* Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F (0 to 35 C)
* Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
* Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
* Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
You have to obey them all, all the time. The sensor is simply just another component that might fail if you exceed these parameters. And it sounds like pretty convincing proof that you were in condensation conditions if the sensor fails by turning red.
I was going for funny when I said leprechauns, but legally they can send scary papers to anyone claiming anything they want without having the "legitimate" background for doing so. They base this on strong statistical evidence that most people will not mount a defense, and will instead comply with their demands.
It may all start innocent, like "we should protect our trademark", but once they get a taste for how profitable it is to win a case, and just how cheap and easy it is to send threatening letters, in no time at all they're expanding their boundaries by an order of magnitude or more. And because it's so expensive to call their bluff, nobody does.
I.P. law is very squishy, and the results are never predetermined. Even if you are personally 100% sure you are in the right, you never know how a court is going to rule. Therefore anyone can pretty much claim anything with regards to I.P. That also means that in most cases, sending the letter won't meet the legal test for barratry because there is no concrete evidence that the sender knew the claim was invalid. (And no ambulance-chasing law firm built upon the practice of barratry is stupid enough to allow that kind of evidence to exist.)
I'm sorry if my broad characterization of lawyers as unethical, filthy, greedy pigs offends any of the real lawyers out there reading this. I didn't mean to offend, I meant to incite a mob to take up pitchforks and torches.:-P
I'm waiting for Quentin Tarantino to come out with "Pulpier Fiction Vol. II", where he'll have some other pervert unchain a sexual deviant who he keeps bound and locked in a storage trunk, and we all discover that the deviant runs a 1-hour-photo place named Photo-Shop.
They've told this skeezy gear company that they can't start using an olympiad's name to sell their crappy products just because that olympiad happens to use their products.
Which is another way of claiming their right to restrict the use of her name. Yes, it's technically different than claiming her name as I.P., but I was answering the question as posed in TFS.
Of course they can claim her name as their I.P. They can also claim to be from the planet Xenu, or they can claim to be 2,000-year-old leprechauns. Claiming a thing is their property does not actually make it their property until a court has made the decision.
For a great example of other lawyers claiming untrue things, look at BoingBoing's laugh at Demi Moore's lawyers' expense. They claimed that BoingBoing was slandering Demi Moore by saying her image was photoshopped, when clearly it was not photoshopped as attested to by the sworn testimony of the photographers.
So the IOC can claim that Lindsey Vonn is made out of ice cream, milkweed pods, and sandpaper, if they want. Won't make it true. If UVEX wasn't getting such a good laugh out of this stupidity, I hope they'd have the integrity to restore Lindsey's name to their web site.
I think there's an awful lot of people in that middle ground where you are. Like you I don't doubt the science, and I think people who claim "oh, look at all the snow, it's cold, you lie" are being willfully deliberately ignorant (deliberately stupid people are the people I most loathe). So the impact vs. conservation discussion is really where people should be choosing to take a stand (or not.)
So I see it as a bunch of personal decisions. Here are some of mine:
Carbon emission capture: it may increase the cost of energy, but by providing jobs to the manufacturers and operators of the carbon sequestration units. I don't have a problem with this.
We need big agricultural efforts to continue to feed a rapidly growing world, and they take energy. I'd rather support ZPG efforts than lower carbon efforts, as they would make a far greater difference to the overall quality of life for everyone.
It does drive me towards preferring carbonless energy sources, such as more nuclear plants and geothermal sources and less fossil fuels: energy without atmospheric emissions seems a total win.
We have potential flooding of coastlines everywhere as sea levels rise. But I live at an elevation of 830 feet, a thousand miles from the nearest coast. No personal impact, and slight bemusement at the thought of the news broadcasting all of Manhattan running from the killer tides like some bad Sci Fi movie.
Death of the polar bears -- if it's them or humans, sorry bears.
If we burn all the fossil fuels for energy, we won't have them for other uses: plastics, lubrication, etc. Seems a waste of good resources.
On the other hand, I'll be dead of old age before we run out of fuel. My kid -- not so old. Potential grandkids -- they'll hate us. So how selfish do I want to be?
You might have been tricked by your school, too. Your similarity detector might have been a Mechanical Turk.
Are you sure the analysis tool was actually all-knowing and all-powerful? Perhaps it was the T.A. grading the exams who noticed the plagiarism, but was told to give the credit for the detection to the analysis tool? Perhaps the T.A. even generated the tool's output to convince you all that the tool was all-powerful and all-knowing.
Or do you know for a fact that they really expelled real students? Did you consider that they might have hired a couple of "plants" with the intent of publicly humiliating and expelling them, and frightening the rest of you into believing that their code analysis tool was infallible when it was really just a bash or perl script written with indent, sort, diff, wc, crc32, and grep? (Of course, I could probably make a pretty effective copy detection tool with just those components, at least effective enough to catch the cheaters who aren't even trying.)
Stage magicians, revivalist healers, psychics and mentalists use these tricks all the time to get their audiences to lower their guard, and to temporarily believe in something they would otherwise think is impossible.
Either way, it obviously made an impression on you as you are still quoting the story 14 years later. So I'd say that whatever they did was effective, even if there is no proof that the tool actually did the task.
Agreed. Learning to ask for help, getting outside help, and incorporating that advice into your work is a huge part of learning.
There's definitely a sliding scale between: "will you help me to understand X?" and "will you do X for me?" And it's more than just a line between those two points, because there are other ways to get help, such as group projects, or working side-by-side with an expert. It seems obvious to me that the intent of the code is to stop students before they get all the way to the latter.
Or perhaps the clause is temporally dependent: maybe they really mean the code to say "will not plagiarize ever, will not copy work ever, and will not get outside help during an exam or quiz unless it has been explicitly permitted by my instructor." (I'm thinking of one of my profs who holds "open-notes / open-laptop / closed-neighbor" exams.)
The algorithms ARE known. It's just that dissolving the chip package in hydrofluoric acid and inserting logic probes into the chip itself is far easier than breaking those algorithms.
He used the attack to retrieve a specific key from a specific chip, not as a general algorithm or protocol attack on the TPM platform.
I will learn to spell protein and gluten correctly. I will learn to spell protein and gluten correctly. I will learn to spell protein and gluten correctly.
Yes, that situation was a bit different. It was a crooked manufacturer selling phony products to various companies. And the scale was more massive than the midnight production runs of the "ordinary" counterfeiters. But the nature of the problems are comparable. Low quality ingredients sold as if they were high quality.
This is also a problem in the aircraft replacement parts industry. Counterfeiters are stamping low strength bolts with markings indicating high strength parts. Inspectors are unable to see the difference. I don't know if any planes have crashed as a result, though.
Yes, by "cheap lead-based solder" I meant inexpensive. Counterfeiters are all about reducing costs to the absolute minimum required to collect your money.
But if there's lead in a box labeled RoHS, and it's disposed of carelessly, lead is reintroduced back into the environment. It would be handled without safety precautions.
I'd rather have durable lead soldered parts than RoHS equipment, too. But if it's labeled RoHS, I would be OK tossing it in the trashcan rather than paying to drop it off at the recycling center. I'm very careful not to dispose of heavy metals in the waste stream.
What makes clothing special or different from electronics? Do you think clothing can't be made "sub-par"? That insulation placed in cheap knockoff down jackets can't be made from coarsely chopped chicken feathers that do nothing to keep you warm? That weak plastic connectors or zippers can't be substituted for durable connectors? That the fabric can't be cut against the weft so that it hangs at funny angles, or ravels instantly? That inadequate hems aren't used so the clothes fall apart after a wearing or two? Or cheap dyes that wash out irregularly in the first washings, and that leach enough dye to stain the rest of the clothes in the load can't be used?
In the case of sunglasses, are you willing to put up with distorted optics just to be seen wearing a pair of "Faux-kleys"?
Or more seriously, a couple years ago huge amounts of pet food were found to have had melamine additives that test positive for proteins instead of using an actual protein made from wheat glutein, causing many pets to painfully die from renal failure. And how many knock-off toys made with lead have been recalled in the past few years?
And then there's the labor used to make the counterfeits. At least with most of the bigger brands the working conditions of the labor forces are monitored (yes, in many cases it's only token monitoring, but they are slowly improving.) If a third shift is brought in to run the machines overnight, do you suppose they're overseen to make sure they get bathroom breaks or mealtimes, fair wages, or that they're not children? Are they locked in, placed at risk of death by fire?
Do you still think that counterfeits are really a bargain, and that you should give these criminals any more of your money? Or do you continue to ignore the problem and say to yourself, "It's $200 in the store vs. $20 from the guy with the blanket on the sidewalk, I'll buy from the guy, it's the same thing."
There's a lot that can go wrong with counterfeit hardware, even if it's made in the same factory. Out-of-spec components can be used in place of the high quality ones originally specified by the Cisco engineers. Cheap lead-based solder could be used with the RoHS label. Speeding up the production process can lead to shoddy workmanship. They probably aren't paying inspectors to check the assemblies. Toxic waste could be dumped in the garbage.
So not only does this make for a trouble-prone product for the customer, it also costs Cisco extra. A customer who paid for a box labeled Cisco is going to expect the same customer service as one who purchased actual legitimate Cisco hardware. They're going to send the crappy boxes in for warranty replacements on Cisco's nickel. And if the quality is sub-par they're going to be complaining about crappy Cisco hardware when it's not Cisco's fault, affecting their brand image.
In some cases the counterfeiters are fencing stolen but legitimate merchandise, but in most cases they're producing low-quality knock-offs.
But his assumption that clock error is responsible for all of the current lack of precision is wrong. Clock error is responsible for probably less than a third of the current error. Atmospherics, multipath reflections, and ephemeris errors account for the bulk of the error.
Sure, every improvement is an improvement. But these clocks are not a magic bullet that will magically grant centimeter precision.
If we ONLY publish and peer review our successes, our failures and errata is discarded.
In this data could be a LOT of really amazing potential, given peer review and continuance.
No wonder we don't have a theory of everything yet, we're not looking at nearly all the data.
Hmm. With the additions of Facebook and Twitter, the web is now essentially a compendium of 99% failures and errata. And according to your hypothesis, we should still find some amazing potential in it. I think you're on to something.
Different way to look at it: why do people want 50" plasma TV sets? Because they don't want to squint at a 7" or a 13" TV. I find watching a movie on the iPhone is equally disappointing. I can see the idea, I can understand the plot, I can hear the dialog, but I cannot get the experience.
So who wants to "game" on an iPhone? I'd never want to play Bioshock or Portal on the tiny screen. Bioshock would be exactly this scary: *boo*. Portal would be exactly this humorous: *ha ha*.
Different kinds of games such as solitare, sudoku, that kind of puzzle stuff, they're all great on the iPhone, because it's a different type of gaming. In real life nobody buys Scrabble HD Edition, or Wide Screen Edition Triominos. They're not needed. This is just the same thing in reverse.
This is why the Drake equation is correct, but useless. Every factor in it is a guess that slides along a scale from "observational estimates" to "wild assed". And by careful selection of just the right guesses, you can come up with a number that suggests dumping truckloads of money into SETI is worth it. But any one of those numbers can skew N to less than one in a heartbeat.
And now, with just one the values that they based the decision to build SETI on reduced by three orders of magnitude, based on just 50 years of observation, that means that the wilder guesses could be even worse than they imagined.
SETI is a waste of money and resources. Participating in it is like participating in the lottery, only with a higher cost of entry and a lower chance of payoff.
Google Toolbar Tracks Your Browsing, Even When Off
At first I thought that this meant that Google was tracking my movements even when my computer was off. I wondered how they'd do this and then I remembered about Google Street View.
Sly bastards.
When my wife showed her mother their house on Google's satellite view, she wanted to go outside to wave at the camera.
Is this a suggestion that we shouldn't be growing orchids? Because that's a suggestion that I give up my rights instead of exercising them, and is utterly defeatist.
If you believe that's the case, you should sit in your basement 24x7 and eat ramen noodles purchased for you by a scofflaw neighbor. Otherwise you might go outside, step on the grass, ride a bike, laugh, and disturb the peace.
Sure, the CITES laws are tough, and may seem crazy to the average reader of the newspaper. But causing the extinction of an orchid species due to overharvesting has happened often enough that they've become necessary. It's still unfortunately very common for sleazy orchid sellers to simply pick the flowers from the wild, rather than go through the expense of raising them in a greenhouse. Without the paperwork, Mr. Norris wouldn't know if his orchids were properly propagated in a nursery, or if some guy chopped down a 200 year old tree simply to take the last few plants from its upper branches.
I feel bad for poor old Mr. Norris in the story, but I refuse to let fear of a despotic bureaucrat with a SWAT team at his disposal change anything I legally do.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-condensing. It's right here: http://www.apple.com/iphone/specs.html
Environmental requirements
* Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F (0 to 35 C)
* Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F (-20 to 45 C)
* Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
* Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)
You have to obey them all, all the time. The sensor is simply just another component that might fail if you exceed these parameters. And it sounds like pretty convincing proof that you were in condensation conditions if the sensor fails by turning red.
I was going for funny when I said leprechauns, but legally they can send scary papers to anyone claiming anything they want without having the "legitimate" background for doing so. They base this on strong statistical evidence that most people will not mount a defense, and will instead comply with their demands.
It may all start innocent, like "we should protect our trademark", but once they get a taste for how profitable it is to win a case, and just how cheap and easy it is to send threatening letters, in no time at all they're expanding their boundaries by an order of magnitude or more. And because it's so expensive to call their bluff, nobody does.
I.P. law is very squishy, and the results are never predetermined. Even if you are personally 100% sure you are in the right, you never know how a court is going to rule. Therefore anyone can pretty much claim anything with regards to I.P. That also means that in most cases, sending the letter won't meet the legal test for barratry because there is no concrete evidence that the sender knew the claim was invalid. (And no ambulance-chasing law firm built upon the practice of barratry is stupid enough to allow that kind of evidence to exist.)
I'm sorry if my broad characterization of lawyers as unethical, filthy, greedy pigs offends any of the real lawyers out there reading this. I didn't mean to offend, I meant to incite a mob to take up pitchforks and torches. :-P
I'm waiting for Quentin Tarantino to come out with "Pulpier Fiction Vol. II", where he'll have some other pervert unchain a sexual deviant who he keeps bound and locked in a storage trunk, and we all discover that the deviant runs a 1-hour-photo place named Photo-Shop.
Then GIMP won't seem so bad.
They've told this skeezy gear company that they can't start using an olympiad's name to sell their crappy products just because that olympiad happens to use their products.
Which is another way of claiming their right to restrict the use of her name. Yes, it's technically different than claiming her name as I.P., but I was answering the question as posed in TFS.
Of course they can claim her name as their I.P. They can also claim to be from the planet Xenu, or they can claim to be 2,000-year-old leprechauns. Claiming a thing is their property does not actually make it their property until a court has made the decision.
For a great example of other lawyers claiming untrue things, look at BoingBoing's laugh at Demi Moore's lawyers' expense. They claimed that BoingBoing was slandering Demi Moore by saying her image was photoshopped, when clearly it was not photoshopped as attested to by the sworn testimony of the photographers.
So the IOC can claim that Lindsey Vonn is made out of ice cream, milkweed pods, and sandpaper, if they want. Won't make it true. If UVEX wasn't getting such a good laugh out of this stupidity, I hope they'd have the integrity to restore Lindsey's name to their web site.
I think there's an awful lot of people in that middle ground where you are. Like you I don't doubt the science, and I think people who claim "oh, look at all the snow, it's cold, you lie" are being willfully deliberately ignorant (deliberately stupid people are the people I most loathe). So the impact vs. conservation discussion is really where people should be choosing to take a stand (or not.)
So I see it as a bunch of personal decisions. Here are some of mine:
A company can act like Apple and still succeed, but it must constantly innovate. Apple's latest 10 years of success attests to this.
Here's a What If: What if Jobs hadn't been ousted from Apple in 1985? Do you think the 1986 - 1996 would have played out the same?
Here's another What If: What if Jobs dies? Do you think 2010 - 2020 will play out like 1986 - 1996?
At least that's a testable hypothesis.
For a minute I read your post as this:
and I was going to vehemently disagree.
ROBOT 01101001: Do you know what is funny about mimes?
ROBOT 10000110: No. What is funny about mimes?
ROBOT 01101001: Their interaction with my gustatory sensory circuits.
ROBOT 10000110: Ha. Ha. Ha.
You might have been tricked by your school, too. Your similarity detector might have been a Mechanical Turk.
Are you sure the analysis tool was actually all-knowing and all-powerful? Perhaps it was the T.A. grading the exams who noticed the plagiarism, but was told to give the credit for the detection to the analysis tool? Perhaps the T.A. even generated the tool's output to convince you all that the tool was all-powerful and all-knowing.
Or do you know for a fact that they really expelled real students? Did you consider that they might have hired a couple of "plants" with the intent of publicly humiliating and expelling them, and frightening the rest of you into believing that their code analysis tool was infallible when it was really just a bash or perl script written with indent, sort, diff, wc, crc32, and grep? (Of course, I could probably make a pretty effective copy detection tool with just those components, at least effective enough to catch the cheaters who aren't even trying.)
Stage magicians, revivalist healers, psychics and mentalists use these tricks all the time to get their audiences to lower their guard, and to temporarily believe in something they would otherwise think is impossible.
Either way, it obviously made an impression on you as you are still quoting the story 14 years later. So I'd say that whatever they did was effective, even if there is no proof that the tool actually did the task.
Agreed. Learning to ask for help, getting outside help, and incorporating that advice into your work is a huge part of learning.
There's definitely a sliding scale between: "will you help me to understand X?" and "will you do X for me?" And it's more than just a line between those two points, because there are other ways to get help, such as group projects, or working side-by-side with an expert. It seems obvious to me that the intent of the code is to stop students before they get all the way to the latter.
Or perhaps the clause is temporally dependent: maybe they really mean the code to say "will not plagiarize ever, will not copy work ever, and will not get outside help during an exam or quiz unless it has been explicitly permitted by my instructor." (I'm thinking of one of my profs who holds "open-notes / open-laptop / closed-neighbor" exams.)
The algorithms ARE known. It's just that dissolving the chip package in hydrofluoric acid and inserting logic probes into the chip itself is far easier than breaking those algorithms.
He used the attack to retrieve a specific key from a specific chip, not as a general algorithm or protocol attack on the TPM platform.
I will learn to spell protein and gluten correctly.
I will learn to spell protein and gluten correctly.
I will learn to spell protein and gluten correctly.
Sorry, teacher.
Yes, that situation was a bit different. It was a crooked manufacturer selling phony products to various companies. And the scale was more massive than the midnight production runs of the "ordinary" counterfeiters. But the nature of the problems are comparable. Low quality ingredients sold as if they were high quality.
This is also a problem in the aircraft replacement parts industry. Counterfeiters are stamping low strength bolts with markings indicating high strength parts. Inspectors are unable to see the difference. I don't know if any planes have crashed as a result, though.
Surprise, I answered this about two hours ago.
Yes, by "cheap lead-based solder" I meant inexpensive. Counterfeiters are all about reducing costs to the absolute minimum required to collect your money.
But if there's lead in a box labeled RoHS, and it's disposed of carelessly, lead is reintroduced back into the environment. It would be handled without safety precautions.
I'd rather have durable lead soldered parts than RoHS equipment, too. But if it's labeled RoHS, I would be OK tossing it in the trashcan rather than paying to drop it off at the recycling center. I'm very careful not to dispose of heavy metals in the waste stream.
What makes clothing special or different from electronics? Do you think clothing can't be made "sub-par"? That insulation placed in cheap knockoff down jackets can't be made from coarsely chopped chicken feathers that do nothing to keep you warm? That weak plastic connectors or zippers can't be substituted for durable connectors? That the fabric can't be cut against the weft so that it hangs at funny angles, or ravels instantly? That inadequate hems aren't used so the clothes fall apart after a wearing or two? Or cheap dyes that wash out irregularly in the first washings, and that leach enough dye to stain the rest of the clothes in the load can't be used?
In the case of sunglasses, are you willing to put up with distorted optics just to be seen wearing a pair of "Faux-kleys"?
Or more seriously, a couple years ago huge amounts of pet food were found to have had melamine additives that test positive for proteins instead of using an actual protein made from wheat glutein, causing many pets to painfully die from renal failure. And how many knock-off toys made with lead have been recalled in the past few years?
And then there's the labor used to make the counterfeits. At least with most of the bigger brands the working conditions of the labor forces are monitored (yes, in many cases it's only token monitoring, but they are slowly improving.) If a third shift is brought in to run the machines overnight, do you suppose they're overseen to make sure they get bathroom breaks or mealtimes, fair wages, or that they're not children? Are they locked in, placed at risk of death by fire?
Do you still think that counterfeits are really a bargain, and that you should give these criminals any more of your money? Or do you continue to ignore the problem and say to yourself, "It's $200 in the store vs. $20 from the guy with the blanket on the sidewalk, I'll buy from the guy, it's the same thing."
I'm not saying that Cisco makes a greasy vegetable oil product.
But Firefox's spellchecker insists is.
There's a lot that can go wrong with counterfeit hardware, even if it's made in the same factory. Out-of-spec components can be used in place of the high quality ones originally specified by the Cisco engineers. Cheap lead-based solder could be used with the RoHS label. Speeding up the production process can lead to shoddy workmanship. They probably aren't paying inspectors to check the assemblies. Toxic waste could be dumped in the garbage.
So not only does this make for a trouble-prone product for the customer, it also costs Cisco extra. A customer who paid for a box labeled Cisco is going to expect the same customer service as one who purchased actual legitimate Cisco hardware. They're going to send the crappy boxes in for warranty replacements on Cisco's nickel. And if the quality is sub-par they're going to be complaining about crappy Cisco hardware when it's not Cisco's fault, affecting their brand image.
In some cases the counterfeiters are fencing stolen but legitimate merchandise, but in most cases they're producing low-quality knock-offs.
But his assumption that clock error is responsible for all of the current lack of precision is wrong. Clock error is responsible for probably less than a third of the current error. Atmospherics, multipath reflections, and ephemeris errors account for the bulk of the error.
Sure, every improvement is an improvement. But these clocks are not a magic bullet that will magically grant centimeter precision.
Well hell, there's reason enough for me to oppose whatever else is in the paragraph below, never mind TFA.
However, upon reading TFA I learned that he owns HarperCollins. So there's another publisher I don't need to feel bad about ignoring.
If we ONLY publish and peer review our successes, our failures and errata is discarded.
In this data could be a LOT of really amazing potential, given peer review and continuance.
No wonder we don't have a theory of everything yet, we're not looking at nearly all the data.
Hmm. With the additions of Facebook and Twitter, the web is now essentially a compendium of 99% failures and errata. And according to your hypothesis, we should still find some amazing potential in it. I think you're on to something.
Different way to look at it: why do people want 50" plasma TV sets? Because they don't want to squint at a 7" or a 13" TV. I find watching a movie on the iPhone is equally disappointing. I can see the idea, I can understand the plot, I can hear the dialog, but I cannot get the experience.
So who wants to "game" on an iPhone? I'd never want to play Bioshock or Portal on the tiny screen. Bioshock would be exactly this scary: *boo*. Portal would be exactly this humorous: *ha ha*.
Different kinds of games such as solitare, sudoku, that kind of puzzle stuff, they're all great on the iPhone, because it's a different type of gaming. In real life nobody buys Scrabble HD Edition, or Wide Screen Edition Triominos. They're not needed. This is just the same thing in reverse.
This is why the Drake equation is correct, but useless. Every factor in it is a guess that slides along a scale from "observational estimates" to "wild assed". And by careful selection of just the right guesses, you can come up with a number that suggests dumping truckloads of money into SETI is worth it. But any one of those numbers can skew N to less than one in a heartbeat.
And now, with just one the values that they based the decision to build SETI on reduced by three orders of magnitude, based on just 50 years of observation, that means that the wilder guesses could be even worse than they imagined.
SETI is a waste of money and resources. Participating in it is like participating in the lottery, only with a higher cost of entry and a lower chance of payoff.
Google Toolbar Tracks Your Browsing, Even When Off
At first I thought that this meant that Google was tracking my movements even when my computer was off. I wondered how they'd do this and then I remembered about Google Street View.
Sly bastards.
When my wife showed her mother their house on Google's satellite view, she wanted to go outside to wave at the camera.
Oh, they're good.
Is this a suggestion that we shouldn't be growing orchids? Because that's a suggestion that I give up my rights instead of exercising them, and is utterly defeatist.
If you believe that's the case, you should sit in your basement 24x7 and eat ramen noodles purchased for you by a scofflaw neighbor. Otherwise you might go outside, step on the grass, ride a bike, laugh, and disturb the peace.
Sure, the CITES laws are tough, and may seem crazy to the average reader of the newspaper. But causing the extinction of an orchid species due to overharvesting has happened often enough that they've become necessary. It's still unfortunately very common for sleazy orchid sellers to simply pick the flowers from the wild, rather than go through the expense of raising them in a greenhouse. Without the paperwork, Mr. Norris wouldn't know if his orchids were properly propagated in a nursery, or if some guy chopped down a 200 year old tree simply to take the last few plants from its upper branches.
I feel bad for poor old Mr. Norris in the story, but I refuse to let fear of a despotic bureaucrat with a SWAT team at his disposal change anything I legally do.