Doing a little burn-and-dodge to fix the contrast in an image is one thing. Moving buildings around and doubling the thickness of smoke is another. Taking two photos in one session and claiming they were taken weeks apart is a third.
You are talking about the first. This is editorial work and damages the truth only to the extent that editing the stutters and stammers out of a spoken statement.
We are seeing examples of the second and third, which are like falsifying sources and, well, lying.
Have you verified that it's actually a Mosquito Device? Because if she has an older television, say from the mid 1980s, her flyback transformer could have started to let go. Some of those televisions had an "instant-on" mode that basically kept the flyback running forever and just deactivated the tuner and the gun. I can remember sleeping on the couch at my aunt and uncle's house and I had to unplug the TV because of a noise they claimed didn't exist. I could hear it everywhere in the house.
If you want evidence, get a microphone and hook it to your laptop. Invite a cop or at least a witness over, show them how the pretty histogram bounces up and down as you talk, then point the microphone at Crazy Lady's house and show him the huge spike at 18 kHz. Make sure Crazy Lady isn't wise to your evidence collecting.
If she really is crazy, maybe she's crazy enough to accidently burn her own house down and try to blame the neighbor kids who braved the flames to rescue her, packed her suitcase with three changes of clothing, her Bible and all of her pills, then drove her down to the bus station and made sure she got on the bus with $100 and a ticket to a random city on the opposite side of the country. Know what I mean?
I'm 37 and it annoyed the piss out of me. I invited my 34 year old wife to listen.
"Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"That really high-pitched tone!"
"I don't hear anything!"
"That tone!"
"Have you been reading Slashdot again?"
Then again, she's a teacher, so she's not supposed to hear it.
Dammit. My speakers were still set to drunk-guy-listening-to-Ministry volume levels. Ten seconds of high-amplitude mosquito noise and my ears still hurt.
Telling a cop that what they pulled you over for is not a crime and that they are wrong, is exactly the wrong way to approach most cops.
I absolutely agree. Truth is, though, this is the case with nearly everybody.
The last time I got pulled over I disagreed with the officer, politely, calling him "sir" -- as he did me -- and never once admitted guilt or conceded that what he belived he saw was an infraction. He wrote me a ticket, decided I needed a lecture, and sent me on my way. The solicitor's office, after a year, decided not to persue the case. He did his job, citing me for what he perceived as dangerous driving, and I did mine, maintaining my innocence all the way down the line.
Getting attention from the police is stressful and an officer must be fully prepared for someone to react inappropriately.
As (yet another) firsthand anecdote, I had to call the police to my house twice this evening. The first time, I had come home from work and a campaign sign was missing from my yard ('cause guess which looney's district I live in?) So I called the police and asked them to please come by only if they had nothing better to do. When an officer showed up, he told me that where I had the sign was on city right-of-way, and that it probably got removed by Code Enforcement. Oh well. I thanked him for his time and we got on with our respective evenings.
An hour later I heard two quick gunshots from the apartments next door. The apartments are on the side of the house my son's crib is on. After I moved my son to another room, I called 911 and the same officer was back in an absolute flash. He asked me some brisk questions, sent me back inside and left in another flash.
No resolution yet. But no further gunshots, either.
For all the disagreements I've had with the police over my driving habits and certain other, oh, let's call them hobbies, I have to respect that they're doing a job that I can't comprehend, and that they never know if one of their "customers" is quite literally going to kill them because they have two priors and a gram of coke.
Feh. It's been a long day and I've run out of things to say. Not all cops are bad. I guess I live in a different part of the country, because for all the cops I saw holding my license up to the dome light so they could see how many staple holes there were through it, I can think of plenty more who are single moms trying to make the world safe for their boy, or who've just seen one too many pickup trucks careening down their own street.
How many cops do you know that don't regularly break the law? No really, I want a number.
Zero. They all break the speed limit and occasionally run red lights or make illegal turns. Several carry coshes, and more than one uses hand-loaded ammunition in his service pistol.
Then again, I live in Atlanta, and nobody drives the speed limit. So I don't know a single person who doesn't regularly break the law.
As for real big laws, well, here in DeKalb county, Georgia, when the Sheriff lost the election a few years ago, he had the winner killed. But seeing as he was an elected official, I see the case as being more about corrupt politicians than bad cops.
[M]ost of them have some serious issues with control which is one of the reasons they become cops. Second, many are very juvenile in their view of right and wrong (based on action movies)
This is shockingly naive and inaccurate, and it would appear that you are the one getting your views from movies. The fact is, most police choose their profession out of a desire to protect the public and preserve the peace by standing up to criminals on our behalf. Their view of right and wrong is that breaking the law is wrong and intervening is right. They get yelled at, punched, stabbed, spat on, verbally and physically assaulted. When somebody is swinging a tire iron, they don't get to run away. They get attacked by women whose boyfriends are getting arrested for beating them. They get puked on by drunks. Shot at during routine traffic stops. They've seen what a child looks like after it's been beaten to death.
The ones with "serious issues with control" generally don't make it past the screening process and generally don't last on the job. Don't confuse issues with control with a need to control a situation. They need to control situations because the situations they deal with, when they get out of control, wind up with somebody badly hurt or killed. And guess what? It just might be them.
Is there such a thing as an asshole cop? Absolutely. There are also asshole grocery clerks, asshole pharmacists, asshole assembly line workers. But nearly all of them will respond to courtesy and respect with courtesy and respect, and treat you the way you deserve to be treated.
Now, on to the GP post: Stand up for yourself if some officer of the "Law" is harassing you. Do it in a respectful manner and respectfully tell them that they cannot legally arrest you for whatever it is they are trying to arrest you for illegally.
If an officer is "harassing" you, say you're doing nothing unlawful, ask them what you're doing that's unlawful. Keep your hands in plain sight, control your temper, do not raise your voice, and maintain your innocence. But if you're placed under arrest, do not perform any act or make any statement which can be construed as resisting arrest. You can disagree to your heart's content as to the grounds for arrest, sure, but resisting arrest is itself a crime that significantly weakens your defense for the crime for which you were arrested.
Actually, in the 1980s, Georgia was 19. South Carolina had a split drinking age: 18 for beer and wine, 21 for liquor. Which makes sense because, as we all know, you can't get completely shitfaced drunk on beer.
All this went straight to hell in 1986 or so.
My best friend back in high school had a 25-year-old doppelganger somewhere in town, who evidently was a very party guy. Nothing like being 17 years old, walking into the liquor store and having the guy behind the counter waive the deposit on a keg because you're such a good customer.
Excellent point! We should also do all our classes via e-meetings because if you put all those people in a room together one of them might have a knife or a gun and start attacking all his classmates, and the attacker will get away with it because we're talking about someone new to hand-to-hand combat.
Obsessing over the worst possible outcome is usually a waste of time. We're talking about a system where only students have accounts. And it's a beginning programming course, for crying out loud. In Java, no less.
A lesson on security is beyond the scope of this post, but if you're feeling paranoid, you may wish to examine options like mounting the users' FS noexec (I don't think.class files don't need the execute flag). Undoubtedly the school has a policy about unauthorized computer use: Make it clear that system crackers will fail the class, get expelled, yadda yadda yadda.
But on the whole such measures are not necessary: Students generally recognize that it's not in their best interest to interfere with the progress of the course and their education. Not once in my computer science studies was a class's server compromised by a student. Telling students they're being entrusted with a responsibility has a remarkable positive effect.
Are you doing graphical programming? If so, skip this.
If your students are all writing CGI-style programs, maybe reading and writing a file or two, why not set up a Linux or FreeBSD box for them? Open ftp and ssh for them and require them to build their programs there. Your requirements for each class will be that they compile and run their programs on your server, do a run under script(1), then hand in all source, output, data and log files via a script you wrote called handin assignment [file...], which copies [file...] into your directory $assignment/$studentid/[file...]. Since handin is suid, write it carefuly: It should contain no mkdir or similar commands.
This will be good for everyone. They will pick up the rudiments of Unix and using remote computers. You will pick up the rudiments of Unix administration, and all your class stuff will be in one convenient directory tree per assignment.
Just for fun, you could write yourself a little program called comment that lets you mark up their source code -- their stuff will be in mono and your comments in mono italics. Print 'em up and give them back at the beginning of class.
Make sure the students have access to a good variety of editors, including a couple of dumbed-down ones like pico.
The downside is that you'll spend a day or two going over the rudiments of Unix, and have to do some early handholding for them, but it will pay off in the end.
I wonder if the publishers can offer customers the chance to customize their books. Get a custom imprint on the first page, order special high-gloss paper, oversize coffee table prints, pocket-sized travel editions, leather binding, gilt edges. That way you could get a sturdy copy for yourself, a run of paperbacks for the class you teach, and a special leather-bound set for Christmas presents, each with a special inscription, and a special hand-cut vellum edition for your grandparents' fiftieth anniversary.
Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open -- you had to swing a latch, align two bits of handle, that sort of thing. But it turns out it's actually quite tricky to get the design of these cans just right. Make it too complex and people can't get them open to put away their garbage in the first place. Said one park ranger, "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists."
I've forgotten why I mentioned this, but it had to do with the considerable overlap between our individual opinions of an "average user."
It's open-source methodologies they're switching to, entirely within the DoD itself. It will probably be a matter setting up sourceforge.dod.gov and adding a Wiki.
The all-diesel thing is a hardware problem, and military hardware isn't cheap.
Keels (and centerboards and such) are meant to reduce two factors: heeling (the ship being leaned over excessively by the wind) and slewing (the ship being shoved sideways instead of forward). If, as the picture in the article suggests, the parasail is attached to the bow and is only used when the wind is largely behind the boat, heel and slew become nonissues in any boat. In fact, many sailors pull up their centerboards when they are on a run or close reach, to reduce drag.
Heeling with a parasail is a nonissue. Tall masts provide sails with tremendous leverage, but parasails exert their force at deck level.
As for slew, I suspect that a supertanker's thousand foot length, two hundred foot beam, and seventy foot draft combine to resist slew very effectively. Supertankers also have 100 khp engines and hefty rudders they can use to compensate for slew very effectively. If the wind is too far off the beam, it's time to haul in the parasail and fire up the engines anyway.
One of the problems with fonetik speling is that letters like "e" have multiple pronunciations. We have 26 letters and more than 26 sounds.
George Bernard Shaw was so pissed off about the English language's anarchic spelling methods that he left money in his will for the design and promotion of phonetic alphabet that leaves the old Roman characters behind. The Shaw alphabet features logical grouping of letters, uses similar shapes for similar phonemes, stuff like that.
A phonetic alphabet -- even if we did it with conventional Roman characters, maybe augmented by digraphs or accents for certain multi-sound letters -- would be a good thing. Look at Korea, which has an astonishingly high literacy rate. The Korean alphabet was designed, and is 100% phonetic. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Korea, and if you can speak Korean, you can learn to read Korean in about two weeks. And dyslexia is almost unheard of.
The problem with phonetic alphabets is phonetic drift. Accents change over time. The Shavian alphabet, for example, would present problems in the U.S. because while it is phonetic, it is phonetic for Received English, which is used in the U.K. but not here. For example, Americans drive a car that has a final "r", but Received English doesn't pronounce that "r" at all. Likewise the butter an American puts on his toast sounds more like "budder." So a phonetic alphabet fails when you cross a dialect line, and a hundred years from now when pronunciations have drifted even more, we're once again stuck with a set of words that are spelled nothing like they're said.
I'm trying to figure out the balance here: All spammers ever offer me is porn and penis enlargement pills. What I want to know is, if all I'm doing is jacking off to porn, why the hell does it matter how big it is?
I had a telemarketer call me on 9/11, about four hours after the towers fell, and tell me that 5% of the proceeds would go to charity if I bought whatever the hell it was they were selling. I could tell she hated her job that day, but I just didn't have it in me to lay into her, just asked to be taken off the call list and hung up. Before then I was merely annoyed by telemarketers. Suddenly, I was disgusted.
I'm pretty sure 9/11 telemarketing was a big part part of how the No Call List came into being.
Good to know. Still, there would be some merit in creating a class for those who sustain a level of selling, rather than those who have big ticket bursts. Not to disparage your vehicle sale (and it must be tough to part with such a fun car), but that's somewhat different that averaging $10k/month by having a hundred items for sale at a time.
Just because you got away with it doesn't put you in the right. You gotta check your six on hills like that. Yes he was being an idiot and probably thought he was sending you a message by stopping that close. But you need to learn a couple of tricks:
After you come to an uphill stop, roll back an inchr or two then slap your brakes hard enough to make your vehicle twicth. This is a great way to tell following driver you're driving a manual.
Learn how to do proper hill starts. Either how to preload the clutch, how heel-and-toe the brake and gas pedals, or how to use the parking brake as a virtual foot.
If bimmerdork a more talented bullshitter, he could have told the cop he had stopped where he could see your rear wheels, but you just kept drifting backwards, ignoring his horn and desperate gestures, and he was blocked in by the car full of teenagers behind him.
After all, they've been sharing theirs with me for months now---thanks to AirSnort and them thinking a good password is their dog's name follwed by a "1".
Slashdot Mirror
You are talking about the first. This is editorial work and damages the truth only to the extent that editing the stutters and stammers out of a spoken statement.
We are seeing examples of the second and third, which are like falsifying sources and, well, lying.
If you want evidence, get a microphone and hook it to your laptop. Invite a cop or at least a witness over, show them how the pretty histogram bounces up and down as you talk, then point the microphone at Crazy Lady's house and show him the huge spike at 18 kHz. Make sure Crazy Lady isn't wise to your evidence collecting.
If she really is crazy, maybe she's crazy enough to accidently burn her own house down and try to blame the neighbor kids who braved the flames to rescue her, packed her suitcase with three changes of clothing, her Bible and all of her pills, then drove her down to the bus station and made sure she got on the bus with $100 and a ticket to a random city on the opposite side of the country. Know what I mean?
"Do you hear that?"
"Hear what?"
"That really high-pitched tone!"
"I don't hear anything!"
"That tone!"
"Have you been reading Slashdot again?"
Then again, she's a teacher, so she's not supposed to hear it.
Dammit. My speakers were still set to drunk-guy-listening-to-Ministry volume levels. Ten seconds of high-amplitude mosquito noise and my ears still hurt.
Because everybody can hear it when a phone on vibrate goes off. Especially if you leave it on your desk.
(I'm so nervous seeing that on my screen I'm afraid to hit the "Submit" button)
The problem is that there's no date for 5/8/5.99996546
I absolutely agree. Truth is, though, this is the case with nearly everybody.
The last time I got pulled over I disagreed with the officer, politely, calling him "sir" -- as he did me -- and never once admitted guilt or conceded that what he belived he saw was an infraction. He wrote me a ticket, decided I needed a lecture, and sent me on my way. The solicitor's office, after a year, decided not to persue the case. He did his job, citing me for what he perceived as dangerous driving, and I did mine, maintaining my innocence all the way down the line.
Getting attention from the police is stressful and an officer must be fully prepared for someone to react inappropriately.
As (yet another) firsthand anecdote, I had to call the police to my house twice this evening. The first time, I had come home from work and a campaign sign was missing from my yard ('cause guess which looney's district I live in?) So I called the police and asked them to please come by only if they had nothing better to do. When an officer showed up, he told me that where I had the sign was on city right-of-way, and that it probably got removed by Code Enforcement. Oh well. I thanked him for his time and we got on with our respective evenings.
An hour later I heard two quick gunshots from the apartments next door. The apartments are on the side of the house my son's crib is on. After I moved my son to another room, I called 911 and the same officer was back in an absolute flash. He asked me some brisk questions, sent me back inside and left in another flash.
No resolution yet. But no further gunshots, either.
For all the disagreements I've had with the police over my driving habits and certain other, oh, let's call them hobbies, I have to respect that they're doing a job that I can't comprehend, and that they never know if one of their "customers" is quite literally going to kill them because they have two priors and a gram of coke.
Feh. It's been a long day and I've run out of things to say. Not all cops are bad. I guess I live in a different part of the country, because for all the cops I saw holding my license up to the dome light so they could see how many staple holes there were through it, I can think of plenty more who are single moms trying to make the world safe for their boy, or who've just seen one too many pickup trucks careening down their own street.
Zero. They all break the speed limit and occasionally run red lights or make illegal turns. Several carry coshes, and more than one uses hand-loaded ammunition in his service pistol.
Then again, I live in Atlanta, and nobody drives the speed limit. So I don't know a single person who doesn't regularly break the law.
As for real big laws, well, here in DeKalb county, Georgia, when the Sheriff lost the election a few years ago, he had the winner killed. But seeing as he was an elected official, I see the case as being more about corrupt politicians than bad cops.
This is shockingly naive and inaccurate, and it would appear that you are the one getting your views from movies. The fact is, most police choose their profession out of a desire to protect the public and preserve the peace by standing up to criminals on our behalf. Their view of right and wrong is that breaking the law is wrong and intervening is right. They get yelled at, punched, stabbed, spat on, verbally and physically assaulted. When somebody is swinging a tire iron, they don't get to run away. They get attacked by women whose boyfriends are getting arrested for beating them. They get puked on by drunks. Shot at during routine traffic stops. They've seen what a child looks like after it's been beaten to death.
The ones with "serious issues with control" generally don't make it past the screening process and generally don't last on the job. Don't confuse issues with control with a need to control a situation. They need to control situations because the situations they deal with, when they get out of control, wind up with somebody badly hurt or killed. And guess what? It just might be them.
Is there such a thing as an asshole cop? Absolutely. There are also asshole grocery clerks, asshole pharmacists, asshole assembly line workers. But nearly all of them will respond to courtesy and respect with courtesy and respect, and treat you the way you deserve to be treated.
Now, on to the GP post: Stand up for yourself if some officer of the "Law" is harassing you. Do it in a respectful manner and respectfully tell them that they cannot legally arrest you for whatever it is they are trying to arrest you for illegally.
If an officer is "harassing" you, say you're doing nothing unlawful, ask them what you're doing that's unlawful. Keep your hands in plain sight, control your temper, do not raise your voice, and maintain your innocence. But if you're placed under arrest, do not perform any act or make any statement which can be construed as resisting arrest. You can disagree to your heart's content as to the grounds for arrest, sure, but resisting arrest is itself a crime that significantly weakens your defense for the crime for which you were arrested.
All this went straight to hell in 1986 or so.
My best friend back in high school had a 25-year-old doppelganger somewhere in town, who evidently was a very party guy. Nothing like being 17 years old, walking into the liquor store and having the guy behind the counter waive the deposit on a keg because you're such a good customer.
That's cherries.
I would, too. Unfortunately, in many U.S. districts, while the polls are open, the bars are closed.
Obsessing over the worst possible outcome is usually a waste of time. We're talking about a system where only students have accounts. And it's a beginning programming course, for crying out loud. In Java, no less.
A lesson on security is beyond the scope of this post, but if you're feeling paranoid, you may wish to examine options like mounting the users' FS noexec (I don't think .class files don't need the execute flag). Undoubtedly the school has a policy about unauthorized computer use: Make it clear that system crackers will fail the class, get expelled, yadda yadda yadda.
But on the whole such measures are not necessary: Students generally recognize that it's not in their best interest to interfere with the progress of the course and their education. Not once in my computer science studies was a class's server compromised by a student. Telling students they're being entrusted with a responsibility has a remarkable positive effect.
If your students are all writing CGI-style programs, maybe reading and writing a file or two, why not set up a Linux or FreeBSD box for them? Open ftp and ssh for them and require them to build their programs there. Your requirements for each class will be that they compile and run their programs on your server, do a run under script(1), then hand in all source, output, data and log files via a script you wrote called handin assignment [file...], which copies [file...] into your directory $assignment/$studentid/[file...]. Since handin is suid, write it carefuly: It should contain no mkdir or similar commands.
This will be good for everyone. They will pick up the rudiments of Unix and using remote computers. You will pick up the rudiments of Unix administration, and all your class stuff will be in one convenient directory tree per assignment.
Just for fun, you could write yourself a little program called comment that lets you mark up their source code -- their stuff will be in mono and your comments in mono italics . Print 'em up and give them back at the beginning of class.
Make sure the students have access to a good variety of editors, including a couple of dumbed-down ones like pico.
The downside is that you'll spend a day or two going over the rudiments of Unix, and have to do some early handholding for them, but it will pay off in the end.
I wonder if the publishers can offer customers the chance to customize their books. Get a custom imprint on the first page, order special high-gloss paper, oversize coffee table prints, pocket-sized travel editions, leather binding, gilt edges. That way you could get a sturdy copy for yourself, a run of paperbacks for the class you teach, and a special leather-bound set for Christmas presents, each with a special inscription, and a special hand-cut vellum edition for your grandparents' fiftieth anniversary.
I've forgotten why I mentioned this, but it had to do with the considerable overlap between our individual opinions of an "average user."
The all-diesel thing is a hardware problem, and military hardware isn't cheap.
Heeling with a parasail is a nonissue. Tall masts provide sails with tremendous leverage, but parasails exert their force at deck level.
As for slew, I suspect that a supertanker's thousand foot length, two hundred foot beam, and seventy foot draft combine to resist slew very effectively. Supertankers also have 100 khp engines and hefty rudders they can use to compensate for slew very effectively. If the wind is too far off the beam, it's time to haul in the parasail and fire up the engines anyway.
George Bernard Shaw was so pissed off about the English language's anarchic spelling methods that he left money in his will for the design and promotion of phonetic alphabet that leaves the old Roman characters behind. The Shaw alphabet features logical grouping of letters, uses similar shapes for similar phonemes, stuff like that.
A phonetic alphabet -- even if we did it with conventional Roman characters, maybe augmented by digraphs or accents for certain multi-sound letters -- would be a good thing. Look at Korea, which has an astonishingly high literacy rate. The Korean alphabet was designed, and is 100% phonetic. There is no such thing as a spelling bee in Korea, and if you can speak Korean, you can learn to read Korean in about two weeks. And dyslexia is almost unheard of.
The problem with phonetic alphabets is phonetic drift. Accents change over time. The Shavian alphabet, for example, would present problems in the U.S. because while it is phonetic, it is phonetic for Received English, which is used in the U.K. but not here. For example, Americans drive a car that has a final "r", but Received English doesn't pronounce that "r" at all. Likewise the butter an American puts on his toast sounds more like "budder." So a phonetic alphabet fails when you cross a dialect line, and a hundred years from now when pronunciations have drifted even more, we're once again stuck with a set of words that are spelled nothing like they're said.
I'm trying to figure out the balance here: All spammers ever offer me is porn and penis enlargement pills. What I want to know is, if all I'm doing is jacking off to porn, why the hell does it matter how big it is?
I'm pretty sure 9/11 telemarketing was a big part part of how the No Call List came into being.
Good to know. Still, there would be some merit in creating a class for those who sustain a level of selling, rather than those who have big ticket bursts. Not to disparage your vehicle sale (and it must be tough to part with such a fun car), but that's somewhat different that averaging $10k/month by having a hundred items for sale at a time.
So if I go a month at $3000, then two months at $0, I can be a PowerSeller(TM)? After all, I've averaged at $1000 in monthly sales over three months.
Perhaps you meant a PowerSeller(TM) must have a minimum of $1000 per month for three consecutive months.
I would be ever so happy if editors and submitters understood the math they were taught in the sixth fucking grade.
- After you come to an uphill stop, roll back an inchr or two then slap your brakes hard enough to make your vehicle twicth. This is a great way to tell following driver you're driving a manual.
- Learn how to do proper hill starts. Either how to preload the clutch, how heel-and-toe the brake and gas pedals, or how to use the parking brake as a virtual foot.
If bimmerdork a more talented bullshitter, he could have told the cop he had stopped where he could see your rear wheels, but you just kept drifting backwards, ignoring his horn and desperate gestures, and he was blocked in by the car full of teenagers behind him.I may as well.
After all, they've been sharing theirs with me for months now---thanks to AirSnort and them thinking a good password is their dog's name follwed by a "1".