Believe it or not, taxes are generally GOOD things. You get your tax dollars back with interest. Taxes pay for things such as police and fire services and make things possible that we could never afford to do on our own. What do you think it would cost you to hire your own security person every time you went out, or build a road to town, or make sure that all the other cars on the road have working brakes - the list is nearly endless. I see your eamil is columbia.edu - you should like taxes since 99% of your education from K - 12 has been paid for by local and state taxes, and a large part of your Columbia education is subsidized right now I am sure. I don't have a problem with that - I just point out that we get those taxes back in the end in ways that appear transparent to us unless we stop to think about it.
The important issue is how to re-distribute that money and to keep the governments from wasting our tax dollars. The old guns or butter arguement. Although we need a strong military (after all we are the richest nation on Earth), personally I think the 120 billion dollars spent so far on the invasion of Iraq would have been better spent establishing a self-funding healthcare system for every man, woman and child in the US - the cost for either was about the same and we got that stupid war instead of universal healthcare.
There is a lot of interesting stuff in your post, but didn't you read the article? The main point of the article was that the well-known longevity benefits of restricted calorie intake could NOT be due to the oxidation theory of aging. The article described a study showing the benefits of the restricted calorie diet were gained within 48 hours and went away within 48 hours regardless of the age of the subject - effects that would not be possible if caused by the decades-long gradual accumulation of oxidation damage in cells.
You are right in theory, but it isn't so simple I think.
One of the terrible things the Republicans have managed to do is set themselves up as the guardians of America. Democrats are weak and unable to defend America according to the Republicans. Anyone who doesn't agree with them is a traitor (think I'm exaggerating? Read Ann Coulter). They have been distressingly effective at getting this message out even though it has no basis in truth. For the Dems to vote against the so-called Patriot Act would have played into the Rebublicans hands and they would have been labeled as un-American.
The Dems have to play a delicate game right now. They first need to change the feeling that to speak out against a "wartime" President is un-patriotic. Only then can they start to wrest back control of the country from the neocons who have hijacked it for their own and their rich cronies gain. In the time immediately after 9/11 it was really quite an accomplishment to get the sunset clauses into the Patriot Act. I give the Dems a lot of credit for that given the situation.
The mood in the country is finally changing and people are beginning to realize what Bush/Cheney/Ascroft/Rumsfeld is doing to the Constitution with their secret evidence, secret trials, cancellation of defendant's constitutional rights, denial of legal counsel and imprisonment without charge using the material witness laws. Now is the time to support the Democrats when they are at last becoming free to speak out in defense of the Constitution and not be called traitors for doing so. Don't jump to the fringe parties whatever you do - that is how Bush gained office (I don't use the term "elected" with this President). If Ralph Nader had not siphoned several thousand votes in Florida from the Democrats it would have been a clear Gore victory and we would have a different President today.
Right. This is another example of how to lie by telling the truth. AKA "SPIN".
Five million people got $20 tax cuts, while 50,000 people got $700,000 tax cuts. Clearly most of the tax cuts (five million) went to the lower end of the spectrum.
How about the New York Times as a source? More creditable? This is an actual tactic that one telemarketer used when defending against hundreds of complaints that they were billing for services people had not agreed to buy. They would record the phone calls and would use edited snippets to "prove" that the customer had, in fact, agreed to the service. Yhe customers usually ended up paying full or partial amounts to the marketer just to get it over with.
This tactic was VERY successful and worked well for many years against many scammed customers. You may like to pretend it is difficult to scam people this way, but in fact it is easy.
And you are 100% wrong that you can't "bill people" if they claim not to have received an item. Telemarketers can bill freely, the customers just don't have to pay. But of course what marketers count on is that many people just pay the money to get you off their backs after dunning phone calls, letters, and threats to ruin credit. What you are also conveniently forgetting is that most of these scams are for services, not for delevery of a tangible good. It is a lot harder to prove that the service people were charged for was not approved by them - particularly when the telemarketer has a voice recording of the person saying "yes, I'd like that" in response to the question "would you like to be a millionaire?".
This article reminds me of the famous Bloom County cartoon where Opus ends up muttering "Another beautiful theory blown to hell by an ugly fact". There are several ugly facts for this project.
First, the statements by the developer seem to be too extreme. She expects 100% efficiency?! If that were true then THAT would be the big story, not these window things. Getting solar cells to 100% would be an incredible breakthrough that would change the world overnight (or overday since they are solar). Saying "Oh, I think we can get to 100%" is either naive or deceitful. Looking for funding are we?
Second - these things are complicated! Complicated = expensive. Installing a $10,000 - $50,000 window to generate a few hundred watts of DC is absurd. Complicated also means high maintenance and unreliable operation.
Third, these windows appear to be about a foot thick to accomodate the moving reflectors. Dedicating that much square footage in new construction would very costly. Retrofitting existing buildings would be basically impossible.
Fourth, there is a major inefficency created by putting the cells behind a vertical sheet of glass. Light-loss due to reflection of the incident solar radiation would vary between 5% and 70+% (depending on the angle of incidence to the surface of the glass) before any light even got to the collector. The amount of light reaching the cells would be reduced considerably even if the collector cell could miraculously acheive 100% efficiency. The most loss would occur in the summer (just when you need it) when the sun scribes its highest arc across the sky. Vertical, reflective solar panels produce almost no power in this situation. The horizontal version shown is better but has its own problems: dirt, snow, leaves, etc. Think about it - she is placing the sun-following trackers behind a vertical, non-moving reflective panel. Sheesh! The efficiency of this thing is going to be horrible.
I think the most favorable comment to make about this idea is that it is similar to the concept cars the automakers bring to autoshows. Never intended to be made, but they show some interesting ideas.
I am not sure how I am going to deal with RF tags telling the stores what I have in my shopping bags as I leave the store. Stores will have no shame in this area. The increasing tendency of retail stores to search customer's bags as they leave the store is a good analog. They have no right to do this without the customer's consent unless they have actually seen you shoplift, but the security guards at the door are seldom told this so the situation sometimes becomes tense. I am constantly amazed at all the people who simply let themselves be searched for the privilege of walking into a store. Will this acquiescence to invasion of privacy extend to RF tags? Should it?
I never allow my bags to be searched by store security. Once I have paid for my purchases the items belong to me and not the store, including the bag the store gives me to carry them in. I will not allow my property to be searched. Datavision in NYC is particularly bad about this and I have been called names and shouted at for refusing to be searched. They have blocked my exit on several occasions which technically constitutes illegal detention. Although I make a point of remaining calm and reasonable during these confrontations I suspect that one day they are going to lay hands on me at which point there will be big trouble.
They say I have to let my bags be searched because they have a Company Policy to search all bags - how absurd. They think I am weird when I tell them that I can't be searched because I have a personal policy of not being searched by store personnel. Being the reasonable person I am I used to let them look at the receipt, but I don't even do that any more after they started refusing to give it back to me. Are they soon going to be able to search my bags and person electronically with RF tags with or without my permission?
Stores often try to justify their actions by posting a sign at the entrance saying they reserve the right to search all bags. So what? Posting a sign saying they want to violate customer's rights does not mean they can do it. They could easily post a sign "reserving the right" to strip-search all customers leaving the store, but that doesn't mean they can do it. Will we soon see signs saying "We reserve the right to electronically catalogue all items on your person as you leave the store"?
IMHO the big issue with RF tags is the opportunity for misuse by stores and governmental agencies. If we don't start saying NO now it will end up like it is with bag searches. The type of information on these tags shoud be restricted. Should Eddie Bauer know that I just bought shirts at Land's End? Or for that matter that I just had my prescription for insomnia filled at the local pharmacy? Or that I was in a northern Detroit suburb last August because that's where and when I bought my pants at an Eddie Bauer? The opportunities for misuse are practically limitless with this technology.
Silicon is the element, and does not cause silicosis. The silicon used in electronics is extremely pure, constains no silica, and poses no risk of silicosis.
Even if the spray-on computer particles were made up of hazardous materials I suspect the risk to the patient would be mitigated by two factors: 1)they are "sand-sized" not "dust-sized" and therefore are not respirable, and 2)they will probably be expensive enough that the researchers won't be producing a lot of overspray. I just can't see the doctors using a Sears Crafstman paint spray gun to apply this thing. But then again, the lifetime warranty would come in handy.
How wonderful for you. However mine weren't working and neither were they working for about 10 million other folks INCLUDING fire and police. Nothing major happened on top of the power outage, but what if it had? what if a plane crashed or there was a large fire in a downtown area and emergency resources had to be coordinated? Then HAM operators could very well have saved your ass.
And on another point, why on earth were you trying to call Detroit Edison? Didn't you know the power was out? did you think maybe they had missed noticing it?
That is a very interesting point that has escaped the attention of many a corporate lawyer. Because you received it, it WAS addressed to you. Almost all the corporations have this wording in their confidentiality/privilege statements and they should know better. It should probably say "...to whom it was intended."
I get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that all these corporations are smugly thinking they have CYA coverage when they really don't!
The legal statement is primarily intended to preserve legal privilege so that any confidential information in the message can still be claimed to be confidential. They are just saying that if you got this message and you are not the recipient, then it was a mistake. It isn't really a threat. They have to be able to say in court that it was an accidental release of privileged information and they said so in the message.
These notices are regularlyappended to any and all email messages by corporations. If they email the corner deli for a lunch order this gets appended to the bottom of their message. The real purpose of statements like this is CYA. In case one of their attorneys accidentally sends out their entire legal strategy for an upcoming case to the corner deli it gives them some chance to keep it out of court at a later date.
If you were to put the US at its most free, and set that as benchmark 100, and the RPC and it's least free, set that as 0. Then you could say that the US is at least a 95 and the RPC is a 10.
If you put the US at 100 and PRC at 0 then the US is 100 and PRC is 0. But you made these numbers up anyway so they mean nothing. The statement of the previous poster that the US is getting more totalitarian and the PRC is getting less totaliatrian is very true.
We still have protection from arbitrary arrest
Bzzzzzt! Wrong! We USED to have freedom from arbitrary arrest. These days the government can and does detain people indefinately without charges and without access to attorneys or family. The governemt frequently will not even tell the families the person is being held. There is no evidence, only a "suspicion". There are secret trials where neither the defendants nor their defense attorneys are able to see the evidence against them, and the defendants are not able to face their accusers as guaranteed in the Constitution. If the government gets a judge who demands the defendants get their Consitutional rights the government drops the charges, calls them an enemy combatant, and holds a secret military tribunal where defendants have no constitutional rights at all.
I used to be proud of America, but now we are a nation that tortures its prisoners, calling them enemy combatants and denying them any rights. Think I am making this up? US authorities frequently deprive prisoners of sleep for days, shine bright lights in their eyes, hang them from hooks so they have to stand on their toes for hours, and keep them in solitary confinement for weeks (the infamous prison camp "cooler").
And don't even get me started on the blood, electric shock, and screaming kind of torture. Maybe our people don't hold the knife, but they hand over the suspect to countries that will do it willingly and then use the information gained. How is that better? Why do you think so many prisners are being held at "an undisclosed location overseas"?
Are you aware that the government just declared that Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is not American soil, and as a result US laws do not apply? As a result they are free to do whatever they want for as long as they want to the detainees held there without any nasty little legal or constitutional issues.
Last month I saw pictures in the news of families lined up outside a US governent facility here in the US asking if their relatives were being held there by the Homeland Security department. Our great administration wouldn't even tell them yes or no. The US now has its own group of "disappeards" - citizens who just vanish off the street, kidnapped by the government and held with no charges. They call them "material witnesses", but what a crock. I was ashamed for America.
Don't beleive me? Here are two of many references... http://www.jeanhay.com/COLUMNS/TROU BLING.HTM http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.h tml?res=F50 917F8395F0C778CDDA10894DA404482
And it's nearly impossible for me to be succesfully sued for libel....
What about the other side of that coin...what if your reputation is destroyed? Why is it good that it is almost impossible for you to correct that wrong by suing the perpetrator for libel? Libel is the publication of false, derogatory information. Explain to me again why not being able to correct that in the courts a good thing?
You and a lot of others need to wake up and take a hard look at the direction the Bush administration is taking this country. Most of the things I was taught in grammer school that made this country great that were GUARANTEED to us by the Constitution are now gone.
The average/. reader is an idiot. Half of/. readers are below average. Are you scared yet?
Not correct. Half the general population is, by definition, below average [in intelligence]. However, there is no information as to where the/. population falls within the general population.
I suspect that the average/.er falls on the north side of the intelligence curve. They are often poorly educated (its an age-related schooling thing - it takes time) and get their facts wrong as a result, but that's a different story.
The idea that you have to talk loudly to be heard over a cell phone is a very common misconception. What is difficult to do over a cell phone is hear the other party. Most people unconsciously translate this into the idea tht they can't be heard either - and talk loudly as a result. Try it next time - speak softly into your cell phone - no one on the other end will complain.
One thing that might postpone implementation is that the incidences of air-rage are increasing, and the airlines are very sensitive to it. Arguements between passengers are a very scary thing to airlines and crews and cellphone use is likely to increase the incidence of very annoyed people on board..
If passengers are allowed to use cell phones during flight it will be a nightmare. In fact, I think it will be nightmareish if they're allowed to use them on the ground. Imagine a long ground delay and having to listen to other people's personal phone calls for an hour or two while sitting on the tarmac. I'm already cringing at the thought.
She paid for it (or her company did), she just did not write a check for it.
Opera is essenially a very good shareware product with a free option. I've paid for plenty of shareware products and I imagine the vast majority of/.ers have too. There is a very active shareware community - so someone must be buying inexpensive software. I have paid for Opera on two of my own computers, but continue to use the free version on my office machines - no big deal.
I certainly hope Opera is not doomed because it is a nice alternative browser that does not send my bucks to MS. I use it almost exclusively. I am very happy that its share of the browser market has been steadily increasing for years and has been picking up a lot of momentum over the past two.
The NYTimes is not a source of SPAM. I have been registered on NYTimes website for many years now and I have never received a single piece of spam associated with that account. How do I know? I used a completely different user name than I normally use and a unique email account name when I registered.
The purpose for registration is to get you to state that you are using it for personal reasons and not for commercial purposes.
I think the point was that this sort of thing would be almost trivial to do, and would up the scale of terrorist fear in the country by an order of magnitude. The 500 lunchboxes was just one example of a thousand things that could be done. It would be impossible to protect the millions of malls, stores, and schools around the country from random acts of terror.
Getting back to the original post, it seems that the dissertation identifying critical yet vulnerable information and financial choke-points makes it clear that there are three areas of attack in the US, listed here in decreasing order of difficulty: 1)single major attacks on the financial centers themselves, (for example Manhattan) 2)focused attacks on the choke points identified in the dissertation, 3)many small attacks around the nation on shopping malls and schools, causing severe economic problems as people stayed home
My point is that there are far too many targets to protect. The US has to deal with this issue at a more basic level than posting guards and restricting information. We have thought too long as a nation that were invulnerable because we had nuclear weapons and smart bombs. We MUST start thinking about what effect our actions and policies have on others around the globe. In the end that is the only way to stop terrorist attacks.
US laws apply in the UK if you are a US citizen. A US citizen who breaks a US law in another country where that activity is legal CAN be prosecuted in the US for the act. This policy was originally applied in response to people who would travel to Asian countries to have sex with children, but it applies pretty much across the board.
Re:This would be really sweet mounted on a car bum
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Giant "Inkjet Printer"
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And of course you could ask Microsoft how painting on streets would go over with local governments. They applied sticky butterfly advertising to the streets and sidewalks of New York City last year and then had to pay people to go around scraping them off when the city said no way.
Parking lots (advertising) and driveways (yard art) might be a better application than streets and highways for your bumber matrix printer.
Put a pivot point near one end of it and you could swivel it vertically to paint along a wall. Good for commercial advertising or sale notices if done with temporary ink.
I read your linked articles but all I saw was "maybe", "could", "might have been". All three of these articles are clearly supposition and speculation. One of the articles stated that un-named associates of Lewinsky SAID she said she said. That's pretty weak "evidence".
quote Lewinskyâ(TM)s report of a private encounter with the president was detailed in todayâ(TM)s Washington Post and New York Times, which cited unnamed sources, including one identified as an associate of Lewinskyâ(TM)s... The newspapers were both somewhat vague in their explanations of what sources they were using and how they would have known this information. endquote.
I'm not embarassing myself. I just refuse to jump on the Ken Starr-Newt Gingrich-right wing "get Clinton at any cost" bandwagon.
I'm not saying that Clinton was the most moral of men in his personal life (far from it), but I do NOT believe he should have been removed from office - please don't put words in my mouth. It was the Republicans, through their agent Linda Tripp, who escalated a consensual relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton and basically caused the whole mess. After 4 years and 40 million dollars this was all Starr could come up with!
And wasn't Newt a lying holier-than-thou hypocrite during all the time he was condeming Clinton for his amoral affair? Oh, he fessed up to his own affair and illegitmate child, but only AFTER he was caught - I don't give many points for that. And what about Linda Tripp posing as Lewinsky's friend while all the time secretly recording private conversations as a GOP spy! The GOP doesn't have a damned thing to learn from Clinton about amoral behavior.
Dictator for Life is correct - impeachment is a process, not a conviction. However I don't think the incorrect use of the term during the Clinton era was done purposefully to imply conviction. It is much more likely that it was a result of sloppy thinking on the media's part and the equally sloppy thinking on the public's part not to find out for themselves.
Slick Willie was the first President to be impeached in over a century (and only the second one at that).
Yes, and Andrew Johnson's impeachment was just as politically motivated as Clinton's. Nixon should have been impeached for authorizing a break-in, and would have been had he not resigned first.
...he was also guilty of conducting an affair with another subordinate - Lewinsky. If you can't see the obvious relevance of the Lewinsky matter to the Jones case...
The Lewinsky affair was completely consensual by both parties - it had nothing to do with P. Jones, really! A more pertinent pertinence question is 'how is the Monica Lewinsky issue pertinent to Whitewater?' Ken Starr was given the Special Prosecutor role to investigate a real estate transaction in Arkansas called Whitewater. After spending more than $40 million taxpayer dollars and years of investigation by a team of rabid Clinton-haters who's sole goal was to destroy Clinton, all they could come up with was a BJ in the Oval Office!? If all the investigatory power of Ken Starr's office couldn't come up with anything then Clinton has to be pretty darned clean. I doubt you or I could stand up to a $40 million investigation into every facit of our lives.
he was also guilty, guilty, guilty of suborning perjury
If my memory serves me, one of Clinton's staff called Lowensky and asked what she was going to say. That is a stretch for "suborning perjury" even for a Clinton hater. As for committing perjury - if Clinton asked for a specific definition of "sex" and the judge said "intercourse" then he did not commit perjury when he said he did not have sex with Monica Lowensky. In the court room it was not a lie, but he went too far when he said the same thing on television to the American public. That WAS a lie because there was no special legal definition in the minds of the audience.
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Believe it or not, taxes are generally GOOD things. You get your tax dollars back with interest. Taxes pay for things such as police and fire services and make things possible that we could never afford to do on our own. What do you think it would cost you to hire your own security person every time you went out, or build a road to town, or make sure that all the other cars on the road have working brakes - the list is nearly endless. I see your eamil is columbia.edu - you should like taxes since 99% of your education from K - 12 has been paid for by local and state taxes, and a large part of your Columbia education is subsidized right now I am sure. I don't have a problem with that - I just point out that we get those taxes back in the end in ways that appear transparent to us unless we stop to think about it.
The important issue is how to re-distribute that money and to keep the governments from wasting our tax dollars. The old guns or butter arguement. Although we need a strong military (after all we are the richest nation on Earth), personally I think the 120 billion dollars spent so far on the invasion of Iraq would have been better spent establishing a self-funding healthcare system for every man, woman and child in the US - the cost for either was about the same and we got that stupid war instead of universal healthcare.
There is a lot of interesting stuff in your post, but didn't you read the article? The main point of the article was that the well-known longevity benefits of restricted calorie intake could NOT be due to the oxidation theory of aging. The article described a study showing the benefits of the restricted calorie diet were gained within 48 hours and went away within 48 hours regardless of the age of the subject - effects that would not be possible if caused by the decades-long gradual accumulation of oxidation damage in cells.
You are right in theory, but it isn't so simple I think. One of the terrible things the Republicans have managed to do is set themselves up as the guardians of America. Democrats are weak and unable to defend America according to the Republicans. Anyone who doesn't agree with them is a traitor (think I'm exaggerating? Read Ann Coulter). They have been distressingly effective at getting this message out even though it has no basis in truth. For the Dems to vote against the so-called Patriot Act would have played into the Rebublicans hands and they would have been labeled as un-American. The Dems have to play a delicate game right now. They first need to change the feeling that to speak out against a "wartime" President is un-patriotic. Only then can they start to wrest back control of the country from the neocons who have hijacked it for their own and their rich cronies gain. In the time immediately after 9/11 it was really quite an accomplishment to get the sunset clauses into the Patriot Act. I give the Dems a lot of credit for that given the situation. The mood in the country is finally changing and people are beginning to realize what Bush/Cheney/Ascroft/Rumsfeld is doing to the Constitution with their secret evidence, secret trials, cancellation of defendant's constitutional rights, denial of legal counsel and imprisonment without charge using the material witness laws. Now is the time to support the Democrats when they are at last becoming free to speak out in defense of the Constitution and not be called traitors for doing so. Don't jump to the fringe parties whatever you do - that is how Bush gained office (I don't use the term "elected" with this President). If Ralph Nader had not siphoned several thousand votes in Florida from the Democrats it would have been a clear Gore victory and we would have a different President today.
Right. This is another example of how to lie by telling the truth. AKA "SPIN".
Five million people got $20 tax cuts, while 50,000 people got $700,000 tax cuts. Clearly most of the tax cuts (five million) went to the lower end of the spectrum.
I made the numbers up, but you get the point.
How about the New York Times as a source? More creditable? This is an actual tactic that one telemarketer used when defending against hundreds of complaints that they were billing for services people had not agreed to buy. They would record the phone calls and would use edited snippets to "prove" that the customer had, in fact, agreed to the service. Yhe customers usually ended up paying full or partial amounts to the marketer just to get it over with.
This tactic was VERY successful and worked well for many years against many scammed customers. You may like to pretend it is difficult to scam people this way, but in fact it is easy.
And you are 100% wrong that you can't "bill people" if they claim not to have received an item. Telemarketers can bill freely, the customers just don't have to pay. But of course what marketers count on is that many people just pay the money to get you off their backs after dunning phone calls, letters, and threats to ruin credit. What you are also conveniently forgetting is that most of these scams are for services, not for delevery of a tangible good. It is a lot harder to prove that the service people were charged for was not approved by them - particularly when the telemarketer has a voice recording of the person saying "yes, I'd like that" in response to the question "would you like to be a millionaire?".
So go for it. What's keeping you?
This article reminds me of the famous Bloom County cartoon where Opus ends up muttering "Another beautiful theory blown to hell by an ugly fact". There are several ugly facts for this project.
First, the statements by the developer seem to be too extreme. She expects 100% efficiency?! If that were true then THAT would be the big story, not these window things. Getting solar cells to 100% would be an incredible breakthrough that would change the world overnight (or overday since they are solar). Saying "Oh, I think we can get to 100%" is either naive or deceitful. Looking for funding are we?
Second - these things are complicated! Complicated = expensive. Installing a $10,000 - $50,000 window to generate a few hundred watts of DC is absurd. Complicated also means high maintenance and unreliable operation.
Third, these windows appear to be about a foot thick to accomodate the moving reflectors. Dedicating that much square footage in new construction would very costly. Retrofitting existing buildings would be basically impossible.
Fourth, there is a major inefficency created by putting the cells behind a vertical sheet of glass. Light-loss due to reflection of the incident solar radiation would vary between 5% and 70+% (depending on the angle of incidence to the surface of the glass) before any light even got to the collector. The amount of light reaching the cells would be reduced considerably even if the collector cell could miraculously acheive 100% efficiency. The most loss would occur in the summer (just when you need it) when the sun scribes its highest arc across the sky. Vertical, reflective solar panels produce almost no power in this situation. The horizontal version shown is better but has its own problems: dirt, snow, leaves, etc. Think about it - she is placing the sun-following trackers behind a vertical, non-moving reflective panel. Sheesh! The efficiency of this thing is going to be horrible.
I think the most favorable comment to make about this idea is that it is similar to the concept cars the automakers bring to autoshows. Never intended to be made, but they show some interesting ideas.
I am not sure how I am going to deal with RF tags telling the stores what I have in my shopping bags as I leave the store. Stores will have no shame in this area. The increasing tendency of retail stores to search customer's bags as they leave the store is a good analog. They have no right to do this without the customer's consent unless they have actually seen you shoplift, but the security guards at the door are seldom told this so the situation sometimes becomes tense. I am constantly amazed at all the people who simply let themselves be searched for the privilege of walking into a store. Will this acquiescence to invasion of privacy extend to RF tags? Should it?
I never allow my bags to be searched by store security. Once I have paid for my purchases the items belong to me and not the store, including the bag the store gives me to carry them in. I will not allow my property to be searched. Datavision in NYC is particularly bad about this and I have been called names and shouted at for refusing to be searched. They have blocked my exit on several occasions which technically constitutes illegal detention. Although I make a point of remaining calm and reasonable during these confrontations I suspect that one day they are going to lay hands on me at which point there will be big trouble.
They say I have to let my bags be searched because they have a Company Policy to search all bags - how absurd. They think I am weird when I tell them that I can't be searched because I have a personal policy of not being searched by store personnel. Being the reasonable person I am I used to let them look at the receipt, but I don't even do that any more after they started refusing to give it back to me. Are they soon going to be able to search my bags and person electronically with RF tags with or without my permission?
Stores often try to justify their actions by posting a sign at the entrance saying they reserve the right to search all bags. So what? Posting a sign saying they want to violate customer's rights does not mean they can do it. They could easily post a sign "reserving the right" to strip-search all customers leaving the store, but that doesn't mean they can do it. Will we soon see signs saying "We reserve the right to electronically catalogue all items on your person as you leave the store"?
IMHO the big issue with RF tags is the opportunity for misuse by stores and governmental agencies. If we don't start saying NO now it will end up like it is with bag searches. The type of information on these tags shoud be restricted. Should Eddie Bauer know that I just bought shirts at Land's End? Or for that matter that I just had my prescription for insomnia filled at the local pharmacy? Or that I was in a northern Detroit suburb last August because that's where and when I bought my pants at an Eddie Bauer? The opportunities for misuse are practically limitless with this technology.
That's why I never give my real email address to anyone.
It was a joke. If he never gives out his email address...duh.
Silicon is the element, and does not cause silicosis. The silicon used in electronics is extremely pure, constains no silica, and poses no risk of silicosis.
Even if the spray-on computer particles were made up of hazardous materials I suspect the risk to the patient would be mitigated by two factors: 1)they are "sand-sized" not "dust-sized" and therefore are not respirable, and 2)they will probably be expensive enough that the researchers won't be producing a lot of overspray. I just can't see the doctors using a Sears Crafstman paint spray gun to apply this thing. But then again, the lifetime warranty would come in handy.
How wonderful for you. However mine weren't working and neither were they working for about 10 million other folks INCLUDING fire and police. Nothing major happened on top of the power outage, but what if it had? what if a plane crashed or there was a large fire in a downtown area and emergency resources had to be coordinated? Then HAM operators could very well have saved your ass.
And on another point, why on earth were you trying to call Detroit Edison? Didn't you know the power was out? did you think maybe they had missed noticing it?
That is a very interesting point that has escaped the attention of many a corporate lawyer. Because you received it, it WAS addressed to you. Almost all the corporations have this wording in their confidentiality/privilege statements and they should know better. It should probably say "...to whom it was intended." I get a warm and fuzzy feeling knowing that all these corporations are smugly thinking they have CYA coverage when they really don't!
The legal statement is primarily intended to preserve legal privilege so that any confidential information in the message can still be claimed to be confidential. They are just saying that if you got this message and you are not the recipient, then it was a mistake. It isn't really a threat. They have to be able to say in court that it was an accidental release of privileged information and they said so in the message.
These notices are regularlyappended to any and all email messages by corporations. If they email the corner deli for a lunch order this gets appended to the bottom of their message. The real purpose of statements like this is CYA. In case one of their attorneys accidentally sends out their entire legal strategy for an upcoming case to the corner deli it gives them some chance to keep it out of court at a later date.
If you were to put the US at its most free, and set that as benchmark 100, and the RPC and it's least free, set that as 0. Then you could say that the US is at least a 95 and the RPC is a 10.
U BLING.HTMh tml?res=F50 917F8395F0C778CDDA10894DA404482
If you put the US at 100 and PRC at 0 then the US is 100 and PRC is 0. But you made these numbers up anyway so they mean nothing. The statement of the previous poster that the US is getting more totalitarian and the PRC is getting less totaliatrian is very true.
We still have protection from arbitrary arrest
Bzzzzzt! Wrong! We USED to have freedom from arbitrary arrest. These days the government can and does detain people indefinately without charges and without access to attorneys or family. The governemt frequently will not even tell the families the person is being held. There is no evidence, only a "suspicion". There are secret trials where neither the defendants nor their defense attorneys are able to see the evidence against them, and the defendants are not able to face their accusers as guaranteed in the Constitution. If the government gets a judge who demands the defendants get their Consitutional rights the government drops the charges, calls them an enemy combatant, and holds a secret military tribunal where defendants have no constitutional rights at all.
I used to be proud of America, but now we are a nation that tortures its prisoners, calling them enemy combatants and denying them any rights. Think I am making this up? US authorities frequently deprive prisoners of sleep for days, shine bright lights in their eyes, hang them from hooks so they have to stand on their toes for hours, and keep them in solitary confinement for weeks (the infamous prison camp "cooler").
And don't even get me started on the blood, electric shock, and screaming kind of torture. Maybe our people don't hold the knife, but they hand over the suspect to countries that will do it willingly and then use the information gained. How is that better? Why do you think so many prisners are being held at "an undisclosed location overseas"?
Are you aware that the government just declared that Guantanamo Bay Naval Base is not American soil, and as a result US laws do not apply? As a result they are free to do whatever they want for as long as they want to the detainees held there without any nasty little legal or constitutional issues.
Last month I saw pictures in the news of families lined up outside a US governent facility here in the US asking if their relatives were being held there by the Homeland Security department. Our great administration wouldn't even tell them yes or no. The US now has its own group of "disappeards" - citizens who just vanish off the street, kidnapped by the government and held with no charges. They call them "material witnesses", but what a crock. I was ashamed for America.
Don't beleive me? Here are two of many references...
http://www.jeanhay.com/COLUMNS/TRO
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.
And it's nearly impossible for me to be succesfully sued for libel....
What about the other side of that coin...what if your reputation is destroyed? Why is it good that it is almost impossible for you to correct that wrong by suing the perpetrator for libel? Libel is the publication of false, derogatory information. Explain to me again why not being able to correct that in the courts a good thing?
You and a lot of others need to wake up and take a hard look at the direction the Bush administration is taking this country. Most of the things I was taught in grammer school that made this country great that were GUARANTEED to us by the Constitution are now gone.
Not correct. Half the general population is, by definition, below average [in intelligence]. However, there is no information as to where the /. population falls within the general population.
I suspect that the average /.er falls on the north side of the intelligence curve. They are often poorly educated (its an age-related schooling thing - it takes time) and get their facts wrong as a result, but that's a different story.
The idea that you have to talk loudly to be heard over a cell phone is a very common misconception. What is difficult to do over a cell phone is hear the other party. Most people unconsciously translate this into the idea tht they can't be heard either - and talk loudly as a result. Try it next time - speak softly into your cell phone - no one on the other end will complain.
One thing that might postpone implementation is that the incidences of air-rage are increasing, and the airlines are very sensitive to it. Arguements between passengers are a very scary thing to airlines and crews and cellphone use is likely to increase the incidence of very annoyed people on board..
If passengers are allowed to use cell phones during flight it will be a nightmare. In fact, I think it will be nightmareish if they're allowed to use them on the ground. Imagine a long ground delay and having to listen to other people's personal phone calls for an hour or two while sitting on the tarmac. I'm already cringing at the thought.
To be correct, your rant should have been written as "One DOES NOT say...", and "One DOES NOT start...", as opposed to your "You DO NOT..."
I see your point, however. His grammer does suck.
But let's face it - you ain't gonna win no spellin' or grammer prizes neither, Bubba.
Opera is essenially a very good shareware product with a free option. I've paid for plenty of shareware products and I imagine the vast majority of /.ers have too. There is a very active shareware community - so someone must be buying inexpensive software. I have paid for Opera on two of my own computers, but continue to use the free version on my office machines - no big deal.
I certainly hope Opera is not doomed because it is a nice alternative browser that does not send my bucks to MS. I use it almost exclusively. I am very happy that its share of the browser market has been steadily increasing for years and has been picking up a lot of momentum over the past two.
Flamebait!? You've got to be kidding.
The NYTimes is not a source of SPAM. I have been registered on NYTimes website for many years now and I have never received a single piece of spam associated with that account. How do I know? I used a completely different user name than I normally use and a unique email account name when I registered.
The purpose for registration is to get you to state that you are using it for personal reasons and not for commercial purposes.
I think the point was that this sort of thing would be almost trivial to do, and would up the scale of terrorist fear in the country by an order of magnitude. The 500 lunchboxes was just one example of a thousand things that could be done. It would be impossible to protect the millions of malls, stores, and schools around the country from random acts of terror.
Getting back to the original post, it seems that the dissertation identifying critical yet vulnerable information and financial choke-points makes it clear that there are three areas of attack in the US, listed here in decreasing order of difficulty:
1)single major attacks on the financial centers themselves, (for example Manhattan)
2)focused attacks on the choke points identified in the dissertation,
3)many small attacks around the nation on shopping malls and schools, causing severe economic problems as people stayed home
My point is that there are far too many targets to protect. The US has to deal with this issue at a more basic level than posting guards and restricting information. We have thought too long as a nation that were invulnerable because we had nuclear weapons and smart bombs. We MUST start thinking about what effect our actions and policies have on others around the globe. In the end that is the only way to stop terrorist attacks.
US laws apply in the UK if you are a US citizen. A US citizen who breaks a US law in another country where that activity is legal CAN be prosecuted in the US for the act. This policy was originally applied in response to people who would travel to Asian countries to have sex with children, but it applies pretty much across the board.
And of course you could ask Microsoft how painting on streets would go over with local governments. They applied sticky butterfly advertising to the streets and sidewalks of New York City last year and then had to pay people to go around scraping them off when the city said no way.
Parking lots (advertising) and driveways (yard art) might be a better application than streets and highways for your bumber matrix printer.
Put a pivot point near one end of it and you could swivel it vertically to paint along a wall. Good for commercial advertising or sale notices if done with temporary ink.
quote Lewinskyâ(TM)s report of a private encounter with the president was detailed in todayâ(TM)s Washington Post and New York Times, which cited unnamed sources, including one identified as an associate of Lewinskyâ(TM)s... The newspapers were both somewhat vague in their explanations of what sources they were using and how they would have known this information. endquote.
I'm not embarassing myself. I just refuse to jump on the Ken Starr-Newt Gingrich-right wing "get Clinton at any cost" bandwagon.
I'm not saying that Clinton was the most moral of men in his personal life (far from it), but I do NOT believe he should have been removed from office - please don't put words in my mouth. It was the Republicans, through their agent Linda Tripp, who escalated a consensual relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton and basically caused the whole mess. After 4 years and 40 million dollars this was all Starr could come up with!
And wasn't Newt a lying holier-than-thou hypocrite during all the time he was condeming Clinton for his amoral affair? Oh, he fessed up to his own affair and illegitmate child, but only AFTER he was caught - I don't give many points for that. And what about Linda Tripp posing as Lewinsky's friend while all the time secretly recording private conversations as a GOP spy! The GOP doesn't have a damned thing to learn from Clinton about amoral behavior.
Slick Willie was the first President to be impeached in over a century (and only the second one at that).
Yes, and Andrew Johnson's impeachment was just as politically motivated as Clinton's. Nixon should have been impeached for authorizing a break-in, and would have been had he not resigned first.
The Lewinsky affair was completely consensual by both parties - it had nothing to do with P. Jones, really! A more pertinent pertinence question is 'how is the Monica Lewinsky issue pertinent to Whitewater?' Ken Starr was given the Special Prosecutor role to investigate a real estate transaction in Arkansas called Whitewater. After spending more than $40 million taxpayer dollars and years of investigation by a team of rabid Clinton-haters who's sole goal was to destroy Clinton, all they could come up with was a BJ in the Oval Office!? If all the investigatory power of Ken Starr's office couldn't come up with anything then Clinton has to be pretty darned clean. I doubt you or I could stand up to a $40 million investigation into every facit of our lives.
he was also guilty, guilty, guilty of suborning perjury
If my memory serves me, one of Clinton's staff called Lowensky and asked what she was going to say. That is a stretch for "suborning perjury" even for a Clinton hater. As for committing perjury - if Clinton asked for a specific definition of "sex" and the judge said "intercourse" then he did not commit perjury when he said he did not have sex with Monica Lowensky. In the court room it was not a lie, but he went too far when he said the same thing on television to the American public. That WAS a lie because there was no special legal definition in the minds of the audience.