Yes, and if it only ever happened once or twice, a few times a year maybe...sure.
However, what if it happens, then happens again...and again. What happens when the number of "anonymous tips" starts to rise?
I would be dollars to donuts that, with enough gathered data, you could finger many many potential "future crimes", many more than you could investigate...or will ever happen.
Its not a question of "do I phone this one in, or let a bunch of people die"....because you don't really know if the plan is real or if he even plans to go through with it.
So how many of these tips need to go out before even one life is saved? How many tips can go out before someone realizes something is up?
where do you draw the line? What if they find out some random dude beats his wife? A child toucher? He smokes pot? Where do you draw the line?
Except the buck stops with them, they are the elected officials.
If they don't feel the system is providing that oversight, then they should blow the wistle to the people who elected them...the public.
War plans are fine but politicians don't get the real war plans anyway, tactical plans. Sure...but if by "war plans" you mean "plans to go to war with someone else" then that sort of back room dealing should be wistle blown....early and often.
How do you know they didn't see it coming? What makes you think the lives of a few 10s of people are worth revealing the true breath of the surveillance system? Do you really think it would be so easy to get them to reveal their hand?
Don't value your time at all? Hmmm depends what you mean by that. I know plenty of people with lots of time that they throw away at video games, movies, TV, reading, etc. Few people don't have time to spare or time that couldn't be better spent. Personally I prefer to work on my own little projects.
Yah I could buy some things for a bit more, maybe even much cheaper when you count time cost. However, what would I do with the time savings? Watch more TV? Spend another night playing Diablo 3?
If I spend a night playing Diablo, I may slightly increase my skill at the game... if I spend my night tweaking designs and soldering parts... I may be doing work that people in china get paid pennies an hour for, but in the end I have a thing I built, I get to use it, get to take some pride in it, and I learned something.
I would turn it around and ask, if you value your time so much that you don't want to spend it building things, what are you doing with it thats so valuable?
1 skylight. Now get the efficiency of a roof top solar panel... with electricity.
2. Blocking IR is huge for windows. We have a few south facing windows with no shade... just blocking IR through them would be huge (I have thoiught of it before too). Especially in the summer, every unit of energy that I don't have to extract and remove with the AC units is money saved.
Anything on top of that, even a little extra electricity (maybe enough to operate the blinds?) is gravy.
I was just thinking same thing from the opposite direction.
Most C&D letters are written by the lawyers. What incentive does a lawyer have to be non-combatitive?
If he is combatative it makes him look good to the people he is representing, and doesn't risk having them question whether he is really doing his job. If he is non-combatative, like this, then that doesn't make more work for him either.
If it leads to a huge battle, the company isn't going to blame the lawyer for being to combative, since he is just fighting for them. If it looks soft or like it isn't going to be effective, they are going to blame him.
Its true, that on a deeper analsys this is probably the better way to go... that doesn't mean that every cog in the wheel making decisions is making that deeper analsys. When the legal department gets notice of infingement, they have one hammer, and you know what that tends to make all problems look like.
I paid over $900 for the kit I built mine from. Worth every penny if you ask me. In fact, I am already seeing the benefits of rapid design. I went from having never done any sort of 3d modeling or design apart from with hand tools to making my own custom parts pretty quick.
More than that, its the rapid prototyping that ROCKS. Its not just that I can design a part and have it made. I always could do that if I wanted to spend the money...but I can design it... print it (in whole or part) and see the results in minutes or hours not days or weeks. Just last night I stopped a print after 20 minutes because the entire subpart I needed to test was done enough for my purposes.
I can go through 4-5 design iterations in 1 night with design features that would have otherwise required special equipment and more time. I can print out threaded parts, with no need to tap or turn them.
A bit much for an impulse buy, but, do you really think a tool like this is the sort of thing you should impulse buy? They are really amazing tools, and limited mostly by your imagination.
That said, they take time to learn how to use effectively, and a fair amount of manual tinkering. Want one that doesn't? Expect to pay ALOT more...and even then... a friend of mine has a professional model where he works. Its not that it takes no tinkering, its just that, at the price they pay for it, its worth it to pay some guy to come out and do the tinkering for you.
getting it down to that range, I am not going to say is a bad thing, but, it just means there will be more of them, sitting in boxes, collecting dust, and otherwise, in the posession of people who played with them for a week and then lost interest....
True it would put them, faster, into the hands of those who really want them and will use them but can't afford one right now, but, what will you be putting in their hands for that price?
All that said, there is a CNC milling machine the Mantis-9 that could be realized somewhere in that price range (havn't priced out the electronics, but the non-electronic hardware is $100... another $100-200 for electronics depending on the options, though possibly less)
With that you can mill PCB to make custom circuit boards.... with the same benefits... rapid prototyping.
Will I make end final parts on it? Sure, why not? Already do, already printed a nice little figurine for the wife (Crest of Hyrule!)... but...its real win is in rapid prototyping.
Actually, this is nothing new, nor specific to apple. A lot of people keep the boxes that products come in, especially if the product has enough value to be worth repackaging in its box for resale or storage later.
For example, I had some pots that came in boxes. I tossed the boxes, as I have a place to store pots and use them frequently.
I have a rice cooker. Kept the box. Keep it in the box. On the rare occasion that I use it, it comes out of the box, and goes back in. If I get around to having a yard sale, I will put it out, in its box.
Likewise, I have the boxes for xbox360 and my wife's PS3. Why? because they might need to be sent out for repair someday, or I might want to sell them.
The only thing special here is that apple is actually still using boxes, whereas other products have moved to clamshells, which are more frustrating to open if you don't have a good pair of sciscors handy at the moment... and don't give you a package that you can easly repackage the product in.... which brings up another nice thing about boxes....
when I open a product in a box, and its already broken, I have a convienet vessel in which to transmit the product back to the store from whence it came to exchange it.
Even better thanks for the info. I was looking at this because I am prototyping some home automation things, but, in the end, I am going to want 10s of these...at $30+ a pop, ardunio boards add significant cost....thats what got me started looking at the atmega itself....and realizing how much the arduino is just a breakout board with some added support and a boot loader.
So I can still support the people who make arduinos as I need them for prototyping, but then, I can shrink my design in both cost and size when it comes time to replicate it over and over.
I am still going to need the regulators for the projects I am working on but, good to know I can do without them.
I have one friend who reads the paper more than he reads news online. Mostly, I think, because he works as a telemarketer, and its easier and more acceptable to read the paper while soliciting donations on the phone than to whip out a laptop (especially since recording devices are a no no in call centers that take credit cards).
Every few weeks he comes out with the hot new story thats going to blow my socks off....invariably I already saw it...online...usually days ago.
I don't see a flaw in the logic. Customer wants something, vendor offers something. Customer states what terms he wants, Vendor says no. Customer walks away. Where is the problem there? Looks like perfectly rational, normal, business to me.
If they are not willing to offer what he wants, he has every right to not change what he wants to make himself their customer.
Ahh I read through the FAQ but didn't realise that was just the GPU. Not so bad then.
Still it depends what you need it for, I see some uses for these. However, most of what I need is more in the arduino space. I kind of assumed if we were comparing the two, then we are not comparing on advanced features like the more general linux tools being available (which is huge) and the video support, which, is nice and great for some things, but not so useful for a lot of projects.
I don't mean to shit on the pi, its neat and does offer some nice features, just that, the dev platform aspect of it doesn't add as much as it does elsewhere, and the features that do set it apart from some of the other offerings are optional in many use cases.
Sigh...I am glad that you posted this. I did a bit more digging, its the wr703n that I was thinking of, which is highly unfortunate, since I got the wr700n from my amazon order. Oops. Thats more than a bit dissapointing.
Actually.... overall I prefer the aduino. The price on these is great for what you get but, as an educational/devel platform.... the issues with broadcom that are evident int he FAQ make this very unattractive.
The arduino is, at its heart, just a breakout for the atmega with a nice boot loader pre-burned. I can work up a design, then if I want to go into some manner of production and make alot...I can incorperate the atmega directly into my design, and go from a $30 part "development platform" to a $3 part with a few bits of support (crystal, voltage regulator...)
I can't do that with pi. I am stuck with a pi. I can develop on a pi but then, every time I want to replicate the design, its another pi.
Its great for what it is, and it may lead to the development of more fully open platforms but, for what I am looking at, I see little advantage over just getting a linux capable wifi router and starting from there. In fact, the wifi itself makes it even better.
But overall, for what I need, I also don't need much more than an atmega.
You know I want one. I want to support their non-profit, and its a cool thing but... and there is a big but....
I just bought a few TP-Links. There is one you can get (wr700n) for about $15-25 (have to look around), can run Openwrt. With Ethernet, USB host, and Wifi, powered from a miniUSB.... is pretty damned close to a rasberry pi for a few bucks less...and its tiny.
They own the means of communication, they store it etc. However, they also offer the illusion of privacy. There is no notice that all communication is being monitored.
A park if a public place...but if I am sitting with you in a park, and we glance around and see nobody nearby, and talk so that no normal person should hear our voices.... would you then say a person using a parabolic listening device to eavesdrop was doing nothing wrong to monitor us? Maybe if its his park?
They may be well within their rights, and its a free service, so I don't HAVE to use it.... but... I am of the opinion that such actions are not worthy of trust, and do feel like a violation of trust. They do make me want to look for alternatives.
As I was reading all these comments, I had just finished telling a co-worker about my amazon order this morning.
The thing is... I needed a sub-mm hex wrench. No problem, I should be able to find that locally. In hindsight I could probably hunt down some obscure hobby shop that sells model airplanes or some such, but, I normally work 9-5ish and while its flexible and I can run out, work late etc.... if I am going to take an hour to do some errands, I have other things to do.
So anyway.... I tried Ace hardware. To their credit, they try to be a good store with hardware in stock. Actually each ace is different, but the one I go to has a good sized back section with all manner of connectors and fittings (Shattuck Ace in Arlington MA)...nothing smaller than 1.5mm
Amazon? They had them, they had them in a precision hex driver set. They offered to have botht he precision set, and an L set to me... next day delivery.... on saturday.
Its hard to argue with that at 8 am, when many of the stores aren't even open yet, and none of them seem to have the product.
Maybe its time to let them go the way of the ice man. We do need more local business but, in the form of people actually using their time to do things....not more min wage jobs standing in front of cash registers.
I did some quick looking around but, can't find a link to the actual list of accounts and passwords. Anyone found it?
Seems to me that just a few months ago, before pastebin got their panties in a bunch about password lists, it was a lot easier to check and see if your accounts are on the list.
Not even sure if mine are, or if any are that I care about, most of them, I think, have good passwords but fuck, it would be nice to know. Hell, there is no garauntee that even a good password doesn't hash to the same thing as some bad one that ends up in the rainbow tables.
Shit even just a list of accounts without the passwords would be nice...though.... it is always fun to laugh at other people's passwords. Actually, I know for a fact that my "insecure password" that I use for free throwaway websites is used by someone else because of leaks like this.
Well thats not exactly true. I mean, I get it, but, the idea that the escape hatch REQUIRES a strong majority is not exactly true.
Like the seals on a real hatch, with repeated stress they crack. Look at drug laws, 100 years ago the first ones were tax acts, alcohol prohibition required a constitutional ammendment....
fast forward to today, and the hatch has blown wide open. We no longr just have tax acts, we have paramilitary forces busting down doors. No constitutional ammendments involved, the hatch was just eroded away, and not even by majorities of clamoring croweds, by a few elite interests with their own agendas.
I often wonder things like.... ok this clearly could deter theieves, but.... what about legitimate owners?
This is not a theoretical problem. Notice I mention how my old buick had a resistor in the key blank? well there were 20 key blanks, each with different values. How do I know this? Because I lost my only copy of the key!
Not only that, but GM had no record of my car being fitted with a security system so the local shop had no clue which of the 20 blanks it was... and there was a lockout after a couple of tries. Took them about 2 days to find the right key blank.
So I have to wonder, if you add up all the incidents of legitimate owners locked out of their cars, time and money etc, how does that inconvinenece compare to all of the incidents of stolen cars? Do these actually save people time and money in the aggregate or cost them even more?
I lose the key to an older car, its a few bucks to fix. My Jetta has a "security key", and they soak you for over $300 when you need a new one (which of course has to be activated).
Clearly having a car stolen can cost more, and even be more of an inconvenience, However, its so much less likely to happen than lost keys (can't comment on other failures).... that I do have to wonder if these things actually pay off.
Interesting. Especially since the source of this information was a police officer who was wielding a slim jim. In fact, he stated that it was against department policy to slim jim open cars for people (though they still carry the slim jim in the cruiser), becasuse, he claimed, that several officers have been seriously injured by setting off side skirt airbags in car doors.
He opened the door anyway, after asking if the car had such air bags (it didn't).
In fact, I was told this by multiple cops. The second one, campus police at the school where I worked, later on, was more amusing. He pulled out his slim jim and said that it was against policy for him to do it (for the same reason) but, that if I wanted to try, I could.
As I was taking him up on this, I thought if the keys are in the car, maybe we can see them, since there is little point to opening the door without the keys anyway. He agreed that this was true and tried to see in with his flashlight. He was unable to see the floor very well, though, and immediately grabbed the slim jim from my hands and popped the door open in about 2 seconds.
Personally, I don't like that very much. I am ok with democracy but, unlimited democracy is tyranny just as bad, if not worst, than with traditional tyrants.
The community should only be voting and making rules about the things that it must, the things that, without regulation, will cause seriously dangerous lack of social order.
For example, prohibitions on all manner of wanton violence (not that its actually a common problem) violence for profit (a bigger problem), these make sense.
However, I see no reason why "democracy" makes sense within my home. The community should no more be taking votes about the color of my bedroom wall than about who I can live with, what I can do with them as consenting adults, what we grow, or wish to provide to other consenting adults.... or what ideas we can express... a number of things.
The point is democracy is fine, until people start voting on civil rights.
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Yes, and if it only ever happened once or twice, a few times a year maybe...sure.
However, what if it happens, then happens again...and again. What happens when the number of "anonymous tips" starts to rise?
I would be dollars to donuts that, with enough gathered data, you could finger many many potential "future crimes", many more than you could investigate...or will ever happen.
Its not a question of "do I phone this one in, or let a bunch of people die"....because you don't really know if the plan is real or if he even plans to go through with it.
So how many of these tips need to go out before even one life is saved? How many tips can go out before someone realizes something is up?
where do you draw the line? What if they find out some random dude beats his wife? A child toucher? He smokes pot? Where do you draw the line?
Except the buck stops with them, they are the elected officials.
If they don't feel the system is providing that oversight, then they should blow the wistle to the people who elected them...the public.
War plans are fine but politicians don't get the real war plans anyway, tactical plans. Sure...but if by "war plans" you mean "plans to go to war with someone else" then that sort of back room dealing should be wistle blown....early and often.
How do you know they didn't see it coming? What makes you think the lives of a few 10s of people are worth revealing the true breath of the surveillance system? Do you really think it would be so easy to get them to reveal their hand?
Don't value your time at all? Hmmm depends what you mean by that. I know plenty of people with lots of time that they throw away at video games, movies, TV, reading, etc. Few people don't have time to spare or time that couldn't be better spent. Personally I prefer to work on my own little projects.
Yah I could buy some things for a bit more, maybe even much cheaper when you count time cost. However, what would I do with the time savings? Watch more TV? Spend another night playing Diablo 3?
If I spend a night playing Diablo, I may slightly increase my skill at the game... if I spend my night tweaking designs and soldering parts... I may be doing work that people in china get paid pennies an hour for, but in the end I have a thing I built, I get to use it, get to take some pride in it, and I learned something.
I would turn it around and ask, if you value your time so much that you don't want to spend it building things, what are you doing with it thats so valuable?
Two things:
1 skylight. Now get the efficiency of a roof top solar panel... with electricity.
2. Blocking IR is huge for windows. We have a few south facing windows with no shade... just blocking IR through them would be huge (I have thoiught of it before too). Especially in the summer, every unit of energy that I don't have to extract and remove with the AC units is money saved.
Anything on top of that, even a little extra electricity (maybe enough to operate the blinds?) is gravy.
Yes but we have already agreed that this is the better route to take. The question is not why did they do this, it is why so many others don't.
I was just thinking same thing from the opposite direction.
Most C&D letters are written by the lawyers. What incentive does a lawyer have to be non-combatitive?
If he is combatative it makes him look good to the people he is representing, and doesn't risk having them question whether he is really doing his job. If he is non-combatative, like this, then that doesn't make more work for him either.
If it leads to a huge battle, the company isn't going to blame the lawyer for being to combative, since he is just fighting for them. If it looks soft or like it isn't going to be effective, they are going to blame him.
Its true, that on a deeper analsys this is probably the better way to go... that doesn't mean that every cog in the wheel making decisions is making that deeper analsys. When the legal department gets notice of infingement, they have one hammer, and you know what that tends to make all problems look like.
I paid over $900 for the kit I built mine from. Worth every penny if you ask me. In fact, I am already seeing the benefits of rapid design. I went from having never done any sort of 3d modeling or design apart from with hand tools to making my own custom parts pretty quick.
More than that, its the rapid prototyping that ROCKS. Its not just that I can design a part and have it made. I always could do that if I wanted to spend the money...but I can design it... print it (in whole or part) and see the results in minutes or hours not days or weeks. Just last night I stopped a print after 20 minutes because the entire subpart I needed to test was done enough for my purposes.
I can go through 4-5 design iterations in 1 night with design features that would have otherwise required special equipment and more time. I can print out threaded parts, with no need to tap or turn them.
A bit much for an impulse buy, but, do you really think a tool like this is the sort of thing you should impulse buy? They are really amazing tools, and limited mostly by your imagination.
That said, they take time to learn how to use effectively, and a fair amount of manual tinkering. Want one that doesn't? Expect to pay ALOT more...and even then... a friend of mine has a professional model where he works. Its not that it takes no tinkering, its just that, at the price they pay for it, its worth it to pay some guy to come out and do the tinkering for you.
getting it down to that range, I am not going to say is a bad thing, but, it just means there will be more of them, sitting in boxes, collecting dust, and otherwise, in the posession of people who played with them for a week and then lost interest....
True it would put them, faster, into the hands of those who really want them and will use them but can't afford one right now, but, what will you be putting in their hands for that price?
All that said, there is a CNC milling machine the Mantis-9 that could be realized somewhere in that price range (havn't priced out the electronics, but the non-electronic hardware is $100... another $100-200 for electronics depending on the options, though possibly less)
With that you can mill PCB to make custom circuit boards.... with the same benefits... rapid prototyping.
Will I make end final parts on it? Sure, why not? Already do, already printed a nice little figurine for the wife (Crest of Hyrule!)... but...its real win is in rapid prototyping.
Actually, this is nothing new, nor specific to apple. A lot of people keep the boxes that products come in, especially if the product has enough value to be worth repackaging in its box for resale or storage later.
For example, I had some pots that came in boxes. I tossed the boxes, as I have a place to store pots and use them frequently.
I have a rice cooker. Kept the box. Keep it in the box. On the rare occasion that I use it, it comes out of the box, and goes back in. If I get around to having a yard sale, I will put it out, in its box.
Likewise, I have the boxes for xbox360 and my wife's PS3. Why? because they might need to be sent out for repair someday, or I might want to sell them.
The only thing special here is that apple is actually still using boxes, whereas other products have moved to clamshells, which are more frustrating to open if you don't have a good pair of sciscors handy at the moment... and don't give you a package that you can easly repackage the product in.... which brings up another nice thing about boxes....
when I open a product in a box, and its already broken, I have a convienet vessel in which to transmit the product back to the store from whence it came to exchange it.
Nothing new, or particularly interesting here.
Even better thanks for the info. I was looking at this because I am prototyping some home automation things, but, in the end, I am going to want 10s of these...at $30+ a pop, ardunio boards add significant cost....thats what got me started looking at the atmega itself....and realizing how much the arduino is just a breakout board with some added support and a boot loader.
So I can still support the people who make arduinos as I need them for prototyping, but then, I can shrink my design in both cost and size when it comes time to replicate it over and over.
I am still going to need the regulators for the projects I am working on but, good to know I can do without them.
Yup.
I have one friend who reads the paper more than he reads news online. Mostly, I think, because he works as a telemarketer, and its easier and more acceptable to read the paper while soliciting donations on the phone than to whip out a laptop (especially since recording devices are a no no in call centers that take credit cards).
Every few weeks he comes out with the hot new story thats going to blow my socks off....invariably I already saw it...online...usually days ago.
I don't see a flaw in the logic. Customer wants something, vendor offers something. Customer states what terms he wants, Vendor says no. Customer walks away. Where is the problem there? Looks like perfectly rational, normal, business to me.
If they are not willing to offer what he wants, he has every right to not change what he wants to make himself their customer.
Ahh I read through the FAQ but didn't realise that was just the GPU. Not so bad then.
Still it depends what you need it for, I see some uses for these. However, most of what I need is more in the arduino space. I kind of assumed if we were comparing the two, then we are not comparing on advanced features like the more general linux tools being available (which is huge) and the video support, which, is nice and great for some things, but not so useful for a lot of projects.
I don't mean to shit on the pi, its neat and does offer some nice features, just that, the dev platform aspect of it doesn't add as much as it does elsewhere, and the features that do set it apart from some of the other offerings are optional in many use cases.
Sigh...I am glad that you posted this. I did a bit more digging, its the wr703n that I was thinking of, which is highly unfortunate, since I got the wr700n from my amazon order. Oops. Thats more than a bit dissapointing.
it looks like you are right... I know one of the TPLinks does support it, and has those features in about that price range.
Actually.... overall I prefer the aduino. The price on these is great for what you get but, as an educational/devel platform.... the issues with broadcom that are evident int he FAQ make this very unattractive.
The arduino is, at its heart, just a breakout for the atmega with a nice boot loader pre-burned. I can work up a design, then if I want to go into some manner of production and make alot...I can incorperate the atmega directly into my design, and go from a $30 part "development platform" to a $3 part with a few bits of support (crystal, voltage regulator...)
I can't do that with pi. I am stuck with a pi. I can develop on a pi but then, every time I want to replicate the design, its another pi.
Its great for what it is, and it may lead to the development of more fully open platforms but, for what I am looking at, I see little advantage over just getting a linux capable wifi router and starting from there. In fact, the wifi itself makes it even better.
But overall, for what I need, I also don't need much more than an atmega.
You know I want one. I want to support their non-profit, and its a cool thing but... and there is a big but....
I just bought a few TP-Links. There is one you can get (wr700n) for about $15-25 (have to look around), can run Openwrt. With Ethernet, USB host, and Wifi, powered from a miniUSB.... is pretty damned close to a rasberry pi for a few bucks less...and its tiny.
I fully agree, but there is a big but....
They own the means of communication, they store it etc. However, they also offer the illusion of privacy. There is no notice that all communication is being monitored.
A park if a public place...but if I am sitting with you in a park, and we glance around and see nobody nearby, and talk so that no normal person should hear our voices.... would you then say a person using a parabolic listening device to eavesdrop was doing nothing wrong to monitor us? Maybe if its his park?
They may be well within their rights, and its a free service, so I don't HAVE to use it.... but... I am of the opinion that such actions are not worthy of trust, and do feel like a violation of trust. They do make me want to look for alternatives.
As I was reading all these comments, I had just finished telling a co-worker about my amazon order this morning.
The thing is... I needed a sub-mm hex wrench. No problem, I should be able to find that locally. In hindsight I could probably hunt down some obscure hobby shop that sells model airplanes or some such, but, I normally work 9-5ish and while its flexible and I can run out, work late etc.... if I am going to take an hour to do some errands, I have other things to do.
So anyway.... I tried Ace hardware. To their credit, they try to be a good store with hardware in stock. Actually each ace is different, but the one I go to has a good sized back section with all manner of connectors and fittings (Shattuck Ace in Arlington MA) ...nothing smaller than 1.5mm
Amazon? They had them, they had them in a precision hex driver set. They offered to have botht he precision set, and an L set to me... next day delivery.... on saturday.
Its hard to argue with that at 8 am, when many of the stores aren't even open yet, and none of them seem to have the product.
Maybe its time to let them go the way of the ice man. We do need more local business but, in the form of people actually using their time to do things....not more min wage jobs standing in front of cash registers.
I did some quick looking around but, can't find a link to the actual list of accounts and passwords. Anyone found it?
Seems to me that just a few months ago, before pastebin got their panties in a bunch about password lists, it was a lot easier to check and see if your accounts are on the list.
Not even sure if mine are, or if any are that I care about, most of them, I think, have good passwords but fuck, it would be nice to know. Hell, there is no garauntee that even a good password doesn't hash to the same thing as some bad one that ends up in the rainbow tables.
Shit even just a list of accounts without the passwords would be nice...though.... it is always fun to laugh at other people's passwords. Actually, I know for a fact that my "insecure password" that I use for free throwaway websites is used by someone else because of leaks like this.
Well thats not exactly true. I mean, I get it, but, the idea that the escape hatch REQUIRES a strong majority is not exactly true.
Like the seals on a real hatch, with repeated stress they crack. Look at drug laws, 100 years ago the first ones were tax acts, alcohol prohibition required a constitutional ammendment....
fast forward to today, and the hatch has blown wide open. We no longr just have tax acts, we have paramilitary forces busting down doors. No constitutional ammendments involved, the hatch was just eroded away, and not even by majorities of clamoring croweds, by a few elite interests with their own agendas.
I often wonder things like.... ok this clearly could deter theieves, but.... what about legitimate owners?
This is not a theoretical problem. Notice I mention how my old buick had a resistor in the key blank? well there were 20 key blanks, each with different values. How do I know this? Because I lost my only copy of the key!
Not only that, but GM had no record of my car being fitted with a security system so the local shop had no clue which of the 20 blanks it was... and there was a lockout after a couple of tries. Took them about 2 days to find the right key blank.
So I have to wonder, if you add up all the incidents of legitimate owners locked out of their cars, time and money etc, how does that inconvinenece compare to all of the incidents of stolen cars? Do these actually save people time and money in the aggregate or cost them even more?
I lose the key to an older car, its a few bucks to fix. My Jetta has a "security key", and they soak you for over $300 when you need a new one (which of course has to be activated).
Clearly having a car stolen can cost more, and even be more of an inconvenience, However, its so much less likely to happen than lost keys (can't comment on other failures).... that I do have to wonder if these things actually pay off.
Interesting. Especially since the source of this information was a police officer who was wielding a slim jim. In fact, he stated that it was against department policy to slim jim open cars for people (though they still carry the slim jim in the cruiser), becasuse, he claimed, that several officers have been seriously injured by setting off side skirt airbags in car doors.
He opened the door anyway, after asking if the car had such air bags (it didn't).
In fact, I was told this by multiple cops. The second one, campus police at the school where I worked, later on, was more amusing. He pulled out his slim jim and said that it was against policy for him to do it (for the same reason) but, that if I wanted to try, I could.
As I was taking him up on this, I thought if the keys are in the car, maybe we can see them, since there is little point to opening the door without the keys anyway. He agreed that this was true and tried to see in with his flashlight. He was unable to see the floor very well, though, and immediately grabbed the slim jim from my hands and popped the door open in about 2 seconds.
So much for policy.
Personally, I don't like that very much. I am ok with democracy but, unlimited democracy is tyranny just as bad, if not worst, than with traditional tyrants.
The community should only be voting and making rules about the things that it must, the things that, without regulation, will cause seriously dangerous lack of social order.
For example, prohibitions on all manner of wanton violence (not that its actually a common problem) violence for profit (a bigger problem), these make sense.
However, I see no reason why "democracy" makes sense within my home. The community should no more be taking votes about the color of my bedroom wall than about who I can live with, what I can do with them as consenting adults, what we grow, or wish to provide to other consenting adults.... or what ideas we can express... a number of things.
The point is democracy is fine, until people start voting on civil rights.
When I was in school I had a roomate from vermont. He used to walk to class, through the snow, in flipflops, wearing shorts and a t-shirt.