If we rely on competitive pressure with airports, we're likely to get a situation similar to the ISP situation. Most people who want broadband in the US have a choice of one or two ISPs. If they don't like the one they're with, either they are SOL or have to go with the one remaining one. This means that ISPs can do pretty much anything they want and the customer has no choice.
With airports, how many do you think there would be in any given area? Probably just one. So what "competitive pressure" would that airport feel to channel funds to something that doesn't generate money (e.g. Security) versus something that does (a third Starbucks in the food court). You won't wind up with secure airlines by relying on "competitive pressure."
Of course, this isn't to say that the TSA should be kept as-is. They should be scaled back dramatically. At least to pre-911 levels. Do the metal detector thing. Don't require people to take off their shoes. Do scan all bags (including checked bags). Don't grope passengers. Do learn from other countries that do security right (e.g. Israel). If the TSA did all of these things tomorrow, I'd be willing to bet that the incidence of terrorism in the US would *NOT* dramatically rise. It would stay completely flat. Flying would be more enjoyable and the TSA would continue to not catch terrorists. (The FBI tends to catch them pre-boarding and the passengers/flight crew tend to stop them post-boarding.) They should only be there to stop the obvious threats. ("No sir, you can't bring a loaded pistol and a 3 machetes on your flight.")
Maybe this research was funded by the TSA to replace their already low paid employees. Coming soon to an airport near you! "Strip naked and get on the probulator!"
According to Google, there isn't any 123 West 4th Street. (Google shows it as the middle of an interesection.) 123 East 4th Street exists but doesn't quite look like an appropriate area. It's a small building right next to a "magic touch unisex salon": http://bit.ly/k7HaBS
Celebrate a day based on 2*pi? No thanks. However, I will celebrate 2.556*pi day. I will likely even have cake on that day. It's the day that I turn approximately 11.46*pi years old.
No worries, they'll just release the Rapiscan Mark II which uses far less radiation and is much better shielded thus eliminating the cancer risk entirely.*
* Source: Rapiscan Industries Examination. No radiation-related studies of the Rapiscan Mark II are allowed by TSA decree and by the "Only Terrorists Question the TSA" Act of 2013.
As bad as the search of the 95 year old with leukemia was, I found this outrageous:
"Weber said she burst into tears during the ordeal, forcing her own pat-down and other measures in accordance with TSA protocol."
So a woman has to watch her mother be groped and forced to remove her undergarments, gets upset by it and thus needs to be groped herself. Because crying women are the next big threat to airline safety! Them and 95 year olds and 6 year old kids! Thank you, TSA. I feel so much safer knowing that a 95 year old grandmother with leukemia won't hijack the plane I'm on using her Depends undergarments along with her accomplice, her daughter who threatens to cry if we don't stay in line!
Not only that, but how many terrorists has the TSA stopped. I haven't heard of a single one being stopped by a backscatter machine or a "freedom grope." Meanwhile, terrorists that get by the "impenetrable" TSA security get stopped by the passengers on the plane. The Underwear Bomber? Shoe bomber? All taken down by the passengers and flight attendants. I'm definitely not saying we should do away with the TSA entirely, but we could move the security line area back to pre-911 levels without any measurable drop in security.
I have an automated script (using Image Magick and a transparent PNG I made) that stamps the copyright at the lower left of the image. Yes, people can still strip off the copyright notice, but it would be a lot harder than a simple crop job. The script also rotates the images if need be and resizes them for posting to the web. This means that the image, even if the copyright notice were stripped somehow, wouldn't be useful for print publication.
I've switched to Chrome also. I can keep Chrome open for days with a group of tabs without memory skyrocketing. Firefox, on the other hand, starts taking up more and more memory until I need to kill it and restart it. Chrome also provides an "about:memory" feature that lists every tab's memory usage and every plugin's memory usage. FireFox folks often blame memory woes on plugins. An "about:memory" to spot the bad plugins would be helpful. About the only time I go back to FireFox is for FireBug to figure out what is causing my JavaScript errors. FireBug Lite doesn't work as well for me.
Hopefully, this will spell the end of reality shows like Survivor. Stick a bunch of people in a remote wilderness and film them running (and sweating) through awful challenges... then transmit the result via smell-o-vision. "What's that stench?!! Oh, not Survivor again! Every time you watch it we need to whip out the air fresheners for the rest of the week. Turn it off now!!!"
I wonder if the same would be true of physical sources of music. Quick: Prove to me that you bought that CD! Do you have a receipt or something? I don't care if you claim you bought it a decade ago, I demand to see proof of ownership. No proof? You must have stolen it from someone. *flashes badge* You need to come with me....
I think the original poster is trying to make a distinction between legally purchased music (either bought as MP3s or bought as CDs and then ripped to MP3s) and music that has been downloaded without the copyright holder's permission (for example, songs back from the old Napster). The poster wants to track down any lingering "got it from Napster" tracks and delete them without having to pour through his entire CD collection and without having to match up all of his iTunes/Amazon/eMusic/etc online purchases.
Wouldn't the MD5 hash vary depending on the bitrate you use, which ripper you use, the information you enter into the ID3 tags (most times not a concern if the ripper pulls from an online database, but could be a problem if you enter custom information) and other factors? I could rip the same song five times and come up with five different ID3 tags.
Not only that, but how would the RIAA's website tell which were legally owned and which weren't? You rip your CD to MP3 tags and the MD5 hash is (somehow) known. Your copy is legal. Now you put that on a sharing site and I download it. My copy is not legal (as I didn't purchase the song on CD or any other format), yet it has the exact same MD5 hash. According to the RIAA's database, my copy is legal too.
And you can't assume that everyone would have different MD5 hashes. If we ripped the same song using the same ripper at the same bitrate with the same meta information (pulled from an online database), couldn't we very easily wind up with files containing the same MD5 hash? If so, how would the RIAA's hash index tell which of ours was legal and which (if any) wasn't?
I've got to disagree a bit. My wife is a stay at home mother and she'll often get frustrated because her life seems to be confined to our house. She has few friends (mostly people she met via social networks) outside of the home and thus talking to people on Facebook or Twitter gives her an outlet. It's a way to reach out to people with similar interests or situations. Kind of like Slashdot gives us geeks/nerds a place to talk about "News for Nerds." Imagine if the Internet disappeared tomorrow. How many of us would have people near to us to talk to in person about our various geeky interests? To those of you who said "plenty", count yourselves lucky. My answer is "none." Social Networking is just another extension of the Internet's ability to bring people together from vast distances to discuss common (or sometimes opposing) views/interests/situations.
During the workday I need to work on projects, answer e-mails and such. I'll have downtime for social networking here and there but not much. When I get home, I need to make dinner, get the kids ready for bed and then do various things (household chores, blog posts, watch TV shows I like watching, spend time with my wife, etc). I can do social networking here as well, but my time is limited. I already have a blog and am on Twitter. Going on Facebook would only spread me too thin. If I want to post something for the world to see that's longer than 140 characters, I'll blog about it. If I want to let people know about it privately, I'll e-mail them. There are only maybe a handful of people from my past that I wonder "what are they doing now." The others? Don't really care. As it stands, I'm constantly trying to rise above my past. I don't need people from my past constantly popping into my present life and judging my current life with comments or "likes".
As much as I'd love to get a smartphone for me and my wife, we're waiting. I just can't justify spending $30 per month for each of us. That's $720 per year that could be applied elsewhere. (And if we really start using it, that $720 a year could go to $1,920 a year.) Money's tight and I'd rather save the cash or spend it on other things.
Now, if they had a family plan. Say, pay $40 per month and get 3GB to share between all phones, I might just go for it. That would mean I'd only be paying $480 per year instead of $720 and the usefulness of smartphones might just overcome that price.
Of course, our choice might be made for us when we renew. Verizon is now requiring data plans for all but the most basic of phones. Even if we want a phone that'll just call and text, we might be forced to buy a data plan anyway.
I've always wondered about "mutations" in the X-Men comic books. There are people whose mutations lead to fantastic powers and there are normal people. I wonder about people in the middle. People who have mutations which lead to mundane powers or even powers which make everyday life difficult. For example, a mutation that makes ones hair grow at 50 times the usual rate. You would need to constantly shave every 6 hours lest you grow a beard not to mention the long tail of hair you would constantly drag behind you. Or perhaps someone would have the absolutely boring ability to change their eye color. Do the X-Men comics ever address people like this or is it just assumed that mutants all have wonderful, fantastic and useful* powers.
* "Useful" meaning "can be used for the mutant's benefit in some manner" and not "has no downside." Cyclop's eye blasts are useful in a fight even if it means nobody can look him in the eye.
The First Amendment is not absolute. You can't take any action, say "First Amendment!!!" while doing it and be ok. If you threw bricks at a cow or burnt a cat, you'd most likely find yourself arrested on charges of cruelty to animals no matter how much you explained that it was a political and/or religious statement.
Cows might be property, but as living creatures we recognize that they are a special kind of living creature. If you took your sofa out back, tied it down and threw bricks at it you wouldn't get in trouble. There would be nothing anyone could do about your destruction of your sofa using bricks. Do the same with a cow, dog or other animal you own, though, and you'll be arrested for animal cruelty (rightfully so). Yes, the cows are going to be killed and turned into meat, but that doesn't mean you need to be cruel to them up before they enter the slaughterhouse.
What was rejected was that property rights of the cows' owners don't trump animal cruelty laws and First Amendment rights.
How would you tell the difference (in software) between "no infrared signal because I'm not in a movie theater" and "no infrared signal because I am in a movie theater and someone put tape over the sensor"?
From what I heard, he was wrapped in a shroud tied to weights (to keep the body from floating). Given currents and organisms determined to get a meal from a sinking corpse, I doubt that shroud protected the body for long. As someone else said, you might be able to find the shroud and weights but the body'll be beyond recognizable by now.
Of course, even if we somehow assume that every creature found Bin Laden's corpse so detestable that they left it alone, you're talking about a sea with a surface area of 1,491,130 square miles with depths of over 15,000 feet (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_sea ). That's a LOT of volume to search to find one body, even the body of someone who was 6 1/2 feet tall. The phrase "needle in a haystack" comes to mind, but I don't think it does it justice. It'd probably be easier to find the needle than Bin Laden's corpse.
This actually happened to me once. I pushed the "unlock doors" button on my car's remote and I heard another car beep. It turned out that this other car was locking/unlocking via my remote along with my car. Had I wanted to, I could have entered this other car easily and taken anything I found inside.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're all equal under the law unless we have enough money and/or power to buy a better form of equality.
If we rely on competitive pressure with airports, we're likely to get a situation similar to the ISP situation. Most people who want broadband in the US have a choice of one or two ISPs. If they don't like the one they're with, either they are SOL or have to go with the one remaining one. This means that ISPs can do pretty much anything they want and the customer has no choice.
With airports, how many do you think there would be in any given area? Probably just one. So what "competitive pressure" would that airport feel to channel funds to something that doesn't generate money (e.g. Security) versus something that does (a third Starbucks in the food court). You won't wind up with secure airlines by relying on "competitive pressure."
Of course, this isn't to say that the TSA should be kept as-is. They should be scaled back dramatically. At least to pre-911 levels. Do the metal detector thing. Don't require people to take off their shoes. Do scan all bags (including checked bags). Don't grope passengers. Do learn from other countries that do security right (e.g. Israel). If the TSA did all of these things tomorrow, I'd be willing to bet that the incidence of terrorism in the US would *NOT* dramatically rise. It would stay completely flat. Flying would be more enjoyable and the TSA would continue to not catch terrorists. (The FBI tends to catch them pre-boarding and the passengers/flight crew tend to stop them post-boarding.) They should only be there to stop the obvious threats. ("No sir, you can't bring a loaded pistol and a 3 machetes on your flight.")
Maybe this research was funded by the TSA to replace their already low paid employees. Coming soon to an airport near you! "Strip naked and get on the probulator!"
I actually considered visiting that during my last trip to NYC, but my wife wasn't interested. (There's a joke in there somewhere.)
According to Google, there isn't any 123 West 4th Street. (Google shows it as the middle of an interesection.) 123 East 4th Street exists but doesn't quite look like an appropriate area. It's a small building right next to a "magic touch unisex salon": http://bit.ly/k7HaBS
Celebrate a day based on 2*pi? No thanks. However, I will celebrate 2.556*pi day. I will likely even have cake on that day. It's the day that I turn approximately 11.46*pi years old.
No worries, they'll just release the Rapiscan Mark II which uses far less radiation and is much better shielded thus eliminating the cancer risk entirely.*
* Source: Rapiscan Industries Examination. No radiation-related studies of the Rapiscan Mark II are allowed by TSA decree and by the "Only Terrorists Question the TSA" Act of 2013.
As bad as the search of the 95 year old with leukemia was, I found this outrageous:
"Weber said she burst into tears during the ordeal, forcing her own pat-down and other measures in accordance with TSA protocol."
So a woman has to watch her mother be groped and forced to remove her undergarments, gets upset by it and thus needs to be groped herself. Because crying women are the next big threat to airline safety! Them and 95 year olds and 6 year old kids! Thank you, TSA. I feel so much safer knowing that a 95 year old grandmother with leukemia won't hijack the plane I'm on using her Depends undergarments along with her accomplice, her daughter who threatens to cry if we don't stay in line!
Not only that, but how many terrorists has the TSA stopped. I haven't heard of a single one being stopped by a backscatter machine or a "freedom grope." Meanwhile, terrorists that get by the "impenetrable" TSA security get stopped by the passengers on the plane. The Underwear Bomber? Shoe bomber? All taken down by the passengers and flight attendants. I'm definitely not saying we should do away with the TSA entirely, but we could move the security line area back to pre-911 levels without any measurable drop in security.
I have an automated script (using Image Magick and a transparent PNG I made) that stamps the copyright at the lower left of the image. Yes, people can still strip off the copyright notice, but it would be a lot harder than a simple crop job. The script also rotates the images if need be and resizes them for posting to the web. This means that the image, even if the copyright notice were stripped somehow, wouldn't be useful for print publication.
I've switched to Chrome also. I can keep Chrome open for days with a group of tabs without memory skyrocketing. Firefox, on the other hand, starts taking up more and more memory until I need to kill it and restart it. Chrome also provides an "about:memory" feature that lists every tab's memory usage and every plugin's memory usage. FireFox folks often blame memory woes on plugins. An "about:memory" to spot the bad plugins would be helpful. About the only time I go back to FireFox is for FireBug to figure out what is causing my JavaScript errors. FireBug Lite doesn't work as well for me.
Hopefully, this will spell the end of reality shows like Survivor. Stick a bunch of people in a remote wilderness and film them running (and sweating) through awful challenges... then transmit the result via smell-o-vision. "What's that stench?!! Oh, not Survivor again! Every time you watch it we need to whip out the air fresheners for the rest of the week. Turn it off now!!!"
I wonder if the same would be true of physical sources of music. Quick: Prove to me that you bought that CD! Do you have a receipt or something? I don't care if you claim you bought it a decade ago, I demand to see proof of ownership. No proof? You must have stolen it from someone. *flashes badge* You need to come with me....
I think the original poster is trying to make a distinction between legally purchased music (either bought as MP3s or bought as CDs and then ripped to MP3s) and music that has been downloaded without the copyright holder's permission (for example, songs back from the old Napster). The poster wants to track down any lingering "got it from Napster" tracks and delete them without having to pour through his entire CD collection and without having to match up all of his iTunes/Amazon/eMusic/etc online purchases.
Wouldn't the MD5 hash vary depending on the bitrate you use, which ripper you use, the information you enter into the ID3 tags (most times not a concern if the ripper pulls from an online database, but could be a problem if you enter custom information) and other factors? I could rip the same song five times and come up with five different ID3 tags.
Not only that, but how would the RIAA's website tell which were legally owned and which weren't? You rip your CD to MP3 tags and the MD5 hash is (somehow) known. Your copy is legal. Now you put that on a sharing site and I download it. My copy is not legal (as I didn't purchase the song on CD or any other format), yet it has the exact same MD5 hash. According to the RIAA's database, my copy is legal too.
And you can't assume that everyone would have different MD5 hashes. If we ripped the same song using the same ripper at the same bitrate with the same meta information (pulled from an online database), couldn't we very easily wind up with files containing the same MD5 hash? If so, how would the RIAA's hash index tell which of ours was legal and which (if any) wasn't?
I've got to disagree a bit. My wife is a stay at home mother and she'll often get frustrated because her life seems to be confined to our house. She has few friends (mostly people she met via social networks) outside of the home and thus talking to people on Facebook or Twitter gives her an outlet. It's a way to reach out to people with similar interests or situations. Kind of like Slashdot gives us geeks/nerds a place to talk about "News for Nerds." Imagine if the Internet disappeared tomorrow. How many of us would have people near to us to talk to in person about our various geeky interests? To those of you who said "plenty", count yourselves lucky. My answer is "none." Social Networking is just another extension of the Internet's ability to bring people together from vast distances to discuss common (or sometimes opposing) views/interests/situations.
During the workday I need to work on projects, answer e-mails and such. I'll have downtime for social networking here and there but not much. When I get home, I need to make dinner, get the kids ready for bed and then do various things (household chores, blog posts, watch TV shows I like watching, spend time with my wife, etc). I can do social networking here as well, but my time is limited. I already have a blog and am on Twitter. Going on Facebook would only spread me too thin. If I want to post something for the world to see that's longer than 140 characters, I'll blog about it. If I want to let people know about it privately, I'll e-mail them. There are only maybe a handful of people from my past that I wonder "what are they doing now." The others? Don't really care. As it stands, I'm constantly trying to rise above my past. I don't need people from my past constantly popping into my present life and judging my current life with comments or "likes".
As much as I'd love to get a smartphone for me and my wife, we're waiting. I just can't justify spending $30 per month for each of us. That's $720 per year that could be applied elsewhere. (And if we really start using it, that $720 a year could go to $1,920 a year.) Money's tight and I'd rather save the cash or spend it on other things.
Now, if they had a family plan. Say, pay $40 per month and get 3GB to share between all phones, I might just go for it. That would mean I'd only be paying $480 per year instead of $720 and the usefulness of smartphones might just overcome that price.
Of course, our choice might be made for us when we renew. Verizon is now requiring data plans for all but the most basic of phones. Even if we want a phone that'll just call and text, we might be forced to buy a data plan anyway.
He built his own fusion reactor when he was 14? Are we sure his name is Taylor Wilson and not Sheldon Cooper?
I've always wondered about "mutations" in the X-Men comic books. There are people whose mutations lead to fantastic powers and there are normal people. I wonder about people in the middle. People who have mutations which lead to mundane powers or even powers which make everyday life difficult. For example, a mutation that makes ones hair grow at 50 times the usual rate. You would need to constantly shave every 6 hours lest you grow a beard not to mention the long tail of hair you would constantly drag behind you. Or perhaps someone would have the absolutely boring ability to change their eye color. Do the X-Men comics ever address people like this or is it just assumed that mutants all have wonderful, fantastic and useful* powers.
* "Useful" meaning "can be used for the mutant's benefit in some manner" and not "has no downside." Cyclop's eye blasts are useful in a fight even if it means nobody can look him in the eye.
The First Amendment is not absolute. You can't take any action, say "First Amendment!!!" while doing it and be ok. If you threw bricks at a cow or burnt a cat, you'd most likely find yourself arrested on charges of cruelty to animals no matter how much you explained that it was a political and/or religious statement.
Cows might be property, but as living creatures we recognize that they are a special kind of living creature. If you took your sofa out back, tied it down and threw bricks at it you wouldn't get in trouble. There would be nothing anyone could do about your destruction of your sofa using bricks. Do the same with a cow, dog or other animal you own, though, and you'll be arrested for animal cruelty (rightfully so). Yes, the cows are going to be killed and turned into meat, but that doesn't mean you need to be cruel to them up before they enter the slaughterhouse.
What was rejected was that property rights of the cows' owners don't trump animal cruelty laws and First Amendment rights.
How would you tell the difference (in software) between "no infrared signal because I'm not in a movie theater" and "no infrared signal because I am in a movie theater and someone put tape over the sensor"?
From what I heard, he was wrapped in a shroud tied to weights (to keep the body from floating). Given currents and organisms determined to get a meal from a sinking corpse, I doubt that shroud protected the body for long. As someone else said, you might be able to find the shroud and weights but the body'll be beyond recognizable by now.
Of course, even if we somehow assume that every creature found Bin Laden's corpse so detestable that they left it alone, you're talking about a sea with a surface area of 1,491,130 square miles with depths of over 15,000 feet (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabian_sea ). That's a LOT of volume to search to find one body, even the body of someone who was 6 1/2 feet tall. The phrase "needle in a haystack" comes to mind, but I don't think it does it justice. It'd probably be easier to find the needle than Bin Laden's corpse.
This actually happened to me once. I pushed the "unlock doors" button on my car's remote and I heard another car beep. It turned out that this other car was locking/unlocking via my remote along with my car. Had I wanted to, I could have entered this other car easily and taken anything I found inside.