If you are worried about that, buy in rural Alaska. Most of Alaska is tax-free.
One day, either the oil will run out, or we will finally wean off of fossil fuels. Then Alaska won't be worth anything to the US except for the expanded fishing-territory rights. That's not enough to support the State's infrastructure, nor its annual pay-out to residents.
Like "owning" a house. You don't own shit. You rent it from the government. Try missing your property tax payments.
OK, sure.
But who builds and maintains roadways, provides postal service, fire departments, tax write-offs for mortgagees, border protection, regulations on other necessary infrastructure items like water, electricity, clean air, and so on?
Some entityhas to be in charge. Otherwise we would be back to tribes and territorial warlords.
Government is a necessary evil. If you don't like how yours is operating –get involved.
Excellent point. This really does seem like a "vote with your wallet" thing. I've got a Nest cam (purchased when they were still Dropcam). I'll keep it as long as it works, but I'm not going to pay their monthly fee...
Totally. Dropcam looked like a perfect solution – until you read a bit and discovered you had to pay to use the hardware you purchased!
WTF is up with that? I have tons of local storage, but Dropcam would only allow me to store video on their servers?!? Stupid business model. I'd rather build one with components from SparkFun.com, use an open-source security cam package, or just write my own in LabView.
A digital camera is a digital camera is a digital camera.
From my second home, or anywhere, I do anything.
* Check the security camera history, for example.
* Access my music, movies, pics, data, projects, archives — AND back up my laptop when on travel.
* Anything else I might want – controlling lights, blast the stereo, whatever
Screw NEST. Proprietary system to control my home? NO THANKS!
OS X Server and Screen Sharing are plenty. Plan B is jumping to Linux (painful, but OS X is BSD Unix-based, so at least my feet are wet.)
I'll be a UK Citizen within a year, regardless. (marriage)
Not as good as Canada, I know, but better weather an no guns. (Canadians are responsible with their guns, but if you get a bunch of Americans moving there...)
FTA: James Bakers says, "If the public does nothing, encryption like that will continue to roll out," he said. "It has public safety costs. Folks have to understand that, and figure out how they are going to deal with that. Do they want the public to bear those costs? Do they want the victims of terrorism to bear those costs?"
Fuck you James Baker.
Fuck you FBI.
Get the CIA to stop knocking over the Governments of Sovereign Nations, and we will not have a terrorism problem.
9 of the top 10 terrorist acts in the US were performed by home-grown US Citizens.
Enough with the FUD and paranoia. Yes, I know that it increases the FBI budget, but that is not the reason that the FBI exists (to grow). Your job is to prevent domestic and inter-state crimes, or to catch those who have committed such.
Some journalists are going to publish only part of it, to damage only those that they have interest in hurting. Wikileaks publishes everything, and that's what we need, so that every citizen can go through it and show what's inside.
People who have access to it, please, leak it all.
(I was checking the journalists in ICIJ from my country, they are not from very different media outlets. I can see a lot staying hidden and I imagine it will be the same for other countries)
People NOT on this first tranche list will now get to live in fear of the next release.
It is a wise strategy, just to get things rolling. Tranches will be released slowly, making absolutely certain that it stays in the headlines for a good, long time. It's the only way to get the public's attention.
It's as if they forgot why the website exists in the first place.
The web designers did forget. Long ago.
Remember the "Punch the Monkey" banner ads? My first encounter was in 1999. In those days, before blockers, I kept a physical post-it note on the side of my monitor, ready to slap over that idiot animation, just so I could read the page's text. Before that, in, say, 1994 or 5, at least AOL's ads were always in the same place, so you could safely leave the post-it semi-permanently on the offending spot.
Ever since then, in web designers never-ending quest to one-up each other, or for web-designer packages to out-do each other, things have continued their slide. YouTube now uses the same idea in some of their over-video text ads—the "(X)" disappears once you mouse over it.
It doesn't help that the marketing department & management are always pushing for company websites to be more 'interactive', 'relevant', 'predictive', or 'bleeding-edge' THAN EVAR!11!!1!
I run one browser nude, but only to ensure web-compatibility of a certain project's interface with standard browsers. (I'm not a web designer.) Whenever using someone else's computer, every time, I am gob-smacked at the number of flashy, blinky, popover, click-trap, and content over-hovering ads that show up. Out come the post-its, as they did just today, as the bottom-crawlers of a recorded TV news broadcast couldn't be blanked by any other means.
By law, it does. Once dead, you are no longer a person.
So, leave a will or similar. Cache all of your passwords in a two-factor form (two people who don't know who the other is, nor what the other's instructions are RE password determination). Your will can disclose this little dance they have to do. IANAL, but believe that a will is A/C privileged and/or private, so reduced risk there.
Get trigger-point injections if you have muscle spasms again. A step above acupuncture, it's a shot right into the muscle, slowly injecting a little bit of saline+lidocaine. Both you and the physician will feel the release, for sure!
Isn't that wet needling? I'll ask the doctor about that one as well - thank you.
The needles they put in now certainly release the muscles, I don't really know how much more I could take. I had needles between C1, my skull, in my temple and lower in my neck (three damn neck injuries!) for spasms that affected my eyesight. I think my yeeoooowww!
Yeah, the first release of any long-term spasm-ed muscle gives a really strong kick. Have the TPI done weekly at first, and then taper to every 2 or 4 weeks.
A muscle, once un-spasm-ed, can get some proper blood flow. It will also do its job, and not offload work to its neighbors. Eventually, after the physician plays whack-a-mole with the "worst 8" on each visit, things will begin to settle down.
Physio after releases is far more effective than doing it with them. Also, buy a Pilates Reformer for your home (mobility and slow-controlled muscle exertion). Don't buy a knock-off, but the real thing, made of wood by the original designer. Look on cragislist or ebay. $2000 is expensive, but after a few years, I sold mine for about the same $$$$ I paid for it, when it was longer needed.
Any web designer who ever uses light gray text on a slightly darker gray background or a font less than 10 pt should be forced to wear the vision fader for a month at least.
The problem lies with them, not you.
Articles will often be presented in 8-pt text, but text in any ads will be 36-pt. And images will span the entire browser window.
Command-+ (or Control-+) in most browsers will magnify all text and re-wrap, usually.
Only if you're unhealthy. I am 40 years old, I eat well and I have an active life. My stomach is flat and muscular.
Agreed. Another example of what "Use it or lose it" gets you:
I'm past 45, and can still fit into jeans I wore in college. 33" waist. Physically, I'm up from 250 to 300 ms in reaction time, but dexterity has increased with experience. Muscle-memory from multiple sports in youth provides a different type of skill than being young and quick. Mentally, I am far more capable of thinking, learning, and creating than at age 22. Mental 'velocity' is still "scary-fast" (I'm told), with working memory and long-term recall also still way up there. Hair? Well, that one's genetic.
I recall being faster than my computer in 1985, as far as giving instructions ahead of its buffer. That is still the case today.
... Knots in my back so tight and painful that the physios elbow was into it and his feet were off the ground, and still I needed more pressure....
Get trigger-point injections if you have muscle spasms again. A step above acupuncture, it's a shot right into the muscle, slowly injecting a little bit of saline+lidocaine. Both you and the physician will feel the release, for sure! It's much better than release via physio, which can bruise or worse when repeated over years.
For acupuncture, make sure the person is also an MD.
That if you want to encrypt the video stream from the drone back to ground, that you might have a lot of latency as that could take some horsepower. But encrypting the navigation signals ought not create any problems with latency.
Their comm link should probably be encrypted. But I do not want their video stream encrypted.
Any citizen can buy a "Police Scanner" to listen to their chatter. This should be no different. Watch the watchers.
Perhaps that just shows what high quality "hobby" parts have achieved.
That's the thing with mass production and economies of scale can do, improve quality while lowering costs. Things that no so long ago would have been an expensive custom item are now cheap enough and of a high enough quality that someone would be stupid to go back to that custom item.
Indeed. In 2003, image-sensors for optical microscopes (in labs) cost from $2000-$8000.
I built one for about $40, and it worked perfectly.
Bought a Mattel QX3 'toy' USB microscope off ebay, ripped out the sensor, stuck it into a tuna can, and mounted that atop a high-quality compound microscope at the RFP. The toy's software worked just fine, enabling super-cheap 40x–1000x image-capture from top-end optics.
Sure, CMOS sensors are noisy, so I just cranked up the illumination for good SNR. And 320x240 was enough—Stitching multiple shots is easy.
... these "national security letters" is garbage and is a prime example how far into a totalitarian state america has fallen...
The 'Totalitarian' term is a bit strong to be used (just yet). 'Overly authoritarian' is inadequate, though. It is technically still a 'semi-socialized representative republic', but that is slipping away. It's slipping closer to 'fascism', but is not there just yet.
Any sociologists want to chime in on the most appropriate term for current-day USA?
Only thing I've seen so far is that the scores and user IDs are appearing in binary. Better than the flood of stupid april fools stories, in my opinion.
Yes, and thank the FSM for that! Slashdot imitating The Onion for one day per year just meant that I lost one stream of potentially important news for the day.
The timing of Reddit's warrant-canary dying is unfortunate (more than usual). It was reported today, at 4:00 am, not March 31.
I would suggest the timing to be a conspired attempt to keep this out of the news-cycle, but that would be giving the NSA and FISA courts wa-a-a-a-a-ay too much credit for being clever. Or capable of such.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are worried about that, buy in rural Alaska. Most of Alaska is tax-free.
One day, either the oil will run out, or we will finally wean off of fossil fuels. Then Alaska won't be worth anything to the US except for the expanded fishing-territory rights. That's not enough to support the State's infrastructure, nor its annual pay-out to residents.
This.
Like "owning" a house. You don't own shit. You rent it from the government. Try missing your property tax payments.
OK, sure.
But who builds and maintains roadways, provides postal service, fire departments, tax write-offs for mortgagees, border protection, regulations on other necessary infrastructure items like water, electricity, clean air, and so on?
Some entity has to be in charge. Otherwise we would be back to tribes and territorial warlords.
Government is a necessary evil. If you don't like how yours is operating –get involved.
Technically Alphabet was created to protect the Google brand from the evil they do.
Wish I had not Commented already.
Parent Comment is spot-on.
Excellent point. This really does seem like a "vote with your wallet" thing. I've got a Nest cam (purchased when they were still Dropcam). I'll keep it as long as it works, but I'm not going to pay their monthly fee...
Totally. Dropcam looked like a perfect solution – until you read a bit and discovered you had to pay to use the hardware you purchased!
WTF is up with that? I have tons of local storage, but Dropcam would only allow me to store video on their servers?!? Stupid business model. I'd rather build one with components from SparkFun.com, use an open-source security cam package, or just write my own in LabView.
A digital camera is a digital camera is a digital camera.
This is why I run a server in my primary home.
From my second home, or anywhere, I do anything.
* Check the security camera history, for example.
* Access my music, movies, pics, data, projects, archives — AND back up my laptop when on travel.
* Anything else I might want – controlling lights, blast the stereo, whatever
Screw NEST. Proprietary system to control my home? NO THANKS!
OS X Server and Screen Sharing are plenty. Plan B is jumping to Linux (painful, but OS X is BSD Unix-based, so at least my feet are wet.)
I'll be a UK Citizen within a year, regardless. (marriage)
Not as good as Canada, I know, but better weather an no guns. (Canadians are responsible with their guns, but if you get a bunch of Americans moving there...)
... Snowden ... Let's at least grant him the privilege of a place to live.
That is a private home, and not a jail cell.
FTA: James Bakers says, "If the public does nothing, encryption like that will continue to roll out," he said. "It has public safety costs. Folks have to understand that, and figure out how they are going to deal with that. Do they want the public to bear those costs? Do they want the victims of terrorism to bear those costs?"
Fuck you James Baker.
Fuck you FBI.
Get the CIA to stop knocking over the Governments of Sovereign Nations, and we will not have a terrorism problem.
9 of the top 10 terrorist acts in the US were performed by home-grown US Citizens.
Enough with the FUD and paranoia. Yes, I know that it increases the FBI budget, but that is not the reason that the FBI exists (to grow). Your job is to prevent domestic and inter-state crimes, or to catch those who have committed such.
STOP over-reaching.
Some journalists are going to publish only part of it, to damage only those that they have interest in hurting. Wikileaks publishes everything, and that's what we need, so that every citizen can go through it and show what's inside.
People who have access to it, please, leak it all.
(I was checking the journalists in ICIJ from my country, they are not from very different media outlets. I can see a lot staying hidden and I imagine it will be the same for other countries)
People NOT on this first tranche list will now get to live in fear of the next release.
It is a wise strategy, just to get things rolling. Tranches will be released slowly, making absolutely certain that it stays in the headlines for a good, long time. It's the only way to get the public's attention.
And Privacy Badger blocked 41 trackers, this is a record for any web page I've visited.
Oh, so that's why the web page I saw looked to have been written directly in html, and contained only text that reflowed without issues.
I was wondering why a "news outlet website" for Silicon Valley looked so completely retro!
At least there was no flashing rainbow text.
FYI roaches seem to get drunk on coffee -- they can even overdose themselves to death.
Good to know.
Know of any 'folk recipes' for a caffeine-based insecticide for roaches or ants?
take a guess at how the cannabis plant worked it out with the bees...
Don't they get lost on the way home, then?
Ah yes, Lake Slashdot. Where everyone is 2 standard deviations above the mean.
Merely two standard deviations?!?
Shirley your knot Sirius. Its moor liek 3 oar fore!
It's as if they forgot why the website exists in the first place.
The web designers did forget. Long ago.
Remember the "Punch the Monkey" banner ads? My first encounter was in 1999. In those days, before blockers, I kept a physical post-it note on the side of my monitor, ready to slap over that idiot animation, just so I could read the page's text. Before that, in, say, 1994 or 5, at least AOL's ads were always in the same place, so you could safely leave the post-it semi-permanently on the offending spot.
Ever since then, in web designers never-ending quest to one-up each other, or for web-designer packages to out-do each other, things have continued their slide. YouTube now uses the same idea in some of their over-video text ads—the "(X)" disappears once you mouse over it.
It doesn't help that the marketing department & management are always pushing for company websites to be more 'interactive', 'relevant', 'predictive', or 'bleeding-edge' THAN EVAR!11!!1!
I run one browser nude, but only to ensure web-compatibility of a certain project's interface with standard browsers. (I'm not a web designer.) Whenever using someone else's computer, every time, I am gob-smacked at the number of flashy, blinky, popover, click-trap, and content over-hovering ads that show up. Out come the post-its, as they did just today, as the bottom-crawlers of a recorded TV news broadcast couldn't be blanked by any other means.
The right to privacy doesn't end at death.
By law, it does. Once dead, you are no longer a person.
So, leave a will or similar. Cache all of your passwords in a two-factor form (two people who don't know who the other is, nor what the other's instructions are RE password determination). Your will can disclose this little dance they have to do. IANAL, but believe that a will is A/C privileged and/or private, so reduced risk there.
Font size is a nuisance but can be adjusted. Low contrast text is very difficult to read. Brown on beige, dark blue on light blue, etc.
If you have a Mac, you can flip on 'high-contrast mode' with a keystroke.
You shouldn't have to, of course, but that's web designers for you.
Get trigger-point injections if you have muscle spasms again. A step above acupuncture, it's a shot right into the muscle, slowly injecting a little bit of saline+lidocaine. Both you and the physician will feel the release, for sure!
Isn't that wet needling? I'll ask the doctor about that one as well - thank you.
The needles they put in now certainly release the muscles, I don't really know how much more I could take. I had needles between C1, my skull, in my temple and lower in my neck (three damn neck injuries!) for spasms that affected my eyesight. I think my yeeoooowww!
Yeah, the first release of any long-term spasm-ed muscle gives a really strong kick. Have the TPI done weekly at first, and then taper to every 2 or 4 weeks.
A muscle, once un-spasm-ed, can get some proper blood flow. It will also do its job, and not offload work to its neighbors. Eventually, after the physician plays whack-a-mole with the "worst 8" on each visit, things will begin to settle down.
Physio after releases is far more effective than doing it with them. Also, buy a Pilates Reformer for your home (mobility and slow-controlled muscle exertion). Don't buy a knock-off, but the real thing, made of wood by the original designer. Look on cragislist or ebay. $2000 is expensive, but after a few years, I sold mine for about the same $$$$ I paid for it, when it was longer needed.
Any web designer who ever uses light gray text on a slightly darker gray background or a font less than 10 pt should be forced to wear the vision fader for a month at least.
The problem lies with them, not you.
Articles will often be presented in 8-pt text, but text in any ads will be 36-pt. And images will span the entire browser window.
Command-+ (or Control-+) in most browsers will magnify all text and re-wrap, usually.
Only if you're unhealthy. I am 40 years old, I eat well and I have an active life. My stomach is flat and muscular.
Agreed. Another example of what "Use it or lose it" gets you:
I'm past 45, and can still fit into jeans I wore in college. 33" waist.
Physically, I'm up from 250 to 300 ms in reaction time, but dexterity has increased with experience.
Muscle-memory from multiple sports in youth provides a different type of skill than being young and quick.
Mentally, I am far more capable of thinking, learning, and creating than at age 22.
Mental 'velocity' is still "scary-fast" (I'm told), with working memory and long-term recall also still way up there.
Hair? Well, that one's genetic.
I recall being faster than my computer in 1985, as far as giving instructions ahead of its buffer. That is still the case today.
... Knots in my back so tight and painful that the physios elbow was into it and his feet were off the ground, and still I needed more pressure. ...
Get trigger-point injections if you have muscle spasms again. A step above acupuncture, it's a shot right into the muscle, slowly injecting a little bit of saline+lidocaine. Both you and the physician will feel the release, for sure! It's much better than release via physio, which can bruise or worse when repeated over years.
For acupuncture, make sure the person is also an MD.
That if you want to encrypt the video stream from the drone back to ground, that you might have a lot of latency as that could take some horsepower. But encrypting the navigation signals ought not create any problems with latency.
Their comm link should probably be encrypted. But I do not want their video stream encrypted.
Any citizen can buy a "Police Scanner" to listen to their chatter. This should be no different. Watch the watchers.
Perhaps that just shows what high quality "hobby" parts have achieved.
That's the thing with mass production and economies of scale can do, improve quality while lowering costs. Things that no so long ago would have been an expensive custom item are now cheap enough and of a high enough quality that someone would be stupid to go back to that custom item.
Indeed. In 2003, image-sensors for optical microscopes (in labs) cost from $2000-$8000.
I built one for about $40, and it worked perfectly.
Bought a Mattel QX3 'toy' USB microscope off ebay, ripped out the sensor, stuck it into a tuna can, and mounted that atop a high-quality compound microscope at the RFP. The toy's software worked just fine, enabling super-cheap 40x–1000x image-capture from top-end optics.
Sure, CMOS sensors are noisy, so I just cranked up the illumination for good SNR. And 320x240 was enough—Stitching multiple shots is easy.
... these "national security letters" is garbage and is a prime example how far into a totalitarian state america has fallen...
The 'Totalitarian' term is a bit strong to be used (just yet).
'Overly authoritarian' is inadequate, though.
It is technically still a 'semi-socialized representative republic', but that is slipping away.
It's slipping closer to 'fascism', but is not there just yet.
Any sociologists want to chime in on the most appropriate term for current-day USA?
Only thing I've seen so far is that the scores and user IDs are appearing in binary. Better than the flood of stupid april fools stories, in my opinion.
Yes, and thank the FSM for that! Slashdot imitating The Onion for one day per year just meant that I lost one stream of potentially important news for the day.
The timing of Reddit's warrant-canary dying is unfortunate (more than usual). It was reported today, at 4:00 am, not March 31.
I would suggest the timing to be a conspired attempt to keep this out of the news-cycle, but that would be giving the NSA and FISA courts wa-a-a-a-a-ay too much credit for being clever. Or capable of such.
Nice post.
Without standards, written communication loses all meaning.