IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
Because I don't have a flashlight (aka torch) every time I want one. When I park the car, I just want to walk to the door without dripping over the stone lined sidewalk, and I want to see where the keyhole is in the door. And it's not just for me, I want guests (and pizza delivery guys) to be able to walk to the door without tripping.
While keeping a flashlight in the car might take care of that problem for me, I'm probably going to forget to take it back out to the car the next day more than once, so it's much simpler to just have a motion controlled floodlight on the house that turns on when I pull in the driveway. It's on a timer too so it won't turn on past midnight. (if I get home after midnight, I'm probably crawling anyway, so I don't need the light)
USAF meets Robot Wars - they should build a simulator and start a competition to build an AI for dogfighting.
Or maybe they should find young children with an aptitude for remote combat, send them to special schools to grow those skills, and trick them into joining live combat without enough knowing it.
I could always see it that way. I thought it looked that way to everyone? I always wondered why when I took a photo I wouldn't see the waves in the photo.
Nice one Geordi. Stop going on about how superior your VISOR is. You're blind. We get it.
Who wants to be a pilot and put your butt on the line every day as you enter enemy territory when you can be a drone pilot half way across the world and go home to your wife and kids every night.
Besides, it's looking more and more like "fighter pilot" is a dead end job and won't be around forever. Why send one fighter when you can send 10 drones that can outmaneuver any manned plane for the less cost and no risk to pilots life.
When I buy a printed book, I own the book. I can read the book whenever and where ever I want.
.
When I buy an eBook, I do not own the book. In order to read the book, I have to hope that some DRM server somewhere will authorize the eBook reader to show me the book I want to read.
I have books on my book shelves that are over 50 years old, and I can still read them fine. Can the same be said about eBooks 50 years from now?
Depends where you buy your books, there are plenty of books on Smashwords and other independent eBook vendors that have no DRM. O'Reilly publishes their technical eBooks without DRM restrictions.
Or , you can purchase books with DRM and strip the DRM using widely available tools. It's annoying to have to go through the extra step on content that you "own", but it assures that you'll always be able to read it, and on any device you own. Of course, if you're going to do that, then it becomes almost as convenient to just download a free copy online -- I don't know why publishers insist on making their content less convenient than the pirated alternative.
sounds neat, but I wonder if its gonna last... corporations will finnd a way to get rid of them, or the system will itself sink in a swamp of administration
I think it will only take one well publicized case of a psychopath using the service to find his victims (either as a provider or user of the service), and it'll die a quick death. The existing corporations will find a way to make sure it stays in the news for as long as possible.
People want to pay 10 bucks a month for Facebook? Funny, I'm trying to get off it...
If he had said $10 per year, that might be a little more reasonable, but I think the people that use and love Facebook so much that they'd consider paying $120/year for the service are probably not the same people that have $120 to spare.
"Seeing that it was impossible to check Google's claims in depth, the ICO decided to just take Google's word it had done what it claimed."
Well, yeh. It only take a memory stick full of WIFI data to be stuck in the back of a draw, or in someone's pocket. What's the ICO gonna do? Strip search all employees?
Googles word for it, is the best they can do.
Yeah, I really don't understand what other choice they had. Even if they did a site visit and someone pointed to a hard drive locked in a safe and said "Here's the data, locked up securely, Sergey is the only one with the key to the safe and he wears it around his neck", what is the ICO supposed to do? Audit every single storage device Google owns to see if there's another copy of the data somewhere?
It's not even clear what they mean by "quarantined cages", are they talking about physical cages, or some logical storage segment with additional access controls?
From the summary it sounded like this would randomly choose which passengers get picked for extra screening. That makes sense and I can see why this would be helpful in ensuring that random screenings really are random.
However, the in the TSA's proposal, it sounds more like they want a device that chooses which line you go to for the normal screening. So rather than passengers (or a TSA agent) automatically balancing themselves across the lines, if several neophyte fliers end up in one line and cause a backlog, the system will continue to randomly assign people to that line even though the other checkpoints may be underutilized. Having TSA manually reroute people to one of the other lines would seem to negate any possible advantage this system would have since any terrorist that wants to game it would just have to enlist a few confederates to slow down the other lines. So this device will only serve to make checkpoints even more annoying than they are now "What do you mean I have to go to that line? There are 10 people waiting, but checkpoint three has only a single person in line!?".
What is the reasoning behind this? If it's to keep a terrorist from choosing the line that his friend works in so he can sneak his dangerous device past the x-ray, then the system is already broken since he'd have to compromise several agents to ensure that his friends are the only ones that can see the x-ray screen and if he's already compromised 2 or 3 TSA agents that are able to get themselves assigned to work at the same checkpoint, then surely those compromised TSA agents could figure out how to sneak the contraband past security and hand it to the terrorist on the other side.
Take a class in earth sciences and understand how aquifers and contaminants work. than come back and revise this post so that you don't sound like an idiot.
Why would I take a class in earth sciences when I already took a class in Philosophy and I learned how to spot an Ad Hominen attack?
Feel free to point out the flaws in my argument, but don't deflect away from the issue by saying "Unless you're a recognized scientist in the field, nothing you say has any validity. Oh, and you're an idiot."
It can take years, decades, or even centuries for water to filter down into a deep aquifer, yet they've decided that after one year that there's no contamination from deep wells?
Sounds more like a study performed by the Fracking industry than real scientists.
> Of course you won't have to pay for it. But your vehicle registration will increase to $500/yr. Just a coincidence.
I believe this was in California. It's already $500/yr.
You're confusing registration fees with property (car) tax, which is based on the value of the vehicle at the time of registration. The last registration for my 10 year old car was "only" $136. Still expensive, compared to many other states, but if you can't afford $500/year for registration, buy a cheaper car. Registration for a brand new $22000 car is $254, even a $50,000 car would cost $436 in registration fees.
Because that has nothing to do with signals intelligence.
NSA isn't "tracking terrorists"; it's doing foreign SIGINT against foreign intelligence targets, some of whom may be described as "terrorists". To take your hypothetical, if NSA tips another agency that it is tracking a terrorist currently within the United States, and OTHER information is developed on, say, the license place of the rental the person is driving, why SHOULDN'T data that has been lawfully* collected by any number of agencies be brought to bear on that problem?
You can sanitize it all you want be applying different labels to it, yet it's still the NSA that's collecting the phone call data, and they are the ones analyzing and searching that data, and they alone are deciding what they can and can't search.
If we want something to not be done by government, it needs to be prohibited from doing so by law. Vague platitudes about surveillance states aren't going to cut it. Here is where some say, "But, but, but, it's unconstitutional!" No. It isn't, if a legal determination has already been successfully made by the government -- whether or not it has been challenged in court -- until a court of competent jurisdiction says it is
But it hasn't been adequately tested in court (despite several attempts) because secret data collection is secret and any attempt to question it in a court with public accountability is soon shut down under the guise of "national security". Just because it's been authorized by a secret government court that's accountable to no one other than the government doesn't make it legal or constitutional.
I don't drive a new(ish) car you insensitive bastard. Is that the law now? I mean I can only assume that's why they crushed so many of them via "Cash for Clunkers" a few years back.
There's nothing wrong with driving an older car as long as it's not emitting unusually high amounts of pollutants, my 10 year old car still passes the smog check (and my last car was 10 years old before I got rid of it and it too passed the smog check).
Cars can fail smog checks for lots of reasons, my favorite was when it failed due to a light on my dashboard being burnt out (ie. nothing to do with emissions). Good times.
Which light was it? If it was your check engine light, it is related to pollution controls since it, for example, will warn you about an oxygen sensor failure, which can lead to the engine running the wrong mixture and emitting more pollutants, or possibly poisoning your catalytic converter.
In California, most of the renewal "fee" is a tax, so that's why you pay every year, because the government is hungry and needs to be fed often.
Please let us not forget the $70 bi-yearly smog inspections (which become yearly if you happen to fail one). God I hate this state.
If you're paying $70 for a smog check, you ought to shop around, my last smog cost $30 including the $8 the state charges for the certificate of compliance (though I may have gotten a discount by owning an AWD car so they couldn't do the full test on the rollers since they only had 2 wheel rollers). I don't mind the smog check if it keeps dirty cars off the road, my 10 year old car has always passed its smog checks.
And you would trust the encryption implementation to protect your data?
If I'm going to use the device at all, I have to have some level of trust that it's doing what they say it does. Whether they put in a checkbox that says "don't back up my credentials" or let me set a password so only I can decrypt the backups, if I don't trust the manufacturer that the software does what is says, I shouldn't be using the device at all if I'm worried about my privacy or security of my data.
Even if I load my own cyanogenmod operating system that I have personally vetted, if I don't trust the manufacturer, then I don't know if the manufacturer stuck some hidden data stealing "feature" in the firmware that I don't have access to.
I turned off Backup on Android after discovering this. They're going to have to store them in the clear (or I guess reversible), so that the "backup" is reversible - i.e. you recover your backup or add a new phone to your account and it "just works" with your wifi.
However, there's no in-between. I can't choose to backup certain things but exclude very sensitive things, like my wifi password and other credentials. Given what we know about government snooping and the constant notices of breached databases these days, I just don't want to use the backup feature at all, and anyone who does is taking a bit of a gamble IMO.
Can't we have a sub-option to "also include credentials", at the very least?
Well, they could offer the option of letting the user set a backup password that is known only to the user (warning the user that if they lose the password, they lose their backups).
Most home users probably won't use it, but those that care about security (like every corporation that uses Android devices) probably will.
digital billboards that use prisms to target personal adds to each car. You were web searching for a new pair of shoes last night, so on your commute to work, you keep seeing Nike, Zappos, and ADIDAS everywhere. It'll happen. Just give it time.
They already have digital billboards that can detect what radio station you're listening to and target ads based on the demographics of that station:
It's probably only a matter of time (or perhaps it's already here) before they snoop cell phone signals to figure out who you are so they can target the ad.
Of course you won't have to pay for it. But your vehicle registration will increase to $500/yr. Just a coincidence.
I've always been !amused by the fact that I need to 'renew' a registration when no information has changed. Selling a car, buying a car, moving a car, all require me to update my registration, but as long as the VIN/Title and the person it is associated with aren't changing, the registration should persist.
In California, most of the renewal "fee" is a tax, so that's why you pay every year, because the government is hungry and needs to be fed often.
I think the reasoning behind the sticker is to prevent a license plate from being valid forever if it's stolen (or you stop paying registration). Without automatic registration lookups, you could easily go for years without anyone noticing that you're driving around on expired plates.
While I'm not wild about being tracked, I simply don't feel that I have an assumption of privacy while driving around on a public road.
There's a big difference between privacy and tracking.
If the police want to sit outside of a known brothel and record license numbers of all of the cars that visit there, well it's a public place and if they want to sit there and write down license numbers, that's fine. My wife could do the same thing, so I shouldn't park there if I don't want anyone to know.
But if they are doing detailed enough tracking to record all of the cars that went to a known Tea Party rally (or whatever political or social group has been deemed the enemy of the parties in power), then they can look for clusters of those same cars attending smaller (and 'secret') political strategy meetings and in turn track all of the cars at those meetings and find the intersections to map out the entire membership of the group (as opposed to just those that went to the rally). That's much more invasive monitoring and it's something that the police wouldn't otherwise be able to do without ubiquitous license plate monitoring unless they devoted so much manpower to it to make it virtually impossible do to on a routine basis -- electronic monitoring removes much of the friction that prevents overbearing monitoring by the government.
And worse, the data never goes away, so if you attended an event 10 years ago that's now been deemed politically unpopular, your attendance of the event can be used against you.
I wonder how difficult it would be to *ahem*....de-activate this tech on the plate?
I mean, maybe the power/battery accidently gets disconnected? Maybe a rock or hammer accidentally smashes some critical part of the plate system? What if the plate accidentally passed in front of some random, activated HERF gun...?
I think this plate has an LCD screen that displays your license plate number while you're driving, and public service announcements (and ads of course!) while you're parked.
If you disable it, it will be immediately obvious.
But my question is, do I have to buy another expensive plate when a rock (or vandal) cracks the screen, or will the state pay for it since they are the ones that decided that the electronic plates would 'save money'? They are claiming that the new plates will save money because renewals will be automatically sent to the plate rather than needing someone to mail out a sticker, but I have a hard time believing that this electronic device is cheaper than a metal license plate that can last decades with the only maintenance being putting on a new sticker every year.
1. NSA's mission, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, is FOREIGN signals intelligence. I know you think they're doing a lot of other things, but they're not. They would never get involved in anything like this. (I realize you may have been making the comment tongue-in-cheek.) If ANY federal agency would be involved, it would be the FBI -- and they are, in fact, because they're the ones who keep the national databases that many state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies use.
But isn't the NSA sucking up data on *every* phone call (whether its an overseas call or purely domestic) "just in case" it involves a foreigner? Why wouldn't they also want to suck up data from every police camera "just in case" it tracks a car driven by a foreigner? Even terrorists know that phones can be tracked, so if the NSA really is tracking terrorists why wouldn't they want to be able to track them by license plate even if they leave the phone at home?
stfu. PV is a hippie pipe dream. and taking money from person A to buy votes from person B is bullshit. ehhhh... energy companies or so evil... never mind that many municipalities own their own power generation infrastructure.
please show us a PV cell factory that itself runs entirely off the grid.
Would you could that a coal plant is not really a coal plant because the mining equipment, trucks, and trains that get the coal to the plant run on dieself, and the construction of boilers, turbines, and other components of the plant could have been fueled by nuclear power?
What matters is how much energy went into production and installation of the PV cells versus how much solar power it produces over its lifetime.
EPCOT stands for "Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a town, not a theme park. Funny how these things go.
If Walt hadn't died, that may have happened. He needed the money from the Magic Kingdom to finance his EPCOT plans, and he died before the MK even opened. After his death, the Walt Disney Company decided that they didn't want to be in the business of building cities. Celebration, FL has some elements of Walt Disney's EPCOT ideas.
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What do you need a floodlight for?
IMHO there is way too much lighting - residential areas just plain don't need outdoor lighting at all; what's wrong with just carrying a torch?
Because I don't have a flashlight (aka torch) every time I want one. When I park the car, I just want to walk to the door without dripping over the stone lined sidewalk, and I want to see where the keyhole is in the door. And it's not just for me, I want guests (and pizza delivery guys) to be able to walk to the door without tripping.
While keeping a flashlight in the car might take care of that problem for me, I'm probably going to forget to take it back out to the car the next day more than once, so it's much simpler to just have a motion controlled floodlight on the house that turns on when I pull in the driveway. It's on a timer too so it won't turn on past midnight. (if I get home after midnight, I'm probably crawling anyway, so I don't need the light)
USAF meets Robot Wars - they should build a simulator and start a competition to build an AI for dogfighting.
Or maybe they should find young children with an aptitude for remote combat, send them to special schools to grow those skills, and trick them into joining live combat without enough knowing it.
Hey, someone should write a book about that.
I could always see it that way. I thought it looked that way to everyone? I always wondered why when I took a photo I wouldn't see the waves in the photo.
Nice one Geordi. Stop going on about how superior your VISOR is. You're blind. We get it.
Who wants to be a pilot and put your butt on the line every day as you enter enemy territory when you can be a drone pilot half way across the world and go home to your wife and kids every night.
Besides, it's looking more and more like "fighter pilot" is a dead end job and won't be around forever. Why send one fighter when you can send 10 drones that can outmaneuver any manned plane for the less cost and no risk to pilots life.
When I buy a printed book, I own the book. I can read the book whenever and where ever I want.
.
When I buy an eBook, I do not own the book. In order to read the book, I have to hope that some DRM server somewhere will authorize the eBook reader to show me the book I want to read.
I have books on my book shelves that are over 50 years old, and I can still read them fine. Can the same be said about eBooks 50 years from now?
Depends where you buy your books, there are plenty of books on Smashwords and other independent eBook vendors that have no DRM. O'Reilly publishes their technical eBooks without DRM restrictions.
Or , you can purchase books with DRM and strip the DRM using widely available tools. It's annoying to have to go through the extra step on content that you "own", but it assures that you'll always be able to read it, and on any device you own. Of course, if you're going to do that, then it becomes almost as convenient to just download a free copy online -- I don't know why publishers insist on making their content less convenient than the pirated alternative.
sounds neat, but I wonder if its gonna last...
corporations will finnd a way to get rid of them, or the system will itself sink in a swamp of administration
I think it will only take one well publicized case of a psychopath using the service to find his victims (either as a provider or user of the service), and it'll die a quick death. The existing corporations will find a way to make sure it stays in the news for as long as possible.
People want to pay 10 bucks a month for Facebook? Funny, I'm trying to get off it...
If he had said $10 per year, that might be a little more reasonable, but I think the people that use and love Facebook so much that they'd consider paying $120/year for the service are probably not the same people that have $120 to spare.
"Seeing that it was impossible to check Google's claims in depth, the ICO decided to just take Google's word it had done what it claimed."
Well, yeh. It only take a memory stick full of WIFI data to be stuck in the back of a draw, or in someone's pocket. What's the ICO gonna do? Strip search all employees?
Googles word for it, is the best they can do.
Yeah, I really don't understand what other choice they had. Even if they did a site visit and someone pointed to a hard drive locked in a safe and said "Here's the data, locked up securely, Sergey is the only one with the key to the safe and he wears it around his neck", what is the ICO supposed to do? Audit every single storage device Google owns to see if there's another copy of the data somewhere?
It's not even clear what they mean by "quarantined cages", are they talking about physical cages, or some logical storage segment with additional access controls?
From the summary it sounded like this would randomly choose which passengers get picked for extra screening. That makes sense and I can see why this would be helpful in ensuring that random screenings really are random.
However, the in the TSA's proposal, it sounds more like they want a device that chooses which line you go to for the normal screening. So rather than passengers (or a TSA agent) automatically balancing themselves across the lines, if several neophyte fliers end up in one line and cause a backlog, the system will continue to randomly assign people to that line even though the other checkpoints may be underutilized. Having TSA manually reroute people to one of the other lines would seem to negate any possible advantage this system would have since any terrorist that wants to game it would just have to enlist a few confederates to slow down the other lines. So this device will only serve to make checkpoints even more annoying than they are now "What do you mean I have to go to that line? There are 10 people waiting, but checkpoint three has only a single person in line!?".
What is the reasoning behind this? If it's to keep a terrorist from choosing the line that his friend works in so he can sneak his dangerous device past the x-ray, then the system is already broken since he'd have to compromise several agents to ensure that his friends are the only ones that can see the x-ray screen and if he's already compromised 2 or 3 TSA agents that are able to get themselves assigned to work at the same checkpoint, then surely those compromised TSA agents could figure out how to sneak the contraband past security and hand it to the terrorist on the other side.
Take a class in earth sciences and understand how aquifers and contaminants work. than come back and revise this post so that you don't sound like an idiot.
Why would I take a class in earth sciences when I already took a class in Philosophy and I learned how to spot an Ad Hominen attack?
Feel free to point out the flaws in my argument, but don't deflect away from the issue by saying "Unless you're a recognized scientist in the field, nothing you say has any validity. Oh, and you're an idiot."
But before you do that, you might want to have a look at this site: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling
It can take years, decades, or even centuries for water to filter down into a deep aquifer, yet they've decided that after one year that there's no contamination from deep wells?
Sounds more like a study performed by the Fracking industry than real scientists.
> Of course you won't have to pay for it. But your vehicle registration will increase to $500/yr. Just a coincidence.
I believe this was in California. It's already $500/yr.
You're confusing registration fees with property (car) tax, which is based on the value of the vehicle at the time of registration. The last registration for my 10 year old car was "only" $136. Still expensive, compared to many other states, but if you can't afford $500/year for registration, buy a cheaper car. Registration for a brand new $22000 car is $254, even a $50,000 car would cost $436 in registration fees.
Because that has nothing to do with signals intelligence.
NSA isn't "tracking terrorists"; it's doing foreign SIGINT against foreign intelligence targets, some of whom may be described as "terrorists". To take your hypothetical, if NSA tips another agency that it is tracking a terrorist currently within the United States, and OTHER information is developed on, say, the license place of the rental the person is driving, why SHOULDN'T data that has been lawfully* collected by any number of agencies be brought to bear on that problem?
You can sanitize it all you want be applying different labels to it, yet it's still the NSA that's collecting the phone call data, and they are the ones analyzing and searching that data, and they alone are deciding what they can and can't search.
If we want something to not be done by government, it needs to be prohibited from doing so by law. Vague platitudes about surveillance states aren't going to cut it. Here is where some say, "But, but, but, it's unconstitutional!" No. It isn't, if a legal determination has already been successfully made by the government -- whether or not it has been challenged in court -- until a court of competent jurisdiction says it is
But it hasn't been adequately tested in court (despite several attempts) because secret data collection is secret and any attempt to question it in a court with public accountability is soon shut down under the guise of "national security". Just because it's been authorized by a secret government court that's accountable to no one other than the government doesn't make it legal or constitutional.
I don't drive a new(ish) car you insensitive bastard.
Is that the law now? I mean I can only assume that's why they crushed so many of them via "Cash for Clunkers" a few years back.
There's nothing wrong with driving an older car as long as it's not emitting unusually high amounts of pollutants, my 10 year old car still passes the smog check (and my last car was 10 years old before I got rid of it and it too passed the smog check).
Cars can fail smog checks for lots of reasons, my favorite was when it failed due to a light on my dashboard being burnt out (ie. nothing to do with emissions). Good times.
Which light was it? If it was your check engine light, it is related to pollution controls since it, for example, will warn you about an oxygen sensor failure, which can lead to the engine running the wrong mixture and emitting more pollutants, or possibly poisoning your catalytic converter.
Please let us not forget the $70 bi-yearly smog inspections (which become yearly if you happen to fail one). God I hate this state.
If you're paying $70 for a smog check, you ought to shop around, my last smog cost $30 including the $8 the state charges for the certificate of compliance (though I may have gotten a discount by owning an AWD car so they couldn't do the full test on the rollers since they only had 2 wheel rollers). I don't mind the smog check if it keeps dirty cars off the road, my 10 year old car has always passed its smog checks.
And you would trust the encryption implementation to protect your data?
If I'm going to use the device at all, I have to have some level of trust that it's doing what they say it does. Whether they put in a checkbox that says "don't back up my credentials" or let me set a password so only I can decrypt the backups, if I don't trust the manufacturer that the software does what is says, I shouldn't be using the device at all if I'm worried about my privacy or security of my data.
Even if I load my own cyanogenmod operating system that I have personally vetted, if I don't trust the manufacturer, then I don't know if the manufacturer stuck some hidden data stealing "feature" in the firmware that I don't have access to.
I turned off Backup on Android after discovering this. They're going to have to store them in the clear (or I guess reversible), so that the "backup" is reversible - i.e. you recover your backup or add a new phone to your account and it "just works" with your wifi.
However, there's no in-between. I can't choose to backup certain things but exclude very sensitive things, like my wifi password and other credentials. Given what we know about government snooping and the constant notices of breached databases these days, I just don't want to use the backup feature at all, and anyone who does is taking a bit of a gamble IMO.
Can't we have a sub-option to "also include credentials", at the very least?
Well, they could offer the option of letting the user set a backup password that is known only to the user (warning the user that if they lose the password, they lose their backups).
Most home users probably won't use it, but those that care about security (like every corporation that uses Android devices) probably will.
digital billboards that use prisms to target personal adds to each car. You were web searching for a new pair of shoes last night, so on your commute to work, you keep seeing Nike, Zappos, and ADIDAS everywhere. It'll happen. Just give it time.
They already have digital billboards that can detect what radio station you're listening to and target ads based on the demographics of that station:
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/science-fiction-news.asp?newsnum=981
It's probably only a matter of time (or perhaps it's already here) before they snoop cell phone signals to figure out who you are so they can target the ad.
Of course you won't have to pay for it. But your vehicle registration will increase to $500/yr. Just a coincidence.
I've always been !amused by the fact that I need to 'renew' a registration when no information has changed. Selling a car, buying a car, moving a car, all require me to update my registration, but as long as the VIN/Title and the person it is associated with aren't changing, the registration should persist.
In California, most of the renewal "fee" is a tax, so that's why you pay every year, because the government is hungry and needs to be fed often.
I think the reasoning behind the sticker is to prevent a license plate from being valid forever if it's stolen (or you stop paying registration). Without automatic registration lookups, you could easily go for years without anyone noticing that you're driving around on expired plates.
While I'm not wild about being tracked, I simply don't feel that I have an assumption of privacy while driving around on a public road.
There's a big difference between privacy and tracking.
If the police want to sit outside of a known brothel and record license numbers of all of the cars that visit there, well it's a public place and if they want to sit there and write down license numbers, that's fine. My wife could do the same thing, so I shouldn't park there if I don't want anyone to know.
But if they are doing detailed enough tracking to record all of the cars that went to a known Tea Party rally (or whatever political or social group has been deemed the enemy of the parties in power), then they can look for clusters of those same cars attending smaller (and 'secret') political strategy meetings and in turn track all of the cars at those meetings and find the intersections to map out the entire membership of the group (as opposed to just those that went to the rally). That's much more invasive monitoring and it's something that the police wouldn't otherwise be able to do without ubiquitous license plate monitoring unless they devoted so much manpower to it to make it virtually impossible do to on a routine basis -- electronic monitoring removes much of the friction that prevents overbearing monitoring by the government.
And worse, the data never goes away, so if you attended an event 10 years ago that's now been deemed politically unpopular, your attendance of the event can be used against you.
I wonder how difficult it would be to *ahem*....de-activate this tech on the plate?
I mean, maybe the power/battery accidently gets disconnected? Maybe a rock or hammer accidentally smashes some critical part of the plate system? What if the plate accidentally passed in front of some random, activated HERF gun...?
I think this plate has an LCD screen that displays your license plate number while you're driving, and public service announcements (and ads of course!) while you're parked.
If you disable it, it will be immediately obvious.
But my question is, do I have to buy another expensive plate when a rock (or vandal) cracks the screen, or will the state pay for it since they are the ones that decided that the electronic plates would 'save money'? They are claiming that the new plates will save money because renewals will be automatically sent to the plate rather than needing someone to mail out a sticker, but I have a hard time believing that this electronic device is cheaper than a metal license plate that can last decades with the only maintenance being putting on a new sticker every year.
1. NSA's mission, to the exclusion of nearly everything else, is FOREIGN signals intelligence. I know you think they're doing a lot of other things, but they're not. They would never get involved in anything like this. (I realize you may have been making the comment tongue-in-cheek.) If ANY federal agency would be involved, it would be the FBI -- and they are, in fact, because they're the ones who keep the national databases that many state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies use.
But isn't the NSA sucking up data on *every* phone call (whether its an overseas call or purely domestic) "just in case" it involves a foreigner? Why wouldn't they also want to suck up data from every police camera "just in case" it tracks a car driven by a foreigner? Even terrorists know that phones can be tracked, so if the NSA really is tracking terrorists why wouldn't they want to be able to track them by license plate even if they leave the phone at home?
stfu.
PV is a hippie pipe dream.
and taking money from person A to buy votes from person B is bullshit.
ehhhh... energy companies or so evil... never mind that many municipalities own their own power generation infrastructure.
please show us a PV cell factory that itself runs entirely off the grid.
Would you could that a coal plant is not really a coal plant because the mining equipment, trucks, and trains that get the coal to the plant run on dieself, and the construction of boilers, turbines, and other components of the plant could have been fueled by nuclear power?
What matters is how much energy went into production and installation of the PV cells versus how much solar power it produces over its lifetime.
I do not use Network Solutions DNS service. I use Google's, which is almost always up.
If you're ok with "almost" always up, Network solutions is almost always up too.
EPCOT stands for "Experimental Planned Community of Tomorrow." It was supposed to be a town, not a theme park. Funny how these things go.
If Walt hadn't died, that may have happened. He needed the money from the Magic Kingdom to finance his EPCOT plans, and he died before the MK even opened. After his death, the Walt Disney Company decided that they didn't want to be in the business of building cities. Celebration, FL has some elements of Walt Disney's EPCOT ideas.