Well, the 72 year old grandmother case is one in which she is accused of downloading rap music that she claims she doesn't recognize. Apparently her machine was 0wn3d and used for downloading thousands of songs, but the RIAA still demanded she pony up.
Of course, she could be lying. She could really be hiding her secret identity, Gran' Muthah, who just be bringin' sounds to her nursing-homies.
In the U.S. anyway, my understanding is that businesses are free to play a radio or TV for their customers, as long as it's from a live broadcast source. The courts determined that the public performance license paid by the radio and TV stations covered the performances in the businesses. But they are specifically not allowed to play CDs, tapes, pre-recorded programs or even to replay recordings made from the on-air broadcasts, unless they have a license.
I have heard that some of these ASCAP and BMI "inspectors" try to lie to small business owners and tell them "you need to buy a license from us for that radio or we'll sue your a$$e$", hoping to frighten the owners into ponying up a few hundred in needless protection money. Some are more honest -- they'll walk into a store, chat up the owner like a customer, ask about the music, and only after they find out it's a CD and not a radio station do they drop the license bomb.
I do not know if the law has ruled yet on satellite radio or cable TV. I also do not know if they've specifically ruled on "internet radio stations" like shoutcast sites; nor do I know if they have ruled on internet "rebroadcasts" of broadcast station signals (if WBBY has a www.wbby.com Real Audio feed, is it legal for the business to play it from their PC or do they need to use an actual FM radio tuner?)
IANAL and this is not legal advice -- it's fricking slashdot.
"Proving that iPod users are either scrupulously honest or more paranoid they'll get sued by RIAA than owners of lesser music players."
Paranoid? How about "three times more likely to lie to a potential RIAA lawyer that they download music?" Or "three times less stupid?" Perhaps, less inflammatorily, we could say "iPod owners are three times more informed about the rapacious RIAA barrators."
I don't think it counts as paranoia when they're publicly taking down 8-year-old girls and 72-year-old grandmas. It's self preservation.
All the frameworks I know tend to use their own string class, their own containers, etc -- and obviously as well their own threading library.
Because they're all OLD. People have needed to do graphics for longer than the STL has been a standard (1997? 1998?), and certainly for longer than the STL has been widely adopted. We're stuck with a YACF (Yet Another Crappy Framework) at our shop, complete with its own string class and container classes. I've asked the vendor recently "why don't you use the STL?" His answer: "code bloat."
This from a guy whose architecture revolves around every class implementing an IsKindOf(int) method that lets the calling program figure out if it's safe to statically cast to yet another homegrown type.
I think the real answer is a severe case of NIH syndrome: Not Invented Here. So I gotta put up with his unextensible, non-standard crap because his shop is filled with arrogant wunderkinder? I need a new vendor.
A programmer who is not able to figure out what to put in a separate function or how to make a proper class hierarchy won't magically do better in Java, C#, Python or whatever else.
No, but they have a better chance of accidentally not breaking something. Thus, in management's eyes, they're more productive.
Troll? Somehow my mom having a bunch of ancient educational stereoscopic slides is a "troll"? Or that the James Ford Bell museum turned them down, mostly because she didn't have a "complete set"?
Or perhaps it's because the pictures are old, and show politically incorrect things. Is that the troll?
I don't get it. Be a man, post a rebuttal. Engage in a conversation. Call me a liar -- even if you're wrong, at least you're not a coward.
I vow never again to rely on anyone else's word when making a significant purchase
That's a touch strong. Perhaps you should alter your vow to never rely on just one (commissioned) person's word. Shop around. Ask around. Surf the web, but keep in mind that lots of the review sites that float to the top of Google are written by astroturfing salesmen, designed you lure you into buying those same crappy cameras anyway. It takes a while to find the trustworthy sites -- "camera reviews" in Google just won't cut it anymore.
or buy a Kodak product.
Can't argue that one! Personally, other than a 1930's era Brownie that I grew up with in my toybox (and a slightly more modern Instamatic 126 cartridge point-n-click from 1972) I've never even considered Kodak for cameras. I always figured you had to buy a Japanese or German camera to get a good one. Films, papers, chemicals, I have no problems with any of Kodak's darkroom products. Strange how I came to that sort of decison when I was so young.
My mom has quite a collection of them. She used to live in an old school that was converted to condominiums in the 1980s, and they had preserved a cabinet with several drawers of these slides. She contacted one of the local museums to see if they were interested, but they were not. As far as I know, she still has them.
They also *can* have enough lag to make it impossible to play video games through them
Heh! I never thought of using it for that. I have tried playing a video game through a ReplayTV though. At least it leveled the playing field between me and my kid. Neither one of us could complete a lap!
I hear that Hauppauge devices have pretty good Linux support. I'm using the WinTV USB2 myself under Windows XP. Nice card, much MUCH better reception than my ATI TV-Wonder card ever had -- plus, it doesn't kill my CPU to have it running.
1) [folding memory card] How about digital cameras taking USB memory sticks directly (I understand this would require a new physical spec, but wouldn't that make a lot more sense?) Writing to USB 2.0 memory sticks is somewhat slower than writing directly to the new compact flash chips out there, and with 8, 11 and even 20 megapixel cameras out there the cameras are already being designed with expensive buffer RAM so they can take multiple shots rapidly. The slower the media, the larger (and more expensive) the buffer has to be to provide the same performance.
3) [front side TV connectors] Don't know what he's talking about; I've had front interfaces on my TV for years, but there must be something more to see for people that care to register.
The front panel has ALL the jacks for the set behind a hidden door, an illuminating light so you can read the labels and see the cords to align them, and a tunnel for the cords to come out the back. Sounds clever.
6) [outer button flip-phone] Come freaking on. A bad UI design has been corrected.
Far as I'm concerned, it created a different and worse problem. I'm forever hitting the side buttons accidentally while the phone is closed, causing random bleeps and boops, and the occasional incorrect-voice-dialing on the misinterpretation that my pocket lint must have said my wife's name. Why can't I turn these damn side buttons off when the phone is closed??? If nothing else, activate them only when it's ringing, otherwise they're just damn annoying!
9) [family portrait burst-mode] Let's grab the quote: the odds of somebody's eyes being closed increases geometrically with the number of people in the group. (emphasis mine). That's a hoot. But, sure I understand the problem. My camera from 2003 let's me take a bunch of pictures in a row. It's not a 2005 idea.
The novelty here is it's done with the self-timer. Of course with my family, they'd all wander off after the first flash, leaving two shots of people milling about!
Thanks for the advice and the page regarding solar power. I've been considering what I might be able to do with solar power, but there's a small problem. I live 45 degrees north of the equator!
If you check out my weather station's history, you'll find at the bottom is a chart with the amount of solar radiation landing on my house. The last three days have brought me peaks of 120 W/m^2, 80 W/m^2 and 16 W/m^2 (granted, there's probably snow sitting on the sensor today, but there's snow sitting on the weather station's solar cell as well.) And none of the days recieved more than 60 Watt-hours for more than four hours per day. This is really typical weather for this time of year.
The $400, 85 Watt Kyocera panel is 16% efficient, and is rated 85 Watts only in 1kW of sunlight at 25 deg C. I'd be looking at maybe getting 6 Watts for four or five hours per day for at least three months out of the year. I'd be hard-pressed to recharge a flashlight battery!
Even in the summer, on the brightest days of the year I typically get only momentary peaks over 1kW. It's certainly not an average up here.
Wow, thanks, that just made it all make sense! And it means the tips themselves are dirt-cheap to make, requiring only two resistors instead of a chip. Clever, clever!
Of course that means I can't use a setup like that unless I want to wire up a power controlling IC for each jack in addition to all the rest of the work.:-( Of course, it would be a cookie-cutter circuit, once it's done it's just a matter of copying it lots... hmm...
I've been thinking of mounting a power supply under my desk for just this purpose. Provide +5 and +12 VDC directly, and add a couple of voltage regulators to offer +9 and +3. I'm really, really sick of the collection of bricks and wall warts I have under here.
There are several reasons I haven't done it yet. The toughest is I'd need a supplier to deliver the dozens of shapes of coaxial connectors that all these gadgets use. I don't really want to strip the cables from the bricks as that makes most of these things non-portable (camera charger, network hub, etc.) It'd be much better to have a drawer full of unused warts that I could just chuck them in while selecting an appropriate wire.
The next reason is most of the power supplies I own are switching power supplies, and I'd have no guarantee that any device would be drawing enough to keep the PS hot. (Hanging a 50W resistor in here doesn't seem like a very good idea, either.)
Finally, probably the biggest reason of all is I'm lazy!:-)
One thing that I am eyeing up, however, is the iGo over at Radio Shack. They have a universal brick with changeable $10 tips that must have regulators built right into them. Maybe hook their brick up to my PC's external +12VDC jack, and octopus out a couple dozen wires or something. I don't know, it sounds expensive. Oh well. Guess I'll live with four power strips and the two dozen outlets and warts.
File type associations are evaluated when a process calls the Win32 API call "ShellExecute()"
The "more right" place to disable this would be with "ftype". This is what my box looks like right now:
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32>assoc.wmf .wmf=wmffile
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32>ftype wmffile wmffile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32>
Unregistering the DLL (as TFA posits) only affects the COM aspects of dealing with WMF files. While COM is how Explorer resolves the association, it does not alter how ShellExecute() will behave. Your suggestion will certainly prevent "launching" attacks that the unregister solution won't stop. The two need to be installed together for maximum protection.
If instead of changing the assoc you change the ftype, you will prevent attacks from any file type that resolves to a wmffile. (Of course now that I said that I just grepped and found the only file type on my system that resolves to wmffile is in fact.wmf.)
Hmm. This led me to check on any other uses of shimgvw.dll.
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32>ftype | find/i "shimgvw" emffile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1 giffile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1 jpegfile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1 Paint.Picture=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1 pjpegfile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1 pngfile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1 TIFImage.Document=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscr een %1 wmffile=rundll32.exe C:\WINDOWS\system32\shimgvw.dll,ImageView_Fullscre en %1
C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32>
I wonder if any of the other file types listed above also have this vulnerability?
How can you use "fait accompli" properly, yet not know the plural of "virus" is "viruses"?
Wordplay has long been a trait of the hacker community, dating back 40 years or more. "Virii" obviously has valid meaning, or you wouldn't have been able to understand it, let alone supply an alternate spelling for it. Virii entered the hacker argot well over ten years ago -- your whining won't eliminate it.
Give the whole "O woe are we! Our poor, precious language is under attack from heathens who mock the very Latin roots of it!" a rest. Language is not a static thing under the watchful control of the OED -- the OED simply reports on the current state of the words. Their slogan proudly proclaims "The definitive record of the English language." Nowhere do they imply control over the words contained within.
Language is dynamic. It changes, it grows. You should, too.
few professors will accept handwritten submissions these days.
Child. I had an English professor REFUSE a paper because I had printed it on a "computer". She would not accept it until I retyped it on a proper typewriter. I think it was the first computer prepared English paper she'd ever encountered. And it's not like she was particularly old, she was simply a Luddite who didn't believe computers should have anything to do with true academic studies, that they should be reserved for the studies of math and science.
Granted, a 9-pin teletype's font wasn't exactly sculpted for ease of reading, and the school's permanently faded ribbons mostly just gray-striped the greenbar pages. But I had used a new ribbon and plain white paper for the occasion, and I had carefully cut the tractor edges from the sides down to 8-1/2" x 11" just for her. I even used the newer teletype that supported lower case! Not good enough -- it was the "computer" at the root of her problem, not so much the media upon which my report was printed.
I'm only half-surprised she didn't teach by candlelight, or from texts hand-copied on parchment scrolls. I almost wonder if she ever made the leap into the 20th century, but I realize that I really don't care if she did or didn't -- the day she rejected that paper I reset my opinion meter of her to "-10" and left it there for the rest of my painful time in her class.
Yes, kids, that's what it was like to be cutting edge in the dark ages of 1979.
There are places you park where you typically approach your car from the front, and there are other places where you approach it from the rear. At her place of employment, she had a window office facing the parking lot where her car sat, and she always approached from the walkway in the front. But at home, she noses her car into the garage all the way to the wall and needs to walk around the back to get to the driver's door.
We had spent a week camping in northern Wisconsin with the car in an unsupervised long term lot. The car was nosed into tall grass, and the roads and walking approach were from the rear, so we didn't see the front. After we returned, she parked in the garage, and ran some shopping errands in the next day or two, but apparently nothing where she saw the car from the front. She spotted it immediately once she returned to work.
Yes, it's possible someone stole it during one of the shopping trips. But the long term lot was the perfect place to steal from: it had deep, tall grasses, a tree-line not too far away, lots of cover; plus it had a sign prominently posted that said "LONG-TERM PARKING" -- even stupid criminals could figure out that the people parking there wouldn't be likely to return for many days.
I'm just glad they didn't smash a window to steal something from inside it, leaving the car's interior exposed to the weather for the week.
Car thieves have long been known to steal plates to give them some extra getaway time. Here in Minnesota we have a front license plate requirement -- vehicles need to have official plates displayed on both the front and rear. That makes it really easy for thieves. They typically steal the front plate while the car is "nosed in" to some parking space, with the hope that the missing plate won't be noticed by the driver for a while.
My wife's car had the front plate stolen in just this manner. It was a few days before she even noticed it was missing. We reported it stolen to the small town sheriff where the crime occurred, but they really didn't care -- they took down the plate number, but that was it. We just had to suck it up and buy replacement plates (with different plate numbers, of course.)
I have occasionally wondered if those plates ended up just adorning some delinquent's garage wall, or if they were ever used in a further crime.
You shouldn't go through a stop light going 50! Even if its green!
Not sure what part of the world you're from, but here in the midwestern United States stoplights on 55 MPH and even 65 MPH roads are not at all uncommon, especially in suburban and rural areas. The yellow lights are quite long giving drivers adequate warning to stop for a red light.
You would NEVER SLOW DOWN for a green signal. That simply causes congestion and accidents.
What, now it's a numbers game? You're right, we're nowhere near the 15 million mark. We've only tortured and hog-piled a couple dozen towelheads, and really only very few have died after being beaten by their captors. And we've only held foreign "enemy combatants" without trials, no citizens, (except for Jose Padilla of course.)
And it's so legal that we have to offshore their detainment lest these terrorists get American lawyers or rights or something. And we've held so few of them that we only needed 8 secret prisons in addition to Gitmo, nothing at all like the gulags of old.
Now, I'm not saying ANY of these people don't deserve what they've gotten (except for that German guy they mistakenly held for half a year.) Padilla is a piece of sh!t thug that can go keep Tookie Williams warm in hell for all I care about him.
But they've not even had court trials or representation or anything. They haven't even been visited by representatives of the Geneva convention.
And this administration went so far as to OPPOSE McCain's "no-torture--EVER!" amendment, and had 9 senatorial cronies back them up.
So, what's the real difference between the 15,000,000 murders committed by the Soviet Union and the 3 dead captives at the hands of this administration? About a 70 year head start. Oh, and we have way better technology.
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Of course, she could be lying. She could really be hiding her secret identity, Gran' Muthah, who just be bringin' sounds to her nursing-homies.
I have heard that some of these ASCAP and BMI "inspectors" try to lie to small business owners and tell them "you need to buy a license from us for that radio or we'll sue your a$$e$", hoping to frighten the owners into ponying up a few hundred in needless protection money. Some are more honest -- they'll walk into a store, chat up the owner like a customer, ask about the music, and only after they find out it's a CD and not a radio station do they drop the license bomb.
I do not know if the law has ruled yet on satellite radio or cable TV. I also do not know if they've specifically ruled on "internet radio stations" like shoutcast sites; nor do I know if they have ruled on internet "rebroadcasts" of broadcast station signals (if WBBY has a www.wbby.com Real Audio feed, is it legal for the business to play it from their PC or do they need to use an actual FM radio tuner?)
IANAL and this is not legal advice -- it's fricking slashdot.
Paranoid? How about "three times more likely to lie to a potential RIAA lawyer that they download music?" Or "three times less stupid?" Perhaps, less inflammatorily, we could say "iPod owners are three times more informed about the rapacious RIAA barrators."
I don't think it counts as paranoia when they're publicly taking down 8-year-old girls and 72-year-old grandmas. It's self preservation.
How about: decisions decisions, DRM or DRM? My answer is "not yet"
So all you have to do is run the WINE autoupdater? :-)
Because they're all OLD. People have needed to do graphics for longer than the STL has been a standard (1997? 1998?), and certainly for longer than the STL has been widely adopted. We're stuck with a YACF (Yet Another Crappy Framework) at our shop, complete with its own string class and container classes. I've asked the vendor recently "why don't you use the STL?" His answer: "code bloat."
This from a guy whose architecture revolves around every class implementing an IsKindOf(int) method that lets the calling program figure out if it's safe to statically cast to yet another homegrown type.
I think the real answer is a severe case of NIH syndrome: Not Invented Here. So I gotta put up with his unextensible, non-standard crap because his shop is filled with arrogant wunderkinder? I need a new vendor.
No, but they have a better chance of accidentally not breaking something. Thus, in management's eyes, they're more productive.
Or perhaps it's because the pictures are old, and show politically incorrect things. Is that the troll?
I don't get it. Be a man, post a rebuttal. Engage in a conversation. Call me a liar -- even if you're wrong, at least you're not a coward.
That's a touch strong. Perhaps you should alter your vow to never rely on just one (commissioned) person's word. Shop around. Ask around. Surf the web, but keep in mind that lots of the review sites that float to the top of Google are written by astroturfing salesmen, designed you lure you into buying those same crappy cameras anyway. It takes a while to find the trustworthy sites -- "camera reviews" in Google just won't cut it anymore.
or buy a Kodak product.
Can't argue that one! Personally, other than a 1930's era Brownie that I grew up with in my toybox (and a slightly more modern Instamatic 126 cartridge point-n-click from 1972) I've never even considered Kodak for cameras. I always figured you had to buy a Japanese or German camera to get a good one. Films, papers, chemicals, I have no problems with any of Kodak's darkroom products. Strange how I came to that sort of decison when I was so young.
My mom has quite a collection of them. She used to live in an old school that was converted to condominiums in the 1980s, and they had preserved a cabinet with several drawers of these slides. She contacted one of the local museums to see if they were interested, but they were not. As far as I know, she still has them.
Heh! I never thought of using it for that. I have tried playing a video game through a ReplayTV though. At least it leveled the playing field between me and my kid. Neither one of us could complete a lap!
I hear that Hauppauge devices have pretty good Linux support. I'm using the WinTV USB2 myself under Windows XP. Nice card, much MUCH better reception than my ATI TV-Wonder card ever had -- plus, it doesn't kill my CPU to have it running.
Leap ahead to AMD.
Lame ahead.
Look at AMD before you leap ahead?
Or, my favorite: "So what if we're not AMD? We got APPLE, bitch!"
Writing to USB 2.0 memory sticks is somewhat slower than writing directly to the new compact flash chips out there, and with 8, 11 and even 20 megapixel cameras out there the cameras are already being designed with expensive buffer RAM so they can take multiple shots rapidly. The slower the media, the larger (and more expensive) the buffer has to be to provide the same performance.
The front panel has ALL the jacks for the set behind a hidden door, an illuminating light so you can read the labels and see the cords to align them, and a tunnel for the cords to come out the back. Sounds clever.
Far as I'm concerned, it created a different and worse problem. I'm forever hitting the side buttons accidentally while the phone is closed, causing random bleeps and boops, and the occasional incorrect-voice-dialing on the misinterpretation that my pocket lint must have said my wife's name. Why can't I turn these damn side buttons off when the phone is closed??? If nothing else, activate them only when it's ringing, otherwise they're just damn annoying!
The novelty here is it's done with the self-timer. Of course with my family, they'd all wander off after the first flash, leaving two shots of people milling about!
If you check out my weather station's history, you'll find at the bottom is a chart with the amount of solar radiation landing on my house. The last three days have brought me peaks of 120 W/m^2, 80 W/m^2 and 16 W/m^2 (granted, there's probably snow sitting on the sensor today, but there's snow sitting on the weather station's solar cell as well.) And none of the days recieved more than 60 Watt-hours for more than four hours per day. This is really typical weather for this time of year.
The $400, 85 Watt Kyocera panel is 16% efficient, and is rated 85 Watts only in 1kW of sunlight at 25 deg C. I'd be looking at maybe getting 6 Watts for four or five hours per day for at least three months out of the year. I'd be hard-pressed to recharge a flashlight battery!
Even in the summer, on the brightest days of the year I typically get only momentary peaks over 1kW. It's certainly not an average up here.
Of course that means I can't use a setup like that unless I want to wire up a power controlling IC for each jack in addition to all the rest of the work. :-( Of course, it would be a cookie-cutter circuit, once it's done it's just a matter of copying it lots... hmm...
There are several reasons I haven't done it yet. The toughest is I'd need a supplier to deliver the dozens of shapes of coaxial connectors that all these gadgets use. I don't really want to strip the cables from the bricks as that makes most of these things non-portable (camera charger, network hub, etc.) It'd be much better to have a drawer full of unused warts that I could just chuck them in while selecting an appropriate wire.
The next reason is most of the power supplies I own are switching power supplies, and I'd have no guarantee that any device would be drawing enough to keep the PS hot. (Hanging a 50W resistor in here doesn't seem like a very good idea, either.)
Finally, probably the biggest reason of all is I'm lazy! :-)
One thing that I am eyeing up, however, is the iGo over at Radio Shack. They have a universal brick with changeable $10 tips that must have regulators built right into them. Maybe hook their brick up to my PC's external +12VDC jack, and octopus out a couple dozen wires or something. I don't know, it sounds expensive. Oh well. Guess I'll live with four power strips and the two dozen outlets and warts.
The "more right" place to disable this would be with "ftype". This is what my box looks like right now:
Unregistering the DLL (as TFA posits) only affects the COM aspects of dealing with WMF files. While COM is how Explorer resolves the association, it does not alter how ShellExecute() will behave. Your suggestion will certainly prevent "launching" attacks that the unregister solution won't stop. The two need to be installed together for maximum protection.If instead of changing the assoc you change the ftype, you will prevent attacks from any file type that resolves to a wmffile. (Of course now that I said that I just grepped and found the only file type on my system that resolves to wmffile is in fact .wmf.)
Hmm. This led me to check on any other uses of shimgvw.dll.
I wonder if any of the other file types listed above also have this vulnerability?Wordplay has long been a trait of the hacker community, dating back 40 years or more. "Virii" obviously has valid meaning, or you wouldn't have been able to understand it, let alone supply an alternate spelling for it. Virii entered the hacker argot well over ten years ago -- your whining won't eliminate it.
Give the whole "O woe are we! Our poor, precious language is under attack from heathens who mock the very Latin roots of it!" a rest. Language is not a static thing under the watchful control of the OED -- the OED simply reports on the current state of the words. Their slogan proudly proclaims "The definitive record of the English language." Nowhere do they imply control over the words contained within.
Language is dynamic. It changes, it grows. You should, too.
Child. I had an English professor REFUSE a paper because I had printed it on a "computer". She would not accept it until I retyped it on a proper typewriter. I think it was the first computer prepared English paper she'd ever encountered. And it's not like she was particularly old, she was simply a Luddite who didn't believe computers should have anything to do with true academic studies, that they should be reserved for the studies of math and science.
Granted, a 9-pin teletype's font wasn't exactly sculpted for ease of reading, and the school's permanently faded ribbons mostly just gray-striped the greenbar pages. But I had used a new ribbon and plain white paper for the occasion, and I had carefully cut the tractor edges from the sides down to 8-1/2" x 11" just for her. I even used the newer teletype that supported lower case! Not good enough -- it was the "computer" at the root of her problem, not so much the media upon which my report was printed.
I'm only half-surprised she didn't teach by candlelight, or from texts hand-copied on parchment scrolls. I almost wonder if she ever made the leap into the 20th century, but I realize that I really don't care if she did or didn't -- the day she rejected that paper I reset my opinion meter of her to "-10" and left it there for the rest of my painful time in her class.
Yes, kids, that's what it was like to be cutting edge in the dark ages of 1979.
Exactly which gadgets did you have in mind?
We had spent a week camping in northern Wisconsin with the car in an unsupervised long term lot. The car was nosed into tall grass, and the roads and walking approach were from the rear, so we didn't see the front. After we returned, she parked in the garage, and ran some shopping errands in the next day or two, but apparently nothing where she saw the car from the front. She spotted it immediately once she returned to work.
Yes, it's possible someone stole it during one of the shopping trips. But the long term lot was the perfect place to steal from: it had deep, tall grasses, a tree-line not too far away, lots of cover; plus it had a sign prominently posted that said "LONG-TERM PARKING" -- even stupid criminals could figure out that the people parking there wouldn't be likely to return for many days.
I'm just glad they didn't smash a window to steal something from inside it, leaving the car's interior exposed to the weather for the week.
My wife's car had the front plate stolen in just this manner. It was a few days before she even noticed it was missing. We reported it stolen to the small town sheriff where the crime occurred, but they really didn't care -- they took down the plate number, but that was it. We just had to suck it up and buy replacement plates (with different plate numbers, of course.)
I have occasionally wondered if those plates ended up just adorning some delinquent's garage wall, or if they were ever used in a further crime.
Not sure what part of the world you're from, but here in the midwestern United States stoplights on 55 MPH and even 65 MPH roads are not at all uncommon, especially in suburban and rural areas. The yellow lights are quite long giving drivers adequate warning to stop for a red light.
You would NEVER SLOW DOWN for a green signal. That simply causes congestion and accidents.
And it's so legal that we have to offshore their detainment lest these terrorists get American lawyers or rights or something. And we've held so few of them that we only needed 8 secret prisons in addition to Gitmo, nothing at all like the gulags of old.
Now, I'm not saying ANY of these people don't deserve what they've gotten (except for that German guy they mistakenly held for half a year.) Padilla is a piece of sh!t thug that can go keep Tookie Williams warm in hell for all I care about him.
But they've not even had court trials or representation or anything. They haven't even been visited by representatives of the Geneva convention.
And this administration went so far as to OPPOSE McCain's "no-torture--EVER!" amendment, and had 9 senatorial cronies back them up.
So, what's the real difference between the 15,000,000 murders committed by the Soviet Union and the 3 dead captives at the hands of this administration? About a 70 year head start. Oh, and we have way better technology.