So why someone would feel it necessary to create a speed camera that wasn't accurate utterly mystifies me.
According to the article: (1) "Forest Heights, a town of about 2,600 where officials expected $2.9 million in ticket revenue this fiscal year, about half the town's $5.8 million budget" (2)"The devices are installed by vendors that typically receive about 40 percent of the payout on each ticket, with the rest going to local, county and state government."
And that's just one small town. There's a lot of money to be made from "inaccurate" speed cameras.
If you read the appmakers' FAQ, they mention it deliberately downgrades the resolution:
"To make it less useful for snoops, the spatial and temporal accuracy of the data has been artificially reduced. You can only animate week-by-week even though the data is timed to the second, and if you zoom in youâ(TM)ll see the points are constrained to a grid, so your exact location is not revealed. The underlying database has no such constraints, unfortunately."
Regarding your idea that "it's some sort of cache/database file used by the OS to make better connections and to do it faster" - uh, how?
wifi/cell: Hey there I'm an access point, here's my station id, give me the right password and I'll let you use me. phone: cool, hang on, before I look up my station:password table I'll just look up my database of where I've been before so I can connect to you faster! wifi/cell: wtf?
I've only played the demo, but from what I saw of the game I'm surprised many of those inmates were capable of standing again at all, let alone murdering guards. Batman may have a "no killing" code, but he doesn't seem to have a problem with breaking bones.
(also, I'd be restraining any inmates Batman was nice enough to take out for me - should be some bedsheets, curtains, cords or straitjackets handy somewhere; worst case, tie them down with their own shirts and trousers)
What that particular slaughter achieved was not what was originally intended, but - much as I might prefer it never happened at all - it did have other impacts.
As an Aussie, next week I'll be spending some time remembering both that we fought with irreverent courage and bravery, and that we let ourselves be sent to die on foreign soil for foreign pride (take that as you will).
So basically all of that banners in FOSS that claim that "this software comes without any implied warranty, not even a warranty of fitness for a particular purpose" have little legal sense, if any? IANAL, just really curious.
IANAL either; my lay understanding is that FOSS can do that only because there's no consideration involved (no exchange of value is required to obtain the software).
Basically, it's legalese for "you paid us nothing, we owe you nothing".
Whose attention? Nerds already know about it, it's not news for nerds. If someone somehow manages to get the attention of the masses [...] the entertainment corporations [...] work to achieve the opposite result
The trouble ahead for the entertainment corporations is that their market isn't just the nerds anymore - it's also the mainstream public who are now following in the nerds footsteps. That's good for profits if everything goes well, but it also means games are becoming newsworthy. And little attracts TV coverage more these days than bad news...
The game corporations will claim that there is no right to play, and maybe even insert a clause that means roughly that into the EULA. It is their right: if you don't agree with their offer, don't buy it!
Don't know which country you're in, but mine has a law concerning "fitness for purpose" that overrides anything a business puts in its EULA.
Do we really need to revel in its [DRM's] failure every single time a major game studio screws its customers?
(a) Yes. It focuses attention on the problem. (b) No. But hey, schadenfreude.
And whether envelope, file or stream, in all cases you have a containment mechanism which can, with the appropriate technologies, be penetrated without evidence to the sender's intended recipient.
(and I seem to recall that in the US the police aren't even allowed to casually thermograph your houses as they drive down the street?)
2. In-transit versus stored.
In-transit: "bags in a postal truck" vs "packets in a network cable". Stored: "bags in a mail room" vs "drives in a mail server", and "post boxes on a wall" vs "user accounts on a webserver".
Or did I misunderstand and the US government can warrantlessly rifle through people's boxes at the post office?
(thanks for mentioning "unitary executive"; I didn't know that term nor its context before)
Since email travels in the clear (mostly) and when you use a cloud service you are giving the information to an untrusted third party, the courts hold that you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Um, as an Aussie I may just be showing my foreign lack of clue, but if you replace "email" with "postal mail", and "a cloud service" with "FedEx", how the bloody hell does that make one damn iota of difference to the Fourth Amendment? Seems to me Justice wasn't just blind on the day US courts came to that conclusion, she was stabbed with her own sword and left bleeding to death in an alley somewhere.
Or have I totally misunderstood the reach of the Fourth Amendment and the US government has always been allowed to go warrantlessly rifling through postal trucks and mail rooms reading everyone's letters?
no slander has occurred because they haven't accused Wikileaks of anything other than violating their terms of service
Hmm. The terms of service prohibit encouraging illegal activity. I thought encouraging someone to commit illegal activity was itself illegal - conspiracy laws? accessory laws? If so, how is accusing someone of violating that clause not equally accusing them of illegal activity?
Also, aren't there laws that protect whistleblowers and allow the press to legally publish information obtained by whistleblowers or stolen by a third party? And isn't the purpose of wikileaks to publish evidence (actual or potential) of wrongdoing (specific or systemic)? Have they crossed a moral event horizon we should know about?
As for PayPal being singled out for this... yeah. It does seem to get a lot of flak. But given (a) PayPal's high profile, and (b) the loathing many have for the fifty yards of finely printed weasel words that compose a typical EULA or TOS these days, is it any wonder? I mean, seriously, those things are a shameful mockery of the social contract, and they taint all companies, including yours, whether your company uses them or not.
(which ties us back to the original topic - even humblebundle.com has a TOS that makes my eyes glaze)
... our payment service cannot be used for activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity
I assume you would assert these are not mutually contradictory statements for an international company when it locally follows the laws of each nation within which it offers its services, and that PayPal behaves thus?
However, various nations operate under the principle of innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and a subset of those nations both (a) criminalise being an accessory to illegal activity and (b) allow libel suits for publicly depicting an innocent as a criminal. How should - and how does - PayPal handle (WikiLeaks) accounts in such nations where the account holder has yet to be found guilty in a court of law of being an accessory to illegal activity?
(also, please provide PayPal's definition of "facilitate", as I feel the Oxford version would hamper PayPal's operations considerably)
Well, I suppose a few people might have vaguely heard that Japan was located in something called the Pacific Ring of Fire, and even fewer might have heard that the Earth averages an 8+ quake every year and a 9+ every twenty, but who pays attention to geologists when you need fifty nuclear plants for a densely populated island on a major tectonic intersection, and building meltdown-capable reactors to 7.9 instead of 9.9 will save your economy a fortune if nothing goes wrong?
Oh, and speaking of Titanic "the boat is unsinkable" moments, in an article pointing out that at least one Japanese legislator saw it coming, the "tempting fate" award goes to Yoshinobu Terasaka, the director general of the Japanese government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency:
"We put in place engineering designs so we won't allow such a situation, the worst kind of situation, to occur," Mr. Terasaka said, according to the transcript. "We push our safety designs to the point where such a situation is practically impossible."
At the border you are not yet in the US, so there are no constitutional protections.
The Constitution is the framework for the organization of the United States government. If the US government is telling you what to do, then the Constitution applies, period.
If they aren't able to profit from that investment, you remove one very useful motive in developing such things.
The other very useful motive being, of course, not dying of Alzheimers (and other similar diseases).
Patents: a method and system for externalizing the costs of enforcing a monopoly that would otherwise require the employment and use of thugs and/or mercenaries.
The exact narration from the film was "But then..." (shot of surprised driver eyeing car instrumentation etc, saying "oh") (shots of car losing speed and coming to a halt) (mixed with exaggerated sound of car losing power) "... although Tesla say it'll do two hundred miles we worked out that on our track it would run out after just fifty five miles... and if it does run out it's not a quick job to charge it up again" (mixed with shots of car being pushed into some kind of hangar).
If I said "I never stated your car would explode on the track" but the video accompanying my non-statement had your car apparently exploding on the track, what would your opinion of my truthfulness be?
I like Top Gear, I know they like to take the mickey out of cars, and the Tesla does have its cons - taking hours to recharge is one of them - but there's also how they finished that segment: (sad/serious-sounding music and narration) "What we have here then is an astonishing technical achievement... the first electric car that you might actually want to buy... it's just a shame that in the real world... it doesn't seem to work."
Of course then there's the very next piece of dialogue after segueing back to the studio: "... and I guess once they've made a few of them they will get better at the reliability." Top Gear drove back and forth across the line so much I'm not sure where they finished.
TLDR: Top Gear came dangerously close to rear-ending the law, maybe they did but I'm not a lawyer; in any case I can't blame Top Gear for Tesla's bad luck in having both their test cars develop problems on a show that loves to bash the faults in cars let alone in exotic new ones!
There's a difference between selling a car fitted with ONSTAR and advertising it as a feature, and selling a car fitted with (the corporate equivalent of) ECHELON and refusing to even admit its existence.
Actually it's because there will be no need to stop people. I see no technical reason why a sufficiently advanced system couldn't identify individuals from across a street. Our bodies already output a wealth of biometric information, let alone what can be additionally obtained by active scanning.
The question people should be asking is, "What are fair and just rules for the inevitable use of these technologies?"
I didn't know that. As far as smartphones go I'm little more than a newbie end-user, which I suspect is pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum from someone like yourself who does mobile development for a living? I tested - if one can call five to ten minutes per phone testing - start UI, call UI, contacts UI, calendar UI, and google syncing. And in my newbie end-user opinion the iphones and androids felt faster and less clunky, and the iphone UI felt 'slick', all of which I should fully admit are subjective observations (and given the issues I've since experienced, one might say the 'slick' has worn off).
I apologise for stating as fact my personal opinion.
I define lying as "knowingly speaking falsehood". Which is why the accusation offended me.
Thankyou for ruling out those possibilities. Does that apply globally to all phones running WP7, just the models in your market, or just your particular model?
And as for "each of the dozen or so (models)", perhaps you assumed that I meant only WP7 phones"? I apologise if I was unclear - I was referring not to only WP7 models but rather to all the models - wp7, android, iphone, etc - of phone in the shops that I checked out.
Anyway, have a nice day. Truly. You sound like you need one.
Well, as Randall himself said at the bottom of the chart, "If you're basing radiation safety procedures on an internet PNG image and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself."
Slashdot Mirror
According to the article:
(1) "Forest Heights, a town of about 2,600 where officials expected $2.9 million in ticket revenue this fiscal year, about half the town's $5.8 million budget"
(2)"The devices are installed by vendors that typically receive about 40 percent of the payout on each ticket, with the rest going to local, county and state government."
And that's just one small town. There's a lot of money to be made from "inaccurate" speed cameras.
Heh, I'm not paranoid, just cynical. :)
Thankyou for the explanation. I still don't see how it's useful or why they feel a need to keep such a long tail, but... meh.
If you read the appmakers' FAQ, they mention it deliberately downgrades the resolution:
Regarding your idea that "it's some sort of cache/database file used by the OS to make better connections and to do it faster" - uh, how?
wifi/cell: Hey there I'm an access point, here's my station id, give me the right password and I'll let you use me.
phone: cool, hang on, before I look up my station:password table I'll just look up my database of where I've been before so I can connect to you faster!
wifi/cell: wtf?
I've only played the demo, but from what I saw of the game I'm surprised many of those inmates were capable of standing again at all, let alone murdering guards. Batman may have a "no killing" code, but he doesn't seem to have a problem with breaking bones.
(also, I'd be restraining any inmates Batman was nice enough to take out for me - should be some bedsheets, curtains, cords or straitjackets handy somewhere; worst case, tie them down with their own shirts and trousers)
What that particular slaughter achieved was not what was originally intended, but - much as I might prefer it never happened at all - it did have other impacts.
As an Aussie, next week I'll be spending some time remembering both that we fought with irreverent courage and bravery, and that we let ourselves be sent to die on foreign soil for foreign pride (take that as you will).
Both are important to consider.
IANAL either; my lay understanding is that FOSS can do that only because there's no consideration involved (no exchange of value is required to obtain the software).
Basically, it's legalese for "you paid us nothing, we owe you nothing".
The trouble ahead for the entertainment corporations is that their market isn't just the nerds anymore - it's also the mainstream public who are now following in the nerds footsteps. That's good for profits if everything goes well, but it also means games are becoming newsworthy. And little attracts TV coverage more these days than bad news...
Don't know which country you're in, but mine has a law concerning "fitness for purpose" that overrides anything a business puts in its EULA.
(a) Yes. It focuses attention on the problem.
(b) No. But hey, schadenfreude.
How could something so simple be gotten so wrong?
Replace "envelope" with "file" or "stream".
And whether envelope, file or stream, in all cases you have a containment mechanism which can, with the appropriate technologies, be penetrated without evidence to the sender's intended recipient.
(and I seem to recall that in the US the police aren't even allowed to casually thermograph your houses as they drive down the street?)
In-transit: "bags in a postal truck" vs "packets in a network cable".
Stored: "bags in a mail room" vs "drives in a mail server", and "post boxes on a wall" vs "user accounts on a webserver".
Or did I misunderstand and the US government can warrantlessly rifle through people's boxes at the post office?
(thanks for mentioning "unitary executive"; I didn't know that term nor its context before)
Um, as an Aussie I may just be showing my foreign lack of clue, but if you replace "email" with "postal mail", and "a cloud service" with "FedEx", how the bloody hell does that make one damn iota of difference to the Fourth Amendment? Seems to me Justice wasn't just blind on the day US courts came to that conclusion, she was stabbed with her own sword and left bleeding to death in an alley somewhere.
Or have I totally misunderstood the reach of the Fourth Amendment and the US government has always been allowed to go warrantlessly rifling through postal trucks and mail rooms reading everyone's letters?
Hmm. The terms of service prohibit encouraging illegal activity. I thought encouraging someone to commit illegal activity was itself illegal - conspiracy laws? accessory laws? If so, how is accusing someone of violating that clause not equally accusing them of illegal activity?
Also, aren't there laws that protect whistleblowers and allow the press to legally publish information obtained by whistleblowers or stolen by a third party? And isn't the purpose of wikileaks to publish evidence (actual or potential) of wrongdoing (specific or systemic)? Have they crossed a moral event horizon we should know about?
As for PayPal being singled out for this... yeah. It does seem to get a lot of flak. But given (a) PayPal's high profile, and (b) the loathing many have for the fifty yards of finely printed weasel words that compose a typical EULA or TOS these days, is it any wonder? I mean, seriously, those things are a shameful mockery of the social contract, and they taint all companies, including yours, whether your company uses them or not.
(which ties us back to the original topic - even humblebundle.com has a TOS that makes my eyes glaze)
I assume you would assert these are not mutually contradictory statements for an international company when it locally follows the laws of each nation within which it offers its services, and that PayPal behaves thus?
However, various nations operate under the principle of innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, and a subset of those nations both (a) criminalise being an accessory to illegal activity and (b) allow libel suits for publicly depicting an innocent as a criminal. How should - and how does - PayPal handle (WikiLeaks) accounts in such nations where the account holder has yet to be found guilty in a court of law of being an accessory to illegal activity?
(also, please provide PayPal's definition of "facilitate", as I feel the Oxford version would hamper PayPal's operations considerably)
Well, I suppose a few people might have vaguely heard that Japan was located in something called the Pacific Ring of Fire, and even fewer might have heard that the Earth averages an 8+ quake every year and a 9+ every twenty, but who pays attention to geologists when you need fifty nuclear plants for a densely populated island on a major tectonic intersection, and building meltdown-capable reactors to 7.9 instead of 9.9 will save your economy a fortune if nothing goes wrong?
Oh, and speaking of Titanic "the boat is unsinkable" moments, in an article pointing out that at least one Japanese legislator saw it coming, the "tempting fate" award goes to Yoshinobu Terasaka, the director general of the Japanese government's Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency:
The Constitution is the framework for the organization of the United States government. If the US government is telling you what to do, then the Constitution applies, period.
The other very useful motive being, of course, not dying of Alzheimers (and other similar diseases).
Patents: a method and system for externalizing the costs of enforcing a monopoly that would otherwise require the employment and use of thugs and/or mercenaries.
The exact narration from the film was "But then..." (shot of surprised driver eyeing car instrumentation etc, saying "oh") (shots of car losing speed and coming to a halt) (mixed with exaggerated sound of car losing power) "... although Tesla say it'll do two hundred miles we worked out that on our track it would run out after just fifty five miles... and if it does run out it's not a quick job to charge it up again" (mixed with shots of car being pushed into some kind of hangar).
If I said "I never stated your car would explode on the track" but the video accompanying my non-statement had your car apparently exploding on the track, what would your opinion of my truthfulness be?
I like Top Gear, I know they like to take the mickey out of cars, and the Tesla does have its cons - taking hours to recharge is one of them - but there's also how they finished that segment: (sad/serious-sounding music and narration) "What we have here then is an astonishing technical achievement... the first electric car that you might actually want to buy... it's just a shame that in the real world... it doesn't seem to work."
Of course then there's the very next piece of dialogue after segueing back to the studio: "... and I guess once they've made a few of them they will get better at the reliability." Top Gear drove back and forth across the line so much I'm not sure where they finished.
TLDR: Top Gear came dangerously close to rear-ending the law, maybe they did but I'm not a lawyer; in any case I can't blame Top Gear for Tesla's bad luck in having both their test cars develop problems on a show that loves to bash the faults in cars let alone in exotic new ones!
There's a difference between selling a car fitted with ONSTAR and advertising it as a feature, and selling a car fitted with (the corporate equivalent of) ECHELON and refusing to even admit its existence.
Zeus?
Errata:
Self-signed HTTPS: except if your browser had visited the site before and could warn that the "new" certificate was not signed by the same party.
CA-signed HTTPS: except if the CA has been compromised into issuing a bad certificate...
Did I get that right?
Actually it's because there will be no need to stop people. I see no technical reason why a sufficiently advanced system couldn't identify individuals from across a street. Our bodies already output a wealth of biometric information, let alone what can be additionally obtained by active scanning.
The question people should be asking is, "What are fair and just rules for the inevitable use of these technologies?"
Eh, I'll just shut up. Building a time machine would be too much like work. :p
I didn't know that. As far as smartphones go I'm little more than a newbie end-user, which I suspect is pretty much on the opposite end of the spectrum from someone like yourself who does mobile development for a living? I tested - if one can call five to ten minutes per phone testing - start UI, call UI, contacts UI, calendar UI, and google syncing. And in my newbie end-user opinion the iphones and androids felt faster and less clunky, and the iphone UI felt 'slick', all of which I should fully admit are subjective observations (and given the issues I've since experienced, one might say the 'slick' has worn off).
I apologise for stating as fact my personal opinion.
Oh, I see what you mean. Locked SIM = no data via cellular. Heh.
Heh. You can also (at least with iPhone 3GS and iOS 4, can't speak for earlier versions) just go to make a call and it will prompt for the SIM code.
:)
But yeah, in hindsight, I may have chosen... poorly.
I define lying as "knowingly speaking falsehood". Which is why the accusation offended me.
Thankyou for ruling out those possibilities. Does that apply globally to all phones running WP7, just the models in your market, or just your particular model?
And as for "each of the dozen or so (models)", perhaps you assumed that I meant only WP7 phones"? I apologise if I was unclear - I was referring not to only WP7 models but rather to all the models - wp7, android, iphone, etc - of phone in the shops that I checked out.
Anyway, have a nice day. Truly. You sound like you need one.
Well, as Randall himself said at the bottom of the chart, "If you're basing radiation safety procedures on an internet PNG image and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself."
Hmm.