Conveniently, I'm also large, and like to eat deer that like to eat soy. Also, I have opposable thumbs, so I get to build and operate things like crossbows, muzzleloaders, and high-powered rifles. The soy is safe! Um, though I like to let them eat a little bit of it, of course. We don't want scrawny venison.
is observably inconvenient when cats or some dogs end up awkwardly trying to chew up big crunchy biscuits
It's worth mentioning that dogs are in fact omnivores. They routinely eat grass and other roughage, and are happy to munch down a sweet piece of fruit. Same behavior you see in coyotes, foxes, wolves, etc. Those pointier-than-ours rear molars in a dog's jaw are great for crunching prey leg bones, but they mesh together pretty well for cookies, too. But you're right that when they eat grass, it pretty much goes down (and out!) intact.
i'm sure there is more to DUPING a stud cow than simply cloning it would also have to be raised the same way and given the same amount of exercise etc..
What's more important than the physical shape in which the bull is kept is that his DNA is ready to go, reproductively, through traditional means. The one being cloned may have been kept/raised to make him look particularly great when being judged, etc., but that's not an issue, really... it's what his sperm do when introduced into cows. The stud's valuable for what he passes on, not for repeat wins at the county fair. If you don't have a proven animal, competitive wins can get you exposure to more and better breeding opportunities (and then, the offspring are all the evidence you need to pitch future breedings).
Once all of that showmanship has been accomplished, it's all about repeat breedings, storing semen for future use, etc. Clones of the bull wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, and they're going to pass along the same DNA whether they've been worked every day by a trainer, fed the same food, or not.
I don't know who is funnier.. you, unable to distinguish higher orders of animal life from an earthworm, or vegans.
Wait! You left off another option: you, for not digesting a little satirical rhetoric. Funny! That's OK. The truth is, the people that are the most fun to make fun of are the ones that actually do lump the earthworms in with the cuter, fuzzier things. But I'll bet they'll still swat a mosquito that's sucking blood out of their forehead, depsite the horrific violence involved. I mean, they only eat a little bit of you.
I've adopted my mom's hippie ways and regularly pay a little extra for organic, local food products.
And if your nice, long-haired organic-minded local farmer happens, after decades of work, to produce a bull that happens to routinely produce offspring that are efficient eaters, have strong immune systems, etc., you can bet that he'd be very happy to lengthen that bull's career by hatching out a couple of twin brothers to share the work. Cloning a stellar animal so that you can produce more later has nothing, whatsoever, to do with how organically (or not) you feed, keep, and eventually render the meat.
I suppose they could only clone high quality animals for the best hauls of meat.. maybe I answered my own question.
In practice, no one is talking about cloning (for example) cattle for meat. The whole point here is to clone the bulls that are shown to produce offspring that, in turn, happen to make really good steaks (or lattes, etc). A prize bull is worth a fortune as a breeding stud. A clone of him is worth spending a fortune on, since he can go forth and make more of what's been working so well for the rancher. Breeding programs are lifelong, and even multi-(human)-generational activities. When you strike genetic gold, it's great to be able to preserve it.
I can't wait till they can clone meat without that unnecessary nervous system, what will those vegans say then?
Hard to say. I still can't get one to say they're sorry for the painful, premature demise of the countless earthworms that are tilled to death so that vegans can have their Thanksgiving Tofurkey. Won't someone think of the collateral damage to the helpless invertebrates?
At the risk of being modded down for a 'me too' post the political apathy of the current 18-25 year olds backs up your comment.
Don't worry, you won't get modded down by the group you're complaining about. It's too much work for them to form an opinion and express it. Now, if they could link to a YouTube video where someone else will be having their opinion for them, that's another matter. So, watch out for that, you mean person. Can't you just hear it?
"That's a nasty thing to say. I'm, like, so... what am I? Let me find a Web 2.0 link to something that says what I am."
Uhm, batteries? Ultra-Capacitors? Motors that lift huge weights up really high thus storing the energy as a gravitational potential?
I don't think we're anywhere CLOSE to being able to use methods like that to run the engines we see in, say... large aircraft. Highly efficient passenger/freight aircraft are still burning something similar to diesel. Batteries and capaciters simply can't compete, so far, with combustion of energy-rich hydrocarbons.
What I would expect is a shift of a few feet as is seen in a California earthquake that separated cable from a repeater, more so than something falling on the cable.
Yeah, I think so too. Though, one guy I've talked to says that they try to have some slack and adequate tensil strength to allow for that sort of thing - but if you've ever seen some of those really shocking fenceline jumps along the San Andreas, you're right - things just plain get re-arranged.
Now, I understand that this discussion doesn't change the fact that you find blackholing Asian IP ranges to be effective in a certain way. But it's always useful to think of the big picture - it may even provide the basis for real solutions.
As I mentioned to the annoyed guy from Hong Kong (who speaks for everyone in Hong Kong, but can't get them to patch their machines!), I think that unpatched pirated desktops really are the main problem. The pervasive notion, in that part of the world, that only chumps pay for things like software, is a big part of this. He accuses me of being a racist (which is nonsense), but that doesn't make me wrong that part of this is social (or, cultural, if you will... not to be confused with racial). The culture of computing needs to change throughout Asia (as, indeed, it must everywhere), but rather than opine on how far along that is or ever will be, all I have to do is be personally familiar with a few address ranges to see what's happening. There are plenty of spam spigots in the US, too. But more machines there are patched, and more ISPs prevent high-volume SMTP relaying. Just that alone (ISP involvement) would make a huge difference to the poor guys that are getting caught up in this despite their own good practices.
I don't speak in terms of "those Asian spammers." Rather, "those Asian IP address ranges from which I seem to get huge portions of my spam and crack attempts." I don't really need to over think things, here - it's plain as day. As for your quest for real solutions... I'm all for it, but I don't think that anything will happen until markets like China turn around their notion of whether any of this matters.
I can hardly ever send messages to anyone on AOL because of broad-brushed blocking
You know why, right? Because millions of people who use AOL keep clicking the "this is spam" button on the junk in their mailboxes, and the system starts picking up on patterns. And one of those patterns includes the huge number of Asian IP addresses that are sending it out. AOL doesn't block because they like to, they block because otherwise certain sources completely overwhelm them and their customers with spam.
There is only ONE place to complain to: the ISPs, schools, and poorly managed corporate networks in your local address space that are allowing all of this to be sent from them. Clean THAT up, and millions of people around the world will start taking your mail again. It's not me (or people like me) punishing you for what other people are doing... it's YOU doing business and communicating from within a network environment that has been totally corrupted by useless and poisonous traffic. You're complaining about the symptom, not the problem.
So one admin decides to black list entire address blocks in order to protect their network, BIG DEAL! Their right and THEIR loss.
Hey, I've got users that DO need their little part of the world exposed to those other trans-Pacific chunks of the 'net, and we deal with different problems (and audiences) in different ways. Things like web-services machines that are only there to serve domestic business partners, etc., don't mind the null route one little bit. Quick and simple. E-mail is touchier, but if you're in Asia you already know that expecting the rest of the world to unblinkingly accept SMTP mail from your own ISP's relays is just silly, under the circumstances and given the history. If I were trying to conduct international business from Asia, I'd be using a domestic US or European mail host, no question.
Yet still missing how prejudinced you are in your blaming the whole of Asia for the actions of some spammers msotly IN THE PAY OF AMERICANS.
You are completely missing the point. There are spammers in Germany, too. Same story. Just like in South America, India, Australia, and Canada. But from those other places, more of the traffic is legitimate. If virtually none of the traffic from a particular class C (or B) address block is legitimate, then I'm often inclined to block it. I get spam and crack attempts from Spain, but I also see a lot of real mail and web traffic from those same addresses... so, I have to make a decision. But when almost EVERYTHING that comes from, say, 81.0.0.0 is complete noise and nonsense, away it goes. I don't CARE what color people are when their use of my network is overhwhelmingly poisonous.
And even worse, having white skin, I get blamed for what you idiots do.
Look, I don't care what color you, or anyone else is. I care what they do. The systems I deal with have nothing whatsoever to do with your daily life (especially since you use a Yahoo account). I'm just telling you facts: there are large IP blocks serving Hong Kong, much of China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., that are, for me and my users, a source of essentially nothing but spam and endless cracking attempts. So until that ratio changes to something more like what I see out of, say, Brazil or Germany, it pretty much all just gets stopped. I'm injecting network geography, not race into this. You're the one that's got race stuck in your head. Packets have no color to me, they just carry the intent of the person sending them, or the carelessness of the person using an unpatched, pirated O/S that's being a slave to the person sending them.
You are the one that said you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and I replied in a way to point out how ridiculous that sounds. You can't have it both ways.
Please do me a favor, since you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and see about the other little problem (aside from the ocean of spam that does come from your neighborhood). The vast majority of the more sophisticated crack attempts that I see pounding on all sorts of systems that I touch come from Asia, and most of that from China and Korea. There are plenty from Romania, Russia, and elsewhere, too, but because of the types of systems that I work with (and the businesses that they support), the signal to noise ratio (for all packets, not just e-mail) from where you're sitting makes handling those packets more or less pointless. I'm sorry that you get a lot of spam from elsewhere, but I see very deliberate, beyond-script-kiddie crap coming from your side of the Pacific in a steady, relentless attack. Not your fault, of course. But save some of your hissing and spitting for the people around you that have forced my hand so many times.
I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water
Yeah, but there's still a lot of energy there, and a several hundred pound rock is still plenty able to crush the coaxial cladding of a cable draped over the sea bed. There's also all sorts of other metalic debris that can get shifted around.
I talked once to a guy that was in the business of knowing how to sabotage these things (well, not Taiwanese cables, but of course Soviet ones, spanning their Naval port areas... for a really interesting look at risky underwater espionage adventures, pick up the non-fiction "Blind Man's Bluff" for a quick read - fascinating). Whether older-style telco copper or newer fiber, the cables can be easily crimped, pinched, etc. Apparently it was fashionable to make it look like a damaged, rusty old trauler derrick (used for pulling in huge fishing nets) had been dropped over the side of a ship and just happened to land on a comms cable... all so that they could gauge how quickly and in what way strategic opponents would shift to other communication methods and go about repairs.
I think most people these days only know of Ford through accident-prone appearances on shows like the Simpsons and impersonations by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live reruns.
It's worth mentioning that Ford was actually very athletic (more so than probably every other president, though Dubya liked to jog and now bikes when he can, and of course Teddy Roosevelt was Action Guy). Ford played very hard in his younger years and it really took a toll on his knees, which is why he had trouble on stairs later on (it may seem quaint to kids today, but they really didn't have the cool knee-joint replacement tech back then).
A cookie for the first hacker who connects a portable RFID reader to one of those uber-geek scrolling LED name badges and writes out, "Hi, $FIRST_NAME $LAST_NAME, pleased to meet you!" whenever someone with a passport walks up to you.
Um, TEN cookies for the one that also has the x-ray vision thing set up to read the crypto key (which is printed in the document) which allows them to actually decrypt what's on the tag... or, something portable (that doesn't involve a giant back-pack) to brute force the decryption while you're standing there at the bar talking the person with the tag. Or, you can relay the scanned data to you fellow "24" cast members in the van outside, where Chloe will take care of it.
As my post (hopefully) shows, there are reasons why you don't want random people having access to your full name, much less any additional data
Sure, I don't want them randomly knowing that. Which is why it's nice that the data on the chips is encrypted. Your average passer-by with an RFID reader - even if the document's existing RF shielding doesn't happen to be closed over the chip - isn't going to get anything, let alone your name. If they've got the major resources to crack the crypto, they've got a whole lot of other ways to play with people's identities, and would have better ways to be up to no good than wanding people in public hoping for some useful tidbit.
People who actually need their identies hidden because other people are targeting them (say, travleing intelligence officer types) are going to have much more souped-up ways of carrying and shielding such things, and are frequently going to be traveling under assumed identies anyway.
I have $66,000 on me... they COULD read the amount of currency in his pocket at a distance
He's going through customs. With over $60k in cash. I guarantee it was not in his pockets. Further, if you've ever been put into the "special" line crossing the border, you know that they'll probably ask you to empty your pockets, too. Especially when your baggage has tens of thousands of cash in it.
They didn't need to read it at a distance, they freakin' looked at it.
I'm a Brit and don't know a deer from an elk from a moose - some of them have horns some of the time don't they? I've rarely been able to get close to large animals for photos in North America but imagine the embarrassment if I saw one of these and was snapping away like hell when the cops came.
Deer, elk, moose: in all cases, males have horns ("racks") and females do not.
Deer: from small (90 pounds or so?) to large (250+ pounds) depending on the flavor (whitetail can get quite large, and out west we have mule deer and various antelopish things that are mid-sized)
Elk: can get quite large. A bull elk is a substantial, several-hundred-pound animal. They are not seen anywhere nearly as frequently in suburban areas, though - much tougher hunting, usually in mountainous areas. Also a fantastic pain the butt to haul out of the woods. We have a small asian elk called a Sika, which now live in the Chesapeake Bay area. They're about the size of a large goat, and are very, very tasty.
Moose: even bigger, but more likely to live in wet areas (they really like marsh grasses and other wet vegetation. Do not taunt a bull moose.
As for taking pictures of robodeer: local cops don't really get paid very much. They absolutely live for being to tell stories about tourists doing funny stuff like that, so please consider such a mistake to be a form of compensation for their hard work. I will also confess to being sure I was looking at a Great Horned Owl, once. It was a very good scarecrow someone has installed on a dead tree next to a corn crib... good enough that I had spent a couple of minutes sneaking up on it with a 200mm lens before realizing I'd been had. The farmer involved thought it was perhaps the funniest thing he'd ever heard.
That's like saying they should reward Boy Scout troops that clean up roadside trash by using napalm, giant vats of hydrochloric acid, or by causing avalanches that will push the other debris off the road. Some twit that discharges a high-power rifle anywhere near a road (to say nothing of shooting down the shoulder of the road, in parallel with it!) isn't doing anyone a favor.
That said, of course, there are too many deer. Various studies suggest that there are untold hundreds of thousands more of them than there were in pre-Columbian times. We're providing them with more edibles and sanctuary than they ever used to have, and have pushed their natural predators way off into the margins. I don't think most soccer moms would like to know that their risk of hitting a deer with their minivans has gone down because there are now more timber wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions in the woods behind their neighborhood soccer field. So, enter the hunters. The careful ones.
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Deer are large and like to eat soy.
Conveniently, I'm also large, and like to eat deer that like to eat soy. Also, I have opposable thumbs, so I get to build and operate things like crossbows, muzzleloaders, and high-powered rifles. The soy is safe! Um, though I like to let them eat a little bit of it, of course. We don't want scrawny venison.
is observably inconvenient when cats or some dogs end up awkwardly trying to chew up big crunchy biscuits
It's worth mentioning that dogs are in fact omnivores. They routinely eat grass and other roughage, and are happy to munch down a sweet piece of fruit. Same behavior you see in coyotes, foxes, wolves, etc. Those pointier-than-ours rear molars in a dog's jaw are great for crunching prey leg bones, but they mesh together pretty well for cookies, too. But you're right that when they eat grass, it pretty much goes down (and out!) intact.
i'm sure there is more to DUPING a stud cow than simply cloning it would also have to be raised the same way and given the same amount of exercise etc..
What's more important than the physical shape in which the bull is kept is that his DNA is ready to go, reproductively, through traditional means. The one being cloned may have been kept/raised to make him look particularly great when being judged, etc., but that's not an issue, really... it's what his sperm do when introduced into cows. The stud's valuable for what he passes on, not for repeat wins at the county fair. If you don't have a proven animal, competitive wins can get you exposure to more and better breeding opportunities (and then, the offspring are all the evidence you need to pitch future breedings).
Once all of that showmanship has been accomplished, it's all about repeat breedings, storing semen for future use, etc. Clones of the bull wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel, and they're going to pass along the same DNA whether they've been worked every day by a trainer, fed the same food, or not.
I don't know who is funnier.. you, unable to distinguish higher orders of animal life from an earthworm, or vegans.
Wait! You left off another option: you, for not digesting a little satirical rhetoric. Funny! That's OK. The truth is, the people that are the most fun to make fun of are the ones that actually do lump the earthworms in with the cuter, fuzzier things. But I'll bet they'll still swat a mosquito that's sucking blood out of their forehead, depsite the horrific violence involved. I mean, they only eat a little bit of you.
I've adopted my mom's hippie ways and regularly pay a little extra for organic, local food products.
And if your nice, long-haired organic-minded local farmer happens, after decades of work, to produce a bull that happens to routinely produce offspring that are efficient eaters, have strong immune systems, etc., you can bet that he'd be very happy to lengthen that bull's career by hatching out a couple of twin brothers to share the work. Cloning a stellar animal so that you can produce more later has nothing, whatsoever, to do with how organically (or not) you feed, keep, and eventually render the meat.
I suppose they could only clone high quality animals for the best hauls of meat.. maybe I answered my own question.
In practice, no one is talking about cloning (for example) cattle for meat. The whole point here is to clone the bulls that are shown to produce offspring that, in turn, happen to make really good steaks (or lattes, etc). A prize bull is worth a fortune as a breeding stud. A clone of him is worth spending a fortune on, since he can go forth and make more of what's been working so well for the rancher. Breeding programs are lifelong, and even multi-(human)-generational activities. When you strike genetic gold, it's great to be able to preserve it.
I can't wait till they can clone meat without that unnecessary nervous system, what will those vegans say then?
Hard to say. I still can't get one to say they're sorry for the painful, premature demise of the countless earthworms that are tilled to death so that vegans can have their Thanksgiving Tofurkey. Won't someone think of the collateral damage to the helpless invertebrates?
At the risk of being modded down for a 'me too' post the political apathy of the current 18-25 year olds backs up your comment.
Don't worry, you won't get modded down by the group you're complaining about. It's too much work for them to form an opinion and express it. Now, if they could link to a YouTube video where someone else will be having their opinion for them, that's another matter. So, watch out for that, you mean person. Can't you just hear it?
"That's a nasty thing to say. I'm, like, so... what am I? Let me find a Web 2.0 link to something that says what I am."
By the way, the combined cash flow of Spot Runner, LinkedIn and Facebook is less than that of one Costco store.
I mean, have you seen a Costco on a Saturday before a ball game?
Uhm, batteries? Ultra-Capacitors? Motors that lift huge weights up really high thus storing the energy as a gravitational potential?
I don't think we're anywhere CLOSE to being able to use methods like that to run the engines we see in, say... large aircraft. Highly efficient passenger/freight aircraft are still burning something similar to diesel. Batteries and capaciters simply can't compete, so far, with combustion of energy-rich hydrocarbons.
What I would expect is a shift of a few feet as is seen in a California earthquake that separated cable from a repeater, more so than something falling on the cable.
Yeah, I think so too. Though, one guy I've talked to says that they try to have some slack and adequate tensil strength to allow for that sort of thing - but if you've ever seen some of those really shocking fenceline jumps along the San Andreas, you're right - things just plain get re-arranged.
Now, I understand that this discussion doesn't change the fact that you find blackholing Asian IP ranges to be effective in a certain way. But it's always useful to think of the big picture - it may even provide the basis for real solutions.
As I mentioned to the annoyed guy from Hong Kong (who speaks for everyone in Hong Kong, but can't get them to patch their machines!), I think that unpatched pirated desktops really are the main problem. The pervasive notion, in that part of the world, that only chumps pay for things like software, is a big part of this. He accuses me of being a racist (which is nonsense), but that doesn't make me wrong that part of this is social (or, cultural, if you will... not to be confused with racial). The culture of computing needs to change throughout Asia (as, indeed, it must everywhere), but rather than opine on how far along that is or ever will be, all I have to do is be personally familiar with a few address ranges to see what's happening. There are plenty of spam spigots in the US, too. But more machines there are patched, and more ISPs prevent high-volume SMTP relaying. Just that alone (ISP involvement) would make a huge difference to the poor guys that are getting caught up in this despite their own good practices.
I don't speak in terms of "those Asian spammers." Rather, "those Asian IP address ranges from which I seem to get huge portions of my spam and crack attempts." I don't really need to over think things, here - it's plain as day. As for your quest for real solutions... I'm all for it, but I don't think that anything will happen until markets like China turn around their notion of whether any of this matters.
I can hardly ever send messages to anyone on AOL because of broad-brushed blocking
You know why, right? Because millions of people who use AOL keep clicking the "this is spam" button on the junk in their mailboxes, and the system starts picking up on patterns. And one of those patterns includes the huge number of Asian IP addresses that are sending it out. AOL doesn't block because they like to, they block because otherwise certain sources completely overwhelm them and their customers with spam.
There is only ONE place to complain to: the ISPs, schools, and poorly managed corporate networks in your local address space that are allowing all of this to be sent from them. Clean THAT up, and millions of people around the world will start taking your mail again. It's not me (or people like me) punishing you for what other people are doing... it's YOU doing business and communicating from within a network environment that has been totally corrupted by useless and poisonous traffic. You're complaining about the symptom, not the problem.
So one admin decides to black list entire address blocks in order to protect their network, BIG DEAL! Their right and THEIR loss.
Hey, I've got users that DO need their little part of the world exposed to those other trans-Pacific chunks of the 'net, and we deal with different problems (and audiences) in different ways. Things like web-services machines that are only there to serve domestic business partners, etc., don't mind the null route one little bit. Quick and simple. E-mail is touchier, but if you're in Asia you already know that expecting the rest of the world to unblinkingly accept SMTP mail from your own ISP's relays is just silly, under the circumstances and given the history. If I were trying to conduct international business from Asia, I'd be using a domestic US or European mail host, no question.
Yet still missing how prejudinced you are in your blaming the whole of Asia for the actions of some spammers msotly IN THE PAY OF AMERICANS.
You are completely missing the point. There are spammers in Germany, too. Same story. Just like in South America, India, Australia, and Canada. But from those other places, more of the traffic is legitimate. If virtually none of the traffic from a particular class C (or B) address block is legitimate, then I'm often inclined to block it. I get spam and crack attempts from Spain, but I also see a lot of real mail and web traffic from those same addresses... so, I have to make a decision. But when almost EVERYTHING that comes from, say, 81.0.0.0 is complete noise and nonsense, away it goes. I don't CARE what color people are when their use of my network is overhwhelmingly poisonous.
And even worse, having white skin, I get blamed for what you idiots do.
Look, I don't care what color you, or anyone else is. I care what they do. The systems I deal with have nothing whatsoever to do with your daily life (especially since you use a Yahoo account). I'm just telling you facts: there are large IP blocks serving Hong Kong, much of China, Taiwan, Korea, etc., that are, for me and my users, a source of essentially nothing but spam and endless cracking attempts. So until that ratio changes to something more like what I see out of, say, Brazil or Germany, it pretty much all just gets stopped. I'm injecting network geography, not race into this. You're the one that's got race stuck in your head. Packets have no color to me, they just carry the intent of the person sending them, or the carelessness of the person using an unpatched, pirated O/S that's being a slave to the person sending them.
You are the one that said you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and I replied in a way to point out how ridiculous that sounds. You can't have it both ways.
I speak for everyone in Hong Kong
Please do me a favor, since you speak for everyone in Hong Kong, and see about the other little problem (aside from the ocean of spam that does come from your neighborhood). The vast majority of the more sophisticated crack attempts that I see pounding on all sorts of systems that I touch come from Asia, and most of that from China and Korea. There are plenty from Romania, Russia, and elsewhere, too, but because of the types of systems that I work with (and the businesses that they support), the signal to noise ratio (for all packets, not just e-mail) from where you're sitting makes handling those packets more or less pointless. I'm sorry that you get a lot of spam from elsewhere, but I see very deliberate, beyond-script-kiddie crap coming from your side of the Pacific in a steady, relentless attack. Not your fault, of course. But save some of your hissing and spitting for the people around you that have forced my hand so many times.
I would think that any kind of rock-slide or similar would be slowed by the friction of the water
Yeah, but there's still a lot of energy there, and a several hundred pound rock is still plenty able to crush the coaxial cladding of a cable draped over the sea bed. There's also all sorts of other metalic debris that can get shifted around.
I talked once to a guy that was in the business of knowing how to sabotage these things (well, not Taiwanese cables, but of course Soviet ones, spanning their Naval port areas... for a really interesting look at risky underwater espionage adventures, pick up the non-fiction "Blind Man's Bluff" for a quick read - fascinating). Whether older-style telco copper or newer fiber, the cables can be easily crimped, pinched, etc. Apparently it was fashionable to make it look like a damaged, rusty old trauler derrick (used for pulling in huge fishing nets) had been dropped over the side of a ship and just happened to land on a comms cable... all so that they could gauge how quickly and in what way strategic opponents would shift to other communication methods and go about repairs.
I think most people these days only know of Ford through accident-prone appearances on shows like the Simpsons and impersonations by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live reruns.
It's worth mentioning that Ford was actually very athletic (more so than probably every other president, though Dubya liked to jog and now bikes when he can, and of course Teddy Roosevelt was Action Guy). Ford played very hard in his younger years and it really took a toll on his knees, which is why he had trouble on stairs later on (it may seem quaint to kids today, but they really didn't have the cool knee-joint replacement tech back then).
Oh, right! I've got almost everything that might come down that pipe null-routed anyway. I feel for the cable repair guys, but...
A cookie for the first hacker who connects a portable RFID reader to one of those uber-geek scrolling LED name badges and writes out, "Hi, $FIRST_NAME $LAST_NAME, pleased to meet you!" whenever someone with a passport walks up to you.
Um, TEN cookies for the one that also has the x-ray vision thing set up to read the crypto key (which is printed in the document) which allows them to actually decrypt what's on the tag... or, something portable (that doesn't involve a giant back-pack) to brute force the decryption while you're standing there at the bar talking the person with the tag. Or, you can relay the scanned data to you fellow "24" cast members in the van outside, where Chloe will take care of it.
As my post (hopefully) shows, there are reasons why you don't want random people having access to your full name, much less any additional data
Sure, I don't want them randomly knowing that. Which is why it's nice that the data on the chips is encrypted. Your average passer-by with an RFID reader - even if the document's existing RF shielding doesn't happen to be closed over the chip - isn't going to get anything, let alone your name. If they've got the major resources to crack the crypto, they've got a whole lot of other ways to play with people's identities, and would have better ways to be up to no good than wanding people in public hoping for some useful tidbit.
People who actually need their identies hidden because other people are targeting them (say, travleing intelligence officer types) are going to have much more souped-up ways of carrying and shielding such things, and are frequently going to be traveling under assumed identies anyway.
I have $66,000 on me ... they COULD read the amount of currency in his pocket at a distance
He's going through customs. With over $60k in cash. I guarantee it was not in his pockets. Further, if you've ever been put into the "special" line crossing the border, you know that they'll probably ask you to empty your pockets, too. Especially when your baggage has tens of thousands of cash in it.
They didn't need to read it at a distance, they freakin' looked at it.
I'm a Brit and don't know a deer from an elk from a moose - some of them have horns some of the time don't they? I've rarely been able to get close to large animals for photos in North America but imagine the embarrassment if I saw one of these and was snapping away like hell when the cops came.
Deer, elk, moose: in all cases, males have horns ("racks") and females do not.
Deer: from small (90 pounds or so?) to large (250+ pounds) depending on the flavor (whitetail can get quite large, and out west we have mule deer and various antelopish things that are mid-sized)
Elk: can get quite large. A bull elk is a substantial, several-hundred-pound animal. They are not seen anywhere nearly as frequently in suburban areas, though - much tougher hunting, usually in mountainous areas. Also a fantastic pain the butt to haul out of the woods. We have a small asian elk called a Sika, which now live in the Chesapeake Bay area. They're about the size of a large goat, and are very, very tasty.
Moose: even bigger, but more likely to live in wet areas (they really like marsh grasses and other wet vegetation. Do not taunt a bull moose.
As for taking pictures of robodeer: local cops don't really get paid very much. They absolutely live for being to tell stories about tourists doing funny stuff like that, so please consider such a mistake to be a form of compensation for their hard work. I will also confess to being sure I was looking at a Great Horned Owl, once. It was a very good scarecrow someone has installed on a dead tree next to a corn crib... good enough that I had spent a couple of minutes sneaking up on it with a 200mm lens before realizing I'd been had. The farmer involved thought it was perhaps the funniest thing he'd ever heard.
They should be paying them, not fining them.
That's like saying they should reward Boy Scout troops that clean up roadside trash by using napalm, giant vats of hydrochloric acid, or by causing avalanches that will push the other debris off the road. Some twit that discharges a high-power rifle anywhere near a road (to say nothing of shooting down the shoulder of the road, in parallel with it!) isn't doing anyone a favor.
That said, of course, there are too many deer. Various studies suggest that there are untold hundreds of thousands more of them than there were in pre-Columbian times. We're providing them with more edibles and sanctuary than they ever used to have, and have pushed their natural predators way off into the margins. I don't think most soccer moms would like to know that their risk of hitting a deer with their minivans has gone down because there are now more timber wolves, coyotes, and mountain lions in the woods behind their neighborhood soccer field. So, enter the hunters. The careful ones.