That's not very impressive. Anyone who has two devices that are syncronized to a common timing source (which most cell phones are) can accomplish this. You just say "I started transmitting at x and you received it at y. x-y/speed of sound at sea level = your result. Now if it could be done with one device, and use doppler effect,etc., to map out the room and roughly what's inside it (like in Batman) then we'd be getting somewhere.
Bill Gates was once quoted as saying he doesn't fear other companies; He fears the guy working out of his garage who's busy producing the next big thing. Naturally, legislation has since been passed so Bill and the other billionaires of the tech world can sleep easy knowing he'll never get through the red tape to bring his product to market. There's patent law, copyright law, tort law, contract law, EULAs, and a plethora of other things making damn sure he'll get bought out or buried in debt and legal proceedings.
Has America lost it's luster? Yes. Quite awhile ago. You don't have to spend anything on education or science anymore... it's really quite pointless... nobody can benefit from it in this country anymore.
Google just tanked a few hundred thousand people's job applications. Corporations will be the only ones thanking them for this feature. Now since they've become a massive bank of information that knows no limits, I suppose this is only fair...
It was believed the Motion Picture Association was keen to go after copyright infringers.
RIAA is already pretty universally hated. They killed Napster and are the ones who usually make the headlines. It makes sense from a PR standpoint to let them fall on the sword.
Life on earth has been adapting and evolving to its environment for billions of years. Why would anyone think it would stop?
Most often, because evolution also says we are one of its byproduct, and while we can look at ourselves and say "Hell yeah! Evolution!", the moment we go outside we're like "what the sh** f*** happened to everybody else?"
why do we ignore that option when an immediate neighbor has paramilitary uprisings in border territories?
Because we have a wall and a heavy military presence to keep it from getting out of hand, and as long as we keep supplying arms to keep the balance of power between the cartels even, they won't become a threat to us. That's how MOST countries deal with this problem in countries they share borders with.
It looks more like some client aren't respecting the DNS TTL value, so technically it's not Amazon's fault.
"Technically", no. But two people pointing a finger at each other and saying "He did it!" doesn't solve anything, and all the customer gets is the finger.
so let's not get into irrationalities and hysterics about things we can't expect them to fix.
Except many of the problems are the direct result of Facebook's monetization of personal data. It's disengenuous to say we can't expect them to fix the problem. The problem is quite easy to fix... it simply requires Facebook find other sources of revenue. But alas, I forget my place -- as the CEO of US Bank recently said, corporations have a right to profits. And hey, if a few billion pieces of spam is the price we pay for their profit, well that's just tough.
Spam follows money. No money = no spam. The solution to this class of social maladies has always been the same: make it cost more than the benefit. And as Facebook is a self-contained system and not a decentralized architecture, like say, the hundreds of thousands of mail servers located throughout the world, the cost of making the necessary infrastructure changes is very low indeed.
The Occupy protests are centered around the fact that the wealth distribution in the United States is ranked about the same as Uguanda; Half the wealth in this country is controlled by approximately 1% of the population, which is the reason for the slogan "We are the 99%". Occupiers have been protesting financial institutions, especially banks.
Now if you hadn't had gone and shot your mouth off about something you clearly don't know anything about, I might have had a bit more sympathy for the rest of your argument. However, I'm going to have to mercilessly gut it now because I am the 99%, and I also have a healthy respect for capitalism -- within limits.
300 lives is nothing. About 120 die every day in auto accidents. Americans are more worried about gas prices there too. Is that because they're heartless? No, it's because those 300, or 120, or a hundred million lives are abstract people. I've never met them. You haven't met them. Nobody who reads this is very likely to have met them. They lived in total obscurity and then some natural disaster came along and went squish, and that was that. They have had little to no bearing on my life, or yours, or anyone's here. But the price of those goods -- that is something tangible, noticable, and therefore real.
You're bitching about human nature here, man. You're like Bono from U2. Nobody gives a damn about them and they shouldn't. They can't. We all got only a limited amount of time on this earth, and a limited amount of resources, emotional or otherwise. And the overwhelming majority of people are going to invest their emotions in things that are real, tangible, and close to them.
Now next time you feel like trying to go and take the moral high ground, don't piss on someone else's back and then say it's raining, mmkays?
The irony is that folks of the political persuasion that want to "tax the rich" more and make corporations "pay their fair share" take every tax break and loophole available too.
That word -- I do not think it means what you think it means. In other news, a lot of the people of that political persuasion don't need tax breaks or loopholes, since their net worth is zero or close to it. And besides, you could increase your tax rate by 50% for those in the bottom 99% of income and it would bring in roughly what taxing the 1% at half the rate that 50% is being taxed now, which would still be about twice what they're being taxed today.
Dramatic irony, dude... it'll f*ck you every time.
There's always that one person in any conversation who just can't take a joke. Tag, you're it. Here, I'll lay it out for you plainly, and I promise to use small words;
Are you saying there's no factual evidence to support this? You disagree with his observation?
Yes and yes. People display a wide variety of behaviors for a wide variety of reasons. Even worse, the emotions expressed are often inconsistent even when circumstances are identical or nearly so because a person's emotional state, receptivity, and responsiveness, depend not just on what's going on now, but on past experience, which isn't available for observation.
I have no idea what this means. Every police officer doesn't profile? Or you can't say either way? Or they shouldn't profile?
Officers who observe others change the behavior of those they are observing. Worse, they come with their own biases based on frequent exposure to extreme behaviors. Those biases in turn create behavioral interactions with those they are observing, which intensify the first order effect.
So... you agree with his premise? Isn't that how a premise works?
I'm saying the statement has no relevance. It's like saying;
1. It is raining. 2. It never rains on the moon. 3. Rain needs clouds. conclusion: It must be cloudy.
#2 is completely irrelevant, even though it is on the same topic.
Where is his backward logic?
He's implying profiling is required to identify people likely to commit crimes. That isn't correct; You can identify people without profiling, for example, by using their past criminal history.
You can't look for people who are about to commit a major crime? Or if you look for them, they won't commit crimes? Or if they commit it, you won't catch them?
Non sequitur. Your questions don't even come close to matching up with the statement I made. My point was that looking for crimes that people are 'about' to commit isn't the problem -- it's the fact that increased surveillance of any sufficiently sized group will result in discovering more criminal activity compared to a control group. The group being placed under surveillance is largely arbitrary; the criterion suggested can just as easily ensnare the average person as a 'terrorist', 'person of interest', or whatever the latest phrase is for a political undesirable. This system will simply provide prosecutors with more 'evidence' of a person's 'guilt', when on closer examination, it's a complete deck of cards. It has zero evidentiary value -- a prosecutor can't show up and say "Well your honor, here's the camera footage of the defendant doing the crime, and... here's our form 193-B stating there was a.13% chance of him doing it this week... which being that it was 4 times higher than his neighbors PROVES he's guilty!"
The method of identifying these factors is flawed. But even if it wasn't, subjecting some people to a 'test' that results in an increased risk to their personal liberty without any due process is a circumvention of the entire point of the judiciary: Which is to be a fair and impartial system. And even if THAT wasn't the case, supposing that this system was supported by incontrovertible scientific accuracy, and that this surveillance was subjected to due process, and said surveillance didn't violate reasonable expectations of privacy, etc., etc., it would still be wrong -- because the justification for the warrant is based on statistical probability, also known as circumstantial evidence. But skipping all that, it comes down to this;
The only way we can have a fair system is when we punish people for the things they've done, not the things they could do. And increased surveillance is a form of punishment -- it's subjecting someone to scrutiny, depriving them of privacy, and even if nothing comes of it to them personally, the risk has an associated cost which would be the time spent behind bars and the fines divided by the percent chance that anyone who is subjected to this increased surveillance will be prosecuted and convicted.
If the technology is broken, let's hope that it's rejected, but a working detection method that increases the accuracy and efficiency of law enforcement will result in increased protection of citizens' rights.
First, hoping for anything regarding the government is a bad way to start an argument. Second, the words "accuracy" and "efficiency" regarding law enforcement are typically red flag words to indicate tyranny and oppression. "fair and impartial" is what a democratic country hopes for, not accurate and efficient.
People who are nervous often are hiding something.
Warning: Pointer to NULL reference.
Every police officer will profile the people around them, and they should.
Error: select '*' from 'personnel' returned too many results.
Warning: join of 'officer' and 'people' objects may cause undesired behavior.
That is how they reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.
Warning: Bad analogy in line 4.
There are lots of people out there, and since you can't really be expected to casually see the criminals in the act...
Compiler warning: Statement will always evaluate as true.
you need to profile them in order to pick out people who are likely to commit crimes.
Error in logic syntax: Affirmation of the consequent.
The TSA is actually an example of what happens when you don't: you end up strip searching 90 year old ladies taking away their walkers (profiling works in the other direction too.)
Error in logic syntax: Affirmation of the consequent.
The trick is to look for people who are about to commit a major crime, and catch them in the act
Warning: This statement will never evaluate. (off topic)
Additional errors were encounted, further processing of stupid_comment.c aborted.
So what they're doing is taking variables that are innocent and legal (changing the pitch of one's voice is not an inherently criminal act), and using it to justify increased surveillance of that individual. And naturally, everyone will be okay with this because "only criminals have anything to hide".
Everyone forgets, of course, that you don't need to be watched for very long before you break a law. It's so hopelessly complex that even lawyers, who spend several years learning about it, are unable to avoid being ensnared against a determined law enforcement effort. If they want you, they will get you. So basically, this system is selecting people to turn into criminals. There is no preventative value here... increased surveillance on anyone will eventually yield evidence that can be used for criminal prosecution.
By reading this comment, you agree to be bound by the terms listed herein; If you are a member, employee, associate, business partner, or affiliate of the RIAA or MPAA, you owe me one million ($1,000,000.00) USD, payable in full immediately. Thanks to your f*cked up interpretation of the law, this is, in fact, perfectly legal. Any attempt to evade this legally binding contract will be grounds for me to sue you at three times the requested amount, waive your right to a trial, and hold me utterly and totally immune to any form of legal challenge by you and/or your employer, until at least 150 years after my timely and natural death. Everybody else... I love 'ya. Stay awesome.
The better question is, how long do all those wiretaps and secret government networks retain the data? If they can record all the traffic on the internet and store it for several years, I don't think storing cell phone data is even a blip on the radar.
That information shouldn't be available to police officers who are running people's plates, etc., because it will subject them to additional scrutiny. The presumption of innocence is something that's been badly eroded thanks to this bullsh*t about terrorism. Frankly, we could have a 9/11 every month and still not equal the number of deaths due to drunk driving -- and we don't have a 'suspected drunk driver' watch list. When the government has lists for everything that has a greater loss of life and property, then we can talk about 'terrorism'.
You guys do realize that everything you do on the internet is unlawful in one fashion or another, somewhere. It's like a police officer following you while you drive. At some point during the trip, regardless of who you are, you're going to do something that is an offense the officer can stop you for. The internet is no different.
Look at how we've made breaking an EULA a crime. Tell me, how many EULAs do you interact with during your average browsing session? That's just one example... there's thousands more buried in a byzantine legal framework. So basically, the exception that they cannot disrupt "legal" traffic is a carte blanche exception to do whatever they want... because everything is illegal somehow.
And if not, your ISP will simply adjust their EULA for their website, and set your default homepage to it, and viola.
1. Register commonly mis-spelled domain names.
2. Make ToS "Any access to this website is prohibited."
3. Report all website accesses to the authorities.
4. Invest in new prison construction.
4. PROFIT.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks a lot like those fractal-based antennas they put in the back of cell phones, only a lot bigger. Made out of metal too, I assume?
That's not very impressive. Anyone who has two devices that are syncronized to a common timing source (which most cell phones are) can accomplish this. You just say "I started transmitting at x and you received it at y. x-y/speed of sound at sea level = your result. Now if it could be done with one device, and use doppler effect,etc., to map out the room and roughly what's inside it (like in Batman) then we'd be getting somewhere.
Bill Gates was once quoted as saying he doesn't fear other companies; He fears the guy working out of his garage who's busy producing the next big thing. Naturally, legislation has since been passed so Bill and the other billionaires of the tech world can sleep easy knowing he'll never get through the red tape to bring his product to market. There's patent law, copyright law, tort law, contract law, EULAs, and a plethora of other things making damn sure he'll get bought out or buried in debt and legal proceedings.
Has America lost it's luster? Yes. Quite awhile ago. You don't have to spend anything on education or science anymore... it's really quite pointless... nobody can benefit from it in this country anymore.
Google just tanked a few hundred thousand people's job applications. Corporations will be the only ones thanking them for this feature. Now since they've become a massive bank of information that knows no limits, I suppose this is only fair...
#occupygoogle
It was believed the Motion Picture Association was keen to go after copyright infringers.
RIAA is already pretty universally hated. They killed Napster and are the ones who usually make the headlines. It makes sense from a PR standpoint to let them fall on the sword.
Soon totally new organisms will crawl out of that river and demand welfare and voting rights.
Not unless they're white.
Life on earth has been adapting and evolving to its environment for billions of years. Why would anyone think it would stop?
Most often, because evolution also says we are one of its byproduct, and while we can look at ourselves and say "Hell yeah! Evolution!", the moment we go outside we're like "what the sh** f*** happened to everybody else?"
Ever tried operating a concrete saw at night?
You use a thermal lance.
Google: You're not supposed to use April Fools jokes as product ideas. Sincerely, Already Nervous Google Users Everywhere
why do we ignore that option when an immediate neighbor has paramilitary uprisings in border territories?
Because we have a wall and a heavy military presence to keep it from getting out of hand, and as long as we keep supplying arms to keep the balance of power between the cartels even, they won't become a threat to us. That's how MOST countries deal with this problem in countries they share borders with.
It looks more like some client aren't respecting the DNS TTL value, so technically it's not Amazon's fault.
"Technically", no. But two people pointing a finger at each other and saying "He did it!" doesn't solve anything, and all the customer gets is the finger.
so let's not get into irrationalities and hysterics about things we can't expect them to fix.
Except many of the problems are the direct result of Facebook's monetization of personal data. It's disengenuous to say we can't expect them to fix the problem. The problem is quite easy to fix... it simply requires Facebook find other sources of revenue. But alas, I forget my place -- as the CEO of US Bank recently said, corporations have a right to profits. And hey, if a few billion pieces of spam is the price we pay for their profit, well that's just tough. Spam follows money. No money = no spam. The solution to this class of social maladies has always been the same: make it cost more than the benefit. And as Facebook is a self-contained system and not a decentralized architecture, like say, the hundreds of thousands of mail servers located throughout the world, the cost of making the necessary infrastructure changes is very low indeed.
The Occupy protests are centered around the fact that the wealth distribution in the United States is ranked about the same as Uguanda; Half the wealth in this country is controlled by approximately 1% of the population, which is the reason for the slogan "We are the 99%". Occupiers have been protesting financial institutions, especially banks.
Now if you hadn't had gone and shot your mouth off about something you clearly don't know anything about, I might have had a bit more sympathy for the rest of your argument. However, I'm going to have to mercilessly gut it now because I am the 99%, and I also have a healthy respect for capitalism -- within limits.
300 lives is nothing. About 120 die every day in auto accidents. Americans are more worried about gas prices there too. Is that because they're heartless? No, it's because those 300, or 120, or a hundred million lives are abstract people. I've never met them. You haven't met them. Nobody who reads this is very likely to have met them. They lived in total obscurity and then some natural disaster came along and went squish, and that was that. They have had little to no bearing on my life, or yours, or anyone's here. But the price of those goods -- that is something tangible, noticable, and therefore real.
You're bitching about human nature here, man. You're like Bono from U2. Nobody gives a damn about them and they shouldn't. They can't. We all got only a limited amount of time on this earth, and a limited amount of resources, emotional or otherwise. And the overwhelming majority of people are going to invest their emotions in things that are real, tangible, and close to them.
Now next time you feel like trying to go and take the moral high ground, don't piss on someone else's back and then say it's raining, mmkays?
The irony is that folks of the political persuasion that want to "tax the rich" more and make corporations "pay their fair share" take every tax break and loophole available too.
That word -- I do not think it means what you think it means. In other news, a lot of the people of that political persuasion don't need tax breaks or loopholes, since their net worth is zero or close to it. And besides, you could increase your tax rate by 50% for those in the bottom 99% of income and it would bring in roughly what taxing the 1% at half the rate that 50% is being taxed now, which would still be about twice what they're being taxed today.
Dramatic irony, dude... it'll f*ck you every time.
There's always that one person in any conversation who just can't take a joke. Tag, you're it. Here, I'll lay it out for you plainly, and I promise to use small words;
Are you saying there's no factual evidence to support this? You disagree with his observation?
Yes and yes. People display a wide variety of behaviors for a wide variety of reasons. Even worse, the emotions expressed are often inconsistent even when circumstances are identical or nearly so because a person's emotional state, receptivity, and responsiveness, depend not just on what's going on now, but on past experience, which isn't available for observation.
I have no idea what this means. Every police officer doesn't profile? Or you can't say either way? Or they shouldn't profile?
Officers who observe others change the behavior of those they are observing. Worse, they come with their own biases based on frequent exposure to extreme behaviors. Those biases in turn create behavioral interactions with those they are observing, which intensify the first order effect.
So... you agree with his premise? Isn't that how a premise works?
I'm saying the statement has no relevance. It's like saying;
1. It is raining.
2. It never rains on the moon.
3. Rain needs clouds.
conclusion: It must be cloudy.
#2 is completely irrelevant, even though it is on the same topic.
Where is his backward logic?
He's implying profiling is required to identify people likely to commit crimes. That isn't correct; You can identify people without profiling, for example, by using their past criminal history.
You can't look for people who are about to commit a major crime? Or if you look for them, they won't commit crimes? Or if they commit it, you won't catch them?
Non sequitur. Your questions don't even come close to matching up with the statement I made. My point was that looking for crimes that people are 'about' to commit isn't the problem -- it's the fact that increased surveillance of any sufficiently sized group will result in discovering more criminal activity compared to a control group. The group being placed under surveillance is largely arbitrary; the criterion suggested can just as easily ensnare the average person as a 'terrorist', 'person of interest', or whatever the latest phrase is for a political undesirable. This system will simply provide prosecutors with more 'evidence' of a person's 'guilt', when on closer examination, it's a complete deck of cards. It has zero evidentiary value -- a prosecutor can't show up and say "Well your honor, here's the camera footage of the defendant doing the crime, and... here's our form 193-B stating there was a .13% chance of him doing it this week... which being that it was 4 times higher than his neighbors PROVES he's guilty!"
The method of identifying these factors is flawed. But even if it wasn't, subjecting some people to a 'test' that results in an increased risk to their personal liberty without any due process is a circumvention of the entire point of the judiciary: Which is to be a fair and impartial system. And even if THAT wasn't the case, supposing that this system was supported by incontrovertible scientific accuracy, and that this surveillance was subjected to due process, and said surveillance didn't violate reasonable expectations of privacy, etc., etc., it would still be wrong -- because the justification for the warrant is based on statistical probability, also known as circumstantial evidence. But skipping all that, it comes down to this;
The only way we can have a fair system is when we punish people for the things they've done, not the things they could do. And increased surveillance is a form of punishment -- it's subjecting someone to scrutiny, depriving them of privacy, and even if nothing comes of it to them personally, the risk has an associated cost which would be the time spent behind bars and the fines divided by the percent chance that anyone who is subjected to this increased surveillance will be prosecuted and convicted.
If the technology is broken, let's hope that it's rejected, but a working detection method that increases the accuracy and efficiency of law enforcement will result in increased protection of citizens' rights.
First, hoping for anything regarding the government is a bad way to start an argument. Second, the words "accuracy" and "efficiency" regarding law enforcement are typically red flag words to indicate tyranny and oppression. "fair and impartial" is what a democratic country hopes for, not accurate and efficient.
People who are nervous often are hiding something.
Warning: Pointer to NULL reference.
Every police officer will profile the people around them, and they should.
Error: select '*' from 'personnel' returned too many results. Warning: join of 'officer' and 'people' objects may cause undesired behavior.
That is how they reduce the signal-to-noise ratio.
Warning: Bad analogy in line 4.
There are lots of people out there, and since you can't really be expected to casually see the criminals in the act...
Compiler warning: Statement will always evaluate as true.
you need to profile them in order to pick out people who are likely to commit crimes.
Error in logic syntax: Affirmation of the consequent.
The TSA is actually an example of what happens when you don't: you end up strip searching 90 year old ladies taking away their walkers (profiling works in the other direction too.)
Error in logic syntax: Affirmation of the consequent.
The trick is to look for people who are about to commit a major crime, and catch them in the act
Warning: This statement will never evaluate. (off topic) Additional errors were encounted, further processing of stupid_comment.c aborted.
So what they're doing is taking variables that are innocent and legal (changing the pitch of one's voice is not an inherently criminal act), and using it to justify increased surveillance of that individual. And naturally, everyone will be okay with this because "only criminals have anything to hide".
Everyone forgets, of course, that you don't need to be watched for very long before you break a law. It's so hopelessly complex that even lawyers, who spend several years learning about it, are unable to avoid being ensnared against a determined law enforcement effort. If they want you, they will get you. So basically, this system is selecting people to turn into criminals. There is no preventative value here... increased surveillance on anyone will eventually yield evidence that can be used for criminal prosecution.
Comment EULA:
By reading this comment, you agree to be bound by the terms listed herein; If you are a member, employee, associate, business partner, or affiliate of the RIAA or MPAA, you owe me one million ($1,000,000.00) USD, payable in full immediately. Thanks to your f*cked up interpretation of the law, this is, in fact, perfectly legal. Any attempt to evade this legally binding contract will be grounds for me to sue you at three times the requested amount, waive your right to a trial, and hold me utterly and totally immune to any form of legal challenge by you and/or your employer, until at least 150 years after my timely and natural death. Everybody else... I love 'ya. Stay awesome.
The better question is, how long do all those wiretaps and secret government networks retain the data? If they can record all the traffic on the internet and store it for several years, I don't think storing cell phone data is even a blip on the radar.
Cell phones->File->'Save All'
That information shouldn't be available to police officers who are running people's plates, etc., because it will subject them to additional scrutiny. The presumption of innocence is something that's been badly eroded thanks to this bullsh*t about terrorism. Frankly, we could have a 9/11 every month and still not equal the number of deaths due to drunk driving -- and we don't have a 'suspected drunk driver' watch list. When the government has lists for everything that has a greater loss of life and property, then we can talk about 'terrorism'.
You guys do realize that everything you do on the internet is unlawful in one fashion or another, somewhere. It's like a police officer following you while you drive. At some point during the trip, regardless of who you are, you're going to do something that is an offense the officer can stop you for. The internet is no different.
Look at how we've made breaking an EULA a crime. Tell me, how many EULAs do you interact with during your average browsing session? That's just one example... there's thousands more buried in a byzantine legal framework. So basically, the exception that they cannot disrupt "legal" traffic is a carte blanche exception to do whatever they want... because everything is illegal somehow.
And if not, your ISP will simply adjust their EULA for their website, and set your default homepage to it, and viola.
Maybe they should post warnings under each of the city limits signs; "Warning: Contains earth quakes." *deep sigh*
Wait, you're telling me that plunging through super-heated plasma at mach 17 for several minutes can cause communication problems? HOLY CRAP! :\
1. Register commonly mis-spelled domain names. 2. Make ToS "Any access to this website is prohibited." 3. Report all website accesses to the authorities. 4. Invest in new prison construction. 4. PROFIT.