Yes. As a matter of fact, the stuff to the left of the dot being "God" is just a joke started by the person who first decided to sell a few inches of column space. You could, in fact, put "Man" there, or make it actually usefully descriptive ("Control Panel").
Personally, I'd put "FSM" there, but for some reason the whole shortcut dealie doesn't work in Linux Mint. Shows how advanced Windows is. We don't even HAVE a God in Linux. Except Linus, of course, but he's a minor deity.:)
There's a CTRL and SHIFT on the right side of the keyboard, too. That will allow you to avoid the gelatinous finger issue.
It's kind of the opposite of the habitual CTRL-ALT-DEL (using the right hand on the lower portion of the keyboard and the left hand for the upper), but you don't have to twist your hand into odd shapes to get CTRL-SHIFT-ESC at least.
Another option is to lay your thumb across the CTRL and SHIFT keys to press them at the same time, then your index or middle finger is perfectly positioned to tap the ESC key. No law says you have to push only one button per digit. Though overall that's even clumsier.
Personally, I'd prefer to develop gelatinous fingers. Sounds like a cool name for a comic book superhero. "Gelatinous Finger Man! Able to press 10 keys arranged at random around the keyboard simultaneously! (cue crappy overprocessed music)"
First, I agree that TSA appears to have overreacted, and isn't doing themselves any favors with their ongoing attempt to blame the traveler for doing something that is perfectly legal and probably didn't seem unusual at all to them. Youngblood needs to hold a new press conference and apologize to Ramirez. Not for the initial reaction, but for his "why would anyone take a risk of carrying honey" bullshit as a thinly veiled attempt to blame Ramirez for shutting down the airport.
However, good quality raw honey has a very strong smell, and given that this guy is a farmer he may have liked some local raw honey he found and decided to take some home. Unfortunately, most people I know would not recognize the aroma of raw honey. It can be rather pungent, and to some people unpleasantly so. Once cooked and processed, as it generally is for American consumption, it's a very different product with comparatively little aroma. Much like milk - the pasteurized homogenized stuff you can buy in most places is not nearly the same as raw milk, and raw milk tastes and smells different - it has an earthy flavor and smell to it that is lost in processing. I love both raw milk and raw honey, but they are very different from their processed counterparts. Hell, most people I know wouldn't recognize the COLOR of raw honey. It can be very dark and cloudy, almost opaquely in some cases.
In some states, it's also illegal to sell raw milk and/or raw honey, so Ramirez might have been stocking up while he had a supply available.
Add to that the fact that bees are routinely fogged with smoke during the honey harvesting process. If Ramirez was present for that process and packed those clothes, you can add "smoke" to the strong raw honey smell. That would make a pretty interesting combination of scents even raw honey lovers might not recognize.
The TNT and acetone peroxide swabs could have easily been the result (as mentioned in the article) of the smoke used to fog the bees during the collection process, or a chemical or chemicals used on the farm. A little Diesel fuel, a little ammonium nitrate, a touch of this, a spot of that, get it on the bottles, handle the bottles while loading them in the suitcase, whammo - false positive.
So looking at it from the perspective of a TSA agent, using the "walk a mile in their moccasins" rule:
1. They did a routine swab of luggage, and one bag tested positive for TNT and acetone peroxide. That's enough to certainly merit looking in the suitcase as a next step. They'd be criminally negligent not to look into it further, that's their damned job.
2. They opened the suitcase and were presented with bottles of thick (probably dark) cloudy amber fluid in unmarked Gatorade bottles. From the point of view of a TSA agent who has just gotten a positive test for explosives, this would be reasonably considered "suspicious". I know I'd be concerned enough not to just pack the suitcase back up and send it on its merry way. So they reasonably investigated further.
3. They opened a bottle and were presented with an unfamiliar, strong smell. I know people who do find the smell of raw honey unpleasant, so the strong unknown smell combined with the tension of having a positive explosives test and the odd packaging, I could easily see someone being nauseated by the smell. Next "reasonable person" reaction is certainly not to taste it and discover it's honey!
Their initial reaction sounds very much like the system worked as it should, given the (probably understandable) misinterpretation of the evidence. Youngblood and TSA management seem to be the only ones truly mishandling this situation, by trying to blame Ramirez for what looks like an honest mistake on the TSA's part. It's time to give Ramirez back his honey, apologize, have Obama invite everyone over for a beer, and move on.
The real shame is that it's likely the root cause of this is the simple fact that many people don't know a REAL food when they see and smell it.
Blackberry devices can encrypt the entire SD card, or part of the SD card (my company allows the/music,/ringtones,/videos, and/pictures folders to be unencrypted, everything else gets encrypted). The encryption key is on the phone, and in the event of a wipe that encryption key is deleted from the phone and all the encrypted data on the SD chip is now useless, even on the original handset.
Despite the inconvenience, remote wipe and "bad password attempt" wipe are critical features in a corporate environment. If my company email is on my phone, I don't want to be the one that allowed someone else to read it.
The default configuration at my company is:
- I have to set a password on my Blackberry. It has to be at least 6 characters long, and contain at least one number and one character.
- The password must be changed every 60 days.
- The phone will lock itself requiring the password to unlock it after 15 minutes.
- All data on the phone is encrypted, including anything written to a Secure Digital chip. The SD card is unreadable outside the phone.
- Ten bad password attempts will wipe the device clean, including nuking the decryption key for any SD card that may be associated with the phone. The company can also remote-wipe it if I tell them it's lost.
With that sort of security arrangement there is always the risk that someone could do a denial of service attack by simply entering a bad password as many times as it takes to wipe the device. That's why corporate smartphones rarely contain original copies of any important information and can be reloaded remotely as easily as they can be nuked. If my seven-year-old nuked my phone, it could be reloaded with all of my data in about an hour or two, and all I have to do is call my company helpdesk (on the same phone) and have them initiate the reload. If I dropped it down a storm drain, my company can reissue an identical phone with all of my corporate data on it in a few hours.
I have to reinstall my non-corporate apps (Google Maps, my RSS reader, etc), but even those use server-side data and all I need to do is log into them. No real data of value is lost unless I'm dumb enough not to have backed up some pictures of value to me or something.
Let's build the lifeboat now. We can put in lawyers, telephone sanitizers, and other useful people to colonize our new planet. We'll tell them we are following it shortly with the rest of the population.
I think "Ark" would be a better name. Let's call it the "B Ark".
Even the junction of excellent cheese and fine chocolate cannot change the laws of physics, except the combination of the two might eventually increase my mass until I become a new singularity.
"Money" as in "people shell out $60 for the 2010 version".
And they will. Make no mistake. Any backlash on this will be minimal. EA has been selling the annual series of these games for years now, and only guarantee server access for one year, after which you either multiplay locally, set up your own server somewhere, or shell out the bucks for the next version. They're just a couple of years behind in their server shutdown schedule. EA is also the only one licensed to do games with real names and logos in them, and people want their unreality to be real. So if EA players want to shove a bunch of pixels that vaguely resemble their favorite players and compete with total strangers doing so, they'll pony up $60.
There will be angst (shock) , and gnashing of teeth (anger), and the threat of a lawsuit or something (denial), followed by maybe some crying (acceptance), followed by the shuffling sound of millions of credit cards being pulled out of millions of wallets. This is the cycle of annual upgrade grief.
I never played football games, but I was into first person shooters for a while (Unreal, Call of Duty, etc). I rarely played online, we had LAN parties. But it got too expensive keeping up with the latest games, even just for 4 game lines ($60/year/game for 4 games was costing me $20 a month just to buy games), so I stopped.
EA would do well to charge a monthly fee for server access and guarantee access to 3-4 releases back. But they apparently do better just selling an annual version with one year (from release date) of access and baking the server costs into the retail price of the game.
If there were a human on Mars, we wouldn't possibly have had him/her there for 6 years. Not with our current technology. Not with our current resources.
For the cost of one human on mars for 6 months, we could have 10 Spirits there for years. Or more. And if one broke, it would be disposable.
Eventually, we want humans there. But to learn about the terrain, the most efficient and effective way is to send robots. When humans go there, our target should be a one-way trip.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more to get a human to Mars in a condition where it can be useful. And then they expect to be able to get back, which is even costlier.
I wonder how much it costs to get a ton to Mars? Let's say we have a payload of ten tons on a one-way rocket.
In ten tons, you could fit:
5 humans at 200 pounds each = 1/2 ton.
Food for all ten humans at 1/2 ton each = 2 1/2 tons.
Water for all five humans, spacesuits, control instruments, bathroom facilities, water recycling plant, personal supplies, medical supplies, etc, call that another half ton at least.
Buggy to carry a couple of humans around on the surface = 1/2 ton.
Scientific instruments for use on the planet = 1 ton (that assumes each of the 5 crewmembers is as well-equipped with gear as the robot).
Power plant to run the water recycling and keep the humans warm, with enough fuel to run it for several years = 1/2 ton (small nuke?).
Oxygen scrubbers for several years, has to be about 1/2 ton at least.
Rocket to get all 5 back up from surface, with fuel, at least 2 tons.
Shielding needed to keep the humans alive (not necessary for robots), at least a ton I'd assume.
I'm not even sure what the additional fuel for a return trip would weigh. A ton? Probably more.
In that same ten tons, you could fit 50 400 pound Spirit/Opportunity type robots, and they'd take up less volume since they could all be crammed in. Put a small nuke plant and bigger wheels on each robot and you might be talking about 25 of them, each capable of operating for years at or above human walking pace, with few or no stops. In the course of 2-3 years, if you spaced them out correctly, you'd be able to sample all of the major landscape types and have covered a LOT of ground.
We could probably have a detailed surface map of Mars with information on what landscapes have what soil types for a significant portion of the planet by the end of the decade if we started building them now. Plus, we'd have a bunch of working nuclear plants on-site and some working scientific instruments that could be used by the eventual human colonists.
Heck, we might even find a way to repurpose some of the robots to give the terraforming process a boost someday.
Sprint does not issue SIM cards, and doesn't use the GSM standard. They are a CDMA carrier. An "unlocked" phone that uses GSM and SIM cards is useless for Sprint. So the GP is not a troll, he/she is just well-informed as to the fractured state of the American mobile phone market.
The specs on the phone indicate that they will not (in the current unlocked version) support CDMA. They'll support UMTS 1, 4, and 8 (which means in the USA they'll support T-Mobile), HSDPA/HSUPA (again, T-Mobile in the US), GSM/EDGE (both European and American bands, which means AT&T and most prepaid plans), WiFi, and Bluetooth.
Maybe when the Verizon version comes out, they'll release an unlocked CDMA version as well. But they've only published an unlocked GSM version so far.
The limitations of our current robots were based on space, cost, and durability. A geologist might be able to search the terrain faster, but they won't be able to be there for more than a few days or weeks at best, and each geologist could really only search one general area. In the same space as your single geologist and all the food and resources he/she will need, we could explore multiple places on the surface of Mars with a generous handful of Spirit-type robots, and they could all stay there for years collecting data.
The reason Spirit and Opportunity are so slow is because they operate on a small solar array, that generates (at peak) 140 watts for the 4 hours of daylight they get in a Martian day. That's about 560 watt/hours an m-day at best, and that's all the energy they need to do what they do. That's a lot of science packed into that amount of energy. They are currently getting a fraction of that due to dust on the arrays, and yet they are still collecting good science, six years in.
If you want enough energy to support a human being there, you're talking nuclear engines. If you're going to make that kind of energy available, you might as well power the robots with nukes - they will then be able to move faster than a human could, and there could be hordes of them for the same cost and resources expended sending one human. And they could stay for years.
To get a single human to mars, on the surface, and back to Earth, you'll need about a half ton of dehydrated food, enough water to recycle so they have a continuous supply, and probably a few thousand watt-hours a day minimum for the entire trip for heat, light, etc. You'll also need radiation shielding (likely tons of it) for the multi-year trip, room for them to exercise, many tons of fuel for the two-way trip, etc.
Spirit weighs about 400 pounds, or a little over twice the weight of a human. But you save the half-ton of food, the water, more than half the fuel (no return trip, no need to re-orbit it), and almost all the energy needed to sustain life during the voyage. The ship is simpler, since you need almost no shielding, no living space - just strap a few (or a few hundred) robots around the outside of a rocket engine.
Take a science team of a dozen, and you could probably have at least 50, maybe 100 robots take their place. And those robots would be able to work there for years. Each could have its own nuclear plant and probably have power and functioning instruments for decades (energy starvation from the solar cells is what is slowly killing off the current robots).
Plus, robots can make a one-way trip. No need to store fuel to bring them all back, just enough for a few dozen of them to send a sample back to a central ship in orbit, which can then pack up the samples and send them back on a relatively small rocket that weighs a few hundred pounds.
Because a robot can be powered down and require no resources for the flight there and back. They can also be stacked neatly into boxes. They also don't fight, or make little robots. They can stay at Mars forever, and no one will clamor to bring them back to Earth. And if your measurements are off and you kill one, you send another.
Heck, you could fit Spirit, Opportunity, and probably a few hundred similar robots in the same amount of space and weight you'd need to provide a single human with food, water, and entertainment for the multi-year mission. And you'd get a LOT more science done. And there'd be plenty of space for an unmanned return module to bring hundreds of pounds of samples back.
If your mission is to learn as much as possible about Mars, sending a human there is about the worst way you could go about it. You're going to stand a good chance of killing him/her, and the space and mass they take up will hobble your eventual effort into near-uselessness. They won't be able to stay for long, and most of your ship will need to come back in order to support them, which means you need a LOT of fuel.
There's certainly the romantic/endeavor angle, and that can't be discounted. But if you really want to inspire people about space exploration, let's build a base on the Moon. With the lower gravity well, it would make a fantastic platform to launch a robotic mission to Mars, and would teach us a lot of lessons about living long-term in the kind of conditions an eventual Mars manned mission would experience. Think "Biodome" without the opportunity to sneak in candy bars.
Better yet, build a permanent, self-sustaining space station at a Lagrange point. If we can do that and keep it running for a decade without outside support, we are ready to send a ship to Mars and keep people there for a while. Maybe even make it a one-way trip and make the ship a space station that can become a permanent orbital settlement over Mars, as a base to start the terraforming process.
Adding CO2 and water to Mars is going to involve industry. And energy. Shitloads of both. Industry is going to involve, by necessity, many of the chemicals you mention, either to run the machinery or as a byproduct of it. Therein lies the problem. Mankind isn't going to wait around for hundreds of years for a long, slow, low-energy terraforming system to work, so by the time we've turned the dial to 11 for enough years to have reached a semi-breathable atmosphere, it'll be polluted.
Now add in your comment about "maintaining our lifestyle". If you typed your post on a computer while wearing clothing in an enclosed space with heat, congratulations, that requires all the chemicals you mentioned above and more.
Even if the Earth's population stopped growing right now, we likely cannot maintain the lifestyle we enjoy now in the US and Europe, and there'd be no way in hell we can extend that same lifestyle to the rest of the planet. Add in the resources necessary to start terraforming Mars and the time it will take for it to complete, and we'll be loading Mars up with more people than it can sustain during the entire process. As soon as Mars has an atmosphere that can grow a few crops and support 50,000 people, we'll dump a half million there in the false hope it'll relieve the population pressures on Earth. And both planets will be overpopulated continuously until we figure out how to overpopulate another planet.
Robinson's "Mars" series, mentioned in the post you replied to, is an excellent read. Robinson has an interesting and thoughtful, if just a tad hopelessly optimistic at the end, view of how terraforming might play out. It's a relatively well-researched (or seemingly so) series, with a lot of interesting theories on approaches to terraforming, and plays out a very human approach to it.
Agreed. The current JavaScript setting is "on" or "off", with no "Allow it, but ask me each time a document wants to use it".
Since I've never received a document with JavaScript, and I'm not seeing that trend change anytime soon, I turn it "off". Sadly, the default setting is "on", so I probably represent some single-digit percentage at best of Adobe users.
And, yes, I could use an alternative, but at work they load Adobe Reader on the default install. I pretty much have to use the tool my employer wants me to, so I take the steps necessary to make it as secure as possible.
With respect, your scenario is extremely impractical. I can't think of a single benefit using a hacked Kodak frame would offer to the would-be pedophile.
Kodak frames exist across the country. The pedophile would have to hack random frames one by one and look at pictures to narrow pictures down to: (a) a victim they like, (b) that they can then verify actually lives in the house and isn't a grandparent's house or something, (c) whose parents have put enough information on the frame to be identified and located, (d) in close enough proximity to them to make it feasible. Then, they'd still have to collect enough information to figure out when the child might be unattended so they can attempt a kidnapping, or figure out some other means of luring the child away.
In other words, the frame offers them almost no useful information, and takes a great deal more time and effort than a Facebook search (which yields far more data AND offers a way to contact the victim) or just getting in their car and driving randomly around school zones watching for kids walking home alone, then figuring out what general direction they are headed. Or just driving around looking for a kid walking alone.
If the pedophile wants pictures of your kids taking a bath, OK, I can see this being a risk if you're uncomfortable with someone spanking off to pictures of your kids. I know the concept of it happening with a picture of my daughter makes my skin crawl.
And Kodak needs to fix this or recall their frames (or sell them as an interesting social experiment in digital graffiti - I might pay a few bucks for one and publish its URL just out of sheer curiosity about what random strangers might post to it).
But they don't need to recall it to protect children from being kidnapped.
The most likely explanation is that the parents simply transferred the money to Neil's account or a common account so he could make investment decisions without them having to approve every transaction. Once it's in a common account, he could then withdraw it and move it to an account under his exclusive control.
However, it is possible that this was also used to get around inheritance taxes, assuming US and British inheritance laws are somewhat similar.
Under US tax law, parents can give money or property to their children within specified annual limits. Those gifts are not subject to inheritance taxes, but there are strict limits on the value that may be transferred each year (you can't just gift a million-dollar house to your kids the day before you die). Once the parents die, the estate becomes subject to inheritance tax and on a large estate they can be pretty high. So a lot of parents who trust their kids will slowly shift some of their assets to their kids while they are alive. This is an important part of estate planning.
Obviously with a really large estate you can't transfer all of it, but the law is designed to allow average citizens to transfer most or all of their assets to their kids without the State taxing it.
But the point is still valid. You are referring to natural obsolescence of hardware. He is referring to forced obsolescence.
What if, in addition to building a phonograph cylinder machine to listen to your old cylinders (which is technologically very feasible) you were prevented from actually playing the cylinders because they were protected by a DRM scheme and the DMCA says you can't bypass those, and you can't Edison to sell you a license because the current licenseholder for the DRM technology isn't selling them any more?
And even if you found an old licensed cylinder player, you couldn't simply borrow it and make a backup of your cylinders, because to do so would involve bypassing the DRM scheme and that's illegal. You could listen to them as long as you can find an old player that was built specifically to handle the DRM scheme your cylinders were encoded with.
At this point, the current DVD CSS scheme is licensed, and that license is not perpetual. If the MPAA wanted to, they could force termination of licensing agreements with the various DVD manufacturers, meaning that no new DVD players could be manufactured that could play CSS-encoded DVDs. It's still possible to make DVD players, just not legal to make them so they can actually play CSS-encrypted DVDs. Once your DVD player dies you can only buy a DECE one, and it's incapable of playing your CSS-encoded movies.
Or you spend 15 minutes with each one of them and DeCSS, breaking the law to watch the media you've paid for.
I'm not saying that the movie studios WOULD do this, but they easily could. And it's not without precedent. Some newer games require that you have an old CD reader around and their DRM schemes refuse to work with anything that can actually write DVDs. Finding a working DVD reader not capable of writing DVDs is slowly getting harder, and there's no technological limitation keeping you from playing the game perfectly well on a newer model drive - just a DRM one.
And, as I'm sure several hundred people have posted already and several hundred more will also mention - none of this will slow down the pirates one whit. They'll crack it before the first movies become commercially available, and anyone who pirates the movie will one again have an arguably superior product to that offered to the paying customers. Pirates will be able to watch their movies on any device they own, keep backup copies, and freely move their content from computer to computer without hassles or asking a licensing agent for permission. Paying customers will have to beg like orphans, "please, sir, could I move this movie to my new computer?" and pray the licensing agent continues to find the business model profitable so they have someone to get permission from.
Of course, that'll never happen. *cough* MSN Music *cough-cough* Yahoo! Music *cough-cough* Wal-Mart Music *cough*
IIRC they put it in "low power mode" last Martian winter and were pleasantly surprised when it survived, booted up, and restarted communications with Earth again when there was enough sunlight available. The trouble is, this year it's stuck at a less-than-ideal angle for collecting sunlight so there may be less of a chance of a springtime startup unless they can adjust the position, which of course takes, well, power. It's a risk either way. Plus, I think it's just locked up a second wheel, leaving it with 4 of 6.
So we'll see. If it can't move again but gets power, its utility as a science platform is going to be severely impacted. Still, it will be able to collect data and pictures of the changing landscape in its immediate vicinity, and it seems to have gotten stuck in an interesting spot, so there will still be useful data coming out of it.
And since the warranty ran out 5+ years ago, I think even a partly functional stationary science platform is pretty darned impressive.
Even after six years, the simple fact that Mankind has working scientific instruments on Mars gives me a geekgasm all over again.
If you want to see examples for other states, the laws usually fall under the "abandoned property" statutes. IANAL so I can only speak for the law that I've been affected by. Google is your friend.
In Maine, 60% of the value of any gift card not used for approximately two years (see citation above for more detailed explanation) must be remitted to the State. I work for a retailer here in the state who never, ever had an expiration date on our gift cards/certificates. We do now, but it's only to encourage the customers to use the damned things so we don't have to go through the paperwork of paying the state their 60% then filing refund paperwork if/when the customer ever finds the card and uses it. In fact, expiration dates cannot be enforced by Maine State Law. But most retailers put one on there now because the act of requesting a refund from the state is such a pain in the ass, so we hope the date gets the customer to spend the card/certificate before the expiration date.
This law is actually good for the Maine consumer because gift cards/certificates are now treated as owned property. Previously, retailers could expire gift certificates that the customer had paid for and there were no repercussions to the retailer. Now, if the retailer accepts your money, it is treated as an owed obligation to the customer. I never really understood why anyone would want to take perfectly good US currency and turn it into a gift card that is worth the same money but may only be spent in one store. But at least the new law ensures that the holder of the card can use it forever and the merchant can't simply expire it and keep the money.
A number of states have had "abandoned property" laws for a LONG time. Property that goes unused for a certain period of time reverts to the State, or a portion of it. These new statutes recognize the fact that anything a consumer purchases is their property.
Note that this really only includes gift cards/certificates that the customer has paid for. "Promotional gift cards" (ie, "buy $50 of stuff and we'll give you a $10 gift card") are not considered property that may be abandoned because the customer didn't actually BUY them. Technically, they are coupons. They have no cash value, and may have expiration dates at the retailer's discretion, and if they go unclaimed the state is owed nothing.
If the customer bought it, it's property, and falls under the abandoned property laws. If the customer earned it by buying something else or whatever, it's not property - it's a coupon.
Sure. Any version of Linux that is old enough to have passed into the public domain would by definition fall outside the GPL or whatever licensing scheme it was under. Newer versions, being published later, would still be protected under standard copyright laws.
Apparently yes. I should have figured it. Some things are apparently constant among all Americans, and finding the British accent desirable seems oddly to be one of them. And the Brits do have a flair for designing gorgeous cars.
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Yes. As a matter of fact, the stuff to the left of the dot being "God" is just a joke started by the person who first decided to sell a few inches of column space. You could, in fact, put "Man" there, or make it actually usefully descriptive ("Control Panel").
Personally, I'd put "FSM" there, but for some reason the whole shortcut dealie doesn't work in Linux Mint. Shows how advanced Windows is. We don't even HAVE a God in Linux. Except Linus, of course, but he's a minor deity. :)
There's a CTRL and SHIFT on the right side of the keyboard, too. That will allow you to avoid the gelatinous finger issue.
It's kind of the opposite of the habitual CTRL-ALT-DEL (using the right hand on the lower portion of the keyboard and the left hand for the upper), but you don't have to twist your hand into odd shapes to get CTRL-SHIFT-ESC at least.
Another option is to lay your thumb across the CTRL and SHIFT keys to press them at the same time, then your index or middle finger is perfectly positioned to tap the ESC key. No law says you have to push only one button per digit. Though overall that's even clumsier.
Personally, I'd prefer to develop gelatinous fingers. Sounds like a cool name for a comic book superhero. "Gelatinous Finger Man! Able to press 10 keys arranged at random around the keyboard simultaneously! (cue crappy overprocessed music)"
First, I agree that TSA appears to have overreacted, and isn't doing themselves any favors with their ongoing attempt to blame the traveler for doing something that is perfectly legal and probably didn't seem unusual at all to them. Youngblood needs to hold a new press conference and apologize to Ramirez. Not for the initial reaction, but for his "why would anyone take a risk of carrying honey" bullshit as a thinly veiled attempt to blame Ramirez for shutting down the airport.
However, good quality raw honey has a very strong smell, and given that this guy is a farmer he may have liked some local raw honey he found and decided to take some home. Unfortunately, most people I know would not recognize the aroma of raw honey. It can be rather pungent, and to some people unpleasantly so. Once cooked and processed, as it generally is for American consumption, it's a very different product with comparatively little aroma. Much like milk - the pasteurized homogenized stuff you can buy in most places is not nearly the same as raw milk, and raw milk tastes and smells different - it has an earthy flavor and smell to it that is lost in processing. I love both raw milk and raw honey, but they are very different from their processed counterparts. Hell, most people I know wouldn't recognize the COLOR of raw honey. It can be very dark and cloudy, almost opaquely in some cases.
In some states, it's also illegal to sell raw milk and/or raw honey, so Ramirez might have been stocking up while he had a supply available.
Add to that the fact that bees are routinely fogged with smoke during the honey harvesting process. If Ramirez was present for that process and packed those clothes, you can add "smoke" to the strong raw honey smell. That would make a pretty interesting combination of scents even raw honey lovers might not recognize.
The TNT and acetone peroxide swabs could have easily been the result (as mentioned in the article) of the smoke used to fog the bees during the collection process, or a chemical or chemicals used on the farm. A little Diesel fuel, a little ammonium nitrate, a touch of this, a spot of that, get it on the bottles, handle the bottles while loading them in the suitcase, whammo - false positive.
So looking at it from the perspective of a TSA agent, using the "walk a mile in their moccasins" rule:
1. They did a routine swab of luggage, and one bag tested positive for TNT and acetone peroxide. That's enough to certainly merit looking in the suitcase as a next step. They'd be criminally negligent not to look into it further, that's their damned job.
2. They opened the suitcase and were presented with bottles of thick (probably dark) cloudy amber fluid in unmarked Gatorade bottles. From the point of view of a TSA agent who has just gotten a positive test for explosives, this would be reasonably considered "suspicious". I know I'd be concerned enough not to just pack the suitcase back up and send it on its merry way. So they reasonably investigated further.
3. They opened a bottle and were presented with an unfamiliar, strong smell. I know people who do find the smell of raw honey unpleasant, so the strong unknown smell combined with the tension of having a positive explosives test and the odd packaging, I could easily see someone being nauseated by the smell. Next "reasonable person" reaction is certainly not to taste it and discover it's honey!
Their initial reaction sounds very much like the system worked as it should, given the (probably understandable) misinterpretation of the evidence. Youngblood and TSA management seem to be the only ones truly mishandling this situation, by trying to blame Ramirez for what looks like an honest mistake on the TSA's part. It's time to give Ramirez back his honey, apologize, have Obama invite everyone over for a beer, and move on.
The real shame is that it's likely the root cause of this is the simple fact that many people don't know a REAL food when they see and smell it.
Sounds like WinMo and BB use the same basic idea.
Blackberry devices can encrypt the entire SD card, or part of the SD card (my company allows the /music, /ringtones, /videos, and /pictures folders to be unencrypted, everything else gets encrypted). The encryption key is on the phone, and in the event of a wipe that encryption key is deleted from the phone and all the encrypted data on the SD chip is now useless, even on the original handset.
Despite the inconvenience, remote wipe and "bad password attempt" wipe are critical features in a corporate environment. If my company email is on my phone, I don't want to be the one that allowed someone else to read it.
The default configuration at my company is:
- I have to set a password on my Blackberry. It has to be at least 6 characters long, and contain at least one number and one character.
- The password must be changed every 60 days.
- The phone will lock itself requiring the password to unlock it after 15 minutes.
- All data on the phone is encrypted, including anything written to a Secure Digital chip. The SD card is unreadable outside the phone.
- Ten bad password attempts will wipe the device clean, including nuking the decryption key for any SD card that may be associated with the phone. The company can also remote-wipe it if I tell them it's lost.
With that sort of security arrangement there is always the risk that someone could do a denial of service attack by simply entering a bad password as many times as it takes to wipe the device. That's why corporate smartphones rarely contain original copies of any important information and can be reloaded remotely as easily as they can be nuked. If my seven-year-old nuked my phone, it could be reloaded with all of my data in about an hour or two, and all I have to do is call my company helpdesk (on the same phone) and have them initiate the reload. If I dropped it down a storm drain, my company can reissue an identical phone with all of my corporate data on it in a few hours.
I have to reinstall my non-corporate apps (Google Maps, my RSS reader, etc), but even those use server-side data and all I need to do is log into them. No real data of value is lost unless I'm dumb enough not to have backed up some pictures of value to me or something.
Let's build the lifeboat now. We can put in lawyers, telephone sanitizers, and other useful people to colonize our new planet. We'll tell them we are following it shortly with the rest of the population.
I think "Ark" would be a better name. Let's call it the "B Ark".
Even the junction of excellent cheese and fine chocolate cannot change the laws of physics, except the combination of the two might eventually increase my mass until I become a new singularity.
"Money" as in "people shell out $60 for the 2010 version".
And they will. Make no mistake. Any backlash on this will be minimal. EA has been selling the annual series of these games for years now, and only guarantee server access for one year, after which you either multiplay locally, set up your own server somewhere, or shell out the bucks for the next version. They're just a couple of years behind in their server shutdown schedule. EA is also the only one licensed to do games with real names and logos in them, and people want their unreality to be real. So if EA players want to shove a bunch of pixels that vaguely resemble their favorite players and compete with total strangers doing so, they'll pony up $60.
There will be angst (shock) , and gnashing of teeth (anger), and the threat of a lawsuit or something (denial), followed by maybe some crying (acceptance), followed by the shuffling sound of millions of credit cards being pulled out of millions of wallets. This is the cycle of annual upgrade grief.
I never played football games, but I was into first person shooters for a while (Unreal, Call of Duty, etc). I rarely played online, we had LAN parties. But it got too expensive keeping up with the latest games, even just for 4 game lines ($60/year/game for 4 games was costing me $20 a month just to buy games), so I stopped.
EA would do well to charge a monthly fee for server access and guarantee access to 3-4 releases back. But they apparently do better just selling an annual version with one year (from release date) of access and baking the server costs into the retail price of the game.
If there were a human on Mars, we wouldn't possibly have had him/her there for 6 years. Not with our current technology. Not with our current resources.
For the cost of one human on mars for 6 months, we could have 10 Spirits there for years. Or more. And if one broke, it would be disposable.
Eventually, we want humans there. But to learn about the terrain, the most efficient and effective way is to send robots. When humans go there, our target should be a one-way trip.
Yup, sorry. I started with 10 and quickly realized that a 10-ton payload couldn't possibly accommodate ten people.
LOL. True.
Unfortunately, it takes a lot more to get a human to Mars in a condition where it can be useful. And then they expect to be able to get back, which is even costlier.
I wonder how much it costs to get a ton to Mars?
Let's say we have a payload of ten tons on a one-way rocket.
In ten tons, you could fit:
5 humans at 200 pounds each = 1/2 ton.
Food for all ten humans at 1/2 ton each = 2 1/2 tons.
Water for all five humans, spacesuits, control instruments, bathroom facilities, water recycling plant, personal supplies, medical supplies, etc, call that another half ton at least.
Buggy to carry a couple of humans around on the surface = 1/2 ton.
Scientific instruments for use on the planet = 1 ton (that assumes each of the 5 crewmembers is as well-equipped with gear as the robot).
Power plant to run the water recycling and keep the humans warm, with enough fuel to run it for several years = 1/2 ton (small nuke?).
Oxygen scrubbers for several years, has to be about 1/2 ton at least.
Rocket to get all 5 back up from surface, with fuel, at least 2 tons.
Shielding needed to keep the humans alive (not necessary for robots), at least a ton I'd assume.
I'm not even sure what the additional fuel for a return trip would weigh. A ton? Probably more.
In that same ten tons, you could fit 50 400 pound Spirit/Opportunity type robots, and they'd take up less volume since they could all be crammed in. Put a small nuke plant and bigger wheels on each robot and you might be talking about 25 of them, each capable of operating for years at or above human walking pace, with few or no stops. In the course of 2-3 years, if you spaced them out correctly, you'd be able to sample all of the major landscape types and have covered a LOT of ground.
We could probably have a detailed surface map of Mars with information on what landscapes have what soil types for a significant portion of the planet by the end of the decade if we started building them now. Plus, we'd have a bunch of working nuclear plants on-site and some working scientific instruments that could be used by the eventual human colonists.
Heck, we might even find a way to repurpose some of the robots to give the terraforming process a boost someday.
http://www.google.com/phone/static/en_US-nexusone_tech_specs.html
No CDMA in the current version, sorry. Maybe they'll offer the CDMA version as a separate unlocked unit come Springtime. Good luck.
Sprint does not issue SIM cards, and doesn't use the GSM standard. They are a CDMA carrier. An "unlocked" phone that uses GSM and SIM cards is useless for Sprint. So the GP is not a troll, he/she is just well-informed as to the fractured state of the American mobile phone market.
The specs on the phone indicate that they will not (in the current unlocked version) support CDMA. They'll support UMTS 1, 4, and 8 (which means in the USA they'll support T-Mobile), HSDPA/HSUPA (again, T-Mobile in the US), GSM/EDGE (both European and American bands, which means AT&T and most prepaid plans), WiFi, and Bluetooth.
Maybe when the Verizon version comes out, they'll release an unlocked CDMA version as well. But they've only published an unlocked GSM version so far.
The limitations of our current robots were based on space, cost, and durability. A geologist might be able to search the terrain faster, but they won't be able to be there for more than a few days or weeks at best, and each geologist could really only search one general area. In the same space as your single geologist and all the food and resources he/she will need, we could explore multiple places on the surface of Mars with a generous handful of Spirit-type robots, and they could all stay there for years collecting data.
The reason Spirit and Opportunity are so slow is because they operate on a small solar array, that generates (at peak) 140 watts for the 4 hours of daylight they get in a Martian day. That's about 560 watt/hours an m-day at best, and that's all the energy they need to do what they do. That's a lot of science packed into that amount of energy. They are currently getting a fraction of that due to dust on the arrays, and yet they are still collecting good science, six years in.
If you want enough energy to support a human being there, you're talking nuclear engines. If you're going to make that kind of energy available, you might as well power the robots with nukes - they will then be able to move faster than a human could, and there could be hordes of them for the same cost and resources expended sending one human. And they could stay for years.
To get a single human to mars, on the surface, and back to Earth, you'll need about a half ton of dehydrated food, enough water to recycle so they have a continuous supply, and probably a few thousand watt-hours a day minimum for the entire trip for heat, light, etc. You'll also need radiation shielding (likely tons of it) for the multi-year trip, room for them to exercise, many tons of fuel for the two-way trip, etc.
Spirit weighs about 400 pounds, or a little over twice the weight of a human. But you save the half-ton of food, the water, more than half the fuel (no return trip, no need to re-orbit it), and almost all the energy needed to sustain life during the voyage. The ship is simpler, since you need almost no shielding, no living space - just strap a few (or a few hundred) robots around the outside of a rocket engine.
Take a science team of a dozen, and you could probably have at least 50, maybe 100 robots take their place. And those robots would be able to work there for years. Each could have its own nuclear plant and probably have power and functioning instruments for decades (energy starvation from the solar cells is what is slowly killing off the current robots).
Plus, robots can make a one-way trip. No need to store fuel to bring them all back, just enough for a few dozen of them to send a sample back to a central ship in orbit, which can then pack up the samples and send them back on a relatively small rocket that weighs a few hundred pounds.
Because a robot can be powered down and require no resources for the flight there and back. They can also be stacked neatly into boxes. They also don't fight, or make little robots. They can stay at Mars forever, and no one will clamor to bring them back to Earth. And if your measurements are off and you kill one, you send another.
Heck, you could fit Spirit, Opportunity, and probably a few hundred similar robots in the same amount of space and weight you'd need to provide a single human with food, water, and entertainment for the multi-year mission. And you'd get a LOT more science done. And there'd be plenty of space for an unmanned return module to bring hundreds of pounds of samples back.
If your mission is to learn as much as possible about Mars, sending a human there is about the worst way you could go about it. You're going to stand a good chance of killing him/her, and the space and mass they take up will hobble your eventual effort into near-uselessness. They won't be able to stay for long, and most of your ship will need to come back in order to support them, which means you need a LOT of fuel.
There's certainly the romantic/endeavor angle, and that can't be discounted. But if you really want to inspire people about space exploration, let's build a base on the Moon. With the lower gravity well, it would make a fantastic platform to launch a robotic mission to Mars, and would teach us a lot of lessons about living long-term in the kind of conditions an eventual Mars manned mission would experience. Think "Biodome" without the opportunity to sneak in candy bars.
Better yet, build a permanent, self-sustaining space station at a Lagrange point. If we can do that and keep it running for a decade without outside support, we are ready to send a ship to Mars and keep people there for a while. Maybe even make it a one-way trip and make the ship a space station that can become a permanent orbital settlement over Mars, as a base to start the terraforming process.
Adding CO2 and water to Mars is going to involve industry. And energy. Shitloads of both. Industry is going to involve, by necessity, many of the chemicals you mention, either to run the machinery or as a byproduct of it. Therein lies the problem. Mankind isn't going to wait around for hundreds of years for a long, slow, low-energy terraforming system to work, so by the time we've turned the dial to 11 for enough years to have reached a semi-breathable atmosphere, it'll be polluted.
Now add in your comment about "maintaining our lifestyle". If you typed your post on a computer while wearing clothing in an enclosed space with heat, congratulations, that requires all the chemicals you mentioned above and more.
Even if the Earth's population stopped growing right now, we likely cannot maintain the lifestyle we enjoy now in the US and Europe, and there'd be no way in hell we can extend that same lifestyle to the rest of the planet. Add in the resources necessary to start terraforming Mars and the time it will take for it to complete, and we'll be loading Mars up with more people than it can sustain during the entire process. As soon as Mars has an atmosphere that can grow a few crops and support 50,000 people, we'll dump a half million there in the false hope it'll relieve the population pressures on Earth. And both planets will be overpopulated continuously until we figure out how to overpopulate another planet.
Robinson's "Mars" series, mentioned in the post you replied to, is an excellent read. Robinson has an interesting and thoughtful, if just a tad hopelessly optimistic at the end, view of how terraforming might play out. It's a relatively well-researched (or seemingly so) series, with a lot of interesting theories on approaches to terraforming, and plays out a very human approach to it.
I stand corrected. Thanks very much for clarifying that.
Agreed. The current JavaScript setting is "on" or "off", with no "Allow it, but ask me each time a document wants to use it".
Since I've never received a document with JavaScript, and I'm not seeing that trend change anytime soon, I turn it "off". Sadly, the default setting is "on", so I probably represent some single-digit percentage at best of Adobe users.
And, yes, I could use an alternative, but at work they load Adobe Reader on the default install. I pretty much have to use the tool my employer wants me to, so I take the steps necessary to make it as secure as possible.
At home, I run Linux with an open-sourced reader.
With respect, your scenario is extremely impractical. I can't think of a single benefit using a hacked Kodak frame would offer to the would-be pedophile.
Kodak frames exist across the country. The pedophile would have to hack random frames one by one and look at pictures to narrow pictures down to:
(a) a victim they like,
(b) that they can then verify actually lives in the house and isn't a grandparent's house or something,
(c) whose parents have put enough information on the frame to be identified and located,
(d) in close enough proximity to them to make it feasible.
Then, they'd still have to collect enough information to figure out when the child might be unattended so they can attempt a kidnapping, or figure out some other means of luring the child away.
In other words, the frame offers them almost no useful information, and takes a great deal more time and effort than a Facebook search (which yields far more data AND offers a way to contact the victim) or just getting in their car and driving randomly around school zones watching for kids walking home alone, then figuring out what general direction they are headed. Or just driving around looking for a kid walking alone.
If the pedophile wants pictures of your kids taking a bath, OK, I can see this being a risk if you're uncomfortable with someone spanking off to pictures of your kids. I know the concept of it happening with a picture of my daughter makes my skin crawl.
And Kodak needs to fix this or recall their frames (or sell them as an interesting social experiment in digital graffiti - I might pay a few bucks for one and publish its URL just out of sheer curiosity about what random strangers might post to it).
But they don't need to recall it to protect children from being kidnapped.
The most likely explanation is that the parents simply transferred the money to Neil's account or a common account so he could make investment decisions without them having to approve every transaction. Once it's in a common account, he could then withdraw it and move it to an account under his exclusive control.
However, it is possible that this was also used to get around inheritance taxes, assuming US and British inheritance laws are somewhat similar.
Under US tax law, parents can give money or property to their children within specified annual limits. Those gifts are not subject to inheritance taxes, but there are strict limits on the value that may be transferred each year (you can't just gift a million-dollar house to your kids the day before you die). Once the parents die, the estate becomes subject to inheritance tax and on a large estate they can be pretty high. So a lot of parents who trust their kids will slowly shift some of their assets to their kids while they are alive. This is an important part of estate planning.
Obviously with a really large estate you can't transfer all of it, but the law is designed to allow average citizens to transfer most or all of their assets to their kids without the State taxing it.
But the point is still valid. You are referring to natural obsolescence of hardware. He is referring to forced obsolescence.
What if, in addition to building a phonograph cylinder machine to listen to your old cylinders (which is technologically very feasible) you were prevented from actually playing the cylinders because they were protected by a DRM scheme and the DMCA says you can't bypass those, and you can't Edison to sell you a license because the current licenseholder for the DRM technology isn't selling them any more?
And even if you found an old licensed cylinder player, you couldn't simply borrow it and make a backup of your cylinders, because to do so would involve bypassing the DRM scheme and that's illegal. You could listen to them as long as you can find an old player that was built specifically to handle the DRM scheme your cylinders were encoded with.
At this point, the current DVD CSS scheme is licensed, and that license is not perpetual. If the MPAA wanted to, they could force termination of licensing agreements with the various DVD manufacturers, meaning that no new DVD players could be manufactured that could play CSS-encoded DVDs. It's still possible to make DVD players, just not legal to make them so they can actually play CSS-encrypted DVDs. Once your DVD player dies you can only buy a DECE one, and it's incapable of playing your CSS-encoded movies.
Or you spend 15 minutes with each one of them and DeCSS, breaking the law to watch the media you've paid for.
I'm not saying that the movie studios WOULD do this, but they easily could. And it's not without precedent. Some newer games require that you have an old CD reader around and their DRM schemes refuse to work with anything that can actually write DVDs. Finding a working DVD reader not capable of writing DVDs is slowly getting harder, and there's no technological limitation keeping you from playing the game perfectly well on a newer model drive - just a DRM one.
And, as I'm sure several hundred people have posted already and several hundred more will also mention - none of this will slow down the pirates one whit. They'll crack it before the first movies become commercially available, and anyone who pirates the movie will one again have an arguably superior product to that offered to the paying customers. Pirates will be able to watch their movies on any device they own, keep backup copies, and freely move their content from computer to computer without hassles or asking a licensing agent for permission. Paying customers will have to beg like orphans, "please, sir, could I move this movie to my new computer?" and pray the licensing agent continues to find the business model profitable so they have someone to get permission from.
Of course, that'll never happen. *cough* MSN Music *cough-cough* Yahoo! Music *cough-cough* Wal-Mart Music *cough*
IIRC they put it in "low power mode" last Martian winter and were pleasantly surprised when it survived, booted up, and restarted communications with Earth again when there was enough sunlight available. The trouble is, this year it's stuck at a less-than-ideal angle for collecting sunlight so there may be less of a chance of a springtime startup unless they can adjust the position, which of course takes, well, power. It's a risk either way. Plus, I think it's just locked up a second wheel, leaving it with 4 of 6.
So we'll see. If it can't move again but gets power, its utility as a science platform is going to be severely impacted. Still, it will be able to collect data and pictures of the changing landscape in its immediate vicinity, and it seems to have gotten stuck in an interesting spot, so there will still be useful data coming out of it.
And since the warranty ran out 5+ years ago, I think even a partly functional stationary science platform is pretty darned impressive.
Even after six years, the simple fact that Mankind has working scientific instruments on Mars gives me a geekgasm all over again.
http://www.maine.gov/treasurer/unclaimed_property/report_property/gc_index.html
If you want to see examples for other states, the laws usually fall under the "abandoned property" statutes. IANAL so I can only speak for the law that I've been affected by. Google is your friend.
In Maine, 60% of the value of any gift card not used for approximately two years (see citation above for more detailed explanation) must be remitted to the State. I work for a retailer here in the state who never, ever had an expiration date on our gift cards/certificates. We do now, but it's only to encourage the customers to use the damned things so we don't have to go through the paperwork of paying the state their 60% then filing refund paperwork if/when the customer ever finds the card and uses it. In fact, expiration dates cannot be enforced by Maine State Law. But most retailers put one on there now because the act of requesting a refund from the state is such a pain in the ass, so we hope the date gets the customer to spend the card/certificate before the expiration date.
This law is actually good for the Maine consumer because gift cards/certificates are now treated as owned property. Previously, retailers could expire gift certificates that the customer had paid for and there were no repercussions to the retailer. Now, if the retailer accepts your money, it is treated as an owed obligation to the customer. I never really understood why anyone would want to take perfectly good US currency and turn it into a gift card that is worth the same money but may only be spent in one store. But at least the new law ensures that the holder of the card can use it forever and the merchant can't simply expire it and keep the money.
A number of states have had "abandoned property" laws for a LONG time. Property that goes unused for a certain period of time reverts to the State, or a portion of it. These new statutes recognize the fact that anything a consumer purchases is their property.
Note that this really only includes gift cards/certificates that the customer has paid for. "Promotional gift cards" (ie, "buy $50 of stuff and we'll give you a $10 gift card") are not considered property that may be abandoned because the customer didn't actually BUY them. Technically, they are coupons. They have no cash value, and may have expiration dates at the retailer's discretion, and if they go unclaimed the state is owed nothing.
If the customer bought it, it's property, and falls under the abandoned property laws. If the customer earned it by buying something else or whatever, it's not property - it's a coupon.
Sure. Any version of Linux that is old enough to have passed into the public domain would by definition fall outside the GPL or whatever licensing scheme it was under. Newer versions, being published later, would still be protected under standard copyright laws.
I really need to explain this?
Apparently yes. I should have figured it. Some things are apparently constant among all Americans, and finding the British accent desirable seems oddly to be one of them. And the Brits do have a flair for designing gorgeous cars.