Could a valid seeming FBI or NSA ID get someone enough access at INS to alter someone's immigration records?
No, how could it? There isn't just a locked door and then an open Wyse terminal that allows you unfettered access to the records.
Could it get someone a look at when the Dept. of the Interior schedules park ranger fly-overs or walk-throughs along the undeveloped parts of the US/Canadian border?
No, because those things are usually coordinated at the local level. Access to the State Highway Patrol headquarters won't tell you when officer Smith plans to patrol the westbound side of highway 23 either.
Could it get unfettered access to many of a state or local government's files?
No, because such access is NEVER unfettered, even for people who ARE allowed in the building.
(BATF, OSR, DEA, FEMA, etc.). These civil oriented agencies mindset re. information or physical security is usually lower than a small town sherriff's office
You're kidding, right? BATF and DEA have the security of a small town sheriff's office?
A single standard ID might help if it was part of a general security upgrade of these agencies, but now we're talking about even more funding, to fix the holes that would otherwise allow not just ID spoofing, but many other tricks. Without that, consolidating ID systems isn't likely to help much, if at all.
I'm sorry, but your blind assertion that they have lax security at the BATF and DEA renders that judgement laughable. A consolidated ID system brings all the various individual systems up to the same level. It doesn't give the holder blanket access to all government facilities. You think they just have to flash a card and the gard lets them in? Doesn't work that way, and it never did.
And increasingly people are not playing. The army has a huge problem recruiting, largely because people heard of conditions outlined by your parent.
Actually, that's not true. They've exceeded the ever-increasing yearly quotas for years. The specific category of recruiting for the national guard has had a hard time of it lately because they can no longer say with a straight face that it'll be only one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year, and they usually recruit outgoing regular military folks looking for a reduced commitment. If you like, I can provide lots of links to boring sites with lots of numbers that lay it all out. To start with I offer this, a good synopsis of the specific trouble the ANG is having, and here are the details of FY2004's recruitment goals for the regular army and reserves.
anything that messes with your credit/criminal record (like being delinquent on a ticket that you never knew you recieved) can seriously cost you tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars come mortgage time...
Parking citations are levied against the vehicle, not a person. They can't touch your credit record or charge you with a crime because all they can show is that your car was in violation, not you. Note the important differences between a parking ticket and a moving violation: your name and signature are on the moving violation, making it a "promise to appear"; a parking ticket has no name or signature, only your car's identification. If you are ticketed and the ticket is stolen, you will get a reminder in the mail, usually in 3-4 weeks. If you ignore those reminders, you'll end up paying at registration renewal time. I once got multiple parking violation notices for a car I had sold months before but the new owner never registered it in his name. Eventually the car was impounded and I got notices that they'd auction it unless I claimed it. Presumably it was auctioned, as I never heard of it again. Nothing went to a collection agency, no court hearings were mandated.
Honestly, I don't know where people get the idea that you can go to jail or have your credit record damaged over a parking ticket .
Realistically, $10/hour seems to be a little high...
Cost of employing someone is often much higher than their hourly wage. They have to factor in insurance cost, taxation, etc. into the total. Employing a $7/hr person could easily cost $10/hr
So if you act without thinking you shouldn't be held accountable?
Being that our bodies can't do much without the brain telling them to do something, I think you'd be hard pressed to characterize any act other than dropping a hot potato as something done without thinking. But go ahead, try to convince the judge that slapping a new barcode sticker on was a "reflex action, like when you scratch a dog and his leg moves".
It wasn't the monkey filling in the scedule that decided to use a 16-bit signed integer.
No, but a couple of dozen people with a clue, a big patch of floor and a lot of chalk and a pile of telephones could cobble something together and get some planes moving.
As a previous poster noted, any system used to keep track of crew scheduling has to be FAA approved, be it a computerized system or a bunch of people in a hangar with chalkboards and phones. They had no pre-approved "greaseboard" procedure, so nothing those couple dozen people came up with would be allowable anyway. The FAA rules are very clear, and they don't cut any slack or make exceptions. Crew scheduling procedures must be submitted, carefully examined, and approved before use and that's simply not going to happen on short notice.
I wonder how hard it would be for a third party to get this information?
Not very, but then what?
Knowing exactly where a big van full of boxes of stuff is right now would make it quite a bit easier to pillage said truck wouldn't it?
Nah, they all run regular routes anyway. Don't need a secret link to the GPS tracker system to know the UPS truck is coming down a certain road at the same time every day.
Or maybe a competitor could conveniently get people to interfere with traffic and slow them down along their routes, things like that.
They couldn't affect them much. So long as the truck is still running, the driver delivers until the packages are all gone. Slow traffic just makes the day a little longer.
abandonware isn't really abandonware. Now, I'm wondering if they bought the name just so they could make money out of lawsuits. If they do, and it works, I wonder how many other companies will attempt to by rights to long and outdated software just to attempt to raise their bottom line by sueing everyone.
Good theory, but it has a minor flaw: most of the popular software now termed "abandonware" wasn't written by Commodore. Owning the Commodore name doesn't give them rights over all software that ran on the platform.
I'm sorry, but this is dumb. Most people who live in suburbs rely on the nearby cities for their jobs, entertainment, and many other things. Why shouldn't they have to pay taxes?
Exactly what taxes are outsiders avoiding that city dwellers don't? If they're coming into the city to do things like work and be entertained, they are doing their part to support the city through a) their employers city taxes, and b) sales tax on everything they buy in the city. The only tax they don't pay is property tax, and since property taxes (ideally) pay for things provided only for city dwellers (like schools), that's how it should be. I'm not sure why it is you think they're getting a free ride just because they live in an unincorporated suburb. In the case of highways, the city doesn't pay for them anyway. The state does. And both the city dwellers and suburb people pay state taxes.
Why are so many people so anti-immigration and protectionist?
Most people aren't anti-immigration, they're anti illegal immigration.
Eventually it will lead to an equalization of wages and a higher standard of living for everyone in the world, not just people in rich countries. Watch and see if the workers in third world countries don't start unionizing and demanding higher wages.
Not when they're afraid of being deported because they're here illegally. Heck, illegal immigrants can file complaints with the EEOC for illegal emplyment practices and get back pay like anyone else and "la migra" won't do a damn thing, but they still don't!
Besides, are you going to start building houses and picking fruit or digging ditches for a living? That's what most of the illegal immegrants are doing over here, jobs you don't want to do anyway
People don't want to do those jobs because the pay isn't enough. The pay is so low because there is a pool of undocumented workers who will work for sub-legal wages. These workers also will not complain because of the threat of deportation, so you can work them long hours in unsafe conditions for next to nothing.
so they are contributers to the economy.
At six bucks an hour, they aren't contributing much in the way of taxes. If they work under the table they pay no income taxes, they make so little that they spend most of it on things with no sales tax (food & rent), and they aren't property owners so they don't pay property tax. It's the employers who are reaping the benefits. The rest of us pick up the tab for their medical expenses and educating their children. Nobody in their right mind should be in favor of illegal immigration. I say start handing out green cards at the border crossing and letting 'em come on in, but that would destroy the wage-lowering effect that immoral employers so desire.
Read to the bottom. They're also hiring a "Staff Scheduler". Only a high school diploma required and 1 year of experience. Maybe they should raise their qualification requirements for this one given recent difficulties....
It wasn't the monkey filling in the scedule that decided to use a 16-bit signed integer. Furthermore, getting several hundred schedule-fillers with higher education wouldn't have kept that integer from overflowing.
The German language thing seems to be somewhat common actually. In Polish it's niemecki for example.
Yeah, the word is similar in all slavic languages. It essentially means "tongue-less", a mildly dismissive term applied to Germans in Russia who didn't speak Russian.
I actually believe that the word for "Netherlands" in Japanese is "Oranda", which would be some sort of a borrowing of "Holland". So it's not just us American lamers that fail to make the distinction.
Heck, most languages call other countries (and/or their native languages) by names that frequently have little relation to their native name. People in Byelorus even complain that germans call their country "white russia" instead of "byelorus", even though they call the German language "nyemetski" instead of "deutsch". So long as the information is passed, people need to quit pitching a fit about it. It's just the way language has developed.
Thomas Edison is analgous to the head of the sony division that used Russel's patent at Sony; he did not invent the lightbulb.
When people say "Edison invented the light bulb", they mean "invented the oxygen-free sealed glass globe with an incandescent filament inside". I think we can all agree that unless there's a filament surrounded by oxygen-free space contained in a translucent container, it ain't a light bulb. Let's take a look at the very page to which you link. First, the page is in error (or at least in confusion) with regard to the work of Humphrey Davy. Their statement:
When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. This is called an electric arc.
This is incorrect. Humphrey Davy essentially discovered the principle upon which the carbon arc light is based. An arc light doesn't make carbon glow by passing current through it, but rather by arcing current between two pieces of carbon. All this is neither here nor their, though, because an arc light is not a light bulb. Now, he may have experimented with smaller pieces of carbon which glow when current was passed through them, but he never made the critical leap to enclosing it in an oxygen-free environment.
Then there's Charles Francis Brush. He "manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square". Again, an arc light, not a light bulb.
Then, finally, we get to Edison:
The inventor Thomas Alva Edison (in the USA) experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.
So now we finally have a light bulb. Invented by Edison. In the US.
While it can be said that Edison did not invent electric illumination, he was essentially the inventor of the "oxygen-free glass globe with incandescent filament" we now call the light bulb.
You bring up a good point. A search for Nigger Mania on both searches yielded the following results:
Google: The site in question was nowhere to be found in the first five pages of results.
MSN Beta: The site in question showed up as the first result.
Google did not find the site, while MSN did. I have seen this happen more than once in recent time. MSN's new search is kicking the crap out of Google.
I wouldn't call that "kicking the crap out of". All MSN did differently was put the two search terms together and see if there was a match for THAT. Since the dumbass cracker fucktard site "niggermania.com" never presents it as two separate words, a search for it as two separate words won't come up in Google.
So what reason is there for the space shuttle now? all the heavy lifting can be done by these things and the personnel can get up in a Soyuz. These things seem "cheap" and from what I've read, this paradigm can be used to just strap on a few more rockets to get to the Moon or Mars.
Can anyone cite a reason for continued shuttle lifetime that isn't political?
Because ferrying people to and from the stupid ISS isn't the Alpha and Omega of the US manned space program.
Er, the Imperial gallon has four Imperial quarts, each comrised of two Imperial pints. The problem you are describing results from your inability to comprehand that US quarts are not the same as Imperial quarts. See?
Oi! So they aren't. They mess it up at the pint level, I see, where they declare an imperial pint is 20oz. That's a bit better because it only "breaks" the dodgy connection of "1 pint (16oz) water weighs 1 pound (16oz)". Very well! Carry on!
Actually, it's the tonne, equal to 1000kg and fairly closs to the Imperial ton.
Actually, either spelling is acceptable. Admittedly, "tonne" is preferable because it specifically means "1000kg", whereas "ton" can be 1000kg, 2000lbs, or (most annoyingly) 2240lbs in the case of the "long ton". Almost as irritating as the damned imperial gallon with that stupid fifth quart. Cripes, look at the word "quart"! The dang word means one FOURTH!
No, just teach the kids metric heavily. Faced with an upcomign populous used to metric, market forces would take over and products would be increasingly metric focused. ie. Instead of being measured in Imperial units and having the metric equivalent next to it, things would be the other way around. This would get the rest of the populous familiar with metric measurement, and ease the transition.
Like I said before, they tried that in the 70's. As a child I had the metric system practically beaten into me at school, but it remained a useless oddity because practically nothing in the "real world" was measured in metric. Some of the road signs carried both km and miles, but odometers still read only miles. The doctor wrote down my weight in pounds, height in feet plus inches. Gasoline, milk, and paint came in gallons. Old family recipes called for pounds, cups, and teaspoons. Short of a draconian government decree forcing all those myriad of industries to switch to metric entirely and to hell with those people stuck with non-metric equipment (e.g. odometers), there's no way to make it stick. And any elected official foolish enough to suggest such a draconian decree had better have another job lined up, 'cause upsetting people's day to day lives is the best way to NOT get re-elected.
Didn't a metric vs. USA measure cause a rocket to crash? Maybe a few more boo-boos like that and we'll see the light.
The vast majority of the unwashed masses doesn't care about rockets, and they're the ones you have to convince to "think in metric". We tried it in the 70's and people stubbornly refused. No matter how many times a mars probe crashes because of a screwup, it's not going to make them change to metric-- it'll just make them think mars probes are a waste of money. The only way to get the US population to accept the metric system would be to force them, and they would never allow it.
Our legal system is far behind the times when it comes to technology, 'cyberspace', online privacy, etc. I wish todays legal minds were working on those issues instead of dreaming up these far off futuristic scenarioes.
Wieners who sit around daydreaming about sentient computers are the last people I want trying to get our legal system "up with the times". Besides, the particular problem of outdated law isn't caused by lack of people thinking about it, it's caused by disagreement as to the solution. Throwing these clowns into the mix would only make it worse.
If I buy a television or radio, plug it in, turn it on and tune it in I am inviting the signal into my house.
Not exactly. The airwaves are public property. The idea is that one should be able to purchase a radio and access these public broadcasts without having to resort to extraordinary efforts to avoid (for example) profanity. In the "olden days" there was no way to go to 97.3FM from 100.7FM without passing by 99.1FM due to the nature of the analog tuning dial (and TV was similar). This being the case, it wasn't unreasonable to prohibit indecent content "in the clear". Since encryption and coding require an additional layer of intentional processing to render the content, the "inadvertent" argument is inapplicable.
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No, how could it? There isn't just a locked door and then an open Wyse terminal that allows you unfettered access to the records.
Could it get someone a look at when the Dept. of the Interior schedules park ranger fly-overs or walk-throughs along the undeveloped parts of the US/Canadian border?
No, because those things are usually coordinated at the local level. Access to the State Highway Patrol headquarters won't tell you when officer Smith plans to patrol the westbound side of highway 23 either.
Could it get unfettered access to many of a state or local government's files?
No, because such access is NEVER unfettered, even for people who ARE allowed in the building.
(BATF, OSR, DEA, FEMA, etc.). These civil oriented agencies mindset re. information or physical security is usually lower than a small town sherriff's office
You're kidding, right? BATF and DEA have the security of a small town sheriff's office?
A single standard ID might help if it was part of a general security upgrade of these agencies, but now we're talking about even more funding, to fix the holes that would otherwise allow not just ID spoofing, but many other tricks. Without that, consolidating ID systems isn't likely to help much, if at all.
I'm sorry, but your blind assertion that they have lax security at the BATF and DEA renders that judgement laughable. A consolidated ID system brings all the various individual systems up to the same level. It doesn't give the holder blanket access to all government facilities. You think they just have to flash a card and the gard lets them in? Doesn't work that way, and it never did.
Actually, that's not true. They've exceeded the ever-increasing yearly quotas for years. The specific category of recruiting for the national guard has had a hard time of it lately because they can no longer say with a straight face that it'll be only one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year, and they usually recruit outgoing regular military folks looking for a reduced commitment. If you like, I can provide lots of links to boring sites with lots of numbers that lay it all out. To start with I offer this, a good synopsis of the specific trouble the ANG is having, and here are the details of FY2004's recruitment goals for the regular army and reserves.
Parking citations are levied against the vehicle, not a person. They can't touch your credit record or charge you with a crime because all they can show is that your car was in violation, not you. Note the important differences between a parking ticket and a moving violation: your name and signature are on the moving violation, making it a "promise to appear"; a parking ticket has no name or signature, only your car's identification. If you are ticketed and the ticket is stolen, you will get a reminder in the mail, usually in 3-4 weeks. If you ignore those reminders, you'll end up paying at registration renewal time. I once got multiple parking violation notices for a car I had sold months before but the new owner never registered it in his name. Eventually the car was impounded and I got notices that they'd auction it unless I claimed it. Presumably it was auctioned, as I never heard of it again. Nothing went to a collection agency, no court hearings were mandated.
Honestly, I don't know where people get the idea that you can go to jail or have your credit record damaged over a parking ticket .
Cost of employing someone is often much higher than their hourly wage. They have to factor in insurance cost, taxation, etc. into the total. Employing a $7/hr person could easily cost $10/hr
Being that our bodies can't do much without the brain telling them to do something, I think you'd be hard pressed to characterize any act other than dropping a hot potato as something done without thinking. But go ahead, try to convince the judge that slapping a new barcode sticker on was a "reflex action, like when you scratch a dog and his leg moves".
No, but a couple of dozen people with a clue, a big patch of floor and a lot of chalk and a pile of telephones could cobble something together and get some planes moving.
As a previous poster noted, any system used to keep track of crew scheduling has to be FAA approved, be it a computerized system or a bunch of people in a hangar with chalkboards and phones. They had no pre-approved "greaseboard" procedure, so nothing those couple dozen people came up with would be allowable anyway. The FAA rules are very clear, and they don't cut any slack or make exceptions. Crew scheduling procedures must be submitted, carefully examined, and approved before use and that's simply not going to happen on short notice.
Not very, but then what?
Knowing exactly where a big van full of boxes of stuff is right now would make it quite a bit easier to pillage said truck wouldn't it?
Nah, they all run regular routes anyway. Don't need a secret link to the GPS tracker system to know the UPS truck is coming down a certain road at the same time every day.
Or maybe a competitor could conveniently get people to interfere with traffic and slow them down along their routes, things like that.
They couldn't affect them much. So long as the truck is still running, the driver delivers until the packages are all gone. Slow traffic just makes the day a little longer.
Those copyrights belong to the companies that wrote those games, not the manufacturer of the platform they ran on.
Good theory, but it has a minor flaw: most of the popular software now termed "abandonware" wasn't written by Commodore. Owning the Commodore name doesn't give them rights over all software that ran on the platform.
Exactly what taxes are outsiders avoiding that city dwellers don't? If they're coming into the city to do things like work and be entertained, they are doing their part to support the city through a) their employers city taxes, and b) sales tax on everything they buy in the city. The only tax they don't pay is property tax, and since property taxes (ideally) pay for things provided only for city dwellers (like schools), that's how it should be. I'm not sure why it is you think they're getting a free ride just because they live in an unincorporated suburb. In the case of highways, the city doesn't pay for them anyway. The state does. And both the city dwellers and suburb people pay state taxes.
Why are so many people so anti-immigration and protectionist?
Most people aren't anti-immigration, they're anti illegal immigration.
Eventually it will lead to an equalization of wages and a higher standard of living for everyone in the world, not just people in rich countries. Watch and see if the workers in third world countries don't start unionizing and demanding higher wages.
Not when they're afraid of being deported because they're here illegally. Heck, illegal immigrants can file complaints with the EEOC for illegal emplyment practices and get back pay like anyone else and "la migra" won't do a damn thing, but they still don't!
Besides, are you going to start building houses and picking fruit or digging ditches for a living? That's what most of the illegal immegrants are doing over here, jobs you don't want to do anyway
People don't want to do those jobs because the pay isn't enough. The pay is so low because there is a pool of undocumented workers who will work for sub-legal wages. These workers also will not complain because of the threat of deportation, so you can work them long hours in unsafe conditions for next to nothing.
so they are contributers to the economy.
At six bucks an hour, they aren't contributing much in the way of taxes. If they work under the table they pay no income taxes, they make so little that they spend most of it on things with no sales tax (food & rent), and they aren't property owners so they don't pay property tax. It's the employers who are reaping the benefits. The rest of us pick up the tab for their medical expenses and educating their children. Nobody in their right mind should be in favor of illegal immigration. I say start handing out green cards at the border crossing and letting 'em come on in, but that would destroy the wage-lowering effect that immoral employers so desire.
It wasn't the monkey filling in the scedule that decided to use a 16-bit signed integer. Furthermore, getting several hundred schedule-fillers with higher education wouldn't have kept that integer from overflowing.
B ups their fares to $500.
B now makes $20,000 on each flight.
Except that it's more like:
A runs out of cash first, but gets bailed out at taxpayer expense B never gets monopoly position and must keep fares low
A & B both run out of money, but manage to subsist on gov't subsidies
we're gonna end up with another Amtrak situation
Yeah, the word is similar in all slavic languages. It essentially means "tongue-less", a mildly dismissive term applied to Germans in Russia who didn't speak Russian.
Heck, most languages call other countries (and/or their native languages) by names that frequently have little relation to their native name. People in Byelorus even complain that germans call their country "white russia" instead of "byelorus", even though they call the German language "nyemetski" instead of "deutsch". So long as the information is passed, people need to quit pitching a fit about it. It's just the way language has developed.
When people say "Edison invented the light bulb", they mean "invented the oxygen-free sealed glass globe with an incandescent filament inside". I think we can all agree that unless there's a filament surrounded by oxygen-free space contained in a translucent container, it ain't a light bulb. Let's take a look at the very page to which you link. First, the page is in error (or at least in confusion) with regard to the work of Humphrey Davy. Their statement:
This is incorrect. Humphrey Davy essentially discovered the principle upon which the carbon arc light is based. An arc light doesn't make carbon glow by passing current through it, but rather by arcing current between two pieces of carbon. All this is neither here nor their, though, because an arc light is not a light bulb. Now, he may have experimented with smaller pieces of carbon which glow when current was passed through them, but he never made the critical leap to enclosing it in an oxygen-free environment.
Then there's Charles Francis Brush. He "manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square". Again, an arc light, not a light bulb.
Then, finally, we get to Edison:
So now we finally have a light bulb. Invented by Edison. In the US.
While it can be said that Edison did not invent electric illumination, he was essentially the inventor of the "oxygen-free glass globe with incandescent filament" we now call the light bulb.
I wouldn't call that "kicking the crap out of". All MSN did differently was put the two search terms together and see if there was a match for THAT. Since the dumbass cracker fucktard site "niggermania.com" never presents it as two separate words, a search for it as two separate words won't come up in Google.
Because ferrying people to and from the stupid ISS isn't the Alpha and Omega of the US manned space program.
Oi! So they aren't. They mess it up at the pint level, I see, where they declare an imperial pint is 20oz. That's a bit better because it only "breaks" the dodgy connection of "1 pint (16oz) water weighs 1 pound (16oz)". Very well! Carry on!
Actually, either spelling is acceptable. Admittedly, "tonne" is preferable because it specifically means "1000kg", whereas "ton" can be 1000kg, 2000lbs, or (most annoyingly) 2240lbs in the case of the "long ton". Almost as irritating as the damned imperial gallon with that stupid fifth quart. Cripes, look at the word "quart"! The dang word means one FOURTH!
Like I said before, they tried that in the 70's. As a child I had the metric system practically beaten into me at school, but it remained a useless oddity because practically nothing in the "real world" was measured in metric. Some of the road signs carried both km and miles, but odometers still read only miles. The doctor wrote down my weight in pounds, height in feet plus inches. Gasoline, milk, and paint came in gallons. Old family recipes called for pounds, cups, and teaspoons. Short of a draconian government decree forcing all those myriad of industries to switch to metric entirely and to hell with those people stuck with non-metric equipment (e.g. odometers), there's no way to make it stick. And any elected official foolish enough to suggest such a draconian decree had better have another job lined up, 'cause upsetting people's day to day lives is the best way to NOT get re-elected.
The vast majority of the unwashed masses doesn't care about rockets, and they're the ones you have to convince to "think in metric". We tried it in the 70's and people stubbornly refused. No matter how many times a mars probe crashes because of a screwup, it's not going to make them change to metric-- it'll just make them think mars probes are a waste of money. The only way to get the US population to accept the metric system would be to force them, and they would never allow it.
Wouldn't that be kilograms? ;)
The metric system has a unit of measure called the ton as well, so no.
Wieners who sit around daydreaming about sentient computers are the last people I want trying to get our legal system "up with the times". Besides, the particular problem of outdated law isn't caused by lack of people thinking about it, it's caused by disagreement as to the solution. Throwing these clowns into the mix would only make it worse.
Not exactly. The airwaves are public property. The idea is that one should be able to purchase a radio and access these public broadcasts without having to resort to extraordinary efforts to avoid (for example) profanity. In the "olden days" there was no way to go to 97.3FM from 100.7FM without passing by 99.1FM due to the nature of the analog tuning dial (and TV was similar). This being the case, it wasn't unreasonable to prohibit indecent content "in the clear". Since encryption and coding require an additional layer of intentional processing to render the content, the "inadvertent" argument is inapplicable.