Since the PATRIOT act, libraries have stopped even keeping track of books you've borrowed and returned, because they could be forced to hand that over.
If you accept that it's super important to know exactly who's using the library's computers, then fingerprints are definitely better than barcodes.
Well, clearly.
The real question is: In what universe is it important for a library to know that? My library doesn't card me when I use a computer. They make me sign a sheet, but that's to keep track of use so everyone has a turn, and they card youngsters, so that parents can say 'No, my child cannot use a computer here.'.
Carding people using computers is akin to carding people wandering the shelves.
We got 911 within the last decade in my hometown. I think it was 96.
People who think 911 has always been everywhere are very ignorant.
The fun thing about getting 911: They refused to hook up the numbers '911' until they normalized all the addresses. For about six months we had a nice, working, expensive 911 center that you could call...just not via '911'. Oooookay. In theory, one number instead of one for poison control, police, fire, hospital, is a good thing...except they were in the phone book, on the first page, and the '911' center wasn't there at all.
911 should have been calling some emergency service since it was invented, even if it's just some desk in the police station, but apparently you're 'not allowed' to hook it up unless there's all sorts of service promises.
This is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. 911 should immediately in the entire US be connected to the local police station if there is no 911 service in a place, but whoever is in charge of this is a bunch of fucking morons.
I don't know if it was just the people in charge in my county who are fucktards or if there's some National Fucktard Council making the rules.
It's required by law as long as your phone line is hooked somewhere. And even that's iffy.
I have moved into a place where the phone had power (I could hear myself talking, I could push buttons and they made noise.) but it had no dial tone, ergo, I could not call anyone, not even 911.
The phone company is not require to leave every line ever laid hooked up to where it was originally hooked up.
I love the idea the guy had to carry the barebones cell phone around that can only make 911 calls.
I thought everyone did this. Everyone who has a cell phone has a spare cell phone laying around. Grab a charger, leave it plugged in. (Really useful for when a knife wielding manic cuts your line.)
Got two phones? One have a car charger? Plug it in in your glove box. (You'll probably want a cigarette lighter splitter, so you can plug other stuff in.)
Don't bother with anything else though. In my experience, emergence cell phones never get charged unless you just leave them plugged in, and having a dead one around can only hurt.
No kidding. I have yet to have a pleasant experience with 911.
The most notable time was when I rear-ended someone and called 911. I was right in the middle of town, told them when the accident was, that no one appeared to be seriously injured, and they wanted my 'name and address'. Repeatedly.
I was like 'Look, lady, I was just in a fucking traffic accident in the middle of town, I'm not telling you my street address. You know, a traffic accident? They don't have street addresses, they are,. in fact, in the street. I don't even know if everyone is okay yet!' and then I hung up on her.
Note I keep emphasising 'in the middle of town'. Any idiot could find me who had lived in the town two weeks, I was like a quarter mile from the square on the main road out of town. They weren't asking for the accident address, in fact, they'd already dispatched the police. They actually thought repeatedly trying to find out my street address during a traffic accident was a good idea.
I don't know what the hell that was about. If they were concerned it was a prank call, they had my number. They're not the damn police...all they needed to know was where it was, and what, basically, had happened, so they knew who to send! What if, while they had been fucking around asking inane questions, someone had died because I wasn't seeing what was going on? (My door was stuck so I couldn't get out of the car while talking on the phone, although admittedly I didn't tell them that.)
The only other time I've called 911, it rang at least 6 times before they answered.
Her number was routed to a non-emergency line because traditional phone companies keep the actual 911 numbers secret.
This whole thing is a condemnation of POTS behavior to a competitor costing lifes, not a VoIP problem.
Every VoIP system should have a list of those numbers, and default that you can override by typing in a new zip, and phone companies should be required to turn the list over.
Well, yes, first of all, that would take way too fucking long. Call up every single police station in the country, and ask for 911's number? Exactly how many 911 centers do you think there are?
Secondly, no, that isn't the number they're talking about. They're talking about the 'real' phone number, the XXX-XXXX phone numer, that 911 is an alias for, not the non-emergency number. Calling it is exactly like calling 911 from the right place. It's like how 411 is an alias for 555-1212.
Those numbers are 'secret', presumable so people in Florida can't prank call 911 in California.
And if anyone thinks that's hard, it's not. Sure, you have to be a real business to get a merchant account, but two words: identity theft.
There are some safeguards to stop this, like restrictions on newly opened merchant accounts, but nothing that can't be gotten around. You can even run a bunch of transactions through using your own cards (Well, cards you have gotten, not in your name.) so they won't be suspicious when you suddenly run 30 a day, because you've always done that, and no one's ever complained before...
And I think a month of billing people $1039.95 might pay better. Just one transaction in that amount...
People don't do this now because using stolen credit card numbers is easy, and they'd have to collect up a bunch to make it worthwild, because merchant accounts cost money. But when you can set up a 'Free Samples' stall in the mall, or whatever, and run through 30 people a day...you're a fool if you think they won't start. (Hey, if you made a fake business for your merchant account, you're already halfway to opening your own place in the mall anyway.
And before anyone says 'They can have off switches', or 'they can be stored in metal', I have to point out that that merely moves the scam inside a legit store with a briefcase with some sort of radio inside, waiting for someone to pull one out. Trickier, yeah. $1039.95 dollars tricky? No.
I don't know what the hell was wrong with that idea in Japan or England or whatever they did with coke machines. Let's put bluetooth transmitters at stores that broadcast an account number, and transaction code, and an amount, and let our cell phones pick it up and enable us to send that much money there. (And that account number can be displayed in the store so we can confirm it.)
The phone just needs to sign the information handed to it and the time, no actual encryption needed at all. Of course, now you need to report a stolen phone just like a stolen CC, so its signature can be disabled at the bank, but there's no way around that.
Of course, as bluetooth isn't secure, that means other people could, in theory, pay our bills for us. Not a very scary security hole.;)
This whole 'the store talk to you automatically' is idiotic. We need to have the information automatically get to us, and then we need to do something, using our stuff, to tell our bank to release the money to them.
Which incidently lets us, or at least our bank, set the security vs. convience. Do we need a PIN? A fingerprint? A rectal scan? What level will we choose to require for them to release our money? The way it is now is idiotic, as is this new proposed method.
I hope you berated the driver, as cutting the engine after putting it in neutral makes no fucking sense at all.
Neutral: Engine stops providing power, power brakes and steering work.
Cutting engine while in drive: Engine not only stops providing power but works to slow the car, but no power steering after engine stops.
Cutting engine while in neutral: Power steering fails. Congrats, idiot.
In addition, putting in neutral makes it a lot more likely you can turn the key to 'lock', as apparently you can do on your friends car.
Although that's still a damn criminal car design. You should never be able to lock steering while the car is able to move. You can't, on 99.99% of cars, and this is something people need to test.
I probably wouldn't even own a car that lets you do such an amazingly dangerous thing as lock the steering in anything other than park.
No, I used to think like you, but have been assured there are cars that are so poorly designed that you can turn the key to lock and even remove it while merrily driving down the highway. Thus, of course, killing everyone because of the total lack of steering.
I have yet to see one of these hypothetical cars, however, and am at a lost to explain how they have not been recalled.
You've never lived until you've bumped the car into neutral while going 75 with your cruise control on and have a panicy five seconds where you desperately try to figure out why your engine is trying to explode by red-lining itself, why the pedal won't come up off the floor yet you appear to be slowing down, and if you should cut the engine on a two lane 70 mph highway where everyone's going 75 and the shoulder is five feet wide.
Wheeeeeee. Talk about 'problem solving under pressure'.
The newer cars presumably have something in place to keep that from happening, but not a 93 Pontiac Sunbird. They just keep the throttle open until you reach the speed you set, the fact you're in neutral and can't reach it be damned!
I used to be confused when people talking about this, because I've still never seen a car where you can turn the ignition all the way off when in drive. (An automatic, I mean, obviously.) I think I once saw a car you could switch into neutral and remove the key, for towing, but never one where you could take the key out while in drive. (And that didn't lock the steering wheel, anyway, IIRC.)
I've been assured they exist, but they can't be that common, and it's a stupid 'feature'.
On most cars, you can't turn the car all the way off, locking the wheel, without shifting into park. Try it once while you're parked...if you can't do it, don't worry about it. If you can do it, you need to be careful about cutting the engine if your throttle goes crazy.
I had a car with power steering (And I always thought, brakes, but it could have just been a big vacuum assist.) that worked without the engine at all. They keep working as long as the wheels kept turning, and were obviously hooked in some way to the axis. I could kill my engine and swerve until I stopped moving, and I'd lose PS right near the end, at, IIRC, about 8 mph.
In my current truck, however, I lose PS immediately when the engine stalls, which sadly it does way too much for the first five minutes of operation. (In fact, that's how I notice it stalled.)
You know one of my gripes? People who ignore 'Keep Moving' signs.
That's just an accident waiting to happen. They posted those signs for a reason. If they just posted them for fun, they'd be up and down the highway. Duh. They only post those at places where people slow down and that's a bad thing.
Of course, it doesn't help when the signs are idiotic. I know of at least one place where you are instructed to Yield to nonexistent traffic on an off ramp. (The lane starts at that point.) So I know to put up with that, but...
I've almost rear-ended a fool who stopped there for no reason without looking and noticing he had his own lane. I don't mean 'waiting for traffic that's in the wrong lane', I don't mean 'slowing for a turn', both of which I expect there, I mean actually no reason at all. You can take that turn at about 25, but he apparently was treating it like a right on red (There is a red light for the left turn people, like 15 feet away.) and stopping for a few seconds.
Yield != Stop. If there is no traffic, keep moving, fools. Yield means 'keep driving unless someone's coming'! There'd be no point if it meant stop, we already have a sign for that!
And I once was driving past there and had someone pull into my lane because they didn't know they had their own, which I wasn't expecting at all. (I'm the worse defensive driver in history, I expect people to drive sanely, which has caused at least one accident.)
Of course, I'm under no expectation that if all the signs made sense that people would actually follow them.
Has anyone else noticed that more and more people are unaware of rules of order at a stop sign? I pulled up at a four way on Friday at the same time as someone to the right of me, and someone else across from me, and the person to the right of me went first, which would have caused me to ram them, because I knew the person across from me was supposed to go, and he was going straight, so I would have gone at the same time. *rolls eyes* Luckily, I was actually trying to open a soft drive, and thus chose to wait...but the guy across from me was rather annoyed at the line jumper.
I'm amazed people don't do that anyway. How do you know how your anti-lock brakes work if you don't practice?
Whenever I get a 'new' car, I run down to the nearby college at night and find an empty lot and slide around a bit, and see what happens when I turn the engine off and if I can turn the key back and have it start magically, aka, a push start, which is incredibly useful if your car stalls while you're driving down the highway. (The other option being a normal start in neutral, but that takes much longer. And wouldn't work if your battery was dead, but that's a rather worse-case scenerio.)
Then I come back and do it again when it's raining, solely for seeing how it skids.
And if I have a car I've never tried it on, and I'm on a completely empty and straight stretch of highway, I kill the engine there, too, to see if it does something different at high speeds. (That's probably a traffic violation, but if a cop appeared out of the blue, I'd just say I stalled for some reason.)
I will admit I've never tried to solve a hypothetical 'stuck pedal', but, OTOH, the parking lots aren't really big enough for that. It's a good idea, though. I know I can shift into neutral at any speed, but I agree that cutting the engine is better...for one thing, it should let the engine slow down the car. I'll have to figure out some way to test that.
Do people really drive around in a ton of metal and not know in advance how it operates when bad things happen to it? When, exactly, are they planning on learning? The time to learn what happens when you slam on the brakes on a puddle of water is not in the middle of traffic. I once had an early antilock system that pulsed the brakes really oddly...there was a lag between losing traction and the unlocking of the brake, or something, I never really figured it out.
I mean, there are somethings you can't learn until they happen, for example, if you really need to stop the car, you can switch into park when you're going 20 mph, but you'd obviously never want to do that unless you had to. But what happens when your engine cuts off, or if you hit a patch of water while turning? Everyone should test that.
By putting it under a Creative Common's license, you're explicitly saying it's okay to copy and modify.
So you're saying...it's okay for them to download the content and modify the presentation and content however they want, but it's not okay to modify it without making a copy?
That doesn't really make sense either, they are making a copy, they're just not making it availible to anyone else.
So, presumably, if they wrote a program that downloaded a copy of your website every night, and then modified it, and put it in the net, they'd be okay, but if they don't put the copy on the internet, just putting it once on their screen, they're evil?
That is about the most idiotic position on copying that I've ever heard anyone take. 'Sure, you can download, modify, and give out as many copies as you want, as long as it's not zero, in which case you can't even modify.'
Erm. I'll just assume you're ignorant, instead of a troll.
Theft is defined as 'intent to deprive someone of their property'. That's the defination. I quote Black's Law Dictionary: "The felonious taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of depriving the true owner of it; larceny."
It's so old a defination it's part of the shared English common law. 'As if a fervant takes his mafter's horfe, without his knowlege, and brings him home again: if a neighbour takes another's plough, that is left in the field, and ufes it upon his own land, and then returns it: if, under colour of arrear of rent, where none is due, I diftrein another's cattel, or fiefe them: all thefe are mifdemefnors and trefpaffes, but no felonies.' (The felony it's not being is 'larciny' or theft.) That's Blackstone's Commentaries, written in 1765. Which is pre-revolution and legally makes it eligable for American common law, BTW. As I can't find where the US Code defines 'theft' except in special circumstances, English common law is the legal defination, believe it or not. (How the hell do you diftrein or fiefe cattle?)
This form of theft is also known as 'theft by taking', the default form of theft, if you will. You are correct that there are other kinds, such as 'theft by conversion', where you legitimately have possession of someone else's property, but 'use it up' without permission, or 'theft by misappropriation', where, IIRC, you have authority to use someone else's money for one purpose, and instead use it for another. All these require 'intent to deprive'.
Copyright infringenment, legally, has NOTHING to do with theft, at all. It's not called theft, it's not defined using the same terms, it's not in the same section of the legal code. In 1985's Dowling v. United States, the Surpreme Court wrote in the majority opinion: "(copyright infringement) does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud... The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use." And they thus decided that copyright infringement across state lines was not the same thing as transporting stolen property.
And let me quote the Seven Circuit Court:
Judge Noonan: Let me say what your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new. And the question is, Does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that somthing new? And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it theft. You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem.
Ramos: Your Honor...
Judge Noonan: So address that, if you would...
Ramos: Your Honor, I would be, I. ..
Judge Noonan:...rather than use abusive language.
You can argue it's morally or ethically theft all you want. But it is not, and never has been, legally theft, or anything even vaguely related to theft. Under no law forbiding 'theft' that has ever existed.
No kidding. I hate to admit it, but I have like five TV shows I watch a week, and I find it much easier just to download them instead of taping them and keeping up with the tapes.
In fact, sometimes I download them in addition to taping them, because sometimes my cable is a bit fuzzy, and I don't want to have to search though five tapes and figure out which is last weeks and which is this week and do I need to watch this show to make sure I have enough room to tape this other show...
First person to suggest a DVR will get a shipping address for them to send me one. Or a paypal address they can send the money to.
Ironically, if the networks would let me download them with commericals, I would watch those commericals. I can, and do, fast-forward through commericals on the VCR, but have no such control when I'm watching downloaded stuff...it's displaying on the same TV, but my computer is way across the room, so I have to start it and walk to my chair that can see the TV, whereas my VCR has a remote.(1)
I wouldn't even mind DRM on them. I actually do download 90% of them, watch them once and delete them. (The last 10% I tend to get off Usenet, an entire series at once, and those get burned onto my 'until [I can afford]/[they release] the DVDs' CD spindle.)
1) I have however just ordered a wireless mouse for exactly this reason. Why they don't make cheap IR receivers for computers that universal remote controls work with, I do not know. I got a wireless keyboard and mouse for 11 dollars plus shipping, which was a deal, but even normally, they're 20 bucks, whereas the cheapest 'remote control' solution was 35 dollars or so, coming with another remote I didn't need. How the hell much can a USB HID chip + an IR controller cost? It logically should only be about two dollars...you can get USB optical mice for five dollars, which actually contain a light sensing device in them in addition to a ton of other stuff, and circuitry to let them operate as PS/2 mice also.
It's ok to borrow things, as long as you do it without causing the owner to be unable to use it if he wants to use it, and you don't dammage or wear it out in the process.
For people who think that's wrong: It's not.
To steal something you have to intend to deprive the owner of it.
While this obviously means you can't accidently steal something (Which is true for a lot of crimes. You can't accidently trespass, either.), it also means it's not theft if you honestly were borrowing something with the intent to return it before the owner wanted it.
Of course, the problem is proving, in court, that you intended to return it. That really only works if there was no logical way for you to have kept it. Maybe if you walked off down the street with someone's pet elephant or something, but normally that doesn't work.
And you have to demonstrate you intended to return it before they would have wanted it back, which basically means 'before they noticed it missing'. Note 'intended'...you don't have to really get it back, just intend to. If you get hit by a car while returning it, you're covered.
This is also why walking up and destroying something of someone else's is called 'theft'. You're intending to deprive them of their property, even though you, yourself, are not intending to keep it.
However, as copyright infringement is not theft, there is no exception with 'I intended to delete it' or whatever the analogy would be.
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Admit it. That actually means 'black folk', doesn't it?
So all they have track of are books you have out.
Well, clearly.
The real question is: In what universe is it important for a library to know that? My library doesn't card me when I use a computer. They make me sign a sheet, but that's to keep track of use so everyone has a turn, and they card youngsters, so that parents can say 'No, my child cannot use a computer here.'.
Carding people using computers is akin to carding people wandering the shelves.
People who think 911 has always been everywhere are very ignorant.
The fun thing about getting 911: They refused to hook up the numbers '911' until they normalized all the addresses. For about six months we had a nice, working, expensive 911 center that you could call...just not via '911'. Oooookay. In theory, one number instead of one for poison control, police, fire, hospital, is a good thing...except they were in the phone book, on the first page, and the '911' center wasn't there at all.
911 should have been calling some emergency service since it was invented, even if it's just some desk in the police station, but apparently you're 'not allowed' to hook it up unless there's all sorts of service promises.
This is possibly the stupidest thing I have ever heard of. 911 should immediately in the entire US be connected to the local police station if there is no 911 service in a place, but whoever is in charge of this is a bunch of fucking morons.
I don't know if it was just the people in charge in my county who are fucktards or if there's some National Fucktard Council making the rules.
I have moved into a place where the phone had power (I could hear myself talking, I could push buttons and they made noise.) but it had no dial tone, ergo, I could not call anyone, not even 911.
The phone company is not require to leave every line ever laid hooked up to where it was originally hooked up.
I thought everyone did this. Everyone who has a cell phone has a spare cell phone laying around. Grab a charger, leave it plugged in. (Really useful for when a knife wielding manic cuts your line.)
Got two phones? One have a car charger? Plug it in in your glove box. (You'll probably want a cigarette lighter splitter, so you can plug other stuff in.)
Don't bother with anything else though. In my experience, emergence cell phones never get charged unless you just leave them plugged in, and having a dead one around can only hurt.
The most notable time was when I rear-ended someone and called 911. I was right in the middle of town, told them when the accident was, that no one appeared to be seriously injured, and they wanted my 'name and address'. Repeatedly.
I was like 'Look, lady, I was just in a fucking traffic accident in the middle of town, I'm not telling you my street address. You know, a traffic accident? They don't have street addresses, they are,. in fact, in the street. I don't even know if everyone is okay yet!' and then I hung up on her.
Note I keep emphasising 'in the middle of town'. Any idiot could find me who had lived in the town two weeks, I was like a quarter mile from the square on the main road out of town. They weren't asking for the accident address, in fact, they'd already dispatched the police. They actually thought repeatedly trying to find out my street address during a traffic accident was a good idea.
I don't know what the hell that was about. If they were concerned it was a prank call, they had my number. They're not the damn police...all they needed to know was where it was, and what, basically, had happened, so they knew who to send! What if, while they had been fucking around asking inane questions, someone had died because I wasn't seeing what was going on? (My door was stuck so I couldn't get out of the car while talking on the phone, although admittedly I didn't tell them that.)
The only other time I've called 911, it rang at least 6 times before they answered.
And, in many cases, a cell phone, when the tower goes down. You might not even know there's a power outage at the tower!
This whole thing is a condemnation of POTS behavior to a competitor costing lifes, not a VoIP problem.
Every VoIP system should have a list of those numbers, and default that you can override by typing in a new zip, and phone companies should be required to turn the list over.
Secondly, no, that isn't the number they're talking about. They're talking about the 'real' phone number, the XXX-XXXX phone numer, that 911 is an alias for, not the non-emergency number. Calling it is exactly like calling 911 from the right place. It's like how 411 is an alias for 555-1212.
Those numbers are 'secret', presumable so people in Florida can't prank call 911 in California.
There are some safeguards to stop this, like restrictions on newly opened merchant accounts, but nothing that can't be gotten around. You can even run a bunch of transactions through using your own cards (Well, cards you have gotten, not in your name.) so they won't be suspicious when you suddenly run 30 a day, because you've always done that, and no one's ever complained before...
And I think a month of billing people $1039.95 might pay better. Just one transaction in that amount...
People don't do this now because using stolen credit card numbers is easy, and they'd have to collect up a bunch to make it worthwild, because merchant accounts cost money. But when you can set up a 'Free Samples' stall in the mall, or whatever, and run through 30 people a day...you're a fool if you think they won't start. (Hey, if you made a fake business for your merchant account, you're already halfway to opening your own place in the mall anyway.
And before anyone says 'They can have off switches', or 'they can be stored in metal', I have to point out that that merely moves the scam inside a legit store with a briefcase with some sort of radio inside, waiting for someone to pull one out. Trickier, yeah. $1039.95 dollars tricky? No.
I don't know what the hell was wrong with that idea in Japan or England or whatever they did with coke machines. Let's put bluetooth transmitters at stores that broadcast an account number, and transaction code, and an amount, and let our cell phones pick it up and enable us to send that much money there. (And that account number can be displayed in the store so we can confirm it.)
The phone just needs to sign the information handed to it and the time, no actual encryption needed at all. Of course, now you need to report a stolen phone just like a stolen CC, so its signature can be disabled at the bank, but there's no way around that.
Of course, as bluetooth isn't secure, that means other people could, in theory, pay our bills for us. Not a very scary security hole. ;)
This whole 'the store talk to you automatically' is idiotic. We need to have the information automatically get to us, and then we need to do something, using our stuff, to tell our bank to release the money to them.
Which incidently lets us, or at least our bank, set the security vs. convience. Do we need a PIN? A fingerprint? A rectal scan? What level will we choose to require for them to release our money? The way it is now is idiotic, as is this new proposed method.
Neutral: Engine stops providing power, power brakes and steering work.
Cutting engine while in drive: Engine not only stops providing power but works to slow the car, but no power steering after engine stops.
Cutting engine while in neutral: Power steering fails. Congrats, idiot.
In addition, putting in neutral makes it a lot more likely you can turn the key to 'lock', as apparently you can do on your friends car.
Although that's still a damn criminal car design. You should never be able to lock steering while the car is able to move. You can't, on 99.99% of cars, and this is something people need to test.
I probably wouldn't even own a car that lets you do such an amazingly dangerous thing as lock the steering in anything other than park.
I have yet to see one of these hypothetical cars, however, and am at a lost to explain how they have not been recalled.
Wheeeeeee. Talk about 'problem solving under pressure'.
The newer cars presumably have something in place to keep that from happening, but not a 93 Pontiac Sunbird. They just keep the throttle open until you reach the speed you set, the fact you're in neutral and can't reach it be damned!
I've been assured they exist, but they can't be that common, and it's a stupid 'feature'.
On most cars, you can't turn the car all the way off, locking the wheel, without shifting into park. Try it once while you're parked...if you can't do it, don't worry about it. If you can do it, you need to be careful about cutting the engine if your throttle goes crazy.
In my current truck, however, I lose PS immediately when the engine stalls, which sadly it does way too much for the first five minutes of operation. (In fact, that's how I notice it stalled.)
That's just an accident waiting to happen. They posted those signs for a reason. If they just posted them for fun, they'd be up and down the highway. Duh. They only post those at places where people slow down and that's a bad thing.
Of course, it doesn't help when the signs are idiotic. I know of at least one place where you are instructed to Yield to nonexistent traffic on an off ramp. (The lane starts at that point.) So I know to put up with that, but...
I've almost rear-ended a fool who stopped there for no reason without looking and noticing he had his own lane. I don't mean 'waiting for traffic that's in the wrong lane', I don't mean 'slowing for a turn', both of which I expect there, I mean actually no reason at all. You can take that turn at about 25, but he apparently was treating it like a right on red (There is a red light for the left turn people, like 15 feet away.) and stopping for a few seconds.
Yield != Stop. If there is no traffic, keep moving, fools. Yield means 'keep driving unless someone's coming'! There'd be no point if it meant stop, we already have a sign for that!
And I once was driving past there and had someone pull into my lane because they didn't know they had their own, which I wasn't expecting at all. (I'm the worse defensive driver in history, I expect people to drive sanely, which has caused at least one accident.)
Of course, I'm under no expectation that if all the signs made sense that people would actually follow them.
Has anyone else noticed that more and more people are unaware of rules of order at a stop sign? I pulled up at a four way on Friday at the same time as someone to the right of me, and someone else across from me, and the person to the right of me went first, which would have caused me to ram them, because I knew the person across from me was supposed to go, and he was going straight, so I would have gone at the same time. *rolls eyes* Luckily, I was actually trying to open a soft drive, and thus chose to wait...but the guy across from me was rather annoyed at the line jumper.
Erm, I don't know why, if they weren't meant to do that, they would do that, as it's been about a 50/50 tossup if they could or not.
Whenever I get a 'new' car, I run down to the nearby college at night and find an empty lot and slide around a bit, and see what happens when I turn the engine off and if I can turn the key back and have it start magically, aka, a push start, which is incredibly useful if your car stalls while you're driving down the highway. (The other option being a normal start in neutral, but that takes much longer. And wouldn't work if your battery was dead, but that's a rather worse-case scenerio.)
Then I come back and do it again when it's raining, solely for seeing how it skids.
And if I have a car I've never tried it on, and I'm on a completely empty and straight stretch of highway, I kill the engine there, too, to see if it does something different at high speeds. (That's probably a traffic violation, but if a cop appeared out of the blue, I'd just say I stalled for some reason.)
I will admit I've never tried to solve a hypothetical 'stuck pedal', but, OTOH, the parking lots aren't really big enough for that. It's a good idea, though. I know I can shift into neutral at any speed, but I agree that cutting the engine is better...for one thing, it should let the engine slow down the car. I'll have to figure out some way to test that.
Do people really drive around in a ton of metal and not know in advance how it operates when bad things happen to it? When, exactly, are they planning on learning? The time to learn what happens when you slam on the brakes on a puddle of water is not in the middle of traffic. I once had an early antilock system that pulsed the brakes really oddly...there was a lag between losing traction and the unlocking of the brake, or something, I never really figured it out.
I mean, there are somethings you can't learn until they happen, for example, if you really need to stop the car, you can switch into park when you're going 20 mph, but you'd obviously never want to do that unless you had to. But what happens when your engine cuts off, or if you hit a patch of water while turning? Everyone should test that.
Some of us stopped using the idiotic original layout a long time ago and switched to the stripped down version.
By putting it under a Creative Common's license, you're explicitly saying it's okay to copy and modify.
So you're saying...it's okay for them to download the content and modify the presentation and content however they want, but it's not okay to modify it without making a copy?
That doesn't really make sense either, they are making a copy, they're just not making it availible to anyone else.
So, presumably, if they wrote a program that downloaded a copy of your website every night, and then modified it, and put it in the net, they'd be okay, but if they don't put the copy on the internet, just putting it once on their screen, they're evil?
That is about the most idiotic position on copying that I've ever heard anyone take. 'Sure, you can download, modify, and give out as many copies as you want, as long as it's not zero, in which case you can't even modify.'
Theft is defined as 'intent to deprive someone of their property'. That's the defination. I quote Black's Law Dictionary: "The felonious taking and removing of another's personal property with the intent of depriving the true owner of it; larceny."
It's so old a defination it's part of the shared English common law. 'As if a fervant takes his mafter's horfe, without his knowlege, and brings him home again: if a neighbour takes another's plough, that is left in the field, and ufes it upon his own land, and then returns it: if, under colour of arrear of rent, where none is due, I diftrein another's cattel, or fiefe them: all thefe are mifdemefnors and trefpaffes, but no felonies.' (The felony it's not being is 'larciny' or theft.) That's Blackstone's Commentaries, written in 1765. Which is pre-revolution and legally makes it eligable for American common law, BTW. As I can't find where the US Code defines 'theft' except in special circumstances, English common law is the legal defination, believe it or not. (How the hell do you diftrein or fiefe cattle?)
This form of theft is also known as 'theft by taking', the default form of theft, if you will. You are correct that there are other kinds, such as 'theft by conversion', where you legitimately have possession of someone else's property, but 'use it up' without permission, or 'theft by misappropriation', where, IIRC, you have authority to use someone else's money for one purpose, and instead use it for another. All these require 'intent to deprive'.
Copyright infringenment, legally, has NOTHING to do with theft, at all. It's not called theft, it's not defined using the same terms, it's not in the same section of the legal code. In 1985's Dowling v. United States, the Surpreme Court wrote in the majority opinion: "(copyright infringement) does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud... The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use." And they thus decided that copyright infringement across state lines was not the same thing as transporting stolen property.
And let me quote the Seven Circuit Court:
Judge Noonan: Let me say what your problem is. You can use these harsh terms, but you are dealing with something new. And the question is, Does the statutory monopoly that Congress has given you reach out to that somthing new? And that's a very debatable question. You don't solve it by calling it theft. You have to show why this court should extend a statutory monopoly to cover the new thing. That's your problem. . ...rather than use abusive language.
Ramos: Your Honor...
Judge Noonan: So address that, if you would...
Ramos: Your Honor, I would be, I. .
Judge Noonan:
You can argue it's morally or ethically theft all you want. But it is not, and never has been, legally theft, or anything even vaguely related to theft. Under no law forbiding 'theft' that has ever existed.
In fact, sometimes I download them in addition to taping them, because sometimes my cable is a bit fuzzy, and I don't want to have to search though five tapes and figure out which is last weeks and which is this week and do I need to watch this show to make sure I have enough room to tape this other show...
First person to suggest a DVR will get a shipping address for them to send me one. Or a paypal address they can send the money to.
Ironically, if the networks would let me download them with commericals, I would watch those commericals. I can, and do, fast-forward through commericals on the VCR, but have no such control when I'm watching downloaded stuff...it's displaying on the same TV, but my computer is way across the room, so I have to start it and walk to my chair that can see the TV, whereas my VCR has a remote.(1)
I wouldn't even mind DRM on them. I actually do download 90% of them, watch them once and delete them. (The last 10% I tend to get off Usenet, an entire series at once, and those get burned onto my 'until [I can afford]/[they release] the DVDs' CD spindle.)
1) I have however just ordered a wireless mouse for exactly this reason. Why they don't make cheap IR receivers for computers that universal remote controls work with, I do not know. I got a wireless keyboard and mouse for 11 dollars plus shipping, which was a deal, but even normally, they're 20 bucks, whereas the cheapest 'remote control' solution was 35 dollars or so, coming with another remote I didn't need. How the hell much can a USB HID chip + an IR controller cost? It logically should only be about two dollars...you can get USB optical mice for five dollars, which actually contain a light sensing device in them in addition to a ton of other stuff, and circuitry to let them operate as PS/2 mice also.
I can't get sci-fi here unless I go to dish.
For people who think that's wrong: It's not.
To steal something you have to intend to deprive the owner of it.
While this obviously means you can't accidently steal something (Which is true for a lot of crimes. You can't accidently trespass, either.), it also means it's not theft if you honestly were borrowing something with the intent to return it before the owner wanted it.
Of course, the problem is proving, in court, that you intended to return it. That really only works if there was no logical way for you to have kept it. Maybe if you walked off down the street with someone's pet elephant or something, but normally that doesn't work.
And you have to demonstrate you intended to return it before they would have wanted it back, which basically means 'before they noticed it missing'. Note 'intended'...you don't have to really get it back, just intend to. If you get hit by a car while returning it, you're covered.
This is also why walking up and destroying something of someone else's is called 'theft'. You're intending to deprive them of their property, even though you, yourself, are not intending to keep it.
However, as copyright infringement is not theft, there is no exception with 'I intended to delete it' or whatever the analogy would be.