I should add that if you have iron pipes, you can get much of the same protection by grounding to the water pipes at the closest point to where they run underground.
That might not meet code, these days, but it used to for a very long time. And it will give you a serviceable ground.
Don't ground to your gas pipe, though. Not A Good Idea.
Ground spikes are standard procedure and have been part of building code for decades.
If you can't find an electrician to do it for you, it's not that difficult to do it yourself. Get 2 ea. 6' copper ground spikes from your local hardware or electrical supply store, and pound them in with a sledgehammer. Careful not to bend them too much in the process. They aren't iron.
Then a little bit of bare copper ground line, maybe around 3 to 4 gauge, to each spike.
It's not a difficult job at all unless your house was built on top of a giant rock. I suspect that the real issue was not the ground spike, but running the rest of the ground wires through existing walls. That is the kind of job that no electrician likes to do. When I was looking to buy a home I passed up an otherwise great price on a nice house for exactly the same reason.
Sure, I could have taken the money saved and upgraded the wiring, but it would have been so much of a pain, and caused so much temporary destruction to the interior, I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
"But if they would just use tin foil instead of silver (really, how bourgeois) it would be a major hit."
Foil-backed wallpaper has been available for decades at least. And it probably would indeed make a good Faraday cage, as long as you grounded it and your doors were metal too.
It's not that. There are at least a couple of major issues here:
(1) The languages at the top of the Tiobe Index (even given that we can assume it has some claim to validity... I'm not so sure) are all compiled languages, or at least compilable to bytecode. Except PHP, which dominated the Web world for a long time but is sliding, and for good reasons.
(2) The languages at the top of the Tiobe index will always have distorted figures because they represent the majority of code that is already installed and being maintained, rather than new programs.
When compiled Ruby has become more mature (there are things like JRuby which is coming along nicely, and Ruby 3.0 will supposedly be compilable to bytecode) you will see an increase in its use, because then it will be more commercially viable and appropriate for desktop applications.
In the meantime, languages that have been mostly used for scripting like Ruby and Python are not used so much for business because all your code is exposed to any would-be customers. That says absolutely nothing about the features of the language itself, except that it is more difficult to compile dynamic languages.
Again, there is nothing here I disagree with, but at the same time, I think there is a legitimate case to be made for protecting the unwary or unsuspecting from charlatans.
Not all self-proclaimed "psychics" are benevolent, for example. Many of them have been exposed as scam artists who prey on the gullible. Of course, evangelists have been known to do the same... and astrologers too.
That is why I think a warning is appropriate: if you are warned that there is no scientific basis for claims of truth or efficacy, then you are (and should be) free to go ahead and do what you want. Some people will do it for fun; others will think the warnings are just hogwash by "unbelievers". There's nothing you can do about the latter anyway.
Hard to tell for several reasons... among them that New York Times website is broken. To would-be OPs: please don't link to articles there. When I click on a link it tells me to log in, which is fine, but then it only gives me front page, never the article referenced by the link. And then, once logged in, if I click the link again (thinking it might take me there), it tells me to log in again even though I am already logged in!. Major, and I really mean major, web fail.
But aside from that, it still doesn't mean much. "What is accepted as scientific truth" has absolutely nothing to do with what appears in the news or blog articles. What is "accepted" as scientific truth -- even though it may take a while to soak in and be accepted -- is what the actual scientists tell us.
It has taken well over 80 years for the public to start accepting the realities of quantum physics, even though many of their household gizmos and even appliances make use of them every day.
Wikis are founts of information, but they are not authorities.
That's still completely arbitrary. Essentially that's saying that if I'm not a complete drone and posting the same kinds of things all the time, I'll get flagged as Spam.
That's an even worse kind of censorship, because it is so insidious.
"It's almost therapeutic to completely suspend your disbelief every once in a while..."
True, and I completely agree with the general sentiment of what you say.
But when someone says it's real, they (not a joke) imply a warranty, and fraud charges are the frequent result.
If it is clearly stated that the service is "for entertainment purposes only", and no other claims are made, then it's a perfectly legitimate operation. It's the others that run afoul of our standards of business.
If it *IS* labeled "for entertainment only", then you can decide for yourself at what level you prefer to be entertained. Anything else, and that decision is distorted or diluted. But THEN, they can claim all the reality they want, and say later it's just part of the act, for entertainment purposes.
And anybody who is taken in by that pretty much deserves to be taken in by that. The world -- and laws -- are and should be geared toward reasonably normal and reasonably reasonable people. Anything else has always resulted in problems.
"For instance, if every SWAT team that served a questionable rubber-stamped no-knock warrant lost two or three members every time they did that, they'd start doing it a lot less."
Mod up. I sure hope it doesn't come to that, but I have to admit that at least some of them probably deserve it.
This reminds me very much of a quote from an old Jack Vance book, by some future (obviously fictitious?) government official who actually had a head on his shoulders:
"I urge you not to endorse this sinister measure.
Humanity many times has had sad experience of superpowerful police forces... As soon as (the police) slip out from under the firm thumb of a suspicious local tribune, they become arbitrary, merciless, a law unto themselves. They think no more of justice, but only of establishing themselves as a privileged and envied elite. They mistake the attitude of natural caution and uncertainty of the civilian population as admiration and respect, and presently they start to swagger back and forth, jingling their weapons in megalomaniac euphoria.
People thereupon become not masters, but servants. Such a police force becomes merely an aggregate of uniformed criminals, the more baneful in that their position
is unchallenged and sanctioned by law. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible. Public convenience or dignity means nothing; police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly overzealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, when apprehended, he is beaten or otherwise tortured for his intolerable presumption. The police complain that they cannot function efficiently, that criminals escape them. Better a hundred unchecked criminals than the despotism of one unbridled police force. Again I warn you, do not endorse this measure. If you do, I shall surely veto it."
"Everything on the internet is "opt in" access!!!"
That is, until you click on a malicious link and are taken to a site full of kiddie porn or something even worse (if there is such a thing) without your prior consent.
Note, however, that I still do not believe even that is an excuse for prior censorship. Catch the people who break those laws, but leave everybody else the hell alone. I don't need the government to tell me what I can see and what I cannot.
It is nothing of the sort. People have written that, to be sure, but their actual evidence has always been somewhere between thin and nonexistent.
If it is well-documented, perhaps you can provide us with links to some kind of unbiased double-blind study that actually tells us this? I would be interested in seeing it.
"The right wing in the U.S. these days mostly wants to reduce the power of federal government and leave you the hell alone."
Haha. Get real. You are confusing "right wing" with Libertarians.
The "small government" policies that the political Right have tried to pretend they believe in have NEVER materialized in the real world.
When the Republicans have been in power they have NEVER reduced the power of the Federal government, NEVER reduced the actual size of government, NEVER reduced overall spending (except to reduce military spending after wars were over, and not even that, most of the time). Not once, at least since the year 1900, have they EVER actually made the government smaller.
And they have NEVER left us alone. For the most part, and until very recently, they have a far worse record when it comes to Constitutional rights than the Democrats.
So you can talk about what the Right pretends its platform to be all you want, but history very clearly shows it to be nothing but rhetoric. Actually that's too polite. Bullshit is the more accurate term.
If they wanted anybody to actually believe them, they should have started putting their money where their mouths were over 50 years ago.
"You would be a martyr? I wouldn't want to go to trial or prison for refusing. Instead, I would end my business, and tell all my customers exactly why I was ending it."
Maybe ruining the economy is their actual goal. It has sure seemed that way, sometimes.
"Good idea. Perhaps this will help spawn decentralized, encrypted social networks. Something like a mixture of Diaspora and Tor would be pretty freaking sweet."
We already have them. Some of them have been around for a long time. Like FreeNet and OneSwarm. Both of which I have had for years now.
But just to be clear: either way it would definitely be no. Even if that meant going to prison. This is WAY over the top. It's un-American.
I wonder when government and law enforcement are going to get the message -- which we have been sending for a long time now -- that they have already gone too far?
"I have lots to hide. Just because it is not illegal, unethical, or immoral does not mean I do not want to hide it.
I am also do not want to spend my time complying with this kind of regulation."
All of the above. If the FBI asked me to provide a "back door" to my service, I'm not sure whether I would just tell them "NO!", or give them the answer I more feel like giving them: "F**k Off And Die!"
Jesus Christ. Do you have reading comprehension issues?
I did not say you need timing data on 30 different streams! What I stated was that if you are trying to get timing data on ONE stream, when it is being used intermittently along with 29 others, in what amounts to practically random order, then... good luck with that. Because you'll need it.
"your obligation to report it as quickly as possible once you are out of harm's way remains."
It doesn't "remain", because it never existed in the first place.
I can be detained as a witness if they know I was there, but I have no legal obligation to volunteer a damned thing. I repeat: courts have been all over this one and there simply is no such obligation.
"Because not securing your weapon in some fashion is negligent."
Leaving it in the street might be negligent, but "not securing it in some fashion" does not qualify. In my state, I can leave a loaded gun on my kitchen counter whenever I damned well please. If someone else (adult) takes it, they are solely responsible for their own actions.
Now, if I were to leave it like that where I knew it was easily accessible to a child, that might be considered negligent, even in my state.
"Correct, but if you know he's a convicted felon and you loan it to him, you are liable, because that's negligent on your part."
If he's a convicted felon who has not had his firearms rights restored (which does happen pretty often), then I am not sure about negligence, but it might be against the law. Regardless; as I was saying that is not the kind of situation to which I was originally referring.
"specifically in the UK or Germany, where the courts have held the owners liable for unsecured wifi routers being used to commit crimes."
Perhaps, in the UK or Germany. I am not familiar with their laws. I was not lying by omission, I simply wasn't considering those regions. Perhaps I should have explicitly stated that I meant the U.S., where we have laws specifically protecting the owners in such cases (such as the DMCA).
"And here again, your post doesn't consider what negligence is: Which is not taking action ahead of time when it would have been prudent to do so. Which is all my original post was about."
Your original post contained statements about that law that were simply false, at least here where I live. I repeat: in general, I have no obligation to prevent a crime, even if I know it is taking place. Further, your comments were in reference to unsecured WiFi, which is specifically protected here by law. I can leave it unsecured and not only is that NOT considered negligence, I have an absolute legal defense (as long as I was not aware in advance of any crimes being committed).
Slashdot Mirror
I should add that if you have iron pipes, you can get much of the same protection by grounding to the water pipes at the closest point to where they run underground.
That might not meet code, these days, but it used to for a very long time. And it will give you a serviceable ground.
Don't ground to your gas pipe, though. Not A Good Idea.
Ground spikes are standard procedure and have been part of building code for decades.
If you can't find an electrician to do it for you, it's not that difficult to do it yourself. Get 2 ea. 6' copper ground spikes from your local hardware or electrical supply store, and pound them in with a sledgehammer. Careful not to bend them too much in the process. They aren't iron.
Then a little bit of bare copper ground line, maybe around 3 to 4 gauge, to each spike.
It's not a difficult job at all unless your house was built on top of a giant rock. I suspect that the real issue was not the ground spike, but running the rest of the ground wires through existing walls. That is the kind of job that no electrician likes to do. When I was looking to buy a home I passed up an otherwise great price on a nice house for exactly the same reason.
Sure, I could have taken the money saved and upgraded the wiring, but it would have been so much of a pain, and caused so much temporary destruction to the interior, I decided it wasn't worth the trouble.
"But if they would just use tin foil instead of silver (really, how bourgeois) it would be a major hit."
Foil-backed wallpaper has been available for decades at least. And it probably would indeed make a good Faraday cage, as long as you grounded it and your doors were metal too.
It's not that. There are at least a couple of major issues here:
(1) The languages at the top of the Tiobe Index (even given that we can assume it has some claim to validity... I'm not so sure) are all compiled languages, or at least compilable to bytecode. Except PHP, which dominated the Web world for a long time but is sliding, and for good reasons.
(2) The languages at the top of the Tiobe index will always have distorted figures because they represent the majority of code that is already installed and being maintained, rather than new programs.
When compiled Ruby has become more mature (there are things like JRuby which is coming along nicely, and Ruby 3.0 will supposedly be compilable to bytecode) you will see an increase in its use, because then it will be more commercially viable and appropriate for desktop applications.
In the meantime, languages that have been mostly used for scripting like Ruby and Python are not used so much for business because all your code is exposed to any would-be customers. That says absolutely nothing about the features of the language itself, except that it is more difficult to compile dynamic languages.
Again, there is nothing here I disagree with, but at the same time, I think there is a legitimate case to be made for protecting the unwary or unsuspecting from charlatans.
Not all self-proclaimed "psychics" are benevolent, for example. Many of them have been exposed as scam artists who prey on the gullible. Of course, evangelists have been known to do the same... and astrologers too.
That is why I think a warning is appropriate: if you are warned that there is no scientific basis for claims of truth or efficacy, then you are (and should be) free to go ahead and do what you want. Some people will do it for fun; others will think the warnings are just hogwash by "unbelievers". There's nothing you can do about the latter anyway.
"What does this even mean?"
Hard to tell for several reasons... among them that New York Times website is broken. To would-be OPs: please don't link to articles there. When I click on a link it tells me to log in, which is fine, but then it only gives me front page, never the article referenced by the link. And then, once logged in, if I click the link again (thinking it might take me there), it tells me to log in again even though I am already logged in!. Major, and I really mean major, web fail.
But aside from that, it still doesn't mean much. "What is accepted as scientific truth" has absolutely nothing to do with what appears in the news or blog articles. What is "accepted" as scientific truth -- even though it may take a while to soak in and be accepted -- is what the actual scientists tell us.
It has taken well over 80 years for the public to start accepting the realities of quantum physics, even though many of their household gizmos and even appliances make use of them every day.
Wikis are founts of information, but they are not authorities.
That's still completely arbitrary. Essentially that's saying that if I'm not a complete drone and posting the same kinds of things all the time, I'll get flagged as Spam.
That's an even worse kind of censorship, because it is so insidious.
"It's almost therapeutic to completely suspend your disbelief every once in a while..."
True, and I completely agree with the general sentiment of what you say.
But when someone says it's real, they (not a joke) imply a warranty, and fraud charges are the frequent result.
If it is clearly stated that the service is "for entertainment purposes only", and no other claims are made, then it's a perfectly legitimate operation. It's the others that run afoul of our standards of business.
If it * IS * labeled "for entertainment only", then you can decide for yourself at what level you prefer to be entertained. Anything else, and that decision is distorted or diluted. But THEN, they can claim all the reality they want, and say later it's just part of the act, for entertainment purposes.
And anybody who is taken in by that pretty much deserves to be taken in by that. The world -- and laws -- are and should be geared toward reasonably normal and reasonably reasonable people. Anything else has always resulted in problems.
"For instance, if every SWAT team that served a questionable rubber-stamped no-knock warrant lost two or three members every time they did that, they'd start doing it a lot less."
Mod up. I sure hope it doesn't come to that, but I have to admit that at least some of them probably deserve it.
This reminds me very much of a quote from an old Jack Vance book, by some future (obviously fictitious?) government official who actually had a head on his shoulders:
"I urge you not to endorse this sinister measure. Humanity many times has had sad experience of superpowerful police forces ... As soon as (the police) slip out from under the firm thumb of a suspicious local tribune, they become arbitrary, merciless, a law unto themselves. They think no more of justice, but only of establishing themselves as a privileged and envied elite. They mistake the attitude of natural caution and uncertainty of the civilian population as admiration and respect, and presently they start to swagger back and forth, jingling their weapons in megalomaniac euphoria.
People thereupon become not masters, but servants. Such a police force becomes merely an aggregate of uniformed criminals, the more baneful in that their position is unchallenged and sanctioned by law. The police mentality cannot regard a human being in terms other than as an item or object to be processed as expeditiously as possible. Public convenience or dignity means nothing; police prerogatives assume the status of divine law. Submissiveness is demanded. If a police officer kills a civilian, it is a regrettable circumstance: the officer was possibly overzealous. If a civilian kills a police officer all hell breaks loose. The police foam at the mouth. All other business comes to a standstill until the perpetrator of this most dastardly act is found out. Inevitably, when apprehended, he is beaten or otherwise tortured for his intolerable presumption. The police complain that they cannot function efficiently, that criminals escape them. Better a hundred unchecked criminals than the despotism of one unbridled police force. Again I warn you, do not endorse this measure. If you do, I shall surely veto it."
"Grown up school yard bullies with the brains of a retarded monkey butt with Glocks..."
There. Fixed that for ya.
That's not a third solution, it is still giving in. You're just telling people WHY you're giving in.
"Everything on the internet is "opt in" access!!!"
That is, until you click on a malicious link and are taken to a site full of kiddie porn or something even worse (if there is such a thing) without your prior consent.
Note, however, that I still do not believe even that is an excuse for prior censorship. Catch the people who break those laws, but leave everybody else the hell alone. I don't need the government to tell me what I can see and what I cannot.
In the United States that is called "Prior Restraint" of speech and it is unconstitutional.
"It's well documented."
It is nothing of the sort. People have written that, to be sure, but their actual evidence has always been somewhere between thin and nonexistent.
If it is well-documented, perhaps you can provide us with links to some kind of unbiased double-blind study that actually tells us this? I would be interested in seeing it.
"The right wing in the U.S. these days mostly wants to reduce the power of federal government and leave you the hell alone."
Haha. Get real. You are confusing "right wing" with Libertarians.
The "small government" policies that the political Right have tried to pretend they believe in have NEVER materialized in the real world.
When the Republicans have been in power they have NEVER reduced the power of the Federal government, NEVER reduced the actual size of government, NEVER reduced overall spending (except to reduce military spending after wars were over, and not even that, most of the time). Not once, at least since the year 1900, have they EVER actually made the government smaller.
And they have NEVER left us alone. For the most part, and until very recently, they have a far worse record when it comes to Constitutional rights than the Democrats.
So you can talk about what the Right pretends its platform to be all you want, but history very clearly shows it to be nothing but rhetoric. Actually that's too polite. Bullshit is the more accurate term.
If they wanted anybody to actually believe them, they should have started putting their money where their mouths were over 50 years ago.
"You would be a martyr? I wouldn't want to go to trial or prison for refusing. Instead, I would end my business, and tell all my customers exactly why I was ending it."
Maybe ruining the economy is their actual goal. It has sure seemed that way, sometimes.
Not willing to stand up for your rights?
I will thank you to not reply to me again. You are the CAUSE of the problem.
"They want to save money. It's not a matter of them being able to hire the best and brightest, they want to do it for free."
No, they don't even want to do it for free. They want to do it AT YOUR EXPENSE.
No, you left out the "and die!" part.
"Not much need to re-write software to capture data since all they really want is inside your tunnels."
There, FTFY. They want inside. There is no genuine need.
"Good idea. Perhaps this will help spawn decentralized, encrypted social networks. Something like a mixture of Diaspora and Tor would be pretty freaking sweet."
We already have them. Some of them have been around for a long time. Like FreeNet and OneSwarm. Both of which I have had for years now.
But just to be clear: either way it would definitely be no. Even if that meant going to prison. This is WAY over the top. It's un-American.
I wonder when government and law enforcement are going to get the message -- which we have been sending for a long time now -- that they have already gone too far?
"I have lots to hide. Just because it is not illegal, unethical, or immoral does not mean I do not want to hide it.
I am also do not want to spend my time complying with this kind of regulation."
All of the above. If the FBI asked me to provide a "back door" to my service, I'm not sure whether I would just tell them "NO!", or give them the answer I more feel like giving them: "F**k Off And Die!"
Jesus Christ. Do you have reading comprehension issues?
I did not say you need timing data on 30 different streams! What I stated was that if you are trying to get timing data on ONE stream, when it is being used intermittently along with 29 others, in what amounts to practically random order, then... good luck with that. Because you'll need it.
"your obligation to report it as quickly as possible once you are out of harm's way remains."
It doesn't "remain", because it never existed in the first place.
I can be detained as a witness if they know I was there, but I have no legal obligation to volunteer a damned thing. I repeat: courts have been all over this one and there simply is no such obligation.
"Because not securing your weapon in some fashion is negligent."
Leaving it in the street might be negligent, but "not securing it in some fashion" does not qualify. In my state, I can leave a loaded gun on my kitchen counter whenever I damned well please. If someone else (adult) takes it, they are solely responsible for their own actions.
Now, if I were to leave it like that where I knew it was easily accessible to a child, that might be considered negligent, even in my state.
"Correct, but if you know he's a convicted felon and you loan it to him, you are liable, because that's negligent on your part."
If he's a convicted felon who has not had his firearms rights restored (which does happen pretty often), then I am not sure about negligence, but it might be against the law. Regardless; as I was saying that is not the kind of situation to which I was originally referring.
"specifically in the UK or Germany, where the courts have held the owners liable for unsecured wifi routers being used to commit crimes."
Perhaps, in the UK or Germany. I am not familiar with their laws. I was not lying by omission, I simply wasn't considering those regions. Perhaps I should have explicitly stated that I meant the U.S., where we have laws specifically protecting the owners in such cases (such as the DMCA).
"And here again, your post doesn't consider what negligence is: Which is not taking action ahead of time when it would have been prudent to do so. Which is all my original post was about."
Your original post contained statements about that law that were simply false, at least here where I live. I repeat: in general, I have no obligation to prevent a crime, even if I know it is taking place. Further, your comments were in reference to unsecured WiFi, which is specifically protected here by law. I can leave it unsecured and not only is that NOT considered negligence, I have an absolute legal defense (as long as I was not aware in advance of any crimes being committed).