Or a college textbook. It's particularly annoying when a university class requires, say, the fifth edition of book X, when the only substantive difference between the 5th and 4th editions appears to be inconsequential additions that throw the page numbering so reading and exercise assignment references by the professor^Wgrad student assitant are relevant only to the 5th edition. "No, you can't buy the used 4th edition for $40, you have to get the 5th for $120". Bastards.
Just to play devil's advocate, let's admit that are many more potential users of Broadband over Powerline than there are HAMs -- by at least one order of magnitude, if not more. A lot more people will benefit from gaining broadband than will be hurt by losing HAM frequencies. Isn't it the FCC's stated duty to allocate the EM spectrum in order to maximize the public's benefit from it?
BPL interference isn't reallocation of spectrum, it's just interference. It'd be one thing if they were saying "hams move to bands this, that, and TheOther", but they're not. They're just letting BPL walk all over the ham bands. Also, does the public benefit more from Yet Another Broadband Provider than it does from a free, volunteer-run communications system that has proven itself invaluable in emergencies year after year? I think not. This topic has been covered ad infinitum here on/. already.
And, realistically, let's follow the money: there's no money to be made from HAM radio; there's a lot to be made from broadband over powerline.
It's not the FCC's job to maximize corporate profits. If BPL were the ONLY way to get broadband to far flung areas, there might be an argument there but being that there's fiber, wireless, satellite, etc., there's no raitonal justification for steamrolling huge swathes of EM spectrum just so power companies can get in on the ISP game.
/* this is where the abstract goes, in the comments */
/* you might read it in hopes of finding out what */ /* this does, but you might as well skip it and */ /* read the code because it's what actually matters */
When will people learn? The ONLY meaning of broadband is analog transmission (frequency division). The term "broadband" has nothing to do with speed.
Yeah, and "baud" doesn't mean "bps". Nor does "motor" mean "internal combustion engine". Furthermore, "screw" and "bolt" are not synonymous. Whaddya gonna do? The common man's vernacular must be accepted sometimes.
Maybe we should give management of those TLDs back to Network Solutions...
Verisign swallowed Network Solutions whole four years ago, so Verisign is Network Solutions. This is the same bunch of crackheads that fought the idea of competing registrars. TLD management needs to be managed by a big, wasteful, government funded and/or non-profit entity. I can stand a little inefficiency when it's not a big fat corporate monopoly doing it.
Don't forget that M$ led a drive to make "high definition" television 640x480, which is lower resolution than analog tv
What? No it's not. Reg'lar TV is something like 320x200. Furthermore, HDTV is up to 1920x1080, so whether they "led a drive" to make it 640x480 or not seems fairly irrelevant.
The reason AOL has been such a disaster on the ISP side is that they are based on outdated technology with little room for growth (in fact, it seems it can only shrink).
Yeah, anyone basing their business model on selling dialup service is doomed. I think they may have jumped on Time-Warner partly in order to get Time Warner Cable's broadband as a way to continue marketing the AOL name. In some ways it did that, but mostly it looks like it didn't. Personally, I'm astounded by how hard they're pushing the latest AOL dial-ware spam CDs. Dialup is a shrinking market, so I reckon they have to push pretty hard to stay afloat.
GTE, the very very bad non-baby-bell from the midwest.
They also have a significant presence in southern california. They used to be the worst local service provider, but got knocked down (up?) to second worst when AT&T bought MediaOne Cable and started offering POTS via broadband. I'm stuck on a DSL line my ISP has to lease from Verizon (competition? what's that?) and it keeps crapping out. Plus, while areas served by SBC are offered amazing deals on fast DSL (up to 7000/768 depending on current traffic load, key words "up to") for $59/mo, I'm stuck with a 1500/128 connection (that works intermittently) for $49/mo and my only choice for faster service is $300/mo for a 3000/768 connection. I hate them.
The way I see this, prioritizing packets also ensures that a minority of users can't abuse the network ressources the everybody else want to use.
Right in my home network I had to prioritze RTP packets (VoIP) so that other people in the house couldn't screw up my phone conversations when saturating my uplink or downlink. The same can be true on a national backbone, especially in failure conditions where you will get links that saturate.
Who will judge which traffic is "worthy"? With your own personal network it's just fine to give VoIP priority, but when it comes to the internet as a whole, you'd need some central authority standing in judgement of traffic to facilitate such a plan. This central authority will inevitably listen to the loudest voices (commerce/industry) and give their traffic highest priority, while "inconsequential" communications, like me FTPing a file to my friend in Russia or you trying to reach a non-commercial personal website of your friend in Cleveland, get marked as low-priority. Eventually, the only traffic that will get through with any reliability will be from "important" corporate and governmental sites. At that point, it's just like fucking TV (pardon my language-- TV bugs me). It's bad enough that DSL and cable up/down bandwidth is so ridiculously asynchronous that you have to pay COMMERCIAL rates if you want to host anything of consequence on your personal machine. That already is them trying to push the internet-as-TV model on us. Traffic prioritizing will just give them another way to screw us.
I think maximizing the routing of internet to return small packets of information with less lag (and less speed), large packets of information with more lag but more speed, and streams of information at a constant rate with constant lag would help everybody. So long as the trade off was enforced at all points, I think it would be honored by protocol developers.
The one problem is that such a system would require centrally-managed routing. How do you guarantee constant-rate packet flow unless there's a central authority monitoring traffic flow? Adding a priority control layer to IP communications will require someone telling us what priority our traffic may be given, else everyone will just set the checkbox labelled "all traffic priority 1" in their network settings and **poof** the utility is gone. It's bad enough with ICANN and Network Solutions pulling the bullshit they can now, without adding that to the mix. Do you really want those NS clowns (or a totally new bunch of clowns) telling you "Priority 3 is free, but if you want Priority 2 clearance, that'll be $5/megabit; Priority 1 is $25/megabit"?
then subtly shift the discussion around to the dangers of the "heathen Chinee."
Heh. I'm gonna try that one next time I'm stuck in a purchasing meeting. I reckon it'll take a long time for them to figure out what I'm talking about, since I am part Chinese.
Well because i have a contract with Dell saying I won't do that, and in return they cut the company a great deal on the other 300 pcs
I call bullshit, because if you were a real manager who had some clue as how to run an IT or IS group you would never ever cut such a deal and even if you would there's no way you could sell it to legal or accounting.
I call bullshit on your bullshit call. Take a walk around (for example) UCLA and see how many Wintel desktop machines you find with the Gateway, IBM, or HP/Compaq name and "Property of UCLA" on them. Exclusive contracts with Dell for desktop machines doesn't lock your R&D department into building a Dell cluster when they want G5's, or make the medical billing department buy a Dell crap server instead of an IBM S/390. Contracts are usually narrow enough in scope to only cover a general set of commodity hardware.
I just thought it was odd that you state a 3 person team has easier to manage dynamics than a 2 person team. In any courses on team building that I have done the instructors have always said that 3 is the absolute worst number to have because in a dispute there is a likelyhood that one person will always feel that they are being picked on
Three works better two if you can hand-pick them for some degree of compatibility. Three is worse than any other number if they are thrust upon each other by circumstance (e.g. the three best hardware guys in the company forced to design the guts of the company's new product). Also, this is a space station so they want to keep the crew as small as possible. It may be that four would work better than three, but that would require 33% more supplies (and they say it's expensive to ship food to Hawaii...)
The English language promotes dyslexia, and obviously you relish this fact.
Do you know what dyslexia is? Using "half" instead of "have" isn't it. That's better described as "illiteracy". It is, however, an excusable error for a non-native speaker of english, since the two words veer confusingly close to one another in casual spoken usage. I don't know if the original poster learned english as a second language, but I certainly hope so.
There are several books on this as a matter of fact. That calling it private property is necesarilly true when your talking about a comercially zoned building and facility.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The second sentence is grammatically damaged. Clarification?
And you keep saying government in broad terms but really it's a matter of city ordinance voted on by the city council, not constitutional law or anything, just like how some cities and municipalities can decide guns are not allowed in their city. Or that you can not carry a weapon in certain establishments, or that if your selling certain goods you need servielance in your store.
No level of government gets carte blanche to violate the US constitution. All laws in the US, be they passed at the federal, state or city level, must pass constitutional muster. The examples you cite aren't proof that cities don't have to abide by the constitution; they are examples of how unconstitutional laws are passed despite their unconstitutionality. Notice how the first two examples you cite are 2nd amendment related. Cities are in violation of the 2nd amendment with those laws. The fact that they are allowed to do so merely illustrates the contempt most jurists have for the 2nd. It's the most wilfully misinterpreted right enumerated in the bill of rights. But I'm not going to go into the politics of constitutional law here. Suffice to say that nothing you've shown so far gives city councils the right to force property owners to spy on their guests at their own expense. If the police came in with a video camera, the business' status as a public forum (still private property; not the same thing as a publicly owned place) would possibly make it permissible (very iffy in a 4th Amd sense), but forcing the owner to do it under penalty of law? No way.
here is my question, answer this if you respond because this is the important one. Why wouldn't you have survielance anyway? Why are you willing to risk lots of damage to machines and stolen items for?
I think you're missing the point of the argument. I'm not saying that cybercafe owners should be prohibited from installing cameras and hiring guards. I'm saying that municipalities are overstepping their authority by forcing them to do it. The right course is the middle course: let the individual business owners decide. It should be neither mandated nor prohibited. The utility of guards and cameras is not my concern, and in the scope of this debate it's irrelevant.
That's a funny quote and all but I don't know if it's entirely true in this case. A lot of the cost involved was put towards getting the technology together and paying the people involved. Once one was built, the other one just required the same set of parts and a team to assemble and test it. No R&D costs were repeated.
While it's not exactly assembly line type savings, there is a reduced cost for building a duplicate of something that already has been built.
Then again, if the degree of hand tooling and calibration each unit requires is sizable, the R&D involved might not be the big cost. My father worked on one of the Raytheon EKV tests, and each one was hand built. The biggest headache was getting the focusing lens over the IR sensor ground perfectly. Of course, this involved more than just making it geometrically perfect. No, it was worse than that: it had to be ground such that it would compensate for unavoidable minute manufacturing flaws in the IR sensor. They were working on it up to the last minute and (fortunately) it was good enough to work. The funny part was when a general observing the test asked why they couldn't start producing them en masse, and the engineers who worked on the lens practically passed out.
you missed the point of that sentence, you don't have right to privacy in a public place
That being your argument, you miss the crucial distinction elsewhere: a cybercafe is not a public place. It's on private property. Whether the public is allowed in to patronize the business or not doesn't affect its status as private property. Look at it this way, if I wanted to open a "Young Communists Lounge" where kids could come and discuss the wit and wisdom of Marx and Engels (yeah, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard too), the government would be way out of line forcing me to install cameras so they could go back and ID patrons if later they suspected one was in on a plot they'd uncovered to overthrow the government. Likewise if it was a Christian Fellowship Hall that the government wanted enforced monitoring of because it suspected "rampant Jesus-ism" was responsible for a recent rash of carjacking. True, as a patron of a cybercafe (or whatever) you have no expectation of privacy because it's private property (albeit a public forum) and your being there is at the sufferance of the property owner. The owner, however has the absolute right to offer privacy in whatever degree he wishes to his patrons. The fact that the city council of Garden Grove only wants the patrons monitored is totally beside the point-- it's private property and they have no business forcing private citizens to spy on their guests solely for the convenience of law enforcement.
besides, how many fonts can their possibly be for cyrillic?
Not as many as the latin alphabet, but there's a few (most of them regional variations). One thing I've always found interesting as far a Cyrillic goes is that there isn't so much difference between monospaced and proportional fonts, as the letters are pretty much all "wide"-- no "skinny" letters like "i", "t", or "j" in the latin alphabet*.
* to those who read cyrillic: yes, tvyordi znak and myaki znak look funny monospaced, but I think they should be abolished, as they're not really letters but accent marks. It's unfortunate that Cyrill and Methodeus chose the Greek alphabet as their basis in creating their 'azbuka' (alphabet), as the phonologies of greek and russian are painfully dissimilar. Even after Czar Peter the Great (and later, the Soviets) reformed Cyrillic to get rid of redundancies, they still have 33 letters! I mean, why give the sh-ch sound its own letter when you already have "shah" and "cheh" that could easily be used together?
That they are going from a fixed-width font (courier) to a variable-width font (Times). Columns of numbers, etc. won't line up as nice with Times, especially if the people creating the documents don't know what they are doing.
Brings to mind a certain group of civilians I had to deal with who were employed by the Department of the Army. It was like the bureaucratic equivalent of a "holler" in W.Virgina. They had MS Word, but they treated it like a "TV typewriter" sort of thing. I recall one woman asking if anyone knew how to make stuff line up without twiddling with the space bar and backspace constantly and, before I could say anything about the "Table" menu or other formatting tricks, another woman said "just use the tab key; there's fancy ways to do it in the menus, but they never work". I just finished my wiring job and left.
You might also think about
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
Which clearly means, among other things, that the confederate states were right, they had the right to leave the union.
Oh yes, absolutely. The Civil War was really the first serious assertion of modern federalism. One need not agree with the reasoning of the CSA in choosing to secede to agree that they certainly had the right to do so.
The important lesson is that it doesn't actually matter what a constitution says, whoever controls the biggest army makes the decisions, if they care enough. The Cherokee learned the same lesson when they tried to use the courts against jackson's army.
Indeed. I think Mao said it best: "All power comes from the barrel of a gun". I would, however, prefer that those wishing to trample my rights just go ahead and point the gun at me to do it, rather than torturing and twisting the words of a fairly blunt and simple document to justify their actions.
I don't recall your privacy in a public place in the bill of rights.
9th amendment, friend: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Just because you don't see "right to privacy" in the bill of rights does not mean it doesn't exist. Honestly, if you're going to swear to protect it, you should sit down and really read it through. That's what spurred my interest in it. My drill sergeant in basic training gave us copies of it to read and gave us a couple lectures on the how the constitution came about (all drill sergeants are apparently insane in one way or another). It went over most of my platoon-mates' heads, but I daresay it made a few of us think.
In these cafes, you have a junior high school students sitting across from gang members. The customers have shown they cannot regulate themselves, the businesses have refused to regulate them, so, unfortunately, it has become the government's task.
The government has no right to mandate businesses footing the bill for public safety expenses. If these cafes are such a problem, then station more cops around them. The singling out of a specific type of business is what makes it absurd. A classmate of mine in 10th grade got stabbed to death outside a public fucking swimming pool. A fellow I knew at work got shot outside a bar. Forgive me if I sound callous, but the fucking cafe isn't the reason your friend got shot. People are assaulted and murdered because other people have no respect for the lives of others. Cameras in cyber-cafes won't change that.
Besides, if privacy is the foremost concern in your mind (more important than say, the lives of children),
Children's lives, adults' lives; I don't see why you think there's a difference. I think a good rule is "if (bad event X) happened to an adult rather than a child, would I be so quick to call for (intrusive remedy Y)?" In other words, quit throwing around the "for the children" argument as if there's something extra-special about children-- there isn't. As a parent I understand the feelings one has for one's own children, but I also recognize this as a purposeful biological reaction designed to protect my own progeny. It's not right for me (or, by extension, the government) to mandate others to protect my child at their own expense. You must accept that life is dangerous. Lobbying the government to pass laws to force others to do what you should be taking responsibility for (watching your kids) is just fucking stupid.
"destroy the anonymity that is so essential to free speech. "
Anonymity?
RTFBOR (read the fucking bill of rights)
The first amendment says absolutely nothing about anonymity. It gives you the right to say what you want but you are always able to be held accountable for your actions.
You are confusing the anonymity of the Internet with actual laws. moron.
And you're confusing smug self righteousness for actual knowledge. As I stated in an earlier post, the 9th amendment to the Bill-of-Fucking-Rights (which you so condescendingly tell others to read) states: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." You know what that means? Let me explain it to you: to paraphrase, it says "just because we didn't list it above, doesn't mean the right doesn't exist."
If you knew anything about the history of the US Constitution, you'd know that there was a lot of concern that fuckwits like you would think that the Bill of Rights was an all-inclusive list of our rights. Apparently the concern was well-founded. Take your sanctimonious ersatz-strict-constructionist position and shove it, pal. You're wrong, and don't even know it. (You didn't even have the balls to log in and identify yourself, so I guess I'm wasting my time on another crapsack AC. damn)
Thus we have the age old "right to privacy" that is not explicitly stated anywhere in the consititution
It's not clear where you stand on the issue so this isn't necessarily directed at you, but anyone who thinks a right has to be enumerated in the constitution in order to exist needs to read the 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Paraphrased, this means "just because we didn't list it in Amd1 thru Amd8 above does not mean a right does not exist."
There was a lot of debate over the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. One side felt it was important to put together a "top 10" type list so as to clearly illustrate what they were talking about when they spoke of inalienable rights. The other side felt that if any such list were enumerated, some would interpret this as the whole list of rights and refuse to recognize other rights not enumerated therein. The first group won the debate (obviously), but the second group had a very good point.
It never ceases to infuriate me when people claim "strict constructionism" when denying rights not listed in the Bill of Rights! First, "strict constructionism" has no business being applied to the rights of the people. It's really a philosophy on the limitation of government: basically, it's the notion that if it's not specifically listed in the constitution as one of its powers, then the federal government isn't allowed to do it. In essence, strict constructionalism should be all about the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Unfortunately, it seems to attract the type of lunatics who wail about Roe v. Wade being based on "non-existent rights" because the right to privacy isn't specifically listed in the Bill of Rights! This is unfortunate, because the other side of the debate is the "living document" clowns who read the constitution looking for new interpretations of the role of the federal government in order to extend its reach! What's a wacky libertarian to do?
Slashdot Mirror
Unless it's a computer book...
Or a college textbook. It's particularly annoying when a university class requires, say, the fifth edition of book X, when the only substantive difference between the 5th and 4th editions appears to be inconsequential additions that throw the page numbering so reading and exercise assignment references by the professor^Wgrad student assitant are relevant only to the 5th edition. "No, you can't buy the used 4th edition for $40, you have to get the 5th for $120". Bastards.
BPL interference isn't reallocation of spectrum, it's just interference. It'd be one thing if they were saying "hams move to bands this, that, and TheOther", but they're not. They're just letting BPL walk all over the ham bands. Also, does the public benefit more from Yet Another Broadband Provider than it does from a free, volunteer-run communications system that has proven itself invaluable in emergencies year after year? I think not. This topic has been covered ad infinitum here on /. already.
And, realistically, let's follow the money: there's no money to be made from HAM radio; there's a lot to be made from broadband over powerline.
It's not the FCC's job to maximize corporate profits. If BPL were the ONLY way to get broadband to far flung areas, there might be an argument there but being that there's fiber, wireless, satellite, etc., there's no raitonal justification for steamrolling huge swathes of EM spectrum just so power companies can get in on the ISP game.
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Yeah, and "baud" doesn't mean "bps". Nor does "motor" mean "internal combustion engine". Furthermore, "screw" and "bolt" are not synonymous. Whaddya gonna do? The common man's vernacular must be accepted sometimes.
Verisign swallowed Network Solutions whole four years ago, so Verisign is Network Solutions. This is the same bunch of crackheads that fought the idea of competing registrars. TLD management needs to be managed by a big, wasteful, government funded and/or non-profit entity. I can stand a little inefficiency when it's not a big fat corporate monopoly doing it.
What? No it's not. Reg'lar TV is something like 320x200. Furthermore, HDTV is up to 1920x1080, so whether they "led a drive" to make it 640x480 or not seems fairly irrelevant.
Yeah, anyone basing their business model on selling dialup service is doomed. I think they may have jumped on Time-Warner partly in order to get Time Warner Cable's broadband as a way to continue marketing the AOL name. In some ways it did that, but mostly it looks like it didn't. Personally, I'm astounded by how hard they're pushing the latest AOL dial-ware spam CDs. Dialup is a shrinking market, so I reckon they have to push pretty hard to stay afloat.
They also have a significant presence in southern california. They used to be the worst local service provider, but got knocked down (up?) to second worst when AT&T bought MediaOne Cable and started offering POTS via broadband. I'm stuck on a DSL line my ISP has to lease from Verizon (competition? what's that?) and it keeps crapping out. Plus, while areas served by SBC are offered amazing deals on fast DSL (up to 7000/768 depending on current traffic load, key words "up to") for $59/mo, I'm stuck with a 1500/128 connection (that works intermittently) for $49/mo and my only choice for faster service is $300/mo for a 3000/768 connection. I hate them.
Who will judge which traffic is "worthy"? With your own personal network it's just fine to give VoIP priority, but when it comes to the internet as a whole, you'd need some central authority standing in judgement of traffic to facilitate such a plan. This central authority will inevitably listen to the loudest voices (commerce/industry) and give their traffic highest priority, while "inconsequential" communications, like me FTPing a file to my friend in Russia or you trying to reach a non-commercial personal website of your friend in Cleveland, get marked as low-priority. Eventually, the only traffic that will get through with any reliability will be from "important" corporate and governmental sites. At that point, it's just like fucking TV (pardon my language-- TV bugs me). It's bad enough that DSL and cable up/down bandwidth is so ridiculously asynchronous that you have to pay COMMERCIAL rates if you want to host anything of consequence on your personal machine. That already is them trying to push the internet-as-TV model on us. Traffic prioritizing will just give them another way to screw us.
The one problem is that such a system would require centrally-managed routing. How do you guarantee constant-rate packet flow unless there's a central authority monitoring traffic flow? Adding a priority control layer to IP communications will require someone telling us what priority our traffic may be given, else everyone will just set the checkbox labelled "all traffic priority 1" in their network settings and **poof** the utility is gone. It's bad enough with ICANN and Network Solutions pulling the bullshit they can now, without adding that to the mix. Do you really want those NS clowns (or a totally new bunch of clowns) telling you "Priority 3 is free, but if you want Priority 2 clearance, that'll be $5/megabit; Priority 1 is $25/megabit"?
Heh. I'm gonna try that one next time I'm stuck in a purchasing meeting. I reckon it'll take a long time for them to figure out what I'm talking about, since I am part Chinese.
I call bullshit, because if you were a real manager who had some clue as how to run an IT or IS group you would never ever cut such a deal and even if you would there's no way you could sell it to legal or accounting.
I call bullshit on your bullshit call. Take a walk around (for example) UCLA and see how many Wintel desktop machines you find with the Gateway, IBM, or HP/Compaq name and "Property of UCLA" on them. Exclusive contracts with Dell for desktop machines doesn't lock your R&D department into building a Dell cluster when they want G5's, or make the medical billing department buy a Dell crap server instead of an IBM S/390. Contracts are usually narrow enough in scope to only cover a general set of commodity hardware.
Heh. And here I was thinking it was the being stuck with glob-matching instead of regex's that made the windows command line useless.
Three works better two if you can hand-pick them for some degree of compatibility. Three is worse than any other number if they are thrust upon each other by circumstance (e.g. the three best hardware guys in the company forced to design the guts of the company's new product). Also, this is a space station so they want to keep the crew as small as possible. It may be that four would work better than three, but that would require 33% more supplies (and they say it's expensive to ship food to Hawaii...)
Do you know what dyslexia is? Using "half" instead of "have" isn't it. That's better described as "illiteracy". It is, however, an excusable error for a non-native speaker of english, since the two words veer confusingly close to one another in casual spoken usage. I don't know if the original poster learned english as a second language, but I certainly hope so.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. The second sentence is grammatically damaged. Clarification?
And you keep saying government in broad terms but really it's a matter of city ordinance voted on by the city council, not constitutional law or anything, just like how some cities and municipalities can decide guns are not allowed in their city. Or that you can not carry a weapon in certain establishments, or that if your selling certain goods you need servielance in your store.
No level of government gets carte blanche to violate the US constitution. All laws in the US, be they passed at the federal, state or city level, must pass constitutional muster. The examples you cite aren't proof that cities don't have to abide by the constitution; they are examples of how unconstitutional laws are passed despite their unconstitutionality. Notice how the first two examples you cite are 2nd amendment related. Cities are in violation of the 2nd amendment with those laws. The fact that they are allowed to do so merely illustrates the contempt most jurists have for the 2nd. It's the most wilfully misinterpreted right enumerated in the bill of rights. But I'm not going to go into the politics of constitutional law here. Suffice to say that nothing you've shown so far gives city councils the right to force property owners to spy on their guests at their own expense. If the police came in with a video camera, the business' status as a public forum (still private property; not the same thing as a publicly owned place) would possibly make it permissible (very iffy in a 4th Amd sense), but forcing the owner to do it under penalty of law? No way.
here is my question, answer this if you respond because this is the important one. Why wouldn't you have survielance anyway? Why are you willing to risk lots of damage to machines and stolen items for?
I think you're missing the point of the argument. I'm not saying that cybercafe owners should be prohibited from installing cameras and hiring guards. I'm saying that municipalities are overstepping their authority by forcing them to do it. The right course is the middle course: let the individual business owners decide. It should be neither mandated nor prohibited. The utility of guards and cameras is not my concern, and in the scope of this debate it's irrelevant.
Then again, if the degree of hand tooling and calibration each unit requires is sizable, the R&D involved might not be the big cost. My father worked on one of the Raytheon EKV tests, and each one was hand built. The biggest headache was getting the focusing lens over the IR sensor ground perfectly. Of course, this involved more than just making it geometrically perfect. No, it was worse than that: it had to be ground such that it would compensate for unavoidable minute manufacturing flaws in the IR sensor. They were working on it up to the last minute and (fortunately) it was good enough to work. The funny part was when a general observing the test asked why they couldn't start producing them en masse, and the engineers who worked on the lens practically passed out.
That being your argument, you miss the crucial distinction elsewhere: a cybercafe is not a public place. It's on private property. Whether the public is allowed in to patronize the business or not doesn't affect its status as private property. Look at it this way, if I wanted to open a "Young Communists Lounge" where kids could come and discuss the wit and wisdom of Marx and Engels (yeah, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard too), the government would be way out of line forcing me to install cameras so they could go back and ID patrons if later they suspected one was in on a plot they'd uncovered to overthrow the government. Likewise if it was a Christian Fellowship Hall that the government wanted enforced monitoring of because it suspected "rampant Jesus-ism" was responsible for a recent rash of carjacking. True, as a patron of a cybercafe (or whatever) you have no expectation of privacy because it's private property (albeit a public forum) and your being there is at the sufferance of the property owner. The owner, however has the absolute right to offer privacy in whatever degree he wishes to his patrons. The fact that the city council of Garden Grove only wants the patrons monitored is totally beside the point-- it's private property and they have no business forcing private citizens to spy on their guests solely for the convenience of law enforcement.
Not as many as the latin alphabet, but there's a few (most of them regional variations). One thing I've always found interesting as far a Cyrillic goes is that there isn't so much difference between monospaced and proportional fonts, as the letters are pretty much all "wide"-- no "skinny" letters like "i", "t", or "j" in the latin alphabet*.
* to those who read cyrillic: yes, tvyordi znak and myaki znak look funny monospaced, but I think they should be abolished, as they're not really letters but accent marks. It's unfortunate that Cyrill and Methodeus chose the Greek alphabet as their basis in creating their 'azbuka' (alphabet), as the phonologies of greek and russian are painfully dissimilar. Even after Czar Peter the Great (and later, the Soviets) reformed Cyrillic to get rid of redundancies, they still have 33 letters! I mean, why give the sh-ch sound its own letter when you already have "shah" and "cheh" that could easily be used together?
Brings to mind a certain group of civilians I had to deal with who were employed by the Department of the Army. It was like the bureaucratic equivalent of a "holler" in W.Virgina. They had MS Word, but they treated it like a "TV typewriter" sort of thing. I recall one woman asking if anyone knew how to make stuff line up without twiddling with the space bar and backspace constantly and, before I could say anything about the "Table" menu or other formatting tricks, another woman said "just use the tab key; there's fancy ways to do it in the menus, but they never work". I just finished my wiring job and left.
Oh yes, absolutely. The Civil War was really the first serious assertion of modern federalism. One need not agree with the reasoning of the CSA in choosing to secede to agree that they certainly had the right to do so.
The important lesson is that it doesn't actually matter what a constitution says, whoever controls the biggest army makes the decisions, if they care enough. The Cherokee learned the same lesson when they tried to use the courts against jackson's army.
Indeed. I think Mao said it best: "All power comes from the barrel of a gun". I would, however, prefer that those wishing to trample my rights just go ahead and point the gun at me to do it, rather than torturing and twisting the words of a fairly blunt and simple document to justify their actions.
9th amendment, friend: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Just because you don't see "right to privacy" in the bill of rights does not mean it doesn't exist. Honestly, if you're going to swear to protect it, you should sit down and really read it through. That's what spurred my interest in it. My drill sergeant in basic training gave us copies of it to read and gave us a couple lectures on the how the constitution came about (all drill sergeants are apparently insane in one way or another). It went over most of my platoon-mates' heads, but I daresay it made a few of us think.
The government has no right to mandate businesses footing the bill for public safety expenses. If these cafes are such a problem, then station more cops around them. The singling out of a specific type of business is what makes it absurd. A classmate of mine in 10th grade got stabbed to death outside a public fucking swimming pool. A fellow I knew at work got shot outside a bar. Forgive me if I sound callous, but the fucking cafe isn't the reason your friend got shot. People are assaulted and murdered because other people have no respect for the lives of others. Cameras in cyber-cafes won't change that.
Besides, if privacy is the foremost concern in your mind (more important than say, the lives of children),
Children's lives, adults' lives; I don't see why you think there's a difference. I think a good rule is "if (bad event X) happened to an adult rather than a child, would I be so quick to call for (intrusive remedy Y)?" In other words, quit throwing around the "for the children" argument as if there's something extra-special about children-- there isn't. As a parent I understand the feelings one has for one's own children, but I also recognize this as a purposeful biological reaction designed to protect my own progeny. It's not right for me (or, by extension, the government) to mandate others to protect my child at their own expense. You must accept that life is dangerous. Lobbying the government to pass laws to force others to do what you should be taking responsibility for (watching your kids) is just fucking stupid.
RTFBOR (read the fucking bill of rights)
The first amendment says absolutely nothing about anonymity. It gives you the right to say what you want but you are always able to be held accountable for your actions.
You are confusing the anonymity of the Internet with actual laws. moron.
And you're confusing smug self righteousness for actual knowledge. As I stated in an earlier post, the 9th amendment to the Bill-of-Fucking-Rights (which you so condescendingly tell others to read) states: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people." You know what that means? Let me explain it to you: to paraphrase, it says "just because we didn't list it above, doesn't mean the right doesn't exist."
If you knew anything about the history of the US Constitution, you'd know that there was a lot of concern that fuckwits like you would think that the Bill of Rights was an all-inclusive list of our rights. Apparently the concern was well-founded. Take your sanctimonious ersatz-strict-constructionist position and shove it, pal. You're wrong, and don't even know it.
(You didn't even have the balls to log in and identify yourself, so I guess I'm wasting my time on another crapsack AC. damn)
It's not clear where you stand on the issue so this isn't necessarily directed at you, but anyone who thinks a right has to be enumerated in the constitution in order to exist needs to read the 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Paraphrased, this means "just because we didn't list it in Amd1 thru Amd8 above does not mean a right does not exist."
There was a lot of debate over the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the US Constitution. One side felt it was important to put together a "top 10" type list so as to clearly illustrate what they were talking about when they spoke of inalienable rights. The other side felt that if any such list were enumerated, some would interpret this as the whole list of rights and refuse to recognize other rights not enumerated therein. The first group won the debate (obviously), but the second group had a very good point.
It never ceases to infuriate me when people claim "strict constructionism" when denying rights not listed in the Bill of Rights! First, "strict constructionism" has no business being applied to the rights of the people. It's really a philosophy on the limitation of government: basically, it's the notion that if it's not specifically listed in the constitution as one of its powers, then the federal government isn't allowed to do it. In essence, strict constructionalism should be all about the 10th Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." Unfortunately, it seems to attract the type of lunatics who wail about Roe v. Wade being based on "non-existent rights" because the right to privacy isn't specifically listed in the Bill of Rights! This is unfortunate, because the other side of the debate is the "living document" clowns who read the constitution looking for new interpretations of the role of the federal government in order to extend its reach! What's a wacky libertarian to do?
Sorry. Kinda went off on a rampage there.