Well, even if it were possible for the government to monitor everyone's whereabouts, 24/7/365.249, it still wouldn't prevent terrorism. It would, however, make everyone a criminal and selective enforcement would become the norm, thus creating new classes of citizens; those who can afford to buy their way out of trouble, and those who can't. Russia was ahead of the curve on this... they didn't need a tracking system for that.
I know adding color would increase bandwidth, but I can't imagine that alone is the problem.
Actually, that alone is the problem. It's a 1mbit / 256kbit stream to a satellite in LEO that's only overhead for 18 minutes every day. I guess it's something about the transmitter being a few billion miles away that makes it hard, or something...
That's not a picture of Mars. I've been where this picture was taken... It's in southern Nevada. They're probably embarassed that the lens cap was left on, so they're showing us this instead.:)
They aim for "Global Good", while asking for you to do "God's work". They should make up their minds and either aim for "Global God" or do "Good's work". Right now, the message is inconsistent.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer people worship gods who say that global good is God's work (you may move the apostrophe if needed to accomodate your religious view). So the message isn't inconsistent, unless you worship a god that considers its work to be something else. Dollarus Maximus, for example... Good for personal fortune, not so good for property values.
"Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not."
Not directly related, but whenever an evil asshole starts prattling on about "God's work" or anything similar, it brings to mind this C.S. Lewis quote...
I suppose now is a bad time to point out he was an ardent Christian who would take great offense to you misusing his words like that. I believe he might even respond with something like, "What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of a person you are."
For every religious extremist who hurts others in the name of God, there are dozens more who help. I'm not suggesting that belief in God is necessary to help others, or in the final analysis, even related. I am saying it's the height of religious arrogance and intolerance to imply that anyone who uses the phrase "God's work" to describe their actions is an "evil asshole" who goes "prattling on". Would you cast them into a reputation and role from which they cannot escape? I have little time or sympathy for a man who believes another is incapable of doing good simply because he disagrees with that person's religious views.
Which god is he talking about, is what I want to know. I mean does he want us to start hitting people with hammers, praying for the undead lord to return from another dimension to cleanse the world of unbelievers with fire, start talking to our ancestors through their severed heads, raise Cthulhu from his watery grave, or what?
One of the crazy ones, anyway. His plan for solving global warming is to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and hand out uranium to private citizens to build small personal reactors. His hobbies include searching for alien life, barbequing french food, and photographing wildlife. I'm not sure if the last two are related or not...
'Darth Vader doing some charity work as he completes the Death Star',
Slashdot editors need to stop posting what is clearly rebel rhetoric. The first Death Star was used on Alderaan to save lives. The planet was partly hollow and heavily fortified; A great many imperial lives would have been sacrificed to end the war in a conventional ground-based attack. By destroying Alderann with the Death Star instead, billions of lives were saved. After that, the galaxy enjoyed its longest period of peace and prosperity in centuries.
The second Death Star was blown up before it was even completed, and it's construction was solely as a deterrent against future war -- it would have reduced the cost of maintaining a fleet of thousands of flag ships as fewer would have been needed for routine patrols. There were not many military personnel on the base at the time, most of those people were contractors working during the recession, caused by supply shortages because funds were diverted to combat the constant terrorist attacks by the rebels. When the Death Star fell, millions of contractors and private citizens lost their lives in an unparalleled terrorist attack. The Empire had no choice then but to respond to these right-wing religious nutjobs with overwhelming force.
Nice try, but facebook was born evil. For intance, they have never made it simple to opt out of stuff. One of the early complaints was that if you opted out of a feature and weren't diligent, you'd find you were opted back in the next time facebook updated anything.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read that. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. The police can, will, and should use ANPR systems; It's a solid technology with many legitimate uses. There is no question about that. The question posed here is whether or not such data should be public, and you've failed so miserably at answering the question my brain hurts.
"Flashing lights are prohibited, except on an authorized emergency vehicle, school bus, bicycle as provided in section 169.222, subdivision 6, road maintenance equipment, tow truck or towing vehicle, service vehicle, farm tractor, self-propelled farm equipment, rural mail carrier vehicle, funeral home vehicle, or on any vehicle as a means of indicating a right or left turn, or the presence of a vehicular traffic hazard requiring unusual care in approaching, overtaking, or passing. "
Next up, flashing your high beams. If you flash your beams to warn other drivers, you very likely will be doing that when they are less than 1,000 feet away. Hello ticket!
You may be right that coming straight out and saying warning motorists of an upcoming speed trap is protected speech today, in Certain jurisdictions, but there has been no nationwide precident, and it's quite clear that the laws have been rewritten so officers can continue to punish you for warning other motorists, they simply now classify it as either an equipment malfunction (if you say you didn't flash your lights), or a moving violation (if you say you did). Oh, point of note: The fines for each cost the same. Choose well, young grasshopper.
Right, and we also should do ID checks every 3 blocks, after all, it would allow to search for...
Actually, that's totally legal, as long as they stop everyone passing the checkpoint.
Just because there are possible legitimate uses for the police to deploy such technologies doesn't mean the benefits outweigh the clear privacy violations.
Er, you're going to deny the benefits of the technology because of a logistical/administrative issue? The privacy violations are only because this data is available publicly, something required by federal law. That's one of the reasons why our crime rate is so high to begin with: Once you're convicted, that conviction becomes public record and can be used forevermore in employment decisions. Which for all intents and purposes makes you unemployable, especially when the economy is bad. Which leaves you only one option for income: More crime.
Do you also really believe that all the PATRIOT act does is protect us from terrorists?
...for comparing records against stolen vehicle, missing persons, wanted criminals, and revoked license reports.
Every technology has both legitimate and illegitimate uses. The law should anticipate illegitimate use and prescribe penalties, rather than wait until the town square is full of angry citizens with pitchforks and torches, and then call them 'subversives' and 'terrorists' and have them water cannoned and shock grendade'd into a bloody pulp while yelling "Terrorists!" Responsible law makers take the social contract of "protect and serve" seriously... which is exactly why there are no responsible law makers anymore. Who the hell wants to protect and serve when you can abuse the hell out of the general population in exchange for kick backs and living in a mansion?
Someone should log the Minneapolis police; somehow I think they'd object.
Actually, in Minnesota, you can be charged with a felony for giving people any warning of an upcoming speed trap. You can also be charged with one for providing information about the police' whereabouts. The first thing authority does whenever it violates your privacy is exempt itself from similar treatment. This is how you periodically hear about an off-duty police officer in plain clothes getting into a fight with someone -- even if they were the aggressor, and even if they fail to identify themselves as a police officer, the other person still goes to jail for many years for striking an officer. Or that case of how a man accidentally bumped into the President in a crowd, while waiting to shake his hand, and was then carried away by the Secret Service and held without a trial for several months because he "made a physical threat against the President."
Government agents can abuse whomever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want. And you will take it, Citizen, or things will get even worse for you... as well as your family and friends.
Step 5: Forget that FOIA requests have your name on it.
Step 6: Go to jail for a long time for... *shakes magic 8 ball* terroristic threats.
Minneapolis city counsel members were amongst the first to draft anti-occupy legislation to evict people from the public squares, in secret and without notice. They then posted signage saying that the area would be closed for 'maintenance'. A few hours later... they rolled in with the big police vans and arrested everyone in sight. Before that they ran water pressure sprayers from dawn to dust in the area the protesters congregated, under the title "routine cleaning". For two weeks.
Do you really think they're gonna blink if someone publishes that information? You can't negotiate with terrorists.
Or you could just change the default in your browser. My IE at work defaults to bing, and my Opera & Chromium browsers default to operasearch and duckduckgo respectively.
That doesn't really solve the problem; the data is still sent in plain-text, and websites can still be taken down or blocked extrajudicially. What I'm proposing would allow governments to exert a level of control over sites located within their borders, and only those within their borders, while allowing international access to continue without interference from those countries.
... will be the death of Google as an honest broker of information.
They ceased being an honest broker when they filed their IPO. Look at Facebook; It went from an amazingly simple and useful website to a horribly bloated content platform that most of its users' dislike but can't quit it because all their friends are on it. Google has become like that: Everybody uses google services, but not because they're better, just that they're popular.
A lot of this crap is due to centralization; ICANN screwing up the DNS namespace in order to turn a buck, the UN screaming at them to give up control and all the politics that goes into that... Google becoming the de facto search engine, and then all the gaming of the system and inevitable government control over it (searching for certain terms while logged in, or sent from your IP address that you were previously logged in from can get you on a watch list now), etc. It seems that the moment a utility service online tries to 'monetize', it turns to shit.
It's clear that Google is reaching the end of its useful life as a search engine; It only continues to command marketshare now because of momentum and a lack of alternatives, not because it is innovative, efficient, or fair.
I imagine that in the not too distant future, someone will design a P2P content distribution network with onion routing and encryption similar to Tor, but capable of decentralized information storage similar to Freenet, we'll be a lot closer to seeing this business model going out of business.
On top of such a network, one would need to build a namespace resolution service; I would suggest it be based on geopolitical boundaries, followed by function, then unique name, but the organizational scheme doesn't matter as long as it is consistent and easy to navigate and update. Each sovereign entity would register its own key with the root service, and after that, they can do what they want... rather than ICANN, you'd have something more like international waters -- you can fly under any flag you want. Otherwise, have a.default namespace for services that do not want to fly a flag (pirates? Yarr!)... The rest of the technical details I'm sure you can fill in.
After those two steps are done, the last would be an indexing service. Google had the right idea; The number of links to a given webpage is a good initial indicator of its value, with some massaging of the data to remove auto-generated pages, etc. But as an alternative to Google's bogosort method, I'd suggest a trust network; If A visits a lot of the same sites as B, then there's a reasonable chance that if B ranks a site positively, A will like it too, so give it a bump in the ratings. Do this enough and clusters of users will emerge automatically on the network. If you rate something badly, then the system lowers the implicit trust level. You can also explicitly trust certain identities, like friends or whatever... similar to how Slashdot has 'friends' and 'foes', but a bit more refined. That trust data doesn't have to be exchanged; After the search results are downloaded, the client would resort the data before pushing it up to the application.
I believe many people would happily trade a few extra seconds of search time and a higher bandwidth cost to use a search engine that was truly 'neutral' algorithmically, and used a trust network for rankings instead of Google's bogosort method. Obviously, my implimentation will have some problems, as any other pre-prototype idea would, but I think what I've described is useful enough as a starting point to thinking of a return to the roots of the internet; We've gotten trapped into thinking of everything as a client/server model, or as content platforms, and all making little islands out of our content. The web wasn't designed this way; It was explicitly designed to allow you to see an image on another person's website, and then link it on your own page. Copyright law screwed that u
But seriously, the accident was not likely preventable anyway. Give the car a break.
I'm just saying that the odds are not significantly better than that of a human driver. That was my only point. And with your numbers, the odds are still about parity with a human driver. The article asserts it is significantly better than a person.
I suppose now would be a bad time to point out that my step-dad works as a general manager for a grocery store. When I say there's no profit in grocery stores, that's based on direct knowledge. In either event, most people will tell you that, in mature markets, the profit margin is the only thing investors consider, which is best represented as a percentage, not an aggregate. Aggregates only matter for investments in private companies, and of the examples provided... none of them are private.
The average (human) driver logs about 1,100 miles per month. So google's car has about 23 years of driving, if it were an average person. The odds of being in an accident for the average person each year is 1 in 6,500. Google's car has already been in one car accident.
Slashdot Mirror
All for the sake of the war on terrorism.
Well, even if it were possible for the government to monitor everyone's whereabouts, 24/7/365.249, it still wouldn't prevent terrorism. It would, however, make everyone a criminal and selective enforcement would become the norm, thus creating new classes of citizens; those who can afford to buy their way out of trouble, and those who can't. Russia was ahead of the curve on this... they didn't need a tracking system for that.
I know adding color would increase bandwidth, but I can't imagine that alone is the problem.
Actually, that alone is the problem. It's a 1mbit / 256kbit stream to a satellite in LEO that's only overhead for 18 minutes every day. I guess it's something about the transmitter being a few billion miles away that makes it hard, or something...
That's not a picture of Mars. I've been where this picture was taken... It's in southern Nevada. They're probably embarassed that the lens cap was left on, so they're showing us this instead. :)
They aim for "Global Good", while asking for you to do "God's work". They should make up their minds and either aim for "Global God" or do "Good's work". Right now, the message is inconsistent.
I don't know about you, but I would prefer people worship gods who say that global good is God's work (you may move the apostrophe if needed to accomodate your religious view). So the message isn't inconsistent, unless you worship a god that considers its work to be something else. Dollarus Maximus, for example... Good for personal fortune, not so good for property values.
God is supposed to be omnipotent. He can get off his ass and do his own work.
Perhaps, but he also has a twisted sense of humor.
"Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not."
"Money."
I'm ready to do God's work.... just, erm, how much does it pay?
Historically it's been the blood of your enemies.
Instant classic
In that case I'll claim that my use of "It's" was intentional then, when I write my memoirs, along with my excessive use, of the comma.
Not directly related, but whenever an evil asshole starts prattling on about "God's work" or anything similar, it brings to mind this C.S. Lewis quote...
I suppose now is a bad time to point out he was an ardent Christian who would take great offense to you misusing his words like that. I believe he might even respond with something like, "What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of a person you are."
For every religious extremist who hurts others in the name of God, there are dozens more who help. I'm not suggesting that belief in God is necessary to help others, or in the final analysis, even related. I am saying it's the height of religious arrogance and intolerance to imply that anyone who uses the phrase "God's work" to describe their actions is an "evil asshole" who goes "prattling on". Would you cast them into a reputation and role from which they cannot escape? I have little time or sympathy for a man who believes another is incapable of doing good simply because he disagrees with that person's religious views.
Which god is he talking about, is what I want to know. I mean does he want us to start hitting people with hammers, praying for the undead lord to return from another dimension to cleanse the world of unbelievers with fire, start talking to our ancestors through their severed heads, raise Cthulhu from his watery grave, or what?
One of the crazy ones, anyway. His plan for solving global warming is to pump sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere and hand out uranium to private citizens to build small personal reactors. His hobbies include searching for alien life, barbequing french food, and photographing wildlife. I'm not sure if the last two are related or not...
'Darth Vader doing some charity work as he completes the Death Star',
Slashdot editors need to stop posting what is clearly rebel rhetoric. The first Death Star was used on Alderaan to save lives. The planet was partly hollow and heavily fortified; A great many imperial lives would have been sacrificed to end the war in a conventional ground-based attack. By destroying Alderann with the Death Star instead, billions of lives were saved. After that, the galaxy enjoyed its longest period of peace and prosperity in centuries.
The second Death Star was blown up before it was even completed, and it's construction was solely as a deterrent against future war -- it would have reduced the cost of maintaining a fleet of thousands of flag ships as fewer would have been needed for routine patrols. There were not many military personnel on the base at the time, most of those people were contractors working during the recession, caused by supply shortages because funds were diverted to combat the constant terrorist attacks by the rebels. When the Death Star fell, millions of contractors and private citizens lost their lives in an unparalleled terrorist attack. The Empire had no choice then but to respond to these right-wing religious nutjobs with overwhelming force.
Never Forget the Liberty Star disasters!
GFY.
Not anatomically possible. Also, I'm right, you're wrong, now go back to 4Chan, loser.
Have you noticed that the ads for restless leg syndrome drugs have vanished? Why is that?
Marketing isn't using television ads for that product anymore. Next question, please.
Nice try, but facebook was born evil. For intance, they have never made it simple to opt out of stuff. One of the early complaints was that if you opted out of a feature and weren't diligent, you'd find you were opted back in the next time facebook updated anything.
"..."
*facepalm*
Dude... you need to up your dosage.
What you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this forum is now dumber for having read that. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul. The police can, will, and should use ANPR systems; It's a solid technology with many legitimate uses. There is no question about that. The question posed here is whether or not such data should be public, and you've failed so miserably at answering the question my brain hurts.
Okay. Heeeere's your sign:
"Flashing lights are prohibited, except on an authorized emergency vehicle, school bus, bicycle as provided in section 169.222, subdivision 6, road maintenance equipment, tow truck or towing vehicle, service vehicle, farm tractor, self-propelled farm equipment, rural mail carrier vehicle, funeral home vehicle, or on any vehicle as a means of indicating a right or left turn, or the presence of a vehicular traffic hazard requiring unusual care in approaching, overtaking, or passing. "
Next up, flashing your high beams. If you flash your beams to warn other drivers, you very likely will be doing that when they are less than 1,000 feet away. Hello ticket!
You may be right that coming straight out and saying warning motorists of an upcoming speed trap is protected speech today, in Certain jurisdictions, but there has been no nationwide precident, and it's quite clear that the laws have been rewritten so officers can continue to punish you for warning other motorists, they simply now classify it as either an equipment malfunction (if you say you didn't flash your lights), or a moving violation (if you say you did). Oh, point of note: The fines for each cost the same. Choose well, young grasshopper.
Right, and we also should do ID checks every 3 blocks, after all, it would allow to search for...
Actually, that's totally legal, as long as they stop everyone passing the checkpoint.
Just because there are possible legitimate uses for the police to deploy such technologies doesn't mean the benefits outweigh the clear privacy violations.
Er, you're going to deny the benefits of the technology because of a logistical/administrative issue? The privacy violations are only because this data is available publicly, something required by federal law. That's one of the reasons why our crime rate is so high to begin with: Once you're convicted, that conviction becomes public record and can be used forevermore in employment decisions. Which for all intents and purposes makes you unemployable, especially when the economy is bad. Which leaves you only one option for income: More crime.
Do you also really believe that all the PATRIOT act does is protect us from terrorists?
Yes, but only the really stupid ones.
...for comparing records against stolen vehicle, missing persons, wanted criminals, and revoked license reports.
Every technology has both legitimate and illegitimate uses. The law should anticipate illegitimate use and prescribe penalties, rather than wait until the town square is full of angry citizens with pitchforks and torches, and then call them 'subversives' and 'terrorists' and have them water cannoned and shock grendade'd into a bloody pulp while yelling "Terrorists!" Responsible law makers take the social contract of "protect and serve" seriously... which is exactly why there are no responsible law makers anymore. Who the hell wants to protect and serve when you can abuse the hell out of the general population in exchange for kick backs and living in a mansion?
Someone should log the Minneapolis police; somehow I think they'd object.
Actually, in Minnesota, you can be charged with a felony for giving people any warning of an upcoming speed trap. You can also be charged with one for providing information about the police' whereabouts. The first thing authority does whenever it violates your privacy is exempt itself from similar treatment. This is how you periodically hear about an off-duty police officer in plain clothes getting into a fight with someone -- even if they were the aggressor, and even if they fail to identify themselves as a police officer, the other person still goes to jail for many years for striking an officer. Or that case of how a man accidentally bumped into the President in a crowd, while waiting to shake his hand, and was then carried away by the Secret Service and held without a trial for several months because he "made a physical threat against the President."
Government agents can abuse whomever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want. And you will take it, Citizen, or things will get even worse for you... as well as your family and friends.
Step 5: Forget that FOIA requests have your name on it.
Step 6: Go to jail for a long time for... *shakes magic 8 ball* terroristic threats.
Minneapolis city counsel members were amongst the first to draft anti-occupy legislation to evict people from the public squares, in secret and without notice. They then posted signage saying that the area would be closed for 'maintenance'. A few hours later... they rolled in with the big police vans and arrested everyone in sight. Before that they ran water pressure sprayers from dawn to dust in the area the protesters congregated, under the title "routine cleaning". For two weeks.
Do you really think they're gonna blink if someone publishes that information? You can't negotiate with terrorists.
Or you could just change the default in your browser. My IE at work defaults to bing, and my Opera & Chromium browsers default to operasearch and duckduckgo respectively.
That doesn't really solve the problem; the data is still sent in plain-text, and websites can still be taken down or blocked extrajudicially. What I'm proposing would allow governments to exert a level of control over sites located within their borders, and only those within their borders, while allowing international access to continue without interference from those countries.
... will be the death of Google as an honest broker of information.
They ceased being an honest broker when they filed their IPO. Look at Facebook; It went from an amazingly simple and useful website to a horribly bloated content platform that most of its users' dislike but can't quit it because all their friends are on it. Google has become like that: Everybody uses google services, but not because they're better, just that they're popular.
A lot of this crap is due to centralization; ICANN screwing up the DNS namespace in order to turn a buck, the UN screaming at them to give up control and all the politics that goes into that... Google becoming the de facto search engine, and then all the gaming of the system and inevitable government control over it (searching for certain terms while logged in, or sent from your IP address that you were previously logged in from can get you on a watch list now), etc. It seems that the moment a utility service online tries to 'monetize', it turns to shit.
It's clear that Google is reaching the end of its useful life as a search engine; It only continues to command marketshare now because of momentum and a lack of alternatives, not because it is innovative, efficient, or fair.
I imagine that in the not too distant future, someone will design a P2P content distribution network with onion routing and encryption similar to Tor, but capable of decentralized information storage similar to Freenet, we'll be a lot closer to seeing this business model going out of business.
On top of such a network, one would need to build a namespace resolution service; I would suggest it be based on geopolitical boundaries, followed by function, then unique name, but the organizational scheme doesn't matter as long as it is consistent and easy to navigate and update. Each sovereign entity would register its own key with the root service, and after that, they can do what they want... rather than ICANN, you'd have something more like international waters -- you can fly under any flag you want. Otherwise, have a .default namespace for services that do not want to fly a flag (pirates? Yarr!) ... The rest of the technical details I'm sure you can fill in.
After those two steps are done, the last would be an indexing service. Google had the right idea; The number of links to a given webpage is a good initial indicator of its value, with some massaging of the data to remove auto-generated pages, etc. But as an alternative to Google's bogosort method, I'd suggest a trust network; If A visits a lot of the same sites as B, then there's a reasonable chance that if B ranks a site positively, A will like it too, so give it a bump in the ratings. Do this enough and clusters of users will emerge automatically on the network. If you rate something badly, then the system lowers the implicit trust level. You can also explicitly trust certain identities, like friends or whatever... similar to how Slashdot has 'friends' and 'foes', but a bit more refined. That trust data doesn't have to be exchanged; After the search results are downloaded, the client would resort the data before pushing it up to the application.
I believe many people would happily trade a few extra seconds of search time and a higher bandwidth cost to use a search engine that was truly 'neutral' algorithmically, and used a trust network for rankings instead of Google's bogosort method. Obviously, my implimentation will have some problems, as any other pre-prototype idea would, but I think what I've described is useful enough as a starting point to thinking of a return to the roots of the internet; We've gotten trapped into thinking of everything as a client/server model, or as content platforms, and all making little islands out of our content. The web wasn't designed this way; It was explicitly designed to allow you to see an image on another person's website, and then link it on your own page. Copyright law screwed that u
But seriously, the accident was not likely preventable anyway. Give the car a break.
I'm just saying that the odds are not significantly better than that of a human driver. That was my only point. And with your numbers, the odds are still about parity with a human driver. The article asserts it is significantly better than a person.
I suppose now would be a bad time to point out that my step-dad works as a general manager for a grocery store. When I say there's no profit in grocery stores, that's based on direct knowledge. In either event, most people will tell you that, in mature markets, the profit margin is the only thing investors consider, which is best represented as a percentage, not an aggregate. Aggregates only matter for investments in private companies, and of the examples provided... none of them are private.
The average (human) driver logs about 1,100 miles per month. So google's car has about 23 years of driving, if it were an average person. The odds of being in an accident for the average person each year is 1 in 6,500. Google's car has already been in one car accident.
I'm not impressed with those odds.