Oddly enough, when working for a computer company in southwest Missouri we had to send a hard drive off to a clean room outfit becuase an office worker wiped out 30 days of ATM data out of thier antiquated. Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by ignorance.
Re:Microsoft is going to become Apple?
on
Phoenix's BIOS Roadmap
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Actually I work for a mid-size trucking company in Springfield, MO (there are several here). All mid to large size trucking companies have some sort of GPS system on board, most also have engine kill-switches but you don't tell drivers that because they tend to be paranoid (unlike slashdot posters:)
Ever tried to pull a truck load for Wal-Mart, Kraft, Tyson, or Bristol-Myers? They all require GPS tracking from the companies that they do buisness with. Legislation in this area is somewhat unnessessary because the buisness world already recognizes the need. This will only affect small companies (owner operators, mom and pop type places) not your big carriers like JB Hunt and Prime who've had at least the tracking part (Qual Comm, Highwaymaster) for years.
Actually, in practice the safest way to stop a truck is not to cut off it's engine while its running but to make it unable to restart once it sotps. We do this from time to time but not often as its best not let the driver know that we can kill his engine (generally we'll shut off his fuel card instead).
Also, we use GPS on our tractors and our trailers and the unit in the tractor is mounted behind the glovebox, antenna and all, there's nothing external to 'see' so unless you knew what you were looking for you wouldn't know it was there. The only external pieces is a little red LED that will blink if some one here wants the driver to call in.
I'm the sysadmin at a trucking company and we've had kill switches on engines as well as gps tracking for a long time. Most major carriers do, if not for hazmat, for pharmacuticals and baby formula. In fact, we have flowthrough to our EDI system so that our customers can track thier own loads if they want to and stop calling us about it. Anyone ever heard of AIRIQ?
We had life a little better, we had our own 16 channel in-house cable, including 14 via sattilite channels. We used comercial grade sat-com to get in our regular cable channels, along with 2 in-house movie channels. But there are dangers associated with using things not made for the military. For instance, there is an anti-missle defense that sends out a huge electromagnetic pulse to knock out missle guidance systems. We lost four reciever front ends before we figured that out that every time the electronic warefare department ran a test, we lost HBO and Cinemax.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough, when working for a computer company in southwest Missouri we had to send a hard drive off to a clean room outfit becuase an office worker wiped out 30 days of ATM data out of thier antiquated. Never attribute to malice that which can be sufficiently explained by ignorance.
In this context, trust is a one-way street...
We have to trust them, they don't trust us.
Actually I work for a mid-size trucking company in Springfield, MO (there are several here). All mid to large size trucking companies have some sort of GPS system on board, most also have engine kill-switches but you don't tell drivers that because they tend to be paranoid (unlike slashdot posters:)
Ever tried to pull a truck load for Wal-Mart, Kraft, Tyson, or Bristol-Myers? They all require GPS tracking from the companies that they do buisness with. Legislation in this area is somewhat unnessessary because the buisness world already recognizes the need. This will only affect small companies (owner operators, mom and pop type places) not your big carriers like JB Hunt and Prime who've had at least the tracking part (Qual Comm, Highwaymaster) for years.
Actually, in practice the safest way to stop a truck is not to cut off it's engine while its running but to make it unable to restart once it sotps. We do this from time to time but not often as its best not let the driver know that we can kill his engine (generally we'll shut off his fuel card instead).
Also, we use GPS on our tractors and our trailers and the unit in the tractor is mounted behind the glovebox, antenna and all, there's nothing external to 'see' so unless you knew what you were looking for you wouldn't know it was there. The only external pieces is a little red LED that will blink if some one here wants the driver to call in.
I'm the sysadmin at a trucking company and we've had kill switches on engines as well as gps tracking for a long time. Most major carriers do, if not for hazmat, for pharmacuticals and baby formula. In fact, we have flowthrough to our EDI system so that our customers can track thier own loads if they want to and stop calling us about it. Anyone ever heard of AIRIQ?
We had life a little better, we had our own 16 channel in-house cable, including 14 via sattilite channels. We used comercial grade sat-com to get in our regular cable channels, along with 2 in-house movie channels. But there are dangers associated with using things not made for the military. For instance, there is an anti-missle defense that sends out a huge electromagnetic pulse to knock out missle guidance systems. We lost four reciever front ends before we figured that out that every time the electronic warefare department ran a test, we lost HBO and Cinemax.