This is from last week. We have a bunch of linux boxes in the lab, for automated testing stuff. One of my coworkers, with a masters' degree in electrical engineering, was setting up a test system and I being the resident expert on writing the ATE programs, went back to help him. All we had was a crummy old 13" monitor, but that's fine: it'll save space. Unfortunately that resolution isn't handled gracefully by the system, so xwindows wouldn't start. That's fine: I do all my work from the shell anyway. It's all scripting. So I'm trying to get this monster HP power supply to turn on, and it won't do a thing; it must have a different GPIB command. So I fired up lynx and went to google to find out what. My coworker is all "what's *that*?" I blinked and said "lynx." "You can look at google text-only?" "Well, yeah..." "WHY? Why would anyone make a text-only browser? What's the point of THAT?" I pointed at the screen, where a kindly webpage had a nice text summary of GPIB commands that showed me how to set the power supply output voltage and turn it on. He said something like "yeah, but..." and then shut up.
Zowie. I had no idea (living in Denver) that it was 10x sea-level. Now I'd like to run that test during the summer, when I'm living in Leadville, elevation 10,000ft.
That's a very cool article. Thanks for posting it.
Find a local electrical engineer who is willing to do consulting work and get that person to do the schematic and produce a working prototype. Many will also be capable of doing the pcb layout. You might end up buying the software for them. OrCAD is usable if it's a simple design. Altium/Protel is easier to use for larger projects. Once you have a functioning layout, you can look at fab companies. At that point, it makes sense to go overseas, not before, because trying to get a decent hardware design done out-of-country is a nightmare. Even cross-country it's really hard: there are lots of tweaks required. Many fab companies can source the parts, do assembly, and test. Expect that to cost 3x as much as the board fabrication itself. Then, you have a functional product, and you can start looking into what it's going to take to get it to a point where it can actually be sold: testing, quality, certification. Expect that to take as long and cost as much as the schematic/layout/fabrication/assembly part. Marketing/advertising is at least as hard, but that part I don't know. For that matter, the marketing research, in the first place, that determines whether it's even worth doing, costs a bunch and takes a lot of time.
In conclusion (as they say) the software is about 15% of the project, and getting the other 85% funded and finished is all work that's as hard as the software, and that you're not good at, so you're probably going to have to purchase.
My chem teacher a: knew that potassium is *more* reactive than sodium, so used less of it and b: put the beaker full of water on the desk that the two cheerleaders in class sat at so when it went phooey they were the ones that ended up soaking wet.
He was a truly superior human being -- and he taught there his entire career, for 15 years after I graduated.
I love the idea. I think it's the coolest thing I've heard in a long time, and in a small shop I think it's a great solution. The problem (to my eyes) is that individuals have a very direct financial reason to scrimp on licenses, and an auditing company has a financial and business incentive to go after the company rather than the individuals. I think people want to do the right thing, as well. If you give them a financial reason to NOT do the right thing -- the software cost coming out of their own pockets, even if it is as a raise -- you almost certainly lower the compliance. In a small company, probably not a big problem. (And absolutely an incentive for people to find good FOSS that works, because they're basically being paid to make it work.) I'm envious that you got to work at a company that was this open-minded and willing to try new things.
That's a great, innovative idea. I'm not confident that it would actually *work*, though: if the employees are using software they've installed without licenses, to do work that benefits the company as a whole, the software cops are going to hold the company responsible. The company is getting the benefit of illegal software and has much deeper pockets than the individuals involved: the software cops won't hesitate to go after it.
>Most larger cars, that's measured at highway speed (55?) and is lower for in-town.
Here's a weird thing about engines, and note that I'm not an engine designer so my explanation might not be that great. Engines are designed to work at their maximum efficiency -- most power delivered per unit of fuel burnt -- at close to their maximum power delivery. If they're operating at less than nearly full power, they're quite wasteful. In part, the drop in efficiency in city driving is because of all the stopping: you accelerate the car, using energy, and then brake, dumping all that energy you just used right into heat. But in part it's just because you're operating the engine at off-peak efficiency. As such, a tiny engine (as the Tata has) operating nearly flat-out (which it'd be doing at 60) will probably be at or near its best efficiency: that's likely to be where it'll get its 60mpg. Note that many carburetted engines tend to have issues with operating at full-throttle and burning a lot more gas than at 90% throttle for not much gain in power, meaning a big drop in efficiency in that last bit of throttle. I don't know if this is carburetted or FI, or if it is in fact operating at its design peak efficiency at 100kph. But I'm betting, based on other designs I've looked at, that it'll be pretty close to its best efficiency near its top speed.
Also, manual clutches have significantly better efficiency than automatic ones if driven by someone who is good at using them, which presumably the test drivers for Tata are. If the people who buy them aren't, that's not really Tata's concern, as much as advertising the car's efficiency is.
Action: religious wackjobs spend several centuries persecuting scientists, killing some and making the lives of others hellish, but finally calm down to the point of merely denying facts that contradict their beliefs and only occasionally shooting doctors or other representatives of science.
Reaction: many scientists become anti-religious.
For some reason I don't understand, you seem to be blaming the scientists here.
I wish I could mod you up. I can't remember how many times I have flown into little asphalt runways out in rural Nebraska/Wyoming/Kansas/Colorado and have seen a big tanker truck standing on the end of the runway, which gets me to looking for the cropduster who is using the pesticide because cropdusters never seem to have radios. They also don't pay any attention whatsoever to the pattern: they just fly straight in at 100 AGL where you can barely see them down against the ground, and put it right down, and if you're on final at 250 AGL, they have priority. One good reason to fly high-wing aircraft is the downward visibility helps for avoiding this kind of accident.
20 years ago, Connie Willis wrote a short story called "Last Of The Winnebagos" that, while it wasn't about this, had it as an aspect. The government started building super-interstates that were limited access, only for computer-controlled cars, and slowly converted all the roads over, one by one, until there were only a few very slow back roads that the old computerless cars could travel. It's a very good and very sad story.
Yeah: I didn't feel like it'd be useful to the conversation, getting into the whole explanation of first class/six months, second class/a year and the difference between medicals and flight reviews. I still think the idea would be good. I don't think the problem is new drivers. They'll learn. The problem (I think) is people whose habits just get worse over time, especially as they get past retirement age. You see lots of crashes with teenagers and a fairly high amount with elderly, if I recall the NTSB reports correctly. The teen ones are self-correcting over time, but the others just get worse.
One's called Namenda, and the other Excellon. Namenda's a neuraminidase blocker. I don't recall off the top of my head how Excellon works. I will say that for me it works better than Namenda but boy does it make your stomach hurt.
There are excellent 155 million year old dragonfly fossils and other less beautiful ones that are roughly 300 million years old. There are a lot of very ancient insect orders. Mammals and birds are newcomers, and still changing a lot, but there have been animals pretty similar to turtles and crocodiles for millions of years, too.
I had a friend who was a very nice, very hippie/crystals&dolphins type. She was bitten by a brown recluse that fell on her when she was dusting in her cellar. The bite was basically between her breast and armpit. Since she didn't believe in modern medicine she put a large variety of herbs on it, slept with a crystal next to it, and watched the necrotizing eat away at her for four months, at which point she'd lost part of her breast and much of her pectoral muscle in this handball-sized crater of horribleness. She finally went to a doctor and they did surgery and removed a bunch of tissue. Less than six months later she had two lumps in the area, that were found to be breast cancer, and ended up killing her. I can't state as a fact that the bite and subsequent massive, widespread cellular damage caused it, but it's sure creepy.
Go to the nice doctor when you get a spider bite. They actually do know some useful things, and spider bites are one of them.
>I tend to think that having a more extensive driver training program where drivers are exposed to poor conditions and limits of vehicle handling are a much better idea than purposely making roads and vehicles worse. Maybe even have rigorous enough testing that the incompetent are actually weeded out and not allowed to possess driver's licenses.
You don't have to spend a lot of time on driver training. Just make the driver test somewhat harder, and make it necessary to retake every three years for everyone under 40, and two years for everyone over 40, to retain their driver license. (I choose those numbers because that's what you have to do to retain your pilot certification.) That'd force people to drive well for at least 30 minutes once every 2-3 years, actually use their turn signals and not tailgate, and maybe those habits would stick, rather than people just driving however they want until their passengers complain or a cop catches them for doing something egregiously stupid.
In a excellent essay called How The SUV Ran Over Automotive Safety. If you don't want to read the article -- which is a shame, because it's excellent -- he basically distinguishes between active and passive safety. Active safety is learning to drive well, and that reduces crashes. Passive safety is airbags and crumple zones, and that increases crashes because people drive more recklessly, knowing that they're safer. People keep their (perceived) risk constant, so if someone acts to reduce their risk, they use up the safety margin and go right back to where they were. Much of the popularity of SUV's and large trucks is precisely because people think that they, individually, are safer driving them, so then they drive more stupidly, meaning that not only are they *not* safer, other people are also less safe.
The lesson being: many people are really stupid and probably shouldn't be allowed to operate power toothbrushes, much less automobiles.
(When I last looked, there were 6 fatal toothbrush accidents in the US per year. Alcohol was almost always involved...)
Dude. It's a *red* light. It's *illegal* to run a red light, whatever your rationalization. In places where traffic planners have decided it's acceptable, they have a green left-turn signal and then nothing, meaning you go when there's a break in traffic. When there's a red turn signal, that means you do not get to go no matter how much you want to. That's the law. If you don't like the law you work to change it. If you break the law you get tickets. If I decide that I'm capable of driving 100 mph, and justify it by saying that this reduces traffic pressure and jams by having me on the road for less time, the police are still going to give me a ticket.
and by the way it certainly is not safe. There are plenty of times where there are several cars in one lane, stopped, but the other lane of a multi-lane is clear and someone coming down that sees that the light is about to turn green and doesn't slow down, aka 'timing the green' -- and around here, that's perfectly legal. The guy who ran the red light and gets t-boned by someone going 50 is the one at fault, and police regularly ticket people for it.
Dude, this is an intersection where both directions have continuous traffic. You could leave the green left turn light on *forever* and there would constantly be cars going through it, until about 11 PM. There is no problem with timing. The problem is with driver patience.
One person is running a red light, the other is going through a green light. I think the fault is clearly on the person who made the choice to drive through a red signal, and from what I've heard, the police around here seem to agree.
In my case it was in 2000, and I spent a year having a lot of trouble reading sentences and managing to follow the meaning. I could handle Dr. Seuss. It's gotten consistently better since then, although I'm still nowhere near as conventionally smart as I was. What I find interesting is that although I feel like I'm the same person, my friends say I'm a much nicer, more considerate person now, and that I accomplish a lot more because I'm more persistent and organized -- because I have to be, since I have a lot of issues with short-term memory. When I was going to a cognitive therapist, one of the things she mentioned was that in some ways they were going to treat me for aging, as much as the accident. She said, four years ago, that she felt like people peaked mentally at about 30, and she wanted to see if she could do stuff to just ward off age-related decline so I'd be about as smart as I would have been anyway. I was prescribed two different types of anti-Alzheimer's medication and wowie, were they amazing in terms of focus and memory. I wish I could afford to keep taking them. Breathtakingly expensive but seriously amazing effects.
While I'd like what you're saying to be true, with some people it simply isn't. I stop for yellow lights, and I routinely get honked at by people behind me for stopping when they wanted to keep going -- even when it means they would have been running a red light. This is particularly egregious when it's a left turn lane that has a red "no left turn permitted" arrow. I often (as in daily) see fully five cars go through the intersection after the arrow has turned red, obstructing cars that are trying to go straight through the now-green light. This is not a matter of poor timing, just a matter of people deciding that it's more important for them to get through the intersection than to obey the traffic rules. We have horrific crashes around here on a regular basis because someone comes through the green light and hits someone who was running the tail end of a previous green that is now red.
To be fair -- there *are* penalties for those things: you lose your job, you may get convicted of perjury, or even impeached. The problem is that the American justice system is designed to first make a guilty/not guilty decision, then assign sentencing based on the quality or type of guilt, which is generally a good thing. People who are guilty of killing someone, but did it by mistake, shouldn't be sentenced the way that someone who killed with purpose and planning. But governments and government agencies aren't making these sorts of decisions out of malice. They're making them out of a wish to keep people safe (and, at a finer-grained level, because individuals will always make decisions that'll keep their jobs, and making a decision to grant people the freedom to keep working with model rockets, while good for the community as a whole, could be very bad for the individual who made that decision if someone ever does something bad with a model rocket, so the person will naturally choose the most conservative course.)
As such, the government agencies are judged lightly, as everyone understands that they were making those decisions based on good intentions, however lousy the result.
>It's as if countries in the "western" world these days are in a race to see who can remove citizen rights the fastest.
>I really don't understand it. Have we really fallen so far so fast?
*All* governments have *always* wanted the ability to spy on everyone, including their own citizens. It's not even paranoia or a matter of the government somehow having a mind of its own: it's just individuals doing their jobs and wanting to make sure that they never get in trouble for not having done enough to keep their jobs and country safe.
The primary difference between what we're seeing now and the Stasi or the Star Chamber is that now, every government *can* easily record 100% of the information that they have access to.
So they are. All of them, all the time, because they feel like they have to.
Governments are *always* the most dangerous entities to humanity, and it's not even like the governments can help it. They just become that way because that's how power works: people functioning in their own self-interest and self-preservation, will always make larger and more intrusive governments.
Quick story. My grandparents were just starting out during the Great Depression so it left them with a big distrust in banks. They both worked hard through their lives and ended up purchasing and running a couple motels later in life, then selling them and handling the mortgages themselves -- which means, the people who bought the mortgages were sending their monthly payments directly to my grandparents, for 30 years. In cash. Because my grandmother was probably a tax cheat. But that's an aside. Here's the thing: her kids and grandkids didn't know about any of this. I'm not even sure her husband really did because granddad was a great guy and a lot of fun but he didn't get involved in the day-to-day finances of the household because, well, he was a little flaky and would give money to down-and-out strangers, so gramma just made sure he only had what he needed. He passed away and she went on living in the house. Then she had a couple of strokes that left her blind, and was still living in the house, and at some point we were cleaning out some of the 50 years' worth of crap she'd accumulated so she woudn't trip over stuff walking around the house while blind, and she mentioned that while we were cleaning, we maybe should get the money out from under her mattress. She said there was a lot of money, maybe even $10,000, under her bed. We were like, "dude." We thought it was a crazy, dangerous thing to keep that kind of money in the house. So we lifted up the mattress and found an enormous pile of manila envelopes, put them in a trash bag, went home, and started counting. It came out to more like $100,000 in cash. It was crazy: we felt like drug lords. We had some issues depositing it in her account, actually, because that kind of cash gets people very interested in where it came from. And the point of this whole story is that about three months after we did this, a nice guy knocked on her front door and said he was from the city and they needed to know where the water line had been run through the front yard so they could dig an underground power cable through and she walked out in the front yard and talked to him for ten minutes, and when she went back inside she noticed all the drawers were open in the kitchen (because she ran into one) and her bedroom had been searched, including under her mattress. (And as an aside, even in a crappy bank account bearing 3% interest, even in a bad economy, that same amount of money would've been worth enormously more had she not stuck it under her bed.)
Re:The original content has to come from somewhere
on
So Amazing, So Illegal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
>I personally think [Kutiboy's] accomplishment here is more one of editing than one of actual creating.
I'm unclear on the difference. If I'm writing using the English language, aren't I just editing? since I didn't invent the language?
Editing, in writing, is generally considered to mean changes intended to clarify a work or to make it adhere to some ruleset. I don't think TFV was aiming for either of those. That is actually the whole point of patents and copyrights: they acknowledge that any creation people make belongs to all of us, in the same way that the language we all speak belongs to all of us, and in order to encourage people to create more stuff the laws provide a brief protection for creators, before their creations become part of society's mental furniture.
Slashdot Mirror
This is from last week.
We have a bunch of linux boxes in the lab, for automated testing stuff. One of my coworkers, with a masters' degree in electrical engineering, was setting up a test system and I being the resident expert on writing the ATE programs, went back to help him. All we had was a crummy old 13" monitor, but that's fine: it'll save space. Unfortunately that resolution isn't handled gracefully by the system, so xwindows wouldn't start. That's fine: I do all my work from the shell anyway. It's all scripting. So I'm trying to get this monster HP power supply to turn on, and it won't do a thing; it must have a different GPIB command. So I fired up lynx and went to google to find out what.
My coworker is all "what's *that*?"
I blinked and said "lynx."
"You can look at google text-only?"
"Well, yeah..."
"WHY? Why would anyone make a text-only browser? What's the point of THAT?"
I pointed at the screen, where a kindly webpage had a nice text summary of GPIB commands that showed me how to set the power supply output voltage and turn it on.
He said something like "yeah, but..." and then shut up.
Zowie. I had no idea (living in Denver) that it was 10x sea-level. Now I'd like to run that test during the summer, when I'm living in Leadville, elevation 10,000ft.
That's a very cool article. Thanks for posting it.
Find a local electrical engineer who is willing to do consulting work and get that person to do the schematic and produce a working prototype. Many will also be capable of doing the pcb layout. You might end up buying the software for them. OrCAD is usable if it's a simple design. Altium/Protel is easier to use for larger projects.
Once you have a functioning layout, you can look at fab companies. At that point, it makes sense to go overseas, not before, because trying to get a decent hardware design done out-of-country is a nightmare. Even cross-country it's really hard: there are lots of tweaks required. Many fab companies can source the parts, do assembly, and test. Expect that to cost 3x as much as the board fabrication itself.
Then, you have a functional product, and you can start looking into what it's going to take to get it to a point where it can actually be sold: testing, quality, certification. Expect that to take as long and cost as much as the schematic/layout/fabrication/assembly part.
Marketing/advertising is at least as hard, but that part I don't know. For that matter, the marketing research, in the first place, that determines whether it's even worth doing, costs a bunch and takes a lot of time.
In conclusion (as they say) the software is about 15% of the project, and getting the other 85% funded and finished is all work that's as hard as the software, and that you're not good at, so you're probably going to have to purchase.
My chem teacher
a: knew that potassium is *more* reactive than sodium, so used less of it
and
b: put the beaker full of water on the desk that the two cheerleaders in class sat at so when it went phooey they were the ones that ended up soaking wet.
He was a truly superior human being -- and he taught there his entire career, for 15 years after I graduated.
I love the idea. I think it's the coolest thing I've heard in a long time, and in a small shop I think it's a great solution.
The problem (to my eyes) is that individuals have a very direct financial reason to scrimp on licenses, and an auditing company has a financial and business incentive to go after the company rather than the individuals.
I think people want to do the right thing, as well. If you give them a financial reason to NOT do the right thing -- the software cost coming out of their own pockets, even if it is as a raise -- you almost certainly lower the compliance. In a small company, probably not a big problem. (And absolutely an incentive for people to find good FOSS that works, because they're basically being paid to make it work.)
I'm envious that you got to work at a company that was this open-minded and willing to try new things.
That's a great, innovative idea.
I'm not confident that it would actually *work*, though: if the employees are using software they've installed without licenses, to do work that benefits the company as a whole, the software cops are going to hold the company responsible. The company is getting the benefit of illegal software and has much deeper pockets than the individuals involved: the software cops won't hesitate to go after it.
>Most larger cars, that's measured at highway speed (55?) and is lower for in-town.
Here's a weird thing about engines, and note that I'm not an engine designer so my explanation might not be that great.
Engines are designed to work at their maximum efficiency -- most power delivered per unit of fuel burnt -- at close to their maximum power delivery. If they're operating at less than nearly full power, they're quite wasteful. In part, the drop in efficiency in city driving is because of all the stopping: you accelerate the car, using energy, and then brake, dumping all that energy you just used right into heat. But in part it's just because you're operating the engine at off-peak efficiency.
As such, a tiny engine (as the Tata has) operating nearly flat-out (which it'd be doing at 60) will probably be at or near its best efficiency: that's likely to be where it'll get its 60mpg.
Note that many carburetted engines tend to have issues with operating at full-throttle and burning a lot more gas than at 90% throttle for not much gain in power, meaning a big drop in efficiency in that last bit of throttle. I don't know if this is carburetted or FI, or if it is in fact operating at its design peak efficiency at 100kph. But I'm betting, based on other designs I've looked at, that it'll be pretty close to its best efficiency near its top speed.
Also, manual clutches have significantly better efficiency than automatic ones if driven by someone who is good at using them, which presumably the test drivers for Tata are. If the people who buy them aren't, that's not really Tata's concern, as much as advertising the car's efficiency is.
Action: religious wackjobs spend several centuries persecuting scientists, killing some and making the lives of others hellish, but finally calm down to the point of merely denying facts that contradict their beliefs and only occasionally shooting doctors or other representatives of science.
Reaction: many scientists become anti-religious.
For some reason I don't understand, you seem to be blaming the scientists here.
I wish I could mod you up.
I can't remember how many times I have flown into little asphalt runways out in rural Nebraska/Wyoming/Kansas/Colorado and have seen a big tanker truck standing on the end of the runway, which gets me to looking for the cropduster who is using the pesticide because cropdusters never seem to have radios. They also don't pay any attention whatsoever to the pattern: they just fly straight in at 100 AGL where you can barely see them down against the ground, and put it right down, and if you're on final at 250 AGL, they have priority. One good reason to fly high-wing aircraft is the downward visibility helps for avoiding this kind of accident.
20 years ago, Connie Willis wrote a short story called "Last Of The Winnebagos" that, while it wasn't about this, had it as an aspect. The government started building super-interstates that were limited access, only for computer-controlled cars, and slowly converted all the roads over, one by one, until there were only a few very slow back roads that the old computerless cars could travel. It's a very good and very sad story.
Yeah: I didn't feel like it'd be useful to the conversation, getting into the whole explanation of first class/six months, second class/a year and the difference between medicals and flight reviews. I still think the idea would be good. I don't think the problem is new drivers. They'll learn. The problem (I think) is people whose habits just get worse over time, especially as they get past retirement age. You see lots of crashes with teenagers and a fairly high amount with elderly, if I recall the NTSB reports correctly. The teen ones are self-correcting over time, but the others just get worse.
One's called Namenda, and the other Excellon. Namenda's a neuraminidase blocker. I don't recall off the top of my head how Excellon works. I will say that for me it works better than Namenda but boy does it make your stomach hurt.
There are excellent 155 million year old dragonfly fossils and other less beautiful ones that are roughly 300 million years old.
There are a lot of very ancient insect orders. Mammals and birds are newcomers, and still changing a lot, but there have been animals pretty similar to turtles and crocodiles for millions of years, too.
I had a friend who was a very nice, very hippie/crystals&dolphins type. She was bitten by a brown recluse that fell on her when she was dusting in her cellar. The bite was basically between her breast and armpit. Since she didn't believe in modern medicine she put a large variety of herbs on it, slept with a crystal next to it, and watched the necrotizing eat away at her for four months, at which point she'd lost part of her breast and much of her pectoral muscle in this handball-sized crater of horribleness. She finally went to a doctor and they did surgery and removed a bunch of tissue. Less than six months later she had two lumps in the area, that were found to be breast cancer, and ended up killing her. I can't state as a fact that the bite and subsequent massive, widespread cellular damage caused it, but it's sure creepy.
Go to the nice doctor when you get a spider bite. They actually do know some useful things, and spider bites are one of them.
>I tend to think that having a more extensive driver training program where drivers are exposed to poor conditions and limits of vehicle handling are a much better idea than purposely making roads and vehicles worse. Maybe even have rigorous enough testing that the incompetent are actually weeded out and not allowed to possess driver's licenses.
You don't have to spend a lot of time on driver training. Just make the driver test somewhat harder, and make it necessary to retake every three years for everyone under 40, and two years for everyone over 40, to retain their driver license. (I choose those numbers because that's what you have to do to retain your pilot certification.)
That'd force people to drive well for at least 30 minutes once every 2-3 years, actually use their turn signals and not tailgate, and maybe those habits would stick, rather than people just driving however they want until their passengers complain or a cop catches them for doing something egregiously stupid.
In a excellent essay called How The SUV Ran Over Automotive Safety. If you don't want to read the article -- which is a shame, because it's excellent -- he basically distinguishes between active and passive safety. Active safety is learning to drive well, and that reduces crashes. Passive safety is airbags and crumple zones, and that increases crashes because people drive more recklessly, knowing that they're safer. People keep their (perceived) risk constant, so if someone acts to reduce their risk, they use up the safety margin and go right back to where they were.
Much of the popularity of SUV's and large trucks is precisely because people think that they, individually, are safer driving them, so then they drive more stupidly, meaning that not only are they *not* safer, other people are also less safe.
The lesson being: many people are really stupid and probably shouldn't be allowed to operate power toothbrushes, much less automobiles.
(When I last looked, there were 6 fatal toothbrush accidents in the US per year. Alcohol was almost always involved...)
Dude. It's a *red* light. It's *illegal* to run a red light, whatever your rationalization.
In places where traffic planners have decided it's acceptable, they have a green left-turn signal and then nothing, meaning you go when there's a break in traffic.
When there's a red turn signal, that means you do not get to go no matter how much you want to. That's the law. If you don't like the law you work to change it. If you break the law you get tickets. If I decide that I'm capable of driving 100 mph, and justify it by saying that this reduces traffic pressure and jams by having me on the road for less time, the police are still going to give me a ticket.
and by the way it certainly is not safe. There are plenty of times where there are several cars in one lane, stopped, but the other lane of a multi-lane is clear and someone coming down that sees that the light is about to turn green and doesn't slow down, aka 'timing the green' -- and around here, that's perfectly legal. The guy who ran the red light and gets t-boned by someone going 50 is the one at fault, and police regularly ticket people for it.
Dude, this is an intersection where both directions have continuous traffic. You could leave the green left turn light on *forever* and there would constantly be cars going through it, until about 11 PM.
There is no problem with timing. The problem is with driver patience.
One person is running a red light, the other is going through a green light. I think the fault is clearly on the person who made the choice to drive through a red signal, and from what I've heard, the police around here seem to agree.
In my case it was in 2000, and I spent a year having a lot of trouble reading sentences and managing to follow the meaning. I could handle Dr. Seuss. It's gotten consistently better since then, although I'm still nowhere near as conventionally smart as I was.
What I find interesting is that although I feel like I'm the same person, my friends say I'm a much nicer, more considerate person now, and that I accomplish a lot more because I'm more persistent and organized -- because I have to be, since I have a lot of issues with short-term memory.
When I was going to a cognitive therapist, one of the things she mentioned was that in some ways they were going to treat me for aging, as much as the accident. She said, four years ago, that she felt like people peaked mentally at about 30, and she wanted to see if she could do stuff to just ward off age-related decline so I'd be about as smart as I would have been anyway. I was prescribed two different types of anti-Alzheimer's medication and wowie, were they amazing in terms of focus and memory. I wish I could afford to keep taking them. Breathtakingly expensive but seriously amazing effects.
While I'd like what you're saying to be true, with some people it simply isn't. I stop for yellow lights, and I routinely get honked at by people behind me for stopping when they wanted to keep going -- even when it means they would have been running a red light. This is particularly egregious when it's a left turn lane that has a red "no left turn permitted" arrow. I often (as in daily) see fully five cars go through the intersection after the arrow has turned red, obstructing cars that are trying to go straight through the now-green light.
This is not a matter of poor timing, just a matter of people deciding that it's more important for them to get through the intersection than to obey the traffic rules. We have horrific crashes around here on a regular basis because someone comes through the green light and hits someone who was running the tail end of a previous green that is now red.
To be fair -- there *are* penalties for those things: you lose your job, you may get convicted of perjury, or even impeached.
The problem is that the American justice system is designed to first make a guilty/not guilty decision, then assign sentencing based on the quality or type of guilt, which is generally a good thing. People who are guilty of killing someone, but did it by mistake, shouldn't be sentenced the way that someone who killed with purpose and planning.
But governments and government agencies aren't making these sorts of decisions out of malice. They're making them out of a wish to keep people safe (and, at a finer-grained level, because individuals will always make decisions that'll keep their jobs, and making a decision to grant people the freedom to keep working with model rockets, while good for the community as a whole, could be very bad for the individual who made that decision if someone ever does something bad with a model rocket, so the person will naturally choose the most conservative course.)
As such, the government agencies are judged lightly, as everyone understands that they were making those decisions based on good intentions, however lousy the result.
>It's as if countries in the "western" world these days are in a race to see who can remove citizen rights the fastest.
>I really don't understand it. Have we really fallen so far so fast?
*All* governments have *always* wanted the ability to spy on everyone, including their own citizens. It's not even paranoia or a matter of the government somehow having a mind of its own: it's just individuals doing their jobs and wanting to make sure that they never get in trouble for not having done enough to keep their jobs and country safe.
The primary difference between what we're seeing now and the Stasi or the Star Chamber is that now, every government *can* easily record 100% of the information that they have access to.
So they are. All of them, all the time, because they feel like they have to.
Governments are *always* the most dangerous entities to humanity, and it's not even like the governments can help it. They just become that way because that's how power works: people functioning in their own self-interest and self-preservation, will always make larger and more intrusive governments.
Let's hear it for strong crypto.
Quick story. My grandparents were just starting out during the Great Depression so it left them with a big distrust in banks. They both worked hard through their lives and ended up purchasing and running a couple motels later in life, then selling them and handling the mortgages themselves -- which means, the people who bought the mortgages were sending their monthly payments directly to my grandparents, for 30 years.
In cash. Because my grandmother was probably a tax cheat. But that's an aside.
Here's the thing: her kids and grandkids didn't know about any of this. I'm not even sure her husband really did because granddad was a great guy and a lot of fun but he didn't get involved in the day-to-day finances of the household because, well, he was a little flaky and would give money to down-and-out strangers, so gramma just made sure he only had what he needed. He passed away and she went on living in the house.
Then she had a couple of strokes that left her blind, and was still living in the house, and at some point we were cleaning out some of the 50 years' worth of crap she'd accumulated so she woudn't trip over stuff walking around the house while blind, and she mentioned that while we were cleaning, we maybe should get the money out from under her mattress. She said there was a lot of money, maybe even $10,000, under her bed. We were like, "dude." We thought it was a crazy, dangerous thing to keep that kind of money in the house.
So we lifted up the mattress and found an enormous pile of manila envelopes, put them in a trash bag, went home, and started counting. It came out to more like $100,000 in cash. It was crazy: we felt like drug lords. We had some issues depositing it in her account, actually, because that kind of cash gets people very interested in where it came from.
And the point of this whole story is that about three months after we did this, a nice guy knocked on her front door and said he was from the city and they needed to know where the water line had been run through the front yard so they could dig an underground power cable through and she walked out in the front yard and talked to him for ten minutes, and when she went back inside she noticed all the drawers were open in the kitchen (because she ran into one) and her bedroom had been searched, including under her mattress.
(And as an aside, even in a crappy bank account bearing 3% interest, even in a bad economy, that same amount of money would've been worth enormously more had she not stuck it under her bed.)
>I personally think [Kutiboy's] accomplishment here is more one of editing than one of actual creating.
I'm unclear on the difference.
If I'm writing using the English language, aren't I just editing? since I didn't invent the language?
Editing, in writing, is generally considered to mean changes intended to clarify a work or to make it adhere to some ruleset. I don't think TFV was aiming for either of those.
That is actually the whole point of patents and copyrights: they acknowledge that any creation people make belongs to all of us, in the same way that the language we all speak belongs to all of us, and in order to encourage people to create more stuff the laws provide a brief protection for creators, before their creations become part of society's mental furniture.