I've said before the Surface marketing was one of the nails in the coffin. The TV ads mostly featured hipster dambasses dancing and hiphoping while spinning the Surface tablet. Very little if any product knowledge is communicated.
I find it ironic that Apple gets accused of having the biggest fanboy/cult following, and yet always advertises people using, enjoying, and having fun with their products, and then MS gets billed as the "serious" technology company whilst showing hipsters flashing, dancing, waving, and hugging their products, instead of using and enjoying them.
I don't understand how these two companies maintain such opposite images from each other.
Apple is turning into the serious, functional tech, while microsoft is turning into the useless status symbol tech. Or at least that's what their publicity is pushing.
They're YEARS late to the show. Tardiness to the tech market always comes with a big price. Their only hope at this point would have been to sell them at a loss just to get a small, valuable slice of market share.
MS has been doing this a lot recently with hardware. If you're going to go to-to-toe with Apple etc you have to outprice them because you're going to have difficulty outfeaturing them and simply not going to be able to (initially) out-perform them. The #1 reason cited by MS fanboys is "apple is too expensive for what you get". MS simply won't be able to get its foot in the door if they leave their biggest edge just sitting on the bench. And it'll go the way of the zune, phone, tv, etc. You'd think by now they'd have learned this lesson??
....when do we start treating these folks like arms dealers? It's not a stretch, ITAR classified cryptography as munitions....
Zero-day exploits are a bit farther down the road than even munitions. At least I can claim I need a gun for self-defense. There's really no "legal use" for a zero-day. It's only immediate purpose is to bypass computer security, which is illegal in almost every corner of the globe. (the biggest three applications being theft, corporate espionage, and spying)
The interesting twist here I think though is that entire governments are doing business with these guys, because they want it just as bad as the more traditional criminals. Normally when you're a government, you simply spend money to get your way. Things you want to have but not let your people have you just make illegal for civilian use.
But this is different. Money doesn't directly GET you a zero day, any more than money can get you nuclear weapons. They require specialized knowledge and skills. So you either spend a huge amount of money to R&D it, or you just go out and buy it. Buying nuclear isn't easy because currently only big governments have it, and they don't want to water down their exclusivity, so they won't sell it at any price. But right now the black market has better R&D on zero-days than any government, and they're completely fine with selling it to anyone, for a high price of course. Also unlike nukes, it's not a matter of needing specialized materials and resources, anyone can R&D it, all they need is a lot of bored skilled nerds;)
So it just makes sense that the black market is playing both sides. Everyone wants it, and they are by far the cheapest source. It's a supplier's dream come true.
agree with the forms. You can't expect good answers if they're not replying to good questions.
the BARE minimum:
1. what were you trying to do? 2. what happened? 3. what were you actually expecting?
That's not necessarily a good list to give to a user, but this is what we tell our front line people to keep in mind when taking a call. There will be two basic limiting factors with online ticket forms. (1) people may not understand the questions and be intimidated enough to not be willing to use the system and (2) duplicate tickets. Make sure whatever you use can handle both issues.
If people aren't using your forms and you've done due diligence with making them aware of them and the need, and they're not getting used, don't blame the users because it's probably something you're doing wrong.
Probably the most frustrating experience for a user is to enter a ticket, and have it "closed" without their having believed it is fixed. Maybe it's fixed and they just didn't even look. Maybe it was changed to work properly and they don't know the new way to use it. Maybe they fixed the problem the customer described, but not what they MEANT. Maybe the fix didn't actually fix the problem at all, or didn't completely fix it and the customer's symptom remains. Maybe they've just been avoiding where the problem is for the last two weeks because they didn't realize it had been fixed on day 2.
Feedback and communication make tickets work.
- make sure you understand the problem. users often try to diagnose the problem and tell you what's wrong, instead of WHY they think it's wrong. here we say "don't check in diagnosis, check in SYMPTOMS." Users frequently mis-diagnose problems. "I can't send email" could stem from "I don't have internet". "My hard drive is dying" could stem from "my computer keeps suddenly shutting down". The entire process is completely dysfunctional if you don't understand their problem. Make sure your form gets symptoms, they're more important than problem descriptions.
- followup is costly, but you NEED to do it. So many ticket systems skip this it's sad. NOTHING frustrates a user more than to have their ticket closed without their believing their problem is fixed. "xxx is fixed. if we don't hear back from you in 24 hrs we will close the ticket" isn't the best solution, but should be considered a bare minimum. If the customer replies back that they don't feel it's fixed, don't just dump it back into the tier 1 queue. Escalate it, increase user interaction, get more information, get feedback. DO NOT rely exclusively on the information in their "it's still broken" reply message. It's time to make a phonecall for more effective live two-way communication.
- prioritize tickets. not just in order of submittal but in order of urgency. tickets that have been back-burnered for awhile should get a bump to their priority. More than one level's worth if needed. The person doing the bump should probably NOT be the one processing the tickets. It's been my experience that an objective fresh viewpoint is needed to make sure that unpleasant tickets don't languish on hold.
One place I worked at recently, the users had almost totally lost confidence in the ticket system. It required me to have comprehensive personal followup on tickets for a solid year before people started trusting the system again. Techs in charge of the queue were summarily deleting vague or "cannot reproduce" tickets with not so much as a response. Tickets were also silently closed whenever a tech though they had fixed the issue. (several tickets had been freshly ressubmitted over a dozen times because the tech didn't understand the user's problem and thought he had fixed it and the user was just too dumb to realize it) Tickets that had several dups in the system from the same user or few users were deleted en mass just to clear the clutter. ("if it's still a problem I'm sure they'll submit another ticket shortly") It was terrible. They had conditioned users
Also similar good reading, the meltdown at Chernobyl was heavily influenced by an engineer in a superior position making bad decisions that other lower experts were aware of but unwilling to make a fuss over. Costs lives.
It's all "make-you-feel-good-software" which doesn't survive a simple OS reinstallation...
Macintosh, use the command line for your linux needs (since it's linux based)
Enable firmware password and full disk encryption, both included free.
Current model macs cannot be overridden by any tech without your apple id. So as long as that stays secure, it's a brick if stolen. There are no back doors.
The tracking software is up to you. There are several commercially available, and I personally rolled my own. They can still remove and wipe (tho not read) your hard drive once they've nicked the laptop, but the computer won't boot, off any hard drive, ever again. All they can do now is part it out, except for the logic board, which is definitely the most expensive part.
That's a common misconception. There's no such thing as a perfectly non-diverging beam. Even with perfect optics, your beam divergence is limited by wavelength and beam diameter -- if you make your beam wider, you can make it diverge less, but then of course it's less useful for burning things.
True, but it depends a lot on the quality of the columnating lens. The two very old handhelds I have here are using first gen plastic lenses. The green one starts at about 1.5mm x 1.5mm, the red one is an oddie, with a starter abut 1mm x 7mm. The red one basically coat a dumpster at 1/2 mile, it's older. And at that distance the newer green is a "dot" between basketball and beachball size, and has the entire dumpster and area immediately around it covered in scatter.
You don't notice this effect when firing the green one up in the air, it looks like a thin straight line all the way up to the clouds. It's of course getting bigger but as it gets farther away, so you don't notice unless it hits something a ways away but that's still reasonably close.
And at those distances, the scatter (I forget the technical term) is horrendous. I don't know if that's the lens or the laser. I assume impurities in the lens. Puts a green or red cloud of speckles all around the "dot".
When you're talking about lazing helicopter hovering over a crowd though, you're still going to get a dot less than a quarter inch wide. But a watt or two of power on that much surface area really doesn't do much unless it catches someone in the eye. Except for the eyes, it's as harmless as a flashlight.
The legal limit for a class///a laser pointer is 5mw iirc. And most laser pointers nowadays are pretty close to that. 10 years ago you could get a 2 or 3mw laser, and you'd pay more (as in... $150 rather than $75) for a 5mw pointer. (I have two from back then, one red, and one green, that one was awesome at the time) So I would be amazed if you could find anyone selling a///a pointer NOT advertised as 5mw. (or "less than 5mw", meaning that's the legal limit we are trying to stay under)
There are other issues also, including wavelength. The first publicly available handheld reds were near infra-red. They may have done 5mw, but the human eye had very poor sensitivity at their nm, so it was borderline false-advertising. My good red one was deep into visible red and was around 10x as visibly bright as commonly available 5mw reds due to wavelength change. My green is only 3mw but is almost blinding by comparison with my red on a wall because of how sensitive the eye is to green compared to red.
Lots of good info on Wikipedia for laser pointers.
but I don't believe for a moment that it'll ignite anything at a distance of several hundred feet
Although atmosphere does reduce the power, it's columnated light and in a vacuum anyway it would not lose any of its power. Dust, fog, humidity in the air will lower the power, but also cause you to be able to see the beam in the air. If you can't see the beam of a laser, it's likely delivering very close to 100% of its output power on target.
Years ago, when laser pointers were expensive, I had a 5mw red laser that we tested at 1/4 mile. It lit up an entire dumpster very nicely. (lenses weren't that good back then, it wouldn't hold a point for more than 25 feet or so, and TONS of scatter)
But on the other issue of power, just because it's a laser doesn't make it any more destructive than something else of the same power. A 100w lightbulb puts out 100x the power of a 1w laser pointer. And you don't see lightbulbs catching helicopters on fire. (even if focused in a spotlight) The only reason 1w lasers catch paper on fire is they're concentrating 1w of power into a 2mm x 2mm area. That would probably feel like a match at 1/2", enough to light paper. That's not going to melt metal obviously, at any range. The laser just lets you project that "half inch from a match" out several hundred yards. It doesn't make it more (or less) intense.
Somewhat back on topic though... wow.... that flight had to SUCK for those helicopter pilots. Someone hits one 727 with a laser pointer and the whole city loses their mind and the swat team rolls. That heli looks like it had 3-4 dozen green and at least two blue pointed at it. They would have to be out of their minds to look down except through cameras, and imagine the refractions going on inside the cockpit, with greens and blues scattering off all the shiny things. I bet that is an incredibly effective deterrent for the pilots.
Ironic, they sent in the helicopters as a show of force, and got driven off by the demonstrators using cheap, commonly available tech. Sort of like making the water canon truck leave by throwing rocks at it. Embarrassing.
Inter-planetary travel imposes inflexible deadlines. Planetary alignment dictates when your launch windows are, and they are frequently several years apart. Compare it with the space shuttle for example, where you can get a launch window everyday or two and have lives at risk. Project planning on an inter-planetary launch spreads out over years. If your part of the project starts getting behind, and it's not something you can fix by simply throwing more resources at it, you have to prioritize so you don't miss your launch window.
A non-fatal glitch that only showed up once during testing, that you have nothing to go on, quickly takes a back seat to engineering making sure it doesn't "pull a Beagle" when it arrives. One-off anomalies in testing are only tackled (and not all of them are necessarily resolved) when all critical systems are verified bulletproof.
There is one other angle often overlooked here that I'm surprised wasn't addressed. On a launch like this, where it typically takes over a year for the mission to reach the destination, this is when those weird glitches should be getting identified and patched on the twin unit in the lab, when you can invest all your ground resources into software testing and improvements. Then software updates are sent to the rover en-route, or shortly after landing. I don't know why this didn't happen. From the sounds of it though, the testers may not have properly documented the glitch. It kinda sounds like they had to talk to them when the problem surfaced and get someone to fess up to having seen a problem like this during testing that didn't get documented. One person covering up a glitch in their work to save face can cost millions of dollars and years of time. Someone ought to get canned for that.
This problem is either handled by thermal storage or by just simply using other power source (commercial, wind, etc) when there's no sun.
One common approach is liquid sodium. You use an array of moving mirrors to heat sodium being circulated in a tower in the middle of the mirror farm. That circulates with a large, heavily insulated tank of liquid sodium under the facility. It heats up during the day, cools off during the evening, but is always hot enough to boil water to run turbines. (unless you get like a week straight of no sun, iirc these facilities can "coast" around four days without much sun)
Really downtime isn't important anyway. During a sunny day, they'll be generating a lot more power than they use in the center. The remainder of that will be getting bought back by the local utility, for credit on their bill when the sun goes down etc. A lot of municipalities/states are passing laws requiring the local utils to buy back power during peak-production times. (they were fighting it) So even just straight solar panels with no thermal or even battery storage is fine. They'll rack up credit during the day, spend it overnight, and will come out somewhere around even on the average, without having to spend money (and reoccurring replacement money) on batteries etc. Batteries are a very poor investment if you can just sell your excess power back to the local utility and use them as an almost zero-cost buffer.
It's like people with babies who think they can still do everything they could before they had children. I don't have a problem with you taking your baby to a cinema, theatre, concert or wherever, as long as you understand that when that baby starts crying, it's your responsibility to take him out of there until he quiets again, even if that means that you'll miss a bit or the entirety of the performance.
I think the core of that problem is that people are overlooking or choosing to ignore their prior decisions when they have a problem. "I have to have a cigarette." "I can't make my baby stop crying." "I can't help if they ring me when I'm on call."
They're all overlooking/ignoring the decisions they made in advance, and the consequences and additional responsibilities they were volunteering to take on. "I chose to start smoking addictive cigarettes." "I had a baby." "I took a job that required me to be on call."
And then they also overlook/ignore the next round of choices they have made. "I attended an event that lasts longer than I can go without a cigarette." "I took my young child to the theatre." "I went to the movies while on call." Somehow they don't see their decisions as relevant to the problem, and thus not their responsibility to deal with. "it's not my problem. it can't be helped." NO. It is your problem, and it could have and can be helped. Accept responsibility for the consequences of your decisions.
I think they're just in denial. And the rest of the world just has to suffer for it.
1) make it clear that cell phones and pagers must be kept OFF if taken into the theater. "You agree to hold harmless anyone taking your functioning phone or pager away from you, including any accidental or intentional damage to said device."
before we get to #2, 911 IN the theater room is not necessary. you probably can't call 911 when you're swimming in the public pool for example. It's not a civil right. If you think that it is, then I challenge you to force your local pool to find a way to accommodate this right. Cellular/landline access to 911 is only relevant when there are no other convenient ways to summon help. Being 40 feet from the theater lobby is NOT too inconvenient. I can probably sprint to the lobby faster than you can fumble for your phone in the dark and dial 911. Maybe you should insist on them leaving the lights on in the theater so you can dial 911 faster? Seconds count! now put that silly argument away.
2) theaters could offer a silent pager, similar to what you find at many restaurants. Check your cell phone or pager at the lobby and get a pager. If your phone goes off, they will vibrate your pager. Theaters should not be required to offer this, and would almost certainly charge for it to prevent half the theater from checking their phones. If you need to be on call 24/7, don't go to a theater that doesn't offer this service. (and don't go for a swim) There are some things you simply can't do if you're on call. You're probably being compensated for this inconvenience. Deal with it, it's not my problem.
Humans do not seem to be negatively impacted by fields of many Tesla.
It's not the magnetic field that''s the problem. Until you get EXTREMELY high anyway. Like, "rip the iron out of your blood" high. Or you have an implant with any ferrous material. (thankfully titanium isn't substantially ferrous)
The problem is the HEPs (High Energy Particles) that are flying out of the sun from CMEs (coronal mass ejections) at moderate speed. These are small atomic level particles, and are moving so fast and are so small that the odds of them ever hitting anything are very slim. But there's a lot of them. So it's like someone shooting at you with a shotgun from a few blocks away. But he's got a million shotguns. Odds are he's gonna get lucky eventually. It works the same as radiation. And when one of these "pellets" hits a strand of DNA, it'll break it up like a cue ball breaking a rack on a pool table. It will almost certainly prevent the cell from ever being able to divide, and will affect enzyme production, which may be fatal to the cell.
If there's enough HEPs flying your way, it's like getting hit with a high or massive dose of radiation. And massive DNA damage. There's also a lot of cellular damage, which the cells might be able to repair if they were working right, which they're not due to the DNA damage. So you get massive cell death throughout your body over the next few hours or days. Maybe enough to kill you. Or almost certainly give you cancer if you survive. Possibly a very nasty, widespread, aggressive cancer.
Aaaanyway, these particles are moving fast and there's a lot of them, but they're very light. And usually heavily charged from their explosive exit from the sun. Charged particles are very easy to influence with a magnetic field. So you put a magnetic field around an area, like the earth's magnetic field does around the earth, and the particles tend to route around the area instead of through it.
The aurora borealis is the visible effect of HEPs interacting with the earth's magnetosphere. When you can see that, there's enough HEPs hitting it to actually deform it. (cool videos of this effect on youtube) The shape of the field is very important. Notice how the north and south magnetic poles of the earth offer far less protection.
The earth's magnetic field protects us from this, so we didn't evolve a resistance to it. So when we leave its protection, we'll need to have something else to keep the HEPs from damaging our cells. And the best two theories going right now are blocking it and deflecting it. Blocking it is heavy, and heavy is never good when you're talking space travel. Deflecting it... well, it's tricky, they're working on it.
the reason physical shielding has to be so thick and dense is the particles are so small and flying so fast that they run through normal matter like it's not hardly even there. (besides the occasional hitting a bit of your dna and knocking the atoms around like a clean break on a pool table) Magnetic deflection would just reroute the HEPs around the capsule. Wouldn't require much weight, but may be a bit power hungry.
I don't know enough about magnetics though... I thought that it only takes significant energy to establish a strong magnetic field, and that unless it's interacting with (pulling/pushing) something, the "maintenance cost" is rather low? (and that you can recover a lot of that energy when turning off the magnet)
I suppose the problem then becomes how to keep the magnetic effects out of the inside of the capsule? Is that even possible?
Several recent space movies have played it like normal space exposure is no big deal unless there's an event like a solar flare that belches HEPs in their direction. Then all the dramatic klaxons go off and theyÂscramble to some purpose-built chamber that shields them until the storm is over. Don't we normally get hours of warnings on big CMEs? I think they're just rushing for the drama effect. Probably more of a "Hmm big CME just went off. Everybody meet up in the Round Room at 1800, pack a lunch, we'll be in there for at least five hours". Maybe something like that would be more practical, if possible. That would allow setting up a stronger magnetic field in a small area, relatively free of electronics and other metals normally required in a space ship.
That's still just a simple substitution cypher, which is dead easy for a computer to crack given a sizeable enough input. Besides, why would OCR fail if it is human readable?
You missed two important points to my suggested method. (1) there's no clue that it's enciphered. (beyond being a bit of a jumble anyway) Even if it's only a substitution cipher (which it indeed is) then it amounts more to stenography than enciphering. Imagine the cpu time they could burn up trying to decipher everything they ran across on the internet that didn't appear to be cleartext? I don't think they'd get much done. The return on investment is too low.
(2) I'm not saying ditch the font tweaking. Just don't go quite as wild as this guy is suggesting. It doesn't need to beat OCR. Why would you bother to OCR something when you have the text of it? that'd be like printing out an email you received, sticking it on the scanner, scanning, OCR'ing, and then reading the result... complete waste of time when you already (think you) have the plain text? Without this light noise to the font, the easiest way to detect my above steno is to compare the font against known fonts. (there really aren't that many, 99% of the fonts you will find in use in a given year will be in a set of under 20,000 and of course there are a few dozen that alone will take the first 70%) You just need to make it not quick to compare your font (hashed) against the known fonts to check to see if someone is pulling the above switcheroo steno, and if you detect it, then dump into more processor intensive analysis like substitution cipher.
Moral of the story is, if the cost to investigate is justified by the level of suspicion that they need to invest more resources, you've already lost. They have infinite resources if they strongly (or even reasonably) suspect you are hiding something.
If the NSA etc want to seriously respond to these ocr-impossible fonts, they'll just look for it (which is rather trivial seeing as they've published the font, it's static) and then just bulk it to a sweatshop in india to get translated. It'll get done in the cubicle adjacent to another doing captchas for the bot-hearders, cheaply, quickly, and 100% effectively.
When Turner contacted us about his concern, and we understood the full situation, we immediately engaged with him to try to make things right. Unfortunately, we have been unable to find common ground so far.
In other words, "we told him we'd buy out all the rights in exchange for a snickers bar and a firm handshake, but much to our surprise he turned our generous offer down, so it's his fault"?
If you exported a document as a pdf, you can embed fonts in it. Run a program to convert your original text file into another one. translate out the characters to other ascii ids. and then embed the font.
For example, ""DOG". Letter "D" is ascii 68. So the pdf will say "this is character 68, in whatever font you had selected." So place the obfuscated glyph for "D" in the position for "Y" (90) and then change all Ds to Ys in the document's text stream. Then when a person reads it, it LOOKS like DOG but copy-paste will get "YOG". Do this for all characters and numbers.
A smart app to do this would roll up a random ascii remapping for each document, and obfuscate characters in the font differently each document. This would make it difficult to craft a specific skimmer module to handle this obfuscation automatically..
This will allow you to email or post the data, and humans to read it, but skimmers won't get legible text with a copy and paste, and if they then fall back to OCR attempt, that will also fail.
Although in reality, fallback to OCR in an automated system is unlikely, and would probably just move on to the next document to skim. So just making very slight adjustments to the glyphs in the font, (to prevent automated correction) in addition to mixing them up, would probably do a good job against fully automated skimming. The adjustments this guy is making (except for the last one) are inconvenient to read. Just adding a LITTLE noise would do the trick I think.
It's just a way for Lucas to make his film more marketable to parents of young children by still having lots of epic battles, but no blood and seeimingly victimless deaths.
That, and it becomes more a war-of-resources than a war-of-blood. Whoever can buy the biggest droid army wins.
In our world, "droids" lack sentience (though are getting better and better at faking it) and to some degree society is viewing them as having rights. At least in the personification sense. In Lucas's world, droids have sentience, but appear to be completely devoid of rights, and in most cases, respect. It's very similar to slavery a century ago. I think that may be the comparison he's making with them?
I think Anakin and Luke's relationship with say, R2D2, is very much the exception to the rule in the Star Wars universe, a bit like how someone in the 1800's treating a slave they owed with any degree of respect was considered inappropriate. Look at how that one guy said "oh, and have the protocol droid's mind wiped." "oh dear..." Very callously said, and very accepting of his fate.
If you are not free to leave, and you are not under arrest, you have been kidnapped.
The last time I saw "kidnapping" defined, there were two requirements. (1) illegally detained and (2) moved more than 50 feet". This may have been for a specific jurisdiction, but I believe it was federal. Unlawful detention is separate from kidnapping, in that kidnapping requires them to force you to come with them.
"Detain" means you will experience a loss of freedom for a bit (can't leave, etc) while the police look into a situation.
also true of arrest.
The police don't need to prove that you did anything to detain you,
also true of arrest. People get arrested on "trumped up charges" all the time. See "officer bubbles" for a good laugh. All they do is drop charges a few hrs later after they're done harassing you. They don't need any proof to arrest you. It's only necessary if they want to keep you there (>24 hrs usually) and successfully prosecute you.
but they also can't detain you indefinitely.
also true of arrest. (without filing charges anyway)
"Arrest" means that they plan on charging you with something.
What anyone means to anyone is irrelevant. It could "mean" they plan on throwing you an aavon party. All that matters are obligations. Anything they "intend" to do but that can change their mind on later is not a defining attribute.
You must be read your Miranda rights
agreed! arrest requires it. but they could probably do it when they are detaining you too. I doubt they do that, since you'd be more likely to clam up, but there's nothing obligating them NOT to for a detention. So that's not as useful as a deciding factor as you might at first expect.
"Unlikely!" you say? I have personal experience here. I was trying to be a helpful citizen many years ago giving a detective information on a theft where I ended up innocently receiving stolen property. I came to the station to give him the details. First thing the prick did was read me my rights. I did not enjoy the experience, and I don't intend on volunteering my assistance to that particular police department again anytime soon. (he apparently marked me as an accomplice and was trying to trick, and I do mean trick, me into incriminating myself) I wasn't under arrest. I wasn't even being detained.
and will have your case tried before a judge
see above on "intent" and "obligation"
You will experience greater restrictions on your freedom
yes and that's what I was hoping someone would actually get specific about instead of repeating "more restrictions" over and over again, which doesn't really tell us anything useful. I see someone else did in another reply though.
but there is more proof that this is justified.
"requires more proof" is no more specific than "more restrictions".
This is the problem that a lot of us are having though, we think we know how to distinguish between "free", "detained", and "arrested", but it's not that simple of a question.
There is a level between being free to go and being arrested: being detained. That is the status of the citizen in your hypothetical. There is a lower burden of proof for an officer to detain you, but the loss of freedom is smaller in scope.
Can you outline the differences in scope / freedom between being detained and under arrest? as far as I'm concerned, they appear to be identical. I lose my right to leave. The only other difference I can foresee is arrest requires specific charges. But are they obligated to tell you? If not, it doesn't matter. They could detain you for an hour, or arrest you for an hour (without specifying charges) and then release you (or drop the unknown charges and release you) - and so what was the difference to you? Either way you spent an hour in custody, having temporarily lost your freedom to leave. What other rights would arrest lose you? Hmmm... search I suppose?
And is this "detention" what is exercised at DUI checkpoints? Sounds like it? "you're not under arrest, but you're not allowed to leave. we haven't decided if we're going to arrest or release you yet. Stay here until we decide."
An earlier comment stated:
"facts and circumstances that would lead a reasonable officer to believe that a crime has been, is being, or will be committed."
I don't see how a DUI checkpoint would meet that criteria. Unless "it's 2:15 am" constitutes a fact and "drunks frequently drive home after the bar closes" constitutes a circumstance?
I recall debating about that in the past. The question arose:
Office: "stay here." Citizen: "Am I under arrest?" Office: "you want to be? no you're not under arrest, not yet. but just stay here for right now." Citizen: "Am I free to go?" Officer: "What did I just say to you? No, you are not free to go. STAY HERE while we xxxxx"
this actually happens frequently. And I don't recall the issue being settled. If you can't leave, and aren't free to go, what is your legal status? What happens if you try to leave? (almost certainly bad things, resisting arrest, interfere with official acts, obstruction of justice, failure to obey an officer of the law, disturbing the peace, etc etc justifying arrest)
So you're kinda in a pickle when they tell you you're not under arrest AND you're not free to leave. Is there a lawyer in the house that can explore this situation, and maybe even suggest some advice? (I know, fat chance, "yes I am a lawyer, NO I am not YOUR lawyer, and this is not legal advice", but do what you can)
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I find it ironic that Apple gets accused of having the biggest fanboy/cult following, and yet always advertises people using, enjoying, and having fun with their products, and then MS gets billed as the "serious" technology company whilst showing hipsters flashing, dancing, waving, and hugging their products, instead of using and enjoying them.
I don't understand how these two companies maintain such opposite images from each other.
Apple is turning into the serious, functional tech, while microsoft is turning into the useless status symbol tech. Or at least that's what their publicity is pushing.
They're YEARS late to the show. Tardiness to the tech market always comes with a big price. Their only hope at this point would have been to sell them at a loss just to get a small, valuable slice of market share.
MS has been doing this a lot recently with hardware. If you're going to go to-to-toe with Apple etc you have to outprice them because you're going to have difficulty outfeaturing them and simply not going to be able to (initially) out-perform them. The #1 reason cited by MS fanboys is "apple is too expensive for what you get". MS simply won't be able to get its foot in the door if they leave their biggest edge just sitting on the bench. And it'll go the way of the zune, phone, tv, etc. You'd think by now they'd have learned this lesson??
Zero-day exploits are a bit farther down the road than even munitions. At least I can claim I need a gun for self-defense. There's really no "legal use" for a zero-day. It's only immediate purpose is to bypass computer security, which is illegal in almost every corner of the globe. (the biggest three applications being theft, corporate espionage, and spying)
The interesting twist here I think though is that entire governments are doing business with these guys, because they want it just as bad as the more traditional criminals. Normally when you're a government, you simply spend money to get your way. Things you want to have but not let your people have you just make illegal for civilian use.
But this is different. Money doesn't directly GET you a zero day, any more than money can get you nuclear weapons. They require specialized knowledge and skills. So you either spend a huge amount of money to R&D it, or you just go out and buy it. Buying nuclear isn't easy because currently only big governments have it, and they don't want to water down their exclusivity, so they won't sell it at any price. But right now the black market has better R&D on zero-days than any government, and they're completely fine with selling it to anyone, for a high price of course. Also unlike nukes, it's not a matter of needing specialized materials and resources, anyone can R&D it, all they need is a lot of bored skilled nerds ;)
So it just makes sense that the black market is playing both sides. Everyone wants it, and they are by far the cheapest source. It's a supplier's dream come true.
agree with the forms. You can't expect good answers if they're not replying to good questions.
the BARE minimum:
1. what were you trying to do?
2. what happened?
3. what were you actually expecting?
That's not necessarily a good list to give to a user, but this is what we tell our front line people to keep in mind when taking a call. There will be two basic limiting factors with online ticket forms. (1) people may not understand the questions and be intimidated enough to not be willing to use the system and (2) duplicate tickets. Make sure whatever you use can handle both issues.
If people aren't using your forms and you've done due diligence with making them aware of them and the need, and they're not getting used, don't blame the users because it's probably something you're doing wrong.
Probably the most frustrating experience for a user is to enter a ticket, and have it "closed" without their having believed it is fixed. Maybe it's fixed and they just didn't even look. Maybe it was changed to work properly and they don't know the new way to use it. Maybe they fixed the problem the customer described, but not what they MEANT. Maybe the fix didn't actually fix the problem at all, or didn't completely fix it and the customer's symptom remains. Maybe they've just been avoiding where the problem is for the last two weeks because they didn't realize it had been fixed on day 2.
Feedback and communication make tickets work.
- make sure you understand the problem. users often try to diagnose the problem and tell you what's wrong, instead of WHY they think it's wrong. here we say "don't check in diagnosis, check in SYMPTOMS." Users frequently mis-diagnose problems. "I can't send email" could stem from "I don't have internet". "My hard drive is dying" could stem from "my computer keeps suddenly shutting down". The entire process is completely dysfunctional if you don't understand their problem. Make sure your form gets symptoms, they're more important than problem descriptions.
- followup is costly, but you NEED to do it. So many ticket systems skip this it's sad. NOTHING frustrates a user more than to have their ticket closed without their believing their problem is fixed. "xxx is fixed. if we don't hear back from you in 24 hrs we will close the ticket" isn't the best solution, but should be considered a bare minimum. If the customer replies back that they don't feel it's fixed, don't just dump it back into the tier 1 queue. Escalate it, increase user interaction, get more information, get feedback. DO NOT rely exclusively on the information in their "it's still broken" reply message. It's time to make a phonecall for more effective live two-way communication.
- prioritize tickets. not just in order of submittal but in order of urgency. tickets that have been back-burnered for awhile should get a bump to their priority. More than one level's worth if needed. The person doing the bump should probably NOT be the one processing the tickets. It's been my experience that an objective fresh viewpoint is needed to make sure that unpleasant tickets don't languish on hold.
One place I worked at recently, the users had almost totally lost confidence in the ticket system. It required me to have comprehensive personal followup on tickets for a solid year before people started trusting the system again. Techs in charge of the queue were summarily deleting vague or "cannot reproduce" tickets with not so much as a response. Tickets were also silently closed whenever a tech though they had fixed the issue. (several tickets had been freshly ressubmitted over a dozen times because the tech didn't understand the user's problem and thought he had fixed it and the user was just too dumb to realize it) Tickets that had several dups in the system from the same user or few users were deleted en mass just to clear the clutter. ("if it's still a problem I'm sure they'll submit another ticket shortly") It was terrible. They had conditioned users
Also similar good reading, the meltdown at Chernobyl was heavily influenced by an engineer in a superior position making bad decisions that other lower experts were aware of but unwilling to make a fuss over. Costs lives.
Macintosh, use the command line for your linux needs (since it's linux based)
Enable firmware password and full disk encryption, both included free.
Current model macs cannot be overridden by any tech without your apple id. So as long as that stays secure, it's a brick if stolen. There are no back doors.
The tracking software is up to you. There are several commercially available, and I personally rolled my own. They can still remove and wipe (tho not read) your hard drive once they've nicked the laptop, but the computer won't boot, off any hard drive, ever again. All they can do now is part it out, except for the logic board, which is definitely the most expensive part.
True, but it depends a lot on the quality of the columnating lens. The two very old handhelds I have here are using first gen plastic lenses. The green one starts at about 1.5mm x 1.5mm, the red one is an oddie, with a starter abut 1mm x 7mm. The red one basically coat a dumpster at 1/2 mile, it's older. And at that distance the newer green is a "dot" between basketball and beachball size, and has the entire dumpster and area immediately around it covered in scatter.
You don't notice this effect when firing the green one up in the air, it looks like a thin straight line all the way up to the clouds. It's of course getting bigger but as it gets farther away, so you don't notice unless it hits something a ways away but that's still reasonably close.
And at those distances, the scatter (I forget the technical term) is horrendous. I don't know if that's the lens or the laser. I assume impurities in the lens. Puts a green or red cloud of speckles all around the "dot".
When you're talking about lazing helicopter hovering over a crowd though, you're still going to get a dot less than a quarter inch wide. But a watt or two of power on that much surface area really doesn't do much unless it catches someone in the eye. Except for the eyes, it's as harmless as a flashlight.
He came right out and claimed the laws didn't apply to him. He changed his title from "duly elected president" to "dictator".
And that's what the riots are about.
You can't vote a dictator out of office a couple years down the road.
The legal limit for a class ///a laser pointer is 5mw iirc. And most laser pointers nowadays are pretty close to that. 10 years ago you could get a 2 or 3mw laser, and you'd pay more (as in... $150 rather than $75) for a 5mw pointer. (I have two from back then, one red, and one green, that one was awesome at the time) So I would be amazed if you could find anyone selling a ///a pointer NOT advertised as 5mw. (or "less than 5mw", meaning that's the legal limit we are trying to stay under)
There are other issues also, including wavelength. The first publicly available handheld reds were near infra-red. They may have done 5mw, but the human eye had very poor sensitivity at their nm, so it was borderline false-advertising. My good red one was deep into visible red and was around 10x as visibly bright as commonly available 5mw reds due to wavelength change. My green is only 3mw but is almost blinding by comparison with my red on a wall because of how sensitive the eye is to green compared to red.
Lots of good info on Wikipedia for laser pointers.
Although atmosphere does reduce the power, it's columnated light and in a vacuum anyway it would not lose any of its power. Dust, fog, humidity in the air will lower the power, but also cause you to be able to see the beam in the air. If you can't see the beam of a laser, it's likely delivering very close to 100% of its output power on target.
Years ago, when laser pointers were expensive, I had a 5mw red laser that we tested at 1/4 mile. It lit up an entire dumpster very nicely. (lenses weren't that good back then, it wouldn't hold a point for more than 25 feet or so, and TONS of scatter)
But on the other issue of power, just because it's a laser doesn't make it any more destructive than something else of the same power. A 100w lightbulb puts out 100x the power of a 1w laser pointer. And you don't see lightbulbs catching helicopters on fire. (even if focused in a spotlight) The only reason 1w lasers catch paper on fire is they're concentrating 1w of power into a 2mm x 2mm area. That would probably feel like a match at 1/2", enough to light paper. That's not going to melt metal obviously, at any range. The laser just lets you project that "half inch from a match" out several hundred yards. It doesn't make it more (or less) intense.
Somewhat back on topic though... wow.... that flight had to SUCK for those helicopter pilots. Someone hits one 727 with a laser pointer and the whole city loses their mind and the swat team rolls. That heli looks like it had 3-4 dozen green and at least two blue pointed at it. They would have to be out of their minds to look down except through cameras, and imagine the refractions going on inside the cockpit, with greens and blues scattering off all the shiny things. I bet that is an incredibly effective deterrent for the pilots.
Ironic, they sent in the helicopters as a show of force, and got driven off by the demonstrators using cheap, commonly available tech. Sort of like making the water canon truck leave by throwing rocks at it. Embarrassing.
Inter-planetary travel imposes inflexible deadlines. Planetary alignment dictates when your launch windows are, and they are frequently several years apart. Compare it with the space shuttle for example, where you can get a launch window everyday or two and have lives at risk. Project planning on an inter-planetary launch spreads out over years. If your part of the project starts getting behind, and it's not something you can fix by simply throwing more resources at it, you have to prioritize so you don't miss your launch window.
A non-fatal glitch that only showed up once during testing, that you have nothing to go on, quickly takes a back seat to engineering making sure it doesn't "pull a Beagle" when it arrives. One-off anomalies in testing are only tackled (and not all of them are necessarily resolved) when all critical systems are verified bulletproof.
There is one other angle often overlooked here that I'm surprised wasn't addressed. On a launch like this, where it typically takes over a year for the mission to reach the destination, this is when those weird glitches should be getting identified and patched on the twin unit in the lab, when you can invest all your ground resources into software testing and improvements. Then software updates are sent to the rover en-route, or shortly after landing. I don't know why this didn't happen. From the sounds of it though, the testers may not have properly documented the glitch. It kinda sounds like they had to talk to them when the problem surfaced and get someone to fess up to having seen a problem like this during testing that didn't get documented. One person covering up a glitch in their work to save face can cost millions of dollars and years of time. Someone ought to get canned for that.
This problem is either handled by thermal storage or by just simply using other power source (commercial, wind, etc) when there's no sun.
One common approach is liquid sodium. You use an array of moving mirrors to heat sodium being circulated in a tower in the middle of the mirror farm. That circulates with a large, heavily insulated tank of liquid sodium under the facility. It heats up during the day, cools off during the evening, but is always hot enough to boil water to run turbines. (unless you get like a week straight of no sun, iirc these facilities can "coast" around four days without much sun)
Really downtime isn't important anyway. During a sunny day, they'll be generating a lot more power than they use in the center. The remainder of that will be getting bought back by the local utility, for credit on their bill when the sun goes down etc. A lot of municipalities/states are passing laws requiring the local utils to buy back power during peak-production times. (they were fighting it) So even just straight solar panels with no thermal or even battery storage is fine. They'll rack up credit during the day, spend it overnight, and will come out somewhere around even on the average, without having to spend money (and reoccurring replacement money) on batteries etc. Batteries are a very poor investment if you can just sell your excess power back to the local utility and use them as an almost zero-cost buffer.
Not user-replaceable.
They'll just have to ship their datacenter to an authorized service provider.
I think the core of that problem is that people are overlooking or choosing to ignore their prior decisions when they have a problem. "I have to have a cigarette." "I can't make my baby stop crying." "I can't help if they ring me when I'm on call."
They're all overlooking/ignoring the decisions they made in advance, and the consequences and additional responsibilities they were volunteering to take on. "I chose to start smoking addictive cigarettes." "I had a baby." "I took a job that required me to be on call."
And then they also overlook/ignore the next round of choices they have made. "I attended an event that lasts longer than I can go without a cigarette." "I took my young child to the theatre." "I went to the movies while on call." Somehow they don't see their decisions as relevant to the problem, and thus not their responsibility to deal with. "it's not my problem. it can't be helped." NO. It is your problem, and it could have and can be helped. Accept responsibility for the consequences of your decisions.
I think they're just in denial. And the rest of the world just has to suffer for it.
Two part solution:
1) make it clear that cell phones and pagers must be kept OFF if taken into the theater. "You agree to hold harmless anyone taking your functioning phone or pager away from you, including any accidental or intentional damage to said device."
before we get to #2, 911 IN the theater room is not necessary. you probably can't call 911 when you're swimming in the public pool for example. It's not a civil right. If you think that it is, then I challenge you to force your local pool to find a way to accommodate this right. Cellular/landline access to 911 is only relevant when there are no other convenient ways to summon help. Being 40 feet from the theater lobby is NOT too inconvenient. I can probably sprint to the lobby faster than you can fumble for your phone in the dark and dial 911. Maybe you should insist on them leaving the lights on in the theater so you can dial 911 faster? Seconds count! now put that silly argument away.
2) theaters could offer a silent pager, similar to what you find at many restaurants. Check your cell phone or pager at the lobby and get a pager. If your phone goes off, they will vibrate your pager. Theaters should not be required to offer this, and would almost certainly charge for it to prevent half the theater from checking their phones. If you need to be on call 24/7, don't go to a theater that doesn't offer this service. (and don't go for a swim) There are some things you simply can't do if you're on call. You're probably being compensated for this inconvenience. Deal with it, it's not my problem.
It's not the magnetic field that''s the problem. Until you get EXTREMELY high anyway. Like, "rip the iron out of your blood" high. Or you have an implant with any ferrous material. (thankfully titanium isn't substantially ferrous)
The problem is the HEPs (High Energy Particles) that are flying out of the sun from CMEs (coronal mass ejections) at moderate speed. These are small atomic level particles, and are moving so fast and are so small that the odds of them ever hitting anything are very slim. But there's a lot of them. So it's like someone shooting at you with a shotgun from a few blocks away. But he's got a million shotguns. Odds are he's gonna get lucky eventually. It works the same as radiation. And when one of these "pellets" hits a strand of DNA, it'll break it up like a cue ball breaking a rack on a pool table. It will almost certainly prevent the cell from ever being able to divide, and will affect enzyme production, which may be fatal to the cell.
If there's enough HEPs flying your way, it's like getting hit with a high or massive dose of radiation. And massive DNA damage. There's also a lot of cellular damage, which the cells might be able to repair if they were working right, which they're not due to the DNA damage. So you get massive cell death throughout your body over the next few hours or days. Maybe enough to kill you. Or almost certainly give you cancer if you survive. Possibly a very nasty, widespread, aggressive cancer.
Aaaanyway, these particles are moving fast and there's a lot of them, but they're very light. And usually heavily charged from their explosive exit from the sun. Charged particles are very easy to influence with a magnetic field. So you put a magnetic field around an area, like the earth's magnetic field does around the earth, and the particles tend to route around the area instead of through it.
The aurora borealis is the visible effect of HEPs interacting with the earth's magnetosphere. When you can see that, there's enough HEPs hitting it to actually deform it. (cool videos of this effect on youtube) The shape of the field is very important. Notice how the north and south magnetic poles of the earth offer far less protection.
The earth's magnetic field protects us from this, so we didn't evolve a resistance to it. So when we leave its protection, we'll need to have something else to keep the HEPs from damaging our cells. And the best two theories going right now are blocking it and deflecting it. Blocking it is heavy, and heavy is never good when you're talking space travel. Deflecting it... well, it's tricky, they're working on it.
the reason physical shielding has to be so thick and dense is the particles are so small and flying so fast that they run through normal matter like it's not hardly even there. (besides the occasional hitting a bit of your dna and knocking the atoms around like a clean break on a pool table) Magnetic deflection would just reroute the HEPs around the capsule. Wouldn't require much weight, but may be a bit power hungry.
I don't know enough about magnetics though... I thought that it only takes significant energy to establish a strong magnetic field, and that unless it's interacting with (pulling/pushing) something, the "maintenance cost" is rather low? (and that you can recover a lot of that energy when turning off the magnet)
I suppose the problem then becomes how to keep the magnetic effects out of the inside of the capsule? Is that even possible?
Several recent space movies have played it like normal space exposure is no big deal unless there's an event like a solar flare that belches HEPs in their direction. Then all the dramatic klaxons go off and theyÂscramble to some purpose-built chamber that shields them until the storm is over. Don't we normally get hours of warnings on big CMEs? I think they're just rushing for the drama effect. Probably more of a "Hmm big CME just went off. Everybody meet up in the Round Room at 1800, pack a lunch, we'll be in there for at least five hours". Maybe something like that would be more practical, if possible. That would allow setting up a stronger magnetic field in a small area, relatively free of electronics and other metals normally required in a space ship.
You missed two important points to my suggested method. (1) there's no clue that it's enciphered. (beyond being a bit of a jumble anyway) Even if it's only a substitution cipher (which it indeed is) then it amounts more to stenography than enciphering. Imagine the cpu time they could burn up trying to decipher everything they ran across on the internet that didn't appear to be cleartext? I don't think they'd get much done. The return on investment is too low.
(2) I'm not saying ditch the font tweaking. Just don't go quite as wild as this guy is suggesting. It doesn't need to beat OCR. Why would you bother to OCR something when you have the text of it? that'd be like printing out an email you received, sticking it on the scanner, scanning, OCR'ing, and then reading the result... complete waste of time when you already (think you) have the plain text? Without this light noise to the font, the easiest way to detect my above steno is to compare the font against known fonts. (there really aren't that many, 99% of the fonts you will find in use in a given year will be in a set of under 20,000 and of course there are a few dozen that alone will take the first 70%) You just need to make it not quick to compare your font (hashed) against the known fonts to check to see if someone is pulling the above switcheroo steno, and if you detect it, then dump into more processor intensive analysis like substitution cipher.
Moral of the story is, if the cost to investigate is justified by the level of suspicion that they need to invest more resources, you've already lost. They have infinite resources if they strongly (or even reasonably) suspect you are hiding something.
If the NSA etc want to seriously respond to these ocr-impossible fonts, they'll just look for it (which is rather trivial seeing as they've published the font, it's static) and then just bulk it to a sweatshop in india to get translated. It'll get done in the cubicle adjacent to another doing captchas for the bot-hearders, cheaply, quickly, and 100% effectively.
In other words, "we told him we'd buy out all the rights in exchange for a snickers bar and a firm handshake, but much to our surprise he turned our generous offer down, so it's his fault"?
If you exported a document as a pdf, you can embed fonts in it. Run a program to convert your original text file into another one. translate out the characters to other ascii ids. and then embed the font.
For example, ""DOG". Letter "D" is ascii 68. So the pdf will say "this is character 68, in whatever font you had selected." So place the obfuscated glyph for "D" in the position for "Y" (90) and then change all Ds to Ys in the document's text stream. Then when a person reads it, it LOOKS like DOG but copy-paste will get "YOG". Do this for all characters and numbers.
A smart app to do this would roll up a random ascii remapping for each document, and obfuscate characters in the font differently each document. This would make it difficult to craft a specific skimmer module to handle this obfuscation automatically..
This will allow you to email or post the data, and humans to read it, but skimmers won't get legible text with a copy and paste, and if they then fall back to OCR attempt, that will also fail.
Although in reality, fallback to OCR in an automated system is unlikely, and would probably just move on to the next document to skim. So just making very slight adjustments to the glyphs in the font, (to prevent automated correction) in addition to mixing them up, would probably do a good job against fully automated skimming. The adjustments this guy is making (except for the last one) are inconvenient to read. Just adding a LITTLE noise would do the trick I think.
That, and it becomes more a war-of-resources than a war-of-blood. Whoever can buy the biggest droid army wins.
In our world, "droids" lack sentience (though are getting better and better at faking it) and to some degree society is viewing them as having rights. At least in the personification sense. In Lucas's world, droids have sentience, but appear to be completely devoid of rights, and in most cases, respect. It's very similar to slavery a century ago. I think that may be the comparison he's making with them?
I think Anakin and Luke's relationship with say, R2D2, is very much the exception to the rule in the Star Wars universe, a bit like how someone in the 1800's treating a slave they owed with any degree of respect was considered inappropriate. Look at how that one guy said "oh, and have the protocol droid's mind wiped." "oh dear..." Very callously said, and very accepting of his fate.
The last time I saw "kidnapping" defined, there were two requirements. (1) illegally detained and (2) moved more than 50 feet". This may have been for a specific jurisdiction, but I believe it was federal. Unlawful detention is separate from kidnapping, in that kidnapping requires them to force you to come with them.
also true of arrest.
also true of arrest. People get arrested on "trumped up charges" all the time. See "officer bubbles" for a good laugh. All they do is drop charges a few hrs later after they're done harassing you. They don't need any proof to arrest you. It's only necessary if they want to keep you there (>24 hrs usually) and successfully prosecute you.
also true of arrest. (without filing charges anyway)
What anyone means to anyone is irrelevant. It could "mean" they plan on throwing you an aavon party. All that matters are obligations. Anything they "intend" to do but that can change their mind on later is not a defining attribute.
agreed! arrest requires it. but they could probably do it when they are detaining you too. I doubt they do that, since you'd be more likely to clam up, but there's nothing obligating them NOT to for a detention. So that's not as useful as a deciding factor as you might at first expect.
"Unlikely!" you say? I have personal experience here. I was trying to be a helpful citizen many years ago giving a detective information on a theft where I ended up innocently receiving stolen property. I came to the station to give him the details. First thing the prick did was read me my rights. I did not enjoy the experience, and I don't intend on volunteering my assistance to that particular police department again anytime soon. (he apparently marked me as an accomplice and was trying to trick, and I do mean trick, me into incriminating myself) I wasn't under arrest. I wasn't even being detained.
see above on "intent" and "obligation"
yes and that's what I was hoping someone would actually get specific about instead of repeating "more restrictions" over and over again, which doesn't really tell us anything useful. I see someone else did in another reply though.
"requires more proof" is no more specific than "more restrictions".
This is the problem that a lot of us are having though, we think we know how to distinguish between "free", "detained", and "arrested", but it's not that simple of a question.
Can you outline the differences in scope / freedom between being detained and under arrest? as far as I'm concerned, they appear to be identical. I lose my right to leave. The only other difference I can foresee is arrest requires specific charges. But are they obligated to tell you? If not, it doesn't matter. They could detain you for an hour, or arrest you for an hour (without specifying charges) and then release you (or drop the unknown charges and release you) - and so what was the difference to you? Either way you spent an hour in custody, having temporarily lost your freedom to leave. What other rights would arrest lose you? Hmmm... search I suppose?
And is this "detention" what is exercised at DUI checkpoints? Sounds like it? "you're not under arrest, but you're not allowed to leave. we haven't decided if we're going to arrest or release you yet. Stay here until we decide."
An earlier comment stated:
I don't see how a DUI checkpoint would meet that criteria. Unless "it's 2:15 am" constitutes a fact and "drunks frequently drive home after the bar closes" constitutes a circumstance?
I recall debating about that in the past. The question arose:
Office: "stay here."
Citizen: "Am I under arrest?"
Office: "you want to be? no you're not under arrest, not yet. but just stay here for right now."
Citizen: "Am I free to go?"
Officer: "What did I just say to you? No, you are not free to go. STAY HERE while we xxxxx"
this actually happens frequently. And I don't recall the issue being settled. If you can't leave, and aren't free to go, what is your legal status? What happens if you try to leave? (almost certainly bad things, resisting arrest, interfere with official acts, obstruction of justice, failure to obey an officer of the law, disturbing the peace, etc etc justifying arrest)
So you're kinda in a pickle when they tell you you're not under arrest AND you're not free to leave. Is there a lawyer in the house that can explore this situation, and maybe even suggest some advice? (I know, fat chance, "yes I am a lawyer, NO I am not YOUR lawyer, and this is not legal advice", but do what you can)