I saw a guy use a macro to control an electric drill to handle the changing torque while he controlled how fast the drill went. I think it would be a great choice for an artist.
The first thing that popped into my mind, wouldn't it be cool to have multiple attachments... remove hand at the wrist, attach drill unit. Or freakin lasers for that matter.
Why would anyone willingly spend money at Worst Buy when there other stores or online stores. The only time I shop there is when I absolutely have to have something immediately (not merely want it) and there is absolutely no other choice. Happened only once in the last six years.
A court order is required to LISTEN in to your phone calls.
But, under the Third Party Doctrine, an attorney for the government can just fill in the blanks on a subpoena template, print it out, and send it to AT&T under his/her inherent authority as an officer of the court, and find out every person you have called or called you, along with date, time, duration, probably GPS info etc.
The 4th Amendment protects stuff you personally have from being searched, but does nothing to prevent stuff other people have about you from being obtained without a warrant.
In Smith, Michael Smith had robbed Patricia McDonough and then phoned repeatedly to threaten her. The police secured a pen register at the phone company (third party) to trace the numbers of calls placed to McDonough. Smith appealed his conviction, asserting that the pen register had violated his Fourth Amendment rights. Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote that when Smith voluntarily "conveyed numerical information to the phone company and . . . its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information to the police."
As more and more information moves online, some have questioned whether this principle should continue to be applied. For example, in the Global Positioning System tracking case, U.S. v. Jones (2012), Justice Sonia Sotomayor's concurrence described the third-party records doctrine as "ill-suited to the digital age, in which people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks." The principle remains the same -- who entrusted their data to AT&T or Capital One in the 1970s are now entrusting their data to Google and Facebook. But the amount of data in the hands of third parties today is potentially much more revealing than in the 1970s. The question is whether that difference in quantity and quality has become a difference in kind.
And yeah -- I totally agree this totally sucks and is plain wrong. But it is important to not live under the false impression of privacy because being wrong can totally screw up your life. Basically, if someone else holds it in any form, you should figure the Government can get it easily.
It is bullshit... but....you might be quite stunned by the reach of the third party doctrine, i.e., you give up your rights to privacy when you entrust stuff to a third party.
At Linux Fest NW, the ACLU and EFF put on a presentation and one of the topics was the third party doctrine. The consensus was that the doctrine might not apply if you bought a server and collocated it. It would likely apply to virtual private servers, almost certainly to shared hosting accounts, and definitely for any service provided by an ISP (your email, or gmail, yahoo mail etc.).
Yeah -- it's bullshit for sure. But that's the state of the law.
Bullshit - my papers and effects are my papers and effects, regardless of where I keep them.
This should not be labeled informative because it is likely to get people into serious shit.
Under the third-party records doctrine, a person cannot assert a Fourth Amendment interest in information knowingly provided to a third party. If strict application of the doctrine ever served us well, it no longer does, leading to absurd results. This is particularly true in an age where so much more information is communicated through intermediaries.....
The doctrine holds that law enforcement does not need a warrant to search and seize information lawfully held by third parties, such as online file hosting services like Dropbox or online email providers like Gmail. Nojeim argues that the third-party records doctrine is outdated and an ill-suited legal standard for today's digital world. For example, people can use physical storage lockers rented out to them by a third party -- that is, a locker rental company -- and retain a warrant protection for their property stored in the lockers. However, if people use an online storage service provided by a third party, their warrant protection is lost.
It would be pretty hillarious to modify a full size Model M to be a bluetooth keyboard for something like a Nexus 7 or iPad mini. Good exercise lugging it around too.
I tool around town in my car getting decent mileage when I don't need to haul anything, and have no problem carry all manner of things -- from trash to the dump or heavy shrimp pots down to my boat -- when I need some extra utility. I totally love the trailer. I wouldn't give a crap if a tree fell on my car, but I'd be totally bummed if my trailer got hurt. It's the best thing I ever purchased, or at least in the top 5.
So maybe it's more like this:
Desktop: truck, always ready to do a big haul but wasting gas when you don't have the need.
Laptop: car and trailer -- reasonably efficient on an all around basis but can do some real work when the need arises.
Tablet: Smart Car-ish -- at the high end of the efficiency range but if you need to take more than a bag of groceries, or more than one passenger, you're SOL. It's really just for personal transportation.
Just about any android tablet can connect to a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. And I'm pretty sure iPads can connect to BT keyboards. I'm not really understanding what all the brouhaha is all about -- if people want to use a keyboard to do real work, it's no prob.
There are some tasks for which a tablet will work in a pinch and is handy, but isn't the sort of thing you'd want to be using all the time, especially for tasks that are remarkably more convenient with dual monitors and multiple desktops. But sometimes you can't tote those along, and then a tablet makes sense.
Tablets are great for consumption users -- about all they need especially if they connect a keyboard for their facebook postings -- and they make a nice backup platform for people who typically need more capabilities but aren't always in a place where that's feasible. But by the time you add in all the extra monitors, keyboards, mice etc.... it really isn't a tablet anymore.
Don't be silly, Gitmo isn't for criminals, it's for getting reward money equal to two or three times your yearly income plus you get to be rid of that annoying neighbor you've had a grudge against forever.
Being called a terrorist or avoiding that label all comes down to who and what you are.
Glenn Greenwald has been commenting on this issue for a while with respect to the disparate law enforcement treatment Muslims receive in general, and specifically most recently in the way the Boston bombers have been labeled terrorists before there is any real knowledge of motive.
Can acts of violence be deemed "terrorism" without knowing the motive?
This is far more than a semantic question. Whether something is or is not "terrorism" has very substantial political implications, and very significant legal consequences as well. The word "terrorism" is, at this point, one of the most potent in our political lexicon: it single-handedly ends debates, ratchets up fear levels, and justifies almost anything the government wants to do in its name. It's hard not to suspect that the only thing distinguishing the Boston attack from Tucson, Aurora, Sandy Hook and Columbine (to say nothing of the US "shock and awe" attack on Baghdad and the mass killings in Fallujah) is that the accused Boston attackers are Muslim and the other perpetrators are not. As usual, what terrorism really means in American discourse - its operational meaning - is: violence by Muslims against Americans and their allies. For the manipulative use of the word "terrorism", see the scholarship of NYU's Remi Brulin and the second-to-last section here.
When it comes to people doing grunt office work, there are two broad categories of worker.
In group 1, you have people who learned how to use MS Office ver X on Windows ver Y at a community college. They don't get how it all works, just know they click this or that. But, as soon as they end up in front of a different version of Windows or Office, they no longer know how it works and need someone to point to what they click in the new version. It's just as easy (or hard) for them to go to a new version of Office as to LibreOffice, because everything they do they do by rote.
In group 2, you have people who have a basic intuitive understanding of how software works, and can figure out how to do what they want without handholding. These people have the capability to adapt just fine.
So really, the joke is on you thinking Win 7 is the end of the need for training. Put your secretary on Win 8 and if she is a category 1 user, watch her head explode. Unless you are just going to use Win 7 for the next 20 years, training will happen, like it or not.
Except they aren't going to cut NSF funding to do something useful like repair bridges. They'll instead spend $436 million on tanks the Army doesn't want or some other BS.
The Windows 7 GUI feels more polished, especially in the area of app installation.
I used to work for a state government agency -- more than ten years ago. Anyway, I was given a computer to use, a login for various things, MS Office to type stuff on, and I was completely forbidden to install anything. I suspect for large entities, including governments, ease of application installation isn't really an issue because the users aren't going to be doing the installing.
Anyway, I left the state and opened up my own business. At first I made copious use of open source because every penny mattered, and then later just because it was familiar to me and worked fine. I can say that for basic word processing and spreadsheet work -- like what 99.999% of what anyone actually does, Open/Libre Office has been just fine over the years (daily frequent usage). In fact, I don't even know how to use most of what LibreOffice offers because in reality, it doesn't matter -- I'm not a book or magazine publisher. I just need to write letters, envelopes, and certain industry specific atypically formatted documents, but nothing a background image, center, bold and italic can't handle.
Recently I had to install windows (7, in a VM) for a special project and I had no choice about this. This is the first version of Windows I've had in a decade (I'm a Linux and OS X user), and you know what, at first it was fucking hard to use. Not because it's actually hard... but because it was unfamiliar. Except, after a few hours or so with it, it sort of clicked and it's as easy as anything else. Just like in my office -- the assistants all use OS X machines, and every new employee goes through a little reorientation with the computer if they aren't OS X familiar, but after a few days, nobody notices (except the total idiots, but it's a good test because it has been well proven to me, that if you can't translate the task from one icon to another, you probably belong in a job where you can listen to music all day and make coffee). Anyway, after a few days, they just use it and do their work without difficulty. I suspect that most people will be able to do the same thing, especially if the IT guy is the one doing all the installation and then telling them "to do that, just click on this icon right here..."
Indeed, many such things exist, though it looks like the difference is that in the ones on the first page of google shopping, you adjust the height by adjusting the leg length rather than raising or lowering the center column as in this patent. Adjusting the leg length would better handle uneven ground.
Has a picture. Looks like a sprinkler on a tripod and you can raise or lower the sprinkler head. Somehow I'm guessing this is not the first such sprinkler.
I once had a cheap feature phone with a physical keyboard -- it's way easier than you think it is. The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type. This leads to typos going unnoticed until after hitting send. Throw in some auto-corruption and touch screen typing is a real slow down. With a physical keyboard, you can type while looking at the screen which is faster and more accurate, because your sense of touch gives you information. A flat plate of smooth glass is not informative.
Still, with every manufacturer focusing on how thin they can make things, as if that is more important than the proportion of width to thickness, we'll never see top-end phones with a real keyboard. Instead, in a few years phones will be thin enough to lacerate your hands if you hold them. I wish someone would tell phone makers that holding a thin slab isn't ergonomic. Imagine if Apple made knives -- you'd not be able to tell which end to hold and would bleed all over everything you tried to chop. There's a reason knives come with a handle that isn't a flat thin slab of metal like a blade.
Maybe the mistake I make in thinking the public wants a police state, is reading the comments sections of various news articles. Even in my comparatively liberal part of the country (Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades), the comments section of my local paper is dominated by those who crave a police state. When I look at articles from other parts of the country, it is worse, all of which makes me feel bitter and fatalistic.
So anyway, maybe it is more true to say that there is a vocal group clambering for a police state, a much much smaller group opposed, and a vast swath of the public focused almost entirely on $randomPopStar. Given that dynamic, our politicians are sure to take any action that secures more power to the government and less to the people.
You are now safe from the threat we created for you.
But still not safe.
America will gladly take the tattered bits of the constitution and pulp them over what is realistically a tiny threat. But when lax zoning laws coupled with almost zero oversight (e.g. holding 1350x as much ammonium nitrate onsite and not reporting it or being inspected) lead to an industrial disaster (*) in which more people were injured and killed almost concurrently with Boston.... the owners might face some kind lawsuit, but you don't hear the public clambering for a police state nor do you hear politicians gladly acquiescing.
Or pick any random refinery explosion, which often kill workers and are often due to aged equipment not being replaced (**).
Now, I don't think industrial accidents should warrant pulping the constitution, but the response we take in such instances should at least be instructive -- there is the potential for criminal and civil charges all of which will take place in the context of a trial conducted under the normal rules of evidence and procedure pertinent to the type of proceeding.
But when many fewer people are hurt or injured by a bomb, we go on a self-destructive freeforall.
Slashdot Mirror
The first thing that popped into my mind, wouldn't it be cool to have multiple attachments ... remove hand at the wrist, attach drill unit. Or freakin lasers for that matter.
Why would anyone willingly spend money at Worst Buy when there other stores or online stores. The only time I shop there is when I absolutely have to have something immediately (not merely want it) and there is absolutely no other choice. Happened only once in the last six years.
For me it was opposite. At the end the clap lines preceded the song for five or six seconds.
A court order is required to LISTEN in to your phone calls.
But, under the Third Party Doctrine, an attorney for the government can just fill in the blanks on a subpoena template, print it out, and send it to AT&T under his/her inherent authority as an officer of the court, and find out every person you have called or called you, along with date, time, duration, probably GPS info etc.
The 4th Amendment protects stuff you personally have from being searched, but does nothing to prevent stuff other people have about you from being obtained without a warrant.
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third-party_records_doctrine_be_revisited/
And yeah -- I totally agree this totally sucks and is plain wrong. But it is important to not live under the false impression of privacy because being wrong can totally screw up your life. Basically, if someone else holds it in any form, you should figure the Government can get it easily.
That's exactly why any obvious thing done "on the internet" is patentable.
The internet is just sooooo different from what came before. /sarcasm
It is bullshit ... but ....you might be quite stunned by the reach of the third party doctrine, i.e., you give up your rights to privacy when you entrust stuff to a third party.
At Linux Fest NW, the ACLU and EFF put on a presentation and one of the topics was the third party doctrine. The consensus was that the doctrine might not apply if you bought a server and collocated it. It would likely apply to virtual private servers, almost certainly to shared hosting accounts, and definitely for any service provided by an ISP (your email, or gmail, yahoo mail etc.).
Yeah -- it's bullshit for sure. But that's the state of the law.
This should not be labeled informative because it is likely to get people into serious shit.
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/the_data_question_should_the_third-party_records_doctrine_be_revisited/
https://www.cdt.org/blogs/suchismita-pahi/0108whats-wrong-third-party-doctrine-and-einstein-30
It would be pretty hillarious to modify a full size Model M to be a bluetooth keyboard for something like a Nexus 7 or iPad mini. Good exercise lugging it around too.
Looks like it's been done: http://hackaday.com/2011/08/09/gods-own-keyboard-now-with-bluetooth/
I think this falls into a new category of trailer slashdot analogies. I have a car, and I have an awesome Thule trailer, now rebranded: http://www.redtrailers.com/ThuleEasyline.asp?mod=SJTP170
I tool around town in my car getting decent mileage when I don't need to haul anything, and have no problem carry all manner of things -- from trash to the dump or heavy shrimp pots down to my boat -- when I need some extra utility. I totally love the trailer. I wouldn't give a crap if a tree fell on my car, but I'd be totally bummed if my trailer got hurt. It's the best thing I ever purchased, or at least in the top 5.
So maybe it's more like this:
Desktop: truck, always ready to do a big haul but wasting gas when you don't have the need.
Laptop: car and trailer -- reasonably efficient on an all around basis but can do some real work when the need arises.
Tablet: Smart Car-ish -- at the high end of the efficiency range but if you need to take more than a bag of groceries, or more than one passenger, you're SOL. It's really just for personal transportation.
Just about any android tablet can connect to a bluetooth mouse and keyboard. And I'm pretty sure iPads can connect to BT keyboards. I'm not really understanding what all the brouhaha is all about -- if people want to use a keyboard to do real work, it's no prob.
There are some tasks for which a tablet will work in a pinch and is handy, but isn't the sort of thing you'd want to be using all the time, especially for tasks that are remarkably more convenient with dual monitors and multiple desktops. But sometimes you can't tote those along, and then a tablet makes sense.
Tablets are great for consumption users -- about all they need especially if they connect a keyboard for their facebook postings -- and they make a nice backup platform for people who typically need more capabilities but aren't always in a place where that's feasible. But by the time you add in all the extra monitors, keyboards, mice etc. ... it really isn't a tablet anymore.
Don't be silly, Gitmo isn't for criminals, it's for getting reward money equal to two or three times your yearly income plus you get to be rid of that annoying neighbor you've had a grudge against forever.
Glenn Greenwald has been commenting on this issue for a while with respect to the disparate law enforcement treatment Muslims receive in general, and specifically most recently in the way the Boston bombers have been labeled terrorists before there is any real knowledge of motive.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/apr/22/boston-marathon-terrorism-aurora-sandy-hook
Make the lens dark with translucent solar cells.
When it comes to people doing grunt office work, there are two broad categories of worker.
In group 1, you have people who learned how to use MS Office ver X on Windows ver Y at a community college. They don't get how it all works, just know they click this or that. But, as soon as they end up in front of a different version of Windows or Office, they no longer know how it works and need someone to point to what they click in the new version. It's just as easy (or hard) for them to go to a new version of Office as to LibreOffice, because everything they do they do by rote.
In group 2, you have people who have a basic intuitive understanding of how software works, and can figure out how to do what they want without handholding. These people have the capability to adapt just fine.
So really, the joke is on you thinking Win 7 is the end of the need for training. Put your secretary on Win 8 and if she is a category 1 user, watch her head explode. Unless you are just going to use Win 7 for the next 20 years, training will happen, like it or not.
Except they aren't going to cut NSF funding to do something useful like repair bridges. They'll instead spend $436 million on tanks the Army doesn't want or some other BS.
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04/29/1932931/army-tanks-spending/?mobile=nc
I used to work for a state government agency -- more than ten years ago. Anyway, I was given a computer to use, a login for various things, MS Office to type stuff on, and I was completely forbidden to install anything. I suspect for large entities, including governments, ease of application installation isn't really an issue because the users aren't going to be doing the installing.
Anyway, I left the state and opened up my own business. At first I made copious use of open source because every penny mattered, and then later just because it was familiar to me and worked fine. I can say that for basic word processing and spreadsheet work -- like what 99.999% of what anyone actually does, Open/Libre Office has been just fine over the years (daily frequent usage). In fact, I don't even know how to use most of what LibreOffice offers because in reality, it doesn't matter -- I'm not a book or magazine publisher. I just need to write letters, envelopes, and certain industry specific atypically formatted documents, but nothing a background image, center, bold and italic can't handle.
Recently I had to install windows (7, in a VM) for a special project and I had no choice about this. This is the first version of Windows I've had in a decade (I'm a Linux and OS X user), and you know what, at first it was fucking hard to use. Not because it's actually hard ... but because it was unfamiliar. Except, after a few hours or so with it, it sort of clicked and it's as easy as anything else. Just like in my office -- the assistants all use OS X machines, and every new employee goes through a little reorientation with the computer if they aren't OS X familiar, but after a few days, nobody notices (except the total idiots, but it's a good test because it has been well proven to me, that if you can't translate the task from one icon to another, you probably belong in a job where you can listen to music all day and make coffee). Anyway, after a few days, they just use it and do their work without difficulty. I suspect that most people will be able to do the same thing, especially if the IT guy is the one doing all the installation and then telling them "to do that, just click on this icon right here ..."
https://www.google.com/search?q=tripod+sprinkler#q=adjustable+tripod+sprinkler&source=univ&tbm=shop
Indeed, many such things exist, though it looks like the difference is that in the ones on the first page of google shopping, you adjust the height by adjusting the leg length rather than raising or lowering the center column as in this patent. Adjusting the leg length would better handle uneven ground.
As usual, the better article is not the one linked to in TFA, but in a deeper link:
http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2013/04/dont-write-this-letter-to-the-patent-office.html
Has a picture. Looks like a sprinkler on a tripod and you can raise or lower the sprinkler head. Somehow I'm guessing this is not the first such sprinkler.
I once had a cheap feature phone with a physical keyboard -- it's way easier than you think it is. The issue with touch screens is that you need to look at the keyboard while you type. This leads to typos going unnoticed until after hitting send. Throw in some auto-corruption and touch screen typing is a real slow down. With a physical keyboard, you can type while looking at the screen which is faster and more accurate, because your sense of touch gives you information. A flat plate of smooth glass is not informative.
Still, with every manufacturer focusing on how thin they can make things, as if that is more important than the proportion of width to thickness, we'll never see top-end phones with a real keyboard. Instead, in a few years phones will be thin enough to lacerate your hands if you hold them. I wish someone would tell phone makers that holding a thin slab isn't ergonomic. Imagine if Apple made knives -- you'd not be able to tell which end to hold and would bleed all over everything you tried to chop. There's a reason knives come with a handle that isn't a flat thin slab of metal like a blade.
Actually, that sounds fascinating. It's an old thread now, who cares about the length?
Maybe the mistake I make in thinking the public wants a police state, is reading the comments sections of various news articles. Even in my comparatively liberal part of the country (Pacific Northwest, west of the Cascades), the comments section of my local paper is dominated by those who crave a police state. When I look at articles from other parts of the country, it is worse, all of which makes me feel bitter and fatalistic.
So anyway, maybe it is more true to say that there is a vocal group clambering for a police state, a much much smaller group opposed, and a vast swath of the public focused almost entirely on $randomPopStar. Given that dynamic, our politicians are sure to take any action that secures more power to the government and less to the people.
But still not safe.
America will gladly take the tattered bits of the constitution and pulp them over what is realistically a tiny threat. But when lax zoning laws coupled with almost zero oversight (e.g. holding 1350x as much ammonium nitrate onsite and not reporting it or being inspected) lead to an industrial disaster (*) in which more people were injured and killed almost concurrently with Boston .... the owners might face some kind lawsuit, but you don't hear the public clambering for a police state nor do you hear politicians gladly acquiescing.
Or pick any random refinery explosion, which often kill workers and are often due to aged equipment not being replaced (**).
Now, I don't think industrial accidents should warrant pulping the constitution, but the response we take in such instances should at least be instructive -- there is the potential for criminal and civil charges all of which will take place in the context of a trial conducted under the normal rules of evidence and procedure pertinent to the type of proceeding.
But when many fewer people are hurt or injured by a bomb, we go on a self-destructive freeforall.
(*) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/25/us/texas-fertilizer-plant-fell-through-cracks-of-regulatory-oversight.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
(**) http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=9717
and a movie, w/ cool tools starting about halfway through:
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/multimedia/videos/Playing-the-Unplayable-Records.html
And maybe some swearing recorded too in a failed attempt, but I'll need to listen another 10 dozen times to figure it out.
Well, I guess we agree. though it sounds like you are disagreeing.
Well, there's always voice over WiFi, something that allows my TMobile phone to work even in places nobody covers.