Well, the article does mention Jim Braman, but it doesn't mention John Opel, IBM's President, and friend to his mom, Mary Maxwell Gates. After all, the contract between Microsoft and IBM is what effectively transferred the monopoly between those two companies, so any relationship prior to that deal should be highly relevant to how Bill Gates got his start.
The article also fails to mention that Bill's great-grandfather J. W. Maxwell was the original Founder (then-deceased), that his grandfather James Willard Maxwell was the President, and that his mom was sitting on the Board of Directors, of a prominent National Bank. For someone who gets started in business, one would think that having your family *being* the bank since its inception -- would somehow be useful -- or at least somewhat relevant -- I think (never mind the personal connection between John Opel and his mom).
With the full understanding that this is for a court to decide, the domain name in this case is too similar. Regardless of any one-line disclaimer about not being affiliated with Wikipedia, it still seems too much like it would be an art website operated by Wikipedia.
No in this case, it's not for a full court to decide. It was for both parties to decide, and they already did decide. They both agreed to that one-line disclaimer (which wasn't there when the complaint was made). Apparently, according to the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Counsel, that disclaimer was enough of a compromise for Wikimedia to accept.
Windows : you're trusting Microsoft, the State of Massachusetts and the Federal Government of America. All of these organizations vet their people, every step up the ladder means more thorough checks. This means that Microsoft has the option of ratting out just about everything you know to the chinese.
This is a moot point then. The NSA uses SELinux internally.
As to trust, I don't personally believe that Microsoft would betray an entire community just because of the economic interest it has in China. That being said, Microsoft does have an history of making software that can be remote-controlled more easily by commercial third parties, and there lies the real problem in my opinion. It's insecure by *design*, not just carelessness.
For instance, making an email client that would run executable scripts as they arrived (without the need of a user having to click on anything), that wasn't just a clever idea, that was a very compelling business model for Microsoft that it was going to sell commercial advertisers. The same goes for DRM, the DRM isn't designed to protect the person who bought the PC, it's designed to protect the interest, control the computer, and cripple every orifice a computer has, solely for the interest of Media companies that pay Microsoft a licensing fee. And also, a third example of commercial remote-controlware software is the "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" program, which is not just designed to collect and verify information from you, it's also designed to make sure your computer not receive security updates should your copy not be "genuine".
I'm surprised Virgin is one of the three ISPs doing this. Does Richard Branson still own that ISP? If he does, I will do my part and boycott all the Virgin brands. Since I live in the US, and since I don't do business with BT, boycotting and bad mouthing BT would be pointless.
Or they could just detect those IP addresses as you said, but put it in the message on top of the page, where they usually put official messages and calls for raising funds. A complete redirect would be overkill in my opinion.
Yeah so we've known for some time that running a file sharing site for illegally redistributed content is bad news from a legal liability standpoint... but I am still surprised by what kinds of activities in our modern age get you jail time.
Well, I didn't. In the US, hosting a tracker is perfectly *legal* according to the US Supreme Court (as long as it's just linking). May be I was a fool for thinking that, but I really believed Sweden would make the same decision even at the lower level of its courts.
If this had been the model from the very start (when modems ruled the earth), it would be taken as normal.
It did start like that initially. In France, the Minitel was charging by the minute (for most non-essential services). And in the US, the AOL service was charging by the minute as well. I remember that time well, one month -- my family had to pay AOL $500. The only other competitors were Prodigy and Compuserve (both were still using awful looking DOS interfaces, and I believe they also both charged by the minute as well).
It's only because the data volumes of users have been low, that it's not worth billing per megabyte.
Bullshit. Just take look at cell phones. Texting (even without any pictures) is ridiculously expensive for very little data. They attract you with what seem reasonable sounding rates, but they bank on you (or your family members) going over your limit -- charging you an arm and a leg if you go over (way more than their marginal cost for the overage).
It's just like the credit card industry, the people who always pay their bills on time are referred to as the deadbeat customers. And the customers that they can justifiably punish, they're allowed to rape them with overage/late fees.
The biggest barrier to such a system is critical mass, which would be easy to obtain if the city simply picked an official provider of such a system.
If you let the city take charge of such project, it's going to fail miserably -- even with massive funding. There are just too many variables that are going to change as time goes on. For instance, would you develop the app for the iPhone, Android, MS, Blackberry, Palm, and Symbian? Ok, fine, probably the top three. And what about the phone service providers, are they going to allow your apps? or actively work to subvert them? And who would own what data? And what about usability? Or privacy questions? Thousands of usability questions would have to get get resolved? Do you really want a City Committee to be the customer in charge of these decisions?
Instead, we should just let entrepreneurs and startups take those risks themselves. Many companies/apps will try to do what you suggest. Many will fail. Some will succeed. Hell, there are probably some good apps that are halfway there already. I say, let the solutions shake themselves out in the marketplace. It may take a little longer initially, but the results will be so much better if you let the marketplace evolve a working solution itself.
PS: I live in San Francisco, I won't repeat my story with the way our city messed up our own cab system (even without the use of Technology), but click on my username -- it's on my last post before this one -- if you're interested. What they did in that case should serve as warning for other cities I hope.
Along the same lines, I don't know much about the cabs in New York, but in San Francisco there is a serious shortage of cabs -- which makes getting a cab nearly impossible to get during rush hours or during popular events, and also very inconvenient/impractical and expensive to fall back on -- should you really want to get rid of your car entirely.
The number of cabs allowed on the streets is set by the city through a medallion system. The drivers that were lucky enough to get issued Medaillons ages ago can rent out each medaillon they have to a cab company or to other drivers for $3000 a month. I know one guy, he owns three Medallions, don't ask me how he got three (that sounded fishy to me), and that gives him $9,000 of income that he gets without even lifting a finger and without having to invest in anything (he doesn't own the actual cabs the Medaillons are put in).
So if you ask me, we need less regulations, not more (at least in SF). I'm all for certifying taxi cabs for accountability and safety reasons, but there is no reason to maintain an artificially low supply of them. And if cabs were a viable option, I'm pretty sure that many people would abandon their cars to go to work -- which would free up even more space (after all, parking is already expensive enough in SF).
Also, before someone mentions the car-share program or the zip-car program where you can rent a car by the hour either through a mix of subscription and per hour charges/metering, that option is ok, but mostly for shopping or running errands, not for many other activities. For instance, commuting, going to the movie theater, and/or going to see friends in the suburbs with it, is not a workable solution. Since they still charge you by the hour (or fine you in case you're late returning it), and still their price by the hour is way more than what a normal rental company would charge you, it doesn't become cost-effective to take a car out -- if you're just going to park it for a couple of hours -- while its clock is running.
I think you meant to say "Semite" or "Semitic", not "semetic". The irony is that the original meaning of the term is arabic sounding/arabic language, and that the Gypsies and the Palestinians have as much right to call themselves Semitic Tribes as the Jews have (in fact, that's how they're referred to in the Old Testament). The only confusing part now is that Arabs are now being called anti-Semite (or otherwise self-hating-Semites), which couldn't be further from the truth. Arabs or Muslims hate the Jews for many stupid reasons, but the most important reason is that some Jews are behaving like a major European Colonial power, so if anything, let's call those guys anti-Europeans/anti-colonial.
Internet-voting is absolute horror. It can be made technically sound but that's about it. Who can assure that it is my wife who gives the vote and not me who stole my wife's ID card or whatever (not that I would do so, just for example)? Who can assure that one isn't giving vote under physical threat? Rhetorical questions but current paper & pen method prevents these kinds of situations perfectly.
My state (California) allows me to vote by mail, which I love, and it's not as horrific as you make it sound. In fact, I'm probably a better voter because of it. I'm not sure why, but the fact that I can send back my ballot right away by mail means that I'll get started on it earlier and will do far more research on it than before. And it's not that the system prevented me from starting earlier when I used to vote in person, after all I did receive a sample ballot that I could fill out in advance if I wanted to, but there is definitely something to be said for the added positive psychological effect that an absentee ballots have on voters.
The only difference is that in your country, you accept the murders which occur when a killer is set free after serving a 10 year sentence, whereas in the countries you've listed they prefer to murder the killer.
Your post seems to imply that the only alternative to the death penalty is an early release ten-year sentence. That's clearly not the case. Most countries have life without parole as a viable option. And even in the United States, it's cheaper to condemn a man to life without parole than to the death penalty, so assuming a limited pot of money, more lesser criminals are probably getting released out onto the streets because you insist on having the death penalty for a few select ones.
That being said, the only time life without parole isn't an option is when your prisoner is a political prisoner. Politics change. Parties rise and parties fall. And even during the trial of Saddam, a number of lawyers and judges were killed (and some others almost killed) because of the work they were doing.
"If you want to make a movie, do it in an empty white room with your two closest friends. Everything else opens you up for copyright claims."
Don't forget to make sure your actors were enclosed in that white room from birth till now, with no television and no human contact, because they might be unwittingly contaminated with copyrighted cultural knowledge otherwise.
I also think it should be illegal to discriminate against people/organisations based on law suits that haven't yet concluded.
Well, if they haven't already, they are probably going to lose their Safe Harbor immunity under the Communications Decency Act.
Let's face it. There will always be companies willing to play the filtering game and pay the penalty for it. Soon enough, every post request made against facebook will be filtered for links and compared against a huge changing list of banned web sites. And if they have the extra processing power and the extra manpower to administrate such a list, while at the same time keeping the number of extra lawsuits down to a minimum, I say all the power to them.
Considering how the Baath party of Iraq (as well as the still in power Baath party of Syria) are pan-arabic national socialist parties they are a whole lot closer to the Vichy regime (and other national socialists) than anyone else involved.
After all there is a reason why a lot of (but not absolutely all) nazis (and particularly in Germany) were against the US invasion of Iraq.
You're just playing word games here, most of the nazis in Europe were/are for the invasion of Iraq, just like most of them hate all Arabs.
As for principles I'll take a single botched hanging over the rather large mass graves created by Hussein any day and I know an awful lot of Iraqis agree.
Forget the Iraqis, the entire World (except the United States) was against Iraq when they gassed the Kurds (in 1988). The gassing of the Kurds was reported on the front page of every major newspaper in Europe (and probably the world). In the US, that particular piece of news got buried. The UN was even going to impose sanctions, but the US vetoed it -- protecting their ally. And finally, the US even loaned Iraq one billion dollars shortly thereafter (if not three billion dollars, I forget the exact number) that Iraq never paid back.
Now I realize that you consider the United States the benevolent father/policeman of the World, but for a benevolent father it's sure sending out mixed messages. When you punish someone, you're supposed to do it right after the act -- not wait fifteen years (and never mind the active protection and lobbying the United States did for Iraq during that time period when the entire World was against them).
If you think predictions based on tea leaves are equivalent to predictions based on the best science available (albeit imperfect), then you are part of the problem.
A scientific prediction is a falsifiable prediction. In this case, the first earthquake's force he predicted was wrong by two orders of magnitude, and the epicenter was off by a couple hundred kilometers. In other words, his prediction was incorrect.
Now should you want to say, that his prediction was close enough, that's fine, but realize that you're entering the realm of horoscope reading and horoscope self-rationalization, not science.
And in my opinion, using scientific language to couch a prediction, without using the scientific method, is much more dangerous than using tea leaves to make the same prediction. At least with the tea leaves, or with the horoscopes, you know (or knew) where you stood (at least, most people do/did). Nowadays, even the tea leaves readers will pretend to know science and to have used science to base their predictions. Just check out the "New Age" section of any major bookstore. You'll find New Age gurus parroting scientific terms and medical terms without having the most basic high school level understanding of any of them. My favorite example is "Hertz per second". WTF? I saw a guru use that nonsensical unit at least twenty times, so I know it wasn't a typo. Or another one on the radio KPFA, which is usually a radio that I like, they have a woman giving medical advice and alternative medicine advice based on the movement of the stars. WTF? Sometimes, people are so dumb, I just want to shoot myself. And of course, even in that last example, that woman was using all kinds of scientific terms to make her diagnosis on the air. With the internet these days, it's really not that difficult to learn the veneer of science -- without learning any of its underlying principles -- and that in my opinion -- is much more dangerous.
Did you get your webcam working on your Aspire One? I bought the same computer for my mom, but with Windows XP on it. The reviews I read said it was going to be difficult to get the driver for the webcam.
As inflammatory as the book title may be, I'm actually surprised that my post was modded down to zero. It would seem that at the very least some newborn infants probably died as a result of Three Mile Island. Here is the relevant quote:
In fact, the state of Pennsylvania hid the health impacts, including deletion of cancers from the public record, abolition of the state's tumor registry, misrepresentation of the impacts it could not hide (including an apparent tripling of the infant death rate in nearby Harrisburg) and much more.
You could write an open letter to the major companies in the relevant industry (and make it clear that several companies are receiving the letter) explaining your inventions.
At my former company, your letters would have been received by a third party we hired to handle customer service. I think we had them send back a form letter asking you to take out a patent, or give up all rights to your invention by signing a waiver, before we'd even read your letter. Either way, we wanted to know where we stood with you before we allowed the letter to make it back up the chain of command, and possibly influence our actions. Many people contribute ideas, and then get upset when their idea gets implemented without them receiving a dime. And of course, this only gets compounded by the fact that many people have the exact same idea at the exact same time for the same company to implement.
They weren't actually worried about common burglars. They were worried about governmental and semi-governmental burglars. The TV licence thugs, the Inland Revenue Service, the Zoning Commission, the Historical Society, those bastards can fine you and put you in prison any time they want. And it only gets worse if they can prove with actual photographs that the new converted alcove on your house is less than a few years old, or that google showed that your television was on last year.
Slashdot Mirror
You guys are paying so much more for electricity than we are, that's what I'd call the EU doomsday scenario. You Europeans are just insane.
Well, the article does mention Jim Braman, but it doesn't mention John Opel, IBM's President, and friend to his mom, Mary Maxwell Gates. After all, the contract between Microsoft and IBM is what effectively transferred the monopoly between those two companies, so any relationship prior to that deal should be highly relevant to how Bill Gates got his start.
The article also fails to mention that Bill's great-grandfather J. W. Maxwell was the original Founder (then-deceased), that his grandfather James Willard Maxwell was the President, and that his mom was sitting on the Board of Directors, of a prominent National Bank. For someone who gets started in business, one would think that having your family *being* the bank since its inception -- would somehow be useful -- or at least somewhat relevant -- I think (never mind the personal connection between John Opel and his mom).
Or you could have just installed linux mint which is just a repackaged version of Ubuntu and which does the sound perfectly.
No in this case, it's not for a full court to decide. It was for both parties to decide, and they already did decide. They both agreed to that one-line disclaimer (which wasn't there when the complaint was made). Apparently, according to the Wikimedia Foundation's Legal Counsel, that disclaimer was enough of a compromise for Wikimedia to accept.
The article was talking about powering your average home, not powering your average walk-in closet with no large appliances in it.
This is a moot point then. The NSA uses SELinux internally.
As to trust, I don't personally believe that Microsoft would betray an entire community just because of the economic interest it has in China. That being said, Microsoft does have an history of making software that can be remote-controlled more easily by commercial third parties, and there lies the real problem in my opinion. It's insecure by *design*, not just carelessness.
For instance, making an email client that would run executable scripts as they arrived (without the need of a user having to click on anything), that wasn't just a clever idea, that was a very compelling business model for Microsoft that it was going to sell commercial advertisers. The same goes for DRM, the DRM isn't designed to protect the person who bought the PC, it's designed to protect the interest, control the computer, and cripple every orifice a computer has, solely for the interest of Media companies that pay Microsoft a licensing fee. And also, a third example of commercial remote-controlware software is the "Microsoft Genuine Advantage" program, which is not just designed to collect and verify information from you, it's also designed to make sure your computer not receive security updates should your copy not be "genuine".
We do need "bigger pieces", we don't want that layer to be too fluid when we start building on it.
I'm surprised Virgin is one of the three ISPs doing this. Does Richard Branson still own that ISP? If he does, I will do my part and boycott all the Virgin brands. Since I live in the US, and since I don't do business with BT, boycotting and bad mouthing BT would be pointless.
Or they could just detect those IP addresses as you said, but put it in the message on top of the page, where they usually put official messages and calls for raising funds. A complete redirect would be overkill in my opinion.
Well, I didn't. In the US, hosting a tracker is perfectly *legal* according to the US Supreme Court (as long as it's just linking). May be I was a fool for thinking that, but I really believed Sweden would make the same decision even at the lower level of its courts.
It did start like that initially. In France, the Minitel was charging by the minute (for most non-essential services). And in the US, the AOL service was charging by the minute as well. I remember that time well, one month -- my family had to pay AOL $500. The only other competitors were Prodigy and Compuserve (both were still using awful looking DOS interfaces, and I believe they also both charged by the minute as well).
Bullshit. Just take look at cell phones. Texting (even without any pictures) is ridiculously expensive for very little data. They attract you with what seem reasonable sounding rates, but they bank on you (or your family members) going over your limit -- charging you an arm and a leg if you go over (way more than their marginal cost for the overage).
It's just like the credit card industry, the people who always pay their bills on time are referred to as the deadbeat customers. And the customers that they can justifiably punish, they're allowed to rape them with overage/late fees.
If you let the city take charge of such project, it's going to fail miserably -- even with massive funding. There are just too many variables that are going to change as time goes on. For instance, would you develop the app for the iPhone, Android, MS, Blackberry, Palm, and Symbian? Ok, fine, probably the top three. And what about the phone service providers, are they going to allow your apps? or actively work to subvert them? And who would own what data? And what about usability? Or privacy questions? Thousands of usability questions would have to get get resolved? Do you really want a City Committee to be the customer in charge of these decisions?
Instead, we should just let entrepreneurs and startups take those risks themselves. Many companies/apps will try to do what you suggest. Many will fail. Some will succeed. Hell, there are probably some good apps that are halfway there already. I say, let the solutions shake themselves out in the marketplace. It may take a little longer initially, but the results will be so much better if you let the marketplace evolve a working solution itself.
PS: I live in San Francisco, I won't repeat my story with the way our city messed up our own cab system (even without the use of Technology), but click on my username -- it's on my last post before this one -- if you're interested. What they did in that case should serve as warning for other cities I hope.
Along the same lines, I don't know much about the cabs in New York, but in San Francisco there is a serious shortage of cabs -- which makes getting a cab nearly impossible to get during rush hours or during popular events, and also very inconvenient/impractical and expensive to fall back on -- should you really want to get rid of your car entirely.
The number of cabs allowed on the streets is set by the city through a medallion system. The drivers that were lucky enough to get issued Medaillons ages ago can rent out each medaillon they have to a cab company or to other drivers for $3000 a month. I know one guy, he owns three Medallions, don't ask me how he got three (that sounded fishy to me), and that gives him $9,000 of income that he gets without even lifting a finger and without having to invest in anything (he doesn't own the actual cabs the Medaillons are put in).
So if you ask me, we need less regulations, not more (at least in SF). I'm all for certifying taxi cabs for accountability and safety reasons, but there is no reason to maintain an artificially low supply of them. And if cabs were a viable option, I'm pretty sure that many people would abandon their cars to go to work -- which would free up even more space (after all, parking is already expensive enough in SF).
Also, before someone mentions the car-share program or the zip-car program where you can rent a car by the hour either through a mix of subscription and per hour charges/metering, that option is ok, but mostly for shopping or running errands, not for many other activities. For instance, commuting, going to the movie theater, and/or going to see friends in the suburbs with it, is not a workable solution. Since they still charge you by the hour (or fine you in case you're late returning it), and still their price by the hour is way more than what a normal rental company would charge you, it doesn't become cost-effective to take a car out -- if you're just going to park it for a couple of hours -- while its clock is running.
I think you meant to say "Semite" or "Semitic", not "semetic". The irony is that the original meaning of the term is arabic sounding/arabic language, and that the Gypsies and the Palestinians have as much right to call themselves Semitic Tribes as the Jews have (in fact, that's how they're referred to in the Old Testament). The only confusing part now is that Arabs are now being called anti-Semite (or otherwise self-hating-Semites), which couldn't be further from the truth. Arabs or Muslims hate the Jews for many stupid reasons, but the most important reason is that some Jews are behaving like a major European Colonial power, so if anything, let's call those guys anti-Europeans/anti-colonial.
My state (California) allows me to vote by mail, which I love, and it's not as horrific as you make it sound. In fact, I'm probably a better voter because of it. I'm not sure why, but the fact that I can send back my ballot right away by mail means that I'll get started on it earlier and will do far more research on it than before. And it's not that the system prevented me from starting earlier when I used to vote in person, after all I did receive a sample ballot that I could fill out in advance if I wanted to, but there is definitely something to be said for the added positive psychological effect that an absentee ballots have on voters.
Your post seems to imply that the only alternative to the death penalty is an early release ten-year sentence. That's clearly not the case. Most countries have life without parole as a viable option. And even in the United States, it's cheaper to condemn a man to life without parole than to the death penalty, so assuming a limited pot of money, more lesser criminals are probably getting released out onto the streets because you insist on having the death penalty for a few select ones.
That being said, the only time life without parole isn't an option is when your prisoner is a political prisoner. Politics change. Parties rise and parties fall. And even during the trial of Saddam, a number of lawyers and judges were killed (and some others almost killed) because of the work they were doing.
Don't forget to make sure your actors were enclosed in that white room from birth till now, with no television and no human contact, because they might be unwittingly contaminated with copyrighted cultural knowledge otherwise.
Well, if they haven't already, they are probably going to lose their Safe Harbor immunity under the Communications Decency Act.
Let's face it. There will always be companies willing to play the filtering game and pay the penalty for it. Soon enough, every post request made against facebook will be filtered for links and compared against a huge changing list of banned web sites. And if they have the extra processing power and the extra manpower to administrate such a list, while at the same time keeping the number of extra lawsuits down to a minimum, I say all the power to them.
You're just playing word games here, most of the nazis in Europe were/are for the invasion of Iraq, just like most of them hate all Arabs.
Forget the Iraqis, the entire World (except the United States) was against Iraq when they gassed the Kurds (in 1988). The gassing of the Kurds was reported on the front page of every major newspaper in Europe (and probably the world). In the US, that particular piece of news got buried. The UN was even going to impose sanctions, but the US vetoed it -- protecting their ally. And finally, the US even loaned Iraq one billion dollars shortly thereafter (if not three billion dollars, I forget the exact number) that Iraq never paid back.
Now I realize that you consider the United States the benevolent father/policeman of the World, but for a benevolent father it's sure sending out mixed messages. When you punish someone, you're supposed to do it right after the act -- not wait fifteen years (and never mind the active protection and lobbying the United States did for Iraq during that time period when the entire World was against them).
A scientific prediction is a falsifiable prediction. In this case, the first earthquake's force he predicted was wrong by two orders of magnitude, and the epicenter was off by a couple hundred kilometers. In other words, his prediction was incorrect. Now should you want to say, that his prediction was close enough, that's fine, but realize that you're entering the realm of horoscope reading and horoscope self-rationalization, not science.
And in my opinion, using scientific language to couch a prediction, without using the scientific method, is much more dangerous than using tea leaves to make the same prediction. At least with the tea leaves, or with the horoscopes, you know (or knew) where you stood (at least, most people do/did). Nowadays, even the tea leaves readers will pretend to know science and to have used science to base their predictions. Just check out the "New Age" section of any major bookstore. You'll find New Age gurus parroting scientific terms and medical terms without having the most basic high school level understanding of any of them. My favorite example is "Hertz per second". WTF? I saw a guru use that nonsensical unit at least twenty times, so I know it wasn't a typo. Or another one on the radio KPFA, which is usually a radio that I like, they have a woman giving medical advice and alternative medicine advice based on the movement of the stars. WTF? Sometimes, people are so dumb, I just want to shoot myself. And of course, even in that last example, that woman was using all kinds of scientific terms to make her diagnosis on the air. With the internet these days, it's really not that difficult to learn the veneer of science -- without learning any of its underlying principles -- and that in my opinion -- is much more dangerous.
Did you get your webcam working on your Aspire One? I bought the same computer for my mom, but with Windows XP on it. The reviews I read said it was going to be difficult to get the driver for the webcam.
A couple of days ago on NPR (I think it was), I heard of someone speaking of this book People Died at Three Mile Island.
At my former company, your letters would have been received by a third party we hired to handle customer service. I think we had them send back a form letter asking you to take out a patent, or give up all rights to your invention by signing a waiver, before we'd even read your letter. Either way, we wanted to know where we stood with you before we allowed the letter to make it back up the chain of command, and possibly influence our actions. Many people contribute ideas, and then get upset when their idea gets implemented without them receiving a dime. And of course, this only gets compounded by the fact that many people have the exact same idea at the exact same time for the same company to implement.
They weren't actually worried about common burglars. They were worried about governmental and semi-governmental burglars. The TV licence thugs, the Inland Revenue Service, the Zoning Commission, the Historical Society, those bastards can fine you and put you in prison any time they want. And it only gets worse if they can prove with actual photographs that the new converted alcove on your house is less than a few years old, or that google showed that your television was on last year.