But it's not likely..... they can't be transmitting on cell phone frequencies from their station anyways, as the transmission outside frequencies within their operating privileges would be a FCC violation that could get their station licenses revoked.

Yup. So they couldn't do so openly. These days, there are plenty of ways to do so anonymously. Given some of the cool tools out there in the Ham world for connecting radios, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find an Elmer who could do some interesting things with cell phones if they wanted to.

Yeah, I'm a ham, but I'd never put my callsign on /.

So, you made a donation to organized crime. How charitable.

As did this police department ...

US local police department pays CryptoLocker ransom

=snip=

A local police department in Swansea, Massachusetts, has paid cybercrooks behind the CryptoLocker ransomware attack to decrypt files locked up by the malware on police computer systems, according to local press reports.

The police department spokesman claimed that the infection had been mopped up and their systems secured, with no personal information stolen.

=end snip=

Agreed. Republicans want to take away certain aspects of your liberty. Democrats want to take others. Neither has any desire whatsoever to actually increase liberty, because that would mean they would lose that much more control over your lives.

Both parties are two sides of the same coin.

We should just start referring to the 'two' political parties in America as the Janus party.

One of the points of a SD (or SDEX) card is that you can read it very simple in an other device. By formtitting it it in JFFS2 or YAFFS you cannot read/exchange the card in windows. Inconvinent, but technically possible.

Shouldn't that be considered a feature. Who wants their data to be infected by a windows device? I've formatted most of my sd cards that are not used in a camera or similar device to ext2 or ext3. To most ms-windows users, it would look like a bad card. I have no problem at all with that.

I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.

Baen Publishing does essentially with some of their books. A couple of years ago, I bought the hardback of a book from their '1632' series, and it came with a CD that contained every other book from the series, plus some others. All with no DRM. It's one of the things that makes me a loyal customer. I reward companies that don't treat me like a potential thief.

I've tried lots of different mp3 players under Linux, but always eventually come back to rhythmbox. I've only got 18k songs or so, so I don't know how it handles larger loads. The thing that I like more than anything else, is how easy the search facility is to use. I mostly run it on a random walk, but if I want something specific, it is easy to find exactly what I want, either by artist, title, or album.

My biggest problem is getting it to exclude certain subdirectories for cataloguing.

As a former Marine, I have some experience with hand grenades, and I can assure you that every case of grenades comes with an entire booklet of warnings, written in dense legalese.

Once the legalese is stripped away it all boils down to "Once you pull the pin, Mr. Hand Grenade is not your friend!"

If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.

This would actually be useful.

Code that up and get back to us.

I'll bet it could be done in a shell script.

I think cameras on all cops will be awesome. But it needs to not be able to be turned off. And if it "malfunctions" there needs to be a look into what the cop was doing at that time. Because they turn off their cameras when its convenient for them. After all... why record yourself taking a bribe?

What would be even more effective is for juries to vote to acquit any time the camera "malfunctions", or the judge just throw the case out based on the 'malfunction'. I know that if I'm on a jury, and video evidence is 'missing', I sure as hell am not going to believe a word the cop says.

~ :) bc
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
4427007044615115050034854648525685871587 / 1409160108506276783085718440252375099653
3
^D

See, it really is 3!

I'd like to point out that there is another Pobox out there, which is a US company (pobox.com), that is apparently not affiliated with this British "Pobox" company.

From their blog:

=snip=

We support @ThePSF in their fight for Python trademarks in the EU. @pobox is *not* http://pobox.co.uk. Learn more: http://pyfound.blogspot.nl/2013/02/python-trademark-at-risk-in-europe-we.htmlâ¦

I'm not affiliated with either company. I've used pobox.com for email forwarding for about 17 years though, which is one thing that made me investigate this, as the UK company's claim of having used 'python' for 17 years seemed to me like about how long the US company had been around.

But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free? I can see pre-1923 works, Baen Books, works of Cory Doctorow and a few other authors who have embraced Creative Commons, and what else?

Most Project Gurenberg etexts/ebooks are every bit as good as "commercial" ebooks. As a matter of fact they tend to have less typos and other artifacts of that nature. Sometimes the quality of "professional-quality ebooks" is often crap.

every once in a blue moon you need Windows.

I thought that was what VMs were for.

"ID for voters" is common-sense, you want to ensure voters are eligible. OTOH attaching the ID to a particular vote destroys the secret part in what is supposed to be a secret ballot.

I don't believe that is what the OP was talking about. The ID is to be able to get the ballot. The ID# is not attached to the ballot at that point.The ballot itself is still secret, but we've validated that the person casting it is eligible to do so.

The inked finger (as used in Iraq) is another good way to ensure people don't vote more than once, but stained fingers do nothing to confirm their eligibility to vote.

Personally, I'm all for that as well.