In the early days of the patent office, they used to require a working model.
This is actually how the Smithsonian Institution first started. The Patent Office was overflowing with gizmoes and once they dropped the requirement for a working model, they unloaded all that junk to the Smithsonian...
Only anglo-saxon have that neurotic fear of government, to the point of giving up the security a normal government yields in order to get the freedom...
To be gobbled-up by a richer guy, or killed by a rogue driver...
A cop has a brain that understands more than a few simple variables, and five senses that can detect some kinds of extenuating circumstances - like the collision you had to speed up to escape from, or the dying friend in the passenger seat of the car in which you are rushing to the hospital.
A black-box recording can be examined in court in case of contestation, and if so, will be examined with far more brainpower a cop is able to muster.
And your ignoring the fact that simply because it happens in public does not give the government the right to monitor every aspect of it.
And what bizzare law prevents the government from looking after the public welfare???
Sigh. I really shouldn't feed the trolls, but since you apparently can't see the difference, trains and planes take fee paying customers, who are putting their lives in the hands of the driver/pilot of that vehicle. I'm fully in favour of buses and taxis having black boxes. Private vehicles are different, though.
How is that? Like buses and taxis, they operate on PUBLIC roads. Why should the standards of operation of private vehicles should be different than those of public ones?
What is the compelling reason for having different expectation of safety from private vehicles in regards to public vehicles?
Sorry, but your argument is just a rewording of the tired assertion that "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide" rhetoric that has been used to violate people's human rights for all of time.
The Montreal motorist betrayed by the truth has been sent to a facility which offers the possibility of those lacking responsibility to rethink their stance on this moral predicament.
Nah, he won't rethink his stance. He'll just be Bubba's bitch.
conservation of momentum give the approximate speed at the time of the colision, as does the magnitude of the damage.
It's not always that easy. There can be hidden defects.
Case in point: a friend of mine works for the railroad. One day, he coupled his train to an automobile-carrier car, whose coupler buckled and this jacked-up the car which then derailed, damaging beyond repair many of the 15 Cadillacs that were on board.
Of course, he was nailed for "coupling at excessive speed", because "what else could make the car derail". Luckily for him, he went to the car repair shop with his camera, and took pictures of the coupler shank, which was cracked (not a recent crack: it was rusted to the core).
Those pictures enabled him to walk away from the hearing with a small reprimand (for being a smartass that was right) instead of losing his job.
I can get angry about it when people start suggesting that black boxes shoulld be mandatory, and that's the next logical step in this case.
Of course they should be. No one blinks at the mention of having event recorders installed on trains and planes; why should'nt they be installed on automobiles?
Driving a car is not a right, but a privilege exerced in public view. Why should you then have any expectation of privacy whilst driving a car? To hide the fact that you are driving in a way that endangers public safety?
You can be pulled over anytime by a cop whenever he sees you driving like a dumbfuck, so what's the difference if it is a blackbox that nails you? Because you can't get away with it anymore?
What DO YOU have so special as to be able to break the law and endanger other people???
Besides, blackboxes are coming anyways. Some years back, in a computer project management class, we had to pick a law-enforcement theme computer project (the teacher has a day job with the $FEDERAL_POLICE_AGENCY).
Bad driving being my major pet peeve, I naturally proposed a computerized driving monitor that would automatically ticket drivers whenever they break traffic laws, thus freeing police for more useful work such as cracking down on criminal spammers.
Well, lo and behold, when he saw the proposal, he curtly refused it with "this is coming anyways"...
So, it's only a matter of time before Big Brother will be your co-pilot...
What defines sexually explicit?? There are some cases where it is obvious and some where it is iffy.
Fashion changes. I just distovered that those now-fashionable wrestling boots just turn me on like nothing I've seen before (more than blue spandex!!!) when worn by a chick...
I enjoy my privacy, too, but too much anonymity can be a bad thing. We all enjoy an abundance of anonymity on the net, and look how people behave: rampant copyrighht infringement, unregulated drug sales, rampant cheating (which has destroyed the value of online gaming for many), spam, truly offensive porn (not just harmless pinups, which I wholeheartedly endorse, but really deviant crap that caters to whole communities of bottom feeders), hate sites, etc...
After spewing so much croporate totalitarian bullshit, you must be voting for Dubya, eh?
People study where the best departments and research centers are. The US attracted many of the world's top students during the 70's, 80's and 90's, because in some fields, research was most advanced. Part of the reason was because not only was Europe devastated in WWII but many of its researchers emmigrated to the U.S. before and during the war as well as during the early phases of the Cold War. It became self-perpetuating. When the leading centers were in pre-war Europe, Europe was sought ought. When the leading centers were in post-war U.S., the U.S. was sought ought.
Now the have been two generations of post-war reconstruction and there is increasing incentive for them to stay home or return back home. The pull of good centers is augmented by the push provided by the Dept. Homespun Security, Patriot Act I-III, etc.
There is also the fact that the americans, being religious and solely attracted to money, are not too keenly attracted to Science. Schools make far more lawyers than engineers and/or scientists. The US has to import a lot of foreign scientists in order to meet it's most basic research needs. Eventually, all those foreign scientists go back home, bringing with them their experience and US-acquired knowledge to State-funded european research laboratories.
I agree that subways are an easy target. The main difference, as I see it, is that an airplane can be hijacked and itself used as a weapon. I suppose a subway could be hijacked, but considering they can only be driven on the track, doing so would be of limited utility. You'd have to have a bomb, which hopefully could be detected by conventional means. I guess what I'm saying is that you'd have to have more than just malicious intent to do damage to the subway system.
Subways aren't glamorous. They carry the small fry, and, after all, the terrorists are fighting for the small fry and, being more numerous than the fat-arses bigshots, you don't really want to alienate them. On the other hand, bigshots fly, so whenever one hijacks a plane, he scores double by annoying (and, if possible, killing) a bunch of fat-arses bigshots.
By far, the most common type of exploit is the buffer overflow, and software vendors are spending millions of dollars to find and prevent these types of vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities still exist -- they are getting fewer in number, however, and finding them is now much more difficult. Part of my consulting practice to software vendors and their major customers is finding and reporting these types of vulnerabilities. Where I used to be able to do the "find vulnerabilities blindfolded with one arm tied behind my back" routine, I now actually have to work to find them in major software products.
Why use a primitive language (C, C++) that is nothing but a glorified assembler that likes to pretend it is a high-level language to write apps? Granted, there is muchos macho appeal to work in C, but if the resulting code is buggy like a chickenwire collander, what good it is to be a jock coder? (I am **NOT** impressed by clever code - and this comes from someone who worked a long time with Forth).
There are far better choices than C* to code programs; there is no excuse to write programs that offer buffer overflows for all to rape.
This company produces one of the hardest spyware / adware program to get rid off (Save and Weathercast) I've spen days fixing computer with there software installed. Can I send them a bill for all the trouble they have cost my company. People click the EULA but give them an option to uninstall the software and not hijack the machine.
Instead, you should send the bill to your 133t 1u3ers that are 5t00p1d enough to install the malware on your company's computers.
More than a year ago, I nearly lost my hobby website (which is close to 11 years old) thanks to this criminal spammer who joed me, because he did not like the comments I made about him on N.A.N.A.E.(more info).
As a result, I made a webpage against the asshole (which we'll call spamtard henceforth). Naturally, spamtard did not like the webpage, and so he kept larting it, and, as a result, the page kept being mirrored and moving all over the place. At one point, there was upwards of 20 copies of it all over the place, copies spamtard kept larting left and right.
Eventually, I received an e-mail from a mirrorer who was asked by a police detective to take down the page "or else, criminal charges will be laid". The mirrorer also made clear that the police was looking for me, and that I should contact them, or else they will supoena my ISP for my personal information and lay criminal charges (for what crime? I never learned it).
Spamtard had complained to the fuzz about my webpage when he saw that he could not have it taken off!!! And a detective was bored enough to pursue the case...
It is interesting that the police did not attempt to contact me personally at that time, but that they resorted to intimidating threats through a third party. According to my counsel, the police was doing a fishing expedition and trying to give me rope so I could hang myself.
Naturally, I DID NOT contact the police, because they have no jurisdiction over where I live, and one should never volunteer information to the police (this is basically a consent search), especially if they are investigating you.
About three months later, I (finally) received an e-mail from the police, asking me to call them, and, again threatening with criminal charges if they had to subpoena my personal information.
Again, I did not contact them. So, three weeks later, I get another e-mail saying that I should call them, because now they have my "personal" information, and if I do not do so, they would send a local cop to investigate me.
The "detective" included my "personal" information he was able to get.
It was totally wrong.
Again, I continued my intensive campaign of doing nothing at all. I suppose the poor chap who was listed as my "personal information" got harassed by the cops; hopefully, he did not cave-in to their bullshit bullying.
Worse, spamtardpublicly aknowledged getting back information from the police. This meant that the police was passing back information to the criminal!!! So, if the criminal ever learned my true identity, I would be nothing but toast!!!
A few weeks afterwards, we learn on NANAE that spamtard was harassing police departments over mirrored copies of the web page! A phone conversation between the detective and an ISP operator also indicated that finally, there would be no criminal charges laid against me, because the prosecuting attorney did not think they could get a conviction.
This is very strange that I have been the target of a criminal investigation without having formally been identified nor directly contacted, and that I learn through a third party
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Only anglo-saxon have that neurotic fear of government, to the point of giving up the security a normal government yields in order to get the freedom...
To be gobbled-up by a richer guy, or killed by a rogue driver...
And your ignoring the fact that simply because it happens in public does not give the government the right to monitor every aspect of it. And what bizzare law prevents the government from looking after the public welfare???
What is the compelling reason for having different expectation of safety from private vehicles in regards to public vehicles?
Those scammers should have their eardrums busted when they are caught.
Case in point: a friend of mine works for the railroad. One day, he coupled his train to an automobile-carrier car, whose coupler buckled and this jacked-up the car which then derailed, damaging beyond repair many of the 15 Cadillacs that were on board.
Of course, he was nailed for "coupling at excessive speed", because "what else could make the car derail". Luckily for him, he went to the car repair shop with his camera, and took pictures of the coupler shank, which was cracked (not a recent crack: it was rusted to the core).
Those pictures enabled him to walk away from the hearing with a small reprimand (for being a smartass that was right) instead of losing his job.
Driving a car is not a right, but a privilege exerced in public view. Why should you then have any expectation of privacy whilst driving a car? To hide the fact that you are driving in a way that endangers public safety?
You can be pulled over anytime by a cop whenever he sees you driving like a dumbfuck, so what's the difference if it is a blackbox that nails you? Because you can't get away with it anymore?
What DO YOU have so special as to be able to break the law and endanger other people???
Besides, blackboxes are coming anyways. Some years back, in a computer project management class, we had to pick a law-enforcement theme computer project (the teacher has a day job with the $FEDERAL_POLICE_AGENCY).
Bad driving being my major pet peeve, I naturally proposed a computerized driving monitor that would automatically ticket drivers whenever they break traffic laws, thus freeing police for more useful work such as cracking down on criminal spammers.
Well, lo and behold, when he saw the proposal, he curtly refused it with "this is coming anyways"...
So, it's only a matter of time before Big Brother will be your co-pilot...
Are you the "Android Cat" on NANAE?
And we know how criminal spammers are good at following the law...
... as soon as it is as "easy" and "intuitive" to use as Windows.
It could be interesting for those geeks who are allergic to water...
Maybe by drinking too much wine???
Shudder!!!
There are far better choices than C* to code programs; there is no excuse to write programs that offer buffer overflows for all to rape.
As a result, I made a webpage against the asshole (which we'll call spamtard henceforth). Naturally, spamtard did not like the webpage, and so he kept larting it, and, as a result, the page kept being mirrored and moving all over the place. At one point, there was upwards of 20 copies of it all over the place, copies spamtard kept larting left and right.
Eventually, I received an e-mail from a mirrorer who was asked by a police detective to take down the page "or else, criminal charges will be laid". The mirrorer also made clear that the police was looking for me, and that I should contact them, or else they will supoena my ISP for my personal information and lay criminal charges (for what crime? I never learned it).
Spamtard had complained to the fuzz about my webpage when he saw that he could not have it taken off!!! And a detective was bored enough to pursue the case...
It is interesting that the police did not attempt to contact me personally at that time, but that they resorted to intimidating threats through a third party. According to my counsel, the police was doing a fishing expedition and trying to give me rope so I could hang myself.
Naturally, I DID NOT contact the police, because they have no jurisdiction over where I live, and one should never volunteer information to the police (this is basically a consent search), especially if they are investigating you.
About three months later, I (finally) received an e-mail from the police, asking me to call them, and, again threatening with criminal charges if they had to subpoena my personal information.
Again, I did not contact them. So, three weeks later, I get another e-mail saying that I should call them, because now they have my "personal" information, and if I do not do so, they would send a local cop to investigate me.
The "detective" included my "personal" information he was able to get.
It was totally wrong.
Again, I continued my intensive campaign of doing nothing at all. I suppose the poor chap who was listed as my "personal information" got harassed by the cops; hopefully, he did not cave-in to their bullshit bullying.
Worse, spamtard publicly aknowledged getting back information from the police. This meant that the police was passing back information to the criminal!!! So, if the criminal ever learned my true identity, I would be nothing but toast!!!
A few weeks afterwards, we learn on NANAE that spamtard was harassing police departments over mirrored copies of the web page! A phone conversation between the detective and an ISP operator also indicated that finally, there would be no criminal charges laid against me, because the prosecuting attorney did not think they could get a conviction.
This is very strange that I have been the target of a criminal investigation without having formally been identified nor directly contacted, and that I learn through a third party
This is very effective: after three or four wedgies, people learn NOT to do some st00pid stuff with Internet Exploder...