Agreed. I've done this in the past and starting as close to the original analog telemetry stream as possible is essential. Even if the noise is so bad that analog filtering doesn't recover any new data in the preD, simply knowing where there is missing data and exactly how much can help tremendously in reconstructing the data. Their raw mpeg files don't provide any of that information.

I did it for years with a wide range of random supermarket flyers and coupon books and other mailbox-clogging guff, but like you had a more recent attempt rebuffed. But the thing is, the law (or rather, both the law and the Code of Federal Regulations enacting the law) haven't changed. 39 CFR 3008 hasn't changed. My suspicion is some lower-level apparatchik has instructed the people who actually implement it to not do so except for obvious porn, in violation of the law. The last time I tried, I didn't follow up because I found a (well hidden) 'unsubscribe' option on that coupon company's website which actually had the desired effect, so problem solved.

But now that I know other people are being bounced by the classification office, next time I move or just get a persistent junk mailer I'll try again, and this time persist and see how far I get..

" But there must be more to do!"

Take your meds and calm down?

"the USPS is the envy of the world"..

Australia Post made a post-tax profit of AUD$311.9 million (USD$289.6 million) in 2013 (http://auspost.com.au/annualreport2013/financial-report.html) in a country with a population of 20 million people scattered across an area close to the size of the continental US. This despite making more than 90% of income from activities where it competes on the open market (ie without government monopoly) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australia_Post).

By contrast, USPS made a loss of USD$5 billion in 2013, in a country with 300 million people. Admittedly, the USPS has been spectacularly hamstrung by congress, which has actively prevented it from acting like a business (in contrast to Australia Post, which was corporatized in 1989 - it acts like an independent business entity but pays all revenue back to the state, reducing the need for taxation) - even conservative thinktanks like the Heritige Foundation think the USPS is unreasonably crippled: http://www.heritage.org/resear....

But the USPS (or the situation its been placed in by congress) is anything but "the envy of the world".

You don't have to pay for it. Per 39 CFR 3008 'Prohibition of pandering advertisements' (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/39/3008), you can tell the USPS that you find mailers from any sender to be offensive and the USPS is required to issue an order that no more mailings be sent to you by that mailer. The form you need is PS1500, available at http://about.usps.com/forms/ps...

Good to know. The ultimate solution in this case was to abandon their software and switch to something web-based so we could use any device with an internet connection. So really they just lost a customer out of it.

This isn't OT. It's a major problem with apple, period. The other half of the same problem is the use of the app store as the sole way to get software means you can't roll back to previous versions of things. Which is a major problem when you're working with software whose purpose is to be multi-device. eg I use a software package used for designing iphone/ipod based surveys - the design software runs on your mac and the end result gets loaded onto idevices for use, which then sync the data collected back to the mac. A recent 'upgrade' of the design software turned out to be incompatible with the client software I had installed on 30 or so idevices. No problem, just update the client software.. Except the newer version of the device software required a newer version of ios, and the devices in question were old enough that they weren't compatable with a newer version of ios, so no upgrade was possible. ok, no problem, roll the mac software back to the previous version. Except you can't do that through the app store. The software supplier seriously suggested the solution was ditching 30 or so perfectly functional idevices and replacing all of them because (they claim - I don't know if this is true) their contract with Apple to allow distribution of their software through the app store prevents them from distributing installables any other way so they couldn't provide me with an installer for the earlier version.

I've been writing ethnographic field notes for about 15 years. I had a couple of phases of trying to do this electronically, but the notes from each of those 3 month experiments are for the most part now lost or at least difficult to access - proprietary formats, failed backups, accidental deletions, you name it. Whereas the paper notebooks are sitting on my bookshelf beside my desk. For one project I chopped the spine off the notebook and dropped the pages into a bulk scanner before perfect-binding the notebook back together again, but the resulting physical notebook is a bit more delicate than I'd like. But I do like having an electronic version, both for backup and so I have a copy available when I'm away from my bookshelf. So these days I photocopy each notebook and drop the photocopies through the scanner (and more recently I've been able to have a student or an intern do it, but for a task I only needed to do every three-six months it was never that onerous to begin with), storing both the photocopy and a copy of the pdf offsite. I've played with various indexing schemes over the years, from leaving the last dozen pages blank and writing a single-line description of the contents of each page as I filled it (2002-03-21: key informant interview, ER doctor, hospital xxx), through to embedding metadata on relevant pages of the pdf to make it searchable (my handwriting is way way too bad for ocr to have any utility). But the 'write the index on the last few pages of the notebook as you go' method has been the simplest and most robust, and it rarely takes long to find anything, even with 30 or so notebooks on my bookshelf. And picking up an old notebook every few months and just reading or skimming through it is often a worthwhile exercise, reminding you of ideas and streams of thought and research context in ways that simply searching for something you already know is in there never can.

As an additional benefit, I've always found making notes in a notebook to be less intrusive in meetings or interviews than typing or using a stylus on a tablet (although changing social norms may make the latter less intrusive eventually), and the act of writing to be less intrusive to my own thought processes than typing (maybe just because no red squiggly lines appear under my notes as I type, or text reflowing, drawing the eye as it does so), but that might just be me, or I might just be showing my age.

NSA 'compaining' about tails? Oh, no, please don't throw me in that briar patch!

http://americanfolklore.net/fo...

Same here. I tried TurboTax one year and it didn't save me any money, didn't really save me any time, and had annoying DRM. You have to research what you can deduct on your own anyway in advance anyway so you can preserve documentation throughout the year, and that is the time consuming part. So paying money just to have software fill out and submit the form doesn't seem worth it for me.

The 'holding some event after the time poeple are leaving so some people stick around longer' is sort of what happened - in the early days everyone used to leave on sunday (the man was tourched on saturday night) then the group who build a structure called the temple each year started burning that on sunday night, so for a couple of years departure was spread across sunday and monday as half the attendees continued to leave on sunday and the other half stuck around to watch the temple burn then left late sunday night or on monday. But the temple burn is now so popular most of the attendees stay for it, and everyone is trying to get out somewhere between sunday night and monday. Maybe we need some niche events for monday which would only appeal to 1/3-1/2 of attendees :)

I moved to the US 14 years ago from another developed nation, but had spent a lot of my childhood in developing nations; I quickly found that anything that baffled me in the US abruptly made a *lot* more sense when viewed as if the US is a third world nation.

"It is a common error, but an error nonetheless, to talk of 'ninth amendment rights.' The ninth amendment is not a source of rights as such; it is simply a rule about how to read the Constitution." Laurence H. Tribe, American Constitutional Law 776 n. 14 (2nd ed. 1998).

I think the wholepoint of regulating ride sharing is it *does* impact someone else - taxi drivers and taxi owners. And it impacts them because you're imposing different regulatory burdens (and hence cost, since regulatory burdens always have at least some complance cost) on two groups of people engaged in the same activity - providing transport in exchange for something of value. The argument the taxi folks are making is the regulatory burden should be equal for people engaged in what's essentially the same activity, and so far that's looking convincing to regulators in Seattle (among other places). Your idea for 'payment' in what's essentially a microcurrency which can only be used to purchase one thing does shift things a bit, and that might help convince city government that it should be regulated differently, but my guess is the number of people willing to drive strangers around town in exchange for a microcurrency which can only be used for purchasing rides from other strangers will be far far fewer than the number of people willing to drive strangers around town in exchange for a currency which can be used for any purpose, and the whole thing will collapse because every time you log in to the app to get a ride, no-one will be close by ready to offer you one, so people will stop using the app. But that's just my cynical opinion.

With respect to politics, I completely agree that the interests of the general public are diffuse compared to the interests of a given industry, and this often has a perverting effect on lobbying. But as someone who has done lobbying at city, state, and county level, I have to tell you that representatives are usually extremely jaded about paid industry lobbyists, and while they'll happily go along with them if there appears to be no non-industry opposition to something, the second you get 10 or 20 obviously fired up regular citizens in front of them, you have their complete attention, because they *know* that those 10 or 20 people who are fired up enough to take the day off work and go to try and meet with their elected representatives are representative of much much larger numbers of people who will be voting at the next election. So if you think there's a case to be made that rideshare systems should be regulated differently than taxis, get together two or three people from each council district together, call every counciller's office and make an appointment, and go and talk to them (or more likely one of their staffers, but it'll still get back to them). Believe me, this works like nothing else does.

I didn't say it was acceptable, but yeah, that's how democracy usually works. I say 'usually' because most democracies also have courts and executive branches in an attempt to moderate the excesses of mob rule - to try and enact the priciple that democracy *should* implement the will of the majority without infringing the rights of the minority.