Profiling - that's it! How about we LOOK AT PEOPLE, get some kind of idea who and what we THINK they might be, and go from there?
The problem is that they already do profiling. There's no other way to explain why I have been "randomly" singled out for this treatment nearly EVERY SINGLE TIME I have gone through Mineta San Jose Airport (including this very morning). It has gone so far beyond what would be considered acceptable by any reasonable person that I am currently seeking legal representation.
Even before today, I was already so fed up that I'm doing the vast majority of my travel this year by Amtrak. Unfortunately, due to scheduling constraints, this one trip required me to travel by plane for one leg. I'm taking Amtrak for the return trip. Henceforth, I will not be traveling by commercial airlines anymore within the continental United States until the TSA is disbanded. If I miss family funerals, so be it. If I miss other special events, that's life. I refuse to be degraded and humiliated as a precondition for travel.
To the Tea Party, want to cut $43.6 billion in government pork? Dissolve the TSA, fire everyone, and cancel all outstanding contracts to Rapiscan and L-3 Communications. Also, add a permanent ban on all future government contracts across the board for these two companies. They're dirty crooks who manipulate politicians into putting our people at risk and forcing the public to give up its fundamental legal right to free travel within our nation's borders, and that is something that simply cannot be tolerated.
Finally, may Satan reserve a special place in Hell for everyone involved in trying to force any parent to choose whether his or her child should be felt up by a stranger or irradiated. If that is what safety demands, then fuck safety. If the only way to be safe is to give up our most basic moral values, our most basic freedoms, and everything else that makes the United States better than some shithole dictatorship, then what are we bothering to fight terrorism for? If that is truly the price of freedom, then the United States that we know and love died and was buried on September 11, 2001, and we're just waiting for the fat lady to arrive to sing Ave Maria and give the eulogy.
I like to have my collection of photos with me on my laptop. It's about 80 gigabytes currently, and growing at 10-20 gigabytes per year.
Also, my OS only takes 7 GB or so (including all the various third-party graft-ins that I use), but the applications I use add a whopping 34 gigabytes of additional storage requirements, and that's without a lot of optional stuff installed. So just to carry the software I have installed on my laptop plus my photos would fill 121 gigabytes with no additional files at all. Add to that my current Photoshop projects at almost 4 GB, musical compositions at 10 GB, etc. and you can quickly see why the commonly available 128 GB sizes just don't cut it.
I'd love to move to an SSD for the added reliability, but I'm currently using a 500 GB hard drive, and am rapidly getting annoyed waiting for terabyte capacity to become thin enough to fit in a laptop so I can upgrade. Call me when SSDs can hold a terabyte for under a grand, and we'll talk. Until then, they're toys as far as I'm concerned.
Excessive energy use leads to pollution if and only if the means for producing the power leads to pollution. Want to fix that problem? Don't ban the bulbs. Ban the coal plants. Banning bulbs to reduce coal emissions is like making it illegal to feed high school students to reduce the teen birth rate....
I'd expect the life to be comparable to that of a normal incandescent bulb if you don't have redeposition going on, but I could be wrong. You probably just got a dud. Either that or there might have been some fun harmonic thing going on where a PWM dimmer hits the filament at just the right rate to cause constructive interference a la the Tacoma Narrows Bridge....:-) But probably just a bad bulb.
Every so often, I get an incandescent that lasts just a few weeks. And then I get another one that lasts ten years. It's pretty much random luck a far as I can tell, though you can extend the life of any incandescent bulb (including halogens) a bit by using a circuit that fades the bulbs up to full brightness from zero instead of slamming the power on and off... or by never turning it off....
Now, anyone who is capable of thinking for themselves recognizes that:
The worst offenders are frequent visitors, and so there would be traces of recent activity
The really dangerous people who produce child pornography for years on end put serious effort into hiding their IP addresses; that is why they are not caught for years on end
You forgot:
3. People who are actually guilty of deliberately downloading such content almost certainly will continue doing so, and thus the police should need no records at all. They need merely to have the right to take control of such a site and continue operating it as a honeypot.
And, as others have probably noted by now, the child porn laws at this point fail all of the traditional tests for the constitutionality of a prohibition anyway:
The existence of child pornography do not represent a clear and present danger to public safety or health (e.g. munitions, FDA regulation, NRC, etc.).
Because most porn in general is not downloaded for money, you cannot realistically use the threat of jail time and the promise of a light sentence to find out who the dealer is because the downloader has no idea.
The laws are not written in such a way that they can be construed as a legitimate regulation of interstate commerce.
Worse, because of the stigma associated with it, child porn represents an excellent opportunity for extortion. The mere existence of records that could be used in a political witch hunt or to blackmail out political leaders into voting a certain way represents a credible threat to the democratic process in general.
Further, I'd be willing to bet good money that if we could sniff around the hard drives and networks of enough Congresspeople, we'd find more than a few files of a dubious nature, but right now, nobody outside of Congress knows that. Imagine how badly our political process could be corrupted if such records were mandated and could be retrieved by less than reputable members of the police and law enforcement, then used to pressure them into voting for laws that favor their own corrupt interests.
Finally, we've been combatting electronic child porn for at least two decades. It should be clear to anyone with common sense that if these laws were truly useful in protecting children from child porn, we'd already have them. Therefore these laws are simply an erosion of privacy that serve no legitimate law enforcement purpose.
To that end, I have a modest proposal: when anyone asks for laws like this, we should immediately use the word "un-American" to describe them. Only by using the same sort of empty rhetoric can we effectively combat such ridiculous laws in the minds of the simpletons who vote for them.
You're confusing instantaneous efficiency with lifetime efficiency, and confusing infrared emissions with envelope temperature. Not all infrared emissions from an incandescent bulb are turned into surface heat on the bulb's envelope.
First, it's important to understand that a halogen bulb is more efficient over its life because filament redeposition ensures that the filament does not get thinner (and thus less effective at producing light) and that the inside of the bulb remains clear of deposits from the filament (which reduces light output). So although a brand new halogen bulb is more efficient than a brand new standard incandescent bulb, the difference for new bulbs isn't nearly as high as the difference over the lifetime of the bulb.
Second, in order for that redeposition to occur, the envelope must remain extremely hot (250 C/482 deg. F), regardless of the wattage of the bulb. (Source: The Great Internet Light Bulb Book, Part I) If a bulb is running cooler than that, it isn't getting any real gain from being a halogen bulb. To put that in perspective, a 100 watt incandescent bulb, according to safety standards, is not allowed to get over 247C/477 deg. F. (Source: allexperts) So the absolute minimum effective envelope temperature for a halogen bulb is roughly the same as the absolute maximum allowed for a 100 watt bulb.
Therefore, fixtures that are only rated for 40 watt incandescent bulbs cannot safely support a halogen bulb. This effectively rules out the safe use of halogen bulbs in the majority of table lamps and many floor lamps.
Your use of a $0.50 bulb over the course of your lifetime affects others, both in increased energy demand (and thus higher energy prices), and higher pollution rates.
So why not require that every light switch be one of those d**ned sensor switches? Bathroom fan switches be replaced with timers? Better efficiency for TVs, VCRs, and computers? All of these things would have a much bigger impact than light bulbs.
For that matter, how do you know that it causes increased pollution? Many of us live in parts of the country that deliberately charge more for power so that we can get most of our power from renewable and other clean sources. Why should we be limited just because you are burning coal to power your incandescent bulbs?
And further, we already pay increasing rates as we consume more power. This should more than balance out the effect on others caused by my use of a cheaper, more power-consuming bulb.
It really doesn't matter, though. If there were value in being more efficient, bulbs would be more efficient. For commercial lighting, they use enough power to make it worth going fluorescent, and most of them went that way twenty years ago or more. For household lighting, they use such a small amount of power that the market doesn't demand more efficient lighting, and most consumers haven't really shown much interest in completely replacing their incandescent bulbs with CFLs in spite of the energy savings. In fact, they have shown a willingness to hoard large quantities of incandescent bulbs to delay the transition. This is a very definite sign of a hopelessly failed energy policy.
So the government steps in and stipulates that bulbs should be more efficient solely for efficiency's sake. Here's what Congress thought would happen:
The bulb makers will come up with new, innovative ways to build incandescent bulbs that provide more light while using less power.
Here's what actually happened:
The U.S. incandescent bulb industry has largely shut down due to the inability to meet the new efficiency requirements, relegating bulb manufacturing to CFL plants in China.
Although there have been a few in-lab improvements in incandescent technology, none of those are likely to see the light of day in the next few years because of the cost involved. Thus, the net effect is that not only is the government forcing CFLs down everyone's throat, but they are also exporting a lot of bulb manufacturing jobs to China. And no, things like "Halogena" bulbs don't count as significant improvements. They're just halogen bulbs. It's largely old-school tech. They've made some minor improvements, but for the most part, the only reason they're still allowed is that the law specified an energy improvement over incandescent bulbs rather than an energy improvement over comparable bulb technology. Sure, when you compare halogen to straight incandescent, you get an energy improvement.
BTW, there's a reason we don't use halogen bulbs everywhere. They're too hot. They represent a significant increase in fire risk over standard incandescent bulbs, and thus are unsuitable for many light fixtures. Arguing that halogens are a globally suitable replacement for incandescent bulbs is a bit like arguing that a box of hand grenades is a suitable replacement for a box of firecrackers on July 4th.
Bottom line: if you want to reduce energy consumption, you should go after things that can easily be made more efficient without direct impact to customers, e.g. power supplies in electronics. Or better yet, move us the **** off of coal and fossil fuels and towards cleaner, more renewable sources of power so that none of the energy conservation matters anymore.
Precious, at least when we're talking about naturally occurring substances, refers to how prevalent it is in the crust. Gold is relatively rare, at 3-6 parts per billion for the crust. Aluminum is about 8%, or about 80 million parts per billion, and is the most common metal on the planet, followed closely by iron at about 5-6%.
Actually, it had nothing to do with aluminum being precious, but rather that most metal manufacturing (until the advent of CNC milling in the 1950s) was done by casting, and pure aluminum doesn't cast well.
It was also a relatively expensive material because the technology to cheaply extract aluminum from aluminum oxide was still in its infancy (the modern Hall-Héroult process having not been invented until two years later, in 1886, with the previous technologies being either extremely expensive, difficult to use in large quantities, or both), but this was in large part due to lack of demand, which was in large part due to the fact that it was historically difficult to cast pure aluminum precisely and get yields comparable to that of other metals or aluminum alloys.
By setting up your analogy with the statement that there is a dead body in the trunk, you've already presumed guilt....
And as I've noted elsewhere, it also presumes that the car belongs to that person. It's pretty easy to swap license plates. By providing that key, you're admitting that it is your car, and thus testifying against yourself....
What this really means is not that crypto keys should be special, but that the entire notion of requiring someone to turn over keys—even physical keys—is a gross abrogation of our government's responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Not that this is any surprise these days; our government wiped its a** with the Constitution on September 11, 2001, and flushed it not long thereafter. That expectation doesn't make the reality of the situation any less disgusting.
More precisely, the defendant, by producing such a password, is incriminating himself or herself by proving that the contents of that encrypted disk, disk image, zip file, or other such content is his or hers.
A computer is not at all like a safe. If somebody breaks into your office and hides jewels in your safe, odds are you're going to know about it. By contrast, your computer does things that you don't know about on a regular basis. For example, do you know what all those launchd timed jobs do on your Mac, or all those background programs do on your Windows box? Didn't think so. Do you know what all those random files all over your hard drive are? Didn't think so. Heck, I work in the computer industry, and even I wouldn't claim to understand every single file on my machine.
Thus, providing the key is, in effect, making a statement that you created that encryption system for the purpose of hiding something, without which there is no evidence that you did it, only that your computer did it.
In short, anyone technically knowledgeable should understand that being forced to provide an encryption key is an egregious fifth amendment violation, where giving a key to a safe generally is not.
Translation: "As far as I'm concerned, the danger posed by a drunk/high driver are the same as any other driver, and the penalties should be equivalent. Needless to say, this would be a very unpopular ruling despite the fact that the dangers are equivalent."
It would be unpopular because they aren't comparable. When you are distracted while driving, you're distracted for a few seconds. An accident only occurs if something happens to occur during those few seconds. When you are drunk, you are incapacitated for the entire duration of your trip. This makes drunk driving much worse than distracted driving.
Also, everyone gets distracted once in a while by something, whether it's texting on a cell phone or shouting at the person you disagree with on talk radio. So in effect, you're arguing that one particular distraction should be singled out, when there's no evidence that it won't simply be replaced by other distractions.
Put another way, 25% of car accidents are linked to gadget use. Better than one in ten drivers are using cell phones at any given moment. This means that this is only a mere 2.5x more likely than you'd expect by purely random chance, and probably less than that if you take into account that teen drivers are much more likely to use cell phones, and are much more likely to have accidents. In short, it is quite likely that this correlation can be explained away completely as mere chance. Probably not completely, but most of it—so much so that passing laws on the subject is unlikely to have a significant impact on accidents.
This is borne out by California's passage of an anti-texting law. Although traffic fatalities went down, they went down by roughly the average amount that they have been dropping each year for the decade prior, suggesting that such laws have minimal impact.
With my experience, the biggest problems were date functions and the fact that MySQL embeds index creation in the create table syntax whereas postgres requires it be separate and the names of indexes are global. This meant that I had some work cut out for me changing index names. There were also a few quirks with some join queries as MySQL is not picky about ordering in the from clause.
Don't forget that the names for column types are substantially different, that even when they are the same, the maximum data lengths for that column type may not be the same (unless you explicitly varchar(xxx)), etc. There's a lot of room for surprises....
Still, it's not nearly as dire as a complete ground-up rewrite.
There's something ironic about calling any country "green" when such a high percentage of people burn sticks of paper and tobacco for their own entertainment. And that definitely isn't done with one eye on longevity. Just saying.
"Windows" is not a generic term for a computer operating system....
Please stop using the word "generic" when you mean "descriptive". They are not the same thing. In fact, they're completely different from a legal perspective (though a term becoming generic can lead to it becoming descriptive). One is a term that was originally a trademark, whereas the other is something being proposed for the first time.
Descriptive: a mark that describes what the mark covers—for example, the mark "grocery store" for a grocery store.
Generic: an existing mark that has been frequently misused (colloquially) to describe similar products—for example aspirin—and thus is no longer exclusive to the original product in common usage.
The process of trademark registration works like this:
1. A company or individual files.
2. The USPTO reviews the mark.
3. If the USPTO decides the mark is not allowed statutorily, you can begin legal proceedings to challenge that in a special administrative tribunal.
4. Once the USPTO grants a tentative approval, they publish that mark publicly in a publication that is usually called the Trademark Official Gazette, Official Gazette, or some other similar name. This begins what is essentially a "request for comments" phase.
5. If another party files an opposition (objection) during this phase, then the two sides argue their case in an administrative tribunal (similar to a court, but more limited in scope).
6. If no oppositions are filed within a certain period of time, or if the trademark registrant prevails in the tribunal, then the mark becomes a registered trademark. If the opposing party prevails, then the mark does not become a registered trademark.
Right now, as best I understand it, this mark is stuck in step 5 under opposition by Microsoft. The opposing argument in that opposition (I think) is that it is descriptive, and thus should not be allowed to become a mark in the first place. That said, I have not read any of the material that Microsoft has submitted to the court, so I could be wrong about their grounds for objecting.
And in parallel with that, Amazon is arguing that it is descriptive in its own court case originally brought by Apple to prevent dilution of the pending mark that could eventually lead to it becoming generic.
You have the inner party—the upper crust, the rich, the members of the party in power. Then you have the people who work for them—the factory workers, and so on. Finally, you have the people outside the cities.
Most people don't use the same types of cables for 5, 10+ years. Few people were using HDMI 5 years ago. I'm guessing something new will be the de facto standard 5-10 years from now.
And even if they do, I have cables that are way over 10 years old with no noticeable oxidation. I do have some really, really old cables that have oxidized (like pre-1980 cables), but nothing more recent.
Why? Apparently the metals used for connectors changed a long time ago, and newer connectors are much less prone to oxidation even without gold plating. The silver-looking connectors you buy today are either plated with nickel or chromium (the metal, not the OS). Although they do oxidize in air, the reaction is self-passivating, which means that it doesn't oxidize to nearly the degree that the silver or steel connectors of yesteryear did.
And this, friends, is why you never ever release a major update to any software on a Friday, much less a Friday before a long holiday weekend.
If their engineers were so clueless as to choose that date, then they deserve to have to work over the weekend to fix it. And if they were so passive that they let their management demand that they release it on that day, they deserve to have to work over the weekend to fix it. Starting to see the pattern here?
Some patents actually require huge investment by venture capitalists, they're gonna want a return.
A real company builds a real product. Patents were not intended to protect companies. They were intended to protect inventors from companies, and specifically, from having their ideas stolen by a company.
The assumption is that by the time you're big enough to be a corporate inventor of anything of consequence, you're also big enough to build products in a timely manner, and thus you don't need patents to protect you from other companies. You should be able to make back your investment before your competitors can copy you. If you can't, it means that either your patent is trivial or it fails the novelty or obviousness tests and your competitors were already working on something similar in parallel with you. Either way, you don't deserve a patent for it.
Better choice: patents are non-transferrable except to heirs upon death. Patents may be licensed, but not sold. This would immediately fix everything that is wrong with patents today, in that businesses would not be allowed to own them, which AFAIK is what was intended by the patent system when it was first created.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that they already do profiling. There's no other way to explain why I have been "randomly" singled out for this treatment nearly EVERY SINGLE TIME I have gone through Mineta San Jose Airport (including this very morning). It has gone so far beyond what would be considered acceptable by any reasonable person that I am currently seeking legal representation.
Even before today, I was already so fed up that I'm doing the vast majority of my travel this year by Amtrak. Unfortunately, due to scheduling constraints, this one trip required me to travel by plane for one leg. I'm taking Amtrak for the return trip. Henceforth, I will not be traveling by commercial airlines anymore within the continental United States until the TSA is disbanded. If I miss family funerals, so be it. If I miss other special events, that's life. I refuse to be degraded and humiliated as a precondition for travel.
To the Tea Party, want to cut $43.6 billion in government pork? Dissolve the TSA, fire everyone, and cancel all outstanding contracts to Rapiscan and L-3 Communications. Also, add a permanent ban on all future government contracts across the board for these two companies. They're dirty crooks who manipulate politicians into putting our people at risk and forcing the public to give up its fundamental legal right to free travel within our nation's borders, and that is something that simply cannot be tolerated.
Finally, may Satan reserve a special place in Hell for everyone involved in trying to force any parent to choose whether his or her child should be felt up by a stranger or irradiated. If that is what safety demands, then fuck safety. If the only way to be safe is to give up our most basic moral values, our most basic freedoms, and everything else that makes the United States better than some shithole dictatorship, then what are we bothering to fight terrorism for? If that is truly the price of freedom, then the United States that we know and love died and was buried on September 11, 2001, and we're just waiting for the fat lady to arrive to sing Ave Maria and give the eulogy.
God help us all.
The spirit and intention of the words is codified by the letters sent between its signers.
I don't know about the other folks, but...
C. Store vast amounts of media.
I like to have my collection of photos with me on my laptop. It's about 80 gigabytes currently, and growing at 10-20 gigabytes per year.
Also, my OS only takes 7 GB or so (including all the various third-party graft-ins that I use), but the applications I use add a whopping 34 gigabytes of additional storage requirements, and that's without a lot of optional stuff installed. So just to carry the software I have installed on my laptop plus my photos would fill 121 gigabytes with no additional files at all. Add to that my current Photoshop projects at almost 4 GB, musical compositions at 10 GB, etc. and you can quickly see why the commonly available 128 GB sizes just don't cut it.
I'd love to move to an SSD for the added reliability, but I'm currently using a 500 GB hard drive, and am rapidly getting annoyed waiting for terabyte capacity to become thin enough to fit in a laptop so I can upgrade. Call me when SSDs can hold a terabyte for under a grand, and we'll talk. Until then, they're toys as far as I'm concerned.
Excessive energy use leads to pollution if and only if the means for producing the power leads to pollution. Want to fix that problem? Don't ban the bulbs. Ban the coal plants. Banning bulbs to reduce coal emissions is like making it illegal to feed high school students to reduce the teen birth rate....
I'd expect the life to be comparable to that of a normal incandescent bulb if you don't have redeposition going on, but I could be wrong. You probably just got a dud. Either that or there might have been some fun harmonic thing going on where a PWM dimmer hits the filament at just the right rate to cause constructive interference a la the Tacoma Narrows Bridge.... :-) But probably just a bad bulb.
Every so often, I get an incandescent that lasts just a few weeks. And then I get another one that lasts ten years. It's pretty much random luck a far as I can tell, though you can extend the life of any incandescent bulb (including halogens) a bit by using a circuit that fades the bulbs up to full brightness from zero instead of slamming the power on and off... or by never turning it off....
You forgot:
3. People who are actually guilty of deliberately downloading such content almost certainly will continue doing so, and thus the police should need no records at all. They need merely to have the right to take control of such a site and continue operating it as a honeypot.
And, as others have probably noted by now, the child porn laws at this point fail all of the traditional tests for the constitutionality of a prohibition anyway:
Worse, because of the stigma associated with it, child porn represents an excellent opportunity for extortion. The mere existence of records that could be used in a political witch hunt or to blackmail out political leaders into voting a certain way represents a credible threat to the democratic process in general.
Further, I'd be willing to bet good money that if we could sniff around the hard drives and networks of enough Congresspeople, we'd find more than a few files of a dubious nature, but right now, nobody outside of Congress knows that. Imagine how badly our political process could be corrupted if such records were mandated and could be retrieved by less than reputable members of the police and law enforcement, then used to pressure them into voting for laws that favor their own corrupt interests.
Finally, we've been combatting electronic child porn for at least two decades. It should be clear to anyone with common sense that if these laws were truly useful in protecting children from child porn, we'd already have them. Therefore these laws are simply an erosion of privacy that serve no legitimate law enforcement purpose.
To that end, I have a modest proposal: when anyone asks for laws like this, we should immediately use the word "un-American" to describe them. Only by using the same sort of empty rhetoric can we effectively combat such ridiculous laws in the minds of the simpletons who vote for them.
You're confusing instantaneous efficiency with lifetime efficiency, and confusing infrared emissions with envelope temperature. Not all infrared emissions from an incandescent bulb are turned into surface heat on the bulb's envelope.
First, it's important to understand that a halogen bulb is more efficient over its life because filament redeposition ensures that the filament does not get thinner (and thus less effective at producing light) and that the inside of the bulb remains clear of deposits from the filament (which reduces light output). So although a brand new halogen bulb is more efficient than a brand new standard incandescent bulb, the difference for new bulbs isn't nearly as high as the difference over the lifetime of the bulb.
Second, in order for that redeposition to occur, the envelope must remain extremely hot (250 C/482 deg. F), regardless of the wattage of the bulb. (Source: The Great Internet Light Bulb Book, Part I) If a bulb is running cooler than that, it isn't getting any real gain from being a halogen bulb. To put that in perspective, a 100 watt incandescent bulb, according to safety standards, is not allowed to get over 247C/477 deg. F. (Source: allexperts) So the absolute minimum effective envelope temperature for a halogen bulb is roughly the same as the absolute maximum allowed for a 100 watt bulb.
Therefore, fixtures that are only rated for 40 watt incandescent bulbs cannot safely support a halogen bulb. This effectively rules out the safe use of halogen bulbs in the majority of table lamps and many floor lamps.
So why not require that every light switch be one of those d**ned sensor switches? Bathroom fan switches be replaced with timers? Better efficiency for TVs, VCRs, and computers? All of these things would have a much bigger impact than light bulbs.
For that matter, how do you know that it causes increased pollution? Many of us live in parts of the country that deliberately charge more for power so that we can get most of our power from renewable and other clean sources. Why should we be limited just because you are burning coal to power your incandescent bulbs?
And further, we already pay increasing rates as we consume more power. This should more than balance out the effect on others caused by my use of a cheaper, more power-consuming bulb.
It really doesn't matter, though. If there were value in being more efficient, bulbs would be more efficient. For commercial lighting, they use enough power to make it worth going fluorescent, and most of them went that way twenty years ago or more. For household lighting, they use such a small amount of power that the market doesn't demand more efficient lighting, and most consumers haven't really shown much interest in completely replacing their incandescent bulbs with CFLs in spite of the energy savings. In fact, they have shown a willingness to hoard large quantities of incandescent bulbs to delay the transition. This is a very definite sign of a hopelessly failed energy policy.
So the government steps in and stipulates that bulbs should be more efficient solely for efficiency's sake. Here's what Congress thought would happen:
Here's what actually happened:
Although there have been a few in-lab improvements in incandescent technology, none of those are likely to see the light of day in the next few years because of the cost involved. Thus, the net effect is that not only is the government forcing CFLs down everyone's throat, but they are also exporting a lot of bulb manufacturing jobs to China. And no, things like "Halogena" bulbs don't count as significant improvements. They're just halogen bulbs. It's largely old-school tech. They've made some minor improvements, but for the most part, the only reason they're still allowed is that the law specified an energy improvement over incandescent bulbs rather than an energy improvement over comparable bulb technology. Sure, when you compare halogen to straight incandescent, you get an energy improvement.
BTW, there's a reason we don't use halogen bulbs everywhere. They're too hot. They represent a significant increase in fire risk over standard incandescent bulbs, and thus are unsuitable for many light fixtures. Arguing that halogens are a globally suitable replacement for incandescent bulbs is a bit like arguing that a box of hand grenades is a suitable replacement for a box of firecrackers on July 4th.
Bottom line: if you want to reduce energy consumption, you should go after things that can easily be made more efficient without direct impact to customers, e.g. power supplies in electronics. Or better yet, move us the **** off of coal and fossil fuels and towards cleaner, more renewable sources of power so that none of the energy conservation matters anymore.
Precious, at least when we're talking about naturally occurring substances, refers to how prevalent it is in the crust. Gold is relatively rare, at 3-6 parts per billion for the crust. Aluminum is about 8%, or about 80 million parts per billion, and is the most common metal on the planet, followed closely by iron at about 5-6%.
My trolling has gotten me a karma bonus, where yours has gotten you a -1 base score, and I'm the idiot? Just saying.
Actually, it had nothing to do with aluminum being precious, but rather that most metal manufacturing (until the advent of CNC milling in the 1950s) was done by casting, and pure aluminum doesn't cast well.
It was also a relatively expensive material because the technology to cheaply extract aluminum from aluminum oxide was still in its infancy (the modern Hall-Héroult process having not been invented until two years later, in 1886, with the previous technologies being either extremely expensive, difficult to use in large quantities, or both), but this was in large part due to lack of demand, which was in large part due to the fact that it was historically difficult to cast pure aluminum precisely and get yields comparable to that of other metals or aluminum alloys.
See The Point of a Monument: A History of the Aluminum Cap of the Washington Monument for details.
Still, the point remains that its cost was largely due to its novelty.
And as I've noted elsewhere, it also presumes that the car belongs to that person. It's pretty easy to swap license plates. By providing that key, you're admitting that it is your car, and thus testifying against yourself....
What this really means is not that crypto keys should be special, but that the entire notion of requiring someone to turn over keys—even physical keys—is a gross abrogation of our government's responsibility to uphold the Constitution. Not that this is any surprise these days; our government wiped its a** with the Constitution on September 11, 2001, and flushed it not long thereafter. That expectation doesn't make the reality of the situation any less disgusting.
More precisely, the defendant, by producing such a password, is incriminating himself or herself by proving that the contents of that encrypted disk, disk image, zip file, or other such content is his or hers.
A computer is not at all like a safe. If somebody breaks into your office and hides jewels in your safe, odds are you're going to know about it. By contrast, your computer does things that you don't know about on a regular basis. For example, do you know what all those launchd timed jobs do on your Mac, or all those background programs do on your Windows box? Didn't think so. Do you know what all those random files all over your hard drive are? Didn't think so. Heck, I work in the computer industry, and even I wouldn't claim to understand every single file on my machine.
Thus, providing the key is, in effect, making a statement that you created that encryption system for the purpose of hiding something, without which there is no evidence that you did it, only that your computer did it.
In short, anyone technically knowledgeable should understand that being forced to provide an encryption key is an egregious fifth amendment violation, where giving a key to a safe generally is not.
Really? Every text I've seen on the subject cites that as an example, including Wikipedia. I'm going to have to go with [citation needed] here. :-)
Translation: "As far as I'm concerned, the danger posed by a drunk/high driver are the same as any other driver, and the penalties should be equivalent. Needless to say, this would be a very unpopular ruling despite the fact that the dangers are equivalent."
It would be unpopular because they aren't comparable. When you are distracted while driving, you're distracted for a few seconds. An accident only occurs if something happens to occur during those few seconds. When you are drunk, you are incapacitated for the entire duration of your trip. This makes drunk driving much worse than distracted driving.
Also, everyone gets distracted once in a while by something, whether it's texting on a cell phone or shouting at the person you disagree with on talk radio. So in effect, you're arguing that one particular distraction should be singled out, when there's no evidence that it won't simply be replaced by other distractions.
Put another way, 25% of car accidents are linked to gadget use. Better than one in ten drivers are using cell phones at any given moment. This means that this is only a mere 2.5x more likely than you'd expect by purely random chance, and probably less than that if you take into account that teen drivers are much more likely to use cell phones, and are much more likely to have accidents. In short, it is quite likely that this correlation can be explained away completely as mere chance. Probably not completely, but most of it—so much so that passing laws on the subject is unlikely to have a significant impact on accidents.
This is borne out by California's passage of an anti-texting law. Although traffic fatalities went down, they went down by roughly the average amount that they have been dropping each year for the decade prior, suggesting that such laws have minimal impact.
So... the net as we know it will be headed the same way as usenet.
Don't forget that the names for column types are substantially different, that even when they are the same, the maximum data lengths for that column type may not be the same (unless you explicitly varchar(xxx)), etc. There's a lot of room for surprises....
Still, it's not nearly as dire as a complete ground-up rewrite.
There's something ironic about calling any country "green" when such a high percentage of people burn sticks of paper and tobacco for their own entertainment. And that definitely isn't done with one eye on longevity. Just saying.
Please stop using the word "generic" when you mean "descriptive". They are not the same thing. In fact, they're completely different from a legal perspective (though a term becoming generic can lead to it becoming descriptive). One is a term that was originally a trademark, whereas the other is something being proposed for the first time.
Descriptive: a mark that describes what the mark covers—for example, the mark "grocery store" for a grocery store.
Generic: an existing mark that has been frequently misused (colloquially) to describe similar products—for example aspirin—and thus is no longer exclusive to the original product in common usage.
The process of trademark registration works like this:
1. A company or individual files.
2. The USPTO reviews the mark.
3. If the USPTO decides the mark is not allowed statutorily, you can begin legal proceedings to challenge that in a special administrative tribunal.
4. Once the USPTO grants a tentative approval, they publish that mark publicly in a publication that is usually called the Trademark Official Gazette, Official Gazette, or some other similar name. This begins what is essentially a "request for comments" phase.
5. If another party files an opposition (objection) during this phase, then the two sides argue their case in an administrative tribunal (similar to a court, but more limited in scope).
6. If no oppositions are filed within a certain period of time, or if the trademark registrant prevails in the tribunal, then the mark becomes a registered trademark. If the opposing party prevails, then the mark does not become a registered trademark.
Right now, as best I understand it, this mark is stuck in step 5 under opposition by Microsoft. The opposing argument in that opposition (I think) is that it is descriptive, and thus should not be allowed to become a mark in the first place. That said, I have not read any of the material that Microsoft has submitted to the court, so I could be wrong about their grounds for objecting.
And in parallel with that, Amazon is arguing that it is descriptive in its own court case originally brought by Apple to prevent dilution of the pending mark that could eventually lead to it becoming generic.
Caveat: IANALBIPOOSD.
I'm assuming it's as described in 1984:
Inner party
Outer party
Proles
You have the inner party—the upper crust, the rich, the members of the party in power. Then you have the people who work for them—the factory workers, and so on. Finally, you have the people outside the cities.
And even if they do, I have cables that are way over 10 years old with no noticeable oxidation. I do have some really, really old cables that have oxidized (like pre-1980 cables), but nothing more recent.
Why? Apparently the metals used for connectors changed a long time ago, and newer connectors are much less prone to oxidation even without gold plating. The silver-looking connectors you buy today are either plated with nickel or chromium (the metal, not the OS). Although they do oxidize in air, the reaction is self-passivating, which means that it doesn't oxidize to nearly the degree that the silver or steel connectors of yesteryear did.
In short, gold plating is a scam.
And this, friends, is why you never ever release a major update to any software on a Friday, much less a Friday before a long holiday weekend.
If their engineers were so clueless as to choose that date, then they deserve to have to work over the weekend to fix it. And if they were so passive that they let their management demand that they release it on that day, they deserve to have to work over the weekend to fix it. Starting to see the pattern here?
A real company builds a real product. Patents were not intended to protect companies. They were intended to protect inventors from companies, and specifically, from having their ideas stolen by a company.
The assumption is that by the time you're big enough to be a corporate inventor of anything of consequence, you're also big enough to build products in a timely manner, and thus you don't need patents to protect you from other companies. You should be able to make back your investment before your competitors can copy you. If you can't, it means that either your patent is trivial or it fails the novelty or obviousness tests and your competitors were already working on something similar in parallel with you. Either way, you don't deserve a patent for it.
Better choice: patents are non-transferrable except to heirs upon death. Patents may be licensed, but not sold. This would immediately fix everything that is wrong with patents today, in that businesses would not be allowed to own them, which AFAIK is what was intended by the patent system when it was first created.