Dear US official; All of my communications are sent via encrypted proxy, and set to stream constantly. The proxy dumps into Tor and a half-dozen other networks.
Compress? This is the gov't. If they can capture everything, they have the money to store it raw. Whether it takes 1x storage space or 10x storage space is only dollars, which they print.
Even given unlimited dollars, there is only so much hardware that the world's electronics industry is capable of producing each year. Therefore even the all-powerful MIBs will have limits on what they can afford to do.
From what I've read, a lot of surveillance doesn't bother analyzing the actual content of the communications at all; instead they just keep track of who was communicating with who at what time(s), and use statistical/data-mining techniques to draw conclusions from that.
If you want to live in a military/police state even more than you do already, then that's the re-interpretation you want...
There seems to be a lot of knee-jerk misinterpretation going on at this site.
I wrote "I can imagine X happening", and multiple people read it as "I hope X happens" and got bent out of shape.
The fact that merely introducing the possibility upsets the 2nd-amendment crowd so much suggests that even they secretly think the possibility is not so far-fetched. After all, given the hash the Supreme Court has made out of the 4th amendment, why should they feel secure about the future sanctity of the 2nd?
Cameras don't combat crime. They don't prevent crime, they don't deter criminals, they don't allow police to stop perpetrators.
It's not unreasonable to argue that it was cameras that prevented the Tsarnaev brothers from carrying out their plan to travel on to New York and plant bombs in Times Square.
Granted, those were mainly private cameras, but public cameras would have done the job too.
My feeling (which I expect to be roundly flamed for, so go ahead if you must) is that camera surveillance in one form or another is pretty much inevitable in public places; and therefore the best way to ensure privacy and civil liberties is not to simply dig in one's heels and demand that the cameras be removed, but rather to figure out how to design cameras that are effective at recording crimes and also as resistant as possible to Big Brother-style abuse.
For example, imagine a law that allows government CCTV cameras, but only if they meet the following design criteria something like the following:
The camera must store video data to a local storage device only -- it's not allowed to transmit video over any network
The camera may not store any video for longer than 14 days. In fact, it is only allowed to contain enough storage space for 14 days' worth of video.
The camera should store the video in an encrypted format. The keys necessary to decrypt the video should be kept by an independent agency and made available to the police only after a judge determines that a crime has been committed that justifies access to the camera's video feed
The camera may not have a network data link faster than 2400 baud. That gives the government the ability to verify that the camera is operating, but no practical ability to access the camera's video stream remotely. If the government wants to review a camera's video, they will have to send someone physically out to the camera to collect its flash storage device. This makes centralized mass-monitoring and mass-data-collection impractical, while still allowing the government to collect specific video evidence after a crime has been committed.
Now I'm sure there are plenty of holes in the above design -- cleverer people than I can come up with something better -- but my point is that civil liberties will be better protected in the long run if we design them into the hardware and into the laws governing the design of said hardware, than if we simply stamp our feet and demand that the government not use a technology which many people perceive (correctly or incorrectly) to be an obvious way to identify and catch criminals.
All you need is a constitutional amendment, and your wishes will come true. Good Luck with that....
Or a re-reading of the 2nd Amendment that puts more weight on the "well-ordered militia" clause... I can imagine a future Supreme Court reading that to restrict gun ownership to only those who serve in the National Guard, military, or police forces.
I think a lot of programmer types like the idea of things being made automatically, so that once you have the design down you can churn out as many copies as you like, just as you can with software.
Having to make each individual item by hand isn't considered an interesting option because it can't scale up.
Whatever h2g2.com is, it isn't the guide, lacks license, and, much like this post, lacks humour of any description, and wouldn't sustain you if served on toast.
Keep in mind that The Guide was written by Douglas Adams, whereas h2g2 was written by a large number of people who, whatever their strengths, are mostly not Douglas Adams.
I think that would explain the difference. (Of course you could also argue that even in the Hitchhiker's books, most of the fictional Guide's contents were probably not very funny, and as such those parts were never quoted in the Guide novels. If you wanted to split hairs)
I mean, them young whippersnappers seem like drooling retards when I break out my trusty old soldering iron. You know, for debugging like back when bugs actually stung...
To be fair, debugging Ruby on Rails with a soldering iron did strike a lot of us as a rather unconventional approach...
Yup that's the problem - people think other people are stupid. Gunpowder was being made 1,000 years ago so anyone who thinks this will "solve" anything is seriously delusional. Explosives are not HARD to make. They are EASY to make.
Frankly, some other people are stupid. Not every terrorist is an evil genius. Hell, most of them are pretty dumb, that's part of the reason why they are able to convince themselves that murder is somehow going to improve things.
So yes, making misbehavior more difficult for stupid people is often a worthwhile thing to do, even if smart people can work around it. Hell, look at iTunes -- easily broken DRM, but still good enough to keep most people buying instead of pirating.
The real hurdle to 3D printing is in being able to produce parts that don't look like rejects from the Lego factory.
The real issue is that most people just don't need custom parts. Most widgets that are useful are already available at a very good price at the local hardware store.
Custom part fabrication is handy for well-heeled tinkerers, but most people aren't tinkerers or well-heeled.
Come out with a 3D food printer, on the other hand, that will probably sell.;)
Try this one: "Whenever liberals talk about tolerance, they are never talking about themselves." It's remarkably consistent.
What you're experiencing is Confirmation bias. That is, once you've made up your mind what a "liberal" acts like, then it's the people who act like your preconception are the people who you will label as liberals, thus strengthening your preconception. The liberals who don't match your preconception you won't notice.
Or do you mean, "acceptance by companies that are willing to take but unwilling to contribute"
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being willing to take but unwilling to contribute, as long as the software's author is okay with that. Since software is free to replicate, it doesn't hurt the software's author or anyone else if a company uses it, and it might even help (e.g. if more companies use the software, it allows the software to be more thoroughly tested and debugged, and may help it become a de facto standard).
That said, if the author of the software doesn't like "freeloaders", the author can license under the GPL instead. Different strokes and all that.
No-one said anything about locking people up. But they could keep tabs on him in many legal ways.
Wait, are we for the government spying on us, or against it? I can never remember.
Or is it that the government should only spy on people who are going to decide to become terrorists 5-10 years in the future? Because if the government is able to predict people's actions that far in advance, I think they can probably erase the national debt pretty quick by playing the stock market...
The only chance he has of a not guilty verdict is if someone like me is on the jury, someone who truly believes that the burden of proof is on the prosecutor and that the burden should be pretty high and that is pretty damn unlikely.
I can sympathize with your outlook, but in this case I think the prosecutors are going to be able to produce a whole lot of very convincing evidence of his guilt. I'd suspect that if you were on the jury, even you would end up voting to convict.
Driving requires AI, even if most driver's don't have intelligence, artificial or otherwise. I've avoided two crashes by watching the heads and eyes of drivers around me
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Since cars have mass and momentum, they are limited by simple physics wrt how fast they can change their velocity. A computer can use that knowledge to determine the complete range of locations a car might possibly be (n) milliseconds from now, and avoid those locations.
Slashdot Mirror
Dear US official; All of my communications are sent via encrypted proxy, and set to stream constantly. The proxy dumps into Tor and a half-dozen other networks.
Dear girlintraining,
We're in ur USB keyboard driver
Recordin all ur passwerds
- lolMIBs
Compress? This is the gov't. If they can capture everything, they have the money to store it raw. Whether it takes 1x storage space or 10x storage space is only dollars, which they print.
Even given unlimited dollars, there is only so much hardware that the world's electronics industry is capable of producing each year. Therefore even the all-powerful MIBs will have limits on what they can afford to do.
From what I've read, a lot of surveillance doesn't bother analyzing the actual content of the communications at all; instead they just keep track of who was communicating with who at what time(s), and use statistical/data-mining techniques to draw conclusions from that.
...he would be arrested for violation of his LIFE LONG NDA you sign when you take a job with the The FBI.
Never heard anything about that from my FBI friend.
Well, of course not -- he wasn't allowed to tell you about it ;^)
If you want to live in a military/police state even more than you do already, then that's the re-interpretation you want...
There seems to be a lot of knee-jerk misinterpretation going on at this site.
I wrote "I can imagine X happening", and multiple people read it as "I hope X happens" and got bent out of shape.
The fact that merely introducing the possibility upsets the 2nd-amendment crowd so much suggests that even they secretly think the possibility is not so far-fetched. After all, given the hash the Supreme Court has made out of the 4th amendment, why should they feel secure about the future sanctity of the 2nd?
Cameras don't combat crime. They don't prevent crime, they don't deter criminals, they don't allow police to stop perpetrators.
It's not unreasonable to argue that it was cameras that prevented the Tsarnaev brothers from carrying out their plan to travel on to New York and plant bombs in Times Square.
Granted, those were mainly private cameras, but public cameras would have done the job too.
My feeling (which I expect to be roundly flamed for, so go ahead if you must) is that camera surveillance in one form or another is pretty much inevitable in public places; and therefore the best way to ensure privacy and civil liberties is not to simply dig in one's heels and demand that the cameras be removed, but rather to figure out how to design cameras that are effective at recording crimes and also as resistant as possible to Big Brother-style abuse.
For example, imagine a law that allows government CCTV cameras, but only if they meet the following design criteria something like the following:
Now I'm sure there are plenty of holes in the above design -- cleverer people than I can come up with something better -- but my point is that civil liberties will be better protected in the long run if we design them into the hardware and into the laws governing the design of said hardware, than if we simply stamp our feet and demand that the government not use a technology which many people perceive (correctly or incorrectly) to be an obvious way to identify and catch criminals.
Maybe a shotgun with ceramic bearings instead of lead pellets?
I believe the invention you're looking for is a gristle gun.
All you need is a constitutional amendment, and your wishes will come true. Good Luck with that....
Or a re-reading of the 2nd Amendment that puts more weight on the "well-ordered militia" clause... I can imagine a future Supreme Court reading that to restrict gun ownership to only those who serve in the National Guard, military, or police forces.
I think a lot of programmer types like the idea of things being made automatically, so that once you have the design down you can churn out as many copies as you like, just as you can with software.
Having to make each individual item by hand isn't considered an interesting option because it can't scale up.
The only question is how many shots before it explodes.
Ah, but they've thought of that. You load it with plastic bullets, which are full of plastic gunpowder.
That way you can 3D-print everything you need, and the materials are all tolerance-matched for safety.
Whatever h2g2.com is, it isn't the guide, lacks license, and, much like this post, lacks humour of any description, and wouldn't sustain you if served on toast.
Keep in mind that The Guide was written by Douglas Adams, whereas h2g2 was written by a large number of people who, whatever their strengths, are mostly not Douglas Adams.
I think that would explain the difference. (Of course you could also argue that even in the Hitchhiker's books, most of the fictional Guide's contents were probably not very funny, and as such those parts were never quoted in the Guide novels. If you wanted to split hairs)
I mean, them young whippersnappers seem like drooling retards when I break out my trusty old soldering iron. You know, for debugging like back when bugs actually stung ...
To be fair, debugging Ruby on Rails with a soldering iron did strike a lot of us as a rather unconventional approach...
Yup that's the problem - people think other people are stupid. Gunpowder was being made 1,000 years ago so anyone who thinks this will "solve" anything is seriously delusional. Explosives are not HARD to make. They are EASY to make.
Frankly, some other people are stupid. Not every terrorist is an evil genius. Hell, most of them are pretty dumb, that's part of the reason why they are able to convince themselves that murder is somehow going to improve things.
So yes, making misbehavior more difficult for stupid people is often a worthwhile thing to do, even if smart people can work around it. Hell, look at iTunes -- easily broken DRM, but still good enough to keep most people buying instead of pirating.
The real hurdle to 3D printing is in being able to produce parts that don't look like rejects from the Lego factory.
The real issue is that most people just don't need custom parts. Most widgets that are useful are already available at a very good price at the local hardware store.
Custom part fabrication is handy for well-heeled tinkerers, but most people aren't tinkerers or well-heeled.
Come out with a 3D food printer, on the other hand, that will probably sell. ;)
Try this one: "Whenever liberals talk about tolerance, they are never talking about themselves." It's remarkably consistent.
What you're experiencing is Confirmation bias. That is, once you've made up your mind what a "liberal" acts like, then it's the people who act like your preconception are the people who you will label as liberals, thus strengthening your preconception. The liberals who don't match your preconception you won't notice.
In the meantime businesses keep coming here, leaving your state with the takers leeching off of your taxes.
Yessir, that business-friendly climate really improves the quality of life over there
Hmm, I suppose this explains the crew in the WALL-E movie.
But if we do that, we are, inevitably, going to pollute the water, and diminish the amount of the already limited amount of water on the moon
Any moon water we pollute can be purified again; we have the technology
Tiger was a questionable update, and every OSX update since has been a load of shit.
Point of order: Snow Leopard was actually pretty good. It may be the best OS/X of all of them, in fact.
Or do you mean, "acceptance by companies that are willing to take but unwilling to contribute"
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being willing to take but unwilling to contribute, as long as the software's author is okay with that. Since software is free to replicate, it doesn't hurt the software's author or anyone else if a company uses it, and it might even help (e.g. if more companies use the software, it allows the software to be more thoroughly tested and debugged, and may help it become a de facto standard).
That said, if the author of the software doesn't like "freeloaders", the author can license under the GPL instead. Different strokes and all that.
The most special cased POS I have seen in a long time.
To be fair, any compiler is eventually going to end up reflecting the qualities of the language it is compiling. :P
No-one said anything about locking people up. But they could keep tabs on him in many legal ways.
Wait, are we for the government spying on us, or against it? I can never remember.
Or is it that the government should only spy on people who are going to decide to become terrorists 5-10 years in the future? Because if the government is able to predict people's actions that far in advance, I think they can probably erase the national debt pretty quick by playing the stock market...
The only chance he has of a not guilty verdict is if someone like me is on the jury, someone who truly believes that the burden of proof is on the prosecutor and that the burden should be pretty high and that is pretty damn unlikely.
I can sympathize with your outlook, but in this case I think the prosecutors are going to be able to produce a whole lot of very convincing evidence of his guilt. I'd suspect that if you were on the jury, even you would end up voting to convict.
They aren't very accurate, so you have to get pretty close. Plus, they take a while to work. Sometimes minutes.
Sounds like a job for a dozen swarm-controlled robots. MIT ought to have something appropriate lying around...
I mean, why can't we get more WOMEN into terrorism?
Done.
Driving requires AI, even if most driver's don't have intelligence, artificial or otherwise. I've avoided two crashes by watching the heads and eyes of drivers around me
There's more than one way to skin a cat. Since cars have mass and momentum, they are limited by simple physics wrt how fast they can change their velocity. A computer can use that knowledge to determine the complete range of locations a car might possibly be (n) milliseconds from now, and avoid those locations.
No face-reading or mind-reading required.