Microwave power transmission has been a reality since at least the 60's and is still in use today (just don't get in the way:). See Das Vikipediem for more info. I believe also that Nikolai Tesla did some little work in this area again see El Viki
Don't get me wrong I applaud any technology the size of a dime that can be made for $5 and transmit power safely for our nifty home devices and pacemakers but, due respect to CNN's science guys I ain't about to go out and buy Powercast's stock just yet. Especially since the most common use of bradcast power (the Radarange) nd medical tech (pacemakers) are rumoured not to get along together.
As noted by VoteTrustUSA the Election Assistance Commission's Voluntary Voting Systems Guidelines:
This standard allows 9.2% of all e-voting systems to fail in any 15-hour Election Day, and a much higher failure rate during the extended "Early Voting" periods now being implemented in many states.
It is important to note also that these standards are voluntary and as such are the "upper bound" for the practical rules, and many states ignore them altogether. Few if any exceed the standard, especially when it comes to "failure rates".
This is true! Apparently this rate of failure is fine for the backbone of our democracy.
or those in the slashdot community with any knowledge of who might be making these posts, it is incumbent upon you to bring forward that information. For those in the slashdot community with some sniffing/hacking skills (mine are rusty), have at it deducing who the asswipes are, find them, and report them.
Definitely a bad idea. Vigilantism, as cathartic as it may be is never never a long-term solution. It's often disasterously bad in the short term as well.
In the short term any information collected by such means would be inadmissible in court and probably lead to violations of other laws. Secondly said information may not be that meaningful in the court of public opinion. Coming down like a ton of bricks on abusive people often tends to a) increase their own hatred and willingness to make and carry out threats, and b) drum up some twisted support/sympathy for them.
In the long term it creates a show that adds fuel to the Great Firewall argument of mandatory online id's and registration of posts both to prevent such threats, or at least identify the guilty, and to stop the vigilantes who either break things in the process of their attack or can be painted as being just as destructive as the original threats. At the end of the day all it would be is a turf war between would be online police and the vigilates and the original threats would be ignored.
This is not to say that they shouldn't be vilified. I think that the process of condemning the attackers should also involve condemning the bloggers who started said site and who, by omission or commission, allow the posts to stand and attack. Christ Locke and others must deal with this or they should be sidelined from all future public involvement. It isn't as cathartic in the short term but it is effective.
Given that this will probably lead to hauling people in based upon spotty clues such as gait, fingerprinting them and taking DNA Samples (never to be destroyed) and then prosecuting a handful for "Failure to Obey" or some other nonsense statute thus clogging the courts with stupid cases this ranks more up there with setting someone on fire to see if their innocence will protect them.
The article is right. At best, high-tech CCTV has been used to identify people after the fact, in some cases but has done nothing to deter or prevent crimes.
Actually the suit pictured in the article doesn't look like it would eliminate peripheral vision. In the second image the cut of the "collar" on the suit doesn't look like it would encompass the head. Rather it looks like it would cup the head had an angle with the top part covering the back of the head and tapering down in front of the ears to the neck. While this isn't a full transparent-aluminum bubble it would allow for a greater degree of peripheral vision than present suits assuming that the remaining portion (not shown in the article) would be clear.
So just to follow up. It is not a solution in search of a problem it is a problem that is growing and being grown by many well-funded actors who no longer want net neutrality (but still want common carrier restrictions). The goal now is to put in place a hard Net Neutrality mandate (i.e. one not based on the vote of four or five appointed persons) before Net Neutrality is no longer the status quo.
At this point at least some of the carriers have begun to (apparently) break the rules as they see fit all the while arguing that the rules must be changed in their favor. This is about preventing them from getting their way.
However at least some of the carriers have begun doing two things: a) arguing that Net Neutrality is illogical and inappropriate and that they need to implement biases, and b) implementing biases. Most noteably many users of Vonage and Comcast have seen their service degrade drastically in recent months just after Comcast released its own competing service.
The contract dispute in question seems to center on the use of systems for accessibility, not the purchase of a complete set of new systems. According to The Verifier Massachusetts use a mixture of Central-Count and Precinct-Count optical scanners for their elections with accessible devices for the disabled. That being the case I doubt that Diebold has much of a case.
For those unfamiliar with the dispute AutoMARK is a ballot marking system that allows voters with disabilities to use a touchscreen, keypad, or "binary switch" (sip and puff or gell-pad for people with no hands or little control over said hands say due to parkinson's or stroke) to fill out a printed ballot. The voter's choices are marked on the ballot using an ink that makes them suitable for scanning by any standard optical scanner (including the Diebold and ES&S scanners used in Massachusetts. The advantage of this system is that it enables voters with disabilities to cast the same type of ballot as everyone else thus avoiding the second-class-voter problem.
Diebold has no such device. In juristictions that use Diebold systems for accessibility, voters with disabilities cast their vote on a Diebold AccuVote-TS or TSX, a touchscreen Direct-Recording-Electronic system. Such votes are saved to the machine's internal flash disk and tallied at the end of the night separately from the votes cast on the optical scanners by every other person.
This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, this means deploying two parallel voting systems on election day and tallying them separately. In effect this creates two classes of voters and subjects disabled voters to using a second-tier system. Similarly Diebold has yet to deploy the same range of accessibility features as are available on the AutoMark. For example they have yet to produce a usable "binary-switch" system.
For that reason I find it unlikely that Diebold will win this case because they are selling, quite simply, an inferior product.
IANAL but in my experience, strictly speaking, the judge can't force him to lie. The courts aren't as I understand it in the business of perpetuating a falsehood. Rather the courts can, as instructed by congress order him to keep such matters secret. Whether he does this by lying or by so isolating himself from all of his friends, family, and coworkers that noone asks is up to him. I suppose if someone were to feel that their soul would burn in hell for all eternity if they were to lie they might opt for the latter route, perhaps growing increasingly hostile to all others around them as a way of dissuading questions.
Practically speaking wither choice seems terrible to me but then the people who wrote, passed, and abused this law clearly wanted it that way to make the bad guys suffer.
The catch is, as the War on Drugs (TM) has shown "we" are always the bad guys.
The problem with NASA isn't a lack of efficiency it is a surfeit of "guidance". Unlike many large budgetary bodies (i.e. the DOD) Congress has taken an express delight in "fine-tuning" parts of NASA's budget over the years through specific mandates. Each mandate sets aside some subset of NASA's overall budget for a selected enterprise out of the control of NASA's administrators. In recent years these mandates have grown increasingly diverse and porcine up to and including a NASA run aquarium.
This has also caused problems in terms of long-term projects (i.e. Shuttle replacements) as, despite pleas from NASA, money that is needed over a period of many electoral cycles to fund such research is constantly redirected. The irony of Congress taking the NASA budget for a shuttle replacement away multiple times and at the same time hauling NASA administrators in to grill them over the costly delays has not been lost on anyone.
What this looks like to me is NASA officials being forced to strip monies from one of the few programs they can still control to fully fund another basic long-term mission. A mission which they are expected to meet despite constant budget cuts.
* Even on campus, good WiFi hotspots are few and far between. We need hotspots that permit ssh tunneling, and encryption that works...Cell phones with internet hookups are probably the only option if you are backpacking Mayan ruins...
Yeah, Thinking about the kinds of vacations that I like (long time far travel) this wouldn't work. If however you restricted yourself to day trips or the Mayan ruins located next to the hotspots (i.e. the ones right by the beach and loaded with tourists) then it might work but who wants to see that. In order to make this work and still see something you would probably be flying somewhere, working like mad in some cafe for several days and then heading out for two day trips to the outdoors. But I would still want some longer time in there.
* The home desktop will always be more comfortable, and as a result my files will always be there. Transferring them to the laptop on the fly is a pain when home upload speeds are so terrible with most ISP's
Try using something like a CVS home directory or subversion. If you have the files on the laptop but backup up to the home machine you will also be less vulnerable to sudden laptop error causing all hell as well.
* You lose lots of weight when you are out and about, seeing as how you don't have a home food supply to compel you. A major plus.
Unless you travel to places that encourage good eating (say Germany with the Chocolate) and then spend all your time sitting around waiting for the WIFi to work.
* The public environment can be quite distracting, especially when you know people that always come and speak to you. Try and find a lonely corner, and suddenly finding a power supply and/or internet link can be challenging.
Yeah being popular sucks huh? Schmuck;)
The above of course works for some jobs i.e. those that don't require stable resources, plants, or where the required stable infrastructure (i.e. Servers and a customer base) are handled by someone else who doesn't get to do the travelling. Now, however if you could rotate travel time that would be good.
**1) Portable hand-crank and/or solar powered flashlight. 2) Portable hand-crank and/or solar powered radio.
Of these the first two is indispensable, often ignored but indespensible even if you only use it to find your way to the loo in the middle of the night.
Honestly, this kind of networking is what has happened before as have mass runs on stores and banks of the type described. The only difference is in how the groups are organizing and the speed with which it is happening. And Amen I say. The public does not exist to serve the state or business. Those fat bastards exist to serve us!
According to the folloup article the couple had been e-mailing the officer about the event and he states that his claim of stalking (which he has now withdrawn) was based upon that. Indeed in that article he claims that his goal was simply to force them to stop sending e-mails. Repeated e-mails may in fact lead to the "pattern of behavior" being shown. Additionally the content of said e-mails may indeed establish intimidation but it would still be difficult to claim that a couple repeatedly sending complaints should intimidate a uniformed, and armed, officer of the law.
IMHO this seems to be a mishandled case that spun out of control. The local chief should have just fined the cop and called it good. Threatening them with stalking, which I agree probably wouldn't hold up in court, only made a bad situation worse.
I care a great deal but I am by no means as optimistic as you. I for one have seen people who once had kids in school or who even have kids in school at present bitch and whine about taxes and assume that schools mus "just be wasting money" so they are thrilled when the budget is reduced. Worse yet I've seen morons get elected to school boards on the promise to "lower taxes by running schools like a business" morons with children mind you. Their solution was to make the grade schoolers pay a fee for each piece of paper they use. If they forgot to show up without the necessary money for paper too fucking bad.
Telling a fucking seven year old that they can't draw pictures with the other kids because Mommy and Daddy are too poor is just plain wrong for the richest society on the planet.
In many cases the teachers already having their salaries cut were being forced to also pay for materials like Glue and Scissors because the school no longer was willing to supply them in an effort to cut expenditures at the taxpayers demand.
So no it isn't waste and it isn't just mystical budgeting. It is people people with kids standing up and taking exactly the road I lay out here time and time again.
Unfortunately many people are just fucking stupid.
Not to be too snarky or anything but while the democrats may have been in control of Congress during those times spending is also affected by the executive branch. I seem to Remember that Regan (or at least his people) took to it heavily and managed to increase the overall size and scope of the federal government by putting additional monies into defense (contracts for people like Haliburton) and things like the DEA while cutting funding for many other social-serivice agencies.
At no time has any Republican president or Congressperson (to my knowledge) actually sought to reduce the size of the Federal Government. They have spoken about it but they have always, ultimately increased "their" favorite parts of the beuraucracy at the expense of others. Over time, irrespective of the party in or out of power the size has always monotonically increased.
We've already seen cash-strapped schools include video advertisements disguised as "Current Affairs". Other schools have formed deals with Pepsi and Coke that require them to consume so much per week in order to maintain the support for school lunches (yes the students do get fat). So yes, I could definitely see a cash-strapped school taking a sweetheart deal with Microsoft to get modern machines provided their students watch so much web advertising. Such things are typically welcomed by people who want to cut taxes and "Run Schools Like a Business".
After all, as long as taxes are lowered who cares?
My first reaction was "Good because wading through terrabytes of useless data will really help win the war on terrer!" However on sober reflection I realize that the very technical infeasability of this is part and parcel of the problem.
For those of you that haven't seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil you must it is an essential requirement for anyone who would just react with the snarkiness I mentioned above.
They can't parse all of that data. A single major ISP on a single day would generate terrabytes of data if everything was logged. In that event any actual law enforcement methods would be swamped by the sheer beureucratic waste of it all. Massive computer systems performing continuous number crunching would still come up with garbage.
But that doesn't matter!
It isn't necessary for this to work. What is necessary is for them to make people perceive that it works at least enough to get it put in place. At that point the system becomes self feeding. Don't like it, well that can get you put on the short list for a check of your habits. Because they can look at a single person's habits, they may be wrong but they can and will do it. But in general the system will be a large self-feeding monstrosoty and any "errors", because there are always errors will be dealt with in the same way that the no-fly-list errors are handled: "not my department, next please!"
Eventually success of this process ceases to be the object only its continuation. Once a large enough beureucracy is established staffed with enough place-men and place-seekers to protect themselves then this will take over. Consider the Drug war as an example. Yes it hasn't hit full steam but think of ho many things today are justified by means of the "Drug War". And take a look at the way justifications for the war are handled. Money for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (led by America's Drug Czar) is spent convincing us to back the drug war or not to vote for legalization. In turn the DEA's budget (paying America's Drug Czar) goes up and who the hell cares if the drugs are stopped. And they aren't even fighting "Terrorists".
In many respects it reminds me of East Germany. At the height of their power the East German Stasi employed one in fifty members of the population as full or part-time spies. This doesn't count the large beureucratic staff that they had or the massive infrastructure that was built and run just to sort through it all. The social costs were enormous as any infraction was targeted for no good reason. The economic costs in turn were insane and deprived the state budget of much of the money that might have been spent say building an infrastructure or feeding the population. No nation on earth had more complete information on its citizens and no nation on earth spent more obtaining it.
Ultimately crime was still committed and even the dissident groups grew because they a) hated the government that much, b) were often flooded with spies sent in by the Stasi, and c) could get away with it. None of the objectives of the Stasi were acheived and East Germany fell, it fell and noone misses it.
This "Law and Order" bull must be stopped, and it must be stopped now! We cannot sit back and think that this is okay or that it will "work its way out. Those of us with a technical mindset are in the best position to explain why this will not work and what a costly destructive system this will be, and we cannot put it off.
For those in the U.S. go Here to find your house rep and place a phone call or send a letter. Then for good measure go Here and tell the Senate not to go there either. Following that try sending a letter to you local paper's letters to the editor. While many of us no longer read the dead-tree press it can and will make a big impact for those that do (read: most people over 35).
That is a very good point. It would be interesting to see how the licencing differs and how it has changed over time. I suspect that in American Television the trend is much more mixed. In the early days of TV there were many independent studios producing shows alongside the larger network studios. While many of those players are gone I suspect that others have taken their place.
Save that now VOA News is available online. But even when it wasn't I don't see that as a flaw seeing as how the VOA news was provided free of charge when asked for not later "resold" to other news companies.
NBC is entirely a private enterprise that (in theory) compensates the public for use of its airspace adequatly via the licences for it's broadcast spectrum (read the in theory before you flame me). As such they have something of a leg to stand on when they claim private ownership and the attractions of DRM for their crap... er... shows.
Anyway, the BBC is (at least on paper) a public enterprise oned (in heory) by the British Public and paid for via the TV Tax. Much like the Voice of America is a service funded by the American Public. As such shouldn't the content produced by the Beeb be freely available (at least to the Brits, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish) for them to do with as they please? Didn't they pay to have it made and as such "own" it?
Or is this one of those cases where the drive to resell said content (say on BBC-America or via deals with other channels, or on DVD) that was supposed to "offset costs" now driving availability?
Slashdot Mirror
Microwave power transmission has been a reality since at least the 60's and is still in use today (just don't get in the way :). See Das Vikipediem for more info. I believe also that Nikolai Tesla did some little work in this area again see El Viki
Don't get me wrong I applaud any technology the size of a dime that can be made for $5 and transmit power safely for our nifty home devices and pacemakers but, due respect to CNN's science guys I ain't about to go out and buy Powercast's stock just yet. Especially since the most common use of bradcast power (the Radarange) nd medical tech (pacemakers) are rumoured not to get along together.
It is important to note also that these standards are voluntary and as such are the "upper bound" for the practical rules, and many states ignore them altogether. Few if any exceed the standard, especially when it comes to "failure rates".
This is true! Apparently this rate of failure is fine for the backbone of our democracy.
Ahh but thanks to the intervention of well-paid lobbyists Federal standards make 10% an "acceptable rate of failure" for an election.
No no, not citizen, subject. England has no constitution, only a queen.
Definitely a bad idea. Vigilantism, as cathartic as it may be is never never a long-term solution. It's often disasterously bad in the short term as well.
In the short term any information collected by such means would be inadmissible in court and probably lead to violations of other laws. Secondly said information may not be that meaningful in the court of public opinion. Coming down like a ton of bricks on abusive people often tends to a) increase their own hatred and willingness to make and carry out threats, and b) drum up some twisted support/sympathy for them.
In the long term it creates a show that adds fuel to the Great Firewall argument of mandatory online id's and
registration of posts both to prevent such threats, or at least identify the guilty, and to stop the vigilantes who either break things in the process of their attack or can be painted as being just as destructive as the original threats. At the end of the day all it would be is a turf war between would be online police and the vigilates and the original threats would be ignored.
This is not to say that they shouldn't be vilified. I think that the process of condemning the attackers should also involve condemning the bloggers who started said site and who, by omission or commission, allow the posts to stand and attack. Christ Locke and others must deal with this or they should be sidelined from all future public involvement. It isn't as cathartic in the short term but it is effective.
Given that this will probably lead to hauling people in based upon spotty clues such as gait, fingerprinting them and taking DNA Samples (never to be destroyed) and then prosecuting a handful for "Failure to Obey" or some other nonsense statute thus clogging the courts with stupid cases this ranks more up there with setting someone on fire to see if their innocence will protect them.
The article is right. At best, high-tech CCTV has been used to identify people after the fact, in some cases but has done nothing to deter or prevent crimes.
Actually the suit pictured in the article doesn't look like it would eliminate peripheral vision. In the second image the cut of the "collar" on the suit doesn't look like it would encompass the head. Rather it looks like it would cup the head had an angle with the top part covering the back of the head and tapering down in front of the ears to the neck. While this isn't a full transparent-aluminum bubble it would allow for a greater degree of peripheral vision than present suits assuming that the remaining portion (not shown in the article) would be clear.
So just to follow up. It is not a solution in search of a problem it is a problem that is growing and being grown by many well-funded actors who no longer want net neutrality (but still want common carrier restrictions). The goal now is to put in place a hard Net Neutrality mandate (i.e. one not based on the vote of four or five appointed persons) before Net Neutrality is no longer the status quo.
At this point at least some of the carriers have begun to (apparently) break the rules as they see fit all the while arguing that the rules must be changed in their favor. This is about preventing them from getting their way.
However at least some of the carriers have begun doing two things: a) arguing that Net Neutrality is illogical and inappropriate and that they need to implement biases, and b) implementing biases. Most noteably many users of Vonage and Comcast have seen their service degrade drastically in recent months just after Comcast released its own competing service.
The contract dispute in question seems to center on the use of systems for accessibility, not the purchase of a complete set of new systems. According to The Verifier Massachusetts use a mixture of Central-Count and Precinct-Count optical scanners for their elections with accessible devices for the disabled. That being the case I doubt that Diebold has much of a case.
For those unfamiliar with the dispute AutoMARK is a ballot marking system that allows voters with disabilities to use a touchscreen, keypad, or "binary switch" (sip and puff or gell-pad for people with no hands or little control over said hands say due to parkinson's or stroke) to fill out a printed ballot. The voter's choices are marked on the ballot using an ink that makes them suitable for scanning by any standard optical scanner (including the Diebold and ES&S scanners used in Massachusetts. The advantage of this system is that it enables voters with disabilities to cast the same type of ballot as everyone else thus avoiding the second-class-voter problem.
Diebold has no such device. In juristictions that use Diebold systems for accessibility, voters with disabilities cast their vote on a Diebold AccuVote-TS or TSX, a touchscreen Direct-Recording-Electronic system. Such votes are saved to the machine's internal flash disk and tallied at the end of the night separately from the votes cast on the optical scanners by every other person.
This is problematic for two reasons. Firstly, this means deploying two parallel voting systems on election day and tallying them separately. In effect this creates two classes of voters and subjects disabled voters to using a second-tier system. Similarly Diebold has yet to deploy the same range of accessibility features as are available on the AutoMark. For example they have yet to produce a usable "binary-switch" system.
For that reason I find it unlikely that Diebold will win this case because they are selling, quite simply, an inferior product.
IANAL but in my experience, strictly speaking, the judge can't force him to lie. The courts aren't as I understand it in the business of perpetuating a falsehood. Rather the courts can, as instructed by congress order him to keep such matters secret. Whether he does this by lying or by so isolating himself from all of his friends, family, and coworkers that noone asks is up to him. I suppose if someone were to feel that their soul would burn in hell for all eternity if they were to lie they might opt for the latter route, perhaps growing increasingly hostile to all others around them as a way of dissuading questions.
Practically speaking wither choice seems terrible to me but then the people who wrote, passed, and abused this law clearly wanted it that way to make the bad guys suffer.
The catch is, as the War on Drugs (TM) has shown "we" are always the bad guys.
The problem with NASA isn't a lack of efficiency it is a surfeit of "guidance". Unlike many large budgetary bodies (i.e. the DOD) Congress has taken an express delight in "fine-tuning" parts of NASA's budget over the years through specific mandates. Each mandate sets aside some subset of NASA's overall budget for a selected enterprise out of the control of NASA's administrators. In recent years these mandates have grown increasingly diverse and porcine up to and including a NASA run aquarium.
This has also caused problems in terms of long-term projects (i.e. Shuttle replacements) as, despite pleas from NASA, money that is needed over a period of many electoral cycles to fund such research is constantly redirected. The irony of Congress taking the NASA budget for a shuttle replacement away multiple times and at the same time hauling NASA administrators in to grill them over the costly delays has not been lost on anyone.
What this looks like to me is NASA officials being forced to strip monies from one of the few programs they can still control to fully fund another basic long-term mission. A mission which they are expected to meet despite constant budget cuts.
Thanks.
Is anyone else getting a "Connection Refused" reply when going to "www.peacefire.org"?
Try here or here to start.
Yeah, Thinking about the kinds of vacations that I like (long time far travel) this wouldn't work. If however you restricted yourself to day trips or the Mayan ruins located next to the hotspots (i.e. the ones right by the beach and loaded with tourists) then it might work but who wants to see that. In order to make this work and still see something you would probably be flying somewhere, working like mad in some cafe for several days and then heading out for two day trips to the outdoors. But I would still want some longer time in there.
Try using something like a CVS home directory or subversion. If you have the files on the laptop but backup up to the home machine you will also be less vulnerable to sudden laptop error causing all hell as well.
Unless you travel to places that encourage good eating (say Germany with the Chocolate) and then spend all your time sitting around waiting for the WIFi to work.
Yeah being popular sucks huh? Schmuck
The above of course works for some jobs i.e. those that don't require stable resources, plants, or where the required stable infrastructure (i.e. Servers and a customer base) are handled by someone else who doesn't get to do the travelling. Now, however if you could rotate travel time that would be good.
**1) Portable hand-crank and/or solar powered flashlight.
2) Portable hand-crank and/or solar powered radio.
Of these the first two is indispensable, often ignored but indespensible even if you only use it to find your way to the loo in the middle of the night.
Honestly, this kind of networking is what has happened before as have mass runs on stores and banks of the type described. The only difference is in how the groups are organizing and the speed with which it is happening. And Amen I say. The public does not exist to serve the state or business. Those fat bastards exist to serve us!
According to the folloup article the couple had been e-mailing the officer about the event and he states that his claim of stalking (which he has now withdrawn) was based upon that. Indeed in that article he claims that his goal was simply to force them to stop sending e-mails. Repeated e-mails may in fact lead to the "pattern of behavior" being shown. Additionally the content of said e-mails may indeed establish intimidation but it would still be difficult to claim that a couple repeatedly sending complaints should intimidate a uniformed, and armed, officer of the law.
IMHO this seems to be a mishandled case that spun out of control. The local chief should have just fined the cop and called it good. Threatening them with stalking, which I agree probably wouldn't hold up in court, only made a bad situation worse.
I care a great deal but I am by no means as optimistic as you. I for one have seen people who once had kids in school or who even have kids in school at present bitch and whine about taxes and assume that schools mus "just be wasting money" so they are thrilled when the budget is reduced. Worse yet I've seen morons get elected to school boards on the promise to "lower taxes by running schools like a business" morons with children mind you. Their solution was to make the grade schoolers pay a fee for each piece of paper they use. If they forgot to show up without the necessary money for paper too fucking bad.
Telling a fucking seven year old that they can't draw pictures with the other kids because Mommy and Daddy are too poor is just plain wrong for the richest society on the planet.
In many cases the teachers already having their salaries cut were being forced to also pay for materials like Glue and Scissors because the school no longer was willing to supply them in an effort to cut expenditures at the taxpayers demand.
So no it isn't waste and it isn't just mystical budgeting. It is people people with kids standing up and taking exactly the road I lay out here time and time again.
Unfortunately many people are just fucking stupid.
Not to be too snarky or anything but while the democrats may have been in control of Congress during those times spending is also affected by the executive branch. I seem to Remember that Regan (or at least his people) took to it heavily and managed to increase the overall size and scope of the federal government by putting additional monies into defense (contracts for people like Haliburton) and things like the DEA while cutting funding for many other social-serivice agencies.
At no time has any Republican president or Congressperson (to my knowledge) actually sought to reduce the size of the Federal Government. They have spoken about it but they have always, ultimately increased "their" favorite parts of the beuraucracy at the expense of others. Over time, irrespective of the party in or out of power the size has always monotonically increased.
We've already seen cash-strapped schools include video advertisements disguised as "Current Affairs". Other schools have formed deals with Pepsi and Coke that require them to consume so much per week in order to maintain the support for school lunches (yes the students do get fat). So yes, I could definitely see a cash-strapped school taking a sweetheart deal with Microsoft to get modern machines provided their students watch so much web advertising. Such things are typically welcomed by people who want to cut taxes and "Run Schools Like a Business".
After all, as long as taxes are lowered who cares?
My first reaction was "Good because wading through terrabytes of useless data will really help win the war on terrer!" However on sober reflection I realize that the very technical infeasability of this is part and parcel of the problem.
For those of you that haven't seen Terry Gilliam's Brazil you must it is an essential requirement for anyone who would just react with the snarkiness I mentioned above.
They can't parse all of that data. A single major ISP on a single day would generate terrabytes of data if everything was logged. In that event any actual law enforcement methods would be swamped by the sheer beureucratic waste of it all. Massive computer systems performing continuous number crunching would still come up with garbage.
But that doesn't matter!
It isn't necessary for this to work. What is necessary is for them to make people perceive that it works at least enough to get it put in place. At that point the system becomes self feeding. Don't like it, well that can get you put on the short list for a check of your habits. Because they can look at a single person's habits, they may be wrong but they can and will do it. But in general the system will be a large self-feeding monstrosoty and any "errors", because there are always errors will be dealt with in the same way that the no-fly-list errors are handled: "not my department, next please!"
Eventually success of this process ceases to be the object only its continuation. Once a large enough beureucracy is established staffed with enough place-men and place-seekers to protect themselves then this will take over. Consider the Drug war as an example. Yes it hasn't hit full steam but think of ho many things today are justified by means of the "Drug War". And take a look at the way justifications for the war are handled. Money for the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (led by America's Drug Czar) is spent convincing us to back the drug war or not to vote for legalization. In turn the DEA's budget (paying America's Drug Czar) goes up and who the hell cares if the drugs are stopped. And they aren't even fighting "Terrorists".
In many respects it reminds me of East Germany. At the height of their power the East German Stasi employed one in fifty members of the population as full or part-time spies. This doesn't count the large beureucratic staff that they had or the massive infrastructure that was built and run just to sort through it all. The social costs were enormous as any infraction was targeted for no good reason. The economic costs in turn were insane and deprived the state budget of much of the money that might have been spent say building an infrastructure or feeding the population. No nation on earth had more complete information on its citizens and no nation on earth spent more obtaining it.
Ultimately crime was still committed and even the dissident groups grew because they a) hated the government that much, b) were often flooded with spies sent in by the Stasi, and c) could get away with it. None of the objectives of the Stasi were acheived and East Germany fell, it fell and noone misses it.
This "Law and Order" bull must be stopped, and it must be stopped now! We cannot sit back and think that this is okay or that it will "work its way out. Those of us with a technical mindset are in the best position to explain why this will not work and what a costly destructive system this will be, and we cannot put it off.
For those in the U.S. go Here to find your house rep and place a phone call or send a letter. Then for good measure go Here and tell the Senate not to go there either. Following that try sending a letter to you local paper's letters to the editor. While many of us no longer read the dead-tree press it can and will make a big impact for those that do (read: most people over 35).
That is a very good point. It would be interesting to see how the licencing differs and how it has changed over time. I suspect that in American Television the trend is much more mixed. In the early days of TV there were many independent studios producing shows alongside the larger network studios. While many of those players are gone I suspect that others have taken their place.
Save that now VOA News is available online. But even when it wasn't I don't see that as a flaw seeing as how the VOA news was provided free of charge when asked for not later "resold" to other news companies.
NBC is entirely a private enterprise that (in theory) compensates the public for use of its airspace adequatly via the licences for it's broadcast spectrum (read the in theory before you flame me). As such they have something of a leg to stand on when they claim private ownership and the attractions of DRM for their crap... er ... shows.
Anyway, the BBC is (at least on paper) a public enterprise oned (in heory) by the British Public and paid for via the TV Tax. Much like the Voice of America is a service funded by the American Public. As such shouldn't the content produced by the Beeb be freely available (at least to the Brits, Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish) for them to do with as they please? Didn't they pay to have it made and as such "own" it?
Or is this one of those cases where the drive to resell said content (say on BBC-America or via deals with other channels, or on DVD) that was supposed to "offset costs" now driving availability?