Here in Indiana, you have a few options when it comes to your license plate. Assuming you are driving a car (not a commercial vehicle, truck, motorcycle, RV, or some other vehicle which requires a different plate) you can choose among the plates shown below.
There is no difference in cost between these. By default, the license branch is supposed to offer the simple blue background plate first, and offer the other two as options upon request. If you would prefer, you may pay extra for a plate that benefits the organization of your choice, such as your favorite university, or perhaps Habitat for Humanity, with a portion of the extra fee given to the organization represented on the plate. Further, Indiana permits personalized license plates (PLPs) with some restrictions on what is allowed on the plate. I'm paraphrasing, but the essence of the restrictions are that the common man will not find your combination of seven letters and numbers offensive.
If you live in Indiana, you've probably seen these plates already, and you may remember that the "In God We Trust" plate got some attention when it debuted. The ACLU brought suit against the state, not for the content of the plate, but to contend that it should carry an extra fee. The ACLU lost the case, and the plate continues to be available to anyone who asks for it at no additional charge.
Now, a bit of trivia. Do you consider the phrase "In God We Trust" to be a religious message? If you said no, the Indiana and US courts would agree with you. You see, "In God We Trust" is the official motto of the United States, and as such, is not considered religious speech. Way back in 1782 the phrase E Pluribus Unum ("out of many, one") was chosen as the text to appear on the Great Seal of the United States. This became the de facto motto for our nation, although there was never any action taken to make it official. In 1956, the lack of an official national motto was apparently a major concern, so congress worked on a bill and President Eisenhower signed into law that "In God We Trust" would become our national motto. This wasn't the first use of the phrase in our government, as it had appeared on our coins and bills since the late 1800's.
That effectively kills any religious argument against the "In God We Trust" plate, but what about speech on PLPs? Should I be able to reserve a PLP with the text "LUVSGOD", "BE GODS", or "NO GODS"? That's exactly what Jason Borneman wants to know. Jason, an atheist, applied for a PLP with the text "NO GODS". His application was rejected on the grounds that it might be offensive, and he is pursuing this through an appeal. Some have suggested that a more positive message might have been accepted, such as "GODFREE" rather than the negative statement "NO GODS". What do you think? If a "BE GODS" PLP is allowed, should a "NO GODS" plate be allowed too?
The Hoosier Plate Debate
Selling Out
I like Extra Life Radio, and listen to it as often as I can. Occassionally something comes up in the discussion that gets me thinking, and this week's episode did just that. The host, Scott Johnson, mentioned that one of the things that really irritates him is when he hears folks use the saying "oh, they totally sold out". He mentioned this in response to criticism of the recent Mt. Dew ads featuring a World of Warcraft tie in.
That got me thinking about the phrase. Scott's beef was that it didn't make sense. After all, Blizzard (Activision) is in the gaming industry not to create some love-in for RPG fans, but to make money. If working with Mt. Dew leads to more money, then that's good business.
Is it really though? I do agree that this term "Selling out" gets thrown around rather flippantly, but sometimes, it is spot on. Branding is incredibly important to some companies. Great care must be taken not to dilute that brand or associate the brand with things that do not synergize with the brand. For instance, you probably won't ever see a Rolex tie-in with McDonald's. McDonald's is all about convenience and being inexpensive, while Rolex is about luxury and prestige. If such a combination were to occur, it could be accurately described as "selling out the brand".
I do agree with Scott Johnson that the pairing of WoW with Mt. Dew does not diminish either brand, and thus the "selling out" comment is not relevant. On the other hand, I do believe it is important to listen to your consumer base, and to be cautious about how, where, and when your brand image is used.
When Does a Quarter Cost More than 25¢
I had an interesting experience at lunch yesterday. My coworkers and I often go out for lunch, and often to the same places. It was on one of these trips that I realized a quarter can be worth a lot more than 25¢ given the right circumstances. There were seven of us heading to the restaurant, so we took two cars. After being seated, we ordered drinks: five waters, a coke, and a diet coke. The waitress (we'll call her "Kay"), returned with the drinks and a scowl on her face. She put all seven drinks at the corner of the table, then unceremoniously dropped seven straws in the center of the table. Not a big deal, but usually a waiter/waitress will pass around drinks and straws individually rather than asking the guest to do it. We placed our food orders and waited for it to arrive...
...and waited and waited and waited some more. It was more than 30 minutes before our food arrived. That's killer on a workday lunch. In the meantime, the drinks at the table were getting low and the waitress was not interested in offering refills. In fact, in the entire time that we waited for food, we never saw our Kay.
Once we were all finished and our checks arrived, six people paid by credit card and I paid with cash. My bill was for $7.25 and I put a $10 bill on the table. Kay asked me if I wanted change, and I said yes. She said, "Are you sure you want change?" Ummm, YES! Firstly, service was bad already, and a $2.75 tip on a $7.25 meal would be a nearly 38% tip! This should have been my first clue that Kay wasn't a math wizard.
Kay returned with the receipts for all of the credit cards and pens...and no change for me. I gave her the benefit of the doubt and assumed she just needed to go back for it. Everyone at the table knew I needed change, so they waited....and waited and waited and waited. When it was clear that Kay wasn't going to give me my change, one of my coworkers called her over and I again asked for my change. With a heaving sigh Kay got her change purse out of her pocket and produced two ones and a quarter for me. Hmmm, not the right change for a $7.25 bill. Wanting the situation to be done and to just leave, I left the quarter on the table. I figured the 50¢ she had shorted me with the quarter was still better than a 10% tip, and definitely more than she deserved. We all returned to our cars to leave.
As we were buckling in, we see Kay come tearing out of the restaurant to the other car. We can't hear her, but we see she has a receipt and is talking emphatically with my coworkers in the other car. We assume someone forgot to sign their receipt and leave. When we get back to the office, one of the guys in the other car drops by my office and puts a quarter on my desk. He said Kay ran out to the car to let them know that we "forgot our quarter". The guys tried to explain to her that this was an adequate tip since she had already shorted me, but it wasn't getting through. Apparently she stomped off in a huff.
That was crossing a line for me. I can deal with bad service (I've lived in Maryland, home state of bad service at restaurants). Running out of the restaurant, harassing the wrong person, and being insolent due to your own ignorance is too much. I called the restaurant and let the manager know that, while we enjoyed their food, I needed an assurance that we would never deal with Kay again if we chose to return. The manager was profusely apologetic and assured me that Kay would not bother us again in his restaurant.
So here we have a case of a quarter being worth more than 25¢, it was worth Kay's job. I'm sure Kay probably hasn't learned any kind of lesson here. She's probably hating my guts for being a meany. Still, I do hope that at some point she is able to learn from this experience to know that you really have to pick your battles. When making that decision, make sure you've used good math.
Should Secretly Tracking Vehicles with GPS Require a Warrant?
There is a really interesting case in Wisconsin that got a write-up in the Chicago Tribune. In the case, the judge ruled that the police did not violate the suspect's 4th amendment privacy rights when they acquired a warrant for and placed a GPS tracking device on his vehicle. The defendent in this case was suspected of stalking a woman. The police received a warrant, although there is no law that requires that they do so, in order to place the tracker on the defendent's vehicle. It was retrieved a few weeks later and the data on the tracker used to get a warrant to search his home and vehicle for further evidence of stalking. He was later found guilty.
It's a sticky legal situation. In my opinion, the judge made the right decision in upholding that the use of the GPS device was legal and did not violate the defendent's rights in any way. The judge expanded on the decision to make it clear that, although the police did get a warrant in this situation, there was no law that made that effort necessary. The judge clearly called this out to get attention for the issue (congratulations, it was a resounding success) and for legistlators to consider a law that would require a warrant for such use of GPS. So what do you think? Do you agree with the ACLU that the police must receive a warrant in order to place a GPS tracking device on your vehicle?
The 4th amendment is a slippery devil. It is the amendment that guards against unreasonable search and seizure. The definition of what is unreasonable is pretty subjective though. It is currently codified for telephone tapping as, (paraphrasing) "If you have a reasonable expectation of privacy, the government must seek a warrant". This means that when you use your home phone from your home, you have a reasonable expectation that your conversation is private. As such, the police need a warrant to listen in on that conversation. However, if you are at the mall chatting with your friend, you have no reason to expect that conversation to be private. Anyone present could easily eavesdrop, and so the police are also permitted to eavesdrop in that situation. Applying the same idea to your vehicle, anytime you travel on a public roadway you have no reasonable expectation that the information about your position is private. Police have and exercise the ability to track you, and this is how people get speeding tickets, traffic violations, citations, or pulled over for an outstanding warrant for their arrest. What's more, anything observable from public grounds is also considered to have no expectation of privacy. So if the police stand in the middle of the road and watch you park your car in the garage, the location of your car is public knowledge (until we catch up to Star Trek with transporter tech anyway). The judge applied this reasoning to say that the information on the position of the defendent's vehicle never had a reasonable expectation to privacy. Given this, the judge ruled that placing a GPS tracker on the vehicle was no different than having an officer tail the vehicle at all times, as the position of the vehicle would always be publicly knowable anyway.
The judge was hoping to get a reaction with the inclusion of the note that the warrant the police received in this situation was not required, and boy did he. The ACLU is sounding the alarm that this is a "gateway drug" of sorts for the government which will inevitably lead to every man woman and child wearing a tracking chip from birth to death. I don't believe that, but I do think it is an interesting question as to whether a warrant should be required for all GPS tracking of vehicles. On the one hand, I don't relish the idea of my location (which is tightly coupled to the location of my vehicle) being public knowledge. Even though it would be possible for any interested party to track me day and night, they don't. As such, I have a relative expectation that my whereabouts are unknown to all except for those I give that information to. In fact, it would be a bit of a danger if my location was always public. If you could easily determine that I was, say, out of state, it might present an enticing opportunity for a burglar to break into my home. Worse yes, someone with violence in mind would know when I at home or at work.
On the other hand, I believe that the scenario cited in the case was a just use of surveilance. It was carefully applied (only the suspect was tracked) and it resulted in someone who really was dangerous being apprehended. I also think to another use of GPS that is used in high speed chases. The police fire a "GPS canon" at a vehicle in a high speed chase. The GPS unit sticks to the vehicle, and the police can then drop off the chase and monitor the vehicle remotely, and thus greatly lessen the danger to the general public. High speed chases are very dangerous, and when a criminal is running he is much more likely to drive dangerously when he feels he is being pursued rather than when not. If warrants were required, either the criminal would require pursuing, thus increasing the danger to the public, or he could contend that the use of the GPS tracker was illegal and thus he must be let free. Either scenario is unsavory.
So is a law necessary to govern the use of GPS tracking units by the police? If so, how should the law be framed? No matter which way you think, the fact that our legislators will be debating it means that it is going to cost you some of your taxes, so it is worth being interested in the answer. If no warrant is required, it might lead to greater use of this technology without the careful application shown by the Wisconsin police. If warrants are required it may create an environment more permissive for those with ill intentions for doing harm to others. Personally, I think that in most cases a warrant is probably in order, although special exceptions should be made to permit applying a tracker in chase situations or other intense situations where the use of the device could alleviate an immediate danger to the public. What about you?
HP Mini 1000 Upgrades
Own an HP Mini 1000, or looking to buy one, and want to know what parts can be upgraded? I've been poking around to see what is available for this great little netbook, and here are some of the things I've found.
Memory
The Mini comes with either 512MB or 1GB of memory. This is definitely the easiest part to upgrade. The documentation seems to suggest that 1GB is the max for this device, but mine took a 2GB Kingston DDR2 chip without any complaints.
Hard Drive
The hard drive is a bit trickier. You'll need to take the keyboard off to get access to it. If you have a unit with a SSD, you'll also need to disconnect the recessed third USB port. There is a good demonstration of how to do all of this here: http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009/01/runcore-18-inch-ssd-on-hp-mini-1000.html
HP Mini Drive
If you purchased with the SSD option, you probably received a 2GB "HP Mini Drive". This is actually just a Transcend JetFlash T3 with a small plastic piece to help it blend nicely with the body of the netbook. You could either order a larger unit from HP, or you could get an original Transcend unit. As of this writing HP is selling the 4GB for $24.99, while transcend has the same unit priced at $17.60. Transcend also offers an 8GB drive for $32.30, which HP does not currently offer.
WWAN
There has been a lot of chatter lately about cellular carriers offering discounted netbooks on a 2-year data contract. The HP Mini 1000 is poised to be a part of that offering. If you ordered yours with the WWAN card built in, you are already set. If not, you can still add one later. This video from jkkmobile demonstrates how to add a WWAN module to your netbook. Again, this involves taking off the keyboard and doing some pretty serious tinkering, so it isn't recommended for the faint of heart.
Battery
The stock 3-cell battery will net you anywhere from 1 to 3 of continuous use, depending on your power settings and what you are doing. HP now offers a 6-cell replacement battery, available for order here.
External VGA
This one is a stickler. That funky connector on the left of the unit is where you plug in a propietary VGA adapter cable. Unfortunately, these are both in short supply and full of issues. Users who have the cable are reporting that it refuses to output anything but 1024x768 regardless of what display is attached. This is bad news for anyone hoping to connect to a projector.
I love my netbook and I am getting a lot of great use from it. It is running Windows 7 RC1 like a champ, and I'm even able to do a little development in Visual Studio on it. So far I have only upgraded the memory, but I'm tempted to upgrade the Transcend flash drive. I'm holding off on a SSD upgrade until prices come down, but it is tempting as I currently only have about 1.5GB of free space on the main drive. Even with a relatively "stock" configuration, I find this unit to be a very nice, performant, and portable computing platform.
Netbook, Windows 7, and Ubuntu Netbook Remix
A couple of weeks ago I picked up a HP Mini 1000 netbook. I had a couple of intentions for this netbook. Firstly, I wanted to use it for any personal network use wherever I went. Rather than using my work PC for checking account balances, personal e-mail, and other non-work related network uses, I would use the netbook instead. Second, I wanted a portable machine that I could do some light development on. Nothing complicated mind you, but just the ability to open up a small project, hack some code, and check that it compiles.
After playing around with the netbook for a while, I can safely say that I am very happy with the decision to purchase it. Netbooks are the latest consumer trend in computing, and there are a lot of models out there. You'll find that they are all very, very similar. The typical unit has two or three USB ports, a 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor, 512MB or 1GB or RAM, and a small solid state hard drive, or possibly a traditional magnetic drive. Most come bundled with a simplified Linux operating system, or Windows XP for a slight price premium. With so many vendors and so little to differentiate them it can be difficult to settle on one. I chose the HP model mostly because the keyboard felt the most comfortable to type on. Otherwise, there isn't much to differentiate it from the other $350 10" netbooks on the market.
I made some modifications to my netbook before even powering it on. First, I upgraded the RAM to 2GB, which only cost $20. Next, rather than use the provided Windows XP operating system I decided to load the beta of Windows 7 (with some help from my colleague Mike Hall who had done the exact same thing to his own netbook). I loaded Visual Studio 2008, Google Chrome, and a handful of utilities that I like. After install my 16GB SSD has about 1.5GB of remaining free space. I put all of my code on the provided 2GB "HP Mini Drive", and I still have two USB ports and an SD Card slot to expand memory further, if necessary.
I'm very happy with Windows 7. Even on the relatively weak processing power of the netbook it runs like a champ. I definitely like it as a replacement for Windows XP. Visual Studio runs well, if a bit sluggishly, and I am able to compile projects as I had hoped.
Still, this beta is eventually going to run out, and at that time I need to make a decision between paying for a license for Windows 7 (if it is available) or selecting some other operating system. I could always revert to Windows XP, which came with the unit, at no cost. Or I could try one of the linux variants on the market, also at no or little cost. A friend of mine tipped me off to the Netbook Remix of Ubuntu. Version 9.04 of the Linux OS just released, so I decided to download it and give it a try. One of the nice features of this release is that you can try it by loading it on a USB stick as a "live" OS, which means you can run it without wiping out the OS already on the machine.
After playing with the netbook remix for a bit, I was impressed. I'm not ready to swap out my Win7 install, but when the beta expires it will definitely be something I consider. With MonoDevelop 2.0 and the Mono framework running I could probably still do some light C# work. One feature of the OS that I really liked was how UI works to maximize screen real estate for the foreground application. One of my frustrations with running Chrome (or any other browser) on Windows 7 is how much of my precious screen is taken up by title bars, menu bars, toolbars, bookmark bars, status bars, and task bars. With limited vertical space, it leaves only just enough room for my active application. This is exacerbated by sites like Google Reader that have a static header that cannot be minimized.
In summary, I'm very happy with the utility I am getting out of my netbook, and I think Windows 7 is a solid OS choice for the platform. I'm impressed by what I see in Ubuntu Netbook Remix as well, and I may give it a try when my beta license expires.
Correlation vs. Causation
News media only makes money if your eyes are on their media. As such, it is in the best interest of the news outlet to sensationalize their story in order to get the most eyes. This can be tricky though, especially when it comes to blurring the line between causation and correlation.
Correlation and causation are both important terms in statistics, and it is easy to get them confused. The difference is important though. Correlation means that there is a statistically significant relationship between to observable phenomenon. For instance, you may find that if you go to bed with your socks on, you have nightmares. There is certainly a correlation between wearing socks and having nightmares, but are the socks actually causing the nightmares? Possibly, but not definitely. Once it can be found that wearing socks definitely causes nightmares, then you have causation. Correlation doesn't automatically imply causation, it doesn't rule it out either.
This topic came to mind because I see articles in the news quite often that take statistical correlation as an opportunity to imply causation. For instance, the recent Craiglist killer was said to have a problem with gambling and to be in debt. There might be a correlation here...do more killers have problems with gambling and debt? Potentially. But do gambling and carrying debt cause you to become a killer? Probably not.
Wikipedia has more extensive article on the topic that you can read here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation It's a little dry, but I found it pretty interesting.