No, they don't need keys, they use the lock button inside. They may have to do this with the drivers door closed and leaning over from the passenger side though - I've seen quite a few cars where the locks are set up such that it is tricky to lock the keys in by accident.
I used to have a car where you had to use the key to lock the driver's side, unless you knew the trick - flick the lock level whilst holding the door open lever open. Very convenient to be able to get out the car and lock it quickly before the days of commonplace remote central locking. I still managed to lock my keys in the car twice though, but I soon learnt how to break into my own car.
I severely doubt we (currently) have facial recognition hooked up to the network of CCTV in this country, but what we do have is ANPR - automatic number plate recognition - all over the place.
There are very obvious cameras around that point clearly at the lanes on major roads which are logging all vehicles using major routes. I should think ANPR also gets hooked up to existing CCTV infrastructure too.
And the police seem to routinely have ANPR in their cars these days too. Well, maybe not the "panda cars" that get used for day to day pig work (runs to the doughnut shop and back, for example), but the traffic cars do. Watch any recent UK cop show (like <accent="Manc">Road Wars</accent>) and you will see them using their ANPR. The police cruise around looking for people to ticket (usually no seatbelts or something minor - you know, dangerous criminals), whilst the cameras in their vehicles are reading every numberplate they see. The machine then alerts the tax collectors^W^W police if a car is less than perfect. So any problem with insurance, car registration, owner's licence, road tax and the car will get pulled over. The ANPR system queries a bunch of databases in real time to do this.
What I really don't like is that more than likely the police car's system records the numberplates it sees, but it will no doubt also record the police car's location (from GPS), the direction the police car was going, and the time/date. With this data, along with the static ANPR data, is spelling the end of private travel by car in the UK.
Numberplates over here are pretty standardised, so I guess ANPR is relatively easy to implement compared to facial recognition. But I bet as soon as facial recognition is even slightly reliable it will be retro fitted to everything it can be. Though thinking about it, even if facial recognition doesn't work fully yet it would still be possible to record faces along with location+date+time. Google's streetview is able to tell what a face is, so there isn't much to stop similar happening through a CCTV network. And once facial recognition is reliable the existing data can be run through the system.
When I got a new passport a year or 2 ago, I had a new photo taken and I got the shop to save the photo onto a USB stick. From now on I will be submitting the same photo whenever a photo is needed for something.... at some point I need to get a new driving licence as I still have my 10+ year old paper one even though plastic licences with a photo have been standard for probably 9 years. When I got the photo done I hadn't had a haircut or shave for 6 months either, and I read all the rules about passport photos - black and white photos are still allowed! So my RFID passport has a picture in it that looks like it was taken in the mid-70s! Passport control at Gatwick airport didn't seem too bothered when I used it there, once I said "don't worry mate, it is me".
Indeed. I am not upgrading to 3 because of the horrific address bar, and now this! Where has the light, fast, sleek browser gone? Oh yeah, someone's pay at Mozilla is based on increasing the number of users, so chasing those IE users has become paramount. Hence the change in direction from a UNIX-esque philosophy to a hand-holding philosophy (happened between 1 and 2, I think).
Sooner or later there will be a bug in FF or someone else's implementation of this geolocation crap, and the browser could be spewing your location to anyone who wants it.
Advertisers will love this crap too, so expect unscrupulous ads to tell users how to turn off the geolocation warnings/prompts totally. Anything that an advertiser would like is never in an individual's interest (unless you are a brainwashed, simple, consumer).
I'm sure he does it because if the customer feels they are getting a good deal out of the service they are paying for then they are more likely to pay him in the future for related services.
Or his clients pay an flat annual fee for routine support, and getting rid of Symantec makes it quicker to get jobs done, and there are less issues related to the AV that aren't an infection.
1) Liberals have not been in power for six months and they've already jacked up taxes. There's no rules of evidence when it comes to the IRS 2) Where was the trial at Waco or at Ruby Ridge? George Bush didn't burn 100 people alive in a house and shoot a two year old. Liberals did that. 3) The Constitution is a treaty. By inventing new federal powers, through the courts, liberals have changed the deal, repeatedly, and have broken it, by twisting the commerce clause apart. 4) Liberals gave us the Federal Reserve. So far, the Federal Reserve provoked the Great Depression, gave us inflation of the 1970s, twin assett bubles, and coming soon, hyperinflation. 5) Liberals gave us free trade. That has pretty much destroyed most of the US manufacturing base. When coupled with the just passed fire tax, that will destroy what's left. 6) Liberals gave us the IMF and the World Bank, which pretty much drive every third world economy into the ground that they can touch. 7) Liberals banned DDT and let 500 million people die from malaria. 8) Liberals refused any sort of practical registration database or quarantine and gave us 1 million dead from AIDS. 9) Liberals rounded up every American citizen of Japanese descent during World War II and tossed them into concentration camps. 10) Liberals consistently try and assault the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th amendments for whatever supports their own agenda. They bully right wing media, they threaten to disarm the country, they block the expression of culture in taxpayer owned facilities, and they place the burden of proof of compliance of every federal regulation on the business and its owners. 11) Liberals want to turn the census into yet another political circus and use census money to pass out bucks to their own thug groups like ACORN. 12) Liberals are against any sort of choice in schools for children, yet, never seem to have a problem keeping their own kids in private schools. Liberals just screwed Washington DC's kids out of charter schools, but will we see any child of any liberal attend a public school in DC? Doubt it.
Sure if you want to live in a hut and have gay sex, liberalism is perfect for you. But, if you want to earn a living, and do anything else, the jackbooted thug of liberalism is the enemy of all mankind. George Bush and other Republicans tried to reach a middle ground with liberals and it is clear that there is none. From here on out, the only answer is to get rid of liberals.... and how doesn't really matter at this point. They aren't political opponents. They are targets.
I used the phrase authority figure because if you have to justify yourself to someone due to threats of arrest they are in a position of authority.
In a related way, something that has happened in this country (UK) over the past few years is that local councils (those that are responsible for the bins and the upkeep of the local area, etc.) are now pretty universally referred to as "local authorities" by themselves, the rest of government and public bodies, and groups like the press. I feel this is a subtle way of changing how we view local government (and by extension, all government).
When I hear someone call the council a local authority these days I play dumb and pretend I don't know who they mean. Then once explained, I go "Oh, you mean the council?". It can lead nicely to pointing out that an elected busybody should never be in a position of authority.
Please, explain exactly why the police watching you & everyone else all the time in public is bad. What, exactly, is the problem there?
Are you afraid of corruption? Of a change in the law? Do you somehow think that either one would be hastened or slowed by mere video surveillance of public places?
I'm with the general population -- liberterians who think anything government is bad, or that anything even vaugey orwellian will inevitably lead to Big Brother re-writing the past and instituting a 2-minute-hate, are the unimaginiative ones, reacting like ludditeis smashing machines without ever thinking and actually applying real principles.
Why on earth should you or I be watched by law enforcement in a supposedly free country? Being constantly watched means sooner or later the police will see something they don't like or don't understand. All of a sudden people in a free country (that past generations laid down lives to protect) are having to justify their actions to an authority figure.
The constant surveillance and encroachment on civil liberties has had the effect that we are answerable to the government, not the other way around as it should be in a democracy.
Corruption is obviously a concern, and the recent MP expenses fun and games have shows how widespread corruption can simmer away unnoticed. Giving these people more power over us is not a good idea when they seem perfectly willing to use powers for their own ends. History is full of examples of abuse of power, so restriction of power is necessary.
Video surveillance is just a facet of the encroachment on us by government, and as it is the most visible and widely understood it gets talked about a lot. Considering how small cameras can be, huge great things are appearing on the sides of buildings all over the country. The cameras are an easy solution for politicians to public demands for clamp downs on street crime - demands whipped up by certain parts of the press.
Many people question the effectiveness of cameras compared to other crime reduction measures, like simply more police on the beat, or dealing with poverty. Of course the 2nd 2 are much harder for politicians, and probably won't be very effective before the next election they face.
One of the issues privacy advocates have is that as many people are willing to give away their privacy (because they have been told it is good for them), they are also willing to give away other people's privacy too. Just because you are happy to be watched by some council employee when you do your shopping doesn't mean I am, and it is very frustrating to lose privacy this way. Unsurprisingly people then express themselves dramatically, and try and warn what we could be moving towards. A dystopian future won't happen overnight, it'd be over multiple generations if it did happen, but I don't want to think that I will leave a world going that way at all.
You are right - there are morons on both side of the political spectrum. (There are people who are also morons if they think there are only 2 sides).
There's no shortage of people lining up to parrot left-wing anti-corporate "facts", just as there are right-wingers who will needlessly defend the latest big business policy that has the real effect of fucking over the little guy, the environment or society.
But when it comes to genuinely smart people, they tend to be what Americans label as "liberal", and the rest of the world would call centrists or centre-left. There are intelligent people who are on the right, but they tend to use their smarts for business or personal gain, and as they benefit from their actions they fail to acknowledge the downsides of their actions. No doubt they recognise the downsides, but admitting it would probably be a death sentence for them or the businesses they run.
Cue an aforementioned big-business defender to mod me troll....
Shit, people like you are the reason there is a phrase that goes something along the lines of "don't argue with an idiot because they'll drag you down to their level then beat you with experience".
But if there were Martians wondering if there were aliens in the universe, those rovers and the other probes on the surface of Mars and in orbit that we have sent would be pretty good evidence.
2 identical planes having a similar malfunction (from the same base, probably worked on by the same ground crew), some people who believe in an invisible space wizard (a.k.a. god) who also say they also believe in alien air/spacecraft, and references to books written by people looking to cash in from the idiots who think aliens visit us is not evidence of anything like aliens.
Now then 4D6963, shut the fuck up, and do us all a favour: Go and play with the traffic or something. With every comment you make on this discussion you are doing nothing more than demonstrating what an utter fool you are, and showing your very loose grasp on reality. That is what your "evidence" shows, nothing more.
The money comes from people phoning you. Voicemail is active as default and most people don't disable it.
When you ring someone else and they don't answer, the voicemail picks up and you pay for one minute of a phone call. That is a lot of money when your customers have thousands of missed calls per day. If the other network reciprocates, then the networks have a tidy income and the customers pay to listen to a robot beep at them.
I'm glad someone else has noticed this, it is one of the things I hate the most about mobile phones. I see it as a clear way by the networks to squeeze more money out of their customers.
A friend has recently got a new job, and with it got a work mobile phone. It goes to voice mail after just 12 seconds of ringing! His own personal phone/SIM that he has had for years probably has VM as an cost-free option, but it hasn't been enabled (the way that seemed to be the default a few years back - mine's the same on a different network) - so it'll ring for up to 1 minute then cut off with a dead line - and no charge is made.
I can imagine that a bunch of suits at tmobile/o2/orange.... had some meeting one day where they decided how they could "moneytize" (or other awful, bullshit, made-up word) the parts of their services that currently aren't profitable. Whereas normally if you were somewhere with your mobile that had poor network coverage, you could not use your phone. But with "free voicemail" as part of the service, if people called you then the caller would get charged, even though they couldn't get hold of you! If people called you whilst you were on the phone, instead of a charge-free engaged tone, it dumps you to VM! Bonuses all round for these suits! And now an excuse to put off upgrading the network too.
All that was required is that all networks have the same policy when it comes to voicemail, and even though I try my best to ignore the BS that surrounds mobile phones and their services, I have noticed that free voicemail seems to be a selling point from all networks these days, and has been for a good while. Traditionally this would have been known as collusion, but these days it is "aligning our synergies".
Is there a GSM phone out there that has a feature that will auto-hang up a call after x seconds if the call has not been answered? Ideally x would be configurable for each phone number in your address book, so as to get around the bullshit practices of the networks.
But lets be honest - the biggest customers of phone manufacturers are the networks themselves, so features on phones are really dictated by the networks, not the users.
Additional: Just adding to this massive discussion.
I don't think I've ever seen an article with so few AC posts either!
Re:Here's a better idea
on
Cellular Repo Man
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Just curious... why? It seems to be what the market demands.
Don't get me wrong - I would jump at the chance to get a non-subsidized phone/data plan, but I am more angry at the ignorant masses than at the companies fulfilling their desires.
In markets like mobile telecoms there are only a few big players, so the market gets offered what the players want to offer, not necessarily what the customers want. Obviously collusion is illegal, but "singing from the same hymn sheet" isn't.
The utter cluelessness of most customers when it comes to computers and tech in general doesn't help much either. I guess this could be viewed as "what the market demands" though.
WMP has claimed.mov support for years. Ive never seen it work, I assumed it was due to some update or change to the codec from Apple making newer files incompatible. It looks like the intention was not to compete/replace QT, its to have basic mov support for camcorders and digicams.
...and in turn the user doesn't have to install Quicktime, which no doubt is presented by Apple as a package of QT, itunes and maybe Safari. Actually, just looked, and the default is a package of QT and itunes, though there was a QT only download.
So the MS support for newer.mov files is just so people don't get itunes as their default music player, and so possibly stick with WMP. MS stand to benefit from this as the competition don't get to promote their music store in the user's face (the last time I saw itunes it looked close to being adware!).
OK, I really don't understan this one. hasn't [alt]+ the shortcut worked before? Seems they had this way back in win95, didn't they?
No, this has NEVER worked right. I have so many shortcuts assigned hotkeys, like Ctrl+Alt+P for a command prompt, Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+N for notepad, etc. Only like 20% of the time does the key work, even in XP and Vista. The rest of the time, the entire Explorer freezes for 20-30 seconds. You can't click on the start menu, the task bar doesn't update, you can't get to Task Manager, etc. Alt-Tab works to go between already-open windows, but the taskbar doesn't redraw. Sit there and press Ctrl+Alt+N over and over, and wait and wait. Suddenly, 10 notepads will all open at once 20 seconds later and the system returns to normal.
Yeap, I get exactly the same. It seems that if Windows is under even the slightest load, you will get the frozen explorer for 30 seconds. And with AV, auto-updates etc. being as hefty as it is, the machine is pretty much always under some load! (Well, in reality on Windows I disable as much is as possible, and write scripts to quickly stop and start things like AV. It is stunning how a modern "user-grade" computer is as slow to use as one from 10 or 15 years ago!).
One of the things I do to minimise the effect that task manager cannot be launched when Windows is having a fit is that I open it first whenever I log onto a Windows machine, and just minimise it. It will pretty much always be accessable with alt-tab that way.
From the looks of it, they have added some features to the Windows key + key, but it is still not customisable. I remember back in the '95 days seeing some nasty bit of naggy shareware that would add extra options, but FFS a feature that basic should be configurable in the OS. For most people the Windows key does nothing, and just takes up keyboard space - it would be perfect for making the OS more functional to advanced [1] users, but I'd wager that it doesn't get more upgraded just so that MS can have some kind of exclusivity about it.... almost like some kind branding, but not trying to over do it. This is reinforced by what they are adding in Windows 7 where winkey + numbers switches tabs in just IE (or whatever TFA said - somehow they managed to write a long paragraph about nothing).
[1] People who can use both the mouse and keyboard!
No, the majority of Sky News viewers allegedly supported 90 days detention without charge. Sky News is just the UK version of Fox News but either way the link to both the poll and the analysis of it on that WP page are now broken links.
The contents of the PDF seem to all be in that analysis, as this looks like it might be a copy of the PDF. It's just very loaded questions, and choices of being either one thing or another, or a "don't know". It is not a good enough quality survey to objectively say whether the public supported the 90 day detention without charge, especially as it was a telephone poll, so only the kind of Sky news watching dipshits who vote on telephone polls would have voted!
Hah, the cannabis in the UK is potentially the same strength as cannabis in any other country (with equivalent climates), though most of the cannabis on the black market is often weaker than it could be due to the actions of law enforcement and the consequences of cannabis being illegal.
You are just parroting the bollocks that the prohibitionists speak. Fuck knows what idiot modded you up!
Due to cannabis having been the illegal for about 2 generations now, there have been selectively bred strains of cannabis developed which are indeed much stronger than naturally occurring cannabis, that are adapted for growth indoors, etc..
The line that the cannabis available nowadays is much stronger in the 60s is bollocks. In the 60s and 70s the vast majority of cannabis available in the UK was hashish, Moroccan, Lebanese etc.. Hashish is made by collecting the resins from the surface of the female cannabis flowers, and pure hashish can be maybe 80% or 90% THC, the active ingredient.
As time went on, hashish got cut more and more with adulterants, lowering the strength and making it much more profitable for people selling it (remember it is illegal - no enforceable quality controls). In the UK now you rarely can get real hashish, and the stuff solid as resin is usually known as soapbar - the general consensus is that it contains ground up cannabis plants (flowers, leaves, stems and all), something to dye it dark like henna or coffee, and an oily product like turpentine to give it a bit of a sheen. There are lots of rumours of other stuff that goes into it too to bulk up the weight, such as tyres or dog shit! Soapbar is maybe 5% THC at the very most, but more like 1 or 2%.
As a consequence of hashish turning to shit and law enforcement crack downs on smuggling people in the UK looked more and more at growing here, and herbal cannabis became much more popular. Basically people started to smoke the whole flowers of the female cannabis plant (with tobacco, as is customary in most of Europe) rather than products made from the flowers. Skunk simply refers to any variety or cannabis that has been selectively bred for strength, as they very often are much smellier than natural cannabis varieties. Killer skunk is a myth made up to sell newspapers and to get politicians and law enforcement power. The percentage of THC in even the strongest strains of skunk is only up to 15% or so, significantly less than what was available on the black market in the past.
As time has gone on, the quality of herbal cannabis has gone down too - look up gritweed. Also the major black market suppliers focus on growing the plants with the biggest amounts of saleable bud, not on strength. They choose varieties that produce the largest amounts of plant matter, and as it is a black market quality counts for very little. 70+ years of cannabis prohibition means that most cannabis users are grossly under-informed about what is good or bad weed.
Someone high on that can be very dangerous. I tell you what, you come over here and ask the gang of youths at the back of the bus to turn their mobile phone MP3 players off and stop stinking up the bus with their joints and see how quickly the situation turns ugly.
Now you just sound like an old man. "Kids with their music, smelly skunk.... I'm going to write to the Daily Mail".
Maybe if you approached them with the right attitude it wouldn't be a problem? More than likely they are just twats who would give you shit no matter what state they are in though, but stoned (only) people tend to not actually be very hostile.
I can assure you that the kind of kids that sit on buses smoking will also have been drinking too, maybe have had a line as well or are buzzing from some amphetamine, or have been chugging redbull all day too.
There are problems in society, but don't just blame cannabis. You sound seriously ignorant when you do so.
I think they are using JS to show otherwise hidden content. If you turn off the style on the page, it appears to show the details of the Adobe problem without having to turn on JS.
I ran into a 1337 overclocking-type site recently that did very similar. If you had JS disabled all the content was obscured by a big panel telling you to enable scripts, and that they weren't doing anything wrong with their JS. Well, they were trying to run scripts from many advertisers and tracking domains, but by simply turning off the page style I was able to see the content.
I left an inflammatory comment on the article, and the kid running the site flamed back and blocked my IP. Fortunately I had saved the content I was after before leaving the flame:)
Hah, actually, having a look from a different IP (in the same netblock, no less) it appears that they don't seem to have that annoyance any more!
There are more often than not sign stating that you may only consume beverages and food purchased on the premises.
I have seen a piece on a consumer TV programme about this exact practice, and it's utter bollocks. They can put up as many signs as they like saying you can only consume stuff bought on the premises, but there are no laws to back it up. In fact, the law may well be on the side of the visitor, with their cache of supermarket bought sweets.
The piece I saw involved undercover cameras, and the spotty youth checking tickets got shirty, but when the manager came down the customers were allowed in straight away.
Actually, I think the exception may be hot food... but if not, I'd be great to take in a kebab meat and chips to watch the latest hollywood bilge-fest. It'd stink no less than the movie!:)
I assume it's only drawing 15 watts while downloading program info. If that takes a whole minute per day, the average power draw is about 0.01 watts, ten times better than the claim. Even if downloads took 10 minutes per day, that only brings it up to the 0.1 watt level.
RTFA - the TV seemed to be in programme download mode 75% of the time it is in sleep, and when in that mode it draws 20W.
A usenet, forum, or other type of online post that is all a link to a Wikipedia article automatically disqualifies the poster from further contributions to the discussion.
I think I'll write a Wikipedia article about it!;)
You are either a troll, or you are exactly the type of person the grandparent was talking about when he said:
People that live on these "we have to protect our children from any type of experience" are so ignorant it doesn't even matter if you speak their language or not.
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No, they don't need keys, they use the lock button inside. They may have to do this with the drivers door closed and leaning over from the passenger side though - I've seen quite a few cars where the locks are set up such that it is tricky to lock the keys in by accident.
I used to have a car where you had to use the key to lock the driver's side, unless you knew the trick - flick the lock level whilst holding the door open lever open. Very convenient to be able to get out the car and lock it quickly before the days of commonplace remote central locking. I still managed to lock my keys in the car twice though, but I soon learnt how to break into my own car.
I severely doubt we (currently) have facial recognition hooked up to the network of CCTV in this country, but what we do have is ANPR - automatic number plate recognition - all over the place.
There are very obvious cameras around that point clearly at the lanes on major roads which are logging all vehicles using major routes. I should think ANPR also gets hooked up to existing CCTV infrastructure too.
And the police seem to routinely have ANPR in their cars these days too. Well, maybe not the "panda cars" that get used for day to day pig work (runs to the doughnut shop and back, for example), but the traffic cars do. Watch any recent UK cop show (like <accent="Manc">Road Wars</accent>) and you will see them using their ANPR. The police cruise around looking for people to ticket (usually no seatbelts or something minor - you know, dangerous criminals), whilst the cameras in their vehicles are reading every numberplate they see. The machine then alerts the tax collectors^W^W police if a car is less than perfect. So any problem with insurance, car registration, owner's licence, road tax and the car will get pulled over. The ANPR system queries a bunch of databases in real time to do this.
What I really don't like is that more than likely the police car's system records the numberplates it sees, but it will no doubt also record the police car's location (from GPS), the direction the police car was going, and the time/date. With this data, along with the static ANPR data, is spelling the end of private travel by car in the UK.
Numberplates over here are pretty standardised, so I guess ANPR is relatively easy to implement compared to facial recognition. But I bet as soon as facial recognition is even slightly reliable it will be retro fitted to everything it can be. Though thinking about it, even if facial recognition doesn't work fully yet it would still be possible to record faces along with location+date+time. Google's streetview is able to tell what a face is, so there isn't much to stop similar happening through a CCTV network. And once facial recognition is reliable the existing data can be run through the system.
When I got a new passport a year or 2 ago, I had a new photo taken and I got the shop to save the photo onto a USB stick. From now on I will be submitting the same photo whenever a photo is needed for something.... at some point I need to get a new driving licence as I still have my 10+ year old paper one even though plastic licences with a photo have been standard for probably 9 years. When I got the photo done I hadn't had a haircut or shave for 6 months either, and I read all the rules about passport photos - black and white photos are still allowed! So my RFID passport has a picture in it that looks like it was taken in the mid-70s! Passport control at Gatwick airport didn't seem too bothered when I used it there, once I said "don't worry mate, it is me".
Indeed. I am not upgrading to 3 because of the horrific address bar, and now this! Where has the light, fast, sleek browser gone? Oh yeah, someone's pay at Mozilla is based on increasing the number of users, so chasing those IE users has become paramount. Hence the change in direction from a UNIX-esque philosophy to a hand-holding philosophy (happened between 1 and 2, I think).
Sooner or later there will be a bug in FF or someone else's implementation of this geolocation crap, and the browser could be spewing your location to anyone who wants it.
Advertisers will love this crap too, so expect unscrupulous ads to tell users how to turn off the geolocation warnings/prompts totally. Anything that an advertiser would like is never in an individual's interest (unless you are a brainwashed, simple, consumer).
I'm sure he does it because if the customer feels they are getting a good deal out of the service they are paying for then they are more likely to pay him in the future for related services.
Or his clients pay an flat annual fee for routine support, and getting rid of Symantec makes it quicker to get jobs done, and there are less issues related to the AV that aren't an infection.
1) Liberals have not been in power for six months and they've already jacked up taxes. There's no rules of evidence when it comes to the IRS
2) Where was the trial at Waco or at Ruby Ridge? George Bush didn't burn 100 people alive in a house and shoot a two year old. Liberals did that.
3) The Constitution is a treaty. By inventing new federal powers, through the courts, liberals have changed the deal, repeatedly, and have broken it, by twisting the commerce clause apart.
4) Liberals gave us the Federal Reserve. So far, the Federal Reserve provoked the Great Depression, gave us inflation of the 1970s, twin assett bubles, and coming soon, hyperinflation.
5) Liberals gave us free trade. That has pretty much destroyed most of the US manufacturing base. When coupled with the just passed fire tax, that will destroy what's left.
6) Liberals gave us the IMF and the World Bank, which pretty much drive every third world economy into the ground that they can touch.
7) Liberals banned DDT and let 500 million people die from malaria.
8) Liberals refused any sort of practical registration database or quarantine and gave us 1 million dead from AIDS.
9) Liberals rounded up every American citizen of Japanese descent during World War II and tossed them into concentration camps.
10) Liberals consistently try and assault the 1st, 2nd, 4th and 5th amendments for whatever supports their own agenda. They bully right wing media, they threaten to disarm the country, they block the expression of culture in taxpayer owned facilities, and they place the burden of proof of compliance of every federal regulation on the business and its owners.
11) Liberals want to turn the census into yet another political circus and use census money to pass out bucks to their own thug groups like ACORN.
12) Liberals are against any sort of choice in schools for children, yet, never seem to have a problem keeping their own kids in private schools. Liberals just screwed Washington DC's kids out of charter schools, but will we see any child of any liberal attend a public school in DC? Doubt it.
Sure if you want to live in a hut and have gay sex, liberalism is perfect for you. But, if you want to earn a living, and do anything else, the jackbooted thug of liberalism is the enemy of all mankind. George Bush and other Republicans tried to reach a middle ground with liberals and it is clear that there is none. From here on out, the only answer is to get rid of liberals.... and how doesn't really matter at this point. They aren't political opponents. They are targets.
So this is what American talk radio is like?
Shit, you are spot on.
I used the phrase authority figure because if you have to justify yourself to someone due to threats of arrest they are in a position of authority.
In a related way, something that has happened in this country (UK) over the past few years is that local councils (those that are responsible for the bins and the upkeep of the local area, etc.) are now pretty universally referred to as "local authorities" by themselves, the rest of government and public bodies, and groups like the press. I feel this is a subtle way of changing how we view local government (and by extension, all government).
When I hear someone call the council a local authority these days I play dumb and pretend I don't know who they mean. Then once explained, I go "Oh, you mean the council?". It can lead nicely to pointing out that an elected busybody should never be in a position of authority.
Please, explain exactly why the police watching you & everyone else all the time in public is bad. What, exactly, is the problem there?
Are you afraid of corruption? Of a change in the law? Do you somehow think that either one would be hastened or slowed by mere video surveillance of public places?
I'm with the general population -- liberterians who think anything government is bad, or that anything even vaugey orwellian will inevitably lead to Big Brother re-writing the past and instituting a 2-minute-hate, are the unimaginiative ones, reacting like ludditeis smashing machines without ever thinking and actually applying real principles.
Why on earth should you or I be watched by law enforcement in a supposedly free country? Being constantly watched means sooner or later the police will see something they don't like or don't understand. All of a sudden people in a free country (that past generations laid down lives to protect) are having to justify their actions to an authority figure.
The constant surveillance and encroachment on civil liberties has had the effect that we are answerable to the government, not the other way around as it should be in a democracy.
Corruption is obviously a concern, and the recent MP expenses fun and games have shows how widespread corruption can simmer away unnoticed. Giving these people more power over us is not a good idea when they seem perfectly willing to use powers for their own ends. History is full of examples of abuse of power, so restriction of power is necessary.
Video surveillance is just a facet of the encroachment on us by government, and as it is the most visible and widely understood it gets talked about a lot. Considering how small cameras can be, huge great things are appearing on the sides of buildings all over the country. The cameras are an easy solution for politicians to public demands for clamp downs on street crime - demands whipped up by certain parts of the press.
Many people question the effectiveness of cameras compared to other crime reduction measures, like simply more police on the beat, or dealing with poverty. Of course the 2nd 2 are much harder for politicians, and probably won't be very effective before the next election they face.
One of the issues privacy advocates have is that as many people are willing to give away their privacy (because they have been told it is good for them), they are also willing to give away other people's privacy too. Just because you are happy to be watched by some council employee when you do your shopping doesn't mean I am, and it is very frustrating to lose privacy this way. Unsurprisingly people then express themselves dramatically, and try and warn what we could be moving towards. A dystopian future won't happen overnight, it'd be over multiple generations if it did happen, but I don't want to think that I will leave a world going that way at all.
You are right - there are morons on both side of the political spectrum. (There are people who are also morons if they think there are only 2 sides).
There's no shortage of people lining up to parrot left-wing anti-corporate "facts", just as there are right-wingers who will needlessly defend the latest big business policy that has the real effect of fucking over the little guy, the environment or society.
But when it comes to genuinely smart people, they tend to be what Americans label as "liberal", and the rest of the world would call centrists or centre-left. There are intelligent people who are on the right, but they tend to use their smarts for business or personal gain, and as they benefit from their actions they fail to acknowledge the downsides of their actions. No doubt they recognise the downsides, but admitting it would probably be a death sentence for them or the businesses they run.
Cue an aforementioned big-business defender to mod me troll....
Shit, people like you are the reason there is a phrase that goes something along the lines of "don't argue with an idiot because they'll drag you down to their level then beat you with experience".
But if there were Martians wondering if there were aliens in the universe, those rovers and the other probes on the surface of Mars and in orbit that we have sent would be pretty good evidence.
2 identical planes having a similar malfunction (from the same base, probably worked on by the same ground crew), some people who believe in an invisible space wizard (a.k.a. god) who also say they also believe in alien air/spacecraft, and references to books written by people looking to cash in from the idiots who think aliens visit us is not evidence of anything like aliens.
Now then 4D6963, shut the fuck up, and do us all a favour: Go and play with the traffic or something. With every comment you make on this discussion you are doing nothing more than demonstrating what an utter fool you are, and showing your very loose grasp on reality. That is what your "evidence" shows, nothing more.
The money comes from people phoning you. Voicemail is active as default and most people don't disable it.
When you ring someone else and they don't answer, the voicemail picks up and you pay for one minute of a phone call. That is a lot of money when your customers have thousands of missed calls per day. If the other network reciprocates, then the networks have a tidy income and the customers pay to listen to a robot beep at them.
I'm glad someone else has noticed this, it is one of the things I hate the most about mobile phones. I see it as a clear way by the networks to squeeze more money out of their customers.
A friend has recently got a new job, and with it got a work mobile phone. It goes to voice mail after just 12 seconds of ringing! His own personal phone/SIM that he has had for years probably has VM as an cost-free option, but it hasn't been enabled (the way that seemed to be the default a few years back - mine's the same on a different network) - so it'll ring for up to 1 minute then cut off with a dead line - and no charge is made.
I can imagine that a bunch of suits at tmobile/o2/orange.... had some meeting one day where they decided how they could "moneytize" (or other awful, bullshit, made-up word) the parts of their services that currently aren't profitable. Whereas normally if you were somewhere with your mobile that had poor network coverage, you could not use your phone. But with "free voicemail" as part of the service, if people called you then the caller would get charged, even though they couldn't get hold of you! If people called you whilst you were on the phone, instead of a charge-free engaged tone, it dumps you to VM! Bonuses all round for these suits! And now an excuse to put off upgrading the network too.
All that was required is that all networks have the same policy when it comes to voicemail, and even though I try my best to ignore the BS that surrounds mobile phones and their services, I have noticed that free voicemail seems to be a selling point from all networks these days, and has been for a good while. Traditionally this would have been known as collusion, but these days it is "aligning our synergies".
Is there a GSM phone out there that has a feature that will auto-hang up a call after x seconds if the call has not been answered? Ideally x would be configurable for each phone number in your address book, so as to get around the bullshit practices of the networks.
But lets be honest - the biggest customers of phone manufacturers are the networks themselves, so features on phones are really dictated by the networks, not the users.
Additional: Just adding to this massive discussion.
I don't think I've ever seen an article with so few AC posts either!
Just curious... why? It seems to be what the market demands.
Don't get me wrong - I would jump at the chance to get a non-subsidized phone/data plan, but I am more angry at the ignorant masses than at the companies fulfilling their desires.
In markets like mobile telecoms there are only a few big players, so the market gets offered what the players want to offer, not necessarily what the customers want. Obviously collusion is illegal, but "singing from the same hymn sheet" isn't.
The utter cluelessness of most customers when it comes to computers and tech in general doesn't help much either. I guess this could be viewed as "what the market demands" though.
I'm sure it's a bit of both, plus some more.
WMP has claimed .mov support for years. Ive never seen it work, I assumed it was due to some update or change to the codec from Apple making newer files incompatible. It looks like the intention was not to compete/replace QT, its to have basic mov support for camcorders and digicams.
...and in turn the user doesn't have to install Quicktime, which no doubt is presented by Apple as a package of QT, itunes and maybe Safari. Actually, just looked, and the default is a package of QT and itunes, though there was a QT only download.
So the MS support for newer .mov files is just so people don't get itunes as their default music player, and so possibly stick with WMP. MS stand to benefit from this as the competition don't get to promote their music store in the user's face (the last time I saw itunes it looked close to being adware!).
And it all started with the rotating desktop cube.
Heh, obligatory:
http://xkcd.com/456/
2. Windows Logo + keyboard shortcut
OK, I really don't understan this one. hasn't [alt]+ the shortcut worked before? Seems they had this way back in win95, didn't they?
No, this has NEVER worked right. I have so many shortcuts assigned hotkeys, like Ctrl+Alt+P for a command prompt, Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, Ctrl+Alt+N for notepad, etc. Only like 20% of the time does the key work, even in XP and Vista. The rest of the time, the entire Explorer freezes for 20-30 seconds. You can't click on the start menu, the task bar doesn't update, you can't get to Task Manager, etc. Alt-Tab works to go between already-open windows, but the taskbar doesn't redraw. Sit there and press Ctrl+Alt+N over and over, and wait and wait. Suddenly, 10 notepads will all open at once 20 seconds later and the system returns to normal.
Yeap, I get exactly the same. It seems that if Windows is under even the slightest load, you will get the frozen explorer for 30 seconds. And with AV, auto-updates etc. being as hefty as it is, the machine is pretty much always under some load! (Well, in reality on Windows I disable as much is as possible, and write scripts to quickly stop and start things like AV. It is stunning how a modern "user-grade" computer is as slow to use as one from 10 or 15 years ago!).
One of the things I do to minimise the effect that task manager cannot be launched when Windows is having a fit is that I open it first whenever I log onto a Windows machine, and just minimise it. It will pretty much always be accessable with alt-tab that way.
From the looks of it, they have added some features to the Windows key + key, but it is still not customisable. I remember back in the '95 days seeing some nasty bit of naggy shareware that would add extra options, but FFS a feature that basic should be configurable in the OS. For most people the Windows key does nothing, and just takes up keyboard space - it would be perfect for making the OS more functional to advanced [1] users, but I'd wager that it doesn't get more upgraded just so that MS can have some kind of exclusivity about it.... almost like some kind branding, but not trying to over do it. This is reinforced by what they are adding in Windows 7 where winkey + numbers switches tabs in just IE (or whatever TFA said - somehow they managed to write a long paragraph about nothing).
[1] People who can use both the mouse and keyboard!
No, the majority of Sky News viewers allegedly supported 90 days detention without charge. Sky News is just the UK version of Fox News but either way the link to both the poll and the analysis of it on that WP page are now broken links.
Actually, here's a copy of the analysis:
http://web.archive.org/web/20071222223751/http://www.spy.org.uk/spyblog/2005/11/yougov_poll_biased_questions_o.html
The contents of the PDF seem to all be in that analysis, as this looks like it might be a copy of the PDF. It's just very loaded questions, and choices of being either one thing or another, or a "don't know". It is not a good enough quality survey to objectively say whether the public supported the 90 day detention without charge, especially as it was a telephone poll, so only the kind of Sky news watching dipshits who vote on telephone polls would have voted!
Except that we have really strong cannabis here.
Hah, the cannabis in the UK is potentially the same strength as cannabis in any other country (with equivalent climates), though most of the cannabis on the black market is often weaker than it could be due to the actions of law enforcement and the consequences of cannabis being illegal.
You are just parroting the bollocks that the prohibitionists speak. Fuck knows what idiot modded you up!
Due to cannabis having been the illegal for about 2 generations now, there have been selectively bred strains of cannabis developed which are indeed much stronger than naturally occurring cannabis, that are adapted for growth indoors, etc..
The line that the cannabis available nowadays is much stronger in the 60s is bollocks. In the 60s and 70s the vast majority of cannabis available in the UK was hashish, Moroccan, Lebanese etc.. Hashish is made by collecting the resins from the surface of the female cannabis flowers, and pure hashish can be maybe 80% or 90% THC, the active ingredient.
As time went on, hashish got cut more and more with adulterants, lowering the strength and making it much more profitable for people selling it (remember it is illegal - no enforceable quality controls). In the UK now you rarely can get real hashish, and the stuff solid as resin is usually known as soapbar - the general consensus is that it contains ground up cannabis plants (flowers, leaves, stems and all), something to dye it dark like henna or coffee, and an oily product like turpentine to give it a bit of a sheen. There are lots of rumours of other stuff that goes into it too to bulk up the weight, such as tyres or dog shit! Soapbar is maybe 5% THC at the very most, but more like 1 or 2%.
As a consequence of hashish turning to shit and law enforcement crack downs on smuggling people in the UK looked more and more at growing here, and herbal cannabis became much more popular. Basically people started to smoke the whole flowers of the female cannabis plant (with tobacco, as is customary in most of Europe) rather than products made from the flowers. Skunk simply refers to any variety or cannabis that has been selectively bred for strength, as they very often are much smellier than natural cannabis varieties. Killer skunk is a myth made up to sell newspapers and to get politicians and law enforcement power. The percentage of THC in even the strongest strains of skunk is only up to 15% or so, significantly less than what was available on the black market in the past.
As time has gone on, the quality of herbal cannabis has gone down too - look up gritweed. Also the major black market suppliers focus on growing the plants with the biggest amounts of saleable bud, not on strength. They choose varieties that produce the largest amounts of plant matter, and as it is a black market quality counts for very little. 70+ years of cannabis prohibition means that most cannabis users are grossly under-informed about what is good or bad weed.
Someone high on that can be very dangerous. I tell you what, you come over here and ask the gang of youths at the back of the bus to turn their mobile phone MP3 players off and stop stinking up the bus with their joints and see how quickly the situation turns ugly.
Now you just sound like an old man. "Kids with their music, smelly skunk.... I'm going to write to the Daily Mail".
Maybe if you approached them with the right attitude it wouldn't be a problem? More than likely they are just twats who would give you shit no matter what state they are in though, but stoned (only) people tend to not actually be very hostile.
I can assure you that the kind of kids that sit on buses smoking will also have been drinking too, maybe have had a line as well or are buzzing from some amphetamine, or have been chugging redbull all day too.
There are problems in society, but don't just blame cannabis. You sound seriously ignorant when you do so.
I think they are using JS to show otherwise hidden content. If you turn off the style on the page, it appears to show the details of the Adobe problem without having to turn on JS.
I ran into a 1337 overclocking-type site recently that did very similar. If you had JS disabled all the content was obscured by a big panel telling you to enable scripts, and that they weren't doing anything wrong with their JS. Well, they were trying to run scripts from many advertisers and tracking domains, but by simply turning off the page style I was able to see the content.
I left an inflammatory comment on the article, and the kid running the site flamed back and blocked my IP. Fortunately I had saved the content I was after before leaving the flame :)
Hah, actually, having a look from a different IP (in the same netblock, no less) it appears that they don't seem to have that annoyance any more!
Francois Mitterand convinced the company that produced the Exocet missiles to give access to the UK to the designs of these weapons.
Allegedly Thatcher threatened to use nukes on Argentina if the French didn't divulge those codes though!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/nov/22/books.france
There are more often than not sign stating that you may only consume beverages and food purchased on the premises.
I have seen a piece on a consumer TV programme about this exact practice, and it's utter bollocks. They can put up as many signs as they like saying you can only consume stuff bought on the premises, but there are no laws to back it up. In fact, the law may well be on the side of the visitor, with their cache of supermarket bought sweets.
The piece I saw involved undercover cameras, and the spotty youth checking tickets got shirty, but when the manager came down the customers were allowed in straight away.
Actually, I think the exception may be hot food... but if not, I'd be great to take in a kebab meat and chips to watch the latest hollywood bilge-fest. It'd stink no less than the movie! :)
by Anonymous Coward on 08-02-09 15:37 (#26772571)
I assume it's only drawing 15 watts while downloading program info. If that takes a whole minute per day, the average power draw is about 0.01 watts, ten times better than the claim. Even if downloads took 10 minutes per day, that only brings it up to the 0.1 watt level.
RTFA - the TV seemed to be in programme download mode 75% of the time it is in sleep, and when in that mode it draws 20W.
It's gems like that AC's comment that make browsing slashdot at -1 worthwhile :)
internewt's law:
A usenet, forum, or other type of online post that is all a link to a Wikipedia article automatically disqualifies the poster from further contributions to the discussion.
I think I'll write a Wikipedia article about it! ;)
You are either a troll, or you are exactly the type of person the grandparent was talking about when he said:
People that live on these "we have to protect our children from any type of experience" are so ignorant it doesn't even matter if you speak their language or not.