So this is a university. This university is searching for some means to provide email access to their students. Preferrably one that integrates into their existing access management which probably is along the lines of LDAP.
What exactly do they need Google, Microsoft or Yahoo for? Can't they set-up own SMTP, POP3, and IMAP servers? Aren't they able to adopt some standard web-frontend like "Horde" for their taste?
PDF is essentially a compressed, higher ability Postscript, right?
On the contrary, PDF is (originally) a subset of PS plus the ability to embed fonts into the document, apply some overall compression where sensible, and stitch everything together into one carrier.
And while it is true that the past knows about "PS bombs" which e.g. will render your printer useless cause its interpreter is stuck in a loop (after all, PS is a Turing-capable programming language opening all sorts of fun if your idea of fun are stack-oriented languages), the problem with current PDF exploits comes from the fact that this format gets increasingly overloaded.
I can see why one would love to see Javascript and embedding all kinds of multimedia stuff within PDF. Would bring PDF on par with Powerpoint with respect to animations etc. -- which wouldn't be the worst thing for me, cause I love doing slides with PDFtex and beamer, and Adobe of course would like to present their format as a vital alternative to those nasty office formats.
But it also adds complexity. Instead of a simple postscript renderer you end up with a gazillion of helper libraries, bringing in their very own bugs.
Why exactly is it then tied that tightly to a platform that porting it over to other platforms seems to basically mean starting all over again? After all, it's not like all 3 platforms would be completely alien in the backend -- they are POSIX compliant. Then the GUI: it's not like there aren't any cross-platform widget sets out there. But even if you want to go for individual approaches for each platform, then you still can separate functionality from the GUI.
So why again is the Mac port "closer to start than finish" (especially when reminding that Chrome is based on Webkit) and the Linux port "even worse"?
The author of the summary makes it sound like the mouse is only good for raising windows and clicking form buttons...
While I'm all open for any input device which does not require me to grow a third arm to operate (after all, two hands are already at the keyboard...) there are areas where I doubt that the mouse will go extinct any time soon: technical drawings, generating schematics and routing the according PCBs. Here, I don't see that your average graphics tablet will be of any benefit. Heck, for such even a mousepad is far from truly usable.
Speech recognition? Sure. As if everyone wants to sit like a babbling, stammering idiot in front of his office PC ("open file... open FILE!... OPEN! FILE!") -- plus, there must be a reason why even on the Enterprise w/ there seemingly great speech recognition they still use keyboards of some sort.
Touch screens? No way! I don't wanna clean the screen every hour to get rid of the finger prints. Besides, there's this thing called "haptics" which makes people still go for those old IBM keyboards.
A Wii controller or some way of finger/arm/eye tracking? If no specific controller is used but just camera or similar, how does it differentiate between voluntary movements which should result in mouse-pointer moves and what keeps it from moving the mouse if I just rub my nose?
Tell you something: what we need is full keyboard control for applications. Uniform across applications, uniform across window managers -- then for most cases we wouldn't even need another input device apart from the good old keyboard...
The hardware itself probably isn't much more than a compander and signal cleaner, e.g. some LM111 plus according resistors/capacitors like I used on my ZX81 to get 2k4 and 3k6.
To go into the 9k6 range, you could eventually go for 4 different frequencies marking 00, 01, 10, and 11 instead of just mark and space. A slightly more dedicated hardware therefore would also install 1 LP (00), 1 HP (11), and 2 BP (01, 10) filters to avoid any confusion.
I wonder if DTMF was ever used for data recording, giving you 16 different symbols and a nice analog way to separate the individual frequency components, therefore being easily able to reconstruct the 16 symbols.
Green on black is great; however, my xterms all run grey on black since I don't want to be confused with all these executables on my color xterm:)
Whatever you do, just don't fall for anything-on-white. No idea who came up with the idea that actively highlighting the non-information would be best -- for a reflexive media like paper (which happens so be somewhat white-ish by nature anyway) I can see the benefits, but for actively illuminated media it's just plain stupid.
As any eye doctor and optrician will tell you.
For some strange reason, however, this knowledge seems to be actively rejected by company's ergonomy advisors who still like to enforce upright sitting at 90 angles in front of an all-white screen.
To respond to your other points -- don't people become more wise as they age, in general? An old population would *have* to have fewer children as a rule. How you get to that point is a social problem to be solved, but assuming it will be solved (as there will be no choice), then the percentage of the population that is young of mind will be very small. That would solve a lot of problems right there.
I'm not exactly sure why an old population needs to have fewer children and why a small population "young of mind" would solve a lot of problems.
We only need to restrict ourselves to "only replace died old farts by kids" if we restrict ourselves to this planet. There should be plenty more out there, but since we right here, right now don't have an immediate benefit (i.e. next quarter revenue) stuff like colonizing the solar system or coming up with a sensible way of space travel are not problems where lots of money is thrown at.
While I agree that aged people tend to grow somewhat wiser, thinking more carefully and maybe also holistic, on the other hand a lot of older people grow unimpressed up to plain stubborn, leading to a "no, that can't be done, otherwise it would have been done already" kind of thinking.
The young mind, however, is stubborn on its own -- in a creative way: "Tell me what you want, I think it can be done and I'll prove ya."
It surely takes a certain level of education until "proper" research may start, but I think there's a reason why breakthroughs usually require lots of PhDs. Young of mind, educated enough, but not old enough to already think on established tracks.
Just because *you* are bored with your current existence and don't know how to fill another livespan doesn't mean others will feel the same.
I'd definitely welcome a society of eternal life, because that means that people will need to drive away from current quarter-based, short-term oriented thinking. Instead, the long-term perspective becomes focus again, therefore potentially leading to real breakthrough as opposed to "look, this mobile phone now comes in fluff and it even has a camera attached!" kind of technological advantages.
Also, we then *desperately* need to find a way to (a) optimize our resource use (harvesting e=mc^2 instead of just burning oil) and (b) spread to other planets, at least spread over our solar system. Both things I've been told as a kid to be lucky to experience by Y2K -- still, I await that badly to happen.
They probably don't fit into a quarter-based revenue plan...
Plus, by not aging conventionally, I may be able to decide to learn something entirely new every 20, 30 years when my previous occupation starts to bore me.
So why again do you think somewhat eternal life will become dull? There's so much to see.
Besides, you'll always have the option of riding the Suicide Booth.
I'm tempted to say "don't defend what you've never used".
Yes, there are methods to provide *some* sort of feedback; never the less, your finger have no orientation of any kind on a non-conventional keyboard. People have already experimented with stuff like this and it always was crap compared to "true" buttons and keys.
Sufficient experience with completely flat input devices already exists. Exists plenty. And those input devices usually were even *much* cheaper to produce. Still, they've died out (for good!) in the 1980s.
That has nothing to do with narrow-mindedness, but since you mentioned touch-screens: watch closely, the next time you see someone typing on a touch-screen. Where are their eyes?
Indeed. On the touch screen. No guidance for fingers, hence eye-control is required.
In 1981 we had machines with foil-based keyboards. On these machines you never knew whether you hit or missed a key -- you either had to constantly monitor the screen or watch yourself typing. Usually the latter.
Heck, there have been *plenty* of alternative input methods in the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from early touch sensors (remembering those on your TV set?) to a vast number of foil-based stuff.
They all died out. For a reason: people hate it when they have no tactile feedback. If they press a button, they not only expect something to happen, but also get the instant feedback of a button being depressed.
I suspect this designer is born in the 1980s. That's the only half-way plausible excuse to come up with touch-sensitive alternative screens as an alternative for keyboards.
Maybe he will then soon have the brilliant idea of chiclet keyboards and non-standard keyboard arrangements.
Its all symptoms of dealing with the symptoms rather than the causes of terrorism.
You're still on the wrong track.
All this is not to stop terrorism. This is to track each and everyone. Anytime. Everywhere.
And it has nothing to do with terrorism at all, at least not in the conventional sense of "terrorism". It's set up to terrorize people. Collecting and browsing their data, providing it to anyone with enough power.
I'm smoking crack, you say?
Then have a look at Germany, where the ultimate wire-tapping law has just be passed. Of course, for fighting terrorism. And big crime. Heck, anything which can get you into jail for 5 years and more. Just raise the limits. Oh, yeah, and the data should be provided to the music and video industry as well.
This is what you get when you outsource legislature to companies by letting lobbying run out of control.
Uhm, but you are aware that the decaying plant material can't give off more CO2 or other Carbon-based greenhouse gases than it originally consisted of. Close cycle and such.
Grow a tree. Burn a tree. No increase in greenhouse gas.
As long as you don't use your conventional gas-powered buzz saw to bring it down and an F350 to haul it to your place...
We did something similar like 10 years ago, hooking the log-file to the sound server where each port hat its individual sound and the frequency of connects directly related to the respective sound's volume.
Was rather interesting as you actually could *hear* all those Windows trojans and worms trying to dig their way into your (Linux) system.
Every year I send intimate details of every penny of income I earn and most of the expenses I have. How is this any different?
I don't understand how people can worry about stuff like this and then defend the income tax to their dying breath.
I really don't care which side you pick as long as you're consistent.
No idea, where you got the idea that I would defend the income tax. If I would rule some country, income tax would be the first to fall; instead, the sole tax to remain is sales tax (leaving me with a clever way to find avoiding illicit work, as I don't believe in punitive damage). But then, let me address your points:
(1) You do not need to file your expenses. You do it to lower your income tax.
(2) Regarding "every penny of income" earned, you may also want to take your bank account manager into consideration, or any other person having access to that very database holding your account data.
But: This data does hardly allow a total surveillance. Yes, using some data mining they might be able to generate a fair amount of data to profile whom you dealt with and who dealt with you. Still, it takes some effort.
The difference to that toll collect madness (and any other surveillance system), however, is that every step of you can and will be tracked and stored for later use -- and just because the IRS is already anal-probing you, this shouldn't be the grounds for enabling general full body-cavity searches. And no, people using rebate coupons, customer cards, etc. should neither play a role, because people still do this *voluntary* and may stop using them whenever they want.
The only way to avoid total surveillance is staying at home, not to drive, not to communicate -- and even then they will come after you because you were automatically flagged for unnormal behavior.
"http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_ a post.html"
In the latter 2 examples, when "It" is used to refer to the Olympic Committee or Microsoft, then "It's" becomes the possessive case.
You obviously didn't scroll down to the part of the page where it clearly says:
Don't use apostrophes for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals.
It's perfectly okay to use "it's" to signal possession.
No, it's not. Just read the very page you liked to refer. Or just ask your English Grammar teacher if there's a money-back-guarantee regarding his (no, not his') or her (no, also not her's) lessons.
Jesus. Ok, it's all right to have a little bit of suspicion with regards to motives here, but "Manhattan 1984"? That's a bit much, isn't it? br>
Also, how does this qualify as having to do with Our Rights Online?
Ignorance is bliss, Darklye, isn't it?
You just may want to have a look at Germany. You might or might not remember the fuzz about the German "Toll Collect" system introduced a couple of years ago. A definitely overblown system being able to measure the car, count axles, shooting fotos, talking to board computers etc.
Everyone thought that this was a crazy amount of technology thrown at a problem so simple as collecting toll. Everyone laughed at the tech consortium which was not able to deliver in time
First voices arose why the contracts were not publicly viewable. No freedom of information for this very contract... Still everyone insisted that this technology will solely be used for collecting toll.
Meanwhile, things changed. A total surveillance infrastructure being able to track individual cars not only with the help of the installed board computer, but just by mere picture recognition (mind you, Germany introduced machine-readable using OCR fonts -- of course all for the sake of increased security against plate counterfeiting -- plates already in the 90s). And while the law still is active that the infrastructure may be solely used for toll collecting, it gets constant fire -- and it will probably only take another legislature period until it falls and finally, all the authorities will also have access to this data.
Not really. At least not the way you like to understand it.
On a related side note -- not mentioned in the summary -- German legislation is currently pursuing efforts to get police and intelligence a new tool called "online searching", meaning just like they already can tap your phone or browse your bank account without you (or your phone company or bank) not even noticing they want to invade and raid your PC, scanning your HD and browsing your files.
Since this requires techniques commonly refered to as "spyware", "trojans", and "worms" they laid the foundation for outruling tools which are able to detect the governmental spyware.
*That* is the true reason behind this law. Not that they want keep the average joe from sniffing his neighbor's WLAN...
Over here we differenciate between what we call Bio-Diesel (aka RME, Rapsmethylester), i.e. esterized oil from canola to match the characteristics of Diesel fuel, and (cleaned, but otherwise unprocessed) plant oil.
The latter always shows bad habits at lower temperatures so that you either convert the installed Diesel fuel system for plant oil use and add an auxiliary Diesel fuel system for cold start (and the last kilometer before arriving home to flush the pipes with Diesel), or you spend twice the money -- for my car about 2000 Euro -- and go for a pre-heating system (at least that's the way I understood them). With modern cars you will, of course, always win the entire tour of replacing tubes and gaskets (for fat-acid resistancy), new injectors, and a motor control unit which also knows how to properly handle plant oil. (Joys of modern Diesel engine technology. For the old ones it's just the tubes/gaskets and maybe injectors.)
But then also Diesel will start gooing out below a certain temperature, hence in the Winter season "Winter Diesel" is sold; even that will turn into goo from about -20/-25C.
Diesel engines are more expensive than gasoline engines, which is one reason that they aren't popular with the buying public. Another is that they're slow to start in cold weather. Body rot and other mechanical failures can make a car useless before the engine fails; this reduces the value of a highly durable engine.
I take it that you live in the US?
So let me tell this to you as someone who lives in a country where Diesel engines are obviously far more advanced; even so far advanced that they are *extremely* popular with the buying public. So advanced, that the government lobbied some anti-Diesel campaigns and raise particulate matter concerns. But then, this doesn't apply to the latest Diesel technology including particle filters -- and older technology can be converted for about 600 Euro.
More expensive than gasoline engines? True. About 2000 Euro with new cars. And you pay about 2 times as much Vehicle tax for Diesel cars in Germany, but since the Diesel fuel is about 20 cents per Liter cheaper (and because Diesel engines have a better mileage) those excess costs for the first year (2000 Euro for the engine, 200 Euro higher tax) are already amortized after 11,000km.
Sure, that tax stuff is a German thing and will most likely not apply for other countries. But then you might be still interested in the better fuel performance of Diesel engines compared to gasoline-powered ones.
What is definitely wrong, though, is that they're slow to start in cold weather or less agile than gasoline engines. That was true in some almost ancient times, but then, I take it, that in the US you still have a quite hard time to get sulfur-free Diesel which is required for modern highest-pressurized (1600-2000bar) Diesel engines.
So don't blame the Diesel technology for your lack of adopting advances in this very technology which otherwere in the world are already used for 15 years.
Actually what I think most people are really objecting to is the way that record companies pump up the volume and saturate the band. Everything sounds like a car commercial the way they use it.
Well, but that is not a problem of the media. You can do the very same to LPs, and compression would work even better in the analog domain.
The problem is that overcompressed music sounds like shite, and that the modern MP3-leeching crowd uses music like any other consumable. And to be able to be consumed in the car or using cheap equipment it better be compressed to death so it stays "loud".
I own almost all my LPs also on CD. CDs are easy to handle. But if I want to *enjoy* the music, I play LPs. No idea whether it is some psychoacoustic stuff going on, the RIAA curve, or the haptics -- the ritual -- of playing an LP. But to me it's more fun to play a CD, even though I hear the little crackles and have to turn the LP after 20 minutes.
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So this is a university. This university is searching for some means to provide email access to their students. Preferrably one that integrates into their existing access management which probably is along the lines of LDAP.
What exactly do they need Google, Microsoft or Yahoo for? Can't they set-up own SMTP, POP3, and IMAP servers? Aren't they able to adopt some standard web-frontend like "Horde" for their taste?
On the contrary, PDF is (originally) a subset of PS plus the ability to embed fonts into the document, apply some overall compression where sensible, and stitch everything together into one carrier.
And while it is true that the past knows about "PS bombs" which e.g. will render your printer useless cause its interpreter is stuck in a loop (after all, PS is a Turing-capable programming language opening all sorts of fun if your idea of fun are stack-oriented languages), the problem with current PDF exploits comes from the fact that this format gets increasingly overloaded.
I can see why one would love to see Javascript and embedding all kinds of multimedia stuff within PDF. Would bring PDF on par with Powerpoint with respect to animations etc. -- which wouldn't be the worst thing for me, cause I love doing slides with PDFtex and beamer, and Adobe of course would like to present their format as a vital alternative to those nasty office formats.
But it also adds complexity. Instead of a simple postscript renderer you end up with a gazillion of helper libraries, bringing in their very own bugs.
So they want to develop a cross-platform browser.
Why exactly is it then tied that tightly to a platform that porting it over to other platforms seems to basically mean starting all over again? After all, it's not like all 3 platforms would be completely alien in the backend -- they are POSIX compliant. Then the GUI: it's not like there aren't any cross-platform widget sets out there. But even if you want to go for individual approaches for each platform, then you still can separate functionality from the GUI.
So why again is the Mac port "closer to start than finish" (especially when reminding that Chrome is based on Webkit) and the Linux port "even worse"?
The author of the summary makes it sound like the mouse is only good for raising windows and clicking form buttons...
While I'm all open for any input device which does not require me to grow a third arm to operate (after all, two hands are already at the keyboard...) there are areas where I doubt that the mouse will go extinct any time soon: technical drawings, generating schematics and routing the according PCBs. Here, I don't see that your average graphics tablet will be of any benefit. Heck, for such even a mousepad is far from truly usable.
Speech recognition? Sure. As if everyone wants to sit like a babbling, stammering idiot in front of his office PC ("open file ... open FILE! ... OPEN! FILE!") -- plus, there must be a reason why even on the Enterprise w/ there seemingly great speech recognition they still use keyboards of some sort.
Touch screens? No way! I don't wanna clean the screen every hour to get rid of the finger prints. Besides, there's this thing called "haptics" which makes people still go for those old IBM keyboards.
A Wii controller or some way of finger/arm/eye tracking? If no specific controller is used but just camera or similar, how does it differentiate between voluntary movements which should result in mouse-pointer moves and what keeps it from moving the mouse if I just rub my nose?
Tell you something: what we need is full keyboard control for applications. Uniform across applications, uniform across window managers -- then for most cases we wouldn't even need another input device apart from the good old keyboard...
The hardware itself probably isn't much more than a compander and signal cleaner, e.g. some LM111 plus according resistors/capacitors like I used on my ZX81 to get 2k4 and 3k6.
To go into the 9k6 range, you could eventually go for 4 different frequencies marking 00, 01, 10, and 11 instead of just mark and space. A slightly more dedicated hardware therefore would also install 1 LP (00), 1 HP (11), and 2 BP (01, 10) filters to avoid any confusion.
I wonder if DTMF was ever used for data recording, giving you 16 different symbols and a nice analog way to separate the individual frequency components, therefore being easily able to reconstruct the 16 symbols.
Green on black is great; however, my xterms all run grey on black since I don't want to be confused with all these executables on my color xterm :)
Whatever you do, just don't fall for anything-on-white. No idea who came up with the idea that actively highlighting the non-information would be best -- for a reflexive media like paper (which happens so be somewhat white-ish by nature anyway) I can see the benefits, but for actively illuminated media it's just plain stupid.
As any eye doctor and optrician will tell you.
For some strange reason, however, this knowledge seems to be actively rejected by company's ergonomy advisors who still like to enforce upright sitting at 90 angles in front of an all-white screen.
I'm not exactly sure why an old population needs to have fewer children and why a small population "young of mind" would solve a lot of problems.
We only need to restrict ourselves to "only replace died old farts by kids" if we restrict ourselves to this planet. There should be plenty more out there, but since we right here, right now don't have an immediate benefit (i.e. next quarter revenue) stuff like colonizing the solar system or coming up with a sensible way of space travel are not problems where lots of money is thrown at.
While I agree that aged people tend to grow somewhat wiser, thinking more carefully and maybe also holistic, on the other hand a lot of older people grow unimpressed up to plain stubborn, leading to a "no, that can't be done, otherwise it would have been done already" kind of thinking.
The young mind, however, is stubborn on its own -- in a creative way: "Tell me what you want, I think it can be done and I'll prove ya."
It surely takes a certain level of education until "proper" research may start, but I think there's a reason why breakthroughs usually require lots of PhDs. Young of mind, educated enough, but not old enough to already think on established tracks.
Go, speak for yourself.
Just because *you* are bored with your current existence and don't know how to fill another livespan doesn't mean others will feel the same.
I'd definitely welcome a society of eternal life, because that means that people will need to drive away from current quarter-based, short-term oriented thinking. Instead, the long-term perspective becomes focus again, therefore potentially leading to real breakthrough as opposed to "look, this mobile phone now comes in fluff and it even has a camera attached!" kind of technological advantages.
Also, we then *desperately* need to find a way to (a) optimize our resource use (harvesting e=mc^2 instead of just burning oil) and (b) spread to other planets, at least spread over our solar system. Both things I've been told as a kid to be lucky to experience by Y2K -- still, I await that badly to happen.
They probably don't fit into a quarter-based revenue plan...
Plus, by not aging conventionally, I may be able to decide to learn something entirely new every 20, 30 years when my previous occupation starts to bore me.
So why again do you think somewhat eternal life will become dull? There's so much to see.
Besides, you'll always have the option of riding the Suicide Booth.
Indeed. Instead, they bought two of the finest synthesizer and sampler vendors and sent them down the drain.
This, Creative, I will never forget. And for this simple reason you won't sell anything to me. Never.
Yes, even if you shipped it with Linux drivers...
I'm tempted to say "don't defend what you've never used".
Yes, there are methods to provide *some* sort of feedback; never the less, your finger have no orientation of any kind on a non-conventional keyboard. People have already experimented with stuff like this and it always was crap compared to "true" buttons and keys.
Sufficient experience with completely flat input devices already exists. Exists plenty. And those input devices usually were even *much* cheaper to produce. Still, they've died out (for good!) in the 1980s.
That has nothing to do with narrow-mindedness, but since you mentioned touch-screens: watch closely, the next time you see someone typing on a touch-screen. Where are their eyes?
Indeed. On the touch screen. No guidance for fingers, hence eye-control is required.
In 1981 we had machines with foil-based keyboards. On these machines you never knew whether you hit or missed a key -- you either had to constantly monitor the screen or watch yourself typing. Usually the latter.
Heck, there have been *plenty* of alternative input methods in the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from early touch sensors (remembering those on your TV set?) to a vast number of foil-based stuff.
They all died out. For a reason: people hate it when they have no tactile feedback. If they press a button, they not only expect something to happen, but also get the instant feedback of a button being depressed.
I suspect this designer is born in the 1980s. That's the only half-way plausible excuse to come up with touch-sensitive alternative screens as an alternative for keyboards.
Maybe he will then soon have the brilliant idea of chiclet keyboards and non-standard keyboard arrangements.
You're still on the wrong track.
All this is not to stop terrorism. This is to track each and everyone. Anytime. Everywhere.
And it has nothing to do with terrorism at all, at least not in the conventional sense of "terrorism". It's set up to terrorize people. Collecting and browsing their data, providing it to anyone with enough power.
I'm smoking crack, you say?
Then have a look at Germany, where the ultimate wire-tapping law has just be passed. Of course, for fighting terrorism. And big crime. Heck, anything which can get you into jail for 5 years and more. Just raise the limits. Oh, yeah, and the data should be provided to the music and video industry as well.
This is what you get when you outsource legislature to companies by letting lobbying run out of control.
Uhm, but you are aware that the decaying plant material can't give off more CO2 or other Carbon-based greenhouse gases than it originally consisted of. Close cycle and such.
Grow a tree. Burn a tree. No increase in greenhouse gas.
As long as you don't use your conventional gas-powered buzz saw to bring it down and an F350 to haul it to your place...
We did something similar like 10 years ago, hooking the log-file to the sound server where each port hat its individual sound and the frequency of connects directly related to the respective sound's volume.
Was rather interesting as you actually could *hear* all those Windows trojans and worms trying to dig their way into your (Linux) system.
Besides, its correct plural in Latin -- if ever used -- would have been "vira" or "virus" (long u), but never virii.
No idea, where you got the idea that I would defend the income tax. If I would rule some country, income tax would be the first to fall; instead, the sole tax to remain is sales tax (leaving me with a clever way to find avoiding illicit work, as I don't believe in punitive damage). But then, let me address your points:
(1) You do not need to file your expenses. You do it to lower your income tax.
(2) Regarding "every penny of income" earned, you may also want to take your bank account manager into consideration, or any other person having access to that very database holding your account data.
But: This data does hardly allow a total surveillance. Yes, using some data mining they might be able to generate a fair amount of data to profile whom you dealt with and who dealt with you. Still, it takes some effort.
The difference to that toll collect madness (and any other surveillance system), however, is that every step of you can and will be tracked and stored for later use -- and just because the IRS is already anal-probing you, this shouldn't be the grounds for enabling general full body-cavity searches. And no, people using rebate coupons, customer cards, etc. should neither play a role, because people still do this *voluntary* and may stop using them whenever they want.
The only way to avoid total surveillance is staying at home, not to drive, not to communicate -- and even then they will come after you because you were automatically flagged for unnormal behavior.
You obviously didn't scroll down to the part of the page where it clearly says:
Don't use apostrophes for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals.
No, it's not. Just read the very page you liked to refer. Or just ask your English Grammar teacher if there's a money-back-guarantee regarding his (no, not his') or her (no, also not her's) lessons.
Ignorance is bliss, Darklye, isn't it?
You just may want to have a look at Germany. You might or might not remember the fuzz about the German "Toll Collect" system introduced a couple of years ago. A definitely overblown system being able to measure the car, count axles, shooting fotos, talking to board computers etc.
Everyone thought that this was a crazy amount of technology thrown at a problem so simple as collecting toll. Everyone laughed at the tech consortium which was not able to deliver in time
First voices arose why the contracts were not publicly viewable. No freedom of information for this very contract... Still everyone insisted that this technology will solely be used for collecting toll.
Meanwhile, things changed. A total surveillance infrastructure being able to track individual cars not only with the help of the installed board computer, but just by mere picture recognition (mind you, Germany introduced machine-readable using OCR fonts -- of course all for the sake of increased security against plate counterfeiting -- plates already in the 90s). And while the law still is active that the infrastructure may be solely used for toll collecting, it gets constant fire -- and it will probably only take another legislature period until it falls and finally, all the authorities will also have access to this data.
Your turn, Mr. Spock.
Not really. At least not the way you like to understand it.
On a related side note -- not mentioned in the summary -- German legislation is currently pursuing efforts to get police and intelligence a new tool called "online searching", meaning just like they already can tap your phone or browse your bank account without you (or your phone company or bank) not even noticing they want to invade and raid your PC, scanning your HD and browsing your files.
Since this requires techniques commonly refered to as "spyware", "trojans", and "worms" they laid the foundation for outruling tools which are able to detect the governmental spyware.
*That* is the true reason behind this law. Not that they want keep the average joe from sniffing his neighbor's WLAN...
To quote the raven: "Nevermore!"
The latter always shows bad habits at lower temperatures so that you either convert the installed Diesel fuel system for plant oil use and add an auxiliary Diesel fuel system for cold start (and the last kilometer before arriving home to flush the pipes with Diesel), or you spend twice the money -- for my car about 2000 Euro -- and go for a pre-heating system (at least that's the way I understood them). With modern cars you will, of course, always win the entire tour of replacing tubes and gaskets (for fat-acid resistancy), new injectors, and a motor control unit which also knows how to properly handle plant oil. (Joys of modern Diesel engine technology. For the old ones it's just the tubes/gaskets and maybe injectors.)
But then also Diesel will start gooing out below a certain temperature, hence in the Winter season "Winter Diesel" is sold; even that will turn into goo from about -20/-25C.
So let me tell this to you as someone who lives in a country where Diesel engines are obviously far more advanced; even so far advanced that they are *extremely* popular with the buying public. So advanced, that the government lobbied some anti-Diesel campaigns and raise particulate matter concerns. But then, this doesn't apply to the latest Diesel technology including particle filters -- and older technology can be converted for about 600 Euro.
More expensive than gasoline engines? True. About 2000 Euro with new cars. And you pay about 2 times as much Vehicle tax for Diesel cars in Germany, but since the Diesel fuel is about 20 cents per Liter cheaper (and because Diesel engines have a better mileage) those excess costs for the first year (2000 Euro for the engine, 200 Euro higher tax) are already amortized after 11,000km.
Sure, that tax stuff is a German thing and will most likely not apply for other countries. But then you might be still interested in the better fuel performance of Diesel engines compared to gasoline-powered ones.
What is definitely wrong, though, is that they're slow to start in cold weather or less agile than gasoline engines. That was true in some almost ancient times, but then, I take it, that in the US you still have a quite hard time to get sulfur-free Diesel which is required for modern highest-pressurized (1600-2000bar) Diesel engines.
So don't blame the Diesel technology for your lack of adopting advances in this very technology which otherwere in the world are already used for 15 years.
Well, but that is not a problem of the media. You can do the very same to LPs, and compression would work even better in the analog domain.
The problem is that overcompressed music sounds like shite, and that the modern MP3-leeching crowd uses music like any other consumable. And to be able to be consumed in the car or using cheap equipment it better be compressed to death so it stays "loud".
I own almost all my LPs also on CD. CDs are easy to handle. But if I want to *enjoy* the music, I play LPs. No idea whether it is some psychoacoustic stuff going on, the RIAA curve, or the haptics -- the ritual -- of playing an LP. But to me it's more fun to play a CD, even though I hear the little crackles and have to turn the LP after 20 minutes.