Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All
Okay, two things: First, threatening programmers never work. Management's been trying that for years. Second -- don't you mean 'kill -9' them all, or maybe demalloc(), or cast them to void*, or one of a dozen other witty things you could do besides the mundane answer of threatening stabby bits on them because you have a case of intellectual snobbery?
Our Apple Certified Genius Ninjas have your IP address and are on their way over to assist.
Ignoring the fact that "apple certified genius" is an oxymoron, I don't see how sending ninjas to my door is going to help them any: Many computer enthusiasts also have a healthy collection of guns. But then, that's Apple for you -- never doing the market research...
This just in: Software that requires contacting a remote server doesn't work when the remote server suffers a total existance failure. Up next: People die when they're killed.
What expectation of privacy does one reasonably have for information they have shared publicly?
That question is improperly phrased -- of course, nobody would have an expectation of privacy when the information was intentionally and willfully shared with the world. It's like setting 0644 permissions: Anyone with access can see it. The problem is, a lot of people seem to think that what's 0640 is really 0644, to frame it in a way slashdot readers can understand.
When I post something on Facebook as an average user, my expectation is that the information posted there is only visible to people I have approved as a friend. In this regard, the information is private: Only those people should be able to see what I post, my pictures, etc. The only thing most people want available to the world at large is their name, picture, and e-mail so other people they may have known can find them. Unfortunately, much more than that is usually available -- and sometimes the re-release of that information isn't even within their control. The company can also access that information, aggregate it, and re-sell it to a third party. People don't expect that, but it's right there in the fine print of they care to look.
In an age where everything you install pops up several warning boxes, license agreements, etc., there's a real loss of impact. So you either have users afraid to do anything with their computers out of fear of breaking it, or users who disregard all warnings because there's so many and they've tuned it out. Privacy notices and the like are the same way.
It's like driving without your seatbelt -- you can do it for years and years and never think anything of it... Until the moment before impact when you realize how stupid it was to have ignored it up until now. Privacy is like this too -- nobody pays attention until something surfaces that has a real, tangible impact on their lives. Like being outed to your family because your netflix queue data was shared in some contest and was insufficiently anonymized. Or an employer asking about those photos some guy posted of you at that party where everyone else was drinking. Nobody, security expert or joe average, sees these kinds of things happen until they hit you right in the face. By then, it's too late. But what's the alternative? Exclude yourself from society -- live under a rock? Never post anything online, never buy anything online, just passively watch it like TV behind layers of anonymization proxies?
The problem is that people's "reasonable expectation" is that they won't be hurt -- and that they're in control. Neither of those things are true. What would you have them do? Live under a rock... or twist in the wind, hopeful that the next privacy catastrophe happens to somebody else, hiding behind statistical probabilities?
I'll assume you have a better argument which doesn't build upon so much shifting semantical sand, but were rushed and didn't have a chance to elaborate fully?
Sorry, I got nothin'. Running these websites isn't free, and once they get big and popular (which increases their usefulness), some company swoops in and turns it into a profit center. In the process, anything that doesn't have a value (your privacy, artistic merit, etc.) is destroyed. This model epitomizes the history of the internet at both the micro and macro level -- all this wonderful diversity and innovation eventually reduces to profit-oriented behavior. The thing that gives the internet its strength -- lack of a central governing authority, is also its biggest weakness because it results in lowest-common denominator value systems becoming the dominant force.
There isn't really an ethical mandate to prevent this behavior, and certainly not a legal one. It's hard to argue for privacy rights because it is a complex issue; It is difficult to come up with simple arguments, and evoke an emotional response from people. As a result, while everyone agrees privacy rights should exist, nobody can define them or present a unified front in advocating them -- what little effort is directed towards the problem is entirely and swiftly dissipated by economic considerations.
I have no easy answers -- I just have a strong feeling that this behavior should be opposed. That feeling is based on my life experience that unbridled economic exploitation results in the destruction of public resources. In this case, the internet is the public resource.
Add friends by brute force, find randomers, try to add a bunch of their friends, move on to the next randomer and do the same thing. A significant number will accept your request? Why? because most people on those sites are attention seeking whores.
So, what you're saying is... do online what stuck-up cheerleader types have been doing for years: Flirt with everyone, lie, cheat, steal, and sleep your way to the top without ever revealing just how shallow you are. GOD I LOVE HUMANITY RIGHT NOW! mutter...mutter...stab.
Theft is clearly defined in law. Privacy invasion's definition hinges upon "reasonableness" in many places.
If we're going to say that theft of a person's physical property and theft of a person's intellectual property are equivalent (as the law leans towards), then it's no small leap to say a person's privacy is nothing more than a license to that intellectual property. And as such, entitled to the same protections as physical property. Thus, theft and privacy violations are roughly equivalent.
If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors steal cars, so it's okay if I steal cars too," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?!
The difference here is that we're giving this information to people by choice -- people we know. Our friends, family, and acquaintances. But the only way to do that is to have a central authority to proxy that exchange. The problem is that this central authority abuses its power and -- even worse -- that the government wants its hands in everything as well. It should require a warrant because although a billion billion people might have access to the data, that doesn't mean you gave permission to the next guy.
How f***ing hard is it to understand this? This isn't about privacy -- this is about permissions and how we construct social spaces online. The government's got no right installing bugs in my house without a warrant, so why the hell should it be any different in a digital space than in a physical one?
Answer: Because they're taking advantage of the fact that it can't be seen and nobody understands how it works. It's that simple. No complex intellectual arguments required -- they're doing it because nobody's going to stop them.
I've posted most of this before on slashdot; This is just a cleanup of previous posts -- it has details of why the ACTA is secret.
A Private War
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.
An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn't matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that's exactly what they're doing.
What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don't really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.
Culture Connection
Just as we have physical connections to each other, we now have digital connections to one another. These connections actively resist attempts at control because it impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. People naturally seek the methods which give them the greatest freedom to express themselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness. Copyright law has been twisted to serve as a bulwark against the logical result of increasing social interconnectedness between people and computers: Access an ever-increasing amount of humanity's history, knowledge, and culture. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. It's how, when, and where it fails that will decide the fate of economies worldwide.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. And every engine, be it physical or social, functions because an energy imbalance exists and by moving energy from one potential to another, we can skim some off to do useful work. Laws work the same way -- by creating artificial differences between groups of people, society produces goods and services. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. It's not a comfor
Why not use the sewers? They're supposed to be enclosed anyway -- they're already pretty hot, and if we built them correctly, we could compress, burn, and expel the gas -- which would maybe produce more energy and utilize existing infrastructure than this idea.
Why is 3D somehow better? They cause eye strain, and the average house watches how many hours of TV a week? This might not just be a bad marketing gimmick -- it could actually be a public health hazard.
I can only assume -- or hope, that the data has been sanitized before release so that the image quality has been significantly degraded to not reveal the full capabilities of said satellites. The capabilities of those satellites are a closely-guarded national secret, and for good reason.
decoding the broadcast ATSC signal takes a rather beefy CPU, so I wonder if decoding it (even in hardware) might not consume a lot of power for a cellphone.
Mobile reception of ATSC signals is difficult because of the larger antenna size required and because phase shifting of the signal and such can corrupt it, even at vehicle speeds. The only solution that makes sense is multicast OTA by the mobile provider. 288x352 @ 25 FPS, with a mono 22Khz audio can be reproduced at a decent quality at maybe 100KB/s, so 20 channels of broadcast TV on a mobile link would consume maybe 2MB/s, which is relatively low.
Why not? We already have hundreds of channels of "high def" cable TV that's usually 480p and so compressed that it looks like hammered sh**. It'll probably look better on a cell phone where fine detail can't be picked up.
In light of that, Kerr asks, is the Supreme Court's ruling still sound?"
Anything reasonably available to you should be available to the police. Thermal imaging scanners, however cheap they become, will never be a commonly available item. Therefore, a warrant should be required because what they're looking for is not in plain sight. Think of telescoping lens and using infra-red to see through drapes to spy on people having sex. In this case, though the technology is readily available, the average person wouldn't do this. There is therefore a reasonable expectation of privacy that people aren't doing this for lawful purposes. Having sex in front of the bay windows of your house, during the day, without pulling the drapes back -- a passerby could see that, and therefore the police can bust you for indecent exposure.
The ultimate issue for most people is privacy. I won't get into that here; I just know the phenomenology and implementation side. I will answer any questions now, so please respond.
Safety interlock design -- is the operator capable of increasing the radiation dosage, and if so what interlocks are present to prevent the person being scanned from being exposed multiple times or at a higher level than intended? The medical field learned from the therac-25 incident, but this is an airport scanner, not a medical scanner. Are the safety standards and review process comparable? How tamper-evident is the system, and what are the possible failure modes that could endanger the operator or person being scanned? Is there a sound or visual indicator the person being scanned can hear to indicate when it is in-use or when it is being activated multiple times?
I have read these scanners are capable of covertly scanning large crowds in real-time. That implies a steady-state emission -- while a single use of this device may be quite low, what are the risks to continual exposure over, say, a 45 minute timeframe? What about frequent travelers -- at what point are the safety margins compromised?
There are statements that the device will not be enabled for the transmission/storage of images -- but while those devices may be shipped with that disabled by default, it makes no sense from an employee-training perspective not to have records and auditing in place. Is it safe to assume this is just hyperbole to reassure people and the machines can be easily configured to do this?
Why millimeter wave over other frequencies in the RF spectrum? Is this just a shortcut from a computational standpoint, or is there an advantage here that can only be realized by this technology? Why not use IR scanners? They can see through many types of clothing as well: and have the added benefit of being a lot safer.
Ben Wallace, the Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, disagrees, saying that the technologies can't detect the kind of low-density explosive that the would-be terrorist tried to use on December 25th."
Since when has a technology that doesn't work deterred the US from using it anyway?:(
My company has spent the last year developing a framework for creating games on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. While we had originally planned to release the product to the public and take a percent of the revenue, we have realized that we can make more money by selling the application to a funded company entering the social gaming space.
Sell it to the spammers, marketing research firms, and anyone without a conscience because the only way someone's paying for your product is if they think they'll realize a return on their investment. And right now, advertisements or leeching away people's personal data is the only way to make money in the "social gaming space". People without a conscience also tend to be cheap-asses, so I wouldn't expect to get much.
Also, for the above-mentioned economic reasons, I don't use facebook or myspace applications and most of the "personal" data on my profiles are outright lies or fabrications.
Handing over information regarding a passenger's name, gender and birth-date may violate Canadian privacy laws
What's worse is that the TSA can't even get any of those three facts right in many cases.
Last Name: "Alphabetic, no numeric or special characters, except dash ( - ) and single quote ( ' ). Do not include suffixes (e.g., jr.). Truncate names longer than 35 characters to 35 characters". First Name: "Secure Flight allows first initial only;" otherwise, same as last name. Honorifics are not to be placed in the name. Middle Name: same as first name.
So if any of your three names doesn't perfectly fit this convention, you will be hit with a $100 Change fee, including if you don't have a middle name. This is particularily problematic for asian, greek, or many other nationalities whose names include special characters or when translated to english result in a name longer than 35 characters.
Gender: Once again, the TSA fails to account for any manner of diversity in the human population. Anyone who doesn't conform to the gender stereotype fixed to your official documents will be subject to additional (unwanted) attention. I wonder if they'll be offering sensitivity training for the crossdressers, transgendered, butch lesbians, and intersexed amongst us. And god help you if the Driver's Bureau screws up, or you live in a state that won't alter birth records after surgery, or one of a dozen other very real problems.
Birthdate: Did you know a lot of people who immigrate to this country don't know when they were born? In fact, in developing countries, it's quite common for people not to know their actual age. People assume a person's date of birth is a fixed thing -- how could you screw that up? And if you live in this country, you don't have to worry about this anyway. Well, remember that until the mid-90s the Social Security Administration wasn't so on about immediately registering newborns -- and did you know some people choose to have their kids at home? Some people don't get a birth certificate until they're five years old because parents just plain forget -- and for a variety of reasons, sometimes they fudge the actual date. Try getting this changed later -- it's fun.
In short, there's no real security being added here. All of it can be defeated quite easily in any event by putting a gun to the head of your wife, kid, or anything else you don't feel like losing. And as we make these security restrictions increasingly ethnocentric, the terrorists will adapt their strategies accordingly, because the payoff is so damn good! They sucked the US economy of trillions of dollars and all they had to do was crash four passenger planes. We offer the best "bang for the buck", literally and figuratively. It doesn't matter if they make it ten thousand times more difficult and expensive to pull another 9/11 job -- it's still an amazingly good deal for the terrorists.
I usually have a penis, unless I'm flying coach. I tried to get my cock through security once. I had to take the batteries out before they'd let it on the plane. They took my lube though... bastards.
Apparently yes. I should have figured it. Some things are apparently constant among all Americans, and finding the British accent desirable seems oddly to be one of them. And the Brits do have a flair for designing gorgeous cars.
If you want to see a lesbian cream herself over a car, two words: Shelby Cobra. Specifically, the 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby Cobra 500 (it's the one with the police interceptor block), with the "Le Mans" stripes and trim, preferably blue. I prefer the hard top, but a lot of girls prefer the converible. They are sad. And it needs to be the MT, not the AT -- because have an AT in that car should be a shooting offense.
Well, keep in mind that most of it is obviously written ABOUT and not FOR you. It's FOR men who apparently like to fantasize that all you gals just want one of us there.
What sexist crap! I want lesbian porn for lesbians. Call it something else, that name is OURS. How hard is that? Granted, a lesbian second date is a moving van but when we're not busy getting our hearts stuffed in a blender or looking sassy and edgy and then going home to our pets for loving (also known as being single), some porn would be nice. It doesn't exist, but there is gay porn -- as in, with dudes. It's great right up until the sexing starts! But then it goes from homoerotic to where's-that-snickers-i-left-in-the-fridge. The only time I've seen gay sex scenes done erotic and sensual is Queer as Folk. The american version, not the British one -- because Russell T. Davies fails at life (mutter, mutter, stab).
But the Top Gear angle intrigues me. I'm already looking at an offtopic mod, so what the hell, can you elaborate on that? It's OK if you'd rather not.
I really need to explain this? Sexy British cars and the accents.
I've been with a number of bi-curious women who are comfortable doing damn near anything with another female, "So long," as one of them put it, "there's a penis in the room."
That's why lesbians are so wary of "bi-curious"... they're heart breakers. so you want to experiment, fine... just own up to that ahead of time. Most don't, and that's why they have such a poor reputation amongst women. bi-curious guys, otoh -- in a word, Jack Harkness. *sighs*
Slashdot Mirror
Don't you mean free()?
Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All
Okay, two things: First, threatening programmers never work. Management's been trying that for years. Second -- don't you mean 'kill -9' them all, or maybe demalloc(), or cast them to void*, or one of a dozen other witty things you could do besides the mundane answer of threatening stabby bits on them because you have a case of intellectual snobbery?
Our Apple Certified Genius Ninjas have your IP address and are on their way over to assist.
Ignoring the fact that "apple certified genius" is an oxymoron, I don't see how sending ninjas to my door is going to help them any: Many computer enthusiasts also have a healthy collection of guns. But then, that's Apple for you -- never doing the market research...
This just in: Software that requires contacting a remote server doesn't work when the remote server suffers a total existance failure.
Up next: People die when they're killed.
What expectation of privacy does one reasonably have for information they have shared publicly?
That question is improperly phrased -- of course, nobody would have an expectation of privacy when the information was intentionally and willfully shared with the world. It's like setting 0644 permissions: Anyone with access can see it. The problem is, a lot of people seem to think that what's 0640 is really 0644, to frame it in a way slashdot readers can understand.
When I post something on Facebook as an average user, my expectation is that the information posted there is only visible to people I have approved as a friend. In this regard, the information is private: Only those people should be able to see what I post, my pictures, etc. The only thing most people want available to the world at large is their name, picture, and e-mail so other people they may have known can find them. Unfortunately, much more than that is usually available -- and sometimes the re-release of that information isn't even within their control. The company can also access that information, aggregate it, and re-sell it to a third party. People don't expect that, but it's right there in the fine print of they care to look.
In an age where everything you install pops up several warning boxes, license agreements, etc., there's a real loss of impact. So you either have users afraid to do anything with their computers out of fear of breaking it, or users who disregard all warnings because there's so many and they've tuned it out. Privacy notices and the like are the same way.
It's like driving without your seatbelt -- you can do it for years and years and never think anything of it... Until the moment before impact when you realize how stupid it was to have ignored it up until now. Privacy is like this too -- nobody pays attention until something surfaces that has a real, tangible impact on their lives. Like being outed to your family because your netflix queue data was shared in some contest and was insufficiently anonymized. Or an employer asking about those photos some guy posted of you at that party where everyone else was drinking. Nobody, security expert or joe average, sees these kinds of things happen until they hit you right in the face. By then, it's too late. But what's the alternative? Exclude yourself from society -- live under a rock? Never post anything online, never buy anything online, just passively watch it like TV behind layers of anonymization proxies?
The problem is that people's "reasonable expectation" is that they won't be hurt -- and that they're in control. Neither of those things are true. What would you have them do? Live under a rock... or twist in the wind, hopeful that the next privacy catastrophe happens to somebody else, hiding behind statistical probabilities?
I'll assume you have a better argument which doesn't build upon so much shifting semantical sand, but were rushed and didn't have a chance to elaborate fully?
Sorry, I got nothin'. Running these websites isn't free, and once they get big and popular (which increases their usefulness), some company swoops in and turns it into a profit center. In the process, anything that doesn't have a value (your privacy, artistic merit, etc.) is destroyed. This model epitomizes the history of the internet at both the micro and macro level -- all this wonderful diversity and innovation eventually reduces to profit-oriented behavior. The thing that gives the internet its strength -- lack of a central governing authority, is also its biggest weakness because it results in lowest-common denominator value systems becoming the dominant force.
There isn't really an ethical mandate to prevent this behavior, and certainly not a legal one. It's hard to argue for privacy rights because it is a complex issue; It is difficult to come up with simple arguments, and evoke an emotional response from people. As a result, while everyone agrees privacy rights should exist, nobody can define them or present a unified front in advocating them -- what little effort is directed towards the problem is entirely and swiftly dissipated by economic considerations.
I have no easy answers -- I just have a strong feeling that this behavior should be opposed. That feeling is based on my life experience that unbridled economic exploitation results in the destruction of public resources. In this case, the internet is the public resource.
Add friends by brute force, find randomers, try to add a bunch of their friends, move on to the next randomer and do the same thing. A significant number will accept your request? Why? because most people on those sites are attention seeking whores.
So, what you're saying is... do online what stuck-up cheerleader types have been doing for years: Flirt with everyone, lie, cheat, steal, and sleep your way to the top without ever revealing just how shallow you are. GOD I LOVE HUMANITY RIGHT NOW! mutter...mutter...stab.
Theft is clearly defined in law. Privacy invasion's definition hinges upon "reasonableness" in many places.
If we're going to say that theft of a person's physical property and theft of a person's intellectual property are equivalent (as the law leans towards), then it's no small leap to say a person's privacy is nothing more than a license to that intellectual property. And as such, entitled to the same protections as physical property. Thus, theft and privacy violations are roughly equivalent.
If this argument was "Well, all my neighbors steal cars, so it's okay if I steal cars too," people would immediately point out how broken that is. But when it's about privacy, suddenly that doesn't apply?
Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot?!
The difference here is that we're giving this information to people by choice -- people we know. Our friends, family, and acquaintances. But the only way to do that is to have a central authority to proxy that exchange. The problem is that this central authority abuses its power and -- even worse -- that the government wants its hands in everything as well. It should require a warrant because although a billion billion people might have access to the data, that doesn't mean you gave permission to the next guy.
How f***ing hard is it to understand this? This isn't about privacy -- this is about permissions and how we construct social spaces online. The government's got no right installing bugs in my house without a warrant, so why the hell should it be any different in a digital space than in a physical one?
Answer: Because they're taking advantage of the fact that it can't be seen and nobody understands how it works. It's that simple. No complex intellectual arguments required -- they're doing it because nobody's going to stop them.
I've posted most of this before on slashdot; This is just a cleanup of previous posts -- it has details of why the ACTA is secret.
A Private War
I used to read stuff like this and get upset. But then I realized that my entire generation knows it's baloney. They can't explain it intellectually. They have no real understanding of the subtleties of the law, or arguments about artists' rights or any of that. All they really understand is there is are large corporations charging private citizens tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, for downloading a few songs here and there. And it's intuitively obvious that it can't possibly be worth that.
An entire generation has disregarded copyright law. It doesn't matter whether copyright is useful or not anymore. They could release attack dogs and black helicopters and it wouldn't really change people's attitudes. It won't matter how many websites they shut down or how many lives they ruin, they've already lost the culture war because they pushed too hard and alienated people wholesale. The only thing these corporations can do now is shift the costs to the government and other corporations under color of law in a desperate bid for relevance. And that's exactly what they're doing.
What does this mean for the average person? It means that we google and float around to an ever-changing landscape of sites. We communicate by word of mouth via e-mail, instant messaging, and social networking sites where the latest fix of free movies, music, and games are. If you don't make enough money to participate in the artificial marketplace of entertainment goods -- you don't exclude yourself from it, you go to the grey market instead. All the technological, legal, and philosophical barriers in the world amount to nothing. There is a small core of people that understand the implications of what these interests are doing and continually search for ways to liberate their goods and services for "sale" on the grey market. It is (economically and politically) identical to the Prohibition except that instead of smuggling liquor we are smuggling digital files.
Billions have been spent combating a singularily simple idea that was spawned thirty years ago by a bunch of socially-inept disaffected teenagers working out of their garages: Information wants to be free. Except information has no wants -- it's the people who want to be free. And while we can change attitudes about smoking with aggressive media campaigns, or convince them to cast their votes for a certain candidate, selling people on goods and services they don't really need, what we cannot change is the foundations upon which a generation has built a new society out of.
Culture Connection
Just as we have physical connections to each other, we now have digital connections to one another. These connections actively resist attempts at control because it impedes the development and nature of the relationships we have with one another. People naturally seek the methods which give them the greatest freedom to express themselves to each other. That is a force of nature (ours, specifically) that has evolved out of our interconnectedness. Copyright law has been twisted to serve as a bulwark against the logical result of increasing social interconnectedness between people and computers: Access an ever-increasing amount of humanity's history, knowledge, and culture. Ultimately, this is a battle they cannot win -- they can only delay, building dams and locks to stem the tide, but they will fail. It's how, when, and where it fails that will decide the fate of economies worldwide.
Every law advantages one group while disadvantaging another. And every engine, be it physical or social, functions because an energy imbalance exists and by moving energy from one potential to another, we can skim some off to do useful work. Laws work the same way -- by creating artificial differences between groups of people, society produces goods and services. This is why we will always have new Prohibitions. It's not a comfor
Why not use the sewers? They're supposed to be enclosed anyway -- they're already pretty hot, and if we built them correctly, we could compress, burn, and expel the gas -- which would maybe produce more energy and utilize existing infrastructure than this idea.
Yay headaches? :(
Why is 3D somehow better? They cause eye strain, and the average house watches how many hours of TV a week? This might not just be a bad marketing gimmick -- it could actually be a public health hazard.
I can only assume -- or hope, that the data has been sanitized before release so that the image quality has been significantly degraded to not reveal the full capabilities of said satellites. The capabilities of those satellites are a closely-guarded national secret, and for good reason.
decoding the broadcast ATSC signal takes a rather beefy CPU, so I wonder if decoding it (even in hardware) might not consume a lot of power for a cellphone.
Mobile reception of ATSC signals is difficult because of the larger antenna size required and because phase shifting of the signal and such can corrupt it, even at vehicle speeds. The only solution that makes sense is multicast OTA by the mobile provider. 288x352 @ 25 FPS, with a mono 22Khz audio can be reproduced at a decent quality at maybe 100KB/s, so 20 channels of broadcast TV on a mobile link would consume maybe 2MB/s, which is relatively low.
Why not? We already have hundreds of channels of "high def" cable TV that's usually 480p and so compressed that it looks like hammered sh**. It'll probably look better on a cell phone where fine detail can't be picked up.
In light of that, Kerr asks, is the Supreme Court's ruling still sound?"
Anything reasonably available to you should be available to the police. Thermal imaging scanners, however cheap they become, will never be a commonly available item. Therefore, a warrant should be required because what they're looking for is not in plain sight. Think of telescoping lens and using infra-red to see through drapes to spy on people having sex. In this case, though the technology is readily available, the average person wouldn't do this. There is therefore a reasonable expectation of privacy that people aren't doing this for lawful purposes. Having sex in front of the bay windows of your house, during the day, without pulling the drapes back -- a passerby could see that, and therefore the police can bust you for indecent exposure.
The ultimate issue for most people is privacy. I won't get into that here; I just know the phenomenology and implementation side. I will answer any questions now, so please respond.
Safety interlock design -- is the operator capable of increasing the radiation dosage, and if so what interlocks are present to prevent the person being scanned from being exposed multiple times or at a higher level than intended? The medical field learned from the therac-25 incident, but this is an airport scanner, not a medical scanner. Are the safety standards and review process comparable? How tamper-evident is the system, and what are the possible failure modes that could endanger the operator or person being scanned? Is there a sound or visual indicator the person being scanned can hear to indicate when it is in-use or when it is being activated multiple times?
I have read these scanners are capable of covertly scanning large crowds in real-time. That implies a steady-state emission -- while a single use of this device may be quite low, what are the risks to continual exposure over, say, a 45 minute timeframe? What about frequent travelers -- at what point are the safety margins compromised?
There are statements that the device will not be enabled for the transmission/storage of images -- but while those devices may be shipped with that disabled by default, it makes no sense from an employee-training perspective not to have records and auditing in place. Is it safe to assume this is just hyperbole to reassure people and the machines can be easily configured to do this?
Why millimeter wave over other frequencies in the RF spectrum? Is this just a shortcut from a computational standpoint, or is there an advantage here that can only be realized by this technology? Why not use IR scanners? They can see through many types of clothing as well: and have the added benefit of being a lot safer.
Ben Wallace, the Conservative Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom, disagrees, saying that the technologies can't detect the kind of low-density explosive that the would-be terrorist tried to use on December 25th."
Since when has a technology that doesn't work deterred the US from using it anyway? :(
My company has spent the last year developing a framework for creating games on Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter. While we had originally planned to release the product to the public and take a percent of the revenue, we have realized that we can make more money by selling the application to a funded company entering the social gaming space.
Sell it to the spammers, marketing research firms, and anyone without a conscience because the only way someone's paying for your product is if they think they'll realize a return on their investment. And right now, advertisements or leeching away people's personal data is the only way to make money in the "social gaming space". People without a conscience also tend to be cheap-asses, so I wouldn't expect to get much.
Also, for the above-mentioned economic reasons, I don't use facebook or myspace applications and most of the "personal" data on my profiles are outright lies or fabrications.
Handing over information regarding a passenger's name, gender and birth-date may violate Canadian privacy laws
What's worse is that the TSA can't even get any of those three facts right in many cases.
Last Name: "Alphabetic, no numeric or special characters, except dash ( - ) and single quote ( ' ). Do not include suffixes (e.g., jr.). Truncate names longer than 35 characters to 35 characters".
First Name: "Secure Flight allows first initial only;" otherwise, same as last name. Honorifics are not to be placed in the name.
Middle Name: same as first name.
So if any of your three names doesn't perfectly fit this convention, you will be hit with a $100 Change fee, including if you don't have a middle name. This is particularily problematic for asian, greek, or many other nationalities whose names include special characters or when translated to english result in a name longer than 35 characters.
Gender: Once again, the TSA fails to account for any manner of diversity in the human population. Anyone who doesn't conform to the gender stereotype fixed to your official documents will be subject to additional (unwanted) attention. I wonder if they'll be offering sensitivity training for the crossdressers, transgendered, butch lesbians, and intersexed amongst us. And god help you if the Driver's Bureau screws up, or you live in a state that won't alter birth records after surgery, or one of a dozen other very real problems.
Birthdate: Did you know a lot of people who immigrate to this country don't know when they were born? In fact, in developing countries, it's quite common for people not to know their actual age. People assume a person's date of birth is a fixed thing -- how could you screw that up? And if you live in this country, you don't have to worry about this anyway. Well, remember that until the mid-90s the Social Security Administration wasn't so on about immediately registering newborns -- and did you know some people choose to have their kids at home? Some people don't get a birth certificate until they're five years old because parents just plain forget -- and for a variety of reasons, sometimes they fudge the actual date. Try getting this changed later -- it's fun.
In short, there's no real security being added here. All of it can be defeated quite easily in any event by putting a gun to the head of your wife, kid, or anything else you don't feel like losing. And as we make these security restrictions increasingly ethnocentric, the terrorists will adapt their strategies accordingly, because the payoff is so damn good! They sucked the US economy of trillions of dollars and all they had to do was crash four passenger planes. We offer the best "bang for the buck", literally and figuratively. It doesn't matter if they make it ten thousand times more difficult and expensive to pull another 9/11 job -- it's still an amazingly good deal for the terrorists.
There something wrong with that?
I usually have a penis, unless I'm flying coach. I tried to get my cock through security once. I had to take the batteries out before they'd let it on the plane. They took my lube though... bastards.
It's entirely possible for security to be too strict for the circumstances, but trying to dissuade use of USB drives isn't totally stupid.
It's not real security though... there's no such thing as client-side security. It's an illusion.
Apparently yes. I should have figured it. Some things are apparently constant among all Americans, and finding the British accent desirable seems oddly to be one of them. And the Brits do have a flair for designing gorgeous cars.
If you want to see a lesbian cream herself over a car, two words: Shelby Cobra. Specifically, the 1967 Ford Mustang Shelby Cobra 500 (it's the one with the police interceptor block), with the "Le Mans" stripes and trim, preferably blue. I prefer the hard top, but a lot of girls prefer the converible. They are sad. And it needs to be the MT, not the AT -- because have an AT in that car should be a shooting offense.
So very, very creamy.
Well, keep in mind that most of it is obviously written ABOUT and not FOR you. It's FOR men who apparently like to fantasize that all you gals just want one of us there.
What sexist crap! I want lesbian porn for lesbians. Call it something else, that name is OURS. How hard is that? Granted, a lesbian second date is a moving van but when we're not busy getting our hearts stuffed in a blender or looking sassy and edgy and then going home to our pets for loving (also known as being single), some porn would be nice. It doesn't exist, but there is gay porn -- as in, with dudes. It's great right up until the sexing starts! But then it goes from homoerotic to where's-that-snickers-i-left-in-the-fridge. The only time I've seen gay sex scenes done erotic and sensual is Queer as Folk. The american version, not the British one -- because Russell T. Davies fails at life (mutter, mutter, stab).
But the Top Gear angle intrigues me. I'm already looking at an offtopic mod, so what the hell, can you elaborate on that? It's OK if you'd rather not.
I really need to explain this? Sexy British cars and the accents.
I've been with a number of bi-curious women who are comfortable doing damn near anything with another female, "So long," as one of them put it, "there's a penis in the room."
That's why lesbians are so wary of "bi-curious"... they're heart breakers. so you want to experiment, fine... just own up to that ahead of time. Most don't, and that's why they have such a poor reputation amongst women. bi-curious guys, otoh -- in a word, Jack Harkness. *sighs*