Perhaps we need a certifying organization like many other industries out there?
Hey, yeah! Like.. like... The American Bar Association! Thank God for organizations like that. Think what unprincipled scum attorneys would be without their oversight.
Now, what would that have to do with GPS? It RECEIVES sattelite signals and works out your location based on the signals.
Then by that logic, every time I listen to the radio, the station knows where I am. Understand that the action of receiving a signal does NOT mean that the system that sent it knows where you are. You may know where you are based on GPS, but no one else will, at least not due to the mere act of receiving the GPS signal.
The British people have a long history of politely bending over and taking it in the ass from their Government every time the Gov't wants to. Witness the RIP act, or the surveillance cameras in public places.
The U.S. isn't far behind in terms of number of surveillance cameras. There are thousands of such cameras in Manhattan alone.
Oh, and I supposed it is just a coincedence that this will allow people to track where everyone drives in the UK?
Nothing in the article would indicate that this system would be capable of actually tracking you. My read is that it has a map of areas of limited speed and uses GPS to determine if you're in one. Given the way the Brits are headed, though, I'm sure the tracking version will be 2.0.
Won't the police be missing a huge portion of their revenue with these cars on the road?
Nah. The system will notice if you're pushing on the accelerator when you're at the max allowed speed. It'll notify law enforcement, who will fine you for attempted speeding. Best of both worlds.
Just cut the wire / damage / jam / shield the antenna and you're free.
I thought of that too. The countermeasure I'd expect is that the authorities would continue to patrol the roads and pull over speeders. If you've disabled the system, there would probably be a hefty fine. Or, given the way the UK seems to be trending, confiscation of your car/home/assets, jailing, caning, and exile to Devil's Isand. Then execution for second offenders.
Prior art reviews in the patent office are obviously not working."
Perhaps the solution is for the Patent Office to place applications online and invite the public to comment on prior art or obviousness. Clearly their own examiners aren't up to the job, or don't have sufficient incentive to do it well. What better way to head off lunatic patents before they get approved and start gumming up the system than to get a lot of interested parties to review them?
I second this excellent recommendation. The way in which launch authorization was obtained and the subsequent efforts to cover it up certainly gave me pause. The rest of the book is also worth reading. Feynman was a brilliant man and an entertaining writer. There's also "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". His experiences on the Manhattan Project (and his breaking the combinations of the safes of his co-workers) make for fascinating reading.
While I applaud innovation, as a practical matter I don't expect things like this to have much effect until they're nearly univerally used. Customers aren't interested in coding umpteen versions (at umpteen times the cost) of their sites to accomodate each bell and whistle available. They end up saying, "make me one version that plays to the least common denominator". And so that's what happens. At the most, they'll permit the use of a few fancy features (like Flash) that many users have or can easily get.
The FCC has mandated that it be possible by October 2001 to geolocate most calls to 911 from cell phones. While it's possible to do this at the base stations by measuring the exact time of signal arrival, as far as I know, no company is upgrading their base stations since it's so expensive. I believe most are planning on placing the functionality in the phone itself by having the phone receive GPS signals. Can it possibly be the plan to insert GPS receiver capabilities in a $10 phone?
I'm guessing the Supreme Court will rule that banning artificially-generated images is not constitutional. When/if this happens, what I expect to eventually occur is that face-recognition software will be used on the images to identify the children. The day is coming (and soon, I think) when every child will have its picture taken as part of entering school, and the digitized image will be placed in a national database. Feature-recognition software is getting good enough to match up those images with those from child-porn photos. The cops will try to identify the kids and then contact them to see if they were really abused. This is just my prediction of how this is going to play out. Personally, I'm not thrilled with having our images entered into databases, which by the way has already happened for almost any adult with a driver's license. Companies have purchased the driver's license databases from the states, including the photographs, and entered them into image-recognition systems. Big Brother ain't far off.
One of the arguments that the banners use is that modern image-editing software makes it nearly impossible to tell whether something was filmed or is artificially generated. I'm hoping the Supreme Court decides for the plaintiffs in this matter; just because it makes the cops job difficult isn't a good reason to curb free expression, no matter how twisted it is.
Where do yoiu guys get these ideas, anyway? The Democrats are just as big a bunch of paleolithic dweebs as the Republicans. Recall that it was Zoe Lofgren (Democrat House Member, CA) who introduced HR 774, the "Internet Freedom and Child Protection Act of 1997" requiring filtering software. It was Diane Feinstein (Democrat Senator CA) who added language to a counter-terrorism bill to ban "bomb-making instructtions" on websites. There were plenty of Democrat sponsors and votes for the Communications Decency Act as well.
As for the top people having had no contact with the net, that's mostly a function of their age. Many of the CEO-level people today came up in an environment where it was beneath them to even know how to type (I know of one 55-year-old guy who just assumed management of an organization, and his first act was to buy a dictating machine because he can't type and secretaries these days don't know shorthand). Those people are retiring now and dying out. Keep in mind that the lower-level folks, down where the policy recommendations come from, tend to be younger and will be much more familiar with the net.
Personally, I'm not very enthusiastic about having moving parts in the most expensive component in my system, unless they're guaranteed not to reduce the chip life. I just had to get my video card replaced after 6 months due to a faulty fan. And it's tough enough cleaning the crud out of my normal-size fans. How am I going to do it with microfans?
The keyboard is ok, but the rest of the issue is what got my attention, particularly the SpringWalker. I wish I'd heard of this publication before this. Neato stuff.
To hell with that. I'll gladly give a DNA sample if asked, if it means getting criminals off the streets.
The classic "I'll gladly give up some liberty for more security." Even if you have full confidence in the benevolence of the present State, do you want to count on that long-term? Suppose some extremeist group gets hold of the levers of government and decides that the DNA database would make a swell way of finding inferior people to expunge? Or that it doesn't make sense to employ people who have genetic predispositions to certain diseases? The opportunities for mischief are limitless, and the only way to prevent them is to limit the collection of this sort of data in the first place.
Say there's 2500 grains of sand per square centimeter (50 on each edge) That's 25,000,000 grains of sand per square meter... even if you only have to render that detail out in a 5x5 meter area, we're talking 625,000,000 grains of sand on the surface... now let's model them realistically so when people walk on the sand it caves in just right... oh, and render some waves and sea grass in the background while you're at it?
Well, sure, you could even model the universe down to its component quarks if you like. But at some point, you've hit the resolving power of the human eye and the additional 'reality' isn't going to be seen. Your beach example is a good one. Individual grains of sand far away just aren't going to have an effect. When the scene is generated, a single polygon is going to represent a large amount of sand, and the image will be completely realistic. The point the original poster was making that at some certain number of polys, you won't be able to tell the computer-generated version from the real thing. Let's assume an HDTV screen size of 1520x1280, which is about 2,000,000 pixels. At a frame rate of 32fps, 2.4 billion polys/sec would mean 75,000,000 polys/frame, which would give you @38 polys/pixel. I'd be willing to bet that that would be about as realistic as you could want.
Just heard on the radio that rolling blackouts are going to hit Northern CA @12:15 Pacific. Each is going to last up to an hour and a half. Must have been some tremendous activity on all those servers up there.
I forgot to mention: don't get your state into a power crisis and then threaten to condemn and takeover the power generating plants as CA governor Davis has done. That's not exactly the way to get investors to build new ones.
The one bright spot in all this is seeing a state government that's utterly dominated by Democrats deal with a crisis. The Satalinist leanings of some of the proposals are quite breathtaking. And the latest state budget that was passed which assumes continued high growth in the CA economy is nothing short of delusional. The state has just passed a bill that will have it buying the power and then selling it to the utilities. The greens and the corporation-haters are screaming their guts out. They apparently want the utilities to go bankrupt. As theater, you can't beat this. The problem is that the cost of admission is rather high.
I'm glad I don't live in CA, but how long before it affects the rest of us?
As long as you don't repeat California's mistakes, you don't have much to worry about. Pennsylvania and Texas are deregulating in a way that will assure them plenty of power, for example. CA capped retail rates but let wholesale rates float. It hasn't allowed a new powerplant online in 10 years during a period when demand increased 5-6% per year, so now 15-25% of power comes from out of state, across power lines that are themselves a mess due to 'deregulation'. It forbid utilites to contract for power for long periods and forced them to buy on the day-ahead market. It forces the purchase of power thru a power exchange with oddball bid rules that assure that a much higher than necessary price is paid. And just yesterday I was hearing some environmentalist saying what a lousy job of conservation CA does, and that's all that's needed to keep the lights on. Just learn from our example, let markets work, and you'll be fine. As an example of what can happen, here in San Diego I'm paying 21 cents per KWH, up from 3 a year ago. The next bill I expect to be above 30 cents.
Didn't the spider-type robots have 3 legs in the book? The artist drew one with 6. I hope this isn't an indication of how faithful the rest of the production is going to be. This was one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time and I'd hate to see it mulched into unrecognizability by Hollywood. ("Mr. Fincher, we marketing droids think that it's important to have a six-year-old boy and a dog in the cast. And can this take place in Altoona instead of outer space?")
There were a number of car stero manufacturers at the latest Consumer Electronics Show, and there were several inexpensive MP3-capable radios. They should be available this year. As for downloading, I'm going to wait for Bluetooth-enabled ones rather than wireless Ethernet. (This tendency to wait for things to stabilize is why I'll probably be watching my analog 525-line television in 2030).
Wow. Interesting story. Where did this take place, BTW. In California?
Yep. It was at Black's Beach in San Diego. By the way, I want to make crystal clear that this was a bad bust. My friend is a gay 54-year-old middle class white guy who would never in his life do such a thing. He's still trying to puzzle out what the cop's motive was. The best he can think is that the cop was a long distance away (not the 10 feet he claimed) and saw something that he mistook for the 'crime', although my friend can't think what it might have been. He was sitting on a rock reading a book for quite some time before the cop roared up in his beach SUV and started yelling at him. I told him he should go back to court to get a declaration of 'factually innocent' which would seal his records on this incident, but I think he's had his fill of dealing with the law.
Further, if the intent was to harrass the individual, the arrest may actually be criminal.
True, but it happens anyway. A friend just got thru a trial. A cop arrested him for masterbating in public at a nude beach with his pants around his ankles. There were no other witnesses on a beach full of people. On the stand, the defense asked the cop, who claimed to have been standing 10 feet away, if he had seen anything unusual about my friend. He said no. My friend had to drop his pants and show the court his large snake tattoo that winds from his pubic area around to his back. Even so, the jury still hung 6-6; some people can't believe that a cop would lie. The judge later called the prosecutor into chambers and chewed him out for wasting the court's time by bringing the case and for basing it on a single witness who perjured himself. I would add that, had it not been for my friend's saving tatoo, he'd have been convicted and would now be having to register as a sex offender. There are some bad apples out there in the police force.
From the article: He is charged with misuse of computer system information, a felony.
According to the article, the information he's being charged with 'misusing' is from the Salem Police Benevolent Association website. To sum up my interpretation of what happened: 1. Kid gets ticked off at the cops.
2. Kid creates possibly-offensive website mocking said cops, lifting information from a cop-associated website as part of his efforts.
3. Cops are righteously pissed off, decide to make an example of him, and launch an investigation.
4. Cops come up with a charge of misuse of computer info.
Not knowing NH law, I don't know whether this law is being correctly applied or is even constitutional. What I do know is that if you're going to 'moon the giant' be ready for the problems that ensue. (My instinctive reaction of this is that the fuzz is going to have some problems making this stick, but perhaps that wasn't the goal. Maybe it was just to roust the kid and force him and his parents to spend thousands defending themselves as punishment.)
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Hey, yeah! Like .. like ... The American Bar Association! Thank God for organizations like that. Think what unprincipled scum attorneys would be without their oversight.
Then by that logic, every time I listen to the radio, the station knows where I am. Understand that the action of receiving a signal does NOT mean that the system that sent it knows where you are. You may know where you are based on GPS, but no one else will, at least not due to the mere act of receiving the GPS signal.
The U.S. isn't far behind in terms of number of surveillance cameras. There are thousands of such cameras in Manhattan alone.
Nothing in the article would indicate that this system would be capable of actually tracking you. My read is that it has a map of areas of limited speed and uses GPS to determine if you're in one. Given the way the Brits are headed, though, I'm sure the tracking version will be 2.0.
Nah. The system will notice if you're pushing on the accelerator when you're at the max allowed speed. It'll notify law enforcement, who will fine you for attempted speeding. Best of both worlds.
I thought of that too. The countermeasure I'd expect is that the authorities would continue to patrol the roads and pull over speeders. If you've disabled the system, there would probably be a hefty fine. Or, given the way the UK seems to be trending, confiscation of your car/home/assets, jailing, caning, and exile to Devil's Isand. Then execution for second offenders.
Perhaps the solution is for the Patent Office to place applications online and invite the public to comment on prior art or obviousness. Clearly their own examiners aren't up to the job, or don't have sufficient incentive to do it well. What better way to head off lunatic patents before they get approved and start gumming up the system than to get a lot of interested parties to review them?
I second this excellent recommendation. The way in which launch authorization was obtained and the subsequent efforts to cover it up certainly gave me pause. The rest of the book is also worth reading. Feynman was a brilliant man and an entertaining writer. There's also "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman". His experiences on the Manhattan Project (and his breaking the combinations of the safes of his co-workers) make for fascinating reading.
While I applaud innovation, as a practical matter I don't expect things like this to have much effect until they're nearly univerally used. Customers aren't interested in coding umpteen versions (at umpteen times the cost) of their sites to accomodate each bell and whistle available. They end up saying, "make me one version that plays to the least common denominator". And so that's what happens. At the most, they'll permit the use of a few fancy features (like Flash) that many users have or can easily get.
The FCC has mandated that it be possible by October 2001 to geolocate most calls to 911 from cell phones. While it's possible to do this at the base stations by measuring the exact time of signal arrival, as far as I know, no company is upgrading their base stations since it's so expensive. I believe most are planning on placing the functionality in the phone itself by having the phone receive GPS signals. Can it possibly be the plan to insert GPS receiver capabilities in a $10 phone?
I'm guessing the Supreme Court will rule that banning artificially-generated images is not constitutional. When/if this happens, what I expect to eventually occur is that face-recognition software will be used on the images to identify the children. The day is coming (and soon, I think) when every child will have its picture taken as part of entering school, and the digitized image will be placed in a national database. Feature-recognition software is getting good enough to match up those images with those from child-porn photos. The cops will try to identify the kids and then contact them to see if they were really abused. This is just my prediction of how this is going to play out. Personally, I'm not thrilled with having our images entered into databases, which by the way has already happened for almost any adult with a driver's license. Companies have purchased the driver's license databases from the states, including the photographs, and entered them into image-recognition systems. Big Brother ain't far off.
One of the arguments that the banners use is that modern image-editing software makes it nearly impossible to tell whether something was filmed or is artificially generated. I'm hoping the Supreme Court decides for the plaintiffs in this matter; just because it makes the cops job difficult isn't a good reason to curb free expression, no matter how twisted it is.
As for the top people having had no contact with the net, that's mostly a function of their age. Many of the CEO-level people today came up in an environment where it was beneath them to even know how to type (I know of one 55-year-old guy who just assumed management of an organization, and his first act was to buy a dictating machine because he can't type and secretaries these days don't know shorthand). Those people are retiring now and dying out. Keep in mind that the lower-level folks, down where the policy recommendations come from, tend to be younger and will be much more familiar with the net.
Personally, I'm not very enthusiastic about having moving parts in the most expensive component in my system, unless they're guaranteed not to reduce the chip life. I just had to get my video card replaced after 6 months due to a faulty fan. And it's tough enough cleaning the crud out of my normal-size fans. How am I going to do it with microfans?
The keyboard is ok, but the rest of the issue is what got my attention, particularly the SpringWalker. I wish I'd heard of this publication before this. Neato stuff.
The classic "I'll gladly give up some liberty for more security." Even if you have full confidence in the benevolence of the present State, do you want to count on that long-term? Suppose some extremeist group gets hold of the levers of government and decides that the DNA database would make a swell way of finding inferior people to expunge? Or that it doesn't make sense to employ people who have genetic predispositions to certain diseases? The opportunities for mischief are limitless, and the only way to prevent them is to limit the collection of this sort of data in the first place.
Well, sure, you could even model the universe down to its component quarks if you like. But at some point, you've hit the resolving power of the human eye and the additional 'reality' isn't going to be seen. Your beach example is a good one. Individual grains of sand far away just aren't going to have an effect. When the scene is generated, a single polygon is going to represent a large amount of sand, and the image will be completely realistic. The point the original poster was making that at some certain number of polys, you won't be able to tell the computer-generated version from the real thing. Let's assume an HDTV screen size of 1520x1280, which is about 2,000,000 pixels. At a frame rate of 32fps, 2.4 billion polys/sec would mean 75,000,000 polys/frame, which would give you @38 polys/pixel. I'd be willing to bet that that would be about as realistic as you could want.
Just heard on the radio that rolling blackouts are going to hit Northern CA @12:15 Pacific. Each is going to last up to an hour and a half. Must have been some tremendous activity on all those servers up there.
The one bright spot in all this is seeing a state government that's utterly dominated by Democrats deal with a crisis. The Satalinist leanings of some of the proposals are quite breathtaking. And the latest state budget that was passed which assumes continued high growth in the CA economy is nothing short of delusional. The state has just passed a bill that will have it buying the power and then selling it to the utilities. The greens and the corporation-haters are screaming their guts out. They apparently want the utilities to go bankrupt. As theater, you can't beat this. The problem is that the cost of admission is rather high.
As long as you don't repeat California's mistakes, you don't have much to worry about. Pennsylvania and Texas are deregulating in a way that will assure them plenty of power, for example. CA capped retail rates but let wholesale rates float. It hasn't allowed a new powerplant online in 10 years during a period when demand increased 5-6% per year, so now 15-25% of power comes from out of state, across power lines that are themselves a mess due to 'deregulation'. It forbid utilites to contract for power for long periods and forced them to buy on the day-ahead market. It forces the purchase of power thru a power exchange with oddball bid rules that assure that a much higher than necessary price is paid. And just yesterday I was hearing some environmentalist saying what a lousy job of conservation CA does, and that's all that's needed to keep the lights on. Just learn from our example, let markets work, and you'll be fine. As an example of what can happen, here in San Diego I'm paying 21 cents per KWH, up from 3 a year ago. The next bill I expect to be above 30 cents.
Didn't the spider-type robots have 3 legs in the book? The artist drew one with 6. I hope this isn't an indication of how faithful the rest of the production is going to be. This was one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time and I'd hate to see it mulched into unrecognizability by Hollywood. ("Mr. Fincher, we marketing droids think that it's important to have a six-year-old boy and a dog in the cast. And can this take place in Altoona instead of outer space?")
There were a number of car stero manufacturers at the latest Consumer Electronics Show, and there were several inexpensive MP3-capable radios. They should be available this year. As for downloading, I'm going to wait for Bluetooth-enabled ones rather than wireless Ethernet. (This tendency to wait for things to stabilize is why I'll probably be watching my analog 525-line television in 2030).
Yep. It was at Black's Beach in San Diego. By the way, I want to make crystal clear that this was a bad bust. My friend is a gay 54-year-old middle class white guy who would never in his life do such a thing. He's still trying to puzzle out what the cop's motive was. The best he can think is that the cop was a long distance away (not the 10 feet he claimed) and saw something that he mistook for the 'crime', although my friend can't think what it might have been. He was sitting on a rock reading a book for quite some time before the cop roared up in his beach SUV and started yelling at him. I told him he should go back to court to get a declaration of 'factually innocent' which would seal his records on this incident, but I think he's had his fill of dealing with the law.
True, but it happens anyway. A friend just got thru a trial. A cop arrested him for masterbating in public at a nude beach with his pants around his ankles. There were no other witnesses on a beach full of people. On the stand, the defense asked the cop, who claimed to have been standing 10 feet away, if he had seen anything unusual about my friend. He said no. My friend had to drop his pants and show the court his large snake tattoo that winds from his pubic area around to his back. Even so, the jury still hung 6-6; some people can't believe that a cop would lie. The judge later called the prosecutor into chambers and chewed him out for wasting the court's time by bringing the case and for basing it on a single witness who perjured himself. I would add that, had it not been for my friend's saving tatoo, he'd have been convicted and would now be having to register as a sex offender. There are some bad apples out there in the police force.
According to the article, the information he's being charged with 'misusing' is from the Salem Police Benevolent Association website. To sum up my interpretation of what happened:
1. Kid gets ticked off at the cops.
2. Kid creates possibly-offensive website mocking said cops, lifting information from a cop-associated website as part of his efforts.
3. Cops are righteously pissed off, decide to make an example of him, and launch an investigation.
4. Cops come up with a charge of misuse of computer info.
Not knowing NH law, I don't know whether this law is being correctly applied or is even constitutional. What I do know is that if you're going to 'moon the giant' be ready for the problems that ensue. (My instinctive reaction of this is that the fuzz is going to have some problems making this stick, but perhaps that wasn't the goal. Maybe it was just to roust the kid and force him and his parents to spend thousands defending themselves as punishment.)