Good God, what is the big fucking deal with all the inauguration here? I mean, sure, it is important in that it is the orderly transition of power in the US, but, really people, why are some treating this as the second coming of Christ?
It is just the swearing in of another president....can't we just look at the digested version on the nights news?
Nah, my wife thinks it's the swearing in of the anti-Christ. Of course he has his followers and with the expanded powers that Bush allowed he has little to slow or stop him when he's in office. Honestly, I usually couldn't careless. I didn't hate bush, but I don't like this guy so much either. I didn't think Gore would have been an improvement over Bush at all. I'm just wanting people to shut the heck up about it already or start with decent jokes about the guy or how awful the guy is. I mean he isn't a real president until we can really bitch about him or make fun of him.
This guy has too many direct worshipers to make me happy. Bush or the religious right doesn't have anything on this guy. Heck, I know the religious right's supposed platform so I can't really fault them for supporting their stated beliefs. This guy's worshippers though I don't know much other than its a personality cult around a leader that they really love. I'm more disturbed by that than anything Bush did. This guy's going to be another JFK where he can do no wrong in the public's eye.
Actually, if articles about him didn't constantly pop up on slashdot, I wouldn't even bother to notice the guy. I didn't notice 70% of what Bush did until folks started bitching about it and even then it usually wasn't that bad or anything really that he could just fix.
I'll have to laugh if this guy gets hit with a Katrina or 9/11 near the end of the his term. Bush was considered pretty decent until those events. Heck, Katrina I hold more against the LA/NO governments than towards Bush. Bush tried the lets do something/anything response. (I kinda think half of what happened to the nation after 9/11 was the same.) I guess if all else fails he could just start the white house intern porn tube channel and be another democrat success story.
Most notably did the school have the right to search the student's phone/does a student have the expectation of privacy. There have been varying rulings over whether the police can search a cell phone or PDA of an individual placed under arrest. In the case of a school, they are not the police and do not have the authority of the police (despite some administrators thinking that they do).
I've never liked the thing where teachers will search a students papers or person at their whim if they think the student has been passing notes or such. What gives any teacher that right? Nothing except that for some weird reason we don't give any rights to folks under 18 years old except treat them like prisoners.
I'd rather the teachers be shot for merely wanting to look at students papers/communications media of any form than any students be punished due to this. This is why some folks don't mind domestic warrant less wiretapping. They've never had private communications in the first place. Realistically we can't shoot teachers for this. Now, it would be nice if they were fired or atleast placed on 1 month unpaid leave if they tried this though. This would apply from K to university to any educational staff or faculty that tried searching a students papers or communication media.
But I don't think forward time travel is possible since there is not/will not be a future.
Actually, it's forward time travel that we've got proof that it can work.;) We travel into the future every second of every day. It's traveling backward or stopping time within a space that we need to work on. I can actually buy the stories where someone invents a device where they get thrown forward in time. The problems with that should be obvious. You don't have a clue what life will be like in 5, 10, 50, 500, or 5,000 years. Your survival or trade goods bag may be worthless.
Now it would be handy if you could get back to the past/the present, but that's where problems start. I'd love to spend $3-5K on various electronic goodies and send them back to myself in 1996. (Heck, while I'm at it, I should work on the stock history, winning lottery numbers, wikipedia, everyone involved in starting Google up, and every open source project that I can burn to DVD or onto a terabyte HD. Heck, also my entire DVD collection.) With only a decade's worth of future toys/history, you could completely take over the economics of the past.
Conrad's time machine is the most obvious of what a small group of smart people would do with a fully working time machine. You'd go from zero to billions really quickly. You'd have your own private company staffed with your own highly educated loyal time agents while you were building your fortune. Then you'd buy an island or tiny country and build an entire working infrastructure in a single day. If the need ever came about, you'd get a warning from the future, and you'd have your entire country remove everything man made into the distant past (think 60-100K years) where modern humans can't follow and nothing would be left on your island or company for them to trace.
Then there's the other snag of transposition... if you say, send yourself back in time, what happens to that volume of space where you arrive? Is it destroyed? And what fills in the void where you left? Or one more expected result is it's transposed with your time's space. Thus all time travel is time swapping, something goes forward and something goes back. Now lets say you do make a time travel machine, and test it without considering the earth-travels-through-space issue... that means whatever you send out, you get a big ball of vacuum back. If it's a very brief travel, you may get a chunk of earth, high pressure ocean, or more likely, high pressure magma. Ouch... hope you got insurance. That'll turn your lab into a disaster area real quick.
There are so man "problems" with time travel, that it really doesn't matter if its possible or not. It's not useful.
Are you kidding? Depending on its energy costs, it could be a very cheap method of throwing stuff into space. O.k. I wouldn't want to try using it to get back down, but if you wanted to ring the solar system with monitoring probes, this is how you'd cheaply get them up there. Now of course each one would have to find itself in space, find earth, and/or find more probes to transmit the results back. O.k. it wouldn't be nearly as useful if all the probes where thrown out of the solar system, but it would actually if you could build 'em to transmit to earth and actually detect the transmissions somewhere on earth. You'd have functioning FTL!;)
* Nuclear fuel, uranium, is radioactive and will cause cancer or direct radiation poisoning. * Coal is full of mercury, and eating it will cause people to call you a mad hatter. * Oil is bad because you can drown in it. * Solar power is bad because the sun can give you sunburn. * Wind power is really nasty because all those spinning blades can chop you up into teeny tiny pieces.
You forgot a few. Burning wood is bad for you. It produces toxic smoke. Burning animal wastes for fuel is bad for the same as above reasons. Eating animal meat for fuel is bad for you because it can make you fat. Farming is bad for the environment since it displaces the "natural" environment with "artificial" food organisms for our benefit. Eating any form of plant is bad. Because it reduces you to a parasite.
The only viable solution is to splice photosynthetic cells into our skin so we can produce our own food.
I am not really directing this at you, but we need to get past the "gosh, it might be toxic!" over-reaction to some really basic chemistry. We have used "water gas" and carbon monoxide systems for a very long time as chemistry goes, and long before anyone really properly characterized its asphyxiating properties. If they could use it in the 19th century without killing everybody, then we can certainly use it in the 21st century without killing everybody. There is more truly nasty chemistry waiting to happen in your average household than any normal person likely imagines, and yet we somehow survive as a society.
Chemical toxicity is becoming like "nuclear" and "radioactive", bogeymen perceived as ineffable evils that will kill us all.
We only survive because of our faulty educational system and the lack of curiosity in most of our population. Most of us don't really feel the urge to mix up our household chemicals. We know that they are all pretty much deadly if you drink them and should be in a locked place if you have small kids around. Every one knows how to use bleach, 409, and various toilet or shower cleaners though without killing everyone in their home. Now could you imagine the world that we could have had if we just tried radioactive and nuclear stuff the same as our chemical crap? Just don't think about actually how deadly the stuff you clean the showers with actually is and you will be fine.
You only make the stationary. I make both stationary and desks. Seeing as everybody wants my desks, I have an unfair advantage to selling my stationary, which is actually inferior to yours simply because the people are buying my desks.
Nah, that's slightly different. You aren't giving away a lifetime supply of stationary with a purchase of own of your desks. You might throw in your best seller of stationary or lowest cost to you stationary as a marketing thing with your desk. It'll run out though. At that time, the person has to run to staples or office depot and pick a stationary to buy.
IE doesn't expire after 1-3 months and then require a purchase if you want to keep using it. Actually most of these third parties would love it if IE did work like that.
I guessed it first try... ftp.mozilla.org No brainer. Granted my dad/mom would have been S.O.L.
I'd have never guessed it. If it where ftp.firefox.org then maybe. Mozilla, nope never. I've always thought of mozilla as legacy legalese that's been inserted into most browsers. I don't run Mozilla. I run IE or Firefox.;)
If IE were to disappear tomorrow replaced by any other browser or combination, the Web would suddenly leap forward technologically and you could run Web apps, view video and audio using standards, develop Web pages in half the time, and use vector graphics to deliver better quality graphics using less bandwidth.
Complete and utter BS. If it were so trivial to create all these web n+1 apps with your preferred browser, then every small vendor that makes a custom webapps would use firefox, opera, or whatever this magic browser was. They'd then just have their clients install said browser before using their product.
I've got several small vendors that utterly hate MS that make web apps to their product that require IE. There webapps don't always work in other browsers. If they really hated MS or really saw an advantage in other browsers, they'd require us to install firefox when installing their app and to use their app through firefox for best results. Believe me; we'd do it if a vendor with a product that we want told us that we needed to.
The deal with Channel One is basically: 1. The company that produced the program placed TV monitors in every schoolroom and a satellite dish to the school district. 2. The school district agreed to require every student to watch the program and its ads. No exceptions, no teacher discretion. Students must watch, or they lose the free TVs. In some districts, parents objected to the second half of this deal. Often, strongly enough that the districts were forced to throw out (or replace) all of the monitors.
Like I said, I went to an Arkansas Junior High and then High School. I believe you. I just find it really funny that others would piss away free TVs over minor ads. Maybe if you were rich enough to already be doing that, then you could stand on your high moral horse and do that. It reminds me of those book covers that had local ads on them. Did it piss off some people? Yep. They could go buy their own book covers that had their own or no ads at a higher rate. Most everyone used the "free" ad based book covers and just drew on them.
Like I said the things came on and went off by themselves and we watched the 5-10 minutes of whatever they wanted us to watch. Some of it was ads yes. I see tons of ads daily. I filtered it out then. I don't recall many of them except some drink ads. We rarely ever used the TVs other than Channel One so its not like we couldn't do without it, but I did find it actually useful for just daily discussions everyone that you are like to see to day seeing the same 5-10 minute program.
I listen to an mp3 CD on the way to work. I don't do morning talk radio or watch TV. It's whatever my co-workers happen to mention that I talk about with them. It was some what nice having "anything" other than the weather or HS sports to talk with others about.
Didn't the CA public not want the Gay marriage thing in the first place? Wasn't something like some judges getting it in there? Considering CA may have been the only or one at least one of a handful to actually have a gay marriage thing in place, I seriously doubt any claims that it would hurt their ability to head hunt.
Are you saying that the tiny percentage of the general population which is gay is so much better/more productive than the 99.99% of the other population it doesn't matter if you hurt the 99.99% productivity or your ability to hire out of that pool as that.01% of gay people that you can manage to hire is just that much better that its almost worth to piss off everyone else?
If that were so, I'm sure straight managers would bend over for them. I'm sure that there exists some people that are just awesomely productive. To say that population is the gay population is humorous at best. You'd basically have to hunt each industry for their super geniuses to find them. I'm sure that the really high end head hunters could list who those people are and exactly how much that it would take to buy/rent their services. Are you going to be able to say that any given sub group of the population produces these people? Not without alot more data to back you up. (I'd actually be curious to the answer to that though.)
I graduated HS in 96 from Arkansas. That was 93-96 in HS and 90-93 in junior high. We had what was called "channel one" almost daily from junior high to the end of HS. What the heck was channel one? About a 5-10 min news program aimed at kids and broadcast to schools through out the nation. They had about a 5 minute local segment where the local school could insert their daily news program if they wanted from the A/V kids if they wanted. I had the impression at the time that it was paid for by a grant or bond or something. Now if we had that in Arkansas back then, I'd assume that every one else had similar educational tools growing up.
If there was any content that the school wanted piped to every one, they'd make sure to tell the teachers and then they'd run it though the tv. They could centrally turn on the tvs play it and then turn them off. (It took effort of a teacher manually turning the things off if they wanted to do something during that period of time.)
I'd really be surprised that in 2008 that there are schools without those sorts of resources. Oh on commentary, what the heck do you think we did for the next 5 minutes after channel one was over? It was discuss/debate what ever the heck was running and wait for the teacher to quieten the room down. We learned more from each other and discussing than from the teacher at that point. The teachers generally thought that it was cutting into their class time and didn't want to waste any time discussing most of the content anyway. It was wait for lunch if you wanted to talk about it. Like we'd have really cared to bring it up by then any way.;)
(BTW: the whole "release the source code" thing is more a rasing-the-stakes legal tactic than a legitimate questioning of the equipment involved. Are you REALLY ready to expend considerable resources to find vindicating flaws in a commercial product? You have to convince the prosecutor you will do it, and succeed, before he'll drop charges in favor of keeping that revenue path flowing.)
I think that you'd really need to be a million or billionaire that doesn't give a care about their public rep to fight this issue until it you win it for this to really matter. You've got to have a moral outrage against MADD for sneaking all these laws across the nation and really want to disarm them. Let's be honest. No politician will publicly try to fight MADD or reduce theses laws. Now every lawyer/politician will do everything behind the senses to give the accused fair defenses.
What really pisses me off, is seeing more of the politician/lawyer DWI cases dropped because a lawyer/politician's family member was an accused and they knew the strings to pull to get everything cleared up to their advantage. I dislike MADD for making life difficult for the average person, but I hate lawyers/politicians for having and using get out of jail at reduced rates cards.
No. It means a bunch of drunk drivers will be on the streets free to run whoever they want over. Even if the prosecutors move to blood test, the defendants will require a medical doctor or lab technician to testify as to the nature of the exam and how the test works, and perhaps the manufacturer of the reagents used in the tests have to verify that they are what they are. Tons of money have to be spent by the DA's office, which means higher taxes. Meanwhile, prosecution of drunk driving will go down, and more drunk drivers will be on the streets.
Everyone wins!
You seem to be complaining that people can defend themselves with lawyers and such. O.k. flip it. You are accused of being a drunk driver on my say so alone. You get all the penalties and can't defend yourself because you are a drunk driver and we don't like them... That doesn't sound right/nice now does it?
The legal system mostly works because most folks have a decent chance to defend themselves from attacks. If I waved a magic box in front of you, that said you were on drugs or have been drinking within the last hour, you'd damn sure to have your guys attack my magic box. What if my magic box just said anyone other than me was on drugs or have been drinking? You wouldn't like that now would you.
And just in case anyone out there is still Hoping for Change starting next week: sorry, the New Boss supports this shit too - and he's a "constitutional scholar"! Every last one of these sons of bitches should be in jail.
I support the death penalty for every successfully elected politician. My theory is that they need to serve a prison sentence equal to their term length with a death sentence at the end. This would be for every elected position. If people wouldn't run for an office, then we make a little app that selects a random lat, long inside the US and sort of the government prize crew shows up and gives the person the job. They don't get the death penalty or prison sentence though.
It can't be worse than our current system.
My other idea is having a fixed number of laws that congress or any of the other federal agencies can operate by. If the public, congress, or president wants to change anything, then they've got to pick an existing law and remove/replace/update it with the new one. There should be a word count limit and limited to a single sentence. Say under 50 words.
But since many Linux-advocates presumably want to see things like Ubuntu go mainstream, the answer can't be "this woman is a moron and the TV station is worse for covering it". Her problems, even if they seem ridiculous, were real enough to her. So how do you counter this kind of problem? (Some might say decent journalism could have helped here, but that's part and parcel of the perception problem.)
Um, you could flip that around and say that you are a moron for using a nonstandard OS that mystifies average users and journalists alike in how to use the damn thing. Sure most of their functionality exists somewhere in the pain in the butt OS, but why would any sane person install or try out anything buy the standard OS that everyone knows that everything works for?
You'd also be a moron for sticking with the platform after attempting to use it and finding instead of useful help on the internet for the new user insults left and right about how stupid the new or average user is. The sane users stick with the mainstream and pay the Geek Squad $300 to install antivirus and run defrag. Oh, they'll moan at the $100 per hour costs of IT help as well.
Now compare this with doing any car maintenance. Does the average slashdotter even know how to change their oil? What about filters and such or how much a starter, alternator, or transmission should cost? No we'd spend what we were told to spend to get our cars fixed. And then moan and whine about how much car repair costs.
If some security manager reads this, goes back to work, and says "OK, change all our WPA passwords, our current ones may not be secure", he will be making a real improvement to his network. He might even be locking out an existing hacker in the process.
Until 10 minutes later the CEO calls the head of IT and has them change the WAP password back to Password1 so he can log in. It's nearly a known fact that managers can't type passwords longer than 8 characters successfully. 16 character or longer passwords become difficult for field IT guys to type. o.k. was that new password ffffffddddddcccccc222222555555? I mean it's difficult enough to get them to use their kid's name plus a number as a password and you want a security consult to change a working system because it might be insecure? Damn.
Every system and facility is insecure if you put enough force into cracking it. We've got an offsite gym/vehicle storage building where the only security is a vericard to get the door and a key for the back. There is a stand alone laptop of little value out there, but there is several thousand dollars of gym equipment there. What level of force/ability do you really think that it would take to clone/spoof a vericard and then load up alot of that equipment onto a semi? The reason that we don't employ a full time guard or have the place monitored by 4-8 DVR cameras is that those in charge of the budget don't think that its worth that amount of effort to protect. But even if you had a guard and cameras, how much money do you think it would take to bribe the guard and disable/by pass the cameras? With enough resources/effort anything is possible.
I'm waiting for this news from the UK. The British decide to censor their entire internet due to one objectionable site found in another country.
Upon closer reading, it'll be Chinese and Russian citizens are now after decades of governmental progress far more free than their UK and US counter parts. Neither the US or UK would like that news so we'd filter it because obviously it's mental porn that isn't good for our citizens to have. As it's mental porn, all those anti-porn laws can be used to filter the internet anyway the current government pleases.
Just wait for the protect the children from mental porn though. Anything that may lead those young citizens to think objectionable thoughts about their government or leaders is obviously mental porn that needs to be filtered. Due to that logic, we need to filter the entire internet from every single citizen before they are exposed to it.
Um, I've been using digital pictures/cameras for near over a decade now. I think that it is more news that this hasn't already been done the last ten years rather than this one new guy is "the first" to use it.
What next? The first president to create his own daily you tube channel, blog, website/forum, on-line poll asking the public who he should pick for cabinet positions, or owning/using his own PDA/Cell phone?
Sure - but saying that the political clock's been turned back 30-40 years isn't exactly something to be thrilled about. That's an immense step backwards. I'd like to think we'd move towards a society with easier movement in time, especially given that there is far more intercontinental communication between people (both business, and personal) than decades ago.
Why would you possibly think that? With the ease of modern communication methods, there is much less need for the average business person to actually travel aboard to conduct business. Heck, we can buy and sell international goods from home now and never personally have to leave the county, much less the country to make the transaction. Shipping companies may have to handle the border problems, but individuals or small/micro businesses just don't have to think about it.
We have moved to where goods, ideas, and communications can move more freely/cheaply across borders. (Just look at Walmart and count the number of made in China or Mexico labels.) It's only actual personal physical transportation that is difficult or annoying.
This is actually a step to keep others out of the country. One that most of the average citizens seem to strongly support. I've wondered why we have it so difficult for foreigners to become citizens. Of course, I think that we need to get rid of all income taxes and make all taxes sales tax based. That way every illegal immigrate and tourist are actually paying for all the government resources where they are at. That would keep folks out of the country far more than effectively than visa forms. I think that there needs to be strong citizenship drives and have the requirements lessened. If you've been living in this country for 6 months, hey you are now a citizen even if you don't want to be. It doesn't matter if you were an illegal immigrate. Most folks wouldn't give a care about them anyway. It's only the lawbreakers that we really worry about anyway. If you break the local laws, it doesn't matter whose citizen are if the local government can get you. Heck, generally they don't care if you leave the state and just keep away unless you happen to kill some one.
78% of Britons did not vote for Labour in the last election. More than three quarters of Britons did not want them, but they got them anyway.
If you understood that minor little fact, and that the Tory party got more votes than Labour in England but lost to Labour nation-wide because of Scottish Labour voters, and that the current Prime Minister was not elected to that role but merely placed there by his party, then you might understand why so many Britons -- particularly the English majority, who are now the only ones who don't have their own Parliament -- are a bit upset with their government.
Blinks. Is that really true? Damn and folks complained about us with the entire Bush/Gore thing at least that was close to near 50/50. I don't see how your government works.
Every time that I think that the US government can't get any worse or that there are just some limits that we wouldn't test; the British go that extra mile.
Actually, people often complain about all of those as well, especially "pistol permits" as you've put it, given than the Second Amendment guarantees the RIGHT to bear arms, not the right to get permission from the government, provided you can provide them with a good enough reason, then pay them and subject yourself to intense scrutiny, and then MAYBE get the right to bear arms in the end.
Imagine if you had to get "free speech" permits or press permits if you wanted to exercise those rights.
Surely not, but the fact that Google is now hosting business services, they are quickly becoming the information sink of the universe. They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online. I just don't like all the big brother business, and while I use GMail for personal stuff, I wouldn't start trusting Google with sensitive documents, memos etc.
Actually, this is as it should be. Any business should fold quickly to whoever happens to be the government or government organizations in their countries if they want to exist as an entity for more than a few minutes. One of the funny things of your statements is that you were afraid of the government coming after google for your corporate data? What has your company been up to where they'll need to be audited or searched?
On a side note, lawyers would love for all your company's email and electronic data to be stored at google. It would make searching through your stuff when you get sued much, much easier.
O.k. Damn, I'm mixed on this. After hearing the numbers, I think that they are willing to be leached for far too much to develop and roll this thing out. I'd like to know where all those 212,000 IT jobs are going to though. Are we talking 2,000 for development and running the back end and 210,000 data entry clerks? That's kinda of how I'd envision those numbers going.
I've not really read much in the article that would make this sound like a grand idea. I want access to my own medical records. I could see insurance, nurses, and doctors needing access. I could see schools and employers wanting access to it though. (Talk about folks that we don't want access to it.)
The thing is data entry clerks for all this crap should exist already so new jobs shouldn't be massively created. Another thing to think about is places where data entry clerks aren't there, you know who is the real data entry clerk... you. How many medical places have you been to where you've been handed a 2-3 page form and told to fill it out? We shouldn't have to do that much manual entry if we have a unified national medical management system. When you are born you'd get issued a medical record and it would stay with you for life. Everything related to you health wise would get dumped into it. School eye and hearing tests, vaccinations, every single time and place/doctor/nurse that has ever looked at you and their notes on what you had at the time, every known drug allergy, random drug tests, and general health recommendations would all be there, and your height and weight from birth to present as well. (Remember those school fat percentage tests and that plastic thingy that they put on your back to test if you had a bent spine? That would be there as well.) Heck, a part of me things PE records could be dumped into there as well. Why? They are a general health and fitness test and results.
Ideally, we just have them scan our national ID/real ID DL and presto every medical record that person has data entry rights too would show up. So if your PE teacher was testing you in 3rd grade, they'd be able to record height, weight, fat percentage, that spine test, and results from PE test scores. The person that the school has to do eye and hearing tests would only be authorized to pull up your previous results from those tests and enter your present current test results for that field only.
I just thought of a valid reason for schools and employers to demand and get access. If you claim to have had an absence do to any medical reason, then the school or employer should be able to query the medical system that you showed up at any medical place and got seen by any doctor. (They shouldn't be able to pull out actually where you went, who you saw, or what they said you had though.)
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Good God, what is the big fucking deal with all the inauguration here? I mean, sure, it is important in that it is the orderly transition of power in the US, but, really people, why are some treating this as the second coming of Christ?
It is just the swearing in of another president....can't we just look at the digested version on the nights news?
Nah, my wife thinks it's the swearing in of the anti-Christ. Of course he has his followers and with the expanded powers that Bush allowed he has little to slow or stop him when he's in office. Honestly, I usually couldn't careless. I didn't hate bush, but I don't like this guy so much either. I didn't think Gore would have been an improvement over Bush at all. I'm just wanting people to shut the heck up about it already or start with decent jokes about the guy or how awful the guy is. I mean he isn't a real president until we can really bitch about him or make fun of him.
This guy has too many direct worshipers to make me happy. Bush or the religious right doesn't have anything on this guy. Heck, I know the religious right's supposed platform so I can't really fault them for supporting their stated beliefs. This guy's worshippers though I don't know much other than its a personality cult around a leader that they really love. I'm more disturbed by that than anything Bush did. This guy's going to be another JFK where he can do no wrong in the public's eye.
Actually, if articles about him didn't constantly pop up on slashdot, I wouldn't even bother to notice the guy. I didn't notice 70% of what Bush did until folks started bitching about it and even then it usually wasn't that bad or anything really that he could just fix.
I'll have to laugh if this guy gets hit with a Katrina or 9/11 near the end of the his term. Bush was considered pretty decent until those events. Heck, Katrina I hold more against the LA/NO governments than towards Bush. Bush tried the lets do something/anything response. (I kinda think half of what happened to the nation after 9/11 was the same.) I guess if all else fails he could just start the white house intern porn tube channel and be another democrat success story.
Most notably did the school have the right to search the student's phone/does a student have the expectation of privacy. There have been varying rulings over whether the police can search a cell phone or PDA of an individual placed under arrest. In the case of a school, they are not the police and do not have the authority of the police (despite some administrators thinking that they do).
I've never liked the thing where teachers will search a students papers or person at their whim if they think the student has been passing notes or such. What gives any teacher that right? Nothing except that for some weird reason we don't give any rights to folks under 18 years old except treat them like prisoners.
I'd rather the teachers be shot for merely wanting to look at students papers/communications media of any form than any students be punished due to this. This is why some folks don't mind domestic warrant less wiretapping. They've never had private communications in the first place. Realistically we can't shoot teachers for this. Now, it would be nice if they were fired or atleast placed on 1 month unpaid leave if they tried this though. This would apply from K to university to any educational staff or faculty that tried searching a students papers or communication media.
But I don't think forward time travel is possible since there is not/will not be a future.
Actually, it's forward time travel that we've got proof that it can work. ;) We travel into the future every second of every day. It's traveling backward or stopping time within a space that we need to work on. I can actually buy the stories where someone invents a device where they get thrown forward in time. The problems with that should be obvious. You don't have a clue what life will be like in 5, 10, 50, 500, or 5,000 years. Your survival or trade goods bag may be worthless.
Now it would be handy if you could get back to the past/the present, but that's where problems start. I'd love to spend $3-5K on various electronic goodies and send them back to myself in 1996. (Heck, while I'm at it, I should work on the stock history, winning lottery numbers, wikipedia, everyone involved in starting Google up, and every open source project that I can burn to DVD or onto a terabyte HD. Heck, also my entire DVD collection.) With only a decade's worth of future toys/history, you could completely take over the economics of the past.
Conrad's time machine is the most obvious of what a small group of smart people would do with a fully working time machine. You'd go from zero to billions really quickly. You'd have your own private company staffed with your own highly educated loyal time agents while you were building your fortune. Then you'd buy an island or tiny country and build an entire working infrastructure in a single day. If the need ever came about, you'd get a warning from the future, and you'd have your entire country remove everything man made into the distant past (think 60-100K years) where modern humans can't follow and nothing would be left on your island or company for them to trace.
Then there's the other snag of transposition... if you say, send yourself back in time, what happens to that volume of space where you arrive? Is it destroyed? And what fills in the void where you left? Or one more expected result is it's transposed with your time's space. Thus all time travel is time swapping, something goes forward and something goes back. Now lets say you do make a time travel machine, and test it without considering the earth-travels-through-space issue... that means whatever you send out, you get a big ball of vacuum back. If it's a very brief travel, you may get a chunk of earth, high pressure ocean, or more likely, high pressure magma. Ouch... hope you got insurance. That'll turn your lab into a disaster area real quick.
There are so man "problems" with time travel, that it really doesn't matter if its possible or not. It's not useful.
Are you kidding? Depending on its energy costs, it could be a very cheap method of throwing stuff into space. O.k. I wouldn't want to try using it to get back down, but if you wanted to ring the solar system with monitoring probes, this is how you'd cheaply get them up there. Now of course each one would have to find itself in space, find earth, and/or find more probes to transmit the results back. O.k. it wouldn't be nearly as useful if all the probes where thrown out of the solar system, but it would actually if you could build 'em to transmit to earth and actually detect the transmissions somewhere on earth. You'd have functioning FTL! ;)
* Nuclear fuel, uranium, is radioactive and will cause cancer or direct radiation poisoning.
* Coal is full of mercury, and eating it will cause people to call you a mad hatter.
* Oil is bad because you can drown in it.
* Solar power is bad because the sun can give you sunburn.
* Wind power is really nasty because all those spinning blades can chop you up into teeny tiny pieces.
You forgot a few.
Burning wood is bad for you. It produces toxic smoke.
Burning animal wastes for fuel is bad for the same as above reasons.
Eating animal meat for fuel is bad for you because it can make you fat.
Farming is bad for the environment since it displaces the "natural" environment with "artificial" food organisms for our benefit.
Eating any form of plant is bad. Because it reduces you to a parasite.
The only viable solution is to splice photosynthetic cells into our skin so we can produce our own food.
I am not really directing this at you, but we need to get past the "gosh, it might be toxic!" over-reaction to some really basic chemistry. We have used "water gas" and carbon monoxide systems for a very long time as chemistry goes, and long before anyone really properly characterized its asphyxiating properties. If they could use it in the 19th century without killing everybody, then we can certainly use it in the 21st century without killing everybody. There is more truly nasty chemistry waiting to happen in your average household than any normal person likely imagines, and yet we somehow survive as a society.
Chemical toxicity is becoming like "nuclear" and "radioactive", bogeymen perceived as ineffable evils that will kill us all.
We only survive because of our faulty educational system and the lack of curiosity in most of our population. Most of us don't really feel the urge to mix up our household chemicals. We know that they are all pretty much deadly if you drink them and should be in a locked place if you have small kids around. Every one knows how to use bleach, 409, and various toilet or shower cleaners though without killing everyone in their home. Now could you imagine the world that we could have had if we just tried radioactive and nuclear stuff the same as our chemical crap? Just don't think about actually how deadly the stuff you clean the showers with actually is and you will be fine.
You only make the stationary. I make both stationary and desks. Seeing as everybody wants my desks, I have an unfair advantage to selling my stationary, which is actually inferior to yours simply because the people are buying my desks.
Nah, that's slightly different. You aren't giving away a lifetime supply of stationary with a purchase of own of your desks. You might throw in your best seller of stationary or lowest cost to you stationary as a marketing thing with your desk. It'll run out though. At that time, the person has to run to staples or office depot and pick a stationary to buy.
IE doesn't expire after 1-3 months and then require a purchase if you want to keep using it. Actually most of these third parties would love it if IE did work like that.
I guessed it first try... ftp.mozilla.org No brainer. Granted my dad/mom would have been S.O.L.
I'd have never guessed it. If it where ftp.firefox.org then maybe. Mozilla, nope never. I've always thought of mozilla as legacy legalese that's been inserted into most browsers. I don't run Mozilla. I run IE or Firefox. ;)
If IE were to disappear tomorrow replaced by any other browser or combination, the Web would suddenly leap forward technologically and you could run Web apps, view video and audio using standards, develop Web pages in half the time, and use vector graphics to deliver better quality graphics using less bandwidth.
Complete and utter BS. If it were so trivial to create all these web n+1 apps with your preferred browser, then every small vendor that makes a custom webapps would use firefox, opera, or whatever this magic browser was. They'd then just have their clients install said browser before using their product.
I've got several small vendors that utterly hate MS that make web apps to their product that require IE. There webapps don't always work in other browsers. If they really hated MS or really saw an advantage in other browsers, they'd require us to install firefox when installing their app and to use their app through firefox for best results. Believe me; we'd do it if a vendor with a product that we want told us that we needed to.
The deal with Channel One is basically:
1. The company that produced the program placed TV monitors in every schoolroom and a satellite dish to the school district.
2. The school district agreed to require every student to watch the program and its ads. No exceptions, no teacher discretion. Students must watch, or they lose the free TVs.
In some districts, parents objected to the second half of this deal. Often, strongly enough that the districts were forced to throw out (or replace) all of the monitors.
Like I said, I went to an Arkansas Junior High and then High School. I believe you. I just find it really funny that others would piss away free TVs over minor ads. Maybe if you were rich enough to already be doing that, then you could stand on your high moral horse and do that. It reminds me of those book covers that had local ads on them. Did it piss off some people? Yep. They could go buy their own book covers that had their own or no ads at a higher rate. Most everyone used the "free" ad based book covers and just drew on them.
Like I said the things came on and went off by themselves and we watched the 5-10 minutes of whatever they wanted us to watch. Some of it was ads yes. I see tons of ads daily. I filtered it out then. I don't recall many of them except some drink ads. We rarely ever used the TVs other than Channel One so its not like we couldn't do without it, but I did find it actually useful for just daily discussions everyone that you are like to see to day seeing the same 5-10 minute program.
I listen to an mp3 CD on the way to work. I don't do morning talk radio or watch TV. It's whatever my co-workers happen to mention that I talk about with them. It was some what nice having "anything" other than the weather or HS sports to talk with others about.
Didn't the CA public not want the Gay marriage thing in the first place? Wasn't something like some judges getting it in there? Considering CA may have been the only or one at least one of a handful to actually have a gay marriage thing in place, I seriously doubt any claims that it would hurt their ability to head hunt.
Are you saying that the tiny percentage of the general population which is gay is so much better/more productive than the 99.99% of the other population it doesn't matter if you hurt the 99.99% productivity or your ability to hire out of that pool as that .01% of gay people that you can manage to hire is just that much better that its almost worth to piss off everyone else?
If that were so, I'm sure straight managers would bend over for them. I'm sure that there exists some people that are just awesomely productive. To say that population is the gay population is humorous at best. You'd basically have to hunt each industry for their super geniuses to find them. I'm sure that the really high end head hunters could list who those people are and exactly how much that it would take to buy/rent their services. Are you going to be able to say that any given sub group of the population produces these people? Not without alot more data to back you up. (I'd actually be curious to the answer to that though.)
I graduated HS in 96 from Arkansas. That was 93-96 in HS and 90-93 in junior high. We had what was called "channel one" almost daily from junior high to the end of HS. What the heck was channel one? About a 5-10 min news program aimed at kids and broadcast to schools through out the nation. They had about a 5 minute local segment where the local school could insert their daily news program if they wanted from the A/V kids if they wanted. I had the impression at the time that it was paid for by a grant or bond or something. Now if we had that in Arkansas back then, I'd assume that every one else had similar educational tools growing up.
If there was any content that the school wanted piped to every one, they'd make sure to tell the teachers and then they'd run it though the tv. They could centrally turn on the tvs play it and then turn them off. (It took effort of a teacher manually turning the things off if they wanted to do something during that period of time.)
I'd really be surprised that in 2008 that there are schools without those sorts of resources. Oh on commentary, what the heck do you think we did for the next 5 minutes after channel one was over? It was discuss/debate what ever the heck was running and wait for the teacher to quieten the room down. We learned more from each other and discussing than from the teacher at that point. The teachers generally thought that it was cutting into their class time and didn't want to waste any time discussing most of the content anyway. It was wait for lunch if you wanted to talk about it. Like we'd have really cared to bring it up by then any way. ;)
It was -30 C at my house this morning. No problem. But when I read kabocox's post, I a chill ran down my spine.
Horribly, I think he's right.
Sorry about that.
(BTW: the whole "release the source code" thing is more a rasing-the-stakes legal tactic than a legitimate questioning of the equipment involved. Are you REALLY ready to expend considerable resources to find vindicating flaws in a commercial product? You have to convince the prosecutor you will do it, and succeed, before he'll drop charges in favor of keeping that revenue path flowing.)
I think that you'd really need to be a million or billionaire that doesn't give a care about their public rep to fight this issue until it you win it for this to really matter. You've got to have a moral outrage against MADD for sneaking all these laws across the nation and really want to disarm them. Let's be honest. No politician will publicly try to fight MADD or reduce theses laws. Now every lawyer/politician will do everything behind the senses to give the accused fair defenses.
What really pisses me off, is seeing more of the politician/lawyer DWI cases dropped because a lawyer/politician's family member was an accused and they knew the strings to pull to get everything cleared up to their advantage. I dislike MADD for making life difficult for the average person, but I hate lawyers/politicians for having and using get out of jail at reduced rates cards.
No. It means a bunch of drunk drivers will be on the streets free to run whoever they want over. Even if the prosecutors move to blood test, the defendants will require a medical doctor or lab technician to testify as to the nature of the exam and how the test works, and perhaps the manufacturer of the reagents used in the tests have to verify that they are what they are. Tons of money have to be spent by the DA's office, which means higher taxes. Meanwhile, prosecution of drunk driving will go down, and more drunk drivers will be on the streets.
Everyone wins!
You seem to be complaining that people can defend themselves with lawyers and such. O.k. flip it. You are accused of being a drunk driver on my say so alone. You get all the penalties and can't defend yourself because you are a drunk driver and we don't like them... That doesn't sound right/nice now does it?
The legal system mostly works because most folks have a decent chance to defend themselves from attacks. If I waved a magic box in front of you, that said you were on drugs or have been drinking within the last hour, you'd damn sure to have your guys attack my magic box. What if my magic box just said anyone other than me was on drugs or have been drinking? You wouldn't like that now would you.
And just in case anyone out there is still Hoping for Change starting next week: sorry, the New Boss supports this shit too - and he's a "constitutional scholar"!
Every last one of these sons of bitches should be in jail.
I support the death penalty for every successfully elected politician. My theory is that they need to serve a prison sentence equal to their term length with a death sentence at the end. This would be for every elected position. If people wouldn't run for an office, then we make a little app that selects a random lat, long inside the US and sort of the government prize crew shows up and gives the person the job. They don't get the death penalty or prison sentence though.
It can't be worse than our current system.
My other idea is having a fixed number of laws that congress or any of the other federal agencies can operate by. If the public, congress, or president wants to change anything, then they've got to pick an existing law and remove/replace/update it with the new one. There should be a word count limit and limited to a single sentence. Say under 50 words.
But since many Linux-advocates presumably want to see things like Ubuntu go mainstream, the answer can't be "this woman is a moron and the TV station is worse for covering it". Her problems, even if they seem ridiculous, were real enough to her. So how do you counter this kind of problem? (Some might say decent journalism could have helped here, but that's part and parcel of the perception problem.)
Um, you could flip that around and say that you are a moron for using a nonstandard OS that mystifies average users and journalists alike in how to use the damn thing. Sure most of their functionality exists somewhere in the pain in the butt OS, but why would any sane person install or try out anything buy the standard OS that everyone knows that everything works for?
You'd also be a moron for sticking with the platform after attempting to use it and finding instead of useful help on the internet for the new user insults left and right about how stupid the new or average user is. The sane users stick with the mainstream and pay the Geek Squad $300 to install antivirus and run defrag. Oh, they'll moan at the $100 per hour costs of IT help as well.
Now compare this with doing any car maintenance. Does the average slashdotter even know how to change their oil? What about filters and such or how much a starter, alternator, or transmission should cost? No we'd spend what we were told to spend to get our cars fixed. And then moan and whine about how much car repair costs.
If some security manager reads this, goes back to work, and says "OK, change all our WPA passwords, our current ones may not be secure", he will be making a real improvement to his network. He might even be locking out an existing hacker in the process.
Until 10 minutes later the CEO calls the head of IT and has them change the WAP password back to Password1 so he can log in. It's nearly a known fact that managers can't type passwords longer than 8 characters successfully. 16 character or longer passwords become difficult for field IT guys to type. o.k. was that new password ffffffddddddcccccc222222555555? I mean it's difficult enough to get them to use their kid's name plus a number as a password and you want a security consult to change a working system because it might be insecure? Damn.
Every system and facility is insecure if you put enough force into cracking it. We've got an offsite gym/vehicle storage building where the only security is a vericard to get the door and a key for the back. There is a stand alone laptop of little value out there, but there is several thousand dollars of gym equipment there. What level of force/ability do you really think that it would take to clone/spoof a vericard and then load up alot of that equipment onto a semi? The reason that we don't employ a full time guard or have the place monitored by 4-8 DVR cameras is that those in charge of the budget don't think that its worth that amount of effort to protect. But even if you had a guard and cameras, how much money do you think it would take to bribe the guard and disable/by pass the cameras? With enough resources/effort anything is possible.
I'm waiting for this news from the UK. The British decide to censor their entire internet due to one objectionable site found in another country.
Upon closer reading, it'll be Chinese and Russian citizens are now after decades of governmental progress far more free than their UK and US counter parts. Neither the US or UK would like that news so we'd filter it because obviously it's mental porn that isn't good for our citizens to have. As it's mental porn, all those anti-porn laws can be used to filter the internet anyway the current government pleases.
Just wait for the protect the children from mental porn though. Anything that may lead those young citizens to think objectionable thoughts about their government or leaders is obviously mental porn that needs to be filtered. Due to that logic, we need to filter the entire internet from every single citizen before they are exposed to it.
Um, I've been using digital pictures/cameras for near over a decade now. I think that it is more news that this hasn't already been done the last ten years rather than this one new guy is "the first" to use it.
What next? The first president to create his own daily you tube channel, blog, website/forum, on-line poll asking the public who he should pick for cabinet positions, or owning/using his own PDA/Cell phone?
Sure - but saying that the political clock's been turned back 30-40 years isn't exactly something to be thrilled about. That's an immense step backwards. I'd like to think we'd move towards a society with easier movement in time, especially given that there is far more intercontinental communication between people (both business, and personal) than decades ago.
Why would you possibly think that? With the ease of modern communication methods, there is much less need for the average business person to actually travel aboard to conduct business. Heck, we can buy and sell international goods from home now and never personally have to leave the county, much less the country to make the transaction. Shipping companies may have to handle the border problems, but individuals or small/micro businesses just don't have to think about it.
We have moved to where goods, ideas, and communications can move more freely/cheaply across borders. (Just look at Walmart and count the number of made in China or Mexico labels.) It's only actual personal physical transportation that is difficult or annoying.
This is actually a step to keep others out of the country. One that most of the average citizens seem to strongly support. I've wondered why we have it so difficult for foreigners to become citizens. Of course, I think that we need to get rid of all income taxes and make all taxes sales tax based. That way every illegal immigrate and tourist are actually paying for all the government resources where they are at. That would keep folks out of the country far more than effectively than visa forms. I think that there needs to be strong citizenship drives and have the requirements lessened. If you've been living in this country for 6 months, hey you are now a citizen even if you don't want to be. It doesn't matter if you were an illegal immigrate. Most folks wouldn't give a care about them anyway. It's only the lawbreakers that we really worry about anyway. If you break the local laws, it doesn't matter whose citizen are if the local government can get you. Heck, generally they don't care if you leave the state and just keep away unless you happen to kill some one.
78% of Britons did not vote for Labour in the last election. More than three quarters of Britons did not want them, but they got them anyway.
If you understood that minor little fact, and that the Tory party got more votes than Labour in England but lost to Labour nation-wide because of Scottish Labour voters, and that the current Prime Minister was not elected to that role but merely placed there by his party, then you might understand why so many Britons -- particularly the English majority, who are now the only ones who don't have their own Parliament -- are a bit upset with their government.
Blinks. Is that really true? Damn and folks complained about us with the entire Bush/Gore thing at least that was close to near 50/50. I don't see how your government works.
Every time that I think that the US government can't get any worse or that there are just some limits that we wouldn't test; the British go that extra mile.
Actually, people often complain about all of those as well, especially "pistol permits" as you've put it, given than the Second Amendment guarantees the RIGHT to bear arms, not the right to get permission from the government, provided you can provide them with a good enough reason, then pay them and subject yourself to intense scrutiny, and then MAYBE get the right to bear arms in the end.
Imagine if you had to get "free speech" permits or press permits if you wanted to exercise those rights.
Surely not, but the fact that Google is now hosting business services, they are quickly becoming the information sink of the universe. They have a history of easily folding to law enforcement, which makes me uneasy about hosting corporate stuff online. I just don't like all the big brother business, and while I use GMail for personal stuff, I wouldn't start trusting Google with sensitive documents, memos etc.
Actually, this is as it should be. Any business should fold quickly to whoever happens to be the government or government organizations in their countries if they want to exist as an entity for more than a few minutes. One of the funny things of your statements is that you were afraid of the government coming after google for your corporate data? What has your company been up to where they'll need to be audited or searched?
On a side note, lawyers would love for all your company's email and electronic data to be stored at google. It would make searching through your stuff when you get sued much, much easier.
O.k. Damn, I'm mixed on this. After hearing the numbers, I think that they are willing to be leached for far too much to develop and roll this thing out. I'd like to know where all those 212,000 IT jobs are going to though. Are we talking 2,000 for development and running the back end and 210,000 data entry clerks? That's kinda of how I'd envision those numbers going.
I've not really read much in the article that would make this sound like a grand idea. I want access to my own medical records. I could see insurance, nurses, and doctors needing access. I could see schools and employers wanting access to it though. (Talk about folks that we don't want access to it.)
The thing is data entry clerks for all this crap should exist already so new jobs shouldn't be massively created. Another thing to think about is places where data entry clerks aren't there, you know who is the real data entry clerk... you. How many medical places have you been to where you've been handed a 2-3 page form and told to fill it out? We shouldn't have to do that much manual entry if we have a unified national medical management system. When you are born you'd get issued a medical record and it would stay with you for life. Everything related to you health wise would get dumped into it. School eye and hearing tests, vaccinations, every single time and place/doctor/nurse that has ever looked at you and their notes on what you had at the time, every known drug allergy, random drug tests, and general health recommendations would all be there, and your height and weight from birth to present as well. (Remember those school fat percentage tests and that plastic thingy that they put on your back to test if you had a bent spine? That would be there as well.) Heck, a part of me things PE records could be dumped into there as well. Why? They are a general health and fitness test and results.
Ideally, we just have them scan our national ID/real ID DL and presto every medical record that person has data entry rights too would show up. So if your PE teacher was testing you in 3rd grade, they'd be able to record height, weight, fat percentage, that spine test, and results from PE test scores. The person that the school has to do eye and hearing tests would only be authorized to pull up your previous results from those tests and enter your present current test results for that field only.
I just thought of a valid reason for schools and employers to demand and get access. If you claim to have had an absence do to any medical reason, then the school or employer should be able to query the medical system that you showed up at any medical place and got seen by any doctor. (They shouldn't be able to pull out actually where you went, who you saw, or what they said you had though.)