Or against any employment contract, as long as human people are employed?:) Nah...
But I'm against granting contractual agreements the leniency that any and all events, outages and problems that some business have may will punch straight through the layer between the parties in a contract and hit the customer. There's always a Force Majeure, of course, that no one can foresee or plan against, but I don't like it when regular, run-of-the-mill business problems of a supplier immediately become the problems of their customers. This violates the isolation necessary between business entities. This isolation is what makes businesses and the commercial world in general resilient against everyday mayhem.
(That's why I'm a huge fan of outsourcing everything except the core business to suppliers that can do these things only, but do it very very well and then stop reinventing their wheels. After all, this principle is what makes complex systems - and Linux servers - so resilient: one entity only performs one particular set of functions, but by concentrating on that goal can be bulletproof in doing so.)
Breach of contract even for a free service is a no-brainer for contract termination.
But a clause in the TOS stating "we can cut you off anytime for whatever reason we want" is different. And yes, I know, it's a free service.
Imagine someone provided electricity for free to their hometown for a decade and then cut off everyone at once stating "it's free, so I do whatever I want". Big deal or not?
People did live without electricity, gas and phone lines for several millennia. Does that mean they can cut them off? And if you were provided with free gas, heating, electricity and transportation for years and then quickly cut off for no reason, you'd be troubled as well.
City dwellers may need gas for heating and cooking more than people in rural areas, but those need their car more. And nerds need Internet access more than jocks. . Now, Facebook may not be the most life-critical utility to me, but the question should be "When does a nice-to-have utility become a must-have necessity and for whom and why?"
A contract, where one party only has to try their best efforts, with no real hard obligations, while the other must pay in cold, hard cash, on time, every month or else doesn't sound exactly fair to me.
I'm all for free enterprise and freedom of contract, but I'd sure as hell sue them if they take cash for no service and/or cause me undue losses or effort. Contracts, where one side takes money and may or may not provide any service of maybe high, medium or low or whatever else quality while the other side just has to pay up and hope are of course valid contracts - but only when the company is registered in Nevada and has a valid license for gambling. Everywhere else, it is illegal and I won't gamble anyway as a matter of principle.
The grandmother's maiden name thing is the number one reason I never answer these questions correctly.
When applying for a new credit card recently, there sure were a set of these maiden-name idiot tests. The customer rep went out of her mind to assure me that no one knows my grandmothers maiden name and sincerely failed to see the irony when she was asking me to write it down on the application form for her and probably all assistants to see. She even failed when I told her that ALL credit card application forms have the same questions, asking for mother or grandmother's maiden name. If you have at least one credit card, chances are almost 100% that someone knows your grandmother's maiden name, able to impersonate you for all other cards you may have. And the savings account. And whatever else poses these stupid questions.
In any case, the Mormons will have a huge database of many people's relatives including their great-great-great-grandmother that surely includes all maiden names they ever had. Publicly searchable. And never forget that sometimes, even mothers get divorced and take back their maiden name.
Thank you so much for bullet-proof security, dear credit card issuing banks.
The only thing to remember now: Never answer these questions correctly. Give some token answer, an unambigous word, maybe with a year number, something that is not a password anywhere else - and be sure to not use the same info anywhere else. Write it down and put it in an envelope, seal it, so you know when it has been opened. It's much easier to keep a safe word secret on a small piece of paper than your mother's maiden name.
Their internal network is an insignificant threat. It's internal and they probably have access to everything anyway.
HTTPS will help with what's going over the wire. And even more with the wireless. A ton of options for filtering, eavesdropping, snooping and altering have just vanished from the bad guys menu. It's not going to help with keyloggers or webcams pointed on keyboards on cybercafes, but other than that, it's fine.
Introduce the general population to the concept of "encrypt everything, just because you can and it has not a one downside but many upsides for me as a client". Score 1 for security. And then convince a literal convention center full of old network geezers that encrypting everything is perfectly feasible even for free-as-in-beer projects on a planetwide scale like Facebook. For these old-timers, a ton of options for excusing, avoiding, stonewalling and complaining about HTTPS will simply vanish within a few months.
And that is what counts.
If everyone encrypts everything, privacy will be much better. Protection from illegal searches is much better. Protection against eavesdroppers is much better. If the added cost for HTTPS is negligible, regular HTTP becomes useless. And rightly so. No one should be sending open postcards when they can have privacy-protected letters.
We as clients cannot advance general HTTPS-for-everything by much. It is the admins and people responsible for all those websites that can. And largely they didn't, until today. Please let me be the first to say: plaintext is dead. Facebook confirms it.
a) Clean up Detroit before looking 10000 km for people to lecture about violence. b) Then Mexico. c) If you have trouble telling apart real, million-scale Genocide (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc.) from - still despicable - regional conflicts, Stalin has won. (He stated after a million deaths, it just becomes a meaningless statistic). Defending a horrible and horribly incorrect exaggeration by stating the truth was evil enough is laughable. Perspective and priorities need to be maintained even in the face of these events. d) If you want to employ False Dichotomy, you need to get better. A regional conflict several orders of magnitude smaller than the Holocaust still needs to be resolved and no absolution was given for continued killing. Still, the Palestinian conflict, in absolute numbers and true size of contested area is something that should worry only Palestine, Israel and Israels immediate neighbors. Emotional "holocaust"-rhetoric is what gives this actual rather small conflict its danger. e) I certainly remember Hamas Charter, art. 7, stating Allah's commandment in killing Jews in direct reference to a Hadith. I also remember Palestinian military groups doing the Hitler salute as their actual military salute, chanting about Khaybar, an event in the Qur'an, where Jews were slaughtered by the Mohammed's army, and Iran even naming their entire production of small arms "Khaybar" after this. I would like someone to hold them accountable for that.
Funny how Palestinian population during the "second" "holocaust" doubles every few years. No matter what currently happened and happens in and around Israel, it is orders of magnitude apart. Several.
Whoever equates a regional conflict, even one the size and scale of Palestinian-Israel, to be a "holocaust" or even a "genocide" has forfeited all rights to a sensible debate.
First, two wrongs don't make a right. It could be both sides of the conflict are depraved lunatics and none is to be trusted. I don't say it is, but it could be.
Second, Israel, a country the size of Maine, maintains a lot of military - for a state of this size - and performs a lot of military action - for a state of this size - within its borders and around them. They do not kill indiscriminately. They do not butcher babies and drink their blood. The day Hamas and their brothers put down their weapons will be the day of peace in the Middle East. In contrast, the day the IDF put down their weapons, would be the day of the second Holocaust.
Third, if you criticize Islam anywhere in the world, there will be blood and tears and you will have to go hiding. Draw cartoons and someone will try to bomb your workplace, axe-murder you and your family, shoot you on the sidewalk. Criticize Israel and you have none of that. The Mossad will not come to get you. The "Zionist Occupied Government" will not come to get you. No one will.
Popular "Islamophobes", i.e. people who criticize Islamic terror and awful Islamic tradition are all in hiding, under police protection and some are killed anyway, years later. They are still brought to trial under Hate Speech laws, at least here in Unfree Europe. (Ref. Geert Wilders).
Popular "Neo-Nazis", i.e. people who broadly and indiscriminately criticize Israel and "the Jews" in general are rarely under direct attack from anyone. They are brought under Hate Speech trials, though, and while investigating for that, they get booked with the things most Neo-Nazis do when they're younger, like possession of illegal weapons, assault and bodily injury etc. (Ref., Ernst Zündel, though he's too old for "assault")
Everyone remembers some of their misery. But not in full, 15 megapixel, color-graded HDR glory - doing that will make people forget even less and slower. That's what I meant:)
Time's a healer only if people throw out the photos...
The Chernobyl disaster had nothing to do with leaky pipes but everything with braindead engineering and even worse management of dangerous technology. Contributing was an intense fear of authority, a rather large dose of personal ignorance and a complete disregard for safety protocols or safety in general. In other words, the pinnacle of the Soviet Union.
These are exactly the general conditions and engineer's mindset under which they should not attempt to connect nuclear reactors with people's homes by any physical medium. And I doubt this general mindset in engineering in this region has turned 180 degrees since then, and yes, they still run these braindead RBMK-type reactors in many plants.
As underscored in another post, conditions for successful use of waste heat in people's home are population density, (rather low) demand for electricity in summer and concentration of people around heavy industry in climates with long and cold winters. These are pretty typical for Russia and rather rare in Poland, Germany and some areas of Japan and China. Maybe also in Canada. Everywhere else the conditions are much less ideal.
And I don't completely trust political, economical and technical processes in Russia and China when it comes to safety in engineering.
Chemical disasters are surely disastrous as seen in Bhopal, but nuclear meltdowns are worse on several orders of magnitude.
Chemical spills wash out, dilute, decompose, break down - but nuclear waste, radioactive dust and irradiated matter just keeps on giving, year after year, for what is probably the rest of human existence.
India could have ten chemical spills the size and effect of Bhopal per year, but we could still go on with our normal lives. But if we had just another 5 Chernobyls anywhere, we would have roughly doubled the natural background radiation of the entire Earth for several millenia.
In theory, they all have isolated circuits/loops with heat exchangers.
In practice, heat exchangers do corrode, need inspection and maintenance and sometimes leak without prior warning. Technically, this can be prevented easily, detected and repaired quickly enough. Question is, can the political and economical forces driving this process be trusted or not?
Even the worst oil spills are tiny little specks of chickenshit compared to a nuclear power plant crew that absolutely, positively needs to get a certain experiment completed before the 1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.
Disadvantages are - maintenance costs for an additional network of public utilities. High maintenance if steam is distributed instead of water - waste heat and water often leaking somewhere, if cities save on the above maintenance. Worse with steam pipes. - cannot be transported far, so it's impossible to built into a somewhat redundant grid (unlike electricity or gas) - if the power plant feeding the local hot water distribution fails, all homes are cold. - cannot be transported far, reaching outlying suburbs is impossible, homes need to be quite close to the power plant, rendering this option very undesirable for nuclear power plants. (Pipes transporting a physical medium from the nuclear reactor to the living room? Of course they have several levels of "impenetrable" heat exchangers as barriers between different circuits, but do you trust anyone else's Geiger counter?)
and the main reason:
The entire thing works only in winter. Waste heat must be dissipated through other means in summer, adding another set of equipment - cooling towers - that require capital expenditure and constant maintenance. Above a certain increased standard of living, electricity usage always has its absolute peak in summer, not coincidentally at the same time when demand for central heating is at its lowest.
So it's a fine technology that works best in scenarios that have a) long, cold, dark winters, b) a low to medium standard of living, c) a high population density and d) low labor costs. For maximum efficiency, add e), the political power to centralize people around power plants or other large industrial heat source (forges, smelters etc.).
In other words, perfect for the past Soviet Union, probably OK for dense northern cities in current Russia or China, less suitable for less-dens, less northern cities. Roughly half of Russia's land mass lies north of Canada's northern border, so it clearly can make more sense for them.
Actually, that's an interesting question on a more philosophical level.
Why is time spent looking at photos of the past not time wasted in the present and worthless for the future?
How is looking at long gone cheerful moments really cheering anyone up in a not-so cheerful present? How is it going to improve the present, the future, one's determination, emotion, knowledge?
I can understand this being good, clean fun as long as all important people in the pictures or in memories connected to the picture are alive, well and still in love. If any of that changes, with love or loved ones lost, some photos immediately become neurotoxic weapons of mass depression. If not for you, then for people in your house, especially the significant other. Emotional time-bombs that you cannot remember ever existing are now hidden within thousands of nice photos, creeping through your backup cycles, finding their way into new computers, new storage space, new lives.
If they pop up somewhere, the may just cause a short daydream at work or a short disagreement with your partner. But they can also open emotional scars you forgot you ever had or make your partner storm out on the spot.
From personal experience, please let me warn you:
Treat any tool or software that can display many photos from your collection at once very very carefully.
Never set tools that display them to rummage through the collection needlessly - and for the love of God don't make it display a random photo out of the entire store.
Organize your collection so it has one parent folder for every year, so when events happen (note I didn't say "if"), you'll have a convenient handle on them to throw the entire lot out, fast, without needing to look at file names, events or even worse, the photos themselves.
If you're squeamish about throwing out everything AND the event itself was of a lower scale, put them in a quarantine folder, put them into a 7z archive to get them out of plain sight from tools that are careless or easily set too broad in scope (Picasa, that means you). A few years later you can unpack them, when you are absolutely sure their toxic content levels have greatly diminished. On the other hand, you haven't looked at them for years, so you won't know they're gone. Delete them.
Doing good things now should be more satisfying than remembering doing them in the past, but even if it isn't, you shouldn't needlessly remember yourself about it.
The human brain is very conveniently wired to forget troubling memories faster - both, the genuinely bad and the good-turned-sour - and forget most things eventually. Be careful when interfering with that process.
Ain't I just an insensitive racist jerk?! Nobody in the real-world would ever act like that! Just another stupid paranoid American buffoon who is too stupid and too scared to travel farther than Disneyland!!
"Doom impending for the uninformed. Read the book to know and be prepared."
Now where have I heard that argument before?
Apparently all the guys who voted for 3 stars on Amazon thought the same and were missing the same.
"The book is supposed to be about: "the average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day.[...]
The book gave some anecdotal stories, but did not do a good job in supporting the statement about "the AVERAGE professional," and as we all know, the plural of anecdotes is not data. [...] I would rather have seen some evidence that everyday activities are crimes.
I guess no one here has read or remembered more of that book except a few anecdotes and a general uneasy feeling.
I've got maybe 10 comments relating to that single book, no excerpts, no examples. Is it that hard to write one clarifying sentence?
Has everyone put this book on the to-read-list like some other poster, spelling doom and gloom from a book he's not even started to read yet?
Don't people write what everyday thing is illegal because it's also illegal to tell people what the laws are or is it because it would be a tacit admission of guilt because it is something that many people do but still know full well it is illegal as heck?
I'm starting to suspect there's only one law that's bothering everyone or else they'd bombarded me with a flurry of cases where their liberties are truly trampled upon.
Even the professionally-made educational YouTube videos on how to handle everyday police encounters best through knowing your rights were all touching this topic. ("Flex Your Rights" and others)
Really, I guess when most people cite the "10.000 laws that no one knows but everyone crosses 5 times a day" without telling any of them, they mean only ONE law that EVERYONE knows and only THEY cross 5 times a day, but can't tell anyone. The Controlled Substance Act of 1970. "Possession, use, trade of Marijuana is illegal"
Sorry, but the article and so many other posters had similar broad accusations, but only one wrote actual links to actual events - in that case LEOs from Maryland prosecuting people for using their cellphone cameras in public to record public actions of officers on public duty.
All other posts were just repeating the message "be wary, be afraid, the cops are out to get you". Being physically unable to commit "driving while Black", may have spared me this sobering experience.
So, what *laws* are written vaguely and how can the express purpose of keeping the rabble in line be proven? Posts written vaguely with the express purpose of "keeping us guessing" won't help.
Speaking about Germany, we have nothing BUT signs, usually several dozen per kilometer, several hundreds, if in inner city areas.
Sure there isn't any sign anywhere?
Can you get the next policeperson handing you a ticket to also write down the correct legally prescribed and 100% ticket-safe speed and sign it for you?
Have you tried driving 58? Getting tickets for both, driving too slow and too fast at the same second will surely yield extreme comic value but is also front page material. (Look at you GPS on a level road to do exactly 58 and then use cruise control to keep it)
If everyone who was wrongly convicted instantly joined the appropriate militia, the size and strength of that militia would soon match the level of corruption among the respective prosecutors. Just like it should be.
I will always encrypt everything to the highest extent possible.
Because of privacy against all unlawful searches, by police, burglars, housemates and ex-girlfriends alike.
I didn't meant to advocating *not* hiding everything just because there is nothing *illegal* to hide.
I just wanted to know what *could* happen - there's no risk-benefit-decision without outlining an actual risk.
Thank you for providing these examples. And yes, arresting and even beating people for recording the police is crazy thuggish and probably reminds many people to look for their Guy Fawkes mask and gunpowder. But as everyone has a cellphones with video now, some even with HD, not even the entire National Guard can enforce that law. People will just do it veeery discreetly, which should be enough to get out unharmed and upload it where it can cause the most outrage.
After all, it worked pretty good in the Islamic Theocratic Republic of Iran. It didn't succeed all the way, for crying out loud, but still...
I have a hard time wrapping my head around these accusations. I didn't say it is impossible or untrue, but accusations of the police in general and in the majority acting like fascist thugs is an incredibly strong one which should carry with them either a metric ton of proof or a rather large grain of salt.
Being naive and missing even a single line of proof, I chose the grain of salt, decided, they're conspiring against me. Occam's Razor, if you will.
Without even constructed examples or singular anecdotes, it's hard to believe. Maybe I'm just too White to get arrested for "driving while Black" or my car looks too bland but spotless, I don't know.
If I was wrongfully sentenced to anything larger than a fine, I contest it in court until the very end. If they planted false evidence, it's time to join the militia, though. The same goes for investigating an innocent photo of my very own kid.
But until then, every cop is my friend. If they catch me speeding or with a blown brake light, I have no one to blame but me.
So, what crime(s) does the average Joe unknowingly commit on a regular basis?
Slashdot Mirror
Or against any employment contract, as long as human people are employed? :) Nah...
But I'm against granting contractual agreements the leniency that any and all events, outages and problems that some business have may will punch straight through the layer between the parties in a contract and hit the customer. There's always a Force Majeure, of course, that no one can foresee or plan against, but I don't like it when regular, run-of-the-mill business problems of a supplier immediately become the problems of their customers. This violates the isolation necessary between business entities. This isolation is what makes businesses and the commercial world in general resilient against everyday mayhem.
(That's why I'm a huge fan of outsourcing everything except the core business to suppliers that can do these things only, but do it very very well and then stop reinventing their wheels. After all, this principle is what makes complex systems - and Linux servers - so resilient: one entity only performs one particular set of functions, but by concentrating on that goal can be bulletproof in doing so.)
Breach of contract even for a free service is a no-brainer for contract termination.
But a clause in the TOS stating "we can cut you off anytime for whatever reason we want" is different. And yes, I know, it's a free service.
Imagine someone provided electricity for free to their hometown for a decade and then cut off everyone at once stating "it's free, so I do whatever I want". Big deal or not?
People did live without electricity, gas and phone lines for several millennia. Does that mean they can cut them off? And if you were provided with free gas, heating, electricity and transportation for years and then quickly cut off for no reason, you'd be troubled as well.
City dwellers may need gas for heating and cooking more than people in rural areas, but those need their car more. And nerds need Internet access more than jocks. .
Now, Facebook may not be the most life-critical utility to me, but the question should be "When does a nice-to-have utility become a must-have necessity and for whom and why?"
A contract, where one party only has to try their best efforts, with no real hard obligations, while the other must pay in cold, hard cash, on time, every month or else doesn't sound exactly fair to me.
I'm all for free enterprise and freedom of contract, but I'd sure as hell sue them if they take cash for no service and/or cause me undue losses or effort. Contracts, where one side takes money and may or may not provide any service of maybe high, medium or low or whatever else quality while the other side just has to pay up and hope are of course valid contracts - but only when the company is registered in Nevada and has a valid license for gambling. Everywhere else, it is illegal and I won't gamble anyway as a matter of principle.
I don't care why they did it. I'm just glad they did.
The grandmother's maiden name thing is the number one reason I never answer these questions correctly.
When applying for a new credit card recently, there sure were a set of these maiden-name idiot tests. The customer rep went out of her mind to assure me that no one knows my grandmothers maiden name and sincerely failed to see the irony when she was asking me to write it down on the application form for her and probably all assistants to see. She even failed when I told her that ALL credit card application forms have the same questions, asking for mother or grandmother's maiden name. If you have at least one credit card, chances are almost 100% that someone knows your grandmother's maiden name, able to impersonate you for all other cards you may have. And the savings account. And whatever else poses these stupid questions.
In any case, the Mormons will have a huge database of many people's relatives including their great-great-great-grandmother that surely includes all maiden names they ever had. Publicly searchable. And never forget that sometimes, even mothers get divorced and take back their maiden name.
Thank you so much for bullet-proof security, dear credit card issuing banks.
The only thing to remember now: Never answer these questions correctly. Give some token answer, an unambigous word, maybe with a year number, something that is not a password anywhere else - and be sure to not use the same info anywhere else. Write it down and put it in an envelope, seal it, so you know when it has been opened. It's much easier to keep a safe word secret on a small piece of paper than your mother's maiden name.
Their internal network is an insignificant threat. It's internal and they probably have access to everything anyway.
HTTPS will help with what's going over the wire. And even more with the wireless. A ton of options for filtering, eavesdropping, snooping and altering have just vanished from the bad guys menu. It's not going to help with keyloggers or webcams pointed on keyboards on cybercafes, but other than that, it's fine.
Introduce the general population to the concept of "encrypt everything, just because you can and it has not a one downside but many upsides for me as a client". Score 1 for security. And then convince a literal convention center full of old network geezers that encrypting everything is perfectly feasible even for free-as-in-beer projects on a planetwide scale like Facebook. For these old-timers, a ton of options for excusing, avoiding, stonewalling and complaining about HTTPS will simply vanish within a few months.
And that is what counts.
If everyone encrypts everything, privacy will be much better. Protection from illegal searches is much better. Protection against eavesdroppers is much better. If the added cost for HTTPS is negligible, regular HTTP becomes useless. And rightly so. No one should be sending open postcards when they can have privacy-protected letters.
We as clients cannot advance general HTTPS-for-everything by much. It is the admins and people responsible for all those websites that can. And largely they didn't, until today. Please let me be the first to say: plaintext is dead. Facebook confirms it.
a) Clean up Detroit before looking 10000 km for people to lecture about violence.
b) Then Mexico.
c) If you have trouble telling apart real, million-scale Genocide (Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot etc.) from - still despicable - regional conflicts, Stalin has won. (He stated after a million deaths, it just becomes a meaningless statistic). Defending a horrible and horribly incorrect exaggeration by stating the truth was evil enough is laughable. Perspective and priorities need to be maintained even in the face of these events.
d) If you want to employ False Dichotomy, you need to get better. A regional conflict several orders of magnitude smaller than the Holocaust still needs to be resolved and no absolution was given for continued killing. Still, the Palestinian conflict, in absolute numbers and true size of contested area is something that should worry only Palestine, Israel and Israels immediate neighbors. Emotional "holocaust"-rhetoric is what gives this actual rather small conflict its danger.
e) I certainly remember Hamas Charter, art. 7, stating Allah's commandment in killing Jews in direct reference to a Hadith. I also remember Palestinian military groups doing the Hitler salute as their actual military salute, chanting about Khaybar, an event in the Qur'an, where Jews were slaughtered by the Mohammed's army, and Iran even naming their entire production of small arms "Khaybar" after this. I would like someone to hold them accountable for that.
Funny how Palestinian population during the "second" "holocaust" doubles every few years. No matter what currently happened and happens in and around Israel, it is orders of magnitude apart. Several.
Whoever equates a regional conflict, even one the size and scale of Palestinian-Israel, to be a "holocaust" or even a "genocide" has forfeited all rights to a sensible debate.
Whereas Israel just makes sure you are dead.
First, two wrongs don't make a right. It could be both sides of the conflict are depraved lunatics and none is to be trusted. I don't say it is, but it could be.
Second, Israel, a country the size of Maine, maintains a lot of military - for a state of this size - and performs a lot of military action - for a state of this size - within its borders and around them. They do not kill indiscriminately. They do not butcher babies and drink their blood. The day Hamas and their brothers put down their weapons will be the day of peace in the Middle East. In contrast, the day the IDF put down their weapons, would be the day of the second Holocaust.
Third, if you criticize Islam anywhere in the world, there will be blood and tears and you will have to go hiding. Draw cartoons and someone will try to bomb your workplace, axe-murder you and your family, shoot you on the sidewalk. Criticize Israel and you have none of that. The Mossad will not come to get you. The "Zionist Occupied Government" will not come to get you. No one will.
Popular "Islamophobes", i.e. people who criticize Islamic terror and awful Islamic tradition are all in hiding, under police protection and some are killed anyway, years later. They are still brought to trial under Hate Speech laws, at least here in Unfree Europe. (Ref. Geert Wilders).
Popular "Neo-Nazis", i.e. people who broadly and indiscriminately criticize Israel and "the Jews" in general are rarely under direct attack from anyone. They are brought under Hate Speech trials, though, and while investigating for that, they get booked with the things most Neo-Nazis do when they're younger, like possession of illegal weapons, assault and bodily injury etc. (Ref., Ernst Zündel, though he's too old for "assault")
Everyone remembers some of their misery. But not in full, 15 megapixel, color-graded HDR glory - doing that will make people forget even less and slower. That's what I meant :)
Time's a healer only if people throw out the photos...
The Chernobyl disaster had nothing to do with leaky pipes but everything with braindead engineering and even worse management of dangerous technology. Contributing was an intense fear of authority, a rather large dose of personal ignorance and a complete disregard for safety protocols or safety in general. In other words, the pinnacle of the Soviet Union.
These are exactly the general conditions and engineer's mindset under which they should not attempt to connect nuclear reactors with people's homes by any physical medium. And I doubt this general mindset in engineering in this region has turned 180 degrees since then, and yes, they still run these braindead RBMK-type reactors in many plants.
As underscored in another post, conditions for successful use of waste heat in people's home are population density, (rather low) demand for electricity in summer and concentration of people around heavy industry in climates with long and cold winters. These are pretty typical for Russia and rather rare in Poland, Germany and some areas of Japan and China. Maybe also in Canada. Everywhere else the conditions are much less ideal.
And I don't completely trust political, economical and technical processes in Russia and China when it comes to safety in engineering.
Chemical disasters are surely disastrous as seen in Bhopal, but nuclear meltdowns are worse on several orders of magnitude.
Chemical spills wash out, dilute, decompose, break down - but nuclear waste, radioactive dust and irradiated matter just keeps on giving, year after year, for what is probably the rest of human existence.
India could have ten chemical spills the size and effect of Bhopal per year, but we could still go on with our normal lives. But if we had just another 5 Chernobyls anywhere, we would have roughly doubled the natural background radiation of the entire Earth for several millenia.
In theory, they all have isolated circuits/loops with heat exchangers.
In practice, heat exchangers do corrode, need inspection and maintenance and sometimes leak without prior warning. Technically, this can be prevented easily, detected and repaired quickly enough. Question is, can the political and economical forces driving this process be trusted or not?
Even the worst oil spills are tiny little specks of chickenshit compared to a nuclear power plant crew that absolutely, positively needs to get a certain experiment completed before the 1st of May annual Workers Party celebration.
Using the city as a heatsink has been tried in many European countries, especially the Eastern parts.
Benefits are clear, but you have to have a rather large network of rather large pipes around the city, transporting hot water or in some places steam.
For examples, see
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:District_heating_pipelines_in_Wuppertal
Lovely, eh?
Disadvantages are
- maintenance costs for an additional network of public utilities. High maintenance if steam is distributed instead of water
- waste heat and water often leaking somewhere, if cities save on the above maintenance. Worse with steam pipes.
- cannot be transported far, so it's impossible to built into a somewhat redundant grid (unlike electricity or gas) - if the power plant feeding the local hot water distribution fails, all homes are cold.
- cannot be transported far, reaching outlying suburbs is impossible, homes need to be quite close to the power plant, rendering this option very undesirable for nuclear power plants. (Pipes transporting a physical medium from the nuclear reactor to the living room? Of course they have several levels of "impenetrable" heat exchangers as barriers between different circuits, but do you trust anyone else's Geiger counter?)
and the main reason:
The entire thing works only in winter. Waste heat must be dissipated through other means in summer, adding another set of equipment - cooling towers - that require capital expenditure and constant maintenance. Above a certain increased standard of living, electricity usage always has its absolute peak in summer, not coincidentally at the same time when demand for central heating is at its lowest.
So it's a fine technology that works best in scenarios that have a) long, cold, dark winters, b) a low to medium standard of living, c) a high population density and d) low labor costs. For maximum efficiency, add e), the political power to centralize people around power plants or other large industrial heat source (forges, smelters etc.).
In other words, perfect for the past Soviet Union, probably OK for dense northern cities in current Russia or China, less suitable for less-dens, less northern cities. Roughly half of Russia's land mass lies north of Canada's northern border, so it clearly can make more sense for them.
Actually, that's an interesting question on a more philosophical level.
Why is time spent looking at photos of the past not time wasted in the present and worthless for the future?
How is looking at long gone cheerful moments really cheering anyone up in a not-so cheerful present? How is it going to improve the present, the future, one's determination, emotion, knowledge?
I can understand this being good, clean fun as long as all important people in the pictures or in memories connected to the picture are alive, well and still in love. If any of that changes, with love or loved ones lost, some photos immediately become neurotoxic weapons of mass depression. If not for you, then for people in your house, especially the significant other. Emotional time-bombs that you cannot remember ever existing are now hidden within thousands of nice photos, creeping through your backup cycles, finding their way into new computers, new storage space, new lives.
If they pop up somewhere, the may just cause a short daydream at work or a short disagreement with your partner. But they can also open emotional scars you forgot you ever had or make your partner storm out on the spot.
From personal experience, please let me warn you:
Treat any tool or software that can display many photos from your collection at once very very carefully.
Never set tools that display them to rummage through the collection needlessly - and for the love of God don't make it display a random photo out of the entire store.
Organize your collection so it has one parent folder for every year, so when events happen (note I didn't say "if"), you'll have a convenient handle on them to throw the entire lot out, fast, without needing to look at file names, events or even worse, the photos themselves.
If you're squeamish about throwing out everything AND the event itself was of a lower scale, put them in a quarantine folder, put them into a 7z archive to get them out of plain sight from tools that are careless or easily set too broad in scope (Picasa, that means you). A few years later you can unpack them, when you are absolutely sure their toxic content levels have greatly diminished. On the other hand, you haven't looked at them for years, so you won't know they're gone. Delete them.
Doing good things now should be more satisfying than remembering doing them in the past, but even if it isn't, you shouldn't needlessly remember yourself about it.
The human brain is very conveniently wired to forget troubling memories faster - both, the genuinely bad and the good-turned-sour - and forget most things eventually. Be careful when interfering with that process.
Ain't I just an insensitive racist jerk?! Nobody in the real-world would ever act like that! Just another stupid paranoid American buffoon who is too stupid and too scared to travel farther than Disneyland!!
BIGOTRY DETECTOR OVERLOAD
DOES NOT COMPUTE
"Doom impending for the uninformed. Read the book to know and be prepared."
Now where have I heard that argument before?
Apparently all the guys who voted for 3 stars on Amazon thought the same and were missing the same.
"The book is supposed to be about: "the average professional in this country wakes up in the morning, goes to work, comes home, eats dinner, and then goes to sleep, unaware that he or she has likely committed several federal crimes that day.[...]
The book gave some anecdotal stories, but did not do a good job in supporting the statement about "the AVERAGE professional," and as we all know, the plural of anecdotes is not data. [...] I would rather have seen some evidence that everyday activities are crimes.
I guess no one here has read or remembered more of that book except a few anecdotes and a general uneasy feeling.
Or it really is just about the weed in the trunk.
I've got maybe 10 comments relating to that single book, no excerpts, no examples.
Is it that hard to write one clarifying sentence?
Has everyone put this book on the to-read-list like some other poster, spelling doom and gloom from a book he's not even started to read yet?
Don't people write what everyday thing is illegal because it's also illegal to tell people what the laws are or is it because it would be a tacit admission of guilt because it is something that many people do but still know full well it is illegal as heck?
I'm starting to suspect there's only one law that's bothering everyone or else they'd bombarded me with a flurry of cases where their liberties are truly trampled upon.
Even the professionally-made educational YouTube videos on how to handle everyday police encounters best through knowing your rights were all touching this topic. ("Flex Your Rights" and others)
Really, I guess when most people cite the "10.000 laws that no one knows but everyone crosses 5 times a day" without telling any of them, they mean only ONE law that EVERYONE knows and only THEY cross 5 times a day, but can't tell anyone. The Controlled Substance Act of 1970. "Possession, use, trade of Marijuana is illegal"
Prove me I am wrong.
I really do care about petitions. And ballots, and jury. And that what follows.
But arguments from books still on the to-read list will not convince me it is time to panic.
[citation needed]
Sorry, but the article and so many other posters had similar broad accusations, but only one wrote actual links to actual events - in that case LEOs from Maryland prosecuting people for using their cellphone cameras in public to record public actions of officers on public duty.
All other posts were just repeating the message "be wary, be afraid, the cops are out to get you". Being physically unable to commit "driving while Black", may have spared me this sobering experience.
So, what *laws* are written vaguely and how can the express purpose of keeping the rabble in line be proven? Posts written vaguely with the express purpose of "keeping us guessing" won't help.
Aren't there any signs?
Speaking about Germany, we have nothing BUT signs, usually several dozen per kilometer, several hundreds, if in inner city areas.
Sure there isn't any sign anywhere?
Can you get the next policeperson handing you a ticket to also write down the correct legally prescribed and 100% ticket-safe speed and sign it for you?
Have you tried driving 58? Getting tickets for both, driving too slow and too fast at the same second will surely yield extreme comic value but is also front page material. (Look at you GPS on a level road to do exactly 58 and then use cruise control to keep it)
If everyone who was wrongly convicted instantly joined the appropriate militia, the size and strength of that militia would soon match the level of corruption among the respective prosecutors. Just like it should be.
I will always encrypt everything to the highest extent possible.
Because of privacy against all unlawful searches, by police, burglars, housemates and ex-girlfriends alike.
I didn't meant to advocating *not* hiding everything just because there is nothing *illegal* to hide.
I just wanted to know what *could* happen - there's no risk-benefit-decision without outlining an actual risk.
Thank you for providing these examples. And yes, arresting and even beating people for recording the police is crazy thuggish and probably reminds many people to look for their Guy Fawkes mask and gunpowder. But as everyone has a cellphones with video now, some even with HD, not even the entire National Guard can enforce that law. People will just do it veeery discreetly, which should be enough to get out unharmed and upload it where it can cause the most outrage.
After all, it worked pretty good in the Islamic Theocratic Republic of Iran. It didn't succeed all the way, for crying out loud, but still...
The line should read
"[...] decided, they're NOT conspiring against me [...]"
I have a hard time wrapping my head around these accusations. I didn't say it is impossible or untrue, but accusations of the police in general and in the majority acting like fascist thugs is an incredibly strong one which should carry with them either a metric ton of proof or a rather large grain of salt.
Being naive and missing even a single line of proof, I chose the grain of salt, decided, they're conspiring against me. Occam's Razor, if you will.
Without even constructed examples or singular anecdotes, it's hard to believe. Maybe I'm just too White to get arrested for "driving while Black" or my car looks too bland but spotless, I don't know.
If I was wrongfully sentenced to anything larger than a fine, I contest it in court until the very end. If they planted false evidence, it's time to join the militia, though. The same goes for investigating an innocent photo of my very own kid.
But until then, every cop is my friend. If they catch me speeding or with a blown brake light, I have no one to blame but me.
So, what crime(s) does the average Joe unknowingly commit on a regular basis?