If someone sends you something in the mail, it is yours, even regardless of what is included in it.
There's a charity that mailshots like this every year. They send out a bunch of 20 christmas cards and say 'if you want to keep them, send xxx otherwise send them back'.
I've even met people who fell for it. It must be profitable because they keep doing it...
MS' problem isn't the bloggers it's the ordinary people. Y'know, the ones that haven't bought a PC since Windows 95 came out, and probably only have XP because a friend put it on there for them.
Outside the techie world that's the vast majority - and Vista is just not specced out to run on those kinds of machines.
Ever notice how everybody ignores those signs and drives as fast as they can?
No, because:
(a) it's illegal (b) the police *love* picking up people for breaking these limits and are usually staked out along the stretch (c) half of the signs have speed cameras on them that activate along with the camera anyway.
The effect is fairly minor though unless lane 3 was congested already.
I don't agree with TFA that the 'ripples' will propogate very far - that relies on everyone tailgating, which really isn't going to happen - a percentage of drivers will be at a proper 2 second gap.. and even though that's (sadly) the minority each one of those will cushion the affect, causing it to die out fairly quickly.
OMG the highways agency think their screwing around with the limit *helps*????
Their system simply doesn't work. I've so often seen the situation clear road -> 60mph limit (jam) -> clear road that I can even predict the jams from the signposts now.
You have a road that is flowing freely at somewhere approaching (say) 85-90% capacity. Then you put a 60mph limit on it. This reduces the speed limit by ~15%.. simplistic calculation - reduce the capacity by 15% on an 85% capacity road. That ain't gonna make the traffic flow more freely. WTF are they thinking?
What's worse is if they continue this for a long time (sometimes they leave these limits on for days.. heck, there's one not far from me that's been the same for 3 months!) the jam backs up all the way up the motorway beyond the limit, backing up into the roundabouts and causing further jams on the roads leading up to the motorway.
It's just that the capacity (bandwidth if you like) of the road is extremely variable.
If someone decides to drive slowly that reduces the capacity all the way up the road behind him. Similarly if (as seems to happen a lot around here) the authorities put an artificial speed limit on the road for 'traffic management'.
If you have 120CPM, and the road capacity is 140CPM - no jam.
As soon as someone decides they're too scared to drive at the speed limit.. road capacity drops to 100CPM.. jam.
Old tech (article is way out of date). Been around for a year or more here. They're actually not that useful... shouting 'stop mugging that old woman' isn't going to actually stop anyone. It's far better to get the police response time down so they turn up and physically stop it.
The space will be really cheap too, as I could put the ad's in places where pedestrians would not see them, but the camera operators will.
There's the flaw in your plan. The cameras are placed in known troublespots.. which are almost by definition where people congregate. No people.. nobody watching. What would be the point?
Camera operators are all linked by radio to the police (and others.. not everything needs a police responce - someone so drunk they're running in front of cars needs someone to guide them to safety not arresting).
All a camera is is an extra set of eyes. Flipping the bird to a camera (or even the police) isn't normally an offence in the UK (technically it's a public order offence, but you'd have to be doing something else to get arrested for it.. too much paperwork and too costly to put people through the courts for such trivia).
The other night I had the ability to watch the police responce to an incident...
About a quarter of a mile away someone hit the panic button (all city centre workers have these at night). Having heard about how fast these could be I started counting. Less than 10 seconds later a police car doing stupid speeds headed in that direction.
Maybe took 15 seconds to get there? If that's 'useless' I'd love to see what you expect the police to actually *do*. Teleport?
The city I'm in (one of the largest in the UK). Has 120 cameras covering the entire region (80 of those in the busy city centre around 2 miles across). btw. They have speakers on them too and have done for a year or so now. And panic buttons below them.
It's manned by a team of around 8 people. Only one of those at any one time is a serving police officer. I've been there.. it's very non-orwellian (although I did note that it's essentially unmarked).
Yet if you were to believe the TV you'd think that they could track the movement of anyone, anytime, and that there were thousands of cameras. In practical terms you simply can't. The manpower and funding to do such a thing just isn't available.
1. A camera even while zoomed out fully only has a limited field of view. That's why you can move them. If you're outside that they can't see you. If you're not doing anything out of the ordinary nobody is likely to swing it in your direction either.
2. If you zoom in to see a specific incident (all the nightclubs, stores, police and carparks are linked by radio to the camera centre and to each other so they know where to look) you effectively shut out everything outside that since you're by definition only watching a small area.
For looking at specific potential crime spots it's ideal. For safeguarding the police and other workers on the ground it's ideal. For anything beyond that you need bodies on the street - and there are several hundred of them on a busy night.
As far as general monitoring of citizens (OK, subjects..) goes.. well maybe multiply the camera count by 100 and have half the police force watching the result and you might get there. Otherwise it isn't going to happen.
Re:Cell providers are the problem, not the phone
on
Inside Apple's iPhone
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· Score: 1
Same in the UK. Only the ignorant pay for ringtones... and there are enough ignorant people to keep an entire industry going, unfortunately.
It seems to me someone capable of manufacturing stuff with no raw materials and going that fast could do something worthwhile with it rather than giving rich kids more junk that they don't need (he doesn't visit poor kids. Gotta keep the workers down y'know).
Santa is a selfish bastard really.
Hell, even Bill Gates manages to give to charity... what has Santa ever done?
No shit batman. Of course it's unscientific. So is caring about your family, eating turkey, giving to charity.. millions of things are unscientific. Doesn't make them bad. Not everything has to be about science.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also the small matter of SQL Server and Visual Studio 2005.
I was shocked when I ran the compatibility wizard and found those were incompatible... 'contact the manufacturer' it says.. umm..
At that price you could buy an MSDN sub and a Laptop and also get Vista 'three weeks before it's on sale'.
Anyway, I thought Windows licenses weren't transferrable?
If someone sends you something in the mail, it is yours, even regardless of what is included in it.
There's a charity that mailshots like this every year. They send out a bunch of 20 christmas cards and say 'if you want to keep them, send xxx otherwise send them back'.
I've even met people who fell for it. It must be profitable because they keep doing it...
MS' problem isn't the bloggers it's the ordinary people. Y'know, the ones that haven't bought a PC since Windows 95 came out, and probably only have XP because a friend put it on there for them.
Outside the techie world that's the vast majority - and Vista is just not specced out to run on those kinds of machines.
Any good driving instructor will teach this.
What is shocking is that so many people seem to forget it the monent they get their license.
Why would a driver have to brake for a camera? Oh right, they were speeding.
So the cause is bad driving. Not speed cameras.
Ever notice how everybody ignores those signs and drives as fast as they can?
No, because:
(a) it's illegal
(b) the police *love* picking up people for breaking these limits and are usually staked out along the stretch
(c) half of the signs have speed cameras on them that activate along with the camera anyway.
The effect is fairly minor though unless lane 3 was congested already.
I don't agree with TFA that the 'ripples' will propogate very far - that relies on everyone tailgating, which really isn't going to happen - a percentage of drivers will be at a proper 2 second gap.. and even though that's (sadly) the minority each one of those will cushion the affect, causing it to die out fairly quickly.
OMG the highways agency think their screwing around with the limit *helps*????
Their system simply doesn't work. I've so often seen the situation clear road -> 60mph limit (jam) -> clear road that I can even predict the jams from the signposts now.
You have a road that is flowing freely at somewhere approaching (say) 85-90% capacity. Then you put a 60mph limit on it. This reduces the speed limit by ~15%.. simplistic calculation - reduce the capacity by 15% on an 85% capacity road. That ain't gonna make the traffic flow more freely. WTF are they thinking?
What's worse is if they continue this for a long time (sometimes they leave these limits on for days.. heck, there's one not far from me that's been the same for 3 months!) the jam backs up all the way up the motorway beyond the limit, backing up into the roundabouts and causing further jams on the roads leading up to the motorway.
It's just that the capacity (bandwidth if you like) of the road is extremely variable.
If someone decides to drive slowly that reduces the capacity all the way up the road behind him. Similarly if (as seems to happen a lot around here) the authorities put an artificial speed limit on the road for 'traffic management'.
If you have 120CPM, and the road capacity is 140CPM - no jam.
As soon as someone decides they're too scared to drive at the speed limit.. road capacity drops to 100CPM.. jam.
Even my crappy peugeot gets 68mpg real world (75mpg theoretical). Cost about 1/10th the cost of a Prius too.
I wouldn't start shouting about 40mpg. It aint great.
I think he meant, in a truly free society there wouldn't be any violent crime.
lol. I hope nobody actually believes that.
Speakers on cameras?
Old tech (article is way out of date). Been around for a year or more here. They're actually not that useful... shouting 'stop mugging that old woman' isn't going to actually stop anyone. It's far better to get the police response time down so they turn up and physically stop it.
The space will be really cheap too, as I could put the ad's in places where pedestrians would not see them, but the camera operators will.
There's the flaw in your plan. The cameras are placed in known troublespots.. which are almost by definition where people congregate. No people.. nobody watching. What would be the point?
Camera operators are all linked by radio to the police (and others.. not everything needs a police responce - someone so drunk they're running in front of cars needs someone to guide them to safety not arresting).
All a camera is is an extra set of eyes. Flipping the bird to a camera (or even the police) isn't normally an offence in the UK (technically it's a public order offence, but you'd have to be doing something else to get arrested for it.. too much paperwork and too costly to put people through the courts for such trivia).
In 10 years, cameras will have face recognition systems
10 years? I know for a fact they'll be in operation in less than a year.
OTOH they're so damned unreliable I suspect that they'll all be junked in 2 years...
The other night I had the ability to watch the police responce to an incident...
About a quarter of a mile away someone hit the panic button (all city centre workers have these at night). Having heard about how fast these could be I started counting. Less than 10 seconds later a police car doing stupid speeds headed in that direction.
Maybe took 15 seconds to get there? If that's 'useless' I'd love to see what you expect the police to actually *do*. Teleport?
Beyond the headlines, it isn't.
The city I'm in (one of the largest in the UK). Has 120 cameras covering the entire region (80 of those in the busy city centre around 2 miles across). btw. They have speakers on them too and have done for a year or so now. And panic buttons below them.
It's manned by a team of around 8 people. Only one of those at any one time is a serving police officer. I've been there.. it's very non-orwellian (although I did note that it's essentially unmarked).
Yet if you were to believe the TV you'd think that they could track the movement of anyone, anytime, and that there were thousands of cameras. In practical terms you simply can't. The manpower and funding to do such a thing just isn't available.
1. A camera even while zoomed out fully only has a limited field of view. That's why you can move them. If you're outside that they can't see you. If you're not doing anything out of the ordinary nobody is likely to swing it in your direction either.
2. If you zoom in to see a specific incident (all the nightclubs, stores, police and carparks are linked by radio to the camera centre and to each other so they know where to look) you effectively shut out everything outside that since you're by definition only watching a small area.
For looking at specific potential crime spots it's ideal. For safeguarding the police and other workers on the ground it's ideal. For anything beyond that you need bodies on the street - and there are several hundred of them on a busy night.
As far as general monitoring of citizens (OK, subjects..) goes.. well maybe multiply the camera count by 100 and have half the police force watching the result and you might get there. Otherwise it isn't going to happen.
Same in the UK. Only the ignorant pay for ringtones... and there are enough ignorant people to keep an entire industry going, unfortunately.
At least link to the proper video rather than a lame wow ripoff.. jeez...
Google have been slipping... half the searches I make either return redirects to kelkoo and pricerunner or completely bogus spamlink pages.
The search engine that cracks removing that junk will usurp google very quickly.
Google is the firefox default page also, which will make a difference.
It seems to me someone capable of manufacturing stuff with no raw materials and going that fast could do something worthwhile with it rather than giving rich kids more junk that they don't need (he doesn't visit poor kids. Gotta keep the workers down y'know).
Santa is a selfish bastard really.
Hell, even Bill Gates manages to give to charity... what has Santa ever done?
Santa uses MYSQL? Oh god, we're screwed.
No shit batman. Of course it's unscientific. So is caring about your family, eating turkey, giving to charity.. millions of things are unscientific. Doesn't make them bad. Not everything has to be about science.