It's bullshit and illegal simply under the 4th and probably under the DMCA. The article specifically mentions that they are using technical means to break the basic encryption of cell calls. When someone uses a cell phone to send a communication and it is encrypted they clearly intend it as a private communication. Deliberately intercepting that communication, breaking the encryption, and then doing who knows what with it is clearly a violation of the 4th. And by breaching the seal of that communication by breaking the encryption they have likely violated the DMCA. The fact that the communication happens via radio signal is of no consequence, when I mail a private letter I put it in my mail box for the carrier to pick up, with the red flag in the raised position. Anyone within a hundred yards can see that I have posting a communication, if they remove that letter, open it, read it, reseal the envelope and put it back they have broken the law.
On top of all of that, we don't need a "right of privacy" as the constitution is a set of laws explicitly listing what the government may do. It is not an explicit listing of citizens rights. Where in the constitution does it spell out that the government, or any entity may establish an automated system to intercept, record, and possibly alter private communications of thousands, possibly millions, of citizens without warrant or notification?
Ummm bullshit. Typically Police are actually not exempt from laws like speed limits. However since a police officer is unlikely to ticket himself or another cop it just doesn't come up. I've never actually seen a law that exempted law officers from being at fault in accidents caused by their breaking traffic laws, in fact I have seen exactly the opposite when I studied to be an officer myself. Even if the laws for electronics usage explicitly permits police officers to use them it does not exempt them from the laws about maintaining proper control of their vehicle and killing people out of negligence. I wouldn't give a damn whether or not the Deputy is ticketed for using an electronic device while operating a motor vehicle. I do however care that the Deputy negligently operated a motor vehicle in such a way that he committed vehicular manslaughter, that is a criminal charge that absolutely fits.
... And nobody gave a flying monkeys uncle. If a corporation decides to conduct business and expend capital buying assets, or bringing assets into any country that crap is then subject to the laws of that country. It isn't up to individual countries to make sure that their laws all coincide nicely for the pleasure of some corporation. I don't have any pity for companies that start here in the USA and then go to other countires and expect special treatment from either country.
Honestly letting a person control the vehicle because a wild animal shows up in the road way is stupid. I've seen my mother nearly drive off the road and hit trees any number of times to avoid a stupid squirrel, dog or cat. The correct answer is to slow down to avoid the collision if possible and reduce damage and injuries regardless. If there is room to avoid the animal while staying on the pavement then the automated car will no doubt be able to handle that manuever infinitely better than a human driver, as it will be able to respond and analyze the situation impossibly faster than a human can even react, let alone think.
So far as what areas should be authorized first. I would think that the interstates and free ways would make the most sense. They represent the simplest of environments for automated cars and the safest of conditions. That also makes the most monotonous part of long drives easier to handle, and hence safer. When they can handle unmapped roadways at some reasonable fraction of the speed limit you let them go there.
I'm still using a wood handled paring knife my Mother was using before I was born. It went through a rough patch when one of my brothers used it to cut a live power cord. But my Father ground the notch out of the blade and put a new edge on it, good as new.
I haven't played any of the Battlefield games so I can't say for sure. But if it's like Wolfenstein was I can understand not having any character customization choices in the single player story mode as the story was written with a particular character in mind. However when you start talking about multiplayer where you are just pitting generic player vs generic player then I agree that there isn't much reason to not allow all sorts of customization.
I don't object to games offering custimization options regardless of it's genre and method of story telling, or even lack of story. I would just rather see a developer put more time into actually making a game that is fun to play in a mechanics fashion than making it into a dress up simulator. But I recognize that a dress up simulator is all or part of what some people want in a game, that is their choice and I've got no cause to tell them what they can and can't have in a game I didn't write. I just think it's silly to expect developers to build games that always take a specific set of players preferences into consideration over another.
The solution is to use and enforce EO's like they are supposed to be. Orders to the various federal troops, which are still bound and restricted by the laws of the land. Interpreting them as law should definitely be stopped. Removing them entirely though would mean that the President would not be able to formally control his branch of the government.
Full character customization only makes sense to me in a sandbox style game or where you actually have branching stories and such that let you as the player create the story. Most games however are made to be very linear and are telling a story, and it's not your story, it's the story of that character. No one complains about not being able to customize the look of a character in a movie after all.
I agree that this kind of behaviour is wrong and should be discouraged by power of law. However I can not agree with a "zero tolerance" policy as that kind of thing always ends up being a disaster one way or another. So far as this case goes it does seem a little silly to abandon your home if it was only a single death threat, although the inclusion of a home adress puts it up a notch.
I'd really like to see more troll exposing shows on TV and such. I've seen some clips where reporters have gone after people who posted what they thought were anonymous insults and threats. I think it'd make a good Cops type show.
I haven't read anything about that book but there has been some archaelogical evidence for civilization resulting in lower life expectancies. The one example I can think of is Native American cultures just a few hundred years ago before European contact. There was a major shift from a hunter gather lifestyle to large villages and cities in the Missipian culture. By analyzing skeletal remains archaeologists were able to show that townies lived shorter lives. A huge part of that was probably due to the lack of sanitation and effective medicine.
If your culture started breeeding between 12-14 you could easily be a grand parent by the time you were 28, a great grand parent at 42, and great great grand parent at 56.
Contrast that with modern society. I knew one great grand parent and she made it to 100. I started with four grand parents but am down to just one now in his 80's. Meanwhile my own family is just getting started.
I would expect that in ancient cultures where the older generations were still fertile they probably never actually stopped having children. There wasn't much in the way of birth control and given the mortality rates of even relatively modern societies it was probably necessary for survival.
The problem is that this kind of activity was part of your regular work life. You had to walk to work, your job probably required a non trivial amount of mobility and effort. Today if you want to fit in that hour of brisk walking it means carving it out of your free time, and it probably means more than just that hour because you need to cleanup afterwards, and possibly travel to and from wherever you do that activity.
Honestly the work I do may not be physically demanding but by the time I clock out I am through with pretty much anything regarding large exenditures of will power. One of these days I might put together a recumbent stationary cycle desk or something so I can do some moderate activity over the course of a few hours. But going out and deliberately working out for an hour just isn't going to happen. And if it means checking out ten years early I'm fine with that, it's better than being miserable for several hours extra every week for 60 years.
This is of course assuming a baked potato which has not been augmented with a cup of sour cream, half a cup of butter, half a pound of bacon, and a pound of shredded cheese.
I'll grant you that the pool of people with spare income was smaller and that getting their attention was much harder but patronage of the arts is how much of the worlds great art came into being. Kickstarter is a variation on that.
Yes, people could possibly starve themselves a bit more and save up the money they need for a big project over the course of twenty years. By then though the time for their idea could have passed completely. Or they may have lost the ability to follow through on the project. Kickstarter is also a good way to guage whether there is any share market for your idea, a project that fails to fund still gives a lot of useful feedback.
There will always be scammers out to grab a quick buck. But that isn't a problem that is exclusive to kickstarter, and from what I've seen isn't even all that rampant. Hell I have much higher confidence in the honesty of any random project on Kickstarter than I do of most any beggar asking for money on the sidewalk.
I would definitely like to see better bookmark option and the ability to turn by chapters. Chapter or section flipping would be very nice and I miss it most when reading stuff like anthologies of short stories and such.
I've backed around a dozen projects so far, mostly games. And I don't think a single one has outright failed yet. A few have delivered in full or part already; Planetary Anihilation, Stonehearth, CastleStory, Delvers Drop, Shadowrun, Ring Runner.
Detroit also benefitted after WW2 by virtue of being an industrial city in a nation that hadn't been bombed out during the war. That is a very considerable competitive advantage to start with.
I get what you are talking about but I've also read a number of books that fooled me with the amount of paper that was left. Usually those were books that had 10's of pages or more of non-story stuff at the end. Appendix's in works of fiction annoy the crap out of me.
Those are all reasons that I really liked Shadowrun when I was role playing in the 90's. It had its own flaws but at least they weren't so balance destroying.
Yes, because I can rapidly analyze each one as it comes in while continuing to work on whatever work actually needs done. It represents a few seconds of distraction here and there at worst. When you come back from vacation though you know that somewhere in that heap is work that is important and you need to find it now. So you have to devote your time to sorting the huge pile of trash, and not getting something more productive done.
Part of the problem is probably the email client we use which doesn't allow for sorting of conversations and such. It does have a system for flagging high importance messages and such, but people use that all the time for stuff that isn't actually important and don't use it when it would be warranted. Of course the correct solution would be to eliminate the chaff in the first place but that front is rather hopeless.
I've actually contemplated taking the delete approach when returning from a week of vacation. The reason for doing so is that we get an inordinate amount of crap email that isn't easily reducable by automated rules. I frequently come back from a week out of the office and have several thousand unread emails. Keeping up with that amount of crap as it comes in is a tolerable waste of time, but being forced to spend most of my first day back trying to sort through all that junk to find the one or two important items is a huge waste. Even when I'm only gone for a couple days it can result in several hours of fruitless email catchup.
Where I work we started using an IM client for all kinds of stuff that I'd rather see done via email. But I'm not management so my opinion is worthless. I prefer email in a business setting precisely because it provides a better audit trail, and at least with the software we use it is far easier to search and stuff. Anyways, just a month or so ago they dropped a nice little bomb, keeping up with the logs is way more work than they expected so they just aren't going to keep them longer than three months. Sometimes our business moves fast and sometimes slow, I can't count the number of times I've had to look up an email from more than a year ago.
I'll grant you that the Federal Civil Service has some pretty good benefits. But the pay is not always one of them. I've known people that were hired away by contractors to work in the same shop for a 50% pay increase.
USAJOBS is pretty awful, partly that is a result of managers writing up the requirements when they have little to no expertise with the subject at hand. The feedback is horrendous, and sadly it used to be even worse.
You are talking about sales or use taxes. And of course when you increase those suddenly spending on those items drops like a rock. And that is why sales and use taxes are generally hated by every class of consumer. And you'll see even consumers in the lowest income brackets deliberately avoiding having to pay it. Where I live the city has a total sales tax rate significantly higher than the neighboring communities, guess where everyone goes to make their big electronics purchases? The bottom line is that sales and use taxes are rather easy to dodge, especially on things like luxuries.
Income makes the most sense to tax because everyone has to have some kind of income. Even the Amish have income. How the income should be taxed is a good matter for debate in my opinion. A flat tax % is morally appealing because each person would then pay the same proportion of their income. But you can also morally argue that only the income above the absolute minimum for survival should be taxed. And then it's a relatively easy step from there to people making extraordinary amounts of money could afford to chip in a little more because they would arguably be much worse off in the event of anarchy prevailing or something, than the proles.
Personally I'm for all income being counted as income for the sake of taxes, abolishing capital gains as a special class. I'm for that tax rate being progressive. I think that the top rate should be higher than it currently is, but also not happen until a higher threshold is met. I think that the rate should scale more smoothly than it currently does. And I think that the amounts for standard deductions should be evaluated and adjusted better, which should enable the elimination of credits that result in actually paying out tax money that wasn't paid in the first place.
I would expect that wrist pain is more of a posture problem. I was reading up on Steno stuff recently and most of them have appeared to be pretty by for ergonomics in my opinion. That doesn't mean though that it couldn't be implemented in a much better way. I prefer to type with my forearms and elbows resting on the table surface with my wrists and hands being levered up to level with the keyboard. Most of the Steno machines I've seen appeared to be much to tall for this to work. But as one of the stenosaurus videos showed you can simply modify an existing keyboard to the same purpose so there isn't any reason you couldn't make a much lower steno machine.
Anyways I'm really interested in a single hand steno keyboard so that I can have full use of a keyboard with my right hand while still using the left for my mouse. Currently I have to take my hand off the mouse a lot or type akwardly all left handed.
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It's bullshit and illegal simply under the 4th and probably under the DMCA. The article specifically mentions that they are using technical means to break the basic encryption of cell calls. When someone uses a cell phone to send a communication and it is encrypted they clearly intend it as a private communication. Deliberately intercepting that communication, breaking the encryption, and then doing who knows what with it is clearly a violation of the 4th. And by breaching the seal of that communication by breaking the encryption they have likely violated the DMCA. The fact that the communication happens via radio signal is of no consequence, when I mail a private letter I put it in my mail box for the carrier to pick up, with the red flag in the raised position. Anyone within a hundred yards can see that I have posting a communication, if they remove that letter, open it, read it, reseal the envelope and put it back they have broken the law.
On top of all of that, we don't need a "right of privacy" as the constitution is a set of laws explicitly listing what the government may do. It is not an explicit listing of citizens rights. Where in the constitution does it spell out that the government, or any entity may establish an automated system to intercept, record, and possibly alter private communications of thousands, possibly millions, of citizens without warrant or notification?
Ummm bullshit. Typically Police are actually not exempt from laws like speed limits. However since a police officer is unlikely to ticket himself or another cop it just doesn't come up. I've never actually seen a law that exempted law officers from being at fault in accidents caused by their breaking traffic laws, in fact I have seen exactly the opposite when I studied to be an officer myself. Even if the laws for electronics usage explicitly permits police officers to use them it does not exempt them from the laws about maintaining proper control of their vehicle and killing people out of negligence. I wouldn't give a damn whether or not the Deputy is ticketed for using an electronic device while operating a motor vehicle. I do however care that the Deputy negligently operated a motor vehicle in such a way that he committed vehicular manslaughter, that is a criminal charge that absolutely fits.
... And nobody gave a flying monkeys uncle. If a corporation decides to conduct business and expend capital buying assets, or bringing assets into any country that crap is then subject to the laws of that country. It isn't up to individual countries to make sure that their laws all coincide nicely for the pleasure of some corporation. I don't have any pity for companies that start here in the USA and then go to other countires and expect special treatment from either country.
Honestly letting a person control the vehicle because a wild animal shows up in the road way is stupid. I've seen my mother nearly drive off the road and hit trees any number of times to avoid a stupid squirrel, dog or cat. The correct answer is to slow down to avoid the collision if possible and reduce damage and injuries regardless. If there is room to avoid the animal while staying on the pavement then the automated car will no doubt be able to handle that manuever infinitely better than a human driver, as it will be able to respond and analyze the situation impossibly faster than a human can even react, let alone think.
So far as what areas should be authorized first. I would think that the interstates and free ways would make the most sense. They represent the simplest of environments for automated cars and the safest of conditions. That also makes the most monotonous part of long drives easier to handle, and hence safer. When they can handle unmapped roadways at some reasonable fraction of the speed limit you let them go there.
I'm still using a wood handled paring knife my Mother was using before I was born. It went through a rough patch when one of my brothers used it to cut a live power cord. But my Father ground the notch out of the blade and put a new edge on it, good as new.
I haven't played any of the Battlefield games so I can't say for sure. But if it's like Wolfenstein was I can understand not having any character customization choices in the single player story mode as the story was written with a particular character in mind. However when you start talking about multiplayer where you are just pitting generic player vs generic player then I agree that there isn't much reason to not allow all sorts of customization.
I don't object to games offering custimization options regardless of it's genre and method of story telling, or even lack of story. I would just rather see a developer put more time into actually making a game that is fun to play in a mechanics fashion than making it into a dress up simulator. But I recognize that a dress up simulator is all or part of what some people want in a game, that is their choice and I've got no cause to tell them what they can and can't have in a game I didn't write. I just think it's silly to expect developers to build games that always take a specific set of players preferences into consideration over another.
The solution is to use and enforce EO's like they are supposed to be. Orders to the various federal troops, which are still bound and restricted by the laws of the land. Interpreting them as law should definitely be stopped. Removing them entirely though would mean that the President would not be able to formally control his branch of the government.
Full character customization only makes sense to me in a sandbox style game or where you actually have branching stories and such that let you as the player create the story. Most games however are made to be very linear and are telling a story, and it's not your story, it's the story of that character. No one complains about not being able to customize the look of a character in a movie after all.
I agree that this kind of behaviour is wrong and should be discouraged by power of law. However I can not agree with a "zero tolerance" policy as that kind of thing always ends up being a disaster one way or another. So far as this case goes it does seem a little silly to abandon your home if it was only a single death threat, although the inclusion of a home adress puts it up a notch.
I'd really like to see more troll exposing shows on TV and such. I've seen some clips where reporters have gone after people who posted what they thought were anonymous insults and threats. I think it'd make a good Cops type show.
I haven't read anything about that book but there has been some archaelogical evidence for civilization resulting in lower life expectancies. The one example I can think of is Native American cultures just a few hundred years ago before European contact. There was a major shift from a hunter gather lifestyle to large villages and cities in the Missipian culture. By analyzing skeletal remains archaeologists were able to show that townies lived shorter lives. A huge part of that was probably due to the lack of sanitation and effective medicine.
If your culture started breeeding between 12-14 you could easily be a grand parent by the time you were 28, a great grand parent at 42, and great great grand parent at 56.
Contrast that with modern society. I knew one great grand parent and she made it to 100. I started with four grand parents but am down to just one now in his 80's. Meanwhile my own family is just getting started.
I would expect that in ancient cultures where the older generations were still fertile they probably never actually stopped having children. There wasn't much in the way of birth control and given the mortality rates of even relatively modern societies it was probably necessary for survival.
The problem is that this kind of activity was part of your regular work life. You had to walk to work, your job probably required a non trivial amount of mobility and effort. Today if you want to fit in that hour of brisk walking it means carving it out of your free time, and it probably means more than just that hour because you need to cleanup afterwards, and possibly travel to and from wherever you do that activity.
Honestly the work I do may not be physically demanding but by the time I clock out I am through with pretty much anything regarding large exenditures of will power. One of these days I might put together a recumbent stationary cycle desk or something so I can do some moderate activity over the course of a few hours. But going out and deliberately working out for an hour just isn't going to happen. And if it means checking out ten years early I'm fine with that, it's better than being miserable for several hours extra every week for 60 years.
This is of course assuming a baked potato which has not been augmented with a cup of sour cream, half a cup of butter, half a pound of bacon, and a pound of shredded cheese.
I'll grant you that the pool of people with spare income was smaller and that getting their attention was much harder but patronage of the arts is how much of the worlds great art came into being. Kickstarter is a variation on that.
Yes, people could possibly starve themselves a bit more and save up the money they need for a big project over the course of twenty years. By then though the time for their idea could have passed completely. Or they may have lost the ability to follow through on the project. Kickstarter is also a good way to guage whether there is any share market for your idea, a project that fails to fund still gives a lot of useful feedback.
There will always be scammers out to grab a quick buck. But that isn't a problem that is exclusive to kickstarter, and from what I've seen isn't even all that rampant. Hell I have much higher confidence in the honesty of any random project on Kickstarter than I do of most any beggar asking for money on the sidewalk.
I would definitely like to see better bookmark option and the ability to turn by chapters. Chapter or section flipping would be very nice and I miss it most when reading stuff like anthologies of short stories and such.
I've backed around a dozen projects so far, mostly games. And I don't think a single one has outright failed yet. A few have delivered in full or part already; Planetary Anihilation, Stonehearth, CastleStory, Delvers Drop, Shadowrun, Ring Runner.
Detroit also benefitted after WW2 by virtue of being an industrial city in a nation that hadn't been bombed out during the war. That is a very considerable competitive advantage to start with.
I get what you are talking about but I've also read a number of books that fooled me with the amount of paper that was left. Usually those were books that had 10's of pages or more of non-story stuff at the end. Appendix's in works of fiction annoy the crap out of me.
Those are all reasons that I really liked Shadowrun when I was role playing in the 90's. It had its own flaws but at least they weren't so balance destroying.
Yes, because I can rapidly analyze each one as it comes in while continuing to work on whatever work actually needs done. It represents a few seconds of distraction here and there at worst. When you come back from vacation though you know that somewhere in that heap is work that is important and you need to find it now. So you have to devote your time to sorting the huge pile of trash, and not getting something more productive done.
Part of the problem is probably the email client we use which doesn't allow for sorting of conversations and such. It does have a system for flagging high importance messages and such, but people use that all the time for stuff that isn't actually important and don't use it when it would be warranted. Of course the correct solution would be to eliminate the chaff in the first place but that front is rather hopeless.
I've actually contemplated taking the delete approach when returning from a week of vacation. The reason for doing so is that we get an inordinate amount of crap email that isn't easily reducable by automated rules. I frequently come back from a week out of the office and have several thousand unread emails. Keeping up with that amount of crap as it comes in is a tolerable waste of time, but being forced to spend most of my first day back trying to sort through all that junk to find the one or two important items is a huge waste. Even when I'm only gone for a couple days it can result in several hours of fruitless email catchup.
Where I work we started using an IM client for all kinds of stuff that I'd rather see done via email. But I'm not management so my opinion is worthless. I prefer email in a business setting precisely because it provides a better audit trail, and at least with the software we use it is far easier to search and stuff. Anyways, just a month or so ago they dropped a nice little bomb, keeping up with the logs is way more work than they expected so they just aren't going to keep them longer than three months. Sometimes our business moves fast and sometimes slow, I can't count the number of times I've had to look up an email from more than a year ago.
I'll grant you that the Federal Civil Service has some pretty good benefits. But the pay is not always one of them. I've known people that were hired away by contractors to work in the same shop for a 50% pay increase.
USAJOBS is pretty awful, partly that is a result of managers writing up the requirements when they have little to no expertise with the subject at hand. The feedback is horrendous, and sadly it used to be even worse.
You are talking about sales or use taxes. And of course when you increase those suddenly spending on those items drops like a rock. And that is why sales and use taxes are generally hated by every class of consumer. And you'll see even consumers in the lowest income brackets deliberately avoiding having to pay it. Where I live the city has a total sales tax rate significantly higher than the neighboring communities, guess where everyone goes to make their big electronics purchases? The bottom line is that sales and use taxes are rather easy to dodge, especially on things like luxuries.
Income makes the most sense to tax because everyone has to have some kind of income. Even the Amish have income. How the income should be taxed is a good matter for debate in my opinion. A flat tax % is morally appealing because each person would then pay the same proportion of their income. But you can also morally argue that only the income above the absolute minimum for survival should be taxed. And then it's a relatively easy step from there to people making extraordinary amounts of money could afford to chip in a little more because they would arguably be much worse off in the event of anarchy prevailing or something, than the proles.
Personally I'm for all income being counted as income for the sake of taxes, abolishing capital gains as a special class. I'm for that tax rate being progressive. I think that the top rate should be higher than it currently is, but also not happen until a higher threshold is met. I think that the rate should scale more smoothly than it currently does. And I think that the amounts for standard deductions should be evaluated and adjusted better, which should enable the elimination of credits that result in actually paying out tax money that wasn't paid in the first place.
I would expect that wrist pain is more of a posture problem. I was reading up on Steno stuff recently and most of them have appeared to be pretty by for ergonomics in my opinion. That doesn't mean though that it couldn't be implemented in a much better way. I prefer to type with my forearms and elbows resting on the table surface with my wrists and hands being levered up to level with the keyboard. Most of the Steno machines I've seen appeared to be much to tall for this to work. But as one of the stenosaurus videos showed you can simply modify an existing keyboard to the same purpose so there isn't any reason you couldn't make a much lower steno machine.
Anyways I'm really interested in a single hand steno keyboard so that I can have full use of a keyboard with my right hand while still using the left for my mouse. Currently I have to take my hand off the mouse a lot or type akwardly all left handed.