Besides TrueType fonts, a couple other things to check are:
1) have you told your X server the resolution of your screen, and loaded the correct font files? One of my pet peeves is that the standard fonts are rendered for 75 and 100 dpi, but I usually run my screen around 120 dpi! If you don't give the server good hints (e.g., using the 75 dpi fonts and default screen resolution) your results will be pretty bad.
2) have you specified ":unscaled" fonts before the standard fonts? "xfnt100" means that the server will attempt to scale any font with a matching name, "xfnt100:unscaled" forces the server to only accept exact matches. This is the problem behind the ugly pixel-replicated fonts. Try listing the standards fonts first with ":unscaled," then the scalable fonts (if any), then the standard fonts without "unscaled." And as before, only list the 100 dpi fonts unless you have a good reason to use 75 dpi.
3) Check your monitor cable, video settings, etc. If your video card is putting out higher frequencies than the monitor can handle, the display will always look horrible. Even if you're within spec, a loose connection or cheap KVM can destroy the signal.
4) Finally, try different fonts. Some fonts are widely used for a "traditional" look, not because they're easy to read on a computer screen. Even a difference in the "foundary" can make a big difference because of the way they handle "serifs" and the like.
These companies could easily be lying about buying you name from an "opt-in" list. I get a *lot* of spam which huffs and puffs and tries to keep the lawyers away with a prominent notice that I only got the message because I opted in with them.
Like any court would give more weight to a self-serving statement by a spammer than a sworn statement by the victim....
Anyway, I've found a very simple procmail eliminates most of my spam. If it's not addressed to me - hell, if it's not addressed to my ISP - in the to:, cc:, or bcc: line it goes into the spam bucket.
This also clobbers legitimate mailing lists, but they're easily pulled out of the stream prior to this filter.
A few messages still get through... but they get my special attention. For instance, I check to see if they're tagged - for the past year or two every time I've given my email address I've used the "user+tag@fqdn" form. It still gets delivered to me, "user," but if the address hasn't been washed I can figure out where they found the address.
Assuming you were reasonably accurate and didn't violate any (reasonable) NDAs, what are they going to tell your current employer? That's a legal minefield - any contact at this point runs the risk of you making a claim for slander or defamation.
It doesn't even matter what they say - the mere fact that they contacted your current employer because you've kept in touch with former coworkers will cast a shadow over every "negative," or even "non-positive," decision for the next few years. Didn't get a promotion, maybe the company said something to your boss. Maybe that guy advertising on late-night TV can find out exactly what your ex-employer said.
As for direct legal actions against you... again, what are they going to accuse you of? In the US, the truth is an absolute defense against slander, so the only concern would be NDAs. Maybe there was an NDA in the pile of papers you signed when you started working there, but NDAs almost always refer to clients and the company's process, not the working environment. They didn't review the NDA in your exit interview, it's a year later, you're discussing the circumstances of your departure from a long-term position....
So again, direct legal action is a minefield. The mere fact that they're accusing you of some misdeed here opens them up to a countersuit. Their case may be frivolous, but yours will not since you're forced to hire a lawyer, etc.
Overall, it sounds like its nothing more than saber rattling by the former employer. The "audit" department does have a legitimate interest in countering false claims about the company... but they have no right to counter honest-but-unflattering speech. Furthermore they should realize that empty threats don't work well in the IT industry - too many people like me consider it an "instant death sentence" for the employer if they try something like this. There are plenty of other employers who don't act like schoolyard bullies out there.
I thought the "kill radius" was a lot more than 20LY -- perhaps something as much as a 1000 LY for anything larger than the proverbial mouse.
The problem is that nearby systems will be whipsawed. First there will be a *lot* more energy pouring into the system - even an extra 5-10% of "sunlight" for a three-month period could seriously mess up an ecosystem. A few hundred to a thousand years later, when the ecosystem is finally recovering, the dust blows through and it could drop the sunlight by the same amount for years. Instant ice age. Of course, the star will also be getting sandblasted by that dust, so once the dust clears the star will still have its chromosphere chewed up. I can't remember if that makes it brighter or dimmer (if the turbulence slows down convection). Either way, the ecosystem is history.
(Obviously anything in orbit is toast. That "dust" is still traveling fast enough to be considered intense radiation.)
The good news is that we don't have to go 1000 LY out ourselves. If humanity reaches a reasonable number of stars, their natural movements will continue to separate the colonies even if all lose interstellar capability.
The biggest error is that THE MOON IS NOT GRAVITATIONALLY BOUND TO THE EARTH. Do the math - the gravitational attraction from the sun is twice that from the earth. The moon is unique in this, and one reason why many people call the earth/moon system a double planet.
To be sure, as a first approximation you can treat the earth-moon system as a binary system and get reasonable results - you can treat the sun's gravitional attraction as a uniform field that can be ignored. But if you want to do any long-term predictions you have to include the tidal forces from the sun - the moon is just a little bit squeezed towards the earth when half-full, and just a little bit pushed away from the earth when new or full. Tidal forces tend to circularize the moon's orbit, but this solar tidal force is "pumping" the moon to a higher orbit at the cost of the earth and moon moving a tad closer to the sun.
In the long run, the sun will win. The moon will "break free" of the earth's orbit *long* before tidal locking occurs. It's been years since I read the details, but I think the earth's day maxes out at under 30 hours/day when the moon escapes, and it won't happen for another billion years or so.
I also seem to recall that the tidal bulges lag the moon, and are slowing it down. But this situation is very odd - everywhere else in the solar system tidal friction cause the orbit to decay to the Roche limit (then you'll get rings as the satellite breaks up). Here the solar tidal forces are actually pumping the moon into a higher orbit.
P.S., I believe I once read that the day was about 23 hours when dinosaurs were walking around. 14 hour days occured shortly after the collision 4 billion years ago, back when the moon would have filled the sky.
I always thought that was a subtle dig at Velstroki (something like that). He claimed that Venus was hot because it had been ejected from Jupiter in Biblical times, not because of greenhouse gases, that its passage had caused the Earth to briefly cease rotating just long enough for the story in the Bible, etc.
The first comments were a little sparse, so I'll practice using my memory...:-) (I had some pretty compelling personal reasons to research this in the early 90's)
Aspertame is composed of two amino acids. One of these amino acids will cross the "blood-brain barrier." That, by itself, isn't particularly worrisome, but the blood-brain barrier has a finite capacity and (iirc) transports the amino acids in the same proportion as they appear in the blood stream. This means that consuming a lot of aspertame will "crowd out" the other amino acids.
This can have some surprising results. A close friend of mine was an apparently healthy 30-year-old, but he had such severe tachycardia that he was starting to black out - imagine sitting quietly and having a pulse of 180-200! (That's higher than the "maximum heart rate", faster than what you would get in an all-out sprint!) His doctors had given him EKGs, CAT scans, etc., and had no idea what was wrong. I knew he drank a *lot* of diet soda and suggested he try cutting it out. He did, and the tachycardia stopped. There is no proof of a causal relationship - maybe it was a coincidence - but he swore off diet sodas for life.
My experience was that diet soda (which I rarely consumed anyway) would actually cause me to become more "intoxicated" than a six-pack of beer if I drank a single can of soda while taking a particular prescription medication. My doctor and I both checked the PDR, there was no interaction listed but that was where I learned about the blood-brain barrier effect. I'm sure some people would go "cool!" at being able to get stoned off a legal diet soft drink, but it terrified me since nobody knew how it was happening and what damage it was causing.
Finally, the <u>Atlantic</u> also did a long article on concerns about Aspertame in the early 90s (or late 80s), but I don't recall the details of that article. (I think that's normal memory loss:-)
Bottom line: I try fairly hard to avoid unnecessary exposure to artificial sweeteners. (It's impossible to avoid all exposure unless you live life like its 1799.) The extra pounds I'm carrying have their own risks, but those risks are known and can be mitigated by taking care to exercise regularly. The risks posed by consuming artifical sweeteners for decades, sweeteners that cross the blood-brain barrier, are unknown.
The essay contains a classic prediction error... but it's something easy to correct.
That error is that people tend to think that change occurs in a linear fashion. This essay is certainly written that way, with an entry for each year.
In reality, change tends to occur in an exponential fashion - and predictions are always too wild in the near term and too timid in the long term. That's easy to correct - you simply "shove" the predictions from both ends towards a point about 2/3 of the way through, but it makes less interesting reading.:-)
So, for everyone who says that "this will never happen in 4 years" you're right... but you're missing the bigger point. It doesn't matter if the actual year is 2008 instead of 2004, or even 2020. What's really important is that each step is modest and oh-so-reasonable given everything that has happened until that point, yet the cumulative effect is a disaster. Since none of this requires a massive leap in technology or law it could well happen within a generation.
For future reference, one country (Sweden?) HAS switched from left-handed driving to right-handed driving, to match the rest of Europe. They report few problems. Speed limits were kept fairly low (30 mph/50 kph?) during the first week while the old signage was covered or replaced, and then gradually returned to normal over the next few weeks.
This wasn't implemented overnight, but it could have been done in a year or two. The limiting factor was the time it took to fabricate and install the new signs (initially covered). Once they were in place the actual transition occured quickly. That's definitely something on-point here.
The easiest way to answer this is to compare it to the "break" signal on serial ports, or the hook "flash" on telephones. The SysReq key is (or is supposed to be) an equivalent "out of band" signal from the keyboard and should always be recognized even if the keyboard buffer is full, hosed, or otherwise unusable.
What do you do with "SysReq"? Anything you want. On some systems, particularly in a "secure" environment, the "SysReq" key is how you get a login prompt because it is how you can ensure that you're seeing the real login program, not a password sniffing userspace front-end. That's the thinking behind WinNT using "Ctl-Alt-Del" to bring up the login screen.
On Linux, the kernel can be configured to bring up a very small "monitor" that allows you to perform a few tasks (e.g., sync'ing the hard disks and performing a clean shutdown) when all else fails.
I don't believe any handlers are installed for Windows non-NT or DOS.
Don't forget the proposed changes to the ATA (IDE) protocols, and accepted changes to the SCSI and Firewire protocols, which allow third parties to control access to sectors on your disk. With compliant software (and you can be damn sure Windows 2002 will support it!) sectors can be rendered unreadable, even un-deletable, to every other program.
On my darker days, I suspect Windows will flip that secure bit on the boot sector for "protection" from "malicious" software such as Linux or *BSD. But I digress..
It's clear that this is a nearly end-to-end solution for "secure" media - you <b>can't</b> read the data from the disk without one encryption key, you can't read the bitstream without a second encryption key, and while first-generation drivers will decrypt the datastream in software, it's not hard to predict that the decryption will be pushed onto the sound card in the near future. You don't have to modify the codec itself, all you need is a bit of silicon between the bus and the codec which handles the decryption.
Looking just a wee bit further ahead, why do you need a sound card at all? USB speakers, with decryption and codecs in the speaker itself!
Think mean-time-to-failure, not just availability
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The issue isn't how often you need to reboot, or how long it takes to come back up. It's why is it necessary AT ALL? This is the difference between availability (which allows support to take down systems for routine maintenance) and mean-time-to-failure (the most common measure of reliability).
Excluding hardware problems, if a computer <b>requires</b> a reboot to avoid problems there's only two possible causes: either resources are being consumed and not released as appropriate (the biggest headache with Netscape), or coding errors are causing random corruption of data structures. Since Windows tends to "flake out" instead of announcing "resource not available," it sounds like it's random corruption of data structures.
Nobody is stupid enough (I hope) to say that Unix is totally bug-free, but its architecture limits the damage a buggy application can do to others, and the system itself, so it's common to hear of heavily loaded systems running for several years without problem.
On the other hand, a mostly idle Windows system will usually become unusable within a week. In practice, I've rarely seen a MIS department that didn't recommend a "preventative reboot" nightly, or at least every other night. This suggests that the code contains a tremendous number of very serious coding errors -- and there are very, very few products where a MTTF of a few days to a week is acceptable. Could you imagine using a refrigerator which had to be unpluggedand reach room temperature weekly, or else it might go beserk and either freeze the food rock-hard or heat up like an oven?
I believe you want more than just ideas. It would also be useful to have some indication of the expected level of difficulty, pointers to resources, possibly even volunteer gurus or managers.
The reason is simple: nothing is more frustrating than to have an idea but grossly underestimate the amount of effort it will take to bring it to completion. You think it will take a few weekends, but months later you may have nothing to show for it. Wouldn't you prefer to know that before starting, or to know if you're trying to make too big of a step, or just to have someone point out that the problem that's been stopped you cold for weeks has already been solved. (This isn't a slam on your skills - in many ways the only difference between beginners and experts is that the latter know how to ask for help.)
As for ideas, I agree that they're easy to come up with. The hard part is figuring out how much work is required and if it's worth doing.
No insult intended, but as a self-admitted junior programmer you aren't in a good position to argue for a rewrite. I know, from being on both sides of the desk. As others have pointed out, a true rewrite will involve far more than you banging on the keyboard for a few weeks.
However, this doesn't mean you can't do anything at all. I consider a couple things fairly safe:
eliminate all compiler warnings. Turn on all compiler warning options and either eliminate them or document (in the code) why they're not a problem. I can usually clean up over 2kloc/day and while 80% of the warnings are trivial (e.g., missing prototypes), a good 5-10% are latent bugs. Variables initialized with incompatible data, functions called with the wrong types of parameters, etc. This sounds incredibly stupid, yet I've repeatedly found "fragile" code becomes much more stable once compiler warnings are eliminated.
close memory leaks. Run the software under an instrumented "malloc" package that detects memory leaks -- and ensure that your code always releases all of the memory it allocates. (You might not be able to release code allocated by libraries you use.) There may not seem to be much value in this, but my experience has shown that the effort required to do this always results in improved code. You should also practice "data hygiene" if you do this - clear the data structures before deallocating them, so it's clear if you subsequently attempt to access a freed object.
An alternative approach is to profile the code and verify that there are equal numbers of fopen() and fclose() calls, equal numbers of malloc() and free() calls, etc.
profile the code and find the hot spots. Profile the code and look for the routines that are called most often. Does it make sense, or is this an indication of a particularly inefficient algorithm? Sometimes the code is written one way because of the limitations of legacy hardware, and now it's just a pointless waste of time. (E.g., I've seen routines that opened a file, read each line until the Nth line, the closed the file and incremented the counter! That might have been necessary 20 years ago, but I replaced it with a bit of code that mmap'd the file into memory and then did some pointer magic and shaved 25 _seconds_ off the startup time!)
prune dead code. Run the code through a call-tree routine and comment out all procedures and global variables which are never called. (I find it best to bracket the code with #if 0/#endif and tag each line with/**/ in the first few columns.) N.B., call-tree software can't find functions called indirectly through data structures! Repeat the process until you've found all procedures only called by procedures which are themselves uncalled, etc. Consider moving routines to other files, if it will allow you to make it static. I've found up to 2/3 of legacy code is now dead, and understanding the bit that remainds is *much* easier. Do not delete the "unused code" until a formal rewrite, however!
After all of this is done, the code may still be a undocumented ball of spaghetti, but it should be sufficiently organized for an intelligent decision whether it makes sense to rewrite subsections.
You obviously don't know much about how the US judicial system works.
Civil suits are between two parties. Everyone else is an observer, even if it's clear to everyone involved that the plantiff carefully searched for a defendant who 1) didn't have many resources to fight the case and 2) seemed to have the best case for establishing broad precedents.
Once the judgement comes down against the plantiff the details don't matter - the precedence has been established and every subsequent court case in this jurisdiction must consider it. (I won't get into binding vs. non-binding precedents, etc.) This is a powerful tool for suppressing dissent, since every future defendant must prove why the precedence doesn't apply in their case.
Needless to say, this create a HUGE potential for mischief. To balance it, courts allow others affected by any precedence established, but not involved in the specific case, to file briefs that may be considered by the court. These briefs usually illuminate points that one party doesn't want brought up - and the other party *can't* bring up because of the rules of the courtroom. This might result in a reversed judgement, or at least the restriction of the judgement to be non-precedent setting.
The MPAA may be fuming about the content of this brief, but there's not a whole lot they can do about it. Any attempt to suppress it would merely serve to highly just how carefully constrained their case is -- and why it must not be used to establish precedence for suppressing such publications.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I paid attention in civics class. If you think I have no right to discuss this (and potentially learn from others) then you believe that either 1) voters are best when ignorant and apathetic or 2) that only practicing lawyers should have the right to vote. Either way, you are no friend of democracy.
If you want to use it for class notes, a verbatim record of what the professor (or more likely, grad student) says is pretty much worthless. You'll retain *far* more information is you make the effort to paraphrase the information and jot that down -- even if you record only one tenth the information and drop your notes in the trash can on the way out the door.
The reason is simple: paraphrasing what you are hearing engages the verbal part of your brain... and verbal memory. Writing that down engages the motor skills, visual and possibly spatial parts of your brain... and visual and spatial memory.
In contrast, if you simply act like a human tape recorder you aren't really engaging the verbal part of your brain - you're doing word recognition, but this is very shallow understanding that won't give you insight into how disconnected parts of the lecture relate to one another. Worse, if you use an unfamiliar writing technique (shorthand - a few months of practice vs. a decade of printing/cursive?) you're physical senses will be focused on producing good shorthand, not what you're actually writing.
Overall, I think using shorthand to take class notes is about the *worst* possible thing you can do. Even listening passively is probably better, since you aren't distracted by trying to get the exact wording or paying attention to your transcription pad.
In those cases where you *must* record the information accurately, the professor will either hand out pages or give you plenty of time to copy it down. But that's fairly rare, especially in your underclassman years.
My perspective: BS math, BS physics (both fields which require painstaking care with mathematical notation) and MS comp sci.
The original poster's problems, and mine, is not server availability, it's short retention periods. Nothing but disk space (either by using larger data spools or dropping newgroups) will solve that problem.
As for the issue of bandwidth consumed by this process, most people will only download the newsgroups they actually read. (I'm only grabbing all of comp.* because some friends asked for full archives for some research projects.) There is no additional overhead incurred in downloading articles that you would have downloaded anyway, it actually <i>helps</i> the availability because the access is spread out throughout the day instead of being clumped.
There's a simple solution to this problem - run your own news server! I set aside a 4 GB partition for the comp.* hierarchy and I have a retention period of several months. I use "suck" to grab the articles from my cable modem's new server - that way I don't need to set up peering arrangements.
This isn't a maintenance-free solution - I don't believe your news server will properly process NEWGRP messages so you'll need to manually check that once a month or so, but it has several benefits:
<ul>
<li>You control the retention period,
<li>Your clients have extremely high responsiveness, since the server is on the same LAN and only serving local users, and
<li>You can run spam filters on the article spool.
</ul>
The importance of the last point can't be overemphasized if you're in the alt.* hierarchy. As an experiment I tried cleaning up some heavily polluted groups, and discovered that the bulk of the offensive spam is from a few <i>very</i> active spammers who are using a couple class-C IP address blocks. (I'm _S_U_R_E_ *Y*O*U*.W.O.U.L.D./R/E/C/O/G/N/I/Z/E/ #T#H#E#M# ^I^M^M^E^D^I^A^T^E^L^Y^) A simple script that deletes any files containing a URL from these address blocks (in all three formats) does an incredible job at reducing the perception of spam.
The mass could be in a large moon, but that begs the question of how the moon was captured. With "small" moons, the capture starts with a highly elliptical orbit which is solely circularized by tidal friction. But how would capture work with a moon several times larger than Jupiter - where would the excess orbital energy go? (In rocky moons it goes into heated rock, but gas giants are bags of fluid.)
There's always the "earth" model - two smaller planets have glancing blow and result in planet and large moon - but both of the smaller planets would be far larger than Jupiter. We can understand collisions between rocky planets, but what would a gas giant collision look like? Esp. when you realize that the collision between the "cores" will undoubtably produce a lot of degenerate matter and even nuclear fusion?
No matter how you look at it, a "moon" solution raises a lot of difficult questions. You're replacing one question with a dozen more difficult ones - not the way science usually works!
Finally, because of orbital dynamics there's no chance that any planet could have two large moons. Any large moon will eject other moons over geological time. This effect can be clearly seen in Saturn's rings, where even small moons have cleared bands.
Actually, a better translation of that commandment is Thou shall not murder. The difference is that "kill" applies to all, while "murder" applies to individuals alone. When the state does it, it's something else: execution, war, ethnic cleansing, et al.
This might seem like a small point, but the Bible is extremely bloody (R-rated, if it were a movie) with all of the mandatory death sentences in Lev., mandatory death of all men, women and children in conquered lands, etc.
I'm hoping this article was a troll, but in case it's not....
The US Military wants no part of the drug war. It's one thing to defend the US coast and borders from military attack, but what you're describing is the wholesale conversion of the US Military into a domestic police force.
History teaches that this is usually soon followed by a military coup. In fact, a well-received essay (which I haven't read, unfortunately) by a senior officer described exactly how the chain of events seen in other countries could lead to a US Military Junta in the early twenty-teens. (I believe he used 2012 in his essay.)
Even if American human nature really is different (ha!) and nobody anywhere within or without the US Military is ever tempted to lead a coup, there's the profound difference between the actions of military and police forces. The military uses whatever force is necessary to counter a threat. Normally, the fastest and most efficient way to do that is to blow the other guy away before he does the same to you. The police (LA SWAT team tactics notwithstanding) is expected to use the minimal amount of force necessary. Suspects are allowed to escape, if capture poses too much risk to others. In physical confrontations, police are injured at nearly twice the rate as suspects. Suspects civil rights must be observed throughout arrest and detention. All of this is completely contrary to the training required of military personnel. (Remember, they are solving a very different problem. Different problem, different strategy, different tools.)
And the specifics of your proposal are ludicrous. Do you have any idea how much totally innocent cross-border traffic there is? Did you understand all of the quirks of the border? (E.g., school children living in Pt. Roberts, Washington, ride a school bus into Canada, then back into the US to attend school. Close the border and you'll have to arrange ferry service. Hell, you'll have to build the harbor facilities for the ferry!) Do you realize that much of the US-Canadian border is no more than a ditch between subdivisions? Do you realize how much of the border is wild forest unmarked except for a narrow band of downed trees?
(And what will you do about Alaska? Will you insist that all domestic flights from Alaska go through customs, or will you station troops along those thousands of miles of border?
How, precisely, will sealed borders reduce the domestic production of various drugs? Some drugs are imported, but marijuana is one of the top-five cash crops in many states. Meth labs cause urban hazmat teams endless hassles. E, LSD, and countless other drugs can be synthesized anywhere you have access to the chemicals. Are you going to send troops with all shipments of antihistamines? Armed guards in every grocery and drug store?
And what, pray tell, does "send them back where they came from" mean when you're talking about a US National reentering the country? In the same what "home is where they can't turn you away," one of the rights of US citizenship is that we *can't* be deported from this country, or refused entry. (We might be arrested and detained, but we can't be forced to another country. Contrawise, no other country can be forced to accept us.) A nearby INS lockup is holding some individuals who have no citizenship (they were stripped of Vietnamese citizenship after the war, and don't consider it home anyway since they left as infants, but never acquired US citizenship and are now disqualified due to felony convictions). Since no country will accept them, and no country can be forced to take them, they are languishing in prison indefinitely.
One minor nit - the courts have tossed out "restrictions" that have the de facto effect of outright bans. E.g., a restriction that a strip club must be located at least one mile from any residence, school, place of worship, or bar when the no location satisfying all those requirements exists.
However, this restriction appears to be no more severe than those imposed on adult entertainment (theatrical movies, porn movies, strip clubs, etc.), alcohol, guns, etc.
We can argue that the law is misguided (e.g., it bans a 17-year-old who's already signed up for military service from realistic games), but not its Constitutionality.
To pick just one obvious example, any files you have from your employer should be on an encrypted FS. Even the company's phone list can be considered "confidential" if it includes employee's home address and unlisted phone numbers. Anything legally recognized as IP (non-published source code, client lists, etc.) should definitely be protected.
You could PGP each file individually (hah!), or just encrypt the entire directory tree/FS.
If you have information on third parties (e.g., financial or medical information on clients) then encryption isn't often isn't even an option - it's <b>required</b> by some of the recently passed privacy laws.
Overall, I would say that it's a tossup whether a fixed system (at either the office or home) needs encrypted filesystems, but there's no doubt that laptops need them.
Your argument overlooked a BIG factor - a store is a "public accomodation" and its business license requires the owner to make certain compromises. No compromise, no business license.
The easiest way to illustrate this is to play "Guess who's coming to dinner." An individual, in his own home, may refuse to allow a guest to enter on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
But a restaurant owner *can't* refuse to allow a guest to dine in his restaurant, legally a "public accomodation," on the basis of some or all of those criteria. (The exact list varies with local laws.) He may only refuse a patron for legitimate reasons, e.g., the restaurant is full, the patron will disrupt others with his actions or odor, the patron is unsanitary (no shoes, no shirt, etc.)
Likewise a private home owner can refuse to allow someone to stay overnight for any reason - or no reason at all. A hotel can't. A private car owner can refuse to give someone a lift, a public car (taxi, limo) can't. A privately funded school can refuse to educate people, a publicly funded one can't. (Again, all subject to "common-sense" exceptions like the facility being filled, legitimate perception of threat to staff or others, etc.)
I'm still undecided whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing (it depends on how much is shoe-horned in through the back door), but no matter what you think about it this invalidates the argument that Constitutional protections only protect you from the government. They also apply, to a surprising extent, to any business entity which doesn't employ you.
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Why did you think it was called PEDophilia, just like PEDestrians?
Besides TrueType fonts, a couple other things to check are:
1) have you told your X server the resolution of your screen, and loaded the correct font files? One of my pet peeves is that the standard fonts are rendered for 75 and 100 dpi, but I usually run my screen around 120 dpi! If you don't give the server good hints (e.g., using the 75 dpi fonts and default screen resolution) your results will be pretty bad.
2) have you specified ":unscaled" fonts before the standard fonts? "xfnt100" means that the server will attempt to scale any font with a matching name, "xfnt100:unscaled" forces the server to only accept exact matches. This is the problem behind the ugly pixel-replicated fonts. Try listing the standards fonts first with ":unscaled," then the scalable fonts (if any), then the standard fonts without "unscaled." And as before, only list the 100 dpi fonts unless you have a good reason to use 75 dpi.
3) Check your monitor cable, video settings, etc. If your video card is putting out higher frequencies than the monitor can handle, the display will always look horrible. Even if you're within spec, a loose connection or cheap KVM can destroy the signal.
4) Finally, try different fonts. Some fonts are widely used for a "traditional" look, not because they're easy to read on a computer screen. Even a difference in the "foundary" can make a big difference because of the way they handle "serifs" and the like.
These companies could easily be lying about buying you name from an "opt-in" list. I get a *lot* of spam which huffs and puffs and tries to keep the lawyers away with a prominent notice that I only got the message because I opted in with them.
Like any court would give more weight to a self-serving statement by a spammer than a sworn statement by the victim....
Anyway, I've found a very simple procmail eliminates most of my spam. If it's not addressed to me - hell, if it's not addressed to my ISP - in the to:, cc:, or bcc: line it goes into the spam bucket.
This also clobbers legitimate mailing lists, but they're easily pulled out of the stream prior to this filter.
A few messages still get through... but they get my special attention. For instance, I check to see if they're tagged - for the past year or two every time I've given my email address I've used the "user+tag@fqdn" form. It still gets delivered to me, "user," but if the address hasn't been washed I can figure out where they found the address.
Assuming you were reasonably accurate and didn't violate any (reasonable) NDAs, what are they going to tell your current employer? That's a legal minefield - any contact at this point runs the risk of you making a claim for slander or defamation.
It doesn't even matter what they say - the mere fact that they contacted your current employer because you've kept in touch with former coworkers will cast a shadow over every "negative," or even "non-positive," decision for the next few years. Didn't get a promotion, maybe the company said something to your boss. Maybe that guy advertising on late-night TV can find out exactly what your ex-employer said.
As for direct legal actions against you... again, what are they going to accuse you of? In the US, the truth is an absolute defense against slander, so the only concern would be NDAs. Maybe there was an NDA in the pile of papers you signed when you started working there, but NDAs almost always refer to clients and the company's process, not the working environment. They didn't review the NDA in your exit interview, it's a year later, you're discussing the circumstances of your departure from a long-term position....
So again, direct legal action is a minefield. The mere fact that they're accusing you of some misdeed here opens them up to a countersuit. Their case may be frivolous, but yours will not since you're forced to hire a lawyer, etc.
Overall, it sounds like its nothing more than saber rattling by the former employer. The "audit" department does have a legitimate interest in countering false claims about the company... but they have no right to counter honest-but-unflattering speech. Furthermore they should realize that empty threats don't work well in the IT industry - too many people like me consider it an "instant death sentence" for the employer if they try something like this. There are plenty of other employers who don't act like schoolyard bullies out there.
I thought the "kill radius" was a lot more than 20LY -- perhaps something as much as a 1000 LY for anything larger than the proverbial mouse.
The problem is that nearby systems will be whipsawed. First there will be a *lot* more energy pouring into the system - even an extra 5-10% of "sunlight" for a three-month period could seriously mess up an ecosystem. A few hundred to a thousand years later, when the ecosystem is finally recovering, the dust blows through and it could drop the sunlight by the same amount for years. Instant ice age. Of course, the star will also be getting sandblasted by that dust, so once the dust clears the star will still have its chromosphere chewed up. I can't remember if that makes it brighter or dimmer (if the turbulence slows down convection). Either way, the ecosystem is history.
(Obviously anything in orbit is toast. That "dust" is still traveling fast enough to be considered intense radiation.)
The good news is that we don't have to go 1000 LY out ourselves. If humanity reaches a reasonable number of stars, their natural movements will continue to separate the colonies even if all lose interstellar capability.
Close, but no cigar.
The biggest error is that THE MOON IS NOT GRAVITATIONALLY BOUND TO THE EARTH. Do the math - the gravitational attraction from the sun is twice that from the earth. The moon is unique in this, and one reason why many people call the earth/moon system a double planet.
To be sure, as a first approximation you can treat the earth-moon system as a binary system and get reasonable results - you can treat the sun's gravitional attraction as a uniform field that can be ignored. But if you want to do any long-term predictions you have to include the tidal forces from the sun - the moon is just a little bit squeezed towards the earth when half-full, and just a little bit pushed away from the earth when new or full. Tidal forces tend to circularize the moon's orbit, but this solar tidal force is "pumping" the moon to a higher orbit at the cost of the earth and moon moving a tad closer to the sun.
In the long run, the sun will win. The moon will "break free" of the earth's orbit *long* before tidal locking occurs. It's been years since I read the details, but I think the earth's day maxes out at under 30 hours/day when the moon escapes, and it won't happen for another billion years or so.
I also seem to recall that the tidal bulges lag the moon, and are slowing it down. But this situation is very odd - everywhere else in the solar system tidal friction cause the orbit to decay to the Roche limit (then you'll get rings as the satellite breaks up). Here the solar tidal forces are actually pumping the moon into a higher orbit.
P.S., I believe I once read that the day was about 23 hours when dinosaurs were walking around. 14 hour days occured shortly after the collision 4 billion years ago, back when the moon would have filled the sky.
I always thought that was a subtle dig at Velstroki (something like that). He claimed that Venus was hot because it had been ejected from Jupiter in Biblical times, not because of greenhouse gases, that its passage had caused the Earth to briefly cease rotating just long enough for the story in the Bible, etc.
The first comments were a little sparse, so I'll practice using my memory... :-) (I had some pretty compelling personal reasons to research this in the early 90's)
:-)
Aspertame is composed of two amino acids. One of these amino acids will cross the "blood-brain barrier." That, by itself, isn't particularly worrisome, but the blood-brain barrier has a finite capacity and (iirc) transports the amino acids in the same proportion as they appear in the blood stream. This means that consuming a lot of aspertame will "crowd out" the other amino acids.
This can have some surprising results. A close friend of mine was an apparently healthy 30-year-old, but he had such severe tachycardia that he was starting to black out - imagine sitting quietly and having a pulse of 180-200! (That's higher than the "maximum heart rate", faster than what you would get in an all-out sprint!) His doctors had given him EKGs, CAT scans, etc., and had no idea what was wrong. I knew he drank a *lot* of diet soda and suggested he try cutting it out. He did, and the tachycardia stopped. There is no proof of a causal relationship - maybe it was a coincidence - but he swore off diet sodas for life.
My experience was that diet soda (which I rarely consumed anyway) would actually cause me to become more "intoxicated" than a six-pack of beer if I drank a single can of soda while taking a particular prescription medication. My doctor and I both checked the PDR, there was no interaction listed but that was where I learned about the blood-brain barrier effect. I'm sure some people would go "cool!" at being able to get stoned off a legal diet soft drink, but it terrified me since nobody knew how it was happening and what damage it was causing.
Finally, the <u>Atlantic</u> also did a long article on concerns about Aspertame in the early 90s (or late 80s), but I don't recall the details of that article. (I think that's normal memory loss
Bottom line: I try fairly hard to avoid unnecessary exposure to artificial sweeteners. (It's impossible to avoid all exposure unless you live life like its 1799.) The extra pounds I'm carrying have their own risks, but those risks are known and can be mitigated by taking care to exercise regularly. The risks posed by consuming artifical sweeteners for decades, sweeteners that cross the blood-brain barrier, are unknown.
The essay contains a classic prediction error... but it's something easy to correct.
:-)
That error is that people tend to think that change occurs in a linear fashion. This essay is certainly written that way, with an entry for each year.
In reality, change tends to occur in an exponential fashion - and predictions are always too wild in the near term and too timid in the long term. That's easy to correct - you simply "shove" the predictions from both ends towards a point about 2/3 of the way through, but it makes less interesting reading.
So, for everyone who says that "this will never happen in 4 years" you're right... but you're missing the bigger point. It doesn't matter if the actual year is 2008 instead of 2004, or even 2020. What's really important is that each step is modest and oh-so-reasonable given everything that has happened until that point, yet the cumulative effect is a disaster. Since none of this requires a massive leap in technology or law it could well happen within a generation.
For future reference, one country (Sweden?) HAS switched from left-handed driving to right-handed driving, to match the rest of Europe. They report few problems. Speed limits were kept fairly low (30 mph/50 kph?) during the first week while the old signage was covered or replaced, and then gradually returned to normal over the next few weeks.
This wasn't implemented overnight, but it could have been done in a year or two. The limiting factor was the time it took to fabricate and install the new signs (initially covered). Once they were in place the actual transition occured quickly. That's definitely something on-point here.
The easiest way to answer this is to compare it to the "break" signal on serial ports, or the hook "flash" on telephones. The SysReq key is (or is supposed to be) an equivalent "out of band" signal from the keyboard and should always be recognized even if the keyboard buffer is full, hosed, or otherwise unusable.
What do you do with "SysReq"? Anything you want. On some systems, particularly in a "secure" environment, the "SysReq" key is how you get a login prompt because it is how you can ensure that you're seeing the real login program, not a password sniffing userspace front-end. That's the thinking behind WinNT using "Ctl-Alt-Del" to bring up the login screen.
On Linux, the kernel can be configured to bring up a very small "monitor" that allows you to perform a few tasks (e.g., sync'ing the hard disks and performing a clean shutdown) when all else fails.
I don't believe any handlers are installed for Windows non-NT or DOS.
Don't forget the proposed changes to the ATA (IDE) protocols, and accepted changes to the SCSI and Firewire protocols, which allow third parties to control access to sectors on your disk. With compliant software (and you can be damn sure Windows 2002 will support it!) sectors can be rendered unreadable, even un-deletable, to every other program.
On my darker days, I suspect Windows will flip that secure bit on the boot sector for "protection" from "malicious" software such as Linux or *BSD. But I digress..
It's clear that this is a nearly end-to-end solution for "secure" media - you <b>can't</b> read the data from the disk without one encryption key, you can't read the bitstream without a second encryption key, and while first-generation drivers will decrypt the datastream in software, it's not hard to predict that the decryption will be pushed onto the sound card in the near future. You don't have to modify the codec itself, all you need is a bit of silicon between the bus and the codec which handles the decryption.
Looking just a wee bit further ahead, why do you need a sound card at all? USB speakers, with decryption and codecs in the speaker itself!
The issue isn't how often you need to reboot, or how long it takes to come back up. It's why is it necessary AT ALL? This is the difference between availability (which allows support to take down systems for routine maintenance) and mean-time-to-failure (the most common measure of reliability).
Excluding hardware problems, if a computer <b>requires</b> a reboot to avoid problems there's only two possible causes: either resources are being consumed and not released as appropriate (the biggest headache with Netscape), or coding errors are causing random corruption of data structures. Since Windows tends to "flake out" instead of announcing "resource not available," it sounds like it's random corruption of data structures.
Nobody is stupid enough (I hope) to say that Unix is totally bug-free, but its architecture limits the damage a buggy application can do to others, and the system itself, so it's common to hear of heavily loaded systems running for several years without problem.
On the other hand, a mostly idle Windows system will usually become unusable within a week. In practice, I've rarely seen a MIS department that didn't recommend a "preventative reboot" nightly, or at least every other night. This suggests that the code contains a tremendous number of very serious coding errors -- and there are very, very few products where a MTTF of a few days to a week is acceptable. Could you imagine using a refrigerator which had to be unpluggedand reach room temperature weekly, or else it might go beserk and either freeze the food rock-hard or heat up like an oven?
I believe you want more than just ideas. It would also be useful to have some indication of the expected level of difficulty, pointers to resources, possibly even volunteer gurus or managers.
The reason is simple: nothing is more frustrating than to have an idea but grossly underestimate the amount of effort it will take to bring it to completion. You think it will take a few weekends, but months later you may have nothing to show for it. Wouldn't you prefer to know that before starting, or to know if you're trying to make too big of a step, or just to have someone point out that the problem that's been stopped you cold for weeks has already been solved. (This isn't a slam on your skills - in many ways the only difference between beginners and experts is that the latter know how to ask for help.)
As for ideas, I agree that they're easy to come up with. The hard part is figuring out how much work is required and if it's worth doing.
However, this doesn't mean you can't do anything at all. I consider a couple things fairly safe:
eliminate all compiler warnings. Turn on all compiler warning options and either eliminate them or document (in the code) why they're not a problem. I can usually clean up over 2kloc/day and while 80% of the warnings are trivial (e.g., missing prototypes), a good 5-10% are latent bugs. Variables initialized with incompatible data, functions called with the wrong types of parameters, etc. This sounds incredibly stupid, yet I've repeatedly found "fragile" code becomes much more stable once compiler warnings are eliminated.
close memory leaks. Run the software under an instrumented "malloc" package that detects memory leaks -- and ensure that your code always releases all of the memory it allocates. (You might not be able to release code allocated by libraries you use.) There may not seem to be much value in this, but my experience has shown that the effort required to do this always results in improved code. You should also practice "data hygiene" if you do this - clear the data structures before deallocating them, so it's clear if you subsequently attempt to access a freed object.
An alternative approach is to profile the code and verify that there are equal numbers of fopen() and fclose() calls, equal numbers of malloc() and free() calls, etc.
profile the code and find the hot spots. Profile the code and look for the routines that are called most often. Does it make sense, or is this an indication of a particularly inefficient algorithm? Sometimes the code is written one way because of the limitations of legacy hardware, and now it's just a pointless waste of time. (E.g., I've seen routines that opened a file, read each line until the Nth line, the closed the file and incremented the counter! That might have been necessary 20 years ago, but I replaced it with a bit of code that mmap'd the file into memory and then did some pointer magic and shaved 25 _seconds_ off the startup time!)
prune dead code. Run the code through a call-tree routine and comment out all procedures and global variables which are never called. (I find it best to bracket the code with #if 0/#endif and tag each line with /**/ in the first few columns.) N.B., call-tree software can't find functions called indirectly through data structures! Repeat the process until you've found all procedures only called by procedures which are themselves uncalled, etc. Consider moving routines to other files, if it will allow you to make it static. I've found up to 2/3 of legacy code is now dead, and understanding the bit that remainds is *much* easier. Do not delete the "unused code" until a formal rewrite, however!
After all of this is done, the code may still be a undocumented ball of spaghetti, but it should be sufficiently organized for an intelligent decision whether it makes sense to rewrite subsections.
You obviously don't know much about how the US judicial system works.
Civil suits are between two parties. Everyone else is an observer, even if it's clear to everyone involved that the plantiff carefully searched for a defendant who 1) didn't have many resources to fight the case and 2) seemed to have the best case for establishing broad precedents.
Once the judgement comes down against the plantiff the details don't matter - the precedence has been established and every subsequent court case in this jurisdiction must consider it. (I won't get into binding vs. non-binding precedents, etc.) This is a powerful tool for suppressing dissent, since every future defendant must prove why the precedence doesn't apply in their case.
Needless to say, this create a HUGE potential for mischief. To balance it, courts allow others affected by any precedence established, but not involved in the specific case, to file briefs that may be considered by the court. These briefs usually illuminate points that one party doesn't want brought up - and the other party *can't* bring up because of the rules of the courtroom. This might result in a reversed judgement, or at least the restriction of the judgement to be non-precedent setting.
The MPAA may be fuming about the content of this brief, but there's not a whole lot they can do about it. Any attempt to suppress it would merely serve to highly just how carefully constrained their case is -- and why it must not be used to establish precedence for suppressing such publications.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I paid attention in civics class. If you think I have no right to discuss this (and potentially learn from others) then you believe that either 1) voters are best when ignorant and apathetic or 2) that only practicing lawyers should have the right to vote. Either way, you are no friend of democracy.
Why do you need to learn shorthand?
If you want to use it for class notes, a verbatim record of what the professor (or more likely, grad student) says is pretty much worthless. You'll retain *far* more information is you make the effort to paraphrase the information and jot that down -- even if you record only one tenth the information and drop your notes in the trash can on the way out the door.
The reason is simple: paraphrasing what you are hearing engages the verbal part of your brain... and verbal memory. Writing that down engages the motor skills, visual and possibly spatial parts of your brain... and visual and spatial memory.
In contrast, if you simply act like a human tape recorder you aren't really engaging the verbal part of your brain - you're doing word recognition, but this is very shallow understanding that won't give you insight into how disconnected parts of the lecture relate to one another. Worse, if you use an unfamiliar writing technique (shorthand - a few months of practice vs. a decade of printing/cursive?) you're physical senses will be focused on producing good shorthand, not what you're actually writing.
Overall, I think using shorthand to take class notes is about the *worst* possible thing you can do. Even listening passively is probably better, since you aren't distracted by trying to get the exact wording or paying attention to your transcription pad.
In those cases where you *must* record the information accurately, the professor will either hand out pages or give you plenty of time to copy it down. But that's fairly rare, especially in your underclassman years.
My perspective: BS math, BS physics (both fields which require painstaking care with mathematical notation) and MS comp sci.
The original poster's problems, and mine, is not server availability, it's short retention periods. Nothing but disk space (either by using larger data spools or dropping newgroups) will solve that problem.
As for the issue of bandwidth consumed by this process, most people will only download the newsgroups they actually read. (I'm only grabbing all of comp.* because some friends asked for full archives for some research projects.) There is no additional overhead incurred in downloading articles that you would have downloaded anyway, it actually <i>helps</i> the availability because the access is spread out throughout the day instead of being clumped.
There's a simple solution to this problem - run your own news server! I set aside a 4 GB partition for the comp.* hierarchy and I have a retention period of several months. I use "suck" to grab the articles from my cable modem's new server - that way I don't need to set up peering arrangements.
.W.O.U.L.D. /R/E/C/O/G/N/I/Z/E/ #T#H#E#M# ^I^M^M^E^D^I^A^T^E^L^Y^) A simple script that deletes any files containing a URL from these address blocks (in all three formats) does an incredible job at reducing the perception of spam.
This isn't a maintenance-free solution - I don't believe your news server will properly process NEWGRP messages so you'll need to manually check that once a month or so, but it has several benefits:
<ul>
<li>You control the retention period,
<li>Your clients have extremely high responsiveness, since the server is on the same LAN and only serving local users, and
<li>You can run spam filters on the article spool.
</ul>
The importance of the last point can't be overemphasized if you're in the alt.* hierarchy. As an experiment I tried cleaning up some heavily polluted groups, and discovered that the bulk of the offensive spam is from a few <i>very</i> active spammers who are using a couple class-C IP address blocks. (I'm _S_U_R_E_ *Y*O*U*
The mass could be in a large moon, but that begs the question of how the moon was captured. With "small" moons, the capture starts with a highly elliptical orbit which is solely circularized by tidal friction. But how would capture work with a moon several times larger than Jupiter - where would the excess orbital energy go? (In rocky moons it goes into heated rock, but gas giants are bags of fluid.)
There's always the "earth" model - two smaller planets have glancing blow and result in planet and large moon - but both of the smaller planets would be far larger than Jupiter. We can understand collisions between rocky planets, but what would a gas giant collision look like? Esp. when you realize that the collision between the "cores" will undoubtably produce a lot of degenerate matter and even nuclear fusion?
No matter how you look at it, a "moon" solution raises a lot of difficult questions. You're replacing one question with a dozen more difficult ones - not the way science usually works!
Finally, because of orbital dynamics there's no chance that any planet could have two large moons. Any large moon will eject other moons over geological time. This effect can be clearly seen in Saturn's rings, where even small moons have cleared bands.
Actually, a better translation of that commandment is Thou shall not murder. The difference is that "kill" applies to all, while "murder" applies to individuals alone. When the state does it, it's something else: execution, war, ethnic cleansing, et al.
This might seem like a small point, but the Bible is extremely bloody (R-rated, if it were a movie) with all of the mandatory death sentences in Lev., mandatory death of all men, women and children in conquered lands, etc.
I'm hoping this article was a troll, but in case it's not....
The US Military wants no part of the drug war. It's one thing to defend the US coast and borders from military attack, but what you're describing is the wholesale conversion of the US Military into a domestic police force.
History teaches that this is usually soon followed by a military coup. In fact, a well-received essay (which I haven't read, unfortunately) by a senior officer described exactly how the chain of events seen in other countries could lead to a US Military Junta in the early twenty-teens. (I believe he used 2012 in his essay.)
Even if American human nature really is different (ha!) and nobody anywhere within or without the US Military is ever tempted to lead a coup, there's the profound difference between the actions of military and police forces. The military uses whatever force is necessary to counter a threat. Normally, the fastest and most efficient way to do that is to blow the other guy away before he does the same to you. The police (LA SWAT team tactics notwithstanding) is expected to use the minimal amount of force necessary. Suspects are allowed to escape, if capture poses too much risk to others. In physical confrontations, police are injured at nearly twice the rate as suspects. Suspects civil rights must be observed throughout arrest and detention. All of this is completely contrary to the training required of military personnel. (Remember, they are solving a very different problem. Different problem, different strategy, different tools.)
And the specifics of your proposal are ludicrous. Do you have any idea how much totally innocent cross-border traffic there is? Did you understand all of the quirks of the border? (E.g., school children living in Pt. Roberts, Washington, ride a school bus into Canada, then back into the US to attend school. Close the border and you'll have to arrange ferry service. Hell, you'll have to build the harbor facilities for the ferry!) Do you realize that much of the US-Canadian border is no more than a ditch between subdivisions? Do you realize how much of the border is wild forest unmarked except for a narrow band of downed trees?
(And what will you do about Alaska? Will you insist that all domestic flights from Alaska go through customs, or will you station troops along those thousands of miles of border?
How, precisely, will sealed borders reduce the domestic production of various drugs? Some drugs are imported, but marijuana is one of the top-five cash crops in many states. Meth labs cause urban hazmat teams endless hassles. E, LSD, and countless other drugs can be synthesized anywhere you have access to the chemicals. Are you going to send troops with all shipments of antihistamines? Armed guards in every grocery and drug store?
And what, pray tell, does "send them back where they came from" mean when you're talking about a US National reentering the country? In the same what "home is where they can't turn you away," one of the rights of US citizenship is that we *can't* be deported from this country, or refused entry. (We might be arrested and detained, but we can't be forced to another country. Contrawise, no other country can be forced to accept us.) A nearby INS lockup is holding some individuals who have no citizenship (they were stripped of Vietnamese citizenship after the war, and don't consider it home anyway since they left as infants, but never acquired US citizenship and are now disqualified due to felony convictions). Since no country will accept them, and no country can be forced to take them, they are languishing in prison indefinitely.
One minor nit - the courts have tossed out "restrictions" that have the de facto effect of outright bans. E.g., a restriction that a strip club must be located at least one mile from any residence, school, place of worship, or bar when the no location satisfying all those requirements exists.
However, this restriction appears to be no more severe than those imposed on adult entertainment (theatrical movies, porn movies, strip clubs, etc.), alcohol, guns, etc.
We can argue that the law is misguided (e.g., it bans a 17-year-old who's already signed up for military service from realistic games), but not its Constitutionality.
To pick just one obvious example, any files you have from your employer should be on an encrypted FS. Even the company's phone list can be considered "confidential" if it includes employee's home address and unlisted phone numbers. Anything legally recognized as IP (non-published source code, client lists, etc.) should definitely be protected.
You could PGP each file individually (hah!), or just encrypt the entire directory tree/FS.
If you have information on third parties (e.g., financial or medical information on clients) then encryption isn't often isn't even an option - it's <b>required</b> by some of the recently passed privacy laws.
Overall, I would say that it's a tossup whether a fixed system (at either the office or home) needs encrypted filesystems, but there's no doubt that laptops need them.
Your argument overlooked a BIG factor - a store is a "public accomodation" and its business license requires the owner to make certain compromises. No compromise, no business license.
The easiest way to illustrate this is to play "Guess who's coming to dinner." An individual, in his own home, may refuse to allow a guest to enter on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
But a restaurant owner *can't* refuse to allow a guest to dine in his restaurant, legally a "public accomodation," on the basis of some or all of those criteria. (The exact list varies with local laws.) He may only refuse a patron for legitimate reasons, e.g., the restaurant is full, the patron will disrupt others with his actions or odor, the patron is unsanitary (no shoes, no shirt, etc.)
Likewise a private home owner can refuse to allow someone to stay overnight for any reason - or no reason at all. A hotel can't. A private car owner can refuse to give someone a lift, a public car (taxi, limo) can't. A privately funded school can refuse to educate people, a publicly funded one can't. (Again, all subject to "common-sense" exceptions like the facility being filled, legitimate perception of threat to staff or others, etc.)
I'm still undecided whether this is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing (it depends on how much is shoe-horned in through the back door), but no matter what you think about it this invalidates the argument that Constitutional protections only protect you from the government. They also apply, to a surprising extent, to any business entity which doesn't employ you.