And yet I have requested the same thing, *twice* and each time through several venues. I specifically requested it on the account deactivation page form for additional comments, I have emailed privacy@facebook.com and for the first attempt at least, also left requests as Wall posts on Mark Zuckerberg's profile pages. (He had two that I found)
To date, none of these attempts through any of the communication channels have yielded me so much as an acknowledgment of receipt, let alone any action.
That would be what? roughly 8% of all U.S. currency in circulation? (approximately *700B$ in circulation, B.G.'s net worth is roughly 56B$) well, just because I am bored and want to have some fun with figures tonight: 56 Billion dollars U.S. is 3,000,666 cubic feet of paper weighing 1,120,000 lbs (more than 500 feet long, 200 feet wide and 30 feet thick)
Assuming we build some kind of furnace capable of burning paper with perfect efficiency at one pound per minute(I know, I know...)** it would take almost 78 days to burn it all, releasing 8,000 BTU's every minute. Again assuming perfect efficiency from heat into electrical power, it would produce over 8434 Kw/h, enough to supply almost my entire energy budget for the year. Given 24 hr operation and no delays in firing up and shutting down, over 1800 people would have their electricity provided for the year.***
*American Billion 1,000,000,000 (1E9) not the international Billion 1,000,000,000,000 (1E12) **perfect efficiency is of course impossible, and short of some heavy duty forced air and very high temps, a pound of paper takes a lot longer than 1 minute to burn. **what a wonderfully wasteful application of money. 56 billion could buy an awful lot more electricity than that.
And in fact that is exactly what I did. I quit, and provided a rather detailed and scathing response when asked why I was quitting.
I was fine with being shown ads, bandwidth and server racks ain't free after all and they gotta be paid for somehow right? I started getting uneasy when they moved to targeted ads. The idea of software scanning my profile for keywords is unpleasant but I rationalized that perhaps the information wasn't being sent off-site or being stored in any permanent sense. But after Microsoft bought into Facebook, that is when I really started paying attention to what the site was doing with MY information. (As far as I am concerned, even if I chose to share it with some site, it remains MY info. I do not agree to sharing it with "marketing affiliates" and the like unless you explicitly list the names and business addresses of the companies involved AND spell out what their data policies are.)
The idea of taking my profile information and perhaps my business relationship data and using it to sell to my friends is pretty f&^%ing sleazy in my book and I flat out won't put up with it. IMHO, it means the marketers are banking on my reputation to sell their crap. And it probably IS crap, stuff I would never recommend to a friend or family member. If it was a worthwhile product, it'd already be getting word of mouth referral no?
Worse yet, the agreements and descriptions carefully leave open the possibility of off site marketing as well. The example I read used Amazon. I list books and reading as among my interests in Facebook, Amazon targets ads at me, scrapes my name and profile image and uses that to target ads to everyone in my friends list. Then if one of those people click the ad, or even browse to Amazon while the ad's cookie is still in their cache then they will be presented with a dynamically created page that includes whatever information about me that Amazon was able to collect and thinks might increase sales to the visitor. Since Facebook insists on using real names, it is fairly easy for Amazon to combine my profile data with any sales data they acquired when doing business with me. Now, in my case, I don't mind much if say my Mom is shown what books I have purchased or shown interest in at Amazon, but there are some people on my friends list that I wouldn't want to share my reading habits with. Worse yet, my name is a fairly common one (the name of a former king of England and an occupational surname), common enough that even in the small town I am in there are three other men with similar enough names that there is occasionally confusion. If I am Richard Wright and there is a Rick Wright or Dick Wright in the same town who also uses Facebook, do I want my mom being shown Rick or Dick's book preferences thinking they are mine? Probably not....
So, in the end, I quit. I also messaged everyone in my list, explained as briefly as possible *why* I was quitting and urged them all to do their own research and think for themselves. I had hoped that a few others would take this as seriously as I and quit as well.
The more cynical (experienced?) among you will have already predicted the response I got. Not one person on my list actually quit over this. Only one actually bothered to even click the news link I provided. (And he didn't even read all of it, said it was "boring news stuff")Three people actually responded to my message. Two to lambaste me for making too much ado about the whole mess and one actually complained about my spamming her. (I sent one mass message, when anyone replied, she got the replies from these strangers in her box as well.) As for the rest? a vast echoing silence was the only response I got. What really pisses me off about the whole thing is two things: First, my profile was not the only place you can find personal information about me. Several relatives have pages and they are not always as careful about what they say as I would like. Ironically enough, I can't go see what they have posted about me unless I log in, but ad
Many Slashdotters put some small amount of stock in the UID's each of us have. Aside from Cowboy Neal , Pathwalker has the lowest I can recall _ever_ seeing actually posting something. (Not to say it hasn't happened mind you, I just don't recall seeing it.) Mine is in the six digits, and fairly high in the six digits at that and I've always wondered if there was any way to get a smaller one. My logic is that of the first thousand UID's ever assigned, not all of them may still be in use, leaving such sought after low numbers available for newcomers like myself should we prove worthy.
Being a BOFH fan, my plans for getting a low UID have revolved around bribery, since I assume that any true geek would be hard to blackmail. This upcoming party and prizes deal suggests a possible alternative route to attaining that coveted low UID, simply winning it.
How about it CowboyNeal, CmdrTaco Jamie McCarthy, Krow, Pudge and Hemo? What say you go through the user lists and see if there isn't a nice low number from an abandoned account that can be safely given away to perhaps the user who organizes the best party on some other criteria? (Largest, most remote*, most technologically advanced etc**.) I can't seem to figure out how to pull up a sequential list of users by UID though so I can't tell if my first choice for UID's is available or not. 101010 is cool but not low enough, so I gotta go with 777.
As an alternative, maybe create a utterly unique UID? I don't know details of how Slashdot creates and tracks user accounts except that for all intents and purposes there is no upper limit on the size of the number that can be assigned and that numbers are assigned sequentially. But maybe it's possible to create an alphanumeric UID? or perhaps assign a UID that is a ridiculously high number? (Come to think of it, I don't think UID 0 was ever assigned was it?)
*I think Deep Penguin (73203) pretty much has that criteria locked
**I know we have some users who are Google employees and Google does have a pretty strict NDA and security policy. Any gang of geeks who manage to hold a Slashdot party (with outside guests of course)in one of Google's big server farms has to have earned some kind of special recognition in my book. (Come to think of it, Google has been known to have a playful side, maybe one of you Google-ites can suggest a commemorative Google page for the event?)
A lady friend of mine did exactly that about a year and a half ago. (Move to Calgary that is, not take a job with McDonald's.) She's an embalming technician by profession and has two jokes she frequently makes about her career and moving choices: 1)She likes working with the dead better than at McDonald's, the pay and hours is better and the customers are easier to deal with. 2)The funeral home she works at offered her 11 dollars an hour more than what she had been making in Ontario. She jokes that this extra wasn't for working for the home, it was to persuade her to live in Calgary. During the winter she often jokes that even that pay ain't enough.
According to mapquest and google maps, Montville is inland of Cleveland and TFA says the break(s)was/were between Cleveland and Montville. That's more than 1.1 Km so I suspect that the affected cable is a single chunk somewhere along Hwy 6 AKA Gar Hwy. Another commenter raised the possibility of someone going down into a manhole and shooting along the shared conduit. A shotgun wouldn't do all that much damage in that scenario as shot deforms significantly on impact with hard surfaces like concrete pipe walls and the resulting deformed pellets wouldn't fly very far even if they managed to avoid being absorbed by cable sheathing. Shotgun slugs or rifle bullets would be able to skip down the conduit better, but of the two my money would have to be on jacketed rifle rounds, not shotgun slugs. The harder material makes for less deformation and a better ricochet effect. Any cantankerous gun-owner crazy enough to blow holes in an underground cable is also likely to be crazy enough to neglect ear defenders. Firearms are LOUD! A shotgun going off in a confined hard surfaced space like a man hole access way is easily loud enough to temporarily deafen and leave a pronounced ringing in the ears. Some permanent damage is highly likely. Just look for the guy who keeps saying "what was that??? I can't hear you!"
I just re-read TFA and realized the summary was misleading. (No surprise there I suppose.) It doesn't actually specify how many breaks the cable suffered, just that a 1.1 Km length was affected.
"The damage affected a large span of cable, more than two-thirds of a mile [1.1 km] long, near Cleveland, TeliaSonera said."
It's possible that it was one continuous piece 1.1 Km long that had one break. While this weakens my points, it doesn't entire negate them.
quote: "When technicians pulled up the affected cable..." To me this sounds like an underground cable, not strung along telephone poles along the highway. I don't know how things are handled in the US, but here in Canada, when backbone or trunk cable is underground it is several feet underground. It is often sharing space with sewer pipes. Within a residential area, I have seen cases where cable is threaded in underground (3 to 4 feet down) plastic pipe (ABS? PVC?)in a designated "service corridor" parallel to the sidewalk, an area set aside by the municipal planners for gas, water and communication connections. Either way, there is a fair bit of dirt between the cable and the firearm. From my Reserves days I know that a.303 or 7.62 NATO round will only go about 20 inches or so into the range berm if fired at very close range, depending on soil type. A twenty inch wall of sand bags will stop most small arms fire. The idea of of a bullet penetrating enough dirt to reach the cable, penetrate the rigid pipe and then damage the cable seems implausible. (Even allowing for the fragility of fiber when dealing with impact.) Then there is the fact that even work crews digging for the stuff rarely now precisely where the cable is, they have to dig a fairly wide and long trench to access the stuff. So even if you DID have a firearm and ammunition combination capable of doing the penetration (Barrett.50 maybe?) it would take many rounds fired essentially blind into the ground to get even one hit. Many hits along a 1.1Km length would require many MANY rounds. How many big rifle rounds do you suppose you could shoot into the ground before somebody showed up to ask you what the hell you were doing?
Shooting above ground cable doesn't have the penetration issue, but hitting that line 30 or more feet up is quite challenging as well. Any round that did hit however would stand a good chance of severing the cable altogether, making that section between poles simply fall to the ground at the severed end. There is still the problem of firing multiple high powered rounds without making the local police unduly interested. Does anyone know for sure if this was above ground or underground cable? And is it maybe hunting season in Ohio? If the cables ARE above ground and in a rural area, then maybe some drunken yahoos thought it would be a good idea to use the cables as a target in some macho bullshit marksmanship test. Most hunting rounds can easily go a kilometer or more downrange and retain enough energy to sever cable, on the other hand, deliberately hitting a target that slender from a klick away is a feat even elite military snipers would likely find challenging. Drunken yahoos would have to be within tens of yards to have a hope in hell of achieving it. One or more drunken idiots repeatedly shooting off a rifle within sight of a road does tend to attract official notice even during hunting season in rural Canada.
Without trying to minimize your loss, or demean your experience in any way, to be fair to the ARC, they were trying to save another person's life that day. Your father was gone, but the remains had the potential to save others. I'm not clear on the exact limitations of organ transplants, specifically hearts, but I know that there is generally some very narrow window of time when the donor organ is still viable and that the closer the deadline the organ is removed, the lower the odds of success. As morbid and grotesque as it seems to the grieving family, doctors have good reasons for wanting to get at the organs while the donor body is still fresh, in some cases, perhaps still warm. I also understand that even when an organ donors card has been signed by the deceased, hospitals and doctors still prefer to confirm permission from the living next of kin. Your wife's request for "space" to come to terms with your loss was quite reasonable and understandable, but by the time your family had a chance to think about such things, the heart would likely be useless. From your description, you were the designated next of kin, so the hospital needed your specific word on the subject, not your wifes. The Red Cross merely assists the hospital in tracking down the next of kin using their call centre. MY wife is a rare blood type and is occasionally called into the hospital on an emergency basis by the Red Cross. As with organ donation, the Red Cross is calling at the request of the hospital staff because they are better set up to do so. It is not unusual for one Red Cross agent to call her at work, another to call the home and still another to call her at her parents home. They generally keep calling every hour on the hour until they either reach her in person or the hospital cancels the rare blood request. You may have been contacted by land line and by cell for a similar reason, one agent not knowing what the other is doing because there just wasn't time to exchange information between them.
All that said, there are a few unfortunate things that occurred 1) Even though your father never apparently signed an organ donors card, the medical staff still wanted his heart. Ethically, in the absence of a clear written agreement by the deceased, the staff are supposed to assume that he did NOT agree. The fact that they still pursued this suggest either they already knew there was a match with a waiting recipient (Something they normally can't determine until the heart has been removed) or they were guilty of far more wishful thinking then I am comfortable with in a medical organization. ("Maybe he was willing to donate, mentioned this to his family but never got around to filling out the card and maybe when we remove the heart it will turn out we can use it.") 2)The pushiness of the first Red Cross agent, while somewhat understandable when there are lives on the line, is still unacceptable when dealing with a family in grief. Graphic descriptions are utterly unacceptable and inexcusable in those circumstances. 3)There should be only one agent handling each transplant case and that agent needs to be far better trained in grief counseling. Bottom line, they are asking for a very personal kind of donation from a family that is at it's most vulnerable.
What you said made me think of a (somewhat) related topic. Several people have posted about the possibility of the big AV vendors and such excluding "official" malware from detection signature libraries. Several mechanisms have been suggested, ranging from voluntary participation to being required by secret Homeland Security legislation. I see several potential problems with the idea of the AV crowd secretly ignoring *any* official malware for *any* reason. 1) Even under the threat of Star Chamber "justice", you could never get 100% compliance from the security community.
a) I am NOT a security type, but it seems to me that much of what these surveillance wares do exhibits the exact same behaviors as many existing threats. (In fact, the article suggests they are based on existing and known flaws.) AFAIK; not all threats are detected by the signature of the files involved (Whether it be created, changed or moved). Some are detected purely by behavior. Even if $AV-VENDOR1 *did* create an update that ignores the tool, until ALL of the users (legit and pirate alike) had that update, there is a risk that the so-called "out of date" suite on a targets computer might detect the surveillance-ware based on behavior.
b)OK, so you got $AV-VENDOR1 and $AV-VENDOR2 to play ball with the Feds, what about $AV-VENDOR 3, 4,..., n ? How quick can you get every US based vendor up to speed and have updates pushed to all of their customers?
c)Not every security company is subject to US law or the FBI's powers of persuasion. What about European companies? (Although that also raises the possibility of Euro AV folk cooperating with Interpol I guess.) 2) To hide something like this would require the involvement of many people scattered all over the place. Sooner or later, someone would spill the beans. 3) How specific is it? from the little I actually read, it sounds like a highly Windows-centric and highly focused tool. TFA mentions the possibility of putting one version after another onto a Myspace site until the target is successfully infected. Are *all* the versions going to be officially invisible as far as the AV crowd is concerned?
It strikes me that there are analogies to make regarding surveillance-ware and malware authors to the closed source vs open source thing. Consider this, the malware threat out there is huge, there are many skilled (and not so skilled) who stand to make a lot of money by owing your machine. Thus there are the black hat "many eyes" scrutinizing code trying to find a new and exploitable flaw compared to comparatively few white hat workers trying to exploit the same code to uphold the law. And even more white and gray hats finding these flaws so they can fix them first. The open source supporters claim that many eyes make for more secure code bases and I agree. But by the same reasoning, more black hats looking for exploits than cops means the black hats will have a better arsenal at their disposal.
For now at least, the security community seems to be holding it's own against the black hats. Without the complicity of the security community, surveillance developers would have a damn hard time coming up with something that the crackers haven't already done and the security guys haven't already fixed. Anyone who is possessed of sufficient clue to do what I consider routine maintenance for computers (updated security suite, properly configured firewall, patched OS) is going to be a tough target for this sort of thing.
it seems to me that a government (*any* government) has it's share of jerks and aside from perhaps the Vatican, can you name me one government that *doesn't* own guns? It is therefor safe to conclude that one purpose of owning firearms is to protect one's own $RIGHTS from the jerks in government if/when the jerks come into power and get to set policy/enact legislation. From what I have read, the rebels in the colonies were pretty clear on this when they were setting up a self-governing system way back in the 1700's. As far as they seemed to be concerned, the purposes of private firearms were: 1)To defend one's life, property, privacy etc from other individuals 2)So that the common population could serve as a militia in the event of war against a foreign power 3)To ensure a degree of sovereignty for the common man to prevent the government from becoming oppressive 4)When all else fails, to give the common man the basic tools for revolt, so that an oppressive regime can be replaced, by force if necessary.
I will readily concede that any capability can be abused, criminals can and indeed do use firearms in the commission of crimes. However, the men who became known as The Founding Fathers knew that decent law-abiding folk greatly outnumber criminals. Giving everyone equal access to personal firearms only makes the common person the equal of the criminals, and since good folk so out number the bad, crime and such can be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, while it can be argued that having guns in the hands of the common people makes tragic accidents or certain types of crime more likely, gentlemen like Franklin and Jefferson seemed to feel that those four reasons I mentioned were so important as to outweigh the risks. Personally, I quite agree with that line of reasoning, it's a shame Her Majesty's servants here in Canada don't.
What's really missing is the sticky rubber/vinyl floors, the smell of cigarette smoke, the sound of traffic a few yards away* and a surly fat guy wandering around with a metal coin dispenser gadget who acts like letting a kid exchange his handful of nickle and dimes for a few more quarters is some huge hassle.
*One of the biggest arcades in Toronto,ON back in the day was the "Funland" On Yonge St. The entire front of the place was fold away doors and in the better weather they would open them all up. Since all the latest games were always up front, it meant you were playing a sidewalks distance from one of the busier streets in the downtown. At certain times of the day, some games would become almost unplayable as the sunlight would reflect off the plate glass windows across the street and glare all over your screen.
only when used as a discount coupon at participating Starbucks! *In compliance with many State and Federal laws, the cash value is.00001$
*I seem to recall seeing words to that effect on several coupons I received in one of those "Valu-Pak" junk mail envelopes recently, despite being in Canada, a country which is notable in it's lack of *any* State laws whatsoever. Provincial and Federal laws, yes, but no State laws at all...
My wife just came out of a court battle against her ex for support. While this was done in a Canadian family court and not an American civil court, I think a few excerpts from our legal bill would be enlightening... 10 hours @ 200$/hr = 2000$ 6 faxes @ 4 each = 24$ long distance 80m@.90/m = 72$ court filing fees = 135$ (3x45$) mediation fees = 980$ GST = 336$ (the GST is the federal level tax at 7%, no the math does not work out, amount listed is for GST on total bill (4800$) while I am only providing selected excerpts to illustrate my point.)
My wife has an excellent lawyer, the antithesis of all those lawyer jokes you've heard. However, note that while he makes 200/hr, this is only when he is in court for us. (Each appearance seems to be rounded to the nearest half hour in the detailed bill.) On the other hand, he "nickel and dimes" us for absolutely everything done on our behalf. I am quite sure that he charges 4$ per fax because that is the pro-rated amount it costs him to have an employee handle those. Similarly, while he charges more than the prime rate for long distance, I suspect that this rate also includes the basic overhead of having the multi-line phone set up in the first place. He charges a much lower rate when simply meeting us and the ex in a conference room in his own offices, a fee which probably not only covers his time, but the space as well.
Finally, GST applies to everything except the court filings themselves. My wife was charged almost 5 grand for a comparatively simple case being handled by a small town lawyer. Based on her experiences, I can easily see a battle against a RIAA suit going into the six figures. Where many people go wrong when figuring legal costs is to assume that the entire sum is based purely on "billable hours". Quite often that final sum will include a LOT of little things like faxes or phone calls. While not as large a percentage of the total as the main billable hours, it's not negligible either.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but for most desktop/tower cases the biggest source of sound is the tiny video card and CPU fans spinning at $BIGNUM rpm. The larger and slower case fans make less sound and at far less obtrusive frequencies. This was the logic behind all those fan controllers and BIOS fan speed controls to slow down the smaller fans whenever the heat load was diminished. It also explains some of the more monstrous CPU cooler rigs out there. Using a big chunk of Cu allows you to use a bigger, slower and hence quieter fan. A passively cooled setup that relies on a large (80mm or larger.) case fan to move that hot air out of the box is going to be inherently a lot quieter than the more typical CPU and Video card fan setup. This rig would still be quiet. Not silent, I'll grant you, but still quieter than the average. In my travels across the WWW, the only truly silent (as in 0Db) systems I have read about are custom built boxes based on mini or nano ITX boards, flash based HDD, 12VDC power supplies and so on. Fun little machines no doubt, but not the makings of a high end desktop machine that this mobo seems to be intended for. (I actually RTFA, 8Gb RAM, 10 SATA ports, 4 Gb RJ-45s sounds like a pretty potent unit to me.)
Which of course, in Soviet Russia, logically means I can't spawn derivative works* (child process) without my work's (employer's) approval. I know sysadmins bitch about having no life outside of work, but that's getting ridiculous!
*(The younger of my two sons so obviously takes after me that he is clearly a derivative work. Yet my wife doesn't see the humour in referring to him as ver. 2.0(beta))
Is it just me, or is there indeed a possibility of developing a subscription model for hardware as well as software? Think about it, when you combine the advances in 3D printing, boutique fabrication technologies and the like. You buy the few components that cannot be readily manufactured with your 3D multi-material printer (case, mobo etc) and buy the more complex parts according to some complex licensing model. e.g. you buy the base chip which comes bundled with a design license. That license entitles you to regular updates and upgrades from the chip vendor as long as you pay the subscription fee. This of course leads to the potential for hardware pirates, who invest in increasingly sophisticated fab equip to sell copies of the chip without all that annoying R&D overhead and the original developers and vendors expending a lot of effort to make sure only authentic processors are able to access those updates. While there are undoubtedly numerous advantages to a processor technology that can be modified after the customer installs it, I can also see a lot of potential Bad Things: 1)Hardware vendors building designs with the same mindset sloppy software designers have: "It's buggy, but only a fraction of our customers will be affected, ship it anyway and we'll fix it in the next update. 2)three words : Intel Genuine Advantage 3)The possibility that an update totally bricks your hardware. The chance that an update will hose a software package has always existed. I.T. folk who know what they are doing rarely roll out those updates as soon as they are released. They wait, install it on the test lab set-up, check the industry news to see if anyone else got screwed over by it, deploy it to selected segments individually and so on. However, the few test labs I have seen are underfunded and run very simplified versions of the main network and are usually hosted on the older equipment that was taken out of the production system because it couldn't keep up with the load. If your production system uses this re-configurable chips, your test lab would have to be identical to the production system in almost every way. 4)If some black hat were to develop a way to re-write part of your CPU to do his bidding, I don't think any software in the world could have a chance to detect and change that. We'd need a whole new industry based on known good hardware being able to check the underlaying hardware. One way of doing that would be to incorporate a rock-solid, utterly reliable component within the chip whose sole job is to check the integrity and function of the re-configurable portions. However, by definition, that part would have to be impossible to modify, which means any new functions you want to add have to be designed so that they can still pass the integrity checks. If the legitimate designers can create new functions that pass the integrity checks, then so can the black hats. In short, we'd have the perpetual arms race between black hats and white hats that we see in the software world. If you think that gets hairy, imagine trying to protect yourself against blended threats, a hardware rewrite and a software package, each innocuous in itself that cannot be detected/defeated by common tools because each does nothing really wrong but when working together owns your system. To prevent this, you'd have to lock your system down against any and all changes and have some kind of checksum or known good image to compare to, something that would make the whole updatable hardware concept much harder to execute and perhaps even pointless to implement.
Well, like most people, you conflate the FM modulation technique with the portion of the EM spectrum that is commonly licensed for FM modulated broadcasts. The confusion is understandable, since the portion of the spectrum allocated to FM is pretty much the same world wide. That said, there are FM transmitters and receivers that operate below 87.5Mhz. My Dad once picked up an old military surplus radio set that could operate at what the dial claimed was 42MHz to 50MHz FM and 3MHz to 30 MHz SW.
A buddy of mine who is currently on active duty with the Canadian Forces (About to go over to Kandahar for a tour in fact.) tells me that there is a large number of old Soviet transistor radios kicking around over in Afghanistan. He claimed that the sig-pigs (grunt slang for Signals Corp) had trouble when they first got over there because the radios operate using FM but at a non-standard part of the spectrum. He didn't know all the details, but good ol' faithful Wikipedia claims that Soviet era radios received FM between 65.9 to 74MHz. The point of the story was that *somebody* over there is still transmitting on the old eastern block frequencies, somebody the intelligence types wanted to eavesdrop on.
So, if you want to Xmit on 66.6, just dig up an old eastern block transmitter and a whole bunch of receivers. (how many receivers? how many listeners do you want?) Of course, you'll have to keep your power levels low or the FCC will come cruising around your neighborhood trying to find the guy sending out interference on the VHF TV band. (66.6 overlaps channel 3 and 4 I think.)
IIRC, your last point was one of the main reasons the CoS was denied tax-exempt religion status in Germany. The protected tax-exemption status most religions enjoy in many countries is based on the simple premise that *most* religions are literally beggars when it comes to money. They *ask* for money (From the faithful, from civic-minded groups, whatever.) but do not demand it. This makes any money one gives to them an act of charity. In return, they sponsor many charitable works. For example, many of the Scouts of America groups I know of (Beavers & Brownies, Cubs and Guides etc.) meet in church basements and Sunday school rooms. I know of churches, synagogues and masjids that support Little League baseball teams, PeeWee league hockey teams and so on. How many Third World relief missions are sponsored or heavily supported by religious groups? Based on the late night TV ads I see, with the exception of some wholly UN chartered groups, virtually all of them. Soup kitchens, AA groups, battered women's shelters the list goes on and on. While some religions have been criticized for the ratio of income to spending, no one denies that they do *something* useful with the money.
This leads me to an important question, like a lot of things, it is based on the teachings of Robert A. Heinlein. "Follow the money" From what I have read in various places, your average CoS member pays thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars in pursuit of redemption. It has been alleged that celebrities may donate millions. (In return, they get to be treated as royalty by the CoS, so it's easy to see the allure. You get accorded a status that money just can't buy anywhere else...) Where is the money going? The only CoS sponsored group I'd ever heard of before reading the wiki on CoS today was Narcanon; which, as a 12-step style group, doesn't cost all that much to run. 12 step style groups tend to operate in the cheapest available space, sometimes even free space. Coffee and donuts is usually paid for by the group through donations. The only major cost I can see is the printing of the pamphlets and other materials. What is the CoS and Seaorg *doing with all that money?
Slashdot Mirror
And yet I have requested the same thing, *twice* and each time through several venues. I specifically requested it on the account deactivation page form for additional comments, I have emailed privacy@facebook.com and for the first attempt at least, also left requests as Wall posts on Mark Zuckerberg's profile pages. (He had two that I found)
To date, none of these attempts through any of the communication channels have yielded me so much as an acknowledgment of receipt, let alone any action.
That would be what? roughly 8% of all U.S. currency in circulation? (approximately *700B$ in circulation, B.G.'s net worth is roughly 56B$)
well, just because I am bored and want to have some fun with figures tonight:
56 Billion dollars U.S. is 3,000,666 cubic feet of paper weighing 1,120,000 lbs
(more than 500 feet long, 200 feet wide and 30 feet thick)
Assuming we build some kind of furnace capable of burning paper with perfect efficiency at one pound per minute(I know, I know...)** it would take almost 78 days to burn it all, releasing 8,000 BTU's every minute. Again assuming perfect efficiency from heat into electrical power, it would produce over 8434 Kw/h, enough to supply almost my entire energy budget for the year. Given 24 hr operation and no delays in firing up and shutting down, over 1800 people would have their electricity provided for the year.***
*American Billion 1,000,000,000 (1E9) not the international Billion 1,000,000,000,000 (1E12)
**perfect efficiency is of course impossible, and short of some heavy duty forced air and very high temps, a pound of paper takes a lot longer than 1 minute to burn.
**what a wonderfully wasteful application of money. 56 billion could buy an awful lot more electricity than that.
And in fact that is exactly what I did. I quit, and provided a rather detailed and scathing response when asked why I was quitting.
I was fine with being shown ads, bandwidth and server racks ain't free after all and they gotta be paid for somehow right? I started getting uneasy when they moved to targeted ads. The idea of software scanning my profile for keywords is unpleasant but I rationalized that perhaps the information wasn't being sent off-site or being stored in any permanent sense. But after Microsoft bought into Facebook, that is when I really started paying attention to what the site was doing with MY information. (As far as I am concerned, even if I chose to share it with some site, it remains MY info. I do not agree to sharing it with "marketing affiliates" and the like unless you explicitly list the names and business addresses of the companies involved AND spell out what their data policies are.)
The idea of taking my profile information and perhaps my business relationship data and using it to sell to my friends is pretty f&^%ing sleazy in my book and I flat out won't put up with it. IMHO, it means the marketers are banking on my reputation to sell their crap. And it probably IS crap, stuff I would never recommend to a friend or family member. If it was a worthwhile product, it'd already be getting word of mouth referral no?
Worse yet, the agreements and descriptions carefully leave open the possibility of off site marketing as well. The example I read used Amazon. I list books and reading as among my interests in Facebook, Amazon targets ads at me, scrapes my name and profile image and uses that to target ads to everyone in my friends list. Then if one of those people click the ad, or even browse to Amazon while the ad's cookie is still in their cache then they will be presented with a dynamically created page that includes whatever information about me that Amazon was able to collect and thinks might increase sales to the visitor. Since Facebook insists on using real names, it is fairly easy for Amazon to combine my profile data with any sales data they acquired when doing business with me. Now, in my case, I don't mind much if say my Mom is shown what books I have purchased or shown interest in at Amazon, but there are some people on my friends list that I wouldn't want to share my reading habits with. Worse yet, my name is a fairly common one (the name of a former king of England and an occupational surname), common enough that even in the small town I am in there are three other men with similar enough names that there is occasionally confusion. If I am Richard Wright and there is a Rick Wright or Dick Wright in the same town who also uses Facebook, do I want my mom being shown Rick or Dick's book preferences thinking they are mine? Probably not....
So, in the end, I quit. I also messaged everyone in my list, explained as briefly as possible *why* I was quitting and urged them all to do their own research and think for themselves. I had hoped that a few others would take this as seriously as I and quit as well.
The more cynical (experienced?) among you will have already predicted the response I got. Not one person on my list actually quit over this. Only one actually bothered to even click the news link I provided. (And he didn't even read all of it, said it was "boring news stuff")Three people actually responded to my message. Two to lambaste me for making too much ado about the whole mess and one actually complained about my spamming her. (I sent one mass message, when anyone replied, she got the replies from these strangers in her box as well.) As for the rest? a vast echoing silence was the only response I got. What really pisses me off about the whole thing is two things: First, my profile was not the only place you can find personal information about me. Several relatives have pages and they are not always as careful about what they say as I would like. Ironically enough, I can't go see what they have posted about me unless I log in, but ad
I Agree...'nuff said.
**off topic, but am I the only one who seems to get singularly apropos captchas on a regular basis?
It's technosexuality and it isn't that new. That is; it isn't new if you consider it to be a subset of the very old Statuephilia
Human-animal marriage has already happened, countless times
Wiki
Many Slashdotters put some small amount of stock in the UID's each of us have. Aside from Cowboy Neal , Pathwalker has the lowest I can recall _ever_ seeing actually posting something. (Not to say it hasn't happened mind you, I just don't recall seeing it.) Mine is in the six digits, and fairly high in the six digits at that and I've always wondered if there was any way to get a smaller one. My logic is that of the first thousand UID's ever assigned, not all of them may still be in use, leaving such sought after low numbers available for newcomers like myself should we prove worthy. Being a BOFH fan, my plans for getting a low UID have revolved around bribery, since I assume that any true geek would be hard to blackmail. This upcoming party and prizes deal suggests a possible alternative route to attaining that coveted low UID, simply winning it. How about it CowboyNeal, CmdrTaco Jamie McCarthy, Krow, Pudge and Hemo? What say you go through the user lists and see if there isn't a nice low number from an abandoned account that can be safely given away to perhaps the user who organizes the best party on some other criteria? (Largest, most remote*, most technologically advanced etc**.) I can't seem to figure out how to pull up a sequential list of users by UID though so I can't tell if my first choice for UID's is available or not. 101010 is cool but not low enough, so I gotta go with 777. As an alternative, maybe create a utterly unique UID? I don't know details of how Slashdot creates and tracks user accounts except that for all intents and purposes there is no upper limit on the size of the number that can be assigned and that numbers are assigned sequentially. But maybe it's possible to create an alphanumeric UID? or perhaps assign a UID that is a ridiculously high number? (Come to think of it, I don't think UID 0 was ever assigned was it?) *I think Deep Penguin (73203) pretty much has that criteria locked **I know we have some users who are Google employees and Google does have a pretty strict NDA and security policy. Any gang of geeks who manage to hold a Slashdot party (with outside guests of course)in one of Google's big server farms has to have earned some kind of special recognition in my book. (Come to think of it, Google has been known to have a playful side, maybe one of you Google-ites can suggest a commemorative Google page for the event?)
A lady friend of mine did exactly that about a year and a half ago. (Move to Calgary that is, not take a job with McDonald's.) She's an embalming technician by profession and has two jokes she frequently makes about her career and moving choices:
1)She likes working with the dead better than at McDonald's, the pay and hours is better and the customers are easier to deal with.
2)The funeral home she works at offered her 11 dollars an hour more than what she had been making in Ontario. She jokes that this extra wasn't for working for the home, it was to persuade her to live in Calgary. During the winter she often jokes that even that pay ain't enough.
According to mapquest and google maps, Montville is inland of Cleveland and TFA says the break(s)was/were between Cleveland and Montville. That's more than 1.1 Km so I suspect that the affected cable is a single chunk somewhere along Hwy 6 AKA Gar Hwy. Another commenter raised the possibility of someone going down into a manhole and shooting along the shared conduit. A shotgun wouldn't do all that much damage in that scenario as shot deforms significantly on impact with hard surfaces like concrete pipe walls and the resulting deformed pellets wouldn't fly very far even if they managed to avoid being absorbed by cable sheathing. Shotgun slugs or rifle bullets would be able to skip down the conduit better, but of the two my money would have to be on jacketed rifle rounds, not shotgun slugs. The harder material makes for less deformation and a better ricochet effect. Any cantankerous gun-owner crazy enough to blow holes in an underground cable is also likely to be crazy enough to neglect ear defenders. Firearms are LOUD! A shotgun going off in a confined hard surfaced space like a man hole access way is easily loud enough to temporarily deafen and leave a pronounced ringing in the ears. Some permanent damage is highly likely. Just look for the guy who keeps saying "what was that??? I can't hear you!"
It doesn't actually specify how many breaks the cable suffered, just that a 1.1 Km length was affected.
It's possible that it was one continuous piece 1.1 Km long that had one break. While this weakens my points, it doesn't entire negate them.
quote: "When technicians pulled up the affected cable..." To me this sounds like an underground cable, not strung along telephone poles along the highway. I don't know how things are handled in the US, but here in Canada, when backbone or trunk cable is underground it is several feet underground. It is often sharing space with sewer pipes. Within a residential area, I have seen cases where cable is threaded in underground (3 to 4 feet down) plastic pipe (ABS? PVC?)in a designated "service corridor" parallel to the sidewalk, an area set aside by the municipal planners for gas, water and communication connections. Either way, there is a fair bit of dirt between the cable and the firearm. From my Reserves days I know that a .303 or 7.62 NATO round will only go about 20 inches or so into the range berm if fired at very close range, depending on soil type. A twenty inch wall of sand bags will stop most small arms fire. The idea of of a bullet penetrating enough dirt to reach the cable, penetrate the rigid pipe and then damage the cable seems implausible. (Even allowing for the fragility of fiber when dealing with impact.) Then there is the fact that even work crews digging for the stuff rarely now precisely where the cable is, they have to dig a fairly wide and long trench to access the stuff. So even if you DID have a firearm and ammunition combination capable of doing the penetration (Barrett .50 maybe?) it would take many rounds fired essentially blind into the ground to get even one hit. Many hits along a 1.1Km length would require many MANY rounds. How many big rifle rounds do you suppose you could shoot into the ground before somebody showed up to ask you what the hell you were doing?
Shooting above ground cable doesn't have the penetration issue, but hitting that line 30 or more feet up is quite challenging as well. Any round that did hit however would stand a good chance of severing the cable altogether, making that section between poles simply fall to the ground at the severed end. There is still the problem of firing multiple high powered rounds without making the local police unduly interested. Does anyone know for sure if this was above ground or underground cable? And is it maybe hunting season in Ohio? If the cables ARE above ground and in a rural area, then maybe some drunken yahoos thought it would be a good idea to use the cables as a target in some macho bullshit marksmanship test. Most hunting rounds can easily go a kilometer or more downrange and retain enough energy to sever cable, on the other hand, deliberately hitting a target that slender from a klick away is a feat even elite military snipers would likely find challenging. Drunken yahoos would have to be within tens of yards to have a hope in hell of achieving it. One or more drunken idiots repeatedly shooting off a rifle within sight of a road does tend to attract official notice even during hunting season in rural Canada.
Without trying to minimize your loss, or demean your experience in any way, to be fair to the ARC, they were trying to save another person's life that day. Your father was gone, but the remains had the potential to save others. I'm not clear on the exact limitations of organ transplants, specifically hearts, but I know that there is generally some very narrow window of time when the donor organ is still viable and that the closer the deadline the organ is removed, the lower the odds of success. As morbid and grotesque as it seems to the grieving family, doctors have good reasons for wanting to get at the organs while the donor body is still fresh, in some cases, perhaps still warm. I also understand that even when an organ donors card has been signed by the deceased, hospitals and doctors still prefer to confirm permission from the living next of kin. Your wife's request for "space" to come to terms with your loss was quite reasonable and understandable, but by the time your family had a chance to think about such things, the heart would likely be useless. From your description, you were the designated next of kin, so the hospital needed your specific word on the subject, not your wifes. The Red Cross merely assists the hospital in tracking down the next of kin using their call centre. MY wife is a rare blood type and is occasionally called into the hospital on an emergency basis by the Red Cross. As with organ donation, the Red Cross is calling at the request of the hospital staff because they are better set up to do so. It is not unusual for one Red Cross agent to call her at work, another to call the home and still another to call her at her parents home. They generally keep calling every hour on the hour until they either reach her in person or the hospital cancels the rare blood request. You may have been contacted by land line and by cell for a similar reason, one agent not knowing what the other is doing because there just wasn't time to exchange information between them.
All that said, there are a few unfortunate things that occurred
1) Even though your father never apparently signed an organ donors card, the medical staff still wanted his heart. Ethically, in the absence of a clear written agreement by the deceased, the staff are supposed to assume that he did NOT agree. The fact that they still pursued this suggest either they already knew there was a match with a waiting recipient (Something they normally can't determine until the heart has been removed) or they were guilty of far more wishful thinking then I am comfortable with in a medical organization. ("Maybe he was willing to donate, mentioned this to his family but never got around to filling out the card and maybe when we remove the heart it will turn out we can use it.")
2)The pushiness of the first Red Cross agent, while somewhat understandable when there are lives on the line, is still unacceptable when dealing with a family in grief. Graphic descriptions are utterly unacceptable and inexcusable in those circumstances.
3)There should be only one agent handling each transplant case and that agent needs to be far better trained in grief counseling. Bottom line, they are asking for a very personal kind of donation from a family that is at it's most vulnerable.
What you said made me think of a (somewhat) related topic. Several people have posted about the possibility of the big AV vendors and such excluding "official" malware from detection signature libraries. Several mechanisms have been suggested, ranging from voluntary participation to being required by secret Homeland Security legislation. I see several potential problems with the idea of the AV crowd secretly ignoring *any* official malware for *any* reason. ..., n ? How quick can you get every US based vendor up to speed and have updates pushed to all of their customers?
1) Even under the threat of Star Chamber "justice", you could never get 100% compliance from the security community.
a) I am NOT a security type, but it seems to me that much of what these surveillance wares do exhibits the exact same behaviors as many existing threats. (In fact, the article suggests they are based on existing and known flaws.) AFAIK; not all threats are detected by the signature of the files involved (Whether it be created, changed or moved). Some are detected purely by behavior. Even if $AV-VENDOR1 *did* create an update that ignores the tool, until ALL of the users (legit and pirate alike) had that update, there is a risk that the so-called "out of date" suite on a targets computer might detect the surveillance-ware based on behavior.
b)OK, so you got $AV-VENDOR1 and $AV-VENDOR2 to play ball with the Feds, what about $AV-VENDOR 3, 4,
c)Not every security company is subject to US law or the FBI's powers of persuasion. What about European companies? (Although that also raises the possibility of Euro AV folk cooperating with Interpol I guess.)
2) To hide something like this would require the involvement of many people scattered all over the place. Sooner or later, someone would spill the beans.
3) How specific is it? from the little I actually read, it sounds like a highly Windows-centric and highly focused tool. TFA mentions the possibility of putting one version after another onto a Myspace site until the target is successfully infected. Are *all* the versions going to be officially invisible as far as the AV crowd is concerned?
It strikes me that there are analogies to make regarding surveillance-ware and malware authors to the closed source vs open source thing. Consider this, the malware threat out there is huge, there are many skilled (and not so skilled) who stand to make a lot of money by owing your machine. Thus there are the black hat "many eyes" scrutinizing code trying to find a new and exploitable flaw compared to comparatively few white hat workers trying to exploit the same code to uphold the law. And even more white and gray hats finding these flaws so they can fix them first. The open source supporters claim that many eyes make for more secure code bases and I agree. But by the same reasoning, more black hats looking for exploits than cops means the black hats will have a better arsenal at their disposal.
For now at least, the security community seems to be holding it's own against the black hats. Without the complicity of the security community, surveillance developers would have a damn hard time coming up with something that the crackers haven't already done and the security guys haven't already fixed. Anyone who is possessed of sufficient clue to do what I consider routine maintenance for computers (updated security suite, properly configured firewall, patched OS) is going to be a tough target for this sort of thing.
it seems to me that a government (*any* government) has it's share of jerks and aside from perhaps the Vatican, can you name me one government that *doesn't* own guns? It is therefor safe to conclude that one purpose of owning firearms is to protect one's own $RIGHTS from the jerks in government if/when the jerks come into power and get to set policy/enact legislation.
From what I have read, the rebels in the colonies were pretty clear on this when they were setting up a self-governing system way back in the 1700's. As far as they seemed to be concerned, the purposes of private firearms were:
1)To defend one's life, property, privacy etc from other individuals
2)So that the common population could serve as a militia in the event of war against a foreign power
3)To ensure a degree of sovereignty for the common man to prevent the government from becoming oppressive
4)When all else fails, to give the common man the basic tools for revolt, so that an oppressive regime can be replaced, by force if necessary.
I will readily concede that any capability can be abused, criminals can and indeed do use firearms in the commission of crimes. However, the men who became known as The Founding Fathers knew that decent law-abiding folk greatly outnumber criminals. Giving everyone equal access to personal firearms only makes the common person the equal of the criminals, and since good folk so out number the bad, crime and such can be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, while it can be argued that having guns in the hands of the common people makes tragic accidents or certain types of crime more likely, gentlemen like Franklin and Jefferson seemed to feel that those four reasons I mentioned were so important as to outweigh the risks. Personally, I quite agree with that line of reasoning, it's a shame Her Majesty's servants here in Canada don't.
my captcha was deplores...how appropriate
What's really missing is the sticky rubber/vinyl floors, the smell of cigarette smoke, the sound of traffic a few yards away* and a surly fat guy wandering around with a metal coin dispenser gadget who acts like letting a kid exchange his handful of nickle and dimes for a few more quarters is some huge hassle.
*One of the biggest arcades in Toronto,ON back in the day was the "Funland" On Yonge St. The entire front of the place was fold away doors and in the better weather they would open them all up. Since all the latest games were always up front, it meant you were playing a sidewalks distance from one of the busier streets in the downtown. At certain times of the day, some games would become almost unplayable as the sunlight would reflect off the plate glass windows across the street and glare all over your screen.
*I seem to recall seeing words to that effect on several coupons I received in one of those "Valu-Pak" junk mail envelopes recently, despite being in Canada, a country which is notable in it's lack of *any* State laws whatsoever. Provincial and Federal laws, yes, but no State laws at all...
Your post has better English in it than the posts of some allegedly native-English speaking AC's I've seen here.
My wife just came out of a court battle against her ex for support. While this was done in a Canadian family court and not an American civil court, I think a few excerpts from our legal bill would be enlightening...
10 hours @ 200$/hr = 2000$
6 faxes @ 4 each = 24$
long distance 80m@.90/m = 72$
court filing fees = 135$ (3x45$)
mediation fees = 980$
GST = 336$
(the GST is the federal level tax at 7%, no the math does not work out, amount listed is for GST on total bill (4800$) while I am only providing selected excerpts to illustrate my point.)
My wife has an excellent lawyer, the antithesis of all those lawyer jokes you've heard. However, note that while he makes 200/hr, this is only when he is in court for us. (Each appearance seems to be rounded to the nearest half hour in the detailed bill.) On the other hand, he "nickel and dimes" us for absolutely everything done on our behalf. I am quite sure that he charges 4$ per fax because that is the pro-rated amount it costs him to have an employee handle those. Similarly, while he charges more than the prime rate for long distance, I suspect that this rate also includes the basic overhead of having the multi-line phone set up in the first place. He charges a much lower rate when simply meeting us and the ex in a conference room in his own offices, a fee which probably not only covers his time, but the space as well.
Finally, GST applies to everything except the court filings themselves. My wife was charged almost 5 grand for a comparatively simple case being handled by a small town lawyer. Based on her experiences, I can easily see a battle against a RIAA suit going into the six figures. Where many people go wrong when figuring legal costs is to assume that the entire sum is based purely on "billable hours". Quite often that final sum will include a LOT of little things like faxes or phone calls. While not as large a percentage of the total as the main billable hours, it's not negligible either.
Feel free to correct me if I am wrong, but for most desktop/tower cases the biggest source of sound is the tiny video card and CPU fans spinning at $BIGNUM rpm. The larger and slower case fans make less sound and at far less obtrusive frequencies. This was the logic behind all those fan controllers and BIOS fan speed controls to slow down the smaller fans whenever the heat load was diminished. It also explains some of the more monstrous CPU cooler rigs out there. Using a big chunk of Cu allows you to use a bigger, slower and hence quieter fan. A passively cooled setup that relies on a large (80mm or larger.) case fan to move that hot air out of the box is going to be inherently a lot quieter than the more typical CPU and Video card fan setup. This rig would still be quiet. Not silent, I'll grant you, but still quieter than the average. In my travels across the WWW, the only truly silent (as in 0Db) systems I have read about are custom built boxes based on mini or nano ITX boards, flash based HDD, 12VDC power supplies and so on. Fun little machines no doubt, but not the makings of a high end desktop machine that this mobo seems to be intended for. (I actually RTFA, 8Gb RAM, 10 SATA ports, 4 Gb RJ-45s sounds like a pretty potent unit to me.)
Which of course, in Soviet Russia, logically means I can't spawn derivative works* (child process) without my work's (employer's) approval. I know sysadmins bitch about having no life outside of work, but that's getting ridiculous!
*(The younger of my two sons so obviously takes after me that he is clearly a derivative work. Yet my wife doesn't see the humour in referring to him as ver. 2.0(beta))
Is it just me, or is there indeed a possibility of developing a subscription model for hardware as well as software? Think about it, when you combine the advances in 3D printing, boutique fabrication technologies and the like. You buy the few components that cannot be readily manufactured with your 3D multi-material printer (case, mobo etc) and buy the more complex parts according to some complex licensing model. e.g. you buy the base chip which comes bundled with a design license. That license entitles you to regular updates and upgrades from the chip vendor as long as you pay the subscription fee. This of course leads to the potential for hardware pirates, who invest in increasingly sophisticated fab equip to sell copies of the chip without all that annoying R&D overhead and the original developers and vendors expending a lot of effort to make sure only authentic processors are able to access those updates. While there are undoubtedly numerous advantages to a processor technology that can be modified after the customer installs it, I can also see a lot of potential Bad Things:
1)Hardware vendors building designs with the same mindset sloppy software designers have: "It's buggy, but only a fraction of our customers will be affected, ship it anyway and we'll fix it in the next update.
2)three words : Intel Genuine Advantage
3)The possibility that an update totally bricks your hardware. The chance that an update will hose a software package has always existed. I.T. folk who know what they are doing rarely roll out those updates as soon as they are released. They wait, install it on the test lab set-up, check the industry news to see if anyone else got screwed over by it, deploy it to selected segments individually and so on. However, the few test labs I have seen are underfunded and run very simplified versions of the main network and are usually hosted on the older equipment that was taken out of the production system because it couldn't keep up with the load. If your production system uses this re-configurable chips, your test lab would have to be identical to the production system in almost every way.
4)If some black hat were to develop a way to re-write part of your CPU to do his bidding, I don't think any software in the world could have a chance to detect and change that. We'd need a whole new industry based on known good hardware being able to check the underlaying hardware. One way of doing that would be to incorporate a rock-solid, utterly reliable component within the chip whose sole job is to check the integrity and function of the re-configurable portions. However, by definition, that part would have to be impossible to modify, which means any new functions you want to add have to be designed so that they can still pass the integrity checks. If the legitimate designers can create new functions that pass the integrity checks, then so can the black hats. In short, we'd have the perpetual arms race between black hats and white hats that we see in the software world. If you think that gets hairy, imagine trying to protect yourself against blended threats, a hardware rewrite and a software package, each innocuous in itself that cannot be detected/defeated by common tools because each does nothing really wrong but when working together owns your system. To prevent this, you'd have to lock your system down against any and all changes and have some kind of checksum or known good image to compare to, something that would make the whole updatable hardware concept much harder to execute and perhaps even pointless to implement.
Algernon!
Nicodemus!
Pinky!
Well, like most people, you conflate the FM modulation technique with the portion of the EM spectrum that is commonly licensed for FM modulated broadcasts. The confusion is understandable, since the portion of the spectrum allocated to FM is pretty much the same world wide. That said, there are FM transmitters and receivers that operate below 87.5Mhz. My Dad once picked up an old military surplus radio set that could operate at what the dial claimed was 42MHz to 50MHz FM and 3MHz to 30 MHz SW.
A buddy of mine who is currently on active duty with the Canadian Forces (About to go over to Kandahar for a tour in fact.) tells me that there is a large number of old Soviet transistor radios kicking around over in Afghanistan. He claimed that the sig-pigs (grunt slang for Signals Corp) had trouble when they first got over there because the radios operate using FM but at a non-standard part of the spectrum. He didn't know all the details, but good ol' faithful Wikipedia claims that Soviet era radios received FM between 65.9 to 74MHz. The point of the story was that *somebody* over there is still transmitting on the old eastern block frequencies, somebody the intelligence types wanted to eavesdrop on.
So, if you want to Xmit on 66.6, just dig up an old eastern block transmitter and a whole bunch of receivers. (how many receivers? how many listeners do you want?) Of course, you'll have to keep your power levels low or the FCC will come cruising around your neighborhood trying to find the guy sending out interference on the VHF TV band. (66.6 overlaps channel 3 and 4 I think.)
right next to the bar code tattoo on your wrist?
IIRC, your last point was one of the main reasons the CoS was denied tax-exempt religion status in Germany. The protected tax-exemption status most religions enjoy in many countries is based on the simple premise that *most* religions are literally beggars when it comes to money. They *ask* for money (From the faithful, from civic-minded groups, whatever.) but do not demand it. This makes any money one gives to them an act of charity. In return, they sponsor many charitable works. For example, many of the Scouts of America groups I know of (Beavers & Brownies, Cubs and Guides etc.) meet in church basements and Sunday school rooms. I know of churches, synagogues and masjids that support Little League baseball teams, PeeWee league hockey teams and so on. How many Third World relief missions are sponsored or heavily supported by religious groups? Based on the late night TV ads I see, with the exception of some wholly UN chartered groups, virtually all of them. Soup kitchens, AA groups, battered women's shelters the list goes on and on. While some religions have been criticized for the ratio of income to spending, no one denies that they do *something* useful with the money.
This leads me to an important question, like a lot of things, it is based on the teachings of Robert A. Heinlein. "Follow the money" From what I have read in various places, your average CoS member pays thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars in pursuit of redemption. It has been alleged that celebrities may donate millions. (In return, they get to be treated as royalty by the CoS, so it's easy to see the allure. You get accorded a status that money just can't buy anywhere else...) Where is the money going? The only CoS sponsored group I'd ever heard of before reading the wiki on CoS today was Narcanon; which, as a 12-step style group, doesn't cost all that much to run. 12 step style groups tend to operate in the cheapest available space, sometimes even free space. Coffee and donuts is usually paid for by the group through donations. The only major cost I can see is the printing of the pamphlets and other materials. What is the CoS and Seaorg *doing with all that money?