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Yeah. Like this city is doing.

Technically the continuously overwritten ring buffer seems hardly more difficult to implement.

One big problem would be battery life. There was a fatal police shooting recently which the police officers' cameras apparently did not record. One reason I heard was that they have 3-hour batteries which are supposed to last for a 12-hour shift. At the very least you have to keep a charger and spare battery in the patrol car to make continuous recording work. Better if you could actually make a single battery last the whole time and take away any plausible reason for not having a recording.

Yes, but it's actually illegal for them to review the tests, let alone coerce students to change their answers.

I forget where the article was, but I read recently that fraud is very common - teachers changing answers themselves and such...

Here are some to wet your whistle.

How can you say Davy Jones (http://www.paloaltoonline.com/photos/deadmansches t.jpg) doesn't have a face? The whole point of that effect was that he's covered in CGI and you can still see his eyes and lips conveying the subtleties of emotion that we expect to see from actors. That is the point which I guess you missed entirely.

People have a hardwired emotional reaction to faces. Without showing faces, its hard to convey a character's emotions. Even if the character's face is covered in tentacles, the same still holds.

V (http://joeblade.com/images/sidebars/v-for-vendett a.jpg)is a much more relevant case because his face doesn't change to convey emotion. However, it is still a face with eyes, nose, mouth and lips. It gives people something to attach to. It satisfies that basic part of our brain that needs to see those items in order to form an emotional attachment. And it does more than that - the sly but benign grin on the mask conveys the character's nature as a devilish rogue out to save the world.

The maker of a Halo movie will have a hard time creating a similar emotional attachment without showing the lead character's face. This is especially true if the aliens do have faces. It's psychological and would be very difficult for the writers and would just be too risky for a Hollywood movie. I'm not saying it can't or shouldn't be done. I'm saying it is difficult and risky and those are two things big Hollywood studios avoid like the plague.

I'll give you great odds if you want to lay money that the studios will cater to Halo fanatics by never showing MC's face, vs. catering to everyone else by showing it.

Was anyone else offended/confused that Ars Technica writes an article with Judge James Ware in it yet puts a picture up of Judge Judy?

I'm not an idiot, you know.

It's almost like they're saying, "You don't know what a judge looks like, so we're going to give you the only image you can conceive a judge having."

Why bring NPR into it if the thing that got you was the bush quotes? If NPR was the thing bothering you why bring up the Bush edit as it was not the NPR show? It just comes across to me that you want one to reflect on the other when all it should reflect on is the programming choice of the radio station.

The programming choice of the radio station is exactly my point. Think about it. Other radio stations don't play those same "Bush edits" for listeners to laugh about.

... most collages and non-profits are run, operated, or have boards made up by some of the biggest capitalists I can think of.

This is bullshit. Nearly every single college out there is liberal, tremendously liberal, I'm talking like 90% liberal staff. There, you think Stanford, the #1 business school in the west, would be more conservative? I mean, damn, you are living in an alternate universe if you honestly believe that! Back up these nonsense comments of yours.

"Bought off the Bush DoJ?" You're insane .. Jobs is a huge Democrat. He is a personal friend of Bill Clinton and was an advisor to the Kerry campaign. I seriously doubt he has any grease in the Bush administration whatsoever.

I never read anything about corruption regarding ShotSpotter, nor did I find any mentions in news archives.

The article I found just mentions that there was significant debate in Redwood City before buying the system from Trilon for $85K. "Opponents, however, claim it is a boondoggle and that the money could be better spent elsewhere, such as on hiring more police officers." (SFChronicle, 3/18/97, "Redwood City Endorses Gunshot Locator System")

The National Institute of Justice funded a study of the ShotSpotter system in Redwood City and Dallas.

The December 1999 report can be found on the NIJ website:

http://www.ncjrs.org/pdffiles1/nij/179274.pdf

The report compared Alliant's SECURES system in Dallas to Trilon's ShotSpotter system in Redwood City.

It sounds like they had a lot of fun with this test in RWC:

Of the 31 field trial events, 8 tested the MP5 assault rifle, 13 tested the .38 caliber pistol rounds, and 10 tested the 12 gauge shotgun. The technology annunciated shotgun tests at the highest rate (90 percent), followed by pistol tests (77 percent), and the MP5 assault rifle (63 percent). Overall, the ShotSpotter technology annunciated nearly 80 percent of the test shots (true positives) and failed to annunciate random gunfire events about 20 percent of the time (false negatives).

Dallas chose not to allow the firing of blank rounds on random street corners:

The [Redwood City] police department approved the firing of test blanks under controlled conditions to measure the performance of the technology in June 1997. Similar permissions were not granted during the field test of the SECURES system in Dallas.

If you're wondering why Redwood City would be picked, keep in mind that neighboring East Palo Alto had the highest per capita murder rate in the country after a string of drug murders in 1992. (The homicide rate is lower now.)

The NIJ report page is pretty entertaining reading:

• Duress Systems in Corrections Facilities
• Voice Translators for Law Enforcement
• DNA in "Minor" Crimes Yields Major Benefits in Public Safety
• Drug Detection in Prison Mailrooms
• Test Results for Software Write Block Tools: RCMP HDL V0.7 (really boring)

(BTW, I'm in Mountain View.)

What I got from among the many news reports I read was that, indeed, she got the maximum jail sentence. Her community service, the exact number of hours I forget, was of unusually large duration because of her apparent lack of remorse.

The most damning thing of all was that, after hitting the girls and arriving at school, she asked her boyfriend if he noticed anything amiss with her car. She knew perfectly well what she had done.

Some links: here, and here.

" or by notification to the news media"

What is the malicous attack is the news media?

I agree with you completely, but at the same time, what do you expect? If you want someone competent working on your network, you have to pay them. Cut the budget by $17 million, and devastation will result.

The "Wave" i just learned was a reference to the "third wave", or the third reich.
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