Just because no charges are filed doesn't mean that the suspects are innocent,
Get a grip on reality for a second, do you not see a pattern YET? Since 911, in the UK alone there have been over 1,000 terrorism-related arrests, only 27 were found guilty and of those only 9 were even muslim. Do you honestly believe that with all of these new rights-what-rights? anti-terror laws that they could not have come up with SOMETHING to charge these people with? And I suppose the $2M the FBI had to pay out was media distortion too?
just because a terrorist suspect lacked the resources to execute his plan doesn't mean that he's perfectly harmless.
Please continue to ignore the adjective "credible" it makes your position so much less about living in fear of the slightest threat.
)The "airplane Imams" you mentioned were deliberately acting suspiciously to get thrown out (reportedly their seating pattern was something that terrorists have used previously
Think about that for a second, use those critical thinking skills. First of all, you learned of that 'fact' from this media you consider to be distorting the truth to reduce the perceived threat, maybe the media buys into the society of fear that you buy into, it is certainly in their best interest because fear sells. Second, have you seen any correlation of these claims? What terrorists have used that seating arrangement before? The media has claimed it was the 911 guys, but once you dig further you realize that sitting by the exit doors is absolutely useless from a tactical perspective because, despite tv and movies, it is impossible to open an emergency exit door while in flight, thus making those seats no more tactically useful than any other, but certainly more comfortable with the extended leg room. I move to them the first chance I get whenever I fly.
they asked for seatbelt extensions without using them
And if you had paid attention to the follow-up stories, you would know that the one guy who asked for an extension weighs 290lbs, and he claims he used it, which is a lot more rational than a conspiracy theory that they were wearing down defenses so that the real terrorists would be able to get seat-belt extensions without question...
prayed loudly, and so on
"Loudly" was not the case, nor did it even occur on the plane - they prayed at the usual time, while in the terminal, in the usual way. Again, pay attention to the follow-ups. As for "and so on" you'll have to give more details, which presumably you don't actually have.
The head of MI5 has stated that about 30 terrorist attacks were being planned in the country, and 1,600 suspects were under surveillance. Now, of course if you harbor fantasies of a 1984 society, you will dismiss this information as bogus, but I personally don't see any reason for MI5 to make up something like that, especially when the threat of Islamic terrorism is so well established. It fits.
Or, you could be the head of MI5 herself and state that, "of the 30 plots some may turn out to be less credible or advanced but it would be hard to be sure until they are fully investigated."
Furthermore, if there really were such major plots, why is it that every single one of them that they have moved on has turned out to be so flimsy? If they really do have credible plots, how come the best they have been able to do is the bumbling idiot Barot?
France is probably suffering the most from Islamic terrorism right now (in the West). They're in a de facto state of civil war.
Prove it. Let's see one citation that doesn't originate from the dhimmi-wannabes. I suggest you check the follow-up stories too, just in case the one that fits your pre-determined mind-set was exaggerated, you know by the conspiracy of the mainstream media to make people less fearful.
If there's a single, universal ID then the forgeries need to be much better. If you only need to learn about one ID, you can learn all the features on it and become quite familiar with it.
That argument works both ways. If there is a single universal ID that needs to be forged, all the forgers will focus on learning all of the features of it and become so familiar with it that the quality of their forgeries will also increase in proportion.
Plus, this whole "real id" thing is just a modification of all the state driver's licenses to contain a baseline level of information in a semi-standard format. It does not really address the forge-ability of the IDs at all, allowing the states to continue on with their own unique styles and implementations, it is just standardization to a minimum level to make centralized databases easier. It is really the worst of both worlds.
However, if copyright has any value at all, then infringement poses a danger to that value, and in turn, to *ALL* copyright holders, so infringing on one person's copyright indirectly reduces the value of everybody's.
And how is that any different from people who employee their right to freedom of speech to convince people that copyright is an antiquated and useless concept? Do they deserve punishment for devaluing the worth of all copyrights?
It's not "mandatory", but any state that does not abide by the Real ID requirements won't recieve any federal funding for roads and such.
Which is a tactic that is abused even more than the interstate commerce clause. They take our money as federal tax and then ransom it back to us to make us do things we don't want to do.
If you make it so you need to buy the whole system at once, and replace the whole thing at once should it die, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
It's called a home-improvement loan. Look into it.
If our guys keep winning, we get to live in liberal democracies.
And THEY get to live in the same soul-crushing poverty of the body and of the mind that are imposed on them by the governments who do the dirty work of propping up these liberal democracies.
Your own arguments about moral relativism are at least as twisted and misrepresentative of the situation as those whom you claim are "moral idiots."
I never see if there are followups to the stories, so I don't know. However, they're always along the lines of "Muslim man caught with C-4 in his home and a map of the subway system."
Well, this story is one such follow-up, and as someone who does regularly pay attention to the follow-ups, this outcome was completely expected. Here are some more recent ones:
Two middle-eastern men arrested with a van full of disposable cell-phones, accused of plotting to blow up bridges around Michigan - released with no charges
Middle-eastern woman detained at a W. Virginia airport because her bottles of liquid tested positive for explosives - released with no charges
Group of imams force airplane to return to airport and are detained because they switched seats and 'acted suspiciously' - released with no charges
Oregon lawyer and muslim convert arrested and held for 17 days by FBI because his fingerprints were 'found' on the Madrid bombs - released with no charges. FBI apologizes and agrees to pay him $2M.
Suspected islamic terrorist shot and killed in London subway while attempting to avoid arrest, public CCTV cameras were offline for maintenance at the time - dead man was a brazilian catholic, and as seen on the recovered CCTV footage, did absolutely nothing suspicious at all.
7 men in Miami arrested for plotting to blow up the sears tower in Chicago - indictment shows they had zero resources and the best they could do for 'plotting' was to photograph FBI buildings in miami - they couldn't even afford a road-trip to Illinois and generally behaved like "a hollywood B-movie version of terrorists." Their particular religion turns out to be as much baptist as it is islamic.
Suskind reports on a canceled plot to poison the NYC subway with cyanide - Richard Clarke debunks the authenticity for being too detailed (as it were the product of a fiction writer) and completely uncorroborated, others debunk it as being implausible as cyanide gas in the quantities required to be effective in that scenario is far too bulky to either transport or manufacturer on site.
Anti-terrorist police conduct a midnight raid on a London flat, arresting two brothers, shooting one of them. Reportedly the brothers were suspected of manufacturing bombs for a plot to attack parts of London. They are released with no charges and zero evidence at all of any manufacturing or plotting.
Then there is Dhiren Barot - poster child for the UK anti-terrorist programs. Arrested, admitted to and convicted of plotting various terrorist acts like his "gas limos project" where he planned to load up a bunch of limousines with barrels of gasoline, park them around London and blow them up simultaneously. Al Queda thought so highly of Barot that they funded him and his 'sleeper cell' the princely sum of $0. He had no money, no actual equipment, nothing more than big talk but now the world is a safer place with that gloryhound locked away for 40 years.
There are lots more just like the above, these were just the ones I could think of off the top of my head without actually looking for other bogus "threats."
On the flip-side, actual, credible threats in the west since 9/11: You've got the London and Madrid bombings, and that's about it. There have been arrests and even successful convictions of a couple of handfuls of people for things like "attending terror training camps" which is a very long way away from plotting, much less plotting with any hope of success.
So, 2 events in the half-decade since 9/11 - that sounds about right for my prediction that there are unlikely to be much more than 5 and certainly no more than 10 credible plots in progress.
Unfortunately, the people who make homeland security policies seem to make decisions based on theater rather than plain-old boring police work. One gets you headlines, and the other gets you results. What a shame that massaging their own egos is priority #1.
You presume that there are any results to get.
Given the really low rate of actual attacks over the last 10-20 years, it seems like there are probably less than 10 potential plots of any significance, maybe even less than 5, "out there."
Presumably the people in these government entities like receiving regular paychecks. So it would come as no surprise that if the threat was overblown they would take up the slack with their own exaggerations.
Whatever happened to the idea that anything not explicitly prohibited by law is legal?
As long as the blind guy doesn't hurt anyone, there should be no prohibition against doing stupid stuff like this. And if he does hurt someone? Well, negligently shooting someone is already illegal, unless you are Dick Cheney.
In order for a hud to be viewable on the windshield in daylight the windshield must be special, which translates into expensive. People lose windshields to rocks falling off of semis and the like every day. That is why this is a stupid idea.
It isn't really as bad as you make it out to be.
The "specialness" is really just a coating to prevent double-reflections (one from the front of the glass and one from the back of the glass). You can purchase a user-applicable version of this coating yourself. Various cars already come with a HUD, like the Corvette which has had it as an option for probably over a decade now.
I've been frustrated by 0.8.5's inability to remember deinterlacing settings,
You have to do more than just set the deinterlace method. IIRC: You have to add the deinterlace filter. You probably also need to change the default setting for files (there are separate settings for files and for streaming).
I really like vlc a lot, but like a lot of Free software, the user-interface could really benefit from improvement.
From your link it sure sounds like it is primarily based on who pays the most when the relevance is equal:
Your keyword-targeted ad is ranked on search results and content pages based on its maximum cost-per-click... and Quality Score. ... We use a rank number to help determine an ad's position on a search results page. The higher the rank number, the higher the position of the ad.
And furthermore the opportunity cost is equal to the price paid by the otherwise highest bidder for that search term. So, if google wants to own a term, they lose out not only on some amount of money, but the maximum amount of money the market would bear.
Don't adwords work by ordering the ad results by highest bidder?
If so, then Google has no opportunity cost here. The highest, non google bidder just gets the 2nd slot instead of the 1st slot.
The only opportunity cost would come from potential advertisers who decide that if they can't have the top slot, they will not buy any ad at all. My guess is that such people are fairly rare and of those, most probably just look for a new keyword for which they are not in competition with google for top slot.
If there were a militant Christian movement complete with suicide bombers I would hope that for my safety Christians would be profiled.
With over 1 billion Christians in the world and somewhere south of 1,000 terrorists, or say even 10,000 in "supporting roles" you've just narrowed your search down from 1 in 500,0000 to 1 in 100,000 -- not really effective when you consider it is at the cost of aggravating the other 99,999 non-terrorist Christians.
Even worse, since you really need those other 99,999 Christians to trust you enough so that they will come to you and report on any Christians in their community who seem to be legitimately suspicious. You've probably thrown away your best chance at actually catching dangerous people all because of bad logic.
It is all a lot more variable than that, I'm just going to throw out a bunch of them:
1) ATSC standards put HDTV's max bitrate at about 18.5Mbps. But, in practice, it is often closer to 13Mbps with null-padding or multi-plexed standard-def channels.
2) h264's advantage over MPEG2 is reduced at higher resolutions. The best HD-h264 encoder versus the best HD-MPEG2 encoder will probably yield a maximum of 2x bitrate savings, often less, for equivalent visual quality.
3) Because film runs at 24fps (24Hz), 60Hz 1080i already carries the same information that any of the 1080p variations (60Hz, 30Hz, 24Hz) can carry. The right software (on a pc) or firmware (on a dedicated HD tuner/player) can reconstruct the original 24fps video from a 1080i encoding in a way that is indistinguishable from a 1080p encoding of the same thing.
4) Actual video sources, like what most HD-cams output are usually more that 24fps, but they are also often resolution-limited to 1440x1080i rather than 1920x1080i, so the numbers aren't straightforward there either.
5) In europe, they decided to stick with the 50Hz thing like they did for standard-def PAL TV. It is weird they would do that since the restrictions that made 50Hz easier for analog tv don't really apply in the digital world. But that's what they did anyway.
Without volunteers, FreeBSD would die...and you wouldn't need Netcraft to confirm it.
The question is how many of those 'volunteers' worked on it during their 'free' time and how many worked on it as part of their regular job adapting FreeBSD to meet their needs. Remove all.edu and and then any non ISP.com addresses and you get a rough approximation of the true 'volunteers' (except for the ISP's that use FreeBSD, which is probably substantial).
Yet, history has shown that if the project is good enough, the inherent goodness of humans is enough. Apache, XFree/Xorg and the BSDs may not be raking in mega-millions of dollars, but they keep on keeping on year after year.
History has shown no such thing. Many of the biggest contributors to those projects are paid. Either directly, like Keith Packard who was hired by SuSE and then Hpaq to work on XFree86/Xorg or indirectly like academics or users who "scratch an itch" for their employer's needs and then feed the enhancements back.
And the asshat who is 5 ft from my bumper isn't traffic, he's an asshat driving too close.
You miss the point. The REASON the states have those laws is because people like you aren't clever enough to figure out on your own that getting out of the way is the safest thing you can do in that situation. Let the asshat past you so he can go be an asshat to someone else. Why would you want him to stick around if he is such a bad driver?
Seriously, I want to concentrate on driving, not whether some nutball in back of me is going to slip up and ram into me because he's got anger management issues.
Bingo.
Safe driving is not just about avoiding accidents, more importantly it is about avoiding dangerous situations.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey man! Great job on that, I bet you took "Quoting out of Context 101" didn't you?
Add this back:
It is entirely selfish of someone to expect others to perform labor/favors for them for nothing.
And the temperature of his life gets a lot warmer doesn't it?
Maybe I'm using my own definition of prohibitively expensive.
Ayup.
Just because no charges are filed doesn't mean that the suspects are innocent,
Get a grip on reality for a second, do you not see a pattern YET? Since 911, in the UK alone there have been over 1,000 terrorism-related arrests, only 27 were found guilty and of those only 9 were even muslim. Do you honestly believe that with all of these new rights-what-rights? anti-terror laws that they could not have come up with SOMETHING to charge these people with? And I suppose the $2M the FBI had to pay out was media distortion too?
just because a terrorist suspect lacked the resources to execute his plan doesn't mean that he's perfectly harmless.
Please continue to ignore the adjective "credible" it makes your position so much less about living in fear of the slightest threat.
)The "airplane Imams" you mentioned were deliberately acting suspiciously to get thrown out (reportedly their seating pattern was something that terrorists have used previously
Think about that for a second, use those critical thinking skills. First of all, you learned of that 'fact' from this media you consider to be distorting the truth to reduce the perceived threat, maybe the media buys into the society of fear that you buy into, it is certainly in their best interest because fear sells. Second, have you seen any correlation of these claims? What terrorists have used that seating arrangement before? The media has claimed it was the 911 guys, but once you dig further you realize that sitting by the exit doors is absolutely useless from a tactical perspective because, despite tv and movies, it is impossible to open an emergency exit door while in flight, thus making those seats no more tactically useful than any other, but certainly more comfortable with the extended leg room. I move to them the first chance I get whenever I fly.
they asked for seatbelt extensions without using them
And if you had paid attention to the follow-up stories, you would know that the one guy who asked for an extension weighs 290lbs, and he claims he used it, which is a lot more rational than a conspiracy theory that they were wearing down defenses so that the real terrorists would be able to get seat-belt extensions without question...
prayed loudly, and so on
"Loudly" was not the case, nor did it even occur on the plane - they prayed at the usual time, while in the terminal, in the usual way. Again, pay attention to the follow-ups. As for "and so on" you'll have to give more details, which presumably you don't actually have.
The head of MI5 has stated that about 30 terrorist attacks were being planned in the country, and 1,600 suspects were under surveillance. Now, of course if you harbor fantasies of a 1984 society, you will dismiss this information as bogus, but I personally don't see any reason for MI5 to make up something like that, especially when the threat of Islamic terrorism is so well established. It fits.
Or, you could be the head of MI5 herself and state that, "of the 30 plots some may turn out to be less credible or advanced but it would be hard to be sure until they are fully investigated."
Furthermore, if there really were such major plots, why is it that every single one of them that they have moved on has turned out to be so flimsy? If they really do have credible plots, how come the best they have been able to do is the bumbling idiot Barot?
France is probably suffering the most from Islamic terrorism right now (in the West). They're in a de facto state of civil war.
Prove it. Let's see one citation that doesn't originate from the dhimmi-wannabes. I suggest you check the follow-up stories too, just in case the one that fits your pre-determined mind-set was exaggerated, you know by the conspiracy of the mainstream media to make people less fearful.
If there's a single, universal ID then the forgeries need to be much better. If you only need to learn about one ID, you can learn all the features on it and become quite familiar with it.
That argument works both ways. If there is a single universal ID that needs to be forged, all the forgers will focus on learning all of the features of it and become so familiar with it that the quality of their forgeries will also increase in proportion.
Plus, this whole "real id" thing is just a modification of all the state driver's licenses to contain a baseline level of information in a semi-standard format. It does not really address the forge-ability of the IDs at all, allowing the states to continue on with their own unique styles and implementations, it is just standardization to a minimum level to make centralized databases easier. It is really the worst of both worlds.
Not everyone wants to pay interest, smartass, and not everyone has equity to do so.
So what happened to always be prohibitively expensive now? Make up your mind. Either it is an absolute, or it is not.
Some want to pay as they go, as they can afford, for things that are not 100% necessity. I think those people are called "responsible".
If you have the equity then by definition you can afford it. Possessing poor home-ec skills does not make someone responsible, not by a long-shot.
I don't see how what the perp believes has any impact on your argument.
However, if copyright has any value at all, then infringement poses a danger to that value, and in turn, to *ALL* copyright holders, so infringing on one person's copyright indirectly reduces the value of everybody's.
And how is that any different from people who employee their right to freedom of speech to convince people that copyright is an antiquated and useless concept? Do they deserve punishment for devaluing the worth of all copyrights?
It's not "mandatory", but any state that does not abide by the Real ID requirements won't recieve any federal funding for roads and such.
Which is a tactic that is abused even more than the interstate commerce clause. They take our money as federal tax and then ransom it back to us to make us do things we don't want to do.
If you make it so you need to buy the whole system at once, and replace the whole thing at once should it die, it will always be prohibitively expensive.
It's called a home-improvement loan. Look into it.
If our guys keep winning, we get to live in liberal democracies.
And THEY get to live in the same soul-crushing poverty of the body and of the mind that are imposed on them by the governments who do the dirty work of propping up these liberal democracies.
Your own arguments about moral relativism are at least as twisted and misrepresentative of the situation as those whom you claim are "moral idiots."
I never see if there are followups to the stories, so I don't know. However, they're always along the lines of "Muslim man caught with C-4 in his home and a map of the subway system."
Well, this story is one such follow-up, and as someone who does regularly pay attention to the follow-ups, this outcome was completely expected. Here are some more recent ones:
Two middle-eastern men arrested with a van full of disposable cell-phones, accused of plotting to blow up bridges around Michigan - released with no charges
Middle-eastern woman detained at a W. Virginia airport because her bottles of liquid tested positive for explosives - released with no charges
Group of imams force airplane to return to airport and are detained because they switched seats and 'acted suspiciously' - released with no charges
Oregon lawyer and muslim convert arrested and held for 17 days by FBI because his fingerprints were 'found' on the Madrid bombs - released with no charges. FBI apologizes and agrees to pay him $2M.
Suspected islamic terrorist shot and killed in London subway while attempting to avoid arrest, public CCTV cameras were offline for maintenance at the time - dead man was a brazilian catholic, and as seen on the recovered CCTV footage, did absolutely nothing suspicious at all.
7 men in Miami arrested for plotting to blow up the sears tower in Chicago - indictment shows they had zero resources and the best they could do for 'plotting' was to photograph FBI buildings in miami - they couldn't even afford a road-trip to Illinois and generally behaved like "a hollywood B-movie version of terrorists." Their particular religion turns out to be as much baptist as it is islamic.
Suskind reports on a canceled plot to poison the NYC subway with cyanide - Richard Clarke debunks the authenticity for being too detailed (as it were the product of a fiction writer) and completely uncorroborated, others debunk it as being implausible as cyanide gas in the quantities required to be effective in that scenario is far too bulky to either transport or manufacturer on site.
Anti-terrorist police conduct a midnight raid on a London flat, arresting two brothers, shooting one of them. Reportedly the brothers were suspected of manufacturing bombs for a plot to attack parts of London. They are released with no charges and zero evidence at all of any manufacturing or plotting.
Then there is Dhiren Barot - poster child for the UK anti-terrorist programs. Arrested, admitted to and convicted of plotting various terrorist acts like his "gas limos project" where he planned to load up a bunch of limousines with barrels of gasoline, park them around London and blow them up simultaneously. Al Queda thought so highly of Barot that they funded him and his 'sleeper cell' the princely sum of $0. He had no money, no actual equipment, nothing more than big talk but now the world is a safer place with that gloryhound locked away for 40 years.
There are lots more just like the above, these were just the ones I could think of off the top of my head without actually looking for other bogus "threats."
On the flip-side, actual, credible threats in the west since 9/11: You've got the London and Madrid bombings, and that's about it. There have been arrests and even successful convictions of a couple of handfuls of people for things like "attending terror training camps" which is a very long way away from plotting, much less plotting with any hope of success.
So, 2 events in the half-decade since 9/11 - that sounds about right for my prediction that there are unlikely to be much more than 5 and certainly no more than 10 credible plots in progress.
Ummm... these are suicide bombers we're talking about. I wouldn't exactly use the word rational to describe these people.
When our guys die in uniform, they are heroes and patriots.
When their guys die they are crazy and irrational.
Unfortunately, the people who make homeland security policies seem to make decisions based on theater rather than plain-old boring police work. One gets you headlines, and the other gets you results. What a shame that massaging their own egos is priority #1.
You presume that there are any results to get.
Given the really low rate of actual attacks over the last 10-20 years, it seems like there are probably less than 10 potential plots of any significance, maybe even less than 5, "out there."
Presumably the people in these government entities like receiving regular paychecks. So it would come as no surprise that if the threat was overblown they would take up the slack with their own exaggerations.
Why does this need to be an explicit law?
Whatever happened to the idea that anything not explicitly prohibited by law is legal?
As long as the blind guy doesn't hurt anyone, there should be no prohibition against doing stupid stuff like this. And if he does hurt someone? Well, negligently shooting someone is already illegal, unless you are Dick Cheney.
In order for a hud to be viewable on the windshield in daylight the windshield must be special, which translates into expensive. People lose windshields to rocks falling off of semis and the like every day. That is why this is a stupid idea.
It isn't really as bad as you make it out to be.
The "specialness" is really just a coating to prevent double-reflections (one from the front of the glass and one from the back of the glass). You can purchase a user-applicable version of this coating yourself. Various cars already come with a HUD, like the Corvette which has had it as an option for probably over a decade now.
I've been frustrated by 0.8.5's inability to remember deinterlacing settings,
You have to do more than just set the deinterlace method.
IIRC:
You have to add the deinterlace filter.
You probably also need to change the default setting for files (there are separate settings for files and for streaming).
I really like vlc a lot, but like a lot of Free software, the user-interface could really benefit from improvement.
And furthermore the opportunity cost is equal to the price paid by the otherwise highest bidder for that search term. So, if google wants to own a term, they lose out not only on some amount of money, but the maximum amount of money the market would bear.
Don't adwords work by ordering the ad results by highest bidder?
If so, then Google has no opportunity cost here. The highest, non google bidder just gets the 2nd slot instead of the 1st slot.
The only opportunity cost would come from potential advertisers who decide that if they can't have the top slot, they will not buy any ad at all. My guess is that such people are fairly rare and of those, most probably just look for a new keyword for which they are not in competition with google for top slot.
If there were a militant Christian movement complete with suicide bombers I would hope that for my safety Christians would be profiled.
With over 1 billion Christians in the world and somewhere south of 1,000 terrorists, or say even 10,000 in "supporting roles" you've just narrowed your search down from 1 in 500,0000 to 1 in 100,000 -- not really effective when you consider it is at the cost of aggravating the other 99,999 non-terrorist Christians.
Even worse, since you really need those other 99,999 Christians to trust you enough so that they will come to you and report on any Christians in their community who seem to be legitimately suspicious. You've probably thrown away your best chance at actually catching dangerous people all because of bad logic.
It is all a lot more variable than that, I'm just going to throw out a bunch of them:
1) ATSC standards put HDTV's max bitrate at about 18.5Mbps. But, in practice, it is often closer to 13Mbps with null-padding or multi-plexed standard-def channels.
2) h264's advantage over MPEG2 is reduced at higher resolutions. The best HD-h264 encoder versus the best HD-MPEG2 encoder will probably yield a maximum of 2x bitrate savings, often less, for equivalent visual quality.
3) Because film runs at 24fps (24Hz), 60Hz 1080i already carries the same information that any of the 1080p variations (60Hz, 30Hz, 24Hz) can carry. The right software (on a pc) or firmware (on a dedicated HD tuner/player) can reconstruct the original 24fps video from a 1080i encoding in a way that is indistinguishable from a 1080p encoding of the same thing.
4) Actual video sources, like what most HD-cams output are usually more that 24fps, but they are also often resolution-limited to 1440x1080i rather than 1920x1080i, so the numbers aren't straightforward there either.
5) In europe, they decided to stick with the 50Hz thing like they did for standard-def PAL TV. It is weird they would do that since the restrictions that made 50Hz easier for analog tv don't really apply in the digital world. But that's what they did anyway.
Without volunteers, FreeBSD would die...and you wouldn't need Netcraft to confirm it.
.edu and and then any non ISP .com addresses and you get a rough approximation of the true 'volunteers' (except for the ISP's that use FreeBSD, which is probably substantial).
The question is how many of those 'volunteers' worked on it during their 'free' time and how many worked on it as part of their regular job adapting FreeBSD to meet their needs. Remove all
You are so right -- better to risk death over a meaningless point than to live a full life.
Yet, history has shown that if the project is good enough, the inherent goodness of humans is enough. Apache, XFree/Xorg and the BSDs may not be raking in mega-millions of dollars, but they keep on keeping on year after year.
History has shown no such thing. Many of the biggest contributors to those projects are paid. Either directly, like Keith Packard who was hired by SuSE and then Hpaq to work on XFree86/Xorg or indirectly like academics or users who "scratch an itch" for their employer's needs and then feed the enhancements back.
Maybe some do, not all, certainly.
And the asshat who is 5 ft from my bumper isn't traffic, he's an asshat driving too close.
You miss the point. The REASON the states have those laws is because people like you aren't clever enough to figure out on your own that getting out of the way is the safest thing you can do in that situation. Let the asshat past you so he can go be an asshat to someone else. Why would you want him to stick around if he is such a bad driver?
Seriously, I want to concentrate on driving, not whether some nutball in back of me is going to slip up and ram into me because he's got anger management issues.
Bingo.
Safe driving is not just about avoiding accidents, more importantly it is about avoiding dangerous situations.