The way that the system is meant to work (at least in the several Aldi(i|s ?) I use regularly ; Lidls too) is that you unload your cart onto the conveyor, then you go past the cashier (who notes anything in the trolley and challenges you on it ; stop shoplifting!) and then s|he starts to scan your goods, placing them on the "dinner plate" area. You take each scanned item from the "dinner plate" area and deposit them back into the empty trolley. You then pay, and take the trolley away to pack your goods into the rucksack (dump them in the car, or whatever), while the cashier gets on with the paying work of processing the next customer.
Read the highlighted text. Why should I take the goods out of my shopping cart, only to put them back in the cart, to take it away to a packing place, to pack them out again into my (Umweltfreundlich!) shopping bags?
Any production engineer at Daimler-Benz, VW or even piss-poor Opel would recognize that a step there is unnecessary (sorry, I am an engineer / Informatiker). Maybe we need a study from one of the Fraunhofer Institutes, which states, "hey, if the goods are unpacked from the shopping cart, why shouldn't we directly pack them into shopping bags, instead of repacking them back into the shopping cart?"
Oh, by the way, I shop at Penny-Markt. Their cash registers have big bays after the scanning, and are separated by a wooden swivel bar that allows the bay to be used by two different customers at the same time. Now if they would hire some teenagers to pack my stuff for me . . . I would be in Heaven . . .
English is my first language, but I am also fluent in German. One time a colleague asked me to translate an email that he had inadvertently been put on CC, in German. The whole department laughing their asses off over the word: Fehlerbehebungsmaßnahmen.
I told them that the meaning for me was crystal clear, but you would need a whole sentence in English to describe what it meant.
My girlfriend, who is a native German speaker,
claims that Unterwasserseebootbeleuchtungsautomatik is a valid word, which is used by a Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän.
So we should cut JFK some slack about getting his articles wrong, or using one, where none should be used. At least he didn't try to wrestle with these words.
I live in central Europe, and the trend to here is moving towards always paying with your EC bank card. A EC card is basically debit and ATM card, and this is quite common for purchases over 20€. However, it takes longer at the supermarket than paying with cash, because they print out a receipt that you have to sign. Even typing in a PIN takes longer than if you pay in cash. The cashier chicks at my supermarket have built-in abacuses in their heads. And when they grab into the cash registers for change, I have noticed that do not even look at the coins . . . they know from feeling the size how much is right.
A lot of folks like to pay with cards at the supermarket, because it gives you time to bag your groceries. No, there are no teen-aged "bag boys" where I live, and supermarkets here try to rudely toss you out, as soon as your bill has been paid. It's always a hoot and a half when I visit the USA with my girlfriend: she always jumps to start bagging the groceries, while some teenage guy gives her a look like, "Are you trying to steal my job?" Aldi is the worst offender: after your purchases get scanned, they are pushed to a packing place that is smaller than an average dinner plate. If you don't pack fast enough, they push your stuff onto the floor. If their prices were not so cheap, no one shop there, unless they are masochists who get sexual pleasure from being abused by assholes.
So anyway, the last time I visited ThePolygamousRanchSister in scenic New Jersey, I asked her where an ATM was. She told me that she never used cash any more. And my observations were that everyone, down to fast food joints, just swiped, and that was quicker than using cash. As soon as swiping a card without a print out and signature or PIN number is possible here, cash will be out.
Aw, the poor cash counterfeiters . . . this will wreck their business model.
Germans are incredibly tolerant about their language; if you try to speak it they will lend helping hands. I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that. (German is not my first language).
I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.
The Soviet planners were so impressed with one-time pads that decided that they needed to be copied:
Somebody who was working for the manufacturers of Soviet secret-communication materials had reused pages of some of the "one-time" pads in other "one-time" pads, which were then used for other secret messages. This defeated the purpose of the one-time pad, which provides ideal security when each page is used exactly once and then disposed of.
The article continues:
It is unclear as to why this fatal mistake was made, or by whom.
I would guess that he, who made the mistake, is pushing up the daisies in Siberia now . . .
In Soviet East Berlin, Erich Honecker eats your jelly doughnut!"
And James Jesus Angelton provided the orchids from his private garden. I am still kicking myself for not attending a book signing session by Markus Wolf, that took place near where I live . . . hell, then I could claim, "I saw the face, of the man without a face!"
A real cryptographer would have written something on the side of his notes saying, "Oh, I have found a really simple solution for this cipher, but I don't have enough room to prove it here. Get back to ya' later on that!"
Meanwhile, poor Günter Schabowski, couldn't decipher the notes from the East German Politburo, and inadvertently opened up the Berlin Wall.
Those politicians and spies say the darnedest things . . .
Try being the "fun uncle" instead of the "odd uncle who's always trying to make them into something they're not."
I did that "fun uncle" thing, and showed my nephew what you could make out of ammonia and iodine crystals (nitrogen triiodide, NI3) and postassium percholrate, aluminum powder and sulfur.
How did that story end? He is applying to grad school to get his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. He got an 800 on his math GRE, so things look good.
He lives on another continent than I, but the last time I visited for Christmas, he gave me a book titled, "Backyard Ballistics."
I never got the chance to show him how folks at Princeton's eating clubs peppered other eating clubs with water ballons launched from funnelators (giant sling-shots, made with surgical tubing). Some folks that I don't know, and don't know me planned to launch a few at George Bush, Senior, when he visited the campus in 1984. Those folks that I didn't know changed their minds, when Secret Service folks showed up on the rooftops of the eating club.
On top of Lego, K'NEX are pretty amazing pieces of construction material. As a kid, I started training with the basic sets, then got into the "master" sets.
I bought myself a K'NEX set called "The big ball factory," and some other sets of spare parts. My computer geek / engineer colleagues came over one night for a few to many beers. Everyone had a plan one how to improve the damn thing. There were four folks working in parallel on different sections at once, and showed no intention of stopping, and lost all track of time . . . just like what happens when you do hard core coding.
My girlfriend quipped to the other girlfriends, that if the beer didn't run out, she would have to chase them all out with a broom. Most of the girlfriends found the behavior "cute", especially since with every improvement, one of the guys would run to his girlfriend, and say, "Look, Romy, at that thing that I just built!"
When the folks were leaving, one of the chicks said, "I'm glad that these toys are in your apartment, and not in mine."
If you work for any serious company, or even an non-serious one, you will know that patents belong to your employer, and not yourself. It's in the fine print of your contract. Hell, my company, an IT firm even has first right on patents that I might come up with, that have nothing to do with their IT business. In other words, if I step in some dog shit, and come up with an idea for a better doggie pooper scooper, I need to get a waiver from from my employer to be able to patent it myself.
And patents have long since left the realm of inventors, and are now the bitches of lawyers. My patents are accessible in the Internet, list me as the Inventor, and my employer as the assignee. From the lawyer's description of the ideas and implementations, you would have no idea what the things was good for. I showed one to an IT colleague, and he was totally perplexed, and only understood what it was good for when I explained it to him in plain IT English.
So despite what TFS implies, patents don't travel with employees. They belong to employers . . . for ever . . . and ever . . . and ever . . .
... a bunch of UAVs will get trashed, but no human lives will be lost . . . that would be an improvement . . . wouldn't it? I dunno, maybe I'm wrong . . . I guess it might help, if the UAVs are not armed with nuclear weapons. I'm reminded of The Far Side cartoon, where American pioneers with covered wagons in a circle are attack by American Indians. One pioneer says to the other, "Hey, they are lighting their arrows! Are they allowed to do that?"
Price for a custom built Seabreacher is dependent on the number of options that a customer chooses, but price tends to range from US$ 65,000 for a standard model to upwards of US$ 85,000 for a high-performance, heavily customized version.
This is about the same price that a BMW M5 will put you back. If you've got the money, I guess your buying choice will depend on whether you live near water, or the Nürburgring.
DISCLAIMER: I rode a couple of laps around the Nürburgring in an M5 driven a professional race driver chick. It was a hoot and a half, to see how she passed guys with too much money, driving Porsches. They didn't want to believe that they were being overtaken by a chick in a white BMW.
God damn that car was fast, but I think that driver, and her knowledge of the track really made the difference!
I What I do is Fedex my "real" hdd to the hotel I'm planning on staying at, usually 1 day before travel to the US is enough for it to be there waiting for me when I arrive at check-in (obviously its an encrypted disk).
Nice tip, but given the latest Al Qaeda shenanigans in Yemen with printer cartridges, shipping hard disk drives will probably be forbidden real soon.
I have traveled to the US on business a lot before 9/11 and a few times after 9/11. The difference in "security" is frightening . . . I'd call it "siege mentality." When the security folks look at my laptop, and I show them my company ID badge, that gets me passed through, no questions asked. But I have to wonder, what do you do if you work for Airbus, and have confidential material on your machine? Will the TSA pass that along to the CIA, who will sell it to Boeing?
Back before 9/11, I often traveled to Austin, Texas on business trips, and I would always get to the airport early, when no one was in the check-in line. One time the guy doing the check-in looked at my passport, and said, "Hmmm. Born in Camden, New Jersey. Passport issued by the US Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. This is obviously a fake." It took me a couple of seconds to realize that he was joking, and then we talked about where he was stationed in Germany during his time in the armed forces. He gave me coupons for free drinks on the national leg of the journey.
This type of light humor is missing these days. Everything is so god-damned serious.
Please take these comments as a joke, and not seriously:-)
Every time I've been to Israel, these 'detectives' have spent a long time searching all my stuff. Since I was doing nothing wrong, clearly their Secret Detective Sense isn't working too good.
Actually, considering the tone of your response, I guess that the 'detectives' picked the right stuff to check.
Needless to say, I have no desire ever to go back there,
I can't speak Hebrew or Yiddish, but I am sure that they have an expression for, "Bye! And don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!"
and I'm guessing the blonde German girl who was in the aisle alongside me last time crying her eyes out after her 'interview' won't be either.
Actually, one of colleagues was, blonde, German, blue-eyed and in her 20's when she went on a business trip to Haifa, and then did a bit of vacation there. She got the full grill through security, because the former East German Secret Service (Stasi) were very "chummy" with Palestinian folks, and the Israeli folks knew that. She didn't cry, though.
On the other hand, when I visited the Jewish Quarter, with my blonde, green-eyed German girlfriend, it was right before Sukkot. She asked me what all the fuss was about, with folks buying funny looking leaves and lemon/limes. I explained that it was kinda sorta a Jewish Thanksgiving, and it was probably practiced in Germany until . . . well, you know. Then she looked around at all those folks haggling over the prices of leaves and limes, and started to cry.
Centurion: What's this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Brian: It says, "Romans go home. "
Centurion: No it doesn't ! What's the latin for "Roman"? Come on, come on !
Brian: Er, "Romanus" !
Centurion: Vocative plural of "Romanus" is?
Brian: Er, er, "Romani" !
Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] "Eunt"? What is "eunt"? Conjugate the verb, "to go" !
Brian: Er, "Ire". Er, "eo", "is", "it", "imus", "itis", "eunt".
Centurion: So, "eunt" is...?
Brian: Third person plural present indicative, "they go".
Centurion: But, "Romans, go home" is an order. So you must use...?
[He twists Brian's ear]
Brian: Aaagh ! The imperative !
Centurion: Which is...?
Brian: Aaaagh ! Er, er, "i" !
Centurion: How many Romans?
Centurion: [Writes "ite"] "Domus"? Nominative? "Go home" is motion towards, isn't it?
Brian: Dative !
[the Centurion holds a sword to his throat]
Brian: Aaagh ! Not the dative, not the dative ! Er, er, accusative, "Domum" !
Centurion: But "Domus" takes the locative, which is...?
Brian: Er, "Domum" !
Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred time
Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
Centurion: Hail Caesar ! And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
If you learned Latin in high school, this is very funny . . . otherwise, most folks would say, "what the Hell is a dative!", despite the fact that it is used in the English language. Whatever . . .
In the church that I was forced to attend as a child, on baptisim day, the choir director sang, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." What a dead giveaway!
Actually, wrong. Although I have long since shit-canned my Christian faith, those god-damned Christian values are really difficult to shake. I still tend to act like a Christian, even though I'm not one. Like, "why don't we try to be nice to each other?" And having compassion for other folks, who are not so well off as yourself. And that choir director gifted me with an appreciation for music, which has traveled through Pink Floyd, Gang of Four, Bauhaus, and Brazilian Techno. It's amazing where ringing hand-bells will bring you.
So, back to the point, I'd rather have someone asking me intelligent questions in the security line (even if he was a Catholic Priest), than some dork who gets his rocks off staring at body scanner images.
Israeli Airport Security folks are professionals
on
Bruce Schneier vs. the TSA
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
My employer has a lab in Haifa, and I know a number of folks who have traveled to Israel on business. They have also traveled to the US, post 9/11. They all state that the Israeli security folks are really detectives, who are very intelligent, ask misleading questions and evaluate the responses. All very "human / personal based." They all felt safe when entering the plane.
The US security seems to be base on technology. You have security folks, who are only capable of identifying a terrorist if the machine beeps.
This reminds me of how despite all the high tech satellite surveillance of Iraq, the wrong conclusions came out of the US intelligence agencies. Allen Dulles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Dulles ) was much better at recognizing the higher value of "human intellegence" (HUMINT).
So what am I ranting about? I would rather be grilled a Inspector Columbo at a security check, than scanned by a machine operated by some doofus.
Actually, there's a gradual movement where states are slowly allowing jurors to ask questions. I think eventually this will spread to all states.
Now you don't get to raise your hand and blurt it out mid-testimony. Questions are submitted to the judge in writing, reviewed, and passed on to both sides if appropriate...
Every once in a while, I read something on Slashdot that restores my faith in humanity. Letting jurors submit questions to the judge is something that is long overdue:
Juror #4: "So, Mr. John Wilkes Booth, the police found you slicing off pieces of flesh of the victim, with a bloody knife, and then eating them. Do you have an explanation for this?"
Juror #9: "Mother Theresa, you seem to have trouble just walking into the jury box, can you please explain, as the prosecution asserts, how you punched Michael Tyson to death?"
If you think you're a fair person, being on a jury is not a bad thing.
Even better, being a fully informed member of a jury
It's neither in the interest of the prosecution nor the defense to pick fair, fully informed jurors. They want folks who can be manipulated through testimony to sway to whatever verdict they want.
Even though I haven't lived there since 1986. My mother, who has nothing else better to do, calls the number on the letter, and tells (brags) that her son is working on another continent. She has repeatedly requested that my name be removed from the list, which doesn't seem to work. She was called up herself, but given that she was over 80, and has heath problems she didn't want to serve. But neither the DA or the defense wanted to excuse her. Did they think that old ladies can be manipulated?
Anyway the case was against a cop from her town being charged for using excessive force or something like that. She was finally so frustrated at not being excused, that when the judge asked her at the end, if there was anything she would like to say, she answered, "I could never find a police officer from my town guilty." I would have thought that the DA would have asked her that, but I guess he was hoping that he had a senior citizen to manipulate.
When my father was called up jury duty, he told me how the selection process went. He was a quiet person, but a very astute observer. Both the DA and the defense kicked off anyone prospective juror who had half a brain. The first question presented to him was about his education and profession. Both the DA and the defense attorney stood up, the judge laughed, and said to my father, "Go home."
Now that I am older, and could afford to spend to spend some time on a jury, I wouldn't mind doing so. But I would probably get chucked as fast as my dad did.
I read these two UK periodicals to get a full spectrum of folks in the UK. From these two, one can conclude that UK citizens (née, subjects) are a highly intelligent, diplomatic and genteel folk, who will punch your fucking teeth out, if you spill their pint. "A pint and a fight, a great British night!"
So it boggles me a bit that UK folks would just pay up on this scam without resistance. It's a good thing that Darl Charles McBride doesn't know about this. Everyone in the UK would be sent a bill for $699 for running Linux on their refrigerators. "Oi! Are yee linuxing up oor lass?"
d) The prize is mostly prestige. i.e. It wouldn't come anywhere near the development costs even for the teams that won.
Engineers and scientists are never in it for the money: they just want to prove that they can do something better than anyone else. This trait in human beings led to constant innovation: quicker methods of starting fires, better weapons to kill cuddly mammoths, etc. The highest art and skill of engineers and scientists is convincing others to pay for their cockamamie contraptions. This was true from Archimedes to Leonardo da Vinci: "Hey, you! Government, despot, whatever! Pay for my research, and I will help you vanquish your enemies!"
"believed to" . . . whatever happened to "proved, beyond a reasonable doubt?" All "in Soviet Russia" jokes aside, this sounds like being able to "denounce" someone, and get them shipped off to the Gulag. If you can prove that a site it infringing on copyrights, fine shut them down. However, if the charge is, "I think that it might be possible that this could be potentially infringing on copyrights that might be possibly owned by someone" . . . no, thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
The way that the system is meant to work (at least in the several Aldi(i|s ?) I use regularly ; Lidls too) is that you unload your cart onto the conveyor, then you go past the cashier (who notes anything in the trolley and challenges you on it ; stop shoplifting!) and then s|he starts to scan your goods, placing them on the "dinner plate" area. You take each scanned item from the "dinner plate" area and deposit them back into the empty trolley. You then pay, and take the trolley away to pack your goods into the rucksack (dump them in the car, or whatever), while the cashier gets on with the paying work of processing the next customer.
Read the highlighted text. Why should I take the goods out of my shopping cart, only to put them back in the cart, to take it away to a packing place, to pack them out again into my (Umweltfreundlich!) shopping bags?
Any production engineer at Daimler-Benz, VW or even piss-poor Opel would recognize that a step there is unnecessary (sorry, I am an engineer / Informatiker). Maybe we need a study from one of the Fraunhofer Institutes, which states, "hey, if the goods are unpacked from the shopping cart, why shouldn't we directly pack them into shopping bags, instead of repacking them back into the shopping cart?"
Oh, by the way, I shop at Penny-Markt. Their cash registers have big bays after the scanning, and are separated by a wooden swivel bar that allows the bay to be used by two different customers at the same time. Now if they would hire some teenagers to pack my stuff for me . . . I would be in Heaven . . .
This is a game where the goal is to find the meaning or a word which is pronounced the same but means different things.
In English, this is called a homonym: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym.
As in, "Can you see the sea?"
English is my first language, but I am also fluent in German. One time a colleague asked me to translate an email that he had inadvertently been put on CC, in German. The whole department laughing their asses off over the word: Fehlerbehebungsmaßnahmen.
I told them that the meaning for me was crystal clear, but you would need a whole sentence in English to describe what it meant.
My girlfriend, who is a native German speaker, claims that Unterwasserseebootbeleuchtungsautomatik is a valid word, which is used by a Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän.
So we should cut JFK some slack about getting his articles wrong, or using one, where none should be used. At least he didn't try to wrestle with these words.
I live in central Europe, and the trend to here is moving towards always paying with your EC bank card. A EC card is basically debit and ATM card, and this is quite common for purchases over 20€. However, it takes longer at the supermarket than paying with cash, because they print out a receipt that you have to sign. Even typing in a PIN takes longer than if you pay in cash. The cashier chicks at my supermarket have built-in abacuses in their heads. And when they grab into the cash registers for change, I have noticed that do not even look at the coins . . . they know from feeling the size how much is right.
A lot of folks like to pay with cards at the supermarket, because it gives you time to bag your groceries. No, there are no teen-aged "bag boys" where I live, and supermarkets here try to rudely toss you out, as soon as your bill has been paid. It's always a hoot and a half when I visit the USA with my girlfriend: she always jumps to start bagging the groceries, while some teenage guy gives her a look like, "Are you trying to steal my job?" Aldi is the worst offender: after your purchases get scanned, they are pushed to a packing place that is smaller than an average dinner plate. If you don't pack fast enough, they push your stuff onto the floor. If their prices were not so cheap, no one shop there, unless they are masochists who get sexual pleasure from being abused by assholes.
So anyway, the last time I visited ThePolygamousRanchSister in scenic New Jersey, I asked her where an ATM was. She told me that she never used cash any more. And my observations were that everyone, down to fast food joints, just swiped, and that was quicker than using cash. As soon as swiping a card without a print out and signature or PIN number is possible here, cash will be out.
Aw, the poor cash counterfeiters . . . this will wreck their business model.
Germans are incredibly tolerant about their language; if you try to speak it they will lend helping hands. I guess they figure that if you have the courage to try to learn it, and speak it, you don't need to prove any valour beyond that. (German is not my first language).
I have seen the film clip where Kennedy says, "Ich bin ein Berliner!", but all of the crowd knew what he wanted to say, and so it was no problem.
They have: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VENONA_project
The Soviet planners were so impressed with one-time pads that decided that they needed to be copied:
Somebody who was working for the manufacturers of Soviet secret-communication materials had reused pages of some of the "one-time" pads in other "one-time" pads, which were then used for other secret messages. This defeated the purpose of the one-time pad, which provides ideal security when each page is used exactly once and then disposed of.
The article continues:
It is unclear as to why this fatal mistake was made, or by whom.
I would guess that he, who made the mistake, is pushing up the daisies in Siberia now . . .
When deciphered, they read BERLIN.
"Ich bin ein Berliner!"
In Soviet East Berlin, Erich Honecker eats your jelly doughnut!"
And James Jesus Angelton provided the orchids from his private garden. I am still kicking myself for not attending a book signing session by Markus Wolf, that took place near where I live . . . hell, then I could claim, "I saw the face, of the man without a face!"
A real cryptographer would have written something on the side of his notes saying, "Oh, I have found a really simple solution for this cipher, but I don't have enough room to prove it here. Get back to ya' later on that!"
Meanwhile, poor Günter Schabowski, couldn't decipher the notes from the East German Politburo, and inadvertently opened up the Berlin Wall.
Those politicians and spies say the darnedest things . . .
Try being the "fun uncle" instead of the "odd uncle who's always trying to make them into something they're not."
I did that "fun uncle" thing, and showed my nephew what you could make out of ammonia and iodine crystals (nitrogen triiodide, NI3) and postassium percholrate, aluminum powder and sulfur.
How did that story end? He is applying to grad school to get his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. He got an 800 on his math GRE, so things look good.
He lives on another continent than I, but the last time I visited for Christmas, he gave me a book titled, "Backyard Ballistics."
I never got the chance to show him how folks at Princeton's eating clubs peppered other eating clubs with water ballons launched from funnelators (giant sling-shots, made with surgical tubing). Some folks that I don't know, and don't know me planned to launch a few at George Bush, Senior, when he visited the campus in 1984. Those folks that I didn't know changed their minds, when Secret Service folks showed up on the rooftops of the eating club.
On top of Lego, K'NEX are pretty amazing pieces of construction material. As a kid, I started training with the basic sets, then got into the "master" sets.
I bought myself a K'NEX set called "The big ball factory," and some other sets of spare parts. My computer geek / engineer colleagues came over one night for a few to many beers. Everyone had a plan one how to improve the damn thing. There were four folks working in parallel on different sections at once, and showed no intention of stopping, and lost all track of time . . . just like what happens when you do hard core coding.
My girlfriend quipped to the other girlfriends, that if the beer didn't run out, she would have to chase them all out with a broom. Most of the girlfriends found the behavior "cute", especially since with every improvement, one of the guys would run to his girlfriend, and say, "Look, Romy, at that thing that I just built!"
When the folks were leaving, one of the chicks said, "I'm glad that these toys are in your apartment, and not in mine."
If you work for any serious company, or even an non-serious one, you will know that patents belong to your employer, and not yourself. It's in the fine print of your contract. Hell, my company, an IT firm even has first right on patents that I might come up with, that have nothing to do with their IT business. In other words, if I step in some dog shit, and come up with an idea for a better doggie pooper scooper, I need to get a waiver from from my employer to be able to patent it myself.
And patents have long since left the realm of inventors, and are now the bitches of lawyers. My patents are accessible in the Internet, list me as the Inventor, and my employer as the assignee. From the lawyer's description of the ideas and implementations, you would have no idea what the things was good for. I showed one to an IT colleague, and he was totally perplexed, and only understood what it was good for when I explained it to him in plain IT English.
So despite what TFS implies, patents don't travel with employees. They belong to employers . . . for ever . . . and ever . . . and ever . . .
... a bunch of UAVs will get trashed, but no human lives will be lost . . . that would be an improvement . . . wouldn't it? I dunno, maybe I'm wrong . . . I guess it might help, if the UAVs are not armed with nuclear weapons. I'm reminded of The Far Side cartoon, where American pioneers with covered wagons in a circle are attack by American Indians. One pioneer says to the other, "Hey, they are lighting their arrows! Are they allowed to do that?"
Price for a custom built Seabreacher is dependent on the number of options that a customer chooses, but price tends to range from US$ 65,000 for a standard model to upwards of US$ 85,000 for a high-performance, heavily customized version.
This is about the same price that a BMW M5 will put you back. If you've got the money, I guess your buying choice will depend on whether you live near water, or the Nürburgring.
DISCLAIMER: I rode a couple of laps around the Nürburgring in an M5 driven a professional race driver chick. It was a hoot and a half, to see how she passed guys with too much money, driving Porsches. They didn't want to believe that they were being overtaken by a chick in a white BMW.
God damn that car was fast, but I think that driver, and her knowledge of the track really made the difference!
I What I do is Fedex my "real" hdd to the hotel I'm planning on staying at, usually 1 day before travel to the US is enough for it to be there waiting for me when I arrive at check-in (obviously its an encrypted disk).
Nice tip, but given the latest Al Qaeda shenanigans in Yemen with printer cartridges, shipping hard disk drives will probably be forbidden real soon.
I have traveled to the US on business a lot before 9/11 and a few times after 9/11. The difference in "security" is frightening . . . I'd call it "siege mentality." When the security folks look at my laptop, and I show them my company ID badge, that gets me passed through, no questions asked. But I have to wonder, what do you do if you work for Airbus, and have confidential material on your machine? Will the TSA pass that along to the CIA, who will sell it to Boeing?
Back before 9/11, I often traveled to Austin, Texas on business trips, and I would always get to the airport early, when no one was in the check-in line. One time the guy doing the check-in looked at my passport, and said, "Hmmm. Born in Camden, New Jersey. Passport issued by the US Consulate in Frankfurt, Germany. This is obviously a fake." It took me a couple of seconds to realize that he was joking, and then we talked about where he was stationed in Germany during his time in the armed forces. He gave me coupons for free drinks on the national leg of the journey.
This type of light humor is missing these days. Everything is so god-damned serious.
Please take these comments as a joke, and not seriously :-)
Every time I've been to Israel, these 'detectives' have spent a long time searching all my stuff. Since I was doing nothing wrong, clearly their Secret Detective Sense isn't working too good.
Actually, considering the tone of your response, I guess that the 'detectives' picked the right stuff to check.
Needless to say, I have no desire ever to go back there,
I can't speak Hebrew or Yiddish, but I am sure that they have an expression for, "Bye! And don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out!"
and I'm guessing the blonde German girl who was in the aisle alongside me last time crying her eyes out after her 'interview' won't be either.
Actually, one of colleagues was, blonde, German, blue-eyed and in her 20's when she went on a business trip to Haifa, and then did a bit of vacation there. She got the full grill through security, because the former East German Secret Service (Stasi) were very "chummy" with Palestinian folks, and the Israeli folks knew that. She didn't cry, though.
On the other hand, when I visited the Jewish Quarter, with my blonde, green-eyed German girlfriend, it was right before Sukkot. She asked me what all the fuss was about, with folks buying funny looking leaves and lemon/limes. I explained that it was kinda sorta a Jewish Thanksgiving, and it was probably practiced in Germany until . . . well, you know. Then she looked around at all those folks haggling over the prices of leaves and limes, and started to cry.
(Doofi? How would you pluralize that word?)
Centurion: What's this, then? "Romanes eunt domus"? People called Romanes, they go, the house?
Brian: It says, "Romans go home. "
Centurion: No it doesn't ! What's the latin for "Roman"? Come on, come on !
Brian: Er, "Romanus" !
Centurion: Vocative plural of "Romanus" is?
Brian: Er, er, "Romani" !
Centurion: [Writes "Romani" over Brian's graffiti] "Eunt"? What is "eunt"? Conjugate the verb, "to go" !
Brian: Er, "Ire". Er, "eo", "is", "it", "imus", "itis", "eunt".
Centurion: So, "eunt" is...?
Brian: Third person plural present indicative, "they go".
Centurion: But, "Romans, go home" is an order. So you must use...? [He twists Brian's ear]
Brian: Aaagh ! The imperative !
Centurion: Which is...?
Brian: Aaaagh ! Er, er, "i" !
Centurion: How many Romans? Centurion: [Writes "ite"] "Domus"? Nominative? "Go home" is motion towards, isn't it? Brian: Dative ! [the Centurion holds a sword to his throat]
Brian: Aaagh ! Not the dative, not the dative ! Er, er, accusative, "Domum" !
Centurion: But "Domus" takes the locative, which is...?
Brian: Er, "Domum" !
Centurion: [Writes "Domum"] Understand? Now, write it out a hundred time
Brian: Yes sir. Thank you, sir. Hail Caesar, sir.
Centurion: Hail Caesar ! And if it's not done by sunrise, I'll cut your balls off.
If you learned Latin in high school, this is very funny . . . otherwise, most folks would say, "what the Hell is a dative!", despite the fact that it is used in the English language. Whatever . . .
In the church that I was forced to attend as a child, on baptisim day, the choir director sang, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." What a dead giveaway!
Actually, wrong. Although I have long since shit-canned my Christian faith, those god-damned Christian values are really difficult to shake. I still tend to act like a Christian, even though I'm not one. Like, "why don't we try to be nice to each other?" And having compassion for other folks, who are not so well off as yourself. And that choir director gifted me with an appreciation for music, which has traveled through Pink Floyd, Gang of Four, Bauhaus, and Brazilian Techno. It's amazing where ringing hand-bells will bring you.
So, back to the point, I'd rather have someone asking me intelligent questions in the security line (even if he was a Catholic Priest), than some dork who gets his rocks off staring at body scanner images.
My employer has a lab in Haifa, and I know a number of folks who have traveled to Israel on business. They have also traveled to the US, post 9/11. They all state that the Israeli security folks are really detectives, who are very intelligent, ask misleading questions and evaluate the responses. All very "human / personal based." They all felt safe when entering the plane.
The US security seems to be base on technology. You have security folks, who are only capable of identifying a terrorist if the machine beeps.
This reminds me of how despite all the high tech satellite surveillance of Iraq, the wrong conclusions came out of the US intelligence agencies. Allen Dulles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Dulles ) was much better at recognizing the higher value of "human intellegence" (HUMINT).
So what am I ranting about? I would rather be grilled a Inspector Columbo at a security check, than scanned by a machine operated by some doofus.
That would make me feel much safer.
.. and has threatened Dell with legal action concerning misuse of his intellectual property, 'emphasize uncertainty', from beyond the grave.
"Dude, your Dell is getting attacked by the ghost of a dead German Physicist!"
Note to self: If accused of a crime that I didn't commit, get the jurisdiction transfered to Wake County (NC). And try the pulled pork.
Yossarian? What kind of name is Yossarian?
It's Yossarian's name, sir.
Actually, there's a gradual movement where states are slowly allowing jurors to ask questions. I think eventually this will spread to all states.
Now you don't get to raise your hand and blurt it out mid-testimony. Questions are submitted to the judge in writing, reviewed, and passed on to both sides if appropriate...
Every once in a while, I read something on Slashdot that restores my faith in humanity. Letting jurors submit questions to the judge is something that is long overdue:
Juror #4: "So, Mr. John Wilkes Booth, the police found you slicing off pieces of flesh of the victim, with a bloody knife, and then eating them. Do you have an explanation for this?"
Juror #9: "Mother Theresa, you seem to have trouble just walking into the jury box, can you please explain, as the prosecution asserts, how you punched Michael Tyson to death?"
If you think you're a fair person, being on a jury is not a bad thing.
Even better, being a fully informed member of a jury
It's neither in the interest of the prosecution nor the defense to pick fair, fully informed jurors. They want folks who can be manipulated through testimony to sway to whatever verdict they want.
Even though I haven't lived there since 1986. My mother, who has nothing else better to do, calls the number on the letter, and tells (brags) that her son is working on another continent. She has repeatedly requested that my name be removed from the list, which doesn't seem to work. She was called up herself, but given that she was over 80, and has heath problems she didn't want to serve. But neither the DA or the defense wanted to excuse her. Did they think that old ladies can be manipulated?
Anyway the case was against a cop from her town being charged for using excessive force or something like that. She was finally so frustrated at not being excused, that when the judge asked her at the end, if there was anything she would like to say, she answered, "I could never find a police officer from my town guilty." I would have thought that the DA would have asked her that, but I guess he was hoping that he had a senior citizen to manipulate.
When my father was called up jury duty, he told me how the selection process went. He was a quiet person, but a very astute observer. Both the DA and the defense kicked off anyone prospective juror who had half a brain. The first question presented to him was about his education and profession. Both the DA and the defense attorney stood up, the judge laughed, and said to my father, "Go home."
Now that I am older, and could afford to spend to spend some time on a jury, I wouldn't mind doing so. But I would probably get chucked as fast as my dad did.
I read these two UK periodicals to get a full spectrum of folks in the UK. From these two, one can conclude that UK citizens (née, subjects) are a highly intelligent, diplomatic and genteel folk, who will punch your fucking teeth out, if you spill their pint. "A pint and a fight, a great British night!"
So it boggles me a bit that UK folks would just pay up on this scam without resistance. It's a good thing that Darl Charles McBride doesn't know about this. Everyone in the UK would be sent a bill for $699 for running Linux on their refrigerators. "Oi! Are yee linuxing up oor lass?"
Ah yes Adelaide, the only place a bomb would do $5,000,000 worth of improvements.
I guess that you have never been to Detroit. It's difficult for new networks, though:
CNN: "Look at these pictures before the bomb blast in Detroit and after the bomb blast! Do you see the difference?"
Viewer: "No."
d) The prize is mostly prestige. i.e. It wouldn't come anywhere near the development costs even for the teams that won.
Engineers and scientists are never in it for the money: they just want to prove that they can do something better than anyone else. This trait in human beings led to constant innovation: quicker methods of starting fires, better weapons to kill cuddly mammoths, etc. The highest art and skill of engineers and scientists is convincing others to pay for their cockamamie contraptions. This was true from Archimedes to Leonardo da Vinci: "Hey, you! Government, despot, whatever! Pay for my research, and I will help you vanquish your enemies!"
Today the Sugar-Daddy is called DARPA.
"believed to" . . . whatever happened to "proved, beyond a reasonable doubt?" All "in Soviet Russia" jokes aside, this sounds like being able to "denounce" someone, and get them shipped off to the Gulag. If you can prove that a site it infringing on copyrights, fine shut them down. However, if the charge is, "I think that it might be possible that this could be potentially infringing on copyrights that might be possibly owned by someone" . . . no, thanks.
Is there something in US law about "due process?"