Take another look at the work environment in his pictures. Grey cubicle after grey cubicle, no windows, tile ceiling with fluorescent lighting, no plants. There aren't even any pictures on the walls - not even that motivational "art" crap companies can get for free - just a bulletin board. If this place has reasonable, human employers I'll eat my hat. Want to lay odds on his being allowed to do it next year?
Strikes me that the only human in this place works in that cube.
My first thought on seeing this was "Now there is someone with WAY too much time on their hands".
Then it struck me that this guy better be careful or his tech job (and we know its a tech job because he works in a grey cubicle) will be offshored by his company and given to someone in Asia who really does live in a hut. Then, having no job, he will have to move into a hut under a local overpass. If he's lucky the comapny will let him take his cubicle with him.
Including the author in this case. Clearly there is good satire and bad satire, the latter being characterized by being indestiguishable from the thing being satirized.:-)
I once participated in an interesting debate in a Bio-Hazards course in Grad school: should there be "forbidden knowledge"? Several people made the point that all scientific information should be free and open and published at will with no restrictions. Others (including myself) believed that there was forbidden knowledge.
Here is an example I gave: There are tribes on Pacific islands and in the Amazon that actively try to kill neighboring tribes. Most people would agree that the knowledge of how to acquire machine guns should be kept from each tribe, as they would immediately slaughter the other tribe given the means. My point is that it is a big mistake to assume we, or our society, is really any different from those tribes. We should not assume that simply because our secrets are bigger or more powerful, or because our society is more technological, or that our god is the "real" God that we are any better. Just as the use of the machine guns to slaughter the opposition would appear to the tribes as perfectly logical in their situation, the use of nuclear weapons or other WMD could appear very logical to even us at some point - even in our technologically and morally "advanced" society. Sociologists will be thinking "social relativism" at this point.
The perfect example is al queda. In their minds the attacks on us are logical and right. We know that is bullshit, but that is what they believe nevertheless. So just as we would prohibit machine guns (local WMD's if you will) to certain tribes, we should prohibit access to advanced WMD to certain elements of the larger world.
The correct balance between freedom of speech and prohibiting the dessimination of dangerous information is a difficult one to maintain. Although there are few more zealous in their defense of personal freedoms than me, I am also of the opinion that there have to be limits. To determine the balance one must judge the immediacy and applicability of the information. For example, I do not think the "idea" of machine guns should be prohibited to the tribes, but the knowledge that there were several hidden behind a tree should be prohibited. It is exactly the same with the publication of information potentially useful to our own "tribes". If it does not lead directly to acquisition of extremely destructive technology then it can be published, but if it tells how WMD can actually be made it should be forbidden.
I agree. One of the biggest problems in nuclear terrorism is all the radioactive material (and even bombs) stored in less than secure areas in countries that used to be part of the USSR. With a fraction of the 87 billion dollars we will expend in _one year_ of the Iraq war we could have bought every gram of this material ten times over and stored it in secure locations. Now THAT would have made me feel a lot more secure from terrorists than invading Iraq ever will.
I am constantly amazed at the people who are quite willing to destroy the Constitution in order to save it. They are also often the same people who use the term "true Americans" a lot to define anyone who disagrees with them as being un-American. Strangely enough they are often horrible spellers as well.
Claiming this article is an aid to terrorists is silly. Does anyone really think the rest of the world lives in grass huts and only the US has physicists and engineers? All this bomb-making information is old stuff and has been available openly for decades. For example, just because all the technical information to build a 747 is readily available doesn't mean that terrorists can just slap one together. If you need one you buy it or steal it. Same for nuclear weapons.
I suggest that we just forget the Constitution and form a secret government (made up of true-Americans of course) where we Americans (true-Americans and un-Americans alike) don't know who is in charge. That way we wouldn't aid the terrorists by actually publishing the names of our precious custodians and exposing them to risk. While we are at it why don;t we just make these true-Americans custodians for life. After all, they wouldn't do anything BAD, would they?
I don't trust the government one inch, and that is exactly WHY I am a patriot.
true, but it was an interesting enough thread for us all to follow it here while being both more interesting and no less off-topic than "all your bases are belong to us" for the millionth time.
I'm not sure I buy the "Je suis" argument but it sounds good.
Well excuuuse me.:-) Hypothetical "creature" then.
However your criticism fails at that point. I claimed neither snake nor salamander to be hypothetical. My post clearly says that the origin of the political term "gerrymandering" was derived from the hypothetical gerrymander. This, I believe, is correct in both language and fact. If I am wrong, and you have a stuffed gerrymander in your closet, please let the Smithsonian and/. know.
That's a terrible analogy. If your car breaks down five years after you bought it, and you return it to the dealer, do you know what he's going to say? "You only have a five-year warranty on parts and labor. Go find a mechanic."
His analogy wasn't perfect, but it made his point. What the dealer will really say is "You have no warranty left, but we'll fix it at $25/hour".
A better analogy would have been "This car is 35 years old and we just can't parts for it any more". That happens and no one complains that Chrysler has run out of door handles for a 1968 Dart and won't make any more. Software-years are like dog-years, and it is reasonable for software makers to stop "making the parts" for old software after 15 years. The original poster says there is NEVER a reason to stop supporting software and uses the car analogy, but he is wrong - there are valid reasons to stop support. If a user absolutely needs to keep 15 year old software running then the onus should be on the user to keep his own in-house software engineers or find independent contractors, just as it is the problem of the 1968 Dart owner to find his own door handle if his Dart is so important to him.
They wouldn't know how any individual voted, just what the statistics are for the polling place. This kind of information is necessary to insure things like gerymandering don't happen. Gerymandering (named after a hypothetical coiling serpent) has been used by crooked politicos to disenfranchise entire groups of people. This can happen by creating oddly shaped districts in which true majorities become minorites.
It isn't just polticians that can get voter statistics, anyone can - it is public information. This is good.
Politicians use general statisitcs to tell them where to target voter education and political ads, and where they are weak and where they are strong. I don't see a problem with this.
The information also allows a kind of check on voting irregularities. This is one of the ways the hanging-chad problem in Florida was identified. When voter statistics showed a majority of some precincts that were 90% Democratic strangely voting for Buchanan in the 2000 Presidential race, a problem was identified. This is good, too.
I said I wasn't going to reply, but what you just said is total baloney. Voting for a person who can't possibly win and by doing so letting the worse of the two candidates win IS wasting your vote. And rather than being democratic it is really opting out of the democratic process. Its worse than wasting your vote - it is actully a vote for the guy you would never have voted for.
The democratic process doesn't require each individual person to to be able to decide who the candidates are. A vote for Goofy or Bugs Bunny is not an exercise in democracy although I am sure those that do will claim it is a "protest vote". Candidates are decided before the election through a consensus process, and then the populace votes for one of those consensus candidates. In a close election voting for a person who can't possibly win is probably the most undemocratic thing I can think of. It is essentially saying "I don't give a fuck what happens to the country - I just want to make my statement."
Making a logical decision about who the next president should be and then casting your vote in a meaningful way to get that accomplished is democracy.
Doesn't it tell you something that Mr. Nader isn't a candidate this year? He clearly knows how badly he screwed up by drawing all those votes into a hopeless cause and thereby put George W. Bush & Company into the Whitehouse.
And that's it - I'm finished. Thanks for your comments.
First, you are making too many assumptions. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but have been a registered as Independent for many years.
When you throw away your vote you don't really think you aren't going to get either a Democrat or a Republican do you? Of course not. Idealism is great until there is actually someone holding a match to the Constitution - and then you have to step up and stop them.
I didn't really like Bush or Gore in 2000, but had to face reality that one of those two was going to be the president. I really didn't want Bush as President becaue I thought he was dumb as a fence post. That hasn't changed, but now I know he is also dangerous and real threat to the country, the Constitution and the environment, and frankly to me personally because I am a person who tends to speak out about repressive regimes and erosion of rights.
I'm off my soapbox now and won't reply again. I know I won't change your mind but maybe somoene else reading this will pause and think about what a wasted vote will really mean in November 04.
Sure, people are making a statement and more power to them for doing it. But when a bus is barreling down on you at 60 MPH it is NOT the time to stand stubbornly in the crosswalk to make a statement that you have the right-of-way. Just as when the alternative is another 4 years of George W. Bush it is NOT the time to make a Green party statement that gets us all squashed under the Bush & Company bus yet again.
I agree with what you are saying, but unfortunatley for us the evidence doesn't support our beliefs. The reduction in the national speed limit to 55 mph from 65 mph after the 1970 (or so) oil embargo resulted in a significant drop in highway fatalities per mile driven. Don't have a reference for it, but it should be easy to google - it was widely reported at the time.
The police really don't expect traffic to go the speed limit. If everyone did it would increase traffic density to levels that would cause mopre accidents than speeding. Speeding is (to a point) actaully a good thing.
This was a small independent rental agency. They were sued by a person who claimed the contract did not make it plain that there would be outrageus penalties. The company also did not tell the renters they were using GPS to monitor their speed. They were using it to ehance their revenue stream.
The company had to refund the charges and were prohibited from using GPS to track speeders unless renters were clearly informed. Since no one in his right mind would agree to such a contract the company stopped the practice.
The threat to privacy and democracy by RFID is NOT overblown. It seems clear to me that the wide acceptance of RFID tags is a serious threat to privacy and even to the democratic form of government. Here is an interesting scenario:
You walk down a street and a government scanner in a van detects that you went into a gun shop (or an opposition political party office or Greenpeace or an abortion-rights office or right-to-life office... you take your pick). That scanner is connected to a national Homeland Security database (probably named something like "Patriot Scanning and Verification System") that identifies you and simultaneously associates all your RFID tags. From that point on anytime you go anywhere those RFID detectors around town know exactly who and where you are. Because all those tags embedded in your clothes have now been associated with your RFID-embedded credit card they don't even have to have personal information on them to identify you. The government can now tell who you hang out with (aka "known associates") by associating your companions' tags with yours. They also know what cities you visit and where you go while you are there.
It won't even be possible to remove or smash all your tags to escape the spying. Just the act of having NO tags would raise a flag and single you out.
Do you think it unlikely that the government won't have agents walking around with RFID loggers at unpopular (to them) political rallies identifying all the subversives?
Simply by entering your name in their computer the government will be able to tell where you have gone, what political rallies you have attended, what activist organizations you have visited, where you travelled, what you bought, who your associates are, and even when you didn't leave your house for a week (no hits). And they will be able to do this for every single person in the country!
Is it really not a concern to you that this can easily be done today? Right now the only thing keeping the ultimate police state from being available to any paranoid right-wing administration, agency or government is that we simply aren't carrying around many of these RFID tags yet.
The only reason you need powerpoint today is that everyone else uses it, and you wouldn't look cool enough if you used hand-drawn diagrams.
I agree with your post except for the above part. Most people use PP because they AREN"T cool and don't have an ounce of creativity in them. They wouldn't be able to present information in an interesting way if they had to. What PP does for them is level the playing field to a pitifully low common denominator, allowing them to 1)not be embarrassed and 2)present useless and biased information in a way that makes it look valid and useful.
Although it is no joking matter, I for one welcome our new government "Patriot Scanning System" overloards.
Seriously, this technology is so dangerous it is not possible to be paranoid about it. We're concerned about a technology that will allow governments to track all its citizens at will, without their permission or knowledge. Here is a scenario:
You are walking down a street and a passive RFID detector senses your card. The RFID sensor belongs to the Homeland Security Administration's new "Patriot Scanning System" and the data is fed to a government computer that says you, Joe Blow, is in front of the opposition political party's office (or the gun shop or the AIDS clinic, the police station, or the Right to Life office - you take your pick). And it does that thousands of times a day for thousands of people. It also knows who you are with so the government now knows your associates. The next time you go to a government building you are stopped and held for questioning because...? You went to a right-to-life meeting and then to a gun shop and then to a hardware store. All of those were perfectly legal actions, yet you now have a red flag on your name in the computer that shouts "potential terrorist".
You just won't carry credit cards, you say? Riggght, but even then so what? All the RFID tags in your clothes from Eddie Bauer or KMart will have RFID tags in them so the government computers can track you with those as well. All you have to do is walk by a single detector and all your RFID tags are thereafter associated with you forever, and each tag "infects" any new tags each time you walk by the government's "Patriot Scanning System".
The government can know whenever you go to an anti-war rally or an anti-abortion rally or a pro-abortion rally or an airport or a train station or a protest against the administration...or, or, or. Think about it - is it so outlandish to think of the government having agents walking through the crowds at political rallies gathering ID information from credit cards?
And PLEASE, don't anyone give me that absurd argument that "if you're not doing anything wrong why do you mind the government knowing everything you do?". I'm a patriot and that WHY I mind.
Yes, a jury can, but first it is extremly rare for one to do it; and second, that is NOT necessarily the end of it. The judge can find that the jury erred in law in their finding, against the weight of evidence, and can fully reverse it - not "nullify" it, actually "reverse" it.
That is why this is such a maddingly complex subject. Yes, in theory it seems you can just vote for another person, but in reality that can be throwing away your vote. Bush won in Florida because Ralph Nader drew more than enough traditional Democratic votes to make it a close race between Bush and Gore - and we all know what happened next. Nader never had a chance to be elected President and even the people who voted for him knew it. And here is something even more telling - Ralph Nader knew it too and STILL didn't throw his support behind the only person who could beat the Bush's in Florida. I'll never forgive him for it.
It unfortunate but true that voting for anyone other than his Democratic rival in 2004 is a vote FOR George Bush. All you Green Party folks out there - I BEG you keep it in mind that a blind vote for Green is a vote for Bush in 2004.
This is subtle and I suppose technically true. However I don't agree that colleges shouldn't produce well-educated graduates having knowledge in areas other than their narrow speciality. Blacksmiths didn't attend "university" yet they needed to know something about wagons and wheels before they could band them in iron. They were blacksmiths, not wagon-wrights, and they still needed some understanding of wagon-making techniques in order not to totally screw it up. The wagon-wrights also had to know someting of the blacksmithing. It is exactly the same for developers and system administrators.
Slashdot Mirror
AT LAST! We've finally tracked down the guy that puts all those Easter Eggs in software!
Take another look at the work environment in his pictures. Grey cubicle after grey cubicle, no windows, tile ceiling with fluorescent lighting, no plants. There aren't even any pictures on the walls - not even that motivational "art" crap companies can get for free - just a bulletin board. If this place has reasonable, human employers I'll eat my hat. Want to lay odds on his being allowed to do it next year?
Strikes me that the only human in this place works in that cube.
My first thought on seeing this was "Now there is someone with WAY too much time on their hands".
Then it struck me that this guy better be careful or his tech job (and we know its a tech job because he works in a grey cubicle) will be offshored by his company and given to someone in Asia who really does live in a hut. Then, having no job, he will have to move into a hut under a local overpass. If he's lucky the comapny will let him take his cubicle with him.
Including the author in this case. Clearly there is good satire and bad satire, the latter being characterized by being indestiguishable from the thing being satirized. :-)
I once participated in an interesting debate in a Bio-Hazards course in Grad school: should there be "forbidden knowledge"? Several people made the point that all scientific information should be free and open and published at will with no restrictions. Others (including myself) believed that there was forbidden knowledge.
Here is an example I gave: There are tribes on Pacific islands and in the Amazon that actively try to kill neighboring tribes. Most people would agree that the knowledge of how to acquire machine guns should be kept from each tribe, as they would immediately slaughter the other tribe given the means. My point is that it is a big mistake to assume we, or our society, is really any different from those tribes. We should not assume that simply because our secrets are bigger or more powerful, or because our society is more technological, or that our god is the "real" God that we are any better. Just as the use of the machine guns to slaughter the opposition would appear to the tribes as perfectly logical in their situation, the use of nuclear weapons or other WMD could appear very logical to even us at some point - even in our technologically and morally "advanced" society. Sociologists will be thinking "social relativism" at this point.
The perfect example is al queda. In their minds the attacks on us are logical and right. We know that is bullshit, but that is what they believe nevertheless. So just as we would prohibit machine guns (local WMD's if you will) to certain tribes, we should prohibit access to advanced WMD to certain elements of the larger world.
The correct balance between freedom of speech and prohibiting the dessimination of dangerous information is a difficult one to maintain. Although there are few more zealous in their defense of personal freedoms than me, I am also of the opinion that there have to be limits. To determine the balance one must judge the immediacy and applicability of the information. For example, I do not think the "idea" of machine guns should be prohibited to the tribes, but the knowledge that there were several hidden behind a tree should be prohibited. It is exactly the same with the publication of information potentially useful to our own "tribes". If it does not lead directly to acquisition of extremely destructive technology then it can be published, but if it tells how WMD can actually be made it should be forbidden.
I agree. One of the biggest problems in nuclear terrorism is all the radioactive material (and even bombs) stored in less than secure areas in countries that used to be part of the USSR. With a fraction of the 87 billion dollars we will expend in _one year_ of the Iraq war we could have bought every gram of this material ten times over and stored it in secure locations. Now THAT would have made me feel a lot more secure from terrorists than invading Iraq ever will.
I am constantly amazed at the people who are quite willing to destroy the Constitution in order to save it. They are also often the same people who use the term "true Americans" a lot to define anyone who disagrees with them as being un-American. Strangely enough they are often horrible spellers as well.
Claiming this article is an aid to terrorists is silly. Does anyone really think the rest of the world lives in grass huts and only the US has physicists and engineers? All this bomb-making information is old stuff and has been available openly for decades. For example, just because all the technical information to build a 747 is readily available doesn't mean that terrorists can just slap one together. If you need one you buy it or steal it. Same for nuclear weapons.
I suggest that we just forget the Constitution and form a secret government (made up of true-Americans of course) where we Americans (true-Americans and un-Americans alike) don't know who is in charge. That way we wouldn't aid the terrorists by actually publishing the names of our precious custodians and exposing them to risk. While we are at it why don;t we just make these true-Americans custodians for life. After all, they wouldn't do anything BAD, would they?
I don't trust the government one inch, and that is exactly WHY I am a patriot.
true, but it was an interesting enough thread for us all to follow it here while being both more interesting and no less off-topic than "all your bases are belong to us" for the millionth time.
I'm not sure I buy the "Je suis" argument but it sounds good.
Well excuuuse me. :-) Hypothetical "creature" then.
/. know.
However your criticism fails at that point. I claimed neither snake nor salamander to be hypothetical. My post clearly says that the origin of the political term "gerrymandering" was derived from the hypothetical gerrymander. This, I believe, is correct in both language and fact. If I am wrong, and you have a stuffed gerrymander in your closet, please let the Smithsonian and
That's a terrible analogy. If your car breaks down five years after you bought it, and you return it to the dealer, do you know what he's going to say? "You only have a five-year warranty on parts and labor. Go find a mechanic."
His analogy wasn't perfect, but it made his point. What the dealer will really say is "You have no warranty left, but we'll fix it at $25/hour".
A better analogy would have been "This car is 35 years old and we just can't parts for it any more". That happens and no one complains that Chrysler has run out of door handles for a 1968 Dart and won't make any more. Software-years are like dog-years, and it is reasonable for software makers to stop "making the parts" for old software after 15 years. The original poster says there is NEVER a reason to stop supporting software and uses the car analogy, but he is wrong - there are valid reasons to stop support. If a user absolutely needs to keep 15 year old software running then the onus should be on the user to keep his own in-house software engineers or find independent contractors, just as it is the problem of the 1968 Dart owner to find his own door handle if his Dart is so important to him.
They wouldn't know how any individual voted, just what the statistics are for the polling place. This kind of information is necessary to insure things like gerymandering don't happen. Gerymandering (named after a hypothetical coiling serpent) has been used by crooked politicos to disenfranchise entire groups of people. This can happen by creating oddly shaped districts in which true majorities become minorites.
It isn't just polticians that can get voter statistics, anyone can - it is public information. This is good.
Politicians use general statisitcs to tell them where to target voter education and political ads, and where they are weak and where they are strong. I don't see a problem with this.
The information also allows a kind of check on voting irregularities. This is one of the ways the hanging-chad problem in Florida was identified. When voter statistics showed a majority of some precincts that were 90% Democratic strangely voting for Buchanan in the 2000 Presidential race, a problem was identified. This is good, too.
I said I wasn't going to reply, but what you just said is total baloney. Voting for a person who can't possibly win and by doing so letting the worse of the two candidates win IS wasting your vote. And rather than being democratic it is really opting out of the democratic process. Its worse than wasting your vote - it is actully a vote for the guy you would never have voted for.
The democratic process doesn't require each individual person to to be able to decide who the candidates are. A vote for Goofy or Bugs Bunny is not an exercise in democracy although I am sure those that do will claim it is a "protest vote". Candidates are decided before the election through a consensus process, and then the populace votes for one of those consensus candidates. In a close election voting for a person who can't possibly win is probably the most undemocratic thing I can think of. It is essentially saying "I don't give a fuck what happens to the country - I just want to make my statement."
Making a logical decision about who the next president should be and then casting your vote in a meaningful way to get that accomplished is democracy.
Doesn't it tell you something that Mr. Nader isn't a candidate this year? He clearly knows how badly he screwed up by drawing all those votes into a hopeless cause and thereby put George W. Bush & Company into the Whitehouse.
And that's it - I'm finished. Thanks for your comments.
First, you are making too many assumptions. I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican, but have been a registered as Independent for many years.
When you throw away your vote you don't really think you aren't going to get either a Democrat or a Republican do you? Of course not. Idealism is great until there is actually someone holding a match to the Constitution - and then you have to step up and stop them.
I didn't really like Bush or Gore in 2000, but had to face reality that one of those two was going to be the president. I really didn't want Bush as President becaue I thought he was dumb as a fence post. That hasn't changed, but now I know he is also dangerous and real threat to the country, the Constitution and the environment, and frankly to me personally because I am a person who tends to speak out about repressive regimes and erosion of rights.
I'm off my soapbox now and won't reply again. I know I won't change your mind but maybe somoene else reading this will pause and think about what a wasted vote will really mean in November 04.
Sure, people are making a statement and more power to them for doing it. But when a bus is barreling down on you at 60 MPH it is NOT the time to stand stubbornly in the crosswalk to make a statement that you have the right-of-way. Just as when the alternative is another 4 years of George W. Bush it is NOT the time to make a Green party statement that gets us all squashed under the Bush & Company bus yet again.
I agree with what you are saying, but unfortunatley for us the evidence doesn't support our beliefs. The reduction in the national speed limit to 55 mph from 65 mph after the 1970 (or so) oil embargo resulted in a significant drop in highway fatalities per mile driven. Don't have a reference for it, but it should be easy to google - it was widely reported at the time.
The police really don't expect traffic to go the speed limit. If everyone did it would increase traffic density to levels that would cause mopre accidents than speeding. Speeding is (to a point) actaully a good thing.
This was a small independent rental agency. They were sued by a person who claimed the contract did not make it plain that there would be outrageus penalties. The company also did not tell the renters they were using GPS to monitor their speed. They were using it to ehance their revenue stream.
The company had to refund the charges and were prohibited from using GPS to track speeders unless renters were clearly informed. Since no one in his right mind would agree to such a contract the company stopped the practice.
The threat to privacy and democracy by RFID is NOT overblown. It seems clear to me that the wide acceptance of RFID tags is a serious threat to privacy and even to the democratic form of government. Here is an interesting scenario:
You walk down a street and a government scanner in a van detects that you went into a gun shop (or an opposition political party office or Greenpeace or an abortion-rights office or right-to-life office... you take your pick). That scanner is connected to a national Homeland Security database (probably named something like "Patriot Scanning and Verification System") that identifies you and simultaneously associates all your RFID tags. From that point on anytime you go anywhere those RFID detectors around town know exactly who and where you are. Because all those tags embedded in your clothes have now been associated with your RFID-embedded credit card they don't even have to have personal information on them to identify you. The government can now tell who you hang out with (aka "known associates") by associating your companions' tags with yours. They also know what cities you visit and where you go while you are there.
It won't even be possible to remove or smash all your tags to escape the spying. Just the act of having NO tags would raise a flag and single you out.
Do you think it unlikely that the government won't have agents walking around with RFID loggers at unpopular (to them) political rallies identifying all the subversives?
Simply by entering your name in their computer the government will be able to tell where you have gone, what political rallies you have attended, what activist organizations you have visited, where you travelled, what you bought, who your associates are, and even when you didn't leave your house for a week (no hits). And they will be able to do this for every single person in the country!
Is it really not a concern to you that this can easily be done today? Right now the only thing keeping the ultimate police state from being available to any paranoid right-wing administration, agency or government is that we simply aren't carrying around many of these RFID tags yet.
The only reason you need powerpoint today is that everyone else uses it, and you wouldn't look cool enough if you used hand-drawn diagrams.
I agree with your post except for the above part. Most people use PP because they AREN"T cool and don't have an ounce of creativity in them. They wouldn't be able to present information in an interesting way if they had to. What PP does for them is level the playing field to a pitifully low common denominator, allowing them to 1)not be embarrassed and 2)present useless and biased information in a way that makes it look valid and useful.
Although it is no joking matter, I for one welcome our new government "Patriot Scanning System" overloards.
Seriously, this technology is so dangerous it is not possible to be paranoid about it. We're concerned about a technology that will allow governments to track all its citizens at will, without their permission or knowledge. Here is a scenario:
You are walking down a street and a passive RFID detector senses your card. The RFID sensor belongs to the Homeland Security Administration's new "Patriot Scanning System" and the data is fed to a government computer that says you, Joe Blow, is in front of the opposition political party's office (or the gun shop or the AIDS clinic, the police station, or the Right to Life office - you take your pick). And it does that thousands of times a day for thousands of people. It also knows who you are with so the government now knows your associates. The next time you go to a government building you are stopped and held for questioning because...? You went to a right-to-life meeting and then to a gun shop and then to a hardware store. All of those were perfectly legal actions, yet you now have a red flag on your name in the computer that shouts "potential terrorist".
You just won't carry credit cards, you say? Riggght, but even then so what? All the RFID tags in your clothes from Eddie Bauer or KMart will have RFID tags in them so the government computers can track you with those as well. All you have to do is walk by a single detector and all your RFID tags are thereafter associated with you forever, and each tag "infects" any new tags each time you walk by the government's "Patriot Scanning System".
The government can know whenever you go to an anti-war rally or an anti-abortion rally or a pro-abortion rally or an airport or a train station or a protest against the administration...or, or, or. Think about it - is it so outlandish to think of the government having agents walking through the crowds at political rallies gathering ID information from credit cards?
And PLEASE, don't anyone give me that absurd argument that "if you're not doing anything wrong why do you mind the government knowing everything you do?". I'm a patriot and that WHY I mind.
Yes, a jury can, but first it is extremly rare for one to do it; and second, that is NOT necessarily the end of it. The judge can find that the jury erred in law in their finding, against the weight of evidence, and can fully reverse it - not "nullify" it, actually "reverse" it.
The original poster was refering to an 8 inch by 10 inch digital back for the camera - not an 8x10 print.
That is why this is such a maddingly complex subject. Yes, in theory it seems you can just vote for another person, but in reality that can be throwing away your vote. Bush won in Florida because Ralph Nader drew more than enough traditional Democratic votes to make it a close race between Bush and Gore - and we all know what happened next. Nader never had a chance to be elected President and even the people who voted for him knew it. And here is something even more telling - Ralph Nader knew it too and STILL didn't throw his support behind the only person who could beat the Bush's in Florida. I'll never forgive him for it.
It unfortunate but true that voting for anyone other than his Democratic rival in 2004 is a vote FOR George Bush. All you Green Party folks out there - I BEG you keep it in mind that a blind vote for Green is a vote for Bush in 2004.
It might be the last thing on our minds until the aliens sue us and confiscate our planet.
Joking aside, copyright and how to profit from the information will come sooner or later after the shock has worn off. I give it three to six months.
This is subtle and I suppose technically true. However I don't agree that colleges shouldn't produce well-educated graduates having knowledge in areas other than their narrow speciality. Blacksmiths didn't attend "university" yet they needed to know something about wagons and wheels before they could band them in iron. They were blacksmiths, not wagon-wrights, and they still needed some understanding of wagon-making techniques in order not to totally screw it up. The wagon-wrights also had to know someting of the blacksmithing. It is exactly the same for developers and system administrators.