Back in 1999 when I struck out on my own, and no longer had a mother in the house to bitch at me to get up, I had a horrible habit of oversleeping. (I still do. Hate, hate hate getting up. Hate it.)
I was living in an apartment complex that was perpetually under "renovation", and by "renovation" I mean they would routinely dig up the parking lot and make you park on the far end of the complex, a good two city blocks away.
SO my solution to my oversleeping issue was to lock the alarm clock in a foot locker, and put the key in my car. To turn the fucker off, I had to wake up, shower, get dressed, trudge to the car, get the key, schlep back, open the locker, and turn off the alarm.
Sounds good on paper. In practice it only took a week or so before I was able to do this while still mostly asleep, and get back, turn off the alarm, and go back to sleep.
Anyway, I don't see this alarm clock working for me either.
I'll second that. I run a synthpop and darkwave radio station (plug!) myself, and I have had people tell me they've never heard this or that artist before, and then go check out their albums. One even went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station.
I also have artists send me promo tracks, full albums, and other stuff -- mostly indie artists looking for some exposure. If they're good (and they usually are) I put them in rotation, so dozens of people get to hear someone they've never heard before.
The artists love it. The listeners love it. No one is losing and everyone is gaining -- except the labels, who, in this day and age, are totally unnecessary anyway.
Some of the artists that send me stuff are easily good enough to get signed, and I know some have been approached, but they steadfastly refuse. They'd rather remain independant of money-grubbing middlemen and idiotic contracts, and get their music to the fans with channels of distribution their target audience is likely to use.
I started this venture after years and years of listening to net radio on live365 and other assorted places. And I bought music after listening. I know the system works.
Frankly, there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcasters do this for the love of the music and because it's fun. Don't penalize us for bringing the art to the people. Don't penalize us, the artists, or the audience.
Do you really think the US military would fight it's civilians? haha. umm lets see...
26,403,703 veterans versus 2,685,713 active duty and reserve? No contest, the military would be completely subjugated in a matter of days. You also failed to realize that most military personal will refuse orders to kill family, friends, and neighbors.
No, I realize it, and was in fact counting on such a response. So let me get this straight.
You're trying to tell me we need guns to fight a tyrannical government, which draws its power over us from a military that would refuse to shoot at us. Okay.
Of course it implies it. What it does not do is prove it. But I'm sure it's just a random coincidence this time, eh? Probably the real cause is Doom, or Marilyn Manson, or something.
2nd Amendment: The right to protect your 1st amendment rights by any means necessary.
So, what are the gun owners waiting for?
Frankly this is just a stupid argument. The little popguns available to the civilian populace isn't going to do a damn thing against the military force of the US. And for all the talk-talk on this point the gun owners spout, I've yet to see anyone take it and do anything with it. What I do see is a bunch of random loons shooting each other.
Guns make people safer! That's why America, with the highest guns per capita of any first-world nation, is the safest nation on Earth, right alongside such sterling examples of crime-free zones like Costa Rica and Colombia.
Clearly the solution to today's situation would have been for everyone to have guns, then people could have started firing recklessly into the fray and that would have been really fucking great!
So the pigs are complaining that they're being treated like everyone else? OH, HOW MY HEART BLEEDS. These are the same authoritarian pricks who pull you over for an expired tag and act like you're a murderer. These are the jackholes that harrass people for standing on the sidewalk. These are the jerkoffs who are more interested in writing bullshit tickets for idiotic non-moving violations to increase state revenue, than they ever have been in enforcing safety on the road, and who selectively pick and choose who they're going to pull over or ticket tonight based on their own arbitrary standards, not any legal reasons.
I have absolutely zero sympathy for cops, especially ones that turn into whiny pussies for being subjected to the same alws as everyone else. A couple weeks of training and a badge don't make you better than anyone.
Re:Will anyone gain anything from this? Not Linux
on
The End is Nigh for XP
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· Score: 1
Ease of installation. Windows requires constant attention, Ubuntu does not. Windows asks questions about partitioning but gives you no clue as to what's a useful choice, Ubuntu provides clear examples of who should use which option. Windows usually doesn't even have drivers installed on a fresh install -- and I'm talking things like ethernet controllers and VGA adapters.
What you get on a fresh install. Windows comes with, well, almost nothing. Wordpad and a shitty browser and an even shitter media player. Ubuntu comes with virtually everything the average user would ever want.
Ease of use. Subjective area, but at least in Gnome, the applications menu is neat, clean, and organized in a straightforward, logical manner. Contrast with the average user's Windows install where the Start Menu is three columns wide and everything makes its own little subfolder according to no plan at all -- sometimes the title of the app, sometimes the name of the software developer, or who fucking knows.
Installation of new things. Windows, you have to go find yourself (your mom can't do this), buy a CD (time consuming and expensive), and then wade through annoying "Setup Wizards" which nag you endlessly about where to install (like your mom knows?), EULAs, and usually all kinds of options Your Mom doesn't understand. God alone knows where it will install (Program Files? Root of C;? None of the above?), and it will leave fifty shortcuts all over the place, and probably in the systray. Contrast with Ubuntu's one-stop-shop of Synaptic, where you just check some boxes, hit "Apply", and it automatically installs, including dependencies needed, and places it in the logical menus. No screwing around.
So his buddy can bring him a little laptop computer and the offender can steal the idiot neighbor's unencrypted wireless to do his dirty work from the comfort of his home. Good idea.
Indeed, my synthpop radio station (plug!) is similar in scope, playing mostly things from non-RIAA labels and independant artists. I, too, have my server hosted in Germany, and the RIAA can kiss my ass. There isn't a place for people to get darkwave, ebm, futurepop type stuff from conventional radio, and net radio is often the only place to turn, outside the drunken haze of a gothic nightclub.
The thing is, there ain't no Benjamens in doing this; I, like most other webcasters, shell out our own money for our own servers or bandwidth or services like live365.com, and we do it for fun and for love of the music. So far as I know, "terrestrial" stations aren't required to pay royalties in the same way, so why are we?
Not at all. I'm simply saying there's a difference between what we call "sheltering" today, and what it was back then. Our version of parenting today seems to take one of two extremes: either don't regulate or monitor the kid at all, or else overprotect and shield him from anything that could possibly be considered unpleasant, violent, or sexual.
Back then, on the other hand, no one pretended unpleasantness didn't exist. You gave your 10 year old a rifle and taught him as best you could the responsibility that came with it. We treat even our teenagers today as though they're incapable of understanding or doing anything, not letting them see anything we dont' want them to see, and then we act shocked that they behave like immature twits. We never let them have any reason to mature, so they don't.
Of course we can't ignore the effects of rampant consumerism, ultra competetive schools, and a near-total lack of anything for kids to do after school, that we have today which we didn't then.
Woah, hang on a second. You want to talk about the past? The 1800s? When people routinely married at 16 or younger and had children (and by implication, sex) shortly thereafter?
When a "man" (a boy by today's standards) was expected to shoulder a rifle and defend his home, family, or country when it was time? When the father died in a war and the son, no matter his age, was expected to be the Man Of The House, including taking care of his siblings, hunting for food if necessary, and otherwise doing what his father did? When children were often exposed to horrific injuries of their elders maimed in war, farming or hunting accidents, and disease?
I grant that people of that era were more uptight about sexual matters but that hasn't really changed all that much. Other than that, exactly how are we sheltering kids less today than we were then?
Dude, I can't believe you spent time thinking about this. But it's really not that hard. Here's how it must work, and probably WILL work in the future.
"Picard to Riker."
Computer hears this, buffers that audio, then sends the audio to the recipient by recognizing Riker's name. Riker then gets to hear the initial message and respond.
There is plenty of food to go around, and there almost always has been. Starving people are not starving because of a lack of food, they are starving because the food never gets to them (usually rotting away in some government surplus warehouse), either due to corruption, negligence, crappy transportation, lack of caring, or some combination thereof.
While food supply is surely a concern, energy supply is no less a concern, unless we want to go back to the dark ages. Saying we should sacrifice one or the other is idiotic. There is a happy medium.
Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Also, nobody has ever been jailed for selling a fucking sandwich to the wrong guy. That's just FUD.
No, it isn't. The fact that there is no minimum dollar amount merchants are supposed to concern themselves with is quite typical of the American style of legislation. You make a law that's ridiculously sweeping and could probably apply to anybody. You only really enforce it when you think it matters, but that ability to go after someone for a minor thing is always looming in the background.
You're right that nobody has yet been prosecuted for selling a sandwich. But all it takes is one snivelling DA to get pissed off about something unrelated, and use this as an excuse to hassle a deli owner (for example).
It hasn't happened yet, but this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider traffic law; does anybody really give a damn that your tag light is out? If you're in daylight it doesn't matter and if it's night, and you're close enough to actually read the thing, then presumably you also have headlights trained on it, so what's the difference? The law is there as a "last resort" option for cops and prosecutors -- gives them an excuse to pull you over and make you miserable for a while or try to find something more serious with which they can nail you. Same with annual tag renewals. If you think it doesn't happen, you've been living in a cave.
Pointing out that a law has potential for abuse is never FUD.
I can't imagine why people would have trouble communicating via email -- male or female. Behold, snippets of actual user emails I receive from allegedly professional, successful adults with college educations: These are actual emails I receive, daily, from the users at a telecom for which I work.
this phone has not worked in 2 days error message is : failed to get boot parameters via dHCP or whatever please fix the phones THANKS
"Via DHCP or whatever." Thanks.
WHY ARE THE PHONES NOT WORKING
That was the whole email. In its entirety.
Main number DOES NOT WORK and answers as DISCONNECTED. This number was successfully ported to you guys in August/September, and has otherwise been working fine !!!!!!!!!!!!!! We need this number to work ASAP!!!!!!!!!!
I swear to you I did not add a single exclamation point to that. Also, if you can tell me how "does not work" and "otherwise works fine" fit together, I'm listening.
FOR THE LAST 4 DAYS WE CANNOT MAKE OUTGOING CALLS TO 800 OR 866 NUMBERS. IT GOES TO A QUICK BUSY SOUND. PLS ADVISE.
"Pls" turn off your caps lock and learn to spell.
NOW you fucking tell me that? When in the fuck did you ever tell me I would need a router or switch? Eveyone has those laying around?
And you also said I could plug it into the wall. What kind of instruction is that? Do I just kick a hole in the wall big enough for a USB connection, or does everyone have working sockets in their wall to accomodate phone systems in case they get one?
Where do I get a fucking router or switch and how much more am I going to have to spend? And where does THAT plug in?
I paid for a fucking phone that would plug into my computer, God damnit.
This was the response to a salesguy from my company telling the customer that the VoIP phone plugs into a router, not the modem jack on his Mac. I really wish I was making this one up.
You'll notice a pattern to these, as well. Specifically, people who have fairly severe problems, but don't tell anyone for days at a time, then dash off a barely-coherent, OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE message into the ether. This is what passes for proper business correspondance these days, and to these people, blithering about a problem days, weeks, or even months after the fact is a perfectly rational way to behave.
These are people who will go on and on about how successful they are with their little mortgage broker jobs or what-have-you. These are men AND women who read and write at the sixth-grade level.
Email fails to communicate -- not because of the medium, but because of the mouth-breathers who use it.
That employers require a degree of people is not evidence that a degree is useful. HR departments are especially notorious for wanting to see degrees for jobs that don't require them, and in any case, the fact that "a degree" is often all that's needed is good evidence that it's useless. "You have a four year degree? Great, welcome aboard!" Of course, it's a degree in, like, anthropology or something, and you're trying to get jobs in the IT sector, but nobody cares, as long as you have a piece of paper proving you sat around for four years learning just enough to pass some tests and then forget it forever.
And do I really need to get into the "business" degrees that are so shit-hot right now, where you take four years to learn corporate crap that would take you six months to absorb by experience in an actual job?
Yes, you get a lot out of the "life experience" of college, but you also get a lot out of kicking around on your own for a few years and seeing what the real world is like. A formalized education is a tool, and not one that everyone needs -- I'd go so far as to say it's one that most people don't need. We have a completely artificial expectation set by employers who are aware that it's an employer's market and they can get as choosy as they want.
Is it possible this is symptomatic of a larger issue with our legal system? Specifically, when laws get so bloated, so numerous, and so detailed that it requires a specialized degree to understand, how is the average citizen supposed to comply with the law?
The summary asks "Why should I have to guess about that?" But this is hardly the only area where statutes on the books are virtually incomprehensible, if they can even be easily accessed, by a nonlawyer.
A quick offtopic example is when my driver's license was suspended, and the judge said it would be suspended for 90 days. Fine. To me, that meant that on day 91, it was no longer suspended, and I could drive. Long story short, I got caught driving on day 92 and arrested for driving on a suspended license -- because I hadn't paid a "reinstatement fee". Now, how was I supposed to know about that? When I posed this question to the court I was told only that "it's the law".
I realize there will always be certain circumstances or specific areas where laws need to get detailed and intense, but for the majority of things the average citizen is going to do, there is a problem if that average citizen cannot comply with the law because he cannot access it or cannot understand it.
It's true. I'm the operator of an internet radio station myself, and, like most other net radio broadcasters, I play music tailored to an audience that cannot find what they're looking for with conventional radio. Synthpop and darkwave music is never going to get airtime, and outside the drunken haze of a goth club, most people will never hear it at all, meaning the arists will never get exposure... unless there are net radio stations that broadcast this type of stuff.
The artists love it too. I've had several independant musicians send me singles and albums asking to be put into rotation. Quoth the latest:
Thanks I appreciate the exposure, it's hard to get the music out as an independent artist which is why I'm trying to get radioplay. The CD is the mail.
It's free exposure for them, to an audience probably already primed for the genre. The artists like it, the audience likes it (or they wouldn't be listening -- and I've had more than a few people thank me for this song or that, saying they'd never heard of this band or that). I like it because it's fun. I get permission from many of the artists or labels to play their stuff, and the ones I don't? They're either too old or obscure to track down, or I just don't care because hey. It's a freaking 96k stream that cannot be copied without a certain amount of technical ability -- certainly harder than cramming a tape into a radio deck and hitting the Record button.
Watching the RIAA try to keep a stranglehold on their monopoly by attempting to legislate or shut down new technology is ridiculous. Like most corporate gluttons they're slow to adapt to a changing market, and by the time they get around to it (net radio's been around for, what, like ten years or more?) they take the most absurd course they possibly can.
I'm tired of it. The artists are tired of it. The audience is tired of it and the labels are rapidly getting tired of it. We're all fucking tired of it, and the RIAA is a rusted machine quickly fading into obscolescence.
They can try to legislate; we'll just move offshore (my server is in Germany, for example) where nobody cares. Like a good man once said, "You can't stop the signal", and I for one intend to keep broadcasting as long as possible. If the RIAA wants to complain that a stream of ebm and industrial music is cutting into the profits of their Rapper Feat. Guest Rapper crowd, that will only highlight their own myopic stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in 1999 when I struck out on my own, and no longer had a mother in the house to bitch at me to get up, I had a horrible habit of oversleeping. (I still do. Hate, hate hate getting up. Hate it.)
I was living in an apartment complex that was perpetually under "renovation", and by "renovation" I mean they would routinely dig up the parking lot and make you park on the far end of the complex, a good two city blocks away.
SO my solution to my oversleeping issue was to lock the alarm clock in a foot locker, and put the key in my car. To turn the fucker off, I had to wake up, shower, get dressed, trudge to the car, get the key, schlep back, open the locker, and turn off the alarm.
Sounds good on paper. In practice it only took a week or so before I was able to do this while still mostly asleep, and get back, turn off the alarm, and go back to sleep.
Anyway, I don't see this alarm clock working for me either.
I'll second that. I run a synthpop and darkwave radio station (plug!) myself, and I have had people tell me they've never heard this or that artist before, and then go check out their albums. One even went to the VNV Nation concert here in Atlanta after hearing them on my station.
I also have artists send me promo tracks, full albums, and other stuff -- mostly indie artists looking for some exposure. If they're good (and they usually are) I put them in rotation, so dozens of people get to hear someone they've never heard before.
The artists love it. The listeners love it. No one is losing and everyone is gaining -- except the labels, who, in this day and age, are totally unnecessary anyway.
Some of the artists that send me stuff are easily good enough to get signed, and I know some have been approached, but they steadfastly refuse. They'd rather remain independant of money-grubbing middlemen and idiotic contracts, and get their music to the fans with channels of distribution their target audience is likely to use.
I started this venture after years and years of listening to net radio on live365 and other assorted places. And I bought music after listening. I know the system works.
Frankly, there ain't no Benjamens in the net radio trade. We broadcasters do this for the love of the music and because it's fun. Don't penalize us for bringing the art to the people. Don't penalize us, the artists, or the audience.
Do you really think the US military would fight it's civilians? haha. umm lets see... 26,403,703 veterans versus 2,685,713 active duty and reserve? No contest, the military would be completely subjugated in a matter of days. You also failed to realize that most military personal will refuse orders to kill family, friends, and neighbors.
No, I realize it, and was in fact counting on such a response. So let me get this straight. You're trying to tell me we need guns to fight a tyrannical government, which draws its power over us from a military that would refuse to shoot at us. Okay.
Sorry, I'm lost. Why do we need guns, again?
Correlation does not necessarily imply causation.
Of course it implies it. What it does not do is prove it. But I'm sure it's just a random coincidence this time, eh? Probably the real cause is Doom, or Marilyn Manson, or something.
2nd Amendment: The right to protect your 1st amendment rights by any means necessary.
So, what are the gun owners waiting for?
Frankly this is just a stupid argument. The little popguns available to the civilian populace isn't going to do a damn thing against the military force of the US. And for all the talk-talk on this point the gun owners spout, I've yet to see anyone take it and do anything with it. What I do see is a bunch of random loons shooting each other.
Move to a different county if you don't like it.
I would if I could.
It's simple: if we didn't have guns, the King of England could come back here any time and start pushing us around again.
Guns make people safer! That's why America, with the highest guns per capita of any first-world nation, is the safest nation on Earth, right alongside such sterling examples of crime-free zones like Costa Rica and Colombia.
Get a goddamned grip. The US has more guns -- and more gun deaths -- than any other developed nation.
Clearly the solution to today's situation would have been for everyone to have guns, then people could have started firing recklessly into the fray and that would have been really fucking great!
So the pigs are complaining that they're being treated like everyone else? OH, HOW MY HEART BLEEDS. These are the same authoritarian pricks who pull you over for an expired tag and act like you're a murderer. These are the jackholes that harrass people for standing on the sidewalk. These are the jerkoffs who are more interested in writing bullshit tickets for idiotic non-moving violations to increase state revenue, than they ever have been in enforcing safety on the road, and who selectively pick and choose who they're going to pull over or ticket tonight based on their own arbitrary standards, not any legal reasons.
I have absolutely zero sympathy for cops, especially ones that turn into whiny pussies for being subjected to the same alws as everyone else. A couple weeks of training and a badge don't make you better than anyone.
Key points are:
Ease of installation. Windows requires constant attention, Ubuntu does not. Windows asks questions about partitioning but gives you no clue as to what's a useful choice, Ubuntu provides clear examples of who should use which option. Windows usually doesn't even have drivers installed on a fresh install -- and I'm talking things like ethernet controllers and VGA adapters.
What you get on a fresh install. Windows comes with, well, almost nothing. Wordpad and a shitty browser and an even shitter media player. Ubuntu comes with virtually everything the average user would ever want.
Ease of use. Subjective area, but at least in Gnome, the applications menu is neat, clean, and organized in a straightforward, logical manner. Contrast with the average user's Windows install where the Start Menu is three columns wide and everything makes its own little subfolder according to no plan at all -- sometimes the title of the app, sometimes the name of the software developer, or who fucking knows.
Installation of new things. Windows, you have to go find yourself (your mom can't do this), buy a CD (time consuming and expensive), and then wade through annoying "Setup Wizards" which nag you endlessly about where to install (like your mom knows?), EULAs, and usually all kinds of options Your Mom doesn't understand. God alone knows where it will install (Program Files? Root of C;? None of the above?), and it will leave fifty shortcuts all over the place, and probably in the systray. Contrast with Ubuntu's one-stop-shop of Synaptic, where you just check some boxes, hit "Apply", and it automatically installs, including dependencies needed, and places it in the logical menus. No screwing around.
So his buddy can bring him a little laptop computer and the offender can steal the idiot neighbor's unencrypted wireless to do his dirty work from the comfort of his home. Good idea.
Indeed, my synthpop radio station (plug!) is similar in scope, playing mostly things from non-RIAA labels and independant artists. I, too, have my server hosted in Germany, and the RIAA can kiss my ass. There isn't a place for people to get darkwave, ebm, futurepop type stuff from conventional radio, and net radio is often the only place to turn, outside the drunken haze of a gothic nightclub.
The thing is, there ain't no Benjamens in doing this; I, like most other webcasters, shell out our own money for our own servers or bandwidth or services like live365.com, and we do it for fun and for love of the music. So far as I know, "terrestrial" stations aren't required to pay royalties in the same way, so why are we?
Microsoft Word launches YOU!
Care to deny this?
Not at all. I'm simply saying there's a difference between what we call "sheltering" today, and what it was back then. Our version of parenting today seems to take one of two extremes: either don't regulate or monitor the kid at all, or else overprotect and shield him from anything that could possibly be considered unpleasant, violent, or sexual.
Back then, on the other hand, no one pretended unpleasantness didn't exist. You gave your 10 year old a rifle and taught him as best you could the responsibility that came with it. We treat even our teenagers today as though they're incapable of understanding or doing anything, not letting them see anything we dont' want them to see, and then we act shocked that they behave like immature twits. We never let them have any reason to mature, so they don't.
Of course we can't ignore the effects of rampant consumerism, ultra competetive schools, and a near-total lack of anything for kids to do after school, that we have today which we didn't then.
Only the way I remember it, it was called the Black Mesa Incident.
Woah, hang on a second. You want to talk about the past? The 1800s? When people routinely married at 16 or younger and had children (and by implication, sex) shortly thereafter?
When a "man" (a boy by today's standards) was expected to shoulder a rifle and defend his home, family, or country when it was time? When the father died in a war and the son, no matter his age, was expected to be the Man Of The House, including taking care of his siblings, hunting for food if necessary, and otherwise doing what his father did? When children were often exposed to horrific injuries of their elders maimed in war, farming or hunting accidents, and disease?
I grant that people of that era were more uptight about sexual matters but that hasn't really changed all that much. Other than that, exactly how are we sheltering kids less today than we were then?
Dude, I can't believe you spent time thinking about this. But it's really not that hard. Here's how it must work, and probably WILL work in the future.
"Picard to Riker."
Computer hears this, buffers that audio, then sends the audio to the recipient by recognizing Riker's name. Riker then gets to hear the initial message and respond.
There is plenty of food to go around, and there almost always has been. Starving people are not starving because of a lack of food, they are starving because the food never gets to them (usually rotting away in some government surplus warehouse), either due to corruption, negligence, crappy transportation, lack of caring, or some combination thereof.
While food supply is surely a concern, energy supply is no less a concern, unless we want to go back to the dark ages. Saying we should sacrifice one or the other is idiotic. There is a happy medium.
Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn't be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.
Also, nobody has ever been jailed for selling a fucking sandwich to the wrong guy. That's just FUD.
No, it isn't. The fact that there is no minimum dollar amount merchants are supposed to concern themselves with is quite typical of the American style of legislation. You make a law that's ridiculously sweeping and could probably apply to anybody. You only really enforce it when you think it matters, but that ability to go after someone for a minor thing is always looming in the background.
You're right that nobody has yet been prosecuted for selling a sandwich. But all it takes is one snivelling DA to get pissed off about something unrelated, and use this as an excuse to hassle a deli owner (for example).
It hasn't happened yet, but this sort of thing happens all the time. Consider traffic law; does anybody really give a damn that your tag light is out? If you're in daylight it doesn't matter and if it's night, and you're close enough to actually read the thing, then presumably you also have headlights trained on it, so what's the difference? The law is there as a "last resort" option for cops and prosecutors -- gives them an excuse to pull you over and make you miserable for a while or try to find something more serious with which they can nail you. Same with annual tag renewals. If you think it doesn't happen, you've been living in a cave.
Pointing out that a law has potential for abuse is never FUD.
I for one welcome our new sheep-hybrid overlords.
These are actual emails I receive, daily, from the users at a telecom for which I work."Via DHCP or whatever." Thanks.That was the whole email. In its entirety.I swear to you I did not add a single exclamation point to that. Also, if you can tell me how "does not work" and "otherwise works fine" fit together, I'm listening."Pls" turn off your caps lock and learn to spell.This was the response to a salesguy from my company telling the customer that the VoIP phone plugs into a router, not the modem jack on his Mac. I really wish I was making this one up.
You'll notice a pattern to these, as well. Specifically, people who have fairly severe problems, but don't tell anyone for days at a time, then dash off a barely-coherent, OF THE UTMOST IMPORTANCE message into the ether. This is what passes for proper business correspondance these days, and to these people, blithering about a problem days, weeks, or even months after the fact is a perfectly rational way to behave.
These are people who will go on and on about how successful they are with their little mortgage broker jobs or what-have-you. These are men AND women who read and write at the sixth-grade level.
Email fails to communicate -- not because of the medium, but because of the mouth-breathers who use it.
The people in your district have voted in favor of cannibis. Cancel or Allow?
That employers require a degree of people is not evidence that a degree is useful. HR departments are especially notorious for wanting to see degrees for jobs that don't require them, and in any case, the fact that "a degree" is often all that's needed is good evidence that it's useless. "You have a four year degree? Great, welcome aboard!" Of course, it's a degree in, like, anthropology or something, and you're trying to get jobs in the IT sector, but nobody cares, as long as you have a piece of paper proving you sat around for four years learning just enough to pass some tests and then forget it forever. And do I really need to get into the "business" degrees that are so shit-hot right now, where you take four years to learn corporate crap that would take you six months to absorb by experience in an actual job? Yes, you get a lot out of the "life experience" of college, but you also get a lot out of kicking around on your own for a few years and seeing what the real world is like. A formalized education is a tool, and not one that everyone needs -- I'd go so far as to say it's one that most people don't need. We have a completely artificial expectation set by employers who are aware that it's an employer's market and they can get as choosy as they want.
Is it possible this is symptomatic of a larger issue with our legal system? Specifically, when laws get so bloated, so numerous, and so detailed that it requires a specialized degree to understand, how is the average citizen supposed to comply with the law?
The summary asks "Why should I have to guess about that?" But this is hardly the only area where statutes on the books are virtually incomprehensible, if they can even be easily accessed, by a nonlawyer.
A quick offtopic example is when my driver's license was suspended, and the judge said it would be suspended for 90 days. Fine. To me, that meant that on day 91, it was no longer suspended, and I could drive. Long story short, I got caught driving on day 92 and arrested for driving on a suspended license -- because I hadn't paid a "reinstatement fee". Now, how was I supposed to know about that? When I posed this question to the court I was told only that "it's the law".
I realize there will always be certain circumstances or specific areas where laws need to get detailed and intense, but for the majority of things the average citizen is going to do, there is a problem if that average citizen cannot comply with the law because he cannot access it or cannot understand it.
The artists love it too. I've had several independant musicians send me singles and albums asking to be put into rotation. Quoth the latest:
It's free exposure for them, to an audience probably already primed for the genre. The artists like it, the audience likes it (or they wouldn't be listening -- and I've had more than a few people thank me for this song or that, saying they'd never heard of this band or that). I like it because it's fun. I get permission from many of the artists or labels to play their stuff, and the ones I don't? They're either too old or obscure to track down, or I just don't care because hey. It's a freaking 96k stream that cannot be copied without a certain amount of technical ability -- certainly harder than cramming a tape into a radio deck and hitting the Record button.
Watching the RIAA try to keep a stranglehold on their monopoly by attempting to legislate or shut down new technology is ridiculous. Like most corporate gluttons they're slow to adapt to a changing market, and by the time they get around to it (net radio's been around for, what, like ten years or more?) they take the most absurd course they possibly can.
I'm tired of it. The artists are tired of it. The audience is tired of it and the labels are rapidly getting tired of it. We're all fucking tired of it, and the RIAA is a rusted machine quickly fading into obscolescence.
They can try to legislate; we'll just move offshore (my server is in Germany, for example) where nobody cares. Like a good man once said, "You can't stop the signal", and I for one intend to keep broadcasting as long as possible. If the RIAA wants to complain that a stream of ebm and industrial music is cutting into the profits of their Rapper Feat. Guest Rapper crowd, that will only highlight their own myopic stupidity.