One: The article says the tech works 90% of the time. That's 100% unacceptable and will place lives at risk, which is why these laws always make an exception for the police, not requiring them to use the technology.
Two: Metalstorm is involved. If you've been deeply into guns for a long time, you know that "Metalstorm's newest thing" is the gun business equivalent of "Duke Nukem Forever" for gamers. There's interesting ideas, nice press releases, lots of PR, and... not much else.
Konica/Minolta Analysis Suspect
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 1
I would point them to the lesson Contax learned when they put autofocus inside the camera body for the 35mm SLRs (the film plane moved back and forth in a mechanical box inside the camera to achieve focus). It was a great solution and allowed full autofocus with all of those great Contax lenses. It also died in the market.
For some reason, most photogs seem to want motors in their lenses. I don't understand it, but that's the way it is.
If a federal agency does a face-plant, I wonder how Congress will react,
In the example I provided, it won't be the whole agency that does the face-plant. It'll just be the part of it that processes the payments made by businesses.:-)
it's STILL better than a corporate job!
You're right about that. At the end of the day, you're right about that.
Uh, well, ok. I actually meant my first link to be merely an example to show that such things exist. I expected the questioner to find their own sources. But if want available product, how about
this,this,
or
this
Thanks for the great link to the Incredible Adventures folks. You gotta love a company that thinks so highly of their services that one of the web pages says "Don't leave the money to your kids! Wouldn't you rather take a space flight?"
Come on, now, be fair. Being a federal employee under Bush is ROUGH. He wants to get rid of you guys, bring in his corporate friends. But this is hardly representative of civil service as a whole,...
That was a well-reasoned response. I appreciate the optimism. Thank you.
I'm a fed and nearly all my experience is in one agency, so let me amplify my previous comments with the caveat that my viewpoint is colored by those facts. (Also, just to be on the safe side, let me clearly state that I speak only for myself and not my employer.)
It is a dangerous oversimplification to say that Bush is bad but things will get better in some upcoming democratic cycle. The actions of a single president, when enshrined into law, will have repercussions for a very long time. At the IRS, for example, literally everything we do is strongly effected by the laws that were passed after Richard Nixon so egregiously misused the power of the agency.
The actions of the current president will fundamentally change the landscape of federal civil service. By doing everything in his power to make it easy to outsource federal employees, he is removing from the federal civil service the workforce stability that historically ensures the smooth delivery of government services. Government services must be delivered smoothly, without interruption, no matter who's in the White House. If this doesn't happen, people can literally die. That's why civil service rules seem to protect deadwood. They do, but that's not the purpose. The deadwood is tolerable if that's what it takes to achieve stability.
The trend toward privatization is an old one, but previously it ebbed and flowed. Not any more. This president is changing the rules (google for, as just one example, "A-76 competition" to see what I mean) radically and permanently. As a result, the old government service bargain of lifetime employment and a pension in exchange for lower wages has been broken. Now, the wages are still low compared to private industry but the stability is rapidly evaporating and the laws are being changed to make sure that stability never returns.
As a result, some agencies are being reorganized into paralysis. The IRS, never a popular group of folks, is seeing a mass exodus of oldsters and is thus bleeding institutional knowledge at a rate that beggars description. I could cite a dozen examples, but I'll use one that this geek crowd might appreciate. I cannot be specific because there'd be hell to pay if I aired such dirty laundry in public, but there's exactly one guy at the IRS who does the assembly programming to institute all the changes Congress makes that effect one critical subsystem. He works on it for about nine months, sees the code installed and tested for a month, oversees the first month of production use of the code, then takes some time off before starting work on the changes for next year.
Guess what? He's retiring next year. He hasn't been asked to show anyone what he does. There is no freakin' way anyone from outside could possibly do the work without months to get up to speed, months that simply don't exist when your project deadlines aren't set by a project manager but are, instead, mandated by law. There have been no plans to replace his work with some other hardware/software and it's far too late to implement such a change for 2006, anyway.
So what's going to happen? Will Congress agree to not change any laws until someone new can get up to speed? Not bloody likely. No, he'll be gone and work will have to be done so someone will contact him and offer him ungodly amounts of money to do the work on a contract basis. Maybe he will. Knowing him, though, maybe he'll tell them to screw off, placing the entire IRS in danger of a cascading series of failures that could lead, literally, to an institutional meltdown. It happened to an airline when a small, neglected, archaic but critical system went belly up; it could happen to the IRS.
Twenty years ago, roughly when I went to work for the federal government, I would have agreed with you. Nowadays, things are different. For a variety of reasons that don't bear listing here, civil service protections are under assault by everyone from middle managers to the political appointees who run agencies on up the food chain. Civil service rules are being abandoned quickly and savagely. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense are leading the charge but the bottom line is that fairly soon (in government time) government hiring and firing practices will mirror the same old crap that happens in private industry.
Hell, even the Internal Revenue Service, the one agency that makes so much money for the government that you'd expect every employee to have not just guaranteed lifetime employment but gold-plated office furniture to boot, has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs over the last couple of years.
I may just be able to reach early retirement and a minimal pension before I get oursourced. I'm the last generation that can count on my government job to actually resemble a government job. For those entering the job market now, civil service ain't what it used to be. It's not a terrible choice, but it's now a decidedly more mixed bag than it once was. Recent college grads, those looking to enter the workforce, should tread carefully.
...depictions of underage nudity in this country are illegal in their own right.
Uh, no.
Go to your local, large, well-stocked bookstore. Ask to see all the books by David Hamilton (or any of a dozen other artists who do similar work). Browse for a while. Report your findings back here.
Yes, I'll grant you that in this instance a case could be made for criminal prosecution and that underage nudity is usually prosecutable. Your blanket statement, however, overstates the situation rather badly.
Not according to one of the comments attached to the article. According to the linked post, this DVD requires you to install software that prevents *any* other DVD copying, even by other methods.
Can anybody vouch for this? To me this was the worst part of the whole thing. Not only does this DVD force you to install software to view it, that installed software then breaks other software on your computer. Very bad stuff, if true.
As for competitions as a justification for anything in general, how about these kinds of competitions: Tank maneuvering. Tank target practice. Fighter/bomber target practice.
I don't see where you're headed. Tank maneuvering, tank target practice, and fighter/bomber target practice are all activities enjoyed by private citizens in the U.S. We have people who own tanks, tank guns, and fully-armed fighter planes and use them for fun.
Of course, that kind of fun is REALLY expensive, so it doesn't happen much. But those activities can be and are done with perfectly legality inside U.S. borders.
Do you believe those should be allowed for anyone for the sake of fun and recreation?
They are already allowed. I don't see that it causes any problems.
I bought, used, and loved the ThinkNIC. It was conceptually similar to this PIC thing, booting Linux off a CD to launch a very basic set of apps. As long as you didn't mind saving your documents to a remote network share somewhere (the instuctions that came with it provided procedures for doing exactly that), it was all the computer lots of our moms and dads need and it only cost $USD199.
Marketwise, it was stillborn.
Now, years of technological process have allowed AMD to bring out the same thing with some disk space and Windows. Personally, I don't see that this is *that* big an improvement. It's pretty much the *same* concept.
This time, I hope it flys. I know I'm itching to throw one onto my home network already.
If you want to turn your digital image files into real photographic prints that will last a long, long time, try San Miguel Photo Lab. No, regular silver prints on photographic paper won't last as long as platinum prints, but, hey, a couple of hundred years should be enough.
I don't have any relationshiop with the lab, but I've seen their work and it's amazing.
...send you back physical printed copies (for a fee). Are there any good sites that do this?
The best place in the world to do this, if you're only interested in black and white prints, is probably San Miguel Photo Lab in Las Vegas. I've seen their work; it's amazing.
Of course, San Miguel charges nearly USD$50.00 for a best-quality 8 by 10 inch print. So if you really meant "Are there any good sites that do this for a fee normal people would consider paying?", I'll have to defer to other posters.
Thank you for some really good, really practical questions. Off the top of my head, here's some brainstormin':
What service would you possibly sell?
Sex. Live music. Any one-off art object guaranteed never to have been scanned for replication. Any human performance, like a stage play or an athletic contest. Conversation. Competition. Tutoring. Religion. Experiences. Health care expertise. Any living thing - plants, pets livestock. Any illegal thing. Insurance. Legal services. Bodyguard services. Gimme an hour and I could list a hundred things.
...what are the people paying you with, and why do you want it?
You can be paid with any of the items above via barter. You can join a co-op where extremely complex bartering scenarios can conveniently be worked out where you can get anything you want from the list above as long as you're willing to provide something from the list above. There would be some accounting involved and equivalencies would have to be decided, but that can be done. We already do it every day via monetary exchange. Also, depending on the ability of the fabs to produce pure things, you may be able to pay with hard money, i.e. precious metals.
Food, water, shelter, entertainment. all are costless.
Not true. Entertainment is not just free DVDs. Good entertainment often involves watching other people do things, in real time, right in front of you. A free CD is cool, but going to the symphony is even better and worth paying for. Anything that involves human interaction, human experience, or learning won't be cost-free even if replicators become real.
So why would you bother providing services to anyone in exchange for something?
For the same reason I do now - because I want something they have and I'm willing to do some work to get them to give it to me. If you're a great violinist and I'm a doctor, I'd be happy to diagnose your illness if you'll play for me. Or I'm a plumber and you've got a leak; you're a photographer and I'm about to get married. Think we can arrange a trade? The opportunities are limitless.
Such a revolution could only lead to one of two inevitable systems:
I disagree. I think both would happen at the same time. Chaos would happen in some places but others would embrace, well, not Utopia, but a radically altered economic landscape.
This thing could work. It could also be really, really brutal. The untalented, the incompetent, the physically or mentally challenged would have a much harder time in a world where people pay for the quality of your work. You're not going to be able to trade your violin-playing services to me for anything if you're a lousy violinist. While a meritocracy is a good thing in theory, I don't think people should starve just because they aren't good at much of anything.
Wait a minute...the fabs could make the bare necessities for anyone who's not sharp enough to succeed on their own merits. No one would starve.
I'll be spending most of tomorrow doing a favor for a dear friend. Her and her two boys(12 and 16) will be on a cruise and I'll be going over their computers with a fine-toothed comb.
Two months ago, both their machines were unusable because of mounds of malware. The older boy had a lousy porn collection but it was clear he'd been massively deleting stuff because he knew I was coming over. The stuff I did find was disturbing enough that I had a long talk with Mom. She, however, didn't want to believe her precious darlings would willingly download the sort of content that could get them thrown in jail. I reached an agreement with her that I'd do this one more time if she agreed not to warn the boys the next time it was going to happen. I rebuilt both machines from scratch - Win2K, ZA, Ad-Aware, AVG, Firefox, and all the updates. Now, one machine is again inoperative and the other is so slow Mom wants to just go buy a new one.
So, without the boys knowing, I'm going to audit the state of their computers and prepare a report for mom. I have pretty good suspicions about why they wanted the digital cameras and webcams that don't leave their rooms. I have pretty good suspicions about what was in those directories with the names I won't print here. But delivering the report to Mom isn't something I'm looking forward to.
The original poster is questioning the decision he made to allow computers in the bedrooms of his teens. Based on what I've seen, if I ever have kids there is no freakin' way they'll have access to any computer behind a closed door until they're at least of legal age to do in person the things they'll be tempted to do on cam.
I have a feeling that if he'd just move the computers to a common area, half his problems would disappear.
Oh, and btw, when I finish I'm wiping both machines and installing some barebones flavor of linux that I'll strip of pretty much everything except a web browser and an office suite. I want them to be able to do basic schoolwork in their bedrooms but Mom can buy them another Windows machine for games and other assorted diversions.
I'd like to hear some ideas on what behaviours distinguish each type of person.
For music, you're asking the difference between an audiophile and a music lover. I always used the "symphony test." If someone had USD$100K sunk in their stereo but didn't have any idea what was on the program for the local symphony this weekend, they were an audiophile. The music was taking a back seat to all those neat-o gadgets. They were not, at heart, a music lover. (For symphony, feel free to substitute any good live-music experience.)
Personally, my epiphany came many years ago when I found myself seriously checking out a particular and rather expensive phono cartridge. Someone pointed out that for the cost of that cartridge, I could pay Yo-Yo Ma to travel to my town, sit in my living room, and play for me in person for an hour or two. In fact, for the cost of that cartridge I could have hired a fine local string ensemble to play for me several times. I'll never forget the feeling of the scales falling from my eyes.
Since then, while I still consider a good stereo system to be a worthwhile joy in this life, I've stopped pursuing gear for the sake of gear. I have less than USD$5K in my stereo and I think it'll suit me just fine for the rest of my life.
Back in the day, that would have sounded to me like the ultimate in crazy talk.
I stopped reading halfway down where Mr. Cerf made reference to:
"...pornography, and the long list of other abuses that creative human beings have invented for the Internet..."
That's ridiculous. If we treat porn as, by definition, an abuse of the net then the floodgates open for all sorts of draconian content control. As legal experience in the U.S. has shown, the word "pornography" can be stretched far too broadly far too easily.
Leave the porn alone, Vinnie. You don't know what you're messin' with. Set up an effective way to police porn on the net and about a zillion geeks are gonna be gunnin' for ya.
Not to mention that pesky ol' "freedom of speech" thing.
I've used the MagnaTrigger conversion on an S&W revolver. That technology dates way back, to the 1960s iirc. It was always expensive but, from both my brief experience and everything I've read about it over the years, it was dead solid reliable.
I never actually bought a conversion, though. It was expensive (more than the cost of the gun, IIRC) and by the time I was old enough to buy handguns I was already into computers. Having to wear a ring that would corrupt any floppy I picked up was, for me, a flaw I couldn't overcome.
I don't think that the MagnaTrigger was ever all that widespread. Cost was an issue. Plus, by the time people were widely discussing locking firearms most cops had switched to autopistols. The MagnaTrigger was a revolver-only technology.
This new ringlock thing, though, arose out of different needs. It's designed to meet the legal requirements in jurisdictions where the law says your gun must be locked. It looks interesting and could meet a real need. I haven't seen published tests, though, and I haven't handled the technology so I can't offer an opinion on reliability beyond "Looks like it's worth checking out."
I notice in the Wired link that Metal Storm is involved. What have these guys ever done besides get some kinds of IP rights to a fancy, electronically controlled version of the roman candle and then parlay that into lots and lots of publicity? Has Metal Storm ever gotten anything new or revolutionary into production and then into reasonably widespread deployment?
I always get an involuntary whiff of snake oil when these guys are mentioned. I'd like to be proven wrong. I'm open to it. Anybody?
We're splitting hairs, here. You can't "unilaterally renounce citizenship and be done with it" as I said in my post. You can, as you've pointed out, unilaterally renounce citizenship if you wish to do so in an extra-legal fashion that leaves lots of bothersome loose ends. That may be worthwhile for political refugees who figure they must get away to save their hide. The grandparent, however, was talking, in part, about renouncing citizenship to get out of paying taxes. I'm inclined to believe that you're more likely to be extradited back for tax crimes than political reasons, anyway.
So allow me to rephrase: Under U.S. law, you cannot unilaterally renounce your U.S. citizenship; you must obtain the approval of State. You can, of course, get the hell out of Dodge knowing you can never return. But that's not quite the same thing, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
Two things:
... not much else.
One: The article says the tech works 90% of the time. That's 100% unacceptable and will place lives at risk, which is why these laws always make an exception for the police, not requiring them to use the technology.
Two: Metalstorm is involved. If you've been deeply into guns for a long time, you know that "Metalstorm's newest thing" is the gun business equivalent of "Duke Nukem Forever" for gamers. There's interesting ideas, nice press releases, lots of PR, and
These guys seem to think that it's smart for K/M to put their image stabilization technology inside the camera body instead of the lenses since it'll make the lenses less expensive. Nice thought.
I would point them to the lesson Contax learned when they put autofocus inside the camera body for the 35mm SLRs (the film plane moved back and forth in a mechanical box inside the camera to achieve focus). It was a great solution and allowed full autofocus with all of those great Contax lenses. It also died in the market.
For some reason, most photogs seem to want motors in their lenses. I don't understand it, but that's the way it is.
In the example I provided, it won't be the whole agency that does the face-plant. It'll just be the part of it that processes the payments made by businesses. :-)
You're right about that. At the end of the day, you're right about that.
Uh, well, ok. I actually meant my first link to be merely an example to show that such things exist. I expected the questioner to find their own sources. But if want available product, how about this, this, or this
Thanks for the great link to the Incredible Adventures folks. You gotta love a company that thinks so highly of their services that one of the web pages says "Don't leave the money to your kids! Wouldn't you rather take a space flight?"
Cool. Way cool.
That was a well-reasoned response. I appreciate the optimism. Thank you.
I'm a fed and nearly all my experience is in one agency, so let me amplify my previous comments with the caveat that my viewpoint is colored by those facts. (Also, just to be on the safe side, let me clearly state that I speak only for myself and not my employer.)
It is a dangerous oversimplification to say that Bush is bad but things will get better in some upcoming democratic cycle. The actions of a single president, when enshrined into law, will have repercussions for a very long time. At the IRS, for example, literally everything we do is strongly effected by the laws that were passed after Richard Nixon so egregiously misused the power of the agency.
The actions of the current president will fundamentally change the landscape of federal civil service. By doing everything in his power to make it easy to outsource federal employees, he is removing from the federal civil service the workforce stability that historically ensures the smooth delivery of government services. Government services must be delivered smoothly, without interruption, no matter who's in the White House. If this doesn't happen, people can literally die. That's why civil service rules seem to protect deadwood. They do, but that's not the purpose. The deadwood is tolerable if that's what it takes to achieve stability.
The trend toward privatization is an old one, but previously it ebbed and flowed. Not any more. This president is changing the rules (google for, as just one example, "A-76 competition" to see what I mean) radically and permanently. As a result, the old government service bargain of lifetime employment and a pension in exchange for lower wages has been broken. Now, the wages are still low compared to private industry but the stability is rapidly evaporating and the laws are being changed to make sure that stability never returns.
As a result, some agencies are being reorganized into paralysis. The IRS, never a popular group of folks, is seeing a mass exodus of oldsters and is thus bleeding institutional knowledge at a rate that beggars description. I could cite a dozen examples, but I'll use one that this geek crowd might appreciate. I cannot be specific because there'd be hell to pay if I aired such dirty laundry in public, but there's exactly one guy at the IRS who does the assembly programming to institute all the changes Congress makes that effect one critical subsystem. He works on it for about nine months, sees the code installed and tested for a month, oversees the first month of production use of the code, then takes some time off before starting work on the changes for next year.
Guess what? He's retiring next year. He hasn't been asked to show anyone what he does. There is no freakin' way anyone from outside could possibly do the work without months to get up to speed, months that simply don't exist when your project deadlines aren't set by a project manager but are, instead, mandated by law. There have been no plans to replace his work with some other hardware/software and it's far too late to implement such a change for 2006, anyway.
So what's going to happen? Will Congress agree to not change any laws until someone new can get up to speed? Not bloody likely. No, he'll be gone and work will have to be done so someone will contact him and offer him ungodly amounts of money to do the work on a contract basis. Maybe he will. Knowing him, though, maybe he'll tell them to screw off, placing the entire IRS in danger of a cascading series of failures that could lead, literally, to an institutional meltdown. It happened to an airline when a small, neglected, archaic but critical system went belly up; it could happen to the IRS.
Twenty years ago, roughly when I went to work for the federal government, I would have agreed with you. Nowadays, things are different. For a variety of reasons that don't bear listing here, civil service protections are under assault by everyone from middle managers to the political appointees who run agencies on up the food chain. Civil service rules are being abandoned quickly and savagely. The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense are leading the charge but the bottom line is that fairly soon (in government time) government hiring and firing practices will mirror the same old crap that happens in private industry.
Hell, even the Internal Revenue Service, the one agency that makes so much money for the government that you'd expect every employee to have not just guaranteed lifetime employment but gold-plated office furniture to boot, has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs over the last couple of years.
I may just be able to reach early retirement and a minimal pension before I get oursourced. I'm the last generation that can count on my government job to actually resemble a government job. For those entering the job market now, civil service ain't what it used to be. It's not a terrible choice, but it's now a decidedly more mixed bag than it once was. Recent college grads, those looking to enter the workforce, should tread carefully.
Yes.
The State of P2P: Analysis Shows "Guy Game" Is Half of All Traffic
Uh, no.
Go to your local, large, well-stocked bookstore. Ask to see all the books by David Hamilton (or any of a dozen other artists who do similar work). Browse for a while. Report your findings back here.
Yes, I'll grant you that in this instance a case could be made for criminal prosecution and that underage nudity is usually prosecutable. Your blanket statement, however, overstates the situation rather badly.
Not according to one of the comments attached to the article. According to the linked post, this DVD requires you to install software that prevents *any* other DVD copying, even by other methods.
Can anybody vouch for this? To me this was the worst part of the whole thing. Not only does this DVD force you to install software to view it, that installed software then breaks other software on your computer. Very bad stuff, if true.
I don't see where you're headed. Tank maneuvering, tank target practice, and fighter/bomber target practice are all activities enjoyed by private citizens in the U.S. We have people who own tanks, tank guns, and fully-armed fighter planes and use them for fun.
Of course, that kind of fun is REALLY expensive, so it doesn't happen much. But those activities can be and are done with perfectly legality inside U.S. borders.
They are already allowed. I don't see that it causes any problems.
So what was your point?
It's the official official state bird.
I bought, used, and loved the ThinkNIC. It was conceptually similar to this PIC thing, booting Linux off a CD to launch a very basic set of apps. As long as you didn't mind saving your documents to a remote network share somewhere (the instuctions that came with it provided procedures for doing exactly that), it was all the computer lots of our moms and dads need and it only cost $USD199.
Marketwise, it was stillborn.
Now, years of technological process have allowed AMD to bring out the same thing with some disk space and Windows. Personally, I don't see that this is *that* big an improvement. It's pretty much the *same* concept.
This time, I hope it flys. I know I'm itching to throw one onto my home network already.
If you want to turn your digital image files into real photographic prints that will last a long, long time, try San Miguel Photo Lab. No, regular silver prints on photographic paper won't last as long as platinum prints, but, hey, a couple of hundred years should be enough.
I don't have any relationshiop with the lab, but I've seen their work and it's amazing.
The best place in the world to do this, if you're only interested in black and white prints, is probably San Miguel Photo Lab in Las Vegas. I've seen their work; it's amazing.
Of course, San Miguel charges nearly USD$50.00 for a best-quality 8 by 10 inch print. So if you really meant "Are there any good sites that do this for a fee normal people would consider paying?", I'll have to defer to other posters.
Thank you for some really good, really practical questions. Off the top of my head, here's some brainstormin':
Sex. Live music. Any one-off art object guaranteed never to have been scanned for replication. Any human performance, like a stage play or an athletic contest. Conversation. Competition. Tutoring. Religion. Experiences. Health care expertise. Any living thing - plants, pets livestock. Any illegal thing. Insurance. Legal services. Bodyguard services. Gimme an hour and I could list a hundred things.
You can be paid with any of the items above via barter. You can join a co-op where extremely complex bartering scenarios can conveniently be worked out where you can get anything you want from the list above as long as you're willing to provide something from the list above. There would be some accounting involved and equivalencies would have to be decided, but that can be done. We already do it every day via monetary exchange. Also, depending on the ability of the fabs to produce pure things, you may be able to pay with hard money, i.e. precious metals.
Not true. Entertainment is not just free DVDs. Good entertainment often involves watching other people do things, in real time, right in front of you. A free CD is cool, but going to the symphony is even better and worth paying for. Anything that involves human interaction, human experience, or learning won't be cost-free even if replicators become real.
For the same reason I do now - because I want something they have and I'm willing to do some work to get them to give it to me. If you're a great violinist and I'm a doctor, I'd be happy to diagnose your illness if you'll play for me. Or I'm a plumber and you've got a leak; you're a photographer and I'm about to get married. Think we can arrange a trade? The opportunities are limitless.
I disagree. I think both would happen at the same time. Chaos would happen in some places but others would embrace, well, not Utopia, but a radically altered economic landscape.
This thing could work. It could also be really, really brutal. The untalented, the incompetent, the physically or mentally challenged would have a much harder time in a world where people pay for the quality of your work. You're not going to be able to trade your violin-playing services to me for anything if you're a lousy violinist. While a meritocracy is a good thing in theory, I don't think people should starve just because they aren't good at much of anything.
Wait a minute...the fabs could make the bare necessities for anyone who's not sharp enough to succeed on their own merits. No one would starve.
Ultimately, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I'll be spending most of tomorrow doing a favor for a dear friend. Her and her two boys(12 and 16) will be on a cruise and I'll be going over their computers with a fine-toothed comb.
Two months ago, both their machines were unusable because of mounds of malware. The older boy had a lousy porn collection but it was clear he'd been massively deleting stuff because he knew I was coming over. The stuff I did find was disturbing enough that I had a long talk with Mom. She, however, didn't want to believe her precious darlings would willingly download the sort of content that could get them thrown in jail. I reached an agreement with her that I'd do this one more time if she agreed not to warn the boys the next time it was going to happen. I rebuilt both machines from scratch - Win2K, ZA, Ad-Aware, AVG, Firefox, and all the updates. Now, one machine is again inoperative and the other is so slow Mom wants to just go buy a new one.
So, without the boys knowing, I'm going to audit the state of their computers and prepare a report for mom. I have pretty good suspicions about why they wanted the digital cameras and webcams that don't leave their rooms. I have pretty good suspicions about what was in those directories with the names I won't print here. But delivering the report to Mom isn't something I'm looking forward to.
The original poster is questioning the decision he made to allow computers in the bedrooms of his teens. Based on what I've seen, if I ever have kids there is no freakin' way they'll have access to any computer behind a closed door until they're at least of legal age to do in person the things they'll be tempted to do on cam.
I have a feeling that if he'd just move the computers to a common area, half his problems would disappear.
Oh, and btw, when I finish I'm wiping both machines and installing some barebones flavor of linux that I'll strip of pretty much everything except a web browser and an office suite. I want them to be able to do basic schoolwork in their bedrooms but Mom can buy them another Windows machine for games and other assorted diversions.
For music, you're asking the difference between an audiophile and a music lover. I always used the "symphony test." If someone had USD$100K sunk in their stereo but didn't have any idea what was on the program for the local symphony this weekend, they were an audiophile. The music was taking a back seat to all those neat-o gadgets. They were not, at heart, a music lover. (For symphony, feel free to substitute any good live-music experience.)
Personally, my epiphany came many years ago when I found myself seriously checking out a particular and rather expensive phono cartridge. Someone pointed out that for the cost of that cartridge, I could pay Yo-Yo Ma to travel to my town, sit in my living room, and play for me in person for an hour or two. In fact, for the cost of that cartridge I could have hired a fine local string ensemble to play for me several times. I'll never forget the feeling of the scales falling from my eyes.
Since then, while I still consider a good stereo system to be a worthwhile joy in this life, I've stopped pursuing gear for the sake of gear. I have less than USD$5K in my stereo and I think it'll suit me just fine for the rest of my life.
Back in the day, that would have sounded to me like the ultimate in crazy talk.
That story is here.
I posted a short note on this subject a while back. Stopping the theft of shopping carts can be mighty short-sighted. Sometimes, instead, it pays to trust your customers.
I stopped reading halfway down where Mr. Cerf made reference to:
That's ridiculous. If we treat porn as, by definition, an abuse of the net then the floodgates open for all sorts of draconian content control. As legal experience in the U.S. has shown, the word "pornography" can be stretched far too broadly far too easily.
Leave the porn alone, Vinnie. You don't know what you're messin' with. Set up an effective way to police porn on the net and about a zillion geeks are gonna be gunnin' for ya.
Not to mention that pesky ol' "freedom of speech" thing.
I've used the MagnaTrigger conversion on an S&W revolver. That technology dates way back, to the 1960s iirc. It was always expensive but, from both my brief experience and everything I've read about it over the years, it was dead solid reliable.
I never actually bought a conversion, though. It was expensive (more than the cost of the gun, IIRC) and by the time I was old enough to buy handguns I was already into computers. Having to wear a ring that would corrupt any floppy I picked up was, for me, a flaw I couldn't overcome.
I don't think that the MagnaTrigger was ever all that widespread. Cost was an issue. Plus, by the time people were widely discussing locking firearms most cops had switched to autopistols. The MagnaTrigger was a revolver-only technology.
MagnaTrigger info is here.
This new ringlock thing, though, arose out of different needs. It's designed to meet the legal requirements in jurisdictions where the law says your gun must be locked. It looks interesting and could meet a real need. I haven't seen published tests, though, and I haven't handled the technology so I can't offer an opinion on reliability beyond "Looks like it's worth checking out."
I notice in the Wired link that Metal Storm is involved. What have these guys ever done besides get some kinds of IP rights to a fancy, electronically controlled version of the roman candle and then parlay that into lots and lots of publicity? Has Metal Storm ever gotten anything new or revolutionary into production and then into reasonably widespread deployment?
I always get an involuntary whiff of snake oil when these guys are mentioned. I'd like to be proven wrong. I'm open to it. Anybody?
We're splitting hairs, here. You can't "unilaterally renounce citizenship and be done with it" as I said in my post. You can, as you've pointed out, unilaterally renounce citizenship if you wish to do so in an extra-legal fashion that leaves lots of bothersome loose ends. That may be worthwhile for political refugees who figure they must get away to save their hide. The grandparent, however, was talking, in part, about renouncing citizenship to get out of paying taxes. I'm inclined to believe that you're more likely to be extradited back for tax crimes than political reasons, anyway.
So allow me to rephrase: Under U.S. law, you cannot unilaterally renounce your U.S. citizenship; you must obtain the approval of State. You can, of course, get the hell out of Dodge knowing you can never return. But that's not quite the same thing, is it?