Rotary engines are really interesting, but engineers generally have to have an avenue to pursue in order to increase efficiency. Just like chronically-filthy 2-stroke diesel engines (think older buses & trucks and locomotives), or chronically-filthy air-cooled gasoline engines, there's only so much you can do with some technologies, due to limitations of the design or exorbitant costs involved with constructing them in ways that would overcome the limitations.
Usually, if a design has good potential and novelty, someone will try to run with it. Mazda has been working on Wankels for 50 years. A number of other major manufacturers tried to do things with them as well, and none of them pulled-off a coup. Rotaries were what set Mazda apart for so long, and they have a cult following. So did the Porsches with air-cooled engines. Emissions and efficiency standards rendered those obsolete, too, because lighter weight and "awesomeness" just don't balance out the flaws.
They treat the Foxconn workers like prisoners, including installing wire mesh over all of the windows of the barracks so the workers can't jump out. That level of control probably works wonders at preventing suicides.
I'm certain they deserved every bit of the bad press and deserve no slack whatsoever.
Foxconn workers who assemble stuff for Dell and a variety of others apparently don't get tortured for days over the loss/theft of pre-release hardware. THAT is the root of the problem, Apple is so caught-up in the silly product release spectacles that they send their iGestapo after people who find prototype phones their drunken employees have carelessly left in public places, and there also seems to be an even more locked-down and insane culture at the Foxconn plants that make Apple products.
I'm sorry, I don't care how special iCrap is, and how much fanboys are caught up in the iHysteria over the imminent release announcement, I have trouble regarding torture as appropriate even when lives are at stake. To torture someone over losing a pre-release device, or even over a blatantly stolen pre-release device is way off the scale of wrongness, and a corporation (and CEO of said corporation) that fosters that sort of culture in its overseas manufacturing facilities is despicable. Did Steve Jobs ever publicly denounce that culture? Did Steve Jobs ever announce measures to change the way situations like that are handled? Did Steve Jobs ever do anything other than tacitly approve the way the Chinese factory overseers handled the missing iPhone crisis?
No, Steve Jobs didn't. He defended the indefensible and did his best to minimize & brush-off the problem. Instead, Apple and Foxconn just blamed the workers for the problems and made them sign anti-suicide pacts. That puts him, and his entire corporation, right alongside the robber barons of the late 1800s as far as I'm concerned.
Actually, many, if not most, campus cops are really a step up from regular city cops. They have the same POST training as any other law enforcement officers in their state, they have the same authority as well, and they are held to a higher standard of professionalism and conduct. They're basically dealing with a mini-city filled with hordes of unwashed, drunk, and privileged young adults. You just can't have power-tripping bullies in a position like that. Around here, most of the problems arise when the city police lose their cool while handling off-campus problems in the neighborhood where all of the frat houses and homes that are rented by students are located.
Point granted-- though I have a lot of trouble envisioning how the pure form of anarcho-syndicalism would function in a practical sense, with all anarchist systems relying so heavily on individual virtue and self-restraint...free communism would be so incredible to have, but human envy and greed always seem to derail such systems on any sorts of large scale, since their trusting altruism is too easily taken advantage of.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's supposed to be the pinnacle of socialism, whereas Marxism-Leninism socialism is supposedly more of a training-wheels sort of arrangement that establishes the order and trains the populace, and then can transcend to the higher form after the class warfare is extinguished and the classes all learn to cooperate and work for mutual benefit, regardless of what their roles are. It's just my observation that, while Lenin is an idealist who I rather admire, the system unfortunately just never progresses to what would amount to that utopia, since it's still rather impossible to train humans not to be selfish dicks.
On a related note, I like the Linux form of socialism. It does generally work beautifully and is a shining example of what free communism can accomplish. I suppose it only works because it's nearly impossible to assign value, so it's free. Since there's no value assigned, people work on it for free. That all adds up to something that I find to be quite priceless, owned by the people, produced by the people, and used by the people.
From whence did you obtain this "original definition" of yours? Who may it be attributed to?
There can be multiple situations where the government owns the means of production. The primary one is socialism, and it owns the means of production "in trust" for the workers (who supposedly elect and control their government). What distinguishes socialism from other such systems is also that the socialist system has to assign value to work; workers, as a collective, generally can't assign their own value when they're their own employer and customers. That's the planned/command economy piece.
Please don't invent new definitions for socialism. There is absolutely nothing in that economic structure that requires it to be a democracy. You're blending and confusing economic systems with political systems. The USSR's economic system was quite socialist, even if their government system was a totalitarian, single-party limited republic. The key hallmarks of socialism are a command economy in which the government owns the means of production.
The primary reason the Mennonites and Amish succeed to a large extent is that they also have the ability to boot people who don't cooperate into the larger society. Without the power of ostracism into exile, you're left with containing subversive citizens within the commune, usually in the form of labor colonies, gulags, and similar.
I can read ancient Greek. Koine ("common") Greek is basically an ancient form of ebonics. The grammar is so sloppy it's painful to read. Every Greek professor I had rolled his or her eyes whenever someone would bring-up the New Testament. It's hillbilly blather written by folks who had minimal education and were only semi-literate, and most in the field regard it as a waste of time because it honestly doesn't matter what it actually says.
You might wonder why I say that. Of course seminarians embrace the notion that they don't need to learn to read no stinkin' Greek. They already "know" what the Holy Scriptures say, so why would they need to question or interpret it further? All of those so-called "independent" translations you mention, hate to break it to you, but they're only independent insofar as the authors' choice of language, but they all carry the preconceived notions that would be best referred to as "Biblical canon" and twist their translations to match that canon perfectly, regardless of what the texts actually say. Since they have a good handle on Truthiness, they're obviously qualified to "correct" all the "mistakes" that were made by the original authors. The ambiguity that comes along with the atrocious grammar makes it particularly easy to twist several key passages into bizarre meanings.
As far as the Dead Sea Scrolls go, one of the biggest myths circulating around Christian culture these days is that they bolster the historical tradition of the Bible. In reality, they seem to do just a tiny bit of that, and add a lot of apocryphal stuff. Of course, the Apocrypha and the gnostic gospels were really all about as sound as the rest of the hodgepodge as the rest of the accepted Christian Bible aside from the contents of the Torah, but they didn't agree so much with the way the Roman Catholic Church wanted to deify Peter and Paul, so they declared other books that didn't fit with their agenda as heretical, edited them out, and tried to burn all of the Gnostic gospels. Some survived, and they're interesting reads if not just as bizarre as most of the New Testament. Your Bible is complete and true, though...why? Because it MUST be true since God wouldn't have allowed His Word (tm) to be destroyed. Oh, right. The Gnostic gospels survived the deliberate Catholic purges and book burnings, some would almost regard that as a miracle in itself.
In short, the things you and those so-called Biblical scholars take on faith tend to be tragic and make you utter fools. You pick on some parts of the Catholic canon and call them "troubling", anyone who can read terrible Greek and cares to do so would pick on you for all the foolishness that your Protestant Bibles pass-off as "translation". I did it for shits 'n giggles a little bit, it's good for little more than an insight into the directions the early Christians who were established rival sects, and were trying to steal market share from other religions, were going. It would be kind of insane to base your dogmatic worldview on anything written in that book, though.
You clearly don't believe in homeopathy. I mean, when water molecules can have "memory" of some compound through insane amounts of dilution, how could it not have a really, really strong memory of the filthy urine and feces that were in it just minutes before? (Tim Minchin has a brilliant video that includes this flaw of homeopathic theory entitled "Storm")
I agree, KDE 4 was initially an utter abomination. I could see the potential, but I stuck with 3.5 for well over a year.
I've been running KDE 4 for a while now, I think it is getting rather mature. It's customizable, reasonably fast, stable, and has a clean appearance to it.
I actually use Kubuntu myself for this very reason. Sure, I've modified it kind of heavily, but I can recommend it for people and offer similar reassurance to the guy in the Hair Club for Men commercials-- there's something to be said for not being "too good" for your own products. I'm familiar with the user experience they'll have.
The "as long as you aren't a gamer" objection is also getting old. There are some games that will not run very well under Wine/Linux, but more and more, it's simply because of arrogance on the part of developers like Ubisoft who love their DRM and Games for Windows Live. Most gamers probably have some clue what they can do and what they can't on Linux. The rest of the people, you can simply tell them:
Me- "You should try Ubuntu, it's more secure and faster than Windows, faster and simpler, and the stability & framerates of World of Warcraft will BLOW YOUR MIND and you don't have to worry as much about your account being 'jacked."
That will work, because that's probably the only damn game they'll want to play anyway.
I'll expand on this to say that one thing I've noticed in a number of my fellow computer geeks for some time is that they're harshly judgmental of others and quick to call them "stupid" and "lusers". Many end users are, but as any task, working on computers is obvious and easy if you've done a lot of work on them because it's your specialty. Not everyone is specialized in computer operation and maintenance. They have other hobbies and occupations. Part of having people skills is not being so full of yourself and nearsighted that you don't call others "stupid" simply because they're not as knowledgeable in a specific field as you are.
Such a union is completely unnecessary. It's really simple: Don't agree to bullshit contracts. Cross things out, walk away if the potential employer won't accept that.
I'd be rather skeptical that such a contract would be enforceable in court anyway, since it is just another potential means for the company to go after you if you siphoned-off their intellectual property or worked on their nickel for your own stuff. When you sign something like that, it makes it that much harder for you to claim something as your own unless you can prove it was all original work, done on your own time, and with your own resources. Any grey areas, and they probably do have a claim to your work. It's like a non-compete agreement, which are probably not worth defending unless there's an egregious violation of trust (e.g., the departing employee stealing clients).
That aside, it's really on the individual to look out for his own interests. This is the only point I agree with Ayn Rand's diatribes on-- a limited application of rational self interest. That's the rationale behind unions, but it isn't limited to a union framework. It behooves every working individual to determine his/her own value and to refuse to accept less or sell-out in unconscionable ways. I have outright laughed at laughable job offers, and I would sooner work in retail for $8/hr than disrespect myself and damage my profession working for $12/hr in an IT job that really should be paying well over $20/hour. Some poor, desperate fools do that, rather than holding out for a fair wage, I'm sure of it. Unions are really just a way of enforcing the situation where nobody can be stupid and sell-out everyone else because its an all-or-none contract.
There is a reason that unions tend to be limited to labor & vocational trades and not professions. Anyone thinking IT is suitable for unionization should consider that it's much harder to quantify professional work and qualifications, but unions rely on standardizing the worker and then basing a contract off that. Each worker must fit exactly in the mold. That means everyone is assumed to have the same level of skills (based on the level of seniority and training), excellence, and overall productivity. That's why "not my job" is the Union mantra-- you must do your job and you WILL be punished for doing more than what your contract allows you to do. IT is really specialized and so many folks wear so many hats, I wouldn't see that working well, and while the protections of a contract are nice to have, they limit your freedom to set your own value and to actually just get your job done. It's really much better to have associations of individuals that let them compare notes and encourage everyone to do right by themselves and by their colleagues, but without being bound by union rules.
If Aaron Rents was to be found guilty of invading anyone's privacy by capturing images from laptops that have been stolen (not returned and not fully purchased), I guess that means the criminals who steal MacBooks and other devices, and the owners take webcam videos & snapshots and use captured/uploaded data from those criminals to track them down are invading the criminals' privacy too. It's really the exact same thing-- the rightful owner of a laptop invading the privacy of a CRIMINAL in order to recover their stolen property.
The wrongdoing here is that an Aaron Rents employee apparently stole the money for himself rather than putting it towards the purchase of the machine (as I recall from the original story), and as far as the company knew, the laptop was stolen. If the people were unjustly snooped-upon, they should take that up with the employee who stole their money.
It's nothing to do with people's rights. The Bill of Rights regulates the government's interactions with citizens, not interactions between citizens. Why is this so hard for folks to comprehend? A free webhosting company refusing to let you spout your trash and censoring you absolutely IS NOT a violation of your First Amendment rights. Aaron Rents spying through stolen laptops is not wiretapping, nor any other conceivable violation of the Fourth Amendment, since they're not doing it on behalf of the government.
If you don't like what Aaron Rents is doing, sue them in a civil case. They're not the government. If they haven't broken some element of the civil code, then no crime has been committed.
I'll point out that the only way to get that to work would be to also "stop paying for the rent for, and essentially steal the rented laptop" so the company would activate the stolen laptop recovery software.
Also, you can't "sue" anyone for the creation of KP...that's not a civil offense, but a criminal one. You can tip-off the authorities, good luck explaining how you know about the alleged KP recording without admitting that you stole the laptop.
Then, watch as nothing happens to that company because they weren't intentionally trying to create KP, and it's simple enough for them to demonstrate that you were probably trying to frame them for a crime to avoid the stolen laptop being recovered. Oh, that behavior on your part is probably more criminal than simply stealing the laptop in the first place. Maybe they could even argue that you arranged to have the minor "do what teens do in front of webcams" and redirect that KP charge right back on you.
In short, good luck with that. I don't think it would end how you seem to envision it would.
Or, IMDH, to follow the example of another "extremely close format approximation that was designed to work around ridiculous licensing terms and fees".
DisplayPort is sufficiently professional grade. It does have a locking mechanism to secure it, not much unlike an XLR connector. It's perfectly suitable for professional use, but it's been my experience that professional gear is excruciatingly slow to migrate to newer interconnects because if something is "pretty good", it's best to stick with it and not create unnecessary compatibility problems between very expensive equipment simply because there's something newer and shinier on the block.
There are still a number of folks out there using Betacam SP rather than DigiBeta or Betacam SX or the other modern digital formats. HDcam is about the only thing that has the potential of unseating "really good, but ancient analog" because it offers so much more in terms of resolution. Heck, I was one of those folks. I was using a Betacam SP deck on my digital 3/4" chip Sony camera head...because it was still great, far superior to the DVCAM deck options (I tried and disliked the quality), and not as horrendously expensive (for minimal gain) as Betacam SX.
So yeah. DVI will continue to be more prevalent in the pro video arena a while longer even though there's something better. It's because the last thing anyone in the pro world wants is to have to replace their entire infrastructure, each piece costing tens of thousands of dollars, over the upgrade of one part of it, and they don't want additional points of expense or failure in the form of adapters, either.
I don't think so, it's mostly the lower-end business computers that have HDMI. The high-end mobile workstations such as Precision have the superior DisplayPort.
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Yeah, this is just about right.
Rotary engines are really interesting, but engineers generally have to have an avenue to pursue in order to increase efficiency. Just like chronically-filthy 2-stroke diesel engines (think older buses & trucks and locomotives), or chronically-filthy air-cooled gasoline engines, there's only so much you can do with some technologies, due to limitations of the design or exorbitant costs involved with constructing them in ways that would overcome the limitations.
Usually, if a design has good potential and novelty, someone will try to run with it. Mazda has been working on Wankels for 50 years. A number of other major manufacturers tried to do things with them as well, and none of them pulled-off a coup. Rotaries were what set Mazda apart for so long, and they have a cult following. So did the Porsches with air-cooled engines. Emissions and efficiency standards rendered those obsolete, too, because lighter weight and "awesomeness" just don't balance out the flaws.
They treat the Foxconn workers like prisoners, including installing wire mesh over all of the windows of the barracks so the workers can't jump out. That level of control probably works wonders at preventing suicides.
I'm certain they deserved every bit of the bad press and deserve no slack whatsoever.
Foxconn workers who assemble stuff for Dell and a variety of others apparently don't get tortured for days over the loss/theft of pre-release hardware. THAT is the root of the problem, Apple is so caught-up in the silly product release spectacles that they send their iGestapo after people who find prototype phones their drunken employees have carelessly left in public places, and there also seems to be an even more locked-down and insane culture at the Foxconn plants that make Apple products.
I'm sorry, I don't care how special iCrap is, and how much fanboys are caught up in the iHysteria over the imminent release announcement, I have trouble regarding torture as appropriate even when lives are at stake. To torture someone over losing a pre-release device, or even over a blatantly stolen pre-release device is way off the scale of wrongness, and a corporation (and CEO of said corporation) that fosters that sort of culture in its overseas manufacturing facilities is despicable. Did Steve Jobs ever publicly denounce that culture? Did Steve Jobs ever announce measures to change the way situations like that are handled? Did Steve Jobs ever do anything other than tacitly approve the way the Chinese factory overseers handled the missing iPhone crisis?
No, Steve Jobs didn't. He defended the indefensible and did his best to minimize & brush-off the problem. Instead, Apple and Foxconn just blamed the workers for the problems and made them sign anti-suicide pacts. That puts him, and his entire corporation, right alongside the robber barons of the late 1800s as far as I'm concerned.
Actually, many, if not most, campus cops are really a step up from regular city cops. They have the same POST training as any other law enforcement officers in their state, they have the same authority as well, and they are held to a higher standard of professionalism and conduct. They're basically dealing with a mini-city filled with hordes of unwashed, drunk, and privileged young adults. You just can't have power-tripping bullies in a position like that. Around here, most of the problems arise when the city police lose their cool while handling off-campus problems in the neighborhood where all of the frat houses and homes that are rented by students are located.
Point granted-- though I have a lot of trouble envisioning how the pure form of anarcho-syndicalism would function in a practical sense, with all anarchist systems relying so heavily on individual virtue and self-restraint...free communism would be so incredible to have, but human envy and greed always seem to derail such systems on any sorts of large scale, since their trusting altruism is too easily taken advantage of.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's supposed to be the pinnacle of socialism, whereas Marxism-Leninism socialism is supposedly more of a training-wheels sort of arrangement that establishes the order and trains the populace, and then can transcend to the higher form after the class warfare is extinguished and the classes all learn to cooperate and work for mutual benefit, regardless of what their roles are. It's just my observation that, while Lenin is an idealist who I rather admire, the system unfortunately just never progresses to what would amount to that utopia, since it's still rather impossible to train humans not to be selfish dicks.
On a related note, I like the Linux form of socialism. It does generally work beautifully and is a shining example of what free communism can accomplish. I suppose it only works because it's nearly impossible to assign value, so it's free. Since there's no value assigned, people work on it for free. That all adds up to something that I find to be quite priceless, owned by the people, produced by the people, and used by the people.
From whence did you obtain this "original definition" of yours? Who may it be attributed to?
There can be multiple situations where the government owns the means of production. The primary one is socialism, and it owns the means of production "in trust" for the workers (who supposedly elect and control their government). What distinguishes socialism from other such systems is also that the socialist system has to assign value to work; workers, as a collective, generally can't assign their own value when they're their own employer and customers. That's the planned/command economy piece.
Please don't invent new definitions for socialism. There is absolutely nothing in that economic structure that requires it to be a democracy. You're blending and confusing economic systems with political systems. The USSR's economic system was quite socialist, even if their government system was a totalitarian, single-party limited republic. The key hallmarks of socialism are a command economy in which the government owns the means of production.
The primary reason the Mennonites and Amish succeed to a large extent is that they also have the ability to boot people who don't cooperate into the larger society. Without the power of ostracism into exile, you're left with containing subversive citizens within the commune, usually in the form of labor colonies, gulags, and similar.
--John Kenneth Galbraith
I can read ancient Greek. Koine ("common") Greek is basically an ancient form of ebonics. The grammar is so sloppy it's painful to read. Every Greek professor I had rolled his or her eyes whenever someone would bring-up the New Testament. It's hillbilly blather written by folks who had minimal education and were only semi-literate, and most in the field regard it as a waste of time because it honestly doesn't matter what it actually says.
You might wonder why I say that. Of course seminarians embrace the notion that they don't need to learn to read no stinkin' Greek. They already "know" what the Holy Scriptures say, so why would they need to question or interpret it further? All of those so-called "independent" translations you mention, hate to break it to you, but they're only independent insofar as the authors' choice of language, but they all carry the preconceived notions that would be best referred to as "Biblical canon" and twist their translations to match that canon perfectly, regardless of what the texts actually say. Since they have a good handle on Truthiness, they're obviously qualified to "correct" all the "mistakes" that were made by the original authors. The ambiguity that comes along with the atrocious grammar makes it particularly easy to twist several key passages into bizarre meanings.
As far as the Dead Sea Scrolls go, one of the biggest myths circulating around Christian culture these days is that they bolster the historical tradition of the Bible. In reality, they seem to do just a tiny bit of that, and add a lot of apocryphal stuff. Of course, the Apocrypha and the gnostic gospels were really all about as sound as the rest of the hodgepodge as the rest of the accepted Christian Bible aside from the contents of the Torah, but they didn't agree so much with the way the Roman Catholic Church wanted to deify Peter and Paul, so they declared other books that didn't fit with their agenda as heretical, edited them out, and tried to burn all of the Gnostic gospels. Some survived, and they're interesting reads if not just as bizarre as most of the New Testament. Your Bible is complete and true, though...why? Because it MUST be true since God wouldn't have allowed His Word (tm) to be destroyed. Oh, right. The Gnostic gospels survived the deliberate Catholic purges and book burnings, some would almost regard that as a miracle in itself.
In short, the things you and those so-called Biblical scholars take on faith tend to be tragic and make you utter fools. You pick on some parts of the Catholic canon and call them "troubling", anyone who can read terrible Greek and cares to do so would pick on you for all the foolishness that your Protestant Bibles pass-off as "translation". I did it for shits 'n giggles a little bit, it's good for little more than an insight into the directions the early Christians who were established rival sects, and were trying to steal market share from other religions, were going. It would be kind of insane to base your dogmatic worldview on anything written in that book, though.
You clearly don't believe in homeopathy. I mean, when water molecules can have "memory" of some compound through insane amounts of dilution, how could it not have a really, really strong memory of the filthy urine and feces that were in it just minutes before? (Tim Minchin has a brilliant video that includes this flaw of homeopathic theory entitled "Storm")
I thought plants craved electrolytes.
I agree, KDE 4 was initially an utter abomination. I could see the potential, but I stuck with 3.5 for well over a year.
I've been running KDE 4 for a while now, I think it is getting rather mature. It's customizable, reasonably fast, stable, and has a clean appearance to it.
I actually use Kubuntu myself for this very reason. Sure, I've modified it kind of heavily, but I can recommend it for people and offer similar reassurance to the guy in the Hair Club for Men commercials-- there's something to be said for not being "too good" for your own products. I'm familiar with the user experience they'll have.
The "as long as you aren't a gamer" objection is also getting old. There are some games that will not run very well under Wine/Linux, but more and more, it's simply because of arrogance on the part of developers like Ubisoft who love their DRM and Games for Windows Live. Most gamers probably have some clue what they can do and what they can't on Linux. The rest of the people, you can simply tell them:
Me- "You should try Ubuntu, it's more secure and faster than Windows, faster and simpler, and the stability & framerates of World of Warcraft will BLOW YOUR MIND and you don't have to worry as much about your account being 'jacked."
That will work, because that's probably the only damn game they'll want to play anyway.
EXACTLY.
Thank you.
I'll expand on this to say that one thing I've noticed in a number of my fellow computer geeks for some time is that they're harshly judgmental of others and quick to call them "stupid" and "lusers". Many end users are, but as any task, working on computers is obvious and easy if you've done a lot of work on them because it's your specialty. Not everyone is specialized in computer operation and maintenance. They have other hobbies and occupations. Part of having people skills is not being so full of yourself and nearsighted that you don't call others "stupid" simply because they're not as knowledgeable in a specific field as you are.
Such a union is completely unnecessary. It's really simple: Don't agree to bullshit contracts. Cross things out, walk away if the potential employer won't accept that.
I'd be rather skeptical that such a contract would be enforceable in court anyway, since it is just another potential means for the company to go after you if you siphoned-off their intellectual property or worked on their nickel for your own stuff. When you sign something like that, it makes it that much harder for you to claim something as your own unless you can prove it was all original work, done on your own time, and with your own resources. Any grey areas, and they probably do have a claim to your work. It's like a non-compete agreement, which are probably not worth defending unless there's an egregious violation of trust (e.g., the departing employee stealing clients).
That aside, it's really on the individual to look out for his own interests. This is the only point I agree with Ayn Rand's diatribes on-- a limited application of rational self interest. That's the rationale behind unions, but it isn't limited to a union framework. It behooves every working individual to determine his/her own value and to refuse to accept less or sell-out in unconscionable ways. I have outright laughed at laughable job offers, and I would sooner work in retail for $8/hr than disrespect myself and damage my profession working for $12/hr in an IT job that really should be paying well over $20/hour. Some poor, desperate fools do that, rather than holding out for a fair wage, I'm sure of it. Unions are really just a way of enforcing the situation where nobody can be stupid and sell-out everyone else because its an all-or-none contract.
There is a reason that unions tend to be limited to labor & vocational trades and not professions. Anyone thinking IT is suitable for unionization should consider that it's much harder to quantify professional work and qualifications, but unions rely on standardizing the worker and then basing a contract off that. Each worker must fit exactly in the mold. That means everyone is assumed to have the same level of skills (based on the level of seniority and training), excellence, and overall productivity. That's why "not my job" is the Union mantra-- you must do your job and you WILL be punished for doing more than what your contract allows you to do. IT is really specialized and so many folks wear so many hats, I wouldn't see that working well, and while the protections of a contract are nice to have, they limit your freedom to set your own value and to actually just get your job done. It's really much better to have associations of individuals that let them compare notes and encourage everyone to do right by themselves and by their colleagues, but without being bound by union rules.
I *almost* did that, but I already felt dirty enough for going for that low-hanging fruit...
You will just have to...
...open your Windows.
If Aaron Rents was to be found guilty of invading anyone's privacy by capturing images from laptops that have been stolen (not returned and not fully purchased), I guess that means the criminals who steal MacBooks and other devices, and the owners take webcam videos & snapshots and use captured/uploaded data from those criminals to track them down are invading the criminals' privacy too. It's really the exact same thing-- the rightful owner of a laptop invading the privacy of a CRIMINAL in order to recover their stolen property.
The wrongdoing here is that an Aaron Rents employee apparently stole the money for himself rather than putting it towards the purchase of the machine (as I recall from the original story), and as far as the company knew, the laptop was stolen. If the people were unjustly snooped-upon, they should take that up with the employee who stole their money.
It's nothing to do with people's rights. The Bill of Rights regulates the government's interactions with citizens, not interactions between citizens. Why is this so hard for folks to comprehend? A free webhosting company refusing to let you spout your trash and censoring you absolutely IS NOT a violation of your First Amendment rights. Aaron Rents spying through stolen laptops is not wiretapping, nor any other conceivable violation of the Fourth Amendment, since they're not doing it on behalf of the government.
If you don't like what Aaron Rents is doing, sue them in a civil case. They're not the government. If they haven't broken some element of the civil code, then no crime has been committed.
I'll point out that the only way to get that to work would be to also "stop paying for the rent for, and essentially steal the rented laptop" so the company would activate the stolen laptop recovery software.
Also, you can't "sue" anyone for the creation of KP...that's not a civil offense, but a criminal one. You can tip-off the authorities, good luck explaining how you know about the alleged KP recording without admitting that you stole the laptop.
Then, watch as nothing happens to that company because they weren't intentionally trying to create KP, and it's simple enough for them to demonstrate that you were probably trying to frame them for a crime to avoid the stolen laptop being recovered. Oh, that behavior on your part is probably more criminal than simply stealing the laptop in the first place. Maybe they could even argue that you arranged to have the minor "do what teens do in front of webcams" and redirect that KP charge right back on you.
In short, good luck with that. I don't think it would end how you seem to envision it would.
Or, IMDH, to follow the example of another "extremely close format approximation that was designed to work around ridiculous licensing terms and fees".
DisplayPort is sufficiently professional grade. It does have a locking mechanism to secure it, not much unlike an XLR connector. It's perfectly suitable for professional use, but it's been my experience that professional gear is excruciatingly slow to migrate to newer interconnects because if something is "pretty good", it's best to stick with it and not create unnecessary compatibility problems between very expensive equipment simply because there's something newer and shinier on the block.
There are still a number of folks out there using Betacam SP rather than DigiBeta or Betacam SX or the other modern digital formats. HDcam is about the only thing that has the potential of unseating "really good, but ancient analog" because it offers so much more in terms of resolution. Heck, I was one of those folks. I was using a Betacam SP deck on my digital 3/4" chip Sony camera head...because it was still great, far superior to the DVCAM deck options (I tried and disliked the quality), and not as horrendously expensive (for minimal gain) as Betacam SX.
So yeah. DVI will continue to be more prevalent in the pro video arena a while longer even though there's something better. It's because the last thing anyone in the pro world wants is to have to replace their entire infrastructure, each piece costing tens of thousands of dollars, over the upgrade of one part of it, and they don't want additional points of expense or failure in the form of adapters, either.
I don't think so, it's mostly the lower-end business computers that have HDMI. The high-end mobile workstations such as Precision have the superior DisplayPort.