Ummm... lowering taxes is "bad for the United States"
Because the United States has to go into deeper debt to pay for your tax cut. It's not like the Democrats or the Republicans are interested in actually lowering our spending amounts. They only argue about where to spend the money...
The government takes in more as a percent of GNP that it has since WWII
Is that per capita or total amount? Since the tax rate is the lowest its has ever been since the IRS was formed, I have my doubts about your statement.
And don't give any me bullshit about Bush. Obama makes Bush look like a tightwad.
Bush got us into two global conflicts consisting of large troop deployments, large expenditures on tactical support, AND large amounts of money going to infrastructure in the name of "nation building". During which the Bush administration lower the tax rate on a (*cough* *cough*) temporary basis which is unprecedented in US history. Normally we would sell bonds earmarked for the cause or raise taxes to pay for the war effort.
Oh yeah, and it's only making Google the default - it's really damn easy to change, unlike, for example, the incredibly difficulty of extracting IE from a Windows system.
I'm not a bug fan of Microsoft but I know they never prevented me from installing another browser. It's almost as easy as changing my default search engine. Using a different standard for you platform of choice?
Really? I know Microsoft Bashing is a sport here on/. and all, but it just blows my mind that we let MS do as they will but Google needs to be checked out. Hm.
Microsoft has already been checked out. It's Google's turn. You act like Google has something to fear from an FTC investigation. It's not like they been penetrating every market by undercutting competition or offering multi-million dollar deals to browser projects to make them the default browser engine. Relax. I'm sure everything will be fine.
The graphic in the article showed a decrease in the number of accidents where only the duration of the yellow light was extended (less than a third reduction). The reduction was not as dramatic as the intersections where cameras were also being used (more than half reduction).
I can only assume both since they used four intersections with no camera enforcement as a control group. The drop in total number of accidents is more dramatic at the intersections where the cameras were being used than the ones where only the yellow light time was extended.
This is why they compared four intersections with camera enforcements against four intersections without camera enforcements. I assume the same type of vehicles were driven at all the intersections studied and as such would account for any improvements in safety being added to the vehicles themselves.
I didn't see the caption in the table. Why they didn't expound on this in the article text is beyond me, except maybe to introduce some bias for the revenue generating argument which the author gave better coverage. Sorry for the confusion.
The table used in the article showed four intersections with camera enforcements and four intersections that only used the longer yellow light (no camera enforcements). The four intersections where no camera enforcements were being performed was selected as a control group. This information only appears in the caption of the graphic not within the article itself.
The number of injuries at the intersection prior to camera enforcements is 28 and after is 9. Total number of accidents prior is 118 and after is 53 (total accidents dropped by more than half).
The number of injuries at the intersection where only the yellow light was extended (no camera enforcement) prior to the study is 25 and after is 9. Total number of accidents prior is 85 and after is 60 (total accidents only dropped by less than a third).
On the surface the number of injuries appears to remain the same. However the reduction on the total number of accidents is more dramatic for the intersections where camera enforcement was in place. This is why the conclusion is as stated above "that extending the yellow light and fining people who run the red lights greatly reduced injuries and accidents".
But it also shows that simply extending the duration of the yellow light greatly reduces injury and accidents too. So, the real issue is, is there justification to use the method that requires paying a third party $700,000 (annually, I assume) to install and maintain the cameras--and charge lots of people high fines to pay for said contract--over simply changing the timing of the lights?
The article states that extending the yellow light and fining people who run the red lights greatly reduced injuries and accidents. There is no mention of only extending the yellow lights. While the placement of the cameras are random, the threat of getting caught is always present at these intersections.
Extending the yellow light without the threat of camera enforcement would only deter the drivers who already have good driving habits. The people who have bad driving habits would more likely take advantage of the longer yellow light and we'd see an uptick in the number of people "racing the yellow light". The "bad" drivers outnumber the "good" drivers and accounts for the increase in front-to-rear collisions due to the fact that they don't practice keeping a safe stopping distance between themselves and the car in front of them.
These are the same "bad" drivers who complain about the automatic enforcement done by cameras because they were lucky enough to not cause an accident therefore they feel like they are being unfairly penalized for running a light (e.g. No harm came from me running the light, so why should I be fined?). Another form of this argument is the "we need to ticket people who cause accidents at intersections" which literally means "no accident = no foul". I would argue that if you don't like being fined by the camera enforcement then try not to run the stop lights.
Quite simply the controversy reported in the article is over people complaining about the fines. The "good" drivers would not run the red light so they aren't likely the ones complaining. As for the $700,000 annually being spent, the program is paying for itself and is cheaper than hiring policemen to enforce the traffic laws 24/7 at these intersections.
Entering the intersection makes sense when you can see an opening coming shortly, but if there is a line of traffic entering the intersection to make a left turn is just going to make traffic worse and create a dangerous situation.
The car making the left turn is stopped in the intersection and not colliding with anyone and the cars behind the white line can not enter the intersection once the light turns red. If traffic congestion proves too bad, the traffic engineer can make the green light longer on the side that has the most cars waiting to turn left and add a green arrow.
I'd actually want to see a very clear causal link between longer yellows and safety increases, because my gut tells me longer yellows would make people ignore them even more.
From the article: City traffic engineer Brian Mitchell said fewer crashes are being recorded at intersections where photo-red-light enforcement has been set up and where yellow-light clearance time has been lengthened.
From the article it appears that the number of injuries at the intersection have actually declined since the introduction of the red-light camera. Front-to-side collisions are down and these are caused by the driver running the red light. These collisions are more dangerous than the front-to-rear collision since the vehicle directly enters the passenger area at a potentially higher speed.
Rear-to-front collisions are caused by the driver tailgating and these in general are due to him not being able to stop in time and the collision are at a much lower speed and do not directly enter the passenger compartment. The data provided in the article reenforces this hypothesis since there were 53 injuries prior to the cameras installation and only 18 afterwards. This is despite the gain of 1 front-to-rear accident.
Following up: After talking to the VEC of one of the top two testing organizations, he explained that the choice is between having a slightly incorrect APRS related question and having no questions relating to APRS on the exam. Since the study materials explain the correct answer as "Automatic Position Reporting System", they don't really think using "Position" instead of "Packet" is that big a deal.
He did point out the origin of this mistake. They used aprs.net as a reference that defines APRS as "Automatic Position Reporting System" instead of the official web page of APRS which is aprs.org that defines it as "Automatic Packet Reporting System". This is one of those cases where a simple mistake and bad fact checking may redefine an acronym.
OSXs finder with all it's annoyances and,,so shiny/no content,, is, unfortunately gaining terrain with copycats (god save us).
If you can't make a point without insulting something then your point isn't that good to begin with.
At the very least learn about whatever you are insulting so you don't look stupid and we could take you seriously. I use OS X and Linux and I like my OS X desktop just fine. I don't want widgets on my desktop. The ones I do have are out of my way on the dashboard. I do not use "mission control" and I don't have to. I just click on my Applications icon on my dock as I always have and I continue business as usual. I can press command-spacebar and spotlight will help me find my relevant emails, files, and web pages visited and or googled. I can define "workflows" with applescript that perform some of my repetitive tasks that I do on a daily basis. Workspaces is nice to organize my windows. This desktop does what it is suppose to do and that is to stay out of my way.
I don't know why people obsess so much about the desktop. I spent more time in my editor and ssh terminal than I ever do on my desktop. Geez you'd think we have better topics for a fanboy war.
Anyway on the topic at hand which is "KDE is just a windows ripoff". I have to agree that KDE does its best to emulate the Windows experience on Linux (warts and all). However the real question is this a bad thing? I don't think so, since I'm not forced to use KDE if I don't like it.
Are these writers currently receiving large amounts of income from advertising revenue, and are they dependent on the sort of advertising that ABP was designed to fight? Somehow, I was under the impression that fledgling writers were not seeing much income from their blogs and generally had to keep their day jobs; am I wrong?
Actually some do leave their day job. As for large amounts of income... what's your definition of large?
APRS is "Automatic Position Reporting System" per the creator. Wikipedia has the name wrong.
Sorry but the correct name is "Automatic Packet Reporting System". Position information is available in the protocol but not its purpose. In fact, when APRS was young and GPS was still expensive the position information was only a rough estimate of the origination station's location.
Anyway APRS was designed to send short messages efficiently and is used for tactical information (eg. weather stations, shelter populations, balloon tracking, you name it). What made it special was that when a packet terminal (a smart radio modem) received this short packet it would simply decrement the time to live field and blindly retransmit that packet if the terminal wasn't its destination. This allowed the information to be broadcasted throughout the area without usual overhead associated with AX.25. Since an area with a lot of APRS stations would be repeating this packet, delivery of the message was pretty much guaranteed. This is why it's called "Automatic Packet Reporting System".
I'm sure Bob Bruninga would agree with me (he created it).
Why yes, I am a HAM. I hold a General ticket.
Congratulations and thanks for being part of the amateur radio service. BTW, I am also an extra class ham radio operator and been one for a couple of decades. I remember when we started using APRS in ARES operations (a very long time ago) at Bob's suggestion during a regional hamfest and the rest is history...
You seem to be more concerned with the problem of paying writers to produce articles, the "old media" style websites like the New York Times.
Correct. The old "Garbage in = Garbage out". You have to pay for good content, and writers deserve to eat too.
What stops the New York Times from putting static images hosted on the New York Times' own servers on the top or sides of its article pages? What stops them from charging a lot of money for those advertisements (remember that this is a famous, widely read, and well-established source of news)?
I'm not concerned with the New York Times. I'm concerned about the fledgling writers who operate their own blog and have no capital or experience to handle advertising on their own.
Perhaps they should have refused to do business with advertisers that fail to respect their users?...
Oh well, they should not have shot themselves in the foot with advertisements...
How about the websites start standing with their users against abusive advertisers, and not doing business with advertisers who violate privacy rights or who use annoying techniques?...
Is that you have an implicit assumption that we pick and choose which websites we will allow advertising when we use a program to block advertisements. You can't have this assumption while advocating the total blocking of advertisements nor while punishing all websites for the abuses done by a few.
Or, if the web cannot be paid for without annoying, invasive advertisements, then it is time to move back to a more distributed system. We had some cool ideas going with peer-to-peer networking a few years ago, perhaps it is time to revisit those ideas -- distribute the cost of accessing information among the users, who can all contribute some of their bandwidth and CPU time. Sure, there will still be problems, but at least smaller publications will not have to worry about being unable to pay for distribution.
I think you confused the cost of creating content with the cost of distributing it. I think the cost of creation is much greater than the cost of current distribution methods, so I don't know what problem you are trying to solve here.
Well, if you want me to read the first amendment, then I'm not finding anything about that.
If you want me to look at the invisible exceptions that judges have 'interpreted' into the constitution, then I guess you're right.
The first amendment with emphasis on the relevant part:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I believe the interpretation of this amendment is that we have the right to criticize our government no matter if it is vocal, written, or in the form of a peaceful protest. I don't think the writers of the constitution had ex-girlfriends in mind when they wrote this.
I would say that "total block" should be the default
I disagree. I think it's best to have to manually enable "total block". If the ads that are white-listed by default aren't bothering the user then the user won't feel compelled to block all ads and the free content that the user enjoys will have some financial support. However if the user is adamant about not seeing any ads or the ads are still to bothersome too the user, they can click on the "total block" option.
If it was "total blocked" by default a very small percentage of the users (if any) will feel compelled to allow white-listed advertisements. While you may feel that this is ideal, the people who work on those free websites depend on the advertisement revenue to stay free and indiscriminately blocking all advertisement will cause the good quality websites to either shutdown or go paywall. This would cause a larger number of low quality web sites to show up on google searches, since they don't put much effort in the content anyway and they make their revenue by gaming the SOE to lure people who don't block the advertisements.
I know there is a huge uproar when a web site decides to go paywall to pay the bills. Now it seems there is a huge uproar over allowing white-listed advertisers to bypass Adblock. These web sites can not exist as a charity, so we must decide which is the best way to support them.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the United States has to go into deeper debt to pay for your tax cut. It's not like the Democrats or the Republicans are interested in actually lowering our spending amounts. They only argue about where to spend the money...
Is that per capita or total amount? Since the tax rate is the lowest its has ever been since the IRS was formed, I have my doubts about your statement.
Bush got us into two global conflicts consisting of large troop deployments, large expenditures on tactical support, AND large amounts of money going to infrastructure in the name of "nation building". During which the Bush administration lower the tax rate on a (*cough* *cough*) temporary basis which is unprecedented in US history. Normally we would sell bonds earmarked for the cause or raise taxes to pay for the war effort.
That my friend is no bullshit.
I'm not a bug fan of Microsoft but I know they never prevented me from installing another browser. It's almost as easy as changing my default search engine. Using a different standard for you platform of choice?
Microsoft has already been checked out. It's Google's turn. You act like Google has something to fear from an FTC investigation. It's not like they been penetrating every market by undercutting competition or offering multi-million dollar deals to browser projects to make them the default browser engine. Relax. I'm sure everything will be fine.
The graphic in the article showed a decrease in the number of accidents where only the duration of the yellow light was extended (less than a third reduction). The reduction was not as dramatic as the intersections where cameras were also being used (more than half reduction).
I can only assume both since they used four intersections with no camera enforcement as a control group. The drop in total number of accidents is more dramatic at the intersections where the cameras were being used than the ones where only the yellow light time was extended.
I wear a tux after work. Why? We're not animals!
This is why they compared four intersections with camera enforcements against four intersections without camera enforcements. I assume the same type of vehicles were driven at all the intersections studied and as such would account for any improvements in safety being added to the vehicles themselves.
I didn't see the caption in the table. Why they didn't expound on this in the article text is beyond me, except maybe to introduce some bias for the revenue generating argument which the author gave better coverage. Sorry for the confusion.
The table used in the article showed four intersections with camera enforcements and four intersections that only used the longer yellow light (no camera enforcements). The four intersections where no camera enforcements were being performed was selected as a control group. This information only appears in the caption of the graphic not within the article itself.
The number of injuries at the intersection prior to camera enforcements is 28 and after is 9. Total number of accidents prior is 118 and after is 53 (total accidents dropped by more than half).
The number of injuries at the intersection where only the yellow light was extended (no camera enforcement) prior to the study is 25 and after is 9. Total number of accidents prior is 85 and after is 60 (total accidents only dropped by less than a third).
On the surface the number of injuries appears to remain the same. However the reduction on the total number of accidents is more dramatic for the intersections where camera enforcement was in place. This is why the conclusion is as stated above "that extending the yellow light and fining people who run the red lights greatly reduced injuries and accidents".
The article states that extending the yellow light and fining people who run the red lights greatly reduced injuries and accidents. There is no mention of only extending the yellow lights. While the placement of the cameras are random, the threat of getting caught is always present at these intersections.
Extending the yellow light without the threat of camera enforcement would only deter the drivers who already have good driving habits. The people who have bad driving habits would more likely take advantage of the longer yellow light and we'd see an uptick in the number of people "racing the yellow light". The "bad" drivers outnumber the "good" drivers and accounts for the increase in front-to-rear collisions due to the fact that they don't practice keeping a safe stopping distance between themselves and the car in front of them.
These are the same "bad" drivers who complain about the automatic enforcement done by cameras because they were lucky enough to not cause an accident therefore they feel like they are being unfairly penalized for running a light (e.g. No harm came from me running the light, so why should I be fined?). Another form of this argument is the "we need to ticket people who cause accidents at intersections" which literally means "no accident = no foul". I would argue that if you don't like being fined by the camera enforcement then try not to run the stop lights.
Quite simply the controversy reported in the article is over people complaining about the fines. The "good" drivers would not run the red light so they aren't likely the ones complaining. As for the $700,000 annually being spent, the program is paying for itself and is cheaper than hiring policemen to enforce the traffic laws 24/7 at these intersections.
The car making the left turn is stopped in the intersection and not colliding with anyone and the cars behind the white line can not enter the intersection once the light turns red. If traffic congestion proves too bad, the traffic engineer can make the green light longer on the side that has the most cars waiting to turn left and add a green arrow.
From the article: City traffic engineer Brian Mitchell said fewer crashes are being recorded at intersections where photo-red-light enforcement has been set up and where yellow-light clearance time has been lengthened.
From the article it appears that the number of injuries at the intersection have actually declined since the introduction of the red-light camera. Front-to-side collisions are down and these are caused by the driver running the red light. These collisions are more dangerous than the front-to-rear collision since the vehicle directly enters the passenger area at a potentially higher speed.
Rear-to-front collisions are caused by the driver tailgating and these in general are due to him not being able to stop in time and the collision are at a much lower speed and do not directly enter the passenger compartment. The data provided in the article reenforces this hypothesis since there were 53 injuries prior to the cameras installation and only 18 afterwards. This is despite the gain of 1 front-to-rear accident.
There is a difference between looking stupid and being stupid. If you don't point out the consequences, how are they suppose to learn?
Following up: After talking to the VEC of one of the top two testing organizations, he explained that the choice is between having a slightly incorrect APRS related question and having no questions relating to APRS on the exam. Since the study materials explain the correct answer as "Automatic Position Reporting System", they don't really think using "Position" instead of "Packet" is that big a deal.
He did point out the origin of this mistake. They used aprs.net as a reference that defines APRS as "Automatic Position Reporting System" instead of the official web page of APRS which is aprs.org that defines it as "Automatic Packet Reporting System". This is one of those cases where a simple mistake and bad fact checking may redefine an acronym.
If you can't make a point without insulting something then your point isn't that good to begin with.
At the very least learn about whatever you are insulting so you don't look stupid and we could take you seriously. I use OS X and Linux and I like my OS X desktop just fine. I don't want widgets on my desktop. The ones I do have are out of my way on the dashboard. I do not use "mission control" and I don't have to. I just click on my Applications icon on my dock as I always have and I continue business as usual. I can press command-spacebar and spotlight will help me find my relevant emails, files, and web pages visited and or googled. I can define "workflows" with applescript that perform some of my repetitive tasks that I do on a daily basis. Workspaces is nice to organize my windows. This desktop does what it is suppose to do and that is to stay out of my way.
I don't know why people obsess so much about the desktop. I spent more time in my editor and ssh terminal than I ever do on my desktop. Geez you'd think we have better topics for a fanboy war.
Anyway on the topic at hand which is "KDE is just a windows ripoff". I have to agree that KDE does its best to emulate the Windows experience on Linux (warts and all). However the real question is this a bad thing? I don't think so, since I'm not forced to use KDE if I don't like it.
I passed the information on to the current VEC. Maybe it will be corrected in the next question pool.
Hmm. Typical. I'll see who I need to contact to have this corrected.
Actually some do leave their day job. As for large amounts of income... what's your definition of large?
Face it. We disagree.
Sorry but the correct name is "Automatic Packet Reporting System". Position information is available in the protocol but not its purpose. In fact, when APRS was young and GPS was still expensive the position information was only a rough estimate of the origination station's location.
Anyway APRS was designed to send short messages efficiently and is used for tactical information (eg. weather stations, shelter populations, balloon tracking, you name it). What made it special was that when a packet terminal (a smart radio modem) received this short packet it would simply decrement the time to live field and blindly retransmit that packet if the terminal wasn't its destination. This allowed the information to be broadcasted throughout the area without usual overhead associated with AX.25. Since an area with a lot of APRS stations would be repeating this packet, delivery of the message was pretty much guaranteed. This is why it's called "Automatic Packet Reporting System".
I'm sure Bob Bruninga would agree with me (he created it).
Congratulations and thanks for being part of the amateur radio service. BTW, I am also an extra class ham radio operator and been one for a couple of decades. I remember when we started using APRS in ARES operations (a very long time ago) at Bob's suggestion during a regional hamfest and the rest is history...
73
Correct. The old "Garbage in = Garbage out". You have to pay for good content, and writers deserve to eat too.
I'm not concerned with the New York Times. I'm concerned about the fledgling writers who operate their own blog and have no capital or experience to handle advertising on their own.
The problem with your comments:
Is that you have an implicit assumption that we pick and choose which websites we will allow advertising when we use a program to block advertisements. You can't have this assumption while advocating the total blocking of advertisements nor while punishing all websites for the abuses done by a few.
I think you confused the cost of creating content with the cost of distributing it. I think the cost of creation is much greater than the cost of current distribution methods, so I don't know what problem you are trying to solve here.
The first amendment with emphasis on the relevant part:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I believe the interpretation of this amendment is that we have the right to criticize our government no matter if it is vocal, written, or in the form of a peaceful protest. I don't think the writers of the constitution had ex-girlfriends in mind when they wrote this.
I disagree. I think it's best to have to manually enable "total block". If the ads that are white-listed by default aren't bothering the user then the user won't feel compelled to block all ads and the free content that the user enjoys will have some financial support. However if the user is adamant about not seeing any ads or the ads are still to bothersome too the user, they can click on the "total block" option.
If it was "total blocked" by default a very small percentage of the users (if any) will feel compelled to allow white-listed advertisements. While you may feel that this is ideal, the people who work on those free websites depend on the advertisement revenue to stay free and indiscriminately blocking all advertisement will cause the good quality websites to either shutdown or go paywall. This would cause a larger number of low quality web sites to show up on google searches, since they don't put much effort in the content anyway and they make their revenue by gaming the SOE to lure people who don't block the advertisements.
I know there is a huge uproar when a web site decides to go paywall to pay the bills. Now it seems there is a huge uproar over allowing white-listed advertisers to bypass Adblock. These web sites can not exist as a charity, so we must decide which is the best way to support them.
Just imagine how much faster your surfing speed will be with no free ad-supported websites to browse.