While I have no doubt that some aspiring psychologist and neurosurgeons would work to create a read/write memory machine for the purposes of treating PTSD, (memory can't trigger if the memory is destroyed. Patient lives a happier and more normal life), it would only be a short jump for the tech on say, DARPA's hands, and you have more of a Universal Soldier type situation, and from there, real, genuine thought police.
Personally though, I look at this in the light of yesterday's news about microtubule structures that preserve memories encoded in axons electrochemically, coupled with a photosensitive protien.
Looks to me like the two sets of researchers are exploring differing parts of the same mechanism, and have discovered that their light sensitive protien triggers shaped memory playback in a neuron similarly to the electrical potential it would experience if it was stimulated by another neuron.
If this were coupled with say, genes for OLEDs, then a neural transiever wouldn't need to rely on invasive contact with the brain to interface meaningfully. Exchanged bursts of photons would be sufficient.
With some improvements in organic semiconductor (plastic) tech, it is entirely feasible to imagine somebody having their brains "painted" in the interface layer like spraypaint. (A water permeable photocuring biopolymer. Perhaps something like liquid silk, with a twist. Without being set by light, it biodegrades, limiting the retardation of the method used by the cerebreal spinal fluid for keeping the brain healthy. ) after that, a controled laser aperature draws all the circuits on top of the brain, passively coupling the synthetic with the biological with a tough, durable, and flexible substrate. A blood plasma tap off the corotid artery for a glucose power cell, and an antenna array printed onto the inside of the cranial cap, and you have yourself a programmable organism.
Pure science fiction at this point, but I could clearly see it happening (in at least a lab). The interface would not introduce any contaminating ions into the mix, and wouldn't be directly connected electronically to the brain. All communication would be photonically transmitted, both directions.
Ethics aside, it would make the manchurian candidate frightfully possible to create.
At which time, its time to reflash the firmware, use nail polish remover on a qtip/sandpaper to mar up the receptical/lens of the camera, or some other "gotcha!" Technique.
A marred up lens will still detect light levels, and avoiding shutting off the screen. It will also make whoever is trying to spy see a shapeless blur, which no amount of digital filtering will fix.
Simple. The cards used for black market transactions are sealed in something like an ink jacket.
To swipe the card, you have to remove it from the jacket. Special tools or skills are needed to get cards into and out of the jackets. (Like counterfieting)
Such people would be either killed on sight by rival orgs, or protected like jewels. Failure to comply with the criminal syndicates rules concerning jacketing and laundering would be a death sentence. (You don't fuck with the money.)
Unjacketting a card yourself will ink your hands what good. A card merchant will treat your unjacketted card as a grade-0 dirty card, and will not give you parity. If your dirty grade-0 card does not have the appropriate funds at time of obfuscation later, the card merchant will remember your face. Best not to try that trick twice. If he sees ink on your hands, he shoots you. UV inks would work best.
The idea *IS* to replicate all the function and problem of cash money.
100 initial launderers go to mexico with their real visa cards. (They don't have cash afterall.)
They go to the bank and get pesos, because they are smart tourists that know mexian vendors will gladly take 1$ USD, when the real cost is 1$ MX. They get epic shittons of folding pesos.
They use this money with a contact in mexico, who gives them well laundered bills, for a fee.
Using the laundered bills, they buy the initial preloaded visas for large denominations.
They mail these to their local distributors, who further launder the cards into smaller denominations directly at retail shops. (Direct swipe method, no ID.) If the clerk asks questions, claim something like "greek wedding party gifts", then never use that store again.
You now have potentially millions of dollars of legitimate untracable digital currency in the drug network. These can be exchanged between brokers and clients as the "clean" flow to launder local "dirty" flow.
Essentially, your junky pays 150$ for a 100$ "anonicard" using a 150 on a tracable prepaid visa he hands to the broker. The broker physically sits on this card. When he gets enough cards, he contacts his distributor. 1:1 parity is exchanged in clean cards with "dirty" ones.
The distributor uses ATMs in the cash using country to get cash. he can even pay patsies to do the transaction at the atm. He uses his laundering connections to get clean cash, which he uses to buy clean cards for distribution.
Failing that, if you can't use a foriegn country, a circle of brokers can buy the initial batch of anonicards using their own bank accounts piecemeal over time. They funnel these to a dedicated denomination broker, who buys new cards using the old ones, so his account and name are never used. They do this several times to create a long chain of anonymous transactions over a wide geographical area. Criminal trials require "beyond reasonable doubt", which you create by injecting anonymous agents in the transactions. Pulling surveylance data from stores will show a huge assortment of associates, many of whom will be "single use" for this very purpose. When it changes hands around 100 or so times, it is well established that anything bought after that is not the responsibility of the initial brokers.
These anonymous cards now have a considerable amount of invested time and effort, and would come in "grades", depending on how far obfuscated the papertrail behind them are. Depending on the grade, buyers pay a percentage over the card's face value to the money handler, payable in physical handoff of "grade zero" (dirty) cards the buyer purchased themself.
Only record kept is total cash volume and numbers and grades of cards exchanged. Buyers show up with dirty cards, and get sold graded clean ones at the agreed rate of exchange.
Dirty grade-0 cards are distributed randomly through the obfuscation network using a card shuffler.
The currency value on them is used to buy new cards, which are passed through the obfuscation network, increasing in gade as they do.
This way an initial risk by the broker union results in a huge flow of cash through their network of small laundering rings.
Payment to the broker union bosses is done through more traditional laundering channels using garanteed grade-A cards, through suitable business and charitable foundations.
If the cards change hands frequently enough, then the tracability of the card becomes as difficult as the tracability of the unique IDs on cash bills.
Rather than swipe the card, the loaded card is traded itself, wholesale. The "20$ card" is treated as a $20 bill would be. You don't rush to the bank every time you get a 20 in change. You pass that 20 to somebody else for a good or service.
Same thing here. The various denominations of card would never go through a card swipe machine, except to permanently denude it of its assets prior to its physical destruction. That 200$ card can have changed hands physically hundreds of times before then. This is the same problem as cash bills.
A launderer would accept old cards, swipe them, and then reissue new ones while on vacation under an alias.
This happens enough times, you will play hell catching the original minter.
If the AU govt keeps on the track they are at emulating the US, its only a matter of time before you get stuffed with "binding arbitration", and abusive EULAs like we are, and which consumer protection laws prohibiting such shennanigans only apply to SMALL business.
As for voiding the warantee.... who said my desire to avoid opening the case was to avoid voiding the warantee? I just wanted to avoid damaging the set on accident, and to minimize aesthetic marring.
This kind of FUCK YOU mod is on par with a custom firmware flash, which you might as well do to this invasive little whore of a set as well, just to be sure.
A couple back room deals, and this becomes very difficult.
Your standard coaxial cable hookup doubles as a physical layer support for ethernet. Just takes a clandestine cable modem being integrated into the box to report back for "quality assurance", and you have a connection that cannot be "unplugged" unless you want to ditch your cable provider, or attach a frequency scrubber in-line before the TV. (Potentially eliminating your ability to use PPV, remote DVR, etc.)
Trust me, if this kind of shit gets pushed, "unplug the internet!" Won't be so easy to do while using the TV as intended.
50 cent roll of electrical tape. Cut a 3x3cm square using scissors. Place it over the camera aperature.
1$ bottle of superglue. The watery runny kind that whicks up into paper, and has a long neck applicator. Lay the television temporarily on a soft, cushioned surface face up, say, on the sofa. Into the microphone grill, gently dribble the runny superglue. Leave in this position for 2 to 3 hours for maximal cone set. Return television to the entertainment center, and feel marginally safer.
The first one is obvious how it works, but the second helps prevent the vibrational movement of the microphone pickup, greatly reducing its sensitivity. Sufficiently glued so that the cone can't move the coil, or the piezo crystal can't be flexed, and you have basically neutered it without opening the system unit.
These little steps are not hard at all. The hard part is staunchly refusing to buy such an intrusive Little whore of a gadget in the first place, as the powers that be all try like mad to get you to swallow that shit pill, and telescreen sensors become standard features.
Shit like this is why I refuse to buy stuff like the kinect. While you can unplug the ethernet cable on your console to ensure the thought police and social services don't see you spanking junior on candid camera, (with audio and motion tracking!), the act of buying an obvious spying device and installing it in your home tells fucked up marketing assholes that you want MOAR spying. I don't want to send that message.
The fundemental problem with drivers on linux (which I do use at home as a desktop) is that there is a decided conflict between hardware vendors and the linux kernel developers.
The linux kernel philosphy is that you are open, straight forward about what your hardware does, what resources it needs, and how to access it.
The hardware vendor philosophy is that you keep all of that secret, create a potentially encrypted or obfuscated blob driver that hooks documented interfaces, loads special proprietary magic code into itself on init, or some other "clever" thing to frustrate people emulating or counterfieting their product, and refusing to budge from it.
The linux devs say "we won't let you make binary blobs, damnit! Not only is that against our project's development model, it is also a violation of our software license! Doing this makes it so we cannot distribute our software legally if you don't comply! To frustrate you and keep you from doing that shit, we will PURPOSEFULLY change our binary ABI for kernel mode drivers on every release, to force you to work yourself to death trying to catch up, until you see the light and just fucking release the driver source already!
The hardware vendors say "if that's the way you want to play, we will go over to microsoft's place. They know the value of a good stable ABI, and the importance of keeping secrets. They also have the lion's share of users, so you linux dweebs can go fuck yourselves. You will take binary blobs and like it, or you can go play somehwere else!"
A small handfull of hardware OEMs "get it", and see how opening their surce code for the linux market, especially in server hardware circles, can firmly cement them as a desirable brand name for hardware that "just fucking works!", like IBM and pals, but for the most part, it is the former, which causes the linux user community (since the line between linux developer and linux user is purposefully blurred by design) have to reverse engineer all the behaviors, quirks, requirements, and secrets of the "oh so secret!" Mainstream devices in order for them to work. Since the users doing this are basically trying to reinvent the wheel with that hardware, they can and often do get things wrong in their reversed driver implementations, and screwy things happen as a result.
Sometimes hardware makers purposefully try to thwart such reverse engineering, like fucking broadcomm. Their wireless chipsets have to pull a secret binary INTO special memory inside themselves from the driver stack in order to turn on. These binaries are signed, and copyrighted. The card won't accept binaries that aren't blessed with the magic number. As such, you have to cheat and use fwcutter to rip the magic blob out of a windows driver, or load the windows driver fully using ndiswrapper.
Either that, or spend a few centuries trying to derive the magic key, by which time nobody will care anyway.
Unless linux reniggs on the open driver requirements (at which point, how is linux different from any other kernel again?), or the hardware companies stop being little bridge trolls (there are some signs on the horizon that show that they might be slowly coming around. A major offender, nvidia, recently said they would start contributing to nouveau, the reverse engineered community driver for their cards. High profile OEMs changing policies and embracing the linux model will only improve adoption, and we can hope more follow nvidia's lead on that), then linux will never have the same direct to market hardware compatibility as windows boxes do.
It is also important to gauge this as a per capita rate.
Eg, if you have a 1% rate, you have a 1% chance that any given student will go apeshit and shoot people.
If you have 100 students, the chance it will happen is now statistically very relevent, as at least one of them will go apeshit by the numbers.
If you cram 1000 in, you now have 10 shooters.
Other contributory factors that are not accounted for: degree of student disciplinary action over time. Degree of broken family life as percentage of student population. Degree of truancy enforcement. Degree of personal libery violation of students over time.
I do believe that you will see a statistical rise in the basic rate of becoming a shooter over time, when adjusted for increased population sizes.
I believe you will also find correlations between disciplinary activity (including the use of metal detectors, drug dogs, etc.) of the school and the schools which produced shooters, vs the schools that didn't; between the truancy enforcement of the same; and against home income and homelife quality of the student populations of the same.
Correlation does not prove causation. That is what experimentation is for.
Find schools with a high shooter rate, do the unthinkable and remove the dogs, the metal detectors, and the draconian zero tolerance rules, and see if there is a net reduction of school shooting statistics.
It is my personal hypothesis that shooters resort to shooting when other methods of resolving violent problems cannot be explored. (Eg, you get mugged for lunch money by a bully? In the 40s and 50s, you manned up and broke the bully's nose. He stopped trying to shake you down for lunch money after that. These days, doing so will land you in juvenile detention. The only avenue provided is the completely impotent 'tell a teacher' option. The teachers are afraid to take action, should poor, misunderstood snowflake bully boy get punished and feel bad. As such, they say they need proof that bully boy is shaking you down for lunch money. They forbid the use of electronic monitoring and recording devices, except for their own, so that isn't an option. It is impossible to prove that the bully is taking your money, and that you aren't abusing the system to bully the poor misunderstood snowflake, and so you have no choice but to simply take it. Add insult to injury, you get screened daily for contraband and have armed retacops in the hallway as morale deteriorates and people start snapping. Eventually, you can't take it anymore. You would have just punched the little bitch years ago, but the thought of going to jail was undesirable. Now you don't care. In for a penny, in for a pound, you bring a gun to school to end the problem permanently. The penalty is the same as if you punched him: jail time.)
Basically, I would say american schools are throwing petrol on the fire by trying to "enforce" safety through threat of violence (what else does an armed security guard represent?), through the threat of severe recrimination for petty offenses (suspension for drawing a man with a gun? Really?), and through complete and total beurocratic inaction that repeatedly screws over and endangers students (gotta protect the school from those sue happy parents of joey the bully! He's a snowflake!).
If anything, simulated violence in a safe venue like video games is thereputic, and not deleterious.
If you widen your statistical comparison to include the same set of comparisons I suggested above to include sample sets from other countries, (human children are human children, regardless of nation) I suspect the correlation between extreme student violence and extreme school imposed penalties and hightened school security would really stand out prominently.
Agreed. That would use her existing muscles, with artificial stimulation. A device worn on the forearm to stimulate those muscles would be less frightening than something like the LukeArm.
Still, I would try to repair the damaged organic system first. There have been many breakthroughs in nerve regeneration in the peripheral nervous system that would be helpful, and artifical stimulation would be a great suppliment to that.
Io is possibly the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The intense tidal heating it gets from jupiter has it literally turning itself inside out like clockwork.
Any mapping of io is useless as a navigational aid. The best it can hope to bee used for is a high quality snapshot for geological analysis over time.
The argumentum ad absurdium here though, is that the following scenarios of A and B also have the same financial and value outcomes, but have radically different social acceptance factors.
1) A buys the track, calls B into the living room, and they listen to the track together at the same time. A buys the track for 1$. B hears the track for free. B is not an entitlement complex asshole.
2) A buys the track, and puts it on an SD card for her MP3 player so she can listen to it while she jogs. She lends the whole player, including her library of purchased tracks to B so he can jam at the gym. B hears an epic shitton of tracks for free. B is not an entitlement complex asshole.
In these latter two cases, the distributor demanding zero-tolerance enforcement of royalty transactions for each and every person exposed to the performance is the entitlement complex asshole, since he is the one insisting he is intitled to compensation for out of band exposure, and demanding restrictions on harmless activities of his potential customers to ensure his demands for what he feels he is entitled to are met.
This is what things like "public performance" fees for singing in public without a paying audience, and the whole SOPA/PIPA shit are about.
Its one thing if A lends B her player, and he dumps a copy if her SDCard for his own use. What right does he have to copy her media? What right does he have to the data anyway?
That isn't what is being effectively killed here though. What is being killed is ("hey, come listen to this!" "Oh hey, that's good, who is that?" ) and ("these are all my old CDs that I don't listen to anymore. How much can I get for the whole box?")
Personally, I feel the intrinsic mindset of the distributor and artist to feel justification in destroying the enjoyment of sharing music, and destroying the ability to pass on a license because they feel entitled to have continually nothing but new sales, and licensed 1person:1payment parity is far more onerous.
Certainly not. Have these things called principles, and a mental disorder known as "integrity."
These immediately disqualify me from work in the legal, corporate, and political vocational fields.
You can't please everyone, but you can lie to everyone. This is how politics works. A person with integrity and ethics who proposes a vitally needed, rationally grounded, but otherwise unpopular solution to current campaign related issues will never win against an unscrupulous liar who puffs smoke up voter's asses, and fills them with meaningless promises of a magical solution to all their problems (like obama's "change" platform....). This is because any realistic solution ot any controversial problem will have unavoidable consequences that will adversely impact at least one party to the issue, else it wouldn't be controversial. As such, any realistic solution will create very violent and outspoken resistance from at least some portion of the voter/supporter demographic, which the shister can still exploit in his/her election platform.
My integrity and sense of ethics precludes my being a smiling charismatic sociopath.
As such, I would never succeed in politics, and I have no interest in trying.
But unlike t-mobile, att does not even give you the option to buy the phone outright.
Don't give me shit about how nobody does that, because I am somebody, and I did exactly that.
The ability to get out from under an onerous termination fee and support contract for a lump sum of a fair market value is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.
Tethering is equivalent to the "3rd party handset or device" restriction that was considered so onerous back in the 60s and 70s.
Basically the phone company said "to ensure quality service, we need to prohibit unlicensed devices from being connected to the telephine network."
It was shot down at the end of the 70s, which is why you can attach answering machines, caller ID readers, and cheap chineese phones.
Tethering is the same principle: attaching an "unaproved" device (computer) to their network.
This is exactly in line with the gp's argument about 2nd chances to change the law.
The "it degrades our network!" Line didn't hold up then, it shouldn't hold up now. Last I checked, a bit originating from a computer instead of a phone was not directly deleterious to any hardware in a cellular network. You could argue that tetherers use more bandwidth, but that is an ancilliary argument. Tethering itself (what is forbidden) does not harm their cellular network in any way. Transmitting excessive data, which is not what is forbidden, is what causes QoS harm.
If they actively advertise that such service is available there (infamous coverage map scandal material here), then yes.
Otherwise, it is false advertising.
They like to advertise spotty coverage areas with a black/white brush of "covered!" In the hopes that people in those areas will switch to them and become saddled with a contract. As a consumer who would be so saddled, I feel they are obligated to satisfy their promises of service to the people they dupe this way.
So, either:
1) they stop lying about effective coverage, and give a 60% theshold before declaring an area "covered" (meaning you get between 3 and 4 bars on a 5 bar indicator), or shade their coverage map with a gradient to show realworld effective coverage.
2) put up, or shut up-- and actually deliver on what their advertising drones spew.
Just because that is inconvenient or expensive for them, does not justify false advertising.
Slashdot Mirror
While I have no doubt that some aspiring psychologist and neurosurgeons would work to create a read/write memory machine for the purposes of treating PTSD, (memory can't trigger if the memory is destroyed. Patient lives a happier and more normal life), it would only be a short jump for the tech on say, DARPA's hands, and you have more of a Universal Soldier type situation, and from there, real, genuine thought police.
Personally though, I look at this in the light of yesterday's news about microtubule structures that preserve memories encoded in axons electrochemically, coupled with a photosensitive protien.
Looks to me like the two sets of researchers are exploring differing parts of the same mechanism, and have discovered that their light sensitive protien triggers shaped memory playback in a neuron similarly to the electrical potential it would experience if it was stimulated by another neuron.
If this were coupled with say, genes for OLEDs, then a neural transiever wouldn't need to rely on invasive contact with the brain to interface meaningfully. Exchanged bursts of photons would be sufficient.
With some improvements in organic semiconductor (plastic) tech, it is entirely feasible to imagine somebody having their brains "painted" in the interface layer like spraypaint. (A water permeable photocuring biopolymer. Perhaps something like liquid silk, with a twist. Without being set by light, it biodegrades, limiting the retardation of the method used by the cerebreal spinal fluid for keeping the brain healthy. ) after that, a controled laser aperature draws all the circuits on top of the brain, passively coupling the synthetic with the biological with a tough, durable, and flexible substrate. A blood plasma tap off the corotid artery for a glucose power cell, and an antenna array printed onto the inside of the cranial cap, and you have yourself a programmable organism.
Pure science fiction at this point, but I could clearly see it happening (in at least a lab). The interface would not introduce any contaminating ions into the mix, and wouldn't be directly connected electronically to the brain. All communication would be photonically transmitted, both directions.
Ethics aside, it would make the manchurian candidate frightfully possible to create.
The same way professional counterfietting rings get the proper paper, inks, and counterfiet ID strips.
Also, the same way they police their bill cookers.
Eg, somebody has a nasty habit of "ripping them off", they tend to end up dead.
At which time, its time to reflash the firmware, use nail polish remover on a qtip/sandpaper to mar up the receptical/lens of the camera, or some other "gotcha!" Technique.
A marred up lens will still detect light levels, and avoiding shutting off the screen. It will also make whoever is trying to spy see a shapeless blur, which no amount of digital filtering will fix.
Simple. The cards used for black market transactions are sealed in something like an ink jacket.
To swipe the card, you have to remove it from the jacket.
Special tools or skills are needed to get cards into and out of the jackets. (Like counterfieting)
Such people would be either killed on sight by rival orgs, or protected like jewels. Failure to comply with the criminal syndicates rules concerning jacketing and laundering would be a death sentence. (You don't fuck with the money.)
Unjacketting a card yourself will ink your hands what good. A card merchant will treat your unjacketted card as a grade-0 dirty card, and will not give you parity. If your dirty grade-0 card does not have the appropriate funds at time of obfuscation later, the card merchant will remember your face. Best not to try that trick twice. If he sees ink on your hands, he shoots you. UV inks would work best.
The idea *IS* to replicate all the function and problem of cash money.
This assumes records are even kept.
See for example this scenario:
100 initial launderers go to mexico with their real visa cards. (They don't have cash afterall.)
They go to the bank and get pesos, because they are smart tourists that know mexian vendors will gladly take 1$ USD, when the real cost is 1$ MX. They get epic shittons of folding pesos.
They use this money with a contact in mexico, who gives them well laundered bills, for a fee.
Using the laundered bills, they buy the initial preloaded visas for large denominations.
They mail these to their local distributors, who further launder the cards into smaller denominations directly at retail shops. (Direct swipe method, no ID.) If the clerk asks questions, claim something like "greek wedding party gifts", then never use that store again.
You now have potentially millions of dollars of legitimate untracable digital currency in the drug network. These can be exchanged between brokers and clients as the "clean" flow to launder local "dirty" flow.
Essentially, your junky pays 150$ for a 100$ "anonicard" using a 150 on a tracable prepaid visa he hands to the broker. The broker physically sits on this card. When he gets enough cards, he contacts his distributor. 1:1 parity is exchanged in clean cards with "dirty" ones.
The distributor uses ATMs in the cash using country to get cash. he can even pay patsies to do the transaction at the atm. He uses his laundering connections to get clean cash, which he uses to buy clean cards for distribution.
Failing that, if you can't use a foriegn country, a circle of brokers can buy the initial batch of anonicards using their own bank accounts piecemeal over time. They funnel these to a dedicated denomination broker, who buys new cards using the old ones, so his account and name are never used. They do this several times to create a long chain of anonymous transactions over a wide geographical area. Criminal trials require "beyond reasonable doubt", which you create by injecting anonymous agents in the transactions. Pulling surveylance data from stores will show a huge assortment of associates, many of whom will be "single use" for this very purpose. When it changes hands around 100 or so times, it is well established that anything bought after that is not the responsibility of the initial brokers.
These anonymous cards now have a considerable amount of invested time and effort, and would come in "grades", depending on how far obfuscated the papertrail behind them are. Depending on the grade, buyers pay a percentage over the card's face value to the money handler, payable in physical handoff of "grade zero" (dirty) cards the buyer purchased themself.
Only record kept is total cash volume and numbers and grades of cards exchanged. Buyers show up with dirty cards, and get sold graded clean ones at the agreed rate of exchange.
Dirty grade-0 cards are distributed randomly through the obfuscation network using a card shuffler.
The currency value on them is used to buy new cards, which are passed through the obfuscation network, increasing in gade as they do.
This way an initial risk by the broker union results in a huge flow of cash through their network of small laundering rings.
Payment to the broker union bosses is done through more traditional laundering channels using garanteed grade-A cards, through suitable business and charitable foundations.
If the cards change hands frequently enough, then the tracability of the card becomes as difficult as the tracability of the unique IDs on cash bills.
Rather than swipe the card, the loaded card is traded itself, wholesale. The "20$ card" is treated as a $20 bill would be. You don't rush to the bank every time you get a 20 in change. You pass that 20 to somebody else for a good or service.
Same thing here. The various denominations of card would never go through a card swipe machine, except to permanently denude it of its assets prior to its physical destruction. That 200$ card can have changed hands physically hundreds of times before then. This is the same problem as cash bills.
A launderer would accept old cards, swipe them, and then reissue new ones while on vacation under an alias.
This happens enough times, you will play hell catching the original minter.
This discounts international transactions, which was meant to be implied.
Eg, you make a nice little vacation trip to belize, use a bank to get local hard currency, buy an epic shitton of preloaded 200$ visa cards.
Upon return home, you sell them for "favors".
If the AU govt keeps on the track they are at emulating the US, its only a matter of time before you get stuffed with "binding arbitration", and abusive EULAs like we are, and which consumer protection laws prohibiting such shennanigans only apply to SMALL business.
As for voiding the warantee.... who said my desire to avoid opening the case was to avoid voiding the warantee? I just wanted to avoid damaging the set on accident, and to minimize aesthetic marring.
This kind of FUCK YOU mod is on par with a custom firmware flash, which you might as well do to this invasive little whore of a set as well, just to be sure.
Preloaded disposable visa.
All this will do is create a thriving money laundering economy. People will buy and fill disposable visa cards, then give those out like cash.
Because you don't want those "features", but all the other HDTV makers jumped on the bandwagon too, and you simply can't find a non-bugged set?
That's how this kind of thing becomes ubiquitous you know.
That costs more than 1.50$
A couple back room deals, and this becomes very difficult.
Your standard coaxial cable hookup doubles as a physical layer support for ethernet. Just takes a clandestine cable modem being integrated into the box to report back for "quality assurance", and you have a connection that cannot be "unplugged" unless you want to ditch your cable provider, or attach a frequency scrubber in-line before the TV. (Potentially eliminating your ability to use PPV, remote DVR, etc.)
Trust me, if this kind of shit gets pushed, "unplug the internet!" Won't be so easy to do while using the TV as intended.
Oh hush. It's very easy.
50 cent roll of electrical tape. Cut a 3x3cm square using scissors. Place it over the camera aperature.
1$ bottle of superglue. The watery runny kind that whicks up into paper, and has a long neck applicator. Lay the television temporarily on a soft, cushioned surface face up, say, on the sofa. Into the microphone grill, gently dribble the runny superglue. Leave in this position for 2 to 3 hours for maximal cone set. Return television to the entertainment center, and feel marginally safer.
The first one is obvious how it works, but the second helps prevent the vibrational movement of the microphone pickup, greatly reducing its sensitivity. Sufficiently glued so that the cone can't move the coil, or the piezo crystal can't be flexed, and you have basically neutered it without opening the system unit.
These little steps are not hard at all. The hard part is staunchly refusing to buy such an intrusive Little whore of a gadget in the first place, as the powers that be all try like mad to get you to swallow that shit pill, and telescreen sensors become standard features.
Shit like this is why I refuse to buy stuff like the kinect. While you can unplug the ethernet cable on your console to ensure the thought police and social services don't see you spanking junior on candid camera, (with audio and motion tracking!), the act of buying an obvious spying device and installing it in your home tells fucked up marketing assholes that you want MOAR spying. I don't want to send that message.
The fundemental problem with drivers on linux (which I do use at home as a desktop) is that there is a decided conflict between hardware vendors and the linux kernel developers.
The linux kernel philosphy is that you are open, straight forward about what your hardware does, what resources it needs, and how to access it.
The hardware vendor philosophy is that you keep all of that secret, create a potentially encrypted or obfuscated blob driver that hooks documented interfaces, loads special proprietary magic code into itself on init, or some other "clever" thing to frustrate people emulating or counterfieting their product, and refusing to budge from it.
The linux devs say "we won't let you make binary blobs, damnit! Not only is that against our project's development model, it is also a violation of our software license! Doing this makes it so we cannot distribute our software legally if you don't comply! To frustrate you and keep you from doing that shit, we will PURPOSEFULLY change our binary ABI for kernel mode drivers on every release, to force you to work yourself to death trying to catch up, until you see the light and just fucking release the driver source already!
The hardware vendors say "if that's the way you want to play, we will go over to microsoft's place. They know the value of a good stable ABI, and the importance of keeping secrets. They also have the lion's share of users, so you linux dweebs can go fuck yourselves. You will take binary blobs and like it, or you can go play somehwere else!"
A small handfull of hardware OEMs "get it", and see how opening their surce code for the linux market, especially in server hardware circles, can firmly cement them as a desirable brand name for hardware that "just fucking works!", like IBM and pals, but for the most part, it is the former, which causes the linux user community (since the line between linux developer and linux user is purposefully blurred by design) have to reverse engineer all the behaviors, quirks, requirements, and secrets of the "oh so secret!" Mainstream devices in order for them to work. Since the users doing this are basically trying to reinvent the wheel with that hardware, they can and often do get things wrong in their reversed driver implementations, and screwy things happen as a result.
Sometimes hardware makers purposefully try to thwart such reverse engineering, like fucking broadcomm. Their wireless chipsets have to pull a secret binary INTO special memory inside themselves from the driver stack in order to turn on. These binaries are signed, and copyrighted. The card won't accept binaries that aren't blessed with the magic number. As such, you have to cheat and use fwcutter to rip the magic blob out of a windows driver, or load the windows driver fully using ndiswrapper.
Either that, or spend a few centuries trying to derive the magic key, by which time nobody will care anyway.
Unless linux reniggs on the open driver requirements (at which point, how is linux different from any other kernel again?), or the hardware companies stop being little bridge trolls (there are some signs on the horizon that show that they might be slowly coming around. A major offender, nvidia, recently said they would start contributing to nouveau, the reverse engineered community driver for their cards. High profile OEMs changing policies and embracing the linux model will only improve adoption, and we can hope more follow nvidia's lead on that), then linux will never have the same direct to market hardware compatibility as windows boxes do.
It's just the sad truth.
It is also important to gauge this as a per capita rate.
Eg, if you have a 1% rate, you have a 1% chance that any given student will go apeshit and shoot people.
If you have 100 students, the chance it will happen is now statistically very relevent, as at least one of them will go apeshit by the numbers.
If you cram 1000 in, you now have 10 shooters.
Other contributory factors that are not accounted for: degree of student disciplinary action over time. Degree of broken family life as percentage of student population. Degree of truancy enforcement. Degree of personal libery violation of students over time.
I do believe that you will see a statistical rise in the basic rate of becoming a shooter over time, when adjusted for increased population sizes.
I believe you will also find correlations between disciplinary activity (including the use of metal detectors, drug dogs, etc.) of the school and the schools which produced shooters, vs the schools that didn't; between the truancy enforcement of the same; and against home income and homelife quality of the student populations of the same.
Correlation does not prove causation. That is what experimentation is for.
Find schools with a high shooter rate, do the unthinkable and remove the dogs, the metal detectors, and the draconian zero tolerance rules, and see if there is a net reduction of school shooting statistics.
It is my personal hypothesis that shooters resort to shooting when other methods of resolving violent problems cannot be explored. (Eg, you get mugged for lunch money by a bully? In the 40s and 50s, you manned up and broke the bully's nose. He stopped trying to shake you down for lunch money after that. These days, doing so will land you in juvenile detention. The only avenue provided is the completely impotent 'tell a teacher' option. The teachers are afraid to take action, should poor, misunderstood snowflake bully boy get punished and feel bad. As such, they say they need proof that bully boy is shaking you down for lunch money. They forbid the use of electronic monitoring and recording devices, except for their own, so that isn't an option. It is impossible to prove that the bully is taking your money, and that you aren't abusing the system to bully the poor misunderstood snowflake, and so you have no choice but to simply take it. Add insult to injury, you get screened daily for contraband and have armed retacops in the hallway as morale deteriorates and people start snapping. Eventually, you can't take it anymore. You would have just punched the little bitch years ago, but the thought of going to jail was undesirable. Now you don't care. In for a penny, in for a pound, you bring a gun to school to end the problem permanently. The penalty is the same as if you punched him: jail time.)
Basically, I would say american schools are throwing petrol on the fire by trying to "enforce" safety through threat of violence (what else does an armed security guard represent?), through the threat of severe recrimination for petty offenses (suspension for drawing a man with a gun? Really?), and through complete and total beurocratic inaction that repeatedly screws over and endangers students (gotta protect the school from those sue happy parents of joey the bully! He's a snowflake!).
If anything, simulated violence in a safe venue like video games is thereputic, and not deleterious.
If you widen your statistical comparison to include the same set of comparisons I suggested above to include sample sets from other countries, (human children are human children, regardless of nation) I suspect the correlation between extreme student violence and extreme school imposed penalties and hightened school security would really stand out prominently.
Agreed. That would use her existing muscles, with artificial stimulation. A device worn on the forearm to stimulate those muscles would be less frightening than something like the LukeArm.
Still, I would try to repair the damaged organic system first. There have been many breakthroughs in nerve regeneration in the peripheral nervous system that would be helpful, and artifical stimulation would be a great suppliment to that.
Cutting off the hand is rather final.
If I were the woman, I would attempt a radical neural stemcell treatment instead. If it goes wrong, then cut off the hand.
The one you re born with is far superior to what science is currently able to provide, and it doesn't scare children.
Io is possibly the most volcanically active body in the solar system. The intense tidal heating it gets from jupiter has it literally turning itself inside out like clockwork.
Any mapping of io is useless as a navigational aid. The best it can hope to bee used for is a high quality snapshot for geological analysis over time.
The argumentum ad absurdium here though, is that the following scenarios of A and B also have the same financial and value outcomes, but have radically different social acceptance factors.
1) A buys the track, calls B into the living room, and they listen to the track together at the same time. A buys the track for 1$. B hears the track for free. B is not an entitlement complex asshole.
2) A buys the track, and puts it on an SD card for her MP3 player so she can listen to it while she jogs. She lends the whole player, including her library of purchased tracks to B so he can jam at the gym. B hears an epic shitton of tracks for free. B is not an entitlement complex asshole.
In these latter two cases, the distributor demanding zero-tolerance enforcement of royalty transactions for each and every person exposed to the performance is the entitlement complex asshole, since he is the one insisting he is intitled to compensation for out of band exposure, and demanding restrictions on harmless activities of his potential customers to ensure his demands for what he feels he is entitled to are met.
This is what things like "public performance" fees for singing in public without a paying audience, and the whole SOPA/PIPA shit are about.
Its one thing if A lends B her player, and he dumps a copy if her SDCard for his own use. What right does he have to copy her media? What right does he have to the data anyway?
That isn't what is being effectively killed here though. What is being killed is ("hey, come listen to this!" "Oh hey, that's good, who is that?" ) and ("these are all my old CDs that I don't listen to anymore. How much can I get for the whole box?")
Personally, I feel the intrinsic mindset of the distributor and artist to feel justification in destroying the enjoyment of sharing music, and destroying the ability to pass on a license because they feel entitled to have continually nothing but new sales, and licensed 1person:1payment parity is far more onerous.
Just my 2 cents worth.
Certainly not. Have these things called principles, and a mental disorder known as "integrity."
These immediately disqualify me from work in the legal, corporate, and political vocational fields.
You can't please everyone, but you can lie to everyone. This is how politics works. A person with integrity and ethics who proposes a vitally needed, rationally grounded, but otherwise unpopular solution to current campaign related issues will never win against an unscrupulous liar who puffs smoke up voter's asses, and fills them with meaningless promises of a magical solution to all their problems (like obama's "change" platform....). This is because any realistic solution ot any controversial problem will have unavoidable consequences that will adversely impact at least one party to the issue, else it wouldn't be controversial. As such, any realistic solution will create very violent and outspoken resistance from at least some portion of the voter/supporter demographic, which the shister can still exploit in his/her election platform.
My integrity and sense of ethics precludes my being a smiling charismatic sociopath.
As such, I would never succeed in politics, and I have no interest in trying.
Really? My 50$/mo throttled (but unlimited otherwise. They are upfront about the throttling) data plan hasn't gone up.
No termination fee that I am aware of. I upgraded from pay as you go so I could get the data plan.
50$/mo is way cheaper than comparable "unlimited talk and text + throttled data" plans from either verizon or att.
You said you wanted to improve reception! I am sure holding your phone that way GREATLY improved your ability to receive what ATT was giving you!
Clearly you were confused about the verbage....
But unlike t-mobile, att does not even give you the option to buy the phone outright.
Don't give me shit about how nobody does that, because I am somebody, and I did exactly that.
The ability to get out from under an onerous termination fee and support contract for a lump sum of a fair market value is worth its metaphorical weight in gold.
Tethering is equivalent to the "3rd party handset or device" restriction that was considered so onerous back in the 60s and 70s.
Basically the phone company said "to ensure quality service, we need to prohibit unlicensed devices from being connected to the telephine network."
It was shot down at the end of the 70s, which is why you can attach answering machines, caller ID readers, and cheap chineese phones.
Tethering is the same principle: attaching an "unaproved" device (computer) to their network.
This is exactly in line with the gp's argument about 2nd chances to change the law.
The "it degrades our network!" Line didn't hold up then, it shouldn't hold up now. Last I checked, a bit originating from a computer instead of a phone was not directly deleterious to any hardware in a cellular network. You could argue that tetherers use more bandwidth, but that is an ancilliary argument. Tethering itself (what is forbidden) does not harm their cellular network in any way. Transmitting excessive data, which is not what is forbidden, is what causes QoS harm.
If they actively advertise that such service is available there (infamous coverage map scandal material here), then yes.
Otherwise, it is false advertising.
They like to advertise spotty coverage areas with a black/white brush of "covered!" In the hopes that people in those areas will switch to them and become saddled with a contract. As a consumer who would be so saddled, I feel they are obligated to satisfy their promises of service to the people they dupe this way.
So, either:
1) they stop lying about effective coverage, and give a 60% theshold before declaring an area "covered" (meaning you get between 3 and 4 bars on a 5 bar indicator), or shade their coverage map with a gradient to show realworld effective coverage.
2) put up, or shut up-- and actually deliver on what their advertising drones spew.
Just because that is inconvenient or expensive for them, does not justify false advertising.