Of course, I was referring to Cicero's Latin as defined by Wheelock's Latin textbook.
That's my point - why "of course"? There are other Latin textbooks out there and many of them use a different pronunciation method and which one is "right" depends - If you are using a common latin phrase in everyday english the "english" method of just pronuncing it the way you would if it was english is "right". Try telling a U.S. Marine that they are pronuncing "Semper Fidelis" all wrong, or any educated person that they have been screwing up "etcetera" all this time. If you are singing christmas carols and pronuncing "in excelcis deo" Mr. Wheelock's way you are going to irritate the singers around you using ecclesiastical latin (the second "c" is pronunced "ch" not the english "s" or classical "k"). In a college classroom you are fine with Mr. Wheelocks method but I'd wager in most classrooms (aside from the most pedantic) proper pronunciation is secondary to the ability to read and write in latin.
It's not like we really know how Cicero pronunced things (though we can make a few guesses) and it's not like anyone is learning "conversational latin" so they can talk to a native speaker.
Re:Slightly Offtopic
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Review: Solaris
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· Score: 5, Informative
Solaris is a Latin word (not a coined-up one)
Search online for a guide to Latin pronounciation.
You still have a problem since there is more than one "proper" pronounciation of latin words. There is classical or antiquarian pronunciation, christian or ecclesiastical pronunciation and protestant or english pronunciation. I'm not that familiar with classical pronunciation (I know it pronunces "v" as "w", "c"'s are hard like "k" etc), the protestant pronunciation method is to just say it how it looks to you, christian pronunciation is that used by the Catholic church. Using the catholic church method i believe you would say the "o" as in "for" not "go" the "a" as in "car" and the "i" as "ee" as in "feet". In other words like most other latin words used in english if you do it "right" only your parish priest even understands what you just said, or you come across as showing off - save the latin pronunciation for when you are using it in a latin sentance.
When I leave for the second time, do I get charged again for the stuff I've already paid for?
I will conceed that the articles vision of completely getting rid of checkout lines is a bit far out but the RFID tags are a reality and they will allow for some very interesting things to happen. The checkout will probably consist of simply walking through the checkout, seeing the list of items, total & selecting a method of payment. In some situations perhaps having a bagger take your items out of the cart and put them in bags for you (which by itself resolves most of the security issues). But scanning the items & ringing them up will be gone. If you want to go back in and then out without being rung up again, don't forget your reciept and go out by the service desk to avoid getting charged.
There are more interesting possiblities. For instance you take a microwaveable burrito out of the fridge which notes that it is now one below the set minumum number of burritos & adds burritos to it's peapod.com order for the next scheduled delivery. You stick it in the microwave & press "auto". The microwave reads the tag, gets the manufacturers recommended power-level & time off the net & zaps the burrito. To get really creepy you sit down at the TV which knows you are now out of burittos and puts up an ad for the competing brand (the high bidder on the "just ate last burrito in the fridge demographic"). You throw out the empty container which goes to the recycling plant where the tags are used to properly sort the recyclables.
Now seeing such connectivity & automation in a typical consumer's home life is admittedly a little far fetched (though most of the things I mentioned have been done in demo's - including the bit with the hyper-targetted TV ad). However, you will likely see very similar scenarios occuring very soon throughout industry & the supply chain. Pervasive RFID allows you to extend the information revolution of the internet beyond abstract bits & bytes of information to include real physical objects. All the implications of such real-time networking of information about real objects are hard to imagine but are likely to be very significant.
RFIDs on clothing? Wouldnt that make it easier for the people to steal stuff if the cashier element was eliminated?
No because they know when an item walks out of the store withoug having been paid for. Think you'll cut the tag off? No, There is no reason for it to be somewhere you can easily do so. Put it in a metalic bag so readers can no longer detect it? No, it is constantly being read by readers around the store. The moment it goes off the net security is notified that an item has "disappeared" and exactly where it was the moment before. No need to spy on you, they aren't tracking *you* at all, they are tracking the products so closely they don't need to.
I'm sure that the articles vision of zero checkout is a bit far out. There will be a checkout but you won't have to take your items out of the cart or basket at all, just walk through the checkout, take a quick look at the readout to check the total & list of items you're buying - select payment method & hit the approval button.
The AutoID center is doing field trials on using the RFID tags for inventory (but not I think for automagic checkouts) & I understand that the first real big order for tags has been made by one of the major consumer products companies.
Receiver fails to detect CC ID chip - customer gets hassled by security/alarms go off.
If it is not detected how would they know to hassle you?
However an aluminum bag (as the poster above suggests) would still not work because the RFID tag is *always* being detected by readers all over the store. Putting it in the aluminum bag makes it "disapear" from the system - which would lead to being hassled by security.
Receiver fails to detect goods/detects wrong number. Makes stock inventory no easier, overcharging and undercharging still a problem.
I don't know how big a problem detecting wrong numbers will be but even with such occasional problems (which happen with bar codes & humans as well) inventory will still be easier. The back wall of the shelving units will be readers that always know *exactly* what is in the store and *exactly* where it is. (They can print the reader antenna onto contact paper). The system not only knows that there are exactly 12 bottles of Cheer on a particular shelf but also that there is one moving down aisle three (in someones cart), one misplaced by a customer on the "impulse item" shelf near the checkout and one has mysteriously dissapeared when the above poster put it in an aluminum bag (the system duly notifying security). Such constant, hyper-accurate (hopefully), real-time inventory management is (one of) the real goals of the RFID tags - more convenient checkout is just an added bonus made possible by such super accurate inventory managment.
No the wings don't flap, which is the defining characteristic of an ornithopter.
As far as I can tell from the google cache of the images this thing has a fan that looks like an old-fashioned lawn-mower that is blowing air over the entire length of it's wing - which apparently provides a lot of lift very efficiently.
Any legitimate statistics to back that up, bucko?
I'm not the original poster but here is a study with a few statistics Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns (warning: this is a PDF) - his was a national study on a county-by-county basis evaluating the effect of right-to-carry laws. It found that counties that introduced right-to-carry laws saw a murder fall by 8.5%, rape fall by 5% and aggrevated assault fall by 7%. You'll have to read the study itself to evaluate it's methodology & raw data - most competing studies that dispute his claims have been done on a state by state rather than county by county basis (such as the study commisioned by the Brady Campaign to disprove Lott's findings). The reason he chose to do it by county is that in many of the state laws counties or munipalities that dominate certain counties have broad discretion in how they issue permits - other state laws explicitly exempt certain localities. For example how good is state data from Pennsylvania in measuring the effect of handgun legislation when Philidelphia (where much of the crime occurs) is exempted from the state law.
How many crimes have you heard of thwarted because someone brandished a Smith and Wesson
Personally only a few - they show up in the local paper from time to time. Of course completely deterred crimes where not even an attempt was made would be impossible to measure except by inference (as in Lott's study) National polls indicate that people use guns defensively against criminal attacks somwhere between 760,000 and 3.5 million times per year (Kleck, Gary and marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun" 86 Journal of Criminal Law and Ciminology 86 - fall 1995).
Data from the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey from 1979 to 1987 indicate that the risk for serious injury from a criminal attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a gun (Southwick, 1996).
True, but then your gun control system has to work properly, i.e. to ensure that criminals do not get hold of guns. In the US it is way too easy to get illegal guns.
As a purely practical matter a lot of guns already exist in the USA. To actually disarm the criminals would require truly draconian invasions of privacy - way, way, way beyond what we are all complaining about after 9/11. Therefore your only option is to disarm law abiding citizens, disarming criminals is a pipe-dream. If we were starting with a clean slate a total gun ban might make sense, we are not.
As for the idea that confronted with the likelyhood that their victim is armed will cause criminals to shoot first - a few thoughts. Most of the reasonably rational and intelligent criminals have already been detered by the likelyhood that their victims will be armed. The irrational and stupid won't be but they were just as likely to shoot you before as they are now. Of the remaining - hard-core that are rational enough to think out that they should shoot first to increase their odds of success some will fail and be shot themselves, some will succeed but will now be a major focus of the police who will A) Pursue a murder investigation much more aggresively than a mere mugging. and B) hopefully have more resources since they don't have to worry about all those crimes that never occured because the criminal *was* detered by his armed victim.
As for the trauma of having to defend yourself - I think any rational father would prefer the trauma of having shot a criminal to defend himself and his daughters over the trauma of his and his daughter being shot themselves. While the two that ran away may continue to be criminals the two that were killed most assuredly will NOT. This man has not only defended himself but also effected a 50% reduction in crime from that particular population of 4 (now 2) criminals. He is not a "hero" he is indeed a hero, there is no need for the scare quotes. I will conceed his heroism exacted a cost in the trauma suffered by himself and his daughters but I would submit that a lack of heroism would have likely had just as high, if not a much higher cost.
Actually there have been a few studies that suggest that it does in fact work. I won't suggest that these studies are conslusive - in any kind of study of society there are just way to many variables. Still they are interesting and *suggest* that an armed citizenry does deter crime to some extent. It does make sense to me that with an armed citizenry there probably IS a trade off between a lower rate of premeditated crimes and an increase in the level of severity (but not necessarily occurance) of crimes of passion. For obvious reasons gun-rights advocates will focus on the one, while gun-control advocates will focus on the other. The reality is probably somewhere in between and probably influenced to a large degree by completely unrelated factors.
You mean to tell me that Bill Clinton was cozy with Hollywood (what a stunning revelation, who would have thought it?) That he supported the DMCA and that Ashcroft (Ashcroft!?!) was the "good guy" on this issue - with a more reasonable law that defended fair use rights? Stop!! You'll make my/. saturated brain implode!! It can't be!!... that doesn't conform to the simple caricatures that explain my world... too complex... doesn't compute... ahh....
*sticks fingers ears* and chants: "Republicans are evil, Ashcroft is Satan" as loudly as possible.
Umm... The link you posted seems to suggest otherwise. Just look at the pictures. The fact that you appeared to have missed this seems to suggest that YOU are not a straight man.
The way I look at it, every parent will have a different view of what's 'right' for their kids. How can some central authority take a concensus of all these opinions?
You are making way to much of a problem out of this. While different parents have somewhat different standards the differences are pretty much on the margins. There is a vast quantity of material on the net which NO parent wants their kid to see. The consensus exists and I suspect that those who raise this as an issue are
being willfully ignorant to sustain opposition to any attempt to protect kids from the more distrubing stuff on the net. It seems that ANY attempt to restrict 6 year olds from seeing goatse.cx is ridiculed as censorship, government mind control or religious fundamentalism run amok. I'm sorry but the only fundamentalism involved in these arguments seems to be a secular fundamentalism that makes a fetish of "free-speech" far beyond anything intended by the constitution or the bounds of common sense.
And more than likely the pedophiles and grown men that cruise with names like Soccergirl342 will be there in masse. The way things are going now, the FBI is going to have to be in every chat room.
Please, Read the article - THERE ARE NO CHAT ROOMS!
Re:Idea: Line Item Veto that could work!
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HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 2
Well of course if there was such a thing as the line item veto the congress could override with a 2/3rd majority vote. BUT, you are still adding power to the Executive branch. Right now the President has very little power over legislation - he can use his political influence & persuasion and he can veto. But he can't get into the legislative trenches and *legislate*. With a line-item veto he would gain the ability to not veto but *edit* legislation. With a newfound ability to wade into the details of legislation he would be able to check and thus influence (far more than he can now) *individual* congressmen rather than check congress as a whole.
To be fair to line-item veto proponents they are usually only talking about the massive appropriations bill & only about giving the Prez the ability to veto distinct sections of the bill appropriating money to distinct agencies & departments in their entirety. Of course if congress was prepared to pass a line item veto law there is no reason they couldn't break up the appropriations bill into numerous distinct laws and achieve the same result. If that large number of bills is too unwieldy perhaps they could change their respective house rules to treat the appropriations bill as one bill (as it is now) but as a legal fiction call each section that *would* have been subject to the line-item veto as a distinct bill, which could then be vetoed by the President.
Re:It's gonna be a corporate giveaway this session
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HomeSec In the News
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· Score: 2
...not the least of which I predict will be more goodies for Valenti & Co.
Umm. You are getting your parties confused. Jack Valenti isn't exactly popular with Republicans. In fact it has already been suggested in some conservative opinion journals that the complete evisceration of Valenti's legislative agenda would be fitting punishment for Hollywoods underwriting of the Democratic party.
Bush Jr. (or any other president) would only use the veto to kill of the other side's pork and goodies, not his own.
Yes, but at least that would be 1/2 of the pork.
On the other had there are very good reasons to oppose the line-tem veto. It hands way to much power over legislation to the executive branch. There needs to be a mechanism that at least puts a roadblock or two to stop abuse of the ammendment process BUT that mechanism should be found in the legislative not the executive branch.
Corporate freebies tacked onto bills in the current environment will be allowed to stay, since they paid the current President and party for them.
There is certainly some truth to this. Of course some industries pay the other party and could expect their freebies to be slashed mercilessly. Also it is too pat to assume that the relationship between donors & politicians is a simple as being bought & paid for. (though that certainly happens) In many cases though a politician believes in certain policies for ideological reasons & will generally vote that way no matter who contributes - since those policies will benefit or hurt different interests you will see those interests align with politicians accordingly. That doesn't necessarily mean that the politician will align with the specific intererests of some contibutor in any particular case. For instance Enron (to use the most hated example) was perfectly happy to give certain Republicans plenty of money BUT those same Republicans could be *guaranteed* to oppose Enron's position on the global warming treaty. Enron made the decision that their interests in general were served by those Republicans even though they knew those Republicans would vote against them on that specific issue. Of course Enron hedged their bets and also spent a lot of money on Democrats, environmental advocates & underwriting international environmental confabs to try and have their cake (a generally pro-business Republican administration) and eat it too (a global warming treaty written by the enviros that would make them billions)
Is there any legitimate reason for the US's current process to ammend a bill.
Of course there are - legislators need some ability to edit the legislation that is submitted to them from the committees. BUT, there are also many illegitimate uses of the ammendment process as well. Since the threshold is lower to pass an ammendment than a stand-alone bill you can abuse it in ways that have nothing to do with editting a bill to make it better. If you want something that wouldn't pass on it's own you can tack it on to a completely unrelated bill that will pass (usually something absolutely essential like the spending authority - no one is going to shut down the entire US government just to kill your little pet issue). If you don't like an otherwise popular bill you can tack on unpopular ammendments to ensure it's defeat.
This is why Presidents like the idea of a line-tem veto they can strip out all the special interest clutter without killing the entire bill. Of course that adds a lot of Legislative power to the Executive branch in a way that can also be abused. It would be better if ammendments had to at least show some degree of relatedness to the bill in question. But who would decide which ammendments were legitimate or not? You know that power would be abused. And the ammendment we are talking about here would obviously pass such a test - as wrongheaded as it is it is certainly pertinant to a homeland security bill.
Well I challenge you to tell grandma to differentiate "readme", "read me", "readme" or "read me " (note extra spaces), or to differentiate "one" and "1", or any of a million other things that Windows/Mac file systems will happily store as different files.
Granted you can still screw things up - though you are a little less likely to do so inadvertantly. I still don't see any advantage to doing so or adding the ability to do so in another way.
It makes spelling correction more difficult mostly by discouraging it's use...
I'm sorry if I'm being dense, perhaps I am missunderstanding you - But I don't see how case insensitivity discourages spelling correction. 'Rede Me" and "REDE ME" are both still misspelled (unless you are asking a medieval Englishman for advice).
...and making it impossible to write powerful algorithims that can weigh case-sensitivity against other possible corrections.
There is no reason your spell checker has to be case insensitive just because the file system is. We are talking about the MacOS here which is case insensitive but also case *preserving*. You can still write your powerful algorithms weighing case sensitivity against other possible corrections. If you want to spell-check "Rede Me" but ignore "REDE ME" you can and those two files will always keep their capitisation they way you created them - you just can't put them both in the same directory.
For the "average user" case means nothing. Grandma picks files by clicking on the little pictures and would never notice if many files had the same name.
Lets test your theory using the common scenario of doing tech support for Grandma over the phone:
Me: "OK, Grandma open now click on the picture of a paper that says 'read me'"
Grandma clicks on 'Read Me' - after long conversation I finally realise she opened the wrong file
Me: "No, the OTHER file that says 'read me'"
Grandma clicks on 'READ ME' - another long period of miscommunication follows
Me: "OK, Grandma open the file that says 'read me' but ignore the files 'READ ME', 'Read Me', 'READ me' and 'read ME'.
Grandma does an Ellen Feiss "hugnh???"
The obvious advantage of case insensitivity is that it is easier for humans to talk & think about what is on a computer without confusion. Even the tech savvy may have the occasional problem with distinguishing between 'Read Me' and 'Read me'.
case insensitivity actually interferes with user-friendliness in a CLI as it makes it more difficult to do really advanced things in the user program, such as spelling correction of filenames.
I don't follow you, how does it make this more difficult?
Re:A little Supreme Court Analysis re: Federalism
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Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
Dude, how did you learn all this stuff? Seriously.
Read a few books. Love him or hate him Bork's
The Tempting of America is a good primer on what strict constructions believe and why. Also Google is your friend.
Re:A little Supreme Court Analysis re: Federalism
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Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
What I mean is that there seems to be a new breed of conservative out there, for whom concepts such as the rule of law, and even the separation of powers, hold little attraction.
Ironically the more conservative the judge the more likely they will NOT be a hack. As in the Bush v. Gore decision the three conservatives while they did make concessions to politics in accepting the liberals shaky, vague and incredibly expansive14th ammendment reasoning made it pretty clear in their consent opinion that thier *real* reasoning was based on a much more narrow, specific and *sound* reading of the constitution.
The "moderates" and the liberals have bought into a vague notion of the constitution as a "living" document who's meaning "evolves" over time with the changing mores of the people (for instance the precise meaning of "liberty" will change as people come to believe different things about what "liberties" they enjoy - so a law that was constitutional in 1800 isn't in 2000 without any change to the constitution). Of course in practice that means it "evolves" with the changing mores of the justices on the court rather than the people who after all *elected* the representatives that wrote whatever law the supremes are striking down. They use noble sounding platitudes like "liberty" & "equality" that the rip out of context to support whatever decisions they happen to desire at the time. The difference then between the moderates and liberals are their policy (and political) preferences - so Sandra Day O'Connor is willing to buy the expansive arguments necessary to support Roe but is also willing to use the same type of expansive (and essentially lawless) reasoning to support Bush in Bush v. Gore. Sadly she was probably influenced more than she would care to admit more by he own desire to retire during a Republican Presidency than by any logical argument flowing from the actual written words of the consitution.
In either event Liberals sent up to the court by Democrats are totally commited to such an expansive and malleable view of the constitution. Moderates sent up by a divided government (by a Dem prez & Rep senate or vise versa) have also bought into that view of the constitution BUT will probably be less motivated to use it in a social crusade. The only hope for federalism is in conservative judges who will only be sent to the court under a purely Republican system (or occasionally by a Rep prez willing to really push)
Re:A little Supreme Court Analysis re: Federalism
on
Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
There have not been many cases where states' rights have been tested in such a way that going with the states would go against the desires of the Republican party.
True, *I* am a Republican but I don't want a Republican hack in the Supreme court. I would rather have a principled constuctionist/federalist that decides according to original intent (followed by precedant) before the temporary interests of any party or policy agenda. The process is MORE important than the result. If we jettison the protections of our liberties and our democracy for the short term victories over policy we are in bad shape.
Bush v. Gore was one, and the Court invoked the 14th pretty heavily there.
The actual breakdown of the court was more complex than that though. The liberals pushed the 14th ammendment argument but (for partisan reasons) didn't think they warranted Supreme Court Action in that case. The Moderates accepted the 14th ammendment argument and (for partisan reasons) thought they DID warrant action. The Conservatives also accepted that argument (I think to just get the broadest possible agreement on a controversial issue) BUT it seems they didn't like it very much. They issued a concurrance that explicitly addressed state soveriegnty and went on to ground their intervention on Section 2 Article 1 - that the state *legislature* sets the rules for elections.
Thier rational for intervening in Florida's affairs was not found in a vague penumbra emminating from the 14th ammendment which could apply to *anything*. Their argument came from the clear precise words of Article 2 which only apply to Presidential elections. If there had been two more strict constructionists (instead of O'Conner and Stevens for instance;) the 14th ammendment would not have raised it's broadly interpreted head and the decision would only have been about the status of a state legislature as a (U.S) Constitutional office that ALONE has the authority to set rules regarding the election of Presidential Electors.
The ruling you reference doesn't seem to have that much to do with the 10th ammendment but with fourth ammendment protections against unreasonable searches (the constitutionality of drug laws themselves wasn't the issue). It is interesting though that the conservatives and liberals split with some on each side.
Re:A little worse than you think.
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Indecision 2002
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· Score: 2
Either the Republicans did it to scare away Democratic voters, or the Democrats did it to fire up their voters and smear the Republicans. Both sides are quite capable of it.
This is a dirty underhanded trick, one way or the other. BUT, it's not as fundamentally subversive to democracy as these games playing around with the actually mechanisms of the election.
On a related note a couple of dirty trick stories. These were told to me by friends of mine who were heavily involved in campaigns - one a Democrat and one a Republican. They may be apocryphal so take them with a grain of salt.
The Republican told me that in a local campaing in Boston the Republican candidates campaign decked out a bus with their opponents signs, bumber stickers & bunting and broke it down blocking a lane of traffic on the southest expressway during morning rush hour on the day of the election.
The Democrat told me that he knew of a campaign (in RI) that had a spy in the opponents camp that passed on to them the list of volunteers and poll workers with home phone #'s. The night before the election the campaign called up all of their opponents volunteers and said:"Oh don't bother showing up tommorrow, we got someone else to cover that precinct."
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, I was referring to Cicero's Latin as defined by Wheelock's Latin textbook.
That's my point - why "of course"? There are other Latin textbooks out there and many of them use a different pronunciation method and which one is "right" depends - If you are using a common latin phrase in everyday english the "english" method of just pronuncing it the way you would if it was english is "right". Try telling a U.S. Marine that they are pronuncing "Semper Fidelis" all wrong, or any educated person that they have been screwing up "etcetera" all this time. If you are singing christmas carols and pronuncing "in excelcis deo" Mr. Wheelock's way you are going to irritate the singers around you using ecclesiastical latin (the second "c" is pronunced "ch" not the english "s" or classical "k"). In a college classroom you are fine with Mr. Wheelocks method but I'd wager in most classrooms (aside from the most pedantic) proper pronunciation is secondary to the ability to read and write in latin.
It's not like we really know how Cicero pronunced things (though we can make a few guesses) and it's not like anyone is learning "conversational latin" so they can talk to a native speaker.
Solaris is a Latin word (not a coined-up one) Search online for a guide to Latin pronounciation.
You still have a problem since there is more than one "proper" pronounciation of latin words. There is classical or antiquarian pronunciation, christian or ecclesiastical pronunciation and protestant or english pronunciation. I'm not that familiar with classical pronunciation (I know it pronunces "v" as "w", "c"'s are hard like "k" etc), the protestant pronunciation method is to just say it how it looks to you, christian pronunciation is that used by the Catholic church. Using the catholic church method i believe you would say the "o" as in "for" not "go" the "a" as in "car" and the "i" as "ee" as in "feet". In other words like most other latin words used in english if you do it "right" only your parish priest even understands what you just said, or you come across as showing off - save the latin pronunciation for when you are using it in a latin sentance.
When I leave for the second time, do I get charged again for the stuff I've already paid for?
I will conceed that the articles vision of completely getting rid of checkout lines is a bit far out but the RFID tags are a reality and they will allow for some very interesting things to happen. The checkout will probably consist of simply walking through the checkout, seeing the list of items, total & selecting a method of payment. In some situations perhaps having a bagger take your items out of the cart and put them in bags for you (which by itself resolves most of the security issues). But scanning the items & ringing them up will be gone. If you want to go back in and then out without being rung up again, don't forget your reciept and go out by the service desk to avoid getting charged.
There are more interesting possiblities. For instance you take a microwaveable burrito out of the fridge which notes that it is now one below the set minumum number of burritos & adds burritos to it's peapod.com order for the next scheduled delivery. You stick it in the microwave & press "auto". The microwave reads the tag, gets the manufacturers recommended power-level & time off the net & zaps the burrito. To get really creepy you sit down at the TV which knows you are now out of burittos and puts up an ad for the competing brand (the high bidder on the "just ate last burrito in the fridge demographic"). You throw out the empty container which goes to the recycling plant where the tags are used to properly sort the recyclables.
Now seeing such connectivity & automation in a typical consumer's home life is admittedly a little far fetched (though most of the things I mentioned have been done in demo's - including the bit with the hyper-targetted TV ad). However, you will likely see very similar scenarios occuring very soon throughout industry & the supply chain. Pervasive RFID allows you to extend the information revolution of the internet beyond abstract bits & bytes of information to include real physical objects. All the implications of such real-time networking of information about real objects are hard to imagine but are likely to be very significant.
RFIDs on clothing? Wouldnt that make it easier for the people to steal stuff if the cashier element was eliminated?
No because they know when an item walks out of the store withoug having been paid for. Think you'll cut the tag off? No, There is no reason for it to be somewhere you can easily do so. Put it in a metalic bag so readers can no longer detect it? No, it is constantly being read by readers around the store. The moment it goes off the net security is notified that an item has "disappeared" and exactly where it was the moment before. No need to spy on you, they aren't tracking *you* at all, they are tracking the products so closely they don't need to.
I'm sure that the articles vision of zero checkout is a bit far out. There will be a checkout but you won't have to take your items out of the cart or basket at all, just walk through the checkout, take a quick look at the readout to check the total & list of items you're buying - select payment method & hit the approval button.
The AutoID center is doing field trials on using the RFID tags for inventory (but not I think for automagic checkouts) & I understand that the first real big order for tags has been made by one of the major consumer products companies.
Receiver fails to detect CC ID chip - customer gets hassled by security/alarms go off.
If it is not detected how would they know to hassle you?
However an aluminum bag (as the poster above suggests) would still not work because the RFID tag is *always* being detected by readers all over the store. Putting it in the aluminum bag makes it "disapear" from the system - which would lead to being hassled by security.
Receiver fails to detect goods/detects wrong number. Makes stock inventory no easier, overcharging and undercharging still a problem.
I don't know how big a problem detecting wrong numbers will be but even with such occasional problems (which happen with bar codes & humans as well) inventory will still be easier. The back wall of the shelving units will be readers that always know *exactly* what is in the store and *exactly* where it is. (They can print the reader antenna onto contact paper). The system not only knows that there are exactly 12 bottles of Cheer on a particular shelf but also that there is one moving down aisle three (in someones cart), one misplaced by a customer on the "impulse item" shelf near the checkout and one has mysteriously dissapeared when the above poster put it in an aluminum bag (the system duly notifying security). Such constant, hyper-accurate (hopefully), real-time inventory management is (one of) the real goals of the RFID tags - more convenient checkout is just an added bonus made possible by such super accurate inventory managment.
This is the funniest/most distrubing thing I have ever seen.
No the wings don't flap, which is the defining characteristic of an ornithopter.
As far as I can tell from the google cache of the images this thing has a fan that looks like an old-fashioned lawn-mower that is blowing air over the entire length of it's wing - which apparently provides a lot of lift very efficiently.
Any legitimate statistics to back that up, bucko?
I'm not the original poster but here is a study with a few statistics Crime, Deterrence, and Right-to-Carry Concealed Handguns (warning: this is a PDF) - his was a national study on a county-by-county basis evaluating the effect of right-to-carry laws. It found that counties that introduced right-to-carry laws saw a murder fall by 8.5%, rape fall by 5% and aggrevated assault fall by 7%. You'll have to read the study itself to evaluate it's methodology & raw data - most competing studies that dispute his claims have been done on a state by state rather than county by county basis (such as the study commisioned by the Brady Campaign to disprove Lott's findings). The reason he chose to do it by county is that in many of the state laws counties or munipalities that dominate certain counties have broad discretion in how they issue permits - other state laws explicitly exempt certain localities. For example how good is state data from Pennsylvania in measuring the effect of handgun legislation when Philidelphia (where much of the crime occurs) is exempted from the state law.
How many crimes have you heard of thwarted because someone brandished a Smith and Wesson
Personally only a few - they show up in the local paper from time to time. Of course completely deterred crimes where not even an attempt was made would be impossible to measure except by inference (as in Lott's study) National polls indicate that people use guns defensively against criminal attacks somwhere between 760,000 and 3.5 million times per year (Kleck, Gary and marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun" 86 Journal of Criminal Law and Ciminology 86 - fall 1995). Data from the Department of Justice's National Crime Victimization Survey from 1979 to 1987 indicate that the risk for serious injury from a criminal attack is 2.5 times greater for women offering no resistance than for women resisting with a gun (Southwick, 1996).
True, but then your gun control system has to work properly, i.e. to ensure that criminals do not get hold of guns. In the US it is way too easy to get illegal guns.
As a purely practical matter a lot of guns already exist in the USA. To actually disarm the criminals would require truly draconian invasions of privacy - way, way, way beyond what we are all complaining about after 9/11. Therefore your only option is to disarm law abiding citizens, disarming criminals is a pipe-dream. If we were starting with a clean slate a total gun ban might make sense, we are not.
As for the idea that confronted with the likelyhood that their victim is armed will cause criminals to shoot first - a few thoughts. Most of the reasonably rational and intelligent criminals have already been detered by the likelyhood that their victims will be armed. The irrational and stupid won't be but they were just as likely to shoot you before as they are now. Of the remaining - hard-core that are rational enough to think out that they should shoot first to increase their odds of success some will fail and be shot themselves, some will succeed but will now be a major focus of the police who will A) Pursue a murder investigation much more aggresively than a mere mugging. and B) hopefully have more resources since they don't have to worry about all those crimes that never occured because the criminal *was* detered by his armed victim.
As for the trauma of having to defend yourself - I think any rational father would prefer the trauma of having shot a criminal to defend himself and his daughters over the trauma of his and his daughter being shot themselves. While the two that ran away may continue to be criminals the two that were killed most assuredly will NOT. This man has not only defended himself but also effected a 50% reduction in crime from that particular population of 4 (now 2) criminals. He is not a "hero" he is indeed a hero, there is no need for the scare quotes. I will conceed his heroism exacted a cost in the trauma suffered by himself and his daughters but I would submit that a lack of heroism would have likely had just as high, if not a much higher cost.
Actually there have been a few studies that suggest that it does in fact work. I won't suggest that these studies are conslusive - in any kind of study of society there are just way to many variables. Still they are interesting and *suggest* that an armed citizenry does deter crime to some extent. It does make sense to me that with an armed citizenry there probably IS a trade off between a lower rate of premeditated crimes and an increase in the level of severity (but not necessarily occurance) of crimes of passion. For obvious reasons gun-rights advocates will focus on the one, while gun-control advocates will focus on the other. The reality is probably somewhere in between and probably influenced to a large degree by completely unrelated factors.
You mean to tell me that Bill Clinton was cozy with Hollywood (what a stunning revelation, who would have thought it?) That he supported the DMCA and that Ashcroft (Ashcroft!?!) was the "good guy" on this issue - with a more reasonable law that defended fair use rights? Stop!! You'll make my /. saturated brain implode!! It can't be!!... that doesn't conform to the simple caricatures that explain my world... too complex... doesn't compute... ahh....
*sticks fingers ears* and chants: "Republicans are evil, Ashcroft is Satan" as loudly as possible.
Straight men don't use Macs.
Umm... The link you posted seems to suggest otherwise. Just look at the pictures. The fact that you appeared to have missed this seems to suggest that YOU are not a straight man.
The way I look at it, every parent will have a different view of what's 'right' for their kids. How can some central authority take a concensus of all these opinions?
You are making way to much of a problem out of this. While different parents have somewhat different standards the differences are pretty much on the margins. There is a vast quantity of material on the net which NO parent wants their kid to see. The consensus exists and I suspect that those who raise this as an issue are being willfully ignorant to sustain opposition to any attempt to protect kids from the more distrubing stuff on the net. It seems that ANY attempt to restrict 6 year olds from seeing goatse.cx is ridiculed as censorship, government mind control or religious fundamentalism run amok. I'm sorry but the only fundamentalism involved in these arguments seems to be a secular fundamentalism that makes a fetish of "free-speech" far beyond anything intended by the constitution or the bounds of common sense.
And more than likely the pedophiles and grown men that cruise with names like Soccergirl342 will be there in masse. The way things are going now, the FBI is going to have to be in every chat room.
Please, Read the article - THERE ARE NO CHAT ROOMS!
Well of course if there was such a thing as the line item veto the congress could override with a 2/3rd majority vote. BUT, you are still adding power to the Executive branch. Right now the President has very little power over legislation - he can use his political influence & persuasion and he can veto. But he can't get into the legislative trenches and *legislate*. With a line-item veto he would gain the ability to not veto but *edit* legislation. With a newfound ability to wade into the details of legislation he would be able to check and thus influence (far more than he can now) *individual* congressmen rather than check congress as a whole.
To be fair to line-item veto proponents they are usually only talking about the massive appropriations bill & only about giving the Prez the ability to veto distinct sections of the bill appropriating money to distinct agencies & departments in their entirety. Of course if congress was prepared to pass a line item veto law there is no reason they couldn't break up the appropriations bill into numerous distinct laws and achieve the same result. If that large number of bills is too unwieldy perhaps they could change their respective house rules to treat the appropriations bill as one bill (as it is now) but as a legal fiction call each section that *would* have been subject to the line-item veto as a distinct bill, which could then be vetoed by the President.
...not the least of which I predict will be more goodies for Valenti & Co.
Umm. You are getting your parties confused. Jack Valenti isn't exactly popular with Republicans. In fact it has already been suggested in some conservative opinion journals that the complete evisceration of Valenti's legislative agenda would be fitting punishment for Hollywoods underwriting of the Democratic party.
Bush Jr. (or any other president) would only use the veto to kill of the other side's pork and goodies, not his own.
Yes, but at least that would be 1/2 of the pork.
On the other had there are very good reasons to oppose the line-tem veto. It hands way to much power over legislation to the executive branch. There needs to be a mechanism that at least puts a roadblock or two to stop abuse of the ammendment process BUT that mechanism should be found in the legislative not the executive branch.
Corporate freebies tacked onto bills in the current environment will be allowed to stay, since they paid the current President and party for them.
There is certainly some truth to this. Of course some industries pay the other party and could expect their freebies to be slashed mercilessly. Also it is too pat to assume that the relationship between donors & politicians is a simple as being bought & paid for. (though that certainly happens) In many cases though a politician believes in certain policies for ideological reasons & will generally vote that way no matter who contributes - since those policies will benefit or hurt different interests you will see those interests align with politicians accordingly. That doesn't necessarily mean that the politician will align with the specific intererests of some contibutor in any particular case. For instance Enron (to use the most hated example) was perfectly happy to give certain Republicans plenty of money BUT those same Republicans could be *guaranteed* to oppose Enron's position on the global warming treaty. Enron made the decision that their interests in general were served by those Republicans even though they knew those Republicans would vote against them on that specific issue. Of course Enron hedged their bets and also spent a lot of money on Democrats, environmental advocates & underwriting international environmental confabs to try and have their cake (a generally pro-business Republican administration) and eat it too (a global warming treaty written by the enviros that would make them billions)
Is there any legitimate reason for the US's current process to ammend a bill.
Of course there are - legislators need some ability to edit the legislation that is submitted to them from the committees. BUT, there are also many illegitimate uses of the ammendment process as well. Since the threshold is lower to pass an ammendment than a stand-alone bill you can abuse it in ways that have nothing to do with editting a bill to make it better. If you want something that wouldn't pass on it's own you can tack it on to a completely unrelated bill that will pass (usually something absolutely essential like the spending authority - no one is going to shut down the entire US government just to kill your little pet issue). If you don't like an otherwise popular bill you can tack on unpopular ammendments to ensure it's defeat.
This is why Presidents like the idea of a line-tem veto they can strip out all the special interest clutter without killing the entire bill. Of course that adds a lot of Legislative power to the Executive branch in a way that can also be abused. It would be better if ammendments had to at least show some degree of relatedness to the bill in question. But who would decide which ammendments were legitimate or not? You know that power would be abused. And the ammendment we are talking about here would obviously pass such a test - as wrongheaded as it is it is certainly pertinant to a homeland security bill.
Well I challenge you to tell grandma to differentiate "readme", "read me", "readme" or "read me " (note extra spaces), or to differentiate "one" and "1", or any of a million other things that Windows/Mac file systems will happily store as different files.
...and making it impossible to write powerful algorithims that can weigh case-sensitivity against other possible corrections.
Granted you can still screw things up - though you are a little less likely to do so inadvertantly. I still don't see any advantage to doing so or adding the ability to do so in another way.
It makes spelling correction more difficult mostly by discouraging it's use...
I'm sorry if I'm being dense, perhaps I am missunderstanding you - But I don't see how case insensitivity discourages spelling correction. 'Rede Me" and "REDE ME" are both still misspelled (unless you are asking a medieval Englishman for advice).
There is no reason your spell checker has to be case insensitive just because the file system is. We are talking about the MacOS here which is case insensitive but also case *preserving*. You can still write your powerful algorithms weighing case sensitivity against other possible corrections. If you want to spell-check "Rede Me" but ignore "REDE ME" you can and those two files will always keep their capitisation they way you created them - you just can't put them both in the same directory.
For the "average user" case means nothing. Grandma picks files by clicking on the little pictures and would never notice if many files had the same name.
Lets test your theory using the common scenario of doing tech support for Grandma over the phone:
Me: "OK, Grandma open now click on the picture of a paper that says 'read me'"
Grandma clicks on 'Read Me' - after long conversation I finally realise she opened the wrong file
Me: "No, the OTHER file that says 'read me'"
Grandma clicks on 'READ ME' - another long period of miscommunication follows
Me: "OK, Grandma open the file that says 'read me' but ignore the files 'READ ME', 'Read Me', 'READ me' and 'read ME'.
Grandma does an Ellen Feiss "hugnh???"
The obvious advantage of case insensitivity is that it is easier for humans to talk & think about what is on a computer without confusion. Even the tech savvy may have the occasional problem with distinguishing between 'Read Me' and 'Read me'.
case insensitivity actually interferes with user-friendliness in a CLI as it makes it more difficult to do really advanced things in the user program, such as spelling correction of filenames.
I don't follow you, how does it make this more difficult?
Dude, how did you learn all this stuff? Seriously.
Read a few books. Love him or hate him Bork's The Tempting of America is a good primer on what strict constructions believe and why. Also Google is your friend.
What I mean is that there seems to be a new breed of conservative out there, for whom concepts such as the rule of law, and even the separation of powers, hold little attraction.
Ironically the more conservative the judge the more likely they will NOT be a hack. As in the Bush v. Gore decision the three conservatives while they did make concessions to politics in accepting the liberals shaky, vague and incredibly expansive14th ammendment reasoning made it pretty clear in their consent opinion that thier *real* reasoning was based on a much more narrow, specific and *sound* reading of the constitution.
The "moderates" and the liberals have bought into a vague notion of the constitution as a "living" document who's meaning "evolves" over time with the changing mores of the people (for instance the precise meaning of "liberty" will change as people come to believe different things about what "liberties" they enjoy - so a law that was constitutional in 1800 isn't in 2000 without any change to the constitution). Of course in practice that means it "evolves" with the changing mores of the justices on the court rather than the people who after all *elected* the representatives that wrote whatever law the supremes are striking down. They use noble sounding platitudes like "liberty" & "equality" that the rip out of context to support whatever decisions they happen to desire at the time. The difference then between the moderates and liberals are their policy (and political) preferences - so Sandra Day O'Connor is willing to buy the expansive arguments necessary to support Roe but is also willing to use the same type of expansive (and essentially lawless) reasoning to support Bush in Bush v. Gore. Sadly she was probably influenced more than she would care to admit more by he own desire to retire during a Republican Presidency than by any logical argument flowing from the actual written words of the consitution.
In either event Liberals sent up to the court by Democrats are totally commited to such an expansive and malleable view of the constitution. Moderates sent up by a divided government (by a Dem prez & Rep senate or vise versa) have also bought into that view of the constitution BUT will probably be less motivated to use it in a social crusade. The only hope for federalism is in conservative judges who will only be sent to the court under a purely Republican system (or occasionally by a Rep prez willing to really push)
There have not been many cases where states' rights have been tested in such a way that going with the states would go against the desires of the Republican party.
;) the 14th ammendment would not have raised it's broadly interpreted head and the decision would only have been about the status of a state legislature as a (U.S) Constitutional office that ALONE has the authority to set rules regarding the election of Presidential Electors.
True, *I* am a Republican but I don't want a Republican hack in the Supreme court. I would rather have a principled constuctionist/federalist that decides according to original intent (followed by precedant) before the temporary interests of any party or policy agenda. The process is MORE important than the result. If we jettison the protections of our liberties and our democracy for the short term victories over policy we are in bad shape.
Bush v. Gore was one, and the Court invoked the 14th pretty heavily there.
The actual breakdown of the court was more complex than that though. The liberals pushed the 14th ammendment argument but (for partisan reasons) didn't think they warranted Supreme Court Action in that case. The Moderates accepted the 14th ammendment argument and (for partisan reasons) thought they DID warrant action. The Conservatives also accepted that argument (I think to just get the broadest possible agreement on a controversial issue) BUT it seems they didn't like it very much. They issued a concurrance that explicitly addressed state soveriegnty and went on to ground their intervention on Section 2 Article 1 - that the state *legislature* sets the rules for elections.
Thier rational for intervening in Florida's affairs was not found in a vague penumbra emminating from the 14th ammendment which could apply to *anything*. Their argument came from the clear precise words of Article 2 which only apply to Presidential elections. If there had been two more strict constructionists (instead of O'Conner and Stevens for instance
The ruling you reference doesn't seem to have that much to do with the 10th ammendment but with fourth ammendment protections against unreasonable searches (the constitutionality of drug laws themselves wasn't the issue). It is interesting though that the conservatives and liberals split with some on each side.
Either the Republicans did it to scare away Democratic voters, or the Democrats did it to fire up their voters and smear the Republicans. Both sides are quite capable of it.
This is a dirty underhanded trick, one way or the other. BUT, it's not as fundamentally subversive to democracy as these games playing around with the actually mechanisms of the election.
On a related note a couple of dirty trick stories. These were told to me by friends of mine who were heavily involved in campaigns - one a Democrat and one a Republican. They may be apocryphal so take them with a grain of salt.
The Republican told me that in a local campaing in Boston the Republican candidates campaign decked out a bus with their opponents signs, bumber stickers & bunting and broke it down blocking a lane of traffic on the southest expressway during morning rush hour on the day of the election.
The Democrat told me that he knew of a campaign (in RI) that had a spy in the opponents camp that passed on to them the list of volunteers and poll workers with home phone #'s. The night before the election the campaign called up all of their opponents volunteers and said:"Oh don't bother showing up tommorrow, we got someone else to cover that precinct."