...well, my dad did. So, I had the experience of playing the "Star Trek" game on a printing terminal connected via an acoustic coupler. It was the Arpanet back then, and not the Internet, and we wore an onion on our belt, a big yellow one, because that was the style.
What was I saying? Oh, right, "full on" internet access wasn't so good in the days before BBSing was popular.
If a country or company wants to operate a nuclear reactor, it should not assume anything about potential disasters â" be they earthquakes, tsunamis, terrorist attacks, or a plane crash. No matter what happens, the reactor must be brought to cold shutdown, which requires electricity and heat sinks. It is a pretty simple principle.
It's simple enough. It's just not possible. For any design you can come up with, someone can come up with a way to break it that is possible (though highly improbable).
You'd think the guy could at least try to resist the temptation to sound like he's in a mob movie. Unless that's part of the draw of the whole being evil thing.
The biggest problem isn't that the charges were dropped. Rather, she now has to answer affirmatively on a job application that she has been arrested and then explain herself.
Really? Canada allows employers to ask about arrests without convictions? A little searching online seems to indicate otherwise. It's not quite illegal to do so in the US (though it is in some states), but it's risky enough (can result in an Equal Opportunity Commission complaint) that most employers don't.
Worse yet, what if the story hits the papers or online news media? Good luck containing that.
Fortunately the story about the false accusation is also in the media this time.
In all literature covering legal self-defense that I've read, it was said that if you provoke someone into attacking you (even with an e.g. verbal insult), you don't get to claim self-defense when they attack you - or at least it will be extremely hard to argue that in court.
Here's Connecticut's model jury instruction on that doctrine: (yeah, I know, it's not Florida)
(One such / Another) circumstance under which a person is not justified in using any degree of physical force in self-defense against another is when (he/she) provokes the other person to use physical force against (him/her).
In order to provoke the use of physical force by another, it is not enough that the defendant by (his/her) conduct elicited the use of physical force by another; rather the defendant must have embarked upon such conduct with the specific intent to provoke the other into using physical force and intending to cause the other physical injury or death.
So you're right about provocation spoiling a self-defense argument, but (at least in Connecticut, and if you have the Florida equivalent please post it) it's a very limited and specific form of provocation -- you have to be deliberately trying to get the other guy to attack you. Just asking someone what he's doing doesn't meet that standard.
And everyone talks like this is unique to the Stand-Your-Ground law. All that law says is that the police have to have reasonable suspicion that you didn't fire in self-defense to arrest you -- just like every other damn crime.
And in fact Zimmerman was arrested.
The other thing the Stand Your Ground law does is eliminate the duty to retreat. In states with a duty to retreat, if a criminal attacks you intending serious bodily harm, you have to run away if you can; if you use deadly force instead, you're guilty of some form of homicide.
I don't know what to believe, but given Zimmerman's past history of unprovoked violence I'm not inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. If nothing else comes of this, it's an excellent example of how that SYG law allows for insane vigilante warfare, making the streets more, not less, dangerous.
So, supposing that Zimmerman is telling the truth about Martin attacking him and there was no SYG law, what would the difference have been? That you'd be able to convict Zimmerman for not running away? Or that Zimmerman would have had to testify that it was impractical to run away, e.g. because Martin knocked him down first thing? The second is no difference at all, and the first seems quite unjust.
In a lineup, you get a bunch of people who match the general description given by the witness, including one who you suspect. You then ask the witness to identify the guilty party out of them. You can do it in person or with photos.
In this case, they apparently showed the victim a bunch of pictures of people who had "friended" the bar, got an ID based on that, and failed to investigate further -- just arrested, charged, and let her try to prove her innocence, which she was fortunately able to do.
...what in the world would the downside of having the energy content for movie snacks posted? It's not as if it would be prohibitely difficult or expensive to calculate for the vendors.
Every regulation has a cost, even if each regulation's cost isn't prohibitive in itself. As you pass regulation after regulation, even if each looks individually good in itself, you build up a barrier to entry to the regulated area of commerce that is so great that only someone who can afford to have a whole compliance department in charge of keeping track of all the regulations can manage to stay in business. And thus you kill entrepreneurship and small business in that area of commerce.
You can see this in practice when health departments shut down kids' lemonade stands.
Without any evidence aside from the word of the accuser that Edna (and I do call her Edna) belongs to the rape cult, he shouldn't take any action against her. Of course, if the rape cult is an actual religion, Skinner as a public school principal can't fire her for membership anyway; funny how that works.
In this case, it's not a rape cult. It's not even anything illegal. Not baring the entirety of her private life to investigators may not be co-operative, but it does not give them license to assume "the worst".
When you hold a position of trust, especially over children, what you do in the rest of your life matters. And that's completely reasonable.
No, it isn't. There's a view of elementary school teachers as being totally strait-laced people who would never drink, curse, make off-color jokes, or (horror of horrors) fuck. The only people who should have ever believed that is their students (and then not for long after leaving elementary school); trying to force the teachers to actually live up to that view is unconscionable.
As I understand it the Slashdot article is (predictably) rather misleading. The technology involved isn't wifi per se but a clever signal processing method used in newer wifi standards (IE 802.11 N).
They claim their patents cover the older 802.11a, too.
slashdot says I shouldn't use too many caps because it's like YELLING. Well maybe I WANT to YELL so the people who just arent UNDERSTANDING can realize why Zimmerman is in the wrong here, and will be prosecuted and found guilty.
Well, maybe before you yell you should pay attention to what you're responding to. What I said, in response to a post claiming that the law required a person to retreat, is that Florida law has no duty to retreat. That doesn't mean that Zimmerman actually acted in self-defense, it just meant that his failure to retreat isn't sufficient to demonstrate that.
As for "provoking the entire fucking situation", there's only so far you can go with that as well. To take a totally different hypothetical, if I insult you and you pull a knife and advance on me, and I pull a gun and shoot you, I have still acted in self defense, even though I "provoked the entire fucking situation".
Right there you see Zimmerman following Martin. Another word would be stalking. The 9-11 operator told him not to engage. Any currently tested law applies only if the victim attempted to retreat and was otherwise forced into a confrontation where they had to protect their life.
There's no duty to retreat in Florida. That was the whole point of "stand your ground". And, IMO, it's perfectly reasonable; why should one legally have to retreat if attacked?
Voice analysis is a well established and studied technique. Unless you're particularly practiced and adept at disguising your voice, there are certain characteristics introduced by the physics of your vocal cords, throat, mouth, and nasal passages that are pretty consistent and identifiable, even with most people doing "impersonations" that sound like some other person.
And how many of those survive sampling down to 8 bit PCM at 8khz, then cell phone compression? How many are invariant between vocal registers? Sorry, I think Zimmerman's a thug, but IMO this audio analysis is not convincing.
It's nothing to do with "standards" at all. It's solely about technology which makes wifi work indoors without signal echo. They came up with the solution to the issue, patented it, then everyone else adapted it without licensing the technology.
Except that's not actually what happened. They wrote a patent broad enough to cover existing technology (OFDM) and got the courts to buy it.
(and to anticipate one of the usual pro-patent lines, no, they do not deserve a patent for describing a wireless LAN based on OFDM, when both wireless LANs and OFDM were pre-existing)
I guess you think one should buy the cheaper poorly insulated house rather than purchase a more expensive but better insulated house.
You'd have to run the numbers. My poorly insulated house with drafty single pane windows cost $3500 in energy (total) last year, which was a very bad winter. If you go with this winter instead, it's $3150. All the insulation in the world (including replacing the windows and doors) is unlikely to cut that by even 25%.
With a tank, you can just install a recirculating pump and valve (or valves) and have hot water quickly to all faucets. Doesn't work with tankless.
Tankless and hard water is also a pretty bad combination. With a gas tanked heater, the scale tends to mostly accumulate on the bottom, where you can just empty it out with a hose. With a tankless heater, the scale tends to clog up the heat exchanger.
But, maybe even light bulbs have cameras and microphones in them now, using the powerlines to transmit the data back..
The powerlines weren't reliable enough. Now the light bulbs transmit the data in the visible spectrum by DPSK-modulating the visible light; it's repeated throughout your house until it reaches a window at which point it's picked up by the black helicopter-drones and sent back to headquarters.
If you don't want to use data and don't use the phone much, the cheapest plan is probably the T-mobile prepaid; $100/1000 minutes, good for a year. Problem is they don't offer data with this at all. They used to offer it for $1.50/day (only on days you used it), but they killed it when the AT&T merger was proposed.
Chinese espionage hackers do it all for us free. They copy our stuff over to their side. It's as off-site as you can get.
The NSA has a copy of everything too, but in either case the problem is the same: restoring the data. Unless you know someone in Chinese intelligence?
(IIRC, such a clandestine "backup" was used in an early episode of "JAG" -- a recording of a transmission had been erased, but NSA had separately recorded it, and the cute blonde lawyer called in a favor with Ollie North to get a copy. This piece of trivia, alas, will never be useful, not even as an answer on Jeopardy)
As is par for slashdot, the summary contradicts the article -- "the invention is designed to convert anti-social-networking types to the joys of Google+" says the summary, whereas the patent abstract says "The ghost profile allows a user to use certain features in a social network without converting to a social network profile. "
In other words, the patent is for just the opposite of what the summary says it is for.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. It's a big company; I had nothing to do with this patent.)
Slashdot Mirror
...well, my dad did. So, I had the experience of playing the "Star Trek" game on a printing terminal connected via an acoustic coupler. It was the Arpanet back then, and not the Internet, and we wore an onion on our belt, a big yellow one, because that was the style.
What was I saying? Oh, right, "full on" internet access wasn't so good in the days before BBSing was popular.
It's simple enough. It's just not possible. For any design you can come up with, someone can come up with a way to break it that is possible (though highly improbable).
You'd think the guy could at least try to resist the temptation to sound like he's in a mob movie. Unless that's part of the draw of the whole being evil thing.
Really? Canada allows employers to ask about arrests without convictions? A little searching online seems to indicate otherwise. It's not quite illegal to do so in the US (though it is in some states), but it's risky enough (can result in an Equal Opportunity Commission complaint) that most employers don't.
Fortunately the story about the false accusation is also in the media this time.
Stupid criminals and innocent people. It's true there are a lot of the former -- and the cops don't believe in the latter.
Here's Connecticut's model jury instruction on that doctrine: (yeah, I know, it's not Florida)
So you're right about provocation spoiling a self-defense argument, but (at least in Connecticut, and if you have the Florida equivalent please post it) it's a very limited and specific form of provocation -- you have to be deliberately trying to get the other guy to attack you. Just asking someone what he's doing doesn't meet that standard.
And in fact Zimmerman was arrested.
The other thing the Stand Your Ground law does is eliminate the duty to retreat. In states with a duty to retreat, if a criminal attacks you intending serious bodily harm, you have to run away if you can; if you use deadly force instead, you're guilty of some form of homicide.
So, supposing that Zimmerman is telling the truth about Martin attacking him and there was no SYG law, what would the difference have been? That you'd be able to convict Zimmerman for not running away? Or that Zimmerman would have had to testify that it was impractical to run away, e.g. because Martin knocked him down first thing? The second is no difference at all, and the first seems quite unjust.
In a lineup, you get a bunch of people who match the general description given by the witness, including one who you suspect. You then ask the witness to identify the guilty party out of them. You can do it in person or with photos.
In this case, they apparently showed the victim a bunch of pictures of people who had "friended" the bar, got an ID based on that, and failed to investigate further -- just arrested, charged, and let her try to prove her innocence, which she was fortunately able to do.
Every regulation has a cost, even if each regulation's cost isn't prohibitive in itself. As you pass regulation after regulation, even if each looks individually good in itself, you build up a barrier to entry to the regulated area of commerce that is so great that only someone who can afford to have a whole compliance department in charge of keeping track of all the regulations can manage to stay in business. And thus you kill entrepreneurship and small business in that area of commerce.
You can see this in practice when health departments shut down kids' lemonade stands.
Without any evidence aside from the word of the accuser that Edna (and I do call her Edna) belongs to the rape cult, he shouldn't take any action against her. Of course, if the rape cult is an actual religion, Skinner as a public school principal can't fire her for membership anyway; funny how that works.
In this case, it's not a rape cult. It's not even anything illegal. Not baring the entirety of her private life to investigators may not be co-operative, but it does not give them license to assume "the worst".
No, it isn't. There's a view of elementary school teachers as being totally strait-laced people who would never drink, curse, make off-color jokes, or (horror of horrors) fuck. The only people who should have ever believed that is their students (and then not for long after leaving elementary school); trying to force the teachers to actually live up to that view is unconscionable.
They claim their patents cover the older 802.11a, too.
Well, maybe before you yell you should pay attention to what you're responding to. What I said, in response to a post claiming that the law required a person to retreat, is that Florida law has no duty to retreat. That doesn't mean that Zimmerman actually acted in self-defense, it just meant that his failure to retreat isn't sufficient to demonstrate that.
As for "provoking the entire fucking situation", there's only so far you can go with that as well. To take a totally different hypothetical, if I insult you and you pull a knife and advance on me, and I pull a gun and shoot you, I have still acted in self defense, even though I "provoked the entire fucking situation".
Great, now you'll have to rip it all out when you sell because of the code about separation between high and low voltage wiring.
Lots of others got it to work. CSIRO claims cover their work as well.
After fighting it tooth and nail for many years.
There's no duty to retreat in Florida. That was the whole point of "stand your ground". And, IMO, it's perfectly reasonable; why should one legally have to retreat if attacked?
And how many of those survive sampling down to 8 bit PCM at 8khz, then cell phone compression? How many are invariant between vocal registers? Sorry, I think Zimmerman's a thug, but IMO this audio analysis is not convincing.
Except that's not actually what happened. They wrote a patent broad enough to cover existing technology (OFDM) and got the courts to buy it.
(and to anticipate one of the usual pro-patent lines, no, they do not deserve a patent for describing a wireless LAN based on OFDM, when both wireless LANs and OFDM were pre-existing)
You'd have to run the numbers. My poorly insulated house with drafty single pane windows cost $3500 in energy (total) last year, which was a very bad winter. If you go with this winter instead, it's $3150. All the insulation in the world (including replacing the windows and doors) is unlikely to cut that by even 25%.
With a tank, you can just install a recirculating pump and valve (or valves) and have hot water quickly to all faucets. Doesn't work with tankless.
Tankless and hard water is also a pretty bad combination. With a gas tanked heater, the scale tends to mostly accumulate on the bottom, where you can just empty it out with a hose. With a tankless heater, the scale tends to clog up the heat exchanger.
It's better that the MPAA and all its member companies go out of business than... no, wait, just leave it as the null comparative; it's just better.
The powerlines weren't reliable enough. Now the light bulbs transmit the data in the visible spectrum by DPSK-modulating the visible light; it's repeated throughout your house until it reaches a window at which point it's picked up by the black helicopter-drones and sent back to headquarters.
If you don't want to use data and don't use the phone much, the cheapest plan is probably the T-mobile prepaid; $100/1000 minutes, good for a year. Problem is they don't offer data with this at all. They used to offer it for $1.50/day (only on days you used it), but they killed it when the AT&T merger was proposed.
The NSA has a copy of everything too, but in either case the problem is the same: restoring the data. Unless you know someone in Chinese intelligence?
(IIRC, such a clandestine "backup" was used in an early episode of "JAG" -- a recording of a transmission had been erased, but NSA had separately recorded it, and the cute blonde lawyer called in a favor with Ollie North to get a copy. This piece of trivia, alas, will never be useful, not even as an answer on Jeopardy)
As is par for slashdot, the summary contradicts the article -- "the invention is designed to convert anti-social-networking types to the joys of Google+" says the summary, whereas the patent abstract says "The ghost profile allows a user to use certain features in a social network without converting to a social network profile. "
In other words, the patent is for just the opposite of what the summary says it is for.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. It's a big company; I had nothing to do with this patent.)