The same bombs detonated near ground level, whether on a ship in the harbor or in a sea container stacked in a yard on land, would have somewhat lower blast radius, I think.
The instant damage would be limited, especially considering how wide everything is spread in the USA. Sometimes you need to drive a car between stores of the same mall.
However a ground explosion will be very dirty. The resulting contamination will sicken millions. This, in terms of civil defense, is worse than outright casualties. Dead do not need anything except revenge. Wounded require resources to treat them and care for them. Mass paranoia (not that it will be entirely unfounded) will take care of the rest - the country will be entirely out of its mind. Add a financial catastrophe to the mix, and this single - and, technically, irrelevant - attack can become a catalyst of country-wide anarchy.
There is a book where a supervillain delivers nukes into the US mainland inside of new cars. The A/C unit of the car is replaced with a nuke; then ships are filled with those cars and sent to US ports. The cars are perfectly functional, except that the A/C is not working - but who is going to test that? Not the dealerships; they are owned by the said supervillain.
There is a lot of large machinery that can contain a nuke, or parts of a nuke. You cannot even take that machinery apart. Consider a large electric motor, for example... that is 10' or 20' in diameter. How would customs agents even power it up? it is absolutely impossible. But that mountain of metal can have plenty of space inside to hold contraband. The shipper does not even need to damage the product. If the container is inspected, the agents see what they expect to see - a bulldozer, for example. How would they know that 90% of its fuel tank is already taken by a contraband? How would anyone know what is hermetically welded inside the steel chassis of that machine? You cannot X-ray it; you have to destroy the product - and the agents will do that only if they have specific information.
The user is in control of what the camera can see. But one could think of more complex images that can be recognized. A human can tell by looking at the camera's output who wears it - the driver or the passenger. I don't know how far this can be pushed with modern machine vision algorithms. I think pretty far, considering self-driving Google cars. It requires CPU power that the tiny Glass doesn't have. But if the image ends up on big servers of Google then recognition can occur there.
Perhaps my tinfoil hat has worn down and needs replacement, but this whole project, as I suspect, aims for [cy]borgization of the entire population. This offers the level of control over the people that hasn't been ever seen before. And it also offers some rewards for compliance - like jobs that can be performed only if you are augmented. How many high end jobs are there today for people who are computer illiterate?
If you're on a motorcycle and you need a computer to tell you when there's a turn or bend coming up...you're doing it wrong.
He is talking about navigation GPS. Motorcycle riders are not born with up to date maps of all roads all over the world in their memory. Like car drivers, they need to know where gas stations are, and restaurants, and rest areas - and simply how to get from 1st North street to 17th East street in a city that you have never been to before.
On the subject of the thread, I think banning of all HUDs is a reasonable first step, until strict rules of what can and cannot be shown to the driver are established. Otherwise you can be sure that teenagers will be watching YouTube and browsing Internet while operating a vehicle. (Why not, they are immortal - they have never died before.)
Which is why Windows 8 has a Notification Center for that sort of thing. Same with IMs and VoIP.
I don't know about that. There is a lot of information in those windows that you, as a manager, have to decide upon. You can't just say that "you've got mail." We all do, all the time. The trick is in seeing who sent it, and about what.
Which don't need to be sitting on the screen at the same time.
Overlapping windows killed DesqView in no time. I guess there was a reason for that?
Corporate will do just fine with 8. [...] They mostly set meetings, take notes, read reports, enter data and write emails with a little web research when needed (rarely).
All that at the same time. Maybe your corporate people are lazy, but the ones I know are multitasking so much that a common engineer cannot even compete. An engineer works on one project, and it's a big deal if the boss calls and asks for an interruption. However the boss has no such excuse - he is *expected* to work on *all* projects that his department does, and at the same time too.
A boss may call his engineer and say "Listen, Bob, we need a Visio chart of how this gizmo and that widget are interoperating." And he can get back "Sure, boss, you will get it tomorrow." Boss will eat this because that's all he can do. However boss's own manager often calls and says "Listen, Jim, I need that quad chart that you had back at $x presentation - just change $a and $b and $c to match our $d, and send it to me. I need it in five minutes. OK?" The boss cannot say "no" to that - and here comes multitasking because all those requests come all the time. You can say that the manager is wrong and he shouldn't overexert his lower managers - but sometimes that's how the dice falls. Managers can be very busy sometimes (especially those who are almost good.) Only a small portion of their workload is preplanned (meet with suppliers, have a meeting.) The workload that comes from the business side is entirely random and depends on what customers want. You cannot predict that. A manager may sit idly at his desk at 3pm on Friday, anticipating an uneventful weekend, and at 3:10pm he may be typing madly to prepare a business proposal for a customer who called at 3:05pm.
That's why a typical boss has Outlook running in a corner of the screen, so that he can see what new disasters developed while he wasn't looking; and he needs to run some note taking application to see what fires he needs to put out before lunch; and he has an IM application running, so that engineers can send him their pleas; and he has a few Word, Excel and PowerPoints running at the same time, in different completion stages. Many have not just the work account, so they have their personal mail open; if they have VoIP then its console is also on that screen. It gets pretty cluttered sometimes. If a manager is not overworked then he is either a genius or a lazy person who can be fired with no harm to the company.
Even thick cloud cover from a thunderstorm doesn't cut the power to unacceptable levels where I live.
Lucky you. Here in winter the power that comes from the dull gray sky is just about 200-300W, even though there is no snow here, at the latitude of 38 degrees North. There are locales in CA that are much worse.
And if electricity is 10 cents per KWhr then that will only take 30,000 hrs at full power to pay off the initial investment
The "full power" is the problem here. PV systems do not produce full power except on a few days in a year, when the star and the Earth are aligned just right, and when there is nothing in the air. Even thin clouds will drop the power severely.
How do I know? I have a 6 kW PV system right here, and I have the power meter readings sent all over my LAN. Right now, at 2:26pm, the power output back into the grid is about 4400W, with about 1 kW consumed by the house (refrigerator, several computers, some lights.) It is already past the peak. The daylight hours change over the year, as well as the position of the Sun in the sky. I don't have the raw readings from the inverter handy (need a new RS485 cable nailed to the wall) but I enjoy zero money sent to PG&E. Well, they do charge me for the connection, but that is covered by the peanuts that I receive once per year as a generating facility. All my heating in winter is electric now, and the propane costs are very, very low.
So in other words, 30 kh at full power may well take you 25 years. If you say that the PV output can be integrated to equal five hours of full power per day (hardly!) then you need 6,000 days to meet your goal - that would be about 16.5 years.
On top of that you have to count the interest on a lump sum payment for the PV system, as opposed to "pay as you go" utility fees. You also need to consider repairs that may become necessary over such a long period of time. The inverter is warrantied for 10 years, for example.
A PV system is *not* financially effective for most people. I don't even know if it is financially effective for me; I think it is marginal - and I live in CA, where sunshine is not exactly a rare thing, and my PV panels are mounted on the ground, not on the roof (making cleaning very simple.) PV may be most useful to people who are hit by the highest rate tier. Those can drop their power draw to something that falls into more reasonably priced tiers (from 35 cents per kW to 10, for example.)
I am capable of controlling the words that come out of my mouth
It only means that your job is too easy. Not all jobs are like that. Being a soldier is an extreme example.
And you can look forward to an employment discrimination lawsuit for that.
Not going to happen. "Sorry, ma'am, we don't have a position that would be a good fit for a person of your caliber." That is if you deign her with a response. But in last ten years HR is adamant in their demand to not respond to applicants. (You gain nothing, they gain potential grounds for a lawsuit. Pascal's wager.)
Did she never hear men talk before? Yes, sometimes we make rude jokes, some of which sexual-themed. All men do.
It is much worse in a 100% (or nearly so) female company. I had a few brief jobs in places where most employees are women, and their jokes would make a grown man blush. Oh, and that would be spoken not occasionally, but all the time, interleaved only with lively debates about certain qualities of this or that person. An occasional man within an earshot is only seen as an extra spice in the dish; some women are even enjoying being "accidentally" overheard.
What are you talking about? This is pretty innovative. I would even say, it's a stroke of a genius!
Just think about it. Millions of entrepreneurs will be sketching their own ideas and storing them on Google servers, where Google people can access them at will and "borrow" from, with no obligations to the author.
I can think of only one enterprise that may come close in audacity: when a gang of thieves opens a bank.
Some time ago I wrote a handy software to do something that is specific to electronic manufacturing industry. It's nothing major or groundbreaking. I just used it to learn WPF. But in the end it was a lot of code, and I didn't want to just give it all away.
Naturally, I was also too cheap to pay for any external licensing software (and besides, it's all mostly junk.) So I wrote my own, using this as an excuse to learn MS Crypto API. It ended up being also pretty large, but it works well.
I wanted to tie every license to a specific hardware, and to make licenses permanent (to that hardware.) If the hardware fails then the customer can negotiate a new code out of band. (In other words, if you ask for a new key once in every few years it's OK, but if you ask for a new key every day it's not.) This instantly closed a bunch of loopholes that relate to backup and restore. I did not want to use online licensing, though this is something I'd like to do one day, for educational purposes.
So the software starts, and in background it collects a ton of hardware descriptors - m/b, HDD, video card, MACs of all NICs, and so on. This gets encrypted to a public key of the publisher (me) then ASCII armored and saved into a file. This becomes a license request block. User sends this file to the publisher.
The publisher is the only person who can decrypt this block. He does so and sees a lot of hardware information. The publisher deletes unwanted hardware tokens, adds his own tokens if he wants, and then he signs the modified plaintext and encrypts it to the public key of the application. (Each software has its own key.) After ASCII armoring this becomes a license file. It is sent to the user.
The user then starts the software. It decrypts the license file and compares those hardware tokens that the publisher elected to keep with those that are fetched from the hardware. If they match then the software runs. If not... too bad.
This solution has several vulnerabilities, of course, and it can be defeated by a single jump instruction - as long as you know where to insert one. That is not obvious. There are other ways to attack this system. But I did not want to build an overly complex protection scheme; my software is not that popular anyway, being very special (it's useless to anyone outside of the industry.) I just wanted to see what I can do:-)
As it often happens, this software was built to scratch a personal itch. I'm running it myself, and all these instances are carefully licensed with proper license files. I started this software many times, and I use it pretty much every day. I had no failures (after a couple early bugs were found and fixed.)
If you make an illegal lane change and hit me, I will be submitting my tapes to government
I have a recorder in the car for the same reason. Nobody can claim privacy on the road; it's designed for just the opposite.
Or are you going to deliberately try to run me off the road if you see a camera mounted on my helmet?
Sometimes bicycle riders try to run me (in a car) off the road. This happens automatically when they ride on narrow roads. To pass safely the driver of the car has to cross the double yellow line. In many locations this is patently unsafe.
I've not seen the advertising that indicates that the glasses are streaming live 100% of the time. You must have read the secret manual.
It doesn't matter what the Glasses do today. They are likely to be able to stream continuously tomorrow. As I understand, the only limiting factor now is the battery. The bandwidth will be free, courtesy of the government.
I think it's that secret kind of recording people need to be concerned about, not something strapped to someone's face in plain view with a red light telling you when it's recording.
Google Glass can be detached from the glasses' frame and installed anywhere else. A ready made spy camera, sold cheaply by the major retailer by the million. Requires zero technical competence to install in every $private_location of pervert's liking. Smaller than an iPhone. Automatic. Not lame.
Google Glass doesn't invade my privacy. People invade my privacy.
That is actually 100% correct. Expanding on your statement, Google Glass is similar to giving a handgun and a pallet of ammo to every teenager, and saying not a word about proper use of this equipment.
Adults are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what they want or not want from GG. However children will be the ultimate fifth column because you cannot control them, and they themselves don't see the world the same as you.
The alternative is a police state that tells you what you can and can't photograph, what you can and can't say and the like.
This is not even the worst case. As matter of fact, most states, democratic and not, have laws that tell you what you cannot photograph and what you cannot say. Well, you can say it, but you will be punished. Holocaust denial in Germany, for example, is verboten. Theocracies usually have blasphemy laws. Thailand jails people for offending the King.
But this can be lived with, as long as all these laws are clearly and explicitly written and made available to everyone who needs to know them. A harsh but fair law is not the worst that can happen.
It would be far worse if the laws are invented on the spot for convenience of the police and the judge. Unfortunately, there are too many of those laws in the USA (and everywhere else, I guess.) There are tens of catch-all laws that can be used to put a newborn child into jail. In essence, they are carte blanche for a police officer to detain you - or, by threat of arrest, force you to give up some of your rights. Filming the police is one of such rights, and it is routinely trod upon.
From another commnent: yes a red LED will blink when recording.
Only until you disconnect it or cover it. This will be the very first thing done to many Glass units. Disconnection is preferred because it saves battery. Besides, the recording person does not benefit from announcing his recording activities.
They can do so today with glasses cams, and button cams. So where's the issue?
Can you tell, off the top of your head, where to buy those cameras? Do you have enough cash to do so? Do you have enough motivation to go through with the plan? Probably not. But even if you do, will you submit your tapes to the government and to private businesses? Likely not.
Google Glass makes distributed surveillance a commodity. It is advertised, it is promoted as new and better lifestyle. Meanwhile all the records are collated, processed by supercomputers, and stored forever by people unknown. Those records can and will be used against you, or against other people who don't deserve that.
At some point quantity transitions into quality. This Google Glass thing is a good example.
Sure, I think it is reasonable to demand cameras off in change rooms and similar places, but if I'm in a place were it would be socially acceptable to take picture with my phone why I should have to turn off my future tech constantly running camera?
Don't you see a contradiction in what you just said?
You defined a set of places where cameras have to be voluntarily turned off. Then in the same breath you declare that you are not going to obey someone else's definition of such places.
The end result: you *will* be filmed in public bathrooms, changing rooms, and everywhere else. Not only it is just as valid as filming in bars, it has monetary value.
LEO satellites don't even have an absolute location. Geostationary ones do, but good luck taking pictures from *that* orbit.
A LEO spy satellite has its own orbital motion; then it has librations around its own center of inertia; then the camera positioner has errors in aligning the camera; then the lens distorts the image a little, especially if you consider that it takes a picture of a sphere, and often the area of interest is not right under the orbit. All these factors combine to give you a significant angular error in pointing the camera. None of this is rocket science, it's simple geometry. I don't know if math is cute or not, but that's what it is.
Satellite maps have no accurate references to coordinates. The satellite knows where it is, and it knows where it points the camera to, but the error is too large from hundreds of miles away. You can see a lamppost, but you don't know its exact coordinates. The nearest lamppost that you do know coordinates of is not in this photo.
This is why you need to take the satellite photo and then send someone who will stand by that specific lamppost, look at his GPS and write: "This is xx.xxx North and yy.yyy East." One such point will pin the map down, modulo rotation; two points will define the flat map; more points will define the map on a sphere and provide for error correction.
Slashdot Mirror
The same bombs detonated near ground level, whether on a ship in the harbor or in a sea container stacked in a yard on land, would have somewhat lower blast radius, I think.
The instant damage would be limited, especially considering how wide everything is spread in the USA. Sometimes you need to drive a car between stores of the same mall.
However a ground explosion will be very dirty. The resulting contamination will sicken millions. This, in terms of civil defense, is worse than outright casualties. Dead do not need anything except revenge. Wounded require resources to treat them and care for them. Mass paranoia (not that it will be entirely unfounded) will take care of the rest - the country will be entirely out of its mind. Add a financial catastrophe to the mix, and this single - and, technically, irrelevant - attack can become a catalyst of country-wide anarchy.
There is a book where a supervillain delivers nukes into the US mainland inside of new cars. The A/C unit of the car is replaced with a nuke; then ships are filled with those cars and sent to US ports. The cars are perfectly functional, except that the A/C is not working - but who is going to test that? Not the dealerships; they are owned by the said supervillain.
There is a lot of large machinery that can contain a nuke, or parts of a nuke. You cannot even take that machinery apart. Consider a large electric motor, for example... that is 10' or 20' in diameter. How would customs agents even power it up? it is absolutely impossible. But that mountain of metal can have plenty of space inside to hold contraband. The shipper does not even need to damage the product. If the container is inspected, the agents see what they expect to see - a bulldozer, for example. How would they know that 90% of its fuel tank is already taken by a contraband? How would anyone know what is hermetically welded inside the steel chassis of that machine? You cannot X-ray it; you have to destroy the product - and the agents will do that only if they have specific information.
The user is in control of what the camera can see. But one could think of more complex images that can be recognized. A human can tell by looking at the camera's output who wears it - the driver or the passenger. I don't know how far this can be pushed with modern machine vision algorithms. I think pretty far, considering self-driving Google cars. It requires CPU power that the tiny Glass doesn't have. But if the image ends up on big servers of Google then recognition can occur there.
Perhaps my tinfoil hat has worn down and needs replacement, but this whole project, as I suspect, aims for [cy]borgization of the entire population. This offers the level of control over the people that hasn't been ever seen before. And it also offers some rewards for compliance - like jobs that can be performed only if you are augmented. How many high end jobs are there today for people who are computer illiterate?
What's to stop stupid drivers from keeping their Glass on "passenger" mode?
It is not too difficult for a computer to recognize the steering wheel and a speedometer in the camera's field of view.
If you're on a motorcycle and you need a computer to tell you when there's a turn or bend coming up...you're doing it wrong.
He is talking about navigation GPS. Motorcycle riders are not born with up to date maps of all roads all over the world in their memory. Like car drivers, they need to know where gas stations are, and restaurants, and rest areas - and simply how to get from 1st North street to 17th East street in a city that you have never been to before.
On the subject of the thread, I think banning of all HUDs is a reasonable first step, until strict rules of what can and cannot be shown to the driver are established. Otherwise you can be sure that teenagers will be watching YouTube and browsing Internet while operating a vehicle. (Why not, they are immortal - they have never died before.)
Which is why Windows 8 has a Notification Center for that sort of thing. Same with IMs and VoIP.
I don't know about that. There is a lot of information in those windows that you, as a manager, have to decide upon. You can't just say that "you've got mail." We all do, all the time. The trick is in seeing who sent it, and about what.
Which don't need to be sitting on the screen at the same time.
Overlapping windows killed DesqView in no time. I guess there was a reason for that?
Corporate will do just fine with 8. [...] They mostly set meetings, take notes, read reports, enter data and write emails with a little web research when needed (rarely).
All that at the same time. Maybe your corporate people are lazy, but the ones I know are multitasking so much that a common engineer cannot even compete. An engineer works on one project, and it's a big deal if the boss calls and asks for an interruption. However the boss has no such excuse - he is *expected* to work on *all* projects that his department does, and at the same time too.
A boss may call his engineer and say "Listen, Bob, we need a Visio chart of how this gizmo and that widget are interoperating." And he can get back "Sure, boss, you will get it tomorrow." Boss will eat this because that's all he can do. However boss's own manager often calls and says "Listen, Jim, I need that quad chart that you had back at $x presentation - just change $a and $b and $c to match our $d, and send it to me. I need it in five minutes. OK?" The boss cannot say "no" to that - and here comes multitasking because all those requests come all the time. You can say that the manager is wrong and he shouldn't overexert his lower managers - but sometimes that's how the dice falls. Managers can be very busy sometimes (especially those who are almost good.) Only a small portion of their workload is preplanned (meet with suppliers, have a meeting.) The workload that comes from the business side is entirely random and depends on what customers want. You cannot predict that. A manager may sit idly at his desk at 3pm on Friday, anticipating an uneventful weekend, and at 3:10pm he may be typing madly to prepare a business proposal for a customer who called at 3:05pm.
That's why a typical boss has Outlook running in a corner of the screen, so that he can see what new disasters developed while he wasn't looking; and he needs to run some note taking application to see what fires he needs to put out before lunch; and he has an IM application running, so that engineers can send him their pleas; and he has a few Word, Excel and PowerPoints running at the same time, in different completion stages. Many have not just the work account, so they have their personal mail open; if they have VoIP then its console is also on that screen. It gets pretty cluttered sometimes. If a manager is not overworked then he is either a genius or a lazy person who can be fired with no harm to the company.
She discovered one instance of this triple entendre :-) This is the one that is not sexist at all. Can't say that about the others :-)
Even thick cloud cover from a thunderstorm doesn't cut the power to unacceptable levels where I live.
Lucky you. Here in winter the power that comes from the dull gray sky is just about 200-300W, even though there is no snow here, at the latitude of 38 degrees North. There are locales in CA that are much worse.
How's the horse and buggy industry going?
A few more years of unmitigated success of the US economy, and it will be on upswing.
And if electricity is 10 cents per KWhr then that will only take 30,000 hrs at full power to pay off the initial investment
The "full power" is the problem here. PV systems do not produce full power except on a few days in a year, when the star and the Earth are aligned just right, and when there is nothing in the air. Even thin clouds will drop the power severely.
How do I know? I have a 6 kW PV system right here, and I have the power meter readings sent all over my LAN. Right now, at 2:26pm, the power output back into the grid is about 4400W, with about 1 kW consumed by the house (refrigerator, several computers, some lights.) It is already past the peak. The daylight hours change over the year, as well as the position of the Sun in the sky. I don't have the raw readings from the inverter handy (need a new RS485 cable nailed to the wall) but I enjoy zero money sent to PG&E. Well, they do charge me for the connection, but that is covered by the peanuts that I receive once per year as a generating facility. All my heating in winter is electric now, and the propane costs are very, very low.
So in other words, 30 kh at full power may well take you 25 years. If you say that the PV output can be integrated to equal five hours of full power per day (hardly!) then you need 6,000 days to meet your goal - that would be about 16.5 years.
On top of that you have to count the interest on a lump sum payment for the PV system, as opposed to "pay as you go" utility fees. You also need to consider repairs that may become necessary over such a long period of time. The inverter is warrantied for 10 years, for example.
A PV system is *not* financially effective for most people. I don't even know if it is financially effective for me; I think it is marginal - and I live in CA, where sunshine is not exactly a rare thing, and my PV panels are mounted on the ground, not on the roof (making cleaning very simple.) PV may be most useful to people who are hit by the highest rate tier. Those can drop their power draw to something that falls into more reasonably priced tiers (from 35 cents per kW to 10, for example.)
I am capable of controlling the words that come out of my mouth
It only means that your job is too easy. Not all jobs are like that. Being a soldier is an extreme example.
And you can look forward to an employment discrimination lawsuit for that.
Not going to happen. "Sorry, ma'am, we don't have a position that would be a good fit for a person of your caliber." That is if you deign her with a response. But in last ten years HR is adamant in their demand to not respond to applicants. (You gain nothing, they gain potential grounds for a lawsuit. Pascal's wager.)
Did she never hear men talk before? Yes, sometimes we make rude jokes, some of which sexual-themed. All men do.
It is much worse in a 100% (or nearly so) female company. I had a few brief jobs in places where most employees are women, and their jokes would make a grown man blush. Oh, and that would be spoken not occasionally, but all the time, interleaved only with lively debates about certain qualities of this or that person. An occasional man within an earshot is only seen as an extra spice in the dish; some women are even enjoying being "accidentally" overheard.
Funny you should say that, as one of the keynotes mentioned that Pycon 2013 was 20% women (attendees?).
What if they signed up before realizing what the conference is *really* about? :-)
Remember when Google used to innovate?
What are you talking about? This is pretty innovative. I would even say, it's a stroke of a genius!
Just think about it. Millions of entrepreneurs will be sketching their own ideas and storing them on Google servers, where Google people can access them at will and "borrow" from, with no obligations to the author.
I can think of only one enterprise that may come close in audacity: when a gang of thieves opens a bank.
Some time ago I wrote a handy software to do something that is specific to electronic manufacturing industry. It's nothing major or groundbreaking. I just used it to learn WPF. But in the end it was a lot of code, and I didn't want to just give it all away.
Naturally, I was also too cheap to pay for any external licensing software (and besides, it's all mostly junk.) So I wrote my own, using this as an excuse to learn MS Crypto API. It ended up being also pretty large, but it works well.
I wanted to tie every license to a specific hardware, and to make licenses permanent (to that hardware.) If the hardware fails then the customer can negotiate a new code out of band. (In other words, if you ask for a new key once in every few years it's OK, but if you ask for a new key every day it's not.) This instantly closed a bunch of loopholes that relate to backup and restore. I did not want to use online licensing, though this is something I'd like to do one day, for educational purposes.
So the software starts, and in background it collects a ton of hardware descriptors - m/b, HDD, video card, MACs of all NICs, and so on. This gets encrypted to a public key of the publisher (me) then ASCII armored and saved into a file. This becomes a license request block. User sends this file to the publisher.
The publisher is the only person who can decrypt this block. He does so and sees a lot of hardware information. The publisher deletes unwanted hardware tokens, adds his own tokens if he wants, and then he signs the modified plaintext and encrypts it to the public key of the application. (Each software has its own key.) After ASCII armoring this becomes a license file. It is sent to the user.
The user then starts the software. It decrypts the license file and compares those hardware tokens that the publisher elected to keep with those that are fetched from the hardware. If they match then the software runs. If not ... too bad.
This solution has several vulnerabilities, of course, and it can be defeated by a single jump instruction - as long as you know where to insert one. That is not obvious. There are other ways to attack this system. But I did not want to build an overly complex protection scheme; my software is not that popular anyway, being very special (it's useless to anyone outside of the industry.) I just wanted to see what I can do :-)
As it often happens, this software was built to scratch a personal itch. I'm running it myself, and all these instances are carefully licensed with proper license files. I started this software many times, and I use it pretty much every day. I had no failures (after a couple early bugs were found and fixed.)
If you make an illegal lane change and hit me, I will be submitting my tapes to government
I have a recorder in the car for the same reason. Nobody can claim privacy on the road; it's designed for just the opposite.
Or are you going to deliberately try to run me off the road if you see a camera mounted on my helmet?
Sometimes bicycle riders try to run me (in a car) off the road. This happens automatically when they ride on narrow roads. To pass safely the driver of the car has to cross the double yellow line. In many locations this is patently unsafe.
I've not seen the advertising that indicates that the glasses are streaming live 100% of the time. You must have read the secret manual.
It doesn't matter what the Glasses do today. They are likely to be able to stream continuously tomorrow. As I understand, the only limiting factor now is the battery. The bandwidth will be free, courtesy of the government.
I think it's that secret kind of recording people need to be concerned about, not something strapped to someone's face in plain view with a red light telling you when it's recording.
Google Glass can be detached from the glasses' frame and installed anywhere else. A ready made spy camera, sold cheaply by the major retailer by the million. Requires zero technical competence to install in every $private_location of pervert's liking. Smaller than an iPhone. Automatic. Not lame.
Google Glass doesn't invade my privacy. People invade my privacy.
That is actually 100% correct. Expanding on your statement, Google Glass is similar to giving a handgun and a pallet of ammo to every teenager, and saying not a word about proper use of this equipment.
Adults are perfectly capable of deciding for themselves what they want or not want from GG. However children will be the ultimate fifth column because you cannot control them, and they themselves don't see the world the same as you.
The alternative is a police state that tells you what you can and can't photograph, what you can and can't say and the like.
This is not even the worst case. As matter of fact, most states, democratic and not, have laws that tell you what you cannot photograph and what you cannot say. Well, you can say it, but you will be punished. Holocaust denial in Germany, for example, is verboten. Theocracies usually have blasphemy laws. Thailand jails people for offending the King.
But this can be lived with, as long as all these laws are clearly and explicitly written and made available to everyone who needs to know them. A harsh but fair law is not the worst that can happen.
It would be far worse if the laws are invented on the spot for convenience of the police and the judge. Unfortunately, there are too many of those laws in the USA (and everywhere else, I guess.) There are tens of catch-all laws that can be used to put a newborn child into jail. In essence, they are carte blanche for a police officer to detain you - or, by threat of arrest, force you to give up some of your rights. Filming the police is one of such rights, and it is routinely trod upon.
From another commnent: yes a red LED will blink when recording.
Only until you disconnect it or cover it. This will be the very first thing done to many Glass units. Disconnection is preferred because it saves battery. Besides, the recording person does not benefit from announcing his recording activities.
They can do so today with glasses cams, and button cams. So where's the issue?
Can you tell, off the top of your head, where to buy those cameras? Do you have enough cash to do so? Do you have enough motivation to go through with the plan? Probably not. But even if you do, will you submit your tapes to the government and to private businesses? Likely not.
Google Glass makes distributed surveillance a commodity. It is advertised, it is promoted as new and better lifestyle. Meanwhile all the records are collated, processed by supercomputers, and stored forever by people unknown. Those records can and will be used against you, or against other people who don't deserve that.
At some point quantity transitions into quality. This Google Glass thing is a good example.
Sure, I think it is reasonable to demand cameras off in change rooms and similar places, but if I'm in a place were it would be socially acceptable to take picture with my phone why I should have to turn off my future tech constantly running camera?
Don't you see a contradiction in what you just said?
You defined a set of places where cameras have to be voluntarily turned off. Then in the same breath you declare that you are not going to obey someone else's definition of such places.
The end result: you *will* be filmed in public bathrooms, changing rooms, and everywhere else. Not only it is just as valid as filming in bars, it has monetary value.
LEO satellites don't even have an absolute location. Geostationary ones do, but good luck taking pictures from *that* orbit.
A LEO spy satellite has its own orbital motion; then it has librations around its own center of inertia; then the camera positioner has errors in aligning the camera; then the lens distorts the image a little, especially if you consider that it takes a picture of a sphere, and often the area of interest is not right under the orbit. All these factors combine to give you a significant angular error in pointing the camera. None of this is rocket science, it's simple geometry. I don't know if math is cute or not, but that's what it is.
Satellite maps have no accurate references to coordinates. The satellite knows where it is, and it knows where it points the camera to, but the error is too large from hundreds of miles away. You can see a lamppost, but you don't know its exact coordinates. The nearest lamppost that you do know coordinates of is not in this photo.
This is why you need to take the satellite photo and then send someone who will stand by that specific lamppost, look at his GPS and write: "This is xx.xxx North and yy.yyy East." One such point will pin the map down, modulo rotation; two points will define the flat map; more points will define the map on a sphere and provide for error correction.