The US has the largest prison population by far in the entire world, both by numbers and proportion of the population. And that is directly attributable to the police-state infrastructure created and perpetuated by the Federal government
Now and again the geek needs to be reminded of how federalism really works in the US.
The prison population of the US varies enormously by state. But the states of the desert Southwest and the old Southern Confederacy are right up there --- and it is damn hard to see them following the federal lead on anything.
Here is a small sampling:
Prisoners per 100,000 population
1 Louisiana 867 5 Texas 648 7 Florida 556 14 Virginia 468 20 California 448 39 New York 288 41 Washington 269 48 Massachusetts 200 50 Maine 148
He was recently released when a federal court overturned the conviction on grounds of improper venue.
Which means his case can retried elsewhere. He cannot claim "double jeopardy."
if the government fails to produce adequate evidence to prove an element of the crime, then the defendant is acquitted and the government doesn't get another bite at the apple. But this has nothing to do with a conviction being vacated because of a procedural error.
But please feel free to clutter up the world with more pointless articles.
The article sums up two fundamental problems for Google Glass:
It's called glassing out. You look cross-eyed. People can't make eye contact with you, and they read things into your lack of eye contact.
I had surgery to gain control over a "wandering" eye when it became obvious how much my inability to maintain eye contact was costing me both at home and at work.
People fear surveillance. They don't want a recording device waved in front of them. And that's how many people see Google Glass. People avoid talking to you when you wear them.
No amount of frames or shades conceals the glowing prism at the front that brands you a Glass-exploring neo-cyborg.
Loss of eye contact makes it difficult to build trust --- and the ever-present "in-your-face" camera only makes things worse.
Jokes aside, Disney is one of the worst pushers of extended copyright and draconian content laws. I for one won't be giving them a dime of my money. If I want to see it, I know how I will.
The pirate scrounges around for copies of the music and videos that other people have been willing to pay for.
The paying customer gets a voice in future projects;
In the case of "Frozen," a voice backed up by one billion dollars in ticket sales for the first run theatrical release alone.
"Frozen" will get a big-budget sequel and is headed for a long run on the Broadway stage and quite possibly twenty-five years of regional stage productions, both amateur and professional.
Which areas are the likely ''up and comers'' in the next decade? These are generally places that have been building up their tech capacity over the past several decades, and seem to be reaching critical mass. One place following a strong trajectory is Salt Lake City, No. 4 on our list, which has enjoyed a 31% spurt in tech employment over the past 10 years. Some of this can be traced to large-scale expansion in the area by top Silicon Valley companies such as Adobe, Electronic Arts and Twitter.
These companies have flocked to Utah for reasons such as lower taxes, a more flexible regulatory environment, a well-educated, multilingual workforce and spectacular nearby natural amenities. Perhaps most critical of all may be housing prices: Three-quarters of Salt Lake area households can afford a median-priced house, compared to 45% in Silicon Valley and about half that in San Francisco.
Goes to show you where our priorities lie as a nation; and how our worthless so-called leaders are asleep at the switch, as usual.
OK, smart guy, show me realistic goals and the spending required for the next five to ten years of research on fusion power. Tell me where the money is to come from and the political trade-offs needed to make this happen.
What really bums me out isn't that the large majority of people like them, but that highly technical people do as well. I know people who, no question, can install anything including an XMPP server...
Not everyone wants to be technician or engineer 24-7-365.
moving forward, there is no longer a major browser that hasn't caved to big media, and DRM. That is, in itself, a continuation of a disturbing trend we're seeing across the Internet, and computing in general.
The geek represents a small and diminishing minority of Internet users.
The PC and the general purpose web browser is not the only or even the dominant platform for accessing media content distributed across the net. If a browser breaks the distribution chain in any way, the masses will go elsewhere ---
it isn't worth discussing erecting barriers to Netflix play, Hulu, Pandora, etc.
Small-time non-profit distributors --- such as torrent-users, who keep the stuff they just downloaded available, but not for long enough to qualify for the second case ---- do not.
I disagree.
OR
by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public
''The Opera Devices SDK provides an excellent end-user experience on Smart TV. With its support we have been able to fast-track the certification for premium content, encompassing specifications like Encrypted Media Extensions, and enabling superior rendering and rapid time to market,'' says Lou Schreurs, Senior Vice-President of Product Creation, Bang & Olufsen. ''It has helped us to deliver the high-quality viewing experience that Bang & Olufsen customers have come to expect from our TVs.''
I'm guessing that the Mozilla foundation tried to figure out what their user base wanted, and came up with the answer that content would keep more users than excluding the DRM module would. Maybe they are right. Maybe they are wrong. Only time will tell.
There is no "maybe" about it.
As of September 2013, Netflix Q3 2013, Netflix reported global streaming subscribers at 40.4 million (31.2 million in U.S.). By Q4 2013, Netflix reported 33.1 million U.S. subscribers.
About 86 million US households have broadband service.
t would appear then that about 40% of broadband subscribers in the states also subscribe to Netflix.
write a FF extension that detects a DRM stream, determines the title from context, and automatically torrents the same title instead. If you can't do it as a plug-in, make a fork, since it's a stunt anyhow.
It is a stunt that will land you in jail.
A stunt that will end in the Firefox browser refusing to install or communicate with any unauthorized extensions.
When you spend 8 hours troubleshooting an open-source project to compile with a third party proprietary library it feels damn good to make it work. Coding is good because it's hard.
Golf is hard.
But golf doesn't pretend to be anything other than a game which is defined by the wholly artificial --- and unnecessary --- obstructions it places in your path,
Only if Pale Moon displays the content users want to see.
Suppose Pale Moon eventually has 10% of browser users? Will Google pay Pale Moon 10% of the money? Little by little, could it happen that Pale Moon is the world's favorite browser and Mozilla Foundation slowly dies?
Firefox is worth $300 million a year to Google only because it is a successful mass market browser that can hold its own against Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer.
The last time Mozilla stood their ground on the H.264 format do you remember what happened? So yeah, tone down the "they are big enough" speech... past "experiments" prove they are not "big enough".
---- even when receiving $300 million a year from its contract with Google.
The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser market share.
The iconic animated version of Let It Go voiced by Idina Menzel is approaching 230 million views on YouTube --- all licensed Frozen content distributed through YouTube alone probably accounts for 500-550 million page views, with no end in sight.
These are big numbers, and big numbers matter to Google ---
which isn't paying the Moz Foundation $300 million a year for links to mass market content Firefox can't display, but its rivals can.
The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. On 20 December 2011 Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually.
Large sections of our Constitution and the basis of our Representative government were designed to keep poor people from voting themselves the land that the wealthy had already claimed... There really wasn't any reason to hide it since if you were literate you were probably rich.
A dangerous assumption to make.
In 1776, one book, written in complex language, sold over 120,000 copies in Colonial America.
First convert 120,000 into a fraction of the U.S. population in 1776: compared to the population at the time of 2.5 million, 120,000 is roughly 1 in 20, or 5%. Today's U.S. population is about 300 million --- of which 5% is 15 million.
Fifteen million copies today! More surprisingly, Common Sense by Thomas Paine sold this equivalent in just three months. In its first year, it sold 500,000 copies, or 20% of the colonial population.
In the late colonial and early federal era, disputes over land ownership centered on the opening of the western frontiers to settlement and the abolition of feudal tenures. The Last Patroon
The Library of America's two volume "The Debate on the Constitution" can be found in most public libraries.
For Americans this is Shakespeare, and more. Not only is it wonderful writing, it is wonderful thinking. -- Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio
The analysts are pessimistic that a newbie can outperform the established automakers.
It isn't a question of performance, it's a question of production.
Tesla doesn't have a "mass market car " in production --- and Tesla's definition of mass market is the $35 to $40,000 car.
Historically, automakers like Ford began with a truly affordable mass market car and absorbed bits and piece of the high end market, as their betters ran into financial trouble, as they always did, sooner or later.
I assume that if the submitter is planning on building a MySQL and django database system for this charity where nobody else has tech experience, he will commit to moving to Senegal and working for the charity to maintain this db for the next decade+ while the db is in use. All for free.
alternatively, he could build a tool nobody knows how to use, migrate critical data to it, then bail.
Everyone here has an answer. But you seem to be the only one who is asking the right questions.
they need a new database to store all their information for the kids, and to help the funding organizations like UNICEF. The charity [has] a few computers running Windows 7. Being a die-hard OSS geek I'm more inclined to knock up a MySQL backend with a Django front-end and run the whole thing from a reliable VPS. But it needs to be understandable by the non-geeks in the charity--- there is no IT expertise here
You might better begin by asking what local sponsors and organizations like UNICEF are using. What support they can offer. If Windows and MS Office are the de facto standards here, you may need to rethink your priorities.
The problem is that Mozilla has thrown away the power that comes from being able to speak for hundreds of millions of users out of fear of losing some of those users.
Last December Disney posted the full animated performance of "Let It Go" by Idina Menzel for HD distribution through YouTube.
3.28 minutes. 226 million views.
All things "Frozen" on YouTube, best guess, conservatively, 500 million views.
You don't lose some of your users if you can't play protected media content, you lose damn near all of them.
It is a total MBA move, as if Mozilla should be driven by profits instead of advocacy.
Mozilla lives and dies by the add click. It's hard to be a successful advocate when you lie dead and buried.
If I steal your boat then you have no boat. If I "steal" your information then we both have the information. Copying is not theft.
Information you have illegally acquired and therefor have no right to possess. Information that has significant material value. To me that looks like theft --- and in the US you can serve hard time on the felony conviction.
Microsoft is writing software for the kind of people who'd type google into the google search bar to get to google.
Microsoft Office targets users whose working day is defined by the documents they read and write.
I have yet to be convinced that the geek has any real understanding of the significance and demands of clerical work as performed on the shoproom floor, by the office temp, salesman, middle management or the CEO.
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
I'd be hard put to name ten credible alternatives to the core components of the MS Office suite.
MS Office remains the gold standard for clerical work.
Full time staff. Part-time job. Office temp. Senior Volunteer. It doesn't matter. If you have MS Office skills, you are employable anywhere south of the Artic circle.
Slashdot Mirror
The US has the largest prison population by far in the entire world, both by numbers and proportion of the population. And that is directly attributable to the police-state infrastructure created and perpetuated by the Federal government
Now and again the geek needs to be reminded of how federalism really works in the US.
The prison population of the US varies enormously by state. But the states of the desert Southwest and the old Southern Confederacy are right up there --- and it is damn hard to see them following the federal lead on anything.
Here is a small sampling:
Prisoners per 100,000 population
1 Louisiana 867
5 Texas 648
7 Florida 556
14 Virginia 468
20 California 448
39 New York 288
41 Washington 269
48 Massachusetts 200
50 Maine 148
List of U.S. states by incarceration rate
He was recently released when a federal court overturned the conviction on grounds of improper venue.
Which means his case can retried elsewhere. He cannot claim "double jeopardy."
if the government fails to produce adequate evidence to prove an element of the crime, then the defendant is acquitted and the government doesn't get another bite at the apple. But this has nothing to do with a conviction being vacated because of a procedural error.
Does Double Jeopardy Forestall Auernheimer's Retrial?
But please feel free to clutter up the world with more pointless articles.
The article sums up two fundamental problems for Google Glass:
It's called glassing out. You look cross-eyed. People can't make eye contact with you, and they read things into your lack of eye contact.
I had surgery to gain control over a "wandering" eye when it became obvious how much my inability to maintain eye contact was costing me both at home and at work.
People fear surveillance. They don't want a recording device waved in front of them. And that's how many people see Google Glass. People avoid talking to you when you wear them.
No amount of frames or shades conceals the glowing prism at the front that brands you a Glass-exploring neo-cyborg.
Loss of eye contact makes it difficult to build trust --- and the ever-present "in-your-face" camera only makes things worse.
Jokes aside, Disney is one of the worst pushers of extended copyright and draconian content laws. I for one won't be giving them a dime of my money. If I want to see it, I know how I will.
The pirate scrounges around for copies of the music and videos that other people have been willing to pay for.
The paying customer gets a voice in future projects;
In the case of "Frozen," a voice backed up by one billion dollars in ticket sales for the first run theatrical release alone.
"Frozen" will get a big-budget sequel and is headed for a long run on the Broadway stage and quite possibly twenty-five years of regional stage productions, both amateur and professional.
Wait a second, I thought potheads were worthless burnouts who will never amount to anything?
You'll see only success stories posted here. Not a word from those whose careers were crippled or cut short by alcohol or drugs.
So what are the tech wages like in Salt Lake City?
Not half bad.
May 2013 Metropolitan and Nonmetropolitan Area Occupational Employment and Wage Estimates --- Salt Lake City, UT
Which areas are the likely ''up and comers'' in the next decade? These are generally places that have been building up their tech capacity over the past several decades, and seem to be reaching critical mass. One place following a strong trajectory is Salt Lake City, No. 4 on our list, which has enjoyed a 31% spurt in tech employment over the past 10 years. Some of this can be traced to large-scale expansion in the area by top Silicon Valley companies such as Adobe, Electronic Arts and Twitter.
These companies have flocked to Utah for reasons such as lower taxes, a more flexible regulatory environment, a well-educated, multilingual workforce and spectacular nearby natural amenities. Perhaps most critical of all may be housing prices: Three-quarters of Salt Lake area households can afford a median-priced house, compared to 45% in Silicon Valley and about half that in San Francisco.
The Best Cities For Tech Jobs [May 2012]
Goes to show you where our priorities lie as a nation; and how our worthless so-called leaders are asleep at the switch, as usual.
OK, smart guy, show me realistic goals and the spending required for the next five to ten years of research on fusion power. Tell me where the money is to come from and the political trade-offs needed to make this happen.
What really bums me out isn't that the large majority of people like them, but that highly technical people do as well. I know people who, no question, can install anything including an XMPP server...
Not everyone wants to be technician or engineer 24-7-365.
moving forward, there is no longer a major browser that hasn't caved to big media, and DRM. That is, in itself, a continuation of a disturbing trend we're seeing across the Internet, and computing in general.
The geek represents a small and diminishing minority of Internet users.
The PC and the general purpose web browser is not the only or even the dominant platform for accessing media content distributed across the net. If a browser breaks the distribution chain in any way, the masses will go elsewhere ---
it isn't worth discussing erecting barriers to Netflix play, Hulu, Pandora, etc.
Small-time non-profit distributors --- such as torrent-users, who keep the stuff they just downloaded available, but not for long enough to qualify for the second case ---- do not.
I disagree.
OR
by the distribution of a work being prepared for commercial distribution, by making it available on a computer network accessible to members of the public
And what does Opera have to say about all this?
Does this answer your question?
''The Opera Devices SDK provides an excellent end-user experience on Smart TV. With its support we have been able to fast-track the certification for premium content, encompassing specifications like Encrypted Media Extensions, and enabling superior rendering and rapid time to market,'' says Lou Schreurs, Senior Vice-President of Product Creation, Bang & Olufsen. ''It has helped us to deliver the high-quality viewing experience that Bang & Olufsen customers have come to expect from our TVs.''
Opera Devices SDK to power Bang & Olufsen connected TVs
I'm guessing that the Mozilla foundation tried to figure out what their user base wanted, and came up with the answer that content would keep more users than excluding the DRM module would. Maybe they are right. Maybe they are wrong. Only time will tell.
There is no "maybe" about it.
As of September 2013, Netflix Q3 2013, Netflix reported global streaming subscribers at 40.4 million (31.2 million in U.S.). By Q4 2013, Netflix reported 33.1 million U.S. subscribers.
About 86 million US households have broadband service.
t would appear then that about 40% of broadband subscribers in the states also subscribe to Netflix.
write a FF extension that detects a DRM stream, determines the title from context, and automatically torrents the same title instead. If you can't do it as a plug-in, make a fork, since it's a stunt anyhow.
It is a stunt that will land you in jail.
A stunt that will end in the Firefox browser refusing to install or communicate with any unauthorized extensions.
When you spend 8 hours troubleshooting an open-source project to compile with a third party proprietary library it feels damn good to make it work. Coding is good because it's hard.
Golf is hard.
But golf doesn't pretend to be anything other than a game which is defined by the wholly artificial --- and unnecessary --- obstructions it places in your path,
Could Pale Moon eventually replace Firefox?
Only if Pale Moon displays the content users want to see.
Suppose Pale Moon eventually has 10% of browser users? Will Google pay Pale Moon 10% of the money? Little by little, could it happen that Pale Moon is the world's favorite browser and Mozilla Foundation slowly dies?
Firefox is worth $300 million a year to Google only because it is a successful mass market browser that can hold its own against Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer.
The last time Mozilla stood their ground on the H.264 format do you remember what happened?
So yeah, tone down the "they are big enough" speech... past "experiments" prove they are not "big enough".
---- even when receiving $300 million a year from its contract with Google.
The decision compromises important principles in order to alleviate misguided fears about loss of browser market share.
The iconic animated version of Let It Go voiced by Idina Menzel is approaching 230 million views on YouTube --- all licensed Frozen content distributed through YouTube alone probably accounts for 500-550 million page views, with no end in sight.
These are big numbers, and big numbers matter to Google ---
which isn't paying the Moz Foundation $300 million a year for links to mass market content Firefox can't display, but its rivals can.
The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox. The original contract expired in November 2006. On 20 December 2011 Mozilla announced that the contract was once again renewed for at least three years to November 2014, at three times the amount previously paid, or nearly US$300 million annually.
Mozilla Foundation
Large sections of our Constitution and the basis of our Representative government were designed to keep poor people from voting themselves the land that the wealthy had already claimed... There really wasn't any reason to hide it since if you were literate you were probably rich.
A dangerous assumption to make.
In 1776, one book, written in complex language, sold over 120,000 copies in Colonial America.
First convert 120,000 into a fraction of the U.S. population in 1776: compared to the population at the time of 2.5 million, 120,000 is roughly 1 in 20, or 5%. Today's U.S. population is about 300 million --- of which 5% is 15 million.
Fifteen million copies today! More surprisingly, Common Sense by Thomas Paine sold this equivalent in just three months. In its first year, it sold 500,000 copies, or 20% of the colonial population.
Today's equivalent is 60 million copies.
Were Colonial Americans More Literate than Americans Today?. ''Every Man Able to Read''
In the late colonial and early federal era, disputes over land ownership centered on the opening of the western frontiers to settlement and the abolition of feudal tenures. The Last Patroon
The Library of America's two volume "The Debate on the Constitution" can be found in most public libraries.
For Americans this is Shakespeare, and more. Not only is it wonderful writing, it is wonderful thinking. -- Nina Totenberg, National Public Radio
The analysts are pessimistic that a newbie can outperform the established automakers.
It isn't a question of performance, it's a question of production.
Tesla doesn't have a "mass market car " in production --- and Tesla's definition of mass market is the $35 to $40,000 car.
Historically, automakers like Ford began with a truly affordable mass market car and absorbed bits and piece of the high end market, as their betters ran into financial trouble, as they always did, sooner or later.
I assume that if the submitter is planning on building a MySQL and django database system for this charity where nobody else has tech experience, he will commit to moving to Senegal and working for the charity to maintain this db for the next decade+ while the db is in use. All for free.
alternatively, he could build a tool nobody knows how to use, migrate critical data to it, then bail.
Everyone here has an answer. But you seem to be the only one who is asking the right questions.
they need a new database to store all their information for the kids, and to help the funding organizations like UNICEF. The charity [has] a few computers running Windows 7. Being a die-hard OSS geek I'm more inclined to knock up a MySQL backend with a Django front-end and run the whole thing from a reliable VPS. But it needs to be understandable by the non-geeks in the charity--- there is no IT expertise here
You might better begin by asking what local sponsors and organizations like UNICEF are using. What support they can offer. If Windows and MS Office are the de facto standards here, you may need to rethink your priorities.
That the charity is running Win 7 is a significant clue. Top 7 OSs in Senegal
a MySQL backend with a Django front-end and run the whole thing from a reliable VPS
Does this really sound to you like something anyone but a geek would understand and be able to maintain?
The problem is that Mozilla has thrown away the power that comes from being able to speak for hundreds of millions of users out of fear of losing some of those users.
Last December Disney posted the full animated performance of "Let It Go" by Idina Menzel for HD distribution through YouTube.
3.28 minutes. 226 million views.
All things "Frozen" on YouTube, best guess, conservatively, 500 million views.
You don't lose some of your users if you can't play protected media content, you lose damn near all of them.
It is a total MBA move, as if Mozilla should be driven by profits instead of advocacy.
Mozilla lives and dies by the add click. It's hard to be a successful advocate when you lie dead and buried.
If I steal your boat then you have no boat. If I "steal" your information then we both have the information. Copying is not theft.
Information you have illegally acquired and therefor have no right to possess. Information that has significant material value. To me that looks like theft --- and in the US you can serve hard time on the felony conviction.
Microsoft is writing software for the kind of people who'd type google into the google search bar to get to google.
Microsoft Office targets users whose working day is defined by the documents they read and write.
I have yet to be convinced that the geek has any real understanding of the significance and demands of clerical work as performed on the shoproom floor, by the office temp, salesman, middle management or the CEO.
Why do people still pay money for software performing most basic tasks like Word 365? Nowadays, they have millions of alternatives.
I'd be hard put to name ten credible alternatives to the core components of the MS Office suite.
MS Office remains the gold standard for clerical work.
Full time staff. Part-time job. Office temp. Senior Volunteer. It doesn't matter. If you have MS Office skills, you are employable anywhere south of the Artic circle.
If your employer supports Microsoft's Home Use Program, Office Professional Plus 2013 is yours to download for $9.95. Take Office home for just $9.95. Software Assurance Home Use Program