You have to bend over backwards to avoid installing nanotech-based jamming paint? WTF kind of building codes do they have where you are?
We, like pretty much everyone else, have building codes that don't require the builder to ensure any particular level RF trasparency. Requiring radio functionality inside would inevitably require the builder to do some sort of testing before inspection. That pretty much constitutes bending over backwards. Such law would certainly make no distinction between intentional (paint) or unintentional (rebar) signal blocking. So yes, in such a case not applying said paint would involve a great deal of related back-bending.
The very first time I miss an emergency call because of this paint, I will be suing both the building and the company that made the paint. I might even sue the guy who applied the paint on the walls..
Then you'd be a dick, and an idiot.
Some people RELY on their cell phones' ability to receive calls...
It's entirely your responsibility to monitor the reception on your cell phone. There's even a little bar graph on the front for that very purpose. Who do you sue when you miss a call in the Eisenhower tunnel? When parking your car underground? when driving behind a freaking hill?
If you need to be in emergency contact it ain't anybody else's fucking problem but yours. In the olden days, that meant sitting next to the damn phone all day. In the even older days, it meant being physically present. The fact that you can get a cell phone nowadays doesn't put the onus of maintaining your availability on someone else.
it would be hard to say whether it addresses passive (non-transmitter) techniques, of even if the act of putting up the paint would be considered active blocking.
When the FCC says "passive" and "active" with regard to blocking radio transmissions, "active" always means "emitting RF radiation", and "passive" always means "NOT emitting RF radiation". Paint, all by itself, will always be passive.
I think imparing a person's ability to contact emergency services is illeagle.
You think wrong. There's no law that requires owners of structures to ensure that the occupants' radio transmitters work effectively. There's not even a law that does so in a roundabout way by prohibiting "imparing a person's ability to contact emergency services". Honestly, why do people just sit around and imagine what they think the law ought to be before talking about it, rather than seeing what it actually is?
The reason it's illegal is because it also blocks police and fire department radios and the cell phones of people dying of strokes in the bathroom.
No, the reason it's illegal is because the FCC prohibits the intentional jamming other signals, particularly when you are not licensed to broadcast on that frequency. There's no law that says builders have to bend over backwards so firemen, cops, and people dying of strokes can use their radio transmitters effectively.
The discrete mechanical knocks open the lock and are produced by a small device that can be carried by any authorized person. The device which opens the lock needs to touch the door (which can be made out of any material such as metal, wood, plastic or glass) to cause the lock mechanism to open. Since there is no keyhole or contact point on the door, this unique mechanism offers a significantly higher level of security then existing technology."
I gotta call absolute, laughable bullshit on this claim. This is just another form of "something you have" security. This is no more secure than a prox card reader-- which can also be installed "cleanly" by mounting the reader head behind the drywall, stucco, or wood of the wall next to the door. In fact, it's arguably less secure. Copying a prox card is not impossible, but practically so. Building a device that can record and repeat a series of "pings" from a sonic transducer, that's comparatively easy.
This would be a cool hack if you could actually knock the code on the door with your knuckles; but since it requires a battery powered box that you have to touch physically to the door, I'm sorry, you might as well use a prox card that you merely wave near the door and never have to deal with a dead battery.
When I clicked reply, no one had asked. When I clicked submit, I was the third or fourth one (don't remember now). I'm actually surprised I haven't been hit with a redundant mod yet.
Heh. Yeah, my outburst was unwarranted. I switch from "oldest first" to "newest first" when I have moderation points. I was thinking the top was the bottom...
Always happy to hear about a spammer being busted, but why does this land in the Secret Service's turf?
My god, how many people are gonna ask that? Look, the Secret Service isn't just the president's bodyguard. They are the law enforcement arm of the US Treasury Department. Remember Elliot Ness, of "The Untouchables" fame? Treasury agent. The Secret Service investigates a lot of things, including credit card fraud and computer crimes.
Sadly, The Davinci Code was not even that good, but the controversey certanly made it popular.
Indeed. Dan Brown is one of the hackiest hack writers whose work I've had the misfortune to read. He took a pretty weak conspiracy theory and the concocted the most uninteresting story possible from it. Chased by an albino asassin? Wasn't the hero of your previous book chased by a deafmute asassin? It's pretty sad when an author can't even figure out what to write without plagiarizing from himself.
If, if, if. So what? A man feeding the ducks at the park ought to be arrested... if he's poisoning the ducks. You can "if" your way to any conclusion. By the same token, lawyers will nearly always if their way out of trouble in these cases. "if our clients are guilty, this or that may be a problem."
Besides, until the lawyers have been found to be knowing participants in the crime, it's safe to say attorney-client privilege still applies. Them being accused of it and appearing to be guilty isn't enough.
that was part of an on going criminal enterprise. So they don't have any confidentiality, and indeed their attorneys should be disbarred and facing prosecution.
Please. You really think Diebold's legal reps aren't smart enough to do the standard lawyer shuffle-and-hop of couching all communications as hypothetical "ifs"? Retroactively applying finding of a defendant's guilt to "prove" he deserved no attorney-client privilege is ridiculous. By your reasoning every criminal defense lawyer should be disbarred when he loses a case.
"While it's a good and just thing that we now know Diebold was doing what they did"
The problem is, we do NOT know that. We only know that two lawyers were talking about them doing what they did. That's not the same thing, compelling as it may be.
So are you saying that the state of California didn't decertify all of Diebold's machines in April 2004 because Diebold installed uncertified software, or that the decertification didn't come as a result of an investigation started after the leaking of Diebold's lawyers' memos?
When it says that he "found" these memos, does it actually mean that he broke the law to gain access to them in the first place?
No, but the way he "found" them was his employer Jones Day (a law firm representing Diebold) had him working with them. While it's a good and just thing that we now know Diebold was doing what they did, the fact that it was leaked from a contract employee for Diebold's attorney is a Very Bad Thing. The presumption of confidentiality when communicating with your attorney is pretty important. He may get lucky and not go down because of the political delicacy of the situation, but they've pretty much got him dead to rights. Really, the guy's a bit of a dumbass for not leaking it anonymously.
Re:I'd like to see an alternative to PayPal, but..
on
Google vs. eBay/PayPal
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· Score: 1
Actually, eBay do decide what payment methods you can use. Currently they don't allow Western Union and they only allow online payment services that have been approved.
Hogwash. I challenge you to quote (and link) the relevant eBay page that says they prohibit Western Union transfers. The most they do is warn against using it, something Western Union itself also warns you against, as a money transfer has no fraud protection.
Pay safely online by never using instant cash transfer services such as Western Union or MoneyGram International to pay for your eBay purchases. These payment methods are unsafe when paying someone you do not know.
Ebay even posts a message from Western Union where they advise buyers to use Bidpay.
Basically, if the seller checks "other payment type", he can demand payment any way he wants and ebay can't do anything about it because eBay isn't an escrow service.
Amazon is a ripoff. Just to see how well it worked, I tried Amazon once to sell a used book. After Amazon charged their fees and shorted me on the (fixed/mandatory) shipping stipend, I ended up making about three bucks on a $15 sale. Not even worth the time it took me to list it, much less pack and ship it.
Autographs in particular, you could buy a autographed photos from hollywood actors at real auctions for anywhere between $100-$5,000... The same photo you bought for $100, could be found on ebay for $10...how do you expect every die-hard Marlon Brando fan to be on Ebay at that particular point in time?? They won't be.. And thats the problem..
No, you have it backwards. Ebay actually is the solution. Autographs used to be artificially scarce because of the limits of geography. To use your hypothetical, do you expect every die-hard Marlon Brando fan to be at a particular live auction in (say) San Diego during the five minutes it takes to auction it off? No, the huge deflation in price you're seeing is the result of every joe schmoe in Backwater, Idaho with Brando's autograph being able to reach potential buyers from the comfort of his living room via eBay. The artificial scarcity imposed by people's inability to find a local buyer for their autograph collection was the only reason you were seeing those high prices before.
Re:I'd like to see an alternative to PayPal, but..
on
Google vs. eBay/PayPal
·
· Score: 1
Obviously, without a court order, eBay won't let GPay (or whatever it's called) be used on the auction site.
You may not have noticed, but it's not up to eBay how buyers pay the sellers. You could demand payment in nickels, or mcdonalds coupons. Clearly they push PayPal, and offer the incentive of tight integration to get people to use it, but they can neither force you to use paypal, nor be forced to tightly integrate a thrid-party payment scheme.
* Don't say it! I have a Roomba too, and you still need to vacuum with a REAL vacuum cleaner once in a while
Sinners stay on earth!
on
Inescapable Data
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"This convergence, in their view, is inescapable, life-altering for both good and bad, and presents a frame-shattering paradigm-shift which is mostly unrecognized"
Is it just me, or is anyone else vaguely unsettled by the weird way some people talk about "The Convergence"? It sounds almost like the tech version of the Rapture?
Honestly, I believe that this view of "the convergence" is as overly optimistic as the 1950's notion that by now we'd be travelling in flying cars, have robots cleaning our house*, and atomic power was going to make electricity too cheap to meter. In real life there's too much (friction? drag? entropy?) due to the sheer scale and complexity of legacy systems for things to happen the way the dreamers envision.
While Chernobyl was not designed with safety foremost (as you pointed out), the accident there was also a result of overeager operators going beyond what was authorized in the plant specs, running the plant through a test procedure that had never been operationally been evaluated during the plant's certification, and trying to maintain a higher than rated power output for months at a clip. These are HUMAN failings, not technical ones.
You need to read up on the RBMK-1000 reactor design before you attribute Chernobyl solely to operator error. None of those human failings would have resulted in the core blowing off the roof and igniting the graphite shielding if it weren't for the fact that the RBMK reactor design itself is a piece of technical insanity. We do not have to worry about another Chernobyl happening in the west because even building such an abomination requires a culture of indifference to safety not seen in industrialized nations outside of the old Soviet Union.
This all smells of bullshit to me. Not on your part -- no offense intended to you -- but on the part of the quantum theorists who came up with these metaphors.
I think the problem is that there is no "accessible" way to explain quantum theory. Either you have enough background to understand the details, or you're fumbling in the dark. All metaphors will be inherently inaccurate and badly fall short. Probably the best explanation I've heard was this:
"Have you ever seen a horse race with a photo finish?"
Well yeah, a late model powerbook isn't what I'm talking about. I'd wager they're not going to spec Powerbooks. If they require laptops, they're going to spec mid grade wintel crap at about the $1500 price point for minimum.
And at that point you're not only dealing with poor color rendition, but limited resolution, a bad keyboard, and mediocre mouse controls. Laptops are the wrong tool for teaching computer art.
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We, like pretty much everyone else, have building codes that don't require the builder to ensure any particular level RF trasparency. Requiring radio functionality inside would inevitably require the builder to do some sort of testing before inspection. That pretty much constitutes bending over backwards. Such law would certainly make no distinction between intentional (paint) or unintentional (rebar) signal blocking. So yes, in such a case not applying said paint would involve a great deal of related back-bending.
Then you'd be a dick, and an idiot.
Some people RELY on their cell phones' ability to receive calls...
It's entirely your responsibility to monitor the reception on your cell phone. There's even a little bar graph on the front for that very purpose. Who do you sue when you miss a call in the Eisenhower tunnel? When parking your car underground? when driving behind a freaking hill?
If you need to be in emergency contact it ain't anybody else's fucking problem but yours. In the olden days, that meant sitting next to the damn phone all day. In the even older days, it meant being physically present. The fact that you can get a cell phone nowadays doesn't put the onus of maintaining your availability on someone else.
When the FCC says "passive" and "active" with regard to blocking radio transmissions, "active" always means "emitting RF radiation", and "passive" always means "NOT emitting RF radiation". Paint, all by itself, will always be passive.
You think wrong. There's no law that requires owners of structures to ensure that the occupants' radio transmitters work effectively. There's not even a law that does so in a roundabout way by prohibiting "imparing a person's ability to contact emergency services". Honestly, why do people just sit around and imagine what they think the law ought to be before talking about it, rather than seeing what it actually is?
No, the reason it's illegal is because the FCC prohibits the intentional jamming other signals, particularly when you are not licensed to broadcast on that frequency. There's no law that says builders have to bend over backwards so firemen, cops, and people dying of strokes can use their radio transmitters effectively.
I gotta call absolute, laughable bullshit on this claim. This is just another form of "something you have" security. This is no more secure than a prox card reader-- which can also be installed "cleanly" by mounting the reader head behind the drywall, stucco, or wood of the wall next to the door. In fact, it's arguably less secure. Copying a prox card is not impossible, but practically so. Building a device that can record and repeat a series of "pings" from a sonic transducer, that's comparatively easy.
This would be a cool hack if you could actually knock the code on the door with your knuckles; but since it requires a battery powered box that you have to touch physically to the door, I'm sorry, you might as well use a prox card that you merely wave near the door and never have to deal with a dead battery.
Heh. Yeah, my outburst was unwarranted. I switch from "oldest first" to "newest first" when I have moderation points. I was thinking the top was the bottom...
My god, how many people are gonna ask that? Look, the Secret Service isn't just the president's bodyguard. They are the law enforcement arm of the US Treasury Department. Remember Elliot Ness, of "The Untouchables" fame? Treasury agent. The Secret Service investigates a lot of things, including credit card fraud and computer crimes.
I know it's only meant as humor, but entrapment is for criminal cases, and you can only be entrapped by law enforcement.
Indeed. Dan Brown is one of the hackiest hack writers whose work I've had the misfortune to read. He took a pretty weak conspiracy theory and the concocted the most uninteresting story possible from it. Chased by an albino asassin? Wasn't the hero of your previous book chased by a deafmute asassin? It's pretty sad when an author can't even figure out what to write without plagiarizing from himself.
Besides, until the lawyers have been found to be knowing participants in the crime, it's safe to say attorney-client privilege still applies. Them being accused of it and appearing to be guilty isn't enough.
Please. You really think Diebold's legal reps aren't smart enough to do the standard lawyer shuffle-and-hop of couching all communications as hypothetical "ifs"? Retroactively applying finding of a defendant's guilt to "prove" he deserved no attorney-client privilege is ridiculous. By your reasoning every criminal defense lawyer should be disbarred when he loses a case.
The problem is, we do NOT know that. We only know that two lawyers were talking about them doing what they did. That's not the same thing, compelling as it may be.
So are you saying that the state of California didn't decertify all of Diebold's machines in April 2004 because Diebold installed uncertified software, or that the decertification didn't come as a result of an investigation started after the leaking of Diebold's lawyers' memos?
No, but the way he "found" them was his employer Jones Day (a law firm representing Diebold) had him working with them. While it's a good and just thing that we now know Diebold was doing what they did, the fact that it was leaked from a contract employee for Diebold's attorney is a Very Bad Thing. The presumption of confidentiality when communicating with your attorney is pretty important. He may get lucky and not go down because of the political delicacy of the situation, but they've pretty much got him dead to rights. Really, the guy's a bit of a dumbass for not leaking it anonymously.
Hogwash. I challenge you to quote (and link) the relevant eBay page that says they prohibit Western Union transfers. The most they do is warn against using it, something Western Union itself also warns you against, as a money transfer has no fraud protection.
Ebay even posts a message from Western Union where they advise buyers to use Bidpay.
Basically, if the seller checks "other payment type", he can demand payment any way he wants and ebay can't do anything about it because eBay isn't an escrow service.
Amazon is a ripoff. Just to see how well it worked, I tried Amazon once to sell a used book. After Amazon charged their fees and shorted me on the (fixed/mandatory) shipping stipend, I ended up making about three bucks on a $15 sale. Not even worth the time it took me to list it, much less pack and ship it.
No, you have it backwards. Ebay actually is the solution. Autographs used to be artificially scarce because of the limits of geography. To use your hypothetical, do you expect every die-hard Marlon Brando fan to be at a particular live auction in (say) San Diego during the five minutes it takes to auction it off? No, the huge deflation in price you're seeing is the result of every joe schmoe in Backwater, Idaho with Brando's autograph being able to reach potential buyers from the comfort of his living room via eBay. The artificial scarcity imposed by people's inability to find a local buyer for their autograph collection was the only reason you were seeing those high prices before.
You may not have noticed, but it's not up to eBay how buyers pay the sellers. You could demand payment in nickels, or mcdonalds coupons. Clearly they push PayPal, and offer the incentive of tight integration to get people to use it, but they can neither force you to use paypal, nor be forced to tightly integrate a thrid-party payment scheme.
* Don't say it! I have a Roomba too, and you still need to vacuum with a REAL vacuum cleaner once in a while
Is it just me, or is anyone else vaguely unsettled by the weird way some people talk about "The Convergence"? It sounds almost like the tech version of the Rapture?
Honestly, I believe that this view of "the convergence" is as overly optimistic as the 1950's notion that by now we'd be travelling in flying cars, have robots cleaning our house*, and atomic power was going to make electricity too cheap to meter. In real life there's too much (friction? drag? entropy?) due to the sheer scale and complexity of legacy systems for things to happen the way the dreamers envision.
Or alternately,
"In Soviet Russia, Matrix lives inside YOU!"
You need to read up on the RBMK-1000 reactor design before you attribute Chernobyl solely to operator error. None of those human failings would have resulted in the core blowing off the roof and igniting the graphite shielding if it weren't for the fact that the RBMK reactor design itself is a piece of technical insanity. We do not have to worry about another Chernobyl happening in the west because even building such an abomination requires a culture of indifference to safety not seen in industrialized nations outside of the old Soviet Union.
I think the problem is that there is no "accessible" way to explain quantum theory. Either you have enough background to understand the details, or you're fumbling in the dark. All metaphors will be inherently inaccurate and badly fall short. Probably the best explanation I've heard was this:
"Have you ever seen a horse race with a photo finish?"
"Yeah"
"Quantum theory is nothing like that"
You can shout that till your throat is horse, no one will listen.
And at that point you're not only dealing with poor color rendition, but limited resolution, a bad keyboard, and mediocre mouse controls. Laptops are the wrong tool for teaching computer art.