And before someone tries to claim that there's no law explicitly saying you can take photographs in public, it's quite definitely part of the First Amendment; the ability to record what occurs in public is instrumental in ensuring freedom of the press.
I agree -- at its core, this is (or is very close to) a Constitutional-level issue, and the Constitution typically reserves citizens' rights rather than limits them. Even to the point that the ninth amendment is JUST about that.
It's my favorite amendment. A tip to you young guys out there: don't ever tell a girl you have a favorite amendment. Just sayin'.
AAAANYhow, the only amendment I can think of that went the other way was the 18th (prohibition) and it was repealed with quite beautiful language (okay, I'll admit I've been reading the Constitution tonight in the process of posting this, and I used to read it just for the beautifully mathematically precise language) that returned such control to the states.
But I don't want to be alarmist about this, nor do I want to lump my cousins from Winnipeg taking snapshots of the Bean in with freedom of the press issues. If we want a truly free press, we need to try to see and accept (hopefully in spirit, but in word if necessary) the subtle differences between the protections journalists should have in a free press and the rights of citizens to take their snapshots. If we start treating citizens like journalists, we open up personal bloggers (for example) to the same libel laws faced by professional journalists. If we treat journalists like citizens, we handcuff them with restrictions as to what they can and can't have access to. There are differences, and the bugger of it is that one person can be both (or elements of both) and therefore subject to both sets of rights. Me posting my blathering on Slashdot, for example, or me posting my opinions in a journalistic format on my blog. Is it news? Is it opinion? Sure!
But the core of the problem with the Bean (and this dumb stuff in New York) is lawyer-ball stupidity, hopefully not some far-reaching Constitutional issue. I would hope it would get shot down as just inane by a lower court before it ever got to the kind of Constitutional scale we're talking about. You know, like the silly judge and his $53 million lawsuit over his lost pants.
On a totally cynical and illogical note, keep in mind that this is happening in Chicago, where Mayor Daley is the Emperor and anyone who funds his public works is basically immune to the law. It makes for a pretty city, but occasionally it results in magnificent stupidity like this.
Actually, the labels are those metal super-adhesive things that are also used in schools for AV equipment. There's no getting this thing off, whereas a little bit of Bestine (or some other solvent) takes permanent marker right off plastic. Moreover, it can be anonymous, so if they impulsively steal something and then can't use it (a password protected PC, for example, they can go through StuffBak with no fear of prosecution (if you want it that way). You can also offer rewards. Basically, it makes the whole process less personal and in many ways more efficient.
No, not all politicians are corrupt and want to flout the Constitution. However, this administration has shown enough of its true colors in the past six years to make it entirely plausible (if not probable) that they felt they had a such a mandate from God or corporate America or whoever that they would circumvent the electoral process to gain office and start doing their thing "on behalf of the American people." Bush is a zealot, and zealots tend to think it's worth bending or breaking rules if need be to advance their agenda, just because they feel it's just that right and important.
So you could argue that he has the interests of the people so fervently in mind that he busted through the rules to get to where he could start helping all the faster (I wouldn't argue that myself, but one could). By that logic, he's a very well-meaning person trying to gain as much power as possible to do the most good.
That, however, still does not excuse stealing an election. It's not a valid election if votes are systematically ignored in certain areas (some votes will always miss being counted, but that should be a random and accidental occurrence, not entire precincts with a heavy slant toward one side being ignored). And if it's not a valid election, the winner is not a valid winner. It seemed like a big expense at the time to propose a new election, but in hindsight, it would have been a bargain compared to the money spent as a result of Bush being president.
To get back to the topic at hand, it's quite evident that you can, through legal wrangling, start or stop counts of votes regardless of whether they're on paper or electronic ballots. So electronic vs. paper doesn't hold much water. It's like arguing about whether to break a neighbor's window with an apple or an orange -- sure, there are differences in the hardware, but it still doesn't change the fact that you're breaking a window.
Transparent electronic would certainly be better than closed electronic, of course, but it's still always possible to throw enough lawyers at it to get certain blocks of votes counted or ignored. So I've never really understood some of the debate about paper vs. electronic -- the votes were there in Ohio in 2000, collected however they collected them. Can electronic machines be rigged to under-report in certain precincts? Sure, but here I tend to agree with you that that's a very deliberate act of sabotage that goes beyond what most people (even most zealots) would do. Same with destroying paper ballots. So the argument always seemed kind of academic to me -- whatever happens in a voting booth can be discarded by applying enough attorneys to the situation.
So I can't set up a tripod and take a long-exposure shot at night, but Google's CreepyTruck can drive around and take pictures for Google Street View? They're not in any one spot for more than a few seconds. Lordy.
Here in Chicago, we have a park right downtown called Millennium Park. It was completed, ironically enough, in 2004. In it is something most Chicagoans call "The Bean" -- it's actually called Cloud Gate, and it's a big reflective kidney-bean-shaped thing that reflects everything around it. The piece was underwritten by some big corporation (Ameritech, maybe?). In the past couple of years, the artist has gotten all pissy about people taking pictures of it, because it's a copyrighted work. The sponsor got involved, leaned on the city, and now the police will often stop people from taking pictures of it without written permission from the artist. (As you might imagine, this also spawned a huge number of posted photographs of it all over the Web.)
In other words, they can plant a bigass bean in the middle of my city, but if I take a picture of it, I'm in the wrong. And while I stand there griping about it, Google can drive by and take my picture. My personal feeling is that the architects of the buildings surrounding the bean should go after the artist for reflecting images of their buildings without written permission. But that just increases the number of people being chowderheads, I suppose.
Indeed. And can Wachovia's software be easily removed? Whether you have Wachovia as your bank or not, many people are going to balk at the thought of alpha testing banking software, or even having a phone in which the software at one time had its hooks.
Besides, as has been hashed and rehashed around here for other hardware/software packages, it's irritating to have to remove something you DON'T want instead of just adding stuff you DO want. Who's paying the bills here, after all?
You know, I was just thinking this myself -- in a gravity-light environment, you could certainly float something out in space that rotated to get a bunch of very strong sunlight to a cylinder of crops around the clock.
I am not a space geek (though I aspire to be one), nor am I an agricultural guy. But it seems like the kind of thing that, given an affordable way to transport it back to Earth, would be almost more efficient in some ways than trying to stack crops in NYC. Assuming you're going to scrap the idea of growing crops in the ample amount of viable farmland we have in this country. Frankly, I think we need to think less about how to build new communities on the farmland and more about whether we're using our space wisely. But that's just me -- I'm surrounded by luxury condominiums here (and more every day), and slowly getting priced out of my own neighborhood. So I have a (theoretical at the very least) bone to pick with the real estate development in the outlying areas that has people going all Henny Penny and trying to figure out how to sell ridiculously expensive real estate on every patch of available land while still generating enough food to feed us all. Still, can anyone enlighten me as to why orbital farms wouldn't be as viable an option as this vertical silliness?
Here in Chicago, the mayor has done a great deal to promote green buildings -- we have LOTS of office and apartment buildings with gardens on top, and it's already paying some dividends in air quality and local produce. I don't think it's ultimately a solution by itself, but it sure beats NOT doing it.
Point taken. But that begs the question (if YouTube IS operating illegally, for example) of whether having and enforcing such regulations would so stifle creativity that it would deny EVERYONE the advances in question. In other words, if you let YouTube become YouTube and then require it to add things like closed captioning, eventually everybody benefits from it. If you make it harder to be YouTube in the first place, maybe no one will ever see what it can be. I'm just thinking out loud here, and it's admittedly not really the point we're talking about. But it struck me as an interesting side point, I guess.
You're right, though, the question should be whether such laws are already on the books. I wonder, though, whether the original poster would very likely know about it if it was already law, given the fact that (if he lives in the U.S.) he lives with aspects of the Americans With Disabilities Act every day.
His political views are pertinent to the discussion -- he is suggesting that it should not be regulated by government. By mentioning that, I would imagine he has limited the amount of "the government should regulate it" comments and therefore minimized the politically charged discourse. Please spare us your policing (and your unkind sig).
Yeah -- it sounds funny (I've been following them online for years), but they're totally bleeding edge here. We're still trying to figure out how to build a bigass SUV that doesn't break the bank -- it would be lovely if we stopped hanging on to this big vehicle idea. Most people spend most of the time driving alone, which means that we're all driving around in boxes of air that are sometimes as big as (let's see, ten feet long, maybe five feet wide, five feet high... minus some seats and stuff...) maybe 200 cubic feet? Add to that the fact that most people want to cool that air during at least half the year, and we're talking about a lot of waste. Heating it doesn't break the bank (as I understand it, car heat is often pulled indirectly off the manifold), but cooling it sure does.
I'd be very happy to be able to house my three-person family (or me and my golf clubs or groceries or other cargo) without the extra empty space to drag around and heat or cool. I know almost no one who consistently needs the space of a minivan, for example. There are always a couple empty seats. If nothing else, going back to a sedan form where you're not using the environmental controls to also heat or cool the cargo area would do a great deal of environmental good.
What I'd like to see is a marketing campaign by the big auto makers for a city car and a travel car. So many families already have two cars, why not make ONE of them efficient for city use? Maybe a three- or four-seat SmartCar kind of thing, and then a hybrid minivan or SUV for travel with luggage?
BTW, I've given up on the rail travel thing. Whatever -- no one asks me.
Anyhow, we can't afford either of the auto options I mention here, of course, but we're not the target demographic for the auto makers (30-40 with no money). But it really seems like the kind of thing a lot of people would embrace -- it's just never been presented to them in that fashion.
Why would anyone get a first-generation iPhone? I think there are some similarities there -- there's a subset of the population that will go for the bleeding-edge product design masterpieces as soon as they come out.
Also, having lived in a very parking-challenged neighborhood here in Chicago for many years and owning a Subaru Justy (a 4-wheel drive ladybug of a car, smaller than a Ford Festiva and so light I could lift it back onto a jack), I can totally see why you'd want one. All those parking spots near the hydrant or almost at the corner that no one else can get into are yours. I never tried it, but I was convinced that if I found a five-foot gap between two Chevy Suburbans parked parallel to the curb, I could have parked perpendicularly between them. It was just a very space-efficient car.
Now I need to be able to put a booster seat in the back (and about half a ton of furry Cheerios, apparently), so I won't have a SmartCar for a while. But I'd definitely put it at the top of my list for my next car if I didn't have that restriction. Gotta love the mileage, too (we've got the highest gas prices in the country here, too, so a $50 tank of gas that doesn't get me very far in my crappy old Mercury wagon makes that SmartCar look even better).
They're already here for rental (at least at the Budget office by my house). I keep almost renting it, but it's about $66 a day (about twice what a basic economy car would cost to rent). Boy, I'm itching to drive that thing, though. It's parked out front of the rental place sometimes, and it's a work of art.
... doesn't mean you should. While I would love to see people obey the law about not talking on the phone (or shaving, or eating a bowl of cereal -- I kid you not, I've seen it on Lake Shore Drive) while driving, what about the first time someone with an open window gets a paintball in the face? Or someone near the car? Or someone walking down the street gets their cell phone jammed?
No, this is just plain stupid. I (and others here) have been able to come up with really simple reasons why this is a bad idea at a rate faster than I can type them.
There are too many laws like this now -- stupid reactionary laws that hurt as many innocent people as lawbreakers. When politicians (the vast majority of whom NEVER touch as much as a cell phone, leaving such things to their staff) start dictating how technology should be used, it never goes well.
My father had a cashier actually ask him to sign the back of his new credit card (he'd gotten it that day and forgotten to sign it before using it) so she could compare it to the receipt he had just signed.
Mod parent up. Good points all around. I am neither an MS apologist nor an MS hater, but OOo is causing them no end of aggravation. If there was a significant presence there, they could really push their OOXML/ODF translation talk, but there's not. I think they're more stuck because of WordPerfect problems, which are much harder to solve.
As has been stated elsewhere in this thread, it's not the government's job to protect you from yourself. It's the government's job to protect you from others. I shudder at the thought of a government with so many hands in my life that it would take on the task of kicking my addiction for me. What's next? Gaming addictions? Porn addictions? Pretty soon you get into legislating morality inside people's homes. No, thank you.
Anyway, again, I'm not a gambler, so I don't know the exact nature of that particularly monkey-on-the-back. I do know, however, that a forced government program to stop my drinking wouldn't have worked. Addictions are funny that way -- you can't make people stop having them. A person has to do the grunt work.
... what's the problem? Our government tried to outlaw a "sin" in the 20's with a Constitutional amendment, and had to repeal it because it was unpopular and unenforceable. I never thought outlawing it was a good idea anyway. I could care less about online gambling personally, but I am a recovering alcoholic and could certainly see how life would be a little easier if there was no booze anywhere around me. But that will never happen, just like a complete eradication of online gambling will never happen. It's just not practical, and I honestly question whether it's ethical anyway. Besides, it's up to me to stay quit -- not the government.
I happen to like Barney Frank a lot -- he's often the no-BS guy in a flock of honking geese in suits worth more than my car. And sometimes he's an arrogant jerk. But I rarely feel like I'm getting the D.C. sugar-coating treatment from him. So perhaps I'm biased. But still, I just don't see that this is a bad thing.
In a free society, people are responsible for themselves (and their children). If they can build a boat here in Illinois (we can't have land-based casinos, but we can have permanently docked unseaworthy boats -- go figure) where people can freely walk in and piss away their money, why should this be outlawed on the Web? It's a silly, unenforceable, and reactionary law that deserves to be repealed. The Reverend Lovejoys of the world had their year or two of cleanliness on this one, and it's time to go back to rational laws about things that the government should be focused on.
True. But I don't think the legal vagaries are the issue here. Music spreads through exposure, not restriction. It just does. "I shall sing your story in song..." and all that. Good music spreads fast. And part of that is through musicians doing covers. I think it's incredibly short-sighted of these people, the RIAA, and whoever the hell else to restrict the spread of music. While a few bucks will be lost to copied music or tabs, I would be terribly surprised if it didn't turn into increased exposure and far more sales down the line.
And now that they've been a bunch of wieners about it, they have created anger and fewer sales. If all of these people would just shut up about the pennies and only be concerned with concerted piracy, exposure would increase and we'd all be happy.
I just went a week or two ago to try to find some Michael Penn tab. It was obviously in the process of being taken down on site after site due to legal threats. If anyone could use a couple extra folks doing covers in bars, it's Michael Penn.
Indeed. I think this is a neat function, but that Google clearly didn't give enough thought to some of the privacy ramifications. I do believe that if you don't want people to see into your house you should hang some curtains. But the fact is, this setup can cause a lot of problems. What if my doctor's office is across the street from that strip club? My mother sees my car in front of a strip club, not across the street from my doc.
I'm making that up, of course (my doctor is across the street from a field), but I think it's an interesting point that should have garnered a bit more attention from Google before they went ahead and posted this.
And by the way, what about the pedestrians? I thought you needed permission from people to publish their photograph. Does this not count somehow?
Dunno, but if it goes to a screen saver like other computers after a prescribed period of time, you could set something up where you have to wake it up by touching two corners or something. Not totally failsafe, but it would remove most chances of accidental reactivation.
In what little I could see (the video kept borking on me), it's more than just a touch screen with visual effects. It looks like you can place other items on the screen and drag things to them (the PDA, for example). That's pretty keen. Mix this with some of the zoom stuff Jef Raskin was working on and the pinch-and-spread interface for zooming that the iPhone has, and this could be very cool to use.
Cool -- thanks for the info. I am a graphic designer by trade (web development now, too), but have ended up the default goto guy for our family business IT stuff. And it's this kind of stuff that stumps me. So I very much appreciate the recipe!
I do, but can you do a clean install? Most of the systems I've bought over the years (admittedly more weren't Dells than were -- I've only bought three or four Dells in the past for myself or on behalf of others) have a restore disc that restores EVERYTHING. So at that point you end up with the same bloaty crapware you started with. If I'm understanding correctly the typical restore discs and their function, it would totally be worth getting the OEM version.
I do go through on new machines and uninstall as much as I can, but I just imagine the cruft it leaves in the registry. AOL in particular seems to barf all over things.
On a side note, we just bought my father a new HP desktop, and it comes with no disc at all. It has a separate partition on the hard drive from which you can make your own restore discs. Pretty cheesy if you ask me.
Honestly, even if I wanted a Windows box, I'd consider buying one of these and then ordering an OEM Windows disc. The math works out to paying about $25 more and ending up with a Windows box without any of the crapware.
'Course, I'd do at least a dual boot anyway, but this might still be a good option for users who want a clean installation of Windows.
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I agree -- at its core, this is (or is very close to) a Constitutional-level issue, and the Constitution typically reserves citizens' rights rather than limits them. Even to the point that the ninth amendment is JUST about that.
It's my favorite amendment. A tip to you young guys out there: don't ever tell a girl you have a favorite amendment. Just sayin'.
AAAANYhow, the only amendment I can think of that went the other way was the 18th (prohibition) and it was repealed with quite beautiful language (okay, I'll admit I've been reading the Constitution tonight in the process of posting this, and I used to read it just for the beautifully mathematically precise language) that returned such control to the states.
But I don't want to be alarmist about this, nor do I want to lump my cousins from Winnipeg taking snapshots of the Bean in with freedom of the press issues. If we want a truly free press, we need to try to see and accept (hopefully in spirit, but in word if necessary) the subtle differences between the protections journalists should have in a free press and the rights of citizens to take their snapshots. If we start treating citizens like journalists, we open up personal bloggers (for example) to the same libel laws faced by professional journalists. If we treat journalists like citizens, we handcuff them with restrictions as to what they can and can't have access to. There are differences, and the bugger of it is that one person can be both (or elements of both) and therefore subject to both sets of rights. Me posting my blathering on Slashdot, for example, or me posting my opinions in a journalistic format on my blog. Is it news? Is it opinion? Sure!
But the core of the problem with the Bean (and this dumb stuff in New York) is lawyer-ball stupidity, hopefully not some far-reaching Constitutional issue. I would hope it would get shot down as just inane by a lower court before it ever got to the kind of Constitutional scale we're talking about. You know, like the silly judge and his $53 million lawsuit over his lost pants.
On a totally cynical and illogical note, keep in mind that this is happening in Chicago, where Mayor Daley is the Emperor and anyone who funds his public works is basically immune to the law. It makes for a pretty city, but occasionally it results in magnificent stupidity like this.
Actually, the labels are those metal super-adhesive things that are also used in schools for AV equipment. There's no getting this thing off, whereas a little bit of Bestine (or some other solvent) takes permanent marker right off plastic. Moreover, it can be anonymous, so if they impulsively steal something and then can't use it (a password protected PC, for example, they can go through StuffBak with no fear of prosecution (if you want it that way). You can also offer rewards. Basically, it makes the whole process less personal and in many ways more efficient.
No, not all politicians are corrupt and want to flout the Constitution. However, this administration has shown enough of its true colors in the past six years to make it entirely plausible (if not probable) that they felt they had a such a mandate from God or corporate America or whoever that they would circumvent the electoral process to gain office and start doing their thing "on behalf of the American people." Bush is a zealot, and zealots tend to think it's worth bending or breaking rules if need be to advance their agenda, just because they feel it's just that right and important.
So you could argue that he has the interests of the people so fervently in mind that he busted through the rules to get to where he could start helping all the faster (I wouldn't argue that myself, but one could). By that logic, he's a very well-meaning person trying to gain as much power as possible to do the most good.
That, however, still does not excuse stealing an election. It's not a valid election if votes are systematically ignored in certain areas (some votes will always miss being counted, but that should be a random and accidental occurrence, not entire precincts with a heavy slant toward one side being ignored). And if it's not a valid election, the winner is not a valid winner. It seemed like a big expense at the time to propose a new election, but in hindsight, it would have been a bargain compared to the money spent as a result of Bush being president.
To get back to the topic at hand, it's quite evident that you can, through legal wrangling, start or stop counts of votes regardless of whether they're on paper or electronic ballots. So electronic vs. paper doesn't hold much water. It's like arguing about whether to break a neighbor's window with an apple or an orange -- sure, there are differences in the hardware, but it still doesn't change the fact that you're breaking a window.
Transparent electronic would certainly be better than closed electronic, of course, but it's still always possible to throw enough lawyers at it to get certain blocks of votes counted or ignored. So I've never really understood some of the debate about paper vs. electronic -- the votes were there in Ohio in 2000, collected however they collected them. Can electronic machines be rigged to under-report in certain precincts? Sure, but here I tend to agree with you that that's a very deliberate act of sabotage that goes beyond what most people (even most zealots) would do. Same with destroying paper ballots. So the argument always seemed kind of academic to me -- whatever happens in a voting booth can be discarded by applying enough attorneys to the situation.
I use StuffBak myself (they're mentioned in TFA). Haven't had to use it yet, but their website is a snap to use and their labels are very affordable.
So I can't set up a tripod and take a long-exposure shot at night, but Google's CreepyTruck can drive around and take pictures for Google Street View? They're not in any one spot for more than a few seconds. Lordy.
Here in Chicago, we have a park right downtown called Millennium Park. It was completed, ironically enough, in 2004. In it is something most Chicagoans call "The Bean" -- it's actually called Cloud Gate, and it's a big reflective kidney-bean-shaped thing that reflects everything around it. The piece was underwritten by some big corporation (Ameritech, maybe?). In the past couple of years, the artist has gotten all pissy about people taking pictures of it, because it's a copyrighted work. The sponsor got involved, leaned on the city, and now the police will often stop people from taking pictures of it without written permission from the artist. (As you might imagine, this also spawned a huge number of posted photographs of it all over the Web.)
In other words, they can plant a bigass bean in the middle of my city, but if I take a picture of it, I'm in the wrong. And while I stand there griping about it, Google can drive by and take my picture. My personal feeling is that the architects of the buildings surrounding the bean should go after the artist for reflecting images of their buildings without written permission. But that just increases the number of people being chowderheads, I suppose.
Indeed. And can Wachovia's software be easily removed? Whether you have Wachovia as your bank or not, many people are going to balk at the thought of alpha testing banking software, or even having a phone in which the software at one time had its hooks.
Besides, as has been hashed and rehashed around here for other hardware/software packages, it's irritating to have to remove something you DON'T want instead of just adding stuff you DO want. Who's paying the bills here, after all?
You know, I was just thinking this myself -- in a gravity-light environment, you could certainly float something out in space that rotated to get a bunch of very strong sunlight to a cylinder of crops around the clock.
I am not a space geek (though I aspire to be one), nor am I an agricultural guy. But it seems like the kind of thing that, given an affordable way to transport it back to Earth, would be almost more efficient in some ways than trying to stack crops in NYC. Assuming you're going to scrap the idea of growing crops in the ample amount of viable farmland we have in this country. Frankly, I think we need to think less about how to build new communities on the farmland and more about whether we're using our space wisely. But that's just me -- I'm surrounded by luxury condominiums here (and more every day), and slowly getting priced out of my own neighborhood. So I have a (theoretical at the very least) bone to pick with the real estate development in the outlying areas that has people going all Henny Penny and trying to figure out how to sell ridiculously expensive real estate on every patch of available land while still generating enough food to feed us all. Still, can anyone enlighten me as to why orbital farms wouldn't be as viable an option as this vertical silliness?
Here in Chicago, the mayor has done a great deal to promote green buildings -- we have LOTS of office and apartment buildings with gardens on top, and it's already paying some dividends in air quality and local produce. I don't think it's ultimately a solution by itself, but it sure beats NOT doing it.
Point taken. But that begs the question (if YouTube IS operating illegally, for example) of whether having and enforcing such regulations would so stifle creativity that it would deny EVERYONE the advances in question. In other words, if you let YouTube become YouTube and then require it to add things like closed captioning, eventually everybody benefits from it. If you make it harder to be YouTube in the first place, maybe no one will ever see what it can be. I'm just thinking out loud here, and it's admittedly not really the point we're talking about. But it struck me as an interesting side point, I guess.
You're right, though, the question should be whether such laws are already on the books. I wonder, though, whether the original poster would very likely know about it if it was already law, given the fact that (if he lives in the U.S.) he lives with aspects of the Americans With Disabilities Act every day.
His political views are pertinent to the discussion -- he is suggesting that it should not be regulated by government. By mentioning that, I would imagine he has limited the amount of "the government should regulate it" comments and therefore minimized the politically charged discourse. Please spare us your policing (and your unkind sig).
Yeah -- it sounds funny (I've been following them online for years), but they're totally bleeding edge here. We're still trying to figure out how to build a bigass SUV that doesn't break the bank -- it would be lovely if we stopped hanging on to this big vehicle idea. Most people spend most of the time driving alone, which means that we're all driving around in boxes of air that are sometimes as big as (let's see, ten feet long, maybe five feet wide, five feet high ... minus some seats and stuff ...) maybe 200 cubic feet? Add to that the fact that most people want to cool that air during at least half the year, and we're talking about a lot of waste. Heating it doesn't break the bank (as I understand it, car heat is often pulled indirectly off the manifold), but cooling it sure does.
I'd be very happy to be able to house my three-person family (or me and my golf clubs or groceries or other cargo) without the extra empty space to drag around and heat or cool. I know almost no one who consistently needs the space of a minivan, for example. There are always a couple empty seats. If nothing else, going back to a sedan form where you're not using the environmental controls to also heat or cool the cargo area would do a great deal of environmental good.
What I'd like to see is a marketing campaign by the big auto makers for a city car and a travel car. So many families already have two cars, why not make ONE of them efficient for city use? Maybe a three- or four-seat SmartCar kind of thing, and then a hybrid minivan or SUV for travel with luggage?
BTW, I've given up on the rail travel thing. Whatever -- no one asks me.
Anyhow, we can't afford either of the auto options I mention here, of course, but we're not the target demographic for the auto makers (30-40 with no money). But it really seems like the kind of thing a lot of people would embrace -- it's just never been presented to them in that fashion.
Why would anyone get a first-generation iPhone? I think there are some similarities there -- there's a subset of the population that will go for the bleeding-edge product design masterpieces as soon as they come out.
Also, having lived in a very parking-challenged neighborhood here in Chicago for many years and owning a Subaru Justy (a 4-wheel drive ladybug of a car, smaller than a Ford Festiva and so light I could lift it back onto a jack), I can totally see why you'd want one. All those parking spots near the hydrant or almost at the corner that no one else can get into are yours. I never tried it, but I was convinced that if I found a five-foot gap between two Chevy Suburbans parked parallel to the curb, I could have parked perpendicularly between them. It was just a very space-efficient car.
Now I need to be able to put a booster seat in the back (and about half a ton of furry Cheerios, apparently), so I won't have a SmartCar for a while. But I'd definitely put it at the top of my list for my next car if I didn't have that restriction. Gotta love the mileage, too (we've got the highest gas prices in the country here, too, so a $50 tank of gas that doesn't get me very far in my crappy old Mercury wagon makes that SmartCar look even better).
They're already here for rental (at least at the Budget office by my house). I keep almost renting it, but it's about $66 a day (about twice what a basic economy car would cost to rent). Boy, I'm itching to drive that thing, though. It's parked out front of the rental place sometimes, and it's a work of art.
... doesn't mean you should. While I would love to see people obey the law about not talking on the phone (or shaving, or eating a bowl of cereal -- I kid you not, I've seen it on Lake Shore Drive) while driving, what about the first time someone with an open window gets a paintball in the face? Or someone near the car? Or someone walking down the street gets their cell phone jammed?
No, this is just plain stupid. I (and others here) have been able to come up with really simple reasons why this is a bad idea at a rate faster than I can type them.
There are too many laws like this now -- stupid reactionary laws that hurt as many innocent people as lawbreakers. When politicians (the vast majority of whom NEVER touch as much as a cell phone, leaving such things to their staff) start dictating how technology should be used, it never goes well.
Wouldn't that be, "Hey! Me over there!"?
My father had a cashier actually ask him to sign the back of his new credit card (he'd gotten it that day and forgotten to sign it before using it) so she could compare it to the receipt he had just signed.
Mod parent up. Good points all around. I am neither an MS apologist nor an MS hater, but OOo is causing them no end of aggravation. If there was a significant presence there, they could really push their OOXML/ODF translation talk, but there's not. I think they're more stuck because of WordPerfect problems, which are much harder to solve.
As has been stated elsewhere in this thread, it's not the government's job to protect you from yourself. It's the government's job to protect you from others. I shudder at the thought of a government with so many hands in my life that it would take on the task of kicking my addiction for me. What's next? Gaming addictions? Porn addictions? Pretty soon you get into legislating morality inside people's homes. No, thank you.
Anyway, again, I'm not a gambler, so I don't know the exact nature of that particularly monkey-on-the-back. I do know, however, that a forced government program to stop my drinking wouldn't have worked. Addictions are funny that way -- you can't make people stop having them. A person has to do the grunt work.
... what's the problem? Our government tried to outlaw a "sin" in the 20's with a Constitutional amendment, and had to repeal it because it was unpopular and unenforceable. I never thought outlawing it was a good idea anyway. I could care less about online gambling personally, but I am a recovering alcoholic and could certainly see how life would be a little easier if there was no booze anywhere around me. But that will never happen, just like a complete eradication of online gambling will never happen. It's just not practical, and I honestly question whether it's ethical anyway. Besides, it's up to me to stay quit -- not the government.
I happen to like Barney Frank a lot -- he's often the no-BS guy in a flock of honking geese in suits worth more than my car. And sometimes he's an arrogant jerk. But I rarely feel like I'm getting the D.C. sugar-coating treatment from him. So perhaps I'm biased. But still, I just don't see that this is a bad thing.
In a free society, people are responsible for themselves (and their children). If they can build a boat here in Illinois (we can't have land-based casinos, but we can have permanently docked unseaworthy boats -- go figure) where people can freely walk in and piss away their money, why should this be outlawed on the Web? It's a silly, unenforceable, and reactionary law that deserves to be repealed. The Reverend Lovejoys of the world had their year or two of cleanliness on this one, and it's time to go back to rational laws about things that the government should be focused on.
True. But I don't think the legal vagaries are the issue here. Music spreads through exposure, not restriction. It just does. "I shall sing your story in song..." and all that. Good music spreads fast. And part of that is through musicians doing covers. I think it's incredibly short-sighted of these people, the RIAA, and whoever the hell else to restrict the spread of music. While a few bucks will be lost to copied music or tabs, I would be terribly surprised if it didn't turn into increased exposure and far more sales down the line.
And now that they've been a bunch of wieners about it, they have created anger and fewer sales. If all of these people would just shut up about the pennies and only be concerned with concerted piracy, exposure would increase and we'd all be happy.
I just went a week or two ago to try to find some Michael Penn tab. It was obviously in the process of being taken down on site after site due to legal threats. If anyone could use a couple extra folks doing covers in bars, it's Michael Penn.
Indeed. I think this is a neat function, but that Google clearly didn't give enough thought to some of the privacy ramifications. I do believe that if you don't want people to see into your house you should hang some curtains. But the fact is, this setup can cause a lot of problems. What if my doctor's office is across the street from that strip club? My mother sees my car in front of a strip club, not across the street from my doc.
I'm making that up, of course (my doctor is across the street from a field), but I think it's an interesting point that should have garnered a bit more attention from Google before they went ahead and posted this.
And by the way, what about the pedestrians? I thought you needed permission from people to publish their photograph. Does this not count somehow?
Dunno, but if it goes to a screen saver like other computers after a prescribed period of time, you could set something up where you have to wake it up by touching two corners or something. Not totally failsafe, but it would remove most chances of accidental reactivation.
In what little I could see (the video kept borking on me), it's more than just a touch screen with visual effects. It looks like you can place other items on the screen and drag things to them (the PDA, for example). That's pretty keen. Mix this with some of the zoom stuff Jef Raskin was working on and the pinch-and-spread interface for zooming that the iPhone has, and this could be very cool to use.
Cool -- thanks for the info. I am a graphic designer by trade (web development now, too), but have ended up the default goto guy for our family business IT stuff. And it's this kind of stuff that stumps me. So I very much appreciate the recipe!
I do, but can you do a clean install? Most of the systems I've bought over the years (admittedly more weren't Dells than were -- I've only bought three or four Dells in the past for myself or on behalf of others) have a restore disc that restores EVERYTHING. So at that point you end up with the same bloaty crapware you started with. If I'm understanding correctly the typical restore discs and their function, it would totally be worth getting the OEM version.
I do go through on new machines and uninstall as much as I can, but I just imagine the cruft it leaves in the registry. AOL in particular seems to barf all over things.
On a side note, we just bought my father a new HP desktop, and it comes with no disc at all. It has a separate partition on the hard drive from which you can make your own restore discs. Pretty cheesy if you ask me.
Honestly, even if I wanted a Windows box, I'd consider buying one of these and then ordering an OEM Windows disc. The math works out to paying about $25 more and ending up with a Windows box without any of the crapware.
'Course, I'd do at least a dual boot anyway, but this might still be a good option for users who want a clean installation of Windows.