Motors in the wheels?... How they hell is this a new idea?
It's an ancient idea in internet time. They were talking about this back in the 1950s.
It's also a rotten idea. The more mass in each wheel, the more forward momentum is converted to vertical momentum in the suspension as the wheel follows irregularities in the road, then converted to heat as the suspension damps the bounce. This is one of the major sources of energy loss that must be made up by prime-mover power.
I.e.: Heavier wheels, lower mileage. That's why even electric cars with independent motors on each wheel put the motors on the frame and connect them with axles and CV joints, despite the considerable increase in moving parts count and expense.
NASA designing a car? Why does this remind me of BART and AMTRAK? In both cases aeronautical engineers were hired to redesign a surface vehicle (despite their experience with surface travel being limited to things like landing gear, used for a tiny percentage of each flight). In both cases they threw out more than a century of engineering solutions and started from scratch. And in both cases they ended up with an expensive deisgn that had rotten ride. (In BART's case new cars now cost six MILLION each and even at that price only one manufacturer - located in France - is willing to build them.)
... and put solar cells on the roof of it. Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home.
Not the AC - also another power hog. The stereo, yes.
You need acres of solar cells to power a commuter car - even an extremely efficient one. Putting some on the car itself can actually be counter-productive, unless you only plan to use it once every few months or so. You may have to burn more power to tote them around than they produce.
Now a moderate sized WINDMILL in a good wind area might actually be able to power short-commute usage of a high-mileage plug-in hybrid. (Not on the car, of course, but near the garage.)
At least one "system like OnStar" (allegedly not OnStar itself) has been used by an investigative agency to bug an alleged crook's car. (Such systems are, after all, remote-controlled cell speakerphones.)
In one case the agency bugged a car for a month, until the operators of the system demanded they cease and desist because the monopolization of the channel was imparing their emergency service. (Not to mention that, if the buggee had been involved in an actual emergeny, hitting the button would have made a "beep" on the agency's tape rather than bringing the aid he was paying for.)
Now if this system is deployed I can imagine some inter-agency foulups, as cops pull over the bugged cars to ticket the drivers.
Red diesel isn't taxed, the only use I've ever had for it is when the boiler ran out of fuel in the middle of the night!
It's also used for marine engines. For instance: Our little sailboat has an auxiliary diesel engine we use to get it in and out of the dock, or as an emergency backup for wind-propulsion problems. It burns no-road-tax dyed diesel fuel from a station at a marina.
We only go through a galon a year or less. But power boats, larger sailboats with auxiliaries, and commercial shipping can go through a LOT. No point in road-taxing them. Most won't even fit on a trailer. Especially the big liners, ferries, container ships, and tankers. B-)
Taxes are very seldom taken "for nothing", they are usually recycled into services for those who paid the taxes.
Unfortunately, once the government gets its hands on money, it generally loots it for other purposes than the one used to justify collecting it.
California's fuel taxes and tolls are particularly bad examples: Both the bridge funds and the fuel taxes have been looted to support politically-correct "transportation related" projects such as public mass transit systems (which, in northern CA, are so poorly organized that they're nearly useless).
In the case of the Bay Bridge this was so extreme that when it came time to do an earthquake retrofit there was nothing to do it with. So they raised the tolls on ALL the bridges in the area (most too far away for the traffic to be related) - by a factor of several - mainly to pay for the Bay Bridge work.
Caltrans in the SF bay area also deliberately takes a long time on road projects and otherwise impedes automobile traffic (and drastically lower its fuel efficiency as a side-effect) in an attempt to force drivers onto the impractically-designed public transit systems and "get them over their love affair with the automobile". (They admitted this when LA had repaired its own freeways after a major earthquake in a few months, while SF was still working on the Loma Prieta quake damage after years.)
This all got so bad that a ballot measure was written to try to earmark the gas taxes and tolls for road work a few years back. But it was poorly written and would have let much of the practices continue (and also got caught in some other state politics that distorted the turnout). It was narrowly defeated at the polls.
He turned on an entire generation of kids to science. Surely I'm not the only one who used to wake up before school at 6 AM to watch Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon before school?
That was his second show.
His first one turned on many (including me) in my generation (now becoming eligible for Senior Citizen Discounts).
Encryption is treated as a munition and is covered under the Treasury department. If the key to an encrypted message is not given on request, there is an immediate 2 year imprisonment for the crime.
In which case I'm already hosed. I've got a bunch of encrypted files lying about to which I've long since forgotten the pass phrases (which, according to standard advice about passwords, I NEVER wrote down). Nothing of interest to them, of course. (Just ancient personal stuff.) But try to convince them of that, once they've got a bee in their bonnets.
Upside to really forgetting passwords is that they can't torture them out of you. Downside is there's no way to get them to stop trying.
step 1 run all your internet apps from a thumbdrive with portable versions. step 2 use a good encryption system on that thumbdrive that gives you deniability.
Step 2B. Don't let your thumb drive go through the washer and drier. (Just happened to me yesterday.) B-( (Fortunately not with a thumb drive containing the only copy of something important.)
French cops have a new tactic in protests : when they label someone "troublemaker" they ask him to delete his camera's memory. Wifi could be a way to get around that.
News coverage of the "police riot" in Chicago in 1968 swung a presidential election and its fallout causes a sea-change in US politics that affects things to this day.
This was the result of a technological change: Chicago police were used to suppressing news of their activities by smashing the newsies' cameras. That convention was the first major deployment of the early "minicam" - a massive, just-barely-man-portable, over-the-shoulder TV camera with a backpack full of support electronics capable of relaying the image to a truck within a couple blocks, which could then relay it to the local studio.
Result: Not only did smashing the camera do no "good", the image of the oncoming billyclub might be on TV screens across the nation before it actually hit.
The Rodney King debacle was a similar quantum leap: This time it was due to the availability of videotaping cameras inexpensive enough to be common even in the inner city. Now police behavior could be videotaped by ordinary citizens and passed on to the press. California's response to the issue was to make it illegal for citizens to tape them "in the performance of their duties" - letting them seize the cameras and tapes in future incidents.
This product potentially gives individual "watchdogs" the same capability that the TV networks got in 1968: The ability to take a picture and have it safely out of the camera - into a laptop around the corner, relayed onto the net, or whatever - before the instrument can be confiscated.
Clearly you did not get the/. memo:... I hope that clears things up for you.
Why, yes, I did miss the memo.
So they DID elect him the official scapegoat:
- If invaders try to conquer Iraq, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Democrats raise taxes, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Supreme Court changes the rules of procedure, it's Bush's fault.
- If there's a hurricane in Timbuktu, it's Bush's fault.
Of course Bush wasn't there when they elected him scapegoat. But that's Bush's fault.
Its time to encrypt EVERYTHING. ( at least until the government bans it ) Sure they know where you went, but not what you viewed or 'said' while there.
Back when I was operating a mailing list on a controversial topic on my home machine, I had a couple rules:
- No postings soliciting or admitting to breaking laws.
- No encrypted traffic (not just on the list: All traffic (except passwords) to-from the machine was in the clear).
The thinking was like this:
- Police, other government investigative agencies, and various unofficial snoops have a long track record of ignoring laws against various kinds of eavesdropping. So you have to assume that the line might be tapped.
- If the police became interested they could always get a warrant and tap the line. (Or illegally tap the line without a warrant to see what's going on, then (if it looked interesting) get a warrant to tap it legally.)
- If the data was encrypted they could STILL get it - by getting a warrant and seizing the computer (and everything else of interest in the house).
- If the data was UNencrypted they would want to keep a low profile to avoid scaring off any "bad guys", would eventually see that there was nothing to go after, and thus would probably switch to hunting real bad guys elsewhere and go away WITHOUT breaking in and trashing stuff.
"Encrypt everything" seems like a nice solution. But if only a few are doing it, just the fact that their traffic is encrypted makes them targets. It's easy to trump up enough stuff to get a warrant and go after the machine.
Once a LOT of people are all swapping lots of encrypted traffic (as the default way of "sealing" the "envelope" on the datagrams) the fact of encryption will stop making the users targets. (The police can still get a warrant and grab the machines. But with so many potential machines to grab they'll have to find some other way to pick the ones to hit - like by bothering to dig up real "probable cause" from other evidence, like they're supposed to.)
Fortunately we don't need to construct a "shelling point" for this: The internet is gradually moving toward pervasive encryption, as the legitimate need to encrypt for personal and corporate security becomes broadly understood. Once that becomes the norm our electronic "papers" will be about as secure as our physical ones. We're starting to get there. But IMHO we're not there yet.
Unfortunately we WON'T be fully safe using encryption until the typical machine configurations are such that, if the machines are seized, it will be impossible to recover incriminating data from them - even with passwords browbeaten out of their owners. Until that time it will still be useful to bypass encryption by raiding one of the machines at the endpoints.
= = = =
Re the list and "no encrypted traffic": When one of the regulate-the-internet laws was about to make it too much hassle to continue, we closed down the list (after finding volunteers to run its successor and - since the participants hadn't agreed to have their info forwarded - announcing the successor on the original list and giving people time to sign up.
Now I regularly use SSH to telecommute or to access the primary house machine from the vacation house. But that's still low-profile: It's clear from the IP addresses that the SSH connections are going to the company, coming from it, or coming from a single external dialup machine via a particular service provider.
Ah, President Bush. I thought I smelled your foul stench.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are promulgated by the Supreme Court (and written by their employees), after receiving a Congressional rubber stamp. Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
But somehow it's Bush's fault, right? Did you elect him the official scapegoat? (If you get a cold it's Bush's fault. If the Supreme Court promulgates a rule you don't like it's Bush's fault. He wasn't there for the election - but that's HIS fault.)
You really need to get medical attention for that jerking knee.
So much for the conservative republican President's desire to keep govt. out of our lives. What a lying sack of shit he is!
The PRESIDENT? What's the PRESIDENT go to do with it?
Quoting Wikipedia:
The FRCP are promulgated by the United States Supreme Court pursuant to the Rules Enabling Act, and then approved by the United States Congress. The Court's modifications to the rules are usually based on recommendations from the Judicial Conference of the United States, the federal judiciary's internal policy-making body.
Internal rulemaking by the JUDICIAL branch - the supreme court and their hirelings - with concurrence from the LEGISLATIVE branch. The EXECUTIVE branch isn't even in this loop.
Are you faulting Bush for failing to stage an unconstitutional armed intervention into the inner workings of the Supreme Court?
Speakers are made by printing electromagnets out of conductive ink and stretching the paper over a cavity like a speaker cone behind the billboard. The electromagnets vibrate in response to a current, creating a sound.'"
Sounds like a lot of current and associated structure to get this to work.
Why not just use plastic piezoelectric benders? Then the paper will talk even when being held in free air.
Unless they recently changed the Constitution and didn't tell anyone about it then ratified treaties are consider the law of the land and the violation of said treaties can be treated as an impeachable offense. I don't know if this will be the route taken for impeachment, assuming impeachment, but legally it does apply.
This is a common misunderstanding of the supremacy clause. (A variant is to read treaties as equivalent to constitutional amendment.)
In fact the supremacy clause is solely about the federal stuff (constitution, laws, and treaties) trumping state law where they conflict. However, note that the constitution trumps BOTH laws and treaties. The constitution is IT. Everything else in the government either derives from it or is null on its face.
The supremacy clause is solely about the several states having delegated (in a binding fashion) certain of their powers, including their foreign policy, to the fed. Countries regularly abrogate treaties. In the case of the US and its several states the fed has the power to make these decisions and the states do not.
Ratification requires congressional approval. Abrogation does not. It generally "just happens". (No point in rocking the political boat by by making a big announcement, unless that's expedient.) That means that the Executive branch just stops behaving as if the treaty had any force, and perhaps issues internal directives to that effect. Typically this happens when the other party abrogates their side of the treaty, or makes war on the US. Then the executive branch determines that the treaty is void and starts ignoring it.
Potentially the Congress might claim some say in whether treaties are to be abrogated. It might mention them in a declaration of war, or pass a resolution stating that one is void. And of course any legislation to implement a treaty needs their action to repeal it or (even if the executive stops enforcing it) it remains on the books (unless the courts strike it for some other reason.) But claiming that the executive branch doesn't have the power to abrogate treaties on its own is a separate constitutional crisis. B-)
Haven't we ratified the Geneva conventions as well, and ignored that?
The US ratified the first four (through 1949) but not the last two protocols (1977).
They are a treaty. As such they are binding on the several states as long as the federal government considers them to be in force. But the fed (like any other government) abides by them or not as it finds convenient, and can declare them null and void at any time it finds convenient. (Meanwhile, treaties have no direct force within the country except through implementing legislation or executive orders. Such legislation is subject to the usual constitutional limits on congressional power. Congress' powers over the other two branches are severely limited. Executive orders are just the orders of a president to his underlings, automatically superseded by any later orders.)
Further, most of the Geneva Convention protections explicitly are not extended to terrorists and other paramilitary forces that don't themselves obey certain of their provisions - such as identifying themselves, wearing uniforms, not deliberately blowing up non-combatants (who aren't in the way of an attack on a "legitimate" military target), etc. The idea is to encourage everybody else to play by "the rules of civilized warfare".
Which is not to say that what the administration is doing is the right thing to do. Just that an appeal to the Geneva Conventions is not a particularly useful charge to make against a president and his administration. It's an attempt to seize moral high ground but has no force in law.
If you want to mount a binding legal attack on a sitting president it needs to be based on constitutional grounds.
... what reason is there to have [the Internet in schools]...
The internet is in schools:
- to create situations like this,
- then use them as an excuse to pass legislation censoring the Internet "to protect the children",
- then use that legislation to achieve as much control of Internet content as government functionaries find useful.
I think it more likely they believe their users will mis-identify software issues as hardware issues and request replacement hardware.
A simple solution for Dell is to provide a standalone hardware diagnostic suite on CDROM. Then they honor the even-thrown-bricks warranty if:
- The issue isn't behavior-related (i.e. cracked screen)
- The standalone diagnostic won't run (i.e. CD drive or mobo busted, RAM fried,...)
- The standalone diagnostic identifies a fault in another hunk of the machine. and anything else is assumed to be a software issue and not their problem.
The logical platform for this is a LiveCD/LiveDVD with a Dell-Ubuntu base install package on it, too. (Then they can also honor the waranty if Ubuntu won't run from the "coaster", if the reinstall won't succeed, or the reinstall won't run when virgin.)
And lucky for me, I press those with my left hand, which doesn't have carpal tunnel.
I'm a VIthian and don't have RSIs yet. I started to get carpal just a bit in my right hand about '86 or so - but switching the mouse to the other side (along with folding in the feet so the keyboard lies flat flat and adding a minimal wrist pad) cleared it up and has held it off for another 20 years so far. I just celebrated my 60th and am still typing away furiously every day.
Switching sides on the mouse has a two minute learning curve once you've added these two aliases:
### "three-button" version of X: ### alias rightmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3"' ### alias leftmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1"'
### "five-button" version of X: alias rightmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5"' alias leftmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5"'
Mirroring the buttons lets you do mirror-motion on pressing them, which is just about automatic. I occasionally switch to the other side and am full speed either way.
But it wasn't carpal that made me stick with vi rather than switching to emacs.
Back when I bought my first unix box (in the early '70s) it only had two meg and used a motorola 8010 so it couldn't do demand paging to run a task bigger than the real RAM. Emacs wouldn't fit.
Since then I've occasionally looked into switching. But every time I do I see that EMACSians take about half-again as many keystrokes to do the things I do heavily. So in addition to the learning curve it would be a step backward in productivity, at least initially.
I considered using a vi emulation mode - until I discovered that (at the time) it had TWO of them, with different divergences from "real vi". B-b Rather than trying to solve the "donkey between two bales of hay" dilemma I stuck with vi.
Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping?:-)
Actually it's now eighty meg and that's the reason for the long delay: They had to put in a whole plumbers' supply of kitchen sinks to get from 8 meg to 80.
You could use an older vi, but then you wouldn't get formatting and hilighting...
How do I turn that off?
The linux install my company did on my desktop has a true vi but simlinks "view" (the canonical "vi it in read-only mode") to "vim". Unfortunately, some of the files I need to work on come out in unreadable purple-on-black under vim, so when I "view" them to open them read-only they become unreadable-only. B-(
Beyond a day or two (or if you want to run something more energy-intensive, like an air conditioner or a microwave oven) you need to run a generator.
Well, you CAN mount solar panels and/or erect a small windmill. But those are pricey, heavy, fragile, and depend on weather and siting. (Parked in a cool, comfy, deep forest? Forget wind and solar.)
Slashdot Mirror
Motors in the wheels? ... How they hell is this a new idea?
It's an ancient idea in internet time. They were talking about this back in the 1950s.
It's also a rotten idea. The more mass in each wheel, the more forward momentum is converted to vertical momentum in the suspension as the wheel follows irregularities in the road, then converted to heat as the suspension damps the bounce. This is one of the major sources of energy loss that must be made up by prime-mover power.
I.e.: Heavier wheels, lower mileage. That's why even electric cars with independent motors on each wheel put the motors on the frame and connect them with axles and CV joints, despite the considerable increase in moving parts count and expense.
NASA designing a car? Why does this remind me of BART and AMTRAK? In both cases aeronautical engineers were hired to redesign a surface vehicle (despite their experience with surface travel being limited to things like landing gear, used for a tiny percentage of each flight). In both cases they threw out more than a century of engineering solutions and started from scratch. And in both cases they ended up with an expensive deisgn that had rotten ride. (In BART's case new cars now cost six MILLION each and even at that price only one manufacturer - located in France - is willing to build them.)
The most significant problem is couples who want to live together, but who don't necessarily work in the same place, ...
Obviously this could be mitigated by strongly encouraging dating among co-workers and nepotism in hiring (hire me, hire my wife and offspring)...
Have to get rid of those pesky sexual harassment and equal-employment laws and rules, though.
(Fortunately, Clinton already got a good start on that by pulling their teeth when it comes to relationships up-and-down the chain of command.)
... and put solar cells on the roof of it. Ok the solar cells may just be for cute factor but my car sits in my office parking lot all day in Florida. It might give me enough power to run the AC on the trip home.
Not the AC - also another power hog. The stereo, yes.
You need acres of solar cells to power a commuter car - even an extremely efficient one. Putting some on the car itself can actually be counter-productive, unless you only plan to use it once every few months or so. You may have to burn more power to tote them around than they produce.
Now a moderate sized WINDMILL in a good wind area might actually be able to power short-commute usage of a high-mileage plug-in hybrid. (Not on the car, of course, but near the garage.)
So does this detect the driver speaking on a cell phone or simply someone in the car talking on a cell phone? TFA did not give details.
Also: Does it distinguish a phone being rung from one being used for a conversation?
At least one "system like OnStar" (allegedly not OnStar itself) has been used by an investigative agency to bug an alleged crook's car. (Such systems are, after all, remote-controlled cell speakerphones.)
In one case the agency bugged a car for a month, until the operators of the system demanded they cease and desist because the monopolization of the channel was imparing their emergency service. (Not to mention that, if the buggee had been involved in an actual emergeny, hitting the button would have made a "beep" on the agency's tape rather than bringing the aid he was paying for.)
Now if this system is deployed I can imagine some inter-agency foulups, as cops pull over the bugged cars to ticket the drivers.
Red diesel isn't taxed, the only use I've ever had for it is when the boiler ran out of fuel in the middle of the night!
It's also used for marine engines. For instance: Our little sailboat has an auxiliary diesel engine we use to get it in and out of the dock, or as an emergency backup for wind-propulsion problems. It burns no-road-tax dyed diesel fuel from a station at a marina.
We only go through a galon a year or less. But power boats, larger sailboats with auxiliaries, and commercial shipping can go through a LOT. No point in road-taxing them. Most won't even fit on a trailer. Especially the big liners, ferries, container ships, and tankers. B-)
Taxes are very seldom taken "for nothing", they are usually recycled into services for those who paid the taxes.
Unfortunately, once the government gets its hands on money, it generally loots it for other purposes than the one used to justify collecting it.
California's fuel taxes and tolls are particularly bad examples: Both the bridge funds and the fuel taxes have been looted to support politically-correct "transportation related" projects such as public mass transit systems (which, in northern CA, are so poorly organized that they're nearly useless).
In the case of the Bay Bridge this was so extreme that when it came time to do an earthquake retrofit there was nothing to do it with. So they raised the tolls on ALL the bridges in the area (most too far away for the traffic to be related) - by a factor of several - mainly to pay for the Bay Bridge work.
Caltrans in the SF bay area also deliberately takes a long time on road projects and otherwise impedes automobile traffic (and drastically lower its fuel efficiency as a side-effect) in an attempt to force drivers onto the impractically-designed public transit systems and "get them over their love affair with the automobile". (They admitted this when LA had repaired its own freeways after a major earthquake in a few months, while SF was still working on the Loma Prieta quake damage after years.)
This all got so bad that a ballot measure was written to try to earmark the gas taxes and tolls for road work a few years back. But it was poorly written and would have let much of the practices continue (and also got caught in some other state politics that distorted the turnout). It was narrowly defeated at the polls.
He turned on an entire generation of kids to science. Surely I'm not the only one who used to wake up before school at 6 AM to watch Mr. Wizard on Nickelodeon before school?
That was his second show.
His first one turned on many (including me) in my generation (now becoming eligible for Senior Citizen Discounts).
Encryption is treated as a munition and is covered under the Treasury department. If the key to an encrypted message is not given on request, there is an immediate 2 year imprisonment for the crime.
In which case I'm already hosed. I've got a bunch of encrypted files lying about to which I've long since forgotten the pass phrases (which, according to standard advice about passwords, I NEVER wrote down). Nothing of interest to them, of course. (Just ancient personal stuff.) But try to convince them of that, once they've got a bee in their bonnets.
Upside to really forgetting passwords is that they can't torture them out of you. Downside is there's no way to get them to stop trying.
step 1 run all your internet apps from a thumbdrive with portable versions.
step 2 use a good encryption system on that thumbdrive that gives you deniability.
Step 2B. Don't let your thumb drive go through the washer and drier. (Just happened to me yesterday.) B-( (Fortunately not with a thumb drive containing the only copy of something important.)
French cops have a new tactic in protests : when they label someone "troublemaker" they ask him to delete his camera's memory. Wifi could be a way to get around that.
News coverage of the "police riot" in Chicago in 1968 swung a presidential election and its fallout causes a sea-change in US politics that affects things to this day.
This was the result of a technological change: Chicago police were used to suppressing news of their activities by smashing the newsies' cameras. That convention was the first major deployment of the early "minicam" - a massive, just-barely-man-portable, over-the-shoulder TV camera with a backpack full of support electronics capable of relaying the image to a truck within a couple blocks, which could then relay it to the local studio.
Result: Not only did smashing the camera do no "good", the image of the oncoming billyclub might be on TV screens across the nation before it actually hit.
The Rodney King debacle was a similar quantum leap: This time it was due to the availability of videotaping cameras inexpensive enough to be common even in the inner city. Now police behavior could be videotaped by ordinary citizens and passed on to the press. California's response to the issue was to make it illegal for citizens to tape them "in the performance of their duties" - letting them seize the cameras and tapes in future incidents.
This product potentially gives individual "watchdogs" the same capability that the TV networks got in 1968: The ability to take a picture and have it safely out of the camera - into a laptop around the corner, relayed onto the net, or whatever - before the instrument can be confiscated.
As a $100 plugin for a range of standard cameras.
Would I pay that much for one? Hell yes!
Clearly you did not get the /. memo: ... I hope that clears things up for you.
Why, yes, I did miss the memo.
So they DID elect him the official scapegoat:
- If invaders try to conquer Iraq, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Democrats raise taxes, it's Bush's fault.
- If the Supreme Court changes the rules of procedure, it's Bush's fault.
- If there's a hurricane in Timbuktu, it's Bush's fault.
Of course Bush wasn't there when they elected him scapegoat. But that's Bush's fault.
Its time to encrypt EVERYTHING. ( at least until the government bans it )
Sure they know where you went, but not what you viewed or 'said' while there.
Back when I was operating a mailing list on a controversial topic on my home machine, I had a couple rules:
- No postings soliciting or admitting to breaking laws.
- No encrypted traffic (not just on the list: All traffic (except passwords) to-from the machine was in the clear).
The thinking was like this:
- Police, other government investigative agencies, and various unofficial snoops have a long track record of ignoring laws against various kinds of eavesdropping. So you have to assume that the line might be tapped.
- If the police became interested they could always get a warrant and tap the line. (Or illegally tap the line without a warrant to see what's going on, then (if it looked interesting) get a warrant to tap it legally.)
- If the data was encrypted they could STILL get it - by getting a warrant and seizing the computer (and everything else of interest in the house).
- If the data was UNencrypted they would want to keep a low profile to avoid scaring off any "bad guys", would eventually see that there was nothing to go after, and thus would probably switch to hunting real bad guys elsewhere and go away WITHOUT breaking in and trashing stuff.
"Encrypt everything" seems like a nice solution. But if only a few are doing it, just the fact that their traffic is encrypted makes them targets. It's easy to trump up enough stuff to get a warrant and go after the machine.
Once a LOT of people are all swapping lots of encrypted traffic (as the default way of "sealing" the "envelope" on the datagrams) the fact of encryption will stop making the users targets. (The police can still get a warrant and grab the machines. But with so many potential machines to grab they'll have to find some other way to pick the ones to hit - like by bothering to dig up real "probable cause" from other evidence, like they're supposed to.)
Fortunately we don't need to construct a "shelling point" for this: The internet is gradually moving toward pervasive encryption, as the legitimate need to encrypt for personal and corporate security becomes broadly understood. Once that becomes the norm our electronic "papers" will be about as secure as our physical ones. We're starting to get there. But IMHO we're not there yet.
Unfortunately we WON'T be fully safe using encryption until the typical machine configurations are such that, if the machines are seized, it will be impossible to recover incriminating data from them - even with passwords browbeaten out of their owners. Until that time it will still be useful to bypass encryption by raiding one of the machines at the endpoints.
= = = =
Re the list and "no encrypted traffic": When one of the regulate-the-internet laws was about to make it too much hassle to continue, we closed down the list (after finding volunteers to run its successor and - since the participants hadn't agreed to have their info forwarded - announcing the successor on the original list and giving people time to sign up.
Now I regularly use SSH to telecommute or to access the primary house machine from the vacation house. But that's still low-profile: It's clear from the IP addresses that the SSH connections are going to the company, coming from it, or coming from a single external dialup machine via a particular service provider.
Ah, President Bush. I thought I smelled your foul stench.
Federal Rules of Civil Procedure are promulgated by the Supreme Court (and written by their employees), after receiving a Congressional rubber stamp. Bush and his whole branch of government aren't even in the loop.
But somehow it's Bush's fault, right? Did you elect him the official scapegoat? (If you get a cold it's Bush's fault. If the Supreme Court promulgates a rule you don't like it's Bush's fault. He wasn't there for the election - but that's HIS fault.)
You really need to get medical attention for that jerking knee.
The PRESIDENT? What's the PRESIDENT go to do with it?
Quoting Wikipedia:
Internal rulemaking by the JUDICIAL branch - the supreme court and their hirelings - with concurrence from the LEGISLATIVE branch. The EXECUTIVE branch isn't even in this loop.
Are you faulting Bush for failing to stage an unconstitutional armed intervention into the inner workings of the Supreme Court?
Your idea does hold merit though and we at Hallmark cards will be looking into it aggressively ;-p
My previous post counts as "prior art". So I just open-sourced it.
Hallmark is welcome to use it - along with anybody else. B-)
Speakers are made by printing electromagnets out of conductive ink and stretching the paper over a cavity like a speaker cone behind the billboard. The electromagnets vibrate in response to a current, creating a sound.'"
Sounds like a lot of current and associated structure to get this to work.
Why not just use plastic piezoelectric benders? Then the paper will talk even when being held in free air.
(Or hasn't the patent on that expired yet?)
Unless they recently changed the Constitution and didn't tell anyone about it then ratified treaties are consider the law of the land and the violation of said treaties can be treated as an impeachable offense. I don't know if this will be the route taken for impeachment, assuming impeachment, but legally it does apply.
This is a common misunderstanding of the supremacy clause. (A variant is to read treaties as equivalent to constitutional amendment.)
In fact the supremacy clause is solely about the federal stuff (constitution, laws, and treaties) trumping state law where they conflict. However, note that the constitution trumps BOTH laws and treaties. The constitution is IT. Everything else in the government either derives from it or is null on its face.
The supremacy clause is solely about the several states having delegated (in a binding fashion) certain of their powers, including their foreign policy, to the fed. Countries regularly abrogate treaties. In the case of the US and its several states the fed has the power to make these decisions and the states do not.
Ratification requires congressional approval. Abrogation does not. It generally "just happens". (No point in rocking the political boat by by making a big announcement, unless that's expedient.) That means that the Executive branch just stops behaving as if the treaty had any force, and perhaps issues internal directives to that effect. Typically this happens when the other party abrogates their side of the treaty, or makes war on the US. Then the executive branch determines that the treaty is void and starts ignoring it.
Potentially the Congress might claim some say in whether treaties are to be abrogated. It might mention them in a declaration of war, or pass a resolution stating that one is void. And of course any legislation to implement a treaty needs their action to repeal it or (even if the executive stops enforcing it) it remains on the books (unless the courts strike it for some other reason.) But claiming that the executive branch doesn't have the power to abrogate treaties on its own is a separate constitutional crisis. B-)
Haven't we ratified the Geneva conventions as well, and ignored that?
The US ratified the first four (through 1949) but not the last two protocols (1977).
They are a treaty. As such they are binding on the several states as long as the federal government considers them to be in force. But the fed (like any other government) abides by them or not as it finds convenient, and can declare them null and void at any time it finds convenient. (Meanwhile, treaties have no direct force within the country except through implementing legislation or executive orders. Such legislation is subject to the usual constitutional limits on congressional power. Congress' powers over the other two branches are severely limited. Executive orders are just the orders of a president to his underlings, automatically superseded by any later orders.)
Further, most of the Geneva Convention protections explicitly are not extended to terrorists and other paramilitary forces that don't themselves obey certain of their provisions - such as identifying themselves, wearing uniforms, not deliberately blowing up non-combatants (who aren't in the way of an attack on a "legitimate" military target), etc. The idea is to encourage everybody else to play by "the rules of civilized warfare".
Which is not to say that what the administration is doing is the right thing to do. Just that an appeal to the Geneva Conventions is not a particularly useful charge to make against a president and his administration. It's an attempt to seize moral high ground but has no force in law.
If you want to mount a binding legal attack on a sitting president it needs to be based on constitutional grounds.
... what reason is there to have [the Internet in schools] ...
The internet is in schools:
- to create situations like this,
- then use them as an excuse to pass legislation censoring the Internet "to protect the children",
- then use that legislation to achieve as much control of Internet content as government functionaries find useful.
Period.
I think it more likely they believe their users will mis-identify software issues as hardware issues and request replacement hardware.
...)
A simple solution for Dell is to provide a standalone hardware diagnostic suite on CDROM. Then they honor the even-thrown-bricks warranty if:
- The issue isn't behavior-related (i.e. cracked screen)
- The standalone diagnostic won't run (i.e. CD drive or mobo busted, RAM fried,
- The standalone diagnostic identifies a fault in another hunk of the machine.
and anything else is assumed to be a software issue and not their problem.
The logical platform for this is a LiveCD/LiveDVD with a Dell-Ubuntu base install package on it, too. (Then they can also honor the waranty if Ubuntu won't run from the "coaster", if the reinstall won't succeed, or the reinstall won't run when virgin.)
And lucky for me, I press those with my left hand, which doesn't have carpal tunnel.
I'm a VIthian and don't have RSIs yet. I started to get carpal just a bit in my right hand about '86 or so - but switching the mouse to the other side (along with folding in the feet so the keyboard lies flat flat and adding a minimal wrist pad) cleared it up and has held it off for another 20 years so far. I just celebrated my 60th and am still typing away furiously every day.
Switching sides on the mouse has a two minute learning curve once you've added these two aliases:
### "three-button" version of X:
### alias rightmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3"'
### alias leftmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1"'
### "five-button" version of X:
alias rightmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 1 2 3 4 5"'
alias leftmouse 'xmodmap -e "pointer = 3 2 1 4 5"'
Mirroring the buttons lets you do mirror-motion on pressing them, which is just about automatic. I occasionally switch to the other side and am full speed either way.
But it wasn't carpal that made me stick with vi rather than switching to emacs.
Back when I bought my first unix box (in the early '70s) it only had two meg and used a motorola 8010 so it couldn't do demand paging to run a task bigger than the real RAM. Emacs wouldn't fit.
Since then I've occasionally looked into switching. But every time I do I see that EMACSians take about half-again as many keystrokes to do the things I do heavily. So in addition to the learning curve it would be a step backward in productivity, at least initially.
I considered using a vi emulation mode - until I discovered that (at the time) it had TWO of them, with different divergences from "real vi". B-b Rather than trying to solve the "donkey between two bales of hay" dilemma I stuck with vi.
Or is it just now Eight Hundred Megs And Constantly Swapping? :-)
Actually it's now eighty meg and that's the reason for the long delay: They had to put in a whole plumbers' supply of kitchen sinks to get from 8 meg to 80.
You could use an older vi, but then you wouldn't get formatting and hilighting...
How do I turn that off?
The linux install my company did on my desktop has a true vi but simlinks "view" (the canonical "vi it in read-only mode") to "vim". Unfortunately, some of the files I need to work on come out in unreadable purple-on-black under vim, so when I "view" them to open them read-only they become unreadable-only. B-(
Beyond a day or two (or if you want to run something more energy-intensive, like an air conditioner or a microwave oven) you need to run a generator.
Well, you CAN mount solar panels and/or erect a small windmill. But those are pricey, heavy, fragile, and depend on weather and siting. (Parked in a cool, comfy, deep forest? Forget wind and solar.)