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.

No, the reason we can't have nice things is because of overlord over-reaction. Don't be such a submissive putz.

Get off it -- that search warrant was based on a reporter posting a link to data. The underlying issue is that he is being punished for engaging in 1st Amendment activity, the ultimate basis for his punishment doesn't matter to the Feds.

Think of it this way: say you decided to install Chrome on your computer, so you download it from the official location and install it. Then a warrant is issued so the cops can examine your laptop to figure out if you installed Chrome. You're thinking "WTF?" that's not a crime and so you give them some lip. Now you're fucked. They hated you because of some random reason, but now they get to punish you -- that it is for some random reason doesn't matter. That's what happened here -- the Feds were out to get him and they got him.

He isn't even a hacker -- he's a reporter FFS. He's going down for reporting stuff the powers that be didn't want reported, the actual crime he is being punished under is just a technicality.

This is /. not People Magazine. It is sort of reasonable to think the usual readership would be familiar with Barrett Brown. Of course there's always wikipedia. Let me tell you how to get there. Go to the Start button and press on the blue "E" icon. That will get you the internets ....

10.5 decades to be exact.

Barrett Brown Faces 105 Years in Jail: But no one can figure out what law he broke. Introducing America's least likely political prisoner

And just so it is clear what level of morality exists among Federal prosecutors, consider this "game" which certainly gets applied in real life:

At the federal prosecutor's office in the Southern District of New York, the staff, over beer and pretzels, used to play a darkly humorous game. Junior and senior prosecutors would sit around, and someone would name a random celebrity -- say, Mother Theresa or John Lennon.

It would then be up to the junior prosecutors to figure out a plausible crime for which to indict him or her. The crimes were not usually rape, murder, or other crimes you'd see on Law & Order but rather the incredibly broad yet obscure crimes that populate the U.S. Code like a kind of jurisprudential minefield: Crimes like "false statements" (a felony, up to five years), "obstructing the mails" (five years), or "false pretenses on the high seas" (also five years). The trick and the skill lay in finding the more obscure offenses that fit the character of the celebrity and carried the toughest sentences. The, result, however, was inevitable: "prison time."

http://www.slate.com/articles/...