The American government is using the 911 pretext to bring in a national ID card with your fingerprint and eyecan embedded in it.
Will this card be made out of tinfoil?
Since you don't seem to have anything but paranoia and conjecture to back up your bold and assertive statements, I have to assume you're really fond of tinfoil.
> There is no card that identifies you as a US citizen. Eh? I'd submit that it's your Social Security Card/number.
I'd submit that it isn't. In fact, you're discouraged from carrying your Social Security card with you unless absolutely necessary.
When I took a day trip to Mexico last year, upon returning to Arizona the border guard asked me to affirm my US citizenship verbally, and to show my NJ state driver's license as confirmation. So from this anecdote, the conclusion I'd draw is that there is effectively NOT a national ID, and state driver's licenses come closest but still don't fit the bill.
The fact that you had to point out the mis-moderation tells you how bad it already is.
Look. Ask any "youth" if the Jews were persecuted and slaughtered by the Nazis, and 99 out of 100 will say they were. Ask them what the marks Jews were forced to wear on their clothing for identification, and probably less than 10 will correctly answer "yellow stars".
It doesn't mean that the youth are being "dumbed down". It means some of the details have simply not been considered as important as the big picture by history.
Yes, the yellow star reference in the grandparent comment was quite clever... but a little more obtuse than it could have been. That's all.
Copyrights might have been extended by Congress, but they can still lapse if they aren't defended comensurate to their value.
Nope, that's wrong. Copyright protections remain in force until the term expires or the owner explicitly releases to the public domain. The owner doesn't HAVE to defend, vigorously or otherwise, if they find out a violation exists. They don't even have to REGISTER their copyright -- it's implicit in the act of creation.
If peoples' ability to disseminate information serves as a message to corporations that their attempts to turn the US into a police state won't work, then I can live with that.
Orrrrrr you could go through VALID channels and work for reform of intellectual property laws. Because as it stands now, if you trade in MS's intellectual property, it's WELL within their legal rights to come after you.
If you don't like it, do something about it. Something BESIDES breaking the law anyway because it suits you and hiding behind "civil disobedience".
I believe a law should be passed that every number ever stated in the news should be followed by an analogous per capita statstic.
Yes, I also believe that the First Amendment should be compromised. They were just kidding when they wrote in that "freedom of the press" thing, right?
When it comes to science questions, such as whether or not global warming is happening and whether or not we are contributing to it and whether or not the icecaps are melting into the ocean at an alarming rate, well, the scientists are correct, and the administration is wrong.
To the best of humankind's current knowledge, at least. I'm willing to accept that those 20 Nobel laureates MAY be proven wrong by future discoveries, but it doesn't logically follow that the administration's stance, that these leaders of the scientific community MUST be wrong, is valid.
I think an overwhelmingly larger number of people drive drunk than have to flee for their lives from an attacker.
Irrelevant. If only one sober motorist is unable to flee from an attacker due to this device and it costs them their lives, the technology is unacceptable.
Can a computer really tune to the level that they can hear it needs to be tuned to for them?
Computers can tune a lot MORE ACCURATELY than even the average pro musician can, but that doesn't necessarily mean BETTER.
Playing some notes just a few Hertz out of "correct" tuning can add a lot of expressiveness. In some genres (think blues), it's rather bland to just play the correct pitches of the scale.
(And this isn't even addressing what "correct" tuning is -- 12-tone equal temperament has been the gold standard for a couple hundred years now, but it's really just a compromise between convenience and harmonic purity -- the fifths are slightly flat and the thirds slightly sharp compared to their pure hamonic counterparts...)
Obviously, morse code operators have had ways of getting around using 'at' signs for almost two hundred years, but it's a cool addition, and is as big a deal as they make out.
Yes, it was so ponderous to have to key out the two-letter word "at" in days of yore! God only knows how they coped.
Yes, that's my complaint about the NewsForge article as well. The author wasn't biased enough TOWARDS open source, and did not misrepresent position statements blatantly enough.
The official view, from the mouth of a senior policy advisor, is quoted several paragraphs down in the story: "The U.S. view is that we don't want to see government, or in this case, the World Summit, advocate one type of software over another."
Your taxpayer is either misinformed, lying, or some combination of the three.
My hometown has a single zip code, yet its residents range from $15k/yr lower class families to multimillionaires. Any attempt to correlate wealth to zip code in that area would be statistically meaningless.
I'm not even going to touch your assertion that enforcement of tax evaders is going to cause a return to a Debtors' Prison system and overcrowding of orphanages, eventually culminating in a child slave trade -- that's aburd on its face.
What I would like to see is some evidence supporting your other assertion, that people who fail to pay taxes do so largely because it would be a financial hardship for them to do so. Do you have any studies which support this conclusion? With the tax laws as they are now, many poor taxpayers actually end up with a tax liability of $0 at the end of the year.
They're the same overloads as before. They're just more public about it since the Bush administration has laid the groundwork for them to do whatever they want to citizens.
The Bush administration has exactly what effect on state government, again?
(Or, since this is Massachusetts we're talking about, perhaps I should say "commonwealth government" instead.)
IMO Bush is indeed a bad president, but it's reactionary and irrational to blame his administration for EVERY change in government that you don't like.
Why not just provide more spectrum for wireless and lets eliminate the mass of cables for a central source for maintenance and upgrades?
Because the wireless spectrum is finite, but bandwith over fiber is practically infinite. If you run out of bandwidth on one strand of fiber, you can always just lay another strand alongside it and double your capacity. Or better yet, right from the outset lay down enough fiber to accomodate 100 years' worth of projected growth -- that makes the incremental costs of adding bandwidth over time negligible.
Cables will almost always be the ideal connection between two stationary points. Wireless communications should be used only when no other solution is practical, such as for mobile devices and isolated points in far-remote locations.
Go ahead -- try to install and run AutoCAD (2004 release) with Architectural and Mechanical desktops loaded... as a regular user.
I haven't tried this myself, so maybe this is a dumb question, but... shouldn't the act of installing a new application be an Administrator task to begin with?
Is it the case that even if you install as Administrator, other user accounts won't be able to run the app?
Have it read as many formats as possible: HTML, RTF, Word Docs, don't dick around with DRM and proprietary formats.
Isn't that self-contradictory?
Have an internal hard drive.
Oh god no.
One 64MB CompactFlash card will hold more texts than an average person can read in a month. Having a hard drive built into an electronic book might be interesting from a "gee-whiz" perspective, but it's simply impractical.
Of course, if you took a device that already had a hard drive, like an iPod, and enhanced the LCD screen to make it appropriate for reading large texts on...
The correct answer to this question is "a font size that's comfortable for me to read."
Perhaps on your desktop, 80-column text is easy to read -- but what about on my pocketpc/smartphone/tiny device? It can't display more than 40 characters per line even if I wanted it to...
Slashdot Mirror
The American government is using the 911 pretext to bring in a national ID card with your fingerprint and eyecan embedded in it.
Will this card be made out of tinfoil?
Since you don't seem to have anything but paranoia and conjecture to back up your bold and assertive statements, I have to assume you're really fond of tinfoil.
> There is no card that identifies you as a US citizen.
Eh? I'd submit that it's your Social Security Card/number.
I'd submit that it isn't. In fact, you're discouraged from carrying your Social Security card with you unless absolutely necessary.
When I took a day trip to Mexico last year, upon returning to Arizona the border guard asked me to affirm my US citizenship verbally, and to show my NJ state driver's license as confirmation. So from this anecdote, the conclusion I'd draw is that there is effectively NOT a national ID, and state driver's licenses come closest but still don't fit the bill.
I thought...it was Internal Affairs that "investigated investigations".
You can be sure that now this story is out, IA will investigate the way he investigated the investigation.
The system works!
The fact that you had to point out the mis-moderation tells you how bad it already is.
Look. Ask any "youth" if the Jews were persecuted and slaughtered by the Nazis, and 99 out of 100 will say they were. Ask them what the marks Jews were forced to wear on their clothing for identification, and probably less than 10 will correctly answer "yellow stars".
It doesn't mean that the youth are being "dumbed down". It means some of the details have simply not been considered as important as the big picture by history.
Yes, the yellow star reference in the grandparent comment was quite clever... but a little more obtuse than it could have been. That's all.
Copyrights might have been extended by Congress, but they can still lapse if they aren't defended comensurate to their value.
Nope, that's wrong. Copyright protections remain in force until the term expires or the owner explicitly releases to the public domain. The owner doesn't HAVE to defend, vigorously or otherwise, if they find out a violation exists. They don't even have to REGISTER their copyright -- it's implicit in the act of creation.
Perhaps you're thinking of trademark?
If peoples' ability to disseminate information serves as a message to corporations that their attempts to turn the US into a police state won't work, then I can live with that.
Orrrrrr you could go through VALID channels and work for reform of intellectual property laws. Because as it stands now, if you trade in MS's intellectual property, it's WELL within their legal rights to come after you.
If you don't like it, do something about it. Something BESIDES breaking the law anyway because it suits you and hiding behind "civil disobedience".
I believe a law should be passed that every number ever stated in the news should be followed by an analogous per capita statstic.
Yes, I also believe that the First Amendment should be compromised. They were just kidding when they wrote in that "freedom of the press" thing, right?
When it comes to science questions, such as whether or not global warming is happening and whether or not we are contributing to it and whether or not the icecaps are melting into the ocean at an alarming rate, well, the scientists are correct, and the administration is wrong.
To the best of humankind's current knowledge, at least. I'm willing to accept that those 20 Nobel laureates MAY be proven wrong by future discoveries, but it doesn't logically follow that the administration's stance, that these leaders of the scientific community MUST be wrong, is valid.
...or why New Jersey's plates all switched from blue to yellow several years ago?
I think an overwhelmingly larger number of people drive drunk than have to flee for their lives from an attacker.
Irrelevant. If only one sober motorist is unable to flee from an attacker due to this device and it costs them their lives, the technology is unacceptable.
Can a computer really tune to the level that they can hear it needs to be tuned to for them?
Computers can tune a lot MORE ACCURATELY than even the average pro musician can, but that doesn't necessarily mean BETTER.
Playing some notes just a few Hertz out of "correct" tuning can add a lot of expressiveness. In some genres (think blues), it's rather bland to just play the correct pitches of the scale.
(And this isn't even addressing what "correct" tuning is -- 12-tone equal temperament has been the gold standard for a couple hundred years now, but it's really just a compromise between convenience and harmonic purity -- the fifths are slightly flat and the thirds slightly sharp compared to their pure hamonic counterparts...)
Obviously, morse code operators have had ways of getting around using 'at' signs for almost two hundred years, but it's a cool addition, and is as big a deal as they make out.
Yes, it was so ponderous to have to key out the two-letter word "at" in days of yore! God only knows how they coped.
Yes, that's my complaint about the NewsForge article as well. The author wasn't biased enough TOWARDS open source, and did not misrepresent position statements blatantly enough.
The official view, from the mouth of a senior policy advisor, is quoted several paragraphs down in the story: "The U.S. view is that we don't want to see government, or in this case, the World Summit, advocate one type of software over another."
Isn't it better to have more choices than less?
Your taxpayer is either misinformed, lying, or some combination of the three.
My hometown has a single zip code, yet its residents range from $15k/yr lower class families to multimillionaires. Any attempt to correlate wealth to zip code in that area would be statistically meaningless.
I'm not even going to touch your assertion that enforcement of tax evaders is going to cause a return to a Debtors' Prison system and overcrowding of orphanages, eventually culminating in a child slave trade -- that's aburd on its face.
What I would like to see is some evidence supporting your other assertion, that people who fail to pay taxes do so largely because it would be a financial hardship for them to do so. Do you have any studies which support this conclusion? With the tax laws as they are now, many poor taxpayers actually end up with a tax liability of $0 at the end of the year.
They're the same overloads as before. They're just more public about it since the Bush administration has laid the groundwork for them to do whatever they want to citizens.
The Bush administration has exactly what effect on state government, again?
(Or, since this is Massachusetts we're talking about, perhaps I should say "commonwealth government" instead.)
IMO Bush is indeed a bad president, but it's reactionary and irrational to blame his administration for EVERY change in government that you don't like.
Though on the other hand, it could even be argued that removing blogs entirely would be a form of "lossless compression".
You do realize that Slashdot itself qualifies as a blog, right?
Stop for a moment and think about what you're sug+++ NO CARRIER
Why not just provide more spectrum for wireless and lets eliminate the mass of cables for a central source for maintenance and upgrades?
Because the wireless spectrum is finite, but bandwith over fiber is practically infinite. If you run out of bandwidth on one strand of fiber, you can always just lay another strand alongside it and double your capacity. Or better yet, right from the outset lay down enough fiber to accomodate 100 years' worth of projected growth -- that makes the incremental costs of adding bandwidth over time negligible.
Cables will almost always be the ideal connection between two stationary points. Wireless communications should be used only when no other solution is practical, such as for mobile devices and isolated points in far-remote locations.
the site selling it never mentioned that it was old and shitty
Where was your due diligence? Did you honestly expect the site selling the software to tell you "Hey! This is old and shitty, don't buy it!"
Caveat emptor, dude. I have trouble believing that you couldn't have discovered some known issues with the product before you bought it.
the people doing the designing typically come from a small set of backgrounds (euro, asian, american...)
Pretty small set there, indeed. It only covers four of the most populous continents!
Native Antarcticans have just as much to contribute to language design as anyone else! If only we would listen.
Who browses as root? Oh, yes, thats right Windows users.
I'm a safety-conscious Windows user! I never login as "root"! I just use the "Administrator" account instead!
Go ahead -- try to install and run AutoCAD (2004 release) with Architectural and Mechanical desktops loaded ... as a regular user.
I haven't tried this myself, so maybe this is a dumb question, but... shouldn't the act of installing a new application be an Administrator task to begin with?
Is it the case that even if you install as Administrator, other user accounts won't be able to run the app?
He went pretty far to disclaim any @stake connection to the paper.
But did he go far enough?
I'm guessing that he didn't run the paper past @Stake's legal department before publishing.
Have it read as many formats as possible: HTML, RTF, Word Docs, don't dick around with DRM and proprietary formats.
Isn't that self-contradictory?
Have an internal hard drive.
Oh god no.
One 64MB CompactFlash card will hold more texts than an average person can read in a month. Having a hard drive built into an electronic book might be interesting from a "gee-whiz" perspective, but it's simply impractical.
Of course, if you took a device that already had a hard drive, like an iPod, and enhanced the LCD screen to make it appropriate for reading large texts on...
How big of a font do you use in your browser?
The correct answer to this question is "a font size that's comfortable for me to read."
Perhaps on your desktop, 80-column text is easy to read -- but what about on my pocketpc/smartphone/tiny device? It can't display more than 40 characters per line even if I wanted it to...