How is this unrealistic? Space fleets of the future outfit their crews with situational aural feedback implants....
Not to spoil the joke. But why not use false-colors or sounds to bring out significant details, enhance situational awareness, in an environment that can't be easily perceived or understood directly?
First admit that us geeks here on/. and other places aren't exacly legion compared to the hordes of mass consumer electronics buyers but we ain't exactly zero either.
This is the injustice in the way Microsoft bullies OEMs into not selling naked PCs.
There is no bullying required.
The OEM system install puts the Windows PC on a billion desktops. PCs sold to customers as a ready-to-run home appliance or office machine. Not a kit of parts.
WalMart sells a $2000 Vista Ultimate HP Pavilion laptop with HD-DVD Drive. DX 10 NVIDIA 8600 video. Integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, webcam, HDTV tuner, fingerprint reader...
You plug this beast in and you are good to go.
You don't have to install the OS. You don't have to de-bug a failed install You don't have think about hardware compatibility. You have a functional set of drivers, set to intelligent defaults.
You have a warranty, a service contract, if anything goes wrong.
A great strategy would be to get linux in the elementary and middle schools, get 'em young.... keep 'em for life.
The perfect strategy...for 1995. No later. I remember watching my niece playing with Windows 95 at age four. XP hit the market in 2001. "Get 'em young?" Microsoft has been a force in the PC market for thirty years.
> But just like geodesic domes that preceded monolithic domes - there are unforeseen issues
Thomas Edison saw the cast concrete home as working-class housing:
These 25x30 foot two story homes had 500 structural pieces and weighed about 250,000 pounds.
The ultimate test of the Edison process would be in mass production. After careful planning, the first large-scale development began, with forty houses planned to be built off Route 22 in Union, New Jersey, during July and August of 1917.
The street was named Ingersoll Terrace. Basements for the first eleven houses were dug with a steam shovel, and all the equipment and materials were put in place. The first few houses went up very slowly, as laborers struggled to learn the system and become familiar with the molds. Eventually the crew began to move with increasing speed and expertise. By the time the mold was broken on the eleventh house, the process was almost as systematized as Edison had predicted.
In the end the technical side of the monolithic concrete house was another Edison success story. But neither Edison nor Ingersoll had predicted the marketing nightmare they would encounter. Ingersoll decided, as a test, to put the first houses up for sale at the agreed price of $1,200 before building the next block. To everyone's surprise, despite the extremely low price, not a single house was sold in the first month. Ingersoll abandoned the project, and no more Edison concrete houses were ever built.
Some historians and Edison biographers blame the publicity and Edison's grandiose predictions for the demise of his most altruistic endeavor. No one wanted to live in a house that had been described as "the salvation of the slum dweller." People were too proud to be stigmatized as having been "rescued from squalor and poverty."
But there may have been a more important reason for the Edison monoliths' failure to catch on. The architect Ernest Flagg noted that "Mr. Edison was not an architect-- it was not cheapness that wanted so much as relief from ugliness, and Mr. Edison's early models entirely did not achieve that relief." From looking at them, it is hard to disagree.
Ten of the original eleven houses remain standing on Ingersoll Terrace, so the technology of the process has certainly shown itself to be durable. The original owners are long gone, but newer residents have generally positive opinions of the little houses. According to Mrs. Joseph Fila, who occupied an Edison house for half a century, "The twenty-four inch walls keep out the summer heat and provide good winter insulation." Joe Kearny says that the maintenance cost of his concrete house is "zero." Dolores Chumsky is less enthusiastic; her house is plagued by an elusive leak that defies detection. She adds that any prospects for renovation or improvements are doomed. "Just try and get someone to come and make repairs," she says. "They may come in once, but they never come back." Edison's Concrete Homes
> A monolithic dome is at the very top of what I'd like to build to live in.
The whole point of a community resource like Wikipedia is to allow for multiple points of view, and by implication, multiple biases. As long as that's transparent and understood, it IS a bonus.
That suggests to me that the Wikipedia can only indexed alphabetically - no matter how unwieldy that becomes.
The Britannica broke from a purely alphabetical listing in 1974 precisely for this reason. Threads became too difficult to follow. Significant content was buried under a mass of trivia. There are practical limits to what you can accomplish even through hypertext links.
I have no great faith in the idea that you can publish with editing. That a "community resource" like the Wikipedia can evade the kind of decisions an editor has to make. For example: Is "Creation Science" - "Science?"
in many ways the wikipedia vs britannica debate is a lot like open vs closed source. One you know what changes are being made and can decipher intent, the other is anyone's guess. Wikipedia may have its shortcomings-- but at least we can see them.
The essays in the Britannica have been signed for [at least] the better part of 100 years and indexed with a quick sketch of the writer's affiliations and credentials.
T.E. Lawrence on Guerrilla Warfare, Albert Einstein on Relativity.
Some will have been ghostwritten of course - Alfred E. Sloan on General Motors, J. Edgar Hoover on the F.B.I.
But such an attribution is still useful. Rather more useful, much more useful, to the general reader, I would think, than the IP address of an anonymous edit to the Wikipedia.
I live in Germany and we still got democracy here, but who guaranties me that this will be like that forever? China's use of total surveillance should be a warning to us all, what can happen too us, too.
China has a tradition of centralized, bureaucratic, government that goes back to the Ch'In Empire ca. 200 BC. The right way to approach this question is to look at your own history and culture.
Aren't there Web sites that carry these things for downloads and use?
MS Office Home provides one-stop shopping for MS Office tutorials, templates, click art, etc.
It's a handsome site, easy to use, light-years removed from OpenOffice.org. And, yes it matters. Most of us don't have the time to re-invent the wheel. To spend endless hours searching for free, professionally designed, co-ordinated, themed and cataloged clip art.
ever thought that *maybe* Sun approached Google and will use that as a way to get people to atleast *try* StarOffice 8 -
Star Office 8 at Amazon.com:
#1 in Linux sales.
#28 in Windows Office Suites.
Where it is sandwiched between Upgrade MS Office Pro at $270 and Word Perfect 11 at $30.
I'll wager you didn't know there were 28 runners in the Windows Office Suite-stakes.
#1 in Windows Office Suites and #1 in Amazon software sales is MS Office Home and Student 2007 at $110 with a three-seat license. Retail boxed. No academic ID required.
Pre-orders for Apple's iWork 8 for the Mac put it at #8 in Amazon software sales. MS Student Teacher Office 2004 for the Mac is #2.
MS Office holds 17 of the top 25 positions in Windows Office Suites.
OpenOffice.org 2.2 is #20 in Windows Office Suites at 49 cents on CD new and used.
The last time I looked, which was about a week back, Star Office 8 ranked around #650 in Amazon software sales. MS Works 8 around #50.
Its all about getting the Sun name and brand out there, making the name known by non-technical people; making it more accessible rather than it being viewed as the domain of the purely UNIX geeks.
I'll wish Sun the best of luck. But I don't think it is going to happen.
The government owned the copper it put in place until the, then, "American Bell Telephone Company" built enough exchanges to receive through government grants the existing copper because uncle sam didn't want to pay for upkeep not to mention it needed private phone system and couldn't do it due to patents
I don't recall "the government" building or owning any of the POTS infrastructure except for a handful of city-owned utilities.
Western Union was offering transcontinental telegraph service in 1861. Before construction of the transcontinental railroad. Western Union was offered the infant AT&T on a plate and didn't think it was worth buying. Western Union, playing catch-up, lost it's legal challenge to Bell's patents. Western Union did not license its lines to the Bell system.
The western land grant railroads were all more or less in place before 1876. The first long-distance call between New York and Chicago was made in 1892, a decade before the invention of the vacuum tube.
The old AT&T benefited from its status as a "natural monopoly." But throughout its history, it was privately financed.
In most of America, only two companies are allowed to run wires into your home.
What you see when you look at photographs of an American city circa 1900 is a rat's nest of wires strung everywhere. The infrastructure below ground will be a half-century older, almost as chaotic and only a little less fragile.
I don't want a dozen companies competing for the right to run a trencher across my front lawn. I don't want the complexity and expense of dealing with multiple service providers. I suspect there are many others who feel the same way.
You can't watch live video of any quality; you can't use any sort of interactive video link; you can't use any remote desktop solution with any level of fluidity; you can only participate in collaborative development with a very limited number of participants...and, perhaps most significantly for the economy, you can't consume new, bandwidth-intensive applications such as sophisticated online gaming.
This is the geek's world view.
The question is - does the middle class want to pay for the infrastructure needed to support it?
As opposed to say, paying for the HPV vaccine to protect their daughters from cervical cancer? Home care for the elderly? Rebuilding bridges? Replanting trees, restoring parks and public beaches closed to swimmers for over forty years?
saying Microsoft is 'good' at fending off the competition is about like saying Al Capone was 'good' at running a business.
Capone was good at running a business - a cartel. He had a classical Italian faith in a tightly organized and disciplined system. Those who kept to their assigned territories, and played by the rules, prospered.
The real world in which Microsoft saw a record $51 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year.
The real world in which the Windows OS is approaching one billion users on the desktop. 90% of the 124 million PCs in China. Where pirated Windows outsells Linux on the streets.
The real world in which public support for the anti-trust break-up of Microsoft never approached critical mass.
The real world in which Vista [which had zero visibility in January] runs head-to-head with Linux in OS Platform Statistics.
So he's essentially saying I should respect Microsoft for thinking up all the dirty tricks it used to get it's monopoly in the first place.... I am not convinced.
Apple chose a closed hardware and software platform that sells at a fixed price through a limited number of outlets. At any given moment, there will be a half dozen or so Macs to choose from on the market, and, if none of them quite fits your needs, well, tough luck. Microsoft liked the look of the IBM PC's modular design, and negotiated a deal that allowed it to license its OS to all comers. Again, at any given moment, there will hundreds if not thousands of PCs and PC-based devices available from seemingly as many vendors. It doesn't matter what your price-point is, how obscure or fantastic your needs are or how mundane. The My-First-PC for your kid? Point-of-sale in the mini-mart? Satellite Internet for the commercial trucker in the Arctic? The mil-standard armored laptop for duty in Iraq? The maxed-out gamer's machine at $5000. No problem. Someone will have an off-the-shelf Windows solution.
Of course Linux can do many of these things - perhaps all of these things. But Microsoft was there twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago. Microsoft defines the PC for a billion users who are not and never have been Geeks.
There's no reason Windows 2000 Pro wasn't sufficient to run today's modern games if they had just released the latest DirectX libraries for it, but then they wouldn't have sold Windows XP and dragged gamers into the wonderful world of DRM and activation.
W2K was invisible in the mass market.
Activation is a problem for the Geek, for everyone else it is fire-and-forget.
I can scream till I'm blue in the face and/or convince 100 (or 1,000 or 1,000,000 or even 1,000,000,000) people that the sky is green, but that does not make the sky green. Truth is not debatable.
The problem is, there are billions of listeners out there who have never heard of the Red Book. They don't care if the sky is green or the sky is blue. The music plays and that is enough.
Where does it say that I am merely renting the music (or video or whatever)? If they had 2 separate prices, one for renting and one for buying, I might believe you.
LOS GATOS, Calif., January 16, 2007 -- Netflix, Inc., the world's largest online movie rental service, today introduced a new feature that allows people to immediately watch movies and television series on their personal computers...
Subscribers will continue to receive DVDs by mail from the company's catalog of over 70,000 titles and will have the additional option of instantly watching about 1,000 movies and TV series on their PCs. The new feature will be included in subscribers' monthly membership plans at no additional cost...
Netflix said the introduction of immediate viewing is part of its plan to lead movie rental by adding electronic delivery to its existing DVD delivery platform. Netflix is specifically focusing on the rental segment of electronic delivery, distinct from the download-to-own market and advertising-supported electronic delivery.
The hours available for instant watching will vary based on subscribers' monthly plans. For example, subscribers on the entry-level $5.99 plan will have six hours of online movie watching per month and subscribers on Netflix's most popular plan, $17.99 for unlimited DVD rental and three discs out at a time, will have 18 hours of online movie watching per month. Netflix Offers Subscribers the Option
Of Instantly Watching Movies on Their PCs
Forbes went downhill after Malcom Forbes Sr. died. Forbes Magazine used to do some hard-hitting investigative reporting.
I'd like to take a moment here to mourn American Heritage and its sister publication I & T, or as it was once known, The American Heritage [of] Invention and Technology. Literate, distinguished, gorgeously illustrated.
Now I am going to explain the difference between a hacker and a cracker.
A hacker is a person with no criminal intent breaking into a computer and just wants to do it to satisfy his curiosity, this however is not generally acceptable in our society. A Cracker is someone who does have criminal intent when breaking into a computer and does it for ulterior motives other then the attaining of knowledge. I believe the former should be allowed while the latter should be strictly discouraged.
I think this is - looked at coldly and realistically - simply too fine a distinction for the public to make.
Part of the thrill of voyeurism may lie in almost being caught. For some, the closer the voyeur is to being discovered, the larger the thrill.Voyeurism
That strikes a little too close to home if "curiosity" is your motive - and technical proficiency your means.
Nor is the "hack-ee" required to take you at your word. It's a bit like planting a camera in the girl's dorm room and claiming later that you never meant to view - or distribute - the video.
You can't accuse anyone of doing something illegal and prosecute them unless you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the individual is guilty. And the accused has a right to face their accuser in court.
"Reasonable doubt" does not mean moral certainty.
Your plate is on the car. The car matches the plate. The odds are overwealming that you, a friend, or family member, will have been behind the wheel -- with your express or implied consent.
This seems to me a "reasonable" argument for the state to make:
You may be facing the streanlined procedures, lower burden of proof, and limited right of appeal of administrative law.
In a pre-technological society you learn to live with the uncertainties of eye-witness testimony.
Personally, I'd rather take my chances challenging the evidence of the camera then directlty contradicting the testimony of the village policeman or state trooper who everyone in town has known since the days he was a five-year old kid on a tricycle.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to spoil the joke. But why not use false-colors or sounds to bring out significant details, enhance situational awareness, in an environment that can't be easily perceived or understood directly?
The home and business market began diverging no later than 1980.
When the PC became a viable game platform with the release of Commander Keen. King's Quest. Wolfenstein 3-D, Maniac Mansion...
It is only a step or two farther on to the PC as media player, the PC as a media center in the home.
Instant messaging. Social networking. P2P Networking.
There is nothing about the locked-down corporate Linux desktop that anyone would want to take home from work.
The apps? Who cares about the apps?
The sine qua non of success in open source - client-side - is a successful port to Windows.
I.e., Firefox. Open Office.
You are as close to zero as makes no difference.
There is no bullying required.
The OEM system install puts the Windows PC on a billion desktops. PCs sold to customers as a ready-to-run home appliance or office machine. Not a kit of parts.
WalMart sells a $2000 Vista Ultimate HP Pavilion laptop with HD-DVD Drive. DX 10 NVIDIA 8600 video. Integrated WiFi, Bluetooth, webcam, HDTV tuner, fingerprint reader...
You plug this beast in and you are good to go.
You don't have to install the OS. You don't have to de-bug a failed install You don't have think about hardware compatibility. You have a functional set of drivers, set to intelligent defaults.
You have a warranty, a service contract, if anything goes wrong.
The perfect strategy...for 1995. No later. I remember watching my niece playing with Windows 95 at age four. XP hit the market in 2001. "Get 'em young?" Microsoft has been a force in the PC market for thirty years.
Thomas Edison saw the cast concrete home as working-class housing:
These 25x30 foot two story homes had 500 structural pieces and weighed about 250,000 pounds.
The ultimate test of the Edison process would be in mass production. After careful planning, the first large-scale development began, with forty houses planned to be built off Route 22 in Union, New Jersey, during July and August of 1917.
The street was named Ingersoll Terrace. Basements for the first eleven houses were dug with a steam shovel, and all the equipment and materials were put in place. The first few houses went up very slowly, as laborers struggled to learn the system and become familiar with the molds. Eventually the crew began to move with increasing speed and expertise. By the time the mold was broken on the eleventh house, the process was almost as systematized as Edison had predicted.
In the end the technical side of the monolithic concrete house was another Edison success story. But neither Edison nor Ingersoll had predicted the marketing nightmare they would encounter. Ingersoll decided, as a test, to put the first houses up for sale at the agreed price of $1,200 before building the next block. To everyone's surprise, despite the extremely low price, not a single house was sold in the first month. Ingersoll abandoned the project, and no more Edison concrete houses were ever built.
Some historians and Edison biographers blame the publicity and Edison's grandiose predictions for the demise of his most altruistic endeavor. No one wanted to live in a house that had been described as "the salvation of the slum dweller." People were too proud to be stigmatized as having been "rescued from squalor and poverty."
But there may have been a more important reason for the Edison monoliths' failure to catch on. The architect Ernest Flagg noted that "Mr. Edison was not an architect-- it was not cheapness that wanted so much as relief from ugliness, and Mr. Edison's early models entirely did not achieve that relief." From looking at them, it is hard to disagree.
Ten of the original eleven houses remain standing on Ingersoll Terrace, so the technology of the process has certainly shown itself to be durable. The original owners are long gone, but newer residents have generally positive opinions of the little houses. According to Mrs. Joseph Fila, who occupied an Edison house for half a century, "The twenty-four inch walls keep out the summer heat and provide good winter insulation." Joe Kearny says that the maintenance cost of his concrete house is "zero." Dolores Chumsky is less enthusiastic; her house is plagued by an elusive leak that defies detection. She adds that any prospects for renovation or improvements are doomed. "Just try and get someone to come and make repairs," she says. "They may come in once, but they never come back." Edison's Concrete Homes
> A monolithic dome is at the very top of what I'd like to build to live in.
The general impression can be that of a stage set for Star Trek. Catalog of Monolithic Dome Home Plans, Torus Something that even a geek may tire of very quickly.
That suggests to me that the Wikipedia can only indexed alphabetically - no matter how unwieldy that becomes.
The Britannica broke from a purely alphabetical listing in 1974 precisely for this reason. Threads became too difficult to follow. Significant content was buried under a mass of trivia. There are practical limits to what you can accomplish even through hypertext links.
I have no great faith in the idea that you can publish with editing. That a "community resource" like the Wikipedia can evade the kind of decisions an editor has to make. For example: Is "Creation Science" - "Science?"
The essays in the Britannica have been signed for [at least] the better part of 100 years and indexed with a quick sketch of the writer's affiliations and credentials.
T.E. Lawrence on Guerrilla Warfare, Albert Einstein on Relativity.
Some will have been ghostwritten of course - Alfred E. Sloan on General Motors, J. Edgar Hoover on the F.B.I.
But such an attribution is still useful. Rather more useful, much more useful, to the general reader, I would think, than the IP address of an anonymous edit to the Wikipedia.
China has a tradition of centralized, bureaucratic, government that goes back to the Ch'In Empire ca. 200 BC. The right way to approach this question is to look at your own history and culture.
MS Office Home provides one-stop shopping for MS Office tutorials, templates, click art, etc.
It's a handsome site, easy to use, light-years removed from OpenOffice.org. And, yes it matters. Most of us don't have the time to re-invent the wheel. To spend endless hours searching for free, professionally designed, co-ordinated, themed and cataloged clip art.
Star Office 8 at Amazon.com:
#1 in Linux sales.
#28 in Windows Office Suites.
Where it is sandwiched between Upgrade MS Office Pro at $270 and Word Perfect 11 at $30.
I'll wager you didn't know there were 28 runners in the Windows Office Suite-stakes.
#1 in Windows Office Suites and #1 in Amazon software sales is MS Office Home and Student 2007 at $110 with a three-seat license. Retail boxed. No academic ID required.
Pre-orders for Apple's iWork 8 for the Mac put it at #8 in Amazon software sales. MS Student Teacher Office 2004 for the Mac is #2.
MS Office holds 17 of the top 25 positions in Windows Office Suites.
OpenOffice.org 2.2 is #20 in Windows Office Suites at 49 cents on CD new and used.
The last time I looked, which was about a week back, Star Office 8 ranked around #650 in Amazon software sales. MS Works 8 around #50.
Its all about getting the Sun name and brand out there, making the name known by non-technical people; making it more accessible rather than it being viewed as the domain of the purely UNIX geeks.
I'll wish Sun the best of luck. But I don't think it is going to happen.
I don't recall "the government" building or owning any of the POTS infrastructure except for a handful of city-owned utilities.
Western Union was offering transcontinental telegraph service in 1861. Before construction of the transcontinental railroad. Western Union was offered the infant AT&T on a plate and didn't think it was worth buying. Western Union, playing catch-up, lost it's legal challenge to Bell's patents. Western Union did not license its lines to the Bell system.
The western land grant railroads were all more or less in place before 1876. The first long-distance call between New York and Chicago was made in 1892, a decade before the invention of the vacuum tube.
The old AT&T benefited from its status as a "natural monopoly." But throughout its history, it was privately financed.
What you see when you look at photographs of an American city circa 1900 is a rat's nest of wires strung everywhere. The infrastructure below ground will be a half-century older, almost as chaotic and only a little less fragile.
I don't want a dozen companies competing for the right to run a trencher across my front lawn. I don't want the complexity and expense of dealing with multiple service providers. I suspect there are many others who feel the same way.
This is the geek's world view.
The question is - does the middle class want to pay for the infrastructure needed to support it?
As opposed to say, paying for the HPV vaccine to protect their daughters from cervical cancer? Home care for the elderly? Rebuilding bridges? Replanting trees, restoring parks and public beaches closed to swimmers for over forty years?
Capone was good at running a business - a cartel. He had a classical Italian faith in a tightly organized and disciplined system. Those who kept to their assigned territories, and played by the rules, prospered.
Precisely.
The real world in which Microsoft saw a record $51 billion in revenues in its last fiscal year.
The real world in which the Windows OS is approaching one billion users on the desktop. 90% of the 124 million PCs in China. Where pirated Windows outsells Linux on the streets.
The real world in which public support for the anti-trust break-up of Microsoft never approached critical mass.
The real world in which Vista [which had zero visibility in January] runs head-to-head with Linux in OS Platform Statistics.
Apple chose a closed hardware and software platform that sells at a fixed price through a limited number of outlets. At any given moment, there will be a half dozen or so Macs to choose from on the market, and, if none of them quite fits your needs, well, tough luck. Microsoft liked the look of the IBM PC's modular design, and negotiated a deal that allowed it to license its OS to all comers. Again, at any given moment, there will hundreds if not thousands of PCs and PC-based devices available from seemingly as many vendors. It doesn't matter what your price-point is, how obscure or fantastic your needs are or how mundane. The My-First-PC for your kid? Point-of-sale in the mini-mart? Satellite Internet for the commercial trucker in the Arctic? The mil-standard armored laptop for duty in Iraq? The maxed-out gamer's machine at $5000. No problem. Someone will have an off-the-shelf Windows solution.
Of course Linux can do many of these things - perhaps all of these things. But Microsoft was there twenty-five years ago, thirty years ago. Microsoft defines the PC for a billion users who are not and never have been Geeks.
W2K was invisible in the mass market.
Activation is a problem for the Geek, for everyone else it is fire-and-forget.
Security Goon say "Shit, that's wierd. But the paper passport looks fine. Go on through."
"Insightful," eh?
A show of hands, please, from anyone willing to test this theory out.
"Weird" is not a word I want to hear from the airport security guard when I am trying to board a plane for New York.
The problem is, there are billions of listeners out there who have never heard of the Red Book. They don't care if the sky is green or the sky is blue. The music plays and that is enough.
LOS GATOS, Calif., January 16, 2007 -- Netflix, Inc., the world's largest online movie rental service, today introduced a new feature that allows people to immediately watch movies and television series on their personal computers...
Subscribers will continue to receive DVDs by mail from the company's catalog of over 70,000 titles and will have the additional option of instantly watching about 1,000 movies and TV series on their PCs. The new feature will be included in subscribers' monthly membership plans at no additional cost...
Netflix said the introduction of immediate viewing is part of its plan to lead movie rental by adding electronic delivery to its existing DVD delivery platform. Netflix is specifically focusing on the rental segment of electronic delivery, distinct from the download-to-own market and advertising-supported electronic delivery.
The hours available for instant watching will vary based on subscribers' monthly plans. For example, subscribers on the entry-level $5.99 plan will have six hours of online movie watching per month and subscribers on Netflix's most popular plan, $17.99 for unlimited DVD rental and three discs out at a time, will have 18 hours of online movie watching per month. Netflix Offers Subscribers the Option Of Instantly Watching Movies on Their PCs
I'd like to take a moment here to mourn American Heritage and its sister publication I & T, or as it was once known, The American Heritage [of] Invention and Technology. Literate, distinguished, gorgeously illustrated.
A hacker is a person with no criminal intent breaking into a computer and just wants to do it to satisfy his curiosity, this however is not generally acceptable in our society. A Cracker is someone who does have criminal intent when breaking into a computer and does it for ulterior motives other then the attaining of knowledge. I believe the former should be allowed while the latter should be strictly discouraged.
I think this is - looked at coldly and realistically - simply too fine a distinction for the public to make.
Part of the thrill of voyeurism may lie in almost being caught. For some, the closer the voyeur is to being discovered, the larger the thrill. Voyeurism
That strikes a little too close to home if "curiosity" is your motive - and technical proficiency your means.
Nor is the "hack-ee" required to take you at your word. It's a bit like planting a camera in the girl's dorm room and claiming later that you never meant to view - or distribute - the video.
The only proof that your "hack" succeeded.
Mechanical Engineers.
That feels right.
The "burglar proof" safe isn't necessarily the "fire proof" safe. The engineer has to find a workable solution for the problem as a whole.
"Reasonable doubt" does not mean moral certainty.
Your plate is on the car. The car matches the plate. The odds are overwealming that you, a friend, or family member, will have been behind the wheel -- with your express or implied consent.
This seems to me a "reasonable" argument for the state to make:
You aren't in court because you were the driver, you are in court because you are responsible for the use of your car. Vicarious liability in the United States
"Traffic Court" may not be a criminal court at all. Traffic Violations Bureau
You may be facing the streanlined procedures, lower burden of proof, and limited right of appeal of administrative law.
In a pre-technological society you learn to live with the uncertainties of eye-witness testimony.
Personally, I'd rather take my chances challenging the evidence of the camera then directlty contradicting the testimony of the village policeman or state trooper who everyone in town has known since the days he was a five-year old kid on a tricycle.