Or living in a light-polluted environment is correlated with poverty, and poverty is a predictor of obesity due to the kids of food you access when poor.

Let's just take it a step further. We need a Megan's law style 'refused to vaccinate' registry, which shows where unvaccinated children and adults go to kingergarten/school/work. Or at very least require schools and kindergartens to make public what percentage of their students have not been vaccinated, so I can make intelligent decisions about where to send or not send my kid.

When the US govt starts dictating who is allowed to come to your conferences you need to move the conference. Same as the AIDS research conferences have been held anywhere except the US since the 80s because from 1987 to 2009 the US govt banned people with AIDS from traveling to the US.

"Our third gen iPad is about two years old, and already we have problems with app upgrades breaking things"

This. Same with iphones. Perfectly good hardware, continuing to do a decent job doing the stuff you bought it for, being slowly forced into obselecense by iOS and app upgrades. Which makes short term sense for a company whose core business is selling hardware - forcing people to buy a new device every couple of years regardless of whether the last device has died or not does in fact make you money. In the short term. But sooner or later your customers get tired of periodically having to replace working hardware just so they can continue to have essentially the same functionality they had with the previous device, and will switch to one of the many other manufacturers who have (by now) duplicated your functionality. The *only* reason to buy Apple hardware is when Apple does something genuinely new and their latest gadget does something genuinely useful that no-one else does yet (first gen iPhones, for example). After that it's all incremental upgrades and forced obselecense and you may as well switch to the competition until the next time Apple does something genuinely new. Assuming they continue to do so - not a guarantee for any company.

He recommended deploying an alternative browser, not replacing IE altogether. That way when IE has a bad vulnerability you notify everyone to temporarilly use the alternate on external sites, use group policy to disable vulnerable features, or even block it at the firewall depending on the severity. They can keep using IE internally during that time. Then when a patch comes out you deploy it and lift the restrictions. The next week when firefox has a zero-day, you do the same for it, and recommend people use IE for the time being. It is a very sensible way to allow the most productivity possible while staying secure.

If they really need to use Active X on externall websites during a vulnerability, you can whitelist those sites in Group Policy if needed, but honestly I would just consider the downtime a cost of doing business with outdated insecure technology in most cases. Cleaning up a bad worm/virus that spread through the entire campus could be much more expensive.

"Another person that doesn't understand Libertarian ideals."

I don't need to understand Libertarian ideals. Everyone I've ever met or read professing 'libertarian ideals' has been a whiny self-centered asshole who appeared to want to live in a society which has been restructured around their desires and fuck everyone else. 'Libertarian ideals' don't need "understanding", they need to be mocked and ridiculed.

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.