Pity, it works rather well here, I think the difference is that over here it's set up in such a way that a lower road toll equates to a profit for the state.
I'll point out that while there are unfairly lowered speed limits, as well as speed limits lowered not to meet safety standards but to make neighbors happy*, but for the most part if you follow NTSB recommendations you'll be very safe, and 'most' local traffic authorities are fixated on being safe. We've had some incidents where yellows have been shortened to generate more revenue from red light cameras, but for the most part judges have been very unsympathetic to red light cameras when this is discovered - and they're unsympathetic even when it's found that they didn't shorten them, but deliberately selected lights that weren't following NTSB standards for whatever reason.
There are constant improvements in the states safety wise, including demanding safer vehicles. As a result we've managed to get our annual fatalities down to just over 30k/year from a high of over 50k/year despite ever more vehicles on the road. One of the more interesting aspects is the psychology of driving that they consider today - most people drive at what they 'feel' is a safe speed, thus there's various psychological tricks you can use to make sure their 'feeling' matches up with reality. Remember, not an expert, just read some articles on it.
Additionally, remember that the USA is generally much more concerned with 'internal affairs' than other countries and we're a lot more fragmented legal wise. We're more like the EU than the UK between our 50 states. As a result we 'air our dirty laundry' a lot more.
I think that the difference in the end is more flavor than substantiative. Liability coverage is also mandatory here in the states, though the details vary.
*One interstate corridor was put in over protest, and part of the deal cut was lower speed limits in an effort to limit noise. Later studies have shown that not only do lower speeds not significantly limit noise, people aren't following them anyways.
Also, a major difference to the USA is that all moving violation fines go into consolidated state revenue.
Not entirely accurate; in some states they still belong to the issuing county/department, in some states the money is split, and in some cases it goes to state revenue. The whole 'go to the state' thing was passed mostly due to the vagrancies of various towns trying to fund themselves via a 'road tax', rigorous enforcement of speed limits with unusually high fines targeted specifically at passers-through.
As a result the problem isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still there, especially in a few states.
Speed limits have virtually nothing to do with the quality of the road surface. It's about hidden driveways, pedestrians, wildlife, oversized vehicles, bends, trees, sun glare, ect.
Given that the Op specified "federal interstates", I can state that at least in the USA the designed safe speed for a highway takes far more into account than just the 'quality of the road surface'. For example, above 55mph driveways are outright forbidden, and 65+ you have to have on/off entry merges that allow entering vehicles to speed up to the posted limit before merging and conversely slow before exiting. Pedestrians are typically forbidden from being on the road - if there's significant need for them to be able to cross, they'll put in a under/overpass for them to cross on. Even controlled intersections are forbidden - again, roads go over/under. When you hit 75 mph, 'oversize vehicles' are handled more by the road being at least 4 lanes - and while you don't really see it at those speeds, but the lanes themselves are wider, thus 'oversize' isn't quite so oversize anymore. I've seen plenty of oversize vehicles that fit comfortably between the lines on the highway.
I'm not a highway designer, but there are additional considerations like maximum curve, slope, and such, all of which becomes much gentler as design speed increases. Then you get some areas like Texas that imposes a different speed limit at night than they do during the day - when sight limit to avoid unexpected obstacles like wildlife is really the only limit to how fast you can go.
So while the authorities may be "unfairly" force drivers slow down in specific circumstances, it's certainly not because they are short of a dime. There will never be a zero road toll as long as there are humans, the question is, and always will be - what is an acceptable toll, where do we stop and say that's as good as it gets?
Come to the states. Unfairly lowered speed limits around specific towns with more than 80% of their police force dedicated to writing speeding tickets in a couple spots, 99% to those passing through, are known. It might be mostly a US phenonemon, but it's very well known here.
It's in the article, just buried. I'm afraid that the 'life equation' is shaping up that life, much less intelligent life, is likely to be more than 5k ly apart on average. It's rare.
If we're to have any hope of sending something off, or even seriously sending some sort of probe off, it's going to have to be within a hundred light years. I figure we've checked those with a relative 'fine toothed comb' already. Being able to 'look' at them with over 10X the resolution due to the OOM closer distance would make it easy.
, so noising them out would not take very much signal.
You're still going to be the source of far louder signal than the satellites overhead, depending on how sophisticated your jammer is. I remember from somewhere that a non-discriminatory jammer* needs to transmit at least 10X as 'loudly' as it's source.
An AC suggested that they simply need to jam until they can get rid of the tracker, but my though is that that probably requires stopping, and if they're tracking your jamming, you're not going to get to stop long before the cops block the area off. For that matter if the device uses the cellular network to provide it's location, there shouldn't be anything stopping it from still providing coarse network based location, which is again 'close enough' for the police to set up blockades and locate the vehicle relatively quickly. They might need to check a block rather than a parking spot. To prevent this they'd need a cellular jammer as well, which would indeed need to be higher powered than the GPS jammer(easier to track). For that matter, at that point you don't NEED the GPS jammer because you're blocking it from talking.
Of course, all this could be rendered quite moot if the device doesn't use the cellular network, or even just has a backup transmitter to act as a more traditional homing beacon on a 'nondisclosed frequency'. Now you either need a frequency analyzer and an adjustible jammer(remember you're doing this while involved in a high speed chase...), or a very high power multi-frequency one that will probably attract the military's attention. It could even be multi-purpose: 1. GPS Jammed - coarse network from cellular systems, 2. Cellular jammed - use alternate frequency system to transmit GPS coords 3. Both jammed - transmit what it can on alternate, basically traditional homing beacon.
More 'options' present themselves the more I think about it. For example, why not hook into the satellite phone system as well?
*IE it just transmits noise as opposed to something that's targeted at an application, like some wireless network jammers that actually spam disconnect notices instead of just noise. Think of it as the difference between a network attack that works by trying to flood the network connections as opposed to a syn flood.
I had to read the article a couple times, but given that KOI-351 is 2.5k ly from here, I think we're looking at something like 25M years for the fastest intercept we could currently manage.
Even at lightspeed we wouldn't be trading letters anytime soon.
You're overthinking the issue. If they're jamming GPS that means they're transmitting. If you're transmitting all they need is equipment to track the jammer. They stop jamming and you go back to tracking the tracker, they jam you track the jammer.
Not BlueStrat, but going by population: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix
The two that I wouldn't peg as 'most onerous anti-gun laws' would be Houston and Phoenix. Going down the list, I'd have to pull #8 San Diego and #10 San Jose to get six 'extremely anti-gun' cities. Also, it might seem strange but Texas doesn't exactly have the most liberal(IE allowing) gun laws in the state. There are a number that don't require permits at all for CCW, open carry is illegal in most of Texas, etc...
One way I was thinking of to solve the independent ISP issue is, everyone who pays taxes is given the fiber connection by the city government, and the city provides a city wide WAN that is not by default connected to the internet.
On the other hand at this point the cheaper option is to have the city WAN offer everyone a certain baseline to 'the internet', maybe 1mb, with the option to pay an additional fee for a bigger pipe.
Otherwise, well, what are the ISPs really offering? A patch cable from the wan to a leased line colocated in one of the switching rooms? The 'last mile(somebody else said in the USA it's equivalent to 17 miles)' is the most expensive bit.
How much would electric cars costs go down with mass production and a build-out of recharging infrastructure?
I figure you might get another 20% or so off the price of the equivalent of a Model S. The biggest expense is the battery pack, and Tesla is already buying commodity cells, such as are used in laptop batteries. The most economical per kwh/most produced size at that.
The recharging infrastructure is branching out and spreading relatively fast, though I'm not happy with how propriatory the tesla stations are.
How much safer would the cars be with just a bit more research and testing if there was a trillion dollar initiative (on the order of the Interstate Highway initiative of the 1950s)?
A trillion dollar initiative isn't 'a bit more R&D'. To put it in perspective, a trillion dollars should be sufficient to build enough nuclear power plants to replace every existing nuclear & coal plant inside the USA. A trillion dollars, amortizied over 30 years is approximately $1M per fatality using current accident rates. So if your $1T preventented EVERY death over the next 30 years it'd be at a cost of $1M per person saved. Probably worthy, but I don't think it'd stop that many(though the injury reduction would help pay for it). As for the Interstate Highway System, the estimated cost is less than half of that, and provided capabilities, not just safety.
How soon would be have fusion energy to power these cars with another trillion dollar initiative (a slashdot article a while back said we were US$80 billion away)?
That would probably be a 'too many cooks' amount of money
If we can spend trillions on Iraq (including future obligations like to care for injured soldiers), and trillions for wall street bailouts, and trillions for "quantiative easing" as mostly a gift to the banks, shouldn't be able to put a couple trillion into upgrading the US transportation system which is still at the core of US commerce and defense?
Iraq & Afghanistan are over decades, of course, you can't just toss this money at something and 'get it done now'. Especially when you're dealing with physical assets and not electron shuffling that bailouts and such actually consist of.
To take it in another angle, ask yourself why Europe, China, and other countries that are nearly as capable of tossing 'trillions' around like you propose aren't? It'd benefit them as well, after all. In some ways they're in a better situation to make such as shift than we are. Besides, the world has already spent 'trillions' on vehicle safety - Top Gear did a piece a few years ago about the difference between a top rated car that earned an 'A' and a 'B'. People walk away from accidents today that would have had them 'dead right there' even a decade ago, even in the cheapest of cars.
My answer is that the problem is manyfold - there's only so many resources you can devote to the problem, we've hit reducing returns for vehicle safety(IE it costs more and more per life saved/injury prevented) without a drastic shift in methodology(such as moving towards self-driving cars). Said alternate methodologies range from 'not developed yet' like self driving to 'Cost trillions in infrastructure modifications' like PRT.
On the military - some of that 'planning to refight the last war' is to ensure that we don't have to refight the previous war - groups were only forced into asymetric warfare because we're so good at symetric warfare.
How many varieties of vehicles do people really want?
If a municipality wants to instal their own system AT&T tells the state legislators that providing phone and internet has so little profit that without the income from that municipality AT&T will have to stop providing service to the entire state. The state sues the municipality and the state police make sure no equipment rolls.
Which is why I mentioned the law thing... Yes, you'd probably need enough municipalities in sufficient different districts in order to force enough senators to support their initiatives, but with enough pressure(grass root campaigns) it can be done.
And yes, I've heard of plenty of situations like yours.
Do you really want to be running individual strands of fiber back home for 49 miles? You're going to need a huge facility for the patch panels for any decently populated area if you run it that long, even if you have unpowered neighborhood collection points where the 2-6 strands you run to individual homes* are collected up into bigger bundles.
It's a balance - and in many other areas far more people are living in multifamily dwellings(apartments & condos) rather than single family homes. It's relatively easy to do the necessary upgrades there.
*It's cheaper to run extra strands than worry about having to run more
The exact same thing was said in regards to power and telecom. We figured out how to make it work.
I've read this a couple times, which part are you arguing against? The home-runs? You don't home-run power though. For that matter you don't 'home run' water or sewer either. If you're thinking that I think that fiber can't be economically run to 'every'* home, you're incorrect. I simply think that 'home runs' aren't ecnomical, in that you're going to need satellite stations. IE there's lots of cities where the 'last mile' might actually be 10 miles or more.
Once you have large numbers of satellite collection points, because of how spread out you are, leasing to independent ISP's becomes a lot more complicated, to the point that offering the rest of the connection, that you propose having independent ISPs doing, is actually the easiest part. Ergo it makes sense to keep it one business. Then the question becomes one of 'how do I prevent the company from becoming a money-grubbing leech?'. Answer: 'Not for Profit' Customer owned Cooperative. Which, as I said, has given me the best service and price over every other utility model I've had to deal with.
As for 'telecom' - We only sort-of made it work for telecom. While we certainly were able to get better than 99.99% of households phone access(only one aspect of 'telecom'), we never really saw extreme cost savings.
*Every in this case being defined as roughly 99.99% of households
However, since there is no regulation, you'd expect the locations where you actually have a population density to be thriving with competition and low prices.
No regulation? Are you kidding? Have you been reading this thread? There's HUGE loads of regulation when it comes to running wire through municipalities. There are issues when it comes to right of ways. Dig permits. Outright non-competes with right of way permits auctioned out on 50+ year contracts, etc...
It's about time the USA stopped worrying about communism or "too much regulation" and started to mandate price limits unless at least three independent services would offer full service for something as important as access to the internet.
Look up what happens when you simply mandate price caps. Some might get cheaper service, but the vast majority are simply told 'not available'. The REAL solutions are a bit more complicated. My favorite is to 'simply' set up local internet cooperatives that DO have access to right-aways. Break the old non-compete contracts if necessary(IE pass a law).
Many municipalities are too spread out for economic home-runs even for fiber.
My personal preference, having lived in 4 different areas, is for telecommunications to be handled by a local cooperative, otherwise known as a 'customer owned business'.
I've received utilities from commercial companies, government and employee owned, as well as cooperatives. The Coops have always had the best customer service, price vs performance, etc...
Hmm... 1. $30k for a 'luxury' auto is probably unattainable. $30k gets you a not-quite baseline Taurus, Malibu, Impala, Avalon, etc... Even a basline Tesla S is over $60k today, and the price has dropped. 2. 'Reducing some of the defense budget' - easy to say, but as I work in defense(AD USAF) I can say that it's complicated to reduce the defense budget right. To put it bluntly we need to be allowed to reduce platforms if you're going to reduce spending - Fewer bases, ships, planes, and tanks to make it short. Congress doesn't like letting us do that. 3. I readily acknowledge that the US Federal Government alone spends almost enough on healthcare to provide universal coverage for all US Citizens if we could reduce our spending per person down to that of the EU average. When I last looked the shortfall was under $100 per person. 4. How do you define safe? Teslas are still traditionally driven vehicles, no reason to believe that the accident rate will be that much less. While they're certainly safer on average in an accident, doubling the average cost per vehicle will offset a lot of the prevented injuries and deaths. For that matter the situation can become quite complex as you convert deaths into expensive medical bills*. Not that I'm against reducing accidents, but it's what I tend to call a 'freakonomics' point, like smoking - where the vast majority of smokers still make it to retirement, but die quickly enough that their healthcare and reitrement payments are actually less than non-smokers, making them cheaper for pension funds. 5. However, I'm all for pushing auto-drive vehicles, but the technology isn't there yet. Before I saw the progress on auto-drive tech, I was pushing for PRT(Personal Rapid Transit) which is a ultra-light rail(3-5 people per pod) system with individually powered and routed cars. 6. Not as big of a chunk of our military goes towards defending oil supplies as you think. Speaking from the inside, the real situation is a lot more complicated. 7. I disagree on how similar technology between credit card processing and radar guidance on a car would be.
Roughly speaking, I'd say that we don't have the technology to release a self-driving car that would reduce accidents as much as you say, much less one that can be built as cheaply as you say. Instead I figure you'd end up with vehicles that are the equivalent of the 'common cars' produced by the USSR and other communist block countries - more expensive, less safe and operational than their commercially produced counterparts.
That's BEFORE getting into the problems with waste that occur when you give people people stuff for free - they tend to not value it like they would if they have to invest effort into obtaining it.
After that, you have the 'problems' of personal preference. Do I need extra cargo space, room for more passangers, towing, off-road, hostile climate, etc...?
*Sadly, it's quite possible for an injured person to end up more expensive to society than a dead one.
However, a computer that is never connected to the internet, on which encrypted copies of the documents are stored, is affordable to the average person and would provide a high degree of security.
Covert entry, keylogger placed on system. Paper in a decent safe should be at least as secure.
Anyway, I think encrypted files on an air-gapped never internet connected computer would be better than paper in a file safe.
But that's pushing the technological limits that I assign to the 'average' reporter who's worried about getting a story out, not being a technophile like most of us. Besides, I can just see it now - "We're taking this computer because we can't access it's contents and it might have child porn on it!" Then they get a court order from a judge(carefully selected like some judges we see on the news) to force you to hand over the keys to it for that investigation.
Arranging this would be time consuming and expensive though and isn't possible to do for every reporter.
Not needed for every reporter, just the ones publishing 'embarrassing' stories.
I figure that'll depend how the economics shake out. Owning a car is a rather massive investment, but there is a transactional cost to renting one, even by the hour when it can drive itself from a holding yard to your door.
On the other hand, a retired couple or individual that needs a car maybe 2-3 times a week(grocery, doctors, shopping) would be an ideal case for renting. Somebody who NEEDS a vehicle during prime commuting times, in addition to taking kids to soccer, going shopping, and such is more likely to want to own his own.
And if you don't care enough about your grandpa to research a bit or even suggest he research a bit...
Oh, I care. I've done a lot of research, actually. I just know that Gramps is already being seen by a number of competent doctors(and he's being taken care of by his daughter that is a nurse) and I'm nowhere near enough(8 time zones away) to make an adequate judgement at this time. I also know my grandfather(obstinate), the local law enforcement situation(not favorable), etc... It's a balancing act. I'm not going to recommend some action without at least a peer-reviewed study that comes close, and convinces me that the positives outweigh the risks. Sadly, at this point I doubt a study on the effects of THC on spinal nerves damaged by polio is going to come out.
He already does physical therapy that's very close to what 'yoga' he'd be able to do, so that's taken care of, which is why I said 'typical'. Then there's all the possible interactions with all the other medications that he takes for various conditions.
How? They're her private notes. It doesn't count as fraud until she deliberate releases them trying to frame them. Since she didn't deliberately release them...
At least in my case I'm upset about multiple things, but since slashdot hit on the lack of encryption first thing, it's what we're talking about. Personally, my thought is encoded pseudonyms like 'deep throat' was.
Is this theft an outrage? Yep. Should government officials be going to jail? Yep. But right now my concern, as pointed out in the article, is the safety/security of the informants. I'm afraid that the wrong people are going to end up in jail.
Actually, as a computer security 'expert' I'm going to have to disagree, at least when your target is 'Uncle Sam' with NSA in his employ.
Too many operating systems are compromised, too many encryption systems and codes. If they want they'll simply hit your computer with a non-disclosed zero-day exploit and steal your encryption key/password.
No, in this case paper files make sense. However any and all names should be encoded pseudonyms for her informants.
I know it's hard to do considering the crowd here, but try and keep in mind - most people, journalists included, barely even know what encryption is, let alone how to use it properly.
Given that they described seizing files and not her computer and such, I'd say that she was keeping them physically. Not a bad idea for a non-computer expert.
On the other hand, journalists have been keeping their sources confidential since before there were computers. Remember, there are coding techniquest that don't need a computer at all. Many people who have lists of people they want to keep confidential will do various things like use code names, sometimes just plain numbers, sometimes substitutions, book codes*, etc...
*Take a book, something big and hefty. The code refers to the page, line/sentence, word, and letter that's correct. The trick is finding the right book and encoding scheme. Broken easily enough with modern computers, but can still be a pain. The reporter would eventually just memorize the code as being X person.
Slashdot Mirror
Pity, it works rather well here, I think the difference is that over here it's set up in such a way that a lower road toll equates to a profit for the state.
I'll point out that while there are unfairly lowered speed limits, as well as speed limits lowered not to meet safety standards but to make neighbors happy*, but for the most part if you follow NTSB recommendations you'll be very safe, and 'most' local traffic authorities are fixated on being safe. We've had some incidents where yellows have been shortened to generate more revenue from red light cameras, but for the most part judges have been very unsympathetic to red light cameras when this is discovered - and they're unsympathetic even when it's found that they didn't shorten them, but deliberately selected lights that weren't following NTSB standards for whatever reason.
There are constant improvements in the states safety wise, including demanding safer vehicles. As a result we've managed to get our annual fatalities down to just over 30k/year from a high of over 50k/year despite ever more vehicles on the road. One of the more interesting aspects is the psychology of driving that they consider today - most people drive at what they 'feel' is a safe speed, thus there's various psychological tricks you can use to make sure their 'feeling' matches up with reality. Remember, not an expert, just read some articles on it.
Additionally, remember that the USA is generally much more concerned with 'internal affairs' than other countries and we're a lot more fragmented legal wise. We're more like the EU than the UK between our 50 states. As a result we 'air our dirty laundry' a lot more.
I think that the difference in the end is more flavor than substantiative. Liability coverage is also mandatory here in the states, though the details vary.
*One interstate corridor was put in over protest, and part of the deal cut was lower speed limits in an effort to limit noise. Later studies have shown that not only do lower speeds not significantly limit noise, people aren't following them anyways.
Also, a major difference to the USA is that all moving violation fines go into consolidated state revenue.
Not entirely accurate; in some states they still belong to the issuing county/department, in some states the money is split, and in some cases it goes to state revenue. The whole 'go to the state' thing was passed mostly due to the vagrancies of various towns trying to fund themselves via a 'road tax', rigorous enforcement of speed limits with unusually high fines targeted specifically at passers-through.
As a result the problem isn't as bad as it used to be, but it's still there, especially in a few states.
Speed limits have virtually nothing to do with the quality of the road surface. It's about hidden driveways, pedestrians, wildlife, oversized vehicles, bends, trees, sun glare, ect.
Given that the Op specified "federal interstates", I can state that at least in the USA the designed safe speed for a highway takes far more into account than just the 'quality of the road surface'. For example, above 55mph driveways are outright forbidden, and 65+ you have to have on/off entry merges that allow entering vehicles to speed up to the posted limit before merging and conversely slow before exiting. Pedestrians are typically forbidden from being on the road - if there's significant need for them to be able to cross, they'll put in a under/overpass for them to cross on. Even controlled intersections are forbidden - again, roads go over/under. When you hit 75 mph, 'oversize vehicles' are handled more by the road being at least 4 lanes - and while you don't really see it at those speeds, but the lanes themselves are wider, thus 'oversize' isn't quite so oversize anymore. I've seen plenty of oversize vehicles that fit comfortably between the lines on the highway.
I'm not a highway designer, but there are additional considerations like maximum curve, slope, and such, all of which becomes much gentler as design speed increases. Then you get some areas like Texas that imposes a different speed limit at night than they do during the day - when sight limit to avoid unexpected obstacles like wildlife is really the only limit to how fast you can go.
So while the authorities may be "unfairly" force drivers slow down in specific circumstances, it's certainly not because they are short of a dime. There will never be a zero road toll as long as there are humans, the question is, and always will be - what is an acceptable toll, where do we stop and say that's as good as it gets?
Come to the states. Unfairly lowered speed limits around specific towns with more than 80% of their police force dedicated to writing speeding tickets in a couple spots, 99% to those passing through, are known. It might be mostly a US phenonemon, but it's very well known here.
It's in the article, just buried. I'm afraid that the 'life equation' is shaping up that life, much less intelligent life, is likely to be more than 5k ly apart on average. It's rare.
If we're to have any hope of sending something off, or even seriously sending some sort of probe off, it's going to have to be within a hundred light years. I figure we've checked those with a relative 'fine toothed comb' already. Being able to 'look' at them with over 10X the resolution due to the OOM closer distance would make it easy.
, so noising them out would not take very much signal.
You're still going to be the source of far louder signal than the satellites overhead, depending on how sophisticated your jammer is. I remember from somewhere that a non-discriminatory jammer* needs to transmit at least 10X as 'loudly' as it's source.
An AC suggested that they simply need to jam until they can get rid of the tracker, but my though is that that probably requires stopping, and if they're tracking your jamming, you're not going to get to stop long before the cops block the area off. For that matter if the device uses the cellular network to provide it's location, there shouldn't be anything stopping it from still providing coarse network based location, which is again 'close enough' for the police to set up blockades and locate the vehicle relatively quickly. They might need to check a block rather than a parking spot. To prevent this they'd need a cellular jammer as well, which would indeed need to be higher powered than the GPS jammer(easier to track). For that matter, at that point you don't NEED the GPS jammer because you're blocking it from talking.
Of course, all this could be rendered quite moot if the device doesn't use the cellular network, or even just has a backup transmitter to act as a more traditional homing beacon on a 'nondisclosed frequency'. Now you either need a frequency analyzer and an adjustible jammer(remember you're doing this while involved in a high speed chase...), or a very high power multi-frequency one that will probably attract the military's attention. It could even be multi-purpose:
1. GPS Jammed - coarse network from cellular systems,
2. Cellular jammed - use alternate frequency system to transmit GPS coords
3. Both jammed - transmit what it can on alternate, basically traditional homing beacon.
More 'options' present themselves the more I think about it. For example, why not hook into the satellite phone system as well?
*IE it just transmits noise as opposed to something that's targeted at an application, like some wireless network jammers that actually spam disconnect notices instead of just noise. Think of it as the difference between a network attack that works by trying to flood the network connections as opposed to a syn flood.
I had to read the article a couple times, but given that KOI-351 is 2.5k ly from here, I think we're looking at something like 25M years for the fastest intercept we could currently manage.
Even at lightspeed we wouldn't be trading letters anytime soon.
You're overthinking the issue. If they're jamming GPS that means they're transmitting. If you're transmitting all they need is equipment to track the jammer. They stop jamming and you go back to tracking the tracker, they jam you track the jammer.
Not BlueStrat, but going by population:
New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix
The two that I wouldn't peg as 'most onerous anti-gun laws' would be Houston and Phoenix. Going down the list, I'd have to pull #8 San Diego and #10 San Jose to get six 'extremely anti-gun' cities. Also, it might seem strange but Texas doesn't exactly have the most liberal(IE allowing) gun laws in the state. There are a number that don't require permits at all for CCW, open carry is illegal in most of Texas, etc...
One way I was thinking of to solve the independent ISP issue is, everyone who pays taxes is given the fiber connection by the city government, and the city provides a city wide WAN that is not by default connected to the internet.
On the other hand at this point the cheaper option is to have the city WAN offer everyone a certain baseline to 'the internet', maybe 1mb, with the option to pay an additional fee for a bigger pipe.
Otherwise, well, what are the ISPs really offering? A patch cable from the wan to a leased line colocated in one of the switching rooms? The 'last mile(somebody else said in the USA it's equivalent to 17 miles)' is the most expensive bit.
How much would electric cars costs go down with mass production and a build-out of recharging infrastructure?
I figure you might get another 20% or so off the price of the equivalent of a Model S. The biggest expense is the battery pack, and Tesla is already buying commodity cells, such as are used in laptop batteries. The most economical per kwh/most produced size at that.
The recharging infrastructure is branching out and spreading relatively fast, though I'm not happy with how propriatory the tesla stations are.
How much safer would the cars be with just a bit more research and testing if there was a trillion dollar initiative (on the order of the Interstate Highway initiative of the 1950s)?
A trillion dollar initiative isn't 'a bit more R&D'. To put it in perspective, a trillion dollars should be sufficient to build enough nuclear power plants to replace every existing nuclear & coal plant inside the USA. A trillion dollars, amortizied over 30 years is approximately $1M per fatality using current accident rates. So if your $1T preventented EVERY death over the next 30 years it'd be at a cost of $1M per person saved. Probably worthy, but I don't think it'd stop that many(though the injury reduction would help pay for it). As for the Interstate Highway System, the estimated cost is less than half of that, and provided capabilities, not just safety.
How soon would be have fusion energy to power these cars with another trillion dollar initiative (a slashdot article a while back said we were US$80 billion away)?
That would probably be a 'too many cooks' amount of money
If we can spend trillions on Iraq (including future obligations like to care for injured soldiers), and trillions for wall street bailouts, and trillions for "quantiative easing" as mostly a gift to the banks, shouldn't be able to put a couple trillion into upgrading the US transportation system which is still at the core of US commerce and defense?
Iraq & Afghanistan are over decades, of course, you can't just toss this money at something and 'get it done now'. Especially when you're dealing with physical assets and not electron shuffling that bailouts and such actually consist of.
To take it in another angle, ask yourself why Europe, China, and other countries that are nearly as capable of tossing 'trillions' around like you propose aren't? It'd benefit them as well, after all. In some ways they're in a better situation to make such as shift than we are. Besides, the world has already spent 'trillions' on vehicle safety - Top Gear did a piece a few years ago about the difference between a top rated car that earned an 'A' and a 'B'. People walk away from accidents today that would have had them 'dead right there' even a decade ago, even in the cheapest of cars.
My answer is that the problem is manyfold - there's only so many resources you can devote to the problem, we've hit reducing returns for vehicle safety(IE it costs more and more per life saved/injury prevented) without a drastic shift in methodology(such as moving towards self-driving cars). Said alternate methodologies range from 'not developed yet' like self driving to 'Cost trillions in infrastructure modifications' like PRT.
On the military - some of that 'planning to refight the last war' is to ensure that we don't have to refight the previous war - groups were only forced into asymetric warfare because we're so good at symetric warfare.
How many varieties of vehicles do people really want?
So, how about a "war on traffic fatalities"? :-)
*looks at War on Drugs* - Hell no!
If a municipality wants to instal their own system AT&T tells the state legislators that providing phone and internet has so little profit that without the income from that municipality AT&T will have to stop providing service to the entire state. The state sues the municipality and the state police make sure no equipment rolls.
Which is why I mentioned the law thing... Yes, you'd probably need enough municipalities in sufficient different districts in order to force enough senators to support their initiatives, but with enough pressure(grass root campaigns) it can be done.
And yes, I've heard of plenty of situations like yours.
Do you really want to be running individual strands of fiber back home for 49 miles? You're going to need a huge facility for the patch panels for any decently populated area if you run it that long, even if you have unpowered neighborhood collection points where the 2-6 strands you run to individual homes* are collected up into bigger bundles.
It's a balance - and in many other areas far more people are living in multifamily dwellings(apartments & condos) rather than single family homes. It's relatively easy to do the necessary upgrades there.
*It's cheaper to run extra strands than worry about having to run more
The exact same thing was said in regards to power and telecom. We figured out how to make it work.
I've read this a couple times, which part are you arguing against? The home-runs? You don't home-run power though. For that matter you don't 'home run' water or sewer either. If you're thinking that I think that fiber can't be economically run to 'every'* home, you're incorrect. I simply think that 'home runs' aren't ecnomical, in that you're going to need satellite stations. IE there's lots of cities where the 'last mile' might actually be 10 miles or more.
Once you have large numbers of satellite collection points, because of how spread out you are, leasing to independent ISP's becomes a lot more complicated, to the point that offering the rest of the connection, that you propose having independent ISPs doing, is actually the easiest part. Ergo it makes sense to keep it one business. Then the question becomes one of 'how do I prevent the company from becoming a money-grubbing leech?'. Answer: 'Not for Profit' Customer owned Cooperative. Which, as I said, has given me the best service and price over every other utility model I've had to deal with.
As for 'telecom' - We only sort-of made it work for telecom. While we certainly were able to get better than 99.99% of households phone access(only one aspect of 'telecom'), we never really saw extreme cost savings.
*Every in this case being defined as roughly 99.99% of households
However, since there is no regulation, you'd expect the locations where you actually have a population density to be thriving with competition and low prices.
No regulation? Are you kidding? Have you been reading this thread? There's HUGE loads of regulation when it comes to running wire through municipalities. There are issues when it comes to right of ways. Dig permits. Outright non-competes with right of way permits auctioned out on 50+ year contracts, etc...
It's about time the USA stopped worrying about communism or "too much regulation" and started to mandate price limits unless at least three independent services would offer full service for something as important as access to the internet.
Look up what happens when you simply mandate price caps. Some might get cheaper service, but the vast majority are simply told 'not available'. The REAL solutions are a bit more complicated. My favorite is to 'simply' set up local internet cooperatives that DO have access to right-aways. Break the old non-compete contracts if necessary(IE pass a law).
Indeed. The way I think of it it's a bit like secrets - the more people in the know, the more likely it's going to get out.
The more competitors you have, the less likely you're going to be able to iron out an anti-consumer deal that everybody will stick to.
Many municipalities are too spread out for economic home-runs even for fiber.
My personal preference, having lived in 4 different areas, is for telecommunications to be handled by a local cooperative, otherwise known as a 'customer owned business'.
I've received utilities from commercial companies, government and employee owned, as well as cooperatives. The Coops have always had the best customer service, price vs performance, etc...
Hmm...
1. $30k for a 'luxury' auto is probably unattainable. $30k gets you a not-quite baseline Taurus, Malibu, Impala, Avalon, etc... Even a basline Tesla S is over $60k today, and the price has dropped.
2. 'Reducing some of the defense budget' - easy to say, but as I work in defense(AD USAF) I can say that it's complicated to reduce the defense budget right. To put it bluntly we need to be allowed to reduce platforms if you're going to reduce spending - Fewer bases, ships, planes, and tanks to make it short. Congress doesn't like letting us do that.
3. I readily acknowledge that the US Federal Government alone spends almost enough on healthcare to provide universal coverage for all US Citizens if we could reduce our spending per person down to that of the EU average. When I last looked the shortfall was under $100 per person.
4. How do you define safe? Teslas are still traditionally driven vehicles, no reason to believe that the accident rate will be that much less. While they're certainly safer on average in an accident, doubling the average cost per vehicle will offset a lot of the prevented injuries and deaths. For that matter the situation can become quite complex as you convert deaths into expensive medical bills*. Not that I'm against reducing accidents, but it's what I tend to call a 'freakonomics' point, like smoking - where the vast majority of smokers still make it to retirement, but die quickly enough that their healthcare and reitrement payments are actually less than non-smokers, making them cheaper for pension funds.
5. However, I'm all for pushing auto-drive vehicles, but the technology isn't there yet. Before I saw the progress on auto-drive tech, I was pushing for PRT(Personal Rapid Transit) which is a ultra-light rail(3-5 people per pod) system with individually powered and routed cars.
6. Not as big of a chunk of our military goes towards defending oil supplies as you think. Speaking from the inside, the real situation is a lot more complicated.
7. I disagree on how similar technology between credit card processing and radar guidance on a car would be.
Roughly speaking, I'd say that we don't have the technology to release a self-driving car that would reduce accidents as much as you say, much less one that can be built as cheaply as you say. Instead I figure you'd end up with vehicles that are the equivalent of the 'common cars' produced by the USSR and other communist block countries - more expensive, less safe and operational than their commercially produced counterparts.
That's BEFORE getting into the problems with waste that occur when you give people people stuff for free - they tend to not value it like they would if they have to invest effort into obtaining it.
After that, you have the 'problems' of personal preference. Do I need extra cargo space, room for more passangers, towing, off-road, hostile climate, etc...?
*Sadly, it's quite possible for an injured person to end up more expensive to society than a dead one.
However, a computer that is never connected to the internet, on which encrypted copies of the documents are stored, is affordable to the average person and would provide a high degree of security.
Covert entry, keylogger placed on system. Paper in a decent safe should be at least as secure.
Anyway, I think encrypted files on an air-gapped never internet connected computer would be better than paper in a file safe.
But that's pushing the technological limits that I assign to the 'average' reporter who's worried about getting a story out, not being a technophile like most of us. Besides, I can just see it now - "We're taking this computer because we can't access it's contents and it might have child porn on it!" Then they get a court order from a judge(carefully selected like some judges we see on the news) to force you to hand over the keys to it for that investigation.
Arranging this would be time consuming and expensive though and isn't possible to do for every reporter.
Not needed for every reporter, just the ones publishing 'embarrassing' stories.
either personally owned or taxis.
I figure that'll depend how the economics shake out. Owning a car is a rather massive investment, but there is a transactional cost to renting one, even by the hour when it can drive itself from a holding yard to your door.
On the other hand, a retired couple or individual that needs a car maybe 2-3 times a week(grocery, doctors, shopping) would be an ideal case for renting. Somebody who NEEDS a vehicle during prime commuting times, in addition to taking kids to soccer, going shopping, and such is more likely to want to own his own.
And if you don't care enough about your grandpa to research a bit or even suggest he research a bit...
Oh, I care. I've done a lot of research, actually. I just know that Gramps is already being seen by a number of competent doctors(and he's being taken care of by his daughter that is a nurse) and I'm nowhere near enough(8 time zones away) to make an adequate judgement at this time. I also know my grandfather(obstinate), the local law enforcement situation(not favorable), etc... It's a balancing act. I'm not going to recommend some action without at least a peer-reviewed study that comes close, and convinces me that the positives outweigh the risks. Sadly, at this point I doubt a study on the effects of THC on spinal nerves damaged by polio is going to come out.
He already does physical therapy that's very close to what 'yoga' he'd be able to do, so that's taken care of, which is why I said 'typical'. Then there's all the possible interactions with all the other medications that he takes for various conditions.
It didn't need to be legal, they just 'needed' the names. The warrant was just an excuse.
How? They're her private notes. It doesn't count as fraud until she deliberate releases them trying to frame them. Since she didn't deliberately release them...
At least in my case I'm upset about multiple things, but since slashdot hit on the lack of encryption first thing, it's what we're talking about. Personally, my thought is encoded pseudonyms like 'deep throat' was.
Is this theft an outrage? Yep. Should government officials be going to jail? Yep. But right now my concern, as pointed out in the article, is the safety/security of the informants. I'm afraid that the wrong people are going to end up in jail.
Actually, as a computer security 'expert' I'm going to have to disagree, at least when your target is 'Uncle Sam' with NSA in his employ.
Too many operating systems are compromised, too many encryption systems and codes. If they want they'll simply hit your computer with a non-disclosed zero-day exploit and steal your encryption key/password.
No, in this case paper files make sense. However any and all names should be encoded pseudonyms for her informants.
I know it's hard to do considering the crowd here, but try and keep in mind - most people, journalists included, barely even know what encryption is, let alone how to use it properly.
Given that they described seizing files and not her computer and such, I'd say that she was keeping them physically. Not a bad idea for a non-computer expert.
On the other hand, journalists have been keeping their sources confidential since before there were computers. Remember, there are coding techniquest that don't need a computer at all. Many people who have lists of people they want to keep confidential will do various things like use code names, sometimes just plain numbers, sometimes substitutions, book codes*, etc...
*Take a book, something big and hefty. The code refers to the page, line/sentence, word, and letter that's correct. The trick is finding the right book and encoding scheme. Broken easily enough with modern computers, but can still be a pain. The reporter would eventually just memorize the code as being X person.