Plus as the late Mr. Adams postulated in his second book in the famous five-book trilogy, money can grow on trees, provided a culture adopts the leaf as its currency;)
The trouble is, I can't tell from TFA whether or not they're actually asking the question like this. Is the school trying to dumb down algebra because they think "x" is too hard of a concept and "blank" is easier, or is the article trying to dumb down the problem because the reporter thinks the readers won't understand what "x" means in algebra? And I can't tell this because they quote him, but what they quote, he's extremely unlikely to have said. You don't just sit there in an interview and say "four plus three plus two equals open parentheses space close parentheses plus two," and therefore we don't really know what it is that the guy *said.*
If he actually *said* "x," then the students are having trouble solving for x. At first blush, if this scenario is the case, I would say that they're reading the equation wrong, namely "four plus three plus two equals what? Now take that and add 2." which really points more to the teacher than the student, because even the most remedial math student can generally get algebra this basic if you explain it properly. The other possibility is that their arithmetic ability is so low that "4+3+2-2" is too difficult for them to handle without a calculator, which also points to teachers, because anyone with arithmetic skills that low should never have passed math classes in years past, and so they shouldn't be in the algebra classroom in the first place.
Otherwise, if the school really is using ( ) instead of x, then the school is screwing up, plain and simple, because as you said, there's only one mathematically correct way to interpret that equation: "4+3+2=+2" at which point the only correct answer is "false." (It's only a yield error if you ask a computer. Most humans, save perhaps the kids in the study, will know that 9 does not equal 2.)
It's really hard to figure out which is happening. I've seen schools dumb down math terribly (I remember playing with drawings of apples in algebra class once before I transferred to the AP section), but on the other hand, I've seen reporters dumb down news, or just plain not understand what they're reporting on, especially if the story is about science or math.
But whatever the scenario, I think we can safely take a long hard look at the school and its methods of instruction before we just chalk it off to "today's kids are morons."
Well, technically, the universe split crap (and yes I do mean crap) that Abrams came up with only effects events after Kirk's dad died. Which is still a couple of centuries in the future for us. Events up till that point remain the same, and therefore even in Abrams' new (crap) canon, we still haven't discovered Klingons by 2010, so ElectricTurtle is correct.
But he's also wrong because Abrams wasn't the first guy in Trekdom to come up with alternate timelines, and time travel, and other plot contrivances. In fact, in Star Trek 4, Kirk and the gang traveled back to 1980's Earth in a Klingon Bird of Prey. Therefore, if we're going to go on the premise that we are now living in the canonical Star Trek universe (which, as Turtle pointed out, is stupid) it's very conceivable that Kirk or someone else dropped a data device which not only inspired the iPad as in the discussion from the other day, but which also had the complete history and theatrical works of the Klingon Empire encoded within its chips, just waiting for these guys to find it and then re-enact one of the operas they found there.
In fact, the more I think on it, the more likely it seems that the people putting on this opera use Macs, which increases the plausibility of this scenario.;)
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
The PADDs were, I think, more analogous to the old dumb terminals of the mainframe era. In the good old days, you'd sit at a screen and a keyboard, but the computer would be off somewhere else in the building. The terminal itself didn't do any of the computing - it just displayed whatever you had the mainframe working on. The PADDs were the same. They were nothing more than a gateway to the main computer (though I think they had some local storage as a buffer, but that's a dim recollection from the days when I used to actually read the tech manual).
And that's why they were so flexible - all it was, was a touch-interface display screen. As such, it's easier to hand a PADD to someone on which you've already accessed specific data than it is to tell them to point their PADD to the same data, forcing them to have to duplicate the steps you've already taken.
and if you heard TFQuestions the reporter asked, they were probably along the lines of "so how close is the iPad to your PADD?" rather than "So what example of modern technology do you think is an analogue to something you designed for the show?"
That may be true, but it's obfuscating the actual point - - don't overdrive your brakes. The reason ABS and TCS and Stabilitrak and all the other "anti-driver-retardation devices" exist is because people are crappy drivers.
In the days before ABS, it's not as though every driver got into a wreck every time it snowed. Some did, because they were dumb, and tailgated other cars, or drove too fast for conditions, or paid attention to the girl in the passenger seat instead of the curve and drove into the ditch. And others managed to avoid it because they drove their car appropriately for the conditions.
While it's true that ABS has stopped wrecks that are caused by drivers who just slam on the brakes and pray when something bad happens, it's also true that ABS has not done what is really needed, which is to yank those idiots off the road until they learn to drive in the first place. Introducing ABS for those drivers is no better than a moron with 4 wheel drive. We've all seen 'em. First snow of the year, and they're out there driving like they're on a race track because "I have 4WD! It's made for these conditions!" Give an idiot ABS, and he'll think he can tailgate as much as he wants, and drive faster than he should, because to him, ABS means "brakes that will never fail to stop the car in the distance required."
Hell, look at the credit crisis. That was caused entirely by shortsightedness. People refused to look beyond today's "I get money! Yaay!" impulse to tomorrow's "Oh, I have to pay it back?" reality. And the banks, supposedly run by smart people, tricked themselves into thinking that capitalizing on stupidity was sustainable. The start of the credit crisis was, depending on how you look at it, either 10 or 30 years ago. Most 1st world people live 2 and 3 times that long, so the idea that longer lifespans will somehow make us mature and rational in our decisionmaking and actions is a nice thought, but entirely wrong.
So outsourcing government responsibilities will work? I don't think so. Look at Blackwater.
Once you outsource it to private companies, you introduce the profit motive. And the profit motive is anathema to public service.
If the profit motive were sufficient to keep organizations ethical and responsible, then the gulf oil spill would never have happened. Neither would Enron. Or Halliburton. Or Exxon Valdez. Or the Valujet crash in Florida.
Once you privatize something that can spark human greed, you lose control over where that greed will take the organization.
Outsourcing meat inspectors would result in rampant bribery by the meat companies in order to pass inspection with unsafe food. You say that'll be taken care of by an audit. But how do you audit a meat inspector's inspections without inspecting the meat that he inspects? At which point you have the government auditor performing the inspection that you're already paying an outside company to perform.
And unless the auditor stayed with the inspector constantly, rather than just spot-checks, the inspector would just inspect properly when the auditor was there, and then go right back to taking bribes the next day.
Just one example of why outsourcing government responsibilities is a terrible idea.
That's great in theory, but realistically it's not do-able. This is kind of getting into the 2nd amendment arguments of "we need our guns so we can stop the government from oppressing us."
They have nuclear missiles and platoons of armored soldiers with grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks. You have a deer rifle. The government is going to win.
The inverse problem to that is that if we do not let our government have the heavy weapons and the military to use them, we won't last long as a country before some other country invades and takes over.
So the only really viable solution, and it will not be 100% effective, but will be much more effective than what we're doing now, is for the public to once again take an interest in government, and vote out the people who do not do what we want them to (with the caveat that we can no longer sit around listening to Glenn Beck and deciding that whatever he says is what's best for the country - we have to actually educate ourselves).
Right now we're sitting back watching reality shows and playing mindless MMO's while sloughing off the tough job of keeping an eye on the running of the country to the people who are running the country. There's no oversight until someone like Beck or Palin comes along and trumpets a "tea party" to get rid of the damn black guy in the white house. And then, rather than doing our own legwork and researching the actual facts, we allow these charlatans to convince us of all sorts of inane bullshit, like Obama is a muslim who wasn't born here.
That seems pretty far removed from the nudie scanners, until you realize that both issues stem from the same thing - a complacent public that would rather let this ridiculous crap happen than get up and do something about it.
I think that's actually a good use of the free market. If a private airline wants to take naked pictures of me before I can fly on their airplanes, then guess what? I'm not going to fly on their airplanes, and I can go to the next airline over, who will not want to take naked pictures of me. By voting with my dollar, we could stop the naked picture taking.
As for having the court rent a room, the point is not WHO is running the security, but WHAT the security is blocking us from accessing. With the government running (or in your example, contracting out the running of) the naked picture scanners, and requiring that everyone go through them if they want to access an airplane, or if they *need* to access a courtroom (keep in mind, that putting these scanners in a courthouse means that if the government issues me a subpoena to appear in court, they are ordering me to let people take naked pictures of myself), we do not have the choice of whether or not to submit to being photographed naked.
Whether the government itself runs the courthouse scanners, or the government subcontracts out the running of the courthouse scanners, it amounts to the same thing - a governmental invasion of our privacy, because it is the government that is causing the naked pictures to be taken.
There we agree entirely. I'm just always leery of "shrink the government!" claims because they're usually made by people who have listened to Reagan and his progeny preach to us that government IS the problem (rather than the people making up the government being the problem) and therefore we should shrink all of it, except of course the military, which needs lots of $2billion stealth bombers.
They want to shrink the government entirely, even though that would mean getting rid of highway departments, meat inspectors, air traffic controllers, the EPA, and other government entities that allow us to have the standard of living we have.
It's not a strawman. Someone did say that. Whoever the anon poster is, tried to tie this issue to a big gubmint issue. He said "The US gov. is much too large." Shrinking the government to an ineffective size will kill the government.
And to your second point, agreed. That's obvious. And the reason that the constitution isn't being followed is because government officials aren't following it, and they're getting away with it because of a lackadaisical public which is not involved in government, and is not holding government officials accountable for what they do in the public's name.
My ridiculous recall for just about every episode of TNG is my resource;) It's so bad that I can usually tell you what the episode's about just by the opening couple of shots and music. This really irritates my SO, who doesn't remember any of them and doesn't want the story related to her in the first 30 seconds.
That's not the point I was trying to make at all. The answer to government abuses is not to kill the government, any more than the answer to a heart attack is to remove the heart. The size of the government has absolutely nothing to do with the level of corruption in the government. Any country with 300 million people and nearly 4 million square miles is going to take a large organization to run it.
And blindly removing laws isn't going to do any good either.
The solution is for the public to take an active role in government again, rather than just believing whatever their cable-"news"-moron-of-choice tells them to believe. Instead of running around believing that all "gubmint" is bad, find the actual bad parts, and cut them out. Want to take naked pictures of everyone for no damned reason at all? You're fired, and will be replaced with someone who will do their job properly and without tromping all over our rights.
TNG nerd here. She was commanding the Enterprise at the time because the rest of the command crew were down on the planet working with the individualist Borgs.
What good would that do? If I wanted to set up this system, and make it so people weren't pissed off about it, the public monitor (which by the way is problematic anyway because now the guy behind you in line can see the naked picture of you) would be set to show an innocuous image. "See? We're blurring the boobs out," even though the image seen by the agents was crystal clear. As mentioned above, this is a software-controlled system, and as such, I can make it do whatever I want it to do, including sending a misrepresentation of the image it's taking to the person who's image it's taking.
Abuse wasn't practically built into the system. It WAS built into the system. You don't need to take a picture of my penis to find out if I'm smuggling a grenade into the courthouse. It, and the rest of me, are non-metallic, and are not composed of explosive compounds. Sniff for explosives, and use a metal detector, just like they've been doing for decades, and you'll be perfectly safe. And the worst part is, TSA, US Marshalls, and the other agencies using these machines KNOW this. They know getting nudie shots of people isn't going to enhance security. It's all security theater, to keep the public believing that they're "protecting" us against a "threat," when really they're grabbing all the authorization for everything they can think of now, while people are still being scared and stupid rather than monitoring the abuses of the government. In short, they want to take naked pictures of you because they can, and because no one is telling them "no."
Yes, but it shows you what it's requesting access to by presenting you with a full screen, or more, of text.
Remember what Spolsky said - normal users don't read dialog boxes. If it's more than a sentence, they just hit "OK."
I really doubt that this story is going to have much of an effect on the average/. reader, but it will effect all those people who come running to us for tech support.
Why do you think they are charging him with the wiretapping violations? The cop got caught doing something stupid and dangerous, and is pissed off about it. Rather than own up to it, they'd rather set fire to the Constitution they are sworn to preserve-protect-and-defend.
Once he's cleared of these charges, the cops should be brought up on charges of treasonous malfeasance. As mentioned earlier, they are clearly trying to intimidate the public into not monitoring their activities out of fear of reprisal. Once that happens, the government agency responsible needs to be busted up, and those responsible for that action need to be in jail.
Your comment on it being Darwinistic is right on, but I think it needs some expansion. It's only Darwinistic if you look at it as the companies and the consumer in the same ecosystem. Without net neutrality, the "fittest" player in that game will be the large corporations that control access to and traffic on the internet. The losing player - the one who, in our Darwinistic model, ends up being booted out of the gene pool (or in this case, gets rendered completely subservient to the whims of the large corporations) is the consumer.
The free market is fine and dandy as long as consumer choice actually matters. But when consumers cannot choose an option that is actually fair to consumers, the free market has failed to achieve the "Best" outcome, and must therefore be pulled back in order to give consumers a chance.
We aren't talking about leveling the playing field between Comcast and Charter here. We're talking about leveling the playing field between big business and consumers. And if we don't, then anyone who doesn't own a major ISP is going to lose.
Franken's example was one outcome - another is having to have a line of credit of sorts with every ISP that hosts anything you might want to look at. If I'm a TWC customer who wants to look at a website hosted on Comcast's servers, there would be nothing to stop Comcast from charging TWC money to access that site. And TWC would, of course, pass that right on to me. The megacorps would get rich(er), and I would be left either paying potentially hundreds of dollars per month to browse the web, or cutting off my net access altogether, which in today's society would have major consequences in daily life.
So does that mean I can now download cracks for software I buy so I can bypass the dumbass copy protection that keeps me from playing the game I bought?
Slashdot Mirror
Plus as the late Mr. Adams postulated in his second book in the famous five-book trilogy, money can grow on trees, provided a culture adopts the leaf as its currency ;)
The trouble is, I can't tell from TFA whether or not they're actually asking the question like this. Is the school trying to dumb down algebra because they think "x" is too hard of a concept and "blank" is easier, or is the article trying to dumb down the problem because the reporter thinks the readers won't understand what "x" means in algebra? And I can't tell this because they quote him, but what they quote, he's extremely unlikely to have said. You don't just sit there in an interview and say "four plus three plus two equals open parentheses space close parentheses plus two," and therefore we don't really know what it is that the guy *said.*
If he actually *said* "x," then the students are having trouble solving for x. At first blush, if this scenario is the case, I would say that they're reading the equation wrong, namely "four plus three plus two equals what? Now take that and add 2." which really points more to the teacher than the student, because even the most remedial math student can generally get algebra this basic if you explain it properly. The other possibility is that their arithmetic ability is so low that "4+3+2-2" is too difficult for them to handle without a calculator, which also points to teachers, because anyone with arithmetic skills that low should never have passed math classes in years past, and so they shouldn't be in the algebra classroom in the first place.
Otherwise, if the school really is using ( ) instead of x, then the school is screwing up, plain and simple, because as you said, there's only one mathematically correct way to interpret that equation: "4+3+2=+2" at which point the only correct answer is "false." (It's only a yield error if you ask a computer. Most humans, save perhaps the kids in the study, will know that 9 does not equal 2.)
It's really hard to figure out which is happening. I've seen schools dumb down math terribly (I remember playing with drawings of apples in algebra class once before I transferred to the AP section), but on the other hand, I've seen reporters dumb down news, or just plain not understand what they're reporting on, especially if the story is about science or math.
But whatever the scenario, I think we can safely take a long hard look at the school and its methods of instruction before we just chalk it off to "today's kids are morons."
Well, technically, the universe split crap (and yes I do mean crap) that Abrams came up with only effects events after Kirk's dad died. Which is still a couple of centuries in the future for us. Events up till that point remain the same, and therefore even in Abrams' new (crap) canon, we still haven't discovered Klingons by 2010, so ElectricTurtle is correct.
But he's also wrong because Abrams wasn't the first guy in Trekdom to come up with alternate timelines, and time travel, and other plot contrivances. In fact, in Star Trek 4, Kirk and the gang traveled back to 1980's Earth in a Klingon Bird of Prey. Therefore, if we're going to go on the premise that we are now living in the canonical Star Trek universe (which, as Turtle pointed out, is stupid) it's very conceivable that Kirk or someone else dropped a data device which not only inspired the iPad as in the discussion from the other day, but which also had the complete history and theatrical works of the Klingon Empire encoded within its chips, just waiting for these guys to find it and then re-enact one of the operas they found there.
In fact, the more I think on it, the more likely it seems that the people putting on this opera use Macs, which increases the plausibility of this scenario. ;)
I think more important than worrying about whether or not you're shooting SD, HD, or UltraMegaSuperFineNanoHD, is worrying about how you're shooting what you're shooting.
I'm tired of the MTV syndrome, where cameras can't ever be steady, and always have to jiggle around like a 7th grader on crack in order to appear more "live" and "in the moment." What's the point of ultra-crisp resolution if you screw it up by shaking the camera so much that I can't see detail in the first place? Rather than various production companies comparing the resolution of their penises to sell movies, I'd rather they concentrate on telling a story with good, steady shooting that draws people in to the scene rather than constantly drawing attention to the fact that they're watching something recorded by a camera in a major earthquake.
TNG nerd here:
The PADDs were, I think, more analogous to the old dumb terminals of the mainframe era. In the good old days, you'd sit at a screen and a keyboard, but the computer would be off somewhere else in the building. The terminal itself didn't do any of the computing - it just displayed whatever you had the mainframe working on. The PADDs were the same. They were nothing more than a gateway to the main computer (though I think they had some local storage as a buffer, but that's a dim recollection from the days when I used to actually read the tech manual).
And that's why they were so flexible - all it was, was a touch-interface display screen. As such, it's easier to hand a PADD to someone on which you've already accessed specific data than it is to tell them to point their PADD to the same data, forcing them to have to duplicate the steps you've already taken.
and if you heard TFQuestions the reporter asked, they were probably along the lines of "so how close is the iPad to your PADD?" rather than "So what example of modern technology do you think is an analogue to something you designed for the show?"
That may be true, but it's obfuscating the actual point - - don't overdrive your brakes. The reason ABS and TCS and Stabilitrak and all the other "anti-driver-retardation devices" exist is because people are crappy drivers.
In the days before ABS, it's not as though every driver got into a wreck every time it snowed. Some did, because they were dumb, and tailgated other cars, or drove too fast for conditions, or paid attention to the girl in the passenger seat instead of the curve and drove into the ditch. And others managed to avoid it because they drove their car appropriately for the conditions.
While it's true that ABS has stopped wrecks that are caused by drivers who just slam on the brakes and pray when something bad happens, it's also true that ABS has not done what is really needed, which is to yank those idiots off the road until they learn to drive in the first place. Introducing ABS for those drivers is no better than a moron with 4 wheel drive. We've all seen 'em. First snow of the year, and they're out there driving like they're on a race track because "I have 4WD! It's made for these conditions!" Give an idiot ABS, and he'll think he can tailgate as much as he wants, and drive faster than he should, because to him, ABS means "brakes that will never fail to stop the car in the distance required."
Yep, it sucks, but you're right.
Hell, look at the credit crisis. That was caused entirely by shortsightedness. People refused to look beyond today's "I get money! Yaay!" impulse to tomorrow's "Oh, I have to pay it back?" reality. And the banks, supposedly run by smart people, tricked themselves into thinking that capitalizing on stupidity was sustainable. The start of the credit crisis was, depending on how you look at it, either 10 or 30 years ago. Most 1st world people live 2 and 3 times that long, so the idea that longer lifespans will somehow make us mature and rational in our decisionmaking and actions is a nice thought, but entirely wrong.
Only if their whuffie is high enough.
So outsourcing government responsibilities will work? I don't think so. Look at Blackwater.
Once you outsource it to private companies, you introduce the profit motive. And the profit motive is anathema to public service.
If the profit motive were sufficient to keep organizations ethical and responsible, then the gulf oil spill would never have happened. Neither would Enron. Or Halliburton. Or Exxon Valdez. Or the Valujet crash in Florida.
Once you privatize something that can spark human greed, you lose control over where that greed will take the organization.
Outsourcing meat inspectors would result in rampant bribery by the meat companies in order to pass inspection with unsafe food. You say that'll be taken care of by an audit. But how do you audit a meat inspector's inspections without inspecting the meat that he inspects? At which point you have the government auditor performing the inspection that you're already paying an outside company to perform.
And unless the auditor stayed with the inspector constantly, rather than just spot-checks, the inspector would just inspect properly when the auditor was there, and then go right back to taking bribes the next day.
Just one example of why outsourcing government responsibilities is a terrible idea.
That's great in theory, but realistically it's not do-able. This is kind of getting into the 2nd amendment arguments of "we need our guns so we can stop the government from oppressing us."
They have nuclear missiles and platoons of armored soldiers with grenade launchers, machine guns, and tanks. You have a deer rifle. The government is going to win.
The inverse problem to that is that if we do not let our government have the heavy weapons and the military to use them, we won't last long as a country before some other country invades and takes over.
So the only really viable solution, and it will not be 100% effective, but will be much more effective than what we're doing now, is for the public to once again take an interest in government, and vote out the people who do not do what we want them to (with the caveat that we can no longer sit around listening to Glenn Beck and deciding that whatever he says is what's best for the country - we have to actually educate ourselves).
Right now we're sitting back watching reality shows and playing mindless MMO's while sloughing off the tough job of keeping an eye on the running of the country to the people who are running the country. There's no oversight until someone like Beck or Palin comes along and trumpets a "tea party" to get rid of the damn black guy in the white house. And then, rather than doing our own legwork and researching the actual facts, we allow these charlatans to convince us of all sorts of inane bullshit, like Obama is a muslim who wasn't born here.
That seems pretty far removed from the nudie scanners, until you realize that both issues stem from the same thing - a complacent public that would rather let this ridiculous crap happen than get up and do something about it.
I think that's actually a good use of the free market. If a private airline wants to take naked pictures of me before I can fly on their airplanes, then guess what? I'm not going to fly on their airplanes, and I can go to the next airline over, who will not want to take naked pictures of me. By voting with my dollar, we could stop the naked picture taking.
As for having the court rent a room, the point is not WHO is running the security, but WHAT the security is blocking us from accessing. With the government running (or in your example, contracting out the running of) the naked picture scanners, and requiring that everyone go through them if they want to access an airplane, or if they *need* to access a courtroom (keep in mind, that putting these scanners in a courthouse means that if the government issues me a subpoena to appear in court, they are ordering me to let people take naked pictures of myself), we do not have the choice of whether or not to submit to being photographed naked.
Whether the government itself runs the courthouse scanners, or the government subcontracts out the running of the courthouse scanners, it amounts to the same thing - a governmental invasion of our privacy, because it is the government that is causing the naked pictures to be taken.
There we agree entirely. I'm just always leery of "shrink the government!" claims because they're usually made by people who have listened to Reagan and his progeny preach to us that government IS the problem (rather than the people making up the government being the problem) and therefore we should shrink all of it, except of course the military, which needs lots of $2billion stealth bombers.
They want to shrink the government entirely, even though that would mean getting rid of highway departments, meat inspectors, air traffic controllers, the EPA, and other government entities that allow us to have the standard of living we have.
Are you suggesting we should emulate the Chinese form of government? If not, then comparing our setup to theirs is pointless.
It's not a strawman. Someone did say that. Whoever the anon poster is, tried to tie this issue to a big gubmint issue. He said "The US gov. is much too large." Shrinking the government to an ineffective size will kill the government.
And to your second point, agreed. That's obvious. And the reason that the constitution isn't being followed is because government officials aren't following it, and they're getting away with it because of a lackadaisical public which is not involved in government, and is not holding government officials accountable for what they do in the public's name.
My ridiculous recall for just about every episode of TNG is my resource ;) It's so bad that I can usually tell you what the episode's about just by the opening couple of shots and music. This really irritates my SO, who doesn't remember any of them and doesn't want the story related to her in the first 30 seconds.
That's not the point I was trying to make at all. The answer to government abuses is not to kill the government, any more than the answer to a heart attack is to remove the heart. The size of the government has absolutely nothing to do with the level of corruption in the government. Any country with 300 million people and nearly 4 million square miles is going to take a large organization to run it.
And blindly removing laws isn't going to do any good either.
The solution is for the public to take an active role in government again, rather than just believing whatever their cable-"news"-moron-of-choice tells them to believe. Instead of running around believing that all "gubmint" is bad, find the actual bad parts, and cut them out. Want to take naked pictures of everyone for no damned reason at all? You're fired, and will be replaced with someone who will do their job properly and without tromping all over our rights.
TNG nerd here. She was commanding the Enterprise at the time because the rest of the command crew were down on the planet working with the individualist Borgs.
What good would that do? If I wanted to set up this system, and make it so people weren't pissed off about it, the public monitor (which by the way is problematic anyway because now the guy behind you in line can see the naked picture of you) would be set to show an innocuous image. "See? We're blurring the boobs out," even though the image seen by the agents was crystal clear. As mentioned above, this is a software-controlled system, and as such, I can make it do whatever I want it to do, including sending a misrepresentation of the image it's taking to the person who's image it's taking.
Abuse wasn't practically built into the system. It WAS built into the system. You don't need to take a picture of my penis to find out if I'm smuggling a grenade into the courthouse. It, and the rest of me, are non-metallic, and are not composed of explosive compounds. Sniff for explosives, and use a metal detector, just like they've been doing for decades, and you'll be perfectly safe. And the worst part is, TSA, US Marshalls, and the other agencies using these machines KNOW this. They know getting nudie shots of people isn't going to enhance security. It's all security theater, to keep the public believing that they're "protecting" us against a "threat," when really they're grabbing all the authorization for everything they can think of now, while people are still being scared and stupid rather than monitoring the abuses of the government. In short, they want to take naked pictures of you because they can, and because no one is telling them "no."
Looks like the FBI is forcing people to violate the law, then, if they're referring to cached images. . .
http://www.fbi.gov/publications/financial/fcs_report052005/fcs_report052005.htm
Yes, but it shows you what it's requesting access to by presenting you with a full screen, or more, of text.
Remember what Spolsky said - normal users don't read dialog boxes. If it's more than a sentence, they just hit "OK."
I really doubt that this story is going to have much of an effect on the average /. reader, but it will effect all those people who come running to us for tech support.
Why do you think they are charging him with the wiretapping violations? The cop got caught doing something stupid and dangerous, and is pissed off about it. Rather than own up to it, they'd rather set fire to the Constitution they are sworn to preserve-protect-and-defend.
Once he's cleared of these charges, the cops should be brought up on charges of treasonous malfeasance. As mentioned earlier, they are clearly trying to intimidate the public into not monitoring their activities out of fear of reprisal. Once that happens, the government agency responsible needs to be busted up, and those responsible for that action need to be in jail.
Your comment on it being Darwinistic is right on, but I think it needs some expansion. It's only Darwinistic if you look at it as the companies and the consumer in the same ecosystem. Without net neutrality, the "fittest" player in that game will be the large corporations that control access to and traffic on the internet. The losing player - the one who, in our Darwinistic model, ends up being booted out of the gene pool (or in this case, gets rendered completely subservient to the whims of the large corporations) is the consumer.
The free market is fine and dandy as long as consumer choice actually matters. But when consumers cannot choose an option that is actually fair to consumers, the free market has failed to achieve the "Best" outcome, and must therefore be pulled back in order to give consumers a chance.
We aren't talking about leveling the playing field between Comcast and Charter here. We're talking about leveling the playing field between big business and consumers. And if we don't, then anyone who doesn't own a major ISP is going to lose.
Franken's example was one outcome - another is having to have a line of credit of sorts with every ISP that hosts anything you might want to look at. If I'm a TWC customer who wants to look at a website hosted on Comcast's servers, there would be nothing to stop Comcast from charging TWC money to access that site. And TWC would, of course, pass that right on to me. The megacorps would get rich(er), and I would be left either paying potentially hundreds of dollars per month to browse the web, or cutting off my net access altogether, which in today's society would have major consequences in daily life.
So does that mean I can now download cracks for software I buy so I can bypass the dumbass copy protection that keeps me from playing the game I bought?