EXACTLY! The only safe way to get around in Atlanta is in a car or in a place where cars are totally banned.

First pedestrians complain and the city passes ordinances forcing the scooters to use the roads instead of sidewalks.

And then the scooters DO that and whoa two of them are run over and the operators are killed by cars.

WHAT THE FUCK DID THEY THINK would happen when you force slow scooter to share the road with much larger, faster, heavier cars, driven by people who don't want to share the road with other cars much less share with scooters or pedestrians or cyclists?

There should NEVER be a place where cars and people on foot or bikes or scooters share the same space. There should always be physical barriers like bollards or guardrails or fences or something to keep these things apart. Because any time where a car collides with a person or bike or scooter, the car is going to win. The only way to be safe is to not allow them to share space.

It's the same in my similar large city. Where the radio clubs used to be very active and maintained and invested in top quality repeaters. 2M, 70cm, 12.GHz, analog and DSTAR and even some clubs with 900MHz and the Yaesu digital format I forget the name of. All of that was huge 10 years ago.

Now, more than half the repeaters have died and not been repaired. The clubs are dying. Meetings have faded. Weekly nets have just ended. Sunday nights around here used to have net after net after net, sometimes two or three at once and everybody hopping around to catch them. Now, most are gone.

Where we used to have repeaters busy a lot of the time, we have silence. Except when one or two people gets on the air for a short chat, invariably one of them will say something about wanting to get off the air so someone else can speak. There's NOBODY else TO speak! There's nobody who wants to talk. Even the repeaters locked into DSTAR nodes are quiet all the time.

The few remaining clubs are mostly around to keep running hamfests. But even those have welcomed in vendors more fit for a flea market than a ham shack. But they justify all the misc stuff for sale by saying XYLs would like to shop for clothes and toys and such.

My license is up for renewal in 2020 and I'm not sure I want to bother. I haven't actually talked on the radio in three or four years. Put a new rig in my truck a year ago and never even kerchunked with it. Felt the huge urge to buy it but once I had it installed, the urge to use it had died.

Correction: the glitter bomb trap was a faked video with a bunch of people in on the joke, all intended to make a viral video that would get lots of media coverage.

Ah well, it was light-hearted so we can just excuse it. And he's sorry!

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

Oracle is like the War of the Worlds Martians (movie version): when Oracle acquires something, soon nothing else is ever heard again coming from that something.

They go in and acquire and silence and kill it.

A company I used to work for was world-leaders in a particular line of business. We made software used by everybody at the top of a couple different industries. And then Oracle bought the company for the patents and recurring revenue. Mostly the patents. They didn't do jack for our existing customer bases except hit everybody they could with licensing agreements several multiples of cost more than they used to cost.

My part of the company was spun out and acquired by somebody else. We happened to be experts in the software we used to make and kept on using it to support some of the old clients. And suddenly even we had to pay a license fee to Oracle to use what we wrote and created and used to goddamn own. Then Oracle raised rates again and again and finally decided they weren't going to let us license what WE created. It wasn't an option they wanted to offer.

I got the hell out of that place shortly before it closed down. There was no viable path forward without the license from Oracle, which didn't exist any longer.

All our old clients were also forced to move to Oracle products and pay pay pay or go elsewhere.

This plan REWARDS not the students but the schools who have engaged in a tuition increase arms race for decades, with many of them acting like corporations where bigger numbers are needed every quarter.

All of that puts pressure on the students who have to take out more and more loans, and the schools know they will do just that, so they raise tuition again, so the students will take even more loans because now you have already taken out a lot and can't stop without that degree that's supposed to make all this debt payoff, right? Right?

And along comes Bernie to reward all those ridiculous tuition increases by vowing to pay off the too much money people borrowed because the schools kept raising rates. Thanks Bernie! Now the schools will double or triple everything because hey, the government guarantees to pay it!

This doesn't fix the problem. The tuition rates are still too high. FIX THAT!

And what about the students who struggled and worked their asses off so they didn't need to borrow? They get nothing.

From what I saw of the whole Maker "movement" as a non-maker, it sure seemed to me people have been making things and sharing the how-to for centuries. DIY and making STUFF has been around forever.

So I never quite understood why it needed to be codified under a brand or called a "movement" or organized into whatever it was organized into. People don't need all that to make things. And the creative people who would be more inclined to make stuff would also be more likely than average to figure out their own way to do things. That is to say, the bigger and better a maker you are, and the deeper you are into it, the less you need a magazine or organization to tell you how to do it, and the less you are to pay money for a magazine or anything else they sell.

Well, the truth is none of those broadcast TV or radio station signals will ever reach aliens. The signals will be so weak and degraded just by the time they reach the Sol system heliopause, there will be nothing at all detectable once you get out to other planetary systems. They won't hear us and we won't hear them.

There have been a handful of military radar beams sent into space and several purposeful radio telescope signals. These are the only signals with enough power to be detectable. None of them were repeating over any length of time. So if we were listening for aliens and heard something comparable to our own signals, even we would probably disregard them. But more likely, we just would never hear them at all.

It's absolutely true. 'dollar' stores are always a sign that the neighborhood is either IN decline or has ALREADY declined.

There are a very few exceptions, like dropping a Dollar Tree into an upscale shopping center, but those are done to cater to the complaints that regular people can't afford to shop in such places. Yes they can, here's a fucking Dollar Tree for you! Happy now?

But usually, these stores come in and take over whatever cheap space they can. It's cheap because there is no demand, because the area won't support better stores of ANY kind.

Family Dollar built a brand-new store two blocks from my house. The lot had been a working furniture shop for decades. They cleared the land and dropped in a new building. What happened? Well it was certainly popular because it was convenient. But it was also burglarized immediately and then again and again and again, literally every few days. The brand-new store sported plywood over shattered windows for months at a time. And still does every time somebody breaks in. The police were powerless.

The store also brought a lot of trash. People don't care about using overflowing trash cans, which are overflowing because the store workers were too busy to keep up with it. But people are pigs and just throw everything anywhere. It wasn't just AT the store but trash dropped here and there along sidewalks in every direction, due to customers consuming stuff while they walked home.

There was a house fire in my area over the holidays. Apparently quite a bad fire, although the people made it out fine.

So one of those people was a former student at a local high school, and well-liked even after she graduated. The school decided to do a fundraiser event and donate clothes and other items the family lost in the fire. The student, in tears, got up in front of the assembled school and the media (it was on TV which is how I saw it) and the former student, an actual graduate says (ahem) "Thank you for helping replace everything that got took"

The "got took" echoed.

Good job, teachers!

Guidelines are not rules or laws or even Best Practices. They're just suggestions. And vague ones at that, which allow the person using them to figure out all the details of how and when and what.

Guidelines are like saying "you ought to have painted walls" but leaving the paint color and even the wall material (brick, plaster, drywall, stucco, recycled political signs) up to the occupant.

We've HAD this sort of thing in routers for years. Everybody had some base standards to follow and went off on their own to implement it. It didn't exactly work well, and hell, that's part of why it's a mess now. Although another huge part is the industry settling on single suppliers like Broadcom and then implementing the same hardware and software across hundreds of models. So everybody look under your chairs. Yes YOU get a vulnerability and YOU get a vulnerability and YOU get a vulnerability.

Kemp is not especially ahead in the race. Both candidates are around 46 percent in the latest polls.

The bit about holding a gun on a kid is a claim related to a TV ad Kemp himself aired. He had a shotgun on his lap and a kid, apparently the boyfriend of one of Kemp's daughters, in an adjacent chair. All of this was in Kemp's own ad and isn't disputable.

The claim is that he pointed the gun at this boy and that equals child abuse. He did not point the gun AT the boy in the ad that aired. It was pointed past the boy, not AT him. Not really even close. Thus the whole claim of child abuse is easy to disprove. However, as a gun safety nut, it irks me to see Kemp treating his gun as a joke, and he almost certainly DID aim it at people on the film crew in the process of making the ad. I find that offensive, stupid and a demonstration of awful behavior and poor judgement. But it wasn't child abuse.

All of that said, there are plenty of other things about Kemp that deserve to be investigated. He's running another ad where he claims to have pulled strings or something similar to get an organ transplant for a sick child. He's right there admitting he played favorites and pressured insurance companies to do what he wanted. It's right there IN his ad. He brags about it. This should be a scandal. Nobody cares.

Rest well, Mr. Allen.

He used to have the nickname "Doctor NetVorkian" because many of the things he invested in promptly tanked in one way or another after his investment. He had a lot of bad luck with his investments.

For those who don't understand the joke, a certain Dr. Kervorkian became notorious for helping ill patients commit suicide.

You need to look up nearlyfreespeech. Just renewed one of my domains there for $13. Adding privacy took it to $16 for a year.

They need to listen to the memes and eat the damn child.

This company used to spam Tumblr with ads for their TWD game using art of a man, a child, and a small amount of food, asking the viewer of the ad what the man should do, which of course would require buying the game to answer. But the Tumblr users, sick of seeing the stupid ad all the time, helpfully suggested the man should eat the child and his food issues would be solved for quite a while.

Maybe the company should have realized, nobody was saying buy the game. And IF your marketing plan involves advertising on Tumblr anyway, you have issues.