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We can always hope that some telco bigwig in California gets caught up in a wildfire that could have been prevented if they hadn't throttled EMS wireless connections.

Probably won't happen. Besides, it's more about what happens as a result of PG&E not doing the obviously necessary tree work they've been putting off because they get bigger executive bonuses if they don't spend the money meeting their basic obligations. They got a monopoly on the right-of-way for power lines, and they were supposed to maintain that right-of-way to prevent fires, but that's not what happened. (Cal Fire has not yet released a statement on whether the current fires were started by PG&E's negligence, but it's usually a safe way to bet.)

Don't need islam for that.

Every time a some one kills their kid because they might be gay, that's an honor killing.
Every time a husband kills his wife because he thinks she cheated on him, that's an honor killing.

It has been well established for many years now that both learning and using "cursive" writing (I know it as "joined" writing) is important for the development of young brains.

For example: http://davidsortino.blogs.pres...

This is irresponsible marketing, and with continuing cuts in education, stands a very good chance of not being challenged by educators before politicians base policy on it.

Amazingly, it could be that the FDA actually listened to the howls of protest (not to mention the poor cattle: did no one consider the cattle?)

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/a...

"The Food and Drug Administration will redraft proposed rules for the use of brewery waste as animal feed after both brewers and farmers complained the plan would impose a burden on the centuries-old practice."

Someone forgot to tell our local police.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20130515/multimedia/130519717?fb_comment_id=fbc_129888690541168_74256_129895867207117#f3ccf9d275a20d

Google probably puts more effort into publicizing their tiny Kansas City gigabit Internet project than actually doing it. Sonic.net, on the other hand, is quietly deploying gigabit fiber to the home in Northern California. Sonic says it costs them about $500 per house they pass to install fiber; if they sell to 1 in 3 houses, which is what they're getting, it's $1500 per house. Sonic charges $70 per month for a gigabit connection. It's only available in a few places, though - Sebastapol, CA and parts of the Sunset District in San Francisco. Elsewhere, they offer 20Mb/s down for $40/month, over lines leased from AT&T.

Sonic has no data caps. Their CEO says that their upstream bandwidth is not a significant cost, and they don't need to throttle their users.

Gigabit fiber to the home is quietly being deployed by Sonic.net in Sebastpol, CA. It costs them about $1500 per drop, but they gain back the $20 per month they were previously paying to AT&T for access to copper. Customers pay $70/month for 1Gb/s Internet connections. 20Mb/s for $40. Sonic makes money on this, and is slowly expanding the service.

The big players in cable hate Sonic, one of the last of the independent ISPs. Network neutral, EFF-endorsed privacy policies, no caching or "deep packet inspection". Just bits.

Sonic isn't in the TV business. (They do resell DirecTV if you want that, but that comes in via a dish, not the Internet connection.) So they don't have any bias towards sending their own content.

South Korea has a special circumstance: (According to a marketing guy at a router company where I worked) About 95% of their population lives in giant apartment buildings - large enough that they have telephone central offices in their basements.

So, any area where people live or work in giant buildings should have great Internet? Then why is the availability of good broadband in Lower Manhattan so poor?

The urban density excuse is ridiculous. It doesn't explain why sub-sub-suburban Sebastopol, CA has FIOS. The explanation is an independent ISP that somehow hasn't gotten screwed over by the legacy carriers and media conglomerates.

Telecom in the U.S. just does not have enough competition. If there's enough competition, problems like population density get solved. If there isn't, everybody just coasts along, gouges the customer, and provides shoddy service. Why should they bother not to?

How would you US citizens feel if you were on the receiving end of Predator drones, cyber attacks and Shock and Awe?

As opposed to having our homes invaded by men with assault rifles, who shoot our dogs and kill, injure, and terrorize innocent people? I think you need to take another look at what is happening in the United States.

Exactly. There was a disturbing case in my backwater suburb recently that illustrates it... Police had a warrant for a 20-year-old murder suspect's arrest, knew where he lived (with his parents & teen brother) & worked, and he had been in court a week earlier. So without contacting *our* police, 40-50 heavily armed Homeland Security agents burst into the family's home at 4:20 AM yelling and lobbing flash grenades & tear gas through the windows. When the guy and his 57-year-old father crawled out from the hallway armed because they thought it was armed intruders, the agents reacted with a "hail of gunfire" that penetrated internal & external house walls and evidently shot 3 of their own men. (If anyone was wondering whether they can protect themselves from the government by owning guns, there's your answer.)

The photo gallery in the local paper shows the agents, weapons, military truck brought in on a tractor-trailer, damage to the house, etc.

Also unsurprisingly, the agents went after the family's pet boxers:

One of the family's two dogs [Sadie] was shot and killed. The other [Tyson] had bolted and escaped, though an agent chased it with a gun, [the 57-year-old father] said...moved to tears by the memory, said he begged the agents, “Don't kill my dogs!”

From what I've read, it was similar to the incident where agents killed an extremely old arthritic labrador -- the 20-year-old used to exercise Tyson on a leash by riding his bike around the neighborhood after work, and a teen neighbor that talked with him about the dogs a few times implied they were friendly in another interview.

Anyone wondering why we don't rebel: one columnist wrote about the reaction he got to a column/post merely questioning the raid. Given this is a liberal region, non-Americans might see why we're kind of fucked...

Sonic.net sounds like a cool company - and they've been chosen as a Google partner for the FTTH experiment

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20101213/BUSINESS/12131005?p=all&tc=pgall

I'm not suggesting that "anonymous" was responsible, only that an attack using similar software could cause lines to burst. The national NBC reporting that just aired Saturday February 12th failed to mention ANY of the issues that were raised locally.

The welds were of variable quality and of course pressure-induced failure will be at weak spots. Report say there were multiple failures at once. I've been unable to find any explanation as to why the pressure shot up right before the explosion.

The line was a 30" major distribution line about 50 years old run at pressures of up to 400 p.s.i.

P.G. & E. didn't even for sure know what kind of pipe they had, which calls into question whether they even knew how much pressure it could safely handle. Their records are incomplete and some were wrong. They claim to have no records of numerous calls from people reporting smelling gas as far back as two months before the explosion. They've switched their public statements around. It took them about two hours to even get people to a valve to cut off the gas. They had reported that a malfunction caused a pressure spike but later backtracked trying to claim that running the pressure up to the normal limit two years earlier somehow weakened the line. The period in question was summer/fall. If line pressures had to be elevated to overcome demand-related pressure loss in downstream lines that would have been during winter. (more likely to be an issue with the explosions in the eastern U.S.). The utility neglected to install and use any automatic shutoff equipment.

There are clearly problems with the utility company procedures, but it's that recanted malfunction causing pressure spike part that would be consistent with an attack via software.

There were a number of reports by California media regarding what happened. Some pulled offline later.
There are videos on YouTube with various local residents commenting on what happened.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pHP2Kpjo9OgJ:articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-09/news/27020428_1_gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast+gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-11/news/27022021_1_pg-e-gas-line-spike

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816

http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-tv-pgesanbrunopipe,0,4690306.story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3z9VRqxOtE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Uza3-EDRc

The worm is not limited to what's in use in Iran. The people in the field that use Windows systems to spit out the code actually used by the control systems generally don't have the knowledge to disassemble the code and spot problems that aren't immediately apparent (like periodic instability or a timed attack). Given that things like pumping stations aren't set up often, expect that most use outside contractors.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9185419/Siemens_Stuxnet_worm_hit_industrial_systems

The national reporting simply blaming the incident on welds was misleading. At least region

I'm not suggesting that "anonymous" was responsible, only that an attack using similar software could cause lines to burst. The national NBC reporting that just aired Saturday February 12th failed to mention ANY of the issues that were raised locally.

The welds were of variable quality and of course pressure-induced failure will be at weak spots. Report say there were multiple failures at once. I've been unable to find any explanation as to why the pressure shot up right before the explosion.

The line was a 30" major distribution line about 50 years old run at pressures of up to 400 p.s.i.

P.G. & E. didn't even for sure know what kind of pipe they had, which calls into question whether they even knew how much pressure it could safely handle. Their records are incomplete and some were wrong. They claim to have no records of numerous calls from people reporting smelling gas as far back as two months before the explosion. They've switched their public statements around. It took them about two hours to even get people to a valve to cut off the gas. They had reported that a malfunction caused a pressure spike but later backtracked trying to claim that running the pressure up to the normal limit two years earlier somehow weakened the line. The period in question was summer/fall. If line pressures had to be elevated to overcome demand-related pressure loss in downstream lines that would have been during winter. (more likely to be an issue with the explosions in the eastern U.S.). The utility neglected to install and use any automatic shutoff equipment.

There are clearly problems with the utility company procedures, but it's that recanted malfunction causing pressure spike part that would be consistent with an attack via software.

There were a number of reports by California media regarding what happened. Some pulled offline later.
There are videos on YouTube with various local residents commenting on what happened.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:pHP2Kpjo9OgJ:articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-09/news/27020428_1_gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast+gas-pipeline-pg-e-fatal-blast&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-01-11/news/27022021_1_pg-e-gas-line-spike

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20110122/WIRE/110129816

http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-tv-pgesanbrunopipe,0,4690306.story

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3z9VRqxOtE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6Uza3-EDRc

The worm is not limited to what's in use in Iran. The people in the field that use Windows systems to spit out the code actually used by the control systems generally don't have the knowledge to disassemble the code and spot problems that aren't immediately apparent (like periodic instability or a timed attack). Given that things like pumping stations aren't set up often, expect that most use outside contractors.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9185419/Siemens_Stuxnet_worm_hit_industrial_systems

The national reporting simply blaming the incident on welds was misleading. At least region

been there, done that.

$50k fine for the coach and the team - Broncos/Niners London 2010
http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20101127/sports/101129637

Half a MILLION fine for the coach, quarter mil for the team plus loss of first round draft pick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_National_Football_League_videotaping_controversy

My problem with the cameras is they are a guilty until proven innocent item. Fighting bad tickets is simply not something I like to do on my days off or worse during my work. I've had two moving violations in my life. One was a bad speed radar ticket. It's not like I am the guy collecting tons of tickets. It won't take many automated screwups to get me to the point of endangering the operators of the highway bandits, especially when they are wrong or corrupt.

url:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/7043325/Driver-parked-in-front-of-speed-camera-gets-tickets.html>

Several people fought an automated ticket with the GPS records. Radar said ticket. GPS with a base accuracy of 0.1mph said innocent. The proven false positives are way too common. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-20001248-38.html http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20080712/NEWS/807120355 http://www.phillyburbs.com/news/local/courier_times/courier_times_news_details/article/28/2009/november/10/pa-man-using-gps-to-fight-speeding-ticket.html I carry a GPS and record the track as a regular activity if I have to drive through some parts of town. Most non technical people are unable to use this defense. In some cases, the court has rejected the evidence as they know too little about it. Can you say unfair trial?

One of our radio personalities got a red light camera ticket last winter during an ice storm. He literally slid through the intersection.

Due to these issues, I am simply marking red light cameras and frequent speed radar spots on my GPS as closed roads and use alternatives instead. I plan my routes to avoid them. Businesses in the area may suffer as a result. I don't know the business impact overall, but I avoid the areas.

Wondering where you got average speed from ?

Average speed is easily calculated, based on the statement from this article:

"It recorded Malone sitting at a stoplight at Frates Road and 30 seconds later going 45 mph 2,040 feet farther down the road,"

That would be 2040 ft / 30 sec === 0.386 mi / 0.0833 hr = 46.4 MPH

Except the article doesn't provide that distance of 2040 feet. So, where are you getting that number from? Not to mention it also doesn't say where he was when the second ping came in. I agree, though, not enough precise data to make a decision on,

after reading this I don't care how fast the kid was going:
"$194 speeding ticket has cost Petaluma $15,000, and counting."

15 grand? How many more tickets do they have to write to make up for that 15 grand wasted? Way to go idiots.

"“We can’t back away from a ticket we feel is justified and necessary for traffic safety due to the cost of appeals and prosecuting it,” he (Police Lt. Mike Cook) said."

Um, yes you can. Tell me something Lt Cook, if someone cheated you out of $200 would you spend $15,000 trying to get it back?

Wondering where you got average speed from ?

Average speed is easily calculated, based on the statement from this article:

"It recorded Malone sitting at a stoplight at Frates Road and 30 seconds later going 45 mph 2,040 feet farther down the road,"

That would be 2040 ft / 30 sec === 0.386 mi / 0.0833 hr = 46.4 MPH

I personally think this article does not have enough info to make any meaningful decisions from.

No, but it does provide "related links" to other articles which do provide sufficient detail. He started at 0 MPH, ended at 45 MPH, and averaged 46.4 MPH. That can't be done without exceeding the speed limit of 45 MPH.

If the average speed is 45 mph, and he was stopped at the end (ie speed 0), then at some point he was going above 45. Especially since you can't stop instantaneously. This is like calculus you learn in High School... If the Judge ruled the other way, the future of America would be even in deeper sh*t than it already is.

Wondering where you got average speed from ?

If you had followed the first link http://tech.slashdot.org/story/08/07/18/0318228/GPS-Tracking-Device-Beats-Radar-Gun-in-Court (a bit of effort I know 2 clicks with the mouse) you would have come to the article
http://hothardware.com/News/Speeding_Radar_Gun_vs_GPS/
with the quote :-

..... Rocky Mountain Tracking device was "very" accurate, to within a couple of meters on location and to within 1 mph on speed. Dr. Heppe also pointed out that the GPS device released instantaneous data, and not data averaged over a distance.

I personally think this article ( http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20091104/ARTICLES/911049901/1334/NEWS?tc=autorefresh) does not have enough info to make any meaningful decisions from.

Since the article didn't give enough information (and manages to misspell one of the street names), I googled around and figured out the path taken (from http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20071002/NEWS/710020308?Title=Case-pits-police-radar-against-GPS-in-teen-s-car#): http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&gl=us&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=105238595049957684644.000477c5e46e20fe9dff3&ll=38.2325,-122.591393&spn=0.010956,0.010257&z=16

The first point is when he was stopped at the intersection, the middle is (probably) where the cop got him on radar, and the end is where the GPS clocked him at 45 MPH.

I estimate that's about 2.2k feet from a dead stop in 30 seconds, which puts his average speed at 50. It's pretty much a given he was speeding when the cop radar'd him and he put on the braked.

Seconded. Furthermore, even if the GPS averaged on a much smaller interval, quoting http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20081206/NEWS/812060371/1334/NEWS:
"The distance between the radar reading and when he was recorded going 45 mph is great enough that Malone could have easily slowed down, Heppe testified."
Game over son, you lost.

The ES 350 and most other modern vehicles are equipped with power-assisted brakes, which operate by drawing vacuum power from the engine. But when an engine opens to full throttle, the vacuum drops, and after one or two pumps of the brake pedal the power assist feature disappears.

As a result, a driver would have to apply enormous pressure to the brake pedal to stop the car, and if the throttle was wide open might not be able to stop it at all, safety experts say.

"I don't think you can stop a car going 120 mph and an engine at full throttle without power assist," said Ditlow, the safety center director.

"There's a standard where you have to be able to stop the car without power-assisted brakes, but obviously I don't think it includes situations where the throttle is wide open," he added.

Drivers in other crashes also found it difficult to rein in a runaway Toyota. Guadalupe Gomez of Redwood City said he was held hostage for 20 miles on a Bay Area freeway by a 2007 Camry traveling more than 100 mph.

Gomez was unable to turn off the engine or shift into neutral and then burned out his brakes before slamming into another car and killing that driver, said attorney Louis Franecke, who represented that victim's family.

It's airtight all right, but for the prosecution. This article reports:

[The GPS device] recorded Malone sitting at a stoplight at Frates Road and 30 seconds later going 45 mph 2,040 feet farther down the road, according to Heppe. In between, Petaluma Officer Steve Johnson reportedly caught Malone on radar going 62 mph. The distance between the radar reading and when he was recorded going 45 mph is great enough that Malone could have easily slowed down, Heppe testified.

Correct. The average velocity between points A and B is (2040 feet) / (30 s) = 46.4 mph. There is some dispute over the distance, which changes things by a few percent at most. The wee bit over 45 isn't the issue. The device recorded an instantaneous velocity of 0 at point A and 45 mph at point B. Obviously, if the terminal velocity is about the same as the average, yet the start was zero, there must have been some distance traveled at above average velocity, and 62 mph sounds just about right to balance the acceleration phase.

The police is right.

You can't have "civil disobedience" against a business model, only against law. And surreptitiously downloading the latest pop-idol's album isn't civil disobedience against copyright law. THIS is civil disobedience against copyright law; the important parts being that the act, and the actors name, have been announced to the authorities, and that he wants them to take him to court over it. Can you say the same?

Depending upon how the GPS is implemented it could be pretty misleading about the velocity. Heck, if it averages a sample every minute, you could easily scream above the speed limit, then slow down or sit at a stop light for a moment, and the average between the two sample points would still look "below the speed limit". Radar is practically instantaneous by comparison. It isn't perfect either, but I don't get the expert's comments from the article: "Dr. Heppe also pointed out that the GPS device released instantaneous data, and not data averaged over a distance.""

Are these military grade GPS units or something? Every GPS unit I've ever used samples at a relatively coarse time sampling, and the "instantaneous" velocity is all over the place as you slow down and/or change directions. The software attempts to interpolate something reasonable, but it sometimes isn't. Sample spacing is usually user-configurable with a tradeoff between the number of points stored and the limited memory storage of the unit. Regardless, the information *has* to be averaged over a significant distance or it isn't very accurate given the limited spatial resolution of a few metres.

I did some searching and based on the name of the GPS unit illustrated in the article I found another more detailed article cited on the vendor's page. On that page you'll see a proud stepdad showing the map with GPS data apparently used in court (click on the image -- it gets bigger). The points illustrated on that map are city blocks apart.

The map is detailed enough to figure out exactly where it is if you poke around in Google Maps near the places mentioned such as the Lakeville Highway. Apparently the traffic incident occurred along Lakeville Highway (116), on the southeast side of Petaluma, California. With that comparison it's possible to figure out the scale, and determine that there's 500-600m or more between the sample points close to the one that's circled in red (presumably the key one, and the street names match).

Half a kilometre sampling is more accurate than radar??? And the article mentions 30-second time sampling. Give me a break! It's relevant, but I don't see why the GPS results would be automatically more reliable.

Finally, if you look carefully at the map in Google Earth and the one in the article, you'll discover that Lakeville Highway significantly curves immediately before the point circled in red ... whereas the line drawn between the red one and the immediately preceding sample point is a straight line. This could be significant if the software calculating the speed from the GPS coordinates was assuming a straight-line path between the points, whereas, in reality, the path taken was curved and therefore longer in the same amount of time. The speed will be underestimated.

Most likely the court simply rolled over the moment the ticket was contested with any type of evidence to the contrary.

October of last year - http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/article/20071002/NEWS/710020308/1033/NEWS01

A ship pilot on the SF Bay makes $490,000. So it's not related, but it's pretty astounding these days what some people make compared to anybody I know.

Oh, and he may have ruined the Bay for the next decade, with that oil spill last week. http://www.pressdemocrat.com/EarlyEdition/article_view.cfm?recordID=7938&publishdate=11/10/2007

I imagine some parents would be thrilled about installing something like this in the car of their teenagers. "Come back by 10 pm or I'll shut off the car."

On a more serious note, not all tracking systems are inherently bad. There's an interesting story about a teenager whose parents installed a GPS tracking system into his car. Now he's going to court as the GPS record shows he wasn't speeding, unlike the police officer who wrote him a ticket.

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20060104/NEWS/601040328/1033/NEWS01

The Press Democrat is a Santa Rosa area (well, Redwood Empire/Sonoma County area) newspaper, so the grandparent poster had it wrong -- the local paper did cover it.

Dunno. But it was reported in Placerville, CA where this sicko is from.

http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articl e?AID=/20060104/NEWS/601040328/1033/NEWS01

It's quite shabby, considering the strong position Burst held in the trial. They really and truly had the goods on Microsoft and let them off the hook for a sum that's pocket change to Microsoft.

will go to help Burst create new products/technology to sell.

No, there will be no new product development.

from an interview with Lang (Burst CEO):

He said instead of hiring more workers to develop more technology, the company will move to enforce its patents, which it believes several other large software companies are using.