Awlaki will be a tough act to follow. I don't imagine there's a long queue of people wanting to sign-up to become a sexually repressed violent woman haters with extreme delusions of grandeur.
So by your rationale, 9/11 was perfectly okay, then? Al Queda had publicly said they were at war with us, and people inside the Towers had committed hate speech against Al Queda. There were also agents with ties to the US government, their declared enemy, inside the building. Can you explain the difference between this act and 9/11, aside from the fact that the terrorists were more efficient?
The hijacking of civilian airliners would seem to be a problem with this viewpoint, unless you're going to claim the passengers were enemies of Al Queda as well.
However, suppose in some alternate 9/11, AQ agents stole military planes and flew them into the Pentagon and White House but not the WTC. You could easily take the position that that wouldn't be a terrorist act. However, even so, it would still be an act of war, and it would still justify the use of military force against Al Queda.
The terrorists have won by bringing us to their level.
Really? So we killed about 3000 civilians to go after a handful of people who had done nothing more than shout 'Down with the USA'?
Granted he was a US citizen but what does the law say about treason during times of war? Certainly his acts were treasonous and was dealt with accordingly.
Treason against the US consists of making war against the US, or adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort. If you catch someone committing treason, you can bring him to trial. This does not mean that you can't just kill them in the act under some circumstances.
Not planning for it, not studying it very carefully to understand the extent, not taking some action to mitigate it, is hiding our head in the sand, and waiting to get smacked in the butt..
In order to plan for it, one must be able to predict it. I don't have any confidence in climatologists to be able to predict the temperature increase, nor (to any useful level of detail) the effects of any temperature increase.
When you get flattened by a giant rock, you're just as dead if the rock rolled off a cliff as if it was dropped by a crane. One is "natural", the other "anthropogenic", but you're still dead.
In the anthropogenic case, maybe you need better cranes or better operators. In the natural case, you better move your butt out of the way -- and no amount of scapegoating and restricting crane usage will help one iota. The cause makes a difference to the solution.
City governments cant keep the basics running smoothly. How the hell are they going to maintain a giant sensor network like that?
Who would let them? You sell the network to the government, install it, and from that point on it maintains itself. City officials who try to make "adjustments" have "accidents".
It seems to me (R) generally want to deregulate business and regulate our personal lives. The (D) generally want to regulate business and deregulate our personal lives. This is the real difference.
Those are just the talking points. The (D)s want to regulate your personal life, they just use environmentalism, egalitarianism, and "compassion" as their excuses, rather than religion and traditional morality. The (R)s want to regulate business to pick the winners.
Doctors are normal people, they aren't omnipotent. So rather than saying "I don't know" they'll run every test they can think of.
Because there's no cost to them (in fact, sometimes profit) in doing so, and often no or minimal cost to the patient. No one has an incentive to push back except the insurance company, and they don't have the knowledge or inclination to know when to push back and when not to.
If there's more people who want spaces than there are spaces, an app which tells you what you already know isn't going to help. By the time it tells you about an available space, it will be gone, to the lucky driver who happened to be cruising by. Only ways to fix this problem are 1) raise parking rates through the roof, until demand drops enough for supply to exceed it. 2) Eliminate whatever it is that causes people to want to park there. 3) Add more parking spots (e.g. garages and lots)
Most city governments hate #3 on principle. And they reasonably believe #2 is stupid, unless whatever businesses are causing the interest are considered "bad" anyway. So that leaves #1. The new system will provide a wonderful excuse to raise rates.
What should be asked is WHY health care costs are so high.
Lots of reasons, but the main one, which causes many of the others, is health insurance, especially flat rate plans (HMO/PPO). One you decouple the person receiving the service from the entity paying for it, you remove an important feedback process. Further, the market power of the insurance companies lets them require that they get a break while cash customers get screwed (medicare started this one).
People do not have to wait for life threatening care with single payer, just non-immediately needed procedures sometimes.
Because it's just SO much fun walking around on a torn ACL or with a bit of cartilage flapping around inside your hip. Though perhaps if you put it that way to Dick Cheney, he'd get Republicans behind single-payer; he's for torture, after all.
The police forces work for the executive branches of government. They investigate and suspect people and when they feel they have enough evidence to make a conviction, they arrest and submit their case (and the suspect(s)) to another branch of government for trial.
Where they make statements designed to obtain a conviction (regardless of the truth of such statements), which are accepted unquestioningly over the testimony of others, because the police wear snazzy uniforms and can lie with a straight face.
The word of a cop is proof beyond reasonable doubt of your guilt. So if these lists get you noticed by cops, you're going to be convicted even if you're 100% innocent.
First of all, switching channels to avoid a microwave is futile... the magnetron isn't all that frequency stable and the peak tends to wander across the band as a result.
Second, 802.11g/n uses OFDM. You get narrowband interference, you reduce the rate on the affected subcarriers. It's built in.
Third, I'm fairly sure using a wifi card as a spectrum analyzer has been done before.
Maybe, but as patents get more specific, they also become less relevant.
At best, that just means that everything old becomes new again when a new underlying technology comes along. Consider patents "... on an IPV6 network", or "on a display with a dot pitch of less than 0.08mm". At worst, they get the narrow patent but enforce it broadly, depending on courts and juries to wave away the fine distinctions without realizing those were the only things making the inventions "novel" in the first place.
Maybe, but as patents get more specific, they also become less relevant. Sounds like you're even more jaded than I am. I hold out some hope, because we've already seen patents such as LZW expire, and (at least to my knowledge), no one has been able to patent it again with "slightly different wording". The system is bad right now, but I don't believe it's that completely corrupt yet.
LZW was patented at least twice; the Unisys patent was the later of the two. It won't be patented again for two reasons: it's too well known and it's so specific that one could actually use publicly-available code from before any subsequent patent to implement it.
Other stuff, though... Apple patented a menu system "on a portable media player", and Microsoft had the cheek to patent something "on a limited resource computer device" which had been done on computers when computers had fewer resources than the PDAs they were referring to.
While the geek rages on... arbritration moves quickly.
Sure, it's easy for the arbiter to find for their client (EA) and move on.
You can continue to sue EA --- and EA can continue to sue you --- in small claims court.
Sure, you can sue at small claims. EA might not even show up, so you get a default judgement. Collecting it is up to you; if EA doesn't have assets in your jurisdiction, forget about it; the process will cost a fortune.
It's all about making the cost of getting justice too high to be worth doing. Then they can steal small amounts from everyone with impunity.
While this poses a problem for short term software development, I wonder if this will have ramifications for long term development. That is... once all the "core technology" patents have expired, they'll be free to use henceforth.
Wrong; they'll just patent them again with slightly different wording or "...on the latest shiny toy". Sure such patents are crap, but no one has the resources to fight them all.
Not only do two wrongs make a right, they're one of very few things that can, when the entity committing the initial wrong is not much less powerful than the initial wronged entity.
Oracle hates everyone, but is either leaving Microsoft alone for the same reason a barracuda won't eat a lawyer, or because they're waiting for the best time to stab them in the back.
They say that "a minimum of interference from other devices". Right, except my electricity meter is for my house, and it has many other devices. So unless you think I'm going to turn off all my lights, my computers, unplug my fridge, shut off my A/C, and so on when I watch a movie, then I can't see this working.
Less of a problem than you might think. You have a set of known power profiles for the signals you're looking for. You correlate each with the meter readings. If one or two correlations is much better than the others, you've found the program(s) being watched.
I'm sure Facebook, Google, and other companies where you're as likely to see a skateboard as a suit are crying into their corporate beers over whether you take them seriously. As for investment bankers, I do know someone who is pierced and tatooed and works for an Wall Street trading firm.
Of course, if we're going by dress, you really have to consider the position. The casual appearance you describe is the hallmark of the programmer... who in their right mind would hire a programmer in a suit? That'd be like hiring a Unix guru without a ponytail!
Its also painfully obvious to the RF engineering crowd.
Oh yeah, if they're so smart why don't RF chipsets include this feature right on the die?
What's that you say, they DO? This is is merely the application of an existing technique to a problem solidly within its domain? Don't care, patent approved.
Slashdot Mirror
I know a really good place to start looking.
The hijacking of civilian airliners would seem to be a problem with this viewpoint, unless you're going to claim the passengers were enemies of Al Queda as well.
However, suppose in some alternate 9/11, AQ agents stole military planes and flew them into the Pentagon and White House but not the WTC. You could easily take the position that that wouldn't be a terrorist act. However, even so, it would still be an act of war, and it would still justify the use of military force against Al Queda.
Really? So we killed about 3000 civilians to go after a handful of people who had done nothing more than shout 'Down with the USA'?
Treason against the US consists of making war against the US, or adhering to its enemies, giving them aid and comfort. If you catch someone committing treason, you can bring him to trial. This does not mean that you can't just kill them in the act under some circumstances.
In order to plan for it, one must be able to predict it. I don't have any confidence in climatologists to be able to predict the temperature increase, nor (to any useful level of detail) the effects of any temperature increase.
In the anthropogenic case, maybe you need better cranes or better operators. In the natural case, you better move your butt out of the way -- and no amount of scapegoating and restricting crane usage will help one iota. The cause makes a difference to the solution.
An operating system controls your computer's infrastructure and resources. CityOS controls your city's infrastructure and resources.
Who would let them? You sell the network to the government, install it, and from that point on it maintains itself. City officials who try to make "adjustments" have "accidents".
Those are just the talking points. The (D)s want to regulate your personal life, they just use environmentalism, egalitarianism, and "compassion" as their excuses, rather than religion and traditional morality. The (R)s want to regulate business to pick the winners.
Because there's no cost to them (in fact, sometimes profit) in doing so, and often no or minimal cost to the patient. No one has an incentive to push back except the insurance company, and they don't have the knowledge or inclination to know when to push back and when not to.
If there's more people who want spaces than there are spaces, an app which tells you what you already know isn't going to help. By the time it tells you about an available space, it will be gone, to the lucky driver who happened to be cruising by. Only ways to fix this problem are
1) raise parking rates through the roof, until demand drops enough for supply to exceed it.
2) Eliminate whatever it is that causes people to want to park there.
3) Add more parking spots (e.g. garages and lots)
Most city governments hate #3 on principle. And they reasonably believe #2 is stupid, unless whatever businesses are causing the interest are considered "bad" anyway. So that leaves #1. The new system will provide a wonderful excuse to raise rates.
Lots of reasons, but the main one, which causes many of the others, is health insurance, especially flat rate plans (HMO/PPO). One you decouple the person receiving the service from the entity paying for it, you remove an important feedback process. Further, the market power of the insurance companies lets them require that they get a break while cash customers get screwed (medicare started this one).
Because it's just SO much fun walking around on a torn ACL or with a bit of cartilage flapping around inside your hip. Though perhaps if you put it that way to Dick Cheney, he'd get Republicans behind single-payer; he's for torture, after all.
Not quite true; the George Washington Parkway in Virginia and D.C. is in Federal jurisdiction; you can get a Federal speeding ticket on it.
Where they make statements designed to obtain a conviction (regardless of the truth of such statements), which are accepted unquestioningly over the testimony of others, because the police wear snazzy uniforms and can lie with a straight face.
The word of a cop is proof beyond reasonable doubt of your guilt. So if these lists get you noticed by cops, you're going to be convicted even if you're 100% innocent.
First of all, switching channels to avoid a microwave is futile... the magnetron isn't all that frequency stable and the peak tends to wander across the band as a result.
Second, 802.11g/n uses OFDM. You get narrowband interference, you reduce the rate on the affected subcarriers. It's built in.
Third, I'm fairly sure using a wifi card as a spectrum analyzer has been done before.
The idea isn't THAT simple.
At best, that just means that everything old becomes new again when a new underlying technology comes along. Consider patents "... on an IPV6 network", or "on a display with a dot pitch of less than 0.08mm". At worst, they get the narrow patent but enforce it broadly, depending on courts and juries to wave away the fine distinctions without realizing those were the only things making the inventions "novel" in the first place.
LZW was patented at least twice; the Unisys patent was the later of the two. It won't be patented again for two reasons: it's too well known and it's so specific that one could actually use publicly-available code from before any subsequent patent to implement it.
Other stuff, though... Apple patented a menu system "on a portable media player", and Microsoft had the cheek to patent something "on a limited resource computer device" which had been done on computers when computers had fewer resources than the PDAs they were referring to.
If an unread, ignored, or rejected EULA or TOS can be binding, why NOT this?
Of course it won't stand up in court, but it does underline the basic illegitimacy of EULAs.
Indeed, so many that if you considered them you'd never even start.
Sure, it's easy for the arbiter to find for their client (EA) and move on.
Sure, you can sue at small claims. EA might not even show up, so you get a default judgement. Collecting it is up to you; if EA doesn't have assets in your jurisdiction, forget about it; the process will cost a fortune.
It's all about making the cost of getting justice too high to be worth doing. Then they can steal small amounts from everyone with impunity.
Wrong; they'll just patent them again with slightly different wording or "...on the latest shiny toy". Sure such patents are crap, but no one has the resources to fight them all.
Not only do two wrongs make a right, they're one of very few things that can, when the entity committing the initial wrong is not much less powerful than the initial wronged entity.
Oracle hates everyone, but is either leaving Microsoft alone for the same reason a barracuda won't eat a lawyer, or because they're waiting for the best time to stab them in the back.
Less of a problem than you might think. You have a set of known power profiles for the signals you're looking for. You correlate each with the meter readings. If one or two correlations is much better than the others, you've found the program(s) being watched.
I'm sure Facebook, Google, and other companies where you're as likely to see a skateboard as a suit are crying into their corporate beers over whether you take them seriously. As for investment bankers, I do know someone who is pierced and tatooed and works for an Wall Street trading firm.
Of course, if we're going by dress, you really have to consider the position. The casual appearance you describe is the hallmark of the programmer... who in their right mind would hire a programmer in a suit? That'd be like hiring a Unix guru without a ponytail!
Oh yeah, if they're so smart why don't RF chipsets include this feature right on the die? What's that you say, they DO? This is is merely the application of an existing technique to a problem solidly within its domain? Don't care, patent approved.