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Chicago Police Force Wins CIO Magazine Award
Roland Piquepaille writes "The Chicago Police Department (CPD) is the sole winner of the 2004 Grand CIO Enterprise Value Award for its data warehouse and application suite. In Taking IT to the Street, the magazine writes that Chicago police officers have an immediate access to more than to 200 GB of data and nearly 8.5 million records of arrests and other incidents. It took $45 million and 3 years to the CPD to build this database with the help of Oracle, but the return on investment is huge, with labor savings of $88 million from 2001 through 2003. And while the national crime rate rose 2 percent from 2000 to 2001, Chicago rates have dropped 16 percent in the last three years. So all this information can and does prevent crime and save lives, but in Police Power Coming Up Behind You, the author reports he is somewhat worried that all these tools could fall into wrong hands. This overview contains selected excerpts and comments about this long article."
Your on crack. Used laptops in cop cars? PCs in cop cars? They needed the equipment they got, not crappy used HP and Dell laptops. Jesus.
Open source is a nice thing, but it's not the end all and be all. Try not to drink SO MUCH of the open source kool-aid.
I can't think of any possible "good" associated with the "bad" of firearms.
Think about it, if you could go back to the beginning and prevent man from inventing firearms, how different would the world be?
What is the possible benefit of a firearm, other than to shoot someone else who has a firearm before he shoots you?
Sure there would still be violence without firearms, but at least it would be forced to either be hand to hand or bow+arrow and thus there'd be much less civilian deaths in large scale conflicts.
Wow, the database made crime drop! Is this the same person that wrote george dubya's economic plan?
Is it possible to create a logic-check as a browser plugin, so when you type something (e.g. tax breaks for rich people will give boost the economy, a database lowered crim 16%, et al) on shaky logical foundations, you get a red underline?
And a lone paperclipman is going to destroy our freedoms?
Think of what hitler could do if he had all that information. He could've rounded up ALL the jews. What if china attacks? I wonder where all the slot-eyed tan people are going to go, hmmmm? It's a little known fact that many japanese families in WW2 were taken to concentration camps (although they got an education, food, water, etc there), many old heirlooms were destroyed by hateful people and goverment officials confiscated stuff if they wanted it.
Can that cop pull up a list of books people have purchased? Or better yet, would anyone care if the police decided to start putting people in jail for owning certain books?
What happens when the database begins tracking everywhere you go, pointing out the small descrepencies in your life that look suspicious. What then? What happens when it begins to catalouge evidence?
Most people don't consider smoking marajuana or selling marajuana a federal offense, but the cops do. With a system like that, they can track everything.
What happens if the religious right gets involved in all this?
"Well Mr Anderson, seems like you've been seeing Betty a lot, and she's been spending the night over for longer and longer periods. Time to goto jail, Mr Anderson, sex without marrage is wrong."
Right now it's just a bunch of information they've collected. As long as it's used for good things that everyone believes in, like catching rapists, murderers, frauds and the like and not for legislating morality or decency, we'll be just fine. Our goverment is handling the drug war by making all kinds of minimum sentances, putting little kinds in jail for 20 years for stealing a candy bar. 3 strikes your out programs that give life sentances and death penalties for getting into a few fights while your in prison and stealing televisions. Privitized prisons which make a profit at incarcerating people, who they then torture to get them to rat out their friends. All kinds of promises to make punishments worse and worse to deter their form of crime. Then turning around and not handling other, much more serious criminals like the RIAA, Microsoft, MPAA, GE, GM, Montanso, Nestle, etc. I can definatly see a tyrrany coming into play in a decade or two like no other tyrrany we've ever known. Accept this one won't be about jews, blacks, or captialism. This one will be about ideologically cleansing the world of anyone with a view that doesn't complement your agenda under false guises. Unlisenced knowledge if pornagraphy, and dangerous you know. And if you've got a bunch of guys with guns and toys who don't mind running around after such idiocy, you've got a tyrrany.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
Speaking of "GUILT", the warmongers are pretty good at using it too. Oh you're against the War, you're unpatriotic, you're not supporting our troops, you should leave this country since you don't like it, you're a self-hating jew, etc.