That's not what we're talking about here. We aren't talking about a highly public figure. We're talking about an employee who might want to keep something secret, like porn preferences.
If you don't care if the public knows about your porn preferences then blackmail won't work. It's not like there's anyone who will vote you out of your cubicle if they discover your porn preferences.. If your spouse doesn't already know your porn preferences then you probably have some issues you need to work out.
I just don't keep my porn preferences particularly secret. I mean, I don't go advertising them but it's not like I'm going to keep it very secret if someone asks. Their reaction makes telling them worthwhile.
"And, keep in mind, China does that if you are nothing more than a political opponent, dissenter, or critic. Your fair trial consists of, "You are guilty.""
Same story in the US. No "enemy combatants" are given a fair trial. They're also tortured, or thrown into a prison and humiliated sexually. (i.e. abu ghraib)
That's fine if you want to check your power usage at whatever interval you go out there. What if you want to measure usage every 2 minutes 24/7 including while you're away at work? It's not laziness at all.
However, my advice to the writer would be to reevaluate your purpose here. Saying "a) accurately measures power usage" is more than a little vague. I assume that you're vague because you don't know what you want to do. No offense intended, but you need to define the problem before you start generating design criteria.
I assume you want to reduce power usage. There's several ways to do this. One way is simply to try and use less shit. Turn off the lights more often, be quick about opening/shutting the fridge/freezer, turn shit off when it's not in use, etc. For this you could just use a commercially available whole-house meter (one that reads at the meter) as this will be your cheapest option. I believe that these also work with online services like you mentioned that generate statistics and graphs.
Another way is to figure out what is using the most power and try to reduce usage of that device. For this you're going to need individual appliance monitoring. This is a lot more expensive than a whole-house system because you need a lot of little measurement devices plugged into every freaking large (and small) appliance in the house.
That said, why do you need graphing? If you just need to see what device is consuming the most power then buy a kill-a-watt or two and start plugging it into things for a week each.
If, for whatever reason, you MUST have individual-appliance graphing then you're going to have to do a little work. By work, I mean circuit design and some scripts to do data collection. To my knowledge, there is no commercially-available device that will measure power from one device and work with anything to graph it. However, fear not as this is not the daunting task that it may seem like. There is a kit out there that will allow you to tweet information from a kill-a-watt. It's called "tweet-a-watt", look it up. There's complete instructions so you shouldn't have any trouble.
You were unspecific about your programming skills so I'm going to assume that you have no idea what you're doing. (ignore the following if this is incorrect) If you just want to twitter the data then you won't have a problem because there's like a bajillion people out there that have already done this and released their work for free use by all. It's going to get more complicated if you want to store data in a database of some sort because that's not nearly as common. You can either learn how to write a script that will put this information into a database, or see if someone online will write you a script. Ask around at work if anyone is interested in trying the same thing and work together. Remember, Google is your friend here. Also, progress may be absurdly slow and you might take quite a few wrong turns. It recently took me a freaking week to get a python script working to import data from a spreadsheet into a mysql db because I didn't know any python when I started. A competent programmer could have whipped one up in about 5 minutes.
Also, your power usage may not be a result of problems with devices being inefficient or being run too long. It might be your house. I'd recommend you'd look into how well your house is insulated, whether your windows leak more heat than is acceptable, etc. I have no knowledge regarding this subject, but it's something you should probably look into.
Because you don't have to have evidence. You have to have a "good faith belief" that someone is doing something wrong. A "good faith belief" can be justified with minimal information. It's another result of this poorly written DMCA.
Technically yes, but a "good faith" belief that someone is doing something illegal is pretty fucking vague. If previous court ruling are any indication, hearing a rumor about "someone" pirating "something" is probably all you need to justify yourself.
"Seriously, name a single thing the iPad can do that another tablet/laptop can't."
Increase your perceived pretentiousness by a factor of 10. How else will people know that I'm a free thinking non-conformist unless I have an apple device?
"your textbooks, email, browsing, and suitable lightweight apps on the iPad... go home, sync up, and do the work on a real computer."
Yes! Buy two devices that cost as much as a laptop to get the functionality of a tablet pc!
I could buy an apple machine, and a computer, or I could go buy a lenovo x-series machine for half the cost and do all of what you just mentioned with one device.
The problem here is that you're assuming that the university is going to buy these for their students and not the students buying them themselves. (The only way there could be any reasonable back end is if the university builds it).
But let's assume you're correct and do the math.
Using laptops, you're out: 1. Cost of software licensing 2. Cost of laptops.
With ipads, you're out: 1. Cost of ipads (equivalent to that of a decent laptop) 2. Cost of software licensing 3. COST OF THE ENTIRE FUCKING BACKEND
You can't just use the current hardware, you have to build a huge new system just for the ipads (unless you happen to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unused server hardware lying around).
Simply put, the ipad is a terrible waste of money.
"What functionality would the average college student be lacking after getting a bluetooth keyboard?"
Your question is, literally, "What functionally would the average college student be lacking after buying accessories to compensate for the lost functionality of the ipad?"
Well, if you buy separate devices for everything you don't have then all of a sudden, you have everything. Of course, it's clunky as hell and costs twice as much. You can't call something "portable" if it's not portable. The ipad is not portable if you have to walk around with a fucking keyboard. Because the main advantage of the ipad is portability, the bluetooth keyboard removes the main advantage of the entire system.
Of course, I'm assuming that people are buying these things to do work. We all know that only about 20% of apple users actually buy apple machines for the functionality (i.e. graphic artists and media specialists), the other 80% buy them so they can hang around in coffee shops and act smarter than they are.
Maybe not, but that's not the point. With a non-transparent wall you can't see shit... except the wall. ANYTHING beats starting at the wall/floor/etc. Even if it's just a lot of water, it's still better than staring at the wall.
Because the "potential supply problems" are "potential OH MY GOD THE COST OF MINING OIL SUDDENLY TRIPPED FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON situations". Basically, the "potential" situations are fabricated for the purpose of profit.
Also, everyone was fucking pissed off at BP for the oil spill and they didn't want to antagonize everyone further. They can try any play off the huge environmental damage as "exaggerated" because 90% of the US population is apparently retarded, but everyone is going to notice higher gas prices. If they raised gas prices then everyone would be calling for more regulation to ensure this doesn't happen again simply because they don't want to risk having to pay more money to fill up their gas-guzzling urban assault vehicle.
The reason that these "potential" issues don't antagonize everyone is because they're always caused by "someone in the middle east, not us".
"We also notice that when a child does well in one subject, in our case math, they tend to do better in other subjects."
No, shit, really? Students that do well in school tend to do well in school. Did you ever stop to think that they do well in math because they do well in school, and not that they do well in everything else because your software magically made them learn everything else really well?
The problem I have with "educational" video games is that ideally they're just a wrapper for the core subject. The video game can do one of two things: A) Stress the core subject and put flashy animations and graphics around it. This just wastes time. You're trying to trick a student into learning, which you can't do. You're trying to trick someone into sitting down and memorizing multiplication tables. The student says "this game is just multiplication tables, it's boring". B) Not stress the core subject and concentrate on the game aspect. This results in no learning.
"We hope that other companies join us in our pursuit in high quality education video games and not simply games that are really flash cards on computer." Alright, I looked at YOUR website and watched YOUR advertisment. It looked like exactly that. The character walks around, finds some obstacle with a multiplication question on it (monster, wall, etc.), enters the answer, obstacle is defeated, repeat ad nauseum.
"Speed traps are set up in spots where assholes like you drive balls to the wall every fucking day."
No, they're set up ONLY at places where there's lots of revenue to be made. I mean, they've literally stopped running red light cameras on intersections because "it's not generating enough revenue". The LAST thing they care about is keeping the public safe. You cannot install a redlight or speed camera under the premise of "keeping things safe" and ethically remove it with the answer of "it's not generating revenue".
Well if it was an intentional leak then the leaker would be a "pirate" by definition. (Of course, this is the newer term or pirate that means one that violates copyright, not the definition that means one that raids ships)
As far as I know, there's no evidence to say that this was intentional or unintentional.
I don't know about marketing, but their business plan sucked balls. Wasn't this the game that required you to buy the initial game, then pay monthly fees, and then you had to listen to and see in-game advertisements on top of all of that? I'm not in the least surprised that this game failed.
The "polarization" mentioned in the summary was most likely a polarization between people that didn't want to see advertisements after they'd already paid for a game and people that don't mind having advertisements thrown at them 24/7.
"This solution creates its own horrible problem: you cannot kick a student out of a class, even if caught cheating, unless you go through the proper channels. For all the universities I have been at this means weeks if not months of dealing with a bureaucracy that has no interest in being fast and is worried more about being sued by the student's family than having academic rigor."
Must be some pretty shitty universities you've been at. Any real university protects their integrity with the entire force of their legal team. Yes, it's slow, but no one is worried about getting sued. Any university that caves into pressure from parents (or their lawyers) after a student cheats on their exam risks losing credibility, which is just as bad as losing their accreditation. And to be honest, it doesn't matter if it takes three days or three months, if the student gets kicked out then their ENTIRE diploma is shot.
"No notes for students is not a draconian policy."
And allowing notes for students is not absurd either. Seriously, some of these tests are amazingly complex problems designed to model real life scenarios. In real life scenarios, you have reference, you have books, you have notes. The issue is being able to properly apply these reference tables, books, etc. in such a way that you can solve a problem in a reasonable amount of time.
Put another way, the purpose of a university is not to prepare you to memorize a cockload of formulas, the purpose is to teach you how to solve problems.
"I've seen countless places where it's been done accidentally, for example, by having a tin roof"
In what world do you live that a tin roof isn't expensive? Sure, compared to other roofs maybe it's cheaper. But for a building that already has a suitable roof, it's bloody expensive.
"Some inexpensive foil wallpaper, metallic paint, or wire mesh all over the place" Yes, let's completely destroy all the decorating that went into this place. Furthermore, this isn't cheap either. Do you have any idea how big a lecture hall really is?
"How I pay for my health care is no business of yours or the Federal Government. "
Translation: I use insurance like everyone else and have absolutely no idea how the fuck I would pay for healthcare without it. I don't make $500,000 per year and can't pay for medical expenses out of pocket but I hate Obama so I'm using this argument of convenience.
"The notion that people should use insurance for routine expenses is absurd"
I agree, but "routine expenses" are not on the order of thousands of dollars. Sure, an oil change is, what, about $30. A doctor's visit is somewhere in the ballpark of $300. God forbid that you're sick and need lab tests done for $500 each. The medicine to cure your disease, something like $700 a bottle. All this for a "routine" expense like strep throat.
Furthermore, you're being "taxed" by private companies as is. Really sick, uninsured, people go to the ER where they're legally required to stabilize the person. They can't pay and the expense gets shifted onto you in the form of $300/capsule Tylenol, $200 for a doctor to take a single look at you, etc.
You're paying either way, but you'll actually pay less with the new plan because people will be able to get things looked at before they develop into serious, expensive, problems.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not what we're talking about here. We aren't talking about a highly public figure. We're talking about an employee who might want to keep something secret, like porn preferences.
If you don't care if the public knows about your porn preferences then blackmail won't work. It's not like there's anyone who will vote you out of your cubicle if they discover your porn preferences.. If your spouse doesn't already know your porn preferences then you probably have some issues you need to work out.
I just don't keep my porn preferences particularly secret. I mean, I don't go advertising them but it's not like I'm going to keep it very secret if someone asks. Their reaction makes telling them worthwhile.
"And, keep in mind, China does that if you are nothing more than a political opponent, dissenter, or critic. Your fair trial consists of, "You are guilty.""
Same story in the US. No "enemy combatants" are given a fair trial. They're also tortured, or thrown into a prison and humiliated sexually. (i.e. abu ghraib)
That's fine if you want to check your power usage at whatever interval you go out there. What if you want to measure usage every 2 minutes 24/7 including while you're away at work?
It's not laziness at all.
However, my advice to the writer would be to reevaluate your purpose here. Saying "a) accurately measures power usage" is more than a little vague. I assume that you're vague because you don't know what you want to do. No offense intended, but you need to define the problem before you start generating design criteria.
I assume you want to reduce power usage. There's several ways to do this. One way is simply to try and use less shit. Turn off the lights more often, be quick about opening/shutting the fridge/freezer, turn shit off when it's not in use, etc. For this you could just use a commercially available whole-house meter (one that reads at the meter) as this will be your cheapest option. I believe that these also work with online services like you mentioned that generate statistics and graphs.
Another way is to figure out what is using the most power and try to reduce usage of that device. For this you're going to need individual appliance monitoring. This is a lot more expensive than a whole-house system because you need a lot of little measurement devices plugged into every freaking large (and small) appliance in the house.
That said, why do you need graphing? If you just need to see what device is consuming the most power then buy a kill-a-watt or two and start plugging it into things for a week each.
If, for whatever reason, you MUST have individual-appliance graphing then you're going to have to do a little work. By work, I mean circuit design and some scripts to do data collection. To my knowledge, there is no commercially-available device that will measure power from one device and work with anything to graph it.
However, fear not as this is not the daunting task that it may seem like. There is a kit out there that will allow you to tweet information from a kill-a-watt. It's called "tweet-a-watt", look it up. There's complete instructions so you shouldn't have any trouble.
You were unspecific about your programming skills so I'm going to assume that you have no idea what you're doing. (ignore the following if this is incorrect) If you just want to twitter the data then you won't have a problem because there's like a bajillion people out there that have already done this and released their work for free use by all. It's going to get more complicated if you want to store data in a database of some sort because that's not nearly as common. You can either learn how to write a script that will put this information into a database, or see if someone online will write you a script. Ask around at work if anyone is interested in trying the same thing and work together. Remember, Google is your friend here. Also, progress may be absurdly slow and you might take quite a few wrong turns. It recently took me a freaking week to get a python script working to import data from a spreadsheet into a mysql db because I didn't know any python when I started. A competent programmer could have whipped one up in about 5 minutes.
Also, your power usage may not be a result of problems with devices being inefficient or being run too long. It might be your house. I'd recommend you'd look into how well your house is insulated, whether your windows leak more heat than is acceptable, etc. I have no knowledge regarding this subject, but it's something you should probably look into.
Because you don't have to have evidence. You have to have a "good faith belief" that someone is doing something wrong. A "good faith belief" can be justified with minimal information. It's another result of this poorly written DMCA.
Technically yes, but a "good faith" belief that someone is doing something illegal is pretty fucking vague. If previous court ruling are any indication, hearing a rumor about "someone" pirating "something" is probably all you need to justify yourself.
Yeah, and buying the ebooks every semester will cost just as much. You don't get your books free just because you have a tablet.
"Seriously, name a single thing the iPad can do that another tablet/laptop can't."
Increase your perceived pretentiousness by a factor of 10. How else will people know that I'm a free thinking non-conformist unless I have an apple device?
"your textbooks, email, browsing, and suitable lightweight apps on the iPad ... go home, sync up, and do the work on a real computer."
Yes! Buy two devices that cost as much as a laptop to get the functionality of a tablet pc!
I could buy an apple machine, and a computer, or I could go buy a lenovo x-series machine for half the cost and do all of what you just mentioned with one device.
" why do you pollute your argument with stuff that is no longer an issue?"
Because it IS STILL AN ISSUE. Apple will fix problems IN THE FUTURE. Which HASN'T HAPPENED YET.
The problem here is that you're assuming that the university is going to buy these for their students and not the students buying them themselves. (The only way there could be any reasonable back end is if the university builds it).
But let's assume you're correct and do the math.
Using laptops, you're out:
1. Cost of software licensing
2. Cost of laptops.
With ipads, you're out:
1. Cost of ipads (equivalent to that of a decent laptop)
2. Cost of software licensing
3. COST OF THE ENTIRE FUCKING BACKEND
You can't just use the current hardware, you have to build a huge new system just for the ipads (unless you happen to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of unused server hardware lying around).
Simply put, the ipad is a terrible waste of money.
"What functionality would the average college student be lacking after getting a bluetooth keyboard?"
Your question is, literally, "What functionally would the average college student be lacking after buying accessories to compensate for the lost functionality of the ipad?"
Well, if you buy separate devices for everything you don't have then all of a sudden, you have everything. Of course, it's clunky as hell and costs twice as much. You can't call something "portable" if it's not portable. The ipad is not portable if you have to walk around with a fucking keyboard. Because the main advantage of the ipad is portability, the bluetooth keyboard removes the main advantage of the entire system.
Of course, I'm assuming that people are buying these things to do work. We all know that only about 20% of apple users actually buy apple machines for the functionality (i.e. graphic artists and media specialists), the other 80% buy them so they can hang around in coffee shops and act smarter than they are.
"On most trips, there is not a whole lot to see."
Maybe not, but that's not the point. With a non-transparent wall you can't see shit... except the wall. ANYTHING beats starting at the wall/floor/etc. Even if it's just a lot of water, it's still better than staring at the wall.
Because the "potential supply problems" are "potential OH MY GOD THE COST OF MINING OIL SUDDENLY TRIPPED FOR SOME UNKNOWN REASON situations". Basically, the "potential" situations are fabricated for the purpose of profit.
Also, everyone was fucking pissed off at BP for the oil spill and they didn't want to antagonize everyone further. They can try any play off the huge environmental damage as "exaggerated" because 90% of the US population is apparently retarded, but everyone is going to notice higher gas prices. If they raised gas prices then everyone would be calling for more regulation to ensure this doesn't happen again simply because they don't want to risk having to pay more money to fill up their gas-guzzling urban assault vehicle.
The reason that these "potential" issues don't antagonize everyone is because they're always caused by "someone in the middle east, not us".
"We also notice that when a child does well in one subject, in our case math, they tend to do better in other subjects."
No, shit, really? Students that do well in school tend to do well in school. Did you ever stop to think that they do well in math because they do well in school, and not that they do well in everything else because your software magically made them learn everything else really well?
The problem I have with "educational" video games is that ideally they're just a wrapper for the core subject. The video game can do one of two things:
A) Stress the core subject and put flashy animations and graphics around it. This just wastes time. You're trying to trick a student into learning, which you can't do. You're trying to trick someone into sitting down and memorizing multiplication tables. The student says "this game is just multiplication tables, it's boring".
B) Not stress the core subject and concentrate on the game aspect. This results in no learning.
"We hope that other companies join us in our pursuit in high quality education video games and not simply games that are really flash cards on computer."
Alright, I looked at YOUR website and watched YOUR advertisment. It looked like exactly that. The character walks around, finds some obstacle with a multiplication question on it (monster, wall, etc.), enters the answer, obstacle is defeated, repeat ad nauseum.
"Speed traps are set up in spots where assholes like you drive balls to the wall every fucking day."
No, they're set up ONLY at places where there's lots of revenue to be made. I mean, they've literally stopped running red light cameras on intersections because "it's not generating enough revenue". The LAST thing they care about is keeping the public safe. You cannot install a redlight or speed camera under the premise of "keeping things safe" and ethically remove it with the answer of "it's not generating revenue".
Well if it was an intentional leak then the leaker would be a "pirate" by definition. (Of course, this is the newer term or pirate that means one that violates copyright, not the definition that means one that raids ships)
As far as I know, there's no evidence to say that this was intentional or unintentional.
I don't know about marketing, but their business plan sucked balls. Wasn't this the game that required you to buy the initial game, then pay monthly fees, and then you had to listen to and see in-game advertisements on top of all of that? I'm not in the least surprised that this game failed.
The "polarization" mentioned in the summary was most likely a polarization between people that didn't want to see advertisements after they'd already paid for a game and people that don't mind having advertisements thrown at them 24/7.
"This solution creates its own horrible problem: you cannot kick a student out of a class, even if caught cheating, unless you go through the proper channels. For all the universities I have been at this means weeks if not months of dealing with a bureaucracy that has no interest in being fast and is worried more about being sued by the student's family than having academic rigor."
Must be some pretty shitty universities you've been at. Any real university protects their integrity with the entire force of their legal team. Yes, it's slow, but no one is worried about getting sued. Any university that caves into pressure from parents (or their lawyers) after a student cheats on their exam risks losing credibility, which is just as bad as losing their accreditation. And to be honest, it doesn't matter if it takes three days or three months, if the student gets kicked out then their ENTIRE diploma is shot.
"No notes for students is not a draconian policy."
And allowing notes for students is not absurd either. Seriously, some of these tests are amazingly complex problems designed to model real life scenarios. In real life scenarios, you have reference, you have books, you have notes. The issue is being able to properly apply these reference tables, books, etc. in such a way that you can solve a problem in a reasonable amount of time.
Put another way, the purpose of a university is not to prepare you to memorize a cockload of formulas, the purpose is to teach you how to solve problems.
"I've seen countless places where it's been done accidentally, for example, by having a tin roof"
In what world do you live that a tin roof isn't expensive? Sure, compared to other roofs maybe it's cheaper. But for a building that already has a suitable roof, it's bloody expensive.
"Some inexpensive foil wallpaper, metallic paint, or wire mesh all over the place"
Yes, let's completely destroy all the decorating that went into this place. Furthermore, this isn't cheap either. Do you have any idea how big a lecture hall really is?
"Fact is, the majority of uninsured people fall into two categories"
Fact is, the majority of uninsured people can't pay for insurance.
I'll cite my reference when you cite yours.
"How I pay for my health care is no business of yours or the Federal Government. "
Translation: I use insurance like everyone else and have absolutely no idea how the fuck I would pay for healthcare without it. I don't make $500,000 per year and can't pay for medical expenses out of pocket but I hate Obama so I'm using this argument of convenience.
"The notion that people should use insurance for routine expenses is absurd"
I agree, but "routine expenses" are not on the order of thousands of dollars. Sure, an oil change is, what, about $30. A doctor's visit is somewhere in the ballpark of $300. God forbid that you're sick and need lab tests done for $500 each. The medicine to cure your disease, something like $700 a bottle.
All this for a "routine" expense like strep throat.
Furthermore, you're being "taxed" by private companies as is. Really sick, uninsured, people go to the ER where they're legally required to stabilize the person. They can't pay and the expense gets shifted onto you in the form of $300/capsule Tylenol, $200 for a doctor to take a single look at you, etc.
You're paying either way, but you'll actually pay less with the new plan because people will be able to get things looked at before they develop into serious, expensive, problems.
Well, we wanted to allow the government to provide the service instead of private companies but apparently that's socialism.