Unless you have a teenage daughter like Elizabeth Smart. The notion that only celebrities are stalked is nonsense.
...So Elizabeth Smart was abducted with the help of Street View? (No.) So, if it were available, how would Street View have changed the abduction? Made it easier? In what way?
A lot of these anti-Street View arguments seem to come down to emotions rather than facts. (My house and RV are visible on Street View and have been for several years. I'm okay with it.)
I'd rather have a stalker that hangs out on Google Earth than standing in the bushes.
Because obviously one can't lead to the other. Not ever. The internet is entirely separate from real life, it's just like one big happy computer game.
So what's the difference, then? I fail to see the additional risk Street View imposes in this situation. It wouldn't be that hard for a stalker to snap a picture just like Street View of whatever the stalker is looking at.
Your argument has a "think of the children" ring to it (except it'd be "stalked women" instead of children of course). Please clarify exactly what additional risk is incurred when Street View has taken a picture of a house where a stalkee lives. (Full disclosure: my house and RV have been visible on Street View for several years, though I'm male and haven't been stalked. I had good reason to think a murderer was going to come after me at one point, though; fortunately he never got out of jail.)
Good point. I bought a Macbook Pro last fall, my first Apple, and I remember thinking that OS X was everything I wished Linux would be.
On the other hand, recently I plugged in my older Canon LiDE 30 (maybe... somewhere around there) scanner, but I couldn't find drivers for it for Snow Leopard. It was pretty disappointing. They are available under Linux, of course. Sigh.
I feel your pain... I'm an aviation geek, and I'm waiting for the day I get shot for standing on the top floor of the BWI parking garage with my scanner listening to ATC while watching departures from RWY 15-R.
Since you mentioned BWI - have you ever visited Gravelly Point? It's off the GW Parkway (northbound) just north of National Airport, fairly close to the north end of the main runway. The planes are either just a few seconds into the air or a few seconds from touching down when they pass overhead. It's pretty impressive that a place like that still exists.:)
If I'm on a list for occasionally taking pics of trains, then I'm on plenty of other lists, too... Oh well. It's not the lists that bothers me. It's the risk of getting arrested or something.
Like someone else said most likely it wouldn't get that far - I'm a reasonable person. My point was more about the culture that has been created.
I'm afraid anymore to walk to the end of the platform and look down the subway tunnels. I'm afraid to take pictures of bridges. I'm afraid to be just plain curious, because it's apparently abnormal and suspicous. It's getting ridiculous. And it's going to come back and bite us in the butt.
As a railfan, I hesitate to take pictures of trains outside museums for similar reasons. Plenty have been accosted or detained for doing nothing more than taking pictures of trains from passenger platforms and similar places, and Amtrak put out a policy recently that makes little sense. Last summer I took a picture of a train that I'd just ridden for two hours (not Amtrak), and I actually felt nervous about it for a moment afterward. I've taken some pictures inside DC's Metro stations from time to time without a problem, but the thought of having the police show up crosses my mind every time I do it.
Of course the solution is to take more pictures of trains so that feeling goes away. But that just increases the odds I'll get some attention from the police over it.
Come on - for this many things to go wrong, there are systemic problems. For example, why hasn't the cap idea been tested at deep wells before?
A review of all operations seems within reason given the scale of the mess it has created. Unless you also think that nuclear power plants shouldn't have their safety plans reviewed and verified because only one of them blew up.
Well, lets look at this in contrast. suspected defects, nope, from the start we had rig workers who survived the initial fire talking about taking shortcuts and damaging equipment (in the test that ruptured/tore the BOP seal because a crane operator touched a control). So there is no suspected defects here.
Really? What about the equipment that was supposed to fail safe and stop the leak? Clearly the safety equipment is very defective.
And when I want to upgrade my processor...oh, wait, not with a laptop, at least not if you want to make a generational jump in processors (small upgrades may be possible, but going from 2 Ghz to 2.2 Ghz doesn't really seem worth the expense and trouble). When it's time to replace the DVD burner with a Blu-Ray drive...oops, no, none of that, either.
And when a component fails? Time to spend big bucks! Ever price a motherboard for a laptop?
Don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a laptop right now in a hotel room. But when I'm home, and not surfing the net while watching TV, I want a desktop machine. When I bought this laptop, I went with a small, light laptop (13" display, 4.5 lbs) so traveling with it would be easier (and it has been perfect for that - much better than the 7+ lb, 15" behemoth I used to lug around).
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer - sure, the purchase price might be only a bit more, but when you want to upgrade it, unless it's hard drive or RAM, you're basically stuck throwing everything way and starting over. That seems wasteful to me.
First, Google seems to have forgotten the early days of the search engine wars in which Yahoo, Excite, et al vied for the most user-hostile, craptacular portal landing pages. I believe it was primarily their choice of a minimal utilitarian design that made people flock to Google, and the quality of the search results, good as they were, was a distant secondary factor among typical users.
There were days earlier than that. Yahoo was the clean page - I remember someone showing it took just 7 seconds to load on a 56K modem or something like that. Google didn't even exist. Then the clutter began, and Google was the one with the clean page.
Other places design their ramps to be long enough. Here, we build them too short, then increase the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph... (I'm looking at you, I-83 in Pennsylvania. To be fair, I've found plenty of other short ramps, including one that I use during my commute on the DC beltway in Maryland.)
I'm a statistician, and I have many of my most useful statistics books sitting on my shelf at my desk at work, and I refer to them from time to time (maybe once or twice a month). Most or all of my coworkers are the same way. I'm not sure how this would work in a Kindle/iPad textbook environment - would I just keep an iPad at work? (Uh, no.) Have to bring my iPad to work every day? That seems kind of cumbersome - I wouldn't need it every day for textbooks, and I can't see why I'd otherwise need it at work, and you can bet the day I'd need something from a textbook in it is the day I would've left it at home or something. (And I haven't even gotten into the problems I'd run into with security... "Hey! That Kindle/iPad looks like company property!")
I'd say the intersections you use need other improvements in safety. I honestly can't remember a time when I've had any of that happen, with the exception of the ambulances, of course... but they have sirens that warn me it's coming in plenty of time to restart the engine.
To be fair, half the problem is that we have two (at least) networks with incompatible technology. As I understand it, most of the rest of the world uses just one standard. The companies could argue early on multiple networks happened because different companies were trying different technologies, and that's fine, but the fact that they've never standardized is quite annoying. If the companies were all cooperating, we could have far better coverage EVERYWHERE.
I recently got an iPhone, but I was torn between that and the Droid... my fiancee and I wanted to go with AT&T because that's what our families both have, so we'd need a cheaper plan. Since the iPhone is what AT&T offers, that's what we went with. Ideally we'd pick phones and carriers separately, but that's just not how it works here. (FWIW, we do like them, though I wish I could tether for the couple times a year I'd use it. I saw the website benm.at someone posted earlier, but it says the phone has to be unlocked... I don't think mine is.)
I actually disagree there (The "I'll take the download, please"). If I buy content, I want to use it when I want, where I want. I don't want artificial constraints about which devices I can use it on, or when I can use it. There has to be a happy medium between them. And frankly, the ten minutes of promos and trailers never bothered me. I simply go to the bathroom or do something else during them...
I think that's what he meant. He said getting it from iTunes is still problematic, and I think he meant "download" as in "illegally download, not from iTunes". That's how I read it, although I can definitely see how using "download" in that last sentence might make the reader think "download from iTunes."
Why on earth would the USPS care who's sending the packages
I can't provide a citation, but I thought that Netflix had various special arrangements with the USPS due to their huge mail volume. Yes, I'm being vague because I don't remember specifics, but things like discounted rates and even possibly specialized delivery/pickup schedules from the Netflix distribution centers.
Any business can get arrangement that if they have a high enough volume and meet certain addressing criteria on the envelopes. Unfortunately I can't find it on their website, but I know it's there somewhere.
Since you brought it up: From your own badly linked article: "However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires."
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the moon is made of cheese, so...
Unless you have a teenage daughter like Elizabeth Smart. The notion that only celebrities are stalked is nonsense.
...So Elizabeth Smart was abducted with the help of Street View? (No.) So, if it were available, how would Street View have changed the abduction? Made it easier? In what way?
A lot of these anti-Street View arguments seem to come down to emotions rather than facts. (My house and RV are visible on Street View and have been for several years. I'm okay with it.)
Because obviously one can't lead to the other. Not ever. The internet is entirely separate from real life, it's just like one big happy computer game.
So what's the difference, then? I fail to see the additional risk Street View imposes in this situation. It wouldn't be that hard for a stalker to snap a picture just like Street View of whatever the stalker is looking at.
Your argument has a "think of the children" ring to it (except it'd be "stalked women" instead of children of course). Please clarify exactly what additional risk is incurred when Street View has taken a picture of a house where a stalkee lives. (Full disclosure: my house and RV have been visible on Street View for several years, though I'm male and haven't been stalked. I had good reason to think a murderer was going to come after me at one point, though; fortunately he never got out of jail.)
Hey, thanks for the tip. (There was no Canon software for the Mac, btw.) I hoped some /.'er had a solution to this problem. :)
Good point. I bought a Macbook Pro last fall, my first Apple, and I remember thinking that OS X was everything I wished Linux would be.
On the other hand, recently I plugged in my older Canon LiDE 30 (maybe... somewhere around there) scanner, but I couldn't find drivers for it for Snow Leopard. It was pretty disappointing. They are available under Linux, of course. Sigh.
I feel your pain... I'm an aviation geek, and I'm waiting for the day I get shot for standing on the top floor of the BWI parking garage with my scanner listening to ATC while watching departures from RWY 15-R.
Since you mentioned BWI - have you ever visited Gravelly Point? It's off the GW Parkway (northbound) just north of National Airport, fairly close to the north end of the main runway. The planes are either just a few seconds into the air or a few seconds from touching down when they pass overhead. It's pretty impressive that a place like that still exists. :)
Like someone else said most likely it wouldn't get that far - I'm a reasonable person. My point was more about the culture that has been created.
I'm afraid anymore to walk to the end of the platform and look down the subway tunnels. I'm afraid to take pictures of bridges. I'm afraid to be just plain curious, because it's apparently abnormal and suspicous. It's getting ridiculous. And it's going to come back and bite us in the butt.
As a railfan, I hesitate to take pictures of trains outside museums for similar reasons. Plenty have been accosted or detained for doing nothing more than taking pictures of trains from passenger platforms and similar places, and Amtrak put out a policy recently that makes little sense. Last summer I took a picture of a train that I'd just ridden for two hours (not Amtrak), and I actually felt nervous about it for a moment afterward. I've taken some pictures inside DC's Metro stations from time to time without a problem, but the thought of having the police show up crosses my mind every time I do it.
Of course the solution is to take more pictures of trains so that feeling goes away. But that just increases the odds I'll get some attention from the police over it.
Ahh, the GX270s. We had a bunch die here, too. Good times.
Come on - for this many things to go wrong, there are systemic problems. For example, why hasn't the cap idea been tested at deep wells before?
A review of all operations seems within reason given the scale of the mess it has created. Unless you also think that nuclear power plants shouldn't have their safety plans reviewed and verified because only one of them blew up.
Well, lets look at this in contrast. suspected defects, nope, from the start we had rig workers who survived the initial fire talking about taking shortcuts and damaging equipment (in the test that ruptured/tore the BOP seal because a crane operator touched a control). So there is no suspected defects here.
Really? What about the equipment that was supposed to fail safe and stop the leak? Clearly the safety equipment is very defective.
And when I want to upgrade my processor...oh, wait, not with a laptop, at least not if you want to make a generational jump in processors (small upgrades may be possible, but going from 2 Ghz to 2.2 Ghz doesn't really seem worth the expense and trouble). When it's time to replace the DVD burner with a Blu-Ray drive...oops, no, none of that, either.
And when a component fails? Time to spend big bucks! Ever price a motherboard for a laptop?
Don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a laptop right now in a hotel room. But when I'm home, and not surfing the net while watching TV, I want a desktop machine. When I bought this laptop, I went with a small, light laptop (13" display, 4.5 lbs) so traveling with it would be easier (and it has been perfect for that - much better than the 7+ lb, 15" behemoth I used to lug around).
Laptops are too expensive to use as a regular computer - sure, the purchase price might be only a bit more, but when you want to upgrade it, unless it's hard drive or RAM, you're basically stuck throwing everything way and starting over. That seems wasteful to me.
First, Google seems to have forgotten the early days of the search engine wars in which Yahoo, Excite, et al vied for the most user-hostile, craptacular portal landing pages. I believe it was primarily their choice of a minimal utilitarian design that made people flock to Google, and the quality of the search results, good as they were, was a distant secondary factor among typical users.
There were days earlier than that. Yahoo was the clean page - I remember someone showing it took just 7 seconds to load on a 56K modem or something like that. Google didn't even exist. Then the clutter began, and Google was the one with the clean page.
I was thinking of the old Fidonet message boards that had three topics banned in the Star Trek forum, because they always devolved into flame wars:
What is with people typing "server" instead of "serve" lately?
I took it as a marketing name to refer to the fact that it's 300+ ppi resolution, which is better (from what they said) than your eye can distinguish.
Other places design their ramps to be long enough. Here, we build them too short, then increase the speed limit from 55 mph to 65 mph... (I'm looking at you, I-83 in Pennsylvania. To be fair, I've found plenty of other short ramps, including one that I use during my commute on the DC beltway in Maryland.)
I'm a statistician, and I have many of my most useful statistics books sitting on my shelf at my desk at work, and I refer to them from time to time (maybe once or twice a month). Most or all of my coworkers are the same way. I'm not sure how this would work in a Kindle/iPad textbook environment - would I just keep an iPad at work? (Uh, no.) Have to bring my iPad to work every day? That seems kind of cumbersome - I wouldn't need it every day for textbooks, and I can't see why I'd otherwise need it at work, and you can bet the day I'd need something from a textbook in it is the day I would've left it at home or something. (And I haven't even gotten into the problems I'd run into with security... "Hey! That Kindle/iPad looks like company property!")
I'd say the intersections you use need other improvements in safety. I honestly can't remember a time when I've had any of that happen, with the exception of the ambulances, of course... but they have sirens that warn me it's coming in plenty of time to restart the engine.
To be fair, half the problem is that we have two (at least) networks with incompatible technology. As I understand it, most of the rest of the world uses just one standard. The companies could argue early on multiple networks happened because different companies were trying different technologies, and that's fine, but the fact that they've never standardized is quite annoying. If the companies were all cooperating, we could have far better coverage EVERYWHERE.
I recently got an iPhone, but I was torn between that and the Droid... my fiancee and I wanted to go with AT&T because that's what our families both have, so we'd need a cheaper plan. Since the iPhone is what AT&T offers, that's what we went with. Ideally we'd pick phones and carriers separately, but that's just not how it works here. (FWIW, we do like them, though I wish I could tether for the couple times a year I'd use it. I saw the website benm.at someone posted earlier, but it says the phone has to be unlocked... I don't think mine is.)
I actually disagree there (The "I'll take the download, please"). If I buy content, I want to use it when I want, where I want. I don't want artificial constraints about which devices I can use it on, or when I can use it. There has to be a happy medium between them. And frankly, the ten minutes of promos and trailers never bothered me. I simply go to the bathroom or do something else during them...
I think that's what he meant. He said getting it from iTunes is still problematic, and I think he meant "download" as in "illegally download, not from iTunes". That's how I read it, although I can definitely see how using "download" in that last sentence might make the reader think "download from iTunes."
I can't provide a citation, but I thought that Netflix had various special arrangements with the USPS due to their huge mail volume. Yes, I'm being vague because I don't remember specifics, but things like discounted rates and even possibly specialized delivery/pickup schedules from the Netflix distribution centers.
Any business can get arrangement that if they have a high enough volume and meet certain addressing criteria on the envelopes. Unfortunately I can't find it on their website, but I know it's there somewhere.
Those happened because of a Slashdotting?
Wow. Did you not read the thread of messages you responded to, or what?
Since you brought it up: From your own badly linked article: "However, there have never been any actual reports of printers which had friction-related fires."