Really, does anything compete in terms of miles per dollar against a shitbox car with a 1.xL gas engine? They all seem to get well over 40 MPG, but who wants to drive one? They've got the comfort and appeal of a cardboard box.
I'm not sure I'd want to own a Volt myself (or any hybrid, really), but I find the Volt most appealing of all the hybrid and electric cars because it is so flexible, even though the gas-only mileage is only 35 MPG (which is still pretty good). I'd bet with the right diesel engine it would be even better.
I think if you don't get lazy and plug it in every night you might not even use the gas engine very often. Even though I drive a lot for work, there are a lot of days where I don't drive more than 35 miles round-trip and I could simply use it as a pure electric vehicle, especially on weekends.
There's no doubt that the Tesla is the coolest of all of them, but the fact that you NEED to plug it in seems like an issue, and it doesn't charge effectively at 120v.
I think in the last few years they mandated that all diesel fuel (at least for on-road vehicles) be of the low sulfur variety. Prior to that we had high sulfur diesel which wasn't much good for the newfangled diesel engines that you see now becoming available in Audis and BMWs, but existed in Europe.
I'd like to see a Chevy Volt with a diesel instead of the gas engine.
I wonder what the minimum size requirement is for Redbox.
You would think they could get those things down to pretty bare-minimum maintenance. I don't think they take cash, so the only thing really left to maintain would be the movies themselves.
You would think they could almost boil that down to some kind of maintenance mode where the disks to be removed could just be bulk ejected and then the new disks just fed in. They could almost hire someone locally to do this once a week and just have them Express Mail a box back and forth with returns and new disks.
It's not like the disks themselves are any kind of significant investment.
Any real maintenance (broken mechanism, etc) could just be done when it was actually needed.
Arguably, organized crime could make money by just killing shopkeepers and taking the till. But at some point they realized they could make MORE money by threatening them with death or violence and getting regular payments for "protection". It's recurring money versus one-time money and has a lot less blowback than dead bodies.
Botnets and remote control of PCs are of more value for crime and intelligence gathering than bricking, so if your goal is long-term value is money or intelligence, then remote-control viruses that let you harvest information are more valuable.
PC viruses seemed to have evolved in the same way -- a lot of the early ones were stupid and malicious, deleting files, corrupting the OS and rendering it unusable. The more contemporary ones mostly strive for stealth and keeping the computer running so that information of value can be continuously harvested.
But it's certainly not hard to imagine a scenario where the group responsible has a different goal and bricking PCs is the desired outcome. And maybe it was meant to be a sleeper virus that was only activated under specific circumstances.
I'm not defending the NSA, either, the story seems implausible because it seems to me that if mass-bricking BIOSes was achievable, someone would have done it by now, either state-sponsored (Israel, Iran, etc) or on a rogue basis. I think there have been some BIOS bricking viruses, but they haven't gotten very far for whatever the reason.
While I'd assume some of the connectivity is contained within the site and some within Russia itself, these are international games and you'd presume a large chunk of the traffic is destined for destinations outside of Russia.
I wonder if any economist has ever modeled what it would look like if all risk was pooled into a central risk pool versus the myriad risk pools we have now for all the various forms of hazard insurance.
Maybe it wouldn't make any sense, but one of the principal arguments for most health care reform schemes is risk pooling. Maybe it only makes sense for like risks, but there are plenty of insurance companies that sell policies for essentially dissimilar risks (ie, my home insurer also provides my boat policy).
Maybe this is largely accomplished by the reinsurance industry, at least on a macroeconomic level.
Well, if they did it right they would be on SP5 or SP6 by now, since they should be releasing a new SP annually to roll up all the existing patches.
I seem to recall there being a demand for an SP4 at least two years ago due to the volume of updates post-SP3. I think the motivation wasn't necessarily SVCHOST but just the sheer download & install time for even new installs with SP3 slipstreamed in.
You would think this would also somewhat lighten the support burden and maybe even the burden on update servers as well, as I gotta believe there is a lot of duplication in updating with patches that supersede patches getting installed at the same time.
I know I've seen XP update listings on machines that showed whole laundry lists of IE updates for the installed IE, along with a new version of IE in the same update session -- wouldn't you just install the new IE version and then skip installing all the old IE patches? I always wondered if maybe the old IE version patches were in there because they were for OS components that weren't replaced or update by the new IE version.
I think there's a bunch of interrelated issues in American culture, many tied to economics.
Parents want to their kids to be successful, and the general theory on this is that you have to do well in school early so that you can get into the right college so you can get the right degree so you can get a good job.
I think this leads to relentless pressure on kids, especially boys, to be "perfect" in school. Deviation from this leads parents to wonder what's wrong, when, in fact, what's wrong may be "he's an 8 year old boy." Parents believe and our culture does everything to reinforce the idea that if you screw up early you won't make it into the right schools, activities, college, etc. There's no room for error, no room to be an 8 year old boy for whom its perfectly normal to have a ton of physical energy and not a lot of focus on sit-still studies.
The educational system, especially in urban areas. There's this relentless focus on "the achievement gap" -- mostly blacks, but often including hispanics, not achieving the same test scores, grades, etc. as other students, mostly whites (although you could include Asians, they often outscore whites).
Fighting the "achievement gap" has led to two things. One, more testing and more focus on elementary education test scores, which has led to more intensive focus on reading and writing, which is challenging for all boys of elementary school age. We've taken something hard for young boys and kind of made it harder for them.
The second thing is that schools have tried to become social welfare delivery mechanisms. It's beyond obvious that the MAIN reason low-income blacks do poorly in schools is the absolute train wreck of urban black culture -- broken families, incarcerated parents, dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods. School districts can't solve this but they have devoted a lot of resources to it -- social workers, free meals, all kinds of social benefits to overcome the insurmountable problems when mom is on welfare or underemployed, dad is in jail or unknown, the neighborhood is a war zone, etc.
This well-intentioned but myopic attempt to solve the insoluble has led to schools losing their focus on kids generally, especially boys, as well as causing them to burn a lot of resources that could be better spent on programs that boys find engaging even though they might not contribute to the political issue of low test scores for black kids.
The last thing I'd add in is our culture's relentless, zero-slack atmosphere where everybody has to be plugged in all the time and there's no time for anything but work and more work. I hate it and I think it has a lot to do with why so many people, especially young people, are fucking snapping and going batshit with guns.
Combine it all together and you have parents terrified that their kid, performing poorly in 2nd or 3rd grade, needs to straighten out NOW or he won't go to college and will wind up poor and destitute.
It's a crazy conclusion but I tell you as a parent of an 8 year old who was in that same situation it absolutely flashes through your mind. My son was basically refusing to do assignments in class and when he did do them doing a very slapdash job, yet was scoring so high on standardized test we got a letter from the district that said he was in their "gifted" category! Of course we did everything we could (pediatric ADHD screening is an absolute joke, they don't even white-out that the screening questionnaire is made by the drug company) and went all out for a neuropsychiatric evaluation that basically said "Your son is really high IQ, school bores him and the tasks he does poorly on are really pretty poorly matched to 8 year old boys. He doesn't need ADHD meds." I'm glad we spent the money to basically learn the obvious because from a pediatrician perspective we could have easily been talked into meds, although even on the drug company ADHD screener we were iffy in terms of ADHD.
The racist tag is added to pretty much everything Republicans do, I'm not sure how they would get much mileage out of a Republican challenging the influence of business in government as racism, but I consistently underestimate the ability of the left to twist issues into accusations of racism.
"Maybe she will use her knowledge from some of the insanity she has seen to actually tackle the current situation of patents, patent-trolling and lawsuits, so that companies can concentrate on true development which benefits all their users, not just the lawyers."
Or maybe she will use her knowledge to simply reinforce the patent system so that holders of large patent portfolios with products in the market are just more immune from all patent challenges, not just trolling challenges.
Which would actually be a worse outcome, since at least the broken system seems to be allowing patent challenges, even though they appear to be cynically motivated.
It's not at all hard to see a trolling "fix" that simply denies challenges. It's easy to see some law getting passed that says "well, you may have a patent for X used in Company's Product Y, but because they have a working product an N other patents for the product, the product would exist anyway because your patent is only a small part of a larger entity."
And now you've eliminated trolling, but you've also made it so that big companies can just steal things from startups or smaller competitors.
It strikes me that at least initially that at least initially the Tea Party (when it at least appeared to be an organic movement, and not something co-opted by any Republican politicians) acknowledged the corruption of government by Big Business, hence the criticism of government bailouts.
But the Tea Party DID get co-opted by elements of the Republican party. It's not clear to me if there is a cohesive grouping of these elements. Most of them seemed to be the kind of noisy, Christian anti-tax types like Michelle Bachman. But as they co-opted the more organic Tea Party movement, they seemed to drop the part about Big Business influence on government, and it became basically just "government is bad, taxes are bad" and the politicians who co-opted merely seemed to gain some kind of mainstream support from business groups.
Right now the split in the Republican party seems less to do with ideology and more to do with more basic political control of party, which is where you kind of get the liberal vs. conservative split, or at least a sense of it.
The Democrats, especially embodied in Elizabeth Warren, seem to have seized on the big business/Wall Street/banking issue and given the historical association of these groups with Republicans have made those issues off-limits to any Republican.
Which is too bad, because I think those issues are really important and I don't think you can get any traction on them by traditional liberal Democrats because their stands on on a lot of issues make them otherwise unpopular. A Republican willing to take them on while maintaining more traditional Republican stances might gain more support.
My guess is that the Stingray device is licensed by the FCC to law enforcement agencies and when a local agency buys it, they get a license issued to them for its use.
...even if "being told what to do" means they decide internally but have a Federal organization slap their letterhead on it and make it a Federal rule/policy.
There will probably be a lot of high-mileage and influential business customers who want to talk on the phone. These people are the gravy for airlines in terms of income and that can get expensive if they switch to another carrier who will allow these calls. Making their own policies that risks exposing them to a competitive disadvantage is something they don't want.
If they do allow calls with their own policy, they then risk the public relations nightmare of bad press and public opinion. Of course they don't really care about vacation travelers opinions very much since they aren't the high margin business customers, but they also don't want the negative PR generally.
It's just so much easier for them on this issue if they don't have to decide on their own and they can just point to a regulatory rule.
My Volvo S80 has radar for the collision avoidance feature and the distance-sensing cruise control.
The only problem I've ever had with it has been in snowstorms where the radar panel gets covered with snow and ice -- the dash display will then show "radar blocked."
On the other hand, my Valentine 1 radar detector will false on other cars radar detectors and some automatic doors on commercial buildings.
About the only other problem I've had with the distance sensing cruise has been getting behind cars driving slightly slower than my set point and not noticing that I'm going a little slower than I want to drive. My car will basically follow the other car and match its speed transparently until it goes faster than my cruise set point.
Given how many people have abandoned their landlines for cell-only service, I would think G.SHDSL wouldn't be so uneconomical given how many idle pairs there are.
I'm not a software developer, but as a long-time network admin it always struck me that shared libraries were a great idea except when they weren't.
Before I switched to FreeBSD, Linux always seemed to have headaches with shared library problems, with some apps not working with some versions of shared libraries and a general nuisance being made with multiple versions of shared libraries being around.
Windows, of course, has its reputation for DLL hell, which I think was more of an issue in really old versions than it is now.
Given the size of storage generally available now, is it really so bad to have statically linked binaries? It greatly increases application portability and version independence and probably makes package management a lot simpler and more risk-free since you don't have to worry about shared libraries.
I've always been tempted to do a statically linked buildworld to see just how much extra space it takes.
Instead of telling people they can't have kids or trying to punish them if they do, why not offer them incentives?
I can think of two ways to approach this, short-term (long-term implantable contraceptives) and long-term (sterilization).
On the short-term side, you could offer a cash payment for any woman willing to use an implantable birth control device. Subdermal implants last for three years, some IUDs as long as five years.
On the long-term side, you could offer a more substantial payment for vasectomies or tubal ligations.
The short-term ones may have longer-term effects since they might delay any pregnancies until later in life when women may be less interested in having children and may cause them to have fewer children over all.
Both options would probably have meaningful social effects since you might greatly reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies and the negative social consequences associated with low-incoming single parents.
Everybody hates existing internet providers for all the usual reasons, inflated prices, crappy services and restrictive and sometimes secretive rules designed to limit actual use of the service along with degradation of connections delivering services that compete with the services provided by the internet provider. I'll agree to that.
But why do I have a suspicion that while Google's fiber product is currently presented as some kind of benevolent, monopoly disrupting service, is it really going to stay that way long term, or is it eventually going to be another flavor of cable internet with restrictions that serve to promote Google's service and inhibit competitors?
While I think that AT&T is just foot dragging to avoid losing business here, I think there's something to the idea that Google wants to look like a telecom but not play by the same rules.
Until very recently, though, booking photos were funcitonally private. It took digital photography combined with modern record keeping systems for them to be widely available, and even now you can't simply browse the police department's web site (at least here in Minneapolis) and grab the photos. You have to go down to the department to get a copy, and it wouldn't surprise me if the copy you get is a printout.
So even though booking photos have a legal status as public informaiton, the idea of running a web site where you "publish" them and then offer to remove them for a fee seems to be not much different than "revenge porn" at least in terms of the extortion component.
Both kinds of sites are making private photos which could be damaging to the people in question. I'd even wager that booking photo sites do more real harm in some ways than revenge porn does.
The legal bar for being arrested is pretty low and lots of people are arrested and quickly released without ever having been charged with a crime, let alone tried and found guilty of one. Yet the mere fact that you were arrested can be used against you to prevent you from getting a job or housing by people who don't know or care to differentiate between arrest and conviction, or simply believe that anyone who was arrested must be guilty of something. It's trivial to think of situations where you could be arrested just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because of mistaken identity with someone who is a criminal.
Some revenge porn may be pictures of people indulging in sexual behavior which could negatively influence their reputatons, but I would bet a lot of it are merely nude photos many of which could have been taken surrepitiously. Even the most petty HR department isn't going to deny a job to a woman just because a photo exists that documents the fact that she does indeed have breasts and a vagina. The harm that results in these photos being public is purely psychological, except where the photos reveal unusual sexual taste or the site further crosses the line by trying to link the photo to pesonal information like addresses and phone numbers.
All of the conventional politicians are stuck trying to push a phony image in lockstep with Ameircan puritansim -- churchgoing, once-a-month missionary position and nothing more than a weak cup of coffee on a Saturday morning.
Since the lifestyles they actually lead involve mistresses, hookers, cocaine, whisky by the barrel, and all manner of shady business deals and votes-for-cash schemes, they are of course vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail by those who can collect the dossiers.
Rob Ford doesn't care. He's willing to admit he gets really fucked up and will try pretty much anything, including hittin' dat pipe 'till da rock is all gone.
We need more Rob Fords who just don't give a shit and aren't slaves to the petty morality of American culture.
While it may not be the be-all, end-all of hybrid or electric vehicles it's an interesting concept that seems to overcome some of the limitations of pure electric vehicles while being more electric and fuel efficient than traditional hybrids like the Prius.
All-electrics like the Tesla are range-limited and the electric power demands of charging them would seem to be something of a cap on how widely they could be adopted. It's one thing to talk about installing rapid charging stations everywhere, but it's quite another to consider what happens when you have 30 houses on a common alley trying to pull 150kW to charge 15 electric cars at the same time.
From a pure "harm reduction" standpoint, a hybrid like this seems to be a pretty decent compromise -- you can cut emissions and fuel consumption considerably and greatly mitigate some of the challenges with a pure electric vehicle.
Plus, the Volt seems to have a lot of room for improvement -- a smaller diesel engine would seem like a great start, as would an option for an LNG engine which would mean even better emissions.
I don't think it's ever a question of A or B, I think it's a question of trying all of them.
I think you're fine if you stay on iOS 4 but the RAM limitations of 5 are so bad that a lot of apps just crash at random for my wife, including simple stuff like the built-in mail app and Safari, which is of course doomed by graphics-heavy web sites and Javascript.
Even on iOS 4 my iPad 1 used to crash on some web sites with a lot of graphics, like image sites that displayed many images on
Problem is, I don't know how you would downgrade to iOS 4 or even if its possible.
...it seems like every large web site/game has some kind of internal communications system, often a real-time chat function and an offline messaging system. These might be tough to monitor with any context simply off the wire, and in combat games it would be pretty easy to talk about organizing terrorist activity and trivially mask it in terms of game-based combat in a way completely opaque to an outside monitor.
One of the oldest espionage tradecraft gimmicks (at least in books and movies) are coded messages places as advertisements in newspapers. If you've ever used IMDB you know that pretty much anyone who has a role in a movie automatically has their own IMDB page, including a message board about them. There are THOUSANDS of minor credited cast and crew members with totally blank or very low traffic message boards that likely to remain totally unseen and could be used for exchanging coded messages. Even the high traffic boards for popular actors or movies would be a good place to drop messsages.
I agree with everything except the iPad 1 part. I think an iPad 2 would be a better choice -- the iPad 1 was underpowered when it was new, mostly from a RAM perspective and it ought to be reasonably cheap as well.
I gave my wife my iPad 1 when I got the 3, and since iOS 6 came out there's been a lot of legitimate complaining about apps crashing and hanging, even the email app.
What's so funny about this (and reinforced by the other replies to your post) is that people really object to the morality of other people "getting away with something" -- eating too much of the wrong food and not exercising enough.
I'm surprised they don't object to people with infections being treated with antibiotics, since if they had better hygiene they wouldn't get sick.
Why should you care if someone else is healthier by taking a pill?
Slashdot Mirror
Really, does anything compete in terms of miles per dollar against a shitbox car with a 1.xL gas engine? They all seem to get well over 40 MPG, but who wants to drive one? They've got the comfort and appeal of a cardboard box.
I'm not sure I'd want to own a Volt myself (or any hybrid, really), but I find the Volt most appealing of all the hybrid and electric cars because it is so flexible, even though the gas-only mileage is only 35 MPG (which is still pretty good). I'd bet with the right diesel engine it would be even better.
I think if you don't get lazy and plug it in every night you might not even use the gas engine very often. Even though I drive a lot for work, there are a lot of days where I don't drive more than 35 miles round-trip and I could simply use it as a pure electric vehicle, especially on weekends.
There's no doubt that the Tesla is the coolest of all of them, but the fact that you NEED to plug it in seems like an issue, and it doesn't charge effectively at 120v.
I think in the last few years they mandated that all diesel fuel (at least for on-road vehicles) be of the low sulfur variety. Prior to that we had high sulfur diesel which wasn't much good for the newfangled diesel engines that you see now becoming available in Audis and BMWs, but existed in Europe.
I'd like to see a Chevy Volt with a diesel instead of the gas engine.
I wonder what the minimum size requirement is for Redbox.
You would think they could get those things down to pretty bare-minimum maintenance. I don't think they take cash, so the only thing really left to maintain would be the movies themselves.
You would think they could almost boil that down to some kind of maintenance mode where the disks to be removed could just be bulk ejected and then the new disks just fed in. They could almost hire someone locally to do this once a week and just have them Express Mail a box back and forth with returns and new disks.
It's not like the disks themselves are any kind of significant investment.
Any real maintenance (broken mechanism, etc) could just be done when it was actually needed.
I guess it depends on what your goals are.
Arguably, organized crime could make money by just killing shopkeepers and taking the till. But at some point they realized they could make MORE money by threatening them with death or violence and getting regular payments for "protection". It's recurring money versus one-time money and has a lot less blowback than dead bodies.
Botnets and remote control of PCs are of more value for crime and intelligence gathering than bricking, so if your goal is long-term value is money or intelligence, then remote-control viruses that let you harvest information are more valuable.
PC viruses seemed to have evolved in the same way -- a lot of the early ones were stupid and malicious, deleting files, corrupting the OS and rendering it unusable. The more contemporary ones mostly strive for stealth and keeping the computer running so that information of value can be continuously harvested.
But it's certainly not hard to imagine a scenario where the group responsible has a different goal and bricking PCs is the desired outcome. And maybe it was meant to be a sleeper virus that was only activated under specific circumstances.
I'm not defending the NSA, either, the story seems implausible because it seems to me that if mass-bricking BIOSes was achievable, someone would have done it by now, either state-sponsored (Israel, Iran, etc) or on a rogue basis. I think there have been some BIOS bricking viruses, but they haven't gotten very far for whatever the reason.
While I'd assume some of the connectivity is contained within the site and some within Russia itself, these are international games and you'd presume a large chunk of the traffic is destined for destinations outside of Russia.
I wonder if any economist has ever modeled what it would look like if all risk was pooled into a central risk pool versus the myriad risk pools we have now for all the various forms of hazard insurance.
Maybe it wouldn't make any sense, but one of the principal arguments for most health care reform schemes is risk pooling. Maybe it only makes sense for like risks, but there are plenty of insurance companies that sell policies for essentially dissimilar risks (ie, my home insurer also provides my boat policy).
Maybe this is largely accomplished by the reinsurance industry, at least on a macroeconomic level.
Well, if they did it right they would be on SP5 or SP6 by now, since they should be releasing a new SP annually to roll up all the existing patches.
I seem to recall there being a demand for an SP4 at least two years ago due to the volume of updates post-SP3. I think the motivation wasn't necessarily SVCHOST but just the sheer download & install time for even new installs with SP3 slipstreamed in.
You would think this would also somewhat lighten the support burden and maybe even the burden on update servers as well, as I gotta believe there is a lot of duplication in updating with patches that supersede patches getting installed at the same time.
I know I've seen XP update listings on machines that showed whole laundry lists of IE updates for the installed IE, along with a new version of IE in the same update session -- wouldn't you just install the new IE version and then skip installing all the old IE patches? I always wondered if maybe the old IE version patches were in there because they were for OS components that weren't replaced or update by the new IE version.
I think there's a bunch of interrelated issues in American culture, many tied to economics.
Parents want to their kids to be successful, and the general theory on this is that you have to do well in school early so that you can get into the right college so you can get the right degree so you can get a good job.
I think this leads to relentless pressure on kids, especially boys, to be "perfect" in school. Deviation from this leads parents to wonder what's wrong, when, in fact, what's wrong may be "he's an 8 year old boy." Parents believe and our culture does everything to reinforce the idea that if you screw up early you won't make it into the right schools, activities, college, etc. There's no room for error, no room to be an 8 year old boy for whom its perfectly normal to have a ton of physical energy and not a lot of focus on sit-still studies.
The educational system, especially in urban areas. There's this relentless focus on "the achievement gap" -- mostly blacks, but often including hispanics, not achieving the same test scores, grades, etc. as other students, mostly whites (although you could include Asians, they often outscore whites).
Fighting the "achievement gap" has led to two things. One, more testing and more focus on elementary education test scores, which has led to more intensive focus on reading and writing, which is challenging for all boys of elementary school age. We've taken something hard for young boys and kind of made it harder for them.
The second thing is that schools have tried to become social welfare delivery mechanisms. It's beyond obvious that the MAIN reason low-income blacks do poorly in schools is the absolute train wreck of urban black culture -- broken families, incarcerated parents, dangerous, crime-ridden neighborhoods. School districts can't solve this but they have devoted a lot of resources to it -- social workers, free meals, all kinds of social benefits to overcome the insurmountable problems when mom is on welfare or underemployed, dad is in jail or unknown, the neighborhood is a war zone, etc.
This well-intentioned but myopic attempt to solve the insoluble has led to schools losing their focus on kids generally, especially boys, as well as causing them to burn a lot of resources that could be better spent on programs that boys find engaging even though they might not contribute to the political issue of low test scores for black kids.
The last thing I'd add in is our culture's relentless, zero-slack atmosphere where everybody has to be plugged in all the time and there's no time for anything but work and more work. I hate it and I think it has a lot to do with why so many people, especially young people, are fucking snapping and going batshit with guns.
Combine it all together and you have parents terrified that their kid, performing poorly in 2nd or 3rd grade, needs to straighten out NOW or he won't go to college and will wind up poor and destitute.
It's a crazy conclusion but I tell you as a parent of an 8 year old who was in that same situation it absolutely flashes through your mind. My son was basically refusing to do assignments in class and when he did do them doing a very slapdash job, yet was scoring so high on standardized test we got a letter from the district that said he was in their "gifted" category! Of course we did everything we could (pediatric ADHD screening is an absolute joke, they don't even white-out that the screening questionnaire is made by the drug company) and went all out for a neuropsychiatric evaluation that basically said "Your son is really high IQ, school bores him and the tasks he does poorly on are really pretty poorly matched to 8 year old boys. He doesn't need ADHD meds." I'm glad we spent the money to basically learn the obvious because from a pediatrician perspective we could have easily been talked into meds, although even on the drug company ADHD screener we were iffy in terms of ADHD.
The racist tag is added to pretty much everything Republicans do, I'm not sure how they would get much mileage out of a Republican challenging the influence of business in government as racism, but I consistently underestimate the ability of the left to twist issues into accusations of racism.
"Maybe she will use her knowledge from some of the insanity she has seen to actually tackle the current situation of patents, patent-trolling and lawsuits, so that companies can concentrate on true development which benefits all their users, not just the lawyers."
Or maybe she will use her knowledge to simply reinforce the patent system so that holders of large patent portfolios with products in the market are just more immune from all patent challenges, not just trolling challenges.
Which would actually be a worse outcome, since at least the broken system seems to be allowing patent challenges, even though they appear to be cynically motivated.
It's not at all hard to see a trolling "fix" that simply denies challenges. It's easy to see some law getting passed that says "well, you may have a patent for X used in Company's Product Y, but because they have a working product an N other patents for the product, the product would exist anyway because your patent is only a small part of a larger entity."
And now you've eliminated trolling, but you've also made it so that big companies can just steal things from startups or smaller competitors.
It strikes me that at least initially that at least initially the Tea Party (when it at least appeared to be an organic movement, and not something co-opted by any Republican politicians) acknowledged the corruption of government by Big Business, hence the criticism of government bailouts.
But the Tea Party DID get co-opted by elements of the Republican party. It's not clear to me if there is a cohesive grouping of these elements. Most of them seemed to be the kind of noisy, Christian anti-tax types like Michelle Bachman. But as they co-opted the more organic Tea Party movement, they seemed to drop the part about Big Business influence on government, and it became basically just "government is bad, taxes are bad" and the politicians who co-opted merely seemed to gain some kind of mainstream support from business groups.
Right now the split in the Republican party seems less to do with ideology and more to do with more basic political control of party, which is where you kind of get the liberal vs. conservative split, or at least a sense of it.
The Democrats, especially embodied in Elizabeth Warren, seem to have seized on the big business/Wall Street/banking issue and given the historical association of these groups with Republicans have made those issues off-limits to any Republican.
Which is too bad, because I think those issues are really important and I don't think you can get any traction on them by traditional liberal Democrats because their stands on on a lot of issues make them otherwise unpopular. A Republican willing to take them on while maintaining more traditional Republican stances might gain more support.
My guess is that the Stingray device is licensed by the FCC to law enforcement agencies and when a local agency buys it, they get a license issued to them for its use.
...even if "being told what to do" means they decide internally but have a Federal organization slap their letterhead on it and make it a Federal rule/policy.
There will probably be a lot of high-mileage and influential business customers who want to talk on the phone. These people are the gravy for airlines in terms of income and that can get expensive if they switch to another carrier who will allow these calls. Making their own policies that risks exposing them to a competitive disadvantage is something they don't want.
If they do allow calls with their own policy, they then risk the public relations nightmare of bad press and public opinion. Of course they don't really care about vacation travelers opinions very much since they aren't the high margin business customers, but they also don't want the negative PR generally.
It's just so much easier for them on this issue if they don't have to decide on their own and they can just point to a regulatory rule.
My Volvo S80 has radar for the collision avoidance feature and the distance-sensing cruise control.
The only problem I've ever had with it has been in snowstorms where the radar panel gets covered with snow and ice -- the dash display will then show "radar blocked."
On the other hand, my Valentine 1 radar detector will false on other cars radar detectors and some automatic doors on commercial buildings.
About the only other problem I've had with the distance sensing cruise has been getting behind cars driving slightly slower than my set point and not noticing that I'm going a little slower than I want to drive. My car will basically follow the other car and match its speed transparently until it goes faster than my cruise set point.
Given how many people have abandoned their landlines for cell-only service, I would think G.SHDSL wouldn't be so uneconomical given how many idle pairs there are.
I'm not a software developer, but as a long-time network admin it always struck me that shared libraries were a great idea except when they weren't.
Before I switched to FreeBSD, Linux always seemed to have headaches with shared library problems, with some apps not working with some versions of shared libraries and a general nuisance being made with multiple versions of shared libraries being around.
Windows, of course, has its reputation for DLL hell, which I think was more of an issue in really old versions than it is now.
Given the size of storage generally available now, is it really so bad to have statically linked binaries? It greatly increases application portability and version independence and probably makes package management a lot simpler and more risk-free since you don't have to worry about shared libraries.
I've always been tempted to do a statically linked buildworld to see just how much extra space it takes.
Instead of telling people they can't have kids or trying to punish them if they do, why not offer them incentives?
I can think of two ways to approach this, short-term (long-term implantable contraceptives) and long-term (sterilization).
On the short-term side, you could offer a cash payment for any woman willing to use an implantable birth control device. Subdermal implants last for three years, some IUDs as long as five years.
On the long-term side, you could offer a more substantial payment for vasectomies or tubal ligations.
The short-term ones may have longer-term effects since they might delay any pregnancies until later in life when women may be less interested in having children and may cause them to have fewer children over all.
Both options would probably have meaningful social effects since you might greatly reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies and the negative social consequences associated with low-incoming single parents.
Everybody hates existing internet providers for all the usual reasons, inflated prices, crappy services and restrictive and sometimes secretive rules designed to limit actual use of the service along with degradation of connections delivering services that compete with the services provided by the internet provider. I'll agree to that.
But why do I have a suspicion that while Google's fiber product is currently presented as some kind of benevolent, monopoly disrupting service, is it really going to stay that way long term, or is it eventually going to be another flavor of cable internet with restrictions that serve to promote Google's service and inhibit competitors?
While I think that AT&T is just foot dragging to avoid losing business here, I think there's something to the idea that Google wants to look like a telecom but not play by the same rules.
Until very recently, though, booking photos were funcitonally private. It took digital photography combined with modern record keeping systems for them to be widely available, and even now you can't simply browse the police department's web site (at least here in Minneapolis) and grab the photos. You have to go down to the department to get a copy, and it wouldn't surprise me if the copy you get is a printout.
So even though booking photos have a legal status as public informaiton, the idea of running a web site where you "publish" them and then offer to remove them for a fee seems to be not much different than "revenge porn" at least in terms of the extortion component.
Both kinds of sites are making private photos which could be damaging to the people in question. I'd even wager that booking photo sites do more real harm in some ways than revenge porn does.
The legal bar for being arrested is pretty low and lots of people are arrested and quickly released without ever having been charged with a crime, let alone tried and found guilty of one. Yet the mere fact that you were arrested can be used against you to prevent you from getting a job or housing by people who don't know or care to differentiate between arrest and conviction, or simply believe that anyone who was arrested must be guilty of something. It's trivial to think of situations where you could be arrested just because you were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because of mistaken identity with someone who is a criminal.
Some revenge porn may be pictures of people indulging in sexual behavior which could negatively influence their reputatons, but I would bet a lot of it are merely nude photos many of which could have been taken surrepitiously. Even the most petty HR department isn't going to deny a job to a woman just because a photo exists that documents the fact that she does indeed have breasts and a vagina. The harm that results in these photos being public is purely psychological, except where the photos reveal unusual sexual taste or the site further crosses the line by trying to link the photo to pesonal information like addresses and phone numbers.
All of the conventional politicians are stuck trying to push a phony image in lockstep with Ameircan puritansim -- churchgoing, once-a-month missionary position and nothing more than a weak cup of coffee on a Saturday morning.
Since the lifestyles they actually lead involve mistresses, hookers, cocaine, whisky by the barrel, and all manner of shady business deals and votes-for-cash schemes, they are of course vulnerable to all kinds of blackmail by those who can collect the dossiers.
Rob Ford doesn't care. He's willing to admit he gets really fucked up and will try pretty much anything, including hittin' dat pipe 'till da rock is all gone.
We need more Rob Fords who just don't give a shit and aren't slaves to the petty morality of American culture.
Why the hate for the Volt?
While it may not be the be-all, end-all of hybrid or electric vehicles it's an interesting concept that seems to overcome some of the limitations of pure electric vehicles while being more electric and fuel efficient than traditional hybrids like the Prius.
All-electrics like the Tesla are range-limited and the electric power demands of charging them would seem to be something of a cap on how widely they could be adopted. It's one thing to talk about installing rapid charging stations everywhere, but it's quite another to consider what happens when you have 30 houses on a common alley trying to pull 150kW to charge 15 electric cars at the same time.
From a pure "harm reduction" standpoint, a hybrid like this seems to be a pretty decent compromise -- you can cut emissions and fuel consumption considerably and greatly mitigate some of the challenges with a pure electric vehicle.
Plus, the Volt seems to have a lot of room for improvement -- a smaller diesel engine would seem like a great start, as would an option for an LNG engine which would mean even better emissions.
I don't think it's ever a question of A or B, I think it's a question of trying all of them.
I think you're fine if you stay on iOS 4 but the RAM limitations of 5 are so bad that a lot of apps just crash at random for my wife, including simple stuff like the built-in mail app and Safari, which is of course doomed by graphics-heavy web sites and Javascript.
Even on iOS 4 my iPad 1 used to crash on some web sites with a lot of graphics, like image sites that displayed many images on
Problem is, I don't know how you would downgrade to iOS 4 or even if its possible.
...it seems like every large web site/game has some kind of internal communications system, often a real-time chat function and an offline messaging system. These might be tough to monitor with any context simply off the wire, and in combat games it would be pretty easy to talk about organizing terrorist activity and trivially mask it in terms of game-based combat in a way completely opaque to an outside monitor.
One of the oldest espionage tradecraft gimmicks (at least in books and movies) are coded messages places as advertisements in newspapers. If you've ever used IMDB you know that pretty much anyone who has a role in a movie automatically has their own IMDB page, including a message board about them. There are THOUSANDS of minor credited cast and crew members with totally blank or very low traffic message boards that likely to remain totally unseen and could be used for exchanging coded messages. Even the high traffic boards for popular actors or movies would be a good place to drop messsages.
I agree with everything except the iPad 1 part. I think an iPad 2 would be a better choice -- the iPad 1 was underpowered when it was new, mostly from a RAM perspective and it ought to be reasonably cheap as well.
I gave my wife my iPad 1 when I got the 3, and since iOS 6 came out there's been a lot of legitimate complaining about apps crashing and hanging, even the email app.
What's so funny about this (and reinforced by the other replies to your post) is that people really object to the morality of other people "getting away with something" -- eating too much of the wrong food and not exercising enough.
I'm surprised they don't object to people with infections being treated with antibiotics, since if they had better hygiene they wouldn't get sick.
Why should you care if someone else is healthier by taking a pill?