> Your credit card and medical information can easily be argued to be your "papers and effects." Privacy is one of the few rights that is specifically defined by the Constitution.
Your CC#, SSN, and medical records are just as valid today as it was before a copy was transmitted to TSA.
In the context of the Founders (who were talking about people stomping into your place, rummaging through stuff, and locking it away while you wait for trial), in what way have your airline's "papers and effects" been "searched or seized"? If filesharing isn't stealing, then it doesn't matter whether it's you and me sharing MP3z, DivXz, and warez, or your airline and your government sharing records of financial transactions.
And yes, I meant "your airline's" data. That data wasn't in your hands, but in the hands of the credit reporting agencies, airlines, and insurance providers, so it ain't your papers we're talking about.
If there really was a Fourth Amendment issue, it'd be trivial to have a judge issue warrants against the three major credit reporting agencies, a few dozen airlines, and a few dozen insurance agencies, specifying the data to be copied.
> Loy's sworn written response was, "No. TSA has not used any (passenger) data to test any of the functions of
CAPPS II."
Pop Quiz! Loy's unsworn, unwritten response was,
a) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data to test all of the functions of CAPPS II."
b) "TSA has used (passenger) data to test functions of screening systems not called CAPPS II"
c) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data to test functions of systems other than CAPPS II"
d) "TSA has used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, CAPPS II",
e) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, CAPPS II"
f) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, profiling systems other than CAPPS II".
g) "All of the above are belong to us!"
Remember, we live in a litigious society.
Republicans: You can say - truthfully - that you "did not have sexual relations with that woman", and that still leaves room for gettin' the knob polished, spunkin' up her dress, and finishing off with a slightly fishy-smelling cigar.
> Cue a host of teenagers racing to prove how cool they are by saying things like "If there's no
caffeine there's no point ROR!"
There's plenty of point to decaffeinated coffee.
I mean, once you get the caffeine out of the beans, you can grind the beans up and throw them in garbage bags marked "decaf", and people will buy them.
But more importantly, after processing a few tonnes of beans this way, you have a farking huge mountain of pure caffeine.
Which you can grind up and sprinkle in your coffee, or add to your Jolt, or Bawls, or just mainline the shit.
> No fluorescent lights. Try to provide full-spectrum sources where possible, and give people the ability to control how much light they work with. I have a big black insert in my window to keep glare off my screen and usually keep my overhead off too. Programmers and creative types are usually the most sensitive to this.
What he said. User-controllable lights are a must.
Ask people about their light preferences, and group your people accordingly.
If you work with papers on your desk all day, or a telephone and a Rolodex, you're probably a "light person". If you say things like "I hate a dark office! I can't work in a cave!", you're a light person.
(Light Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC under the desk with 21" monitor with fingerprints all over the screen, the contrast and brightness both cranked all the way up, but running at 640x480x60Hz, and that's just fine with him because all he uses his computer for is PowerPoint slides)
If you work with a CRT all day, and use IM and email, you're probably a "dark person". You can't work in a lit room, you need to see your screen. If you say things like "Fuck, I hate the glare! I can't see a goddamn thing in here!", you're a dark person.
(Dark Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC with the cover off and assorted computer guts splayed all over the desk, and a 21" monitor that gets a daily spritzing of Windex every morning and has the on-screen adjustments have been perfectly tweaked for razor-sharp convergence at 1600x1200, because every fucking pixel counts - not just when using Photoshop or paging through reams of code, but when fragging his cubemates at 5:01 pm!)
Group the dark people together and the light people together. Don't believe the bullshit from light people about how a "dark office" makes people sick and unproductive. Don't believe the bullshit from dark people about how a "light office" makes it impossible to read the screen. Just acknowledge that these two types of people are different, and provide adequate space for both.
> How far away are the rabbit ears from your computer? I think you'd almost want them in a different room, to avoid all the interference.
Computer (SFF box) was adjacent to the TV; moving the antenna affected reception on both computer and TV, but computer reception was consistently (and significantly) worse. I'm still inclined to suspect the ATI tuner, unless the RF shielding on the card was borked at the factory or just plain insufficient for the environment of a PC the case.
> It's called the NT virtual DOS machine (NTVDM) and it's been part of Windows NT since at least 4.0. It does have protected memory space, but it doesn't do any sandboxing of the process from the filesystem or network interfaces.
Speaking of which, why the hell does NTVDM eat 100% of CPU doing busy-waits when using legacy apps? Fer cryin' out loud, Win9x (granted, 9x was DOS) did a better job.
(Yes, I miss being able to use Vern Buerg's LIST.COM on XP. It's the only thing that made 9x and DOS usable.)
> It drives me nuts that people keep spending R&D money on Over-the-air tuner cards for HDTV. THere are plenty of these out there, and they all stink.
Hell, I'll settle for ATI giving me something that can pull NTSC OTA. I tried the following experiment a while back.
Rabbit ears + TV = good picture on most OTA channels.
Rabbit ears + ATI AIW = nothing.
Rabbit ears + signal amplifier + ATI AIW = shittier OTA reception than I get with rabbit ears on the TV set.
And ATI expects me to believe they can pull HDTV OTA? Yeah, right.
> Be sure to join us next week as David Huffman invites us to take a peek into the exciting world of quantum flower arrangement.:p
Quantum flower arrangement's out of the question, because due to observations taken in 1999, Dr. Huffman is no longer in a superposition of the "alive" and "dead" states.
Then again, if anyone was capable of pressing his funereal flowers between sheets of paper in such a way that the state of said flowers would remain indeterminate for five years, Huffman's your guy:)
> I think you might be right, but if anybody could salvage Star Trek, it's Straczynski.
(Opening comm channel to the UPN Flagship Berman...)
"Captain Berman, First Officer Braga. Only one man - J. M. Straczynski - has done battle with broadcast studio executives while being able to produce five years of good science fiction television. He is behind me. You are front of me. If your employer values the deep-space franchise, be somewhere else!"
> The original mission was to beat the Soviets to space and the moon. If you doubt that, please notice that the Soviets QUIT trying to go to the moon after we were first.
...which would be a great point, except that NASA also quit pretty much immediately thereafter:(
Well, we didn't get commercial space flight by 1980, but we'll have commercials filmed in spaceflight by 2005!
1. Design and build spacecraft: cost $25M
2. Win the X-Prize: income $10M
3. ????
From spaceflightnow.com:
> "Man!" Melvill said, shaking his fists together as he climbed from SpaceShipOne. "I went pretty high, though. When I got to the top, I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was absolutely amazing. M&Ms were going all around. It was so cool! We have got to have video of that because I did it in front of one of the video cameras. I haven't ate them. They are in the cockpit."
At last, the truth is revealed!
3. Cash advance for "Mars Candies On Mars" ad campaign: income $15.1M
4. PROFIT!
Seriously - congrats to Burt, Mike, Paul, and the rest of the team. Good luck, Godspeed, and the day the general public is allowed to buy tickets on one of your ships, I'm there.
> ROTFLMAO! You make your point in a very witty way. Thank you. However, AFAIK, the plane itself was a dead end. Just a proof of concept, just as this one is. Honored for what it is, with nothing else expected from it.
We're in violent agreement here: the real importance is to show the world that it can be done. It took 20 years to go from two guys in a bicycle shop to the Spirit of St. Louis, and another 20 years before Joe Sixpack could realistically expect to fly across the Atlantic during his lifetime.
We've had orbital capability for over 50 years, and I, much like you, am sick and tired of waiting for NASA to get the ball rolling.
> As I understand it, this ship can't make orbit, couldn't come back from one if it did, and has no clear path to an orbital vehicle. It's designed to win the prize and nothing else. Not that it's not an important milestone, mind you, but it's just a dead-end.
As I understand it, this ship is so laden down with fuel that it can barely make it off the runway, and with only a single engine and single pilot, has no clear path to being able to carry passengers or transatlantic mail. It's designed to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize and nothing else. Not that it's not an important milestone, mind you, but
it's just a dead-end.
> I wonder what the "Independant Federation of Planets of Burt" will look like?
Something like an albatross buggering a duck, but for some reason, we'll all take a second glance and decide that it still looks like the coolest thing we've ever seen fly.
> The alleged story is indeed mostly true (reference here) although apparently it was two Heineken bottles, and the the theory of how they got there is that it was a prank, not an oversight during construction.
The story is in an indeterminate state between truth and falsity, and apparently the number of bottles is in an indeterminate state between 1 and 2, and the theory of how they got there is referred to as the Heineken uncertainty principle.
> > The Induce Act stands for "Inducement Devolves into Unlawful Child Exploitation Act," > >But you have to give him props for the semi-recursive naming convention., similar to "Wine Is Not an Emulator", or "Gnu is Not Unix".
> The perfect time (in the government's eyes) for you to die is at age 6x and 1/2 when you retire - you've spent 40 or more years paying into social security, but haven't yet started drawing from it.
When Otto von Bismarck invented the concept of public pensions in the late 1800s, the retirement age of 65 was chosen -- and life expectancy was 45.
When Social Security went into effect in the 30s, with a retirement age of 65 based on the German system, life expectancy was 63.
Come to Carousel! Come for renewal! There is no Sanctuary, and runners deserve their fate at the hands of the sandmen.
> What, fraud and corruption in a government run program paid for by the little guy? I find this so hard to believe!
Still more evidence that we live in a culture of the people versus the powerful! To compensate for the waste in the programme, and to ensure that children not on the loading docks of the powerful can also ride on the information superhighway, we must double funding for this program immediately! The American people are big-hearted enough to know that it's right to chip in a couple more bucks a month on their phone bills. It's for the children!
> *note to the sarcasm imparied: my tongue was firmly in cheek.
I see your sarcasm and raise you cynicism.
Prediction: We see my sarcastic comment used - without sarcasm - in the John Kerry campaign this summer.
Side bet: After we see the Kerry spot, the Bush campaign uses the same text, but replaces the "people versus the powerful" and "ride the information superhighway" phrases with "not be left behind on the information superhighway".
> Flexplay has partnered with GreenDisk and local environmental organizations to develop several closed-loop recycling options to test with consumers.
Translation: Flexplay has given a few donations to some gullible people who think they can browbeat taxpayers into paying for the mayor's best friend's garbage hauling contractor to set up whatever closed-loop recycling option makes everybody the most money and/or votes, depending on whether they're businessmen, lobbyists, or politicians, not that we can tell the difference.
> Am I the only one who's a bit frightened by the concept of Space Property rights? We all knew it
was coming of course, but why not something more akin to our handling of the oceans as
international waters? Sure, let private corporations control asteroids, artificial satellites and other space debris but keep space itself free for general use by all, or by some international body.
Actually, that's basically what "Space Property Rights" means.
Currently, there are no property rights in space (or more accurately, on other worlds). By treaty, bodies in outer space are "governed" rather like Antarctica -- no government can claim the Moon for itself and issue deeds to explorers. Likewise, no private citizen can land on the Moon and claim it for himself or herself.
In the case of Antarctica, maybe that's a good thing - it's a nice lab, but it's pretty small and can't sustain a tourism industry.
In the case of the Moon, Mars, and (collectively) the asteroids - they're big enough that it'll take so damn long to "pave over 'em" or otherwise "despoil" their "natural" state, that scientific research wouldn't be jeopardized by private ownership of 'em.
Without space property rights, there can be no return on investment for the private sector. Without the private sector's involvement, the only entities doing space exploration, tourism, industrialization or colonization, will be governments. Problem is, governments have "better" things to do than establish offworld colonies. Space exploration doesn't help a government stay in power, and unsurprisingly, governments tend not to give a fuck about it except insofar as to use space programmes to spread the pork around.
A radical proposal:
"The first person to land on Mars, and to live there some specified minimum duration (such as a year), and to return alive owns the entire Red Planet."
With space property rights -- whether in the radical form above, or by following the more traditional "Homesteading" model in which government opened up the West by taking ownership of the land for the express purpose of giving it away to anyone who could survive there long enough -- we're much more likely to make it off this mudball.
> > That's all well and good, but what I really, really am dying to know is what my firewall FEELS like... > >I'd say probably just like my wife. Cold and completely inaccessible.
Post her URL to Slashdot. We can fix both of those problems... but not in that order.
> This is an amazingly thorough review - thanks "code_rage"!
You're thinking the author?
This code_rage person not only read the report and not only understood it well enough to summarize it, but well enough to clearly and concisely express damn near everything insightful, informative, and interesting possible about every section of it.
So the only thing left for any of us to do is scrounge at the bottom of the (+1, Funny) barrel.
Code_rage, you utter bastard!
> I mean honestly, you are either going to have to take some reading material or a gameboy - you're not going to be able to go out on the beach for a stroll or to get a picture with Mickey.
Precisely why us geeks are looking forward to space tourism. Hell, I bring portable electronic entertainment and avoid the beach when staying at an Earth hotel. At least in zero-G nobody'd be making fun of me for it!
(Throwing Mickey out the nearest airlock sounds like fun, though. Imagine a horde of angry investors putting Eisner in a Mickey suit, slicing a hole in the side of the inflatable space station, and riding him all the way down to Earth by using his ears as an ablative heat-shield during re-entry, and a parachute just before impact. Even if it didn't work, you'd get some great pictures on the way down!)
Slashdot Mirror
Your CC#, SSN, and medical records are just as valid today as it was before a copy was transmitted to TSA.
In the context of the Founders (who were talking about people stomping into your place, rummaging through stuff, and locking it away while you wait for trial), in what way have your airline's "papers and effects" been "searched or seized"? If filesharing isn't stealing, then it doesn't matter whether it's you and me sharing MP3z, DivXz, and warez, or your airline and your government sharing records of financial transactions.
And yes, I meant "your airline's" data. That data wasn't in your hands, but in the hands of the credit reporting agencies, airlines, and insurance providers, so it ain't your papers we're talking about.
If there really was a Fourth Amendment issue, it'd be trivial to have a judge issue warrants against the three major credit reporting agencies, a few dozen airlines, and a few dozen insurance agencies, specifying the data to be copied.
As Bill Joy said, "Privacy is dead. Get over it."
Pop Quiz! Loy's unsworn, unwritten response was,
a) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data to test all of the functions of CAPPS II."
b) "TSA has used (passenger) data to test functions of screening systems not called CAPPS II"
c) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data to test functions of systems other than CAPPS II"
d) "TSA has used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, CAPPS II",
e) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, CAPPS II"
f) "Agencies other than TSA have used (passenger) data not to test, but to implement, profiling systems other than CAPPS II".
g) "All of the above are belong to us!"
Remember, we live in a litigious society.
Republicans: You can say - truthfully - that you "did not have sexual relations with that woman", and that still leaves room for gettin' the knob polished, spunkin' up her dress, and finishing off with a slightly fishy-smelling cigar.
Democrats: Now watch this drive!
There's plenty of point to decaffeinated coffee.
I mean, once you get the caffeine out of the beans, you can grind the beans up and throw them in garbage bags marked "decaf", and people will buy them.
But more importantly, after processing a few tonnes of beans this way, you have a farking huge mountain of pure caffeine.
Which you can grind up and sprinkle in your coffee, or add to your Jolt, or Bawls, or just mainline the shit.
What he said. User-controllable lights are a must. Ask people about their light preferences, and group your people accordingly.
If you work with papers on your desk all day, or a telephone and a Rolodex, you're probably a "light person". If you say things like "I hate a dark office! I can't work in a cave!", you're a light person.
(Light Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC under the desk with 21" monitor with fingerprints all over the screen, the contrast and brightness both cranked all the way up, but running at 640x480x60Hz, and that's just fine with him because all he uses his computer for is PowerPoint slides)
If you work with a CRT all day, and use IM and email, you're probably a "dark person". You can't work in a lit room, you need to see your screen. If you say things like "Fuck, I hate the glare! I can't see a goddamn thing in here!", you're a dark person.
(Dark Person Symptoms: 3.0 GHz PC with the cover off and assorted computer guts splayed all over the desk, and a 21" monitor that gets a daily spritzing of Windex every morning and has the on-screen adjustments have been perfectly tweaked for razor-sharp convergence at 1600x1200, because every fucking pixel counts - not just when using Photoshop or paging through reams of code, but when fragging his cubemates at 5:01 pm!)
Group the dark people together and the light people together. Don't believe the bullshit from light people about how a "dark office" makes people sick and unproductive. Don't believe the bullshit from dark people about how a "light office" makes it impossible to read the screen. Just acknowledge that these two types of people are different, and provide adequate space for both.
Computer (SFF box) was adjacent to the TV; moving the antenna affected reception on both computer and TV, but computer reception was consistently (and significantly) worse. I'm still inclined to suspect the ATI tuner, unless the RF shielding on the card was borked at the factory or just plain insufficient for the environment of a PC the case.
Speaking of which, why the hell does NTVDM eat 100% of CPU doing busy-waits when using legacy apps? Fer cryin' out loud, Win9x (granted, 9x was DOS) did a better job.
(Yes, I miss being able to use Vern Buerg's LIST.COM on XP. It's the only thing that made 9x and DOS usable.)
Yes, and the view and feeling are no doubt every bit as cool.
Hell, I'll settle for ATI giving me something that can pull NTSC OTA. I tried the following experiment a while back.
Rabbit ears + TV = good picture on most OTA channels.
Rabbit ears + ATI AIW = nothing.
Rabbit ears + signal amplifier + ATI AIW = shittier OTA reception than I get with rabbit ears on the TV set.
And ATI expects me to believe they can pull HDTV OTA? Yeah, right.
Quantum flower arrangement's out of the question, because due to observations taken in 1999, Dr. Huffman is no longer in a superposition of the "alive" and "dead" states.
Then again, if anyone was capable of pressing his funereal flowers between sheets of paper in such a way that the state of said flowers would remain indeterminate for five years, Huffman's your guy :)
(Opening comm channel to the UPN Flagship Berman...)
"Captain Berman, First Officer Braga. Only one man - J. M. Straczynski - has done battle with broadcast studio executives while being able to produce five years of good science fiction television. He is behind me. You are front of me. If your employer values the deep-space franchise, be somewhere else!"
1. Design and build spacecraft: cost $25M
2. Win the X-Prize: income $10M
3. ????
From spaceflightnow.com:
> "Man!" Melvill said, shaking his fists together as he climbed from SpaceShipOne. "I went pretty high, though. When I got to the top, I released a bag of M&Ms in the cockpit. It was absolutely amazing. M&Ms were going all around. It was so cool! We have got to have video of that because I did it in front of one of the video cameras. I haven't ate them. They are in the cockpit." At last, the truth is revealed!
3. Cash advance for "Mars Candies On Mars" ad campaign: income $15.1M
4. PROFIT!
Seriously - congrats to Burt, Mike, Paul, and the rest of the team. Good luck, Godspeed, and the day the general public is allowed to buy tickets on one of your ships, I'm there.
We're in violent agreement here: the real importance is to show the world that it can be done. It took 20 years to go from two guys in a bicycle shop to the Spirit of St. Louis, and another 20 years before Joe Sixpack could realistically expect to fly across the Atlantic during his lifetime.
We've had orbital capability for over 50 years, and I, much like you, am sick and tired of waiting for NASA to get the ball rolling.
As I understand it, this ship is so laden down with fuel that it can barely make it off the runway, and with only a single engine and single pilot, has no clear path to being able to carry passengers or transatlantic mail. It's designed to win the $25,000 Orteig Prize and nothing else. Not that it's not an important milestone, mind you, but it's just a dead-end.
Something like an albatross buggering a duck, but for some reason, we'll all take a second glance and decide that it still looks like the coolest thing we've ever seen fly.
Oh, you said Planets. Nevermind.
The story is in an indeterminate state between truth and falsity, and apparently the number of bottles is in an indeterminate state between 1 and 2, and the theory of how they got there is referred to as the Heineken uncertainty principle.
>
>But you have to give him props for the semi-recursive naming convention., similar to "Wine Is Not an Emulator", or "Gnu is Not Unix".
"I, Duce!" :)
When Otto von Bismarck invented the concept of public pensions in the late 1800s, the retirement age of 65 was chosen -- and life expectancy was 45.
When Social Security went into effect in the 30s, with a retirement age of 65 based on the German system, life expectancy was 63.
Come to Carousel! Come for renewal! There is no Sanctuary, and runners deserve their fate at the hands of the sandmen.
Still more evidence that we live in a culture of the people versus the powerful! To compensate for the waste in the programme, and to ensure that children not on the loading docks of the powerful can also ride on the information superhighway, we must double funding for this program immediately! The American people are big-hearted enough to know that it's right to chip in a couple more bucks a month on their phone bills. It's for the children!
> *note to the sarcasm imparied: my tongue was firmly in cheek.
I see your sarcasm and raise you cynicism.
Prediction: We see my sarcastic comment used - without sarcasm - in the John Kerry campaign this summer.
Side bet: After we see the Kerry spot, the Bush campaign uses the same text, but replaces the "people versus the powerful" and "ride the information superhighway" phrases with "not be left behind on the information superhighway".
Translation: Flexplay has given a few donations to some gullible people who think they can browbeat taxpayers into paying for the mayor's best friend's garbage hauling contractor to set up whatever closed-loop recycling option makes everybody the most money and/or votes, depending on whether they're businessmen, lobbyists, or politicians, not that we can tell the difference.
Actually, that's basically what "Space Property Rights" means.
Currently, there are no property rights in space (or more accurately, on other worlds). By treaty, bodies in outer space are "governed" rather like Antarctica -- no government can claim the Moon for itself and issue deeds to explorers. Likewise, no private citizen can land on the Moon and claim it for himself or herself.
In the case of Antarctica, maybe that's a good thing - it's a nice lab, but it's pretty small and can't sustain a tourism industry.
In the case of the Moon, Mars, and (collectively) the asteroids - they're big enough that it'll take so damn long to "pave over 'em" or otherwise "despoil" their "natural" state, that scientific research wouldn't be jeopardized by private ownership of 'em.
Without space property rights, there can be no return on investment for the private sector. Without the private sector's involvement, the only entities doing space exploration, tourism, industrialization or colonization, will be governments. Problem is, governments have "better" things to do than establish offworld colonies. Space exploration doesn't help a government stay in power, and unsurprisingly, governments tend not to give a fuck about it except insofar as to use space programmes to spread the pork around.
A radical proposal:
With space property rights -- whether in the radical form above, or by following the more traditional "Homesteading" model in which government opened up the West by taking ownership of the land for the express purpose of giving it away to anyone who could survive there long enough -- we're much more likely to make it off this mudball.
"Who are these slashdot people... they swept over like Mongol-Tartars!"
- "Latest Chernobyl Motorcycle Photos"
>
>I'd say probably just like my wife. Cold and completely inaccessible.
Post her URL to Slashdot. We can fix both of those problems... but not in that order.
You're thinking the author?
This code_rage person not only read the report and not only understood it well enough to summarize it, but well enough to clearly and concisely express damn near everything insightful, informative, and interesting possible about every section of it.
So the only thing left for any of us to do is scrounge at the bottom of the (+1, Funny) barrel. Code_rage, you utter bastard!
Precisely why us geeks are looking forward to space tourism. Hell, I bring portable electronic entertainment and avoid the beach when staying at an Earth hotel. At least in zero-G nobody'd be making fun of me for it!
(Throwing Mickey out the nearest airlock sounds like fun, though. Imagine a horde of angry investors putting Eisner in a Mickey suit, slicing a hole in the side of the inflatable space station, and riding him all the way down to Earth by using his ears as an ablative heat-shield during re-entry, and a parachute just before impact. Even if it didn't work, you'd get some great pictures on the way down!)