Traffic cameras were ruled unconstitutional in Minnesota precisely because the owner of the car photographed was judged guilty until proven innocent. The Minnesota Supreme Court rightly viewed this reversal of the burden of proof as unconstitutional and voided the city ordinance that setup the cameras and made them refund the tickets.
I wonder if this system could be challenged similarly.
Some sort of bounty-based alternative, in addition to the cost, would amount to offering to pay anybody who can come up with a few rusty Kalashnikovs and a boat full of dead Somalis. What could possibly go wrong?
I don't know, but I suspect the idea that the US will, for the foreseeable future, be able to retaliate with nuclear weapons at a level that leaves the future of an aggressor's entire civilization as an open question is very valuable.
Think of it this way -- if Iran develops a viable nuclear weapon, they might decide that they could unilaterally close the Straights of Hormuz to all shipping using conventional means, with the understanding that a conventional defense risked a short-range regional nuclear retaliation (ie, to prevent the Saudis from playing with the conventional weapons the US has provided to them).
What's to stop the Iranians in this situation? The only thing to stop them is the knowledge that if they actually used a nuclear weapon -- or maybe even seriously threatened to use one -- against an American backed target that they were at risk of an overwhelming nuclear retaliation from the US.
One that would be impossible to stop (ie, ICBMs, sub-launched missiles) and would be at a level of devastation that might reduce Iran to the same category of civilization as Carthage. Assured destruction means that - your cities in ruins, your population reduced to a small fraction and your land unused.
It sounds crazy, but I believe that this keeps a lid on a lot of trouble.
It's probably cost prohibitive for some SOHO setup, but I think some of the mid-tier firewall and link balancer products will support sticky connections and/or policy routing specific IPs and URLs.
I've installed a half-dozen or so Ecessa PowerLinks and have not had any problems with users being unable to get to or work with specific sites, even though it works as you generally suggest (although they use a dummy LAN between the PowerLink and your internal firewall).
The same is true for Watchguard Firebox firewalls with the Fireware Pro software level and multi-wan.
IMHO, the bigger issue is failover that doesn't leave something to be desired. Most products I've worked with tend to want to use ping or, slightly better, TCP connects to static IPs on a per-interface basis to test to see if there's a network there. It's all well and good, but false positives/negatives are tough to avoid.
A big chunk of the problem is that you want to test something on the internet and not served, co-hosted or part of your ISPs network -- you want to make sure you can get past the ISP.
Ping is nearly useless across the public internet as a rule, unless you have a host you can ping and expect a packet back. TCP connect is a lot smarter, but the whole static IP thing is a huge problem unless you frequently check and validate IPs regularly or are using known statics. It'd be far more helpful to use DNS names that were cached and refreshed periodically, but I haven't seen any devices designed for this.
There's far too much emphasis on rolling in fees as a source of revenue growth instead of raising prices to account for the needed revenue.
I'd like to see some kind of regulation that would prohibit adding fees to the cost of a service unless the fees represented a charge for a service that was optional and supplied and delivered by the same company providing the primary purchased service.
The only loophole would be if you agreed in writing, in an agreement seperate from any other service agreement, to allow charges and this agreement could be unilaterally cancelled at any time by payee without obligation to pay any outstanding fees and without threatening other services. This would make companies very hesitant to engage in this practice since it would leave them vulnerable to a haircut on these fees with no means of recouping them.
This, for example, would make airline fuel surcharges (aka, fare increases without fare increases) prohibited, yet baggage fees wouldn't be, since they are inherently optional (I don't like them either, but you don't *need* to check a bag to fly on a plane).
Phone company charges would be impossible, since a seperate written agreement wouldn't be worth the effort on their part.
I wish he would fix Epcot and make it the future fantasy it used to be when it opened.
And while he's at it, fix Tomorrowland to make it feel like a vision of tomorrow again like it did in 1978, not a bad cartoon character version of tomorrow it is now. Updating the Carousel of Progress to current standards would be even better, especially if they featured iPads, AppleTV, etc.
Walt may have been a closet fascist, but I really admire his ability to create a vision of the future that was inspiring, instead of the insipid and dystopic versions we're assaulted with by popular culture, the plutocrats and the socialists.
I think the answer lies in the DisplayPort connector -- why do some computers have DisplayPort and not HDMI?
My sense is that the adapters either undermine connector licensing -- Wikipedia notes that DisplayPort is a royalty free standard -- or somehow threaten copyright controls built into HDMI, or both.
BluRay has to use HDCP for HD video, which pretty much mandates HDMI, so TV makers have put HDMI on TVs, and from there it became something of a home AV standard. Computer makers didn't need HDCP, so they went with the royalty-free solution, which in turn has been easy to connect to HDMI displays with an adapter. I note on Newegg that there are a number of monitors available with DisplayPort, so it's possible to go all-DP on a computer setup.
My best guess is that with so many people wanting to plug a laptop (no royalty) into a TV and at least some display makers willing to add DP, the future for HDMI as a standard is perhaps threatened and revenue is certainly decreased by 50% in some future world when only half the devices use your connector.
And if you think even not that further out, there may be a future where nobody buys a "TV" anymore -- you buy a display with either in-built intelligence to view programming from network(s) or you attach some computing device. If the latter has DisplayPort and this is what most people do, then the TV doesn't need HDMI and the standard withers, much to the chagrin of the people cashing royalty checks, and to the movie studios who want the DRM.
Management ignorance helps management cover itself -- if problems occur during a vacation, it's REAL easy to throw the IT guy under the bus in his absence. The problem MUST be due to his mistakes or choices, not due to the fact that management has staffed poorly.
Business management is a worthy set of knowledge and skills, but I think we've reached an unfortunate situation where it's become considered the only skill necessary -- just as Lutz says, the notion that if "if you can measure it, you can manage it" and knowledge and experience of an organization's core specialties are considered unnecessary except at the most superficial level (usually in the 20 minutes or less PowerPoint presentation).
Worse, it's also badly distracted by the opportunity costs of profit maximization through technical manipulation -- which is really no surprise considering that so many MBAs got an undergrad degree in "business" with its relentless focus on technical details like balance sheets and finance mechanisms and measurements of marketing success. The MBA itself with its even greater technical focus on areas like finance and accounting seems to breed legions of people who think that given the data, they can understand anything.
That being said, those are worthy skills -- but how can you manage an organization that makes widgets if you don't understand widgets? I'd like to see an MBA program that won't admit anyone who doesn't have an undergrad degree in *something else*.
I think there's generally poor training for firearms rules. I also carry the latest TSA regs AND the airline's web page on firearms (laminated for durability).
About the 'worst' incident I had was at the Bullhead City, AZ/Laughlin, NV airport. I think the airport is technically in AZ, and both airline ticket agents said I could not lock my weapons case with my own lock. I had to get a supervisor and show them the TSA and airline regulations and they quickly acceded.
They also had a Mojave County Deputy come over and 'inspect' my guns to see if they were loaded, despite being fitted with trigger locks AND cable locks so as to be rendered totally nonusable and nonfirable.
Strangely, at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, TSA doesn't even bother opening the case. They just run it through X-ray. I use aluminum hard-sided gun cases and I don't get how they can see anything.
Credit card payment processing is the ideal complicity/trace/choke point for much of the world of spam and crimeware.
Why doesn't the FBI turn the next prosecution into a RICO prosecution and drag a payment processor and/or bank and some of its executives into the prosecution?
A few 20 year jail sentences and $250,000 fines plus forfeitures would make many processors think twice about their "man in the middle" role.
Spam and scareware wouldn't be worth doing if you couldn't get paid for them -- no matter how scared I am, I can't manage to shove a $20 into my monitor.
1) Lack of support for bluetooth mouse AT ALL. I could (grudgingly) accept not supporting it in native apps, but with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it could pretty much stand in (via RDP) for a PC.
2) Lack of reasonable support for external storage. I understand there are workarounds with the camera connection kit, but still, why not just a SD slot? It'd also be nice to support some kind of "commons" storage area that wasn't object type specific, and maybe this is what's being avoided.
So do you work for the Chinese Propaganda Ministry in its Countering Anti-Chinese Rhetoric in Western Blogs department, or do you just freelance for fun?
What part of the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei was the result of Western Imperialism or the defense of China?
No, the subject is not off-topic, as the problem with Chinese use of surveillance technology isn't the surveillance per se (although it is a problem in the West and in China), it's the use of that technology to buttress a ONE PARTY STATE that actively runs a POLITICAL GULAG and ARRESTS, IMPRISONS AND EXECUTES its citizens for threatening the hegemony of the COMMUNIST PARTY.
I could almost tolerate the iPhone app, but it presents a Fisher-Price reduced subset of stories and features. What's worse is that iPad app isn't much better.
There appear to be a lot more stories on the web version of the paper, plus you have access to add comments and get the blogs that are missing. Why it's so hard to make an iPad app to access a snapshot of the web site I don't know.
How about a simple app that just lets me read a PDF of the paper?
Maybe they were playing a kind of brinksmanship, forcing competitors to bid higher and higher for patents they needed more than Google did, and thus depriving competitors of cash useful for other operations that are more critical to Google.
This kind of corporate strategy makes a lot of sense for shareholders -- if you win the auction for a patent crucial to a competitor's product, even if you paid somewhat more than the market value, you deprive a competitor of a technology or force them to license or cross-license with you, or make them re-design their product.
If you lose, you don't spend a dime but you force your competitor to spend far more than they otherwise would have, and thus deprive them of resource useful for competing against you.
It's reminds me of playing backgammon -- even if you have only a weak advantage, doubling forces your opponent to either resign or accept and chance losing.
It works great with a bluetooth keyboard, but I *do* wish Apple would support the bluetooth mouse profile. Touch doesn't translate well to Windows via RDP and reaching to touch the screen is a nuisance with an external keyboard running, although you can get a lot done with a Bluetooth keyboard.
I was just thinking aluminum smelting as an example, not as the best possible use.
Regardless of the consumer, I would think the potential disruption would be offset by discounting the power overproduction purchases to cost of production vs. commercial rates.
Presumably the peak demands would be somewhat predictable and the overproduction users who may be cut off or forced to purchase at higher commercial rates could alter their production schedules to minimize any disruption.
Even if the power consumer was highly sensitive to power changes, they could probably cover it with local generation and/or other grid usage.
Why not run the plant at some kind of overproduction level? The overproduction could be used for water electrolysis, aluminum smelting or some other energy-intensive task that could be scaled back to meet peak power demands.
Water electrolysis could supply hydrogen which could be burned or turned to methane for longer term storage and used to also provide peak power.
Isn't this a repost of the iPhone app developer who made the photo-graphing lock screen and kept anonymous stats of the "passcodes" people entered into his lock-screen-like lock screen?
Is it laziness, or is it "I was just out on patrol getting shot at and avoiding land mines for the last 14 hours and I get to to it again every day for the next six months and I don't really feel like exerting some effort to save Uncle Sam $5 at this point."
Won't there be the inevitable threads praising/bashing Apple, praising/bashing Android, threads comparing the two, Nokia advocates bashing both and at least one person each evangelizing for webOS and Windows Phone 7?
It's all tied up in the customer/vendor/ownership issues of DVR boxes.
Cable companies want the absolute cheapest box they can get and don't care about energy consumption since they don't pay for it. Box makers want to make the cheapest box possible since that's what cable companies want.
Consumers would probably like a more energy efficient box but the box cost is obfuscated through their monthly subscriptions fees.
Where it could make a difference is with Tivo boxes; since they are bought outright by the owners, the small per-unit price increase for improved energy management could be sold as a feature. A price increase of $50 that resulted in $25 annual energy savings could be worthwhile, and that's a relatively small cut in consumption -- about 40 watts, which ought to be easy to achieve if you can keep the HDD spun down 20 hours a day.
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Traffic cameras were ruled unconstitutional in Minnesota precisely because the owner of the car photographed was judged guilty until proven innocent. The Minnesota Supreme Court rightly viewed this reversal of the burden of proof as unconstitutional and voided the city ordinance that setup the cameras and made them refund the tickets.
I wonder if this system could be challenged similarly.
Some sort of bounty-based alternative, in addition to the cost, would amount to offering to pay anybody who can come up with a few rusty Kalashnikovs and a boat full of dead Somalis. What could possibly go wrong?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
I don't know, but I suspect the idea that the US will, for the foreseeable future, be able to retaliate with nuclear weapons at a level that leaves the future of an aggressor's entire civilization as an open question is very valuable.
Think of it this way -- if Iran develops a viable nuclear weapon, they might decide that they could unilaterally close the Straights of Hormuz to all shipping using conventional means, with the understanding that a conventional defense risked a short-range regional nuclear retaliation (ie, to prevent the Saudis from playing with the conventional weapons the US has provided to them).
What's to stop the Iranians in this situation? The only thing to stop them is the knowledge that if they actually used a nuclear weapon -- or maybe even seriously threatened to use one -- against an American backed target that they were at risk of an overwhelming nuclear retaliation from the US.
One that would be impossible to stop (ie, ICBMs, sub-launched missiles) and would be at a level of devastation that might reduce Iran to the same category of civilization as Carthage. Assured destruction means that - your cities in ruins, your population reduced to a small fraction and your land unused.
It sounds crazy, but I believe that this keeps a lid on a lot of trouble.
It's probably cost prohibitive for some SOHO setup, but I think some of the mid-tier firewall and link balancer products will support sticky connections and/or policy routing specific IPs and URLs.
I've installed a half-dozen or so Ecessa PowerLinks and have not had any problems with users being unable to get to or work with specific sites, even though it works as you generally suggest (although they use a dummy LAN between the PowerLink and your internal firewall).
The same is true for Watchguard Firebox firewalls with the Fireware Pro software level and multi-wan.
IMHO, the bigger issue is failover that doesn't leave something to be desired. Most products I've worked with tend to want to use ping or, slightly better, TCP connects to static IPs on a per-interface basis to test to see if there's a network there. It's all well and good, but false positives/negatives are tough to avoid.
A big chunk of the problem is that you want to test something on the internet and not served, co-hosted or part of your ISPs network -- you want to make sure you can get past the ISP.
Ping is nearly useless across the public internet as a rule, unless you have a host you can ping and expect a packet back. TCP connect is a lot smarter, but the whole static IP thing is a huge problem unless you frequently check and validate IPs regularly or are using known statics. It'd be far more helpful to use DNS names that were cached and refreshed periodically, but I haven't seen any devices designed for this.
There's far too much emphasis on rolling in fees as a source of revenue growth instead of raising prices to account for the needed revenue.
I'd like to see some kind of regulation that would prohibit adding fees to the cost of a service unless the fees represented a charge for a service that was optional and supplied and delivered by the same company providing the primary purchased service.
The only loophole would be if you agreed in writing, in an agreement seperate from any other service agreement, to allow charges and this agreement could be unilaterally cancelled at any time by payee without obligation to pay any outstanding fees and without threatening other services. This would make companies very hesitant to engage in this practice since it would leave them vulnerable to a haircut on these fees with no means of recouping them.
This, for example, would make airline fuel surcharges (aka, fare increases without fare increases) prohibited, yet baggage fees wouldn't be, since they are inherently optional (I don't like them either, but you don't *need* to check a bag to fly on a plane).
Phone company charges would be impossible, since a seperate written agreement wouldn't be worth the effort on their part.
I wish he would fix Epcot and make it the future fantasy it used to be when it opened.
And while he's at it, fix Tomorrowland to make it feel like a vision of tomorrow again like it did in 1978, not a bad cartoon character version of tomorrow it is now. Updating the Carousel of Progress to current standards would be even better, especially if they featured iPads, AppleTV, etc.
Walt may have been a closet fascist, but I really admire his ability to create a vision of the future that was inspiring, instead of the insipid and dystopic versions we're assaulted with by popular culture, the plutocrats and the socialists.
I think the answer lies in the DisplayPort connector -- why do some computers have DisplayPort and not HDMI?
My sense is that the adapters either undermine connector licensing -- Wikipedia notes that DisplayPort is a royalty free standard -- or somehow threaten copyright controls built into HDMI, or both.
BluRay has to use HDCP for HD video, which pretty much mandates HDMI, so TV makers have put HDMI on TVs, and from there it became something of a home AV standard. Computer makers didn't need HDCP, so they went with the royalty-free solution, which in turn has been easy to connect to HDMI displays with an adapter. I note on Newegg that there are a number of monitors available with DisplayPort, so it's possible to go all-DP on a computer setup.
My best guess is that with so many people wanting to plug a laptop (no royalty) into a TV and at least some display makers willing to add DP, the future for HDMI as a standard is perhaps threatened and revenue is certainly decreased by 50% in some future world when only half the devices use your connector.
And if you think even not that further out, there may be a future where nobody buys a "TV" anymore -- you buy a display with either in-built intelligence to view programming from network(s) or you attach some computing device. If the latter has DisplayPort and this is what most people do, then the TV doesn't need HDMI and the standard withers, much to the chagrin of the people cashing royalty checks, and to the movie studios who want the DRM.
Management ignorance helps management cover itself -- if problems occur during a vacation, it's REAL easy to throw the IT guy under the bus in his absence. The problem MUST be due to his mistakes or choices, not due to the fact that management has staffed poorly.
Business management is a worthy set of knowledge and skills, but I think we've reached an unfortunate situation where it's become considered the only skill necessary -- just as Lutz says, the notion that if "if you can measure it, you can manage it" and knowledge and experience of an organization's core specialties are considered unnecessary except at the most superficial level (usually in the 20 minutes or less PowerPoint presentation).
Worse, it's also badly distracted by the opportunity costs of profit maximization through technical manipulation -- which is really no surprise considering that so many MBAs got an undergrad degree in "business" with its relentless focus on technical details like balance sheets and finance mechanisms and measurements of marketing success. The MBA itself with its even greater technical focus on areas like finance and accounting seems to breed legions of people who think that given the data, they can understand anything.
That being said, those are worthy skills -- but how can you manage an organization that makes widgets if you don't understand widgets? I'd like to see an MBA program that won't admit anyone who doesn't have an undergrad degree in *something else*.
I think there's generally poor training for firearms rules. I also carry the latest TSA regs AND the airline's web page on firearms (laminated for durability).
About the 'worst' incident I had was at the Bullhead City, AZ/Laughlin, NV airport. I think the airport is technically in AZ, and both airline ticket agents said I could not lock my weapons case with my own lock. I had to get a supervisor and show them the TSA and airline regulations and they quickly acceded.
They also had a Mojave County Deputy come over and 'inspect' my guns to see if they were loaded, despite being fitted with trigger locks AND cable locks so as to be rendered totally nonusable and nonfirable.
Strangely, at Phoenix Sky Harbor airport, TSA doesn't even bother opening the case. They just run it through X-ray. I use aluminum hard-sided gun cases and I don't get how they can see anything.
Yes! Traveling with a firearm is like getting extra special first class check-in.
I love how they treat you like somebody special; I think in some airports they assume you're a cop.
Credit card payment processing is the ideal complicity/trace/choke point for much of the world of spam and crimeware.
Why doesn't the FBI turn the next prosecution into a RICO prosecution and drag a payment processor and/or bank and some of its executives into the prosecution?
A few 20 year jail sentences and $250,000 fines plus forfeitures would make many processors think twice about their "man in the middle" role.
Spam and scareware wouldn't be worth doing if you couldn't get paid for them -- no matter how scared I am, I can't manage to shove a $20 into my monitor.
For me its only crippled in two ways:
1) Lack of support for bluetooth mouse AT ALL. I could (grudgingly) accept not supporting it in native apps, but with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse, it could pretty much stand in (via RDP) for a PC.
2) Lack of reasonable support for external storage. I understand there are workarounds with the camera connection kit, but still, why not just a SD slot? It'd also be nice to support some kind of "commons" storage area that wasn't object type specific, and maybe this is what's being avoided.
So do you work for the Chinese Propaganda Ministry in its Countering Anti-Chinese Rhetoric in Western Blogs department, or do you just freelance for fun?
What part of the arrest and detention of Ai Weiwei was the result of Western Imperialism or the defense of China?
No, the subject is not off-topic, as the problem with Chinese use of surveillance technology isn't the surveillance per se (although it is a problem in the West and in China), it's the use of that technology to buttress a ONE PARTY STATE that actively runs a POLITICAL GULAG and ARRESTS, IMPRISONS AND EXECUTES its citizens for threatening the hegemony of the COMMUNIST PARTY.
I could almost tolerate the iPhone app, but it presents a Fisher-Price reduced subset of stories and features. What's worse is that iPad app isn't much better.
There appear to be a lot more stories on the web version of the paper, plus you have access to add comments and get the blogs that are missing. Why it's so hard to make an iPad app to access a snapshot of the web site I don't know.
How about a simple app that just lets me read a PDF of the paper?
Maybe they were playing a kind of brinksmanship, forcing competitors to bid higher and higher for patents they needed more than Google did, and thus depriving competitors of cash useful for other operations that are more critical to Google.
This kind of corporate strategy makes a lot of sense for shareholders -- if you win the auction for a patent crucial to a competitor's product, even if you paid somewhat more than the market value, you deprive a competitor of a technology or force them to license or cross-license with you, or make them re-design their product.
If you lose, you don't spend a dime but you force your competitor to spend far more than they otherwise would have, and thus deprive them of resource useful for competing against you.
It's reminds me of playing backgammon -- even if you have only a weak advantage, doubling forces your opponent to either resign or accept and chance losing.
....when air travel becomes too expensive due to fuel costs or unaffordable at the volumes currently used due to other economic issues?
It works great with a bluetooth keyboard, but I *do* wish Apple would support the bluetooth mouse profile. Touch doesn't translate well to Windows via RDP and reaching to touch the screen is a nuisance with an external keyboard running, although you can get a lot done with a Bluetooth keyboard.
I was just thinking aluminum smelting as an example, not as the best possible use.
Regardless of the consumer, I would think the potential disruption would be offset by discounting the power overproduction purchases to cost of production vs. commercial rates.
Presumably the peak demands would be somewhat predictable and the overproduction users who may be cut off or forced to purchase at higher commercial rates could alter their production schedules to minimize any disruption.
Even if the power consumer was highly sensitive to power changes, they could probably cover it with local generation and/or other grid usage.
Why not run the plant at some kind of overproduction level? The overproduction could be used for water electrolysis, aluminum smelting or some other energy-intensive task that could be scaled back to meet peak power demands.
Water electrolysis could supply hydrogen which could be burned or turned to methane for longer term storage and used to also provide peak power.
Isn't this a repost of the iPhone app developer who made the photo-graphing lock screen and kept anonymous stats of the "passcodes" people entered into his lock-screen-like lock screen?
Is it laziness, or is it "I was just out on patrol getting shot at and avoiding land mines for the last 14 hours and I get to to it again every day for the next six months and I don't really feel like exerting some effort to save Uncle Sam $5 at this point."
Quantum communications -- you're aware of all thoughts simultaneously as they occur. Actually sharing them is no longer necessary.
Won't there be the inevitable threads praising/bashing Apple, praising/bashing Android, threads comparing the two, Nokia advocates bashing both and at least one person each evangelizing for webOS and Windows Phone 7?
It's all tied up in the customer/vendor/ownership issues of DVR boxes.
Cable companies want the absolute cheapest box they can get and don't care about energy consumption since they don't pay for it. Box makers want to make the cheapest box possible since that's what cable companies want.
Consumers would probably like a more energy efficient box but the box cost is obfuscated through their monthly subscriptions fees.
Where it could make a difference is with Tivo boxes; since they are bought outright by the owners, the small per-unit price increase for improved energy management could be sold as a feature. A price increase of $50 that resulted in $25 annual energy savings could be worthwhile, and that's a relatively small cut in consumption -- about 40 watts, which ought to be easy to achieve if you can keep the HDD spun down 20 hours a day.