I guess I may have misunderstood, but I thought this was an office. Don't architects and designers design to a functional spec? If I hired Frank Lloyd Wright to design a garage for me, it darn well better hold cars. I don't care what your designer thinks, if he is designing an office, it has to be a functional office first, and a showcase for his skills second. If he has to jump through hoops to make it both, those are his hoops, not yours. Anytime a designer expects a functional change to make his design easier it demonstrates two things:
1- He misunderstands his position in the scheme of things
2- He is not a good imaginative designer, who would make a way to either hide the cabling or make the cabling aesthetically pleasing and harmonize with the rest of his design.

If the Bobs at your place of employment actually weigh design and function equally they are equally wrong. You can have functioning ugliness or your can have functioning attractiveness, or you have dysfunction, one of those does damage to the future outlook of your company.

Bah! I feel scrooginess coming on.

In fighting these overreaches in the courts, would it be possible for a party whose legally owned video was "accidentally" taken down by someone like Warner Bros. to bring a suit for libel? Warner Bros. or some computer they have empowered to act for them has made a false claim that they (the legal video poster) committed a crime.

If I were to tell the grocery store down the street in writing that my neighbor Joe stole bubblegum, and the store took action against Joe, based on my known false statement; Joe could sue me for libel with a good prospect of success.

Is this case much different? Even if the DMCA says that someone can claim works they don't own, it doesn't it definitely does not say they can testify in a legal document that someone broke the law without the accused having recourse in the courts.

I would love to see them held in contempt and found guilt of perjury, but it appears that isn't going to happen. However when actual damages have occurred such as loss of YoutTube accounts or damage to reputation it seems to me that someone should at least talk to a lawyer about the possibility of a libel suit.

It would really be fun to see a class action libel suit brought by a group of victims of false take downs.

When I look at my friends phones I don't think they do uninstall apps, screen after screen of unused little icons that do marvelous things that no one remembers.
I think they just install stuff until they think their phone is too slow, then upgrade and start over.

Wibbly Wobbly Timey Wimey... Stuff

hmm, do you live in a city? I have seen dogs bite a porcupine, in fact the same dog multiple porcupines, and our porcupines have barbed quills, unlike your friendly little hedgehogs. I don't think that was a very apt simile, even though the dog does whimper and yowl a lot while you pull the quills out of their nose with a pliers.

On the actual point of your post, exactly what pointy fur am I gonna grow? Exactly how does my using GPG do actual damage to the government dogs when they do bite me? The principle behind a hedgehog's defence is that it hurts the offender, how do I do that to the government? Are you advocating some kind of militant response?

The fact is that when we have to preemptively encrypt all our personal email because we know it is being intercepted, as opposed to sometimes encrypting sensitive emails in case it gets misdirected, then the mental/emotional damage PJ is talking about in TFA has already occurred. We have already been deprived of the concept of personal privacy, we are already in Auschwitz with Primo Levi.

Whether the government actually is intercepting all our email or not no longer matters. It is no longer just the preppers and the tinfoil hat types that see the NSA behind every door, it is now a significant percentage of the unwashed masses.

At this point what intelligent person would actually believe the government if the were to come clean, admit what they had done in the past and give us transparent oversight into what they are doing now?
Based on history most of us would immediately assume there is yet another three letter acronym behind the NSA, with even quieter black helicopters, that has been pulling the strings all along, and will continue to do so unseen by us.

It is much like what Asimov did with his foundation series after the first three, there is always a darker more hidden organization behind the ones we uncover, and they are always better manipulators than the ones before. We are just discovering psychohistory, but in reality a hidden group has been steering all of human civilization for thousands of years, and yeah, they are robots.

This rant went a little over the top, but I am thinking of all the stuff I did as a kid that my children will never be able to do, and it pisses me off.

Yeah, I looked at those troughs and crests and said
"Wait, that isn't wifi, I don't see any Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing there, he must have accidentally visualized the NSA scanner waves protecting Washington DC from any stray intelligence"

And then I realized the NSA scanner waves must really work.

I have encountered 2 of these devices in my life. The first one I was a teenager, and still smart enough to realize the only way to make it safe was to immediately cut both ends from the cord.

If you are into that kind of excitement we could probably make you a phone charger that involved metal contacts on your shoes and a walk on the third rail....

By the way, there are actually recessed male receptacles, designed specifically to use a normal (or sometimes twist-lock) extension cord, they are seen on the side of most campers and motorhomes, and on the side of my kids playhouse. Makes it easy to make the playhouse electrically safe, just put the extension cord away.

They even come in rain resistant outdoor styles, or, if you want to drop a buncha money, in actual water proof styles.

Electrical safety really isn't all that hard, but you do have to avoid being an idiot.

If you want GFCI for your couch, or anything for that matter, go to your local building supply store (the one contractors use, not the one with blister packed picture hanging kits) and buy a 1 foot GFCI interrupter cord, they are required on construction sites in my area, just plug it between your couch and the wall.

"In any case, the representative is full of shit. When I'm walking my kid to school, and we get to the door, I can smell the exhaust of the dozens of cars sitting there. It does not smell like that from an equal number of people breathing."

I am pretty sure it isn't the CO2 you are smelling from those cars.

I am also pretty sure that CO2, even in concentrations that will heat the globe and drown us all in rising seas before it cooks the flesh off our bones in broiling deserts does not present an immediate health risk to individual humans.

However the stuff you do smell in those car exhausts does present a real immediate health risk for the people who breathe it, and a cyclist doesn't emit any of those chemicals no matter how hard he pedals.

It is starting to annoy me that the global warming hysteria (I am not a denier, global warming does appear to be a real, already occurring problem) has made all other pollution issues invisible. Yes, global warming will cause suffering, probably even in my lifetime, but the toxins we emit by burning fossil fuels have been causing individual suffering for generations. After all, CO2 is not directly toxic. Many of the other compounds released by burning fossil fuels are direct primary toxins, even in small PPM concentrations.

This article was really a very subtle commentary on the misuse of the word "hack", using a parody of creative reuse of household objects to point out that common sense doesn't require any special qualifications.

I am afraid that it is too subtle for most people to understand, especially those who normally use the stuff they own to accomplish what they want to do, as opposed to those who use the things they own strictly for the use pictured on the box.

Oh, also, don't most geeks have a camera tripod around somewhere? Wouldn't that have saved the ridiculous expense on the milk crates and the emotional stress of the ugly bookshelf?

I have not only seen cat3 in the wild, I still know of a dorm that is pre-cat3, uncategorized phone cable. It is a very loosely twisted air cable, and it is punched through standard 66 blocks, sharing cables with analog voice. Sometimes to get a room the 2 pair needed a single pair is stolen from 2 other rooms.

And for you cable monkeys out there, there are spots in that building with cables carrying ethernet on cables spliced with UYs

  Yep, it does work, and will even connect at 100M most of the time.

It is the last dorm on campus that isn't at least Cat5e, with several that are Cat6a now. It is becoming less of a problem, since almost all students are coming equipped with laptops, and 802.11n wireless is much more convenient. There are probably a few runs in that building still nailed down at 10half, because those runs were flaky enough that the NIC would negotiate to 100M and then error 99 percent of the packets.

I still have a box of single sided 3.5 floppies, on which the shutter latches open, and has to be manually released. Got the drive they fit also, it hooks to an HP portable via a current loop connection, along with a thinkjet printer. Haven't fired it up in a few years, but it predates all the flaky Chinese capacitors, so it should be good to go, barring decomposed drive belts and rollers.

The problem I see here is they say you aren't free to do whatever you want in your own home. For a municipality to not hire you or worse, fire you, for doing something legal on your own time in your own house seems to fly in the face of the spirit of equal opportunity law, even if it doesn't break the letter.

    I have no problem with a private company making whatever rules it wants, hire just women, or no women, or no blacks, or only people that own cats, whatever, but when a government does it that is contrary to my view of what liberty actually means.

    I notice in TFA that this is a policy enacted by commissioners, not a law which would have to be passed by a legislative body. I would imagine that it would be much more difficult to pass a law, and I have a feeling that it won't take too many years for policies like this to start falling in court. As the article mentions, the list of legal but potentially hazardous activities is fairly extensive.

Somewhere in my collection of stuff I have a box of SGI knobs, and I think some buttons as well. SGI made them as serial devices to hook to their workstations, probably in the Indigo days, maybe as recently as Indigo 2.

I think these days you would look either to the music world or the arcade cabinet builders if you were looking for something that would give tactile input and didn't require a lot of hardware hacking.

They might also be blue, or orange, or maybe frictionless black on black. Who actually thinks we have enough data to populate a computer model to make this wild conjecture? For Pete's sake, we can't even model Earth well enough to predict vague global temperature trends, how in the world can we have a valid model of an theoretical ecosystem that might or might not exist somewhere in the universe, which might or might not have life systems that use the energy from starlight to feed chemical reactions to store and use energy???? Can we please start using dewey decimal to categorize these stories so we know which ones are fiction without bothering to read TFA?

I guess I was referring to a transmission system, not a single long distance link. In a transmission system which includes the voltage reduction mechanism at the various tap-in points the fact that you can use simple transformers adds significant simplicity and reliability to the system, which actually matters as much if not more than the actual transmission losses in the wire. In fact, I understand that resistance losses in the wire are a good thing in climates that have icing problems in winter, since the HV lines are self heating. In fact, in the wikipedia article you mentioned it appears the only place HVDC has real transmission advantage over AC is in constrained wire cables, such as undersea links, where capacitance kills the AC. The phase decoupling when using a DC link between AC grids would also be extremely beneficial, but for other uses the inherent difficulties of switching and converting high power DC lines seem to outweigh the benefits