Criminalizing anything tends to open that entire market to the criminal element.
Agreed; that's why I prefer regulating stuff over making it outright illegal. The government maintains more control if it's only regulated; not banned.
There is stuff that needs to remain illegal. Stuff like slavery, murder, abuse, assault, theft, rape. Crimes where there's an identifiable victim. Even child labor isn't outright outlawed in the USA, it's just highly, highly regulated.
Gang-on-gang violence is, essentially, their version of a justice system.
Only partially. Many instances are outright wars for resources. IE territory, trade opportunities, etc...
A lot of the outright executions are for the 'justice' system, I will admit.
This stuff is actually made worse by the actual government. Because of the US justice system; many of the more traditional punishments become impossible/impractical. The broken family structures also don't help. The end result is death becomes the only real punishment.
Without the justice system, the only means you'd have for dealing with such situations is violence.
Bingo.
If the criminal element had a similar systems, they wouldn't be the criminal element. They'd be corporations
Some of the more developed gangs/mobs start looking awfully like corporations as is.
Of course, all this is why I favor legalizing drugs and prostitution; I believe that the cost in money, lives, and liberty with them being illegal exceeds the costs of making it legal. Basically, you turn a multimillion expense in the WoD into a multimillion tax revenue stream. Give us a healthy shot towards balancing the budget, at least.
That, however, opens them up to lawsuits that they wouldn't otherwise be subject to, especially if they try to keep him for years. Judges have a lot of leeway when it comes to contempt of court sentences, but I don't think they can do it to the level of a felony(IE over a year). Might be wrong though.
Depending on what's on the HD, that might be his best option.
Laws against fraud, theft, and murder would still apply.
True. Of course, I often compare gangs to primitive tribal societies. Serious - they have internal laws and punishments, engage in both trade and wars for territory and valuables.
Now, being in an 'early state of evolution', said tribe's government is primitive(normally some form of warlordism), as is the 'justice' system.
I've been curious as to what would happen if the gangs had access to neutral civilian courts for addressing concerns in their black market trading... Would it drop the violence?
It is more about less additional and extraneous information than anything else.
I'd say that it's more about eliminating noise than any information. Noise isn't normally considered information, and information isn't normally considered extraneous. At least not when it's easily ignored.
These CDs will have the exact same capabilities of the old style.
And yes I am all for better sound quality... the industry is trying its best to double dip and triple dip the consumer.
Oh yes. Sony's a big one at this, I think that if they're lucky about 1 in 10 of their formats actually catch on. Of course, the biggest killer of their media formats is their insistance on riddling them with DRM - increasing the cost of the media and equipment, while crippling capabilities.
I would have been more impressed if they'd somehow managed to keep it compatible while 'hiding' a second layer such that while you'd get the traditional old two channel audio with a traditional player, a blue laser player would be able to access the second layer, enabling high fidelity, high bitrate 6 or even 8 channel sound.
As is, it sounds like they're eliminating 'errors' by doing the equivalent of printing old 200 dpi images with a modern 1200 dpi printer. Sure, it's a bit cleaner, but there's no additional information.
Yes, this sort of thing is very worrying. When did "right to search" turn into "right to confiscate large amounts of expensive equipment, including their personal information, means to communicate, and equipment and data necessary for their livelihood"?
One of the things I'd be suing for, including the costs to sue them to get my stuff back.
An image of 16-17 year olds would be covered by the law, and presumably blocked by the IWF - however, it is highly unreasonable to refer to it as a child abuse image, since no child has been abused in its production.
One interesting quirk is that one prosecuter's office was considering charging a 14(?) year old girl with production of child porn - a serious federal and local felony for recording herself.
They were expecting to get some adult when they were investigating, but it turned out she did it all herself. There was no other law they could charge her with violating, and technically she did violate it. But, by that arguement she would also be the victim, to be protected/helped.
Fortuantly, they saw the crazyness of it, but were having trouble figuring out how to get her help(what she was doing to herself, even seperate of the videos weren't healthy), but constrained by the law unless she was charge/convicted of a crime.
you really think you can succeed in the CP war by going after one side or the other? or even both at the same time? reprehensible or not- it's a human vice that will apparently always have its adherents.
Unlike the 'wars' on drugs and prostitution, I actually think that the 'War on Child Abuse' is one worthy of fighting, seeing as how there are actual victims, not consenting competent adults.
Still, I agree with you that it's unlikely to ever be 'won'. While distasteful, I'm sure the authorities could come up with enough CP images to set up honeypots so we'd be able to find those attracted to children for further scrutiny.
I'm kinda reminded of the selling of confiscated illegal ivory to fund further enforcement efforts in Africa. Like with the ivory, the harm has already been done in the production of those images. Actual implementation of honeypots and which images to use would be complicated, of course. I'd probably end up asking the victims, once they reach majority, for permission.
Now, this might seem oddball, but wouldn't this be ineffective and worse than nothing for preventing child abuse, the whole reason child porn is bad?
My reasoning: If the pervs are unable to get it from non-domestic sources, they are more likely to look domestically for it; even producing it themselves instead of downloading it.
1 child abused to produce X images of CP downloaded 10k times is 'better' than 2 children abused to produce 2X images of CP, each downloaded 5k times because of blocking resulting in greater sectionalization.
Personally, I'd prefer not bothering with blocking over monitoring and tracking down persistant downloaders.
Look at it like illegal drug distribution networks. Which is better, disallowing international phone calls to try to keep the out of country makers from communicating with their in country distributers, or actually tracing the calls and use them to track down the makers/distributers?
Cost for the media, in all likelihood. A pressed CD/DVD is on the order of pennies. A USB key with the same capacity is still like $10.
What I would see is some sort of itunes style system with cached storage of the video. That way the user is paying for the storage of the stuff they want to cache. A $100 1TB drive should be able to store 100 not terribly compressed HD Movies, giving you a storage cost of $1 each.
Video doesn't eliminate any of the steps to a successful prosecution, but it simplifies some and in some cases may be the difference between wasting effort (such as when the victim is withholding important information) or being unable to move on to the next step (such as when the victim is dead and can't report what the camera did).
The problem is that in many cases they install this stuff while still lacking the necessary resources to pursue the criminals. I mean, even if somebody does spot a crime in progress on a camera, they have to have enough police presence that an officer can respond quickly enough to matter.
In such cases the money would be better spent putting more officers on the street. Community policing has shown it's worth.
As a secondary, I'd legalize drugs & prostitution, tax and regulate it. Then we can put all the law enforcement assets currently going to that to solving what I consider real crimes.
First, it's done by people reporting being victims of crime; some statistics come from the police(such as arrests, police reports), some come from surveys.
The problem with cameras is that they're expensive to actively monitor; human time is expensive, any one camera is very unlikely to be filming a crime in progress, and a human can only effectively monitor a half dozen or so visuals. A virtually uninhabited building is one thing, you can put motion sensors on the cameras such that a alarm directs the viewer to the most active cameras, but a semi-busy street? Not so much. So identifying a crime in progress is so rare that it made international news one time when they happened to see one live in England - and that was while doing some routine testing of the system.
The second problem, is, Okay, the camera has worked about as well as you can expect it to. Citizen A has made a report that she was mugged in Zone 123, review of cameras shows incident.
Now, in order to bring the criminal to justice:
We have to identify, based on A's testimony and the camera images, just which hoodied and bandanaded thug did it. -Camera may or may not be useful We have to figure out where thug 45,034 is hanging out this week (traditional police work) Actually send a police unit out to collect him. (traditional police work) Build a case and prosecute him (traditional police and prosecutor work) Punish/Reform him using the standards of the time - Imprisonment, fines(blood from stone comes to mind), etc...
That's how antitheft devices work in general. Bolt locks on a house don't prevent entry, but they either require more complex picking or the burglar to get in a different way, such as breaking a window, because there's a latch holding the window closed. Bars make entering through windows more difficult. Alarms limit the time a burglar has, safes and vaults either require large amounts of time or power tools/explosives.
If somebody is considering stealing your phone, it's unlikely he'll decide not to because he recognizes it as a model he doesn't want.
On the other hand, if it becomes known that some brand of phone will disable itself the moment it connects to a network, no matter it's SIM chip, once it's reported stolen, except for reporting it's location via GPS, the smart thieves won't keep them, and won't steal them if they recognize it.
If it starts becoming a standard feature, people stop stealing cell phones for the most part, because it's not worth it.
Once he's stolen it, he's sure as hell not going to give it back to you (although he may toss it, if it's not worth trying to sell).
This can be a good thing if the service reports the GPS location of the phone, if available. Then you just pick it up from the alley or bushes or whatever. Maybe even, with the cooperation of the company(and another phone), cause it to ring when you're in the area to make it easier. A cell-phone version of lojack, basically.
For a cell phone, your best bet is to destroy the data and disable the device, making it unusable (and therefore worthless, or nearly so) after it has been stolen.
I mentioned disabling, though I should have mentioned the wiping.
Sometimes you just need to do field testing; the Executive could have used the excuse of determining whether or not to continue the project, funding or some such.
Personally, I hope this spurs a call for anti-theft measures to be integrated into the device. GPS reporting, disabling if reported stolen, so on... Sure, they could be bypassed, but antitheft measures work basically on 'I'm more of a pain in the butt to steal(from) than the next guy'.
Modern shutters are designed with a flicker-rate of two times (48 Hz) or even sometimes three times (72 Hz) the frame rate of the film, so as to reduce the perception of screen flickering.
Given the 'sometimes', the two flickers per cell is more or less the standard, with some doing 3.
Remember, film projection results in different light qualities than a CRT monitor, and LCD/Plasma screens don't truly 'flicker' at all as they're constant light projectors. With a projector effectively the whole screen is either lit or not.
Well, by my reading of the article this would be used as the substrate for manufacturing the storage system, not as storage.
IE they'd use a sapphire base instead of a silicon one, using the auto-ordering substrate to arrange things beyond the density that photolithography can do.
So you'd just have really, really, dense flash memory. Well, that and your CPU, RAM, etc...
Well, consider that Steel, which is used in construction left and right, is made from Iron with a melting point of 1538C
Also, Silicon is 1414C, and yes they melt the silicon to make the wafers. Don't forget that we also melt a lot of silicon for windows.
As for keeping the temperature up for 24 hours, well, the vast amount of the cost is getting the temperature that hot, after that it just depends on how well insulated your oven is.
better yet, using a display that operates in multiples of 24 (72Hz and 120Hz work quite well)
It's an LCD monitor. There's no particular reason it needs to refresh at 60htz or faster.
My LCD TV is perfectly happy operating at 24hz when that's the media it's presented. I imagine that, given the right hardware and programming, the thing would be perfectly happy refreshing at any given interval between 1 and 60hz, only limited by whatever scheme is telling it the resolution and refresh rates it's supposed to be displaying.
Still - I think it'd be best for movie makers to switch from filming in 24fps to 60 or even 72fps. There's not many movie theaters left with actual film projectors; even if you have to run off some reels of film, it's easy enough to downsample 60/72 fps to 24.
Hmmm... One thing I'm thinking of is quality - while I am very annoyed by 'mere' 60hz on a crt, I've never really had a problem with televisions, and have to really concentrate to see any jumping with film. Remember, each cell in 24fps film is displayed *twice*, so you get 48 flashes a second, 24 cells. Increasing the number of frames by a factor of 3, while with any decent compression alogorithm it wouldn't increase the size of the video by a factor of 3, is still increasing the quality of video by an almost imperceptible amount, for a very real increase in size. How much, I don't really know. There's a LOT of variables.
Now I almost want to conduct some tests... Find some 'true' 120fps video, reencode at 24fps and 60fps, see how much the file size ends up. You'd want Low motion and High motion test sections as well.
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Criminalizing anything tends to open that entire market to the criminal element.
Agreed; that's why I prefer regulating stuff over making it outright illegal. The government maintains more control if it's only regulated; not banned.
There is stuff that needs to remain illegal. Stuff like slavery, murder, abuse, assault, theft, rape. Crimes where there's an identifiable victim. Even child labor isn't outright outlawed in the USA, it's just highly, highly regulated.
Gang-on-gang violence is, essentially, their version of a justice system.
Only partially. Many instances are outright wars for resources. IE territory, trade opportunities, etc...
A lot of the outright executions are for the 'justice' system, I will admit.
This stuff is actually made worse by the actual government. Because of the US justice system; many of the more traditional punishments become impossible/impractical. The broken family structures also don't help. The end result is death becomes the only real punishment.
Without the justice system, the only means you'd have for dealing with such situations is violence.
Bingo.
If the criminal element had a similar systems, they wouldn't be the criminal element. They'd be corporations
Some of the more developed gangs/mobs start looking awfully like corporations as is.
Of course, all this is why I favor legalizing drugs and prostitution; I believe that the cost in money, lives, and liberty with them being illegal exceeds the costs of making it legal. Basically, you turn a multimillion expense in the WoD into a multimillion tax revenue stream. Give us a healthy shot towards balancing the budget, at least.
That, however, opens them up to lawsuits that they wouldn't otherwise be subject to, especially if they try to keep him for years. Judges have a lot of leeway when it comes to contempt of court sentences, but I don't think they can do it to the level of a felony(IE over a year). Might be wrong though.
Depending on what's on the HD, that might be his best option.
Laws against fraud, theft, and murder would still apply.
True. Of course, I often compare gangs to primitive tribal societies. Serious - they have internal laws and punishments, engage in both trade and wars for territory and valuables.
Now, being in an 'early state of evolution', said tribe's government is primitive(normally some form of warlordism), as is the 'justice' system.
I've been curious as to what would happen if the gangs had access to neutral civilian courts for addressing concerns in their black market trading... Would it drop the violence?
It is more about less additional and extraneous information than anything else.
I'd say that it's more about eliminating noise than any information. Noise isn't normally considered information, and information isn't normally considered extraneous. At least not when it's easily ignored.
These CDs will have the exact same capabilities of the old style.
And yes I am all for better sound quality... the industry is trying its best to double dip and triple dip the consumer.
Oh yes. Sony's a big one at this, I think that if they're lucky about 1 in 10 of their formats actually catch on. Of course, the biggest killer of their media formats is their insistance on riddling them with DRM - increasing the cost of the media and equipment, while crippling capabilities.
Well, one of the first two generations of PS3, at least.
But yes, that was pretty much what I was proposing.
I would have been more impressed if they'd somehow managed to keep it compatible while 'hiding' a second layer such that while you'd get the traditional old two channel audio with a traditional player, a blue laser player would be able to access the second layer, enabling high fidelity, high bitrate 6 or even 8 channel sound.
As is, it sounds like they're eliminating 'errors' by doing the equivalent of printing old 200 dpi images with a modern 1200 dpi printer. Sure, it's a bit cleaner, but there's no additional information.
Yes, this sort of thing is very worrying. When did "right to search" turn into "right to confiscate large amounts of expensive equipment, including their personal information, means to communicate, and equipment and data necessary for their livelihood"?
One of the things I'd be suing for, including the costs to sue them to get my stuff back.
An image of 16-17 year olds would be covered by the law, and presumably blocked by the IWF - however, it is highly unreasonable to refer to it as a child abuse image, since no child has been abused in its production.
One interesting quirk is that one prosecuter's office was considering charging a 14(?) year old girl with production of child porn - a serious federal and local felony for recording herself.
They were expecting to get some adult when they were investigating, but it turned out she did it all herself. There was no other law they could charge her with violating, and technically she did violate it. But, by that arguement she would also be the victim, to be protected/helped.
Fortuantly, they saw the crazyness of it, but were having trouble figuring out how to get her help(what she was doing to herself, even seperate of the videos weren't healthy), but constrained by the law unless she was charge/convicted of a crime.
you really think you can succeed in the CP war by going after one side or the other? or even both at the same time? reprehensible or not- it's a human vice that will apparently always have its adherents.
Unlike the 'wars' on drugs and prostitution, I actually think that the 'War on Child Abuse' is one worthy of fighting, seeing as how there are actual victims, not consenting competent adults.
Still, I agree with you that it's unlikely to ever be 'won'. While distasteful, I'm sure the authorities could come up with enough CP images to set up honeypots so we'd be able to find those attracted to children for further scrutiny.
I'm kinda reminded of the selling of confiscated illegal ivory to fund further enforcement efforts in Africa. Like with the ivory, the harm has already been done in the production of those images. Actual implementation of honeypots and which images to use would be complicated, of course. I'd probably end up asking the victims, once they reach majority, for permission.
Now, this might seem oddball, but wouldn't this be ineffective and worse than nothing for preventing child abuse, the whole reason child porn is bad?
My reasoning: If the pervs are unable to get it from non-domestic sources, they are more likely to look domestically for it; even producing it themselves instead of downloading it.
1 child abused to produce X images of CP downloaded 10k times is 'better' than 2 children abused to produce 2X images of CP, each downloaded 5k times because of blocking resulting in greater sectionalization.
Personally, I'd prefer not bothering with blocking over monitoring and tracking down persistant downloaders.
Look at it like illegal drug distribution networks. Which is better, disallowing international phone calls to try to keep the out of country makers from communicating with their in country distributers, or actually tracing the calls and use them to track down the makers/distributers?
2gb isn't really enough; DVDs are 4.7/8.5 depending on whether they're dual layer or not.
Thus, you're stuck going to 8GB sticks, and those are still at least $10.
Cost for the media, in all likelihood. A pressed CD/DVD is on the order of pennies. A USB key with the same capacity is still like $10.
What I would see is some sort of itunes style system with cached storage of the video. That way the user is paying for the storage of the stuff they want to cache. A $100 1TB drive should be able to store 100 not terribly compressed HD Movies, giving you a storage cost of $1 each.
I've been running netflix on firefox without any problems; you just have to install the silverlight plugin
Video doesn't eliminate any of the steps to a successful prosecution, but it simplifies some and in some cases may be the difference between wasting effort (such as when the victim is withholding important information) or being unable to move on to the next step (such as when the victim is dead and can't report what the camera did).
The problem is that in many cases they install this stuff while still lacking the necessary resources to pursue the criminals. I mean, even if somebody does spot a crime in progress on a camera, they have to have enough police presence that an officer can respond quickly enough to matter.
In such cases the money would be better spent putting more officers on the street. Community policing has shown it's worth.
As a secondary, I'd legalize drugs & prostitution, tax and regulate it. Then we can put all the law enforcement assets currently going to that to solving what I consider real crimes.
Then they change the billing address of one of their cards, and pay it online.
First, it's done by people reporting being victims of crime; some statistics come from the police(such as arrests, police reports), some come from surveys.
The problem with cameras is that they're expensive to actively monitor; human time is expensive, any one camera is very unlikely to be filming a crime in progress, and a human can only effectively monitor a half dozen or so visuals. A virtually uninhabited building is one thing, you can put motion sensors on the cameras such that a alarm directs the viewer to the most active cameras, but a semi-busy street? Not so much. So identifying a crime in progress is so rare that it made international news one time when they happened to see one live in England - and that was while doing some routine testing of the system.
The second problem, is, Okay, the camera has worked about as well as you can expect it to. Citizen A has made a report that she was mugged in Zone 123, review of cameras shows incident.
Now, in order to bring the criminal to justice:
We have to identify, based on A's testimony and the camera images, just which hoodied and bandanaded thug did it. -Camera may or may not be useful
We have to figure out where thug 45,034 is hanging out this week (traditional police work)
Actually send a police unit out to collect him. (traditional police work)
Build a case and prosecute him (traditional police and prosecutor work)
Punish/Reform him using the standards of the time - Imprisonment, fines(blood from stone comes to mind), etc...
I'd heard reporting a phone stolen and having the companies disable it to be quite difficult. So I was just going on what I'd heard.
I've never known anybody who had one stolen....
Some criminals will steal them in order to make international phone calls for various reasons(like drug deals).
That's how antitheft devices work on cars
That's how antitheft devices work in general. Bolt locks on a house don't prevent entry, but they either require more complex picking or the burglar to get in a different way, such as breaking a window, because there's a latch holding the window closed. Bars make entering through windows more difficult. Alarms limit the time a burglar has, safes and vaults either require large amounts of time or power tools/explosives.
If somebody is considering stealing your phone, it's unlikely he'll decide not to because he recognizes it as a model he doesn't want.
On the other hand, if it becomes known that some brand of phone will disable itself the moment it connects to a network, no matter it's SIM chip, once it's reported stolen, except for reporting it's location via GPS, the smart thieves won't keep them, and won't steal them if they recognize it.
If it starts becoming a standard feature, people stop stealing cell phones for the most part, because it's not worth it.
Once he's stolen it, he's sure as hell not going to give it back to you (although he may toss it, if it's not worth trying to sell).
This can be a good thing if the service reports the GPS location of the phone, if available. Then you just pick it up from the alley or bushes or whatever. Maybe even, with the cooperation of the company(and another phone), cause it to ring when you're in the area to make it easier. A cell-phone version of lojack, basically.
For a cell phone, your best bet is to destroy the data and disable the device, making it unusable (and therefore worthless, or nearly so) after it has been stolen.
I mentioned disabling, though I should have mentioned the wiping.
Sometimes you just need to do field testing; the Executive could have used the excuse of determining whether or not to continue the project, funding or some such.
Personally, I hope this spurs a call for anti-theft measures to be integrated into the device. GPS reporting, disabling if reported stolen, so on... Sure, they could be bypassed, but antitheft measures work basically on 'I'm more of a pain in the butt to steal(from) than the next guy'.
Looks like we're both right.
Modern shutters are designed with a flicker-rate of two times (48 Hz) or even sometimes three times (72 Hz) the frame rate of the film, so as to reduce the perception of screen flickering.
Given the 'sometimes', the two flickers per cell is more or less the standard, with some doing 3.
Remember, film projection results in different light qualities than a CRT monitor, and LCD/Plasma screens don't truly 'flicker' at all as they're constant light projectors. With a projector effectively the whole screen is either lit or not.
Well, by my reading of the article this would be used as the substrate for manufacturing the storage system, not as storage.
IE they'd use a sapphire base instead of a silicon one, using the auto-ordering substrate to arrange things beyond the density that photolithography can do.
So you'd just have really, really, dense flash memory. Well, that and your CPU, RAM, etc...
Well, consider that Steel, which is used in construction left and right, is made from Iron with a melting point of 1538C
Also, Silicon is 1414C, and yes they melt the silicon to make the wafers. Don't forget that we also melt a lot of silicon for windows.
As for keeping the temperature up for 24 hours, well, the vast amount of the cost is getting the temperature that hot, after that it just depends on how well insulated your oven is.
Sapphire can be created artificially
Compared to the cost of silicon wafers of sufficient quality the price isn't even that bad.
better yet, using a display that operates in multiples of 24 (72Hz and 120Hz work quite well)
It's an LCD monitor. There's no particular reason it needs to refresh at 60htz or faster.
My LCD TV is perfectly happy operating at 24hz when that's the media it's presented. I imagine that, given the right hardware and programming, the thing would be perfectly happy refreshing at any given interval between 1 and 60hz, only limited by whatever scheme is telling it the resolution and refresh rates it's supposed to be displaying.
Still - I think it'd be best for movie makers to switch from filming in 24fps to 60 or even 72fps. There's not many movie theaters left with actual film projectors; even if you have to run off some reels of film, it's easy enough to downsample 60/72 fps to 24.
Hmmm... One thing I'm thinking of is quality - while I am very annoyed by 'mere' 60hz on a crt, I've never really had a problem with televisions, and have to really concentrate to see any jumping with film. Remember, each cell in 24fps film is displayed *twice*, so you get 48 flashes a second, 24 cells. Increasing the number of frames by a factor of 3, while with any decent compression alogorithm it wouldn't increase the size of the video by a factor of 3, is still increasing the quality of video by an almost imperceptible amount, for a very real increase in size. How much, I don't really know. There's a LOT of variables.
Now I almost want to conduct some tests... Find some 'true' 120fps video, reencode at 24fps and 60fps, see how much the file size ends up. You'd want Low motion and High motion test sections as well.