For example, every email has a button saying "charge the sender $0.10". It's at the recipient's option whether or not to charge the guy.
The problem then arises that someone could wage a financial war against any service that sends any sort of e-mail to their users. So, say for instance that someone gets ticked off at slashdot, registers an account, gets a password sent to them and hits the button. Granted, the service could refuse to e-mail anyone that has charged it, but that doesn't stop an army of slashdotters from attacking someone like SCO or Microsoft.
If we could determine which e-mails were legitimate and which ones weren't so that we could decide which of these charges are legitimate, we wouldn't have the spam problem in the first place. I guess the solution is to force users to e-mail you, so that you can e-mail them back.. and then if they charge you, you can charge them back. But does the client trust that the server won't accidentally charge them?
The other question then is who gets this money? If the recipient gets it, then malicious people will just search for anyone to send them e-mail (more likely make a spider to do so) so they can get some extra pennies. If someone else gets it, who do we deem worthy enough to benefit from the e-mail wars mentioned above?
Overall, just sounds like an accounting nightmare, since someone has to account for whether or not an e-mail was sent or not - and then enforce things so that one recipient can only inflict the charge once.
I've had a Tungsten T for about a year now, and I've been very happy with it. For day to day things, I mostly use the standard aps, but I also use it occasionally as an mp3 player, HP48GX emulator (faster than my real version), and with my bluetooth phone I can check e-mail and look up stuff on the web, chat on ICQ, etc. I have a couple other random aps on there that are useful too.
I had a Treo 300 for a brief stint and it locked up like crazy, and I understand what you mean about that driving you nuts. But with the Tungsten T I think I had one hard lockup, and two sudden reboots, and I've never lost any data. Because of that, I only synch about once every two weeks, and the battery life has been good enough that I generally only remember to charge it about once a week.
I think Palm's problem is that almost every Palm-powered device has a different version of their OS, so there's a little bit of hit and miss. For example, the Treo300 had a version tweaked by Handspring specifically for that device. There seem to be more problems with the devices not sold by Palm, since most of those can't upgrade the OS. You might check their website for updates - they did have some for the Tungsten T to fix an audio level problem for mp3 playback.
And a mention for my problem with the other option - the pocket PC. I have yet to see one with a vibrating alarm, which just astounds me. I usually leave everything on vibrate to avoid having it be disruptive during meetings, movies, classes, etc.
14 seems a little large, but they claim it takes up just about the same space as Courier 12
My first reaction was that they this was another effect of people not sticking to font standards. 12 points = 1 pica = 1/6 of an inch height, which I have often seen ignored. Surprisingly enough, in Word, these two fonts are about the same height.. the difference is that Times is narrower. So I guess they went with a taller version to maintain about the same amount of info per page, and perhaps make it easier to read in the process.
Re:let's see sun invents java, ibm, makes a tool .
on
Sun and Eclipse Squabble
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Funny how when it's an open source group doing the fragmenting it somehow becomes a good thing.
There's a big difference between what Microsoft was trying to do and what IBM is doing. Eclipse works completely within the current language constructs. Since everything I've seen in SWT is just done through JNI, it's just another library, so anything made in Eclipse can be run in Netbeans and vice-versa. You may need to port your project files and fix your classpath, but none of the actual code needs to be changed. You can even have applications with both SWT and Swing. All eclipse is is an IDE that supports the SWT library. It's a pretty slick IDE, and I use it for most of my normal java development even though I don't use SWT.
Microsoft on the other hand, from my understanding, was trying to hijack things that would make the language itself different - like they did/do with HTML. Let's say for instance that Microsoft made a compiler and VM that supported operator overloading.. then anyone that used operator overloading with their system wouldn't be able to use it in the standard system.
A CS degree gives you CS skills. CS skills are not the same as commercial programming skills, much as you may not want to believe that.
From the replies overall, it looks like I should have made that post longer to clarify, and this one will be too short as well. I have worked in industry, I do understand that there is a difference. I jumped into my first job with little C++ experience and was useful in a day or two. I wasn't writing the same sort of code that the old timers were writing, but I was able to make some useful things that saved time in the big picture. Eventually I ended up being the primary author of our main components, which was software for blind people, and must be responsive and stable.
Anyway, I digress. I'll agree that in the case of C++, saying proficient in two weeks is overstepping. Proficient enough in many cases, maybe. C++ is a nasty language, of which 50% of the intracacies aren't used on a regular basis. They're perfect in certain situations, but there are a lot of things I've used once, but don't find useful often (operator char* for instance). There are a lot of people that think they know everything about C++ and you can usually find something new to throw at them. You don't need to know 100% of the C++ language intracacies to write good code in the language.
But, aside from arguing exactly how long it takes to be a guru in C++... Everything boils down to machine code. Teach someone how things work in assembly, teach them basic programming language concepts, and from then on out, you only need to teach them how a particular language translates things to machine code and what the syntax is for those concepts. That last step doesn't take nearly as long as the first two.
If someone knows how objects are actually implemented at the machine level, they're not phased when they play with a language like Python and have to have self as the first argument of every method. If you tell a C++ programmer that Java's like C++ except every object identifer is a memory address with reference syntax, they can figure it out pretty quick.
I'll jump off this thread now and allow the flames to continue:) In the end though, I'll admit that I had extraordinary teachers, and extraordinary peers, so my view of the world is probably biased.
If I ask for C++ experience, your VB skills are probably not going to help debug the memory leaks you create.
These sorts of requirements have always been silly to me - mostly because I attended a good school. A lot of computer science departments realize that the language that is in style changes, so they teach a good amount of theory, rather than specific languages. What this means is that their students can basically pick up a new language by grabbing and book and be useful in a day or two - and be proficient in probably a week or two. Granted, having VB as a first language likely means it's not one of these kinds of people:P
By basing hiring decisions based on specific languages and not the background needed to pick up a new language, companies may be missing out on potentially better employees - those that are flexible enough to still function if say someone were to decide that everything needs to be rewritten in java 6 months down the line. I'll admit that identifying these kinds of people may be difficult.
Perhaps companies should be a little more general about what they want rather than specific programming languages and start asking for conceptual skills. "Must have experience with an object-oriented language, memory management, traversing tree and graph-like data structures. Specific familiarity with C++ and HTML a plus." or "Must have experience with a write-only scripting language" which we all know refers to Perl:P
I used to telnet into BBSes back when the internet and BBS worlds overlapped. I think you could argue that anything that could be done on a BBS could be done 'over the internet', since they didn't exclude telnet from their claim. I would hope that a decent lawyer could then argue that anything done on a BBS would be prior art. But, I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps my rules of logic don't play in the world of law.
The.86 error was because someone decided that they wanted round numbers, so when they changed the spec, they decided to round up. Well, in the process they forgot to throw out the old documentation. So, they ordered the correctly sized part for the old spec and got it wrong.
Probably a good example for software engineering class. "See, changing the specification, once released, may result in bodily harm!"
And sometimes on that occasion you can put "about:config" in the address bar, change general.useragent.vendor to "MSIE" and have it work anyway. MBNA recently changed their online payment system, and they're telling people to do this if they want to use Firebird. Just change it back when you're done so that the rest of the world is aware of the fact that other browsers are used!
Most times that I've heard the fee mentioned, it's been a fee that's levied on every e-mail, not conditionally. The conditional model is a little more acceptable to me, if implemented nicely. Though I still prefer non-monetary methods.
What would be really nice is if some percentage of the spammer's fee went to the spammee. So, for those spammer's not dissuaded by it, we at least get something in return for having to deal with the junkmail. There would of course need to be a lot of extras to guard against malicious use, but there are a lot of smart people out there that can probably make it work.
Probably the largest problem for such things is who do we trust enough to manage the system in the first place. Run all the transactions through paypal or something? Maybe just get Slashdot to manage it:P
Lol, that's funny. I'm pretty sure I glanced when I wrote the original note just to make sure I wasn't imagining that, and it still was. Okay, well, scratch that then.. Mike Rowe's going down:P
One other comment though. I've heard a lot of people spouting off US laws. The CNN article I read said he's in Canada, so it's Canadian law that governs here. I don't know if that makes any difference though.
I won't argue that the comments on Slashdot are good and they help balance the bias, but you also have to consider the bias of the audience that comments on Slashdot. Slashdot is 'News for Nerds', and hence those of us that read it, whether we like it or not, have the bias of a somewhat technically literate crowd.
In the real world, some people still buy Microsoft, some get frustrated with Linux, some could care less about Martian rovers on the moon... Maybe the world would be better off if it thought like the average Slashdot reader, but then again, maybe not.
On this thread overall, it's probably good to read other perspectives, but I'm kind of surprised that there's discussion about some internet use being more worthwhile than someone else's use. Personally, I think that keeping in touch with friends and family is more worthwhile than my news reading, but that's me. Conversation and the sharing of ideas, other than an opposable thumb, is what makes us human. So writing off a person who just writes e-mail and chats with their friends as not putting the internet to good use is disturbing. Most of these news sources quoted (other than slashdot of course) are one-way communication. It's generally the discussion with others that gives us insight and other perspectives. Why else would commenting on blogs be popular?
I think that the internet also adds many conveniences that are worthwhile - I can do all of my finances online, and can pay my bills while on vacation. I can order things from another state without leaving my living room. I can get directions from my house without having to ask anyone. I can even converse and argue with random people I don't know about stuff on Slashdot. My guess is that if you polled those people that said they use the internet, few would consider their use of it not to be worthwhile.
Despite all of this talk of name dilution and trademarks, I would think that whitehouse.com would have changed hands long before this kid Mike Rowe got sued. Microsoft whines "But this kid's site sorta sounds like our company name". The white house replies "The.com version of our.gov site is a porn site. Deal with it!" Maybe if Mike Rowe set up a porn site at mikerowesoft, no one would bother him because they didn't want to draw attention to it.
Well, the IBM hard drive business was sold to Hitachi, but it is my understanding that the former IBMers now reside in California (A least one that I know does). If the pay wasn't competitive, I doubt they would have moved all these guys to California first, where the cost of living is definitely higher.
I did a bunch of stereo vis work a few years back, and I really hated cross-eyed at first, but now I prefer it.. It's much easier to see larger images with cross-eyed viewing. If the images are large enough, your eyes cannot relax enough to center on the images properly, so you end up backing away from the image to reduce the angle. With cross-eyed viewing, your eyes are a little more flexible, so you can usually see larger images, or get closer to them to see better detail... though after a few hours of that you get some nasty headaches:)
They do. Nasa has a nice description of the landing. They deploy parachutes, fire rockets, bring the thing to a halt about 40 feet up, and then cut the chute and drop it to the floor below. I would guess that this is to reduce the risk of the probe getting caught up in the parachute, but I honestly don't know.
I woke up on Christmas to little kids driving up and down the street on gopeds and mopeds outside my parent's house. At first I thought they were battery powered and didn't go very fast, but I was apparently wrong. They honk at each other and idle them outside, polluting the air in more ways than one. They fly down the road faster than anyone without traffic sense should be allowed. And people wonder why americans are generally overweight and unhealthy.
So in evaluating technologies as best and worst, are there any personal feelings people rate these with? Personally I would say that improvements to communication and travel are good because it brings family and friends closer - 1200 miles doesn't seem as far as it used to, and it's a lot cheaper to get there (It was actually cheaper for me to drive home for Christmas than fly this year). On the other hand, people like my father refuse to use a self-propelled lawn mower because it forces him to get some routine exercise. He wouldn't say it's a bad technology, just not useful to him.
Their problem wasn't the data they received from exit polling, it was hubris: they looked at the data, which showed a very close election, and decided to predict the winner despite the closeness. They gambled, and "lost," but didn't lose much.
Sounds a lot like Bush's so called election. When the news stations flipped from saying that Gore won to Bush winning, the official polls in Florida only had Bush winning by less than 100 votes with like 70% reporting. And as we've seen, even the actual poll results have some error.
In my stats class, we were told that almost everyone uses 95% confidence, so that if it's not stated, it's just assumed to be 95% confidence. Maybe it was 90%, but I'm pretty sure it was 95%..
I've met several Mexicans abroad who were really offended by the term "American" being used to describe U.S. Citizens.
I was amused by this in my Spanish class when they told us that hispanics were offended by us calling ourselves Americans, and then proceded to tell us that we are to be referred to as 'norteamericanos' (or gringos). This seemed a little odd to me, since North America is also a big place that contains more than the US. Might as well just call us americans - it's shorter.
Spike strips would be nearly as good, but it seems terribly few cops are actually carrying them.
If you read the article, this is the entire reason why this legislation exists in the first place. They're scared about the manufacturing of ride flat tires, because it renders the spike strips ineffective.
So on NBC today they said that legal experts don't expect it to affect existing suits. I'm kind of confused how they can say that the method of identification of these people was illegal, but the current suits can continue, since they wouldn't have been able to legally identify those people.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally hear it with my headphones on. I can definitely hear my mouse wheel, and generally other things as well. It's quite annoying.
You would be amazed by the amount of linear algebra that results from your camping.
For example, every email has a button saying "charge the sender $0.10". It's at the recipient's option whether or not to charge the guy.
The problem then arises that someone could wage a financial war against any service that sends any sort of e-mail to their users. So, say for instance that someone gets ticked off at slashdot, registers an account, gets a password sent to them and hits the button. Granted, the service could refuse to e-mail anyone that has charged it, but that doesn't stop an army of slashdotters from attacking someone like SCO or Microsoft.
If we could determine which e-mails were legitimate and which ones weren't so that we could decide which of these charges are legitimate, we wouldn't have the spam problem in the first place. I guess the solution is to force users to e-mail you, so that you can e-mail them back.. and then if they charge you, you can charge them back. But does the client trust that the server won't accidentally charge them?
The other question then is who gets this money? If the recipient gets it, then malicious people will just search for anyone to send them e-mail (more likely make a spider to do so) so they can get some extra pennies. If someone else gets it, who do we deem worthy enough to benefit from the e-mail wars mentioned above?
Overall, just sounds like an accounting nightmare, since someone has to account for whether or not an e-mail was sent or not - and then enforce things so that one recipient can only inflict the charge once.
I've had a Tungsten T for about a year now, and I've been very happy with it. For day to day things, I mostly use the standard aps, but I also use it occasionally as an mp3 player, HP48GX emulator (faster than my real version), and with my bluetooth phone I can check e-mail and look up stuff on the web, chat on ICQ, etc. I have a couple other random aps on there that are useful too.
I had a Treo 300 for a brief stint and it locked up like crazy, and I understand what you mean about that driving you nuts. But with the Tungsten T I think I had one hard lockup, and two sudden reboots, and I've never lost any data. Because of that, I only synch about once every two weeks, and the battery life has been good enough that I generally only remember to charge it about once a week.
I think Palm's problem is that almost every Palm-powered device has a different version of their OS, so there's a little bit of hit and miss. For example, the Treo300 had a version tweaked by Handspring specifically for that device. There seem to be more problems with the devices not sold by Palm, since most of those can't upgrade the OS. You might check their website for updates - they did have some for the Tungsten T to fix an audio level problem for mp3 playback.
And a mention for my problem with the other option - the pocket PC. I have yet to see one with a vibrating alarm, which just astounds me. I usually leave everything on vibrate to avoid having it be disruptive during meetings, movies, classes, etc.
14 seems a little large, but they claim it takes up just about the same space as Courier 12
My first reaction was that they this was another effect of people not sticking to font standards. 12 points = 1 pica = 1/6 of an inch height, which I have often seen ignored. Surprisingly enough, in Word, these two fonts are about the same height.. the difference is that Times is narrower. So I guess they went with a taller version to maintain about the same amount of info per page, and perhaps make it easier to read in the process.
Funny how when it's an open source group doing the fragmenting it somehow becomes a good thing.
There's a big difference between what Microsoft was trying to do and what IBM is doing. Eclipse works completely within the current language constructs. Since everything I've seen in SWT is just done through JNI, it's just another library, so anything made in Eclipse can be run in Netbeans and vice-versa. You may need to port your project files and fix your classpath, but none of the actual code needs to be changed. You can even have applications with both SWT and Swing. All eclipse is is an IDE that supports the SWT library. It's a pretty slick IDE, and I use it for most of my normal java development even though I don't use SWT.
Microsoft on the other hand, from my understanding, was trying to hijack things that would make the language itself different - like they did/do with HTML. Let's say for instance that Microsoft made a compiler and VM that supported operator overloading.. then anyone that used operator overloading with their system wouldn't be able to use it in the standard system.
A CS degree gives you CS skills. CS skills are not the same as commercial programming skills, much as you may not want to believe that.
From the replies overall, it looks like I should have made that post longer to clarify, and this one will be too short as well. I have worked in industry, I do understand that there is a difference. I jumped into my first job with little C++ experience and was useful in a day or two. I wasn't writing the same sort of code that the old timers were writing, but I was able to make some useful things that saved time in the big picture. Eventually I ended up being the primary author of our main components, which was software for blind people, and must be responsive and stable.
Anyway, I digress. I'll agree that in the case of C++, saying proficient in two weeks is overstepping. Proficient enough in many cases, maybe. C++ is a nasty language, of which 50% of the intracacies aren't used on a regular basis. They're perfect in certain situations, but there are a lot of things I've used once, but don't find useful often (operator char* for instance). There are a lot of people that think they know everything about C++ and you can usually find something new to throw at them. You don't need to know 100% of the C++ language intracacies to write good code in the language.
But, aside from arguing exactly how long it takes to be a guru in C++... Everything boils down to machine code. Teach someone how things work in assembly, teach them basic programming language concepts, and from then on out, you only need to teach them how a particular language translates things to machine code and what the syntax is for those concepts. That last step doesn't take nearly as long as the first two.
If someone knows how objects are actually implemented at the machine level, they're not phased when they play with a language like Python and have to have self as the first argument of every method. If you tell a C++ programmer that Java's like C++ except every object identifer is a memory address with reference syntax, they can figure it out pretty quick.
I'll jump off this thread now and allow the flames to continue :) In the end though, I'll admit that I had extraordinary teachers, and extraordinary peers, so my view of the world is probably biased.
If I ask for C++ experience, your VB skills are probably not going to help debug the memory leaks you create.
These sorts of requirements have always been silly to me - mostly because I attended a good school. A lot of computer science departments realize that the language that is in style changes, so they teach a good amount of theory, rather than specific languages. What this means is that their students can basically pick up a new language by grabbing and book and be useful in a day or two - and be proficient in probably a week or two. Granted, having VB as a first language likely means it's not one of these kinds of people :P
By basing hiring decisions based on specific languages and not the background needed to pick up a new language, companies may be missing out on potentially better employees - those that are flexible enough to still function if say someone were to decide that everything needs to be rewritten in java 6 months down the line. I'll admit that identifying these kinds of people may be difficult.
Perhaps companies should be a little more general about what they want rather than specific programming languages and start asking for conceptual skills. "Must have experience with an object-oriented language, memory management, traversing tree and graph-like data structures. Specific familiarity with C++ and HTML a plus." or "Must have experience with a write-only scripting language" which we all know refers to Perl :P
It wasn't over the "internet" but close enough.
I used to telnet into BBSes back when the internet and BBS worlds overlapped. I think you could argue that anything that could be done on a BBS could be done 'over the internet', since they didn't exclude telnet from their claim. I would hope that a decent lawyer could then argue that anything done on a BBS would be prior art. But, I'm not a lawyer, so perhaps my rules of logic don't play in the world of law.
The .86 error was because someone decided that they wanted round numbers, so when they changed the spec, they decided to round up. Well, in the process they forgot to throw out the old documentation. So, they ordered the correctly sized part for the old spec and got it wrong.
Probably a good example for software engineering class. "See, changing the specification, once released, may result in bodily harm!"
And sometimes on that occasion you can put "about:config" in the address bar, change general.useragent.vendor to "MSIE" and have it work anyway. MBNA recently changed their online payment system, and they're telling people to do this if they want to use Firebird. Just change it back when you're done so that the rest of the world is aware of the fact that other browsers are used!
Most times that I've heard the fee mentioned, it's been a fee that's levied on every e-mail, not conditionally. The conditional model is a little more acceptable to me, if implemented nicely. Though I still prefer non-monetary methods.
What would be really nice is if some percentage of the spammer's fee went to the spammee. So, for those spammer's not dissuaded by it, we at least get something in return for having to deal with the junkmail. There would of course need to be a lot of extras to guard against malicious use, but there are a lot of smart people out there that can probably make it work.
Probably the largest problem for such things is who do we trust enough to manage the system in the first place. Run all the transactions through paypal or something? Maybe just get Slashdot to manage it :P
Lol, that's funny. I'm pretty sure I glanced when I wrote the original note just to make sure I wasn't imagining that, and it still was. Okay, well, scratch that then.. Mike Rowe's going down :P
One other comment though. I've heard a lot of people spouting off US laws. The CNN article I read said he's in Canada, so it's Canadian law that governs here. I don't know if that makes any difference though.
I won't argue that the comments on Slashdot are good and they help balance the bias, but you also have to consider the bias of the audience that comments on Slashdot. Slashdot is 'News for Nerds', and hence those of us that read it, whether we like it or not, have the bias of a somewhat technically literate crowd.
In the real world, some people still buy Microsoft, some get frustrated with Linux, some could care less about Martian rovers on the moon... Maybe the world would be better off if it thought like the average Slashdot reader, but then again, maybe not.
On this thread overall, it's probably good to read other perspectives, but I'm kind of surprised that there's discussion about some internet use being more worthwhile than someone else's use. Personally, I think that keeping in touch with friends and family is more worthwhile than my news reading, but that's me. Conversation and the sharing of ideas, other than an opposable thumb, is what makes us human. So writing off a person who just writes e-mail and chats with their friends as not putting the internet to good use is disturbing. Most of these news sources quoted (other than slashdot of course) are one-way communication. It's generally the discussion with others that gives us insight and other perspectives. Why else would commenting on blogs be popular?
I think that the internet also adds many conveniences that are worthwhile - I can do all of my finances online, and can pay my bills while on vacation. I can order things from another state without leaving my living room. I can get directions from my house without having to ask anyone. I can even converse and argue with random people I don't know about stuff on Slashdot. My guess is that if you polled those people that said they use the internet, few would consider their use of it not to be worthwhile.
Despite all of this talk of name dilution and trademarks, I would think that whitehouse.com would have changed hands long before this kid Mike Rowe got sued. Microsoft whines "But this kid's site sorta sounds like our company name". The white house replies "The .com version of our .gov site is a porn site. Deal with it!" Maybe if Mike Rowe set up a porn site at mikerowesoft, no one would bother him because they didn't want to draw attention to it.
Well, the IBM hard drive business was sold to Hitachi, but it is my understanding that the former IBMers now reside in California (A least one that I know does). If the pay wasn't competitive, I doubt they would have moved all these guys to California first, where the cost of living is definitely higher.
I did a bunch of stereo vis work a few years back, and I really hated cross-eyed at first, but now I prefer it.. It's much easier to see larger images with cross-eyed viewing. If the images are large enough, your eyes cannot relax enough to center on the images properly, so you end up backing away from the image to reduce the angle. With cross-eyed viewing, your eyes are a little more flexible, so you can usually see larger images, or get closer to them to see better detail... though after a few hours of that you get some nasty headaches :)
They do. Nasa has a nice description of the landing. They deploy parachutes, fire rockets, bring the thing to a halt about 40 feet up, and then cut the chute and drop it to the floor below. I would guess that this is to reduce the risk of the probe getting caught up in the parachute, but I honestly don't know.
I woke up on Christmas to little kids driving up and down the street on gopeds and mopeds outside my parent's house. At first I thought they were battery powered and didn't go very fast, but I was apparently wrong. They honk at each other and idle them outside, polluting the air in more ways than one. They fly down the road faster than anyone without traffic sense should be allowed. And people wonder why americans are generally overweight and unhealthy.
So in evaluating technologies as best and worst, are there any personal feelings people rate these with? Personally I would say that improvements to communication and travel are good because it brings family and friends closer - 1200 miles doesn't seem as far as it used to, and it's a lot cheaper to get there (It was actually cheaper for me to drive home for Christmas than fly this year). On the other hand, people like my father refuse to use a self-propelled lawn mower because it forces him to get some routine exercise. He wouldn't say it's a bad technology, just not useful to him.
Their problem wasn't the data they received from exit polling, it was hubris: they looked at the data, which showed a very close election, and decided to predict the winner despite the closeness. They gambled, and "lost," but didn't lose much.
Sounds a lot like Bush's so called election. When the news stations flipped from saying that Gore won to Bush winning, the official polls in Florida only had Bush winning by less than 100 votes with like 70% reporting. And as we've seen, even the actual poll results have some error.
In my stats class, we were told that almost everyone uses 95% confidence, so that if it's not stated, it's just assumed to be 95% confidence. Maybe it was 90%, but I'm pretty sure it was 95%..
I've met several Mexicans abroad who were really offended by the term "American" being used to describe U.S. Citizens.
I was amused by this in my Spanish class when they told us that hispanics were offended by us calling ourselves Americans, and then proceded to tell us that we are to be referred to as 'norteamericanos' (or gringos). This seemed a little odd to me, since North America is also a big place that contains more than the US. Might as well just call us americans - it's shorter.
Spike strips would be nearly as good, but it seems terribly few cops are actually carrying them.
If you read the article, this is the entire reason why this legislation exists in the first place. They're scared about the manufacturing of ride flat tires, because it renders the spike strips ineffective.
And less likely to be identified as containing a laptop by thieves.
So on NBC today they said that legal experts don't expect it to affect existing suits. I'm kind of confused how they can say that the method of identification of these people was illegal, but the current suits can continue, since they wouldn't have been able to legally identify those people.