Long after is not long after at all... the article states (you did read the article, didn't you?) that the police department purges these records every three months.
But the most important thing here that nobody seems to be hitting on is that the residents -ASKED- for this system to be put in to place. This town is an enourmously wealthy one, and they were up in arms about them having an alarming 3 residential burglaries over the course of a year, and ASKED for the system to be put in to place.
To demand that the cameras be removed would be something akin to me coming to your house and taking your video camera because I didn't like how much you were monitoring your own life, let alone the lives of your poor, innocent children. Plus, you keep those videos forever.
They already do have that ability. Disable the alaskan oil pipeline and hit a couple of saudi oil tankers and the nation would grind to a screeching halt, and at a much faster and more permanent rate than turning off a few hazmat trucks.
I'm not sure exactly what people think NCIC is, but judging by the responses that were modded up, I believe at least some of the assumptions are erroneous. The functions of NCIC are basically keeping a record of stolen property, allowing agencies to search for warrants, records of restraining orders, missing persons, deported felons, and specific threats to national security (such as people who have expressed specific intent to kill the president, etc... not people who buy too many books on fertilizer storage). Very few changes have been implemented since the inception of the system... none even remotely approaching the draconian orwellian total information awareness machine that people seem to think this is.
One more apparently misunderstood point is that a "hit" on any information does not give the officer to power to arrest the person they believe to be a match. At the bottom (or top, depending on the state) of any NCIC hit is a message stating "Immediately confirm with ORI (originating agency)". Wants and warrants are not stored in NCIC. All that is present is a reference to a want or warrant held by a local agency. The officer must then contact the ORI directly to confirm the want. This does not involve NCIC in any way.
So what does the change in the rules regarding this do? Not much, really. The are hundreds of thousands if not millions of transactions within NCIC every day. Basically what DOJ is doing is clarifying that any errors are the responsibility (and liability) of the agency that enters them.
This changes your legal process the following way:
Old way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the DOJ and local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge throws out the case against DOJ, finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You get money. Hooray.
The new way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You still get money. Hooray.
There are pluses and minuses to both. You will generally not get poor working in the public sector. Most positions have been around for a while and are specialized enough that union representation is quite common, thus benefits and salary are usually adequate. Private sector, on the other hand, loves dishing out minimum wage in lower end jobs, such as retail and food services, and even in higher paying jobs union representation has become much thinner.
You will never, it should be noted, get rich in the public sector either unless you rise near the very top. Nobody cares that the CEO of a major corporation makes millions. EVERYbody cares when you get a 2% COLA on your contract in the public sector, because it's their tax dollars, damnit. You are a public servant and you should serve out of the goodness of your heart.
It may be in Nintendo's best interest to offer these devices with such bad lighting. I happen to work at a very large toy retailer (I won't mention the name, but it has a backwards consonant in the name and has a giraffe of questionable sexual orientation for a mascot), and it is a well known fact (around there anyway) that we make almost nothing on the systems themselves: usually only enough to cover shipping and storage. The reason: video game companies generally sell their systems at a loss in profit, and make it up in royalties on games and accessories. With us it is no different. The only reason we carry video game systems at all is so we can sell games and accessories.
This is such a huge point that everyone who works at our location has had to watch a 10 minute training video all about how to sell accessories and games with the system, especially to people who, well, have no intention of doing so.
So it comes as no surprise to me that there is a "flaw" in the system which is most easily solved by (*gasp!*) buying an accessory. An accessory which, I might add, is not backwards compatible with the old game boy systems, so you have to buy a new one.
I am going to be building my own computer here shortly, and one of the main things that has kept me from doing it for so long is the lack of support if I mess up. On the other side of the coin, however, I note that most of my calls to tech support have been regarding either faulty hardware or conflicts from software I didn't need in the first place. Being that I can filter a lot of that out, is there any need for me to worry?
What really gets my goat is the spam's that say they are selling targeted lists of email addresses, with everyone opt-in. Well, if that's true, then how did they get my name? I'm no opportunity seeker, and I sure as hell didn't opt-in.
Wouldn't it be theoretically possible for an open source community to apply for patents on things that are generally considered to be public domain, just so an unscrupulous company can't do the same? As I understand it, in order to get in trouble for patent infringement, the patent holder has to get their panties up in bunches and whine to the feds first. Either you could get a site to solicit donations, or just do a kind of hungersite thing, IE: "Thanks, you just kept.8 public domain ideas out of the hands of unscrupulous money grubbing idiots."
I work in the electronics booth at a certain unnamed international toy chain with a backwards letter in their name. I can definitely see why sega would want to abandon this genre. There is simply too few games to support paying for such a system, and too few people buying them. With Playstation, PS One (the smaller, $99 version of playstation) and PS2, there are hundreds, if not thousands of games available, due largely to the fact that it is an international platform and there are tons of import games for it (though not all of them do very well in the translation. See zero-wing AKA "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"). With sega, they have to basically do every game in house, since it would be hard to convince a developer to support the platform with such a bad track record of success.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't oz have the exact same problem when their entire power grid was routed through one big underground cable? I guess the australian philosophy is why have 2 decent ones when you can have one great one?
The use of two parallel, horizontal lines to express that the values on either side of said lines are equal. Implementation will require the immediate recall of all computer keyboards to replace the "=" key with the "=(TM)" key.
I think a lot of the stuff that the recording industry is scared about is that it will be harder for them to pawn off these "throwaway CDs" where they have the title made-for-radio track, and the rest of the CD is shit. Basically what's going to happen is the bands who actually give a damn what they put out are going to get the sales, and crappy manufactured bands aren't going to get squat. Unfortunately for the RIAA, that means that they are going to have to work harder on giving their "artists" new "work."
A better way, imho, is to use a non-resolvable domain name, like user@domain.com.nospam... or you could be more creative and do something like i.like@to.co.uk.spaghetti ~Ken
Ironic that this thread would show up as soon as I sign up for my PCS-to-email service. There are countless advantages to this. I pay US$5 a month for 300 messages of 120 characters each. Most convos I would have, I never end up relaying more than 120 characters of pertinent information anyway. Plus, you never roam, there's no long distance, and you don't get those stupid rounded up to the next minute charges.
First, let me start off by saying that I am a musician, and I fully believe in technologies like napster and gnutella (more in gnutella, but that's a personal preference). I see it as a way to fight back against the money-grubbing, over-charging, creativity-squashing record industry. But pertaining to the issue at hand: I can see how this would be a problem for napsterites, but us gnutellians should be in the clear. So the company can get a list of our IPs. Then what? Are they going to have gnutella ban them? Wait, that's not possible. Report us to the law? Well, no, since we didn't actually get the file to begin with, no crime has taken place. The most they can do is report us to our ISP, most of whom don't care.
I think one fundamental issue that we are all too willing to ignore on the napster/piracy issue is that there is some massive assumption that every person who downloads music was planning on buying the CD in the first place. Stated another way: mp3 downloading is not necessarily stopping somebody from buying a cd: if mp3s did not exist, people would not start snatching up cds in droves so that they could hear their favorite journey track or commodores cover. They would go without it.
The sheer irony will be if the gov lets this thing slide, making decryption illegal. After all, this is the same government that is whining and complaining that they need a way to break our encryption, remember?
Ironically, C|Net, who usually seems to be a major player in net freedom, has succumbed to the pressure and stopped mirroring the file. They deleted all records off of shareware.com and download.com. A site wide search points to this site which simply returns the message "The program you've requested, "DeCSS", is not available for download at this time. You might try searching for this title at a later date, or use the search box to look for a similar program now. "
The very fact that we are discussing this at all seems to contradict the idea that protesting is ineffective. After all, if there were no protests in seattle, I wouldn't have known about the WTO meeting at all. Plus, this calls to attention the standpoint of the protesters to the masses, and their grievances are now being heard worldwide. This is sure to generate more followers of their ideas, and more people means more clout.
Slashdot Mirror
Long after is not long after at all... the article states (you did read the article, didn't you?) that the police department purges these records every three months.
But the most important thing here that nobody seems to be hitting on is that the residents -ASKED- for this system to be put in to place. This town is an enourmously wealthy one, and they were up in arms about them having an alarming 3 residential burglaries over the course of a year, and ASKED for the system to be put in to place.
To demand that the cameras be removed would be something akin to me coming to your house and taking your video camera because I didn't like how much you were monitoring your own life, let alone the lives of your poor, innocent children. Plus, you keep those videos forever.
There is always a manual override, but the cardinal rule of overrides in Star Trek is that they never EVER work in emergencies.
apparently you've never heard of cable television.
Nope, that wasn't subtle. And for the record, neither was this. But when you have devotion like this, you have to know you're doing something right.
They already do have that ability. Disable the alaskan oil pipeline and hit a couple of saudi oil tankers and the nation would grind to a screeching halt, and at a much faster and more permanent rate than turning off a few hazmat trucks.
I'm not sure exactly what people think NCIC is, but judging by the responses that were modded up, I believe at least some of the assumptions are erroneous. The functions of NCIC are basically keeping a record of stolen property, allowing agencies to search for warrants, records of restraining orders, missing persons, deported felons, and specific threats to national security (such as people who have expressed specific intent to kill the president, etc... not people who buy too many books on fertilizer storage). Very few changes have been implemented since the inception of the system... none even remotely approaching the draconian orwellian total information awareness machine that people seem to think this is.
One more apparently misunderstood point is that a "hit" on any information does not give the officer to power to arrest the person they believe to be a match. At the bottom (or top, depending on the state) of any NCIC hit is a message stating "Immediately confirm with ORI (originating agency)". Wants and warrants are not stored in NCIC. All that is present is a reference to a want or warrant held by a local agency. The officer must then contact the ORI directly to confirm the want. This does not involve NCIC in any way.
So what does the change in the rules regarding this do? Not much, really. The are hundreds of thousands if not millions of transactions within NCIC every day. Basically what DOJ is doing is clarifying that any errors are the responsibility (and liability) of the agency that enters them.
This changes your legal process the following way:
Old way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the DOJ and local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge throws out the case against DOJ, finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You get money. Hooray.
The new way: An erroneous hit is made on you in NCIC. The officer deviates from procedure and federal law by not confirming the hit with the ORI. You sue the local agency for violation of civil rights. The judge finds the local agency and arresting officer liable. You still get money. Hooray.
There are pluses and minuses to both. You will generally not get poor working in the public sector. Most positions have been around for a while and are specialized enough that union representation is quite common, thus benefits and salary are usually adequate. Private sector, on the other hand, loves dishing out minimum wage in lower end jobs, such as retail and food services, and even in higher paying jobs union representation has become much thinner.
You will never, it should be noted, get rich in the public sector either unless you rise near the very top. Nobody cares that the CEO of a major corporation makes millions. EVERYbody cares when you get a 2% COLA on your contract in the public sector, because it's their tax dollars, damnit. You are a public servant and you should serve out of the goodness of your heart.
It may be in Nintendo's best interest to offer these devices with such bad lighting. I happen to work at a very large toy retailer (I won't mention the name, but it has a backwards consonant in the name and has a giraffe of questionable sexual orientation for a mascot), and it is a well known fact (around there anyway) that we make almost nothing on the systems themselves: usually only enough to cover shipping and storage. The reason: video game companies generally sell their systems at a loss in profit, and make it up in royalties on games and accessories. With us it is no different. The only reason we carry video game systems at all is so we can sell games and accessories.
This is such a huge point that everyone who works at our location has had to watch a 10 minute training video all about how to sell accessories and games with the system, especially to people who, well, have no intention of doing so.
So it comes as no surprise to me that there is a "flaw" in the system which is most easily solved by (*gasp!*) buying an accessory. An accessory which, I might add, is not backwards compatible with the old game boy systems, so you have to buy a new one.
I am going to be building my own computer here shortly, and one of the main things that has kept me from doing it for so long is the lack of support if I mess up. On the other side of the coin, however, I note that most of my calls to tech support have been regarding either faulty hardware or conflicts from software I didn't need in the first place. Being that I can filter a lot of that out, is there any need for me to worry?
What really gets my goat is the spam's that say they are selling targeted lists of email addresses, with everyone opt-in. Well, if that's true, then how did they get my name? I'm no opportunity seeker, and I sure as hell didn't opt-in.
Wouldn't it be theoretically possible for an open source community to apply for patents on things that are generally considered to be public domain, just so an unscrupulous company can't do the same? As I understand it, in order to get in trouble for patent infringement, the patent holder has to get their panties up in bunches and whine to the feds first. Either you could get a site to solicit donations, or just do a kind of hungersite thing, IE: "Thanks, you just kept .8 public domain ideas out of the hands of unscrupulous money grubbing idiots."
I work in the electronics booth at a certain unnamed international toy chain with a backwards letter in their name. I can definitely see why sega would want to abandon this genre. There is simply too few games to support paying for such a system, and too few people buying them. With Playstation, PS One (the smaller, $99 version of playstation) and PS2, there are hundreds, if not thousands of games available, due largely to the fact that it is an international platform and there are tons of import games for it (though not all of them do very well in the translation. See zero-wing AKA "ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US"). With sega, they have to basically do every game in house, since it would be hard to convince a developer to support the platform with such a bad track record of success.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't oz have the exact same problem when their entire power grid was routed through one big underground cable? I guess the australian philosophy is why have 2 decent ones when you can have one great one?
The use of two parallel, horizontal lines to express that the values on either side of said lines are equal. Implementation will require the immediate recall of all computer keyboards to replace the "=" key with the "=(TM)" key.
Does anybody have, or know where I can obtain, a crack for winamp that would allow me to use freedb.org?
I think a lot of the stuff that the recording industry is scared about is that it will be harder for them to pawn off these "throwaway CDs" where they have the title made-for-radio track, and the rest of the CD is shit. Basically what's going to happen is the bands who actually give a damn what they put out are going to get the sales, and crappy manufactured bands aren't going to get squat. Unfortunately for the RIAA, that means that they are going to have to work harder on giving their "artists" new "work."
A better way, imho, is to use a non-resolvable domain name, like user@domain.com.nospam... or you could be more creative and do something like i.like@to.co.uk.spaghetti ~Ken
Ironic that this thread would show up as soon as I sign up for my PCS-to-email service. There are countless advantages to this. I pay US$5 a month for 300 messages of 120 characters each. Most convos I would have, I never end up relaying more than 120 characters of pertinent information anyway. Plus, you never roam, there's no long distance, and you don't get those stupid rounded up to the next minute charges.
~Ken
First, let me start off by saying that I am a musician, and I fully believe in technologies like napster and gnutella (more in gnutella, but that's a personal preference). I see it as a way to fight back against the money-grubbing, over-charging, creativity-squashing record industry. But pertaining to the issue at hand: I can see how this would be a problem for napsterites, but us gnutellians should be in the clear. So the company can get a list of our IPs. Then what? Are they going to have gnutella ban them? Wait, that's not possible. Report us to the law? Well, no, since we didn't actually get the file to begin with, no crime has taken place. The most they can do is report us to our ISP, most of whom don't care.
I think one fundamental issue that we are all too willing to ignore on the napster/piracy issue is that there is some massive assumption that every person who downloads music was planning on buying the CD in the first place. Stated another way: mp3 downloading is not necessarily stopping somebody from buying a cd: if mp3s did not exist, people would not start snatching up cds in droves so that they could hear their favorite journey track or commodores cover. They would go without it.
The sheer irony will be if the gov lets this thing slide, making decryption illegal. After all, this is the same government that is whining and complaining that they need a way to break our encryption, remember?
Heck, you could just use your TV-out port on your video card and record it directly to VHS. Are we going to make coaxial cable illegal, then, too?
Let us not forget the Canadian Copyright Board's decision to levy a heavy tax on recordable CDs to "protect" artists from pirating.
Ironically, C|Net, who usually seems to be a major player in net freedom, has succumbed to the pressure and stopped mirroring the file. They deleted all records off of shareware.com and download.com. A site wide search points to this site which simply returns the message "The program you've requested, "DeCSS", is not available for download at this time. You might try searching for this title at a later date, or use the search box to look for a similar program now. "
The very fact that we are discussing this at all seems to contradict the idea that protesting is ineffective. After all, if there were no protests in seattle, I wouldn't have known about the WTO meeting at all. Plus, this calls to attention the standpoint of the protesters to the masses, and their grievances are now being heard worldwide. This is sure to generate more followers of their ideas, and more people means more clout.