Perhaps your library should start asking for email addresses for those patrons that wish to use them. Then send your notices via email and via telephone. One is bound to make it.
I work for a group of public libraries that uses a computer to call and say "Someone at this telephone number" -- we won't say who, because if you use a public library we consider it your own damn business -- "has an item waiting to be picked up at the So-and-So Public Library".
What does the little "someone at this number" dance actually accomplish? If it's a one person household then the person recieving the message already knows who they are. If there are two people in the house then it's obviously either for you or for the other person. If there's a whole family, then you probably have to know who's waiting for a book anyway in order to relay the message to the right person.
And, most annoying of all, if more than one person in the household uses the library (gasp!) then you're just confusing everyone by being all coy and not saying who the darn message is for.
Once upon a time this was true for most digital cameras. "Hot mirror" IR lens filters designed to prevent ambient IR from "leaking" into your photos were popular accessories.
Nowdays many digital cameras have an IR filter built in (maybe not the cheap models) so I don't know how well your suggestion would work.
A normal laser pointer isn't going to cause any permanent damage, but having one shone in your eyes can certainly be distracting enough to cause a problem if you're driving when it happens.
Red dots appearing out of nowhere can also spook people into thinking that they're being targeted with a laser gun sight. And if you're a police officer (or the Maryland-DC area with the recent plague of random sniper attacks) that might not be an entirely unreasonable fear.
Those were just the first three I happened to look at; the rest seem similar. So, there you have it straight from the horse's ass^H^H^H mouth: these companies' missions are not primarily to return profit (Genentech doesn't even mention that); all three have medical innovation and discovery as their primary mission. Just goes to show you can't trust a corporation to do what it sets out to do.
Or that you really shouldn't pay much attention to corporate mission statements.
There's a simple reason you don't see "make a profit" written in there is because it's a given. It'd be like me writing "wake up, breathe, eat" in my to-do list every day.
A private company that doesn't make a profit won't last long enough to accomplish anything, at least not unless it's kept on life-support by some source of outside funding (and that really just pushes the problem further away.)
But profit isn't the goal. It's just the means by which to reach the goal. Companies that forget that little detail are the ones that get in trouble, because they become so preoccupied with doing anything to make a buck that they forget how to actually do the things the company exists to do.
Unfortunately, most customers aren't interested because systems like this are expensive.
And becasue some customers might really not need them for their particular circumstances. A failure or security breach isn't necessarily the end of the world. If your window gets shattered once a year by a thrown stone you can spend a bunch on unbreakable glass or metal shutters, or just keep of stock of replacement panes around. So it is with securityt; they may believe that it's cheaper, easier, and more practical to just fix things when they inevitably get broken. Sure, sometimes that's false economy based on bad estimates and wishful thinking, but sometimes it might be valid.
"GIMP has all the hard work done - the image tools are great, and wingimp claim to have 90% of PS's functionality."
You're on the right track, but getting the interface right is also part of the hard work. And it'll take a lot more than a random user and a few hours of spare time to create an consistent and functional user interface that can compare favorably to a program like Photoshop. Photoshop isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good, and Adobe has invested a lot of time and effort over many years to make it that way.
And it's not just Photoshop/GIMP. No offense intended to the skilled programmers out there, but until more OS projects realize that good UI design is every bit as important as raw functionality then they'll never be able to compare favorably to commercial products on the desktop. For something that I'm expected to use every single day of my professional life, a free program with a tedious, arbitrary, ugly, and inconsistent UI is just not worth the cost in annoyance, frustration, and lost productivity.
Look at Batman. 60's TV show Batman is an abomination to me. Batman to me is supposed to be dark and gritty.
Batman's current level of "dark and gritty"-ness is a fairly recent retcon. Some of the early stories were pretty goofy.
Batman became public domain though, there could be a deluge of 60's Batman stories written by anybody and the original nature of the character would be completely lost. How do you preserve it?
Printer DPI isn't directly related to on-screen pixels. Photo-quality inkjet printers such as Epson's have just six actual ink colors: cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, and black. Those are the primary subtractive colors. The "light" shades reduce the appearance of distracting speckled effects when printing areas of less saturated hues (like skies). Non-photo inkjets typically have only the basic four CYMK inks.
The printer uses various dithering techniques to create a gamut of colors as similar as possible to what you'd see on your monitor. But a single pixel of, say, bright orange, will require lots of dithered ink dots to create. The high printer resolution is still important, but what you're really getting are smoother and more accurate colors, and not necessarily more visible detail.
So in practice there's a point at which pumping more resolution to the printer won't result in any real improvement. With my aging Epson Stylus Photo 1200 my comfort level is usually somewhere between 200-300DPI.
Right-o, because, as we all know, no communities based on shared interests and goals ever existed before the open source movement came along.
Too many open source advocates have the bad habit of overestimating their own signifigance and underestimating everyone else. That's probably why most people don't even know what Open Source is.
That's a good point. The different rate structures certainly do make cable more appealing over there. However, the cable infrastructure had to be there before switching from dialup could even be an option. Europe's relatively small size and higher population density made wiring the whole country with a modern cable infrastructure a lot easier, relative to the United States.
It's really the same as with mobile phones. Since the US chose to keep the mobile phones within the existing number structure, i.e you cannot tell whether you're calling a mobile or a fixed line, and since customers expect unmetered local calls, then the subscriber had to pay for incoming calls, which lead to less willingness to give out your phone number, which lead to the uncommon situation of Europe getting a lead over the US in a matter of driving technology adaption.
Could be. I personally don't give my mobile number out because I really don't want people to call me, regardless of how much I'm paying.:)
And there is a silver lining to this cloud. Because incoming calls are not free it's given us the legal leverage to prevent evil telemarketers from bombarding cell phones with the same sort of voice-spam that my landline phone is plagued with. (I dunno if that sort of thing's a problem in Europe or not.)
This has absolutely nothing to do with the TIPS program. It was a citizen who saw a group of suspicious people having a conversation that suggested a possible threat, and she reported it.
Buy a scanner and listen to the police broadcasts in any sizable city or town and you'll probably hear a dozen "suspicious behaviour" or "suspicious vehicle" reports each day. The police investigate them routinely. Most of the time it's nothing; sometimes it's a domestic violence situation or a drug dealer; and sometimes (like happened a mile from my house last year) it's an armed robber hanging around waiting for the right moment to rob the convenience store. Citizen watch groups are a good thing, but the police have to be trained to act appropriately with limited or possibly inaccurate information.
For that matter, the article you link to is very clear that in this case that the police did pretty much what they should have done and acted with proper discretion. It was irresponsible and sensationalistic pseudo-journalists that spread false information and did the real damage.
If I read a book about "Islam", "Jihad", "American is Evil", or, hell, any book written by Noam Chomsky... will I be locked up, my possessions molested, my name defaced, and my job lost?
No. That's not going to happen. And, amazingly enough, posting to Slashdot won't get you arrested either.
The land of the free? Are you serious? I feel like my nation has become a suicide bomber - ready to self destruct out of shear desperation and hate.
Then maybe you should take a deep breath and lie down for a bit. A waitress reports three men of Middle-Eastern appearance who are possibly discussing mass murder and they're stopped, searched, and questioned. So clearly that means you're going to be arrested and thrown in the gulag for reading the wrong book or having a tan. Right-o.
No, corporations don't vote, but employees do. Corporations and industries have valid viewpoints that should be heard if we want good, effective laws that actually work in practice. In general passing laws about stuff you know nothing about firsthand is not a really good idea, and the people who know how stuff works usually work in industry. The self-interest of corporations have to be balanced against public opinion, public good, legal priciples, and other interested parties, of course, but shutting them out because you don't like them really isn't the answer. (All this applies to labor unions too, which can be every bit as selfish and destructive as any coporation.)
And, yes, you can meet with your congressman. Read above for a great post explaining how you can do exactly that.
It's not just the sensor that's important. It's the lens is often the limiting factor.
That's why a professional photographer (film or digital) will happily drop $3500 on something like a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS (Image Stabilizer) USM lens, when a lesser 300mm lens costs $300. Or spend $2500 on a 50mm f/1.0L USM when a basic 50mm lens is only $75.
It's not just lens-envy, either. Spend more and you get tack-sharp optics and smoother focusing, and with a brighter (faster) lens like that you can get amazing low-light capabilities and depth-of-field effects. And if your exposure is still kinda long, Image Stabilization (IS) will also help compensate for those slight jitters you mention (and it really does work - if I have to, I can take handheld photos with reasonable sharpness at.25 second exposures.)
I'm no pro and I can't afford the very best L-Series professional lenses for my D30. (Though I did splurge on a 50mm f/1.4 USM for portraits.) I make do with the best consumer lenses and accept the limitations imposed by my wallet and my skills. But don't misplace the source of the limitations or underestimate what can be done with current technology.
That's right. It's also useful to have "extra" resolution for cropping purposes. Like if your original photo isn't framed just right and has distracting/ugly junk off to one side, or if you want to work with just a part of a larger photo. (Many of the famous photographic prints we've all seen are cropped from the original negatives for reasons like these.)
Anyway, the more image resolution you have overall, the more pixels you have to work with in that cropped portion, and the better your final results will be. That can give a photographer a lot more "darkroom" flexibility with their digital image.
There's a difference between people dying in a natural disaster and people being murdered as a deliberate act. You know that as well as I do, and pretending that you don't is dishonest.
For all the sound and fury (as illustrated in that AP article) the current laws are really nothing the US hasn't been through before in other times of war. Any law can be abused or misused by those in power, but we seldom hear about the far more frequent times when they're used to good effect.
Obviously we have to watch very carefully for abuse or overzealous enforcement, but it's counterproductive and simpleminded to automatically assume that the people who are sworn to protect you are all evil fascist pigs out to lock you up because you post mean things about GWB on Slashdot.
In other words, I'm not happy that these measures are necessary, but I'd rather trust the FBI with expanded survelliance powers than trust that a madman with a bomb or a live culture of smallpox will play fair and only plot their actions where the FBI is allowed to listen in.
1) What's to stop someone from lying and claiming that their vote was miscounted once the votes had been tallied, or being coerced/bribed/persuaded into fraudulently changing their vote after the fact?
2) If a complete re-vote could be forced simply by a large number of complaints, with no means to tell if the complaints are valid or not, then a large enough group of unscrupulous (or misguided) voters could challenge any election which didn't give the results they wanted. (Combining this with existing voter fraud techniques could create a block of phantom voters just for this purpose.)
3) What's to prevent someone else from reading and/or challenging your vote if they obtain your number, or if they are able to fraudulently generate a valid random identifier?
4) When someone comes forward to claim that their vote was miscounted, they'd no longer be anonymous. Sure, they could use their secret number to check the status of the vote and remain anonymous (technical issues aside) but at some point the person casting the vote would need to identify themselves in person before casting a corrected ballot. Remember, the result of your vote is anonymous, but you aren't; you must register and be identified before you're a valid voter.
I was thinking the same thing, unfortunately the discontinued Kodak frames seem to have become pretty scarce since then. And I agree with the article author's assessment of the other digital frames that are still on the market--way too expensive, too limited, or just plain ugly.
I have two of the Kodak frames (also from computergeeks.com), one in my office and one at home. I almost wish that I'd bought up a batch to re-sell - people love the things. I scale down a fresh batch of my favorite digital photos every few weeks and put them on a pair of old 8MB flash cards for display. It couldn't be simpler.
I also have an Audrey set up to do something similar, though it pulls images off a shared network folder.
Good post. Like you suggest, you don't need a formal exersize program. Exersize for the sake of exersize is hard for some of us to justify, but there are a lots of useful tasks that also function as exersize.
Gardening is a good way to get started, for example. Get some fresh air, some exersize, and you end up with some nice healthy vegetables to supplement your diet and save money.
Like most research, what you find depends on where you look and how you look for it. There's lots of junk online (a lot of it obviously recycled from the same sources), but there's a huge amount of reliable information in a wide variety of subjects presented by people who really know what they're talking about. Unfortunately most teachers don't bother to instruct kids on how to distinguish between good and bad sources.
Don't tell them to give up on the web and visit the library (where someone else has ostensibly done all the critical thinking for them--though libraries contain plenty of poorly researched and written information, too). They won't take you seriously for long because they know there's good stuff out there, even if they might not have the skills to make best use of it yet. Instead, show them how to do proper research using whatever method is most effective.
...And it's the company bathroom, too, so cameras in there are just fine. And that's a company desk, so if an employee writes a note to themselves (especially if they use a company pen or company paper) then you have a right to sneak into their purse and make a copy. And it's the company cafeteria and the company health insurance plan, so monitoring and regulating what employees have for lunch is a perfectly reasonable activity...
Some companies need to realize that their employees aren't company property. As the workplace makes increasingly irrational demands upon employee's personal time, employees have no choice but to squeeze in necessary personal tasks wherever they can. Alleged "security concerns" are another convenient sham to justify increasingly intrusive tactics on the part of power-hungry execs and admins who have no faith in their employees and who lack the management ability to create a productivive workplace without resorting to intimidation and coercion.
This is nothing more than an extension of what is already being done in the law enforcement communities. In smaller communities, like the one where I used to live, police could simply memorize the names of the folks that they suspected of being "on a bad path."
I wish I had some mod points, because you are exactly correct.
In the small city where I live the local police recognize and know many of the people they've encountered by sight and by name. It's pretty common for officers pass this sort of information back and forth. They know that guy with the bad temper who drives a black Chevy, that woman on the corner who gets drunk and makes a nuisance of herself, that kid who seems to be around an awful lot when fires get started, and the elderly man that occasionally gets lost and might need a ride back home.
All of this is perfectly valid information, and all of it can be easily gathered by anyone with eyes to see. You don't have any right to anonymity or proof against observation while walking around in public, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with a police officer noting your actions or remembering your identity. If this database is used for this same general purpose than this is simply good community policing.
Right. Though I think it's fair to say that speech facilitates communication, which in turn facilitates the development of culture. You can't have a viable culture without a reliable means of communicating, but there are other ways to communicate besides speech.
Enron to me exemplifies that your power structure is far from ideal. Rather than having the people pay for the campaigns (through the national treasury), you have the corporations that care about profits and only profits buying influence in the political circles. Giving corporations a lot of power is generally a bad idea, since they care less about ethics and more about money.
I guess that depends on the corporation in question. Most politicians aren't bad people, and a good politician won't sell his soul for any amount of campaign money. European nations with different systems have hardly been free of political scandal. In any case, campaign donations aren't the only way for corporations to influence the government. And a reasonable level of corporate influence is not an entirely bad thing. Fashionable cynicism aside, blind anti-corporatism is just as bad as blindly going along with whatever corporations want.
Greed is essentially a destructive force. Greed fosters bad judgement and short-term benefits.
Greed is an inextricable part of human nature. By itself it's not destructive or constructive, it just is. Sometimes it's greed for money, sometimes for power, other times for fame. It can be channeled to drive us toward good things as well as bad. It's how we react to our selfish impulses that determine the morality of our actions.
As Aimee Mann sings - "it is not going to stop.. until you wise up". You really, really need to look at who you elect during the upcoming elections. Don't just look at the words, but examine the past. If you wish to come through this alive, you'll need wisdom and courage, not demagogues (sp?) and special interest representatives.
Oh, we'll come through it alive. The country has seen far worse situations than this is likely to cause for the average person. And I think we've got wisdom and courage aplenty, thank you. I personally think the current administration is doing as well as any could, and I think it's disingenous to pretend that that the previous administration or any of the alternatives that were running were somehow blameless or less "tainted".
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps your library should start asking for email addresses for those patrons that wish to use them. Then send your notices via email and via telephone. One is bound to make it.
I work for a group of public libraries that uses a computer to call and say "Someone at this telephone number" -- we won't say who, because if you use a public library we consider it your own damn business -- "has an item waiting to be picked up at the So-and-So Public Library".
What does the little "someone at this number" dance actually accomplish? If it's a one person household then the person recieving the message already knows who they are. If there are two people in the house then it's obviously either for you or for the other person. If there's a whole family, then you probably have to know who's waiting for a book anyway in order to relay the message to the right person.
And, most annoying of all, if more than one person in the household uses the library (gasp!) then you're just confusing everyone by being all coy and not saying who the darn message is for.
OpenSource development is more successful because the people involved love what they're doing.
Unfortunately that implies a disadvantage, too: Things they don't love doing often don't get done at all.
Once upon a time this was true for most digital cameras. "Hot mirror" IR lens filters designed to prevent ambient IR from "leaking" into your photos were popular accessories.
Nowdays many digital cameras have an IR filter built in (maybe not the cheap models) so I don't know how well your suggestion would work.
A normal laser pointer isn't going to cause any permanent damage, but having one shone in your eyes can certainly be distracting enough to cause a problem if you're driving when it happens.
Red dots appearing out of nowhere can also spook people into thinking that they're being targeted with a laser gun sight. And if you're a police officer (or the Maryland-DC area with the recent plague of random sniper attacks) that might not be an entirely unreasonable fear.
Those were just the first three I happened to look at; the rest seem similar. So, there you have it straight from the horse's ass^H^H^H mouth: these companies' missions are not primarily to return profit (Genentech doesn't even mention that); all three have medical innovation and discovery as their primary mission. Just goes to show you can't trust a corporation to do what it sets out to do.
Or that you really shouldn't pay much attention to corporate mission statements.
There's a simple reason you don't see "make a profit" written in there is because it's a given. It'd be like me writing "wake up, breathe, eat" in my to-do list every day.
A private company that doesn't make a profit won't last long enough to accomplish anything, at least not unless it's kept on life-support by some source of outside funding (and that really just pushes the problem further away.)
But profit isn't the goal. It's just the means by which to reach the goal. Companies that forget that little detail are the ones that get in trouble, because they become so preoccupied with doing anything to make a buck that they forget how to actually do the things the company exists to do.
Unfortunately, most customers aren't interested because systems like this are expensive.
And becasue some customers might really not need them for their particular circumstances. A failure or security breach isn't necessarily the end of the world. If your window gets shattered once a year by a thrown stone you can spend a bunch on unbreakable glass or metal shutters, or just keep of stock of replacement panes around. So it is with securityt; they may believe that it's cheaper, easier, and more practical to just fix things when they inevitably get broken. Sure, sometimes that's false economy based on bad estimates and wishful thinking, but sometimes it might be valid.
"GIMP has all the hard work done - the image tools are great, and wingimp claim to have 90% of PS's functionality."
You're on the right track, but getting the interface right is also part of the hard work. And it'll take a lot more than a random user and a few hours of spare time to create an consistent and functional user interface that can compare favorably to a program like Photoshop. Photoshop isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good, and Adobe has invested a lot of time and effort over many years to make it that way.
And it's not just Photoshop/GIMP. No offense intended to the skilled programmers out there, but until more OS projects realize that good UI design is every bit as important as raw functionality then they'll never be able to compare favorably to commercial products on the desktop. For something that I'm expected to use every single day of my professional life, a free program with a tedious, arbitrary, ugly, and inconsistent UI is just not worth the cost in annoyance, frustration, and lost productivity.
Look at Batman. 60's TV show Batman is an abomination to me. Batman to me is supposed to be dark and gritty.
Batman's current level of "dark and gritty"-ness is a fairly recent retcon. Some of the early stories were pretty goofy.
Batman became public domain though, there could be a deluge of 60's Batman stories written by anybody and the original nature of the character would be completely lost. How do you preserve it?
By letting the best stories define the character.
Printer DPI isn't directly related to on-screen pixels. Photo-quality inkjet printers such as Epson's have just six actual ink colors: cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, and black. Those are the primary subtractive colors. The "light" shades reduce the appearance of distracting speckled effects when printing areas of less saturated hues (like skies). Non-photo inkjets typically have only the basic four CYMK inks.
The printer uses various dithering techniques to create a gamut of colors as similar as possible to what you'd see on your monitor. But a single pixel of, say, bright orange, will require lots of dithered ink dots to create. The high printer resolution is still important, but what you're really getting are smoother and more accurate colors, and not necessarily more visible detail.
So in practice there's a point at which pumping more resolution to the printer won't result in any real improvement. With my aging Epson Stylus Photo 1200 my comfort level is usually somewhere between 200-300DPI.
Right-o, because, as we all know, no communities based on shared interests and goals ever existed before the open source movement came along.
Too many open source advocates have the bad habit of overestimating their own signifigance and underestimating everyone else. That's probably why most people don't even know what Open Source is.
That's a good point. The different rate structures certainly do make cable more appealing over there. However, the cable infrastructure had to be there before switching from dialup could even be an option. Europe's relatively small size and higher population density made wiring the whole country with a modern cable infrastructure a lot easier, relative to the United States.
:)
It's really the same as with mobile phones. Since the US chose to keep the mobile phones within the existing number structure, i.e you cannot tell whether you're calling a mobile or a fixed line, and since customers expect unmetered local calls, then the subscriber had to pay for incoming calls, which lead to less willingness to give out your phone number, which lead to the uncommon situation of Europe getting a lead over the US in a matter of driving technology adaption.
Could be. I personally don't give my mobile number out because I really don't want people to call me, regardless of how much I'm paying.
And there is a silver lining to this cloud. Because incoming calls are not free it's given us the legal leverage to prevent evil telemarketers from bombarding cell phones with the same sort of voice-spam that my landline phone is plagued with. (I dunno if that sort of thing's a problem in Europe or not.)
This has absolutely nothing to do with the TIPS program. It was a citizen who saw a group of suspicious people having a conversation that suggested a possible threat, and she reported it.
Buy a scanner and listen to the police broadcasts in any sizable city or town and you'll probably hear a dozen "suspicious behaviour" or "suspicious vehicle" reports each day. The police investigate them routinely. Most of the time it's nothing; sometimes it's a domestic violence situation or a drug dealer; and sometimes (like happened a mile from my house last year) it's an armed robber hanging around waiting for the right moment to rob the convenience store. Citizen watch groups are a good thing, but the police have to be trained to act appropriately with limited or possibly inaccurate information.
For that matter, the article you link to is very clear that in this case that the police did pretty much what they should have done and acted with proper discretion. It was irresponsible and sensationalistic pseudo-journalists that spread false information and did the real damage.
If I read a book about "Islam", "Jihad", "American is Evil", or, hell, any book written by Noam Chomsky... will I be locked up, my possessions molested, my name defaced, and my job lost?
No. That's not going to happen. And, amazingly enough, posting to Slashdot won't get you arrested either.
The land of the free? Are you serious? I feel like my nation has become a suicide bomber - ready to self destruct out of shear desperation and hate.
Then maybe you should take a deep breath and lie down for a bit. A waitress reports three men of Middle-Eastern appearance who are possibly discussing mass murder and they're stopped, searched, and questioned. So clearly that means you're going to be arrested and thrown in the gulag for reading the wrong book or having a tan. Right-o.
No, corporations don't vote, but employees do. Corporations and industries have valid viewpoints that should be heard if we want good, effective laws that actually work in practice. In general passing laws about stuff you know nothing about firsthand is not a really good idea, and the people who know how stuff works usually work in industry. The self-interest of corporations have to be balanced against public opinion, public good, legal priciples, and other interested parties, of course, but shutting them out because you don't like them really isn't the answer. (All this applies to labor unions too, which can be every bit as selfish and destructive as any coporation.)
And, yes, you can meet with your congressman. Read above for a great post explaining how you can do exactly that.
It's not just the sensor that's important. It's the lens is often the limiting factor.
.25 second exposures.)
That's why a professional photographer (film or digital) will happily drop $3500 on something like a Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS (Image Stabilizer) USM lens, when a lesser 300mm lens costs $300. Or spend $2500 on a 50mm f/1.0L USM when a basic 50mm lens is only $75.
It's not just lens-envy, either. Spend more and you get tack-sharp optics and smoother focusing, and with a brighter (faster) lens like that you can get amazing low-light capabilities and depth-of-field effects. And if your exposure is still kinda long, Image Stabilization (IS) will also help compensate for those slight jitters you mention (and it really does work - if I have to, I can take handheld photos with reasonable sharpness at
I'm no pro and I can't afford the very best L-Series professional lenses for my D30. (Though I did splurge on a 50mm f/1.4 USM for portraits.) I make do with the best consumer lenses and accept the limitations imposed by my wallet and my skills. But don't misplace the source of the limitations or underestimate what can be done with current technology.
That's right. It's also useful to have "extra" resolution for cropping purposes. Like if your original photo isn't framed just right and has distracting/ugly junk off to one side, or if you want to work with just a part of a larger photo. (Many of the famous photographic prints we've all seen are cropped from the original negatives for reasons like these.)
Anyway, the more image resolution you have overall, the more pixels you have to work with in that cropped portion, and the better your final results will be. That can give a photographer a lot more "darkroom" flexibility with their digital image.
There's a difference between people dying in a natural disaster and people being murdered as a deliberate act. You know that as well as I do, and pretending that you don't is dishonest.
Post-9/11 legislation has not effected me at all.
For all the sound and fury (as illustrated in that AP article) the current laws are really nothing the US hasn't been through before in other times of war. Any law can be abused or misused by those in power, but we seldom hear about the far more frequent times when they're used to good effect.
Obviously we have to watch very carefully for abuse or overzealous enforcement, but it's counterproductive and simpleminded to automatically assume that the people who are sworn to protect you are all evil fascist pigs out to lock you up because you post mean things about GWB on Slashdot.
In other words, I'm not happy that these measures are necessary, but I'd rather trust the FBI with expanded survelliance powers than trust that a madman with a bomb or a live culture of smallpox will play fair and only plot their actions where the FBI is allowed to listen in.
I don't think it would be so simple in practice:
1) What's to stop someone from lying and claiming that their vote was miscounted once the votes had been tallied, or being coerced/bribed/persuaded into fraudulently changing their vote after the fact?
2) If a complete re-vote could be forced simply by a large number of complaints, with no means to tell if the complaints are valid or not, then a large enough group of unscrupulous (or misguided) voters could challenge any election which didn't give the results they wanted. (Combining this with existing voter fraud techniques could create a block of phantom voters just for this purpose.)
3) What's to prevent someone else from reading and/or challenging your vote if they obtain your number, or if they are able to fraudulently generate a valid random identifier?
4) When someone comes forward to claim that their vote was miscounted, they'd no longer be anonymous. Sure, they could use their secret number to check the status of the vote and remain anonymous (technical issues aside) but at some point the person casting the vote would need to identify themselves in person before casting a corrected ballot. Remember, the result of your vote is anonymous, but you aren't; you must register and be identified before you're a valid voter.
I was thinking the same thing, unfortunately the discontinued Kodak frames seem to have become pretty scarce since then. And I agree with the article author's assessment of the other digital frames that are still on the market--way too expensive, too limited, or just plain ugly.
I have two of the Kodak frames (also from computergeeks.com), one in my office and one at home. I almost wish that I'd bought up a batch to re-sell - people love the things. I scale down a fresh batch of my favorite digital photos every few weeks and put them on a pair of old 8MB flash cards for display. It couldn't be simpler.
I also have an Audrey set up to do something similar, though it pulls images off a shared network folder.
Good post. Like you suggest, you don't need a formal exersize program. Exersize for the sake of exersize is hard for some of us to justify, but there are a lots of useful tasks that also function as exersize.
Gardening is a good way to get started, for example. Get some fresh air, some exersize, and you end up with some nice healthy vegetables to supplement your diet and save money.
Like most research, what you find depends on where you look and how you look for it. There's lots of junk online (a lot of it obviously recycled from the same sources), but there's a huge amount of reliable information in a wide variety of subjects presented by people who really know what they're talking about. Unfortunately most teachers don't bother to instruct kids on how to distinguish between good and bad sources.
Don't tell them to give up on the web and visit the library (where someone else has ostensibly done all the critical thinking for them--though libraries contain plenty of poorly researched and written information, too). They won't take you seriously for long because they know there's good stuff out there, even if they might not have the skills to make best use of it yet. Instead, show them how to do proper research using whatever method is most effective.
...And it's the company bathroom, too, so cameras in there are just fine. And that's a company desk, so if an employee writes a note to themselves (especially if they use a company pen or company paper) then you have a right to sneak into their purse and make a copy. And it's the company cafeteria and the company health insurance plan, so monitoring and regulating what employees have for lunch is a perfectly reasonable activity...
Some companies need to realize that their employees aren't company property. As the workplace makes increasingly irrational demands upon employee's personal time, employees have no choice but to squeeze in necessary personal tasks wherever they can. Alleged "security concerns" are another convenient sham to justify increasingly intrusive tactics on the part of power-hungry execs and admins who have no faith in their employees and who lack the management ability to create a productivive workplace without resorting to intimidation and coercion.
This is nothing more than an extension of what is already being done in the law enforcement communities. In smaller communities, like the one where I used to live, police could simply memorize the names of the folks that they suspected of being "on a bad path."
I wish I had some mod points, because you are exactly correct.
In the small city where I live the local police recognize and know many of the people they've encountered by sight and by name. It's pretty common for officers pass this sort of information back and forth. They know that guy with the bad temper who drives a black Chevy, that woman on the corner who gets drunk and makes a nuisance of herself, that kid who seems to be around an awful lot when fires get started, and the elderly man that occasionally gets lost and might need a ride back home.
All of this is perfectly valid information, and all of it can be easily gathered by anyone with eyes to see. You don't have any right to anonymity or proof against observation while walking around in public, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with a police officer noting your actions or remembering your identity. If this database is used for this same general purpose than this is simply good community policing.
Right. Though I think it's fair to say that speech facilitates communication, which in turn facilitates the development of culture. You can't have a viable culture without a reliable means of communicating, but there are other ways to communicate besides speech.
Enron to me exemplifies that your power structure is far from ideal. Rather than having the people pay for the campaigns (through the national treasury), you have the corporations that care about profits and only profits buying influence in the political circles. Giving corporations a lot of power is generally a bad idea, since they care less about ethics and more about money.
I guess that depends on the corporation in question. Most politicians aren't bad people, and a good politician won't sell his soul for any amount of campaign money. European nations with different systems have hardly been free of political scandal. In any case, campaign donations aren't the only way for corporations to influence the government. And a reasonable level of corporate influence is not an entirely bad thing. Fashionable cynicism aside, blind anti-corporatism is just as bad as blindly going along with whatever corporations want.
Greed is essentially a destructive force. Greed fosters bad judgement and short-term benefits.
Greed is an inextricable part of human nature. By itself it's not destructive or constructive, it just is. Sometimes it's greed for money, sometimes for power, other times for fame. It can be channeled to drive us toward good things as well as bad. It's how we react to our selfish impulses that determine the morality of our actions.
As Aimee Mann sings - "it is not going to stop.. until you wise up". You really, really need to look at who you elect during the upcoming elections. Don't just look at the words, but examine the past. If you wish to come through this alive, you'll need wisdom and courage, not demagogues (sp?) and special interest representatives.
Oh, we'll come through it alive. The country has seen far worse situations than this is likely to cause for the average person. And I think we've got wisdom and courage aplenty, thank you. I personally think the current administration is doing as well as any could, and I think it's disingenous to pretend that that the previous administration or any of the alternatives that were running were somehow blameless or less "tainted".