That's the real question. Because if 'broadband' is a term with a real official meaning, it would be possible to go after any ISP selling 'broadband' that isn't 'broadband' for false advertising. Alternately, if their contracts and the like say that they're selling 5 Mbps and they're actually selling 1 Mbps, that could also be actionable.
Ha! I've never seen (and probably never will) a residential internet service contract that doesn't say "up to X, but we don't guarantee shit."
IMO, the phrase "up to" should be completely banned in advertising.
Or the way my employer used to do it before we got bought: We had vacation, but no sick days. If you were sick, it was "stay home and don't spread it around here," but it didn't use vacation time, and there wasn't a hard limit. They were also pretty flexible about taking an hour or two to meet the plumber or whatever. Oddly enough, no one really abused the system, since they actually treated us well. (part of that was probably the lack of the "well, I have it, so I might as well use it" mentality that giving X number of sick days promotes)
Most companies will give you time off, at least for funerals. The ones that don't are probably the same asses that hire these kinds of investigators. Maybe the not-sick days are a symptom, rather than a problem?
I mostly agree with you, when you're talking about actual poverty. However, the GP said "average worker". I think it was CNNMoney that had an average net worth calculator (this was a year or two ago) that said the average net worth of someone my age (33) was about $8k. That should give a pretty good idea how much debt the "average" person with a house full of stuff and a car is carrying.
I think the GP is right. If you have a reasonable job, there's not much excuse for not having a 6-12 month "oh shit" or "flip off the boss" fund, other than keeping up with the Joneses.
I'm not really sure why the organizers are determined to do this in the most difficult way possible. There's sand and sun all over the place, including many that are a lot closer to electrical markets (the US southwest, for example). So why not just build these things there and sidestep the whole issue of superconducting wires? This plan doesn't make sense to me.
I've keep trying to figure out why everyone fixates on deserts, too. If you're going to use PV anyway, why the hell aren't you putting the panels as close as possible to where the power will be used? According to the solar radiation meter on a nearby weather station, there's about 100kW of energy hitting my roof around noon during the summer (sounds crazy, but the meter reads almost 1kW/m^2 during summer and 600W/m^2 during winter). Why not put PV (or mirrors for solar thermal, if the heart of the plant can be made small enough) up there? As a bonus, it keeps all that heat from hitting my house! Or above parking lots? There's plenty of space, at least in a suburban type setting, for putting solar panels.
so a good compromise would be to tie this lockout to MPH. under say, 5 MPH, texting and talking should be ok. and if you speed up, you spontaneously lose signal (or spontaneously get it back when you slow back down). so the poor humps stuck in slow moving traffic jams are adequately entertained, for example
This makes absolutely no sense. The times when I'm creeping along at 5mph (parking lots, traffic, alley, whatever) are when I need to be paying the MOST attention to driving. If anything, limit it to between 60-70mph to keep me awake on long drives, when I just need to stay between the lines. (if you're really sadistic, make it drop the call if the car isn't going between the speed limit and 3mph below for the stretch of road you're currently on - this would also definitively prove to most of the "but *I* can handle it" crowd that they really can't)
I think this style of approach should be perfectly allowable, but it should be regulated because one can obviously go too far. Not sure what form this regulation would take.. maybe some kind of government run website where people not paying their bills are listed.
Err... I think this is called a credit reporting agency... We have them already.
You could probably design legislation like this to not impact small businesses at all. Just say that you either have a compliant web site OR an easily located phone number (via eyes or screen readers, or whatever) that immediately goes to a real person.
Small businesses pretty much already operate that way, anyway, and if I was blind, I'd probably prefer it, since humans are a very good verbal DWIM interface. Obviously you'd have some things like ecommerce sites that are really only workable online, but I don't think most small businesses roll their own any more anyway.
They require registration of your device, but if they required a login then no Playstations, Xboxes, or iPhones would work
Now there's an idea... Register my iPhone, then spoof it's MAC on my desktop to do all my p2p. When they come calling, "But that's my *iPhone*, it doesn't *have* a p2p client... Obviously that's someone spoofing me."
Not that they'd care about a little detail like that...
Actually, I could see them used in conjunction with some sort of transport vehicle that powers/charges the suits while in the vehicle.
For example, in Iraq & Afghanistan, a few soldiers in powered armor could jump out of the vehicle to check something/clear a building, and not have to worry so much about being tagged with small arms. Since they would spend most of the time in the vehicle, battery life would be less of an issue.
You wouldn't even really have to armor everyone if it's possible for unarmored personnel to used the armored ones for cover. (kind of a crappy job for the armored ones, though!)
Killing some executives requires a plan. Finding their addresses, driving hundreds of miles, etc; Plenty of time to lose the "heat of the moment" and realize the consequences of such actions.
I'd not expect to see such a thing from people merely ruined financially; however, if, as one of the OPs suggested, you have a bunch of people basically already sentenced to death from cancer caused by this, it would be a *completely* different story.
Divorce your spouse (if any), and make sure they and the kids end up with all the assets. Then you have a few months for your crusade before you die anyway. Heck, getting killed by the cops during your rampage might even save you from a slow, painful death from the cancer.
Guess what. They don't care. The sort of folks who obsessively block ads aren't good customers anyway, and they aren't interested in random traffic, they are only interested in traffic from potential consumers.
Plus, I noticed EA was on that list. How much you want to bet that you'll have to get through one of these to get to, say, the download page for an important update to your game?
You wouldn't even have to have the teacher do the verification if you just put a cheap IR camera in the classroom that counted warm bodies and alerted when the swipe tally and warm body tally didn't match.
For anyone who believes use of such technology to search people / private property will be ruled unconstitutional, think again - drug sniffing dogs are often allowed to search one's private property, such as one's vehicle, that's accessible from the street despite no "contraband" being in plain view.
The difference with a drug dog is that they're not searching your car, they're searching the ambient air. It IS in plain "veiw" (nasally) to them. The car is basically leaking drug particles all over the place, which is glaringly obvious if you have the wetware to detect it. This is completely different from scanning the inside of a person/vehicle/house. Would a cop be out of line if he walked down the street and smelled MJ smoke when he passed a parked car, and went to investigate?
Of course doomsday predictions are always for a future date. It would be much more interesting if someone figured out a doomsday prediction for a date 3 years past. That would mean someone has to make a time machine to go back and warn them that the world is about to end. Knowing the world didn't end we could be certain that we will succeed in the time-travel mission.
This of course means that when the world does end it isn't our fault- it's the fault of the people from the future failing to post-predict the apocalypse and make a time machine to stop it.
The interesting thing about this is that there are theoretically an infinite number of "people from the future," and an infinite amount of time for them to develop time travel and a method for averting an apocalypse.
So, if a world-ending apocalypse does happen, we'll at least know that time travel really is impossible. -
Exactly. I did the math once and at 15', the difference between DVD and HD is meaningless on a 46" screen. Pretty meaningless on a 55" screen.
Who'd have thought? If you don't set up your media room properly, you don't get the benefits of the tech. Viewing distance and display size have to be properly related, and 15' is a pretty long way. At that range, you'd need a projector (70-80" screen) to get the full benefit of 1080p. In fact at 15' on a 46" TV, you probably won't be able to see the difference between 480p and DVD (you'd need to move in to about 12' to start seeing that).
So, either pick your resolution and TV size, then sit the proper distance away, or, if you're like me and your viewing distance is dictated by the available space, pick a display size and resolution to match (and if you're limited by budget to a smaller screen, available space almost never prevents you from sitting *closer*).
That isn't an immediate enough threat of death or grievous bodily harm (the standard here in TX) to justify employing deadly force. Now, if they come out from under the car with a big wrench or something, you might be able to articulate that threat (In TX, you'd probably be OK in that case; grand juries here seem to give homeowners the benefit of the doubt).
Now, if I found someone in my garage doing that, they'd probably end up at gunpoint until the cops arrived, but that would be somewhat of a bluff, since I'm not going to shoot someone that takes off running. If it was actually an FBI guy, he'd probably be smart enough to play along, since he's got a guaranteed "get out of jail free" when the cops show up (and if he's really smart, he'll keep his mouth shut until after he's arrested and removed from the scene, so I wouldn't know what he really was).
What I find works best is taking the first letter of every word in an easy to remember phrase. For example, "poor aunt sally slipped while out racing dogs". Er, wait...
Or just use the whole phrase? Much easier to remember, and suddenly your brute-forcing work goes from around 70^(avg. # chars) to like 600,000^(avg. # words) - and that doesn't count variations for punctuation/capitalization, etc. Little annoys me more than upper limits on password length.
Technology might not be the root of the problem, but it certainly allows the effects of the missing integrity and sincerity you mention to spread much faster and to a much wider audience.
The proliferation of online social networks and forums has also made it easier to communicate with people with similar views, to the exclusion of everyone that doesn't agree. That would tend to reinforce any illusion of reality people want to create for themselves. You can even see that effect here on slashdot, where I think we tend to be a little more intellectually honest with ourselves than most places.
Or, as non-value-producing citizens, they could lead lifestyles that didn't require them to make money hand over fist to sustain. They have the potential to make more than doctors, and I can't imagine anyone would argue that doctors contribute much more to society than lawyers ever could.
Not to mention that doctors could probably contribute even more, if it weren't for the lawyers...
It doesn't matter if you're legally liable or not. Once you touch someone's computer, all future problems become YOUR problem, and they expect you to fix it for free.
This is why I pretty much refuse to do anything like that outside of my job, free or not, unless you happen to be my parents or other similarly close relation.
Besides, I work with computers all day. I don't want to work on my *own* computer when I get home, let alone someone else's...
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
And ISPs start offering decent upstream bandwidth?
Right now I hate torrents because it always seems to be slower than a server with a good connection. The past few times I've been forced to use it, I've been uploading faster than I was downloading (I do have decent upstream).
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care about the heat puns, I just want to know if all of that sodium will cause high steam pressure.
That's the real question. Because if 'broadband' is a term with a real official meaning, it would be possible to go after any ISP selling 'broadband' that isn't 'broadband' for false advertising. Alternately, if their contracts and the like say that they're selling 5 Mbps and they're actually selling 1 Mbps, that could also be actionable.
Ha! I've never seen (and probably never will) a residential internet service contract that doesn't say "up to X, but we don't guarantee shit."
IMO, the phrase "up to" should be completely banned in advertising.
Or the way my employer used to do it before we got bought: We had vacation, but no sick days. If you were sick, it was "stay home and don't spread it around here," but it didn't use vacation time, and there wasn't a hard limit. They were also pretty flexible about taking an hour or two to meet the plumber or whatever. Oddly enough, no one really abused the system, since they actually treated us well. (part of that was probably the lack of the "well, I have it, so I might as well use it" mentality that giving X number of sick days promotes)
Most companies will give you time off, at least for funerals. The ones that don't are probably the same asses that hire these kinds of investigators. Maybe the not-sick days are a symptom, rather than a problem?
I mostly agree with you, when you're talking about actual poverty. However, the GP said "average worker". I think it was CNNMoney that had an average net worth calculator (this was a year or two ago) that said the average net worth of someone my age (33) was about $8k. That should give a pretty good idea how much debt the "average" person with a house full of stuff and a car is carrying.
I think the GP is right. If you have a reasonable job, there's not much excuse for not having a 6-12 month "oh shit" or "flip off the boss" fund, other than keeping up with the Joneses.
I'm not really sure why the organizers are determined to do this in the most difficult way possible. There's sand and sun all over the place, including many that are a lot closer to electrical markets (the US southwest, for example). So why not just build these things there and sidestep the whole issue of superconducting wires? This plan doesn't make sense to me.
I've keep trying to figure out why everyone fixates on deserts, too. If you're going to use PV anyway, why the hell aren't you putting the panels as close as possible to where the power will be used? According to the solar radiation meter on a nearby weather station, there's about 100kW of energy hitting my roof around noon during the summer (sounds crazy, but the meter reads almost 1kW/m^2 during summer and 600W/m^2 during winter). Why not put PV (or mirrors for solar thermal, if the heart of the plant can be made small enough) up there? As a bonus, it keeps all that heat from hitting my house! Or above parking lots? There's plenty of space, at least in a suburban type setting, for putting solar panels.
so a good compromise would be to tie this lockout to MPH. under say, 5 MPH, texting and talking should be ok. and if you speed up, you spontaneously lose signal (or spontaneously get it back when you slow back down). so the poor humps stuck in slow moving traffic jams are adequately entertained, for example
This makes absolutely no sense. The times when I'm creeping along at 5mph (parking lots, traffic, alley, whatever) are when I need to be paying the MOST attention to driving. If anything, limit it to between 60-70mph to keep me awake on long drives, when I just need to stay between the lines. (if you're really sadistic, make it drop the call if the car isn't going between the speed limit and 3mph below for the stretch of road you're currently on - this would also definitively prove to most of the "but *I* can handle it" crowd that they really can't)
I think this style of approach should be perfectly allowable, but it should be regulated because one can obviously go too far. Not sure what form this regulation would take.. maybe some kind of government run website where people not paying their bills are listed.
Err... I think this is called a credit reporting agency... We have them already.
You could probably design legislation like this to not impact small businesses at all. Just say that you either have a compliant web site OR an easily located phone number (via eyes or screen readers, or whatever) that immediately goes to a real person.
Small businesses pretty much already operate that way, anyway, and if I was blind, I'd probably prefer it, since humans are a very good verbal DWIM interface. Obviously you'd have some things like ecommerce sites that are really only workable online, but I don't think most small businesses roll their own any more anyway.
They require registration of your device, but if they required a login then no Playstations, Xboxes, or iPhones would work
Now there's an idea... Register my iPhone, then spoof it's MAC on my desktop to do all my p2p. When they come calling, "But that's my *iPhone*, it doesn't *have* a p2p client... Obviously that's someone spoofing me."
Not that they'd care about a little detail like that...
Actually, I could see them used in conjunction with some sort of transport vehicle that powers/charges the suits while in the vehicle.
For example, in Iraq & Afghanistan, a few soldiers in powered armor could jump out of the vehicle to check something/clear a building, and not have to worry so much about being tagged with small arms. Since they would spend most of the time in the vehicle, battery life would be less of an issue.
You wouldn't even really have to armor everyone if it's possible for unarmored personnel to used the armored ones for cover. (kind of a crappy job for the armored ones, though!)
Killing some executives requires a plan. Finding their addresses, driving hundreds of miles, etc; Plenty of time to lose the "heat of the moment" and realize the consequences of such actions.
I'd not expect to see such a thing from people merely ruined financially; however, if, as one of the OPs suggested, you have a bunch of people basically already sentenced to death from cancer caused by this, it would be a *completely* different story.
Divorce your spouse (if any), and make sure they and the kids end up with all the assets. Then you have a few months for your crusade before you die anyway. Heck, getting killed by the cops during your rampage might even save you from a slow, painful death from the cancer.
Guess what. They don't care. The sort of folks who obsessively block ads aren't good customers anyway, and they aren't interested in random traffic, they are only interested in traffic from potential consumers.
Plus, I noticed EA was on that list. How much you want to bet that you'll have to get through one of these to get to, say, the download page for an important update to your game?
You wouldn't even have to have the teacher do the verification if you just put a cheap IR camera in the classroom that counted warm bodies and alerted when the swipe tally and warm body tally didn't match.
For anyone who believes use of such technology to search people / private property will be ruled unconstitutional, think again - drug sniffing dogs are often allowed to search one's private property, such as one's vehicle, that's accessible from the street despite no "contraband" being in plain view.
The difference with a drug dog is that they're not searching your car, they're searching the ambient air. It IS in plain "veiw" (nasally) to them. The car is basically leaking drug particles all over the place, which is glaringly obvious if you have the wetware to detect it. This is completely different from scanning the inside of a person/vehicle/house. Would a cop be out of line if he walked down the street and smelled MJ smoke when he passed a parked car, and went to investigate?
Speaking of the apocalypse:
Of course doomsday predictions are always for a future date. It would be much more interesting if someone figured out a doomsday prediction for a date 3 years past. That would mean someone has to make a time machine to go back and warn them that the world is about to end. Knowing the world didn't end we could be certain that we will succeed in the time-travel mission.
This of course means that when the world does end it isn't our fault- it's the fault of the people from the future failing to post-predict the apocalypse and make a time machine to stop it.
The interesting thing about this is that there are theoretically an infinite number of "people from the future," and an infinite amount of time for them to develop time travel and a method for averting an apocalypse.
So, if a world-ending apocalypse does happen, we'll at least know that time travel really is impossible.
-
Exactly. I did the math once and at 15', the difference between DVD and HD is meaningless on a 46" screen. Pretty meaningless on a 55" screen.
Who'd have thought? If you don't set up your media room properly, you don't get the benefits of the tech. Viewing distance and display size have to be properly related, and 15' is a pretty long way. At that range, you'd need a projector (70-80" screen) to get the full benefit of 1080p. In fact at 15' on a 46" TV, you probably won't be able to see the difference between 480p and DVD (you'd need to move in to about 12' to start seeing that).
So, either pick your resolution and TV size, then sit the proper distance away, or, if you're like me and your viewing distance is dictated by the available space, pick a display size and resolution to match (and if you're limited by budget to a smaller screen, available space almost never prevents you from sitting *closer*).
IAACHLH (I am a concealed handgun license holder)
That isn't an immediate enough threat of death or grievous bodily harm (the standard here in TX) to justify employing deadly force. Now, if they come out from under the car with a big wrench or something, you might be able to articulate that threat (In TX, you'd probably be OK in that case; grand juries here seem to give homeowners the benefit of the doubt).
Now, if I found someone in my garage doing that, they'd probably end up at gunpoint until the cops arrived, but that would be somewhat of a bluff, since I'm not going to shoot someone that takes off running. If it was actually an FBI guy, he'd probably be smart enough to play along, since he's got a guaranteed "get out of jail free" when the cops show up (and if he's really smart, he'll keep his mouth shut until after he's arrested and removed from the scene, so I wouldn't know what he really was).
Ok, sticking something ON your car without a warrant is within the realm of possibility, but actually *modifying* it?
Young people are careless - film at 11...
What I find works best is taking the first letter of every word in an easy to remember phrase. For example, "poor aunt sally slipped while out racing dogs". Er, wait...
Or just use the whole phrase? Much easier to remember, and suddenly your brute-forcing work goes from around 70^(avg. # chars) to like 600,000^(avg. # words) - and that doesn't count variations for punctuation/capitalization, etc. Little annoys me more than upper limits on password length.
Technology might not be the root of the problem, but it certainly allows the effects of the missing integrity and sincerity you mention to spread much faster and to a much wider audience.
The proliferation of online social networks and forums has also made it easier to communicate with people with similar views, to the exclusion of everyone that doesn't agree. That would tend to reinforce any illusion of reality people want to create for themselves. You can even see that effect here on slashdot, where I think we tend to be a little more intellectually honest with ourselves than most places.
Or, as non-value-producing citizens, they could lead lifestyles that didn't require them to make money hand over fist to sustain. They have the potential to make more than doctors, and I can't imagine anyone would argue that doctors contribute much more to society than lawyers ever could.
Not to mention that doctors could probably contribute even more, if it weren't for the lawyers...
It doesn't matter if you're legally liable or not. Once you touch someone's computer, all future problems become YOUR problem, and they expect you to fix it for free.
This is why I pretty much refuse to do anything like that outside of my job, free or not, unless you happen to be my parents or other similarly close relation.
Besides, I work with computers all day. I don't want to work on my *own* computer when I get home, let alone someone else's...
When torrent support comes equipped on all the major browsers, it can take off.
And ISPs start offering decent upstream bandwidth?
Right now I hate torrents because it always seems to be slower than a server with a good connection. The past few times I've been forced to use it, I've been uploading faster than I was downloading (I do have decent upstream).