You should already be aware that most of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights has already been undermined, so I don't know how you'd be surprised that a few other words have been ignored. They have become a historic relic, not a guide to the modern legal system.
I'm going to treat them as if they have entered the public domain.
I can't see why one wouldn't. Unless you want to be known as a sucker. Time for a major reboot of the ruling class. Legally, of course, like how the Articles of Confederation were disposed of in the US.
Put a small heater in the traffic signal that turns on below 0C (32F).
Or better yet, wire the heater to one of these and have someone drive around and turn them on when it snows.
Either way, if the municipalities don't solve the problem, they will get sued. How much does that cost?
'We can remove the snow with heat, but the cost of doing that in terms of energy use has not brought any enthusiasm from cities and states that buy these signals,' said the CEO of an LED traffic-signal manufacturer.
Ya, but you wouldn't need any more energy than the incandescent light used in the first place -- maybe not even as much if you get real sophisticated with a thermostat. And you'd use it less than the lamp, since in most climates it's only freezing part of the year. So you'd still get savings, just not as much as you'd first hoped. Perhaps fewer accidents would be sufficient consolation to everyone but local body shops.
Unless the driver was saying "you know, I couldn't make out the shape at all.. it just looked like -a- green light, and that was good enough for me", of course.
Diffusion, I guess. Snow both attenuates and scatters light.
I really hate the 4-way stop in the USA. In Europe there is no such thing as a 4-way stop, you have 2 stop signs in one direction and 2 yield signs in the other direction.
If 4 cars (or 2 or 3 for that matter) come to the intersection at the same time, who goes first? Unless you have a very precise clock you can't really figure out who goes first. The rules get really complicated at that point, you have to give priority to the right (2 cars), you have to give priority to the direction with the most cars (3 cars) or use hand signs and other forms of communication (4 cars).
Firstly, if two drivers approach from opposite directions controlled by the stop signs, you're still back to the "who goes first?" case.
In the second place, a "yield" sign in the higher priority direction sounds misleading. Yield to whom? The cars with the stop signs? Aren't they supposed to be waiting for you to pass? In the US, a yield sign is the equivalent of a stop sign, except you are not required to come to a complete stop before proceeding if the way is clear. Does "yield" just mean "watch out" in Europe?
Lastly, what if both directions are pretty much equal in terms of traffic? How do traffic engineers determine who is blessed with the yields?
And third, US four-way stop rules are not as complicated as you suggest. If two cars arrive at about the same time, the rightmost driver has right of way. If traffic is coming from all directions, you alternate: right-of-way goes to the next driver on the left after each car goes. You may have witnessed people making it harder than necessary -- we've got idiots here too -- but it's not as difficult as you thought it was.
That's why I think things like right or left turn indicators should not be solid lights, but flashing indicators instead. They should also be in yellow and not in green. In addition, they should be located up next to the red light (left of the light for left-turn indicators, right of the light for right-turn indicators) and not down at the bottom where they can be mistaken for a green. That way, it's VERY clear they are (a) not a full-on green light, (b) clearly an exception to the still-lit red light, and (c) intuitive for people who are color blind (blinking light to the left of a solid means left turns only are allowed, etc).
We could also use the blinking lights patterns to convey extra information to drivers, like road and traffic conditions ahead, speed limits and the like. Imagine the possibilities.
Can you find anyone who was recommending against these bulbs before they were installed, or as they say, is hindsight 20/20? I wouldn't be surprised if nobody actually knew that the lightbulbs were why snow didn't stick to the streetlights, since that's the way they've always been (maybe there had been tests run with florescent bulbs previous to the LED bulbs?).
Agreed. I really doubt the problem was foreseen by anyone. How many people, traffic engineers included, wondered why stop lights weren't obscured with snow? It's the dog that didn't bark. And who wouldn't want to save some electricity cost on the city's bill, and the extra labor and traffic tie-ups needed to more frequently replace incandescent lamps? Lower costs mean lower taxes, and/or more resources for dealing with other problems, of which most cities have no shortage.
If ANY of the lights are covered, be there 3, 4, or more, you can't assume the lights are correctly indicating what to do. That means *STOP*, and go only when it is safe to do so.
And if the conditions are so bad that you can't tell whether any of the lights are covered or not, you should be slowing down sufficiently that you DO have the time to assess the status of the lights.
Except if your lights aren't covered, you're not gonna know that someone else's is. Traffic lights are intentionally positioned and aimed so you can't see the other directions (for obvious reasons). You might not even know that weather was bad enough to warrant the extra caution: streets are clear and dry but blowing snow is still blanketing lights in other directions. The people who know their lights are obscured are being extra cautious at the intersection, treating it like a stop sign. But that's no guarantee the cross traffic is slowing down to make your life easier.
WTF, man? Do I go around tweetering people about their spelling, bad grammar, shallowness and banality? Are you sure you're reading/posting in the right place?
Good point. I would have to see the uniforms before passing judgment. Without further information, I would say that in general, uniforms marginalize individuals and make them feel like a smaller cog in the machine.
The old joke goes:
Q: How do you tell if you are upper, middle or lower class?
A: When you go to work, if you have your name on your uniform, you're lower class; on a cubicle, middle class; or on the building, upper class.
Sounds like they're putting the help desk guys "in their place". An embroidered name badge would seal the deal.
So there should be no privacy at all in any kind of legally binding arrangement?
Why argue such a ridiculous extreme? Why not say "so all weasels should be strangled?" or something equally unrelated.
As long as both parties wish to keep the agreement private, fine. Else, no. You can't hardly keep it a secret if you want to enforce it when your partner won't fulfill his end, now can you? Gonna take a labor agreement to the NSA Star Chamber Court? Tell 'em it's "National Security"?
If "x is wrong, but isn't as wrong as y" doesn't qualify as moral relativism, I'm not sure what would, precisely.
I don't think that term means what you think it means. It's not saying that, morally speaking, X is "relatively" worse than Y. It's more along the lines of saying that there isn't an absolute morality. For instance, Person A might disagree with Person B as to whether action X is moral or not: it's not Person A's "relative" judgment about X vs. Y. There's a Wikipedia entry on Moral Relativism.
A good manager has godlike omnipotent powers to handle all externalities and all incidents and occurences of Murphy's Law etc.....
Unplanned overtime happens because sometimes, sh*t happens, even in the best run organization. The best manager is still not responsible or able to control what sales promised the customer nor what legal said were restrictions on the code, nor the schedule changes the customer asked for.
Unfortunately, shit is always happening to a lot of managers and their teams. Therefore, there is always a crisis. I think the point was that a good manager will catch on to the fact that sales is always over-promising, legal is always adding restrictions, customers are always asking for changes. One doesn't have to be godlike to know that some or all of these things will always come up and plan accordingly.
Suppose you drive to work. And suppose for some reason it's important to be there at a particular time. Almost every day there is some kind of traffic problem. One day it's construction, another day it's an accident. Still another, a traffic light malfunctioned, a snowstorm, a plague of locusts.. And some lucky days everything goes right. On those days, you're on time for work. The rest of the days you are late through no fault of your own.
Seeing as the Bible was put together by the Pope about 1600 years ago, it's really contradictory to suggest that the Bible can have more authority than the Pope.
I'm pretty sure you'd get a completely different (and totally circular answer) if you suggested that to a Southern Baptist.
But I can just imagine myself trying to look up how to deliver a baby on my phone's Internet browser. I wouldn't even get "how to" entered with T9 before I passed out.
I really like the idea of a battery powered lawnmower, as opposed to the electric lawnmower I had as a kid back in the 70s. My parents were foolish enough to think I could use it without running over the cord... boy did I prove them wrong.
Battery powered lawnmowers are certainly more flexible than corded electrics. No running over the cord, no getting wrapped around a tree or lampost like a tetherball.
However, there is a strategy for using the corded mower: The corded mower usually had the pushbar hinged in the middle, and it could be flipped over to push the mower the other direction. The idea was you started out close to the power outlet with the cord loosely coiled on the ground like a rope. Then you start mowing back and forth (as the ox plows) normal to the direction the cord is feeding, flipping the handle at the end of the row and mowing the next row, always pulling the cord behind you as you work away from the power source. Some lawns are more suitable to this approach than others. I cannot figure out why this particular design was abandoned for the fixed handle like you find on a gas mower, the flippy-handled mower was a really great idea. My grandmother mowed her little yard with one of these up until her 90th year.
IMHO, the ultimate in corded electric mower development was a "hovercraft" design. A friend of mine who is a collector of lawnmowers has one of these babies.
And let's not forget that one of them sits near your balls, which means I am willing to pay a little extra to make sure it doesn't leak or explode. I imagine insurance, increased product testing and more regulations all add to the price difference as well.
My lead-acid battery powered mower caught fire. Apparently there was a recall that I didn't know about since it was a hand-me-down. Battery terminals can be shorted together through the blade brake if the PCBs flex too much. And the blade brake is just a long piece of somewhat resistive wire intended to be connected to the motor terminals through a DPDT switch when the battery connection was removed, thus stopping the motor faster than if it had to just spin down. The exciting thing is that this could have happened while the mower was stored in the garage. Much more likely to happen during use, since moving it around is more likely to deform the PCB than just sitting there.
This probably would have been much worse if a lithium battery were shorted out. As it was, I pulled off the cover and broke the circuit, destroying only the blade brake's insulation.
Rights that you would not have if you did not agree to it. You aren't bound to it by downloading the BusyBox source code, but it grants you the right to redistribute that code (or binaries produced from it). You can't on the one hand claim not to agree to the GPL and exercise the rights it grants you on the other.
EULAs, in contrast, do not grant you any rights you did not already have, and so there's nothing to prevent you from simply not agreeing to them.
You can't sell someone software and then turn around and claim it's a license. If you want to negotiate a license, you have to do it beforehand. Once the transaction is complete, there are no backsies.
Again, if you disagree, here's the EULA for this comment:
By reading this comment, you agree to make a $5 donation to the EFF.
Whenever clicking an "I agree" or open a "by breaking this seal" package, I either have somebody else do the clicking and breaking or I cross my fingers. I figure finger-crossing has a more established legal tradition than "if you use this you agree to never sue us for intentional damages" text.
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You should already be aware that most of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights has already been undermined, so I don't know how you'd be surprised that a few other words have been ignored. They have become a historic relic, not a guide to the modern legal system.
"Quaint" is the operative word, I believe.
Any legislator that voted for these retroactive extensions should be arrested.
Fixed that.
US Constitution, Article 1, Section 9, paragraph 3:
"No bill of attainder or ex post facto law shall be passed."
Congress broke the biggest law.
Not to mention making a mockery or the "limited time" phrase in Art. I, Sect. 8.
I'm going to treat them as if they have entered the public domain.
I can't see why one wouldn't. Unless you want to be known as a sucker. Time for a major reboot of the ruling class. Legally, of course, like how the Articles of Confederation were disposed of in the US.
Put a small heater in the traffic signal that turns on below 0C (32F).
Or better yet, wire the heater to one of these and have someone drive around and turn them on when it snows. Either way, if the municipalities don't solve the problem, they will get sued. How much does that cost?
Ooh, or maybe one of these
From the summary:
'We can remove the snow with heat, but the cost of doing that in terms of energy use has not brought any enthusiasm from cities and states that buy these signals,' said the CEO of an LED traffic-signal manufacturer.
Ya, but you wouldn't need any more energy than the incandescent light used in the first place -- maybe not even as much if you get real sophisticated with a thermostat. And you'd use it less than the lamp, since in most climates it's only freezing part of the year. So you'd still get savings, just not as much as you'd first hoped. Perhaps fewer accidents would be sufficient consolation to everyone but local body shops.
Glass? Does this glass differ from the type of glass found on cars because I can assure you that snow sticks to glass.
And glare. Those shades aren't just there to make a fashion statement.
http://www.worldofstock.com/slides/MES2459.jpg ...to make it appear as a circle, exactly?
Unless the driver was saying "you know, I couldn't make out the shape at all.. it just looked like -a- green light, and that was good enough for me", of course.
Diffusion, I guess. Snow both attenuates and scatters light.
I really hate the 4-way stop in the USA. In Europe there is no such thing as a 4-way stop, you have 2 stop signs in one direction and 2 yield signs in the other direction.
If 4 cars (or 2 or 3 for that matter) come to the intersection at the same time, who goes first? Unless you have a very precise clock you can't really figure out who goes first. The rules get really complicated at that point, you have to give priority to the right (2 cars), you have to give priority to the direction with the most cars (3 cars) or use hand signs and other forms of communication (4 cars).
Firstly, if two drivers approach from opposite directions controlled by the stop signs, you're still back to the "who goes first?" case.
In the second place, a "yield" sign in the higher priority direction sounds misleading. Yield to whom? The cars with the stop signs? Aren't they supposed to be waiting for you to pass? In the US, a yield sign is the equivalent of a stop sign, except you are not required to come to a complete stop before proceeding if the way is clear. Does "yield" just mean "watch out" in Europe?
Lastly, what if both directions are pretty much equal in terms of traffic? How do traffic engineers determine who is blessed with the yields?
And third, US four-way stop rules are not as complicated as you suggest. If two cars arrive at about the same time, the rightmost driver has right of way. If traffic is coming from all directions, you alternate: right-of-way goes to the next driver on the left after each car goes. You may have witnessed people making it harder than necessary -- we've got idiots here too -- but it's not as difficult as you thought it was.
That's why I think things like right or left turn indicators should not be solid lights, but flashing indicators instead. They should also be in yellow and not in green. In addition, they should be located up next to the red light (left of the light for left-turn indicators, right of the light for right-turn indicators) and not down at the bottom where they can be mistaken for a green. That way, it's VERY clear they are (a) not a full-on green light, (b) clearly an exception to the still-lit red light, and (c) intuitive for people who are color blind (blinking light to the left of a solid means left turns only are allowed, etc).
We could also use the blinking lights patterns to convey extra information to drivers, like road and traffic conditions ahead, speed limits and the like. Imagine the possibilities.
against the recommendations of professionals.
Can you find anyone who was recommending against these bulbs before they were installed, or as they say, is hindsight 20/20? I wouldn't be surprised if nobody actually knew that the lightbulbs were why snow didn't stick to the streetlights, since that's the way they've always been (maybe there had been tests run with florescent bulbs previous to the LED bulbs?).
Agreed. I really doubt the problem was foreseen by anyone. How many people, traffic engineers included, wondered why stop lights weren't obscured with snow? It's the dog that didn't bark. And who wouldn't want to save some electricity cost on the city's bill, and the extra labor and traffic tie-ups needed to more frequently replace incandescent lamps? Lower costs mean lower taxes, and/or more resources for dealing with other problems, of which most cities have no shortage.
If ANY of the lights are covered, be there 3, 4, or more, you can't assume the lights are correctly indicating what to do. That means *STOP*, and go only when it is safe to do so.
And if the conditions are so bad that you can't tell whether any of the lights are covered or not, you should be slowing down sufficiently that you DO have the time to assess the status of the lights.
Except if your lights aren't covered, you're not gonna know that someone else's is. Traffic lights are intentionally positioned and aimed so you can't see the other directions (for obvious reasons). You might not even know that weather was bad enough to warrant the extra caution: streets are clear and dry but blowing snow is still blanketing lights in other directions. The people who know their lights are obscured are being extra cautious at the intersection, treating it like a stop sign. But that's no guarantee the cross traffic is slowing down to make your life easier.
WTF, man? Do I go around tweetering people about their spelling, bad grammar, shallowness and banality? Are you sure you're reading/posting in the right place?
Good point. I would have to see the uniforms before passing judgment. Without further information, I would say that in general, uniforms marginalize individuals and make them feel like a smaller cog in the machine.
The old joke goes:
Q: How do you tell if you are upper, middle or lower class?
A: When you go to work, if you have your name on your uniform, you're lower class; on a cubicle, middle class; or on the building, upper class.
Sounds like they're putting the help desk guys "in their place". An embroidered name badge would seal the deal.
So there should be no privacy at all in any kind of legally binding arrangement?
Why argue such a ridiculous extreme? Why not say "so all weasels should be strangled?" or something equally unrelated.
As long as both parties wish to keep the agreement private, fine. Else, no. You can't hardly keep it a secret if you want to enforce it when your partner won't fulfill his end, now can you? Gonna take a labor agreement to the NSA Star Chamber Court? Tell 'em it's "National Security"?
Really? If they go to church...Shouldn't their church be supporting/helping them?
No, a person should be doing their own shoplifting, not relying on a church or others to do it for them. Aide-toi. Le Ciel t'aidera.
If "x is wrong, but isn't as wrong as y" doesn't qualify as moral relativism, I'm not sure what would, precisely.
I don't think that term means what you think it means. It's not saying that, morally speaking, X is "relatively" worse than Y. It's more along the lines of saying that there isn't an absolute morality. For instance, Person A might disagree with Person B as to whether action X is moral or not: it's not Person A's "relative" judgment about X vs. Y. There's a Wikipedia entry on Moral Relativism.
A good manager has godlike omnipotent powers to handle all externalities and all incidents and occurences of Murphy's Law etc.....
Unplanned overtime happens because sometimes, sh*t happens, even in the best run organization. The best manager is still not responsible or able to control what sales promised the customer nor what legal said were restrictions on the code, nor the schedule changes the customer asked for.
Unfortunately, shit is always happening to a lot of managers and their teams. Therefore, there is always a crisis. I think the point was that a good manager will catch on to the fact that sales is always over-promising, legal is always adding restrictions, customers are always asking for changes. One doesn't have to be godlike to know that some or all of these things will always come up and plan accordingly.
Suppose you drive to work. And suppose for some reason it's important to be there at a particular time. Almost every day there is some kind of traffic problem. One day it's construction, another day it's an accident. Still another, a traffic light malfunctioned, a snowstorm, a plague of locusts.. And some lucky days everything goes right. On those days, you're on time for work. The rest of the days you are late through no fault of your own.
opps put bbcode instead of html... , well show i am fallible as any other man..LOL Council of Nicaea
Except the Pope, of course.
Seeing as the Bible was put together by the Pope about 1600 years ago, it's really contradictory to suggest that the Bible can have more authority than the Pope.
I'm pretty sure you'd get a completely different (and totally circular answer) if you suggested that to a Southern Baptist.
Heck, man. Just being born guarantees death.
But I can just imagine myself trying to look up how to deliver a baby on my phone's Internet browser. I wouldn't even get "how to" entered with T9 before I passed out.
Wait, if you were home, why would you need mobile internet? Or were there other circumstances keeping you from accessing your home net connection?
Because he did not want to have to Goggle "how to clean afterbirth off of a laptop"...
Can't clean laptop! The goggles, they do nothing!
I really like the idea of a battery powered lawnmower, as opposed to the electric lawnmower I had as a kid back in the 70s. My parents were foolish enough to think I could use it without running over the cord... boy did I prove them wrong.
Battery powered lawnmowers are certainly more flexible than corded electrics. No running over the cord, no getting wrapped around a tree or lampost like a tetherball.
However, there is a strategy for using the corded mower: The corded mower usually had the pushbar hinged in the middle, and it could be flipped over to push the mower the other direction. The idea was you started out close to the power outlet with the cord loosely coiled on the ground like a rope. Then you start mowing back and forth (as the ox plows) normal to the direction the cord is feeding, flipping the handle at the end of the row and mowing the next row, always pulling the cord behind you as you work away from the power source. Some lawns are more suitable to this approach than others. I cannot figure out why this particular design was abandoned for the fixed handle like you find on a gas mower, the flippy-handled mower was a really great idea. My grandmother mowed her little yard with one of these up until her 90th year.
IMHO, the ultimate in corded electric mower development was a "hovercraft" design. A friend of mine who is a collector of lawnmowers has one of these babies.
And let's not forget that one of them sits near your balls, which means I am willing to pay a little extra to make sure it doesn't leak or explode. I imagine insurance, increased product testing and more regulations all add to the price difference as well.
My lead-acid battery powered mower caught fire. Apparently there was a recall that I didn't know about since it was a hand-me-down. Battery terminals can be shorted together through the blade brake if the PCBs flex too much. And the blade brake is just a long piece of somewhat resistive wire intended to be connected to the motor terminals through a DPDT switch when the battery connection was removed, thus stopping the motor faster than if it had to just spin down. The exciting thing is that this could have happened while the mower was stored in the garage. Much more likely to happen during use, since moving it around is more likely to deform the PCB than just sitting there.
This probably would have been much worse if a lithium battery were shorted out. As it was, I pulled off the cover and broke the circuit, destroying only the blade brake's insulation.
How can you steal TV when it comes over the air, for free ?
Maybe you modified the TV to get channels the manufacturer didn't want you to receive, you bad boy.
Rights that you would not have if you did not agree to it. You aren't bound to it by downloading the BusyBox source code, but it grants you the right to redistribute that code (or binaries produced from it). You can't on the one hand claim not to agree to the GPL and exercise the rights it grants you on the other.
EULAs, in contrast, do not grant you any rights you did not already have, and so there's nothing to prevent you from simply not agreeing to them.
You can't sell someone software and then turn around and claim it's a license. If you want to negotiate a license, you have to do it beforehand. Once the transaction is complete, there are no backsies.
Again, if you disagree, here's the EULA for this comment:
By reading this comment, you agree to make a $5 donation to the EFF.
Whenever clicking an "I agree" or open a "by breaking this seal" package, I either have somebody else do the clicking and breaking or I cross my fingers. I figure finger-crossing has a more established legal tradition than "if you use this you agree to never sue us for intentional damages" text.