I rented for a long time -- ten years -- and recently "bought" a house. The fact is, most people borrow the money to get a house, I know I did. So in the first instance, I was renting a property directly, but the second is like renting money to buy a property. In the second instance, there's a whole lot of extra maintenance issues that aren't included in the monthly payment either and so I figure I'm paying roughly double to rent the money to buy a house than I paid to rent a (very nice waterfront) apartment. Obviously there are reasons I felt it was worth it when I rented the money to buy this house, but I'll be honest, those reasons seem less valid over time. Especially after a plumber leaves you a $2000 bill (yes, I had the inspection).

I know it is against the rules to RTFA, but sometimes it is worth it:

Email encryption first became available to the public in 1991, when Phil Zimmermann released a free program called Pretty Good Privacy, or PGP, on the Internet. ... The U.S. government subsequently investigated Zimmermann for violating arms trafficking laws because high-powered encryption was subject to export restrictions.

In 1997, Koch attended a talk by free software evangelist Richard Stallman, who was visiting Germany. Stallman urged the crowd to write their own version of PGP. "We can't export it, but if you write it, we can import it," he said.

Inspired, Koch decided to try. "I figured I can do it," he recalled. He had some time between consulting projects. Within a few months, he released an initial version of the software he called Gnu Privacy Guard, a play on PGP and an homage to Stallman's free Gnu operating system.

As a side point, Stallman is endlessly criticized around here, laughed at, etc. But he inspired Koch to do something really important and that should be recognized a little bit. Obviously Koch deserves massive praise (and funding) because he did all the work, but it also struck me how important philosophical and moral principles can be in making the world a better place because they can inspire people to do the work.

That's interesting history. In the American Colonies prior to the revolution, juries would often find defendants not guilty of unpopular laws, but you are correct, the verdicts had no effect on the law, which remained the same.

I feel I should be more clear about the point I was trying to make above -- jury nullification in the United States falls largely into two categories, a pre-revolutionary predisposition to stick it to King George, and something I didn't mention but happened plenty in the South, a hesitance to convict whites of violence against blacks.

In either case, jury nullification is likely only when a populace is on the verge of rebellion and the crimes are seen more as political issues rather than real crimes (pre-revolution example), or when the law runs up against deep seated widely accepted cultural prejudices (civil rights example).

For geeks though, to think that JN would apply in a file sharing case, or one in which a reporter uses the <a> tag to link to private materials other people hacked, or any of the many computer or data related litigation topics we see here, is pure fantasy because 1) we are nowhere close to any sort of open rebellion and if we were, it probably wouldn't have much to do with the digital world; and 2) geeks are far from being wholly accepted as part of the cultural norm, and as much as we've taken ownership of the terms "geek" and "nerd", most non-geek people don't, deep in their heart, see those labels as a badge of honor.

Yes, there are jocks who call themselves "football geeks" but it's all sort of tongue in cheek and they've certainly never experienced the derision most people hold for us just barely bubbling under the surface. And even if it isn't derision, just try talking about something interesting or exciting to a geek, to anyone else, and you get at best a sort of forbearance, like they'll accept your annoying characteristics so they can get help with their computers. In most localities, geeks aren't going to get the whole-hearted undying support of the wider community. We can get toleration, and perhaps be thanked at times (though I think people forget just how much technology does for them), but that's it, and what that means is, jury nullification on geek issues will not happen.

Jury Nullification is how many of the founding fathers got away with violating various tax rules and stuff the Great Britain was trying to enforce ....

That said, JN comes up in just about every time slashdot covers a trial. The chance that any person will be blessed with JN is probably less than winning the Powerball lottery twice in a row. It just doesn't happen.

I tried PCBSD a month ago. Installation was brain dead simple and it played all media files without any effort beyond installing the players. The only issue I had is that it won't deal with LUKS encrypted drives nicely so I installed Mint. Mint also plays all media but the video is choppier whereas on PCBSD it silky smooth. My plan, when I get around to it, is to order another HD and then transition back to PCBSD after some copying. I've just been lazy about it.

And what explains the Democrats' embrace of everything Nixonian?

Having had a long interest in pottery, I've looked at some of the history of pottery in Japan. Interestingly, in the late 1500s, Japan invaded Korea and while they didn't get much territory-wise, they rounded up a lot of potters and forced them give up their knowledge in Japan. Pottery was high technology in those days. Anyway, kidnapping knowledgable workers is a time honored tradition.

The example I reference is usually called the Pottery Wars, rather than "Ceramic Wars" but there's a short synopsis here: The Ceramic Wars: Hideyoshi's Japan Kidnaps Korean Artisans

re-aim the camera at closing time to aim at the door. What's so hard about that?

Came here to suggest this. Besides doing a static image, you can also use it as a motion detector so that at night, if there is a break-in, there's a chance of getting a snapshot of the robbers.

Here's a link: http://www.lavrsen.dk/foswiki/...

This looks interesting: https://medium.com/@Cvrsor/how...

My opinion will be unpopular, but I think RRMartin is just milking it at this point. I've listened to all the books published so far as audiobooks, and my experience was that the first two books were very fun, and then it started to drag out -- more and more characters introduced, the same sort of imagery and conversation patterns repeated, and time just stopped moving altogether. By the last book, I was just bored silly and it was all I could do to trudge through it.

RRMartin got famous, got money, and has been milking it, extending it, trying to make sure it never ever ends. I'm interested enough in how the story turns out, should it be finished, that I will read the wikipedia synopsis of it. But I would never deal with the whole repetitive unabridged bullshit ever again.

NOTE: I've only seen the first season of the TV show, and I liked it a lot. The TV show is quite likely way better than the books because there are some natural constraints in that context. I won't pay for the shows though. I don't want to give RRM anything -- he took a promising interesting story, and is just torturing it now for the money. Fucker.

On the one hand I sympathize with everything you say. On the other hand, so what? Why does everyone need to do something that will keep their name around for the ages -- maybe it's enough that they don't cause active harm. Not every person is going to be a Turing, a Vonnegut, or a Michelangelo making works that will endure for the ages. It isn't possible, and besides, on a long enough time scale, even the great works will mean nothing at all. I don't think it is wrong to say that even the Einsteins of the world, are just monkey-button-pushers -- people like that just push them in more mesmerizing patterns than I can, just like I can push them in more mesmerizing patterns than others can, etc. etc. That doesn't make me any less a MBPer than anyone else. I will admit that I sometimes feel condescending toward lower level MBPers, but if I zoom out to a great distance, the destruction of the solar system or the heat death of the universe for example, the difference between any one person's button-pushing and any other's button-pushing become indistinguishable and utterly irrelevant.

The "my days" thing might be valid. Young people have grown up in a world where surveillance is expected, and thus it doesn't rub them wrong so much older people like myself. To put this in another context, racism for example, I would say that for the most part, generational characteristics don't change, they die with their members. Today, most people would be shocked and outraged to see a drinking fountain with a "Whites Only" sign over it, but in 1950, it would be common. The difference between now and then is that most of the people who saw that as right and proper, are dead now. They didn't learn to live a non-racist life through education or the law -- they kept on being racist until death made them irrelevant. That's good of course.

This can work negatively as well however, and the younger generations, if this study and others like it are true, don't really care about the constitutional privacy protections us fogies do care about. What that suggests, is privacy protections will continue to erode over time as people in my generation (and older) start to die off (I'm Gen X for any pop-demographers who care).

http://elsag.com/mobile.htm

1800 license plates per minute, monitor 4 lanes of traffic at once -- yeah, show me the man in a lawnchair who can do that.

A man in a lawn chair can record hundreds of license plates per second? Are you seriously saying such a ridiculous thing?

As for the differing states, one would at least be able to choose to live in one with good policies.

No, the Constitution is not an enumeration of rights you have left, it _is_ an enumeration of the rights the Feds have:

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.