WRT to GPS trackers, they will just get less specific about the place, and more specific about what they are looking for.
Looking for a single paper out of hundreds is very privacy infringing if they have to go through all of them.
Looking for a location that someone goes, and is seen going to, is not very privacy infringing at all. It's privacy infringing enough to now require a warrant, but still not very.
And, incidentally, a lot of the specificity of the address doesn't have anything to do with the fourth amendment rights of the person being search, and is more related to making sure they're searching the correct house, simply because all too often police have made very very stupid mistakes. Likewise, I imagine the courts will require the car to be specified as exactly.
What if you see them putting the GPS on your car, after they have obtained a warrant? Are you allowed to take it off?
Yes, you can take off the device, just like you could take off any other part of your car. You can probably even destroy it if you want.
There's actually a guy who discovered a tracker, destroyed it, was arrested by the police for destroying their property, and he won, but an important part of the case was that there was no identifying mark on the tracker identifying it as police property.
They knew he knew it was a police tracker, but could not prove it. (And he, of course, didn't have to testify if he did or not.) Hence, legally, he could do whatever he wanted to it, just like he could to any other part of his car.
So, unless they've started labeling them 'property of the police', you can destroy them if you want, or just claim ownership of them. I mean, as far as you know, it's just some part of your car. They have to prove you knew it was owned by someone else.
If it is labeled as owned by someone else, it is legally 'mislaid property', which is when the owner put something somewhere on purpose and didn't come back to get it. (As opposed to, for example, dropping it, which is 'lost property'.)
You are required to turn 'mislaid property' over the owner of the premise it's found on. Aka, the owner of the car. After which, the owner of the car has to keep it for a specific amount of time in case the person comes back to claim it. If the owner does not come back to claim it in a specific amount of time, the car owner now legally owns it.
See your state laws for your requirements, and if you have any obligation to attempt to find the owner, or notify the police. (Hilariously, if you are required to notify the local police, some police departments are so discombobulated you could probably notify the people in charge of keeping track of lost property you'd found some GPS tracker owned by 'the police', and that would never get forward to anyone who would actually claim it.)
But, regardless of whether you know it's owned by someone else, and what the laws say about mislaid property, you can certainly remove it. It's your car, you can unattach anything from it you want. (Although you'll get a ticket if you remove headlights or mufflers or whatever and then attempt to operate it on a public road.;)
But now there are a lot of people flabberghasted I'd be saying this about official police stuff. Well, legally, once you know about a warrant, you can't interfere with it, so if you knew the police had installed it on your car as part of a legal search, you couldn't remove it.
But this requires them actually informing you of the warrant, which they obviously don't do for secret tracking. Otherwise, the law allows you to assume they absentmindedly installed a GPS tracker in your car while peering under your car, and forgot to pick it up when they stood up.
Does this mean, if you're driving a stolen car, and they don't seize it, and they don't have a warrant not to seize it, you can sue them for violating your civil rights?;)
I laugh, but actually police probably do need some sort of court-ordered justification (It probably wouldn't be called a 'warrant'.) to let a non-owner drive off in a stolen car if they, for some reason, wanted to do that.
And, just as important, you can actually observe people following you in cars.
It's like audio recordings. The police can follow you around in public and listen to what you say, and write it down. (And I'd argue they should even be able to record what they can personally hear, but that's neither here nor there.)
This is because you have no expectation of privacy from someone when they're standing close enough to hear you!
They cannot, however, stand across a public park and point a directional mic at you without a warrant. Even if you're in public and they're in public. They can hide in the bushes (You don't have an expectation of privacy from bushes that can conceal people unless you've checked there's no one there.), but they can't record you from 100 feet away.
So that should extend to cars. People can actually determine if cars are following them. People who do detect that can attempt to no longer be followed by various maneuvers, people can simple choose to go wherever they're trying not to reveal. They have no expectation of privacy from other cars on the road, but they know when those cars are there.
But with a GPS tracker, they could easily end up in a circumstance when they did have an expectation of privacy, even if they are, strictly speaking, on public property. 'Public property' is just shorthand for publically-owned property...it doesn't mean you have no expectations of privacy there. (Or no one would ever use public restrooms.)
You can't be required to self-incriminate yourself with a warrant, either, you loon. Your entire analogy is stupid...you aren't disclosing your location, a police device is.
It's like arguing that mug shots are self-incrimination, because 'you' are disclosing what you look like. No, you look like something, and you are at a specific location, either of which anyone can plainly see, and the police have recorded those things as evidence.
Now, the courts have held that tracking you in secret is like tape recording you in secret, which needs a warrant. This is entirely logical. If there are no obvious people there who could hear you, you have an expectation of privacy of what you say, despite you being 'in public'. If you deliberately lose people who are following your vehicle, or made sure no one is in the first place, you have an expectation of privacy in your location, despite you being 'in public'.
And with that expectation of privacy is the requirement that the government get a warrant to overcome it.
But has nothing at all to do with self-incrimination.
You can describe a place without stating the location or address.
For example, if you think someone was the bank robber you're looking for, and hide the money, you can describe the place as 'the place the money is hidden'. That is what the warrant is trying to find.
It's essentially the same as how they do normal search warrants...they don't have to specify, for example, which murder weapon they're going to be looking for and seize. They just say they're looking for anything connected with that specific murder, including a weapon that is approximately X size and shape.
The fourth just means that warrants have to state what their purpose is and what the police intend to find. It doesn't mean they have to specify exactly what they will find and where.
And before asking 'how vague is allowed', well, that's essentially up to the judge, who do have rules and guidelines they follow when issuing warrants.
It sounds extremely silly and pointless when stated, but the point is that it go before a judge with that information on it is the actual check, not that it 'have the information' at all.
Judges tend to let police trade off broadness...i.e, if you want a wide net that lets you seize a lot of stuff, you have to specify a small location. The ultimate example being the area of a crime scene, which police can search with no stated items being looked for, although that's not actually via a 'warrant'.
Likewise, if you want to search all of someone's house, you damn well better have some sort of specific thing you're looking for, and not just general evidence. And you can't look where that thing can't be found...if you're looking for a crowbar, you can't look inside a file folder.
I don't know what the rules or standards are going to be for GPS trackers. The argument before was that you had no expectation of privacy of where you drove, because people could follow you. But the courts apparently realized that, in the real world, you can actually detect when people follow you, so you do have an expectation when you know they aren't.
I just said the same thing on here. It frankly just baffles me.
'Someone walking in on you doing that at work', while sounding just embarrassing, is actually a really good way to end up getting arrested.
So I'm forced to conclude they're not doing that, which just raises more questions. Some sort of self-pleasuring hedonist would actually make sense, but that can't be right.
There are really only three reasons for looking at porn in public:
They can't do it at home. Which is why people do it at the public library, because they don't have an internet connection, but anyone who's working in an office with a computer can afford a computer and DSL almost by definition.
Or they are porn addicts. Just like any pleasurable activity, people can become psychologically dependent on porn...but surely that many people can't have one to porn, and having to do while at work, instead of waiting until they get home, is extreme excessive impossible levels of dependency.
Compare a gambling addiction, much the same...you rarely see even the most hardcore addicts gambling once a day. Yes, they might get 'sucked in' and go on gambling binge for several days, but it's like a monthly occurrence, not an hourly one.
Or a gaming addiction...yes, people might spend every minute of free time gaming, but usually can go to a job without having to game in the middle of it.
Of course, addictions work differently, but this addiction is just strange and implausible.
No, we are left with the third option: They are total fucking morons, who simply do not consider the future in anyway whatsoever, and do whatever they want, at any moment.
Indeed. If someone is looking at that much porn at work, we can conclude a few things:
1. The workplace is in serious danger of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
2. A lot of people appear to have jobs that require them to do nothing, so perhaps some sort of reduction in personnel is in order, and certainly some sort of actual goals and progress reporting should be implemented.
3a. The employee is a moron who don't understand he'll likely get fired if caught doing that, when he could just do it at home.
3b. Or he's an actual pornography addict who can't go eight hours without it. (Yes, they do exist.)
The 3a people have always astonished me. I mean, yes, some people are actually unable to afford an internet connection, which explains surfing for porn at the library and whatnot.
But anyone in a office job with an internet connection can afford a damn DSL connection at home, but instead choose to risk their job by looking at it at work. And, in fact, risk imprisonment if they do what people often do while looking at porn...in fact, I'm not really sure what the point of collecting and viewing a bunch of porn if that is not possible in your environment.
I'm more worried about the first two, considering this, as taxpayers, we'd be the ones paying for lawsuits and for wasteful employees.
The only type of attack that I think would work in this situation would be a man-in-the-middle attack, which is very unlikely as well.
Actually, those attacks are some of the most relevant in Europe, where they've been doing that sort of stuff for a while.
Although, strictly speaking, it's more 'man at your end', where they simply put trojans on systems that wait for you to, entirely legitimately, log into your account, and then simply send some money their way from your now-authenticated web browser.
Hey, dumbass. Ice melting on land and flowing into the ocean will, in addition to raising sea levels, cause lower ocean temperatures, which, will result in more ocean ice on average. (Yes, all that water is slightly above freezing, and hence won't freeze by itself, but it will allow ocean ice floating in it to stay frozen longer.)
In fact, the amount that the oceans are cooling compared to the amount that the air is warning is a pretty good indicator of the amount of ice on land that is melting into the ocean.
I swear to god, some people are totally unable to figure out how this whole 'temperature' thing works, or how different parts of the system work.
Tell me, does your refrigerator make your house hotter, or colder? Your stove? Ice you cart in from outside? What if you set that ice on the stove, or in the refrigerator?
Stay the fuck away from making any statements about thermodynamics until you actually understand basic concepts in it.
Yup, several places are already going away. See the post below yours.
But everyone able to dismiss them by saying 'Oh, that land didn't go totally under the ocean. The only only rose a few inches, and then the beach, for some strange reason, eroded away in a storm. If the beach was still there, it would still be above the ocean.'
Which is totally ignoring the fact that this is how things disappear under the waves, and will be unless we're willing to pave things right up the water.
Things do not disappear under the ocean, as in, they stay in one place and the ocean slowly inches up. No, they start getting hit with waves that go higher and higher on average, that causes more wear and tear and eventually takes away the land. That's why we have beaches or rocks at every single ocean...because other stuff disappears until the ocean hits beaches or rocks. If it starts going over the existing beaches or rocks, it will start 'eating' things again. It will start eating beaches anyway, as the weird equilibrium of sand arriving and leaving that is 'a beach' gets misaligned. (OTHOH, some beaches might get bigger. Who knows?)
So something can be a foot above see level, the ocean can go up three inches, and, suddenly, that thing is gone, baffling all.
How this is going to work with, say, Manhattan, is unknown. People are delusionally imagining the ocean slowly rising, creeping up streets unless we build tiny tiny dikes...but in the real world,
I suspect that, at some point, the damn ocean is going to break into the underground areas via erosion of some point that no one ever suspected, and the whole island will quickly fall apart.
Latitude - cereal crops are adapted to the amount of sunlight received at temperate latitudes. At the polar latitudes, it is dark for the whole winter, and then quickly progresses to long periods of day. Cereal crops will not grow in those light conditions
A lot people totally forget about this, assuming that plant growth is entirely due to temperature, and we can just move all crops 500 miles north.
Not only, as you pointed out, do they need the correct amount and timing of light and the correct soil, but they also need the correct amount of water.
I mean, heck, I live in north Georgia. North Georgia and south Georgia have basically the same average temperature, with it being just slightly colder in the north. Usually about five degrees or so.
They do not, however, have anywhere near the same weather patterns, because south Georgia is flat, and north Georgia is the southern-most part of the Smokey mountains. They also do not have the same soil, south Georgia used to be under the ocean.
South Georgia is vast farms, north Georgia is not. Same temperature, different situation. Raise north Georgia's temperature five degrees, it's not magically turning into south Georgia.
Granted, under climate change, the amount of precipitation is going to change...but not in any predictable way.
We're going to have to build new energy alternatives anyway, because, completely independent of climate change, we're running out of oil.
In fact, starting the change now away is probably less expensive than waiting till the last minute, especially since we don't know when the 'last minute' is. (Could be five years, could be thirty-five.)
Please note by 'running out of oil', I actually mean 'until oil is so expensive normal people can't afford to operate vehicles on it or purchase power made from it'. At some point, it will be cheaper to produce a new electric car for less than it would cost to drive 100 miles in a gasoline car, or a new nuclear plant for how much it would cost to operate an existing oil based on for a year, and well before that point, we'll all have switched over.
I make that clarification because some people think I'm talking about the hypothetical point in time we've squeezed every drop out of the earth, which will probably be never....in 2500, long after we've all switch from oil, some billionaire is going to be driving his gasoline-power motorcycle at $400 a gallon, produced from the sole operating oil well on the planet, but that is not actually relevant to anything.
Of course the irony is that the people benefiting from the status quo have always whined about the cost, even when at the time it was trivial. The sad fact is, that since AGW is a positive feedback loop, the longer we have delayed taking steps to slow/reverse the process, the harder and more expensive it becomes.
That, really, is the issue. There are people out there who are saying things like 'We have to balance what we should do to stop this with how much effect the changes themselves would do.'
That POV would carry a lot more weight if every damn suggestion that could conceivable cost the slightest bit of time or effort, for the last two decades, hadn't been shot down. The right hasn't been saying 'Okay, we can do this, but we're going to hold off on this for now', they're saying 'NO!!!!!!!'.
For example, raising car MPGs. We didn't bother to do that for two damn decades.
Despite every other country in the world doing it (Hence it wouldn't make us less competitive.), despite slowly raising the MPGs fuel standard had
not had any measurable effect on the economy, despite the fact is was wildly successful in one decade by almost doubling fuel efficiency, we just decided to stop. We got a conservative congress, and a conservative Democratic president, and we stopped.
Well, stopping did have an economic effect. A fairly large one. Namely, it killed our car companies, because people wanted high MPGs and started buying Hondas and Toyotas.
I'm not saying we should have psychically figured out people would want this, and force our car companies to do it for that reason, but I am saying that just because a car company says 'Being forced to do X will hurt us' doesn't mean they have the slightest damn idea if that's true or not, and what they actually mean is 'This will hurt our profits in the short term, aka, hurt the stock price, aka, hurt my bonuses'.
Meanwhile, in China, they're already ten MPGs higher than us in average MPGs. Doesn't appear to have hurt their economy any.
Every single suggestion, every tiny change to slightly help thing, even in cases where the change has already been proven to work and not had any discernible effect on the economy, had been fought by the right. They don't get to talk about 'compromise' and 'going slowly', they have forfeited that right due to their total lack of trustworthiness in that issue.(1)
Anyone who wants to seriously discuss that is going to have to come to the other side, and be okay with, for example, 75% of the changes, but then argue that perhaps we need to work slow on the 25%, because actual logical discussion can show how they might be a bad idea.
1) This is, in fact, the right's modus operandi, and once people understand it people opposing them will get a lot more done. They constantly scream no to any tiny change, and then, when the dam finally bursts, they suddenly want to compromise to a point that they, until recently, had violently objected to. They want to 'go slow', somehow forgetting that the left had proposed that solution a decade ago, and now we're not really at the point we can 'go slow'. The same thing is happening right now in health care.
The people who write the software haven't figured out that we need a way to tell it to look ahead and pre-load the maps.
xGPS on a (jailbroken) iPhone can do this. It uses Google maps, and you can specify areas in advance for it to cache.
Although annoyingly it's via 'hilight a rectangle' instead of it figuring it out from a pre-plotted route. But you can also do this via computer and download it to your phone, although I've never figured out the point of that. (Maybe people without wifi but with a computer?)
But you can also tell it to cache everything it gets, and follow the route yourself in advance. (I wish they'd add a 'fly route' mode like Google Earth, which would make this simpler.) Although, if you do this, IIRC, you have to remember to actually clear your cache occasionally, or any amount of traveling will fill your phone.
And, yes, I also wonder how GPS evidence works in court. I've only had occasion to use xGPS a few times, but I do know it's incorrect at my house, placing me a good eight miles away most of the time. That's not even vaguely close!
But oddly enough, once I turned it on in town, where it is correct, and drove to my house, glancing at it along the way to see at what point it went so horrible wrong...and it happily proceeded to correctly locate me the entire distance, and continued to do so once I got there! It's only if I start using it at my house that it's wrong. (One day I need to turn it on as I leave and see when it become correct.)
Hell, don't worry about that. It doesn't need to be secret. They can only search data going through the border at that time.
You can have a computer that boots up and says 'Enter URL of encrypted file', downloading and running the file when you do so, and they, in theory, can't do a thing about it, because they can only search the device you actually have in your hand. They can't make you download data onto the device for them to search!
Heck, you can have one that says 'Press enter to download and run virtual machine', with no password at all, and, legally, you aren't taking that data through customs, so legally they can't search that data. Might want to password protect that just in case, though.
All these plans about smuggling data, or transferring it over the net, are a bit silly when you take into account the fact that they can only search what you are physically possessing and carrying over the border. They can't demand passwords to data not on the system, even if the system is clearly set up to use those things.
Strictly speaking, you could probably hide an micro-SD card somewhere in a car where even dismantling the entire car would not result in someone finding it. Ever. It's too small and the pieces of the car too big.
Likewise, strip search won't find micro-SD cards, because you can hide them inside the seams in your clothing.
As I have suggested in the past WRT to smuggling stuff on an airplane, and suggest now for this:
All security measures should have a bounty for violating them. You should be able to go to some government office, buy for $5 a specific thing you're 'not allowed' to get through security, like a gun-shaped piece of metal, and attempt to carry that through security. We can make them all orange with FAKE on them so there's no confusion with actual security risks.
If you get it through, you get $50 when you demonstrate this and explain how you did it. If you get caught, they take it away and you're out the $5.
And they'd have to publish the stats. And they have to, after six months, publish the actual methods used. (I.e., they have six months to fix any specific hole.)
If enough people succeed, the entire attempt to stop that thing from getting through security is ended. Because clearly anyone who wants to can get that thing through anyway.
In this case, as the entire premise of 'blocking data' from crossing the border is inherently nonsensical, people would just FTP and walk into the government office, point to the data on a remote server, and collect their reward.
Likewise, this would stop the idiotic 'remove shoes' and the 'no liquids' rules, as any idiot can figure out ways around those very specific rules.
For liquids, of course, it's easy enough to simply have a lot of people and collect the liquid on the other side in the restroom. They can even buy bottled water for a non-suspicious container.
For the shoe bomber, the whole premise is smuggling X amount of materials in without it going through the x-ray, but, rather, carried on your person through the metal detector. There's obviously pockets, and fake stomachs, and strapped to legs inside long pants, but I point out that there's somewhere that women can easily pad out with more material than would fit in a shoe sole which would not arouse much suspicion.
The problem was that the change from 2.4 to 2.5, by the end of its lifetime, was so large it was practically the change from 95 to NT.
They then promptly went too far in the other direction and decided there wouldn't be a dev kernel at all, which has resulted in no code-cleanup projects, or, in fact, any huge projects at all.
Sometimes you need a huge change in the kernel. There's no way around it. They need to make sure that they don't do what happened with 2.5 and 2.6, where they made like five huge changes at once, but current system requires every single release to be 100% stable, and that means every single release will be essentially like the previous.
Yes, I'm aware that there are temporary 'forks' in each version, like there's a 2.6.29-blah where the new blah subsystem is being tested, and that patch is kept up for each kernel version, and will eventually be merged in.
That's all well and good for moderately sized changes, and small changes, of course, get approved all at once. But it rather leaves large changes out in the cold, especially ones that touch multiple systems and hence can't really be approved via the normal process.
And people don't think that code reuse and cleanup are large projects, but let's pretend that, for example, the CRC32 code wasn't reused all over the kernel. To get it in a separate function (like it is now) requires writing the function, a small change, and then you have to track down everywhere that uses it and delete a dozen lines of codes. In probably 40 places, across multiple subsystems, which in theory requires dozens of different patches submitted to the maintainer of each subsystem.
In the past, you'd do that in the dev kernel, and you'd submit it to Linus, and Linus was a lot more willing to alter people's subsystems without their permission in dev. Without dev, he doesn't have anywhere to dump a bunch of changes on someone and say 'Sorry, here's some changes, hopefully they don't break things too much'.
Now, in theory, you could simply write that function, and submit a patch or two, and hope that each subsystem guy goes out and does the changes on his own once he sees it exists. But it's your 'itch', not his, and he probably won't. So all you've accomplished is add something that one or two drivers use, and everyone else still uses their own, which makes the kernel even more bloated, and just confuses everyone.
Or, to put it simply: You can't make big changes without a) either breaking stuff, or b) going very slowly, so slowly that most changes don't happen. Without a dev kernel, you can't break stuff.
In fact, the only big changes I see are in memory allocation, which is a single system with a very active maintainer and hard to really break, and in ext4, which is still 'dev' even in the stable kernel. And, of course, new drivers, but those are each small changes, no matter how many total there are.
Or at least, that's what I think is happening. I don't really pay a lot of attention to kernel development anymore, just sometimes read changelogs.
I'm afraid that hardware detection may well be required, because critical services (such as NFS exports or MySQL) which rely on mounted partitions in most large-scale environments must have those directories already mounted before running 'exportfs' or before starting the relevant services, or they can create incredible chaos.
That's just one of the ways that trying to make a distro that works on both servers and desktop is a bad idea.
But, anyway, I wasn't talking about 'hardware initialization', I was talking about detecting changes in the hardware profile. 90% of that stuff happens automatically in the kernel and module loader, but I'm talking about the nonsense that distros do for the last 10%, attempting to, for example, notice that there's a new scanner and set up in SANE, or a new printer in the right place, or giving a new network card some configuration, or whatever. A fine thing to run each boot, a stupid thing to run during startup.
While there are a lot of time-saving measures that could be implemented on startup, attempting to load drivers at different times almost certainly isn't worth it, and I wasn't trying to suggest that.
I completely agree with you about material being in the wrong init levels frequently, and the need for dependency management. (RedHat has some old mistakes in handling wifi devices _after_ network initialization, which causes real chaos.)
My major problem is trying to figure out what, in rcS.d, actually is needed, and in what order. Because stupidly rcS.d apparently means both 'services necessary to start the system' and 'services that should run in all runlevels'. On ubuntu, it comes with stuff like udev, without which the system can't function, and stuff like ntpdate, which isn't even needed at all.
At the minimum, we need a 'stuff will get the system booted to where you can log into a VT' directory, and a 'stuff to run at all runlevels' directory.
And, incidentally, 'single user' mode is somewhat stupid, too. I've never really understood why I can't have VTs in that, or what the point of that is over init=/bin/sh. (Yes, we used to have problems with/dev/ being read only, but now most distros have/dev/ as a tmpfs.)
Runlevels are a rather outdated concept at this point in time anyway. All that's really needed is 'shit is broken, leave it read-only and give me a prompt' and 'normal running'. Heck, we've even stopped using different ones for adding X now, essentially every desktop just starts into X. (And those that don't just use the tried and true 'startx'.)
And forcing network file systems such as NFS or CIFS to wait until the network is running would make complete sense.
Well, yes, but do you even need the network up before starting X? Usually not.
Now, because this is Linux, the system should come with moderately good defaults, that you can override either way. You want to wait until the network is up before X starts? There should be a checkbox for that somewhere.
I.e., we don't just need dependencies, we need, to some extent, user-configurable ones.
init scripts especially are rather idiotic, and it's a testament to how much crap Windows is doing that Linux distros manage to load in roughly the same time.
It's especially dumb when things that could start after the system has finished booting, like samba and ssh, instead start first.
Likewise, driver detection. Um, no, you don't do that on startup, unless it's a first-time boot. You do that when the system is running, which means the very first time someone boots with that fancy new sound card the startup sound isn't going to come out it...but the other sounds should. That tiny tradeoff saved 15 seconds every boot.
And even just crap like cleaning out/tmp and remounting network drives and CD-ROMs and etc. That's background stuff.
That, right there, is the problem. For some totally unknown reason, Linux distributions have no 'deferred startup' script area. You either get run on startup, and everyone waits for you, or get stuck in cron when you only need to run once.
Or, hell, some sort of dependency based system, where you list what services you want up as fast a possible (On most desktops this would be X Windows and Gnome/KDE, but for servers it might be mysql and Apache, or postfix and courier, or whatever.) and each service has a list of things it needs. And then you should also list services that should come up when the system has finished that, in a non-time critical manner.
Redhat tries at this, but fails. Debian doesn't even try.
I know, I've working on a Ubuntu XBMC box. I would really like XBMC to startup and then have ssh and samba, and, hell, the virtual consoles start later. I've about given up on this concept, though.
It doesn't help that no distinctions seem to be made between 'these scripts must execute, at startup, in this order, to create a functioning and mounted system', and scripts that run later that are just services. Yes, there's rcS.d vs. rc2.d (or whatever), but for some reason, non-required services sometimes get put in rcS.d, probably because no one's ever bothered to set hard and fast rules what they mean by 'system'. (Hint...a sound daemon is not required to have a working system. Hardware detection is not required to have a working system. Mounting the fucking/dev partition is required.)
Of course, Linus can't do anything about all this except frown at the distro people.
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Like I said, you can trade off on broadness.
WRT to GPS trackers, they will just get less specific about the place, and more specific about what they are looking for.
Looking for a single paper out of hundreds is very privacy infringing if they have to go through all of them.
Looking for a location that someone goes, and is seen going to, is not very privacy infringing at all. It's privacy infringing enough to now require a warrant, but still not very.
And, incidentally, a lot of the specificity of the address doesn't have anything to do with the fourth amendment rights of the person being search, and is more related to making sure they're searching the correct house, simply because all too often police have made very very stupid mistakes. Likewise, I imagine the courts will require the car to be specified as exactly.
What if you see them putting the GPS on your car, after they have obtained a warrant? Are you allowed to take it off?
Yes, you can take off the device, just like you could take off any other part of your car. You can probably even destroy it if you want.
There's actually a guy who discovered a tracker, destroyed it, was arrested by the police for destroying their property, and he won, but an important part of the case was that there was no identifying mark on the tracker identifying it as police property.
They knew he knew it was a police tracker, but could not prove it. (And he, of course, didn't have to testify if he did or not.) Hence, legally, he could do whatever he wanted to it, just like he could to any other part of his car.
So, unless they've started labeling them 'property of the police', you can destroy them if you want, or just claim ownership of them. I mean, as far as you know, it's just some part of your car. They have to prove you knew it was owned by someone else.
If it is labeled as owned by someone else, it is legally 'mislaid property', which is when the owner put something somewhere on purpose and didn't come back to get it. (As opposed to, for example, dropping it, which is 'lost property'.)
You are required to turn 'mislaid property' over the owner of the premise it's found on. Aka, the owner of the car. After which, the owner of the car has to keep it for a specific amount of time in case the person comes back to claim it. If the owner does not come back to claim it in a specific amount of time, the car owner now legally owns it.
See your state laws for your requirements, and if you have any obligation to attempt to find the owner, or notify the police. (Hilariously, if you are required to notify the local police, some police departments are so discombobulated you could probably notify the people in charge of keeping track of lost property you'd found some GPS tracker owned by 'the police', and that would never get forward to anyone who would actually claim it.)
But, regardless of whether you know it's owned by someone else, and what the laws say about mislaid property, you can certainly remove it. It's your car, you can unattach anything from it you want. (Although you'll get a ticket if you remove headlights or mufflers or whatever and then attempt to operate it on a public road.;)
But now there are a lot of people flabberghasted I'd be saying this about official police stuff. Well, legally, once you know about a warrant, you can't interfere with it, so if you knew the police had installed it on your car as part of a legal search, you couldn't remove it.
But this requires them actually informing you of the warrant, which they obviously don't do for secret tracking. Otherwise, the law allows you to assume they absentmindedly installed a GPS tracker in your car while peering under your car, and forgot to pick it up when they stood up.
The police do not 'seize' people, they arrest them.
And do not need a search warrant to do so.
In fact, there is an expectation of seizure.
Does this mean, if you're driving a stolen car, and they don't seize it, and they don't have a warrant not to seize it, you can sue them for violating your civil rights? ;)
I laugh, but actually police probably do need some sort of court-ordered justification (It probably wouldn't be called a 'warrant'.) to let a non-owner drive off in a stolen car if they, for some reason, wanted to do that.
And, just as important, you can actually observe people following you in cars.
It's like audio recordings. The police can follow you around in public and listen to what you say, and write it down. (And I'd argue they should even be able to record what they can personally hear, but that's neither here nor there.)
This is because you have no expectation of privacy from someone when they're standing close enough to hear you!
They cannot, however, stand across a public park and point a directional mic at you without a warrant. Even if you're in public and they're in public. They can hide in the bushes (You don't have an expectation of privacy from bushes that can conceal people unless you've checked there's no one there.), but they can't record you from 100 feet away.
So that should extend to cars. People can actually determine if cars are following them. People who do detect that can attempt to no longer be followed by various maneuvers, people can simple choose to go wherever they're trying not to reveal. They have no expectation of privacy from other cars on the road, but they know when those cars are there.
But with a GPS tracker, they could easily end up in a circumstance when they did have an expectation of privacy, even if they are, strictly speaking, on public property. 'Public property' is just shorthand for publically-owned property...it doesn't mean you have no expectations of privacy there. (Or no one would ever use public restrooms.)
You can't be required to self-incriminate yourself with a warrant, either, you loon. Your entire analogy is stupid...you aren't disclosing your location, a police device is.
It's like arguing that mug shots are self-incrimination, because 'you' are disclosing what you look like. No, you look like something, and you are at a specific location, either of which anyone can plainly see, and the police have recorded those things as evidence.
Now, the courts have held that tracking you in secret is like tape recording you in secret, which needs a warrant. This is entirely logical. If there are no obvious people there who could hear you, you have an expectation of privacy of what you say, despite you being 'in public'. If you deliberately lose people who are following your vehicle, or made sure no one is in the first place, you have an expectation of privacy in your location, despite you being 'in public'.
And with that expectation of privacy is the requirement that the government get a warrant to overcome it.
But has nothing at all to do with self-incrimination.
You can describe a place without stating the location or address.
For example, if you think someone was the bank robber you're looking for, and hide the money, you can describe the place as 'the place the money is hidden'. That is what the warrant is trying to find.
It's essentially the same as how they do normal search warrants...they don't have to specify, for example, which murder weapon they're going to be looking for and seize. They just say they're looking for anything connected with that specific murder, including a weapon that is approximately X size and shape.
The fourth just means that warrants have to state what their purpose is and what the police intend to find. It doesn't mean they have to specify exactly what they will find and where.
And before asking 'how vague is allowed', well, that's essentially up to the judge, who do have rules and guidelines they follow when issuing warrants.
It sounds extremely silly and pointless when stated, but the point is that it go before a judge with that information on it is the actual check, not that it 'have the information' at all.
Judges tend to let police trade off broadness...i.e, if you want a wide net that lets you seize a lot of stuff, you have to specify a small location. The ultimate example being the area of a crime scene, which police can search with no stated items being looked for, although that's not actually via a 'warrant'.
Likewise, if you want to search all of someone's house, you damn well better have some sort of specific thing you're looking for, and not just general evidence. And you can't look where that thing can't be found...if you're looking for a crowbar, you can't look inside a file folder.
I don't know what the rules or standards are going to be for GPS trackers. The argument before was that you had no expectation of privacy of where you drove, because people could follow you. But the courts apparently realized that, in the real world, you can actually detect when people follow you, so you do have an expectation when you know they aren't.
Um, fair warning, circletimessquare is a rather absurdist and well-known troll.
Now, he might be serious this time, he actually does participate in serious conversations, but, anyway, there's your warning.
I just said the same thing on here. It frankly just baffles me.
'Someone walking in on you doing that at work', while sounding just embarrassing, is actually a really good way to end up getting arrested.
So I'm forced to conclude they're not doing that, which just raises more questions. Some sort of self-pleasuring hedonist would actually make sense, but that can't be right.
There are really only three reasons for looking at porn in public:
They can't do it at home. Which is why people do it at the public library, because they don't have an internet connection, but anyone who's working in an office with a computer can afford a computer and DSL almost by definition.
Or they are porn addicts. Just like any pleasurable activity, people can become psychologically dependent on porn...but surely that many people can't have one to porn, and having to do while at work, instead of waiting until they get home, is extreme excessive impossible levels of dependency.
Compare a gambling addiction, much the same...you rarely see even the most hardcore addicts gambling once a day. Yes, they might get 'sucked in' and go on gambling binge for several days, but it's like a monthly occurrence, not an hourly one.
Or a gaming addiction...yes, people might spend every minute of free time gaming, but usually can go to a job without having to game in the middle of it.
Of course, addictions work differently, but this addiction is just strange and implausible.
No, we are left with the third option: They are total fucking morons, who simply do not consider the future in anyway whatsoever, and do whatever they want, at any moment.
Indeed. If someone is looking at that much porn at work, we can conclude a few things:
1. The workplace is in serious danger of a sexual harassment lawsuit.
2. A lot of people appear to have jobs that require them to do nothing, so perhaps some sort of reduction in personnel is in order, and certainly some sort of actual goals and progress reporting should be implemented.
3a. The employee is a moron who don't understand he'll likely get fired if caught doing that, when he could just do it at home.
3b. Or he's an actual pornography addict who can't go eight hours without it. (Yes, they do exist.)
The 3a people have always astonished me. I mean, yes, some people are actually unable to afford an internet connection, which explains surfing for porn at the library and whatnot.
But anyone in a office job with an internet connection can afford a damn DSL connection at home, but instead choose to risk their job by looking at it at work. And, in fact, risk imprisonment if they do what people often do while looking at porn...in fact, I'm not really sure what the point of collecting and viewing a bunch of porn if that is not possible in your environment.
I'm more worried about the first two, considering this, as taxpayers, we'd be the ones paying for lawsuits and for wasteful employees.
The only type of attack that I think would work in this situation would be a man-in-the-middle attack, which is very unlikely as well.
Actually, those attacks are some of the most relevant in Europe, where they've been doing that sort of stuff for a while.
Although, strictly speaking, it's more 'man at your end', where they simply put trojans on systems that wait for you to, entirely legitimately, log into your account, and then simply send some money their way from your now-authenticated web browser.
Hey, dumbass. Ice melting on land and flowing into the ocean will, in addition to raising sea levels, cause lower ocean temperatures, which, will result in more ocean ice on average. (Yes, all that water is slightly above freezing, and hence won't freeze by itself, but it will allow ocean ice floating in it to stay frozen longer.)
In fact, the amount that the oceans are cooling compared to the amount that the air is warning is a pretty good indicator of the amount of ice on land that is melting into the ocean.
I swear to god, some people are totally unable to figure out how this whole 'temperature' thing works, or how different parts of the system work.
Tell me, does your refrigerator make your house hotter, or colder? Your stove? Ice you cart in from outside? What if you set that ice on the stove, or in the refrigerator?
Stay the fuck away from making any statements about thermodynamics until you actually understand basic concepts in it.
Yup, several places are already going away. See the post below yours.
But everyone able to dismiss them by saying 'Oh, that land didn't go totally under the ocean. The only only rose a few inches, and then the beach, for some strange reason, eroded away in a storm. If the beach was still there, it would still be above the ocean.'
Which is totally ignoring the fact that this is how things disappear under the waves, and will be unless we're willing to pave things right up the water.
Things do not disappear under the ocean, as in, they stay in one place and the ocean slowly inches up. No, they start getting hit with waves that go higher and higher on average, that causes more wear and tear and eventually takes away the land. That's why we have beaches or rocks at every single ocean...because other stuff disappears until the ocean hits beaches or rocks. If it starts going over the existing beaches or rocks, it will start 'eating' things again. It will start eating beaches anyway, as the weird equilibrium of sand arriving and leaving that is 'a beach' gets misaligned. (OTHOH, some beaches might get bigger. Who knows?)
So something can be a foot above see level, the ocean can go up three inches, and, suddenly, that thing is gone, baffling all.
How this is going to work with, say, Manhattan, is unknown. People are delusionally imagining the ocean slowly rising, creeping up streets unless we build tiny tiny dikes...but in the real world, I suspect that, at some point, the damn ocean is going to break into the underground areas via erosion of some point that no one ever suspected, and the whole island will quickly fall apart.
Latitude - cereal crops are adapted to the amount of sunlight received at temperate latitudes. At the polar latitudes, it is dark for the whole winter, and then quickly progresses to long periods of day. Cereal crops will not grow in those light conditions
A lot people totally forget about this, assuming that plant growth is entirely due to temperature, and we can just move all crops 500 miles north.
Not only, as you pointed out, do they need the correct amount and timing of light and the correct soil, but they also need the correct amount of water.
I mean, heck, I live in north Georgia. North Georgia and south Georgia have basically the same average temperature, with it being just slightly colder in the north. Usually about five degrees or so.
They do not, however, have anywhere near the same weather patterns, because south Georgia is flat, and north Georgia is the southern-most part of the Smokey mountains. They also do not have the same soil, south Georgia used to be under the ocean.
South Georgia is vast farms, north Georgia is not. Same temperature, different situation. Raise north Georgia's temperature five degrees, it's not magically turning into south Georgia.
Granted, under climate change, the amount of precipitation is going to change...but not in any predictable way.
We're going to have to build new energy alternatives anyway, because, completely independent of climate change, we're running out of oil.
In fact, starting the change now away is probably less expensive than waiting till the last minute, especially since we don't know when the 'last minute' is. (Could be five years, could be thirty-five.)
Please note by 'running out of oil', I actually mean 'until oil is so expensive normal people can't afford to operate vehicles on it or purchase power made from it'. At some point, it will be cheaper to produce a new electric car for less than it would cost to drive 100 miles in a gasoline car, or a new nuclear plant for how much it would cost to operate an existing oil based on for a year, and well before that point, we'll all have switched over.
I make that clarification because some people think I'm talking about the hypothetical point in time we've squeezed every drop out of the earth, which will probably be never....in 2500, long after we've all switch from oil, some billionaire is going to be driving his gasoline-power motorcycle at $400 a gallon, produced from the sole operating oil well on the planet, but that is not actually relevant to anything.
Of course the irony is that the people benefiting from the status quo have always whined about the cost, even when at the time it was trivial. The sad fact is, that since AGW is a positive feedback loop, the longer we have delayed taking steps to slow/reverse the process, the harder and more expensive it becomes.
That, really, is the issue. There are people out there who are saying things like 'We have to balance what we should do to stop this with how much effect the changes themselves would do.'
That POV would carry a lot more weight if every damn suggestion that could conceivable cost the slightest bit of time or effort, for the last two decades, hadn't been shot down. The right hasn't been saying 'Okay, we can do this, but we're going to hold off on this for now', they're saying 'NO!!!!!!!'.
For example, raising car MPGs. We didn't bother to do that for two damn decades.
Despite every other country in the world doing it (Hence it wouldn't make us less competitive.), despite slowly raising the MPGs fuel standard had not had any measurable effect on the economy, despite the fact is was wildly successful in one decade by almost doubling fuel efficiency, we just decided to stop. We got a conservative congress, and a conservative Democratic president, and we stopped.
Well, stopping did have an economic effect. A fairly large one. Namely, it killed our car companies, because people wanted high MPGs and started buying Hondas and Toyotas.
I'm not saying we should have psychically figured out people would want this, and force our car companies to do it for that reason, but I am saying that just because a car company says 'Being forced to do X will hurt us' doesn't mean they have the slightest damn idea if that's true or not, and what they actually mean is 'This will hurt our profits in the short term, aka, hurt the stock price, aka, hurt my bonuses'.
Meanwhile, in China, they're already ten MPGs higher than us in average MPGs. Doesn't appear to have hurt their economy any.
Every single suggestion, every tiny change to slightly help thing, even in cases where the change has already been proven to work and not had any discernible effect on the economy, had been fought by the right. They don't get to talk about 'compromise' and 'going slowly', they have forfeited that right due to their total lack of trustworthiness in that issue.(1)
Anyone who wants to seriously discuss that is going to have to come to the other side, and be okay with, for example, 75% of the changes, but then argue that perhaps we need to work slow on the 25%, because actual logical discussion can show how they might be a bad idea.
1) This is, in fact, the right's modus operandi, and once people understand it people opposing them will get a lot more done. They constantly scream no to any tiny change, and then, when the dam finally bursts, they suddenly want to compromise to a point that they, until recently, had violently objected to. They want to 'go slow', somehow forgetting that the left had proposed that solution a decade ago, and now we're not really at the point we can 'go slow'. The same thing is happening right now in health care.
It's a bit absurd to complain that the Democrats can't solve every single problem at once.
And it's actually questionable if cap and trade will pass the Senate at all anyway.
The people who write the software haven't figured out that we need a way to tell it to look ahead and pre-load the maps.
xGPS on a (jailbroken) iPhone can do this. It uses Google maps, and you can specify areas in advance for it to cache.
Although annoyingly it's via 'hilight a rectangle' instead of it figuring it out from a pre-plotted route. But you can also do this via computer and download it to your phone, although I've never figured out the point of that. (Maybe people without wifi but with a computer?)
But you can also tell it to cache everything it gets, and follow the route yourself in advance. (I wish they'd add a 'fly route' mode like Google Earth, which would make this simpler.) Although, if you do this, IIRC, you have to remember to actually clear your cache occasionally, or any amount of traveling will fill your phone.
And, yes, I also wonder how GPS evidence works in court. I've only had occasion to use xGPS a few times, but I do know it's incorrect at my house, placing me a good eight miles away most of the time. That's not even vaguely close!
But oddly enough, once I turned it on in town, where it is correct, and drove to my house, glancing at it along the way to see at what point it went so horrible wrong...and it happily proceeded to correctly locate me the entire distance, and continued to do so once I got there! It's only if I start using it at my house that it's wrong. (One day I need to turn it on as I leave and see when it become correct.)
Hell, don't worry about that. It doesn't need to be secret. They can only search data going through the border at that time.
You can have a computer that boots up and says 'Enter URL of encrypted file', downloading and running the file when you do so, and they, in theory, can't do a thing about it, because they can only search the device you actually have in your hand. They can't make you download data onto the device for them to search!
Heck, you can have one that says 'Press enter to download and run virtual machine', with no password at all, and, legally, you aren't taking that data through customs, so legally they can't search that data. Might want to password protect that just in case, though.
All these plans about smuggling data, or transferring it over the net, are a bit silly when you take into account the fact that they can only search what you are physically possessing and carrying over the border. They can't demand passwords to data not on the system, even if the system is clearly set up to use those things.
Strictly speaking, you could probably hide an micro-SD card somewhere in a car where even dismantling the entire car would not result in someone finding it. Ever. It's too small and the pieces of the car too big.
Likewise, strip search won't find micro-SD cards, because you can hide them inside the seams in your clothing.
As I have suggested in the past WRT to smuggling stuff on an airplane, and suggest now for this:
All security measures should have a bounty for violating them. You should be able to go to some government office, buy for $5 a specific thing you're 'not allowed' to get through security, like a gun-shaped piece of metal, and attempt to carry that through security. We can make them all orange with FAKE on them so there's no confusion with actual security risks.
If you get it through, you get $50 when you demonstrate this and explain how you did it. If you get caught, they take it away and you're out the $5.
And they'd have to publish the stats. And they have to, after six months, publish the actual methods used. (I.e., they have six months to fix any specific hole.)
If enough people succeed, the entire attempt to stop that thing from getting through security is ended. Because clearly anyone who wants to can get that thing through anyway.
In this case, as the entire premise of 'blocking data' from crossing the border is inherently nonsensical, people would just FTP and walk into the government office, point to the data on a remote server, and collect their reward.
Likewise, this would stop the idiotic 'remove shoes' and the 'no liquids' rules, as any idiot can figure out ways around those very specific rules.
For liquids, of course, it's easy enough to simply have a lot of people and collect the liquid on the other side in the restroom. They can even buy bottled water for a non-suspicious container.
For the shoe bomber, the whole premise is smuggling X amount of materials in without it going through the x-ray, but, rather, carried on your person through the metal detector. There's obviously pockets, and fake stomachs, and strapped to legs inside long pants, but I point out that there's somewhere that women can easily pad out with more material than would fit in a shoe sole which would not arouse much suspicion.
If X Windows is one of the things run in parallel, it's essentially what I'm talking about anyway.
The problem was that the change from 2.4 to 2.5, by the end of its lifetime, was so large it was practically the change from 95 to NT.
They then promptly went too far in the other direction and decided there wouldn't be a dev kernel at all, which has resulted in no code-cleanup projects, or, in fact, any huge projects at all.
Sometimes you need a huge change in the kernel. There's no way around it. They need to make sure that they don't do what happened with 2.5 and 2.6, where they made like five huge changes at once, but current system requires every single release to be 100% stable, and that means every single release will be essentially like the previous.
Yes, I'm aware that there are temporary 'forks' in each version, like there's a 2.6.29-blah where the new blah subsystem is being tested, and that patch is kept up for each kernel version, and will eventually be merged in.
That's all well and good for moderately sized changes, and small changes, of course, get approved all at once. But it rather leaves large changes out in the cold, especially ones that touch multiple systems and hence can't really be approved via the normal process.
And people don't think that code reuse and cleanup are large projects, but let's pretend that, for example, the CRC32 code wasn't reused all over the kernel. To get it in a separate function (like it is now) requires writing the function, a small change, and then you have to track down everywhere that uses it and delete a dozen lines of codes. In probably 40 places, across multiple subsystems, which in theory requires dozens of different patches submitted to the maintainer of each subsystem.
In the past, you'd do that in the dev kernel, and you'd submit it to Linus, and Linus was a lot more willing to alter people's subsystems without their permission in dev. Without dev, he doesn't have anywhere to dump a bunch of changes on someone and say 'Sorry, here's some changes, hopefully they don't break things too much'.
Now, in theory, you could simply write that function, and submit a patch or two, and hope that each subsystem guy goes out and does the changes on his own once he sees it exists. But it's your 'itch', not his, and he probably won't. So all you've accomplished is add something that one or two drivers use, and everyone else still uses their own, which makes the kernel even more bloated, and just confuses everyone.
Or, to put it simply: You can't make big changes without a) either breaking stuff, or b) going very slowly, so slowly that most changes don't happen. Without a dev kernel, you can't break stuff.
In fact, the only big changes I see are in memory allocation, which is a single system with a very active maintainer and hard to really break, and in ext4, which is still 'dev' even in the stable kernel. And, of course, new drivers, but those are each small changes, no matter how many total there are.
Or at least, that's what I think is happening. I don't really pay a lot of attention to kernel development anymore, just sometimes read changelogs.
I'm afraid that hardware detection may well be required, because critical services (such as NFS exports or MySQL) which rely on mounted partitions in most large-scale environments must have those directories already mounted before running 'exportfs' or before starting the relevant services, or they can create incredible chaos.
That's just one of the ways that trying to make a distro that works on both servers and desktop is a bad idea.
But, anyway, I wasn't talking about 'hardware initialization', I was talking about detecting changes in the hardware profile. 90% of that stuff happens automatically in the kernel and module loader, but I'm talking about the nonsense that distros do for the last 10%, attempting to, for example, notice that there's a new scanner and set up in SANE, or a new printer in the right place, or giving a new network card some configuration, or whatever. A fine thing to run each boot, a stupid thing to run during startup.
While there are a lot of time-saving measures that could be implemented on startup, attempting to load drivers at different times almost certainly isn't worth it, and I wasn't trying to suggest that.
I completely agree with you about material being in the wrong init levels frequently, and the need for dependency management. (RedHat has some old mistakes in handling wifi devices _after_ network initialization, which causes real chaos.)
My major problem is trying to figure out what, in rcS.d, actually is needed, and in what order. Because stupidly rcS.d apparently means both 'services necessary to start the system' and 'services that should run in all runlevels'. On ubuntu, it comes with stuff like udev, without which the system can't function, and stuff like ntpdate, which isn't even needed at all.
At the minimum, we need a 'stuff will get the system booted to where you can log into a VT' directory, and a 'stuff to run at all runlevels' directory.
And, incidentally, 'single user' mode is somewhat stupid, too. I've never really understood why I can't have VTs in that, or what the point of that is over init=/bin/sh. (Yes, we used to have problems with /dev/ being read only, but now most distros have /dev/ as a tmpfs.)
Runlevels are a rather outdated concept at this point in time anyway. All that's really needed is 'shit is broken, leave it read-only and give me a prompt' and 'normal running'. Heck, we've even stopped using different ones for adding X now, essentially every desktop just starts into X. (And those that don't just use the tried and true 'startx'.)
And forcing network file systems such as NFS or CIFS to wait until the network is running would make complete sense.
Well, yes, but do you even need the network up before starting X? Usually not.
Now, because this is Linux, the system should come with moderately good defaults, that you can override either way. You want to wait until the network is up before X starts? There should be a checkbox for that somewhere.
I.e., we don't just need dependencies, we need, to some extent, user-configurable ones.
If you can't get your external hard drive working in Linux, you're lying.
init scripts especially are rather idiotic, and it's a testament to how much crap Windows is doing that Linux distros manage to load in roughly the same time.
It's especially dumb when things that could start after the system has finished booting, like samba and ssh, instead start first.
Likewise, driver detection. Um, no, you don't do that on startup, unless it's a first-time boot. You do that when the system is running, which means the very first time someone boots with that fancy new sound card the startup sound isn't going to come out it...but the other sounds should. That tiny tradeoff saved 15 seconds every boot.
And even just crap like cleaning out /tmp and remounting network drives and CD-ROMs and etc. That's background stuff.
That, right there, is the problem. For some totally unknown reason, Linux distributions have no 'deferred startup' script area. You either get run on startup, and everyone waits for you, or get stuck in cron when you only need to run once.
Or, hell, some sort of dependency based system, where you list what services you want up as fast a possible (On most desktops this would be X Windows and Gnome/KDE, but for servers it might be mysql and Apache, or postfix and courier, or whatever.) and each service has a list of things it needs. And then you should also list services that should come up when the system has finished that, in a non-time critical manner.
Redhat tries at this, but fails. Debian doesn't even try.
I know, I've working on a Ubuntu XBMC box. I would really like XBMC to startup and then have ssh and samba, and, hell, the virtual consoles start later. I've about given up on this concept, though.
It doesn't help that no distinctions seem to be made between 'these scripts must execute, at startup, in this order, to create a functioning and mounted system', and scripts that run later that are just services. Yes, there's rcS.d vs. rc2.d (or whatever), but for some reason, non-required services sometimes get put in rcS.d, probably because no one's ever bothered to set hard and fast rules what they mean by 'system'. (Hint...a sound daemon is not required to have a working system. Hardware detection is not required to have a working system. Mounting the fucking /dev partition is required.)
Of course, Linus can't do anything about all this except frown at the distro people.