Amen. It's obvious that most "modern" interfaces and "apps" are being designed by people who have no real idea of what they are doing, delivering, and are simply winging it on bluff.
Engelbart's tradgedy is the same tradgedy that is giving us substandard tablet interfaces, less usable UI's like Unity, and which is walling us off in restricted private gardens like Facebook instead of offerring us the wider potential of the web.
Talk about limited attention span. The Seattle restorethe4th rally was scheduled for July 6 at Westlake Center in Seattle. You would think that in a city of a half-million people, a few of which are tech savvy, the protest would have drawn something.
Instead, there were three ambulances, three cop cars, a dozen cops, and one guy walking around with a sign saying "What does Jesus mean to you" or some crap like that.
What the hell? Anonymous could get a pretty big turnout to protest the Church of Scientology, an organization that harms a minuscule fraction of the world's most gullible people, but nobody in Seattle can turn out to protest programs that harm every fucking person in the planet?
YOU SUCK SEATTLE.
We are a nation of laws, not men. If you don't agree with the actions of a governmental organization then you need to lobby your governmental representatives with your views.
So what you are saying, is that we are a nation of men. What else can you mean when the only way to get criminals out of office is to lobby them. Forget impeachment and that PMITA federal prison system they made into the biggest in the world, let's see if we can get them to quit committing crimes by buying them caviar and giving them really fat checks for their next campaign. Somehow -- I think that does not incentivize good behavior, but rather the opposite.
And what about those assholes in the revolving door plan -- contractor, to official, to contractor, to official -- like Clapper? Should we send them xmas cards in the hopes that he and his ilk won't commit perjury?
Only after releasing it from the Disney Vault for a limited period release - be sure not to miss out - call 1-800-DISNEY now for our special collectors edition edition.
You have my sincerest apologies from all of Australia. I've just had a quick look at their website, and other than looking like it clawed it's way out of Geocities by the skin of it's teeth, the venue itself looks like it is the product of nightmares triggered by a combination of the consumption of bad shellfish and a clown phobia.
The previous owner of our house went bankrupt. The first couple of years we were getting bailiff at the doorstep at all sorts of hours asking for him and not believing us when we said we didn't know where he was or how to find him.
One house I lived in used to get a lot of wrong numbers, we set up the outbound message on the answering machine to "Blind, Drunk and Legless, Solicitor at the Bar".
A notorius Irish Judge recently gave a man a two year suspended sentence for raping a women in front of her children. He's done worse, and so have other Irish judges.
The supreme court is particularly notorius, with at least one judge on it having never sat behind a bench before. They've done everything; from ruling that mens only golf clubs are non-discriminatory, to making it legal to keep people imprisoned even if the law that convicted them is later ruled to be constitutional -- Google the Mr A case (tl;dr "teh pedos!!"). Members of the court are not above public dust-ups with the executive, on their own behalf or for anyone else they favour.
In Ireland, we don't have laws. What we have are more like customs. And he who pays the most for the festivities decides what those customs are.
You do need a special license to run a day care service, and you should need a special license to drive people around unless you have a few million in the bank to pay for the damage you cause.
Lots of people work in the underground economy to avoid taxes, and while there is some short term gain to be had be outside the system, there are reasons why the system exists. Some of it bullshit, like wars and NSA and so forth, but some of it comes out of the labor movement and is designed to help and protect workers. Things like unemployment and workers comp. By working under the table, when something goes wrong, you are really screwed. And big business is always looking for ways to shift the costs of doing business onto the worker. This is probably one of those ways.
I don't know about every state, but one of the big games businesses try to play is telling people to become independent contractors. They think that if their workers are ICs, they won't have to pay workers comp premiums. Except the WA state statute doesn't talk about "employees" -- it talks about "workers where the essence of the contract is personal labor." So a while back, it was a popular way for taxi companies to shirk their responsibility by leasing cabs to drivers and making them independent contractors. Didn't work and they got spanked because the drivers provided only personal labor.
In the case of this company, where they act as dispatcher arranging payment, pick up, drop off and act as boss (they'll essentially fire you if you don't live up to their standards) -- that's personal labor. And while you may provide your own car, that isn't good enough to get beyond the "worker" definition (been tried). So anyway, if this company is operating in WA and not paying premiums, it's going to get fined, and if a worker gets hurt while driving, they'll be on the hook for all the claim costs.
That was my thought as well, but it turns out it isn't carpooling -- it's a paid service, and a fairly steep one at that.
http://www.lyft.me/drivers
From the "become a driver" page: "Drivers are making up to $35/hr + choosing their own hours."
It sounds like a taxi service, except Lyft doesn't have employees, doesn't have to pay unemployment or workers comp insurance, and then if there is an accident, will the driver's private insurance which most likely assumes you are not being a public carrier, pay out?
It could be done. Enclose a dollar or two in an envelope containing the sealed letter with postage applied. This would allow an aggregator to pay for the postage of mailing the package on to another node. Hopefully, the receipt of payments would even out over all nodes so that it would fund the multiple remailings.
The big flaw though, is that nothing prevents the PO from just opening the aggregated mail packages and the individual letters.
So we need snail mail tor? mail aggregators receive mail then mail packages of s-mail to nodes who shuffle it with other packages, divide it up and then remail shuffled packages, till after several iterations, an exit node drops the individual letters into a mail box. Expensive though.
You would think that watching the news, but look at the stats and you'd know you were wrong:
http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm
Example:
Crime rate per 100k people:
1968: 3,370.2
2011: 3,295.0
The peak was around from 1975 to 1996, ranging from about 5.2k to 5.8k per 100k population. It's been in the 3k range and steadily falling since 2004. But falling crime rates don't attract viewers.
Other sources. Crime rate in the 00s. See PDF pages 3 & 4 (national rate steady decline): http://www.umassd.edu/media/umassdartmouth/seppce/centerforpolicyanalysis/crime.pdf
1991 -- 2010, FBI stats on Violent crime. 2010 level almost half of that in 1991: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls
How odd, just last night I was reading John Kiriakou's recent open letter in which he outlines how the Lieutenant prison boss tried to instigate a fight between him and another prisoner (*)? See page 4-5.
I told the CO that I could kill the guy with my thumb. He's about 5'4" and 125 pounds compared to my 6'1" and 250 pounds.
(*) The prison Lieutenant Told John that some Iraqi Kurd from Buffalo, who is basically in prison because he wouldn't testify against his parishioners, had been ordered to kill him. John later found out that the Lieut. told this same Kurd that John had been ordered to kill _him_. The idea being to get a fight going and lock them both up in solitary forever.
Until the casing, bullet, and primer can be made from non-metalic substances, getting the gun past detectors might be easy but getting the ammo in to make use of it substantially harder. Right now, they'd be better off 3d printing knives because an empty gun is just a way to get yourself killed.
"Money is the root of all money." -- the moving finger
