Ahem. Hicks are from the mountains, not 'the South', which also comprises rednecks.
Rule of thumb: You live where there are hills and tiny rundown houses at the end of dirt road four miles deep in the woods, you're a hick. You live on a forty arce run down farm and grow peanuts, you're a redneck.
There are many overlaps, but they should not be confused.
Okay, I'm sorry, but this is fucking offensive to me.
Porn sites are not, in general, fronts for child molesters, you fucktard. You can argue they exploit women, you can argue with a good deal more sense they exploit men, you can call them perverts and say they're going to hell and wish they didn't exist at all. Hell, you can even argue that some of them are trying to, despite laws to the country, sell their products to 14-18 year olds.
No, it's you who are wrong. There is absolutely nothing that would not make, under any circumstances, a Senator not a 'Congressman'.
The reason we call Senators Senators is that the Senate is consider 'more important', and it's certainly more selective, than the House.
But 'Congressman' isn't a title. It does not even exist in the Constitution. The correct titles are 'Senator' and 'Representative'.
We have started using it as a title of both houses of the legislature, but there's no magical offical definition that excludes Senators as you seem to assert. The Constitution quite clearly says that both the HoR and Senate together are 'Congress', and that one is properly referenced to as 'the House' with 'Representatives' in it, and the other is 'the Senate' with 'Senators' in it.
The way it refers to both is 'Members of the legislature', or 'Members of either house', so a more 'offical' term than 'Congressman' might be 'Member of Congress'. However, Congressman has, and has as long as it's been used, been how we refer to them both.
It's only idiots who hear 'Senator' and 'Congressman' on TV that think Senators aren't Congresmen. They use that, because like I said, being in the Senator is 'more important' and we wouldn't want to imply they were the same as lowly Representatives.
It's the difference between 'surgeons' and 'doctors'. People call the doctors who see them for a broken leg 'doctors', when a more specific title is 'general practioners', whereas they almost always call surgeons 'surgeons'. That doesn't mean that a surgeon isn't a doctor, it's just in one case we use a specific name and one case we use the general.
The idiotic tubes analogy wasn't anything to do with 'water pipes', and the fact the flow of data through pipes works somewhat like the flow of electrons through wires doesn't have anything to do with net neutrality, which is routers (Which don't even have an analogy in plumbing.) choose what 'types of water' (again, no analogy in plumbing) to through in what amounts. About the closest device I can think of to a router is a hot/cold faucet, and I can't figure out any sort of sane analogy from that.
It wasn't a plumbing analogy, it was a physical-objects-through-tube analogy, as show by the fact, in his world, things can slow down and get 'jammed'. But even if it was a plumbing analogy, it still made no sense.
And, the sad thing is, there is a fairly good analogy, as someone pointed out: Freeways, and police at on-ramps only directing certain kinds of traffic onto the freeways. You have to explain that, in the middle of these on-ramps, there are mediums-sized parking lots that everyone stops for a bit and the police can pick out anyone who's already arrived to go next, along with the fact that all internet traffic is basically six states away and contains four interstate switches and two sets of surface streets, but it will convey the concept to the layman. (And, technically, the roads can't be overloaded, everyone drives at exactly 65 mph or whatever, and trying to 'overload' the road just means you're trying to put two vehicles in the same place, resulting, obviously, in a crash that destroys both the vehicles. Luckily, on 'the internets', when the vehicle doesn't arrive, they send for another identical one.)
I guess they sucked so much, perhaps the former drivers wanted to pay the nearly 2 million offered to stop GM crushing them just so they could smash them themselves?
GM has a stated policy of supporting cars they sell for ten years with parts. They were not willing to do that here.
In addition, those batteries were dangerous. They couldn't be disposed of legally in landfills, and under various laws they, GM, were in charge of disposing of them. And they were physically dangerous to people attempt repair work on the car, which is why GM never let anyone do it except themselves.
And the chargers were installed...what happens when someone moves and they leave behind a house with an unsupported GM manufactured death charger in the garage. (Or, even if they just stop using their cars?)
They had two solutions: Give the cars away, and hope that nothing they did ever came back and bite them in the ass, be it people demanding parts (One dead battery, and the car is finished forever.) or an auto repair shop that attempts to fix the car and someone gets electricuted, or a state suing them because someone disposed of a battery improperly, or anything.
Or, the other solution....just get rid of them.
And while not everyone needs to drive over 122 miles a day, they want a car that can drive that far. And no one like to sit there and stare at the odometer going 'Okay, this is exactly 59 miles, I need to reach where I'm going in the next two or turn around', or go 'If I cut over to the video store, how many miles does that add?' or 'I seem to be braking a lot today, how much extra is that taking off my batteries?' So, in practice, 122 miles translates to a real round trip commute of 40 miles.
You cannot build a commerically viable car with those restrictions that is not designed for a specific 'campus', a small area it will stay within. And those people want golf cars, not cars.
And, like I said, all the fucktards whining about this: Hey, dumbass. We have electric cars that get almost the same kilowatt per hour mileage. They're called hybrids with conversion kits (Toyota is about to start selling them direct, too.), and they cost less on the lot than it cost GM to make the EV1. Hell, you can buy a GM hybrid and run it as an electric car. We got those three years after the end of the EV1, thanks to improvements in batteries, so all this 'killing of the electric car' did was royally screw GM out of a lot of money because it zigged instead of zagged...it could have kept the experiment up and bought the patents from Toyota when they showed up.
It's not so much the insane conspiracy that gets me. (Why the hell does GM want to use gasoline? They don't own anything to do with oil.) It's the fact this huge mindbogglingly stupid conspiracy keep electric cars away from people...for three years. (And if you think, within three years, that everyone would have charging stations, you are insane.) That's not a conspiracy, that's just someone getting on board early and failing because the technology wasn't quite up to usable levels. It's akin to making a movie about OS/2 called 'What killed the preemptive multitasking operating system?'.
My point is that's what they did - they approached him at a conference, with a lot of people standing around, in a situation that was impossible to really secure.
Jesus Christ.
Okay, let's go over this again. When you're attending a conference, you're walking around semi-randomly. Yes, you might have signed up for certain events, but you might not be there. It is dangerous to try to arrest doing that.
When you're speaking at a conference, you must show up at a certain place, before the speech, to check in. Possibly you get a microphone attached, and they tell you some stuff about time limits, and you meet the people who are about to introduce you. You don't just walk in and up to the stage and start speaking.
In addition to this, because many speakers have fans, and some people at converences are lookie-lous who have nothing better to do than stare at this as it's going on, it usually happens in somewhat private settings. There's a 'speakers area' or a 'backstage area' or something so the aforementioned meeting doesn't happen at the doorway to the meeting room, at least at any well-designed conference. In addition, speakers who are nervious can calm their nerves and practice their speech, out of sight.
Do you follow this yet? Right before someone speaking is about the only time you'll know exactly where they are and that they will be almost alone, at any conference. They're behind the 'staff only' door, with maybe a few staff people and some other speakers. They aren't on the floor, which even in well-controlled conferences tend to have a dozen exits (Conferences have moved to badge security instead of physical access security for that reason.), they're in an area with two or three entrances and presumably the FBI is smart enough to have blueprints.
But in the case of active witness tampering, where any further contact might harm the case even more, and where the suspect is very knowledgeable about law enforcement techniques and could easily destroy evidence or flee, it seems unlikely to me that you would want to wait.
They can't destroy evidence when they're in another town at a conference, unless the evidence is being carried are on his person, which is exactly the reason you have to arrest them quickly and make sure they do not flee.
Witness tampering doesn't require you to be there in person. I'm sure a smart private eye could accomplish more with a cell phone and an Internet connection than they could in person, anyway. If you really are concerned about that, you want the person incommunicado pronto. You probably also don't want that person digging up more info on other witnesses in the case, since presumably that was their goal to begin with.
I think, at this point, the witness tampering was long over. And note he wasn't witness tampering out of some sort of personal motive, he was (accusedly) witness tampering because, in addition to getting paid to track someone down, he was paid to lean on them to not testify. It wasn't random 'I'll do anything to keep this case from trial', it was for profit, and assuming he wasn't being paid to do that again, he wouldn't. (Which, if the FBI had his phone tapped, they'd know.)
Math is not a science. Math is a system of rules, but it is not a system of rules derived by obvservation and experimentation. It's no more science than the rules of tic-tac-toe are, even if it is much more useful.
And, frankly, I wasn't aware anyone even even vaguely considered math a science. At no point in math is the scientific method used. Once you start running experiments, you're reached physics or chemistry or something, not math. Math operates on an entirely different concept called 'proofs', and you don't have to 'test' them by running controlled experiments, or postulate and alter theories with regard to those experiments. Doing that is science, not doing that is not science.(1)
And while math is a language, no other language is a science, either, you loon. The study of language can be a science, but not the actual language. (No, that doesn't make language a science, any more than birds are a science because the study of them is. The 'study' of anything is a science.)
And the idea that you can get a 'bachelor of science' in it making is science is inane. You can get a BS or BA in every field of study. You get either a BS or BA based on other classes, not how 'sciency' your major is.
1) How much you can do experiments depends on whether or not it's 'hard' or 'soft' science, but even things like history and even sociology make theories, even if they are somewhat vague, and try to test them using other known examples. I.e., this group of people did X, but this other group of people did Y. We think this difference is that the first group didn't have A. A makes you Y instead of X. So this third group, who is very A...did they do X or Y? These aren't 'controlled' experiments, thus earning the name 'soft science', nor are the theories very absolute, but it is science in a sense.
Do a little fucking research and you'll find out exactly what killed that.
One hint: It's exactly what everyone is still focusing on.
The batteries sucked ass. They were such high voltage the company was deathly afraid to let anyone near them, and to keep the weight down so it got what was still an absurdly low range of at most 150 miles (Most people didn't get that much, and that's the second version of the car, the first got 2/3rds that.), the recharger had to be installed in a garage, you couldn't just plug it.
The EV1 worked if you commuted to work in it, if you lived within 40 miles of work. It was absurdly expensive and didn't work anywhere else because of the, say it with me, batteries, and no one had any way around that in 1999.
Solely-battery powered electricity cars do not work, or, at least, they didn't work then. And, incidentally, the idea that GM would spend billions of dollars on research and then kill the project itself, or let someone else kill it, is insane.
And, the fact that there was a waiting list to lease at the time they shut the program down is not that useful, considering that GM lost something like 45,000 on each EV1 it produced and leased.
However, if you want a fucking electric car, well, buy a damn hybird, get conversion to enable the electric only mode and wall charging, and stop bitching. Those cost less than an EV1, which cost about 80,000 to make. And, as an added bonus, if you actually need to drive a useful distance, you can use the gas motor.
Physics/chemistry and math are not the same thing. Math is not a science. And engineering requires a sound base in physics and math, along with a lot of engineering specific rules-of-thumb that let you predict the behavior of complex systems without actually building them.
And note none of those kids game up with new solutions to anything. Everything they did we already knew how to do. It's just they came up with different, and possibly better, ways of figuring it out. Which is an amazing accomplishment, but not actually that important.
And laypeople do come up with new things in engineering all the time. They're called 'inventions', and they never operate on anything but well-understood principles...they just do something that no one ever bothered, or managed, to do before, that's really useful.
No one here is going to magically invent a new way to turn CO2 into carbon. We could, in theory, locate an existing way of doing it that works here, but the problem is that are already teams of engineers working on that, and have been trying to solve it for almost fifty years.
I don't understand the point you're making, since this is of course exactly what they did.
No, it's not. They waited for him somewhere he was due to be, and then arrested him when he showed up.
If it's worthwhile to apprehend him quickly, grab him at home in the morning, or something like that. Particularly for something communication-related and time sensitive like witness tampering, wouldn't you want to grab a person sooner rather than later, in order to prohibit any further illegal communications.
He was at a conference, so presumably they weren't worried about witness tampering. In addition, he was more than likely nowhere near any witnesses. Being at a conference involves 'randomly wandering around doing things that he finds interesting', not any sort of schedule. And it's entirely possible they had no idea where he was staying.
I don't buy the "snag 'em in public" theory either - I'd be a lot more confident in my ability to disappear in a crowded location, rather than early in the morning at home or something like that.
We have absolutely no indication he was snagged 'in public', or, at least, anywhere near a crowd of people. None at all. This is just something you made up. It is equally likely that they simply waited outside the stage door and arrested him when he showed up.
Tell me something. You work for the FBI. You get enough evidence to arrest this guy, you go to do it, you find he's at a conference in another city. Luckily, the FBI has people there, too. So...how do you do it? Well, you can try to track down where he's staying, but remember he's a PI and might not be under his real name, or might just be staying with someone. OTOH, there's this conference, you can find him there. You show up, and before you start trying to track him down, you notice tomorrow he's speaking.
What do you do? Shove your weight around trying to find him and hoping like hell this PI doesn't notice someone is tracking him down? Hope that nobody, at this converence of people who have a long history of working both with and against law enforcement, decides to clue him in the FBI's looking for him? Sit in his hotel lobby and hope he shows up and doesn't notice you and doesn't run when he does? (And, that, again, no one else from the conference notices you.)
Or do you wait till the next day and calmly take a seat where you can watch where people are supposed to show up to give a speech, and arrest him when he does so?
And, incidentally, I don't see anything wrong with a 'prep walk', even pretending everything you say is absolutely true. It is entirely possible the FBI does want PIs to know "Tracking down confidental witnesses' families and putting pressure on them won't be tolerated."....and?
As long as they don't prejudice the jury (The jury is in another state, and no one there would be very likely to be picked for it anyway, and it didn't make any media beside slashdot.), and they honestly have enough evidence against him, I don't see the problem.
Yeah, because you can trivially find people at conventions, and there's no way the FBI running around looking for him to arrest might have tipped him off and caused him to flee.
Seriously, a lot of these comments are damn stupid. The absolute best way to arrest someone is to learn they will be exactly at a certain place exactly at a certain time, and then show up there. They probably had a guy sitting outside the prep room, and when he shows up they just grabbed him. It's a much smarter idea than running around the conference willy-nilly and disturbing things and having word get back to him and him fleeing and them having to shut down the airports and wasting tons of tax money.
And, incidentally, police do this all the time. If you don't know they're after you, they wait until you're in a known location before going after you. Like, if you're in your house, they might wait for you to start getting in your car before pulling in behind you and blocking you in.
The police openly approaching someone over open ground is a good way for them to start running. Openly approaching someone at a conference, where it can take quite some time to find someone and there are all those people around, would be completely irresponsible behavior.
Whether or not he's guilty is another matter, but the method of his arrest is not questionable.
They don't enforce the law at all, no one's ever been charged, and there's actually no penalty stated in the law for violating it. The intent of the law isn't actually to make every house have a gun, just most of them. (In addition, you can opt out if you have physical or mental disabilities or are a conscientious objector.)
Oh, and reading up on it on Wikipedia, Kennasaw State University is actually outside the city limits, so the law doesn't apply. Huh. Mildly ironic that two groups of people live within a mile of each other, one being required to possess a gun in their living space, and one being required not to possess one there.
Anyway, some dishonest anti-gun control people use a goofy and dishonest statistic about the rate of burglaries dropping, but in general the numbers of crimes committed seems to have remained what it was since the law was passed 1982. While, of course, the city has quadrupled in size, and other surrounding cities that are same-distance same-size suburbs of Atlanta, like Roswell GA, have had crime climb as more criminals started commuting in from Atlanta. So, in general, the law seems to be working okay to decrease crime, in that criminals seem to go somewhere else.
And, despite what some people expected, there have been exactly two gun-related murders in the town since 1982, which is the same as the number of knife-related murders, giving the whole place an absurdly low murder rate of 0.2 a year or so.
Stars, before they become supernovas, and even if they won't, like ours, expand to red giant size. This will include the earth inside the sun, first cooking it and then continuing on to melt it.
The fact that after it then collapses to a white dwarf it won't then explode with enough energy to vaporize the earth is a rather moot point. There won't, and can't, be an earth at that time. Whatever molten iron remains of it will have gotten sucked along as the sun collapsed into the white dwarf.
Because he's an idiot who thinks that has something to do with the sun, instead of the fact we've come up with half a dozen ways to render this planet uninhabitable.
All wireless networks are unswitched, you lunatic. If you have the encryption key, or there is none, you can see every packet as it goes past.
But, um, anyway, someone can, indeed, send out ARP broadcast packets, or get an IP (Or just make one of them up) and send out a broadcast, and find what other MAC addresses are on the network even if it's switched. MAC addresses stop working past routers, not switches. It's just a switched network makes you detect actively by sending out a broadcast packet instead of passively by watching them go by, but that's a near moot point when you are presumably trying to detect a wireless computer to pose your wireless computer as, because that isn't switched.
The fact that it is switched with the wired network, which despite your weird outrage is actually how every wifi device works because otherwise Windows craptacular broadcast networking would suck all the bandwidth, or even on a different segment, which yes, might keep anyone from seeing MAC addresses depending what you mean by that, is moot, because they're trying to sniff wireless MAC addresses, not wired ones. And actually makes this easier because they can easier figure out which is wireless and which isn't, which keeps them from doing something stupid like spoofing a MAC address, on their wireless card, of a wired network card.
Now, if you're trying to argue that you have no wireless computers at all, why the fuck are you running a wifi network? Or were you not following this conversation at all?
To recap: We are discussing the fact that if someone cracks your WEP (or you have no WEP) and wants to commit a crime, they can take one of your wireless computer MAC and IP addresses, thus rendering the magical 'router logging' that you seemed to think would save you self-incriminatory. (Not that that would work anyway.) They actually have an incentive to do that, as some people have MAC locks on their router, or just check various status pages on the router to see what MAC addresses have been using it, even in addition to encryption. So if they see a MAC address in the output they had to capture and decrypt to find the key, that isn't currently on the network, there's no reason not to use it.
They would, except this is apparently the homeowner's association's network, which everyone seems to be missing. Hence it is less 'You can't run an open WAP', which indeed they could not ban, but 'You can't run an open WAP connected to our network', which they certainly can.
Um, by sniffing the network? You don't even need special wireless tools for that one, standard TCP/IP sniffing will get it, just like any unswitched network on the same 'wire'. Or, hell, just broadcast a 255.255.255.255 packet and see who responds, you don't even have to 'sniff'.
Of course, you need to know the WEP key to do that, but the point's already been made you can crack that.
However, trying to say 'But look at this log I have of some other MAC address doing it' is idiotic, because your router does not keep logs of what internal IP connected to what external IP.
If the police show up, it will be because your ISP-assigned IP address did X, and demonstrating that there was a mysterious MAC address assigned an IP on the network five minutes before that doesn't prove they did it, was still online at the time, or that that computer even existed...maybe you just changed your MAC for a second and got a new IP, and changed it and your MAC back. You have no way to demonstrate that that MAC was actually the one to do the crime, and no way to demonstrate that it wasn't you.(1)
Granted, you don't need to demonstrate that's true, they have to demonstrate it's not, but it's not a trivial 'Hey, look at my logs, it's not me, see?' 'Oh, haha, you're right, it was someone else, sorry for the bother. Did you see any mysterious people with a laptop hanging around?'.
1) Hell, if I was going to commit crimes, like say CC phishing, I'd get a laptop with a delibrately broken hard drive and a Linux boot CD and a wireless connection. Boot that up, change the MAC to some specific one, 'break into' my wireless router, do whatever, change the MAC back, and put it away. It looks exactly like a drive-by. And if the cops ask, that's my 'broken laptop'.
Are you in Kennesaw Georgia or is there another town with that law?
I went to SPSU and hung out with some students at Kennesaw State, and it was really funny how state law prohibited firearms on or near campus, and yet city law required each 'household' to own a gun.
What everyone is missing is the condo people are apparently providing the net connection.
They have a perfect right to demand you secure your wireless connection to their network.
And, in fact, if it wasn't their network, they would not be allowed to do anything of the sort. It doesn't matter what the convent says, the FCC has said that it is legal to own and operate any radio you are licensed to operated anywhere, regardless of any convent. Presumably this would extend to how you operate it.
Well that's not the sort of reply I was expecting. (I was expecting an entirely different sort of incoherent reply.)
However, there are roughly two ways of looking at a problem in politics. You can either try to change it through law, or you can not try to change it through law. The first is called 'liberal', and the second 'conservative'.
Now, there are some problems that everyone agrees the laws should attempt to fix, such as murder. And there are problems everyone agrees the law shouldn't, such as a burnt-out lightbulb in your bathroom. In addition, there are many 'problems' that many people do not agree are actually problems, and even some things where one side sees a problem and a solution, and the other side thinks the solution is the problem and the problem is the solution, like abortion.
So, this doesn't exactly match up to the (supposed) left and right in this country, but it is, in theory, where they are coming from. The left 'progresses' and the right 'resists adding government solutions'.
This is now wrong. The left is still in the same place it always is.
However, the right has been taken over by two offshoots of the left, or, at least, two 'progressive' groups who want to use the government to solve problems. The theocons and the neocons. The theocons want to solve the problem that a lot of people aren't their particular brand of Christian, and are even gay.(1) The neocons want to solve the problem that the world does not operate how we want it to.
I.e., the 'right' is trying to solve problems. In fact, they're trying to solve more problems than the left right now.
The actual left in this country rejected these theories because they don't see those 'problems' as, you know, actual problems. And, as is what generally happens when the government 'solves' problems that stem from incorrect assumptions, like the neocons, or just don't fucking exist at all, like the theocons, they have completely and utterly screwed it up. (The right isn't alone here. The drug prohibition and gun control are both total cockups becuase they solved problems that didn't exist, or at least solved real problems the wrong way.)
And none of this would fucking matter if the right hadn't made 'liberal' out to be a bad word. Our government was one of the most enlightened and liberal governments in the world at the time of its founding. In fact, almost every government on this planet is either extremely liberal compared to 500 years ago, or a dictatorship shithole like North Korea. For that little doublespeak alone the current 'right' needs to burn in hell.
1) Before some fucktard leaps in about how they're just protecting us from 'activist judges', that doesn't matter. If you are trying to solve a problem using the government, you are operating in a liberal universe. It doesn't matter how you try to solve it. If you were actually just attempting to correct some flaw in the government, maybe, but the sole, and stated, aim, seems to be to condemn homosexuality via the government, and the government making moral judgements is a liberal concept.
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Ahem. Hicks are from the mountains, not 'the South', which also comprises rednecks.
Rule of thumb: You live where there are hills and tiny rundown houses at the end of dirt road four miles deep in the woods, you're a hick. You live on a forty arce run down farm and grow peanuts, you're a redneck.
There are many overlaps, but they should not be confused.
Okay, I'm sorry, but this is fucking offensive to me.
Porn sites are not, in general, fronts for child molesters, you fucktard. You can argue they exploit women, you can argue with a good deal more sense they exploit men, you can call them perverts and say they're going to hell and wish they didn't exist at all. Hell, you can even argue that some of them are trying to, despite laws to the country, sell their products to 14-18 year olds.
But child molesters? Are you serious?
No, it's you who are wrong. There is absolutely nothing that would not make, under any circumstances, a Senator not a 'Congressman'.
The reason we call Senators Senators is that the Senate is consider 'more important', and it's certainly more selective, than the House.
But 'Congressman' isn't a title. It does not even exist in the Constitution. The correct titles are 'Senator' and 'Representative'.
We have started using it as a title of both houses of the legislature, but there's no magical offical definition that excludes Senators as you seem to assert. The Constitution quite clearly says that both the HoR and Senate together are 'Congress', and that one is properly referenced to as 'the House' with 'Representatives' in it, and the other is 'the Senate' with 'Senators' in it.
The way it refers to both is 'Members of the legislature', or 'Members of either house', so a more 'offical' term than 'Congressman' might be 'Member of Congress'. However, Congressman has, and has as long as it's been used, been how we refer to them both.
It's only idiots who hear 'Senator' and 'Congressman' on TV that think Senators aren't Congresmen. They use that, because like I said, being in the Senator is 'more important' and we wouldn't want to imply they were the same as lowly Representatives.
It's the difference between 'surgeons' and 'doctors'. People call the doctors who see them for a broken leg 'doctors', when a more specific title is 'general practioners', whereas they almost always call surgeons 'surgeons'. That doesn't mean that a surgeon isn't a doctor, it's just in one case we use a specific name and one case we use the general.
You hit the bullseye on the nose.
The idiotic tubes analogy wasn't anything to do with 'water pipes', and the fact the flow of data through pipes works somewhat like the flow of electrons through wires doesn't have anything to do with net neutrality, which is routers (Which don't even have an analogy in plumbing.) choose what 'types of water' (again, no analogy in plumbing) to through in what amounts. About the closest device I can think of to a router is a hot/cold faucet, and I can't figure out any sort of sane analogy from that.
It wasn't a plumbing analogy, it was a physical-objects-through-tube analogy, as show by the fact, in his world, things can slow down and get 'jammed'. But even if it was a plumbing analogy, it still made no sense.
And, the sad thing is, there is a fairly good analogy, as someone pointed out: Freeways, and police at on-ramps only directing certain kinds of traffic onto the freeways. You have to explain that, in the middle of these on-ramps, there are mediums-sized parking lots that everyone stops for a bit and the police can pick out anyone who's already arrived to go next, along with the fact that all internet traffic is basically six states away and contains four interstate switches and two sets of surface streets, but it will convey the concept to the layman. (And, technically, the roads can't be overloaded, everyone drives at exactly 65 mph or whatever, and trying to 'overload' the road just means you're trying to put two vehicles in the same place, resulting, obviously, in a crash that destroys both the vehicles. Luckily, on 'the internets', when the vehicle doesn't arrive, they send for another identical one.)
What if it is a site where not the model is called Barbie, but it's about a person's fantasies about Barbie.
Those aren't different things. There's a reason why Barbie is a popular name for tall leggy blonde porn stars, and that's almost entirely that doll.
I guess they sucked so much, perhaps the former drivers wanted to pay the nearly 2 million offered to stop GM crushing them just so they could smash them themselves?
GM has a stated policy of supporting cars they sell for ten years with parts. They were not willing to do that here.
In addition, those batteries were dangerous. They couldn't be disposed of legally in landfills, and under various laws they, GM, were in charge of disposing of them. And they were physically dangerous to people attempt repair work on the car, which is why GM never let anyone do it except themselves.
And the chargers were installed...what happens when someone moves and they leave behind a house with an unsupported GM manufactured death charger in the garage. (Or, even if they just stop using their cars?)
They had two solutions: Give the cars away, and hope that nothing they did ever came back and bite them in the ass, be it people demanding parts (One dead battery, and the car is finished forever.) or an auto repair shop that attempts to fix the car and someone gets electricuted, or a state suing them because someone disposed of a battery improperly, or anything.
Or, the other solution....just get rid of them.
And while not everyone needs to drive over 122 miles a day, they want a car that can drive that far. And no one like to sit there and stare at the odometer going 'Okay, this is exactly 59 miles, I need to reach where I'm going in the next two or turn around', or go 'If I cut over to the video store, how many miles does that add?' or 'I seem to be braking a lot today, how much extra is that taking off my batteries?' So, in practice, 122 miles translates to a real round trip commute of 40 miles.
You cannot build a commerically viable car with those restrictions that is not designed for a specific 'campus', a small area it will stay within. And those people want golf cars, not cars.
And, like I said, all the fucktards whining about this: Hey, dumbass. We have electric cars that get almost the same kilowatt per hour mileage. They're called hybrids with conversion kits (Toyota is about to start selling them direct, too.), and they cost less on the lot than it cost GM to make the EV1. Hell, you can buy a GM hybrid and run it as an electric car. We got those three years after the end of the EV1, thanks to improvements in batteries, so all this 'killing of the electric car' did was royally screw GM out of a lot of money because it zigged instead of zagged...it could have kept the experiment up and bought the patents from Toyota when they showed up.
It's not so much the insane conspiracy that gets me. (Why the hell does GM want to use gasoline? They don't own anything to do with oil.) It's the fact this huge mindbogglingly stupid conspiracy keep electric cars away from people...for three years. (And if you think, within three years, that everyone would have charging stations, you are insane.) That's not a conspiracy, that's just someone getting on board early and failing because the technology wasn't quite up to usable levels. It's akin to making a movie about OS/2 called 'What killed the preemptive multitasking operating system?'.
My point is that's what they did - they approached him at a conference, with a lot of people standing around, in a situation that was impossible to really secure.
Jesus Christ.
Okay, let's go over this again. When you're attending a conference, you're walking around semi-randomly. Yes, you might have signed up for certain events, but you might not be there. It is dangerous to try to arrest doing that.
When you're speaking at a conference, you must show up at a certain place, before the speech, to check in. Possibly you get a microphone attached, and they tell you some stuff about time limits, and you meet the people who are about to introduce you. You don't just walk in and up to the stage and start speaking.
In addition to this, because many speakers have fans, and some people at converences are lookie-lous who have nothing better to do than stare at this as it's going on, it usually happens in somewhat private settings. There's a 'speakers area' or a 'backstage area' or something so the aforementioned meeting doesn't happen at the doorway to the meeting room, at least at any well-designed conference. In addition, speakers who are nervious can calm their nerves and practice their speech, out of sight.
Do you follow this yet? Right before someone speaking is about the only time you'll know exactly where they are and that they will be almost alone, at any conference. They're behind the 'staff only' door, with maybe a few staff people and some other speakers. They aren't on the floor, which even in well-controlled conferences tend to have a dozen exits (Conferences have moved to badge security instead of physical access security for that reason.), they're in an area with two or three entrances and presumably the FBI is smart enough to have blueprints.
But in the case of active witness tampering, where any further contact might harm the case even more, and where the suspect is very knowledgeable about law enforcement techniques and could easily destroy evidence or flee, it seems unlikely to me that you would want to wait.
They can't destroy evidence when they're in another town at a conference, unless the evidence is being carried are on his person, which is exactly the reason you have to arrest them quickly and make sure they do not flee.
Witness tampering doesn't require you to be there in person. I'm sure a smart private eye could accomplish more with a cell phone and an Internet connection than they could in person, anyway. If you really are concerned about that, you want the person incommunicado pronto. You probably also don't want that person digging up more info on other witnesses in the case, since presumably that was their goal to begin with.
I think, at this point, the witness tampering was long over. And note he wasn't witness tampering out of some sort of personal motive, he was (accusedly) witness tampering because, in addition to getting paid to track someone down, he was paid to lean on them to not testify. It wasn't random 'I'll do anything to keep this case from trial', it was for profit, and assuming he wasn't being paid to do that again, he wouldn't. (Which, if the FBI had his phone tapped, they'd know.)
Math is not a science. Math is a system of rules, but it is not a system of rules derived by obvservation and experimentation. It's no more science than the rules of tic-tac-toe are, even if it is much more useful.
And, frankly, I wasn't aware anyone even even vaguely considered math a science. At no point in math is the scientific method used. Once you start running experiments, you're reached physics or chemistry or something, not math. Math operates on an entirely different concept called 'proofs', and you don't have to 'test' them by running controlled experiments, or postulate and alter theories with regard to those experiments. Doing that is science, not doing that is not science.(1)
And while math is a language, no other language is a science, either, you loon. The study of language can be a science, but not the actual language. (No, that doesn't make language a science, any more than birds are a science because the study of them is. The 'study' of anything is a science.)
And the idea that you can get a 'bachelor of science' in it making is science is inane. You can get a BS or BA in every field of study. You get either a BS or BA based on other classes, not how 'sciency' your major is.
1) How much you can do experiments depends on whether or not it's 'hard' or 'soft' science, but even things like history and even sociology make theories, even if they are somewhat vague, and try to test them using other known examples. I.e., this group of people did X, but this other group of people did Y. We think this difference is that the first group didn't have A. A makes you Y instead of X. So this third group, who is very A...did they do X or Y? These aren't 'controlled' experiments, thus earning the name 'soft science', nor are the theories very absolute, but it is science in a sense.
Are you talking about the EV1?
Do a little fucking research and you'll find out exactly what killed that.
One hint: It's exactly what everyone is still focusing on.
The batteries sucked ass. They were such high voltage the company was deathly afraid to let anyone near them, and to keep the weight down so it got what was still an absurdly low range of at most 150 miles (Most people didn't get that much, and that's the second version of the car, the first got 2/3rds that.), the recharger had to be installed in a garage, you couldn't just plug it.
The EV1 worked if you commuted to work in it, if you lived within 40 miles of work. It was absurdly expensive and didn't work anywhere else because of the, say it with me, batteries, and no one had any way around that in 1999.
Solely-battery powered electricity cars do not work, or, at least, they didn't work then. And, incidentally, the idea that GM would spend billions of dollars on research and then kill the project itself, or let someone else kill it, is insane.
And, the fact that there was a waiting list to lease at the time they shut the program down is not that useful, considering that GM lost something like 45,000 on each EV1 it produced and leased.
However, if you want a fucking electric car, well, buy a damn hybird, get conversion to enable the electric only mode and wall charging, and stop bitching. Those cost less than an EV1, which cost about 80,000 to make. And, as an added bonus, if you actually need to drive a useful distance, you can use the gas motor.
Physics/chemistry and math are not the same thing. Math is not a science. And engineering requires a sound base in physics and math, along with a lot of engineering specific rules-of-thumb that let you predict the behavior of complex systems without actually building them.
And note none of those kids game up with new solutions to anything. Everything they did we already knew how to do. It's just they came up with different, and possibly better, ways of figuring it out. Which is an amazing accomplishment, but not actually that important.
And laypeople do come up with new things in engineering all the time. They're called 'inventions', and they never operate on anything but well-understood principles...they just do something that no one ever bothered, or managed, to do before, that's really useful.
No one here is going to magically invent a new way to turn CO2 into carbon. We could, in theory, locate an existing way of doing it that works here, but the problem is that are already teams of engineers working on that, and have been trying to solve it for almost fifty years.
I don't understand the point you're making, since this is of course exactly what they did.
No, it's not. They waited for him somewhere he was due to be, and then arrested him when he showed up.
If it's worthwhile to apprehend him quickly, grab him at home in the morning, or something like that. Particularly for something communication-related and time sensitive like witness tampering, wouldn't you want to grab a person sooner rather than later, in order to prohibit any further illegal communications.
He was at a conference, so presumably they weren't worried about witness tampering. In addition, he was more than likely nowhere near any witnesses. Being at a conference involves 'randomly wandering around doing things that he finds interesting', not any sort of schedule. And it's entirely possible they had no idea where he was staying.
I don't buy the "snag 'em in public" theory either - I'd be a lot more confident in my ability to disappear in a crowded location, rather than early in the morning at home or something like that.
We have absolutely no indication he was snagged 'in public', or, at least, anywhere near a crowd of people. None at all. This is just something you made up. It is equally likely that they simply waited outside the stage door and arrested him when he showed up.
Tell me something. You work for the FBI. You get enough evidence to arrest this guy, you go to do it, you find he's at a conference in another city. Luckily, the FBI has people there, too. So...how do you do it? Well, you can try to track down where he's staying, but remember he's a PI and might not be under his real name, or might just be staying with someone. OTOH, there's this conference, you can find him there. You show up, and before you start trying to track him down, you notice tomorrow he's speaking.
What do you do? Shove your weight around trying to find him and hoping like hell this PI doesn't notice someone is tracking him down? Hope that nobody, at this converence of people who have a long history of working both with and against law enforcement, decides to clue him in the FBI's looking for him? Sit in his hotel lobby and hope he shows up and doesn't notice you and doesn't run when he does? (And, that, again, no one else from the conference notices you.)
Or do you wait till the next day and calmly take a seat where you can watch where people are supposed to show up to give a speech, and arrest him when he does so?
And, incidentally, I don't see anything wrong with a 'prep walk', even pretending everything you say is absolutely true. It is entirely possible the FBI does want PIs to know "Tracking down confidental witnesses' families and putting pressure on them won't be tolerated.". ...and?
As long as they don't prejudice the jury (The jury is in another state, and no one there would be very likely to be picked for it anyway, and it didn't make any media beside slashdot.), and they honestly have enough evidence against him, I don't see the problem.
Yeah, because you can trivially find people at conventions, and there's no way the FBI running around looking for him to arrest might have tipped him off and caused him to flee.
Seriously, a lot of these comments are damn stupid. The absolute best way to arrest someone is to learn they will be exactly at a certain place exactly at a certain time, and then show up there. They probably had a guy sitting outside the prep room, and when he shows up they just grabbed him. It's a much smarter idea than running around the conference willy-nilly and disturbing things and having word get back to him and him fleeing and them having to shut down the airports and wasting tons of tax money.
And, incidentally, police do this all the time. If you don't know they're after you, they wait until you're in a known location before going after you. Like, if you're in your house, they might wait for you to start getting in your car before pulling in behind you and blocking you in.
The police openly approaching someone over open ground is a good way for them to start running. Openly approaching someone at a conference, where it can take quite some time to find someone and there are all those people around, would be completely irresponsible behavior.
Whether or not he's guilty is another matter, but the method of his arrest is not questionable.
Um, no. The best way to make a stir would be to arrest him during his speech, which they did not do.
They don't enforce the law at all, no one's ever been charged, and there's actually no penalty stated in the law for violating it. The intent of the law isn't actually to make every house have a gun, just most of them. (In addition, you can opt out if you have physical or mental disabilities or are a conscientious objector.)
Oh, and reading up on it on Wikipedia, Kennasaw State University is actually outside the city limits, so the law doesn't apply. Huh. Mildly ironic that two groups of people live within a mile of each other, one being required to possess a gun in their living space, and one being required not to possess one there.
Anyway, some dishonest anti-gun control people use a goofy and dishonest statistic about the rate of burglaries dropping, but in general the numbers of crimes committed seems to have remained what it was since the law was passed 1982. While, of course, the city has quadrupled in size, and other surrounding cities that are same-distance same-size suburbs of Atlanta, like Roswell GA, have had crime climb as more criminals started commuting in from Atlanta. So, in general, the law seems to be working okay to decrease crime, in that criminals seem to go somewhere else.
And, despite what some people expected, there have been exactly two gun-related murders in the town since 1982, which is the same as the number of knife-related murders, giving the whole place an absurdly low murder rate of 0.2 a year or so.
Erm, no.
Stars, before they become supernovas, and even if they won't, like ours, expand to red giant size. This will include the earth inside the sun, first cooking it and then continuing on to melt it.
The fact that after it then collapses to a white dwarf it won't then explode with enough energy to vaporize the earth is a rather moot point. There won't, and can't, be an earth at that time. Whatever molten iron remains of it will have gotten sucked along as the sun collapsed into the white dwarf.
Because he's an idiot who thinks that has something to do with the sun, instead of the fact we've come up with half a dozen ways to render this planet uninhabitable.
All supernovas actually happened some time ago unless it's our Sun that's blowing up.
Not the ones that haven't happened yet.
All wireless networks are unswitched, you lunatic. If you have the encryption key, or there is none, you can see every packet as it goes past.
But, um, anyway, someone can, indeed, send out ARP broadcast packets, or get an IP (Or just make one of them up) and send out a broadcast, and find what other MAC addresses are on the network even if it's switched. MAC addresses stop working past routers, not switches. It's just a switched network makes you detect actively by sending out a broadcast packet instead of passively by watching them go by, but that's a near moot point when you are presumably trying to detect a wireless computer to pose your wireless computer as, because that isn't switched.
The fact that it is switched with the wired network, which despite your weird outrage is actually how every wifi device works because otherwise Windows craptacular broadcast networking would suck all the bandwidth, or even on a different segment, which yes, might keep anyone from seeing MAC addresses depending what you mean by that, is moot, because they're trying to sniff wireless MAC addresses, not wired ones. And actually makes this easier because they can easier figure out which is wireless and which isn't, which keeps them from doing something stupid like spoofing a MAC address, on their wireless card, of a wired network card.
Now, if you're trying to argue that you have no wireless computers at all, why the fuck are you running a wifi network? Or were you not following this conversation at all?
To recap: We are discussing the fact that if someone cracks your WEP (or you have no WEP) and wants to commit a crime, they can take one of your wireless computer MAC and IP addresses, thus rendering the magical 'router logging' that you seemed to think would save you self-incriminatory. (Not that that would work anyway.) They actually have an incentive to do that, as some people have MAC locks on their router, or just check various status pages on the router to see what MAC addresses have been using it, even in addition to encryption. So if they see a MAC address in the output they had to capture and decrypt to find the key, that isn't currently on the network, there's no reason not to use it.
They would, except this is apparently the homeowner's association's network, which everyone seems to be missing. Hence it is less 'You can't run an open WAP', which indeed they could not ban, but 'You can't run an open WAP connected to our network', which they certainly can.
Um, by sniffing the network? You don't even need special wireless tools for that one, standard TCP/IP sniffing will get it, just like any unswitched network on the same 'wire'. Or, hell, just broadcast a 255.255.255.255 packet and see who responds, you don't even have to 'sniff'.
Of course, you need to know the WEP key to do that, but the point's already been made you can crack that.
However, trying to say 'But look at this log I have of some other MAC address doing it' is idiotic, because your router does not keep logs of what internal IP connected to what external IP.
If the police show up, it will be because your ISP-assigned IP address did X, and demonstrating that there was a mysterious MAC address assigned an IP on the network five minutes before that doesn't prove they did it, was still online at the time, or that that computer even existed...maybe you just changed your MAC for a second and got a new IP, and changed it and your MAC back. You have no way to demonstrate that that MAC was actually the one to do the crime, and no way to demonstrate that it wasn't you.(1)
Granted, you don't need to demonstrate that's true, they have to demonstrate it's not, but it's not a trivial 'Hey, look at my logs, it's not me, see?' 'Oh, haha, you're right, it was someone else, sorry for the bother. Did you see any mysterious people with a laptop hanging around?'.
1) Hell, if I was going to commit crimes, like say CC phishing, I'd get a laptop with a delibrately broken hard drive and a Linux boot CD and a wireless connection. Boot that up, change the MAC to some specific one, 'break into' my wireless router, do whatever, change the MAC back, and put it away. It looks exactly like a drive-by. And if the cops ask, that's my 'broken laptop'.
Are you in Kennesaw Georgia or is there another town with that law?
I went to SPSU and hung out with some students at Kennesaw State, and it was really funny how state law prohibited firearms on or near campus, and yet city law required each 'household' to own a gun.
What everyone is missing is the condo people are apparently providing the net connection.
They have a perfect right to demand you secure your wireless connection to their network.
And, in fact, if it wasn't their network, they would not be allowed to do anything of the sort. It doesn't matter what the convent says, the FCC has said that it is legal to own and operate any radio you are licensed to operated anywhere, regardless of any convent. Presumably this would extend to how you operate it.
Not a single Clerks 2 reference yet?
Well that's not the sort of reply I was expecting. (I was expecting an entirely different sort of incoherent reply.)
However, there are roughly two ways of looking at a problem in politics. You can either try to change it through law, or you can not try to change it through law. The first is called 'liberal', and the second 'conservative'.
Now, there are some problems that everyone agrees the laws should attempt to fix, such as murder. And there are problems everyone agrees the law shouldn't, such as a burnt-out lightbulb in your bathroom. In addition, there are many 'problems' that many people do not agree are actually problems, and even some things where one side sees a problem and a solution, and the other side thinks the solution is the problem and the problem is the solution, like abortion.
So, this doesn't exactly match up to the (supposed) left and right in this country, but it is, in theory, where they are coming from. The left 'progresses' and the right 'resists adding government solutions'.
This is now wrong. The left is still in the same place it always is.
However, the right has been taken over by two offshoots of the left, or, at least, two 'progressive' groups who want to use the government to solve problems. The theocons and the neocons. The theocons want to solve the problem that a lot of people aren't their particular brand of Christian, and are even gay.(1) The neocons want to solve the problem that the world does not operate how we want it to.
I.e., the 'right' is trying to solve problems. In fact, they're trying to solve more problems than the left right now.
The actual left in this country rejected these theories because they don't see those 'problems' as, you know, actual problems. And, as is what generally happens when the government 'solves' problems that stem from incorrect assumptions, like the neocons, or just don't fucking exist at all, like the theocons, they have completely and utterly screwed it up. (The right isn't alone here. The drug prohibition and gun control are both total cockups becuase they solved problems that didn't exist, or at least solved real problems the wrong way.)
And none of this would fucking matter if the right hadn't made 'liberal' out to be a bad word. Our government was one of the most enlightened and liberal governments in the world at the time of its founding. In fact, almost every government on this planet is either extremely liberal compared to 500 years ago, or a dictatorship shithole like North Korea. For that little doublespeak alone the current 'right' needs to burn in hell.
1) Before some fucktard leaps in about how they're just protecting us from 'activist judges', that doesn't matter. If you are trying to solve a problem using the government, you are operating in a liberal universe. It doesn't matter how you try to solve it. If you were actually just attempting to correct some flaw in the government, maybe, but the sole, and stated, aim, seems to be to condemn homosexuality via the government, and the government making moral judgements is a liberal concept.