There's a fire. The firepeople can park in the middle of the street and run a hose past your car.
I'm guessing its because they won't be able to **see** the fire hydrant rather than be able to physically get to it. We have "H" fire hydrant signs on the pavement (US: sidewalk) in highly visible locations to indicate hydrants which are usually accessed via flat metal panels in the ground.
A fair compromise would be an understanding that if there is a fire, the firefighters can run the hose *over* your car to get where they need to be. Seriously, have you seen a 6" fire hose in use? It's not like they get a real choice in which direction it goes: under pressure you can't make cute little S turns to get around vehicles, you lay it as straight as possible from the hydrant to the fire.
In US cities you can only park where there is a parking space explicitly drawn
Well, this isn't really true, it varies by state and city but a lot of times parking spaces are not drawn (it seems to me they are usually only drawn if there are parking meters, but that is convention, not law).
The most important rules are to look at the curb color; if it is painted red, or yellow then you can't park there for example; then make sure you aren't parking in front of a driveway, because then you won't just get a ticket, the owner will have your car towed; then another important rule is never park next to a fire hydrant. That is so if there's a fire, the firemen can get to it.
Next, if you have picked a spot to park that isn't explicitly allowed (via a meter) scan up and down the street for any signs with arrows on them. They probably contain fine print about specific parking restrictions (standing but no parking, no stopping certain times/days, etc) and then look for "permit parking only" or better yet eye any other cars for identical hanging tags or stickers to see if you have found yourself in a permit area. Yes, inner city parking (in just about every city of any appreciable size) is such a nightmare that it's really no wonder anyone with a little bit of money flees to the suburbs.
I thought all hydrants were dry-barrel. The firemen remove the side caps and connect hoses, then open the valve using the large nut on top of the hydrant. The valve itself is below ground at the water main, connected by a shaft to the nut.
The reason crashing into the hydrant causes the geyser is because the valve is either broken by the impact at the top of its shaft, or the shaft is sheared off and the stopper in the valve is pushed out by water pressure.
That's how it was explained to me anyway. Maybe other systems are different.
If the valve is not on OR under the hydrant, but under a main shutoff cover (as described) then the issue of hitting the hydrant is nonexistent; you can rip it clean out of the ground if you want and water will still not come out unless you rip out the main shutoff too.
I do find the whole fire hydrant thing in the US a bit odd - we have hydrant points here in the UK, but they are below ground with a small manhole cover over it, and are also positioned so they cannot be trivially blocked (either in the road, or on the pavement). We don't seem to have any major issues with inaccessibility, so why the US?
It's not a question of the hookup being completely inaccessible, it's a question of it being accessible enough to quickly service both sides of the street (as hydrants are generally only installed on one side). So, no parking next to them, and firefighters have a decent chance at getting hoses hooked to pump trucks or run across the street to fight a fire.
Hand-balling security to the end user, when 90% of end users are muppets will not work, as demonstrated by the malware success on the Windows platform. Android is the Windows XP of smartphones. The rest of the world has tried that approach for the past 30 years, seen that it is not viable, and moved on. End users are not, and will not ever be, or care to be security experts. Apple gets that. Microsoft is beginning to get that. Android fans who say that leaving security stuff to the end user do not get that. Yet. It will come.
Except, the article he quoted said nothing of putting an actual security requirement on the user. Instead, the mere notion that the app will present all of its permissions at install time seems to be pushing the developers to limit what they ask for in the first place. Security by design is a Good Thing. Cyanogenmod, for those who really want to bite off a big piece of the pie, is an entirely different conversation.
I have an Android and an iPhone and find the iPhone works better for what I need it for. While I've been frustrated from time to time with the iPhone, it doesn't take more than a minute or two of using the Android before I'm ready to pitch the damn thing into a nearby lake. It's nothing about available apps or external storage or anything, just basic usability. Being able to compose an email or text someone.
[John]
Glad you are comfortable sending a text or a really long text (email) on your iPhone. Those of us interested in a smartphone will continue to enjoy the Android experience.
You clearly picked the wrong one. Follow the link for the ayePhone or if you want dual sim (and maritime compatible) version click on ayeayePhone. See, user error.
Just because something hasn't been updated doesn't automatically mean it's broken. Everyone's hopped on to this nonsensical upgrade treadmill. Software doesn't 'wear out.' If it's not buggy, it will stay buggy. If it's working, it will stay working.
As far as supported vs unsupported software goes, you should be assuming your system can be compromised and planning accordingly anyway, whether you get updates or not.
That's true for something like an ASCII text editor where the requirements are dead simple. However when encryption, and in particular fancy-tricks encryption like deniability are part of the requirements, you bet your ass that problems will appear out of nowhere. Humans make mistakes, and humans make software, so humans make software with mistakes. Just because it passed every practical review and test the first time around, doesn't make it future-proof. With the source code and enough time, someone will find an exploitable bug. If there is no chance that the Good Guys will find it first (since they apparently caught the last train to the coast) then that leaves one eventuality, that the Bad Guys will find it first, and everything that was once safely locked up will be left hanging in the breeze.
Most of the time I'm sedentary it's because my job has me sit at a desk typing code(or slashdot comments) all day. This is exacerbated for most people, because they attach an hour or more of sedentary driving onto each end.
And being sedentary is mentally exhausting compared to light exercise. It's no surprise that there's an obesity epidemic.
Your point is right, but to be correct "most people" spend 25 minutes driving on either end of their day. Hourlong commutes might be common for drivers in big cities but are the exception nationally.
Traffic deaths per person and per mile were at their peak in the 30s and 40s, when cars were poorly designed and tested (given their relative novelty) and today, despite there being so many new distractions for drivers, traffic deaths continue to decline. We suck at driving way more than cars suck at protecting us, and it's only through better designed machines (not anything we are doing to be better drivers, clearly) are we staying safer on the roads.
It is certainly true that traffic deaths have continued to decline for decades. And that is mostly, if not entirely, due to safer cars.
However, traffic ACCIDENTS (measured both by accidents per passenger-mile and by absolute number of accidents) have also been declining for at least the last couple decades. I can believe safer cars cause fewer deaths, I don't see how safer cars cause fewer accidents....
Cars are easier to control than ever before. They stop faster, turn sharper, and provide the driver more insight through better sight lines (when they are choosing to pay attention) vs cars of the past that were much more poorly designed. Or maybe it's because a "good driving" gene is slowly emerging as a selected for trait? I could see it either way.
Given this article mere moments ago on/. indicating that Google's autonomous cars have driven 700,000 miles on public roads with no citations, it's difficult to argue that they're not more competent, if not hyper-competent, compared to human drivers (most of whom get traffic tickets, and most of whom don't drive 700,000 miles between doing so).
Article has many good valid points, though, but that point irked me.
This. If we mythologize the competence of robots (at least ones well designed and tested to pilot a car) then it's not by nearly as much as we mythologize our own competence. Traffic deaths per person and per mile were at their peak in the 30s and 40s, when cars were poorly designed and tested (given their relative novelty) and today, despite there being so many new distractions for drivers, traffic deaths continue to decline. We suck at driving way more than cars suck at protecting us, and it's only through better designed machines (not anything we are doing to be better drivers, clearly) are we staying safer on the roads.
>>>>they will drive off and transport someone else who needs a ride
This is interesting point that I think should be further discussed. Would you want *your* car to be used by somebody else? Perhaps. Still, I keep my cars very clean (A), some other people's cars look like insides of a trashcan (B). What happens when Group A's car ends up being used by Group B riders?
I guess you will have to have self-driving and self-cleaning cars. Otherwise ride-sharing is no-go for me, no matter how much it saves me or the planet.
Why the heck wouldn't there be self-cleaning cars? Or at least, cars whose owners (the corps that invest in the fleets and scheduling systems) value cleanliness and have the cars drive on a regular basis to some distant outpost where they are meticulously cleaned by very low cost labor. A night shift at an abandoned warehouse 10 miles outside of town, perhaps. The cars will stream in, timed perfectly to not require a queue, and then travel back out to their staging zones ready for the morning commute.
And those will be the cars for the more sanitary (and slightly higher paying) passengers. The possibilities for transportation systems developed around true driverless cars are really unlimited.
If the vendor pays, then the vendor owns the brain in the car you bought rather than YOU owning the brain in YOUR car. They will make modding the car illegal as they own it. And if they are liable for it's misbehavior, that even makes sense.
Do you want to live in a world where you own your property? Or would you prefer to rent a license from the corporate overlords?
If I can get wherever I am going whenever I want, for a fraction of the cost (basically a very low cost taxi service since the most expensive element, the driver, is now missing) then fuck it, why would I own a car at all? Sign me up for the "private busing" service where every morning it picks me up, takes me to work, then goes and takes other people to work, then brings us all home individually, whenever it is that we wanted/needed it (thanks to dynamic scheduling of thousands of passengers' needs) and I will forget I ever knew how to drive a car.
But crap, now we have the Taxi companies and bus driver unions to contend with. This might not go anywhere after all.
Is this wise? They know where you live. Plus, your car can tow away itself.
One of the many many amazing things about driverless cars is that they don't actually _need_ to be parked in order for you to get where you are going. Ideally, they will drive off and transport someone else who needs a ride, or find a parking space some miles away, or even just drive itself around the block until you are done doing whatever you stopped to do. Because the future!
Taxing EVs makes perfect sense. They still need roads to be built and maintained.
Adding an enforcement fee for a car that doesn't need enforcement is just absurd. If the number of tickets being written drops because there are no more speeding cars and reckless drivers, then just reduce the size of the police force. You don't need patrol cops any more and that's a good thing. Instead of employing people as patrol cops, they can instead work as artists or scientists or something that makes the world better instead of being a necessary evil.
Except traffic enforcement (despite how much we might despise it) is not the "necessary evil" in this case. Traffic enforcement is done by officers not needed at actual incidents, like trouble calls, emergency response, etc. Take away "those officers" and you have a police force that can't respond nearly as well to a major incident like an active shooter, armed robbery in progress, pursuit, etc. and will not respond as fast to incidents like breaking/entering, assault, etc. where response time is critical. This is what we expect from the police force, and we currently exploit the need for a traffic safety deterrent incentive (a fine) to pay for it. If it's not there any more, either taxes will go up or police protection will go down.
Now, is a future of almost ubiquitous driverless-car use preferable for its own improvement in safety and efficiency? Probably. Let taxation and funding come from actual citizen demand (and passed in voted tax levies), not from how effective speed traps are.
What if you made an app for iOS that, when activated, jammed all the cell signals within a 500' radius?[...] If I take my SD card out, is the phone legal now?
Nope, if you have an SD card to take out, you're using a KIRF iPhone and it was illegal as soon as it was imported to the US, and always will be. For a slightly different reason though.
It's not like prisons are trying to violate rights--they're generally trying to [fill in the blank]
Of course not. What it IS like, is prisons are trying to turn a profit (lots of them are, anyway) and in doing so reduce the costs to the point where they (guards, admins, etc) have no choice but to abuse the prisoners just to keep them all in line.
Well if the prison guards are actually showing pirated movies, it isn't piracy for profit, but it isn't exactly piracy for personal use either.
Given that the prisons in Ohio are privatized, yes anything provided to the inmates would be legally and practically "for profit". Still not sure why they would bother offering them anything but super old DVDs and VHS movies that have been scrapped at the local library, but one thing that comes to mind is a guard curtailed a favor from an inmate in exchange for something recent to watch. It will be interesting to see if the investigation turns anything up.
I was under the impression that Tesla vehicles used banks of off-the-shelf 18650 Li-ion batteries.
Really? Because you read it on a forum? 18650's are great for flashlights but pretty lousy on density/weight. They no doubt use a custom packaging, there would be no point in having a zillion cylinders and all the requisite wasted space and weight inside a single pack for a roadster. Guess we will have to wait until someone finally tears one open (or there is a bad enough crash) to know for sure though.
Depends on the state. If you're traveling with a weapon through Massachusetts and that weapon is stolen from you and then used to commit a murder- you will end up standing trial for murder with the thief who stole your weapon.
That's a little rhetoric-heavy, care to cite a source? Seems that most heavy gun ownership laws only require reporting the theft (upon penalty of loss of license or possible civil action, not criminal, if the gun is used in a subsequent crime) and there is no precedent available that suggests that in MA you are going to be charged with a capital offense if your gun is used by a thief to commit murder.
I've heard people fair slightly better when they have a fake ADT sign/stickers they bought off eBay.
This. Surveys/research has shown that thieves avoid houses that might be alarmed (according to signage) and move to easier targets. Most insurance companies even offer a discount for merely having a security system on the premises (with the presumption that it came with signs/stickers) even if said system is deactivated and not monitored remotely.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a fire. The firepeople can park in the middle of the street and run a hose past your car.
I'm guessing its because they won't be able to **see** the fire hydrant rather than be able to physically get to it. We have "H" fire hydrant signs on the pavement (US: sidewalk) in highly visible locations to indicate hydrants which are usually accessed via flat metal panels in the ground.
A fair compromise would be an understanding that if there is a fire, the firefighters can run the hose *over* your car to get where they need to be. Seriously, have you seen a 6" fire hose in use? It's not like they get a real choice in which direction it goes: under pressure you can't make cute little S turns to get around vehicles, you lay it as straight as possible from the hydrant to the fire.
In US cities you can only park where there is a parking space explicitly drawn
Well, this isn't really true, it varies by state and city but a lot of times parking spaces are not drawn (it seems to me they are usually only drawn if there are parking meters, but that is convention, not law).
The most important rules are to look at the curb color; if it is painted red, or yellow then you can't park there for example; then make sure you aren't parking in front of a driveway, because then you won't just get a ticket, the owner will have your car towed; then another important rule is never park next to a fire hydrant. That is so if there's a fire, the firemen can get to it.
Next, if you have picked a spot to park that isn't explicitly allowed (via a meter) scan up and down the street for any signs with arrows on them. They probably contain fine print about specific parking restrictions (standing but no parking, no stopping certain times/days, etc) and then look for "permit parking only" or better yet eye any other cars for identical hanging tags or stickers to see if you have found yourself in a permit area. Yes, inner city parking (in just about every city of any appreciable size) is such a nightmare that it's really no wonder anyone with a little bit of money flees to the suburbs.
I thought all hydrants were dry-barrel. The firemen remove the side caps and connect hoses, then open the valve using the large nut on top of the hydrant. The valve itself is below ground at the water main, connected by a shaft to the nut.
The reason crashing into the hydrant causes the geyser is because the valve is either broken by the impact at the top of its shaft, or the shaft is sheared off and the stopper in the valve is pushed out by water pressure.
That's how it was explained to me anyway. Maybe other systems are different.
If the valve is not on OR under the hydrant, but under a main shutoff cover (as described) then the issue of hitting the hydrant is nonexistent; you can rip it clean out of the ground if you want and water will still not come out unless you rip out the main shutoff too.
I do find the whole fire hydrant thing in the US a bit odd - we have hydrant points here in the UK, but they are below ground with a small manhole cover over it, and are also positioned so they cannot be trivially blocked (either in the road, or on the pavement). We don't seem to have any major issues with inaccessibility, so why the US?
It's not a question of the hookup being completely inaccessible, it's a question of it being accessible enough to quickly service both sides of the street (as hydrants are generally only installed on one side). So, no parking next to them, and firefighters have a decent chance at getting hoses hooked to pump trucks or run across the street to fight a fire.
Hand-balling security to the end user, when 90% of end users are muppets will not work, as demonstrated by the malware success on the Windows platform. Android is the Windows XP of smartphones. The rest of the world has tried that approach for the past 30 years, seen that it is not viable, and moved on. End users are not, and will not ever be, or care to be security experts. Apple gets that. Microsoft is beginning to get that. Android fans who say that leaving security stuff to the end user do not get that. Yet. It will come.
Except, the article he quoted said nothing of putting an actual security requirement on the user. Instead, the mere notion that the app will present all of its permissions at install time seems to be pushing the developers to limit what they ask for in the first place. Security by design is a Good Thing. Cyanogenmod, for those who really want to bite off a big piece of the pie, is an entirely different conversation.
I have an Android and an iPhone and find the iPhone works better for what I need it for. While I've been frustrated from time to time with the iPhone, it doesn't take more than a minute or two of using the Android before I'm ready to pitch the damn thing into a nearby lake. It's nothing about available apps or external storage or anything, just basic usability. Being able to compose an email or text someone.
[John]
Glad you are comfortable sending a text or a really long text (email) on your iPhone. Those of us interested in a smartphone will continue to enjoy the Android experience.
Alibaba lied when they sold me my ePhone!
You clearly picked the wrong one. Follow the link for the ayePhone or if you want dual sim (and maritime compatible) version click on ayeayePhone. See, user error.
Just because something hasn't been updated doesn't automatically mean it's broken. Everyone's hopped on to this nonsensical upgrade treadmill. Software doesn't 'wear out.' If it's not buggy, it will stay buggy. If it's working, it will stay working.
As far as supported vs unsupported software goes, you should be assuming your system can be compromised and planning accordingly anyway, whether you get updates or not.
That's true for something like an ASCII text editor where the requirements are dead simple. However when encryption, and in particular fancy-tricks encryption like deniability are part of the requirements, you bet your ass that problems will appear out of nowhere. Humans make mistakes, and humans make software, so humans make software with mistakes. Just because it passed every practical review and test the first time around, doesn't make it future-proof. With the source code and enough time, someone will find an exploitable bug. If there is no chance that the Good Guys will find it first (since they apparently caught the last train to the coast) then that leaves one eventuality, that the Bad Guys will find it first, and everything that was once safely locked up will be left hanging in the breeze.
A lot of GNU tools haven't been updated in around two decades yet no one feels like they need to be rewritten.
If it ain't broke don't try to "fix" it.
I was shocked to find out the other day that the cron most Linux distributions use was last updated in 1993.
How have the requirments of cron changed in lthe last 20, even 40, years?
Where is my microsecond scheduling, you insensitive clod?
Most of the time I'm sedentary it's because my job has me sit at a desk typing code(or slashdot comments) all day. This is exacerbated for most people, because they attach an hour or more of sedentary driving onto each end.
And being sedentary is mentally exhausting compared to light exercise. It's no surprise that there's an obesity epidemic.
Your point is right, but to be correct "most people" spend 25 minutes driving on either end of their day. Hourlong commutes might be common for drivers in big cities but are the exception nationally.
Why do I want my household appliances sending usage data to who knows where?
You're low on milk.
I mean, you could find out of you were low on milk. You know, wirelessly. Yeah.
It is certainly true that traffic deaths have continued to decline for decades. And that is mostly, if not entirely, due to safer cars.
However, traffic ACCIDENTS (measured both by accidents per passenger-mile and by absolute number of accidents) have also been declining for at least the last couple decades. I can believe safer cars cause fewer deaths, I don't see how safer cars cause fewer accidents....
Cars are easier to control than ever before. They stop faster, turn sharper, and provide the driver more insight through better sight lines (when they are choosing to pay attention) vs cars of the past that were much more poorly designed. Or maybe it's because a "good driving" gene is slowly emerging as a selected for trait? I could see it either way.
Given this article mere moments ago on /. indicating that Google's autonomous cars have driven 700,000 miles on public roads with no citations, it's difficult to argue that they're not more competent, if not hyper-competent, compared to human drivers (most of whom get traffic tickets, and most of whom don't drive 700,000 miles between doing so).
Article has many good valid points, though, but that point irked me.
This. If we mythologize the competence of robots (at least ones well designed and tested to pilot a car) then it's not by nearly as much as we mythologize our own competence. Traffic deaths per person and per mile were at their peak in the 30s and 40s, when cars were poorly designed and tested (given their relative novelty) and today, despite there being so many new distractions for drivers, traffic deaths continue to decline. We suck at driving way more than cars suck at protecting us, and it's only through better designed machines (not anything we are doing to be better drivers, clearly) are we staying safer on the roads.
>>>>they will drive off and transport someone else who needs a ride
This is interesting point that I think should be further discussed. Would you want *your* car to be used by somebody else? Perhaps. Still, I keep my cars very clean (A), some other people's cars look like insides of a trashcan (B). What happens when Group A's car ends up being used by Group B riders?
I guess you will have to have self-driving and self-cleaning cars. Otherwise ride-sharing is no-go for me, no matter how much it saves me or the planet.
Why the heck wouldn't there be self-cleaning cars? Or at least, cars whose owners (the corps that invest in the fleets and scheduling systems) value cleanliness and have the cars drive on a regular basis to some distant outpost where they are meticulously cleaned by very low cost labor. A night shift at an abandoned warehouse 10 miles outside of town, perhaps. The cars will stream in, timed perfectly to not require a queue, and then travel back out to their staging zones ready for the morning commute.
And those will be the cars for the more sanitary (and slightly higher paying) passengers. The possibilities for transportation systems developed around true driverless cars are really unlimited.
If the vendor pays, then the vendor owns the brain in the car you bought rather than YOU owning the brain in YOUR car.
They will make modding the car illegal as they own it. And if they are liable for it's misbehavior, that even makes sense.
Do you want to live in a world where you own your property?
Or would you prefer to rent a license from the corporate overlords?
If I can get wherever I am going whenever I want, for a fraction of the cost (basically a very low cost taxi service since the most expensive element, the driver, is now missing) then fuck it, why would I own a car at all? Sign me up for the "private busing" service where every morning it picks me up, takes me to work, then goes and takes other people to work, then brings us all home individually, whenever it is that we wanted/needed it (thanks to dynamic scheduling of thousands of passengers' needs) and I will forget I ever knew how to drive a car.
But crap, now we have the Taxi companies and bus driver unions to contend with. This might not go anywhere after all.
Is this wise? They know where you live. Plus, your car can tow away itself.
One of the many many amazing things about driverless cars is that they don't actually _need_ to be parked in order for you to get where you are going. Ideally, they will drive off and transport someone else who needs a ride, or find a parking space some miles away, or even just drive itself around the block until you are done doing whatever you stopped to do. Because the future!
Oh, you were being funny?
Taxing EVs makes perfect sense. They still need roads to be built and maintained.
Adding an enforcement fee for a car that doesn't need enforcement is just absurd. If the number of tickets being written drops because there are no more speeding cars and reckless drivers, then just reduce the size of the police force. You don't need patrol cops any more and that's a good thing. Instead of employing people as patrol cops, they can instead work as artists or scientists or something that makes the world better instead of being a necessary evil.
Except traffic enforcement (despite how much we might despise it) is not the "necessary evil" in this case. Traffic enforcement is done by officers not needed at actual incidents, like trouble calls, emergency response, etc. Take away "those officers" and you have a police force that can't respond nearly as well to a major incident like an active shooter, armed robbery in progress, pursuit, etc. and will not respond as fast to incidents like breaking/entering, assault, etc. where response time is critical. This is what we expect from the police force, and we currently exploit the need for a traffic safety deterrent incentive (a fine) to pay for it. If it's not there any more, either taxes will go up or police protection will go down.
Now, is a future of almost ubiquitous driverless-car use preferable for its own improvement in safety and efficiency? Probably. Let taxation and funding come from actual citizen demand (and passed in voted tax levies), not from how effective speed traps are.
Only the higher security prisons are private, I believe. The county jail where I am (somewhat rural Ohio) is still staffed by county employees.
Jail != Prison...
What if you made an app for iOS that, when activated, jammed all the cell signals within a 500' radius?[...] If I take my SD card out, is the phone legal now?
Nope, if you have an SD card to take out, you're using a KIRF iPhone and it was illegal as soon as it was imported to the US, and always will be. For a slightly different reason though.
It's not like prisons are trying to violate rights--they're generally trying to [fill in the blank]
Of course not. What it IS like, is prisons are trying to turn a profit (lots of them are, anyway) and in doing so reduce the costs to the point where they (guards, admins, etc) have no choice but to abuse the prisoners just to keep them all in line.
Well if the prison guards are actually showing pirated movies, it isn't piracy for profit, but it isn't exactly piracy for personal use either.
Given that the prisons in Ohio are privatized, yes anything provided to the inmates would be legally and practically "for profit". Still not sure why they would bother offering them anything but super old DVDs and VHS movies that have been scrapped at the local library, but one thing that comes to mind is a guard curtailed a favor from an inmate in exchange for something recent to watch. It will be interesting to see if the investigation turns anything up.
I was under the impression that Tesla vehicles used banks of off-the-shelf 18650 Li-ion batteries.
Really? Because you read it on a forum? 18650's are great for flashlights but pretty lousy on density/weight. They no doubt use a custom packaging, there would be no point in having a zillion cylinders and all the requisite wasted space and weight inside a single pack for a roadster. Guess we will have to wait until someone finally tears one open (or there is a bad enough crash) to know for sure though.
Depends on the state. If you're traveling with a weapon through Massachusetts and that weapon is stolen from you and then used to commit a murder- you will end up standing trial for murder with the thief who stole your weapon.
That's a little rhetoric-heavy, care to cite a source? Seems that most heavy gun ownership laws only require reporting the theft (upon penalty of loss of license or possible civil action, not criminal, if the gun is used in a subsequent crime) and there is no precedent available that suggests that in MA you are going to be charged with a capital offense if your gun is used by a thief to commit murder.
I've heard people fair slightly better when they have a fake ADT sign/stickers they bought off eBay.
This. Surveys/research has shown that thieves avoid houses that might be alarmed (according to signage) and move to easier targets. Most insurance companies even offer a discount for merely having a security system on the premises (with the presumption that it came with signs/stickers) even if said system is deactivated and not monitored remotely.
Put up a beware of Doug sign
+1 I have one of those. That Doug is a mean motherfucker. No one messes with my shit. End of ask /.