No, I haven't pointed out why i.d. checking isn't useful. Just because they make a 51-foot ladder doesn't make a 50-foot wall useless. Attrition, folks: Make someone present valid i.d. and maybe you stop 50 out of 51 trying to get on the plane for bad purposes. Make no one present valid i.d. and all 51 march aboard multiple planes.
Checking i.d. is useful, it's just not perfect. By that logic no security measure, no vaccination, no machine or vehicle safety equipment, no protective gear is worth a dime. Thank you, but I'll keep wearing my seatbelt and buying cars with airbags, keep using safety goggles and gloves in the work lab, keep taking shots before going abroad, and keep right on presenting my i.d. at the airport.
"How the fuck does volunteering yourself for a more thorough search affect the safety of anyone else on that flight in any way?"
Who do you imagine did the more thorough search -- guys who would otherwise be reading Slashdot all day? There's a reason that "obstruction of justice" is a crime and not called "keeping useless cops busy." To a lesser degree than someone charged with this, he did indeed divert resources, workers, away from the task of either monitoring the security lanes or questioning better candidates for questioning.
"They didn't just wave others through because he went through a different search. Everyone else was still searched just the same."
The only way to give as much attention to everyone else would be to slow them all down by closing one of the X-ray lines otherwise manned by the questioners or, if the questioners did only that task, by not sending someone else in his place, someone diverted for a better reason than being a non-i.d.-carrying prick, in either which case I say, "thanks, asshole."
I don't want to wait in line longer because of some narcishit, and I don't want someone who would harm me and my fellow passengers getting by because those who do this questioning are occupied with someone who's daddy didn't hug him enough, or maybe too much. Wanting airport security to do its job effectively and efficiently is not freedom hating. The question "where are your papers?" is very different when it is not connected with sending you to a death camp. We have lists of people we don't want on planes, along with their aliases; if they can just pick a new name out of a hat and not so much have to pay a forger to get through security, we're in serious trouble.
... from looking for people trying to kill other people, to escort him through expedited security. Let's change the law NOW to require i.d. for freaks like this unwilling to take the threat of terrorism seriously and realize that there are trade-offs. Just try buying something with a check of, sometimes, a credit card without i.d.; just try getting a job without i.d. (albeit at the cost of illegal aliens being a major source of identity theft, a second-order result since anyone here legally has proper i.d.).
My simple idea: Allow me to set it to meeting/movie/restaurant/polite/quiet mode for a set period; thus I don't need to (remember to) change it back because it will be automatic. I've missed a lot of calls from friends because the phone is on vibrate and sitting on a sofa cushion, ten hours after a meeting for which I silenced it. (And then left it on the meeting room table during the meeting, so that any vibrationss were amplified. D'oh!)
The threat was to blow up a building, but then again the FBI was talking about taking the computers rather apparently to get evidence to prosecute. It would have made more sense to clear the library and use the computers in place if they were racing the clock to find the bomber.
My question is, did the librarian do this same calculus? Or would she have obstructed a search if lives were on the line, or a terrorist act were imminent? She doesn't come off sounding like someone who recognizes that sometimes we as reasonable people can surrender non-essential liberties for a lot of security, and end up with both. (To flip the Ben Franklin quote, which is concerned with essential liberties, more fundamental than whether when lives are on the line an FBI agent can see the same things that minimum-wage library slaves peruse everyday.)
Use voice recognition; I'm yelling at the damn thing, telling it exactly what it's shortcomings are, so there is no need for special gloves or cameras. The appropriate hardware is a $10 microphone.
(1) Does it still require a landline telephone connection? I have a cable modem for Net access, useful for remote programming, but like many others have dropped the (otherwise) unnecessary landline.
(2) Does it offer, either plainly or through a simple hack, the 30-second commercial skip? The DVR from my cable company allows dual recording while I'm watching another recording, so foregoing the 30-second commercial skip seemed a small cost.
But if the Series 3 drops the landline requirement and offers the commercial skip, as well as records two programs as noted in the posting, it might make sense to get when I upgrade to HDTV.
... because of shifts in when I had to program my VCR. In no way was there a "five-season arc"; rather it was choppy and changing, much like the last two seasons of Andromeda.
A measure of how lame it was could be seen in the commercials for the boxed set, which quoted the NYT saying it was "a galactic United Nations." Describing a setting is not the same as critical praise, and I can think of a lot of things that are more complimentary than comparison to the UN. But perhaps "uneven and hard to follow even with the episodes in order" would not sell many DVDs.
600 fpm isn't that fast in many industries, but it depends what you're doing with it. Are you capping soda bottles, 40 per second? Wow. Are you reading RFID tags to items 12" to 24" apart, five to ten per second? Ho. Hum. Your speed is on the same order of magnitude as a checker, and you should be able to go much faster even with barcodes, provided you use a good reader, either a fixed unit, if goods are in a consistent position, or possibly a camera feeding an image to a PC to read (ones capable of 60 frames per second are not uncommon).
I would really like to understand why so many extra embryos are created when using IVF. I know that several at a time are used with each attempt at implantation, but why not "make" just enough for each attempt as it approaches? Is it not time-consuming to fertilize each egg? Are separately-frozen eggs and sperm less viable for fertilization?
I have about the same qualms as above about IVF, yet if really would make a difference for me if zygotes were created by 2's and 3's rather than by the score.
Those most likely to use IVF are also those most likely to pass on American values of liberty and tolerance to their children, so I am loath to be too critical.
You assume the users are the residents. My example was specifically of non-residents adding demand to the system. I believe that library users are non-anonymous not solely to get back unreturned books, but to demonstrate that the library is benefitting the same community it is funded by. My old county lacked a well-distributed library system, and one year I paid to belong to a nearby town's locally-funded library. If said library were anonymous, rather than a few people adding $25 to the library's coffers for modest usages, thousands would have added pennies apiece (through interest on the deposits) for heavy usage.
That said, there is nothing that requires libraries to keep records of who specifically borrowed what, once it is returned. My new county has a reciprocal arrangement with the neighboring county's library system, and once the books are back on the shelves, it should matter little to them that I borrowed $19 book A at their library and one of their residents borrowed $18.99 book B from mine.
Perhaps anonymity does not allow for non-residency, but this implies a very low level of anonymity. A court might decide that whoever administers the card program on behalf of the library is de facto part of the library, and must turn over their records if subpeonaed.
The purpose of these cards would be to protect the library from loss, assuming the only reason to be able to trace library patrons is to recover unreturned items. Assume a small library loses $1000 worth of books per year, buys the replacements, buys $5000 in new books, pays $4000 for utilities, pays $80,000 for wages, and has $10,000 in other expenses. The $1000 they recoup from the anonymous prepaid library cards is 1% of their budget. Where do they get the rest?
Government. Which means taxes. Which means taxpayers. Which means public officials liable to the taxpayers/voters on how their funds are spent. Assume you are an official in Almost Readerless County, next to Cheap University Student County, and you implement the anonymous system. Suddenly you find your sleepy three-branch library system expanding to 18 busy branches full of textbooks and anime, at the expense of the taxpayer-funded county budget. How much of the new demand is coming from your constituents' appreciation of privacy and how much from freeloaders in the next county?
... how many sites would go into password-protected status overnight with a password page that says, prominently, "the password is FUCKTHEFEC"; I wonder if RSS feeds qualify as "limited distribution" in the same way as email lists.
Comcast DVR is $10 a month. Except not really; it's $10 after paying $15 bucks for the digital cable box which was only useful to me for the TV listings that TiVo provides. Please stay in business, I might finally take the plunge after tax time. Frankly I think that the demand is quite elastic at this point so that a reduction in the monthly fee - to $10 say - would yield a larger total return within a year.
Why haven't we heard more about Venezeula, where apparently many machines recorded exactly the same number of pro-recall votes in opposition to Mr. Chavez? Sounds like tampering to me...
I pass hundreds of people in an airport who could have RFID readers and thus would have my data to copy and retransmit. Get that data from me and a few hundred other people and they will find someone they look enough like that they can make a very effective fake passport.
This data should not be transmitted contactless. Are you going to tell an immigration official, "Just scan the passport in my pocket"? No, you will still present the actual passport, so they can simple touch a smart card style chip on the passport to a reader and get the same information (more effectively than trying to pick out my info from that of dozens of others nearby).
Biometric info is not necessarily a bad thing, but RFID is not the right technology choice. Perhaps if I carry my passport in a tin foil bag...
My favorite office had pink noise generators so that it was next-to-impossible to here human voices from a couple cubicles over. After some initial adjustments so we didn't need to shout at each other in conference rooms, it was a godsend vs. the normal "Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!" or Celine Dion.
We also each had two phone lines on the PBX. Inevitably there are times you need to make a call while awaiting an important call. It just made sense.
And before I die, I hope to work somewhere that actually gives me a cordless phone, which for reasons unknowable no executive will ever, ever allow.
Many industrial networks, e.g. PROFIBUS and DeviceNet, use the Master-Slave terminology, and it makes sense in those cases. Since there is a large amount of installed equipment that may only be minimally labeled (M and S, MA and SL, much like many hard drives), changing the terminology would be difficult. Any future documentation would have to at a minimum acknowledge the old terms (e.g. index entry "Master - see xyz").
The easiest transition would allow the most common abbreviations to continue to be meaningful. Of course this can all be dismissed as foolish, but it would be nice not to have to dicuss forever.
Cambridge, Mass. She attends Harvard. And because Drudge made a big deal out of a (well-written and well-reasoned) letter she wrote to the Crimson, and the Crimson is online, I know her real name too.
Googled this because it sounded familiar. Someone tried to publish it on K5 (http://www.kuro5hin.org/poll/1016650972_LbdXJFhi) in late March, just a couple days after some of the online gaming sites caught it. More recently, according to Media Life Magazine (http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news2002/jun02/j un24/3_wed/news5wednesday.html), the program was ended after the death of the Queen Mum. Apparently "deadvertising" suddenly becomes tacky when a centenarian on the public dole kicks it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I haven't pointed out why i.d. checking isn't useful. Just because they make a 51-foot ladder doesn't make a 50-foot wall useless. Attrition, folks: Make someone present valid i.d. and maybe you stop 50 out of 51 trying to get on the plane for bad purposes. Make no one present valid i.d. and all 51 march aboard multiple planes.
Checking i.d. is useful, it's just not perfect. By that logic no security measure, no vaccination, no machine or vehicle safety equipment, no protective gear is worth a dime. Thank you, but I'll keep wearing my seatbelt and buying cars with airbags, keep using safety goggles and gloves in the work lab, keep taking shots before going abroad, and keep right on presenting my i.d. at the airport.
How many you've been told about and how many we've found are different things. You've made an assertion, please support it.
"How the fuck does volunteering yourself for a more thorough search affect the safety of anyone else on that flight in any way?"
Who do you imagine did the more thorough search -- guys who would otherwise be reading Slashdot all day? There's a reason that "obstruction of justice" is a crime and not called "keeping useless cops busy." To a lesser degree than someone charged with this, he did indeed divert resources, workers, away from the task of either monitoring the security lanes or questioning better candidates for questioning.
"They didn't just wave others through because he went through a different search. Everyone else was still searched just the same."
The only way to give as much attention to everyone else would be to slow them all down by closing one of the X-ray lines otherwise manned by the questioners or, if the questioners did only that task, by not sending someone else in his place, someone diverted for a better reason than being a non-i.d.-carrying prick, in either which case I say, "thanks, asshole."
I don't want to wait in line longer because of some narcishit, and I don't want someone who would harm me and my fellow passengers getting by because those who do this questioning are occupied with someone who's daddy didn't hug him enough, or maybe too much. Wanting airport security to do its job effectively and efficiently is not freedom hating. The question "where are your papers?" is very different when it is not connected with sending you to a death camp. We have lists of people we don't want on planes, along with their aliases; if they can just pick a new name out of a hat and not so much have to pay a forger to get through security, we're in serious trouble.
... from looking for people trying to kill other people, to escort him through expedited security. Let's change the law NOW to require i.d. for freaks like this unwilling to take the threat of terrorism seriously and realize that there are trade-offs. Just try buying something with a check of, sometimes, a credit card without i.d.; just try getting a job without i.d. (albeit at the cost of illegal aliens being a major source of identity theft, a second-order result since anyone here legally has proper i.d.).
My simple idea: Allow me to set it to meeting/movie/restaurant/polite/quiet mode for a set period; thus I don't need to (remember to) change it back because it will be automatic. I've missed a lot of calls from friends because the phone is on vibrate and sitting on a sofa cushion, ten hours after a meeting for which I silenced it. (And then left it on the meeting room table during the meeting, so that any vibrationss were amplified. D'oh!)
The threat was to blow up a building, but then again the FBI was talking about taking the computers rather apparently to get evidence to prosecute. It would have made more sense to clear the library and use the computers in place if they were racing the clock to find the bomber.
My question is, did the librarian do this same calculus? Or would she have obstructed a search if lives were on the line, or a terrorist act were imminent? She doesn't come off sounding like someone who recognizes that sometimes we as reasonable people can surrender non-essential liberties for a lot of security, and end up with both. (To flip the Ben Franklin quote, which is concerned with essential liberties, more fundamental than whether when lives are on the line an FBI agent can see the same things that minimum-wage library slaves peruse everyday.)
Use voice recognition; I'm yelling at the damn thing, telling it exactly what it's shortcomings are, so there is no need for special gloves or cameras. The appropriate hardware is a $10 microphone.
Two questions:
(1) Does it still require a landline telephone connection? I have a cable modem for Net access, useful for remote programming, but like many others have dropped the (otherwise) unnecessary landline.
(2) Does it offer, either plainly or through a simple hack, the 30-second commercial skip? The DVR from my cable company allows dual recording while I'm watching another recording, so foregoing the 30-second commercial skip seemed a small cost.
But if the Series 3 drops the landline requirement and offers the commercial skip, as well as records two programs as noted in the posting, it might make sense to get when I upgrade to HDTV.
Tens of millions of fewer dead peasants!
... because of shifts in when I had to program my VCR. In no way was there a "five-season arc"; rather it was choppy and changing, much like the last two seasons of Andromeda.
A measure of how lame it was could be seen in the commercials for the boxed set, which quoted the NYT saying it was "a galactic United Nations." Describing a setting is not the same as critical praise, and I can think of a lot of things that are more complimentary than comparison to the UN. But perhaps "uneven and hard to follow even with the episodes in order" would not sell many DVDs.
600 fpm isn't that fast in many industries, but it depends what you're doing with it. Are you capping soda bottles, 40 per second? Wow. Are you reading RFID tags to items 12" to 24" apart, five to ten per second? Ho. Hum. Your speed is on the same order of magnitude as a checker, and you should be able to go much faster even with barcodes, provided you use a good reader, either a fixed unit, if goods are in a consistent position, or possibly a camera feeding an image to a PC to read (ones capable of 60 frames per second are not uncommon).
Subliminal thought: Metric? Useless.
I would really like to understand why so many extra embryos are created when using IVF. I know that several at a time are used with each attempt at implantation, but why not "make" just enough for each attempt as it approaches? Is it not time-consuming to fertilize each egg? Are separately-frozen eggs and sperm less viable for fertilization?
I have about the same qualms as above about IVF, yet if really would make a difference for me if zygotes were created by 2's and 3's rather than by the score.
Those most likely to use IVF are also those most likely to pass on American values of liberty and tolerance to their children, so I am loath to be too critical.
You assume the users are the residents. My example was specifically of non-residents adding demand to the system. I believe that library users are non-anonymous not solely to get back unreturned books, but to demonstrate that the library is benefitting the same community it is funded by. My old county lacked a well-distributed library system, and one year I paid to belong to a nearby town's locally-funded library. If said library were anonymous, rather than a few people adding $25 to the library's coffers for modest usages, thousands would have added pennies apiece (through interest on the deposits) for heavy usage.
That said, there is nothing that requires libraries to keep records of who specifically borrowed what, once it is returned. My new county has a reciprocal arrangement with the neighboring county's library system, and once the books are back on the shelves, it should matter little to them that I borrowed $19 book A at their library and one of their residents borrowed $18.99 book B from mine.
Perhaps anonymity does not allow for non-residency, but this implies a very low level of anonymity. A court might decide that whoever administers the card program on behalf of the library is de facto part of the library, and must turn over their records if subpeonaed.
The purpose of these cards would be to protect the library from loss, assuming the only reason to be able to trace library patrons is to recover unreturned items. Assume a small library loses $1000 worth of books per year, buys the replacements, buys $5000 in new books, pays $4000 for utilities, pays $80,000 for wages, and has $10,000 in other expenses. The $1000 they recoup from the anonymous prepaid library cards is 1% of their budget. Where do they get the rest?
Government. Which means taxes. Which means taxpayers. Which means public officials liable to the taxpayers/voters on how their funds are spent. Assume you are an official in Almost Readerless County, next to Cheap University Student County, and you implement the anonymous system. Suddenly you find your sleepy three-branch library system expanding to 18 busy branches full of textbooks and anime, at the expense of the taxpayer-funded county budget. How much of the new demand is coming from your constituents' appreciation of privacy and how much from freeloaders in the next county?
Berkeley puts out geniuses. Specifically, for every 100 it takes in, about 3 make it out. The rest become addle-brained communists.
... how many sites would go into password-protected status overnight with a password page that says, prominently, "the password is FUCKTHEFEC"; I wonder if RSS feeds qualify as "limited distribution" in the same way as email lists.
Comcast DVR is $10 a month. Except not really; it's $10 after paying $15 bucks for the digital cable box which was only useful to me for the TV listings that TiVo provides. Please stay in business, I might finally take the plunge after tax time. Frankly I think that the demand is quite elastic at this point so that a reduction in the monthly fee - to $10 say - would yield a larger total return within a year.
Why haven't we heard more about Venezeula, where apparently many machines recorded exactly the same number of pro-recall votes in opposition to Mr. Chavez? Sounds like tampering to me...
I pass hundreds of people in an airport who could have RFID readers and thus would have my data to copy and retransmit. Get that data from me and a few hundred other people and they will find someone they look enough like that they can make a very effective fake passport.
This data should not be transmitted contactless. Are you going to tell an immigration official, "Just scan the passport in my pocket"? No, you will still present the actual passport, so they can simple touch a smart card style chip on the passport to a reader and get the same information (more effectively than trying to pick out my info from that of dozens of others nearby).
Biometric info is not necessarily a bad thing, but RFID is not the right technology choice. Perhaps if I carry my passport in a tin foil bag...
My favorite office had pink noise generators so that it was next-to-impossible to here human voices from a couple cubicles over. After some initial adjustments so we didn't need to shout at each other in conference rooms, it was a godsend vs. the normal "Corporate Accounts Payable, Nina speaking! Just a moment!" or Celine Dion.
We also each had two phone lines on the PBX. Inevitably there are times you need to make a call while awaiting an important call. It just made sense.
And before I die, I hope to work somewhere that actually gives me a cordless phone, which for reasons unknowable no executive will ever, ever allow.
Many industrial networks, e.g. PROFIBUS and DeviceNet, use the Master-Slave terminology, and it makes sense in those cases. Since there is a large amount of installed equipment that may only be minimally labeled (M and S, MA and SL, much like many hard drives), changing the terminology would be difficult. Any future documentation would have to at a minimum acknowledge the old terms (e.g. index entry "Master - see xyz").
The easiest transition would allow the most common abbreviations to continue to be meaningful. Of course this can all be dismissed as foolish, but it would be nice not to have to dicuss forever.
Cambridge, Mass. She attends Harvard. And because Drudge made a big deal out of a (well-written and well-reasoned) letter she wrote to the Crimson, and the Crimson is online, I know her real name too.
Does finding out that their from Connecticut and didn't know it somehow make them wiser?
Googled this because it sounded familiar. Someone tried to publish it on K5 (http://www.kuro5hin.org/poll/1016650972_LbdXJFhi) in late March, just a couple days after some of the online gaming sites caught it. More recently, according to Media Life Magazine (http://www.medialifemagazine.com/news2002/jun02/j un24/3_wed/news5wednesday.html), the program was ended after the death of the Queen Mum. Apparently "deadvertising" suddenly becomes tacky when a centenarian on the public dole kicks it.
... at the end of a record, before you take the needle off? Everyone seems to copy that.
My fear is that we will all have to have something on all the time to avoid plagiarizing the silence. Actual my fear is that it will be Celine Dion.