I'm not even convinced this is an issue. From TFS:
Investigators seeking warrants must provide a judge with probable cause that a crime has been committed, but investigators often obtain cell-tracking records under lower standards of judicial review â" through subpoenas, which are granted routinely, or through an intermediate type of court order based on an argument that the information requested would be relevant to an investigation.
It's still getting judicial review before the records are released. Therefore, a third party (the judge) must review the request before the executive branch (cops, FBI) get to demand the records. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Before the cops or FBI can investigate my property or person, yes, they need a warrant. But cell phone data? Chicken Little, anyone?
...but I think its pretty safe to say almost all people never leave the house, even the car without their cell phone.
Are you kidding me? I've left my cell phone -- intentionally or otherwise -- at home, at work and in my car many, many, many times. Assuming that someone must be lying because they said they didn't have their cell phone with them at the time is quite a stretch, IMHO. The weight of the cell phone data as evidence would have to depend upon the circumstances.
For example, I would not be overly impressed with the argument that your cellphone data suggested that your phone was in your own house when ${RandomFamilyMember} was murdered, since it seems perfectly reasonable to me that you could conceivably have left the phone at home that day -- especially if the phone did not move for a reasonably long time before or after the murder. I would expect any half-way competent attorney could poke all kinds of holes through that evidence.
OTOH, if the cell phone data says you were at the bank when it was robbed, no one can find any images that look even reasonably like you on the CCTV recordings, your clothes match what the perpetrator was wearing at the robbery AND you have no reasonable explanation for how your cell phone was at the scene of the crime when it occurred, then I'd say there's a pretty good chance that you ARE the droid we are looking for.
I suspect it's not cyclists like you that most of the car drivers above are griping at. I drive cars and ride bikes, so I have been on both sides of the argument. As I posted in a reply to someone else earlier, in 25 years or so on bikes, I can probably count on one hand the number of times that a motorist has been obviously upset with me. In all honesty, most of those times, the motorist was justified in his/her anger. Cyclists who are courteous in traffic (as it sounds like you are and like I try to be) typically don't draw the anger of motorists.
Unfortunately, there both motorists and cyclists who drive/ride with the proverbial chip on their shoulders, and give a collective black eye to their respective groups, sigh.
You state that as if the law was the same everywhere. It's not. In Texas, I received a ticket for riding a bike on a sidewalk on a college campus. In Alaska, where I now live, most of the "sidewalks" are bike paths and are shared by pedestrians and cyclists. Cyclists are expected to use the bike paths when available.
The law compels YOU, as a driver of a faster and heavier vehicle, to be aware of slower traffic and conduct yourself accordingly.
Yes. However, at least in Alaska, if you are impeding the traffic of five or more vehicles -- whether or not you are travelling at the posted speed limit -- you are required by law to pull over to the side of the road and let traffic pass. This is law for cyclists and motor vehicles. So while car drivers might have the responsibility and legal obligation to "be aware of slower traffic and conduct [themselves] accordingly" cyclists also have the responsibility and legal obligation to be aware of faster traffic and conduct themselves accordingly.
Let's see...I've been a cyclist since I was in junior high school, and I'm 38 now. That's 25 years, give or take? In all that time, I've been honked at and cursed by drivers...maybe a handful of times? (Actually, I can't recall even a single time I've actually had a driver curse at me when I was on a bike)
I'm not there, I don't know the whole story so I can't really judge, but if you've been honked at more times than you can count and cursed at four times, perhaps you should try to figure out what you could possibly be doing to anger all those drivers. An old friend once said to me, "If you meet five a**holes on the way to work, chances are, you're one of them." Just sayin'...
However, I would imagine that you could use a largish capacitor to store electrical energy for when you are stopped. Depending upon how efficient your lights are, you could probably design the circuit to provide a long enough run time to be useful.
I was living in Japan at the time, and the bike was a Japanese 5-speed (the Japanese made some seriously cool bikes when I lived there), so maybe it was just a more efficient light/generator combo than you can get at Wal-Mart. However, while the additional drag with the generator on was perceptible, it really wasn't all that bad. And the lights powered by the generator on that bike were frikken bright:)
You are the third person to suggest this, but it won't work for an airfoil. I've already explained why in replies to my original post; jump up to parent and follow the threads for the full explanation, but for the short version, try it using an ethernet cable, power cord, iPhone cable, etc. to simulate the flagellum and with a post-it note to simulate the rotor blade and see what happens to the airflow across the "rotor" at various points in the "rotation."
See the explanation I gave to EvilViper for why not. Or, do like I did and simulate a flagellum by attaching a post-it note to a cat-5 cable. Notice what happens to the airflow across the rotor blade as the cat-5 cable "rotates" in your hand. It has to be a truly spinning structure to work, and the flagellum isn't close enough.
Did you take a look at how the shoulder works? Attach an airfoil to your arm notice that at some point during the "rotation" the rotor blade will shift from aligned with the relative wind to perpendicular to the relative wind. Not terribly efficient for generating lift...certainly not "close enough to be repurposed."
Countering the rotational force of the rotors isn't that difficult. I used to have a free-flight model helicopter which used the rotational force of the rotors to provide additional lift. A standard model airplane propeller was attached to the crankshaft of the engine as in a normal model airplane. The base of the engine was mounted to a set of larger propeller blades, like you would typically find on a helicopter. As the engine rotated the model airplane propeller, the reaction of that force rotated the second, larger set blades in the opposite direction. The end result was a counter-rotating propeller design which allowed almost all of the energy from the engine to provide lift for the helicopter (minus some loss due to heat and friction). While this might be a little difficult to implement in a fully-functional helicopter powered by an internal combustion engine (how do you plumb the fuel supply lines?), it would probably be trivial to implement in a small electric engine-powered design.
...or the more ideal, but far less attainable, comparison: a biological helicopter
I'm not one to throw out the word "impossible" very quickly, since people who have used that word have been proven wrong so many times in the past. However, I read an argument back in...Jr. High?...that claimed that a truly rotational structure on a biological organism was at the very least highly improbable. There aren't biological structures that can rotate infinitely, because biological mechanisms require plumbing (blood, etc.) and muscle attach points on both halves of the rotating structure.
Think of it this way: how do you pump nutrients and return wastes from the rotor shaft and the blades? If you have the shaft sitting in a pool of mixed nutrients and wastes, you have an extremely inefficient circulatory system (due to the mixing), which I think wouldn't work well with the power requirements of a flying organism. Then, how do you attach muscles to the rotor shaft to spin the blades without having muscles that are infinitely long? Even owls' heads only rotate a finite distance -- they can't rotate like the girl's head in "The Exorcist"
About the only way I can see to have a biological helicopter would be to have a pair of symbiotes -- one being the body of the "helicopter" and the other being the rotor shaft and rotor blades. The two organisms nest together so the rotor organism spins on top of the body organism, and the body organism continuously grabs, spins and releases the shaft of the rotor organism.
It was clearly a joke, but it was not just a joke. It was a joke made to poke fun at GGPP who seems to think (haha!) that as long as we sheeple just keep drinking the cool-aid, the government isn't interested in us.
80K/year is "barely a living wage"? If you want a 4 bedroom house with a three car garage, 2 Hummers, 3 kids, a couple of dogs, and a 2-week overseas vacation every year, maybe. Don't confuse "living wage" with "the American dream". There's a huge difference.
Depends on where you live. I used to know a guy who worked for Cisco in San Jose, but wanted to move to Alaska really badly. When he moved to Anchorage (where I live), he used the just the equity he had from his house in San Jose to pay cash for a new house in one of the really nice parts of Anchorage (Hillside). He mentioned once that his bonus at Cisco one year was greater than his entire earnings one year at the company we worked for in Alaska (which was one of the better paying places to work in Anchorage).
You can be pretty comfortable on 80K/year in Anchorage, but from how my friend described San Jose, it's probably more inline with "barely a living wage" that gpp mentioned.
re: Palin vs. Monegan: Monegan was indeed respected during his tenure at APD. However, having dated someone who worked at APD while Monegan was there, believe me when I say APD could teach graduate courses on disfunction. There are a lot of good people there, but... Anyway, if you had followed the entire story, you would know Monegan's actions regarding Wooten looked an awful lot like one cop covering up for another. From what I know of what happened, Wooten needed to be fired, and Palin pushed the issue...and paid for it when the press decided it was a vendetta for personal reasons.
re: "New Ethics Complaint Against Palin": TFA is too short on details to take much of a stance one way or another. In honesty, yes, I did miss that particular story, and so I can't either justify Palin or condemn her in this issue.
re: Palin fashion: yeah, I heard about that and somehow, I just can't seem to get too terribly worked up about it. The ethical grey line is whether clothing and make-up is "personal use" for someone running for the 2nd highest office in the country. Were the NRA, the ACLU or some other lobbying group funding Palin's makeover I'd be upset. However, for the RNC to do it for the purpose of getting her elected...give me a break. Both parties spend a small fortune prepping their candidates for office; getting her ready to appear before a national audience was just a small part of that prep work. Had the RNC not played up Palin's "one of the people" persona first, I doubt this would have even hit the news stands. So...is that the best you've got?
Well, first of all, she was running for VP, not President...
Really?!?!? How did I miss that little detail??? I'm so embarrassed! Oh wait, that's what I said in the first paragraph: "...had she made it to V.P."....which you quoted, by the way.
neither of them have demonstrated they understand jack **** about relating to people outside a certain (thankfully dwindling) segment of "middle America."
As opposed to Obama, who seems to be really good at relating to CEOs of banks and automobile manufacturers. That money's got to come from somewhere, and I have a sinking feeling it's the working class stiffs like me who will get left holding this bill next April 15th.
Obama may be a charming impostor but he at least can speak eloquently and knowledgeably about many of the bigger issues we face in the world today.
Yep, he can speak eloquently about it all right. Unfortunately, so far, it looks to be style without substance. As for knowledgeably...time will tell, but I'm not hopeful. FWIW, I do hope your right about Obama though, because right now, America is in piss poor shape.
After Clinton, I thought, "It couldn't get any worse..." but it did. I said it again -- and was wrong again -- during the Bush Administration. And now I've said it again with Obama in the White House. <cringes in anticipation of the next president>
Picking the lesser of two evils is still picking evil. If enough people figure that out and start acting on that knowledge, then perhaps we'll finally have a chance to elect some real change.
...but the idea that Palin was somehow outside of that vile ignorant corruption is absurd.
Look, I'm just as cynical as the next guy (read my comment history if you want to verify it), but as a resident of Alaska for 20 years, Palin -- while certainly not perfect -- has in many ways been a breath of fresh air. Under her administration as governor, Alaska has (finally!!!) started cleaning house. The investigations into government corruption in AK have toppled both Dems and Republicans. I would really like to have seen what would have happened had she made it to V.P.
In any case, she couldn't possibly have been worse than the "change" and "hope" that we ended up putting in the White House:(
But in this case, does usability outweigh security?
(from TFS)
9 times out of 10, yes. But that 10th time is the only one that matters.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to login to something -- a server, a web page, e-mail -- on someone else's computer, with them sitting right next to me, watching as I log in. I'm comfortable enough not to worry about them stealing my password by watching my hands on the keyboard, but if I had to entere an unmasked password into a login prompt, that would be another thing entirely.
Perhaps I should have said "mainstream, consumer-grade engine technology."
Mods that work on a race track aren't necessarily going to make for an acceptable daily driver. For example, it's possible to tweak the cams for max HP at high RPMs, but it results in poor performance at idle and low RPM -- which makes for a car that just barely runs from stoplight to stoplight, but really comes into its own when making max power.
Slashdot Mirror
Investigators seeking warrants must provide a judge with probable cause that a crime has been committed, but investigators often obtain cell-tracking records under lower standards of judicial review â" through subpoenas, which are granted routinely, or through an intermediate type of court order based on an argument that the information requested would be relevant to an investigation.
It's still getting judicial review before the records are released. Therefore, a third party (the judge) must review the request before the executive branch (cops, FBI) get to demand the records. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Before the cops or FBI can investigate my property or person, yes, they need a warrant. But cell phone data? Chicken Little, anyone?
...but I think its pretty safe to say almost all people never leave the house, even the car without their cell phone.
Are you kidding me? I've left my cell phone -- intentionally or otherwise -- at home, at work and in my car many, many, many times. Assuming that someone must be lying because they said they didn't have their cell phone with them at the time is quite a stretch, IMHO. The weight of the cell phone data as evidence would have to depend upon the circumstances.
For example, I would not be overly impressed with the argument that your cellphone data suggested that your phone was in your own house when ${RandomFamilyMember} was murdered, since it seems perfectly reasonable to me that you could conceivably have left the phone at home that day -- especially if the phone did not move for a reasonably long time before or after the murder. I would expect any half-way competent attorney could poke all kinds of holes through that evidence.
OTOH, if the cell phone data says you were at the bank when it was robbed, no one can find any images that look even reasonably like you on the CCTV recordings, your clothes match what the perpetrator was wearing at the robbery AND you have no reasonable explanation for how your cell phone was at the scene of the crime when it occurred, then I'd say there's a pretty good chance that you ARE the droid we are looking for.
I suspect it's not cyclists like you that most of the car drivers above are griping at. I drive cars and ride bikes, so I have been on both sides of the argument. As I posted in a reply to someone else earlier, in 25 years or so on bikes, I can probably count on one hand the number of times that a motorist has been obviously upset with me. In all honesty, most of those times, the motorist was justified in his/her anger. Cyclists who are courteous in traffic (as it sounds like you are and like I try to be) typically don't draw the anger of motorists.
Unfortunately, there both motorists and cyclists who drive/ride with the proverbial chip on their shoulders, and give a collective black eye to their respective groups, sigh.
The law compels YOU, as a driver of a faster and heavier vehicle, to be aware of slower traffic and conduct yourself accordingly.
Yes. However, at least in Alaska, if you are impeding the traffic of five or more vehicles -- whether or not you are travelling at the posted speed limit -- you are required by law to pull over to the side of the road and let traffic pass. This is law for cyclists and motor vehicles. So while car drivers might have the responsibility and legal obligation to "be aware of slower traffic and conduct [themselves] accordingly" cyclists also have the responsibility and legal obligation to be aware of faster traffic and conduct themselves accordingly.
Let's see...I've been a cyclist since I was in junior high school, and I'm 38 now. That's 25 years, give or take? In all that time, I've been honked at and cursed by drivers...maybe a handful of times? (Actually, I can't recall even a single time I've actually had a driver curse at me when I was on a bike)
I'm not there, I don't know the whole story so I can't really judge, but if you've been honked at more times than you can count and cursed at four times, perhaps you should try to figure out what you could possibly be doing to anger all those drivers. An old friend once said to me, "If you meet five a**holes on the way to work, chances are, you're one of them." Just sayin'...
Yeah, that's true...
However, I would imagine that you could use a largish capacitor to store electrical energy for when you are stopped. Depending upon how efficient your lights are, you could probably design the circuit to provide a long enough run time to be useful.
Yes, actually I have used a generator on a bike.
:)
I was living in Japan at the time, and the bike was a Japanese 5-speed (the Japanese made some seriously cool bikes when I lived there), so maybe it was just a more efficient light/generator combo than you can get at Wal-Mart. However, while the additional drag with the generator on was perceptible, it really wasn't all that bad. And the lights powered by the generator on that bike were frikken bright
Cars blind me too, so why not return the favour?
Maybe because a car will do a lot more damage to you than you will to them if they can't see you?
Okay...now you are rotating the blade through 360 degrees rather than the rotor shaft. Same problem -- you've just moved it to a new location.
Alternatively the rotating part could simply not be alive.
That's actually a pretty good idea... :)
You are the third person to suggest this, but it won't work for an airfoil. I've already explained why in replies to my original post; jump up to parent and follow the threads for the full explanation, but for the short version, try it using an ethernet cable, power cord, iPhone cable, etc. to simulate the flagellum and with a post-it note to simulate the rotor blade and see what happens to the airflow across the "rotor" at various points in the "rotation."
Nope.
See the explanation I gave to EvilViper for why not. Or, do like I did and simulate a flagellum by attaching a post-it note to a cat-5 cable. Notice what happens to the airflow across the rotor blade as the cat-5 cable "rotates" in your hand. It has to be a truly spinning structure to work, and the flagellum isn't close enough.
Did you take a look at how the shoulder works? Attach an airfoil to your arm notice that at some point during the "rotation" the rotor blade will shift from aligned with the relative wind to perpendicular to the relative wind. Not terribly efficient for generating lift...certainly not "close enough to be repurposed."
Countering the rotational force of the rotors isn't that difficult. I used to have a free-flight model helicopter which used the rotational force of the rotors to provide additional lift. A standard model airplane propeller was attached to the crankshaft of the engine as in a normal model airplane. The base of the engine was mounted to a set of larger propeller blades, like you would typically find on a helicopter. As the engine rotated the model airplane propeller, the reaction of that force rotated the second, larger set blades in the opposite direction. The end result was a counter-rotating propeller design which allowed almost all of the energy from the engine to provide lift for the helicopter (minus some loss due to heat and friction). While this might be a little difficult to implement in a fully-functional helicopter powered by an internal combustion engine (how do you plumb the fuel supply lines?), it would probably be trivial to implement in a small electric engine-powered design.
...or the more ideal, but far less attainable, comparison: a biological helicopter
I'm not one to throw out the word "impossible" very quickly, since people who have used that word have been proven wrong so many times in the past. However, I read an argument back in...Jr. High?...that claimed that a truly rotational structure on a biological organism was at the very least highly improbable. There aren't biological structures that can rotate infinitely, because biological mechanisms require plumbing (blood, etc.) and muscle attach points on both halves of the rotating structure.
Think of it this way: how do you pump nutrients and return wastes from the rotor shaft and the blades? If you have the shaft sitting in a pool of mixed nutrients and wastes, you have an extremely inefficient circulatory system (due to the mixing), which I think wouldn't work well with the power requirements of a flying organism. Then, how do you attach muscles to the rotor shaft to spin the blades without having muscles that are infinitely long? Even owls' heads only rotate a finite distance -- they can't rotate like the girl's head in "The Exorcist"
About the only way I can see to have a biological helicopter would be to have a pair of symbiotes -- one being the body of the "helicopter" and the other being the rotor shaft and rotor blades. The two organisms nest together so the rotor organism spins on top of the body organism, and the body organism continuously grabs, spins and releases the shaft of the rotor organism.
Power hungry "decider" vs bad ideas with good intentions are pretty different.
Which is which?
Like a true career criminal? No, just like someone who actually paid attention in history class. Unlike about 90% of /. anymore. And get off my lawn!
It was clearly a joke, but it was not just a joke. It was a joke made to poke fun at GGPP who seems to think (haha!) that as long as we sheeple just keep drinking the cool-aid, the government isn't interested in us.
80K/year is "barely a living wage"? If you want a 4 bedroom house with a three car garage, 2 Hummers, 3 kids, a couple of dogs, and a 2-week overseas vacation every year, maybe. Don't confuse "living wage" with "the American dream". There's a huge difference.
Depends on where you live. I used to know a guy who worked for Cisco in San Jose, but wanted to move to Alaska really badly. When he moved to Anchorage (where I live), he used the just the equity he had from his house in San Jose to pay cash for a new house in one of the really nice parts of Anchorage (Hillside). He mentioned once that his bonus at Cisco one year was greater than his entire earnings one year at the company we worked for in Alaska (which was one of the better paying places to work in Anchorage).
You can be pretty comfortable on 80K/year in Anchorage, but from how my friend described San Jose, it's probably more inline with "barely a living wage" that gpp mentioned.
re: Palin vs. Monegan:
Monegan was indeed respected during his tenure at APD. However, having dated someone who worked at APD while Monegan was there, believe me when I say APD could teach graduate courses on disfunction. There are a lot of good people there, but... Anyway, if you had followed the entire story, you would know Monegan's actions regarding Wooten looked an awful lot like one cop covering up for another. From what I know of what happened, Wooten needed to be fired, and Palin pushed the issue...and paid for it when the press decided it was a vendetta for personal reasons.
re: "New Ethics Complaint Against Palin": TFA is too short on details to take much of a stance one way or another. In honesty, yes, I did miss that particular story, and so I can't either justify Palin or condemn her in this issue.
re: Palin fashion: yeah, I heard about that and somehow, I just can't seem to get too terribly worked up about it. The ethical grey line is whether clothing and make-up is "personal use" for someone running for the 2nd highest office in the country. Were the NRA, the ACLU or some other lobbying group funding Palin's makeover I'd be upset. However, for the RNC to do it for the purpose of getting her elected...give me a break. Both parties spend a small fortune prepping their candidates for office; getting her ready to appear before a national audience was just a small part of that prep work. Had the RNC not played up Palin's "one of the people" persona first, I doubt this would have even hit the news stands. So...is that the best you've got?
Well, first of all, she was running for VP, not President...
Really?!?!? How did I miss that little detail??? I'm so embarrassed! Oh wait, that's what I said in the first paragraph: "...had she made it to V.P."....which you quoted, by the way.
neither of them have demonstrated they understand jack **** about relating to people outside a certain (thankfully dwindling) segment of "middle America."
As opposed to Obama, who seems to be really good at relating to CEOs of banks and automobile manufacturers. That money's got to come from somewhere, and I have a sinking feeling it's the working class stiffs like me who will get left holding this bill next April 15th.
Obama may be a charming impostor but he at least can speak eloquently and knowledgeably about many of the bigger issues we face in the world today.
Yep, he can speak eloquently about it all right. Unfortunately, so far, it looks to be style without substance. As for knowledgeably...time will tell, but I'm not hopeful. FWIW, I do hope your right about Obama though, because right now, America is in piss poor shape.
Yeah, you got me on that one :)
After Clinton, I thought, "It couldn't get any worse..." but it did. I said it again -- and was wrong again -- during the Bush Administration. And now I've said it again with Obama in the White House. <cringes in anticipation of the next president>
No.
Picking the lesser of two evils is still picking evil. If enough people figure that out and start acting on that knowledge, then perhaps we'll finally have a chance to elect some real change.
...but the idea that Palin was somehow outside of that vile ignorant corruption is absurd.
Look, I'm just as cynical as the next guy (read my comment history if you want to verify it), but as a resident of Alaska for 20 years, Palin -- while certainly not perfect -- has in many ways been a breath of fresh air. Under her administration as governor, Alaska has (finally!!!) started cleaning house. The investigations into government corruption in AK have toppled both Dems and Republicans. I would really like to have seen what would have happened had she made it to V.P.
:(
In any case, she couldn't possibly have been worse than the "change" and "hope" that we ended up putting in the White House
But in this case, does usability outweigh security?
(from TFS)
9 times out of 10, yes. But that 10th time is the only one that matters.
I can't tell you how many times I've had to login to something -- a server, a web page, e-mail -- on someone else's computer, with them sitting right next to me, watching as I log in. I'm comfortable enough not to worry about them stealing my password by watching my hands on the keyboard, but if I had to entere an unmasked password into a login prompt, that would be another thing entirely.
Keep masking the password prompt, please.
Perhaps I should have said "mainstream, consumer-grade engine technology."
:)
Mods that work on a race track aren't necessarily going to make for an acceptable daily driver. For example, it's possible to tweak the cams for max HP at high RPMs, but it results in poor performance at idle and low RPM -- which makes for a car that just barely runs from stoplight to stoplight, but really comes into its own when making max power.
Still, you are right, and I stand corrected