It absolutely only depends on the way you live your life. The PDA is a good solution for some people, and a really crappy one for other people. This was illustrated to me with my ipod.
I got one as a cheap bonus with my ibook during my senior year in college. I used it *everywhere*. Since I walked to and from everything I did, it was permanently inside my jacket, frequently synched with my newest music, always synched with my contacts.
Then I graduated and started driving to work every morning. The ipod immediately offered me nothing. Sure, it can play in my car stereo, but with a 20 minute drive, I may as well play MP3 CDs. I didn't use it for months.
Now I've got a new job where the commute includes a 40 minute ferry ride and a 15 minute walk, each direction, every day. I'd shoot myself without my ipod. But I never use the contacts/scheduling features because I can do all that with my PC at work.
Blah, blah, blah. The point is, PDAs, or any other such device, are useful if your life fits their uses. They don't conform to you. You shouldn't conform to them either. If you're a homebody, drive only between work and home, or home and the bar, your PDA isn't going to do anything for you. If you constantly find yourself not having your information when you need it, get a PDA. This is, at max, like 5% of the population.
Oh. Crap. You're totally right, I didn't mean that prisoners shouldn't be tapped. I'm just nutty about the fact that Brits don't mind being videotaped in public. Sure, video in public, but then if you use that video as evidence against someone, you better show that you use *all* that video against *everyone* suspicious. Which of course they cannot. So they're just trawling. Unequal protection under the law. Dunno if that's illegal in Britain, but it should be.
Anyway. I keep finding myself talking like a libertarian. I'm not a big-L Libertarian. I'm a liberal. I just believe in limited, targetted gov't programs, rather than the authoritarian corporate socialist crap we get from the Reps and the Dems. I'll sit down now.
Oh, the reason we have bad laws is because we have bad citizens. It's just as hard to get a law repealed as it is to make a new law (as it should be). The reason the US has so much bad legislation is that the vast majority of Americans don't care about their personal freedoms. They don't realize when they've been robbbed. That's not going to get better any time soon. It might take something as invasive as a stamp tax to get them to wake up.
But unfortunately, our politicians are as smart as our direct marketters. They know that if we are *aware* of how we're being taxed, then we'd be much more upset. So taxes are included in the price of cigarettes. Included in the price of gas. Included in your cable bill. You are never asked about a million things, so you don't realize you've lost the ability to choose.
Our drug laws, DMCA, CSEA, etc. will all go away if and only if the mainstream gets angry about them. I just don't see that happening. Perhaps if we had a more conservative (that is, stricter interpretation of the constitution, not politically conservative necessarily) supreme court, then we might be able to shortcut such an awakening.
Alex de Tocqueville (sp?) felt that we didn't have enough checks to prevent a tyranny of the majority. I'm not sure that he expected that tyranny to be due to apathy, rather than antagonism, but here we are. He was right.
Oh. Sure. Agreed. We need better cell regulation. I thought grandparent was talking about land lines, though. Although it's the same company, it's a different regulatory body. FCC or rather your local PUC.
Whatever. Plenty of liberals agree with grandparent posters points. Plenty of academics would agree too.
Sure, there's a lot of stuff that comes from libertarians that's pure trash, but that wasn't any of it. Dividing up the world into right wing and left wing doesn't work.
I think that's very very wrong. The thing is, everyone does *something* illegal. Jaywalking. Something. So the thing is, if the gov't monitors everyone, they get to choose who to persecute. If they want to fuck with anyone, they can.
If they are going to monitor everyone, then they better well go after everyone for every infraction. Otherwise, it's not equal protection under the law. I realize that's a US law, but I'm sure you folks have something similar.
If every single drug user went to jail, we would have realized that the war on drugs is a horrible detriment to our society a long time ago. These bad laws would have gone away. Uneven application of laws leads to very bad things.
But if Verizon cared about our privacy, they could operate like libraries do: Don't keep records unless they are absolutely necesary for billing/auditing purposes.
Since they don't care about our privacy, they will be one more source for the CSEA.
The Gov't is doing fucked up things. The fucked up part of the CSEA is that they are *combining* the fucked up things that the gov't does with the fucked up things that corps do. Now we've got one unified big brother watching over our shoulder. And Verizon is helping.
Again, he's talking about discrete voice recognition, which requires you to speak a certain way, but does not require training or voice profiles. Much harder to use than viavoice or dragon, but it works better. Much better when you get practice using it.
Ever sat next to two people having a conversation on a bus? Was that really too loud?
Ever worked in a call center? You wind up with a room full of people talking all day long. Sustained speech at a reasonable volume is absolutely safe. You are the first person that I've ever heard suggesting otherwise.
When you're in the same room as someone else, do you type to them, or do you talk to them? Have you ever had a conversation that lasted for hours? Did you get laryngitis?
It would take quite a while until computer interfaces made speech a good way to control a computer, but once they did, they'd do it in such a way that programmers wouldn't have to spell every word they speak. That's easy. As is noise cancellation for a roomful of speakers. I don't understand your criticism. Speech recognition, perfected, would outdo typing. Sure, those of us that have spent years typing all day long, every day, can type faster than we talk. Perhaps if we spent that much time getting proficient at a particular type of speech input, we'd be better at that.
You don't need an ISP to send email. You can run your own mailserver. Charging money for email (which is a horrendously bad idea for a number of reasons) would require changing all the protocols we use to send and receive mail, and if we didn't all do it at the same time, it would be worthless.
There are changes that could be made to SMTP that might stop spam, but that's not how to do it.
That's why I mentioned stealing fruit in Qatar and doing drugs in Singapore. Both of those actions carry incredibly unjust consequences, and the US Gov't will do nothing to protect its citizens from those consequences.
Even when there was that huge outcry 'cause some dumbass American was going to get caned in Singapore, the *Gov't* didn't do anything. Pols might have lectured about how Singapore shouldn't cane the kid, but there was no official action.
Iran *does* have "crazy religious laws" but it's still a particularly bad example. Since the US and the Iranian gov'ts do not have any relations, an American woman in Iran would have less than no diplomatic sway. The only protection she might get would be due to internal popular pro-US sentiment. But that probably wouldn't do anything anyway.
Iran would be wrong for doing it, but for the same reason they'd be wrong for doing it to their own population. As long as Iran is a sovereign nation, they can make whatever inane law they please. I guess it can't violate internationally accepted human rights, or they might face war, but that's really the only threat.
While 6.5 miles may meet some statistical standard for insurers, it's not really sufficient in the individual company's case when planning to survive large natural disasters or civil disorder (or whatever else you haven't though of).
As an example from a large telco I worked for - data from Omaha, NE was offsited to Washington and vice-versa. Cross-country like that is your best bet.
Even better, if aliens come and destroy all the major cities, there's no way in hell they're going to bother with Omaha, NE.
That's pretty fuckin' cool. I went to U of Penn, and there was a reunion of all the programmers for the ENIAC while I was there. Those are some hard core old ladies.
Oh. Of course, sometimes it's very hard to get someone deported. Hence, "You'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy."
But I really don't understand the case you describe. There was a case where a Canadian committed murder in the US, got arrested in the US, and they tried to get him deported to Canada before he was tried in the US? I've definitely never heard of anything like that before. I've heard of Canada refusing extradition due to our (braindead) capital punishment, but what you describe is pretty bizarre.
Sure, if the US asked Russia to extradite Dmitri, we'd get laughed out of Moscow. But that's not what happened. Again. The problem is that we have an unjust law. Dmitri shouldn't have been arrested because he did not violate that law. Not because he's Russian. Being a citizen of one country doesn't mean you can violate the laws of another, and then expect to travel there. Again, if the *crime* occurs in the US, and then the criminal is in the US, arrest the criminal. This is not complicated, and it works the same way if you... do drugs in Singapore... steal fruit in Qatar... whatever.
The problem is the unjust law. The problem is the unjust law. The problem is the unjust law.
What an interesting coincidence. You *are* wrong. As I open up my laptop here at work, I see that my there are five APs from one tenant here, one from a local ISP, and one from a starbucks in the basement.
Do you have some reason to believe that a new standard would be developed for this new spectrum that worked worse than the current standard?
Even if you were correct, imagine what would happen if we still regulated in the same fashion that we regulate the visual spectrum: You can't put blinding lights in public places, can you?
So, people would have to turn down their APs so that they did not interfere with their neighbors. If your ISP wants to broadcast so loudly that you can't use your own AP in your house, then they need to make a *contract* with you. Anything less is government manipulation, and is as reprehensible as the worst kind of socialism.
This is how the free market works when it works right. I can't begin to understand how anyone could see it differently. Please, if you do, explain.
Um, I didn't mean to imply that deporting someone was easy. Is that the only part that you felt was really incorrect?
Dmitri did something in Russia that would have been a crime, had he committed it in the US. So he should not have been arrested. All I was trying to say was that being Russian isn't should have made him safe. It was that he didn't violate the DMCA, someone else in his company did. If *that* person had flown to the US, all the same things would have happened to that person, and there'd be no jurisdictional question at all. Right?
Uh... I don't understand. You seem to be advocating the kind of privatization that is actually *more* gov't control. How would you feel if the visible spectrum were licensed in the manner you prescribe? Are we being socialists by insisting that everyone should be able to use the visual spectrum to communicate?
If grandparent poster's jaw-dropping conclusion is correct, we'll be able to sit around and think to ourselves: "I'm glad that spectrum is open for broadband..... otherwise I wouldn't be on broadband right now." because *any* private organization will be able to use the spectrum. Please show me how this would be a bad thing. And you could also tell me how this is more restrictive than saying only government-mandated organizations are allowed to use the spectrum.
Both candidate were crooks. Davis' only danger is that he's done so much to piss off real liberals that we almost all went and voted for some loser 3rd party candidate, just to show him he needed us.
But in the end, Simon's positions were just too frightening. So we voted for Davis. And losing an election doesn't make Democracy an illusion.
Slashdot Mirror
It absolutely only depends on the way you live your life. The PDA is a good solution for some people, and a really crappy one for other people. This was illustrated to me with my ipod.
I got one as a cheap bonus with my ibook during my senior year in college. I used it *everywhere*. Since I walked to and from everything I did, it was permanently inside my jacket, frequently synched with my newest music, always synched with my contacts.
Then I graduated and started driving to work every morning. The ipod immediately offered me nothing. Sure, it can play in my car stereo, but with a 20 minute drive, I may as well play MP3 CDs. I didn't use it for months.
Now I've got a new job where the commute includes a 40 minute ferry ride and a 15 minute walk, each direction, every day. I'd shoot myself without my ipod. But I never use the contacts/scheduling features because I can do all that with my PC at work.
Blah, blah, blah. The point is, PDAs, or any other such device, are useful if your life fits their uses. They don't conform to you. You shouldn't conform to them either. If you're a homebody, drive only between work and home, or home and the bar, your PDA isn't going to do anything for you. If you constantly find yourself not having your information when you need it, get a PDA. This is, at max, like 5% of the population.
Whoever marked this Troll, I hope I get you in metamod.
Oh. Crap. You're totally right, I didn't mean that prisoners shouldn't be tapped. I'm just nutty about the fact that Brits don't mind being videotaped in public. Sure, video in public, but then if you use that video as evidence against someone, you better show that you use *all* that video against *everyone* suspicious. Which of course they cannot. So they're just trawling. Unequal protection under the law. Dunno if that's illegal in Britain, but it should be.
Anyway. I keep finding myself talking like a libertarian. I'm not a big-L Libertarian. I'm a liberal. I just believe in limited, targetted gov't programs, rather than the authoritarian corporate socialist crap we get from the Reps and the Dems. I'll sit down now.
Oh, the reason we have bad laws is because we have bad citizens. It's just as hard to get a law repealed as it is to make a new law (as it should be). The reason the US has so much bad legislation is that the vast majority of Americans don't care about their personal freedoms. They don't realize when they've been robbbed. That's not going to get better any time soon. It might take something as invasive as a stamp tax to get them to wake up.
But unfortunately, our politicians are as smart as our direct marketters. They know that if we are *aware* of how we're being taxed, then we'd be much more upset. So taxes are included in the price of cigarettes. Included in the price of gas. Included in your cable bill. You are never asked about a million things, so you don't realize you've lost the ability to choose.
Our drug laws, DMCA, CSEA, etc. will all go away if and only if the mainstream gets angry about them. I just don't see that happening. Perhaps if we had a more conservative (that is, stricter interpretation of the constitution, not politically conservative necessarily) supreme court, then we might be able to shortcut such an awakening.
Alex de Tocqueville (sp?) felt that we didn't have enough checks to prevent a tyranny of the majority. I'm not sure that he expected that tyranny to be due to apathy, rather than antagonism, but here we are. He was right.
Wow. So everyone that says ma bell was a government monopoly is full of crap? The only thing keeping competitors out was monopoly tactics?
I believe you, I just don't know how I got my head screwed around so badly.
Oh. Sure. Agreed. We need better cell regulation. I thought grandparent was talking about land lines, though. Although it's the same company, it's a different regulatory body. FCC or rather your local PUC.
Cool. I had my own safeway clubcardclub. Now we can merge.
As a liberal, I feel the need to point out that I agree completely.
Right, but that monopoly would last as long as his patent. The reason that they had a monopoly until the 80s was because the government enforced it.
Whatever. Plenty of liberals agree with grandparent posters points. Plenty of academics would agree too.
Sure, there's a lot of stuff that comes from libertarians that's pure trash, but that wasn't any of it. Dividing up the world into right wing and left wing doesn't work.
I think that's very very wrong. The thing is, everyone does *something* illegal. Jaywalking. Something. So the thing is, if the gov't monitors everyone, they get to choose who to persecute. If they want to fuck with anyone, they can.
If they are going to monitor everyone, then they better well go after everyone for every infraction. Otherwise, it's not equal protection under the law. I realize that's a US law, but I'm sure you folks have something similar.
If every single drug user went to jail, we would have realized that the war on drugs is a horrible detriment to our society a long time ago. These bad laws would have gone away. Uneven application of laws leads to very bad things.
But if Verizon cared about our privacy, they could operate like libraries do: Don't keep records unless they are absolutely necesary for billing/auditing purposes.
Since they don't care about our privacy, they will be one more source for the CSEA.
The Gov't is doing fucked up things. The fucked up part of the CSEA is that they are *combining* the fucked up things that the gov't does with the fucked up things that corps do. Now we've got one unified big brother watching over our shoulder. And Verizon is helping.
Um...
One of those regulations is that if you switch local providers, they have to let you keep your #.
Again, he's talking about discrete voice recognition, which requires you to speak a certain way, but does not require training or voice profiles. Much harder to use than viavoice or dragon, but it works better. Much better when you get practice using it.
Ever sat next to two people having a conversation on a bus? Was that really too loud?
Ever worked in a call center? You wind up with a room full of people talking all day long. Sustained speech at a reasonable volume is absolutely safe. You are the first person that I've ever heard suggesting otherwise.
When you're in the same room as someone else, do you type to them, or do you talk to them? Have you ever had a conversation that lasted for hours? Did you get laryngitis?
It would take quite a while until computer interfaces made speech a good way to control a computer, but once they did, they'd do it in such a way that programmers wouldn't have to spell every word they speak. That's easy. As is noise cancellation for a roomful of speakers. I don't understand your criticism. Speech recognition, perfected, would outdo typing. Sure, those of us that have spent years typing all day long, every day, can type faster than we talk. Perhaps if we spent that much time getting proficient at a particular type of speech input, we'd be better at that.
You don't need an ISP to send email. You can run your own mailserver. Charging money for email (which is a horrendously bad idea for a number of reasons) would require changing all the protocols we use to send and receive mail, and if we didn't all do it at the same time, it would be worthless.
There are changes that could be made to SMTP that might stop spam, but that's not how to do it.
That's why I mentioned stealing fruit in Qatar and doing drugs in Singapore. Both of those actions carry incredibly unjust consequences, and the US Gov't will do nothing to protect its citizens from those consequences.
Even when there was that huge outcry 'cause some dumbass American was going to get caned in Singapore, the *Gov't* didn't do anything. Pols might have lectured about how Singapore shouldn't cane the kid, but there was no official action.
Iran *does* have "crazy religious laws" but it's still a particularly bad example. Since the US and the Iranian gov'ts do not have any relations, an American woman in Iran would have less than no diplomatic sway. The only protection she might get would be due to internal popular pro-US sentiment. But that probably wouldn't do anything anyway.
Iran would be wrong for doing it, but for the same reason they'd be wrong for doing it to their own population. As long as Iran is a sovereign nation, they can make whatever inane law they please. I guess it can't violate internationally accepted human rights, or they might face war, but that's really the only threat.
That's a joke, right?
While 6.5 miles may meet some statistical standard for insurers, it's not really sufficient in the individual company's case when planning to survive large natural disasters or civil disorder (or whatever else you haven't though of).
As an example from a large telco I worked for - data from Omaha, NE was offsited to Washington and vice-versa. Cross-country like that is your best bet.
Even better, if aliens come and destroy all the major cities, there's no way in hell they're going to bother with Omaha, NE.
That's pretty fuckin' cool. I went to U of Penn, and there was a reunion of all the programmers for the ENIAC while I was there. Those are some hard core old ladies.
Oh. Of course, sometimes it's very hard to get someone deported. Hence, "You'll get deported, or arrested the next time you travel to Italy."
But I really don't understand the case you describe. There was a case where a Canadian committed murder in the US, got arrested in the US, and they tried to get him deported to Canada before he was tried in the US? I've definitely never heard of anything like that before. I've heard of Canada refusing extradition due to our (braindead) capital punishment, but what you describe is pretty bizarre.
Sure, if the US asked Russia to extradite Dmitri, we'd get laughed out of Moscow. But that's not what happened. Again. The problem is that we have an unjust law. Dmitri shouldn't have been arrested because he did not violate that law. Not because he's Russian. Being a citizen of one country doesn't mean you can violate the laws of another, and then expect to travel there. Again, if the *crime* occurs in the US, and then the criminal is in the US, arrest the criminal. This is not complicated, and it works the same way if you... do drugs in Singapore... steal fruit in Qatar... whatever.
The problem is the unjust law.
The problem is the unjust law.
The problem is the unjust law.
Right?
What an interesting coincidence. You *are* wrong. As I open up my laptop here at work, I see that my there are five APs from one tenant here, one from a local ISP, and one from a starbucks in the basement.
Do you have some reason to believe that a new standard would be developed for this new spectrum that worked worse than the current standard?
Even if you were correct, imagine what would happen if we still regulated in the same fashion that we regulate the visual spectrum: You can't put blinding lights in public places, can you?
So, people would have to turn down their APs so that they did not interfere with their neighbors. If your ISP wants to broadcast so loudly that you can't use your own AP in your house, then they need to make a *contract* with you. Anything less is government manipulation, and is as reprehensible as the worst kind of socialism.
This is how the free market works when it works right. I can't begin to understand how anyone could see it differently. Please, if you do, explain.
Um, I didn't mean to imply that deporting someone was easy. Is that the only part that you felt was really incorrect?
Dmitri did something in Russia that would have been a crime, had he committed it in the US. So he should not have been arrested. All I was trying to say was that being Russian isn't should have made him safe. It was that he didn't violate the DMCA, someone else in his company did. If *that* person had flown to the US, all the same things would have happened to that person, and there'd be no jurisdictional question at all. Right?
Uh... I don't understand. You seem to be advocating the kind of privatization that is actually *more* gov't control. How would you feel if the visible spectrum were licensed in the manner you prescribe? Are we being socialists by insisting that everyone should be able to use the visual spectrum to communicate?
If grandparent poster's jaw-dropping conclusion is correct, we'll be able to sit around and think to ourselves: "I'm glad that spectrum is open for broadband..... otherwise I wouldn't be on broadband right now." because *any* private organization will be able to use the spectrum. Please show me how this would be a bad thing. And you could also tell me how this is more restrictive than saying only government-mandated organizations are allowed to use the spectrum.
Oh, be fair.
Both candidate were crooks. Davis' only danger is that he's done so much to piss off real liberals that we almost all went and voted for some loser 3rd party candidate, just to show him he needed us.
But in the end, Simon's positions were just too frightening. So we voted for Davis. And losing an election doesn't make Democracy an illusion.