I think the bigger problem, instead of people not using the cameras, will be people thinking that they don't need to look around just because they have a camera... So, they'll be staring intently at the rear-facing camera, when a kid from off to the side somewhere runs out behind the car.
Even people who are currently very good at looking behind/beside them might get a false sense of security from having the camera. "Hey, I've got one of these new reverse cams, I don't need to look anywhere but the screen while reversing."
If this law is implemented, it'll be interesting to see what effect it has on the "collisions while reversing" statistic. My guess is that it'll stay the same (people who don't want to pay attention now, will never pay attention) or get slightly worse (false sense of security actually decreasing alertness during reversing).
Either way, the politicians win by getting to tell everyone they are thinking of the children, and whoever makes/installs these cameras wins by having forced purchases. The people who lose are 100% of car owners, and possibly even those same children.
Indeed there is only one species of cannabis. Well maybe two or three depending on who you ask - some people describe up to three species: sativa, indica, and ruderalis. But regardless of how you choose to classify cannabis plants - all varieties do produce at least some amount of THC and have varying usefulness as hemp fiber (which I think has to do with how tall the woody/fibrous parts of the plant grow).
Now, even if the law doesn't differentiate between different potencies of cannabis, law enforcement should still take it into account. Generally weed that grows wild is "dirt weed", of a very low potency, and of limited usefulness as a drug. Hell, even top quality seeds can bear very weak marijuana, if the plant hasn't been properly and meticulously tended to. One of my friends used to be a grower, and having seen him work at it and sampling each one of his successive crops, I see that growing quality cannabis does take a fair bit of time, effort, and skill.
So, if someone's got a high-potency strain that's obviously been cultivated in some way (whether its irrigation, evidence of fertilizing, footpaths leading out to where the plants grow, growing in pots, growing indoors in any capacity...) then the lawmen can be sure that it was being intentionally cultivated. But if it's a wild strain of low-potency dirt weed growing in a ditch somewhere on a large property, I don't think that should prove that the property's owner was cultivating it "beyond a reasonable doubt." There's a reason it's called weed, it's fairly apt to popping up anywhere, and it would certainly be even more prevalent if we didn't have this 60+ years program of eradicating it.
Even if we've foolishly committed ourselves to a so-called war on marijuana, the least we could do is to make sure that only people who are, in fact, cultivating it get punished. Not innocent landowners who get caught in the crossfire.
While I haven't looked at the slavery and women's rights movements too deeply, trying to claim the civil rights movement as a Christian movement is just being dishonest. On the whole, it was definitely a social/political revolution, not a religious one. Remember that churches were just as segregated as anything else back in the civil rights days. Some didn't "integrate" until the 80s. Sure, some black church leaders supported civil rights - it's because they were black, not because they were church leaders. You can point to MLK as being a Baptist, and I can point to the religious trappings of the KKK on the opposite side. ("God's pure white children", etc.)
In more recent times, we see Christians (and other religious groups) being on the forefront of gay persecution. Not every church is as bad as the Westboro Baptist, but by and large they are not accepting of gay rights. The more evangelical churches, and the politicians that campaign on their religious values, have moved to claim gay persecution as one of their calls to arms.
Overall, I don't see religion as the root cause of many problems, it's just one of the symptoms of stupidity or a lack of critical thinking. I do think that, once people are hooked, it can encourage further stupidity, but then it can just be seen as the original stupidity advancing and perpetuating itself. My parents, and several others close to me, are highly religious and I've observed firsthand how it is generally holding our society back.
Just one example that's very personal to me: Several years ago I had a substance addiction problem, at 19, living with my parents and no way to support myself. My parents, at the urging of the pastor and members of their church, decided to stop funding my visits to the psychologist I had just decided to go to to seek help for several problems I'd had/have. "Men do not have the power to heal you, only God" they told me. I went to church with them for a few months and received what I can only describe as an evangelical exorcism, to "cast the demons out". Meanwhile my problem continued unabated and unhelped. A couple months later they decided to just throw me out on the street - "That way he'll have to turn to God." What do you know, my problem became acutely worse, being out on the street. A few weeks later, when I was at my absolute lowest point ever, they finally realized there would be blood on their hands if they didn't try to help me. They took me back and I finally convinced them that providing a stable living arrangement and qualified, professional help were the best things they could do. My condition improved greatly after that.
Religion is a obstacle on the road to logical thinking, and by extension, a better society. While some people may find it brings them happiness (ignorance equaling bliss), on the whole it does far more harm to the human species than good.
It is a totally awesome thing they found and probably gives them whole new ideas about how to grow thin 2d structures. Just a week ago there was another bit of news about awesome 2d ice channels in graphite that open and close to keep helium from going through them.
This reminds me a bit of a transistor...
Perhaps all these ways we're figuring out to manipulate things on an atomic scale will have some payoff in computing. It could be as simple as smaller fab processes for conventional computer chips. It could be evolutionary advancements of current chip technology, that's somehow augmented by using this new atom-level manipulation. Or it could mean revolutionary advancements, like quantum computing or some as-of-yet unimagined computing paradigm.
Dioxins have never been used as herbicides. The dioxins in Agent Orange were contaminants in the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, which were the two herbicidal components of Agent Orange.
TBH I don't know of any nerds under 35 who are particularly interested in comic books (some of them are interested in the spinoffs like movies and games, though.) I think comic books had their heyday in the 50s-80s, and are on the way out. Superhero comics anyway. Manga seems to be taking up some of the superhero-comic readership.
It's been close to a decade since PC games (consoles too?) had demos... I'd say piracy has completely replaced demos. The last one I remember playing is the Far Cry demo. The original Far Cry.
Seriously, if anyone can name me off even four big-name PC games released since 2006 that have had demos, I'll eat my hat.
Oh, they have no problem monitoring people within their borders. The fact that various three-letter-agencies (I can't recall if it was specifically the FBI or the CIA) kept close tabs on people who were seen as in opposition to the establishment (John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr, and Timothy Leary were extensively monitored) is well-known. Imagine all the stuff that we don't know... These examples happened like 40 years ago.
My first two examples weren't arrested or tried for anything (although Lennon had applications for US citizenship repeatedly denied despite him living in NY for years). The third one had a miniscule quantity of drugs planted in his car at a border crossing and was arrested, later being broken out of jail by the Weather Underground. See, they don't just throw you in jail for not liking the government or its policies. You're right, they could never do it like that, it's too obvious and would alert even people with their heads in the sand. What they do is they monitor you silently, covertly. If they dislike you enough, they either catch you slipping doing one of the myriad things they've criminalized, or they outright plant evidence on you - underage pornography in your computer, a joint butt in your ashtray. That's what they get you for.
Within the past decade, it's gotten even more trivial to monitor large amounts of people covertly or semi-covertly. Remember the stories here about a week ago detailing their new Facebook monitoring program? I wouldn't be surprised if they are monitoring many parts of the internet aside from Facebook, in a semi-automated way, to track down actual or potential "dissidents". To single people out for closer, more detailed monitoring. The concept that they need warrants for any of this stuff (or that such warrants aren't trivially easy to obtain, besides) is a myth, I don't think that's been true for the last 60 years, or more. They've long been putting together the regulatory framework to make this monitoring legal: think Patriot Act, and a dozen other pieces of legislation that chip away at our freedoms one by one. Not that it being illegal ever stopped them from doing it... If you think the Constitution, and the rights of the citizens, are anything more than toilet paper to each and everyone in the federal government, you are simply being ignorant.
Lossy compression such as MP3, AAC, and according to TFS also video compression, are all fundamentally based on FFT (fast fourier transforms). Depending on how well this new specific method works, we could see decreases in the time it takes to encode all this stuff. Which can be quite a long time... have you ever tried to do a 2-pass MPEG 4 conversion on a feature-length digital video? Video encoding doesn't scale well to multiple cores either, so nowadays when performance increases coming mostly from adding more cores... video encoding hasn't been getting faster at the same pace it used to. I'm thinking this new FFT algorithm could make a big difference in encoding speeds.
Additionally, I know lots of audio (and I'm assuming video) effects, DSPs of the kind you find in Adobe Audition, Audacity, et al., rely on FFTs. Computing such effects could get a lot faster. With increases in both the speed of adding effects, and compression afterwards, we might be seeing a significant speedup in the overall digital audio/video-editing process.
While I haven't taken up any position myself on fracking or this proposed volcano power, I recognize that they are a totally different game from nuke power. We've been playing around with nuclear reactions, in either a military or civilian context, for 70 years. How nuclear reactors work is well-understood, as are the risks. Reactor designs have advanced to a point where the only dangers are human stupidity, in various forms. Pumping water into a volcano, however... that's never been done. We have no conception of the risks.
It'd be a bad thing for MS, since they want people to shell out the money for their new OSes as often as possible. (Obvious.) It wouldn't be a bad thing for the users. But GP didn't seem to argue that it would be bad for the users.
You aren't the typical user. The typical Jane Q. Public Internet user uses almost nothing but Facebook, YouTube, Google, et al., maybe augmented by a couple other sites that suit their interests. I cite my parents, my aunt, all their church buddies, my neighbor, and my non-geek friends (hell, even the geek friends) as the source of my observations. Although the hard data (Alexa web rankings, and the profits these companies make) also agree with this.
Besides, you're assuming Google's end-game here is just to block your access to their service to piss you off or something. They don't care that you'll turn right around and use another search engine. You saw their SOPA message, which was the goal. They're trying to get as many people as possible to hear the message, to raise awareness about SOPA among the general public, hopefully enough awareness that the politicians will take notice and realize they can't quietly pass SOPA without anyone caring.
Ah, they're not willing to interrupt their business. It's just going to be the front page's color scheme turning black, with an advertisement-like notice about SOPA that can be waved away by a click. Money is still king...
"Tampering with the voting process", WTF? This doesn't have anything to do with the actual voting. This would just be Facebook decided to revoke THEIR services which were being rendered to the candidate. Revoking their support of a candidates campaign, effectively. Nobody's preventing anyone from going to the polls. Nobody's even preventing the candidates from getting their message out through alternate web sites and non-Internet methods, of which there are many. Are you suggesting that organizations shouldn't be allowed to freely revoke their material support of a politician?
I'm all for catching people who abuse reserved parking spaces and fining them, but $5,000 is excessive. That amounts to one-sixth of the median annual household income in the United States. Yeah, taking someone's parking spot is a dick move, but it's not dick enough to garnish a whole 2 months of their income. Unintended consequences - maybe his kid's guitar is gonna have to be pawned to make rent. Maybe that guy won't be able to afford a car repair, and loses his job because he can't get to work. For what? A parking space?
This sort of vindictive thinking you're displaying is the reason why we often have, for example, ridiculous sentencing guidelines for just about every crime, mandatory minimums, etc. (Judges who don't give a fuck also factor into this, and they display your same attitude.) This kind of thinking, when applied to matters of law and punishment, ruins lives. It's one of the things that contributes to us having the most incarcerated population of any developed nation, and one of the least effective justice systems.
Now, as far as what the proper amount of a parking fine should be, it should be proportional to your income. Consider my example in the first paragraph, then consider a millionaire like Steve Jobs - a $5k or even $10k fine really wouldn't punish him that much, relatively. Proportional fines would eliminate this discrepancy and bring that much more justice into our justice system. I'm really not sure why we don't have them already. But if you're going to go with a flat fine for whatever reason, I think $200-$500 would be a reasonable number. In my jurisdiction, the signs actually say "$500 MINIMUM FINE", if I remember correctly.
Well, the parent said -
"Fortunately there were not turns involved during that portion of the trip."
Which implies that, if there had been turns, that would have been unfortunate. Which implies that something bad would have happened - namely, the parent getting lost.
Personally, I could never understand people who relied solely on GPS for directions. Yes, it's very handy to have. But what if the battery runs out? Software or hardware error? Or, these gaps in coverage, which I didn't even know happened? Before any trip to a new place, I always trace the route on Google maps, and print it out. This way, not only do I have a hard-copy backup of my directions, I am also able to customize my route (which is oftentimes better than what my GPS picks). Not to mention, looking over the maps beforehand familiarizes me somewhat with my route and what's around it. This is ESPECIALLY important if I'm going on a long trip through multiple states that I'm totally unfamiliar with, like the parent.
You just don't get any of those benefits when all you do it get in your car, turn the ignition, and wait until the robot voice tells you when to turn.
Indeed - losing 21k domains sounds impressive... not so much when viewed in the light that the net loss for that day was only 1k (one twentieth of the number being paraded around in the headline).
To make this article even MORE useless, it fails to give any baseline for comparison... How many do they typically lose in a day? How many do they typically gain? This half-assed information for ONE DAY, makes for a, probably deliberately, misleading article.
It could be possible to track someone who's used Starbucks public wi-fi. Starbucks is going to know who was in their store at a specific date and time. They'll most likely have you on video surveillance. Say there were three people with their laptops on Starbucks wi-fi at the time the attack happened. It shouldn't be difficult to determine which one is the likely member of Anonymous through basic detective work. Or, you could set up surveillance on all three of them, and wait until the right one lets it slip that he did the attack, or is associated with Anonymous. This might seem like a lot of work to go through to catch the guy, these methods may even be illegal. But remember, this is the military-industrial-corporate-thinktank-government complex (aka BIG MONEY) we're talking about here. And, with the stolen CCs, theres going to be quite a few people who lost BIG MONEY in this. I wouldn't discount the lengths they'd be willing to go to get this guy. Some of these bigshots they pissed off may be able to pull strings at Starbucks to get the video surveillance tapes, maybe even data from Starbucks network itself (MAC addresses and more), if such data is logged. Or, they could just do their own dirty deeds and take it illegally from Starbucks. Some of the people pissed off in this incident may not give a fuck, like the Zetas. Maybe they don't even care to be sure they have the right guy - they're going to get him whacked, or plant kiddie porn on his computer, regardless.
There's no way they did this intentionally. The execution of arbitrary scripts from an MP3 file has far-ranging implications for normal users. Someone's going to end up using this exploit to write malware. If that becomes widespread, you'll get "Kindles get viruses" into the mind of the consumer. They did not want this bug/security flaw. Coincidentally, it's a "happy accident" for people who want to jailbreak their devices (which are a miniscule minority with no impact on Amazon's bottom line). But there's no reason why Amazon would want this type of vulnerability in their device.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the bigger problem, instead of people not using the cameras, will be people thinking that they don't need to look around just because they have a camera... So, they'll be staring intently at the rear-facing camera, when a kid from off to the side somewhere runs out behind the car.
Even people who are currently very good at looking behind/beside them might get a false sense of security from having the camera. "Hey, I've got one of these new reverse cams, I don't need to look anywhere but the screen while reversing."
If this law is implemented, it'll be interesting to see what effect it has on the "collisions while reversing" statistic. My guess is that it'll stay the same (people who don't want to pay attention now, will never pay attention) or get slightly worse (false sense of security actually decreasing alertness during reversing).
Either way, the politicians win by getting to tell everyone they are thinking of the children, and whoever makes/installs these cameras wins by having forced purchases. The people who lose are 100% of car owners, and possibly even those same children.
Indeed there is only one species of cannabis. Well maybe two or three depending on who you ask - some people describe up to three species: sativa, indica, and ruderalis. But regardless of how you choose to classify cannabis plants - all varieties do produce at least some amount of THC and have varying usefulness as hemp fiber (which I think has to do with how tall the woody/fibrous parts of the plant grow).
Now, even if the law doesn't differentiate between different potencies of cannabis, law enforcement should still take it into account. Generally weed that grows wild is "dirt weed", of a very low potency, and of limited usefulness as a drug. Hell, even top quality seeds can bear very weak marijuana, if the plant hasn't been properly and meticulously tended to. One of my friends used to be a grower, and having seen him work at it and sampling each one of his successive crops, I see that growing quality cannabis does take a fair bit of time, effort, and skill.
So, if someone's got a high-potency strain that's obviously been cultivated in some way (whether its irrigation, evidence of fertilizing, footpaths leading out to where the plants grow, growing in pots, growing indoors in any capacity...) then the lawmen can be sure that it was being intentionally cultivated. But if it's a wild strain of low-potency dirt weed growing in a ditch somewhere on a large property, I don't think that should prove that the property's owner was cultivating it "beyond a reasonable doubt." There's a reason it's called weed, it's fairly apt to popping up anywhere, and it would certainly be even more prevalent if we didn't have this 60+ years program of eradicating it.
Even if we've foolishly committed ourselves to a so-called war on marijuana, the least we could do is to make sure that only people who are, in fact, cultivating it get punished. Not innocent landowners who get caught in the crossfire.
Dude, I think I'm in a time warp right now... HUUUUACK COUGH HUUUAURGH KUH HWAAARK~ (oh shit chocobo noises)
While I haven't looked at the slavery and women's rights movements too deeply, trying to claim the civil rights movement as a Christian movement is just being dishonest. On the whole, it was definitely a social/political revolution, not a religious one. Remember that churches were just as segregated as anything else back in the civil rights days. Some didn't "integrate" until the 80s. Sure, some black church leaders supported civil rights - it's because they were black, not because they were church leaders. You can point to MLK as being a Baptist, and I can point to the religious trappings of the KKK on the opposite side. ("God's pure white children", etc.)
In more recent times, we see Christians (and other religious groups) being on the forefront of gay persecution. Not every church is as bad as the Westboro Baptist, but by and large they are not accepting of gay rights. The more evangelical churches, and the politicians that campaign on their religious values, have moved to claim gay persecution as one of their calls to arms.
Overall, I don't see religion as the root cause of many problems, it's just one of the symptoms of stupidity or a lack of critical thinking. I do think that, once people are hooked, it can encourage further stupidity, but then it can just be seen as the original stupidity advancing and perpetuating itself. My parents, and several others close to me, are highly religious and I've observed firsthand how it is generally holding our society back.
Just one example that's very personal to me: Several years ago I had a substance addiction problem, at 19, living with my parents and no way to support myself. My parents, at the urging of the pastor and members of their church, decided to stop funding my visits to the psychologist I had just decided to go to to seek help for several problems I'd had/have. "Men do not have the power to heal you, only God" they told me. I went to church with them for a few months and received what I can only describe as an evangelical exorcism, to "cast the demons out". Meanwhile my problem continued unabated and unhelped. A couple months later they decided to just throw me out on the street - "That way he'll have to turn to God." What do you know, my problem became acutely worse, being out on the street. A few weeks later, when I was at my absolute lowest point ever, they finally realized there would be blood on their hands if they didn't try to help me. They took me back and I finally convinced them that providing a stable living arrangement and qualified, professional help were the best things they could do. My condition improved greatly after that.
Religion is a obstacle on the road to logical thinking, and by extension, a better society. While some people may find it brings them happiness (ignorance equaling bliss), on the whole it does far more harm to the human species than good.
It is a totally awesome thing they found and probably gives them whole new ideas about how to grow thin 2d structures. Just a week ago there was another bit of news about awesome 2d ice channels in graphite that open and close to keep helium from going through them.
This reminds me a bit of a transistor...
Perhaps all these ways we're figuring out to manipulate things on an atomic scale will have some payoff in computing. It could be as simple as smaller fab processes for conventional computer chips. It could be evolutionary advancements of current chip technology, that's somehow augmented by using this new atom-level manipulation. Or it could mean revolutionary advancements, like quantum computing or some as-of-yet unimagined computing paradigm.
Dioxins have never been used as herbicides. The dioxins in Agent Orange were contaminants in the herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, which were the two herbicidal components of Agent Orange.
TBH I don't know of any nerds under 35 who are particularly interested in comic books (some of them are interested in the spinoffs like movies and games, though.) I think comic books had their heyday in the 50s-80s, and are on the way out. Superhero comics anyway. Manga seems to be taking up some of the superhero-comic readership.
"Movie rentals" - I don't think Blockbuster DVDs (or UK equivalent) are any cheaper than the streaming solutions than the G.P. mentioned...
"Pirated version not the demo..."
It's been close to a decade since PC games (consoles too?) had demos... I'd say piracy has completely replaced demos. The last one I remember playing is the Far Cry demo. The original Far Cry.
Seriously, if anyone can name me off even four big-name PC games released since 2006 that have had demos, I'll eat my hat.
Oh, they have no problem monitoring people within their borders. The fact that various three-letter-agencies (I can't recall if it was specifically the FBI or the CIA) kept close tabs on people who were seen as in opposition to the establishment (John Lennon, Martin Luther King Jr, and Timothy Leary were extensively monitored) is well-known. Imagine all the stuff that we don't know... These examples happened like 40 years ago.
My first two examples weren't arrested or tried for anything (although Lennon had applications for US citizenship repeatedly denied despite him living in NY for years). The third one had a miniscule quantity of drugs planted in his car at a border crossing and was arrested, later being broken out of jail by the Weather Underground. See, they don't just throw you in jail for not liking the government or its policies. You're right, they could never do it like that, it's too obvious and would alert even people with their heads in the sand. What they do is they monitor you silently, covertly. If they dislike you enough, they either catch you slipping doing one of the myriad things they've criminalized, or they outright plant evidence on you - underage pornography in your computer, a joint butt in your ashtray. That's what they get you for.
Within the past decade, it's gotten even more trivial to monitor large amounts of people covertly or semi-covertly. Remember the stories here about a week ago detailing their new Facebook monitoring program? I wouldn't be surprised if they are monitoring many parts of the internet aside from Facebook, in a semi-automated way, to track down actual or potential "dissidents". To single people out for closer, more detailed monitoring. The concept that they need warrants for any of this stuff (or that such warrants aren't trivially easy to obtain, besides) is a myth, I don't think that's been true for the last 60 years, or more. They've long been putting together the regulatory framework to make this monitoring legal: think Patriot Act, and a dozen other pieces of legislation that chip away at our freedoms one by one. Not that it being illegal ever stopped them from doing it... If you think the Constitution, and the rights of the citizens, are anything more than toilet paper to each and everyone in the federal government, you are simply being ignorant.
For such a system to work, you'd first need to have the database that links UPCs of retail items to the detailed information about its manufacture.
Good thing there's nothing to stop you from patenting a non-working idea though!
Lossy compression such as MP3, AAC, and according to TFS also video compression, are all fundamentally based on FFT (fast fourier transforms). Depending on how well this new specific method works, we could see decreases in the time it takes to encode all this stuff. Which can be quite a long time... have you ever tried to do a 2-pass MPEG 4 conversion on a feature-length digital video? Video encoding doesn't scale well to multiple cores either, so nowadays when performance increases coming mostly from adding more cores... video encoding hasn't been getting faster at the same pace it used to. I'm thinking this new FFT algorithm could make a big difference in encoding speeds.
Additionally, I know lots of audio (and I'm assuming video) effects, DSPs of the kind you find in Adobe Audition, Audacity, et al., rely on FFTs. Computing such effects could get a lot faster. With increases in both the speed of adding effects, and compression afterwards, we might be seeing a significant speedup in the overall digital audio/video-editing process.
While I haven't taken up any position myself on fracking or this proposed volcano power, I recognize that they are a totally different game from nuke power. We've been playing around with nuclear reactions, in either a military or civilian context, for 70 years. How nuclear reactors work is well-understood, as are the risks. Reactor designs have advanced to a point where the only dangers are human stupidity, in various forms. Pumping water into a volcano, however... that's never been done. We have no conception of the risks.
It'd be a bad thing for MS, since they want people to shell out the money for their new OSes as often as possible. (Obvious.) It wouldn't be a bad thing for the users. But GP didn't seem to argue that it would be bad for the users.
You aren't the typical user. The typical Jane Q. Public Internet user uses almost nothing but Facebook, YouTube, Google, et al., maybe augmented by a couple other sites that suit their interests. I cite my parents, my aunt, all their church buddies, my neighbor, and my non-geek friends (hell, even the geek friends) as the source of my observations. Although the hard data (Alexa web rankings, and the profits these companies make) also agree with this.
Besides, you're assuming Google's end-game here is just to block your access to their service to piss you off or something. They don't care that you'll turn right around and use another search engine. You saw their SOPA message, which was the goal. They're trying to get as many people as possible to hear the message, to raise awareness about SOPA among the general public, hopefully enough awareness that the politicians will take notice and realize they can't quietly pass SOPA without anyone caring.
Ah, they're not willing to interrupt their business. It's just going to be the front page's color scheme turning black, with an advertisement-like notice about SOPA that can be waved away by a click. Money is still king...
"Tampering with the voting process", WTF? This doesn't have anything to do with the actual voting. This would just be Facebook decided to revoke THEIR services which were being rendered to the candidate. Revoking their support of a candidates campaign, effectively. Nobody's preventing anyone from going to the polls. Nobody's even preventing the candidates from getting their message out through alternate web sites and non-Internet methods, of which there are many. Are you suggesting that organizations shouldn't be allowed to freely revoke their material support of a politician?
I'm all for catching people who abuse reserved parking spaces and fining them, but $5,000 is excessive. That amounts to one-sixth of the median annual household income in the United States. Yeah, taking someone's parking spot is a dick move, but it's not dick enough to garnish a whole 2 months of their income. Unintended consequences - maybe his kid's guitar is gonna have to be pawned to make rent. Maybe that guy won't be able to afford a car repair, and loses his job because he can't get to work. For what? A parking space?
This sort of vindictive thinking you're displaying is the reason why we often have, for example, ridiculous sentencing guidelines for just about every crime, mandatory minimums, etc. (Judges who don't give a fuck also factor into this, and they display your same attitude.) This kind of thinking, when applied to matters of law and punishment, ruins lives. It's one of the things that contributes to us having the most incarcerated population of any developed nation, and one of the least effective justice systems.
Now, as far as what the proper amount of a parking fine should be, it should be proportional to your income. Consider my example in the first paragraph, then consider a millionaire like Steve Jobs - a $5k or even $10k fine really wouldn't punish him that much, relatively. Proportional fines would eliminate this discrepancy and bring that much more justice into our justice system. I'm really not sure why we don't have them already. But if you're going to go with a flat fine for whatever reason, I think $200-$500 would be a reasonable number. In my jurisdiction, the signs actually say "$500 MINIMUM FINE", if I remember correctly.
Well, the parent said -
"Fortunately there were not turns involved during that portion of the trip."
Which implies that, if there had been turns, that would have been unfortunate. Which implies that something bad would have happened - namely, the parent getting lost.
Personally, I could never understand people who relied solely on GPS for directions. Yes, it's very handy to have. But what if the battery runs out? Software or hardware error? Or, these gaps in coverage, which I didn't even know happened? Before any trip to a new place, I always trace the route on Google maps, and print it out. This way, not only do I have a hard-copy backup of my directions, I am also able to customize my route (which is oftentimes better than what my GPS picks). Not to mention, looking over the maps beforehand familiarizes me somewhat with my route and what's around it. This is ESPECIALLY important if I'm going on a long trip through multiple states that I'm totally unfamiliar with, like the parent.
You just don't get any of those benefits when all you do it get in your car, turn the ignition, and wait until the robot voice tells you when to turn.
Indeed - losing 21k domains sounds impressive... not so much when viewed in the light that the net loss for that day was only 1k (one twentieth of the number being paraded around in the headline). To make this article even MORE useless, it fails to give any baseline for comparison... How many do they typically lose in a day? How many do they typically gain? This half-assed information for ONE DAY, makes for a, probably deliberately, misleading article.
It could be possible to track someone who's used Starbucks public wi-fi. Starbucks is going to know who was in their store at a specific date and time. They'll most likely have you on video surveillance. Say there were three people with their laptops on Starbucks wi-fi at the time the attack happened. It shouldn't be difficult to determine which one is the likely member of Anonymous through basic detective work. Or, you could set up surveillance on all three of them, and wait until the right one lets it slip that he did the attack, or is associated with Anonymous. This might seem like a lot of work to go through to catch the guy, these methods may even be illegal. But remember, this is the military-industrial-corporate-thinktank-government complex (aka BIG MONEY) we're talking about here. And, with the stolen CCs, theres going to be quite a few people who lost BIG MONEY in this. I wouldn't discount the lengths they'd be willing to go to get this guy. Some of these bigshots they pissed off may be able to pull strings at Starbucks to get the video surveillance tapes, maybe even data from Starbucks network itself (MAC addresses and more), if such data is logged. Or, they could just do their own dirty deeds and take it illegally from Starbucks. Some of the people pissed off in this incident may not give a fuck, like the Zetas. Maybe they don't even care to be sure they have the right guy - they're going to get him whacked, or plant kiddie porn on his computer, regardless.
Presumably, it would only take "Warner Music Group says so", if it works anything like the DMCA notices on Youtube and such.
Presumably a pyramid also builds up?
There's no way they did this intentionally. The execution of arbitrary scripts from an MP3 file has far-ranging implications for normal users. Someone's going to end up using this exploit to write malware. If that becomes widespread, you'll get "Kindles get viruses" into the mind of the consumer. They did not want this bug/security flaw. Coincidentally, it's a "happy accident" for people who want to jailbreak their devices (which are a miniscule minority with no impact on Amazon's bottom line). But there's no reason why Amazon would want this type of vulnerability in their device.
I think it's more of the lack of a sufficient space program that'll lose us "unique resources."