The first one is unavoidable. You need to use the camera for range finding metrics, which means you have to hold the phone up. Texting on the bus is oibnoxious, but much less so than Mavis talking about her shitzu and its bathroom habbits on 150 decibels.
The latter is easy. Use of a gsm quadband phone is assumed for maximum world coverage of the app, purchase a prepaid gsm sim, and use a non-subsidised handset. Buy both with cash, or with a greendot reloadable visa.
(I assume the buyer is a "nerd", who knows what he/she wants, and knows which handset to get for maximum utility.)
Also, re #2: we are putting the phone in raw mode, and unregistering from the tower so that we can enter promiscuous mode. After that we stop broadcasting anything, and collect several seconds of raw datagrams from the local area for metric analysis. Gsm is encrypted (though the encryption has been broken by researchers), and we don't care about that portion of the data feed. We are interested only in the headers, and in the snr.
We gather the information to uniquely identify which tower, and which subscriber we are going to screw with. There is no need to deeply inspect the packets, so this process should take only a few seconds, and shouldn't run afoul of privacy laws. While still in raw/promiscuous mode, we send out the false radio packets claiming to be from the tower. These should be unencrypted, and unstamped by the device's sim or unique id. You are directly impersonating the tower, sending unencrypted unicasts. These are 'pulsed' at a configurable rate, so that you can still listen. When the bastard goes silent, you falsify a "hangup" signal directed at the tower. This keeps the tower from trying to keep the connection hot.
At no time during the jamming do you broadcast your own sim or your own uuid.
This is also why a custom rom with root is needed, besides for the obvious kernel driver hooks to pull this off, since many carriers monitor what applications you install, run, and use, for "quality improvement." This means you need a reliably sanitized environment that has been completely cleansed of this, including google's sync utility.
(You don't want to be narking on yourself that you have a jamming app installed. Especially to a soulless corporation, like a wireless carrier or google.)
Cellphone jamming does not have to be dickish to everyone else around it.
Here is how I personally would make a cellphone jammer:
Take an ordinary quad band cellphone, preferably an android one with a well documented radio, with a rear facing camera, and a custom rom image running with root.
On the phone is the "jam this bastard!" Application, which I will have written myself. What it does is put the phone into promiscuous mode to capture datagrams not directed at it, and take signal to noise ratio measurements, along with a camera distance estimate from the rear facing camera. Using some inverse cube rule math, and some fuzzy metrics from the camera, it identifies the "bastard" you are aiming the phone at. You simply pretend you are texting away.
Once it identifies the "bastard", and their uuid (iemi, ssid, mac, whatever the network uses), and the tower+protocol used, it starts spoofing RST datagrams from the tower, sent as unicasts over the cellular band being used by the "bastard", with headers indicating that it is for the bastard's handset. The rate of injection is configurable.
This causes the "bastard" to lose connection with the tower as his handset obeys the connection reset command. A combination of this and some clever and fast spoofing on the part of the jamming phone to impersonate the jammed handset to send the "hang up" signal to the tower, will force a targetted dropped calls. At least in theory.
It would not impact any other cellular users, since it would use spoofed unicasts.
In the event that it can't directly interface with the target network, it would use the camera for range finding, and look for "noise". It would then use a combination of the internal antennas broadcasting raw bit patterns to poison a specific noise source. (Say, using a multiplexed 2.4ghz wifi signal with an 800mhz signal to create a psuedo-broadcast at some other frequency via partial wave reinforcement, done using timed broadcasts of a user data pattern.)
The partial wave reinforcement to create the false effective signal would have a radically short range. It might interfere with other nearby devices, but would be quickly and effectively attenuated by environmental obstacles.
(Basically, you create a "beat" frequency emission using two frequencies on either side of the target frequency. The overlap of the two signals creates a 'false', or "beat" frequency in the desired band. If either of the source emissions falls off or gets deflected/reflected, the resulting beat freq will not be in the target band.)
This means the signal would still not leave the bus.
This might not force a disconnect, but would degrade QoS, and might improve the chances of a natural disconnect, especially if the bus is moving, since it could disrupt tower handoff.
(The second method is for, eg, a verizon smartphone using "bastard", and a quadband T-mo using jammer. The jammer cannot see the raw data traffic on verizon's spectrum, since the phone antenna is not able to pick it up. No radio emission is completely discrete, especially with multipath interferences and other randomizing sources of attenuation, so communications on that foreign band should be detectable as noise on the native band from the local environmental attenuation. This is similar to an att gsm phone making a home stereo buzz. The phone is not really broadcasting on such a low frequency, the signal just attenuates there/causes a signal induction, creating noise.)
In europe, where practically everyone uses gsm, the android smartphone based jamming app would be surgical and effective. In NA, where there is cdma and gsm, the dirty second option is needed.
Granted, very few handsets have radios with such capabilities, or are sufficiently well documented publicly to bastardize them for this purpose.
In the first case, anybody else on the bus will be totally unimpacted by the DoS exploit.
In the second case, some nearby (within maybe 2 to 5 meters) people might be effected, but only if th
The idea is not to expose kids to technology. They are surrounded by it already. They can't help but be "exposed."
The idea is to expose technology to the kids. Far too much of modern technology comes with the implied "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!", and not nearly enough "oh, you like the glowing green head projector? Here's how to make him have boobies on his head and a snidley whiplash mustache! And this button makes him sound like a chipmunk! Would you like your own big green glowing head projector? Awesome! Here's how I made mine!"
There is far too much compartmentalization in modern society, and due to that, there is a very large demographic that relies on children not being more savvy than them with tech. This is mostly in educational and political circles. This reliance makes a conflict of interest when it comes to tech; they teach just enough to use, but not enough to comprehend and adapt the tech. (They call this a wide variety of things, but the most common is "abuse" of the technology, or vandalism.)
Maker scouts would focus on kids that have already been exposed to the tech, and want to learn more. It would actively encourage novel applications of technology, and the creation of disruptive appliances. In short, it would be every technology teacher's nightmare come true, where the kids learn dangerous things like assembler, kernel hacking, lowlevel electronics and computer logic, and graduate from drawing penises on the lab computers, to creating network worms that do it for them.
I would really love to see something like this, but I realize that most people would consider this on par with having a terrorist training camp for cyber terrorists.
The idea is exactly the opposite though. Terror comes from ignorance, and learned helplessness more often than not. This would seek to break that trend. The kids that come out would know what real cyberwarfare is, and laugh at the antics paraded around on the news, like many of us do.
The problem is with the way this particular warp drive operates.
It isn't the intersellar medium that produces the energy wave. It is the collateral effect of the warp field itself.
More specifically, the edge of the warp bubble acts like an event horizon, and the radiation is hawking radiation that forms from virtual particles getting caught in it, and being made real.
While the drive is "on", these particles are stuck to the event horizon of the warp bubble. They never get anywhere close to the ship, and as such never get funneled into any collector orifice.
The longer the warp bubble is on, the more virtual particles will get caught, the bigger the blast wave when the bubble pops.
One potential solution is a specially made "harbor" fascility that is designed for this very thing, so that ships arriving drop out of warp (and immediately stop. That's the beauty of this hypothetical warp drive), puke out the event shock, which is collected by the harbor commission's harbor ship, and then the ship takes off using conventional drive to its habitated destination.
Yes. But it also shows a trend toward medical dependency.
If people who would die and or be infertile without treatment are given said treatment, and this is considered normal, they will pass on this dependency. As such, the percentage of the population that carries the defect will amplify over time.
It might be balanced out against social stigmas, (people find the idea of a mate that is wholly dependent upon medicine for survival to be undesirable, for instance), but this is potentially eroded by modern trends in western culture, that attempt to paint the disabled or otherwise "undesirable" (for whatever reason. Desirability of a mate is a personal decision) in a more favorable light to discourage cultural discrimination. As such, clearly deleterious genes, such as for type1 diabetes, or male infertility, can be passed on, and "normalized" via medical practices coupled with social progressivism.
(Note: I am not suggesting that such progressivism is wholly bad. I am merely mindful of side effects that aren't intended.)
In a few thousand years, we might all be test tube babies because of this ubiqutious punctuation of natural selection.
The argument I was making was that "infertility" caused by deleterious mutations on the non-redundant Y chromosome is not a sufficient evolutionary hurdle. We have already routinely begun helping those defective genes propogate within the genepool, amplifying their prevelence above what it would have otherwise been.
In doing so, we have removed the selection force which keeps only healthy copies of that chromosome around.
I would contest this, since we are meddling with natural selection with infertility treatments.
Specifically, the genes on the y chromosome are responsible for healthy sperm and androgen production. Many forms of male infertility are related to malformed sperm, such as sperm with incomplete or otherwise defective acrosomes, tail defects, etc. These can be environmentally caused (had a high fever at one point, or some other non-genetic cause), or they can be genetically caused.
Modern assisted reproduction techniques involve the assisted impregnation of an ovum with such a defective sperm using a pipette, and a mild electric shock, followed by ivf.
The treatment does not weed out genetic causes for the defect, which enables the defect to be passed to offspring, negating the protection that natural selection provides.
For 10k, they could splurge on a USB hardware key with a TPM inside. That's what MasterCAM does.
Using a sufficiently aggressive UUID with a private key to decrypt part of the executable at runtime would put the kabosh on a lot of copying and cracking attempts.
That makes an unfortunate presumption that the energy must come from compustion, and not some other source.
Energy comes in more forms than black gold my friend. The problem is getting people to stop measuring energy in "equivalent barrels of oil". Energy is better measured in units designed for it, like joules.
When you agnosticize the unit, and permit non-oil energy sources for the reaction, and further eliminate the notion of creating the oil for the purposes of combustion (the whole idea is to stop doing that!) Then the real baseline costs of synthetic synthesis of plastics and solvents from vegetable oils becomes clear.
As long as you use self-refferential units, and purposefully confuse the issue by using them, any amount of non-fossil fuel energy in the supply chain will produce lopsided numbers.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are 50,000 joules of energy in 1 gal of an unspecified refined petrolium fuel. There are 55gal of this in a standard chemical barrel. We'll set this as the "oil equivilent" unit for energy.
(2,750,000 joules per barrel. These figures do not correspond to a real fuel oil. They are ficticious.)
Let's say it takes the stated 10x energy to refine a vegetable oil into said fuel oil. This means we need 27,500,000 joules of energy to accomplish this task.
So, we realize "we will never be able to continue with combustion energy with these figures! We *must* abandon combustion as the energy source!"
We still want to make the 55gal of fuel oil, because it has value as more than just fuel. We use it to make life saving plastics, and durable synthetic textiles. Having exhausted natural petrolium, we have no choice but to make it this way.
Sunlight on earth has an energy density of 1350W/M^2. ((1350)(joules/sec)/(M^2))
This means that with 100% efficiency (a pipedream!), you need only approx 6 square meters and 1 hour of time to produce the "equivilent" of 550 gallons of fuel oil energy needed for the synthesis.
The most efficient cells are closer to 30%, and consumer grade is closer to 10% efficient. This means we need 10x as much collection surface to get the required energy. So, 60 square meters, over 1 hour.
When we work this into the equasion, we have gotten 10x the energy of the oil without any form of combustion. However, because we are measuring in "barrels of oil equivilent", we have the impossible situation of 10x the energy "created", being "burned" to perform that creation. This is nonsense, since no fuel at all was burned (unless you count solar mass as fuel, but that's just being pedantic.) This why we should measure as joules to begin with, and not obfuscate the issue.
"But producing only 550gal equivilent of energy in an hour, of which only 6 to 8 hours of the day are useful, does not yeild enough energy/M^2 density to power our civilization!"
No shit sherlock. You need neuclear for that! Modern reactors (news flash, fukushima is *not* a modern design!) Are able to reprocess their waste products many times over, and produce very little high level waste. They have energy densities that make fossil fules look quaint, and can use fairly common isotopes as fuels. It is the only stopgap energy that is viable as a bandaid while we research fusion that can satisfy the immediate power needs.
Remember, we are creating the 55gals of oil as a feedstock for creating plastics. *not as fuel*.
"What about my car!? Chemical batteries don't appear plausible enough to ever have densities rivaling fossil fuels! What will I put in my vehicle!? I can't drive to work with an extension cord behind me!"
Quite right. But you know what? There are several "reasonably safe" radio isotopes that you can built a very high energy primary atomic battery out of. Carbon 14 for instance... or, if you want a refuelable powercell, liquid tritium.
Those are both beta emitters that release electrons as the decay particles. Integrating them into a high temperature, high bandgap semiconductor with ad
Redundant infrastructure would definately pull the teeth on the netneutrality issue, and would effectively drown the "bandwidth hogs!" Issue too.
Single runs might be easier for civil planners to manage, but they get constipated the way water and sewerlines do when too many people use them, and once the area is developed, good luck getting the trenchers and backehoes in to replace/upgrade the pipe.
Allowing multiple companies to lay lines would solve a whole lot of problems.
I wonder how many chairs were thrown in/at financial, in order to ship the money...
Surely marketing and their PR drones would have had a coniption fit about the public backlash should such memos get out? Or, did MS flex its muscles with the MSNBC affiliation to suppress news of the memo?
Oh, I agree. If the phone company says the person lives there (barring the special case where the debt is also to the phone company.. more on that later) then that constitutes probable cause that the person is lying.
*it is possible that the debtor has claimed a false name and identity to activate service at their real address via identity fraud, such as with stolen identity information from the internet. In this case, the phone company's records will list the identity fraud victim as the debtor. This is likely from the fraud victim being charged for services they did not receive, and disputing the bill. This should stand out plainly when the address being serviced is very distant from the address of the person being billed. As such, this is a special case where the phone company's records can clearly be in error. My friend's family's agency collects utility bills for the local utilities, and this circumstance has cropped up a few times.
However, when a person that is not listed by the phone company as being the debtor who has had their number randomly belted out by a repeat offender to enable service (it isn't hard to fabricate a "valid" local number), and tells you that they do not know the debtor, and that they don't live there, you should listen to them.
I understand that this can create an intractable situation, especially with experienced repeat debtors, who are very careful to not expose their real telephone and home address, and conduct all their debts under unregistered aliases. This creates a situation, where excepting a slipup on their part, your only lead is the fraudulent telephone number. While I understand how frustrating that I, you are not authorised to keep harassing the victim of the fraud insisting to speak with the debtor. The victim does not have that information, did not create the debt, and would very much like for you to stop calling them. This is when you start making calls to other agencies to look for a slipup. (Or dig through the mountainous file cabinet, in the case of my collections friends. Some debtors have aggregate files that weigh several pounds with multiple aliases.)
The problem I have with many telephone debt collection agencies is that they are harrasing. There *are* federal and state laws againsr harrassing collections practices, which clearly spell out what is and is not harrassment.
I am not going to accuse you or your employing agency of any of these following practices. I am merely pointing out that many collectors do these things as standard operating practise, banking on the fact that few debtors know their rights under the law.
1) calling outside of business hours, or to a number other than a personal residence or private cellphone. No calling at work. 2) calling after being informed to stop calling, and for all debt collection activity to be done by authorized us mail only. (If told to discontinue telephone negotiations, you must comply, and must do in person or by mail negotiations. This is a federal law. Failure to comply is punishable by fines on a per call basis.) 3) falsely claiming to have a court case ready/threatening suit. (You must be able to provide the name and contact information of your prosecutorial legal counsel and the case number on demand. Failure to do so constitutes a breach of this federal statute) 4) claiming a debt that is not verifiably owned. 5) cashing a payment cheque, then failing to credit the balance. (I have seen this happen many times.) 6)harrassing people other than the debtors, such as family members. 7)repeatedly calling a number that is not for the debtor, demanding to speak to the debtor. (People give a false number frequently, especially with repeat debtors. When the person on the other end informs you that the debtor does not live there, you are not authorised to continue calling just because you think the person you spoke with is lying.) 8) become verbally abusive or threatening.
I am best friends with somebody who's family owns a collections agency, (who keeps paper records! Its crazy!) And have had several lengthly discussions about proper calling practices. I don't think collections is an evil or unnecessary vocation. However, there are plenty of predatory collections agencies out there.
I don't want to name any directly. (They get bitchy about such accusations.) However, there exists a special class of debtor that purposefully creates debts to collect fines from collections agencies via the consumer protection statutes in their areas. These people could not stay in that business if the violation of the statutes were not endemic and profuse.
It is this abusive behavior from collections agencies which gives them a bad name.
Agreed, but there would be far fewer of them. That's the deal.
Get busted for posession of pot? 1) go to jail, or 2) get drug counselling and rehab. (Possibly both.)
If pot were not illegal, then people would 1) not be arrested for posession, and 2) would not be compelled to go to a rehab clinic.
Combined, this results in far lower demand for law enforcement and encarceration facilities, and a fae lower demand for drug treatment services.
Decriminalizing even some of the more popular and less dangerous drugs would radically reduce the necessity for a whole host of government workers (or government sanctioned workers) related to drug law enforcement and treatment.
That's what I was getting at. The DEA protects those interests, not society's in general, since as you pointed out, even with complete decriminalization there will still be drug treatment centers and people trying to get clean. (The dea does not effectively reduce the number of addicts, it only increases the socioeconomic burden of being one, and creates jobs that have no businss being created to manage a problem that the enforcement itself helps create.)
The DEA is not a vitally important regulatory agency, unless you happen to work in pharmecuticals, law enforcement, drug counselling/rehab, or government itself.
The vast majority of people in the US do not fall into any of those categories, so saying the DEA is vitally important is untrue in the vast majority of individual circumstances.
The country would be much better off without it, and without the "war on drugs" nonsense that spawned it.
Clearly you are approaching this dilema from a faulted pretext: that the DEA is supposed to be doing something good for YOU.
Who benefits from trying to force people to stop using drugs, and for the ones that persist, who benefits from having addicts shooting up draino based simulants?
Here is who I see benefitting from these trends:
1) corporate america. If drug use is prohibited, they have a legal ability to fire you, which allows them to shut people out of the hiring process that they find undesirable. If drug use was not illegal, fireing the amphetamine user becomes much more difficult. (Look at the handwrangling that HR drones do when you ask them about company policies concerning people on prescription amphetamines.)
2) "aid" and "support" federal agencies, and federally assisted charities. A friend of mine who works for a city govt recently told me a wild yarn about the recent tent cities with the occupy movement, and private citizens giving out charitable aid to the tent residents. He told me that this jeapordized the "necessity" of the local civic aid orgs, who organized to have the tent cities removed because of the unplanned charitable activity. It doesn't take a very far stretch of thought to see how state funded drug rehab clinics and other "vital" infrastructure benefits from having a steady stream of patients to "treat".
3) federal regulators, who benefit by being given a job to create this mess.
4) the pharmecutical companies, who exploit the production shortfall to drive demand and with it a higher sustained price.
The DEA, and a shocking number of other federal regulators, do not regulate for YOUR benefit.
I make below median income for my area, and way below standard pay for my vocation (quality engineer.) However, my employer treats me to some smexxy digs at work, which rival or surpass the high paid positions at the big boys.
I value the stability of my lower paying job, and coupled with the smexxy digs, I'm not terribly interested in alternative employment at the moment.
That said, a person bucking rivets at boeing gets paid on average 33% more than I do, drives 2 cars, and lives in a house valued over 100k. (In terms of local economy, that's a 4 bed, 2 bath, large kitchen, large livingroom single family home. Doctors and lawyers live in 250k homes)
I am single. I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in a domestic partner of any sex. I am 30. If I was going to have a biological imperative, it would have happened by now, seeing as I am male, and testosterone only decreases after 30. I am therefor content to live in a 25k home. The lower monthly payment let's me derive more pleasure from my paycheck.
Most people in my wage bracket (30-35k) are considered impoverished, or borderline impoverished. The people I work with make comparable pay, but consider me to be wealthy. This is not the case, per se.
The big differences between myself and the machinists on the floor (discounting work conditions) is that 1) most of them have either a wife and kids, or pay alimony/child support. And 2) support a large number of expensive and deleterious habits, such as smoking and drinking.
If I engaged in/were subject to those 2 things, I would certainly not be as happily well off as I currently am.
I recognize that I am an anomalous minority, (a man with no libido, and who hasn't had a libido ever, and as such has no child support or significant other to support) And as such do not judge others by myself. I use myself as a bounding element on the statistic only. (I live modestly well, but not opulently.) The vast median of people working in small machine shops in my area are boarderline impoverished, and many get government support of one kind or another. However, even in this impoverished condition they are much better off than most of their chinese counterparts.
The people working for the big boys live very nicely, and routinely send their children to college. In terms of chinese analogs, these people would be among the wealthy, and certainly wouldn't be working at foxconn as an assembly worker. Perhaps as a midgrade pencil pusher.
Depending on how you bound "manufacturing worker", and how the loal economy is structured (I couldn't afford food and a dumpster to sleep in, let alone personal luxuries if I lived in california with my paygrade, for example.), it can mean vastly different things.
Some manufacturing workers do indeed live reasonably glamorous lives. Opulently so, compared to you median chinese laborer.
Oh, I know all about the less scrupulous factory environments that are in the US. (I work in aerospace, and outside of the big boys' shops, things get dirty indeed.)
My employer does a fairly good job about insisting things be kept as clean and neat as possible, and that hazardous substances be treated properly, but I have seen and heard of.things even locally that would make heads turn here on slashdot. For instance, one of the companies my mom worked at in the 70s was being cheap and issued latex gloves instead of nitrile for working in MEK. My mom got to experience the joys of aaccute keytone poisoning, but her employer did nothing about it, and refused to acknowledge culpability... until after the statute of limitations ran out, then they came clean about knowing exactly what the signs and sympthoms of overexposure were. (Mom was a dead ringer.)
Another horror story I have heard is from a plastics and composite materials fab plant that works with graphite fiber prepreg and fiberboard. They had workers using power sanders on graphite composite inside an enclosed assemblage WITHOUT forced air full body bunny-suits, as OSHA requires. They were given simple dust masks instead, and from the accounts I have heard repeated by multiple unrelated sources, people routinely left that line covered in black powder from head to toe daily. Carbon fiber composite is a nanomaterial. People were inhaling dangerous particulates as if it were an ordinary and benign dust (if there even is such a thing).
My brother has accute chromium poisoning from spraying hexavalent chromium primer with improper safety equipment issued by his employer.
(Names of companies redacted to protect the guilty, as I don't relish the thought of a libel suit.)
The posters mentioning that maintaining osha practices and keeping workers healthy and safe as the reasons for western made products being so expensive is absolutely dead on. The weaker/smaller companies around my area often cheese on "strict" adherence to health and safety regs to compete against bigger shops. If those regs were not tied to outrageous fines, I can garantee that those shops would not comply at all, and that the big shops would not be far behind.
Osha and niosh keep what manufacturing jobs we do still have from entering a phyrric race to the bottom to compete with chinese labor. Even lacklustre enforcement of health and safety is vastly superior to *NO* enforcement of health and safety.
Foxconn probably does offer better safety and living conditions than other, less well known factory cities, but only because it has a high profile customer that it desperately wants to keep, and has been put on the spot for the comparatively poor conditions (look, a factory is a factory, and even a super clean one is not a good place to live in) by western standards. It has powerful "court of public opinion" pressures to offer better (if not immaculate by chinese standards) health, safety, and living conditions. If it didn't, it would lose the business of those very important customers.
Personally, I am opposed to the very idea of "company towns". I would rather that foxconn simply employ the thousands of people, and let them buy homes or rent apartments in the host city with a proper city government, even if it was a corrupt communist one, than run the whole show itself. The lack of official oversight and employee freedom/power to "bargain" with their employer, instead of bowing and being thankful for what is given, is a considerable red flag in my mind, and I don't mean that politically. I suspect that it is this lack of power to bargain that is the big cause of foxconn's suicides.
In western cultures, a huge plethora of supporting industries will gather around a major one. Take for instance, the situation in wichita ks, where I work.
We have amost all the big names in town. A learjet, a boeing/spirit, 2 cessna plants, a hawker beech, and a bombardier. In addition to those, we have an uncountable number of small machine and composite fab com
Voice recognition in automated help/answering systems predates apple's siri. I distinctly remember calling the ATT support line for my area, and being greeted by a female robot that wanted me to speak aloud my account number. This was sometime around 2005.
Primitive, yes, but predates their patent.
Dragon naturally speaking has it beat, since the speech recognition prototype algorithms used were initially taken to market in 1982.
I am fairly certain that the iphone wasn't even a wetdream for apple's favorite psychopath, the venerable Mr. Jobs, when this technology hit the scene. That the success of this technology ins successive years would be a logical progression for user interactions is highly obvious, and implementation on a handset engineered to be a general purpose computing environment is not noteworthy from a technological viewpoint, as it is precisely the kind of environment that the inventors of the algorithm tested their implementations on.
This patent should not have been granted to apple.
I would say that his advice applies in some circumstances, and not in others.
For instance, I refuse to play a "serious" game that doesn't have a compelling story. I avoid FPS for that reason, for the most part.
Better suggestion: don't overspecialize. Don't overexert one part of the game's development to permit somebody on the team to produce "their opus".
A good game is engrossing, and a good story helps with that. A good game is enjoyable, and good gameplay helps with that. Sacrificing one for the other does not improve the final product. If you focus too much on story, and your gameplay sucks, people will hate it. If you focus on gameplay and ship a terrible story, people will only play the multiplayer or freeplay modes.
Balance the work, and make a "good" story with "good" gameplay. Don't fixate on "epic story" or "rivetting gameplay", at the expense of the other. Similarly, don't forcefeed the player wasteful eyecandy. If you do, you end up making "the phantom menace: the game!", and people will hate it.
So, because people inherit a family farm (news flash, nobody but millionares can afford to straight up buy farmland these days. Farmers are farming land an ancestor homesteaded over a hundred years ago.), and choose to keep that property and grow food, they are willfullu choosing to live in the dark ages?
Firstly: while the road grader is paid by the state taxroll, he very rarely, if ever, shows up. More often than not, the farmers themselves put a blade on their tractors and grade the road themselves. The state does supply fesh gravel every 10 years or so, but the roadbeds would have become unservicable years before then were it not for self-performed maintenance. Last I checked, city people weren't expected to repair potholes with fresh asphalt, or to steamroll it flat themselves.
Farm subsidies:
There is debate here. On one hand, if the property taxes on agrcultural properties and assets were not so high, these subsidies would probably not be needed at all. On the other, many people who are on the more wealthy side could dodge paying their fair tax burden by buying agricultural property and equipment and just sitting on it for the tax breaks.
Farmers, while owning large chunks of expensive property and equipment, are not all that wealthy when all the expenses add up. They aren't multimillionaire tycoons. Large sums of money pass through their hands, yes, but the vast majority of it goes toward fuel, fertilizer, seed, and equipment costs. Not a whole lot stays in the farmer's hands after a good harvest. (Exceptions being cattle with some of the more dubious ranching practices in effect, such as those used by factory ranchers.) The federal government has a vested interest in making sure its citizens have enough food to eat. That is why they subsidize the actual crops themselves. A bad year or two without that assistance, coupled with high property and equipment taxes, and you end up with farmers going bankrupt, and being unable to farm anymore. I've seen it first hand.
Now then.. tell me, what do you think the taxes they pay on property and equipment go for? Roads in the rural areas they live in, or maintenance of major paved highways? (Which are supposed to be paid for by the fuel tax anyway.)
Tell me again how unfair the farm subsidies are. I dare you. Think about it next time you buy a loaf of bread, or a pound of hamburger.
I was not kidding around with hyperbole on the fire prevention statement. I've put out plenty of fires with a burlap sack. Especially around the 4th, when city people wanting to escape city fire ordinances on "the good stuff" drive out into the county and fire them off on the side of the road, or illegally at the lake. Most of the time there is a big push to get the wheat in before the 4th for this very reason, but the weather is not always cooperative.
Really, it's been my experience that city people are selfish, spoiled, trashy people. They drive out into the county with old appliances and furniture and dump it in overflow ditches, on secluded roadsides, and treerows, just to avoid paying the trashman afew bills to haul it off and dispose of it properly. What, do they think stainless steel simply decomposes in a few weeks or something? Or is more "I don't care about those farmers, I don't want to pay 200$ to dispose of it!" Instead? In addition to that, and starting fires on the 4th, you have city kids and their dumbshit parents getting them RTVs that they can't ride in the city. So, they plan a weekend outing to go ride them all over a freshly plowed (and probably seeded) field. They destroy literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments for 5 hours of fun, and think nothing of it. And then you have the ever-present feral animal problem, where that "cute little pitbull puppy" grows up and isn't so cute with their 3 year old child anymore. Do they take it to the humane society? Oh fuck no. They think they are being more kind to the animal by dropping it out in the boonies and driving off and leaving it, where it slowly starves, goes stark raving mad, and ends up killing livestock and being shot for it.
Here's a heads up: cleaning up after your asses costs farmers and their families money and time. Then you bastards turn around and tell us all how greedy we are when we
You would be surprised to find that many of the areas that the telecoms claim to service with dsl, are not in fact, actually servicable by dsl.
Take for instace: a quaint little town just outside wichita. "Peck Ks".
Recently pushed into prominence by being about 10 miles from a newly built casino. (Northstar.) This town doesn't even have a gas station. It has crappy 1950s federally mandated telephone and powerlines that are unreliable. Residents have to use on-air televison, or satelite.
Internet is either horrible dialup at 28.8 speeds on a good day, with continual disconnects from the shitty lines, or, 50$/mo (w/o bundling) satelite, with data caps, or 2g verizon coverage.
I know, because my mother lives there.
Oh, ATT claims that dsl is available... until you actually call and ask.
You aparently are not realizing the number of farmers being serviced, nor are you comprehending that large civic centers with the necessary trunk lines are fairly uniformly dotted inside such agrarian areas.
Also, I am not suggesting that the mesh network supply a t1 speed connection for all users either. It only needs to provide better than 28.8kbps dialup. (Bcause that is all you can squeeze out of the horrifically neglected lines that were only installed because of a 1950s federal law requiring them.)
Latency would be bad. Yes. It has to hop through tree clutter between god knows how many repeaters to get to the trunk. But if it is 1) faster than 28.8kbps, and 2)costs approx 10$/mo or less, aggregated between subsribers, it will be a hit. That is how fucking badly people demand internet out there.
The problem with the forcing, is the latter option you mention. The telecoms are focusing on local maxima, and the initial costs of implementing a suitable level of service does not have a comparable RoI when viewed against a high density city.
Many major metro areas in the intended coverage zones are completely surrounded by agrarian farmers. Take for instance, oklahoma city OK, wichita KS, Topeka KS, Hutchinson KS, etc.
Said dedicated fiber trunks would at most 5 to 10 miles to the city edge, where they interface with the mesh network.
The cost for those pipes will indeed be quite sizable, and out of the reach of the farmers. However, here is how it SHOULD be viewed:
Either they open and maintain those short trunks, well inside the urban coverage areas, *OR* they can expect another 1950s telephone access bill to pass, and they can expect to lay thousands of miles of cable instead.
There are litterally thousands of farmers in the mesh network area. Aggregated over that pool, the 250k/yr cost of a trunk line can easily come into the 10-15$/mo range, especially since you are not paying to service the mesh.
The real problem will be keeping the local state and city governments (especially city!) From trying to treat the license fees from the mesh's operation as a fungible income source.
Oh yes.. the burden of maintaining a single mile of dedicated fiber. Oh, its so terrible!
If you are so concerned about it, the fed bill to enact the "forcing" can simply set limits on how much the isps charge per megabyte transerred, (we are talking wired data on their network. The mesh network is not theirs.) Institutes rules that state goverments have to follow to pay for the service (a 1$/mo bond issue would easily pass for something as highly demanded as internet access.) And which forces the telecoms to accept the peering arrangement.
The state then levies a simple bond tax on the operation of the mesh repeater per farmer. That money goes directly to reimburse the upstream isp.
Boom. No spoiled, bratty city people have to pay a fucking dime.
Slashdot Mirror
The first one is unavoidable. You need to use the camera for range finding metrics, which means you have to hold the phone up. Texting on the bus is oibnoxious, but much less so than Mavis talking about her shitzu and its bathroom habbits on 150 decibels.
The latter is easy. Use of a gsm quadband phone is assumed for maximum world coverage of the app, purchase a prepaid gsm sim, and use a non-subsidised handset. Buy both with cash, or with a greendot reloadable visa.
(I assume the buyer is a "nerd", who knows what he/she wants, and knows which handset to get for maximum utility.)
Also, re #2: we are putting the phone in raw mode, and unregistering from the tower so that we can enter promiscuous mode. After that we stop broadcasting anything, and collect several seconds of raw datagrams from the local area for metric analysis. Gsm is encrypted (though the encryption has been broken by researchers), and we don't care about that portion of the data feed. We are interested only in the headers, and in the snr.
We gather the information to uniquely identify which tower, and which subscriber we are going to screw with. There is no need to deeply inspect the packets, so this process should take only a few seconds, and shouldn't run afoul of privacy laws. While still in raw/promiscuous mode, we send out the false radio packets claiming to be from the tower. These should be unencrypted, and unstamped by the device's sim or unique id. You are directly impersonating the tower, sending unencrypted unicasts. These are 'pulsed' at a configurable rate, so that you can still listen. When the bastard goes silent, you falsify a "hangup" signal directed at the tower. This keeps the tower from trying to keep the connection hot.
At no time during the jamming do you broadcast your own sim or your own uuid.
This is also why a custom rom with root is needed, besides for the obvious kernel driver hooks to pull this off, since many carriers monitor what applications you install, run, and use, for "quality improvement." This means you need a reliably sanitized environment that has been completely cleansed of this, including google's sync utility.
(You don't want to be narking on yourself that you have a jamming app installed. Especially to a soulless corporation, like a wireless carrier or google.)
Cellphone jamming does not have to be dickish to everyone else around it.
Here is how I personally would make a cellphone jammer:
Take an ordinary quad band cellphone, preferably an android one with a well documented radio, with a rear facing camera, and a custom rom image running with root.
On the phone is the "jam this bastard!" Application, which I will have written myself. What it does is put the phone into promiscuous mode to capture datagrams not directed at it, and take signal to noise ratio measurements, along with a camera distance estimate from the rear facing camera. Using some inverse cube rule math, and some fuzzy metrics from the camera, it identifies the "bastard" you are aiming the phone at. You simply pretend you are texting away.
Once it identifies the "bastard", and their uuid (iemi, ssid, mac, whatever the network uses), and the tower+protocol used, it starts spoofing RST datagrams from the tower, sent as unicasts over the cellular band being used by the "bastard", with headers indicating that it is for the bastard's handset. The rate of injection is configurable.
This causes the "bastard" to lose connection with the tower as his handset obeys the connection reset command. A combination of this and some clever and fast spoofing on the part of the jamming phone to impersonate the jammed handset to send the "hang up" signal to the tower, will force a targetted dropped calls. At least in theory.
It would not impact any other cellular users, since it would use spoofed unicasts.
In the event that it can't directly interface with the target network, it would use the camera for range finding, and look for "noise".
It would then use a combination of the internal antennas broadcasting raw bit patterns to poison a specific noise source. (Say, using a multiplexed 2.4ghz wifi signal with an 800mhz signal to create a psuedo-broadcast at some other frequency via partial wave reinforcement, done using timed broadcasts of a user data pattern.)
The partial wave reinforcement to create the false effective signal would have a radically short range. It might interfere with other nearby devices, but would be quickly and effectively attenuated by environmental obstacles.
(Basically, you create a "beat" frequency emission using two frequencies on either side of the target frequency. The overlap of the two signals creates a 'false', or "beat" frequency in the desired band. If either of the source emissions falls off or gets deflected/reflected, the resulting beat freq will not be in the target band.)
This means the signal would still not leave the bus.
This might not force a disconnect, but would degrade QoS, and might improve the chances of a natural disconnect, especially if the bus is moving, since it could disrupt tower handoff.
(The second method is for, eg, a verizon smartphone using "bastard", and a quadband T-mo using jammer. The jammer cannot see the raw data traffic on verizon's spectrum, since the phone antenna is not able to pick it up. No radio emission is completely discrete, especially with multipath interferences and other randomizing sources of attenuation, so communications on that foreign band should be detectable as noise on the native band from the local environmental attenuation. This is similar to an att gsm phone making a home stereo buzz. The phone is not really broadcasting on such a low frequency, the signal just attenuates there/causes a signal induction, creating noise.)
In europe, where practically everyone uses gsm, the android smartphone based jamming app would be surgical and effective. In NA, where there is cdma and gsm, the dirty second option is needed.
Granted, very few handsets have radios with such capabilities, or are sufficiently well documented publicly to bastardize them for this purpose.
In the first case, anybody else on the bus will be totally unimpacted by the DoS exploit.
In the second case, some nearby (within maybe 2 to 5 meters) people might be effected, but only if th
The idea is not to expose kids to technology. They are surrounded by it already. They can't help but be "exposed."
The idea is to expose technology to the kids. Far too much of modern technology comes with the implied "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!", and not nearly enough "oh, you like the glowing green head projector? Here's how to make him have boobies on his head and a snidley whiplash mustache! And this button makes him sound like a chipmunk! Would you like your own big green glowing head projector? Awesome! Here's how I made mine!"
There is far too much compartmentalization in modern society, and due to that, there is a very large demographic that relies on children not being more savvy than them with tech. This is mostly in educational and political circles. This reliance makes a conflict of interest when it comes to tech; they teach just enough to use, but not enough to comprehend and adapt the tech. (They call this a wide variety of things, but the most common is "abuse" of the technology, or vandalism.)
Maker scouts would focus on kids that have already been exposed to the tech, and want to learn more. It would actively encourage novel applications of technology, and the creation of disruptive appliances. In short, it would be every technology teacher's nightmare come true, where the kids learn dangerous things like assembler, kernel hacking, lowlevel electronics and computer logic, and graduate from drawing penises on the lab computers, to creating network worms that do it for them.
I would really love to see something like this, but I realize that most people would consider this on par with having a terrorist training camp for cyber terrorists.
The idea is exactly the opposite though. Terror comes from ignorance, and learned helplessness more often than not. This would seek to break that trend. The kids that come out would know what real cyberwarfare is, and laugh at the antics paraded around on the news, like many of us do.
The problem is with the way this particular warp drive operates.
It isn't the intersellar medium that produces the energy wave. It is the collateral effect of the warp field itself.
More specifically, the edge of the warp bubble acts like an event horizon, and the radiation is hawking radiation that forms from virtual particles getting caught in it, and being made real.
While the drive is "on", these particles are stuck to the event horizon of the warp bubble. They never get anywhere close to the ship, and as such never get funneled into any collector orifice.
The longer the warp bubble is on, the more virtual particles will get caught, the bigger the blast wave when the bubble pops.
One potential solution is a specially made "harbor" fascility that is designed for this very thing, so that ships arriving drop out of warp (and immediately stop. That's the beauty of this hypothetical warp drive), puke out the event shock, which is collected by the harbor commission's harbor ship, and then the ship takes off using conventional drive to its habitated destination.
Yes. But it also shows a trend toward medical dependency.
If people who would die and or be infertile without treatment are given said treatment, and this is considered normal, they will pass on this dependency. As such, the percentage of the population that carries the defect will amplify over time.
It might be balanced out against social stigmas, (people find the idea of a mate that is wholly dependent upon medicine for survival to be undesirable, for instance), but this is potentially eroded by modern trends in western culture, that attempt to paint the disabled or otherwise "undesirable" (for whatever reason. Desirability of a mate is a personal decision) in a more favorable light to discourage cultural discrimination. As such, clearly deleterious genes, such as for type1 diabetes, or male infertility, can be passed on, and "normalized" via medical practices coupled with social progressivism.
(Note: I am not suggesting that such progressivism is wholly bad. I am merely mindful of side effects that aren't intended.)
In a few thousand years, we might all be test tube babies because of this ubiqutious punctuation of natural selection.
The argument I was making was that "infertility" caused by deleterious mutations on the non-redundant Y chromosome is not a sufficient evolutionary hurdle. We have already routinely begun helping those defective genes propogate within the genepool, amplifying their prevelence above what it would have otherwise been.
In doing so, we have removed the selection force which keeps only healthy copies of that chromosome around.
I would contest this, since we are meddling with natural selection with infertility treatments.
Specifically, the genes on the y chromosome are responsible for healthy sperm and androgen production. Many forms of male infertility are related to malformed sperm, such as sperm with incomplete or otherwise defective acrosomes, tail defects, etc. These can be environmentally caused (had a high fever at one point, or some other non-genetic cause), or they can be genetically caused.
Modern assisted reproduction techniques involve the assisted impregnation of an ovum with such a defective sperm using a pipette, and a mild electric shock, followed by ivf.
The treatment does not weed out genetic causes for the defect, which enables the defect to be passed to offspring, negating the protection that natural selection provides.
For 10k, they could splurge on a USB hardware key with a TPM inside. That's what MasterCAM does.
Using a sufficiently aggressive UUID with a private key to decrypt part of the executable at runtime would put the kabosh on a lot of copying and cracking attempts.
That makes an unfortunate presumption that the energy must come from compustion, and not some other source.
Energy comes in more forms than black gold my friend. The problem is getting people to stop measuring energy in "equivalent barrels of oil". Energy is better measured in units designed for it, like joules.
When you agnosticize the unit, and permit non-oil energy sources for the reaction, and further eliminate the notion of creating the oil for the purposes of combustion (the whole idea is to stop doing that!) Then the real baseline costs of synthetic synthesis of plastics and solvents from vegetable oils becomes clear.
As long as you use self-refferential units, and purposefully confuse the issue by using them, any amount of non-fossil fuel energy in the supply chain will produce lopsided numbers.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that there are 50,000 joules of energy in 1 gal of an unspecified refined petrolium fuel. There are 55gal of this in a standard chemical barrel. We'll set this as the "oil equivilent" unit for energy.
(2,750,000 joules per barrel. These figures do not correspond to a real fuel oil. They are ficticious.)
Let's say it takes the stated 10x energy to refine a vegetable oil into said fuel oil. This means we need 27,500,000 joules of energy to accomplish this task.
So, we realize "we will never be able to continue with combustion energy with these figures! We *must* abandon combustion as the energy source!"
We still want to make the 55gal of fuel oil, because it has value as more than just fuel. We use it to make life saving plastics, and durable synthetic textiles. Having exhausted natural petrolium, we have no choice but to make it this way.
Sunlight on earth has an energy density of 1350W/M^2. ((1350)(joules/sec)/(M^2))
This means that with 100% efficiency (a pipedream!), you need only approx 6 square meters and 1 hour of time to produce the "equivilent" of 550 gallons of fuel oil energy needed for the synthesis.
The most efficient cells are closer to 30%, and consumer grade is closer to 10% efficient. This means we need 10x as much collection surface to get the required energy. So, 60 square meters, over 1 hour.
When we work this into the equasion, we have gotten 10x the energy of the oil without any form of combustion. However, because we are measuring in "barrels of oil equivilent", we have the impossible situation of 10x the energy "created", being "burned" to perform that creation. This is nonsense, since no fuel at all was burned (unless you count solar mass as fuel, but that's just being pedantic.) This why we should measure as joules to begin with, and not obfuscate the issue.
"But producing only 550gal equivilent of energy in an hour, of which only 6 to 8 hours of the day are useful, does not yeild enough energy/M^2 density to power our civilization!"
No shit sherlock. You need neuclear for that! Modern reactors (news flash, fukushima is *not* a modern design!) Are able to reprocess their waste products many times over, and produce very little high level waste. They have energy densities that make fossil fules look quaint, and can use fairly common isotopes as fuels. It is the only stopgap energy that is viable as a bandaid while we research fusion that can satisfy the immediate power needs.
Remember, we are creating the 55gals of oil as a feedstock for creating plastics. *not as fuel*.
"What about my car!? Chemical batteries don't appear plausible enough to ever have densities rivaling fossil fuels! What will I put in my vehicle!? I can't drive to work with an extension cord behind me!"
Quite right. But you know what? There are several "reasonably safe" radio isotopes that you can built a very high energy primary atomic battery out of. Carbon 14 for instance... or, if you want a refuelable powercell, liquid tritium.
Those are both beta emitters that release electrons as the decay particles. Integrating them into a high temperature, high bandgap semiconductor with ad
No.. but it does somewhat mention the "japanese method"
http://mobile.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+36:12&version=KJV
Yummy!
Redundant infrastructure would definately pull the teeth on the netneutrality issue, and would effectively drown the "bandwidth hogs!" Issue too.
Single runs might be easier for civil planners to manage, but they get constipated the way water and sewerlines do when too many people use them, and once the area is developed, good luck getting the trenchers and backehoes in to replace/upgrade the pipe.
Allowing multiple companies to lay lines would solve a whole lot of problems.
I wonder how many chairs were thrown in/at financial, in order to ship the money...
Surely marketing and their PR drones would have had a coniption fit about the public backlash should such memos get out? Or, did MS flex its muscles with the MSNBC affiliation to suppress news of the memo?
I still want a chaircount though.
Oh, I agree. If the phone company says the person lives there (barring the special case where the debt is also to the phone company.. more on that later) then that constitutes probable cause that the person is lying.
*it is possible that the debtor has claimed a false name and identity to activate service at their real address via identity fraud, such as with stolen identity information from the internet. In this case, the phone company's records will list the identity fraud victim as the debtor. This is likely from the fraud victim being charged for services they did not receive, and disputing the bill. This should stand out plainly when the address being serviced is very distant from the address of the person being billed. As such, this is a special case where the phone company's records can clearly be in error. My friend's family's agency collects utility bills for the local utilities, and this circumstance has cropped up a few times.
However, when a person that is not listed by the phone company as being the debtor who has had their number randomly belted out by a repeat offender to enable service (it isn't hard to fabricate a "valid" local number), and tells you that they do not know the debtor, and that they don't live there, you should listen to them.
I understand that this can create an intractable situation, especially with experienced repeat debtors, who are very careful to not expose their real telephone and home address, and conduct all their debts under unregistered aliases. This creates a situation, where excepting a slipup on their part, your only lead is the fraudulent telephone number. While I understand how frustrating that I, you are not authorised to keep harassing the victim of the fraud insisting to speak with the debtor. The victim does not have that information, did not create the debt, and would very much like for you to stop calling them. This is when you start making calls to other agencies to look for a slipup. (Or dig through the mountainous file cabinet, in the case of my collections friends. Some debtors have aggregate files that weigh several pounds with multiple aliases.)
The problem I have with many telephone debt collection agencies is that they are harrasing. There *are* federal and state laws againsr harrassing collections practices, which clearly spell out what is and is not harrassment.
I am not going to accuse you or your employing agency of any of these following practices. I am merely pointing out that many collectors do these things as standard operating practise, banking on the fact that few debtors know their rights under the law.
1) calling outside of business hours, or to a number other than a personal residence or private cellphone. No calling at work.
2) calling after being informed to stop calling, and for all debt collection activity to be done by authorized us mail only. (If told to discontinue telephone negotiations, you must comply, and must do in person or by mail negotiations. This is a federal law. Failure to comply is punishable by fines on a per call basis.)
3) falsely claiming to have a court case ready/threatening suit. (You must be able to provide the name and contact information of your prosecutorial legal counsel and the case number on demand. Failure to do so constitutes a breach of this federal statute)
4) claiming a debt that is not verifiably owned.
5) cashing a payment cheque, then failing to credit the balance. (I have seen this happen many times.)
6)harrassing people other than the debtors, such as family members.
7)repeatedly calling a number that is not for the debtor, demanding to speak to the debtor. (People give a false number frequently, especially with repeat debtors. When the person on the other end informs you that the debtor does not live there, you are not authorised to continue calling just because you think the person you spoke with is lying.)
8) become verbally abusive or threatening.
I am best friends with somebody who's family owns a collections agency, (who keeps paper records! Its crazy!) And have had several lengthly discussions about proper calling practices. I don't think collections is an evil or unnecessary vocation. However, there are plenty of predatory collections agencies out there.
I don't want to name any directly. (They get bitchy about such accusations.) However, there exists a special class of debtor that purposefully creates debts to collect fines from collections agencies via the consumer protection statutes in their areas. These people could not stay in that business if the violation of the statutes were not endemic and profuse.
It is this abusive behavior from collections agencies which gives them a bad name.
Agreed, but there would be far fewer of them. That's the deal.
Get busted for posession of pot? 1) go to jail, or 2) get drug counselling and rehab. (Possibly both.)
If pot were not illegal, then people would 1) not be arrested for posession, and 2) would not be compelled to go to a rehab clinic.
Combined, this results in far lower demand for law enforcement and encarceration facilities, and a fae lower demand for drug treatment services.
Decriminalizing even some of the more popular and less dangerous drugs would radically reduce the necessity for a whole host of government workers (or government sanctioned workers) related to drug law enforcement and treatment.
That's what I was getting at. The DEA protects those interests, not society's in general, since as you pointed out, even with complete decriminalization there will still be drug treatment centers and people trying to get clean. (The dea does not effectively reduce the number of addicts, it only increases the socioeconomic burden of being one, and creates jobs that have no businss being created to manage a problem that the enforcement itself helps create.)
The DEA is not a vitally important regulatory agency, unless you happen to work in pharmecuticals, law enforcement, drug counselling/rehab, or government itself.
The vast majority of people in the US do not fall into any of those categories, so saying the DEA is vitally important is untrue in the vast majority of individual circumstances.
The country would be much better off without it, and without the "war on drugs" nonsense that spawned it.
Clearly you are approaching this dilema from a faulted pretext: that the DEA is supposed to be doing something good for YOU.
Who benefits from trying to force people to stop using drugs, and for the ones that persist, who benefits from having addicts shooting up draino based simulants?
Here is who I see benefitting from these trends:
1) corporate america. If drug use is prohibited, they have a legal ability to fire you, which allows them to shut people out of the hiring process that they find undesirable. If drug use was not illegal, fireing the amphetamine user becomes much more difficult. (Look at the handwrangling that HR drones do when you ask them about company policies concerning people on prescription amphetamines.)
2) "aid" and "support" federal agencies, and federally assisted charities. A friend of mine who works for a city govt recently told me a wild yarn about the recent tent cities with the occupy movement, and private citizens giving out charitable aid to the tent residents. He told me that this jeapordized the "necessity" of the local civic aid orgs, who organized to have the tent cities removed because of the unplanned charitable activity. It doesn't take a very far stretch of thought to see how state funded drug rehab clinics and other "vital" infrastructure benefits from having a steady stream of patients to "treat".
3) federal regulators, who benefit by being given a job to create this mess.
4) the pharmecutical companies, who exploit the production shortfall to drive demand and with it a higher sustained price.
The DEA, and a shocking number of other federal regulators, do not regulate for YOUR benefit.
I make below median income for my area, and way below standard pay for my vocation (quality engineer.) However, my employer treats me to some smexxy digs at work, which rival or surpass the high paid positions at the big boys.
I value the stability of my lower paying job, and coupled with the smexxy digs, I'm not terribly interested in alternative employment at the moment.
That said, a person bucking rivets at boeing gets paid on average 33% more than I do, drives 2 cars, and lives in a house valued over 100k. (In terms of local economy, that's a 4 bed, 2 bath, large kitchen, large livingroom single family home. Doctors and lawyers live in 250k homes)
I am single. I have absolutely no interest whatsoever in a domestic partner of any sex. I am 30. If I was going to have a biological imperative, it would have happened by now, seeing as I am male, and testosterone only decreases after 30. I am therefor content to live in a 25k home. The lower monthly payment let's me derive more pleasure from my paycheck.
Most people in my wage bracket (30-35k) are considered impoverished, or borderline impoverished. The people I work with make comparable pay, but consider me to be wealthy. This is not the case, per se.
The big differences between myself and the machinists on the floor (discounting work conditions) is that 1) most of them have either a wife and kids, or pay alimony/child support. And 2) support a large number of expensive and deleterious habits, such as smoking and drinking.
If I engaged in/were subject to those 2 things, I would certainly not be as happily well off as I currently am.
I recognize that I am an anomalous minority, (a man with no libido, and who hasn't had a libido ever, and as such has no child support or significant other to support) And as such do not judge others by myself. I use myself as a bounding element on the statistic only. (I live modestly well, but not opulently.) The vast median of people working in small machine shops in my area are boarderline impoverished, and many get government support of one kind or another. However, even in this impoverished condition they are much better off than most of their chinese counterparts.
The people working for the big boys live very nicely, and routinely send their children to college. In terms of chinese analogs, these people would be among the wealthy, and certainly wouldn't be working at foxconn as an assembly worker. Perhaps as a midgrade pencil pusher.
Depending on how you bound "manufacturing worker", and how the loal economy is structured (I couldn't afford food and a dumpster to sleep in, let alone personal luxuries if I lived in california with my paygrade, for example.), it can mean vastly different things.
Some manufacturing workers do indeed live reasonably glamorous lives. Opulently so, compared to you median chinese laborer.
Please be more specific in your assessments.
I agree. When walmart has more gdp than half of europe, there is more than just a problem. There is a big fucking problem.
I agree on the health and safety side too. With the way things are going, it is only a matter of time.
Oh, I know all about the less scrupulous factory environments that are in the US. (I work in aerospace, and outside of the big boys' shops, things get dirty indeed.)
My employer does a fairly good job about insisting things be kept as clean and neat as possible, and that hazardous substances be treated properly, but I have seen and heard of.things even locally that would make heads turn here on slashdot. For instance, one of the companies my mom worked at in the 70s was being cheap and issued latex gloves instead of nitrile for working in MEK. My mom got to experience the joys of aaccute keytone poisoning, but her employer did nothing about it, and refused to acknowledge culpability... until after the statute of limitations ran out, then they came clean about knowing exactly what the signs and sympthoms of overexposure were. (Mom was a dead ringer.)
Another horror story I have heard is from a plastics and composite materials fab plant that works with graphite fiber prepreg and fiberboard. They had workers using power sanders on graphite composite inside an enclosed assemblage WITHOUT forced air full body bunny-suits, as OSHA requires. They were given simple dust masks instead, and from the accounts I have heard repeated by multiple unrelated sources, people routinely left that line covered in black powder from head to toe daily. Carbon fiber composite is a nanomaterial. People were inhaling dangerous particulates as if it were an ordinary and benign dust (if there even is such a thing).
My brother has accute chromium poisoning from spraying hexavalent chromium primer with improper safety equipment issued by his employer.
(Names of companies redacted to protect the guilty, as I don't relish the thought of a libel suit.)
The posters mentioning that maintaining osha practices and keeping workers healthy and safe as the reasons for western made products being so expensive is absolutely dead on. The weaker/smaller companies around my area often cheese on "strict" adherence to health and safety regs to compete against bigger shops. If those regs were not tied to outrageous fines, I can garantee that those shops would not comply at all, and that the big shops would not be far behind.
Osha and niosh keep what manufacturing jobs we do still have from entering a phyrric race to the bottom to compete with chinese labor. Even lacklustre enforcement of health and safety is vastly superior to *NO* enforcement of health and safety.
Foxconn probably does offer better safety and living conditions than other, less well known factory cities, but only because it has a high profile customer that it desperately wants to keep, and has been put on the spot for the comparatively poor conditions (look, a factory is a factory, and even a super clean one is not a good place to live in) by western standards. It has powerful "court of public opinion" pressures to offer better (if not immaculate by chinese standards) health, safety, and living conditions. If it didn't, it would lose the business of those very important customers.
Personally, I am opposed to the very idea of "company towns". I would rather that foxconn simply employ the thousands of people, and let them buy homes or rent apartments in the host city with a proper city government, even if it was a corrupt communist one, than run the whole show itself. The lack of official oversight and employee freedom/power to "bargain" with their employer, instead of bowing and being thankful for what is given, is a considerable red flag in my mind, and I don't mean that politically. I suspect that it is this lack of power to bargain that is the big cause of foxconn's suicides.
In western cultures, a huge plethora of supporting industries will gather around a major one. Take for instance, the situation in wichita ks, where I work.
We have amost all the big names in town. A learjet, a boeing/spirit, 2 cessna plants, a hawker beech, and a bombardier. In addition to those, we have an uncountable number of small machine and composite fab com
Voice recognition in automated help/answering systems predates apple's siri. I distinctly remember calling the ATT support line for my area, and being greeted by a female robot that wanted me to speak aloud my account number. This was sometime around 2005.
Primitive, yes, but predates their patent.
Dragon naturally speaking has it beat, since the speech recognition prototype algorithms used were initially taken to market in 1982.
http://atwiki.assistivetech.net/index.php/Dragon_NaturallySpeaking
I am fairly certain that the iphone wasn't even a wetdream for apple's favorite psychopath, the venerable Mr. Jobs, when this technology hit the scene. That the success of this technology ins successive years would be a logical progression for user interactions is highly obvious, and implementation on a handset engineered to be a general purpose computing environment is not noteworthy from a technological viewpoint, as it is precisely the kind of environment that the inventors of the algorithm tested their implementations on.
This patent should not have been granted to apple.
I would say that his advice applies in some circumstances, and not in others.
For instance, I refuse to play a "serious" game that doesn't have a compelling story. I avoid FPS for that reason, for the most part.
Better suggestion: don't overspecialize. Don't overexert one part of the game's development to permit somebody on the team to produce "their opus".
A good game is engrossing, and a good story helps with that. A good game is enjoyable, and good gameplay helps with that. Sacrificing one for the other does not improve the final product. If you focus too much on story, and your gameplay sucks, people will hate it. If you focus on gameplay and ship a terrible story, people will only play the multiplayer or freeplay modes.
Balance the work, and make a "good" story with "good" gameplay. Don't fixate on "epic story" or "rivetting gameplay", at the expense of the other. Similarly, don't forcefeed the player wasteful eyecandy. If you do, you end up making "the phantom menace: the game!", and people will hate it.
"Good" and "balanced" is the key.
So, because people inherit a family farm (news flash, nobody but millionares can afford to straight up buy farmland these days. Farmers are farming land an ancestor homesteaded over a hundred years ago.), and choose to keep that property and grow food, they are willfullu choosing to live in the dark ages?
That's what you are basically saying.
(Cough)
[I grew up in an agrarian environment]
Firstly: while the road grader is paid by the state taxroll, he very rarely, if ever, shows up. More often than not, the farmers themselves put a blade on their tractors and grade the road themselves. The state does supply fesh gravel every 10 years or so, but the roadbeds would have become unservicable years before then were it not for self-performed maintenance. Last I checked, city people weren't expected to repair potholes with fresh asphalt, or to steamroll it flat themselves.
Farm subsidies:
There is debate here. On one hand, if the property taxes on agrcultural properties and assets were not so high, these subsidies would probably not be needed at all. On the other, many people who are on the more wealthy side could dodge paying their fair tax burden by buying agricultural property and equipment and just sitting on it for the tax breaks.
Farmers, while owning large chunks of expensive property and equipment, are not all that wealthy when all the expenses add up. They aren't multimillionaire tycoons. Large sums of money pass through their hands, yes, but the vast majority of it goes toward fuel, fertilizer, seed, and equipment costs. Not a whole lot stays in the farmer's hands after a good harvest. (Exceptions being cattle with some of the more dubious ranching practices in effect, such as those used by factory ranchers.) The federal government has a vested interest in making sure its citizens have enough food to eat. That is why they subsidize the actual crops themselves. A bad year or two without that assistance, coupled with high property and equipment taxes, and you end up with farmers going bankrupt, and being unable to farm anymore. I've seen it first hand.
Now then.. tell me, what do you think the taxes they pay on property and equipment go for? Roads in the rural areas they live in, or maintenance of major paved highways? (Which are supposed to be paid for by the fuel tax anyway.)
Tell me again how unfair the farm subsidies are. I dare you. Think about it next time you buy a loaf of bread, or a pound of hamburger.
I was not kidding around with hyperbole on the fire prevention statement. I've put out plenty of fires with a burlap sack. Especially around the 4th, when city people wanting to escape city fire ordinances on "the good stuff" drive out into the county and fire them off on the side of the road, or illegally at the lake. Most of the time there is a big push to get the wheat in before the 4th for this very reason, but the weather is not always cooperative.
Really, it's been my experience that city people are selfish, spoiled, trashy people. They drive out into the county with old appliances and furniture and dump it in overflow ditches, on secluded roadsides, and treerows, just to avoid paying the trashman afew bills to haul it off and dispose of it properly. What, do they think stainless steel simply decomposes in a few weeks or something? Or is more "I don't care about those farmers, I don't want to pay 200$ to dispose of it!" Instead? In addition to that, and starting fires on the 4th, you have city kids and their dumbshit parents getting them RTVs that they can't ride in the city. So, they plan a weekend outing to go ride them all over a freshly plowed (and probably seeded) field. They destroy literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in investments for 5 hours of fun, and think nothing of it. And then you have the ever-present feral animal problem, where that "cute little pitbull puppy" grows up and isn't so cute with their 3 year old child anymore. Do they take it to the humane society? Oh fuck no. They think they are being more kind to the animal by dropping it out in the boonies and driving off and leaving it, where it slowly starves, goes stark raving mad, and ends up killing livestock and being shot for it.
Here's a heads up: cleaning up after your asses costs farmers and their families money and time. Then you bastards turn around and tell us all how greedy we are when we
You would be surprised to find that many of the areas that the telecoms claim to service with dsl, are not in fact, actually servicable by dsl.
Take for instace: a quaint little town just outside wichita. "Peck Ks".
Recently pushed into prominence by being about 10 miles from a newly built casino. (Northstar.) This town doesn't even have a gas station. It has crappy 1950s federally mandated telephone and powerlines that are unreliable. Residents have to use on-air televison, or satelite.
Internet is either horrible dialup at 28.8 speeds on a good day, with continual disconnects from the shitty lines, or, 50$/mo (w/o bundling) satelite, with data caps, or 2g verizon coverage.
I know, because my mother lives there.
Oh, ATT claims that dsl is available... until you actually call
and ask.
It is that way over most of the state, in fact.
You aparently are not realizing the number of farmers being serviced, nor are you comprehending that large civic centers with the necessary trunk lines are fairly uniformly dotted inside such agrarian areas.
Also, I am not suggesting that the mesh network supply a t1 speed connection for all users either. It only needs to provide better than 28.8kbps dialup. (Bcause that is all you can squeeze out of the horrifically neglected lines that were only installed because of a 1950s federal law requiring them.)
Latency would be bad. Yes. It has to hop through tree clutter between god knows how many repeaters to get to the trunk. But if it is 1) faster than 28.8kbps, and 2)costs approx 10$/mo or less, aggregated between subsribers, it will be a hit. That is how fucking badly people demand internet out there.
The problem with the forcing, is the latter option you mention. The telecoms are focusing on local maxima, and the initial costs of implementing a suitable level of service does not have a comparable RoI when viewed against a high density city.
Many major metro areas in the intended coverage zones are completely surrounded by agrarian farmers. Take for instance, oklahoma city OK, wichita KS, Topeka KS, Hutchinson KS, etc.
Said dedicated fiber trunks would at most 5 to 10 miles to the city edge, where they interface with the mesh network.
The cost for those pipes will indeed be quite sizable, and out of the reach of the farmers. However, here is how it SHOULD be viewed:
Either they open and maintain those short trunks, well inside the urban coverage areas, *OR* they can expect another 1950s telephone access bill to pass, and they can expect to lay thousands of miles of cable instead.
There are litterally thousands of farmers in the mesh network area. Aggregated over that pool, the 250k/yr cost of a trunk line can easily come into the 10-15$/mo range, especially since you are not paying to service the mesh.
The real problem will be keeping the local state and city governments (especially city!) From trying to treat the license fees from the mesh's operation as a fungible income source.
Oh yes.. the burden of maintaining a single mile of dedicated fiber. Oh, its so terrible!
If you are so concerned about it, the fed bill to enact the "forcing" can simply set limits on how much the isps charge per megabyte transerred, (we are talking wired data on their network. The mesh network is not theirs.) Institutes rules that state goverments have to follow to pay for the service (a 1$/mo bond issue would easily pass for something as highly demanded as internet access.) And which forces the telecoms to accept the peering arrangement.
The state then levies a simple bond tax on the operation of the mesh repeater per farmer. That money goes directly to reimburse the upstream isp.
Boom. No spoiled, bratty city people have to pay a fucking dime.