It's bad enough that some kook at the Washington Times twisted some mild interest shown by the DHS in a restraining device into a government conspiracy to fit every passenger with a shock collar. It's bad enough when someone submits the editorial to Slashdot without checking any facts.
Now I'm reading posts speculating on cost to implement, IT security of the system that will be put into place, and complications for passengers with pacemakers. Even though the original supposition is false, you've invented this reality where you'd really jack things up by putting your mad hacking skillz to work. Really.
Read the DHS letter referenced by the op-ed piece. You will not only do a disservice to the authors (who bank on sheeple accepting what they write as spoon-fed truth), but you will also realize that there is no plan to outfit air travelers with shock collars. The DHS official expresses interest in adopting the technology for detainee management. He makes the mistake of including possible applications in the air travel area (likely to manage detainees in airports or on passenger flights). From this, these authors spin up a pretty good tale of science fiction, where a government organization spends several billion dollars per year on a nefarious plot to put dog collars on airline passengers. Wait, what?
Any discussion further down this train of thought is the worst kind of mental masturbation. We may as well discuss how to cause chaos on the Enterprise by hacking into its computer and initiating a self-destruct sequence, or rigging the transporter to reassemble people inside out. That has about as much of a tie to reality as this discussion.
That's what bugs me about the article referenced by this topic, as well as the headline of this particular Slashdot item. It's rampant speculation, and unrealistic at that. With over 2 million air travelers per day domestically alone, there's no way such a scheme would be given any consideration.
Doesn't stop Lamperd from dreaming, though. They seem like a boiler-room type penny stock company, so I'd love to see the way they're spinning this mild interest from DHS to their investors. "They want to put one of these on every person in every airport. We're a billion dollar business!!!!"
--Having it on paying air passengers is "conceivable"--> this is the sticking point for most of the./ discussion. It is outrageous, insane, and fascist. It is not, however, close to reality (yet).
Were that the only possible application of the device in an air passenger context, then one could interpret the statement made in the letter ("In addition, it is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes") to mean putting shock collars on passengers. However, that is highly unlikely what the DHS official means, especially considering the rest of his response focuses on the detention and transportation of bad guys. It's much more likely that DHS is interested in using such a device to detain ne'er-do-wells on a plane or in an airport.
Think about it... outfitting every air passenger is just not feasible, neither from a cost perspective nor from a PR perspective. The tinfoil hat crowd will insist otherwise, but I don't believe the notion of collaring passengers was even entertained by anyone at the agency.
There are no "plans for the device" on the part of DHS. The idea for outfitting passengers has originated from the company trying to sell them, Lamperd FTS. Why? Because selling tens of millions of these bad boys is a lot more exciting to the business than selling a few thousand.
By reading the response from the DHS (http://www.lamperdlesslethal.com/news/upload/pg1HomelandSecurity7_06.pdf) you'll see exactly what they think of the idea. DHS asks for a written proposal, and outlines the areas of interest for them, which are almost solely around prisoner detention and transport. The official also finds it "conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes," but the tone of the letter effectively takes Lamperd's pie in the sky multi-billion dollar contract off the table. Lamperd sends DHS a brochure with their cockamamie idea, DHS responds saying "we can see how you got there. Now here's how *we* would use it, so send us a proposal that focuses on our needs."
That's it. End of story. Yet some kook at the Washington Times puts two and two together and gets ZOMG THE BUSHNAZIS WANT TO PUT SHOCK COLLARS ON US!!!11!!!!ONE!!1!!
Actually, you're comparing the purchase of a single apple to the purchase of a railcar full of apples. If you buy a railcar full of apples, sure, you will spend a fraction per apple of what you'd spend in a grocery store. But you are committing to buying all those apples. You don't get to return the unused portion to your commodities broker.
Same goes for your T1 metaphor. You're committing to buying a bunch of bandwidth, so you get a better marginal rate. But your provider doesn't send you a refund each month for your unused kilobytes. You commit to a usage minimum, and that's why you get it at such a low marginal rate. I'm pretty sure if you were to commit a $600 monthly nut to Verizon, you'd get unlimited calls, data, texting, and whatever else of their services you wanted.
Some may not remember, but the era from the late 40s through most of the 50s was known as the "Baby Boom." Fertility rate during that time remains unequaled in US history. As a result, we've got quite a lot of people in this country who are over the age of 50. We can probably expect the targets of many products and services, not just television, to skew much older in the coming years.
We're not in wartime. There has been no legal declaration of war, and hence no legal use of wartime powers. Our troops are conducting operations under the orders of the Commander in Chief, not because a war was declared. Saying "I wasn't in a fight, I was just exchanging punches with another guy" does not mean you weren't in a fight.
We are supposed to be better than our enemies. We are supposed to uphold the ideals of our Consitution. No, we're supposed to be better at killing our enemies than they are at killing us. What part of the Constitution was FDR upholding when he interred over 100,000 citizens against their will? Or when he made bombing civilian targets in Germany part of US doctrine? Or when Truman authorized the deployment of not one, but two atomic weapons?
To borrow from another quote, "war is Hell." Like it or not, we're in a state of war. The "police action" technicality is a convenience purported by those who want decisive action, but want to keep it from being too decisive (and coincidentally reap the political capital that follows).
Leaks are more an aesthetic problem than an environmental one. Oil is a food source, and takes its place at the bottom of the food chain. Look in the mountains of southern California for evidence -- there are naturally occurring oil streams coming out of the mountains there.
In an oil spill, the only animals that experience significant, nearly irreparable harm are birds. And they're pretty fragile as it is.
You suggest the "natural world" should forever be a snapshot of when you first noticed it. An environment is not an entity of its own accord. It is a result of all its inputs, and we are a very large input on the environment. The only difference between us and other inputs is our self-awareness.
The impact we have on the "natural world" becomes part of that world. Are there not birds, rats, cockroaches, etc. that thrive on the fruits of human progress? What makes them less important than the flora and fauna in a tropical rainforest?
Actually, that's not true. It would have been pathetically easy to deposit extra votes in the ballot box without anyone noticing.
It is fallacious to think we can have a foolproof voting system. And those who complain the loudest will never be satisfied. Use paper voting, and there is outcry of fraud, ballot box stuffing, etc. Move to computer voting, and there is still outcry of fraud, ballot box stuffing, etc. If a paper trail is added, suddenly they're tracking who votes for whom. There's no winning. In fact, it doesn't even get any better -- make a Venn diagram of the complainants in each of those three scenarios, and I guarantee you it pretty much looks like one thick circle.
We just have to trust that most poll workers are civically responsible, and are doing their best to mitigate fraud. Anyone who doesn't think that is the case in his precinct is more than welcome to step away from his busy day of posting on Slashdot and volunteer to work the polls. That's a little more work than writing snarky message board comments, however.
I don't find one OS to be more capable than the other on the desktop. You mention disc burning and ISO mounting, but neither is part of the operating system. Although there are nicer tools for image mounting available for Linux and Unix OS's.
I'm actually the opposite of the author. I've completely dumped Microsoft products at home (save for the Xbox 360) in favor of Mac and Ubuntu. At work we're a Microsoft shop. I'd prefer open source, but quite honestly where Microsoft has us is with their development tools and the.NET framework.
Server admins haven't needed to be co-located with the physical servers since the dawn of IP KVMs and Lantronix boxes. Virtualization makes management much easier, and multi-cores mean a smaller footprint, but this is nothing that is earth-shattering by any means.
For many, if not most, organizations, portability provides very little value. If I'm running a public website, it is unlikely I will swap out OS and web server platforms at will, and even more unlikely I will run some kind of heterogeneous environment. If I'm marketing commercial software, I'm likely to either pick a supported OS platform for a rich application, or market the software as a service and access the services through thin clients (either web or simple GUI applications). Either way, I'm not looking to find a 100% portable language. First, it doesn't exist, and a 90% portable language doesn't do me much better than one that is not portable at all.
Think the fourth consideration should instead be the agility of the language. How easy is it to write code orthogonally? Is there a convenient facility for writing unit and integration tests? Can builds and testing be easily automated?.NET is a real standout with this consideration. Java and RoR are also top players. With these platforms, you can easily maintain a codebase of high quality. As software systems grow in complexity, and with software development trending toward more agile methodologies, stability and regression testing become more important.
In fact, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this mentioned at all in this discussion.
If VueStar is smart, they'll send out invoices, take payment from who will pay, and avoid pursuit of those who won't.
Any court action would likely vacate this patent. Even if no prior art is found, it fails the tests of novelty and obviousness.
There is nothing novel about these claims, as the solution to the problem of attaching clickable images to search results is no different than having dynamic clickable image buttons. It is an obvious invention because anyone skilled in the art of basic web scripting could come up with this "invention" independently in less than a work day.
There will be people who pay the invoice -- any business in the process of being acquired or funded may find it worth the $5k to not have the risk of a patent infringement suit floating around out there. This is what VueStar is counting on, and this will be a decent windfall for them, as blatantly as they're trolling.
This is an excellent point. Any situation will bear golden opportunity for some. For every period of expansion, there will always be some period of recession that follows. During the expansion time, you see innovation in "newsworthy" areas -- new, cutting edge products that are years out from being monetized. During recession periods, the innovation shifts to less exciting areas -- efficiency improvements, etc.
Look at the paid search space. It was most likely an inevitability that the market would gravitate toward a pay-per-click model. Make no mistake about it, though -- the dot com crash greatly contributed to that industry's meteoric rise. Because of the bad taste left by the dot com bubble, ad dollars shifted to services where payment could be directly tied to performance.
Actually, I would call it aligning the requirements of professionals in the real estate industry with those in the finance industry.
This is no different than what is required of anyone who works in trading securities, from people on the floor of the stock exchange to minimum wage desk brokers at discount brokerages.
What do you mean by "modernization," exactly? For at least 25 years, since I was in Catholic grade school, evolution has been taught. At that time, doctrine was that Genesis and many of the other Old Testament books were allegorical, and not meant to be regarded as factual. People are only surprised by these stories because they lump the Catholic church in with the holy rollers who think the universe is only 6,000 years old and science is a trick of Satan to lure unsuspecting souls into the lake of fire.
I don't know how but I would hope responsible citizens would wake the fuck up and start to see the actual machinery of a police state for what it is.
See, that's where you are mistaken. There are very few citizens left in the Miami area, and almost none in the city of Miami. So it's a police state over a bunch of foreign nationals. Big deal.
Many enterprise providers still have this same kind of "pay for what you use" pricing model. EMC does this as well. They'll send you a SAN filled to the max with drives. When you need more, they come unlock more.
What I don't get is how people think this is a bad idea, or that the customer is somehow getting screwed. If you max out your space and need to add LUNs to your storage array, it's a costly endeavor that involves backing up all your data and rebuilding the SAN. If you buy the biggest SAN you can, you're paying quite a lot of money for quite a lot of empty storage. The subscription pricing model solves these economic inefficiencies.
Why not just take your laptop home with you? Your company sprung for the laptop so you'd have the benefit of portability, so it seems sensible to take advantage of that nifty little feature every day. No longer will you have to remote into your machine -- you instead have it right there with you! (btw, laptops weren't designed to run 24/7, so you'd be doing your machine a favor) And you foil the plans of would-be thieves by taking away their intended target.
I know it's a trifle inconvenient, and you seem to be pretty inconvenience-averse. But instead of designing the Fort Knox of laptop security enclosures, maybe it's time to sack up and lug that extra 5 pounds around with you.
It's nice that you're so culturally sensitive and all, but I have news for you: It's the cleaning crew who was doing the stealing.
I worked on the maintenance staff of a large office building throughout college. One job we had was to install hidden cameras in areas where there were problems reported by tenants, problems being chronic theft. In the nearly 100 instances we did this, all were members of the cleaning crew.
There are plenty of instances where it makes plenty of sense to not evaluate new products as they are released. If you barely use some product, I would suggest that it makes no sense at all to evaluate alternatives. It's simply not worth your time.
The example you cite proves that point. Visual Studio is a tool of your trade, or at least a tool you use in pursuit of a hobby. This means it holds importance to you, that you have a greater-than-average interest in what the product has to offer. Conversely, I have a set of sockets (and socket wrenches) at home. I went to Sears and bought the first set I saw. In the next five years, socket wrench technology could improve dramatically, with newer alloys for the sockets, better bearings for the wrenches, etc. I so seldom have use for those tools, it would make no difference to me. Even if Sears were to offer a one-for-one trade, it would not be worth my time to do it.
This is not a fear of change. It is a rational decision. If an item provides little utility to you, there is no amount of innovation that will make it worth your while to reevaluate.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just getting ridiculous...
It's bad enough that some kook at the Washington Times twisted some mild interest shown by the DHS in a restraining device into a government conspiracy to fit every passenger with a shock collar. It's bad enough when someone submits the editorial to Slashdot without checking any facts.
Now I'm reading posts speculating on cost to implement, IT security of the system that will be put into place, and complications for passengers with pacemakers. Even though the original supposition is false, you've invented this reality where you'd really jack things up by putting your mad hacking skillz to work. Really.
Read the DHS letter referenced by the op-ed piece. You will not only do a disservice to the authors (who bank on sheeple accepting what they write as spoon-fed truth), but you will also realize that there is no plan to outfit air travelers with shock collars. The DHS official expresses interest in adopting the technology for detainee management. He makes the mistake of including possible applications in the air travel area (likely to manage detainees in airports or on passenger flights). From this, these authors spin up a pretty good tale of science fiction, where a government organization spends several billion dollars per year on a nefarious plot to put dog collars on airline passengers. Wait, what?
Any discussion further down this train of thought is the worst kind of mental masturbation. We may as well discuss how to cause chaos on the Enterprise by hacking into its computer and initiating a self-destruct sequence, or rigging the transporter to reassemble people inside out. That has about as much of a tie to reality as this discussion.
That's what bugs me about the article referenced by this topic, as well as the headline of this particular Slashdot item. It's rampant speculation, and unrealistic at that. With over 2 million air travelers per day domestically alone, there's no way such a scheme would be given any consideration.
Doesn't stop Lamperd from dreaming, though. They seem like a boiler-room type penny stock company, so I'd love to see the way they're spinning this mild interest from DHS to their investors. "They want to put one of these on every person in every airport. We're a billion dollar business!!!!"
If you RTFA...
C'mon, this is Slashdot.
--Having it on paying air passengers is "conceivable"--> this is the sticking point for most of the ./ discussion. It is outrageous, insane, and fascist. It is not, however, close to reality (yet).
Were that the only possible application of the device in an air passenger context, then one could interpret the statement made in the letter ("In addition, it is conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes") to mean putting shock collars on passengers. However, that is highly unlikely what the DHS official means, especially considering the rest of his response focuses on the detention and transportation of bad guys. It's much more likely that DHS is interested in using such a device to detain ne'er-do-wells on a plane or in an airport.
Think about it... outfitting every air passenger is just not feasible, neither from a cost perspective nor from a PR perspective. The tinfoil hat crowd will insist otherwise, but I don't believe the notion of collaring passengers was even entertained by anyone at the agency.
There are no "plans for the device" on the part of DHS. The idea for outfitting passengers has originated from the company trying to sell them, Lamperd FTS. Why? Because selling tens of millions of these bad boys is a lot more exciting to the business than selling a few thousand.
By reading the response from the DHS (http://www.lamperdlesslethal.com/news/upload/pg1HomelandSecurity7_06.pdf) you'll see exactly what they think of the idea. DHS asks for a written proposal, and outlines the areas of interest for them, which are almost solely around prisoner detention and transport. The official also finds it "conceivable to envision a use to improve air security, on passenger planes," but the tone of the letter effectively takes Lamperd's pie in the sky multi-billion dollar contract off the table. Lamperd sends DHS a brochure with their cockamamie idea, DHS responds saying "we can see how you got there. Now here's how *we* would use it, so send us a proposal that focuses on our needs."
That's it. End of story. Yet some kook at the Washington Times puts two and two together and gets ZOMG THE BUSHNAZIS WANT TO PUT SHOCK COLLARS ON US!!!11!!!!ONE!!1!!
Actually, you're comparing the purchase of a single apple to the purchase of a railcar full of apples. If you buy a railcar full of apples, sure, you will spend a fraction per apple of what you'd spend in a grocery store. But you are committing to buying all those apples. You don't get to return the unused portion to your commodities broker.
Same goes for your T1 metaphor. You're committing to buying a bunch of bandwidth, so you get a better marginal rate. But your provider doesn't send you a refund each month for your unused kilobytes. You commit to a usage minimum, and that's why you get it at such a low marginal rate. I'm pretty sure if you were to commit a $600 monthly nut to Verizon, you'd get unlimited calls, data, texting, and whatever else of their services you wanted.
Some may not remember, but the era from the late 40s through most of the 50s was known as the "Baby Boom." Fertility rate during that time remains unequaled in US history. As a result, we've got quite a lot of people in this country who are over the age of 50. We can probably expect the targets of many products and services, not just television, to skew much older in the coming years.
To borrow from another quote, "war is Hell." Like it or not, we're in a state of war. The "police action" technicality is a convenience purported by those who want decisive action, but want to keep it from being too decisive (and coincidentally reap the political capital that follows).
Perhaps you should consider that being complicit in calling them "Deep Red gun owners" may be contributing to the rift between you.
Leaks are more an aesthetic problem than an environmental one. Oil is a food source, and takes its place at the bottom of the food chain. Look in the mountains of southern California for evidence -- there are naturally occurring oil streams coming out of the mountains there.
In an oil spill, the only animals that experience significant, nearly irreparable harm are birds. And they're pretty fragile as it is.
You suggest the "natural world" should forever be a snapshot of when you first noticed it. An environment is not an entity of its own accord. It is a result of all its inputs, and we are a very large input on the environment. The only difference between us and other inputs is our self-awareness.
The impact we have on the "natural world" becomes part of that world. Are there not birds, rats, cockroaches, etc. that thrive on the fruits of human progress? What makes them less important than the flora and fauna in a tropical rainforest?
Real problem is still TOO MANY PEOPLE.
You're right, the herd needs to be culled. You first.Actually, that's not true. It would have been pathetically easy to deposit extra votes in the ballot box without anyone noticing.
It is fallacious to think we can have a foolproof voting system. And those who complain the loudest will never be satisfied. Use paper voting, and there is outcry of fraud, ballot box stuffing, etc. Move to computer voting, and there is still outcry of fraud, ballot box stuffing, etc. If a paper trail is added, suddenly they're tracking who votes for whom. There's no winning. In fact, it doesn't even get any better -- make a Venn diagram of the complainants in each of those three scenarios, and I guarantee you it pretty much looks like one thick circle.
We just have to trust that most poll workers are civically responsible, and are doing their best to mitigate fraud. Anyone who doesn't think that is the case in his precinct is more than welcome to step away from his busy day of posting on Slashdot and volunteer to work the polls. That's a little more work than writing snarky message board comments, however.
I don't find one OS to be more capable than the other on the desktop. You mention disc burning and ISO mounting, but neither is part of the operating system. Although there are nicer tools for image mounting available for Linux and Unix OS's.
.NET framework.
I'm actually the opposite of the author. I've completely dumped Microsoft products at home (save for the Xbox 360) in favor of Mac and Ubuntu. At work we're a Microsoft shop. I'd prefer open source, but quite honestly where Microsoft has us is with their development tools and the
Server admins haven't needed to be co-located with the physical servers since the dawn of IP KVMs and Lantronix boxes. Virtualization makes management much easier, and multi-cores mean a smaller footprint, but this is nothing that is earth-shattering by any means.
For many, if not most, organizations, portability provides very little value. If I'm running a public website, it is unlikely I will swap out OS and web server platforms at will, and even more unlikely I will run some kind of heterogeneous environment. If I'm marketing commercial software, I'm likely to either pick a supported OS platform for a rich application, or market the software as a service and access the services through thin clients (either web or simple GUI applications). Either way, I'm not looking to find a 100% portable language. First, it doesn't exist, and a 90% portable language doesn't do me much better than one that is not portable at all.
.NET is a real standout with this consideration. Java and RoR are also top players. With these platforms, you can easily maintain a codebase of high quality. As software systems grow in complexity, and with software development trending toward more agile methodologies, stability and regression testing become more important.
Think the fourth consideration should instead be the agility of the language. How easy is it to write code orthogonally? Is there a convenient facility for writing unit and integration tests? Can builds and testing be easily automated?
In fact, I'm a little surprised I haven't seen this mentioned at all in this discussion.
There's too much prior art out there already.
If VueStar is smart, they'll send out invoices, take payment from who will pay, and avoid pursuit of those who won't.
Any court action would likely vacate this patent. Even if no prior art is found, it fails the tests of novelty and obviousness.
There is nothing novel about these claims, as the solution to the problem of attaching clickable images to search results is no different than having dynamic clickable image buttons. It is an obvious invention because anyone skilled in the art of basic web scripting could come up with this "invention" independently in less than a work day.
There will be people who pay the invoice -- any business in the process of being acquired or funded may find it worth the $5k to not have the risk of a patent infringement suit floating around out there. This is what VueStar is counting on, and this will be a decent windfall for them, as blatantly as they're trolling.
This is an excellent point. Any situation will bear golden opportunity for some. For every period of expansion, there will always be some period of recession that follows. During the expansion time, you see innovation in "newsworthy" areas -- new, cutting edge products that are years out from being monetized. During recession periods, the innovation shifts to less exciting areas -- efficiency improvements, etc.
Look at the paid search space. It was most likely an inevitability that the market would gravitate toward a pay-per-click model. Make no mistake about it, though -- the dot com crash greatly contributed to that industry's meteoric rise. Because of the bad taste left by the dot com bubble, ad dollars shifted to services where payment could be directly tied to performance.
Actually, I would call it aligning the requirements of professionals in the real estate industry with those in the finance industry.
This is no different than what is required of anyone who works in trading securities, from people on the floor of the stock exchange to minimum wage desk brokers at discount brokerages.
What do you mean by "modernization," exactly? For at least 25 years, since I was in Catholic grade school, evolution has been taught. At that time, doctrine was that Genesis and many of the other Old Testament books were allegorical, and not meant to be regarded as factual. People are only surprised by these stories because they lump the Catholic church in with the holy rollers who think the universe is only 6,000 years old and science is a trick of Satan to lure unsuspecting souls into the lake of fire.
See, that's where you are mistaken. There are very few citizens left in the Miami area, and almost none in the city of Miami. So it's a police state over a bunch of foreign nationals. Big deal.
Many enterprise providers still have this same kind of "pay for what you use" pricing model. EMC does this as well. They'll send you a SAN filled to the max with drives. When you need more, they come unlock more.
What I don't get is how people think this is a bad idea, or that the customer is somehow getting screwed. If you max out your space and need to add LUNs to your storage array, it's a costly endeavor that involves backing up all your data and rebuilding the SAN. If you buy the biggest SAN you can, you're paying quite a lot of money for quite a lot of empty storage. The subscription pricing model solves these economic inefficiencies.
Why not just take your laptop home with you? Your company sprung for the laptop so you'd have the benefit of portability, so it seems sensible to take advantage of that nifty little feature every day. No longer will you have to remote into your machine -- you instead have it right there with you! (btw, laptops weren't designed to run 24/7, so you'd be doing your machine a favor) And you foil the plans of would-be thieves by taking away their intended target.
I know it's a trifle inconvenient, and you seem to be pretty inconvenience-averse. But instead of designing the Fort Knox of laptop security enclosures, maybe it's time to sack up and lug that extra 5 pounds around with you.
It's nice that you're so culturally sensitive and all, but I have news for you: It's the cleaning crew who was doing the stealing.
I worked on the maintenance staff of a large office building throughout college. One job we had was to install hidden cameras in areas where there were problems reported by tenants, problems being chronic theft. In the nearly 100 instances we did this, all were members of the cleaning crew.
There are plenty of instances where it makes plenty of sense to not evaluate new products as they are released. If you barely use some product, I would suggest that it makes no sense at all to evaluate alternatives. It's simply not worth your time.
The example you cite proves that point. Visual Studio is a tool of your trade, or at least a tool you use in pursuit of a hobby. This means it holds importance to you, that you have a greater-than-average interest in what the product has to offer. Conversely, I have a set of sockets (and socket wrenches) at home. I went to Sears and bought the first set I saw. In the next five years, socket wrench technology could improve dramatically, with newer alloys for the sockets, better bearings for the wrenches, etc. I so seldom have use for those tools, it would make no difference to me. Even if Sears were to offer a one-for-one trade, it would not be worth my time to do it.
This is not a fear of change. It is a rational decision. If an item provides little utility to you, there is no amount of innovation that will make it worth your while to reevaluate.