Background checks for mental illness seems like a good idea, but there are some SERIOUS problems with how such a system would have to be setup for it to accomplish anything. As other people have mentioned, you could possibly make the whole problem WORSE. If someone is suffering from mental illness, the last thing you ever want to do is create barriers for them getting the treatment they need. The potential to have their firearms confiscated because they discussed suicidal thoughts with a therapist is going to cause some to avoid going to a therapist.
This is a known problem that exists with the Security Clearance system the US government uses. I've had people mention that they have avoided going to a mental health professional because that is a reportable event on your SF-86, and some people fear that they might lose their clearance, and thus their job (and career).
You don't want to put people in a position where they are weighing the consequences they would be subject to if they decided to seek medical help, especially if they DO need that help.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
That is a problem with a specific person who would be identified as the only person allowed to be armed in a given area.
However, if you had multiple people, perhaps 5 teachers/employees who were interested in carrying-concealed for the specific purpose of being a last chance defense, then a potential gunman not know who/where those individuals would be.
It's the same concept of the Air Marshals on flights. Not everyone needs to be prepared to respond to a threat, but the probability that there are some present who are prepared to respond serves as a very real deterrent.
I'm not sure why the concept of a sort of 'Air-marshal' like program for schools is such a scary concept for people. Let school employees volunteer for the program, give them some modified emergency response training, and regularly check to ensure that they are emotionally stable.
I trust my barber to place a straight razor on my neck without snapping. The capability for someone to hurt another is so vast that our brains don't even bother registering it most of the time. A screened, trained, school employee with a firearm is probably less dangerous than an unscreened school employee with no firearm (because what would stop them anyway?)
The difference is that the solution you propose is not going to make a significant difference to the problem you perceive. Just because a law wouldn't work, doesn't mean it can't also impact many people in a negative manner.
Pretend that there was a huge spike in accidental drowning deaths of unattended toddlers in swimming pools due to inattentive parents. Now, imagine that someone proposed a law which would require every single pool in the country to have a life-preserver within 10' of pool.
It would be a completely ineffectual law, because the drownings would still happen because most toddlers drown when they stumble into an unattended pool, so with no-one there to attend, the life preserver would be useless.
That doesn't mean that the life-preserver IS useless always, but it isn't the preventative measure which would work for THAT problem. Even worse, you may have made the problem worse because of the time/money spent on life preservers can't be spent on other, possibly more effective measures.
So you certainly can have a law which impacts the law abiding, and really has no impact on the problem you are attempting to fix.
Honestly, it will be something like they do with scanners/printers and currency now. To avoid legislation, the major producers of 3D printers will add checks to reject known illegal patterns. Will that work well? No, because images are much more simple to scan for than 'Can this shape be used to make the illegal item'. However, I can certainly see it being implemented to avoid draconian laws.
If you want to look into a slightly distopian future, but an unfortunately likely one? All personal scale 3D printers will be declared illegal if they accept un-signed designs. To have a design signed, an individual will submit the design and pay a fee to have the design 'checked' for potential illegal uses. The trusted checking agency will then sign the design and transmit it back to the 3D-printer owner.
If you don't think something like that is probable, I only need to point you to HDCP and the DRM practice of requiring devices to disable/degrade their performance if encryption is not established. IN a similar manner your 3D printer would not function (or would degrade to lower resolution printing) if that the design couldn't be verified.
Could this be circumvented: Quite likely. However the law would be written such that circumvention would be illegal, and posessesion of a modified device would be illegal. In addition, a law would be passed which would make manufacture/sale of a non-certificate checking device illegal.
Could people produce their own home-made systems? Yes. However, market forces would mean that these devices would never receive the benefit that a 100% legal product would receive. Such benefits include a robust parts market, corporate sized R&D budgets, etc... ie: the legislation would serve to keep just enough companies out of the market to ensure that the market never achieves critical mass (ie: it would never become self-sustaining enough such that hobbyists could devote enough time/money/expertise without it just being a side gimmick).
Would there be workarounds? Sure, but it might just be enough to reduce the inflow of 'new blood' and cause its death through attrition.
Sure, but can the printer nearly approach the functioning quality of the material used in those..?
Eventually it will as the technology matures. However that doesn't matter. The quality of the manufacturing and material are selling points to people who are buying what can be classified as 'Durable Goods'.
I have some magazines which still work 30 years after manufacture (Moreso, 10 of those years was in storage with the spring compressed). 10 years of use, 10 years of poor storage in an uncle's shed, 1 day of cleaning storage dust/rust, 10 more years of use. Those are what are sold by the companies.
If you aren't interested in something which will work reliably for 30 years, but instead something which will work reliably 2-3 times, then material and quality mattter much less.
Oblig car analogy: If all you cared about was winning a single drag race, you wouldn't care if boosting the output of your engine would cause it to fail after 20,000 miles instead of 200,000 miles.
It's not legal to ferment grain at home. Only beer and wine.
But it is relatively easy to GET high proof alcohol even though it is easy to make. That's why alcohol prohibition was so damaging to the US.
Here are three ingredients which combine to make a BAD situation: 1. Demand 2. Non-complex production (kitchen chemistry/basement workshop level) 3. Prohibition of use/ownership
Hell, just 1 and 3 are bad enough. When you toss in 2 it becomes unwinnable. Other countries get away with it because Demand is low. Which is what we really should be looking at reducing in the US before trying to get to number 3.
Except that a 52" 4K TV is less pixel-dense than a 1080p 17" laptop screen - or even less. It's just that the panels that the 17" laptop screens are cut out of are finally of a manufacturing quality that they can cut out a 52" screen with no major flaws. This is why bigger screens are so much more expensive.
This is the trickle-down of the last generation of computer monitors.
Yes, a 52" screen is less pixel dense than a 17" 1080p screen... Which is irrelevant because it isn't less pixel dense than a 52" 1080p screen.
ie: I'm pretty sure that I'm glad that a 4k 24" screen will soon be able to replace my 1k 24" screen.
I realize that a lot of tech writers have forgotten what it is like to use computers, but I really miss the high-resolution monitors that we USED to have.
I'm glad that one of the big things that the companies are pushing now are going to be 4K displays for TVs because that means that (due to the shared manufacturing lines), the screens for computer monitors are going to get 4K screens eventually as well. I hate that you have to go out of your way to find a monitor that exceeds the 'television' format of 1080p.
So, I'm really excited to see this be the new push, because I have little use for '3D'.
Or, you know, your prof could have been less of a dick and provided photocopies of his overheads, hell, you could have even asked for them. A smart board isn't going to magically make a dumb professor/student smart.
I know it's easy to look at things and say 'Oh, here is the obvious solution, I can't believe you didn't do this.' the professor on the overhead was just an example. Would you matter if I said he used a chalk or whiteboard? The point is that it is a situation which can benefit from the use of a smartboard that a professor using a tablet can almost, but not quite match.
(and for the record, photocopies of the transparencies aren't very good at recording sequential snapshots as someone draws a graph by hand, takes questions as to what the graph should look like if the function were 'xyz' instead, then draws that new function ontop, and continuing with several other questions/examples using the same graph. But as I said, just pretent it's a professor using a whiteboard instead)
This summary was perhaps one of the worst I've ever seen in Slashdot history.
Hint: Summarize whatever the hell it is you are linking to. Don't try to shoehorn in a half-critique of CES, plugs for our very own Timothy(okay...), and OMIGOSH Bill Clinton, can you actually believe that, no I'm not making it up, like wow!
The major problem, is that I have no clue if you are attempting to poke fun at the lamp, if it really is cool, are you linking to a fake product parody page?
Yes this is just a rant about a summary, but for some reason its wording really irked me. I'm glad it seems I'm not the only one.
It's a big problem with parties. I can't vote against a party. I can't even vote against a particular issue. Even worse, if I do vote for one issue, it is implied that I support the other issues that candidate/party supports as well.
And let me tell you, being conservative, liberal, pro-ACLU, pro-NRA, pro-EFF, anti-drugwar...
Well let's just say I don't get to vote on any of my issues without voting against my issues at the same time, and it sucks.
Honestly, and sadly? I'm waiting for the school busses to get hit. Molotov to the front door, molotov to the back exit.
The sad fact of life is that there is nothing you can do to stop someone from killing (or horrifically injuring) large numbers of people once that person reaches the decision point to actually carry out such an event.
The only thing that will work with any real measure of success is somehow preventing that person from reaching the 'mass kill' decision point. Whether that is better mental health care, more intrusive observation (profiling based on flags,etc), removing the stigma/obstacles for people who want to seek counselling, I don't know, nor do I think I would like some possible solutions. But the important thing that people must not forget is that just because you may be 'crazy' doesn't mean you are stupid, and no amount of money will be able to create a solution which makes mass killings impossible, or even difficult.
Tablet for the actual interaction, projector so all the others can see. That would certainly kill off the need for smart boards, which are just obtuse to work with in general.
I disagree, but you are mostly correct.
With the rise of online education, I would wager you will see MORE use of smartboards, or at least a push for use of smartboards for dual in-person/online courses. The Smartboard will remain a critical element to capture the ephemerial 'chalk board' segment of a live lecture.
Imagine that the professor is giving a normal presentation using a white board, while a camera captures the lecture for the online audience. Anything the professor does on the whiteboard is important for the online students to see. Typical lecture cameras are insufficient to capture the detail of a whiteboard in video. The current approach tends to require static pre-generated lecture notes/slides which the online students can refer to, but any deviation from the slides will only appear on the whiteboard, and it is very easy for a professor to forget to 'capture' what he writes on the board.
The smartboard is probably the best method to capture this information, and send it realtime to the online students. As an added benefit, nothing is lost to the eraser between slides/lectures.
For my signals processing course, I generated about 10-15 pages of notes PER LECTURE where the professor would use a dry-erase marker to write on an old school overhead projector. Had he used a smartboard, I would have been able to focus less on furious copying of the lengthy problems he was working through, and observe more actively, knowing I could refer back to the perfect copy of projector scribblings the smartboard captured.
A tablet interface just doesn't cut it for working complex problems. In school, I remember something I called the chalkboard effect. If I was having difficulty with a math problem on paper, I would go to an empty classroom and work the problem out on the chalkboard, something about that form factor (size perhaps?) made working problems on the chalkboard almost trivial compared to the difficulty of the problem when worked on paper.
Sure, the professor could write on a tablet, but that would eliminate a good 70% of the communication potential of the human body. Without the ability to use body language, gesture, refer easily to comments on side boards, etc, trying to teach via tablet would be a huge pain.
So in summary, you are right about the projector, and certainly using a tablet, but I think the tablet would work best in the hands of the audience, while the professor works from the giant tablet (the smartboard)
There is nothing to prevent the government from imposing a use tax on data. The decision to do so, or not, is a policy decision based on the wisdom of the policy. Even traffic shaping, as you describe, isn't barred by anything in the founding document.
Think so?
Then why are poll taxes illegal? Hint: You can't charge people to exercise their rights, because poor or rich, you still have that right.
You started with the term rational, then in this post you switched and said radical change. Freudian?
You state that we need to, but I don't think that's been proven.
Think about how well banning alcohol worked in the early 20th century and the absurd rise in crime that caused which we are still trying to dig out from under. Alcohol directly kills more people than firearms, and has less benefits than firearms. But we would consider a ban on alcohol to be anathema today.
So unless those alcohol deaths are so bad that we have to radically change who can access it, I just don't see how you can state that a need for radical change exists for firearms.
I don't see why a false arrest is shameful, especially when it's shown to be false
Arrests are often published in the newspapers. Acquittals, dismissals, or dropped charges? Not so much.
Would you unconditionally allow someone who was arrested for child abuse watch your child without reservations even if they were exhonorated? Almost every parent would have slight misgivings. And given the choice between someone who was arrested, but exhonorated, and a person who was never even arrested, would choose the latter.
False arrests aren't shameful in a perfectly logical world, but we don't live in such a world. In this world, you can be the VICTIM of a crime and still be blamed by the community (See also "Asking for it, or should have known better." mentality)
Just because you are 'in public' does not make everything you do public.
Sadly, that's the part with the phrase 'reasonable expectation of privacy' that everyone gets so wrong it's almost backwards.
You could be in public with your spouse, look around to ensure that no one is within earshot, and whisper something into their ear. You DO have a reasonable expectation that such a conversation would be private.
If someone was down the way with a parabolic mic, it could be argued that such eavesdropping went beyond what people should expect to occur. The couple had every expectation, and even took efforts to ensure that the whispered message was private, even though they were speaking in a public place.
Now, I won't argue that such a thing would be upheld in every case, but it is an exception to the concept that a public space = no privacy of anything.
If one can't take the first step in programming and get acquainted to the tools, he won't be able to make the later steps either.
I completely disagree. It doesn't make any sense to require that you start using the tools which the professionals use.
If you wanted to become even an amateur race car driver, you don't learn to drive in an Ariel Atom. A second hand Honda Civic is probably a good start. You don't even need to start with a manual car, since the important things when starting off are learning the basic rules.
Having access to tweak the compression ratio, fuel/air mixture, suspension or brake responsiveness can come later, after learning the basics.
Most home invaders are either well-armed or on heavy drugs, or both.
Blame the existence of the second amendment for giving citizens that they have a chance, solo, against government forces. Also blame television for making people think that violent home invasions happen once a week.
First, most home invaders are not heavily armed. and second, my home has been broken into twice (not often, 20 years ago and 5 years ago) However, I once held someone at gunpoint after they chased me down the street and into my home. I was able to grab a shotgun and hold them at bay until they ran off. Thankfully for me, they didn't realize that I only grabbed the shotgun and didn't have any ammo for it, but damned if it wasn't a terrifying moment.
I had no chance to call the police until after the guy ran away. I didn't know what he had, or what he intended, other than the fact that he kept trying to coax me to put down the gun and come outside. I didn't want to move an inch or distract myself to try to grab the phone, and I wasn't going to let him out of my sight to try and find some ammunition.
Home invasions do happen, obviously it isn't TV, but then again, TV doesn't exactly portray gun owners in a positive light either.
While a lower rate (football alone) isn't American Football responsible for approximately 25 deaths or catastrophic injuries per year?
(4+ direct deaths such as severed spines, 9+ indirect deaths like heart attacks, and an average of 13 injuries such as total paralysis)
I'm not saying this as a plea to ban football in HS. (However, I think we do put our HS players in too much danger), but to illustrate that I believe people are wildly overreacting to the actual threat. Mass shootings average 100 deaths per year. That is an astonishingly small number when you factor in the population size, and when you also consider the risk due to things that are completely avoidable like HS football.
I believe that you are wrong, and I'll use an example from computers:
What happens when people have 20 passwords/authentication methods they have to remember or maintain? They adopt habits which render those protections worse than not having them in the first place. Those 20 passwords become variations on each other at best, and more likely, simply become reused among sites. Even worse, if one changes frequenty, people tend to make their passwords very simple to barely meet the requirement.
If I had 20 'RFID' rings to match me with 20 of my firearms, I'm pretty sure that within 2-3 cases of bringing the wrong dongle to the range, I'd do the same thing I do with my shotgun choke tubes and keys. I'd get an elastic harness for the firearm, and keep it right on the gun.
The result is that you now would have 20 firearms, with the 'lockout' mechanism taped right to the side of the firearm, and the benefit is lost.
(I also don't even want to get into the terror of having a battery within my firearm would cause me from a risk of corrosion standpoint, so any firearm I'd store I'd have to always remember to remove the battery)
Firearms are mechanical devices. A safe is a hell of a lot better of a system than any sort of electronic interlock.
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Background checks for mental illness seems like a good idea, but there are some SERIOUS problems with how such a system would have to be setup for it to accomplish anything. As other people have mentioned, you could possibly make the whole problem WORSE. If someone is suffering from mental illness, the last thing you ever want to do is create barriers for them getting the treatment they need. The potential to have their firearms confiscated because they discussed suicidal thoughts with a therapist is going to cause some to avoid going to a therapist.
This is a known problem that exists with the Security Clearance system the US government uses. I've had people mention that they have avoided going to a mental health professional because that is a reportable event on your SF-86, and some people fear that they might lose their clearance, and thus their job (and career).
You don't want to put people in a position where they are weighing the consequences they would be subject to if they decided to seek medical help, especially if they DO need that help.
Gotcha, thanks.
The term 'green-on-blue attack' refers to the (quite common) situations where an aghan security force member will launch a surprise attack on NATO military personnel with which he is supposed to be working. Again, it turns out to not be that difficult to kill a few armed, trained, soldiers if you just wait for their backs to be turned.
That is a problem with a specific person who would be identified as the only person allowed to be armed in a given area.
However, if you had multiple people, perhaps 5 teachers/employees who were interested in carrying-concealed for the specific purpose of being a last chance defense, then a potential gunman not know who/where those individuals would be.
It's the same concept of the Air Marshals on flights. Not everyone needs to be prepared to respond to a threat, but the probability that there are some present who are prepared to respond serves as a very real deterrent.
I'm not sure why the concept of a sort of 'Air-marshal' like program for schools is such a scary concept for people. Let school employees volunteer for the program, give them some modified emergency response training, and regularly check to ensure that they are emotionally stable.
I trust my barber to place a straight razor on my neck without snapping. The capability for someone to hurt another is so vast that our brains don't even bother registering it most of the time. A screened, trained, school employee with a firearm is probably less dangerous than an unscreened school employee with no firearm (because what would stop them anyway?)
The difference is that the solution you propose is not going to make a significant difference to the problem you perceive. Just because a law wouldn't work, doesn't mean it can't also impact many people in a negative manner.
Pretend that there was a huge spike in accidental drowning deaths of unattended toddlers in swimming pools due to inattentive parents. Now, imagine that someone proposed a law which would require every single pool in the country to have a life-preserver within 10' of pool.
It would be a completely ineffectual law, because the drownings would still happen because most toddlers drown when they stumble into an unattended pool, so with no-one there to attend, the life preserver would be useless.
That doesn't mean that the life-preserver IS useless always, but it isn't the preventative measure which would work for THAT problem. Even worse, you may have made the problem worse because of the time/money spent on life preservers can't be spent on other, possibly more effective measures.
So you certainly can have a law which impacts the law abiding, and really has no impact on the problem you are attempting to fix.
Honestly, it will be something like they do with scanners/printers and currency now. To avoid legislation, the major producers of 3D printers will add checks to reject known illegal patterns. Will that work well? No, because images are much more simple to scan for than 'Can this shape be used to make the illegal item'. However, I can certainly see it being implemented to avoid draconian laws.
If you want to look into a slightly distopian future, but an unfortunately likely one?
All personal scale 3D printers will be declared illegal if they accept un-signed designs. To have a design signed, an individual will submit the design and pay a fee to have the design 'checked' for potential illegal uses. The trusted checking agency will then sign the design and transmit it back to the 3D-printer owner.
If you don't think something like that is probable, I only need to point you to HDCP and the DRM practice of requiring devices to disable/degrade their performance if encryption is not established. IN a similar manner your 3D printer would not function (or would degrade to lower resolution printing) if that the design couldn't be verified.
Could this be circumvented: Quite likely. However the law would be written such that circumvention would be illegal, and posessesion of a modified device would be illegal. In addition, a law would be passed which would make manufacture/sale of a non-certificate checking device illegal.
Could people produce their own home-made systems? Yes. However, market forces would mean that these devices would never receive the benefit that a 100% legal product would receive. Such benefits include a robust parts market, corporate sized R&D budgets, etc... ie: the legislation would serve to keep just enough companies out of the market to ensure that the market never achieves critical mass (ie: it would never become self-sustaining enough such that hobbyists could devote enough time/money/expertise without it just being a side gimmick).
Would there be workarounds? Sure, but it might just be enough to reduce the inflow of 'new blood' and cause its death through attrition.
Sure, but can the printer nearly approach the functioning quality of the material used in those..?
Eventually it will as the technology matures. However that doesn't matter. The quality of the manufacturing and material are selling points to people who are buying what can be classified as 'Durable Goods'.
I have some magazines which still work 30 years after manufacture (Moreso, 10 of those years was in storage with the spring compressed). 10 years of use, 10 years of poor storage in an uncle's shed, 1 day of cleaning storage dust/rust, 10 more years of use. Those are what are sold by the companies.
If you aren't interested in something which will work reliably for 30 years, but instead something which will work reliably 2-3 times, then material and quality mattter much less.
Oblig car analogy: If all you cared about was winning a single drag race, you wouldn't care if boosting the output of your engine would cause it to fail after 20,000 miles instead of 200,000 miles.
It's not legal to ferment grain at home. Only beer and wine.
But it is relatively easy to GET high proof alcohol even though it is easy to make. That's why alcohol prohibition was so damaging to the US.
Here are three ingredients which combine to make a BAD situation:
1. Demand
2. Non-complex production (kitchen chemistry/basement workshop level)
3. Prohibition of use/ownership
Hell, just 1 and 3 are bad enough. When you toss in 2 it becomes unwinnable. Other countries get away with it because Demand is low. Which is what we really should be looking at reducing in the US before trying to get to number 3.
Except that a 52" 4K TV is less pixel-dense than a 1080p 17" laptop screen - or even less. It's just that the panels that the 17" laptop screens are cut out of are finally of a manufacturing quality that they can cut out a 52" screen with no major flaws. This is why bigger screens are so much more expensive.
This is the trickle-down of the last generation of computer monitors.
Yes, a 52" screen is less pixel dense than a 17" 1080p screen... Which is irrelevant because it isn't less pixel dense than a 52" 1080p screen.
ie: I'm pretty sure that I'm glad that a 4k 24" screen will soon be able to replace my 1k 24" screen.
I realize that a lot of tech writers have forgotten what it is like to use computers, but I really miss the high-resolution monitors that we USED to have.
I'm glad that one of the big things that the companies are pushing now are going to be 4K displays for TVs because that means that (due to the shared manufacturing lines), the screens for computer monitors are going to get 4K screens eventually as well. I hate that you have to go out of your way to find a monitor that exceeds the 'television' format of 1080p.
So, I'm really excited to see this be the new push, because I have little use for '3D'.
Or, you know, your prof could have been less of a dick and provided photocopies of his overheads, hell, you could have even asked for them. A smart board isn't going to magically make a dumb professor/student smart.
I know it's easy to look at things and say 'Oh, here is the obvious solution, I can't believe you didn't do this.' the professor on the overhead was just an example. Would you matter if I said he used a chalk or whiteboard? The point is that it is a situation which can benefit from the use of a smartboard that a professor using a tablet can almost, but not quite match.
(and for the record, photocopies of the transparencies aren't very good at recording sequential snapshots as someone draws a graph by hand, takes questions as to what the graph should look like if the function were 'xyz' instead, then draws that new function ontop, and continuing with several other questions/examples using the same graph. But as I said, just pretent it's a professor using a whiteboard instead)
This summary was perhaps one of the worst I've ever seen in Slashdot history.
Hint: Summarize whatever the hell it is you are linking to. Don't try to shoehorn in a half-critique of CES, plugs for our very own Timothy(okay...), and OMIGOSH Bill Clinton, can you actually believe that, no I'm not making it up, like wow!
The major problem, is that I have no clue if you are attempting to poke fun at the lamp, if it really is cool, are you linking to a fake product parody page?
Yes this is just a rant about a summary, but for some reason its wording really irked me. I'm glad it seems I'm not the only one.
I like this suggestion. I pay property taxes on my property (and in VA, that includes my cars).
Why shouldn't IP be taxed? It certainly requires a lot of government to maintain.
It's a big problem with parties. I can't vote against a party. I can't even vote against a particular issue. Even worse, if I do vote for one issue, it is implied that I support the other issues that candidate/party supports as well.
And let me tell you, being conservative, liberal, pro-ACLU, pro-NRA, pro-EFF, anti-drugwar...
Well let's just say I don't get to vote on any of my issues without voting against my issues at the same time, and it sucks.
Honestly, and sadly? I'm waiting for the school busses to get hit. Molotov to the front door, molotov to the back exit.
The sad fact of life is that there is nothing you can do to stop someone from killing (or horrifically injuring) large numbers of people once that person reaches the decision point to actually carry out such an event.
The only thing that will work with any real measure of success is somehow preventing that person from reaching the 'mass kill' decision point. Whether that is better mental health care, more intrusive observation (profiling based on flags,etc), removing the stigma/obstacles for people who want to seek counselling, I don't know, nor do I think I would like some possible solutions. But the important thing that people must not forget is that just because you may be 'crazy' doesn't mean you are stupid, and no amount of money will be able to create a solution which makes mass killings impossible, or even difficult.
Tablet for the actual interaction, projector so all the others can see.
That would certainly kill off the need for smart boards, which are just obtuse to work with in general.
I disagree, but you are mostly correct.
With the rise of online education, I would wager you will see MORE use of smartboards, or at least a push for use of smartboards for dual in-person/online courses. The Smartboard will remain a critical element to capture the ephemerial 'chalk board' segment of a live lecture.
Imagine that the professor is giving a normal presentation using a white board, while a camera captures the lecture for the online audience. Anything the professor does on the whiteboard is important for the online students to see. Typical lecture cameras are insufficient to capture the detail of a whiteboard in video. The current approach tends to require static pre-generated lecture notes/slides which the online students can refer to, but any deviation from the slides will only appear on the whiteboard, and it is very easy for a professor to forget to 'capture' what he writes on the board.
The smartboard is probably the best method to capture this information, and send it realtime to the online students. As an added benefit, nothing is lost to the eraser between slides/lectures.
For my signals processing course, I generated about 10-15 pages of notes PER LECTURE where the professor would use a dry-erase marker to write on an old school overhead projector. Had he used a smartboard, I would have been able to focus less on furious copying of the lengthy problems he was working through, and observe more actively, knowing I could refer back to the perfect copy of projector scribblings the smartboard captured.
A tablet interface just doesn't cut it for working complex problems. In school, I remember something I called the chalkboard effect. If I was having difficulty with a math problem on paper, I would go to an empty classroom and work the problem out on the chalkboard, something about that form factor (size perhaps?) made working problems on the chalkboard almost trivial compared to the difficulty of the problem when worked on paper.
Sure, the professor could write on a tablet, but that would eliminate a good 70% of the communication potential of the human body. Without the ability to use body language, gesture, refer easily to comments on side boards, etc, trying to teach via tablet would be a huge pain.
So in summary, you are right about the projector, and certainly using a tablet, but I think the tablet would work best in the hands of the audience, while the professor works from the giant tablet (the smartboard)
There is nothing to prevent the government from imposing a use tax on data. The decision to do so, or not, is a policy decision based on the wisdom of the policy. Even traffic shaping, as you describe, isn't barred by anything in the founding document.
Think so?
Then why are poll taxes illegal? Hint: You can't charge people to exercise their rights, because poor or rich, you still have that right.
You started with the term rational, then in this post you switched and said radical change. Freudian?
You state that we need to, but I don't think that's been proven.
Think about how well banning alcohol worked in the early 20th century and the absurd rise in crime that caused which we are still trying to dig out from under. Alcohol directly kills more people than firearms, and has less benefits than firearms. But we would consider a ban on alcohol to be anathema today.
So unless those alcohol deaths are so bad that we have to radically change who can access it, I just don't see how you can state that a need for radical change exists for firearms.
I don't see why a false arrest is shameful, especially when it's shown to be false
Arrests are often published in the newspapers. Acquittals, dismissals, or dropped charges? Not so much.
Would you unconditionally allow someone who was arrested for child abuse watch your child without reservations even if they were exhonorated? Almost every parent would have slight misgivings. And given the choice between someone who was arrested, but exhonorated, and a person who was never even arrested, would choose the latter.
False arrests aren't shameful in a perfectly logical world, but we don't live in such a world. In this world, you can be the VICTIM of a crime and still be blamed by the community (See also "Asking for it, or should have known better." mentality)
Just because you are 'in public' does not make everything you do public.
Sadly, that's the part with the phrase 'reasonable expectation of privacy' that everyone gets so wrong it's almost backwards.
You could be in public with your spouse, look around to ensure that no one is within earshot, and whisper something into their ear. You DO have a reasonable expectation that such a conversation would be private.
If someone was down the way with a parabolic mic, it could be argued that such eavesdropping went beyond what people should expect to occur. The couple had every expectation, and even took efforts to ensure that the whispered message was private, even though they were speaking in a public place.
Now, I won't argue that such a thing would be upheld in every case, but it is an exception to the concept that a public space = no privacy of anything.
Perhaps he got what he paid for.
the Macbook pro does not dent easy... far far far less dentable than any other plastic case.
Wait... you are claiming that aluminum is less dentable than plastic?
If one can't take the first step in programming and get acquainted to the tools, he won't be able to make the later steps either.
I completely disagree. It doesn't make any sense to require that you start using the tools which the professionals use.
If you wanted to become even an amateur race car driver, you don't learn to drive in an Ariel Atom. A second hand Honda Civic is probably a good start. You don't even need to start with a manual car, since the important things when starting off are learning the basic rules.
Having access to tweak the compression ratio, fuel/air mixture, suspension or brake responsiveness can come later, after learning the basics.
Most home invaders are either well-armed or on heavy drugs, or both.
Blame the existence of the second amendment for giving citizens that they have a chance, solo, against government forces. Also blame television for making people think that violent home invasions happen once a week.
First, most home invaders are not heavily armed. and second, my home has been broken into twice (not often, 20 years ago and 5 years ago) However, I once held someone at gunpoint after they chased me down the street and into my home. I was able to grab a shotgun and hold them at bay until they ran off. Thankfully for me, they didn't realize that I only grabbed the shotgun and didn't have any ammo for it, but damned if it wasn't a terrifying moment.
I had no chance to call the police until after the guy ran away. I didn't know what he had, or what he intended, other than the fact that he kept trying to coax me to put down the gun and come outside. I didn't want to move an inch or distract myself to try to grab the phone, and I wasn't going to let him out of my sight to try and find some ammunition.
Home invasions do happen, obviously it isn't TV, but then again, TV doesn't exactly portray gun owners in a positive light either.
While a lower rate (football alone) isn't American Football responsible for approximately 25 deaths or catastrophic injuries per year?
(4+ direct deaths such as severed spines, 9+ indirect deaths like heart attacks, and an average of 13 injuries such as total paralysis)
I'm not saying this as a plea to ban football in HS. (However, I think we do put our HS players in too much danger), but to illustrate that I believe people are wildly overreacting to the actual threat. Mass shootings average 100 deaths per year. That is an astonishingly small number when you factor in the population size, and when you also consider the risk due to things that are completely avoidable like HS football.
The hysteria just bugs the hell out of me.
I believe that you are wrong, and I'll use an example from computers:
What happens when people have 20 passwords/authentication methods they have to remember or maintain? They adopt habits which render those protections worse than not having them in the first place. Those 20 passwords become variations on each other at best, and more likely, simply become reused among sites. Even worse, if one changes frequenty, people tend to make their passwords very simple to barely meet the requirement.
If I had 20 'RFID' rings to match me with 20 of my firearms, I'm pretty sure that within 2-3 cases of bringing the wrong dongle to the range, I'd do the same thing I do with my shotgun choke tubes and keys. I'd get an elastic harness for the firearm, and keep it right on the gun.
The result is that you now would have 20 firearms, with the 'lockout' mechanism taped right to the side of the firearm, and the benefit is lost.
(I also don't even want to get into the terror of having a battery within my firearm would cause me from a risk of corrosion standpoint, so any firearm I'd store I'd have to always remember to remove the battery)
Firearms are mechanical devices. A safe is a hell of a lot better of a system than any sort of electronic interlock.