Where the fuck is the "comprehensive jobs plan" Obama's been talking about
You mean the 2009 stimulus, which the Republicans threatened to fillibuster unless most of the jobs stuff was removed? (Although there's still enough jobs stuff in there that's it's still creating jobs.)
Or the 'jobs through infrastructure' plan in 2010, which the Republicans rejected?
But, um, if you're talking about his current jobs plan....try watching TV two days from now?
I agree with you about Obama's idiotic health care stuff. He 'pre-compromised' away 90% of the ground. He should have started with proposing to nationalize the entire medical industry, and compromised to single payer, or, if worse came to worse, a public option.
Instead, he not only started with crap, and ended up with even bigger crap, he let them rig it where it wouldn't start for years.
This capacity is nowhere near reached currently, and if it was, it has the somewhat trivially solution of making another ten minute trip back to get more mail.
Pretending it would take another set of trucks and delivery people to deliver twice as much mail to the same addresses is just idiotic. There might be a very small set of dense urban routes that are near the carrying capacity of delivery, (At which point, like I said, they have to make a small detour to get more) but generally mail delivery people are limited by distance and number of stops, not whether they have 200 or 400 pounds of mail in their truck.
The amount of delivered mail is rather trivial. The time consuming part is going to each mailbox and delivering it. They have an entire vehicle to put mail in.
I've always thought they should make things easier by simply stopping delivery to each 'address'. Buy a bunch of 10 locking mailboxes, like you see at malls, stick them at the end of the street, and give people the key to theirs.
No shit, and the asshats did that to me. I ordered something using UPS, and UPS handed it over to USPS to deliver to my street address.
I don't have a mailbox. I have a PO box for postal mail.
And, apparently, USPS won't deliver any mail without a mailbox (Not even packages that wouldn't fit in said mailbox), so it went back to the post office, within ten feet of my post office box, and bounced all the way back to the sender.
Look, you idiots writing shipping systems. You already know that you have to be willing to ship using the USPS for post office boxes, and you're smart enough to use that.
Well, you're going to have to start fucking providing the reverse option, or at least tell people you're going to use the USPS for the last mile. Because some of us live at places that the USPS won't deliver to, you goddamn idiots. You can't just transparently switch over to them without warning us.
I've gotten around the problem by switching my address to my PO box, at least for places where that's free or the same cost. That actually costs the sender more money, they use the post office the entire way, but I'm forced to do that until idiots figure out that you can't just randomly hand things to the post office and assume every street address can get mail.
When I went to speak to the post office about this idiocy (And I don't want to imply is is their fault that people hand them undeliverable packages, they were just the only people I could easily talk to.), they said I could cheat and use an invalid address that had my PO box on the second line of the address, and sometimes the mail carrier, when they noticed that I didn't have a mailbox, would redirect the mail there. Yeah, I don't do 'sometimes' delivery of my packages, and that hack only works because my PO and street are in the same zip.
Or I could buy a mailbox...but I don't want a mailbox. I don't want to get mail at my mailbox. I pay for a damn post office box, and drive over there every day for the privilege of not having to worry about people stealing my mail from my mailbox. (Packages from FedEx and UPS, OTOH, get left out of sight in my carport. Whereas I suspect packages delivered by USPS would get left at my mailbox.)
I've always wondered why the USPS didn't set up an email system that had a box for each street address, and have people get passwords by email...so you could confirm your address by possession of such an email address.
Or even normal person validation? Perhaps I want to confirm the person I'm conversing with halfway across the country really exists? Well, why don't I give him an email address, and he can go to a kiosk at the post office, hold up his driver's license, have a picture taken, punch in my email, and it will send me a digitally signed picture.
Or, hell, how about an escrow service? Make it where people can send a package to a post office somewhere, and to pick it up, the recipient has to pay $X to the post office, which then sticks a check to the sender in the mail. (This is how I used to imagine COD worked when I was a kid, before finding out it basically doesn't exist.)
The fact that there are post offices everywhere gets them in on the ground floor of all sorts of services that are not actually commercially viable for anyone else.
And, as you pointed out, they could have done electronic bill payment before anyone accepted it, simply by printing out a money order each month and delivering it with the mail. They could have done it without bank support or biller support, back in 1980 or whenever people started getting credit cards.
There's lots of stuff USPS could get into, and doesn't. This is because there are laws about what it can and can't do...and no one seems to care it is collapsing, because most of the things it does aren't useful, and the one part that is useful (rural delivery to the entire country) is being overused by its competitors.
Look, we need to accept that the post office cannot make enough to keep running doing what it's doing, and either let it do more, or subsides it. (No, letting third parties operate it is not a solution.)
I'm pretty certain there's some sort of US constitutional legal theory stopping people from being charged by both the state and the Feds for the same crime.
Of course, you can be charged with crimes for committing crimes. That actually happens a lot with the mafia, as RICO is a law which forbids other types of crime done in a systematic way (Or perhaps a better word is 'organized', as that is the sort of crime it is aimed at), including state crimes.
You collect protection money from one place, it's just extortion, a state crime. You collect it from five, it's multiple counts of extortion (obviously) and a Federal RICO violation for committing multiple counts of extortion.
Basically, as I understand it, the constitutional premise is that you can't be charged with multiple crimes for the same action. They can't charge someone with murder and manslaughter for the same killing, that is double jeopardy. They can't charge someone at different levels, like state and local or state and federal, that's also double jeopardy. Basically, they are only allowed to have one trial to determine the guilt or innocence of you committing a specific action. (RICO, OTOH, is charging you with the crime of being found guilty of multiple crimes.)
However, I think you are right to some extent about 'sovereigns', as I seem to recall some sort of legal argument allowing two separate states to charge someone with a single crime. Double jeopardy doesn't allow multiple charges 'vertically', but it might allow it 'horizontally'. I don't think anyone's tested it, though, as situations like that are fairly rare.
Although it is advised not to shoot people across the border, because Germany will charge and arrest you also. If you commit a crime involving two sovereign jurisdictions, you can be charged in one, serve your sentence and then be extradited and charged in the other for the exact same action. Hence it's a pretty stupid way to 'avoid' anything.
Technically, if the bullet passed Switzerland on the way, you could be charged there also. Seriously. If part of a crime happens in a country, they are under no obligation to ignore it just because another part happened somewhere else, or even that you've been arrested, charged, tried, and served your sentence for it somewhere else. You do any part of 'killing someone' in their country, they can arrest you for 'killing someone'.
I put 'sovereign' up there in quotes, because I think this doesn't apply to US states, just actual countries. Two states can't charge you for the same action. Under US law, that would count as 'double jeopardy'.
The US would, however, have no problem with itself and Canada charging you for the same crime. It's only forbidden for the US itself charging someone twice.
I really don't understand what you're trying to say there. If you want to assert the TIA has no actual firmware in it, that is fine, and perhaps true, I have no idea. As the system itself has no BIOS, it is entirely possible there is no video BIOS either.
But if it has no ROM, then the emulator can't be 'using' it. Uh, duh.
And I don't know why you decided that 'cloning' has to do with anything. Emulators do not 'clone'. Emulators 'emulate'. You can tell because they're called called emulators, not clones. The software is emulating the functionality of the TIA.
The lawsuit, and patents, really doesn't have anything to do with that. Pretty much all console patents are for specific tricks to make hardware work slightly better, and do not apply to software emulating the results of those tricks in the slightest. Patents are for methods, a specific way of doing something, and doing something via hardware and doing it via software are so very different that no hardware patent is going to cover software.
I.e., someone might patent that 'Raising the interrupt line twice in a row with no data pending signals a request to signal startup' or something, which can screw with clone makers who can't 'license' that...but emulators don't care, emulators do not actually have interrupt lines, and thus cannot be in violation of a patent.
This is, of course, pretending the patents on the Atari are still valid. They are not, but there were hardware patents on pretty much every console, so the most modern consoles have patented methods in them, and yet it's legal to emulate, for example, a PS2. Patent-wise it's legal, at least. (Copyright, DMCA, trademark, perhaps there are issues. But patents? No problem there.)
It sounds surreal, but they simply started executing code directly off the cartridge. (They didn't copy it into console memory...they couldn't, the damn thing had 128 bytes of RAM.)
There is nothing copyrightable inside an Atari 2600 except the 'video ROM', which emulators obviously don't use. (1)
Which is why this was found legal. (And, hell, at that point in time there were patents, also. Patents that have since expired.)
1) The TIA, as it is called, is an utterly surreal video output device, and worth reading about on Wikipedia. You had to provide the data for each line of video in real time...and it didn't bother to inform you when it wanted each line. So programmers literally had to count clock cycles to know when to hand new lines to the video output!
There is nothing in the story that supports the idea that Wikileaks used the same password for all the encrypted files they gave out, you idiot. The file decrypted was the file they gave the Guardian, and the password was the one they gave the Guardian.
What happened is the Wikileaks site was attacked and hence mirrors were made of the site, including a mirror of the ciphertext by accident. Which is not any sort of security breach...in the actual real world, having the ciphertext lets you do jack-squat, and the assumption should be that intelligence agencies have downloads from the Wikileaks site intercepted anyway. You're not supposed to worry about copies of ciphertext...they get backed up and stored all over the damn place, although admittedly ending up as a torrent is a bit extreme. (The idea of [hostile country] sending their equivalent of the CIA to break into the Guardian, however, is not extreme at all.)
And then the Guardian and David Leigh published the password. Let's pretend it hadn't been torrented: They had personally accounted for every copy of ciphertext and made sure they weren't in the wrong hand. Right? They made sure that Wikileaks didn't have any copies laying around, or that the internet hadn't cached it. Right? Every backup erased, every hard drive wiped, all NSA taps disabled before download, every janitor who had access to their computer while they weren't there memory-scanned, that no one broke in and made a copy of the file. Right?
Oh, wait, no, that would be impossible, and more importantly, they're idiots. Idiots who just fucking published all the information that Wikileaks carefully had newspapers redact because the goddamn password would make it a more exciting story, and they didn't understand in this day of cloud storage and backups and giant hard drives and browser caches, the way we keep encrypted information secret is to not give out the password to it, not control the fucking ciphertext. (If we could control that, we wouldn't need encryption.) The password that Wikileaks carefully transferred by hand and speech, in what was possibly the most paranoid manner I've ever seen.
In their universe, the real 'secret' was the file that had moved over the internet, and it's impossible that anyone could have intercepted that or made copies of that. Because they're goddamn imbeciles that no knowing about the internet and that no one should ever trust again.
If the file hadn't been torrented, we never would have realized that was the real password, and Iran would have happily continued to decrypt the file they had someone steal off the Guardian's backup server. (For a hypothetical.)
I know people have decided that eugenics means 'killing unfit people', but that isn't even slightly what anyone who ever proposed it meant by that.
Eugenics is removing 'unfit' people from the gene poor, which doesn't require killing anyone at all, but sterilizing them. No one has ever been killed in the name of eugenics.
In fact, the reason that eugenics even existed was, because for one of the first time in histories, governments were actually providing a place for 'lunatics' and other such people to live. Sadly, many of the female 'lunatics' persisted in getting raped and having babies so the solution was, obviously, to sterilize them.
At some point someone said 'Hey, we could do that to all the defective people.', and eugenics was born.
The real problem, of course, is that people 100 years ago had absolutely idiotic and racist and sexist ideas about mental illness or how genetics works and all sorts of things, so their idea of 'unfit' or 'defective' people was pretty stupid. (Women basically started out an inch from 'defective' to begin with.) There were a lot of people in their mental institutions that had no actual problems at all.
Viruses work by reproducing in your body. And usually causing other problems.
Vaccines work by causing your body to generate antibodies, which then stick around to kill that specific virus when it shows up. This is how your body fights viruses normally, except normally it has to wait until they show up and it notices them and creates antibodies, which can take days. Vaccines 'cheat' by having your body prepare in advance.
This can result in you essentially 'not getting sick', because the antibodies killed the virus before you noticed. (What it means to 'get sick' is rather a blurry area. Technically, viruses are getting in our body and starting to reproduce all the time...and are killed in minutes because of roving antibodies.) If it killed the virus, you are not spreading the virus. If that fails, if you are exposed to so much it overcomes your antibodies, the vaccine will still result in you getting 'less sick'. Even if your body's head start wasn't enough to stop it at the beginning, it still has a head start.
Antiviruses do not, in any manner, stop symptoms of disease. They just hopefully reduce the amount of virus in your body. If you appear less sick, aka, if the disease has less symptoms, it is because you are actually less sick, because you have less virus in you. And hence you are less contagious.
If you want to reduce symptoms of a disease, please notice the handy array of medicines that are used to reduce common symptoms, available at the local drug store. You want to stop your lungs from doing what they're doing because of a fluid inbalance set up by the virus, please take some actual medication that does that. The vaccine isn't even 'in your body' anymore, it got removed by the immune response it set up!
Now, there are people who have a somewhat magical ability to have a certain virus reproducing inside them, and yet not show any signs of sickness. Often, this lack of symptoms includes the internal triggers a body uses know it is infected, so it fails to trigger an immune response, so they don't ever 'get better'.
That has nothing to do with vaccines at all. Vaccines do not change the signs of sickness at all, they change a person's body so it knows how to kill a virus on sight.
It's not a binary thing, people. Vaccines cause you to build up antibodies, which fight viruses. Exposure to enough of the virus at once can actually overload the antibodies. (Exposure to small amounts of the virus, OTOH, will help increase immunity without you getting sick...but that's a dangerous line to walk.)
It's actually the reason I'm against one vaccine: Chicken Pox.
Why? Because to build up the level of vaccine to the amount that will actually overcome chicken pox, you have to revaccinate, and even then it's probably only going to last for 20 years or so. Which means it wears off exactly when that virus becomes deadly to get as an adult. Hope your 25 year-old remembers to get vaccinated, or even remembers to visit the fricken doctor at all and doesn't think he's immortal.
But actually having chicken pox builds up the antibodies so much that they essentially never wear off. So it's either be vaccinated every decade for your entire life, or just get the damn disease once as a kid. (And, of course, nothing stops you from starting to get the vaccine when you're 50 or whatever, just in case they have worn off.)
Of course, kids should be vaccinated against all actually dangerous disease, like measles and stuff. In fact...look, if you don't what to have your kid vaccinated, fine. We can't force you. But we can keep you from living anywhere close to us. You can move to these un-vaccinated colony we've set up, and die of measles or something. without risking us.
Chicken pox...eh, I don't think so. That isn't dangerous for kids (Well, not more dangerous than the dozen or so other dangerous things kids do.), and giving it to them makes the permanently (As opposed to temporary with vaccines) immune to getting it as adults, when it is dangerous. Just because we can vaccine against chicken pox doesn't mean it actually makes sense. We should take advantage of the relative harmlessness of it to kids, give them the actual disease, and treat that as a 'super vaccine' that's going to last much longer than a shot of the dead virus in their arm.
In 2010, iPhone (15.7%) actually had market share than Android (22.7%), and slightly less than RIM (16.0%) . And Symbian (37.6%) is ahead of all those of those.
In 2011, Android sales have taken off, eating the Symbian market alive, and will possibly end up overtaking Symbian by the end of the year. Everyone else seems to be staying roughly the same.
Being tied for third place with 16% of the market is hardly much better than their PC position. Apple pays a hell of a lot of product placement and advertising to make it look like iPhones are more popular than they are.
No, this isn't for ISP DNS, which baffled me at first also. ISP DNS servers almost always use the same 'outgoing path' as your traffic, and hence get handed the same mirror that you yourself would have been handed.
In fact, this often gives better results than 'correct' geolocation, as DNS servers are usually closer to the network boundary. If the geolocation shows I'm in Tennessee, they might direct me to a mirror in Nashville...but what if my ISP actually connects to the internet via Atlanta, and now instead I'm going from Tennesse to Atlanta back to Nashville? However, the ISPs DNS server are likely to be in Atlanta, as they are usually right at the internet connection, so if they ask for the DNS, they get the Atlanta mirror.
That's not what this article is talking about. This article is talking about the opposite problem, for things like OpenDNS or google DNS, where the DNS server will be somewhere else entirely from the user. Google has DNS servers...and they're in one location, not at your ISP. Everyone who currently uses them gets sent to the closest mirror to that DNS server, which is clearly stupid.
That said, as almost everyone uses their ISPs DNS, calling this a 'global internet speedup' is pretty silly. It's a speedup for the few nerds who use OpenDNS or Google DNS.
The real joke is that, as Windows includes more and more stuff that is not part of an OS in it, (Like a giant media player.), they've managed to ignore one thing that actually is part of an OS: The ability to directly copy disk partitions as files, and mount them.
The fact they've now gotten the ability to mount one form of them...uh...yay?
You still can't copy an ISO from a CD, you still can't put an ISO on a CD, you still can't copy a boot image to a floppy or USB drive, etc, etc.
That is actual 'operating system' stuff. That's low-level device and filesystem stuff, it's exactly what the operating system should be doing. The fact you have to download some third party software to do those things, but not to have a paint program, is insane.
The way to get back resale is to lobby for a change in copyright law requiring it.
There's no reason that a system like Steam, which knows damn well what software is installed on what computer and can stop it from running, should not allow resale. It's not just Steam that this is needed for. DLCs are this way also.
This is never going to happen by itself. What we need is a change in the law to start requiring it. We need a law saying something like 'Any software tied to a specific account and checked online regularly for authorization, shall be transferable to another account upon request.'
The best thing that could happen to the internet is Windows users being taught that the place to install software is from the 'Install Software' area, which operates like aptitude or whatever on Linux. (Or alternately from CD.)
It should be possible to easily add repositories for third parties to make sure their product is in there. Or give them the ability to show ads while you're browsing them, and you've got cnet and all those guys on the bandwagon. Or even let them 'skin' the interface.
Even better, make it different websites, but websites they only get to via a special program, with a unified login system.
Just how 'locked down' the rest of the system should be is an interesting question. It has to be somewhat 'hard' to disable, as otherwise malware will just tell people to do it. It's can't be a simple prompt...we already have that! But it does have to actually be disableable.
I think something like 'Hit F4 during a boot, and then after boot you get a checkbox to let you install software from wherever, either until the next boot or forever'. I.e, you actually boot in a different 'mode', which would help software from disabling it itself. And that's odd enough that users aren't going to sleepwalk past it.
And the system should keep track of this, so people who are called to fix a computer can say 'Hey, wait a second, what did you install last week?'.
And, of course, corporate systems would probably end up locked down to one repository, and this would be unable to be disabled.
Don't photograph X in public place because copyright is held on X should NOT stand up in court.
Why the fuck not?
What happens if someone is performing a copyright play in a public place? Do you think you have the right to record that and make copies?
What if someone is showing a 'movie in the park'? Do you have the right to record that and make copies?
What if someone is airing music live over the public radio waves? Do you have the right to record that and make copies?
I'm a little baffled here as to the objection. I understand the whole 'copyright on sculptures' area of law is a bit obscure compared to other parts of copyright that get talked about here, but, seriously:
No, you do not have the right to make copies of copyrighted things even if they're in sitting in public.
Now, in this specific circumstances it appears it was the city that owned the copyright, and it's perfectly valid to complain about whatever policies they set up, just like it would be perfectly valid to complain that they wanted me to pay for making copies of city law or something. That's a fairly stupid and annoying revenue stream.
And, believe it or not, there are exceptions to copyright that allow 'incidental' images of copyrighted things showing up in the background, so it's possible the city was over-zealous in enforcement. And you can complain about that.
But it's not a copyright objection. Sculptures do, in fact, have a copyright, which, yes, can restrict people from taking pictures of them. Just like paintings and photographs.
"Protecting the public" doesn't mean anything, as the police don't have a legal duty to do that anyway, as has been reinforced time and again by the courts.
You know, I'd have some sort of respect for 'The situation was dangerous and we did what we had to do' excuse for the police...
...if they didn't clearly do whatever the fuck they wanted whenever they wanted, even when there was no danger at all.
I.e., I'd buy 'Oh, but we had to tase him, he was a threat' a lot more if the police weren't running around trying to arrest people holding video cameras. Or fighting to keep cameras recording all interrogations.
If police want some sort of trust when they make decisions that are supposedly life and death, if they want a benefit of the doubt in those circumstances...they have to stop doing the exact same sort of shit when there clearly is no danger, but someone is backtalking or recording them or basically committing the crime of Doing Stuff The Police Dislike.
If the police only ran roughshod over everyone when there actually appeared to be some of threat, and not day in and day out, perhaps the next time they shoot someone laying on the ground in the fucking head, we might actually think it was for presenting some sort of threat.
It's probably worth mentioning that 'playing possum' (And playing wounded) is actually a war crime, specifically to deter people from having to run around shooting corpses.
It's a form of perfidy, aka, illegally deceiving the other side in war.(1)
However, going around shooting corpses is not a war crime. It's just discouraged. But if the other side is committing perfidy, well, you do what you have to.
I suspect you misunderstood or oversimplified what the soldier was being accused of. You're not supposed to kill wounded that are unable to fight. You can ''kill' people who are 'dead', though.
1) Please notice only certain types of deception are illegal, not deception in general. It is legal to wear the wrong rank insignia, for example.(Please check with your own military for permission before doing that.;) And it's legal to not wear a uniform at all...you lose some Geneva protections, but it's 'legal'. (Which makes the whole 'unlawful combatants' rather idiotic a term...you can fight unlawfully, but shooting at people while out of uniform is not that that.)
It is, however, never legal under any circumstances to pretend to be the Red Cross, or to pretend to dead or so wounded you can't fight...and then fight.
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If they were supposed to carry it up to my door, then why the hell didn't they do that despite me lacking a mailbox?
Where the fuck is the "comprehensive jobs plan" Obama's been talking about
You mean the 2009 stimulus, which the Republicans threatened to fillibuster unless most of the jobs stuff was removed? (Although there's still enough jobs stuff in there that's it's still creating jobs.)
Or the 'jobs through infrastructure' plan in 2010, which the Republicans rejected?
But, um, if you're talking about his current jobs plan....try watching TV two days from now?
I agree with you about Obama's idiotic health care stuff. He 'pre-compromised' away 90% of the ground. He should have started with proposing to nationalize the entire medical industry, and compromised to single payer, or, if worse came to worse, a public option.
Instead, he not only started with crap, and ended up with even bigger crap, he let them rig it where it wouldn't start for years.
This capacity is nowhere near reached currently, and if it was, it has the somewhat trivially solution of making another ten minute trip back to get more mail.
Pretending it would take another set of trucks and delivery people to deliver twice as much mail to the same addresses is just idiotic. There might be a very small set of dense urban routes that are near the carrying capacity of delivery, (At which point, like I said, they have to make a small detour to get more) but generally mail delivery people are limited by distance and number of stops, not whether they have 200 or 400 pounds of mail in their truck.
Erm, huh?
The amount of delivered mail is rather trivial. The time consuming part is going to each mailbox and delivering it. They have an entire vehicle to put mail in.
I've always thought they should make things easier by simply stopping delivery to each 'address'. Buy a bunch of 10 locking mailboxes, like you see at malls, stick them at the end of the street, and give people the key to theirs.
No shit, and the asshats did that to me. I ordered something using UPS, and UPS handed it over to USPS to deliver to my street address.
I don't have a mailbox. I have a PO box for postal mail.
And, apparently, USPS won't deliver any mail without a mailbox (Not even packages that wouldn't fit in said mailbox), so it went back to the post office, within ten feet of my post office box, and bounced all the way back to the sender.
Look, you idiots writing shipping systems. You already know that you have to be willing to ship using the USPS for post office boxes, and you're smart enough to use that.
Well, you're going to have to start fucking providing the reverse option, or at least tell people you're going to use the USPS for the last mile. Because some of us live at places that the USPS won't deliver to, you goddamn idiots. You can't just transparently switch over to them without warning us.
I've gotten around the problem by switching my address to my PO box, at least for places where that's free or the same cost. That actually costs the sender more money, they use the post office the entire way, but I'm forced to do that until idiots figure out that you can't just randomly hand things to the post office and assume every street address can get mail.
When I went to speak to the post office about this idiocy (And I don't want to imply is is their fault that people hand them undeliverable packages, they were just the only people I could easily talk to.), they said I could cheat and use an invalid address that had my PO box on the second line of the address, and sometimes the mail carrier, when they noticed that I didn't have a mailbox, would redirect the mail there. Yeah, I don't do 'sometimes' delivery of my packages, and that hack only works because my PO and street are in the same zip.
Or I could buy a mailbox...but I don't want a mailbox. I don't want to get mail at my mailbox. I pay for a damn post office box, and drive over there every day for the privilege of not having to worry about people stealing my mail from my mailbox. (Packages from FedEx and UPS, OTOH, get left out of sight in my carport. Whereas I suspect packages delivered by USPS would get left at my mailbox.)
I've always wondered why the USPS didn't set up an email system that had a box for each street address, and have people get passwords by email...so you could confirm your address by possession of such an email address.
Or even normal person validation? Perhaps I want to confirm the person I'm conversing with halfway across the country really exists? Well, why don't I give him an email address, and he can go to a kiosk at the post office, hold up his driver's license, have a picture taken, punch in my email, and it will send me a digitally signed picture.
Or, hell, how about an escrow service? Make it where people can send a package to a post office somewhere, and to pick it up, the recipient has to pay $X to the post office, which then sticks a check to the sender in the mail. (This is how I used to imagine COD worked when I was a kid, before finding out it basically doesn't exist.)
The fact that there are post offices everywhere gets them in on the ground floor of all sorts of services that are not actually commercially viable for anyone else.
And, as you pointed out, they could have done electronic bill payment before anyone accepted it, simply by printing out a money order each month and delivering it with the mail. They could have done it without bank support or biller support, back in 1980 or whenever people started getting credit cards.
There's lots of stuff USPS could get into, and doesn't. This is because there are laws about what it can and can't do...and no one seems to care it is collapsing, because most of the things it does aren't useful, and the one part that is useful (rural delivery to the entire country) is being overused by its competitors.
Look, we need to accept that the post office cannot make enough to keep running doing what it's doing, and either let it do more, or subsides it. (No, letting third parties operate it is not a solution.)
I'm pretty certain there's some sort of US constitutional legal theory stopping people from being charged by both the state and the Feds for the same crime.
Of course, you can be charged with crimes for committing crimes. That actually happens a lot with the mafia, as RICO is a law which forbids other types of crime done in a systematic way (Or perhaps a better word is 'organized', as that is the sort of crime it is aimed at), including state crimes.
You collect protection money from one place, it's just extortion, a state crime. You collect it from five, it's multiple counts of extortion (obviously) and a Federal RICO violation for committing multiple counts of extortion.
Basically, as I understand it, the constitutional premise is that you can't be charged with multiple crimes for the same action. They can't charge someone with murder and manslaughter for the same killing, that is double jeopardy. They can't charge someone at different levels, like state and local or state and federal, that's also double jeopardy. Basically, they are only allowed to have one trial to determine the guilt or innocence of you committing a specific action. (RICO, OTOH, is charging you with the crime of being found guilty of multiple crimes.)
However, I think you are right to some extent about 'sovereigns', as I seem to recall some sort of legal argument allowing two separate states to charge someone with a single crime. Double jeopardy doesn't allow multiple charges 'vertically', but it might allow it 'horizontally'. I don't think anyone's tested it, though, as situations like that are fairly rare.
Although it is advised not to shoot people across the border, because Germany will charge and arrest you also. If you commit a crime involving two sovereign jurisdictions, you can be charged in one, serve your sentence and then be extradited and charged in the other for the exact same action. Hence it's a pretty stupid way to 'avoid' anything.
Technically, if the bullet passed Switzerland on the way, you could be charged there also. Seriously. If part of a crime happens in a country, they are under no obligation to ignore it just because another part happened somewhere else, or even that you've been arrested, charged, tried, and served your sentence for it somewhere else. You do any part of 'killing someone' in their country, they can arrest you for 'killing someone'.
I put 'sovereign' up there in quotes, because I think this doesn't apply to US states, just actual countries. Two states can't charge you for the same action. Under US law, that would count as 'double jeopardy'.
The US would, however, have no problem with itself and Canada charging you for the same crime. It's only forbidden for the US itself charging someone twice.
I really don't understand what you're trying to say there. If you want to assert the TIA has no actual firmware in it, that is fine, and perhaps true, I have no idea. As the system itself has no BIOS, it is entirely possible there is no video BIOS either.
But if it has no ROM, then the emulator can't be 'using' it. Uh, duh.
And I don't know why you decided that 'cloning' has to do with anything. Emulators do not 'clone'. Emulators 'emulate'. You can tell because they're called called emulators, not clones. The software is emulating the functionality of the TIA.
The lawsuit, and patents, really doesn't have anything to do with that. Pretty much all console patents are for specific tricks to make hardware work slightly better, and do not apply to software emulating the results of those tricks in the slightest. Patents are for methods, a specific way of doing something, and doing something via hardware and doing it via software are so very different that no hardware patent is going to cover software.
I.e., someone might patent that 'Raising the interrupt line twice in a row with no data pending signals a request to signal startup' or something, which can screw with clone makers who can't 'license' that...but emulators don't care, emulators do not actually have interrupt lines, and thus cannot be in violation of a patent.
This is, of course, pretending the patents on the Atari are still valid. They are not, but there were hardware patents on pretty much every console, so the most modern consoles have patented methods in them, and yet it's legal to emulate, for example, a PS2. Patent-wise it's legal, at least. (Copyright, DMCA, trademark, perhaps there are issues. But patents? No problem there.)
Atari 2600s don't have BIOSes. Seriously.
It sounds surreal, but they simply started executing code directly off the cartridge. (They didn't copy it into console memory...they couldn't, the damn thing had 128 bytes of RAM.)
There is nothing copyrightable inside an Atari 2600 except the 'video ROM', which emulators obviously don't use. (1)
Which is why this was found legal. (And, hell, at that point in time there were patents, also. Patents that have since expired.)
1) The TIA, as it is called, is an utterly surreal video output device, and worth reading about on Wikipedia. You had to provide the data for each line of video in real time...and it didn't bother to inform you when it wanted each line. So programmers literally had to count clock cycles to know when to hand new lines to the video output!
There is nothing in the story that supports the idea that Wikileaks used the same password for all the encrypted files they gave out, you idiot. The file decrypted was the file they gave the Guardian, and the password was the one they gave the Guardian.
What happened is the Wikileaks site was attacked and hence mirrors were made of the site, including a mirror of the ciphertext by accident. Which is not any sort of security breach...in the actual real world, having the ciphertext lets you do jack-squat, and the assumption should be that intelligence agencies have downloads from the Wikileaks site intercepted anyway. You're not supposed to worry about copies of ciphertext...they get backed up and stored all over the damn place, although admittedly ending up as a torrent is a bit extreme. (The idea of [hostile country] sending their equivalent of the CIA to break into the Guardian, however, is not extreme at all.)
And then the Guardian and David Leigh published the password. Let's pretend it hadn't been torrented: They had personally accounted for every copy of ciphertext and made sure they weren't in the wrong hand. Right? They made sure that Wikileaks didn't have any copies laying around, or that the internet hadn't cached it. Right? Every backup erased, every hard drive wiped, all NSA taps disabled before download, every janitor who had access to their computer while they weren't there memory-scanned, that no one broke in and made a copy of the file. Right?
Oh, wait, no, that would be impossible, and more importantly, they're idiots. Idiots who just fucking published all the information that Wikileaks carefully had newspapers redact because the goddamn password would make it a more exciting story, and they didn't understand in this day of cloud storage and backups and giant hard drives and browser caches, the way we keep encrypted information secret is to not give out the password to it, not control the fucking ciphertext. (If we could control that, we wouldn't need encryption.) The password that Wikileaks carefully transferred by hand and speech, in what was possibly the most paranoid manner I've ever seen.
In their universe, the real 'secret' was the file that had moved over the internet, and it's impossible that anyone could have intercepted that or made copies of that. Because they're goddamn imbeciles that no knowing about the internet and that no one should ever trust again.
If the file hadn't been torrented, we never would have realized that was the real password, and Iran would have happily continued to decrypt the file they had someone steal off the Guardian's backup server. (For a hypothetical.)
What Hitler did wasn't eugenics.
I know people have decided that eugenics means 'killing unfit people', but that isn't even slightly what anyone who ever proposed it meant by that.
Eugenics is removing 'unfit' people from the gene poor, which doesn't require killing anyone at all, but sterilizing them. No one has ever been killed in the name of eugenics.
In fact, the reason that eugenics even existed was, because for one of the first time in histories, governments were actually providing a place for 'lunatics' and other such people to live. Sadly, many of the female 'lunatics' persisted in getting raped and having babies so the solution was, obviously, to sterilize them.
At some point someone said 'Hey, we could do that to all the defective people.', and eugenics was born.
The real problem, of course, is that people 100 years ago had absolutely idiotic and racist and sexist ideas about mental illness or how genetics works and all sorts of things, so their idea of 'unfit' or 'defective' people was pretty stupid. (Women basically started out an inch from 'defective' to begin with.) There were a lot of people in their mental institutions that had no actual problems at all.
Uh, no.
Viruses work by reproducing in your body. And usually causing other problems.
Vaccines work by causing your body to generate antibodies, which then stick around to kill that specific virus when it shows up. This is how your body fights viruses normally, except normally it has to wait until they show up and it notices them and creates antibodies, which can take days. Vaccines 'cheat' by having your body prepare in advance.
This can result in you essentially 'not getting sick', because the antibodies killed the virus before you noticed. (What it means to 'get sick' is rather a blurry area. Technically, viruses are getting in our body and starting to reproduce all the time...and are killed in minutes because of roving antibodies.) If it killed the virus, you are not spreading the virus. If that fails, if you are exposed to so much it overcomes your antibodies, the vaccine will still result in you getting 'less sick'. Even if your body's head start wasn't enough to stop it at the beginning, it still has a head start.
Antiviruses do not, in any manner, stop symptoms of disease. They just hopefully reduce the amount of virus in your body. If you appear less sick, aka, if the disease has less symptoms, it is because you are actually less sick, because you have less virus in you. And hence you are less contagious.
If you want to reduce symptoms of a disease, please notice the handy array of medicines that are used to reduce common symptoms, available at the local drug store. You want to stop your lungs from doing what they're doing because of a fluid inbalance set up by the virus, please take some actual medication that does that. The vaccine isn't even 'in your body' anymore, it got removed by the immune response it set up!
Now, there are people who have a somewhat magical ability to have a certain virus reproducing inside them, and yet not show any signs of sickness. Often, this lack of symptoms includes the internal triggers a body uses know it is infected, so it fails to trigger an immune response, so they don't ever 'get better'.
That has nothing to do with vaccines at all. Vaccines do not change the signs of sickness at all, they change a person's body so it knows how to kill a virus on sight.
Yeah, that's something that people ignore.
It's not a binary thing, people. Vaccines cause you to build up antibodies, which fight viruses. Exposure to enough of the virus at once can actually overload the antibodies. (Exposure to small amounts of the virus, OTOH, will help increase immunity without you getting sick...but that's a dangerous line to walk.)
It's actually the reason I'm against one vaccine: Chicken Pox.
Why? Because to build up the level of vaccine to the amount that will actually overcome chicken pox, you have to revaccinate, and even then it's probably only going to last for 20 years or so. Which means it wears off exactly when that virus becomes deadly to get as an adult. Hope your 25 year-old remembers to get vaccinated, or even remembers to visit the fricken doctor at all and doesn't think he's immortal.
But actually having chicken pox builds up the antibodies so much that they essentially never wear off. So it's either be vaccinated every decade for your entire life, or just get the damn disease once as a kid. (And, of course, nothing stops you from starting to get the vaccine when you're 50 or whatever, just in case they have worn off.)
Of course, kids should be vaccinated against all actually dangerous disease, like measles and stuff. In fact...look, if you don't what to have your kid vaccinated, fine. We can't force you. But we can keep you from living anywhere close to us. You can move to these un-vaccinated colony we've set up, and die of measles or something. without risking us.
Chicken pox...eh, I don't think so. That isn't dangerous for kids (Well, not more dangerous than the dozen or so other dangerous things kids do.), and giving it to them makes the permanently (As opposed to temporary with vaccines) immune to getting it as adults, when it is dangerous. Just because we can vaccine against chicken pox doesn't mean it actually makes sense. We should take advantage of the relative harmlessness of it to kids, give them the actual disease, and treat that as a 'super vaccine' that's going to last much longer than a shot of the dead virus in their arm.
In 2010, iPhone (15.7%) actually had market share than Android (22.7%), and slightly less than RIM (16.0%) . And Symbian (37.6%) is ahead of all those of those.
In 2011, Android sales have taken off, eating the Symbian market alive, and will possibly end up overtaking Symbian by the end of the year. Everyone else seems to be staying roughly the same.
Being tied for third place with 16% of the market is hardly much better than their PC position. Apple pays a hell of a lot of product placement and advertising to make it look like iPhones are more popular than they are.
No, this isn't for ISP DNS, which baffled me at first also. ISP DNS servers almost always use the same 'outgoing path' as your traffic, and hence get handed the same mirror that you yourself would have been handed.
In fact, this often gives better results than 'correct' geolocation, as DNS servers are usually closer to the network boundary. If the geolocation shows I'm in Tennessee, they might direct me to a mirror in Nashville...but what if my ISP actually connects to the internet via Atlanta, and now instead I'm going from Tennesse to Atlanta back to Nashville? However, the ISPs DNS server are likely to be in Atlanta, as they are usually right at the internet connection, so if they ask for the DNS, they get the Atlanta mirror.
That's not what this article is talking about. This article is talking about the opposite problem, for things like OpenDNS or google DNS, where the DNS server will be somewhere else entirely from the user. Google has DNS servers...and they're in one location, not at your ISP. Everyone who currently uses them gets sent to the closest mirror to that DNS server, which is clearly stupid.
That said, as almost everyone uses their ISPs DNS, calling this a 'global internet speedup' is pretty silly. It's a speedup for the few nerds who use OpenDNS or Google DNS.
Uh, no, it comes from Apple having less than 10% of the marketshare, vs. MS's 85%.
Boxen is an accepted computer term, just like mouses is. You feed a snake two mice, you hook up to a computer two mouses.
When old words get used as new terms meaning something else, it is perfectly acceptable for pluralizations to change.
The real joke is that, as Windows includes more and more stuff that is not part of an OS in it, (Like a giant media player.), they've managed to ignore one thing that actually is part of an OS: The ability to directly copy disk partitions as files, and mount them.
The fact they've now gotten the ability to mount one form of them...uh...yay?
You still can't copy an ISO from a CD, you still can't put an ISO on a CD, you still can't copy a boot image to a floppy or USB drive, etc, etc.
That is actual 'operating system' stuff. That's low-level device and filesystem stuff, it's exactly what the operating system should be doing. The fact you have to download some third party software to do those things, but not to have a paint program, is insane.
The way to get back resale is to lobby for a change in copyright law requiring it.
There's no reason that a system like Steam, which knows damn well what software is installed on what computer and can stop it from running, should not allow resale. It's not just Steam that this is needed for. DLCs are this way also.
This is never going to happen by itself. What we need is a change in the law to start requiring it. We need a law saying something like 'Any software tied to a specific account and checked online regularly for authorization, shall be transferable to another account upon request.'
That's what I've been saying.
The best thing that could happen to the internet is Windows users being taught that the place to install software is from the 'Install Software' area, which operates like aptitude or whatever on Linux. (Or alternately from CD.)
It should be possible to easily add repositories for third parties to make sure their product is in there. Or give them the ability to show ads while you're browsing them, and you've got cnet and all those guys on the bandwagon. Or even let them 'skin' the interface.
Even better, make it different websites, but websites they only get to via a special program, with a unified login system.
Just how 'locked down' the rest of the system should be is an interesting question. It has to be somewhat 'hard' to disable, as otherwise malware will just tell people to do it. It's can't be a simple prompt...we already have that! But it does have to actually be disableable.
I think something like 'Hit F4 during a boot, and then after boot you get a checkbox to let you install software from wherever, either until the next boot or forever'. I.e, you actually boot in a different 'mode', which would help software from disabling it itself. And that's odd enough that users aren't going to sleepwalk past it.
And the system should keep track of this, so people who are called to fix a computer can say 'Hey, wait a second, what did you install last week?'.
And, of course, corporate systems would probably end up locked down to one repository, and this would be unable to be disabled.
I approve of all of that...except the requirement to use VIM, which is just stupid.
Don't photograph X in public place because copyright is held on X should NOT stand up in court.
Why the fuck not?
What happens if someone is performing a copyright play in a public place? Do you think you have the right to record that and make copies?
What if someone is showing a 'movie in the park'? Do you have the right to record that and make copies?
What if someone is airing music live over the public radio waves? Do you have the right to record that and make copies?
I'm a little baffled here as to the objection. I understand the whole 'copyright on sculptures' area of law is a bit obscure compared to other parts of copyright that get talked about here, but, seriously:
No, you do not have the right to make copies of copyrighted things even if they're in sitting in public.
Now, in this specific circumstances it appears it was the city that owned the copyright, and it's perfectly valid to complain about whatever policies they set up, just like it would be perfectly valid to complain that they wanted me to pay for making copies of city law or something. That's a fairly stupid and annoying revenue stream.
And, believe it or not, there are exceptions to copyright that allow 'incidental' images of copyrighted things showing up in the background, so it's possible the city was over-zealous in enforcement. And you can complain about that.
But it's not a copyright objection. Sculptures do, in fact, have a copyright, which, yes, can restrict people from taking pictures of them. Just like paintings and photographs.
"Protecting the public" doesn't mean anything, as the police don't have a legal duty to do that anyway, as has been reinforced time and again by the courts.
You know, I'd have some sort of respect for 'The situation was dangerous and we did what we had to do' excuse for the police...
I.e., I'd buy 'Oh, but we had to tase him, he was a threat' a lot more if the police weren't running around trying to arrest people holding video cameras. Or fighting to keep cameras recording all interrogations.
If police want some sort of trust when they make decisions that are supposedly life and death, if they want a benefit of the doubt in those circumstances...they have to stop doing the exact same sort of shit when there clearly is no danger, but someone is backtalking or recording them or basically committing the crime of Doing Stuff The Police Dislike.
If the police only ran roughshod over everyone when there actually appeared to be some of threat, and not day in and day out, perhaps the next time they shoot someone laying on the ground in the fucking head, we might actually think it was for presenting some sort of threat.
It's probably worth mentioning that 'playing possum' (And playing wounded) is actually a war crime, specifically to deter people from having to run around shooting corpses.
It's a form of perfidy, aka, illegally deceiving the other side in war.(1)
However, going around shooting corpses is not a war crime. It's just discouraged. But if the other side is committing perfidy, well, you do what you have to.
I suspect you misunderstood or oversimplified what the soldier was being accused of. You're not supposed to kill wounded that are unable to fight. You can ''kill' people who are 'dead', though.
1) Please notice only certain types of deception are illegal, not deception in general. It is legal to wear the wrong rank insignia, for example.(Please check with your own military for permission before doing that.;) And it's legal to not wear a uniform at all...you lose some Geneva protections, but it's 'legal'. (Which makes the whole 'unlawful combatants' rather idiotic a term...you can fight unlawfully, but shooting at people while out of uniform is not that that.)
It is, however, never legal under any circumstances to pretend to be the Red Cross, or to pretend to dead or so wounded you can't fight...and then fight.