If the original record is relatively tamper proof (Ha!) this could serve as a good recourse against police by citizens who are wrongfully accused or otherwise abused.
Since every camera comes with an off-switch, at the very least it is prudent that all of the recordings have a timestamp. This would at least allow precise knowledge of how much time is missing if the officer turns the camera off for a time. The act of intentionally concealing something in the midst of police action could easily be considered suspect by a court if the events of that missing time are disputed.
Essentially, Open Office becomes the poor clone of Excel that can't quite compete.
There's no need for that. Open Office can assimilate compatibility with MS Office, AND it can go beyond. For me, major turning points were when Open Office started supporting HTML editing and PDF exports as standard features out of the box. In addition, I've frequently found Open Office to have better support for old MS Office formats than new versions of MS Office.
Scripting should be no different than the file format capabilities. Open Office can support the most used scripting capabilities in Excel, plus an assortment of other options. Then it is MS Office which cannot compete feature for feature.
With DVDs, people aren't happy unless they're absolutely bit-perfect and 100% glitch-free.
Uh, yeah, no kidding. If VHS has a glitch, then you're talking about a little static on a frame or two, or maybe even for a second of playback. When DVDs get glitches, playback just stops. Most of the time the glitches are scratches or some other sort of problem that can't be cleaned off, and the only way to bypass them is to use the chapter menu to attempt to go past the glitch and rewind as far as you can without making playback stop again. This makes glitches on DVDs far more painful than on VHS.
Personally I prefer something like the default Windows 2000/XP screensaver, which is just the Windows logo being displayed at a random location that changes every couple of seconds.
Try gnome-screensaver. In its default configuration, it just blanks the screen to black, then eventually powers off the display. In the normal fashion it pops up a password prompt when you press a key or move the mouse. I like the simplicity. If I'm running some process in the background, I don't want my screensaver taking up processor power. Blank is perfect.
I thought the funny thing about the article was the Slashdot banner at the top which reads, "POLITICS FOR NERDS. YOUR VOTE MATTERS." Perhaps they should make a second banner for stories in which your vote doesn't matter...
It makes more sense to give a web browser write access only to a small part of the file system than to force an entirely separate device to have a hard drive, IMO.
That's a reasonably clever idea. It could be applied more generally too. A wide variety of user apps could be restricted to only have write access to specified directories. With judicious use of symbolic links, this could even be made painless for the user.
This is essentially already done with a lot of server software, by running it as a dedicated user. It would just be a generalization of this concept to specify directory restrictions for apps running as a single user.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia -- Don't follow spurious 'urgent' links in email
Just wait until someone comes up with a virus which edits Wikipedia with links to itself as a method of propagation. The spammers have been doing this for some time, and it's only a matter of time before the virus writers start doing this as well.
Then it will genuinely be an issue of the degree of trust you can place in a link found on Wikipedia.
"...quantum entanglement, a spooky property that links particles however far apart they are...." Why not just make quantum networks that transfer using the quantum state directly. It would be faster-than-light networking,
First, to entangle two quantum states at a distance the entanglement must be established in a localized interaction after which the particles representing that state can move to a distance. And second, while entanglement links two states at a distance, it does not in any way permit a mechanism for transferring classical information via that entanglement.
In almost every case it comes down to visas and border controls that stop humans freely moving around their planet. On the surface it looks like a good idea, but it's absolutely ridiculous that a human shouldn't be able to freely roam the public spaces of their own planet!
No more ridiculous than you not being allowed to walk into someone's home, eat their food and sleep in their bed without their permission...
A better analogy would perhaps be being unable to buy a new house or move into the neighboring town without the people in that town deciding as a whole that they will permit you to live near them. It sounds silly, exclusionary, and backwards when we think of it in terms of a town, but most people still find it reasonable in terms of nations. In reality, the difference is only in the distance of our worldview and the scope of our self-identity, and in time and with increased communications, these are both broadening. Therefore it is likely that there will come a time when restricted migration across national borders will be largely regarded as backward, restrictive, and even oppressive.
Don't forget the process of identifying and evaluating experts in the first place. This is psychologically challenging due to the significant tendency of people assigned to judge expertise to not be objective, plus the redundant requirement that they themselves must usually be experts to do the job well.
where there is really only one quantum state accessible in two locations. And then when you first open one of the filenames, they are both automatically filled with the same content, and are then immediately unlinked into two separate but identical files.
Producing ID on demand is also not inherently a civil liberty issue. It loses you some privacy, granted, but you don't lose any liberty. You can still do everything you wanted to do before the ID legislation.
Correction. You're free to go anywhere that you want everyone to know you're going.
Unfortunately, freedom of assembly doesn't work so well when officials can track who those who assemble are, and use that information against them to affect their personal or professional lives.
What? A politician who wants verifiably fair elections? There must be some kind of mistake...
Maybe he's funded by Big Paper.;)
But seriously, it's a bad sign when we have to be shocked at someone with interest in the greater good over partisanship. There is absolutely no sensible reason for fair elections to be a partisan issue in the first place. Every candidate and official that HASN'T supported a verifiable paper trail is one we should be shocked about.
One fear is that some predatory monopolist, a Microsoft of the airwaves, would end up owning all of the spectrum. That won't happen. First, the market value of the spectrum would approach $1 trillion, out of the reach of any individual corporation.
... as I said before, regulation only stifles progress and innovation.
You missed a more likely problem. The more likely problem under your/McCullagh's proposal is that a rather limited resource, the useful portions of the spectrum, will be entirely in the control of corporations with deep pockets. This means there can be no low budget independent channels, no public television, no low-cost political discussion outlets over the airwaves, no ham radio operators relaying emergency information, and so forth. The spectrum will be bought up by those who have deep pockets and want to use it for only purposes which are highly profitable, and the remainder will be held onto by speculators waiting for it to go up in value, as it is a limited resource. The freedom of press doesn't work so well when legislation is arranged to specifically enforce the idea that only the rich can use a media.
The media you have available, then, will not be a matter of choice, but will be determined entirely by the type of broadcasts which are most profitable given the now extremely costly resource. The quality of content is terrible when it only targets the most general of interests, or the most gullible of spenders.
The secondary, but still annoying side-effect of this would be that hardware, like your TV and radio, will rapidly become obsolete as companies buy up portions of the spectrum that used to work for that device. This would make people unwilling to buy a product unless the spectrum range is guaranteed to remain present by some stable organization. Since you want to eliminate the FCC, the only remaining source for a stable organization of this sort would be a huge corporation, and thus such products will only provide for you the media that one corporation decides you should receive. You would probably have to subscribe to, or rent, a different broadcast TV or decoder for every corporation in the area, if there is even more than one in your area. It wouldn't be very profitable to give away broadcast TV when you can just as easily encrypt it and charge a subscription. So if anyone is left broadcasting unencrypted in a frequency band, you can buy their band from them, encrypt it, demand a subscription for access, and make more money. Hurray for consumers choice being in charge?
I love how the average/.er is against the FCC when they're censoring Howard Stern or Janet Jackson, but in favor of their cracking down on "big business".
I think most Slashdotters believe in freedom and diversity of information. When the government censors culture, this restricts the freedom and diversity of information. When a small handful of big businesses own all the major media outlets, this also restricts the freedom and diversity of information.
the FCC has no right regulating them anyhow... but thats more of my free-market philosophy.
Err, and how is the magic free market going to save you your neighbor or a company down the street decides to destroy your TV/radio reception, or screw up every CRT in your house, while they are playing with high power broadcasts for fun or profit?
How will the free market save you when a business decides it is more profitable to buy up the entire internet backbone and sublicense access to only the wealthiest sources of information?
Faith in the free market solving all your problems carries with it a very heavy assumption that what is most profitable for businesses will make things better for you. In reality, an exclusive focus on what is most profitable for business can make things much worse for you. Capitalism only works when there is freedom of choice for the consumer, but profit is maximized when the consumer does not have freedom of choice. A completely unregulated market will naturally approach the second condition.
Unfortunately, caloric restriction only raises the life expectancy of rodents in the laboratory, not when exposed to natural conditions.
Well I know plenty of people who spend all day in the lab and barely take any time off to eat. But I'm guessing this will not increase their lifespan much.:)
If you could change the balance at any point, what would it mean to be able to choose between heightened risk of cancer and some of the worse effects of old age? What a choice to have to make.
Ideally, you would be able to turn it on and off at will. Turn off aging when you reach a certain age. Then if you contract cancer, turn it on really quick to help kill off the cancer, and then when you recover from cancer, turn the "aging" process back off.
Not that we could do anything of the sort anytime soon, but hey, it could work on Star Trek.
I priced it out. (Years ago, so I'm sure the prices have changed.)
Tivo + livetime subscription: $500, $400 after rebate
Computer capable of running MythTV halfway decently: $1000
I don't know quite where you got your prices. At least a year ago I picked up a TV card with remote for $50, and a spare 160 GB HD to dedicate to MythTV for around $100, and was able to add MythTV functionality to an existing Linux server for no more cost than this (the prices should now be lower). If you don't have an existing Linux server to add MythTV to, the other hardware requirements are quite minimal since the TV cards usually come with an encoder, and so a fairly cheap desktop could be used. A machine dedicated exclusively to MythTV wouldn't even need a second harddrive.
Also, it seems TiVo no longer offers the lifetime subscription you mention. MythTV of course requires no subscription. While of course there is the problem that you have to install MythTV yourself, I would say MythTV is both cheaper and more flexible.
In order to prevent a massive lawsuite storm from all the major networks, TiVo officially only allows you to fast-forward through commercials, not skip them
Or you can just use MythTV, where you can automatically skip them without pressing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Since every camera comes with an off-switch, at the very least it is prudent that all of the recordings have a timestamp. This would at least allow precise knowledge of how much time is missing if the officer turns the camera off for a time. The act of intentionally concealing something in the midst of police action could easily be considered suspect by a court if the events of that missing time are disputed.
Call me stupid, but in a free country people should be able to be on the street without running in fear because the cops are carrying guns.
There's no need for that. Open Office can assimilate compatibility with MS Office, AND it can go beyond. For me, major turning points were when Open Office started supporting HTML editing and PDF exports as standard features out of the box. In addition, I've frequently found Open Office to have better support for old MS Office formats than new versions of MS Office.
Scripting should be no different than the file format capabilities. Open Office can support the most used scripting capabilities in Excel, plus an assortment of other options. Then it is MS Office which cannot compete feature for feature.
Uh, yeah, no kidding. If VHS has a glitch, then you're talking about a little static on a frame or two, or maybe even for a second of playback. When DVDs get glitches, playback just stops. Most of the time the glitches are scratches or some other sort of problem that can't be cleaned off, and the only way to bypass them is to use the chapter menu to attempt to go past the glitch and rewind as far as you can without making playback stop again. This makes glitches on DVDs far more painful than on VHS.
Try gnome-screensaver. In its default configuration, it just blanks the screen to black, then eventually powers off the display. In the normal fashion it pops up a password prompt when you press a key or move the mouse. I like the simplicity. If I'm running some process in the background, I don't want my screensaver taking up processor power. Blank is perfect.
Well, that, and sometimes it just hurts.
I thought the funny thing about the article was the Slashdot banner at the top which reads, "POLITICS FOR NERDS. YOUR VOTE MATTERS." Perhaps they should make a second banner for stories in which your vote doesn't matter...
That's a reasonably clever idea. It could be applied more generally too. A wide variety of user apps could be restricted to only have write access to specified directories. With judicious use of symbolic links, this could even be made painless for the user.
This is essentially already done with a lot of server software, by running it as a dedicated user. It would just be a generalization of this concept to specify directory restrictions for apps running as a single user.
Just wait until someone comes up with a virus which edits Wikipedia with links to itself as a method of propagation. The spammers have been doing this for some time, and it's only a matter of time before the virus writers start doing this as well.
Then it will genuinely be an issue of the degree of trust you can place in a link found on Wikipedia.
First, to entangle two quantum states at a distance the entanglement must be established in a localized interaction after which the particles representing that state can move to a distance. And second, while entanglement links two states at a distance, it does not in any way permit a mechanism for transferring classical information via that entanglement.
A better analogy would perhaps be being unable to buy a new house or move into the neighboring town without the people in that town deciding as a whole that they will permit you to live near them. It sounds silly, exclusionary, and backwards when we think of it in terms of a town, but most people still find it reasonable in terms of nations. In reality, the difference is only in the distance of our worldview and the scope of our self-identity, and in time and with increased communications, these are both broadening. Therefore it is likely that there will come a time when restricted migration across national borders will be largely regarded as backward, restrictive, and even oppressive.
Don't forget the process of identifying and evaluating experts in the first place. This is psychologically challenging due to the significant tendency of people assigned to judge expertise to not be objective, plus the redundant requirement that they themselves must usually be experts to do the job well.
The premise of entanglement is more like:
ln -s source target
where there is really only one quantum state accessible in two locations. And then when you first open one of the filenames, they are both automatically filled with the same content, and are then immediately unlinked into two separate but identical files.
Correction. You're free to go anywhere that you want everyone to know you're going.
Unfortunately, freedom of assembly doesn't work so well when officials can track who those who assemble are, and use that information against them to affect their personal or professional lives.
Maybe he's funded by Big Paper.
But seriously, it's a bad sign when we have to be shocked at someone with interest in the greater good over partisanship. There is absolutely no sensible reason for fair elections to be a partisan issue in the first place. Every candidate and official that HASN'T supported a verifiable paper trail is one we should be shocked about.
Indeed. I usually make my presentations with OpenOffice (in ooimpress). That way, I can save them as odp, powerpoint, or pdf.
You missed a more likely problem. The more likely problem under your/McCullagh's proposal is that a rather limited resource, the useful portions of the spectrum, will be entirely in the control of corporations with deep pockets. This means there can be no low budget independent channels, no public television, no low-cost political discussion outlets over the airwaves, no ham radio operators relaying emergency information, and so forth. The spectrum will be bought up by those who have deep pockets and want to use it for only purposes which are highly profitable, and the remainder will be held onto by speculators waiting for it to go up in value, as it is a limited resource. The freedom of press doesn't work so well when legislation is arranged to specifically enforce the idea that only the rich can use a media.
The media you have available, then, will not be a matter of choice, but will be determined entirely by the type of broadcasts which are most profitable given the now extremely costly resource. The quality of content is terrible when it only targets the most general of interests, or the most gullible of spenders.
The secondary, but still annoying side-effect of this would be that hardware, like your TV and radio, will rapidly become obsolete as companies buy up portions of the spectrum that used to work for that device. This would make people unwilling to buy a product unless the spectrum range is guaranteed to remain present by some stable organization. Since you want to eliminate the FCC, the only remaining source for a stable organization of this sort would be a huge corporation, and thus such products will only provide for you the media that one corporation decides you should receive. You would probably have to subscribe to, or rent, a different broadcast TV or decoder for every corporation in the area, if there is even more than one in your area. It wouldn't be very profitable to give away broadcast TV when you can just as easily encrypt it and charge a subscription. So if anyone is left broadcasting unencrypted in a frequency band, you can buy their band from them, encrypt it, demand a subscription for access, and make more money. Hurray for consumers choice being in charge?
I think most Slashdotters believe in freedom and diversity of information. When the government censors culture, this restricts the freedom and diversity of information. When a small handful of big businesses own all the major media outlets, this also restricts the freedom and diversity of information.
Err, and how is the magic free market going to save you your neighbor or a company down the street decides to destroy your TV/radio reception, or screw up every CRT in your house, while they are playing with high power broadcasts for fun or profit?
How will the free market save you when a business decides it is more profitable to buy up the entire internet backbone and sublicense access to only the wealthiest sources of information?
Faith in the free market solving all your problems carries with it a very heavy assumption that what is most profitable for businesses will make things better for you. In reality, an exclusive focus on what is most profitable for business can make things much worse for you. Capitalism only works when there is freedom of choice for the consumer, but profit is maximized when the consumer does not have freedom of choice. A completely unregulated market will naturally approach the second condition.
Well I know plenty of people who spend all day in the lab and barely take any time off to eat. But I'm guessing this will not increase their lifespan much.
If you could change the balance at any point, what would it mean to be able to choose between heightened risk of cancer and some of the worse effects of old age? What a choice to have to make.
Ideally, you would be able to turn it on and off at will. Turn off aging when you reach a certain age. Then if you contract cancer, turn it on really quick to help kill off the cancer, and then when you recover from cancer, turn the "aging" process back off.
Not that we could do anything of the sort anytime soon, but hey, it could work on Star Trek.
At 71 vulnerabilities, that could start to add up to some real money... Is there a quantity limit?
I don't know quite where you got your prices. At least a year ago I picked up a TV card with remote for $50, and a spare 160 GB HD to dedicate to MythTV for around $100, and was able to add MythTV functionality to an existing Linux server for no more cost than this (the prices should now be lower). If you don't have an existing Linux server to add MythTV to, the other hardware requirements are quite minimal since the TV cards usually come with an encoder, and so a fairly cheap desktop could be used. A machine dedicated exclusively to MythTV wouldn't even need a second harddrive.
Also, it seems TiVo no longer offers the lifetime subscription you mention. MythTV of course requires no subscription. While of course there is the problem that you have to install MythTV yourself, I would say MythTV is both cheaper and more flexible.
In order to prevent a massive lawsuite storm from all the major networks, TiVo officially only allows you to fast-forward through commercials, not skip them
Or you can just use MythTV, where you can automatically skip them without pressing anything.