The systems all seem to use RF to talk between the key fob and the system in the car.
Although I'm sure the key fob transmitter is low power, that doesn't mean you couldn't trigger it with a more powerful transmitter, from further away...you'd need to build some mechanism into the receiver in order to make it addressable (so you wouldn't knock out all the cars on the road, although I suppose that would be an interesting feature as well), but as long as you've got everyone wiring a black box into critical parts of their car, why not?
Not saying that's necessarily what they're up to, and I gather the Canucks seem to have a...different degree...of trust in their government than I do down here, but if the government told me that I must install a radio-controlled device into the ignition system of my car, and gave me only five models to choose from, made by three obscure companies that I'd never heard of... I'd be suspicious.
IIRC, there were some proposals back in the 80s/early-90s for systems that would use EMP-like technologies to disable cars remotely during chases; the most ridiculous one that I remember was a device mounted on a police car that shot a large manhole-sized device, frisbee-style, under the car it was pursuing, which would produce some sort of pulse as it passed under the engine, disabling the car. Seemed like a hell of a long shot to me, but it was attractive enough during the height of the crack/crime epidemic to get some people interested, apparently. I never heard anything about it again, so I'm thinking that it was vaporware. Although not that long ago there was an article here on Slashdot about some sort of "sticky" car-tracker that the police could use to tag cars during pursuits and use like an involuntary Lo-Jack -- that seems a lot more feasible.
Maybe true: no 2 year committment to ATT, but perhaps a 1 year committment in the local state penitentiary:-). Well, this is probably better than to be with ATT, so GO FOR IT!
However, a few years ago there was someone who was talking about an "imminent Usenet renaissance." Not sure that's actually occurred but their theory was that most ISPs no longer make it easy to get on Usenet, so the users who actually participate in discussions there are usually fairly interested / experts. In other words, most of the AOL users / script kiddies / etc. are busy trolling PHPBB sites, because they're easier to get into than Usenet.
Unfortunately because of the spam problems, there's really no point in reading unmoderated groups IMO.
From an architectural standpoint I really like Usenet. It's just unfortunate that upgrades to it that would have curtailed spam and kept it alive and more mainstream never caught on. It's certainly a better way of having a global discussion system than discrete, centralized web forums, where a single server crash (or rogue admin, or hacking) can eliminate thousands or millions of discussions in an instant. Usenet is the collective memory of the internet, thanks to caching services; very few web forums can compete with that. (Actually I'd say that Slashdot is one of the few that does, because Slashdot has been consistently good about preserving old content and not deleting stuff; most database-driven web sites aren't like that, though.)
Almost makes me want to fire up my newsreader and see if there's anything there to see. Almost.
Anyone out there familiar enough with the systems involved to describe exactly what they're trying to mandate?
Most new cars I've bought in the past 8 years or so have had systems that prevent the engine from starting if the car doesn't handshake with a microchip in the ignition key shank. (However, contrary to what some people apparently believe, they don't make the cars impossible to steal, of course.) Is this what they're talking about? I can't imagine it would be easy to retrofit one on a car that doesn't have one already, since it's a pretty integral part of the ignition system and ECU.
According to this page, there are only a few immobilizers that pass some sort of Canadian standard, but I couldn't get any information on how they work by Googling them, and they don't seem to be widespread outside of Canada. (Or actually outside the province of Manitoba at all.) The small number of approved designs combined with making them very widespread via compulsory installation seems like a recipe for disaster: if the thieves are already getting past the safeguards built into modern cars from the factory, they're not stupid; I expect it won't be long before how to bypass them becomes common knowledge. [1]
I think this is the web site of one manufacturer of approved devices, Autowatch. Basically they look like some sort of key-fob RF transponder that communicates either automatically or on-command with a receiver in the car that immobilizes it. Seems like there's a variety of attack vectors there, from just routing around the disablement device in the car, to faking the code (easy if it's a rolling-code system, harder if it's a public-key handshake). Ups the ante a little bit, and it might make thieves target older cars instead of newer ones (which doesn't strike me as an exactly socially useful outcome) or push them to neighboring provinces, but I'm pretty skeptical that it'll have much of a substantial long-term effect on crime.
[1] If I were living there I'd also be immediately and deeply suspicious of any government mandate that requires the purchase of a device from a for-profit corporation, particularly when it only gives you the choice of three corporations, and one corporation makes 3/5 approved models. Seems like a recipe for corruption to me. But then again, I don't trust government further than I can throw it. (And an insurance company run by the government? Nightmare.)
Well, if you're a AAA member you can get this now. For example, I just did a 1,300 mile drive and used AAA's website to get the directions. You set the starting location and the destination and then you can add things like construction information, restaurants, hotels, gas stations, etc. You can add multiple stops, force it to take certain routes, etc. It ends up with an overview similar to what MapQuest and Google Maps do, but then it also gives around 30 pages with detailed maps of every intersection and major area, alternatives, etc. It's really nice.
You're aware, I hope, that AAA has been doing this for about 30 years....manually.
You've always been able to go in to an AAA office and get a map package like this. It has some sort of funny name, maybe a "TripTix"? You could tell them your start and end address and date of travel, and they'd do up a nice customized route plan for you, with information on traffic and other possible delays, with your route highlighted and nice typed directions. Basically they'd take maps for each step of the way, highlight them, bundle them with all the directions and other info, and bind them all together in a nice neat package. Very labor-intensive -- I'd be surprised if they still offered the service. Last time I went to get one was about 10 years ago, and I think they had cut you down to one per member per year.
Used to always get them for family vacations back in the day. Probably still have a few around too.
It's offensive enough to a wide enough swath of Americans as to make it a non-starter, particularly after the defeat of the bill today (which contrary to TFA was more because it was hated, by both sides, than because of Real ID).
Furthermore, the number of Americans who support "legalization" varies widely depending on who's conducting the poll and how you word the questions therein; a while back there was a poll that showed that 66% of Americans would "say 'yes' to ordinances that suspend the business licenses of employers who hire illegal aliens, penalize landlords who rent to illegal aliens with fines and make English the official language," (unfortunately the actual article that was linked to on Digg has gone subscription-only). There's a fairly widely quoted Rassmussen poll that claims that "Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters would favor an approach that focuses exclusively on 'exclusively on [sic] securing the border and reducing illegal immigration.'"
The fact that the percentages drop to around 20-30% when you alter the wording means that there are a lot of people, I think, who don't really know what they think about it, or don't have a very cohesive opinion. (Or they're just inconsistent or feel differently based on the issue; they might come across as pro-immigration in one poll that asks about deportation, but anti-illegal in another that asks about punishing employers.)
I'm not really pushing for any poll over any other -- they all can be manipulated to tell one side of the story or another (and frequently are) -- but the bottom line is that the bill that was finally killed today was a path to legalization, and nobody liked it. It's an issue that's divisive enough that I think Congress will think twice before bringing it up again, and that means that border security needs to move forward without depending on an amnesty plan to win Mexican cooperation with.
disrespectful to record stores? Hwah? How? Because they don't get to sell the CDs Prince decided to give away? I recently gave a camera to a friend... should the local camera shop be angry? I dinged their sales!
Replace "camera" with "music," and "local camera shop" with "giant media conglomerate," and the answer, I think, is yes.
It seems that in the past 10 years or so, many corporations have decided to treat anything that denies them revenue as if it's identical to actually taking something they already had. Personally, I think it's an effect of the type of cash-flow accounting and projection that's now overwhelmingly popular, where the entire worth of your business (read: stock price) is based on how much money you think you're going to make. When it turns out that, oops, you didn't actually make that much money, they go absolutely berzerk and start looking for anyone to pin the blame on. Because, to them, they've already made that money, in some weird way, as soon as they started projecting it.
Hush with your crazy logic! This is Slashdot, where everything is black and white. (...) -- Piracy is ethically no different from a mob looting a store whose locks were broken. Apparently.
MS SLES Coupons
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GPLv3 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is it really true that they're "distributing" Linux by selling the SLES coupons?
The way I read this, it's a pretty high-risk maneuver. They've essentially given Novell a free pass, hoping that they can undermine Microsoft with the SLES coupons thing. But if Microsoft can argue that they're not really distributing Linux by selling the coupons, then the whole thing, I think, unravels -- Novell gets a free pass for nothing and can continue on its merry way, remaining in the death-pact with Microsoft and using GPL3 code.
Given that Microsoft isn't screaming bloody murder about this, I think they must not see it as a big risk, and that to me isn't a good thing. It means they think they can avoid having their patents undermined, and if that's true, then excepting Novell will be for nothing.
Please read my reply to the post just above yours; I actually agree with you more than I think you realize. Although I believe in secure borders that doesn't necessarily imply a one-size-fits-all solution. The problems on the U.S./Canada border are entirely different from those on the U.S./Mexico border, as well as the relationship between the countries themselves, and thus I think the solutions will be quite different.
On the northern border, the U.S. and Canada have a lot of mutual interests, both in having secure borders but in also allowing the free flow of ideas, people, goods, and capital; the perceived risk on the northern border, from the U.S. standpoint, isn't from Canada itself, but rather the possibility of Canada acting as an unwitting conduit into the U.S. from less-friendly places. It seems to me as if much of that risk could be mitigated through cooperation.
The problem in the south is that the U.S. and Mexican governments are at odds over a great many things; the Mexican government has goals that are frankly not conducive to U.S. border security. (E.g.: Mexico's economy is dependent on the money that illegal workers in the U.S. send back, and those workers depend on a porous border to get here; on lower levels you have corruption caused by drug cartels who benefit by insecure U.S. borders.) Lacking any basis for an effective cooperative solution that's not highly offensive to people in the U.S. (in other words, one that doesn't involve legalizing drugs or illegal workers), I think the U.S. government has a mandate to act in its citizens' best interest and deploy a more or less unilateral solution.
Although the U.S. and Canada have significant political and cultural differences, I don't really see many of the issues that are leading to calls for a border wall or military deployment on the southern border becoming an issue in the north.
Not just natives, if you drive up into pretty much any border state in the U.S., and aren't standing at a major road crossing, you can just walk across. Get a good DeLorme map of Maine and there are a ton of dirt roads and Jeep trails up in the backwoods that wander over the border -- if you're on one, you'd never know. When I used to live there, every once in a while you'd hear a story about somebody who got in trouble, or dodged getting in trouble, after accidentally taking a deer on the wrong side of the line.
Somewhere recently I read a story about a town on the U.S./Canada border that's literally divided in half. They don't really try to enforce the checkpoints on the people that live there, because it would get a little ridiculous. There are also towns in Maine that I've heard of, which only have road access from the Canadian side.
That said, although we need to do something about the porosity of both borders (as well as our ports and maritime areas), I think the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is different than between the U.S. and Mexico, and the solutions there might be slightly different as a result, and focus more on 'defense in depth' and law-enforcement cooperation, rather than literal barriers. (The U.S./Canada border is so huge, compared even to the Mexican border, that fencing it just isn't practical, much less monitoring it.) The challenges on the northern border are different, and thus I think some creativity and different solutions are required.
True. But my point was more, "if there was some technology that could give us 100x performance in 10 years, it would be put to use."
Technology has given us (by your numbers, which look fine to me) a 26-50x improvement in the last decade, and modern applications and games are still pushing that right along. If the engineers had managed 100x, then we'd all be using faster machines, and our applications would be that much more resource-intensive.
So anyway, what I was really disputing was the GGP's claim that, in essence, there's some limit above which most people won't care about having a faster computer. I think that's false, and there are enough broken predictions ("640k should be good enough.." etc.) surrounding it to show that people will buy hardware based on applications and features, and applications will be designed for cutting edge hardware, and thus the upgrade treadmill will continue with no signs of stopping, regardless of how many times more powerful computers get for the same price.
I was wondering how long it was going to take someone to work some totally non sequitur U.S.-bashing into a technical discussion... and there you went and did it!
but what is even the high-end gamer going to need a chip 100 times faster than today's machines for any time in the next decade?
If you compare megahertz-cores (number of megahertz times number of cores at that speed), I suspect that there's been almost a 100x increase in the past 10 years, at least if you look from the low end a decade ago to the high end of personal computers now.
I don't see why the next ten years would be any different. Operating systems will continue to get more bloated, software packages will get more feature-stuffed, games will continue to demand just slightly more than whatever's available to most people with expenses and regular lives, and most people will buy a new machine every few years based on whatever's on sale for $500 at Best Buy when their old one gets clogged with spyware.
Sure, 100x might be a bit of a stretch (I'm not sure whether silicon will go that much further and I'm not totally convinced that parallelism is the solution for general-purpose computing), but if that kind of power was available, it would be put to use.
Software expands to fill the resources made available to it, and then some. Always has and always will.
I'm not sure that the objections to the border fence and RealID are the same, or are really being objected to by the same people.
At least that I've seen, a lot of people seem to be against RealID, while also being supportive of robust enforcement of our immigration laws. They (and I include myself in this camp) want our immigration laws enforced, but want it enforced in ways that don't impose upon and potentially make criminals out of many legitimate citizens who don't want to be forced to carry around "papers" all the time, or have to show them to any official on command. People want our immigration law enforced at our borders, with possible incursions 'inland' to attempt to remedy (by which I mean, deport) people who are known to be here illegally.
But in general I think that the two aren't hand in hand. I don't really understand the objections to the border wall, since it seems like a totally unremarkable and obvious solution when you've got people walking across that shouldn't be walking across (I also think that putting the military down there is an obvious solution, too, since defending the nation's borders is a totally legitimate use for the military -- why is it OK to use our military to defend some other country's borders and not our own?). My personal suspicion there is that the opposition is pragmatic rather than philosophical -- there are a lot of agribusiness lobbies that depend on illegal immigrants and don't want anything that makes the labor supply tighter, and a robust border defense would do that. Also, Bush seems to be almost comically cozy with the Mexican President, and the Mexicans obviously don't want any U.S. border defenses, because illegal workers in the 'States are a major source of income for Mexico. (But why we should really care about that is beyond me. Last time I checked, Mexico didn't have a seat in the Senate.)
At any rate, I think it's not at all hypocritical to be against the internal borders that Real ID would create, while also supporting firm control over our external borders, both to the north and south.
Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at in the last two paragraphs. I think this will mostly affect situations where there are big VAR networks competing with internet discounters, and probably won't affect Wal-Mart much, at least from a consumer's perspective. However, they'll probably have to flex their muscles with manufacturers to keep it that way.
Every California person looking to get a Driver's License will get fingerprinted, and I imagine a number of other states do the same. Every American that wants a passport also gets fingerprinted and has to show documents such as his/her Birth Certificate, etc. No -- absolutely not true. I can't say that California is unique in fingerprinting drivers-license applicants, but it's definitely not widespread. I've never been fingerprinted for anything aside from a Concealed Carry Permit for a handgun. [1] (I have a suspicion that the fingerprinting requirement in California has to do with the number of illegal/undocumented/bad-IDed workers they have there, and they see fingerprints as the only practical way to keep people from using forged papers. Good reason not to live there IMO.)
In many other states, you have to prove that you're a legal resident of the state you're applying for the Drivers License in, which can involve showing them your birth certificate, Passport, Green Card, or Consular Report of Birth Abroad (equivalent of a Birth Certificate for children born to U.S. parents outside the borders of the U.S.), as well as evidence that you're actually a resident of the state itself (to keep people from double-registering), and I don't have any problem with that. But the fingerprinting seems intensely creepy.
Also, I don't know where you got the fingerprinting requirement for a Passport, but that's likewise not true. Again, you need to prove both identity and citizenship, but I've had a Passport for years and I've never been fingerprinted.
[1] And even there, I think it's creepy, and mostly only a feature of fairly liberal states/counties that are doing it as a bureaucratic hurdle to discourage people from applying for CCWs. That's definitely how it works in VA.
What I don't understand is why people get so up in arms about requiring people to prove that they are eligible for the services for which they are applying. Well, I strongly oppose Real ID, and I certainly don't oppose "requiring people to prove that they are eligible for the services for which they are applying."
You should absolutely, without question, have to prove eligibility before you receive any form of government service. However, I fail to see how getting on a bus or train or plane, operated by a private carrier, paid for out of my own pocket, is a "government service." I'm not asking for a government service there, and I don't think I should have to have some rentacop-gestapo-wannabe tell me that I need to show any fucking papers for it.
Apply for welfare? Definitely require ID (and not just ID, proof of eligibility, including citizenship and residence). Same for voting. And given that we've permanently wormed the government into employment (mandatory payroll deductions for taxes, Social Security, etc.), and you're essentially applying for an (albeit mandatory, probably unwanted) "service" when you take a job, I can see requiring it there, too.
But the offensive part of Real ID was the travel requirements; America has always been a nation without internal borders, and that was for reasons that are as true now as they were in the 18th century.
Microsoft may not benefit, but Wal-Mart certainly will.
I don't think you're understanding the decision.
Right now, and for the past 90-odd years, it was illegal for a manufacturer to demand or enforce a price floor on its retail distributors.
The USSC said that now, manufacturers can do this. That's the change.
If anything, this is going to hurt Wal-Mart, because it prevents them from using their distribution network and huge size to drive out competition, at least not on brand-name goods.
Example: right now, Wal-Mart carries Sony cameras. Sony can't enforce a price floor, so they sell the cameras to everyone at the wholesale price -- say $250. Because Wal-Mart is so big, they only need to charge a small markup, or maybe not even any markup at all. So they price the camera at $249 or $255. A smaller camera store somewhere can't exist on those margins, in order to meet overhead it needs to sell the camera at $275. Until now, this would have been how the prices would have fallen. (And it's incidentally why you can go to one store, like Best Buy or Wal-Mart, and find a camera for less than you can find it for at Ritz Camera -- which has much more overhead -- or go to an online store with virtually no overhead and find it cheaper than any B&M store.)
With the ruling, Sony can -- if it chooses -- require its distributors to agree to a price floor on its products. It still sells them cameras at the wholesale price of $250 each, but they're contractually obligated not to sell them to customers for less than $275. Sony doesn't make any more money (at least not directly), but it forces the playing field to be artificially 'level' between distributors. To the consumer, the prices get higher. Wal-Mart suddenly has the same prices as every other store, at least on the same products. (Wal-Mart makes more profit on each unit sold, because its overhead is lower, but this isn't obvious to the consumer.)
If anything this is very bad for big-box stores, because it's harder for them to use big name-brand items as loss leaders to bring in business. The people it's worst for are the deep-discount internet retailers, since they effectively have to compete against a local B&M, while still charging the same prices.
In reality I doubt it'll really affect Wal-Mart that much, because WM is big enough that they can go to almost any manufacturer in the world who might be thinking of demanding a price floor, and tell them to drop dead.
Where I really see this having a lot of effect is in markets where there's still a large independent VAR network, little product placement in big-box stores, and a lot of deep-discount internet retailers. Musical instruments and pro audio equipment comes to mind. Every city has a musical-instrument store or two in it somewhere, and they generally charge a lot more than internet retailers; I can imagine that in the near future, companies like Yamaha and Roland are going to be under a lot of pressure from their VAR networks to institute price floors and force the internet retailers to sell products at the same prices that they go for in the B&M stores.
I'm not sure there's any hard and fast definition, but I took it to mean a blend of "neo-conservativism" and "libertarianism," aka "Republican Libertarianism," rather than some other subsets of Libertarianism. (Anarcho-Libertarianism, etc.)
'Libertarian' is a umbrella term that covers a whole lot of people and groups with a variety of philosophies and stances on particular issues, with the only common thread being an interest in individual liberties. The way that is accomplished, and the practical effects it has, are widely debated.
Just for everyone's collective enlightenment, the story about day-care is discussed in Freakonomics. IIRC it occured in Israel.
Definitely a book worth reading if you're even peripherally interested in economics or the economic consequences of everyday actions. Good light summer reading.
Slashdot Mirror
The systems all seem to use RF to talk between the key fob and the system in the car.
... I'd be suspicious.
Although I'm sure the key fob transmitter is low power, that doesn't mean you couldn't trigger it with a more powerful transmitter, from further away...you'd need to build some mechanism into the receiver in order to make it addressable (so you wouldn't knock out all the cars on the road, although I suppose that would be an interesting feature as well), but as long as you've got everyone wiring a black box into critical parts of their car, why not?
Not saying that's necessarily what they're up to, and I gather the Canucks seem to have a...different degree...of trust in their government than I do down here, but if the government told me that I must install a radio-controlled device into the ignition system of my car, and gave me only five models to choose from, made by three obscure companies that I'd never heard of
IIRC, there were some proposals back in the 80s/early-90s for systems that would use EMP-like technologies to disable cars remotely during chases; the most ridiculous one that I remember was a device mounted on a police car that shot a large manhole-sized device, frisbee-style, under the car it was pursuing, which would produce some sort of pulse as it passed under the engine, disabling the car. Seemed like a hell of a long shot to me, but it was attractive enough during the height of the crack/crime epidemic to get some people interested, apparently. I never heard anything about it again, so I'm thinking that it was vaporware. Although not that long ago there was an article here on Slashdot about some sort of "sticky" car-tracker that the police could use to tag cars during pursuits and use like an involuntary Lo-Jack -- that seems a lot more feasible.
Maybe true: no 2 year committment to ATT, but perhaps a 1 year committment in the local state penitentiary :-). Well, this is probably better than to be with ATT, so GO FOR IT!
Either way, you're going to get fucked.
Surprises me too.
However, a few years ago there was someone who was talking about an "imminent Usenet renaissance." Not sure that's actually occurred but their theory was that most ISPs no longer make it easy to get on Usenet, so the users who actually participate in discussions there are usually fairly interested / experts. In other words, most of the AOL users / script kiddies / etc. are busy trolling PHPBB sites, because they're easier to get into than Usenet.
Unfortunately because of the spam problems, there's really no point in reading unmoderated groups IMO.
From an architectural standpoint I really like Usenet. It's just unfortunate that upgrades to it that would have curtailed spam and kept it alive and more mainstream never caught on. It's certainly a better way of having a global discussion system than discrete, centralized web forums, where a single server crash (or rogue admin, or hacking) can eliminate thousands or millions of discussions in an instant. Usenet is the collective memory of the internet, thanks to caching services; very few web forums can compete with that. (Actually I'd say that Slashdot is one of the few that does, because Slashdot has been consistently good about preserving old content and not deleting stuff; most database-driven web sites aren't like that, though.)
Almost makes me want to fire up my newsreader and see if there's anything there to see. Almost.
Anyone out there familiar enough with the systems involved to describe exactly what they're trying to mandate?
Most new cars I've bought in the past 8 years or so have had systems that prevent the engine from starting if the car doesn't handshake with a microchip in the ignition key shank. (However, contrary to what some people apparently believe, they don't make the cars impossible to steal, of course.) Is this what they're talking about? I can't imagine it would be easy to retrofit one on a car that doesn't have one already, since it's a pretty integral part of the ignition system and ECU.
According to this page, there are only a few immobilizers that pass some sort of Canadian standard, but I couldn't get any information on how they work by Googling them, and they don't seem to be widespread outside of Canada. (Or actually outside the province of Manitoba at all.) The small number of approved designs combined with making them very widespread via compulsory installation seems like a recipe for disaster: if the thieves are already getting past the safeguards built into modern cars from the factory, they're not stupid; I expect it won't be long before how to bypass them becomes common knowledge. [1]
I think this is the web site of one manufacturer of approved devices, Autowatch. Basically they look like some sort of key-fob RF transponder that communicates either automatically or on-command with a receiver in the car that immobilizes it. Seems like there's a variety of attack vectors there, from just routing around the disablement device in the car, to faking the code (easy if it's a rolling-code system, harder if it's a public-key handshake). Ups the ante a little bit, and it might make thieves target older cars instead of newer ones (which doesn't strike me as an exactly socially useful outcome) or push them to neighboring provinces, but I'm pretty skeptical that it'll have much of a substantial long-term effect on crime.
[1] If I were living there I'd also be immediately and deeply suspicious of any government mandate that requires the purchase of a device from a for-profit corporation, particularly when it only gives you the choice of three corporations, and one corporation makes 3/5 approved models. Seems like a recipe for corruption to me. But then again, I don't trust government further than I can throw it. (And an insurance company run by the government? Nightmare.)
Well, if you're a AAA member you can get this now. For example, I just did a 1,300 mile drive and used AAA's website to get the directions. You set the starting location and the destination and then you can add things like construction information, restaurants, hotels, gas stations, etc. You can add multiple stops, force it to take certain routes, etc. It ends up with an overview similar to what MapQuest and Google Maps do, but then it also gives around 30 pages with detailed maps of every intersection and major area, alternatives, etc. It's really nice.
You're aware, I hope, that AAA has been doing this for about 30 years....manually.
You've always been able to go in to an AAA office and get a map package like this. It has some sort of funny name, maybe a "TripTix"? You could tell them your start and end address and date of travel, and they'd do up a nice customized route plan for you, with information on traffic and other possible delays, with your route highlighted and nice typed directions. Basically they'd take maps for each step of the way, highlight them, bundle them with all the directions and other info, and bind them all together in a nice neat package. Very labor-intensive -- I'd be surprised if they still offered the service. Last time I went to get one was about 10 years ago, and I think they had cut you down to one per member per year.
Used to always get them for family vacations back in the day. Probably still have a few around too.
It's offensive enough to a wide enough swath of Americans as to make it a non-starter, particularly after the defeat of the bill today (which contrary to TFA was more because it was hated, by both sides, than because of Real ID).
Furthermore, the number of Americans who support "legalization" varies widely depending on who's conducting the poll and how you word the questions therein; a while back there was a poll that showed that 66% of Americans would "say 'yes' to ordinances that suspend the business licenses of employers who hire illegal aliens, penalize landlords who rent to illegal aliens with fines and make English the official language," (unfortunately the actual article that was linked to on Digg has gone subscription-only). There's a fairly widely quoted Rassmussen poll that claims that "Sixty-nine percent (69%) of voters would favor an approach that focuses exclusively on 'exclusively on [sic] securing the border and reducing illegal immigration.'"
The fact that the percentages drop to around 20-30% when you alter the wording means that there are a lot of people, I think, who don't really know what they think about it, or don't have a very cohesive opinion. (Or they're just inconsistent or feel differently based on the issue; they might come across as pro-immigration in one poll that asks about deportation, but anti-illegal in another that asks about punishing employers.)
I'm not really pushing for any poll over any other -- they all can be manipulated to tell one side of the story or another (and frequently are) -- but the bottom line is that the bill that was finally killed today was a path to legalization, and nobody liked it. It's an issue that's divisive enough that I think Congress will think twice before bringing it up again, and that means that border security needs to move forward without depending on an amnesty plan to win Mexican cooperation with.
disrespectful to record stores? Hwah? How? Because they don't get to sell the CDs Prince decided to give away? I recently gave a camera to a friend... should the local camera shop be angry? I dinged their sales!
Replace "camera" with "music," and "local camera shop" with "giant media conglomerate," and the answer, I think, is yes.
It seems that in the past 10 years or so, many corporations have decided to treat anything that denies them revenue as if it's identical to actually taking something they already had. Personally, I think it's an effect of the type of cash-flow accounting and projection that's now overwhelmingly popular, where the entire worth of your business (read: stock price) is based on how much money you think you're going to make. When it turns out that, oops, you didn't actually make that much money, they go absolutely berzerk and start looking for anyone to pin the blame on. Because, to them, they've already made that money, in some weird way, as soon as they started projecting it.
(...)
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Piracy is ethically no different from a mob looting a store whose locks were broken. Apparently.
Is it really true that they're "distributing" Linux by selling the SLES coupons?
The way I read this, it's a pretty high-risk maneuver. They've essentially given Novell a free pass, hoping that they can undermine Microsoft with the SLES coupons thing. But if Microsoft can argue that they're not really distributing Linux by selling the coupons, then the whole thing, I think, unravels -- Novell gets a free pass for nothing and can continue on its merry way, remaining in the death-pact with Microsoft and using GPL3 code.
Given that Microsoft isn't screaming bloody murder about this, I think they must not see it as a big risk, and that to me isn't a good thing. It means they think they can avoid having their patents undermined, and if that's true, then excepting Novell will be for nothing.
Please read my reply to the post just above yours; I actually agree with you more than I think you realize. Although I believe in secure borders that doesn't necessarily imply a one-size-fits-all solution. The problems on the U.S./Canada border are entirely different from those on the U.S./Mexico border, as well as the relationship between the countries themselves, and thus I think the solutions will be quite different.
On the northern border, the U.S. and Canada have a lot of mutual interests, both in having secure borders but in also allowing the free flow of ideas, people, goods, and capital; the perceived risk on the northern border, from the U.S. standpoint, isn't from Canada itself, but rather the possibility of Canada acting as an unwitting conduit into the U.S. from less-friendly places. It seems to me as if much of that risk could be mitigated through cooperation.
The problem in the south is that the U.S. and Mexican governments are at odds over a great many things; the Mexican government has goals that are frankly not conducive to U.S. border security. (E.g.: Mexico's economy is dependent on the money that illegal workers in the U.S. send back, and those workers depend on a porous border to get here; on lower levels you have corruption caused by drug cartels who benefit by insecure U.S. borders.) Lacking any basis for an effective cooperative solution that's not highly offensive to people in the U.S. (in other words, one that doesn't involve legalizing drugs or illegal workers), I think the U.S. government has a mandate to act in its citizens' best interest and deploy a more or less unilateral solution.
Although the U.S. and Canada have significant political and cultural differences, I don't really see many of the issues that are leading to calls for a border wall or military deployment on the southern border becoming an issue in the north.
Not just natives, if you drive up into pretty much any border state in the U.S., and aren't standing at a major road crossing, you can just walk across. Get a good DeLorme map of Maine and there are a ton of dirt roads and Jeep trails up in the backwoods that wander over the border -- if you're on one, you'd never know. When I used to live there, every once in a while you'd hear a story about somebody who got in trouble, or dodged getting in trouble, after accidentally taking a deer on the wrong side of the line.
Somewhere recently I read a story about a town on the U.S./Canada border that's literally divided in half. They don't really try to enforce the checkpoints on the people that live there, because it would get a little ridiculous. There are also towns in Maine that I've heard of, which only have road access from the Canadian side.
That said, although we need to do something about the porosity of both borders (as well as our ports and maritime areas), I think the relationship between Canada and the U.S. is different than between the U.S. and Mexico, and the solutions there might be slightly different as a result, and focus more on 'defense in depth' and law-enforcement cooperation, rather than literal barriers. (The U.S./Canada border is so huge, compared even to the Mexican border, that fencing it just isn't practical, much less monitoring it.) The challenges on the northern border are different, and thus I think some creativity and different solutions are required.
True. But my point was more, "if there was some technology that could give us 100x performance in 10 years, it would be put to use."
Technology has given us (by your numbers, which look fine to me) a 26-50x improvement in the last decade, and modern applications and games are still pushing that right along. If the engineers had managed 100x, then we'd all be using faster machines, and our applications would be that much more resource-intensive.
So anyway, what I was really disputing was the GGP's claim that, in essence, there's some limit above which most people won't care about having a faster computer. I think that's false, and there are enough broken predictions ("640k should be good enough.." etc.) surrounding it to show that people will buy hardware based on applications and features, and applications will be designed for cutting edge hardware, and thus the upgrade treadmill will continue with no signs of stopping, regardless of how many times more powerful computers get for the same price.
I was wondering how long it was going to take someone to work some totally non sequitur U.S.-bashing into a technical discussion ... and there you went and did it!
but what is even the high-end gamer going to need a chip 100 times faster than today's machines for any time in the next decade?
If you compare megahertz-cores (number of megahertz times number of cores at that speed), I suspect that there's been almost a 100x increase in the past 10 years, at least if you look from the low end a decade ago to the high end of personal computers now.
I don't see why the next ten years would be any different. Operating systems will continue to get more bloated, software packages will get more feature-stuffed, games will continue to demand just slightly more than whatever's available to most people with expenses and regular lives, and most people will buy a new machine every few years based on whatever's on sale for $500 at Best Buy when their old one gets clogged with spyware.
Sure, 100x might be a bit of a stretch (I'm not sure whether silicon will go that much further and I'm not totally convinced that parallelism is the solution for general-purpose computing), but if that kind of power was available, it would be put to use.
Software expands to fill the resources made available to it, and then some. Always has and always will.
I'm not sure that the objections to the border fence and RealID are the same, or are really being objected to by the same people.
At least that I've seen, a lot of people seem to be against RealID, while also being supportive of robust enforcement of our immigration laws. They (and I include myself in this camp) want our immigration laws enforced, but want it enforced in ways that don't impose upon and potentially make criminals out of many legitimate citizens who don't want to be forced to carry around "papers" all the time, or have to show them to any official on command. People want our immigration law enforced at our borders, with possible incursions 'inland' to attempt to remedy (by which I mean, deport) people who are known to be here illegally.
But in general I think that the two aren't hand in hand. I don't really understand the objections to the border wall, since it seems like a totally unremarkable and obvious solution when you've got people walking across that shouldn't be walking across (I also think that putting the military down there is an obvious solution, too, since defending the nation's borders is a totally legitimate use for the military -- why is it OK to use our military to defend some other country's borders and not our own?). My personal suspicion there is that the opposition is pragmatic rather than philosophical -- there are a lot of agribusiness lobbies that depend on illegal immigrants and don't want anything that makes the labor supply tighter, and a robust border defense would do that. Also, Bush seems to be almost comically cozy with the Mexican President, and the Mexicans obviously don't want any U.S. border defenses, because illegal workers in the 'States are a major source of income for Mexico. (But why we should really care about that is beyond me. Last time I checked, Mexico didn't have a seat in the Senate.)
At any rate, I think it's not at all hypocritical to be against the internal borders that Real ID would create, while also supporting firm control over our external borders, both to the north and south.
Yeah, that's kinda what I was getting at in the last two paragraphs. I think this will mostly affect situations where there are big VAR networks competing with internet discounters, and probably won't affect Wal-Mart much, at least from a consumer's perspective. However, they'll probably have to flex their muscles with manufacturers to keep it that way.
I'm totally with you. Although, I think the Voyager missions are even more humbling.
s /
Voyager 2 weekly reports (from 1995 to 2007, not sure where the 1977 to 1995 ones are) available:
http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/weekly-report
In many other states, you have to prove that you're a legal resident of the state you're applying for the Drivers License in, which can involve showing them your birth certificate, Passport, Green Card, or Consular Report of Birth Abroad (equivalent of a Birth Certificate for children born to U.S. parents outside the borders of the U.S.), as well as evidence that you're actually a resident of the state itself (to keep people from double-registering), and I don't have any problem with that. But the fingerprinting seems intensely creepy.
Also, I don't know where you got the fingerprinting requirement for a Passport, but that's likewise not true. Again, you need to prove both identity and citizenship, but I've had a Passport for years and I've never been fingerprinted.
[1] And even there, I think it's creepy, and mostly only a feature of fairly liberal states/counties that are doing it as a bureaucratic hurdle to discourage people from applying for CCWs. That's definitely how it works in VA.
s/Kryptonite/pork/g
You should absolutely, without question, have to prove eligibility before you receive any form of government service. However, I fail to see how getting on a bus or train or plane, operated by a private carrier, paid for out of my own pocket, is a "government service." I'm not asking for a government service there, and I don't think I should have to have some rentacop-gestapo-wannabe tell me that I need to show any fucking papers for it.
Apply for welfare? Definitely require ID (and not just ID, proof of eligibility, including citizenship and residence). Same for voting. And given that we've permanently wormed the government into employment (mandatory payroll deductions for taxes, Social Security, etc.), and you're essentially applying for an (albeit mandatory, probably unwanted) "service" when you take a job, I can see requiring it there, too.
But the offensive part of Real ID was the travel requirements; America has always been a nation without internal borders, and that was for reasons that are as true now as they were in the 18th century.
Microsoft may not benefit, but Wal-Mart certainly will.
I don't think you're understanding the decision.
Right now, and for the past 90-odd years, it was illegal for a manufacturer to demand or enforce a price floor on its retail distributors.
The USSC said that now, manufacturers can do this. That's the change.
If anything, this is going to hurt Wal-Mart, because it prevents them from using their distribution network and huge size to drive out competition, at least not on brand-name goods.
Example: right now, Wal-Mart carries Sony cameras. Sony can't enforce a price floor, so they sell the cameras to everyone at the wholesale price -- say $250. Because Wal-Mart is so big, they only need to charge a small markup, or maybe not even any markup at all. So they price the camera at $249 or $255. A smaller camera store somewhere can't exist on those margins, in order to meet overhead it needs to sell the camera at $275. Until now, this would have been how the prices would have fallen. (And it's incidentally why you can go to one store, like Best Buy or Wal-Mart, and find a camera for less than you can find it for at Ritz Camera -- which has much more overhead -- or go to an online store with virtually no overhead and find it cheaper than any B&M store.)
With the ruling, Sony can -- if it chooses -- require its distributors to agree to a price floor on its products. It still sells them cameras at the wholesale price of $250 each, but they're contractually obligated not to sell them to customers for less than $275. Sony doesn't make any more money (at least not directly), but it forces the playing field to be artificially 'level' between distributors. To the consumer, the prices get higher. Wal-Mart suddenly has the same prices as every other store, at least on the same products. (Wal-Mart makes more profit on each unit sold, because its overhead is lower, but this isn't obvious to the consumer.)
If anything this is very bad for big-box stores, because it's harder for them to use big name-brand items as loss leaders to bring in business. The people it's worst for are the deep-discount internet retailers, since they effectively have to compete against a local B&M, while still charging the same prices.
In reality I doubt it'll really affect Wal-Mart that much, because WM is big enough that they can go to almost any manufacturer in the world who might be thinking of demanding a price floor, and tell them to drop dead.
Where I really see this having a lot of effect is in markets where there's still a large independent VAR network, little product placement in big-box stores, and a lot of deep-discount internet retailers. Musical instruments and pro audio equipment comes to mind. Every city has a musical-instrument store or two in it somewhere, and they generally charge a lot more than internet retailers; I can imagine that in the near future, companies like Yamaha and Roland are going to be under a lot of pressure from their VAR networks to institute price floors and force the internet retailers to sell products at the same prices that they go for in the B&M stores.
Microsoft is a monopoly. This means that they can set a base price on any product and no one can legally go beneath it.
What's the latency on the space-time wormhole you're apparently communicating through?
I'm not sure there's any hard and fast definition, but I took it to mean a blend of "neo-conservativism" and "libertarianism," aka "Republican Libertarianism," rather than some other subsets of Libertarianism. (Anarcho-Libertarianism, etc.)
'Libertarian' is a umbrella term that covers a whole lot of people and groups with a variety of philosophies and stances on particular issues, with the only common thread being an interest in individual liberties. The way that is accomplished, and the practical effects it has, are widely debated.
Just for everyone's collective enlightenment, the story about day-care is discussed in Freakonomics. IIRC it occured in Israel.
Definitely a book worth reading if you're even peripherally interested in economics or the economic consequences of everyday actions. Good light summer reading.
Free-as-in-liberty does not have anything to do with free-as-in-healthcare.