... if the League of Women Voters is friggin' stupid enough to support a cause that breaks elections, they're working quite well to make people regret granting women suffrage in the first place...
"They are essentially bound to see this through...otherwise, they'd get sued by their own shareholders. They took a gamble and lost, and everything else is just following through to avoid getting sued."
That still might not work. They might not get sued for exactly the same fine points, but considering incompetence in senior management, incompetence in those hired to determine that Linux was to be a target, incompetence in the Public Relations department for making false accusations and unfounded claims, and incompetence in the legal department, it might not be hard to sue them (or brokers that convinced a stockholder to have purchased them).
To use your analogies against you, if there were police officers present in the locations that cameras are planned for, or if police made rounds that included those places, the odds are better that they'd find people in the act of committing a crime, so that they could stop it in process, catch the criminal, and therefore prevent the criminal from striking again on someone else. Cameras are solely an after-the-fact method that ends up usually having multiple victims before the problem is bad enough to get them to investigate.
Yes, I am bitter. I live in a city with a huge car theft problem, and I've been the victim of that once. Here they're not using cameras to catch criminals, they're using bait cars with tracking devices and remote locking doors to catch the criminals red-handed. That is one use of modern technology in police work that I whole-heartedly support. It doesn't track innocent people or give anyone the opportunity to infringe on the rights of those who have a reasonable expectation of privacy, those devices track people who actively seek to deprive others of property. They just happened to be stupid enough to steal something owned by the government designed to be trackable and recoverable.
Then allow me to carry. If it's a known dangerous place and if I am in a position to need to frequent it, let me arm myself so that I might be able to deal with the situation.
Also, like I said before, put more police out. That's their job, to be Constables On Patrol, right?
This thing'll be used to drop porn on the board room's projector during a meeting, a'la Fight Club, or will be used to write nasty things about the presenter, who would probably be facing the audience rather than the screen...
"To be fair, you don't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street in downtown Baltimore."
I'd maintain that unless you are in the presence of other people you have every reasonable expectation of privacy. Cameras are not people.
If you have a clothing problem in public, do you usually look for a semi-private nook or side area to make your adjustment? That's an expectation of privacy, even at a small level.
The entire point is that one should be able to go along and do as one wants without worry about others butting in. I personally believe in allowing people do do what they want as long as they don't infringe upon others. Obviously mugging is a form of infringement, but if they want to correct that they need to post people out there in dark blue uniforms with shiny stylized pieces of metal worn, not cameras. They need to allow the populace to defend itself without fear of legal action by a criminal who is injured in the act of committing a crime. Cameras don't prevent the mugger from attacking, and they don't necessarily do a very good job of identifying the suspect either, as all of those convenience store and bank cameras have demonstrated for decades.
Cameras have never made me feel more secure, except in one or two really weird situations, like a building fire alarm evacuation.
I don't support the idea of using cameras for direct traffic enforcement either. I would concede that using red-light-activated cameras isn't wrong, but should be used as supplimentary evidence to determine what happened in a car accident in an intersection. Otherwise, use the data collected to send a nice letter to the driver informing them that they'll be asked to enroll in a traffic school with penalty of license removal if they continue the practice. Don't use them for direct citations, don't use them for velocity.
Get cameras out of our society. Big Brother does not need to be watching us.
"That's actually more a function of how it's administered rather than the actual sensor degrading. You can dial the sensitivity up and down you see, and guess what the admin gets yelled at for more?"
Which totally defeats the purpose of the system in the first place. At work we use Kronos clocks with badge punching. As far as we know it requires the employee to have the badge in their posession to clock in and out. Most of us that are hourly are field tech staff, so we have to wear our badges for the day anyway, so we don't really have any opportunity to have others punch us in or out.
As for the clocks themselves, I haven't yet played around enough to determine if we can punch in a code on the numeric keypad and have that count as a card swipe. I'm hoping that I can, so that I don't have to wear out the damn badge as often as I do from swiping.
"I use my knife to pry out the caps lock key and throw it away. I started doin this three years ago and my life has been significantly happier ever since."
Wow. I did that back in 1995 or so when I was playing Quake and using a Mouse Systems ergo keyboard, except I pried off the Windows and Menu keys, affectionately referred to as the Lamer Keys, because they'd cause me to switch out of the game into the OS and would crash the game. Since I had the most powerful computer of the gamers I played with at the time I was usually the server, so if I broke it was really bad.
Anyone who writes a fairly serious amount of documentation likes having capslock key. Especially if it's MS-DOS commands with long pathnames.
...I worked for a company as a QA engineer breaking software, and many of our developers were family people. The easiest solution to being able to deal with family stuff was to work from home. They had offices in the home where they could work relatively undisturbed yet be there in an instant if something desperately needed their attention, and any "crash!" noise was usually loud enough to make it through anyway. Breaks to spend some time with the family every now and then worked out okay, so the kids got to see their father, but work still was able to be completed.
Well, the bulk of the costs associated with a title on DVD are movie production costs. Those are factored in when the movie is made for theatrical release, and the added profit driven by DVD sales is currently just gravy. Direct-to-video sales and porn don't have that relief from production costs that theatrical release gives them, but generally they have a lot less overhead and are not as high quality of a production.
The costs of creating a DVD out of a movie on film are fairly small. The equipment to do a good transfer isn't cheap, but most of it has been around since the Laserdisc days and still does a good job. They have to create the menuing system, produce any bonus material, and clean up the transfer, but I'd bet that they can do it in a matter of a couple of months for less than $200,000. All that it comes to then is stamping out the DVDs, packaging them, and distributing them.
Music is messed up because the system is more broken. Money isn't made through radio by and large, despite the numerous times particular songs are played. They expect to make their money through sales of CDs, and are probably afraid that if they lower the prices that all they'll see is lower profit without appreciable increases in sales numbers. We can argue that if they're cheaper we'll buy them, but convincing record labels to try this just isn't working.
When the MPAA first released titles on DVD, they were in the $20 range. They lowered prices when releases of older movies came out on DVD, many to the $10-$12 range, and low and behold, people buy them. They buy them in droves! I know people who bought their first DVD player a year ago who are already up to eighty titles, and they don't even watch movies nightly.
As much as I hate region coding, their prosecution of Jon Johansen, CSS, and the like, I can justify buying their products because I still get my money's worth most of the time. The $5.99 bargain bins at Walmart, Target, and many of the movie/media stores only help the matter. They understood that the prices they charged for Laserdiscs ($30-$70 depending on the title and the packaging method) just was not going to work if they wanted widespread adoption.
I know that it's not entirely fair to compare DVDs and CDs, because of the size of the content of most DVDs, but they're still little flat discs that are packaged and sold similarly. While CDs take up less space, if they were cheap enough they'd have a hard time keeping them on the shelves. Everyone would have that new hot CD because they could justify spending a little more than a meal on it, versus a week's food budget.
We have learned from Chernobyl's mistakes to some extent, and from Three Mile Island's, but we still make mistakes. We discovered cracks in some American reactors. We've discovered leakage and problems with seals in some of the steam-dryer units, which contain the water that went through the core. These are some very bad things to find. What's scariest is that they should have been found when they were minor issues, and aren't found until some visitor through the plant asks, "What's that big crack over there?"
We still have a lot more lessons to learn when it comes to nuclear power.
The environmental laws were to curb the production of leaded gasoline, rather than specifically diesel.
Lead is interesting. It's a very nice fuel additive as far as octane ratings go. If you look at engines produced in the 1960s and 1970s (ie, the 426 HEMI) you'll find 10:1 compression or higher common in production engines that run on then-pump gas. When the late '70s rolled around and fuel changed to unleaded, the octane ratings dropped from 110 to the eighties, and engines compression ratings dropped. My car's 360ci engine built for the '78 model year has 8.4:1 compression. What is used as racing unleaded or as additives is about as good as old-school leaded gas.
Leaded gasoline also doesn't work very well with catalytic converters, so when they mandated cats on all new cars in the late seventies they had to deal with that too.
I can see very *CHEAP* computers being free, a'la internet subscriptions like the eMachines and the like were for a long time, but I cannot see good stuff being free. Hardware vendors have a physical thing to manufacture and they must always consume raw materials to produce these things. Therefore unless software subscription services pay the vendors for the hardware, the user still will directly purchase hardware. Of course, either way the hardware is being bought, we just have a new middleman.
I like open source and free software because I can buy any class and kind of machine that I can afford and run software that doesn't cost anything on it. I can go without upgrading for five years if I really want to and if the hardware will meet the needs. I'd rather spend $2000 every few years than shell out a monthly rate and be dependent on whatever crap the subscription service provides.
The very sad, sad thing is that I understand your joke. I had a tagline database for my BlueWave Offline Mail Reader that had about 900 "NO CARRIER" taglines in it.
"Bruce Sterling needs to learn a lot more about nuclear power than he evidently knows. He seems to be stuck in a Chernobyl culture."
Can you blame him for being such? We've rendered a rather sizeable piece of what had been arable land completely useless for the long term. For those that cite that the RBMK-1000 reactor is a bad design, hindsight is 20/20. Yes, our current reactors appear to be better than the graphite moderator reactors of the Soviet era, but at the time they were designed they were considered modern and reliable. Kinda like now with our pressurized water reactors and heavy water reactors...
"Why not save the electricity, and ironing, and just hang your clothes on a clothesline for the day?"
Because I live in a city in a desert. If I were to do that, they'd smell like dirt and automobile fumes, even more than they do from simply being within a city.
How about instead of spending $1700 on a robot, just take your clothes out of the dryer and hang them up quickly enough that they don't have time to wrinkle?
Slashdot Mirror
... if the League of Women Voters is friggin' stupid enough to support a cause that breaks elections, they're working quite well to make people regret granting women suffrage in the first place...
If MS Reality is designed to make those flying through the sky things like the XP ads claim work, I hope that it doesn't crash.
Keep the FAA out of our computers!
"They are essentially bound to see this through...otherwise, they'd get sued by their own shareholders. They took a gamble and lost, and everything else is just following through to avoid getting sued."
That still might not work. They might not get sued for exactly the same fine points, but considering incompetence in senior management, incompetence in those hired to determine that Linux was to be a target, incompetence in the Public Relations department for making false accusations and unfounded claims, and incompetence in the legal department, it might not be hard to sue them (or brokers that convinced a stockholder to have purchased them).
To use your analogies against you, if there were police officers present in the locations that cameras are planned for, or if police made rounds that included those places, the odds are better that they'd find people in the act of committing a crime, so that they could stop it in process, catch the criminal, and therefore prevent the criminal from striking again on someone else. Cameras are solely an after-the-fact method that ends up usually having multiple victims before the problem is bad enough to get them to investigate.
Yes, I am bitter. I live in a city with a huge car theft problem, and I've been the victim of that once. Here they're not using cameras to catch criminals, they're using bait cars with tracking devices and remote locking doors to catch the criminals red-handed. That is one use of modern technology in police work that I whole-heartedly support. It doesn't track innocent people or give anyone the opportunity to infringe on the rights of those who have a reasonable expectation of privacy, those devices track people who actively seek to deprive others of property. They just happened to be stupid enough to steal something owned by the government designed to be trackable and recoverable.
Then allow me to carry. If it's a known dangerous place and if I am in a position to need to frequent it, let me arm myself so that I might be able to deal with the situation.
Also, like I said before, put more police out. That's their job, to be Constables On Patrol, right?
"Having a bunch of retired policemen and college students run the cameras sounds like a really bad idea in this context..."
If they can print off images from the cameras, how long until they start taking pictures of young women? That'll get the lawyers salivating...
This thing'll be used to drop porn on the board room's projector during a meeting, a'la Fight Club, or will be used to write nasty things about the presenter, who would probably be facing the audience rather than the screen...
"To be fair, you don't really have a reasonable expectation of privacy on the street in downtown Baltimore."
I'd maintain that unless you are in the presence of other people you have every reasonable expectation of privacy. Cameras are not people.
If you have a clothing problem in public, do you usually look for a semi-private nook or side area to make your adjustment? That's an expectation of privacy, even at a small level.
The entire point is that one should be able to go along and do as one wants without worry about others butting in. I personally believe in allowing people do do what they want as long as they don't infringe upon others. Obviously mugging is a form of infringement, but if they want to correct that they need to post people out there in dark blue uniforms with shiny stylized pieces of metal worn, not cameras. They need to allow the populace to defend itself without fear of legal action by a criminal who is injured in the act of committing a crime. Cameras don't prevent the mugger from attacking, and they don't necessarily do a very good job of identifying the suspect either, as all of those convenience store and bank cameras have demonstrated for decades.
Cameras have never made me feel more secure, except in one or two really weird situations, like a building fire alarm evacuation.
I don't support the idea of using cameras for direct traffic enforcement either. I would concede that using red-light-activated cameras isn't wrong, but should be used as supplimentary evidence to determine what happened in a car accident in an intersection. Otherwise, use the data collected to send a nice letter to the driver informing them that they'll be asked to enroll in a traffic school with penalty of license removal if they continue the practice. Don't use them for direct citations, don't use them for velocity.
Get cameras out of our society. Big Brother does not need to be watching us.
I thought that they were already delisted, and only noticeable through a specific lookup.
They're not in the newspaper stocks listings...
Instead of a ring, you could play this messed up thing that Weird Al put at the end of Off the Deep End...
I thought that California had the market cornered on this during the energy crisis...
"That's actually more a function of how it's administered rather than the actual sensor degrading. You can dial the sensitivity up and down you see, and guess what the admin gets yelled at for more?"
Which totally defeats the purpose of the system in the first place. At work we use Kronos clocks with badge punching. As far as we know it requires the employee to have the badge in their posession to clock in and out. Most of us that are hourly are field tech staff, so we have to wear our badges for the day anyway, so we don't really have any opportunity to have others punch us in or out.
As for the clocks themselves, I haven't yet played around enough to determine if we can punch in a code on the numeric keypad and have that count as a card swipe. I'm hoping that I can, so that I don't have to wear out the damn badge as often as I do from swiping.
"I use my knife to pry out the caps lock key and throw it away. I started doin this three years ago and my life has been significantly happier ever since."
Wow. I did that back in 1995 or so when I was playing Quake and using a Mouse Systems ergo keyboard, except I pried off the Windows and Menu keys, affectionately referred to as the Lamer Keys, because they'd cause me to switch out of the game into the OS and would crash the game. Since I had the most powerful computer of the gamers I played with at the time I was usually the server, so if I broke it was really bad.
Anyone who writes a fairly serious amount of documentation likes having capslock key. Especially if it's MS-DOS commands with long pathnames.
...I worked for a company as a QA engineer breaking software, and many of our developers were family people. The easiest solution to being able to deal with family stuff was to work from home. They had offices in the home where they could work relatively undisturbed yet be there in an instant if something desperately needed their attention, and any "crash!" noise was usually loud enough to make it through anyway. Breaks to spend some time with the family every now and then worked out okay, so the kids got to see their father, but work still was able to be completed.
Now I have to go back and look at my Pong machine to see if it qualifies as Prior Art...
Well, the bulk of the costs associated with a title on DVD are movie production costs. Those are factored in when the movie is made for theatrical release, and the added profit driven by DVD sales is currently just gravy. Direct-to-video sales and porn don't have that relief from production costs that theatrical release gives them, but generally they have a lot less overhead and are not as high quality of a production.
The costs of creating a DVD out of a movie on film are fairly small. The equipment to do a good transfer isn't cheap, but most of it has been around since the Laserdisc days and still does a good job. They have to create the menuing system, produce any bonus material, and clean up the transfer, but I'd bet that they can do it in a matter of a couple of months for less than $200,000. All that it comes to then is stamping out the DVDs, packaging them, and distributing them.
Music is messed up because the system is more broken. Money isn't made through radio by and large, despite the numerous times particular songs are played. They expect to make their money through sales of CDs, and are probably afraid that if they lower the prices that all they'll see is lower profit without appreciable increases in sales numbers. We can argue that if they're cheaper we'll buy them, but convincing record labels to try this just isn't working.
I picked up a copy of "Inventing the Abbots" for $5.50 at Walmart once.
Mmmmmm... Very naked Jennifer Connelly...
I've been arguing this for years.
When the MPAA first released titles on DVD, they were in the $20 range. They lowered prices when releases of older movies came out on DVD, many to the $10-$12 range, and low and behold, people buy them. They buy them in droves! I know people who bought their first DVD player a year ago who are already up to eighty titles, and they don't even watch movies nightly.
As much as I hate region coding, their prosecution of Jon Johansen, CSS, and the like, I can justify buying their products because I still get my money's worth most of the time. The $5.99 bargain bins at Walmart, Target, and many of the movie/media stores only help the matter. They understood that the prices they charged for Laserdiscs ($30-$70 depending on the title and the packaging method) just was not going to work if they wanted widespread adoption.
I know that it's not entirely fair to compare DVDs and CDs, because of the size of the content of most DVDs, but they're still little flat discs that are packaged and sold similarly. While CDs take up less space, if they were cheap enough they'd have a hard time keeping them on the shelves. Everyone would have that new hot CD because they could justify spending a little more than a meal on it, versus a week's food budget.
We have learned from Chernobyl's mistakes to some extent, and from Three Mile Island's, but we still make mistakes. We discovered cracks in some American reactors. We've discovered leakage and problems with seals in some of the steam-dryer units, which contain the water that went through the core. These are some very bad things to find. What's scariest is that they should have been found when they were minor issues, and aren't found until some visitor through the plant asks, "What's that big crack over there?"
We still have a lot more lessons to learn when it comes to nuclear power.
You're half-right.
The environmental laws were to curb the production of leaded gasoline, rather than specifically diesel.
Lead is interesting. It's a very nice fuel additive as far as octane ratings go. If you look at engines produced in the 1960s and 1970s (ie, the 426 HEMI) you'll find 10:1 compression or higher common in production engines that run on then-pump gas. When the late '70s rolled around and fuel changed to unleaded, the octane ratings dropped from 110 to the eighties, and engines compression ratings dropped. My car's 360ci engine built for the '78 model year has 8.4:1 compression. What is used as racing unleaded or as additives is about as good as old-school leaded gas.
Leaded gasoline also doesn't work very well with catalytic converters, so when they mandated cats on all new cars in the late seventies they had to deal with that too.
I can see very *CHEAP* computers being free, a'la internet subscriptions like the eMachines and the like were for a long time, but I cannot see good stuff being free. Hardware vendors have a physical thing to manufacture and they must always consume raw materials to produce these things. Therefore unless software subscription services pay the vendors for the hardware, the user still will directly purchase hardware. Of course, either way the hardware is being bought, we just have a new middleman.
I like open source and free software because I can buy any class and kind of machine that I can afford and run software that doesn't cost anything on it. I can go without upgrading for five years if I really want to and if the hardware will meet the needs. I'd rather spend $2000 every few years than shell out a monthly rate and be dependent on whatever crap the subscription service provides.
"[No Carrier]"
The very sad, sad thing is that I understand your joke. I had a tagline database for my BlueWave Offline Mail Reader that had about 900 "NO CARRIER" taglines in it.
"Torpedoes? What torp--" NO CARRIER
"Bruce Sterling needs to learn a lot more about nuclear power than he evidently knows. He seems to be stuck in a Chernobyl culture."
Can you blame him for being such? We've rendered a rather sizeable piece of what had been arable land completely useless for the long term. For those that cite that the RBMK-1000 reactor is a bad design, hindsight is 20/20. Yes, our current reactors appear to be better than the graphite moderator reactors of the Soviet era, but at the time they were designed they were considered modern and reliable. Kinda like now with our pressurized water reactors and heavy water reactors...
"Why not save the electricity, and ironing, and just hang your clothes on a clothesline for the day?"
Because I live in a city in a desert. If I were to do that, they'd smell like dirt and automobile fumes, even more than they do from simply being within a city.
How about instead of spending $1700 on a robot, just take your clothes out of the dryer and hang them up quickly enough that they don't have time to wrinkle?
It works for me...