I'm glad there's going to be a hearing (re: Maricopa) but I believe that everyone there will simply be clarified on the spirit of that law, which is to give the County a means to unilaterally sever a contract IF THEY WANT TO, and establishes some reasonsble grounds to do so, probably limited by what's appropriate to the State constitution.
I don't read the statute as a binding mandate on the county to stop doing business with a contractor, but rather, as an escape valve that they may exercise if they so choose.
I suspect that everybody who shows up Monday will be told as much, if the matter is even addressed. I'll try to be there...
>defending those people for firing the guns, for >whatever reason
Their rights and traditions don't trump common sense. I didn't see any of the replies before yours, because they were all below my threshold.
>Yet if some group did that in the US
More to the point, anybody civilian shooting an *automatic* weapon in the US, or even just HAVING one, is going to get a whole lot of the wrong kind of attention. You want to be shot on sight? Walk down a street in DC with an AK47.
>And don't gripe about it being illegal, I'm sure >you can find at least one out of the way place >where it is legal.
I know lots of places where it's legal to shoot provided your firearm itself is legal.
We're not talking about.22's or 30-0-6's here, or even 12ga. shotguns. We're talking about infantry rifles with 7.62mm ammo. They aren't using blanks, even if there were blanks available, they'd cost more.
If the USAF and the Marines and the UN are in your country fighting a conflict, you might want to keep your guns under control. That's the bottom line here.
*BUT* there is a general state of war and civil unrest in the country. As a direct consequence of that, it becomes unreasonable to engage in certain customary actions.
Case in point, fireworks in Arizona on the 4th of July. It's traditional, but expect to be arrested for burning them... Or lynched if certain very angry people get to you before the law enforcement folks do.
Just because it's traditional to shoot guns in the air does not make it right. And an accident like the wedding party attack is exactly what happens when you ignore common sense and discretion given extenuating circumstances!
If you knew a room was filled with gas, would you turn on the light switch to check?
>Why should they expect this? What they were >doing is a traditional wedding salute in their >culture
Of course they were. But the CURRENT SITUATION in their country demands greater care and discretion than they exhibited.
A traditional 4th of July celebration in MY culture involves fireworks. But where I live (Arizona) fireworks are highly discouraged this year. I'd be a damned fool to go shooting fireworks. I'd expect to get arrested. I'd run the risk of being killed by vigilantes in some places!
I'm not "writing it off as a wartime neccessity". I'm merely tempering my surprise. I'm not at all surprised. And I still think you'd have to be an idiot to behave that way at this moment, considering the overall situation in that country.
If you go shooting off guns where combatants can be spooked, you'd be a damned fool not to realize there could be severe consequences.
Acting all shocked isn't going to help anyone but news publishers.
Too many posts basically tell the OP not to go to college! There's no doubt some truth to that. The school part of the experience is not, as you may naievely surmise, to "be taught", rather to provide the opportunity to teach yourself (ostensibly with guidance and supervision), then be tested.
The goal of the university experience is part education for its own sake, and part quest for a framable document! Myriad problems arise when an individual seeks one part without the others!
My university catalog actually says you'll not be admitted if you have more than 15 hours without a degree plan. (I think that's pretty harsh).
Community colleges don't do this, but once you get a degree from one, it's somewhat a waste of effort to keep studying there.
I have a certain amount of contempt for the whole system, which was put there BY the system (been to 5 colleges!) So excuse my hostility today;-)
Apologies if you're beyond this, but it is EXCELLENT if you're thinking of going to a college level algebra class. Takes a few weeks to work through. You'll be ready for intermediate algebra or precalc when done.
I wonder if you have education versus career reversed?
I mean, I can think of very few professional degree programs that even get into multivar calculus. At my university, that's quite an optional endeavor for anyone but math majors!
Lots of science majors take calculus, but it's brief calculus.
Now, I'm in something like the same boat as the original poster. I was good with language, never with math. I failed every math endeavor I attempted, scraping through college on a liberal arts degree by barely passing the algebra requirement. That was then. At the age of 35, I discovered a new interest in learning math for its own sake, and am now doing a part-time program at a university majoring in math!
If I had to do this for "career" reasons, I'd not be able to. It's only because it's education for its own sake that I can even face it. I'm hoping to retire as a math professor someday. I don't want to teach NOW, but as a gray, when the business world doesn't suit me anymore, hopefully I can still work as an educator!
The wedding party participants were shooting guns. To me, the plain stupidity of that almost justifies the end. The only reason I say "almost" is that the consequences fell on small children who would have had no means to stop the idiots who were shooting their guns in the air. And the only thing that makes this any different in my opinion that it happened in Afghanistan, and not Garland Texas or Peoria AZ, is that people in Afghanistan should expect consequences for shooting off guns! They should expect that men with superior firepower have their ears on and will respond to gunshots with bigger gunshots. This isn't a placid suburban community we're talking about, it's AFGHANISTAN. I would not expect to live long just holding a rifle there, much less shooting it off like I'm pancho villa celebrating a wedding.
A mortal shell is a fitting end for a lunatic who thinks it's okay to shoot off his gun indiscriminately into the air.
Now, as to the girl in Utah. There is one dark perspective to the journalistic value of the story: reporters are secretly hoping the girl is dead, was killed by a relative, etc. They're paying attention to this case and not to others because this case has a better chance of not having a happy ending. When it starts to look like the milwaukee girl is going to turn up dead, the press will feast on that story too. Don't you get that Jon? You don't WANT the poor girl in Milwaukee to be elevated to that kind of media status, because it will probably mean she's dead.
Also it's closer to 18 *thousand* worldcom employees (you said 1800 codeguru); that does not even take into account the money lost to *lots* of small players (people, small service companies, equipment vendors, etc.) that had contracts with worldcom affiliates. Let's don't even talk about the exposure of certain banks yet.
I'll personally kick the ass of anyone I see shooting off their gun, thinking the bullets don't come down hard. Do that in a battlefield, and expect you and everyone around you to have a very short life.
>Speed limits were posted (not previously needed >for horse and buggy carriages).
I'm not going to look up a cite for you, but I can assure you that speed limits did exist for ridden horses as well as for carriages in many urban areas, long before the inception of the automobile.
Obviously the "speed limit" was a subjective measure, but accidents due to unsafe equestrian locomotion were quite common.
This does not detract from your post at all, I realize, but I think it's important to get a perspective. Urban crowding and transportation issues did not begin with the horse and buggy.
If you really feel like researching this, one place to start would be Pittsburgh, which I know for certain had a speed limit in the horse-and-buggy days. It would not surprise me at all to find documented cases of people getting in trouble for "dui" in the 19th century.
Another, probably even older example is from the biography of one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. For the life of me I can't remember which one. But it appears he was something of a scofflaw, there being a known citation for his habit of driving the carriage at full tilt!
As a side note, there is a frequently vectored story about the signers and the greif they withstood... but most of that is myth...
Nonsense. You can choose not to use Microsoft software. You can choose not to use a device that runs Microsoft software. You can choose not to have a computer at all.
You CAN "just say no."
You choose to, or your employer chooses for you, but nobody has literally held a gun to your head and said "accept this". Unless you are in a prison labor program, or have had a court order to do some specific task... Until they reinstate the draft, I can't think of any other situation where running Microsoft software isn't optional.
>Show of hands: How many Slashdotters remember >seeing that first Pong game?
I remember well. I was already a pinball junkie. There was a restaurant in Dallas that had a vintage arcade, which included a cardfall nickelodoeon featuring "Married Bliss", a marble maze contraption, various old fortune-telling/strength machines, a clawhook prize game, and so on. One day they installed the first Pong game in Dallas, sometime during the Nixon administration... The fact that it was a quarter for each player was something of a showstopper for us.
Very soon afterwards, it became necessary for the "haves" to have a home pong set. Being one of the "have not's" I had to settle for a *mechanical* pong clone, which actually turned out to be quite cool in and of itself.
The fad died out, and several years later I became the first person in my sphere of influence to have a home computer, in 1978, and was pretty much the only one around me to be into such things for the longest time. Well into the 80's.
Re:He thinks the problem is spam
on
Mapping the Spam
·
· Score: 3, Funny
"I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."
Truly spoken by someone who has never seen a sexchart.
Re:Leftist Propaganda **SPOILERS**
on
Minority Report
·
· Score: 2
>Also, if you think the American public would be >cool with prisoners being plugged into the >Matrix and sealed off, you're a moron.
Wouldn't dissenters (and morons) be the first ones to disappear?
>I've always been curious: Who pays these costs, >and even more important... how do I get to be >one of the ones collecting all these billions >every year?
Until and unless someone has the guts to claim these losses against Federal taxes, I'm going to consider them without merit.
> When was the last time you heard anyone ask if > the diagnostic computer code was available?
That one example might sound silly, but when you're negotiating with a car dealer, it's questions like this that give you power! They can't answer these questions, they either don't know the answer (and don't even know how to make one up!) or they are expressly forbidden from answering. That gives you all kinds of power over them! They are prepared for you to ask specific types of questions for which they have rehearsed answers. They operate under a principle that influences your reaction to what they say and do. If you can throw them off their program, you have the opportunity to negotiate in ways that you do not have when they are in control. So, think creatively; think of things they haven't been asked 30 times today. Then make sure they understand that the answers are influencing you to walk away without signing a loan paper...
>From all the installations of Linux I've >experirienced, with a little bit of >configuration it will run on anything.
There is plenty of hardware out there that won't work under Linux with any amount of "configuration."
For most of this stuff, there are people ready and willing to create drivers but the specs are not available to them.
Even some IBM Thinkpads are part of the problem, with their MWave devices, etc. I imagine they got themselves into an untenable position in the support department by claiming to embrace linux and then shipping machines that will *never* work under linux.
We don't really need IBM to expressly support Linux, we just need them to refrain from using components like winmodems, sound, video, and bus drivers that don't have open specs (and consequently have no linux serviceability).
To me, better than "supported Linux" would be a laptop that actually has all of its components in a workable state.
If I found out that Thinkpads have winmodems or other components for which drivers do not exist on any system other than windows, I will go with the theory that IBM is giving up in frustration at the support nightmare that ensues when Linux is installed on such a beast.
I would really like to see a compatability list of all the notebooks on the market. Do any of them have complete hardware compatability with linux?
> Someone else has solved the problem, but >they've got a patent on using the material that >they use, so he's got to find a different one >that works almost as well or better.
Has he even considered licensing the material?
How long until the patent expires? Will it take longer than that to develop the product anyway?
>Magazines and TV have to clearly label >advertisements as such. Are there no such laws >for radio?
No, and where do you get the idea that there are such laws for print and TV? Except for laws covering political campaign ads, I don't believe there are any.
Does the cast of Friends point out that they are advertising for Pottery Barn? Does some kind of disclaimer pop up before a commercial break? Does your magazine ad have words to the effect that you are looking at an ad?
What laws do you think would govern this type of stuff, and how do you think they would get passed without significant noise from free speech advocates? (Advertising execs would suddenly BECOME free speech advocates if lawmakers made a move in this direction.)
The distinction between content and advertising is only a superficial one. It certainly is not a legislated one. Not in a free country anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
>What "features" are you talking about?
I know enough people who'd say, just the running commentary is a big enough feature to make the format attractive.
You fell for the joke in Office Space?
I'm glad there's going to be a hearing (re: Maricopa) but I believe that everyone there will simply be clarified on the spirit of that law, which is to give the County a means to unilaterally sever a contract IF THEY WANT TO, and establishes some reasonsble grounds to do so, probably limited by what's appropriate to the State constitution.
I don't read the statute as a binding mandate on the county to stop doing business with a contractor, but rather, as an escape valve that they may exercise if they so choose.
I suspect that everybody who shows up Monday will be told as much, if the matter is even addressed. I'll try to be there...
>defending those people for firing the guns, for
.22's or 30-0-6's here,
>whatever reason
Their rights and traditions don't trump common sense. I didn't see any of the replies before yours, because they were all below my threshold.
>Yet if some group did that in the US
More to the point, anybody civilian shooting an *automatic* weapon in the US, or even just HAVING one, is going to get a whole lot of the wrong kind of attention. You want to be shot on sight? Walk down a street in DC with an AK47.
>And don't gripe about it being illegal, I'm sure
>you can find at least one out of the way place
>where it is legal.
I know lots of places where it's legal to shoot provided your firearm itself is legal.
We're not talking about
or even 12ga. shotguns. We're talking about infantry rifles with 7.62mm ammo. They aren't using blanks, even if there were blanks available, they'd cost more.
If the USAF and the Marines and the UN are in your country fighting a conflict, you might want
to keep your guns under control. That's the bottom line here.
Custom, yes.
*BUT* there is a general state of war and civil unrest in the country. As a direct consequence of that, it becomes unreasonable to engage in certain customary actions.
Case in point, fireworks in Arizona on the 4th of July. It's traditional, but expect to be arrested for burning them... Or lynched if certain very angry people get to you before the law enforcement folks do.
Just because it's traditional to shoot guns in the air does not make it right. And an accident like the wedding party attack is exactly what happens when you ignore common sense and discretion given extenuating circumstances!
If you knew a room was filled with gas, would you turn on the light switch to check?
>Why should they expect this? What they were
>doing is a traditional wedding salute in their
>culture
Of course they were. But the CURRENT SITUATION in their country demands greater care and discretion than they exhibited.
A traditional 4th of July celebration in MY culture involves fireworks. But where I live (Arizona) fireworks are highly discouraged this year. I'd be a damned fool to go shooting fireworks. I'd expect to get arrested. I'd run the risk of being killed by vigilantes in some places!
I don't see this as one bit different.
I'm not "writing it off as a wartime neccessity".
I'm merely tempering my surprise. I'm not at all surprised. And I still think you'd have to be an idiot to behave that way at this moment, considering the overall situation in that country.
If you go shooting off guns where combatants can be spooked, you'd be a damned fool not to realize there could be severe consequences.
Acting all shocked isn't going to help anyone but news publishers.
Too many posts basically tell the OP not
;-)
to go to college! There's no doubt some truth to that. The school part of the experience is not,
as you may naievely surmise, to "be taught", rather to provide the opportunity to teach yourself (ostensibly with guidance and supervision), then be tested.
The goal of the university experience is part education for its own sake, and part quest for a framable document! Myriad problems arise when an individual seeks one part without the others!
My university catalog actually says you'll not be admitted if you have more than 15 hours without a degree plan. (I think that's pretty harsh).
Community colleges don't do this, but once you get a degree from one, it's somewhat a waste of effort to keep studying there.
I have a certain amount of contempt for the whole system, which was put there BY the system (been to 5 colleges!) So excuse my hostility today
Forgotten Algebra
Barron's
0812019432
Apologies if you're beyond this, but it is EXCELLENT if you're thinking of going to a
college level algebra class. Takes a few weeks
to work through. You'll be ready for intermediate
algebra or precalc when done.
I wonder if you have education versus career reversed?
I mean, I can think of very few professional degree programs that even get into multivar calculus. At my university, that's quite an optional endeavor for anyone but math majors!
Lots of science majors take calculus, but it's brief calculus.
Now, I'm in something like the same boat as the original poster. I was good with language, never with math. I failed every math endeavor I attempted, scraping through college on a liberal arts degree by barely passing the algebra requirement. That was then. At the age of 35, I discovered a new interest in learning math for its own sake, and am now doing a part-time program at a university majoring in math!
If I had to do this for "career" reasons, I'd not be able to. It's only because it's education for its own sake that I can even face it. I'm hoping to retire as a math professor someday. I don't want to teach NOW, but as a gray, when the business world doesn't suit me anymore, hopefully I can still work as an educator!
The wedding party participants were shooting guns.
To me, the plain stupidity of that almost justifies the end. The only reason I say "almost" is that the consequences fell on small children who would have had no means to stop the idiots who were shooting their guns in the air. And the only thing that makes this any different in my opinion that it happened in Afghanistan, and not Garland Texas or Peoria AZ,
is that people in Afghanistan should expect consequences for shooting off guns! They should
expect that men with superior firepower have their ears on and will respond to gunshots with bigger gunshots. This isn't a placid suburban community we're talking about, it's AFGHANISTAN. I would not expect to live long just holding a rifle there, much less shooting it off like I'm pancho villa celebrating a wedding.
A mortal shell is a fitting end for a lunatic who thinks it's okay to shoot off his gun indiscriminately into the air.
Now, as to the girl in Utah. There is one dark perspective to the journalistic value of the story: reporters are secretly hoping the girl is dead, was killed by a relative, etc. They're paying attention to this case and not to others because this case has a better chance of not having a happy ending. When it starts to look like the milwaukee girl is going to turn up dead, the press will feast on that story too. Don't you get that Jon? You don't WANT the poor girl in Milwaukee to be elevated to that kind of media status, because it will probably mean she's dead.
Also it's closer to 18 *thousand* worldcom employees (you said 1800 codeguru); that does not even take into account the money lost to *lots* of small players (people, small service companies, equipment vendors, etc.) that had contracts with worldcom affiliates. Let's don't even talk about the exposure of certain banks yet.
I'll personally kick the ass of anyone I see shooting off their gun, thinking the bullets don't come down hard. Do that in a battlefield, and expect you and everyone around you to have a very short life.
>Speed limits were posted (not previously needed
>for horse and buggy carriages).
I'm not going to look up a cite for you, but I can assure you that speed limits did exist for ridden horses as well as for carriages in many urban areas, long before the inception of the automobile.
Obviously the "speed limit" was a subjective measure, but accidents due to unsafe equestrian locomotion were quite common.
This does not detract from your post at all, I realize, but I think it's important to get a perspective. Urban crowding and transportation issues did not begin with the horse and buggy.
If you really feel like researching this, one place to start would be Pittsburgh, which I know for certain had a speed limit in the horse-and-buggy days. It would not surprise me at all to find documented cases of people getting in trouble for "dui" in the 19th century.
Another, probably even older example is from the biography of one of the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. For the life of me I can't remember which one. But it appears he was something of a scofflaw, there being a known citation for his habit of driving the carriage at full tilt!
As a side note, there is a frequently vectored story about the signers and the greif they withstood... but most of that is myth...
>use login with key instead of passwords
This is harder than it should be, to convince semitechnical people that it is more secure, or secure at all.
It's very, very hard for some people to get their brain around key-based authentication, or the concept that a password scheme could be weaker.
>You can't "just say no."
Nonsense. You can choose not to use Microsoft software. You can choose not to use a device that runs Microsoft software. You can choose not to have a computer at all.
You CAN "just say no."
You choose to, or your employer chooses for you, but nobody has literally held a gun to your head and said "accept this". Unless you are in a prison labor program, or have had a court order to do some specific task... Until they reinstate the draft, I can't think of any other situation where running Microsoft software isn't optional.
>Show of hands: How many Slashdotters remember
>seeing that first Pong game?
I remember well. I was already a pinball junkie.
There was a restaurant in Dallas that had a vintage arcade, which included a cardfall nickelodoeon featuring "Married Bliss", a marble maze contraption, various old fortune-telling/strength machines, a clawhook prize game, and so on. One day they installed the first Pong game in Dallas, sometime during the Nixon administration... The fact that it was a quarter for each player was something of a showstopper for us.
Very soon afterwards, it became necessary for the "haves" to have a home pong set. Being one of the "have not's" I had to settle for a *mechanical* pong clone, which actually turned out to be quite cool in and of itself.
The fad died out, and several years later I became the first person in my sphere of influence
to have a home computer, in 1978, and was pretty much the only one around me to be into such things for the longest time. Well into the 80's.
"I can't imagine how hard it was to put this together, it looks like a giant circuit design layout, but shows just how big and interwoven the spam problem is."
Truly spoken by someone who has never seen a sexchart.
>Also, if you think the American public would be
>cool with prisoners being plugged into the
>Matrix and sealed off, you're a moron.
Wouldn't dissenters (and morons) be the first ones to disappear?
>I've always been curious: Who pays these costs,
>and even more important... how do I get to be
>one of the ones collecting all these billions
>every year?
Until and unless someone has the guts to claim these losses against Federal taxes, I'm going to
consider them without merit.
I won't set foot in a new car dealer!
Also, you don't want them to feel foolish, just hungry!
> When was the last time you heard anyone ask if
> the diagnostic computer code was available?
That one example might sound silly, but when you're negotiating with a car dealer, it's questions like this that give you power! They
can't answer these questions, they either don't know the answer (and don't even know how to make one up!) or they are expressly forbidden from answering. That gives you all kinds of power over them! They are prepared for you to ask specific types of questions for which they have rehearsed answers. They operate under a principle that influences your reaction to what they say and do. If you can throw them off their program, you have the opportunity to negotiate in ways that you do not have when they are in control. So, think creatively; think of things they haven't been asked 30 times today. Then make sure they understand that the answers are influencing you to walk away without signing a loan paper...
I wish this clown could receive a scathing letter from a person who grew up in such a little town, and became a successful automotive engineer.
It would be even better if that person was an ethnic minority, and if he or she had gone on to be an executive in the automotive industry.
It would be even BETTER if that person were in a position to execute the walking papers of the moron who said that crap in the parent post.
>From all the installations of Linux I've
>experirienced, with a little bit of
>configuration it will run on anything.
There is plenty of hardware out there that won't
work under Linux with any amount of "configuration."
For most of this stuff, there are people ready and willing to create drivers but the specs are not available to them.
Even some IBM Thinkpads are part of the problem, with their MWave devices, etc. I imagine they got themselves into an untenable position in the support department by claiming to embrace linux and then shipping machines that will *never* work under linux.
We don't really need IBM to expressly support Linux, we just need them to refrain from using components like winmodems, sound, video, and bus drivers that don't have open specs (and consequently have no linux serviceability).
To me, better than "supported Linux" would be a laptop that actually has all of its components in a workable state.
If I found out that Thinkpads have winmodems or other components for which drivers do not exist on any system other than windows, I will go with the theory that IBM is giving up in frustration at the support nightmare that ensues when Linux is installed on such a beast.
I would really like to see a compatability list of all the notebooks on the market. Do any of them have complete hardware compatability with linux?
> Someone else has solved the problem, but
>they've got a patent on using the material that
>they use, so he's got to find a different one >that works almost as well or better.
Has he even considered licensing the material?
How long until the patent expires? Will it take longer than that to develop the product anyway?
>Magazines and TV have to clearly label
>advertisements as such. Are there no such laws
>for radio?
No, and where do you get the idea that there are such laws for print and TV? Except for laws covering political campaign ads, I don't believe there are any.
Does the cast of Friends point out that they are advertising for Pottery Barn? Does some kind of disclaimer pop up before a commercial break? Does your magazine ad have words to the effect that you are looking at an ad?
What laws do you think would govern this type of stuff, and how do you think they would get passed without significant noise from free speech advocates? (Advertising execs would suddenly BECOME free speech advocates if lawmakers made a move in this direction.)
The distinction between content and advertising is only a superficial one. It certainly is not a legislated one. Not in a free country anyway.
Did anybody else read that headline as
some sort of gaming in prison?