They're not pulling one over on the government- they're pulling one over on us.
In the 1950's, the corporate share of taxes was about 50%. Citizens paid half, corporations paid half.
Now? it is about 2%.
You do realize that it all comes out of peoples' pockets no matter where you take it, right? Tax a business more and it profits less and, in turn, employees are rewarded less. You may be able to raise the share of taxes so that the majority is taken from businesses instead of individuals, but that's going to do absolutely nothing to increase workers' actual take-home.
Don't be naive. Yes, it is irresponsible to leave it unlocked because society isn't civilized and thieves do exist, but that doesn't mean I own any responsibility for the actions of a person who chooses to break the law. If they were an honest person they wouldn't steal the car. Simply providing an opportunity for a crime in no way makes me responsible for the criminal's personal morals, ethics, or decisions. If I locked the car and the same thief broke into the car, hotwired it, and then drove off, would I still be partly responsible because I didn't use The Club? What if I used the club but they broke it off? Then am I partly responsible because I don't have a remote kill-switch on the engine? Because I didn't put a boot on a wheel? Because I didn't take a taxi instead?
Same way, f you don't lock your car door and leave the keys in the ignition, parked in the lot at the mall while you shop, and it gets stolen, you can't blame the car thief 100%. Some of the responsibility rests on you for your carelessness.
Holy shit, you are delusional. A car thief is not 100% responsible for each car he has stolen? Responsibility is not a sliding scale based on the ease of the crime, the thief is 100% responsible once he decides to break the law and steal the car. Just because it's easy for me to shoplift at my local supermarket doesn't make it partially ok for me to take product without paying.
There's something sad about the fact that a flat-screen monitor with integrated speakers won "Best of CES Innovations Award" this year. Sure, it looks slick... but best of innovations?
Can you please show me in this "constitution" where it says people have a right to fly? Oh wait, you're talking about the searches that you consent to when you when you enter security checkpoints. Hm... that you *consent* to. By all means, don't consent to the searches, don't enter the security checkpoints, don't fly. You have no obligation nor protected right to air-travel. If you like airports so much, you could even go to the airport to rent a car and drive to your destination without being searched.
Now, back to the point about the system being broken but your *rights* not being violated...
Get rid of the TSA! They're a drain on resources and violate my constitutional rights in the name of 'security'.
The current process is flawed, but stop whining that your rights were violated when in fact they were not. You consent to the search when you enter the security area. If you don't want to be searched, don't enter the checkpoint. You can't get on the plane without going through the checkpoint but flying isn't a right. If you don't like the airport searches, there are other methods to get to your destination that may be less convenient but don't involve such security measures.
It is a shame that the 9th Circuit decided you can no longer walk away from the process once you begin (decision (pdf)), but you still have to enter the checkpoint to begin the process. The TSA isn't actively approaching people wandering around the airport and demanding searches upon threat of arrest.
I know they'll be shared resources, but I still don't see the major benefit vs better general education. Kids can't read e-books while dad is checking the weather or market prices for his crop. Sadly, dad's information isn't going to be of much use to him. What good is it to know that your crop has a higher value in a village 3 miles away if he has no practical means of transport to that market? What good is it to know that a storm front is moving in if he has no practical ability to harvest his crop a day or 2 early and no physically-protected location to store that harvest? What good are better returns 1 week from now if his family needs to eat *today*?
For instance, let's say the village farmer can get $1/bushel more for his crop if he takes it to the neighboring village. He can't just run over there with 1 bushel because it's several kilometers and that would take a lot of time for very little return. So he has to build up a minimum amount that is worth transporting for the extra return. Now the situation gets more complex because the farmer doesn't have the proper facilities to harvest or store his crop to build an inventory. He has to leave more product growing in the field in the hopes that, at some point, he can capitalize on market differences. Unfortunately, he's sinking costs (seed, water, energy) into growing a larger crop while harvesting less product (not to mention the risk of a weather front destroying the crop and putting him in a situation from which he cannot recover because after his bigger up-front expenses he has no seed money for next year). Ideal long-term: that may pay off for him but it's not guaranteed. Realistic short-term: he's a very poor farmer and his family needs to eat. So he's forced to harvest the crop like he traditionally did and when the markets shift and he could make a little extra from the neighboring market finally arrives he no longer has a surplus to harvest/transport.
Same thing goes for weather reports. Our farmer sees a big stormfront moving in that may decimate his crop. Unfortunately he's a poor small farmer whose normal business model is to harvest and transport directly to market, so he has no facility in which to store his crop. What the hell is he supposed to do with this information? Now he knows a few days earlier that his crop will be ruined but he still has no means with which to avert this disaster.
Free-flow of information is only useful if there is a way to do something with that information. If transportation infrastructures were better, small villages could trade more product more easily. That inter-village trading will result in better information exchange which will in turn (eventually) reult in better returns on crops, livestock, etc. Once that starts to happen, then these villages would have use for OLPC and it could be world-altering because they'd have the information but also the means to capitalize on that information. Unfortunately, right now it's more just a circle jerk for academics, geeks, & hardware manufacturers.
My company does a lot of work with farmers in developing nations. We've seen time and again that simply giving them information doesn't help much because their situation and/or mindset is fundamentally flawed. When they need money *today* it's impossible to convince them that if they delay harvest for another 7 days their crop will be worth orders of magnitude more. We've even tried to assume the investment risk and pay them up-front for a future harvest but they take the money and inevitably we didn't get the product we paid for. Giving people information and expecting them to process it and react the way we do is simply naive. Cultures have to walk before they can run. Mindsets need to change which will only happen when infrastructures get better. Explaining the theory of exporting your crop to a neighboring village is pointless if it's difficult to transport. If the means to transport exists, the theory of exporting a crop will become reality without needing to be taught.
You're missing the point. It's not that $100m spent on OLPC won't eventually yield returns, but that $100m spent on teachers & better learning environments will yield better returns. The real problem isn't that kids in developing countries are getting great pen & paper education but lack digital tools, it's that they're not getting enough education period.
The above linked post addresses the problem that there are 100 million children needing education in India. India could spend $400 million and still only have enough laptops for 2 kids out of 100. Even if they share, the percentage of kids using these tools will be extremely low. That same amount of money could be spent on teachers, books, classrooms, sanitation needs, etc. and provide a boost for a much greater percentage of the student population.
So here's the quandary: Is it better to provide giant educational leaps & opportunities to a miniscule portion of the population, or to offer moderate educational benefits to as many children as possible? This is further complicated by the class structures in the countries. It's likely that the higher-status kids will wind up with the XOs at the expense of the lower-status kids. The Haves continue to have, and the Have-Nots continue to go without. Nothing changes despite how noble the project seems on the surface.
I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. I wasn't being disingenuous, I travel internationally for business on a regular basis and have never had an experience like that nor have I heard of anything along those lines from the other people I know.
I still hold to my belief that behavioral profiling is inherently as effective if not more effective than pure random selection. Someone in your situation (noticable anxiety, odd carry-on contents, out-of-the-norm destinations) deserves more attention than the business traveler with OneWorld Emerald status.
Well, given that any additional delay in an airport already beset by myriad "security" delays is a problem and might make you miss a flight and could, as a result ruin your holiday, I'm not sure that's melodramatic.
Secondary inspections don't take much time. They generally go through your bag(s), go over you with a metal detector wand, and pat you down. Occasionally they run residue tests on your bags or your person and/or use air-jet systems to see what partical trace they can find. The longest I've ever been stuck in secondary was 15 minutes and that included residue tests and a supervisor consultation.
My point is this: Even if you don't get selected by one of the profilers, there's still a good chance you might end up in secondary so it should be budgeted into your time. If you miss your flight because you got held up for 5-10 minutes in secondary, did you really miss your flight solely because of the inspection? Or was it because you couldn't find parking? Traffic? Left home late? Woke up late? If you ever get to the airport with less than 15 minutes "fudge time" for terminal/checkpoint delays you can't reasonably be upset if you miss your flight. If you're operating on that slim of a margin, even if you skate through security without holdup you're still boarding the plane moments before it's taking off, as opposed to 30-40 minutes earlier when boarding began. It seems a bit spurious to blame the security checkpoint when there were probably multiple contributing factors.
And as we're seeing more examples of people being detained and denied travel for pretty spurious reasons, well no, I don't consider any extra people going to a secondary screening lottery to be any better.
I do agree with you that the security process is screwed up, but I think this behavioral profiling is better than the stupid random selection system that goes on now. Other posters have bemoaned the 99%+ false-positive rate. I'd love to know what the false-positive rate is for all the randomly-selected people. I'd imagine it's greater if only for the fact that anybody with something hide could simply ditch their contraband prior to entering the security queue (the marked boarding passes are pretty easy to pick up on if you fly more than once in a while).
Because that's what's going to happen, because with all this overhyped security I'm tense and slightly afraid when I'm dealing with these people anyway. Why? Because they have the power, on suspiciuon alone, to really ruin my day, my entire holiday, my business trip or perhaps even my life, depending on just how far they want to take everything.
You know the *worst* they can do is flag you for secondary screening? You know you can also get sent to secondary for a variety of other reasons from random selection to carry-on contents to metal levels when you walk through the scanner? If your life is so easily ruined you should never go to the airport. On the off-chance your boarding pass gets printed with "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" in the bottom corner you're going to make a stop at secondary regardless of whether a microexpression got misread or not. That's an awful big risk to take. I'm a frequent flier and I hate airport security as much as the next guy, but it's a bit melodramatic to pretend your entire holiday or life might be ruined because a TSA officer said, "using the back of my hand I'm going to touch the inside of your thigh" (and yes, that's as bad as the secondary pat-downs get).
For a little more perspective, since January 2006 they've flagged 70,000 people. That's a rate of about 96 people per day, or 1 every 15 minutes. SEATAC handles 30 million travellers a year which means that on an hourly basis 3420 travelers are unaffected by this program and 4 extra people get sent to secondary. Is that really so bad?
You'd have to study more than just algorithms to get on a plane - all of the data the barcode represents would have to be in the airline's computer as well, else you won't ever get past the gate.
Ticket numbers are tied to specific passengers, not just flight & seat info. If you got to the point where you could accurately predict future ticket numbers for other passengers, you'd be able to get past security and likely on the plane... until a legitimate passenger shows up with the same ticket number. Even if you didn't sit in the seat you forged, they'd force everyone to disembark and reauthenticate themselves with photo-ids. Then there's the uncomfortable situation of trying to explain why you forged a boarding pass to circumvent security measures.
No chocolate pixies here, just a realist who doesn't automatically assume every company is evil. Hanlon's Razor isn't a perfect fit here but there's no reason to assume malice from 1 registrar when many people have experienced these effects with a multiple registrars. There are plenty of posts illustrating that the WHOIS process isn't secure and can be sniffed or "tasted" at several points. I don't know Bob Parsons personally so I can't vouch for his integrity, but since he decries the ill effects of this practise and there is no real evidence to suggest that GoDaddy is involved I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Now, if WHOIS through every other registrar was guaranteed to be safe but for some reason squatters were snapping up domains searched through GoDaddy... you'd have a point. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Actually, Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy) has been complaining about "domain tasting" and "domain kiting" for years. Google Bob Parsons domain tasting and look at the results. I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening upstream from Godaddy, but I'd be shocked to find Godaddy is in any way willingly facilitating the practise.
Whatever the merits of Sodomsky's tastes, what got me was this portion of the court's opinion: "[T]he playing of videos already in the computer was a manner of ensuring that the burner was functioning properly." It's hard to tell who's the bigger idiot here, the CC employee for thinking that playing files off the hard drive would verify the operation of a DVD drive, or the court for accepting that kind of crap!
While not the most scientific or "correct" way to verify a burn job finished successfuly, is it that uncommon for people to do a quick verification by opening files on media they just burned? I could see one of these low-paid chain-store techs burning several folders to a DVD and then opening random image/video files on the burned media to see if things worked.
He's a tard for using a "full featured word processor" for a "simple find and replace" Two points you and the other fanboys are missing: (1) there IS no text editor for "a simple find and replace" in a default micro$oft system, and (2) full featured text editors in Linux do NOT load the whole file in memory before opening it.
Two things you don't get:
The vast majority of people buying computers these days don't need to do find and replace on text files that are hundreds of megabytes or larger. If you need to perform that operation, you probably aren't just cruising on a clean "default micro$oft system" and hopefully are capabale of finding the right tool for the job. Either way, your argument is a strawman because the parent poster said Word was the wrong tool for the particular job and you responded by saying MS doesn't include the right tool.
The parent also used the term "full featured word processor" and you responded with a comment about "full featured text editors". A word processor is for composing & formatting documents while a text editor is simply for editing text. Just because you don't know the difference doesn't mean there isn't one.
I could call you an idiot and a shill for completely missing the point in your haste to slam Microsoft, but that wouldn't help foster an intelligent discussion, would it?
It appears that each meter is meant to be placed in between 2 spaces instead of directly alongside a single space, and is only good for the 2 spaces on either side of it. Vehicle arrival/departure seems to be monitored by linked vehicle sensors embedded in the pavement (or curb?). So they get a snapshot of your plate as you pull in and 1 as you leave and it's married up with a sensor in the ground saying your car never moved during the time in between the photos.
One of the other features listed is that the machine sends an alert out when it detects it needs maintenance. Maybe it could detect and report camera obstruction or vandalism?
I also wonder if it will scan plates as soon as it detects the presence of a new vehicle - could it report an invalid or unregistered plate or a plate with warrants against the registered owner or would this just turn up as bad data when it attempts to print a ticket...?
Curious technology... since it's wired to the internet, I wonder if they'd provide a facility to pay via website or mobile phone. (A different electronic system recently deployed near SF allows you to "feed" your meter using your mobile phone which is quite convenient if you had to walk a block or 2 to your final destination.)
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting concept. On the vendor's website there's a "grace period" feature listed that indicates it could be possible to pay off an expired meter. I'll be curious to see how many cities turn that switch off.
(I haven't seen one live yet, just heard about them and used Google to find that article.)
one who presents a candidate for baptism or confirmation and undertakes responsibility for the person's religious education or spiritual welfare
one who assumes responsibility for some other person or thing
a person or an organization that pays for or plans and carries out a project or activity; especially : one that pays the cost of a radio or television program usually in return for advertising time during its course
A sponsor is definitely responsible for the presence of an ad, so it is absolutely a sponsored ad and the second definiteion applies. It is slightly less direct to use the third definition since the money is being paid specifically on ad placement and not an ambiguous sponsorship with considerations, nevertheless it is financing Google's operation in return for advertising so the definition could be used. In either case, it is not innacurate to consider paid listings to be "sponsored".
Of course, neither scenario is the same as making a purchase at a supermarket. The buyer is not taking sole responsibility for the supermarket's presence and the buyer is not asking the supermarket to advertise the buyer or the buyer's products. You cannot simply use any scenario where money changes hands as an example of sponsorship.
Since when has "sponsored" been a weasel word? When a sports team or race car has sponsors' logos all over their gear, does anyone doubt that there was a business arrangement? When a TV program has an announcer's voice saying, "Sponsored by Brand X", does anyone doubt it's an advertisement? Even if "sponsored" does not explicitely mean that money changed hands, it does mean that those results are there as the result of a sponsor, meaning they are not the product of the Google search algorithm. That isn't fraud just because some people are illiterate.
If changing the background color and adding a border to segregate sponsored links from search results is not enough, why should we assume that using a different font will make a difference?
Slashdot Mirror
Just wanted to say thanks for posting that link. I'd never read that article before and I found it very enjoyable.
In the 1950's, the corporate share of taxes was about 50%. Citizens paid half, corporations paid half.
Now? it is about 2%.
You do realize that it all comes out of peoples' pockets no matter where you take it, right? Tax a business more and it profits less and, in turn, employees are rewarded less. You may be able to raise the share of taxes so that the majority is taken from businesses instead of individuals, but that's going to do absolutely nothing to increase workers' actual take-home.
Don't be naive. Yes, it is irresponsible to leave it unlocked because society isn't civilized and thieves do exist, but that doesn't mean I own any responsibility for the actions of a person who chooses to break the law. If they were an honest person they wouldn't steal the car. Simply providing an opportunity for a crime in no way makes me responsible for the criminal's personal morals, ethics, or decisions. If I locked the car and the same thief broke into the car, hotwired it, and then drove off, would I still be partly responsible because I didn't use The Club? What if I used the club but they broke it off? Then am I partly responsible because I don't have a remote kill-switch on the engine? Because I didn't put a boot on a wheel? Because I didn't take a taxi instead?
Holy shit, you are delusional. A car thief is not 100% responsible for each car he has stolen? Responsibility is not a sliding scale based on the ease of the crime, the thief is 100% responsible once he decides to break the law and steal the car. Just because it's easy for me to shoplift at my local supermarket doesn't make it partially ok for me to take product without paying.
There's something sad about the fact that a flat-screen monitor with integrated speakers won "Best of CES Innovations Award" this year. Sure, it looks slick... but best of innovations?
Can you please show me in this "constitution" where it says people have a right to fly? Oh wait, you're talking about the searches that you consent to when you when you enter security checkpoints. Hm... that you *consent* to. By all means, don't consent to the searches, don't enter the security checkpoints, don't fly. You have no obligation nor protected right to air-travel. If you like airports so much, you could even go to the airport to rent a car and drive to your destination without being searched.
Now, back to the point about the system being broken but your *rights* not being violated...
The current process is flawed, but stop whining that your rights were violated when in fact they were not. You consent to the search when you enter the security area. If you don't want to be searched, don't enter the checkpoint. You can't get on the plane without going through the checkpoint but flying isn't a right. If you don't like the airport searches, there are other methods to get to your destination that may be less convenient but don't involve such security measures.
It is a shame that the 9th Circuit decided you can no longer walk away from the process once you begin (decision (pdf)), but you still have to enter the checkpoint to begin the process. The TSA isn't actively approaching people wandering around the airport and demanding searches upon threat of arrest.
I wish I had mod points. Very well put.
I know they'll be shared resources, but I still don't see the major benefit vs better general education. Kids can't read e-books while dad is checking the weather or market prices for his crop. Sadly, dad's information isn't going to be of much use to him. What good is it to know that your crop has a higher value in a village 3 miles away if he has no practical means of transport to that market? What good is it to know that a storm front is moving in if he has no practical ability to harvest his crop a day or 2 early and no physically-protected location to store that harvest? What good are better returns 1 week from now if his family needs to eat *today*?
For instance, let's say the village farmer can get $1/bushel more for his crop if he takes it to the neighboring village. He can't just run over there with 1 bushel because it's several kilometers and that would take a lot of time for very little return. So he has to build up a minimum amount that is worth transporting for the extra return. Now the situation gets more complex because the farmer doesn't have the proper facilities to harvest or store his crop to build an inventory. He has to leave more product growing in the field in the hopes that, at some point, he can capitalize on market differences. Unfortunately, he's sinking costs (seed, water, energy) into growing a larger crop while harvesting less product (not to mention the risk of a weather front destroying the crop and putting him in a situation from which he cannot recover because after his bigger up-front expenses he has no seed money for next year). Ideal long-term: that may pay off for him but it's not guaranteed. Realistic short-term: he's a very poor farmer and his family needs to eat. So he's forced to harvest the crop like he traditionally did and when the markets shift and he could make a little extra from the neighboring market finally arrives he no longer has a surplus to harvest/transport.
Same thing goes for weather reports. Our farmer sees a big stormfront moving in that may decimate his crop. Unfortunately he's a poor small farmer whose normal business model is to harvest and transport directly to market, so he has no facility in which to store his crop. What the hell is he supposed to do with this information? Now he knows a few days earlier that his crop will be ruined but he still has no means with which to avert this disaster.
Free-flow of information is only useful if there is a way to do something with that information. If transportation infrastructures were better, small villages could trade more product more easily. That inter-village trading will result in better information exchange which will in turn (eventually) reult in better returns on crops, livestock, etc. Once that starts to happen, then these villages would have use for OLPC and it could be world-altering because they'd have the information but also the means to capitalize on that information. Unfortunately, right now it's more just a circle jerk for academics, geeks, & hardware manufacturers.
My company does a lot of work with farmers in developing nations. We've seen time and again that simply giving them information doesn't help much because their situation and/or mindset is fundamentally flawed. When they need money *today* it's impossible to convince them that if they delay harvest for another 7 days their crop will be worth orders of magnitude more. We've even tried to assume the investment risk and pay them up-front for a future harvest but they take the money and inevitably we didn't get the product we paid for. Giving people information and expecting them to process it and react the way we do is simply naive. Cultures have to walk before they can run. Mindsets need to change which will only happen when infrastructures get better. Explaining the theory of exporting your crop to a neighboring village is pointless if it's difficult to transport. If the means to transport exists, the theory of exporting a crop will become reality without needing to be taught.
You're missing the point. It's not that $100m spent on OLPC won't eventually yield returns, but that $100m spent on teachers & better learning environments will yield better returns. The real problem isn't that kids in developing countries are getting great pen & paper education but lack digital tools, it's that they're not getting enough education period.
The above linked post addresses the problem that there are 100 million children needing education in India. India could spend $400 million and still only have enough laptops for 2 kids out of 100. Even if they share, the percentage of kids using these tools will be extremely low. That same amount of money could be spent on teachers, books, classrooms, sanitation needs, etc. and provide a boost for a much greater percentage of the student population.
So here's the quandary: Is it better to provide giant educational leaps & opportunities to a miniscule portion of the population, or to offer moderate educational benefits to as many children as possible? This is further complicated by the class structures in the countries. It's likely that the higher-status kids will wind up with the XOs at the expense of the lower-status kids. The Haves continue to have, and the Have-Nots continue to go without. Nothing changes despite how noble the project seems on the surface.
I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. I wasn't being disingenuous, I travel internationally for business on a regular basis and have never had an experience like that nor have I heard of anything along those lines from the other people I know.
I still hold to my belief that behavioral profiling is inherently as effective if not more effective than pure random selection. Someone in your situation (noticable anxiety, odd carry-on contents, out-of-the-norm destinations) deserves more attention than the business traveler with OneWorld Emerald status.
Secondary inspections don't take much time. They generally go through your bag(s), go over you with a metal detector wand, and pat you down. Occasionally they run residue tests on your bags or your person and/or use air-jet systems to see what partical trace they can find. The longest I've ever been stuck in secondary was 15 minutes and that included residue tests and a supervisor consultation.
My point is this: Even if you don't get selected by one of the profilers, there's still a good chance you might end up in secondary so it should be budgeted into your time. If you miss your flight because you got held up for 5-10 minutes in secondary, did you really miss your flight solely because of the inspection? Or was it because you couldn't find parking? Traffic? Left home late? Woke up late? If you ever get to the airport with less than 15 minutes "fudge time" for terminal/checkpoint delays you can't reasonably be upset if you miss your flight. If you're operating on that slim of a margin, even if you skate through security without holdup you're still boarding the plane moments before it's taking off, as opposed to 30-40 minutes earlier when boarding began. It seems a bit spurious to blame the security checkpoint when there were probably multiple contributing factors.
And as we're seeing more examples of people being detained and denied travel for pretty spurious reasons, well no, I don't consider any extra people going to a secondary screening lottery to be any better.I do agree with you that the security process is screwed up, but I think this behavioral profiling is better than the stupid random selection system that goes on now. Other posters have bemoaned the 99%+ false-positive rate. I'd love to know what the false-positive rate is for all the randomly-selected people. I'd imagine it's greater if only for the fact that anybody with something hide could simply ditch their contraband prior to entering the security queue (the marked boarding passes are pretty easy to pick up on if you fly more than once in a while).
You know the *worst* they can do is flag you for secondary screening? You know you can also get sent to secondary for a variety of other reasons from random selection to carry-on contents to metal levels when you walk through the scanner? If your life is so easily ruined you should never go to the airport. On the off-chance your boarding pass gets printed with "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX" in the bottom corner you're going to make a stop at secondary regardless of whether a microexpression got misread or not. That's an awful big risk to take. I'm a frequent flier and I hate airport security as much as the next guy, but it's a bit melodramatic to pretend your entire holiday or life might be ruined because a TSA officer said, "using the back of my hand I'm going to touch the inside of your thigh" (and yes, that's as bad as the secondary pat-downs get).
For a little more perspective, since January 2006 they've flagged 70,000 people. That's a rate of about 96 people per day, or 1 every 15 minutes. SEATAC handles 30 million travellers a year which means that on an hourly basis 3420 travelers are unaffected by this program and 4 extra people get sent to secondary. Is that really so bad?
Ticket numbers are tied to specific passengers, not just flight & seat info. If you got to the point where you could accurately predict future ticket numbers for other passengers, you'd be able to get past security and likely on the plane... until a legitimate passenger shows up with the same ticket number. Even if you didn't sit in the seat you forged, they'd force everyone to disembark and reauthenticate themselves with photo-ids. Then there's the uncomfortable situation of trying to explain why you forged a boarding pass to circumvent security measures.
No chocolate pixies here, just a realist who doesn't automatically assume every company is evil. Hanlon's Razor isn't a perfect fit here but there's no reason to assume malice from 1 registrar when many people have experienced these effects with a multiple registrars. There are plenty of posts illustrating that the WHOIS process isn't secure and can be sniffed or "tasted" at several points. I don't know Bob Parsons personally so I can't vouch for his integrity, but since he decries the ill effects of this practise and there is no real evidence to suggest that GoDaddy is involved I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Now, if WHOIS through every other registrar was guaranteed to be safe but for some reason squatters were snapping up domains searched through GoDaddy... you'd have a point. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Actually, Bob Parsons (CEO of GoDaddy) has been complaining about "domain tasting" and "domain kiting" for years. Google Bob Parsons domain tasting and look at the results. I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening upstream from Godaddy, but I'd be shocked to find Godaddy is in any way willingly facilitating the practise.
Yes, but only because Slashdot has started googling itself for stories to post.
While not the most scientific or "correct" way to verify a burn job finished successfuly, is it that uncommon for people to do a quick verification by opening files on media they just burned? I could see one of these low-paid chain-store techs burning several folders to a DVD and then opening random image/video files on the burned media to see if things worked.
Two things you don't get:
I could call you an idiot and a shill for completely missing the point in your haste to slam Microsoft, but that wouldn't help foster an intelligent discussion, would it?
Even by /. standards, it seems a bit ridiculous to blame Windows for shortcomings on the iPhone.
It appears that each meter is meant to be placed in between 2 spaces instead of directly alongside a single space, and is only good for the 2 spaces on either side of it. Vehicle arrival/departure seems to be monitored by linked vehicle sensors embedded in the pavement (or curb?). So they get a snapshot of your plate as you pull in and 1 as you leave and it's married up with a sensor in the ground saying your car never moved during the time in between the photos.
One of the other features listed is that the machine sends an alert out when it detects it needs maintenance. Maybe it could detect and report camera obstruction or vandalism?
I also wonder if it will scan plates as soon as it detects the presence of a new vehicle - could it report an invalid or unregistered plate or a plate with warrants against the registered owner or would this just turn up as bad data when it attempts to print a ticket...?
Curious technology... since it's wired to the internet, I wonder if they'd provide a facility to pay via website or mobile phone. (A different electronic system recently deployed near SF allows you to "feed" your meter using your mobile phone which is quite convenient if you had to walk a block or 2 to your final destination.)
Yeah, it's a pretty interesting concept. On the vendor's website there's a "grace period" feature listed that indicates it could be possible to pay off an expired meter. I'll be curious to see how many cities turn that switch off.
(I haven't seen one live yet, just heard about them and used Google to find that article.)
Yup, unlike new parking meters.
Of course that's a stretch, and it is not within the context or scope of the word "sponsor".
According to Merriam-Webster, a sponsor is...
A sponsor is definitely responsible for the presence of an ad, so it is absolutely a sponsored ad and the second definiteion applies. It is slightly less direct to use the third definition since the money is being paid specifically on ad placement and not an ambiguous sponsorship with considerations, nevertheless it is financing Google's operation in return for advertising so the definition could be used. In either case, it is not innacurate to consider paid listings to be "sponsored".
Of course, neither scenario is the same as making a purchase at a supermarket. The buyer is not taking sole responsibility for the supermarket's presence and the buyer is not asking the supermarket to advertise the buyer or the buyer's products. You cannot simply use any scenario where money changes hands as an example of sponsorship.
Since when has "sponsored" been a weasel word? When a sports team or race car has sponsors' logos all over their gear, does anyone doubt that there was a business arrangement? When a TV program has an announcer's voice saying, "Sponsored by Brand X", does anyone doubt it's an advertisement? Even if "sponsored" does not explicitely mean that money changed hands, it does mean that those results are there as the result of a sponsor, meaning they are not the product of the Google search algorithm. That isn't fraud just because some people are illiterate.
If changing the background color and adding a border to segregate sponsored links from search results is not enough, why should we assume that using a different font will make a difference?