Harassing TSA agents, DHS inspectors, or even the police is counter-productive. While there are "bad apples" who abuse their authority, most are just regular people trying to do a job which means constantly dealing with pissed off people. After a stint in a support and warranty call center, I can really sympathize with them -- there's nothing THEY can do about it, same as I couldn't wave a magic wand and make a warranty valid a few weeks after it expired, no matter HOW much a customer yelled at me.
Stick to hounding the government and the three letter agencies that make the DECISIONS to deploy these people, but let them do their job until their jobs are eliminated.
Doesn't sound like you think it's actually counter-productive, but rather just un-productive. At any rate, I'm with the GP and will be doing it, productive or not. I'm not looking to get better service, I'm just looking to vent my spleen on the proximate cause of my problems. If it's a drone just following orders, too bad.
The office of at least one of the more corrupt U.S. state Governors monitors online posts for politically unfavorable viewpoints and has even taken action against them.
King Sam lost that one, though. Got pwned by a high school student.
Then don't give your parents administrative privileges. It's that simple.
Linux can be just as hosed if you give everyone access to sudo, which is exactly what the UAC is.
The personal dynamics of the situation aside, you've got to weigh getting called frequently for minor issues like application installs and config changes against getting called occasionally for complete system wipe and re-install.
No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.
I'd like to know how you'd propose getting around that in general terms with any modern OS.
gksudo and the prompt on OS X - once you've persuaded the person to enter their password, you're away. You've got root access, you can do literally anything you like. Up to and including patching the kernel so that you are more-or-less impossible to remove.
I guess it means no root access or sudo privilege for the user.
Unfortunately, the user and admin of a home PC are usually one and the same.
When a church -- or other small organization's -- library falls into disorder, it's usually because the little old lady, who served as the volunteer librarian since she was middle aged, has gone to her reward.
Unfortunately, no amount of automation can make up for this. Your system -- no matter how advanced, primitive, simple or whatever -- really requires an owner. Without this, it will fall into disorder just as the previous one did and you'll be back to square one.
If you can't find a new volunteer librarian, don't do it. You'll spend most of your time cataloging, and then entropy will take over.
Disassemble it using your 7/32" nut driver (buy online, it's an uncommon size) and run everything but the circuit board through the dishwasher. Enclose the key caps in a basket so they don't end up melted by the heater.
Works remarkably well and doesn't take the print off the keys, either. Use alcohol to clean the board. It will have some crumbs on it, mostly, unless you spill liquids into the keyboard.
Serious question: have you actually done this? How do you keep the keys oriented the right direction in the dishwasher so they don't come out upside down full of water and gunk?
I suggest you go on line to the theaters near you and check out prices for seating time that are near the same time of day for Alvin and the Chipmunks and Mission impossible. 7.25 for the former, 10 bucks for the latter in most areas near me in the same complex.
I did that, and no price difference here. There all the same, time and "Ds" being equal.
I have pontificated on slashdot long ago on my spiritual beliefs, why I believe there is a creator, and my frustration with religion.
I sat through one "leadership" lesson, and was told things like "if you need them, you can't lead them".
That goes against everything in me. I have got to make those under me feel worthless and dependent so they will follow me? I call bullshit.
I've seen this too, where anyone who disagrees with the leader's "vision" is demonized as a troublemaker, one who is fomenting dysfunction in the congregation. And by "disagree," I mean asking questions like: "What do we need this building expansion for? In what ways is the existing structure inadequate, and how will these changes rectify that?"
I lay a great deal of blame on a certain business management book masquerading as a Christian leadership guide, that endorses identifying allies and casting off those who aren't easily sold on the latest vision.
According to In 2008, some precincts used a show of hands. It looks like the rules are different for each precinct.
I quote the Iowa Republican Party website here, that states that the caucus candidate preference poll is by paper ballot.
First, the Presidential Poll is taken. At the beginning of your precinct caucus meeting, the Caucus Chairman will call for the Presidential Preference Poll. Any Presidential candidate or candidate representative will be given the floor to speak on behalf of his or her candidate, and then ballots will be passed out for the poll. You can write your preference on the ballot and the results will be reported to both the precinct caucus and the national media.
It also is not a secret ballot. So changing the vote would be harder since the people at the precint saw how people voted. It is pretty hard to change the vote later when the vote is a show of hands. Since it is not a secret ballot you are more likely to get things like voter itimidation by employers, and vote buying.
Actually, for the Iowa Republican caucus, it is a secret straw poll. In the Democratic Party caucus, supporters of candidates divide into groups based on the candidate they prefer (which would obviously not be secret). In both cases, only registered voters in the precinct are allowed to participate, but you can register on the spot.
Caucuses are a bad idea to begin with. They value a better organized/paid for campaign over a better candidate. Also, why are Iowa and New Hampshire so special that they get to vote first and eliminate candidtes that may do better in other areas? The first primaries should be done on a rotating basis.
They favor the more dedicated voters in each party, since caucusing requires more time and effort than voting in a primary.
Why should the Iowa primary have verifiable paper ballots, so results can't be changed, and then have the entire main U.S. election be electronic with questionable machines that can be?
Not the exact answer to what you asked, but relevent to the question anyway:
Iowa's party-candidate-selection-system is a caucus, run by the parties. It is not a primary and is not run by the state. You gather at someone's house, rented hall, community center or wherever your party arranged for your precinct, cast a ballot and sit around arguing for your candidate(s) until someone gets a majority.
Caucuses seem to favor the most dedicated party members' votes, since it requires a bigger commitment from the voter than a primary.
I don't buy the "they're too similar to people" argument. I don't care how similar to people they are, they're not people. A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people. There is no valid normative theory that draws a line between primates and the rest of animals.
But doesn't this just draw the line in a slightly different place, i.e. between humans and all other animals?
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 . Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out. But there's a whole world out there that's worth exploring, and it's worth the risk to leave your basement. Being able to communicate with other people while traveling makes your life better. That's worth something. Listening to the car radio is worth something. Reading the newspaper while driving makes the ride more fun, and is worth something. Each of these items has risk. Some risks are worth the benefit. Others aren't.
In the end, we're all going to die of something. The challenge is not to make every moment its best, nor to live the longest possible. It's somewhere in the product of these two.
Cost-benefit, shmost-benefit. This is 'Merca! If we can justify invading two countries resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, shredding the constitution, bankrupting the nation and squandering our reputation in the world community for 3000 people who died 10 years ago, we can certainly justify nuking France -- at the least -- to solve the problem of 3000 people who die every year from distracted driving.
Texting while driving is something which shouldn't be legal. It's not a matter of morality, it's dangerous enough that it should be banned. Same goes for talking on the cellphone without a handset. Eating lunch and really anything else that's distracting and requires one to take a hand off the wheel.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
You're being deliberately obtuse. When he wrote "take a hand off the wheel," everyone recognized that as a colloquialism meaning: "partially or fully relinquishing the vehicle controls in order to do something unrelated to controlling the vehicle." And everyone knew that gear shifts and adaptive vehicle control devices are 'vehicle controls'.
OTOH . . . You may be on to something with banning smoking in cars. Operating a branding iron in order to ignite an object you're holding in your mouth -- right over your lap -- does sound kind of potentially distracting. Much as I don't really want to force idiots not to smoke, they seem to keep testing my resolve by doing obnoxious things like throwing used smoking materials out the window onto my lawn so as not to dirty up their ashtrays.
I have often wondered what would happen if people started filing DMCA takedown notices by the millions on major websites against the big content producers. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for filing bogus notices.
If individuals started doing this, I assure you there would be consequences for them. The feds, the MPAAs and RIAAs and their members, and even YouTube itself understands that this law can be abused, but that privilege is for the modern nobility, not the masses.
If federal bailouts are distorting the markets, that's a problem with federal bailouts. When making a bad loan really does cost you the amount of the loan, people get pretty smart about figuring out who to lend to.
But if legal bribery is distorting federal accountability . . .
I would suspect that Facebook's sharing of information with legal authorities includes shadow accounts, and if banks or credit reporting agencies strike a deal with Facebook to get at "indicator" information about people, they'd be able to view shadow accounts as well.
Good point. In Soviet Russia, facebook account has you.
YouTube may have helped make a dime for Bennie Moten in your case. Great. Next time I'm around the long-gone Hey Hey club, I'll stop in and tell the late Mr. Moten about his good fortune. But that's not the issue here,
You state the following:
[Doctorow] wants YouTube to use their server farm and bandwidth to serve these PD movies to everyone all over the world, without charging anyone a dime. YouTube has criteria for deciding what types of films they're willing to do this with.
This is completely speculative on your part. You are assigning motivations to Doctorow and FedFlix that are not supported by TFA. You are also assigning a policy to YouTube that I've never heard of and can't find any corroboration for, namely that their business is solely acting as a server farm and bandwidth provider for for-profit video producers. Clearly this is not true, given how much YouTube traffic is driven amateur cat videos, etc.
Why put this stuff on YouTube at all? Why not post it to the Internet Archive and other archival sites?
(Of course, false copyright claims should be prosecuted as fraudulent and punished accordingly.)
The stuff is already archived before FedFlix does anything. FedFlix is seeking to make these more available, that is, "share" them. Which is what YouTube is for. It's even in the Summary: "The videos are posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world.".
And according to TFA: "Malamud's group pays the fees associated with retrieving copies from the US government... and posts them to YouTube, the Internet Archive and other video sites."
Slashdot Mirror
Harassing TSA agents, DHS inspectors, or even the police is counter-productive. While there are "bad apples" who abuse their authority, most are just regular people trying to do a job which means constantly dealing with pissed off people. After a stint in a support and warranty call center, I can really sympathize with them -- there's nothing THEY can do about it, same as I couldn't wave a magic wand and make a warranty valid a few weeks after it expired, no matter HOW much a customer yelled at me.
Stick to hounding the government and the three letter agencies that make the DECISIONS to deploy these people, but let them do their job until their jobs are eliminated.
Doesn't sound like you think it's actually counter-productive, but rather just un-productive. At any rate, I'm with the GP and will be doing it, productive or not. I'm not looking to get better service, I'm just looking to vent my spleen on the proximate cause of my problems. If it's a drone just following orders, too bad.
The office of at least one of the more corrupt U.S. state Governors monitors online posts for politically unfavorable viewpoints and has even taken action against them.
King Sam lost that one, though. Got pwned by a high school student.
Then don't give your parents administrative privileges. It's that simple.
Linux can be just as hosed if you give everyone access to sudo, which is exactly what the UAC is.
The personal dynamics of the situation aside, you've got to weigh getting called frequently for minor issues like application installs and config changes against getting called occasionally for complete system wipe and re-install.
No, I think there's a problem with an OS that allows for that degree of fundamental OS modification on the basis of a single click with no user confirmation prompts and no recovery path.
I'd like to know how you'd propose getting around that in general terms with any modern OS.
gksudo and the prompt on OS X - once you've persuaded the person to enter their password, you're away. You've got root access, you can do literally anything you like. Up to and including patching the kernel so that you are more-or-less impossible to remove.
I guess it means no root access or sudo privilege for the user.
Unfortunately, the user and admin of a home PC are usually one and the same.
When a church -- or other small organization's -- library falls into disorder, it's usually because the little old lady, who served as the volunteer librarian since she was middle aged, has gone to her reward.
Unfortunately, no amount of automation can make up for this. Your system -- no matter how advanced, primitive, simple or whatever -- really requires an owner. Without this, it will fall into disorder just as the previous one did and you'll be back to square one.
If you can't find a new volunteer librarian, don't do it. You'll spend most of your time cataloging, and then entropy will take over.
Disassemble it using your 7/32" nut driver (buy online, it's an uncommon size) and run everything but the circuit board through the dishwasher. Enclose the key caps in a basket so they don't end up melted by the heater.
Works remarkably well and doesn't take the print off the keys, either. Use alcohol to clean the board. It will have some crumbs on it, mostly, unless you spill liquids into the keyboard.
Serious question: have you actually done this? How do you keep the keys oriented the right direction in the dishwasher so they don't come out upside down full of water and gunk?
Really? No price difference?
I suggest you go on line to the theaters near you and check out prices for seating time that are near the same time of day for Alvin and the Chipmunks and Mission impossible. 7.25 for the former, 10 bucks for the latter in most areas near me in the same complex.
I did that, and no price difference here. There all the same, time and "Ds" being equal.
In summary, the law signed by Obama has no effect on the Occupy protesters.
Unless there is a secret interpretation of the law. And don't tell me that doesn't happen.
Over 50% of health care spending goes to pay for the last two weeks of life.
You're often in pretty poor health right before you die.
This crap even got into my church.
I have pontificated on slashdot long ago on my spiritual beliefs, why I believe there is a creator, and my frustration with religion.
I sat through one "leadership" lesson, and was told things like "if you need them, you can't lead them".
That goes against everything in me. I have got to make those under me feel worthless and dependent so they will follow me? I call bullshit.
I've seen this too, where anyone who disagrees with the leader's "vision" is demonized as a troublemaker, one who is fomenting dysfunction in the congregation. And by "disagree," I mean asking questions like: "What do we need this building expansion for? In what ways is the existing structure inadequate, and how will these changes rectify that?"
I lay a great deal of blame on a certain business management book masquerading as a Christian leadership guide, that endorses identifying allies and casting off those who aren't easily sold on the latest vision.
According to In 2008, some precincts used a show of hands. It looks like the rules are different for each precinct.
I quote the Iowa Republican Party website here, that states that the caucus candidate preference poll is by paper ballot.
First, the Presidential Poll is taken. At the beginning of your precinct caucus meeting, the Caucus Chairman will call for the Presidential Preference Poll. Any Presidential candidate or candidate representative will be given the floor to speak on behalf of his or her candidate, and then ballots will be passed out for the poll. You can write your preference on the ballot and the results will be reported to both the precinct caucus and the national media.
It also is not a secret ballot. So changing the vote would be harder since the people at the precint saw how people voted. It is pretty hard to change the vote later when the vote is a show of hands. Since it is not a secret ballot you are more likely to get things like voter itimidation by employers, and vote buying.
Actually, for the Iowa Republican caucus, it is a secret straw poll. In the Democratic Party caucus, supporters of candidates divide into groups based on the candidate they prefer (which would obviously not be secret). In both cases, only registered voters in the precinct are allowed to participate, but you can register on the spot.
Caucuses are a bad idea to begin with. They value a better organized/paid for campaign over a better candidate. Also, why are Iowa and New Hampshire so special that they get to vote first and eliminate candidtes that may do better in other areas? The first primaries should be done on a rotating basis.
They favor the more dedicated voters in each party, since caucusing requires more time and effort than voting in a primary.
Why should the Iowa primary have verifiable paper ballots, so results can't be changed, and then have the entire main U.S. election be electronic with questionable machines that can be?
Not the exact answer to what you asked, but relevent to the question anyway:
Iowa's party-candidate-selection-system is a caucus, run by the parties. It is not a primary and is not run by the state. You gather at someone's house, rented hall, community center or wherever your party arranged for your precinct, cast a ballot and sit around arguing for your candidate(s) until someone gets a majority.
Caucuses seem to favor the most dedicated party members' votes, since it requires a bigger commitment from the voter than a primary.
dicks.com actually takes me to dickssportinggoods.com. I agree with your other points though.
I didn't used to . . . found out the "hard" way.
I don't buy the "they're too similar to people" argument. I don't care how similar to people they are, they're not people. A person's ethical concerns are limited to the realm of people. There is no valid normative theory that draws a line between primates and the rest of animals.
But doesn't this just draw the line in a slightly different place, i.e. between humans and all other animals?
It was probably wood's alloy. It's got a nice low melting temperature around 80C-90C and would probably have been perfect for those kinds of toys.
Wikipedia: "It is a eutectic alloy of 50% bismuth, 26.7% lead, 13.3% tin, and 10% cadmium by weight."
What could possibly go wrong?
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
I think that's the mentality that's missing from this whole argument. A risk / benefit analysis. I think LaHood said that 3000 people a year die due to distracted driving. Out of 300 million. Or around 1 in 100,000 . Everybody would be safer if they stayed in their basement, rather than getting out. But there's a whole world out there that's worth exploring, and it's worth the risk to leave your basement. Being able to communicate with other people while traveling makes your life better. That's worth something. Listening to the car radio is worth something. Reading the newspaper while driving makes the ride more fun, and is worth something. Each of these items has risk. Some risks are worth the benefit. Others aren't. In the end, we're all going to die of something. The challenge is not to make every moment its best, nor to live the longest possible. It's somewhere in the product of these two.
Cost-benefit, shmost-benefit. This is 'Merca! If we can justify invading two countries resulting in tens of thousands of deaths, shredding the constitution, bankrupting the nation and squandering our reputation in the world community for 3000 people who died 10 years ago, we can certainly justify nuking France -- at the least -- to solve the problem of 3000 people who die every year from distracted driving.
Texting while driving is something which shouldn't be legal. It's not a matter of morality, it's dangerous enough that it should be banned. Same goes for talking on the cellphone without a handset. Eating lunch and really anything else that's distracting and requires one to take a hand off the wheel.
So we're banning smoking in cars, manual transmissions, and the handicapped now?
You're being deliberately obtuse. When he wrote "take a hand off the wheel," everyone recognized that as a colloquialism meaning: "partially or fully relinquishing the vehicle controls in order to do something unrelated to controlling the vehicle." And everyone knew that gear shifts and adaptive vehicle control devices are 'vehicle controls'.
OTOH . . . You may be on to something with banning smoking in cars. Operating a branding iron in order to ignite an object you're holding in your mouth -- right over your lap -- does sound kind of potentially distracting. Much as I don't really want to force idiots not to smoke, they seem to keep testing my resolve by doing obnoxious things like throwing used smoking materials out the window onto my lawn so as not to dirty up their ashtrays.
I have often wondered what would happen if people started filing DMCA takedown notices by the millions on major websites against the big content producers. There doesn't seem to be any penalty for filing bogus notices.
If individuals started doing this, I assure you there would be consequences for them. The feds, the MPAAs and RIAAs and their members, and even YouTube itself understands that this law can be abused, but that privilege is for the modern nobility, not the masses.
If federal bailouts are distorting the markets, that's a problem with federal bailouts. When making a bad loan really does cost you the amount of the loan, people get pretty smart about figuring out who to lend to.
But if legal bribery is distorting federal accountability . . .
I would suspect that Facebook's sharing of information with legal authorities includes shadow accounts, and if banks or credit reporting agencies strike a deal with Facebook to get at "indicator" information about people, they'd be able to view shadow accounts as well.
Good point. In Soviet Russia, facebook account has you.
I also want MY neighborhood swept clean of those who don't belong there. That means leaning on them, but what's MINE is MINE.
Idealism is nice, but it doesn't work on trash. Beat 'em, lock 'em up, or cap 'em.
I think that maybe when you reached for the dog whistle, you picked up the regular whistle instead. Because when you blew it we could all hear it.
YouTube may have helped make a dime for Bennie Moten in your case. Great. Next time I'm around the long-gone Hey Hey club, I'll stop in and tell the late Mr. Moten about his good fortune. But that's not the issue here,
You state the following:
[Doctorow] wants YouTube to use their server farm and bandwidth to serve these PD movies to everyone all over the world, without charging anyone a dime. YouTube has criteria for deciding what types of films they're willing to do this with.
This is completely speculative on your part. You are assigning motivations to Doctorow and FedFlix that are not supported by TFA. You are also assigning a policy to YouTube that I've never heard of and can't find any corroboration for, namely that their business is solely acting as a server farm and bandwidth provider for for-profit video producers. Clearly this is not true, given how much YouTube traffic is driven amateur cat videos, etc.
Why put this stuff on YouTube at all? Why not post it to the Internet Archive and other archival sites?
(Of course, false copyright claims should be prosecuted as fraudulent and punished accordingly.)
The stuff is already archived before FedFlix does anything. FedFlix is seeking to make these more available, that is, "share" them. Which is what YouTube is for. It's even in the Summary: "The videos are posted by the nonprofit FedFlix organization, which liberates public domain government-produced videos and makes them available to the world.".
And according to TFA: "Malamud's group pays the fees associated with retrieving copies from the US government ... and posts them to YouTube, the Internet Archive and other video sites."