Personally, I refuse to fly unless it is under the most important of circumstances. Sickness or death of a family member. Business trip that cannot be driven for time sensitive reasons. I have actually avoided it simply be figuring out a solution that did not require it.
However, there are those that will still be forced to fly, especially by their work. Kind of hard to tell the company and the boss that you refuse to fly, even for religious reasons. You will either get stuck in a stagnant position with no chance of promotion or fired.
Your outcome is logical, but if that happens we will just need to figure out a different solution to fight them. I don't know what that is either. Personal travel we can all limit, but I have always been under the impression that the majority of the airlines business is business flights. That is the very definition of a captive audience. Corporations tend to not listen or care when you start explaining how your rights are violated.
So your solution will also involve a lot of business people suing their corporations when they dismiss them for refusing to fly.
It will have to get really ugly, which is probably going to happen anyways......
On the other hand, my son is extraordinarily proud of his video game accomplishments... probably because they're the most "real" form of competition he will likely every have, at least until he's much older.
Sometimes that can be an understatement. I have played Halo against college students and others my own age and held my own. In fact, in my age group, I am almost god like. I once played against a 13 year old. After about 15 minutes he asked if I had really played before or if I was just lying.
These "video games" can be harder than you think. It ain't Donkey Kong anymore.
If your son is winning victories against South Koreans in Starcraft....... let's just say he made it to the majors and is a top player:)
I had no idea who he was till I Googled it. My own philosophy does contain many elements of what you may call Eastern Philosophy. It is not limited to it though. Universal truths are found everywhere for self evident reasons.
Although I am happy that you used mockery of my philosophical response to you in your own response. It is certainly a step up from the hatred previously.
Wow. In Las Vegas they call that doubling down. On that hate part at least.
You are part of the problem.
Since the very beginning. People like you that are only filled with hate and actually use the word "kill" in their ideas of how to solve problems. Whether it is in some intangible God's name, some other philosophy, perceived slight, or sense of justice and progress.
You say you are mostly harmless, but you are not. Everyday you expose the rest of us to your disease. Hate breeds more hate. That is not just a cliche, but an observation of human nature.
It is most certain, that words or not, you have chosen violence in your path. You have chosen the path of the warrior, but not with honor, only bloodshed for the illusion of something better.
Violence and hate is what continues to fill this world with suffering and pain, and the very very few of us that have obtained real power, use people like you as pawns to expand and maintain their power.
I pity you while you are on this path. Hopefully one day, the hate will be gone and replaced.
And for the record, I am not a pacifist. I can also walk the path of the warrior, but I will only do so when absolutely required. When logic, reasoning, and words fail. When the weak must be protected, when I must defend myself and those I love. At that point I will kill. However, my heart will not be filled with hate when I do so, and I will not hate those I have to kill to defend myself and my family. The greatest martial artists and swordsman in history have always said that true skill and power as a warrior is only obtained when one fights with peace and serenity inside them.
That is the difference between a true master and a common street thug or disillusioned vigilante such as yourself.
If you truly wish to change things for the better, to change the world and bring enlightenment, you must first obtain it yourself. Otherwise, the only thing you do is spread the hate and violence and become no better than those you fight against and harm those you would protect no differently than those you despise.
You have become one with your enemy in both spirit and action.
I was limiting my comments about the choice to flights within the intercontinental US.
Going through the border is a WHOLE different story as even US Citizens no longer have any rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution. It's a virtual Berlin Wall. I can enjoy all the rights I have left as long as I stay within the border of my country. I attempt to cross it, and *poof*, all of my rights disappear. Coming back in I am not a US Citizen again till I make it through processing.
I amazed you will come back. My next out of country trips are being planned via boats. It will take longer to get where I am going, but not nearly as insane as coming in from a plane. I have done this a few times since 9/11 and when you get back from a cruise even, they are not like that.
If it does get to that point, I will just borrow a sail boat and make my way to where I want to go. Doubles as being a pretty neat vacation in of itself.
If you're right all of my business out of country will be done by lawyers and video conferencing. I had already taken into account that they can steal your equipment and copy your data. My plan around that was much simpler than TrueCrypt. I was just going to take the hard drives out and ship them (still encrypted), or just ship the whole laptop. Most of my work and data is available via a secure remote connection anyways.
I find it extremely humorous that you are comparing TSA agents to WWII German concentration camp guards like the ones at Auschwitz.
You have to a tenuous grasp on reality to perceive the choice of going through a machine, that does not kill you, and a pat down, also designed to not kill you, as being related to the processing into a concentration camp.
I will begrudgingly admit, that airline food might be comparable to the food at a concentration camp, but otherwise you're just like what they serve on the short flight.... nuts.
I will agree with the head hunter option as passive resistance.
Also keep in mind, that the economy varies from state to state. My friend was looking for a job for over a year and half and burned through all of his savings. Lived with me at the time and towards the end was completely dependent upon me. Unable to pay rent, etc.
As far as TSA agents go, believe me, he is one of the good guys. He won't be a dick to you and is actually very nice. It is not a coincidence he is already moving up the ranks. He has a unique ability to deal with people and get them to calm down. Explain their options, etc.
For the record, the poster I replied to offered 4 suggestions. Only one was passive, and he emphasized overall that the goal was to give these "people" no choice, make their lives miserable, and through negative reinforcement and outright punishment and discrimination (which is illegal anyways) force them to quit their jobs and find new ones.
The economy is not actually that good. As a TSA agent you at least have full medical coverage and benefits as a state worker from what I understand. Many jobs might be found for less money, but also with less benefits. He needs those benefits for his family.
Just quitting and finding another job is simplistic and not always as easy as it sounds. I am lucky. My services are not that easy to find, I have a good reputation, and I am scraping by. Not nearly doing as good as I was a few years back before the 2nd Great Depression started, but I am surviving.
Not everyone is that lucky. I still have many friends on unemployment. They can't even take some jobs because they pay less than unemployment and that would mean they cannot afford the debt they have either. Makes it a really tough decision. On unemployment it makes it kind of hard to find a cheaper place to live that is not dangerous or in the ghetto areas of town, and in many cases means bankruptcy.
The head hunter option is by the far the best. If, as a society, we could actually offer comparable jobs to the TSA agents they would take them. I was not kidding when I compared their jobs to call centers and telemarketing. Giving them a sensible option that allows them to change their jobs without unreasonable, and in many cases economically non viable consequences, is the most intelligent answer in that persons post.
Considering that one of my friends (20 years) is a supervisor, you're plan does not work for me. The regular TSA agents and supervisors are not bad people at all. It is hard enough to find a job in this economy and a TSA agent is worse than a call center or telemarketer in terms of stress and bullshit.
You want to cause them pain by mistreating them, which is not that much different than physical violence in the spirit of your argument.
Antagonistic behavior and belligerence is never the answer to conflict resolution.
Simple intelligence would dictate the answer here:
The TSA allows you the option of a pat down. It takes 700 - 1000 times longer. Literally. I don't like being touched by a strange man, especially right up against my junk. Guess what? He does not really want to do it either.
Optimum solution to getting them to change their minds is for us to take a path of suffering instead of a path of violence. We all subject ourselves to the pat down. Then it will take 12 hours to get through the check points, the airlines will go absolutely ape shit and scream even louder for a private alternative to the TSA, and the TSA is effectively shut down by an inefficient process.
Either that, or they would need 100 TSA agents manning each entry point to do a pat down procedure.
It costs me more in time and energy, and it invades my privacy. However, my privacy and personal space is invaded by a single person and the data is not recorded that could be kept forever.
I dislike the current situation as much as you do, but I will not resort to your methods. They are far to aggressive, harmful, and uncivilized.
People need to remember the lesson of Gandhi. Non-violence and passive resistance can be as strong as water shaping the world over time. There is a time when violence is required for self preservation, but I hardly think the TSA policies are a threat against your life.
Your privacy? Who cares...the problem is that you think someone does care. Stop worrying about how others judge you, and it doesn't matter about your privacy. The gov't is corrupt? The gov't has always been corrupt.
That is one of the problems when arguing about how absolutely critical Privacy is to maintaining our Freedom.
You are making a philosophical argument. You specifically are suffering from what I call "Star Trek" glasses. In an ideal world, or even your envisioned Utopia, privacy might not actually be required, or much smaller levels or privacy would be acceptable. For example, the whole world could know everything about you, where you are, your thoughts about certain subjects. All of it indexed and searchable like Google. Privacy would only exist for sex (when desired) or bodily functions. Perhaps over time, even the need for privacy in those actions would no longer be needed.
It is not hard to imagine a society or race of beings that have no concept of it, especially a strongly telepathic one.
However, at our point in history, you also point out that the government is deeply corrupt. Privacy is not just a fundamental human right (one which we can freely give up in the aforementioned Utopia), but a strategic defense.
Governments have always demonstrated that they are made up of people. Therefore, it is those people that have been corrupt. They will use the tools and resources at their disposal towards their corrupt ends.
Privacy has always been a defense for the people because it was very difficult in recent centuries to strongly and effectively remove it from the people by force. The technology and communications infrastructure simply did not exist.
In Sun Tzu's Art of War he specifically devotes a fairly large amount of attention to espionage and spies. It was to gather information, because information was valuable. To quote Sun Tzu:
What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.
Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
Quantities like length, breadth, distance and magnitude, are susceptible of exact mathematical determination; human actions cannot be so calculated.
Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
Only today has the ability to obtain foreknowledge been so cheaply attained by government and so far reaching. The state police agencies of 50-60 years ago would have marveled at the ability we have today. Far more people would have died had those abusive and corrupt governments had access to the tools and resources we have today.
To be saddened by the loss of privacy and to be concerned by it is not philosophical ignorance as you imply. The enlightened understanding you speak of is ignorance itself.
Privacy, Anonymity, and the strength in numbers that we possess is absolutely our best defense. It is not about you, clifyt, judging me. It is about the corrupt government official determining that I am a threat to their social order through knowledge obtained by my lack of privacy. In some countries, that just gets you killed. Maybe ostracized, discredited, etc. The consequences can vary, but the premise remains eternal. As long as corrupt governments exist, or governments at all, we are in danger directly proportional to the amount of Privacy and Anonymity we lack.
Consider that. Philosophy is wonderful. These thoughts will help us advance and take humanity to heights we can't yet dream of. However, today is today, and today that ideal world does not exist. You might want to be more pragmatic about it.
I prefer headless operating systems for my servers. It's what I use the most. I guess my biggest problem in trying different variants is just time really. I got so much to do coding and developing with a CentOS platform that I don't have the time yet to really explore different OS. Truth also being I don't have a lot of time for games either.
When I do get out from under the projects that I there are many things I am curious about, and BSD has always been one of them. If nothing else because Apple is based on it.
You missed my point. Of course Apple has based their OS on an open source platform, and therefore it is subject to certain terms.
My point is that Apple will not let you download their entire OS for free from a distro which is being counted amongst the BSD variants that are.
So if we are going to count up all the BSD installations, in the context of open source and a comparison against Linux, then it does not make logical sense to include Apple's BSD variant. One might say such a study or analysis would be deliberately misleading.
My first point is getting modded down of course, but I hold no opinion of BSD (fanboys pay attention - not agree!=troll) either way. So I can honestly say that before hearing this story I had no idea of the state of BSD in open source at all. I knew Apple was based on it, but other than that, I just hear about occasional references by other admins that they run such and such on BSD.
Although I was curious about BSD, I am just very comfortable with Red Hat and CentOS. No judgement against anything else. So can't we just all get along?:)
I mean we are all on the side of open source right? So why get our panties in a bunch and get into a fight over it?:D
The vast majority of all Linux and Unix variants are open source. Mac OS X is not free and is sold. I have never used BSD and I use CentOS myself and have never really formed a strong opinion one way or the other about BSD at all.
I think the point here is not to bash BSD, although it certainly sounds like it, but to point out that those that support it through their coding contributions are a dwindling group.
Of course Apple can easily pick up, or already has, enough coders to keep their BSD variant going strong... but that is not going to be a variant that I can download and install on my server is it?
With all due respect, you cannot legitimately argue to include Mac OS X installations as BSD installations since it is not open source or free.
Ohhhh, and to add insult to injury in this case the dipshits who configured the femtocells setup a 6 character password.
Seriously?
So now every femtocell they charged a consumer for to get, so they could get better reception and download speeds of their own bandwidth is not only exposing themselves to danger, but the femtocell itself can be used to wreak havoc on the cellular customers in general.
I hate to admit this, but part of me wants to laugh hysterically. The only option is to no longer accept connection from the femtocells and refund all the money, or deliver new femtocells to the existing owners.
Either way, Vodafone is going to get bent over for a jolly good time. They deserve it.
Wait, we're still explaining to people on Slashdot what the function of one is?
The function of a femtocell is to expand the cellular range of a provider, while providing revenue to the provider instead of being an expense. Additionally, the bandwidth consumed is not on their network (cellular network), but on the customers bandwidth.
In the US at least this is abhorrent because the people, through government, granted them so many easements and right of ways, financial incentives, tax breaks, etc.
Despite how much has been given to them they continue to raise prices, encourage "mystery fees", enjoy near infinite profit margins on txt messages, etc. and do not contribute nearly enough to their infrastructures. At just what point are the American People (I don't know how this situation relates to EU), going to get compensated or some sort of benefit from all of "help" we gave the carriers to create the infrastructure?
When the bandwidth runs out and starts costing more... then it becomes issues about piracy and other bullshit that gets us all arguing about Net Neutrality.
The reason why Netflix is such a big deal is because not everyone in a neighborhood can actually be using all of their bandwidth at once. Netflix, regardless of CDNs, causes problems for them.
It is related, because it is all related to the costs of bandwidth and infrastructure.
A femtocell explained more simply is a big FUCK YOU to the consumer by the wireless carriers.
I might be more amenable to it if they leased it and gave me a discount for running one on my bandwidth.
Anybody else reminded of the movie Pluto Nash (which I actually really liked) and that you needed police approval and involvement to get plastic surgery?:)
...it's whether you can get away with patenting it.
It's not whether or not you can get away with patenting it....
It's whether or not you have the resources to sue people that will be willing to settle just to make you go away, and whether or not your patent can stand up in a court case in Texas.
If the patent was just stupid to begin with and a mistake it is only a threat to smaller people who cannot defend themselves, a cost of business to larger people that can afford to just pay the extortion fee.
The real key with patents like this is not to pick a fight with somebody your own size.
That's why it all comes down to claims and obviousness of the invention. If the accelerometer made that much of a difference it could easily by bypassed just by the switching mechanism you mention. I can imagine a non-toxic conductive liquid in a simple loop around the device that can close and open circuits as you rotate and flip the device. Bulky, and would require more to make it work, but just a really simplistic example.
I am sure that the patent will not hold up to scrutiny though and the first person to be sued will have an army of prior art and obviousness supporters behind them.
That's the other part of a patent. It has to be non obvious. This is obvious to everybody within the last 15 years and should not be patentable. Somebody could patent the technology to accomplish the obvious method or process, but not the obvious method or process itself.
Quite the opposite. At least according to the lawyers. If you can take an existing process and substantially add to it, or modify it, and make original claims, it makes no difference if the existing process is patented. You can still be awarded the patent...
However....... that does not eliminate your obligations to the patent holder of the existing process. You need to have a licensing deal with them, and in order for them to use your "added value" process they need to license from you.
It does work that way, but it is quite rare because nobody puts the resources in to put a patent "on top" of another patent. The "top" can be effectively prohibited from bringing a product to market and the "bottom" can just sit there forever and not care.
And taking an existing invention and putting it into something smaller is patentable innovation? Come on
We don't know the entire facts here unless you read their whole patent and then look at their claims. They're might be real innovation there we can't see.
However, there is a huge problem in the USPTO where they just don't find existing prior art that most Slashdotters could tell you about in five minutes if you just asked.
Just like in my last post regarding patents, I think there should be a 3 month public review of patents where it is under a probationary status and anyone is allowed to submit instances of prior art. If anything should be crowdsourced, it is this. That would help the examiners immensely because they could have targeted research based on public input. There are an awful lot of older IT people that can tell you about prior art for hours on end and even more historians out there that will remember of the top of their head that somebody did something like that already.
Or maybe they charged her with disorderly conduct because they couldn't find any other offense to use...?
A simple Google search will reveal more than enough articles where the TSA states that you can receive up to an $11,000 fine and be subject to arrest. There are local police that are stationed at airports for this purpose, among others.
Additionally, a friend of mine is a supervisor with the TSA. Most information I get directly from him. For instance, there are two types of scanners that can create the "naked porno" pictures.
Asking him directly, he did inform me that if I refused to go through the scanner and the invasive "grope" search that the TSA policy in force at the time dictated that the local police would be asked to detain me, forcibly detain and search me just like any other person. There was a fine involved, although he did not specify the number, and said that it was very possible that I could be arrested and charged.
So according to the articles and the direct information from a TSA supervisor, there does seem to be an offense on the books that they can use to charge you with. Fines don't come out of the middle of nowhere either. That relates to some sort of offence and may be related to others.
You might be right that there does not exist a specific criminal offense, but from everything I have heard from articles online and from my friend certainly seem to indicate that they can arrest you for something.
It is weird that they keep threatening you with it, yet we have not seen somebody charged with it yet. Maybe they just wait for you to get a little upset and then charge you with a generic "disorderly conduct"?
I will ask my friend what the specific charge actually is. He can't tell me everything because they don't want the terrorizers to know their system, but he can tell me anything that the public should be informed of, or should be common knowledge.
She wasn't arrested for a refusing a patdown. She was arrested for being belligerent.
And?
That still does not make the TSA policy any less clear or enforced. Once you hand your drivers license over and boarding pass, and you pass through the little gate inside the checkpoint, you have passed the point of no return.
According to the law, and TSA policy you cannot refuse to complete the screening process. Note, I said complete the process. You do have the right to say that you will not subject yourself to A, B, or C, but there is no going backwards. You have to make a choice.
Failure to comply and attempts to leave the screening area, even to leave the airport, are offences that can allow you to be arrested. I know this personally. I did choose the pat down and crotch grab vs the 3D porno image machine.
Note, that I wholly disagree with the practice, but the fact they charged her with disorderly conduct is because they did not want to charge her with the other offence.
That is strategic on the part of the TSA. If she had been arrested for failure to comply with the screening or leaving quietly, there could be a court case. The TSA could be forced to hand over data under subpoena. They could lose and precedence would be established. When this case goes to trial she will be surprised that the screening measures will have practically nothing to do with her case, and the judge will more than likely not allow it to be presented as evidence, nor will the judge allow the TSA to be forced to hand over data and anything, and the whole thing might have everything to do with disorderly conduct. Basically, her court case will be about her behavior, and the airport and TSA will be irrelevant.
Same reason the IRS will usually choose to settle instead of going full on in court if they think they even have the smallest chance of losing. It is to deny the citizenry precedence in law to allow us to fight them effectively through the courts.
Don't be fooled because of the way she was charged. What caused the whole situation is that she did not want pornographic (that which can be considered obscene) images of her children and did not want her children touched and groped by another person. She had no choices her according to TSA policy and was backed into a corner. Golly jee willickers....... I can't possibly understand why she blew her top and got arrested for "disorderly conduct". You back anybody into a corner with zero options and that is what you get. Especially, when they feel their children are being harmed.
Can someone clarify how viewing the email with downloaded pictures necessarily identifies the customer?
Simple. Rewrite rules in Apache. You can use them to uniquely identify each picture in the email and associate it with a uniqueid or campaign. All that matters is when the browser makes a request that the data is fed back to the browser in a way it expects. I do it all the time. IIRC, they sometime are specific white space markers called "tracking pixels".
A coupon could have a non-unique barcode to keep track of how many customers the bank sent the merchant's way without the coupon being specific to the client. Same goes for links in email; isn't it more trouble to have every click-through associated uniquely with an email?
It will more than likely be email. It's cheapest to implement. As for as non-specific goes that is impossible here. I, Bob Smith made a purchase of a XYZ at some company.com. If the bank wants to claim the commission they have to state what campaign it was (by virtue of billing the correct company) and that company would have all the profile information for that purchase transaction including, but not limited to, address, city, state, cc num, full name, email address, billing address, mailing address, user account credentials for purchase tracking and membership.
They can now link all of the information I provided them with the demographics they purchased.
You missed the point, but still have the right argument.
When you pay the bank, you don't get back a list of names at all. The bank would be sending out junk mail, SMS, or email based on your chosen demographics. It would be a 3rd party offer.
Most websites, companies, etc. allow you to specify that you don't want to receive it, but they also specify that affiliates and subsidiaries get access to to the data. The banks don't get that loophole in this case.
In your example, what you are really pointing out is that whatever percentage of customers click on the links, or even view the email with downloaded pictures, are revealing themselves and losing their privacy. In order for the bank to receive a commission it needs to admit that particular customer was indeed part of the chosen demographics.
It violates customer's privacy in spirit, in actuality the customer is mislead at best, and worst responsible for losing their own privacy through their own actions.
In other words, the customers are being tricked into confirming purchasing habits outside of the bank.
Very dirty and hopefully there will be an opt-out option for this voluntarily, or by law.
Then YOUR lawsuit is against the person you LOANED it to. Not the person who picked it up in the trash.
You cannot file a police report claiming theft against the person who took it from the trash. At best you can file a civil suit claiming ownership, which will be dubious at best.
You have nothing to bring to the authorities to cause them to create a criminal investigation and your only remedies are civil against the person you loaned it to.
If that statement was untrue, Mr. Anderson would be in custody right now either by the State of Texas (to be sent to Alaska) or by federal authorities. Not only is he not in custody, but he initiated the lawsuit and this in a civil court.
He clearly knew what it was and probably arranged for the rock to be in that trashcan to begin with, if that whole trashcan story is true anyway.
If am missing the point, you are clearly biased.
Not only are arguing about possession, whether it could even be owned by the Museum, you are creating fiction intended to show his intent as clearly dishonest, when there are no facts that support your allegations.
The scarcity of an object has nothing to do with the legal questions at hand and salvage rights. Did treasure hunters know that objects and gold from Spanish ships belonged to the Spanish? Of course they did. Does it make their legal claims any less? Of course not.
So I may be "missing the point", but I am not inventing the truth to support an emotional opinion that the man is a dishonorable thief.
Unless this debris was placed within the public utilities easement (TFA doesn't say), then it belonged to the museum and was private property.
All the more reason why you should stop calling the man a thief if you don't know where the garbage was placed when he picked it up. That is one thing that is clear. He picked it up from the garbage that was set aside from the clean up crews.
So your argument about exactly where the garbage was when he picked up does have legal significance, but does not speak negatively to the intent of Mr. Anderson. He "intended" to pick it up from the trash.
Your repeated attempts to vilify him and denigrate him don't serve any useful purpose. These facts will be presented and argued in court. You're acting like he is evil and murders puppies everyday.
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I agree with what you are saying.
Personally, I refuse to fly unless it is under the most important of circumstances. Sickness or death of a family member. Business trip that cannot be driven for time sensitive reasons. I have actually avoided it simply be figuring out a solution that did not require it.
However, there are those that will still be forced to fly, especially by their work. Kind of hard to tell the company and the boss that you refuse to fly, even for religious reasons. You will either get stuck in a stagnant position with no chance of promotion or fired.
Your outcome is logical, but if that happens we will just need to figure out a different solution to fight them. I don't know what that is either. Personal travel we can all limit, but I have always been under the impression that the majority of the airlines business is business flights. That is the very definition of a captive audience. Corporations tend to not listen or care when you start explaining how your rights are violated.
So your solution will also involve a lot of business people suing their corporations when they dismiss them for refusing to fly.
It will have to get really ugly, which is probably going to happen anyways......
On the other hand, my son is extraordinarily proud of his video game accomplishments... probably because they're the most "real" form of competition he will likely every have, at least until he's much older.
Sometimes that can be an understatement. I have played Halo against college students and others my own age and held my own. In fact, in my age group, I am almost god like. I once played against a 13 year old. After about 15 minutes he asked if I had really played before or if I was just lying.
These "video games" can be harder than you think. It ain't Donkey Kong anymore.
If your son is winning victories against South Koreans in Starcraft....... let's just say he made it to the majors and is a top player :)
I had no idea who he was till I Googled it. My own philosophy does contain many elements of what you may call Eastern Philosophy. It is not limited to it though. Universal truths are found everywhere for self evident reasons.
Although I am happy that you used mockery of my philosophical response to you in your own response. It is certainly a step up from the hatred previously.
Keep smiling :) It's good for you.
Wow. In Las Vegas they call that doubling down. On that hate part at least.
You are part of the problem.
Since the very beginning. People like you that are only filled with hate and actually use the word "kill" in their ideas of how to solve problems. Whether it is in some intangible God's name, some other philosophy, perceived slight, or sense of justice and progress.
You say you are mostly harmless, but you are not. Everyday you expose the rest of us to your disease. Hate breeds more hate. That is not just a cliche, but an observation of human nature.
It is most certain, that words or not, you have chosen violence in your path. You have chosen the path of the warrior, but not with honor, only bloodshed for the illusion of something better.
Violence and hate is what continues to fill this world with suffering and pain, and the very very few of us that have obtained real power, use people like you as pawns to expand and maintain their power.
I pity you while you are on this path. Hopefully one day, the hate will be gone and replaced.
And for the record, I am not a pacifist. I can also walk the path of the warrior, but I will only do so when absolutely required. When logic, reasoning, and words fail. When the weak must be protected, when I must defend myself and those I love. At that point I will kill. However, my heart will not be filled with hate when I do so, and I will not hate those I have to kill to defend myself and my family. The greatest martial artists and swordsman in history have always said that true skill and power as a warrior is only obtained when one fights with peace and serenity inside them.
That is the difference between a true master and a common street thug or disillusioned vigilante such as yourself.
If you truly wish to change things for the better, to change the world and bring enlightenment, you must first obtain it yourself. Otherwise, the only thing you do is spread the hate and violence and become no better than those you fight against and harm those you would protect no differently than those you despise.
You have become one with your enemy in both spirit and action.
I was limiting my comments about the choice to flights within the intercontinental US.
Going through the border is a WHOLE different story as even US Citizens no longer have any rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution. It's a virtual Berlin Wall. I can enjoy all the rights I have left as long as I stay within the border of my country. I attempt to cross it, and *poof*, all of my rights disappear. Coming back in I am not a US Citizen again till I make it through processing.
I amazed you will come back. My next out of country trips are being planned via boats. It will take longer to get where I am going, but not nearly as insane as coming in from a plane. I have done this a few times since 9/11 and when you get back from a cruise even, they are not like that.
If it does get to that point, I will just borrow a sail boat and make my way to where I want to go. Doubles as being a pretty neat vacation in of itself.
If you're right all of my business out of country will be done by lawyers and video conferencing. I had already taken into account that they can steal your equipment and copy your data. My plan around that was much simpler than TrueCrypt. I was just going to take the hard drives out and ship them (still encrypted), or just ship the whole laptop. Most of my work and data is available via a secure remote connection anyways.
I find it extremely humorous that you are comparing TSA agents to WWII German concentration camp guards like the ones at Auschwitz.
You have to a tenuous grasp on reality to perceive the choice of going through a machine, that does not kill you, and a pat down, also designed to not kill you, as being related to the processing into a concentration camp.
I will begrudgingly admit, that airline food might be comparable to the food at a concentration camp, but otherwise you're just like what they serve on the short flight.... nuts.
I will agree with the head hunter option as passive resistance.
Also keep in mind, that the economy varies from state to state. My friend was looking for a job for over a year and half and burned through all of his savings. Lived with me at the time and towards the end was completely dependent upon me. Unable to pay rent, etc.
As far as TSA agents go, believe me, he is one of the good guys. He won't be a dick to you and is actually very nice. It is not a coincidence he is already moving up the ranks. He has a unique ability to deal with people and get them to calm down. Explain their options, etc.
For the record, the poster I replied to offered 4 suggestions. Only one was passive, and he emphasized overall that the goal was to give these "people" no choice, make their lives miserable, and through negative reinforcement and outright punishment and discrimination (which is illegal anyways) force them to quit their jobs and find new ones.
The economy is not actually that good. As a TSA agent you at least have full medical coverage and benefits as a state worker from what I understand. Many jobs might be found for less money, but also with less benefits. He needs those benefits for his family.
Just quitting and finding another job is simplistic and not always as easy as it sounds. I am lucky. My services are not that easy to find, I have a good reputation, and I am scraping by. Not nearly doing as good as I was a few years back before the 2nd Great Depression started, but I am surviving.
Not everyone is that lucky. I still have many friends on unemployment. They can't even take some jobs because they pay less than unemployment and that would mean they cannot afford the debt they have either. Makes it a really tough decision. On unemployment it makes it kind of hard to find a cheaper place to live that is not dangerous or in the ghetto areas of town, and in many cases means bankruptcy.
The head hunter option is by the far the best. If, as a society, we could actually offer comparable jobs to the TSA agents they would take them. I was not kidding when I compared their jobs to call centers and telemarketing. Giving them a sensible option that allows them to change their jobs without unreasonable, and in many cases economically non viable consequences, is the most intelligent answer in that persons post.
The rest was just filled with hate.
Considering that one of my friends (20 years) is a supervisor, you're plan does not work for me. The regular TSA agents and supervisors are not bad people at all. It is hard enough to find a job in this economy and a TSA agent is worse than a call center or telemarketer in terms of stress and bullshit.
You want to cause them pain by mistreating them, which is not that much different than physical violence in the spirit of your argument.
Antagonistic behavior and belligerence is never the answer to conflict resolution.
Simple intelligence would dictate the answer here:
The TSA allows you the option of a pat down. It takes 700 - 1000 times longer. Literally. I don't like being touched by a strange man, especially right up against my junk. Guess what? He does not really want to do it either.
Optimum solution to getting them to change their minds is for us to take a path of suffering instead of a path of violence. We all subject ourselves to the pat down. Then it will take 12 hours to get through the check points, the airlines will go absolutely ape shit and scream even louder for a private alternative to the TSA, and the TSA is effectively shut down by an inefficient process.
Either that, or they would need 100 TSA agents manning each entry point to do a pat down procedure.
It costs me more in time and energy, and it invades my privacy. However, my privacy and personal space is invaded by a single person and the data is not recorded that could be kept forever.
I dislike the current situation as much as you do, but I will not resort to your methods. They are far to aggressive, harmful, and uncivilized.
People need to remember the lesson of Gandhi. Non-violence and passive resistance can be as strong as water shaping the world over time. There is a time when violence is required for self preservation, but I hardly think the TSA policies are a threat against your life.
Your privacy? Who cares...the problem is that you think someone does care. Stop worrying about how others judge you, and it doesn't matter about your privacy. The gov't is corrupt? The gov't has always been corrupt.
That is one of the problems when arguing about how absolutely critical Privacy is to maintaining our Freedom.
You are making a philosophical argument. You specifically are suffering from what I call "Star Trek" glasses. In an ideal world, or even your envisioned Utopia, privacy might not actually be required, or much smaller levels or privacy would be acceptable. For example, the whole world could know everything about you, where you are, your thoughts about certain subjects. All of it indexed and searchable like Google. Privacy would only exist for sex (when desired) or bodily functions. Perhaps over time, even the need for privacy in those actions would no longer be needed.
It is not hard to imagine a society or race of beings that have no concept of it, especially a strongly telepathic one.
However, at our point in history, you also point out that the government is deeply corrupt. Privacy is not just a fundamental human right (one which we can freely give up in the aforementioned Utopia), but a strategic defense.
Governments have always demonstrated that they are made up of people. Therefore, it is those people that have been corrupt. They will use the tools and resources at their disposal towards their corrupt ends.
Privacy has always been a defense for the people because it was very difficult in recent centuries to strongly and effectively remove it from the people by force. The technology and communications infrastructure simply did not exist.
In Sun Tzu's Art of War he specifically devotes a fairly large amount of attention to espionage and spies. It was to gather information, because information was valuable. To quote Sun Tzu:
What enables the wise sovereign and the good general to strike and conquer, and achieve things beyond the reach of ordinary men, is FOREKNOWLEDGE.
Now this foreknowledge cannot be elicited from spirits; it cannot be obtained inductively from experience, nor by any deductive calculation.
Quantities like length, breadth, distance and magnitude, are susceptible of exact mathematical determination; human actions cannot be so calculated.
Knowledge of the enemy's dispositions can only be obtained from other men.
Only today has the ability to obtain foreknowledge been so cheaply attained by government and so far reaching. The state police agencies of 50-60 years ago would have marveled at the ability we have today. Far more people would have died had those abusive and corrupt governments had access to the tools and resources we have today.
To be saddened by the loss of privacy and to be concerned by it is not philosophical ignorance as you imply. The enlightened understanding you speak of is ignorance itself.
Privacy, Anonymity, and the strength in numbers that we possess is absolutely our best defense. It is not about you, clifyt, judging me. It is about the corrupt government official determining that I am a threat to their social order through knowledge obtained by my lack of privacy. In some countries, that just gets you killed. Maybe ostracized, discredited, etc. The consequences can vary, but the premise remains eternal. As long as corrupt governments exist, or governments at all, we are in danger directly proportional to the amount of Privacy and Anonymity we lack.
Consider that. Philosophy is wonderful. These thoughts will help us advance and take humanity to heights we can't yet dream of. However, today is today, and today that ideal world does not exist. You might want to be more pragmatic about it.
I prefer headless operating systems for my servers. It's what I use the most. I guess my biggest problem in trying different variants is just time really. I got so much to do coding and developing with a CentOS platform that I don't have the time yet to really explore different OS. Truth also being I don't have a lot of time for games either.
When I do get out from under the projects that I there are many things I am curious about, and BSD has always been one of them. If nothing else because Apple is based on it.
You missed my point. Of course Apple has based their OS on an open source platform, and therefore it is subject to certain terms.
My point is that Apple will not let you download their entire OS for free from a distro which is being counted amongst the BSD variants that are.
So if we are going to count up all the BSD installations, in the context of open source and a comparison against Linux, then it does not make logical sense to include Apple's BSD variant. One might say such a study or analysis would be deliberately misleading.
My first point is getting modded down of course, but I hold no opinion of BSD (fanboys pay attention - not agree!=troll) either way. So I can honestly say that before hearing this story I had no idea of the state of BSD in open source at all. I knew Apple was based on it, but other than that, I just hear about occasional references by other admins that they run such and such on BSD.
Although I was curious about BSD, I am just very comfortable with Red Hat and CentOS. No judgement against anything else. So can't we just all get along? :)
I mean we are all on the side of open source right? So why get our panties in a bunch and get into a fight over it? :D
Your argument is fundamentally wrong.
The vast majority of all Linux and Unix variants are open source. Mac OS X is not free and is sold. I have never used BSD and I use CentOS myself and have never really formed a strong opinion one way or the other about BSD at all.
I think the point here is not to bash BSD, although it certainly sounds like it, but to point out that those that support it through their coding contributions are a dwindling group.
Of course Apple can easily pick up, or already has, enough coders to keep their BSD variant going strong... but that is not going to be a variant that I can download and install on my server is it?
With all due respect, you cannot legitimately argue to include Mac OS X installations as BSD installations since it is not open source or free.
Ohhhh, and to add insult to injury in this case the dipshits who configured the femtocells setup a 6 character password.
Seriously?
So now every femtocell they charged a consumer for to get, so they could get better reception and download speeds of their own bandwidth is not only exposing themselves to danger, but the femtocell itself can be used to wreak havoc on the cellular customers in general.
I hate to admit this, but part of me wants to laugh hysterically. The only option is to no longer accept connection from the femtocells and refund all the money, or deliver new femtocells to the existing owners.
Either way, Vodafone is going to get bent over for a jolly good time. They deserve it.
Wait, we're still explaining to people on Slashdot what the function of one is?
The function of a femtocell is to expand the cellular range of a provider, while providing revenue to the provider instead of being an expense. Additionally, the bandwidth consumed is not on their network (cellular network), but on the customers bandwidth.
In the US at least this is abhorrent because the people, through government, granted them so many easements and right of ways, financial incentives, tax breaks, etc.
Despite how much has been given to them they continue to raise prices, encourage "mystery fees", enjoy near infinite profit margins on txt messages, etc. and do not contribute nearly enough to their infrastructures. At just what point are the American People (I don't know how this situation relates to EU), going to get compensated or some sort of benefit from all of "help" we gave the carriers to create the infrastructure?
When the bandwidth runs out and starts costing more... then it becomes issues about piracy and other bullshit that gets us all arguing about Net Neutrality.
The reason why Netflix is such a big deal is because not everyone in a neighborhood can actually be using all of their bandwidth at once. Netflix, regardless of CDNs, causes problems for them.
It is related, because it is all related to the costs of bandwidth and infrastructure.
A femtocell explained more simply is a big FUCK YOU to the consumer by the wireless carriers.
I might be more amenable to it if they leased it and gave me a discount for running one on my bandwidth.
Anybody else reminded of the movie Pluto Nash (which I actually really liked) and that you needed police approval and involvement to get plastic surgery? :)
It's not whether or not you can get away with patenting it....
It's whether or not you have the resources to sue people that will be willing to settle just to make you go away, and whether or not your patent can stand up in a court case in Texas.
If the patent was just stupid to begin with and a mistake it is only a threat to smaller people who cannot defend themselves, a cost of business to larger people that can afford to just pay the extortion fee.
The real key with patents like this is not to pick a fight with somebody your own size.
That's why it all comes down to claims and obviousness of the invention. If the accelerometer made that much of a difference it could easily by bypassed just by the switching mechanism you mention. I can imagine a non-toxic conductive liquid in a simple loop around the device that can close and open circuits as you rotate and flip the device. Bulky, and would require more to make it work, but just a really simplistic example.
I am sure that the patent will not hold up to scrutiny though and the first person to be sued will have an army of prior art and obviousness supporters behind them.
That's the other part of a patent. It has to be non obvious. This is obvious to everybody within the last 15 years and should not be patentable. Somebody could patent the technology to accomplish the obvious method or process, but not the obvious method or process itself.
Quite the opposite. At least according to the lawyers. If you can take an existing process and substantially add to it, or modify it, and make original claims, it makes no difference if the existing process is patented. You can still be awarded the patent...
However....... that does not eliminate your obligations to the patent holder of the existing process. You need to have a licensing deal with them, and in order for them to use your "added value" process they need to license from you.
It does work that way, but it is quite rare because nobody puts the resources in to put a patent "on top" of another patent. The "top" can be effectively prohibited from bringing a product to market and the "bottom" can just sit there forever and not care.
And taking an existing invention and putting it into something smaller is patentable innovation? Come on
We don't know the entire facts here unless you read their whole patent and then look at their claims. They're might be real innovation there we can't see.
However, there is a huge problem in the USPTO where they just don't find existing prior art that most Slashdotters could tell you about in five minutes if you just asked.
Just like in my last post regarding patents, I think there should be a 3 month public review of patents where it is under a probationary status and anyone is allowed to submit instances of prior art. If anything should be crowdsourced, it is this. That would help the examiners immensely because they could have targeted research based on public input. There are an awful lot of older IT people that can tell you about prior art for hours on end and even more historians out there that will remember of the top of their head that somebody did something like that already.
Or maybe they charged her with disorderly conduct because they couldn't find any other offense to use...?
A simple Google search will reveal more than enough articles where the TSA states that you can receive up to an $11,000 fine and be subject to arrest. There are local police that are stationed at airports for this purpose, among others.
Additionally, a friend of mine is a supervisor with the TSA. Most information I get directly from him. For instance, there are two types of scanners that can create the "naked porno" pictures.
Asking him directly, he did inform me that if I refused to go through the scanner and the invasive "grope" search that the TSA policy in force at the time dictated that the local police would be asked to detain me, forcibly detain and search me just like any other person. There was a fine involved, although he did not specify the number, and said that it was very possible that I could be arrested and charged.
So according to the articles and the direct information from a TSA supervisor, there does seem to be an offense on the books that they can use to charge you with. Fines don't come out of the middle of nowhere either. That relates to some sort of offence and may be related to others.
You might be right that there does not exist a specific criminal offense, but from everything I have heard from articles online and from my friend certainly seem to indicate that they can arrest you for something.
It is weird that they keep threatening you with it, yet we have not seen somebody charged with it yet. Maybe they just wait for you to get a little upset and then charge you with a generic "disorderly conduct"?
I will ask my friend what the specific charge actually is. He can't tell me everything because they don't want the terrorizers to know their system, but he can tell me anything that the public should be informed of, or should be common knowledge.
She wasn't arrested for a refusing a patdown. She was arrested for being belligerent.
And?
That still does not make the TSA policy any less clear or enforced. Once you hand your drivers license over and boarding pass, and you pass through the little gate inside the checkpoint, you have passed the point of no return.
According to the law, and TSA policy you cannot refuse to complete the screening process. Note, I said complete the process. You do have the right to say that you will not subject yourself to A, B, or C, but there is no going backwards. You have to make a choice.
Failure to comply and attempts to leave the screening area, even to leave the airport, are offences that can allow you to be arrested. I know this personally. I did choose the pat down and crotch grab vs the 3D porno image machine.
Note, that I wholly disagree with the practice, but the fact they charged her with disorderly conduct is because they did not want to charge her with the other offence.
That is strategic on the part of the TSA. If she had been arrested for failure to comply with the screening or leaving quietly, there could be a court case. The TSA could be forced to hand over data under subpoena. They could lose and precedence would be established. When this case goes to trial she will be surprised that the screening measures will have practically nothing to do with her case, and the judge will more than likely not allow it to be presented as evidence, nor will the judge allow the TSA to be forced to hand over data and anything, and the whole thing might have everything to do with disorderly conduct. Basically, her court case will be about her behavior, and the airport and TSA will be irrelevant.
Same reason the IRS will usually choose to settle instead of going full on in court if they think they even have the smallest chance of losing. It is to deny the citizenry precedence in law to allow us to fight them effectively through the courts.
Don't be fooled because of the way she was charged. What caused the whole situation is that she did not want pornographic (that which can be considered obscene) images of her children and did not want her children touched and groped by another person. She had no choices her according to TSA policy and was backed into a corner. Golly jee willickers....... I can't possibly understand why she blew her top and got arrested for "disorderly conduct". You back anybody into a corner with zero options and that is what you get. Especially, when they feel their children are being harmed.
Can someone clarify how viewing the email with downloaded pictures necessarily identifies the customer?
Simple. Rewrite rules in Apache. You can use them to uniquely identify each picture in the email and associate it with a uniqueid or campaign. All that matters is when the browser makes a request that the data is fed back to the browser in a way it expects. I do it all the time. IIRC, they sometime are specific white space markers called "tracking pixels".
A coupon could have a non-unique barcode to keep track of how many customers the bank sent the merchant's way without the coupon being specific to the client. Same goes for links in email; isn't it more trouble to have every click-through associated uniquely with an email?
It will more than likely be email. It's cheapest to implement. As for as non-specific goes that is impossible here. I, Bob Smith made a purchase of a XYZ at some company.com. If the bank wants to claim the commission they have to state what campaign it was (by virtue of billing the correct company) and that company would have all the profile information for that purchase transaction including, but not limited to, address, city, state, cc num, full name, email address, billing address, mailing address, user account credentials for purchase tracking and membership.
They can now link all of the information I provided them with the demographics they purchased.
You missed the point, but still have the right argument.
When you pay the bank, you don't get back a list of names at all. The bank would be sending out junk mail, SMS, or email based on your chosen demographics. It would be a 3rd party offer.
Most websites, companies, etc. allow you to specify that you don't want to receive it, but they also specify that affiliates and subsidiaries get access to to the data. The banks don't get that loophole in this case.
In your example, what you are really pointing out is that whatever percentage of customers click on the links, or even view the email with downloaded pictures, are revealing themselves and losing their privacy. In order for the bank to receive a commission it needs to admit that particular customer was indeed part of the chosen demographics.
It violates customer's privacy in spirit, in actuality the customer is mislead at best, and worst responsible for losing their own privacy through their own actions.
In other words, the customers are being tricked into confirming purchasing habits outside of the bank.
Very dirty and hopefully there will be an opt-out option for this voluntarily, or by law.
Then YOUR lawsuit is against the person you LOANED it to. Not the person who picked it up in the trash.
You cannot file a police report claiming theft against the person who took it from the trash. At best you can file a civil suit claiming ownership, which will be dubious at best.
You have nothing to bring to the authorities to cause them to create a criminal investigation and your only remedies are civil against the person you loaned it to.
If that statement was untrue, Mr. Anderson would be in custody right now either by the State of Texas (to be sent to Alaska) or by federal authorities. Not only is he not in custody, but he initiated the lawsuit and this in a civil court.
He clearly knew what it was and probably arranged for the rock to be in that trashcan to begin with, if that whole trashcan story is true anyway.
If am missing the point, you are clearly biased.
Not only are arguing about possession, whether it could even be owned by the Museum, you are creating fiction intended to show his intent as clearly dishonest, when there are no facts that support your allegations.
The scarcity of an object has nothing to do with the legal questions at hand and salvage rights. Did treasure hunters know that objects and gold from Spanish ships belonged to the Spanish? Of course they did. Does it make their legal claims any less? Of course not.
So I may be "missing the point", but I am not inventing the truth to support an emotional opinion that the man is a dishonorable thief.
Unless this debris was placed within the public utilities easement (TFA doesn't say), then it belonged to the museum and was private property.
All the more reason why you should stop calling the man a thief if you don't know where the garbage was placed when he picked it up. That is one thing that is clear. He picked it up from the garbage that was set aside from the clean up crews.
So your argument about exactly where the garbage was when he picked up does have legal significance, but does not speak negatively to the intent of Mr. Anderson. He "intended" to pick it up from the trash.
Your repeated attempts to vilify him and denigrate him don't serve any useful purpose. These facts will be presented and argued in court. You're acting like he is evil and murders puppies everyday.