They probably wouldn't have any harder of a time in either case; if anything, recent history has shown that the biggest obstacles to over-reaching bureaucrats are... other bureaucrats. Or at least that the public sector in some cases can be a lot more respectful of individual rights than the private, in the face of inappropriate government "interest," e.g. librarians.
Sometimes it's easier to stand up and do the Good Thing when you don't have a giant profit motive to get in the way.
Also, although I'm no advocate of big government, if the government is going to monitor your communcations anyway, it might be better for the network to be clearly identified as a government-supplied one; people are more likely to take privacy precautions if they don't have the false sense of security that comes with "private" internet service. (Those last three words being an oxymoron anyway.)
Unfortunately, it's just a "How to _use an antenna_" article.
Yeah, pretty much.
I don't want to be too hard on the guy, because it sounds like this was his first antenna project, but the whole article just makes me a little sad. What he did isn't even all that hard, and if he had done a little more searching around he would have found literally thousands of pages and hundreds of articles, complete with formulae and schematics, on how to build antennas of this type.
There's an amateur radio band located just above (and IIRC overlapping slightly with) the 2.4GHz ISM band. There's tons of antenna construction resources; the American Radio Relay League has two volumes written about the topic. (Although it covers a lot more than just antennas, admittedly.) Although I don't own the book, I'd bet that most of those articles probably have equations for scaling the dimensions to particular frequencies, so it would be trivial to do what he was attempting. (And a quite likely a violation of FCC rules, but that's another story.)
On a more general note, it's a little sad to see how little of a connection there is between the radio "hacking" community and the computer one. Perhaps it's due to there being a generational gap in there, but I've never met two groups of people that have as much in common, philosophically, as computer hackers and ham radio tinkerers. When I read articles like TFA, where the author says "To my knowledge no-one has built a homebrew biquad UMTS antenna before..." it just really underscores how poor a job the amateur radio community has done in connecting with computer geeks. The topic at hand here isn't something breathless and new, it's well-understood to the point of probably being boring. But because of the lack of connection between the two interest groups (even though, as in this case, they have a lot of common interests even if they don't realize it), we have computer geeks painfully reinventing the basics of antenna design, and we have ham radio operators who haven't in some cases even figured the Web out completely, much less how to use it to collaborate.
That's not to say that there aren't computer geeks who are into ham radio and vice versa -- the number of radio-related software projects is testament to that (as am I, and others here on/.), but it's a lot less than you would think given how much each group could stand to gain and benefit and learn from the other. There's some stuff being done that honestly is breathless and new, on the cutting edge of both radio communications technology and information/computer technology, but there's a shortage of people with the combined background to contribute. How much further along would we be, if both groups were't wasting so much time reinventing each others' wheels?
But on another note, Showing some sort of letter from a billing agency could be used to prove residence. Utility, eletric, creditcard bill, bank statments, cell phone bill, loan payment book, voter registration card, all could be used to were you live and who you are.
That would prove residency at a particular address, but not that you're eligible to vote.
Being eligible to vote consists of two things:
1) Proof of residency / domiciliation in the district in which you want to vote. 2) Proof of legal status (i.e. Citizenship, and that you're not a felon or mental defective).
Actually voting adds another dimension:
3) Proof of identity (that you actually are the citizen residing in district x that you claim to be).
So a utility bill would satisfy #1, but it doesn't say anything about #2. Unfortunately, just because someone is living in this country these days doesn't say much about their right to actually be doing so, and certainly doesn't imply that they have the right to vote (even leaving out illegals, you still have legal aliens -- people with visas -- who have residence but not legal status to vote).
Right now I think the Diebold thing is a bigger risk than the identification problems, because of the sheer scale and ease of rigging an election that's possible when the votes aren't linked to any sort of physical artifacts, but aside from that I think the voter-identification problem is the second-biggest weakness that we have yet to effectively deal with. On one hand, we don't want to do anything that will disenfranchise voters and lower participation, but fradulent-but-high turnout is worse than low-but-representative turnout.
My reaction to rsync.net was similar. I'd really love to try them out, but I can't come up with any really good ways to justify that kind of expense.
If you have multiple locations available for your use -- and if you're a home user, who doesn't? (parents, friends, etc.) -- it's a lot cheaper and you can get a lot more flexibility if you take an old PC, put a bunch of drives in it, and set it up somewhere. Then just have your systems replicate to it at night. (Yes, it's not bidirectional if you just use vanilla rsync, so if you have a lot of file churn you'll need to script something to keep the backup from bloating.)
I guess the 'setup cost' is higher than a managed service like rsync.net, but a minimalist system doesn't even take that long. Install Debian, install rsyncd if it's not already there, and open a port in the firewall for it. (Actually you don't really even need to run it as a daemon, now that I think about it.) WebDAV could take longer, but you'd have to really value your time highly to pay rsync.net's prices in exchange for an afternoon setting up Apache and a couple of cron jobs.
Personally I just have an old 600MHz Celeron machine that I set up with rsync and ssh/sftp with dyndns, and then traded a friend for a similar system that he had set up. I keep his box in a closet, plugged into my router, and he does the reverse. We both get off-site backups, and the only real cost of ownership is the electricity. (And if I was doing it today, you could get one of those routers that can run Linux from CompactFlash and can mount an external HD via USB 2.0... I bet you could get the whole thing down to a few watts that way and under $200.)
I am normally very skeptical of the DIY route -- it's tough to compete with mass-production in many instances. But I think that this is one situation where even a low-grade geek can toss themselves together something in a day that will be nearly the equal of rsync.net's service, for workstation-backup use. Hopefully the rsync.net guys will adjust their pricing accordingly and make a liar out of me soon, though.
It really seems like nothing short of a massively-publicized fraud is going to stop the juggernaut that is Diebold right now. There have been enough vulnerabilities reported, and no action has been taken. It's becoming more and more obvious that until Something Bad happens to a production system -- not a test system, not a "simulated election," until there is real fraud, in a real election, nothing is going to change.
Given that voting is pretty much the most fundamental part of democracy and a free society, maybe we're approaching the point where some sort of "direct action" is going to be required.
Think of it like a bomb that has to be defused; sometimes you need to make the bomb blow up in a controlled manner, in order to keep it from going off at some less convenient time when it would be more damaging.
The only way that Congress is ever going to wake up to the threat that these Diebold machines represent is when there's a major election fraud perpetrated in some painfully obvious way. I know I'm going to sound extreme here, but maybe what's going to be required is for somebody to purposely invalidate an election; delete all the votes from several polling places and replace them with votes for "Santa Claus" or something -- be creative. Or just brick the machines at the very beginning of a voting day; I can't imagine that anything the Diebold salespeople do will be able to preserve their reputation in the face of that level of chaos.
I understand that this path is quite a dangerous one to go down, in fact a person being caught doing it in today's climate would probably run the risk of being labeled a 'terrorist' or worse. However, right now we're heading straight for an iceberg labeled "election fraud" and it's becoming obvious that the American Public in general and Congress in particular is planning on sitting with their thumbs in their ears until we run straight into it.
I think the whole idea that you can build a structure, place it in public, and then prohibit other people from taking photographs of it from either public or their own property is ludicrous. The "copyright" of an architectural design ought to only apply to reproductions within that same medium -- i.e., physical structures -- and even then I'm not wholly convinced of the logic of having it under protection. If I take a photo of a building, even if I then reproduce that photo all over the place, I fail to see how it devalues the actual structure.
It's yet another example where our governments (collectively -- not even finger-pointing at any particular government this time) have woefully undervalued the rights of the public in favor of the interests of "rights holders."
My personal feeling is that Copyright should be approached in a minimalist way: it's not a right, it's a grant, given only where necessary in order to encourage the development of the arts where they wouldn't be developed otherwise, and where the net gain to society as a result of granting the monopoly exceeds that gained by allowing free reproduction. Given that we have thousands of years of historical evidence showing that architecture has progressed just fine without copyright protection, I think it's ridiculous that we've decided to "protect" it just now.
I'm not sure I agree with your thoughts on it helping "small production films."
Actors are cheap; CG is expensive. The percieved 'cost' of actors is distorted by how much it costs to hire a super-star, but most low-budget films can't afford that anyway, so they're using no-name actors to begin with. I think the actors' salaries are a pretty small part of most small-budget films who aren't trying to hire someone with name recognition.
A machine would definitely be cheaper than hiring Harrison Ford, but to paraphrase Monty Burns, it's probably not going to be cheaper than hiring his 'Mexican, non-union replacement.'
In any major city there is probably a surplus of actors willing to work in film for a basic living wage (and quite possibly less than that). Particularly if you can script your film to use youngish actors, there's a fairly big talent pool of people willing to work for publicity; in some cases they can be quite good.
I fail to see how this development -- which when you get right down to it, is really just a very-much-improved animation technology -- would change that situation.
Voice actors would still be required, unless your advertising campaign is going to be all done with silent films.
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It might be the actions of a man receiving a sufficient paycheck from a corporation, eager to demonstrate that their dubiously named "Genuine Advantage" program actually detects and makes the user aware of a "counterfeit" copy of Windows that they might have bought unknowingly, when in fact it's widely perceived to be nothing but obnoxious spyware, of no tangible benefit to the consumer at all.
Just tossing that out there as a possibility. People trade dignity, self-respect and the respect of others for money all the time.
All language is inherently arbitrary. There's no real reason why "dog" should correspond to the animal that you and I think it means, it's just something we've agreed upon (probably unconsciously) as part of learning the language. If we could get together everyone who speaks English tomorrow and decide to pick a different word for "dog," then the new word we'd pick would be the 'correct' one. Or at least it would be 'correct' insofar as there is a correct term.
Language only has value if everyone understands and agrees what certain otherwise-meaningless utterances represent. So if you decide to use a different definition of a particular term than the one everyone else uses, it's not a question of who's "right" and "wrong," it's a matter of who's going to be understood by the most people among the intended audience.
More to the point, in the case of "begging the question," there are two meanings at work: one which is commonly used in the vernacular, and another rather specialized meaning, used within the realm of philosophical discussion. The 'correct' definition of the term depends on the context of its use. This really isn't that hard to understand -- there are many, many words and phrases which are similar: they have both commonly-understood meanings, and different or more particular meanings when used in technical contexts. That doesn't mean that the vernacular meaning is "more wrong" or "less correct" than the technical one, just that the phrase has two distinct meanings.
I think this discussion comes up here on Slashdot a lot, because there seem to be a lot of people around here who seem to be incapable of understanding that in natural language, it's quite possible for the same utterance or visual symbol to have a variety of meanings depending on the context it's being used in, and this context may be somewhat subtle. While these nuances may make understanding a little more difficult than some hypothetical Newspeak-ish, precisely defined language, it's the fuzziness that gives natural language its flexibility and descriptive power. Stop trying to pigeonhole it.
Only buildings created after December 1, 1990 are protected by copyright. Fortunately for photographers, the copyright in an architectural work does not include the right to prevent others from making and distributing photos of the constructed building, if the building is located in a public place or is visible from a public place. So you don't need permission to stand on a public street and photograph a public building. You don't need permission to photograph a public building from inside the building (although you may need permission to photograph separately-owned decorative objects in the building, such as a statue). You don't need permission to stand on a public street and photograph a private building such as a church or a house. This "photographer's exception" to the copyright-owner's rights applies only to buildings, a category which includes houses, office buildings, churches, gazebos, and garden pavilions. The exception does not apply to monuments (protectable as "sculptural works") or other copyrighted works, such as statues and paintings.
No idea how it works in other countries; I've heard unconfirmed reports that the situation in France is particularly bad. Apparently you can't take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night without violating somebody's copyright there. (I think it's the lighting.)
The police only have to read you your rights if they want to question you and then later use your testimony (the results of said questioning) as evidence.
If you're caught red-handed doing something illegal, then it's not out of the realm of possibility that the police might just not bother. If they don't want to ask you anything, then they don't need to make you aware of your rights. (At least not right at the scene of the arrest, like you're familiar with seeing in movies.)
I have known numerous people who have been arrested and never read their rights at the scene, because there was no reason for the police to question them; the evidence was so overwhelming (e.g. simple drug possession, DUI) that the police didn't care what they had to say and weren't going to ask them anything. Whether this is official procedure or not I can't say.
you could say that the police have a right to privacy
And you would be very, very wrong.
People who are police officers -- that is, the men and women who do that as their job -- have a right to privacy, when they're at home and off-duty, or doing personal business. As public officials, they have none as they are conducting their jobs. Some of what they do may be confidential, because there's a vested public interest in keeping it secret, but such areas should be clearly and narrowly defined by law. (And that's different from general 'privacy' anyway.)
Furthermore, when standing on a public street, nobody has a right to privacy sufficient to overwhelm my right to photograph them there. It's a public place, you chose to be there, if I choose to record an image of that public place with you in it, tough luck for you.
It's a very dangerous road we go down, when we say that any aspect of our Government -- from the local police on upwards to the highest echelons of the Executive Branch -- has an inherent "right" to be secretive. Nobody does. Where the government is secretive, it should be so only because there's an overwhelming public interest for it to be that way, or where doing so prevents citizens' rights from themselves being violated (e.g., personal records maintained by the government on Federal employees). But those should be the exceptions, and not the rule. Any time you have a situation where citizens have to justify the disclosure of information from the government on a regular basis, you have a problem.
Frankly, I'm tired of the form that is a feature movie. Maybe it's me getting old or whatever, but I'm unable to build any enthusiasm even for movies I should really like. I think it started with Lord of The Rings, actually, which I saw and enjoyed - they're everything a movie should be for me - but to my own surprise I never felt I actually cared about it. I saw the first two, then really just forgot about seeing the third. I finally did see it on DVD, but out of a sense of duty, of finishing off something I started, more than anything else. It was great, it was absorbing, it was magnificient - and I would not have missed it at all had I simply skipped the whole thing.
We've had the 2-hour feature for a century or so; perhaps it's time for the form to reinvent itself?
This is one of the most interesting comments I've read in this discussion so far.
I'd argue that the market is proving you right, as we speak. I think the new format of choice is not the two-hour movie, but the 45-minute serial. In the past few years we've seen the demise of the "story arc" sitcom (where each episode was basically self-contained and usually returned the situation to wherever it began, for the next episode), long a staple of American television, and replaced it with plot-driven series TV shows. I think the epitome of the genre is "24," just because it's really the antithesis of the sitcom format, but there are many other shows that have popped up that are basically the same thing.
On one hand, people seem to like the shorter plotlines of series shows: you can get your 'dose' of entertainment in 45 minutes if you skip the commercials, rather than in two hours; but on the other hand the sales of DVD sets and my personal experience watching them indicates that people aren't adverse to watching two or three hours of serial episodes in a sitting.
In some ways the whole thing reminds me of another change, which went in the opposite direction: the transition in the 19th century from serial fiction literature, to bound novels. It seems as though today we're going from movies, to series shows where each season has a basically 'cinematic' plot (pretty much any one season of most new dramas could have been a movie, although whether a good or bad one I won't say), and then where that one plot is broken into hourlong sub-plots that are delivered to the viewer in chunks.
If I was cynical I'd say that this is further evidence of the ADD-ization of this country and of our society in general, but I won't pass judgement. I think I'll go watch another episode of Nip/Tuck, instead.
I think you're incredibly naive. The militant groups are putting those violent videos out on the Internet as recruiting tools. They're saying "Hey, this is what we do every day! Wanna come murder some people with us?" And judging by the response, quite a few people want to do just that.
The fact that such a video has been produced in the first place, and circulated, ought to be a wake-up call to people like you, because there are a whole lot of people who see something like that -- see videos of someone beheading someone else, or blowing someone else's brains out -- and don't say "Dear God, that's horrible!" but instead "Wow, I wish I could do that!"
Not everyone looks at violence and killing and reacts with distaste; quite frankly, I think that reaction is one that's only become accepted as the norm rather recently, in some major (mostly Western) cultures. In fact, in quite a lot of places in the world, they probably wouldn't even understand the 'moral high ground' you're standing on -- because to them, it's not murder if the person getting killed is a Sunni/Shiite/Jew/Muslim/Nigger/Pashto/untermensch/ etc., they might not even be regarded as fully human. The idea that 'killing is always wrong,' and 'all life is sacred' is not a universal premise; or it's a universal premise only when you factor in various definitions of 'life' or 'killing,' which wouldn't be universal.
Human life, particularly human life if it belongs to somebody who's not in your ethnic/cultural/religious/tribal group, is very, very cheap, in many parts of the world. People aren't going to stop killing just because you show it to them on TV, and in some cases they might be more attracted than repulsed. I think human nature may be a little uglier in reality than you're imagining it is.
Actually where I am, in Northern Virginia, you can actually by an E-Z Pass with cash.
I think you buy it for $20, and the pass comes pre-loaded with $10 in tolls; you get the other $10 "back" when you link it to your credit card. However, even if you don't link it to your credit card, you could still get through the toll lanes anonymously, at 200% of the normal rate.
That said, there's really no anonymity when you're going through a toll plaza; they're full of security cameras. The EZ Pass lanes probably have more of them aimed right at your bumper for plate recognition, but most of the regular lanes have at least one camera on them anyway that will catch your plate. (And once they know when you went through, they can use the entrance/exit ticket to figure out where you went and how fast you were driving.) If somebody wants to track you, they can. EZ Pass does make it easier, though.
Personally, I'm all for EZ Pass -- I don't care if it's underwritten by Satan himself, I have a personal thing against waiting in line, so I'd sell my soul for a transponder if that's what it cost. It would be nice, though, if there was some way that you could add money to your account using cash instead of linking it to a credit card. Maybe they could let you use those ATM-like terminals in 7-11s that accept cash to add money to your account, and pre-pay?
But as you pointed out, the government in particular really dislikes the ability of individual citizens to be anonymous, in practically anything; virtually no system is ever created with that as a goal, unfortunately.
I know quite a few people that do similar things, and it really seems like they spend more time futzing with their cobbled-together systems and trying to decide what to upgrade next, than actually doing stuff with them and just enjoying having something that works the way it's supposed to.
I'm not advocating a 'disposable culture' here, just saying that it seems to make a lot more sense to me to save up money for a while, get something that's really nice and you'll really enjoy using and not have to worry about for a while, use it until it's absolutely unbearable (which I define as 'no longer will run critical pieces of software'), then repeat, keeping the old machine as a backup/server/space-heater/whatever.
Maybe there's a fundamental difference in how people view computers, I suppose. I guess if you look at it as a hobby, and enjoy the upgrades, that's one thing; I really don't. My hobby isn't working on my computer, it's working with my computer. It's a tool, and one that I want to just work as transparently as possible, so that I can do stuff with it. So to that end, I just figure on dropping about two grand every three or four years (although I have done mid-cycle upgrades of hard drives and RAM) and then not having to worry about it.
I thought about a car analogy here, but I decided to do everyone a favor and skip it.:)
Actually I'm pretty certain that Bayer lost the trademark to both "Aspirin" and "Heroin" (two of their major ones) after World War I, as part of the assets that were seized by the Allies and sold as war reparations.
Wikipedia indicates that the rights to the "Aspirin" name were purchased from the U.S. Government by one Sterling Drug, and it was they who lost the trademark in 1921 because it had become too genericized -- not Bayer.
In short, Bayer lost their trademark because they were on the wrong side of a war, it was Sterling that lost it to genericization here in the US. The story might be different in other countries, if they didn't play along with the seizure of the brand from Bayer in the first place.
Okay, I had a bit of a brain-fart in the first paragraph (even though I previewed). I meant:
Generally -- and obviously I don't know the specs on what kind of shelves you used -- freestanding shelves can hold a lot more weight than wall-mounted ones. With any kind of wall-mounted system that's not somehow supported on the forward end by the floor, you're going to be putting a lot of torque on the points where it attaches to the walls.
Generally -- and obviously I don't know the specs on what kind of shelves you used -- freestanding shelves can hold a lot more weight than wall-mounted ones. With any kind of wall-mounted system that's not somehow supported on the forward end by the floor, you're going to be putting a lot of torque on the points where it attaches to the floor.
Depending on how much weight you're considering putting on the shelves, that may or may not be acceptable. Desktop computers used a servers probably aren't heavy enough, even if you fill up a shelf full of them, to rip wall-mounted shelves of the type you're talking about from the wall. But UPS units -- filled full of big Pb-acid batteries -- probably could.
Plus, using freestanding shelves in an office environment might be less of a pain: it might not require having maintaince come in for the install, like you might have to do if anything was being screwed into the walls, for instance. Particularly true if the walls are not traditional drywall-over-wood, for example if they're concrete or use steel studs, or if there is a lot of infrastructure in the walls that they need to worry about before drilling.
However, in terms of space-efficiency, I think you're very right about wall-mounted units requiring less floorspace. In any situation where space usage has to be maximized, I think effective use of shelving and other modular systems (pegboard, slatwall, etc.) are a must.
Yes; in fact I used to do this occasionally -- using the VCR as a tuner and then feeding the video from it into a ADC box to digitize it. However as long as I had to change the channels manually, not having an IR blaster to change the VCRs channel automatically, it was just more trouble than digital recordings were worth to me. I only watch most of the stuff I recorded once anyway. For me, just using video tape was the simpler solution, and gave me more playback options.
But as a more general solution, or for someone else, I would certainly recommend using a good VCR as a tuner, if your PC card's analog electronics aren't up to the task. In particular, many old VCRs (like those all-metal 1980s beasts) sometimes have terrific reception, even if the mechanicals are all shot and they do nothing but eat tapes.
I can't escape this feeling that some day, if Hollywood gets their way, we're going to look back on the pre-digital television era and regard the VCR with something akin to awe. What a versatile tool it was, and -- until the advent of Macrovision, anyway -- built without crippling restrictions. If you could watch it on TV, you could record it; that fundamental, obvious statement is looking to be more and more in peril.
I wasn't bashing on your calculations, they were entirely logical if you think about the eye as a 'digital camera' sort of device... which I think is how a lot of people do think about it. (Actually when I used to sell cameras, once upon a time, I used to get people asking questions like "what film speed is my eye?" So I expect that people today are probably asking how many megapixels their eye has... when they really mean 'how many megapixels does my brain make me think that my eye has?')
It's pretty fascinating stuff when you get down to it.
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They probably wouldn't have any harder of a time in either case; if anything, recent history has shown that the biggest obstacles to over-reaching bureaucrats are ... other bureaucrats. Or at least that the public sector in some cases can be a lot more respectful of individual rights than the private, in the face of inappropriate government "interest," e.g. librarians.
Sometimes it's easier to stand up and do the Good Thing when you don't have a giant profit motive to get in the way.
Also, although I'm no advocate of big government, if the government is going to monitor your communcations anyway, it might be better for the network to be clearly identified as a government-supplied one; people are more likely to take privacy precautions if they don't have the false sense of security that comes with "private" internet service. (Those last three words being an oxymoron anyway.)
Unfortunately, it's just a "How to _use an antenna_" article.
/.), but it's a lot less than you would think given how much each group could stand to gain and benefit and learn from the other. There's some stuff being done that honestly is breathless and new, on the cutting edge of both radio communications technology and information/computer technology, but there's a shortage of people with the combined background to contribute. How much further along would we be, if both groups were't wasting so much time reinventing each others' wheels?
Yeah, pretty much.
I don't want to be too hard on the guy, because it sounds like this was his first antenna project, but the whole article just makes me a little sad. What he did isn't even all that hard, and if he had done a little more searching around he would have found literally thousands of pages and hundreds of articles, complete with formulae and schematics, on how to build antennas of this type.
There's an amateur radio band located just above (and IIRC overlapping slightly with) the 2.4GHz ISM band. There's tons of antenna construction resources; the American Radio Relay League has two volumes written about the topic. (Although it covers a lot more than just antennas, admittedly.) Although I don't own the book, I'd bet that most of those articles probably have equations for scaling the dimensions to particular frequencies, so it would be trivial to do what he was attempting. (And a quite likely a violation of FCC rules, but that's another story.)
On a more general note, it's a little sad to see how little of a connection there is between the radio "hacking" community and the computer one. Perhaps it's due to there being a generational gap in there, but I've never met two groups of people that have as much in common, philosophically, as computer hackers and ham radio tinkerers. When I read articles like TFA, where the author says "To my knowledge no-one has built a homebrew biquad UMTS antenna before..." it just really underscores how poor a job the amateur radio community has done in connecting with computer geeks. The topic at hand here isn't something breathless and new, it's well-understood to the point of probably being boring. But because of the lack of connection between the two interest groups (even though, as in this case, they have a lot of common interests even if they don't realize it), we have computer geeks painfully reinventing the basics of antenna design, and we have ham radio operators who haven't in some cases even figured the Web out completely, much less how to use it to collaborate.
That's not to say that there aren't computer geeks who are into ham radio and vice versa -- the number of radio-related software projects is testament to that (as am I, and others here on
But on another note, Showing some sort of letter from a billing agency could be used to prove residence. Utility, eletric, creditcard bill, bank statments, cell phone bill, loan payment book, voter registration card, all could be used to were you live and who you are.
That would prove residency at a particular address, but not that you're eligible to vote.
Being eligible to vote consists of two things:
1) Proof of residency / domiciliation in the district in which you want to vote.
2) Proof of legal status (i.e. Citizenship, and that you're not a felon or mental defective).
Actually voting adds another dimension:
3) Proof of identity (that you actually are the citizen residing in district x that you claim to be).
So a utility bill would satisfy #1, but it doesn't say anything about #2. Unfortunately, just because someone is living in this country these days doesn't say much about their right to actually be doing so, and certainly doesn't imply that they have the right to vote (even leaving out illegals, you still have legal aliens -- people with visas -- who have residence but not legal status to vote).
Right now I think the Diebold thing is a bigger risk than the identification problems, because of the sheer scale and ease of rigging an election that's possible when the votes aren't linked to any sort of physical artifacts, but aside from that I think the voter-identification problem is the second-biggest weakness that we have yet to effectively deal with. On one hand, we don't want to do anything that will disenfranchise voters and lower participation, but fradulent-but-high turnout is worse than low-but-representative turnout.
My reaction to rsync.net was similar. I'd really love to try them out, but I can't come up with any really good ways to justify that kind of expense.
... I bet you could get the whole thing down to a few watts that way and under $200.)
If you have multiple locations available for your use -- and if you're a home user, who doesn't? (parents, friends, etc.) -- it's a lot cheaper and you can get a lot more flexibility if you take an old PC, put a bunch of drives in it, and set it up somewhere. Then just have your systems replicate to it at night. (Yes, it's not bidirectional if you just use vanilla rsync, so if you have a lot of file churn you'll need to script something to keep the backup from bloating.)
I guess the 'setup cost' is higher than a managed service like rsync.net, but a minimalist system doesn't even take that long. Install Debian, install rsyncd if it's not already there, and open a port in the firewall for it. (Actually you don't really even need to run it as a daemon, now that I think about it.) WebDAV could take longer, but you'd have to really value your time highly to pay rsync.net's prices in exchange for an afternoon setting up Apache and a couple of cron jobs.
Personally I just have an old 600MHz Celeron machine that I set up with rsync and ssh/sftp with dyndns, and then traded a friend for a similar system that he had set up. I keep his box in a closet, plugged into my router, and he does the reverse. We both get off-site backups, and the only real cost of ownership is the electricity. (And if I was doing it today, you could get one of those routers that can run Linux from CompactFlash and can mount an external HD via USB 2.0
I am normally very skeptical of the DIY route -- it's tough to compete with mass-production in many instances. But I think that this is one situation where even a low-grade geek can toss themselves together something in a day that will be nearly the equal of rsync.net's service, for workstation-backup use. Hopefully the rsync.net guys will adjust their pricing accordingly and make a liar out of me soon, though.
It really seems like nothing short of a massively-publicized fraud is going to stop the juggernaut that is Diebold right now. There have been enough vulnerabilities reported, and no action has been taken. It's becoming more and more obvious that until Something Bad happens to a production system -- not a test system, not a "simulated election," until there is real fraud, in a real election, nothing is going to change.
Given that voting is pretty much the most fundamental part of democracy and a free society, maybe we're approaching the point where some sort of "direct action" is going to be required.
Think of it like a bomb that has to be defused; sometimes you need to make the bomb blow up in a controlled manner, in order to keep it from going off at some less convenient time when it would be more damaging.
The only way that Congress is ever going to wake up to the threat that these Diebold machines represent is when there's a major election fraud perpetrated in some painfully obvious way. I know I'm going to sound extreme here, but maybe what's going to be required is for somebody to purposely invalidate an election; delete all the votes from several polling places and replace them with votes for "Santa Claus" or something -- be creative. Or just brick the machines at the very beginning of a voting day; I can't imagine that anything the Diebold salespeople do will be able to preserve their reputation in the face of that level of chaos.
I understand that this path is quite a dangerous one to go down, in fact a person being caught doing it in today's climate would probably run the risk of being labeled a 'terrorist' or worse. However, right now we're heading straight for an iceberg labeled "election fraud" and it's becoming obvious that the American Public in general and Congress in particular is planning on sitting with their thumbs in their ears until we run straight into it.
Just food for thought.
I got another one you'll love:
Q: Does it run Linux?
A: It does now!
I think the whole idea that you can build a structure, place it in public, and then prohibit other people from taking photographs of it from either public or their own property is ludicrous. The "copyright" of an architectural design ought to only apply to reproductions within that same medium -- i.e., physical structures -- and even then I'm not wholly convinced of the logic of having it under protection. If I take a photo of a building, even if I then reproduce that photo all over the place, I fail to see how it devalues the actual structure.
It's yet another example where our governments (collectively -- not even finger-pointing at any particular government this time) have woefully undervalued the rights of the public in favor of the interests of "rights holders."
My personal feeling is that Copyright should be approached in a minimalist way: it's not a right, it's a grant, given only where necessary in order to encourage the development of the arts where they wouldn't be developed otherwise, and where the net gain to society as a result of granting the monopoly exceeds that gained by allowing free reproduction. Given that we have thousands of years of historical evidence showing that architecture has progressed just fine without copyright protection, I think it's ridiculous that we've decided to "protect" it just now.
I'm not sure I agree with your thoughts on it helping "small production films."
Actors are cheap; CG is expensive. The percieved 'cost' of actors is distorted by how much it costs to hire a super-star, but most low-budget films can't afford that anyway, so they're using no-name actors to begin with. I think the actors' salaries are a pretty small part of most small-budget films who aren't trying to hire someone with name recognition.
A machine would definitely be cheaper than hiring Harrison Ford, but to paraphrase Monty Burns, it's probably not going to be cheaper than hiring his 'Mexican, non-union replacement.'
In any major city there is probably a surplus of actors willing to work in film for a basic living wage (and quite possibly less than that). Particularly if you can script your film to use youngish actors, there's a fairly big talent pool of people willing to work for publicity; in some cases they can be quite good.
I fail to see how this development -- which when you get right down to it, is really just a very-much-improved animation technology -- would change that situation.
Voice actors would still be required, unless your advertising campaign is going to be all done with silent films.
You let the Magic Smoke out ... I'm sorry, your hardware is done now. You'll need to take it in for a recharge.
It might be the actions of a man receiving a sufficient paycheck from a corporation, eager to demonstrate that their dubiously named "Genuine Advantage" program actually detects and makes the user aware of a "counterfeit" copy of Windows that they might have bought unknowingly, when in fact it's widely perceived to be nothing but obnoxious spyware, of no tangible benefit to the consumer at all.
Just tossing that out there as a possibility. People trade dignity, self-respect and the respect of others for money all the time.
All language is inherently arbitrary. There's no real reason why "dog" should correspond to the animal that you and I think it means, it's just something we've agreed upon (probably unconsciously) as part of learning the language. If we could get together everyone who speaks English tomorrow and decide to pick a different word for "dog," then the new word we'd pick would be the 'correct' one. Or at least it would be 'correct' insofar as there is a correct term.
Language only has value if everyone understands and agrees what certain otherwise-meaningless utterances represent. So if you decide to use a different definition of a particular term than the one everyone else uses, it's not a question of who's "right" and "wrong," it's a matter of who's going to be understood by the most people among the intended audience.
More to the point, in the case of "begging the question," there are two meanings at work: one which is commonly used in the vernacular, and another rather specialized meaning, used within the realm of philosophical discussion. The 'correct' definition of the term depends on the context of its use. This really isn't that hard to understand -- there are many, many words and phrases which are similar: they have both commonly-understood meanings, and different or more particular meanings when used in technical contexts. That doesn't mean that the vernacular meaning is "more wrong" or "less correct" than the technical one, just that the phrase has two distinct meanings.
I think this discussion comes up here on Slashdot a lot, because there seem to be a lot of people around here who seem to be incapable of understanding that in natural language, it's quite possible for the same utterance or visual symbol to have a variety of meanings depending on the context it's being used in, and this context may be somewhat subtle. While these nuances may make understanding a little more difficult than some hypothetical Newspeak-ish, precisely defined language, it's the fuzziness that gives natural language its flexibility and descriptive power. Stop trying to pigeonhole it.
http://www.photosecrets.com/p14.html
No idea how it works in other countries; I've heard unconfirmed reports that the situation in France is particularly bad. Apparently you can't take a picture of the Eiffel Tower at night without violating somebody's copyright there. (I think it's the lighting.)
The police only have to read you your rights if they want to question you and then later use your testimony (the results of said questioning) as evidence.
If you're caught red-handed doing something illegal, then it's not out of the realm of possibility that the police might just not bother. If they don't want to ask you anything, then they don't need to make you aware of your rights. (At least not right at the scene of the arrest, like you're familiar with seeing in movies.)
I have known numerous people who have been arrested and never read their rights at the scene, because there was no reason for the police to question them; the evidence was so overwhelming (e.g. simple drug possession, DUI) that the police didn't care what they had to say and weren't going to ask them anything. Whether this is official procedure or not I can't say.
you could say that the police have a right to privacy
And you would be very, very wrong.
People who are police officers -- that is, the men and women who do that as their job -- have a right to privacy, when they're at home and off-duty, or doing personal business. As public officials, they have none as they are conducting their jobs. Some of what they do may be confidential, because there's a vested public interest in keeping it secret, but such areas should be clearly and narrowly defined by law. (And that's different from general 'privacy' anyway.)
Furthermore, when standing on a public street, nobody has a right to privacy sufficient to overwhelm my right to photograph them there. It's a public place, you chose to be there, if I choose to record an image of that public place with you in it, tough luck for you.
It's a very dangerous road we go down, when we say that any aspect of our Government -- from the local police on upwards to the highest echelons of the Executive Branch -- has an inherent "right" to be secretive. Nobody does. Where the government is secretive, it should be so only because there's an overwhelming public interest for it to be that way, or where doing so prevents citizens' rights from themselves being violated (e.g., personal records maintained by the government on Federal employees). But those should be the exceptions, and not the rule. Any time you have a situation where citizens have to justify the disclosure of information from the government on a regular basis, you have a problem.
I'd argue that the market is proving you right, as we speak. I think the new format of choice is not the two-hour movie, but the 45-minute serial. In the past few years we've seen the demise of the "story arc" sitcom (where each episode was basically self-contained and usually returned the situation to wherever it began, for the next episode), long a staple of American television, and replaced it with plot-driven series TV shows. I think the epitome of the genre is "24," just because it's really the antithesis of the sitcom format, but there are many other shows that have popped up that are basically the same thing.
On one hand, people seem to like the shorter plotlines of series shows: you can get your 'dose' of entertainment in 45 minutes if you skip the commercials, rather than in two hours; but on the other hand the sales of DVD sets and my personal experience watching them indicates that people aren't adverse to watching two or three hours of serial episodes in a sitting.
In some ways the whole thing reminds me of another change, which went in the opposite direction: the transition in the 19th century from serial fiction literature, to bound novels. It seems as though today we're going from movies, to series shows where each season has a basically 'cinematic' plot (pretty much any one season of most new dramas could have been a movie, although whether a good or bad one I won't say), and then where that one plot is broken into hourlong sub-plots that are delivered to the viewer in chunks.
If I was cynical I'd say that this is further evidence of the ADD-ization of this country and of our society in general, but I won't pass judgement. I think I'll go watch another episode of Nip/Tuck, instead.
I think you're incredibly naive. The militant groups are putting those violent videos out on the Internet as recruiting tools. They're saying "Hey, this is what we do every day! Wanna come murder some people with us?" And judging by the response, quite a few people want to do just that.
/ etc., they might not even be regarded as fully human. The idea that 'killing is always wrong,' and 'all life is sacred' is not a universal premise; or it's a universal premise only when you factor in various definitions of 'life' or 'killing,' which wouldn't be universal.
The fact that such a video has been produced in the first place, and circulated, ought to be a wake-up call to people like you, because there are a whole lot of people who see something like that -- see videos of someone beheading someone else, or blowing someone else's brains out -- and don't say "Dear God, that's horrible!" but instead "Wow, I wish I could do that!"
Not everyone looks at violence and killing and reacts with distaste; quite frankly, I think that reaction is one that's only become accepted as the norm rather recently, in some major (mostly Western) cultures. In fact, in quite a lot of places in the world, they probably wouldn't even understand the 'moral high ground' you're standing on -- because to them, it's not murder if the person getting killed is a Sunni/Shiite/Jew/Muslim/Nigger/Pashto/untermensch
Human life, particularly human life if it belongs to somebody who's not in your ethnic/cultural/religious/tribal group, is very, very cheap, in many parts of the world. People aren't going to stop killing just because you show it to them on TV, and in some cases they might be more attracted than repulsed. I think human nature may be a little uglier in reality than you're imagining it is.
Actually where I am, in Northern Virginia, you can actually by an E-Z Pass with cash.
I think you buy it for $20, and the pass comes pre-loaded with $10 in tolls; you get the other $10 "back" when you link it to your credit card. However, even if you don't link it to your credit card, you could still get through the toll lanes anonymously, at 200% of the normal rate.
That said, there's really no anonymity when you're going through a toll plaza; they're full of security cameras. The EZ Pass lanes probably have more of them aimed right at your bumper for plate recognition, but most of the regular lanes have at least one camera on them anyway that will catch your plate. (And once they know when you went through, they can use the entrance/exit ticket to figure out where you went and how fast you were driving.) If somebody wants to track you, they can. EZ Pass does make it easier, though.
Personally, I'm all for EZ Pass -- I don't care if it's underwritten by Satan himself, I have a personal thing against waiting in line, so I'd sell my soul for a transponder if that's what it cost. It would be nice, though, if there was some way that you could add money to your account using cash instead of linking it to a credit card. Maybe they could let you use those ATM-like terminals in 7-11s that accept cash to add money to your account, and pre-pay?
But as you pointed out, the government in particular really dislikes the ability of individual citizens to be anonymous, in practically anything; virtually no system is ever created with that as a goal, unfortunately.
I've never really understood this attitude.
:)
I know quite a few people that do similar things, and it really seems like they spend more time futzing with their cobbled-together systems and trying to decide what to upgrade next, than actually doing stuff with them and just enjoying having something that works the way it's supposed to.
I'm not advocating a 'disposable culture' here, just saying that it seems to make a lot more sense to me to save up money for a while, get something that's really nice and you'll really enjoy using and not have to worry about for a while, use it until it's absolutely unbearable (which I define as 'no longer will run critical pieces of software'), then repeat, keeping the old machine as a backup/server/space-heater/whatever.
Maybe there's a fundamental difference in how people view computers, I suppose. I guess if you look at it as a hobby, and enjoy the upgrades, that's one thing; I really don't. My hobby isn't working on my computer, it's working with my computer. It's a tool, and one that I want to just work as transparently as possible, so that I can do stuff with it. So to that end, I just figure on dropping about two grand every three or four years (although I have done mid-cycle upgrades of hard drives and RAM) and then not having to worry about it.
I thought about a car analogy here, but I decided to do everyone a favor and skip it.
Actually I'm pretty certain that Bayer lost the trademark to both "Aspirin" and "Heroin" (two of their major ones) after World War I, as part of the assets that were seized by the Allies and sold as war reparations.
Wikipedia indicates that the rights to the "Aspirin" name were purchased from the U.S. Government by one Sterling Drug, and it was they who lost the trademark in 1921 because it had become too genericized -- not Bayer.
In short, Bayer lost their trademark because they were on the wrong side of a war, it was Sterling that lost it to genericization here in the US. The story might be different in other countries, if they didn't play along with the seizure of the brand from Bayer in the first place.
Generally -- and obviously I don't know the specs on what kind of shelves you used -- freestanding shelves can hold a lot more weight than wall-mounted ones. With any kind of wall-mounted system that's not somehow supported on the forward end by the floor, you're going to be putting a lot of torque on the points where it attaches to the floor.
Depending on how much weight you're considering putting on the shelves, that may or may not be acceptable. Desktop computers used a servers probably aren't heavy enough, even if you fill up a shelf full of them, to rip wall-mounted shelves of the type you're talking about from the wall. But UPS units -- filled full of big Pb-acid batteries -- probably could.
Plus, using freestanding shelves in an office environment might be less of a pain: it might not require having maintaince come in for the install, like you might have to do if anything was being screwed into the walls, for instance. Particularly true if the walls are not traditional drywall-over-wood, for example if they're concrete or use steel studs, or if there is a lot of infrastructure in the walls that they need to worry about before drilling.
However, in terms of space-efficiency, I think you're very right about wall-mounted units requiring less floorspace. In any situation where space usage has to be maximized, I think effective use of shelving and other modular systems (pegboard, slatwall, etc.) are a must.
Yes; in fact I used to do this occasionally -- using the VCR as a tuner and then feeding the video from it into a ADC box to digitize it. However as long as I had to change the channels manually, not having an IR blaster to change the VCRs channel automatically, it was just more trouble than digital recordings were worth to me. I only watch most of the stuff I recorded once anyway. For me, just using video tape was the simpler solution, and gave me more playback options.
But as a more general solution, or for someone else, I would certainly recommend using a good VCR as a tuner, if your PC card's analog electronics aren't up to the task. In particular, many old VCRs (like those all-metal 1980s beasts) sometimes have terrific reception, even if the mechanicals are all shot and they do nothing but eat tapes.
I can't escape this feeling that some day, if Hollywood gets their way, we're going to look back on the pre-digital television era and regard the VCR with something akin to awe. What a versatile tool it was, and -- until the advent of Macrovision, anyway -- built without crippling restrictions. If you could watch it on TV, you could record it; that fundamental, obvious statement is looking to be more and more in peril.
I wasn't bashing on your calculations, they were entirely logical if you think about the eye as a 'digital camera' sort of device ... which I think is how a lot of people do think about it. (Actually when I used to sell cameras, once upon a time, I used to get people asking questions like "what film speed is my eye?" So I expect that people today are probably asking how many megapixels their eye has ... when they really mean 'how many megapixels does my brain make me think that my eye has?')
It's pretty fascinating stuff when you get down to it.