For the day to day legal BS average people are likely to encounter the situation is just as bad. I doubt the police are going to break down my door and accuse me of running a meth lab, but let's look at something as common as traffic violations.
Your court date will roll around and you'll plead not guilty. A trial date will be set, meaning you'll have to schedule your life around that, and try to get a lawyer to help. The average person isn't expected to fully understand the law, because it's so nuanced and convoluted, which is why defense attorneys with years of specialized training exist. The average person is expected to fully abide by the law he doesn't understand, though, which may suggest a problem with the system, but nobody will question it during this process.
On your trial date you'll speak to some self-important prosecutor or solicitor who acts on behalf of the government. He'll treat your minor case like it's the crime of the century. Depending on your demeanor he may offer a deal of some sort, which usually entails you pleading guilty to a somewhat lessor offense. What he probably won't tell you is that if you reject this offer, and make him go through the hassle of an actual trial, he'll push for the maximum possible punishment the law allows, regardless of any circumstances up to that point, because he doesn't want to do more work.
This is justice in America.
If you take his deal, you've just pleaded guilty to an offense you may not have even committed, and is probably something so stupid no one should care even if you did do it, but you're intimidated into the plea by his legal jargon and the fact that, as an average Joe, you don't have the time, money, or resources devoted to fighting it. You'll pay a few hundred dollars in fines and be on your way, with an arrest record, a criminal history, and completely out the hundreds you spent for the bond, the fine, the impound, the attorney, and anything else. The state will pat itself on the back for a job well done for cleaning up the mean streets of dangerous scum like you.
If you don't take his deal you'll be put on trial. For minor offenses you may not even get a jury of twelve average Joes who will sympathize with you; the state has found a loophole and called this an "administrative matter", meaning you'll get tried by a judge, who will claim to be impartial but is on the state's payroll and has a vested interest in making sure things turn out in the state's favor, not to mention his clouded view of every person who appears before him as a criminal.
The judge will ignore everything you say, and your attorney will be mostly powerless since the time for deal-making is over and all he can do is try to object to the prosection's evidence. There will be little evidence to which he can object, though, since for most minor offenses there aren't any significant witnesses or material bits of evidence. Nothing but the policeman's word and charge on the books, often, and this will be taken as wholly sufficient to pronounce you guilty, whereupon you'll pay a huge fine, face possible jail time, and be in worse shape than you had you just meekly submitted instead of trying to assert your right as an American to a fair and impartial trial.
If you're very lucky, you may win your case and be pronounced "not guilty". You spent time in jail, have an arrest record, paid a pretty penny to bondsmen and lawyers and impound lots, had to take time off work, stressed the hell out of yourself dealing with this. Thousands of dollars later the state will send you on your way without so much as a "sorry about the trouble".
This is justice in America.
Create thousands upon thousands of arbitrary, meaningless laws which serve no public good, which citizens can't keep track of or reasonably comprehend, then leap out from behind the bushes to scream "GOTCHA!" when they may break one, rubbing your hands with glee that you can extract more money from the citizens. Punish them for daring to question the authority of the state. That's justice in America, and when you create laws just for the purpose of turning otherwise normal people into criminals, you cause them to lose all respect for the law.
How can a state pick 51% of an executive? And 49% of another? They pick a SINGLE executive, not two, three or more.
What? My state has fifteen electoral votes. Seems it'd be pretty easy to split those to at least a close approximation of the popular vote of the state.
By removing this system, you effectivly remove any executive representation to small states. Preseidents will be elected by large cities (Los Angeles, New York City, etc) of a handfull of states.
I've heard this argument over and over and it has absolutely never made any sense to me whatsoever. How, exactly, would that work? With a direct popular vote, the doofus in Wyoming has just as much say as the doofus in New York. What's the problem? How would this "unfairly" weight anything, and if you can show me that it does, can you also show me how that's significantly different from what's going on now? The candidates care about the New York vote, the California vote, the Texas vote. You know, the big hitters. Nobody cares about the Wyoming vote or the Hawaii vote. How would it be different without the electoral system?
I ask in all seriousness, because I've never understood this argument, and it just keeps getting tossed out there like it's axiomatic.
Right now, all I know is that living in a heavily red state, I might as well not bother going to the polls, because my vote will not be counted. Someone decided that where I happen to live is the most important thing about me. I have much more in common with people from my general age range, or income range, because I share very definite things in common with them about the future, taxes and spending, etc. Considering my vote in a group with those people would make some sense.
But I share nothing in common with a bunch of retired yahoos from south Georgia, or soccer moms out in the far-off suburbs -- yet my vote is rolled right in with theirs for no good reason I can see. How is that rational or fair?
I think we're all well aware that Darwin laid out most -- though not all -- of the groundwork for evolutionary science, but since then there's been 150 years of research done on the topic, so deciding that evolution is wrong because Darwin himself wasn't 100% correct is like deciding a building is ugly by standing in the basement.
But the anti-evolution fundamentalists can't quite wrap their head around that. They have a mindset where the first time someone said something, it's truth. Their dogma hasn't changed significantly in two thousand years; on the few occasions it has, it's quietly integrated into their knowledge. A prime example is how livid the church was with Galileo for daring to suggest, as others had, the heliocentric model, for dogma at the time declared the heavens to be eternal and unchanging. Now every fundamentalist can give you an impressive speech about how the precise orbits of the planets is proof of the magnificence of God. No one really remembers or cares that this wasn't always the case.
But more to the point, their obsession with Darwin is based on their obsession with authority figures and revelation. To them, truth is and always has been the Bible, and the people who wrote the Bible were, allegedly, handed this knowledge from on high. No one had to go find out what commandments and laws God wanted -- he apparently just told someone. In that same vein, the Church is the authority on interpreting the Bible or enforcing it, and so people associated with the Church are also authorities. A fundamentalist's entire worldview is predicated on these revealed truths from authorities.
They therefore assume that everyone else works on this same principle -- that authority figures hand out information which is either true or false, and if they can show that person, or anything he said, to be in error, then they've destroyed his authority. To them, the information is only as good as the authority of the person who offered it, because that person's authority is the final product and the information is really only secondary. If Paul was just some guy nobody would care what he said, but because he was supposedly in touch with the ultimate authority, his words are recorded and now we all know what he said.
They don't realise or don't care that science is done by incorporating the knowledge of dozens of disciplines and thousands of people who worked on the problem before, and that knocking one of them down doesn't affect the final product because the product is not the authority of the scientist.
So, by attacking Darwin they hope to make him look foolish or wrong, and if they can do that, then absolutely everything built upon his work is also foolish or wrong. That's the mindset of a fundamentalist -- the mindset of anyone who believes in revelation over investigation.
How many people are actually sitting around thinking "Man, I'd love to buy a new house, but I'm $3000 dollars short". No one.
I'm sitting around thinking "Man, I'd love to move out of my hellhole apartment, but I don't have the money to pay the up-front rent, the security deposit, the moving costs, etc." 3000 bucks would do me a world of good there. Maybe I could get some car repairs while I'm at it. God knows I could use it, and the mechanic would have some extra money. I'm not really fond of my furniture either, so buying a few new pieces, even if they're not top quality, would be nice. All of this would put money into the economy -- the landlord, the mechanic, the shopkeep -- and I'd get a decent little upgrade in my standard of living.
But that's just me. What might others do with 3000 dollars? Some would buy new TVs and other trinkets, which I guess is their perogative. An awful lot of people would use it to downplay their mortgages, which would save their butts and give the precious banks their precious money. I have to imagine countless thousands who would finally get that broken car fixed, or that new computer, or save themselves from eviction or mortgage foreclosures, or pay some local handyman to put in new windows, or whatever. Some of the money would go back into the local economy, some wouldn't -- but I don't see how that result is any different from what's being proposed, and this would increase the quality of a lot of lives, unlike artificially propping up yet another house of cards.
I'm not saying that giving everyone the three thousand dollars is necessarily the way to do it but don't discount it just because "some of it would go to foreign economies", "it wouldn't create jobs", "you can't really use it to buy a house", or the other excuses people are offering around here. 3000 dollars in the hands of the people would probably make more of a positive impact on the general population than giving it to random pet projects of Senators.
The thing is, this doesn't happen, because Unix systems have had a well defined directory hierarchy for a long time that explains where different types of data should go, the programmers generally respect it, and follow it.
Which was probably the OP's point about publishing standards at the very least. I've seen a few Unix programs that put things in odd places, but generally they behave, and it certainly can't be compared to Windows' insanity, where every single developer has their own little idea about where things should go, and there's no good argument to be made for or against it because Microsoft doesn't seem to care.
As above, when you type in that magic command to install a package, you take it on faith that it will put its files in the right place, and most of the time it will.
But at least in, say, Linux package repositories, the package has been checked and examined by people who know what's what, and have vouched for the package in terms of not being spyware, putting things where they belong, and so forth. It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good, and light years ahead of Windows where the basic idea is to get a CD or executable installer from god-knows-where, run it, and hope to Hell that it doesn't do anything to screw up your system.:)
With a shorter yellow light there's less time to decide what to do, and more importantly, less time to implement it. The light's yellow ahead and I'm doing 45mph -- do I have enough time to get through? I don't know! Should I just slam on the brakes? I don't think I can do 45 to 0 in this distance! What should I do?
It's been proven over and over again (check the links in some of the other replies to your post) that not only does a shorter yellow light cause more accidents because of the above type of thinking, but reduces compliance. If I'm travelling at speed, and I'm not sure I can make the yellow light, I'd rather risk zipping through the red light with that half-second margin than risk hitting the anchors and screeching to a halt while the bozo behind me wraps his front fender around my trunk just because some pissant municipality wanted another way to bilk the citizens out of more money.
But not everyone is like me. Many, if not most people, will slam the brakes because they don't want to get a ticket, and coming to a dead stop in a short distance where other cars around you are also travelling fast is an invitation for disaster. Regardless of whether other people "should" leave more space between them and the car in front of them, that isn't how it works in real life, and laws that ignore what people will actually do instead of what some utopian driver's-ed teacher wishes they would do are there only to generate revenue.
True. But the majority also don't care what the application is -- they want to get a specific task accomplished and they've been shown, and have memorized, where to click to do that. The slavering masses on our sales floor aren't using Outlook and Word because they have some love of those products -- they're using it because they want to send email or write a document, and they know those programs will let them.
People like that don't give a damn what it is or how it works, as long as they can do their jobs. If you put them in front of an Ubuntu machine and showed them "this is where the email is, this is where the word processor is," they'd be just fine. Do you think they care that they're sending email in Evolution instead of Outlook? They don't. Do you think they care that they're writing a sales proposal in Writer instead of Word? They don't. They just care whether it works or not.
The view that things need to be compatible with Microsoft applications because people "know" those applications is ludicrous. The majority of the population doesn't "know" Microsoft -- they know what they've been explicitly shown, and are usually unable to do anything even slightly more advanced than what they've already been taught. Hell, with most people, if you rearrange their desktop icons, they become hopelessly lost.
This also explains the mass confusion when Vista came out, or the Office "ribbon" -- suddenly no one knew what the hell they were doing, and had to learn again. Only took 'em a day or two. It wouldn't be any different if they switched to Ubuntu -- an initial outcry of "WHERE'S MY EMAIL?", then they'd find it, remember that, and go about their business.
Yeah, there are always going to be those situations where someone needs some stupid application that only runs on Windows, and for which no OSS alternative exists. Fine. But a huge percentage of a corporate workforce is comprised of sales staff, marketing staff, HR staff, and the like. Most of the time these sort of positions gain nothing from running Windows, or Microsoft applications. They need to be able to use email, write documents, log into web-based CRMs, fiddle with a spreadsheet sometimes, and other stuff that is fully covered in any major Linux distro, for free, and often much more competently than Microsoft has ever dreamed.
Switching people like that would be a cinch. Tell them it's the new Windows Mojave for all I care. They'd be able to do their jobs, and the rest of your IT staff could focus on more important things instead of re-imaging some luser's drive for the fifth time after he bollocksed it up, or removing viruses, or worrying about licenses, and all the rest. Oh yeah, and it's free.
someone needs to come out with a distro with the goal of, "absolutely, positively, 100% Windows Compatible"
Dude, Windows isn't even compatible with Windows. Switch versions and half your apps stop working. New versions of Word won't read old formats, and vice versa. The list goes on.
Maybe I'm just preaching to the choir, but the whole "Our team knows Microsoft, that's why we can't switch" argument has absolutely never made sense to me.
I know your point wasn't really about whether Windows sucks or Linux sucks. It just caught my attention because I'd recently been griping about that very thing -- Microsoft KBs that purport to solve problems, but in reality, they have several different articles for any given problem, and each of them are full of arcane, incomprehensible gibberish involving adding unknown values to unknown registry entries, making text files and magically incanting them to insert themselves somewhere, and the like. None of it is ever explained, there's no way to find out on your own what's going on, and no way to find out on your own how to do any of it. That last part is what really bothers me -- I don't expect anyone to have in-born knowledge of any OS, but with most Unixes the resources are available to find out what's going on for yourself if you're so inclined. With Microsoft, it's all a complete mystery unless you want to shell out money for stupid classes. And even then, half the MCSEs I know still don't know what the hell is going on.
To me it's comparable to the way math is taught in schools -- here's the quadratic formula. Memorize it, and grind through it on command. I can do that with my eyes closed now, but ten years later I still have no idea what it actually does, what it means, what the purpose of it is, or how anyone figured it out. It's just handed down from on high.
And the thing is, I have had to do these little Microsoft dances before. My own machines rarely get bollocksed up to the point where it's necessary but somehow our sales staff manages to do weird things to their machines on a weekly basis. I always have to resort to this sort of thing because Windows itself, as far as I can tell, provides zero diagnostic tools -- no logfiles, no way to run something from a cli to see what it's doing. If you're lucky you'll get an 0xDEADBEEF error, like that helps.
Amazing. This is what it takes to solve many Microsoft-related problems (ones that aren't "solved" by reinstalling something, which isn't a solution), yet thousands of Windows fanboys proudly thump their chests at how usable it is, while making snotty remarks if a Linux user has to so much as glance sideways at an xterm.
And at least in Linux, a cursory knowledge of any Unix-based system is enough to get around. There are manpages for stuff. There are things that explain what these options or those switches do, and logfiles to help you understand what's going wrong, so there are ways to figure out, on your own, what to do.
I'm a veteran user/admin of both systems and the above KB article, and tons more like it, completely flummox me. Sure, I could mindlessly execute the instructions but there's no way I'd ever figure out to do any of that on my own, and I don't see any way to deduce any of it either. To even understand half of it requires some knowledge of should-be-obsolete-by-now DOS hijinks. And just what the hell is "SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 P330 T3"?
It just astonishes me that gibberish like the above, or having to manually expand cab files, or alter hex values buried thirteen layers deep in the registry, or extract files out of a CD by hand, is considered okay by so many, but god forbid you instruct a user to "apt-get install" something, because ha! ha! that's just difficult and non-intuitive!
"has a medical condition that will not allow him to jog for more than 20 meters without collapsing".
Okay. What's wrong with that? You have a problem believing someone could contract malaria in Africa? Do you think most of the people here could sprint twenty meters without collapsing? It really was not that huge a show-stopper if you knew how to manage the game mechanic.
The vehicles suck. They are usually about as bullet-resistant as wet kleenex and have about as much durability; on the other hand they explode into giant fireballs when their lifebar is depleted.
Actually, most of them took a good couple of minutes to explode even after they'd been damaged to the point of not being usable. It might not be "realistic" that they explode but if you want pure realism, one or two bullets would have killed you every single time, and the majority of people you meet in this game (and every other FPS) are carrying automatic weapons. How much realism do you want?
The enemies are incredibly annoying.
Okay, I found their single-mindedness a bit tiresome, but really, in each guard post there were only three or four doofuses, and it was easy to eliminate them, especially since a good portion of them would jump into their Jeeps and rush you, letting you gun them down. It got rather silly at times but it's hardly a reason to flip out. Park far away, gun them down, move on. Or better yet, plan routes around them. The map is huge. Use it to your advantage.
Instead of using an (unrealistic, game-y) map on some techno gizmo or overlaid on the screen in a corner, this game's hero has a... *drumroll* clipboard. Yep, a clipboard.
Two seconds ago you were whining about the lack of realism, now you want magical HUDs and in-game maps that mysteriously appear in the corner. In a real life, more-or-less-now scenario, you bet you'd have a clipboard and a GPS. And you'd have to put them down when you sprinted or jumped into a river. That's realistic, the type of realism you claimed to want so much. The auto-scrolling thing is a little off, sure, but there must be at least some concessions for the fact that we're playing a game -- though, if you want to get hot and bothered, every GPS I've seen in the past few years can zoom in and out of your location if you want it to.. which is all the map was really doing.
A bunch of obsessives with nothing else to do have sunk to the digital equivalent of rooting through someone's trash, and found out that Apple may, possibly, be considering an idea that's been implemented a thousand different ways since the sixities or earlier, and has universally failed because it is a bad idea because nobody wants to worry about how they look on the phone. Nobody wants to worry about answering the phone if they just got out of the shower, just got out of bed, are having a bad hair day, really shouldn't have worn that shirt today, lied to the boss/girlfriend/buddy/ex about where you are and why you can't see them right now.
Those, and many others, have been the traditional reasons against videophones -- and they've been very good ones. Being able to see a talking head on the other side has never, in the history of this technology, been useful to anyone.
And now here comes a new reason for thinking it's stupid. Can you imagine trying to keep a damned hand-held unit still enough to not make the other person nauseated? Most people I know have enough difficulty holding that phone still long enough to take a photograph without looking like they're suffering from some neurological disorder. I really don't want to suffer through a video conference with someone holding up a phone as it shakes and shimmies all over the place.
Sure, you could put it in some kind of iHolder which keeps it iSteady on your iDesk, but why bother? Of what possible benefit is this? What does this bring to the conversation that couldn't be accomplished by voice alone?
If any other company were considering this, it would be roundly panned as being a silly idea that's failed for three or four decades, but god forbid we deride anything the almighty Apple might do.
When I came aboard our sysadmin had done the same thing. djikstra and langland are our webservers, sylow is a fileserver, some of our SIP proxies were cantor, laplace, gauss, dedekind, and ramanujan, our firewalls were archimedes and hypatia. Database machines named things like euler and erdos.
He was a total math geek so this made sense to him. For someone like me, who doesn't know math and didn't recognise most of these names, it took some getting used to, but after a few days I just had them memorized. Many of them have been decommissioned or repurposed, but it's easy to make the mental switch.
With only twentysomething machines to worry about at the time, and only the two of us to administrate them, it worked fine. But as we grew, and more servers were constantly added, and more employees with varying resposibilities on each of them, someone decided "this won't scale" and now, except for the legacy machines he and I set up, we're stuck with boring things like "sip1", "sip2", "sip3", "db1", "db2", "db3", and so forth.
I actually find that more difficult in many ways, but maybe that's just because I'm better with words than numbers. Regardless, I can remember that cantor was having a load issue three days ago and that explains this user's complaint, but I can't remember if it was sip7 or sip13 that was having the problem...
Plus, the NOC team didn't bother setting these machines' IP addresses in a logical way. I'd have made it so, say, db9 is, for example, 10.0.1.9. Instead it's whatever was available, so in addition to memorizing all the numbers I have to remember which IP addresses correspond to what, or ping the hostnames until I find the right one. Highly annoying.
Re:Because you don't need more cycles in biz
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Less Is Moore
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Let's be honest here. What does the average office PC run? A word processor, a spreadsheet, an SAP frontend, maybe a few more tools. And then we're basically done. This isn't really rocket science for a contemporary computer, it's neither heavy on the CPU nor on the GPU.
I wish. The average office PC is so laden with crapware that it's barely chugging along. The salespeople at my company are forever whining about how "slow" their dual core 1.8ghz laptops are, and whenever I look it's because they have five IE windows open, two IM clients, thirty little "helper" applications in the systray, virus scanners constantly running (but not accomplishing a hell of a lot), things constantly checking for updates, god-knows-what malware in the background, stupid little "1000 Free Smilies" toolbars, and a whole plethora of other inane things, in addition to the few applications they legitimately need for work.
Many companies have tighter policies and procedures in place to prevent users from doing this kind of thing, but just as many don't, and of course managers and other self-important people somehow get themselves exempt from it all. People think they need to get newer, faster computers every so often because their old ones are "too slow", when in reality, more resources usually just means more resources for the crapware to use.
If people kept their machines clean and didn't install stupid garbage, then I'd agree with you -- ancient 1.4ghz Pentium M machines would be far more than adequate for the majority of "office" users. Unfortunately, in gritty reality, users often just do whatever the hell they like, and manage to completely trash their nice, fast systems within days of getting them.
No, he rose to fame when he was a spokesman for Mineke-brand mufflers.
In seriousness though, Foreman has said that not only has he made way more money selling his grills, but he's far more famous for that than he ever was for boxing.
In Unreal 2004? The bots that follow the same retarded routes over and over, frequently stop and stare into space during critical moments, and will shoot at you even though you're further away than the engine can even render, are hidden in foliage, and aren't doing anything tactically significant anyway, while ignoring the guy taking down their node six feet away?
Unreal 2004 has some of the most retarded bots I've ever seen in a game, to the point where if there are more than a few on a server, I leave because it's absolutely no fun. They make horrible enemies and even worse teammates (how many times have I seen one grab a vehicle, plow it into a hillside, and get stuck there spinning its wheels for the next ten minutes?).
Yeah, I hadda go off on this rant. Back to the normal discussion!
If a poster on a forum posted information on where to find Barack Obama, and a death threat, would you expect the server that hosted that forum to be seized?
Let's find out. Hey everyone, here's Barack Obama's home address and telephone number! Let's ring his doorbell and run away!
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
(202) 456-2640
You're either an adult, or you're not. If you get charged as one, it should be strongly argued that the accused should automatically have all the same rights and responsibilities as one.
Yeah, you'd think so, except courts, and judges, are lazy and don't want to think. It's easier to just adhere to the letter of the law, because considering the spirit of the law is too hard.
A few years ago I had to go to court for some minor traffic violation, and as these things go, I had to sit there for hours listening to other people go stand in front of the judge and be told they have no chance.
One case was an eighteen year old girl who had apparently been caught drinking at a party when the cops showed up, so they arrested her and charged her with consumption by a minor. As with most teenagers in court, she had her parents with her. The judge asked her something -- I forget what -- and the father started to answer.
The judge cut him off, saying "Sir, I appreciate the interest of the family, but legally speaking, your daughter is an adult, so this answer has to come from her, okay?"
Not once did anyone question the stupidity of saying this girl was a legal adult, while charging her with underage consumption of alcohol. The judge was outright stating that in the eyes of the law, she is an adult, so what's the goddamned problem?
This kind of thing happens all the time, and if they're going to be as obnoxiously inflexible about something as insignificant as an 18 year old girl having a few beers, how do you think they're going to react to something as emotionally charged as child porn?
I absolutely agree with you -- if you are going to charge someone as an adult, then it logically follows that they are legally adults and can do anything an adult may legally do, including drinking, having sex, or participate in pornography. If you think someone isn't mature enough to make appropriate decisions, then how can you justify holding them responsible for their decisions?
But, alas, the court system is fundamentally stupid about such matters and I doubt it will ever change.
I think the point is that our society is utterly two-faced about the situation. We market sexuality, much of which is specifically aimed at the teenage demographic, and then when the teens actually display sexual curiosity we condemn or -- in this case -- criminalise them.
We all clamored to see 17 year old Britney dancing around in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, but anyone who actually interacts with a 17 year old girl is viewed as a sick, twisted individual.
We're okay with shows like Hannah Montana which feature underage girls in tight or skimpy clothing, but when the actual actress takes some racy photos of herself, there's a huge outcry from the morality police.
We can't get enough of the salicious tale of Jamie Lynn Spears being pregnant, buying tabloids and magazines to read all about it, but we also bash her for being a slut or "setting a bad example".
The law itself is just as absurd. In many states the age of consent is 16, so while it would be perfectly legal to have sex with a 16 year old, if a camera gets involved, suddenly you're the most horrible monster around.
So, I believe the original poster's point was that, particularly in today's litiguous and victim-culture environment, a strong case could be made that the teens in this case are actually victims of a cruel, exploitative media. Furthermore, the point in all his hypothetical lawsuits would be a way of announcing the hypocritical attitudes we all have -- a way of saying "Fine, if teenage sexuality is so evil, let's get rid of all this marketing! You can't have it both ways!" Might make people rethink their position on the entire issue... but probably not.
Not to mention the fact that you can tell what a service is doing on a Unix system. In Windows you'll have several "svchost" processes sucking up resources and you have no idea what they're actually doing.
You make some interesting points but I think you're way, way off with some of them.
Let's start with your amusing dialog at the drive-through. Fine, the command line can be annoyingly strict about what options and switches are available for which commands. That's the way it goes. But Windows, or any GUI, isn't really any better, is it? Now you can see your options -- sometimes. Sometimes you're dealing with a "wizard" which doesn't really tell you what the hell is going on either. You see all kinds of stuff "preparing" and "installing" but you have no real clue what it's doing.
Let's not pretend GUIs aren't just as strict either. You can only do certain things in certain windows or tabs or contexts. To do anything more advanced than launching an application you have to know exactly where the shortcut/launcher/applet is, and most GUIs are so poorly laid-out that you have to experiment with them to find the one thing you want to change. Not to mention how, particularly in Windows, they're constantly changing, so what you think you knew will cease to be valid with the next release of the application or OS. And while I can carry my CLI knowledge to nearly any other Unix, GUIs rarely let you do that. Each application or OS has its own little finicky way of doing things. Or don't you remember the Office 2003 to Office 2007 Ribbon debacle?
Who here in their right mind would actually sit down at a computer and just randomly type in:
"Sudo apt get" and expect their computer to update itself?
No one. Your average yob would go to "Applications > Add/Remove Software" which, by the way, actually lets you add things, unlike Windows' version of it, where you can only remove software. Or, they might click on the little icon which quietly appears in the corner and says "Updates Are Available."
But who would sit at a computer, having no prior knowledge, and know how to google for something, download an executable installer, and run it? Do you think people were born with this knowledge? At some point they had to learn (or have someone do it for them, which negates the argument entirely).
But it's also infinitely more approachable to a user. You don't need to have someone tell you how to do things. You can just sit down at and attempt to match your desires with the options on the screen.
That makes sense on the face of it, but reality shows a different story -- users are completely flummoxed by computers (which to them is Windows). If they could figure stuff out on their own they wouldn't be calling people like us all day long asking how to accomplish basic tasks. Maybe the GUI isn't as intuitive or friendly as you think it is, or maybe users are just scared of breaking something, but the result is the same either way -- they don't attempt, and when they do, they don't get their desired result. Then they call for help. So.
Understand that the majority of people are not "using" the computer in any meaningful sense. They are launching a few applications, which they know how to do because they've memorized where to click, and they can only use those applications because someone held their hands and showed them how to do the bare minimum necessary to get the task done.
And how many times have we seen a user who, upon sitting at an unfamiliar XP computer, suddenly can't do anything? Their shortcuts aren't where they're expected. Things are laid out in a new and unfamiliar way. On their computer, they can launch Outlook from the desktop icon, but this desktop doesn't have one. What to do, what to do? The fact that they're using a GUI isn't helping them out of this mess.
The other problem is even after they memorize a command line solution they probably don't understand what it is they're doing.
As above, most users have no understanding of what they're doing anyway. They click Outlook and it opens. They have no idea how it works, nor do they care. For power users, I'd arg
That's a great idea except that the inauguration takes place at noon, Eastern time, when most Americans are at work. I don't have a television at my office. I don't think there's been a television at *any* place I've worked unless you count my table-waiting days.
If I could watch online, that'd be ideal, and my boss wouldn't even care -- but where am I supposed to find a TV?
The article specifically references visible light. If that's wrong, then what advantage is gained over using radio as we do now, which is already part of the EM spectrum?
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For the day to day legal BS average people are likely to encounter the situation is just as bad. I doubt the police are going to break down my door and accuse me of running a meth lab, but let's look at something as common as traffic violations.
Your court date will roll around and you'll plead not guilty. A trial date will be set, meaning you'll have to schedule your life around that, and try to get a lawyer to help. The average person isn't expected to fully understand the law, because it's so nuanced and convoluted, which is why defense attorneys with years of specialized training exist. The average person is expected to fully abide by the law he doesn't understand, though, which may suggest a problem with the system, but nobody will question it during this process.
On your trial date you'll speak to some self-important prosecutor or solicitor who acts on behalf of the government. He'll treat your minor case like it's the crime of the century. Depending on your demeanor he may offer a deal of some sort, which usually entails you pleading guilty to a somewhat lessor offense. What he probably won't tell you is that if you reject this offer, and make him go through the hassle of an actual trial, he'll push for the maximum possible punishment the law allows, regardless of any circumstances up to that point, because he doesn't want to do more work.
This is justice in America.
If you take his deal, you've just pleaded guilty to an offense you may not have even committed, and is probably something so stupid no one should care even if you did do it, but you're intimidated into the plea by his legal jargon and the fact that, as an average Joe, you don't have the time, money, or resources devoted to fighting it. You'll pay a few hundred dollars in fines and be on your way, with an arrest record, a criminal history, and completely out the hundreds you spent for the bond, the fine, the impound, the attorney, and anything else. The state will pat itself on the back for a job well done for cleaning up the mean streets of dangerous scum like you.
If you don't take his deal you'll be put on trial. For minor offenses you may not even get a jury of twelve average Joes who will sympathize with you; the state has found a loophole and called this an "administrative matter", meaning you'll get tried by a judge, who will claim to be impartial but is on the state's payroll and has a vested interest in making sure things turn out in the state's favor, not to mention his clouded view of every person who appears before him as a criminal.
The judge will ignore everything you say, and your attorney will be mostly powerless since the time for deal-making is over and all he can do is try to object to the prosection's evidence. There will be little evidence to which he can object, though, since for most minor offenses there aren't any significant witnesses or material bits of evidence. Nothing but the policeman's word and charge on the books, often, and this will be taken as wholly sufficient to pronounce you guilty, whereupon you'll pay a huge fine, face possible jail time, and be in worse shape than you had you just meekly submitted instead of trying to assert your right as an American to a fair and impartial trial.
If you're very lucky, you may win your case and be pronounced "not guilty". You spent time in jail, have an arrest record, paid a pretty penny to bondsmen and lawyers and impound lots, had to take time off work, stressed the hell out of yourself dealing with this. Thousands of dollars later the state will send you on your way without so much as a "sorry about the trouble".
This is justice in America.
Create thousands upon thousands of arbitrary, meaningless laws which serve no public good, which citizens can't keep track of or reasonably comprehend, then leap out from behind the bushes to scream "GOTCHA!" when they may break one, rubbing your hands with glee that you can extract more money from the citizens. Punish them for daring to question the authority of the state. That's justice in America, and when you create laws just for the purpose of turning otherwise normal people into criminals, you cause them to lose all respect for the law.
I did, long ago.
Totally offtopic, but "timeshift"? Are you serious? Did we really need a 2.0 buzzword for recording things?
That I can dodge bullets? Or that when I'm ready, I won't have to?
How can a state pick 51% of an executive? And 49% of another? They pick a SINGLE executive, not two, three or more.
What? My state has fifteen electoral votes. Seems it'd be pretty easy to split those to at least a close approximation of the popular vote of the state.
By removing this system, you effectivly remove any executive representation to small states. Preseidents will be elected by large cities (Los Angeles, New York City, etc) of a handfull of states.
I've heard this argument over and over and it has absolutely never made any sense to me whatsoever. How, exactly, would that work? With a direct popular vote, the doofus in Wyoming has just as much say as the doofus in New York. What's the problem? How would this "unfairly" weight anything, and if you can show me that it does, can you also show me how that's significantly different from what's going on now? The candidates care about the New York vote, the California vote, the Texas vote. You know, the big hitters. Nobody cares about the Wyoming vote or the Hawaii vote. How would it be different without the electoral system?
I ask in all seriousness, because I've never understood this argument, and it just keeps getting tossed out there like it's axiomatic.
Right now, all I know is that living in a heavily red state, I might as well not bother going to the polls, because my vote will not be counted. Someone decided that where I happen to live is the most important thing about me. I have much more in common with people from my general age range, or income range, because I share very definite things in common with them about the future, taxes and spending, etc. Considering my vote in a group with those people would make some sense.
But I share nothing in common with a bunch of retired yahoos from south Georgia, or soccer moms out in the far-off suburbs -- yet my vote is rolled right in with theirs for no good reason I can see. How is that rational or fair?
I think we're all well aware that Darwin laid out most -- though not all -- of the groundwork for evolutionary science, but since then there's been 150 years of research done on the topic, so deciding that evolution is wrong because Darwin himself wasn't 100% correct is like deciding a building is ugly by standing in the basement.
But the anti-evolution fundamentalists can't quite wrap their head around that. They have a mindset where the first time someone said something, it's truth. Their dogma hasn't changed significantly in two thousand years; on the few occasions it has, it's quietly integrated into their knowledge. A prime example is how livid the church was with Galileo for daring to suggest, as others had, the heliocentric model, for dogma at the time declared the heavens to be eternal and unchanging. Now every fundamentalist can give you an impressive speech about how the precise orbits of the planets is proof of the magnificence of God. No one really remembers or cares that this wasn't always the case.
But more to the point, their obsession with Darwin is based on their obsession with authority figures and revelation. To them, truth is and always has been the Bible, and the people who wrote the Bible were, allegedly, handed this knowledge from on high. No one had to go find out what commandments and laws God wanted -- he apparently just told someone. In that same vein, the Church is the authority on interpreting the Bible or enforcing it, and so people associated with the Church are also authorities. A fundamentalist's entire worldview is predicated on these revealed truths from authorities.
They therefore assume that everyone else works on this same principle -- that authority figures hand out information which is either true or false, and if they can show that person, or anything he said, to be in error, then they've destroyed his authority. To them, the information is only as good as the authority of the person who offered it, because that person's authority is the final product and the information is really only secondary. If Paul was just some guy nobody would care what he said, but because he was supposedly in touch with the ultimate authority, his words are recorded and now we all know what he said.
They don't realise or don't care that science is done by incorporating the knowledge of dozens of disciplines and thousands of people who worked on the problem before, and that knocking one of them down doesn't affect the final product because the product is not the authority of the scientist.
So, by attacking Darwin they hope to make him look foolish or wrong, and if they can do that, then absolutely everything built upon his work is also foolish or wrong. That's the mindset of a fundamentalist -- the mindset of anyone who believes in revelation over investigation.
How many people are actually sitting around thinking "Man, I'd love to buy a new house, but I'm $3000 dollars short". No one.
I'm sitting around thinking "Man, I'd love to move out of my hellhole apartment, but I don't have the money to pay the up-front rent, the security deposit, the moving costs, etc." 3000 bucks would do me a world of good there. Maybe I could get some car repairs while I'm at it. God knows I could use it, and the mechanic would have some extra money. I'm not really fond of my furniture either, so buying a few new pieces, even if they're not top quality, would be nice. All of this would put money into the economy -- the landlord, the mechanic, the shopkeep -- and I'd get a decent little upgrade in my standard of living.
But that's just me. What might others do with 3000 dollars? Some would buy new TVs and other trinkets, which I guess is their perogative. An awful lot of people would use it to downplay their mortgages, which would save their butts and give the precious banks their precious money. I have to imagine countless thousands who would finally get that broken car fixed, or that new computer, or save themselves from eviction or mortgage foreclosures, or pay some local handyman to put in new windows, or whatever. Some of the money would go back into the local economy, some wouldn't -- but I don't see how that result is any different from what's being proposed, and this would increase the quality of a lot of lives, unlike artificially propping up yet another house of cards.
I'm not saying that giving everyone the three thousand dollars is necessarily the way to do it but don't discount it just because "some of it would go to foreign economies", "it wouldn't create jobs", "you can't really use it to buy a house", or the other excuses people are offering around here. 3000 dollars in the hands of the people would probably make more of a positive impact on the general population than giving it to random pet projects of Senators.
The thing is, this doesn't happen, because Unix systems have had a well defined directory hierarchy for a long time that explains where different types of data should go, the programmers generally respect it, and follow it.
:)
Which was probably the OP's point about publishing standards at the very least. I've seen a few Unix programs that put things in odd places, but generally they behave, and it certainly can't be compared to Windows' insanity, where every single developer has their own little idea about where things should go, and there's no good argument to be made for or against it because Microsoft doesn't seem to care.
As above, when you type in that magic command to install a package, you take it on faith that it will put its files in the right place, and most of the time it will.
But at least in, say, Linux package repositories, the package has been checked and examined by people who know what's what, and have vouched for the package in terms of not being spyware, putting things where they belong, and so forth. It's not perfect but it's pretty damn good, and light years ahead of Windows where the basic idea is to get a CD or executable installer from god-knows-where, run it, and hope to Hell that it doesn't do anything to screw up your system.
With a shorter yellow light there's less time to decide what to do, and more importantly, less time to implement it. The light's yellow ahead and I'm doing 45mph -- do I have enough time to get through? I don't know! Should I just slam on the brakes? I don't think I can do 45 to 0 in this distance! What should I do?
It's been proven over and over again (check the links in some of the other replies to your post) that not only does a shorter yellow light cause more accidents because of the above type of thinking, but reduces compliance. If I'm travelling at speed, and I'm not sure I can make the yellow light, I'd rather risk zipping through the red light with that half-second margin than risk hitting the anchors and screeching to a halt while the bozo behind me wraps his front fender around my trunk just because some pissant municipality wanted another way to bilk the citizens out of more money.
But not everyone is like me. Many, if not most people, will slam the brakes because they don't want to get a ticket, and coming to a dead stop in a short distance where other cars around you are also travelling fast is an invitation for disaster. Regardless of whether other people "should" leave more space between them and the car in front of them, that isn't how it works in real life, and laws that ignore what people will actually do instead of what some utopian driver's-ed teacher wishes they would do are there only to generate revenue.
People use applications, not operating systems.
True. But the majority also don't care what the application is -- they want to get a specific task accomplished and they've been shown, and have memorized, where to click to do that. The slavering masses on our sales floor aren't using Outlook and Word because they have some love of those products -- they're using it because they want to send email or write a document, and they know those programs will let them.
People like that don't give a damn what it is or how it works, as long as they can do their jobs. If you put them in front of an Ubuntu machine and showed them "this is where the email is, this is where the word processor is," they'd be just fine. Do you think they care that they're sending email in Evolution instead of Outlook? They don't. Do you think they care that they're writing a sales proposal in Writer instead of Word? They don't. They just care whether it works or not.
The view that things need to be compatible with Microsoft applications because people "know" those applications is ludicrous. The majority of the population doesn't "know" Microsoft -- they know what they've been explicitly shown, and are usually unable to do anything even slightly more advanced than what they've already been taught. Hell, with most people, if you rearrange their desktop icons, they become hopelessly lost.
This also explains the mass confusion when Vista came out, or the Office "ribbon" -- suddenly no one knew what the hell they were doing, and had to learn again. Only took 'em a day or two. It wouldn't be any different if they switched to Ubuntu -- an initial outcry of "WHERE'S MY EMAIL?", then they'd find it, remember that, and go about their business.
Yeah, there are always going to be those situations where someone needs some stupid application that only runs on Windows, and for which no OSS alternative exists. Fine. But a huge percentage of a corporate workforce is comprised of sales staff, marketing staff, HR staff, and the like. Most of the time these sort of positions gain nothing from running Windows, or Microsoft applications. They need to be able to use email, write documents, log into web-based CRMs, fiddle with a spreadsheet sometimes, and other stuff that is fully covered in any major Linux distro, for free, and often much more competently than Microsoft has ever dreamed.
Switching people like that would be a cinch. Tell them it's the new Windows Mojave for all I care. They'd be able to do their jobs, and the rest of your IT staff could focus on more important things instead of re-imaging some luser's drive for the fifth time after he bollocksed it up, or removing viruses, or worrying about licenses, and all the rest. Oh yeah, and it's free.
someone needs to come out with a distro with the goal of, "absolutely, positively, 100% Windows Compatible"
Dude, Windows isn't even compatible with Windows. Switch versions and half your apps stop working. New versions of Word won't read old formats, and vice versa. The list goes on.
Maybe I'm just preaching to the choir, but the whole "Our team knows Microsoft, that's why we can't switch" argument has absolutely never made sense to me.
I know your point wasn't really about whether Windows sucks or Linux sucks. It just caught my attention because I'd recently been griping about that very thing -- Microsoft KBs that purport to solve problems, but in reality, they have several different articles for any given problem, and each of them are full of arcane, incomprehensible gibberish involving adding unknown values to unknown registry entries, making text files and magically incanting them to insert themselves somewhere, and the like. None of it is ever explained, there's no way to find out on your own what's going on, and no way to find out on your own how to do any of it. That last part is what really bothers me -- I don't expect anyone to have in-born knowledge of any OS, but with most Unixes the resources are available to find out what's going on for yourself if you're so inclined. With Microsoft, it's all a complete mystery unless you want to shell out money for stupid classes. And even then, half the MCSEs I know still don't know what the hell is going on.
To me it's comparable to the way math is taught in schools -- here's the quadratic formula. Memorize it, and grind through it on command. I can do that with my eyes closed now, but ten years later I still have no idea what it actually does, what it means, what the purpose of it is, or how anyone figured it out. It's just handed down from on high.
And the thing is, I have had to do these little Microsoft dances before. My own machines rarely get bollocksed up to the point where it's necessary but somehow our sales staff manages to do weird things to their machines on a weekly basis. I always have to resort to this sort of thing because Windows itself, as far as I can tell, provides zero diagnostic tools -- no logfiles, no way to run something from a cli to see what it's doing. If you're lucky you'll get an 0xDEADBEEF error, like that helps.
Okay, end of speech.
Amazing. This is what it takes to solve many Microsoft-related problems (ones that aren't "solved" by reinstalling something, which isn't a solution), yet thousands of Windows fanboys proudly thump their chests at how usable it is, while making snotty remarks if a Linux user has to so much as glance sideways at an xterm.
And at least in Linux, a cursory knowledge of any Unix-based system is enough to get around. There are manpages for stuff. There are things that explain what these options or those switches do, and logfiles to help you understand what's going wrong, so there are ways to figure out, on your own, what to do.
I'm a veteran user/admin of both systems and the above KB article, and tons more like it, completely flummox me. Sure, I could mindlessly execute the instructions but there's no way I'd ever figure out to do any of that on my own, and I don't see any way to deduce any of it either. To even understand half of it requires some knowledge of should-be-obsolete-by-now DOS hijinks. And just what the hell is "SET BLASTER=A220 I5 D1 P330 T3"?
It just astonishes me that gibberish like the above, or having to manually expand cab files, or alter hex values buried thirteen layers deep in the registry, or extract files out of a CD by hand, is considered okay by so many, but god forbid you instruct a user to "apt-get install" something, because ha! ha! that's just difficult and non-intuitive!
"has a medical condition that will not allow him to jog for more than 20 meters without collapsing".
Okay. What's wrong with that? You have a problem believing someone could contract malaria in Africa? Do you think most of the people here could sprint twenty meters without collapsing? It really was not that huge a show-stopper if you knew how to manage the game mechanic.
The vehicles suck. They are usually about as bullet-resistant as wet kleenex and have about as much durability; on the other hand they explode into giant fireballs when their lifebar is depleted.
Actually, most of them took a good couple of minutes to explode even after they'd been damaged to the point of not being usable. It might not be "realistic" that they explode but if you want pure realism, one or two bullets would have killed you every single time, and the majority of people you meet in this game (and every other FPS) are carrying automatic weapons. How much realism do you want?
The enemies are incredibly annoying.
Okay, I found their single-mindedness a bit tiresome, but really, in each guard post there were only three or four doofuses, and it was easy to eliminate them, especially since a good portion of them would jump into their Jeeps and rush you, letting you gun them down. It got rather silly at times but it's hardly a reason to flip out. Park far away, gun them down, move on. Or better yet, plan routes around them. The map is huge. Use it to your advantage.
Instead of using an (unrealistic, game-y) map on some techno gizmo or overlaid on the screen in a corner, this game's hero has a... *drumroll* clipboard. Yep, a clipboard.
Two seconds ago you were whining about the lack of realism, now you want magical HUDs and in-game maps that mysteriously appear in the corner. In a real life, more-or-less-now scenario, you bet you'd have a clipboard and a GPS. And you'd have to put them down when you sprinted or jumped into a river. That's realistic, the type of realism you claimed to want so much. The auto-scrolling thing is a little off, sure, but there must be at least some concessions for the fact that we're playing a game -- though, if you want to get hot and bothered, every GPS I've seen in the past few years can zoom in and out of your location if you want it to.. which is all the map was really doing.
A bunch of obsessives with nothing else to do have sunk to the digital equivalent of rooting through someone's trash, and found out that Apple may, possibly, be considering an idea that's been implemented a thousand different ways since the sixities or earlier, and has universally failed because it is a bad idea because nobody wants to worry about how they look on the phone. Nobody wants to worry about answering the phone if they just got out of the shower, just got out of bed, are having a bad hair day, really shouldn't have worn that shirt today, lied to the boss/girlfriend/buddy/ex about where you are and why you can't see them right now.
Those, and many others, have been the traditional reasons against videophones -- and they've been very good ones. Being able to see a talking head on the other side has never, in the history of this technology, been useful to anyone.
And now here comes a new reason for thinking it's stupid. Can you imagine trying to keep a damned hand-held unit still enough to not make the other person nauseated? Most people I know have enough difficulty holding that phone still long enough to take a photograph without looking like they're suffering from some neurological disorder. I really don't want to suffer through a video conference with someone holding up a phone as it shakes and shimmies all over the place.
Sure, you could put it in some kind of iHolder which keeps it iSteady on your iDesk, but why bother? Of what possible benefit is this? What does this bring to the conversation that couldn't be accomplished by voice alone?
If any other company were considering this, it would be roundly panned as being a silly idea that's failed for three or four decades, but god forbid we deride anything the almighty Apple might do.
If you can't handle a couple of extra pounds of gear on your bike, or on foot, maybe your choice of laptop isn't your biggest problem right now.
When I came aboard our sysadmin had done the same thing. djikstra and langland are our webservers, sylow is a fileserver, some of our SIP proxies were cantor, laplace, gauss, dedekind, and ramanujan, our firewalls were archimedes and hypatia. Database machines named things like euler and erdos.
He was a total math geek so this made sense to him. For someone like me, who doesn't know math and didn't recognise most of these names, it took some getting used to, but after a few days I just had them memorized. Many of them have been decommissioned or repurposed, but it's easy to make the mental switch.
With only twentysomething machines to worry about at the time, and only the two of us to administrate them, it worked fine. But as we grew, and more servers were constantly added, and more employees with varying resposibilities on each of them, someone decided "this won't scale" and now, except for the legacy machines he and I set up, we're stuck with boring things like "sip1", "sip2", "sip3", "db1", "db2", "db3", and so forth.
I actually find that more difficult in many ways, but maybe that's just because I'm better with words than numbers. Regardless, I can remember that cantor was having a load issue three days ago and that explains this user's complaint, but I can't remember if it was sip7 or sip13 that was having the problem...
Plus, the NOC team didn't bother setting these machines' IP addresses in a logical way. I'd have made it so, say, db9 is, for example, 10.0.1.9. Instead it's whatever was available, so in addition to memorizing all the numbers I have to remember which IP addresses correspond to what, or ping the hostnames until I find the right one. Highly annoying.
Let's be honest here. What does the average office PC run? A word processor, a spreadsheet, an SAP frontend, maybe a few more tools. And then we're basically done. This isn't really rocket science for a contemporary computer, it's neither heavy on the CPU nor on the GPU.
I wish. The average office PC is so laden with crapware that it's barely chugging along. The salespeople at my company are forever whining about how "slow" their dual core 1.8ghz laptops are, and whenever I look it's because they have five IE windows open, two IM clients, thirty little "helper" applications in the systray, virus scanners constantly running (but not accomplishing a hell of a lot), things constantly checking for updates, god-knows-what malware in the background, stupid little "1000 Free Smilies" toolbars, and a whole plethora of other inane things, in addition to the few applications they legitimately need for work.
Many companies have tighter policies and procedures in place to prevent users from doing this kind of thing, but just as many don't, and of course managers and other self-important people somehow get themselves exempt from it all. People think they need to get newer, faster computers every so often because their old ones are "too slow", when in reality, more resources usually just means more resources for the crapware to use.
If people kept their machines clean and didn't install stupid garbage, then I'd agree with you -- ancient 1.4ghz Pentium M machines would be far more than adequate for the majority of "office" users. Unfortunately, in gritty reality, users often just do whatever the hell they like, and manage to completely trash their nice, fast systems within days of getting them.
No, he rose to fame when he was a spokesman for Mineke-brand mufflers.
In seriousness though, Foreman has said that not only has he made way more money selling his grills, but he's far more famous for that than he ever was for boxing.
It also has reasonably good AI for the bots.
In Unreal 2004? The bots that follow the same retarded routes over and over, frequently stop and stare into space during critical moments, and will shoot at you even though you're further away than the engine can even render, are hidden in foliage, and aren't doing anything tactically significant anyway, while ignoring the guy taking down their node six feet away?
Unreal 2004 has some of the most retarded bots I've ever seen in a game, to the point where if there are more than a few on a server, I leave because it's absolutely no fun. They make horrible enemies and even worse teammates (how many times have I seen one grab a vehicle, plow it into a hillside, and get stuck there spinning its wheels for the next ten minutes?).
Yeah, I hadda go off on this rant. Back to the normal discussion!
Let's find out. Hey everyone, here's Barack Obama's home address and telephone number! Let's ring his doorbell and run away!
You're either an adult, or you're not. If you get charged as one, it should be strongly argued that the accused should automatically have all the same rights and responsibilities as one.
Yeah, you'd think so, except courts, and judges, are lazy and don't want to think. It's easier to just adhere to the letter of the law, because considering the spirit of the law is too hard.
A few years ago I had to go to court for some minor traffic violation, and as these things go, I had to sit there for hours listening to other people go stand in front of the judge and be told they have no chance.
One case was an eighteen year old girl who had apparently been caught drinking at a party when the cops showed up, so they arrested her and charged her with consumption by a minor. As with most teenagers in court, she had her parents with her. The judge asked her something -- I forget what -- and the father started to answer.
The judge cut him off, saying "Sir, I appreciate the interest of the family, but legally speaking, your daughter is an adult, so this answer has to come from her, okay?"
Not once did anyone question the stupidity of saying this girl was a legal adult, while charging her with underage consumption of alcohol. The judge was outright stating that in the eyes of the law, she is an adult, so what's the goddamned problem?
This kind of thing happens all the time, and if they're going to be as obnoxiously inflexible about something as insignificant as an 18 year old girl having a few beers, how do you think they're going to react to something as emotionally charged as child porn?
I absolutely agree with you -- if you are going to charge someone as an adult, then it logically follows that they are legally adults and can do anything an adult may legally do, including drinking, having sex, or participate in pornography. If you think someone isn't mature enough to make appropriate decisions, then how can you justify holding them responsible for their decisions?
But, alas, the court system is fundamentally stupid about such matters and I doubt it will ever change.
I think the point is that our society is utterly two-faced about the situation. We market sexuality, much of which is specifically aimed at the teenage demographic, and then when the teens actually display sexual curiosity we condemn or -- in this case -- criminalise them.
We all clamored to see 17 year old Britney dancing around in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, but anyone who actually interacts with a 17 year old girl is viewed as a sick, twisted individual.
We're okay with shows like Hannah Montana which feature underage girls in tight or skimpy clothing, but when the actual actress takes some racy photos of herself, there's a huge outcry from the morality police.
We can't get enough of the salicious tale of Jamie Lynn Spears being pregnant, buying tabloids and magazines to read all about it, but we also bash her for being a slut or "setting a bad example".
The law itself is just as absurd. In many states the age of consent is 16, so while it would be perfectly legal to have sex with a 16 year old, if a camera gets involved, suddenly you're the most horrible monster around.
So, I believe the original poster's point was that, particularly in today's litiguous and victim-culture environment, a strong case could be made that the teens in this case are actually victims of a cruel, exploitative media. Furthermore, the point in all his hypothetical lawsuits would be a way of announcing the hypocritical attitudes we all have -- a way of saying "Fine, if teenage sexuality is so evil, let's get rid of all this marketing! You can't have it both ways!" Might make people rethink their position on the entire issue... but probably not.
Not to mention the fact that you can tell what a service is doing on a Unix system. In Windows you'll have several "svchost" processes sucking up resources and you have no idea what they're actually doing.
You make some interesting points but I think you're way, way off with some of them.
Let's start with your amusing dialog at the drive-through. Fine, the command line can be annoyingly strict about what options and switches are available for which commands. That's the way it goes. But Windows, or any GUI, isn't really any better, is it? Now you can see your options -- sometimes. Sometimes you're dealing with a "wizard" which doesn't really tell you what the hell is going on either. You see all kinds of stuff "preparing" and "installing" but you have no real clue what it's doing.
Let's not pretend GUIs aren't just as strict either. You can only do certain things in certain windows or tabs or contexts. To do anything more advanced than launching an application you have to know exactly where the shortcut/launcher/applet is, and most GUIs are so poorly laid-out that you have to experiment with them to find the one thing you want to change. Not to mention how, particularly in Windows, they're constantly changing, so what you think you knew will cease to be valid with the next release of the application or OS. And while I can carry my CLI knowledge to nearly any other Unix, GUIs rarely let you do that. Each application or OS has its own little finicky way of doing things. Or don't you remember the Office 2003 to Office 2007 Ribbon debacle?
Who here in their right mind would actually sit down at a computer and just randomly type in: "Sudo apt get" and expect their computer to update itself?
No one. Your average yob would go to "Applications > Add/Remove Software" which, by the way, actually lets you add things, unlike Windows' version of it, where you can only remove software. Or, they might click on the little icon which quietly appears in the corner and says "Updates Are Available."
But who would sit at a computer, having no prior knowledge, and know how to google for something, download an executable installer, and run it? Do you think people were born with this knowledge? At some point they had to learn (or have someone do it for them, which negates the argument entirely).
But it's also infinitely more approachable to a user. You don't need to have someone tell you how to do things. You can just sit down at and attempt to match your desires with the options on the screen.
That makes sense on the face of it, but reality shows a different story -- users are completely flummoxed by computers (which to them is Windows). If they could figure stuff out on their own they wouldn't be calling people like us all day long asking how to accomplish basic tasks. Maybe the GUI isn't as intuitive or friendly as you think it is, or maybe users are just scared of breaking something, but the result is the same either way -- they don't attempt, and when they do, they don't get their desired result. Then they call for help. So.
Understand that the majority of people are not "using" the computer in any meaningful sense. They are launching a few applications, which they know how to do because they've memorized where to click, and they can only use those applications because someone held their hands and showed them how to do the bare minimum necessary to get the task done.
And how many times have we seen a user who, upon sitting at an unfamiliar XP computer, suddenly can't do anything? Their shortcuts aren't where they're expected. Things are laid out in a new and unfamiliar way. On their computer, they can launch Outlook from the desktop icon, but this desktop doesn't have one. What to do, what to do? The fact that they're using a GUI isn't helping them out of this mess.
The other problem is even after they memorize a command line solution they probably don't understand what it is they're doing.
As above, most users have no understanding of what they're doing anyway. They click Outlook and it opens. They have no idea how it works, nor do they care. For power users, I'd arg
That's a great idea except that the inauguration takes place at noon, Eastern time, when most Americans are at work. I don't have a television at my office. I don't think there's been a television at *any* place I've worked unless you count my table-waiting days.
If I could watch online, that'd be ideal, and my boss wouldn't even care -- but where am I supposed to find a TV?
The article specifically references visible light. If that's wrong, then what advantage is gained over using radio as we do now, which is already part of the EM spectrum?