If you aren't seriously looking for a new job, don't waste the time of the interviewer. Sure, put your resume out there to see if you get any hits, but interviewing for jobs you don't want and don't intend to take crosses the line.
Independent IT consulting/programming is a difficult, thankless task with high risk and few rewards. I know what you are thinking: my employer pays independent consultants/programmers $150/hour! I could be making that kind of coin!
A rule of thumb is that even a successful IT consultant (which most aren't) need to charge approx. three times what an employer would pay them for the exact same job to cover overhead, downtime, and benefits. You, and you alone, are responsible for all the stuff your employer handles now: sales, legal, marketing, sales, accounting, benefits, and did I mention sales? You need contacts, superior networking skills (of the people type, not the computing kind), and enough of a financial cushion to prepare yourself to be earning peanuts until you get enough business volume to make it off the ground, if you ever do. And don't forget that ALL vacation is unpaid vacation when you work for yourself.
And entrepreneurs trying to sell a product have it even tougher; most new products fail because the creator over-estimated the market for them and/or didn't know the right way to sell them. The quality of the product itself has very little to do with selling it. You could bust your balls for a year working like a madman to recover the equivalent of half of what you'd get flipping burgers.
When a new business works, it works. But even then, self-employment has a way of taking over the life of the entrepreneur; any of them will tell you that any notion of work-life balance goes out the window when you work for yourself.
Municipalities and state governments are MORONS. There is not one reason to spend a single cent of tax incentives on a data center. They hear "Google", "Apple", "Facebook", and they have visions of hundreds of highly-paid software engineers sitting in row upon row of cubicles, and then going home to their brand-new houses, spending all their millions in local stores, etc.
Not even the companies themselves promise much in the way of jobs, but the governments aren't paying attention.
If you have finite electrical generating and grid capacity, it's far better to lure in SOME kind of manufacturing facility (they do still exist) then a data center that will book a huge portion of the output while employing a tiny handful of people that really don't get paid that much.
Your old contract requires the destruction of the equipment. Your new contract failed to price in its replacement. Why is this the agency's problem? If I were the client, I'm not going to go out of my way to evaluate your data destruction ideas and instead would simply request you perform the contract as agreed.
Make sure your negotiators don't foul this up for future contracts.
IBM is emphatically NOT an end-user-focused company. They explicitly fled away from that market years ago. What on earth would they do with WebOS that couldn't be done easier and cheaper with some other OS?
Check out the SX-70. That is some seriously cool technology. It's clearly in the same league for sheer geeky awesomeness as any other classic camera.
And a classic Leica or Mamiya (or even a current camera fresh out of the factory) can't spit out a usable snapshot print in a couple of minutes without a separate printer.
Here is an excerpt from letter I dug up online from the FAA:
a. The purpose of the rule is to provide minimum safe altitudes for flight and to provide adequate protection to persons on the ground. Thus, it distinguishes flight over sparsely settled areas as well as large metropolitan areas from low flying aircraft. Thus, size of the area is not controlling, and violations of the rule have been sustained for operation of aircraft: (i) over a small congested area consisting of approximately 10 houses and a school (Allman, 5 C.A.B. 8 (1940)); (ii) over campus of a university (Tobin, 5 C.A.B. 162, 164(1941); (iii) over a beach area along a highway, and (iv) over a boy's camp where there were numerous people on the docks and children at play on shore. b. The presence of people is important to the determination of whether a particular area is "congested." Thus, no violation was found in the case of a flight over a large shop building and four one-family dwellings because, in the words of the CAB examiner, "it is not known (to the court) whether the dwellings were occupied." In that case, the area surrounding the buildings was open, flat and semiarid.
(NOTE: The FAR references have changed since this letter was published.)
Helicopters can fly however low they want, within reason:
FAR 91.119(d)(1): (1) A helicopter may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section, provided each person operating the helicopter complies with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the FAA.
And planes are only required to fly 1000 feet above congested residential areas: FAR 91.119(b): (b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
Over uncongested areas, 500 AGL is fine.
And any altitude is fine if needed for takeoff or landing.
Before complaining to the FAA again, you should do your research. You also might want to download the approach plates (if any) for the airport to see how low they are supposed to be flying over your house.
On a windy day the plane can slide all over the glide path if you just sit back and let it sink to the ground. To make a proper landing, you need to make constant adjustments to the throttle, stick, and rudder. Those are kind of tough if you can't see the 'bleeping ground; a crosswind gust and you are toast.
Yes, takeoff is the most dangerous phase of a flight, but it would be correct to say that landing is the phase that is the most dependent on what you see outside the windscreen.
When a service is provided for free, you aren't the customer, you are the product.
Google handed out my referrer data before, to everybody, for free. Now they restrict it to clicks on ads. My overall privacy has increased. I imagine ad buyers would revolt if they didn't get the referrer data they have always gotten from Google. Google, quite properly, doesn't give a flying *bleep!* about webmasters collecting referrer data on clicks they are getting for free.
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous?
Can they attach such a device to you, or your clothing? Why should your car be any different?
There is a difference between you/your clothing and your car. You car's primary use is to travel upon public roadways. You/your clothing do many other things, mostly in places where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. (I expect that the data from the GPS, once it crossed onto private property, would not be admissible until it again merged onto a public roadway.)
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient?
There's only one constitutional standard: Probable Cause. "Reasonable" is something you establish by getting a warrant. If you haven't been issued a warrant then you haven't established that the search is reasonable. More to the point, authorization to perform a search or seizure is a warrant, and a declaration that an entire class of searches or seizures is authorized as "reasonable" without reference to specific persons or property and probably cause is strictly in violation of the second half of the 4th Amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
You are correct that "Reasonable Suspicion" does not appear in the Constitution. It is a term adopted by the legal system to describe a legal standard; specifically "more than an "inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 'hunch'"; it must be based on "specific and articulable facts", "taken together with rational inferences from those facts." This is a paraphrase of Terry v. Ohio in the Wikipedia entry on Reasonable Suspicion. Just because a phrase does not appear in the Constitution does not mean it cannot be used to describe constitutional rights.
The complete and total search of anything and everything that crosses the border, without warrant, oath, affirmation, etc. of any kind, was explicitly authorized by the 1st Congress in legislation, and we can assume they knew what the 4th amendment meant, since many of them debated and signed it. So that, right there, is a declaration that an entire class of searches is reasonable without a warrant. Your assertion that only searches with a warrant are reasonable is unsupported by centuries of constitutional jurisprudence.
Your 0 0 0 plan is anarchy, pure and simple. Govt, of a large country, in a useful form, requires money in order to operate.
We tried to run a government on the 0 0 0 plan; it was called the Articles of Confederation. They didn't work, hence the Constitution.
You want to cut 99.99% of the government? At 2010 levels, that would leave you with a Federal Budget of approx. $345 Million. That ain't enough to provide Defense, Customs/Immigration, and Diplomacy; the most basic services of any Sovereign nation, much less Provide for the Common Defense, Promote the General Welfare, and Secure the Blessings of Liberty for Ourselves and Posterity. It's about a $1.10 per person.
Firstly, the position of your vehicle on public roads is not now, and never has been, subject to constitutional protections. Those public roads are public property, and any member of the public, or the state itself, can record data about what vehicles are traveling which roads when. (Just like you can collect data on public airspace usage... there are exhaustive databases that have years of flight tracking for every plane in the US that flew under a flight plan.) That data can be bought, sold, transferred, analyzed, reported on, used in lawsuits or criminal cases, etc. with no restrictions of any kind. This part of the law isn't the least bit vague. A little creepy, yes, but not legally questionable. The only legal questions are on the collection methods, not the data itself.
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous? Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act... an officer can frisk you and your clothing (property) without a warrant during an arrest, but he can't toss your car (another form of property.)
An officer can, under current constitutional law, place a chalk mark on your tire to track how long it has been parked by the roadside. What are the legally significant distinctions between that and a GPS tracker in your tire well? Is that distinction enough to make the device "unreasonable"? There certainly are distinctions between the two, but where is the line of "reasonable" search without a warrant crossed?
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient? The two standards to choose from would be Reasonable Suspicion (no warrant needed) vs. Probable Cause (intrusive enough to make a warrant necessary.)
This is not contorted logic here... it's a legitimate legal question where different judges have interpreted the relevant precedent differently. And it's not one I know the answer to.
If you were a commodity speculator, you'd have placed an order for way more than one hard drive a month ago for later delivery, and you'd be selling the right to have the billing and shipping information changed. You would never, yourself, actually have the ability to pay for, accept delivery of, or use, those drives.
Firstly, the 4th amendment protects against "unreasonable" search and seizure without a warrant. "Reasonable" is open to interpretation.
The thinking goes like this... it's not illegal for somebody like a meter maid to walk up to your car, mark the tire, and walk away. This is one way a meter maid can "track" your car. They, via the chalk mark, must "modify" your tire to do so.
The police can currently track suspects on public roads without a warrant through the expensive, dangerous, and error-prone method of tailing a vehicle. A GPS tracker stuck to the wheelwell produces identical information at far less expense and risk. As long as the whereabouts of the vehicle are not tracked on private property, it produced the exact same data following the car would. Again, neither method requires a warrant. They have "modified" your vehicle no more than our prototypical meter maid.
The job of the courts is to draw the line to decide between the state's interest in the efficient operation of law enforcement and the citizen's interest in having his property untouched by the state. (Your location on public roads is already public data not subject to protection of any kind... it's the collecting of that data that's the sticking point; can they touch your property without a warrant to do so?)
"These are clear violations of the fourth amendment..."
If that were true, I don't think that "time and again" the courts would be ruling otherwise, and "legal clarity" would not be required. It's an unsettled area of law.
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, complete and utter legal ignoramuses do not end up as high-level judges. Certainly some of them may produce rulings with which there is legitimate grounds for appeal (and rulings with which a majority of Slashdot posters disagree), but that does not make those decisions blatantly unjustified from the start.
Personally, I think it's borderline, and I don't know enough 4th-amdendment jurisprudence to make a definitive call.
Hey, I LIKE Star Trek... it's is generally fairly well-done Space Opera. But what it does not contain is an internally consistent system of science or physics; the capabilities of Trek technology are loose rules that are routinely modified to fit the plot of the current episode/movie. Which is fine; it's fiction, not a documentary.
The only point I was trying to make is that one does not require science to be Science Fiction. Nor does something require spaceships and ray guns to deserve to be in the Science Fiction section of the book store.
SciFi is often (usually) the extrapolation of technology based on whatever made-up science the author requires to serve his setting and plot. Please tell me exactly what science Gene Roddenberry was drawing on when he came up with the warp drive or the transporter for Star Trek.
Very few authors with FTL travel bother to come up with some scientifically plausible way for it to actually be possible. They cobble something together, often with an internally-consistent and plot-useful structure if they don't want to be writing crappy pulp (Weber and Drake have both done decent jobs, Roddenberry did not), but it's not, in any way, based on science. Most (though not all) ignore time dilation. Most (though not all) ignore special relativity. Most (though not all) ignore the effects of hitting a piece of dust at appreciable fractions of c. (The usual crutch around all this is "Hyperspace"... convenient, but still a total fabrication.) We still call it science fiction, despite the complete and total utter lack of anything vaguely resembling actual science.
Need I remind any geek of Clarke's famous maxim about technology and magic? The type of Fantasy I generally read DOES have internally consistent systems for what we call magic. I named three book series, all of which use forces that don't exist in our universe, but are consistent within the book's setting, and no more implausible (and possibly more plausible) than a "warp" drive that runs off of "dilithium crystals" and somehow enables time travel when the plot requires it, but not when the plot requires time travel to be impossible.
There certainly are some authors that set their books in near-future that use reasonable extrapolations of current technology, but to be frank, that's a pretty small fraction of what's out there.
P.S. Give me some geek cred... you didn't need to tell me what A Song of Ice and Fire referred to.:-)
What I read of The Last Centurion (and I didn't blow the cash to actually buy it and read it in full), the bias did harm the story line. It was downright Rand-ian in it's polemic. Ringo wasn't preaching in that book, he was whacking the reader on the head with a 2x4.
And if you check out the Tuloriad (co-Authored with Kratman), that most certainly does prothletize (if I'm using (or even spelling) the word correctly... couldn't find a definition, and hadn't seen it before.) It most certainly is preachy, and even includes an downright silly afterword just in case you missed the not-at-all subtle (but poorly made) point. The Christian co-plot (I was considering calling it a sub-text, but that would have given it too many points for subtlety) absolutely destroyed what could have been an otherwise fascinating plotline.
But yeah, I have no beef with those that like the PoS series, but it ain't my cup of tea.
I used to wonder why Fantasy was grouped in with SF. But futuristic SF involves things that are not possible (at least by our current understanding.) Why should we limit "Science Fiction" to Starships and Lightsabers? Why not Swords, Sorcery, and Magic? If we strip current tech from a "hard" SF book, you are left with more-or-less magic anyway.
Really, my yardstick for good Fantasy (at least, Fantasy that I enjoy reading) is that it presents a system of magic that is methodical and is internally consistent. I don't care for the "call upon the favor of the Gods" type stuff. But stuff like the Mistborn trilogy, or the Coldfire or Magister series all present stuff that would be "hard" traditional SF if the setting had been changed.
Instead of trying to draw a fuzzy line between "hard" Fantasy, and Tolkien-type stuff, it makes more sense to just stick them in the same section of the store.
The March Upcountry series (which he co-authored with Weber) is excellent, the first four books of the Posleen Wars is solid military SF (as is the Cally offshoot that was co-written) and the Council Wars were also good. (As a side note, Weber has also Clancy-fied himself, but in the "I don't need an editor" way, as opposed to the "I assume all my readers will share my political views and will present them uncritically" way.)
It's kind of funny, the downright bizarre Paladin of Shadows ("Ghost", et al) series was something he didn't ever think would get published, due to it being too extreme. Jim Baen published it anyway, correctly divining that there was a market for this stuff. With how well it did, Ringo made the not entirely unjustified decision to let his political and/or sexual preferences become a major part of his works.
I guess it makes him money, but I can't stand to read the stuff. (I don't like extreme polemic from either end of the political spectrum in my SF, and the sex stuff in Paladin of Shadows is just gross, and I'm not a prude.)
What publishers use this practice? Just looking around online, including many sites advising authors on negotiating contracts (including the Author's Guild), none mention advances having to be repaid. Wikipedia mentioned this was not uncommon in the film industry, but was rather rare in book publishing.
I believe it is not unheard of for a schock publisher negotiating a multi-book deal to try and push for earnings from hits offsetting advances from flops, but that's a long way from requiring the author to pony up a repayment.
There is no self-publishing "blacklist." What IS blacklisted is individual works that have already been "published" by a vanity house like PublishAmerica.
And they "will not publish new authors?" What kind of crock is this? There are plenty of new authors that get published every year. Yes, most of the publicity, and sales, goes to proven authors, but that is to be expected.
Slashdot Mirror
If you aren't seriously looking for a new job, don't waste the time of the interviewer. Sure, put your resume out there to see if you get any hits, but interviewing for jobs you don't want and don't intend to take crosses the line.
Independent IT consulting/programming is a difficult, thankless task with high risk and few rewards. I know what you are thinking: my employer pays independent consultants/programmers $150/hour! I could be making that kind of coin!
A rule of thumb is that even a successful IT consultant (which most aren't) need to charge approx. three times what an employer would pay them for the exact same job to cover overhead, downtime, and benefits. You, and you alone, are responsible for all the stuff your employer handles now: sales, legal, marketing, sales, accounting, benefits, and did I mention sales? You need contacts, superior networking skills (of the people type, not the computing kind), and enough of a financial cushion to prepare yourself to be earning peanuts until you get enough business volume to make it off the ground, if you ever do. And don't forget that ALL vacation is unpaid vacation when you work for yourself.
And entrepreneurs trying to sell a product have it even tougher; most new products fail because the creator over-estimated the market for them and/or didn't know the right way to sell them. The quality of the product itself has very little to do with selling it. You could bust your balls for a year working like a madman to recover the equivalent of half of what you'd get flipping burgers.
When a new business works, it works. But even then, self-employment has a way of taking over the life of the entrepreneur; any of them will tell you that any notion of work-life balance goes out the window when you work for yourself.
Part and parcel with these deals is essentially a waiver from property tax. These are not minor discounts.
Try to know the facts (or lack thereof) behind your arguments; they'll be more sound.
Municipalities and state governments are MORONS. There is not one reason to spend a single cent of tax incentives on a data center. They hear "Google", "Apple", "Facebook", and they have visions of hundreds of highly-paid software engineers sitting in row upon row of cubicles, and then going home to their brand-new houses, spending all their millions in local stores, etc.
Not even the companies themselves promise much in the way of jobs, but the governments aren't paying attention.
If you have finite electrical generating and grid capacity, it's far better to lure in SOME kind of manufacturing facility (they do still exist) then a data center that will book a huge portion of the output while employing a tiny handful of people that really don't get paid that much.
Your old contract requires the destruction of the equipment. Your new contract failed to price in its replacement. Why is this the agency's problem? If I were the client, I'm not going to go out of my way to evaluate your data destruction ideas and instead would simply request you perform the contract as agreed.
Make sure your negotiators don't foul this up for future contracts.
Groupon absolutely allows merchants to limit deals. Merchants simply fail to actually do so.
IBM is emphatically NOT an end-user-focused company. They explicitly fled away from that market years ago. What on earth would they do with WebOS that couldn't be done easier and cheaper with some other OS?
Check out the SX-70. That is some seriously cool technology. It's clearly in the same league for sheer geeky awesomeness as any other classic camera.
And a classic Leica or Mamiya (or even a current camera fresh out of the factory) can't spit out a usable snapshot print in a couple of minutes without a separate printer.
Here is an excerpt from letter I dug up online from the FAA:
a. The purpose of the rule is to provide minimum safe altitudes for flight and to provide adequate protection to persons on the ground. Thus, it distinguishes flight over sparsely settled areas as well as large metropolitan areas from low flying aircraft. Thus, size of the area is not controlling, and violations of
the rule have been sustained for operation of aircraft: (i) over a small congested area consisting of approximately 10 houses and a school (Allman, 5 C.A.B. 8 (1940)); (ii) over campus of a university (Tobin, 5 C.A.B. 162, 164(1941); (iii) over a beach area along a highway, and (iv) over a boy's camp
where there were numerous people on the docks and children at play on shore. b. The presence of people is important to the determination of whether a particular area is "congested." Thus, no violation was found in the case of a flight over a large shop building and four one-family dwellings because, in the
words of the CAB examiner, "it is not known (to the court) whether the dwellings were occupied." In that case, the area surrounding the buildings was open, flat and semiarid.
(NOTE: The FAR references have changed since this letter was published.)
The full web page (with definitions from international authorities too) is here: http://footflyer.com/PPGBibleUpdates/Chapter08/congested.htm
Helicopters can fly however low they want, within reason:
FAR 91.119(d)(1): (1) A helicopter may be operated at less than the minimums prescribed in paragraph (b) or (c) of this section, provided each person operating the helicopter complies with any routes or altitudes specifically prescribed for helicopters by the FAA.
And planes are only required to fly 1000 feet above congested residential areas:
FAR 91.119(b): (b) Over congested areas. Over any congested area of a city, town, or settlement, or over any open air assembly of persons, an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.
Over uncongested areas, 500 AGL is fine.
And any altitude is fine if needed for takeoff or landing.
Before complaining to the FAA again, you should do your research. You also might want to download the approach plates (if any) for the airport to see how low they are supposed to be flying over your house.
On a windy day the plane can slide all over the glide path if you just sit back and let it sink to the ground. To make a proper landing, you need to make constant adjustments to the throttle, stick, and rudder. Those are kind of tough if you can't see the 'bleeping ground; a crosswind gust and you are toast.
Yes, takeoff is the most dangerous phase of a flight, but it would be correct to say that landing is the phase that is the most dependent on what you see outside the windscreen.
When a service is provided for free, you aren't the customer, you are the product.
Google handed out my referrer data before, to everybody, for free. Now they restrict it to clicks on ads. My overall privacy has increased. I imagine ad buyers would revolt if they didn't get the referrer data they have always gotten from Google. Google, quite properly, doesn't give a flying *bleep!* about webmasters collecting referrer data on clicks they are getting for free.
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous?
Can they attach such a device to you, or your clothing? Why should your car be any different?
There is a difference between you/your clothing and your car. You car's primary use is to travel upon public roadways. You/your clothing do many other things, mostly in places where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. (I expect that the data from the GPS, once it crossed onto private property, would not be admissible until it again merged onto a public roadway.)
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient?
There's only one constitutional standard: Probable Cause. "Reasonable" is something you establish by getting a warrant. If you haven't been issued a warrant then you haven't established that the search is reasonable. More to the point, authorization to perform a search or seizure is a warrant, and a declaration that an entire class of searches or seizures is authorized as "reasonable" without reference to specific persons or property and probably cause is strictly in violation of the second half of the 4th Amendment: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
You are correct that "Reasonable Suspicion" does not appear in the Constitution. It is a term adopted by the legal system to describe a legal standard; specifically "more than an "inchoate and unparticularized suspicion or 'hunch'"; it must be based on "specific and articulable facts", "taken together with rational inferences from those facts." This is a paraphrase of Terry v. Ohio in the Wikipedia entry on Reasonable Suspicion. Just because a phrase does not appear in the Constitution does not mean it cannot be used to describe constitutional rights.
The complete and total search of anything and everything that crosses the border, without warrant, oath, affirmation, etc. of any kind, was explicitly authorized by the 1st Congress in legislation, and we can assume they knew what the 4th amendment meant, since many of them debated and signed it. So that, right there, is a declaration that an entire class of searches is reasonable without a warrant. Your assertion that only searches with a warrant are reasonable is unsupported by centuries of constitutional jurisprudence.
Ah, Roman_mir again...
Your 0 0 0 plan is anarchy, pure and simple. Govt, of a large country, in a useful form, requires money in order to operate.
We tried to run a government on the 0 0 0 plan; it was called the Articles of Confederation. They didn't work, hence the Constitution.
You want to cut 99.99% of the government? At 2010 levels, that would leave you with a Federal Budget of approx. $345 Million. That ain't enough to provide Defense, Customs/Immigration, and Diplomacy; the most basic services of any Sovereign nation, much less Provide for the Common Defense, Promote the General Welfare, and Secure the Blessings of Liberty for Ourselves and Posterity. It's about a $1.10 per person.
Firstly, the position of your vehicle on public roads is not now, and never has been, subject to constitutional protections. Those public roads are public property, and any member of the public, or the state itself, can record data about what vehicles are traveling which roads when. (Just like you can collect data on public airspace usage... there are exhaustive databases that have years of flight tracking for every plane in the US that flew under a flight plan.) That data can be bought, sold, transferred, analyzed, reported on, used in lawsuits or criminal cases, etc. with no restrictions of any kind. This part of the law isn't the least bit vague. A little creepy, yes, but not legally questionable. The only legal questions are on the collection methods, not the data itself.
The Constitutional question is: Can officers attach a device to your car without a warrant to make it more efficient to collect data that they could warrantlessly collect in other ways that would be more inefficient, expensive, and dangerous? Where do you balance the interests of the state in the efficient execution of law enforcement operations with the privacy rights of citizens? This is a common constitutional balancing act... an officer can frisk you and your clothing (property) without a warrant during an arrest, but he can't toss your car (another form of property.)
An officer can, under current constitutional law, place a chalk mark on your tire to track how long it has been parked by the roadside. What are the legally significant distinctions between that and a GPS tracker in your tire well? Is that distinction enough to make the device "unreasonable"? There certainly are distinctions between the two, but where is the line of "reasonable" search without a warrant crossed?
We can guess that officers placing such a device with no justification would not past constitutional muster, but is the Reasonable Suspicion standard sufficient? The two standards to choose from would be Reasonable Suspicion (no warrant needed) vs. Probable Cause (intrusive enough to make a warrant necessary.)
This is not contorted logic here... it's a legitimate legal question where different judges have interpreted the relevant precedent differently. And it's not one I know the answer to.
If you were a commodity speculator, you'd have placed an order for way more than one hard drive a month ago for later delivery, and you'd be selling the right to have the billing and shipping information changed. You would never, yourself, actually have the ability to pay for, accept delivery of, or use, those drives.
Firstly, the 4th amendment protects against "unreasonable" search and seizure without a warrant. "Reasonable" is open to interpretation.
The thinking goes like this... it's not illegal for somebody like a meter maid to walk up to your car, mark the tire, and walk away. This is one way a meter maid can "track" your car. They, via the chalk mark, must "modify" your tire to do so.
The police can currently track suspects on public roads without a warrant through the expensive, dangerous, and error-prone method of tailing a vehicle. A GPS tracker stuck to the wheelwell produces identical information at far less expense and risk. As long as the whereabouts of the vehicle are not tracked on private property, it produced the exact same data following the car would. Again, neither method requires a warrant. They have "modified" your vehicle no more than our prototypical meter maid.
The job of the courts is to draw the line to decide between the state's interest in the efficient operation of law enforcement and the citizen's interest in having his property untouched by the state. (Your location on public roads is already public data not subject to protection of any kind... it's the collecting of that data that's the sticking point; can they touch your property without a warrant to do so?)
"These are clear violations of the fourth amendment..."
If that were true, I don't think that "time and again" the courts would be ruling otherwise, and "legal clarity" would not be required. It's an unsettled area of law.
Contrary to popular Slashdot belief, complete and utter legal ignoramuses do not end up as high-level judges. Certainly some of them may produce rulings with which there is legitimate grounds for appeal (and rulings with which a majority of Slashdot posters disagree), but that does not make those decisions blatantly unjustified from the start.
Personally, I think it's borderline, and I don't know enough 4th-amdendment jurisprudence to make a definitive call.
Hey, I LIKE Star Trek... it's is generally fairly well-done Space Opera. But what it does not contain is an internally consistent system of science or physics; the capabilities of Trek technology are loose rules that are routinely modified to fit the plot of the current episode/movie. Which is fine; it's fiction, not a documentary.
The only point I was trying to make is that one does not require science to be Science Fiction. Nor does something require spaceships and ray guns to deserve to be in the Science Fiction section of the book store.
SciFi is often (usually) the extrapolation of technology based on whatever made-up science the author requires to serve his setting and plot. Please tell me exactly what science Gene Roddenberry was drawing on when he came up with the warp drive or the transporter for Star Trek.
Very few authors with FTL travel bother to come up with some scientifically plausible way for it to actually be possible. They cobble something together, often with an internally-consistent and plot-useful structure if they don't want to be writing crappy pulp (Weber and Drake have both done decent jobs, Roddenberry did not), but it's not, in any way, based on science. Most (though not all) ignore time dilation. Most (though not all) ignore special relativity. Most (though not all) ignore the effects of hitting a piece of dust at appreciable fractions of c. (The usual crutch around all this is "Hyperspace"... convenient, but still a total fabrication.) We still call it science fiction, despite the complete and total utter lack of anything vaguely resembling actual science.
Need I remind any geek of Clarke's famous maxim about technology and magic? The type of Fantasy I generally read DOES have internally consistent systems for what we call magic. I named three book series, all of which use forces that don't exist in our universe, but are consistent within the book's setting, and no more implausible (and possibly more plausible) than a "warp" drive that runs off of "dilithium crystals" and somehow enables time travel when the plot requires it, but not when the plot requires time travel to be impossible.
There certainly are some authors that set their books in near-future that use reasonable extrapolations of current technology, but to be frank, that's a pretty small fraction of what's out there.
P.S. Give me some geek cred... you didn't need to tell me what A Song of Ice and Fire referred to. :-)
What I read of The Last Centurion (and I didn't blow the cash to actually buy it and read it in full), the bias did harm the story line. It was downright Rand-ian in it's polemic. Ringo wasn't preaching in that book, he was whacking the reader on the head with a 2x4.
And if you check out the Tuloriad (co-Authored with Kratman), that most certainly does prothletize (if I'm using (or even spelling) the word correctly... couldn't find a definition, and hadn't seen it before.) It most certainly is preachy, and even includes an downright silly afterword just in case you missed the not-at-all subtle (but poorly made) point. The Christian co-plot (I was considering calling it a sub-text, but that would have given it too many points for subtlety) absolutely destroyed what could have been an otherwise fascinating plotline.
But yeah, I have no beef with those that like the PoS series, but it ain't my cup of tea.
I used to wonder why Fantasy was grouped in with SF. But futuristic SF involves things that are not possible (at least by our current understanding.) Why should we limit "Science Fiction" to Starships and Lightsabers? Why not Swords, Sorcery, and Magic? If we strip current tech from a "hard" SF book, you are left with more-or-less magic anyway.
Really, my yardstick for good Fantasy (at least, Fantasy that I enjoy reading) is that it presents a system of magic that is methodical and is internally consistent. I don't care for the "call upon the favor of the Gods" type stuff. But stuff like the Mistborn trilogy, or the Coldfire or Magister series all present stuff that would be "hard" traditional SF if the setting had been changed.
Instead of trying to draw a fuzzy line between "hard" Fantasy, and Tolkien-type stuff, it makes more sense to just stick them in the same section of the store.
It is indeed a shame Ringo Clancy-fied himself.
The March Upcountry series (which he co-authored with Weber) is excellent, the first four books of the Posleen Wars is solid military SF (as is the Cally offshoot that was co-written) and the Council Wars were also good. (As a side note, Weber has also Clancy-fied himself, but in the "I don't need an editor" way, as opposed to the "I assume all my readers will share my political views and will present them uncritically" way.)
It's kind of funny, the downright bizarre Paladin of Shadows ("Ghost", et al) series was something he didn't ever think would get published, due to it being too extreme. Jim Baen published it anyway, correctly divining that there was a market for this stuff. With how well it did, Ringo made the not entirely unjustified decision to let his political and/or sexual preferences become a major part of his works.
I guess it makes him money, but I can't stand to read the stuff. (I don't like extreme polemic from either end of the political spectrum in my SF, and the sex stuff in Paladin of Shadows is just gross, and I'm not a prude.)
What publishers use this practice? Just looking around online, including many sites advising authors on negotiating contracts (including the Author's Guild), none mention advances having to be repaid. Wikipedia mentioned this was not uncommon in the film industry, but was rather rare in book publishing.
I believe it is not unheard of for a schock publisher negotiating a multi-book deal to try and push for earnings from hits offsetting advances from flops, but that's a long way from requiring the author to pony up a repayment.
There is no self-publishing "blacklist." What IS blacklisted is individual works that have already been "published" by a vanity house like PublishAmerica.
And they "will not publish new authors?" What kind of crock is this? There are plenty of new authors that get published every year. Yes, most of the publicity, and sales, goes to proven authors, but that is to be expected.