Why is it that problems never seem to get corrected until they are well and truly disastrous in scope.
Because it takes that long for not doing something to become more expensive than doing something, and money is all that matters to the entities that have to make most of the changes.
Well, I obviously wasn't there during your particular incident, but often, a cop that takes the time to give someone a good ass-chewing IS the good cop. From the cop's perspective, citing and going is easier and takes less time.
Sometimes they'll see that you have a clean driving/criminal record (indicating that you're probably normally a good boy/girl), and figure that a lecture might do as much to prevent a future infraction as a citation, without the permanent consequences for you. (more likely for younger individuals that are probably being stupid rather than malicious)
Because at that scale, it's enough money to notice.
When I worked at a small 10-employee company, the owner would always get really good coffee for the break room. Cost a few $ more, but wasn't a big deal.
When I moved to a 20,000-employee company, the good coffee didn't last long, because $(peanuts * 20,000) is enough savings to be noticed (and increase the bonus of some executive, so he's not going to leave it on the table for the next guy).
Yeah. Load the page as normal, then, in the background, replace the redirects with direct links.
As a bonus, if enough people started using it, it would so bork up the tracking stats (and the load on the redirect servers) that using redirects like that would be less appealing in the first place.
So let me re-iterate: Nowhere was I calling for banning guns. I was merely disputing the claims that guns are needed for protection and opposition to the government. The former does not apply if crime is not a problem, and the latter is utter BS.
I don't know of any place in the world where crime is not a problem. Sure, there are places that are significantly safer than others, but you can become a victim anywhere. I know the chances of me specifically being a victim are vanishingly small (way less then dying in a car crash, for example), but that's still no reason not to reduce the risk when it's so easy. I wear a seatbelt in the car, and I carry a licensed concealed handgun when I'm out. The great part about the concealed handgun is that the more people have them, the more risky it becomes to commit violent crime, thus reducing crime without actually having to use force.
I believe what you say is true for developed nations, but I think the real use of tech like this would be in situations where there normally *wouldn't* be an anaesthesiologist available. Developing countries, field hospitals, etc., where something is better than nothing.
While I certainly don't agree with the Paris theater burning fiasco, I also don't follow that the Bible encourages such action, if read properly.
And there's the basic problem. Most Muslims will tell you that the Koran, if read properly, does not encourage such action. Most Muslims believe their faith teaches tolerance and peaceful coexistence with other faiths. It's a relative minority of Muslims who believe the Koran calls on them to blow up infidels, in exactly the same way it is a minority of Christians who believe the Bible calls on them to blow up abortion clinics. Peaceful muslims aren't interesting, though, any more than the 330,000 US churches who will not be burning Korans on Saturday are interesting.
In other news: Extremists find that religion is a good way to rationalize their extremism. Film at 11.
Think BP will pay a dime if it sees it can avoid it?
Why? because it would cost them more not too. If BP ran with the law at the time and said too bad soo sorry we are only liable for 75m, the media and the politicians would have gone ramped with it in their own name (elect/pay me i'll fight the evil doers BP for you).. instead BP did the correct thing and said out front before ANYONE mentioned making them pay - that they would pay for it. That they would foot the bill, and so far they have.
In other words.... They couldn't avoid it! It was pretty obvious that if BP had stuck to the $75m thing, the law would have been changed. Too much political capital at stake. So, they did the intelligent thing and made it look like they were doing it because they wanted to do the right thing. You can bet your ass if they had been able to sweep it under the rug, they would have.
It's just the same people being stupid that always existed. It's just that technology has given them a much wider audience for "It's better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
So now instead of just seeing our local village idiots, we get to see everyone's.
I might add that it is getting harder to avoid jury service, even if various tricks work in some courts. I wish jury service was a voluntary duty, not unlike voting.
Ha... I don't *try* to avoid jury duty, but I've found that after it becomes apparent that you're not a clueless loser, whichever side is planning on trying to pull a fast one will try to get rid of you...
Well, is it a Porche 911 because it came out of a Porche 911 factory, or because it's a car made out of parts that match the specs to build a Porche 911?
If the former, then no, you can't build a Porche 911 in your garage, even if you use "real" Porche parts. If the latter, yes, you could.
No, no, if you're going to put GPS trackers on officials' vehicles, you don't want to just publish the coordinates of everywhere they go. That would very quickly lead to the discovery and removal of said device.
Wait till they go somewhere questionable, then "coincidentally" show up with a camera and publish pics instead. The tracker will survive longer, and the evidence will be much harder to refute.:)
If stupid people deserve to die, then I guess we should sentence all mentally retarded, or maybe even anyone with a tested IQ less than 120, to death then.
The IQ thing is a GREAT idea! Kill everyone under 120, which then changes the average and raises the bar to have a 120 IQ... More people to kill! Pretty soon only Stephen Hawking will be left!
Yes, surely that is why I have no life! See you in court, Slashdot!
That's nothing! I just realized how much of my life in the past 3 years I've spent SLEEPING! Holy crap. Sometimes my sleeping sessions ran to almost 14 hours at a time, and I just can't stop. No matter how hard I try, I end up sleeping at least a few hours every day. See you in court, Sealy!
So what's the difference, then? I fail to see the additional risk Street View imposes in this situation. It wouldn't be that hard for a stalker to snap a picture just like Street View of whatever the stalker is looking at.
Well, it's impossible to detect a stalker using Street View. One casing the place in person could be discovered by a vigilant victim or neighbor and dealt with before the situation goes any further.
How do you know you haven't been stalked? Maybe it was just a really good stalker.
It also won't matter in your 'vette or BMW 99.9% of the time. The only time you'd probably get any benefit is driving on a track when it's really hot out, and even then, you can compensate by starting a few psi low and taking a few warm-up laps.
Checking your tires weekly for proper inflation will do more for you than nitrogen ever will.
If you set up a race car like a street car (0 camber), you would see a race car that fails to perform as well as its peers.
If you set up a street car like a race car, you'll be able to corner a lot better, but you'll reduce your braking ability in straight line stops, and your tires will wear significantly faster.
With the negative camber tires, as the body rolls, they'll suffer the same fate. Instead of riding on the largest part of the tire (the tread), they'll roll up onto the outer edge.
Another consideration with negative camber is the way in which it "increases" traction. You can go further before you start to slide, but once you start, it's more dramatic and unpredictable (you're going faster with more energy to release). With zero camber, you start to slide earlier, but it's more predicable and forgiving, which is generally a good thing for street cars where most people don't know where the limit is, much less how to drive near it.
If you are going to race a car, great, then you probably do want to modify it and there are some cool classes of racing purely on modified street cars. However realize that it is expensive, and generally you have to do a good deal of mods for it to be worthwhile. Don't just lower your car and think that matters to any real degree. While lowering the suspension is likely to be something done in converting a car for racing, that doesn't mean that lowering it alone is going to get you anything driving around town, other than some scrapes from speed bumps.
And really, if what you want is more performance in a street car, you just need to spend more and buy a more performance street car. Go get an Audi S4 or something. It'll have more power and speed than you can use on any street outside of the autobahn.
Before you go and spend ANY money, *learn to drive what you have*!
Provided it's in good repair, you'd be amazed at what you can wring out of a stock, or 99% stock street car.
I drive a 2001 Toyota Solara, with the only mod being an upgraded rear stabilizer bar (to kill the horrendous under steer they have stock), and with decent performance tires in stock size. Total cost: $150, plus 45 minutes to put it on. The performance tires didn't cost much more than replacing with OEM.
I had the opportunity to track it a few weeks ago at a performance driving school. The first day, I managed to reel in a Corvette, simply because he wasn't driving well. Yes, my 10-year-old v6 empty-nester-mobile caught a car with bigger tires, better suspension and double the HP & torque. (not for long, though, he learned!)
So learn to drive first, especially if you're going to drive your new, powerful, and less-forgiving sports car on the same road I'm on.
Not to mention the fact that it seems like game developers now spend too much time on "pretty" and not enough time on "fun." These days, I get much more fun/$ mileage out of trolling through Stardock's Impulse for older games that are actually fun. My PC from two generations back could deal with some of those easily. You don't need a shiny new gfx card when the biggest problems are being locked into low resolutions and not supporting 16:10 aspect ratios.
I've also noticed that consoles are crippling PC gaming in another way: The developers want to develop a game for both PC and console, so the PC version ends up over-simplified and with a stunted control scheme to make it compatible with console controls.
Doubled, maybe, but I wasn't talking about adding a measly 40 years to lifespan. I meant REAL advances - like completely stopping or reversing ageing, so people are looking at hundreds of years of life (or more).
Suddenly, no one can say, "Who cares about X, I won't be around, anyway!" It would change a lot of things. Would you still get into a car with the current bad state of road safety and risk an accident if death in a car crash meant losing 500 years of your life? And with long enough lifespans, we'll have the "Age of Sail" all over again - it'll just be "Age of Solar Sail," and the months/years will be spent on space travel instead of sea travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that problems never seem to get corrected until they are well and truly disastrous in scope.
Because it takes that long for not doing something to become more expensive than doing something, and money is all that matters to the entities that have to make most of the changes.
COOL! That means there will be 6,662 machines in my house that I can figure out how to get open in private. I'll be RICH!
Well, I obviously wasn't there during your particular incident, but often, a cop that takes the time to give someone a good ass-chewing IS the good cop. From the cop's perspective, citing and going is easier and takes less time.
Sometimes they'll see that you have a clean driving/criminal record (indicating that you're probably normally a good boy/girl), and figure that a lecture might do as much to prevent a future infraction as a citation, without the permanent consequences for you. (more likely for younger individuals that are probably being stupid rather than malicious)
Because at that scale, it's enough money to notice.
When I worked at a small 10-employee company, the owner would always get really good coffee for the break room. Cost a few $ more, but wasn't a big deal.
When I moved to a 20,000-employee company, the good coffee didn't last long, because $(peanuts * 20,000) is enough savings to be noticed (and increase the bonus of some executive, so he's not going to leave it on the table for the next guy).
Yeah. Load the page as normal, then, in the background, replace the redirects with direct links.
As a bonus, if enough people started using it, it would so bork up the tracking stats (and the load on the redirect servers) that using redirects like that would be less appealing in the first place.
I'm guessing the real problem is birdshot+bird perched on cable...
So let me re-iterate: Nowhere was I calling for banning guns. I was merely disputing the claims that guns are needed for protection and opposition to the government. The former does not apply if crime is not a problem, and the latter is utter BS.
I don't know of any place in the world where crime is not a problem. Sure, there are places that are significantly safer than others, but you can become a victim anywhere. I know the chances of me specifically being a victim are vanishingly small (way less then dying in a car crash, for example), but that's still no reason not to reduce the risk when it's so easy. I wear a seatbelt in the car, and I carry a licensed concealed handgun when I'm out. The great part about the concealed handgun is that the more people have them, the more risky it becomes to commit violent crime, thus reducing crime without actually having to use force.
Yes, but it also rates Slashdot at zero Canards, so it's obviously full of crap...
IANAD...
I believe what you say is true for developed nations, but I think the real use of tech like this would be in situations where there normally *wouldn't* be an anaesthesiologist available. Developing countries, field hospitals, etc., where something is better than nothing.
While I certainly don't agree with the Paris theater burning fiasco, I also don't follow that the Bible encourages such action, if read properly.
And there's the basic problem. Most Muslims will tell you that the Koran, if read properly, does not encourage such action. Most Muslims believe their faith teaches tolerance and peaceful coexistence with other faiths. It's a relative minority of Muslims who believe the Koran calls on them to blow up infidels, in exactly the same way it is a minority of Christians who believe the Bible calls on them to blow up abortion clinics. Peaceful muslims aren't interesting, though, any more than the 330,000 US churches who will not be burning Korans on Saturday are interesting.
In other news: Extremists find that religion is a good way to rationalize their extremism. Film at 11.
Think BP will pay a dime if it sees it can avoid it?
Why? because it would cost them more not too. If BP ran with the law at the time and said too bad soo sorry we are only liable for 75m, the media and the politicians would have gone ramped with it in their own name (elect/pay me i'll fight the evil doers BP for you).. instead BP did the correct thing and said out front before ANYONE mentioned making them pay - that they would pay for it. That they would foot the bill, and so far they have.
In other words.... They couldn't avoid it! It was pretty obvious that if BP had stuck to the $75m thing, the law would have been changed. Too much political capital at stake. So, they did the intelligent thing and made it look like they were doing it because they wanted to do the right thing. You can bet your ass if they had been able to sweep it under the rug, they would have.
It's just the same people being stupid that always existed. It's just that technology has given them a much wider audience for "It's better to be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt."
So now instead of just seeing our local village idiots, we get to see everyone's.
I might add that it is getting harder to avoid jury service, even if various tricks work in some courts. I wish jury service was a voluntary duty, not unlike voting.
Ha... I don't *try* to avoid jury duty, but I've found that after it becomes apparent that you're not a clueless loser, whichever side is planning on trying to pull a fast one will try to get rid of you...
Well, is it a Porche 911 because it came out of a Porche 911 factory, or because it's a car made out of parts that match the specs to build a Porche 911?
If the former, then no, you can't build a Porche 911 in your garage, even if you use "real" Porche parts. If the latter, yes, you could.
No, no, if you're going to put GPS trackers on officials' vehicles, you don't want to just publish the coordinates of everywhere they go. That would very quickly lead to the discovery and removal of said device.
Wait till they go somewhere questionable, then "coincidentally" show up with a camera and publish pics instead. The tracker will survive longer, and the evidence will be much harder to refute. :)
If stupid people deserve to die, then I guess we should sentence all mentally retarded, or maybe even anyone with a tested IQ less than 120, to death then.
The IQ thing is a GREAT idea! Kill everyone under 120, which then changes the average and raises the bar to have a 120 IQ... More people to kill! Pretty soon only Stephen Hawking will be left!
3142 comments?
Submission Summary: 36 pending, 879 rejected, 607 accepted (1522 total, 39.88% accepted)?
Yes, surely that is why I have no life! See you in court, Slashdot!
That's nothing! I just realized how much of my life in the past 3 years I've spent SLEEPING! Holy crap. Sometimes my sleeping sessions ran to almost 14 hours at a time, and I just can't stop. No matter how hard I try, I end up sleeping at least a few hours every day. See you in court, Sealy!
So what's the difference, then? I fail to see the additional risk Street View imposes in this situation. It wouldn't be that hard for a stalker to snap a picture just like Street View of whatever the stalker is looking at.
Well, it's impossible to detect a stalker using Street View. One casing the place in person could be discovered by a vigilant victim or neighbor and dealt with before the situation goes any further.
How do you know you haven't been stalked? Maybe it was just a really good stalker.
Whats the cost $20-$30 each? + food?
$20-$30 each + a box of tissues
It also won't matter in your 'vette or BMW 99.9% of the time. The only time you'd probably get any benefit is driving on a track when it's really hot out, and even then, you can compensate by starting a few psi low and taking a few warm-up laps.
Checking your tires weekly for proper inflation will do more for you than nitrogen ever will.
If you set up a race car like a street car (0 camber), you would see a race car that fails to perform as well as its peers.
If you set up a street car like a race car, you'll be able to corner a lot better, but you'll reduce your braking ability in straight line stops, and your tires will wear significantly faster.
With the negative camber tires, as the body rolls, they'll suffer the same fate. Instead of riding on the largest part of the tire (the tread), they'll roll up onto the outer edge.
Another consideration with negative camber is the way in which it "increases" traction. You can go further before you start to slide, but once you start, it's more dramatic and unpredictable (you're going faster with more energy to release). With zero camber, you start to slide earlier, but it's more predicable and forgiving, which is generally a good thing for street cars where most people don't know where the limit is, much less how to drive near it.
If you are going to race a car, great, then you probably do want to modify it and there are some cool classes of racing purely on modified street cars. However realize that it is expensive, and generally you have to do a good deal of mods for it to be worthwhile. Don't just lower your car and think that matters to any real degree. While lowering the suspension is likely to be something done in converting a car for racing, that doesn't mean that lowering it alone is going to get you anything driving around town, other than some scrapes from speed bumps.
And really, if what you want is more performance in a street car, you just need to spend more and buy a more performance street car. Go get an Audi S4 or something. It'll have more power and speed than you can use on any street outside of the autobahn.
Before you go and spend ANY money, *learn to drive what you have*!
Provided it's in good repair, you'd be amazed at what you can wring out of a stock, or 99% stock street car.
I drive a 2001 Toyota Solara, with the only mod being an upgraded rear stabilizer bar (to kill the horrendous under steer they have stock), and with decent performance tires in stock size. Total cost: $150, plus 45 minutes to put it on. The performance tires didn't cost much more than replacing with OEM.
I had the opportunity to track it a few weeks ago at a performance driving school. The first day, I managed to reel in a Corvette, simply because he wasn't driving well. Yes, my 10-year-old v6 empty-nester-mobile caught a car with bigger tires, better suspension and double the HP & torque. (not for long, though, he learned!)
So learn to drive first, especially if you're going to drive your new, powerful, and less-forgiving sports car on the same road I'm on.
Not to mention the fact that it seems like game developers now spend too much time on "pretty" and not enough time on "fun." These days, I get much more fun/$ mileage out of trolling through Stardock's Impulse for older games that are actually fun. My PC from two generations back could deal with some of those easily. You don't need a shiny new gfx card when the biggest problems are being locked into low resolutions and not supporting 16:10 aspect ratios.
I've also noticed that consoles are crippling PC gaming in another way: The developers want to develop a game for both PC and console, so the PC version ends up over-simplified and with a stunted control scheme to make it compatible with console controls.
Fool the sensor? Because tires are SO hard to partially deflate if you just want to trip the sensor.
Doubled, maybe, but I wasn't talking about adding a measly 40 years to lifespan. I meant REAL advances - like completely stopping or reversing ageing, so people are looking at hundreds of years of life (or more).
Suddenly, no one can say, "Who cares about X, I won't be around, anyway!" It would change a lot of things. Would you still get into a car with the current bad state of road safety and risk an accident if death in a car crash meant losing 500 years of your life? And with long enough lifespans, we'll have the "Age of Sail" all over again - it'll just be "Age of Solar Sail," and the months/years will be spent on space travel instead of sea travel.