Or, for that matter, "the captain has switched on the seat-belt sign".
I have no need to hear such annoyances during a flight. I keep my seatbelt fastened when seated because I know that not all turbulence can be predicted, and even a good ride report from an aircraft on the same route ahead of you doesn't mean it won't happen to you. Of course, being a pilot I tend to know such things.
I'm also probably listening on the aircraft audio system, and that announcement is fed into the headsets directly. This is why I find the sometimes-enforced policy of turning off noise cancelling headsets so counterproductive. With them on, I hear the cabin announcements more clearly than from any distorted, tiny speaker. With them off, I hear nothing.
And when I want to get up, I just look at the seatbelt sign itself to see if the "captain has switched on the seatbelt sign".
Most crimes don't survive well with collective defendants.
This statement makes no sense. Crimes don't "survive". Having multiple defendants does not make something that is normally illegal magically legal.
"I didn't block access. I was standing on the sidewalk. It isn't illegal to stand on the sidewalk."
However, you did block access to the facility by choosing to stand "on the sidewalk" in front of the door, which is a crime.
Much like twins in fiction
"Let's run the criminal justice system under the fanciful rules of fiction" is your argument now?
Blocking access to a facility is already a crime. It is a crime that should not be decriminalized, because then it truly would be legal for people to block the access to abortion clinics.
You've never heard protesters calling abortion doctors "murderers"?
We're talking about Anonymous and DDoS. You're equating the people they attack with murderers. And you're saying that anyone who shares a server with these "murderers" deserves the same consequences, which says that you think unknowingly sharing a server with someone you disagree with is as bad as murder.
Trying to paint this as an issue of being able to deal with murderers is hyperbole beyond reason.
The fact you can physically do something that is illegal doesn't make it legal. You are not allowed, legally, to prevent access, even if you can find enough people willing to do it. It's called "civil disobedience".
Now, if you are arguing that you CAN and SHOULD be able to legally block entrance to places of business you don't like, I'm sure there are a few anti-abortion groups that would love to have you as a member.
Much like the gastroenterology doctor upstairs from the doctor doing abortions isn't affected when a protest blocks access to the building.
That might be why it is illegal to block access during a protest.
If you share a building (or server) with the murderer,
Wow. Simply wow. You're equating a difference of agreement with someone and murder now.
Pick your friends well.
I use a web host and I have no idea who any of the other clients are. I have no real way of knowing that, without an exhaustive scan of every DNS record by domain name to see how many of them have the same DNS servers as I do. You're claiming that innocent people are guilty of murder because they don't know who else buys web services from the company they do.
There are several kinds of DDoS, some that could be seen as a protest (i.e. making customers not being able to access a company, putting a big sign making them aware that that company is misbehaving in your opinion), and some that could be seen as vandalism (breaking windows, throwing chairs, or even launching Windows 8).
The first example and last example are both vandalism. The middle example is hacking a site, which is not a DDoS.
Anonymous wants DDoS to be legal so they can attack sites they don't like (or rather, that anyone who claims to be acting under the guise of Anonymous -- i.e. anyone) for whatever reason they feel like it, or no reason at all, and not fear legal repercussions.
The problem with their "hitting the refresh button" argument is that it is 1) hundreds or thousands of "people" hitting the refresh button, and 2) many of those "people" have not consented to having their computers used for this "free speech" activity. There are many things that are reasonable to do when there are only one or two people doing them, but are unethical when more than a few do it. (I am going to ride around town on the bus just to sightsee. Imagine 60 people who are doing nothing but riding around town just to sightsee on the same bus. Nobody else can use the bus. Their taxes paid for the service, too, and they have a right to use it.) And using other people's property without their permission to exercise your free speech rights is theft, not to mention the theft of services from the website or server you are attacking.
Whether or not you agree or disagree is completely irrelevant to issue. This girl has the religious right to not be mandated to do anything, especially anything her religion mandates against.
And whether or not her and her father's beliefs are nutzo or not, they are being inconsistent and that makes this case ridiculous.
The complaint was that this girl was being forced to wear an RFID tag. Mark of the beast, cancer causing, whatever reason. Doesn't matter. Ok, the school said she didn't have to wear an RFID tag. That solves the problem, right?
No. The father turned this offer down because accepting it would prevent him from complaining about being forced to wear an RFID tag. Read the PDF of the case.
Now, perhaps he also feels that simply wearing an ID of any kind is "the mark of the beast", but that's not what the complaint says, and the complaint wasn't filed when she was forced to wear an ID, it was only after the RFID-based system was installed. So, no "mark of the beast" for just an ID, no religious issues.
Where's the case? Some people here are complaining that the school is wasting money on this system of keeping track of the students they are required to care for. Where are the complaints about the cost of this specious lawsuit?
And yes, the schools are required to keep track of the students, and this system (despite the claims that they are treating students like cattle) allows students MORE freedom to come and go where they need to. The school knows they are someplace they are supposed to be; parents who call in to find their kids in an emergency can do so more easily; time isn't taken in every class every day every hour taking roll of who is and isn't there.
Now, if the students were being treated like cattle, the school would be forcing them to eat antibiotics and then there would be a stun stick at the end of the graduation line.
In other words, it won't fix the underlying issue that when you won't scan they just issue you another badge.
That's not the underlying problem, because the girl and her father were offered an official school ID without an RFID chip in it and HE REFUSED. The superintendent was clear that not having the chip would not interfere with her schooling in any way. That pretty much rules out the "they'll just give you one that does scan" idea.
The real underlying problem is the litigious nature of the modern citizen. If something bad happens to a child at school because the school loses track of them, there's a lawsuit. The alleged independent nature of children isn't considered when a lawsuit comes around.
Doubt my claim about litigiousness? This father was offered an option to completely bypass the use of RFID on his child AND HE REFUSED IT specifically so he could still sue.
Well since the summary states that the compromise that the court finds acceptable is to remove the battery from the badge
And if you read the actual filing, you'll find that the superintended had already offered a "compromise" of using an ID that had no RFID in it at all. The father refused that offer because it would... ready for this?... give him no grounds for complaining that his child's right to freedom of religion was being violated. Yes, indeed, the fact that his child could go to school without her freedom of religion being violated was not sufficient for this guy.
He's talking about the $25.00 model which would make it 4x the cost.
I've never seen the $25 model anywhere for sale, and even at that price, 4 times the cost is only 300% more, not 400% more. Add in the things the AppleTV comes with that the $25 Pi doesn't and you're back to maybe twice as much (or just 100% more).
There's no reason to debate that.
If that was what had been written, yes, it is still wrong, so yes, there is a reason to debate it. Considering it isn't what was said...
And then go through the process of actually building the weapon.
It ain't rocket science.
And in the meantime, that combination of purchases as Home Depot has possibly tipped off the FBI that you're planning to kill people with a bomb.
A foot-long piece of threaded pipe and two pipe caps, paid for with cash. I've bought that kind of stuff many times. The FBI has yet to bother with me. Duct tape and nails, too.
If you're worried about the FBI, you buy ten foot sections, a pipe cutter, and a die. And some end caps. Buy one a day for a week. Too many people use pipe for too many things for it to raise any red flags anywhere.
A gun requires far less effort and can conceivably kill far more people.
The people who have been killed or maimed by pipe bombs or IEDs are glad to know this reassuring bit of information.
Sure, the hacker may disable the disabler and go on a spree, but then it's no worse than what we have now.
Wrong. Sadly and ignorantly wrong.
The guy who disabled the "disabler" would be able to shoot up the place just like he could now, but someone who has a smart gun that would have been able to shoot the bad guy to stop him won't be able to. The "smart gun" will notice that it is in a "congested area", and won't know that the other, disabler-disabled gun is there because the signal it would transmit has been DISABLED. That's worse than what we have now.
And this fancy new "law" would fail for exactly the same reason that the myriad of gun laws already fail to prevent nuts from going on shooting sprees: nuts who want to go on shooting sprees IGNORE THE LAW.
If we consider a 10% failure rate in either direction, it's still better than what we have now.
When your life is in danger and you have a weapon you could use to keep from dying, I think you'd probably not want that 10% failure rate. When you're a soft-fuzzy-warm-feelgood anti-gun nut who wouldn't have a gun anyway, that 10% failure rate for someone else doesn't seem so much of a problem.
One of the episodes of American Guns, about this gunshop, dealt with a custom pink gun for a woman client, and the mom planned on turning it into a regular product. I might not buy one, but I'd sure like to take a close look at it. Her. Whatever...
But can you control the relay of the serial commands to the cameras with the AppleTV device? Or use it to take over the Windows PC in your Winlink system?
Dunno. Not going to bother trying.
We're talking about wide functionality here rather than price,
No, actually, the specific part of the original statement I was replying to, which I quoted in my reply, was only about price. Once you figure in the extra stuff you get with AppleTV, and correct the original failure at simple math, the prices don't seem that outrageous after all.
$35 compared to $100 is "400% more"? Try 200% more. Or three times the price. But with a case and a power supply. And a "disk" of some kind already installed. So, $10 for a case, $5 for a USB charger/PS, $12 for a 8Gb class 10 SD card, you're up to 62$. That cuts your excess price down to 50%. Then consider that you'll probably have someone to call when it doesn't work...
And, I assume, a better layout so you don't have things sticking out all sides, like the power and SD card on one end, the USB and net connections on the other, the HDMI on a third side, and the audio and composite video the fourth.
And, I hope, a failure rate that does not approach that of the Rpi. Out of six I already have, one simply throws up its hands and loses all USB-based connectivity after running for a minute or two (sometimes less), which means no USB devices or network connection. Of the two model 2's I bought (with the extra GPIO in place of resistors), both had most of the extra GPIO holes (where you'd want to install connectors) pre-filled with solder.
Don't get me wrong. These are wonderful devices at a great price. A price where I consider them basically throw-away if they don't work. I'm going to be putting one at the remote end of a gigabit ethernet link to control some cameras that need serial commands to turn them on, and I'll have one running in the Winlink messaging system as a replacement for an old Windows clunker. I'll eventually package one up with Xbian as a home media device, maybe.
The complaint also extended to bits saying that by only having the mark you can participate in the economy and that by not having the RFID chip the child was being burdened by not being able to participate in the school economy.
You don't have to read very far into the actual complaint pointed to by the "claimed it did not work off campus" link in the summary to see that the superintendent told the family that the girl would not lose ANY ability to participate in school services. There was no burden. She would be wearing essentially the same ID she's already been wearing and accepting, doing the same things as before.
In fact, if you do read the complaint, you'll find out that the father refused to accept the un-chipped ID because his acceptance would prevent him from filing a complaint that his daughters freedom of religion was being abridged. Yes, if you aren't forced to do something that violates your freedom of religion, then yes, you don't have a reason to complain about being forced to do something that violates your freedom of religion. So, in fact, the trivial solution to the problem is unacceptable simply because the father wants to have something to complain about.
If wearing the ID itself was already a violation of her freedom of religion, then the complaint should not bother mentioning the RFID aspect, since it is irrelevant, and it should have been filed years ago, and the girl should have long ago refused to wear the id at all. Since none of that happened, then we know the real complaint has nothing to do with the "mark of the beast", because the "mark of the beast" has been acceptable to the father and the girl for a long time already.
Regarding the summary's implication that the superintended lied about the RFID chip not working off-campus, that's just hyperbole on the summary writer's part. The SYSTEM (Smart ID) truly does NOT work off-campus because any outside RFID readers won't be tied into the Smart ID database that would be required to convert the UID in the chip into student data. No student off-campus will be able to buy coffee at Starbucks using this id; no nefarious evil-doer will be able to know that "Susan Smith, student at XYZ middle school, has walked into the Fuzzy Feather Massage Parlor". Bad guys might know that RFID tag 2029929022938 has just walked by, but that's it. It's the same level of tracking you have if you carry an object you bought at Walmart with an RFID in it around, or your Mobile or other fast-pass, or any of the multitude of other RFIDed things.
1. Correlation exists between global warming and decrease.
2. Effect is global. (That's why it's called "global warming.")
3. I'm not sure of the third reason, but if you give me a few hundred thousand dollars in grant money I can spend the next ten years studying the effects and any other correlations I can amass.
Can you charge parking fees for an airport enforced quarantine?
Of course. Why not? Don't forget, a gate that has a plane parked at it cannot accept another incoming flight, so one in the gate may mean another sitting on the ramp, at least one engine running, and an entire flight crew on the clock. Or a closed terminal may trigger flow control and delay the departure of flights from other airports, where gate charges will certainly accrue.
The business people are allowed to come and go, even when planes aren't moving.
Huh? A business person waiting to board a flight can't go anywhere except a short distance from the gate or the flight may get called and he'll miss it altogether. Then remember that a flight that leaves an hour late arrives an hour later than it otherwise would. (Sometimes the pilots will put the pedal to the metal and try to make up time, but not always.)
A business person ON a plane waiting to push with the door closed is in electronic quarantine, unless the wait gets to be long and the pilot lets people power up. That will delay the departure when it comes time to leave, however.
The OP didn't talk about time lost to passengers, however.
They are still making money from trapped passengers.
How so? Trapped passengers aren't usually perusing the Sky Mall catalog, and the waitresses haven't broken open the galley to sell food. Trapped passengers cost money.
Airlines never compensate passengers for any inconvenience caused by missed flights or connections due to security reasons.
That doesn't change the fact that rebooking/rerouting or otherwise dealing with delayed pax costs the airline money. A delayed flight may push a crew past their legal duty day, forcing the airline to call in a backup crew -- and pay them. Any tin sitting on the ramp waiting for a gate, or that has to taxi back to a gate to be reboarded, is burning jet fuel at a good clip. Overtime for the ground crews unloading/reloading. Re-deicing if necessary. Lots of costs. And, due to flow control, those costs can occur at airports all over the country, not just the one that is closed.
We have devolved into a Country of lunatics who cannot do any kind of cost benefits analysis.
No, we have devolved into a country of lawyers, and politicians who can do cost-benefit analysis.
If something bad happened to that plane, then the lawyers would be lining up to sue someone/anyone, and that includes ATL, the airline, and any other government deep-pockets that were in any way involved. And the politicians know how bad it would look for them to be connected to this in any way, so their cost-benefit analysis goes something like this: "I cost a lost of money to a lot of people, the benefit is 1) a lawsuit won't stick to me, and 2) I can use it as an example of how I care about the public when it comes time to be re-elected."
it is just not worth the risk that someone might pull out their phone, calculate it...
I have no idea what the antecedent for "it" is here. Calculate what? The price rounded down? How many people will need a smartphone to calculate a rounded-to-a-nickel price? Not many.
...and people will simply not shop at retailers who do this.
People will get over this pretty quickly, if they even notice the two or three cent price increase on every product that is currently ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7. People who buy 10 widgets that used to cost $0.67 and is changed to $0.69 will pay twenty cents more overall. Everyone who buys just one will pay three cents more than they did before. Two results in a four cent increase. Three will result in a pre-rounding price of $2.07, which rounds down to $2.05, but is still four cents more than they would have paid before.
Applied to an economy as a whole, this can quickly add up to $11 million. But it's Canada, so maybe it will only be a few dollars.
I usually have very little faith in people, but in this case I will tend to believe in honesty.
Whose "honesty" are you believing in? The people who won't notice the change, or will get over it pretty quickly, or the stores who have the right to change prices when they need to?
Oh, I forgot to add. I have a server that sends out regular status reports on the disk arrays it serves. Because it uses an email program that does not produce MIME, and as such doesn't bother including a MIME-Version or Content-Type header, I cannot read that email on my wonderful new tablet. The POP/IMAP servers that the tablet accesses keep putting in bogus MIME-Version headers and nonsense Content-Type that confuses the email client.
Not to mention the increasing number of standards-abusing websites that demand an email address so they can spam you later, but won't accept valid email addresses because some moron didn't bother reading the RFC that defines what characters are and are not legal in the local part of an email address. E.g., '+'. There's even RFC that cover one use of '+' in email addresses, and yet morons who program this stuff don't think you should be allowed to use one.
You mentioned the relevant standards already:
email
Yes, isn't email such a wonderful, universal standard?
My main non-work email is on a shell account under linux. My main work email is under Evolution on linux.
I routinely get things as attachments to my non-work email that I have to forward to work and then save to disk so I can access them using Word or Adobe Reader on my Windows system, because OO or xpdf or evince can't quite handle that format properly. And lots of things to my work email that only bypass the forwarding step.
I especially love the pdfs (a fine standard, too) that evince renders as "lots of strange symbols", but can print out just fine. Thus losing entirely the ability to be paperless. I just got a travel reimbursement form that popped out of the latest and greatest electronic accounting system that evince was completely unable to deal with (didn't even open a display window), so I couldn't even try printing it to see how it turned out.
It seems that the "standards" for the "paperless office" all seem to be Microsoft based and depend on the latest versions of Microsoft software. Or require access to proprietary software systems by every employee that requires a day or two of training so they won't screw anything up.
Who knows what you have lying around in some filing cabinet...
Who knows what files you have laying about on a stack of floppies you can't even read anymore? Or how many files that disgruntled employee was able to take home on that nearly microscopic microSD card...
Slashdot Mirror
Or, for that matter, "the captain has switched on the seat-belt sign".
I have no need to hear such annoyances during a flight. I keep my seatbelt fastened when seated because I know that not all turbulence can be predicted, and even a good ride report from an aircraft on the same route ahead of you doesn't mean it won't happen to you. Of course, being a pilot I tend to know such things.
I'm also probably listening on the aircraft audio system, and that announcement is fed into the headsets directly. This is why I find the sometimes-enforced policy of turning off noise cancelling headsets so counterproductive. With them on, I hear the cabin announcements more clearly than from any distorted, tiny speaker. With them off, I hear nothing.
And when I want to get up, I just look at the seatbelt sign itself to see if the "captain has switched on the seatbelt sign".
Most crimes don't survive well with collective defendants.
This statement makes no sense. Crimes don't "survive". Having multiple defendants does not make something that is normally illegal magically legal.
"I didn't block access. I was standing on the sidewalk. It isn't illegal to stand on the sidewalk."
However, you did block access to the facility by choosing to stand "on the sidewalk" in front of the door, which is a crime.
Much like twins in fiction
"Let's run the criminal justice system under the fanciful rules of fiction" is your argument now?
Blocking access to a facility is already a crime. It is a crime that should not be decriminalized, because then it truly would be legal for people to block the access to abortion clinics.
You've never heard protesters calling abortion doctors "murderers"?
We're talking about Anonymous and DDoS. You're equating the people they attack with murderers. And you're saying that anyone who shares a server with these "murderers" deserves the same consequences, which says that you think unknowingly sharing a server with someone you disagree with is as bad as murder.
Trying to paint this as an issue of being able to deal with murderers is hyperbole beyond reason.
Nobody could get through without effort.
The fact you can physically do something that is illegal doesn't make it legal. You are not allowed, legally, to prevent access, even if you can find enough people willing to do it. It's called "civil disobedience".
Now, if you are arguing that you CAN and SHOULD be able to legally block entrance to places of business you don't like, I'm sure there are a few anti-abortion groups that would love to have you as a member.
Much like the gastroenterology doctor upstairs from the doctor doing abortions isn't affected when a protest blocks access to the building.
That might be why it is illegal to block access during a protest.
If you share a building (or server) with the murderer,
Wow. Simply wow. You're equating a difference of agreement with someone and murder now.
Pick your friends well.
I use a web host and I have no idea who any of the other clients are. I have no real way of knowing that, without an exhaustive scan of every DNS record by domain name to see how many of them have the same DNS servers as I do. You're claiming that innocent people are guilty of murder because they don't know who else buys web services from the company they do.
I'm sorry, but that's just nuts.
There are several kinds of DDoS, some that could be seen as a protest (i.e. making customers not being able to access a company, putting a big sign making them aware that that company is misbehaving in your opinion), and some that could be seen as vandalism (breaking windows, throwing chairs, or even launching Windows 8).
The first example and last example are both vandalism. The middle example is hacking a site, which is not a DDoS.
Anonymous wants DDoS to be legal so they can attack sites they don't like (or rather, that anyone who claims to be acting under the guise of Anonymous -- i.e. anyone) for whatever reason they feel like it, or no reason at all, and not fear legal repercussions.
The problem with their "hitting the refresh button" argument is that it is 1) hundreds or thousands of "people" hitting the refresh button, and 2) many of those "people" have not consented to having their computers used for this "free speech" activity. There are many things that are reasonable to do when there are only one or two people doing them, but are unethical when more than a few do it. (I am going to ride around town on the bus just to sightsee. Imagine 60 people who are doing nothing but riding around town just to sightsee on the same bus. Nobody else can use the bus. Their taxes paid for the service, too, and they have a right to use it.) And using other people's property without their permission to exercise your free speech rights is theft, not to mention the theft of services from the website or server you are attacking.
Whether or not you agree or disagree is completely irrelevant to issue. This girl has the religious right to not be mandated to do anything, especially anything her religion mandates against.
And whether or not her and her father's beliefs are nutzo or not, they are being inconsistent and that makes this case ridiculous.
The complaint was that this girl was being forced to wear an RFID tag. Mark of the beast, cancer causing, whatever reason. Doesn't matter. Ok, the school said she didn't have to wear an RFID tag. That solves the problem, right?
No. The father turned this offer down because accepting it would prevent him from complaining about being forced to wear an RFID tag. Read the PDF of the case.
Now, perhaps he also feels that simply wearing an ID of any kind is "the mark of the beast", but that's not what the complaint says, and the complaint wasn't filed when she was forced to wear an ID, it was only after the RFID-based system was installed. So, no "mark of the beast" for just an ID, no religious issues.
Where's the case? Some people here are complaining that the school is wasting money on this system of keeping track of the students they are required to care for. Where are the complaints about the cost of this specious lawsuit?
And yes, the schools are required to keep track of the students, and this system (despite the claims that they are treating students like cattle) allows students MORE freedom to come and go where they need to. The school knows they are someplace they are supposed to be; parents who call in to find their kids in an emergency can do so more easily; time isn't taken in every class every day every hour taking roll of who is and isn't there.
Now, if the students were being treated like cattle, the school would be forcing them to eat antibiotics and then there would be a stun stick at the end of the graduation line.
In other words, it won't fix the underlying issue that when you won't scan they just issue you another badge.
That's not the underlying problem, because the girl and her father were offered an official school ID without an RFID chip in it and HE REFUSED. The superintendent was clear that not having the chip would not interfere with her schooling in any way. That pretty much rules out the "they'll just give you one that does scan" idea.
The real underlying problem is the litigious nature of the modern citizen. If something bad happens to a child at school because the school loses track of them, there's a lawsuit. The alleged independent nature of children isn't considered when a lawsuit comes around.
Doubt my claim about litigiousness? This father was offered an option to completely bypass the use of RFID on his child AND HE REFUSED IT specifically so he could still sue.
Well since the summary states that the compromise that the court finds acceptable is to remove the battery from the badge
And if you read the actual filing, you'll find that the superintended had already offered a "compromise" of using an ID that had no RFID in it at all. The father refused that offer because it would ... ready for this? ... give him no grounds for complaining that his child's right to freedom of religion was being violated. Yes, indeed, the fact that his child could go to school without her freedom of religion being violated was not sufficient for this guy.
He's talking about the $25.00 model which would make it 4x the cost.
I've never seen the $25 model anywhere for sale, and even at that price, 4 times the cost is only 300% more, not 400% more. Add in the things the AppleTV comes with that the $25 Pi doesn't and you're back to maybe twice as much (or just 100% more).
There's no reason to debate that.
If that was what had been written, yes, it is still wrong, so yes, there is a reason to debate it. Considering it isn't what was said ...
And then go through the process of actually building the weapon.
It ain't rocket science.
And in the meantime, that combination of purchases as Home Depot has possibly tipped off the FBI that you're planning to kill people with a bomb.
A foot-long piece of threaded pipe and two pipe caps, paid for with cash. I've bought that kind of stuff many times. The FBI has yet to bother with me. Duct tape and nails, too.
If you're worried about the FBI, you buy ten foot sections, a pipe cutter, and a die. And some end caps. Buy one a day for a week. Too many people use pipe for too many things for it to raise any red flags anywhere.
A gun requires far less effort and can conceivably kill far more people.
The people who have been killed or maimed by pipe bombs or IEDs are glad to know this reassuring bit of information.
are you sure you wanted to do that? click yes or no
And when you are defending yourself against an armed assailant, this gives a very literal meaning to "blue screen of death".
Sure, the hacker may disable the disabler and go on a spree, but then it's no worse than what we have now.
Wrong. Sadly and ignorantly wrong.
The guy who disabled the "disabler" would be able to shoot up the place just like he could now, but someone who has a smart gun that would have been able to shoot the bad guy to stop him won't be able to. The "smart gun" will notice that it is in a "congested area", and won't know that the other, disabler-disabled gun is there because the signal it would transmit has been DISABLED. That's worse than what we have now.
And this fancy new "law" would fail for exactly the same reason that the myriad of gun laws already fail to prevent nuts from going on shooting sprees: nuts who want to go on shooting sprees IGNORE THE LAW.
If we consider a 10% failure rate in either direction, it's still better than what we have now.
When your life is in danger and you have a weapon you could use to keep from dying, I think you'd probably not want that 10% failure rate. When you're a soft-fuzzy-warm-feelgood anti-gun nut who wouldn't have a gun anyway, that 10% failure rate for someone else doesn't seem so much of a problem.
There are a number of pink guns out there.
One of the episodes of American Guns, about this gunshop, dealt with a custom pink gun for a woman client, and the mom planned on turning it into a regular product. I might not buy one, but I'd sure like to take a close look at it. Her. Whatever...
But can you control the relay of the serial commands to the cameras with the AppleTV device? Or use it to take over the Windows PC in your Winlink system?
Dunno. Not going to bother trying.
We're talking about wide functionality here rather than price,
No, actually, the specific part of the original statement I was replying to, which I quoted in my reply, was only about price. Once you figure in the extra stuff you get with AppleTV, and correct the original failure at simple math, the prices don't seem that outrageous after all.
That sounds about right. 400% more expensive,
$35 compared to $100 is "400% more"? Try 200% more. Or three times the price. But with a case and a power supply. And a "disk" of some kind already installed. So, $10 for a case, $5 for a USB charger/PS, $12 for a 8Gb class 10 SD card, you're up to 62$. That cuts your excess price down to 50%. Then consider that you'll probably have someone to call when it doesn't work ...
And, I assume, a better layout so you don't have things sticking out all sides, like the power and SD card on one end, the USB and net connections on the other, the HDMI on a third side, and the audio and composite video the fourth.
And, I hope, a failure rate that does not approach that of the Rpi. Out of six I already have, one simply throws up its hands and loses all USB-based connectivity after running for a minute or two (sometimes less), which means no USB devices or network connection. Of the two model 2's I bought (with the extra GPIO in place of resistors), both had most of the extra GPIO holes (where you'd want to install connectors) pre-filled with solder.
Don't get me wrong. These are wonderful devices at a great price. A price where I consider them basically throw-away if they don't work. I'm going to be putting one at the remote end of a gigabit ethernet link to control some cameras that need serial commands to turn them on, and I'll have one running in the Winlink messaging system as a replacement for an old Windows clunker. I'll eventually package one up with Xbian as a home media device, maybe.
The complaint also extended to bits saying that by only having the mark you can participate in the economy and that by not having the RFID chip the child was being burdened by not being able to participate in the school economy.
You don't have to read very far into the actual complaint pointed to by the "claimed it did not work off campus" link in the summary to see that the superintendent told the family that the girl would not lose ANY ability to participate in school services. There was no burden. She would be wearing essentially the same ID she's already been wearing and accepting, doing the same things as before.
In fact, if you do read the complaint, you'll find out that the father refused to accept the un-chipped ID because his acceptance would prevent him from filing a complaint that his daughters freedom of religion was being abridged. Yes, if you aren't forced to do something that violates your freedom of religion, then yes, you don't have a reason to complain about being forced to do something that violates your freedom of religion. So, in fact, the trivial solution to the problem is unacceptable simply because the father wants to have something to complain about.
If wearing the ID itself was already a violation of her freedom of religion, then the complaint should not bother mentioning the RFID aspect, since it is irrelevant, and it should have been filed years ago, and the girl should have long ago refused to wear the id at all. Since none of that happened, then we know the real complaint has nothing to do with the "mark of the beast", because the "mark of the beast" has been acceptable to the father and the girl for a long time already.
Regarding the summary's implication that the superintended lied about the RFID chip not working off-campus, that's just hyperbole on the summary writer's part. The SYSTEM (Smart ID) truly does NOT work off-campus because any outside RFID readers won't be tied into the Smart ID database that would be required to convert the UID in the chip into student data. No student off-campus will be able to buy coffee at Starbucks using this id; no nefarious evil-doer will be able to know that "Susan Smith, student at XYZ middle school, has walked into the Fuzzy Feather Massage Parlor". Bad guys might know that RFID tag 2029929022938 has just walked by, but that's it. It's the same level of tracking you have if you carry an object you bought at Walmart with an RFID in it around, or your Mobile or other fast-pass, or any of the multitude of other RFIDed things.
1. Correlation exists between global warming and decrease.
2. Effect is global. (That's why it's called "global warming.")
3. I'm not sure of the third reason, but if you give me a few hundred thousand dollars in grant money I can spend the next ten years studying the effects and any other correlations I can amass.
Is your changed belief a correlation with taking the class or was it caused by taking the class?
Can you charge parking fees for an airport enforced quarantine?
Of course. Why not? Don't forget, a gate that has a plane parked at it cannot accept another incoming flight, so one in the gate may mean another sitting on the ramp, at least one engine running, and an entire flight crew on the clock. Or a closed terminal may trigger flow control and delay the departure of flights from other airports, where gate charges will certainly accrue.
The business people are allowed to come and go, even when planes aren't moving.
Huh? A business person waiting to board a flight can't go anywhere except a short distance from the gate or the flight may get called and he'll miss it altogether. Then remember that a flight that leaves an hour late arrives an hour later than it otherwise would. (Sometimes the pilots will put the pedal to the metal and try to make up time, but not always.)
A business person ON a plane waiting to push with the door closed is in electronic quarantine, unless the wait gets to be long and the pilot lets people power up. That will delay the departure when it comes time to leave, however.
The OP didn't talk about time lost to passengers, however.
They are still making money from trapped passengers.
How so? Trapped passengers aren't usually perusing the Sky Mall catalog, and the waitresses haven't broken open the galley to sell food. Trapped passengers cost money.
Airlines never compensate passengers for any inconvenience caused by missed flights or connections due to security reasons.
That doesn't change the fact that rebooking/rerouting or otherwise dealing with delayed pax costs the airline money. A delayed flight may push a crew past their legal duty day, forcing the airline to call in a backup crew -- and pay them. Any tin sitting on the ramp waiting for a gate, or that has to taxi back to a gate to be reboarded, is burning jet fuel at a good clip. Overtime for the ground crews unloading/reloading. Re-deicing if necessary. Lots of costs. And, due to flow control, those costs can occur at airports all over the country, not just the one that is closed.
We have devolved into a Country of lunatics who cannot do any kind of cost benefits analysis.
No, we have devolved into a country of lawyers, and politicians who can do cost-benefit analysis.
If something bad happened to that plane, then the lawyers would be lining up to sue someone/anyone, and that includes ATL, the airline, and any other government deep-pockets that were in any way involved. And the politicians know how bad it would look for them to be connected to this in any way, so their cost-benefit analysis goes something like this: "I cost a lost of money to a lot of people, the benefit is 1) a lawsuit won't stick to me, and 2) I can use it as an example of how I care about the public when it comes time to be re-elected."
it is just not worth the risk that someone might pull out their phone, calculate it ...
I have no idea what the antecedent for "it" is here. Calculate what? The price rounded down? How many people will need a smartphone to calculate a rounded-to-a-nickel price? Not many.
...and people will simply not shop at retailers who do this.
People will get over this pretty quickly, if they even notice the two or three cent price increase on every product that is currently ending in 1, 2, 6 or 7. People who buy 10 widgets that used to cost $0.67 and is changed to $0.69 will pay twenty cents more overall. Everyone who buys just one will pay three cents more than they did before. Two results in a four cent increase. Three will result in a pre-rounding price of $2.07, which rounds down to $2.05, but is still four cents more than they would have paid before.
Applied to an economy as a whole, this can quickly add up to $11 million. But it's Canada, so maybe it will only be a few dollars.
I usually have very little faith in people, but in this case I will tend to believe in honesty.
Whose "honesty" are you believing in? The people who won't notice the change, or will get over it pretty quickly, or the stores who have the right to change prices when they need to?
Not to mention the increasing number of standards-abusing websites that demand an email address so they can spam you later, but won't accept valid email addresses because some moron didn't bother reading the RFC that defines what characters are and are not legal in the local part of an email address. E.g., '+'. There's even RFC that cover one use of '+' in email addresses, and yet morons who program this stuff don't think you should be allowed to use one.
</rant>
You mentioned the relevant standards already: email
Yes, isn't email such a wonderful, universal standard?
My main non-work email is on a shell account under linux. My main work email is under Evolution on linux. I routinely get things as attachments to my non-work email that I have to forward to work and then save to disk so I can access them using Word or Adobe Reader on my Windows system, because OO or xpdf or evince can't quite handle that format properly. And lots of things to my work email that only bypass the forwarding step.
I especially love the pdfs (a fine standard, too) that evince renders as "lots of strange symbols", but can print out just fine. Thus losing entirely the ability to be paperless. I just got a travel reimbursement form that popped out of the latest and greatest electronic accounting system that evince was completely unable to deal with (didn't even open a display window), so I couldn't even try printing it to see how it turned out.
It seems that the "standards" for the "paperless office" all seem to be Microsoft based and depend on the latest versions of Microsoft software. Or require access to proprietary software systems by every employee that requires a day or two of training so they won't screw anything up.
Who knows what you have lying around in some filing cabinet...
Who knows what files you have laying about on a stack of floppies you can't even read anymore? Or how many files that disgruntled employee was able to take home on that nearly microscopic microSD card...