Exactly what is so damn special about that particular plot of land, anyway?
Since times immemorial it has been a magic orchard with a natural Reality Distortion Field of its own?;-)
They even say if you dig RF-undead iPhone4s deep enough beneath the ancient apple trees, sometimes they return white-washed and fixed so you can hold them any way you like...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/ is the kind of movie requiring some real submarine footage. The other one's Smurfahontas in CGI (quite an accomplishment nonetheless - that should be spared the sad sequel fate of Highlander) - so why would anyone risk their life (and/or sub) for what they could so convincingly render in 3D anyway?
Our taxes pay agencies boasting their purported capability to do just that. If they let bot-herders proliferate for years, how are they supposed to be more efficient against terrorists not entirely dissimilar in organization (and with the first able to turn into the latter at any time by using/"renting out" their botnets as Weapons of Mass Disruption e.g. for DDoS attacks against critical infrastructures)?
In continental Europe, protections enumerated in a constitution or principles stated in some law cannot be enforced; legislators generally need to translate those protections into specific laws every time a new situation or new technology arises.
In the US, constitutional protections and principles can be enforced by the courts through common law without legislators having to get involved.
However, specifically in labor law (somewhat atypically) the German Federal Labor Court also assumes immediate effect even of constitutional principles between parties to a contract or lawsuit. Europe is not without its share of Common Law jurisdictions of course (and court hierarchies that do set their own kinds of precedents), to name but Ireland and the UK.
In general, there had already been all-encompassing, sweeping protections of privacy enacted by Federal Statute (following demands by the Supreme Court) in Germany for many years, actually serving as a model for many countries and the EU itself. The worry caused by piecemeal legislation instead of updating (and reinforcing by criminal sanctions long overdue) the time-tested (albeit poorly enforced) overarching rules is how it paves the way for concealing the view to and universally accepted effect of the latter.
To quote once more eminent the French lawyers having compiled the Code Civil:
Il ne faut point de lois inutiles ; elles affaibliraient les lois nécessaires ; elles compromettraient la certitude et la majesté de la législation. [...]
Dans les matières mêmes qui fixent particulièrement [l']attention [du législateur], il est une foule de détails qui lui échappent, ou qui sont trop contentieux et trop mobiles pour pouvoir devenir l'objet d'un texte de loi.
The moment you hear politicians exclaim how a law needs to be made because of (and often against) a "Google", "Facebook" or similar, its unlikely to be a good one - and more often than not comes built-in with a recipe for evasion by the next company, product and/or competitor, besides its obvious susceptibility to constitutional challenge.
Many of these protections are already in place in the US and Europe is just catching up.
A different view would be that Europe is replacing comprehensive but poorly enforced protection with piecemeal/sectoral US-style prohibitions.
The trouble with that is how everything not explicitly banned becomes (perceived as) permitted if one legislates this way (after making people believe that was needed because they'd previously had no rights to privacy, when in fact they did extensively, but the problem was with prosecution of violations), i.e. there'll always be loopholes wide enough to drive a truck thru.
Even spamming is not a crime in much of Europe to this day.
no cameras? So they can't utilize technology, but they're still allowed to stand behind you and watch you work, right?
No, after a series of scandals (that went far beyond keeping employees from stealing or surfing all day), just no cameras e.g. in change rooms or rest rooms, where they wouldn't be allowed to stand in front of you and watch you undress etc. "IRL" either.
Also, no covert widespread phone surveillance or reading of private correspondence (if allowed on company premises/equipment in the first place) under the "excuse" that they'd need to find "moles" (celebrated as whistleblowers entitled to special protection in other jurisdictions).
The Facebook prong is an entirely different thing altogether: HR (or private investigators on their part, probably even "pre-emptively") shouldn't be allowed to intrude social networking sites as "false friends" to harvest dirt on (would-be) employees (not that anyone in their right mind should let that pile up there anyway).
...enforcement (by understaffed Data Protection authorities which -a bit like the firemen of Fahrenheit 451- now even have to help "the other side" identity citizens who try to exercise their rights with respect to SWIFT snooping) if employers' intrusions of privacy (to that point that even surveillance cameras on the loo now need to be explicitly banned) in the jurisdiction that pretty much "invented" habeas data.
Trouble is, by regulating lots of nitty-gritty details instead of a broad "Constitutional right"-style protection, one makes it even harder for the law to keep up with progress - while exposing the loopholes most clearly to those determined to use them with impunity.
To quote Portalis, one of the masterminds behind the French Civil Code:
Quoi que l'on fasse, les lois positives ne sauraient jamais entièrement remplacer l'usage de la raison naturelle dans les affaires de la vie. Les besoins d'une société sont si variés, la communication des hommes est si active, leurs intérêts sont si multipliés, et leurs rapports si étendus, qu'il est impossible au législateur de pourvoir à tout.
A friend's request to display custom content on a projection clock made me wonder if/why there are really no such displays (as in "1ft digits across the room") that could be computer-interfaced with the likes of lcdproc, or even for pixel graphics.
Has anyone seen such a thing commercially available without the need for DIY optics?
Are you saying DGT amazingly (even more so at their price tag) stopped short of placing a cheap little LED on each square, as pretty much every stand-alone chess computer has done at least since the early 1980s?
Actually he says in his project diary (in a forum where they usually take TFTs apart to rebuild them into things like these or even one's own R2D2) that quite contrary to Microsoft's approach, all his web cam looks for are the pieces' shadows on the board cast by ambient light.
No need to detect more than that, the server knows which chessman comes from a particular square.
...ultimately comes from the barrel of a gun) to steal from society
few people realize that was [Ayn Rand's] principle point
This view seems at least as old as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété?, 1840 (quite a different school of thought than Objectivism for sure).
With respect to Ayn Rand's contributions to be revisited for the present debate, one might rather point at the bureaucrats' stance in Atlas Shrugged:
Not wanting their laws observed but broken to cash in on guilt as it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
One thing's for sure if you could get the followers of both authors to agree:
The proposed bill would be, to rehash Lawrence Lessig's take on the dreaded DMCA, "bad law and bad policy."
the public chastisement (fittingly also exposing the source) of anyone in office advocating a strategy from that book, which said:
As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
My point is, "think of the children" is pretty much the ultimate ender of debates here.
And you know a page out of whose (banned) book that is, while the news media does not dare to challenge politicians recycling that strategy:
As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.
Godwin alert to anyone googling the author of that line...
No additional information has been found about the spacecraft's capabilities or purpose, except for a US Air Force statement that the satellite has no space-weapons purpose.
...and meet the Vulcans.
Of course, if the public knew, they'd find out about Cheyenne Mountain too.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0204686/ - and Timescape of course: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104362/
It's a known issue not only on Windows 7 / Vista http://support.microsoft.com/kb/977178 but also on XP http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317272 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330100 - however the lastest incarnation of the flaw does not seem to get fixed for the older systems such as XP (or has anyone found a solution for this?), and Intel Matrix drivers as a workaround http://www.sevenforums.com/crashes-debugging/50479-1-tb-wdc-black-fails-wake-sleep.html#6 require (and have their installer check for) one of a few specific boards.
Since times immemorial it has been a magic orchard with a natural Reality Distortion Field of its own? ;-)
They even say if you dig RF-undead iPhone4s deep enough beneath the ancient apple trees, sometimes they return white-washed and fixed so you can hold them any way you like...
...with their unlimited learning and memory.
;-)
Haven't we always known they ran the world anyway?
Just my 42 cents...
Wasn't what made the magic of Avatar that it isn't there, nor actually anywhere?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/ is the kind of movie requiring some real submarine footage. The other one's Smurfahontas in CGI (quite an accomplishment nonetheless - that should be spared the sad sequel fate of Highlander) - so why would anyone risk their life (and/or sub) for what they could so convincingly render in 3D anyway?
Gleaming white pyramid, need we see (23) more? ;-)
And that's just days after having been implicated in the destruction of Alderaan...
Our taxes pay agencies boasting their purported capability to do just that. If they let bot-herders proliferate for years, how are they supposed to be more efficient against terrorists not entirely dissimilar in organization (and with the first able to turn into the latter at any time by using/"renting out" their botnets as Weapons of Mass Disruption e.g. for DDoS attacks against critical infrastructures)?
However, specifically in labor law (somewhat atypically) the German Federal Labor Court also assumes immediate effect even of constitutional principles between parties to a contract or lawsuit.
Europe is not without its share of Common Law jurisdictions of course (and court hierarchies that do set their own kinds of precedents), to name but Ireland and the UK.
In general, there had already been all-encompassing, sweeping protections of privacy enacted by Federal Statute (following demands by the Supreme Court) in Germany for many years, actually serving as a model for many countries and the EU itself. The worry caused by piecemeal legislation instead of updating (and reinforcing by criminal sanctions long overdue) the time-tested (albeit poorly enforced) overarching rules is how it paves the way for concealing the view to and universally accepted effect of the latter.
To quote once more eminent the French lawyers having compiled the Code Civil:
The moment you hear politicians exclaim how a law needs to be made because of (and often against) a "Google", "Facebook" or similar, its unlikely to be a good one - and more often than not comes built-in with a recipe for evasion by the next company, product and/or competitor, besides its obvious susceptibility to constitutional challenge.
A different view would be that Europe is replacing comprehensive but poorly enforced protection with piecemeal/sectoral US-style prohibitions. The trouble with that is how everything not explicitly banned becomes (perceived as) permitted if one legislates this way (after making people believe that was needed because they'd previously had no rights to privacy, when in fact they did extensively, but the problem was with prosecution of violations), i.e. there'll always be loopholes wide enough to drive a truck thru.
Even spamming is not a crime in much of Europe to this day.
No, after a series of scandals (that went far beyond keeping employees from stealing or surfing all day), just no cameras e.g. in change rooms or rest rooms, where they wouldn't be allowed to stand in front of you and watch you undress etc. "IRL" either.
Also, no covert widespread phone surveillance or reading of private correspondence (if allowed on company premises/equipment in the first place) under the "excuse" that they'd need to find "moles" (celebrated as whistleblowers entitled to special protection in other jurisdictions).
The Facebook prong is an entirely different thing altogether: HR (or private investigators on their part, probably even "pre-emptively") shouldn't be allowed to intrude social networking sites as "false friends" to harvest dirt on (would-be) employees (not that anyone in their right mind should let that pile up there anyway).
The level of detail is not necessarily the wisest way to make law, though: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1762764&cid=33337514
Trouble is, by regulating lots of nitty-gritty details instead of a broad "Constitutional right"-style protection, one makes it even harder for the law to keep up with progress - while exposing the loopholes most clearly to those determined to use them with impunity.
To quote Portalis, one of the masterminds behind the French Civil Code:
A friend's request to display custom content on a projection clock made me wonder if/why there are really no such displays (as in "1ft digits across the room") that could be computer-interfaced with the likes of lcdproc, or even for pixel graphics.
Has anyone seen such a thing commercially available without the need for DIY optics?
In the name of Eris, how can't this be an Apple? Today is Pungenday, the 47th day of Confusion in the YOLD 3176 ;-)
Are you saying DGT amazingly (even more so at their price tag) stopped short of placing a cheap little LED on each square, as pretty much every stand-alone chess computer has done at least since the early 1980s?
Actually he says in his project diary (in a forum where they usually take TFTs apart to rebuild them into things like these or even one's own R2D2) that quite contrary to Microsoft's approach, all his web cam looks for are the pieces' shadows on the board cast by ambient light.
No need to detect more than that, the server knows which chessman comes from a particular square.
For anyone not lucky enough to have a honeytrapping provider, at least there is the http://www.xs4all.nl/~egbg/counterscript.html
This view seems at least as old as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Qu'est-ce que la propriété?, 1840 (quite a different school of thought than Objectivism for sure).
With respect to Ayn Rand's contributions to be revisited for the present debate, one might rather point at the bureaucrats' stance in Atlas Shrugged:
Not wanting their laws observed but broken to cash in on guilt as it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.
One thing's for sure if you could get the followers of both authors to agree:
The proposed bill would be, to rehash Lawrence Lessig's take on the dreaded DMCA, "bad law and bad policy."
Prophetic at least in name(s) and effect.
And you know a page out of whose (banned) book that is, while the news media does not dare to challenge politicians recycling that strategy:
Godwin alert to anyone googling the author of that line...
Kernighan & Plauger
The Elements of Programming Style
2nd edition, 1974 (exemplified in FORTRAN and PL/1!)
Of course, if the public knew, they'd find out about Cheyenne Mountain too.
e.g. on an HxC Floppy Drive Emulator...