How the fuck is requiring an interlock to detect drunk driving "not punishing"? The entire point of the device is that IT IS A PUNISHMENT!! Someone drove drunk, broke the law, and now must be punished. Furthermore, just because something "changes antisocial behavior" does NOT mean that it doesn't run afoul of civil liberties.
OK, first of all, in what world do you live in that drunk driving is a misdemeanor? Second, this isn't lifelong, it's something like 5 years or some such.
"all random tests can be performed while the car is in motion"
Thus distracting the driver and increasing the possibility that he will cause an accident. At least, that's the argument that's going to be made in court any time any car with an interlock is involved in an accident. The manufacturers probably want to avoid this liability to avoid being accused of "encouraging distracted driving".
I've been told that whenever you order X amount of drinks, they put straws in X-1 of the drinks. Thus, the one for the driver technically isn't an open container or some shit like that. These drive through liquor stores are generally located in places where people like to drink and drive anyway, thus why there's not some huge movement to ban them entirely.
There's a difference between drunk and impaired to the point that you can't drive. Unsafe driving comes way before being too hammered to stand up.
Furthermore,.08 isn't drunk for ANYONE..08 translates to a percentage (.08 is NOT 8%, but there is a conversion from BAC to percent, it just involves some other coefficients) of your blood that is alcohol. Thus, everyone gets drunk at the same BAC, give or take a small margin.
Of course, everyone takes a different amount of alcohol to actually reach the same BAC, but if you knew what you were talking about then I wouldn't have to explain that.
That's about as stupid as trying to reduce crime to 0. It is impossible. Not "very difficult", but literally impossible without violating the constitution (e.g. constant monitoring).
But anyone that runs the plate (some cops now have automatic plate scanners) will see that it doesn't match the car (color, make, model, etc) or that it isn't a valid plate.
If a scanner picks up some nonsense RFID tag then it's just going to discard it because the tires aren't registered to the car, or even at all.
I'm sorry, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding this.
Magicjack, a VOIP provider, is now going to allow users to make VOIP calls through their smartPHONE? Why the fuck would you use this if you have a smart PHONE. Given that most data plans for smartphones are way more expensive than the talk and text part of the plan, wouldn't it make more sense to... oh, I don't know, just make a fucking phone call? I fail to see how this could serve any purpose whatsoever.
"It might not be a bad idea for Twitter and Facebook to drop you an email a couple times a year, requesting that you log into your account just to confirm you're still alive."
We find that your account to be inactive, please go to website and verify account details or your account will be deleting. http://www.obvious-spam-link.com
OK, first of all dead people can't own property. This is to stop all the legal shenanigans that people could do if you could shift liability onto dead people.
Second, a "will" is exactly what you need. Release all of your writings into the public domain. Twitter/FB is unlikely to allow you to keep your postings up once they have determined that you're dead because you're taking up server resources that would be better spent on active people that generate more ad revenue. (How many people visit FB pages of dead people after a few weeks? My guess is 0).
Once you release all of your work into the public domain it will be impossible for your relatives to censor you because they'll have no rights to it. Of course, you still have to distribute it somehow (assuming twitter/FB won't let you).
Just because you dropped out of college doesn't mean that it's worthless.
I'm not saying it's absolutely crucial for everyone to attend college, but it's mandatory for certain professions. For example, a mechanical engineer will have to know calculus, physics, and a lot of design principals. Are you seriously suggesting that this can be taught on the job? If so, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There is a lot of stuff that you need to know before you can actually do certain jobs, just because you don't have one of these jobs doesn't mean no one else does either.
I find that most people that rail against college are one of two types of people: 1. People that dropped out of college because they weren't smart enough or because they couldn't manage their time properly. 2. People with a job that doesn't require any college education.
The first type of person is just bitter that they couldn't handle it, the second type of person is too short sighted to see that there are jobs that require more book learning than theirs. They assume that because they learned how to wire a house on the job that an engineer can learn how to build a bridge on the job.
"If the sensor IDs were captured at roadside tracking points and stored in databases, third parties could infer or prove that the driver has visited potentially sensitive locations such as medical clinics, political meetings, or nightclubs,"
The issue described in the article is that you can identify the tires by their RFID tag. This means that you could track cars. The article completely fails to mention that you ALREADY HAVE A FUCKING LICENSE PLATE ATTACHED TO YOUR CAR! The license plate is a unique identifier required by law on all motor vehicles. Anyone who wants to prove you visited location XYZ is simply going to use a $20 camera and get a shot of your license plate. Yeah, getting readings with RFID is a little easier then setting up a camera and some plate scanning software, but neither one is very hard for someone who wants to track you.
As for "confounding" the control unit, that's not a problem with security, that's a problem with the fucking control unit. The article mentions that once they sent false data to it, they couldn't get the thing to work correctly even after rebooting it. Any device that can't handle junk data is worse than useless. Something being intolerant of noise is not a security problem, it's a stupid engineer problem. Sure, it might not function while you're jamming it with garbage, but if it fails to work after a reboot then you've done something seriously wrong.
"Hellgate:London (the next game from the developers of Diablo 2)"
Hellgate london was developed by SOME of the people that had formerly worked at blizzard, some of which had actually worked on diablo. Of course blizzard, as a company, had nothing to do with hellgate london at all. To say the hellgate london "was the next game from the developers of diablo 2" is, at the very least, misleading.
Blizzard hasn't shown the same lack of attention to their games that you describe. Starcraft II doesn't require you to be online to play it (if you can't log on it gives you a "play offline" option), WoW is being constantly updated (although I'm sure the same attention wouldn't be there were there not a subscription fee involved). The DRM in starcraft II and WoW is the most transparent that I've ever seen in my life. I've never once had an issue with it (I've had multiple issues with steam and other DRM schemes). I'm not familiar with diablo but I haven't heard the complaints that you seem to be describing.
Has the US population degraded to the point that we can't figure out what a square meter is? Do we need to measure volume in terms of SUV trunks?
I'll forgive people for not being familiar for units of radiation exposure because it's not something that 99% of the population will ever deal with, but how the hell does a dental x-ray put it in perspective? It's not like you can feel an X-ray. (If you can feel radiation then it's way more than enough to kill you, below insta-death levels you're not going to feel a damn thing).
At least with the size of the thing they gave dimensions in addition to their bullshit comparison, they didn't even bother to mention with real units how much radiation this thing will have to withstand. This serves to do nothing but perpetuate the idiocy growing more and more common in the US today.
"For things like ModelSim that I couldn't get an OS X version of, I just fired up VMware Fusion"
For things that you couldn't do with a mac, you used windows. I really don't see how you call paying for vmware fusion, paying for windows, then having to run a second virtual computer just to use one software package "no problems using a mac". Sure, you might be using a mac, but it's a mac running windows.
Running HSPICE on unix machines remotely also doesn't count as "using a mac" because you aren't using a mac, you're using a linux box. You're basically just turning your mac into a windows machine or a linux terminal based on the situation, neither of which is "using a mac".
You also have to remember that this survey was conducted on ONE university, on top of that, there's no information about how this study was done.
At my college (an engineering college) you'll find it nearly impossible to find anyone that uses a mac. 90% or more of the students here have windows based machines, only an odd handful of people have macs. That's for numerous reasons. 1. macs are bloody expensive. A lot of mac models have really nice hardware, but this is completely negated by their price. You can buy a nice windows based laptop for about $800. A comparable mac laptop is somewhere around $1200 at the minimum. 2. macs won't run the software required for a lot of engineering. Now, let's be very clear here. This isn't idiot college admins making windows software mandatory when there are suitable alternatives. The software we use is stuff like solidworks (3d modeling program) and NI labview. These applications have no OSS equivalent. Even if they did, these applications are industry standard so it actually makes a lot of sense to use them. 3. Most of the people here are smart enough not to fall for the hype that apple likes to spew. "Thinking different" is great and all, until your computer costs 3 times as much as everything else and isn't even compatible with what you need to do. People here are generally smart enough not to fall for the "OHHH! SHINY!!!!" factor that macs have going for them.
And now to my second point. How was this study done? Did they survey every student on campus? Did they just ask the people that hung out in the local starbucks (and thus skew it towards mac users)? Did they send an email to the mac users group and ask them what systems they used? Does this university focus on liberal arts, engineering, both? How many people are from each department? I looked it up on wikipedia, but couldn't find detailed statistics. Different professions and fields of study demand different computers. Multimedia generation and editing will be done on mac, engineering stuff will be done on windows, and experimental physics stuff is generally done on linux.
And of course this survey is only about INCOMING FRESHMEN. What about the people that have been there for 3 years? How many people stuck with their mac? How many people found it to be worthless, sold it, and bought a windows machine?
Long story short: This study should be taken about as seriously as political polls.
The services themselves are not necessarily secure, but may be an excellent solution for the OP. If everything he uploads is properly encrypted then it doesn't matter if it gets leaked. After he dies, he'll stop paying the bill (obviously) and the data will be purged after some time. Some time later, the space on the hard drive will be overwritten with something else, thus erasing any trace that the files ever existed.
Because it's a private service, no one has any reason to go looking there. Now sure, if you're hiding government secrets there then you can bet your ass that the FBI will get that data, but that isn't the case here. It's not like your company IT admin will be going through this data as part of a routine when you die, and that's the important part.
Because your secrets could possibly affect other people. For example, your wife might not be looked upon too highly if people know that she married a guy that was into some weird fetish. Also, their secrets might be stored with your stuff as well. Those things should not be released.
That's neither funny nor hypocritical at all. At least during war, it's accepted that spying is a legitimate strategy for gaining an advantage. It makes perfect sense to want your government to gain an advantage over your enemy and to be angry when the enemy is gaining an advantage over you.
I'm not saying that spying is justified, all I'm saying is that there's no contradiction in supporting your government spying on other countries but being angry at other governments spying on you.
NO! The point of a roundabout is to eliminate the need to have a light stop traffic in various directions. The roundabout is supposed to facilitate traffic flow. Making them small enough to the point that they slow down traffic defeats the purpose.
Except that the entire point of the game is NOT to be a simulation. Tell me, what in the hell is this supposed to be simulating? We don't even have any preliminary designs for a moonbase in the works. I'm sure that a few engineers have probably scribbled something on a cocktail napkin with their vision of a moonbase, but it's not exactly a high priority on NASA's list. How do you develop a simulator for something that doesn't exist on any real level CONCEPTUALLY?
This was built to be a GAME, and has failed as a GAME.
I completely agree with you about people disregarding science and the sad state of affairs in the USA regarding education, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the discussion at hand.
Even salaried workers like to leave at 5:00 PM. I mean, let's say you aren't paid hourly, would you like to pull an all-nighter for something that can wait until next week?
"If you want a preview of what living off planet would be like, build..."
Yeah, it'll suck for awhile. Of course, the idea is that you then DEVELOP the colony into a bigger colony, then you become self sufficient, etc. It's not a matter of "go sit on mars and do nothing", it's "go to mars, set up a bigger camp, and we'll send another ship in a few months with more people and more supplies, etc."
Also, he's not saying that we should go to mars RIGHT THE HELL NOW. He's saying that we need to actually work towards making this a possibility, that people need to be open to the idea of developing technology that will allow us to visit other planets. You're saying that we shouldn't try to make the technology to visit other planets until we have the technology to visit other planets... which makes no sense.
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How the fuck is requiring an interlock to detect drunk driving "not punishing"? The entire point of the device is that IT IS A PUNISHMENT!! Someone drove drunk, broke the law, and now must be punished. Furthermore, just because something "changes antisocial behavior" does NOT mean that it doesn't run afoul of civil liberties.
And if they simply revoked his license then you'd be bitching about the government taking away his civil liberties. Pick one.
OK, first of all, in what world do you live in that drunk driving is a misdemeanor? Second, this isn't lifelong, it's something like 5 years or some such.
Get your facts straight, dumbass.
"all random tests can be performed while the car is in motion"
Thus distracting the driver and increasing the possibility that he will cause an accident. At least, that's the argument that's going to be made in court any time any car with an interlock is involved in an accident. The manufacturers probably want to avoid this liability to avoid being accused of "encouraging distracted driving".
I've been told that whenever you order X amount of drinks, they put straws in X-1 of the drinks. Thus, the one for the driver technically isn't an open container or some shit like that. These drive through liquor stores are generally located in places where people like to drink and drive anyway, thus why there's not some huge movement to ban them entirely.
There's a difference between drunk and impaired to the point that you can't drive. Unsafe driving comes way before being too hammered to stand up.
.08 isn't drunk for ANYONE. .08 translates to a percentage (.08 is NOT 8%, but there is a conversion from BAC to percent, it just involves some other coefficients) of your blood that is alcohol. Thus, everyone gets drunk at the same BAC, give or take a small margin.
Furthermore,
Of course, everyone takes a different amount of alcohol to actually reach the same BAC, but if you knew what you were talking about then I wouldn't have to explain that.
That's about as stupid as trying to reduce crime to 0. It is impossible. Not "very difficult", but literally impossible without violating the constitution (e.g. constant monitoring).
But anyone that runs the plate (some cops now have automatic plate scanners) will see that it doesn't match the car (color, make, model, etc) or that it isn't a valid plate.
If a scanner picks up some nonsense RFID tag then it's just going to discard it because the tires aren't registered to the car, or even at all.
Changing a tire really isn't that hard.
I'm sorry, I'm having a lot of trouble understanding this.
Magicjack, a VOIP provider, is now going to allow users to make VOIP calls through their smartPHONE? Why the fuck would you use this if you have a smart PHONE. Given that most data plans for smartphones are way more expensive than the talk and text part of the plan, wouldn't it make more sense to... oh, I don't know, just make a fucking phone call?
I fail to see how this could serve any purpose whatsoever.
"It might not be a bad idea for Twitter and Facebook to drop you an email a couple times a year, requesting that you log into your account just to confirm you're still alive."
We find that your account to be inactive, please go to website and verify account details or your account will be deleting. http://www.obvious-spam-link.com
OK, first of all dead people can't own property. This is to stop all the legal shenanigans that people could do if you could shift liability onto dead people.
Second, a "will" is exactly what you need. Release all of your writings into the public domain. Twitter/FB is unlikely to allow you to keep your postings up once they have determined that you're dead because you're taking up server resources that would be better spent on active people that generate more ad revenue. (How many people visit FB pages of dead people after a few weeks? My guess is 0).
Once you release all of your work into the public domain it will be impossible for your relatives to censor you because they'll have no rights to it. Of course, you still have to distribute it somehow (assuming twitter/FB won't let you).
Just because you dropped out of college doesn't mean that it's worthless.
I'm not saying it's absolutely crucial for everyone to attend college, but it's mandatory for certain professions. For example, a mechanical engineer will have to know calculus, physics, and a lot of design principals. Are you seriously suggesting that this can be taught on the job? If so, you clearly don't know what you're talking about. There is a lot of stuff that you need to know before you can actually do certain jobs, just because you don't have one of these jobs doesn't mean no one else does either.
I find that most people that rail against college are one of two types of people:
1. People that dropped out of college because they weren't smart enough or because they couldn't manage their time properly.
2. People with a job that doesn't require any college education.
The first type of person is just bitter that they couldn't handle it, the second type of person is too short sighted to see that there are jobs that require more book learning than theirs. They assume that because they learned how to wire a house on the job that an engineer can learn how to build a bridge on the job.
"If the sensor IDs were captured at roadside tracking points and stored in databases, third parties could infer or prove that the driver has visited potentially sensitive locations such as medical clinics, political meetings, or nightclubs,"
The issue described in the article is that you can identify the tires by their RFID tag. This means that you could track cars. The article completely fails to mention that you ALREADY HAVE A FUCKING LICENSE PLATE ATTACHED TO YOUR CAR! The license plate is a unique identifier required by law on all motor vehicles. Anyone who wants to prove you visited location XYZ is simply going to use a $20 camera and get a shot of your license plate. Yeah, getting readings with RFID is a little easier then setting up a camera and some plate scanning software, but neither one is very hard for someone who wants to track you.
As for "confounding" the control unit, that's not a problem with security, that's a problem with the fucking control unit. The article mentions that once they sent false data to it, they couldn't get the thing to work correctly even after rebooting it. Any device that can't handle junk data is worse than useless. Something being intolerant of noise is not a security problem, it's a stupid engineer problem. Sure, it might not function while you're jamming it with garbage, but if it fails to work after a reboot then you've done something seriously wrong.
"Hellgate:London (the next game from the developers of Diablo 2)"
Hellgate london was developed by SOME of the people that had formerly worked at blizzard, some of which had actually worked on diablo. Of course blizzard, as a company, had nothing to do with hellgate london at all. To say the hellgate london "was the next game from the developers of diablo 2" is, at the very least, misleading.
Blizzard hasn't shown the same lack of attention to their games that you describe. Starcraft II doesn't require you to be online to play it (if you can't log on it gives you a "play offline" option), WoW is being constantly updated (although I'm sure the same attention wouldn't be there were there not a subscription fee involved). The DRM in starcraft II and WoW is the most transparent that I've ever seen in my life. I've never once had an issue with it (I've had multiple issues with steam and other DRM schemes). I'm not familiar with diablo but I haven't heard the complaints that you seem to be describing.
Has the US population degraded to the point that we can't figure out what a square meter is? Do we need to measure volume in terms of SUV trunks?
I'll forgive people for not being familiar for units of radiation exposure because it's not something that 99% of the population will ever deal with, but how the hell does a dental x-ray put it in perspective? It's not like you can feel an X-ray. (If you can feel radiation then it's way more than enough to kill you, below insta-death levels you're not going to feel a damn thing).
At least with the size of the thing they gave dimensions in addition to their bullshit comparison, they didn't even bother to mention with real units how much radiation this thing will have to withstand. This serves to do nothing but perpetuate the idiocy growing more and more common in the US today.
"For things like ModelSim that I couldn't get an OS X version of, I just fired up VMware Fusion"
For things that you couldn't do with a mac, you used windows. I really don't see how you call paying for vmware fusion, paying for windows, then having to run a second virtual computer just to use one software package "no problems using a mac". Sure, you might be using a mac, but it's a mac running windows.
Running HSPICE on unix machines remotely also doesn't count as "using a mac" because you aren't using a mac, you're using a linux box. You're basically just turning your mac into a windows machine or a linux terminal based on the situation, neither of which is "using a mac".
You also have to remember that this survey was conducted on ONE university, on top of that, there's no information about how this study was done.
At my college (an engineering college) you'll find it nearly impossible to find anyone that uses a mac. 90% or more of the students here have windows based machines, only an odd handful of people have macs. That's for numerous reasons.
1. macs are bloody expensive. A lot of mac models have really nice hardware, but this is completely negated by their price. You can buy a nice windows based laptop for about $800. A comparable mac laptop is somewhere around $1200 at the minimum.
2. macs won't run the software required for a lot of engineering. Now, let's be very clear here. This isn't idiot college admins making windows software mandatory when there are suitable alternatives. The software we use is stuff like solidworks (3d modeling program) and NI labview. These applications have no OSS equivalent. Even if they did, these applications are industry standard so it actually makes a lot of sense to use them.
3. Most of the people here are smart enough not to fall for the hype that apple likes to spew. "Thinking different" is great and all, until your computer costs 3 times as much as everything else and isn't even compatible with what you need to do. People here are generally smart enough not to fall for the "OHHH! SHINY!!!!" factor that macs have going for them.
And now to my second point. How was this study done? Did they survey every student on campus? Did they just ask the people that hung out in the local starbucks (and thus skew it towards mac users)? Did they send an email to the mac users group and ask them what systems they used? Does this university focus on liberal arts, engineering, both? How many people are from each department? I looked it up on wikipedia, but couldn't find detailed statistics. Different professions and fields of study demand different computers. Multimedia generation and editing will be done on mac, engineering stuff will be done on windows, and experimental physics stuff is generally done on linux.
And of course this survey is only about INCOMING FRESHMEN. What about the people that have been there for 3 years? How many people stuck with their mac? How many people found it to be worthless, sold it, and bought a windows machine?
Long story short: This study should be taken about as seriously as political polls.
The services themselves are not necessarily secure, but may be an excellent solution for the OP. If everything he uploads is properly encrypted then it doesn't matter if it gets leaked. After he dies, he'll stop paying the bill (obviously) and the data will be purged after some time. Some time later, the space on the hard drive will be overwritten with something else, thus erasing any trace that the files ever existed.
Because it's a private service, no one has any reason to go looking there. Now sure, if you're hiding government secrets there then you can bet your ass that the FBI will get that data, but that isn't the case here. It's not like your company IT admin will be going through this data as part of a routine when you die, and that's the important part.
This sounds like bullshit. Do you have some evidence to back this up? Just because this might sound like a legitimate policy doesn't mean it is.
Because your secrets could possibly affect other people. For example, your wife might not be looked upon too highly if people know that she married a guy that was into some weird fetish. Also, their secrets might be stored with your stuff as well. Those things should not be released.
That's neither funny nor hypocritical at all. At least during war, it's accepted that spying is a legitimate strategy for gaining an advantage. It makes perfect sense to want your government to gain an advantage over your enemy and to be angry when the enemy is gaining an advantage over you.
I'm not saying that spying is justified, all I'm saying is that there's no contradiction in supporting your government spying on other countries but being angry at other governments spying on you.
NO! The point of a roundabout is to eliminate the need to have a light stop traffic in various directions. The roundabout is supposed to facilitate traffic flow. Making them small enough to the point that they slow down traffic defeats the purpose.
Except that the entire point of the game is NOT to be a simulation. Tell me, what in the hell is this supposed to be simulating? We don't even have any preliminary designs for a moonbase in the works. I'm sure that a few engineers have probably scribbled something on a cocktail napkin with their vision of a moonbase, but it's not exactly a high priority on NASA's list. How do you develop a simulator for something that doesn't exist on any real level CONCEPTUALLY?
This was built to be a GAME, and has failed as a GAME.
I completely agree with you about people disregarding science and the sad state of affairs in the USA regarding education, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the discussion at hand.
Even salaried workers like to leave at 5:00 PM. I mean, let's say you aren't paid hourly, would you like to pull an all-nighter for something that can wait until next week?
"If you want a preview of what living off planet would be like, build..."
Yeah, it'll suck for awhile. Of course, the idea is that you then DEVELOP the colony into a bigger colony, then you become self sufficient, etc. It's not a matter of "go sit on mars and do nothing", it's "go to mars, set up a bigger camp, and we'll send another ship in a few months with more people and more supplies, etc."
Also, he's not saying that we should go to mars RIGHT THE HELL NOW. He's saying that we need to actually work towards making this a possibility, that people need to be open to the idea of developing technology that will allow us to visit other planets. You're saying that we shouldn't try to make the technology to visit other planets until we have the technology to visit other planets... which makes no sense.