Look, either Google gets to do its thing or it will take the search engine away and THEN where will we be? Huh?
So Google figures out that it doesn't need to pay Skyhook for WiFi information anymore if it has its own database - and building its own database is fairly simple from the Google Street View vans. This saves them money, allows them to do better advertising and charge advertisers more. What possibly would there be to complain about, anyway?
It's not that you were actually using this information for something, now was it? So what do you care if someone else makes money off it? Or at least saves money. Besides, it isn't like Skyhook didn't do exactly the same thing to build their database - or didn't you think of that?
One of the rules of the Internet seems to be that whoever is the most daring and audacious gets the prize. If you can figure out how to make money off something - no matter how incredibly invasive or annoying it might be - then the first one to do it wins. You mean you didn't think it was worth taking pictures through people's windows all over the world? Well, see - Google did it and won, you lost. The idea that you might not want everyone all over the planet to have access to a photo of your front door and whatever you have in your windows isn't really relevant to the discussion. You gave your permission when you didn't shoot the tires out on the van as a trespasser. And today, there are no neighborhoods that would decide to "take action" - nobody knows their neighbors well enough to join them in doing anything.
Windows 7 ALWAYS runs as non-privileged. The only difference you would see is not having to type the password, just clicking OK.
Why are you having to escalate privilege levels all the time? It should not be necessary at all. Even if some old software is trying to write in the wrong place and cannot be configured (or used) properly, then you can set the permissions for where it is trying to write to eliminate the privilege escalation.
The whole point is to eliminate privilege escalation entirely. Yes, it is needed if you are installing something - and non-Admin users shouldn't be installing software. Yes, it is needed if you are modifying files in the Windows folder, but you shouldn't need to be doing that much either.
Internet Explorer runs pretty much in a wholly separate privilege domain where it can't really write anywhere. Or call stuff to write anywhere. So that is pretty safe. However, if you have software adhereing to an old security model (the "I can write anywhere I want" model), then you are going to either have to change permissions or put up with a lot of escalation to get things done. Problem is, that means anytime something asks, you are going to escalate.
Me, I'd be looking at fixing the software problem.
The first word here is "Cooperative". Anything involving the Internet that requires two or more agents (people, software, whatever) to "cooperate" ends up as a great big security exposure and people lose savings, credit and who knows what else.
So we are thinking somehow that "cooperative" will work with 2000lb vehicles traveling on highways at over 60MPH/100KPH? Somehow I have a feeling that this will work out about as well as SMTP is working for us now.
When the Internet was a few colleges, Bell Labs and the US Military coupled up SMTP worked fine, as will a trial of this. Scale to 50% of the vehicles on the road and you will have Some Random Hacker thinking it might be cool to "cooperate" a bit more enthusiastically than everyone expects. And then you have the equivalent of spam on the highways.
Hitting a can of SPAM at 60MPH is going to create quite a mess, as will any sort of "cooperative" sort of stuff on highways.
And if they would work for $0.50 a day then maybe it might make sense.
When it isn't financially sensible to employ people at $0.50 a day, you can expect the people to be replaced by machines with one or two people watching over them getting paid $2 a day. Factories are going to go where the labor is cheap and where the products can be shipped to customers. Whereever that might be these days.
But power lines are dangerous - they cause all sorts of health problems according to people that think they live by them. Because of this there aren't really going to be any more constructed in the US any time soon.
This is such a huge problem that they are considering building a transmission line through the bottom of a lake so nobody will see it.
Unfortunately, here in the US 99% of the population isn't interested in becoming really "literate". They are happy to watch NASCAR events and American Idol on TV, read People magazine and the Weekly World News and not much else.
The Internet is specifically for playing games, forwarding hoax emails and for building up a self-reinforcing attitude of superiority by reading blogs from people suffering from "Extreme Ego Syndrome" or EES. It used to be that in person when encountering someone with EES you would excuse yourself quickly - today's EES sufferers now have a forum and an audience, two things guaranteed to build a simple case of EES into the much more severe EFES (Extreme Fatous Ego Syndrome). EFES sufferers have been known to rise to high public office (like Grand Dragon or the equivalent in Mensa) and sometimes run for President.
Sadly, there is no know cure for EFES and the cure for EES is to isolate the sufferer until their ego will fit in a hatbox. The US Army used to have a solution for this - Alaska - but this is no longer a reasonable solution. Too many people in Alaska these days.
Pretty much beginning with the Satellite Home Receiver Act, it became illegal to receive certain radio signals in the US. Prior to that time anything that you could passively receive was legal to receive and do anything you wanted with it. After that, a number of laws passed which changed this. It is illegal to receive (and decrypt in an unauthorized manner) video satellite signals. It is now illegal to receive cell phone and cordless phone signals. In some states it is illegal to receive police radar signals. Specifically it is probably not illegal anywhere to receive WiFi signals, but you can't make the assumption that just because it is unencrypted it is not illegal - none of the signals that are specifically illegal to receive are encrypted.
There is nothing "secure" about WPA. WPA2 may be a little more secure but both are easily cracked in a few minutes time. There is no such thing as "wireless security" if someone has 10 minutes and the proper motivation.
Licensed or unlicensed doesn't really matter as none of the signals that are in fact illegal to receive are in licensed bands.
The secret to embryonic stem cells was always cloning. Sure, Harry can't benefit from someone else's stem cells but if you first clone Harry and create an embryo you can now harvest the embryo for stem cells and they work for Harry just fine.
Now there is a little hitch there. If you let the embryo develop you now have a real life clone of Harry. This is unlikely to be like The 6th Day, but it gets pretty complicated. And very, very distressing for the religious types when it comes down to talking about Harry's soul and Harry's clone's soul.
Embryonic stem cells don't work without human cloning. You mean you didn't know that from the beginning? How could you miss it because embryonic stem cells are genotype specific?
The problem is that formerly senators and other "statesmen" we pretty much placed in high regard and respected. Today, there are no respected senators because we know way too much about their personal lives, personal failings and everything else about them.
It is very difficult to respect someone after their wife slaps them in public. Or is caught doing unsavory things in a mens room. Or they didn't pay all the taxes that are due. Or it is disclosed that they were caught shoplifting when they were 12. Forgive and forget? I'm sorry, the Internet doesn't forget. Ever.
So now we have a bunch of unrespected, rather unremarkable people trying to govern the country. They are finding it difficult to gather much support for anything. Electing a new crop of unrespected, unremarkable people isn't going to fix anything.
How do we fix this? Well, it probably isn't fixable, at least not in the short term. You see, all the respected statesmen of yesteryear had just as many failings as the folks in office today, except we didn't know about them. And the people that did had some common sense to understand that shouting it from rooftops would (a) personally destroy good people and (b) make it impossible for them to be effective in their job. Today, you get money for destroying people and nobody cares about what happens to these people in government. They did the crime, they get to do the time - or something like that.
I own a Kindle. It is completely unsuitable for displaying PDF documents that have not been customized for the screen dimensions. As is every other eBook reader out there, because you cannot see a full page and there is no good way to zoom and pan quickly. Unless of course you have an LCD display, which then makes it useless for reading other materals.
Same goes for Postscript - after all, PDF is a subset of Postscript.
Some eBook readers display a special eBook version of PDF which is designed specifically for Adobe-enabled readers. The page description is thrown out and the text is reformatted to fit the screen. As far as I am concerned, this isn't a PDF anymore. PDF is a page description language where the pages are intended to be rendered as the author intended.
HTML has a different problem with the Modern Web - games are played to get the page to display in a particular format with the screen width pretty much hard-coded into the page layout. At least a minimum width. For these documents, again a eBook reader is going to fail.
For all of these what is needed is something that can display an A4 or USA letter size page in a readable manner. Given display costs and yields today, you could probably have that for $500 or a bit more. Anything less than that is going to have an unreadably tiny display forcing you to (slowly) pan and zoom, zoom and pan.
I keep seeing posts like this, mostly from people that haven't tried to read an 8 inch wide page on a 4 inch wide display. With an eInk display it responds well to turning pages while reading and infuriatingly slowly attempting to move quickly. It doesn't work. Anything where the page is laid out by the author with a fixed idea of how the page should appear isn't going to come out very well without a display capable of handling at least that width, if not that height. Where eBook readers shine is where the "page" is dynamically formatted from unformatted text to fit the display. Just about anything else is a waste of time.
There are many, many ways to be "impaired" and not all of them can be proven with a blood test.
Heck, driving while texting is a form of "impairment".
You do not get to drive a multi-ton vehicle capable of inflicting serious bodily harm without being able to devote 100% of your attention to doing so. If, in the opinion of an experienced observer, you aren't driving in a manner that indicates you are in complete control of the vehicle, absolutely you deserve a ticket.
If all you have is a camera with an interesting and perhaps pertinent video on it, it isn't going to be considered to be evidence - nobody knows how the video got there and there is almost certainly no documentation on how it was handled after the alleged acts occurred.
If you record something that you think might be valuable at trial later you need to get proper documentation (where and when it was taken at least) and document the chain of custody of the camera or cell phone from that point until the video is unloaded. Best to have a neutral third party handle that and put the video on some write-once media so it cannot be altered. Then have the person that did the transferring mark the finished DVD for identification and be prepared to testify that the DVD is the one they made. Then turn the DVD over to a lawyer.
Without doing all of this your video is going to be considered to be untrustworthy. It could have been altered. It could have been taken three days later with actors. Nobody knows and therefore it isn't "evidence" in any manner at all.
Since you wouldn't go through the trouble of properly handling and documenting a video that you didn't like there is pretty much no reason to worry about something being used against you that you took. However, the ATM camera across the street and the surveilance system for the convenience store both got you and those systems are going to come with lots and lots of documentation. Both are probably secured against tampering until the police come and collect the video. So remember, there are lots of video recording systems in use all over a modern city and the police can get all of that video.
You absolutely can have in-car video subpoenaed as part of a trial. Your lawyer does it and there is no way it can be denied. Losing the video is pretty clear at trial that something hinky is going on. There are rules about how in-car video has to be kept. My company deals with police archiving in-car video for this very reason.
Traffic court without a lawyer? Forget about it - nobody wants to deal with that and you would be correct.
Submitting your own video record is going to be problematic because there is no presumption (or even requirement) how this video has been handled. Who exactly would be available to testify that the video hasn't been altered? You would need a video forensic expert to be on hand and there would need to be documentation about the chain of custody of the video, just as for any other piece of evidence. Not having that pretty much means it would be excluded.
So if you have a video of police misconduct you need to get proper documentation and have witnesses that can testify about the chain of custody and handling of the video. Best to have a neutral third party take the video from the camera and put it on a DVD or something where is cannot be altered. And they need to mark the DVD and be prepared to testify that it is the DVD they made.
If you have users in a corporate environment that have Administrator rights and click on anything that is clickable then maybe Parental Controls are the right choice. Because clearly the employees are a bunch of children that need to be controlled.
A new, completely incompatible operating system today has pretty much zero chance of gathering even 0.1% of the current market unless it has something really big going for it.
Why would application developers (both internal corporate ones and ISVs) target a new operating system?
Today the most prevalent operating system is Windows, but OS X (mobile variety) is catching up. Right now if Apple were even the least bit interested in ISV software development they would likely be able to displace Microsoft in a few years. Unfortunately Apple is so disinterested in the ISV marketplace and intent on screwing over developers this is very unlikely to happen.
Today when building a platform-agnostic application there are three real possible targets:
Windows
OS X
Linux
Adding something new to that mix - regardless of who might do it - is going to be a tough sell. It would be insane for Microsoft to do this at this point because abandoning application compatibility would pretty much destroy their existing market as well as the new one being a flop. Apple was able to get away with it (twice!) only because the users are going to pretty much do whatever Apple tells them they have to. Microsoft foisted a somewhat incompatible operating system (Vista) on the world, and even with probably 90% of the applications working on it that 10% has meant a lot of people are sticking with XP still today.
The interesting thing will be to see what Google comes up with for their non-OS OS with virtually none of the services an OS provides. Who will target it for applications, and more to the point, why? Security will likely be very good - if there are no applications in a real executable sense, then it is really hard to have security problems. Same with disk storage - if there isn't any, you can't have persistent behaviors local to the machine itself.
The problem is that most people under 30 or so do not see "copyright infringement" as any sort of law worth paying attention to. In first grade the teacher was downloading software without paying for it and pretty much every day in school the same lesson was reinforced, day after day.
Sure, it is illegal and you can be sued. You can also get a ticket for speeding but this has no effect whatsoever on half (or more) of the drivers on the road today. There is no respect for the content owners, whoever they are - it is assumed that it some fat old white guy with plenty of money that doesn't really need the extra profit of one more sale.
Today, without major restructuring of the Internet at large, it can be assumed that within a few days of release of a DVD that the movie content will be ripped and made available online.
If an Internet user has the knowledge to access these "available" movies, they can be downloaded and viewed with little or no risk to the downloader. This may require some fancy work to prevent the content from being redistributed and if you do not know how to do this you are certainly exposing yourself to redistribution and the legal penalties that come from that.
If someone does not have this knowledge, they have to buy their content. Because of this we are rapidly approaching a two-class environment: some people know how to get content for free while others have to pay for it. Right now, the division between these classes is also enforced by lack of broadband capacity - if your connection is dial-up or a weak DSL link you can't download free content no matter what you know.
Today it is possible for content providers to still make money from the 2nd class "payers", but this is going to change rapidly. I don't see any possibility for stopping this movement, no matter how many lawsuits are filed. The penalty is just too remote a possibility and too far removed from the act of redistribution. You get a notice in the mail six months after doing something and you are supposed to remember doing it? Worse, there is a trial over something that occurred two years before. It is like getting a speeding ticket from a state you used to live in and six months after you sold the car. There just isn't any connection between the act and the penalty for it to seem real and not arbitrary.
I'd say the content providers are going to see their revenue shrink rapidly as more and more of the "payers" die off and are replaced by well-educated (in the Internet black arts) younger people with better Internet connections. They might be able to replace the direct sales revenue (which retailers share in) with some kind of ad-supported content in the future - but retailers will not be sharing in that at all. This puts WalMart as a content retailer out of the business entirely, as it does with Amazon and anyone else that would consider themselves a "retailer".
Oh well. I think it plain to say "Piracy Rules!" If your business model depends on people paying for digital content, someone out there is going to ruin your day.
There are two entirely different things that are both lumped together as "Identity Theft".
The first one is where someone manages to get a bank or loan company to give them credit based on false credentials. You wake up one morning and discover that you owe lots of people you never even heard of, perhaps as much as a year after the loan was given. This is big trouble, because your success depends on convincing the originator of the loan that they made a mistake. It can take years to clean this up and plenty of money. Fortunately, it is extremely rare.
The second sort of "Identity Theft" is where someone "borrows" your credit card number. It is nothing more than credit card fraud and takes about 10 minutes to clear up. It personally happens to me at least once a year. I believe that many businesses end up selling credit card numbers one way or another, usually through employees looking for some extra income. A valid credit card number is worth maybe $2 on the open market, so if you collect of 50 of them you have yourself $100. Plenty of people could use an extra $100 a week.
Credit card fraud is so incredibly common that nearly all large stores have insurance to cover their losses. So they pretty much don't care when it happens - they file for insurance coverage and are reimbursed. The credit card companies do not care at all and pretty much refuse to even attempt to prosecute the people doing it because it looks bad. So the only loser in this is a small business that gets taken on a credit card sale and doesn't have the insurance that bigger stores have.
With a "no prosecution" stand, credit card fraud is about as rampant as it could possibly be. There are no consequences to doing it. If you walk in to a store and try to use a fraudulent credit card it might not validate - around 1960 they called the cops. Today they take the card and suggest you get lost. I suppose if you insisted they call the police they might, but you wouldn't be charged with anything like credit card fraud because nobody cares. Probably end up getting charged with making an ass of yourself in public.
Yes, I have had a physical credit card stolen and reported to the police. I knew who took it and who used it in a store (successfully, I might add), but the police wouldn't do a thing unless the credit card company wanted to press charges. They never do, so they guy got the stuff from the store and got away with it clean.
The problem with nationalizing a company - any company - by the US government is that is pretty much opens a door that is very hard to close.
Further, once that door is open just a tiny little bit it makes it pretty obvious to anyone with sizable assets and either potential or actual large-scale liabilities that the same thing might happen to them. Suddenly, the US is a very bad place to have any assets because they might get seized.
Sure, you could claim that the US needs to nationalize BP because of the oil spill. So what about nationalizing Toyota because of their car problems? A whole lot more people may have been killed from Toyota's problems than will ever die because of the oil spill. Same thing really applies to GM and Ford for exactly the same reasons. Would GE be safe, considering they make a huge percentage of the jet airliner engines?
The problem isn't even that the government doesn't want to be in business. It is that once it is "acceptable" take stuff over where exactly do you draw the line and how do you keep Congress from not crossing over that line? Short answer is that you don't.
I'd say if BP was nationalized anyone with sizable assets in the US would simply pull out. If they needed some resource that was in the US there would be a subsidary set up to operate it and it would be treated as something that could disappear in a moment.
Basically, the US would be a third-world country overnight and there would be nothing anyone could do to stop it because it would be 1,000 independent decisions by boards of directors. I'd expect the unemployment to go from 20% to 40% in a year and stay that way basically forever.
It would be an incredibly stupid move. But, given the current government in Washington, it isn't anything that I would say would be impossible to do. And it would be extremely popular. For a while.
What was mentioned wasn't a sales tax but income taxes. A store already (collects and) pays a sales tax on goods sold and then somewhere along the line pays an income tax on the money collected.
Pretty much in the US if you make over $600 a year you are subject to income taxes. Period. On just about every dime you bring in. If you aren't reporting it as income, you are a tax cheat and robbing the people that should be getting your redistributed wealth, or so they say.
While it might be nice, I assure you that nobody sniffing, recording or accessing your encrypted (and cracked) wireless access point will ever be charged with "wiretapping". There does not appear to be any right to privacy on wireless computer communications at this point.
The first nuclear desalination plant was built in San Diego. Because of a little scuffle with Mr. Castro it was subsequently moved to Guantanamo to support the military base there. I believe Cuba cut off the water supply to the base sometime around 1962 or so.
There is no "voltage" requirement for desalination. The original plant - any any plant built today - would just boil the water and then condense the steam getting pure, distilled water out. There would be a lot of briney residue left over.]
Unfortunately, this briney residue would
likely be considered a hazardous waste and regulated. A nuclear plant built this way could also generate lots of electricity, but that probably wouldn't be allowed either. All in all, I suspect we are going to see a lot of the US Southwest become utterly uninhabitable within the next 50 years because of a lack of water. It isn't that we don't know what to do about the problem, it is that the solutions that will work are simply offensive to a rather vocal minority.
It makes much more sense, to them, to have extreme downward pressure on the population so that we can have a zero-impact "sustainable" way of life for the remaining humans who can then live side-by-side with Mother Nature. The fact that Mother Nature tends to eat her young and leave the unfit to die horribly is just a minor thing that "environmentalists" have never experienced.
If you thought they gave you a binding contract, you were wrong. They had you sign a service agreement which is quite different. They offered you terms of service which are subject to change at any time and you accepted their terms.
No business is going to give a consumer (or even another business) a contract that commits them to anything unless there is no other option. And then, it will take six months to negotiate the contract between the lawyers and cost $10,000. Hardly practical for most things.
So what you get is a service agreement which commits them to nothing and commits you to nothing besides paying the bill for an agreed upon length of time. You might think it is some kind of contract, but it isn't.
Nobody in the 1970s was all that interested in a "safe" car except maybe a very small minority. And while these cars might have been safe, nobody is talking about what they cost or what sort of performance they had.
The "right" thing probably would have been for the US Government to nationalize the Big Three automakers and mandate that nobody could buy anything except an official US Government produced car. They could have then made the cars safe and high mileage. Nobody would have anything to compare them to and if they cost $50,000 each that would have just further reduced the dependence on automobiles. The could have used the highways right-of-way for rail lines and torn up most of the concrete.
All we really need is a truely benvolent dictator to tell us what the right way is and shove it down everyone's throats. We might actually be on the road to that, especially if the carbon tax goes through. We won't have to worry about consumer choice anymore - all of those complex decisions will be made for us.
Be careful what you wish for, in a Progressive/Liberal government world you just might get it.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, either Google gets to do its thing or it will take the search engine away and THEN where will we be? Huh?
So Google figures out that it doesn't need to pay Skyhook for WiFi information anymore if it has its own database - and building its own database is fairly simple from the Google Street View vans. This saves them money, allows them to do better advertising and charge advertisers more. What possibly would there be to complain about, anyway?
It's not that you were actually using this information for something, now was it? So what do you care if someone else makes money off it? Or at least saves money. Besides, it isn't like Skyhook didn't do exactly the same thing to build their database - or didn't you think of that?
One of the rules of the Internet seems to be that whoever is the most daring and audacious gets the prize. If you can figure out how to make money off something - no matter how incredibly invasive or annoying it might be - then the first one to do it wins. You mean you didn't think it was worth taking pictures through people's windows all over the world? Well, see - Google did it and won, you lost. The idea that you might not want everyone all over the planet to have access to a photo of your front door and whatever you have in your windows isn't really relevant to the discussion. You gave your permission when you didn't shoot the tires out on the van as a trespasser. And today, there are no neighborhoods that would decide to "take action" - nobody knows their neighbors well enough to join them in doing anything.
The whole point is to eliminate privilege escalation entirely. Yes, it is needed if you are installing something - and non-Admin users shouldn't be installing software. Yes, it is needed if you are modifying files in the Windows folder, but you shouldn't need to be doing that much either.
Internet Explorer runs pretty much in a wholly separate privilege domain where it can't really write anywhere. Or call stuff to write anywhere. So that is pretty safe. However, if you have software adhereing to an old security model (the "I can write anywhere I want" model), then you are going to either have to change permissions or put up with a lot of escalation to get things done. Problem is, that means anytime something asks, you are going to escalate.
Me, I'd be looking at fixing the software problem.
The first word here is "Cooperative". Anything involving the Internet that requires two or more agents (people, software, whatever) to "cooperate" ends up as a great big security exposure and people lose savings, credit and who knows what else.
So we are thinking somehow that "cooperative" will work with 2000lb vehicles traveling on highways at over 60MPH/100KPH? Somehow I have a feeling that this will work out about as well as SMTP is working for us now.
When the Internet was a few colleges, Bell Labs and the US Military coupled up SMTP worked fine, as will a trial of this. Scale to 50% of the vehicles on the road and you will have Some Random Hacker thinking it might be cool to "cooperate" a bit more enthusiastically than everyone expects. And then you have the equivalent of spam on the highways.
Hitting a can of SPAM at 60MPH is going to create quite a mess, as will any sort of "cooperative" sort of stuff on highways.
And if they would work for $0.50 a day then maybe it might make sense.
When it isn't financially sensible to employ people at $0.50 a day, you can expect the people to be replaced by machines with one or two people watching over them getting paid $2 a day. Factories are going to go where the labor is cheap and where the products can be shipped to customers. Whereever that might be these days.
But power lines are dangerous - they cause all sorts of health problems according to people that think they live by them. Because of this there aren't really going to be any more constructed in the US any time soon.
This is such a huge problem that they are considering building a transmission line through the bottom of a lake so nobody will see it.
Unfortunately, here in the US 99% of the population isn't interested in becoming really "literate". They are happy to watch NASCAR events and American Idol on TV, read People magazine and the Weekly World News and not much else.
The Internet is specifically for playing games, forwarding hoax emails and for building up a self-reinforcing attitude of superiority by reading blogs from people suffering from "Extreme Ego Syndrome" or EES. It used to be that in person when encountering someone with EES you would excuse yourself quickly - today's EES sufferers now have a forum and an audience, two things guaranteed to build a simple case of EES into the much more severe EFES (Extreme Fatous Ego Syndrome). EFES sufferers have been known to rise to high public office (like Grand Dragon or the equivalent in Mensa) and sometimes run for President.
Sadly, there is no know cure for EFES and the cure for EES is to isolate the sufferer until their ego will fit in a hatbox. The US Army used to have a solution for this - Alaska - but this is no longer a reasonable solution. Too many people in Alaska these days.
Licensed or unlicensed doesn't really matter as none of the signals that are in fact illegal to receive are in licensed bands.
The secret to embryonic stem cells was always cloning. Sure, Harry can't benefit from someone else's stem cells but if you first clone Harry and create an embryo you can now harvest the embryo for stem cells and they work for Harry just fine.
Now there is a little hitch there. If you let the embryo develop you now have a real life clone of Harry. This is unlikely to be like The 6th Day, but it gets pretty complicated. And very, very distressing for the religious types when it comes down to talking about Harry's soul and Harry's clone's soul.
Embryonic stem cells don't work without human cloning. You mean you didn't know that from the beginning? How could you miss it because embryonic stem cells are genotype specific?
The problem is that formerly senators and other "statesmen" we pretty much placed in high regard and respected. Today, there are no respected senators because we know way too much about their personal lives, personal failings and everything else about them.
It is very difficult to respect someone after their wife slaps them in public. Or is caught doing unsavory things in a mens room. Or they didn't pay all the taxes that are due. Or it is disclosed that they were caught shoplifting when they were 12. Forgive and forget? I'm sorry, the Internet doesn't forget. Ever.
So now we have a bunch of unrespected, rather unremarkable people trying to govern the country. They are finding it difficult to gather much support for anything. Electing a new crop of unrespected, unremarkable people isn't going to fix anything.
How do we fix this? Well, it probably isn't fixable, at least not in the short term. You see, all the respected statesmen of yesteryear had just as many failings as the folks in office today, except we didn't know about them. And the people that did had some common sense to understand that shouting it from rooftops would (a) personally destroy good people and (b) make it impossible for them to be effective in their job. Today, you get money for destroying people and nobody cares about what happens to these people in government. They did the crime, they get to do the time - or something like that.
I own a Kindle. It is completely unsuitable for displaying PDF documents that have not been customized for the screen dimensions. As is every other eBook reader out there, because you cannot see a full page and there is no good way to zoom and pan quickly. Unless of course you have an LCD display, which then makes it useless for reading other materals.
Same goes for Postscript - after all, PDF is a subset of Postscript.
Some eBook readers display a special eBook version of PDF which is designed specifically for Adobe-enabled readers. The page description is thrown out and the text is reformatted to fit the screen. As far as I am concerned, this isn't a PDF anymore. PDF is a page description language where the pages are intended to be rendered as the author intended.
HTML has a different problem with the Modern Web - games are played to get the page to display in a particular format with the screen width pretty much hard-coded into the page layout. At least a minimum width. For these documents, again a eBook reader is going to fail.
For all of these what is needed is something that can display an A4 or USA letter size page in a readable manner. Given display costs and yields today, you could probably have that for $500 or a bit more. Anything less than that is going to have an unreadably tiny display forcing you to (slowly) pan and zoom, zoom and pan.
I keep seeing posts like this, mostly from people that haven't tried to read an 8 inch wide page on a 4 inch wide display. With an eInk display it responds well to turning pages while reading and infuriatingly slowly attempting to move quickly. It doesn't work. Anything where the page is laid out by the author with a fixed idea of how the page should appear isn't going to come out very well without a display capable of handling at least that width, if not that height. Where eBook readers shine is where the "page" is dynamically formatted from unformatted text to fit the display. Just about anything else is a waste of time.
There are many, many ways to be "impaired" and not all of them can be proven with a blood test.
Heck, driving while texting is a form of "impairment".
You do not get to drive a multi-ton vehicle capable of inflicting serious bodily harm without being able to devote 100% of your attention to doing so. If, in the opinion of an experienced observer, you aren't driving in a manner that indicates you are in complete control of the vehicle, absolutely you deserve a ticket.
If all you have is a camera with an interesting and perhaps pertinent video on it, it isn't going to be considered to be evidence - nobody knows how the video got there and there is almost certainly no documentation on how it was handled after the alleged acts occurred.
If you record something that you think might be valuable at trial later you need to get proper documentation (where and when it was taken at least) and document the chain of custody of the camera or cell phone from that point until the video is unloaded. Best to have a neutral third party handle that and put the video on some write-once media so it cannot be altered. Then have the person that did the transferring mark the finished DVD for identification and be prepared to testify that the DVD is the one they made. Then turn the DVD over to a lawyer.
Without doing all of this your video is going to be considered to be untrustworthy. It could have been altered. It could have been taken three days later with actors. Nobody knows and therefore it isn't "evidence" in any manner at all.
Since you wouldn't go through the trouble of properly handling and documenting a video that you didn't like there is pretty much no reason to worry about something being used against you that you took. However, the ATM camera across the street and the surveilance system for the convenience store both got you and those systems are going to come with lots and lots of documentation. Both are probably secured against tampering until the police come and collect the video. So remember, there are lots of video recording systems in use all over a modern city and the police can get all of that video.
You absolutely can have in-car video subpoenaed as part of a trial. Your lawyer does it and there is no way it can be denied. Losing the video is pretty clear at trial that something hinky is going on. There are rules about how in-car video has to be kept. My company deals with police archiving in-car video for this very reason.
Traffic court without a lawyer? Forget about it - nobody wants to deal with that and you would be correct.
Submitting your own video record is going to be problematic because there is no presumption (or even requirement) how this video has been handled. Who exactly would be available to testify that the video hasn't been altered? You would need a video forensic expert to be on hand and there would need to be documentation about the chain of custody of the video, just as for any other piece of evidence. Not having that pretty much means it would be excluded.
So if you have a video of police misconduct you need to get proper documentation and have witnesses that can testify about the chain of custody and handling of the video. Best to have a neutral third party take the video from the camera and put it on a DVD or something where is cannot be altered. And they need to mark the DVD and be prepared to testify that it is the DVD they made.
If you have users in a corporate environment that have Administrator rights and click on anything that is clickable then maybe Parental Controls are the right choice. Because clearly the employees are a bunch of children that need to be controlled.
A new, completely incompatible operating system today has pretty much zero chance of gathering even 0.1% of the current market unless it has something really big going for it.
Why would application developers (both internal corporate ones and ISVs) target a new operating system?
Today the most prevalent operating system is Windows, but OS X (mobile variety) is catching up. Right now if Apple were even the least bit interested in ISV software development they would likely be able to displace Microsoft in a few years. Unfortunately Apple is so disinterested in the ISV marketplace and intent on screwing over developers this is very unlikely to happen.
Today when building a platform-agnostic application there are three real possible targets:
Adding something new to that mix - regardless of who might do it - is going to be a tough sell. It would be insane for Microsoft to do this at this point because abandoning application compatibility would pretty much destroy their existing market as well as the new one being a flop. Apple was able to get away with it (twice!) only because the users are going to pretty much do whatever Apple tells them they have to. Microsoft foisted a somewhat incompatible operating system (Vista) on the world, and even with probably 90% of the applications working on it that 10% has meant a lot of people are sticking with XP still today.
The interesting thing will be to see what Google comes up with for their non-OS OS with virtually none of the services an OS provides. Who will target it for applications, and more to the point, why? Security will likely be very good - if there are no applications in a real executable sense, then it is really hard to have security problems. Same with disk storage - if there isn't any, you can't have persistent behaviors local to the machine itself.
The problem is that most people under 30 or so do not see "copyright infringement" as any sort of law worth paying attention to. In first grade the teacher was downloading software without paying for it and pretty much every day in school the same lesson was reinforced, day after day.
Sure, it is illegal and you can be sued. You can also get a ticket for speeding but this has no effect whatsoever on half (or more) of the drivers on the road today. There is no respect for the content owners, whoever they are - it is assumed that it some fat old white guy with plenty of money that doesn't really need the extra profit of one more sale.
Today, without major restructuring of the Internet at large, it can be assumed that within a few days of release of a DVD that the movie content will be ripped and made available online.
If an Internet user has the knowledge to access these "available" movies, they can be downloaded and viewed with little or no risk to the downloader. This may require some fancy work to prevent the content from being redistributed and if you do not know how to do this you are certainly exposing yourself to redistribution and the legal penalties that come from that.
If someone does not have this knowledge, they have to buy their content. Because of this we are rapidly approaching a two-class environment: some people know how to get content for free while others have to pay for it. Right now, the division between these classes is also enforced by lack of broadband capacity - if your connection is dial-up or a weak DSL link you can't download free content no matter what you know.
Today it is possible for content providers to still make money from the 2nd class "payers", but this is going to change rapidly. I don't see any possibility for stopping this movement, no matter how many lawsuits are filed. The penalty is just too remote a possibility and too far removed from the act of redistribution. You get a notice in the mail six months after doing something and you are supposed to remember doing it? Worse, there is a trial over something that occurred two years before. It is like getting a speeding ticket from a state you used to live in and six months after you sold the car. There just isn't any connection between the act and the penalty for it to seem real and not arbitrary.
I'd say the content providers are going to see their revenue shrink rapidly as more and more of the "payers" die off and are replaced by well-educated (in the Internet black arts) younger people with better Internet connections. They might be able to replace the direct sales revenue (which retailers share in) with some kind of ad-supported content in the future - but retailers will not be sharing in that at all. This puts WalMart as a content retailer out of the business entirely, as it does with Amazon and anyone else that would consider themselves a "retailer".
Oh well. I think it plain to say "Piracy Rules!" If your business model depends on people paying for digital content, someone out there is going to ruin your day.
There are two entirely different things that are both lumped together as "Identity Theft".
The first one is where someone manages to get a bank or loan company to give them credit based on false credentials. You wake up one morning and discover that you owe lots of people you never even heard of, perhaps as much as a year after the loan was given. This is big trouble, because your success depends on convincing the originator of the loan that they made a mistake. It can take years to clean this up and plenty of money. Fortunately, it is extremely rare.
The second sort of "Identity Theft" is where someone "borrows" your credit card number. It is nothing more than credit card fraud and takes about 10 minutes to clear up. It personally happens to me at least once a year. I believe that many businesses end up selling credit card numbers one way or another, usually through employees looking for some extra income. A valid credit card number is worth maybe $2 on the open market, so if you collect of 50 of them you have yourself $100. Plenty of people could use an extra $100 a week.
Credit card fraud is so incredibly common that nearly all large stores have insurance to cover their losses. So they pretty much don't care when it happens - they file for insurance coverage and are reimbursed. The credit card companies do not care at all and pretty much refuse to even attempt to prosecute the people doing it because it looks bad. So the only loser in this is a small business that gets taken on a credit card sale and doesn't have the insurance that bigger stores have.
With a "no prosecution" stand, credit card fraud is about as rampant as it could possibly be. There are no consequences to doing it. If you walk in to a store and try to use a fraudulent credit card it might not validate - around 1960 they called the cops. Today they take the card and suggest you get lost. I suppose if you insisted they call the police they might, but you wouldn't be charged with anything like credit card fraud because nobody cares. Probably end up getting charged with making an ass of yourself in public.
Yes, I have had a physical credit card stolen and reported to the police. I knew who took it and who used it in a store (successfully, I might add), but the police wouldn't do a thing unless the credit card company wanted to press charges. They never do, so they guy got the stuff from the store and got away with it clean.
The problem with nationalizing a company - any company - by the US government is that is pretty much opens a door that is very hard to close.
Further, once that door is open just a tiny little bit it makes it pretty obvious to anyone with sizable assets and either potential or actual large-scale liabilities that the same thing might happen to them. Suddenly, the US is a very bad place to have any assets because they might get seized.
Sure, you could claim that the US needs to nationalize BP because of the oil spill. So what about nationalizing Toyota because of their car problems? A whole lot more people may have been killed from Toyota's problems than will ever die because of the oil spill. Same thing really applies to GM and Ford for exactly the same reasons. Would GE be safe, considering they make a huge percentage of the jet airliner engines?
The problem isn't even that the government doesn't want to be in business. It is that once it is "acceptable" take stuff over where exactly do you draw the line and how do you keep Congress from not crossing over that line? Short answer is that you don't.
I'd say if BP was nationalized anyone with sizable assets in the US would simply pull out. If they needed some resource that was in the US there would be a subsidary set up to operate it and it would be treated as something that could disappear in a moment.
Basically, the US would be a third-world country overnight and there would be nothing anyone could do to stop it because it would be 1,000 independent decisions by boards of directors. I'd expect the unemployment to go from 20% to 40% in a year and stay that way basically forever.
It would be an incredibly stupid move. But, given the current government in Washington, it isn't anything that I would say would be impossible to do. And it would be extremely popular. For a while.
What was mentioned wasn't a sales tax but income taxes. A store already (collects and) pays a sales tax on goods sold and then somewhere along the line pays an income tax on the money collected.
Pretty much in the US if you make over $600 a year you are subject to income taxes. Period. On just about every dime you bring in. If you aren't reporting it as income, you are a tax cheat and robbing the people that should be getting your redistributed wealth, or so they say.
While it might be nice, I assure you that nobody sniffing, recording or accessing your encrypted (and cracked) wireless access point will ever be charged with "wiretapping". There does not appear to be any right to privacy on wireless computer communications at this point.
The first nuclear desalination plant was built in San Diego. Because of a little scuffle with Mr. Castro it was subsequently moved to Guantanamo to support the military base there. I believe Cuba cut off the water supply to the base sometime around 1962 or so.
There is no "voltage" requirement for desalination. The original plant - any any plant built today - would just boil the water and then condense the steam getting pure, distilled water out. There would be a lot of briney residue left over.]
Unfortunately, this briney residue would
likely be considered a hazardous waste and regulated. A nuclear plant built this way could also generate lots of electricity, but that probably wouldn't be allowed either. All in all, I suspect we are going to see a lot of the US Southwest become utterly uninhabitable within the next 50 years because of a lack of water. It isn't that we don't know what to do about the problem, it is that the solutions that will work are simply offensive to a rather vocal minority.
It makes much more sense, to them, to have extreme downward pressure on the population so that we can have a zero-impact "sustainable" way of life for the remaining humans who can then live side-by-side with Mother Nature. The fact that Mother Nature tends to eat her young and leave the unfit to die horribly is just a minor thing that "environmentalists" have never experienced.
Demand for water will certainly decrease as the population decreases.
The way to a "sustainable planet" is by decreasing the population. Pretty darn quick, too.
Unfortunately, billions of corpses will cause quite a bit of short-term pollution, but heck, we gotta get there somehow.
If you thought they gave you a binding contract, you were wrong. They had you sign a service agreement which is quite different. They offered you terms of service which are subject to change at any time and you accepted their terms.
No business is going to give a consumer (or even another business) a contract that commits them to anything unless there is no other option. And then, it will take six months to negotiate the contract between the lawyers and cost $10,000. Hardly practical for most things.
So what you get is a service agreement which commits them to nothing and commits you to nothing besides paying the bill for an agreed upon length of time. You might think it is some kind of contract, but it isn't.
Nobody in the 1970s was all that interested in a "safe" car except maybe a very small minority. And while these cars might have been safe, nobody is talking about what they cost or what sort of performance they had.
The "right" thing probably would have been for the US Government to nationalize the Big Three automakers and mandate that nobody could buy anything except an official US Government produced car. They could have then made the cars safe and high mileage. Nobody would have anything to compare them to and if they cost $50,000 each that would have just further reduced the dependence on automobiles. The could have used the highways right-of-way for rail lines and torn up most of the concrete.
All we really need is a truely benvolent dictator to tell us what the right way is and shove it down everyone's throats. We might actually be on the road to that, especially if the carbon tax goes through. We won't have to worry about consumer choice anymore - all of those complex decisions will be made for us.
Be careful what you wish for, in a Progressive/Liberal government world you just might get it.