OK, so things are going to hell in a handbasket and if we continue burning pretty much anything we are all doomed. Right?
There is one huge problem with this. People are pretty subborn about strong beliefs. So much so that they tend towards behaviors that will induce other people with different beliefs to kill them and they go willingly to their deaths rather than abandon their beliefs. You know, the whole "Give me liberty or give me death" sort of thing. Joan of Arc, etc. Got it?
So where are the "climate martyrs?"
Let's start with with something simple: Resolved: Coal burning power plants will kill millions of people if not billions if they are not turned off right now. Can we agree with that? No? I thought this was pretty much settled science... Well, let's just pretend that this is an established fact in some people's minds, OK? So, if it is that critical to the lives of millions of people why are these power plants still operating? How many dedicated martyrs would it really take to shut down all the coal burning power plants in the USA and keep them that way for at least five or ten years? Fewer than 100 people, I assure you. Possibly only 10. Can we not find 10 people whose beliefs are strong enough in destructive (and fatal) human-induced climate change to do this job?
No, we cannot. There aren't 10 people that could get together and agree on this course of action. Now it is understood that humans do not work well together without a strong leader, and other than perhaps Al Gore there is no strong leader in this area. So we are clearly lacking leadership. But I would say that even more importantly we are lacking strong conviction. Early Christians were martyred by the hundreds because of a religious belief and often killed in incredibly bizzare and painful ways to make it obvious to the upcoming victims that this was not a course they wanted to pursue - and yet they did because of the strength of their beliefs. Nobody wrote about the undoubted thousands that repented, confessed and were excused from the "final proceedings" but it is certain that there were plenty of those. All we have records of are the multitudes that did not cast aside their beliefs.
It is also important to understand that should the climate be changing solely because of human induced causes that the folks (likely martyrs) that were to stop it - by destroying the fabric of the carbon-spewing economy we have - would be hailed as saints and saviors in a pretty short period of time. People would certainly be able to go proudly around saying that their parent, brother or sister was one of the few that tipped the balance in favor of human survival.
So where are the martyrs? Does no one have strong enough beliefs that they are willing to step up and take direct action? Apparently not.
The other side of this is, of course, that should a few people find strength in their beliefs and embark on a campaign of destroying the carbon-spewing economy and the climate still continued to shift in undesirable directions these people (and their relatives and offspring) would be considered destructive fools, traitors to the human race and causing unimaginable suffering in the name of a mistaken belief. I really do not think this would have any affect on folks with very strong beliefs but it is a sobering thought for the rest of us sitting around watching.
Immigration sucks, doesn't it? The problem is there are plenty of people abusing banks and other institutions in ways that make any sort of penalty very difficult to put on people. Most of this abuse comes from people with questionable immigration status or status that indicates they might be in a different country next week.
So, someone should let you run up a lot of bills and then disappear? Believe me, that has happened enough already that anyone is reluctant to become the latest victim.
The problem with "online" anything is that all the financial stuff is based on trust. No money is exchanged at all. You buy something and a bill gets generated and if you are nice person, you will pay it. If you aren't so nice, someone gets stuck with the bill. Most of the online financial stuff that is complicated is just trying to make sure someone else gets stuck with the bill.
In the US this problem got resolved for the most part with VISA-logoed debit cards. The bank issues the card and the money is immediately (well, within two days) taken out of the account that backs it. The cards can be processed as a credit card by any merchant WITHOUT a PIN and the transaction is treated as a credit card charge until it reaches the issuing bank. What happens when the account reaches zero? What is supposed to happen is all transactions are immediately declined - except it doesn't necessarily work out that way for as long as two days.
In some very immigration-friendly countries the banks know all about the two-day situation and aren't willing to get stuck with that. The problem gets worse when credit card processing is done by a lot of merchants on a paper basis rather than swiping a card on a terminal. What can easily happen is Not-So-Nice Person runs up a lot of charges and exceeds their account balance and is subsequently living in a different country. For a few hundreds dollars pursuing them isn't worthwhile so the charges just get eaten by the bank. Got real popular when the debit card situation was just getting started.
Can you really blame them?
What would be interesting is a one-time use card with a specific value that you had to purchase with cash from a machine. No change - sorry, if you bought a $20 card and only spent $18 the extra was just a gift to the issuer. But it would completely solve the problem. Why only one-time use? Eliminates the potential for the card's value to be decreased even for the merchant that phones in credit card charges at the end of the day. No two-day problem, ever. No question about using the card online either - it has a specific, known value until it is used and then it has no value and can easily be confirmed that way.
Problem is, if Apple did not block it they might be held legally liable for continued distribution and at least contributing to willful infringement of the patent.
They are playing it safe. Perhaps a little too safe, but as Apple has zero stake in the app it really makes no sense not to be as safe as possible. If anything the problem with the entire App Store model is that the "store" has a lot to lose and nothing to gain by distributing applications, so they are going to follow the most restrictive course possible.
Best Buy, for instance, faces the same problem with a boxed software product on their shelf - except they have a stake in the game in that they paid for shipping the box and the loss of revenue. Best Buy has maybe 200 boxed products on the shelf - Apple has millions of application in the App Store so dropping one is effectively zero impact.
The trade-off is pretty clear. If you want "safe" applications the only way to go is the App Store model as all other Internet distribution models have failed to keep the customer "safe". But you are dragging a third party into the process that has little interest in being there at all. I'm sure Apple would much rather have 200 really good applications than millions - with 2% of them being fart-noise-maker applications.
One huge problem is the FBI decided that credit card fraud - any type - is "Identity Theft" and that is how their reporting structure works. This hugely inflates the amount of "Identity Theft" that is reported giving a big leg up to the probably bigger scam artists at Lifelock. No matter how much credit card fraud costs merchants, the number is dwarfed by the amount of money going to Lifelock and other "identity protection" thieves.
Now, who really is affected by credit card fraud? Certainly not the banks - fraudulent charges are simply charged back to the merchant. Does it hurt the card holder? Well, not really. If you get a charge on your bill that you didn't make you do not have to pay it. Most of the time the credit card company is already aware of the fraudulent use and has taken such charges off the bill. Now, the card company almost certainly will want to change the card number and set you a new card and that can be somewhat inconvenient, but that is about it. Well, what about the merchant? If you are in the business of taking credit cards for almost any retail business you have insurance that covers this sort of thing. The merchant is paying for this insurance, so they might as well use it. I guess we are all paying a little bit for this because the merchants might save a few pennies on their general business insurance if they didn't need this coverage. So figure that when you go to a store you are paying $0.000001 more to cover the credit card fraud insurance.
So who loses? The insurance company? Not really. The merchant that is silly enough not to have insurance? Probably. Certainly nobody else is losing anything in this which is why it is not prosecuted in the US - nobody actually using a fraudulent card ever gets even arrested. They do take the card away if you are using a fake card, which obviously doesn't apply when credit card fraud is done through the Internet.
So really this is almost a vicimless crime that affects nobody. So your credit card number is used fraudulently... big deal... get a new card and move on.
Did you know that a fresh credit card number is worth about $0.50 on the open market today? This means that every time you use a card with a human involved it is a good chance they are collecting card numbers. A guy working in a restaurant can make an extra $50 a week easily just collecting numbers and such from cards handed over by customers. There is little risk with this as at worst he might get fired if caught. The police will not even arrest someone for this sort of activity.
Yes, I get a credit card used fraudulently at least once a year. I get a call about some silly charge that someone tried to make and they take it off the bill. End of story. The guy this posting is about is evidently higher up the food chain enough that someone thinks he is worth prosecuting, but I doubt it goes anywhere. There just isn't anyone losing out enough to justify spending anyone's time and money prosecuting folks like this. So it will continue and get more and more prevalent.
Understand that there are no laws against libel or slander - they are not criminal acts. They are actionable in civil court only. Law enforcement has no part in the civil court system.
Having a law that made libel or slander a criminal act would be a whole different sort of environment and as far as I know this isn't the case anywhere on the planet. Oh in some countries it is a criminal act to libel or slander certain public officials. And some religious ones as well. But the average Joe (or Jose) has to fight his own battles and get his own discovery done for the lawsuit.
Hire someone to find the jerk that is harassing, or the police can get off their butts and stop eating doughnuts long enough to do their job. It is not hard to locate someone who is doing this online without making new laws to force a company to roll over and do the cops job for them.
Hire someone? Sorry, can't be done. At least not today. So maybe you have an IP address and can trace that to an ISP. Great. The ISP says they aren't turning anything over except under subpoena or to law enforcement. Fine, you get a lawyer and file a lawsuit against John Doe - who's identity will be disclosed by the ISP. Except they do not have the identity, all they have is the account holder and (maybe) an address. Oh, and don't take too long filing your lawsuit - some ISPs keep their DHCP history for a very short period of time - so the response to the discovery subpeona is "Sorry, we don't have that information."
I assure you without some kiddy porn or a bomb factory nobody is going to allow examination of the computers at that address to figure out if one of them was used. You just don't have the weight of a RIAA lawsuit on your side. If there are multiple people living at that address you can NEVER figure out which one it was conclusively, not even with the standards of a civil lawsuit.
Unless of course the perp brags - which is so incredibly common that it does make everyone's life easier. But we're assuming here they aren't bragging on IRC or AIM about what they have done and leaving chat logs all over their computer.
I have tried this approach before and found out that it would take literally tens of thousands of dollars to get nowhere. It is an endless series of doors each one leading to a dead end and prying those doors open gets real expensive real fast. Half of the problem is the ISP which today believes it is their customer's right to do an unlimited amount of damage to other people while they shield the perp's identity.
Law enforcement considers the whole issue to be a civil problem and will not participate in any way so you can forget about the cops as well.
Sorry, but the way the Internet is constructed right now everyone has the right to cause harm - it is just that they aren't exercising that right very much. Sure, people get hurt. People get hurt in bar fights also, but you don't see anyone making those illegal, do you? Well, maybe in some places but not everywhere. Think of the Internet as a way to have a bar fight with the lights out.
No, sorry, today you can't pass laws saying that nearly untracable people and unprovable identities are responsible for anything at all. The best you can get is catching people when they brag about the harm they have caused. This means the smart ones - the ones that do not brag - are untouchable.
Since the beginning of the Internet is has been the right and privilege of the masses to annoy, pester, defame and even drive to suicide anyone at all. Nobody is immune to this today and a lot of people are just beginning to figure out they have this power. When the Internet was populated exclusively by academic types and the military, it really didn't mean very much. Turning the average Joe loose has been quite an adventure, hasn't it?
This is kind of a joke because as others have pointed out the maximum tracking that can be done externally is getting an IP address and anybody could be at the other end of that IP address. Of course it would be possible to pass a law saying that the account holder for an IP address is responsible for whatever happens using that IP address - but until that happens it could be Sam next door, it could be little Suzy or it could be the dog.
Now the other way this makes sense is to have some sort of required secure identity required for use of the Internet. Remove the anonyminity and you have a whole different environment. Suddenly, you can't annoy, pester, defame or even drive to suicide anyone else while being safely shielded by supposed anonyminity and the good graces of your ISP. So far we have been pretty well isolated from the ravages of what might be possible in today's environment and I'd call that lucky. Should more people figure out their power to do harm and actually start doing it I would expect a pretty swift response that eliminates anonyminity permanently.
You know it has to come and it is just a matter of time before a few lives are ruined... while the perpetrators are shielded from any consequences. I think it will be interesting to see just how this plays out and how many high school girls kill themselves over this sort of thing. My guess is you could probably drive your average housewife to either leave the country or kill herself based on enough volume of lies and viral spreading of vicious rumors. That might be fun to watch also.
It seems that a lot of people are trying to pin Stuxnet firmly on the US Government, current administration. So far it seems to be mostly "unnamed knowledgable sources" which could be BS - but things could get more credible.
At some point our friends in Iran are likely to decide that Stuxnet cost them millions of dollars and years of work and the US is responsible. If, or when, they come to this conclusion I would expect something quite overt from Iran to show up. Possibly as a retalitory cyber attack, possibly something as crude as blowing up a few buildings full of people. Something that is assured to cost the US more than a few million dollars. Obviously there is very little that can be done to stop such an attack - especially if it came in the form of something like Weather Bug with people clamoring to figure out how to install it in spite of what ever controls, warning and blocks put in their way. Ever seen someone in a business with all locked-down users (no Admin rights) call the help desk to ask if they could have someone install Weather Bug for them? Yeah, like that.
My guess is that the US isn't backpedaling fast enough to convince the world that it isn't responsible for Stuxnet... so I'd expect retaliation before the end of the year. What would be the point of doing it to a lame-duck president? So probably before November. Of course Iran might decide that Obama is preferrable to Romney and wait until after the election assuming (rightly so) that a successful attack would bring down the government.
We could have cleaner air next year, if we had the motivation. We do not. Nobody in government seems to think that it is worth the cost to do the things that would be required to end or reduce CO2 emissions by more than 50%. Heck, nobody seems to think it is worth it to reduce them by as little as 20%.
Personally, I suspect that may be the correct viewpoint from both a political and economic standpoint.
What is needed are environmentally oriented people beginning mass destruction of the carbon-burning infrastructure if you want to see massive changes made today. Make it so that it is impossible to operate a coal-fired power plant without someone destroying it. Make it so that cars on city streets have a shorter lifespan than 2nd lieutenants in Vietnam. Tear down the carbon infrastructure. Then you will see changes. Until then, it is all just a bunch of wankers whining and nobody is taking it seriously.
What? There are no people committed enough to do this? Well then, I think you have your answer.
I suspect if you are driving a car while trying to use Visual Studio there are many folks wishing you were on the road alone. I suppose having the menus easier to read while speeding down the road would be a slight improvement, but like texting while driving I think "visualstudioing" while driving is insane.
There is no such thing as swift and sure punishment today. If you kill someone there is about a 20% chance of being caught, tried and convicted if you are reasonably smart about it. Fortunately for those that develop a taste for it the odds are distinctly not in favor of repeat offenders - sooner or later your number will be up.
But what this does mean is that for the average guy on the street killing someone does not result in anything swift and sure. We have plenty of crime shows on TV showing how "crime doesn't pay" and showing every criminal act being prosecuted and in almost all cases being convicted, but that isn't reality. The reality shown in TV news and newspapers is that plenty of murders aren't solved and nobody is ever caught. Even the ones that are caught there can be problems with the case where it is never prosecuted. And then there are trial problems where it isn't at all clear in many cases. End result is about 20% conviction rate in the end.
Of course there are the folks that cave in to the police and just confess. And there are the folks that just can't manage to not tell their friends. I'm not considering these because nobody thinks of these possibilities ahead of time. The only real question is if you kill someone what are the real chances of ending up in prison or on death row. Today, the answer is a rather appalling 20%.
This isn't even considering the folks that are on the street today that would consider a stable bed and being fed regularly a vast improvement over their life situation - so prison doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
I believe most of the problem with the current conviction rate has to do with the size of the population rather than the procedures involved. If we had 10 million people in the US instead of 330 million there would be a far greater certainity about being convicted of a crime - just like there was in the 1800s when there were actually only 10 million people in most of the US.
The question that needs to be answered at a high level is indeed, how much is life worth?
In theory, it is not permissible for law enforcement to do anything until a criminal act is committed. This means that if you (and the police) know with absolute certanity that someone is to be killed nothing can be done until they are in fact killed. There are plenty of edge cases to this but at the most extreme if you see someone with a gun walking towards someone else saying "I'm going to kill you!" in reality nothing can be done until their target is in fact killed.
Now, basic humanity suggests that this isn't a good idea. So the extension of this is that if there is reasonable suspicion that someone intends to do harm to another - through knowledge that a third party has - shouldn't there be some responsibility to look into preventing this act? Somewhere between a phone call and a sharp tap on the shoulder with a message saying "We are watching you" would probably be enough to save a few lives.
Of course, locking someone up for life or at least a very long time because they intend to kill someone probably isn't the right answer. But then we get into the murky world of "psychological readustment" - do we put someone in the hands of state shrinks because they have a good chance of harming someone else?
Sure, there is some question of privacy here, but in reality is everyone's privacy worth more than some percentage of people killed being saved? It all comes down to the question of what is a life worth? In some countries clearly it is worth nothing - because everyone there agrees that the afterlife is much, much better and the sooner you get there the better. In most Western countries this doesn't hold for much and the folks that think this way are considered odd, maybe even dangerous. So for the most part in the West the entire question is sidestepped and ignored - everyone assumes life is very valuable. Except in some cases where we actively seek to cheapen it. Is this one of those cases where life just isn't that valuable?
I'd have to question if there were any rules being followed by Japan during WW II. What percentage of Allied prisoners made it back? 25%? Some did, but not very many. What would you call the invasion of China by Japan and how the civilian population was treated?
Rules? No, I don't think there were any rules in that part of WW II. There was no clear division between civilians and military as far as Japan was concerned and that is one of the primary objectives of the Geneva Conventions. They treated their civilians as military workers and they treated civilians in invaded lands as combatants.
And Japan was prepared to fight on until the last man on their islands. At least the military was, driving the civilians ahead of them into the Allied troops.
An important lesson in warfare was learned in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles was that you do not crush your defeated enemy completely - unless you are prepared to make them extinct. Sure, win at all costs but then make sure there is an operating country left.
10 years after WW I Germany was a wreck and this led directly to the rise of Hitler and WW II.
10 years after WW II both Germany and Japan had strong economies and a great deal of rebuilding had been done. Neither Germany nor Japan was "crushed" from their defeat and in many ways Japan's society improved a great deal. The average man on the street probably came out better because of how Japan was managed post-war than if the war had never happened. All traces of feudalism were wiped out of the country whereas before many had persisted.
I'd say the other approach that works was Carthage which we have not seen the likes of since - burn everything to the ground, salt the fields so nothing grows there and kill everyone - men, women, children, dogs, everyone. If you aren't prepared to go that far, it is necessary to leave a functioning country after defeat.
This is one problem with Iraq and Afganistan. Iraq was a functioning country but it was crushed almost completely. Afganistan post-Taliban could probably be said not to have been a functioning country even before being invaded. In both cases failure to leave a functioning country will almost certainly result in more wars.
Hope you have a job. Because programs like this will insure that US graduates get to earn postdoc qualifications in burger-flipping while foreign students that are eager for jobs paying much more than they could get at home will take what employment there is.
Look around and see what other first-world countries are doing for immigration. Most have far more restrictive policies than the US does and is far, far harsher for anyone violating their laws. Overstay your visa in Germany and you will likely be arrested and shipped out of the country. Walk into Mexico and you will find that their border is defended by the Mexican Army, and they do defend their border vigorously, with armed response to invaders.
The US is still allowing huge numbers of legal immigrants in and these people are competing for the same jobs that US graduates are. Absolutely, we can employ cheaper foreign labor in all areas of employment - but we better figure out how to support the jobless that aren't going to get what jobs there are. You see, we finally have the economy that functions without a huge unjustifiable bubble - and at least 30% of the country is unemployed or underemployed. Meaning that STEM graduates are working at McDonalds because there simply aren't the STEM jobs to go around.
And we want to bring in more people for these jobs that will work cheaper? As I said, hope you have a job - because with programs like this you will be supporting 2-3 non-working people. There simply is no choice in the matter any more. We are going to have to return to permanent government support for the folks that aren't working.
I saw this in the 1960s... well, I didn't see it as much as I experienced it. I went to 1st grade with a "Dick and Jane" book and I learned how to read. Pretty well, if I do say so myself. My sister went to the same school 4 years later and came home with an entirely different book that stressed some kind of phonics where words were spelled "phonetically" rather than using English. She did not learn how to read.
The fevor over experimentation has increased since then to the point today where there are hundreds of curriculm packages available to schools and little guidance as to what makes one of them better than another. In many districts you end up with a decision being made by a local school board, in others it is mandated by the state education board.
In my opinion the basic problem is the mainstreaming of children of vastly different abilities in the same classroom. Today we have in a single elementary classroom children that have been reading for a long time, children beginning to learn to read and children that are seemingly resistent to learning to read. This is extremely frustrating for the teacher which certainly does percolate up through the entire heirarchy to the school board. The result in recent years has been to shove a curriculm package into the teacher's hands and tell them to "teach this" and everything will work out fine. It isn't working out fine. And the outcomes are, well, predictable.
The "new age" philosophy that everyone has to succeed and there are no "losers" just winners is one thing. The problem is the schools are faced with a societal problem that there simply is no "new age" solution for - you cannot take a child that doesn't know how to read in the 2nd grade and put them in a classroom with students that are reading with the hope they are going to pick it up by assimilation. What ends up happening is not that the lowest performing children pick things up by assimilation or that the children help each other. What does in fact happen is the classroom ends up operating at the lowest common denominator so the lowest performing students are not left behind staring out the window. Of course, this isn't fun for the students that have already mastered the material being covered again for them. And there is little fulfillment for the teacher.
We got ourselves into this situation because parents will not accept that their child is not the smartest kid in the school. Their lack of acceptance of the state of their child translates into potential lawsuits for the school unless they conform to the parent's beliefs about their child. When this happened in the 1950s (and it did even then) it wasn't common so the school could brush it off and eventually someone acquainted the parents with reality. Now, 60 years later it is entirely too common and it cannot be brushed off. The schools know they have to "mainstream" everyone so there are no special students and nobody has to repeat a grade. This means the spectum in the classroom is from the special needs student that isn't understanding to the exceptional student that is a grade level or two ahead of everyone else.
The situation is terrible for the teachers and the administration solution is to keep throwing different packages at the teachers to try to make it managable. It isn't working very well.
Uh, except these aren't nuclear weapons production facilities, supposedly. It is uranium enrichment for peaceful nuclear power.
If this "admission" were to be taken seriously I would expect Iran to be mighty pissed about it and want something worth millions (tens of millions?) to happen to the US, somewhere, somehow.
The problem with this kind of journalism is that we can sit back and say that of course this guy doesn't have the real scoop. But why wouldn't someone high up in Iran not take this to his boss and say "See, they admit it!" The logical followup from Iran is to step up actions, unleash the dogs of war and start preparing to take out Tel Aviv.
Sure it is nice the people in the US are free to come up with stuff like this and "theorize" about it. The problem is that the separation between the journalist and reality may not be quite so apparent to those on the other side of this. This is actually an extremely provocative statement, supposedly from informed sources in the US government. So provocative in fact as to pretty much dare Iran to do something about it.
It doesn't matter that we can laugh and say it is all BS. It might not appear that way in Iran. And it isn't going to be a subject of humor to them, ever.
Perhaps a better question is how does the government ensure every citizen has an Internet connection and some device to make use of it? If the government is going to start making the Internet important for every citizen, then there needs to be "Internet education" so it can be used intelligently and it absolutely needs to be a state-mandated utility service. Every house has a connection.
And then we need standardization. It makes little sense to have a state web site that demands 500Kbps bandwidth to play the video when not everyone has that. Nor does it make sense for the government to spend time designing a web site that might require 2Mbps bandwidth if that is more than the standard service mandated by law.
It took around 40 years for every dwelling in the US to be connected to the telephone network, and even then there were "party lines" where phone service was shared between a number of dwellings. That didn't end until around 1960 in some areas. It got done because the states individually had tariff requirements that made it happen. It might take nearly that long before the government could assume every dwelling in the US had Internet service of some minimum bandwidth and service level. It would certainly require a major restructuring of how telecommunications works in the US to implement something like that.
Frankly, I don't see it happening. It is way too much government interference for most people's tastes. And can you imagine a government-mandated (and likely tax-subsidized) Internet where everyone in the country gets lessons on how to download stuff from The Pirate Bay? You want to see some serious filtering and censorship, just make the government pay for it.
So what is the problem with someone who is suitably motivated voting twice? They are clearly more interested in current events than the 30-40% who never vote for anything. Even worse, most elections get less than 50% turnout - significantly less.
We are talking about Vermont here, home of Ben and Jerry's. If someone in Russia were to vote on something, would it be that big a deal? Being Vermont, it just isn't going to be that interesting to most people not in the area.
Clearly, based on racial ideals, voter ID laws are absurd. It is trying to solve a non-problem and making it difficult for people to vote. Now, if we had 100% voter turnout and people were having fistfights in the parking lot over issues on the ballot there might be a case here. But in most elections when only a small percentage of people actually vote, who cares? If it isn't important enough for people to even bother voting on, it certainly isn't important to ensure "the right people" are voting.
Besides, with the ease of making fake IDs today - high school kids are doing it all the time - why would anyone consider a driver's license to be all that imnportant? I could have five different ones for five different states and nobody would notice.
DVRs cannot record HDMI streams in hi-def due to HDCP protection.
B.S. I just recently had a Cox DVR that output HDMI from HD recordings. I believe most cable systems have HD DVR devices. Certainly Dish and DirectTV do as well.
Now, you can't take any random HDMI source and record it. There is no HDMI recording device available, nor is there going to be.
As to what you can work around with HDMI, I don't know but I suspect the answer is that there is no such thing as an HDMI input device available. Period.
Composite isn't going to be HD no matter what - the bandwidth simply isn't there. What you could probably find is a component input device that delivers a digital HD stream from component inputs.
If you, the viewer skips the commercials there is no problem.
If some does this for you, as a service, there is a huge problem. A video store that was cutting out all the "nasty" parts of movies to make them more "family friendly" got sued over the same thing a while back. I think they lost. I expect Dish to lose as well.
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OK, so things are going to hell in a handbasket and if we continue burning pretty much anything we are all doomed. Right?
There is one huge problem with this. People are pretty subborn about strong beliefs. So much so that they tend towards behaviors that will induce other people with different beliefs to kill them and they go willingly to their deaths rather than abandon their beliefs. You know, the whole "Give me liberty or give me death" sort of thing. Joan of Arc, etc. Got it?
So where are the "climate martyrs?"
Let's start with with something simple: Resolved: Coal burning power plants will kill millions of people if not billions if they are not turned off right now. Can we agree with that? No? I thought this was pretty much settled science... Well, let's just pretend that this is an established fact in some people's minds, OK? So, if it is that critical to the lives of millions of people why are these power plants still operating? How many dedicated martyrs would it really take to shut down all the coal burning power plants in the USA and keep them that way for at least five or ten years? Fewer than 100 people, I assure you. Possibly only 10. Can we not find 10 people whose beliefs are strong enough in destructive (and fatal) human-induced climate change to do this job?
No, we cannot. There aren't 10 people that could get together and agree on this course of action. Now it is understood that humans do not work well together without a strong leader, and other than perhaps Al Gore there is no strong leader in this area. So we are clearly lacking leadership. But I would say that even more importantly we are lacking strong conviction. Early Christians were martyred by the hundreds because of a religious belief and often killed in incredibly bizzare and painful ways to make it obvious to the upcoming victims that this was not a course they wanted to pursue - and yet they did because of the strength of their beliefs. Nobody wrote about the undoubted thousands that repented, confessed and were excused from the "final proceedings" but it is certain that there were plenty of those. All we have records of are the multitudes that did not cast aside their beliefs.
It is also important to understand that should the climate be changing solely because of human induced causes that the folks (likely martyrs) that were to stop it - by destroying the fabric of the carbon-spewing economy we have - would be hailed as saints and saviors in a pretty short period of time. People would certainly be able to go proudly around saying that their parent, brother or sister was one of the few that tipped the balance in favor of human survival.
So where are the martyrs? Does no one have strong enough beliefs that they are willing to step up and take direct action? Apparently not.
The other side of this is, of course, that should a few people find strength in their beliefs and embark on a campaign of destroying the carbon-spewing economy and the climate still continued to shift in undesirable directions these people (and their relatives and offspring) would be considered destructive fools, traitors to the human race and causing unimaginable suffering in the name of a mistaken belief. I really do not think this would have any affect on folks with very strong beliefs but it is a sobering thought for the rest of us sitting around watching.
Immigration sucks, doesn't it? The problem is there are plenty of people abusing banks and other institutions in ways that make any sort of penalty very difficult to put on people. Most of this abuse comes from people with questionable immigration status or status that indicates they might be in a different country next week.
So, someone should let you run up a lot of bills and then disappear? Believe me, that has happened enough already that anyone is reluctant to become the latest victim.
The problem with "online" anything is that all the financial stuff is based on trust. No money is exchanged at all. You buy something and a bill gets generated and if you are nice person, you will pay it. If you aren't so nice, someone gets stuck with the bill. Most of the online financial stuff that is complicated is just trying to make sure someone else gets stuck with the bill.
In the US this problem got resolved for the most part with VISA-logoed debit cards. The bank issues the card and the money is immediately (well, within two days) taken out of the account that backs it. The cards can be processed as a credit card by any merchant WITHOUT a PIN and the transaction is treated as a credit card charge until it reaches the issuing bank. What happens when the account reaches zero? What is supposed to happen is all transactions are immediately declined - except it doesn't necessarily work out that way for as long as two days.
In some very immigration-friendly countries the banks know all about the two-day situation and aren't willing to get stuck with that. The problem gets worse when credit card processing is done by a lot of merchants on a paper basis rather than swiping a card on a terminal. What can easily happen is Not-So-Nice Person runs up a lot of charges and exceeds their account balance and is subsequently living in a different country. For a few hundreds dollars pursuing them isn't worthwhile so the charges just get eaten by the bank. Got real popular when the debit card situation was just getting started.
Can you really blame them?
What would be interesting is a one-time use card with a specific value that you had to purchase with cash from a machine. No change - sorry, if you bought a $20 card and only spent $18 the extra was just a gift to the issuer. But it would completely solve the problem. Why only one-time use? Eliminates the potential for the card's value to be decreased even for the merchant that phones in credit card charges at the end of the day. No two-day problem, ever. No question about using the card online either - it has a specific, known value until it is used and then it has no value and can easily be confirmed that way.
Problem is, if Apple did not block it they might be held legally liable for continued distribution and at least contributing to willful infringement of the patent.
They are playing it safe. Perhaps a little too safe, but as Apple has zero stake in the app it really makes no sense not to be as safe as possible. If anything the problem with the entire App Store model is that the "store" has a lot to lose and nothing to gain by distributing applications, so they are going to follow the most restrictive course possible.
Best Buy, for instance, faces the same problem with a boxed software product on their shelf - except they have a stake in the game in that they paid for shipping the box and the loss of revenue. Best Buy has maybe 200 boxed products on the shelf - Apple has millions of application in the App Store so dropping one is effectively zero impact.
The trade-off is pretty clear. If you want "safe" applications the only way to go is the App Store model as all other Internet distribution models have failed to keep the customer "safe". But you are dragging a third party into the process that has little interest in being there at all. I'm sure Apple would much rather have 200 really good applications than millions - with 2% of them being fart-noise-maker applications.
One huge problem is the FBI decided that credit card fraud - any type - is "Identity Theft" and that is how their reporting structure works. This hugely inflates the amount of "Identity Theft" that is reported giving a big leg up to the probably bigger scam artists at Lifelock. No matter how much credit card fraud costs merchants, the number is dwarfed by the amount of money going to Lifelock and other "identity protection" thieves.
Now, who really is affected by credit card fraud? Certainly not the banks - fraudulent charges are simply charged back to the merchant. Does it hurt the card holder? Well, not really. If you get a charge on your bill that you didn't make you do not have to pay it. Most of the time the credit card company is already aware of the fraudulent use and has taken such charges off the bill. Now, the card company almost certainly will want to change the card number and set you a new card and that can be somewhat inconvenient, but that is about it. Well, what about the merchant? If you are in the business of taking credit cards for almost any retail business you have insurance that covers this sort of thing. The merchant is paying for this insurance, so they might as well use it. I guess we are all paying a little bit for this because the merchants might save a few pennies on their general business insurance if they didn't need this coverage. So figure that when you go to a store you are paying $0.000001 more to cover the credit card fraud insurance.
So who loses? The insurance company? Not really. The merchant that is silly enough not to have insurance? Probably. Certainly nobody else is losing anything in this which is why it is not prosecuted in the US - nobody actually using a fraudulent card ever gets even arrested. They do take the card away if you are using a fake card, which obviously doesn't apply when credit card fraud is done through the Internet.
So really this is almost a vicimless crime that affects nobody. So your credit card number is used fraudulently... big deal... get a new card and move on.
Did you know that a fresh credit card number is worth about $0.50 on the open market today? This means that every time you use a card with a human involved it is a good chance they are collecting card numbers. A guy working in a restaurant can make an extra $50 a week easily just collecting numbers and such from cards handed over by customers. There is little risk with this as at worst he might get fired if caught. The police will not even arrest someone for this sort of activity.
Yes, I get a credit card used fraudulently at least once a year. I get a call about some silly charge that someone tried to make and they take it off the bill. End of story. The guy this posting is about is evidently higher up the food chain enough that someone thinks he is worth prosecuting, but I doubt it goes anywhere. There just isn't anyone losing out enough to justify spending anyone's time and money prosecuting folks like this. So it will continue and get more and more prevalent.
Understand that there are no laws against libel or slander - they are not criminal acts. They are actionable in civil court only. Law enforcement has no part in the civil court system.
Having a law that made libel or slander a criminal act would be a whole different sort of environment and as far as I know this isn't the case anywhere on the planet. Oh in some countries it is a criminal act to libel or slander certain public officials. And some religious ones as well. But the average Joe (or Jose) has to fight his own battles and get his own discovery done for the lawsuit.
Hire someone to find the jerk that is harassing, or the police can get off their butts and stop eating doughnuts long enough to do their job. It is not hard to locate someone who is doing this online without making new laws to force a company to roll over and do the cops job for them.
Hire someone? Sorry, can't be done. At least not today. So maybe you have an IP address and can trace that to an ISP. Great. The ISP says they aren't turning anything over except under subpoena or to law enforcement. Fine, you get a lawyer and file a lawsuit against John Doe - who's identity will be disclosed by the ISP. Except they do not have the identity, all they have is the account holder and (maybe) an address. Oh, and don't take too long filing your lawsuit - some ISPs keep their DHCP history for a very short period of time - so the response to the discovery subpeona is "Sorry, we don't have that information."
I assure you without some kiddy porn or a bomb factory nobody is going to allow examination of the computers at that address to figure out if one of them was used. You just don't have the weight of a RIAA lawsuit on your side. If there are multiple people living at that address you can NEVER figure out which one it was conclusively, not even with the standards of a civil lawsuit.
Unless of course the perp brags - which is so incredibly common that it does make everyone's life easier. But we're assuming here they aren't bragging on IRC or AIM about what they have done and leaving chat logs all over their computer.
I have tried this approach before and found out that it would take literally tens of thousands of dollars to get nowhere. It is an endless series of doors each one leading to a dead end and prying those doors open gets real expensive real fast. Half of the problem is the ISP which today believes it is their customer's right to do an unlimited amount of damage to other people while they shield the perp's identity.
Law enforcement considers the whole issue to be a civil problem and will not participate in any way so you can forget about the cops as well.
Sorry, but the way the Internet is constructed right now everyone has the right to cause harm - it is just that they aren't exercising that right very much. Sure, people get hurt. People get hurt in bar fights also, but you don't see anyone making those illegal, do you? Well, maybe in some places but not everywhere. Think of the Internet as a way to have a bar fight with the lights out.
No, sorry, today you can't pass laws saying that nearly untracable people and unprovable identities are responsible for anything at all. The best you can get is catching people when they brag about the harm they have caused. This means the smart ones - the ones that do not brag - are untouchable.
Since the beginning of the Internet is has been the right and privilege of the masses to annoy, pester, defame and even drive to suicide anyone at all. Nobody is immune to this today and a lot of people are just beginning to figure out they have this power. When the Internet was populated exclusively by academic types and the military, it really didn't mean very much. Turning the average Joe loose has been quite an adventure, hasn't it?
This is kind of a joke because as others have pointed out the maximum tracking that can be done externally is getting an IP address and anybody could be at the other end of that IP address. Of course it would be possible to pass a law saying that the account holder for an IP address is responsible for whatever happens using that IP address - but until that happens it could be Sam next door, it could be little Suzy or it could be the dog.
Now the other way this makes sense is to have some sort of required secure identity required for use of the Internet. Remove the anonyminity and you have a whole different environment. Suddenly, you can't annoy, pester, defame or even drive to suicide anyone else while being safely shielded by supposed anonyminity and the good graces of your ISP. So far we have been pretty well isolated from the ravages of what might be possible in today's environment and I'd call that lucky. Should more people figure out their power to do harm and actually start doing it I would expect a pretty swift response that eliminates anonyminity permanently.
You know it has to come and it is just a matter of time before a few lives are ruined... while the perpetrators are shielded from any consequences. I think it will be interesting to see just how this plays out and how many high school girls kill themselves over this sort of thing. My guess is you could probably drive your average housewife to either leave the country or kill herself based on enough volume of lies and viral spreading of vicious rumors. That might be fun to watch also.
This comes from finance.
See, ads = money. Not technology, not science, nothing counts but the money.
I believe historically it is based on M being 1000 in Roman numerals. And similarly, MM is million in finance.
It seems that a lot of people are trying to pin Stuxnet firmly on the US Government, current administration. So far it seems to be mostly "unnamed knowledgable sources" which could be BS - but things could get more credible.
At some point our friends in Iran are likely to decide that Stuxnet cost them millions of dollars and years of work and the US is responsible. If, or when, they come to this conclusion I would expect something quite overt from Iran to show up. Possibly as a retalitory cyber attack, possibly something as crude as blowing up a few buildings full of people. Something that is assured to cost the US more than a few million dollars. Obviously there is very little that can be done to stop such an attack - especially if it came in the form of something like Weather Bug with people clamoring to figure out how to install it in spite of what ever controls, warning and blocks put in their way. Ever seen someone in a business with all locked-down users (no Admin rights) call the help desk to ask if they could have someone install Weather Bug for them? Yeah, like that.
My guess is that the US isn't backpedaling fast enough to convince the world that it isn't responsible for Stuxnet... so I'd expect retaliation before the end of the year. What would be the point of doing it to a lame-duck president? So probably before November. Of course Iran might decide that Obama is preferrable to Romney and wait until after the election assuming (rightly so) that a successful attack would bring down the government.
We could have cleaner air next year, if we had the motivation. We do not. Nobody in government seems to think that it is worth the cost to do the things that would be required to end or reduce CO2 emissions by more than 50%. Heck, nobody seems to think it is worth it to reduce them by as little as 20%.
Personally, I suspect that may be the correct viewpoint from both a political and economic standpoint.
What is needed are environmentally oriented people beginning mass destruction of the carbon-burning infrastructure if you want to see massive changes made today. Make it so that it is impossible to operate a coal-fired power plant without someone destroying it. Make it so that cars on city streets have a shorter lifespan than 2nd lieutenants in Vietnam. Tear down the carbon infrastructure. Then you will see changes. Until then, it is all just a bunch of wankers whining and nobody is taking it seriously.
What? There are no people committed enough to do this? Well then, I think you have your answer.
I suspect if you are driving a car while trying to use Visual Studio there are many folks wishing you were on the road alone. I suppose having the menus easier to read while speeding down the road would be a slight improvement, but like texting while driving I think "visualstudioing" while driving is insane.
There is no such thing as swift and sure punishment today. If you kill someone there is about a 20% chance of being caught, tried and convicted if you are reasonably smart about it. Fortunately for those that develop a taste for it the odds are distinctly not in favor of repeat offenders - sooner or later your number will be up.
But what this does mean is that for the average guy on the street killing someone does not result in anything swift and sure. We have plenty of crime shows on TV showing how "crime doesn't pay" and showing every criminal act being prosecuted and in almost all cases being convicted, but that isn't reality. The reality shown in TV news and newspapers is that plenty of murders aren't solved and nobody is ever caught. Even the ones that are caught there can be problems with the case where it is never prosecuted. And then there are trial problems where it isn't at all clear in many cases. End result is about 20% conviction rate in the end.
Of course there are the folks that cave in to the police and just confess. And there are the folks that just can't manage to not tell their friends. I'm not considering these because nobody thinks of these possibilities ahead of time. The only real question is if you kill someone what are the real chances of ending up in prison or on death row. Today, the answer is a rather appalling 20%.
This isn't even considering the folks that are on the street today that would consider a stable bed and being fed regularly a vast improvement over their life situation - so prison doesn't sound like such a bad idea.
I believe most of the problem with the current conviction rate has to do with the size of the population rather than the procedures involved. If we had 10 million people in the US instead of 330 million there would be a far greater certainity about being convicted of a crime - just like there was in the 1800s when there were actually only 10 million people in most of the US.
The question that needs to be answered at a high level is indeed, how much is life worth?
In theory, it is not permissible for law enforcement to do anything until a criminal act is committed. This means that if you (and the police) know with absolute certanity that someone is to be killed nothing can be done until they are in fact killed. There are plenty of edge cases to this but at the most extreme if you see someone with a gun walking towards someone else saying "I'm going to kill you!" in reality nothing can be done until their target is in fact killed.
Now, basic humanity suggests that this isn't a good idea. So the extension of this is that if there is reasonable suspicion that someone intends to do harm to another - through knowledge that a third party has - shouldn't there be some responsibility to look into preventing this act? Somewhere between a phone call and a sharp tap on the shoulder with a message saying "We are watching you" would probably be enough to save a few lives.
Of course, locking someone up for life or at least a very long time because they intend to kill someone probably isn't the right answer. But then we get into the murky world of "psychological readustment" - do we put someone in the hands of state shrinks because they have a good chance of harming someone else?
Sure, there is some question of privacy here, but in reality is everyone's privacy worth more than some percentage of people killed being saved? It all comes down to the question of what is a life worth? In some countries clearly it is worth nothing - because everyone there agrees that the afterlife is much, much better and the sooner you get there the better. In most Western countries this doesn't hold for much and the folks that think this way are considered odd, maybe even dangerous. So for the most part in the West the entire question is sidestepped and ignored - everyone assumes life is very valuable. Except in some cases where we actively seek to cheapen it. Is this one of those cases where life just isn't that valuable?
I'd have to question if there were any rules being followed by Japan during WW II. What percentage of Allied prisoners made it back? 25%? Some did, but not very many. What would you call the invasion of China by Japan and how the civilian population was treated?
Rules? No, I don't think there were any rules in that part of WW II. There was no clear division between civilians and military as far as Japan was concerned and that is one of the primary objectives of the Geneva Conventions. They treated their civilians as military workers and they treated civilians in invaded lands as combatants.
And Japan was prepared to fight on until the last man on their islands. At least the military was, driving the civilians ahead of them into the Allied troops.
An important lesson in warfare was learned in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles was that you do not crush your defeated enemy completely - unless you are prepared to make them extinct. Sure, win at all costs but then make sure there is an operating country left.
10 years after WW I Germany was a wreck and this led directly to the rise of Hitler and WW II.
10 years after WW II both Germany and Japan had strong economies and a great deal of rebuilding had been done. Neither Germany nor Japan was "crushed" from their defeat and in many ways Japan's society improved a great deal. The average man on the street probably came out better because of how Japan was managed post-war than if the war had never happened. All traces of feudalism were wiped out of the country whereas before many had persisted.
I'd say the other approach that works was Carthage which we have not seen the likes of since - burn everything to the ground, salt the fields so nothing grows there and kill everyone - men, women, children, dogs, everyone. If you aren't prepared to go that far, it is necessary to leave a functioning country after defeat.
This is one problem with Iraq and Afganistan. Iraq was a functioning country but it was crushed almost completely. Afganistan post-Taliban could probably be said not to have been a functioning country even before being invaded. In both cases failure to leave a functioning country will almost certainly result in more wars.
Hope you have a job. Because programs like this will insure that US graduates get to earn postdoc qualifications in burger-flipping while foreign students that are eager for jobs paying much more than they could get at home will take what employment there is.
Look around and see what other first-world countries are doing for immigration. Most have far more restrictive policies than the US does and is far, far harsher for anyone violating their laws. Overstay your visa in Germany and you will likely be arrested and shipped out of the country. Walk into Mexico and you will find that their border is defended by the Mexican Army, and they do defend their border vigorously, with armed response to invaders.
The US is still allowing huge numbers of legal immigrants in and these people are competing for the same jobs that US graduates are. Absolutely, we can employ cheaper foreign labor in all areas of employment - but we better figure out how to support the jobless that aren't going to get what jobs there are. You see, we finally have the economy that functions without a huge unjustifiable bubble - and at least 30% of the country is unemployed or underemployed. Meaning that STEM graduates are working at McDonalds because there simply aren't the STEM jobs to go around.
And we want to bring in more people for these jobs that will work cheaper? As I said, hope you have a job - because with programs like this you will be supporting 2-3 non-working people. There simply is no choice in the matter any more. We are going to have to return to permanent government support for the folks that aren't working.
I saw this in the 1960s... well, I didn't see it as much as I experienced it. I went to 1st grade with a "Dick and Jane" book and I learned how to read. Pretty well, if I do say so myself. My sister went to the same school 4 years later and came home with an entirely different book that stressed some kind of phonics where words were spelled "phonetically" rather than using English. She did not learn how to read.
The fevor over experimentation has increased since then to the point today where there are hundreds of curriculm packages available to schools and little guidance as to what makes one of them better than another. In many districts you end up with a decision being made by a local school board, in others it is mandated by the state education board.
In my opinion the basic problem is the mainstreaming of children of vastly different abilities in the same classroom. Today we have in a single elementary classroom children that have been reading for a long time, children beginning to learn to read and children that are seemingly resistent to learning to read. This is extremely frustrating for the teacher which certainly does percolate up through the entire heirarchy to the school board. The result in recent years has been to shove a curriculm package into the teacher's hands and tell them to "teach this" and everything will work out fine. It isn't working out fine. And the outcomes are, well, predictable.
The "new age" philosophy that everyone has to succeed and there are no "losers" just winners is one thing. The problem is the schools are faced with a societal problem that there simply is no "new age" solution for - you cannot take a child that doesn't know how to read in the 2nd grade and put them in a classroom with students that are reading with the hope they are going to pick it up by assimilation. What ends up happening is not that the lowest performing children pick things up by assimilation or that the children help each other. What does in fact happen is the classroom ends up operating at the lowest common denominator so the lowest performing students are not left behind staring out the window. Of course, this isn't fun for the students that have already mastered the material being covered again for them. And there is little fulfillment for the teacher.
We got ourselves into this situation because parents will not accept that their child is not the smartest kid in the school. Their lack of acceptance of the state of their child translates into potential lawsuits for the school unless they conform to the parent's beliefs about their child. When this happened in the 1950s (and it did even then) it wasn't common so the school could brush it off and eventually someone acquainted the parents with reality. Now, 60 years later it is entirely too common and it cannot be brushed off. The schools know they have to "mainstream" everyone so there are no special students and nobody has to repeat a grade. This means the spectum in the classroom is from the special needs student that isn't understanding to the exceptional student that is a grade level or two ahead of everyone else.
The situation is terrible for the teachers and the administration solution is to keep throwing different packages at the teachers to try to make it managable. It isn't working very well.
Good that you have the sense to filter out the hype and see through to the underlying BS.
Now, are you sure the folks in Iran have the same abilities? Or, might they just believe this 100%?
Stuxnet cost them time and likely tens of millions of dollars. I would expect them to present the bill soon.
Uh, except these aren't nuclear weapons production facilities, supposedly. It is uranium enrichment for peaceful nuclear power.
If this "admission" were to be taken seriously I would expect Iran to be mighty pissed about it and want something worth millions (tens of millions?) to happen to the US, somewhere, somehow.
The problem with this kind of journalism is that we can sit back and say that of course this guy doesn't have the real scoop. But why wouldn't someone high up in Iran not take this to his boss and say "See, they admit it!" The logical followup from Iran is to step up actions, unleash the dogs of war and start preparing to take out Tel Aviv.
Sure it is nice the people in the US are free to come up with stuff like this and "theorize" about it. The problem is that the separation between the journalist and reality may not be quite so apparent to those on the other side of this. This is actually an extremely provocative statement, supposedly from informed sources in the US government. So provocative in fact as to pretty much dare Iran to do something about it.
It doesn't matter that we can laugh and say it is all BS. It might not appear that way in Iran. And it isn't going to be a subject of humor to them, ever.
Perhaps a better question is how does the government ensure every citizen has an Internet connection and some device to make use of it? If the government is going to start making the Internet important for every citizen, then there needs to be "Internet education" so it can be used intelligently and it absolutely needs to be a state-mandated utility service. Every house has a connection.
And then we need standardization. It makes little sense to have a state web site that demands 500Kbps bandwidth to play the video when not everyone has that. Nor does it make sense for the government to spend time designing a web site that might require 2Mbps bandwidth if that is more than the standard service mandated by law.
It took around 40 years for every dwelling in the US to be connected to the telephone network, and even then there were "party lines" where phone service was shared between a number of dwellings. That didn't end until around 1960 in some areas. It got done because the states individually had tariff requirements that made it happen. It might take nearly that long before the government could assume every dwelling in the US had Internet service of some minimum bandwidth and service level. It would certainly require a major restructuring of how telecommunications works in the US to implement something like that.
Frankly, I don't see it happening. It is way too much government interference for most people's tastes. And can you imagine a government-mandated (and likely tax-subsidized) Internet where everyone in the country gets lessons on how to download stuff from The Pirate Bay? You want to see some serious filtering and censorship, just make the government pay for it.
So what is the problem with someone who is suitably motivated voting twice? They are clearly more interested in current events than the 30-40% who never vote for anything. Even worse, most elections get less than 50% turnout - significantly less.
We are talking about Vermont here, home of Ben and Jerry's. If someone in Russia were to vote on something, would it be that big a deal? Being Vermont, it just isn't going to be that interesting to most people not in the area.
Clearly, based on racial ideals, voter ID laws are absurd. It is trying to solve a non-problem and making it difficult for people to vote. Now, if we had 100% voter turnout and people were having fistfights in the parking lot over issues on the ballot there might be a case here. But in most elections when only a small percentage of people actually vote, who cares? If it isn't important enough for people to even bother voting on, it certainly isn't important to ensure "the right people" are voting.
Besides, with the ease of making fake IDs today - high school kids are doing it all the time - why would anyone consider a driver's license to be all that imnportant? I could have five different ones for five different states and nobody would notice.
DVRs cannot record HDMI streams in hi-def due to HDCP protection.
B.S. I just recently had a Cox DVR that output HDMI from HD recordings. I believe most cable systems have HD DVR devices. Certainly Dish and DirectTV do as well.
Now, you can't take any random HDMI source and record it. There is no HDMI recording device available, nor is there going to be.
As to what you can work around with HDMI, I don't know but I suspect the answer is that there is no such thing as an HDMI input device available. Period.
Composite isn't going to be HD no matter what - the bandwidth simply isn't there. What you could probably find is a component input device that delivers a digital HD stream from component inputs.
If you, the viewer skips the commercials there is no problem.
If some does this for you, as a service, there is a huge problem. A video store that was cutting out all the "nasty" parts of movies to make them more "family friendly" got sued over the same thing a while back. I think they lost. I expect Dish to lose as well.