Linux works for me. I've been using it exclusively for home use for about 8 years now. I don't try to "sell" it to other people beyond an occasional nudge because it would be obnoxious in the way that pushing one's religion on others is obnoxious. If someone is interested enough to ask, I'll tell him/her about the benefits I get from it, the same way I would if asked about my religion. But it's a personal choice.
I frankly am tired of these "Linux desktop is dead" trolls. The user base seems to be growing, and aside from the travesty that occurred with the introduction of Gnome 3, it's getting better and better.
Maybe you could hire J.S.G. Boggs to create your notes. What you don't want to do, however, is copy U.S. currency, because that can get you thrown in the slammer.
Coincidentally, we recently watched The Man Who Copied, which was a pretty good film with a slow start. You might enjoy it.
Canceling your status as an organ donor on the basis of this article is rather over-reactive. It would be better to talk with your physician about concerns about this. This is a conversation (or series of conversations, as we learn and understand more) that we all ought to have, because every one of us is going to die someday, and most of us will have to deal with end-of-life decision making for loved ones, whether we are the one who tells the doctor that it's OK to remove life support or the ones who have to agree with (and make peace with) that person.
I am pretty sure that no doctor is going to hack away at you before he/she has discussed your situation with a family member, and I have heard that even with the donor box checked on a license, organ harvesting doesn't occur without a family's permission. Once you're in the state that they're thinking you are ready to become an organ donor, your fate is pretty well out of your control anyhow unless you wake up and tell them you're not dead yet.
FWIW, when we're unconscious, we can still act surprisingly conscious. I've been under a few times for wisdom teeth and major surgery, and I've been told of things I did or said, of which I had no recollection. And I was a long way from being a beating-heart cadaver.
I have a somewhat peculiar habit of trying to imagine what it would be like to die in the ways I hear of people dying, and I've been sure I don't have the guts to do it; however, I realize that I don't have any choice in the matter, and I will go whenever and however I go. The best I can do is suck it up and try to hang on for the end of the ride. I'm middle-aged, and from here on out, it's only downhill.
Finally, I have known a couple of people who have benefited from transplants. Besides their own enjoyment of life, there has been the joy of their families at not losing them so soon. If someone else can get some benefit from my heart, cornea, or any other part of me after I'm through with it, then I'm all for it.
My Toyota RAV4 has a backup camera, and I find the damn thing makes it harder for me to back up safely. The monitor is in the rearview mirror, and the camera, above the license plate, points down at a sharp angle, which makes it useful for hitching a trailer or checking for things immediately behind the car, but it makes it hard to see out the mirror -- especially at night -- so I don't really see anything more than five feet away. Additionally, since I wear progressive lenses, I have a hard time seeing the monitor because I'm having to focus on an image at a foot away instead of the much longer distance through the mirror.
The camera also won't help if someone is under the car, as my wife was when she was run over as a toddler.
TFA states that it was an airline official who refused to allow the passenger to board, not an agent of the government.
This is not an accident! The airlines are purposely referring to all their rules as "government mandated" to stop customers from arguing. As I understand it, many of their rules aren't actually mandated by anyone but the airlines themselves.
It's not just airlines that do that. I can't begin to count the number of times I've been told some stupid policy is "the law" when, in fact, no such law or government regulation exists.
TFA states that it was an airline official who refused to allow the passenger to board, not an agent of the government. It's still galling, but let's express our discontent where it belongs.
I was surprised to find that the hunters may well have been within their rights. I thought that perhaps there would be a law against shooting within a short distance of a highway, but I can't find anything in SC law that prohibits it. There's a law against shooting at occupied aircraft, but it doesn't say anything about drones.
South Carolina is one of those states that still believes in the Second Amendment. There is no permit necessary to own and/or carry a shotgun in South Carolina.
Correction: South Carolina is one of those states that believes that gun ownership is one of the Ten Commandments.
I was going to say he sounds like one of our U.S. legislators -- spouting off again. But I've been a fool to believe that the U.S. has cornered the market on jackasses.
Interesting to read in the Wikipedia article that the Aussies didn't learn from their previous experience and introduced another rabbit viruse in 1996. I wonder what they'll do 80-some years from now, when the rabbits are still around and unaffected by both diseases.
And yet, as a bicyclist and pedestrian, the idea of something other than a human at the wheel -- even with the distractions and problems affecting humans' driving -- makes me very queasy.
Not entirely. I've occasionally hit web sites that purport to run a scan and find a boatload of viruses on my computer. Since I don't use an antivirus program, it might be credible, except that I'm running Linux and the files "found" by the "scan" are things like Windows DLLs which are not, in fact, anywhere on it. I'm not sure if the web sites where I've seen this have any connection to Symantec. I hope the plaintiff takes them to the cleaners!
We used to use Symantic antivirus at my workplace. Then we had a virus outbreak. Not a cutting-edge virus, just an old USB-stick-infector that symantic was powerless against. Didn't even detect it half the time, and when it did failed to do anything. So we use Sophos now.
Apparently some (most/all?) AV vendors age out virus signatures after a while, so that there aren't too many to be checked. You might want to consider AppGuard, which helps fill the gaps left by AV products. (Disclosure: I work for the company that makes AppGuard.)
I went into it feeling the same way, but reading the judge's reasoning in the PDF (linked to in the original post, but also here for your convenience -- search for "tracking" to get to the relevant section), I can see that he gave it serious and fair consideration, including citing similar cases that predate GPS. I still feel that the way I'd deal with such a tracking device, should I ever find one, would be to attach it to another vehicle -- preferably a boat trailer or a garbage truck.
Interesting transcript. Is there one available that wasn't translated to ebonics? I listened to the guy speak, and his English was as good as just about anyone else's. (To stay on the off-topic, I will concede that he sounds serious -- but the blatant racism of the transcriber [presumably not you] is pretty disgusting and unnecessary.)
My class (1976) has never held a reunion -- something to do with the combination of an unusually high proportion of slackers and Southern racial politics -- but what I see of most of my "friends" on Facebook tells me that we're best off being Facebook "friends" and that my hometown is a great place to be from.
Just for grins, I plugged the numbers from TFA's chart into a spreadsheet and totaled up the changes, since they didn't give us that information. The change in injury numbers didn't seem to be significant (-68% at camera-enforced intersections vs. -64% at modified-control intersections), but the total number of accidents seemed to tell a different story. At camera-enforced intersections, there were 118 accidents before and 53 afterward (-55%), vs. 85 before and 60 afterward (-29%). Yes, rear-ending went up at the camera-controlled intersections, but it seems to have been more than offset by the reduction in side collisions. I'm surprised that there wasn't a significant difference in injuries since side injuries seem like they'd be worse.
IMHO, expecting all the numbers to go down is unrealistic, since any engineer will tell you that most decisions involve trade-offs.
I wonder what the average cost per accident is. I figure that if both sets of intersections started out with 118 accidents and experienced the same proportional reductions, the number of accidents saved would be 65 and 35, respectively. If an accident costs only $5,000, then the savings would total $325,000 and $175,000, meaning the cameras bring in an extra $150,000 to the people involved. Somehow, though, I think that accidents cost more than that, as the last two (low-speed) collisions in my family, with no bodily injury to anyone and only our car being damaged (don't ask) were about $4,000 per accident. It looks like the break-even point for the city's cost of the contract is about $23,000 per accident, assuming tickets don't defray the $700,000 cost.
I'd like to have seen two more sets of numbers -- no change in traffic signal and no camera, and both camera and modified control.
China will clone it for Iran and start selling copies for one tenth of the price we spend on them in the states.
DEY TUK R JERBS!
Somehow, I think cloning a U.S. drone is kind of like cloning a cell phone. It's not going to be good for much without the supporting network. My understanding is that the drones are controlled via satellite, so they'd need a few of those, a control room, and God knows how much supporting computer equipment and software. The Iranians would have to defend the ground-based control infrastructure, and I'd just about put money on Israel taking it out as soon as it became operational.
The bigger problem is that the Iranians could possibly learn enough about how the drones are controlled to at least render them ineffective, or, as many have observed, they could barter the right to examine the thing to more capable nations.
So, this is how a former blue state, now red, looks at fiscal responsibility?
I will argue that Virginia has never been a blue state. Yes, it was under the control of the Democrats for many years, but Virginia has always been conservative on things like taxation and social issues. By the time the networks began referring to red and blue states, Virginia had already several very conservative Republican governors, including one who had needed remove a Confederate flag from his den to try to avoid losing votes from people who find the thing offensive.
FWIW, since it's a tax deduction and Virginia's maximum income tax is 5.75%, the deduction would be about $144, but the family of the deceased would have put at least $2,500 into the economy of the Eastern Shore. My gut says that most of the people paying for this extravagance would not be Virginians, and so they would have no Virginia income tax liability. When it comes to funeral expenses, $2,500 is at the low end of what a lot of people spend. Moreover, I expect that there would be many families who would travel to the area to watch the launch, helping boost tourism in an area without much other prospect for business.
When I read the summary, I was a little ticked off (being a Virginia taxpayer), but even though I loathe the delegate who introduced the bill, I can't fault him on this one.
For small business, I don't really see a problem with clouds, unless your paranoid. ( Then again, it isn't because I'm paranoid that they aren't all after me...)
Actually, I am paranoid. One of my areas of cloud interest is at my synagogue. Google Apps or some other web-based service could solve our schedule management issues and facilitate staff's being able to work from home without requiring us to get into managing a VPN, not to mention sharing information among volunteers. But there is this lingering fear, "What if the government goes wacko, like happened in Germany 70+ years ago?" But I realize that there is already so much data out there that a Nazi-like government wouldn't need synagogue files to track people down, especially now that 90% of the congregation is on Facebook. As the old saying goes, "That ship has sailed."
Slashdot Mirror
Linux works for me. I've been using it exclusively for home use for about 8 years now. I don't try to "sell" it to other people beyond an occasional nudge because it would be obnoxious in the way that pushing one's religion on others is obnoxious. If someone is interested enough to ask, I'll tell him/her about the benefits I get from it, the same way I would if asked about my religion. But it's a personal choice.
I frankly am tired of these "Linux desktop is dead" trolls. The user base seems to be growing, and aside from the travesty that occurred with the introduction of Gnome 3, it's getting better and better.
Nice job!
Maybe you could hire J.S.G. Boggs to create your notes. What you don't want to do, however, is copy U.S. currency, because that can get you thrown in the slammer.
Coincidentally, we recently watched The Man Who Copied, which was a pretty good film with a slow start. You might enjoy it.
Canceling your status as an organ donor on the basis of this article is rather over-reactive. It would be better to talk with your physician about concerns about this. This is a conversation (or series of conversations, as we learn and understand more) that we all ought to have, because every one of us is going to die someday, and most of us will have to deal with end-of-life decision making for loved ones, whether we are the one who tells the doctor that it's OK to remove life support or the ones who have to agree with (and make peace with) that person.
I am pretty sure that no doctor is going to hack away at you before he/she has discussed your situation with a family member, and I have heard that even with the donor box checked on a license, organ harvesting doesn't occur without a family's permission. Once you're in the state that they're thinking you are ready to become an organ donor, your fate is pretty well out of your control anyhow unless you wake up and tell them you're not dead yet.
FWIW, when we're unconscious, we can still act surprisingly conscious. I've been under a few times for wisdom teeth and major surgery, and I've been told of things I did or said, of which I had no recollection. And I was a long way from being a beating-heart cadaver.
I have a somewhat peculiar habit of trying to imagine what it would be like to die in the ways I hear of people dying, and I've been sure I don't have the guts to do it; however, I realize that I don't have any choice in the matter, and I will go whenever and however I go. The best I can do is suck it up and try to hang on for the end of the ride. I'm middle-aged, and from here on out, it's only downhill.
Finally, I have known a couple of people who have benefited from transplants. Besides their own enjoyment of life, there has been the joy of their families at not losing them so soon. If someone else can get some benefit from my heart, cornea, or any other part of me after I'm through with it, then I'm all for it.
My Toyota RAV4 has a backup camera, and I find the damn thing makes it harder for me to back up safely. The monitor is in the rearview mirror, and the camera, above the license plate, points down at a sharp angle, which makes it useful for hitching a trailer or checking for things immediately behind the car, but it makes it hard to see out the mirror -- especially at night -- so I don't really see anything more than five feet away. Additionally, since I wear progressive lenses, I have a hard time seeing the monitor because I'm having to focus on an image at a foot away instead of the much longer distance through the mirror.
The camera also won't help if someone is under the car, as my wife was when she was run over as a toddler.
Interesting commentary.
TFA states that it was an airline official who refused to allow the passenger to board, not an agent of the government.
This is not an accident! The airlines are purposely referring to all their rules as "government mandated" to stop customers from arguing. As I understand it, many of their rules aren't actually mandated by anyone but the airlines themselves.
It's not just airlines that do that. I can't begin to count the number of times I've been told some stupid policy is "the law" when, in fact, no such law or government regulation exists.
TFA states that it was an airline official who refused to allow the passenger to board, not an agent of the government. It's still galling, but let's express our discontent where it belongs.
I was surprised to find that the hunters may well have been within their rights. I thought that perhaps there would be a law against shooting within a short distance of a highway, but I can't find anything in SC law that prohibits it. There's a law against shooting at occupied aircraft, but it doesn't say anything about drones.
South Carolina is one of those states that still believes in the Second Amendment. There is no permit necessary to own and/or carry a shotgun in South Carolina.
Correction: South Carolina is one of those states that believes that gun ownership is one of the Ten Commandments.
So much for my escape plan.
I was going to say he sounds like one of our U.S. legislators -- spouting off again. But I've been a fool to believe that the U.S. has cornered the market on jackasses.
Interesting to read in the Wikipedia article that the Aussies didn't learn from their previous experience and introduced another rabbit viruse in 1996. I wonder what they'll do 80-some years from now, when the rabbits are still around and unaffected by both diseases.
And yet, as a bicyclist and pedestrian, the idea of something other than a human at the wheel -- even with the distractions and problems affecting humans' driving -- makes me very queasy.
Not entirely. I've occasionally hit web sites that purport to run a scan and find a boatload of viruses on my computer. Since I don't use an antivirus program, it might be credible, except that I'm running Linux and the files "found" by the "scan" are things like Windows DLLs which are not, in fact, anywhere on it. I'm not sure if the web sites where I've seen this have any connection to Symantec. I hope the plaintiff takes them to the cleaners!
We used to use Symantic antivirus at my workplace. Then we had a virus outbreak. Not a cutting-edge virus, just an old USB-stick-infector that symantic was powerless against. Didn't even detect it half the time, and when it did failed to do anything. So we use Sophos now.
Apparently some (most/all?) AV vendors age out virus signatures after a while, so that there aren't too many to be checked. You might want to consider AppGuard, which helps fill the gaps left by AV products. (Disclosure: I work for the company that makes AppGuard.)
I went into it feeling the same way, but reading the judge's reasoning in the PDF (linked to in the original post, but also here for your convenience -- search for "tracking" to get to the relevant section), I can see that he gave it serious and fair consideration, including citing similar cases that predate GPS. I still feel that the way I'd deal with such a tracking device, should I ever find one, would be to attach it to another vehicle -- preferably a boat trailer or a garbage truck.
How about newtgingrich.xxx? It sounds appropriate!
How about .lies, and require all politicians or political action groups to host their sites there?
Interesting transcript. Is there one available that wasn't translated to ebonics? I listened to the guy speak, and his English was as good as just about anyone else's. (To stay on the off-topic, I will concede that he sounds serious -- but the blatant racism of the transcriber [presumably not you] is pretty disgusting and unnecessary.)
My class (1976) has never held a reunion -- something to do with the combination of an unusually high proportion of slackers and Southern racial politics -- but what I see of most of my "friends" on Facebook tells me that we're best off being Facebook "friends" and that my hometown is a great place to be from.
Just for grins, I plugged the numbers from TFA's chart into a spreadsheet and totaled up the changes, since they didn't give us that information. The change in injury numbers didn't seem to be significant (-68% at camera-enforced intersections vs. -64% at modified-control intersections), but the total number of accidents seemed to tell a different story. At camera-enforced intersections, there were 118 accidents before and 53 afterward (-55%), vs. 85 before and 60 afterward (-29%). Yes, rear-ending went up at the camera-controlled intersections, but it seems to have been more than offset by the reduction in side collisions. I'm surprised that there wasn't a significant difference in injuries since side injuries seem like they'd be worse.
IMHO, expecting all the numbers to go down is unrealistic, since any engineer will tell you that most decisions involve trade-offs.
I wonder what the average cost per accident is. I figure that if both sets of intersections started out with 118 accidents and experienced the same proportional reductions, the number of accidents saved would be 65 and 35, respectively. If an accident costs only $5,000, then the savings would total $325,000 and $175,000, meaning the cameras bring in an extra $150,000 to the people involved. Somehow, though, I think that accidents cost more than that, as the last two (low-speed) collisions in my family, with no bodily injury to anyone and only our car being damaged (don't ask) were about $4,000 per accident. It looks like the break-even point for the city's cost of the contract is about $23,000 per accident, assuming tickets don't defray the $700,000 cost.
I'd like to have seen two more sets of numbers -- no change in traffic signal and no camera, and both camera and modified control.
China will clone it for Iran and start selling copies for one tenth of the price we spend on them in the states. DEY TUK R JERBS!
Somehow, I think cloning a U.S. drone is kind of like cloning a cell phone. It's not going to be good for much without the supporting network. My understanding is that the drones are controlled via satellite, so they'd need a few of those, a control room, and God knows how much supporting computer equipment and software. The Iranians would have to defend the ground-based control infrastructure, and I'd just about put money on Israel taking it out as soon as it became operational.
The bigger problem is that the Iranians could possibly learn enough about how the drones are controlled to at least render them ineffective, or, as many have observed, they could barter the right to examine the thing to more capable nations.
So, this is how a former blue state, now red, looks at fiscal responsibility?
I will argue that Virginia has never been a blue state. Yes, it was under the control of the Democrats for many years, but Virginia has always been conservative on things like taxation and social issues. By the time the networks began referring to red and blue states, Virginia had already several very conservative Republican governors, including one who had needed remove a Confederate flag from his den to try to avoid losing votes from people who find the thing offensive.
FWIW, since it's a tax deduction and Virginia's maximum income tax is 5.75%, the deduction would be about $144, but the family of the deceased would have put at least $2,500 into the economy of the Eastern Shore. My gut says that most of the people paying for this extravagance would not be Virginians, and so they would have no Virginia income tax liability. When it comes to funeral expenses, $2,500 is at the low end of what a lot of people spend. Moreover, I expect that there would be many families who would travel to the area to watch the launch, helping boost tourism in an area without much other prospect for business.
When I read the summary, I was a little ticked off (being a Virginia taxpayer), but even though I loathe the delegate who introduced the bill, I can't fault him on this one.
For small business, I don't really see a problem with clouds, unless your paranoid. ( Then again, it isn't because I'm paranoid that they aren't all after me...)
Actually, I am paranoid. One of my areas of cloud interest is at my synagogue. Google Apps or some other web-based service could solve our schedule management issues and facilitate staff's being able to work from home without requiring us to get into managing a VPN, not to mention sharing information among volunteers. But there is this lingering fear, "What if the government goes wacko, like happened in Germany 70+ years ago?" But I realize that there is already so much data out there that a Nazi-like government wouldn't need synagogue files to track people down, especially now that 90% of the congregation is on Facebook. As the old saying goes, "That ship has sailed."