Crowdfunding is not the future of Sci Fi, well unless you have infinite amounts of patience it's not. One of the things I have learned is that people will pay for Star Trek. Sometimes they'll pay for other things. Sometimes they won't. DC Fontana and some others tried to raise $600,000 for a new 4 episode Sci Fi series that had nothing to do with Trek but did involve a few Trek actors and they didn't even come close to getting the money necessary. Tim Russ, who played Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager, raised over $200,000 late in 2012 to do a one shot Star Trek web episode that he hopes (no guarantees though, he admits) will inspire CBS to pick it up and pay for an ongoing series. It should come out sometime this year, I think, but we're still waiting. Star Trek Continues, referenced above, has a whopping two episodes and 3 shorts available. Probably the best of the financed Trek series, Star Trek Phase II, has produced only 8 episodes (and 2 or 3 shorts I think) in 10 years. Fan financed productions are certainly better than nothing, but given the slowness with which even the best operate and the always possible chance of donor fatigue and unwillingness to support expensive projects, I don't really see fan financing as an option.
They're so concerned about people making calls, yet they've had airline phones for years.
When's the last time you've flown? Because while at one time they did have such phones, I haven't seen one in years and I do fly at least once a year, sometimes internationally. Surely you do know that when you have pay airline prices to use their phones, when they were available, no person in coach was going to talk more than a few minutes due to the cost.
You're correct but it's not obvious that the law will actually be applied in this case. Clearly,
the NZ and US both really, REALLY want to crucify Dot Com and are willing to break
the law, cheat, lie, steal, defraud and everything else in order to do it.
As an American, I can tell you that US definitely wants to get him as it's what our overlords in Hollywood (including the RIAA) want. It's really difficult for me to see why NZ would care much at all, but I can understand that the US might use pressure to make them care. However, I have to agree with what another poster said in saying that NZ might be deliberately screwing up as a way to (secretly) protest being goaded into action by the US.
That's really only half true. Informed buyers know that a slow charge time (16 hours or so for the Leaf if I recall) is annoying and unusable.
I disagree. I lease a Leaf and I love the car. I fully admit it's not for everybody but I needed a 2nd car that I could use as a daily driver (I live approx. 20 miles from work) and my work commute stays well within the expected range (75 miles and up depending on your sources - Nissan says it will do 85 miles on a charge if the weather is not unreasonably hot or cold). I have no big need for quick charging and am quite content with standard trickle charging from a 110 outlet overnight. I have a gasoline burning car that I can use anytime I want, it just doesn't get great gas mileage in the city. I do a lot of stop and go driving to work, so it's expensive to drive my gasoline car to the office. More range in the car would be great as I could take it to visit family members who don't live very close to me, but I love the car. I've talked to others who also have one and I can't tell you how cool it is to pass by convenience stores and gasoline stations and know that you don't have to stop for gasoline. It's not practical as an only car unless you simply do not ever need to go beyond the charge range, but as an additional car it can meet a lot of people's needs.
like so many other articles, this just seems like another reminder to never ever use godaddy
Huh. The conclusion I came to is "NEVER use Twitter". I've deliberately refused to join it and that just reinforced why I refuse to do so. I can't be targeted for my Twitter handle if I don't use the service. GoDaddy has its problems for sure (and I admit to being a customer at present) but I'm not totally convinced that no other registrar wouldn't have done the same thing.
It's a competing currency. The marketplace says "we have no faith in your dollars." Government says "so?" The marketplace says "we will replace the dollar." Government says "no."
I just wonder how it took so long.
There are a finite number of bit coins. You can only get more by getting them from other people. Let me guess - you're one of those gold standard people too, right? The dollar is in no danger of being replaced by bitcoin, as if such could ever happen. Shrem seems to have believed that he could act as an intermediary for transactions that he knew were in violation of US law and not be held responsible. He can test that assertion in a court of law. When bitcoin exchanges that don't have ties to Silk Road start get closed down on trumped up charges you might have a point, but right now your "evil government took them down because it feared them" hypothesis isn't strong.
The spying, if it is actually happening, may not necessarily be for the benefit of American industry. German companies have been known to have secret deals through intermediaries to sell banned technology to countries that their own government does not legally allow them to sell directly to because of international sanctions. Anybody here watch the American TV series "Breaking Bad"? It featured a crystal meth drug empire that used a German conglomerate to provide the equipment necessary to run the secret lab used for much of the series. There is some chance that basically the NSA just wants to know if Siemens is selling things in violation of UN rules to countries like Iran and North Korea.
You're comparing apples and oranges by suggesting that all paid jobs are equivalent. First of all, I have no idea what the workers on those jobs were paid and I suspect neither do you. So you may have no way to know if the pay was average, above average, or less than average. Since the Hoover Dam was constructed in the middle of the depression, I suspect that the pay was good only in relative terms as getting paid for any job beat getting nothing to not work. 11 people died in the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. As best I can tell, as much as could be done for safety was done. Only 5 people died in building the Empire State Building. But 112 people died in building the Hoover Dam. Does that fit the bill of "considering the welfare of their employees sacrosanct"? I'm not thinking that it does. I've come to the conclusion that even with the absolute best practices, it is impossible to write any sizable code that can not be exploited, and the bigger the project, the more likely it can be exploited. You are right that Facebook does indeed try to be cheap in some ways with regards to employees (Zuckerberg is a very loud voice in the "We can't function without more H1-B visa employees!" argument) but the problem is that when you are a big website, some guy with time on his hands may try to crack your security for giggles. It's kind of like having a dozen people every day trying to take down and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge than what you imply, which is that Facebook is just too cheap and maybe too stupid to write good code.
I've been many times to Ukraine, although the last time I went there was 8 years ago and I have no reason to return any time soon. I was actually in the country, by blind chance, during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and had a chance to see it first hand and talk to various Ukrainians at the time. Everybody knew the election results were crooked, even those who liked the original outcome, and the result was that when the army refused to intervene and the police decided to stay out too and the Ukrainian Supreme Court demanded another election, Viktor Yushchenko won.
Yushchenko was a friend of the West (EU and USA) and while as best I can tell he had served competently as Prime Minister in the past, he was as incompetent a man as could ever be put into the presidency. His incompetency led to Yulia Tymoshenko (the Sarah Palin of Ukraine) exploiting the situation and trying to grab power legally via the office of Prime Minister. Under enormous pressure and horrible circumstances she negotiated a truly horrible long term deal with Russia to pay historically high prices for natural gas. This deal quickly haunted Ukraine as natural gas market prices fell far below what Ukraine was now legally obligated to pay their "friends" in Russia. This deal has had a very large and very negative impact on the Ukrainian economy as they can't live without the natural gas and are still obligated to pay prices far above current market prices to Mother Russia for it.
Yushchenko made some feeble attempts to implement true reform and start cracking down on corruption, but when faced with opposition he quickly gave up and nothing really changed. Tymoshenko refused to cooperate with him, trying to position herself for a future run for president. The Sarah Palin link is pretty accurate with the exception that Palin probably knows on some level that she can't ever be president (too polarizing and even a majority of her own party don't back or respect her), Tymoshenko's ego refused to allow her to cooperate with Yushchenko, so they became bitter enemies and in fact Yushchenko was forced at one time to get his mortal electoral enemy, Viktor Yanukovych (the current president and loser of the 2004 re-vote), to serve as Prime Minister as working with him seemed better than working with the self-serving Tymoshenko.
Yushchenko ran for a 2nd term and since he and Tymoshenko hated each other so much, they split the anti-Yanukovych vote with Tymoshenko coming out on the better end of that split. The country is roughly half pro-Russian thanks to the Krushchev era decision to enlarge the Ukrainian SSR with what had always been Russian speaking and ethnically Russian lands. The half of the country that considers itself Ukrainian is pro-EU and very anti-Russia, remembering well how poorly Ukrainians were treated in the USSR days (even today most Russians think of them as being something like country bumpkins or rednecks). The country is roughly split 50-50 along those lines, so when the pro-EU side has no unified candidate (Yushchenko and Tymoshenko hated each other so much that neither would give up a run for the presidency to consolidate behind the other), the pro-Russia side wins. Yanukovych is fairly smart and devious but he fails to realize that the pro-EU half of Ukraine still has no unified candidate to oppose him (there are currently roughly 3 candidates splitting support), so while half the country hates him, they can't get enough votes to defeat him in the next presidential election (2015 I think). Unfortunately Yanukovych is an old school, Soviet era politician and he remembers the failure of the 2004 cheating to give him the handoff victory he expected (he was the handpicked choice of the outgoing president), so he is going to change the game where the opposition simply cannot legally mount the kind of protests they need to get rid of him. Since the various self-serving members of the pro-EU side refuse to unite behind a single candidate, the pro-EU opposition remains hopelessly split and unable to effect c
I get between a few hundred and a few thousand USD for any given contract, and my clients actually expect their software to work. How does one go about getting this much money for a steaming pile of shit?
My first job out of college was working for the Department of Defense as a civilian programmer (I worked for a specific branch of the US military, but I'd prefer not to name it). I can tell you based on what I saw that the answer to your question is "Get a contract awarded to you." My first job was that I was hired to work with a small team trying to finish up a salvage operation on some old IBM hardware that the contractor never completed the project on. We were finishing up making it work after the contractor gave up and gave us the computers. I can't say this with 100% absolute certainty, but the senior guy on the project insisted that the contract got fully paid and the vendor never was sued for giving up on the project without meeting what the project called for. He said they just turned over the computers and the source code for as far as they had gotten and called it a day with Uncle Sam just shrugging his shoulders about it. I learned while working there that literally anything can be justified if it's on a contract. No cost is so high that it can't be justified if it's on a contract between the DoD and a private company. The right wingers unfortunately help to waste US taxpayer money here by insisting that everything there is can be done "cheaper" (ha ha ha) by any private company. Almost all of my DoD career was spent working on various projects where the government reclaimed them from a contractor (sometimes after completion, sometimes when the contractor just gave up on it) and everything was significantly cheaper for us once we took over the projects. So what happens is that unscrupulous vendors bid cheaply on contracts they can't be sure that they can actually complete because they're rarely sued and they can usually get fully paid or close to it for any half-way attempt they make on the project. Nobody on the right ever questions the wisdom of this process because it is "saving money".
It's been about 8-9 years since I last bought a PC in a store rather than built my own, and the one I bought was HP. Why? They used really good quality parts. And the crapware they put on wasn't any worse than anybody else's, at least back then. Plus they used standard parts which was great, because it meant that you could buy off the shelf stuff to upgrade the PC and it would work instead of being locked into that evil world of having to buy parts only from the manufacturer because they used customized parts and connectors everywhere.
Maybe you don't remember, but Vista was such a turd that all the major PC manufacturers started selling XP boxes as an option instead of Vista, well after Vista had been planned to be the only option available. HP and other manufacturers forced Microsoft to grudgingly support this at the time. So yeah, most of us have seen this movie before.
Lots of industry insiders say that the vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from Office and Windows and that both are in an inevitable decline and will shrink every year. Microsoft spent years in reaction mode, watching where the industry went and getting to the party late, claiming that they were always there, they were, uh, just in the back talking to somebody else, but yeah, there were at the party since it started, sure. It worked well for them as they just hopped on the bandwagon on most trends and let somebody else take the risk to see if anybody wanted it before they committed to it, but that proved to be a failure when mobile devices succeeded and their puny attempts to enter the markets failed. Even when they finally got on the tablet bandwagon, their original price point was absurd and nobody would pay it. In the past, just like Intel, they've just rolled the dice without any real thought to whether what they were doing made sense or not, as it was easier to just throw money at the mistakes and move on than to think carefully about whether they should be doing what they were doing. PCs last years and only gamers have a compelling reason to upgrade every 1-2 years. So now people are keeping old PCs because they still work and asking "Why do I need to pay $150 (or whatever) for a new version of Windows?". Microsoft depended on PCs being eclipsed every few years to the point that users felt compelled to upgrade and that hasn't been the case for years, so the reason to get a new version of Windows vanished with it. And when that new version of Windows sucks as bad as Win 8 does, nobody is going to want it. A surprising number of people are finding that things like iPads and Chromebooks meet their simplistic "computing" needs very well and they don't really need to buy a new PC and pay for Win 8 just to send email and watch YouTube.
Which is why you need the two magic phrases: "Am I free to go?", "I want a lawyer".
Seriously, hours of a moron trying to "verbal" a confession out of someone when he had the whole and entire evidence in his possession. This is a perfect example, you are never helping yourself by cooperating with this crap.
Am I free to go? [No.] I want a lawyer.
This sounds great. And maybe for some people it is. Do you have a lawyer on retainer? Then by all means, this is for you. I'm pretty sure that Joe Average Citizen does not have his own personal lawyer available at a quick call. So what happens then? Do they just assign some random lawyer to you from the public defender's office? In that case you might be better off trying to be your own lawyer. Suppose they just give you a phone and say "OK, find a lawyer to call"? Who do you call when you've never had to do that before? Yes, this sounds great, but the odds of some average guy getting Saul Goodman (Breaking Bad reference, for those who don't know) to magically fall out of the sky to defend him seem pretty remote to me.
IBM is spending a billion dollars on AI. That's serious. IBM usually succeeds at making what they set out to make.
In the past, that was true because IBM had some genius leadership at the top in the past. I do not believe that to be true today. The current management at IBM has one goal - to keep their stock price high. As a result, they continually gut first world employees and reports are that they are saving management jobs as they send people in the trenches home with a severance package. I worked for a company on a previous job that tried this approach and it was not successful. IBM seems to be a pretty employee hostile place to work in places like the USA and it's hard for me to believe that this bet is going to pay off, but we shall see.
The United States is going more and more decrepit. I for one am glad there's Russian, European and Chinese alternatives to fall back onto if the GPS system becomes useless for one reason or another.
Yes because we all know that neither the Russians nor the Chinese would ever under any circumstances manipulate such alternatives that they controlled if it suited their whims to do so and only the "evil" US would ever do such a terrible thing. Right....
My experience has been that non-technical managers in IT suck. The worst manager I ever worked for was non-technical and that meant that she was easily lied to because she had no way to judge what she was being told and she just assumed that the people under her would tell the truth. She made a lot of bad hiring decisions because we had some job applicants who lied about their experience and she lacked the ability to see through it and saw no need to have technical people in the department talk to the potential employees prior to hiring them. She also made a decision in agreeing to change the kind of work we did that at the time I expressed concern that it was not a good decision. In the end, a department of about 15 people was completely gutted when this new work was moved to a cheaper country we had an office in. She was a pointy haired boss to an extreme and she used to pepper her conversations with whatever industry buzz words were in vogue at the time to make herself look like she really understood the kind of technical work she managed. It's a long story not worth going into, but basically we had some upper management changes in the company and a female manager who had personally protected my manager left the company and the new male manager who took over made my manager a golden parachute offer she could not resist. Her husband was loaded and she used his money to start a business that had nothing to do with IT and as far as I know she has never worked in IT since. The best managers I've worked for all had IT backgrounds and were real in the trenches IT people before being promoted to management and it made them more effective at the kind of management battles that managers have to do with other departments and better able to represent our interests since they actually understood the work we were doing under them.
The best argument for change in PD laws
on
Public Domain Day 2014
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The best argument I've heard for changing the laws dealing with public domain in the USA is that in these days of federal budget cutting and decreasing spending, if these copyrights are so valuable then why are they being renewed for free automatically? It would seem logical to make a change where those who want their copyrights to be extended could pay a fee, perhaps fairly large, and fill out some paperwork to get the copyright renewed. If they forget to fill out the forms in time and pay the fee in time, too bad. That's how it was some years ago. If you forgot to renew your copyright in time, you lost it. Congress could enact a sliding scale where the renewal fee increases exponentially. For example, say that all works get an original copy right period of 50 years. Then if renewal is desired, the copyright holder could pay $500,000 for a renewal period of 10 years. If they want the works renewed at the end of that period for another 10 years, the fee goes up to $5 million. The next 10 year period is $50 million. The one after that is $500 million, then $5 billion and so on. Eventually the cost will get prohibitive that nobody will pay it any more and works will enter the public domain. I really do not get how if these works are so valuable that they must be renewed that Congress has to let it be done for free and virtually forever. Unfortunately to date the US Supreme Court has basically ruled "We're not saying that we think that extending copyright is a great idea, but the Constitution does permit it. As long as the termination date is less than 'never', any extension is probably legal." Why is Congress giving away money in renewal fees if these works are truly so valuable that they must remain in copyright longer?
And the real irony is that Disney built its animated empire on stories in the public domain:
- Snow White? Grimm's Fairy Tales.
- Pinocchio? Carlo Collodi, 1880.
- Fantasia? Classical music from the public domain. The highlight, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, is from Goethe in 1798.
- Bambi? Nope, they stole that one too, from a 1923 work of Felix Salten
- Cinderella? That was written about 1700.
- Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carroll, of course.
Basically, if it's a "Disney princess", they almost definitely stole the character from somewhere else.
Disclaimer: I am a Disney fan. However, I am willing to admit that Disney has hypocritically played both sides of the aisle here in milking public domain when it suited them (Snow White now practically belongs to them, for example) and crying loudly for copyright protection for their original material about to enter the public domain, but your examples are not 100% accurate.
Fantasia contains "Rite Of Spring" which was composed by Igor Stravinski and should have been under copyright at the time (the film came out in 1940 and "Rite" was composed in 1913.).
Bambi was based on a book and Disney purchased the film rights to the book, although they bought them from a producer who had previously purchased the rights and abandoned the project when he realized it would be too difficult for him to do.
Obama said recently in an interview that spying in the US was limited by laws in the US. They he added that for the rest of the world, the NSA is not limited by any laws. So I guess that means that the US doesn't care about breaking laws in other countries.
That's a very sour thought, when you chew on the implications of that statement.
You can get off your sanctimonious high horse. Are you really and truly arguing that laws have no national boundary? Suppose some foreign country passes a draconian law against watching internet pornography and they proscribe the death penalty to violators. Are you really going to argue that you should be subject to that law? The laws of other countries don't apply on US soil. Sometimes those countries try to extend their reach to other countries. For example, Ebay got in a bunch of trouble in France years ago for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia in the USA. Not France, but the USA. So Ebay had to put in a filter to attempt to block all information of such sales if the person was coming from a French IP address. Are you in favor of that kind of thing?
If you want to argue that the US should care about breaking the laws of other countries while in those countries, then that is a completely different argument to make, but I doubt that the NSA does its work outside of US soil for that very reason - foreign laws won't apply to actions done on US soil. Well, those countries may think that their laws apply, but good luck on an extradition request.
Most people who have responded seem to not understand the legal argument here. Yes, this is risky to his case and basically he can't explain how he got the coins without hurting his own case. However, that's not the point. My guess is that he and his attorneys know that he is going to lose in court and go to jail. They are trying a novel argument that likely won't work that the government doesn't have the right to seize the coins no matter how acquired specifically because of their electronic nature. This is basically a low percentage "hail Mary" type play (to use an American football reference - look it up in Wikipedia if you don't understand it) to try to at least get him some income (and get his lawyers paid now) for when he gets out of jail. It's trying to turn the best case scenario into "Yeah, you're going to jail, but you'll still be rich when you get out". The unpleasant alternative is to say nothing, let the government keep the coins, and proceed with his weak defense that probably won't work anyway, in which case he goes to jail for a long time penniless. He's going to jail - the only question is whether this highly unlikely argument to keep the coins actually works and he at least gets to leave prison as a rich man. Anything can happen in a US courtroom, but I don't think this is going to be successful.
I have learned from observance and being around people with various mental issues that those who regularly take their meds do a lot better than those who do not. One of the problems with mental illnesses is that the illness will convince the person who has it that they don't need to take their meds. If you are prone to this kind of thing where you don't take your meds when you feel good, you are going to have problems in a work place. I guarantee it. The most unpleasant work experience of my life was working with a guy my manager forced us to hire because we had left the job open for a long time and he told us that we had to hire someone or the job would be closed forever. So we hired the least objectionable of a very uninspiring group of candidates we interviewed for the job. On his first day at work, he told us all that he was bi-polar and he saw no need to take any medicine for this. The next 6 months or whatever it was that he worked with us were just very bad as we saw him both unrealistically happy and in the deepest depths of depression and neither state was very good for us as co-workers. He finally left us for another job and became somebody else's problem. I don't want to go into details as for all I know maybe he reads Slashdot and he could recognize himself, but he found an interesting way as he left the company to create problems for us for months to come and I wouldn't wish what he did to us on anybody.
Right now I have a co-worker who battles depression and a few other issues and while it sometimes makes him difficult to deal with, he does regularly take his meds and we've learned to just accept his occasional bad moods as they don't last and he is a valuable contributor. But if you are going to go through periods where you don't take your meds, you'll do nobody any favors by working in an office.
The USA will eventually find itself alone, and without allies. And it's not just the spying, it's the drone attacks on soil with countries we are not at war with. Recently we blew up a wedding party in Yemen, killing over 13 which I'm sure included women and children. But oh no, we're not evil. We're the good guys. Uh huh.
Nonsense. Regimes that hate or hated freedom like the Soviet Union and the PRC have plenty of allies. The US will still have its friends. The major ones who really matter aren't leaving.
Little by little, we are making enemies of the world, and until we change our ways, less and les of the world is going to want to do business with us because we have shown we're not trustworthy.
Brazil's president is a quite a bit more anti-US anyway than her predecessor who despite coming from a supposedly anti-US background was actually pretty friendly towards the US while president. Let's just say that the whole spying affair has provided her with a convenient excuse to pile on the anti-Americanism when she was already leaning that way since she took office. There are a lot of internal problems within Brazil right now and being able to thumb her nose in Uncle Sam's face helps to distract the population from real problems that her government has been completely unable to make any progress on solving. This is an old strategy used by more countries than I can even mention. Whenever there are big problems at home, just blame the US for something. I'm not sure that Cuba and Venezuela's government could even exist if the ability to blame all of their problems on the US boogeyman got taken away from them.
And to the poster who blames a 4.5 billion dollar loss on the economy to Ed Snowden, screw you. All Snowden did was CONFIRM what everyone knew already, but just couldn't prove. He will be shown to be a hero, this decade's Cindy Sheehan.
I don't know anything that could possibly make you appear more of a nut job than to actually think Cindy Sheehan is a hero. Almost nobody knew what the NSA was up to. It was only nut jobs like you who always suspect the worst of government who just got lucky this time with your wild guess.
At this point, I think it's inevitable that spying will be a central issue in the 2016 Presidential election, and neither party will dare to defend the status quo. Corporate campaign donors are starting to see the economic implications, and they'll be raising a hell of a fuss by the time two more years have gone by.
You cannot possibly be American if you think that. As someone born and raised in the USA, I can assure you that my countrymen have a memory span of about 5 minutes and whatever the 2016 election's main story is, concern about NSA issues will not be it. The economy will likely be the biggest issue of 2016 with both major party candidates arguing that they've got the best plan to create new jobs.
I love (not really) how on Slashdot anything related to the airline industry brings out posts from people who never travel by plane. I had a friend who last traveled on a plane around 1999. He's not likely to ever travel anywhere by plane again in his life and this is by choice. He never flew after the TSA existed, yet listening to hm talk about the TSA you would think TSA had singled him out for unfair treatment on some flight years ago and he bore a grudge he never got over. Slashdot is the same way where people post here about how great it is to be able to talk on planes and they never fly anywhere.
I think letting people talk on planes on their cell phones is a horrible idea, but the airlines will allow if it given a choice. This is why the only way to stop it is for the government to forbid it. Now if I hold a minority opinion on this and it's clear that the majority of flyers want to talk on their cell phones on planes, I will accept that. I won't like it, but I'll accept it. The US airlines will allow this if given a choice for 2 reasons. The first is that they've already proven themselves unwilling to restrict alcohol sales to obviously inebriated passengers, some of whom in their drunken state cause problems serious enough to get them arrested when the plane lands, perhaps even having to make an emergency landing. Alcohol sales bring in money. They won't be stopped. The second reason is that this obviously creates a money making situation where they can, as mentioned earlier, sell "quiet zone" spaces at a premium. I travel by plane sometimes for personal reasons and I am not happy at all at the thought of having to pay an extra $200 or more just so I don't have to listen to someone else's phone conversation for the whole flight.
I am a US citizen and I've dealt with US customs before, but not New Zealand customs. In my experience, customs generally has no interest in your phone and laptop if you are truly a Joe Backpacker kind of guy. They are very interested in you if they think you are trying to smuggle drugs or something else. A couple of years ago I got back from a trip to China to visit my girlfriend and the guy I talked to at Customs at the US airport became convinced that I was smuggling Chinese herbs, so he made me go to a special line so my luggage could get examined. I was a bit amused as I knew they would find nothing as I brought no herbs of any kind with me and very few souvenirs of the trip. The guy who examined my luggage actually got annoyed because he found nothing. I was immediately allowed to leave with my luggage. I am sure that there is much more to this story than the backpacker is telling because he knows that Customs probably had a very good reason to be interested in him. For example, he may have worked with Wikileaks, been in contact with Snowden, or have some other non-Snowden issue that caused Customs to be very interested in him. In fact, don't be surprised if we get more information and it actually has nothing to do with Snowden because he transited through San Francisco and apparently US Customs had no interest in him. If US Customs felt that he was a source of useful information about Snowden, they'd have confiscated his electronics there. I'm pretty sure that New Zealand customs does not randomly target backpackers for confiscation of electronics and this is not an example of a police state gone mad. I'm sure he knows the real reason they took his stuff and he doesn't want to mention it because he wants to play the "I'm being singled out for nothing!" angle to the press right now.
Of course, for some inexplicable reason US didnt respond to Soviet challenge by leveraging the power of free markets, private industry and entrepreneurial spirit. They decided to beat massive Soviet state run design bureaus backed by their military industry complex by establishing their own massive state run design bureau backed by their military industrial complex. They even bagged members of the same team of germans as their design leads !
The US led private industry design and build the Apollo project. I don't know how detailed the specs were that private companies like Lockheed and Boeing were given for their parts of the program, for example. I did have a chance some years ago to talk to a guy who worked on the Apollo project for NASA and he was working there during the first moon landing. He told me an interesting story about the onboard computer that the LEM (lunar lander) used and mentioned that MIT was responsible for the programming on it.
Slashdot Mirror
Crowdfunding is not the future of Sci Fi, well unless you have infinite amounts of patience it's not. One of the things I have learned is that people will pay for Star Trek. Sometimes they'll pay for other things. Sometimes they won't. DC Fontana and some others tried to raise $600,000 for a new 4 episode Sci Fi series that had nothing to do with Trek but did involve a few Trek actors and they didn't even come close to getting the money necessary. Tim Russ, who played Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager, raised over $200,000 late in 2012 to do a one shot Star Trek web episode that he hopes (no guarantees though, he admits) will inspire CBS to pick it up and pay for an ongoing series. It should come out sometime this year, I think, but we're still waiting. Star Trek Continues, referenced above, has a whopping two episodes and 3 shorts available. Probably the best of the financed Trek series, Star Trek Phase II, has produced only 8 episodes (and 2 or 3 shorts I think) in 10 years. Fan financed productions are certainly better than nothing, but given the slowness with which even the best operate and the always possible chance of donor fatigue and unwillingness to support expensive projects, I don't really see fan financing as an option.
They're so concerned about people making calls, yet they've had airline phones for years.
When's the last time you've flown? Because while at one time they did have such phones, I haven't seen one in years and I do fly at least once a year, sometimes internationally. Surely you do know that when you have pay airline prices to use their phones, when they were available, no person in coach was going to talk more than a few minutes due to the cost.
You're correct but it's not obvious that the law will actually be applied in this case. Clearly, the NZ and US both really, REALLY want to crucify Dot Com and are willing to break the law, cheat, lie, steal, defraud and everything else in order to do it.
As an American, I can tell you that US definitely wants to get him as it's what our overlords in Hollywood (including the RIAA) want. It's really difficult for me to see why NZ would care much at all, but I can understand that the US might use pressure to make them care. However, I have to agree with what another poster said in saying that NZ might be deliberately screwing up as a way to (secretly) protest being goaded into action by the US.
That's really only half true. Informed buyers know that a slow charge time (16 hours or so for the Leaf if I recall) is annoying and unusable.
I disagree. I lease a Leaf and I love the car. I fully admit it's not for everybody but I needed a 2nd car that I could use as a daily driver (I live approx. 20 miles from work) and my work commute stays well within the expected range (75 miles and up depending on your sources - Nissan says it will do 85 miles on a charge if the weather is not unreasonably hot or cold). I have no big need for quick charging and am quite content with standard trickle charging from a 110 outlet overnight. I have a gasoline burning car that I can use anytime I want, it just doesn't get great gas mileage in the city. I do a lot of stop and go driving to work, so it's expensive to drive my gasoline car to the office. More range in the car would be great as I could take it to visit family members who don't live very close to me, but I love the car. I've talked to others who also have one and I can't tell you how cool it is to pass by convenience stores and gasoline stations and know that you don't have to stop for gasoline. It's not practical as an only car unless you simply do not ever need to go beyond the charge range, but as an additional car it can meet a lot of people's needs.
like so many other articles, this just seems like another reminder to never ever use godaddy
Huh. The conclusion I came to is "NEVER use Twitter". I've deliberately refused to join it and that just reinforced why I refuse to do so. I can't be targeted for my Twitter handle if I don't use the service. GoDaddy has its problems for sure (and I admit to being a customer at present) but I'm not totally convinced that no other registrar wouldn't have done the same thing.
It's a competing currency. The marketplace says "we have no faith in your dollars." Government says "so?" The marketplace says "we will replace the dollar." Government says "no."
I just wonder how it took so long.
There are a finite number of bit coins. You can only get more by getting them from other people. Let me guess - you're one of those gold standard people too, right? The dollar is in no danger of being replaced by bitcoin, as if such could ever happen. Shrem seems to have believed that he could act as an intermediary for transactions that he knew were in violation of US law and not be held responsible. He can test that assertion in a court of law. When bitcoin exchanges that don't have ties to Silk Road start get closed down on trumped up charges you might have a point, but right now your "evil government took them down because it feared them" hypothesis isn't strong.
The spying, if it is actually happening, may not necessarily be for the benefit of American industry. German companies have been known to have secret deals through intermediaries to sell banned technology to countries that their own government does not legally allow them to sell directly to because of international sanctions. Anybody here watch the American TV series "Breaking Bad"? It featured a crystal meth drug empire that used a German conglomerate to provide the equipment necessary to run the secret lab used for much of the series. There is some chance that basically the NSA just wants to know if Siemens is selling things in violation of UN rules to countries like Iran and North Korea.
You're comparing apples and oranges by suggesting that all paid jobs are equivalent. First of all, I have no idea what the workers on those jobs were paid and I suspect neither do you. So you may have no way to know if the pay was average, above average, or less than average. Since the Hoover Dam was constructed in the middle of the depression, I suspect that the pay was good only in relative terms as getting paid for any job beat getting nothing to not work. 11 people died in the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. As best I can tell, as much as could be done for safety was done. Only 5 people died in building the Empire State Building. But 112 people died in building the Hoover Dam. Does that fit the bill of "considering the welfare of their employees sacrosanct"? I'm not thinking that it does. I've come to the conclusion that even with the absolute best practices, it is impossible to write any sizable code that can not be exploited, and the bigger the project, the more likely it can be exploited. You are right that Facebook does indeed try to be cheap in some ways with regards to employees (Zuckerberg is a very loud voice in the "We can't function without more H1-B visa employees!" argument) but the problem is that when you are a big website, some guy with time on his hands may try to crack your security for giggles. It's kind of like having a dozen people every day trying to take down and destroy the Golden Gate Bridge than what you imply, which is that Facebook is just too cheap and maybe too stupid to write good code.
I've been many times to Ukraine, although the last time I went there was 8 years ago and I have no reason to return any time soon. I was actually in the country, by blind chance, during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and had a chance to see it first hand and talk to various Ukrainians at the time. Everybody knew the election results were crooked, even those who liked the original outcome, and the result was that when the army refused to intervene and the police decided to stay out too and the Ukrainian Supreme Court demanded another election, Viktor Yushchenko won.
Yushchenko was a friend of the West (EU and USA) and while as best I can tell he had served competently as Prime Minister in the past, he was as incompetent a man as could ever be put into the presidency. His incompetency led to Yulia Tymoshenko (the Sarah Palin of Ukraine) exploiting the situation and trying to grab power legally via the office of Prime Minister. Under enormous pressure and horrible circumstances she negotiated a truly horrible long term deal with Russia to pay historically high prices for natural gas. This deal quickly haunted Ukraine as natural gas market prices fell far below what Ukraine was now legally obligated to pay their "friends" in Russia. This deal has had a very large and very negative impact on the Ukrainian economy as they can't live without the natural gas and are still obligated to pay prices far above current market prices to Mother Russia for it.
Yushchenko made some feeble attempts to implement true reform and start cracking down on corruption, but when faced with opposition he quickly gave up and nothing really changed. Tymoshenko refused to cooperate with him, trying to position herself for a future run for president. The Sarah Palin link is pretty accurate with the exception that Palin probably knows on some level that she can't ever be president (too polarizing and even a majority of her own party don't back or respect her), Tymoshenko's ego refused to allow her to cooperate with Yushchenko, so they became bitter enemies and in fact Yushchenko was forced at one time to get his mortal electoral enemy, Viktor Yanukovych (the current president and loser of the 2004 re-vote), to serve as Prime Minister as working with him seemed better than working with the self-serving Tymoshenko.
Yushchenko ran for a 2nd term and since he and Tymoshenko hated each other so much, they split the anti-Yanukovych vote with Tymoshenko coming out on the better end of that split. The country is roughly half pro-Russian thanks to the Krushchev era decision to enlarge the Ukrainian SSR with what had always been Russian speaking and ethnically Russian lands. The half of the country that considers itself Ukrainian is pro-EU and very anti-Russia, remembering well how poorly Ukrainians were treated in the USSR days (even today most Russians think of them as being something like country bumpkins or rednecks). The country is roughly split 50-50 along those lines, so when the pro-EU side has no unified candidate (Yushchenko and Tymoshenko hated each other so much that neither would give up a run for the presidency to consolidate behind the other), the pro-Russia side wins. Yanukovych is fairly smart and devious but he fails to realize that the pro-EU half of Ukraine still has no unified candidate to oppose him (there are currently roughly 3 candidates splitting support), so while half the country hates him, they can't get enough votes to defeat him in the next presidential election (2015 I think). Unfortunately Yanukovych is an old school, Soviet era politician and he remembers the failure of the 2004 cheating to give him the handoff victory he expected (he was the handpicked choice of the outgoing president), so he is going to change the game where the opposition simply cannot legally mount the kind of protests they need to get rid of him. Since the various self-serving members of the pro-EU side refuse to unite behind a single candidate, the pro-EU opposition remains hopelessly split and unable to effect c
I get between a few hundred and a few thousand USD for any given contract, and my clients actually expect their software to work. How does one go about getting this much money for a steaming pile of shit?
My first job out of college was working for the Department of Defense as a civilian programmer (I worked for a specific branch of the US military, but I'd prefer not to name it). I can tell you based on what I saw that the answer to your question is "Get a contract awarded to you." My first job was that I was hired to work with a small team trying to finish up a salvage operation on some old IBM hardware that the contractor never completed the project on. We were finishing up making it work after the contractor gave up and gave us the computers. I can't say this with 100% absolute certainty, but the senior guy on the project insisted that the contract got fully paid and the vendor never was sued for giving up on the project without meeting what the project called for. He said they just turned over the computers and the source code for as far as they had gotten and called it a day with Uncle Sam just shrugging his shoulders about it. I learned while working there that literally anything can be justified if it's on a contract. No cost is so high that it can't be justified if it's on a contract between the DoD and a private company. The right wingers unfortunately help to waste US taxpayer money here by insisting that everything there is can be done "cheaper" (ha ha ha) by any private company. Almost all of my DoD career was spent working on various projects where the government reclaimed them from a contractor (sometimes after completion, sometimes when the contractor just gave up on it) and everything was significantly cheaper for us once we took over the projects. So what happens is that unscrupulous vendors bid cheaply on contracts they can't be sure that they can actually complete because they're rarely sued and they can usually get fully paid or close to it for any half-way attempt they make on the project. Nobody on the right ever questions the wisdom of this process because it is "saving money".
It's been about 8-9 years since I last bought a PC in a store rather than built my own, and the one I bought was HP. Why? They used really good quality parts. And the crapware they put on wasn't any worse than anybody else's, at least back then. Plus they used standard parts which was great, because it meant that you could buy off the shelf stuff to upgrade the PC and it would work instead of being locked into that evil world of having to buy parts only from the manufacturer because they used customized parts and connectors everywhere.
Maybe you don't remember, but Vista was such a turd that all the major PC manufacturers started selling XP boxes as an option instead of Vista, well after Vista had been planned to be the only option available. HP and other manufacturers forced Microsoft to grudgingly support this at the time. So yeah, most of us have seen this movie before.
Lots of industry insiders say that the vast majority of Microsoft's revenue comes from Office and Windows and that both are in an inevitable decline and will shrink every year. Microsoft spent years in reaction mode, watching where the industry went and getting to the party late, claiming that they were always there, they were, uh, just in the back talking to somebody else, but yeah, there were at the party since it started, sure. It worked well for them as they just hopped on the bandwagon on most trends and let somebody else take the risk to see if anybody wanted it before they committed to it, but that proved to be a failure when mobile devices succeeded and their puny attempts to enter the markets failed. Even when they finally got on the tablet bandwagon, their original price point was absurd and nobody would pay it. In the past, just like Intel, they've just rolled the dice without any real thought to whether what they were doing made sense or not, as it was easier to just throw money at the mistakes and move on than to think carefully about whether they should be doing what they were doing. PCs last years and only gamers have a compelling reason to upgrade every 1-2 years. So now people are keeping old PCs because they still work and asking "Why do I need to pay $150 (or whatever) for a new version of Windows?". Microsoft depended on PCs being eclipsed every few years to the point that users felt compelled to upgrade and that hasn't been the case for years, so the reason to get a new version of Windows vanished with it. And when that new version of Windows sucks as bad as Win 8 does, nobody is going to want it. A surprising number of people are finding that things like iPads and Chromebooks meet their simplistic "computing" needs very well and they don't really need to buy a new PC and pay for Win 8 just to send email and watch YouTube.
Which is why you need the two magic phrases: "Am I free to go?", "I want a lawyer".
Seriously, hours of a moron trying to "verbal" a confession out of someone when he had the whole and entire evidence in his possession. This is a perfect example, you are never helping yourself by cooperating with this crap.
Am I free to go? [No.] I want a lawyer.
This sounds great. And maybe for some people it is. Do you have a lawyer on retainer? Then by all means, this is for you. I'm pretty sure that Joe Average Citizen does not have his own personal lawyer available at a quick call. So what happens then? Do they just assign some random lawyer to you from the public defender's office? In that case you might be better off trying to be your own lawyer. Suppose they just give you a phone and say "OK, find a lawyer to call"? Who do you call when you've never had to do that before? Yes, this sounds great, but the odds of some average guy getting Saul Goodman (Breaking Bad reference, for those who don't know) to magically fall out of the sky to defend him seem pretty remote to me.
IBM is spending a billion dollars on AI. That's serious. IBM usually succeeds at making what they set out to make.
In the past, that was true because IBM had some genius leadership at the top in the past. I do not believe that to be true today. The current management at IBM has one goal - to keep their stock price high. As a result, they continually gut first world employees and reports are that they are saving management jobs as they send people in the trenches home with a severance package. I worked for a company on a previous job that tried this approach and it was not successful. IBM seems to be a pretty employee hostile place to work in places like the USA and it's hard for me to believe that this bet is going to pay off, but we shall see.
The United States is going more and more decrepit. I for one am glad there's Russian, European and Chinese alternatives to fall back onto if the GPS system becomes useless for one reason or another.
Yes because we all know that neither the Russians nor the Chinese would ever under any circumstances manipulate such alternatives that they controlled if it suited their whims to do so and only the "evil" US would ever do such a terrible thing. Right....
My experience has been that non-technical managers in IT suck. The worst manager I ever worked for was non-technical and that meant that she was easily lied to because she had no way to judge what she was being told and she just assumed that the people under her would tell the truth. She made a lot of bad hiring decisions because we had some job applicants who lied about their experience and she lacked the ability to see through it and saw no need to have technical people in the department talk to the potential employees prior to hiring them. She also made a decision in agreeing to change the kind of work we did that at the time I expressed concern that it was not a good decision. In the end, a department of about 15 people was completely gutted when this new work was moved to a cheaper country we had an office in. She was a pointy haired boss to an extreme and she used to pepper her conversations with whatever industry buzz words were in vogue at the time to make herself look like she really understood the kind of technical work she managed. It's a long story not worth going into, but basically we had some upper management changes in the company and a female manager who had personally protected my manager left the company and the new male manager who took over made my manager a golden parachute offer she could not resist. Her husband was loaded and she used his money to start a business that had nothing to do with IT and as far as I know she has never worked in IT since. The best managers I've worked for all had IT backgrounds and were real in the trenches IT people before being promoted to management and it made them more effective at the kind of management battles that managers have to do with other departments and better able to represent our interests since they actually understood the work we were doing under them.
The best argument I've heard for changing the laws dealing with public domain in the USA is that in these days of federal budget cutting and decreasing spending, if these copyrights are so valuable then why are they being renewed for free automatically? It would seem logical to make a change where those who want their copyrights to be extended could pay a fee, perhaps fairly large, and fill out some paperwork to get the copyright renewed. If they forget to fill out the forms in time and pay the fee in time, too bad. That's how it was some years ago. If you forgot to renew your copyright in time, you lost it. Congress could enact a sliding scale where the renewal fee increases exponentially. For example, say that all works get an original copy right period of 50 years. Then if renewal is desired, the copyright holder could pay $500,000 for a renewal period of 10 years. If they want the works renewed at the end of that period for another 10 years, the fee goes up to $5 million. The next 10 year period is $50 million. The one after that is $500 million, then $5 billion and so on. Eventually the cost will get prohibitive that nobody will pay it any more and works will enter the public domain. I really do not get how if these works are so valuable that they must be renewed that Congress has to let it be done for free and virtually forever. Unfortunately to date the US Supreme Court has basically ruled "We're not saying that we think that extending copyright is a great idea, but the Constitution does permit it. As long as the termination date is less than 'never', any extension is probably legal." Why is Congress giving away money in renewal fees if these works are truly so valuable that they must remain in copyright longer?
And the real irony is that Disney built its animated empire on stories in the public domain:
- Snow White? Grimm's Fairy Tales.
- Pinocchio? Carlo Collodi, 1880.
- Fantasia? Classical music from the public domain. The highlight, the Sorcerer's Apprentice, is from Goethe in 1798.
- Bambi? Nope, they stole that one too, from a 1923 work of Felix Salten
- Cinderella? That was written about 1700.
- Alice in Wonderland? Lewis Carroll, of course.
Basically, if it's a "Disney princess", they almost definitely stole the character from somewhere else.
Disclaimer: I am a Disney fan. However, I am willing to admit that Disney has hypocritically played both sides of the aisle here in milking public domain when it suited them (Snow White now practically belongs to them, for example) and crying loudly for copyright protection for their original material about to enter the public domain, but your examples are not 100% accurate.
Fantasia contains "Rite Of Spring" which was composed by Igor Stravinski and should have been under copyright at the time (the film came out in 1940 and "Rite" was composed in 1913.).
Bambi was based on a book and Disney purchased the film rights to the book, although they bought them from a producer who had previously purchased the rights and abandoned the project when he realized it would be too difficult for him to do.
Obama said recently in an interview that spying in the US was limited by laws in the US. They he added that for the rest of the world, the NSA is not limited by any laws. So I guess that means that the US doesn't care about breaking laws in other countries.
That's a very sour thought, when you chew on the implications of that statement.
You can get off your sanctimonious high horse. Are you really and truly arguing that laws have no national boundary? Suppose some foreign country passes a draconian law against watching internet pornography and they proscribe the death penalty to violators. Are you really going to argue that you should be subject to that law? The laws of other countries don't apply on US soil. Sometimes those countries try to extend their reach to other countries. For example, Ebay got in a bunch of trouble in France years ago for allowing the sale of Nazi memorabilia in the USA. Not France, but the USA. So Ebay had to put in a filter to attempt to block all information of such sales if the person was coming from a French IP address. Are you in favor of that kind of thing?
If you want to argue that the US should care about breaking the laws of other countries while in those countries, then that is a completely different argument to make, but I doubt that the NSA does its work outside of US soil for that very reason - foreign laws won't apply to actions done on US soil. Well, those countries may think that their laws apply, but good luck on an extradition request.
Most people who have responded seem to not understand the legal argument here. Yes, this is risky to his case and basically he can't explain how he got the coins without hurting his own case. However, that's not the point. My guess is that he and his attorneys know that he is going to lose in court and go to jail. They are trying a novel argument that likely won't work that the government doesn't have the right to seize the coins no matter how acquired specifically because of their electronic nature. This is basically a low percentage "hail Mary" type play (to use an American football reference - look it up in Wikipedia if you don't understand it) to try to at least get him some income (and get his lawyers paid now) for when he gets out of jail. It's trying to turn the best case scenario into "Yeah, you're going to jail, but you'll still be rich when you get out". The unpleasant alternative is to say nothing, let the government keep the coins, and proceed with his weak defense that probably won't work anyway, in which case he goes to jail for a long time penniless. He's going to jail - the only question is whether this highly unlikely argument to keep the coins actually works and he at least gets to leave prison as a rich man. Anything can happen in a US courtroom, but I don't think this is going to be successful.
I have learned from observance and being around people with various mental issues that those who regularly take their meds do a lot better than those who do not. One of the problems with mental illnesses is that the illness will convince the person who has it that they don't need to take their meds. If you are prone to this kind of thing where you don't take your meds when you feel good, you are going to have problems in a work place. I guarantee it. The most unpleasant work experience of my life was working with a guy my manager forced us to hire because we had left the job open for a long time and he told us that we had to hire someone or the job would be closed forever. So we hired the least objectionable of a very uninspiring group of candidates we interviewed for the job. On his first day at work, he told us all that he was bi-polar and he saw no need to take any medicine for this. The next 6 months or whatever it was that he worked with us were just very bad as we saw him both unrealistically happy and in the deepest depths of depression and neither state was very good for us as co-workers. He finally left us for another job and became somebody else's problem. I don't want to go into details as for all I know maybe he reads Slashdot and he could recognize himself, but he found an interesting way as he left the company to create problems for us for months to come and I wouldn't wish what he did to us on anybody.
Right now I have a co-worker who battles depression and a few other issues and while it sometimes makes him difficult to deal with, he does regularly take his meds and we've learned to just accept his occasional bad moods as they don't last and he is a valuable contributor. But if you are going to go through periods where you don't take your meds, you'll do nobody any favors by working in an office.
The USA will eventually find itself alone, and without allies. And it's not just the spying, it's the drone attacks on soil with countries we are not at war with. Recently we blew up a wedding party in Yemen, killing over 13 which I'm sure included women and children. But oh no, we're not evil. We're the good guys. Uh huh.
Nonsense. Regimes that hate or hated freedom like the Soviet Union and the PRC have plenty of allies. The US will still have its friends. The major ones who really matter aren't leaving.
Little by little, we are making enemies of the world, and until we change our ways, less and les of the world is going to want to do business with us because we have shown we're not trustworthy.
Brazil's president is a quite a bit more anti-US anyway than her predecessor who despite coming from a supposedly anti-US background was actually pretty friendly towards the US while president. Let's just say that the whole spying affair has provided her with a convenient excuse to pile on the anti-Americanism when she was already leaning that way since she took office. There are a lot of internal problems within Brazil right now and being able to thumb her nose in Uncle Sam's face helps to distract the population from real problems that her government has been completely unable to make any progress on solving. This is an old strategy used by more countries than I can even mention. Whenever there are big problems at home, just blame the US for something. I'm not sure that Cuba and Venezuela's government could even exist if the ability to blame all of their problems on the US boogeyman got taken away from them.
And to the poster who blames a 4.5 billion dollar loss on the economy to Ed Snowden, screw you. All Snowden did was CONFIRM what everyone knew already, but just couldn't prove. He will be shown to be a hero, this decade's Cindy Sheehan.
I don't know anything that could possibly make you appear more of a nut job than to actually think Cindy Sheehan is a hero. Almost nobody knew what the NSA was up to. It was only nut jobs like you who always suspect the worst of government who just got lucky this time with your wild guess.
At this point, I think it's inevitable that spying will be a central issue in the 2016 Presidential election, and neither party will dare to defend the status quo. Corporate campaign donors are starting to see the economic implications, and they'll be raising a hell of a fuss by the time two more years have gone by.
You cannot possibly be American if you think that. As someone born and raised in the USA, I can assure you that my countrymen have a memory span of about 5 minutes and whatever the 2016 election's main story is, concern about NSA issues will not be it. The economy will likely be the biggest issue of 2016 with both major party candidates arguing that they've got the best plan to create new jobs.
I love (not really) how on Slashdot anything related to the airline industry brings out posts from people who never travel by plane. I had a friend who last traveled on a plane around 1999. He's not likely to ever travel anywhere by plane again in his life and this is by choice. He never flew after the TSA existed, yet listening to hm talk about the TSA you would think TSA had singled him out for unfair treatment on some flight years ago and he bore a grudge he never got over. Slashdot is the same way where people post here about how great it is to be able to talk on planes and they never fly anywhere.
I think letting people talk on planes on their cell phones is a horrible idea, but the airlines will allow if it given a choice. This is why the only way to stop it is for the government to forbid it. Now if I hold a minority opinion on this and it's clear that the majority of flyers want to talk on their cell phones on planes, I will accept that. I won't like it, but I'll accept it. The US airlines will allow this if given a choice for 2 reasons. The first is that they've already proven themselves unwilling to restrict alcohol sales to obviously inebriated passengers, some of whom in their drunken state cause problems serious enough to get them arrested when the plane lands, perhaps even having to make an emergency landing. Alcohol sales bring in money. They won't be stopped. The second reason is that this obviously creates a money making situation where they can, as mentioned earlier, sell "quiet zone" spaces at a premium. I travel by plane sometimes for personal reasons and I am not happy at all at the thought of having to pay an extra $200 or more just so I don't have to listen to someone else's phone conversation for the whole flight.
I am a US citizen and I've dealt with US customs before, but not New Zealand customs. In my experience, customs generally has no interest in your phone and laptop if you are truly a Joe Backpacker kind of guy. They are very interested in you if they think you are trying to smuggle drugs or something else. A couple of years ago I got back from a trip to China to visit my girlfriend and the guy I talked to at Customs at the US airport became convinced that I was smuggling Chinese herbs, so he made me go to a special line so my luggage could get examined. I was a bit amused as I knew they would find nothing as I brought no herbs of any kind with me and very few souvenirs of the trip. The guy who examined my luggage actually got annoyed because he found nothing. I was immediately allowed to leave with my luggage. I am sure that there is much more to this story than the backpacker is telling because he knows that Customs probably had a very good reason to be interested in him. For example, he may have worked with Wikileaks, been in contact with Snowden, or have some other non-Snowden issue that caused Customs to be very interested in him. In fact, don't be surprised if we get more information and it actually has nothing to do with Snowden because he transited through San Francisco and apparently US Customs had no interest in him. If US Customs felt that he was a source of useful information about Snowden, they'd have confiscated his electronics there. I'm pretty sure that New Zealand customs does not randomly target backpackers for confiscation of electronics and this is not an example of a police state gone mad. I'm sure he knows the real reason they took his stuff and he doesn't want to mention it because he wants to play the "I'm being singled out for nothing!" angle to the press right now.
Of course, for some inexplicable reason US didnt respond to Soviet challenge by leveraging the power of free markets, private industry and entrepreneurial spirit. They decided to beat massive Soviet state run design bureaus backed by their military industry complex by establishing their own massive state run design bureau backed by their military industrial complex. They even bagged members of the same team of germans as their design leads !
The US led private industry design and build the Apollo project. I don't know how detailed the specs were that private companies like Lockheed and Boeing were given for their parts of the program, for example. I did have a chance some years ago to talk to a guy who worked on the Apollo project for NASA and he was working there during the first moon landing. He told me an interesting story about the onboard computer that the LEM (lunar lander) used and mentioned that MIT was responsible for the programming on it.