If I'm underatnding some of the other posts in this thread corectly then the binary is already signed, using GPG, it's just that Microsoft won't recognise the signature.
I use Paintshop Pro, that implements all the functions and features I need (and will use Photoshop filters, a big plus). I've tried The Gimp and to be brutally honest the AC has described my experiences of it.
Perhaps the ideal would be if the app could be skinned so those who like the current interface could run it with the "Gimp Classic" UI but those migrating from other packages can use "GIMP for PSP users" or "GIMP for Photoshop users" &c.
I'm used to having to switch UI when I change apps and I found The Gimp too much of a learning curve to switch.
Sure they do. But are their suggestions any good? I've been using Amazon UK for about 6 years now and have bought a good few hundred books, CDs, DVDs, videos &c from them. When I look at the suggestions I find that about 1-2 will be something I already have (we'll call that a hit) and 0-1 will be somethign I could conceivably want (usually an updated edition of a book I already have) but everything else makes me wonder if they are actually looking at my data or are just reccomending things that they make a good profit on. Being charitable I'd give them a hit rate of around 2%.
There's usually a link for "Why is this being reccomended" which links to a page where they indicate what past purchases they're using as a basis for the reccomendation. That can be quite funny, it'll be something like because in the past I bought CDs by 'Bauhaus', 'They might be giants' and 'The London Symphony Orchestra' they thought I would be bound to want the latest Britney.
Reminds me of a paragraph in a Terry Pratchett book ("Jingo" IIRC) which basically boiled down to there being no racism between humans as black and white would get together to beat up green and purple.
What is the alternative? Take as your basic axioms that we want OSS to be widely adopted (the aim) and that most of the world has better things to do with their time than learn enough about programming to be able to download, read, understand and compile the source code (observed truth). Solutions that will result in my having to spend all my free time responding to requests from friends, family, friends of family, family of friends, friends of the family of someone a friend of my mother once met on a bus to 'put that Firefly/Foxbat/Foxfire thingie' on their PC are non-valid.
They didn't exploit the most obvious loophole of all. Each student writes a non-trivial piece of *NIX software with at least 10 discoverable exploits in. They then fake a project page on Sourceforge or other suitable site with pseudonymous contact details. All students then pick one or two bugs out of 10 other students programs (making sure that they don't all pick the same programs and same exploits) and report them.
Probably counts as cheating but so long as you all do it, if caught, you could claim it was a form of civil disobediance against braindead assignments and sue the university for mental distress and trauma.
It's your implementation that force you to put a DRM on each machine and take away users' power to do whatever they like to their own machine.
I missed the bit where it was suggested about putting Digital Rights Management software on peoples machines. I know Microsoft do that in Windows (try ripping an audio CD in Windows Media Player on one Windows PC and then copying the files onto another Windows PC, odds are (unless the PCs are cloned copies) that you'll have to export the licenses from the first machine and import them onto the second PC to play them) whether you want it or not.
Also, what's this "their own machine" business? If it's their work machine then (except in certain very rare situations) it's not their machine, it's their employer's machine. If I'm employing someone and providing them with desk space and equipment then I have a right (even duty) to control what they do with that equipment and what they can install on it.
Stephen
Re:Is THIS the future of TV?
on
The Other VoIP
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· Score: 1
I just know that I've never seen one or an advert for one and that neither amazon.co.uk or dixons.co.uk seem to list them. It's not unusual for a product to come out in the US but not appear here for some time. We do have similar devices but, as mentioned in an earlier comment, they are combined with something else (the two that spring immediately to mind are a combined DVD recorder and PVR and Sky+ which combines a satellitte decoder with a PVR) and don't, so far as I am aware, gave the function of being able to search on an actor's name.
Stephen
Re:Is THIS the future of TV?
on
The Other VoIP
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· Score: 1
Re:Is THIS the future of TV?
on
The Other VoIP
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· Score: 1, Informative
I'm in UK, I believe that TiVo aren't available here (nothing on amazon.co.uk or dixons.co.uk). I've seen PVRs on sale but they seem to either not have any show related functions you mention (really they're just like normal VCRs in that you set the start and end times, the only differences are they use a hard drive and some let you pause live TV). If you're on SkyTV (UK version of FOXTV) and have a Sky+ box then it will let you scroll through the TV listings (don't know if it covers all channels or just some) and select the shows you want to record but so far as I am aware they don't support topic or actor searches.
Stephen
Re:Is THIS the future of TV?
on
The Other VoIP
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· Score: 1
I'd rather keep my PC and TV/Video as separate items, partly cos I use a laptop as my primary PC. It doesn't seem to solve the changing the channel on my cable box part of the problem. Plus a 22 inch TV is a heck of a lot cheaper than a 22 inch monitor and a PVR is likely to be a lot cheaper than the hardware/software required by this. I'll keep an eye on it tho', might turn out useful.
Stephen
Re:Is THIS the future of TV?
on
The Other VoIP
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In all seriousness I'd love to be able to download the TV schedules to my PC, locate the shows I want to see (and be prompted about shows featuring actors I like or written/directed by writers/directors I like) then be able to have my TV change channel or my video (or PVR if I had one) start recording at the appropriate time. I don't watch much TV (tend to read or surf the web) but the shows I do watch I like to keep up with. It's really frustrating to find that a new series of a show I like has started (or the previous series is being rerun), an actor I like has a guest spot in an episode of a show I don't normally watch or a film I want to see has been on but I miss it it because I happened to not see any trailers.
For that I'd buy a PVR (alhough it would have to interface to my cable box as well).
I haven't measured the squarefootage of the house I'm renting in right now but I'd guess it would be somewhere around the 800 mark. The area could be politely called a slum, a shit hole would be more accurate (rubbish strewn street, badly maintained roads, derelict factory units at the end of the road, rat infested additionally there's a major problem with teenaged and slightly older gangs and racial tension that means that the police won't come into the area after dark). The house itself has no central heating, double glazing, loft insulation or other 'improvements'. About 10 years ago it would have sold for about 20k UKP (about $38 at current exchange rates), 5 years ago for about 60k UKP ($114) and an identical one just down the road from me just went for 160k UKP ($304).
Direct property taxes (council tax) are around 700 ukp pa. Contents only insurance (capped at 5,000 ukp for a total claim) comes to about 300 ukp pa, buildings insurance would be about the same again.
Unfortunately, unless you're very lucky, then a lot of your expenses are only partially within your control. For example if you're working in a particular city then you have to live there (or commute long distances every day which is expensive in and of itself) which means buying or renting a property. Here in the UK over the past decade or so house prices have gone insanely high, what even 5 years ago would have bought you a very nice house with a big garden in a very nice area now won't get you a studio flat in a slum. Salaries have not anywhere near kept pace. Where ever you live you're restricted as to who supplies your water (local monopolies) and usually you're restricted as to who provides your gas and electricity (in theory where ever you are you can have any supplier but in practice very few suppliers cover the whole country).
About half to two thirds of my take home salary goes on things that I cannot directly influence (rent, water, council tax, insurance &c) and much of the rest (e.g. food, clothes, gas, electric, phone, Internet) I could cut it back but only so far (for example I could use my phone less but I have to have one due to work requirements so would still have to pay the standing charge).
Even better print up some stickers with a message like "Call now for hot dates in your area: 555-1234" or "Girls ready to take your call 24x7: 555-1234" but with their phone number. Then put the stickers on the inside of the cubicle doors of public and commercial restrooms (pub, mall, bar, gas station, church &c). Not only will the resulting calls jam up their phonelines but given the nature of the calls most of their call centre/reception staff will probably quit. I'm not sure about the US but I do now that in the UK the staff who quit will be able to sue the employer under health and safety legislation on the basis that their trading activities resulted in an unsafe workplace.
But how many users or ISPs use RBLs. Since I started using Spamcop a couple of years ago my spam load per day dropped from 300+ to less than 10. I'm probably pretty unusual because I use an RBL, the vast majority of users (and their ISPs) don't.
RBLs are like immunisation. There's little point just immunising a small number of people against a common disease, a lot of people are still going to get sick. You have to immunise every one (or at least as many people as you can). We had a vaccine for Smallpox for literally hundreds of years but it still raged unchecked throughout most of the world. It was only after the mass innoculation programmes that it was restricted to smaller and smaller areas until it was virtually eliminated. If every user, or at least most of them, used an RBL then spamming couldn't work because virtually no one would ever see it.
Another aspect is that when you're getting more than a dozen or so spam mails a day it's simply not feasible to report them all, you'd spend all your time dealing with spam and wouldn't have time for anything else. When that's down to a few a day, the few that haven't made it into the RBL yet, you can report all of them. So, if everyone uses an RBL then very little spam will get through and what little does is far more likely to be reported.
I remember reading an article about vegetable oil being used (mainly for trucks, buses and other larger vehicles). I've also read about ethanol bewing used (mainly for cars and other smaller vehicles). If these micreogenerators could run on ethanol (presumably in the form of methylated spirit) then that would be good.
He might have a point tho'. I remember running WordPerfect 5.2 under Windows 3.1 and DOS 5 on a 386SX 25MHz and I remember it running a heck of a lot faster than Word 2000 under Windows 2000 on the 1.2GHz on my desk right now.
Assuming that the code would even run on contemporary processors (as I recall it was 16 bit code, should still run I would have thought, drivers are likely to be the problem) and I could find the installation disks (less likely, I've moved house 5 times since then), it would be interesting to try. Some time ago (1996) I did a C programming course, I remember one of the tutors saying that whenever a new machine came out one of the first tests he'd run was to install a particular pascal compiler and compile a program he wrote in the early 1980s. The code being compiled in the same compiler went from several hours to a few minutes between when he first wrote it and when he talked to us. Obviously this wasn't just a test of processor speed but also included memory speed, bus speed, caching and disk speed as well.
There's a good chance that's Chinese coal you're burning.
I'd be most interested in these generators if they ran on vegetable oil. Large areas of South America (especially Brasil) have been using vegetable oil as a major fuel source (especially in the automotive arena) for some time. I'd rather plant sunflowers or corn than drill oil wells.
Stephen
Re:It is a problem because the market is dwindling
on
Sun-isms Debunked
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· Score: 1
Plus, clustering has a much higher management overhead (on any platform, not just x86) than non-clustered multi-processor/multicore single box solutions. The biggest problems come where different machines in the cluster need to be aware of each other and work around each other (e.g. a database cluster or a service where the same session could hit different parts of the cluster at different times).
The only machine/os combination I've found that did clustering anything like elegantly was VMS on VAX or Alpha. Tru64 came close, it'll be interesting to see how much of that gets into HP-UX. If you've never had to contend with distributed cache and lock management (my main experience is in database where such things are important) then you've never seriously considered suicide by paper shredder. Clusters are a very good way of spending lots of money on consultants and still not having a working system to show for it.
The Royal Mail do have people who can authorise the opening of mail (they're not what I would call middle management though, they're regional manager types). This is so that mail can be opened if need be to determine the correct delivery address or if it has been sent back "Return to sender" but there's no sender address on the outside. Or at least that's what my friends who work for Royal Mail tell me.
What about the postroom/admin staff at your workplace? How can you be sure they don't steal your mail? Anything that involves people also involves the possibility that those people might be dishonest. Sure you can make sure you don't hire people to positions of trust who have previously demonstrated that they can't be trusted, but that requires firstly that they've already commited an offense and secondly that you can identify them.
Interfering with the Royal Mail is a pretty major offense, technically it's a form of treason. For example if a letter addressed to someone else is delivered to your house (maybe it was wrongly delivered, it's to a previous occupant or it was misaddressed) and you open it then you have commited a crime. The reason the Royal Mail have people at the depots who can authorise the opening of mail is so that if something gets sent back 'return to sender' and there's no sender address on the outside they can have it opened to determine the senders address.
Personally I think a verifiable ID card would be a good idea so long as it could be kept secure (and verifiable) and everyone has one. Maybe something with your name, your photo and some sort of ID number on the front (perhaps blood group or similar info that it might be helpful to have quickly available incase of emergency) for quick checks and a chip inside that holds an encrypted key that links to your records on government/legal systems for more indepth checks. The reason it's important for everyone to have one is that in that situation the sheer volume of data will reduce the ease of spurious searches, it won't stop them but it might make them too expensive to be worth running.
Except we don't. Some areas do have CCTV camera surveilance, shopping areas mostly, which tends to be a mixture of police and private (shops monitoring their own store fronts). They are very clearly sign posted with warnings that if you enter that area you will be under CCTV observation.
The problem with the phone cameras is that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence (and photographic evidence) of people taking them into places where a fixed CCTV camera would not be allowed and taking pictures whilst appearing to be making a call or just holding their phone. Apparently there is a roaring trade in photographs of naked children in swimming pool changing areas and of 'up skirt' shots taken with such phones.
I don't think that this proposed law will have any noticable real effect. It's just something so that those responsible for public safety can be seen to be doing something about the problem, without going to the effort of actually doing something about it.
I think a much more effective solution would be to arrest the people using these phones and dump them on some island somewhere until they die.
Slashdot Mirror
If I'm underatnding some of the other posts in this thread corectly then the binary is already signed, using GPG, it's just that Microsoft won't recognise the signature.
Stephen
I use Paintshop Pro, that implements all the functions and features I need (and will use Photoshop filters, a big plus). I've tried The Gimp and to be brutally honest the AC has described my experiences of it.
Perhaps the ideal would be if the app could be skinned so those who like the current interface could run it with the "Gimp Classic" UI but those migrating from other packages can use "GIMP for PSP users" or "GIMP for Photoshop users" &c.
I'm used to having to switch UI when I change apps and I found The Gimp too much of a learning curve to switch.
Stephen
Well, we didn't want to run alpha code in production. We wanted to give it a long beta test period.
Stephen
Sure they do. But are their suggestions any good? I've been using Amazon UK for about 6 years now and have bought a good few hundred books, CDs, DVDs, videos &c from them. When I look at the suggestions I find that about 1-2 will be something I already have (we'll call that a hit) and 0-1 will be somethign I could conceivably want (usually an updated edition of a book I already have) but everything else makes me wonder if they are actually looking at my data or are just reccomending things that they make a good profit on. Being charitable I'd give them a hit rate of around 2%.
There's usually a link for "Why is this being reccomended" which links to a page where they indicate what past purchases they're using as a basis for the reccomendation. That can be quite funny, it'll be something like because in the past I bought CDs by 'Bauhaus', 'They might be giants' and 'The London Symphony Orchestra' they thought I would be bound to want the latest Britney.
Stephen
Reminds me of a paragraph in a Terry Pratchett book ("Jingo" IIRC) which basically boiled down to there being no racism between humans as black and white would get together to beat up green and purple.
Stephen
What is the alternative? Take as your basic axioms that we want OSS to be widely adopted (the aim) and that most of the world has better things to do with their time than learn enough about programming to be able to download, read, understand and compile the source code (observed truth). Solutions that will result in my having to spend all my free time responding to requests from friends, family, friends of family, family of friends, friends of the family of someone a friend of my mother once met on a bus to 'put that Firefly/Foxbat/Foxfire thingie' on their PC are non-valid.
Stephen
They didn't exploit the most obvious loophole of all. Each student writes a non-trivial piece of *NIX software with at least 10 discoverable exploits in. They then fake a project page on Sourceforge or other suitable site with pseudonymous contact details. All students then pick one or two bugs out of 10 other students programs (making sure that they don't all pick the same programs and same exploits) and report them.
Probably counts as cheating but so long as you all do it, if caught, you could claim it was a form of civil disobediance against braindead assignments and sue the university for mental distress and trauma.
$$$$$Profit$$$$$!
Stephen
I missed the bit where it was suggested about putting Digital Rights Management software on peoples machines. I know Microsoft do that in Windows (try ripping an audio CD in Windows Media Player on one Windows PC and then copying the files onto another Windows PC, odds are (unless the PCs are cloned copies) that you'll have to export the licenses from the first machine and import them onto the second PC to play them) whether you want it or not.
Also, what's this "their own machine" business? If it's their work machine then (except in certain very rare situations) it's not their machine, it's their employer's machine. If I'm employing someone and providing them with desk space and equipment then I have a right (even duty) to control what they do with that equipment and what they can install on it.
Stephen
I just know that I've never seen one or an advert for one and that neither amazon.co.uk or dixons.co.uk seem to list them. It's not unusual for a product to come out in the US but not appear here for some time. We do have similar devices but, as mentioned in an earlier comment, they are combined with something else (the two that spring immediately to mind are a combined DVD recorder and PVR and Sky+ which combines a satellitte decoder with a PVR) and don't, so far as I am aware, gave the function of being able to search on an actor's name.
Stephen
As noted above I'm in the UK so cannot use TiVo.
Stephen
I'm in UK, I believe that TiVo aren't available here (nothing on amazon.co.uk or dixons.co.uk). I've seen PVRs on sale but they seem to either not have any show related functions you mention (really they're just like normal VCRs in that you set the start and end times, the only differences are they use a hard drive and some let you pause live TV). If you're on SkyTV (UK version of FOXTV) and have a Sky+ box then it will let you scroll through the TV listings (don't know if it covers all channels or just some) and select the shows you want to record but so far as I am aware they don't support topic or actor searches.
Stephen
I'd rather keep my PC and TV/Video as separate items, partly cos I use a laptop as my primary PC. It doesn't seem to solve the changing the channel on my cable box part of the problem. Plus a 22 inch TV is a heck of a lot cheaper than a 22 inch monitor and a PVR is likely to be a lot cheaper than the hardware/software required by this. I'll keep an eye on it tho', might turn out useful.
Stephen
In all seriousness I'd love to be able to download the TV schedules to my PC, locate the shows I want to see (and be prompted about shows featuring actors I like or written/directed by writers/directors I like) then be able to have my TV change channel or my video (or PVR if I had one) start recording at the appropriate time. I don't watch much TV (tend to read or surf the web) but the shows I do watch I like to keep up with. It's really frustrating to find that a new series of a show I like has started (or the previous series is being rerun), an actor I like has a guest spot in an episode of a show I don't normally watch or a film I want to see has been on but I miss it it because I happened to not see any trailers.
For that I'd buy a PVR (alhough it would have to interface to my cable box as well).
Stephen
I haven't measured the squarefootage of the house I'm renting in right now but I'd guess it would be somewhere around the 800 mark. The area could be politely called a slum, a shit hole would be more accurate (rubbish strewn street, badly maintained roads, derelict factory units at the end of the road, rat infested additionally there's a major problem with teenaged and slightly older gangs and racial tension that means that the police won't come into the area after dark). The house itself has no central heating, double glazing, loft insulation or other 'improvements'. About 10 years ago it would have sold for about 20k UKP (about $38 at current exchange rates), 5 years ago for about 60k UKP ($114) and an identical one just down the road from me just went for 160k UKP ($304).
Direct property taxes (council tax) are around 700 ukp pa. Contents only insurance (capped at 5,000 ukp for a total claim) comes to about 300 ukp pa, buildings insurance would be about the same again.
Unfortunately, unless you're very lucky, then a lot of your expenses are only partially within your control. For example if you're working in a particular city then you have to live there (or commute long distances every day which is expensive in and of itself) which means buying or renting a property. Here in the UK over the past decade or so house prices have gone insanely high, what even 5 years ago would have bought you a very nice house with a big garden in a very nice area now won't get you a studio flat in a slum. Salaries have not anywhere near kept pace. Where ever you live you're restricted as to who supplies your water (local monopolies) and usually you're restricted as to who provides your gas and electricity (in theory where ever you are you can have any supplier but in practice very few suppliers cover the whole country).
About half to two thirds of my take home salary goes on things that I cannot directly influence (rent, water, council tax, insurance &c) and much of the rest (e.g. food, clothes, gas, electric, phone, Internet) I could cut it back but only so far (for example I could use my phone less but I have to have one due to work requirements so would still have to pay the standing charge).
Stephen
Even better print up some stickers with a message like "Call now for hot dates in your area: 555-1234" or "Girls ready to take your call 24x7: 555-1234" but with their phone number. Then put the stickers on the inside of the cubicle doors of public and commercial restrooms (pub, mall, bar, gas station, church &c). Not only will the resulting calls jam up their phonelines but given the nature of the calls most of their call centre/reception staff will probably quit. I'm not sure about the US but I do now that in the UK the staff who quit will be able to sue the employer under health and safety legislation on the basis that their trading activities resulted in an unsafe workplace.
Stephen
But how many users or ISPs use RBLs. Since I started using Spamcop a couple of years ago my spam load per day dropped from 300+ to less than 10. I'm probably pretty unusual because I use an RBL, the vast majority of users (and their ISPs) don't.
RBLs are like immunisation. There's little point just immunising a small number of people against a common disease, a lot of people are still going to get sick. You have to immunise every one (or at least as many people as you can). We had a vaccine for Smallpox for literally hundreds of years but it still raged unchecked throughout most of the world. It was only after the mass innoculation programmes that it was restricted to smaller and smaller areas until it was virtually eliminated. If every user, or at least most of them, used an RBL then spamming couldn't work because virtually no one would ever see it.
Another aspect is that when you're getting more than a dozen or so spam mails a day it's simply not feasible to report them all, you'd spend all your time dealing with spam and wouldn't have time for anything else. When that's down to a few a day, the few that haven't made it into the RBL yet, you can report all of them. So, if everyone uses an RBL then very little spam will get through and what little does is far more likely to be reported.
Stephen
The first article I remember reading about it was in an issue of New Scientist from the 1970s. That's a long development cycle!
Stephen
I remember reading an article about vegetable oil being used (mainly for trucks, buses and other larger vehicles). I've also read about ethanol bewing used (mainly for cars and other smaller vehicles). If these micreogenerators could run on ethanol (presumably in the form of methylated spirit) then that would be good.
Stephen
He might have a point tho'. I remember running WordPerfect 5.2 under Windows 3.1 and DOS 5 on a 386SX 25MHz and I remember it running a heck of a lot faster than Word 2000 under Windows 2000 on the 1.2GHz on my desk right now.
Assuming that the code would even run on contemporary processors (as I recall it was 16 bit code, should still run I would have thought, drivers are likely to be the problem) and I could find the installation disks (less likely, I've moved house 5 times since then), it would be interesting to try. Some time ago (1996) I did a C programming course, I remember one of the tutors saying that whenever a new machine came out one of the first tests he'd run was to install a particular pascal compiler and compile a program he wrote in the early 1980s. The code being compiled in the same compiler went from several hours to a few minutes between when he first wrote it and when he talked to us. Obviously this wasn't just a test of processor speed but also included memory speed, bus speed, caching and disk speed as well.
Stephen
There's a good chance that's Chinese coal you're burning.
I'd be most interested in these generators if they ran on vegetable oil. Large areas of South America (especially Brasil) have been using vegetable oil as a major fuel source (especially in the automotive arena) for some time. I'd rather plant sunflowers or corn than drill oil wells.
Stephen
Plus, clustering has a much higher management overhead (on any platform, not just x86) than non-clustered multi-processor/multicore single box solutions. The biggest problems come where different machines in the cluster need to be aware of each other and work around each other (e.g. a database cluster or a service where the same session could hit different parts of the cluster at different times).
The only machine/os combination I've found that did clustering anything like elegantly was VMS on VAX or Alpha. Tru64 came close, it'll be interesting to see how much of that gets into HP-UX. If you've never had to contend with distributed cache and lock management (my main experience is in database where such things are important) then you've never seriously considered suicide by paper shredder. Clusters are a very good way of spending lots of money on consultants and still not having a working system to show for it.
Stephen
The Royal Mail do have people who can authorise the opening of mail (they're not what I would call middle management though, they're regional manager types). This is so that mail can be opened if need be to determine the correct delivery address or if it has been sent back "Return to sender" but there's no sender address on the outside. Or at least that's what my friends who work for Royal Mail tell me.
Stephen
What about the postroom/admin staff at your workplace? How can you be sure they don't steal your mail? Anything that involves people also involves the possibility that those people might be dishonest. Sure you can make sure you don't hire people to positions of trust who have previously demonstrated that they can't be trusted, but that requires firstly that they've already commited an offense and secondly that you can identify them.
Interfering with the Royal Mail is a pretty major offense, technically it's a form of treason. For example if a letter addressed to someone else is delivered to your house (maybe it was wrongly delivered, it's to a previous occupant or it was misaddressed) and you open it then you have commited a crime. The reason the Royal Mail have people at the depots who can authorise the opening of mail is so that if something gets sent back 'return to sender' and there's no sender address on the outside they can have it opened to determine the senders address.
Personally I think a verifiable ID card would be a good idea so long as it could be kept secure (and verifiable) and everyone has one. Maybe something with your name, your photo and some sort of ID number on the front (perhaps blood group or similar info that it might be helpful to have quickly available incase of emergency) for quick checks and a chip inside that holds an encrypted key that links to your records on government/legal systems for more indepth checks. The reason it's important for everyone to have one is that in that situation the sheer volume of data will reduce the ease of spurious searches, it won't stop them but it might make them too expensive to be worth running.
Stephen
Except we don't. Some areas do have CCTV camera surveilance, shopping areas mostly, which tends to be a mixture of police and private (shops monitoring their own store fronts). They are very clearly sign posted with warnings that if you enter that area you will be under CCTV observation.
The problem with the phone cameras is that there is plenty of anecdotal evidence (and photographic evidence) of people taking them into places where a fixed CCTV camera would not be allowed and taking pictures whilst appearing to be making a call or just holding their phone. Apparently there is a roaring trade in photographs of naked children in swimming pool changing areas and of 'up skirt' shots taken with such phones.
I don't think that this proposed law will have any noticable real effect. It's just something so that those responsible for public safety can be seen to be doing something about the problem, without going to the effort of actually doing something about it.
I think a much more effective solution would be to arrest the people using these phones and dump them on some island somewhere until they die.
Stephen