heh etymotic earphones are absolutly worth every mother fucking penny!
I bought a pair of ES-4 earphones because they were the only things I could find that looked like they would work underneath my motorcycle helmet. They did, mostly at least. Hurts a bit to take the helmet off but hey... I only need to do that once or twice a day anyway.
They sound awsome... and with 29 db noise reduction, nothing says "I am not listning to you" quite like the completely oblivious expression of someone who can't even hear the slightest peep.
Of course you do have to get used to wearing them. They are basically built around reusable ear plugs, so there is a soft material (either foam or a rubber/plastic frob depending on which fits best for you) shoved into your ear canal.
and the cord... oh my god.... its like 9 feet long. great for routing in weird ways through a jacket. Out the helmet, clipped so there is plenty of slack, down my jacket, then out to the tank bag... soo soo nice.
And this is exactly why I never read email with a client that renders HTML. I use mutt, and I stick with it. I don't even tell it how to send html to another program.
If its important i can read it between the html. However, I have NEVER receieved ANYTHING in an HTML containing email except spam. Everyone who has ever tried to send me an email with html formatting has already been appropriatly bitch slapped.
Its not so much that I worry the FBI is after me, I just know that spammers use it for address verification, and thats the last thing I need is more spam. My filter already gets 50 or so messages a day (what ever would I do without spamassassin?)
I find it amusing that the FBI would use tools that are so obviously meant to catch careless losers. Then again who knows what it really means? Maybe they did something else?
Don't know how to have fun, or perhaps, have a different idea of what fun is?
Frankly, I like to think I know how to have fun. I enjoy my comapny and the company of like minded people (and even not so like minded people) quite a bit.
Frankly, of all the places to visit, Vegas is almost dead last on the list (somewhere below Elizabeth, NJ, and ive been there...::shudder::). Just totally not my scene.
Unlimited means "without limit". It means "If you use this all you want, we arn't going to shut you off because you hit some limit".
Now its not unlimited bandwidth... the bandwidth is limited by thge equipment. It is unlimited usage of the available bandwidth. That means if I jump on and slam thm at full bandwidth 24 hours a day 7 day s aweek, and it affects other customers... well guess what. Thats not my fault, its their fault for allocating so much bandwith to me and telling me it was unlimited.
If there is a limit, then they are misrepresenting their service to trick me into becomming a customer. They are falsly representing themselves. They are dishonest. What more do I need to say?
If they advertise unlimited access for $X then thats what they have to give me. Just like if the grocery store offeres me Y brand canned tomatoes for $.15 in their circular, they HAVE to sell me Y brand canned tomatoes for $.15 - its the law.
See its one thing if you walk in with one great deal in mind and they convince you to get some other deal. Thats high pressure sales, and as much as I may dislike it and the tricks they often employ to do it, its fine and legal. However when they offer you something that they don't really have (like an "unlimited plan") and sell you something else (ie a "limited plan" under the guise of being unlimited), thats just not legal.
Call it what you want. False Advertising, "bait and switch". Its a quite simple scam. But in the end thats exactly what it is - a scam. And its not a question of whether it should be legal - we already have laws against this shit because dishonest companies have done this shit for years.
I remember when it first came out. It was silly. Ziplink (one of my first real ISPs) offered me unlimited. Then a few months later called me and said that I was averaging 8 hours a day online and thats well above normal usage blah blah policy of excessive usage blah blah keep it up and we will bump you to a buisness account
Needless to say I dropped them like a hot potato. I mean if you say unlimited, thats unlimited. YOu can't redefine "unlimited" (tho your definition is completely reasonable... in fact theres no reason you would need ot allow simultaneous connections like that at all).
Of course when everyone was on dialup alot of ISPs got killed by unlimited plans. As im sure you know (maybe others don't) the problem was the rule of thumb was around 7 accounts per modem or so. So if one person stayed on for 24 hours straight, they tied up a phone line and modem for the entire24 hours and completely throw off your numbers.... in fact it ends up costing more in equipment and telephone fees to keep that user than you make from them.
Basically the entire service made money in the float, the ability to overbook services yet still be available just because everyone wasn't using it at the same time. A few "power users" could really fuck the whole thing up.
But thats the problem with unlimited access... for many it just turne dout to not be profitable. Was it moving power users to broadband that saved the unlimited dialup? I figured it would have gone the way of the dodo by now.
However they advertise it as unlimited don't they?
Well unlimited is just that. If they go around calling their service unlimited, and I siugn up for it, it damned well better be unlimited or else no matter what their clauses say... thats false advertising. Plain and simple.
They can try all they want to tell you otherwise, but if they told you unlimited before you sgned up, and havn't sent you a notice saying the unlimited plan has been cancelled and you are being moved to some other plan, then I don't think they have a leg to stand on.
Of course when an ISP tried to pull this shit on me about 8 years ago, I just voted with my dollars. I said goodbye Ziplink, not so nice knowing you, and found a better ISP.
Mine wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't 400 miles from home, on memorial day weekend.
Its true though, I don't need anything more than what I have. Now sure, its not that I don't drool over some of the beefier bikes, but the bandit gets me where I need it to.
I just wish it were a bit more comfortable. I need to bring the bars up a bit to change the seating position
I have to agree. Ive heard tails of people running into new riders who just got their license going out and buying R1s. Absolutly insane. Ive never even ridden an R1 myself but, ive seen the stats. (read: drooled over the stats)
I got myself a yamaha virago 1100 from the 80s for my first bike a couple of years back. It was a bit big but it just looked so nice. Being a big guy, it served me well (theres a few bikes out there that a person over 200 lbs would put over its rated weight limit! Not that ive never ridden any of them without a problem, but still)
Anyway, when I crashed in maryland (down at about 45, sprained my wrist, bike didn't fare so well. Im living proof that motorcycle accidents just arn't necissarily that bad - assuming you know to slide and wear proper gear etc) However I know a couple of people that went down at about the speed I did recently (why to noobies ride 2 up? dumb) who fared a little worst... bunch of road rash mostly. (give me a simple sprain any day) and a bit banged up from bad landings.
One thing to remember: just about everyone crashes. but its really good if your first couple of crashes are very small and minor. Cuz the first one happens so fast. I remember mine, I grabbed the brake in a full on turn (when I shouldn't have been in full lean - I should have been going slower). I grabbed the brake and next thing I knew I was on the ground.
After a couple of crashes that all changed. BY the time I had my big one, the adreniline was pumping at the moment I sensed I was going down, time slowed, and I had plenty of time to consider every action ("Get legs out from under the bike before the ground", "Land flat", "Slide straight"... these are all actual thoughts I had and things I managed to execute rather flawlessly while falling to the ground at 45 MPH)
Back to my original point though... I got myself a Bandit 600 after that, and for having so much less engine... it has 10 more horsepower and weighs nearly 100 lbs less. It absolutly cooks in comparison. I let one of these noobs take it around the parking lot once (he was actually pretty good for a noob) and he said "You know the main difference between your bike and the ones we practiced on is that I hwas doing 30 (it was quite a good size lot) but your bike was only at 3000 rpms" (I didn't have the heart to tell him that he wasn't even in its power band yet)
Most 600s are much too much bike for most noobs to really be riding around on. They still have way too much to learn... like don't grab the brake.
If someone has enough interest they will break it. I supose thats really the morla of the story. And if you do come up with a way to make the voting booth secure... well then they will just run candidates in the two most major parties that are each kind of non-offensive in their own ways but when you boiul them down are basically exactly the same....
Oh wait... they have been doing that for years.
Anyone else tired of haviong to choose between the idiot sons of the rich?
You do realise that in reference to a general question "How do I run an ecommerce site without cookies to keep state", you have a very language specific answer.
Unfortunaly in perl, I don't have a "session_register" call.
The more general answer would be to (yuk) store the session id in the URL.
Then you curse at whoever it was that decided originally that trying to hack statefulness onto a fundamentally stateless protocol as the insane trouble maker that he or she is.
Oh yea, and keep a table of session ID vs IP and time them out... lest someone accidently pass on a URL with a session ID and have their session hijacked.
Thats fine. Go for it. There are plenty of sites out there.
Yours just wont be one that I visit. No skin off my nose. I wont really even feel like I am missing out on anything. And I will probably equate you with the idiot flash developers that I know, the ones who can barely turn their computer on without drooling all over the keyboard.
this is a situation where you CAN have your cake and eat it too.
Just get a slashdot subscription. Its really pretty damned cheap. You get to both say no to ads and to support the site. Whats wrong with a subscription here and there? I think they are a great idea myself.
Well I for one don't need to know about every single product. When I identify an area of my life that could be improved by some gadget, I look for such a gadget. I don't need some marketdroids going around trying to tell me about their gadgets, if I needed their gadget, I would find them.
In the end its the consumer's choice. When freezers became available and cheap enough to go into every home, then alot of ice harvesters were out of work pretty damned quick. Boo Hoo. The old ways are replaced by the new ones. Its evolution in action.
This is what the consumer wants, this is what the consumer gets. So long as there is enough revenue in selling banner ads, it will continue. When it drops far enough, then it will stop. Its not a moral thing, its not lamentable, its not even a good thing. Its just the way it is.
I mean hell, there are sites, like this one, where people actually pay a small fee just to not have to look at the fucking ads. I know I do... why? because I like to support the site and I hate ads.
I don't just think of it as supporting slashdot either. I see it as casting my vote, as a customer and consumer, for the ad companies to go out of buisness. Its my vote with my dollars.
In a way its almost the ultimate form of democracy. If I don't want it, I say no to it, if everyone says no to it, then they make no money, and they go out of buisness. Its not a sad thing... its what the people voted for.
Exactly. I think IBMs people understand this, and thats probably why they havn't done it. Frankly, I think the issue here is that SCO shot its load way too early. Had they been more discrete, they may have gotten Big Blue to buy them out as a pre-emptive strike against all this.
Since they didn't, now Big Blue isn't going to do it. It woul dlook very bad, it would set bad precident, and it would leave the field open for the next money grubbers who can make some vacuous claims. No, now they are committed.
The best part here is that, if they lose, they have a good chance of validating the GPL, and closing off one more avenue of FUD, like a junky collapsing an overshot vein. Thats a nice win.
Now it may take a while, but victory will be worth the wait. Besides, Big Blue has pockets deeper than some governments - my prediction is that by the time this is finished SCO will be little more than 3 letters on court filings.
> At the same time a single-payer system saves the present, it destroys the > future: a single-payer can dictate prices to providers, reducing profit > margins to the point where no research can be done. I'm not willing to give up > the chance to find a cure for cancer or heart disease just so people who > didn't earn it can get free health care on my back. You'd be stupid to support > this as well.
Wow getting down and calling people stupid for supporting something you don't like. Pretty quick on the draw there bucko.
Why should we assume that private research is the only way this stuff gets done. There is plenty of medical research done on government grants, and otherwise not paid for by private dollars.
This idea that taxes and government funding are all evil and inefficient is so naive. Frankly when it comes to things like health care that people just need across the board, government funding and taxes work. It has afterall brought us things like the Interstate Highway system, not to mention that most of the rest of the civilized world (yes I being somewhat Europe-US-centric in my view of "the civilized world") already has single payer healthcare and it works just fine.
If youy insist on invectives, anyone who trook their head out of their ass and thought a little more about his fellow man than his own bottom line, might realise that the general health of the people around him is quite in his own best interest.
Now don't get me wrong, im not in favor of higher taxes per se. Just that there are programs that I am willing to pay more taxes for. Personally I would rather see them find the money by gutting some of the more egregious offences against the peoples money - like a fair portion of the military industrial complex - and do NOT favor lowering taxes at the expense of important social programs.
Now if you would kindly stop "garaunteeing" that I would support the same things as you if I just wasn't so fucking uneducated in the ways of the world, I will happily drop the suggestion that you get your head out of your ass and work on that sense of empathy with your fellow man.
I dunno, as one of those geeks that has an income above the national median, I don't find my taxes are especially high. In fact, id be happy to have them take more if it would buy single payer health care to help alot of those non-geeks I know who struggle just to make a living and for whom carrying health insurance takes a signifigant portion of their meager wage.
However I might be kind of pissed if those extra dollars instead went to funding another game of "Bomb the brown people" or draping cloth to cover the supposed naughty bits on statues.
And I certainly would not be happy to see yet more checks go out to people that are too small to actually make any difference in their lives, aside from maybe helping them make a single car payment, just to have a purely symbpolic tax cut to helps someones aproval rating while the deficit goes up again.
Try over 25, been doing what I do professionally for several years, have moved twice in as aany years and about to do it again, and have owned enough stuff to fill a small moving truck to the brim and still leave shit at my parents...
and the only vehicles I own are a Suzuki Bandit 600 and a pair of New Balance sneakers. (oh ive owned a couple of cars, but the burned too much gas and took up too much of the road for my use. when I realised that 99% of my driving was solo)
When I need to move... I rent a truck. When I want to ride cross country... I suck it up and hold on tight.
Why weren't you dealing with logs right in the first place? I mean sure, we don't have them all right here either but, we have enough monitoring to notice when the log partition is filling and fix it... nagios + pager + oncall person = no crashes because partitions filled.
Theres no way any of this aside form maybe a small deamon for local system monitoring (load, disk usage etc) should have been runing on the production mail server itself. Logs should be sucked down to another host and processed there. Mail notification should flow from monitoring box to people it needs to notify...never through the machine being monitored.
And once a min? My god thats too much monitoring...and they were doing it 60 times that! Once every 5 mins, means that within 10 mins of a problem, someones pager is going off. Anyone who thinks they needs better than that needs to deflate their sense of self importance. (I mean how fast can you have someone knowledgable onsite and ready to go? Within 2 seconds? I think not...takes at least 30 seconds on average for a mail to make it out to a pager!)
And the textbook (as in motorcycle safety textbook" answer is, why didn't you see him?
While people in cars can generally strap in, sit back and relax and sue the fuck out of anyone who tbones them like that, motorcycles don't have the luxrury. You have to be always consious of where you are, how much you can see, and all that.
If you are follwing close on a truck and it blows a back wheel, your fucked. If you come ramping around a blind turn and slam into the back of a disabled car... why were you goin that fast?
Now of course im a born and bread boston driver, so I am especially atune to light cycles, you would think we invented flooring the gas on yellow (or even early red) so I don't just look for people to run the light, I expect them to do it....and drive accordingly.
Once its clear tho, im still the first person accross the intersection.
I fill mine for less than that, and I have a 5 gallon tank! (granted I usually don't go far past the reserve before I refill).
I have the Sport-Standard Suzuki Bandit (looks like a rice rocket, but rides like a standard bike, nice upright seat). I kinda wish I went cruiser again about half the time, but by that same token the Bandit 600 gets me around just fine and its a bit more practical in the city (I used to do alot of in city commuting... not so much now that I live a 5 min walk to work).
Most practical vehicle I have ever owned. And the nice thing about a motorcycle... you will have a problem that only the richest car owners have... you have to get used to the fact that yes, everyone really is turning their head to watch you ride by (talk about pressure:)) - but you get over that pretty quick (well as much as you ever can get over it;))
Try that with an SUV. A cheap 5 grand bike will easily turn as many heads as a Porche (anyone who thinks im kidding, should try it sometime). Even more so really, because even the quietest bike makes a little noise, and they are soo different from cars.
The other nice thing... bikes don't lie to you.
The bike never says "Your perfectly safe, relax, fall asleep, no worries". The bike says "Pay attention, your one mistake away from nasty death" (which isn't really true, the majority of bike accidents arn't even so bad, quite survable, and with proper training and equipment, most riders walk away with little more than bruised pride and a damaged bike) - of course, if you actually hit something like a car or an SUV, all bets are off... best not to do that.
But a bike gives you the control, small size, and manuverability, that when coupled with proper training can keep you out of such accidents. They can stop on a dime or put some distance between you and a problem pretty damned quick.
Hell speaking of a porche... it may beat a cheap bike (emphasis on cheap) on the top end, but NO car beats even a cheap bike off the line. Ok, MAYBE a 250 or even a 400... but lets face it... msot people start out around 600cc and NO car beats a 600cc bike off the line unless its in BAD need of some work.
Hell I had a porche that only BARELY beat me off the line... when I had a two cylindar 1100 with 1 worthless sparkplug (it was soiled darker than a black steers tukus on a moonless prairy night)... and he still had to try pretty hard to beat me at the light.
Of course SUV drivers don't have a higher survival rate than other cars, they are just more likely to kill others, and not a single bit more likely to survive themselves.
And the idea that an Economy car is "undersized" is absolutly silly. If anything they are apropriatlysized for the general use case. Thats transporting 1 or 2 people (which is about what you see in 95% of cars on the road at any given time... SUV or otherwise).
Frankly in the long run its cheaper and safer for EVERYONE to drive an economy car, and rent a larger vehicle when you NEED one. You know that MAYBE once a year or every two years that you might move, or maybe that weekend or two you actually go camping.
Biut whatever, once oil price hit where they really should be, I imagine the much touted "Market forces" will take care of the SUVs so im not too worried. And I will still be tooling around in the most practical vehicle I have ever owned... my motorcycle... 40 MPG in the city, 50 on the highway, small enough to make room and I NEVER have to look for parking.
Not to mention it can fit between traffic in a jam, out accelerate ANY 4 wheeler (taking off or comming to a stop), and lets face it... get the biggest fucking SUV penis extention you want...
When it comes right down to it... everyones watching ME ride down the street, you in your SUV are just another boring fish in the sea of SUVs and other cagers... and with all that... an empty tank still only costs me $5 to fill.
However the total issue of spam and spam fighting includes alot more than free speech. Free Speech is a side issue to spam.
If spammers set up their own mail relays (as some have done in the past) and sent their mail through them JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, then nobody would give two shits what the spammers were sending.
Of course, a large number of people would just blacklist them by ip to keep the spew out, and everyone who liked thier filthy spew would be prefectly free to recieve it. Hell mail filters could even be setup to reject based on ip and reciever so users could individually choose to block spammers....
Free speech would be protected, and my ability to tune out your free speech and go about my buisness would be protected.
This is NOT the current case.
Spammers prowl the net looking for cheap and easy ways to bypass filters. I put up a filter that blacks spam... they know people don't want to listen to them, and so they activly try to subvert peoples blocks. They jump IPs, they switch ISPs, they search for open servers and then hammer the fuck out of them, thus shifting the cost of sending their spam to some random innocent person who just setup their mail server poorly or perhaps too "trustingly".
ME going around sending mail to you is free speech. Me trying to trick you into sending mail or directing the charges for sending my spew to you is NOT free speech, and thats really the main problem with spammers... they don't acept the cost of their own spew, they shift as much of that cost as possible to others.
Never mind the high percentage of spam that is just scams, Nigerian scams, fake products, ilicit products etc etc. That stuff isn't free speech either. You do NOT have the right, for example, to tell me you sell toner cartridges and give me part numbers and cost and where to send my money to, unless you intend to send me toner cartidges after you cash my check.
If spammers would just use their ISPs smtp server and stopping jumping accounts and trying to exploit random peoples smtp servers, and basiclaly using every underhanded trick they can think of to trick people into reading their mail, then they would have a leg to stand on in the free speech arena and I would say fine, let them spew.
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heh etymotic earphones are absolutly worth every mother fucking penny!
I bought a pair of ES-4 earphones because they were the only things I could find that looked like they would work underneath my motorcycle helmet. They did, mostly at least. Hurts a bit to take the helmet off but hey... I only need to do that once or twice a day anyway.
They sound awsome... and with 29 db noise reduction, nothing says "I am not listning to you" quite like the completely oblivious expression of someone who can't even hear the slightest peep.
Of course you do have to get used to wearing them. They are basically built around reusable ear plugs, so there is a soft material (either foam or a rubber/plastic frob depending on which fits best for you) shoved into your ear canal.
and the cord... oh my god.... its like 9 feet long. great for routing in weird ways through a jacket. Out the helmet, clipped so there is plenty of slack, down my jacket, then out to the tank bag... soo soo nice.
-steve
That would be my guess on how they do it.
And this is exactly why I never read email with a client that renders HTML.
I use mutt, and I stick with it. I don't even tell it how to send html
to another program.
If its important i can read it between the html. However, I have NEVER
receieved ANYTHING in an HTML containing email except spam. Everyone
who has ever tried to send me an email with html formatting has already
been appropriatly bitch slapped.
Its not so much that I worry the FBI is after me, I just know that
spammers use it for address verification, and thats the last thing I need is more spam. My filter already gets 50 or so messages a day (what ever would I do without spamassassin?)
I find it amusing that the FBI would use tools that are so obviously meant to catch careless losers. Then again who knows what it really means? Maybe they did
something else?
-Steve
Don't know how to have fun, or perhaps, have a different idea of what fun is?
::shudder::). Just totally not my scene.
Frankly, I like to think I know how to have fun. I enjoy my comapny and the company of like minded people (and even not so like minded people) quite a bit.
Frankly, of all the places to visit, Vegas is almost dead last on the list (somewhere below Elizabeth, NJ, and ive been there...
-Steve
Unlimited means "without limit". It means "If you use this all you want, we arn't going to shut you off because you hit some limit".
Now its not unlimited bandwidth... the bandwidth is limited by thge equipment. It is unlimited usage of the available bandwidth. That means if I jump on and slam thm at full bandwidth 24 hours a day 7 day s aweek, and it affects other customers... well guess what. Thats not my fault, its their fault for allocating so much bandwith to me and telling me it was unlimited.
If there is a limit, then they are misrepresenting their service to trick me into becomming a customer. They are falsly representing themselves. They are dishonest. What more do I need to say?
If they advertise unlimited access for $X then thats what they have to give me. Just like if the grocery store offeres me Y brand canned tomatoes for $.15 in their circular, they HAVE to sell me Y brand canned tomatoes for $.15 - its the law.
See its one thing if you walk in with one great deal in mind and they convince you to get some other deal. Thats high pressure sales, and as much as I may dislike it and the tricks they often employ to do it, its fine and legal. However when they offer you something that they don't really have (like an "unlimited plan") and sell you something else (ie a "limited plan" under the guise of being unlimited), thats just not legal.
Call it what you want. False Advertising, "bait and switch". Its a quite simple scam. But in the end thats exactly what it is - a scam. And its not a question of whether it should be legal - we already have laws against this shit because dishonest companies have done this shit for years.
-Steve
Well now that i have seen the book review on the web spiders book...
maybe I am just mining the net for information that is of personal interest.
(like all of its free porn!)
-Steve
Whats unlimited dialup cost these days?
I remember when it first came out. It was silly. Ziplink (one of my first real ISPs) offered me unlimited. Then a few months later called me and said that I was averaging 8 hours a day online and thats well above normal usage blah blah policy of excessive usage blah blah keep it up and we will bump you to a buisness account
Needless to say I dropped them like a hot potato. I mean if you say unlimited, thats unlimited. YOu can't redefine "unlimited" (tho your definition is completely reasonable... in fact theres no reason you would need ot allow simultaneous connections like that at all).
Of course when everyone was on dialup alot of ISPs got killed by unlimited plans. As im sure you know (maybe others don't) the problem was the rule of thumb was around 7 accounts per modem or so. So if one person stayed on for 24 hours straight, they tied up a phone line and modem for the entire24 hours and completely throw off your numbers.... in fact it ends up costing more in equipment and telephone fees to keep that user than you make from them.
Basically the entire service made money in the float, the ability to overbook services yet still be available just because everyone wasn't using it at the same time. A few "power users" could really fuck the whole thing up.
But thats the problem with unlimited access... for many it just turne dout to not be profitable. Was it moving power users to broadband that saved the unlimited dialup? I figured it would have gone the way of the dodo by now.
-Steve
Aha!
However they advertise it as unlimited don't they?
Well unlimited is just that. If they go around calling their service unlimited, and I siugn up for it, it damned well better be unlimited or else no matter what their clauses say... thats false advertising. Plain and simple.
They can try all they want to tell you otherwise, but if they told you unlimited before you sgned up, and havn't sent you a notice saying the unlimited plan has been cancelled and you are being moved to some other plan, then I don't think they have a leg to stand on.
Of course when an ISP tried to pull this shit on me about 8 years ago, I just voted with my dollars. I said goodbye Ziplink, not so nice knowing you, and found a better ISP.
-Steve
Mine wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't 400 miles from home, on memorial day weekend.
Its true though, I don't need anything more than what I have. Now sure, its not that I don't drool over some of the beefier bikes, but the bandit gets me where I need it to.
I just wish it were a bit more comfortable. I need to bring the bars up a bit to change the seating position
-Steve
I have to agree. Ive heard tails of people running into new riders who just got their license going out and buying R1s. Absolutly insane. Ive never even ridden an R1 myself but, ive seen the stats. (read: drooled over the stats)
I got myself a yamaha virago 1100 from the 80s for my first bike a couple of years back. It was a bit big but it just looked so nice. Being a big guy, it served me well (theres a few bikes out there that a person over 200 lbs would put over its rated weight limit! Not that ive never ridden any of them without a problem, but still)
Anyway, when I crashed in maryland (down at about 45, sprained my wrist, bike didn't fare so well. Im living proof that motorcycle accidents just arn't necissarily that bad - assuming you know to slide and wear proper gear etc)
However I know a couple of people that went down at about the speed I did recently (why to noobies ride 2 up? dumb) who fared a little worst... bunch of road rash mostly. (give me a simple sprain any day) and a bit banged up from bad landings.
One thing to remember: just about everyone crashes. but its really good if your first couple of crashes are very small and minor. Cuz the first one happens so fast. I remember mine, I grabbed the brake in a full on turn (when I shouldn't have been in full lean - I should have been going slower). I grabbed the brake and next thing I knew I was on the ground.
After a couple of crashes that all changed. BY the time I had my big one, the adreniline was pumping at the moment I sensed I was going down, time slowed, and I had plenty of time to consider every action ("Get legs out from under the bike before the ground", "Land flat", "Slide straight"... these are all actual thoughts I had and things I managed to execute rather flawlessly while falling to the ground at 45 MPH)
Back to my original point though... I got myself a Bandit 600 after that, and for having so much less engine... it has 10 more horsepower and weighs nearly 100 lbs less. It absolutly cooks in comparison. I let one of these noobs take it around the parking lot once (he was actually pretty good for a noob) and he said "You know the main difference between your bike and the ones we practiced on is that I hwas doing 30 (it was quite a good size lot) but your bike was only at 3000 rpms" (I didn't have the heart to tell him that he wasn't even in its power band yet)
Most 600s are much too much bike for most noobs to really be riding around on. They still have way too much to learn... like don't grab the brake.
-Steve
But see thats where I disagree.... it is a crazy idea...
One thats just crazy enough to work!
-Steve
And hence... diebold.
If someone has enough interest they will break it. I supose thats really the morla of the story. And if you do come up with a way to make the voting booth secure... well then they will just run candidates in the two most major parties that are each kind of non-offensive in their own ways but when you boiul them down are basically exactly the same....
Oh wait... they have been doing that for years.
Anyone else tired of haviong to choose between the idiot sons of the rich?
-Steve
mmm I love macaroons they are soooo good.
There is this place up the street that makes them sooo good. Coconut Macaroons. Mmmm Now I wanna go eat some.
-Steve
You do realise that in reference to a general question "How do I run an ecommerce site without cookies to keep state", you have a very language specific answer.
Unfortunaly in perl, I don't have a "session_register" call.
The more general answer would be to (yuk) store the session id in the URL.
Then you curse at whoever it was that decided originally that trying to hack statefulness onto a fundamentally stateless protocol as the insane trouble maker that he or she is.
Oh yea, and keep a table of session ID vs IP and time them out... lest someone accidently pass on a URL with a session ID and have their session hijacked.
-Steve
Thats fine. Go for it. There are plenty of sites out there.
Yours just wont be one that I visit. No skin off my nose. I wont really even feel like I am missing out on anything. And I will probably equate you with the idiot flash developers that I know, the ones who can barely turn their computer on without drooling all over the keyboard.
Your move.
-Steve
Ahhhh but...
this is a situation where you CAN have your cake and eat it too.
Just get a slashdot subscription. Its really pretty damned cheap. You get to both say no to ads and to support the site. Whats wrong with a subscription here and there? I think they are a great idea myself.
-Steve
Well I for one don't need to know about every single product. When I identify an area of my life that could be improved by some gadget, I look for such a gadget. I don't need some marketdroids going around trying to tell me about their gadgets, if I needed their gadget, I would find them.
In the end its the consumer's choice. When freezers became available and cheap enough to go into every home, then alot of ice harvesters were out of work pretty damned quick. Boo Hoo. The old ways are replaced by the new ones. Its evolution in action.
This is what the consumer wants, this is what the consumer gets. So long as there is enough revenue in selling banner ads, it will continue. When it drops far enough, then it will stop. Its not a moral thing, its not lamentable, its not even a good thing. Its just the way it is.
I mean hell, there are sites, like this one, where people actually pay a small fee just to not have to look at the fucking ads. I know I do... why? because I like to support the site and I hate ads.
I don't just think of it as supporting slashdot either. I see it as casting my vote, as a customer and consumer, for the ad companies to go out of buisness. Its my vote with my dollars.
In a way its almost the ultimate form of democracy. If I don't want it, I say no to it, if everyone says no to it, then they make no money, and they go out of buisness. Its not a sad thing... its what the people voted for.
-Steve
Exactly. I think IBMs people understand this, and thats probably why they havn't done it. Frankly, I think the issue here is that SCO shot its load way too early. Had they been more discrete, they may have gotten Big Blue to buy them out as a pre-emptive strike against all this.
Since they didn't, now Big Blue isn't going to do it. It woul dlook very bad, it would set bad precident, and it would leave the field open for the next money grubbers who can make some vacuous claims. No, now they are committed.
The best part here is that, if they lose, they have a good chance of validating the GPL, and closing off one more avenue of FUD, like a junky collapsing an overshot vein. Thats a nice win.
Now it may take a while, but victory will be worth the wait. Besides, Big Blue has pockets deeper than some governments - my prediction is that by the time this is finished SCO will be little more than 3 letters on court filings.
-Steve
> At the same time a single-payer system saves the present, it destroys the
> future: a single-payer can dictate prices to providers, reducing profit
> margins to the point where no research can be done. I'm not willing to give up
> the chance to find a cure for cancer or heart disease just so people who
> didn't earn it can get free health care on my back. You'd be stupid to support
> this as well.
Wow getting down and calling people stupid for supporting something you don't like. Pretty quick on the draw there bucko.
Why should we assume that private research is the only way this stuff gets done. There is plenty of medical research done on government grants, and otherwise not paid for by private dollars.
This idea that taxes and government funding are all evil and inefficient is so naive. Frankly when it comes to things like health care that people just need across the board, government funding and taxes work. It has afterall brought us things like the Interstate Highway system, not to mention that most of the rest of the civilized world (yes I being somewhat Europe-US-centric in my view of "the civilized world") already has single payer healthcare and it works just fine.
If youy insist on invectives, anyone who trook their head out of their ass and thought a little more about his fellow man than his own bottom line, might realise that the general health of the people around him is quite in his own best interest.
Now don't get me wrong, im not in favor of higher taxes per se. Just that there are programs that I am willing to pay more taxes for. Personally I would rather see them find the money by gutting some of the more egregious offences against the peoples money - like a fair portion of the military industrial complex - and do NOT favor lowering taxes at the expense of important social programs.
Now if you would kindly stop "garaunteeing" that I would support the same things as you if I just wasn't so fucking uneducated in the ways of the world, I will happily drop the suggestion that you get your head out of your ass and work on that sense of empathy with your fellow man.
-Steve
I dunno, as one of those geeks that has an income above the national median, I don't find my taxes are especially high. In fact, id be happy to have them take more if it would buy single payer health care to help alot of those non-geeks I know who struggle just to make a living and for whom carrying health insurance takes a signifigant portion of their meager wage.
However I might be kind of pissed if those extra dollars instead went to funding another game of "Bomb the brown people" or draping cloth to cover the supposed naughty bits on statues.
And I certainly would not be happy to see yet more checks go out to people that are too small to actually make any difference in their lives, aside from maybe helping them make a single car payment, just to have a purely symbpolic tax cut to helps someones aproval rating while the deficit goes up again.
Not that I am bitter or anything.
-Steve
Reading through older posts....
Try over 25, been doing what I do professionally for several years, have moved twice in as aany years and about to do it again, and have owned enough stuff to fill a small moving truck to the brim and still leave shit at my parents...
and the only vehicles I own are a Suzuki Bandit 600 and a pair of New Balance sneakers. (oh ive owned a couple of cars, but the burned too much gas and took up too much of the road for my use. when I realised that 99% of my driving was solo)
When I need to move... I rent a truck. When I want to ride cross country... I suck it up and hold on tight.
-Steve
I agree...and what I want to know...
Why weren't you dealing with logs right in the first place? I mean sure, we don't have them all right here either but, we have enough monitoring to notice when the log partition is filling and fix it... nagios + pager + oncall person = no crashes because partitions filled.
Theres no way any of this aside form maybe a small deamon for local system monitoring (load, disk usage etc) should have been runing on the production mail server itself. Logs should be sucked down to another host and processed there.
Mail notification should flow from monitoring box to people it needs to notify...never through the machine being monitored.
And once a min? My god thats too much monitoring...and they were doing it 60 times that! Once every 5 mins, means that within 10 mins of a problem, someones pager is going off. Anyone who thinks they needs better than that needs to deflate their sense of self importance. (I mean how fast can you have someone knowledgable onsite and ready to go? Within 2 seconds? I think not...takes at least 30 seconds on average for a mail to make it out to a pager!)
-Steve
And the textbook (as in motorcycle safety textbook" answer is, why didn't you see him?
While people in cars can generally strap in, sit back and relax and sue the fuck out of anyone who tbones them like that, motorcycles don't have the luxrury. You have to be always consious of where you are, how much you can see, and all that.
If you are follwing close on a truck and it blows a back wheel, your fucked. If you come ramping around a blind turn and slam into the back of a disabled car... why were you goin that fast?
Now of course im a born and bread boston driver, so I am especially atune to light cycles, you would think we invented flooring the gas on yellow (or even early red) so I don't just look for people to run the light, I expect them to do it....and drive accordingly.
Once its clear tho, im still the first person accross the intersection.
WTF $7!
:)) - but you get over that pretty quick (well as much as you ever can get over it ;))
... and he still had to try pretty hard to beat me at the light.
I fill mine for less than that, and I have a 5 gallon tank! (granted I usually don't go far past the reserve before I refill).
I have the Sport-Standard Suzuki Bandit (looks like a rice rocket, but rides like a standard bike, nice upright seat). I kinda wish I went cruiser again about half the time, but by that same token the Bandit 600 gets me around just fine and its a bit more practical in the city (I used to do alot of in city commuting... not so much now that I live a 5 min walk to work).
Most practical vehicle I have ever owned. And the nice thing about a motorcycle... you will have a problem that only the richest car owners have... you have to get used to the fact that yes, everyone really is turning their head to watch you ride by (talk about pressure
Try that with an SUV. A cheap 5 grand bike will easily turn as many heads as a Porche (anyone who thinks im kidding, should try it sometime). Even more so really, because even the quietest bike makes a little noise, and they are soo different from cars.
The other nice thing... bikes don't lie to you.
The bike never says "Your perfectly safe, relax, fall asleep, no worries". The bike says "Pay attention, your one mistake away from nasty death" (which isn't really true, the majority of bike accidents arn't even so bad, quite survable, and with proper training and equipment, most riders walk away with little more than bruised pride and a damaged bike) - of course, if you actually hit something like a car or an SUV, all bets are off... best not to do that.
But a bike gives you the control, small size, and manuverability, that when coupled with proper training can keep you out of such accidents. They can stop on a dime or put some distance between you and a problem pretty damned quick.
Hell speaking of a porche... it may beat a cheap bike (emphasis on cheap) on the top end, but NO car beats even a cheap bike off the line. Ok, MAYBE a 250 or even a 400... but lets face it... msot people start out around 600cc and NO car beats a 600cc bike off the line unless its in BAD need of some work.
Hell I had a porche that only BARELY beat me off the line... when I had a two cylindar 1100 with 1 worthless sparkplug (it was soiled darker than a black steers tukus on a moonless prairy night)
-Steve
Of course SUV drivers don't have a higher survival rate than other cars, they are just more likely to kill others, and not a single bit more likely to survive themselves.
And the idea that an Economy car is "undersized" is absolutly silly. If anything they are apropriatlysized for the general use case. Thats transporting 1 or 2 people (which is about what you see in 95% of cars on the road at any given time... SUV or otherwise).
Frankly in the long run its cheaper and safer for EVERYONE to drive an economy car, and rent a larger vehicle when you NEED one. You know that MAYBE once a year or every two years that you might move, or maybe that weekend or two you actually go camping.
Biut whatever, once oil price hit where they really should be, I imagine the much touted "Market forces" will take care of the SUVs so im not too worried. And I will still be tooling around in the most practical vehicle I have ever owned...
my motorcycle... 40 MPG in the city, 50 on the highway, small enough to make room and I NEVER have to look for parking.
Not to mention it can fit between traffic in a jam, out accelerate ANY 4 wheeler (taking off or comming to a stop), and lets face it... get the biggest fucking SUV penis extention you want...
When it comes right down to it... everyones watching ME ride down the street, you in your SUV are just another boring fish in the sea of SUVs and other cagers... and with all that... an empty tank still only costs me $5 to fill.
-Steve
Spam *IS* free speech.
However the total issue of spam and spam fighting includes alot more than free speech. Free Speech is a side issue to spam.
If spammers set up their own mail relays (as some have done in the past) and sent their mail through them JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, then nobody would give two shits what the spammers were sending.
Of course, a large number of people would just blacklist them by ip to keep the spew out, and everyone who liked thier filthy spew would be prefectly free to recieve it. Hell mail filters could even be setup to reject based on ip and reciever so users could individually choose to block spammers....
Free speech would be protected, and my ability to tune out your free speech and go about my buisness would be protected.
This is NOT the current case.
Spammers prowl the net looking for cheap and easy ways to bypass filters. I put up a filter that blacks spam... they know people don't want to listen to them, and so they activly try to subvert peoples blocks. They jump IPs, they switch ISPs, they search for open servers and then hammer the fuck out of them, thus shifting the cost of sending their spam to some random innocent person who just setup their mail server poorly or perhaps too "trustingly".
ME going around sending mail to you is free speech. Me trying to trick you into sending mail or directing the charges for sending my spew to you is NOT free speech, and thats really the main problem with spammers... they don't acept the cost of their own spew, they shift as much of that cost as possible to others.
Never mind the high percentage of spam that is just scams, Nigerian scams, fake products, ilicit products etc etc. That stuff isn't free speech either. You do NOT have the right, for example, to tell me you sell toner cartridges and give me part numbers and cost and where to send my money to, unless you intend to send me toner cartidges after you cash my check.
If spammers would just use their ISPs smtp server and stopping jumping accounts and trying to exploit random peoples smtp servers, and basiclaly using every underhanded trick they can think of to trick people into reading their mail, then they would have a leg to stand on in the free speech arena and I would say fine, let them spew.
-Steve