When these defense labs come up with "non lethal" weapons and so forth for use against the enemy, what enemy do you think they're talking about? Their own fellow citizens. You don't really think soldiers are going to jump out of their Humvees and helicopters in a foreign warzone armed with sticky nets and seizure lights, do you?
Heh, nice timing, considering I'm babysitting an XP install on a laptop right now. A few moments ago, this was my diatribe:
kitten`> "Windows automatically adjusted your screen resolution." kitten`> Thanks, Windows. kitten`> 800x600 was exactly what I was going for. kitten`> Please, let me take a tour of Windows XP. kitten`> Ah. kitten`> As usual. kitten`> Windows completely failed to install: kitten`> Ethernet controller, network controller, PCI Device (I assume sound), Video Controller, and Unknown Device. kitten`> Which must be wireless, since that isn't working either. kitten`> So it has no useful way to get online to get the drivers it needs. kitten`> Ready for the desktop!
The Declaration of Independence was written before the United States was formed under the Constitution. It is therefore not a legal document and has absolutely no legal weight whatsoever.
You might say it's a reflection of their mindset, and that's fine, but that doesn't say much. These people lived hundreds of years ago and outright atheism was virtually unheard of. Many of the founders were Christian; many were Deist. All were aware, firsthand, of what happens when government and religion tangle with each other, to the detriment of both, which is why the first amendment -- which does come from a legal document -- specifically prohibits it.
The founder's motives may not have been completely secular; you're right. In fact, I'd be surprised if they were secular at all. Many of them, or at least their families, had come to the colonies to get away from the comingling of religion and government they saw in Britain.
In other words, they knew that when religion sticks its face in government's business, religion becomes corrupt and a tool for the power-hungry and causes the people to lose respect for it. And when government sticks its nose in religion's business, government becomes oppressive and controlling and causes people to lose respect for it.
They were wise to tell the church and the state to stay away from each other.
Re:Shorting AMD stock: NASDAQ figures
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Is AMD Dead Yet?
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Well, I think the point is that as computers have gotten insanely faster, what the high majority of people are *doing* with them hasn't become any more demanding of resources. Slashdot is hardly representative of typical computer users. The average yob uses his computer at work for general office crap, which mostly means running MS Office, a couple of browser windows (since they have yet to figure out tabs), and maybe AIM or something similar. They did this eight years ago on their Pentium 2 machines and got along just fine. They're still doing it now that they have Core 2 Duo. CPU speeds are more than adequate for this kind of crap, and they were more than adequate eight years ago, because what most people want their computers to do hasn't changed much.
At home, most people aren't doing anything different, either. They're screwing around with some websites, catching up on email, maybe watching a few videos. Again, they were doing this years ago with their Pentium 3 and getting along just fine. Their needs haven't changed.
For most people, more computer resources just means more resources for their malware to use. The user sure isn't doing anything with it.
So sure, you may want your computer to do more, but most people don't. They just want it to feel responsive and open Word within a few seconds when they click on it -- which their old Pentium 3 machines still could, if they trimmed the crapware out. The notion that the average person needs more than current CPU power is ridiculous -- until the average person starts doing more than running a few Office apps and IE windows, which isn't going to happen any time soon.
When torturing someone you're usually trying to get unverifiable information out of them. If you could verify it by other means in the first place, odds are you'd do so and save everyone the hassle (including yourself -- torture ain't easy). We're talking about things like names of your cohorts, dates, locations perhaps.. but mostly, just a confession to some crime or other. That is what is meant by "telling them what they want to hear". Torture someone long enough and they'll confess to whatever nonsense you want.
Or did you think all those people in Salem who confessed to being witches really were?
You have an odd idea about "most people", I think. As I look around right now, there are six other people besides myself using laptops and none of them have a mouse -- myself included. The touchpad or whatever works fine for "most people", since "most people" want things to be as integrated as possible without lugging around extra equipment like external pointing devices.
Now imagine being able to work while hiking in nature... what we really need is subnotebooks at the right size to keep them with our hands in front of us while walking... I have found a nice place where I go hiking and it has some rocks at the right configuration that they behave just like a desk...
Has it occured to you that there might be more to life than just working and worrying about your "earning power"?
Fair enough, but regardless of who wrote the book or jokes, it looks to me like Norris' gripe is that someone is making money off his likeness. Whether or not that's legal (through satire or parody, etc) isn't really what I'm arguing here -- my point was only that it doesn't look like he's targetting the "author" because of the jokes, but because of the profit being generated from his celebrity.
He's not suing over the jokes. In fact he's always seemed to take them in pretty good humor and I believe he's quoted some of his favorites in interviews before. The satire aspect doesn't appear to be what has Norris in a snit.
He's suing some guy who took a bunch of jokes other people wrote, and is now trying to turn those jokes into a profitable venture. Satire is one thing, but unauthorized use of a celebrity's name or likeness for profit is something else entirely.
It may turn out to be protected speech, as there are a lot of gray areas here. For example, I doubt the National Enquirer gets permission from Brad Pitt (for example) every time they run some BS story about him, but they're capitalizing on his name to sell their magazine.
I guess we'll just have to see what the courts decide, but it's just incorrect to suggest that Norris is suing random people over some jokes. He's never really complained about any of them until the moment someone tried to use his name for profit, and that's really a different bag.
And, furthermore, you could argue that since every one of the statements about Chuck Norris is completely true, it isn't satire, but an unauthorized biography of his life.:P
A couple of suggestions for Pal Robotics here. If your goal is to make a friendly human-companion robot, don't name it REEM. Don't make it look like it's about to go on a cybernetic rampage, and don't give it steel claws for hands.
"If you hate the US, then leave!" It's so easy for people to say that -- usually uptight conservatives, I've noticed -- but much harder to actually do. Besides the sheer expense of moving, the associated travel costs, the fees and such for paperwork both in the US and in the destination country, obtaining permits, visas, citizenship, and securing a job in a foreign nation where your native language may not even be spoken, there's also the fact that many countries just aren't interested in Americans, making it more difficult. Getting asylum as a workaround is even more difficult still.
I've thought about making an offer to the types of people who spout that nonsense: If you want to get together and fund me, I'll get the hell out of here. I don't make enough to leave on my own in any reasonable timeframe, but you can pool your resources, get me out of the US, and you'll have one less liberal agitator in your midst. What a deal!
Finally, the "love or it leave it" mantra is one of cowardice. It's easy to hold an opinion when everyone else around you holds the same opinion, and I find it interesting how quick some people want to excise all contrary opinions from their society.
Personally I find blind jingoism to be one of the most un-American attitudes possible, and a bit of time with a history book, and the reason this place was founded in the first place, might support that idea. If I'm right, then I'd say it's the "love it or leave it" crowd who should be leaving, since they clearly have no idea what the United States is really about, but I'll give you a hint: It's not about running away from a bad situation, nor is it about standing your ground and bleating platitudes in the face of wrong.
Yeah, but just because the full word is "mathematics", it doesn't follow that "maths" is somehow more proper than "math". In both cases you're severely shortening the word for the sake of brevity, so why quibble over whether or not the last letter should or should not be dropped, in the light of all the other letters we're so willing to forgo?
If anything, "maths" would have to be a contraction, with an apostrophe indicating the missing letters, but I never seem to hear Brits or other Commonwealth-English speakers argue in favor of that when they're getting righteous over the proper term.
Why not install this on a couple VMs (or actual machines sitting around) and then install all kinds of free software on it? Let them chew on the fact that so many people, straight away after installing, go get Firefox and Open Office and GIMP and VLC and Thunderbird and Pidgin.. and never bother using IE or Office or whatever else. Make sure they also see all the useless services you disable and how quickly you can shut off UAC.
Perhaps so, but my primary complaint is that you Brits seem to do it consistently (cf. my examples above), which means it isn't irregular. Your cited example of "the population is increasing" is the irregularity as far as British grammar conventions go; the rest of the time it seems every Brit wants to treat collective nouns as plural, which is, as far as I am concerned, demonstrably incorrect and not merely a matter of dialect or regional variation. It really stings some deep part inside of me that wanted to become an English teacher so I could inflict Beowulf upon yet another generation.
Well, Brits and people who speak British English have yet to figure out the concept of "collective nouns" and their place in subject/verb agreement. They will argue that since "a population" necessarily consists of multiple individuals, it is a plural noun and requires the verb "are". This is incorrect -- a population is a single, collective entity, and requires the verb "is".
Examples include "The band are playing" or "Microsoft are releasing an update".
However, they will fight and argue this until their death, insisting that they are correct.
Actually I prefer having the dotfiles in the home directory. Maybe I'm weird like that, but they don't bother me, and the average user will certainly never need to bother with them. On the up side, I can leverage it to quickly restore any machine to my personal preferences. Once I tar my home directory, all I have to do is put a CD in a new machine, ignore it for 20 minutes, come back, untar my directory, then let apt do its thing for all the applications I care about. One hour later and I'm back and running a machine configured to my exact preferences.
Yes, I realize that if all preferences were in a dedicated folder elsewhere I could do that, but it's just one more thing, and I don't see any benefit, unless I'm missing something.
Only usually, since the "average Joe" thinks it's okay to know jack-all squat about the thousand-dollar plus machine upon which his business utterly depends, and which he's been using day in and day out, year after year... he hires some "IT professional" who is marginally above your average ISP tier-one helpdesk yob. Of course the "IT guy" doesn't do anything useful, but the Average Joe has zero knowledge with which to assess the actual talent of the guy he's paying 80 dollars an hour. And so he continues paying out the nose, nothing ever gets done, and the cycle continues.
The problem with you story is that your average "End LUser" is not going to be able to edit the xorg.conf using vi, and even if they could, probably wouldn't know to change "nvidia" to "ati". The CLI is a bit beyond what most people care to know.
Ask the average user what they'd do if the video settings were messed up in Windows, then. Many will give you a blank stare -- they have no idea what "video settings" means. Maybe you meant "the icons are too big/small".
Some will know enough to futz with resolution settings, but not most. (At my office, all the salespeople have laptops + LCD panel, and the resolution is always horribly mangled on the secondary screen. They either don't notice, or think that's normal.)
How many "average users" know enough to check what kind of video card they have, go to the appropriate vendor's website, download the drivers, and install them? Not many. And let's not act like we've never seen Windows do weird video crap, even on a fresh install. The average user is just as helpless in Windows as they would be in Linux.
And let's be fair -- what the original poster was doing was highly unusual. Very few people would take an old hard drive, stick it in a new computer, and expect it to boot cleanly. Even I wouldn't bother because installing anew is easier than cleaning up the crap. The fact that Linux did it at all, with only one minor config change required, is pretty spiff. The few times I've attempted that, at least with XP, it would bluescreen immediately and never actually boot; either that, or boot into some insane low-resolution, with most of the hardware undetected (or detected as "unknown"), and puking errors all over the place.
Actually, whenever I've installed Feisty on a dual-core machine,/proc/cpuinfo declares both cores, considering them two processors. Furthermore, when I use the little graphical system-management thing (system > administration > system monitor) it shows both cores running, and uname -a shows the SMP kernel.
I forget what previous releases did, but Feisty seems to detect dual core systems and use the appropriate kernel very well. The ones I've tried have all been Intel, not AMD, but I doubt that would make a difference, so hopefully he shouldn't be having any problems there.
They aren't "people" in the context of an HOV lane, the purpose of which is (allegedly) to reduce traffic congestion by concentrating two or more people into a car, thus taking cars off the road which those people would otherwise be using on their own.
Now, it's impossible to try to make everyone "prove" that they'd be driving on their own if they weren't passengers in this HOV-using car, so the law just sort of assumes, for the sake of simplicity, that if you're in a car with a passenger, you can use the HOV lane. So far, so good.
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to prove that your ten year old kid wouldn't be taking his own car if he weren't your passenger, so the fact that he's riding with you doesn't take a car off the road.
Yet for some idiotic reason the law says your ten year old kid counts when enforcing HOVs. The rationale is usually "Well, the law says occupant", but then, doesn't my dog count as an occupant? Why couldn't I put her in the back seat, let her stick her face out the window, and cruise on down the HOV lane? She's as much a passenger as some kid, and both are equally likely to be using their own cars if I weren't giving them a ride.
Suddenly the "occupant" argument sounds pretty stupid, yes?
The fact that the law makes such conditions acceptable shows the true meaning of the HOV lane, which is revenue generation and federal compliance. Here in Atlanta the only reason we have them is because our ozone was too high and the EPA leaned in and said we don't get any more federal highway funding until we do something about it, so we said sure, how about we lop off a lane from every highway? That'll clear it right up!
Every freaking time I go to Hartsfield International and try to get through the little security pillbox on the way to a flight? How's that? I fly two or three times a year and I have never been able to get past them without being searched at least, and questioned at most. You're damn right I'm nervous after one or two iterations of that crap.
Maybe he's nervous because there's a bunch of low-paid hired goons slouching around looking for excuses to search him and possibly brand him as a terrorist under some obscure, vaguely-defined law.
Slashdot Mirror
When these defense labs come up with "non lethal" weapons and so forth for use against the enemy, what enemy do you think they're talking about? Their own fellow citizens. You don't really think soldiers are going to jump out of their Humvees and helicopters in a foreign warzone armed with sticky nets and seizure lights, do you?
The Korean War
Lebanon crisis of 1958
Bay of Pigs Invasion
Dominican Intervention
Vietnam War
Tehran hostage rescue
Grenada
Beirut
Panama
Post Cold War Era:
Gulf War
Somalia
Yugoslavia
We didn't start the fire. It was always burning since the world's been turning. We didn't light it, but we've tried to fight it.
Heh, nice timing, considering I'm babysitting an XP install on a laptop right now. A few moments ago, this was my diatribe:
kitten`> "Windows automatically adjusted your screen resolution."
kitten`> Thanks, Windows.
kitten`> 800x600 was exactly what I was going for.
kitten`> Please, let me take a tour of Windows XP.
kitten`> Ah.
kitten`> As usual.
kitten`> Windows completely failed to install:
kitten`> Ethernet controller, network controller, PCI Device (I assume sound), Video Controller, and Unknown Device.
kitten`> Which must be wireless, since that isn't working either.
kitten`> So it has no useful way to get online to get the drivers it needs.
kitten`> Ready for the desktop!
The Declaration of Independence was written before the United States was formed under the Constitution. It is therefore not a legal document and has absolutely no legal weight whatsoever.
You might say it's a reflection of their mindset, and that's fine, but that doesn't say much. These people lived hundreds of years ago and outright atheism was virtually unheard of. Many of the founders were Christian; many were Deist. All were aware, firsthand, of what happens when government and religion tangle with each other, to the detriment of both, which is why the first amendment -- which does come from a legal document -- specifically prohibits it.
The founder's motives may not have been completely secular; you're right. In fact, I'd be surprised if they were secular at all. Many of them, or at least their families, had come to the colonies to get away from the comingling of religion and government they saw in Britain.
In other words, they knew that when religion sticks its face in government's business, religion becomes corrupt and a tool for the power-hungry and causes the people to lose respect for it. And when government sticks its nose in religion's business, government becomes oppressive and controlling and causes people to lose respect for it.
They were wise to tell the church and the state to stay away from each other.
Well, I think the point is that as computers have gotten insanely faster, what the high majority of people are *doing* with them hasn't become any more demanding of resources. Slashdot is hardly representative of typical computer users. The average yob uses his computer at work for general office crap, which mostly means running MS Office, a couple of browser windows (since they have yet to figure out tabs), and maybe AIM or something similar. They did this eight years ago on their Pentium 2 machines and got along just fine. They're still doing it now that they have Core 2 Duo.
CPU speeds are more than adequate for this kind of crap, and they were more than adequate eight years ago, because what most people want their computers to do hasn't changed much.
At home, most people aren't doing anything different, either. They're screwing around with some websites, catching up on email, maybe watching a few videos. Again, they were doing this years ago with their Pentium 3 and getting along just fine. Their needs haven't changed.
For most people, more computer resources just means more resources for their malware to use. The user sure isn't doing anything with it.
So sure, you may want your computer to do more, but most people don't. They just want it to feel responsive and open Word within a few seconds when they click on it -- which their old Pentium 3 machines still could, if they trimmed the crapware out. The notion that the average person needs more than current CPU power is ridiculous -- until the average person starts doing more than running a few Office apps and IE windows, which isn't going to happen any time soon.
When torturing someone you're usually trying to get unverifiable information out of them. If you could verify it by other means in the first place, odds are you'd do so and save everyone the hassle (including yourself -- torture ain't easy). We're talking about things like names of your cohorts, dates, locations perhaps.. but mostly, just a confession to some crime or other. That is what is meant by "telling them what they want to hear". Torture someone long enough and they'll confess to whatever nonsense you want.
Or did you think all those people in Salem who confessed to being witches really were?
You have an odd idea about "most people", I think. As I look around right now, there are six other people besides myself using laptops and none of them have a mouse -- myself included. The touchpad or whatever works fine for "most people", since "most people" want things to be as integrated as possible without lugging around extra equipment like external pointing devices.
Now imagine being able to work while hiking in nature ... what we really need is subnotebooks at the right size to keep them with our hands in front of us while walking ... I have found a nice place where I go hiking and it has some rocks at the right configuration that they behave just like a desk ...
Has it occured to you that there might be more to life than just working and worrying about your "earning power"?
Fair enough, but regardless of who wrote the book or jokes, it looks to me like Norris' gripe is that someone is making money off his likeness. Whether or not that's legal (through satire or parody, etc) isn't really what I'm arguing here -- my point was only that it doesn't look like he's targetting the "author" because of the jokes, but because of the profit being generated from his celebrity.
He's not suing over the jokes. In fact he's always seemed to take them in pretty good humor and I believe he's quoted some of his favorites in interviews before. The satire aspect doesn't appear to be what has Norris in a snit.
:P
He's suing some guy who took a bunch of jokes other people wrote, and is now trying to turn those jokes into a profitable venture. Satire is one thing, but unauthorized use of a celebrity's name or likeness for profit is something else entirely.
It may turn out to be protected speech, as there are a lot of gray areas here. For example, I doubt the National Enquirer gets permission from Brad Pitt (for example) every time they run some BS story about him, but they're capitalizing on his name to sell their magazine.
I guess we'll just have to see what the courts decide, but it's just incorrect to suggest that Norris is suing random people over some jokes. He's never really complained about any of them until the moment someone tried to use his name for profit, and that's really a different bag.
And, furthermore, you could argue that since every one of the statements about Chuck Norris is completely true, it isn't satire, but an unauthorized biography of his life.
A couple of suggestions for Pal Robotics here. If your goal is to make a friendly human-companion robot, don't name it REEM. Don't make it look like it's about to go on a cybernetic rampage, and don't give it steel claws for hands.
"If you hate the US, then leave!" It's so easy for people to say that -- usually uptight conservatives, I've noticed -- but much harder to actually do. Besides the sheer expense of moving, the associated travel costs, the fees and such for paperwork both in the US and in the destination country, obtaining permits, visas, citizenship, and securing a job in a foreign nation where your native language may not even be spoken, there's also the fact that many countries just aren't interested in Americans, making it more difficult. Getting asylum as a workaround is even more difficult still.
I've thought about making an offer to the types of people who spout that nonsense: If you want to get together and fund me, I'll get the hell out of here. I don't make enough to leave on my own in any reasonable timeframe, but you can pool your resources, get me out of the US, and you'll have one less liberal agitator in your midst. What a deal!
Finally, the "love or it leave it" mantra is one of cowardice. It's easy to hold an opinion when everyone else around you holds the same opinion, and I find it interesting how quick some people want to excise all contrary opinions from their society.
Personally I find blind jingoism to be one of the most un-American attitudes possible, and a bit of time with a history book, and the reason this place was founded in the first place, might support that idea. If I'm right, then I'd say it's the "love it or leave it" crowd who should be leaving, since they clearly have no idea what the United States is really about, but I'll give you a hint: It's not about running away from a bad situation, nor is it about standing your ground and bleating platitudes in the face of wrong.
Yeah, but just because the full word is "mathematics", it doesn't follow that "maths" is somehow more proper than "math". In both cases you're severely shortening the word for the sake of brevity, so why quibble over whether or not the last letter should or should not be dropped, in the light of all the other letters we're so willing to forgo?
If anything, "maths" would have to be a contraction, with an apostrophe indicating the missing letters, but I never seem to hear Brits or other Commonwealth-English speakers argue in favor of that when they're getting righteous over the proper term.
Why not install this on a couple VMs (or actual machines sitting around) and then install all kinds of free software on it? Let them chew on the fact that so many people, straight away after installing, go get Firefox and Open Office and GIMP and VLC and Thunderbird and Pidgin.. and never bother using IE or Office or whatever else. Make sure they also see all the useless services you disable and how quickly you can shut off UAC.
Perhaps so, but my primary complaint is that you Brits seem to do it consistently (cf. my examples above), which means it isn't irregular. Your cited example of "the population is increasing" is the irregularity as far as British grammar conventions go; the rest of the time it seems every Brit wants to treat collective nouns as plural, which is, as far as I am concerned, demonstrably incorrect and not merely a matter of dialect or regional variation. It really stings some deep part inside of me that wanted to become an English teacher so I could inflict Beowulf upon yet another generation.
Well, Brits and people who speak British English have yet to figure out the concept of "collective nouns" and their place in subject/verb agreement. They will argue that since "a population" necessarily consists of multiple individuals, it is a plural noun and requires the verb "are". This is incorrect -- a population is a single, collective entity, and requires the verb "is". Examples include "The band are playing" or "Microsoft are releasing an update". However, they will fight and argue this until their death, insisting that they are correct.
Actually I prefer having the dotfiles in the home directory. Maybe I'm weird like that, but they don't bother me, and the average user will certainly never need to bother with them. On the up side, I can leverage it to quickly restore any machine to my personal preferences. Once I tar my home directory, all I have to do is put a CD in a new machine, ignore it for 20 minutes, come back, untar my directory, then let apt do its thing for all the applications I care about. One hour later and I'm back and running a machine configured to my exact preferences. Yes, I realize that if all preferences were in a dedicated folder elsewhere I could do that, but it's just one more thing, and I don't see any benefit, unless I'm missing something.
Major fracture detected. Morphine administered. Warning: Vital signs are critical. Seek medical attention.
Only usually, since the "average Joe" thinks it's okay to know jack-all squat about the thousand-dollar plus machine upon which his business utterly depends, and which he's been using day in and day out, year after year... he hires some "IT professional" who is marginally above your average ISP tier-one helpdesk yob. Of course the "IT guy" doesn't do anything useful, but the Average Joe has zero knowledge with which to assess the actual talent of the guy he's paying 80 dollars an hour. And so he continues paying out the nose, nothing ever gets done, and the cycle continues.
Amazing how that works, innit?
The problem with you story is that your average "End LUser" is not going to be able to edit the xorg.conf using vi, and even if they could, probably wouldn't know to change "nvidia" to "ati". The CLI is a bit beyond what most people care to know.
Ask the average user what they'd do if the video settings were messed up in Windows, then. Many will give you a blank stare -- they have no idea what "video settings" means. Maybe you meant "the icons are too big/small".
Some will know enough to futz with resolution settings, but not most. (At my office, all the salespeople have laptops + LCD panel, and the resolution is always horribly mangled on the secondary screen. They either don't notice, or think that's normal.)
How many "average users" know enough to check what kind of video card they have, go to the appropriate vendor's website, download the drivers, and install them? Not many. And let's not act like we've never seen Windows do weird video crap, even on a fresh install. The average user is just as helpless in Windows as they would be in Linux.
And let's be fair -- what the original poster was doing was highly unusual. Very few people would take an old hard drive, stick it in a new computer, and expect it to boot cleanly. Even I wouldn't bother because installing anew is easier than cleaning up the crap. The fact that Linux did it at all, with only one minor config change required, is pretty spiff. The few times I've attempted that, at least with XP, it would bluescreen immediately and never actually boot; either that, or boot into some insane low-resolution, with most of the hardware undetected (or detected as "unknown"), and puking errors all over the place.
Actually, whenever I've installed Feisty on a dual-core machine, /proc/cpuinfo declares both cores, considering them two processors. Furthermore, when I use the little graphical system-management thing (system > administration > system monitor) it shows both cores running, and uname -a shows the SMP kernel.
I forget what previous releases did, but Feisty seems to detect dual core systems and use the appropriate kernel very well. The ones I've tried have all been Intel, not AMD, but I doubt that would make a difference, so hopefully he shouldn't be having any problems there.
So I suppose British English is the be-all and end-all of proper grammar, then? Tell me, when "are" the band playing?
You can complain about American English when you guys figure out the concept of collective nouns and subject/verb agreement.
They aren't "people" in the context of an HOV lane, the purpose of which is (allegedly) to reduce traffic congestion by concentrating two or more people into a car, thus taking cars off the road which those people would otherwise be using on their own.
Now, it's impossible to try to make everyone "prove" that they'd be driving on their own if they weren't passengers in this HOV-using car, so the law just sort of assumes, for the sake of simplicity, that if you're in a car with a passenger, you can use the HOV lane. So far, so good.
On the other hand, it's pretty easy to prove that your ten year old kid wouldn't be taking his own car if he weren't your passenger, so the fact that he's riding with you doesn't take a car off the road.
Yet for some idiotic reason the law says your ten year old kid counts when enforcing HOVs. The rationale is usually "Well, the law says occupant", but then, doesn't my dog count as an occupant? Why couldn't I put her in the back seat, let her stick her face out the window, and cruise on down the HOV lane? She's as much a passenger as some kid, and both are equally likely to be using their own cars if I weren't giving them a ride.
Suddenly the "occupant" argument sounds pretty stupid, yes?
The fact that the law makes such conditions acceptable shows the true meaning of the HOV lane, which is revenue generation and federal compliance. Here in Atlanta the only reason we have them is because our ozone was too high and the EPA leaned in and said we don't get any more federal highway funding until we do something about it, so we said sure, how about we lop off a lane from every highway? That'll clear it right up!
Every freaking time I go to Hartsfield International and try to get through the little security pillbox on the way to a flight? How's that? I fly two or three times a year and I have never been able to get past them without being searched at least, and questioned at most. You're damn right I'm nervous after one or two iterations of that crap.
Maybe he's nervous because there's a bunch of low-paid hired goons slouching around looking for excuses to search him and possibly brand him as a terrorist under some obscure, vaguely-defined law.