My house has aluminum siding, and I assure you, it works. I get four bars outside the house, but had to purchase a repeater to get signal inside, or all of my cell phone use at home would have to be while standing next to a window that faces a cell tower.
Speed cameras are required to be highly visible in the UK which is why they have big fluorescent panels on the back.
For now.
With this concept in place, ANY camera whose location is known in a database somewhere and which is capable of accurate timestamps could be used as a "speed camera". The existing network of surveillance cameras could be used to capture license plates, probably largely as-is.
Plus, even if you made these cameras visible, there would be no specific reason to slow down for them. They aren't measuring your speed. They are measuring your location at a point in time. Your average speed between being seen by cameras is what counts, not the speed you adjust to when you see the big fluorescent panel.
But the core issue is that these are not, strictly speaking, "speed cameras". They are surveillance cameras. Determining average speed between two captured points is just the justification for... err, I mean the tip of the iceberg in terms of their violations of citizen privac... sorry again, I mean applications for useful data collection.
Wouldn't matter. If the camera was in a fixed or semi-fixed location, the last known GPS location would be pretty good.
Plus, if your license plate started getting associated with consistent "GPS SIGNAL LOST" errors, you could potentially be in for a lot more than a speeding ticket.
The cameras could also potentially determine their own location, saving a bit on installation costs.
Why install them in fixed locations? Put them on city busses and police cars. Capture license plate numbers randomly and geotag each one.
Did you enjoy your really fast drive between Cardiff and London? The police can now show that your car was in Cardiff at 8:15AM (photographed from a police car) and in London at 10:00AM (photographed from a double-decker bus). Both images are GPS-timestamped and geotagged. Somewhere, sometime, you did some serious speeding to manage that.
Of course, this isn't even as much about speeding at that point. It's about knowing where the majority of cars are at any given point. I suspect speeding is more of an excuse to buy these inexpensive mobile geotagging cameras and get them installed everywhere.
take the average speed and base your ticket on that?
Yes, that would be the ideal for a technology like this. If it is impossible for you to have followed the speed limit getting between two points, you calculate out the minimum average violation of the speed limit that would be theoretically possible and ticket based on that minimum. The police should always err on the side of what they can actually prove, which means they'll be undercharging people for their actual speed but will catch a lot of speeders they are missing today.
what if you go twice the speed limit for a while, and then stop for a while to throw off the average?
You certainly could, and that would reduce or eliminate your ticket. But what would be the point? You wouldn't get to your destination any faster.
Plus, try to predict where these cameras are. Something like this will make these cameras cheap enough that they can be everywhere, and hard to spot. You might go twice the speed limit for a while and get photographed twice during that process, so the two cameras you knew about don't matter.
Yes. If I recall the case correctly, his defense was that he could not have committed the murders because he was so far away, but the prosecution subpoenaed his FastPass logs and discovered that he not only drove up the highway on the day of the murder, but that the timing of his FastPass use coincided with the time of the murder.
Keep in mind, though, that he was not convicted based on this evidence. He was convicted based on a bunch of other evidence. His primary defense was disproved using this evidence.
There was also some talk a while back about using FastPass logs to issue speeding tickets. If you got from Exit 12 to Exit 77 in under one hour, you covered 65 miles in under an hour. If the speed limit is 65MPH, at some point you were speeding, or you've invented wormhole navigation or teleportation technology. You can either demonstrate your new technology or pay the fine for speeding. I don't know if that's ever gone anywhere.
Unless they have speed cameras on every single road
Bingo!
Speed cameras today are expensive, easy to see, and easy to defeat. With a system like this, the cameras need a lot less technology (no actual speed detection), they can be a lot smaller (GPS geotagging exists in POCKET cameras today), and cost a lot less.
Now the residents of the township of East Noob can deal with their speeding problem - the asshole who whooshes through town at 7AM at highway speeds.
They call their local constabulary and ask that a speed camera be attached to the mailbox in front of Toby's house, and another be attached to the mailbox at Jeb's house 1 mile down the street. Both cameras are so small as to be undetectable, and do not emit RADAR or Laser pulses. Assume the speed limit in town is 20MPH for the sake of argument, so it is physically impossible for someone to obey the speed limit AND get between the two houses in less than 3 minutes.
If your car is photographed in front of Toby's house at 07:15:15 and then in front of Jeb's house at 07:16:15, you've averaged 60MPH, and this can easily be proven. If you've managed to do that AND taken side roads, you were driving even faster than that, but it's sufficient to prove that you exceeded the speed limit.
The cameras can be moved anywhere, any time (because the images are all geotagged, so you could even have them mounted on every police car in Britain taking random samples of license plate numbers). Given tools like that, you could easily discover that a particular car was spotted in Cardiff, then again in London 2 hours later. It's easy to demonstrate that even using the most efficient route between the two cities that trip was physically impossible while following speed limits.
There are a lot of existing cameras that could be upgraded, and you could add a lot of cameras cheaply to the system to add information. Strap one to the front of every City bus, police car, put one at random traffic lights, anywhere you have power. The cameras could load their data over WiFi or some similar means (remote cameras could run off solar panels and get a visit every few days from a car that just pulls the images over WiFi as it drives by, and uploads them to the database when it gets back in range of the City).
The position and distance between the two camera checkpoints on Earth is known.
Except for portable speed cameras, which I suspect is what this technology is all about. Actually, upon further reflection, this is probably more about eliminating the speed detection technology, and replacing it with simple "point-a-to-point-b" measuring.
A GPSr chip is cheap, easy to use, and makes a camera aware of its own location. Hell, we've got consumer pocket cameras in the $300 range that can geotag images using a built-in GPS now. And I think that's what they are looking at here - eliminating the speed measurement portion and just making them cameras (and therefore a lot cheaper). It'll save them a lot of money, and allow them to put up much smaller and more subtle cameras. Plus, there's nothing for the driver to detect (RADAR, etc). It's a passive optical camera.
Have a camera take pictures of all of the cars driving by a specific section of highway, each picture geotagged with where and when it was taken (times and locations determined via GPS connection). Put another camera 10 miles down the same highway with the same technology. If you photograph a car (regardless of speed it was going at the time it was photographed) at the first point, then photograph the same car 5 minutes later 10 miles down the road, you know that car has been averaging 120MPH to get from point "a" to point "b".
The interesting part about this is that there's no real way around it. With conventional speed cameras, technologies like "trapster" can alert you to speed traps (or a RADAR detector can figure out if speed-measuring technology is in use) and you can slam on the brakes long enough to go by the trap at legal speed, then roar back up to speed as soon as the danger has passed. With average-speed measuring, if you get to your destination faster than the laws of physics would have allowed you to while maintaining a legal speed, the system knows you've been speeding, and if they can demonstrate you moved between the two locations at impossible speed, there's no defense involving bad speed detection equipment, etc. You covered 10 miles in 5 minutes. That can be easily demonstrated, easily proven, and you're just going to have to cough up the dough.
It's not totally unbeatable, it's just impractical to defeat it. I mean, technically (assuming a 60MPH speed limit) you COULD drive down the highway at 120MPH for an hour like a crazed weasel on crack, then park your car by the side of the road just before the speed camera for an hour to kill the time and get your average speed to 60, but then what's the point? It's still taken you two hours to reach your destination. You might as well just drive at 60MPH for the two hours and get there with more fuel in the tank.
Drat. And here I was hoping that MythBusters really would try to debunk that myth, and in typical fashion conclude the episode by blowing the satellite out of the sky.
Hark! Is this an intelligent post I see before me? I can admire you, yet I have mod points not. Would a +5 Insightful by any other name smell so sweet?
Alas, poor, mod points! I knew them well, yet I have frittered them away on frivolous frippery, ere knowing that yon post awaited!
Wow. I've bashed my head up against use tax nexus issues before, but... wow. I had no idea some of the rules surrounding the holidays were nearly as complex as the base rules, and they only last a few days.
PS: I'm basing that on following New Mexico's (as a random example) detailed regs surrounding the tax holiday. The chart is a severe oversimplification, almost to the point of uselessness.
Frankly, I'm amazed any retailer IN the state can figure that mess out. And that's the regulations pertaining to an exception that lasts two days out of the damned year.
Use tax logic is almost fractal in nature. The closer you look, the more detail there is, ad infinitum.
There are lots of examples of people doing much harder things for a much lower possibility of return in the identity theft or industrial espionage arenas.
100 old photocopiers (assuming you don't just dumpster-dive them for free) might set you back $30,000. They'll take you 2-3 weeks to sift through, but there's a really good chance that one of them would contain a single document that could net you hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more), or several hundred documents worth a few hundred each.
It's not like this is skillful hacking. Anyone with enough skill to operate a screwdriver and install software on a Windows machine could manage this. Dumpster-dive a couple of old PC's, scrounge up a few old photocopiers now and then, and you could have a spare-time career that could net you some serious jail time, err, money.
It's risky, but for those who don't have scruples.. with great risk comes the potential for great rewards.
Personally, I think finding the drive/memory and smashing the shit out of it would be cheaper and more effective. Shame that the photocopier can't be reused, but spending $500 to wipe a photocopier that you can sell for $300 isn't very efficient either. Recycle the parts, and give $300 to a charity so they can buy a used photocopier from someone else.
Your statement is an example of "security through obscurity" or "hiding in plain sight". That model of security was already disproved long ago. And, by "long ago", I'm referring to thousands of years, not weeks. It not only predates the invention of the photocopier, it predates the invention of paper. It probably even predates the concept of walking upright.
Hiding important things in an ocean of unimportant things means that someone can still get at the important things if they try hard enough, or are aware enough to look. The chances of discovery are directly proportional to the amount of knowledge the attacker has about how the data is hidden and roughly inversely proportional to the amount of "chaff" data you put out there to hide the "wheat".
And with the "try hard enough" being "extract the contents of the drive and show me thumbnails of everything on it", or even "extract the contents and OCR the whole lot and search for words like CONFIDENTIAL, SSN, and PAY TO THE ORDER OF" (all of which would be a couple of minutes' work for a 12-year-old child these days), you're not going to be able to obscure things all that well.
What is data worth these days? If you could buy, say, 10 of these $300 printers, you're out $3,000. If each one yields 100 pages for a total yield of 1000 pages, you're paying $3 a page. 99% of the images are likely going to be company picnic memos. Until you get the 10 pages that contain the company payroll data, or something someone will pay good money for. And if it doesn't work out, you rebuild the photocopier and resell it, or even rent it to a company you know has lots of juicy data going through and make sure the sale includes a routine maintenance agreement so you can swap drives out every few weeks.
Of course, if you know where your used photocopiers are coming from, they could yield a much higher return. Did your local hospital just make a big deal of donating photocopiers to a local charity? Go in to the charity with a nicer model of photocopier and offer to swap them out. With a little creative thinking, you could get photocopiers that are more likely to have good salable information in them.
This isn't the biggest security hole ever, it's not even the biggest security hole this month, but it is pretty scary.
No. The "use tax" is a tax levied on your use or consumption of a product you purchased as a resident of your state. It has nothing to do with where you purchased the item.
If you use it in your state and are a resident of the state, you must pay use tax. If you purchase it from a seller within your state, they will collect the use tax for you (and call it "sales tax") and help you meet your tax obligation by handling the paperwork for you.
If you purchase it from a seller not subject to your state's laws, then they are not obligated to collect it on your behalf. That does not mean you don't owe that tax. It only means the seller is not obligated to keep track of it for you, and it's now your job.
The interstate nature of the commerce is completely irrelevant to the nature of the tax. You have to pay a use tax on everything you use in your state as a resident of your state, no matter where you bought it from. You could import it from Alpha Centauri and you'd still have to pay use tax on it because you used it. Your vendor on Alpha Centauri III doesn't know or care that your state has a use tax, that's your responsibility to pay.
You'd pay it if you did business within the state, but the only difference is that the company within the state is under the jurisdiction of your state and therefore must collect it for you and handle all the paperwork for you.
When you do business outside the state, the vendor you are working with is not subject to tax. But you still are, because the tax has nothing to do with where you bought the item, it has to do with where you used it.
Here's an example that might make it clearer:
I lived in New Hampshire (no sales tax) many moons ago. I purchased a new automobile there and did not pay sales tax on that automobile. I moved to Kentucky (sales tax) a few years later. When I went to register my car in Kentucky, I owed them sales tax on the present Kelly Blue Book value of my car because I had not paid a sales tax on it previously and I was using the car in Kentucky. As a resident of Kentucky, I was using a product in Kentucky, and therefore I had to pay use taxes in Kentucky on that car.
When I moved back to Maine about 4 years ago, I had to prove that I had paid sales taxes that were equal to or higher than the Maine tax rate. Had the Kentucky rate been lower, I would have owed Maine the difference between Kentucky's sales tax rate and Maine's for the present Kelly Blue Book value of my car.
Maine and Kentucky have a "reciprocal agreement" on use tax, so Maine actually filed paperwork to Kentucky to have Kentucky pay them the use taxes on my behalf. Had I moved back to New Hampshire, I could have theoretically filed to have that portion of the use tax I did not "use" refunded to me from Kentucky.
So (numbers made up for clarity) my car was worth, say, $20,000 when I bought it. When I moved to Kentucky, they had a 5% tax rate and the car was worth $15,000 so I owed them $750 in use taxes. When I moved to Maine, the car was worth $10,000 and Maine has the same tax rate as Kentucky for cars so Kentucky paid Maine $500. Assuming my car is worth $5,000 now, I could move to New Hampshire and probably file to have Maine refund my $250 in "unused use taxes" if I wanted to. If I moved to a state with a 10% tax rate on cars the new state would file for $250 from Maine, and I'd have to cough up an additional $250 so the state would collect $500 for their 10% of the $5,000 car I'm now using in their state as a state resident.
No interstate commerce laws were broken, though many brain cells were horribly inconvenienced in the process of my grasping the concept.
This is exactly what a use tax is for. If you use it in a state and you live in that state, you must pay use tax on taxable items you use in that state. The confusion arises because most states have had it collected by the sellers for so long that people have largely forgotten (or willfully ignore) that they have to pay a use tax on e
I suspect Gizmodo will end up with some form of penalty, or at least if the law applies as it should they will.
The phone was taken without authorization and re-sold. That means that whomever at Gizmodo negotiated that deal was knowingly dealing in stolen property. I can't think of any circumstances where a phone left at a bar while the owner went to take a pee would be considered "abandoned property".
If no penalty is forthcoming, it'll probably be because Apple either orchestrated the whole thing to start with (and netted 5 grand for a prototype, plus all the free publicity they could eat), or decided the publicity was worth the loss of an easily-replaceable prototype.
I sincerely doubt he's going to be fired, or even penalized. So he lost a prototype, honestly, who cares? It got remote-wiped, which means he obviously reported it to Apple immediately like a good workerdrone. Losing a phone, even a prototype, is not a terminal offense at any company I've ever worked for. Hell, I've known people who have lost $5,000 LAPTOPS and all they get is a "tsk-tsk" and stuck with a crappy old laptop for a while until a replacement could be ordered. The hardware is almost completely insignificant, it's the data on it that counts.
My current company encourages us to report lost or stolen Blackberries or laptops immediately so they can be remote-nuked. There is no penalty for losing one or even damaging one, and there is no career implication, as long as you report it immediately. As my boss once put it, "I'd rather pay to replace 10 Blackberries and call you 'Mr. Butterfingers' than find out that one of them ended up in the hands of a competitor while unlocked because you were afraid to tell me about it."
Honestly, if anyone was considering hiring this guy and hesitated over this, they have no business making hiring decisions. Stuff gets lost, and what is important is how the employee reacts. The fact that the device had a remote-wipe code pending by the time Gizmodo got ahold of it tells me that the employee reported the loss, and therefore reacted appropriately to an honest mistake. He probably lost his place on top of the list to get the 5G prototype when it comes out, but I'm sure he'll remain gainfully employed and I sincerely doubt this will affect any future job prospects.
There were too many fast food logos in the summary picture and I was too impatient to read the rest of the article, in fact I don't think I can complete this sentenc...
... and then gets a huge bonus and possible promotion because his "mistake" (assuming it wasn't all an Apple marketing trick to start with) got Apple yet more face time in the press, and helped feed the fanboi frenzy for the newest 4G "ooohhh shiny".
Yes, try something closer to 50,000 tax rates once you factor in county/municipal/local sales taxes, differing rates based on the item sold of which categories differ by state (a bag of potato chips sold here in Maine is considered a "snack" if it's a small bag and is therefore taxable, but "groceries" if it's a large bag and is therefore nontaxable, unless it is sold in a place that depends on prepared food sales like a restaurant for more than 50% of their income at which point it's a "snack" again).
North Carolina is not asking Amazon to collect taxes. They are asking for sales information so they can go after their own citizens themselves. Still not information they are authorized to, but they are entitled to that sales tax income - it's just that the citizens of their own state should be paying it since they chose to do business with a company that doesn't collect it on their behalf.
Sales tax is an obligation of the purchaser, not the seller. It's just that, for "convenience", all states that levy a sales tax also require any sellers to collect it to save paperwork for the buyer and to make sure that most of it gets collected. Since Amazon isn't in North Carolina, they can't be required to collect sales tax, so North Carolina citizens need to be paying it themselves.
Because Amazon is not being asked to collect the taxes. The State wants the information so they can audit their own citizens and see if they've paid up. And Amazon is not going to be aware of what items are taxable, nontaxable, or taxable at different rates within a state, not to mention county, municipal, or zone taxes, tax holidays on specific items, etc etc.
So they are going to pull Cleetus's sales records, say "Hey, Cleetus, you purchased 12 CDs at $10 each at a tax rate of 5%, 4 XBOX games at a luxury tax of 7%, 13 pounds of lard which is nontaxable, 48 rolls of duct tape at $1 a roll which is taxable at 5%, and 4,200 Mars Bars totalling $2,000 at the snack tax rate of 8%. Let's look at last year's tax submissions, did you pay use tax on those items? No? Well, here's what you owe, plus a big fat penalty and interest because you didn't pay it yourself like the law says you needed to."
Having said that, North Carolina has no right to ask Amazon for that information. That would have to be a federal law, not a state law. North Carolina has no authority over Amazon.com - Amazon does not have a presence there.
Use tax is not a tax on interstate commerce. The state is not asking for any money specifically because the sale was across a border or from another state. Use tax is a tax on you as a purchaser and citizen of your state, levied by a state that has taxation authority over you, on items that you purchase for use in your state. When a seller collects it, it's called "sales tax". When you pay it yourself because you did business with a seller who does not have to collect it, it's generally called "use tax".
Sales taxes and "use taxes" (sales taxes not collected by sellers on your behalf) are really the same thing, just collected differently. They are owed by the purchaser who is subject to the laws of the state in which they live. Everything you purchase that you intend to use or consume in your home state is almost certainly subject to that tax (your state laws may differ, but I doubt it), regardless of where you bought it. Your state is free to pass a law that anything you buy for use within the state is subject to taxation. They can also pass laws that sellers who have a presence in your state (and are therefore subject to your state's laws) have to collect that tax on your behalf and remit it to the state. At that point, it is called "Sales Tax" and you have no paperwork to file. The money is added to your purchase and the seller remits it to the state, and everything is all legal.
If the seller you purchase your goods from does not collect that tax, then it's highly likely that your state laws still say that you have to pay it. You just don't have someone conveniently collecting it for you and forwarding it to the state. You have to pay it yourself. This is generally referred to as "use tax", though states may have their own term for it.
In my home state (Maine) we have a tickybox on our state income tax form that allows us to pay a small percentage of our income (something like 0.6% or something - it's a small amount) that is designed to replace any small purchases we make out of state. It's basically a "check this box, pay your $x, and you are absolved of any small items you've purchased and not paid sales tax on". The alternatives to that are to keep all of your out-of-state purchase receipts and remit sales tax on all of those purchases for which you did not pay sales tax (there's a form for that), or to break the law and skirt paying the sales tax you legally owe the state (there's a penalty for that, even though it's what most people actually do and chances are they'll never actually get caught at it).
Your state cannot impose laws on sellers in other states to force them to collect the taxes on your behalf. That does not absolve you, as a citizen of your state, of the obligation to pay taxes on things you purchase for use within your state under the tax code of your state. It just makes it less convenient for you to do so, and more likely that you will break the law by not paying that tax.
There may be some states that are OK with their citizens skirting their sales/use tax laws and buying things outside the state and never paying taxes on them. I don't personally know of any, but I've only lived in 4 states and one of them (New Hampshire) did not have Sales/Use Tax. The other three had very strict laws about paying taxes on everything you bought, no matter where you bought it. The fact that most people were ignorant of those laws (willfully or otherwise) does not invalidate the laws.
North Carolina (and, by the way, Oregon and a few other states) is looking for information on purchasers within their own states so they can start going after their own citizens for nonpayment of their taxes. That is invalid, to my knowledge (REMINDER: IANAL), since Oregon cannot pass a law stating that companies from other states have to disclose anything to them. Oregon would have to have the Federal government pass such a law, at which point Amazon would have to comply.
I read it the same way, with the same "IANAL" disclaimer.
When I call you using my Google Voice number, my CallerID will show up on your phone with a number that I own and can be reached at. If you dial that number, you will reach me, or at least my voicemail if I don't like you (grin). No attempt has been made to fool anyone into thinking the phone call has come from anyone else. There's a difference between spoofing a CallerID (which is actually not banned by this new change), and spoofing a CallerID with the intent to defraud or mislead (which is banned).
The caller ID text does not actually identify me by name. I think it shows "Google Voice" or "Level Three" (the local number clearinghouse that routes my number). But there's no intent to defraud or mislead inherent in that. I'm not pretending to be someone named "Google Voice" or "Level Three". If it became an issue, Google could probably bypass that pretty simply by sending no CallerID Text or asking Level Three to wipe out CallerID text .
Of course, there's a very easy way around it if someone decided it applied to Google Voice numbers. Google could also declare all Google Voice numbers to be "CallerID Blocked" (private numbers) and not send the phone numbers in the CallerID field. Anyone with their own switch (800 #'s, 911, etc) would get ANI information, everyone else would get "UNKNOWN NUMBER". It would make Google Voice a whole lot less convenient, but it would neatly bypass this law.
I think this whole "this is bad for business" issue goes back to the huge yawning chasm between what people thought the US Government is trying to do (banning CID spoofing) and what they are actually trying to do (banning CID spoofing with an intent to defraud or mislead).
Maybe the problem is that, in the official published legislation, the term "with intent to defraud or mislead" shows up on the next line, and journalists just read as far as selling headlines tells them to.
There needs to be a law against writing news articles that have an intent to defraud or mislead.
(how many people will read the above sentence and think that I want to ban news reporting?):)
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My house has aluminum siding, and I assure you, it works. I get four bars outside the house, but had to purchase a repeater to get signal inside, or all of my cell phone use at home would have to be while standing next to a window that faces a cell tower.
"How do you know it was Mohammad?"
"He turned me into a newt."
"A NEWT?
"I got better."
Speed cameras are required to be highly visible in the UK which is why they have big fluorescent panels on the back.
For now.
With this concept in place, ANY camera whose location is known in a database somewhere and which is capable of accurate timestamps could be used as a "speed camera". The existing network of surveillance cameras could be used to capture license plates, probably largely as-is.
Plus, even if you made these cameras visible, there would be no specific reason to slow down for them. They aren't measuring your speed. They are measuring your location at a point in time. Your average speed between being seen by cameras is what counts, not the speed you adjust to when you see the big fluorescent panel.
But the core issue is that these are not, strictly speaking, "speed cameras". They are surveillance cameras. Determining average speed between two captured points is just the justification for... err, I mean the tip of the iceberg in terms of their violations of citizen privac... sorry again, I mean applications for useful data collection.
Wouldn't matter. If the camera was in a fixed or semi-fixed location, the last known GPS location would be pretty good.
Plus, if your license plate started getting associated with consistent "GPS SIGNAL LOST" errors, you could potentially be in for a lot more than a speeding ticket.
The cameras could also potentially determine their own location, saving a bit on installation costs.
Why install them in fixed locations? Put them on city busses and police cars. Capture license plate numbers randomly and geotag each one.
Did you enjoy your really fast drive between Cardiff and London? The police can now show that your car was in Cardiff at 8:15AM (photographed from a police car) and in London at 10:00AM (photographed from a double-decker bus). Both images are GPS-timestamped and geotagged. Somewhere, sometime, you did some serious speeding to manage that.
Of course, this isn't even as much about speeding at that point. It's about knowing where the majority of cars are at any given point. I suspect speeding is more of an excuse to buy these inexpensive mobile geotagging cameras and get them installed everywhere.
take the average speed and base your ticket on that?
Yes, that would be the ideal for a technology like this. If it is impossible for you to have followed the speed limit getting between two points, you calculate out the minimum average violation of the speed limit that would be theoretically possible and ticket based on that minimum. The police should always err on the side of what they can actually prove, which means they'll be undercharging people for their actual speed but will catch a lot of speeders they are missing today.
what if you go twice the speed limit for a while, and then stop for a while to throw off the average?
You certainly could, and that would reduce or eliminate your ticket. But what would be the point? You wouldn't get to your destination any faster.
Plus, try to predict where these cameras are. Something like this will make these cameras cheap enough that they can be everywhere, and hard to spot. You might go twice the speed limit for a while and get photographed twice during that process, so the two cameras you knew about don't matter.
Yes. If I recall the case correctly, his defense was that he could not have committed the murders because he was so far away, but the prosecution subpoenaed his FastPass logs and discovered that he not only drove up the highway on the day of the murder, but that the timing of his FastPass use coincided with the time of the murder.
Keep in mind, though, that he was not convicted based on this evidence. He was convicted based on a bunch of other evidence. His primary defense was disproved using this evidence.
There was also some talk a while back about using FastPass logs to issue speeding tickets. If you got from Exit 12 to Exit 77 in under one hour, you covered 65 miles in under an hour. If the speed limit is 65MPH, at some point you were speeding, or you've invented wormhole navigation or teleportation technology. You can either demonstrate your new technology or pay the fine for speeding. I don't know if that's ever gone anywhere.
Unless they have speed cameras on every single road
Bingo!
Speed cameras today are expensive, easy to see, and easy to defeat. With a system like this, the cameras need a lot less technology (no actual speed detection), they can be a lot smaller (GPS geotagging exists in POCKET cameras today), and cost a lot less.
Now the residents of the township of East Noob can deal with their speeding problem - the asshole who whooshes through town at 7AM at highway speeds.
They call their local constabulary and ask that a speed camera be attached to the mailbox in front of Toby's house, and another be attached to the mailbox at Jeb's house 1 mile down the street. Both cameras are so small as to be undetectable, and do not emit RADAR or Laser pulses. Assume the speed limit in town is 20MPH for the sake of argument, so it is physically impossible for someone to obey the speed limit AND get between the two houses in less than 3 minutes.
If your car is photographed in front of Toby's house at 07:15:15 and then in front of Jeb's house at 07:16:15, you've averaged 60MPH, and this can easily be proven. If you've managed to do that AND taken side roads, you were driving even faster than that, but it's sufficient to prove that you exceeded the speed limit.
The cameras can be moved anywhere, any time (because the images are all geotagged, so you could even have them mounted on every police car in Britain taking random samples of license plate numbers). Given tools like that, you could easily discover that a particular car was spotted in Cardiff, then again in London 2 hours later. It's easy to demonstrate that even using the most efficient route between the two cities that trip was physically impossible while following speed limits.
There are a lot of existing cameras that could be upgraded, and you could add a lot of cameras cheaply to the system to add information. Strap one to the front of every City bus, police car, put one at random traffic lights, anywhere you have power. The cameras could load their data over WiFi or some similar means (remote cameras could run off solar panels and get a visit every few days from a car that just pulls the images over WiFi as it drives by, and uploads them to the database when it gets back in range of the City).
The position and distance between the two camera checkpoints on Earth is known.
Except for portable speed cameras, which I suspect is what this technology is all about. Actually, upon further reflection, this is probably more about eliminating the speed detection technology, and replacing it with simple "point-a-to-point-b" measuring.
A GPSr chip is cheap, easy to use, and makes a camera aware of its own location. Hell, we've got consumer pocket cameras in the $300 range that can geotag images using a built-in GPS now. And I think that's what they are looking at here - eliminating the speed measurement portion and just making them cameras (and therefore a lot cheaper). It'll save them a lot of money, and allow them to put up much smaller and more subtle cameras. Plus, there's nothing for the driver to detect (RADAR, etc). It's a passive optical camera.
Have a camera take pictures of all of the cars driving by a specific section of highway, each picture geotagged with where and when it was taken (times and locations determined via GPS connection). Put another camera 10 miles down the same highway with the same technology. If you photograph a car (regardless of speed it was going at the time it was photographed) at the first point, then photograph the same car 5 minutes later 10 miles down the road, you know that car has been averaging 120MPH to get from point "a" to point "b".
The interesting part about this is that there's no real way around it. With conventional speed cameras, technologies like "trapster" can alert you to speed traps (or a RADAR detector can figure out if speed-measuring technology is in use) and you can slam on the brakes long enough to go by the trap at legal speed, then roar back up to speed as soon as the danger has passed. With average-speed measuring, if you get to your destination faster than the laws of physics would have allowed you to while maintaining a legal speed, the system knows you've been speeding, and if they can demonstrate you moved between the two locations at impossible speed, there's no defense involving bad speed detection equipment, etc. You covered 10 miles in 5 minutes. That can be easily demonstrated, easily proven, and you're just going to have to cough up the dough.
It's not totally unbeatable, it's just impractical to defeat it. I mean, technically (assuming a 60MPH speed limit) you COULD drive down the highway at 120MPH for an hour like a crazed weasel on crack, then park your car by the side of the road just before the speed camera for an hour to kill the time and get your average speed to 60, but then what's the point? It's still taken you two hours to reach your destination. You might as well just drive at 60MPH for the two hours and get there with more fuel in the tank.
Drat. And here I was hoping that MythBusters really would try to debunk that myth, and in typical fashion conclude the episode by blowing the satellite out of the sky.
Hark! Is this an intelligent post I see before me? I can admire you, yet I have mod points not. Would a +5 Insightful by any other name smell so sweet?
Alas, poor, mod points! I knew them well, yet I have frittered them away on frivolous frippery, ere knowing that yon post awaited!
Wow. I've bashed my head up against use tax nexus issues before, but... wow. I had no idea some of the rules surrounding the holidays were nearly as complex as the base rules, and they only last a few days.
PS: I'm basing that on following New Mexico's (as a random example) detailed regs surrounding the tax holiday. The chart is a severe oversimplification, almost to the point of uselessness.
Frankly, I'm amazed any retailer IN the state can figure that mess out. And that's the regulations pertaining to an exception that lasts two days out of the damned year.
Use tax logic is almost fractal in nature. The closer you look, the more detail there is, ad infinitum.
I hope you were being sarcastic, then.
There are lots of examples of people doing much harder things for a much lower possibility of return in the identity theft or industrial espionage arenas.
100 old photocopiers (assuming you don't just dumpster-dive them for free) might set you back $30,000. They'll take you 2-3 weeks to sift through, but there's a really good chance that one of them would contain a single document that could net you hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more), or several hundred documents worth a few hundred each.
It's not like this is skillful hacking. Anyone with enough skill to operate a screwdriver and install software on a Windows machine could manage this. Dumpster-dive a couple of old PC's, scrounge up a few old photocopiers now and then, and you could have a spare-time career that could net you some serious jail time, err, money.
It's risky, but for those who don't have scruples .. with great risk comes the potential for great rewards.
Personally, I think finding the drive/memory and smashing the shit out of it would be cheaper and more effective. Shame that the photocopier can't be reused, but spending $500 to wipe a photocopier that you can sell for $300 isn't very efficient either. Recycle the parts, and give $300 to a charity so they can buy a used photocopier from someone else.
Your statement is an example of "security through obscurity" or "hiding in plain sight". That model of security was already disproved long ago. And, by "long ago", I'm referring to thousands of years, not weeks. It not only predates the invention of the photocopier, it predates the invention of paper. It probably even predates the concept of walking upright.
Hiding important things in an ocean of unimportant things means that someone can still get at the important things if they try hard enough, or are aware enough to look. The chances of discovery are directly proportional to the amount of knowledge the attacker has about how the data is hidden and roughly inversely proportional to the amount of "chaff" data you put out there to hide the "wheat".
And with the "try hard enough" being "extract the contents of the drive and show me thumbnails of everything on it", or even "extract the contents and OCR the whole lot and search for words like CONFIDENTIAL, SSN, and PAY TO THE ORDER OF" (all of which would be a couple of minutes' work for a 12-year-old child these days), you're not going to be able to obscure things all that well.
What is data worth these days? If you could buy, say, 10 of these $300 printers, you're out $3,000. If each one yields 100 pages for a total yield of 1000 pages, you're paying $3 a page. 99% of the images are likely going to be company picnic memos. Until you get the 10 pages that contain the company payroll data, or something someone will pay good money for. And if it doesn't work out, you rebuild the photocopier and resell it, or even rent it to a company you know has lots of juicy data going through and make sure the sale includes a routine maintenance agreement so you can swap drives out every few weeks.
Of course, if you know where your used photocopiers are coming from, they could yield a much higher return. Did your local hospital just make a big deal of donating photocopiers to a local charity? Go in to the charity with a nicer model of photocopier and offer to swap them out. With a little creative thinking, you could get photocopiers that are more likely to have good salable information in them.
This isn't the biggest security hole ever, it's not even the biggest security hole this month, but it is pretty scary.
No. The "use tax" is a tax levied on your use or consumption of a product you purchased as a resident of your state. It has nothing to do with where you purchased the item.
If you use it in your state and are a resident of the state, you must pay use tax. If you purchase it from a seller within your state, they will collect the use tax for you (and call it "sales tax") and help you meet your tax obligation by handling the paperwork for you.
If you purchase it from a seller not subject to your state's laws, then they are not obligated to collect it on your behalf. That does not mean you don't owe that tax. It only means the seller is not obligated to keep track of it for you, and it's now your job.
The interstate nature of the commerce is completely irrelevant to the nature of the tax. You have to pay a use tax on everything you use in your state as a resident of your state, no matter where you bought it from. You could import it from Alpha Centauri and you'd still have to pay use tax on it because you used it. Your vendor on Alpha Centauri III doesn't know or care that your state has a use tax, that's your responsibility to pay.
You'd pay it if you did business within the state, but the only difference is that the company within the state is under the jurisdiction of your state and therefore must collect it for you and handle all the paperwork for you.
When you do business outside the state, the vendor you are working with is not subject to tax. But you still are, because the tax has nothing to do with where you bought the item, it has to do with where you used it.
Here's an example that might make it clearer:
I lived in New Hampshire (no sales tax) many moons ago. I purchased a new automobile there and did not pay sales tax on that automobile. I moved to Kentucky (sales tax) a few years later. When I went to register my car in Kentucky, I owed them sales tax on the present Kelly Blue Book value of my car because I had not paid a sales tax on it previously and I was using the car in Kentucky. As a resident of Kentucky, I was using a product in Kentucky, and therefore I had to pay use taxes in Kentucky on that car.
When I moved back to Maine about 4 years ago, I had to prove that I had paid sales taxes that were equal to or higher than the Maine tax rate. Had the Kentucky rate been lower, I would have owed Maine the difference between Kentucky's sales tax rate and Maine's for the present Kelly Blue Book value of my car.
Maine and Kentucky have a "reciprocal agreement" on use tax, so Maine actually filed paperwork to Kentucky to have Kentucky pay them the use taxes on my behalf. Had I moved back to New Hampshire, I could have theoretically filed to have that portion of the use tax I did not "use" refunded to me from Kentucky.
So (numbers made up for clarity) my car was worth, say, $20,000 when I bought it. When I moved to Kentucky, they had a 5% tax rate and the car was worth $15,000 so I owed them $750 in use taxes. When I moved to Maine, the car was worth $10,000 and Maine has the same tax rate as Kentucky for cars so Kentucky paid Maine $500. Assuming my car is worth $5,000 now, I could move to New Hampshire and probably file to have Maine refund my $250 in "unused use taxes" if I wanted to. If I moved to a state with a 10% tax rate on cars the new state would file for $250 from Maine, and I'd have to cough up an additional $250 so the state would collect $500 for their 10% of the $5,000 car I'm now using in their state as a state resident.
No interstate commerce laws were broken, though many brain cells were horribly inconvenienced in the process of my grasping the concept.
This is exactly what a use tax is for. If you use it in a state and you live in that state, you must pay use tax on taxable items you use in that state. The confusion arises because most states have had it collected by the sellers for so long that people have largely forgotten (or willfully ignore) that they have to pay a use tax on e
I suspect Gizmodo will end up with some form of penalty, or at least if the law applies as it should they will.
The phone was taken without authorization and re-sold. That means that whomever at Gizmodo negotiated that deal was knowingly dealing in stolen property. I can't think of any circumstances where a phone left at a bar while the owner went to take a pee would be considered "abandoned property".
If no penalty is forthcoming, it'll probably be because Apple either orchestrated the whole thing to start with (and netted 5 grand for a prototype, plus all the free publicity they could eat), or decided the publicity was worth the loss of an easily-replaceable prototype.
I sincerely doubt he's going to be fired, or even penalized. So he lost a prototype, honestly, who cares? It got remote-wiped, which means he obviously reported it to Apple immediately like a good workerdrone. Losing a phone, even a prototype, is not a terminal offense at any company I've ever worked for. Hell, I've known people who have lost $5,000 LAPTOPS and all they get is a "tsk-tsk" and stuck with a crappy old laptop for a while until a replacement could be ordered. The hardware is almost completely insignificant, it's the data on it that counts.
My current company encourages us to report lost or stolen Blackberries or laptops immediately so they can be remote-nuked. There is no penalty for losing one or even damaging one, and there is no career implication, as long as you report it immediately. As my boss once put it, "I'd rather pay to replace 10 Blackberries and call you 'Mr. Butterfingers' than find out that one of them ended up in the hands of a competitor while unlocked because you were afraid to tell me about it."
Honestly, if anyone was considering hiring this guy and hesitated over this, they have no business making hiring decisions. Stuff gets lost, and what is important is how the employee reacts. The fact that the device had a remote-wipe code pending by the time Gizmodo got ahold of it tells me that the employee reported the loss, and therefore reacted appropriately to an honest mistake. He probably lost his place on top of the list to get the 5G prototype when it comes out, but I'm sure he'll remain gainfully employed and I sincerely doubt this will affect any future job prospects.
There were too many fast food logos in the summary picture and I was too impatient to read the rest of the article, in fact I don't think I can complete this sentenc...
... and then gets a huge bonus and possible promotion because his "mistake" (assuming it wasn't all an Apple marketing trick to start with) got Apple yet more face time in the press, and helped feed the fanboi frenzy for the newest 4G "ooohhh shiny".
Yes, try something closer to 50,000 tax rates once you factor in county/municipal/local sales taxes, differing rates based on the item sold of which categories differ by state (a bag of potato chips sold here in Maine is considered a "snack" if it's a small bag and is therefore taxable, but "groceries" if it's a large bag and is therefore nontaxable, unless it is sold in a place that depends on prepared food sales like a restaurant for more than 50% of their income at which point it's a "snack" again).
North Carolina is not asking Amazon to collect taxes. They are asking for sales information so they can go after their own citizens themselves. Still not information they are authorized to, but they are entitled to that sales tax income - it's just that the citizens of their own state should be paying it since they chose to do business with a company that doesn't collect it on their behalf.
Sales tax is an obligation of the purchaser, not the seller. It's just that, for "convenience", all states that levy a sales tax also require any sellers to collect it to save paperwork for the buyer and to make sure that most of it gets collected. Since Amazon isn't in North Carolina, they can't be required to collect sales tax, so North Carolina citizens need to be paying it themselves.
Because Amazon is not being asked to collect the taxes. The State wants the information so they can audit their own citizens and see if they've paid up. And Amazon is not going to be aware of what items are taxable, nontaxable, or taxable at different rates within a state, not to mention county, municipal, or zone taxes, tax holidays on specific items, etc etc.
So they are going to pull Cleetus's sales records, say "Hey, Cleetus, you purchased 12 CDs at $10 each at a tax rate of 5%, 4 XBOX games at a luxury tax of 7%, 13 pounds of lard which is nontaxable, 48 rolls of duct tape at $1 a roll which is taxable at 5%, and 4,200 Mars Bars totalling $2,000 at the snack tax rate of 8%. Let's look at last year's tax submissions, did you pay use tax on those items? No? Well, here's what you owe, plus a big fat penalty and interest because you didn't pay it yourself like the law says you needed to."
Having said that, North Carolina has no right to ask Amazon for that information. That would have to be a federal law, not a state law. North Carolina has no authority over Amazon.com - Amazon does not have a presence there.
Let me first say that IANAL.
Use tax is not a tax on interstate commerce. The state is not asking for any money specifically because the sale was across a border or from another state. Use tax is a tax on you as a purchaser and citizen of your state, levied by a state that has taxation authority over you, on items that you purchase for use in your state. When a seller collects it, it's called "sales tax". When you pay it yourself because you did business with a seller who does not have to collect it, it's generally called "use tax".
Sales taxes and "use taxes" (sales taxes not collected by sellers on your behalf) are really the same thing, just collected differently. They are owed by the purchaser who is subject to the laws of the state in which they live. Everything you purchase that you intend to use or consume in your home state is almost certainly subject to that tax (your state laws may differ, but I doubt it), regardless of where you bought it. Your state is free to pass a law that anything you buy for use within the state is subject to taxation. They can also pass laws that sellers who have a presence in your state (and are therefore subject to your state's laws) have to collect that tax on your behalf and remit it to the state. At that point, it is called "Sales Tax" and you have no paperwork to file. The money is added to your purchase and the seller remits it to the state, and everything is all legal.
If the seller you purchase your goods from does not collect that tax, then it's highly likely that your state laws still say that you have to pay it. You just don't have someone conveniently collecting it for you and forwarding it to the state. You have to pay it yourself. This is generally referred to as "use tax", though states may have their own term for it.
In my home state (Maine) we have a tickybox on our state income tax form that allows us to pay a small percentage of our income (something like 0.6% or something - it's a small amount) that is designed to replace any small purchases we make out of state. It's basically a "check this box, pay your $x, and you are absolved of any small items you've purchased and not paid sales tax on". The alternatives to that are to keep all of your out-of-state purchase receipts and remit sales tax on all of those purchases for which you did not pay sales tax (there's a form for that), or to break the law and skirt paying the sales tax you legally owe the state (there's a penalty for that, even though it's what most people actually do and chances are they'll never actually get caught at it).
Your state cannot impose laws on sellers in other states to force them to collect the taxes on your behalf. That does not absolve you, as a citizen of your state, of the obligation to pay taxes on things you purchase for use within your state under the tax code of your state. It just makes it less convenient for you to do so, and more likely that you will break the law by not paying that tax.
There may be some states that are OK with their citizens skirting their sales/use tax laws and buying things outside the state and never paying taxes on them. I don't personally know of any, but I've only lived in 4 states and one of them (New Hampshire) did not have Sales/Use Tax. The other three had very strict laws about paying taxes on everything you bought, no matter where you bought it. The fact that most people were ignorant of those laws (willfully or otherwise) does not invalidate the laws.
North Carolina (and, by the way, Oregon and a few other states) is looking for information on purchasers within their own states so they can start going after their own citizens for nonpayment of their taxes. That is invalid, to my knowledge (REMINDER: IANAL), since Oregon cannot pass a law stating that companies from other states have to disclose anything to them. Oregon would have to have the Federal government pass such a law, at which point Amazon would have to comply.
I read it the same way, with the same "IANAL" disclaimer.
When I call you using my Google Voice number, my CallerID will show up on your phone with a number that I own and can be reached at. If you dial that number, you will reach me, or at least my voicemail if I don't like you (grin). No attempt has been made to fool anyone into thinking the phone call has come from anyone else. There's a difference between spoofing a CallerID (which is actually not banned by this new change), and spoofing a CallerID with the intent to defraud or mislead (which is banned).
The caller ID text does not actually identify me by name. I think it shows "Google Voice" or "Level Three" (the local number clearinghouse that routes my number). But there's no intent to defraud or mislead inherent in that. I'm not pretending to be someone named "Google Voice" or "Level Three". If it became an issue, Google could probably bypass that pretty simply by sending no CallerID Text or asking Level Three to wipe out CallerID text .
Of course, there's a very easy way around it if someone decided it applied to Google Voice numbers. Google could also declare all Google Voice numbers to be "CallerID Blocked" (private numbers) and not send the phone numbers in the CallerID field. Anyone with their own switch (800 #'s, 911, etc) would get ANI information, everyone else would get "UNKNOWN NUMBER". It would make Google Voice a whole lot less convenient, but it would neatly bypass this law.
I think this whole "this is bad for business" issue goes back to the huge yawning chasm between what people thought the US Government is trying to do (banning CID spoofing) and what they are actually trying to do (banning CID spoofing with an intent to defraud or mislead).
Maybe the problem is that, in the official published legislation, the term "with intent to defraud or mislead" shows up on the next line, and journalists just read as far as selling headlines tells them to.
There needs to be a law against writing news articles
that have an intent to defraud or mislead.
(how many people will read the above sentence and think that I want to ban news reporting?) :)