Should every single person who exceeds the speed limit by 1 mph even for a few seconds get a ticket? Should every jaywalker get ticketed every time even when there is no traffic to speak of?
[devilsadvocate]Sure. It would give the government more money to spend on bailing out their buddies and future employers... er I mean helping struggling American homeowners.{/devilsadvocate]
When a person violates motor vehicle laws badly enough, they lose their license to use a motor vehicle for some duration.
When a lawyer violates the Bar rules badly enough, they lose their license to practice law in that state for some duration (or forever, if you do the types of things Jack Thompson did.)
When a company violates telemarketing laws badly enough, they should lose the ability to telemarket for some duration. Prevent them from calling any customers (without the customer's explicit request -- if someone leaves your company voicemail asking you to contact them, that's okay) for a week for the first offense, doubling with each subsequent offense. Make it so that the punishment sticks even if they try to do some sort of corporate shell game ("No we're not HyperGlobalMegaCompuTech, we're GlobalCompuHyperMegaTech. See our freshly painted sign?") Eventually they'll learn (or be barred from calling customers for long enough that they'll go out of business before regaining the ability to telemarket.)
Even better, no physical modification required -- just change the duration, frequency, or volume of the tone. Making the phone make the sound for 1 microsecond, or at 30,000 Hertz, or at 5 dB would all prevent it from being heard, but technically the phone would be making "a tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone." [copy & paste from the text of the bill] Admittedly, the 30KHz sound would probably only be audible to dogs, and the 5 dB sound would only be audible if there's no other sound present to drown it out (rustling leaves or calm breathing is 10 dB, a very calm room is 20-30) but nothing in the bill says the tone has to be audible to humans or in the presence of other sounds.
They don't. You'll have to buy a new camera phone, thus stimulating the economy. Two birds, one stone!
Re:Why people watch movies..
on
Daemon
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· Score: 1
I've heard this referred to as the CSI effect. Prosecutors know that juries that have watched a CSI* will be watching and waiting for DNA evidence, since every 15 minutes (exaggerating, but not by much) the characters on CSI* will get some criminal to confess based on DNA evidence they collected from a crime scene. If you don't have DNA evidence, you'd better have a good reason to give the jury to explain that lack.
If you play your music loud enough for the neighbors to hear, isn't that either disturbing the peace (if they don't like it) or public performance without permission of the copyright holder (if they do)?
That second point likely contributes to why a lot of software companies don't produce a Linux version of their software.
If you need to run your software on Windows XP Service Pack 3, and it requires a function from a system library, all you need to do is test it on an SP3 machine in-house and you can be fairly sure it will run on your customers' SP3 machines, since Microsoft controls what's in the OS. The same holds for OS X under Apple's control. On Linux? It may run perfectly fine on Red Hat, but the version of that function in SuSE's library may behave just differently enough to break your software, and Ubuntu may have diverged enough that its version of that library doesn't even have that function.
And of course, if your company claims to support their software on Linux, and it doesn't work on a user's Ubuntu box, do you think the user is going to blame: Ubuntu or your software?
It's quite possible that the voters do know what they are doing; they just don't have anyone better to vote for.
One thing that a lot of people forget -- you can vote for anyone you want as long as they satisfy the legal requirements, even if their name is NOT on the ballot.
Now the standard response to this is "But I don't want to throw my vote away." Fine, then don't. If the person elected to the post finds that they won with a whopping 21% of the votes cast instead of the 52% they received the previous election, don't you think that sends a message that they're on thin ice and that if they don't change what they're doing, they may lose the next election with an even smaller portion of the overall vote?
If you don't like the position the two major party candidates have on taxes, fine. Find someone else whose position you do like (your friend, your neighbor, your accountant, your attorney, etc.), make sure they don't have a position on another issue that you can't agree with, and vote for them.
I thought Apple already made a product like that -- the iLabelMaker. Indeed, that's what I first thought of when I saw the name "MacBook Wheel" -- a MacBook with a label maker's interface.
Sure, Picard could have told the computer "Whenever I ask the replicator for tea, I want a cup of Earl Grey, hot, unless I specify otherwise." in one of the early episodes. However, people who missed that episode wouldn't know in a future episode that when he called for "Computer, tea." he was actually getting a cup of hot Earl Grey tea.
Even if there are some legal repercussion, pay an inmate who's already in prison for life or a homeless person to send out a few dozen accusation letters. What are they going to do to the inmate, throw him in jail for even longer than life? As for the homeless person, depending on his situation, spending a short time in jail might be an improvement.
In my experience in technical support, sharing "the why" makes users more cooperative. If you say "Do X and tell me what happens", users may underestimate the importance of doing X. If you say "I think I know what the problem is, but I need you to do X and tell me what happens to be sure" or "To check and make sure that Y is not the problem, I need you to do X and tell me if Z happens" then they realize it's an important step in getting the problem fixed.
How do you know this to be true? You'll forgive me if I ask for more proof that the surveillance was legal than the words of the officials who ordered and/or performed the surveillance.
Why are you leaving a visitor alone with a network jack? When my company brings in a visitor, about the only time we leave them unattended is when they're in the cafeteria in the morning eating breakfast (and as far as I know there are no network jacks in there) and when they're in the restroom (no network jacks in there, either.)
When they use a different voice actor or actress for the computer voice in the next Star Trek movie (after the one that's currently in production), at least one of the main characters should remark that they miss the old voice from before the main computer upgrade, as a salute.
"It's only right that someone who created or contributed to something of real value gets to benefit for the full course of their life," he said.
So glad to hear you say that, Mr. Burnham. I have a few letters here for you. Here's the royalty bill from the farmer who grew the corn that you consumed on March 17, 1983 (after all, he created something of real value to you -- without it and other food like it, you would have starved.) Here's the bill from the guy you hired to paint your house on June 23, 1996. The other seventy-three bags of bills like them are waiting just outside your front door -- your prompt payment will be appreciated.
If he has a wife, girlfriend, or significant other, ask him if he has to pay for everything she does for him. [If you think you can get away with it, include a couple of examples of what you mean by 'everything' -- I'm sure you can think of a couple.] If he admits he doesn't, ask him what the catch is. Then when he says something along the lines of "she does because she wants to", tell him that a lot of FOSS programmers release their code for free because they want to.
Sounds like these Wikipediaarticles are relevant. Perhaps they misheard when 99942 Apophis was supposed to pass by and potentially (but unlikely) strike the planet.
Also, it is impressive you can separate the Christmas madness that starts after Thanksgiving from the actual holidays of Dec. 23rd to 31st.
Where are you living? Stores around here started their Christmas madness around Halloween. In my opinion, almost all of those stores jumped the gun. [I'm inclined to give Christmas Tree Shops an okay, since they have the name of the holiday in their company name all year.]
As a result, it tends to get waved away as "magic" or "this will be explained later" but there's so much waved away that the students get disconnected. For instance, to simply output a line to a command line in Java you're looking at System.out.println("output");
whereas with c++ (for instance) you have cout << "output" << endl;
As someone who's teaching this stuff, the second is easier to explain in detail and doesn't rely on saying "don't worry what System.out is".
Don't you mean
std::cout << "output" << std::endl;
or do you say "don't worry what the line 'using namespace std;' at the beginning of this code does"?
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I would imagine the repossession industry and practitioners of bankruptcy law would be reasonably "recession proof".
[devilsadvocate]Sure. It would give the government more money to spend on bailing out their buddies and future employers ... er I mean helping struggling American homeowners.{/devilsadvocate]
They still don't. Electors that don't vote the way the state voted are called faithless electors.
When a person violates motor vehicle laws badly enough, they lose their license to use a motor vehicle for some duration.
When a lawyer violates the Bar rules badly enough, they lose their license to practice law in that state for some duration (or forever, if you do the types of things Jack Thompson did.)
When a company violates telemarketing laws badly enough, they should lose the ability to telemarket for some duration. Prevent them from calling any customers (without the customer's explicit request -- if someone leaves your company voicemail asking you to contact them, that's okay) for a week for the first offense, doubling with each subsequent offense. Make it so that the punishment sticks even if they try to do some sort of corporate shell game ("No we're not HyperGlobalMegaCompuTech, we're GlobalCompuHyperMegaTech. See our freshly painted sign?") Eventually they'll learn (or be barred from calling customers for long enough that they'll go out of business before regaining the ability to telemarket.)
Even better, no physical modification required -- just change the duration, frequency, or volume of the tone. Making the phone make the sound for 1 microsecond, or at 30,000 Hertz, or at 5 dB would all prevent it from being heard, but technically the phone would be making "a tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone." [copy & paste from the text of the bill] Admittedly, the 30KHz sound would probably only be audible to dogs, and the 5 dB sound would only be audible if there's no other sound present to drown it out (rustling leaves or calm breathing is 10 dB, a very calm room is 20-30) but nothing in the bill says the tone has to be audible to humans or in the presence of other sounds.
They don't. You'll have to buy a new camera phone, thus stimulating the economy. Two birds, one stone!
I've heard this referred to as the CSI effect. Prosecutors know that juries that have watched a CSI* will be watching and waiting for DNA evidence, since every 15 minutes (exaggerating, but not by much) the characters on CSI* will get some criminal to confess based on DNA evidence they collected from a crime scene. If you don't have DNA evidence, you'd better have a good reason to give the jury to explain that lack.
If you play your music loud enough for the neighbors to hear, isn't that either disturbing the peace (if they don't like it) or public performance without permission of the copyright holder (if they do)?
That second point likely contributes to why a lot of software companies don't produce a Linux version of their software.
If you need to run your software on Windows XP Service Pack 3, and it requires a function from a system library, all you need to do is test it on an SP3 machine in-house and you can be fairly sure it will run on your customers' SP3 machines, since Microsoft controls what's in the OS. The same holds for OS X under Apple's control. On Linux? It may run perfectly fine on Red Hat, but the version of that function in SuSE's library may behave just differently enough to break your software, and Ubuntu may have diverged enough that its version of that library doesn't even have that function.
And of course, if your company claims to support their software on Linux, and it doesn't work on a user's Ubuntu box, do you think the user is going to blame: Ubuntu or your software?
One thing that a lot of people forget -- you can vote for anyone you want as long as they satisfy the legal requirements, even if their name is NOT on the ballot.
Now the standard response to this is "But I don't want to throw my vote away." Fine, then don't. If the person elected to the post finds that they won with a whopping 21% of the votes cast instead of the 52% they received the previous election, don't you think that sends a message that they're on thin ice and that if they don't change what they're doing, they may lose the next election with an even smaller portion of the overall vote?
If you don't like the position the two major party candidates have on taxes, fine. Find someone else whose position you do like (your friend, your neighbor, your accountant, your attorney, etc.), make sure they don't have a position on another issue that you can't agree with, and vote for them.
Of course not.
They say "Bad Mather Fucker", naturally.
I thought Apple already made a product like that -- the iLabelMaker. Indeed, that's what I first thought of when I saw the name "MacBook Wheel" -- a MacBook with a label maker's interface.
Sure, Picard could have told the computer "Whenever I ask the replicator for tea, I want a cup of Earl Grey, hot, unless I specify otherwise." in one of the early episodes. However, people who missed that episode wouldn't know in a future episode that when he called for "Computer, tea." he was actually getting a cup of hot Earl Grey tea.
Even if there are some legal repercussion, pay an inmate who's already in prison for life or a homeless person to send out a few dozen accusation letters. What are they going to do to the inmate, throw him in jail for even longer than life? As for the homeless person, depending on his situation, spending a short time in jail might be an improvement.
In my experience in technical support, sharing "the why" makes users more cooperative. If you say "Do X and tell me what happens", users may underestimate the importance of doing X. If you say "I think I know what the problem is, but I need you to do X and tell me what happens to be sure" or "To check and make sure that Y is not the problem, I need you to do X and tell me if Z happens" then they realize it's an important step in getting the problem fixed.
How do you know this to be true? You'll forgive me if I ask for more proof that the surveillance was legal than the words of the officials who ordered and/or performed the surveillance.
Why are you leaving a visitor alone with a network jack? When my company brings in a visitor, about the only time we leave them unattended is when they're in the cafeteria in the morning eating breakfast (and as far as I know there are no network jacks in there) and when they're in the restroom (no network jacks in there, either.)
When they use a different voice actor or actress for the computer voice in the next Star Trek movie (after the one that's currently in production), at least one of the main characters should remark that they miss the old voice from before the main computer upgrade, as a salute.
So glad to hear you say that, Mr. Burnham. I have a few letters here for you. Here's the royalty bill from the farmer who grew the corn that you consumed on March 17, 1983 (after all, he created something of real value to you -- without it and other food like it, you would have starved.) Here's the bill from the guy you hired to paint your house on June 23, 1996. The other seventy-three bags of bills like them are waiting just outside your front door -- your prompt payment will be appreciated.
If he has a wife, girlfriend, or significant other, ask him if he has to pay for everything she does for him. [If you think you can get away with it, include a couple of examples of what you mean by 'everything' -- I'm sure you can think of a couple.] If he admits he doesn't, ask him what the catch is. Then when he says something along the lines of "she does because she wants to", tell him that a lot of FOSS programmers release their code for free because they want to.
No, Knuth uses butterflies.
Sounds like these Wikipedia articles are relevant. Perhaps they misheard when 99942 Apophis was supposed to pass by and potentially (but unlikely) strike the planet.
The New Shimmer Taser -- it's a self-defense device, it's a defibrilator, it's a self-defense device AND a defibrilator.
Where are you living? Stores around here started their Christmas madness around Halloween. In my opinion, almost all of those stores jumped the gun. [I'm inclined to give Christmas Tree Shops an okay, since they have the name of the holiday in their company name all year.]
Don't you mean
std::cout << "output" << std::endl;
or do you say "don't worry what the line 'using namespace std;' at the beginning of this code does"?