By saying that to the cop you are showing that you are aware of the situation which makes you at fault since you are showing prior knowledge. That's different than getting your speedo calibrated after the ticket and finding it under reporting. Unless they can find evidence to the contrary the reasonable assumption of the later case is that you had no way to know it was broken.

I'm in VA and had a period in my younger days where I saw far too much of the inside of my local traffic courts. As such I can say that if you came to court with certified documentation that your speedometer was under reporting most judges would let you off (especially if you also brought receipts showing it was corrected). In a few cases the judge would do the math based on your calibration report and reduce the ticket to what you "thought" you were doing. I never saw such a case where the judge stuck them with the original ticket.

There was a day when those things were difficult and specialized but the tools have been made easier to use and more common over time. The same will happen with programming (and has been happening since the first program was written).

There is a difference between framing a wall in an otherwise finished house and framing the house itself. There is a difference between changing your oil and rebuilding your engine. Just because some tasks in a job really are (or should be) simple enough that anyone with a clue and the inclination can do it doesn't mean that there isn't still room for the specialists and more experienced non-specialists to do the heavy lifting.

That doesn't mean that everyone can or should code, but that doesn't mean people should fear writing a little bit of it when they find a need just like they shouldn't fear patching a hole in their drywall.

The only reason the equivalent of changing your oil isn't routine in coding is that people believe it's some mystical thing that they can't do. When it's really simple for them to "paint the walls" without having to "build the whole house" they'll do it (even if the rest of us professionals have an aneurysm over the drips and splatters). They just need the simple tools and understanding which starts with education.

It's worse than that in some places. Verizon laid the lines literally to my parents property line but decided not to go any farther even though the rest of the houses beyond that point all had signed the agreement that brought FiOS into the sub-division. So this is a case where you have half a sub-division with access to FiOS and half without.

Interestingly Verizon claimed that it was due to people not signing up in the numbers that the agreement promised, but that was at least partially due to the majority of the houses what wanted it were beyond the point where they packed it in. My dad even offered to foot the bill to have them do the last 25' to his house but they weren't interested.

And just how much of what the NSA does do you think isn't categorized as "state secrets"? Who is going to judge what really is a state secret? The same ones that approved the things we're already complaining about?

All such a law would do is make clueless people feel better, give incumbents a "see what I did for your benefit" talking point, and generate more work and cost for government offices to comply with it (even the ones that still aren't being honest).

I'm not saying that I wouldn't want such a thing to exist, i'm just pointing out the reality that it won't have the desired effect and will in fact just result in a lot of waste.

Well there are signs telling you not to go there. That will keep the terrorists out right? Right?

That's my view of this whole thing. OK Apple Maps is being stupid and the drivers even dumber, but I live at the end of the runway for an International airport and there are unhappy looking people with guns standing next to closed gates for any non-public access points to the grounds (which includes anything that leads to the runways). So WTF is going on up in Fairbanks?

That's not the DVR's fault. That's the stupid channels that start and stop things at times other than what they have have set in their guide information. These seemed to really get bad a few years ago (History channel seems to the worst that I watch).

I recently had to replace my old TiVO S3 and was quite disappointed to find that the new one is even slower than the S3 which I was quite irritated by to begin with.

Your claim was that there is a conspiracy against OSS organizations, but this wasn't some obscure rule or gray area that they used to revoke the status. The X.org accountant also admits that he screwed it up so unless you have evidence that he is a plant by the IRS or "the powers that be" there is no conspiracy evidenced by this case.

The IRS's job is to collect taxes according to the tax law (convoluted though it may be). Part of that job is to make sure that people and businesses are paying what they should be (loopholes aside). This is a clear case of X.org's status was reviewed and the IRS found that they weren't meeting the requirements of the non-profit status. It's really not any different than if you had consistently filed your taxes late, they decide to audit you for it, and they turn up evidence of your unreported eBay store that you are supposed to be paying taxes on. Just because you don't like taxes or don't agree with some particular tax law doesn't make what happens in cases like this wrong.

I'm not denying that there are abuses and things aren't enforced uniformly, but the fact is that they failed to follow the law and were punished for it according to the law.

People complain when a government agency isn't doing their job and you're complaining about them actually doing it. There is no conspiracy here. There is no trampling of freedoms. This is exactly what is supposed to happen in such cases.

No, but the way they keep moving April 15th to a different day of the week every year sure is hard to keep up with!

So the "powers that be" infiltrated X.Org's finance/accounting groups and made them not follow the rules for non-profits?

This is no different than the spun up fiasco a few months ago about the IRS investigating non-profits that appeared to be fronts for political organizations (and contrary to the Fox spin, it was not just targeting the Tea Party). To be a non-profit there are some specific rules you have to follow to maintain the status. It is the IRS's job to investigate to make sure you are following those rules.

So the real news here is "IRS does their job and idiots get upset about it and make up conspiracy stories".

No, ODB-II was mandated on every new car sold in the US starting in 1996. CAN didn't gain mass adoption for quite a while yet (I have a 2001 with out it and just replaced a 2004 not too long ago that didn't have it).

All of the things you listed as not being possible without CAN were also around long before CAN (and well before ODB-II (though entirely unrelated) was mandated).

Even for the cars that are built today, there are still a fair number that do not have any wireless access to the bus (e.g. cars without OnSTAR or the like). I just bought one in fact. The wireless access was his concern and he still has plenty of options to avoid that while still having all the other benefits of a CAN based car.

What a baseball bat can do and what a gun can do are two totally different things, but then what a .22 target pistol and a .45 caliber Tommy Gun can do are also two drastically different things.

You argue that a gun is an equalizer, which it is, but bringing a baseball bat to a fist fight is also equalizing/tilting the result in your favor as well.

A gun, just like a baseball bat, is an inanimate object that is capable of doing nothing on it's own without external forces. Also like a baseball bat it is perfectly safe when being used properly.

The real problem is the person holding the weapon and the only difference a gun makes is how big of a problem that person is for those they interact with. We really need to focus on the issues that drive people to these extreme situations rather than the tool they used to act it out.

I personally would argue that there are weapons that the average person doesn't need. I would also argue that there should be stricter classing (e.g. target pistols vs semi-auto, vs full-auto, etc..), training, and licensing so that we know that those that want to have a weapon have a reasonable expectancy to know how to use. care for, and handle it properly. I won't, however, argue that the solution to the worlds ills is to try and remove guns (both because it won't be possible and that want to do harm will still find other ways).

Maybe you don't recall, but box cutters were used for the most horrific event in the US in the last few decades. No guns, just a few box cutters to take over a couple of planes...

So does using the "but everyone else is doing it" argument.

I've used all kinds of languages for different purposes and the only thing I can say nice about PHP is that it is nearly as ubiquitous as Perl. Otherwise it is neither as capable or well thought out as it's competitors. My personal pet peeve is the inconsistent error handling (some functions just return true/false, some use NULL and false interchangeably, some write their error messages to STDERR, some to STDOUT, most give you no way to programmatically capture the error in a reasonable manner, and a few actually use the built exception functionality (though I still saw a handful that just used a generic exception with no details about the failure). The top failure of the language that gets the majority of my venom is their poor use of the __FILE__ macro and the maintainers refusal to recognize that they are the ones doing it wrong (translates links rather than giving you the raw value like every other major language).

Really the biggest problem with PHP is not the language itself, however, it's all the bad information out there about how to use it. Many of the helpful examples (especially for form processing or database work) are so full of security holes it's not funny. Sadder still is that it's the newbies that don't understand such concepts that read this bad advice as gospel and then continue to promote it by posting it again in their turn. All languages have their holes and flaws, but PHPs are more visible because of it's ubiquity (e.g. anyone can get a cheap hosting account that supports PHP) and because it drives the majority of the UIs on the web.

I'll vote to acquit you only if you take out the bastard that thought the "triple square" was an improvement. I have Torx bits coming out of my ass, but no my new car needs a triple square to pull the seats out. You know what those extra teeth buy you? Even more stripped bolts than Torx does!

Is a good dead common hex bolt really too difficult?

Unless all you do is read headlines and 2 sentence paragraphs, there is no conundrum. They are not denying the existence of the program, that it was kept from the public, or that it keeps a record of all call metadata. They are denying the validity of some of the additional claims he has made saying that he did not have the level of access that would have been needed for some things and that others simply don't exist (and you can trust that they would never not tell you of such things...). So there is nothing preventing them from charging him for the crimes he did commit without contradicting themselves.