No, the story we're discussing points out that a strong basis for association with a candidate is their "looks" in common. This "Mulatto" idea you have is a fake category that is a contiuum. There are really only two distinct races out of the "Black", "White" and "Mulatto" categories, which are the very few "Black" Americans with only subsaharan African ancestors, and the somewhat larger "White" category of Americans with only European ancestors. By far the largest group is what you're calling "Mulatto", which also includes the vast majority of supposedly "Black" Americans, and also the very major majority of supposedly "White" Americans. The two distinct groups are so small, and so different from the categories people are put into, that those categories are not categories at all, but gross inaccuracies.
The species divide is real: humans and monkeys can't produce mixed offspring. That is so far from the case in practice among Americans that using that reduction extreme is absurd. Much more accurate than "we're all monkeys" (apes, really), though true in a very general sense, is the much more precisely true statement that "we're all Americans".
Nonsense. That "average White person"'s relation to Stanley Dunham would be only 2 generations closer than their relation to Barack Obama. "Average White person" #2's relation to #1 is almost certainly not as close as is Dunham's to Obama's. Therefore, #1's relation to Obama is practically the same as #2's relation to Obama. Just as #1 and #2 are probably related exactly as closely to Obama as to Dunham's grandfather, who is another "average White person".
Those are the simple statistical facts. Your inability to realize that because of Obama's skin color, and your typical reaction to denial of projecting accusations of "attempt to confuse" onto me, instead of you, the confuser, are excellent demonstrations of just how cloudy some people's minds get when they see different skin color, though they are also shown the facts.
If I left a car floating on top of a pair of very strong opposing "permanent" magnets (made of the kind of stuff driving tiny headphones or those potent little refrigerator door magnets, but large enough to float a car with its wheels off), how long would they stay pushed apart? After some years or decades, would the magnetic force on each magnet eventually force the magnets back to a disorganized magnetic domains state, and let the magnets to lose repulsive force, so they eventually didn't push apart at all, and collapsed?
When I peel the plastic backing off a new bandaid in the dark, it glows along the separating point where the backing peels off the adhesive. Even the paper wrapping package of the individual bandaid glows as I peel it apart along its glued seams.
Is there x-ray frequency light that I'm not seeing in that glowing little miracle?
Of course not "exactly". No two people, even identical twins at 10 minutes old, look "exactly" alike.
The point is that Obama and his grandfather resemble each other so much more closely than they differ, other than Obama's skin color, that they are very clearly more closely related than most any two White people. Yet Obama is designated as "other" by White people.
Yes, that one characteristic of his appearance has quite a lot of disproportionate power in people's affiliation with him, as the research this story discusses documents. In fact, there is no real "Black" or "White" or "Mulatto" category truly distinct from one another in America, except among a very small minority who have no ancestors who weren't descended from only subsaharan Africans, or whose African ancestors are many hundreds or thousands of generations distant. In fact, nearly everyone in America is a "Mulatto", and especially among "Black" Americans. And most especially among people in the South, who act most completely opposite that fuzzy status. Which I suppose is "human nature", the nature of people whose power over each other is based on "Us" vs "Them", even if it's completely contrived, and perhaps especially when the boundaries are contrived, and the crossing of them is encouraged by their merely nominal, though forceful, enforcement.
Obama is half "Black" and half "White". He's been called "Black" so many times, it's only fair to call him "White". Especially because he looks just like his White family.
I'd love to see more sites online that do something like this SOS edition did. That is, a mirrored subset of Wikipedia, with every page in the mirror checked and maybe corrected by its host. That way, people can check with their preferred authority(ies) whether to accept what they see in "the" Wikipedia. While leaving Wikipedia itself standalone, "caveat emptor", for anyone to check on their own the usual ways.
A really good implementation would link from the "master" Wikipedia out to each "approving" site's copy of it. And a really good system would incorporate quality revisions in the downstream sites back upstream to the master Wikipedia.
This SOS edition is a step in that direction.
Constitution Inherently, Explicitly Limits G'vment
on
Schneier on Security
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Another recurring theme throughout the book is how the Bush administration has little by little eroded the Constitution, all in the name of fighting terrorism. Schneier notes that the brilliant framework the founding fathers created by creating divisions of power (executive, legislative, judicial) with checks and balances violates a basic unwritten rule, that the government should be granted only limited powers, and for limited purposes. Since there is a certainty that government powers will be abused.
The Constitution doesn't violate the basic unwritten rule that the government should be granted only limited powers, and for limited purposes.
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The rest of the Constitution is perfectly consistent with that written rule, though the 10th Amendment does make it explicit, as seemed prudent to those who wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights so there'd be no doubt that the Constitution protected those rights.
I don't really know what that paragraph I quoted from this review is even supposed to mean. Nor have I read this latest book by Schneier. But I also have read much of Schneier's writings over the past decade plus, including some of his other books (yes, starting with _Applied Cryptography_), and even some direct email correspondence, and I do not believe that Schneier says that the Constitution violates an unwritten rule of limited government. Schneier knows as well as anyone that the Constitution is the exemplar document of inherently limited government, as the Constitution itself says, which is such rock solid conventional wisdom that it's a cliche.
Providing power during the peak hours is already a costly proposition because approximately 10 percent of the existing generating capacity only gets used about 50 hours a year: Most of the time, that expensive capital equipment sits idle waiting for a crisis.
Therefore, this "second hump" does not require more extra generating/transmission equipment at all, because it is still within the existing capacity, just shifted into a later timeslot. Therefore the second hump represents a whole lot of energy use that the power corps can charge money for, but which requires only more fuel, not more overhead infrastructure (and probably not much more manpower at all). Therefore power corps must love the second hump, because it's lots of extra profit with only a tiny extra reinvestment. It's more of their expensive capacity producing revenue for more of its lifetime, which is a solution to power corps' problem of keeping that extra capacity around for spikes.
It's also a good way for power demand to increase, if it is going to (and it is going to). Because those appliances are great targets for replacement with more efficient devices. OLED and other more efficient displays, and better home-wide power management (like smart homes/vehicles/offices that power up only when the people are actually within range to use them) are relatively small innovations. More and more of our power consumption is DC, instead of AC, which can also benefit from home-wide DC supplies, rather than a wasteful adapter per device (vampiring power even when the device is disconnected, but the adapter isn't). And home generation from solar and some other alternate supplies generate DC, which the devices can consume directly, rather than losses inverting into AC and then rectifying back into DC.
So this is actually good news. If we use it right, anyway.
Instead of making some roadworthy cars into flying models that get fuel efficiency measured in "gallons per mile", not "miles per gallon", much more practical would be amphibious cars.
Yes, amphibious cars also get lower mileage than road cars, but since we're using up all the fuel to generate a Greenhouse that will continue to wash out roads and even submerge islands, the amphibious car is a lot more practical. And one that sinks will probably limit its damage to only the driver and passengers, not the strip of homes along its route.
But the local mail cache is itself just a failsafe. If it goes down but the main remote mail store is up, it doesn't matter. Only if it goes down while the remote is down does it matter. But it hasn't decreased your remote's uptime; its downtime is only a small fraction of the extra uptime it supplies. Even if the local/remote stores' roles are reversed in priority, this is still true.
Redundancy doesn't reduce uptime if the two redundant routes are truly redundant, and not only partly redundant (which would thereby create a new, nonredundant, failurepoint). That's why the simple formula of Main-Uptime-Percentage + (Alternate-Uptime-Percentage * Main-Downtime-Percentage) works: 99.9% uptime and 99.9% alternate uptime means 99.9999% uptime over the redundant system.
This is fun for me, too. Seeing how these conventional network wisdoms scale to any architecture, even one that counts GMail as a whole as a failurepoint, is not my current job. But I'm reassured that there's nothing new under the Sun, even when the datacenters use other CPUs in massive parallelism:).
You have it backwards. Multiple nukes taking out multiple failurepoints is a very low probability. What's more, in that event, the overall context of worldwide war means that most apps won't matter at all if they go down (eg. your coupon service, your appliance sales customer contact database), so the benefit of mitigating that very low risk is very small at a huge cost. Which means you don't do it.
However, GMail going down is now proven to have a relatively high probability. The impact doesn't render any services irrelevant. The cost of mitigating it by using something else, or adding local caching and server redundancy is relatively low, though just depending on a more distributed set of alternatives is probably cheaper with the same mitigating bottom line. So the cost:benefit*risk evaluation is clearly a legitimate subject for small to large IT departments to address.
Critical services go down and people get fired when they rationalize inaction or expensive waste like that, and the inevitable crisis (like bankruptcy) shows the weak link was in the IT department, not in the IT systems per se. That's how orgs grow and learn, and how life goes on.
No, GMail is clearly a single failurepoint. As is now clear all of GMail can indeed go down at once, or at least in a way that people cannot "route around" by using an alternate server during the outage. Realizing that one's network schema has such a single failurepoint takes an insightful network admin, for reasons just like this one. It might not be obvious that those different boxes in the schema can make an impassable barrier if they go down together, and that such an event is entirely possible, but that's what a good network admin gets paid the big bucks for.
If I thought that more than a few minutes more than a couple times a year were an acceptable downtime for, say, any of the investment banks I worked for, they'd have a hot spare replacement for me spun up and working overtime before I even knew it. Some orgs tolerate failure. The ones that count do not, and do not tolerate admins who do.
Outsourcing links in your essential service chains is risky enough. Outsourcing them to a single point of failure is too risky. So many independent places all outsourcing something so central to so many service chains is unacceptably risky.
I would never rely on GMail without a local cache of all the content GMail holds, or without a truly alternate server to serve my messages when GMail goes down, as it clearly does some percentage of the time.
I'm not denying I'm being aggressive when I take steps to stop assholes like you from endangering my life. I'm on a motorcycle - I'm aggressive. You want to take your chances with me, I don't give a fuck about the law. If I see you jabbering away with your phone pressed to your face, I will ask you to stop. If you don't, I will present you with the very real risk that your reckless driving habits have just endangered your life, before it endangers mine.
You're a fool. I didn't mention the cops, either. Drive your masshole truck down and take your chances. Give me your license plate number and I'll skip the introductory pleasantries when I see you with your facephone. You can spend your time "freaking out" while I teach you that you're not as safe inside your metal cage as you think you are.
No, when I see someone on their phone who continues on my path until we stop in traffic, I gesture with my hand that they should hang up. Usually I pull out my camera to snap them, and they quickly put the phone down, because they know they're totally wrong. Sometimes they refuse, and ignore me. I knock on the window. They usually then put the phone down, or start screaming at me. Which is when I either rip off their rearview mirror and bash their car with it, or just follow them home.
Because those people are taking extra risks with my life. I do what I can to protect my life, and others who live like me. But you just put yourself in the other category: people who use your cars as weapons, thinking you're immune to the consequences.
So thanks for the challenge. I will be looking for you on the road. What's your license plate number? Please drive around NYC sometime soon - when can I expect you?
The tracking feature of this phone is not necessary for insurance corps to examine your phone log after you crash. The insurer will sell you a policy that will not accept paying your liabilities if you are taking an illegal risk like driving with a live phone pressed to your face. Once one insurer adjusts their coverage to that reasonable level, the others will too. You'll be able to find a policy that lets you talk like that, but it will cost you a lot extra to cover the extra risk, on a much smaller class of people who admit doing it and are willing to pay - rather than use a handsfree kit. The phones will probably have records of whether their speakerphone or Bluetooth handsfree accessory was in use - that's where you might find an insurance corp subsidy to your plan, and a higher price if you don't use a phone that logs handsfree. Or the insurance corp will just subpoena a CALEA recording of your call, and analyze how far your face was from the phone.
The point is that the technical ability to detect whether you were pressing a live phone to your face when you crashed is a solvable problem, so the higher risk will be incorporated in coverage - or lack of it.
As for the motorcycle, this approach would be a much better way to encourage helmet use. If you don't wear a helmet when you crash, you better have the more expensive "freedom" insurance, or you're not covered. A much more just and economical approach than simply fining people and refusing to let them anticipate their own risks and tolerance for it.
Any time a driver is in a collision, their phone records should be searchable by their insurance corp for whether they were in a voice, text or other mobile phone session. If they were, and there's no evidence that the phone was operated by someone else (a passenger, left with someone at home, etc), they should be entitled to zero liability protection from their insurance. And their risk rating should get a lot worse.
Some people can drive while phoning. Everyone who tries it should be absolutely sure that they can handle it, or pay the consequences.
But preemptively interfering with people's phones without precisely excluding only those who are pressing it to their faces or otherwise taking an unmanageable risk is going way too far without adequate benefit.
And I say that as a motorcyclist who will harangue drivers I see pressing phones to their faces in traffic, and follow them home screaming blood at them if they don't hang up when I make the "hang it up" motion at them.
But that inference isn't really a threat to "privacy". That site was a party to those other transactions. Why doesn't it have the right to recognize the other party to those transactions, when its own identity is firmly established?
Anonymity and privacy are linked, but separate. Their conflation into seeing cookies as "privacy threats" would really be dispelled if the browser had an icon for "you are maintaining a cookie for this site" (greyed out when you aren't), that is clickable to manage that cookie, including setting "yes/no cookies (this site / all sites)" with just that click.
I can understand if there's a bug that lets one site read or write another site's cookies. But how are properly functioning cookies any threat to privacy? They are indeed a threat to anonymity, only because they let a site ID a browser (or a Flash player or some other client) as "the same as that other time". But what private info other than that you are the same person (or maybe not, on a shared machine) is threatened? The remote site could just store on its server any info about your transactions. It could require that you login to verify that you're that same returning visitor. And even without cookies, a remote site could send any info it got from your transactions over to any other site without notifying you. Cookies have nothing to do with it.
Of course, any info stored on my machine should have a usable UI to manage it. But an inconvenient one isn't really a "privacy threat". After all, what is the threat? What goes wrong when it's abused?
Freddie Johnson isn't going to vote 73 times in that election, and perhaps not even at all.
If you were interested in the truth, you'd read what the editors of the Cleveland PD, in which that article you cited was published, explained about this latest hypocritical distraction by Republicans:
To be fair, ACORN did flag some cards as questionable, but by law even those had to be turned in -- only the board can reject them. ACORN also cooperated with the board in identifying problems, and has fired rule-breaking canvassers.
No matter what's implied on talk radio, keep this in mind: Bogus registrations do not equate to vote fraud. Freddie Johnson won't be voting 42 times on Nov. 4. With the elections board referring his case to the county prosecutor, he faces criminal charges instead.
You stupid Republican fucks owe every American an apology for stealing enough elections to put the greatest gangsters of all time at the controls of the greatest catastrophes ever wrought on America. Stop pretending that you have any standing to tell anyone anything. Just shut the fuck up and listen for a few years. Maybe then you'll have a chance at being right about something once.
I'm not holding my breath. Goodbye, and good riddance to your faithy Republican theocracy.
That should reassure you. Unless, of course, you're just another Republican more addicted to Rush Limbo's lies (and insHannity's, and the rest who get the Republican Party faxes) than to the truth about what makes America great. In which case you need to admit that Republicans are the vote fraudsters, as is well known from your party's stealing the 2000 and 2004 elections in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. And the Gonzales US Attorney purges of any Federal prosecutor who didn't selectively prosecute Democrats to help Republicans win elections. The list is 8 years long.
But why should you care? You Republicans stole the election, then stole everything else in the country (tangible and otherwise), leaving us in ruin. You're the Party of Nixon: "You're Guilty Only If You Get Caught", and "When the President Does It, It's Not Illegal". America's better than that, so we're dumping you for democracy instead. Sure, that scares the crap out of Republicans like you whose whole world is partisan abuse of everything in sight. But hey, you're addicted to fear - it's your problem. And with your criminal gang out of power, it's not so much mine anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Therefore, you're a redneck.
No, the story we're discussing points out that a strong basis for association with a candidate is their "looks" in common. This "Mulatto" idea you have is a fake category that is a contiuum. There are really only two distinct races out of the "Black", "White" and "Mulatto" categories, which are the very few "Black" Americans with only subsaharan African ancestors, and the somewhat larger "White" category of Americans with only European ancestors. By far the largest group is what you're calling "Mulatto", which also includes the vast majority of supposedly "Black" Americans, and also the very major majority of supposedly "White" Americans. The two distinct groups are so small, and so different from the categories people are put into, that those categories are not categories at all, but gross inaccuracies.
The species divide is real: humans and monkeys can't produce mixed offspring. That is so far from the case in practice among Americans that using that reduction extreme is absurd. Much more accurate than "we're all monkeys" (apes, really), though true in a very general sense, is the much more precisely true statement that "we're all Americans".
Nonsense. That "average White person"'s relation to Stanley Dunham would be only 2 generations closer than their relation to Barack Obama. "Average White person" #2's relation to #1 is almost certainly not as close as is Dunham's to Obama's. Therefore, #1's relation to Obama is practically the same as #2's relation to Obama. Just as #1 and #2 are probably related exactly as closely to Obama as to Dunham's grandfather, who is another "average White person".
Those are the simple statistical facts. Your inability to realize that because of Obama's skin color, and your typical reaction to denial of projecting accusations of "attempt to confuse" onto me, instead of you, the confuser, are excellent demonstrations of just how cloudy some people's minds get when they see different skin color, though they are also shown the facts.
If I left a car floating on top of a pair of very strong opposing "permanent" magnets (made of the kind of stuff driving tiny headphones or those potent little refrigerator door magnets, but large enough to float a car with its wheels off), how long would they stay pushed apart? After some years or decades, would the magnetic force on each magnet eventually force the magnets back to a disorganized magnetic domains state, and let the magnets to lose repulsive force, so they eventually didn't push apart at all, and collapsed?
Or are these magnets really "permanent"?
When I peel the plastic backing off a new bandaid in the dark, it glows along the separating point where the backing peels off the adhesive. Even the paper wrapping package of the individual bandaid glows as I peel it apart along its glued seams.
Is there x-ray frequency light that I'm not seeing in that glowing little miracle?
Of course not "exactly". No two people, even identical twins at 10 minutes old, look "exactly" alike.
The point is that Obama and his grandfather resemble each other so much more closely than they differ, other than Obama's skin color, that they are very clearly more closely related than most any two White people. Yet Obama is designated as "other" by White people.
Yes, that one characteristic of his appearance has quite a lot of disproportionate power in people's affiliation with him, as the research this story discusses documents. In fact, there is no real "Black" or "White" or "Mulatto" category truly distinct from one another in America, except among a very small minority who have no ancestors who weren't descended from only subsaharan Africans, or whose African ancestors are many hundreds or thousands of generations distant. In fact, nearly everyone in America is a "Mulatto", and especially among "Black" Americans. And most especially among people in the South, who act most completely opposite that fuzzy status. Which I suppose is "human nature", the nature of people whose power over each other is based on "Us" vs "Them", even if it's completely contrived, and perhaps especially when the boundaries are contrived, and the crossing of them is encouraged by their merely nominal, though forceful, enforcement.
Barack Obama looks exactly like his grandfather, Stanley Dunham, except Barack's skin is darker and his hair curlier.
Obama is half "Black" and half "White". He's been called "Black" so many times, it's only fair to call him "White". Especially because he looks just like his White family.
I'd love to see more sites online that do something like this SOS edition did. That is, a mirrored subset of Wikipedia, with every page in the mirror checked and maybe corrected by its host. That way, people can check with their preferred authority(ies) whether to accept what they see in "the" Wikipedia. While leaving Wikipedia itself standalone, "caveat emptor", for anyone to check on their own the usual ways.
A really good implementation would link from the "master" Wikipedia out to each "approving" site's copy of it. And a really good system would incorporate quality revisions in the downstream sites back upstream to the master Wikipedia.
This SOS edition is a step in that direction.
The Constitution doesn't violate the basic unwritten rule that the government should be granted only limited powers, and for limited purposes.
The 10th Amendment clearly wrote that "unwritten rule":
The rest of the Constitution is perfectly consistent with that written rule, though the 10th Amendment does make it explicit, as seemed prudent to those who wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights so there'd be no doubt that the Constitution protected those rights.
I don't really know what that paragraph I quoted from this review is even supposed to mean. Nor have I read this latest book by Schneier. But I also have read much of Schneier's writings over the past decade plus, including some of his other books (yes, starting with _Applied Cryptography_), and even some direct email correspondence, and I do not believe that Schneier says that the Constitution violates an unwritten rule of limited government. Schneier knows as well as anyone that the Constitution is the exemplar document of inherently limited government, as the Constitution itself says, which is such rock solid conventional wisdom that it's a cliche.
Therefore, this "second hump" does not require more extra generating/transmission equipment at all, because it is still within the existing capacity, just shifted into a later timeslot. Therefore the second hump represents a whole lot of energy use that the power corps can charge money for, but which requires only more fuel, not more overhead infrastructure (and probably not much more manpower at all). Therefore power corps must love the second hump, because it's lots of extra profit with only a tiny extra reinvestment. It's more of their expensive capacity producing revenue for more of its lifetime, which is a solution to power corps' problem of keeping that extra capacity around for spikes.
It's also a good way for power demand to increase, if it is going to (and it is going to). Because those appliances are great targets for replacement with more efficient devices. OLED and other more efficient displays, and better home-wide power management (like smart homes/vehicles/offices that power up only when the people are actually within range to use them) are relatively small innovations. More and more of our power consumption is DC, instead of AC, which can also benefit from home-wide DC supplies, rather than a wasteful adapter per device (vampiring power even when the device is disconnected, but the adapter isn't). And home generation from solar and some other alternate supplies generate DC, which the devices can consume directly, rather than losses inverting into AC and then rectifying back into DC.
So this is actually good news. If we use it right, anyway.
Instead of making some roadworthy cars into flying models that get fuel efficiency measured in "gallons per mile", not "miles per gallon", much more practical would be amphibious cars.
Yes, amphibious cars also get lower mileage than road cars, but since we're using up all the fuel to generate a Greenhouse that will continue to wash out roads and even submerge islands, the amphibious car is a lot more practical. And one that sinks will probably limit its damage to only the driver and passengers, not the strip of homes along its route.
Besides, amphibious cars actually work.
But the local mail cache is itself just a failsafe. If it goes down but the main remote mail store is up, it doesn't matter. Only if it goes down while the remote is down does it matter. But it hasn't decreased your remote's uptime; its downtime is only a small fraction of the extra uptime it supplies. Even if the local/remote stores' roles are reversed in priority, this is still true.
Redundancy doesn't reduce uptime if the two redundant routes are truly redundant, and not only partly redundant (which would thereby create a new, nonredundant, failurepoint). That's why the simple formula of Main-Uptime-Percentage + (Alternate-Uptime-Percentage * Main-Downtime-Percentage) works: 99.9% uptime and 99.9% alternate uptime means 99.9999% uptime over the redundant system.
This is fun for me, too. Seeing how these conventional network wisdoms scale to any architecture, even one that counts GMail as a whole as a failurepoint, is not my current job. But I'm reassured that there's nothing new under the Sun, even when the datacenters use other CPUs in massive parallelism :).
You have it backwards. Multiple nukes taking out multiple failurepoints is a very low probability. What's more, in that event, the overall context of worldwide war means that most apps won't matter at all if they go down (eg. your coupon service, your appliance sales customer contact database), so the benefit of mitigating that very low risk is very small at a huge cost. Which means you don't do it.
However, GMail going down is now proven to have a relatively high probability. The impact doesn't render any services irrelevant. The cost of mitigating it by using something else, or adding local caching and server redundancy is relatively low, though just depending on a more distributed set of alternatives is probably cheaper with the same mitigating bottom line. So the cost:benefit*risk evaluation is clearly a legitimate subject for small to large IT departments to address.
Critical services go down and people get fired when they rationalize inaction or expensive waste like that, and the inevitable crisis (like bankruptcy) shows the weak link was in the IT department, not in the IT systems per se. That's how orgs grow and learn, and how life goes on.
No, GMail is clearly a single failurepoint. As is now clear all of GMail can indeed go down at once, or at least in a way that people cannot "route around" by using an alternate server during the outage. Realizing that one's network schema has such a single failurepoint takes an insightful network admin, for reasons just like this one. It might not be obvious that those different boxes in the schema can make an impassable barrier if they go down together, and that such an event is entirely possible, but that's what a good network admin gets paid the big bucks for.
If I thought that more than a few minutes more than a couple times a year were an acceptable downtime for, say, any of the investment banks I worked for, they'd have a hot spare replacement for me spun up and working overtime before I even knew it. Some orgs tolerate failure. The ones that count do not, and do not tolerate admins who do.
Outsourcing links in your essential service chains is risky enough. Outsourcing them to a single point of failure is too risky. So many independent places all outsourcing something so central to so many service chains is unacceptably risky.
I would never rely on GMail without a local cache of all the content GMail holds, or without a truly alternate server to serve my messages when GMail goes down, as it clearly does some percentage of the time.
"Obscene" language is the universal language of all programmers, especially while debugging.
It brings me no pleasure to see other countries chipping away at the USA's leadership in totalitarianism.
I'm not denying I'm being aggressive when I take steps to stop assholes like you from endangering my life. I'm on a motorcycle - I'm aggressive. You want to take your chances with me, I don't give a fuck about the law. If I see you jabbering away with your phone pressed to your face, I will ask you to stop. If you don't, I will present you with the very real risk that your reckless driving habits have just endangered your life, before it endangers mine.
You're a fool. I didn't mention the cops, either. Drive your masshole truck down and take your chances. Give me your license plate number and I'll skip the introductory pleasantries when I see you with your facephone. You can spend your time "freaking out" while I teach you that you're not as safe inside your metal cage as you think you are.
No, when I see someone on their phone who continues on my path until we stop in traffic, I gesture with my hand that they should hang up. Usually I pull out my camera to snap them, and they quickly put the phone down, because they know they're totally wrong. Sometimes they refuse, and ignore me. I knock on the window. They usually then put the phone down, or start screaming at me. Which is when I either rip off their rearview mirror and bash their car with it, or just follow them home.
Because those people are taking extra risks with my life. I do what I can to protect my life, and others who live like me. But you just put yourself in the other category: people who use your cars as weapons, thinking you're immune to the consequences.
So thanks for the challenge. I will be looking for you on the road. What's your license plate number? Please drive around NYC sometime soon - when can I expect you?
The tracking feature of this phone is not necessary for insurance corps to examine your phone log after you crash. The insurer will sell you a policy that will not accept paying your liabilities if you are taking an illegal risk like driving with a live phone pressed to your face. Once one insurer adjusts their coverage to that reasonable level, the others will too. You'll be able to find a policy that lets you talk like that, but it will cost you a lot extra to cover the extra risk, on a much smaller class of people who admit doing it and are willing to pay - rather than use a handsfree kit. The phones will probably have records of whether their speakerphone or Bluetooth handsfree accessory was in use - that's where you might find an insurance corp subsidy to your plan, and a higher price if you don't use a phone that logs handsfree. Or the insurance corp will just subpoena a CALEA recording of your call, and analyze how far your face was from the phone.
The point is that the technical ability to detect whether you were pressing a live phone to your face when you crashed is a solvable problem, so the higher risk will be incorporated in coverage - or lack of it.
As for the motorcycle, this approach would be a much better way to encourage helmet use. If you don't wear a helmet when you crash, you better have the more expensive "freedom" insurance, or you're not covered. A much more just and economical approach than simply fining people and refusing to let them anticipate their own risks and tolerance for it.
Any time a driver is in a collision, their phone records should be searchable by their insurance corp for whether they were in a voice, text or other mobile phone session. If they were, and there's no evidence that the phone was operated by someone else (a passenger, left with someone at home, etc), they should be entitled to zero liability protection from their insurance. And their risk rating should get a lot worse.
Some people can drive while phoning. Everyone who tries it should be absolutely sure that they can handle it, or pay the consequences.
But preemptively interfering with people's phones without precisely excluding only those who are pressing it to their faces or otherwise taking an unmanageable risk is going way too far without adequate benefit.
And I say that as a motorcyclist who will harangue drivers I see pressing phones to their faces in traffic, and follow them home screaming blood at them if they don't hang up when I make the "hang it up" motion at them.
But that inference isn't really a threat to "privacy". That site was a party to those other transactions. Why doesn't it have the right to recognize the other party to those transactions, when its own identity is firmly established?
Anonymity and privacy are linked, but separate. Their conflation into seeing cookies as "privacy threats" would really be dispelled if the browser had an icon for "you are maintaining a cookie for this site" (greyed out when you aren't), that is clickable to manage that cookie, including setting "yes/no cookies (this site / all sites)" with just that click.
I can understand if there's a bug that lets one site read or write another site's cookies. But how are properly functioning cookies any threat to privacy? They are indeed a threat to anonymity, only because they let a site ID a browser (or a Flash player or some other client) as "the same as that other time". But what private info other than that you are the same person (or maybe not, on a shared machine) is threatened? The remote site could just store on its server any info about your transactions. It could require that you login to verify that you're that same returning visitor. And even without cookies, a remote site could send any info it got from your transactions over to any other site without notifying you. Cookies have nothing to do with it.
Of course, any info stored on my machine should have a usable UI to manage it. But an inconvenient one isn't really a "privacy threat". After all, what is the threat? What goes wrong when it's abused?
Freddie Johnson isn't going to vote 73 times in that election, and perhaps not even at all.
If you were interested in the truth, you'd read what the editors of the Cleveland PD, in which that article you cited was published, explained about this latest hypocritical distraction by Republicans:
You stupid Republican fucks owe every American an apology for stealing enough elections to put the greatest gangsters of all time at the controls of the greatest catastrophes ever wrought on America. Stop pretending that you have any standing to tell anyone anything. Just shut the fuck up and listen for a few years. Maybe then you'll have a chance at being right about something once.
I'm not holding my breath. Goodbye, and good riddance to your faithy Republican theocracy.
You'll be happy to know that ACORN's registration procedures are extremely rigorous and legal, despite the Republican government's attempt to frame it with lies to interfere with ACORN's work helping people vote who Republicans would rather not.
Oh, you're sure to be pleased to know that McCain has also strongly endorsed ACORN by campaigning with it.
That should reassure you. Unless, of course, you're just another Republican more addicted to Rush Limbo's lies (and insHannity's, and the rest who get the Republican Party faxes) than to the truth about what makes America great. In which case you need to admit that Republicans are the vote fraudsters, as is well known from your party's stealing the 2000 and 2004 elections in Florida, Ohio and elsewhere. And the Gonzales US Attorney purges of any Federal prosecutor who didn't selectively prosecute Democrats to help Republicans win elections. The list is 8 years long.
But why should you care? You Republicans stole the election, then stole everything else in the country (tangible and otherwise), leaving us in ruin. You're the Party of Nixon: "You're Guilty Only If You Get Caught", and "When the President Does It, It's Not Illegal". America's better than that, so we're dumping you for democracy instead. Sure, that scares the crap out of Republicans like you whose whole world is partisan abuse of everything in sight. But hey, you're addicted to fear - it's your problem. And with your criminal gang out of power, it's not so much mine anymore.