Indeed. They like to pretend that you did not buy a single copy of a program, but instead a license to USE that program under a long list of typically quite restrictive conditions. (which you don't even know about at the point of sale) And that's not reasonable at all. What typically happens is something along the lines of:
"I would like to buy a copy of Microsoft Office please", "Very well, that'll be $X then. Is that all ?", "Yes thank you, here you are." (hands over the box with the software)
It is COMPLETELY reasonable for the customer to expect that he just bought a copy of Microsoft Office. He said he wanted to do that, was quoted a price, paid the price, and was given the product. It's just about as classical a sale as one can imagine. If you substitute "3 pounds of bananas" for "a copy of Microsoft Office", there's really not a shadow of doubt.
We've got that; here in Norway. Infact it fitst in zero text and is called "copyright law". Normally copyright law prevents you from legally making copies of a protected work, but here there's an exception for such a copy as is needed to install and use a computer-program (also allowed to backup your computer, thus creating an additional copy).
So, no eula is requires at all, if all they want to say is: You're allowed to use this program on one computer, and to take backups of that computer, but not allowed to make a bunch of copies
Typically, though, they like to try to restrict you a hell of a lot more than that. Legally it's likely VOID, but that don't stop them from trying to restrict you from a large set of actions that are allowable under copyright-law, such as disassembling the software, publishing benchmarks of the software without their consent and so on and so forth.
That's entirely unrelated to FaceBooks terms of service. In some jurisdictions, publishing portraits require consent from the subject, so doing so would be a violation of copyright-law.
Anyways, you don't own copyright in pictures your friend took of you. (though, as I said above, depending on jurisdictions, it's possible your friend needs your consent to legally do certain things with the photos)
It's true, it nessecarily must be arbitrary because any line drawn in the sand could always be drawn somewhere else. There's no magical thing about exactly 16, or 18, or 15 that makes exactly THAT the correct line. But the corner-cases are absurd, and needs to be dealt with. Here's a few examples that are DEFINITELY in the needs-change category:
Currently, explicit pictures of someone under 18 counts as child-porn with harsh sentences. This includes if the pictures are of yourself. Yes, really, you can be 17, take a few explicit snapshots of YOURSELF and be convicted of production of child-porn. Additionally, if you share it with anyone, say you send a picture to your boyfriend, you're now also guilty of distributing childporn. And he is guilty of posession. Frankly, that's absurd.
(It's actually even worse in some jurisdictions where porn with actors under 18 is illegal, but the age of consent is 16. Here you can be 16, and legally fuck your girlfriend all you like. If any of you take a *picture* of it, though, you're now both liable for production and/or posession of child-porn. Extremely silly. Surely, if you're allowed to do it, you should also be allowed to watch a picture of it ?)
Similarily, it makes no sense to slap sex-offender on one (or both) parts in a sexual relationship between two consenting people of similar age. If two 15 year olds decide to sleep with oneanother, you may or may not be ok with that, but in any case, it certainly is neither pedophilia, sexual child-abuse or statutory rape. (okay, so some jurisdictions, like Texas have exceptions where sex with a minor is not considered statutory rape if the age-difference is 3 years or less)
Furthermore, many jurisdictions claim as child-porn any explicit material where the actors are, or APPEAR to be under a certain age. This is nonsense. It's essentially toughtcrime. It's a lot like saying that sleeping with a 19-year old should be illegal, if she dresses up in a high-school-uniform. Assuming the participants are definitely adult, mere appearance does not make something molestation. We might aswell convict various actors of murder on the grounds that they have on various occasions APPEARED to kill someone. Acting should not be a crime.
What someone can "legally" do is completely irrelevant. If 20 people apply for a job, and 4 of them are invited for an interview, the remaining 16 will generally not even know precisely why they where not invited. If they -do- ask why not, it's always trivial to come up with a plausible and permissible reason, even if the REAL reason is something that wouldn't be permissible.
Guess what; if your internet-history gives me the impression you're a dick, you won't be among the invited ones, regardless of qualifications. That's not a problem if you really ARE a dick, but I could see why you'd consider that a problem if it's just some other guy with the same name as you, being a dick.
On the other hand, most HR-departments *are* aware that names aren't generally usable as identifiers, not even when combined with a city. And when a closer look easily reveals that we're definitely not talking about the same person, I don't think there's all that much need for concern in this particular case.
You don't -have- to put any content that you consider valuable on Facebook, you know ?
Even if you -do- want a FaceBook profile, there's no reason it cannot consist of "I'm named X. Y. to see a gazillion of my pictures/poems/essays/whatever, visit my homepage at [url]"
Their unlimited perpetual rights to do whatever the hell they please with any content you upload to facebook, only covers content that you actually, you know, upload to facebook.
Not all vaccines give a 100% protection. Some of them just give a vastly decreased chance of falling ill. So it's perfectly possible that as a result of these parents not vaccinating their children, not only could their child suffer from a serious disease, but they could also contribute to spreading the disease more widely, a possible result is that some vaccinated children also become ill. (if it's a vaccine that does not give 100% protection)
That's why quite a few kindergartens in Norway refuse to take children who aren't vaccinated. It doesn't only expose these children to danger, it could also endanger the vaccinated children needlessly.
It depends on how much of someones time you want. A lawyer will generally cost $150+ an hour, so your $1000 will buy you a single work-day, give or take.
What this means is you can't afford to (and it would be a waste anyway) use a lawyer for everyday normal stuff. But you can afford to, and definitely should, use a qualified lawyer for tricky situations with potentially large consequences. It's worthwhile to have a lawyer check for the most common pitfalls when buying a house, for example, because $1000 is cheap insurance when problems can easily cost 2 orders of magnitude more than that.
The everyday normal stuff you should make an attempt to learn yourself. It's not that hard. There's a small number of laws a normal person comes into contact with on a regular basis. You want to know consumer-protection-laws, for example, since most of make purchases that come under it several times every week, and it's good to know your rights when something doesn't work as advertised, or breaks down prematurely.
Listen, when my uncle got his first PC (he was an early adopter) he paid about $3500 for it, which at the time was more than a months salary. It was a fairly average PC at the time.
Today, the most commonly sold PC for the home-consumer market is a $700 laptop, or something along those lines. But in the time between, salaries have aproximately doubled. So, the reality is that a typical home-pc today costs 1/10th of what it did when he got his first PC, it's aproximately 20 years ago. (a 386, back then)
The typical PC of today is ALSO several orders of magnitude more powerful, true.
I know it's a common myth that PCs have "same price, more power", but it's simply not true. Not even close to true. The reality is more along the lines of "insane increase in power, large decrease in price"
True, the power has grown by perhaps a factor of 1000 while the price has only fallen by a factor of 10. But that's logical, because there's physical constraints on the price, but fewer physical constraints on performance. Also, in many markets computers are "cheap enough". Here in Norway, for example, the set of people who don't have a computer because they can't afford one, is basically empty. Most people actually select the $700+ laptops, despite the existence of $300 laptops. So it seems to me, people are voting with their wallets and saying they DO want that power.
You're right. Some places really truly are worse than other places. Relativism is bullshit.
But I'm not sure where your argument is headed; Are you truly saying we shouldn't be concerned about the policies and the development in the UK, because there exists worse places on this planet ?
It sorta sounds like it, and that makes no sense at all.
If something is bad, then it remains BAD even if you can point to one (or many!) examples of things which are WORSE.
Dunno. 320kbps, averaged 24/7. But few people use the internet 24/7. And even if they did, 320kbps is more than you'll use doing anything other than video-streaming or downloading. Web-surfing or game-playing or radio-listening will use significantly less than that.
Yeah, it's easy to use 100GB by downloading a few multi-gigabyte files, but with other use, not so very easy. I think they're right, they claim 99% of their customers use less than this today, and I'm inclined to believe that claim.
Not really. It's about -you- safely stopping. In *general* in driving you're assumed to drive as if the driver in front of you may, at any time, suddenly fully apply the brakes. Assuming you've got the same braking-power he has, that means you need to keep a distance long enough to cover your own reaction-time.
Face it, there are a large selection of reasons why a driver may suddenly need to brake. Hitting the driver infront of you, because he braked unexpectedly, means you're driving hazardously and are fully to blame for the resulting accident.
If you drive so close that "if he brakes hard, we crash", then you're *too* close. Simple as that.
Swapping jobs ain't that dangerous. True, the newest employee is sometimes the first to be let go, but on the other hand, the new company is unlikely to be hiring if they think there's a high risk they'll need to cut those jobs again in short order.
Besides, your old company already proved they won't treat you fairly unless pressured, and THAT is something that's really unlikely to change.
It does depend on the data. But I do think that the easily accessible bandwith is growing faster than the size of data that needs to be transported secretly across borders, so that it's more and more practical to make the transport by data-transfer rather than carrying physical media.
There's going to be exceptions for a while, where your data is, and must be, huge, and you're transporting them from a region with very poor bandwith. But I do think the *trend* points towards the extinction of physical-media as a means of data-transport.
If it's risky data to be carrying, there's still no reason to hand-carry it across the border. If I wanted to get 10GB of unpopular data out of Iran (not completely random example, I've got several close friends in Iran), I'd *never* risk asking any of them to carry it. Rather I'd ask them to encrypt it, store it on a flash-card or something, and mail that card out, putting no return-adress on it, and if extra paranoid, have the card mailed in a different city than the one they live in.
It's not idiot-proof, but it's hell of a lot better than showing up at the border and hoping for the best.
If it was only 1GB, yeah, I'd ask them to upload it. Sure, it'd take time, but even by modem, you can upload a gigabyte in about 30 hours. If there was no rush, I'd ask them to do it 50MB a day, spread over 3 weeks. Wouldn't be that suspicious, particularily not if the upload happened to https://www.flickr.com/https://mail.google.com/ or a similar site where it's non-suspicious to upload 50MB worth of data every now and then.
Sure. They've got the power. They can pull their gun and shoot you dead for no reason whatsoever, should they be so inclined. Depending on the regime in power, they may or may not even be able to get away with that.
But nevertheless, if the information genuinely isn't on your laptop, there's nothing they can do to get their hands on that information. Besides, in many situations, transmitting the information rather than transporting it means that you have no need to cross the border at ALL. (well, obviously you will need to do that if you're going in to get it, but not if the information is for example from an informant on the inside)
I recommend this practice heartily for everyone visiting USA, for example. The border-people claim the right to search anyone, without probable cause, and to refuse entry if they find anything suspicious, it's anyones guess if an encrypted partition to which you refuse to tell the password counts as "suspicious". (my guess would be yes, certainly yes if you have a beard)
So, much better to go to USA with a naked laptop. You can keep your data online somewhere, you'll still have full access to the data once you're inside USA.
True enough. Even if your dissatisfaction about pay is the reason you're leaving, them offering more pay ain't reason enough to stay. It goes something like this:
"I really think my compensation isn't in line with my competences and responsibilities, could we discuss adjusting it to a more apropriate level ?"
"No."
"I see, in that case, here's my resignation-letter, I will be starting at [competitor-X] next month."
"We can't afford to lose you, we'll pay you whatever they're offering, plus 10%".
Seriously, at that point, the only sensible thing is to walk out. If they're only willing to pay you what you're actually worth to them when faced with (in essence) an ultimatum, then screw them. They had their chance when responding to your first inquiry, they blew it.
Indeed. I bought 5W slow-starting bulbs for the kids room for precisely this reason. If a kid is awake in the night and you need a little bit of light for dealing with whatever the problem is (needs new diapers or something), then turning on the floodlights is a bad idea. It makes everyone fully awake, and is pretty close to physically painful for eyes accustomed to darkness.
The 5W slow-starters give about the same light as a 20W incadescent when they're fully on, but they start out a lot less than that, and then gradually build up to that level over about 3 minutes.
This use-case is more or less dying out though. Because transporting bits across a border by having someone hand-carry them is just too large a risk, assuming it's the kind of bits the government of either country would rather not have crossing the border.
Much better to transmit the bits out, in encrypted form, over some kind of network. Even if there's no internet, you can always do it over satelite-phone or something. Yeah, I know that's like $3/minute, but how many minutes do you need to transmit the ascii-text of an interview or something ?
It's sligthly more of a problem if it's something largish, particularily if it's HD-video though, but even this problem is going away. Even if you're in Iran, it's not very hard to find an access-point with a megabit or more of capacity.
There's no question; the safest way to store "dangerous" bits on your laptop while crossing a border, is to NOT store them on there at all. They can't find what is genuinely not there.
A standard is a good thing. Assuming you can get at the encrypted blocks, this makes it possible to *test* that a certain implementation is conforming to the standard. This gives better guarantees than simply to trust the undocumented, untested encryption invented by some manufacturer.
There can be bugs in the standard, offcourse, but it's going to get heavy scrutiny by very competent crypto-heads, so any obvious mistakes should be discovered quickly.
Citation needed:-) No, seriously, where'd you get the idea that "most of the editors" of Wikipedia self-identify as "liberal", "green" or "communist" ?
I agree that "communist" is in general leftist everywhere, (more spesifically authoritarian left) but liberal is very ambigous, because it's used very differently in different parts of the world, for example usage similar to the one politicalcompass use is common in Europe, where right-left is one seen as one axis, and authoritarian/liberal as another axis alltogether. (so you can be liberal-left or liberal-right, authoritarian-left or authoritarian-right)
Green is *somewhat* more likely to be assosiated with left-wing views, but again it's a very relative term, it's not nearly as strongly a left-indicator in Scandinavia as it is in USA, for example. (we've got 3 socialist parties, 2 of which would describe themselves as green, and 4 non-socialist parties, 2 of which would also describe themselves as green)
I'm fairly average, for example, by Norwegian standards. By US standards I'd be a socialist economically, and extremely liberal on a freedom-axis, and green. Indeed even trying to place me on the US political map would be a challenge.
The Obama article, immediately preceeding an election, isn't a good sample for how Wikipedia tends to work. You are right that there's significantly more problems with handling issues that are controversial in hot situation. Wikipedia may indeed not be the best source of neutral information on a HOTLY contested issue, such as the properties of one of the two presidential candidates immediately before an election.
"Leftist" is a relative term. What is seen as neutral by an average American, appears as rigthwing propaganda to many Europeans, and vice versa. It depends a lot on where your "centre" is, and I don't think there's an objectively "correct" answer to that.
Sure, but on the other hand, if you live somewhere warm it'll add to the heatload an ac-unit has to handle, so this concern comes in the "it depends" category.
My point was just that economics alone won't lead consumers away from plasmas, even though they do use a lot more power.
I do know some TVs are used for decades. But on the other hand, I don't think it's a good bet that the -average- lcd or plasma bought today will be used actively for much more than 12 years.
The single remaining large Norwegian proprietary encyclopedia announced a similar move a month or two back. The fundamental point, which they are unable (or more likely unwilling) to accept is that they cannot BOTH have a thriving community AND remain in a "special" position.
Assuming I have expertise on a certain subject, and would like to share some of that with the world at no cost. Why would I do so by contributing to a closed Encyclopedia, owned and controlled by a single entity with shareholder-profit as their main motivation, rather than by contributing to an open Encyclopedia with all content equally available to all under a free license ?
There's no answer to this.
The second problem is that, to a first aproximation, Wikipedia is the only existing encyclopedia on the web. If all the others closed, and redirected their traffic to Wikipedia, the latter would likely not even notice a bump in the traffic. Encyclopedia Brittanica is likely the second-most-popular, and their traffic is literally something like 1% of wikipedias traffic, ignorable.
So, they're proposing to compete with the dominant (as in 100 times their size) player in the field of user-contributed open encyclopedias by doing precisely the same thing as them, only poorer, and only under THEIR control rather than under the control of the contributors.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. They like to pretend that you did not buy a single copy of a program, but instead a license to USE that program under a long list of typically quite restrictive conditions. (which you don't even know about at the point of sale) And that's not reasonable at all. What typically happens is something along the lines of:
"I would like to buy a copy of Microsoft Office please", "Very well, that'll be $X then. Is that all ?", "Yes thank you, here you are." (hands over the box with the software)
It is COMPLETELY reasonable for the customer to expect that he just bought a copy of Microsoft Office. He said he wanted to do that, was quoted a price, paid the price, and was given the product. It's just about as classical a sale as one can imagine. If you substitute "3 pounds of bananas" for "a copy of Microsoft Office", there's really not a shadow of doubt.
We've got that; here in Norway. Infact it fitst in zero text and is called "copyright law". Normally copyright law prevents you from legally making copies of a protected work, but here there's an exception for such a copy as is needed to install and use a computer-program (also allowed to backup your computer, thus creating an additional copy).
So, no eula is requires at all, if all they want to say is: You're allowed to use this program on one computer, and to take backups of that computer, but not allowed to make a bunch of copies
Typically, though, they like to try to restrict you a hell of a lot more than that. Legally it's likely VOID, but that don't stop them from trying to restrict you from a large set of actions that are allowable under copyright-law, such as disassembling the software, publishing benchmarks of the software without their consent and so on and so forth.
That's entirely unrelated to FaceBooks terms of service. In some jurisdictions, publishing portraits require consent from the subject, so doing so would be a violation of copyright-law.
Anyways, you don't own copyright in pictures your friend took of you. (though, as I said above, depending on jurisdictions, it's possible your friend needs your consent to legally do certain things with the photos)
It's true, it nessecarily must be arbitrary because any line drawn in the sand could always be drawn somewhere else. There's no magical thing about exactly 16, or 18, or 15 that makes exactly THAT the correct line. But the corner-cases are absurd, and needs to be dealt with. Here's a few examples that are DEFINITELY in the needs-change category:
Currently, explicit pictures of someone under 18 counts as child-porn with harsh sentences. This includes if the pictures are of yourself. Yes, really, you can be 17, take a few explicit snapshots of YOURSELF and be convicted of production of child-porn. Additionally, if you share it with anyone, say you send a picture to your boyfriend, you're now also guilty of distributing childporn. And he is guilty of posession. Frankly, that's absurd.
(It's actually even worse in some jurisdictions where porn with actors under 18 is illegal, but the age of consent is 16. Here you can be 16, and legally fuck your girlfriend all you like. If any of you take a *picture* of it, though, you're now both liable for production and/or posession of child-porn. Extremely silly. Surely, if you're allowed to do it, you should also be allowed to watch a picture of it ?)
Similarily, it makes no sense to slap sex-offender on one (or both) parts in a sexual relationship between two consenting people of similar age. If two 15 year olds decide to sleep with oneanother, you may or may not be ok with that, but in any case, it certainly is neither pedophilia, sexual child-abuse or statutory rape. (okay, so some jurisdictions, like Texas have exceptions where sex with a minor is not considered statutory rape if the age-difference is 3 years or less)
Furthermore, many jurisdictions claim as child-porn any explicit material where the actors are, or APPEAR to be under a certain age. This is nonsense. It's essentially toughtcrime. It's a lot like saying that sleeping with a 19-year old should be illegal, if she dresses up in a high-school-uniform. Assuming the participants are definitely adult, mere appearance does not make something molestation. We might aswell convict various actors of murder on the grounds that they have on various occasions APPEARED to kill someone. Acting should not be a crime.
What someone can "legally" do is completely irrelevant. If 20 people apply for a job, and 4 of them are invited for an interview, the remaining 16 will generally not even know precisely why they where not invited. If they -do- ask why not, it's always trivial to come up with a plausible and permissible reason, even if the REAL reason is something that wouldn't be permissible.
Guess what; if your internet-history gives me the impression you're a dick, you won't be among the invited ones, regardless of qualifications. That's not a problem if you really ARE a dick, but I could see why you'd consider that a problem if it's just some other guy with the same name as you, being a dick.
On the other hand, most HR-departments *are* aware that names aren't generally usable as identifiers, not even when combined with a city. And when a closer look easily reveals that we're definitely not talking about the same person, I don't think there's all that much need for concern in this particular case.
You don't -have- to put any content that you consider valuable on Facebook, you know ?
Even if you -do- want a FaceBook profile, there's no reason it cannot consist of "I'm named X. Y. to see a gazillion of my pictures/poems/essays/whatever, visit my homepage at [url]"
Their unlimited perpetual rights to do whatever the hell they please with any content you upload to facebook, only covers content that you actually, you know, upload to facebook.
And on other, unrelated children.
Not all vaccines give a 100% protection. Some of them just give a vastly decreased chance of falling ill. So it's perfectly possible that as a result of these parents not vaccinating their children, not only could their child suffer from a serious disease, but they could also contribute to spreading the disease more widely, a possible result is that some vaccinated children also become ill. (if it's a vaccine that does not give 100% protection)
That's why quite a few kindergartens in Norway refuse to take children who aren't vaccinated. It doesn't only expose these children to danger, it could also endanger the vaccinated children needlessly.
It depends on how much of someones time you want. A lawyer will generally cost $150+ an hour, so your $1000 will buy you a single work-day, give or take.
What this means is you can't afford to (and it would be a waste anyway) use a lawyer for everyday normal stuff. But you can afford to, and definitely should, use a qualified lawyer for tricky situations with potentially large consequences. It's worthwhile to have a lawyer check for the most common pitfalls when buying a house, for example, because $1000 is cheap insurance when problems can easily cost 2 orders of magnitude more than that.
The everyday normal stuff you should make an attempt to learn yourself. It's not that hard. There's a small number of laws a normal person comes into contact with on a regular basis. You want to know consumer-protection-laws, for example, since most of make purchases that come under it several times every week, and it's good to know your rights when something doesn't work as advertised, or breaks down prematurely.
"start" to fall ?
Listen, when my uncle got his first PC (he was an early adopter) he paid about $3500 for it, which at the time was more than a months salary. It was a fairly average PC at the time.
Today, the most commonly sold PC for the home-consumer market is a $700 laptop, or something along those lines. But in the time between, salaries have aproximately doubled. So, the reality is that a typical home-pc today costs 1/10th of what it did when he got his first PC, it's aproximately 20 years ago. (a 386, back then)
The typical PC of today is ALSO several orders of magnitude more powerful, true.
I know it's a common myth that PCs have "same price, more power", but it's simply not true. Not even close to true. The reality is more along the lines of "insane increase in power, large decrease in price"
True, the power has grown by perhaps a factor of 1000 while the price has only fallen by a factor of 10. But that's logical, because there's physical constraints on the price, but fewer physical constraints on performance. Also, in many markets computers are "cheap enough". Here in Norway, for example, the set of people who don't have a computer because they can't afford one, is basically empty. Most people actually select the $700+ laptops, despite the existence of $300 laptops. So it seems to me, people are voting with their wallets and saying they DO want that power.
You're right. Some places really truly are worse than other places. Relativism is bullshit.
But I'm not sure where your argument is headed; Are you truly saying we shouldn't be concerned about the policies and the development in the UK, because there exists worse places on this planet ?
It sorta sounds like it, and that makes no sense at all.
If something is bad, then it remains BAD even if you can point to one (or many!) examples of things which are WORSE.
Dunno. 320kbps, averaged 24/7. But few people use the internet 24/7. And even if they did, 320kbps is more than you'll use doing anything other than video-streaming or downloading. Web-surfing or game-playing or radio-listening will use significantly less than that.
Yeah, it's easy to use 100GB by downloading a few multi-gigabyte files, but with other use, not so very easy. I think they're right, they claim 99% of their customers use less than this today, and I'm inclined to believe that claim.
Not really. It's about -you- safely stopping. In *general* in driving you're assumed to drive as if the driver in front of you may, at any time, suddenly fully apply the brakes. Assuming you've got the same braking-power he has, that means you need to keep a distance long enough to cover your own reaction-time.
Face it, there are a large selection of reasons why a driver may suddenly need to brake. Hitting the driver infront of you, because he braked unexpectedly, means you're driving hazardously and are fully to blame for the resulting accident.
If you drive so close that "if he brakes hard, we crash", then you're *too* close. Simple as that.
If you think about it, read-only-memory also doesn't make a whole lot of sense. More properly, it should be called write-once-memory.
Swapping jobs ain't that dangerous. True, the newest employee is sometimes the first to be let go, but on the other hand, the new company is unlikely to be hiring if they think there's a high risk they'll need to cut those jobs again in short order. Besides, your old company already proved they won't treat you fairly unless pressured, and THAT is something that's really unlikely to change.
It does depend on the data. But I do think that the easily accessible bandwith is growing faster than the size of data that needs to be transported secretly across borders, so that it's more and more practical to make the transport by data-transfer rather than carrying physical media.
There's going to be exceptions for a while, where your data is, and must be, huge, and you're transporting them from a region with very poor bandwith. But I do think the *trend* points towards the extinction of physical-media as a means of data-transport.
If it's risky data to be carrying, there's still no reason to hand-carry it across the border. If I wanted to get 10GB of unpopular data out of Iran (not completely random example, I've got several close friends in Iran), I'd *never* risk asking any of them to carry it. Rather I'd ask them to encrypt it, store it on a flash-card or something, and mail that card out, putting no return-adress on it, and if extra paranoid, have the card mailed in a different city than the one they live in.
It's not idiot-proof, but it's hell of a lot better than showing up at the border and hoping for the best.
If it was only 1GB, yeah, I'd ask them to upload it. Sure, it'd take time, but even by modem, you can upload a gigabyte in about 30 hours. If there was no rush, I'd ask them to do it 50MB a day, spread over 3 weeks. Wouldn't be that suspicious, particularily not if the upload happened to https://www.flickr.com/ https://mail.google.com/ or a similar site where it's non-suspicious to upload 50MB worth of data every now and then.
Sure. They've got the power. They can pull their gun and shoot you dead for no reason whatsoever, should they be so inclined. Depending on the regime in power, they may or may not even be able to get away with that.
But nevertheless, if the information genuinely isn't on your laptop, there's nothing they can do to get their hands on that information. Besides, in many situations, transmitting the information rather than transporting it means that you have no need to cross the border at ALL. (well, obviously you will need to do that if you're going in to get it, but not if the information is for example from an informant on the inside)
I recommend this practice heartily for everyone visiting USA, for example. The border-people claim the right to search anyone, without probable cause, and to refuse entry if they find anything suspicious, it's anyones guess if an encrypted partition to which you refuse to tell the password counts as "suspicious". (my guess would be yes, certainly yes if you have a beard)
So, much better to go to USA with a naked laptop. You can keep your data online somewhere, you'll still have full access to the data once you're inside USA.
True enough. Even if your dissatisfaction about pay is the reason you're leaving, them offering more pay ain't reason enough to stay. It goes something like this:
"I really think my compensation isn't in line with my competences and responsibilities, could we discuss adjusting it to a more apropriate level ?"
"No."
"I see, in that case, here's my resignation-letter, I will be starting at [competitor-X] next month."
"We can't afford to lose you, we'll pay you whatever they're offering, plus 10%".
Seriously, at that point, the only sensible thing is to walk out. If they're only willing to pay you what you're actually worth to them when faced with (in essence) an ultimatum, then screw them. They had their chance when responding to your first inquiry, they blew it.
Indeed. I bought 5W slow-starting bulbs for the kids room for precisely this reason. If a kid is awake in the night and you need a little bit of light for dealing with whatever the problem is (needs new diapers or something), then turning on the floodlights is a bad idea. It makes everyone fully awake, and is pretty close to physically painful for eyes accustomed to darkness.
The 5W slow-starters give about the same light as a 20W incadescent when they're fully on, but they start out a lot less than that, and then gradually build up to that level over about 3 minutes.
Perfect !
This use-case is more or less dying out though. Because transporting bits across a border by having someone hand-carry them is just too large a risk, assuming it's the kind of bits the government of either country would rather not have crossing the border.
Much better to transmit the bits out, in encrypted form, over some kind of network. Even if there's no internet, you can always do it over satelite-phone or something. Yeah, I know that's like $3/minute, but how many minutes do you need to transmit the ascii-text of an interview or something ?
It's sligthly more of a problem if it's something largish, particularily if it's HD-video though, but even this problem is going away. Even if you're in Iran, it's not very hard to find an access-point with a megabit or more of capacity.
There's no question; the safest way to store "dangerous" bits on your laptop while crossing a border, is to NOT store them on there at all. They can't find what is genuinely not there.
A standard is a good thing. Assuming you can get at the encrypted blocks, this makes it possible to *test* that a certain implementation is conforming to the standard. This gives better guarantees than simply to trust the undocumented, untested encryption invented by some manufacturer.
There can be bugs in the standard, offcourse, but it's going to get heavy scrutiny by very competent crypto-heads, so any obvious mistakes should be discovered quickly.
Citation needed :-) No, seriously, where'd you get the idea that "most of the editors" of Wikipedia self-identify as "liberal", "green" or "communist" ?
I agree that "communist" is in general leftist everywhere, (more spesifically authoritarian left) but liberal is very ambigous, because it's used very differently in different parts of the world, for example usage similar to the one politicalcompass use is common in Europe, where right-left is one seen as one axis, and authoritarian/liberal as another axis alltogether. (so you can be liberal-left or liberal-right, authoritarian-left or authoritarian-right)
Green is *somewhat* more likely to be assosiated with left-wing views, but again it's a very relative term, it's not nearly as strongly a left-indicator in Scandinavia as it is in USA, for example. (we've got 3 socialist parties, 2 of which would describe themselves as green, and 4 non-socialist parties, 2 of which would also describe themselves as green)
I'm fairly average, for example, by Norwegian standards. By US standards I'd be a socialist economically, and extremely liberal on a freedom-axis, and green. Indeed even trying to place me on the US political map would be a challenge.
The Obama article, immediately preceeding an election, isn't a good sample for how Wikipedia tends to work. You are right that there's significantly more problems with handling issues that are controversial in hot situation. Wikipedia may indeed not be the best source of neutral information on a HOTLY contested issue, such as the properties of one of the two presidential candidates immediately before an election.
"Leftist" is a relative term. What is seen as neutral by an average American, appears as rigthwing propaganda to many Europeans, and vice versa. It depends a lot on where your "centre" is, and I don't think there's an objectively "correct" answer to that.
Sure, but on the other hand, if you live somewhere warm it'll add to the heatload an ac-unit has to handle, so this concern comes in the "it depends" category. My point was just that economics alone won't lead consumers away from plasmas, even though they do use a lot more power.
I do know some TVs are used for decades. But on the other hand, I don't think it's a good bet that the -average- lcd or plasma bought today will be used actively for much more than 12 years.
The single remaining large Norwegian proprietary encyclopedia announced a similar move a month or two back. The fundamental point, which they are unable (or more likely unwilling) to accept is that they cannot BOTH have a thriving community AND remain in a "special" position.
Assuming I have expertise on a certain subject, and would like to share some of that with the world at no cost. Why would I do so by contributing to a closed Encyclopedia, owned and controlled by a single entity with shareholder-profit as their main motivation, rather than by contributing to an open Encyclopedia with all content equally available to all under a free license ?
There's no answer to this.
The second problem is that, to a first aproximation, Wikipedia is the only existing encyclopedia on the web. If all the others closed, and redirected their traffic to Wikipedia, the latter would likely not even notice a bump in the traffic. Encyclopedia Brittanica is likely the second-most-popular, and their traffic is literally something like 1% of wikipedias traffic, ignorable.
So, they're proposing to compete with the dominant (as in 100 times their size) player in the field of user-contributed open encyclopedias by doing precisely the same thing as them, only poorer, and only under THEIR control rather than under the control of the contributors.
This will fly like a lead balloon.