What we don't love is anybody taking away your freedom to choose what you create, how you create it
First thing I thought of was the restrictive technology in Photoshop that detects currency and screws with your image. And is Adobe going to support Ogg Vorbis in HTML5? So we have the choice of how we encode our videos, that is, with a *known* patent-bomb like h.264, or a (so far) free and clear codec, e.g. Ogg.
Because you know, I'd love to have the freedom to choose my codec and work with pictures of my currency... and then there are those Adobe PDF documents where I can't copy for pasting later, even though fair use dictates my right to do so; oh, and hey, where is Adobe AIR for AmigaOS 4.1? Wait, you want to have a CHOICE about where you put your hard-earned effort based on your ideas about the platform? Well, imagine that.:) Funny you're so incensed about the manufacturer of a platform having a choice about what tech it allows on-board, eh?
Oh, and BTW, I don't want your sucky mouse-over tech. As far as I'm concerned, if I didn't click it, it shouldn't be doing anything. One of the most annoying things on the web is when my mouse happens to cross over some box on the way to something I *do* want to click, and the damn thing jumps up in the middle of my display, blocks my view of the page, and begins to play some inane bit of crapvertising, which won't go away until I figure out the advertiser's version of "close me." Thanks a whole bloody lot for THAT, Adobe. Menus that fly up when I didn't click them aren't much better.
There is exactly one good thing about flash: I can generally turn that crap off by getting rid of the flash code infestation. DLLs or plug-ins or whatever. And when something says "you need flash", I just say "liar" and go on my merry way.:)
Who says we can't park solar collecters(sic) in the ocean?
Hmm. So you're suggesting that we limit the amount of sunlight that reaches the sea. My first concern would be, what happens to the sea life, then? The sea is not the equivalent of a desert; it is the equivalent of an incredibly vibrant and thriving forest that depends directly upon sunlight (except where we've screwed it up already.)
The right place to do this is in the desert; in the US, the desert southwest is a great candidate. We could easily obtain enough power from there to cover all our energy needs. Storage is the big deal, and for that, pumping water uphill for later downhill runs through turbines is a great way to go until/unless we can come up with something better.
The desert is also a lot less violent area to try to setup a large physical infrastructure. If you'd ever been out on the ocean watching 10 meter waves stir things up, you'd be less sanguine about the feasibility of ocean solar installations, let me tell you.
We do have an "energy problem", and it is defined by two words: 1) government, and 2) corporations.
How to get them out of the way is the problem. Available energy is not.
But what never ceases to amaze me is the mentality that an energy source that is only good for 200 years (of which about 150 we've already used) is somehow better than an energy source that is good for 1 billion years or so.
You're only amazed because you're looking at the wrong mentality. The key here is the attitude that the recovery, sale and subsequent consumption of petroleum products ensures that the people and companies that are currently in power, remain in power.
Since they'll be dead and gone by the time the resource runs out, they are not concerned about oil running out; they're in business to recover it, and so they need to make sure that continues. Since they don't have an inexpensive means of making the transition from oil to solar - oil and gas leases and machinery and skills and refining and transport infrastructure being 100% useless in solar terms - they're not concerned with how well solar performs; they're not concerned with the transition to solar, except in how to delay that transition to keep themselves in power (hence, the better and better gasoline and diesel engines we're finally seeing coming out of auto manufacturers); and they also work quite hard to see to it that inexpensive solar cells and the support electronics do not reach the consumer in any significant quantity.
Creating a solar plant and running it - solar cells, electronics, batteries - is FAR less expensive than paying current power bills for even a few years (I designed and built one for a BIG house with BIG energy demands, so I should know.) The fact that the average consumer outside of an urban area and in the sunbelt doesn't have one should make it very clear to you that there are artificial market forces at very serious work.
That finger-painting is markup, though. Swiping a word to select it and clicking bold is no different than surrounding the text with <B>word</B> there's no technical roadblock to storing the document that way, either.
You're conflating document creation with document storage. Believe me, the document doesn't store the swipe or the click. It just stores regions with markup. The issue is will this markup be easily understood (just text, obvious from context like <B>word</B>), with external references to other media (stills, motion sequences) or will it be some binary munge snuggled around some custom text encoding, interleaved with image and chart data in *their* own formats so that no one has a decent chance of decoding (*cough* PDF *cough*) without a significant (and expensive) effort?
I really believe text markup is the way to go.
I've got old docs (from "Stylograph", ca. 1970's) in text form, complete with markup, and I can read them and know just how they were intended to look, even *outside* of Stylograph. were I inclined (I'm not) I could write an importer for a current formatting app, for instance a filter for Tex would probably be very short work. But I actually don't care how these docs look, I'm just interested in the content - family letters, old resumes, design proposals, etc. Which is entirely readable because... it's text!
Somehow, I don't think that 25 years from now, people will care if it looks exactly like it looked now, as long as the text and section headings, toc and index, tables and lists... are intact, recoverable, and comprehensible by an archivist, and from there perhaps into public hands.
The best way to store a document isn't PDF. While the spec is open, the documents may not be -- copy and paste disabled, passwords, etc. PDF is a format with easily used features designed to LIMIT access. That's a hella poor choice for an archive format.
Text files - perhaps unicode files, today - are the best option. Markup languages like HTML are excellent because they let the viewer set the presentation to a great extent; section subheading sizes, font sizes, etc. Until we can edit defects out of the genome and repair all injuries, we also should be considering accessability. PDF, again, bad choice. Everything is determined by the document. HTML or something like it is oodles better: You set the font size, feed it almost directly to a reader, etc.
And as for formats like.doc and so on... no. Just, no.
But as bad as format issues are...
Storage media is worse.
You want to read your 1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you. Not only do I have a working system with usable drives at 35, 40 and 80 track, single and double density, I also have a working emulation so once i have your data, I can put it up in software that was meant to understand it.
That's your most serious problem. Not the data format -- the data storage medium. better make it easy to transfer from a to b to c to n... because otherwise, it'll be like FLEX files... right now, I'm one of very few people in the world that can still read the original floppies. And I'm getting old, and am definitely not all that healthy.
Any blind person, especially any adapted and competent one, who wants to gain the sense of sight would be well advised to study Oliver Sachs's classic piece "To See and Not See."
Yeah, the glass sides are cool, but it will look so dirty after just a few uses.
They've addressed that - the glass sides are double-paned. Shouldn't get messy quickly, and it's very easy to clean, both glass and crumb tray. See the video if you're curious.
And yet, what does this toaster give me that this one doesn't?
Well, let's see: Quartz heating elements, evenly cooked toast, the ability to see how brown the toast is so there's no possible excuse for getting toast that isn't to your preferences, the device is not made poorly, and the heating system and build quality should offer considerable associated reliability, which I thought was your key issue. It can also toast without being set to maximum, which is a complaint on the page of the toaster you refer to. This one also has some style. You didn't mention a price limit, you know. In fact, you said you had bucks and alluded to the idea that you were in the class of folks who would pay well for a good toaster. Well, this is a good toaster and they seem quite happy to have you pay well, at least by my poor standards.:)
I guess you were just complaining to see your words in a post, though. No problem, carry on.
Avatar plays fine on my PS3. Looks fabulous. (I blogged about the movie here.) Still not clear why anyone would buy a Bluray player other than a PS3. Horsepower (and therefore loading speed), up-to-date-ness, ability to play games, music, etc... just can't see why you'd want something else. We've got a lot of Bluray titles. They all play flawlessly on the PS3. If I buy a new Bluray tomorrow, I've every reason to think it'll play just fine, too. Sony's been 100% on the ball for us. If my PS3 were to break, I'd complete the purchase of a new one within the hour.
We've got a contract, so we can't just bail, but when it is up, that'll be the end of it. It isn't because of the Internet, though -- HD reception via satellite is much better quality than the vast majority of Internet streaming video. The reason why is that the programming is just terrible. The things that they put on television simply aren't the things that entertain me and mine. It doesn't matter where you get your programming if watching it makes you feel like you're wasting your time.
We do still have the Internet if something comes up we need to know about, and it's likely to be both more timely, and available on demand, news in particular. News networks - CNN, FOX, etc. - are just pitiful. FOX is like a work of (bad) fiction, and CNN is a reach-around fest for the clueless. Half a country can be in ruins and the top story on CNN will be that some Hollywood marriage is breaking up.
As far as what we continue to use the television for, there's still plenty without broadcast: XBox 360/HDDVD (yeah, we have a few), PS3/Bluray, Wii, DVD, and our media Mac. It isn't like we aren't entertained -- far from it. We've got an adequate collection of movies and games, too.
Television is probably the technology that had the most potential to be a force for good in our society. Today, it seems to me to be the technology that has least lived up to its potential. Not that it hasn't matured technically, no question that it has, but that the content is, socially speaking, crap.
There's some kind of thing that goes on in marketing, entertainment, and politics that almost always seems to go for the left side of the Gaussian, as if collecting the not-so-clever is easier than collecting the clever. Maybe it's just that simple. All I know for sure is that currently, television content is mind-numbingly awful, and on the rare occasion that they produce something worth watching, it rarely survives the seasonal cullings by the networks. And in the end, you can get all the shows on a DVD or Bluray (if you're lucky), and watch them without commercials, in very good quality, as many times as you like, and furthermore, you can legitimately loan 'em to your friends.
XKCD is plenty funny from time to time, and like every other comic out there, some strips are better than others. If you don't get the jokes, or you don't think they're funny, that's a reflection on your view-of/capacity-for humor, not XKCD. As for the drawing... it's minimal, because the point is rarely in the quality of the drawing. And it's only fair to point out that if everything you accept as funny must also be drawn to some arbitrary standard, you're going to miss a whole lot of funny things. I expect you don't tolerate South Park well, either, eh? Given the quality of the drawing, which is somewhere between hilariously abysmal and straight-up awful. It's still funny as heck from time to time.
XKCD is one of the few comics I visit regularly. But then again, my sense of humor wasn't shot off in the war.
Former HP's lady CEO told a PI to do it to journalists and was never charged with any wrong doing.
George Bush jr. caused a US citizen to be incarcerated (very) long term without recourse to a lawyer or even a phone call, and he hasn't been charged with any wrong doing either, or impeached, as would have been entirely appropriate for the gross violation of his oath. So what's your point? That application of justice under the constitution and the law is imperfect? I think we all know that already. The point of public discourse is to keep that in view, and subsequently improve things by hashing out our viewpoints and acting accordingly as opportunities to nudge things one way or another make themselves available to us.
This has nothing to do with "social rules for privacy".
It has everything to do with them. It has been well understood for centuries that privacy was important; the 4th (and to some extent the 3rd) amendment is specifically a mechanism intended to restrain the government from violating privacy unless it has good and sufficient reason, reason it is required to show in order to pursue such a violation. "persons, houses, papers, and effects" precisely define the domain, as of the time of writing, where privacy was most important, and then the nature of the 4th amendment is specifically that of restricting access (search) and possession (seizure), those very things that are the virtual pillars of privacy.
To limit abuses of these powers they are required to get a court to sign off of on violating the property rights of others
That's an over-simplification. It isn't just property rights. The precise wording is "persons, houses, papers, and effects." This is about a whole swath of things that you may or may not (and may not even be able to) own; it isn't simply about property. By its very nature, it covers objects and concepts that would not be your property by limiting access under a general umbrella.
For instance, if you have a vase of mine at your rented home, it is not protected as your property (neither the home or the vase are your property) it is protected by your privacy, and this is precisely what the fourth amendment and law sensibly predicated upon it accomplishes by specifying more than just "property" as the issues at hand, and making the pendant authorization particular to "places... persons... or things" rather than "property."
Further, it shows why the law goes in such ridiculous circles trying to define these boundaries; because the common misunderstanding is about property (which simply doesn't work as the definitive issue), when the actual issue at hand is, and always was, protecting the privacy of the citizen. Which again, the laws predicated upon the 4th recognize over and over again simply by extending these ideas to things like phone calls, medical records, human resources documents and DNA sequences; these are not property issues; they are privacy issues.
Conversely, when power seekers try to carve out exceptions for particular types of communications (email, for instance), it is trivially easy to see not only that they are wrong, but why they are wrong, when you actually understand that the 4th is not about property per se, but only as property is an aspect of a citizen's privacy.
I am perfectly ready to concede that there is a great deal of flawed reasoning extant, and some of it has even made it into legislation; but so far, it has been very easy to demonstrate that such legislation was intended to be unauthorized. The reasoning behind the 4th is almost impeccable, though unfortunately poorly written, like a number of other portions of the constitution (the 2nd is perhaps the poster child for this... you can't understand it unless you analyze it rather thoroughly... which the courts and many citizens often fail to do, and end up with misunderstandings like "the national guard" is somehow involved, or that it might not describe a citizen's individual right to arms, despite its rather significant presence in the bill of rights, or that it is limited to guns, though it clearly says "arms"...)
Personally, I think the greatest mistake made was the presumption that those who would swear an oath to uphold the constitution would actually take that oath seriously. If the authors had understood that politicians, judges and legislators who were to come could be wholly without honor, not to mention not even bothering to study the document they swore to uphold, I suspect they'd have added teeth: Actual punishment for violating the constitution, and we could have seen many dishonorable legislators and judges go down c
Arrogant? No. I'm entitled to an opinion, and to state that opinion. As a citizen, there is no requirement that I keep said opinion(s) to myself. You, on the other hand, are absolutely entitled to counter it. By all means, do so. Every mistake of mine I can correct improves me, and I'm all for that. Calling names, however, gets you nowhere. Try not to worry about my willingness to state my position, and instead, look at the actual position, and if you have a counter, let fly.
Also, I am bound to point out that thus far, it appears that my opinion (based, among other things, upon thirty-plus years of study of the constitution and surrounding events, by the way) does describe the situation accurately. No one has yet to post a reasonable counterpoint. But again, if you think otherwise... please, enlighten us all. The floor is yours.
I didn't ruin anything. I said justification. Not law. See this essay on privacy. The constitution codifies social rules for privacy in order to limit the authorized powers of the feds. Those rules already existed and they were, and are, quite obvious to anyone in our society that isn't brain damaged or so socially inept they must be kept under supervision.
If that is a problem, either (a) encrypt your over-the-air communications, or (b) communicate through a channel over which--unlike free-space radio--one can legitimately claim property-rights.
No. You have mis-identified the problem. The social boundary already exists. Encryption hardens the boundary, but does not make it appear or go away. You are not welcome to walk in my door just because I have not put a lock upon it; the social boundary is obvious. See the skirt argument in the previously referenced essay.
Regardless of whether I encrypt (or employ other hardening), interception of private communications is understood to be wrong, and obviously so. Our entire society would have to change -- and so the reasoning that created the 4th amendment -- in order for it to be ok for someone to cross boundaries simply because they have not been hardened. Such an event is neither likely, or reasonable.
I said justification. Not law. Not the same thing at all. It is 100% clear that the constitution was intended to make the feds recognize, and obey, the existence of certain bounds of privacy that already existed in our society, which private citizens are already expected to comply with.
With the ability to read the constitution - and reason above a third grade level - it is 100% clear that spying on a US citizen's communications without probable cause AND a warrant is not an authorized power for the US government or a US state. It is also doubtful that there exists, or can exist with constitution as currently constructed, a justification for a private citizen exercising such a power.
From what I can gather, they plan to do the de-orbit burn at 5:30 MST, and land by 6:48 MST, so the sun will hit them and any visible atmospheric disturbances and so they should be visible, clouds permitting. I've set my alarm and plan to be outside with a 400mm lens and a 15 mp camera. If I catch 'em, I'll post a link to the images here.
They'll only go over me if orbit 222 is the one, though. Here's hoping. Mach 22. Hoo-ah.
Slashdot Mirror
First thing I thought of was the restrictive technology in Photoshop that detects currency and screws with your image. And is Adobe going to support Ogg Vorbis in HTML5? So we have the choice of how we encode our videos, that is, with a *known* patent-bomb like h.264, or a (so far) free and clear codec, e.g. Ogg.
Because you know, I'd love to have the freedom to choose my codec and work with pictures of my currency... and then there are those Adobe PDF documents where I can't copy for pasting later, even though fair use dictates my right to do so; oh, and hey, where is Adobe AIR for AmigaOS 4.1? Wait, you want to have a CHOICE about where you put your hard-earned effort based on your ideas about the platform? Well, imagine that. :) Funny you're so incensed about the manufacturer of a platform having a choice about what tech it allows on-board, eh?
Oh, and BTW, I don't want your sucky mouse-over tech. As far as I'm concerned, if I didn't click it, it shouldn't be doing anything. One of the most annoying things on the web is when my mouse happens to cross over some box on the way to something I *do* want to click, and the damn thing jumps up in the middle of my display, blocks my view of the page, and begins to play some inane bit of crapvertising, which won't go away until I figure out the advertiser's version of "close me." Thanks a whole bloody lot for THAT, Adobe. Menus that fly up when I didn't click them aren't much better.
There is exactly one good thing about flash: I can generally turn that crap off by getting rid of the flash code infestation. DLLs or plug-ins or whatever. And when something says "you need flash", I just say "liar" and go on my merry way. :)
Hmm. So you're suggesting that we limit the amount of sunlight that reaches the sea. My first concern would be, what happens to the sea life, then? The sea is not the equivalent of a desert; it is the equivalent of an incredibly vibrant and thriving forest that depends directly upon sunlight (except where we've screwed it up already.)
The right place to do this is in the desert; in the US, the desert southwest is a great candidate. We could easily obtain enough power from there to cover all our energy needs. Storage is the big deal, and for that, pumping water uphill for later downhill runs through turbines is a great way to go until/unless we can come up with something better.
The desert is also a lot less violent area to try to setup a large physical infrastructure. If you'd ever been out on the ocean watching 10 meter waves stir things up, you'd be less sanguine about the feasibility of ocean solar installations, let me tell you.
We do have an "energy problem", and it is defined by two words: 1) government, and 2) corporations.
How to get them out of the way is the problem. Available energy is not.
You're only amazed because you're looking at the wrong mentality. The key here is the attitude that the recovery, sale and subsequent consumption of petroleum products ensures that the people and companies that are currently in power, remain in power.
Since they'll be dead and gone by the time the resource runs out, they are not concerned about oil running out; they're in business to recover it, and so they need to make sure that continues. Since they don't have an inexpensive means of making the transition from oil to solar - oil and gas leases and machinery and skills and refining and transport infrastructure being 100% useless in solar terms - they're not concerned with how well solar performs; they're not concerned with the transition to solar, except in how to delay that transition to keep themselves in power (hence, the better and better gasoline and diesel engines we're finally seeing coming out of auto manufacturers); and they also work quite hard to see to it that inexpensive solar cells and the support electronics do not reach the consumer in any significant quantity.
Creating a solar plant and running it - solar cells, electronics, batteries - is FAR less expensive than paying current power bills for even a few years (I designed and built one for a BIG house with BIG energy demands, so I should know.) The fact that the average consumer outside of an urban area and in the sunbelt doesn't have one should make it very clear to you that there are artificial market forces at very serious work.
Yes, absolutely. Sailing ships, solar panels, and geothermal energy just don't work. And never will.
Oh, wait. Yes, they do. And always have. And always -- for any humanly significant value of always - will. :)
Unless you meant "crazy like a fox"?
Nah.
I'm not eccentric. I'm a crackpot. Get it right!
That finger-painting is markup, though. Swiping a word to select it and clicking bold is no different than surrounding the text with <B>word</B> there's no technical roadblock to storing the document that way, either.
You're conflating document creation with document storage. Believe me, the document doesn't store the swipe or the click. It just stores regions with markup. The issue is will this markup be easily understood (just text, obvious from context like <B>word</B>), with external references to other media (stills, motion sequences) or will it be some binary munge snuggled around some custom text encoding, interleaved with image and chart data in *their* own formats so that no one has a decent chance of decoding (*cough* PDF *cough*) without a significant (and expensive) effort?
I really believe text markup is the way to go.
I've got old docs (from "Stylograph", ca. 1970's) in text form, complete with markup, and I can read them and know just how they were intended to look, even *outside* of Stylograph. were I inclined (I'm not) I could write an importer for a current formatting app, for instance a filter for Tex would probably be very short work. But I actually don't care how these docs look, I'm just interested in the content - family letters, old resumes, design proposals, etc. Which is entirely readable because... it's text!
Somehow, I don't think that 25 years from now, people will care if it looks exactly like it looked now, as long as the text and section headings, toc and index, tables and lists... are intact, recoverable, and comprehensible by an archivist, and from there perhaps into public hands.
The best way to store a document isn't PDF. While the spec is open, the documents may not be -- copy and paste disabled, passwords, etc. PDF is a format with easily used features designed to LIMIT access. That's a hella poor choice for an archive format.
Text files - perhaps unicode files, today - are the best option. Markup languages like HTML are excellent because they let the viewer set the presentation to a great extent; section subheading sizes, font sizes, etc. Until we can edit defects out of the genome and repair all injuries, we also should be considering accessability. PDF, again, bad choice. Everything is determined by the document. HTML or something like it is oodles better: You set the font size, feed it almost directly to a reader, etc.
And as for formats like .doc and so on... no. Just, no.
But as bad as format issues are...
Storage media is worse.
You want to read your 1970's STWPC FLEX text files? I can do it for you. Not only do I have a working system with usable drives at 35, 40 and 80 track, single and double density, I also have a working emulation so once i have your data, I can put it up in software that was meant to understand it.
That's your most serious problem. Not the data format -- the data storage medium. better make it easy to transfer from a to b to c to n... because otherwise, it'll be like FLEX files... right now, I'm one of very few people in the world that can still read the original floppies. And I'm getting old, and am definitely not all that healthy.
Ten "gets it" points for you, and a "whoosh" for the other guy. :)
How?
They've addressed that - the glass sides are double-paned. Shouldn't get messy quickly, and it's very easy to clean, both glass and crumb tray. See the video if you're curious.
Well, let's see: Quartz heating elements, evenly cooked toast, the ability to see how brown the toast is so there's no possible excuse for getting toast that isn't to your preferences, the device is not made poorly, and the heating system and build quality should offer considerable associated reliability, which I thought was your key issue. It can also toast without being set to maximum, which is a complaint on the page of the toaster you refer to. This one also has some style. You didn't mention a price limit, you know. In fact, you said you had bucks and alluded to the idea that you were in the class of folks who would pay well for a good toaster. Well, this is a good toaster and they seem quite happy to have you pay well, at least by my poor standards. :)
I guess you were just complaining to see your words in a post, though. No problem, carry on.
Toaster Of Doom
No, not that you don't have one, just that it doesn't intersect with the humor in the cartoon.
Like I said, it's a matter of taste. It doesn't mean that the cartoon wasn't funny. It just means it wasn't funny to you.
Avatar plays fine on my PS3. Looks fabulous. (I blogged about the movie here.) Still not clear why anyone would buy a Bluray player other than a PS3. Horsepower (and therefore loading speed), up-to-date-ness, ability to play games, music, etc... just can't see why you'd want something else. We've got a lot of Bluray titles. They all play flawlessly on the PS3. If I buy a new Bluray tomorrow, I've every reason to think it'll play just fine, too. Sony's been 100% on the ball for us. If my PS3 were to break, I'd complete the purchase of a new one within the hour.
"Works for me."
I blogged about this yesterday: Publishers and the E-book Ecosphere
The question of what publishers want for books isn't the correct question.
We've got a contract, so we can't just bail, but when it is up, that'll be the end of it. It isn't because of the Internet, though -- HD reception via satellite is much better quality than the vast majority of Internet streaming video. The reason why is that the programming is just terrible. The things that they put on television simply aren't the things that entertain me and mine. It doesn't matter where you get your programming if watching it makes you feel like you're wasting your time.
We do still have the Internet if something comes up we need to know about, and it's likely to be both more timely, and available on demand, news in particular. News networks - CNN, FOX, etc. - are just pitiful. FOX is like a work of (bad) fiction, and CNN is a reach-around fest for the clueless. Half a country can be in ruins and the top story on CNN will be that some Hollywood marriage is breaking up.
As far as what we continue to use the television for, there's still plenty without broadcast: XBox 360/HDDVD (yeah, we have a few), PS3/Bluray, Wii, DVD, and our media Mac. It isn't like we aren't entertained -- far from it. We've got an adequate collection of movies and games, too.
Television is probably the technology that had the most potential to be a force for good in our society. Today, it seems to me to be the technology that has least lived up to its potential. Not that it hasn't matured technically, no question that it has, but that the content is, socially speaking, crap.
There's some kind of thing that goes on in marketing, entertainment, and politics that almost always seems to go for the left side of the Gaussian, as if collecting the not-so-clever is easier than collecting the clever. Maybe it's just that simple. All I know for sure is that currently, television content is mind-numbingly awful, and on the rare occasion that they produce something worth watching, it rarely survives the seasonal cullings by the networks. And in the end, you can get all the shows on a DVD or Bluray (if you're lucky), and watch them without commercials, in very good quality, as many times as you like, and furthermore, you can legitimately loan 'em to your friends.
XKCD is plenty funny from time to time, and like every other comic out there, some strips are better than others. If you don't get the jokes, or you don't think they're funny, that's a reflection on your view-of/capacity-for humor, not XKCD. As for the drawing... it's minimal, because the point is rarely in the quality of the drawing. And it's only fair to point out that if everything you accept as funny must also be drawn to some arbitrary standard, you're going to miss a whole lot of funny things. I expect you don't tolerate South Park well, either, eh? Given the quality of the drawing, which is somewhere between hilariously abysmal and straight-up awful. It's still funny as heck from time to time.
XKCD is one of the few comics I visit regularly. But then again, my sense of humor wasn't shot off in the war.
Just stop doing business with anyone in Massachusetts.
That's what I'm going to do at this point. They need to get control of their legislature.
George Bush jr. caused a US citizen to be incarcerated (very) long term without recourse to a lawyer or even a phone call, and he hasn't been charged with any wrong doing either, or impeached, as would have been entirely appropriate for the gross violation of his oath. So what's your point? That application of justice under the constitution and the law is imperfect? I think we all know that already. The point of public discourse is to keep that in view, and subsequently improve things by hashing out our viewpoints and acting accordingly as opportunities to nudge things one way or another make themselves available to us.
It has everything to do with them. It has been well understood for centuries that privacy was important; the 4th (and to some extent the 3rd) amendment is specifically a mechanism intended to restrain the government from violating privacy unless it has good and sufficient reason, reason it is required to show in order to pursue such a violation. "persons, houses, papers, and effects" precisely define the domain, as of the time of writing, where privacy was most important, and then the nature of the 4th amendment is specifically that of restricting access (search) and possession (seizure), those very things that are the virtual pillars of privacy.
That's an over-simplification. It isn't just property rights. The precise wording is "persons, houses, papers, and effects." This is about a whole swath of things that you may or may not (and may not even be able to) own; it isn't simply about property. By its very nature, it covers objects and concepts that would not be your property by limiting access under a general umbrella.
For instance, if you have a vase of mine at your rented home, it is not protected as your property (neither the home or the vase are your property) it is protected by your privacy, and this is precisely what the fourth amendment and law sensibly predicated upon it accomplishes by specifying more than just "property" as the issues at hand, and making the pendant authorization particular to "places... persons... or things" rather than "property."
Further, it shows why the law goes in such ridiculous circles trying to define these boundaries; because the common misunderstanding is about property (which simply doesn't work as the definitive issue), when the actual issue at hand is, and always was, protecting the privacy of the citizen. Which again, the laws predicated upon the 4th recognize over and over again simply by extending these ideas to things like phone calls, medical records, human resources documents and DNA sequences; these are not property issues; they are privacy issues.
Conversely, when power seekers try to carve out exceptions for particular types of communications (email, for instance), it is trivially easy to see not only that they are wrong, but why they are wrong, when you actually understand that the 4th is not about property per se, but only as property is an aspect of a citizen's privacy.
I am perfectly ready to concede that there is a great deal of flawed reasoning extant, and some of it has even made it into legislation; but so far, it has been very easy to demonstrate that such legislation was intended to be unauthorized. The reasoning behind the 4th is almost impeccable, though unfortunately poorly written, like a number of other portions of the constitution (the 2nd is perhaps the poster child for this... you can't understand it unless you analyze it rather thoroughly... which the courts and many citizens often fail to do, and end up with misunderstandings like "the national guard" is somehow involved, or that it might not describe a citizen's individual right to arms, despite its rather significant presence in the bill of rights, or that it is limited to guns, though it clearly says "arms"...)
Personally, I think the greatest mistake made was the presumption that those who would swear an oath to uphold the constitution would actually take that oath seriously. If the authors had understood that politicians, judges and legislators who were to come could be wholly without honor, not to mention not even bothering to study the document they swore to uphold, I suspect they'd have added teeth: Actual punishment for violating the constitution, and we could have seen many dishonorable legislators and judges go down c
Arrogant? No. I'm entitled to an opinion, and to state that opinion. As a citizen, there is no requirement that I keep said opinion(s) to myself. You, on the other hand, are absolutely entitled to counter it. By all means, do so. Every mistake of mine I can correct improves me, and I'm all for that. Calling names, however, gets you nowhere. Try not to worry about my willingness to state my position, and instead, look at the actual position, and if you have a counter, let fly.
Also, I am bound to point out that thus far, it appears that my opinion (based, among other things, upon thirty-plus years of study of the constitution and surrounding events, by the way) does describe the situation accurately. No one has yet to post a reasonable counterpoint. But again, if you think otherwise... please, enlighten us all. The floor is yours.
I didn't ruin anything. I said justification. Not law. See this essay on privacy. The constitution codifies social rules for privacy in order to limit the authorized powers of the feds. Those rules already existed and they were, and are, quite obvious to anyone in our society that isn't brain damaged or so socially inept they must be kept under supervision.
No. You have mis-identified the problem. The social boundary already exists. Encryption hardens the boundary, but does not make it appear or go away. You are not welcome to walk in my door just because I have not put a lock upon it; the social boundary is obvious. See the skirt argument in the previously referenced essay.
Regardless of whether I encrypt (or employ other hardening), interception of private communications is understood to be wrong, and obviously so. Our entire society would have to change -- and so the reasoning that created the 4th amendment -- in order for it to be ok for someone to cross boundaries simply because they have not been hardened. Such an event is neither likely, or reasonable.
I said justification. Not law. Not the same thing at all. It is 100% clear that the constitution was intended to make the feds recognize, and obey, the existence of certain bounds of privacy that already existed in our society, which private citizens are already expected to comply with.
With the ability to read the constitution - and reason above a third grade level - it is 100% clear that spying on a US citizen's communications without probable cause AND a warrant is not an authorized power for the US government or a US state. It is also doubtful that there exists, or can exist with constitution as currently constructed, a justification for a private citizen exercising such a power.
From what I can gather, they plan to do the de-orbit burn at 5:30 MST, and land by 6:48 MST, so the sun will hit them and any visible atmospheric disturbances and so they should be visible, clouds permitting. I've set my alarm and plan to be outside with a 400mm lens and a 15 mp camera. If I catch 'em, I'll post a link to the images here.
They'll only go over me if orbit 222 is the one, though. Here's hoping. Mach 22. Hoo-ah.
The first orbit is of great interest, because it goes right overhead (Ft. Peck, Montana.) Need to find out when.