There isn't enough solar energy striking an area the size of a car to power one effectively.
Yes, these aren't conventional cars in any way, especially not in appearance. Many of the ones that I've seen from races in the past look like very long, wide, flat beetles (the insect, not the VW) so as to increase the surface area that is being hit by sunlight. They are usually the size of a couple of conventional cars.
People were irritated with DS9 and Voyager because they focused specifically on action and special effects. When that didn't work they swung to the other extreme of becoming cardboard cutout soap operas. (Remember the whole Worf/Dax thing? Shudder.) TNG had that perfect balance of action and interpersonal relationships.
But what DS9 had that TNG comepletely missed out on was depth of plot.
In TNG you got 37 minutes of story (74 if it was a two-parter) that was wrapped up neatly in the end. There were one or two plotlines per episode and that was it. The best exception to this rule of thumb were the series of episodes surrounding the Klingon succession and Worf's family.
With DS9 you got a whole series with several major plotlines weaved throughout for the duration. You had Bajor vs Cardassia, Federation vs. Dominion, Wormhole Aliens and the Prophets, Alternate Reality with the (very naughty but oh-so-fun) "bad" Kira, and so on. These were major themes from the beginning until the end, and they kept the series interesting. It was what compelled me to keep watching, even though they had a couple bad eipsodes. It created a sense of investment in the series.
Don't get me wrong, I liked TNG. Voyager I could forget about (and largely I did). But I think that DS9 was the best of the four series.
Yes, but I bet the cellphone that's 1/3 the size of your flip-phone isn't powerful enough to reach from a planet's surface to an orbiting spaceship without using repeater towers. Think more along the lines of a satellite phone.
BTW, for those that don't know, M$ has free viewers for most of their file formats available for download. Not that I expect your average teach to know this.
The problem with that is that when you have to make a revision or correction you're SOL.
The education about Free Software has to occur while the teachers are still learning...in college. Get the colleges and universities to promote this in their classrooms.
Now it's been 7 or 8 years since I was in college, but that the time there was no requirement for people majoring in education to take any computer classes whatsoever. I desperately hope that this has changed, but I suspect that it has not since it is often assumed nowdays that anybody who has graduated from high school or college would have to have learned how to use a PC during the course of completing their studies.
), and he said the teachers got VERY excited about emoticons. i submit that most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use COMPUTERS.
You can extend that to include most teachers at most schools regardless of the level of students that they are teaching. There are obvious exceptions in more affluent school districts, but for the majority of them the above is true. Most public schools simply don't have the money to train their staff. Period. I live in Ohio, and here we have a state requirement that in order for a teacher to retain their state teaching certificate/license that they must complete a certain amount of continuing education on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this is generally considered the teacher's responsibility, NOT the school district's (though again some more affluent districts do cover the costs).
There is actually quite a debate going on now in the Ohio Supreme Court that has me somewhat excited about the future of Ohio's education systems. The state legislature is being forced to completely revamp the way that school districts receive funding because the current system (based on property taxes within the district) was ruled unconstitutional. Under the property tax system the discrepancy was mid-boggling. The poorest school district in the state (in the hills of southeastern Ohio) only had an average of $300 to spend per student. The richest school district in the state (an affluent suburb of Cleveland) had $13,000 per student. I don't know how it's going to finally be sorted out as it's still in debate but I think that it is important to note the size of the discrepancy. Most schools just don't have the money to properly train their students, let alone train the teachers.
Right or wrong, it is HUGELY important these days that people learn to use MS applications. There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
No it's not. It's not important at all. As many have pointed out, if you understand the concepts behind StarOffice, PerfectOffice, etc, then you can figure out MS-Office with little difficulty whatsoever. Beyond that, the specifics of what they are taught about how to use MS-Office XP in 9th grade will be obsolete by the time they finish High School or college and the company they work for is using Office XP+2 or XP+4. The only thing that is going to make them the least bit proficient is going to be an understanding of the basic concepts of a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. And they can get that from free software just as easily, and much more cheaply.
But here's my other point: most of the people that I've had to work with in the past 8 years or so since I've been out of school have been essentially clueless about how to use even the basic MS-Office or Windows functions. "What do you mean by right-click? I clicked on the right thing!" "You mean you can open Excel without double-clicking on a spreadsheet?" "Drag and drop? What's that?" "I don't go into the Start button because I might mess something up. I only run programs that are already on the screen [she meant desktop]." I used to get stuff like that all the time. Companies in the tech biz tend to be an exception to the above, but in every non-tech company I've worked at the level of computer literacy is as close to zero as could be possible.
Some people may claim that this is because the people I've worked with never had the advantage of working with PCs in school. While this may be true, they are also the same people who have been working with PCs during the course of their jobs for the last 10 years, and they've managed to learn almost nothing.
So with the lack of computer literacy in business in mind, I think that it's more important to a) teach basic concepts and how to learn new ones in schools, and b) let the businesses train new employees on the specifics of doing a mail-merge in Word.
Today, if you don't have at least a degree from a two-year college, you can't get a job that will pay enough to support a family.
Not quite true. I know plenty of people in the tech industry who do not have degrees who make anything from $50,000/year up to $100,000/year. Granted, I wouldn't care to support a family at the lower end of the spectrum (at all actually, but for arguments sake let's say that I'm a family man) but it would certainly be possible if the family weren't too big and one were careful with their money. Their are a lot of lower-middle-class families in the US who manage to get by on less.
You forgot to point out that he claims to be living in Kansas, home of the "Let's not teach evolution anymore because it's wrong" State Board of Education. That's how I finally knew it was a troll.
The younger the kids, the more annoying these inconsistancies become. And then you turn kids off to computers.
I dunno about that. I'm pretty annoyed by the ridiculous number of inconsistent things that you have to do in Super Mario 69,000 and Legend of Zelda 42 in order to get the Vorpal Sword of Punishing Wrath and Bubbles, yet my 9 year old nephew can do it with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. Kids have far more capacity to learn than those of us who are older and stuck in our ways. Kids are constantly learning about life and the world anyway, so it isn't much of an extra effort for them.
My thinking is that if you teach a kid how to use Gnome and/or KDE in grade school and then teach them how to use the command line in middle and high school, they'll come out of it with a pretty good knowledge of the workings of PCs. And after learning Linux figuring out Windows and MS apps ought to be a snap.
Or stick with the Mac and OSX platform for grade school (pretty point and click) and then when they get older teach them about the BSD system that's sitting under all of it.
Did he have permission to install/run the client on the computers? We don't have a solid answer to this one, but I would suspect a court would find the answer was yes. The school employed him to administer the computer. In liu of giving him explicit instructions, they were relying on him to A) Stay within the bounds of the law (eg, no illegal copies of software) and B) use his best profesional judgement on the best way to admin the machine.
You're assuming that he was the admin. He uses the term "configurator." To me this implies that he is a guy from desktop support who was told to make a standard image for all of the PCs in the system. In such a case, they are usually provided with a list of standard apps and configurations to use.
I could be wrong, but I've yet to meet an Admin who called himself anything but Admin (or guru or god).
I thought that he said that he was the "configurator." To me, that means that he's the guy who made the Ghost image that was deployed on 500 machines statewide. That's quite a difference from the "administrator," the person who in the end is responsible for all of the day-to-day workings of the systems under his control.
That sounds really familiar. I recall in my college days having to drive one of my friends to court in another state. Her previous employer had apparently caught her red-handed pocketing cash from the register. I can't remember how much it was, other than it was around $1000 (over the course of several months).
So anyway we waited and waited through the preceeding cases. One of them was a man who was being given his second DUI conviction. He got a sentence that was mostly suspended, so he actually wound up having to serve 3 days. Before the bailiff took him off to the county jail, the defendant complained that he had already missed the dinner meal at the jail (he'd apparently been in before and knew the feeding schedules) and asked if he could go across the street and grab a hamburger before he went in, and the judge let him.
My friend was given a sentence of 30 days, suspended down to 3 days to serve, plus having to pay restitution, plus 100 hours of community service. I normally would have considered that a reasonable sentence for the crime, had the DUI guy not been in front of us. Sometimes it makes me wonder...
I wonder if the third world will end up being the futuristic society that we have been promised since the 1940's? It's interesting that because of first-world dependence on backwards compatible technologies (ie, gasoline engine, coal burning power plants, etc) that the newer and more environmentally friendly technologies are taking root in the third world nations. I guess I think of it as getting a chance to (technilogically) start over with a clean slate in many cases instead of having to work within the somewhat outdated framework of modern, first-world technology.
Either way cash is the way to go, but it gets harder/more inconvient every day to use cash.
I agree. I sometimes wonder if businesses would accept cash at all if it didn't have the magic phrase, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public or private" printed on it.
There is another solution to these grocery savings cards, keychains etc. Use another grocery store!
That would be my ideal solution as well, but it is not feasible where I live. There are three large grocery stores in my area (Big Bear, Kroger, and Giant Eagle) and they are all part of large chains that have the same kind of plan. Kroger and Big Bear didn't use to have the cards, but Giant Eagle came into town with their discount card and all of the Kroger and Big Bear customers started complaining that they wanted a discount card program to, so they implemented one. So now I have to pay extra for my groceries in order to maintain my privacy.
On the other hand I do pay for a lot of my groceries using checks which allow them the same tracking ability.
While this may be possible, it sure isn't easy. With the discount card system they scan your card (your identity) with your groceries and a computer can correllate everything. With a check they would have to at least do the footwork manually, and even then they wouldn't have your consent to do it. I'm pretty sure in the T&Cs for the discount card there is something in there permitting them to collect personal information on you.
By the power vested in my by Godwin's Law, I hereby declare this thread ended.
That's funny, I hadn't read about it before. Still, it wouldn't come about if it weren't accurate. Doing something "for the public good" implies that the public doesn't have the good sense to do what's good for them to begin with. While in some cases that's accurate, in most cases it is not.
Well, you obviously have a sense of humor, so I won't be too much of a dick about this to you.:-)
Right. Let's start with your last comment. Those cameras you see all over britain are public cameras, owned and operated either by local councils (government departments), or by the police. What is wrong with them knowing where you are? They're not going to pull you over and try and sell you stuff.
But are you being monitored by the cameras? Yes. And that was my point, that there is a lot of monitoring done by the government in Britain. It doesn't matter to me if it's for "public safety" or not, it's still monitoring and it's not the job of my government to babysit its citizens. I wonder what happens if I resemble someone who is wanted for a crime? Are the chances good that I'll actually get stopped and dragged to the police station for questioning? I seem to recall a similar case recently.
What, exactly, are you trying to get away from?
I don't have to be trying to get away from anything or anybody simply because I want privacy. I want privacy for privacy's sake, that way I don't have to worry about who is watching me or why when I'm taking care of my personal matters. It's just creepy to think that you shouldn't have that right.
If you work in a shady part of town, every time your car gets broken in to raises the premiums of the people who actually put their car where they say, which is unfair on them, and technically insurance fraud.
In the US, insurance regulations vary by state. Where I live I am only required to disclose the primary address where the car is parked (home), whether it is garaged or parked on the street, the approximate annual mileage driven, the purpose of the car (daily driver to work or just a sunny weekend getaway car), and if I drive it to and from work the approximate round-trip mileage to and from work. There is no requirement to disclose where I work or where the car is parked while at work. But if the insurance companies in the US had some legal way of finding this out they would certainly use it against us if they could.
Maybe that's why you don't want the feds on your trail?
I don't want the feds on my trail because they cannot be trusted to enforce the laws that we have in the manner that they are currently implemented. Why should I allow them to further complicate matters when I don't have to? Why should I allow my government to have new powers when they can't be trusted with what they've got?
The number of credit cards issued in your country far surpasses the number issued in the rest of the world. That alone means that every single one of those cards can be traced when used. And not to mention that ralph's savings thing on your keyring;)
We could swap our credit cards for your security cameras. Monitoring has degrees. I personally don't use credit cards (only cash except on purchases larger than $1000 or so, though I often write a check instead) and I certainly don't use those grocery store discount keyrings that track my purchases and send me junk-mail based on it. I pay the higher price for the food and am glad to retain what little privacy I have left. But even so, I'd much rather have someone monitor my grocery habits than to be on camera 24/7 except for when I'm in my own home.
Your paranoia that every tracking facility is open to any private business with cash to burn is slightly unfounded.
It may be now, but the future isn't that far off. In the US it is very common for most office buildings to have cameras mounted outside so that corporate security can monitor the goings-on at the property. They can use this information in any way they see fit. Acme rent-a-car tracks you for commercial purposes, as do most store discount key-ring tags. Your mobile phone company monitors your usage patterns and combines it with the usage patterns of other subscribers to create calling packages that maximize their profits (and your monthly statement). And it keeps on going from there. In the US, the overwhelming majority of the monitoring that goes on is done by business, not government.
All I can say is I'm glad I don't share insurance companies with you, and I'm watched by cameras. and that chip in my head (pesky CIA).
Correct me if I'm wrong here but Acme, as a car rental company are well within their rights to impose terms and conditions when they lease their property to another party.
Assuming that the terms and conditions are legal and enforceable, probably. But apparently the T&Cs in this case are neither legal nor enforceable.
What is the loss of the phone company when you make a phone call when the ciruits are not full? Nothing. OK, maybe a tiny fraction of electricity, and the potential that the circuits fill.
The phone company provides their service to you 24/7, whether you are making a call at the time or not. You're paying in some part for the availability of the service.
What is the loss of the car company when you speed? Nothing. OK, maybe a tiny fraction of a reduced mechanical lifetime, and the potential that you get into an accident and cause the company's insurance rates to go up.
With the rental car you are already paying for the availability of the car in rental and insurance fees. But what the court said is that you can't bill somebody for the "potential" of them causing you damages. Otherwise the phone company would bill you for the "potential" of you cutting down a tree in your yard because it might fall on their phone lines.
If the contract states that speeding incurrs a charge, how is it relevant what mechanism was used to determine that the driver was speeding?
Because if the device isn't able to accurately determine whether speeding actually occurred, then how can they have a basis for charging the customer? GPS isn't perfect. Neither is a car's speedometer. They often don't agree.
Also, bear in mind that just because it's been written into a contract and signed doesn't mean that it's legal or even enforceable. If the rental contract had said that speeding would result in the rental clerk getting the right to live with you rent-free for a month it probably wouldn't be enforceable.
Provided that they tell you beforehand, can anyone supply a compelling reason why it's immoral or unethical for them to monitor one of their cars with GPS?
Yes. The GPS system can be subject to signal outages (GPS is line-of-sight, remember) which sometimes register as ludicrous fluctuations in speed.
Also, the speedometer on the car isn't likely to be calibrated to match the accuracy of the GPS system. It's possible for the speedometer to read 65 MPH while the GPS reads it at 72 MPH. Which system do you trust? Which system is more accurate? Does the driver even have the GPS data available to him? From the last time that this article was posted, it seemed clear that the GPS/tracking system was hidden inside the car to prevent tampering, so I doubt that there is an LCD readout for the driver to use.
There are some occasions when it is considered appropriate to exceed a posted speed limit such as accelerating to avoid a potential accident, accelerating to merge with high-speed traffic, etc. The GPS system will record these incidents as violations while a police officer wouldn't even look twice at them.
It is unreasonable to assume that Acme has a system in place of monitoring the posted speed limits on every section of road in their part of the country. Rand McNally has a hard time trying to keep their maps accurate as new roads pop up and freeway interchanges are built and re-built. How much easier is it to change a posted speed limit than to build a new road? What Acme had on file as a 45 MPH construction zone may now be an open stretch of 65 MPH freeway. How can they guarantee that their records are 100% accurate?
The system in place at Acme does not take any of these common occurances into account. It merely logs each instance where the "speed limit" is exceeded and automatically charges your account for it, even before you've returned the car. It is judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal. And even if there were a right of appeal, the often transient conditions that would result in the GPS system registering excess speed wouldn't be feasible to prove in any convincing way.
MY experience with digital speedometers is that they suck.
Not necessarily so. A speedometer is a speedometer is a speedometer. The ones with digital displays are just that - digital displays. They still get the data that they display in roughly the same manner as analog speedometers. The problem is, it's damn near impossible to make a speedometer that is 100% accurate. Even the best of them have some small variation in them. The faster you go, the more the variation comes into play and the more inaccurate a speedometer becomes. There is also some degree of drift in the speedometer, meaning that the longer the speedometer goes without calibration the less accurate it tends to be. Changing the diameter of the tires/wheels (total sum diameter) can also increase the inaccuracy of the speedometer.
Taking all of that into account, I'm not really suprised about your 113 MPH speeding ticket. But you're damn lucky to get off on only $55. In Ohio I've paid $85 for being only 19 MPH over the limit, but the fines are increased based on speed increments. Being +20 MPH jacks up the fine in a big way.
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There isn't enough solar energy striking an area the size of a car to power one effectively.
Yes, these aren't conventional cars in any way, especially not in appearance. Many of the ones that I've seen from races in the past look like very long, wide, flat beetles (the insect, not the VW) so as to increase the surface area that is being hit by sunlight. They are usually the size of a couple of conventional cars.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
People were irritated with DS9 and Voyager because they focused specifically on action and special effects. When that didn't work they swung to the other extreme of becoming cardboard cutout soap operas. (Remember the whole Worf/Dax thing? Shudder.) TNG had that perfect balance of action and interpersonal relationships.
But what DS9 had that TNG comepletely missed out on was depth of plot.
In TNG you got 37 minutes of story (74 if it was a two-parter) that was wrapped up neatly in the end. There were one or two plotlines per episode and that was it. The best exception to this rule of thumb were the series of episodes surrounding the Klingon succession and Worf's family.
With DS9 you got a whole series with several major plotlines weaved throughout for the duration. You had Bajor vs Cardassia, Federation vs. Dominion, Wormhole Aliens and the Prophets, Alternate Reality with the (very naughty but oh-so-fun) "bad" Kira, and so on. These were major themes from the beginning until the end, and they kept the series interesting. It was what compelled me to keep watching, even though they had a couple bad eipsodes. It created a sense of investment in the series.
Don't get me wrong, I liked TNG. Voyager I could forget about (and largely I did). But I think that DS9 was the best of the four series.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Yes, but I bet the cellphone that's 1/3 the size of your flip-phone isn't powerful enough to reach from a planet's surface to an orbiting spaceship without using repeater towers. Think more along the lines of a satellite phone.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
But why a prequel?
To show George Lucas how it's really done.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
BTW, for those that don't know, M$ has free viewers for most of their file formats available for download. Not that I expect your average teach to know this.
The problem with that is that when you have to make a revision or correction you're SOL.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
The education about Free Software has to occur while the teachers are still learning...in college. Get the colleges and universities to promote this in their classrooms.
Now it's been 7 or 8 years since I was in college, but that the time there was no requirement for people majoring in education to take any computer classes whatsoever. I desperately hope that this has changed, but I suspect that it has not since it is often assumed nowdays that anybody who has graduated from high school or college would have to have learned how to use a PC during the course of completing their studies.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
), and he said the teachers got VERY excited about emoticons. i submit that most of the teachers in elementary schools don't have the first idea how to use COMPUTERS.
You can extend that to include most teachers at most schools regardless of the level of students that they are teaching. There are obvious exceptions in more affluent school districts, but for the majority of them the above is true. Most public schools simply don't have the money to train their staff. Period. I live in Ohio, and here we have a state requirement that in order for a teacher to retain their state teaching certificate/license that they must complete a certain amount of continuing education on a regular basis. Unfortunately, this is generally considered the teacher's responsibility, NOT the school district's (though again some more affluent districts do cover the costs).
There is actually quite a debate going on now in the Ohio Supreme Court that has me somewhat excited about the future of Ohio's education systems. The state legislature is being forced to completely revamp the way that school districts receive funding because the current system (based on property taxes within the district) was ruled unconstitutional. Under the property tax system the discrepancy was mid-boggling. The poorest school district in the state (in the hills of southeastern Ohio) only had an average of $300 to spend per student. The richest school district in the state (an affluent suburb of Cleveland) had $13,000 per student. I don't know how it's going to finally be sorted out as it's still in debate but I think that it is important to note the size of the discrepancy. Most schools just don't have the money to properly train their students, let alone train the teachers.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Right or wrong, it is HUGELY important these days that people learn to use MS applications. There are far more jobs for high school students and college students that require people who know Word and Excel than there are jobs that require people to know StartOffice or Gnumeric.
No it's not. It's not important at all. As many have pointed out, if you understand the concepts behind StarOffice, PerfectOffice, etc, then you can figure out MS-Office with little difficulty whatsoever. Beyond that, the specifics of what they are taught about how to use MS-Office XP in 9th grade will be obsolete by the time they finish High School or college and the company they work for is using Office XP+2 or XP+4. The only thing that is going to make them the least bit proficient is going to be an understanding of the basic concepts of a word processor, spreadsheet, etc. And they can get that from free software just as easily, and much more cheaply.
But here's my other point: most of the people that I've had to work with in the past 8 years or so since I've been out of school have been essentially clueless about how to use even the basic MS-Office or Windows functions. "What do you mean by right-click? I clicked on the right thing!" "You mean you can open Excel without double-clicking on a spreadsheet?" "Drag and drop? What's that?" "I don't go into the Start button because I might mess something up. I only run programs that are already on the screen [she meant desktop]." I used to get stuff like that all the time. Companies in the tech biz tend to be an exception to the above, but in every non-tech company I've worked at the level of computer literacy is as close to zero as could be possible.
Some people may claim that this is because the people I've worked with never had the advantage of working with PCs in school. While this may be true, they are also the same people who have been working with PCs during the course of their jobs for the last 10 years, and they've managed to learn almost nothing.
So with the lack of computer literacy in business in mind, I think that it's more important to a) teach basic concepts and how to learn new ones in schools, and b) let the businesses train new employees on the specifics of doing a mail-merge in Word.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Today, if you don't have at least a degree from a two-year college, you can't get a job that will pay enough to support a family.
Not quite true. I know plenty of people in the tech industry who do not have degrees who make anything from $50,000/year up to $100,000/year. Granted, I wouldn't care to support a family at the lower end of the spectrum (at all actually, but for arguments sake let's say that I'm a family man) but it would certainly be possible if the family weren't too big and one were careful with their money. Their are a lot of lower-middle-class families in the US who manage to get by on less.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
What a masterful troll, I salute you.
You forgot to point out that he claims to be living in Kansas, home of the "Let's not teach evolution anymore because it's wrong" State Board of Education. That's how I finally knew it was a troll.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
The younger the kids, the more annoying these inconsistancies become. And then you turn kids off to computers.
I dunno about that. I'm pretty annoyed by the ridiculous number of inconsistent things that you have to do in Super Mario 69,000 and Legend of Zelda 42 in order to get the Vorpal Sword of Punishing Wrath and Bubbles, yet my 9 year old nephew can do it with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. Kids have far more capacity to learn than those of us who are older and stuck in our ways. Kids are constantly learning about life and the world anyway, so it isn't much of an extra effort for them.
My thinking is that if you teach a kid how to use Gnome and/or KDE in grade school and then teach them how to use the command line in middle and high school, they'll come out of it with a pretty good knowledge of the workings of PCs. And after learning Linux figuring out Windows and MS apps ought to be a snap.
Or stick with the Mac and OSX platform for grade school (pretty point and click) and then when they get older teach them about the BSD system that's sitting under all of it.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Did he have permission to install/run the client on the computers? We don't have a solid answer to this one, but I would suspect a court would find the answer was yes. The school employed him to administer the computer. In liu of giving him explicit instructions, they were relying on him to A) Stay within the bounds of the law (eg, no illegal copies of software) and B) use his best profesional judgement on the best way to admin the machine.
You're assuming that he was the admin. He uses the term "configurator." To me this implies that he is a guy from desktop support who was told to make a standard image for all of the PCs in the system. In such a case, they are usually provided with a list of standard apps and configurations to use.
I could be wrong, but I've yet to meet an Admin who called himself anything but Admin (or guru or god).
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
He did "administer" the machines.
I thought that he said that he was the "configurator." To me, that means that he's the guy who made the Ghost image that was deployed on 500 machines statewide. That's quite a difference from the "administrator," the person who in the end is responsible for all of the day-to-day workings of the systems under his control.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
That sounds really familiar. I recall in my college days having to drive one of my friends to court in another state. Her previous employer had apparently caught her red-handed pocketing cash from the register. I can't remember how much it was, other than it was around $1000 (over the course of several months).
So anyway we waited and waited through the preceeding cases. One of them was a man who was being given his second DUI conviction. He got a sentence that was mostly suspended, so he actually wound up having to serve 3 days. Before the bailiff took him off to the county jail, the defendant complained that he had already missed the dinner meal at the jail (he'd apparently been in before and knew the feeding schedules) and asked if he could go across the street and grab a hamburger before he went in, and the judge let him.
My friend was given a sentence of 30 days, suspended down to 3 days to serve, plus having to pay restitution, plus 100 hours of community service. I normally would have considered that a reasonable sentence for the crime, had the DUI guy not been in front of us. Sometimes it makes me wonder...
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Nah. I'd vote for River Phoenix since he did such a good job at the beginning of "Last Crusade." Oh, wait a minnit...damn.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
I wonder if the third world will end up being the futuristic society that we have been promised since the 1940's? It's interesting that because of first-world dependence on backwards compatible technologies (ie, gasoline engine, coal burning power plants, etc) that the newer and more environmentally friendly technologies are taking root in the third world nations. I guess I think of it as getting a chance to (technilogically) start over with a clean slate in many cases instead of having to work within the somewhat outdated framework of modern, first-world technology.
Just a thought anyways.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Either way cash is the way to go, but it gets harder/more inconvient every day to use cash.
I agree. I sometimes wonder if businesses would accept cash at all if it didn't have the magic phrase, "This note is legal tender for all debts, public or private" printed on it.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
There is another solution to these grocery savings cards, keychains etc. Use another grocery store!
That would be my ideal solution as well, but it is not feasible where I live. There are three large grocery stores in my area (Big Bear, Kroger, and Giant Eagle) and they are all part of large chains that have the same kind of plan. Kroger and Big Bear didn't use to have the cards, but Giant Eagle came into town with their discount card and all of the Kroger and Big Bear customers started complaining that they wanted a discount card program to, so they implemented one. So now I have to pay extra for my groceries in order to maintain my privacy.
On the other hand I do pay for a lot of my groceries using checks which allow them the same tracking ability.
While this may be possible, it sure isn't easy. With the discount card system they scan your card (your identity) with your groceries and a computer can correllate everything. With a check they would have to at least do the footwork manually, and even then they wouldn't have your consent to do it. I'm pretty sure in the T&Cs for the discount card there is something in there permitting them to collect personal information on you.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
By the power vested in my by Godwin's Law, I hereby declare this thread ended.
That's funny, I hadn't read about it before. Still, it wouldn't come about if it weren't accurate. Doing something "for the public good" implies that the public doesn't have the good sense to do what's good for them to begin with. While in some cases that's accurate, in most cases it is not.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Well, you obviously have a sense of humor, so I won't be too much of a dick about this to you.:-)
;)
Right. Let's start with your last comment. Those cameras you see all over britain are public cameras, owned and operated either by local councils (government departments), or by the police. What is wrong with them knowing where you are? They're not going to pull you over and try and sell you stuff.
But are you being monitored by the cameras? Yes. And that was my point, that there is a lot of monitoring done by the government in Britain. It doesn't matter to me if it's for "public safety" or not, it's still monitoring and it's not the job of my government to babysit its citizens. I wonder what happens if I resemble someone who is wanted for a crime? Are the chances good that I'll actually get stopped and dragged to the police station for questioning? I seem to recall a similar case recently.
What, exactly, are you trying to get away from?
I don't have to be trying to get away from anything or anybody simply because I want privacy. I want privacy for privacy's sake, that way I don't have to worry about who is watching me or why when I'm taking care of my personal matters. It's just creepy to think that you shouldn't have that right.
If you work in a shady part of town, every time your car gets broken in to raises the premiums of the people who actually put their car where they say, which is unfair on them, and technically insurance fraud.
In the US, insurance regulations vary by state. Where I live I am only required to disclose the primary address where the car is parked (home), whether it is garaged or parked on the street, the approximate annual mileage driven, the purpose of the car (daily driver to work or just a sunny weekend getaway car), and if I drive it to and from work the approximate round-trip mileage to and from work. There is no requirement to disclose where I work or where the car is parked while at work. But if the insurance companies in the US had some legal way of finding this out they would certainly use it against us if they could.
Maybe that's why you don't want the feds on your trail?
I don't want the feds on my trail because they cannot be trusted to enforce the laws that we have in the manner that they are currently implemented. Why should I allow them to further complicate matters when I don't have to? Why should I allow my government to have new powers when they can't be trusted with what they've got?
The number of credit cards issued in your country far surpasses the number issued in the rest of the world. That alone means that every single one of those cards can be traced when used. And not to mention that ralph's savings thing on your keyring
We could swap our credit cards for your security cameras. Monitoring has degrees. I personally don't use credit cards (only cash except on purchases larger than $1000 or so, though I often write a check instead) and I certainly don't use those grocery store discount keyrings that track my purchases and send me junk-mail based on it. I pay the higher price for the food and am glad to retain what little privacy I have left. But even so, I'd much rather have someone monitor my grocery habits than to be on camera 24/7 except for when I'm in my own home.
Your paranoia that every tracking facility is open to any private business with cash to burn is slightly unfounded.
It may be now, but the future isn't that far off. In the US it is very common for most office buildings to have cameras mounted outside so that corporate security can monitor the goings-on at the property. They can use this information in any way they see fit. Acme rent-a-car tracks you for commercial purposes, as do most store discount key-ring tags. Your mobile phone company monitors your usage patterns and combines it with the usage patterns of other subscribers to create calling packages that maximize their profits (and your monthly statement). And it keeps on going from there. In the US, the overwhelming majority of the monitoring that goes on is done by business, not government.
All I can say is I'm glad I don't share insurance companies with you, and I'm watched by cameras. and that chip in my head (pesky CIA).
Har har.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Correct me if I'm wrong here but Acme, as a car rental company are well within their rights to impose terms and conditions when they lease their property to another party.
Assuming that the terms and conditions are legal and enforceable, probably. But apparently the T&Cs in this case are neither legal nor enforceable.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
What is the loss of the phone company when you make a phone call when the ciruits are not full? Nothing. OK, maybe a tiny fraction of electricity, and the potential that the circuits fill.
The phone company provides their service to you 24/7, whether you are making a call at the time or not. You're paying in some part for the availability of the service.
What is the loss of the car company when you speed? Nothing. OK, maybe a tiny fraction of a reduced mechanical lifetime, and the potential that you get into an accident and cause the company's insurance rates to go up.
With the rental car you are already paying for the availability of the car in rental and insurance fees. But what the court said is that you can't bill somebody for the "potential" of them causing you damages. Otherwise the phone company would bill you for the "potential" of you cutting down a tree in your yard because it might fall on their phone lines.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
If the contract states that speeding incurrs a charge, how is it relevant what mechanism was used to determine that the driver was speeding?
Because if the device isn't able to accurately determine whether speeding actually occurred, then how can they have a basis for charging the customer? GPS isn't perfect. Neither is a car's speedometer. They often don't agree.
Also, bear in mind that just because it's been written into a contract and signed doesn't mean that it's legal or even enforceable. If the rental contract had said that speeding would result in the rental clerk getting the right to live with you rent-free for a month it probably wouldn't be enforceable.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
Provided that they tell you beforehand, can anyone supply a compelling reason why it's immoral or unethical for them to monitor one of their cars with GPS?
Yes. The GPS system can be subject to signal outages (GPS is line-of-sight, remember) which sometimes register as ludicrous fluctuations in speed.
Also, the speedometer on the car isn't likely to be calibrated to match the accuracy of the GPS system. It's possible for the speedometer to read 65 MPH while the GPS reads it at 72 MPH. Which system do you trust? Which system is more accurate? Does the driver even have the GPS data available to him? From the last time that this article was posted, it seemed clear that the GPS/tracking system was hidden inside the car to prevent tampering, so I doubt that there is an LCD readout for the driver to use.
There are some occasions when it is considered appropriate to exceed a posted speed limit such as accelerating to avoid a potential accident, accelerating to merge with high-speed traffic, etc. The GPS system will record these incidents as violations while a police officer wouldn't even look twice at them.
It is unreasonable to assume that Acme has a system in place of monitoring the posted speed limits on every section of road in their part of the country. Rand McNally has a hard time trying to keep their maps accurate as new roads pop up and freeway interchanges are built and re-built. How much easier is it to change a posted speed limit than to build a new road? What Acme had on file as a 45 MPH construction zone may now be an open stretch of 65 MPH freeway. How can they guarantee that their records are 100% accurate?
The system in place at Acme does not take any of these common occurances into account. It merely logs each instance where the "speed limit" is exceeded and automatically charges your account for it, even before you've returned the car. It is judge, jury and executioner with no right of appeal. And even if there were a right of appeal, the often transient conditions that would result in the GPS system registering excess speed wouldn't be feasible to prove in any convincing way.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.
MY experience with digital speedometers is that they suck.
Not necessarily so. A speedometer is a speedometer is a speedometer. The ones with digital displays are just that - digital displays. They still get the data that they display in roughly the same manner as analog speedometers. The problem is, it's damn near impossible to make a speedometer that is 100% accurate. Even the best of them have some small variation in them. The faster you go, the more the variation comes into play and the more inaccurate a speedometer becomes. There is also some degree of drift in the speedometer, meaning that the longer the speedometer goes without calibration the less accurate it tends to be. Changing the diameter of the tires/wheels (total sum diameter) can also increase the inaccuracy of the speedometer.
Taking all of that into account, I'm not really suprised about your 113 MPH speeding ticket. But you're damn lucky to get off on only $55. In Ohio I've paid $85 for being only 19 MPH over the limit, but the fines are increased based on speed increments. Being +20 MPH jacks up the fine in a big way.
Say "NO!" to tax money for religious groups.