Nope. It was something else. It was also something that I had to pay for and was before 1999 but not by a whole lot of. It had a yellow icon that sat in the system tray. It was kind of nice, actually. I moved and ended up with dial-up internet only. So I had another piece of software that would compress text and images and pages would be delivered faster. Unfortunately, that would not work with the first piece of software as that too needed to work as a proxy. That's when I used a hosts file for a while but that's just a pain in the ass and not nearly refined enough for my use (sorry APK but it's true) so I eventually moved on to other methods of blocking ads.
I still can't remember the first program's name. I've brought it up before and a few people had some guesses and one of them remembered the application but not the name. So, well, I figure I'll be doing absolutely nothing some day and it will suddenly occur to me what the name was. It will be like a great revelation and then I'll promptly forget it for the next time I want to remember it. It was kind of like Ad Muncher but it's not them - they were too late in the game, they're only 15 years old. (I just checked and he has a bit about the history of the company and doesn't mention any inspirational software sources or anything.)
Ah well... It does kind of bug me that I can't remember but life's too short for it to let it get to me for too long.
You might as well make it count 'em while you're there. It has been a long time but... Hmm... LET A = "DUH" IF A 50000 GOTO {line number} ELSE GOT {line number} then PRINT A and a line for END.
Meh, something like that. It has been a *very* long time.
Heh, we need the pedobear gif that says, "Too old!" I was having an email chat with another/.er and we've concluded that the old ladies hate it and the old men are envious. I imagine that means nothing good can come of it. The Hello Kitty panties were kind of odd for me at first. I wasn't quite sure how to take it but I've adapted just fine.;-)
As an aside: Man, Florida is lovely this time of year. It was in the 70s and there were a few small showers. It's dark in Maine and probably about 32 f. at home but probably colder with the wind chill. Hmm... Nope, Google says it's snowing but pretty warm (almost 40 - but the house is up on the mountain) and 20 MPH winds. I was walking on the beach earlier today.
It's actually probably for the best that they don't support Unicode. I mean, really... It's not like we'd do anything useful with it. No, I'd expect the results to be people posting the pile of poop emoji.
I pay more than the amount that I could possibly owe to a variety of charities - I do not even write off all of those donations as I kind of prefer anonymous giving in some areas.
Donations, why??? At least that way, I get to decide on how the money is spent instead of them buying a part of a new bomber or whatnot. I've also paid more in taxes than is owed. I've even donated to NASA. You can donate to NASA but you can't earmark it for a special project, it has to go into their general fund.
That and, well, if I didn't hire an accountant I'd have no idea how much to pay. My taxes are a bit complicated and I have no idea what all the various regulations are. It's not like I fill out EZ Form 1040 or the likes. I'm not even sure if the various bits of COTS software would be of much assistance.
At any rate, I probably do pay more than I could get away with paying. I don't write off half the donations, I don't keep a bunch of receipts, I don't bother making full use of a LLC and having a bunch of "business expenses" to write off, and I don't do stuff like write down depreciation of assets or anything too complex. At least not as a general rule, I do not. I'd never lay claims to being perfect, ideal, or altruistic.
I concur! Heh... I have the entirety of Pinky and the Brain, via torrent I think, at my house. I think when everything settles down and the missus and I head up to bed, I'll probably stream it and watch some tonight. I'm in Florida and they *really* frown on weed here so I didn't bring any with me and I won't be going to buy any. There are other things to do, I guess. It is Florida, after all.
Yup. There were a few ads and some spam but it was kind of nice for a while. Even when it was officially the WWW, I don't recall it being too bad. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990s when I started blocking ads. We did have some ads and spam before that but not a lot. I recall even seeing some images that said things like, "Call this number to connect to this BBS - this BBS is the best!" (That sort of stuff.) Sometimes I'd see Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) but, damn it, we read it back then! (Well, I did.) It was exciting to get an email.
In the 1990s, I found an application that ran in the system tray. It had a yellow icon, that's all I really remember as far as its name. You used it as a proxy and it would block ads. You could download rules, it had some built in, and you could add domains, wildcards, subdomains, sizes, and the likes to your rules. For the life of me, I don't recall the name of the application. Twenty years is a long time to survive in my head.
The little missus has Hello Kitty panties and a couple of shirts and a hat.:/ It's already a little awkward going out in public with a g/f that's nearly 40 years my junior (oh, the stares the women give me - the men smile and nod knowingly) but it's a bit more awkward when she's wearing a Hello Kitty fuzzy hat or, now that we're down here, a shirt.
Ah well... It could be worse. She could be wearing just the hat, shirt, and panties. I'm pretty sure that someone will just shoot me at that point. It is Florida after all.
I'm not clicking that link. I haven't got time for that right now.;-) It's gotta be Animaniacs. I'm not big on TV but that was awesome and Pinky and the Brain was equally awesome. Yes, yes I did smoke a lot of weed back then.
Can't they hash and salt all of that - including the actual security questions and allow you to make your own hint/questions? It's not like those are called all that frequently so it shouldn't add a bunch of overhead, should it? And, if so, why the hell are we still not doing that?
Canada has a strange system as I understand it. It's rather subjective and, of course, has all the potential trappings that go with subjective enforcement. I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure I am not as I've done some work there, although it was not me personally but a few employees who did the work. I should also probably know this for certain (I don't) because I've got dual citizenship by grace of heritage. (I'm mostly Micmac.)
Now, in Canada you can, theoretically, go as fast as you want (in certain areas) as long as you're below the maximum speed limit. However, you can still be going slower than that speed and be cited for something akin to "unsafe driving speeds." Theoretically, I could be going along at the speed limit and you could be going along at a slower speed. I, with more training, can be doing fine and handling my vehicle in a safe manner while you may be stopped if the officer thinks you're driving too fast and exhibiting signs that you're going too fast for the conditions.
And, for amusement: Driving in the snow is dangerous but, eventually, you end up with giant snowbanks. I own a number of vehicles and not all of them are meant to go to shows or the likes - some are meant for fun. I have a 1978 Datsun B210 that has only one goal in life and that's to serve me in absurd ways. I do almost nothing with it that it was meant to do. I will drive it through the woods and to the top of mountains. It has been rolled over multiple times and not by accident. There are but two seats and 5 point restraint harnesses and a helmet should be worn.
Anyhow, there's a steep hill near my house (a lot of them, actually) and I'll crest the hill, make sure nobody is coming, lock the e-brake, and cut the wheel quickly in one direction or the other. We then 'pinball' down to the bottom of the hill, bouncing off of snowbanks, and usually with very little control or no control at all. You just let up on the e-brake and apply some acceleration, and try to keep it going all the way to the bottom should you end up being close to stuck in a snowbank. It's a standard shift so it's a whole lot of work and a buttload of fun.
It's even reasonably safe. I live in an unincorporated township that has six residencies and there are times of the day when the odds of traffic are near zero, plus you can see if anyone's coming from a long ways away. The snowbanks are as high as 10 meters and rather soft unless there was a thaw and freeze spell just prior.
Well, not just for amusement, I guess the point is that safe, conditions, and acceptable risks are all very subjective. If you ever want to try it, let me know when you're in the States and I'll even let you drive it. Another fun one is to go roaring into town at night, hit the e-brake just before you hit the snowbank, you hit the snowbank sideways and flip the car upside down and go skidding across the ice. Then you get out, flip it right-side-up and wait for the oil to drain back down and you're good to go and do it again. You might as well visit the old guys out ice fishing while you're there. They've come to expect me to behave a bit like this and I've even managed to get a few of 'em to ride with me.
I used to want to be either a stunt-driver or the guy that drove the car for television commercials. That's why I chose motor-pool driver for my first selection MOS, why I was curious about traffic in uni, and why I've since taken many driving courses. I have zero at-fault accidents on my record. The examples above were not accidents, they were on purpose.;-)
So, it's very subjective and we'd need intelligent and unbiased enforcement if we want to go with a different system (I think). I suspect we'd be far better for it *assuming* that we had well trained enforcement officers. Maybe we should look at Japan's police training or the training given by the Alaska State Troopers? The RCMP isn't too bad and might be worth looking into.
Sorry for the novella but I figured I'd fill in some info and give some examples. For science!
Well then why not just say, "Early 1990s Internet?":-)
I do not recall the school or the site but way back when (probably early, very early, 1990s) there was a site that you could visit. I tunneled there through a BBS as I recall. Anyhow, at this site there were some guys working in a lab and you, the remote person, could watch them on a video stream (a poor stream but a stream regardless). If you timed it right (and lag was really bad) then you could control a robotic arm and throw a snowball at the lab workers and maybe hit one.
I never did hit one. Lemme see if Google knows anything about this.
A quick search doesn't reveal much but it appears someone at Linden Labs (2nd Life) might be familiar with it because they have some festivities where people are encouraged to throw virtual snowballs at the lab workers.
Do I have a point? Well, sort of... It might not have been common but there were some streaming video things here and there. I had fiber at the office early on, for example. I even had an ISDN at home but that was a bit later. This would have been after moving out of Cambridge and setting up shop in Winston-Salem, NC. The snowball throwing was while I was still living in Cambridge so that means earlier than just before Christmas of 1991. I think... My memory isn't *that* good.
Just man up and admit you're an asshole. It's easier after that and a lot more honest. You'll be in good company, I assure you. I suspect my prior comment was too long for you to actually fully read and comprehend so I'll make this one shorter. "Sympathizer?" Really? Heh... No, I'm an asshole and block the hell out of ads. Fuck 'em.
Thanks! My neighbor's wife flew down with my dog. They have a couple that live there and help out and it's winter so now her husband is going to fly down tomorrow and spend the holiday with us here. What's more awesome is neither of them have been that far from home before and I guess this is his first time on an airplane. I wish I had time to get a body camera up to him. Seeing him deal with the TSA (he looks like a grumpy old farmer but he's really sharp and has cutting wit known as Maine humor) will be priceless.
But, he's going to box up all my not-obviously-junk-mail and bring it to the post office and ship it as he, "Heads downta Pohtland ta catch tha jet, ayuh." (Ayuh is not said like it's said in the movies, it's actually said on an inhale and sometimes an inhale and then an exhale so you get ayuh yuh yuh yuh yuh like an echo.)
If it was *everyone* in the past then I'm in the breech twice, maybe? I don't know how they deal with it. I had to go through the process to deal with classified information in the handling of prisoners (I was a transport officer which meant I handled documents that may be classified - not that I'd have actually read them). That was in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, I had to do it again to do some work for the military which has, to this day, kind of annoyed the hell out of me.
I can not say what I did (it should be painfully obvious if you're familiar with what I did for a job) but I can damned sure say that the whole process was stupid as hell and that there's no reason that data should have been classified as anything higher than FOUO. Two of us had to go through the process and then, to make it worse, spend about a year of our lives living at [redacted], working on *their* hardware, and generally making a project that should have been six months last almost a year and a half.
(I modeled traffic, vehicular and pedestrian.) I'm pretty sure I can say that the data about [redacted] shouldn't be classified. However, consulting on how to react and optimize during/after an emergency *might* qualify as just a wee bit classified? I don't think it should have been classified any higher than FOUO but they didn't ask my opinion on the subject.
Err... I'm going to redact a little of this. I don't want to be a terrorist! Hmm... That looks better. I'm still kind of curious as to how that data ended up with a classified (I forget exactly which level) status. Well, no... I know *how* it got there and I know *why* it got there but the *why* is just plain stupid. Mr. Terrorist is smart enough to know that people congregate at the mess hall during chow call, for example. Err... I think I can say that. Meh... Ah well, it was pretty good money, it was just a pain in the ass.
That'd make some sense.;-) I'd never heard of the company before but was able to do a little digging (in fact, I did use dig fastdnsservers.com as i recall) and that's when I bumped into them - from there it was kind of a guess as it appears to still be a reseller of some type but it *might* be that they've got co-lo hardware in a DC somewhere. I didn't dig that deep, I'm pretty lazy these days, after all.
There is some evidence to support the idea so you're guess is correct. On closed highways, some of them, we have both a minimum and a maximum speed. Those are for ideal situations. They have emergency signs that turn on and show a new limit during snowy/icy conditions. During that time, there's no minimum speed limit but - theoretically, if traffic falls below a certain speed they're to close the highway because it's likely due to visibility or inability to control the vehicle's deceleration speed.
Unfortunately, this varies per State with no real limits any more so you get people from outside the area (America's kind of broken) who aren't familiar with icy roads that are covered in a layer of snow who then cause large accidents or, more amusingly, end up spinning around and around until they finally slide off into the ditch. It's actually not that often that they get hurt so it's okay to be amused. It really is quite comical to watch. They're thrashing about frantically all while the car is being quite graceful and going where it was going to go no matter what you did. Of course, if they'd stop thrashing about they had a chance at recovering from the skid.
Anyhow, some areas have multiple speeds for multiple conditions (such as trucks are limited to a slower speed or not allowed at all in certain weather). This is backed by pretty sound research. It's not universal and it is often ignored but the idea is sound. Unbiased and frequent enforcement of traffic laws does actually help but speed traps aren't usually a good idea. If you're really curious, I can dig out a few papers as I'm pretty sure I still have them stored on my home network and I can access that from here.
Actually, yes. And why? Well, I can't speak for other people but I can speak for me. In my case, it's because I am kind of tired of being lumped in with the caricatures. I, for one, pay my taxes - every penny that is owed is paid. I don't even make any great effort to avoid taxes even though I could, it's kind of easy. I didn't break any laws to get to where I am - I just worked hard as hell and got lucky. I don't kick dogs. I don't eat cats. I do actual investing these days and not short term HFT type crap through an investment house. I didn't steal your girlfriend. I donate tons of money to worthy causes. I didn't magically become a monster just because I accumulated some wealth.
By the way, if you want to write off a party then form a LLC and call it a promotion. Or just pay your taxes instead of wanting to be like the person you dislike. Only long term investments are taxed at 15%. You can access all the deductions, you probably have to be creative and lie and may go to jail but you can do it. However, if you're really a "star" then I suppose you can have a party with your friends and call it a promotional party - or, you can tell your friends about Widget 73 and call it a sales event. You'll want to get a LLC going first, keep good records, and probably hire both an accountant and lawyer or learn to do the paperwork yourself.
Maine had a 5.5% sales tax hike that went on for quite some time. Even some stores had to buy new cash registers to cope with the percentage point. A few years later they put it back to where it was prior to the hike (namely 5%). Now, to be fair, nobody expected the sales tax to go back down or anything. It did, however, return to 5% and it did so almost on schedule - as I recall. I didn't live here at the time so I don't know all the details but it does, sometimes, happen.
I was browsing a local paper's site the other day and the town officials (selectmen) voluntarily gave up their health-care coverage. That is, for the most part, another example. Sure, they're exceedingly rare but they *do* happen to do the right thing once in a while. At this point, I'm pretty sure they only do the right thing by accident, it was almost certainly not their intent.
I'd agree with amateurish but I'd not agree that it was ugly. I'd say it's not my preference but I could live with it. (I do like it *more* with a bit of theming.)
Note: Most of that stuff is normally full-screen. I made them smaller so that you can see a few examples.
That's the desktop that I'm logged into, via VNC, right now. I'm actually only using a Live USB environment, locally, so there's no need to share that as it is pretty stock.
The top-most (maybe kind of ugly, I've not yet changed the color to match the newly applied background) bar is a "dock" that I added myself simply by making and styling an extra panel, positioning it, and making it only appear when I mouse-over the top-most part of the screen. It's clean, light, and pretty speedy on modern hardware.
That was not with a lot of work and it could still be a bit more aesthetically pleasing but I'm comfortable with it and don't find it ugly. I'm not a Microsoft hater or anything, by the way, I just liked the look of the penguin and the colors were nice enough to be able to use transparency comfortably. I've shown others similar screen-shots and they were happy enough to tell me that it looked surprisingly good to them.
That's an example of something that I don't find to be ugly. I find it utilitarian, easy to look at, easy to navigate, and familiar. Familiarity has a bit important to me. I can (and do) accept change but I prefer familiar - I picked what is familiar because it matches my workflow best.
Would you find that ugly and, if so, why? Beauty is (usually) in the eye of the beholder. Of course, I've fought a Beholder and they're not so very nice!
It looks like a pretty basic site. It has both his resume and a bunch of drinking games so the name checks out.;-) Some digging shows it's probably a reseller with some shanji.com outfit and it looks like that's actually a reseller of another company. It appears to be Windows hosting.
What you seem to be missing is that it is *their* computer too. Now, keep in mind, I block the hell out of ads. I just admit that I'm a prick. My blocking ads is like me being a guest in someone's house and telling the other people, perhaps the owner, that I don't want to listen to to shut their pie hole. Yeah, it's their property and they can set the rules. If sites say to not use them with an ad blocker then I hit the close/back button - I'm limited in how much of an asshole I'll be. I'm still an asshole, however. I'm just aware of it and slightly less of one than I could be.
Thanks. An AC mentioned that they'd said they'd send out notices by mail but I don't recall them mentioning that and I could have sworn at least a couple of people mentioned that they'd been notified by email and a couple others mentioning regular mail.
I'm just waiting for it to show up in a giant data dump on a torrent site. *sighs* Sadly, the people who stole the information have shown themselves to be better stewards of the data than OPM. Okay, so it was kind of a joke but still... I've dealt with being doxxed before, in part, and it is kind of creepy.
Oh, I'm quite well within the 1% metric. Even on a national scale, I'm well within that metric. I have a finance manager and an accountant. I *do* know how I operate. Hell, you're in the 1% on a global scale. You've got a computer, internet, electricity, safe housing, food, and assets of greater value than some folks will earn in their entire lives. That brush you're wielding is almost too large to fit in your hand.
To that I'd respond that they were driving too fast for the conditions, still, and that alcohol was certainly a contributing factor. The conditions are not necessarily road conditions but the condition of the driver is included in that. It may not seem particularly helpful as a metric but it is - it's the root cause. If we can solve that, instead of treating symptoms, we can pretty much eliminate traffic accidents or even vehicular accidents. Unfortunately, people are really not that good at driving and aren't nearly as skilled at it as they think they are.
I do have a kind of unique perspective. I worked in traffic modeling for many years and was a professional driver (trained in the military and that was my job while I served for quite some time). Since then, I've also become quite an automobile aficionado and I've taken many, many advanced on/off road and specialized driving courses up to and including open wheel, on track, training courses. If you crash, you were going too fast for the conditions. If multiple people crash then chances are that multiple people were going too fast for the conditions. Obviously, if it were a race, the objective is to find the edge of that envelope and stay within the boundaries as close to the limits as possible.
I guess I could see someone seeing it as not a useful metric but I humbly disagree. I think it's the most important safety element to keep in mind. I can also say, with some authority, that few municipalities actually seem to be all that keen on taking the advice about speed limits. They paid, quite handsomely, for the advice but they don't seem too keen on taking it.
There are many times and places where it would be perfectly safe to exceed the posted speed limit (assuming it is without traffic or that traffic is all doing that same or similar speed). That, to me, means the speed limit should be increased but, at the same time, people need to be aware that the speed limit is the maximum speed at which it is safe to travel with ideal conditions. Rather than educate drivers they'd just as soon keep the speed limits arbitrarily low. Speed, in and of itself, isn't the cause of the majority of accidents. Speed *and* conditions are the cause - almost invariably. Sometimes any speed greater than 0 MPH is too fast for the conditions, like when you're drunk and hitting a tree at 5 MPH.
I'm pretty sure we're saying the same things, for the most part, but differently. I've tried to articulate it a bit more clearly.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. It was something else. It was also something that I had to pay for and was before 1999 but not by a whole lot of. It had a yellow icon that sat in the system tray. It was kind of nice, actually. I moved and ended up with dial-up internet only. So I had another piece of software that would compress text and images and pages would be delivered faster. Unfortunately, that would not work with the first piece of software as that too needed to work as a proxy. That's when I used a hosts file for a while but that's just a pain in the ass and not nearly refined enough for my use (sorry APK but it's true) so I eventually moved on to other methods of blocking ads.
I still can't remember the first program's name. I've brought it up before and a few people had some guesses and one of them remembered the application but not the name. So, well, I figure I'll be doing absolutely nothing some day and it will suddenly occur to me what the name was. It will be like a great revelation and then I'll promptly forget it for the next time I want to remember it. It was kind of like Ad Muncher but it's not them - they were too late in the game, they're only 15 years old. (I just checked and he has a bit about the history of the company and doesn't mention any inspirational software sources or anything.)
Ah well... It does kind of bug me that I can't remember but life's too short for it to let it get to me for too long.
SYNTAX ERROR LINE 10
You might as well make it count 'em while you're there. It has been a long time but... Hmm... LET A = "DUH" IF A 50000 GOTO {line number} ELSE GOT {line number} then PRINT A and a line for END.
Meh, something like that. It has been a *very* long time.
Heh, we need the pedobear gif that says, "Too old!" I was having an email chat with another /.er and we've concluded that the old ladies hate it and the old men are envious. I imagine that means nothing good can come of it. The Hello Kitty panties were kind of odd for me at first. I wasn't quite sure how to take it but I've adapted just fine. ;-)
As an aside: Man, Florida is lovely this time of year. It was in the 70s and there were a few small showers. It's dark in Maine and probably about 32 f. at home but probably colder with the wind chill. Hmm... Nope, Google says it's snowing but pretty warm (almost 40 - but the house is up on the mountain) and 20 MPH winds. I was walking on the beach earlier today.
U+1F595
It's actually probably for the best that they don't support Unicode. I mean, really... It's not like we'd do anything useful with it. No, I'd expect the results to be people posting the pile of poop emoji.
I pay more than the amount that I could possibly owe to a variety of charities - I do not even write off all of those donations as I kind of prefer anonymous giving in some areas.
Donations, why??? At least that way, I get to decide on how the money is spent instead of them buying a part of a new bomber or whatnot. I've also paid more in taxes than is owed. I've even donated to NASA. You can donate to NASA but you can't earmark it for a special project, it has to go into their general fund.
That and, well, if I didn't hire an accountant I'd have no idea how much to pay. My taxes are a bit complicated and I have no idea what all the various regulations are. It's not like I fill out EZ Form 1040 or the likes. I'm not even sure if the various bits of COTS software would be of much assistance.
At any rate, I probably do pay more than I could get away with paying. I don't write off half the donations, I don't keep a bunch of receipts, I don't bother making full use of a LLC and having a bunch of "business expenses" to write off, and I don't do stuff like write down depreciation of assets or anything too complex. At least not as a general rule, I do not. I'd never lay claims to being perfect, ideal, or altruistic.
I concur! Heh... I have the entirety of Pinky and the Brain, via torrent I think, at my house. I think when everything settles down and the missus and I head up to bed, I'll probably stream it and watch some tonight. I'm in Florida and they *really* frown on weed here so I didn't bring any with me and I won't be going to buy any. There are other things to do, I guess. It is Florida, after all.
Yup. There were a few ads and some spam but it was kind of nice for a while. Even when it was officially the WWW, I don't recall it being too bad. It wasn't until the mid-to-late 1990s when I started blocking ads. We did have some ads and spam before that but not a lot. I recall even seeing some images that said things like, "Call this number to connect to this BBS - this BBS is the best!" (That sort of stuff.) Sometimes I'd see Unsolicited Commercial Email (UCE) but, damn it, we read it back then! (Well, I did.) It was exciting to get an email.
In the 1990s, I found an application that ran in the system tray. It had a yellow icon, that's all I really remember as far as its name. You used it as a proxy and it would block ads. You could download rules, it had some built in, and you could add domains, wildcards, subdomains, sizes, and the likes to your rules. For the life of me, I don't recall the name of the application. Twenty years is a long time to survive in my head.
The little missus has Hello Kitty panties and a couple of shirts and a hat. :/ It's already a little awkward going out in public with a g/f that's nearly 40 years my junior (oh, the stares the women give me - the men smile and nod knowingly) but it's a bit more awkward when she's wearing a Hello Kitty fuzzy hat or, now that we're down here, a shirt.
Ah well... It could be worse. She could be wearing just the hat, shirt, and panties. I'm pretty sure that someone will just shoot me at that point. It is Florida after all.
you can always say "I only signed up for the kids".
That can be taken horribly out of context.
I'm not clicking that link. I haven't got time for that right now. ;-) It's gotta be Animaniacs. I'm not big on TV but that was awesome and Pinky and the Brain was equally awesome. Yes, yes I did smoke a lot of weed back then.
Can't they hash and salt all of that - including the actual security questions and allow you to make your own hint/questions? It's not like those are called all that frequently so it shouldn't add a bunch of overhead, should it? And, if so, why the hell are we still not doing that?
Canada has a strange system as I understand it. It's rather subjective and, of course, has all the potential trappings that go with subjective enforcement. I may be mistaken but I'm pretty sure I am not as I've done some work there, although it was not me personally but a few employees who did the work. I should also probably know this for certain (I don't) because I've got dual citizenship by grace of heritage. (I'm mostly Micmac.)
Now, in Canada you can, theoretically, go as fast as you want (in certain areas) as long as you're below the maximum speed limit. However, you can still be going slower than that speed and be cited for something akin to "unsafe driving speeds." Theoretically, I could be going along at the speed limit and you could be going along at a slower speed. I, with more training, can be doing fine and handling my vehicle in a safe manner while you may be stopped if the officer thinks you're driving too fast and exhibiting signs that you're going too fast for the conditions.
And, for amusement: Driving in the snow is dangerous but, eventually, you end up with giant snowbanks. I own a number of vehicles and not all of them are meant to go to shows or the likes - some are meant for fun. I have a 1978 Datsun B210 that has only one goal in life and that's to serve me in absurd ways. I do almost nothing with it that it was meant to do. I will drive it through the woods and to the top of mountains. It has been rolled over multiple times and not by accident. There are but two seats and 5 point restraint harnesses and a helmet should be worn.
Anyhow, there's a steep hill near my house (a lot of them, actually) and I'll crest the hill, make sure nobody is coming, lock the e-brake, and cut the wheel quickly in one direction or the other. We then 'pinball' down to the bottom of the hill, bouncing off of snowbanks, and usually with very little control or no control at all. You just let up on the e-brake and apply some acceleration, and try to keep it going all the way to the bottom should you end up being close to stuck in a snowbank. It's a standard shift so it's a whole lot of work and a buttload of fun.
It's even reasonably safe. I live in an unincorporated township that has six residencies and there are times of the day when the odds of traffic are near zero, plus you can see if anyone's coming from a long ways away. The snowbanks are as high as 10 meters and rather soft unless there was a thaw and freeze spell just prior.
Well, not just for amusement, I guess the point is that safe, conditions, and acceptable risks are all very subjective. If you ever want to try it, let me know when you're in the States and I'll even let you drive it. Another fun one is to go roaring into town at night, hit the e-brake just before you hit the snowbank, you hit the snowbank sideways and flip the car upside down and go skidding across the ice. Then you get out, flip it right-side-up and wait for the oil to drain back down and you're good to go and do it again. You might as well visit the old guys out ice fishing while you're there. They've come to expect me to behave a bit like this and I've even managed to get a few of 'em to ride with me.
I used to want to be either a stunt-driver or the guy that drove the car for television commercials. That's why I chose motor-pool driver for my first selection MOS, why I was curious about traffic in uni, and why I've since taken many driving courses. I have zero at-fault accidents on my record. The examples above were not accidents, they were on purpose. ;-)
So, it's very subjective and we'd need intelligent and unbiased enforcement if we want to go with a different system (I think). I suspect we'd be far better for it *assuming* that we had well trained enforcement officers. Maybe we should look at Japan's police training or the training given by the Alaska State Troopers? The RCMP isn't too bad and might be worth looking into.
Sorry for the novella but I figured I'd fill in some info and give some examples. For science!
Well then why not just say, "Early 1990s Internet?" :-)
I do not recall the school or the site but way back when (probably early, very early, 1990s) there was a site that you could visit. I tunneled there through a BBS as I recall. Anyhow, at this site there were some guys working in a lab and you, the remote person, could watch them on a video stream (a poor stream but a stream regardless). If you timed it right (and lag was really bad) then you could control a robotic arm and throw a snowball at the lab workers and maybe hit one.
I never did hit one. Lemme see if Google knows anything about this.
A quick search doesn't reveal much but it appears someone at Linden Labs (2nd Life) might be familiar with it because they have some festivities where people are encouraged to throw virtual snowballs at the lab workers.
Do I have a point? Well, sort of... It might not have been common but there were some streaming video things here and there. I had fiber at the office early on, for example. I even had an ISDN at home but that was a bit later. This would have been after moving out of Cambridge and setting up shop in Winston-Salem, NC. The snowball throwing was while I was still living in Cambridge so that means earlier than just before Christmas of 1991. I think... My memory isn't *that* good.
Just man up and admit you're an asshole. It's easier after that and a lot more honest. You'll be in good company, I assure you. I suspect my prior comment was too long for you to actually fully read and comprehend so I'll make this one shorter. "Sympathizer?" Really? Heh... No, I'm an asshole and block the hell out of ads. Fuck 'em.
Thanks! My neighbor's wife flew down with my dog. They have a couple that live there and help out and it's winter so now her husband is going to fly down tomorrow and spend the holiday with us here. What's more awesome is neither of them have been that far from home before and I guess this is his first time on an airplane. I wish I had time to get a body camera up to him. Seeing him deal with the TSA (he looks like a grumpy old farmer but he's really sharp and has cutting wit known as Maine humor) will be priceless.
But, he's going to box up all my not-obviously-junk-mail and bring it to the post office and ship it as he, "Heads downta Pohtland ta catch tha jet, ayuh." (Ayuh is not said like it's said in the movies, it's actually said on an inhale and sometimes an inhale and then an exhale so you get ayuh yuh yuh yuh yuh like an echo.)
If it was *everyone* in the past then I'm in the breech twice, maybe? I don't know how they deal with it. I had to go through the process to deal with classified information in the handling of prisoners (I was a transport officer which meant I handled documents that may be classified - not that I'd have actually read them). That was in the 1980s. In the early 2000s, I had to do it again to do some work for the military which has, to this day, kind of annoyed the hell out of me.
I can not say what I did (it should be painfully obvious if you're familiar with what I did for a job) but I can damned sure say that the whole process was stupid as hell and that there's no reason that data should have been classified as anything higher than FOUO. Two of us had to go through the process and then, to make it worse, spend about a year of our lives living at [redacted], working on *their* hardware, and generally making a project that should have been six months last almost a year and a half.
(I modeled traffic, vehicular and pedestrian.) I'm pretty sure I can say that the data about [redacted] shouldn't be classified. However, consulting on how to react and optimize during/after an emergency *might* qualify as just a wee bit classified? I don't think it should have been classified any higher than FOUO but they didn't ask my opinion on the subject.
Err... I'm going to redact a little of this. I don't want to be a terrorist! Hmm... That looks better. I'm still kind of curious as to how that data ended up with a classified (I forget exactly which level) status. Well, no... I know *how* it got there and I know *why* it got there but the *why* is just plain stupid. Mr. Terrorist is smart enough to know that people congregate at the mess hall during chow call, for example. Err... I think I can say that. Meh... Ah well, it was pretty good money, it was just a pain in the ass.
That'd make some sense. ;-) I'd never heard of the company before but was able to do a little digging (in fact, I did use dig fastdnsservers.com as i recall) and that's when I bumped into them - from there it was kind of a guess as it appears to still be a reseller of some type but it *might* be that they've got co-lo hardware in a DC somewhere. I didn't dig that deep, I'm pretty lazy these days, after all.
There is some evidence to support the idea so you're guess is correct. On closed highways, some of them, we have both a minimum and a maximum speed. Those are for ideal situations. They have emergency signs that turn on and show a new limit during snowy/icy conditions. During that time, there's no minimum speed limit but - theoretically, if traffic falls below a certain speed they're to close the highway because it's likely due to visibility or inability to control the vehicle's deceleration speed.
Unfortunately, this varies per State with no real limits any more so you get people from outside the area (America's kind of broken) who aren't familiar with icy roads that are covered in a layer of snow who then cause large accidents or, more amusingly, end up spinning around and around until they finally slide off into the ditch. It's actually not that often that they get hurt so it's okay to be amused. It really is quite comical to watch. They're thrashing about frantically all while the car is being quite graceful and going where it was going to go no matter what you did. Of course, if they'd stop thrashing about they had a chance at recovering from the skid.
Anyhow, some areas have multiple speeds for multiple conditions (such as trucks are limited to a slower speed or not allowed at all in certain weather). This is backed by pretty sound research. It's not universal and it is often ignored but the idea is sound. Unbiased and frequent enforcement of traffic laws does actually help but speed traps aren't usually a good idea. If you're really curious, I can dig out a few papers as I'm pretty sure I still have them stored on my home network and I can access that from here.
Actually, yes. And why? Well, I can't speak for other people but I can speak for me. In my case, it's because I am kind of tired of being lumped in with the caricatures. I, for one, pay my taxes - every penny that is owed is paid. I don't even make any great effort to avoid taxes even though I could, it's kind of easy. I didn't break any laws to get to where I am - I just worked hard as hell and got lucky. I don't kick dogs. I don't eat cats. I do actual investing these days and not short term HFT type crap through an investment house. I didn't steal your girlfriend. I donate tons of money to worthy causes. I didn't magically become a monster just because I accumulated some wealth.
By the way, if you want to write off a party then form a LLC and call it a promotion. Or just pay your taxes instead of wanting to be like the person you dislike. Only long term investments are taxed at 15%. You can access all the deductions, you probably have to be creative and lie and may go to jail but you can do it. However, if you're really a "star" then I suppose you can have a party with your friends and call it a promotional party - or, you can tell your friends about Widget 73 and call it a sales event. You'll want to get a LLC going first, keep good records, and probably hire both an accountant and lawyer or learn to do the paperwork yourself.
Maine had a 5.5% sales tax hike that went on for quite some time. Even some stores had to buy new cash registers to cope with the percentage point. A few years later they put it back to where it was prior to the hike (namely 5%). Now, to be fair, nobody expected the sales tax to go back down or anything. It did, however, return to 5% and it did so almost on schedule - as I recall. I didn't live here at the time so I don't know all the details but it does, sometimes, happen.
I was browsing a local paper's site the other day and the town officials (selectmen) voluntarily gave up their health-care coverage. That is, for the most part, another example. Sure, they're exceedingly rare but they *do* happen to do the right thing once in a while. At this point, I'm pretty sure they only do the right thing by accident, it was almost certainly not their intent.
I'd agree with amateurish but I'd not agree that it was ugly. I'd say it's not my preference but I could live with it. (I do like it *more* with a bit of theming.)
This isn't as nice as it *could* be but:
http://i.imgur.com/DgpeDjN.png
Note: Most of that stuff is normally full-screen. I made them smaller so that you can see a few examples.
That's the desktop that I'm logged into, via VNC, right now. I'm actually only using a Live USB environment, locally, so there's no need to share that as it is pretty stock.
The top-most (maybe kind of ugly, I've not yet changed the color to match the newly applied background) bar is a "dock" that I added myself simply by making and styling an extra panel, positioning it, and making it only appear when I mouse-over the top-most part of the screen. It's clean, light, and pretty speedy on modern hardware.
That was not with a lot of work and it could still be a bit more aesthetically pleasing but I'm comfortable with it and don't find it ugly. I'm not a Microsoft hater or anything, by the way, I just liked the look of the penguin and the colors were nice enough to be able to use transparency comfortably. I've shown others similar screen-shots and they were happy enough to tell me that it looked surprisingly good to them.
That's an example of something that I don't find to be ugly. I find it utilitarian, easy to look at, easy to navigate, and familiar. Familiarity has a bit important to me. I can (and do) accept change but I prefer familiar - I picked what is familiar because it matches my workflow best.
Would you find that ugly and, if so, why? Beauty is (usually) in the eye of the beholder. Of course, I've fought a Beholder and they're not so very nice!
It looks like a pretty basic site. It has both his resume and a bunch of drinking games so the name checks out. ;-) Some digging shows it's probably a reseller with some shanji.com outfit and it looks like that's actually a reseller of another company. It appears to be Windows hosting.
What you seem to be missing is that it is *their* computer too. Now, keep in mind, I block the hell out of ads. I just admit that I'm a prick. My blocking ads is like me being a guest in someone's house and telling the other people, perhaps the owner, that I don't want to listen to to shut their pie hole. Yeah, it's their property and they can set the rules. If sites say to not use them with an ad blocker then I hit the close/back button - I'm limited in how much of an asshole I'll be. I'm still an asshole, however. I'm just aware of it and slightly less of one than I could be.
Thanks. An AC mentioned that they'd said they'd send out notices by mail but I don't recall them mentioning that and I could have sworn at least a couple of people mentioned that they'd been notified by email and a couple others mentioning regular mail.
I'm just waiting for it to show up in a giant data dump on a torrent site. *sighs* Sadly, the people who stole the information have shown themselves to be better stewards of the data than OPM. Okay, so it was kind of a joke but still... I've dealt with being doxxed before, in part, and it is kind of creepy.
Oh, I'm quite well within the 1% metric. Even on a national scale, I'm well within that metric. I have a finance manager and an accountant. I *do* know how I operate. Hell, you're in the 1% on a global scale. You've got a computer, internet, electricity, safe housing, food, and assets of greater value than some folks will earn in their entire lives. That brush you're wielding is almost too large to fit in your hand.
To that I'd respond that they were driving too fast for the conditions, still, and that alcohol was certainly a contributing factor. The conditions are not necessarily road conditions but the condition of the driver is included in that. It may not seem particularly helpful as a metric but it is - it's the root cause. If we can solve that, instead of treating symptoms, we can pretty much eliminate traffic accidents or even vehicular accidents. Unfortunately, people are really not that good at driving and aren't nearly as skilled at it as they think they are.
I do have a kind of unique perspective. I worked in traffic modeling for many years and was a professional driver (trained in the military and that was my job while I served for quite some time). Since then, I've also become quite an automobile aficionado and I've taken many, many advanced on/off road and specialized driving courses up to and including open wheel, on track, training courses. If you crash, you were going too fast for the conditions. If multiple people crash then chances are that multiple people were going too fast for the conditions. Obviously, if it were a race, the objective is to find the edge of that envelope and stay within the boundaries as close to the limits as possible.
I guess I could see someone seeing it as not a useful metric but I humbly disagree. I think it's the most important safety element to keep in mind. I can also say, with some authority, that few municipalities actually seem to be all that keen on taking the advice about speed limits. They paid, quite handsomely, for the advice but they don't seem too keen on taking it.
There are many times and places where it would be perfectly safe to exceed the posted speed limit (assuming it is without traffic or that traffic is all doing that same or similar speed). That, to me, means the speed limit should be increased but, at the same time, people need to be aware that the speed limit is the maximum speed at which it is safe to travel with ideal conditions. Rather than educate drivers they'd just as soon keep the speed limits arbitrarily low. Speed, in and of itself, isn't the cause of the majority of accidents. Speed *and* conditions are the cause - almost invariably. Sometimes any speed greater than 0 MPH is too fast for the conditions, like when you're drunk and hitting a tree at 5 MPH.
I'm pretty sure we're saying the same things, for the most part, but differently. I've tried to articulate it a bit more clearly.