The US Supreme Court upheld random traffic stops to check for people driving under the influence (don't have the citation handy... I think it was in Michigain and in the 80's).
I'm not going to look up the cases, but I think you are wrong in this case. Random stops of individual drivers are NOT legal, but random checkpoints where ALL drivers are stopped are legal.
Although not easier than just pulling it off, it is very easy just to cut through the soft metal of the steering wheel to remove the lock. It doesn't matter how thick or hardened the bar-lock is.
I think you are giving too much credit to the laptop thief. Most of them will not be technical geniuses, just thieves. They are likely to just move the alarm and set it off, or more likely just leave it alone. Neither will they be attracted by the challenge - they just want to get the laptop with the least amount of risk.
They are going to skip the alarm lock just because of the added trouble and the possibility of setting it off. They will go for easier pickings. Also, as a later poster mentions, it is possible to lift the alarm and unscrew it, but again this is taking unnecessary risk from the thief's point of view.
It is the additional deterrent the alarm presents over just a simple non-alarmed lock. Think about it - which laptop are you going to steal, one with an alarm lock or the one with a cable next to it?
As my Dad used to say - "All a lock does is keep an honest person honest."
You won't like this but i think this is mostly BS. You use what appears to be a lot of intelligent-sounding jargon, but when the reader wades through the wordyness it doesn't really make any valid arguments. Take, for example, your statment that "A co-operative solution will not work - someone always has to do worse for anyone to do better than the market...". This just isn't true. Wealth is being created all the time (i.e. gold is being mined and oil is being pumped). Since that wealth is being added to the economy there need not be (in theory) any losers. Of course there are losers, but there really do not HAVE to be losers.
I make my living trading (and do quite well at it) and I have seen my basic philosophy borne out - most complexity introduced by analysts (and by analysts I mean people who think about market theory and not stock analysts) is useless. It basically justifies their salaries and grants.
Here is my operating principle: The market is driven by psychology, pure and simple. The market does what investors THINK it will do and not what it SHOULD do. The direction of any stock in the market (and therefore the market itself) is completely random. However, (and this is important), people do not think it is random! As a result a layer of non-randomness is overlayed on the market by people's expectations.
Hundreds of chartist mumbo-jumbo indicators have been invented that purport to predict the market, but they are nonsense. The important thing is that a lot of people look at these chart predictors (MACD, Bollinger Bands, RSI, etc) and act on them. The indicators themselves are meaningless, but the effect they have on investors is not.
An analogy is the terror alerts in NYC. They are based on meaningless information yet they effect behavior. If you want to maximize your chances of jay-walking without being hit by a car in Manhattan then do it in front of the Citicorp building. Useless information about 4-year old targeting has caused the traffic there to be less than in other places. The MACD is the same as the orange alert - it means nothing in itself but behavior is nevertheless altered so advantage can be gained.
What is the point? That Mandlebrott's idea to analyse statistical data to predict the market is an exercise in futility because they are trying to analyse random data, not behavior.
However, Galactica has always, even during the original run, suffered from lack of budget. The original series for example, cost $1,000,000 per episode in 1978 and it was cancelled even though it was the number one show that year.
What alternate universe are you in? First, which is it - BSG suffered from low budget, or had $1 million/episode? A million dllars was a LOT of money in 1978. I was around in 1978 and there was NO WAY Battlestar Gallactica was the number one TV show. It was a low-rated dog then, and just watch its reruns today to see why. As for its budget, maybe the first episode cost a million because of all the model-making required, but all the subsequent ones just recycled all the special effects ad nauseum and cost much, much less. How many left turns of a space-fighter could an adult stand before getting bored.
I watched the mini-series with trepidation, remembering how bad the original was, but was pleasantly surprised at the high production values and the interesting philosophical questions it brought up.
It is likely that people who think the original BSG was so great only think so because they were 8 years old at the time and have great memories of a "cool" TV show. Remember, children LIKE repetition, so those 15 special effects we saw over and over again really appealed to them.
What the Cheney are you talking about? What you say makes no sense on many levels, but here is an easy one: do you think the kids were not telling their potential customers why they should buy this antenna? Wasn't that pitching it, a word that you used to define hawk?
How does having more than one CC constitute fraud? If I were living in Nigeria and banks kept holding my purchases simply because of where I lived I'd have alternate sources of payment available, too. For all we know this is standard operating procedure of honest people in Nigeria.
I once worked for a U.S. pharmaceutical company who had facilities in Puerto Rico, and even they had trouble paying for purchases from the states even though we were a well-recognized major US company. I well remember a frustrated employee calling me from PR for help in making a purchase of safety equipment saying "What do they think we pay with - BANANAS?"
Drugs in the environment is a potentially serious problem in the world (no matter what the pharmaceutical company lobbyists tell you). Animal feed often contains very large amounts of antibiotics and hormones that find their way into the food supply and the environment in general. Pharmaceutical companies market these uses of their products very aggressively to farmers and ranchers to increase production and profits. Not all of these substances are metabolized and humans get dosed with them when they eat the meat (beef and chicken products are particularly high in these agents). Milk also has significant hormone and antibiotic contaminants.
Hormones are a particular problem since such very small amounts of them can cause effects in humans. Even if hormone therapy were restricted to humans (as opposed to feed animals) it would still be a problem since un-metabolized hormones are excreted in urine to the water supply. Concentrations of hormones have been measured in drinking water in some communities at significant levels. No one knows what the effects of long term low-level hormone dosing has on the human population.
So if the test is sensitive enough it is quite possible to test positive for drug use just by eating meat. Given the amount of calories these racers must consume daily I find it plausible he may have had a "methadone sandwich" of sorts.
You really make your point - it's more content than spelling that indicates the mental skills of the writer. Ironically you illustrate that with your nonesensical stream-of-conciousness post rather than with the content of your message.
Now if only they could fix the problem with a certain local PO in a city I used to live in. I swear they could mis-deliver/lose more mail in a year than I ever had anywhere else in my life to date.
Let me guess - CHICAGO.
I once lived Chicago - at the time the city with the worst mail delivery rate in the country. I also had the misfortune to live in the zip code (60604) with the worst mail delivery in the city itself. I had to tell people not to mail me anything they really needed me to receive. I bet 1/3 of my mail was never delivered. I once mailed a post card from a letter box and it took two months to get five blocks, but I suppose I should be happy it was delivered at all since that lousy PO was in charge of both pick-up AND delivery.
It's like the old joke - the postal rate increase was to cover the cost of storage, but in Chicago it was to cover the cost of landfill fees.
hoarding their articles like some stupid info-miser shows nothing more than a complete lack of understanding somewhere in the company.
The key point is that the articles are, in fact, THEIR articles to do with as they please. The Times has to maintain offices, pay reporters and support staff, print and deliver papers, maintain web access, and pay hundreds of other expenses to provide this information to you. You may not be aware of it but the Times does allow all articles to be permanently free once linked in a blog or on a site such as/.
Maybe the Times is doing it wrong, and then maybe not - but you aren't providing any facts to support your moaning and bitching about how they should be giving you their product for free, just invective saying how stupid they are. When you have built a billion dollar business employing thousands of people, come back and tell us how stupid Times management is and then I may listen to you.
LostCluster makes excellent points. I have been racking my brain to come up with a positive reason for keeping these reports secret and the only one i can think of is terrorists might read a report stating that a "Failure in the Smith Street microwave tower caused a general outage in a 3 square mile area in the Detroit suburb of Y". This would let terrorist know that they could cause that outage by destroying that substation.
This kind of information would seem to be of limited help to terrorists since it doesn't take a genius to figure out that "Duh, taking out the telephone infrastructure cuts off phone service." In any event, surely terrorists would go after higher value targets than cell phones, even as part of a larger operation. Presumably even the terrorists would like the cell phones to be working to better organize their escape.
I wonder why Reichsminister Ridge and Fatherland... oops, I mean Director Ridge and Homeland Security are spending their time on this low level stuff while bigger issues need addressing (i.e. tens of thousands of uninspected containers arrive at our ports every day).
I suspect that it just one more calculated assault on openness and freedom by our current secretive, civil liberties-cancelling administration.
However, having said that, I for one welcome our new secretive, civil liberties-cancelling overlords. Hey, at least the trains will run on time.
I knew it was only a matter of time before I was called anti-American or a traitor for having my own opinion that differed from yours. I do know that intolerance of other's opinions was not what the Founding Father's had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.
Anyone who edits the text of the Constitution to make it appear to support their own agenda more than it actually does is not a true supporter of the Constitution. It is really scary that there or people such as you who call others traitors for having a different viewpoint. Don't you see the irony in calling others unpatriotic simply because they consider the Consitution as much theirs as yours?
I didn't ask question. I said I didn't understand how you can leave out important sections of the Constitution simply to bend its meaning to your own desire. I suppose in order not to be an idiot in your eyes (not that a give a shit) I have to take your guidance on understanding the Founding Father's intentions? I don't have to learn hitory - I know history and I know that the determination of intentions is a more complex issue than your simplistic ideology purports it to be.
You've now called me stupid, idiotic and uneducated because I pointed out that you omitted a significant portion of your quote in order to change its meaning to suite your purpose. Is that stupid? I don't think so, no matter what you say. Although I daresay I am significantly better educated than you I don't know that for sure, but clearly none of your education shows through your intolerance, jingoism and hatred.
Read your journal!?? Oh, thank you O Great and All-Knowing One, Purveyor and Definer of the Truth for All In The World Where No Alternate Position Is Allowed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
it was cool to watch the first man on the moon on TV, live. Plus hearing about Sputnik in the first grade. However, it definately wasn't worth the 30 years! |-)
I don't think this applies to SMS spam is because in many cases the person getting it is not charged for it. I know that is true on my t mobile plan. Other plans may differ but I think that is a big loophole in intent.
Your first point is exactly right, but your second point is wrong. The regulation says that calls may not be made...
ii. To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
The last item is additive, not limiting. It says "OR any service for which the called party is charged for the call", not "AND for which the called party is charged for the call". Therefore the other prohibitions listed do not have to be paid for by the called party to apply. No loophole there.
" paranoia if a person honestly believes that the presidential election, covered around the clock by half a dozen news agencies, considered by the Supreme Court, was "stolen"
I am not paranoid, and I truly believe that Bush and his brother stole the election by political manipulation of votes in Florida - before, during and after election day.
Bush was NOT elected, the election was stopped before all the votes were counted. He was essentially appointed by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. They STOPPED THE VOTE COUNTING in Florida while Bush was ahead. Their incredible rationale was that speed was more important than actually determining the will of the people. I have never heard of a judicial finding more contrary to the intentions of the founding fathers. The Supreme Court members who pulled that coup off should have been run out of Washington on a rail.
What I'm complaining about is this conspiracy theory nonsense that I keep reading from the Democratic party/voters. They'd have me believe that Bush is a completely incompetent moron who (disengage rational thought) is the mastermind behind the most nefarious and profitable corruption in world history. They continuously point to the glaring, embarrassing international goofs the White House makes while (disengage rational thought) the Bush administration is pulling off the most successful power grab in American history.
There is a BIG difference between GW Bush the individual and the Bush administration. Cheney is more likely the brains behind the sweatheart deals for Halliburton and Vinell Corporation. Also, the moronic GW Bush is only one member of a family that is very politically savy and which has been making fortunes at war profiteering since WWI. I dare say GW is being told what to do by his smarter relatives.
Slashdot Mirror
The US Supreme Court upheld random traffic stops to check for people driving under the influence (don't have the citation handy ... I think it was in Michigain and in the 80's).
I'm not going to look up the cases, but I think you are wrong in this case. Random stops of individual drivers are NOT legal, but random checkpoints where ALL drivers are stopped are legal.
Although not easier than just pulling it off, it is very easy just to cut through the soft metal of the steering wheel to remove the lock. It doesn't matter how thick or hardened the bar-lock is.
He's lucky he wasn't sued into backruptcy and put in prison. Man-traps are very illegal.
I think you are giving too much credit to the laptop thief. Most of them will not be technical geniuses, just thieves. They are likely to just move the alarm and set it off, or more likely just leave it alone. Neither will they be attracted by the challenge - they just want to get the laptop with the least amount of risk.
They are going to skip the alarm lock just because of the added trouble and the possibility of setting it off. They will go for easier pickings. Also, as a later poster mentions, it is possible to lift the alarm and unscrew it, but again this is taking unnecessary risk from the thief's point of view.
It is the additional deterrent the alarm presents over just a simple non-alarmed lock. Think about it - which laptop are you going to steal, one with an alarm lock or the one with a cable next to it?
As my Dad used to say - "All a lock does is keep an honest person honest."
Exactly. The very nature of stock trading is that no money is created, it's only moved.
Can someone explain precisely how this got modded up?
Because Elsworth Toohey is alive and well in this slashdot thread.
You won't like this but i think this is mostly BS. You use what appears to be a lot of intelligent-sounding jargon, but when the reader wades through the wordyness it doesn't really make any valid arguments. Take, for example, your statment that "A co-operative solution will not work - someone always has to do worse for anyone to do better than the market...". This just isn't true. Wealth is being created all the time (i.e. gold is being mined and oil is being pumped). Since that wealth is being added to the economy there need not be (in theory) any losers. Of course there are losers, but there really do not HAVE to be losers.
I make my living trading (and do quite well at it) and I have seen my basic philosophy borne out - most complexity introduced by analysts (and by analysts I mean people who think about market theory and not stock analysts) is useless. It basically justifies their salaries and grants.
Here is my operating principle: The market is driven by psychology, pure and simple. The market does what investors THINK it will do and not what it SHOULD do. The direction of any stock in the market (and therefore the market itself) is completely random. However, (and this is important), people do not think it is random! As a result a layer of non-randomness is overlayed on the market by people's expectations.
Hundreds of chartist mumbo-jumbo indicators have been invented that purport to predict the market, but they are nonsense. The important thing is that a lot of people look at these chart predictors (MACD, Bollinger Bands, RSI, etc) and act on them. The indicators themselves are meaningless, but the effect they have on investors is not.
An analogy is the terror alerts in NYC. They are based on meaningless information yet they effect behavior. If you want to maximize your chances of jay-walking without being hit by a car in Manhattan then do it in front of the Citicorp building. Useless information about 4-year old targeting has caused the traffic there to be less than in other places. The MACD is the same as the orange alert - it means nothing in itself but behavior is nevertheless altered so advantage can be gained.
What is the point? That Mandlebrott's idea to analyse statistical data to predict the market is an exercise in futility because they are trying to analyse random data, not behavior.
However, Galactica has always, even during the original run, suffered from lack of budget. The original series for example, cost $1,000,000 per episode in 1978 and it was cancelled even though it was the number one show that year.
What alternate universe are you in? First, which is it - BSG suffered from low budget, or had $1 million/episode? A million dllars was a LOT of money in 1978. I was around in 1978 and there was NO WAY Battlestar Gallactica was the number one TV show. It was a low-rated dog then, and just watch its reruns today to see why. As for its budget, maybe the first episode cost a million because of all the model-making required, but all the subsequent ones just recycled all the special effects ad nauseum and cost much, much less. How many left turns of a space-fighter could an adult stand before getting bored.
I watched the mini-series with trepidation, remembering how bad the original was, but was pleasantly surprised at the high production values and the interesting philosophical questions it brought up.
It is likely that people who think the original BSG was so great only think so because they were 8 years old at the time and have great memories of a "cool" TV show. Remember, children LIKE repetition, so those 15 special effects we saw over and over again really appealed to them.
What the Cheney are you talking about? What you say makes no sense on many levels, but here is an easy one: do you think the kids were not telling their potential customers why they should buy this antenna? Wasn't that pitching it, a word that you used to define hawk?
How does having more than one CC constitute fraud? If I were living in Nigeria and banks kept holding my purchases simply because of where I lived I'd have alternate sources of payment available, too. For all we know this is standard operating procedure of honest people in Nigeria.
I once worked for a U.S. pharmaceutical company who had facilities in Puerto Rico, and even they had trouble paying for purchases from the states even though we were a well-recognized major US company. I well remember a frustrated employee calling me from PR for help in making a purchase of safety equipment saying "What do they think we pay with - BANANAS?"
Drugs in the environment is a potentially serious problem in the world (no matter what the pharmaceutical company lobbyists tell you). Animal feed often contains very large amounts of antibiotics and hormones that find their way into the food supply and the environment in general. Pharmaceutical companies market these uses of their products very aggressively to farmers and ranchers to increase production and profits. Not all of these substances are metabolized and humans get dosed with them when they eat the meat (beef and chicken products are particularly high in these agents). Milk also has significant hormone and antibiotic contaminants.
Hormones are a particular problem since such very small amounts of them can cause effects in humans. Even if hormone therapy were restricted to humans (as opposed to feed animals) it would still be a problem since un-metabolized hormones are excreted in urine to the water supply. Concentrations of hormones have been measured in drinking water in some communities at significant levels. No one knows what the effects of long term low-level hormone dosing has on the human population.
So if the test is sensitive enough it is quite possible to test positive for drug use just by eating meat. Given the amount of calories these racers must consume daily I find it plausible he may have had a "methadone sandwich" of sorts.
You really make your point - it's more content than spelling that indicates the mental skills of the writer. Ironically you illustrate that with your nonesensical stream-of-conciousness post rather than with the content of your message.
Now if only they could fix the problem with a certain local PO in a city I used to live in. I swear they could mis-deliver/lose more mail in a year than I ever had anywhere else in my life to date.
Let me guess - CHICAGO.
I once lived Chicago - at the time the city with the worst mail delivery rate in the country. I also had the misfortune to live in the zip code (60604) with the worst mail delivery in the city itself. I had to tell people not to mail me anything they really needed me to receive. I bet 1/3 of my mail was never delivered. I once mailed a post card from a letter box and it took two months to get five blocks, but I suppose I should be happy it was delivered at all since that lousy PO was in charge of both pick-up AND delivery.
It's like the old joke - the postal rate increase was to cover the cost of storage, but in Chicago it was to cover the cost of landfill fees.
somebody please mod this up for humor. That gecko/insurance comment was very funny.
hoarding their articles like some stupid info-miser shows nothing more than a complete lack of understanding somewhere in the company.
/.
The key point is that the articles are, in fact, THEIR articles to do with as they please. The Times has to maintain offices, pay reporters and support staff, print and deliver papers, maintain web access, and pay hundreds of other expenses to provide this information to you. You may not be aware of it but the Times does allow all articles to be permanently free once linked in a blog or on a site such as
Maybe the Times is doing it wrong, and then maybe not - but you aren't providing any facts to support your moaning and bitching about how they should be giving you their product for free, just invective saying how stupid they are. When you have built a billion dollar business employing thousands of people, come back and tell us how stupid Times management is and then I may listen to you.
LostCluster makes excellent points. I have been racking my brain to come up with a positive reason for keeping these reports secret and the only one i can think of is terrorists might read a report stating that a "Failure in the Smith Street microwave tower caused a general outage in a 3 square mile area in the Detroit suburb of Y". This would let terrorist know that they could cause that outage by destroying that substation.
This kind of information would seem to be of limited help to terrorists since it doesn't take a genius to figure out that "Duh, taking out the telephone infrastructure cuts off phone service." In any event, surely terrorists would go after higher value targets than cell phones, even as part of a larger operation. Presumably even the terrorists would like the cell phones to be working to better organize their escape.
I wonder why Reichsminister Ridge and Fatherland... oops, I mean Director Ridge and Homeland Security are spending their time on this low level stuff while bigger issues need addressing (i.e. tens of thousands of uninspected containers arrive at our ports every day).
I suspect that it just one more calculated assault on openness and freedom by our current secretive, civil liberties-cancelling administration.
However, having said that, I for one welcome our new secretive, civil liberties-cancelling overlords. Hey, at least the trains will run on time.
I knew it was only a matter of time before I was called anti-American or a traitor for having my own opinion that differed from yours. I do know that intolerance of other's opinions was not what the Founding Father's had in mind when they wrote the Constitution.
Anyone who edits the text of the Constitution to make it appear to support their own agenda more than it actually does is not a true supporter of the Constitution. It is really scary that there or people such as you who call others traitors for having a different viewpoint. Don't you see the irony in calling others unpatriotic simply because they consider the Consitution as much theirs as yours?
I didn't ask question. I said I didn't understand how you can leave out important sections of the Constitution simply to bend its meaning to your own desire. I suppose in order not to be an idiot in your eyes (not that a give a shit) I have to take your guidance on understanding the Founding Father's intentions? I don't have to learn hitory - I know history and I know that the determination of intentions is a more complex issue than your simplistic ideology purports it to be.
You've now called me stupid, idiotic and uneducated because I pointed out that you omitted a significant portion of your quote in order to change its meaning to suite your purpose. Is that stupid? I don't think so, no matter what you say. Although I daresay I am significantly better educated than you I don't know that for sure, but clearly none of your education shows through your intolerance, jingoism and hatred.
Read your journal!?? Oh, thank you O Great and All-Knowing One, Purveyor and Definer of the Truth for All In The World Where No Alternate Position Is Allowed. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
...why you left out the part that says: "in an organized militia".
it was cool to watch the first man on the moon on TV, live. Plus hearing about Sputnik in the first grade. However, it definately wasn't worth the 30 years! |-)
I don't think this applies to SMS spam is because in many cases the person getting it is not charged for it. I know that is true on my t mobile plan. Other plans may differ but I think that is a big loophole in intent.
Your first point is exactly right, but your second point is wrong. The regulation says that calls may not be made...
ii. To any telephone number assigned to a paging service, cellular telephone service, specialized mobile radio service, or other radio common carrier service, or any service for which the called party is charged for the call;
The last item is additive, not limiting. It says "OR any service for which the called party is charged for the call", not "AND for which the called party is charged for the call". Therefore the other prohibitions listed do not have to be paid for by the called party to apply. No loophole there.
Life's hard and it isn't fair. Get one.
That's 65,000 barrels of oil saved per year, not 650,000. Still, its a good start.
" paranoia if a person honestly believes that the presidential election, covered around the clock by half a dozen news agencies, considered by the Supreme Court, was "stolen"
I am not paranoid, and I truly believe that Bush and his brother stole the election by political manipulation of votes in Florida - before, during and after election day.
Bush was NOT elected, the election was stopped before all the votes were counted. He was essentially appointed by the conservative majority of the Supreme Court. They STOPPED THE VOTE COUNTING in Florida while Bush was ahead. Their incredible rationale was that speed was more important than actually determining the will of the people. I have never heard of a judicial finding more contrary to the intentions of the founding fathers. The Supreme Court members who pulled that coup off should have been run out of Washington on a rail.
What I'm complaining about is this conspiracy theory nonsense that I keep reading from the Democratic party/voters. They'd have me believe that Bush is a completely incompetent moron who (disengage rational thought) is the mastermind behind the most nefarious and profitable corruption in world history. They continuously point to the glaring, embarrassing international goofs the White House makes while (disengage rational thought) the Bush administration is pulling off the most successful power grab in American history.
There is a BIG difference between GW Bush the individual and the Bush administration. Cheney is more likely the brains behind the sweatheart deals for Halliburton and Vinell Corporation. Also, the moronic GW Bush is only one member of a family that is very politically savy and which has been making fortunes at war profiteering since WWI. I dare say GW is being told what to do by his smarter relatives.