I appreciate that the Seattle PD is trying to do *something* to fix this problem, but their solution would likely not have saved the life of swatting victim Andrew Finch. Finch was murdered by Officer Justin Rapp who will face no consequences for his actions. The idiot who made the swatting call has at least been charged, but the trigger man got a pass.
Finch wasn't a gamer and had no reason to believe he was at risk for swatting. He died because he twitched the wrong way when he was startled at the front door by shouted commands, bright lights, and a bunch of body-armor wearing cops pointing their guns at him.
Should everybody register for this service? If so, will that just cause cops to ignore the list even more?
What is really needed is police training on de-escalation and considering the probability that a call is legitimate instead of just the worst-case possibility. And for dispatch to pass along to the responding officers important information like the 911 call coming from thousands of miles away and the 911 caller still being on the call (both true in Finch case IIRC). Also, training (or more training) on the realistic human response time to commands when an innocent civilian is startled by multiple contradicting shouted commands, bright lights, and multiple cops pointing guns at them. You watch the videos of many of these police shootings, and complying with their commands before they shoot would require superhuman cognition and reflexes.
Around 2000, I spent over a month one summer driving around the US with camping gear, a stack of AAA maps, AAA books for each state listing campgrounds, and no plan other than to see interesting things like national parks. I drove around 10,000 miles. Most mornings, I spread out a map on the picnic table and figured out where to go that day and where I would be able to sleep or shop if necessary. No GPS and a basic analog/digital cell phone that kind of worked (analog, $0.69/minute roaming) in most non-mountain areas. It was an unforgettable experience. It's a shame if newer travelers are unable to experience some of these things.
As the driver found out, USA atlas with 1-2 pages per state should be in the toolkit purely as a backup map. AAA still has good state-level paper maps that are usable for everything except in-city driving and are good for trip planning even with a GPS.
On most trips, I still try to carry the state-level maps and usually use them a couple of times for something. I have yet to see a good way on a small-screen phone or GPS to answer questions like "how far away is the coast," or "how much out of our way would it be to go to that town" or "what's the next sizable town within 2 miles of the road we are on," which a glance at a paper map answers. GPS will tell you the closest town but it may be way off your route.
I do think GPS has been a big benefit for safety. Reading maps while driving was never safe but often necessary before GPS.
Yeah, saying they are "presumably, not really aware" is BS. I'm not sure why the post's author felt compelled to express sympathy for people perpetuating a scam that takes advantage of vulnerable people. The people who both manage and make these calls are criminals, and they should pay for their crimes with whatever $ they have and loss of freedom. Sympathy should go to the victims.
I engaged one of these guys once who for whatever reason would not hang up on me. He was articulate and seemed quite intelligent. I called him a scammer and a criminal who should be in jail. I told him he should be ashamed to face his family. I told him to get an education and a real job. He claimed he was going to school in preparation for the merchant marine, which I agreed was a real job. He eventually admitted he was a scammer. He was totally aware of what he was doing.
UC Berkeley doesn't have a right to distribute anything (they aren't "private people"). A private person has that right, but UC Berkeley is a public institution that doesn't have that right (despite the citizen's united ruling), and it is subject to ADA Title II restrictions. Private persons are only limited by ADA Title I (employment discrimination rules).
My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?
It seems we have a case here of a law (the ADA) abridging a constitutional right. Again, we're not talking about a wheelchair ramp or a swimming pool or service dogs; we're talking about creative content. Courts seem to pretty strongly favor free speech over other interests even if those other interests are compelling (e.g., Citizens United).
The reality here is that the public is being harmed by the removal of and ceased production of this content. At a minimum, I wish UC Berkeley would ask the current DoJ to reconsider; they might come up with a different response than the Obama DoJ. (Plus UC Berkeley should cut off all interactions with Gallaudet if it can be found that institution was complicit in these actions.) But if there's a chance of winning in court on free speech grounds, UC Berkeley could do us all a service by getting that ruling. Of course, none of those actions coincide with Berkeley's own institutional political agenda, so they probably won't happen.
How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?
Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?
We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?
*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.
if you can handle hands-on, avoid the "use two breaker panels" nonsense, it's not possible to do that and meet electrical and criminal code requirements that you be unable to back-feed the power line and kill the guys working to restore power.
Actually the "use two breakers" method can be completely safe, legal, and up to code if you use a generator interlock kit according to http://www.interlockkit.com/. I've done a little research and so far it seems legitimate.
Essentially it's a piece of metal that creates a mechanical interlock so that your main breaker and generator breaker can physically never both be on at the same time. You have the main and generator breaker in the same panel and now can safely backfeed into your panel. To keep it legal, you hook the generator breaker up to a 240/120V locking outlet (i.e., no male-male suicide cords).
It seems kind of silly that they charge $150 for a piece of metal, but this solution allows you to hook up your entire panel (instead of choosing 6 circuits available on a typical manual transfer switch) and seems much cheaper than a full transfer-switch panel/setup.
> Accommodations do not devalue test scores. If anything, it makes the test scores a more accurate > comparison, because the students who would normally be discounted for external reasons (that is, > reasons outside of the knowledge being tested) are now being fairly measured.
> The use of psychotropic drugs by healthy individuals is all kinds of stupid, and they are, in a > sense, deflating scores. But let us not suggest for a moment that allowing students with > learning disabilities or ADHD to compete fairly is somehow ruining it for the rest of you. It > is that kind of thinking that perpetuates the myth that ADHD is "just laziness" or that LD kids > "just need to try harder".
I'm not particularly athletic or adept at long distance-running. Let's say that gets me labeled as "atheletically disabled" and the school/courts/congress decide that I should be spotted an extra 4 minutes when running a mile. Now let's say the school is also required to report the times of all runners without noting who got extra time on the report. My four-minute mile (really an 8 minute mile) and a true athelete's four-four minute mile look the same on the report. How does that scenario not devalue the athelete's score?
I maintain that the same applies to academic schores. It devalues the scores of everyone who took the test under the stated conditions if some students are allowed to take the test with extra time or chemical enhancement.
I'm not against giving people with recognized illness extra time (or medication); I am against not marking the extraordinary test conditions in big red letters on all of their score reports. People receiving the scores would thus know the person did well on the test (because of the score) but not to compare that person unfavorably against someone who maybe didn't do so well but took the test under the required conditions.
Call it unfairness, discrimination, or whatever you want, but if I come into the ER with a life-threatening illness, I don't want treatment delayed half an hour because I get a physician who needed 30-minutes of extra time to pass an "illness diagnosis" exam in med school. The undergrad school, med school, and hiring hospital all need to know if the candidate's tests were given under extraordinary conditions.
Drugs are no substitue for real learning, but they can provide an unfair advantage in an artificial situation intended to measure learning, such as a college exam.
It's bad enough that the standardized test scores of the kids who get extra time for learning-disabilities are no longer flagged with giant red text saying "TEST ADMINISTERED UNDER NONSTANDARD CONDITIONS." Neither are the tests of the kids who take drugs for ADHD flagged as such. They're getting time and/or focus advantages on those tests that the rest of us aren't; I was wild and unforcused as a kid too, but instead of getting drugs to make me do better my parents made me sit down and work. Now we have to compete against kids who get special advantages such as extra time and chemical assistance. Think about that the next time you get denied for an award or a scholarship based on test scores or GPA. The people using these test scores can't tell if a high-scorer was smart or just drugged (or given extra time).
It's no suprise that healthy people want the same advantage, but just like with the extra time for the learning disabled and the kids on ADHD drugs, the real losers will be the students who would have done well on their own whose scores are now deflated compared to the enhanced population.
I made it through high school, undergrad, and a graduate program and never took an exam under the influence of anything more mind-altering than a few Coca-Colas. Perhaps that's a question that should be asked in job interviews.
> It's a non-issue because collecting call data is not monitoring.
> If you want to call it monitoring, then Ma Bell has been monitoring us since
> private lines were introduced.
IMO people are missing the point about why this logging is so bad.
Monitoring who we call, when, and for how long is the same as the government compiling a list of our friends, family, and buisness associates, and using that network to go on a fishing expedition for suspicious activity. I don't know about you, but I don't want the government knowing how many times I called my doctor last week and how the timing of those calls corresponded to calling my family members. Something as simple as that information could be used to make (possibly incorrect) inferences about my health. This database has a chilling effect on free association.
To say the database is OK because it omits "personally identifying" information such as names and addresses is misleading; your phone number is nearly as unique and identifier for you as your SSN and a more unique identifer than a common name like Robert Johnson. And the data are easily associated with names anyway through tools such as www.reversephonedirectory.com.
My understanding is that in the past, the courts frowned on massive fishing expeditions for evidence against individuals that were not personally suspected of a crime.
I started programming in BASIC on an Apple IIe and IIgs in 4th grade essentially because I had run out of other interesting things to do with the computer.
Sure, I had an office package (AppleWorks) and a graphics program (Deluxe Paint II), and a few classic games (Space Quarks), so it was much "better" than the really early days of home computing. But still, that was about it, and it was fun to write letters, draw, and play the same simple game for only so long. My parents weren't going to buy me the interesting-looking games that were on the shelf, so I started writing programs. And then started writing my own games.
Nothing I did then would have won an award or gotten published in a good conference, but I sure learned a lot of math and programming concepts based on a few books and a bit of adult guidance. Usually I learned something when I had a need for it. I learned about arrays because I wanted a way to store a bitmap for the 40x40 low-resolution graphics mode. I learned a suprising amount about geometry when I wanted to draw a circle; the concept of x^2 + y^2 = r^2 was a bit foreign to me when I didn't even know pi*r^2 or 2*pi*r, but literally my dad gave me the equation and I muddled through enough to get a circle to (very slowly) render.
I still say that experience over just a few years (almost all of my "fun" programming was from 4th-10th grade and about 75% of that was in 4th-6th) had a huge influence on my life path; I have a Ph.D in computer engineering and work in industry now.
I don't really think kids are any different now than before; it's just that they have so many "fun things to do" handed to them that there is less necessity for creative thinking. To start programming for fun in an era of unlimited cheap/free game downloads and unlimited free communication over unlimited distances would take a degree of dedication I may not have had.
And I don't think the "complexity" of modern programming interfaces is at all the problem. A quick google search shows plenty of free LOGO interpreters, and I'm sure the same exists for BASIC. Heck, you could do more fun/experimental programming in Matlab than I ever did in Applesoft BASIC with much less programming knowledge or outside assistance.
The author is a professor in the CS department at Purdue. At the beginning of 2005-2006, Purdue IT announced that they were going to require *every* password on *every* computer to be changed every 30 days. They made it clear that this policy was not restricted to administrator accounts, and in fact it has been pointed out in several articles that students will have to remember to change their passwords during summer and co-op sessions, or their accounts will be disabled. You also won't be allowed to re-use passwords for six replacement cycles. The policy isn't enforced yet but will be "real soon now."
This policy seems to be generally seen as idiotic by students, faculty, and staff. The IT people who talk about it seem to be made to "toe the line," and make up excuses about how this policy went through all the review/administrative processes. Nobody has an explanation for how this policy will be made practical for all the alumni and external accounts which might be accessed only a few times a year.
Many people see this policy as a copout response to the multiple security breaches in the past several years. On multiple occasions the whole university (30K+ studenets, plus faculty/staff) received orders to change passwords immediately because some database was compromised. Rumor had it that one database was storing passwords in plaintext because of incompatibility between hashing mechanisms used by different systems. Rather than take responsibility for and fix their security breaches, they are simply forcing this policy on everyone.
I suspect the author wrote this article largely as a condemnation of this policy.
There is a huge difference between signing a form saying you've picked up your prescription (presumably used for the pharmacy's own records) and signing a form and giving your name/address to be used in a government database to track what medication we are all using.
I am not asked to show ID when I pick up a (non-narcotic, non-controlled-substance) perscription. I should not be made to show my "papers" or be subjected to a government tracking system to maintain my health as decided by myself and my doctor.
It amazes me how a huge chunk of the populace gets all hyped up over abortion or even anonymous databases of abortion rates in a "don't touch my body" sort of way, but they are perfectly willing to let the government track and restrict their use of non-prescritpion medications that are far more common and impact far more people than abortions.
You're a friggin idiot. Try living across the street from a meth lab for a while. Enjoy the sight of tweekers coming in and out of your neighborhood,
The solution to crime is to punish the criminals by locking them up with serious jail time, not coddling the criminals with sympathy and "counseling" while treating innocents like criminals by making them show their papers to engage in a perfectly legal activity.
On the first offense, lock up *every* drug user over the age of 12 for 5 years with no parole and *every* drug dealer for 10 years without parole instead of groaning on and on about their "bad upbringing" and "disease of addiction." That will provide a real deterrent, unlike the silly drug-free-America TV ads. But whatever you do, don't treat me like a criminal because of someone else's stupidity.
This meth restriction is yet another step toward treating innocent Americans like criminals by making us show our "papers" and submit to government logging to engage in a perfectly legal activity. The abusive and almost-always-wrong no-fly list concept (ask anyone named David Nelson or Robert Johnson how hard it is to get on an airplane) is now being expanded to a no-buy list.
We can't fly for work or leisure without this crap, and now we can't treat our cold/allergies with the safe, legal medicine of our choice.
I for one plan to *walk* to a pharmacy the next time I need cold meds and show the same government-issued photo ID I use to fly: an INS PortPass with no address and no expiration date. There is *no* requirement to carry a drivers license around in this country if you are not driving, and I make it a point never to show my DL to anyone other than for driving purposes.
If the pharmacy refuses to sell me legal medication because I chose not to drive to their store, I'll tell them to expect a call from the press and a lawyer. I wonder if any of the civil-liberties groups will help out on this.
I urge *anyone* subjected to this crap once the federal law is in place to collect the names and contact info of the pharmacy and whatever law enforcement agency they are turning your data over to and to file a detailed Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act request demanding to see the recordds they are maaintining on you. If we the people can make the pharmacists and enforcement agencies suffer under a crushing burden of questions and paperwork, they will demand a fix that respects privacy and freedom.
And to get a license here with showing your SSN card you need your old license, a SSN card and one other form of identification, providing proof of address. As far as I can tell, looking at the DMV section of mass.gov you made up the third form of identification - they list social security cards as interchangable with passports. There's no additional hassle if you don't want to show your social security card.
Right. Because you need one primary and one secondary form of identification. You can't use one item (your passport) as both at the same time.
The mass.gov website was the origin of my confusion.
It looks like you read the website exactly as I did as needing 3 forms of ID; you read that with an SSN card you are OK with SSN Card + old license + 3rd form with proof of address. So when I went to the RMV I brought my passport (supposedly interchangable with SSN card) + old license + apartment lease. The guy at the desk insisted that because I lacked an SSN card I couldn't get a license without a 4th form of identification, claiming that with passport + old license + lease I lacked "proof of signature" or "proof of address" because the lease alone could not act as both proof of signature and address. (and the signatures on the passport and old license didn't count because they were already "used" as the other two forms) We went back and forth and got somewhat heated where he started huffing about state law. I plopped down two additional forms of govt-issued photo ID (student ID from state school and federal INSPass) and he said they were inadequate because they didn't have signatures and it was not allowed to use the old license for "proof of signature" and the student-id or INSPass as "proof of photo."
At this point many reasonable citizens could be expected to be horribly confused.
I finally realized I had a blank check on me, which let the check act as proof of address and the lease act as signature, which provided the 4 forms of ID he demanded and let me get my license without driving 25 miles each way back to the RMV and waiting in line for another hour.
Most of these silly anti-identity-theft rules do little to protect against theft and much to harass/annoy innocent citizens. All that should matter when getting a license is that 1) I'm not physically/mentally impaired too much to drive (e.g. eye test and/or driving test) 2) I live in that state (proven by lease), 3) I am who I say I am (proven by old license, INSPass, student ID, and particularly US passport which is nearly impossible to forge well), and 4) I'm not an illegal alien (proven by US passport). I submit that old license + passport + lease should be adequate for this purpose.
Here in the people's-socialist-republic of Massachusetts you have to give your SSN to get a driver's license and they'd *really* like you to show your SSN card in the process. You have to present either a passport or an SSN card, and if you present a passport and no SSN card then you aren't allowed to use that passport as "proof of photo", "proof of identity," or "proof of signature" even though that passport would be valid as (one) of those if you present an SSN card.
So to get a license here without showing an SSN card, you need your old license, a passport, and two other forms of identification: one that provides "proof of address" and one that provides "proof of signature" (your passport and old license can't be used for proof of signature in this case). I ended up using an apartment lease and a blank check as proof of signature and proof of address, which is very silly since both of those are easily forged. But I kept with my lifetime habit of never showing my SSN card to anyone for anything. It sits in a safe and there it stays.
The ability to selectively disable the network has long been a feature though usually it's spoken of in terms of disabling it over a (non-USA) battlefield. The govt. would be stupid to do this in all but the most serious emergency and then only for the shortest possible time.
I wonder what the per-hour or per-day economic impact of disabling GPS over a heavily poplulated USA region?
A decent number of aircraft/airports that use GPS approaches would have to go back to more primitive instrument landings (more delays); many trucking/shipping companies rely on GPS for tracking goods. Then there are surveyers and agriculture and such that may use GPS augmented with some local beacon for high accuracy.
That is silly. Are "premium customers" going to be bound by some NDA not to talk about the vulnerabilities? What's to prevent some news outlet from becoming a "premium customer" and then publishing everything they hear five minutes later. But now MSFT will look bad (worse) because the press is announcing there flaws instead of them.
Your point about it being difficult (actually impossible) to hire 50/50 because of a lack of supply is correct and leads to another problem: bidding wars over the tiny handful of female/minority candidates.
Every institution wants to "look good" in the quota charts, so they bid up the offers to females/minorities. It doesn't matter if it's undergrads, grad students, faculty, or employees at a company, it happens.
Not only does this seem wrong to the less-desirable, but qualified, non-minority candidates, but it doesn't seem to make economic sense to the institution either. Which is better, being able to admit/hire 3 well-qualified non-minorities or 2 well-qualified (or worse, mostly-qualified) minorities, because the bidding war for the minorities (fellowships, salaries, whatever) was so fierce there isn't money left for a third person.
A do-not-spam list that was a one-way hash of the addresses would be immune to becoming a spam-me-now list. From the wording of the "ruling," FTC lacks basic technical knowledge of one-way hashes. (could have used hashes for the telephone list too, but didn't)
Imperfect, but better-than-nothing, enforcement could occur with a law allowing individual, ISP, or (state)attorneys-general to sue and collect $500/spam damages against spammers and the companies that authorize them. Most commercial spammers are traceable because there's no way to complete the sale without contact info.
Unfortunately, Congress was beholden to the DMA last fall and passed DMA's wimpy you-can-spam law instead of allowing this simple right of action like many state laws.
FTC (and Congress) are dead wrong, and apparently completely ignorant, on this issue.
Depending on how "small" the convention really is, how much bandwidth you really need, and the cellular coverage of this campground, you might be able to load balance a handful of 3G-type cellphones through a NAT box to get adequate bandwidth to supply your 802.11 network's external traffic.
My sprint pcs phone gives me reliable 100-150 kbps up/down (yes I know the ToS issues with hooking up to a computer) and connects via USB. Load balance a couple of those, or maybe just one if it's really "small" and you're set, assuming you have coverage.
To be totally legit, sprint will sell you a pcmcia card designed to use their data network. They charge a lot for it and the service, but probably still less than a satellite provider.
In the April 2004 IEEE Spectrum, page 6 (no link available, sorry) there's a statement approved by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology's Committee on Man and Radiation.
Basically it does a great analysis of the physics involved in creating a spark to ignite gasoline vapors and concludes there is nothing to worry about.
They also clarify the difference between (dangerous) static sparks and the potential hazard from cell phones.
The rumored risk from cell phones seems to me a lot like the rumored risk to commercial aircraft avionics from laptops/electronics/etc. Every time there is an unexplained incident, the people in charge (fire chiefs, pilots, whatever) jump to blame whatever nearby technology they don't fully understand. Anecdotal evidence does not constitute proof, however. Too bad the mainstream media doesn't do a little more homework.
Many non left-wing (i.e., "right wing" and libertarian) types such as myself are just as opposed to this sort of crap as the left. Secret powers, clandestine searches, library taps, and intrusive security screening don't appeal to me either. Don't lump everyone who's not a Democrat-liberal together.
I personally don't think it would have been any better under the Democrats. For the most part, they all voted for the patriot act too. And it was the Democrats who pushed for a true cabinet-level DHS, and Bush who caved in and gave it to them. And it was the Democrats who pushed for the creation of a 50,000+ federal-employee TSA because they wanted to create union votes.
There was an irrational post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to taking away civil liberties and creating a window-dressing of security. That's what we need to fight.
I don't like Kerry and you don't like Bush, and I think it's fine if we disagree on taxes, health care, social services, and affirmative action. But we can still unite on this issue, which is probably more important to the fundamentals of our country than any of the others I listed. Cutting out the name calling is part of that though.
I think it's great to see the ACLU and the ACU (American Conservative Union) fighting on the same side on some of these issues. It's a true sign that the government is wrong when both sides are united.
None of the suggestions for schools (or parents) involve actually doling out punishments to the bullies. Very typical to tell the victim to "ignore it" or "chin up" while not punishing the bully.
If schools would actually punish bullies (for actions committed on school grounds or using school equipment), it would help greatly. And it would reduce the need for victims to need to learn to fight back in self defense. (Self-defense is seen as a negative by many of the same authorities that refuse to punish the offenders--ref. the giant subthread above on the good and bad of self defense.)
In 7th-grade (1991) I had to fight tooth and nail to get two bullies suspended for one day each. It involved my parents, their parents, 2-3 teachers, and 2-3 principals. That was a slap on the wrist punishment, but it kept those two away from me permanently.
We could actually deter bullies if real punishments (long suspensions resulting in class failure, expulsions, small claims judgements for out-of-school offenses) were doled out for serious offenses.
A large portion of the generation capacity of the Purdue power plan was down for maint. at the time of the city power outage last Friday--otherwise Purdue would have been much better off.
MSEE is on the city grid, not the university grid, though, because of its location and newness. So all the engineering machines would have been hosed either way. That was the 2nd power outage in 7 days for MSEE, and one of dozens since I've been here.
Purdue will never be a preeminent 21st-century school with 21st century computing facilities until it can learn to reliably maintain 19th-century utilities (electricity).
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I appreciate that the Seattle PD is trying to do *something* to fix this problem, but their solution would likely not have saved the life of swatting victim Andrew Finch. Finch was murdered by Officer Justin Rapp who will face no consequences for his actions. The idiot who made the swatting call has at least been charged, but the trigger man got a pass.
Finch wasn't a gamer and had no reason to believe he was at risk for swatting. He died because he twitched the wrong way when he was startled at the front door by shouted commands, bright lights, and a bunch of body-armor wearing cops pointing their guns at him.
Should everybody register for this service? If so, will that just cause cops to ignore the list even more?
What is really needed is police training on de-escalation and considering the probability that a call is legitimate instead of just the worst-case possibility. And for dispatch to pass along to the responding officers important information like the 911 call coming from thousands of miles away and the 911 caller still being on the call (both true in Finch case IIRC). Also, training (or more training) on the realistic human response time to commands when an innocent civilian is startled by multiple contradicting shouted commands, bright lights, and multiple cops pointing guns at them. You watch the videos of many of these police shootings, and complying with their commands before they shoot would require superhuman cognition and reflexes.
Around 2000, I spent over a month one summer driving around the US with camping gear, a stack of AAA maps, AAA books for each state listing campgrounds, and no plan other than to see interesting things like national parks. I drove around 10,000 miles. Most mornings, I spread out a map on the picnic table and figured out where to go that day and where I would be able to sleep or shop if necessary. No GPS and a basic analog/digital cell phone that kind of worked (analog, $0.69/minute roaming) in most non-mountain areas. It was an unforgettable experience. It's a shame if newer travelers are unable to experience some of these things.
As the driver found out, USA atlas with 1-2 pages per state should be in the toolkit purely as a backup map. AAA still has good state-level paper maps that are usable for everything except in-city driving and are good for trip planning even with a GPS.
On most trips, I still try to carry the state-level maps and usually use them a couple of times for something. I have yet to see a good way on a small-screen phone or GPS to answer questions like "how far away is the coast," or "how much out of our way would it be to go to that town" or "what's the next sizable town within 2 miles of the road we are on," which a glance at a paper map answers. GPS will tell you the closest town but it may be way off your route.
I do think GPS has been a big benefit for safety. Reading maps while driving was never safe but often necessary before GPS.
Yeah, saying they are "presumably, not really aware" is BS. I'm not sure why the post's author felt compelled to express sympathy for people perpetuating a scam that takes advantage of vulnerable people. The people who both manage and make these calls are criminals, and they should pay for their crimes with whatever $ they have and loss of freedom. Sympathy should go to the victims.
I engaged one of these guys once who for whatever reason would not hang up on me. He was articulate and seemed quite intelligent. I called him a scammer and a criminal who should be in jail. I told him he should be ashamed to face his family. I told him to get an education and a real job. He claimed he was going to school in preparation for the merchant marine, which I agreed was a real job. He eventually admitted he was a scammer. He was totally aware of what he was doing.
UC Berkeley doesn't have a right to distribute anything (they aren't "private people"). A private person has that right, but UC Berkeley is a public institution that doesn't have that right (despite the citizen's united ruling), and it is subject to ADA Title II restrictions. Private persons are only limited by ADA Title I (employment discrimination rules).
My understanding is that business/corporate entities do have some amount of 1st Amendment rights (e.g., speech and certainly press). IANAL; do state/local government institutions lack that right? If so, what about the professors working for them (who likely originated the content)?
It seems we have a case here of a law (the ADA) abridging a constitutional right. Again, we're not talking about a wheelchair ramp or a swimming pool or service dogs; we're talking about creative content. Courts seem to pretty strongly favor free speech over other interests even if those other interests are compelling (e.g., Citizens United).
The reality here is that the public is being harmed by the removal of and ceased production of this content. At a minimum, I wish UC Berkeley would ask the current DoJ to reconsider; they might come up with a different response than the Obama DoJ. (Plus UC Berkeley should cut off all interactions with Gallaudet if it can be found that institution was complicit in these actions.) But if there's a chance of winning in court on free speech grounds, UC Berkeley could do us all a service by getting that ruling. Of course, none of those actions coincide with Berkeley's own institutional political agenda, so they probably won't happen.
How is this not a free speech issue? Doesn't UC Berkeley have a 1st amendment right to distribute creative content -- especially free content -- in whatever format it wants with or without accommodations?
Can a photograph or painting be banned if it does not have a descriptive text to accommodate the blind? What if the artist's point was to have something that was visual only? What if the artwork were in fact a political statement about the absurdity of laws like the ADA resulting in censorship and including the descriptive text would defeat the purpose of the artwork?
We're not talking about a physical wheelchair ramp or an ATM that is too high (*); we're talking about creative content. So why isn't it protected?
*At my workplace the ATM was removed because it was too high for wheelchair access and didn't have headphone-jack capability. Fixing it to comply with ADA was cost prohibitive to the credit union that owned the ATM. So instead of leaving a non-disabled-accessible ATM they took away the ATM from everyone.
if you can handle hands-on, avoid the "use two breaker panels" nonsense, it's not possible to do that and meet electrical and criminal code requirements that you be unable to back-feed the power line and kill the guys working to restore power.
Actually the "use two breakers" method can be completely safe, legal, and up to code if you use a generator interlock kit according to http://www.interlockkit.com/. I've done a little research and so far it seems legitimate.
Essentially it's a piece of metal that creates a mechanical interlock so that your main breaker and generator breaker can physically never both be on at the same time. You have the main and generator breaker in the same panel and now can safely backfeed into your panel. To keep it legal, you hook the generator breaker up to a 240/120V locking outlet (i.e., no male-male suicide cords).
It seems kind of silly that they charge $150 for a piece of metal, but this solution allows you to hook up your entire panel (instead of choosing 6 circuits available on a typical manual transfer switch) and seems much cheaper than a full transfer-switch panel/setup.
> Accommodations do not devalue test scores. If anything, it makes the test scores a more accurate
> comparison, because the students who would normally be discounted for external reasons (that is,
> reasons outside of the knowledge being tested) are now being fairly measured.
> The use of psychotropic drugs by healthy individuals is all kinds of stupid, and they are, in a
> sense, deflating scores. But let us not suggest for a moment that allowing students with
> learning disabilities or ADHD to compete fairly is somehow ruining it for the rest of you. It
> is that kind of thinking that perpetuates the myth that ADHD is "just laziness" or that LD kids
> "just need to try harder".
I'm not particularly athletic or adept at long distance-running. Let's say that gets me labeled as "atheletically disabled" and the school/courts/congress decide that I should be spotted an extra 4 minutes when running a mile. Now let's say the school is also required to report the times of all runners without noting who got extra time on the report. My four-minute mile (really an 8 minute mile) and a true athelete's four-four minute mile look the same on the report. How does that scenario not devalue the athelete's score?
I maintain that the same applies to academic schores. It devalues the scores of everyone who took the test under the stated conditions if some students are allowed to take the test with extra time or chemical enhancement.
I'm not against giving people with recognized illness extra time (or medication); I am against not marking the extraordinary test conditions in big red letters on all of their score reports. People receiving the scores would thus know the person did well on the test (because of the score) but not to compare that person unfavorably against someone who maybe didn't do so well but took the test under the required conditions.
Call it unfairness, discrimination, or whatever you want, but if I come into the ER with a life-threatening illness, I don't want treatment delayed half an hour because I get a physician who needed 30-minutes of extra time to pass an "illness diagnosis" exam in med school. The undergrad school, med school, and hiring hospital all need to know if the candidate's tests were given under extraordinary conditions.
Drugs are no substitue for real learning, but they can provide an unfair advantage in an artificial situation intended to measure learning, such as a college exam.
It's bad enough that the standardized test scores of the kids who get extra time for learning-disabilities are no longer flagged with giant red text saying "TEST ADMINISTERED UNDER NONSTANDARD CONDITIONS." Neither are the tests of the kids who take drugs for ADHD flagged as such. They're getting time and/or focus advantages on those tests that the rest of us aren't; I was wild and unforcused as a kid too, but instead of getting drugs to make me do better my parents made me sit down and work. Now we have to compete against kids who get special advantages such as extra time and chemical assistance. Think about that the next time you get denied for an award or a scholarship based on test scores or GPA. The people using these test scores can't tell if a high-scorer was smart or just drugged (or given extra time).
It's no suprise that healthy people want the same advantage, but just like with the extra time for the learning disabled and the kids on ADHD drugs, the real losers will be the students who would have done well on their own whose scores are now deflated compared to the enhanced population.
I made it through high school, undergrad, and a graduate program and never took an exam under the influence of anything more mind-altering than a few Coca-Colas. Perhaps that's a question that should be asked in job interviews.
> It's a non-issue because collecting call data is not monitoring.
> If you want to call it monitoring, then Ma Bell has been monitoring us since
> private lines were introduced.
IMO people are missing the point about why this logging is so bad.
Monitoring who we call, when, and for how long is the same as the government compiling a list of our friends, family, and buisness associates, and using that network to go on a fishing expedition for suspicious activity. I don't know about you, but I don't want the government knowing how many times I called my doctor last week and how the timing of those calls corresponded to calling my family members. Something as simple as that information could be used to make (possibly incorrect) inferences about my health. This database has a chilling effect on free association.
To say the database is OK because it omits "personally identifying" information such as names and addresses is misleading; your phone number is nearly as unique and identifier for you as your SSN and a more unique identifer than a common name like Robert Johnson. And the data are easily associated with names anyway through tools such as www.reversephonedirectory.com.
My understanding is that in the past, the courts frowned on massive fishing expeditions for evidence against individuals that were not personally suspected of a crime.
I started programming in BASIC on an Apple IIe and IIgs in 4th grade essentially because I had run out of other interesting things to do with the computer.
Sure, I had an office package (AppleWorks) and a graphics program (Deluxe Paint II), and a few classic games (Space Quarks), so it was much "better" than the really early days of home computing. But still, that was about it, and it was fun to write letters, draw, and play the same simple game for only so long. My parents weren't going to buy me the interesting-looking games that were on the shelf, so I started writing programs. And then started writing my own games.
Nothing I did then would have won an award or gotten published in a good conference, but I sure learned a lot of math and programming concepts based on a few books and a bit of adult guidance. Usually I learned something when I had a need for it. I learned about arrays because I wanted a way to store a bitmap for the 40x40 low-resolution graphics mode. I learned a suprising amount about geometry when I wanted to draw a circle; the concept of x^2 + y^2 = r^2 was a bit foreign to me when I didn't even know pi*r^2 or 2*pi*r, but literally my dad gave me the equation and I muddled through enough to get a circle to (very slowly) render.
I still say that experience over just a few years (almost all of my "fun" programming was from 4th-10th grade and about 75% of that was in 4th-6th) had a huge influence on my life path; I have a Ph.D in computer engineering and work in industry now.
I don't really think kids are any different now than before; it's just that they have so many "fun things to do" handed to them that there is less necessity for creative thinking. To start programming for fun in an era of unlimited cheap/free game downloads and unlimited free communication over unlimited distances would take a degree of dedication I may not have had.
And I don't think the "complexity" of modern programming interfaces is at all the problem. A quick google search shows plenty of free LOGO interpreters, and I'm sure the same exists for BASIC. Heck, you could do more fun/experimental programming in Matlab than I ever did in Applesoft BASIC with much less programming knowledge or outside assistance.
The author is a professor in the CS department at Purdue. At the beginning of 2005-2006, Purdue IT announced that they were going to require *every* password on *every* computer to be changed every 30 days. They made it clear that this policy was not restricted to administrator accounts, and in fact it has been pointed out in several articles that students will have to remember to change their passwords during summer and co-op sessions, or their accounts will be disabled. You also won't be allowed to re-use passwords for six replacement cycles. The policy isn't enforced yet but will be "real soon now."
s sguidelines.cfm
This policy seems to be generally seen as idiotic by students, faculty, and staff. The IT people who talk about it seem to be made to "toe the line," and make up excuses about how this policy went through all the review/administrative processes. Nobody has an explanation for how this policy will be made practical for all the alumni and external accounts which might be accessed only a few times a year.
Many people see this policy as a copout response to the multiple security breaches in the past several years. On multiple occasions the whole university (30K+ studenets, plus faculty/staff) received orders to change passwords immediately because some database was compromised. Rumor had it that one database was storing passwords in plaintext because of incompatibility between hashing mechanisms used by different systems. Rather than take responsibility for and fix their security breaches, they are simply forcing this policy on everyone.
I suspect the author wrote this article largely as a condemnation of this policy.
Here's the link to the Purdue password policy: http://www.itap.purdue.edu/security/procedures/pa
There is a huge difference between signing a form saying you've picked up your prescription (presumably used for the pharmacy's own records) and signing a form and giving your name/address to be used in a government database to track what medication we are all using.
I am not asked to show ID when I pick up a (non-narcotic, non-controlled-substance) perscription. I should not be made to show my "papers" or be subjected to a government tracking system to maintain my health as decided by myself and my doctor.
It amazes me how a huge chunk of the populace gets all hyped up over abortion or even anonymous databases of abortion rates in a "don't touch my body" sort of way, but they are perfectly willing to let the government track and restrict their use of non-prescritpion medications that are far more common and impact far more people than abortions.
You're a friggin idiot. Try living across the street from a meth lab for a while. Enjoy the sight of tweekers coming in and out of your neighborhood,
The solution to crime is to punish the criminals by locking them up with serious jail time, not coddling the criminals with sympathy and "counseling" while treating innocents like criminals by making them show their papers to engage in a perfectly legal activity.
On the first offense, lock up *every* drug user over the age of 12 for 5 years with no parole and *every* drug dealer for 10 years without parole instead of groaning on and on about their "bad upbringing" and "disease of addiction." That will provide a real deterrent, unlike the silly drug-free-America TV ads. But whatever you do, don't treat me like a criminal because of someone else's stupidity.
This meth restriction is yet another step toward treating innocent Americans like criminals by making us show our "papers" and submit to government logging to engage in a perfectly legal activity. The abusive and almost-always-wrong no-fly list concept (ask anyone named David Nelson or Robert Johnson how hard it is to get on an airplane) is now being expanded to a no-buy list.
We can't fly for work or leisure without this crap, and now we can't treat our cold/allergies with the safe, legal medicine of our choice.
I for one plan to *walk* to a pharmacy the next time I need cold meds and show the same government-issued photo ID I use to fly: an INS PortPass with no address and no expiration date. There is *no* requirement to carry a drivers license around in this country if you are not driving, and I make it a point never to show my DL to anyone other than for driving purposes.
If the pharmacy refuses to sell me legal medication because I chose not to drive to their store, I'll tell them to expect a call from the press and a lawyer. I wonder if any of the civil-liberties groups will help out on this.
I urge *anyone* subjected to this crap once the federal law is in place to collect the names and contact info of the pharmacy and whatever law enforcement agency they are turning your data over to and to file a detailed Privacy Act and Freedom of Information Act request demanding to see the recordds they are maaintining on you. If we the people can make the pharmacists and enforcement agencies suffer under a crushing burden of questions and paperwork, they will demand a fix that respects privacy and freedom.
Right. Because you need one primary and one secondary form of identification. You can't use one item (your passport) as both at the same time.
The mass.gov website was the origin of my confusion.
It looks like you read the website exactly as I did as needing 3 forms of ID; you read that with an SSN card you are OK with SSN Card + old license + 3rd form with proof of address. So when I went to the RMV I brought my passport (supposedly interchangable with SSN card) + old license + apartment lease. The guy at the desk insisted that because I lacked an SSN card I couldn't get a license without a 4th form of identification, claiming that with passport + old license + lease I lacked "proof of signature" or "proof of address" because the lease alone could not act as both proof of signature and address. (and the signatures on the passport and old license didn't count because they were already "used" as the other two forms) We went back and forth and got somewhat heated where he started huffing about state law. I plopped down two additional forms of govt-issued photo ID (student ID from state school and federal INSPass) and he said they were inadequate because they didn't have signatures and it was not allowed to use the old license for "proof of signature" and the student-id or INSPass as "proof of photo."
At this point many reasonable citizens could be expected to be horribly confused.
I finally realized I had a blank check on me, which let the check act as proof of address and the lease act as signature, which provided the 4 forms of ID he demanded and let me get my license without driving 25 miles each way back to the RMV and waiting in line for another hour.Most of these silly anti-identity-theft rules do little to protect against theft and much to harass/annoy innocent citizens. All that should matter when getting a license is that 1) I'm not physically/mentally impaired too much to drive (e.g. eye test and/or driving test) 2) I live in that state (proven by lease), 3) I am who I say I am (proven by old license, INSPass, student ID, and particularly US passport which is nearly impossible to forge well), and 4) I'm not an illegal alien (proven by US passport). I submit that old license + passport + lease should be adequate for this purpose.
Here in the people's-socialist-republic of Massachusetts you have to give your SSN to get a driver's license and they'd *really* like you to show your SSN card in the process. You have to present either a passport or an SSN card, and if you present a passport and no SSN card then you aren't allowed to use that passport as "proof of photo", "proof of identity," or "proof of signature" even though that passport would be valid as (one) of those if you present an SSN card.
So to get a license here without showing an SSN card, you need your old license, a passport, and two other forms of identification: one that provides "proof of address" and one that provides "proof of signature" (your passport and old license can't be used for proof of signature in this case). I ended up using an apartment lease and a blank check as proof of signature and proof of address, which is very silly since both of those are easily forged. But I kept with my lifetime habit of never showing my SSN card to anyone for anything. It sits in a safe and there it stays.
The ability to selectively disable the network has long been a feature though usually it's spoken of in terms of disabling it over a (non-USA) battlefield. The govt. would be stupid to do this in all but the most serious emergency and then only for the shortest possible time.
I wonder what the per-hour or per-day economic impact of disabling GPS over a heavily poplulated USA region?
A decent number of aircraft/airports that use GPS approaches would have to go back to more primitive instrument landings (more delays); many trucking/shipping companies rely on GPS for tracking goods. Then there are surveyers and agriculture and such that may use GPS augmented with some local beacon for high accuracy.
What other key economic uses of GPS are there?
That is silly. Are "premium customers" going to be bound by some NDA not to talk about the vulnerabilities? What's to prevent some news outlet from becoming a "premium customer" and then publishing everything they hear five minutes later. But now MSFT will look bad (worse) because the press is announcing there flaws instead of them.
Your point about it being difficult (actually impossible) to hire 50/50 because of a lack of supply is correct and leads to another problem: bidding wars over the tiny handful of female/minority candidates.
Every institution wants to "look good" in the quota charts, so they bid up the offers to females/minorities. It doesn't matter if it's undergrads, grad students, faculty, or employees at a company, it happens.
Not only does this seem wrong to the less-desirable, but qualified, non-minority candidates, but it doesn't seem to make economic sense to the institution either. Which is better, being able to admit/hire 3 well-qualified non-minorities or 2 well-qualified (or worse, mostly-qualified) minorities, because the bidding war for the minorities (fellowships, salaries, whatever) was so fierce there isn't money left for a third person.
A do-not-spam list that was a one-way hash of the addresses would be immune to becoming a spam-me-now list. From the wording of the "ruling," FTC lacks basic technical knowledge of one-way hashes. (could have used hashes for the telephone list too, but didn't)
Imperfect, but better-than-nothing, enforcement could occur with a law allowing individual, ISP, or (state)attorneys-general to sue and collect $500/spam damages against spammers and the companies that authorize them. Most commercial spammers are traceable because there's no way to complete the sale without contact info.
Unfortunately, Congress was beholden to the DMA last fall and passed DMA's wimpy you-can-spam law instead of allowing this simple right of action like many state laws.
FTC (and Congress) are dead wrong, and apparently completely ignorant, on this issue.
Depending on how "small" the convention really is, how much bandwidth you really need, and the cellular coverage of this campground, you might be able to load balance a handful of 3G-type cellphones through a NAT box to get adequate bandwidth to supply your 802.11 network's external traffic.
My sprint pcs phone gives me reliable 100-150 kbps up/down (yes I know the ToS issues with hooking up to a computer) and connects via USB. Load balance a couple of those, or maybe just one if it's really "small" and you're set, assuming you have coverage.
To be totally legit, sprint will sell you a pcmcia card designed to use their data network. They charge a lot for it and the service, but probably still less than a satellite provider.
In the April 2004 IEEE Spectrum, page 6 (no link available, sorry) there's a statement approved by the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology's Committee on Man and Radiation.
Basically it does a great analysis of the physics involved in creating a spark to ignite gasoline vapors and concludes there is nothing to worry about.
They also clarify the difference between (dangerous) static sparks and the potential hazard from cell phones.
The rumored risk from cell phones seems to me a lot like the rumored risk to commercial aircraft avionics from laptops/electronics/etc. Every time there is an unexplained incident, the people in charge (fire chiefs, pilots, whatever) jump to blame whatever nearby technology they don't fully understand. Anecdotal evidence does not constitute proof, however. Too bad the mainstream media doesn't do a little more homework.
Many non left-wing (i.e., "right wing" and libertarian) types such as myself are just as opposed to this sort of crap as the left. Secret powers, clandestine searches, library taps, and intrusive security screening don't appeal to me either. Don't lump everyone who's not a Democrat-liberal together.
I personally don't think it would have been any better under the Democrats. For the most part, they all voted for the patriot act too. And it was the Democrats who pushed for a true cabinet-level DHS, and Bush who caved in and gave it to them. And it was the Democrats who pushed for the creation of a 50,000+ federal-employee TSA because they wanted to create union votes.
There was an irrational post-9/11 knee-jerk reaction to taking away civil liberties and creating a window-dressing of security. That's what we need to fight.
I don't like Kerry and you don't like Bush, and I think it's fine if we disagree on taxes, health care, social services, and affirmative action. But we can still unite on this issue, which is probably more important to the fundamentals of our country than any of the others I listed. Cutting out the name calling is part of that though.
I think it's great to see the ACLU and the ACU (American Conservative Union) fighting on the same side on some of these issues. It's a true sign that the government is wrong when both sides are united.
None of the suggestions for schools (or parents) involve actually doling out punishments to the bullies. Very typical to tell the victim to "ignore it" or "chin up" while not punishing the bully.
If schools would actually punish bullies (for actions committed on school grounds or using school equipment), it would help greatly. And it would reduce the need for victims to need to learn to fight back in self defense. (Self-defense is seen as a negative by many of the same authorities that refuse to punish the offenders--ref. the giant subthread above on the good and bad of self defense.)
In 7th-grade (1991) I had to fight tooth and nail to get two bullies suspended for one day each. It involved my parents, their parents, 2-3 teachers, and 2-3 principals. That was a slap on the wrist punishment, but it kept those two away from me permanently.
We could actually deter bullies if real punishments (long suspensions resulting in class failure, expulsions, small claims judgements for out-of-school offenses) were doled out for serious offenses.
A large portion of the generation capacity of the Purdue power plan was down for maint. at the time of the city power outage last Friday--otherwise Purdue would have been much better off.
MSEE is on the city grid, not the university grid, though, because of its location and newness. So all the engineering machines would have been hosed either way. That was the 2nd power outage in 7 days for MSEE, and one of dozens since I've been here.
Purdue will never be a preeminent 21st-century school with 21st century computing facilities until it can learn to reliably maintain 19th-century utilities (electricity).