Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Privacy, Spectrum, Location
Sir, you just need to trust us. geekee writes "An article on CNN claims that the proposed passenger-screening system for air travelers is much more innocuous than previously claimed. Now it is claimed that the Transportation Security Administration "will not view credit records, traffic violations or other personal data", according to Admiral James Loy. He also claims records of travel will not be maintained. "Airline reservation agents would provide a traveler's name, address, phone number, date of birth, and travel plans to the TSA, which would then check that information against a variety of commercial databases and an FBI watch list.", according to TSA spokeperson Heather Rosenker."
Thinking of the children means more than hiding their eyes. Jim Tyre writes: "You pointed out that my censorware.net piece ["CIPA Before the Supreme Court"] provided a nifty link to where the official supreme court oral argument transcript would be when available online. It's now available."
What's good for the mercantilists ... wait, no doesn't have the same ring. Lawrence Lessig says that the current radio spectrum is vastly underutilized, and that new technology can extract much more use from it, creating a true radio commons. Zo writes to point out that many Salon readers disagree: "Radio waves, bandwidth, the spectrum. . .Don't we know *anything* for sure?
Sir, these books smell fine ... what's the catch?
silentbozo writes "Avid Slashdotters will remember the Baen Free Library, which puts up free web versions of Baen titles for ANYONE to download and read without having to mess around with encryption and DRM. They went a step further with this experiment last fall with the release of David Weber's War of Honor which had a bunch of novels in html, rtf, doc, palmdoc, and othe formats on CD (bound into the hardcover), which you could copy and give away to anyone. Well, they're at it again. In May, they'll have another CD for those of you who didn't get War of Honor, bound into John Ringo's Hell's Faire.
I got hooked reading John Ringo's books after browsing through my copy of the War of Honor CD... and it's a great way of catching up on the previous books in the series. Hell's Faire looks really good - I personally am looking forward to finding out what happens to the O'Neals as they fight the Posleen on Earth, and to the crew of Bun-Bun... Eat anti-matter Posleen-boy!"
As secure as ... well, you pick. Anthanos writes "pGina [http://pgina.xpasystems.com], a modular authentication framework for Windows, has come a long way since it was last noted on /. nearly a year ago. Since then a full-fledged LDAP plugin, PAM plugin, and chaining have all become part of the feature set. The kicker is the recently released Slashdot plugin, which allows authentication of Windows clients with... yup you guessed it, Slashdot Accounts! XPA Systems has even begun offering services revolving around this GPL product. Seems this may be the solution for people looking to merge authentication of Windows clients with MacOSX, Solaris, and other *nix boxen."
Let's see a handheld that uses both, please ... Mattias Östergren writes "Well aware of the risks with dependency of GPS the European Space Agency (ESA) have developed their own satellite navigation system, EGNOS. EGNOS is more accurate than GPS and the signal also tell you how much it could be off.
The first reference station have just been installed on the roof of the Land Survey in Gävle, Sweden. There is a Swedish press release about it."
(Actually, the existing setup is sweet, but 5cm would be much sweeter.)
It has to do with statistics. Theoretically, the more information you have per data point, and the more datapoints you have, the more accurate your results are.
:) ).
The problem is, if you have too much information per datapoint, you start getting false positives.
Think of it like your Bayesian spam filter(God, I LOVE Moz 1.3!)...the longer you train it (the more spam messages you feed it), the better it will be at recognizing the types of messages you give it.
However, if you, say, start feeding it messages from your ex-spouse, it will start homing in on on other stuff. Possibly personal mail, or maybe legal notifications (depending on your situation.
What's this Submit thingy do?
There is no reason not to rely on the US GPS system...
Really? I would beg to differ. I say this under the context that the US taxpayer bought and paid for the GPS, so they have no duty to guarantee any level of service, however some of the arguments against a European GPS system seems to be along the lines of the kid who's taking his ball home and gets angry when he sees that they got their own ball.
Political sidenote: I love how the administration has set up a whole slew of ridiculous propaganda techniques to give the illusion of a dangerous enemy to enrage the public into a president supporting, pollster responding public. Want to invade someone? Up your dubious "threat level" as if you are responding to some overt immediate threat from the deadly enemy. Want to pretend that your enemy is more powerful than they really are? Talk about disrupting GPS, lest they guide their 1960s era Soviet T55s by it... Eurasia...europa...who knows anymore. I am making no comment about the righteousness of this war, but I hope that people can see through these shallow manipulations.
[TDMA] is an immensely powerful technique, and one that is infinitely scalable. It's only limitation is the speed of our electronics, which can and should maintain it's exponential speed curve.
This is why the spectrum is underutilized.
You do realize that as sampling rate goes up, spectrum use (bandwidth) goes up, right?
Any given region of spectrum can only carry so much data, any way you slice it. Power, noise/clutter, and bandwidth combined determine (and limit) data rate.