If you want to do anything but surf the internet and email, Comcast will suck for you. and it's gonna get worse. They want to oversell the connectivity even further. they already are at a 13 to 1 ratio and want to push it to a 15 to 1. Stable is 10 to 1.
You know they have every right to do this but it is surely already biting them in the ass. In most markets they do have DSL as competition so if they oversell too much they ought to expect to lose customers.
What I don't really understand is what advantage they see to this practice. I have no idea how oversold Cox is but I have very little trouble with my cable modem. Then again, I do mostly do web surfing and e-mail but anytime I've used iChat AV or Skype it has worked flawlessly as well. When my brother has visited he has had no trouble gaming. So based on my own purely anecdotal observations I imagine that Cox is not overselling beyond a reasonable limit. They're private so I don't know what their financials look like but I imagine they wouldn't be doing continual network upgrades if they were losing money.
So what I really don't get is this whole fuck the customer attitude. As with any business, your customers are your revenue stream. Do not piss them off. Seriously. It may not bite you immediately but it will bite you eventually. Comcast's rates are already higher than average from what I've seen (e.g. $60 instead of $45) and they seem to be the most aggressive at overselling. To what end? How much money are you really going to save overselling 15 to 1 vs. 13 to 1 or 10 to 1? How much do you value your reputation as an internet provider that works without constant trouble? It's difficult of course to put a number on that but it's not impossible. Perhaps they actually have to see customers moving away in droves to really understand the revenue hit? But by then it will be too late, their reputation as a decent ISP will be well tarnished and they'll have trouble getting new customers.
Not being from Arkansas I have no prior experience with what he's done but I have to say that I like the way Mike Huckabee thinks and I like what I've heard about him and from him. He's one of the few Republican candidates to come out and say, hey, maybe Bush did jump in to Iraq a little too quickly. But unlike the democratic candidates or Ron Paul, Huckabee is still clear on the fact that we need to finish what we started.
I also sort of like that he gets attacked by Rush and Hannity for doing exactly what he says he's going to do. For instance, he raised the sales tax by 37%. What the actual numbers are I have no idea but that probably means something like 3.0% to 4.0%. He also lowered income taxes. Overall they're saying he thus "raised taxes" by 800 some million and only lowered them by 300 some million. But I assume they are talking about revenue there and to me it's totally consistent with his position that we need to lower or completely rid ourselves of income/production taxes and raise sales/consumption taxes to get the revenue the government needs to run. Huckabee is a fair-taxer, which I like.
Huckabee is also against the "school vouchers" program and his reasoning is quite interesting. He feels that giving vouchers to parochial schools could be used by an organization like the ACLU to try to claim that parochial schools were now receiving government funding and were thus subject to government rules. Instead, Huckabee would like to reduce the tax burden so that families could simply afford themselves to send their kids to alternative schools.
He's also an evangelical preacher and seems to be a rather moderate one. I myself am not an evangelical (much more traditional.. episcopalian if anything) but I like that Huckabee is a religious man who seems to know that religion has its place and government has its place. They are intertwined in principles and goals but one of our founding principles is that religion is not part of the state. Of course my brother the democrat doesn't like him because he fears a theocracy. I like him for the same reason though. That is to say I too fear a theocracy and also fear the government trying to take over the role of religion (i.e. the religion of atheistic government). I feel that Huckabee is definitely a supporter of separation of church and state and knows that religion has a place in people's lives for those who choose to believe.
The problem is that Huckabee has really screwed up by not going after McCain and instead only going after Romney. Both Huckabee and McCain have had the foresight to take on main-stream media issues like health care, education, and global warming. The difference I've seen is that Huckabee has moderate/conservative answers but McCain's answers seem to be to just bow to whatever the Democrats have proposed. Huckabee would have been a lot better off to leave the contrast between him and Romney implicit because it is obvious enough. And he should have contrasted himself with McCain because the difference there is subtle but I think very important.
So now I'm left in a situation where I'm voting 1 week after tomorrow. If Huckabee drops out, I'm going with Romney. If he gets enough in Super Tuesday to have a chance and he stays in the race despite the media pressure for him to drop out then I'm going with Huckabee, even if I think McCain might wind up winning. I'm not voting for Romney just to vote against McCain, even though I dislike him. It's a long shot but we'll see.
But in the US, there is no one to switch to. So the market can't demand anything.
Huh? I can get DSL from Verizon for probably around $25-30 if bundled with a phone line (haven't looked into it lately). I choose to buy regular cable modem service from Cox for $40. I could also choose to buy Cox's limited-speed (e.g. comparable with DSL) service for $25. And I could choose to buy Cox's premier service for like $60 which offers a much faster connection and I believe a guarantee of absolutely no transfer caps.
So I am very much setting my price. I believe $40/mo is reasonable for internet service and I do not have cable nor a phone line, just a cell phone. I could pay a little more for a faster connection but I have no reason to. My current service is more than fast enough for anything I care to do. I could also pay less, and I imagine some people do, to save a little money at the expense of a slightly slower connection not really suitable for large downloads but perfect for the typical habits of most computer users (e.g. e-mail, web browsing, iTunes purchases).
Based on purely anecdotal evidence it seems to me that most of the people I know feel that $40/mo maybe up to $50/mo is a reasonable price to pay for internet service. So I think the market has in fact set the price. I should also mention that within the last few years, Cox has bumped up the data transfer rates for the Hampton Roads area. I used to get like 2Mbit down/256k up. Now it's 5/2M for the same $40. In a few years it'll probably bump up again.
One interesting bit of trivia: Cox Communications is now wholly owned by its parent, Cox Enterprises, which is privately held. They merged the Cox Communications subsidiary with Time Warner, went on NYSE, then repurchased all shares within 10 years. It would be interesting to see how much of their revenue comes from the various tiers of internet service and what percentage of their customer base goes with each tier. However, since they are privately held they are under no obligation to provide this information to the public (and thus to competitors).
As far as I know, they also did not take any of the money offered by the government during the Clinton administration as part of Al Gore's grand "Internet Superhighway" vision. The incumbent baby bells that did take this money wound up basically squandering it while Cox proceeded to eat their lunch. So do you really want to tell me that we need the government to subsidize internet access now? Ok, I'm not getting the blazing fast speeds they have in Japan and South Korea. So what? Assuming Cox keeps doing what they've been doing then In a few years I'll have them. And instead of paying for it with Uncle Sam as a middle-man I'll have paid for it simply by continuing to pay my internet bill every month.
Sorry this sounds like some advertisement for the company. I am not an employee of theirs, don't know any of their employees, and have never done business with them aside from paying for their internet service. I have gotten exactly what I signed up for and then some since they have worked on building out their network using the revenues they get from selling their services. Gee. What a concept! I only point them out simply because they are a great example of what the free market can do when it is left to do it. There are, of course, bad examples. Comcast's screwed up BitTorrent filtering is an example of that. But I still don't think it's worthy of government sanctions. We don't know if they've gotten the message yet but hopefully they have and they'll implement some decent QoS instead of the hack-job they did implement and focus on building out more infrastructure and more clearly defining to their customers the limits of their service. For example, a simple notice to the effect of "bandwidth will be reduced for users transferring an excessive amount of data" would have saved their ass.
There is one problem with my capitalistic utopia. In the event that
Maybe you should read my post first. I'm arguing that all voting should be done by paper ballot with hand-counting. That also addresses the ACLU's concern.
Only if every county in Ohio moves to traditional paper ballots which would be an absolute nightmare to count. It's a little late in the process to print scannable ballots for every county but the obvious long-term solution is to go with optical scan. That way, if all precincts can have the scanners present then voters can get instant notification. If some cannot then to maintain the ACLU's idea of fair it's simple enough to just collect the ballots in a box for all precincts and scan them later.
At least standardizing on optical-scan ballots means you have options and ultimately if all else fails you can still count them by hand.
I think voting should be on paper ballots that are hand counted. There is no more reason to mechanize voting than there is to mechanize kissing.
Obviously, if you want to vote anonymously, you can't get feedback about whether you filled it in correctly. But, then, you aren't in elementary school anymore.
According to the ACLU's legal brief if the county in question were to implement this voting system (traditional paper ballots) they'd still be in trouble. You see, the ACLU's legal argument is not that non-notice voting systems are bad but that because other counties have notice voting systems voters in counties with non-notice voting systems are at a disadvantage.
Read my other post in this discussion for a more thorough analysis.
I do not really see the issue with central tabulation. If you didn't mark a candidate for a particular race or a choice for a referendum (an "undervote") then clearly you didn't wish to vote on it. Yes, it would be better to mark the write-in space and put a line through it or write in your own name but I think it would be clear to another human what the intention was. And if you voted for two people in the same race (an "overvote") then your vote doesn't count for that race. Sorry, if you're so stupid you can't figure out that you are only supposed to vote for one person per race when the ballot instructions clearly state that then your non-vote need not be counted.
In the case when it is a machine error occurring at the central tabulator then that error can easily be flagged and the ballot can be put aside. In the event that the race between two candidates is close enough that the number of ballots with errors could make a difference, then the ballots with errors can be looked at by human beings. If the error was caused by stray markings, then a group of people can determine the intent. If the error was caused by the voter clearly marking no choice or more than one choice then that vote can be thrown out.
In the grand scheme of things I would estimate that you might have to throw out a handful of ballots due to unreconcilable errors. That's within a reasonable margin of error.
And what about considering things in the era before technology. That is, simply writing the candidates' names on a piece of paper or being given a piece of paper with a series of checkboxes. What did they do back then if the name was unreadable or the voter marked two boxes or none at all? I would venture a guess that they did the same things I propose above. Namely, they made a best effort.
However, none of what I just said is actually critical to the ACLU's case. Once again, the media (AP in this case) has taken what looks like nothing more than a press release from a large organization and printed it as fact. The ACLU is not in fact asking for an injunction to prevent what they are calling in their brief a "non-notice" voting system. Instead, they are asking for the injunction because some counties have "notice" systems and others have "non-notice" systems.
If you read the ACLU's brief you will note that it specifically states their legal argument is "not that the central count optical scan (CCOS) system violates equal protection per se." No, instead they are arguing that the disparity in voting systems means that Ohio voters are not getting equal protection of the law as required by the fourteenth amendment.
I am not sure I buy that argument. Is it really the case that voting systems with different characteristics are necessarily unequal? Furthermore, as far as I know Ohio primaries are not winner-take-all. Thus, even in the highly unlikely event that a not insignificant portion of ballots had unreconcilable errors the ultimate outcome would be one or two delegates going to the wrong candidate. Even in that case can it really be proven that voters got unequal treatment?
Furthermore, the potential for fraud with computerized voting systems planned for use in other counties should be compared to the potential of an optical-scan ballot with unreconcilable errors planned for use in this county. If the disadvantages are reasonably equal then the ACLU's argument is toast.
Most people fond of saying that this country was founded on Judeo-Christian beliefs look over the fact that most our founding fathers were agnostic.
Are you trying to imply that Judeo-Christian beliefs and agnosticism are mutually exclusive? Recall that agnosticism is defined as "the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims--particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of god, gods, deities, or even ultimate reality--is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently unknowable due to the nature of subjective experience." (Wikipedia)
Many good christians are also agnostics. Putting it another way, a christian agnostic knows that he cannot logically prove or disprove the existence of god and so takes it as a matter of faith that there is a creator or some higher power that we are meant to serve.
To claim that the founding fathers were agnostics instead of christians is historically inaccurate. There is religious symbolism throughout the capital representing several major religions, not just christianity. A much better hypothesis is that the founding fathers understood that religion is a matter of faith and personal choice and that the ability to hold varied religious beliefs is one of the inalienable rights endowed on humans by their creator. But wait... that's actually one of the core tenants of Judeo-Christianity, namely the concept of free will.
Newt Gingrich wrote a book called "Rediscovering God in America" that talks about the symbolism present in Washington. He has also made it into a documentary on DVD. The DVD is particularly interesting because the viewer is able to see the actual symbols that Gingrich is talking about. Beyond displaying the symbolism, Gingrich shows how the founders' varied religious beliefs played into the creation of our founding documents.
As with any other great works in human history, our founding documents build on the body of knowledge that existed at the time of their creation. Part of our body of knowledge is religious texts. It is foolish to ignore religion when trying to build a society because a large portion of religion is about building societies. The unique aspect that our founding fathers added was that the fundamental axioms (the self-evident truths) could be distilled to encompass all of humanity instead of only members of a specific religion.
But that does not mean that our founding documents are intended to replace religious beliefs. If they did that then they would have effectively been forming a religion themselves. Instead, they complement religious beliefs.
Then don't do business with me. You never have to do business with anyone. Business deals and in fact all transactions are about benefitting both parties. In the simplest case you pay another person money for something you need. They get money (benefitting them) you get their good or service (benefitting you).
The real issue I take with this story is that there is an implicit assumption that what Intel did harms OLPC. All Intel did was attempt to sell a laptop at nearly twice the price with much higher specifications. If the buyer is willing to pay that much for laptops then he really wasn't in the OLPC's target market. If anything it helps OLPC by showing them that they need to refine their idea of their market niche.
And if Peru winds up buying OLPCs for primary schools and ClassMate PCs for secondary, then OLPC will know that they did get their target market right. If OLPC can only sell laptops without competition then their product is not in very high demand at all. It's basic economic theory.
Nice straw man. When did I say I thought coal-fired power plants are either on or off? I didn't. You are the one with the idea to run the coal plants at night then reduce the output and use solar/wind/etc. during the day. It just doesn't work that way. By the time you've finally reduced the output of the plant, you'll need it again.
You could try to plan in advance and reduce output earlier, but then what do you do if it turns out you have more demand than anticipated and the cloud cover is heavier than expected or the winds aren't blowing as hard as expected? By that time it's too late! You aren't going to increase the output of the coal plant that quickly.
So in order to meet the demand you're going to have to increase the output on some type of generator that can be brought online quickly. And that typically means natural gas or oil. The problem is that both of those are significantly more expensive to run, primarily due to the fuel costs.
If you were running a power company, you'd have already put it out of business or you'd have somehow convinced the regulators that you really do need to charge twice as much for electricity as everyone else. Fat chance on that last one. They're going to point to the power company in the neighboring state still using coal/nuclear and wonder why it costs you twice as much to produce electricity.
I'm sorry if you find my rhetoric patronizing. It clearly reveals that you know you don't know what you're talking about. If you did you'd point out why I was wrong which you can't do because I'm not. Instead, you cry about my supposedly harsh rhetoric.
Since I already know that your next reply will be to ignore everything I've said, concentrate solely on the way I said it, and come up with the online equivalent of "just because you say it louder doesn't make it right" I'd appreciate it if you simply do not respond and save me the trouble of reading it.
That's really funny. Do you have any idea how hard it is to start and stop a coal-fired power plant? I'll pardon your ignorance, as it's expected. It's comments like yours and the original poster's that illustrate why it's very important to get people from the established industry on board.
Now I don't mean we shouldn't add in other resources to try to offset the load. The reason I find solar interesting is that on a hot summer day it provides that extra little bit of energy needed to keep air conditioners running at exactly the time it's needed. But then consider something like a windmill. Sure, if it's blowing then you can capture the wind, if not you cannot. I've spent enough days sweltering in 90-100 degree heat waiting to start a sailboat race to know first-hand that the wind doesn't blow on super-hot days. And that's just to get a relatively small boat (e.g 30-40 ft.) moving. The only boats that can do well in that are the smaller craft < 30 ft. That's clearly not enough wind energy to make a windmill farm viable.
What's interesting about this technology is that it's non-disruptive. It provides a way to bridge what we've been doing so far with where we want to go.
The problem with your analogy is that a feedback loop between humans and the sun is very unlikely and is almost comical. A feedback loop between CO2 availability and plant life is a possibility. Different plants react differently but some are known to respond well to CO2-rich atmospheres.
What exactly is the wrongdoing here? An Intel salesman (actually saleswoman) had a meeting with a potential buyer to convince them to buy Intel's product instead of the competitor's product.
That Intel was partnering with OLPC does not mean that Intel has stopped competing with OLPC. It looks more like Mr. Negroponte wants to carve out a market niche with zero competition. That just isn't going to happen.
Here's a very simple example: Apple partnered with Microsoft to ensure Microsoft would release Office for the first few versions of Mac OS X. Then Apple started marketing the Mac OS X platform as a competitor to Windows PCs. Yet Microsoft still makes Office for Mac and is about to release an updated version. Microsoft is still loosely partnered with Apple. It's just good business.
Look, I'm not pushing for any one technology to be used. But I think it's a good thing that we're looking to reduce pollutants. I agree though that CO2 is very hard to classify as a pollutant.
The problem with reducing "carbon emissions" is that it's physically impossible to do it without using other sources of energy. Every "fossil fuel" we burn is going to emit carbon. Every time we breath we emit carbon. Nature (or the Creator if you are so inclined) provided a balance though. Plants do exactly the opposite and soak up carbon and use energy from the sun to split the CO2 back into the carbon they need to grow and the O2 they do not want, but we need.
The interesting thing to me is that CO2 makes up about three to four hundredths of a percent of our atmosphere. Or put another way, 300 to 400 parts per million. Now it's basically indisputable that over the past 50 years we've increased from the low 300 ppm to the high 300 ppm. It remains to be seen whether that number will continue to increase or whether nature will naturally balance that. It's quite possible that the slightly higher CO2 levels will promote plant life and that essentially no matter how much CO2 we dump into the atmosphere, the plant life will keep it at a new "normal" level of say high-300, low-400 ppm. It's also possible that the low-300 ppm level is the balance but the natural system is simply taking some time to adjust itself to the additional CO2 we've been emitting over the past 50 or so years.
Anyone who says he knows what nature is going to do is a flat out liar. He can take a guess, even a well-educated guess, but it's still just probabilities. So the only real plan is to hedge our bets. If nature will correct itself then it's better to let nature do it. If we expend energy in an attempt to remove CO2 emissions then we're removing CO2 in a much more inefficient manner than nature could itself do. If, on the other hand, it becomes very clear that we absolutely must remove CO2 then we had better be ready to do it. I don't think we're even close to the point where it's a certainty that we must do it ourselves. It's much more the case that we're close to a point where science cannot give us a definitive answer on what may or may not happen if CO2 levels continue to rise. It may very well be that we've reached or are about to reach a new "normal" CO2 level and we won't see CO2 levels rise further.
The really troubling part is that the whole thing is being heavily politicized. A classic way of increasing government power is to convince the populace that there is a dire problem that only government intervention can fix. The CO2 "problem" is a great one for this purpose because it's impossible to fix it. So after it's determined that private industry can't fix it (because no one can) the populace will be convinced that only government can fix it. By then the government's power will have been increased and the tone will change towards showing how the government is doing everything it can. It won't matter that CO2 levels continue to increase or that they stabilize (which is something they'd have done anyway). By then the larger government will be in power and they can take credit for whatever happens or doesn't happen.
Interesting? Mods.. please. I really hope the poster was joking.
[...] the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricity
As if we have a limited supply of solar energy. Yes, we better not do this because we might drain the sun.
The sad thing is that I think there are far too many people on this forum who are completely uninterested in technologies like this. Yeah, sure, we'd love to be able to grab all the energy we need from the sun and we'd love to be able to store during dark periods or transmit it with relatively low loss from lit areas to unlit areas. And it'd be great if we could harvest energy from the winds (hey, I'm a sailboat racer.. I do it all the time) or from the natural water flows.
However, until we can get all of these technologies working, something we may never see in our lifetimes, wouldn't it be nice if we could reduce the amount of pollution we produce and start harvesting at least some amount of energy from the sun? It's basically free energy. Every little thing we can do to use it will greatly improve our ability to continue the lifestyles we enjoy while reducing our environmental footprint.
We've got at least a few generations and probably many more to work this out and come up with creative ways to both meet our demands for energy and reduce our environmental footprint.
You do not need approval or authorization to get a job. You need to authenticate that you are a U.S. Citizen.
Now, in my opinion, that shouldn't even be necessary. What makes it necessary is our ridiculous production tax and the associated socialist programs as well as a protectionist attitude that aliens must be given permission to work here in addition to permission to enter in the first place. Now I think that permission to enter in the first place is a basic sovereign right of the nation, but permission to work is a ridiculous thing.
That said, there are some things you do need permission for. You need permission to drive a car or open a store front. It is not your inalienable right to open a noisy business in a residential neighborhood nor your inalienable right to drive an uninsured car or to drive when you have not shown you know how to be mindful to other drivers. But keep in mind that it's the cities and states that handle things like that. In other words, it's your fellow local citizens wanting some semblance of order.
So don't lump all interactions with authorities into the same group. You're right that sometimes you need permission, but those permissions come from the states and cities, not the federal government. At the federal level you don't need permission or authorization, only authentication.
It is a mistake to think of the U.S. federalist system in terms of the European democracies, which seems to be what you are doing.
The default assumtion today is that a person does not have any rights. This holds unless and until the person shows the documents.
No, the default assumption is that people cannot be trusted to say who they are. Once you prove who you are and that you can be trusted then people will trust you.
What you are doing is showing your employer that you do not need permission. Do you not see that you are presumed guilting until you can prove you are innocent? The employer assumes that you don't have that right until you show otherwise.
I realize it's a very fine distinction, but it's a very important one. As a U.S. citizen you do not need permission to work. You are not presumed "guilty" of anything, merely presumed to possibly be lying about your citizenship status. Once you prove you are a citizen there is no permission to give because such a concept does not exist. That is what the whole "inalienable rights" thing is all about. The idea that rights come from the Creator and are not permissions arbitrarily bestowed by government.
It is to your detriment that you don't see it this way. You go into the transaction in a position of weakness because you believe you need permission. Simply stop thinking that way. You are the one giving up your rights. It is all in your head. When enough people start thinking about things the way you do, it sets the stage for a police state. The very thing you are trying to avoid you are helping to bring about by your willingness to legitimize the idea.
So what I want to know is why people like you don't mind being treated as suspected criminals each time they deal with authorities?
I don't even understand what you're talking about. I've never felt like I was being treated as a suspected criminal. Do you mean that you feel like a suspected criminal when you go to the DMV or go to city hall to get a business license or whatever? Why? It's a basic function of government to keep track of what its citizens are doing and to resolve conflicts between and among its citizens.
I'm not scared of losing my passport. Nor am I scared of any authority in this country or any country I'd travel to asking me for it while walking down the street. What I'm concerned about is someone picking my pocket or stealing my bag, probably just for money or something they can fence, and getting my passport as well. That is why you should use a passport holder whenever you are anywhere that you need a passport. It's something you ought to be doing anyway and if you've ever traveled abroad then you were a lucky fool that you didn't get your shit stolen.
As for the rest of your rant, I really don't know what to say. Requiring identification within the U.S. is a different issue entirely from requiring a passport outside the U.S. Besides that, your logic is somewhat flawed. Your claim as I understand it is that requiring identification is the same thing as being granted permission. For example, no U.S. citizen needs permission to work in the U.S. When you show your identification to your employer, you aren't being granted permission in return. What you are doing is showing your employer that you do not need permission. If you feel you need permission, then that's your own insecurity.
Wow. Just wow. You seem to be saying that checking papers at the border is equal to what the nazis did. My understanding of the Nazi "papers please" was that the police were arresting and interrogating people simply for not having their papers while in public places.
Care to explain your analogy to border security further? It's rather superficial. Here's another one using your logic:
Did you take a shit today? Yes? My god! You're just like all the Nazis!
So attach a strap to one side with a snap on the end of it that holds it closed. Or use a piece of tape. Or hell, put a rubber band around it.
I don't know about you, but I would never carry my passport in a bag, nor put it in my pants pocket. They make passport holders you can wear under your clothes that keep your passport completely invisible. You should be using one anyway, and if you use one, it will also keep it flat and thus closed.
Besides that, the passport situation is different. The new passports have all of your identity information stored on them. The cards they're talking about here just have a number. As you enter the gates, your number is sensed. That lets a computer system pull up your information from a database in advance so it's ready to go for the real border screener to view.
Of course, a card with a bar code and a few simple fixed scanners on the way into the gates would have worked almost as well without the possibility of the number being read remotely.
So if microsoft forgot to renew a domain they owned (like taht'd ever happen), I could jump it myself and do whatever I like? Rules are rules, after all.
Funny you should mention this because Microsoft did indeed forget to renew microsoft.com a few years ago. Some guy bought it and pointed it back at the servers so microsoft.com would keep working and then called MS and said.. uhh.. hey, you probably want your domain back.
As far as I know, MS paid him for the registration fee and maybe a small amount as a thank you for keeping microsoft.com up and running but that was about it.
Mark Cuban is the same asshole who financed the movie Redacted. In it, U.S. soldiers are portrayed as raping a young Iraqi girl then successfully covering up their actions (hence the title). It is a work of fiction. The closest thing in reality is that some U.S. soldiers are now in military prison for life for dong something similar.
Brian DePalma, the film's director, knows that the film does not reflect reality. His stated goal is to make the U.S. military look worse than it is by writing fiction that seems close enough to reality to be plausible to some people. U.S. ticket sales are essentially nonexistent and so far Cuban has grossed only tens of thousands of dollars from his distribution of this film. That is, Cuban has completely lost his ass on this film so far.
That said, the film will inevitably be used by terrorist groups as the propaganda piece that it is. What better way to recruit young muslims who are perhaps on the fence about the U.S. occupation of Iraq than to show a film where U.S. soldiers rape an Iraqi girl and get away with it. This will only serve to prolong the war that many people are already unhappy with to say the least.
Regardless of your opinion about the war, and even if you think it was the worst idea in history, and even if you are not a U.S. citizen, I urge you to think for yourself about what Cuban and DePalma have done here. Their actions put the U.S. and the world in more danger by fomenting anti-U.S. sentiment, particularly among Muslims.
After you've given it some thought I'd like to suggest one simple way you can let Cuban know that you don't like what he's done. If you attend a Mavericks game please bring a simple sign saying only "Support Our Troops." Do not go protesting in front of Cuban's office or other businesses. Do not do it to get your own 15 minutes of fame. Simply display a sign showing your support for our troops. If you want you can even write on it "I don't support the war but I do support our troops."
Guys like Cuban exemplify the elitism that often goes along with having more money than one knows what to do with. That's not to say that making a lot of money is bad. It's a reward for doing what the market wants and Cuban has been rewarded well for this. But unless one reminds himself to maintain his own humility one will quickly turn into an elitist asshole. Perhaps Cuban's huge financial loss on this movie will change his tune, but then again, it probably won't.
Most of Slashdot readership is male so it's not necessarily a bad thing to just assume it for an ambiguous handle. I actually chided someone for doing the opposite with my handle, pointing out that since a supermajority of slashdot posters are male it's rather stupid to say things like "s/he." And what about the folks lacking gender identity, shall we start using "s/h/it?"
At any rate though, I would have said she in response to you since as far as I know, Lena is an unambiguously female name. And so for failing to recognize a fairly significant clue as to your sex, I have to chide the OP myself.
Thanks for the insightful post. I wish I had mod points but sadly I don't. Slashdot used to be full of comments like yours simply doing a plain-English read of the constitution. But these days it seems more fashionable to read things into it that don't exist and then claim something is unconstitutional because of it. Witness this very story and all the stories like it.
I am a registered ADC developer and so I had access to all the seeds. That was a god send for dealing with the new 64-bit Objective-C runtime but I also figured that since I had the seeds, well, why not see how compatible Leopard is with non-Apple hardware.
There are legit reasons to do it. For instance, a base Darwin system can be made out of entirely open source software. Until you start decrypting binaries or (given the DMCA) tell people how to do it, you're not breaking the law. Running binaries you compile yourself is also not breaking the law nor the license.
So I did some research into it and looked at the various hacked kernels that are out there as well as some of the available source patches. After doing some research on it I realized that a good bulk of the typical kernel patch is due to lack of the "/efi" node in the device tree. Well, boot-132 (the non-EFI bootloader) is open source and after a bit of hacking I modified it to look for the ACPI and SMBIOS tables and put them in the appropriate sub-nodes of the efi node.
Assuming the right processor (e.g. Core or Core 2) that's enough to get any kernel Apple has ever made to boot without modifying the binary or recompiling from source. Unfortunately I used a P4 as a test rig so I had to do a tiny bit of hacking. It's pretty easy since the source is available so you can just fix it and recompile. Or if the source isn't available (e.g. source for Leopard isn't yet) you can still quite easily patch the machine code to ignore the processor family.
Once you've got that the only thing between you and OS X is a way to get the kernel to decrypt the binaries. Amit Singh has illustrated the magic poem which is actually not the decryption but instead a secondary protection mechanism. In some earlier Leopard seeds, that mechanism didn't appear to be used anymore. The real decryption is two AES keys, also widely available. The interface between the kernel and the decryption kernel extension is public. That is, there's a function pointer variable in the source and basically you just write a function that does the AES decryption and then set the appropriate function pointer to the address of your function from your kernel extension's initialization routine. That's all I'll give away on a public forum though. And I'm not giving anything away here, it's public knowledge, right in the source code to xnu.
I post here not to tell people how to hack it but to illustrate that it's not some difficult scheme. I have a good laugh reading the various osx86 forums about how cool these hackers must be if they can crack OS X. It's not as if Apple tried to make it hard. I mean, putting the decryption hook in "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" is a pretty dead giveaway. The other good meme is the thought that the methods of hacking need to be kept secret so Apple doesn't figure them out. Believe me, if I can reverse engineer the hacks then I'm quite certain Apple has several people who can. If they even want to. I see no indication that anyone at Apple is trying to prevent hacks. They write code that works on their machines. If it happens to work on other x86 machines, it does. They haven't ever done anything to stop it.
The only practical way to allow for that is to install equipment capable of tapping any domestic phone conversation.
Totally, absolutely, and completely, wrong. They can do what they did before. Get a warrant, and then call the phone company and have them install an electronic tap. Takes about 24 hours to get the warrant and about 2 minutes for the phone company employee to install the tap (it's basically just a bit of typing at the keyboard).
Huh? How do you think an electronic tap works. In order to implement the tap you have to have the equipment to do it. As you say, it takes about 2 minutes for the phone company employee to install the tap. They do that by issuing a couple of commands to their electronic phone switch. What do you think the equipment that Klein installed does?
By necessity, the equipment has the capability to monitor any conversation.
When Mohammed Al Foobari comes into the U.S. from Saudi Arabia you can bet that any phone call he makes or receives is recorded. You really want to stop that?
If Mohammed Al Foobari actually did something, it should be easy for the government to get a warrant from the FISA court. If he didn't do anything, he shouldn't be tapped. This strikes me as common sense.
The Bush administration's position is that they don't need a warrant to tap calls when one or both endpoints are foreign. If both endpoints are domestic they have the ability to get a warrant for a floating wiretap. That means that when Al Foobari comes into the country law enforcement can get a warrant tied to Al Foobari, not to specific phones that Al Foobari uses. Assuming Al Foobari is being followed by law enforcement, law enforcement can call the phone company and get immediate wiretaps on any phone he could be using.
So if our suspected terrorist is seen entering a private residence, that residence's phone is immediately monitored. If he's seen using a pay phone, that pay phone is immediately monitored. If he uses the phone at a local coffee shop, it's monitored.
To me, that only seems sensible. But the discussion has gotten conflated. The Bush administration's failure to obtain a warrant when one or both endpoints lie outside the U.S. has been taken to mean that it is monitoring domestic phone calls without a warrant. That's true only if you use a rather loose version of domestic. The phone company certainly bills you for an international call in that case.
Separate from that, the installation of equipment capable of providing the floating wiretap service has been taken to mean that the administration is monitoring all domestic phone calls. So some people put these together and claim that the Bush administration is monitoring all domestic phone calls without a warrant.
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You know they have every right to do this but it is surely already biting them in the ass. In most markets they do have DSL as competition so if they oversell too much they ought to expect to lose customers.
What I don't really understand is what advantage they see to this practice. I have no idea how oversold Cox is but I have very little trouble with my cable modem. Then again, I do mostly do web surfing and e-mail but anytime I've used iChat AV or Skype it has worked flawlessly as well. When my brother has visited he has had no trouble gaming. So based on my own purely anecdotal observations I imagine that Cox is not overselling beyond a reasonable limit. They're private so I don't know what their financials look like but I imagine they wouldn't be doing continual network upgrades if they were losing money.
So what I really don't get is this whole fuck the customer attitude. As with any business, your customers are your revenue stream. Do not piss them off. Seriously. It may not bite you immediately but it will bite you eventually. Comcast's rates are already higher than average from what I've seen (e.g. $60 instead of $45) and they seem to be the most aggressive at overselling. To what end? How much money are you really going to save overselling 15 to 1 vs. 13 to 1 or 10 to 1? How much do you value your reputation as an internet provider that works without constant trouble? It's difficult of course to put a number on that but it's not impossible. Perhaps they actually have to see customers moving away in droves to really understand the revenue hit? But by then it will be too late, their reputation as a decent ISP will be well tarnished and they'll have trouble getting new customers.
Not being from Arkansas I have no prior experience with what he's done but I have to say that I like the way Mike Huckabee thinks and I like what I've heard about him and from him. He's one of the few Republican candidates to come out and say, hey, maybe Bush did jump in to Iraq a little too quickly. But unlike the democratic candidates or Ron Paul, Huckabee is still clear on the fact that we need to finish what we started.
I also sort of like that he gets attacked by Rush and Hannity for doing exactly what he says he's going to do. For instance, he raised the sales tax by 37%. What the actual numbers are I have no idea but that probably means something like 3.0% to 4.0%. He also lowered income taxes. Overall they're saying he thus "raised taxes" by 800 some million and only lowered them by 300 some million. But I assume they are talking about revenue there and to me it's totally consistent with his position that we need to lower or completely rid ourselves of income/production taxes and raise sales/consumption taxes to get the revenue the government needs to run. Huckabee is a fair-taxer, which I like.
Huckabee is also against the "school vouchers" program and his reasoning is quite interesting. He feels that giving vouchers to parochial schools could be used by an organization like the ACLU to try to claim that parochial schools were now receiving government funding and were thus subject to government rules. Instead, Huckabee would like to reduce the tax burden so that families could simply afford themselves to send their kids to alternative schools.
He's also an evangelical preacher and seems to be a rather moderate one. I myself am not an evangelical (much more traditional.. episcopalian if anything) but I like that Huckabee is a religious man who seems to know that religion has its place and government has its place. They are intertwined in principles and goals but one of our founding principles is that religion is not part of the state. Of course my brother the democrat doesn't like him because he fears a theocracy. I like him for the same reason though. That is to say I too fear a theocracy and also fear the government trying to take over the role of religion (i.e. the religion of atheistic government). I feel that Huckabee is definitely a supporter of separation of church and state and knows that religion has a place in people's lives for those who choose to believe.
The problem is that Huckabee has really screwed up by not going after McCain and instead only going after Romney. Both Huckabee and McCain have had the foresight to take on main-stream media issues like health care, education, and global warming. The difference I've seen is that Huckabee has moderate/conservative answers but McCain's answers seem to be to just bow to whatever the Democrats have proposed. Huckabee would have been a lot better off to leave the contrast between him and Romney implicit because it is obvious enough. And he should have contrasted himself with McCain because the difference there is subtle but I think very important.
So now I'm left in a situation where I'm voting 1 week after tomorrow. If Huckabee drops out, I'm going with Romney. If he gets enough in Super Tuesday to have a chance and he stays in the race despite the media pressure for him to drop out then I'm going with Huckabee, even if I think McCain might wind up winning. I'm not voting for Romney just to vote against McCain, even though I dislike him. It's a long shot but we'll see.
But in the US, there is no one to switch to. So the market can't demand anything.
Huh? I can get DSL from Verizon for probably around $25-30 if bundled with a phone line (haven't looked into it lately). I choose to buy regular cable modem service from Cox for $40. I could also choose to buy Cox's limited-speed (e.g. comparable with DSL) service for $25. And I could choose to buy Cox's premier service for like $60 which offers a much faster connection and I believe a guarantee of absolutely no transfer caps.
So I am very much setting my price. I believe $40/mo is reasonable for internet service and I do not have cable nor a phone line, just a cell phone. I could pay a little more for a faster connection but I have no reason to. My current service is more than fast enough for anything I care to do. I could also pay less, and I imagine some people do, to save a little money at the expense of a slightly slower connection not really suitable for large downloads but perfect for the typical habits of most computer users (e.g. e-mail, web browsing, iTunes purchases).
Based on purely anecdotal evidence it seems to me that most of the people I know feel that $40/mo maybe up to $50/mo is a reasonable price to pay for internet service. So I think the market has in fact set the price. I should also mention that within the last few years, Cox has bumped up the data transfer rates for the Hampton Roads area. I used to get like 2Mbit down/256k up. Now it's 5/2M for the same $40. In a few years it'll probably bump up again.
One interesting bit of trivia: Cox Communications is now wholly owned by its parent, Cox Enterprises, which is privately held. They merged the Cox Communications subsidiary with Time Warner, went on NYSE, then repurchased all shares within 10 years. It would be interesting to see how much of their revenue comes from the various tiers of internet service and what percentage of their customer base goes with each tier. However, since they are privately held they are under no obligation to provide this information to the public (and thus to competitors).
As far as I know, they also did not take any of the money offered by the government during the Clinton administration as part of Al Gore's grand "Internet Superhighway" vision. The incumbent baby bells that did take this money wound up basically squandering it while Cox proceeded to eat their lunch. So do you really want to tell me that we need the government to subsidize internet access now? Ok, I'm not getting the blazing fast speeds they have in Japan and South Korea. So what? Assuming Cox keeps doing what they've been doing then In a few years I'll have them. And instead of paying for it with Uncle Sam as a middle-man I'll have paid for it simply by continuing to pay my internet bill every month.
Sorry this sounds like some advertisement for the company. I am not an employee of theirs, don't know any of their employees, and have never done business with them aside from paying for their internet service. I have gotten exactly what I signed up for and then some since they have worked on building out their network using the revenues they get from selling their services. Gee. What a concept! I only point them out simply because they are a great example of what the free market can do when it is left to do it. There are, of course, bad examples. Comcast's screwed up BitTorrent filtering is an example of that. But I still don't think it's worthy of government sanctions. We don't know if they've gotten the message yet but hopefully they have and they'll implement some decent QoS instead of the hack-job they did implement and focus on building out more infrastructure and more clearly defining to their customers the limits of their service. For example, a simple notice to the effect of "bandwidth will be reduced for users transferring an excessive amount of data" would have saved their ass.
There is one problem with my capitalistic utopia. In the event that
Only if every county in Ohio moves to traditional paper ballots which would be an absolute nightmare to count. It's a little late in the process to print scannable ballots for every county but the obvious long-term solution is to go with optical scan. That way, if all precincts can have the scanners present then voters can get instant notification. If some cannot then to maintain the ACLU's idea of fair it's simple enough to just collect the ballots in a box for all precincts and scan them later.
At least standardizing on optical-scan ballots means you have options and ultimately if all else fails you can still count them by hand.
I think voting should be on paper ballots that are hand counted. There is no more reason to mechanize voting than there is to mechanize kissing.
Obviously, if you want to vote anonymously, you can't get feedback about whether you filled it in correctly. But, then, you aren't in elementary school anymore.
According to the ACLU's legal brief if the county in question were to implement this voting system (traditional paper ballots) they'd still be in trouble. You see, the ACLU's legal argument is not that non-notice voting systems are bad but that because other counties have notice voting systems voters in counties with non-notice voting systems are at a disadvantage.
Read my other post in this discussion for a more thorough analysis.
I do not really see the issue with central tabulation. If you didn't mark a candidate for a particular race or a choice for a referendum (an "undervote") then clearly you didn't wish to vote on it. Yes, it would be better to mark the write-in space and put a line through it or write in your own name but I think it would be clear to another human what the intention was. And if you voted for two people in the same race (an "overvote") then your vote doesn't count for that race. Sorry, if you're so stupid you can't figure out that you are only supposed to vote for one person per race when the ballot instructions clearly state that then your non-vote need not be counted.
In the case when it is a machine error occurring at the central tabulator then that error can easily be flagged and the ballot can be put aside. In the event that the race between two candidates is close enough that the number of ballots with errors could make a difference, then the ballots with errors can be looked at by human beings. If the error was caused by stray markings, then a group of people can determine the intent. If the error was caused by the voter clearly marking no choice or more than one choice then that vote can be thrown out.
In the grand scheme of things I would estimate that you might have to throw out a handful of ballots due to unreconcilable errors. That's within a reasonable margin of error.
And what about considering things in the era before technology. That is, simply writing the candidates' names on a piece of paper or being given a piece of paper with a series of checkboxes. What did they do back then if the name was unreadable or the voter marked two boxes or none at all? I would venture a guess that they did the same things I propose above. Namely, they made a best effort.
However, none of what I just said is actually critical to the ACLU's case. Once again, the media (AP in this case) has taken what looks like nothing more than a press release from a large organization and printed it as fact. The ACLU is not in fact asking for an injunction to prevent what they are calling in their brief a "non-notice" voting system. Instead, they are asking for the injunction because some counties have "notice" systems and others have "non-notice" systems.
If you read the ACLU's brief you will note that it specifically states their legal argument is "not that the central count optical scan (CCOS) system violates equal protection per se." No, instead they are arguing that the disparity in voting systems means that Ohio voters are not getting equal protection of the law as required by the fourteenth amendment.
I am not sure I buy that argument. Is it really the case that voting systems with different characteristics are necessarily unequal? Furthermore, as far as I know Ohio primaries are not winner-take-all. Thus, even in the highly unlikely event that a not insignificant portion of ballots had unreconcilable errors the ultimate outcome would be one or two delegates going to the wrong candidate. Even in that case can it really be proven that voters got unequal treatment?
Furthermore, the potential for fraud with computerized voting systems planned for use in other counties should be compared to the potential of an optical-scan ballot with unreconcilable errors planned for use in this county. If the disadvantages are reasonably equal then the ACLU's argument is toast.
Are you trying to imply that Judeo-Christian beliefs and agnosticism are mutually exclusive? Recall that agnosticism is defined as "the philosophical view that the truth value of certain claims--particularly metaphysical claims regarding theology, afterlife or the existence of god, gods, deities, or even ultimate reality--is unknown or, depending on the form of agnosticism, inherently unknowable due to the nature of subjective experience." (Wikipedia)
Many good christians are also agnostics. Putting it another way, a christian agnostic knows that he cannot logically prove or disprove the existence of god and so takes it as a matter of faith that there is a creator or some higher power that we are meant to serve.
To claim that the founding fathers were agnostics instead of christians is historically inaccurate. There is religious symbolism throughout the capital representing several major religions, not just christianity. A much better hypothesis is that the founding fathers understood that religion is a matter of faith and personal choice and that the ability to hold varied religious beliefs is one of the inalienable rights endowed on humans by their creator. But wait... that's actually one of the core tenants of Judeo-Christianity, namely the concept of free will.
Newt Gingrich wrote a book called "Rediscovering God in America" that talks about the symbolism present in Washington. He has also made it into a documentary on DVD. The DVD is particularly interesting because the viewer is able to see the actual symbols that Gingrich is talking about. Beyond displaying the symbolism, Gingrich shows how the founders' varied religious beliefs played into the creation of our founding documents.
As with any other great works in human history, our founding documents build on the body of knowledge that existed at the time of their creation. Part of our body of knowledge is religious texts. It is foolish to ignore religion when trying to build a society because a large portion of religion is about building societies. The unique aspect that our founding fathers added was that the fundamental axioms (the self-evident truths) could be distilled to encompass all of humanity instead of only members of a specific religion.
But that does not mean that our founding documents are intended to replace religious beliefs. If they did that then they would have effectively been forming a religion themselves. Instead, they complement religious beliefs.
Then don't do business with me. You never have to do business with anyone. Business deals and in fact all transactions are about benefitting both parties. In the simplest case you pay another person money for something you need. They get money (benefitting them) you get their good or service (benefitting you).
The real issue I take with this story is that there is an implicit assumption that what Intel did harms OLPC. All Intel did was attempt to sell a laptop at nearly twice the price with much higher specifications. If the buyer is willing to pay that much for laptops then he really wasn't in the OLPC's target market. If anything it helps OLPC by showing them that they need to refine their idea of their market niche.
And if Peru winds up buying OLPCs for primary schools and ClassMate PCs for secondary, then OLPC will know that they did get their target market right. If OLPC can only sell laptops without competition then their product is not in very high demand at all. It's basic economic theory.
Nice straw man. When did I say I thought coal-fired power plants are either on or off? I didn't. You are the one with the idea to run the coal plants at night then reduce the output and use solar/wind/etc. during the day. It just doesn't work that way. By the time you've finally reduced the output of the plant, you'll need it again.
You could try to plan in advance and reduce output earlier, but then what do you do if it turns out you have more demand than anticipated and the cloud cover is heavier than expected or the winds aren't blowing as hard as expected? By that time it's too late! You aren't going to increase the output of the coal plant that quickly.
So in order to meet the demand you're going to have to increase the output on some type of generator that can be brought online quickly. And that typically means natural gas or oil. The problem is that both of those are significantly more expensive to run, primarily due to the fuel costs.
If you were running a power company, you'd have already put it out of business or you'd have somehow convinced the regulators that you really do need to charge twice as much for electricity as everyone else. Fat chance on that last one. They're going to point to the power company in the neighboring state still using coal/nuclear and wonder why it costs you twice as much to produce electricity.
I'm sorry if you find my rhetoric patronizing. It clearly reveals that you know you don't know what you're talking about. If you did you'd point out why I was wrong which you can't do because I'm not. Instead, you cry about my supposedly harsh rhetoric.
Since I already know that your next reply will be to ignore everything I've said, concentrate solely on the way I said it, and come up with the online equivalent of "just because you say it louder doesn't make it right" I'd appreciate it if you simply do not respond and save me the trouble of reading it.
That's really funny. Do you have any idea how hard it is to start and stop a coal-fired power plant? I'll pardon your ignorance, as it's expected. It's comments like yours and the original poster's that illustrate why it's very important to get people from the established industry on board.
Now I don't mean we shouldn't add in other resources to try to offset the load. The reason I find solar interesting is that on a hot summer day it provides that extra little bit of energy needed to keep air conditioners running at exactly the time it's needed. But then consider something like a windmill. Sure, if it's blowing then you can capture the wind, if not you cannot. I've spent enough days sweltering in 90-100 degree heat waiting to start a sailboat race to know first-hand that the wind doesn't blow on super-hot days. And that's just to get a relatively small boat (e.g 30-40 ft.) moving. The only boats that can do well in that are the smaller craft < 30 ft. That's clearly not enough wind energy to make a windmill farm viable.
What's interesting about this technology is that it's non-disruptive. It provides a way to bridge what we've been doing so far with where we want to go.
The problem with your analogy is that a feedback loop between humans and the sun is very unlikely and is almost comical. A feedback loop between CO2 availability and plant life is a possibility. Different plants react differently but some are known to respond well to CO2-rich atmospheres.
What exactly is the wrongdoing here? An Intel salesman (actually saleswoman) had a meeting with a potential buyer to convince them to buy Intel's product instead of the competitor's product.
That Intel was partnering with OLPC does not mean that Intel has stopped competing with OLPC. It looks more like Mr. Negroponte wants to carve out a market niche with zero competition. That just isn't going to happen.
Here's a very simple example: Apple partnered with Microsoft to ensure Microsoft would release Office for the first few versions of Mac OS X. Then Apple started marketing the Mac OS X platform as a competitor to Windows PCs. Yet Microsoft still makes Office for Mac and is about to release an updated version. Microsoft is still loosely partnered with Apple. It's just good business.
Look, I'm not pushing for any one technology to be used. But I think it's a good thing that we're looking to reduce pollutants. I agree though that CO2 is very hard to classify as a pollutant.
The problem with reducing "carbon emissions" is that it's physically impossible to do it without using other sources of energy. Every "fossil fuel" we burn is going to emit carbon. Every time we breath we emit carbon. Nature (or the Creator if you are so inclined) provided a balance though. Plants do exactly the opposite and soak up carbon and use energy from the sun to split the CO2 back into the carbon they need to grow and the O2 they do not want, but we need.
The interesting thing to me is that CO2 makes up about three to four hundredths of a percent of our atmosphere. Or put another way, 300 to 400 parts per million. Now it's basically indisputable that over the past 50 years we've increased from the low 300 ppm to the high 300 ppm. It remains to be seen whether that number will continue to increase or whether nature will naturally balance that. It's quite possible that the slightly higher CO2 levels will promote plant life and that essentially no matter how much CO2 we dump into the atmosphere, the plant life will keep it at a new "normal" level of say high-300, low-400 ppm. It's also possible that the low-300 ppm level is the balance but the natural system is simply taking some time to adjust itself to the additional CO2 we've been emitting over the past 50 or so years.
Anyone who says he knows what nature is going to do is a flat out liar. He can take a guess, even a well-educated guess, but it's still just probabilities. So the only real plan is to hedge our bets. If nature will correct itself then it's better to let nature do it. If we expend energy in an attempt to remove CO2 emissions then we're removing CO2 in a much more inefficient manner than nature could itself do. If, on the other hand, it becomes very clear that we absolutely must remove CO2 then we had better be ready to do it. I don't think we're even close to the point where it's a certainty that we must do it ourselves. It's much more the case that we're close to a point where science cannot give us a definitive answer on what may or may not happen if CO2 levels continue to rise. It may very well be that we've reached or are about to reach a new "normal" CO2 level and we won't see CO2 levels rise further.
The really troubling part is that the whole thing is being heavily politicized. A classic way of increasing government power is to convince the populace that there is a dire problem that only government intervention can fix. The CO2 "problem" is a great one for this purpose because it's impossible to fix it. So after it's determined that private industry can't fix it (because no one can) the populace will be convinced that only government can fix it. By then the government's power will have been increased and the tone will change towards showing how the government is doing everything it can. It won't matter that CO2 levels continue to increase or that they stabilize (which is something they'd have done anyway). By then the larger government will be in power and they can take credit for whatever happens or doesn't happen.
Interesting? Mods.. please. I really hope the poster was joking.
[...] the solar energy could be more profitably used to directly produce electricityAs if we have a limited supply of solar energy. Yes, we better not do this because we might drain the sun.
The sad thing is that I think there are far too many people on this forum who are completely uninterested in technologies like this. Yeah, sure, we'd love to be able to grab all the energy we need from the sun and we'd love to be able to store during dark periods or transmit it with relatively low loss from lit areas to unlit areas. And it'd be great if we could harvest energy from the winds (hey, I'm a sailboat racer.. I do it all the time) or from the natural water flows.
However, until we can get all of these technologies working, something we may never see in our lifetimes, wouldn't it be nice if we could reduce the amount of pollution we produce and start harvesting at least some amount of energy from the sun? It's basically free energy. Every little thing we can do to use it will greatly improve our ability to continue the lifestyles we enjoy while reducing our environmental footprint.
We've got at least a few generations and probably many more to work this out and come up with creative ways to both meet our demands for energy and reduce our environmental footprint.
You do not need approval or authorization to get a job. You need to authenticate that you are a U.S. Citizen.
Now, in my opinion, that shouldn't even be necessary. What makes it necessary is our ridiculous production tax and the associated socialist programs as well as a protectionist attitude that aliens must be given permission to work here in addition to permission to enter in the first place. Now I think that permission to enter in the first place is a basic sovereign right of the nation, but permission to work is a ridiculous thing.
That said, there are some things you do need permission for. You need permission to drive a car or open a store front. It is not your inalienable right to open a noisy business in a residential neighborhood nor your inalienable right to drive an uninsured car or to drive when you have not shown you know how to be mindful to other drivers. But keep in mind that it's the cities and states that handle things like that. In other words, it's your fellow local citizens wanting some semblance of order.
So don't lump all interactions with authorities into the same group. You're right that sometimes you need permission, but those permissions come from the states and cities, not the federal government. At the federal level you don't need permission or authorization, only authentication.
It is a mistake to think of the U.S. federalist system in terms of the European democracies, which seems to be what you are doing.
No, the default assumption is that people cannot be trusted to say who they are. Once you prove who you are and that you can be trusted then people will trust you.
What you are doing is showing your employer that you do not need permission. Do you not see that you are presumed guilting until you can prove you are innocent? The employer assumes that you don't have that right until you show otherwise.I realize it's a very fine distinction, but it's a very important one. As a U.S. citizen you do not need permission to work. You are not presumed "guilty" of anything, merely presumed to possibly be lying about your citizenship status. Once you prove you are a citizen there is no permission to give because such a concept does not exist. That is what the whole "inalienable rights" thing is all about. The idea that rights come from the Creator and are not permissions arbitrarily bestowed by government.
It is to your detriment that you don't see it this way. You go into the transaction in a position of weakness because you believe you need permission. Simply stop thinking that way. You are the one giving up your rights. It is all in your head. When enough people start thinking about things the way you do, it sets the stage for a police state. The very thing you are trying to avoid you are helping to bring about by your willingness to legitimize the idea.
So what I want to know is why people like you don't mind being treated as suspected criminals each time they deal with authorities?I don't even understand what you're talking about. I've never felt like I was being treated as a suspected criminal. Do you mean that you feel like a suspected criminal when you go to the DMV or go to city hall to get a business license or whatever? Why? It's a basic function of government to keep track of what its citizens are doing and to resolve conflicts between and among its citizens.
I'm not scared of losing my passport. Nor am I scared of any authority in this country or any country I'd travel to asking me for it while walking down the street. What I'm concerned about is someone picking my pocket or stealing my bag, probably just for money or something they can fence, and getting my passport as well. That is why you should use a passport holder whenever you are anywhere that you need a passport. It's something you ought to be doing anyway and if you've ever traveled abroad then you were a lucky fool that you didn't get your shit stolen.
As for the rest of your rant, I really don't know what to say. Requiring identification within the U.S. is a different issue entirely from requiring a passport outside the U.S. Besides that, your logic is somewhat flawed. Your claim as I understand it is that requiring identification is the same thing as being granted permission. For example, no U.S. citizen needs permission to work in the U.S. When you show your identification to your employer, you aren't being granted permission in return. What you are doing is showing your employer that you do not need permission. If you feel you need permission, then that's your own insecurity.
Wow. Just wow. You seem to be saying that checking papers at the border is equal to what the nazis did. My understanding of the Nazi "papers please" was that the police were arresting and interrogating people simply for not having their papers while in public places.
Care to explain your analogy to border security further? It's rather superficial. Here's another one using your logic:
Did you take a shit today? Yes? My god! You're just like all the Nazis!
So attach a strap to one side with a snap on the end of it that holds it closed. Or use a piece of tape. Or hell, put a rubber band around it.
I don't know about you, but I would never carry my passport in a bag, nor put it in my pants pocket. They make passport holders you can wear under your clothes that keep your passport completely invisible. You should be using one anyway, and if you use one, it will also keep it flat and thus closed.
Besides that, the passport situation is different. The new passports have all of your identity information stored on them. The cards they're talking about here just have a number. As you enter the gates, your number is sensed. That lets a computer system pull up your information from a database in advance so it's ready to go for the real border screener to view.
Of course, a card with a bar code and a few simple fixed scanners on the way into the gates would have worked almost as well without the possibility of the number being read remotely.
Funny you should mention this because Microsoft did indeed forget to renew microsoft.com a few years ago. Some guy bought it and pointed it back at the servers so microsoft.com would keep working and then called MS and said.. uhh.. hey, you probably want your domain back.
As far as I know, MS paid him for the registration fee and maybe a small amount as a thank you for keeping microsoft.com up and running but that was about it.
Mark Cuban is the same asshole who financed the movie Redacted. In it, U.S. soldiers are portrayed as raping a young Iraqi girl then successfully covering up their actions (hence the title). It is a work of fiction. The closest thing in reality is that some U.S. soldiers are now in military prison for life for dong something similar.
Brian DePalma, the film's director, knows that the film does not reflect reality. His stated goal is to make the U.S. military look worse than it is by writing fiction that seems close enough to reality to be plausible to some people. U.S. ticket sales are essentially nonexistent and so far Cuban has grossed only tens of thousands of dollars from his distribution of this film. That is, Cuban has completely lost his ass on this film so far.
That said, the film will inevitably be used by terrorist groups as the propaganda piece that it is. What better way to recruit young muslims who are perhaps on the fence about the U.S. occupation of Iraq than to show a film where U.S. soldiers rape an Iraqi girl and get away with it. This will only serve to prolong the war that many people are already unhappy with to say the least.
Regardless of your opinion about the war, and even if you think it was the worst idea in history, and even if you are not a U.S. citizen, I urge you to think for yourself about what Cuban and DePalma have done here. Their actions put the U.S. and the world in more danger by fomenting anti-U.S. sentiment, particularly among Muslims.
After you've given it some thought I'd like to suggest one simple way you can let Cuban know that you don't like what he's done. If you attend a Mavericks game please bring a simple sign saying only "Support Our Troops." Do not go protesting in front of Cuban's office or other businesses. Do not do it to get your own 15 minutes of fame. Simply display a sign showing your support for our troops. If you want you can even write on it "I don't support the war but I do support our troops."
Guys like Cuban exemplify the elitism that often goes along with having more money than one knows what to do with. That's not to say that making a lot of money is bad. It's a reward for doing what the market wants and Cuban has been rewarded well for this. But unless one reminds himself to maintain his own humility one will quickly turn into an elitist asshole. Perhaps Cuban's huge financial loss on this movie will change his tune, but then again, it probably won't.
God, I hate that. It's she.
Most of Slashdot readership is male so it's not necessarily a bad thing to just assume it for an ambiguous handle. I actually chided someone for doing the opposite with my handle, pointing out that since a supermajority of slashdot posters are male it's rather stupid to say things like "s/he." And what about the folks lacking gender identity, shall we start using "s/h/it?"
At any rate though, I would have said she in response to you since as far as I know, Lena is an unambiguously female name. And so for failing to recognize a fairly significant clue as to your sex, I have to chide the OP myself.
Thanks for the insightful post. I wish I had mod points but sadly I don't. Slashdot used to be full of comments like yours simply doing a plain-English read of the constitution. But these days it seems more fashionable to read things into it that don't exist and then claim something is unconstitutional because of it. Witness this very story and all the stories like it.
Anyway, bravo to you for your simple analysis.
I am a registered ADC developer and so I had access to all the seeds. That was a god send for dealing with the new 64-bit Objective-C runtime but I also figured that since I had the seeds, well, why not see how compatible Leopard is with non-Apple hardware.
There are legit reasons to do it. For instance, a base Darwin system can be made out of entirely open source software. Until you start decrypting binaries or (given the DMCA) tell people how to do it, you're not breaking the law. Running binaries you compile yourself is also not breaking the law nor the license.
So I did some research into it and looked at the various hacked kernels that are out there as well as some of the available source patches. After doing some research on it I realized that a good bulk of the typical kernel patch is due to lack of the "/efi" node in the device tree. Well, boot-132 (the non-EFI bootloader) is open source and after a bit of hacking I modified it to look for the ACPI and SMBIOS tables and put them in the appropriate sub-nodes of the efi node.
Assuming the right processor (e.g. Core or Core 2) that's enough to get any kernel Apple has ever made to boot without modifying the binary or recompiling from source. Unfortunately I used a P4 as a test rig so I had to do a tiny bit of hacking. It's pretty easy since the source is available so you can just fix it and recompile. Or if the source isn't available (e.g. source for Leopard isn't yet) you can still quite easily patch the machine code to ignore the processor family.
Once you've got that the only thing between you and OS X is a way to get the kernel to decrypt the binaries. Amit Singh has illustrated the magic poem which is actually not the decryption but instead a secondary protection mechanism. In some earlier Leopard seeds, that mechanism didn't appear to be used anymore. The real decryption is two AES keys, also widely available. The interface between the kernel and the decryption kernel extension is public. That is, there's a function pointer variable in the source and basically you just write a function that does the AES decryption and then set the appropriate function pointer to the address of your function from your kernel extension's initialization routine. That's all I'll give away on a public forum though. And I'm not giving anything away here, it's public knowledge, right in the source code to xnu.
I post here not to tell people how to hack it but to illustrate that it's not some difficult scheme. I have a good laugh reading the various osx86 forums about how cool these hackers must be if they can crack OS X. It's not as if Apple tried to make it hard. I mean, putting the decryption hook in "Don't Steal Mac OS X.kext" is a pretty dead giveaway. The other good meme is the thought that the methods of hacking need to be kept secret so Apple doesn't figure them out. Believe me, if I can reverse engineer the hacks then I'm quite certain Apple has several people who can. If they even want to. I see no indication that anyone at Apple is trying to prevent hacks. They write code that works on their machines. If it happens to work on other x86 machines, it does. They haven't ever done anything to stop it.
Totally, absolutely, and completely, wrong. They can do what they did before. Get a warrant, and then call the phone company and have them install an electronic tap. Takes about 24 hours to get the warrant and about 2 minutes for the phone company employee to install the tap (it's basically just a bit of typing at the keyboard).
Huh? How do you think an electronic tap works. In order to implement the tap you have to have the equipment to do it. As you say, it takes about 2 minutes for the phone company employee to install the tap. They do that by issuing a couple of commands to their electronic phone switch. What do you think the equipment that Klein installed does?
By necessity, the equipment has the capability to monitor any conversation.
When Mohammed Al Foobari comes into the U.S. from Saudi Arabia you can bet that any phone call he makes or receives is recorded. You really want to stop that?If Mohammed Al Foobari actually did something, it should be easy for the government to get a warrant from the FISA court. If he didn't do anything, he shouldn't be tapped. This strikes me as common sense.
The Bush administration's position is that they don't need a warrant to tap calls when one or both endpoints are foreign. If both endpoints are domestic they have the ability to get a warrant for a floating wiretap. That means that when Al Foobari comes into the country law enforcement can get a warrant tied to Al Foobari, not to specific phones that Al Foobari uses. Assuming Al Foobari is being followed by law enforcement, law enforcement can call the phone company and get immediate wiretaps on any phone he could be using.
So if our suspected terrorist is seen entering a private residence, that residence's phone is immediately monitored. If he's seen using a pay phone, that pay phone is immediately monitored. If he uses the phone at a local coffee shop, it's monitored.
To me, that only seems sensible. But the discussion has gotten conflated. The Bush administration's failure to obtain a warrant when one or both endpoints lie outside the U.S. has been taken to mean that it is monitoring domestic phone calls without a warrant. That's true only if you use a rather loose version of domestic. The phone company certainly bills you for an international call in that case.
Separate from that, the installation of equipment capable of providing the floating wiretap service has been taken to mean that the administration is monitoring all domestic phone calls. So some people put these together and claim that the Bush administration is monitoring all domestic phone calls without a warrant.