As others pointed out, the Kinect is not simply just a camera. There are infrared and laser sensors for depth detection. It likely won't be fooled by a 2D photograph.
On the one hand, you groan about "people put up with the XBOX360.." and then say "consumer sheep is going to lose it". You do realize that most 'consumer sheep' won't, in fact, "lose it", and you prove the point with your snide remark about the XBOX platform.
This isn't going to be enforced the way you think. It's likely not going to stop playing just because somebody walked in. Where this is going to be used is for things like pay-per-view sporting events and premium content services. This is primarily here to prevent a bar (or similar venue) from buying the consumer-priced-for-home-viewing $90 wrestling fight. (typically, bars and the like pay higher prices based upon their foot traffic) And people won't lose it: they'll pony up the money like they always have. You will have a small number that will complain, but they won't complain that loudly.
What makes a good hacker is exactly the same things that tend towards "counter-culture." Rules breaking. Irreverence to power structure. Exploring outside the lines. Being not only willing to take a chance, but thriving on the adrenaline rush of being on the bleeding edge.
You don't get that spending your young adulthood in a computer or mathematics degree program at a community college. You get that from spending those years at places like DEFCON (and to a lesser degree, Burning Man).
And they do "real engineering" every day. They do it when they sleep. They do it when they idly sit on the train fiddling with a battery-powered Raspberry Pi or Arduino project, trying to use it to figure out some weird wireless signal they discovered.
And they'll do it for whomever pays them the most and gets in their way the least. Increasingly, it isn't Government or Fortune 500. And that's the point.
But "the pool" includes people who use drugs recreationally, "ping" somewhere on the Aspbergers/Autism/ADD spectrum (and as a result usually have financial or criminal issues that makes them "unhire-able" by the Government), and to a very large degree don't find a job where there's a lot of spending time in meetings and filling out timesheets and forms to be very rewarding. Often, some of the best candidates have multiples of these issues: some of the best people in security, in fact, have all of these issues.
Guess what? The skills that define a "good hacker" are going to tend towards somebody who's "counter-culture."
Most of the really good hackers I've met are very enterprising souls. They don't give a rat's ass about your "rules". They typically are making a passable living working outside the boundaries. They define your rules as "bullshit." They have one motivation: toys. They don't care about your petty office drama, your corporate ladder-climbing, and your marketing bullshit.
It's exactly your mentality that ensures that the US Government (and, by in large, most of the Fortune 500) will continue to fall further behind. Your average hacker can make more in two hours than you'd pay him in a week hacking together some Perl script on a contract basis. And you can bet crime does, in fact, pay here. It pays quite well.
The difference is: at least where I work, the "badge" is a near-field chip that requires the reader be within a few inches. My employer can't "ping" my badge and know what room I'm in. They can see what the last door I opened was, but there's no tracking of exit doors (I don't need to "badge out" to leave), and may doors (to things like the break room and bathroom) are not even tracked.
And I work in a Tier III datacenter.
IF the badges are not near-field and IF the badges can be "pinged" anytime, anywhere, then it's a problem. If it's just that the teacher uses a handheld reader to "scan" the badge, I fail to see the problem.
Android still uses the Linux kernel, with very minor modifications. Linux isn't the userspace, it's a monolithic kernel written by Linus Torvalds. The fact that Android's user space isn't made up of the GNU toolchain doesn't change the fact that Android is, in fact, a Linux-based operating system.
BSD Unix is both a kernel and a userspace. OS X uses bits and pieces of both, and discards significant chunks of both the BSD userland and kernel code.
Greywater often contains small amounts of biohazard contaminants and chemicals (such as phosphates from detergents). At best, it contains rotting food and grease, which does in fact represent a health hazard.
The one who is uneducated is you. How hard is it to drop it with your blackwater?
So, I live in a cabin "off-grid", and I'm a technology professional. I'm fortunate: my employer operates an LTE system that I'm just BARELY in the coverage area of, and there seems to be adequate service from most of the major US cell carriers that I have backup options when the LTE goes out (which it does every time the wind blows my directional antenna off the mark).
Believe me, you develop a "sixth sense" for Starbucks locations when they are the primary source of high speed Internet. Granted, I'm in the Pacific Northwest.. but I know where every usable hotspot is between my shack and downtown Seattle (some 300 miles away). I've learned which coffee shops to avoid, too.
The trick seems to be to have LOTS of options and be flexible. In addition to the service I get from work, I keep a Verizon USB dongle handy. It isn't cheap, but having that little bit of insurance means I'm not completely offline. I also still have a phone modem, and I can drive 12 miles to the store and use their phone line in an emergency for 10-15 minutes. Truck stops sometimes have phone ports for this purpose, BTW.
Yeah, the problem with most RV camps WiFi hotspots is very few are "managed", and all it takes is one teenager's laptop to BitTorrent the connection into oblivion.
Because the Universal Connect Fee is only levied on telephone access lines, and generally only "conventional" lines at that.
If you only have a cable modem connection with no phone line attached to it, and use many VoIP services and/or a cell phone, chances are you aren't paying into the Universal Service Fund.
Here's the problem: the vast majority of the "Americans" doing the talking are the ones that make us look bad. Those of us who are reasonable and "European" in our viewpoints and politics aren't the ones that are getting heard.
And it's not just a "media bias" thing. Even looking objectively at our own domestic media the Right Wing is the one doing all the shouting.
Not knowing what dollar amount this is, that's your problem right there. If you don't have about US$1,000 handy in cash already available, you are more or less going to be traceable by anyone who is going to matter. And if you don't have any experience going "off-grid" for a short period of time when it didn't matter, you're going to screw up.
I work for a telecom company that has a significant investment in Huawei gear. Their equipment often has serious bugs, and upper management is starting to notice that the ability of the service and support teams to "do their jobs" is being hurt by Huawei's bugs, and we're seriously entertaining bids from other vendors.
The sad part is that their equipment is SO much cheaper than anything else on the market.. I don't know if we could afford to even convert a fraction of our gear to some other vendor. The economics of the business is such that we couldn't afford to provide the service at the prices we charge without using the cheapest option available.
.. and Amdocs is an old, archaic piece of shit that everybody is trying to migrate away from.
But, as you point out, it's difficult for even a small system like my employer to migrate to something else. It takes years to get everything working even for the best systems.
I'm not sure letting local governments run the infrastructure is much better. For example, I can imagine many cities (especially in the US Southeast) would censor the hell out of the connection, and you think the cable/phone companies give the police a lot of access to the network for monitoring? Imagine what would happen if the PD and the infrastructure people have the same boss.
No thanks. The system we have sucks, but it could be a LOT worse.
Work in IT or at a NOC position for a small to medium size company doing a lot of cutting edge stuff. I work for a small independent cable company in their NOC, and while (after 20+ years in the field) it's a little underutilizing my skills, I'm often doing a lot of physical activity. Yeah, I spend about 60% of my time sitting at a desk, but the remaining 40% keeps me moving.
Most of the verification of where the underground utilities are located is not done from maps, it's done by metal detection and simple detective work.
I've worked in the cable and telecom business for 20+ years, and I can tell you the typical cable and phone company may have a rough idea of where the cables are.. but they don't know exactly where they are down to the foot. My cable company, for example, knows that the feeder cable off node 201A goes down Empire Ave., and is on the electric company's pole from the freeway to 8th, and turns right at 8th. But just looking at the maps and legal documents doesn't tell you what side of the street it is on. And the legal documents are a blanket agreement between us and the electric company to use their poles at a particular altitude. The electric line continues for another few miles down Empire, but we don't use it beyond 8th.
Most of the knowledge is with the engineers and maintenance techs who work in the field. Even a lot of that knowledge gets out-of-date pretty fast, and a good chunk of the troubleshooting steps they must engage in is a game of "find the cable."
So, no, we don't have maps quite like you would expect. No cable or telephone company I've ever worked with has very detailed (let alone accurate) records.
As a technician / engineer for a regional cable company (with a LONG history in both the conventional telephone and cable industry) I strongly concur with this statement.
Yes, the major trunk lines are probably not too hard to find. However, a good chunk of the "last mile" is a combination of utility easements on private property, "pole-sharing" arrangements with another utility (usually the electric utility), and ad-hoc informal arrangements with property owners. The latter one is especially common in rural areas, where the shortest route between, say, a cable amplifier or telephone drop box might cross three or four neighboring properties that were never formalized.. or the paperwork involving that formal arrangement has been lost since World War II.
The older the city and/or the smaller the population, the sloppier the documentation is.
Slashdot Mirror
As others pointed out, the Kinect is not simply just a camera. There are infrared and laser sensors for depth detection. It likely won't be fooled by a 2D photograph.
Do you even see the irony in your own statement?
On the one hand, you groan about "people put up with the XBOX360.." and then say "consumer sheep is going to lose it". You do realize that most 'consumer sheep' won't, in fact, "lose it", and you prove the point with your snide remark about the XBOX platform.
This isn't going to be enforced the way you think. It's likely not going to stop playing just because somebody walked in. Where this is going to be used is for things like pay-per-view sporting events and premium content services. This is primarily here to prevent a bar (or similar venue) from buying the consumer-priced-for-home-viewing $90 wrestling fight. (typically, bars and the like pay higher prices based upon their foot traffic) And people won't lose it: they'll pony up the money like they always have. You will have a small number that will complain, but they won't complain that loudly.
Technically, the "MPG" per passenger mile is lowest on an airplane. A fully loaded Boeing 747-400 gets the equivalent of 91 miles per gallon.
You miss the point, though.
What makes a good hacker is exactly the same things that tend towards "counter-culture." Rules breaking. Irreverence to power structure. Exploring outside the lines. Being not only willing to take a chance, but thriving on the adrenaline rush of being on the bleeding edge.
You don't get that spending your young adulthood in a computer or mathematics degree program at a community college. You get that from spending those years at places like DEFCON (and to a lesser degree, Burning Man).
And they do "real engineering" every day. They do it when they sleep. They do it when they idly sit on the train fiddling with a battery-powered Raspberry Pi or Arduino project, trying to use it to figure out some weird wireless signal they discovered.
And they'll do it for whomever pays them the most and gets in their way the least. Increasingly, it isn't Government or Fortune 500. And that's the point.
No.
But "the pool" includes people who use drugs recreationally, "ping" somewhere on the Aspbergers/Autism/ADD spectrum (and as a result usually have financial or criminal issues that makes them "unhire-able" by the Government), and to a very large degree don't find a job where there's a lot of spending time in meetings and filling out timesheets and forms to be very rewarding. Often, some of the best candidates have multiples of these issues: some of the best people in security, in fact, have all of these issues.
Guess what? The skills that define a "good hacker" are going to tend towards somebody who's "counter-culture."
Most of the really good hackers I've met are very enterprising souls. They don't give a rat's ass about your "rules". They typically are making a passable living working outside the boundaries. They define your rules as "bullshit." They have one motivation: toys. They don't care about your petty office drama, your corporate ladder-climbing, and your marketing bullshit.
It's exactly your mentality that ensures that the US Government (and, by in large, most of the Fortune 500) will continue to fall further behind. Your average hacker can make more in two hours than you'd pay him in a week hacking together some Perl script on a contract basis. And you can bet crime does, in fact, pay here. It pays quite well.
The difference is: at least where I work, the "badge" is a near-field chip that requires the reader be within a few inches. My employer can't "ping" my badge and know what room I'm in. They can see what the last door I opened was, but there's no tracking of exit doors (I don't need to "badge out" to leave), and may doors (to things like the break room and bathroom) are not even tracked.
And I work in a Tier III datacenter.
IF the badges are not near-field and IF the badges can be "pinged" anytime, anywhere, then it's a problem. If it's just that the teacher uses a handheld reader to "scan" the badge, I fail to see the problem.
Bad example.
Android still uses the Linux kernel, with very minor modifications. Linux isn't the userspace, it's a monolithic kernel written by Linus Torvalds. The fact that Android's user space isn't made up of the GNU toolchain doesn't change the fact that Android is, in fact, a Linux-based operating system.
BSD Unix is both a kernel and a userspace. OS X uses bits and pieces of both, and discards significant chunks of both the BSD userland and kernel code.
Cite: http://www.deq.state.or.us/wq/reuse/docs/graywater/FinalGWACRecommendations.pdf
This is the document my state's DEQ used to back up changes to the laws that required all greywater be treated.
Greywater often contains small amounts of biohazard contaminants and chemicals (such as phosphates from detergents). At best, it contains rotting food and grease, which does in fact represent a health hazard.
The one who is uneducated is you. How hard is it to drop it with your blackwater?
So, I live in a cabin "off-grid", and I'm a technology professional. I'm fortunate: my employer operates an LTE system that I'm just BARELY in the coverage area of, and there seems to be adequate service from most of the major US cell carriers that I have backup options when the LTE goes out (which it does every time the wind blows my directional antenna off the mark).
Believe me, you develop a "sixth sense" for Starbucks locations when they are the primary source of high speed Internet. Granted, I'm in the Pacific Northwest.. but I know where every usable hotspot is between my shack and downtown Seattle (some 300 miles away). I've learned which coffee shops to avoid, too.
The trick seems to be to have LOTS of options and be flexible. In addition to the service I get from work, I keep a Verizon USB dongle handy. It isn't cheap, but having that little bit of insurance means I'm not completely offline. I also still have a phone modem, and I can drive 12 miles to the store and use their phone line in an emergency for 10-15 minutes. Truck stops sometimes have phone ports for this purpose, BTW.
Yeah, the problem with most RV camps WiFi hotspots is very few are "managed", and all it takes is one teenager's laptop to BitTorrent the connection into oblivion.
I would argue doing this with your greywater makes you a douche.
Because the Universal Connect Fee is only levied on telephone access lines, and generally only "conventional" lines at that.
If you only have a cable modem connection with no phone line attached to it, and use many VoIP services and/or a cell phone, chances are you aren't paying into the Universal Service Fund.
Here's the problem: the vast majority of the "Americans" doing the talking are the ones that make us look bad. Those of us who are reasonable and "European" in our viewpoints and politics aren't the ones that are getting heard.
And it's not just a "media bias" thing. Even looking objectively at our own domestic media the Right Wing is the one doing all the shouting.
"99% of your money is in a bank account. "
Not knowing what dollar amount this is, that's your problem right there. If you don't have about US$1,000 handy in cash already available, you are more or less going to be traceable by anyone who is going to matter. And if you don't have any experience going "off-grid" for a short period of time when it didn't matter, you're going to screw up.
My variant of that was to use the name "Montgomery, Bart".
Those in San Francisco will get the joke.
... and try to improve life where you are.
It is catching up to them.
I work for a telecom company that has a significant investment in Huawei gear. Their equipment often has serious bugs, and upper management is starting to notice that the ability of the service and support teams to "do their jobs" is being hurt by Huawei's bugs, and we're seriously entertaining bids from other vendors.
The sad part is that their equipment is SO much cheaper than anything else on the market.. I don't know if we could afford to even convert a fraction of our gear to some other vendor. The economics of the business is such that we couldn't afford to provide the service at the prices we charge without using the cheapest option available.
.. and Amdocs is an old, archaic piece of shit that everybody is trying to migrate away from.
But, as you point out, it's difficult for even a small system like my employer to migrate to something else. It takes years to get everything working even for the best systems.
I'm not sure letting local governments run the infrastructure is much better. For example, I can imagine many cities (especially in the US Southeast) would censor the hell out of the connection, and you think the cable/phone companies give the police a lot of access to the network for monitoring? Imagine what would happen if the PD and the infrastructure people have the same boss.
No thanks. The system we have sucks, but it could be a LOT worse.
.. but, here it is.
Work in IT or at a NOC position for a small to medium size company doing a lot of cutting edge stuff. I work for a small independent cable company in their NOC, and while (after 20+ years in the field) it's a little underutilizing my skills, I'm often doing a lot of physical activity. Yeah, I spend about 60% of my time sitting at a desk, but the remaining 40% keeps me moving.
I'm not tellin' which one.
Given enough access to an old net.news database from back then, I bet someone could figure it out.
Dammit, where is that 3B1 backup tape?
Most of the verification of where the underground utilities are located is not done from maps, it's done by metal detection and simple detective work.
I've worked in the cable and telecom business for 20+ years, and I can tell you the typical cable and phone company may have a rough idea of where the cables are.. but they don't know exactly where they are down to the foot. My cable company, for example, knows that the feeder cable off node 201A goes down Empire Ave., and is on the electric company's pole from the freeway to 8th, and turns right at 8th. But just looking at the maps and legal documents doesn't tell you what side of the street it is on. And the legal documents are a blanket agreement between us and the electric company to use their poles at a particular altitude. The electric line continues for another few miles down Empire, but we don't use it beyond 8th.
Most of the knowledge is with the engineers and maintenance techs who work in the field. Even a lot of that knowledge gets out-of-date pretty fast, and a good chunk of the troubleshooting steps they must engage in is a game of "find the cable."
So, no, we don't have maps quite like you would expect. No cable or telephone company I've ever worked with has very detailed (let alone accurate) records.
As a technician / engineer for a regional cable company (with a LONG history in both the conventional telephone and cable industry) I strongly concur with this statement.
Yes, the major trunk lines are probably not too hard to find. However, a good chunk of the "last mile" is a combination of utility easements on private property, "pole-sharing" arrangements with another utility (usually the electric utility), and ad-hoc informal arrangements with property owners. The latter one is especially common in rural areas, where the shortest route between, say, a cable amplifier or telephone drop box might cross three or four neighboring properties that were never formalized.. or the paperwork involving that formal arrangement has been lost since World War II.
The older the city and/or the smaller the population, the sloppier the documentation is.