like proof of age when buying alcohol with no means to confirm the validity of the card, how exactly are they going to protect against things like this?