Yeah. Randi doesn't have any degrees that I know of, and I don't know how much actual scientific knowledge he has, but he's a near expert on the scientific method and pointing out failures, either deliberate or accidental, of it.
There's a difference between believing something is wrong and pointing out, by it's own definitions, something is illogical.
Homeopathy assumes that substances can continue to affect water after they aren't there. Not only does this go against several hundred years of scientific testing, it's also unsupported by any physical theory of the universe.
But, perhaps more important, it makes no goddamn sense out of homeopathy! If they do continue to affect things, you're basically screwed, because homeopathy provides absolutely no way to 'reset' water, and hence all water that exists is infinitely fully of random crap!
And, no, it's not 'the last thing'. During homeopathy, you dilute what you're working with...with water that you, and everyone else, has no idea of the 'homeopathic history' of.
Until homeopathy addresses this point, or the point that when you make a liquid in a container you will end up with measurable amounts of that container and stirring instrument in the liquid (Which logically sdhould greatly effect the result.), it's not even worth pretending it's some sort of science.
Scientifically, it's sorta like asserting that you have a device that lets you walk through walls...until you can come up with some rational sounding reason it doesn't make you fall through floors, we shouldn't really even talk to you, as you're obviously a loon. Only scientific theories that are vaguely consistent with themselves in some manner are worth testing, ones that aren't are obviously wrong from the start. (They have, in effect, failed their own test.)
And as homeopathic quacks completely refuse to do any sort of double-blind experiment, they aren't medicine either.
The greenhouse effect in general isn't the slightest questionable. Otherwise the damn planet would catch on fire, because it would just get hotter and hotter. (Because the planet loses almost no heat in any manner except radiation.)
There's no explanation of the temperature of the planet and atmosphere except via the greenhouse effect. The surface must be emitting infrared and the upper atmosphere must be intercepting some, but not all, of that. (In addition to incoming radiation.) Otherwise our temperature make no sense at all.
Hell, we can see the process when it fails, just look at Venus. The atmosphere got too reflective, which reduced radiation hitting the planet, but sadly also reduced radiation escaping, so it just sort of built up.
We know the temperature of the atmospheric system can't be explained solely by light hitting the earth with just heat moving outward from there. That wouldn't give us warm enough air at ground level, much less the temperature we see a mile up in the air.
You can argue there are specific parts we don't understand, like how much different parts of the atmosphere work, but saying that it's 'never been proven' is idiotic. It is the best atmospheric theory we have. Hell, it's the only one we have.
Acupuncture 'works' because it gets your body to release natural painkillers, even when it's done in such a manner as to not cause any pain. It's a neat trick, actually. A sort of paradoxical pain.
And endorphines can help with various problems, from pain to mild depression.
But drinking some hot sauce does the same thing. As does riding a bumpy rollercoaster. There's a lot of things people can do to trick their body into going 'Crap, I've been injured, better stop the pain' when there's actually no physical pain, or at least no physical harm.
And there's no indication it can help with any problem outside of pain and mental stuff.
There is nothing a good chiropractor can do that a good massage therapist couldn't. The difference is that one of them isn't pretending to be a medical expert and charging you for x-rays they can't read.
I used to go to Southern Polytechnic State University, a college that is backed up against Life University, a college (possible the college) to churn out chiropractors, and a lot of people at my school had fun debunking chiropracy in their spare time. Sadly, I left before Life University got unaccredited, that must have provided a lot of laughs at SPSU.
I don't know why big companies decided to purchase companies instead of specific products, but it's pretty damn stupid and annoying. If you want a game, buy the game. Don't buy a company with five games and use one of them, delay another one years and then never release it, and just ignore the other three.
The only reason that this is an issue is that we insist on doing all the elections on the same damn piece of paper. (Or the same computer.)
It would be trivially easy to have a single ballot per congressional district (Which includes federal stuff and state stuff, as congressional districts do not cross state lines.), a single county ballot, and a single city ballot, and count them all by hand.
Alternately we could print a single state/federal ballot and a congressional district ballot, but as the second literally would have one question on it, it would seem sorta silly. We could print the same format district ballot, though, and have merely make the last question just have different names about who to elect as Representitive.
And some state, of course, only have one congressional district.
Instead we end up printing insanely wacky things as congressional district cut counties and cities in half. That's half the problem standing in the way or reform, right there...all the little precincts with different ballots.
...hates how Microsoft buys companies and then destroys half their product lines?
It's not just FASA, I don't really know much about them. The one that really pissed me off was Access Software, which MS bought for the fricking golf game, incidentally destroying the Tex Murphy franchise.
I understand, and am resigned to, Microsoft buying and/or destroying competitors. What really pisses me off is when they decide to purchase and then sit on intellectual property, like I am sure they are about to do with FASA's licenses, simply because they think it won't make them high enough profits but are too fucking lazy to sell it, despite the fact it has nothing to do with any of their core business.
But now you have to upload the individual tracks (using the Oboe program to sync). It's good and I use it, but it's a lot of time and bandwidth uploading tracks that are often going to be exact duplicates of files already on their system so I can see how his original idea could have seemed appealing (to both the end-user, their ISP and the service).
What he should do is super-compress them, with, and this is the key, a changable-but-not-included table. If you don't know what I mean, compression programs, at their simplest, replace repeated lengths of bytes with a single reference, and then put that string of bytes in a lookup table.
But considering songs have known content, he can do it perfectly.
I.e, say you want to upload a song off a CD. What the program could do is grab the song, lookup the CDDA information, ask for it on a server, which would send the client the perfect compression table for that sound, which would consist of...exactly one entry: The entire content of the song, and the number '1'.
The client would then upload the song, using the amazing compression, by sending the number '1' to the server, and a reference to the table it used. Tada. And it could be stored on the server like that, as one bit.
Or, if they want to make sure that someone can't grab that table and pull the song out of it, they can chop the song into 65536 pieces and assign them the labels randomly, and then the client has to match them to the right pieces and upload the compressed 65k result.
Yeah, I'm being a little silly, but it's not actually me, it's the RIAA with their rational for shutting down mp3.com. Instead of uploading every song, you have to download every song, but most people have asymetical connections, and legally, a distinction between this and uploading using real compression is meaningless.
There are two parts there. You can non-fraudulently pretend all you want, and charge for it.
You can even fool people with the pretending, but if you do that, then you can't charge.
I.e, you can pretend you have psychic powers, you can charge to demonstrate these psychic powers, and you can fool people into thinking you have psychic powers, you just can't do all three at the same time.(1)
So if you're pretending you can fool people for free, or charge them with them understand it's a trick. (Charging them to see a magic act where you guess their card, for example.)
I was just pointing out that, according to the law, if you're not pretending, if you are an actual psychic, you actually can charge people who believe you're a psychic, thus asserting that fake-psychicness is against the law in Canada is not that useful to demonstrating that someone is a fake.
It doesn't mean they're a liar, it means they're either a liar or a real psychic, but considering they asserted they were a real psychic from the start, you already know they're a liar or a real psychic.
1) Which also means that you can charge people who you've fooled into thinking you have psychic powers without you actually 'pretending', or least claiming, you actually have them. Which is how 'psychics' in the phone book get away with it. They are careful to never assert they can actually see the future or find lost objects, so if you go to them expecting that to happen, that's your problem.
Likewise, GM made my car, but you wouldn't see me crying and suing GM if a faulty gas line caught the gas tank on fire and the car explodes killing everyone in the backseat. Cause I know that without GM, I wouldn't even have a car!
Imagine someone finding an envelope on the ground beside your car, and in order for it not to blow away, they stick it under your wipers. That does not make it yours.
And imagine they found it on the ground and walked up to you, claiming it was theirs, and gave it to you.
Something doesn't become theft on your part because someone gave something to you they didn't have the right to. It's stolen property, but unknowingly possessing or using stolen property is not a crime.
You have to to give it back, but you can operate as if it's yours until them. Otherwise, all transfers of ownership would be impossible, because you'd have to go and check if they actually owned the property, and then if the person they got it from actually owned it, and so on back.
More to the point, the legality of a property transfer has nothing to do with the method of one. Except where there are explicit laws about the transfer, like a house or a car.
If a meter wench put clamps on your wheels, they do not then automatically belong to you.
No shit, Sherlock. Did the big 'Property of The City' on it clue you in there? There's a reason they put that on there, you know.
He found unlabeled boxes attached to his car. He called the police, he asked if the boxes were theirs. They were not. (At least, according to the police, and, obviously, they'd know.)
And if someone welds a can of caltraps under the rear bumper of your car (to be shook loose at random), you can not be held responsible for accidents that's caused by them.
You can't be held responsible for something you had no cause to know about, but that's entirely unrelated to whether or not it's your property. If they stole a box of nails out of your front seat and stuck them under your bumper, or just unattached your bumper and made it fall off, you aren't liable either. (Assuming the facts are not in question.)
And no, if a burglar drops his wallet with $1,000 on your floor, that doesn't make the money yours. He may be guilty of a crime, but that doesn't give you any rights to what's not yours.
Which is why I made the distinction between 'attached' and not attached. Sometimes things fall on or in your property. That does not make them yours. (Unless they are vegetation, which oddly enough is yours in most places.)
And sometimes things are left on your property, for you, and they are in fact yours.
It's all what a reasonable person would think. A reasonable person assumes a wallet laying on the ground is not for him (Even in his own house), whereas a reasonable person would assume an unlabeled envelope taped to his door full of cash is for him, even if he can think of no reason why this would be.(1) However, sitting in his front lawn, nope, not for him.
Likewise, if you're parked in a parking lot and walk up and see a cooler full of soda sitting on your car, it's reasonable to assume some ass is just using your car as a table and that is not, in fact, a gift.
And if you walk out and see something stuck under your wipers?(2) That is pretty clearly someone leaving you something on purpose.
In other words, while something simply being on your property doesn't make it yours (And I didn't say it did.), it doesn't mean it's not yours. Transfer of ownership can be implied by leaving something for someone.
It happens all the time with delivery people, or people leaving things in mailboxes. (According to postal regulations, things that enter the postal system are property of the recipient.) Or, like I said, things stuck under wipers.
He checked to see if the police had left it, which would be the only people that reasonable would attach things to his car not as a gift, and it wasn't them.
Now, if someone else shows up and claims it's theirs and the left it attached to his car by accident, he might be in trouble, but as it pretty obviously is the police's, only they would have grounds for complaint. And they can't because they said it wasn't theirs, leaving the obvious implication it was his.
1) Well, it might be on the wrong house, but that doesn't really apply to this case.
2) And that raises an interesting question. Are you honestly asserting that people can't legally claim ownership of pieces of paper stuck under their wipers? And before you say 'Paper is valueless', let's postulate it is an 85 dollar concert ticket.
I don't know why anyone would announce where they were getting the listings from. Write a scrapper that, each day, goes out to whatever site is used and pages through the farthest-away day, inserting random delays like real users.
You only need to collect the cable channels once, or once for each time zone. Local is a bit trickier, it would be best to find the 'biggest' cable provider you can. (Cable providers between major cities often include both cities' local channels.)
There's really no way to detect it, barring tricks like randomly giving out slightly wrong data to different IPs and sees which one ends up in the end result.
The whole concept is just idiotic anyway. Television networks should provide free listings of their shows, which they do anyway on their websites. If they'd just spend a damn week making some sort of RSS format or something, it'd all be over. (Or use the XML format xap2it was using.)
And cable and sat providers would lump all feeds from their various stations into a single one. And I suspect in most major cities someone would set up a website listing the dozen or so URLs that the broadcast channels use, or even put them together for you in one file.
It's not like it would be a lot of damn bandwidth. You don't need to check them more than once a day. Hell, once a week is enough for PVRs, if there are two weeks of data.
You can non-fraudulently pretend all you want. Actors, for example, do it all the time. You can even fool people if you want.
You just can't, in any manner, charge for it.
However, you're right, this doesn't alter the fact that a psychic could, indeed, work for the police in Canada if he was actually a psychic, which I'm sure this guy asserted he was. So I'm not sure what pointing out the law is supposed to accomplish except that if he was working with the police, he must be a real psychic.
If someone leaves something on the edge of your land, sure, just like if someone leaves something on top of your car.
But that's not this situation. Someone clearly intended for him to take possession of it, it wasn't some accident or situation where they couldn't move it any further. It's like someone erecting a shed on your lawn or leaving an envelope full of money taped to your door. It was a deliberate attaching of their property to yours, and the safe assumption is that it was some sort of gift.
While you're being facetious, if you do find something securely attached to your car, (Not just sitting on it, which could have been set there temporarily, actually attached to the car.) it is in fact yours unless someone can step forward and claims it.
Someone clearly intended for you to take possession of it, it's like if you open your front door and find a box sitting there without any text on it and a toaster inside. Unless you are informed otherwise, it is clearly some sort of gift, and you can operate on that assumption until then.
More to the point, why don't pacemakers and breast implants cause cancer?
Inert things inside the human body that are significantly larger than cells do not cause cancer. They might cause immune responses if the 'inert' material is poorly chosen, but they do not cause cancer, and there's another Nobel price waiting for anyone to demonstrate different.
Of course, particulates like asbestos and soot can cause cancer if they are in the body, like if they end up getting pulled into lung tissue. They interfere at the cellular level. And even larger things moving around in the body are dangerous and can cause aneurysm and whatnot, just ask people with air bubbles in their blood.
But anything big enough to see in the human body made of glass or certain plastics, anything that will not flake off, is not dangerous in and of itself, and so we must conclude that, in some way, either RFID manufacturers are idiots and used the wrong materials or it's the radio aspect that's causing cancer.
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No, no, no, they dilute the compost so much there's nothing left.
Aka, they use normal tap water.
Hey, wait, I think I screwed up that joke.
Yeah. Randi doesn't have any degrees that I know of, and I don't know how much actual scientific knowledge he has, but he's a near expert on the scientific method and pointing out failures, either deliberate or accidental, of it.
There's a difference between believing something is wrong and pointing out, by it's own definitions, something is illogical.
Homeopathy assumes that substances can continue to affect water after they aren't there. Not only does this go against several hundred years of scientific testing, it's also unsupported by any physical theory of the universe.
But, perhaps more important, it makes no goddamn sense out of homeopathy! If they do continue to affect things, you're basically screwed, because homeopathy provides absolutely no way to 'reset' water, and hence all water that exists is infinitely fully of random crap!
And, no, it's not 'the last thing'. During homeopathy, you dilute what you're working with...with water that you, and everyone else, has no idea of the 'homeopathic history' of.
Until homeopathy addresses this point, or the point that when you make a liquid in a container you will end up with measurable amounts of that container and stirring instrument in the liquid (Which logically sdhould greatly effect the result.), it's not even worth pretending it's some sort of science.
Scientifically, it's sorta like asserting that you have a device that lets you walk through walls...until you can come up with some rational sounding reason it doesn't make you fall through floors, we shouldn't really even talk to you, as you're obviously a loon. Only scientific theories that are vaguely consistent with themselves in some manner are worth testing, ones that aren't are obviously wrong from the start. (They have, in effect, failed their own test.)
And as homeopathic quacks completely refuse to do any sort of double-blind experiment, they aren't medicine either.
I don't actually know there's been any scientific research done into phrenology. For all anyone knows, it may, in fact, be correct.
Of course, as absolutely no one believes it anymore, it's doubtful anyone will bother to test it.
What the hell are you talking about?
The greenhouse effect in general isn't the slightest questionable. Otherwise the damn planet would catch on fire, because it would just get hotter and hotter. (Because the planet loses almost no heat in any manner except radiation.)
There's no explanation of the temperature of the planet and atmosphere except via the greenhouse effect. The surface must be emitting infrared and the upper atmosphere must be intercepting some, but not all, of that. (In addition to incoming radiation.) Otherwise our temperature make no sense at all.
Hell, we can see the process when it fails, just look at Venus. The atmosphere got too reflective, which reduced radiation hitting the planet, but sadly also reduced radiation escaping, so it just sort of built up.
We know the temperature of the atmospheric system can't be explained solely by light hitting the earth with just heat moving outward from there. That wouldn't give us warm enough air at ground level, much less the temperature we see a mile up in the air.
You can argue there are specific parts we don't understand, like how much different parts of the atmosphere work, but saying that it's 'never been proven' is idiotic. It is the best atmospheric theory we have. Hell, it's the only one we have.
Acupuncture 'works' because it gets your body to release natural painkillers, even when it's done in such a manner as to not cause any pain. It's a neat trick, actually. A sort of paradoxical pain.
And endorphines can help with various problems, from pain to mild depression.
But drinking some hot sauce does the same thing. As does riding a bumpy rollercoaster. There's a lot of things people can do to trick their body into going 'Crap, I've been injured, better stop the pain' when there's actually no physical pain, or at least no physical harm.
And there's no indication it can help with any problem outside of pain and mental stuff.
With the placebo effect, it's worth mentioning that would happen at a real doctor too.
I.e., it doesn't even vaguely count as an 'advantage'.
There is nothing a good chiropractor can do that a good massage therapist couldn't. The difference is that one of them isn't pretending to be a medical expert and charging you for x-rays they can't read.
I used to go to Southern Polytechnic State University, a college that is backed up against Life University, a college (possible the college) to churn out chiropractors, and a lot of people at my school had fun debunking chiropracy in their spare time. Sadly, I left before Life University got unaccredited, that must have provided a lot of laughs at SPSU.
Oh, sure, EA's just as bad, if not worse.
I don't know why big companies decided to purchase companies instead of specific products, but it's pretty damn stupid and annoying. If you want a game, buy the game. Don't buy a company with five games and use one of them, delay another one years and then never release it, and just ignore the other three.
The only reason that this is an issue is that we insist on doing all the elections on the same damn piece of paper. (Or the same computer.)
It would be trivially easy to have a single ballot per congressional district (Which includes federal stuff and state stuff, as congressional districts do not cross state lines.), a single county ballot, and a single city ballot, and count them all by hand.
Alternately we could print a single state/federal ballot and a congressional district ballot, but as the second literally would have one question on it, it would seem sorta silly. We could print the same format district ballot, though, and have merely make the last question just have different names about who to elect as Representitive.
And some state, of course, only have one congressional district.
Instead we end up printing insanely wacky things as congressional district cut counties and cities in half. That's half the problem standing in the way or reform, right there...all the little precincts with different ballots.
...hates how Microsoft buys companies and then destroys half their product lines?
It's not just FASA, I don't really know much about them. The one that really pissed me off was Access Software, which MS bought for the fricking golf game, incidentally destroying the Tex Murphy franchise.
I understand, and am resigned to, Microsoft buying and/or destroying competitors. What really pisses me off is when they decide to purchase and then sit on intellectual property, like I am sure they are about to do with FASA's licenses, simply because they think it won't make them high enough profits but are too fucking lazy to sell it, despite the fact it has nothing to do with any of their core business.
Yeah, he'll be laughing all the way to the bank like he did with Lindows.
But now you have to upload the individual tracks (using the Oboe program to sync). It's good and I use it, but it's a lot of time and bandwidth uploading tracks that are often going to be exact duplicates of files already on their system so I can see how his original idea could have seemed appealing (to both the end-user, their ISP and the service).
What he should do is super-compress them, with, and this is the key, a changable-but-not-included table. If you don't know what I mean, compression programs, at their simplest, replace repeated lengths of bytes with a single reference, and then put that string of bytes in a lookup table.
But considering songs have known content, he can do it perfectly.
I.e, say you want to upload a song off a CD. What the program could do is grab the song, lookup the CDDA information, ask for it on a server, which would send the client the perfect compression table for that sound, which would consist of...exactly one entry: The entire content of the song, and the number '1'.
The client would then upload the song, using the amazing compression, by sending the number '1' to the server, and a reference to the table it used. Tada. And it could be stored on the server like that, as one bit.
Or, if they want to make sure that someone can't grab that table and pull the song out of it, they can chop the song into 65536 pieces and assign them the labels randomly, and then the client has to match them to the right pieces and upload the compressed 65k result.
Yeah, I'm being a little silly, but it's not actually me, it's the RIAA with their rational for shutting down mp3.com. Instead of uploading every song, you have to download every song, but most people have asymetical connections, and legally, a distinction between this and uploading using real compression is meaningless.
I could have sworn we knew this was where dyslexic came from, that you see two letters that don't end up in the right order in your head.
There are two parts there. You can non-fraudulently pretend all you want, and charge for it.
You can even fool people with the pretending, but if you do that, then you can't charge.
I.e, you can pretend you have psychic powers, you can charge to demonstrate these psychic powers, and you can fool people into thinking you have psychic powers, you just can't do all three at the same time.(1)
So if you're pretending you can fool people for free, or charge them with them understand it's a trick. (Charging them to see a magic act where you guess their card, for example.)
I was just pointing out that, according to the law, if you're not pretending, if you are an actual psychic, you actually can charge people who believe you're a psychic, thus asserting that fake-psychicness is against the law in Canada is not that useful to demonstrating that someone is a fake.
It doesn't mean they're a liar, it means they're either a liar or a real psychic, but considering they asserted they were a real psychic from the start, you already know they're a liar or a real psychic.
1) Which also means that you can charge people who you've fooled into thinking you have psychic powers without you actually 'pretending', or least claiming, you actually have them. Which is how 'psychics' in the phone book get away with it. They are careful to never assert they can actually see the future or find lost objects, so if you go to them expecting that to happen, that's your problem.
Likewise, GM made my car, but you wouldn't see me crying and suing GM if a faulty gas line caught the gas tank on fire and the car explodes killing everyone in the backseat. Cause I know that without GM, I wouldn't even have a car!
What are you talking about? I've never heard of them getting paid for this.
Imagine someone finding an envelope on the ground beside your car, and in order for it not to blow away, they stick it under your wipers. That does not make it yours.
And imagine they found it on the ground and walked up to you, claiming it was theirs, and gave it to you.
Something doesn't become theft on your part because someone gave something to you they didn't have the right to. It's stolen property, but unknowingly possessing or using stolen property is not a crime.
You have to to give it back, but you can operate as if it's yours until them. Otherwise, all transfers of ownership would be impossible, because you'd have to go and check if they actually owned the property, and then if the person they got it from actually owned it, and so on back.
More to the point, the legality of a property transfer has nothing to do with the method of one. Except where there are explicit laws about the transfer, like a house or a car.
If a meter wench put clamps on your wheels, they do not then automatically belong to you.
No shit, Sherlock. Did the big 'Property of The City' on it clue you in there? There's a reason they put that on there, you know.
He found unlabeled boxes attached to his car. He called the police, he asked if the boxes were theirs. They were not. (At least, according to the police, and, obviously, they'd know.)
And if someone welds a can of caltraps under the rear bumper of your car (to be shook loose at random), you can not be held responsible for accidents that's caused by them.
You can't be held responsible for something you had no cause to know about, but that's entirely unrelated to whether or not it's your property. If they stole a box of nails out of your front seat and stuck them under your bumper, or just unattached your bumper and made it fall off, you aren't liable either. (Assuming the facts are not in question.)
And no, if a burglar drops his wallet with $1,000 on your floor, that doesn't make the money yours. He may be guilty of a crime, but that doesn't give you any rights to what's not yours.
Which is why I made the distinction between 'attached' and not attached. Sometimes things fall on or in your property. That does not make them yours. (Unless they are vegetation, which oddly enough is yours in most places.)
And sometimes things are left on your property, for you, and they are in fact yours.
It's all what a reasonable person would think. A reasonable person assumes a wallet laying on the ground is not for him (Even in his own house), whereas a reasonable person would assume an unlabeled envelope taped to his door full of cash is for him, even if he can think of no reason why this would be.(1) However, sitting in his front lawn, nope, not for him.
Likewise, if you're parked in a parking lot and walk up and see a cooler full of soda sitting on your car, it's reasonable to assume some ass is just using your car as a table and that is not, in fact, a gift.
And if you walk out and see something stuck under your wipers?(2) That is pretty clearly someone leaving you something on purpose.
In other words, while something simply being on your property doesn't make it yours (And I didn't say it did.), it doesn't mean it's not yours. Transfer of ownership can be implied by leaving something for someone.
It happens all the time with delivery people, or people leaving things in mailboxes. (According to postal regulations, things that enter the postal system are property of the recipient.) Or, like I said, things stuck under wipers.
He checked to see if the police had left it, which would be the only people that reasonable would attach things to his car not as a gift, and it wasn't them.
Now, if someone else shows up and claims it's theirs and the left it attached to his car by accident, he might be in trouble, but as it pretty obviously is the police's, only they would have grounds for complaint. And they can't because they said it wasn't theirs, leaving the obvious implication it was his.
1) Well, it might be on the wrong house, but that doesn't really apply to this case.
2) And that raises an interesting question. Are you honestly asserting that people can't legally claim ownership of pieces of paper stuck under their wipers? And before you say 'Paper is valueless', let's postulate it is an 85 dollar concert ticket.
Yeah, if they knew you were doing it.
I don't know why anyone would announce where they were getting the listings from. Write a scrapper that, each day, goes out to whatever site is used and pages through the farthest-away day, inserting random delays like real users.
You only need to collect the cable channels once, or once for each time zone. Local is a bit trickier, it would be best to find the 'biggest' cable provider you can. (Cable providers between major cities often include both cities' local channels.)
There's really no way to detect it, barring tricks like randomly giving out slightly wrong data to different IPs and sees which one ends up in the end result.
The whole concept is just idiotic anyway. Television networks should provide free listings of their shows, which they do anyway on their websites. If they'd just spend a damn week making some sort of RSS format or something, it'd all be over. (Or use the XML format xap2it was using.)
And cable and sat providers would lump all feeds from their various stations into a single one. And I suspect in most major cities someone would set up a website listing the dozen or so URLs that the broadcast channels use, or even put them together for you in one file.
It's not like it would be a lot of damn bandwidth. You don't need to check them more than once a day. Hell, once a week is enough for PVRs, if there are two weeks of data.
You can non-fraudulently pretend all you want. Actors, for example, do it all the time. You can even fool people if you want.
You just can't, in any manner, charge for it.
However, you're right, this doesn't alter the fact that a psychic could, indeed, work for the police in Canada if he was actually a psychic, which I'm sure this guy asserted he was. So I'm not sure what pointing out the law is supposed to accomplish except that if he was working with the police, he must be a real psychic.
If someone leaves something on the edge of your land, sure, just like if someone leaves something on top of your car.
But that's not this situation. Someone clearly intended for him to take possession of it, it wasn't some accident or situation where they couldn't move it any further. It's like someone erecting a shed on your lawn or leaving an envelope full of money taped to your door. It was a deliberate attaching of their property to yours, and the safe assumption is that it was some sort of gift.
While you're being facetious, if you do find something securely attached to your car, (Not just sitting on it, which could have been set there temporarily, actually attached to the car.) it is in fact yours unless someone can step forward and claims it.
Someone clearly intended for you to take possession of it, it's like if you open your front door and find a box sitting there without any text on it and a toaster inside. Unless you are informed otherwise, it is clearly some sort of gift, and you can operate on that assumption until then.
Really? Pets don't have the skill to remove their nametags? That's certainly an interesting claim.
More to the point, why don't pacemakers and breast implants cause cancer?
Inert things inside the human body that are significantly larger than cells do not cause cancer. They might cause immune responses if the 'inert' material is poorly chosen, but they do not cause cancer, and there's another Nobel price waiting for anyone to demonstrate different.
Of course, particulates like asbestos and soot can cause cancer if they are in the body, like if they end up getting pulled into lung tissue. They interfere at the cellular level. And even larger things moving around in the body are dangerous and can cause aneurysm and whatnot, just ask people with air bubbles in their blood.
But anything big enough to see in the human body made of glass or certain plastics, anything that will not flake off, is not dangerous in and of itself, and so we must conclude that, in some way, either RFID manufacturers are idiots and used the wrong materials or it's the radio aspect that's causing cancer.