Well, we have a Yellow Sea, Black Sea, White Sea, Red Sea, and all the others are Blue, so now a Green Sea.
Re:Got that finger pointed the wrong way...
on
Beware the Internet
·
· Score: 1
All measurements show increasing quality and length of life. We live in ever-increasing plentitude.
I don't know where you are taking these measurements, but I look around (in the UK) and see seriously decreasing plentitude. While there are plentiful digital devices and other small gadgets (things that do not use much physical material), things that do use much physical material are less plentiful (or more costly, leaving less money for other things) because world resources are limited and there are now so many people to provide.
For a start, land area. New houses here are tiny, in tiny plots. My father in law, a basic manual worker with no savings, was allocated a house 50 years ago with three large bedrooms on a 1/4 acre plot. 10 years ago it was knocked down and 8 flats for "professional" people built in its place. As fuel is running short and its price goes up, there are more and more people in the UK in winter who have inadequate warmth. People here are also eating crappier food than 15-20 years ago (I have noticed it appearing openly on super-market shelves - not just the horsemeat affair).
The problem is compounded by the fashionable paranoia about things like nuclear power stations and supposed poisons. Eg creosote has been banned; I have 200 m of fence to maintain and I shall now be spending a greater proportion of my life maintaining it and repairing as a result - that is not a better quality of life. There are creosote alternatives but they cost much more - so less money for me to spend on other things.
Reading through the comments there isn't too much disagreement about the underlying OS [the disagreement is] with Metro.
Got it in one.
I first used a computer back in 1981 and seen and used a lot of UIs over the years... My typing speed isn't so bad having used all those CLIs over the years.
Me too
[I] am fine with search to find something as that's how I find things on the Internet.
I don't just use the Internet. There is a polarisation here between (shall we say) people who are organised and people who are not. I know where my stuff is, in organised directories, but MS seems to assume that everyone is disorganised and needs to search. We organised people find that insulting and patronising.
Metro with a touchscreen works and in fact for my three year old she finds it awkward that my 2010 Mac Book Pro doesn't have a [touch]screen
Good Lord, take a look at your foot Lord Uxbridge, it seems to have been shot off! So Metro is OK for 3-year-olds. That is what many of us have been saying all along.
Is Metro perfect, no, but at least its a start to move away from a desktop metaphor that was introduced way back when
That is like saying Smartcars are a move away from pick-up trucks. Some of us need or just prefer pick-up trucks. Motor vehicles when they were invented were all pretty similar, then specialised types came out - vans, limos, sports, pick-ups, etc. Same is happening with PCs. Those of us who create stuff rather than just "consume" the internet, or who play full sized games, will continue to provide a market for full-sized PC with mice and keyboards.
How did the takeup of ME compare? That was billed as the "consumer oriented" OS at the time...... At least with ME, there was always a strong sense that it was never intended as much more than a short-term stopgap.
As I recall in those days, queues of people camped on PCWorld's doorstep for a few days before each new Windows release (like they do for Apple stuff today).
I do not recall ME being regarded as a stopgap. The name "ME" even suggested it was forward looking. True, those who knew better recognised it as W95 on a Zimmerframe - one last fling by MS to extract money from the consumer market with a pointless upgrade. I never ran ME, but understand that it was actually worse than 98.
Also, there was no gap to stop. Windows NT was already available and had been runnable on entry-level PCs' for some time (and did, in the form of XP just a year later). It was games compatibility that kept the crappy 95/98/ME bloodline going, but MS needed to tell the games writers to port their stuff to NT/XP sooner or later; and they should have done it sooner.
OEMs cannot make a living by selling PCs without Windows at its bulk discounted price, nor without a Windows certification sticker on it.
The only consumers that care about Windows Certification are enterprise customers... Seriously.. do you think your grandmother makes sure that the laptop has Windows Certification before she buys it?
Yes. Possible scene in PCWorld:-
Grandmother/JoePublic : "Nice colour, but does it run Windows?"
Salesman : "Of course it does madam/sir, they all do!"
GM/JP : "So why doesnt it have that 'Designed for Windows' sticker on it like those others do?"
Salesman : "Just a detail madam/sir, Microsoft are very strict, just one minor thing, nothing to worry..."
GM/JP : "Not sure about that then"
Salesman : "You mentioned those others, that's a nice one over there...."
I don't see much of a problem - it only affects people who wants to dual boot and that is totally last century. Boot Linux and run Windows in a VM.
It is not to do with dual boot, it is to do with booting anything at all. This is a motherboard chip feature. Booting from a live CD will be impossible, and even if you wipe your HD, trying to install anything else will be impossible - if Secure Boot is enabled.
You can disable Secure Boot (FTTB, but I suspect MS will hope to clobber even that in the not too distant future), and I will myself. But it will deter people from trying out Linux tentatively and perhaps liking it. That's how I started, and MS hate people doing that.
[AC wrote] you just lost your license to distribute OEM Windows copies.
[Rockoon wrote] No you didn't.....you just lost Windows Certification.
Amounts to the same thing. With the exception of a tiny niche market, OEMs cannot make a living by selling PCs without Windows at its bulk discounted price, nor without a Windows certification sticker on it. While it would not bother me, Joe Public just won't buy a PC unless they see "Designed for Windows" on it.. Withdrawing either of those priviledges are weapons Microsoft has to control the market.
I followed the link to their website and the first thing up is their demand my email address. WTF? I cannot just browse their site without them demanding my email?
Next thing, they demand I upgrade my browser. That's my business; it's their business to design their website to use HTML standards.
Do these jerks seriously expect people to sign on after a start like that?
FTFA:- "'dazzle,' a type of camouflage used during World War II to make it hard to detect the size and shape of warships."
It was first used in WW1; pink, black, white, and lime green in jagged stripes and patches, together with rigged canvas jagged shapes between the funnels and masts to try to confuse enemy optical rangefinders. Another trick was to paint the profile of a smaller ship on the side of a larger one.
.. you managed to write such a long post while completely ignoring the point of what I said. Please don't reply to me again without reading what I say. The problem has nothing to do with complacency, vigilance, or paranoia; it has everything to do with a cost/benefit analysis.
I have read it again and see that I was picking up two of your points : (1) "we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain" - which I why I raised the subject of compacency, and (2) you said that threat from within one's own government is greater than threat from foreign invasion - which I responded to without much enlargement in my last sentence. I did not see anything about cost/benefit.
"Threat" from your own government might be a more continuous undercurrent, while foreign invasions are occasional events; but the latter are generally far more devastating, and indiscriminate about who the suffering falls on.
The [European] Union's influence... is absolutely essential for making life bearable for millions of people. As an example... a person moving to another state does [not] have to exchange their drivers licence any more (in my case, I would have had to change it 3 times during the last 5 years if the old rules would have applied).
Having to change a driving licence if you move to a new state your definition of "Unbearable" !? Well I have moved house, not between states, several times and it is almost unbearable dealing with removals companies, estate agents and solicitors; applying for a driving licence is trivial by comparison.
Then the vast majority of people in the world find life "bearable" without moving out of their state at all. Some people (the survivors) even found living in Auschwitz "bearable" (or they would not have survived).
Reminds me of the story of a guy rejected by his girlfriend. "I cannot bear to live without you!" he said. "So how come you are still alive then?" she asked.
In all honestly I think we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain and hacking their computers.
It's not about morals, it's that at some point, the threat from having a dark, hidden organization inside the government, operating away from the light of disclosure, becomes greater than the threat of foreign countries invading. It's been a long time since Britain attacked us.
Complacency is not a good basis for running security organisations. Vigilance on their part is not paranoia, it is a professional responsibility to look everywhere. I have been in the British military, and assure you that plans to invade just about every other place in the world are created - often as staff training excercises and then filed away. These may or may not be practical with the UK's current level of forces, but for example, if a need suddenly arose to invade some West Indian island whose dictator started to massacre his people, there would be no need to waste time preparing plans, an existing one would be dusted off, tweaked a bit for the present circumstances, and used. No doubt soneone at Sandhurst (UK Army staff college) has more than once posed the rather hypothetical question "How would one go about invading the USA?", even if the answer would require the alliance of France, Germany and Russia.
Similarly I would not take it personally if the USA had a contingency plan filed away to invade the UK. It might not be so hypothetical either as the UK is not the nation it was in WW2 or the cold war. For example there is an increasingly large Muslim contingent who now feel confident enough to demonstate at UK military funerals, of all things. The British thought that they could make immigrants into more "Englishmen" but that doesn't happen - so, politically, anything could happen here within the next generation.
As for our own governments being a greater threat than the threat of foreign invasion, despite some examples you could give me I am afraid you are lacking in imagination or much knowledge of history.
Surely Mortgage Investors Corporation pulled in far more than $7.5 Million with this fraud.
I'm not so sure about that. These are calls to people who asked not to be called, therefore they were more likely to be pissed off than to buy into their crap. I am suprised that even calls made at random result in a net gain for the calling company, because for every customer they gain I guess there is at least one thoroughly pissed off by them.
There are several companies I would never buy from because I got cold calls from them, and moreover I troll them whenever I can:- go to Hell Everest Double Glazing and Talk-Talk, for example. I give out their phone numbers (their private office ones which I found out) whenever I can to other salesmen, among other things.
I'm not some list monger. If I called you then we met in person, were properly introduced, discussed some matter you expressed interest in having more info about and you shared your number for that purpose.
That type of call is not the subject of this discussion. Someone mod this guy "off topic" please.
I'm thoroughly confident that if I ever had to actually (or virtually) see myself as others see me interacting in a social situation, I'd never go to a party again.
Don't know why this was modded funny. Someone once recorded me singing which I did not realise until they played it back (amid Homeric mirth among bystanders). I have never sung a word since - seriously. That was just a sound recording - hate to think what effect a video would have on me.
Any engineering course worth its weight DOES teach a healthy skepticism.
Agreed. Moreover, engineers are already more sceptical by nature than humanities people.
Now quoting FTFA itself:
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific."
No, that is not my experience in life. Techies tend to be are far more critical of "authority" and "management" than others are.
Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions"
Yes, it was for a time, peaking around 1950, but the human race has since become somewhat disillusioned with science an is now tending back towards mysticism. One sympton of this is that it is becoming harder to fill science courses at uni. Another is the tendency for technical things such as phones to have hidden any sign of how they were made or could be repaired (Apple boast about it) - people do not want to be reminded that their phone is technical, rather that it was formed by some kind of magic.
".. to capture enough energy to push itself through the ocean.."
You do not need to dumb things down on this site, Slashdotters are not all daft. You mean "to propel it", and you mean "power" not "energy" here.
"An impressive 512 square meters.. of photovoltaic cells"
Impressively large, impressively small or impressively what we would expect? That sounds a lot on a 85t vessel, which is tiny for a "ship" - unless it is like a raft or catamaran, it would only be about 30m long and 6m wide - so the cells are about 3x the deck area; where do they put them? (the link is/. -ed). So I guess you mean large. I'd be more impressed if the area was small, which it is not
I don't care about being tracked so I can be served useful ads. As a choice between seeing useful ads and non useful ones, I'd prefer to see useful ones. Remind me again why I should care?
Sounds like you do care - you care that you should receive ads useful to yourself.
That is why there should be a choice. You will choose tracking, fine. I will refuse it.
No, jail is useless if it does not rehabilitate its convicts
Eh? A major reason why I (and no doubt many others) do not commit offences is that I do not wish to have time taken out of my life spent in jail. The other reasons are to do with ethics.
What certainly does NOT come into my decision is whether or not I would be "rehabilitated" in jail. I do not even know what it means or involves (brain washing?) so it can hardly be a factor.
This is at the same level of silliness as the figure I heard to maintain one railway level crossing in the UK - £17,000 per year (17,000 pounds in case that doesn't render for you). Yet, having lived in the UK all my life I have never once seen a level crossing undergoing any maintenance; they are obviously extremely reliable and don't need much. So where does the 17,000 go? No doubt replacement parts are very expensive, but as I said I have never seen anything being replaced. The figure is crazy, even allowing for some parts of the system being out of sight (circuits back at the control centre?).
As an experienced engineer (have even been a railway engineer myself) I would love to take over the maintenance of say half a dozen of these crossings at 17,000 for the lot.
A little over a decade ago,... every time I locked my car, a car across the street would unlock.
About that time, my boss (who had the usual boring company car in the usual colour) returned to a large car park, thought he found his car, and unlocked it with the remote. He was actually sitting in the drivers seat before he realised it was not his car.
It is not just about the quality and other tech aspects of the camera. There is a world of difference in the ability of a specialist photographer to anticipate and shoot at the decisive moment, with good framing, and that of someone just hauled in to do the job. People like Don McCullin [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McCullin] would probably still have got cracking photos even with a Box Brownie, while a typical hack writer would probably produce laughably amateurish pics even with a top-of-the-range Nikon.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we have a Yellow Sea, Black Sea, White Sea, Red Sea, and all the others are Blue, so now a Green Sea.
All measurements show increasing quality and length of life. We live in ever-increasing plentitude.
I don't know where you are taking these measurements, but I look around (in the UK) and see seriously decreasing plentitude. While there are plentiful digital devices and other small gadgets (things that do not use much physical material), things that do use much physical material are less plentiful (or more costly, leaving less money for other things) because world resources are limited and there are now so many people to provide.
For a start, land area. New houses here are tiny, in tiny plots. My father in law, a basic manual worker with no savings, was allocated a house 50 years ago with three large bedrooms on a 1/4 acre plot. 10 years ago it was knocked down and 8 flats for "professional" people built in its place. As fuel is running short and its price goes up, there are more and more people in the UK in winter who have inadequate warmth. People here are also eating crappier food than 15-20 years ago (I have noticed it appearing openly on super-market shelves - not just the horsemeat affair).
The problem is compounded by the fashionable paranoia about things like nuclear power stations and supposed poisons. Eg creosote has been banned; I have 200 m of fence to maintain and I shall now be spending a greater proportion of my life maintaining it and repairing as a result - that is not a better quality of life. There are creosote alternatives but they cost much more - so less money for me to spend on other things.
I could go on, but you get the point.
Reading through the comments there isn't too much disagreement about the underlying OS [the disagreement is] with Metro.
Got it in one.
I first used a computer back in 1981 and seen and used a lot of UIs over the years ... My typing speed isn't so bad having used all those CLIs over the years.
Me too
[I] am fine with search to find something as that's how I find things on the Internet.
I don't just use the Internet. There is a polarisation here between (shall we say) people who are organised and people who are not. I know where my stuff is, in organised directories, but MS seems to assume that everyone is disorganised and needs to search. We organised people find that insulting and patronising.
Metro with a touchscreen works and in fact for my three year old she finds it awkward that my 2010 Mac Book Pro doesn't have a [touch]screen
Good Lord, take a look at your foot Lord Uxbridge, it seems to have been shot off! So Metro is OK for 3-year-olds. That is what many of us have been saying all along.
Is Metro perfect, no, but at least its a start to move away from a desktop metaphor that was introduced way back when
That is like saying Smartcars are a move away from pick-up trucks. Some of us need or just prefer pick-up trucks. Motor vehicles when they were invented were all pretty similar, then specialised types came out - vans, limos, sports, pick-ups, etc. Same is happening with PCs. Those of us who create stuff rather than just "consume" the internet, or who play full sized games, will continue to provide a market for full-sized PC with mice and keyboards.
How did the takeup of ME compare? That was billed as the "consumer oriented" OS at the time ...... At least with ME, there was always a strong sense that it was never intended as much more than a short-term stopgap.
As I recall in those days, queues of people camped on PCWorld's doorstep for a few days before each new Windows release (like they do for Apple stuff today).
I do not recall ME being regarded as a stopgap. The name "ME" even suggested it was forward looking. True, those who knew better recognised it as W95 on a Zimmerframe - one last fling by MS to extract money from the consumer market with a pointless upgrade. I never ran ME, but understand that it was actually worse than 98.
Also, there was no gap to stop. Windows NT was already available and had been runnable on entry-level PCs' for some time (and did, in the form of XP just a year later). It was games compatibility that kept the crappy 95/98/ME bloodline going, but MS needed to tell the games writers to port their stuff to NT/XP sooner or later; and they should have done it sooner.
OEMs cannot make a living by selling PCs without Windows at its bulk discounted price, nor without a Windows certification sticker on it.
The only consumers that care about Windows Certification are enterprise customers... Seriously.. do you think your grandmother makes sure that the laptop has Windows Certification before she buys it?
Yes. Possible scene in PCWorld :-
..."
...."
Grandmother/JoePublic : "Nice colour, but does it run Windows?"
Salesman : "Of course it does madam/sir, they all do!"
GM/JP : "So why doesnt it have that 'Designed for Windows' sticker on it like those others do?"
Salesman : "Just a detail madam/sir, Microsoft are very strict, just one minor thing, nothing to worry
GM/JP : "Not sure about that then"
Salesman : "You mentioned those others, that's a nice one over there
I don't see much of a problem - it only affects people who wants to dual boot and that is totally last century. Boot Linux and run Windows in a VM.
It is not to do with dual boot, it is to do with booting anything at all. This is a motherboard chip feature. Booting from a live CD will be impossible, and even if you wipe your HD, trying to install anything else will be impossible - if Secure Boot is enabled.
You can disable Secure Boot (FTTB, but I suspect MS will hope to clobber even that in the not too distant future), and I will myself. But it will deter people from trying out Linux tentatively and perhaps liking it. That's how I started, and MS hate people doing that.
[AC wrote] you just lost your license to distribute OEM Windows copies.
[Rockoon wrote] No you didn't... ..you just lost Windows Certification.
Amounts to the same thing. With the exception of a tiny niche market, OEMs cannot make a living by selling PCs without Windows at its bulk discounted price, nor without a Windows certification sticker on it. While it would not bother me, Joe Public just won't buy a PC unless they see "Designed for Windows" on it.. Withdrawing either of those priviledges are weapons Microsoft has to control the market.
I followed the link to their website and the first thing up is their demand my email address. WTF? I cannot just browse their site without them demanding my email?
Next thing, they demand I upgrade my browser. That's my business; it's their business to design their website to use HTML standards.
Do these jerks seriously expect people to sign on after a start like that?
FTFA :- "'dazzle,' a type of camouflage used during World War II to make it hard to detect the size and shape of warships."
It was first used in WW1; pink, black, white, and lime green in jagged stripes and patches, together with rigged canvas jagged shapes between the funnels and masts to try to confuse enemy optical rangefinders. Another trick was to paint the profile of a smaller ship on the side of a larger one.
.. you managed to write such a long post while completely ignoring the point of what I said. Please don't reply to me again without reading what I say. The problem has nothing to do with complacency, vigilance, or paranoia; it has everything to do with a cost/benefit analysis.
I have read it again and see that I was picking up two of your points : (1) "we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain" - which I why I raised the subject of compacency, and (2) you said that threat from within one's own government is greater than threat from foreign invasion - which I responded to without much enlargement in my last sentence. I did not see anything about cost/benefit.
"Threat" from your own government might be a more continuous undercurrent, while foreign invasions are occasional events; but the latter are generally far more devastating, and indiscriminate about who the suffering falls on.
The [European] Union's influence ... is absolutely essential for making life bearable for millions of people. As an example ... a person moving to another state does [not] have to exchange their drivers licence any more (in my case, I would have had to change it 3 times during the last 5 years if the old rules would have applied).
Having to change a driving licence if you move to a new state your definition of "Unbearable" !? Well I have moved house, not between states, several times and it is almost unbearable dealing with removals companies, estate agents and solicitors; applying for a driving licence is trivial by comparison.
Then the vast majority of people in the world find life "bearable" without moving out of their state at all. Some people (the survivors) even found living in Auschwitz "bearable" (or they would not have survived).
Reminds me of the story of a guy rejected by his girlfriend. "I cannot bear to live without you!" he said. "So how come you are still alive then?" she asked.
In all honestly I think we can defend ourselves perfectly well without spying on Britain and hacking their computers. It's not about morals, it's that at some point, the threat from having a dark, hidden organization inside the government, operating away from the light of disclosure, becomes greater than the threat of foreign countries invading. It's been a long time since Britain attacked us.
Complacency is not a good basis for running security organisations. Vigilance on their part is not paranoia, it is a professional responsibility to look everywhere. I have been in the British military, and assure you that plans to invade just about every other place in the world are created - often as staff training excercises and then filed away. These may or may not be practical with the UK's current level of forces, but for example, if a need suddenly arose to invade some West Indian island whose dictator started to massacre his people, there would be no need to waste time preparing plans, an existing one would be dusted off, tweaked a bit for the present circumstances, and used. No doubt soneone at Sandhurst (UK Army staff college) has more than once posed the rather hypothetical question "How would one go about invading the USA?", even if the answer would require the alliance of France, Germany and Russia.
Similarly I would not take it personally if the USA had a contingency plan filed away to invade the UK. It might not be so hypothetical either as the UK is not the nation it was in WW2 or the cold war. For example there is an increasingly large Muslim contingent who now feel confident enough to demonstate at UK military funerals, of all things. The British thought that they could make immigrants into more "Englishmen" but that doesn't happen - so, politically, anything could happen here within the next generation.
As for our own governments being a greater threat than the threat of foreign invasion, despite some examples you could give me I am afraid you are lacking in imagination or much knowledge of history.
Surely Mortgage Investors Corporation pulled in far more than $7.5 Million with this fraud.
I'm not so sure about that. These are calls to people who asked not to be called, therefore they were more likely to be pissed off than to buy into their crap. I am suprised that even calls made at random result in a net gain for the calling company, because for every customer they gain I guess there is at least one thoroughly pissed off by them.
:- go to Hell Everest Double Glazing and Talk-Talk, for example. I give out their phone numbers (their private office ones which I found out) whenever I can to other salesmen, among other things.
There are several companies I would never buy from because I got cold calls from them, and moreover I troll them whenever I can
I'm not some list monger. If I called you then we met in person, were properly introduced, discussed some matter you expressed interest in having more info about and you shared your number for that purpose.
That type of call is not the subject of this discussion. Someone mod this guy "off topic" please.
The FTC having won the case, legally it is now fact surely?
I'm thoroughly confident that if I ever had to actually (or virtually) see myself as others see me interacting in a social situation, I'd never go to a party again.
Don't know why this was modded funny. Someone once recorded me singing which I did not realise until they played it back (amid Homeric mirth among bystanders). I have never sung a word since - seriously. That was just a sound recording - hate to think what effect a video would have on me.
Any engineering course worth its weight DOES teach a healthy skepticism.
Agreed. Moreover, engineers are already more sceptical by nature than humanities people.
:
Now quoting FTFA itself
The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific."
No, that is not my experience in life. Techies tend to be are far more critical of "authority" and "management" than others are.
Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions"
Yes, it was for a time, peaking around 1950, but the human race has since become somewhat disillusioned with science an is now tending back towards mysticism. One sympton of this is that it is becoming harder to fill science courses at uni. Another is the tendency for technical things such as phones to have hidden any sign of how they were made or could be repaired (Apple boast about it) - people do not want to be reminded that their phone is technical, rather that it was formed by some kind of magic.
FTFA :-
"The 89,000 kg (nearly 100 ton) ship"
.."
.. of photovoltaic cells"
/. -ed). So I guess you mean large. I'd be more impressed if the area was small, which it is not
Why not just say 85 tonnes?
".. to capture enough energy to push itself through the ocean
You do not need to dumb things down on this site, Slashdotters are not all daft. You mean "to propel it", and you mean "power" not "energy" here.
"An impressive 512 square meters
Impressively large, impressively small or impressively what we would expect? That sounds a lot on a 85t vessel, which is tiny for a "ship" - unless it is like a raft or catamaran, it would only be about 30m long and 6m wide - so the cells are about 3x the deck area; where do they put them? (the link is
I don't care about being tracked so I can be served useful ads. As a choice between seeing useful ads and non useful ones, I'd prefer to see useful ones. Remind me again why I should care?
Sounds like you do care - you care that you should receive ads useful to yourself.
That is why there should be a choice. You will choose tracking, fine. I will refuse it.
No, jail is useless if it does not rehabilitate its convicts
Eh? A major reason why I (and no doubt many others) do not commit offences is that I do not wish to have time taken out of my life spent in jail. The other reasons are to do with ethics.
What certainly does NOT come into my decision is whether or not I would be "rehabilitated" in jail. I do not even know what it means or involves (brain washing?) so it can hardly be a factor.
There are worse things than assembling IKEA furniture.
Yes indeed :-
1) Going round one of their shops
2) Using their furniture.
This is at the same level of silliness as the figure I heard to maintain one railway level crossing in the UK - £17,000 per year (17,000 pounds in case that doesn't render for you). Yet, having lived in the UK all my life I have never once seen a level crossing undergoing any maintenance; they are obviously extremely reliable and don't need much. So where does the 17,000 go? No doubt replacement parts are very expensive, but as I said I have never seen anything being replaced. The figure is crazy, even allowing for some parts of the system being out of sight (circuits back at the control centre?).
As an experienced engineer (have even been a railway engineer myself) I would love to take over the maintenance of say half a dozen of these crossings at 17,000 for the lot.
A little over a decade ago, ... every time I locked my car, a car across the street would unlock.
About that time, my boss (who had the usual boring company car in the usual colour) returned to a large car park, thought he found his car, and unlocked it with the remote. He was actually sitting in the drivers seat before he realised it was not his car.
It is not just about the quality and other tech aspects of the camera. There is a world of difference in the ability of a specialist photographer to anticipate and shoot at the decisive moment, with good framing, and that of someone just hauled in to do the job. People like Don McCullin [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McCullin] would probably still have got cracking photos even with a Box Brownie, while a typical hack writer would probably produce laughably amateurish pics even with a top-of-the-range Nikon.
First mention of Half-Life. Its drones are what sprang to my mind immediately.
I find the shotgun is the best way to bring them down.