You really think that the American Public, who can't be bothered to vote people out of office who violate all kinds of other rights, intrude upon private affairs, and gave wholesale approval to an illegal spying program perpetrated against every citizen of this country, will somehow mobilize and vote people out of office for supporting the implementation of the metric system? What?
Except the feds do have that power. One of the clauses enumerating the powers of Congress has explicitly states that "The Congress shall have power to... fix the Standard of Weights and Measures".
So if Congress wants to say "lets get of this nonsense imperial crap no one can remember" they can do that at any times, and the states have literally no standing to say otherwise.
The issue is that the government does not wait until they think you *are* a criminal to do this stuff, they start doing it when they think you *might* be a criminal, or worse yet, when someone *wants* you to be a criminal. It's not the stuff that would actually manage to fetch a warrant that a lot of people are worried about, it's the fishing expeditions that lazy crime fighting agencies and power abusing bureaucrats engage in if they don't like some of your associations. Just look to what happened during the McCarthy era to see what can happen when persons in power don't like the idea of you exercising your right to free association with people they don't like, regardless of if any rules are being broken.
The big problem with this is that Judges tend to dislike Juries being notified of that right and tend to throw people out for even mentioning it in court.
Man, it really sucks that Papa Johns would do crap like that, with the texting and threats of layoffs and reduced hours. What a cheapskate that guy is. Too bad they make the best pizza out of the three big chains. Now I might have to consider not eating it on ideological grounds.
If anything is absolutely critical for a companies production infrastructure, it should not be connected to the internet, and all the systems involved should be locked down so hard that you need admin approval to so much as change the desktop wallpaper, let alone write to the disk or plug in a thumbdrive.
And if there is a need for data transfer from those machines to the internet, hire a few extremely trustworthy individuals to run sneakernet between the two networks, and have the whole thing recorded on security camera: the room in which the two network connection points are in, and the monitors and KB/Mouse inputs on the two computers.
Probably cheaper to have up to 6 guys who do nothing but sit in a room manually transferring files and data from the secured infrastructure LAN during their shifts to the internet at employee request than it would be to suffer a cyberattack that cripples production. And if something DOES go down, it's all on the video anyway, so it should be hard to figure out which of the sneakernet employees did it.
What I hate about these articles that say there is no right to privacy in the Constitution is that they completely forget about the existence of the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
What that amendment means is that "just because we did not list that right here, does not mean it does not exist as a right. There are many rights we did not list here, and this amendment is intended to protect them as well as those we did list already". And yes, it is very broad. It is supposed to be broad because it is supposed to be a check on government power and a protection of the publics general rights. The Tenth Amendment is written along a similar line. Both are intended to say "any power or right we did not explicitly give to the federal government, we give to the people and the states". They are supposed to be very very broad because they are supposed to have a very broad interpretation in order to protect personal freedom and the autonomy of the states. And I think a right to privacy easily passes the test for inclusion under the Ninth Amendment.
I disagree with anyone who says that the Constitution contains no right to privacy. It contains one, by virtue of the Ninth Amendment, by not explicitly denying it.
Given the widespread, nationwide abuse of this practice by employers, I believe this might actually be a justifiable use of the ol' "Necessary and Proper" clause.
If they've stopped showing up entirely, I say the court should issue warrants and hold them in contempt until they take the proceedings seriously.
They made their bed, time to lay in it.
I think having everyone use UTC would be impractical. If the sun is out and its 2am UTC, someones gonna be confused, somewhere. And its gonna just be a giant pain in the rear end for everyone that isn't already using UTC to begin with. And even if you eliminate time zone boundaries, you still kind of need date boundaries. At one point do we say that monday is done with and tuesday begins? Is that a local thing? Do we keep time zones and just have them define the start and end points of the local day now?
And then theres all the technology that we use. Sure, disabling DST and just setting everything to UTC would be easy, but then every scheduled process has to be converted over to UTC. And then new rules for DST have to be implemented and its all a big pain in the you no what. Why don't we just go ahead and implement metric time while were at it just to make sure everyone's sense of time is sufficiently scrambled? Ugh...
I think something that would be much more practical would be to simply eliminate DST worldwide, and for countries that span multiple timezones to simplify. As far as the US goes, it would be easy to get the lower 48 on the same schedule. EST just falls back 90 minutes, CST falls back 30, MST jumps ahead 30, and PST jumps ahead 90. Bam, one unified timezone and no ones off by more than 90 minutes.
At those speeds, I cant imagine that there isnt some lost/corrupted data. Does retransmission factor into the 90 minute time, or are they using so many redundant signals that theres no need for a TCP-like packed received ack?
Whenever communication between Earth and Mars comes up I just have to wonder how long it's going to be until we find a way to communicate faster than light using something like quantum nonlocality. Otherwise were going to need two internets once we finally colonize that rusted out wasteland. (No really, it is all rusted out...that orange color comes from iron oxide, aka rust)
It seems like Hollywood just can't be content to let a good work stand on its own. Sooner or later everything good has to get either a sequel, prequel, or remake. It's just disrespectful, in my opinion, to works that are actually good and stand the test of time on their own. Not everything has to be turned into a cash cow.
From what I have read on the subject of interstellar space travel, we need two mechanisms to be order to make the journey in a somewhat reasonable fashion:
1. Faster Than Light (FTL) travel
2. A habitat with artificial gravity of some sort.
FTL travel may not be as science fictiony as we think. Anyone remember the episode of Futurama where they explained how the ships engines worked? They worked by moving space around the ship rather than moving the ship around space. Thats sort of the concept behind what may turn out to be a real life warp drive. Take a pocket of space and move it rather than your ship in order to achieve superluminal speeds. The issue is that in order to do that you need some exotic stuff called negative energy, and so far its existence hasnt even been verified yet, and apparently if it does exist the only way to generate it would be to use the most powerful stuff in the universe: antimatter. And that stuff is so expensive you could spend every piece of currency on earth and not even get enough to make a paperweight from. So for now were stuck at sublight.
Artificial gravity isnt so hard. Any circular, spinning habitat will do. But I for one hope we can discover and learn to manipulate gravitons somehow in order to generate or counter gravity at will. That way we could actually build ships that look like the Enterprise and are livable inside for an average joe. It would also enable us to be 100% certain that we could colonize planets that dont have gravity similar to Earths, which I think is going to be very important if you are sending people out to explore the galaxy. Right now the biggest question in my mind with regards to the potential colonization of Mars or the Moon is how the human body will react to fractional gravity. We know how the human body reacts in microgravity, and obviously we know how it reacts in normal gravity, but we have no idea how life will be for people living day to day on planets with gravity just a fraction of the earths. If it is anything like microgravity and you have to stay active all the time, it will be unfeasible for anyone without military discipline to live a normal life because of the strict routine. Discovering how to use and manipulate gravity itself would allow us to fix that. We could augment the planets natural gravity with artificial gravity and bring it up to a point where any normal human could live there, thus enabling us to colonize worlds of any size as long as their gravity is less than 1g.
I don't know how the Cable Companies do things, but one of the things I looked into after becoming a DirecTV subscriber was getting boxes that I owned outright instead of boxes I leased. What I discovered is that even if you own the box, they still charge you 5 or 6 bucks a month to use it with their system by calling it a "mirroring" fee.
Considering that everything I've read about IPTV boxes suggests that they have to actively request the content from a central line, and the more advanced cable boxes all need to interface with the central system for the purposes of knowing what channels are and aren't allowed, PPV ordering, and on-demand access, I can safely assume that there is no way you could slip some kind of box on to the system and have it just magically work in some kind of passive mode the way you could just hook up your old cable ready TV to the old analog systems. The companies are gonna know its there, and they're gonna charge you a fee to use it, regardless of if you own it or they do.
The difference is that banks have a huge amount of safeguards built in, as well as the fact that if your system doesn't work right and ends up siphoning money off to who knows where, people will find out about it and shut it down. Banks have a tremendous amount of incentive to make sure their systems work correctly and don't defraud anyone of their savings and holdings when transferred electronically. If the system doesn't work people will take their money to a bank where it does.
Votes are different. The public has a huge interest in making sure the system works as intended, but they really don't have any power to ensure that the system works as intended. The source code is closed, the contracts were negotiated in secret, and who knows what kind of worms and loopholes are in the code to create some kind of fraud. Voting machine companies as well as politicians and political parties could easily work out deals so that certain elections get swung certain ways and certain candidates never get elected. There is no foundation of trust to build on.
And if the public smells something fishy, what option do they have? It's not like they can vote with their citizenship and move to another country the same way they can vote with their wallet and move to another bank.
Electronic voting just has too many dark possibilities entangled with it for me to have any faith in it, and that is why I will never engage in any kind of voting where there is not some kind of physical manifestation of my ballot.
If you are going to make an example of someone, make an example of someone who actually succeeded in using social networking to incite violence and cause damage.
These two were just some drunken idiots who thought the riots were cool and wanted to bring them to their town while in a state of inebriation.
Fine the hell out of them and make them do some work for the community, no need to take four years of their lives away for something they failed utterly at.
Considering how needlessly bright a lot of displays are on portable devices, another way to dim the thing and reuse some of the energy it wastes is a good thing. If a portable device can double as a flashlight when its on the lowest dimming setting possible, its too bright.
I'm just wondering how accurately we can know when a certain piece of rock on the moon was formed anyway. I assume its by some means of geologic comparison of similar rocks on earth or something. But considering the size difference, you have to figure the moon, once it coalesced into existence after the supposed explosion that ejected that matter from earth, cooled a lot quicker than earth did.
So does that mean that if a company tells you to stop hacking its products, you should put it on your resume? Seems like it should lend some kind of credibility.
The whole world seems to be developing some kind of ADHD that is detrimental to new ideas that take longer to develop than what is now considered normal. Investors want their returns now, news outlets don't want to bother reporting on something besides an election that takes months to develop, and consumers don't want to wait, they'll just take the next best thing that pops up.
The pace of life arguably has something to do with it, as we increasingly work as a society to eliminate the need to wait for anything. Want news? Well back in the 70s you had to wait for your local newscast to tell you what happened in summary, and then you got the paper the next morning for the details. Then came cable news, and you could watch stuff develop live. More cable news outlets came out and copied and expanded on it. Anyone remember how some people were glued to their sets day after day watching the OJ Simpson trial go down in real time? And now in comes the internet and you can get your news from thousands of outlets on the web, social networks, and once you hear about it you tend to not care anymore.
People have forgotten how to be patient and a lot of it can be attributed to the "I want it NOW" mentality that our society seems to promote above all else. We need to calm the hell down, or we'll run over the next big as we dash off in our overfinanced and undeserved sports cars to get our next quick fix of overpriced whatever the hell it is that they're serving today.
Slow down.
...if it was rumored to include the ability to run any app you want instead of just whats in apples store. I'd also appreciate a rumor that they're going to get a new marketing campaign, because that piano number at the start of their current commercials drives me crazy and makes me scramble for the mute button.
But anyway, I'm rumored to be completely uninterested in an ipad anyway. I'd just appreciate some rumors that apple is going to be a little less evil every so often.
What I want to know is how long it takes a certain amount of plants to churn out a certain amount of hydrogen. If a small enough number of plants could cough up enough hydrogen fast enough, maybe people with their own gardens could one day harness this and self power their cars enough for short, daily driving.
Also seems like it's judicial roulette whenever a group files a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against a large number of people. On rare occasion, the bullet is in the barrel and the judge is willing to apply the law and make the mass filing party jump through the same procedural hoops everyone else has to or apply actual common-sense protections to the defendants.
Slashdot Mirror
You really think that the American Public, who can't be bothered to vote people out of office who violate all kinds of other rights, intrude upon private affairs, and gave wholesale approval to an illegal spying program perpetrated against every citizen of this country, will somehow mobilize and vote people out of office for supporting the implementation of the metric system? What?
Except the feds do have that power. One of the clauses enumerating the powers of Congress has explicitly states that "The Congress shall have power to ... fix the Standard of Weights and Measures".
So if Congress wants to say "lets get of this nonsense imperial crap no one can remember" they can do that at any times, and the states have literally no standing to say otherwise.
The issue is that the government does not wait until they think you *are* a criminal to do this stuff, they start doing it when they think you *might* be a criminal, or worse yet, when someone *wants* you to be a criminal. It's not the stuff that would actually manage to fetch a warrant that a lot of people are worried about, it's the fishing expeditions that lazy crime fighting agencies and power abusing bureaucrats engage in if they don't like some of your associations. Just look to what happened during the McCarthy era to see what can happen when persons in power don't like the idea of you exercising your right to free association with people they don't like, regardless of if any rules are being broken.
The big problem with this is that Judges tend to dislike Juries being notified of that right and tend to throw people out for even mentioning it in court.
Man, it really sucks that Papa Johns would do crap like that, with the texting and threats of layoffs and reduced hours. What a cheapskate that guy is. Too bad they make the best pizza out of the three big chains. Now I might have to consider not eating it on ideological grounds.
Jerks.
If anything is absolutely critical for a companies production infrastructure, it should not be connected to the internet, and all the systems involved should be locked down so hard that you need admin approval to so much as change the desktop wallpaper, let alone write to the disk or plug in a thumbdrive.
And if there is a need for data transfer from those machines to the internet, hire a few extremely trustworthy individuals to run sneakernet between the two networks, and have the whole thing recorded on security camera: the room in which the two network connection points are in, and the monitors and KB/Mouse inputs on the two computers.
Probably cheaper to have up to 6 guys who do nothing but sit in a room manually transferring files and data from the secured infrastructure LAN during their shifts to the internet at employee request than it would be to suffer a cyberattack that cripples production. And if something DOES go down, it's all on the video anyway, so it should be hard to figure out which of the sneakernet employees did it.
What I hate about these articles that say there is no right to privacy in the Constitution is that they completely forget about the existence of the Ninth Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
What that amendment means is that "just because we did not list that right here, does not mean it does not exist as a right. There are many rights we did not list here, and this amendment is intended to protect them as well as those we did list already". And yes, it is very broad. It is supposed to be broad because it is supposed to be a check on government power and a protection of the publics general rights. The Tenth Amendment is written along a similar line. Both are intended to say "any power or right we did not explicitly give to the federal government, we give to the people and the states". They are supposed to be very very broad because they are supposed to have a very broad interpretation in order to protect personal freedom and the autonomy of the states. And I think a right to privacy easily passes the test for inclusion under the Ninth Amendment.
I disagree with anyone who says that the Constitution contains no right to privacy. It contains one, by virtue of the Ninth Amendment, by not explicitly denying it.
Given the widespread, nationwide abuse of this practice by employers, I believe this might actually be a justifiable use of the ol' "Necessary and Proper" clause.
If they've stopped showing up entirely, I say the court should issue warrants and hold them in contempt until they take the proceedings seriously. They made their bed, time to lay in it.
I dont really care how it works, what I care is if it leaves my ability to refuse to answer intact.
I think having everyone use UTC would be impractical. If the sun is out and its 2am UTC, someones gonna be confused, somewhere. And its gonna just be a giant pain in the rear end for everyone that isn't already using UTC to begin with. And even if you eliminate time zone boundaries, you still kind of need date boundaries. At one point do we say that monday is done with and tuesday begins? Is that a local thing? Do we keep time zones and just have them define the start and end points of the local day now?
And then theres all the technology that we use. Sure, disabling DST and just setting everything to UTC would be easy, but then every scheduled process has to be converted over to UTC. And then new rules for DST have to be implemented and its all a big pain in the you no what. Why don't we just go ahead and implement metric time while were at it just to make sure everyone's sense of time is sufficiently scrambled? Ugh...
I think something that would be much more practical would be to simply eliminate DST worldwide, and for countries that span multiple timezones to simplify. As far as the US goes, it would be easy to get the lower 48 on the same schedule. EST just falls back 90 minutes, CST falls back 30, MST jumps ahead 30, and PST jumps ahead 90. Bam, one unified timezone and no ones off by more than 90 minutes.
At those speeds, I cant imagine that there isnt some lost/corrupted data. Does retransmission factor into the 90 minute time, or are they using so many redundant signals that theres no need for a TCP-like packed received ack? Whenever communication between Earth and Mars comes up I just have to wonder how long it's going to be until we find a way to communicate faster than light using something like quantum nonlocality. Otherwise were going to need two internets once we finally colonize that rusted out wasteland. (No really, it is all rusted out...that orange color comes from iron oxide, aka rust)
It seems like Hollywood just can't be content to let a good work stand on its own. Sooner or later everything good has to get either a sequel, prequel, or remake. It's just disrespectful, in my opinion, to works that are actually good and stand the test of time on their own. Not everything has to be turned into a cash cow.
From what I have read on the subject of interstellar space travel, we need two mechanisms to be order to make the journey in a somewhat reasonable fashion:
1. Faster Than Light (FTL) travel
2. A habitat with artificial gravity of some sort.
FTL travel may not be as science fictiony as we think. Anyone remember the episode of Futurama where they explained how the ships engines worked? They worked by moving space around the ship rather than moving the ship around space. Thats sort of the concept behind what may turn out to be a real life warp drive. Take a pocket of space and move it rather than your ship in order to achieve superluminal speeds. The issue is that in order to do that you need some exotic stuff called negative energy, and so far its existence hasnt even been verified yet, and apparently if it does exist the only way to generate it would be to use the most powerful stuff in the universe: antimatter. And that stuff is so expensive you could spend every piece of currency on earth and not even get enough to make a paperweight from. So for now were stuck at sublight.
Artificial gravity isnt so hard. Any circular, spinning habitat will do. But I for one hope we can discover and learn to manipulate gravitons somehow in order to generate or counter gravity at will. That way we could actually build ships that look like the Enterprise and are livable inside for an average joe. It would also enable us to be 100% certain that we could colonize planets that dont have gravity similar to Earths, which I think is going to be very important if you are sending people out to explore the galaxy. Right now the biggest question in my mind with regards to the potential colonization of Mars or the Moon is how the human body will react to fractional gravity. We know how the human body reacts in microgravity, and obviously we know how it reacts in normal gravity, but we have no idea how life will be for people living day to day on planets with gravity just a fraction of the earths. If it is anything like microgravity and you have to stay active all the time, it will be unfeasible for anyone without military discipline to live a normal life because of the strict routine. Discovering how to use and manipulate gravity itself would allow us to fix that. We could augment the planets natural gravity with artificial gravity and bring it up to a point where any normal human could live there, thus enabling us to colonize worlds of any size as long as their gravity is less than 1g.
I don't know how the Cable Companies do things, but one of the things I looked into after becoming a DirecTV subscriber was getting boxes that I owned outright instead of boxes I leased. What I discovered is that even if you own the box, they still charge you 5 or 6 bucks a month to use it with their system by calling it a "mirroring" fee.
Considering that everything I've read about IPTV boxes suggests that they have to actively request the content from a central line, and the more advanced cable boxes all need to interface with the central system for the purposes of knowing what channels are and aren't allowed, PPV ordering, and on-demand access, I can safely assume that there is no way you could slip some kind of box on to the system and have it just magically work in some kind of passive mode the way you could just hook up your old cable ready TV to the old analog systems. The companies are gonna know its there, and they're gonna charge you a fee to use it, regardless of if you own it or they do.
The difference is that banks have a huge amount of safeguards built in, as well as the fact that if your system doesn't work right and ends up siphoning money off to who knows where, people will find out about it and shut it down. Banks have a tremendous amount of incentive to make sure their systems work correctly and don't defraud anyone of their savings and holdings when transferred electronically. If the system doesn't work people will take their money to a bank where it does.
Votes are different. The public has a huge interest in making sure the system works as intended, but they really don't have any power to ensure that the system works as intended. The source code is closed, the contracts were negotiated in secret, and who knows what kind of worms and loopholes are in the code to create some kind of fraud. Voting machine companies as well as politicians and political parties could easily work out deals so that certain elections get swung certain ways and certain candidates never get elected. There is no foundation of trust to build on.
And if the public smells something fishy, what option do they have? It's not like they can vote with their citizenship and move to another country the same way they can vote with their wallet and move to another bank.
Electronic voting just has too many dark possibilities entangled with it for me to have any faith in it, and that is why I will never engage in any kind of voting where there is not some kind of physical manifestation of my ballot.
If you are going to make an example of someone, make an example of someone who actually succeeded in using social networking to incite violence and cause damage. These two were just some drunken idiots who thought the riots were cool and wanted to bring them to their town while in a state of inebriation. Fine the hell out of them and make them do some work for the community, no need to take four years of their lives away for something they failed utterly at.
Considering how needlessly bright a lot of displays are on portable devices, another way to dim the thing and reuse some of the energy it wastes is a good thing. If a portable device can double as a flashlight when its on the lowest dimming setting possible, its too bright.
I'm just wondering how accurately we can know when a certain piece of rock on the moon was formed anyway. I assume its by some means of geologic comparison of similar rocks on earth or something. But considering the size difference, you have to figure the moon, once it coalesced into existence after the supposed explosion that ejected that matter from earth, cooled a lot quicker than earth did.
So does that mean that if a company tells you to stop hacking its products, you should put it on your resume? Seems like it should lend some kind of credibility.
The whole world seems to be developing some kind of ADHD that is detrimental to new ideas that take longer to develop than what is now considered normal. Investors want their returns now, news outlets don't want to bother reporting on something besides an election that takes months to develop, and consumers don't want to wait, they'll just take the next best thing that pops up. The pace of life arguably has something to do with it, as we increasingly work as a society to eliminate the need to wait for anything. Want news? Well back in the 70s you had to wait for your local newscast to tell you what happened in summary, and then you got the paper the next morning for the details. Then came cable news, and you could watch stuff develop live. More cable news outlets came out and copied and expanded on it. Anyone remember how some people were glued to their sets day after day watching the OJ Simpson trial go down in real time? And now in comes the internet and you can get your news from thousands of outlets on the web, social networks, and once you hear about it you tend to not care anymore. People have forgotten how to be patient and a lot of it can be attributed to the "I want it NOW" mentality that our society seems to promote above all else. We need to calm the hell down, or we'll run over the next big as we dash off in our overfinanced and undeserved sports cars to get our next quick fix of overpriced whatever the hell it is that they're serving today. Slow down.
...if it was rumored to include the ability to run any app you want instead of just whats in apples store. I'd also appreciate a rumor that they're going to get a new marketing campaign, because that piano number at the start of their current commercials drives me crazy and makes me scramble for the mute button. But anyway, I'm rumored to be completely uninterested in an ipad anyway. I'd just appreciate some rumors that apple is going to be a little less evil every so often.
What I want to know is how long it takes a certain amount of plants to churn out a certain amount of hydrogen. If a small enough number of plants could cough up enough hydrogen fast enough, maybe people with their own gardens could one day harness this and self power their cars enough for short, daily driving.
With stuff this serious, don't ask Slashdot. CALL YOUR LAWYER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!oneoneeleven.
Also seems like it's judicial roulette whenever a group files a massive copyright infringement lawsuit against a large number of people. On rare occasion, the bullet is in the barrel and the judge is willing to apply the law and make the mass filing party jump through the same procedural hoops everyone else has to or apply actual common-sense protections to the defendants.