Talking to the guy is fine. Asking for his identity, politely or not, is not fine. When reading the article and some of the supporting briefs it becomes clear there was no probable cause in this case. The police have to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed before they can ask for identification from citizens, and the officer did not do that. An anonymous tip does not establish probable cause. Also, Mr. Hiibel had no idea there had been a report of a domestic incident. As far as he new the police just drove up and started asking him for his identity. He was right to say no, in my opinion
Proper police procedure by the officer would have helped a lot. He probably got confused because he was used to stopping people for traffic violations and being able to ask for their ID - but Mr. Hiibel had not been stopped for a violation. That means the officer had no right to demand, or even ask for, identification. It is clear that the officer knows very little about the law, and even less about constitutional rights of citizens - which is pretty scary when you think about it.
The terrorists haven't destroyed our way of life and never had the power to. They just gave those in power an excuse to finish destroying our way of life and national heritage.
That's 100% true.
Think Kerry will be any different than Bush? Just remember that they're both avowed and dedicated Bonesmen. They are no different on the inside, they just attempt to give the illusion of being different on the outside.
I'm suspicious about Kerry's insider status (he turned populist just a little bit too fast for me), but in the end I think he *would* be different than Bush. No politician in the history of the country has been more aggressive than G.W. Bush in cancelling the rights of Americans. Simultaneously turning the U.S. into the most hated country on the planet was just an added bonus.
When the Roman Emperor Caligula was finally deposed, the Praeatorian Guards installed a horse on the throne of Rome as a clear statement that nothing could be worse than Caligula. After four years of George W. Bush I understand exactly how they felt. Kerry or Edwards (or the horses they rode in on) - it doesn't matter to me.
Oh stop with the histrionics. What happened was a violation but it really isn't Nazi Germany here yet. Slashdrones are so silly.
-Detention of citizens without trial or recourse to courts or lawyers -Detention of citizens without charge for unlimited time -Secret detentions (the US now has its own "disappeards") -Declaring people "enemy combatants" and allowing them neither Constitutional protections NOR rights as prisoners of war. -Torture of enemy combatants (as defined by international law) -Local police undercover agents infiltrating lawful political opposition groups under the auspices of the Joint Terrorism Task Force -The ruling party seriously suggesting that the Constitution might need to be suspended after 9/11
No, it isn't "really" Nazi Germany, but it is getting far too close for my comfort.
Wants a [sic] warrants baby... Wants and warrants Who the heck do you think you are, the Terminator?
I've always found that if you act calm and composed with an officer of the law, they will usually treat you as a human being
Of course what you really mean is if you do everything they say when they violate your rights and invade your privacy THEN they treat you politely while abusing your rights. What they are actually doing is treating you like the sheep you are. Note I am not condemning police in general - we are talking about those situations where citizens' rights get violated.
Sorry, but if this is MY stop, I want to know if I'm dealing with a multiple ax murderer BEFORE I try to put him in cuffs and into the back of my cruiser. This is circular logic. If Mr. Hiibel hadn't refused to identify himself he would probably not have been handcuffed and thrown into the back of the police car. To state that another way - if the officer had not decided to violate Mr. Hiibel's rights there would have been no handcuffs or back seats.
I haven't seen the video (slashdotted) but I have news for you - being a pain in the ass isn't a crime in this country. Being unhappy that you've been asked for your ID illegally is not a crime. Non-violent resistance to giving your name or ID (i.e. not "understanding" what the charge is, asking Why, and declining to produce ID) is NOT a crime in this country. However, if more people start thinking the way you do they soon will be.
What he could have done is asked the guy what his name was, first
No. The police officer did NOT have the right to ask his name. His name had no bearing on determining if a crime had been committed or even if there was probable cause. How is it better for your Constitutional rights to have the police demand your identity by voice rather than by paper? The whole point is that you do not have to identify yourself to the police simply because they want to know who you are.
Then if the answer was suspicious, ask for his ID
Suspicious? How can giving or not giving you name be suspicious? Is "Donald Duck" a suspicious name - or is what Mr. Hiibel answered ("Why?") suspicious enough?
For my money, wired is a fun interesting source for gadgets and stuff, but it's too sensationalist technology. It feels to me like it treats tech still as some miracle or black-box that is to be possessed but not truly known. It is just like wired to treat this like some groundbreaking news when video games and technology are, at heart, just like any other industry.
Here is a little history of Wired. Back in the 60's there was a really cool magazine called Whole Earth Catalog. It was a large inch-thick newsprint magazine with sources for thousands of interesting environmental and alternate life-style gadgets. Unfortunately the magazine's success went to its two creators' heads and they started thinking of themselves as the source of cool, the definers of cool, and everyone else as uncool. When they had the planet-sized ego to actually re-name the Earth in one of their magazines I stopped reading it. Evidently so did a whole lot of others because they went out of business soon after we no longer lived on planet Earth. Maybe the Post Office couldn't figure out how to deliver to another planet.
The creators of Wired are the same people who created Whole Earth Catalog and they still have the same Gaia-sized egos. They've come a long way from compost spreaders to iPOD replacements, but they still see themselves as the definers of cool and everyone else as hopelessly uncool or backwards.
A few years ago I read my one and only Wired Magazine and thought "What egomaniacs write this thing!". I didn't find out until later that it was the same old WEC crowd. In Wired's favor at least it didn't try to re-name the Earth, but who could read green and pink type on a red background anyway?
t's a hard decision...but, I also think...'Hey they shouldn't have been having all those kids'...and really if you can't afford them, you should not have them.
You are looking at the issue of welfare from your white (probably) middle-class perspective. You are making the incorrect assumption that everyone's experiences and world view are the same as yours and the world you live in is the same as the world everyone else lives in. Can you go out and interview for a good job? Probably. People who have come from a poor environment often can't do that - not because they aren't smart or good people, but because they don't have the skills. An office environment to them is like a foreign country.
Expecting people trapped in the welfare loop to simply get a good job or be the first in their family to go to college would be like plopping you or me down in a Tibetan monestary and expecting us to be Buddhist monks, or dropping us in the middle of a Brazilian field and saying "Here, farm coffee for a living" - we couldn't do it. Sure, getting out of the welfare loop can be done but it is harder than you or I can imagine.
You are right - lot's of people ARE caught in a welfare loop, but it isn't all their fault. They are there because their parents were there (who couldn't get good jobs) and their parents before them (who weren't *allowed* good jobs), and their parents before them (who may have been slaves or share-croppers). There is a welfare loop today because we have created and sustained a culture that ignores the real cultural disadvantages handed to a major part of our population by our history of slavery and racism. I think we owe these people something (not Affirmative Action, that's the wrong approach, but that's another post). And yes, I know that not all poor are minorities, but except for the slavery thing all the other points apply. I'm a case in point - read the last paragraph.
I know it sounds like I am a flaming liberal, but I'm not. Slashdot is a science/technical discussion group, and it is salient to point out that just as personal viewpoints should have no place in the physical sciences we must be careful to not let our views in the social issues be determined by our own biases. It is very easy for you or me to just say "Get a job", but there is an old truism that we can't know another until we have walked a mile in his shoes.
And please, don't think that blocks to minority advancement are a thing of the past. I have worked for two major pharmaceutical companies in the New York City area and not one employee in a thousand was black or hispanic except for the mail room and the janitorial departments. I've seen my supervisor hire a white over a black for a semi-professional position because the black had a slight black accent. I KNOW that racism still holds minorities back in ALL areas of the country and so I am not quite so quick as you to say "Just get a job".
Finally, if people who couldn't afford children could not have them then I would not have been born. My parents often did not have a dime to give me to see the Saturday matinee with friends. Today I am in the top 10% of wage-earners in this country. I broke out of that loop, but then it was pretty easy for me -I'm a white male. A black male of the same time in the exact same town would not have had a chance. The situation is only slighty better for minority children born today.
Tracking where you go (EZPass, cell phone), what you buy (credit card, buyer's programs, RFIDs)
Although RFIDs will allow stores to track what you buy, that is a trivial abuse of RFIDs compare to what the government can do with them. The real risk is that RFIDs will allow the government to set up the most efficient domestic spying network ever envisioned. Simply by putting scanners on streets the government will be able to tell where you (and everyone else) goes. They will be able to tell who you associate with by the tags in the clothing of the people you talk to, which political rallies you attend, and where you travel, how many times you walked by the Whitehouse or into an opposition political party's office or officer Smith's ex-wife's house. They will be able to ID everyone at a political rally just by walking in the crowd with a portable scanner linked to a database of RFID/names. Congress has repeatedly rejected the idea of a national identity card for citizens, but unless something is done the government will soon be able to track everything you do literally from crib to grave. Just because they CAN do it does not mean we have to stand by and let it happen.
You stated above that because technology has advanced, privacy can no longer be expected. In reality technology has not negated our rights, but it has made them much more difficult to keep and defend. The right to freedom and privacy must be technology independent. If it isn't then we can all kiss our so-called free American asses goodbye.
About the only thing you are really free to do is act in your own home.
You are the kind of citizen dictators have wet dreams about. You have already given up your rights without anyone even having to take them away from you. You are a sheep. OBJECT when Homeland security takes away another freedom! OBJECT when Homeland Security sets up yet another data-mining database to learn more about law-abiding Americans' travel histories. OBJECT when the Anti-Terrorism Task Force recruits your local police to spy on groups opposing the administration's policies. OBJECT when the administration forces protestors onto buses and takes them to a fenced area out of sight and hearing of the press! OBJECT when the Justice Department asks for your medical records. Don't sit there and bleat" baa, baa, baaa we have no rights".
I can't undertand why everyone seems fixated on RFID only being a problem in commercial settings. The real problem is the potential for government spying and intrusion. Ubiquitous RFID tags in clothing and credit cards are a right-wing government's wet dream.
Scenario 1) Homeland Security identifies "suspects" and surreptitiously scans the RFID tags in their clothes and credit cards. (Remember, its only Prada for now - soon RFID tags will be everywhere.) The government can then track all these people by simply placing automatic scanners on city streets. Our "suspect" will never be able to go anywhere without being tracked again because new tags are automatically associated with his old tags by the government database. In other words, in the government database your Prada credit card associates your Eddie Bauer shirt which associates your Adidas shoes, which....
Scenario 2) Homeland Security detects other tags on persons walking with the suspects. They are then tagged as "known associates" and tracked as well. Whenever known associates meet - voila,, a conspiracy.
Scenario 3) Homeland Security places a scanner at a political rally and knows immediately who attended. They may not know all the names at first, but a quick check of the Homeland Security RFID database or the Eddie Bauer or Prada or Sears RFiD databases (subpeonaed earlier for "national security" reasons) identifies a good portion. Plus if you attended you are now a "known associate" of all those rabble-rousers, communists, and terrorist sympathizers.
Given the self-infecting nature of the RFID tags it wouldn't be difficult for the government to identify and track every man, woman and child in the country within a year or so.
Think you can outwit the system by carefully eliminating your tags or by jamming the signals? Nope - when everyone has tags the act of being WITHOUT tags will be suspicious in itself.
Airports are the perfect place to start this government tracking system - you have to identify yourself, there are lots of tags in your luggage, and in airports almost anything is allowed the government in the name of security.
...why the Mars Rover failure and resurrection is considered a miracle of human inginuity, rather than an indictment of crummy testing
Excellent point, and one that the team investigating the institutional problems that caused NASA's latest shuttle disaster should look into. Also, it does seem monumentally stupid not to have run one of the test Rovers around the parking lot collecting data for a few days to insure it actually worked before sending one to Mars.
George W. Bush inherited a $127 billion fiscal surplus but ran through all of that and more in his first year. He has turned a $5.6 trillion 10 year forecast surplus into a $3+ trillion forecast loss-an almost unimaginable reversal of $9 trillion in only three years.
That $3.7 trillion deficit doesn't even include the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Bush, using Enron-like accounting, decided didn't have to go into the budget.
In other words, let's make an emotional plea instead of being rational, More correctly my argument is made from an extremely rational and realistic point of view - rather than some ivory-tower rationalized economic theories where real people don't suffer losing their jobs, their livelihoods, or their homes to satisfy the never-ending greed of corporations.
then went on to explain why it doesn't work that way No you didn't. Your tract was about issues that I did not raise. The original argument was that all those dollars (read "resources" since you clearly have a tendency to misinterpret by re-statement)sent out of the country to pay overseas workers only come back to the US to improve the economy. That contention, that it is better to send those dollars overseas than to pay US workers, is falacious since it does not take into account that 1)the funds coming back only offset the losses incurred when they left, and 2)the funds were not available for investment in this country while they were gone. Your wealth-building scenario for India that results from the infux of US dollars (again, read "resources") is true, but your conclusion - that investment in India's workers is more valuable for the US than investment in US workers is plain wrong.
Tech workers have just experienced for the first time what workers in other industries have known about for centuries: a labor surplus. This is not mostly the result of outsourcing (though that can aggravate the situation a bit); it's *mostly* the result of the dotcom bust Most IT professioinals do not or did not work in the dotcom arena. Most IT workers are emplyed by corporatons, large and small, that need to maintain an information system within their organization. There is a labor surplus - you are correct - but it is being fueled by outsourcing jobs to cheap foreign labor.
Today the bottom 10% (much less the bottom 90%) in the US have a higher standard of living than they had a scant twenty years ago. Today our "poor" throw away more food, eat out at restaurants more often, buy more clothes, and have more high-tech gadgets than they did in 1985.
First, you clearly don't know what "poor" means. Is your idea of "poor" a family that has to use last-year's cellphones while wondering where the rent is coming from this month? Second, the important factor is 'expectations' and how they relate to reality. As reality gets further from expectations revolution arises. The "revolution" here meaning changing jobs, getting a divorce, changing an administration, or toppling a government. For the first time EVER, most Americans do not think that their children will be able to have a better life then they have had. The decades old middle-class expectations of a better life for their children has crashed into the reality wall in this country. (I mentioned children here - so I suppose you are going to accuse me of being irrational again).
You exaggerate. Greatly. We're not starving I never said IT workers are starving. I even used the word "metaphor" in my post. You seem to be a fairly intelligent person, so why do you insult your intelligence by obtusely interpreting what I wrote as saying workers in the US are starving. You re-interpreted my ideas throughout your reply. Read what the other person says - not what you wish they had said. Your original post was intelligent and interesting. However, your replies seem to fall back on the tired-old spin techniques of restating the other person's opinions in an inaccurate manner and then rebutting the re-statement. That is intellectually lazy.
Aha - a nice, well written discourse. However, the crux of the matter is down near the bottom where you say:
When that happens, which will usually be sooner rather than later, the US ecconomy regains the twenty billion in GNP that it lost due to the oursourcing.
Correct me if I'm wrong (which I am sure you will do), but isn't that EXACTLY what I said that you disagreed with, saying economics doesn't work that way? I continue to quote:
Now we're at zero, as you say. *However*, the ecconomy of Ubbledubgong is still up some fourty billion or so. The people there are going to be buying more Coca Cola, because they now can afford it.
Let's bring down your 'free-trade is good for everyone' argument to a more human level and get the Uggalabalongs out of it.
In the depression in the 30's many farmers (i.e. American workers) who had lost everything to the banks had to put their families to work as migrant workers picking crops. Now this income was needed to buy food so they literally would not starve to death, so getting those jobs was about as critical as could be. Crop owners (mainly agri-business, a term not yet coined) would advertize jobs at $1/day (a great wage) so hundreds of workers would show up - many more than there were actual jobs. Then the owners would announce they were only paying.25 per day but they still filled all the slots because the jobs meant children would eat that night. But the next day the owners announced they were only going to pay.10 per day. "If you don't want to take it, there are a hundred people outside the fence waiting for your job.", they'd say - and sure enough, there were.
Now, according to your argument, this is fine and dandy because all these growers were saving money that they would then spend on whatever, eventually making jobs for the starving people outside their fence (assuming, of course, they were still alive to work). According to you, and I quote: "The unemployed workers in the US will have to find some new jobs, which is unfortunate. But this will get balanced out.
The outsourcing of jobs to the absolute cheapest labor possible without regard for the welfare and humanity of the citizens who have made it possible for those companies to prosper is the current equivalent of depression-era 'greed above all else' thinking. Do you see the parallel? Tech workers today are out of a job because the companies found a cheaper labor force, but when they try to find another job there are more candidates than jobs so salaries go down and they are lucky to get a job at ANY wage. That brings wages down across the board - not just in tech. And who rakes in the profits from both ends (cheap wages overseas and lower wages at home)- the corporations who started the whole thing by outsourcing. What a racket!
Those inexpensive offshore workers who will work for 20% of what US workers need are the new people outside the fence. As soon as they get inside the fence (India today) they will find to their dismay that there are new workers (Burmese, Thai, you name a place) standing outside the fence willing to work for less to get THEIR jobs. And who rakes in the cash? You guessed it - CEO's. Sure, the Indian, Thai or Burmese workers get their new low wages, which is, after all, better than starving to death...and doesn't THAT sound familiar!
It isn't the Indian, Thai or US workers who are the villians here, it is the greed-driven growers (oops, Companies) who are gleefully exploiting human lives for profit. And the irony is the American companies are crying crocodile tears for the poor under-developed countries they are helping and chanting "Ain't Free Trade wonderful!" at the same time. If they were really interested in helping they would invest in the countries' infrastructures to build local jobs, not by exploiting the lower wage requirements of developing countries' workers.
Although many people don't know it, this country was on th
Let's face it - the real reason Hubble is being abandoned before its time is because G.W.Bush needed a "vision" for his State of the Union address. "Look at me - I'm John F. Kennedy!".
The head of NASA, knowing quite well who butters his bread, cut Hubble AND the International Space Station less than a week later! We are only going to complete our current obligations to the ISP and then devote all our resources to the ill-conceived (and expensive) Man on Mars program. All because G.W. Bush needed a vision for his political speech.
If (Please, God) the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld gang gets kicked out of office in November, all this may change as we get back to doing science and space research for the benefit of mankind and not for the political benefit of our pseudo-elected President.
So you have the US buying cheap labour from India, and India buying more advanced finished goods and services from the US. This creates a favorable trade situation and pumps up the US ecconomy
Excuse me, but that's only the positive half of the equation. All those dollars that India is supposed to be spending to improve our balance of payments came from sending the dollars out of the US in the first place. Even if every dollar returns to the US (unlikely because of market inefficiency) the net balance is zero. As a result, all that is happening is that the economy gets pumped up from a depressed state back to something approaching the situation before all those resources were shipped overseas.
The main objective being to motivate shareholders and executives to think of the company's long term best interest and not just jack up earnings by cutting maintenance, R&D, selling the family jewels, etc.
Don't blame shareholders - they have almost no influence on the corporate direction unless they are major shareholders. Although it is possible for shareholders to vote executives out, in reality it is almost impossible. Blame the executives directly.
If there were a similar way to make politicians or the public fiscally-minded, too, it would be nice.
Don't blame the public - they have almost no influence on the deficit direction. In fact, a major plank of the GOP platform has always been deficit reduction and less government spending. No politician gets elected by promising to increase the deficit. I can hear it now: G.W.Bush in 1999 - Elect me in 2000! I promise to take a 1.5 trillion dollar surplus and make it a 3.7 trilllion dollar deficit in four short years! Think he would have been eleced? No way. Blame the liers directly!
Of course one could argue that Bush wasn't elected at all.
MSN will always be biased towards them in some way. It's just the way they do things.
That is how the news organizations have always been, since before the printing press. An unbiased press is a very new concept in the world (and still a rarity). There may not be anything wrong with that if readers/viewers _know_ the reporter are biased in a certain direction. What ires me however is that MSNBC constantly touts their objectivity while reporting in a biased and self-serving way.
I am ashamed to say that as an American I have to agree with you. If you truly want to have freedom from government intrusion and heavy-handed abuse of your rights, you have to live somewhere other than the US. But not Britain, by the way. I still think the US is in the top 20% of countries where personal freedoms are important, but we no longer lead the world.
Things I grew up with that I accepted as being a basic part of America are just no longer true, mainly that the government can't imprison you without a trial, you are always entitled to a lawyer, and the government has to actually charge you to imprison you, and the government cannot torture prisoners. The trend of the US government to detain people they don't like indefinately without charge by calling them Material Witnesses is an abomination in this so-called "Land of the Free".
Don't even get me started on the self-serving legal maneuver of calling people (including US citizens) "enemy combatants" and giving them neither legal rights NOR rights as prisoners of war. Why doesn't this upset more Americans? I live in Manhattan and I really hate terrorsits, but these people need to be tried and punished using the democratic process.
I used to be told that one of the things setting this country apart from dictatorships was that dictatorships could imprison people at will and would not even tell their families they had been taken - they just disappeared. Well, the US has its own "disappeards" now. Two years ago I saw a newscast of family members outside a Washington State Federal Detention facility holding signs with pictures of their son they thought was being held there. It turned out later that the government wanted to hold him but because there was absolutely no evidence he committed any crime he was being held indefinately and secretly under Material Witness laws. There are people in this country that have been in prison cells for years under Material Witness laws without access to the courts or legal counsel. This is AMERICA?
Why did it not cause more alarm when this administration was seriously talking about suspending the Constitution after 9/11? Although cutting your own throat is a sure way to avoid cancer, the cure is worse than the disease. It is the same with the Bush administration and the extreme right-wing Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld ultra-nationalistic policies the Republican Party has turned to. What is most worrying is the willingness of the average American to accept this behavior by our government and to actually support it as Patriotic.
To end on a more positive note, it is encouraging to see the Presidential candidates criticizing the current administration for trampling our Constitutional rights. That they are willing to do so indicates that there is a very large segment of the voting population that agrees that the right-wing Bush administration has gone too far.
When you are in the middle of a public mall or visiting my website you are no longer treading "in private" and therefore have zero expectation to privacy.
I don't believe citizens have zero expectation of privacy just because they are in a mall. Suppose there is a politcal rally in a mall. The act of simply being in a public place can be a political statement under certain circumstances. The right to remain anonymous in public has been deemed a basic right by the Supreme Court, although that right is rapidly being eroded by technology and the accelerated anti-privacy policies of the government after 9/11.
Neither police nor mall security have the "right" to demand identification from me just because I am in that public place. The police because they are government and we are supposed to be protected by the constitution, and mall security because they are private citizens and don't have a right to force you do tell them anything. If I had zero expectations of privacy neither of the above examples would be true.
A legal exception to this are in airports and other transportation areas where, without warrants, the police have had the right to demand ID and search people just walking in the area. This was used mainly to find illicit drugs before 9/11.
Transportation venues are an area where people do give up their right to privacy just by being there, although I think most people are unaware of the fact (and therefore DO have an expectation of privacy that does not actually exist). For the past 20 years the majority of Americans would not have thought the police had the right to search them if they just walked into an airport to see a relative off, although expectations of privacy in airports has changed dramatically since 9/11.
The weight all those iPod users gained was offset by the weight they lost in their wallets when they paid for that very small light-weight expensive harddrive.
I would dare say that a lot of the long overdue innovation in Microsoft's Windows line was due to being handcuffed with compatibility issues.
There are two sides to that story. Waaaay back when, I decided to go with IBM (and by default Microsoft, that tiny start-up in Washington state) because Apple kept bringing out new computers every few years that were not backward compatible. Being a poor student at the time I decided I could not afford to throw away all my software every two or three years and buy new.
You may be right that backwards compatibility slows advancement somewhat, but it can also lower costs for users.
There are whole new marketing niches to be exploited here, folks. When I use my Tivo to FF through the commercials some catch my eye and I stop the Tivo to see what that the commercial was about. That gives the advertisers a viewer they drool over - one who chose to watch the commercial and is paying attention to it. Which commercials attract viewers to drop out of FF would be extremely valuable for Tivo to capture. The new niche? Designing commercial graphics so they grab the Tivo viewer's attention in FF.
To be really Machiavellian about it, advertisers could develop three levels to every commercial - the usual normal-speed commercial message, the graphics to entice viewers out of FF, and the Tivo FF subliminal "buy-me" message.
If you're reading this, Tivo, this is my idea and I expect royalties if you go for it.
On the other hand there is one commercial that even on the Tivo makes me close my eyes and wait the 4 seconds it takes to FF - the hair removal tool commercial that shows extreme close-up of thigh, back and neck hair being removed. Makes me really glad Tivo can't display in HD yet.
I have HDTV and Tivo but I have all my HDTV stations set up in Tivo because I really like Tivo's program guide. I often click the Tivo to an HDTV station it can't receive just to see the description of what is playing. If I like it I switch over to the HDTV channel for real.
It would be hard to prove anyone was stealing HBO just because their Tivo "looked" at the channel
Still seems reasonable to me - 2.5 mile distance making a 5 mile round-trip. At 25 miles per hour that's only a six-minute trip to the store. But OK have it your way. Cutting that distance in half to 1.25 miles (only 5 blocks) still results in 50,000 to 125,000 gallons of fuel burned for every million rentals returned, adding 3,500 tons of CO2 to the air.
But again, my real point has been missed that sustainable development is a complicated issue and _all_ the costs of our actions need to be considered before deciding what is best for the planet. I'm not really interested in whether people live 2 miles or 2 feet from a video rental store. I'm not even interested in whether it is more efficient to rent or buy - it was just an EXAMPLE of the type of thinking that has to go into deciding the best course of action in any decision.
Slashdot Mirror
Talking to the guy is fine. Asking for his identity, politely or not, is not fine. When reading the article and some of the supporting briefs it becomes clear there was no probable cause in this case. The police have to establish probable cause that a crime has been committed before they can ask for identification from citizens, and the officer did not do that. An anonymous tip does not establish probable cause. Also, Mr. Hiibel had no idea there had been a report of a domestic incident. As far as he new the police just drove up and started asking him for his identity. He was right to say no, in my opinion
Proper police procedure by the officer would have helped a lot. He probably got confused because he was used to stopping people for traffic violations and being able to ask for their ID - but Mr. Hiibel had not been stopped for a violation. That means the officer had no right to demand, or even ask for, identification. It is clear that the officer knows very little about the law, and even less about constitutional rights of citizens - which is pretty scary when you think about it.
The terrorists haven't destroyed our way of life and never had the power to. They just gave those in power an excuse to finish destroying our way of life and national heritage.
That's 100% true.
Think Kerry will be any different than Bush? Just remember that they're both avowed and dedicated Bonesmen. They are no different on the inside, they just attempt to give the illusion of being different on the outside.
I'm suspicious about Kerry's insider status (he turned populist just a little bit too fast for me), but in the end I think he *would* be different than Bush. No politician in the history of the country has been more aggressive than G.W. Bush in cancelling the rights of Americans. Simultaneously turning the U.S. into the most hated country on the planet was just an added bonus.
When the Roman Emperor Caligula was finally deposed, the Praeatorian Guards installed a horse on the throne of Rome as a clear statement that nothing could be worse than Caligula. After four years of George W. Bush I understand exactly how they felt. Kerry or Edwards (or the horses they rode in on) - it doesn't matter to me.
Oh stop with the histrionics. What happened was a violation but it really isn't Nazi Germany here yet. Slashdrones are so silly.
-Detention of citizens without trial or recourse to courts or lawyers
-Detention of citizens without charge for unlimited time
-Secret detentions (the US now has its own "disappeards")
-Declaring people "enemy combatants" and allowing them neither Constitutional protections NOR rights as prisoners of war.
-Torture of enemy combatants (as defined by international law)
-Local police undercover agents infiltrating lawful political opposition groups under the auspices of the Joint Terrorism Task Force
-The ruling party seriously suggesting that the Constitution might need to be suspended after 9/11
No, it isn't "really" Nazi Germany, but it is getting far too close for my comfort.
Wants a [sic] warrants baby... Wants and warrants
Who the heck do you think you are, the Terminator?
I've always found that if you act calm and composed with an officer of the law, they will usually treat you as a human being
Of course what you really mean is if you do everything they say when they violate your rights and invade your privacy THEN they treat you politely while abusing your rights. What they are actually doing is treating you like the sheep you are. Note I am not condemning police in general - we are talking about those situations where citizens' rights get violated.
Sorry, but if this is MY stop, I want to know if I'm dealing with a multiple ax murderer BEFORE I try to put him in cuffs and into the back of my cruiser.
This is circular logic. If Mr. Hiibel hadn't refused to identify himself he would probably not have been handcuffed and thrown into the back of the police car. To state that another way - if the officer had not decided to violate Mr. Hiibel's rights there would have been no handcuffs or back seats.
I haven't seen the video (slashdotted) but I have news for you - being a pain in the ass isn't a crime in this country. Being unhappy that you've been asked for your ID illegally is not a crime. Non-violent resistance to giving your name or ID (i.e. not "understanding" what the charge is, asking Why, and declining to produce ID) is NOT a crime in this country. However, if more people start thinking the way you do they soon will be.
What he could have done is asked the guy what his name was, first
No. The police officer did NOT have the right to ask his name. His name had no bearing on determining if a crime had been committed or even if there was probable cause. How is it better for your Constitutional rights to have the police demand your identity by voice rather than by paper? The whole point is that you do not have to identify yourself to the police simply because they want to know who you are.
Then if the answer was suspicious, ask for his ID
Suspicious? How can giving or not giving you name be suspicious? Is "Donald Duck" a suspicious name - or is what Mr. Hiibel answered ("Why?") suspicious enough?
My printer has 8 colors. If the document is valuable enough it would be easy to just run the paper through 8 printers in series, allowing 64 "colors".
For my money, wired is a fun interesting source for gadgets and stuff, but it's too sensationalist technology. It feels to me like it treats tech still as some miracle or black-box that is to be possessed but not truly known. It is just like wired to treat this like some groundbreaking news when video games and technology are, at heart, just like any other industry.
Here is a little history of Wired. Back in the 60's there was a really cool magazine called Whole Earth Catalog. It was a large inch-thick newsprint magazine with sources for thousands of interesting environmental and alternate life-style gadgets. Unfortunately the magazine's success went to its two creators' heads and they started thinking of themselves as the source of cool, the definers of cool, and everyone else as uncool. When they had the planet-sized ego to actually re-name the Earth in one of their magazines I stopped reading it. Evidently so did a whole lot of others because they went out of business soon after we no longer lived on planet Earth. Maybe the Post Office couldn't figure out how to deliver to another planet.
The creators of Wired are the same people who created Whole Earth Catalog and they still have the same Gaia-sized egos. They've come a long way from compost spreaders to iPOD replacements, but they still see themselves as the definers of cool and everyone else as hopelessly uncool or backwards.
A few years ago I read my one and only Wired Magazine and thought "What egomaniacs write this thing!". I didn't find out until later that it was the same old WEC crowd. In Wired's favor at least it didn't try to re-name the Earth, but who could read green and pink type on a red background anyway?
t's a hard decision...but, I also think...'Hey they shouldn't have been having all those kids'...and really if you can't afford them, you should not have them.
You are looking at the issue of welfare from your white (probably) middle-class perspective. You are making the incorrect assumption that everyone's experiences and world view are the same as yours and the world you live in is the same as the world everyone else lives in. Can you go out and interview for a good job? Probably. People who have come from a poor environment often can't do that - not because they aren't smart or good people, but because they don't have the skills. An office environment to them is like a foreign country.
Expecting people trapped in the welfare loop to simply get a good job or be the first in their family to go to college would be like plopping you or me down in a Tibetan monestary and expecting us to be Buddhist monks, or dropping us in the middle of a Brazilian field and saying "Here, farm coffee for a living" - we couldn't do it. Sure, getting out of the welfare loop can be done but it is harder than you or I can imagine.
You are right - lot's of people ARE caught in a welfare loop, but it isn't all their fault. They are there because their parents were there (who couldn't get good jobs) and their parents before them (who weren't *allowed* good jobs), and their parents before them (who may have been slaves or share-croppers). There is a welfare loop today because we have created and sustained a culture that ignores the real cultural disadvantages handed to a major part of our population by our history of slavery and racism. I think we owe these people something (not Affirmative Action, that's the wrong approach, but that's another post). And yes, I know that not all poor are minorities, but except for the slavery thing all the other points apply. I'm a case in point - read the last paragraph.
I know it sounds like I am a flaming liberal, but I'm not. Slashdot is a science/technical discussion group, and it is salient to point out that just as personal viewpoints should have no place in the physical sciences we must be careful to not let our views in the social issues be determined by our own biases. It is very easy for you or me to just say "Get a job", but there is an old truism that we can't know another until we have walked a mile in his shoes.
And please, don't think that blocks to minority advancement are a thing of the past. I have worked for two major pharmaceutical companies in the New York City area and not one employee in a thousand was black or hispanic except for the mail room and the janitorial departments. I've seen my supervisor hire a white over a black for a semi-professional position because the black had a slight black accent. I KNOW that racism still holds minorities back in ALL areas of the country and so I am not quite so quick as you to say "Just get a job".
Finally, if people who couldn't afford children could not have them then I would not have been born. My parents often did not have a dime to give me to see the Saturday matinee with friends. Today I am in the top 10% of wage-earners in this country. I broke out of that loop, but then it was pretty easy for me -I'm a white male. A black male of the same time in the exact same town would not have had a chance. The situation is only slighty better for minority children born today.
Tracking where you go (EZPass, cell phone), what you buy (credit card, buyer's programs, RFIDs)
Although RFIDs will allow stores to track what you buy, that is a trivial abuse of RFIDs compare to what the government can do with them. The real risk is that RFIDs will allow the government to set up the most efficient domestic spying network ever envisioned. Simply by putting scanners on streets the government will be able to tell where you (and everyone else) goes. They will be able to tell who you associate with by the tags in the clothing of the people you talk to, which political rallies you attend, and where you travel, how many times you walked by the Whitehouse or into an opposition political party's office or officer Smith's ex-wife's house. They will be able to ID everyone at a political rally just by walking in the crowd with a portable scanner linked to a database of RFID/names. Congress has repeatedly rejected the idea of a national identity card for citizens, but unless something is done the government will soon be able to track everything you do literally from crib to grave. Just because they CAN do it does not mean we have to stand by and let it happen.
You stated above that because technology has advanced, privacy can no longer be expected. In reality technology has not negated our rights, but it has made them much more difficult to keep and defend. The right to freedom and privacy must be technology independent. If it isn't then we can all kiss our so-called free American asses goodbye.
About the only thing you are really free to do is act in your own home.
You are the kind of citizen dictators have wet dreams about. You have already given up your rights without anyone even having to take them away from you. You are a sheep. OBJECT when Homeland security takes away another freedom! OBJECT when Homeland Security sets up yet another data-mining database to learn more about law-abiding Americans' travel histories. OBJECT when the Anti-Terrorism Task Force recruits your local police to spy on groups opposing the administration's policies. OBJECT when the administration forces protestors onto buses and takes them to a fenced area out of sight and hearing of the press! OBJECT when the Justice Department asks for your medical records. Don't sit there and bleat" baa, baa, baaa we have no rights".
I can't undertand why everyone seems fixated on RFID only being a problem in commercial settings. The real problem is the potential for government spying and intrusion. Ubiquitous RFID tags in clothing and credit cards are a right-wing government's wet dream.
....
Scenario 1) Homeland Security identifies "suspects" and surreptitiously scans the RFID tags in their clothes and credit cards. (Remember, its only Prada for now - soon RFID tags will be everywhere.) The government can then track all these people by simply placing automatic scanners on city streets. Our "suspect" will never be able to go anywhere without being tracked again because new tags are automatically associated with his old tags by the government database. In other words, in the government database your Prada credit card associates your Eddie Bauer shirt which associates your Adidas shoes, which
Scenario 2) Homeland Security detects other tags on persons walking with the suspects. They are then tagged as "known associates" and tracked as well. Whenever known associates meet - voila,, a conspiracy.
Scenario 3) Homeland Security places a scanner at a political rally and knows immediately who attended. They may not know all the names at first, but a quick check of the Homeland Security RFID database or the Eddie Bauer or Prada or Sears RFiD databases (subpeonaed earlier for "national security" reasons) identifies a good portion. Plus if you attended you are now a "known associate" of all those rabble-rousers, communists, and terrorist sympathizers.
Given the self-infecting nature of the RFID tags it wouldn't be difficult for the government to identify and track every man, woman and child in the country within a year or so.
Think you can outwit the system by carefully eliminating your tags or by jamming the signals? Nope - when everyone has tags the act of being WITHOUT tags will be suspicious in itself.
Airports are the perfect place to start this government tracking system - you have to identify yourself, there are lots of tags in your luggage, and in airports almost anything is allowed the government in the name of security.
...why the Mars Rover failure and resurrection is considered a miracle of human inginuity, rather than an indictment of crummy testing
Excellent point, and one that the team investigating the institutional problems that caused NASA's latest shuttle disaster should look into. Also, it does seem monumentally stupid not to have run one of the test Rovers around the parking lot collecting data for a few days to insure it actually worked before sending one to Mars.
George W. Bush inherited a $127 billion fiscal surplus but ran through all of that and more in his first year. He has turned a $5.6 trillion 10 year forecast surplus into a $3+ trillion forecast loss-an almost unimaginable reversal of $9 trillion in only three years.
That $3.7 trillion deficit doesn't even include the cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which Bush, using Enron-like accounting, decided didn't have to go into the budget.
In other words, let's make an emotional plea instead of being rational, More correctly my argument is made from an extremely rational and realistic point of view - rather than some ivory-tower rationalized economic theories where real people don't suffer losing their jobs, their livelihoods, or their homes to satisfy the never-ending greed of corporations.
then went on to explain why it doesn't work that way
No you didn't. Your tract was about issues that I did not raise. The original argument was that all those dollars (read "resources" since you clearly have a tendency to misinterpret by re-statement)sent out of the country to pay overseas workers only come back to the US to improve the economy. That contention, that it is better to send those dollars overseas than to pay US workers, is falacious since it does not take into account that 1)the funds coming back only offset the losses incurred when they left, and 2)the funds were not available for investment in this country while they were gone. Your wealth-building scenario for India that results from the infux of US dollars (again, read "resources") is true, but your conclusion - that investment in India's workers is more valuable for the US than investment in US workers is plain wrong.
Tech workers have just experienced for the first time what
workers in other industries have known about for centuries: a labor surplus.
This is not mostly the result of outsourcing (though that can aggravate the
situation a bit); it's *mostly* the result of the dotcom bust
Most IT professioinals do not or did not work in the dotcom arena. Most IT workers are emplyed by corporatons, large and small, that need to maintain an information system within their organization. There is a labor surplus - you are correct - but it is being fueled by outsourcing jobs to cheap foreign labor.
Today the bottom 10% (much less the bottom 90%) in the
US have a higher standard of living than they had a scant twenty years ago.
Today our "poor" throw away more food, eat out at restaurants more often,
buy more clothes, and have more high-tech gadgets than they did in 1985.
First, you clearly don't know what "poor" means. Is your idea of "poor" a family that has to use last-year's cellphones while wondering where the rent is coming from this month? Second, the important factor is 'expectations' and how they relate to reality. As reality gets further from expectations revolution arises. The "revolution" here meaning changing jobs, getting a divorce, changing an administration, or toppling a government. For the first time EVER, most Americans do not think that their children will be able to have a better life then they have had. The decades old middle-class expectations of a better life for their children has crashed into the reality wall in this country. (I mentioned children here - so I suppose you are going to accuse me of being irrational again).
You exaggerate. Greatly. We're not starving
I never said IT workers are starving. I even used the word "metaphor" in my post. You seem to be a fairly intelligent person, so why do you insult your intelligence by obtusely interpreting what I wrote as saying workers in the US are starving. You re-interpreted my ideas throughout your reply. Read what the other person says - not what you wish they had said. Your original post was intelligent and interesting. However, your replies seem to fall back on the tired-old spin techniques of restating the other person's opinions in an inaccurate manner and then rebutting the re-statement. That is intellectually lazy.
Aha - a nice, well written discourse. However, the crux of the matter is down near the bottom where you say:
.25 per day but they still filled all the slots because the jobs meant children would eat that night. But the next day the owners announced they were only going to pay .10 per day. "If you don't want to take it, there are a hundred people outside the fence waiting for your job.", they'd say - and sure enough, there were.
When that happens, which will usually
be sooner rather than later, the US ecconomy regains the twenty billion in
GNP that it lost due to the oursourcing.
Correct me if I'm wrong (which I am sure you will do), but isn't that EXACTLY what I said that you disagreed with, saying economics doesn't work that way? I continue to quote:
Now we're at zero, as you say. *However*, the ecconomy of Ubbledubgong is
still up some fourty billion or so. The people there are going to be buying
more Coca Cola, because they now can afford it.
Let's bring down your 'free-trade is good for everyone' argument to a more human level and get the Uggalabalongs out of it.
In the depression in the 30's many farmers (i.e. American workers) who had lost everything to the banks had to put their families to work as migrant workers picking crops. Now this income was needed to buy food so they literally would not starve to death, so getting those jobs was about as critical as could be. Crop owners (mainly agri-business, a term not yet coined) would advertize jobs at $1/day (a great wage) so hundreds of workers would show up - many more than there were actual jobs. Then the owners would announce they were only paying
Now, according to your argument, this is fine and dandy because all these growers were saving money that they would then spend on whatever, eventually making jobs for the starving people outside their fence (assuming, of course, they were still alive to work). According to you, and I quote: "The unemployed workers in the US will have to find some new jobs, which is unfortunate. But this will get balanced out.
The outsourcing of jobs to the absolute cheapest labor possible without regard for the welfare and humanity of the citizens who have made it possible for those companies to prosper is the current equivalent of depression-era 'greed above all else' thinking. Do you see the parallel? Tech workers today are out of a job because the companies found a cheaper labor force, but when they try to find another job there are more candidates than jobs so salaries go down and they are lucky to get a job at ANY wage. That brings wages down across the board - not just in tech. And who rakes in the profits from both ends (cheap wages overseas and lower wages at home)- the corporations who started the whole thing by outsourcing. What a racket!
Those inexpensive offshore workers who will work for 20% of what US workers need are the new people outside the fence. As soon as they get inside the fence (India today) they will find to their dismay that there are new workers (Burmese, Thai, you name a place) standing outside the fence willing to work for less to get THEIR jobs. And who rakes in the cash? You guessed it - CEO's. Sure, the Indian, Thai or Burmese workers get their new low wages, which is, after all, better than starving to death...and doesn't THAT sound familiar!
It isn't the Indian, Thai or US workers who are the villians here, it is the greed-driven growers (oops, Companies) who are gleefully exploiting human lives for profit. And the irony is the American companies are crying crocodile tears for the poor under-developed countries they are helping and chanting "Ain't Free Trade wonderful!" at the same time. If they were really interested in helping they would invest in the countries' infrastructures to build local jobs, not by exploiting the lower wage requirements of developing countries' workers.
Although many people don't know it, this country was on th
Let's face it - the real reason Hubble is being abandoned before its time is because G.W.Bush needed a "vision" for his State of the Union address. "Look at me - I'm John F. Kennedy!".
The head of NASA, knowing quite well who butters his bread, cut Hubble AND the International Space Station less than a week later! We are only going to complete our current obligations to the ISP and then devote all our resources to the ill-conceived (and expensive) Man on Mars program. All because G.W. Bush needed a vision for his political speech.
If (Please, God) the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld gang gets kicked out of office in November, all this may change as we get back to doing science and space research for the benefit of mankind and not for the political benefit of our pseudo-elected President.
So you have the US buying cheap labour from India, and India buying
more advanced finished goods and services from the US. This creates a
favorable trade situation and pumps up the US ecconomy
Excuse me, but that's only the positive half of the equation. All those dollars that India is supposed to be spending to improve our balance of payments came from sending the dollars out of the US in the first place. Even if every dollar returns to the US (unlikely because of market inefficiency) the net balance is zero. As a result, all that is happening is that the economy gets pumped up from a depressed state back to something approaching the situation before all those resources were shipped overseas.
The main objective being to motivate shareholders and executives to think of the company's long term best interest and not just jack up earnings by cutting maintenance, R&D, selling the family jewels, etc.
Don't blame shareholders - they have almost no influence on the corporate direction unless they are major shareholders. Although it is possible for shareholders to vote executives out, in reality it is almost impossible. Blame the executives directly.
If there were a similar way to make politicians or the public fiscally-minded, too, it would be nice.
Don't blame the public - they have almost no influence on the deficit direction. In fact, a major plank of the GOP platform has always been deficit reduction and less government spending. No politician gets elected by promising to increase the deficit. I can hear it now: G.W.Bush in 1999 - Elect me in 2000! I promise to take a 1.5 trillion dollar surplus and make it a 3.7 trilllion dollar deficit in four short years! Think he would have been eleced? No way. Blame the liers directly!
Of course one could argue that Bush wasn't elected at all.
MSN will always be biased towards them in some way. It's just the way they do things.
That is how the news organizations have always been, since before the printing press. An unbiased press is a very new concept in the world (and still a rarity). There may not be anything wrong with that if readers/viewers _know_ the reporter are biased in a certain direction. What ires me however is that MSNBC constantly touts their objectivity while reporting in a biased and self-serving way.
I am ashamed to say that as an American I have to agree with you. If you truly want to have freedom from government intrusion and heavy-handed abuse of your rights, you have to live somewhere other than the US. But not Britain, by the way. I still think the US is in the top 20% of countries where personal freedoms are important, but we no longer lead the world.
Things I grew up with that I accepted as being a basic part of America are just no longer true, mainly that the government can't imprison you without a trial, you are always entitled to a lawyer, and the government has to actually charge you to imprison you, and the government cannot torture prisoners. The trend of the US government to detain people they don't like indefinately without charge by calling them Material Witnesses is an abomination in this so-called "Land of the Free".
Don't even get me started on the self-serving legal maneuver of calling people (including US citizens) "enemy combatants" and giving them neither legal rights NOR rights as prisoners of war. Why doesn't this upset more Americans? I live in Manhattan and I really hate terrorsits, but these people need to be tried and punished using the democratic process.
I used to be told that one of the things setting this country apart from dictatorships was that dictatorships could imprison people at will and would not even tell their families they had been taken - they just disappeared. Well, the US has its own "disappeards" now. Two years ago I saw a newscast of family members outside a Washington State Federal Detention facility holding signs with pictures of their son they thought was being held there. It turned out later that the government wanted to hold him but because there was absolutely no evidence he committed any crime he was being held indefinately and secretly under Material Witness laws. There are people in this country that have been in prison cells for years under Material Witness laws without access to the courts or legal counsel. This is AMERICA?
Why did it not cause more alarm when this administration was seriously talking about suspending the Constitution after 9/11? Although cutting your own throat is a sure way to avoid cancer, the cure is worse than the disease. It is the same with the Bush administration and the extreme right-wing Cheney/Wolfowitz/Rumsfeld ultra-nationalistic policies the Republican Party has turned to. What is most worrying is the willingness of the average American to accept this behavior by our government and to actually support it as Patriotic.
To end on a more positive note, it is encouraging to see the Presidential candidates criticizing the current administration for trampling our Constitutional rights. That they are willing to do so indicates that there is a very large segment of the voting population that agrees that the right-wing Bush administration has gone too far.
When you are in the middle of a public mall or visiting my website you are no longer treading "in private" and therefore have zero expectation to privacy.
I don't believe citizens have zero expectation of privacy just because they are in a mall. Suppose there is a politcal rally in a mall. The act of simply being in a public place can be a political statement under certain circumstances. The right to remain anonymous in public has been deemed a basic right by the Supreme Court, although that right is rapidly being eroded by technology and the accelerated anti-privacy policies of the government after 9/11.
Neither police nor mall security have the "right" to demand identification from me just because I am in that public place. The police because they are government and we are supposed to be protected by the constitution, and mall security because they are private citizens and don't have a right to force you do tell them anything. If I had zero expectations of privacy neither of the above examples would be true.
A legal exception to this are in airports and other transportation areas where, without warrants, the police have had the right to demand ID and search people just walking in the area. This was used mainly to find illicit drugs before 9/11.
Transportation venues are an area where people do give up their right to privacy just by being there, although I think most people are unaware of the fact (and therefore DO have an expectation of privacy that does not actually exist). For the past 20 years the majority of Americans would not have thought the police had the right to search them if they just walked into an airport to see a relative off, although expectations of privacy in airports has changed dramatically since 9/11.
The weight all those iPod users gained was offset by the weight they lost in their wallets when they paid for that very small light-weight expensive harddrive.
I would dare say that a lot of the long overdue innovation in Microsoft's Windows line was due to being handcuffed with compatibility issues.
There are two sides to that story. Waaaay back when, I decided to go with IBM (and by default Microsoft, that tiny start-up in Washington state) because Apple kept bringing out new computers every few years that were not backward compatible. Being a poor student at the time I decided I could not afford to throw away all my software every two or three years and buy new.
You may be right that backwards compatibility slows advancement somewhat, but it can also lower costs for users.
There are whole new marketing niches to be exploited here, folks. When I use my Tivo to FF through the commercials some catch my eye and I stop the Tivo to see what that the commercial was about. That gives the advertisers a viewer they drool over - one who chose to watch the commercial and is paying attention to it. Which commercials attract viewers to drop out of FF would be extremely valuable for Tivo to capture. The new niche? Designing commercial graphics so they grab the Tivo viewer's attention in FF.
To be really Machiavellian about it, advertisers could develop three levels to every commercial - the usual normal-speed commercial message, the graphics to entice viewers out of FF, and the Tivo FF subliminal "buy-me" message.
If you're reading this, Tivo, this is my idea and I expect royalties if you go for it.
On the other hand there is one commercial that even on the Tivo makes me close my eyes and wait the 4 seconds it takes to FF - the hair removal tool commercial that shows extreme close-up of thigh, back and neck hair being removed. Makes me really glad Tivo can't display in HD yet.
I have HDTV and Tivo but I have all my HDTV stations set up in Tivo because I really like Tivo's program guide. I often click the Tivo to an HDTV station it can't receive just to see the description of what is playing. If I like it I switch over to the HDTV channel for real.
It would be hard to prove anyone was stealing HBO just because their Tivo "looked" at the channel
Still seems reasonable to me - 2.5 mile distance making a 5 mile round-trip. At 25 miles per hour that's only a six-minute trip to the store. But OK have it your way. Cutting that distance in half to 1.25 miles (only 5 blocks) still results in 50,000 to 125,000 gallons of fuel burned for every million rentals returned, adding 3,500 tons of CO2 to the air.
But again, my real point has been missed that sustainable development is a complicated issue and _all_ the costs of our actions need to be considered before deciding what is best for the planet. I'm not really interested in whether people live 2 miles or 2 feet from a video rental store. I'm not even interested in whether it is more efficient to rent or buy - it was just an EXAMPLE of the type of thinking that has to go into deciding the best course of action in any decision.