Actually, hashes are difficult to secure for general communications purposes without putting a cap on the size of the transmission. In information-content terms, a collision proof hash is equivalent to a lossless compression algorithm.
A hash will either contain all of the non-redundant information in the original content, or some of the information gets lost during the hash. Non-redundant information being defined in an information-theory sense that a given bit is completely random/unpredictable based on the content of preceding bits.
In order for a hash to be completely collision proof, it has to contain all of the non-redundant information contained in the original file. Otherwise information in the orignal message is lost in the hash. And if information is lost from the original message, that creates a possibility of constructing a message that differs only in the information that is removed by the hash. Only if the original message is reconstructible from the hash (plus possible information contained in the hash algorithm itself) will it be collision-proof. You've either got the information-content, or you don't. And if you don't have the content, you can't validate it.
The fact is... If everyone made money, the stock market would be an impossible thing. Some people will lose while some will gain. No magic piece of software is going to change that.
Thanks to the inputs of human labor and intelligence bringing increases in productivity into the economy, the stock market is not a zero sum game. Even accounting for inflation, there has been real growth in the overall value of the market, just as there has been real growth in the overall value of the world economy. So it IS possible for everyone to make (a little) money.
On the other hand, if everyone is making money in the same proportion to their level of investment, your subjective perception of your wealth won't be as high as your actual gain in purchasing power. That's because relative to everyone else, you haven't moved. The fact that you now have an HDTV and a new car seems less like a gain in wealth because everyone else in your neighborhood has one too.
And once you factor in commissions, account fees and so forth, you can see that the small investor is still more likely to lose money than larger investors, even if they are able to implement the same investment strategy.
Besides, if IBM developers erased code on their personal machines, what's the big deal? It's still in the version history, so no evidence was destroyed. It would take a CMVC admin to wipe the data from the version history. And it would be hard. Not only would she have to zap the offending version, but every subsequent version would have to be renumbered to hide the gap. There are probably other ramifications, like editing the embedded version code comments in the source file.
And (at least according to IBM), the CMVC version history for much of this was archived to tape, so developers wouldn't have had access to the code at the alleged time anyway. What SCO is alleging implies either 1) that the CMVC admin who extracted the archive from tape for the purposes of complying with the courts discovery order has confessed to editing the version history and purging data during that process or 2) that IBM lied when they said that the CMVC archive had been taken offline and put in storage. Given IBM's history at handling IP law from a patent perspective, I don't buy that. Their lawyers are smarter than to try to scam a court with such an obvious ploy.
As discussed, the software shouldn't be vulnerable to such attacks. But it's not FUD either.
The tags shouldn't be able to be overwritten without the change being detected as corrupt data. In other words, strong encryption. This is available, but more expensive, so customers are being marketed cheaper insecure solutions without becoming aware of the risks they are incurring.
If the patient ID tag in your hospital bracelet can be modified to show you as a different patient (say one needing a leg amputated for gangrene), that isn't just the scanning software that's a problem.
Eventually, almost all of these movies get "edited for content and duration" in order to go out on Broadcast and non-premium cable channels anyway. Why can't Cleanflix and the studios do a deal to have the studios accelerate that (presumably licensed) process and get the "broadcast" version of movies out on DVD?
Or is there going to be another lawsuit against the TV stations for editing content, too?
The irony is that the companies are also dependent on that big superhighway going through their front door. It's how they communicate with their suppliers, competitors, allies and customers. People carry laptops around to do their presentations now, not huge portfolios of transparencies. People work at home because companies assign work that requires 50-100 hours a week to complete. Every packet or disk sector that enters or leaves the companies network in the course of daily business could be the one that brings the whole system down.
But it takes the human factor to really fsck things up. That's why social engineering is so effective. The routers and firewalls operate with their inflexible rules and it takes a code defect to get through them without additional support. But humans can be persuaded to violate their own rules by methods ranging from bribery to blackmail.
There's nothing in the article to confirm whether the poor, ignorant consumers actually gave the drive to tech support for disposal, or just talked with a floor clerk and dropped it in the recycling bin. In either case, bad Best Buy. But bad consumer if they just dropped it in a recycling bin.
Well the interference doesn't depend so much on the size of the photo-receptor as the spacing between them. The smaller the spacing/insulation, the greater the leakage. Leakage also makes things run hotter (like 90nm Pentiums), which increases thermal noise (electrical "sparks" due to random electron jumps into conductivity and back down again). Leakage also increases with the intensity of the light hitting a sensor. This means that sensors separated by a smaller gap are more vulnerable to "blooming" where a light source blots out the surrounding pixels because the current from the pixels that are actually hit by the light leaks into the adjacent ones.
CMOS has traditionally been considered noisier than CCD, but when the pixels get this small and this close together that distinction is less important.
saying that all of those people/organizations exhibit terroristic behavior. I would add than any government of laws uses a certain level of coercion on the members of it's society. Similarly, children are forced to attend school. SO it isn't just being coerced and threatened that constitutes terrorism.
Terrorism is the little guy's reflection of tyranny. When they use violence and threats to get what they want, the powerful are tyrants, the humble are terrorists.
Besides coercion and the threat of violence, there has to be a certain level of actual violence. And you should also mention lawlessness. The tyrant and terrorist distinguish themselves by excluding themselves from the obligations of the rule of law, and their threats are credible because they are usually carried out. So, many fundamentalist terrorists violate the tenets of their own religion (jihadists and abortion clinic bombers for example) under the belief that the outrage they are fighting against doesn't deserve the law.
Interestingly, under this definition, we end up with Patent trolls, and MPAA/RIAA off the list. They may wield the law like it was a nuclear weapon, but they don't have guys going to people's houses to knee-cap them. Some of the others depend on how you interpret events. The NSA, FBI, and UN seem to stay within the law on the surface. And the evidence otherwise is debatable, especially when you include the requirement of an active threat of violence. On the other hand, Greenpeace, PETA, bullies and the others qualify (though I haven't heard of Greenpeace eco-terrorism in a long time). Finally, you left out drug dealers and street gangs, which are much worse than school bullies, even if you just consider witness intimidation. And George Bush is looking a lot like a tyrant.
He's certainly expressed that he considers certain laws as not restraining his own executive authority, as in the notes associated with the signing of the McCain anti-torture bill. His justice department has also expressed that "unlawful enemy combatants" are outside the pale of the Geneva convention, even though they (eventually) elected to honor it. Special extractions, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib demonstrate that he is willing to condone violence outside the law (though he may still have his foot holding the door open).
I won't even get into all the other hot topics we always see on/., other than to note that the administration is very into "the ends justify the means". You constantly hear Cheney, Rummy and Bushie saying things like "You've got to remember that these are very bad people we're trying to catch." whenever someone complains about how things are being handled. It doesn't matter if you're trying to catch terrorists or squirrels, unless you believe that the ends justify the means.
So IMO, Bush stays on the list of terrorists and tyrants. If nothing else, it just disturbs me that regardless of whether his actions are legal or not, whenever he exercises his power, it always seems to be in the direction of greater secrecy, greater government control over dissent, and greater monitoring of the general public.
The United States Supreme Court today refused to hear a case brought by students of Ball State University against the National Security Agency for recording their network activity on the university's active art installation depicting the activity of the network. The refusal leaves in place a lower court ruling that the National Security Agency has the right to record and decode network traffic that is displayed in public locations, no matter how the information is encoded.
I thought/. was older than that: it's the vi (and more) editing command meaning "Search for any character". Considering the number of characters (human and byte-sized) on/., this makes just as much sense as the http: explanation. It's also a pretty useless command, which also seems appropriate to many of the posts here.:)
The thing that gets me about the global warming debate is that the economic cost and risk about the same no matter what, but if we DO something about global warming, we at least get some technological and poliitical benefits. Even assuming that Global warming is a natural trend, it'shappening. Regardless of whether it's "caused" by human or natural factors, we can certainly reduce our "unnatural" contributions to greenhouse gasses to an extent that will reduce the impact of any "natural" warming trend.
If we take action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, we get 1) new and/or improved technologies to improve energy efficiency and reduce fossil fuel consumption 2) Better public transportation (at least in the US). Both of these leave us better prepared for when the oil runs out and reduce our interdependence with Islamic fundamentalists that happen to own oil.
Another reason to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel is if we burn all the fossil fuels in coal, oil and natural gas, the CO2 content of the atmosphere will be so high it will kill most vertebrate life on the planet. This is a longer trend (200 years+/-), but it's still within a historic, rather than a geologic time period.
If we don't do anything about global warming, we (in the US) have a choice either to build a levee around the entire East Coast of the US from Galveston to Miami to Portland Maine, plus much of the west coast as well. The east coast levee would destroy the Gulf Coast Bayous, Everglades national park and hundreds of square miles of property and wetlands. If we do nothing about the levee the ocean should take about 50-100 years to cover thousands of square miles of residential, commercial and industrial real-estate valued in the trillions of dollars. So exactly how is this a lower cost than taking action about global warming? And given current budget levels, how long do you think it would take to build such a levee?
Other countries around the world all have the same problem.
The cost is extreme no matter how we go, but the social and economic benefit is much greater if we act proactively. Of course, it may already be too late. The ice cap melts in Greenland and Antarctica have already accelerated twice as fast as expected.
Actually, the math behind even business applications can be pretty intense. It's usually hidden behind APIs or rules of thumb. Which is probably the problem. Business apps are usually just the same building block put together in different structures. Some examples: -Encryption Algorithms -Compression Algorithms -Hash Table Construction (do you remember why the size of the hash table is best to be a prime number?).
You can't really call yourself a software ENGINEER unless you know the math (or at least you did once upon a time) behind the techniques. It's kind of like the difference between an Electrical Engineer and an Electrician. An electrician will know Ohm's law, wire gauges and the electric code (among other things) using standard copper and aluminum wire compositions. An electrical engineer will know how to calculate the conductive characteristics of a wire made of any material, including non-standard configurations.
Even in business apps that just use APIs, the math can come in handy for debugging and testing. At a minimum it lets you sanity check that encryption API you downloaded off of Sourceforge.
It's not a "wasted vote", even if they don't get elected. If Libertarian candidates start taking enough votes to influence elections (even 10%), somebody in the major parties will start to coopt their platform and really work to reduce government.
If a libertarian candidate actually does get elected, they won't be able to implement the "scarier" parts of their platform (like legalized prostitution and drugs), because they'll still have to deal with the Republicrats. But it will finally give a serious voice to limiting the role of the federal government.
If enough libertarians get elected to actually form a voting bloc, then the "scary" pieces are still unlikely to be passed, but they'll even have enough power to start taking on the lobbyist power structures.
And in the meantime you're sending the right message to government: they've gone too far, too many times for us to put up with it anymore.
You mean the spindizzy, don't you? Considering the technique used in this experiment, James Blish's term seems more relevant than it did when he first wrote those stories and novellas.
Figure about 100 years more and they can probably re-issue Boston's eponymous album with photographic cover art.
Considering how anything Laptop-related tends to be overpriced (kind of like USB cables sold at retail), here are some suggestions for alternatives. None of them are super portable, but for using on a couch, lounger or bed at home, they do the trick: 1) A "breakfast in bed" tray with swing out legs. If the laptop isn't too hot, the fold-in area for the legs will provide enough of an air pocket between your lap and the PC (though this may feel lumpy). If your laptop runs hotter, rest the tray on the arms of the chair or open the legs out to provide more distance from the heat source. Also tends to be large enough to accommodate widescreen laptops or a mouse pad.
2) A laptop writer's desk. Intended for writing (anyone remember paper?), they often have some kind of padding on the underside. Usually a little more portable than the breakfast tray, but you can get really fancy models with small drawers and other accessories that increase the bulk.
A lot of people have been saying for a long time that "homeland security", the PAT-RIOT act and the war on terror were just codewords for more government interference in people's daily lives. So now pornography is a homeland security issue?
Various conservative factions first gained power at the local government level and leveraged that power to take control nationally. Between RICO and PATRIOT and executive orders authorizing surveillance, the federal government certainly has the capability of being just as interfering as these Montgomery County officials.
I'm starting to feel like that corny old poem about first they came for the Jews, then the homosexuals and I never spoke up. In the case of the U.S. it's already progressing from the terrorists to Muslims in general, non-violent political agitators, and now pornography viewers.
When will the "small-government" conservatives put their votes where there brains are? A "wasted" vote for the libertarian party would demonstrate commitment to their principles and send the major parties a message.
So you're saying that the mainstream Republican party is just as much a pawn of the religious right as the Democrats are a pawn of the labor unions? Because looking at the Republican party platform, I don't see a lot of mainstream positions on issues like sex education, evolution, global warming or science in general. I see positions designed to let fundamentalists advance their agenda at the expense of overall society.
Where are the "mainstream" Republicans hiding when this kind of crap gets put into their platform?
That whole scene in Dover reminded me over the old Equal Rights Amendment back in the 70's and 80's. For you people who haven't lived that long, this was a US constitutional amendment intended to prohibit discrimination against women. Several state legislatures were convinced that the word "sex" referred to sexual practices rather than gender.
Slashdot Mirror
Such an eerily appropriate HR number...
Actually, hashes are difficult to secure for general communications purposes without putting a cap on the size of the transmission. In information-content terms, a collision proof hash is equivalent to a lossless compression algorithm.
A hash will either contain all of the non-redundant information in the original content, or some of the information gets lost during the hash. Non-redundant information being defined in an information-theory sense that a given bit is completely random/unpredictable based on the content of preceding bits.
In order for a hash to be completely collision proof, it has to contain all of the non-redundant information contained in the original file. Otherwise information in the orignal message is lost in the hash. And if information is lost from the original message, that creates a possibility of constructing a message that differs only in the information that is removed by the hash. Only if the original message is reconstructible from the hash (plus possible information contained in the hash algorithm itself) will it be collision-proof. You've either got the information-content, or you don't. And if you don't have the content, you can't validate it.
Thanks to the inputs of human labor and intelligence bringing increases in productivity into the economy, the stock market is not a zero sum game. Even accounting for inflation, there has been real growth in the overall value of the market, just as there has been real growth in the overall value of the world economy. So it IS possible for everyone to make (a little) money.
On the other hand, if everyone is making money in the same proportion to their level of investment, your subjective perception of your wealth won't be as high as your actual gain in purchasing power. That's because relative to everyone else, you haven't moved. The fact that you now have an HDTV and a new car seems less like a gain in wealth because everyone else in your neighborhood has one too.
And once you factor in commissions, account fees and so forth, you can see that the small investor is still more likely to lose money than larger investors, even if they are able to implement the same investment strategy.
Besides, if IBM developers erased code on their personal machines, what's the big deal? It's still in the version history, so no evidence was destroyed. It would take a CMVC admin to wipe the data from the version history. And it would be hard. Not only would she have to zap the offending version, but every subsequent version would have to be renumbered to hide the gap. There are probably other ramifications, like editing the embedded version code comments in the source file.
And (at least according to IBM), the CMVC version history for much of this was archived to tape, so developers wouldn't have had access to the code at the alleged time anyway. What SCO is alleging implies either 1) that the CMVC admin who extracted the archive from tape for the purposes of complying with the courts discovery order has confessed to editing the version history and purging data during that process or 2) that IBM lied when they said that the CMVC archive had been taken offline and put in storage. Given IBM's history at handling IP law from a patent perspective, I don't buy that. Their lawyers are smarter than to try to scam a court with such an obvious ploy.
As discussed, the software shouldn't be vulnerable to such attacks. But it's not FUD either.
The tags shouldn't be able to be overwritten without the change being detected as corrupt data. In other words, strong encryption. This is available, but more expensive, so customers are being marketed cheaper insecure solutions without becoming aware of the risks they are incurring.
If the patient ID tag in your hospital bracelet can be modified to show you as a different patient (say one needing a leg amputated for gangrene), that isn't just the scanning software that's a problem.
Eventually, almost all of these movies get "edited for content and duration" in order to go out on Broadcast and non-premium cable channels anyway. Why can't Cleanflix and the studios do a deal to have the studios accelerate that (presumably licensed) process and get the "broadcast" version of movies out on DVD?
Or is there going to be another lawsuit against the TV stations for editing content, too?
The irony is that the companies are also dependent on that big superhighway going through their front door. It's how they communicate with their suppliers, competitors, allies and customers. People carry laptops around to do their presentations now, not huge portfolios of transparencies. People work at home because companies assign work that requires 50-100 hours a week to complete. Every packet or disk sector that enters or leaves the companies network in the course of daily business could be the one that brings the whole system down.
But it takes the human factor to really fsck things up. That's why social engineering is so effective. The routers and firewalls operate with their inflexible rules and it takes a code defect to get through them without additional support. But humans can be persuaded to violate their own rules by methods ranging from bribery to blackmail.
Don't forget to wipe your butt and wash your hands after using the facilities.
across the front of the table.
20 bucks say the flea market booth was run by a Best Buy employee to supplement his meager pay using "discards" he had acquired from the store.
There's nothing in the article to confirm whether the poor, ignorant consumers actually gave the drive to tech support for disposal, or just talked with a floor clerk and dropped it in the recycling bin. In either case, bad Best Buy. But bad consumer if they just dropped it in a recycling bin.
Nothing seems to stop anyone else around here.
Well the interference doesn't depend so much on the size of the photo-receptor as the spacing between them. The smaller the spacing/insulation, the greater the leakage. Leakage also makes things run hotter (like 90nm Pentiums), which increases thermal noise (electrical "sparks" due to random electron jumps into conductivity and back down again). Leakage also increases with the intensity of the light hitting a sensor. This means that sensors separated by a smaller gap are more vulnerable to "blooming" where a light source blots out the surrounding pixels because the current from the pixels that are actually hit by the light leaks into the adjacent ones.
CMOS has traditionally been considered noisier than CCD, but when the pixels get this small and this close together that distinction is less important.
saying that all of those people/organizations exhibit terroristic behavior. I would add than any government of laws uses a certain level of coercion on the members of it's society. Similarly, children are forced to attend school. SO it isn't just being coerced and threatened that constitutes terrorism.
/., other than to note that the administration is very into "the ends justify the means". You constantly hear Cheney, Rummy and Bushie saying things like "You've got to remember that these are very bad people we're trying to catch." whenever someone complains about how things are being handled. It doesn't matter if you're trying to catch terrorists or squirrels, unless you believe that the ends justify the means.
Terrorism is the little guy's reflection of tyranny. When they use violence and threats to get what they want, the powerful are tyrants, the humble are terrorists.
Besides coercion and the threat of violence, there has to be a certain level of actual violence. And you should also mention lawlessness. The tyrant and terrorist distinguish themselves by excluding themselves from the obligations of the rule of law, and their threats are credible because they are usually carried out. So, many fundamentalist terrorists violate the tenets of their own religion (jihadists and abortion clinic bombers for example) under the belief that the outrage they are fighting against doesn't deserve the law.
Interestingly, under this definition, we end up with Patent trolls, and MPAA/RIAA off the list. They may wield the law like it was a nuclear weapon, but they don't have guys going to people's houses to knee-cap them. Some of the others depend on how you interpret events. The NSA, FBI, and UN seem to stay within the law on the surface. And the evidence otherwise is debatable, especially when you include the requirement of an active threat of violence. On the other hand, Greenpeace, PETA, bullies and the others qualify (though I haven't heard of Greenpeace eco-terrorism in a long time). Finally, you left out drug dealers and street gangs, which are much worse than school bullies, even if you just consider witness intimidation. And George Bush is looking a lot like a tyrant.
He's certainly expressed that he considers certain laws as not restraining his own executive authority, as in the notes associated with the signing of the McCain anti-torture bill. His justice department has also expressed that "unlawful enemy combatants" are outside the pale of the Geneva convention, even though they (eventually) elected to honor it. Special extractions, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib demonstrate that he is willing to condone violence outside the law (though he may still have his foot holding the door open).
I won't even get into all the other hot topics we always see on
So IMO, Bush stays on the list of terrorists and tyrants. If nothing else, it just disturbs me that regardless of whether his actions are legal or not, whenever he exercises his power, it always seems to be in the direction of greater secrecy, greater government control over dissent, and greater monitoring of the general public.
I can see it now...
The United States Supreme Court today refused to hear a case brought by students of Ball State University against the National Security Agency for recording their network activity on the university's active art installation depicting the activity of the network. The refusal leaves in place a lower court ruling that the National Security Agency has the right to record and decode network traffic that is displayed in public locations, no matter how the information is encoded.
I thought /. was older than that: it's the vi (and more) editing command meaning "Search for any character". Considering the number of characters (human and byte-sized) on /., this makes just as much sense as the http: explanation. It's also a pretty useless command, which also seems appropriate to many of the posts here. :)
The thing that gets me about the global warming debate is that the economic cost and risk about the same no matter what, but if we DO something about global warming, we at least get some technological and poliitical benefits. Even assuming that Global warming is a natural trend, it'shappening. Regardless of whether it's "caused" by human or natural factors, we can certainly reduce our "unnatural" contributions to greenhouse gasses to an extent that will reduce the impact of any "natural" warming trend.
If we take action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, we get 1) new and/or improved technologies to improve energy efficiency and reduce fossil fuel consumption 2) Better public transportation (at least in the US). Both of these leave us better prepared for when the oil runs out and reduce our interdependence with Islamic fundamentalists that happen to own oil.
Another reason to wean ourselves off of fossil fuel is if we burn all the fossil fuels in coal, oil and natural gas, the CO2 content of the atmosphere will be so high it will kill most vertebrate life on the planet. This is a longer trend (200 years+/-), but it's still within a historic, rather than a geologic time period.
If we don't do anything about global warming, we (in the US) have a choice either to build a levee around the entire East Coast of the US from Galveston to Miami to Portland Maine, plus much of the west coast as well. The east coast levee would destroy the Gulf Coast Bayous, Everglades national park and hundreds of square miles of property and wetlands. If we do nothing about the levee the ocean should take about 50-100 years to cover thousands of square miles of residential, commercial and industrial real-estate valued in the trillions of dollars. So exactly how is this a lower cost than taking action about global warming? And given current budget levels, how long do you think it would take to build such a levee?
Other countries around the world all have the same problem.
The cost is extreme no matter how we go, but the social and economic benefit is much greater if we act proactively. Of course, it may already be too late. The ice cap melts in Greenland and Antarctica have already accelerated twice as fast as expected.
Actually, the math behind even business applications can be pretty intense. It's usually hidden behind APIs or rules of thumb. Which is probably the problem. Business apps are usually just the same building block put together in different structures.
Some examples:
-Encryption Algorithms
-Compression Algorithms
-Hash Table Construction (do you remember why the size of the hash table is best to be a prime number?).
You can't really call yourself a software ENGINEER unless you know the math (or at least you did once upon a time) behind the techniques. It's kind of like the difference between an Electrical Engineer and an Electrician. An electrician will know Ohm's law, wire gauges and the electric code (among other things) using standard copper and aluminum wire compositions. An electrical engineer will know how to calculate the conductive characteristics of a wire made of any material, including non-standard configurations.
Even in business apps that just use APIs, the math can come in handy for debugging and testing. At a minimum it lets you sanity check that encryption API you downloaded off of Sourceforge.
That's not flying, that's orbiting. Otherwise you don't miss, you hit.
whenever you are offered the choice.
It's not a "wasted vote", even if they don't get elected. If Libertarian candidates start taking enough votes to influence elections (even 10%), somebody in the major parties will start to coopt their platform and really work to reduce government.
If a libertarian candidate actually does get elected, they won't be able to implement the "scarier" parts of their platform (like legalized prostitution and drugs), because they'll still have to deal with the Republicrats. But it will finally give a serious voice to limiting the role of the federal government.
If enough libertarians get elected to actually form a voting bloc, then the "scary" pieces are still unlikely to be passed, but they'll even have enough power to start taking on the lobbyist power structures.
And in the meantime you're sending the right message to government: they've gone too far, too many times for us to put up with it anymore.
Or if you're female you can go to Dildo Street in Puerto Rico.
You mean the spindizzy, don't you? Considering the technique used in this experiment, James Blish's term seems more relevant than it did when he first wrote those stories and novellas.
Figure about 100 years more and they can probably re-issue Boston's eponymous album with photographic cover art.
Considering how anything Laptop-related tends to be overpriced (kind of like USB cables sold at retail), here are some suggestions for alternatives. None of them are super portable, but for using on a couch, lounger or bed at home, they do the trick:
1) A "breakfast in bed" tray with swing out legs. If the laptop isn't too hot, the fold-in area for the legs will provide enough of an air pocket between your lap and the PC (though this may feel lumpy). If your laptop runs hotter, rest the tray on the arms of the chair or open the legs out to provide more distance from the heat source. Also tends to be large enough to accommodate widescreen laptops or a mouse pad.
2) A laptop writer's desk. Intended for writing (anyone remember paper?), they often have some kind of padding on the underside. Usually a little more portable than the breakfast tray, but you can get really fancy models with small drawers and other accessories that increase the bulk.
A lot of people have been saying for a long time that "homeland security", the PAT-RIOT act and the war on terror were just codewords for more government interference in people's daily lives. So now pornography is a homeland security issue?
Various conservative factions first gained power at the local government level and leveraged that power to take control nationally. Between RICO and PATRIOT and executive orders authorizing surveillance, the federal government certainly has the capability of being just as interfering as these Montgomery County officials.
I'm starting to feel like that corny old poem about first they came for the Jews, then the homosexuals and I never spoke up. In the case of the U.S. it's already progressing from the terrorists to Muslims in general, non-violent political agitators, and now pornography viewers.
When will the "small-government" conservatives put their votes where there brains are? A "wasted" vote for the libertarian party would demonstrate commitment to their principles and send the major parties a message.
So you're saying that the mainstream Republican party is just as much a pawn of the religious right as the Democrats are a pawn of the labor unions? Because looking at the Republican party platform, I don't see a lot of mainstream positions on issues like sex education, evolution, global warming or science in general. I see positions designed to let fundamentalists advance their agenda at the expense of overall society.
Where are the "mainstream" Republicans hiding when this kind of crap gets put into their platform?
That whole scene in Dover reminded me over the old Equal Rights Amendment back in the 70's and 80's. For you people who haven't lived that long, this was a US constitutional amendment intended to prohibit discrimination against women. Several state legislatures were convinced that the word "sex" referred to sexual practices rather than gender.