Your point is probably accurate - it is unlikely that fines from individuals have much of an impact on a Police Department's budget. Still, I'll bet they can have a tremendous impact on the budget of a typical individual. I imagine a person living pretty much paycheck-to-paycheck would be hit hard by a fine for DUI, and it would truly suck if the conviction wouldn't have occurred if the machines were properly calibrated...
Realistically, the margin of error, even on a machine which hadn't been calibrated on its schedule, may not be enough to have made a substantial difference, but still...
I know we all want to retain the right to resell what we have purchased, even at a loss, but this system seems to have a DRM that isn't terribly effective. It looks like an obvious flaw, and no one's pointing it out, so I guess we're supposed to pretend we don't see it?
It appears I can make a back up of my iTunes music, install the files on a secondary computer which is running the ReDigi DRM software, and sell them from there. This would not impact my files on my iOS devices, nor would it affect the files on my primary computer which does not have ReDigi installed.
The only way I could see this meeting a bulletproof Rights Management standard would be for the only non-ephemeral copies to be stored in the locker in the first place: in other words, you'd have to download directly from iTunes to the cloud, so that no copy of the song would ever reside on your computer. Once you have the file on your system, there will always be a way to copy it, and the DRM agent isn't omniscient.
I've never played Guitar Freaks, so please forgive me if I sound like an idiot, but Guitar Hero does have a grading system based on the percentage of notes hit and the length of consecutive runs - I have certainly used that function to rate my improvement on some songs that were difficult for me.
In Austin, there's a Goodwill computer store that used to have a lot of old, non-functional Macintosh computers. I once bought a dead SE/30 for $15 with the intention of mounting a mini-ITX board and small monitor in it. I ended up being too lazy to complete the project, but I had no qualms about "rip[ping] apart vintage Apple gear", despite many years with a cherished Mac Plus.
So, you are saying that non-sentient animals are able to make a connection between the sex drive and the birth of offspring which takes place months later? Really?
I would argue that the only drive that animals have is the desire to couple - because it feels really good. It is only humans that understand the connection between the act of coupling and reproduction, and only the prudes who try to convince otherwise, because it suits their purposes to imply that people who couple in ways they don't approve are acting "against nature". It's just not true...
I never had to deal with power outage problems, but when I was a computer tech at Computer City in the 90's, I had a nice little old lady customer who picked up her computer which I had repaired (and tested) bring it back to the shop, insisting it didn't work. I took it in the back, plugged it in and turned it on, and it worked perfectly, so I brought it back out, and she took it home again. About 2 hours later, she comes back, with the same complaint. This time I decide to demonstrate the computer works, so I plug it in up front so she can see. As soon as I hit the power button, she realizes that she assumed the powerstrip was how to turn the computer on, and she had never touched the power button on the actual computer at her home. She was very apologetic, and thanked me for my patience.
Exactly! They didn't invent it, they co-opted it to capitalize on the good feelings the smiley face inspires in people, and they want people to feel good about Walmart (which I grant is difficult with all the stories about imprisoning workers in the store at night, not offering benefits to more than a handful of employees at most stores, hiring illegals to avoid being trapped with pesky minimum wage and fair labor laws, etc.).
Since it has been around for a while, the Trademark office should flatly reject any attempt to trademark the smiley - that's the responsible, intelligent thing to do.
I can practically feel my blood pressure go up every time I have to drive near rush hour, since every other driver on the road is either an idiot or a maniac*. If I could ride a bicycle or use public transportation, I would consider it, but in Texas, it just ain't possible. I think the stress-relieving nature of the actual physical work also contributes to the lower stress levels - they go hand-in-hand.
*: Idiot (n): Person driving slower than the speaker. Maniac (n): Person driving faster than the speaker.
I'm more than a little concerned, not because coffee makes me jittery (it does), but because I seem to keep caffeine in my system for a long time. If I drink a caffeinated beverage after noon, there's a good chance I may still have enough caffeine in my system to keep me awake after 2:00 a.m.
I've known for some time that I process caffeine more slowly than many of my friends, but with the results of this new study (and a family history of heart disease), I believe I will have to seriously reduce my coffee intake.
It's not that hard - sure, Apple officially* discourages the possibility of getting music from an iPod onto a computer, but there's a gaping hole in that security: if you select the option to allow you to mount the iPod as a drive in Windows, and your Explorer is configured to display hidden folders, you have complete access to the music library. Yes, the folder configuration is pretty munged up, but the Find File function works perfectly, and you can drag-and-drop from the "Find File" window to another Explorer window. From there, you could easily drag-and-drop into iTunes, and voila!
* Likewise, the FairPlay system has a big hole - there is nothing to stop anyone from burning purchased tracks onto an Audio CD and re-ripping them. The quality drop is negligible, and the newly ripped tracks have no copy protection whatsoever. Apple's software makes it mildly inconvenient to get around the copy protection, but not so difficult that any additional software is actually required to accomplish it.
I have to agree with you - there were a lot of lame things about the Nick Fury, but I didn't absolutely hate it while watching it. Truly, it could have been a lot worse.
Case in point? Well, no list of the worst Marvel Comics-based movies is complete without the stinking pile of swamp muck that is "Man-Thing". Now that is a good contender for worst Marvel movie, and it's a pretty recent effort, too!
What he said was more along the lines of "my wife ceased being a clandestine officer the day Robert Novak blew her identity." That has exactly the opposite spin of your phrasing, and for good reason - although she was still operating out of Langley, she was still working in the field of WMDs, and she was doing so undercover, with a staff of other undercover agents.
I don't know why treason is now considered acceptable by the Republican Party, but secret agents like Plame work hard and risk their lives (she travelled with an ordinary passport, and was likely to be executed if caught as a spy) to protect our country. I think we owe them better than to out them because of mean-spirited, lying political B.S.
If she wasn't a covert agent, smart guy, then why does the CIA insist that she was - they wouldn't have reported it as a crime if she weren't still a covert agent. If there was no crime, then why did a special prosecutor (appointed by Bush, no less) feel this issue was so important he was willing to send 2 reporters to jail unless they named their sources, one of whom is still in jail now?
I've been a huge Ellison fan since the first time I read "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktock Man in the early 80's.
A few other very good Ellison stories include: Mefisto in Onyx Grail Djinn, No Chaser Pretty Maggie Moneyeys Shattered Like a Glass Goblin Paingod The Deathbird Anywhere but Here, With Anybody But You Chatting With Anubis Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral Paladin of the Lost Hour
and many others I'm too lazy to type out.
The thing about Ellison's writing that grabs so many people is that he expertly blends fantastic settings and situations with real human drama. The events descibed might be bizarre or possibly futuristic (although Ellison's work usually has a timeless quality), but the emotions the characters are dealing with are very real and familiar.
/My personal Ellison story - Harlan had a huge line for autographs at Dragoncon '99, and I was too far back to be able to get my book signed before he had to leave. He came back on his own time to sign for all the people who got cut off in that line. A real stand-up guy!
I agree that he was within his rights to make the statements he made in that letter, as he was also within his rights to donate, help with fundraising, and generally campaign for the candidate he preferred.
I just feel that his partisan political manuevering left a bad taste in my mouth, and that his statement, delivered after the questions about the security of his company's machines had been called into question, was poorly thought-out, and made his whole company seem biased. If there is a growing cynicism in this country that the whole government is for sale to the highest bidder, then he just reinforced it.
To draw an admittedly flawed analogy, a judge shouldn't express a preference about which way the verdict should go in a case before him, even if the case will be decided by a jury who hasn't learned of his bias, and the sentencing is to be determined by guidelines that he has no say over. It may not make any difference to the results, but it's still not cool.
I think that people in certain positions should be above the appearance of impropriety, and if we are going to contract out the design and construction of our vote-counting machines to any private or publically-held company, then I think the people in charge of those companies should be committed enough to the ideals of our democratic system to voluntarily keep their political positions to themselves.*
*While I would appreciate the intent of a law or clause in their contract restricting them from campaigning for candidates affected by their machines, I do recognize that would be an unconstitutional violation of their First Amendment rights, and as such, would not be acceptable. I still would prefer them to really be impartial, but I could cope if they pretend to be impartial or just don't campaign for particular candidates - yes, privately-held bias is less harmful to our democratic process than publicly-admitted bias.
Here's an idea - maybe the person who runs the company making vote-counting machines should be making public statements about how he's "committed to ensuring that the machines deliver an accurate count of the vote tallies", instead of such blatant political posturing.
No, O'Dell never made any public statements that he would engage in election fraud, but he did say that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio's Electoral votes to Bush. That is a bit more specific than saying he wanted to help Bush win in Ohio, and it is mostly the particular wording used that caused the uproar.
I am not saying that I think he knowingly engaged in election fraud (considering that Blackwell was both the Sec. of State of Ohio and the co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio, and he did more than his share of election "fixing", it's not like O'Dell needed to), but I am saying that having the head of the company pushing for a particular result could be perceived as encouraging underlings to take that as a more important goal than accuracy.
It's just a bad idea for people involved in vote-counting to have an obvious political agenda that could be perceived as being more important with their professional impartiality. I believe that harms the people's confidence in our electoral system, and by extension, harms our democracy,
Are you unable to read, or are you just trying to obfuscate the truth?
The article, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer begins with this quote:
The head of a company vying to sell voting machines in Ohio told Republicans in a recent fund-raising letter that he is "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
The Aug. 14 letter from Walden O'Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc. - who has become active in the re-election effort of President Bush - prompted Democrats this week to question the propriety of allowing O'Dell's company to calculate votes in the 2004 presidential election.
There is no proof that any improprieties were committed, but the suggestion that the head of the company that makes vote-counting machines should not be making such biased comments in public is hardly a radical one.
I can certainly see that the Mac, especially running the Unix-based System X, would be inherently more stable than a Wintel machine, but it is certainly true that there are viruses and trojans that affect Macintosh, and at least some of the relative paucity of malware on Macintosh is due to its lower market share.
Still, I haven't used a Mac regularly since System 7 was new, so maybe I need to buy a Mac mini and test this out for myself...
Copy-protected "CD's" do not conform to Redbook specs because anyone can rip a Redbook disc without any difficulty. There are many methods of copy-protection, and they all tend to cause issues with newer players that can see multiple sessions on a disc and get confused. Any really old audio-only player should work OK, and getting one of these to work on a computer can be tricky.
Dualdiscs, on the other hand, are not copy-protected by definition (although it is possible that some might be in the future). The potential incompatibility here is that, in order to get both a CD and a DVD onto a single disc, the thickness was compromised. Most CD players will have no problem with this, but slot-loading mechanisms (as found in just about every car-mounted CD player) could have a serious problem. Once you have the disc in a player, and the laser properly focuses, there is no problem. I have ripped the CD side of a Dualdisc into iTunes without a hiccup.
Slashdot Mirror
Your point is probably accurate - it is unlikely that fines from individuals have much of an impact on a Police Department's budget. Still, I'll bet they can have a tremendous impact on the budget of a typical individual. I imagine a person living pretty much paycheck-to-paycheck would be hit hard by a fine for DUI, and it would truly suck if the conviction wouldn't have occurred if the machines were properly calibrated...
Realistically, the margin of error, even on a machine which hadn't been calibrated on its schedule, may not be enough to have made a substantial difference, but still...
I know we all want to retain the right to resell what we have purchased, even at a loss, but this system seems to have a DRM that isn't terribly effective. It looks like an obvious flaw, and no one's pointing it out, so I guess we're supposed to pretend we don't see it?
It appears I can make a back up of my iTunes music, install the files on a secondary computer which is running the ReDigi DRM software, and sell them from there. This would not impact my files on my iOS devices, nor would it affect the files on my primary computer which does not have ReDigi installed.
The only way I could see this meeting a bulletproof Rights Management standard would be for the only non-ephemeral copies to be stored in the locker in the first place: in other words, you'd have to download directly from iTunes to the cloud, so that no copy of the song would ever reside on your computer. Once you have the file on your system, there will always be a way to copy it, and the DRM agent isn't omniscient.
OK, I met Harlan in '98, and he was actually a pretty standup guy, but that was a damned funny joke!
Bravo!
Pity that wrf3 has apparently drunk so much of the kool-aid, he doesn't realize how he's being played...
I've never played Guitar Freaks, so please forgive me if I sound like an idiot, but Guitar Hero does have a grading system based on the percentage of notes hit and the length of consecutive runs - I have certainly used that function to rate my improvement on some songs that were difficult for me.
In Austin, there's a Goodwill computer store that used to have a lot of old, non-functional Macintosh computers. I once bought a dead SE/30 for $15 with the intention of mounting a mini-ITX board and small monitor in it. I ended up being too lazy to complete the project, but I had no qualms about "rip[ping] apart vintage Apple gear", despite many years with a cherished Mac Plus.
So, you are saying that non-sentient animals are able to make a connection between the sex drive and the birth of offspring which takes place months later? Really?
I would argue that the only drive that animals have is the desire to couple - because it feels really good. It is only humans that understand the connection between the act of coupling and reproduction, and only the prudes who try to convince otherwise, because it suits their purposes to imply that people who couple in ways they don't approve are acting "against nature". It's just not true...
Good point, how exactly is "Shock and Awe" a whole lot different from blitzkrieg?
I guess we'd need to ask both the Poles and Iraqis...
(Is this my first Godwin? I think it is!)
I never had to deal with power outage problems, but when I was a computer tech at Computer City in the 90's, I had a nice little old lady customer who picked up her computer which I had repaired (and tested) bring it back to the shop, insisting it didn't work. I took it in the back, plugged it in and turned it on, and it worked perfectly, so I brought it back out, and she took it home again. About 2 hours later, she comes back, with the same complaint. This time I decide to demonstrate the computer works, so I plug it in up front so she can see. As soon as I hit the power button, she realizes that she assumed the powerstrip was how to turn the computer on, and she had never touched the power button on the actual computer at her home. She was very apologetic, and thanked me for my patience.
Exactly! They didn't invent it, they co-opted it to capitalize on the good feelings the smiley face inspires in people, and they want people to feel good about Walmart (which I grant is difficult with all the stories about imprisoning workers in the store at night, not offering benefits to more than a handful of employees at most stores, hiring illegals to avoid being trapped with pesky minimum wage and fair labor laws, etc.).
Since it has been around for a while, the Trademark office should flatly reject any attempt to trademark the smiley - that's the responsible, intelligent thing to do.
If I had mod points, you'd get an "Insightful".
I can practically feel my blood pressure go up every time I have to drive near rush hour, since every other driver on the road is either an idiot or a maniac*. If I could ride a bicycle or use public transportation, I would consider it, but in Texas, it just ain't possible. I think the stress-relieving nature of the actual physical work also contributes to the lower stress levels - they go hand-in-hand.
*: Idiot (n): Person driving slower than the speaker. Maniac (n): Person driving faster than the speaker.
I'm more than a little concerned, not because coffee makes me jittery (it does), but because I seem to keep caffeine in my system for a long time. If I drink a caffeinated beverage after noon, there's a good chance I may still have enough caffeine in my system to keep me awake after 2:00 a.m.
I've known for some time that I process caffeine more slowly than many of my friends, but with the results of this new study (and a family history of heart disease), I believe I will have to seriously reduce my coffee intake.
Bummer...
It's not that hard - sure, Apple officially* discourages the possibility of getting music from an iPod onto a computer, but there's a gaping hole in that security: if you select the option to allow you to mount the iPod as a drive in Windows, and your Explorer is configured to display hidden folders, you have complete access to the music library. Yes, the folder configuration is pretty munged up, but the Find File function works perfectly, and you can drag-and-drop from the "Find File" window to another Explorer window. From there, you could easily drag-and-drop into iTunes, and voila!
* Likewise, the FairPlay system has a big hole - there is nothing to stop anyone from burning purchased tracks onto an Audio CD and re-ripping them. The quality drop is negligible, and the newly ripped tracks have no copy protection whatsoever. Apple's software makes it mildly inconvenient to get around the copy protection, but not so difficult that any additional software is actually required to accomplish it.
I have to agree with you - there were a lot of lame things about the Nick Fury, but I didn't absolutely hate it while watching it. Truly, it could have been a lot worse.
Case in point? Well, no list of the worst Marvel Comics-based movies is complete without the stinking pile of swamp muck that is "Man-Thing". Now that is a good contender for worst Marvel movie, and it's a pretty recent effort, too!
What he said was more along the lines of "my wife ceased being a clandestine officer the day Robert Novak blew her identity." That has exactly the opposite spin of your phrasing, and for good reason - although she was still operating out of Langley, she was still working in the field of WMDs, and she was doing so undercover, with a staff of other undercover agents.
I don't know why treason is now considered acceptable by the Republican Party, but secret agents like Plame work hard and risk their lives (she travelled with an ordinary passport, and was likely to be executed if caught as a spy) to protect our country. I think we owe them better than to out them because of mean-spirited, lying political B.S.
If she wasn't a covert agent, smart guy, then why does the CIA insist that she was - they wouldn't have reported it as a crime if she weren't still a covert agent. If there was no crime, then why did a special prosecutor (appointed by Bush, no less) feel this issue was so important he was willing to send 2 reporters to jail unless they named their sources, one of whom is still in jail now?
I've been a huge Ellison fan since the first time I read "Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktock Man in the early 80's.
/My personal Ellison story - Harlan had a huge line for autographs at Dragoncon '99, and I was too far back to be able to get my book signed before he had to leave. He came back on his own time to sign for all the people who got cut off in that line. A real stand-up guy!
A few other very good Ellison stories include:
Mefisto in Onyx
Grail
Djinn, No Chaser
Pretty Maggie Moneyeys
Shattered Like a Glass Goblin
Paingod
The Deathbird
Anywhere but Here, With Anybody But You
Chatting With Anubis
Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral
Paladin of the Lost Hour
and many others I'm too lazy to type out.
The thing about Ellison's writing that grabs so many people is that he expertly blends fantastic settings and situations with real human drama. The events descibed might be bizarre or possibly futuristic (although Ellison's work usually has a timeless quality), but the emotions the characters are dealing with are very real and familiar.
Chipped her tooth, right?
I agree that he was within his rights to make the statements he made in that letter, as he was also within his rights to donate, help with fundraising, and generally campaign for the candidate he preferred.
I just feel that his partisan political manuevering left a bad taste in my mouth, and that his statement, delivered after the questions about the security of his company's machines had been called into question, was poorly thought-out, and made his whole company seem biased. If there is a growing cynicism in this country that the whole government is for sale to the highest bidder, then he just reinforced it.
To draw an admittedly flawed analogy, a judge shouldn't express a preference about which way the verdict should go in a case before him, even if the case will be decided by a jury who hasn't learned of his bias, and the sentencing is to be determined by guidelines that he has no say over. It may not make any difference to the results, but it's still not cool.
I think that people in certain positions should be above the appearance of impropriety, and if we are going to contract out the design and construction of our vote-counting machines to any private or publically-held company, then I think the people in charge of those companies should be committed enough to the ideals of our democratic system to voluntarily keep their political positions to themselves.*
*While I would appreciate the intent of a law or clause in their contract restricting them from campaigning for candidates affected by their machines, I do recognize that would be an unconstitutional violation of their First Amendment rights, and as such, would not be acceptable. I still would prefer them to really be impartial, but I could cope if they pretend to be impartial or just don't campaign for particular candidates - yes, privately-held bias is less harmful to our democratic process than publicly-admitted bias.
Here's an idea - maybe the person who runs the company making vote-counting machines should be making public statements about how he's "committed to ensuring that the machines deliver an accurate count of the vote tallies", instead of such blatant political posturing.
No, O'Dell never made any public statements that he would engage in election fraud, but he did say that he was committed to helping deliver Ohio's Electoral votes to Bush. That is a bit more specific than saying he wanted to help Bush win in Ohio, and it is mostly the particular wording used that caused the uproar.
I am not saying that I think he knowingly engaged in election fraud (considering that Blackwell was both the Sec. of State of Ohio and the co-chair of the Bush/Cheney campaign in Ohio, and he did more than his share of election "fixing", it's not like O'Dell needed to), but I am saying that having the head of the company pushing for a particular result could be perceived as encouraging underlings to take that as a more important goal than accuracy.
It's just a bad idea for people involved in vote-counting to have an obvious political agenda that could be perceived as being more important with their professional impartiality. I believe that harms the people's confidence in our electoral system, and by extension, harms our democracy,
The article, from the Cleveland Plain Dealer begins with this quote:
There is no proof that any improprieties were committed, but the suggestion that the head of the company that makes vote-counting machines should not be making such biased comments in public is hardly a radical one.
Well, I still don't think it would be terribly useful on a vacation, even as a backup, but your other ideas are very clever and convincing.
I humbly concede there are some uses for which a cheap camcorder with a 20-minute recording time would be perfect.
I imagine this would be trivially easy to hack, but with only 20 minutes of what is probably lo-res video, why would anyone bother?
I can certainly see that the Mac, especially running the Unix-based System X, would be inherently more stable than a Wintel machine, but it is certainly true that there are viruses and trojans that affect Macintosh, and at least some of the relative paucity of malware on Macintosh is due to its lower market share.
Still, I haven't used a Mac regularly since System 7 was new, so maybe I need to buy a Mac mini and test this out for myself...
There are two different issues here:
Copy-protected "CD's" do not conform to Redbook specs because anyone can rip a Redbook disc without any difficulty. There are many methods of copy-protection, and they all tend to cause issues with newer players that can see multiple sessions on a disc and get confused. Any really old audio-only player should work OK, and getting one of these to work on a computer can be tricky.
Dualdiscs, on the other hand, are not copy-protected by definition (although it is possible that some might be in the future). The potential incompatibility here is that, in order to get both a CD and a DVD onto a single disc, the thickness was compromised. Most CD players will have no problem with this, but slot-loading mechanisms (as found in just about every car-mounted CD player) could have a serious problem. Once you have the disc in a player, and the laser properly focuses, there is no problem. I have ripped the CD side of a Dualdisc into iTunes without a hiccup.