Who cares about drones? I already get nightly flyby's of the San Diego police helicopter. Worse yet, my house seems to resonate around 45Hz, which means that if the copter is in the air within a few miles of my house, I experience a low rumble. At least if they used drones I could sleep at night.
It's likely our complaints will fall on deaf ears. We don't need a political solution - we need a technical one.
There has to be some group of people looking at ways around SOPA... Alternate DNS systems, Tor, tunneling, encryption... all of these things should be able to defeat whatever measures they throw at us. The real way to defeat SOPA is to render it irrelevant.
We can do this now, before it's passed, or we can do it after, but we're going to do it regardless.
Actually - I wonder if there is a certification agency for security/privacy? I've never heard of it, but if someone like the EFF got together with a testing lab and established a logo-certification program for various classes of devices(phones, operating systems, set-top boxes, networking equipment, etc.) you'd have a way for the consumer to evaluate security and make decisions accordingly.
Look, the people who develop the phones use them too. The reality is that there just aren't that many smart, motivated, capable engineers out there. Even when you have a few alpha-engineers on a team, their time is usually spent trying to squash those hard-to-fix bugs instead of doing a thorough security analysis. They're rushing to get the damn thing to production so they can move on to the next big thing.
I've spent my career developing embedded applications and not once has anyone paid me to address security. Bugs - user experience issues, stability problems, content security, standards compliance - those get the money. No one in management values security or privacy and they won't unless security researchers and hackers make the consumer aware of it.
"in use by the civilian public... fourth amendment generally doesn't reach it"
Can you cite the case? I was curious about this - if a civilian uses technology the police aren't allowed to, can the civilian's report serve as probable cause? If that's the case, why don't police use more private contractors to break the law for them?
So what about drone detection systems? It would sure be nice if there was a way for civilians to track small drones with little to no radar footprint. I'd bet the acoustic or RF signature of the drone would be a good place to start.
The whole thing is a giant gift to the TSA... who do you think is going to have to secure the track and molest the riders?
Re:So is there an alternative?
on
Of Mice and Cancer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
People are hard to experiment on, because you can't control all of the variables. People also have different genes. It's hard to tell if an effect was due to the drug, their environment, or their genetic makeup.
Mice, while definitely not people, have fairly homogeneous genetics and you can control what they eat, their exercise, etc.
So a few weeks ago my neighbor, a blue collar, beer drinkin, pot smoking guy in his 50s, gets a spider bite on his finger which gets infected. It keeps getting worse, his finger doubled in size, turned bright red, with red streaks going up his arm. Finally I convince him to go to the doctor.
He goes, gets powerful antibiotics, and starts to get better. I ask him a few days later how he's doing... his response? "Oh it's getting better, but I don't like how the antibiotics make me feel so I stopped taking them."
I ripped the guy a new asshole. It's dipshits like this that create antibiotic resistant bacteria. You can't blame the doctors when the patients refuse to follow the instructions.
- you get to pay for the useless clusterfuck that is the TSA.
- in 20 years you get to pay for the cancer settlement arranged with the TSA union.
- By then, I'm sure we'll have socialized medicine... so you get to pay for their care.
I'm a contractor, so I understand fully how the government gets paid to fuck-up, and then gets paid again to fix the fuck-up.
Not only that, but he chose to spend all of his 'political capital' on health reform, losing control of Congress in the process. Just imagine if he hadn't been obsessed with a monolithic, controversial health-care package and actually focused on some of his campaign promises. Even Hillary wouldn't have been that stupid.
Just off the top of my head, he's broken promises regarding:
- Ending the wars. Regrettably Bush was responsible for the draw-down in Iraq. Obama just held to the agreement. - Human rights. He's deporting people in droves. He's murdering citizens based on the decisions of a secret council. - Transparency. His administration is seeking to weaken the Freedom of Information Act. He doubled-down on prosecutions of whistle-blowers. He's stonewalling on Solyndra and Fast-n-furious. - Guantanamo. Still going strong. - Medical Marijuana.
Hell, he just added a new foreign base in Australia. Do we really need to expand our military into Australia?
It seems to me they'd have been more effective staging rallies every Saturday where normal people might show up. The whole Phish-concert-meets-homeless-shelter thing they had going only scares people away. But these are the same people who think giant puppets and drum circles are going to bring down the most powerful people in the world, so logic... isn't their strong suit.
There still exists a whole lot of anger at politicians(occupy K street, anyone?) and bankers, and hopefully someone will figure out how to tap into it and create real, lasting change.
The guy should have attached it to a taxi. The cops would have spent weeks analyzing and investigating every taxi stop.
Y'all better get used to this though. If the courts take away their ability to install GPS trackers, they'll just subpoena your cell phone records. They're already installing license plate scanners in police vehicles and traffic cameras. In a few years we'll have massive government databases with the locations of license plate readings stored so they can construct a log of where every vehicle has been.
The age of the individual was fun and I'm glad I was around to see it. I'm just thankful I don't have kids - my genes aren't a good fit for the future we're creating.
How can a democracy function effectively when the government is more complex than the average voter can understand?
In order to make intelligent decisions, voters need to understand what they're controlling. If they can't do that, you've got to remove some functionality.
You'd mark him a troll for saying something incorrect that you disagree with? Can we get an admin to take this guy's mod points away? He's not a troll. Please learn the difference before you moderate again.
Good point - using Gentoo brings a familiarity with the totality of the Linux experience that is second only to following the Linux from Scratch guide. It's been a few years, but I was never as sharp on my Linux internals, and the current state of important packages, as when I was using Gentoo.
Get a journalist from a major network and ask them why the fuck they let politicians off the hook when they give non-answers to direct questions in interviews and debates.
TFA seems to imply that a patient spends more time in the tube because of the slow processing of the images.... Is there a reason they need to be in the tube while the images are developed? Maybe they need to retake images if they didn't come out? Barring that... wtf? Why not just do the scan and process the images offline on another piece of equipment? Storage is cheap nowadays, and caching the received RF data temporarily should be feasible.
Seems to me it would be fairly trivial to add two cameras to the wingtips and use them, the GPS coordinates of the plane, and some trigonometry, to automatically file a report with an FAA clearinghouse which forwards the laser's source position to the local authorities. Having a reliable response system in place would act as a significant deterrent.
I think a more scary scenario is when 10+W handheld lasers start becoming the norm. We're going to end up in a future of drive-by blindings and arson attacks if we're not careful. Seriously, who thinks a drunk asshole could resist the possibility of lighting some guys pants on fire across a crowded bar?
Speaking of lasers - what's the legality of pointing them at the sky if you don't see a plane? I was shining a 300mW green pen into the sky(from my neighbor's house:)) last night and noticed the local ghetto bird(police copter) taking an interest in our area for a bit. I was only pointing at jupiter, so I don't think I broke any laws, but for now I'm paranoid and won't shine it in the sky from my house.
Shit, I just modded.. ah well.. gotta respond to this.
Anyone who has equity in their home should really consider bumping up your insurance and adding an umbrella policy.
I work around the corner from an exotic car dealer, and a few months back I found myself behind a $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron. One slip of the foot and everything I own would be gone in a poof of carbon fiber dust.
I just got a quote for $1mil coverage(about $220/year on top of my normal premiums), bringing my auto coverage to $1.25 mil. Sure, it won't quite cover the Veyron, but should cover the lambos and bentleys.
Yeah ok, Ron Paul's ideas are a little crazy, but he's the only one who seems serious about dealing with our impending financial doom. He's also the only one who really gives a damn about freedom, fairness, and transparency.
Please - give him one term. Let him trim the federal government - you can always build it back up in a few years. Think of it as a giant refactoring project.
Right now we've got an immensely complicated federal government. It's beyond the comprehension of an average American. If they can't comprehend it, they can't make wise decisions as voters. Let's tear it down so we can build it back up with the lessons we've learned.
We've got the Microsoft Windows of government - slow, poorly designed, with duplicate features - many of which you don't want, and prone to spectacular failure when you need it most. It's inner workings are opaque and it's behavior is oftentimes hard to anticipate.
We need a Unix-like government: efficient, fast, responsive, cleanly designed, compartmentalized, and well documented. People need to feel like they can participate and have a voice, because when you don't have that people end up rioting in the streets.
Yeah, like if they arrest you for disorderly conduct or assembling without a permit?
I'm sure it's already been said, but if we didn't have a drug war we wouldn't be having this discussion. The drug war just may end up destroying the western liberal tradition.
I used to work at a wireless networking startup. That's pretty much what they did, except instead of phone it was 'proprietary networking technology we didn't even invent'.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about drones? I already get nightly flyby's of the San Diego police helicopter. Worse yet, my house seems to resonate around 45Hz, which means that if the copter is in the air within a few miles of my house, I experience a low rumble. At least if they used drones I could sleep at night.
It's likely our complaints will fall on deaf ears. We don't need a political solution - we need a technical one.
There has to be some group of people looking at ways around SOPA... Alternate DNS systems, Tor, tunneling, encryption... all of these things should be able to defeat whatever measures they throw at us. The real way to defeat SOPA is to render it irrelevant.
We can do this now, before it's passed, or we can do it after, but we're going to do it regardless.
Actually - I wonder if there is a certification agency for security/privacy? I've never heard of it, but if someone like the EFF got together with a testing lab and established a logo-certification program for various classes of devices(phones, operating systems, set-top boxes, networking equipment, etc.) you'd have a way for the consumer to evaluate security and make decisions accordingly.
Look, the people who develop the phones use them too. The reality is that there just aren't that many smart, motivated, capable engineers out there. Even when you have a few alpha-engineers on a team, their time is usually spent trying to squash those hard-to-fix bugs instead of doing a thorough security analysis. They're rushing to get the damn thing to production so they can move on to the next big thing.
I've spent my career developing embedded applications and not once has anyone paid me to address security. Bugs - user experience issues, stability problems, content security, standards compliance - those get the money. No one in management values security or privacy and they won't unless security researchers and hackers make the consumer aware of it.
"in use by the civilian public... fourth amendment generally doesn't reach it"
Can you cite the case? I was curious about this - if a civilian uses technology the police aren't allowed to, can the civilian's report serve as probable cause? If that's the case, why don't police use more private contractors to break the law for them?
Regardless, even though the Supremes have declared it illegal for police to use IR cameras, they're doing it anyway: http://reason.com/blog/2008/12/06/gotcha
So what about drone detection systems? It would sure be nice if there was a way for civilians to track small drones with little to no radar footprint. I'd bet the acoustic or RF signature of the drone would be a good place to start.
The whole thing is a giant gift to the TSA... who do you think is going to have to secure the track and molest the riders?
People are hard to experiment on, because you can't control all of the variables. People also have different genes. It's hard to tell if an effect was due to the drug, their environment, or their genetic makeup.
Mice, while definitely not people, have fairly homogeneous genetics and you can control what they eat, their exercise, etc.
So a few weeks ago my neighbor, a blue collar, beer drinkin, pot smoking guy in his 50s, gets a spider bite on his finger which gets infected. It keeps getting worse, his finger doubled in size, turned bright red, with red streaks going up his arm. Finally I convince him to go to the doctor.
He goes, gets powerful antibiotics, and starts to get better. I ask him a few days later how he's doing... his response? "Oh it's getting better, but I don't like how the antibiotics make me feel so I stopped taking them."
I ripped the guy a new asshole. It's dipshits like this that create antibiotic resistant bacteria. You can't blame the doctors when the patients refuse to follow the instructions.
Ain't it great?
- you get to pay for the useless clusterfuck that is the TSA.
- in 20 years you get to pay for the cancer settlement arranged with the TSA union.
- By then, I'm sure we'll have socialized medicine... so you get to pay for their care.
I'm a contractor, so I understand fully how the government gets paid to fuck-up, and then gets paid again to fix the fuck-up.
Not only that, but he chose to spend all of his 'political capital' on health reform, losing control of Congress in the process. Just imagine if he hadn't been obsessed with a monolithic, controversial health-care package and actually focused on some of his campaign promises. Even Hillary wouldn't have been that stupid.
Just off the top of my head, he's broken promises regarding:
- Ending the wars. Regrettably Bush was responsible for the draw-down in Iraq. Obama just held to the agreement.
- Human rights. He's deporting people in droves. He's murdering citizens based on the decisions of a secret council.
- Transparency. His administration is seeking to weaken the Freedom of Information Act. He doubled-down on prosecutions of whistle-blowers. He's stonewalling on Solyndra and Fast-n-furious.
- Guantanamo. Still going strong.
- Medical Marijuana.
Hell, he just added a new foreign base in Australia. Do we really need to expand our military into Australia?
There are 3 pages of broken promises over at politifact: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/obameter/rulings/promise-broken/
Sure, other presidents might have been worse. I don't care. I voted for a guy who promised he'd be different. He wasn't. He lied.
It seems to me they'd have been more effective staging rallies every Saturday where normal people might show up. The whole Phish-concert-meets-homeless-shelter thing they had going only scares people away. But these are the same people who think giant puppets and drum circles are going to bring down the most powerful people in the world, so logic... isn't their strong suit.
There still exists a whole lot of anger at politicians(occupy K street, anyone?) and bankers, and hopefully someone will figure out how to tap into it and create real, lasting change.
Also looks like evidence that someone built a runway, realized it was in a bad spot(look at the arroyos), and built it again a little to the east.
The guy should have attached it to a taxi. The cops would have spent weeks analyzing and investigating every taxi stop.
Y'all better get used to this though. If the courts take away their ability to install GPS trackers, they'll just subpoena your cell phone records. They're already installing license plate scanners in police vehicles and traffic cameras. In a few years we'll have massive government databases with the locations of license plate readings stored so they can construct a log of where every vehicle has been.
The age of the individual was fun and I'm glad I was around to see it. I'm just thankful I don't have kids - my genes aren't a good fit for the future we're creating.
How can a democracy function effectively when the government is more complex than the average voter can understand?
In order to make intelligent decisions, voters need to understand what they're controlling. If they can't do that, you've got to remove some functionality.
You'd mark him a troll for saying something incorrect that you disagree with? Can we get an admin to take this guy's mod points away? He's not a troll. Please learn the difference before you moderate again.
Good point - using Gentoo brings a familiarity with the totality of the Linux experience that is second only to following the Linux from Scratch guide. It's been a few years, but I was never as sharp on my Linux internals, and the current state of important packages, as when I was using Gentoo.
Shit.. that does it.. I'm switching back!
Get a journalist from a major network and ask them why the fuck they let politicians off the hook when they give non-answers to direct questions in interviews and debates.
TFA seems to imply that a patient spends more time in the tube because of the slow processing of the images.... Is there a reason they need to be in the tube while the images are developed? Maybe they need to retake images if they didn't come out? Barring that... wtf? Why not just do the scan and process the images offline on another piece of equipment? Storage is cheap nowadays, and caching the received RF data temporarily should be feasible.
Seems to me it would be fairly trivial to add two cameras to the wingtips and use them, the GPS coordinates of the plane, and some trigonometry, to automatically file a report with an FAA clearinghouse which forwards the laser's source position to the local authorities. Having a reliable response system in place would act as a significant deterrent.
I think a more scary scenario is when 10+W handheld lasers start becoming the norm. We're going to end up in a future of drive-by blindings and arson attacks if we're not careful. Seriously, who thinks a drunk asshole could resist the possibility of lighting some guys pants on fire across a crowded bar?
Speaking of lasers - what's the legality of pointing them at the sky if you don't see a plane? I was shining a 300mW green pen into the sky(from my neighbor's house :)) last night and noticed the local ghetto bird(police copter) taking an interest in our area for a bit. I was only pointing at jupiter, so I don't think I broke any laws, but for now I'm paranoid and won't shine it in the sky from my house.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lights_out_(manufacturing)
Shit, I just modded.. ah well.. gotta respond to this.
Anyone who has equity in their home should really consider bumping up your insurance and adding an umbrella policy.
I work around the corner from an exotic car dealer, and a few months back I found myself behind a $1.5 million Bugatti Veyron. One slip of the foot and everything I own would be gone in a poof of carbon fiber dust.
I just got a quote for $1mil coverage(about $220/year on top of my normal premiums), bringing my auto coverage to $1.25 mil. Sure, it won't quite cover the Veyron, but should cover the lambos and bentleys.
Yeah ok, Ron Paul's ideas are a little crazy, but he's the only one who seems serious about dealing with our impending financial doom. He's also the only one who really gives a damn about freedom, fairness, and transparency.
Please - give him one term. Let him trim the federal government - you can always build it back up in a few years. Think of it as a giant refactoring project.
Right now we've got an immensely complicated federal government. It's beyond the comprehension of an average American. If they can't comprehend it, they can't make wise decisions as voters. Let's tear it down so we can build it back up with the lessons we've learned.
We've got the Microsoft Windows of government - slow, poorly designed, with duplicate features - many of which you don't want, and prone to spectacular failure when you need it most. It's inner workings are opaque and it's behavior is oftentimes hard to anticipate.
We need a Unix-like government: efficient, fast, responsive, cleanly designed, compartmentalized, and well documented. People need to feel like they can participate and have a voice, because when you don't have that people end up rioting in the streets.
Yeah, like if they arrest you for disorderly conduct or assembling without a permit?
I'm sure it's already been said, but if we didn't have a drug war we wouldn't be having this discussion. The drug war just may end up destroying the western liberal tradition.
I used to work at a wireless networking startup. That's pretty much what they did, except instead of phone it was 'proprietary networking technology we didn't even invent'.