I'm just saying that not _everything_ they do is motivated by some need to torture, maim and oppress. Some stuff, like railroads or civillian sattellites or their own codecs are built just as well in the capitalist USA or in the mostly-socialist Western Europe.
You're largely wrong. There are some sectors of the Chinese capitalist economy that are motivated by the pure economic value and low-level decisions that are made on technical merits (whether to run half meter or quarter meter sewer pipe), but major decisions like a satellite network ALWAYS depend on whether or not the device will further the power and authority of the Communist party and the military.
Why adopt a "wait and see" attitude with the Chinese government? We can already see the millions dead since the 1960s in the name of the glory of the Communist party. What could possibly motivate you to think that the situation has changed for the better and that their totalitarian government deserves the benefit of the doubt on ANY project that looks, smells and tastes like a political surveillance network?
I don't know how the digital data is structured on cable.
Is it one massive, encrypted stream encompassing the entire physical spectrum dedicated to digital channels that, once decrypted is a series of interleaved MPEG streams encompassing individual channels (think of an IPSec tunnel connecting two LANs, for example)? Tuning the cable box to a digital channel just means decrypting the meta-stream and then grabbing the substream for the particular channel you're looking for.
Or is each digital channel allocated a physically distinct spectrum on the wire with its own individually encrypted stream? Tuning would mean focusing the cable box on an RF band and then decrypting.
If it's the latter, then it would be technically possible to "tune" to the spectrum segment that had the channel you wanted, and that entire encrypted stream could go to disk and then playback would simply be presenting a cable-card compatible device the stream which it would then decode.
If its the former, you'd be out of luck as you'd have to record pretty much everything at once, but playback would allow you to channel surf, since you'd have recorded literally every digital channel.
Even if it was physically distinct bands you could tune to and dump to disk, the problem would be mapping cable spectrum to channels. I think that this is probably largely dynamic and arbitrary; a channel band could conceivably be widened or shrunk to accomodate changes in bitrate, and the spectrum->channel mapping might change as well, and you'd never know this unless you had access to unencrypted control bands.
Even if it is China and the mandatory knee jerk reaction is "chinese govt==evil"
I'm sorry, but I missed something. Is there some other more apt reaction to a government with a long, bloody track record of torturing, killing and suppressing its people in the name of ideology?
I don't understand the people that come out of the woodwork as apologists for the Chinese government here. The Chinese government IS EVIL and that knee-jerk reaction isn't a "knee-jerk" reaction, it's as simple and logical a reaction to the totalitarian brutality they've demonstrates as the "knee-jerk" reaction to Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, ad nauseum.
You can't record uncompressed HDTV signals on your PC without a really muscular hardware-based encoding system. The raw, uncompressed signal is too much bandwidth to put to disc and I'm unaware of any consumer-level MPEG chips capable of real-time encoding of an HD stream.
The solution would be a CableCard based TV card. CavbleCard is the new standard for enabling digital/HD/premium cable tuning capabilities directly in TVs and other devices. Basically you get a smart card from the cable company that fits a slot in the device, providing the authentication and decoding capabilities otherwise provided by a cable box. You still can't do interactive stuff like PPV and some of the stop/start movie functions, but for HBO and digital tier channels you can finally ditch the cable box.
With a CableCard based TV card, you'd be able to do what DirecTivo and cable-provided DVRs do -- take the *pre-compressed* signal off the cable line and write it to disc. No encoding required, no encoding hardware required. Playing these files just means pumping the data through the tuner portion of the card as if you were watching a live stream.
The challenges for most would be (A) will they authorize CableCard for PC-based DVR setups and (B) would there be any easy way to transcode the files to open standards? My guess is "maybe" for (A) and "unlikely" for (B). I'd wager that "they" really, really don't want people getting even well-encrypted/encoded HD video on their hard disks.
Slightly off topic: Why aren't there inexpensive real-time or faster MPEG encode/transcode boards for the PC? There are so many DVD recorders that use hardware encoding setups these days, that it would seem trivial to provide a hardware MPEG trans/encoding setup for PCs for a couple of hundred dollars. I hate spending.5-.75 real time encoding to MPEG. You can do it faster, but the quality sux0rs. And yes, there are pro boards that can do this, but for $$$$ and they're *only* real-time, not multiples of real time.
I doubt they'll lower the cost; they'll just consider this a way to lower losses.
I'd own a second (and possibly third) Tivo if I didn't have to buy subscriptions for all of them. That's just lunacy, especially when the two other units could just copy the data from one of the units, in effect costing Tivo zero in delivery costs.
If the banner ads are a problem, I'll just keep using my 2nd gen standalone until it craps out and then rent (for $5 per month) a hidef PVR from the cable company. It'll suck more than the Tivo, but it'll record Hidef (satellite HDTivo isn't an option where I live) and I won't have any money sunk into the hardware.
Among Tivo's many idiotic decisions are wasting too much development effort on non-core features (such as MP3s and photos), failure to deliver more core features (batch save/play), no cablecard-based unit on the horizon (HD recording, no IR blasting for digital cable channels), and little if any evolution of the hardware (firewire disk expansion and DVD-R add-ons).
Adding banner ads is just another stupid decision on their part to cover up the other stupid decisions on their part.
Senior corporate people are almost always from "marketing". Many corporate dollars and salaries are built around marketing.
Technologies that block or make "marketing" activities moot threaten the most powerful corporate players, either through obsolesence or disrupting business models based on marketers spending money on marketing services.
It's only a matter of time before absorbing marketing messages gets defined as a constitutional obligation, and generating them a constitutional right (oh wait, they've redefined the 1st Ammendment to the US constitution this way already....)
I've installed SP2 on a bunch of systems and had no functionality problems I've been able to attribute to SP2.
However, it still doesn't eliminate people from getting themselves full of spyware. I rebuilt my neighbor's system with SP2. I reinstalled and updated their AV, left on the firewall and tightened up the IE policies to no avail.
Two weeks later, their machine was so full of spyware it was almost unusable, and it wasn't apparent that they had downloaded anything, either. I'm suspecting that their son, who's a big "Texas Hold 'Em" player, started hitting search-engine matches to "Poker" and installed every ActiveX control offered, but there's no proof.
I should have added Mozilla or Firefox, but it's an old Celeron box and the slipstreamed SP2 install took too much of my time as it was; hanging around for one more install was another block of time I didn't have.
What we get on the news is a bunch of useless crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone.
They're a victim of at least two problems: the ratings game, the continuous short-period "news cycle". These things feed into each other to produce a crappy product.
The ratings game requires "mass interest" news, like Scott Peterson, as well as a generally high-gloss presentation that requires them to present the news in a fashion guaranteed to hold interest, and most people are bored with in-depth detail, facts and analysis.
The short-period news cycle is one of the worst problems. Every 2-3 hours (or sooner, depending on the channel), they need to have "new" news and updates on existing stories. In order to keep viewers, they have to do more than replay what they played 2 hours ago. This means they end up interviewing the media itself (the media asking the media for its opinion...?). The upshot is a lot of incoherent and tertiary information and opinion that just obscures the actual story.
These things then overlap and recombine to produce four TV anchors discussing the Peterson trial, which, when muting the sound, makes it look more like an ad for hair care products or clothing.
The scientific community. We're talking about science, remember?
The post I was replying to was talking about segregation, and quoted a religious scholar. I don't think we're talking science in this subthread.
In the case of segregation, science comes down firmly on one side, just like it does regarding Creationism. There's simply no scientific basis for the thing we call 'race' amongst humans, nor is there any sociological basis for claims that segregation reduces crime, etc.
If you can state the thesis we can test scientifically (double-blind, etc) for determining who should live/work/etc where, I'm willing to listen. Until then I'm calling segregation something other than a scientific issue.
So who gets to decide that "the other side" doesn't have a legitimate argument for a specific issue? Who is the arbiter of the veracity of one side's claim, if not the court of public opinion?
Segregation was long-standing social, legal and political *institution*, and despite King's complaints about the media, it's almost entirely (except in the minds of a select few) disappeared from American life, both as an institution and as a point of advocacy.
Perhaps it might have been overcome more quickly if the media had simply ignored the claims of those in favor of it, but what happens when the media does that with something like Iraq, Terrorism or some other issue where the claim that apparently lacks moral superiority is merely dismissed?
That's not fair. If you are going to make one drug freely available, how can you specify limits on another. Oh, you don't do that drug, that's why.
Opiates and most stimulants (amphetimines, cocaine) are highly addictive and have some pretty significant health consequences with long-term use. Opiates perhaps less so, but controlling access will minimize both "uninformed" access and grossly destructive access. If you want to take these drugs, fine, but we should prevent them getting into the hands of people whose decision making processes aren't capable of understanding the consequences of their use and to prevent profiteering.
Marijuana is a lot harder to hurt yourself on; it's not physically addictive (although habit forming, and smoking isn't good for you) and you can't overdose on it. This is even more true than with alcohol.
If Pot is made legal I would propose the same penalty for Pot related traffic accidents as I do for Alcohol related ones. One bullet.
Driving while intoxicated shouldn't be tolerated, period. The death sentence might be bit strong on the first offense. I'd rather see something like 6 months in the workhouse and a 5 year probation for the first offense and a 2 year jail sentence, forfeiture of the automobile and 10 years of probation for the second offense. Third offense would be 5 years in prison, forfeiture of the automobile, permanent loss of driving privileges, and 10 years of probation. I'd consider the death sentence for vehicular homicide.
Any cars driven by the person in question after their 1st or 2nd offenses must have "CONVICTED DRUNK DRIVER" prominently (10" yellow on black reflective letters) displayed on all sides of the car as well as the hood. Getting caught driving a vehicle without these markings would be considered a "next" offense, regardless of whether the driver was drunk or not. Cars so marked would be subject to random and arbitrary search.
I'd also consider mandating the wearing of an orange, non-removable bracelet with "CONVICTED DRUNK DRIVER" on it.
This latter mechanism would probably be as effective as anything else, since the public shame and identification would be highly effective.
You know, I've had really good luck at State Farm for car insurance. I've had two claims handled really well, and the agents in our lobby that I use *always* have super up to date equipment; I frequently see new equipment boxes in their office space, and they had 17" LCD displays 3+ years ago (we still buy CRTs).
Yes and no and "The Office"
on
Cube Farm
·
· Score: 1
I've seen it three times now. The first time I thought it was brilliant. The second time, I thought it was kind of boring. The third time I thought it was more clever than the first time, and I caught a bunch of things I missed then.
unfortunately, it's not nearly as good as "The Office" on the BBC. I can't think of anything that will exceed that for artistic critique on the modern office environment.
I would actually legalize all of it, with varying levels of control. Pot would be out and out legal in the same way the alcohol is, as would a number of low-grade pharmaceuticals (ambien, etc).
Heroin, methamphetimine, cocaine and other addictive drugs would be cheap and legal, but would only come from controlled distribution, with severe penalties for violating the distribution.
Even if you kept "hard" drugs illegal and legalized pot alone, you'd still open up a ton of law enforcement and criminal justice resources that are completely wasted today.
The US rate of incarceration is largely driven by drug-related sentences that are long and frequently manditory. If you fill up your prison space with non-violent drug offenders in on no-parole 20 year sentences and your tax base refuses to pay for increases in prison space for all the other offenders that actually impact quality of life (swindle/fraud, property crime, and crimes of physical violence), you'll find that those "other" crimes have sentences that basically reflect the prison space and the rate of incarcertation.
Harsh prison sentences for rape, most murders, robbery, arson, and a number of property crimes are a good idea. You just need to be able to house those offenders. Locking up guys growing a few pounds of marijuana for 20 years and only locking a rapist for 2 years because you don't have the space is patently absurd.
The other problem driving US crimes rates is our wholesale importation of third world populations and their blatantly broken social environment into our already broken underclass cities and neighborhoods. That only provides more fodder for crime and crime rates.
I'd also mention our other ridiculous desire, disarming law-abiding citizens through "gun control", but would you believe someone who advocated legalizing drugs and must-issue pistol carry permits?
Plus, I would be able to see whatever doctor I wanted instead of being limited to "the network". Since I am paying my own way, I would have more flexibility to be a good consumer, rather than relying on the insurance company to be a good consumer for me.
My personal opinon on this is that the closely-held network doctors (eg, those in network-based clinics) tend to suck more than non-network doctors (eg, those in a typically larger private practice), largely due to the number of patients they have to see and some of the other MBA-style efficiency and cost constraints on them.
But non-network docs can suck, too. The last two I've had (in different practices) have moved on me, leaving me to find a different doctor within the practice. And they're all kind of busy, leading you too block the door to explain your problem and hope you get more than just a prescription for Extra-Strength Advil and admonishment to get more exercise and eat better.
Which leads me to my biggest question -- how the hell do you be a good consumer? Sure, I flip through the glossy clinic book, telling me that Doc so and so graduated from Sawbones U and got his MD from Pills R Us, but so what? It's not like they're going to hand out home phone numbers for referrals, and 9 times of out 10 the people you work with are either totally clueless or seeing someone in the wrong part of town from you.
It needs the extra bandwidth for uncomrpessed audio, though. In addition to just better sounding audio, you'll get more battery runtime from bluetooth headphone setups that don't have to recompress an analog audio signal.
MAPI is dead and it looks like MS is heading towards WebDAV as their connectivity model in the future, since that's what Entourage 2004 uses. I really wish that they would have extended IMAP instead, as WebDAV requires IIS and accessing the mailbox as a filesystem isn't entirely efficient, IMHO.
The first followup poster makes a great point about how we really can follow the money, when banks aren't getting rich participating in the fraud and covering up the money trail.
Furthermore, you're mixing a lot of different "crimes" and money sources in your comment.
But all cash transactions are fundamentally untracable, but the problem that both kidnappers and othe crime figures have is converting cash to bank deposits. $500 is easy, $500,000 a week is really hard due to reporting requirements for overseas travel and US domestic cash deposit reporting. Once the transactions become electronic, they are tracable to the extent that banks aren't corrupted as well. Stories about drug dealers renting or buying houses just to store cash stuffed floor-ceiling aren't entirely made-up.
Terrorists have the added advantage of varying national laws surrounding financial transactions, corrupt governments and financial institutions as well as political backers who are unwilling to cooperate with those trying to trace terrorism-related financial transactions.
Finding the guy who transferred money out of gramma's bank account? Much simpler.
We used Groupwise from 4.1 to 5.x, and I'm frankly glad to be on Exchange. Sure you can gripe a lot of about Exchange and Win2k, but we've had nothing but good luck with it, certainly far better luck than the CPU-crushing bombfest that Groupwise on Netware 4.x was.
The closest thing to a problem in 3 years has been getting Entourage 2004 to work with it, and that was fixed with a post SP3 rollup we hadn't yet installed.
The good thing about a hugely popular email system is the amount of software and third party support for it. As you suggest, this is good for the lusers, especially the executive-types who guy buy a gadget from zitpopper at Best Buy and then expect it to work with email. It does with Outlook, with Groupwise probably not, and *maybe* with Notes.
..where they call *anyone* participating in the enterprise a "co-conspirator" and everybody gets the full punishment, despite only a small participation in the actual "crime".
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just saying that not _everything_ they do is motivated by some need to torture, maim and oppress. Some stuff, like railroads or civillian sattellites or their own codecs are built just as well in the capitalist USA or in the mostly-socialist Western Europe.
You're largely wrong. There are some sectors of the Chinese capitalist economy that are motivated by the pure economic value and low-level decisions that are made on technical merits (whether to run half meter or quarter meter sewer pipe), but major decisions like a satellite network ALWAYS depend on whether or not the device will further the power and authority of the Communist party and the military.
Why adopt a "wait and see" attitude with the Chinese government? We can already see the millions dead since the 1960s in the name of the glory of the Communist party. What could possibly motivate you to think that the situation has changed for the better and that their totalitarian government deserves the benefit of the doubt on ANY project that looks, smells and tastes like a political surveillance network?
I don't know how the digital data is structured on cable.
Is it one massive, encrypted stream encompassing the entire physical spectrum dedicated to digital channels that, once decrypted is a series of interleaved MPEG streams encompassing individual channels (think of an IPSec tunnel connecting two LANs, for example)? Tuning the cable box to a digital channel just means decrypting the meta-stream and then grabbing the substream for the particular channel you're looking for.
Or is each digital channel allocated a physically distinct spectrum on the wire with its own individually encrypted stream? Tuning would mean focusing the cable box on an RF band and then decrypting.
If it's the latter, then it would be technically possible to "tune" to the spectrum segment that had the channel you wanted, and that entire encrypted stream could go to disk and then playback would simply be presenting a cable-card compatible device the stream which it would then decode.
If its the former, you'd be out of luck as you'd have to record pretty much everything at once, but playback would allow you to channel surf, since you'd have recorded literally every digital channel.
Even if it was physically distinct bands you could tune to and dump to disk, the problem would be mapping cable spectrum to channels. I think that this is probably largely dynamic and arbitrary; a channel band could conceivably be widened or shrunk to accomodate changes in bitrate, and the spectrum->channel mapping might change as well, and you'd never know this unless you had access to unencrypted control bands.
No, the idea would be that playback would just route this data back through the CableCard for decryption and decoding.
No. The OpenCable spec is full of paranoia, like you can never allow an unencrypted version of the stream to exist outside a chip.
That still doesn't mean that the PC HDD couldn't be used for storing the encrypted data stream off the cable.
Even if it is China and the mandatory knee jerk reaction is "chinese govt==evil"
I'm sorry, but I missed something. Is there some other more apt reaction to a government with a long, bloody track record of torturing, killing and suppressing its people in the name of ideology?
I don't understand the people that come out of the woodwork as apologists for the Chinese government here. The Chinese government IS EVIL and that knee-jerk reaction isn't a "knee-jerk" reaction, it's as simple and logical a reaction to the totalitarian brutality they've demonstrates as the "knee-jerk" reaction to Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, Khmer Rouge Cambodia, ad nauseum.
You can't record uncompressed HDTV signals on your PC without a really muscular hardware-based encoding system. The raw, uncompressed signal is too much bandwidth to put to disc and I'm unaware of any consumer-level MPEG chips capable of real-time encoding of an HD stream.
.5-.75 real time encoding to MPEG. You can do it faster, but the quality sux0rs. And yes, there are pro boards that can do this, but for $$$$ and they're *only* real-time, not multiples of real time.
The solution would be a CableCard based TV card. CavbleCard is the new standard for enabling digital/HD/premium cable tuning capabilities directly in TVs and other devices. Basically you get a smart card from the cable company that fits a slot in the device, providing the authentication and decoding capabilities otherwise provided by a cable box. You still can't do interactive stuff like PPV and some of the stop/start movie functions, but for HBO and digital tier channels you can finally ditch the cable box.
With a CableCard based TV card, you'd be able to do what DirecTivo and cable-provided DVRs do -- take the *pre-compressed* signal off the cable line and write it to disc. No encoding required, no encoding hardware required. Playing these files just means pumping the data through the tuner portion of the card as if you were watching a live stream.
The challenges for most would be (A) will they authorize CableCard for PC-based DVR setups and (B) would there be any easy way to transcode the files to open standards? My guess is "maybe" for (A) and "unlikely" for (B). I'd wager that "they" really, really don't want people getting even well-encrypted/encoded HD video on their hard disks.
Slightly off topic: Why aren't there inexpensive real-time or faster MPEG encode/transcode boards for the PC? There are so many DVD recorders that use hardware encoding setups these days, that it would seem trivial to provide a hardware MPEG trans/encoding setup for PCs for a couple of hundred dollars. I hate spending
I doubt they'll lower the cost; they'll just consider this a way to lower losses.
I'd own a second (and possibly third) Tivo if I didn't have to buy subscriptions for all of them. That's just lunacy, especially when the two other units could just copy the data from one of the units, in effect costing Tivo zero in delivery costs.
If the banner ads are a problem, I'll just keep using my 2nd gen standalone until it craps out and then rent (for $5 per month) a hidef PVR from the cable company. It'll suck more than the Tivo, but it'll record Hidef (satellite HDTivo isn't an option where I live) and I won't have any money sunk into the hardware.
Among Tivo's many idiotic decisions are wasting too much development effort on non-core features (such as MP3s and photos), failure to deliver more core features (batch save/play), no cablecard-based unit on the horizon (HD recording, no IR blasting for digital cable channels), and little if any evolution of the hardware (firewire disk expansion and DVD-R add-ons).
Adding banner ads is just another stupid decision on their part to cover up the other stupid decisions on their part.
Senior corporate people are almost always from "marketing". Many corporate dollars and salaries are built around marketing.
Technologies that block or make "marketing" activities moot threaten the most powerful corporate players, either through obsolesence or disrupting business models based on marketers spending money on marketing services.
It's only a matter of time before absorbing marketing messages gets defined as a constitutional obligation, and generating them a constitutional right (oh wait, they've redefined the 1st Ammendment to the US constitution this way already....)
I've installed SP2 on a bunch of systems and had no functionality problems I've been able to attribute to SP2.
However, it still doesn't eliminate people from getting themselves full of spyware. I rebuilt my neighbor's system with SP2. I reinstalled and updated their AV, left on the firewall and tightened up the IE policies to no avail.
Two weeks later, their machine was so full of spyware it was almost unusable, and it wasn't apparent that they had downloaded anything, either. I'm suspecting that their son, who's a big "Texas Hold 'Em" player, started hitting search-engine matches to "Poker" and installed every ActiveX control offered, but there's no proof.
I should have added Mozilla or Firefox, but it's an old Celeron box and the slipstreamed SP2 install took too much of my time as it was; hanging around for one more install was another block of time I didn't have.
What we get on the news is a bunch of useless crap that doesn't mean anything to anyone.
They're a victim of at least two problems: the ratings game, the continuous short-period "news cycle". These things feed into each other to produce a crappy product.
The ratings game requires "mass interest" news, like Scott Peterson, as well as a generally high-gloss presentation that requires them to present the news in a fashion guaranteed to hold interest, and most people are bored with in-depth detail, facts and analysis.
The short-period news cycle is one of the worst problems. Every 2-3 hours (or sooner, depending on the channel), they need to have "new" news and updates on existing stories. In order to keep viewers, they have to do more than replay what they played 2 hours ago. This means they end up interviewing the media itself (the media asking the media for its opinion...?). The upshot is a lot of incoherent and tertiary information and opinion that just obscures the actual story.
These things then overlap and recombine to produce four TV anchors discussing the Peterson trial, which, when muting the sound, makes it look more like an ad for hair care products or clothing.
The scientific community. We're talking about science, remember?
The post I was replying to was talking about segregation, and quoted a religious scholar. I don't think we're talking science in this subthread.
In the case of segregation, science comes down firmly on one side, just like it does regarding Creationism. There's simply no scientific basis for the thing we call 'race' amongst humans, nor is there any sociological basis for claims that segregation reduces crime, etc.
If you can state the thesis we can test scientifically (double-blind, etc) for determining who should live/work/etc where, I'm willing to listen. Until then I'm calling segregation something other than a scientific issue.
So who gets to decide that "the other side" doesn't have a legitimate argument for a specific issue? Who is the arbiter of the veracity of one side's claim, if not the court of public opinion?
Segregation was long-standing social, legal and political *institution*, and despite King's complaints about the media, it's almost entirely (except in the minds of a select few) disappeared from American life, both as an institution and as a point of advocacy.
Perhaps it might have been overcome more quickly if the media had simply ignored the claims of those in favor of it, but what happens when the media does that with something like Iraq, Terrorism or some other issue where the claim that apparently lacks moral superiority is merely dismissed?
That's not fair. If you are going to make one drug freely available, how can you specify limits on another. Oh, you don't do that drug, that's why.
Opiates and most stimulants (amphetimines, cocaine) are highly addictive and have some pretty significant health consequences with long-term use. Opiates perhaps less so, but controlling access will minimize both "uninformed" access and grossly destructive access. If you want to take these drugs, fine, but we should prevent them getting into the hands of people whose decision making processes aren't capable of understanding the consequences of their use and to prevent profiteering. Marijuana is a lot harder to hurt yourself on; it's not physically addictive (although habit forming, and smoking isn't good for you) and you can't overdose on it. This is even more true than with alcohol.
If Pot is made legal I would propose the same penalty for Pot related traffic accidents as I do for Alcohol related ones. One bullet.
Driving while intoxicated shouldn't be tolerated, period. The death sentence might be bit strong on the first offense. I'd rather see something like 6 months in the workhouse and a 5 year probation for the first offense and a 2 year jail sentence, forfeiture of the automobile and 10 years of probation for the second offense. Third offense would be 5 years in prison, forfeiture of the automobile, permanent loss of driving privileges, and 10 years of probation. I'd consider the death sentence for vehicular homicide.
Any cars driven by the person in question after their 1st or 2nd offenses must have "CONVICTED DRUNK DRIVER" prominently (10" yellow on black reflective letters) displayed on all sides of the car as well as the hood. Getting caught driving a vehicle without these markings would be considered a "next" offense, regardless of whether the driver was drunk or not. Cars so marked would be subject to random and arbitrary search.
I'd also consider mandating the wearing of an orange, non-removable bracelet with "CONVICTED DRUNK DRIVER" on it.
This latter mechanism would probably be as effective as anything else, since the public shame and identification would be highly effective.
You know, I've had really good luck at State Farm for car insurance. I've had two claims handled really well, and the agents in our lobby that I use *always* have super up to date equipment; I frequently see new equipment boxes in their office space, and they had 17" LCD displays 3+ years ago (we still buy CRTs).
I've seen it three times now. The first time I thought it was brilliant. The second time, I thought it was kind of boring. The third time I thought it was more clever than the first time, and I caught a bunch of things I missed then.
unfortunately, it's not nearly as good as "The Office" on the BBC. I can't think of anything that will exceed that for artistic critique on the modern office environment.
...wants to know if you want to add your "all your data are belong to us" to his new IT startup.
I would actually legalize all of it, with varying levels of control. Pot would be out and out legal in the same way the alcohol is, as would a number of low-grade pharmaceuticals (ambien, etc).
Heroin, methamphetimine, cocaine and other addictive drugs would be cheap and legal, but would only come from controlled distribution, with severe penalties for violating the distribution.
Even if you kept "hard" drugs illegal and legalized pot alone, you'd still open up a ton of law enforcement and criminal justice resources that are completely wasted today.
The US rate of incarceration is largely driven by drug-related sentences that are long and frequently manditory. If you fill up your prison space with non-violent drug offenders in on no-parole 20 year sentences and your tax base refuses to pay for increases in prison space for all the other offenders that actually impact quality of life (swindle/fraud, property crime, and crimes of physical violence), you'll find that those "other" crimes have sentences that basically reflect the prison space and the rate of incarcertation.
Harsh prison sentences for rape, most murders, robbery, arson, and a number of property crimes are a good idea. You just need to be able to house those offenders. Locking up guys growing a few pounds of marijuana for 20 years and only locking a rapist for 2 years because you don't have the space is patently absurd.
The other problem driving US crimes rates is our wholesale importation of third world populations and their blatantly broken social environment into our already broken underclass cities and neighborhoods. That only provides more fodder for crime and crime rates.
I'd also mention our other ridiculous desire, disarming law-abiding citizens through "gun control", but would you believe someone who advocated legalizing drugs and must-issue pistol carry permits?
Plus, I would be able to see whatever doctor I wanted instead of being limited to "the network". Since I am paying my own way, I would have more flexibility to be a good consumer, rather than relying on the insurance company to be a good consumer for me.
My personal opinon on this is that the closely-held network doctors (eg, those in network-based clinics) tend to suck more than non-network doctors (eg, those in a typically larger private practice), largely due to the number of patients they have to see and some of the other MBA-style efficiency and cost constraints on them.
But non-network docs can suck, too. The last two I've had (in different practices) have moved on me, leaving me to find a different doctor within the practice. And they're all kind of busy, leading you too block the door to explain your problem and hope you get more than just a prescription for Extra-Strength Advil and admonishment to get more exercise and eat better.
Which leads me to my biggest question -- how the hell do you be a good consumer? Sure, I flip through the glossy clinic book, telling me that Doc so and so graduated from Sawbones U and got his MD from Pills R Us, but so what? It's not like they're going to hand out home phone numbers for referrals, and 9 times of out 10 the people you work with are either totally clueless or seeing someone in the wrong part of town from you.
It needs the extra bandwidth for uncomrpessed audio, though. In addition to just better sounding audio, you'll get more battery runtime from bluetooth headphone setups that don't have to recompress an analog audio signal.
For home-based audio, what's wrong with 802.11?
MAPI is dead and it looks like MS is heading towards WebDAV as their connectivity model in the future, since that's what Entourage 2004 uses. I really wish that they would have extended IMAP instead, as WebDAV requires IIS and accessing the mailbox as a filesystem isn't entirely efficient, IMHO.
Oh well.
The first followup poster makes a great point about how we really can follow the money, when banks aren't getting rich participating in the fraud and covering up the money trail.
Furthermore, you're mixing a lot of different "crimes" and money sources in your comment.
But all cash transactions are fundamentally untracable, but the problem that both kidnappers and othe crime figures have is converting cash to bank deposits. $500 is easy, $500,000 a week is really hard due to reporting requirements for overseas travel and US domestic cash deposit reporting. Once the transactions become electronic, they are tracable to the extent that banks aren't corrupted as well. Stories about drug dealers renting or buying houses just to store cash stuffed floor-ceiling aren't entirely made-up.
Terrorists have the added advantage of varying national laws surrounding financial transactions, corrupt governments and financial institutions as well as political backers who are unwilling to cooperate with those trying to trace terrorism-related financial transactions.
Finding the guy who transferred money out of gramma's bank account? Much simpler.
We used Groupwise from 4.1 to 5.x, and I'm frankly glad to be on Exchange. Sure you can gripe a lot of about Exchange and Win2k, but we've had nothing but good luck with it, certainly far better luck than the CPU-crushing bombfest that Groupwise on Netware 4.x was.
The closest thing to a problem in 3 years has been getting Entourage 2004 to work with it, and that was fixed with a post SP3 rollup we hadn't yet installed.
The good thing about a hugely popular email system is the amount of software and third party support for it. As you suggest, this is good for the lusers, especially the executive-types who guy buy a gadget from zitpopper at Best Buy and then expect it to work with email. It does with Outlook, with Groupwise probably not, and *maybe* with Notes.
..where they call *anyone* participating in the enterprise a "co-conspirator" and everybody gets the full punishment, despite only a small participation in the actual "crime".
Terrorism or not, why doesn't the government track all kinds of online fraud generally?