Slashdot Mirror
Manhattan 1984
Etherwalk writes "The New York Times is reporting on developments in the quest to charge driving fees for all vehicles headed below 86th Street in Manhattan. Notably absent from any part of the discussion is that a record is made of every car or truck that enters, together with the vehicle ownership information and the date and time of travel — either as part of EZ-Pass or in license-plate photos taken for subsequent billing."
Thing is, I discussed this with my US cousin a few months back, and told him how in the Netherlands, we had all sorts of systems in place already to monitor traffic for billing and speeding registration purposes, using cameras that read license plates. He was sure that, for privacy reasons alone, such systems would never fly in the States.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Jesus. Ok, it's all right to have a little bit of suspicion with regards to motives here, but "Manhattan 1984"? That's a bit much, isn't it?
Also, how does this qualify as having to do with Our Rights Online?
To prevent this day from getting worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD TH
We've had a similar system running in London for a while now here in the UK.
Now you too can look forward to people using fake license plates to avoid charges, or people who have been nowhere near the area being charged and/or fined because the number plate recognition software read a letter or number wrong.
We've had this in Central London for ages. It's called, slightly euphemistically, the Congestion Charge. All vehicles entering a zone in Central London have their registration plates recorded by cameras. It's no big deal.
wow... thats certainly quite a statement you made. I had to read it a couple times to actually understand what you were saying.
As for the missing comments, it is currently 1:30AM on US west coast, 4:30AM on US east coast, somewhere between 9:30AM and 11:30AM for most of Europe. I would expect comments from Japan as it is 5:30 PM there now, however this topic does not directly concern the citizens there (and I doubt slashdot comes in a Japanese version, but I could be wrong)
Technically this is already feasible by ensuring that every single vehicle is equipped with a GPS receiver and a transponder that transmits its identity and its itinerary (in time and space} to collection stations.
As long as there is no congestion, and there are sufficient funds to keep all roads in good condition, the question doesn't appear. It becomes very different however when congestion starts blocking the grid, and when it's hard to find enough money for maintenance (of bridges for example}.
Under current conditions however, there is a strong incentive to toll. And yes ... there are privacy aspects.
Where electronically transmitted itineraries could be encrypted to prevent eavesdropping, someone has to do the billing ... and that someone can only do that if they can link the vehicle with a driver. And hence they will also be able to link vehicle, diver, and itinerary.
It's not quite there yet, but the signs are that it's only a matter of time. Unless someone can come up with a fool-proof alternative way of putting up the money *and* ensuring an acceptable level of service. In other words: don't count on it not happening.
After all ... what's privacy in the face of financial incentives?
But rest assured ... there probably will be a capped-fee paying option for those who really don't want their movements tracked and who can afford to pay the national maximum road price per mile where- and whenever they drive. Those subscribes don't need to submit their itineraries ... their subscriber ID will do.
The only snag is that the maximum road price will be about 20$ per mile. If your car does 50 mph, that would be 1000$ per hour maximum. So anyone willing (and able} to pay 365 x 24 x 1000$ per year would be allowed un-metered driving any time and any place. Anybody else will have to submit their itineraries and pay a road-use charge.
Oh yes ... and don't bore us with complaints that you already pay gasoline tax. What you *pay* in unimportant. What counts is the difference between what's needed for upkeep and congestion management and what's currently available.
If it keeps the paranoid from driving their cars around Manhattan, that's a bonus reduction in traffic. I'm all for it. In fact, publish the data if you can't satisfactorily explain why you need to take your car in. Make it hurt to not take public transport.
Or possibly both.
This appears to be a product of the thinking that the "market can regulate anything". Everywhere there is congestion, plans seeking to regulate it through differential charging are springing up all over the place. The revenues typically more than cover the cost of implementation in their first year. My opinion is that these schemes just take yet more money from the average Joe who works, because he typically doesn't have any choice as to where and when he drives when commuting to work - traffic pressure on its own is more than sufficient incentive to stop driving in rush hour if it's at all possible.
Of course, you do get the highly desirable (for the intelligence community) side-effect of being able to track all vehicles present in such a schema.
Those worried for the privacy of New Yorkers should spare a thought for those of us in Europe, as our governments are presently colluding on a system that will mandate the fitting of a GPS tracker with a cellular modem to each and every motor vehicle that will log all movement. We already have number plate cameras on most major motorways (ostensibly to check to see if untaxed vehicles are moving), and a congestion charging scheme in London that has been so successful in terms of revenue that other metropolitan areas are queuing up to see who can be next.
http://www.dft.gov.uk/pgr/roads/roadpricing/
The Information Commissioner has repeatedly asked for details of how this info is used. It has also emerged that outside congestion charge hours the cameras are kept online and are STILL recording.
It is no coincidence that the Information Commissioner has been rendered fairly toothless politically. Westminster can't afford anyone asking the right questions - it could make people realise that the UK is now close to being a full fledged police state (it's never been a democracy).
Worse, that hasn't reduced crime one bit - you need a feeling of insecurity to stop people from asking questions..
1984 - it's a manual..
For areas of central London (UK) we already have a system in place called congestion charging. Basically whenever you enter/exit one of the zones, cameras hooked up with number plate recognition record you.
The system works reasonably well, but it doesn't really stop people driving in the "congestion" zones and most people really dislike the system, for example, if you don't realize you've driven through a congestion charging zone you end up with a bill in the post for more than it would normally cost (you get discounts for paying same-day or prior to entering the zone).
Now - the mayor is proposing to charge different rates based on what type of car you have - small effecient compacts would pay nothing or next to nothing, while massive SUVs or anything with a 3+ liter engine would pay upto £25 GBP per day ($50 USD).
The most likely outcome of this? Poorer people will use public transport, while for the richer bigger fines will just affirm their social status, or make them consider getting smaller cars.
Oh - and I'm not mentioning the use of the system to track criminals, bail jumpers or "potential terrorists", because it's happening frequently and is just another way that the government is abusing the powers they gave themselfs by-proxy.
land of the free indeed....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Manhattan is full of niggers
Clearly you meant "the working class", and you're correct. Manhattan is full of working class individuals who clearly have an interest past that of which is providing the employment. If you meant otherwise, then your conflation of racial division with division in class and/or earning potential is the point of discussion, at which point any rational individual would have to disagree with your assessment.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I find that most people who reject number plate tracking, CCTV cameras, automatic logging and vehicle license MOT test (legal UK vehicle check to ensure it is road worthy) and the like generally have something to hide.
i sion#Crime_registration
Whilst I agree there must be safeguards, it seems that every day there are crimes solved, prevented or swiftly responded to by this kind of technology.
See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-circuit_telev
from the FA above:
"Claims that they reduce or deter crime have not been clearly borne out by independent studies[2], though the government claims that when properly used they do result in deterrence, rather than displacement. One clear effect that has been noted is a reduction of car crime when used in car parks. Cameras have also been installed in taxis to deter violence against drivers, and also in mobile police surveillance vans. In some cases CCTV cameras have become a target of attacks themselves. Middlesbrough council have recently installed "Talking CCTV" cameras in their busy town-centre. It is a system pioneered in Wiltshire which allows CCTV operators to communicate directly with the offenders they spot. This idea is first known to have appeared in George Orwell's famous novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The use of CCTV in the United States is less common, though increasing, and generally meets stronger opposition. In 1998 3,000 CCTV systems were found in New York City. There are 2,200 CCTV systems in Chicago.
The most measurable effect of CCTV is not on crime prevention, but on detection and prosecution. Several notable murder cases have been solved with the use of CCTV evidence, notably the Jamie Bulger case, and catching David Copeland, the Soho nail bomber. The use of CCTV to track the movements of missing children is now routine.
After the bombings of London on 7 July 2005, CCTV footage was used to identify the bombers. The media was surprised that few tube trains actually had CCTV cameras, and there were some calls for this to be increased.
On July 22, 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead by police at Stockwell tube station. CCTV footage has debunked some police claims. Because of the follow-up bombing attempts the previous day, some of the tapes had been supposedly removed from CCTV cameras for study, and they were not functional. The use of DVR technology may solve this problem."
In the UK the police are building up a large DNA database from everybody charged with a criminal offence (now nearly 5m entries) this solves crimes regularly. See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3232744.stm as an example.
Bottom line, I have no problem with this technology if safeguards are in place and it makes the streets a safer place to walk.
As a British subject, it's nice to see our American allies catching up in the war on citizens^H^H^H^H^H^H terror.
George Orwell is one of the greatest British heroes to ever live, and now his ideas are spreading around the world. This must surely be England's finest hour.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I hate to play devil's advocate here, but this could be a much better system than a toll booth system. Either way it seems they are looking to make the traffic congested area a toll zone. Toll booths create a stop and go traffic nightmare. Creating a system that is automated (and like most things automated NOT perfect) would at least be a solid solution to not only DETER atleast some traffic, but also not hinder traffic flow. Now of course people will be screaming about how such a system will be used.
Obviously one major problematic scenario is law enforcement going wild with such a resource. You would hope there would be a secure system to prevent abuse, but it creates the infinite problem of who will watch the watchers, who will watch the watchers watching the watchers, etc. As long as the system does not needlessly collect data (such as a blanket camera system that tracks ALL movements within the zone) I dont think most people would mind. You have to remember that even at tollbooths your car is caught on camera (security cameras). True, security cameras dont have the retention this system would require (for billing purposes it would be atleast a month depending on monthly/quartly/yearly pricing) but again, imposes limitations on the use of such data could aid in ensuring the privacy of drivers.
Sorry to go anti-1984 here, but this system is far less frightening than say a CCTV blanket system like that already purposed for many downtown locations around the US, and already in wide spread use in England. While the article was scant on the operational details of the system, it felt like it was going to be used solely to track motorists entering an area and just for billing purposes (as much as we can trust that!).
You'd have made a great Hitler Youth member.
BTW, New Yorkers, when they tell you that the London Congestion Chrage cut traffic by 20% they are LYING. The scheme was launched at the beginning of a school holiday when the traffic volume drops by over 15% anyway. They also promised that the £5 charge would NOT be raised - yet raised the charge to £8 when it became clear that the CC wasn't making enough money. The proposal is now to have a "congestion" charge based on the CO2 emissions of your car, with the top rate (225g/km - basically any petrol engine over about 2.5litres capacity) being £25 per day. That's right FIFTY DOLLARS PER DAY. Oh, and it goes without saying that the CC zone has also been extended in area, with more extensions promised, and that the ANPR camera network that drives the system is now used by the police to track EVERYONE. What do they do with the data? Who knows. Can you see the data relating to you? Of course not.
1984 it is not. Orwell never dreamed of ANPR, GPS and ubiquitous supercomputing.
You have been warned.
What remains on that list is the portion that doesn't care about any of that, they will stop at nothing to do whatever crime they intend to commit. Sorry to say, but no matter what you do, crime will always happen. (an example of this is crime during Soviet Russia, if the police even thought you might be responsible for a crime you were either killed or sent go a gulag, yet it still occurred)
I doubt that in any major city since the 1800's have people actually been seriously afraid of having their homes stripped bare, burned down, or riddled with bullet holes (there are exceptions however, gang warfare and race warfare, neither of which would be impacted by this system in the slightest)
After a earlier trial in Stockholm, Sweden the system is back online. The automatic license plate reading system is developed by IBM and only scans license plates when you drive into the toll zone or leaving it. It created a 20% decrease in traffic during the earlier trial and the average speed increased. The air pollution levels was reduced. The bus system, trains and subway noticed an increase in passengers but travel times was reduced still.
The information is kept until payment has been made, when it's removed from the system. With only 2 weeks to pay not much information can be recovered from the database.
With all the alarming reports about climate change and greenhouse gases it's probably a good idea to implement road tolls all over the world. In Stockholm environment friendly cars don't have to pay the road tolls. What is defined as a environment friendly car is subject to change every year as development goes forward.
This consolidates power in the hands of government. Right now, the UK government can be offensive, inappropriate, incompetent, all the traditional sins of government, but they do stop short of being outright openly evil. Alas, government is not a static reliable thing. Many of the functions of government are being gleefully handed over to corporations, either by market-worshipping dingbats who genuinely believe that the market can regulate itself, or by corrupt arseholes who just want the stock options.
Now, imagine the same systems in the hands of a major corporation. Now imagine that the corporation has very few legal restrictions on what it does. Now imagine you have pissed them off.
If that didn't scare you, you have a serious lack of imagination.
I grew up and live close to Beaumont, TX. Closest toll road is in Houston (80+ miles away) that I know of, we have a free ferry even to Galveston. It was a whole different world when I lived in Maryland and was going to NJ, NY, and other states in that area. I don't remember any toll roads in Austin either. It is quite strange going from this environment to a place like NJ where you can't pump your own gas and on the way there you got planes flying over the road to give out tickets in PA.
s/©//g
Texas has "upgraded" some of their toll booths with a similar technology. For about a month after they first started using it, I can remember the reports of people from out of state being fined, and likewise for what should be a relatively simple system.
Unfortunately, the complexity came from something that was "outside" (figuratively speaking) the system.
That being said, what's so newsworthy about this? The fact that it's in New York?
It's when the government starts setting up cameras everywhere to monitor people that you need to be concerned. First it starts with tolls, then red lights, then every street corner, then it starts with measuring the velocity of a moving automobile, then RFID chips, and THEN an Orwellian society might come into play.
That being said, the tin foil hat goes on tonight.
Oh yeah, in that last bastion of freedom: the UK. If it was restricted to just London I could live with that as who in their right mind would want to go there anyway but this broken thinking is spreading to other cities. If that wasn't enough we now have ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) on all the motorways, some a-roads and I've seen it at pertol stations as well. Welcome to the police state. Have a nice stay.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Because it's just like driving through any other toll plaza anywhere else. I've not heard of any that don't use cameras to track cars or give away the fact that you crossed the control point with your ETC transponder. How this information is any different from going through other toll plazas or border crossings is beyond me. Moreover, why it matters is also a puzzling thought. So a computer knows you drove into Manhattan. It's not like it would have been a secret without these toll plazas.
If "they" want to watch you, they can do it. That ability is not new, nor is it going anywhere. Attempting to attribute some lingering fear to the fact that you're visible to others in public is paranoid.
There's a difference to being in view in public, and having your whereabouts noted, and retrievable for all of eternity. I find it kinda disconcerting that I could one day be confronted by police with an exhaustive list of my movements for the last 10 years.
My uncle was visited by ASIO for suspected terrorism related stuff. We're Muslim, and it's a tradition donate food to poor people. He runs a butcher, and so sent meat to a Middle Eastern based charity organization. They then sent it to a regional distribution center which then distributed it to various community groups, one of which was apparently on an Interpol watch list of some description. Despite the layer upon layer of distance, my uncle's house was raised, all computer data was copied and he was questioned (bear in mind he sent a bunch of dead sheep, not a briefcase of hard currency or blueprints for nuclear related widget thingies).
He was presented with a list of every phone call he'd made in the last 10 years or so, and every call overseas he was required to explain. We're from South Africa, and are of Indian descent. Being Indian with a bloody huge families we have, we have relatives all over the place, and so we make heaps of overseas phone calls. Eventually, they decided my uncle was harmless, and left him alone. Nonetheless, ever since then I've been gearing up to move to a country that is not in the Western Axis, as I am increasingly getting the feeling that we as Muslims just aren't welcome. Plus, I don't like the idea that someone, somewhere has access to all of my movements.
Oh, and if you're going to give me the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" line, please don't, I've heard it many times before and it sounds dumber each time I hear it.
I hate printers.
Is how there is not any outrage, but there is acceptability, for the corupt nature of the whole situation. Gas taxes are supposed to pay for roads (maint & repair). That would go to figure, you use public roads, you should pay for them. But now here's a situation where the Federal Govt is giving NY 300+ million to charge people more money to use _PUBLIC_ roads. I guess "Public" no longer means paid for by the people's taxes, but means, paid for by the people's taxes, and rented out to the folks who can afford it.
Rerouting congestion does not solve the problem. NIMBY all over again. Those cars have to go somewhere. And as for the folks who think that public transportation is good enough, that could be viewed as another freedom taken away. Folks drive for many reasons, one being a sense of going where they want, when they want.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
It's treatment like this that makes me currently hate most people here in Australia.
Most of the so-called "western world" (I abhor that term... how do you divide a sphere in east and west?) needs a real kick up the backside.
Ezekiel 23:20
than what they're doing in with the Narrows bridge in Washington state? I think they're taking pictures of license plates and fining people who skip the toll.
Do people really think that this changes their privacy? Lots of folks have mentioned the congestion charging here in London, but even before it was introduced I got a letter from the police to say that their cameras had seen my car in an area where a murder had been committed, and had I seen anything? If they want to track folks in Manhattan I bet they already have the technology in place.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
The most common method at the moment is probably cloning car plates. Pick a similar car to yours which already goes into the zone, and duplicate its plates. Assuming your target car has a yearly pass, noone will ever notice.
I would expect that duplicate plates would be a poor strategy. It should not be hard for a computerized system to notice the same plate has been seen at two different location and alert the police.
Another common technique to use if you don't want to actually break the law is to register your car to a company using a PO Box number. Once registered, drop the PO Box. In the UK all fines go to the registered address, which will then be no longer functional.
Why on earth would the government (or the collections agency that was contracted) not look at the ownership history of the P.O. Box? Also, wouldn't you lose the paperwork to re-register the vehicle as well.
Maybe that's why motorbicycles (that's what the law calls 'em) are excluded from the London Congestion Charge in the first place. That and the fact that they take up less space on the road.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
There are ways to do this while keeping privacy in mind and largely intact.
To take where I live as an example. I can pick a manually operated lane and pay via coin toss or handing cash to a human being. These lanes do not record anything unless you try to blast through without paying.
I am not 100% positive such an anonymous alternative is required by law, but I'm fairly certain of it.
If opting for a transponder to avoid having to stop, there are strict limits as to how long identifiable information may be stored. The main concern is of course to register the amount of passes so your transponder is deducted properly. The specific booth or time is not required to fulfill that need. However, since you are entitled to complain, normally the specifics are stored for a short period of time for reference (you have full access to this information by contacting the company or logging into their site). You can opt out of that as well, but that obviously means you have less to point at if you do wish to complain.
Now, I do not live in the US. I trust the oversight system in place where I live to handle this properly. They not only have the power to shut down projects not respecting privacy, they can do the same to government surveillance experiments. And they have done so several times in recent history. I'd not put the same faith in the current US administration.
I'm not sure exactly how toll plazas in the states work, with EZPass and other things, but there was a (slightly famous) case in South Africa where a toll plaza helped solve a murder.
This happened at least ten years ago, so I'm not sure if video surveillance was the norm back then. I know now that all toll plazas here have cameras that record licence plates, but payment is still entirely manual - you pay with cash or credit card... the most automated means of passing is by swiping your credit card yourself in an express lane. But anyways. Because some toll plazas are on roads that are used daily for people to get to work and back, some of them offer concession cards to people living in the area to get a discounted rate. So, you pull up at the toll booth, hand in your concession card, the attendant swipes it, it registers the discounted fare, you pay, get your card back, and leave. What not many people knew, was that since you had to apply for these cards, and the cards were issued on a per vehicle basis (the card has to match the license plate to prevent fraud), the card has the vehicle details and registered owner details stored in its magnetic strip, and when the operator swipes your card to register your concession, the card details are logged in a database somewhere.
What happened was, this guy decided to murder his employee to cash in on a life policy that he had taken out in the employees name. He took his family 3-4 hours away to a casino resort for the weekend, and asked the employee to check on the house while he was away. While the family was asleep, he got in his car, drove back home, killed the employee and made it look like a break-in, drove back to the resort, and appeared very surprised and upset at the break-in and murder in his house when he returned. Although it was very suspicious and lots of evidence pointed to him, he did have the alibi of having checked in in person at the resort for the weekend. Except that he used his concession card when he drove through the toll each time, which recorded his car details and the date and time that he passed through.
These days, the discount you get for having a concession card is the equivalent of less than US$1... back then it would have been closer to around 10-20c US each trip. So, if he hadn't tried to save himself around 50c and paid the full toll price, he could have gotten away with murder.
I'm not trying to justify data recording at toll booths nor put them down. Just thought it was an interesting, somewhat related story.
I go through 6 toll plazas a day. 90% of the time, I have to drop to about 65mph to do so. (10% of the time, something stupid is going on.)
Don't get me wrong. I hate paying tolls. I think roads should be free to use. The privacy problems with having an EZ Tag scare the crap out of me, though not enough to make me give it up.
However, criticism that toll booths create a stop and go traffic nightmare are overblown and unfair. Old toll installations that rely on human tolltakers have these problems; none of the newer systems I've seen installed in the last decade suffer from such difficulties.
I think the reason these systems are a little more acceptable in Europe is that there are strong privacy laws in place. Yes, there is a lot of data being collected, which could *potentially* be used malicously, but privacy laws prevent this from happening (for the most part). Every organisation who collects this data has to be open about what they're collecting, and what they're using it for. Any deviation from this can result in severe penalties.
In the end, collecting and analysing data is an extremely valuable and useful thing. It benefits not just the companies who collect it, but potentially society as a whole. For example, the London C-charge records data on vehicles for pretty much the same reason as what's being proposed in Manhattan. The positive impact is a huge reduction in congestion and pollution in central London. These types of benefits have to be weighed against the potential for mis-use.
Unfortunately, in the US, people don't have the same level of legal privacy protection as the rest of the developed world (not just Europe). Perhaps that's the real problem here.
Actually, I'm fairly certain he was referring to colored folks. Apparently, he doesn't care for 'em.
Toronto has had a system like this in place for years, on its only toll road, Highway 407. If you don't have an 'EZ Pass' transponder in your car, then a camera snaps your license plate.
How else would they bill you?
Well, I guess they could open toll booths and slow traffic to a creep, but I think this is a good progression. Besides, they aren't tracking You, they're just tracking customers. Which is you. Yes. You.
If the current public transport systems are overtaxed, then improve them. Lay on more, improve the quality. I'd say that's a success story in the making. Please don't follow the idiots in power over here in the UK who decided the solution to trains being too popular was to raise ticket prices so less people would travel by train (or presumably squeeze more out of a captive audience).
I guess there is always the issue of car manufacturers and oil producers having influence in your government and being really unhappy that you're not buying their products. Probably that's unpatriotic and makes you a terrorist or something these days....
This was already shot down in the NY state senate weeks ago. Gotta love the Times.
Sure it's a stretch, but just because it isn't part of _our_ public 'online' experience, doesn't mean that it isn't (or won't be) accessible to _someone_ online (in some sense), by which I mean stored and network-accessible. Sadly, I'll probably never get to see my own complete credit/financial, telephone, ATM, public transit, driving, air travel, medical, and employment histories at-a-glance (or yours), although someone might.
Maybe a second layer of tinfoil wouldn't hurt.
^^
And yes, it seems ridiculous to charge you for road use after you pay for a license. But no, it isn't really.
Look at it this way ... some stretches of road are in higher demand than can be accommodated. Hence congestion. With congestion everybody pays ... in lost time {time is money}, reduced accessibility, increased fuel cost, unavailability of parking places etc. Congestion is generally seen as undesirable. But how to avoid it on roads that are in high demand?
The basic idea is to treat road use as any other scarce good: auction it. You could, in theory, do this by allocating say X time-limited slots and auctioning them. This would rank all potential users of that particular road by how much that road-use is worth to them, and only the X highest bidders would get a slot. Not sympathetic, but economically sound. If you can't afford a resource (road use} then it's economically inefficient to let you have it. Singapore for example does something like that. Annual vehicle licenses are limited, and are usually worth more than the cars people drive.
Now auctioning time-limited slots has a practical downside: you never know if you're going to be able to get to your destination, and it costs a lot of money to stage the auction, and then police the use of roads. So people try the next-best thing: road tolling. It's easier and less costly to police than straight time-slots, and it's easier on the users. Done properly it gets rid of those potential users to whom that scarce good (road use} is worth least ... and it allows others, whose need is apparently more urgent, to have it. Not nice, but effective.
And yes ... if you held a referendum you probably wouldn't be able to get support for road pricing. But then voters are famously inconsistent and short-sighted, and sometimes downright stupid. That's why we have a system of representation instead of direct voting on all major issues. It allows unpopular but necessary measures to go through. Of course it allows plenty of stupid money-wasting schemes to go through as well ... but there you go.
Computer Eye, formerly Computerworld (1983); backcover with synopsis.
Just a reminder.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Sorry, but here in the States, anyone may take photographs of whatever they want when they are in a public place, as long as there is no specific statute or ordinance in place prohibiting such activity (military bases, etc.) Property owners can prevent you from taking pictures while on their property; however, they cannot prohibit you from photographing any visible part of that property while on public land. Literally, I could stand on a street corner and photograph every license plate that passes, every person, etc., and nothing could legally be done to stop me (some cops don't understand this). I could also set up a camera to record a public street and capture everything going on.
Most tollbooths are already recorded to make sure that they can collect from people who pass without paying: if you don't pay the requisite fee, you get a bill. This is the same damn thing: a state (or in this case, a municipality) is charging for the use of the roads that it has to fund.
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
And of course, since you're here in Aus, you're already being tracked via automated bridge tolling, and have been for years.
This wasn't in Manhattan, but I did live in central NY up until last year. I had an EZPass for the thruway for years, but before I had one, I actually received a ticket from the thruway system. It was on Valentine's day, they insisted I ran through the EZPass lane without paying. (I had previously never had an EZPass). I know for a fact that was false, because my wife and I had an optometrist's appointment, we were going to go out for dinner afterwards. Well, they had dialated our pupils so we just drove home... nowhere near the thruway.
... I think someone had stolen them from the recycle bin and ran through the ezpass lane.
Anyhow, to make a long story short, my means of contacting friends who had friends who worked for the thruway, I eventually got in touch with a real person. By this time several weeks had gone by and they escalated the small fine into preparing to take away my license. My friend-with-a-friend suggested that I ask for the picture of my car, as they take pictures, as you go through the lane. Sure enough, either my car type didn't match, or they didn't have the picture. It was dropped and I never heard another thing again.
I honestly think a few weeks prior I had thrown out some old license plates (those in NY know you're supposed to recycle them, but also you're supposed to deface/damage them)
Just an example of how some crazy surveillance crap saved me from a fine or getting my license revoked.
FLR
- (a} earmarking of funds
- {b} insufficient differentiation
{a} As regards earmarking of funds: the temptation is enormous to use gasoline taxes for other things besides road maintenance. Think of e.g. Defense, Homeland Security, Education. Those departments have huge, and varying, needs. How about persuading your average politician, say VP Cheney, that he can't spend gasoline tax income on the military or DHS or whatever? I'd love to hear back from you after you've tried ...
{b} A tax on gasoline won't help reduce congestion. Any tax that even comes close to keeping people away from much-in-demand roads during the rush hour, would be totally un-affordable to anyone driving on a country road in the late evening.
Makes me think who NEEDS to run a petrol vehicle with an engine size of over 2.5 litres capacity? Most cars in the UK are less than 2 litres anyway.
Classic, first of all you denounce the entire UK as a bunch of right wing Sun reading racists and then in the very next sentance you moan about people making sweeping statements about sections of society. A case of double standards here perhaps ?
The majority of people in the UK are not right wing Sun reading racists, although some of us are and some of the more religiously inspired members of the Muslim community are really not interested much in integration.
If you actually want to do something to help both the right wing racists and the isolationist muslims it's best to see people as they actually are rather than relying on broad caricatures.
We aren't talking about graphiti and squeegee guys?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
I would advise you not to move.
If you move, they win. If fear makes you move, terror wins.
Disconcerting as it is, you should fight such moves. You have a right to a certain degree of privacy and I am sure a detailed log of all your uncle's phone calls for the last 10 years obtained with very little trouble is well beyond what a government should be able to do.
It's what extremists on both sides want - to separate us based on our races and religions and to make us fear each other. I refuse to cooperate with them.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Especially to drive around London in, who the hell wants to drive around London in the first place ?
Maybe the people delivering your goods and services.
If you have ever been to Manhattan, then you would know that there are large areas of it where cars and trucks just do not belong. Parts of it -should- be blocked off to general traffic, and only allow those vehicles which directly support the community. When parking your car costs much more than a night's hotel bill, you know that cars are simply out of place there. Treat the place more like a park, less like a parking lot.
I would love it if someone said that to me.
If someone did say that to me - a man, in this example - then I could ask him what his wife's favourite sexual position is, or which co-worker he would turn gay for, or which one person he would kill if he could get away with it.
I don't really care what his answers would be, but that's not why I'd want to ask. I would want that person to decide for himself whether he would tell me or not. If he doesn't feel comfortable telling me, or feels offended that I'd ask, he won't answer, even if he can. That's exactly the point.
If you've got nothing to hide, you really do have nothing to fear. This is true, for as far as it goes, and I'm sure the people who say it believe it. The catch is simple: everyone has something to hide, and not everyone realises it.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
That's why the UK government has basically been forced into ultra political correctness by not teaching any subjects in school that are counter to Muslim hardline teachings.
Notable absent from the FP is that grammar, together with editing - either in form or content.
The difference is that YOU don't have immediate access into huge databases (at least I hope you don't) that associate those license plates, or maybe even those faces, with names, SSN's, blood types, or DNA sequences. And you aren't on the hook to solve a bunch of crimes where we often have to take your word for it that "that guy did it, because someone else told us so."
So much for Freedom of Movement... "Public" travel my eye... /Get a brain morans
I find myself wondering why there isn't a "WTF?" moderator tag...
http://xkcd.com/313/
AFAIK (I'm from upstate but go down to the city regularly), the subway runs 24/7 and the lines go just about everywhere. And if where you want to go isn't next to a subway stop, you could always walk (exercise! yay!), or take a cab if need be.
I fail to see how public transportation, if well-funded (which the MTA isn't, sadly,) curtails personal freedom. In fact, I think it *enhances* it, because then I don't have to worry about getting in an accident and wrecking my car, I don't have to waste a ton of gas idling at stop lights (which means I have more money in my pocket, which is excellent because everything in the city costs more,) and tiredness/drunkenness are of no consequence.
Plus, you can't read the paper in a car. Well, you *shouldn't*, but people do. Yet another reason not to drive in the city.
Errr. No. There is no case of double-standards, I did not moan about people making sweeping statements at all. Most people in the UK are right-wing, that's why The Sun has the highest readership of any 'newspaper'.
*parses*
Well met!
One commenter noted that these are "public" roads, not toll roads. I'm not sure I understand how he draws the distinction. I pay taxes to help maintain both public and toll roads. As a New Yorker, I have no problems with private cars being charged to drive on roads. I've been taking the subway for over a decade and haven't driven for over 15 years. Yet I still have to pay for my "public" train system. Why should drivers be any different?
One of the major points of congestion pricing is to limit the number of cars in lower Manhattan. If you choose not to drive because of a loss of privacy, I think that would be considered a "win."
If you want to squawk about the use of computerized records being used to track people, check out the subway system. Far more people use the subway than use the roads, and through the use of the Metrocard my movements can be tracked throughout the city. That is a far larger invasion of privacy in New York City than any proposed congestion pricing models.
--Sam
That it was a story about life in 1984 NYC? I love that stuff... Boom boxes, walkmen, 3 channels of analog TV (well, maybe a few more in New York), mainframe computers. Those were the days!
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I'm not really surprised at the amount of outcry over this from people who don't actually live in Manhattan whose principles have no practical problems to contend with.
I probably have more reason than some to oppose this law as I own a motor vehicle and live in Manhattan - though mine is a motorcycle and (in London anyway) they are exempt from congestion pricing. Obviously, I hope they get a similar exemption here, but more to the point:
The New York State legislature recently shot this down. It's in the news because Bloomberg managed to wring some money from the Feds on the condition that the legislature approves it next year by the end of March. It is not a sure thing that this will occur. I consider myself a political pragmatist, and I can't really argue that this isn't a practical solution -- anyone who has ever hopped on a bus or tried to take a cab during rush hour knows that you may as well walk (assuming you can even get a cab then). A previous poster was correct in saying that the only people who can speed in Manhattan are cyclists (bicyclists, not bikers like me...at least not if we want to live). I talked to one bike messenger who can get from Penn Station to Union Square in 2 minutes.
If the idea is that all of us who take public transit (and that's not just the subways) will have a faster/easier time of it, that's a good thing. There are provisions in this bill that funnel a lot of money to the public transit system, which, despite having an awful track record of spending money, would benefit from the $100 million or so it would get -- and that's just the Federal share.
Also, to compare & contrast: unless you are a daily commuter, it costs $4 to take the subway somewhere ($2 each way). The congestion pricing is currently $8 for the day. That's a lot more (duh) but it's not so bad that I wouldn't ever drive through Manhattan -- I'd just make a point not to do it regularly. For anyone who has ever sat in the Lincoln Tunnel, that is perhaps not such a bad thing. Anybody whose destination is Manhattan will bleed $8 out their pores just spending an afternoon here.
As for me -- I'm moving to Brooklyn.
Just like being in London then.
(Disclaimer: although I'm British, I live about 200km. from London; and also about as far from the sea is it's possible to get in a country this size.)
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
If everyone is so worried about their privacy, then take the subway and pay for your card with cash.
Getting more people to take the subway is the main reason for the congestion plan in the first place.
I've got to say here that I agree with your sentiments about Islam and Muslims. While I have nothing against these people personally, I don't like their religion and the societies it creates. It IS oppressive.
I think that "Western" civilization is better. Sure, not perfect, with room for improvement. Still, it's better. We have more freedoms, we have more wealth, and we have a better morality. Most people in Western culture believe in freedom and equality, and want the citizens of our society to also believe in these values.
Agreed; just because it's a "religion" doesn't mean we should be forced to accept it whole heartedly.
On your last point - I do care about being tracked and I do value privacy. I actually read privacy statements on things I sign, and I don't sign things that I don't agree with. I don't buy into the "if you're not hiding anything, then you shouldn't care" thinking.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
It is not just a question of "use" but of the amount of damage a vehicle does to the road.
Studded tires are a good example - on a local interstate (eastern Washington state), the ruts from the studded tires are deep enough in the road surface that it seriously changes the way the car handles.
But more interestingly, I heard (some time ago) that damage goes up with the number of miles traveled, the square of the speed and the fourth power (!) of the weight. Which, if true, (I've not been able to verify this) would mean that a truck weighing 10 times my car (low for most loaded trucks), driving the same speed as me and the same distance, should be spending $10,000 (10^4) on highway maintenance for every $1 I spend. Let's be simple and suppose that I put $100 into road maintenance per year - then that truck should be putting $1,000,000 per year into the same fund. Better estimates (trucks driving 50 hours a week, many are rather heavier, most travel mostly at higher speeds than I do around town) put that ratio up into the hundreds of thousands and the estimated cost rather higher. The chances though that anyone is going to remove this (rather serious) invisible subsidy are, well, less than infinitesimal.
Neither, it's to do with Sarbanes-Oxley.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You already need to pay a toll to get into Manhattan, across every bridge and tunnel, maybe with the exception of one or two local bridges way up north. So, 'they' already know you are on the island; this just would help narrow down whether you were below 86th. And not very well-they probably won't record when you left. Given that prime Manhattan parking space is as expensive per square foot as prime manhattan real estate, and most traffic in Manhattan is cabs, I doubt this will have the impact they want. It seems to me the biggest impact will be for people who regularly make the trip across 86th street, which might cut down traffic on the George Washington Bridge, and might reduce traffic above 86th, and might get people to take a cab to 86th street and then transit the rest of the way home. It will bring in revenue, which is really what this is about.
how do you divide a sphere in east and west?
Easy! What is west from Greenwich is the western hemisphere, what is east from Greenwich is the eastern hemisphere.
Have you been sleeping during geography classes?
So say we all
Remind me why I should give up something to get what I've already got.
(IANAL)
Not in New York City either
But Christianity and Judaism are okay, despite following the same "God"? I say we get rid of them all, since they've been making countries less free since their conception!
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
ummm, you do realize that "Western civilization" is based on Islam?
Europe came out of the dark ages when they tried to annihilate the "barbarian Mohammedans" and returned with new knowledge.
the openness of Islamic society at its height allowed ideas to flow and mix from Spain to Malaysia.
the scientific, mathematic, medical and philosophical works that modern technology is built on were developed by Muslims, combining what they learned from the ancient Greeks, Indians and Chinese.
www.1001inventions.com
just because a bunch of misguided lunatics have hijacked the religion doesn't mean the religion leads to lunacy.
The sad part is that you don't see the hypocrisy in your position.
You pretend opposing Muslim existence in your midst is a noble cause, preventing the negative changes they might bring to our society -- but you don't seem to realize you're bringing about much more negative changes through your related acts (and irrational support of such acts).
You think you're fighting theocratic totalitarianism -- but to do so, you implement your own totalitarian measures, which simply cannot be characterized in any lesser terms. Universal wiretapping without warrant requirements, secret overseas prisons, physically coercive interrogation (torture, but let's not get caught up in semantics), multi-year jail terms for people who are not given trials (nor even allowed to talk to lawyers), and numerous other offenses are the clear evidence. Do you not see it, or do you just not want to see it?
I don't think your examples of Islamic states are entirely fair. Or at least, they're a bit limited. I fully agree that there are no Islamic states that I would care to live in. However, secular states which happen to be Islamic, such as Turkey, seem to be a lot better.
Of course, Turkey is not without its darker side - treatment of the Kurds in particular - but I'm not convinced that's down to Islam. Plenty of other places manage to come up with attrocities of their own without recourse to Islam, or even religion; the same goes for all the lesser trials.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
_Most_ Muslims, like most everyone who claims some sort of religious faith, don't really give a damn about "converting" everyone to their faith - they just want to live a comfortable and interesting life.
Its only those people who are insecure in their faith (or who like to use xenophobia as a useful political tool) who are panicking about the "evil Muslim hordes trying to convert everyone to Islam".
Here in Germany the equivalent of the Sun has sales of 5 million. While that makes it the biggest "newspaper" it still doesn't let it reach the majority of the population. I'd like to see the Sun's sales numbers if it actually reaches the majority of the UK population.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Like many other information gathering systems, my concern is not for the primary legitimate uses. The fact that this data will in all probability be archived as an abstract summary/conclusion instead of the actual evidence means there will be no way to dispute mistakes. Much like when a police officer 'accidently' destroys notes so that his word becomes the primary evidence rather than the recorded observations made at the time. The consequence will be that anyone wishing to dispute a possible mistake will simply be confronted with "the system says your vehicle was there".
At that point, you better have footage from a television news team and a handwritten note from the Pope that he was riding shotgun with you on the other side of town. Anything less, and its your word against the government's expert witness. When this happens YEARS after the supposed incident(s) how are you going to come up with an armorclad alibi?
Store the *recordings themselves* or don't retain the data after it has been used for its DESIGNED purpose.
How the heck did this get modded as insightful? This is a positively xenophobic interpretation of Muslims and Islam.
I've worked with many Muslims over the years. I've enjoyed working with them as much as I enjoy working with anyone. In *my* country, Muslims are certainly welcome. Are there murderous, extremist Muslims out there? Sure. And there's murderous, extremist people in every religion. (For example, see whitehouse.gov.)
Apart from when you said this...
And then, assuming you're the original Anonymous Coward, you go on to make more sweeping generalisation that everyone who reads the Sun is a right wing racist and most people read the Sun therefore the English are mostly right wing racists.
Even assuming you're correct about all Sun readers being right wing racists ( which I don't think you are ) the Sun is read by only 6% of the adult population of England, not including the rest of the UK. I would say that the 94% of the adult population consituted 'most people' rather 6%, but maybe because that's because I'm not stupid ?
Most English people are decent reasonable people ( who voted for a Left Wing government ) and in general it's people like you who, with your rabid, badly thought out and plain stupid generalisations and predujices are responsible for letting the side down.
Sound scary yet?
Nyhetsankaret.com -- det bÃsta av Sveriges Nyhetssido
I mean, come on people. I have an EZ-Pass for the Thruway in NY. Every time I go through a toll booth, it gets noted (date, time, plaza #, vehicle). Actually, every plaza that I've seen has a camera system in it for license plate recognition. What the hell is the difference here? Also, anyone here use a credit card? How about a store discount card? Hmm? You can't tell me that the store doesn't store that data in a big database somewhere. I think people are getting a bit paranoid here.
The point of this system is to provide a disincentive for unnecessary driving into Manhattan. If that means stripping Escalade-driving cagers of their privacy, so be it! I'm generally concerned about surveillance, but not that of bridge and tunnel barbarians. Since NYC has a good mass transit system, unnecessary can pretty much be defined as driving anything other than a delivery truck, bus, construction vehicle, etc. Suburban drivers need to start taking the train or move. I don't have much sympathy for owners of McMansions living in Sprawlville, NJ. Ride a train, bus, or bicycle, and stop giving all of us asthma!
"Those who believe in telekinetics, raise my hand" - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
You can complain all you want about the privacy issues, but The Framers could never envision
a world where traffic snarled a major city. The trade off here is your privacy(marginally) for the
right to do something that you shouldn't be doing in the first place, namely driving in a city.
I am going to generalize and say that more than half of the people that drive into downtown areas like
Chicago, or Manhattan, or London, or Paris do so because they are vain and want people to know that they have
cars. Or they are to uppity to use public transportation. The simple fact that our world is too bloody crowded
with worthless automobiles driven by people who don't need them. I recently saw a guy argue with a delivery
truck driver over a minor scratch on the bumper of his Mercedes. Here is some news, if you park on a city street,
expect your car to bumped, dinged and scratched. Don't spend several times more than an average person's annual
salary on a motorcar and then complain about the minor fraction of your weekly income that it'll cost to get it
repainted because you are shallow, vain, SOB.
Congestion charges and their assocciated privacy issues ought to make people think twice about whether or not they
actually need to drive somewhere. Maybe if more people would be worried about whether or not they actually needed
to drive somewhere rather than if their driving habits are being monitored, we'd all be better off.
And by the way, you don't have any reasonable right to privacy in a public place. Most American guarantees of privacy
center on whether the government may arbitrarily delve into your private doings. Using a PUBLIC motorway is not PRIVATE
act. A private act is scratching your nose on your couch, not getting into a publicly registered vehicle, using a public
motorway and driving amongst the general public.
So get together a group of people (or an online social network) and arrange to swap EZ-Passes. Do it periodically, so that no one has any one pass for too long, and make sure that everyone pays whatever fees they've accumulated on the pass they have before they swap it.
Don't keep track of who had the pass in the past; just keep track of where they are now, and if the cops ask, you can reasonably say that you have no idea who was using that pass 6 months ago.
- The Amazina Llama
Now it is truly frightening.
May the Maths Be with you!
Join the fight in the preservation of your right to bear arms. www.righttokeepandbeararms.com
"just because a bunch of misguided lunatics have hijacked the religion doesn't mean the religion leads to lunacy."
That ignores the fact this sort of religion has no checks and balances, making it especially easy for "Bolsheviks" to take over, so they do!
"Europe came out of the dark ages when they tried to annihilate the "barbarian Mohammedans" and returned with new knowledge.
the openness of Islamic society at its height allowed ideas to flow and mix from Spain to Malaysia.
the scientific, mathematic, medical and philosophical works that modern technology is built on were developed by Muslims, combining what they learned from the ancient Greeks, Indians and Chinese."
Correct, but no longer relevant!
The time of which you speak is over, finished, done, dead as dust, and Islam is not al all like that any more. Modern Muslims referring to the past glories of Islam are like Egyptians glorying in the history of the Pharaohs.
Wanting to bring back the ancient past, with its primitve customs and tribal outlook, is toxic.
I am not a desert tribesman and do not wish to live by rules appropriate to such "people". I support any level of action necessary to stop this cult of deliberate regression.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
"But Christianity and Judaism are okay, despite following the same "God"? I say we get rid of them all, since they've been making countries less free since their conception!
In the real world, Christianity and Judaism have been usefully weakened so they don't pose as much of a threat. (I'm an atheist so I like none of them.) The idea that we should strive equally for some impossible ideal outcome as a matter of principle does not make intelligent social policy.
In which society, right now, would your rather live given the choice between predominately Christian, Jewish, or Muslim countries?
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Because all Muslims are just like those crazy brown guys you saw on 24 or Fox News. All Muslims do nothing but plot then act on plans for converting the world to Islam. There are no "normal" people who also happen to follow the faith of Islam. Of course, the same is true for all other religions. We don't want Jews because they spread Judaism. We don't want Catholics, Protestants, Evangelicals, or any other Christian denomination because they spread Christianity. But why stop there? Let's make sure that those with different skin colors or culture heritages are kept the hell away too. My Daddy already taught me anything worth knowing and I don't need someone who looks, talks, or thinks differently putting confusing thoughts in my head.
The spread of Islam cannot be considered desirable by non-Muslims because of the societies it creates. You mean like the cities of Spain and the Middle East a thousand years ago? Those Muslim cities that happened to be centers of enlightenment and scientific learning, while Christian Europe was in the midst of the Dark Ages? Or perhaps you mean the secular democracy in Turkey, a Muslim nation? Islam is an exceptionally oppressive religion in practice, and practice trumps theory.Religion is an exceptionally oppressive organization in practice... Fixed that for you. Islam is not special.
I've seen the best you can do even with massive wealth (KSA, and the Gulf Emirates) and do not want MY country to be like them.I agree on this point, but I've also seen what has happened and continues to happen in the best "Christian nations" and do not want MY country to be like them.
Many of us don't care about political correctness, and don't want even "reasonable" Muslims in their midst. Sure. You are of the same lot as the whites who don't want blacks in their neighborhood, heterosexuals who are afraid they may catch Gay if a homosexual lives near them, and men who understand that women are subservient to them. You need the world to be divided into neat classes and you know that the bucket you are in is the best. In fact, your group (gender, culture, race, sexual orientation, religion, political party, etc) is the only correct one and has inherent dominance over the lesser groups. If Muslim society is good and righteous, Muslims might prove their loyalty by moving back to the Caliphate. This statement doesn't even make sense. I don't need them. I don't want Islamic changes in MY society. I don't want Muslims to have leverage by increasing their population in MY country. To reiterate, Different is bad and Same is good. I suppose you're okay with the Muslim influences that pulled Christian Europe out of the Dark Ages and lead directly to its scientific and industrial revolutions? Just because Islam is a "religion" doesn't mean it should not be viewed as a political ideology. I am free to oppose Islam (everywhere but Islamic countries) just as I am free to oppose Maoism or Stalinism. To the extent my country becomes Islamic I will be less free, so anything that induces Muslims to leave suits me fine. The Ottoman empire began creating a constitutional democracy 150 years ago and secularized their government fifty years later. There have been hosts of authoritarian and autocratic nations through the centuries, some religious, some secular, and some adamantly anti-religious. Just like every organized religion, there are political movements within Islam but that does not make it a political ideology. All major religions can be separated into the faith and organized religion, you are opposed to the organized religion but lumping the faith with it in your fear and ignorance.I hope Canadians will get billed for their use of these streets since New York has so graciously assisted them by handing over the DMV database of NY residents so they can be billed if they happen to drive on the automatic tolled 407 highway in Toronto. The most galling aspect of this is that residents of some Canadian provinces with stronger privacy laws can freely drive on the highway without being billed.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
I would hope that they are taking into account that to get from Long Island to New Jersey you pretty much have to travel through midtown/downtown Manhattan to do so (otherwise the only other options are the GWB and Verrazano Bridge, which are way too far out of the way). Unfortunately the highways that were supposed to connect the Manhattan Bridge to the Holland Tunnel, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel to the Lincoln Tunnel, were never built. So, that forces traffic on Canal and 34th Streets, respectively. Would there be exemptions for those streets? It's not fair to have to pay an extra $8 if all you are going to do is take a 10-15 minute jaunt going from end to end, not intending on parking anywhere.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
Why just tax the specific people that use the road when you can tax both?
--- Do you believe in the day?
This mod needs to be meta-moderated. Actually, I'll go ahead and earn some karma for myself by saying the following:
"There is no reason for atheists to want religious people, because as believers they spread religion.
The spread of religion cannot be considered desirable by atheists because of the societies it creates.
Religions are exceptionally oppressive in practice, and practice trumps theory.
I've seen the best you can do even with massive wealth (the WORLD) and do not want MY world to be like that.
Many of us don't care about political correctness, and don't want even "reasonable" religious people in their midst. If a religious society is good and righteous, religious nuts might prove their loyalty by moving back to wherever their religion started. I don't need them. I don't want religious changes in MY society. I don't want religious people to have leverage by increasing their population in MY country.
Just because something is a "religion" doesn't mean it should not be viewed as a political ideology. I am free to oppose religion (everywhere but non-secular countries) just as I am free to oppose Nazism. To the extent my country becomes religious I will be less free, so anything that induces religious people to leave suits me fine."
I hope the OP was being sarcastic and the moderator who modded him up and the replier who 'agreed' construed it as sarcasm.
I am a from a Hindu family who lived through riots in my town and I have seen the kind of inhuman behaviour that can be triggered by such views as your own. I am not defending Muslims, but am preaching acceptance of people's faith and beliefs.
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
"Do you not see it, or do you just not want to see it?"
I've lived long enough to see that in practice, most of these measures are selectively applied. I do not have fairness toward my enemies as a goal, because I understand exactly how they will (and I would, if I were them) exploit the inherent weakness of fair systems.
Let me break it down further:
I'm not going to Gitmo. I'm not a Muslim.
I don't care what is done to my enemies. I don't care if they are not given trials, for they would be severing my neck if I fell into their hands. None of the "totalitarian" measures affect me or what I do, because I CHOOSE not to be among the affected groups.
I don't give a damn if the CIA/NSA/local PD see everything I do. If they did, they might well hire me because their surveillance would do nothing but prove I'm on their side.
"you don't seem to realize you're bringing about much more negative changes"
I've visited "modern" Islamic countries many times over my military career including Turkey, UAE, KSA, Kuwait, and Bahrain. (I'd rate Turkey the best by far, but it took Kemal Ataturk to make something of it.)
I have and use social skills and was received on a very friendly basis. (Fake anti-Israel/Judaism rants work wonders. Try some when you want to really learn what your audience thinks!)
"Much more negative" than Islam? Not even close. That's laughable.
No level of US government/public actions against Communism (the obvious historic parallel) ever created a climate as oppressive as that created by modern Islam. The average American is not at all affected by Gitmo or any other anti-Jihadist measures.
I am not the least deterred from doing anything I wish.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
personally i think they should turn a random town in new jersey into a parking lot, and force people to take trains into the city. cars ruin midtown. i hate cars. all streets should become pedestrian thoroughfairs. make times square a permanent street fair. turn the taxi fleet into a bunch of pedicabs, scooters, and small european style microcars. make all truck deliveries during a certain hour of the night
and then i turn to slashdot, and i find a bunch of spin that frankly doesn't get the situation at all. a lot of the discussion here is about accepting a loss of freedom
loss of freedom?! you mean GAIN of freedom. the oppressive fascist presence here being CARS, not the government!
hello, i live here, i think i understand better than the average slashbot about what is going on with this plan. i don't see it as mourning a loss of freedom. i see it as celebrating a loss of CARS
let's put it this way: in the fight against what you perceive as an intrusive government and loss of privacy, try to understand what people on the ground are actually thinking about the situation, and pick the right fight. don't misinterpret the situation and come charging in horns ablaring about this issue or that issue that frankly, no one is actually concerned with and doesn't even apply
or rather, for the sake of argument, let's take the absurd position that the slashbots here are correct about this being an intrusive government issue and not a clogged traffic issue. ok, well then, now you understand that those who live in midtown manhattan welcome the devilish scheme of emperor palpatine to take away their freedoms under the guise of a bait and switch maneuver that the issue is something else entirely. fine: now try to understand what emperor palpatine is baiting us with, and use that issue as a starting point for your own words. the point being, it doesn't pay to march into a situation with the discussion already all figured out in your head without any input or attempt to persuade the people who are actually the targets of the plan in question
know your audience, speak to their concerns. or don't bother speraking at all. because they're not going to listen to you if you don't try to understand where they are coming from
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, my experience with toll roads is virtually nill....until recently when I had to cross the causeway bridge to NOLA daily for awhile. Until the end, I didn't notice the license plate cameras...but, as far as a computer knowing (aside from an image on file) that I went across it...I paid cash every day, so no automatic toll tag record generated for me.
Really, no one in the govt. has a NEED to know when or where I'm going in general. If there is no need, why should we be in such a rush to give out such information?
By itself it may not be that important, however, we've all come to know that by amalgamating small pieces of innocuous data, that bigger pictures can be drawn about anything. Who knows what that grouping of data might someday show, or be used for? I'd rather not have to worry about it...if there is no need, then lets not gather it.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"I've worked with many Muslims over the years."
That is not the same as living in an Islamic society or an area heavily influenced by Islamic social mores.
Have you lived in or visited one at length?
Muslims need not be of the "murderous, extremist" variety to promote Islam, which creates oppressive societies where Muslims have enough people to press the issue. Albert Speer was a presentable Nazi. That did not make Nazism OK.
Consider how Muslim immigration is changing once fiercely secular France. Frenchmen and women died on the barricades for freedom from the strangling grip of Church and King. Now they alter their behaviors and laws to accomodate believers in an ideology that is the exact opposite of what their ancestors for.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
There are a couple of issues with this proposal. The most basic one would be: how would it work?
All bridge & tunnel commuters would be exempt, because they already paid their toll to get in. How do you track that? How can they tell you crossed a toll bridge instead of the free bridge (there's on on the east side on 121st or so)? Is the mayor assuming that congestion isn't caused by the bridge and tunnel crowd?
Is NYC going to put a barrier across 86th street? How does that affect fire and emergency vehicles? How are the barriers going to go away during the day?
What if you have to drive across the 86th street line every day, for multiple deliveries? Is there a multiple-entry fee?
If you get below 86th before the cutoff time, then leave, can you go back in?
It's an interesting proposal, but I've never seen any data on the components of "congestion." If everybody is below 86th street when fee time starts, the fee won't do much to prevent congestion.
People should not be allowed to reference 1984 (or say "Orwellian") unless they've actually read the thing. It describes a totalitarian state that makes Stalin look like a libertarian. It's not just about a government that spies on its people (though only the upper classes). It's about people willfully changing their own memories of the past and a ruling party that claims to control reality. All of this is set in a world of permanent war and grinding poverty for almost all of humanity.
People are right to be concerned about the government spying on them. But most of the intrusions that people are up in arms about is a long way from "1984" territory. Being added to a database every time you drive into Manhattan does raise privacy concerns, but it's many orders of magnitude away from the nightmare Orwell described.
Warning: it's illegal to follow the above Gutenberg Australia link if you live in the U.S. or some other country that has effectively made copyrights permanent. That's a bad thing, but it's not "Orwellian" either.
You might want to turn that history book right-side-up and try again.
I'm sorry. Did you not understand the passage you quoted? Oh, my. I'm sorry again. You did NOT understand the passage you quoted, and my question may have confused you further.
e d_States
If you do believe that states are funded by the taxes that we already pay, what about the states that have no state taxes? Like, for example, New Hampshire? Did you know that if you drive on Rt. 95 from Maine to Massachusetts, you have to drive across a tiny sliver of New Hampshire? And that you have to pass through a toll booth when you do? Did you know that states also get slices of federal money as well? Did you know that there are roads all over every state that are NOT considered Interstate Highways, and that these roads must also be kept up at a cost, and this money must come from somewhere?
We can look at the example of the Newport Bridge, that takes visitors from Conanicut Island (Jamestown RI) to Aquidneck Island (Newport RI). It is the only toll road in RI. $2 a head. This money goes to pay for the upkeep and maintenance of the bridge. The state collects this money.
Now, to actually partially support your statement, the Maine Turnpike which is a northern end of I-95 is one of the last (if not actually the last) privately owned Turnpikes in the country, owned and operated by the Maine Turnpike Authority. Not surprisingly, it is an exit based flat fee turnpike like the New Jersey Turnpike. The money that the MTA collects goes right back into the road.
Now, the passage you quoted states quite clearly how many states charge tolls to turn the money around into keeping the road in operation. IE charging people for using the popular and well-traveled road they are... using. The state has to maintain the road whether or not every Tom, Dick, and Harry pays the toll. The state doesn't sit with it's trucks waiting, to drop half an inch of asphalt when a buck gets paid at the toll booth. I know it LOOKS like they do, but they don't. The toolbooth thing has more in common with a Net30 type of deal. So since the passage you quoted specifically deals with toll roads and paying tolls... why was your response...
"I do believe that the states are funded by the taxes that we already pay."
You are partially correct. However there are all kinds of taxes. Retail purchase taxes. Property Taxes. Fuel Taxes. Income Taxes. Inheritance Taxes. YOU don't pay the same taxes that I pay, because the services you use are different than the services I use. You also live in a different state than I. You also live a different lifestyle than I. The fact that most states are funded by the taxes that "we" already pay, has little to do with a state charging a toll for an overused portion of road that needs specific attention and it's own dedicated construction crew. You would do all of us a great service, and yourself the greatest service of all, by educating yourself in what taxes in the US of A are all about. I'd recommend spending a few minutes at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Unit
because it is a brief overview and still quite comprehensive. This way, when you open your mouth again to spout off about Taxes, you will have a much better idea of exactly what you are talking about, and you won't look like a complete idiot.
"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." -D. Adams
If you move, they win. If fear makes you move, terror wins.
Depends on whether you play a de_ or cs_ map.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Mod parent up. And give Rudi "Disneyland" Guiliani a hard kick in the butt when you see him for making NYC what it is. I still love the town, and there are still interesting parts but some neighborhoods have lost their charm.
Ah, just wait till the economy isn't so great again...
-b.
Why can't a free society just stockpile information in case it might be needed? I don't see a problem until they start with a person, then find out what he's guilty of. This person's uncle had suspicious behavior, so they dug up everything they had on him. They went to him with everything they had dug up, and asked him to explain the suspicious parts. This is perfectly acceptable in a free society. Problems would be if they found that he might be guilty, so he vanished until they were done with him. Or if one of the DoHS guys was his neighbor, and didn't like him for whatever reason, so he went on a witch hunt in the hopes of getting the uncle sent away and replaced with a better neighbor. What actually happened is acceptable.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
There are simply too many vehicles trying to fit into too small a space in our cities. Even if there are enough parking spaces, there can't be sufficient infrastructure to move those cars from/to those places. Privacy concerns aside, the congestion charge seems a reasonable charge for those who insist on driving through areas that can't support that traffic and has perfectly fine alternatives.
And don't get me started on "school run 5 litre 4x4s"
If this were really happening, what would you think?
If they really want to do this, all they need to do is start making new plates with embedded RFID. They would not need to do anything with the RFID for a while... just distribute the new plates to existing drivers and make sure that all new drivers also get the new plates. The plates should be visually different from the old ones so that it is easy to tell the difference and let people know that past a certain date (maybe 5 years or so in the future) people who are still driving with the old plates will face fines. In a few years nearly everyone would have the new plates. They can then start using the RFID tags in the plates as they see fit.
Of course, this won't do anything to track the plates of people driving who are from out-of-state, but they can still track the raw numbers by measuring the number of cars that pass through major areas and comparing that to the number of cars with RFID plates. My money would be on that number being an insignificant minority in most areas except near state borders, due to the locality principle.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem is that they keep track of the car--even if you don't have EZ-Pass, which makes a record, you have a license plate which is photographed, and then you're billed based on the license plate. So there are feasible alternatives to EZ-Pass, but the privacy concern exists either way.
Public Transit is almost certain to come under surveillance, though. There's a much better argument for recorded surveillance there, at least for a time: the mass transit system is a terribly appealing terrorist target, I should think.
And the system mentioned in the article notes your license plate if you don't have EZ-PAss.
Or at least somehow render the license plate non-readable to cameras, but, readable by humans.
I know Mythbusters showed at the time the products out there for this didn't work....has there been any progress made on this?
I realize the importance of 'not being seen'....I'd like to know ways of not being tracked.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
It certainly is far worse to track people who may be connected to terrorist organizations than to blow up, shoot, and behead innocent people. Far worse! Evil Westerners!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
"New Hampshire does not have a general sales tax or an income tax on an individual's reported W-2 wages. There are taxes on an individual's interest and dividends income, inheritance, business taxes, consumer excise taxes and other taxes as listed below. Fuel taxes are administered by the NH Dept. of Safety Road Toll office at 603-271-2311.
Every state has taxes.Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I wasn't complaining about them making generalisations, I was complaining that the generalisations were incorrect. There is a big difference. Saying that the majority of people in the UK are right-wing is a fact, as I have shown above. When Rupert--right wing--Murdoch says jump, the Labour Party asks: 'how high would you like Mr Murdoch?'
Wow, you think Labour are a left-wing government?! No. They're more right-wing than the Conservatives. Tony Blair privatises more than most Tory governments have done. Look at how the real left-wing gets along with him.
I still stand by my point. In a free society, the public is not be under the all seeing eye of the state.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
You also don't understand that it's not the fact that we aren't invisible that annoys us, but the fact that we are being logged, tagged, tracked. Who holds this information, who buys it?
When you're fired from your job, will your boss tell you it's because he bought traffic data that tells him you often go in the gay part of town? This stuff is creepy, if you have enough brains to think about the implications.
But for those who think that their masters are benevolent, or for those who find the distinction between border crossing and intra-city drives beyond them, there's always your ostrich approach.
You can't take the sky from me...
Godwin's Law, anyone?
Actually, it sounds a heck of a lot like good ol' fashioned bigotry, hidden behind a little bit of xenophobia. As an example, atheism doesn't necessarily breed people like the Nazis any more than it breeds governments like the one in the old USSR, so I don't really see how a religion which advocates peace could be seen as such a catalyst for creating awful regimes. Last I checked, Christianity and Judaism both talk about doing some pretty awful things to people, and we love stomping all over the Earth killing people even though both are supposedly peaceful religions... But wait, it's okay because we don't behead people, and I guess killing women and children is okay, so long as it's done under our flag?
The scariest part of this entire thread seems to be that supposedly rational people are advocating throwing people into a bottomless pit, or having their government play "Big Brother" with them, all in the sake of "save us from the hordes of head-chopping Islamic Fundamentalist Terrorists!" or whatever name the current US administration is parroting for the citizens of the Middle East.
"He may look like an idiot, and talk like an idiot, but don't let that fool you. He really is an idiot." - Duck Soup
In your specific case, as you describe it, congestion charging would indeed achieve nothing for you, except make your life more expensive because the next-best mode alternative is likely to be even worse. And yes ... public transport is notorious for requiring additional travel for access to and egress from the public transport network. And yes ... I know that the British train system suffers from decades of under-investment. And no ... of course you can't be blamed for the poor service level of public transport you describe. The only remaining question is: what would the impact of that congestion charging scheme that you describe be on Birmingham as a whole plus, say, people withing 10 miles of it? In other words ... would the welfare decrease for you and others like you be offset by a welfare increase for others? Chances are that either economic studies of congestion charging and its effects would show a net economic benefit, or that the importance of relieving congestion in the center of Birmingham is rated very highly.
Unfortunately it's darned near impossible to come up with any policies that affect lots of people that aren't plain unreasonable in at least some of the cases. And market-based approaches and overall economic perspectives only consider overall monetary (or monetizable) effects and contain no consideration whatsoever for individual hardship or reasonableness.
Orthodox economic thought would say "You choose this consumption bundle, consisting of residential location, choice of workplace, travel mode etc., which was optimal for you. This apparently includes a residential location away from the big city with a poor accessability. Now external factors (read congestion charging) are changing the cost of that consumption bundle so it's no longer optimal. It's your responsability to re-optimize your consumption bundle, taking transaction cost into account.".
Freely translated as: "If you don't like the price increase of your commute, change home or workplace or both. If those costs outweigh the cost increase of your commute, suck it up.".
This line of thought doesn't contain a lot of empathy, I admit. But it's pure market-oriented thought nonetheless. The underlying idea is that if places like Birmingham can't offer a decent level of accessability for specific commuters, then those people should just move elsewhere. And it's true ... from the perspective of a whole region or even a country, ... but not exactly fair to the individuals involved.
Unless someone has a reason to remember you, they will forget that they saw you walking or driving in public in about 3 seconds. Contrast that to having your exact location, method of transport, and time of travel stored in a permanent, searchable database.
So... if Islamic countries imposed Sharia, would that in your mind make Islam a political ideology?
As to this:
Which countries, other than Islamic, have religious police? Which societies, other than Islamic, support religious mandated murder ( for adultery, for instance ) or dismemberment ( cutting off a thiefs hand ) ?
I've heard the equivalency argument ( that Christianity / Judaism / et. al. are just as bad as Islam ) but I've yet to see an example of a modern society as extreame as Islamic.
A Human Right
Laicity FTW!
You can't take the sky from me...
Where you go in public is absolutely not private data. Whether there's a photo of your car at a toll plaza in Manhattan or in San Francisco is completely irrelevant to any cause you might have. There is no sense of privacy on public roads, and certainly a Manhattan toll plaza is no more an erosion of your privacy than anything else. You're already "logged and tracked" by a number of systems. To think that anyone is going to go through the effort of collating all those data sources to get a comprehensive picture of you is simply paranoid.
The reason the whole system is half-assed is because of absurd people like you. Instead of trying to stop a toll booth from going up (ooooh, scary), why not instead demand that any time someone accesses your data, that that access is also "logged and tracked" so you can see who did it? Like a credit report, your "traffic report" would be available to you, or your medical report. This stuff is creepy, if you have enough brains to think about the implications. No, it isn't. It's just plain paranoid. If you're fired from your job without just cause, there's a little thing called wrongful termination. If they can make a legitimate case that you are incompetent, then that's why you were fired. But for those who think that their masters are benevolent, or for those who find the distinction between border crossing and intra-city drives beyond them, there's always your ostrich approach. There is no distinction. They are arbitrary traffic control points. This has nothing to do with identification via passports, which is a sovereignty and citizenship issue and not relevant here. This is about vehicle tracking, which is identical at, say, the Canadian border and at the bridge toll plaza.
The bottom line is that you disagree with society's decision that law enforcement should be able to collect from toll violators. You don't like that there is a service available that lets you use an ETC transponder instead of carrying coins and cash in your car (in exchange for which an electronic record is formed). You don't like that using a card means that someone has to know what you bought (and where and when). You don't like that in order to have the best possible medical care, that means a medical history has to be collected and shared with the people who are treating you. Well, tough shit. In order to make use of most any service, you have to give up some information.
Don't like toll plazas taking photos of your car? Use the subway. Don't like the library keeping track of which of its books you've taken from them? Buy them. Or just dig a hole in the ground and live in it without interacting with society. Who cares. But don't try to drag society down with you because of your paranoid delusions.
Let me make it first clear, that I do agree that at least from what I see on Fox&Friends Islamic ideals are often in direct opposition to those of America as a society. However, people like to ignore the fact that there are successful progressive societies in which Islam is the predominate religion, there is a separation between church and state, people do not live in caves, and RPG-7s are not distributed to school children.
With that said, if America is succeeding according to the mission it set out upon, it should not matter if its society became predominately christian, jewish, muslim, atheist, wiccan, church of the subgenious, scientologist, zoroastrian, or hindu, because the laws of the state are intended to be separate from those of the religious majority. If that is not the case, then we need to address why that is.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
You can't take the sky from me...
Yep, they can track you: don't drive into Manhattan. It's that simple. That's the whole point of the proposed law, to keep people from driving into Manhattan.
You can walk in, bike in, skate in, helicopter in, take the bus or train (you paid for that MetroCard with cash, right?) and you won't be tracked. There isn't going to be a border checkpoint or anything like when you fly into one of our airports.
But if you choose to use a car, you forfeit this particular slice of your right to privacy.
I'm a paranoid guy, but I'm all for this. Get out and walk like the rest of us if you don't like it.
You can't take the sky from me...
A real home run for the Gummermint! They get to pick your pocket and spy on you simultaneously!
Personally I'm waiting for the flickering camera/monitor thingy in every room!
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is bliss
Trust us, we're the government!
If I kill you it'll be for you're own good!
Achtung Juden!
Amerika Uber Alles!
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
I think you'll find he's making a simple empirical statement. It's impossible to find a country with a majority Muslim population where you have a reasonable degree of freedom. Trying to make a fundamentalist/moderate distinction is irrelevant. Anywhere Muslims are in the majority the extremists have too much power.
The bookstores track me.
Fools like you don't realize that each baby step takes society in the same direction.
You can't take the sky from me...
What about the majority of the people, who, since they are centrist and trying to eke out a living don't read any of those newspapers or really care about what goes on in them unless it impacts their own lives?
Most people watch the evening news or talk to their friends to get that kind of information. This is the silent majority that doesn't really care who rules the country as long as things don't change too much for the worse.
Can you possibly make a plate visible to an eye and invisible to a camera when they're both using the same wavelengths of radiation to detect images? I remember seeing that episode and thinking it was an idiotic idea, but maybe they know something I don't. I don't recall them going into the science of it at all.
Or, one theory was that cameras had to use a flash..if you had some reflective particles that would react to the flash overwhelming the receptors on the camera?
Something like that.
I'd wish for some kind of sophisticated auto targeting system, that would shoot a laser into the camera, and blind it while you passed by it...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Are we reasonable people?
I, like wombat, live in Manhattan. And I too, am more than a little worried about real outcome(s) of implementing a 'congestion pricing' system in NYC with respect to privacy and our rights to be 'secure in our homes'.
Understand that, in PRACTICE, the fourth amendment and the expectation of privacy are legally tested using the assumption of reasonableness - meaning that the private space is defined based on prevailing understanding (read 'common sense') of what is / is not private space.
For example, can one reasonably assume that while at a Mets game (public space) one will not be seen, and that one's uncovered face will not be photographed by other fans, sports photographers, news crews? No, it is not reasonable to assume this, and the Major League Baseball can broadcast your face on TV or on the JumboTron without permission. However, aiming a camera up your skirt and broadcasting your ass for all to see would is NOT permissible precisely 'cause it's private space and would fail test of reasonableness.
Context informs reasonableness (and yes, my example does NOT directly address authority of the government). The thing to remember is that reasonableness is a subjective standard. If the state (or by proxy corporations!) move the boundaries of what constitutes a reasonable understanding of privacy (congestion pricing = we told you we'd be watching you!) then these boundaries become legal when no one objects. And this test also applies to all automated record keeping (cell phone locaation, RFID!) and remote sensing technologies (thermal imaging systems!).
I know that I don't want my movements / associations recorded at will by the government. I assume that most you share a similar and reasonable position. Am I wrong?
Google up on 'expectation of privacy', 'reasonable person test' and 'plain view doctrine' for more. Hell, perhaps then read / re-read the fourth amendment.
Mr. Green.
The Guardian is hardly a counterpart to the Sun. The Grauniad is a newspaper, the Sun is a comic with bits of news thrown in - mainly about so called celebrities.
Murdoch is no fool, what attracts people to the Sun is tits and titillation and that gives him an opportunity to feed them his propaganda. However, you should be aware there are people who know it's bollocks but buy it anyway.
Most people in the UK are right-wing, that's why The Sun has the highest readership of any 'newspaper'.
Er, no.
The Sun has a bare pair of young (18-24 year-old) female breasts on page 3 every day (except Saturday AFAIK), a "problem page" that is as close to porn as they can get away with, a photo story with young females in lingerie, often very close together in pairs, and "news" about all the latest celebrity faux-lesbian cliche incidents.
Apart from the odd hate story regarding foreigners of strange people of varying non-conformist lifestyles (often followed by huge public apologies the next day when they realise that they've misjudged the current state of political correctness), there isn't much news or other content in the Sun.
And don't forget the adverts for Adult *cough* DVDs and phone services in the back.
The real right-wingers read the Daily Mail.
Stick Men
What you said here about theists is more true than anything I have ever read on Slashdot. We could spend all day discussing what religious entities have committed what atrocities in their name all day, but eventually, only one real conclusion can be reached. Whenever people become ingrained with a concept that there is something supreme to their own lives and the lives of their loved ones, it does nothing but breed more misguided fools who are willing to expend their lives and the lives of others for their holy goal. What's worse is that religions that force individuals to constantly be confronted with their religions are the best at building these sorts of climates. For example, Christian churches that are really community compounds where children must all learn together in a nonpublic atmosphere so that the church can maintain power by embedding their ideals into the children at a young age, where adults are required to spend so many hours a week at church engaged in various activities and studies to promote their religious awareness (really just to maintain their brainwashed state). Muslims who are forced to recognize their beliefs and be bound to them 7 times a day, every day of their life are another example. L. Ron-ists who are socially manipulated to buy more books and invest and devote more into their "church" as a means of social and religious acceptance are beginning to fall into the same path. Yes, religion is the opiate of the small minded masses and all such institutions should be destroyed for the good and enlightenment of all.
I'm sure most people who bitch at the notion of having their cars tracked while being in NYC will probably carry a cell phone. Thus, they can already be traced with greater accuracy than their cars as these will have their license plates scanned only every now and then.
where's all that Karma?
The vast majority of people are idiots. The problem is they're too stupid to realize it.
The vast majority of people who think that the vast majority of people are idiots, are idiots. Mostly the ones who think they're being smart by including their own self in that majority of idiots ;-)
You just got troll'd!
Sad thing is, the original source of that comment was from an anti-Islamic rant. As I replaced muslims with 'religious people' and non-muslims with 'atheists', I started finding out that the paragraph read truer and truer. It is quite remarkable that the reasons religious nuts give for hating members of another religion can be said about any religion and in fact about religion in general.
However, although an atheist myself, we ought to realize that religion is pervasive in society and is not necessarily a bad thing. It provides the majority with a moral compass and drives them to lead productive and positive lives. The few members of the different religions (and I suppose there are fundamentalist atheists as well) who gain the most notoriety for extreme acts are sadly considered representative of those religions and religion in general.
Organized religion is arguably detrimental to society, but I have no problems with people having a personal religion. Spirituality -not religion seems to be the order of the day
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
You said, "find it kinda disconcerting that I could one day be confronted by police with an exhaustive list of my movements for the last 10 years."
But that's just the thing; you're disconcerted, and nothing more. It is uncomfortable, feeling like you're constantly watched, under scrutiny and that everything you do can be held against you. But that only underscores what the real problem is; that even though we are putting in place systems to watch (and, perhaps in an ideal world 'secure') the public and public spaces, we are not putting into place anything to oversee those systems. No one is watching the watchers.
In fact, we're fed the line, "You can't know what we're doing because it compromises (national) security." The real uncomfortable truth, though, is that in a democratic society which is becoming ever-more populated, we are not only going to have to accept that the technology which can be used to track individuals will be used to do so, but that if we want that to not be a problem, we must rise to the challenge of putting into place a check and a balance for that new power being utilized by our government.
I think, though, it's a mistake to try and escape to a non-'Western Axis' country. I think it was Mohamed who said (and I'm paraphrasing, because I don't speak Arabic), "One should act, and if one cannot act, one should speak, and if one cannot speak, only then should one simply think. But thinking is the weakest form doing right." He was talking about the necessity to speak and, more importantly, do the things that are required to bring around a just society. Simply thinking, 'This is wrong' or 'I am made uncomfortable by this' is not enough; one has to speak to that and to act upon that. I think that removing yourself from the arena is therefore the worst thing that can happen; Americans are underexposed to Islamic culture as it is. Separation isn't the answer, integration is. When we are living side by side with Muslims it is going to be a lot harder to vote for someone who is eager to "threaten to bomb Mecca and Medina" in the 'war on terror'.
The solution is really to balance the power equation. You can run - for now, anyway - or you can demand your right as a human and moreover as a citizen; your right to know who is accessing that information, and how they're using it, and what other information they're accessing - or not accessing.
[Ego]out
First of all, lets go over some terrorism we've been exposed to in the last thirty years that aren't Muslim; The IRA, Timothy McVeigh, Christians who shoot abortion doctors, Japanese who gas subways - and lets not get into what sort of fear-mongering, heavy-handed threats and bombing that the current Administration has engaged in which could easily classify as 'terrorism'.
I mean, clearly you're flame-baiting - else why are you anonymous? But it's a bald-faced lie that Islam is any more terrorist than any other demographic. Propagating that lie is as immoral as any act as I can think of. I mean, really, think for yourself - stop listening to the propaganda that is being fed to you.
And before you respond; Islam is not at all about violence, or about hate. In fact, if you knew anything at all about it's origins, you'd probably recognize the perversion that it's being put through to serve the ends of people who don't have religious enlightenment in mind at all, but their own lamentable ends.
[Ego]out
As much as I agree with most of the points you are making, I don't think you help your arguments much by constantly going back to the effects of the Islamic religion hundreds or thousands of years ago. These are really not very relevent to the problems we are facing today. Similarly, if we were to talk about Christians and their effect on the modern world, I wouldn't find it very useful to bring up stuff that happened a long time ago.
For what it's worth, I have gotten to know a few Muslim friends and they are all cool people that are as decent as anyone else I have met. In particular I find their devotion to a "pure" lifestyle (no drinking, smoking, swearing, etc) commendable, if not because I agree necessarily with the premise, at least because I admire their committment and self-control.
One friend, however, has a grudge against Israel and I felt like he wasn't really able to talk about the topic objectively; he constantly demonized Israel in our discussion of the topic of Israel versus Palestine. But he is from Palestine originally so I suppose he can't be expected to see things too objectively.
My point in our discussion was that I think that Isreal and Palestine are both very culpable in their shared problems, but my friend refused to admit that the Palestineans (sp?) ever did anything wrong.
That's really the only thing I felt like I could fault him on though. He was really an outstanding person otherwise.
Bangladesh has 100M people, of which 85M are Muslim. It is a secular parliamentary democracy. That sounds like a 'reasonable degree of freedom' to me. In short; your view of the Muslim world is a bit biased.
[Ego]out
This is the rational that got us into this whole damn mess in the first place, confusing whole swaths of people for small groups.
Some westerners do want to destroy the Muslim way of life, thus all westerners are a threat. See the fallacy?
Every group has a lunatic fringe who is hell bend on destroying all out groups. Does this make the superculture bad? No, it means the lunatic fringe is bad. Though I agree that the superculture should be trying to quash the violent, ignorant, morons within it too. So all muslims do own their extremists to a limited extent. But then again us Americans own our warmongering, bigoted, fundamentalists too, and we're doing nothing to stop them either.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
You're making an entirely fallacious connection by saying that the religion is the primary source of their societies. That is a lot like saying the entirety of the United States culture was a result Protestantism. We have more freedoms due to our form of government - which explicitly separated out the Church. We have more wealth for reasons that have nothing to do with religion - and little to do with our outstanding moral character. We have gone all over the world taking what we want to make ourselves richer; it is a great surprise anyone still likes us, given the travesties of poverty we've inflicted. Islamic morality is actually quite appealing, if you look at it - but it has little to do with the 'fundamentalist' values we see spoken about on TV. It is certainly more appealing than a society who can't get their voting straight, who let convicted criminals of national-scope crimes get away without a sentence, who pollute their environment and the environments of others with nary a care. I don't think you can point to Western morality as our saving grace.
[Ego]out
No, but no one has blown anything up in the name of Sartre or Plato, either. Plenty of things have been blown up for 'God', though, in many forms - because God is a thought, an abstraction, an entity without material form. And thus the ultimate in things that can be corrupted to serve any purpose. Buddha was real, and preached a practical philosophy.
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You don't think the class warfare going on in the US isn't oppressive? Where rich kids are allowed - aided, even - in going to wealthy schools, while poor kids are relegated to dumps and an educational future that is next to useless? You think that the corporate execs of Enron were looking to help the common man, their employees, have a permissive future by embezzling their money and leaving them without recourse? Perhaps you think things like the Patriot Act give us more options?
There are many types of freedom; I am free, right now, to walk anywhere. But I have to pay for a car - I'm limited financially. I am limited by my education, by my age, by my skin color, by any number of things, and these little limitations can add up to oppression. Would I be less free elsewhere? Sure, but lets not lie to ourselves and pretend that we, in America, are as free as we could possibly be.
But, you know, some of my ancestors were probably slave owners. Some of them probably slaughtered some demographic at some point. Some of them were probably Vikings or Romans or somesuch. I definitely don't fight for the glory of Pax Romana - and would fight against it, if it were even feasible. It's not unnatural for people to change what they want. It's also not unnatural to say, 'My ancestors died for this cause, but I choose to live for the fruits of that cause'. One of the fruits of freedom is that you don't have to kill to enforce your viewpoint, you have to educate. And perhaps, for the French, they deem that the highest virtue is accommodation, rather than oppression of a choice that people are making.
There is nothing wrong with promoting Islam. There is everything wrong with promoting oppressive regimes. But what person in this world can say they aren't doing that? The U.S. - and all it's taxpayers - gave Saddam the money and the arms to fight Iran, and oppress his people. We are doing the same with the Saudis, the Egyptians, the Israelis, the Pakistanis - even while our own government takes our rights away. Long story short; Let he who is without fault throw the first stone.
[Ego]out
Just beacuse another entity watches, doesnt make it right.
We as a regular US citizen should be able to expect a certian level of anonymity ( which is a guranteed right BTW ). Unless you are under court ordered surveillance, not having the government tracking when/where you go or what you did when you get there is a reasonable expectation.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The Americans are beheading people now? I know all my life they have been blowing up and shooting (as well as occasionally burning alive) innocent people but never heard much about beheading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
"Muslim people have committed heinous acts of terror in the name of Islam against Western targets, and have come right out and said there will be no peace until all the infidels are gone. It's not that Westerners feel threatened by Muslims, it's that we are threatened by Muslims. Muslims are threatening our lives, our society, our way of life. Is it a surprise that you don't feel welcome?"
Well, once upon a time there was Inquisition so Christian people have committed heinous acts of terror in the name of Christianity against Western targets, and have come right out and said there will be no peace until all the infidels are gone. It's not that Westerners feel threatened by Christians, it's that we are threatened by Christians (Inquisition has not gone away). Christians are threatening our lives, our society, our way of life. Is it a surprise that you don't feel welcome?
Maybe you forgot the meaning of the word "some"? Maybe it has more to do with the fact that they are terrorists than with the fact they are muslims? I for one know for certain some muslims that are far from terrorits and I can say I know (not personally) some Christians that *are* terrorists. The circumnstace that I'm worried about is not if they are Christians or Muslims, but if they are terrorists or not.
So you are saying - lets track all the people in the event someone will be a terrorist? Let's hinder all our citizen movements to keep them safe. How was that saying - "Thoe who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - or something like that.
Can you define a terrorist?
Hmm.. yesterdays freedom fighters are todays terrorists!
Be careful when the definitions change, you may end up in one of them.
All the security measures can't keep you safe from someone who really wants to get to you. All they do is hinder you, and what is worse they can be used against you when the next scape goat changes.
And about westerners... evil... all people are evil, the degree only changes from your point of view.
That is an important distinction. Belief != religion. Points well taken.
"Sure. You are of the same lot as the whites who don't want blacks in their neighborhood, heterosexuals who are afraid they may catch Gay if a homosexual lives near them, and men who understand that women are subservient to them. You need the world to be divided into neat classes and you know that the bucket you are in is the best. In fact, your group (gender, culture, race, sexual orientation, religion, political party, etc) is the only correct one and has inherent dominance over the lesser groups."
Gender is not ideology.
Race is not ideology.
Sexual orientation is not ideology.
Religion IS political ideology (its basis in superstition does not change that) and I don't object to Islam simply because it is "different" from my atheism.
I object to it because it is practiced in a manner that, where it predominates, restricts freedoms I DEMAND from a society. It does not offer me anything I want, does not offer me more freedom, and can not in any way improve my country.
"you are opposed to the organized religion but lumping the faith with it in your fear and ignorance."
Faith results in faith-based action. I've seen the results, so I judge the faith.
If you disagree, then I defy you to show why I or anyone else not Islamic should welcome it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Come on, own up. You've never actually met a Muslim, have you? You're only going by the stuff you see on that TV of yours, aren't you?
I hate printers.
Can I also ask you, is it possible to find a country where the majority of the country is Muslim, where the government is not either a) a de-facto dictatorship or b) a puppet regime of another, more powerful state ?
I hate printers.
"However, although an atheist myself, we ought to realize that religion is pervasive in society and is not necessarily a bad thing. It provides the majority with a moral compass and drives them to lead productive and positive lives."
Like, oh well, burning witches, or taking hearts off their bodies, or turning down people that says Earth is not the center or the Universe?
*Ethics* is what gives people "the moral compass" that drives society. You, being a declared atheist should know better: it is not God the one that tells people not to kill other people, but *you*. At most, you, once decided not to kill other people because of their thoughts, call then God into your side as an authority argument. But it is not God the one that makes you not to kill people (as there is as many people killing others "in the name of God" than not); it's you.
"The few members of the different religions (and I suppose there are fundamentalist atheists as well) who gain the most notoriety for extreme acts are sadly considered representative of those religions and religion in general."
Well, most religions considered word-by-word as they are, expresly ask you for such extreme acts. It's only when religion is not religion anymore that you will find a "sensible" society: if God asks you for such an such, who are you to say "well, this I'll do, but that I won't"; it's God no less asking you going each Sunday to church than asking to lapidate to death in case of blasphemy; who are you to say "I'm a moderate theist, so I will believe Almighty God when He says I shall go church on Sunday, but I won't take Him seriously when He say I shall lapidate the blaspheme"? It's all or nothing, for God's shake! (pun intended).
But once you take that path, that God is not to be taken seriously on such and such "unimportant" details, why not follow it in its entirity and just not take God seriously *at all*? After all, you can't be wrong, not at least for a long time: if you are making God ungry disbelieving Him, He will bring upon you a flooding or a notable rain of sulphur and fire, so you can't misunderstand His mightyness, so why not try?
I'll ignore your misuse of the Bolshevik term, as it just colours you as a rabid "the Commies are coming" nutjob. In fact, Islam is the *only* religion that specifies system of government that embodies democratic principles. It is the reason Muslims want unity of the church and state, because we believe that a godless state is a state in the hands of the whims of men. Modern Middle Eastern nations are *not* Islamic, they are de facto dictatorships, propped up by more powerful geopolitical bodies. The Islamic idea of "shura" is actually the foundational concept behind the corporate board meeting. Islamic government died about 100 years ago, and was replaced by a bunch of crackpot loonies sponsored by the Allied powers who won WW1 and divided up Africa and the Middle East for their own colonial purposes. Muslims do not want Saudi to be the center of the world, we want the West to stop sponsoring the Saudi government. If the US stop supporting the Saudi government and other Middle Eastern nutjobs with military hardware, we, the Muslim people, will do the rest for you.
I hate printers.
Just out of interest, do you actually know what percentage of people held in Gitmo are Muslim? I Here's another question, how many people there are actually non-Muslim US citizens? I'll let you find that out for yourself, as homework
I hate printers.
Thanks, CNN/Fox
Right, and the tax dollars you pay go to the US war machine, which is used to "pre-emptively" wage war and to secure foreign resources (read: steal) in the name of national security. That makes you, personally, a threat to pretty much every citizen of the third world. Double standards, anyone?
I hate printers.
He sent it to a distribution org, which sent it to a regional distribution center, who sent it to a community group. I don't think connections can get much more distant than that.
The point I'm making, you dolt, is that less than a month after he sent the meat (we do it once a year), he was presented with transcripts and records going back 10 years.
If you think that random searches and arbitrary detention is fine, perhaps you agree with the RIAAs proposed legislation allowing them to remotely install spyware on peoples' PCs to search for music, which essentially is an unwarranted search. On a related note, what the *hell* are you doing on Slashdot?
And you think I'd be moving out to spite my fellow citizens here or find a better life? You certainly have a twisted world view.
I hate printers.
Don't they already track people entering Manhattan through any of the bridges or tunnels because they are all terrorist targets? They already know you're in there.
We are the 198 proof..
Ahem. Excuse me, but why O why is the parent post a "troll", moderators? I think it makes perfect sense to levy the road taxes on the people who are using them.
Trust not a man who's rich in flax / His morals may be sadly lax
Now i might be held accountable for my actions!
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
LOL +1 funny for you
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
*Ethics* is what gives people "the moral compass" that drives society. You, being a declared atheist should know better: it is not God the one that tells people not to kill other people, but *you*. At most, you, once decided not to kill other people because of their thoughts, call then God into your side as an authority argument. But it is not God the one that makes you not to kill people (as there is as many people killing others "in the name of God" than not); it's you While I understand your point (people justify hatred and violence with religion), I still believe that while people do have 'ethics', religion gives them a reason to be ethical. More so when a person doesn't know what is ethical. Then they have a safety net of turning to religion for guidance. And sure enough, you have misguided nuts roaming around there, but the majority of religious people still lead 'good' lives. Trouble is when a religious person gets into power and makes decisions for the entire society based on a literal translation of outdated texts to suit his own ends.
Which brings me to... Well, most religions considered word-by-word as they are, expresly ask you for such extreme acts. It's only when religion is not religion anymore that you will find a "sensible" society: if God asks you for such an such, who are you to say "well, this I'll do, but that I won't"; it's God no less asking you going each Sunday to church than asking to lapidate to death in case of blasphemy; who are you to say "I'm a moderate theist, so I will believe Almighty God when He says I shall go church on Sunday, but I won't take Him seriously when He say I shall lapidate the blaspheme"? It's all or nothing, for God's shake! (pun intended). While religions ask for/subtly suggest extreme acts, most people do not indulge in them in today's society. I think civilization can be somewhat measured by freedom of thought and in today's society, flogging a man wouldn't be acceptable in developed and even developing countries even if religion mandates it. The real danger is the ease with which this freedom of thought can be shut down and people manipulated in the name of religion, but I am sure that with time, more and more people will realize that their so called God is something that each one defines for him/herself and has nothing to do with authority figures. But once you take that path, that God is not to be taken seriously on such and such "unimportant" details, why not follow it in its entirity and just not take God seriously *at all*? After all, you can't be wrong, not at least for a long time: if you are making God ungry disbelieving Him, He will bring upon you a flooding or a notable rain of sulphur and fire, so you can't misunderstand His mightyness, so why not try? Human nature. If the society places heavy penalties for stoning women, people will stop doing it hoping that God will understand that they couldn't. Think of a traffic analogy. Just because you break speed limits on yoru way to work every single day does not mean that you run red lights and drive on the shoulder if you're in a hurry.
All said, a personal religion is therefore something I do not oppose. Nobody does stupid things becasue they 'talk to God every night'. They do stupid things when others interpret the religion for them with ulterior motives like greed for money/power. It's religious groupthink that's dangerous. Having an imaginary friend in the sky is mostly safe ('cept for the odd psychopath) and very necessary for some people.
Cheers!
Atheist: Buddhist in a Prius
"You statement seems akin to saying "I hate Christians because they burn alive people whom they suspect as witches.""
No, because that hasn't happened in 200 years, whereas muslims are still chopping off hands for stealing and cutting out tongues for lying.
Fundamentalist Islam is a big problem, and I realize that not all muslims are fundamentalist. But ask any true muslim about the plane crashes on 9/11 and they'll say "So what."
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Race is not ideology.
Sexual orientation is not ideology.
Religion IS political ideology... Religion is no more and no less an ideology than the others. What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be white, black, or hispanic? What does it mean to be gay? What does it mean to be Christian? To some people the answers are very basic and straightforward. To others, they involve much more. I don't object to Islam simply because it is "different" from my atheism. I object to it because it is practiced in a manner that, where it predominates, restricts freedoms I DEMAND from a society. It does not offer me anything I want, does not offer me more freedom, and can not in any way improve my country. You object to it precisely because it is a different religion than your own. Your own militant anti-Islamic viewpoint would greatly restrict others' freedom of religion, one of the primary measuring sticks of freedom. Faith results in faith-based action. I've seen the results, so I judge the faith.
If you disagree, then I defy you to show why I or anyone else not Islamic should welcome it. You fail to understand the difference between personal faith and organized religion. Nearly all major religions, at a personal level, boil down to the golden rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
The really sad thing here is that you are no different than those you look down upon. You believe you are morally and intellectually superior to the barbaric Muslims, yet you simply walk a different branch of the same path. You generalize and demonize all Muslims, lumping them into a poorly stereotyped definition that suits you. In your own society, you would banish Muslims, based not upon the individual person but upon your understanding of their religion.
Weak Analogy
Somehow, I excelled at geography, however, I refuse to acknowledge that you can split a sphere into east and west >_
Ezekiel 23:20
I refuse to split a sphere in east and west too. But with this huge stony sphere under my feet, I have no problem at all. Neither do cartographers.
(Somehow I'm still amazed that the GP post of mine was modded "informative" instead of "troll". Sorry for trolling, anyways.)
So say we all
Odd don't you think that this all started seriously for my friends in the UK during the tenure of another man named Blair? Personally I am happy I do not yet consider myself a "subject", even if the reality is that I am "subject" to more intrusions upon my liberty with each passing day.
Wabi-Sabi
Matthew
I still believe after your long winded response that I am still correct in that the States are funded by the taxes in which we pay.