Politburo, your choice of a handle speaks volumes about your politics.
The soldiers say in their own words that...
So because Private Snuffy, the article 15 king, said it, that makes it official SOP for every swinging d*ck in country? What part of 'cherry picking' do you not understand? Go talk to enough stupid straight legs just out of AIT and you'll find one that will tell you they are not simply authorized to but are fscking required to cut off enemy KIA's nut sacks to keep as souvenirs.
We were trained to drive vehicles slowly with out revving the engines to minimize our sound signature. To move purposely and quietly with out talking on the march. When we practiced manned a defensive perimeter or were in an ambush position we stayed for hours alert and silent in our fighting positions.
It is bad enough that we had to dress up all funny and wear a distinctive marking to suit LOAC. So the bad guys can recognize us at a distance. Make extra noise is a bad thing. Prior to moving out we'd jump around and make sure our gear didn't rattle. Nothing made noise. You could get you and your buddies killed because your canteen sloshed as you walked.
Listening to loud music on a mission would distract you from your assigned task, alert the enemy of your approach and could prevent you from hearing inter unit communications.
So universal involuntary service would be better? Maybe a 4 year tour between high school and college? Oh if they get a paycheck they are still mercenaries? So lets have four years of unpaid involuntary service then...so now aren't they slaves?
The volunteers that served in the civil war like my mom's great grandfather in one of the Delaware Regiments killed people to free the slaves and he got paid. So now you seem to think serving for pay is wrong? My Dad's older cousin fought in North Africa and died on D-day+5 in Normandy. He got a pay check too. My father was in Korea and Vietnam. He collected a check 'til the day he died. My older brother was in Vietnam. He got a pay check for that too. I was lucky my term of service occurred when the only shooting people on a regular basis for government pay was in Columbia and South America and I got paid for that.
Every one of you needs to think back over what a mostly volunteer military has done for you over the last 100 years. And you need to wonder if the current batch of people in Iraq are there for the paycheck or if they are there because they think people that would kill random folks out in our streets are wrong.
The same people that sent 19 highjackers to the US want to bring shira law to the US. Under shira law the establishment of a religion is required of the government. Remeber they invented the janissary.
Pay in our blood up front to stay free or, pay in your dhimmis blood to be slaves.
Aim? Who needs aim? They invented automatic weapons for people like me that don't feel like aiming.:)
(Got your joke. For the rest of you fully automatic weapons don't 'aim themselves'.)
Firing full auto isn't even remotely like what you see in the movies. Depending on the weapons rate of fire and design, recoil can be very difficult to control. HK MP5's are used by many LEO's because their slow rate of fire (600 rounds per minute "rpm") and ergonomics make them very easy to shoot accurately. The MAC M11/9 is the same caliber (9X19mm) but is much harder to control because of its high cyclic rate (1300 rpm) and a very shooter unfriendly design. Using the M11/9's suppressor as a front grip only works for the first magazine. After that you fry your hands. Holding the trigger down and 'hosing bullets' only makes sure your weapon is black and you're in the process of reloading when the bad guys pop out of cover and make you dead. Bursts of two or three aimed rounds are more effective than hosing it. Even the pig gunners shoot bursts to conserve ammo and prevent overheating their barrels. The M16 rifle has a built in 'burst limiter'. You can only fire a three round burst then you have to lift your finger and pull the trigger again. This is to aid in fire control and annoy people with good trigger disciple since the burst unit doesn't reset when you release the trigger in the middle of a brust.
Battle field noise, the smell of power smoke and the mechanics of aiming and firing your weapon are all part of military training. The training areas are wired with artillery simulators, smoke pots and other training aids. At a minimum you have to develop situational awareness, team work and an understanding of the right tactic to use. After 3-4 days of 20 to 22 hour days in the field staggering around in the night with 40-50 pounds of gear through knee deep mud and closely grown vegetation just remembering which hand is your left hand is difficult.
Things you don't experience often in training are picking up your buddy's body parts and dropping them in the body bag with the rest of him. Going through his pockets and putting his stuff in the personal effects bag. You don't often smell the combination of puke-feces smell of ruptured intestines or the smell of rotting blood in your fighting hole Some people die in training accidents and the DoD makes the use of them to teach you how not to get dead.
The games train tactics. They are not the only training being done. They can't simulate the physical demands of combat or the muscle memory involved in most basic solders tasks. The combat simulators for infantrymen make use of wrap-around panoramic displays and simulate firing special weapons like the javelin missile or the stinger. They train how to use a specific weapon.
Games like the FPS developed by the army are intended to get the recruit trained in maneuver and fire. The games teach them to use cover and concealment to move and shoot. The games teach them not to get too focused on what is in front of them and be aware of what is behind them.
Since the United States decided that the conventions don't apply to "illegal enemy combatants" does that mean they also don't worry about using these special "less lethal" bullets anymore?
Get it right if you are not wearing a uniform or a symbol that is recognizable at a distance you are an illegal combatant and the Geneva Conventions expressly do not apply. Under LOAC such combatants are spies and subject to summary trial and execution on the field of battle.
I've always used a 'pass phrase'. You just pull the first letter from the first position in the first word, second letter from the second position in the second word and so forth. Use a non-l334 substitution for some vowels e.g. 'a is 7', 'e is %' and some arbiter rule for sticking in a wild-card character in the middle.
You end up with a less guessable password that is easier to remember.
And you have very low reading comprehension. I said "USED THE INTERNET". You read "GOT MY SLASHDOT UID". Are you not a native English speaker or just a product of a post 1970 high school?
I'm amazed you can use the keyboard with reading skills like that! It is no wonder you're such a skeptic since you can't read what is written; you can't believe anything you've tried to read.
Some of us are from the '60's and have children older than you. The technology discussed in the article was just so much fiction only twenty-five years ago. Many sub 20k Slashdot userids welcome the fact our life expectancy and quality of life has increased significantly due to technology. I first used the internet over a teletype terminal and the six million dollar man was still in production.
LA
Times has an article on a California bill that would
require all cars to have a GPS and wireless connection for downloading the
miles driven.Newsmax has some interesting
observations on the motivations for the idea.
Creativity seems to be correlated with awareness of other cultures and subcultures, and this in turn seems to be correlated with liberalism.
Finding correlations is meaningless. Homicides correlate with summer weather. Summer weather is correlated with an increase in chicks in bikinis. Ergo Chicks in bikinis cause homicides
some time early this year. Most like to get ready to confiscate them.
Punishment for non-compliance is stiff. The project was supposed to cost $10 million. Current cost is over a billion and rising. extimated 80% of people are just ignoring the law.
I guess it's true outlaw guns and only criminals will have them.
Like the RCMP says "You have no need to defend yourself. Just get on the radio and call us and we will hunt across the entire NW territories to catch who ever it was that just murdered you."
We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes.
If your vote is so important to why don't volunteers count the votes? Several states, Texas example, require a human readable ballot. Smaller cities may use hand counts. Most large cities use a machine/human readable "scantron" type ballots. They mark the ballots with a permanent ink marker. Marking more than one selection for the same race invalidates only the section of the ballot for that race. IF you notice you made a mistake you can get a fresh ballot. The spoiled ballot is destroyed while you watch. Observers from all parties can watch the election judges (the people that issue the ballots, destroy the miss-marked ballots and watch you put your ballot in the box).
In Europe and Canada most countries require a paper ballot. They limit the number of voters assigned to each polling place so the votes can be counted and certified within a few hours of the close of the polls. Usually they have next day official results. It does require lots of people to complete the process but most are volunteers.
...made pathetic policy choices that made the coming
recession worse...
The last recession started in the last year of Clinton's
administration with the 'dot com' bomb and ended in January 2003. It was the mildest recession ever according
to Alan Greespan.
So how did the Mr. Bush's policy choices impact the US economy? Looks more like
he stopped a slide into recession cause by a stock market bubble created by the
previous administration's eight years of mismanagement of the economy
...and is a complete moron...
That graduated from one
of the most prestigious universities in the United States. Where did you go to school and what is your
GPA? What does a nurse call the man that graduates last in his class from
medical school? I believe the correct form of address is 'Doctor'.
I love how the socialist-democrats
like to attack the person with unsupported ambiguous statements negative
statements or 'Have you stopped beating you wide yet' type rhetoric. The next phase when confronted with facts is
for the liberals to refuse
you your 1st amendment rights by any means possible because as
we all know 'the end justifies the means'.
...but it is certainly not hard to pretend to be someone who died 50 years ago. This has happened before. If they could make a secure E-voting machine...
Yes, a secure voting machine that depends on the motor voter registration system so all the non-resident and undocumented aliens can vote along with all the dead people. You'd most likely jump up and down with glee if they web enabled the registration and voting systems because Secure e-Voting (TM) has to be better. Right?
From what you say you seem to think someone stands in line and votes the graveyard. The Chicago method is to get control of the voter registration rolls for a district and 'add' the graveyard. Then the 'impartial' volunteer election judge checks off the extra names and stuffs the ballot box after the polls close.
Any voting system without a 100% human readable audit trail that is accessible to the voter at the time they place the vote and without a 100% reliable method of matching a ballot to the registration list is vulnerable. What plagues the voting system in the US is we are too cheap to devote the required resources to the system. The UK and many European countries have next day election results using paper hand counted ballots. They however don't try to have only 17 polling places in a city of five hundred thousand, as is the case in so many US cities.
Do you know how many bacteria, yeast, and fungus are on the floor? Your really eating foot-fungus when you eat something that just fell on the floor. Yuck yuck yuck.
Did you know the floor has fewer bacteria, yeasts and fungi than the inside of your mouth?
Did you know urine from a healthy human has less bacteria, yeasts and fungi than the inside of your mouth?
Did you know urine from a healthy human has antibiotic and antifungal properties and can be used to cure foot fungus?
Did you know one of the causes of dermatitis (bacterial infection of the skin) is too frequent washing with harsh chemical cleaners like alcohol gels?
Did you know that per square inch the floor in most households have fewer bacteria, yeasts and fungi than raw vegetables, fruits and nuts?
Did you know most food contains tiny amounts of deadly neurotoxins created by bacterial growth?
Did you know you should to look at where organic food comes from and exactly what 'organic fertilizer' means?
Did you know you are being bombarded by k, l and m X-ray radiation streaming out of your monitor at this very second?
Did you know more people are irrationally afraid of bacteria that is very unlikely to harm them than are afraid of cars that are more likely kill them?
I think that solar panels are net energy gainers after about 2 years. And you can put 'em on top of buildings
From a quick Google the average solar energy in North Americas is about 600 watts per meter square. So over a 12 hour day one receives:
12 hours x 600 watts per sq. m = 7200 watt-hours per sq. m which equals 4.8 kilowatt hours per sq. m.
This is equivalent to 0.19 gallons of gasoline.
For 1000 square feet of horizontal area (typical roof area single family two story home) this is equivalent to 18 gallons of gas or about 675 KWH.
Hmm... My last electric bill was for several times that and I have a natural gas water heater. The math only gets worse and worse for multi-family/multi-story buildings like any high-density area. I could get my vehicle fuel needs from my roof (if my home owners association would allow such a thing), but the majority of people/and businesses would be hard pressed to do so.
We'd still have to build solar farms and transmission/collection infrastructure to get the energy we need just for vehicles. You very quickly run into the NIMBY problems for alternative energy projects. Look at the resistance to building a wind generation pilot plant off the Massachusetts coast as an example. The majority of the resistance is from a group of in word only greens. They are trying to kill the project because it is in their back yard. Environmentalism is okay if they don't have to have their view of the ocean at their summer house blocked by the project.
Multiply the number of projects needed to fill the requirement by several thousand, since most places near enough to a location that needs the power are going to suffer from the NIMBY issue you have to increase the total cost of the project to include a collection network. Just because the solar panel is a net energy gainer after two years does not mean the collection, distribution, legal and maintenance costs will be amortized in two years. Who will sweep the dust off the panels every few hours to keep the efficiency up?
Hmm... Where will we get the hydrogen for all those green hydrogen fueled cars? Nuclear power plants? Coal fired powered power plants? Those solutions for generating hydrogen are potentially worse than the continued use of diesel or gasoline fuels.
Wind power? Just look at the problems getting a pilot test done on the coast off Massachusetts. The Kennedy's are saying NIMBY to a commercial wind power generation project. Yes you can build them in the middle of the desert but then you have to build a power transmission line to get the product to the consumer. Due to the low density of the power the cost of building and maintaining the transmission lines needed to "add" windmill farms to the grid approaches the market value of the power generated.
Same NIMBY and transmission issues with solar generation projects.
Aqueous alcohol fuel cells look to be more realistic solution. You don't have to use as dry (water free) an alcohol as in direct combustion of the alcohol. Use of biomass generated methane gas and direct solar heating to power the grain fermentation units and distillation units would increase the energy density of the fuel. You flush a nice bit of biomass down your toilet every day so every major city has a ready supply. Plus recovery of the biomass from waste water via a closed loop tertiary water treatment system will provide additional drinking water for the city. Don't gag about drinking the treated sewage idea most likely if you like on a major river system and get your drinking water from that river you all ready do. You just have a lot less control over the quality of the water at the intake than you would with a closed system.
Lifted from an ad for a POLICE / FIRE
COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
THE POSITION
Under supervision, receives and dispatches emergency and routine calls for police and fire service; operates a variety of communications equipment including public safety radio, telephones and recorders; determines nature, priority and disposition of calls using a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system; maintains radio communications and status of police and fire field units; and does other work as required.
The Combined Communications Center is a 24-hour facility located at the Police Department. Incumbents must be available to work weekends, holidays, call back, standby, and rotating shifts. The current shifts are: Day Shift 6:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; Evening Shift 4:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.; and Night Shift 9:00 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. Shifts are rotated every 12 weeks (from day shift, to evening shift, to night shift); there are no exceptions to shift work.
EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS
Ability to: Follow oral and written instructions; learn police and fire radio operations and procedures, local streets, police beats, fire districts, the classifications of crimes and recognition of common police and fire codes in order to obtain information from the public, initiate a response, and accurately record information; remember instructions and information; clearly and tactfully communicate factual information to citizens; question callers while simultaneously typing information into a computer terminal.
Skill in: Operating a computer terminal; listening and speaking clearly and responding quickly and accurately to emergency and routine requests for assistance.
Desirable Qualifications: Spanish-speaking skills; experience/training as an emergency communications operator, dispatcher or similar position requiring knowledge of emergency medical or public safety operations; coursework in criminal justice or communications; prior computer-aided dispatch (CAD) experience.
Typing Certification of 30 net w.p.m. is required. You must submit a copy of a typing certificate of 30 net w.p.m. (gross words-per-minute minus errors) with your application. The typing certificate must have been obtained within the last twelve months. The City does not give typing tests.
EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS
High school graduate or equivalent (myemphasis)
Lifted from an ad for a UNIVERSITY POLICE OFFICER TRAINEE
REQUIRMENTS
University Police Officers meet the highest police standards in New York State.
To become a University Officer, a person must:
be 21 years of age
be a New York State Resident
have completed 60 college credit hours(my emphasis)
possess a valid New York State drivers license
pass a written Civil Service examination
pass a medical examination
have binocular acuity of 20/20 corrected or uncorrected, and
no less than 20/100 uncorrected
pass a physical agility test (includes testing for
cardiovascular and muscular endurance, strength, and flexibility)
pass a psychological examination
pass an extensive background investigation
pass 16 weeks of basic training administered by SUNY at the New York State Police Academy in Albany.
Unfortunately most citizens are trading their intrinsic human rights for a false feeling of safety and only seem to want to protect some of the rights inherent in the human condition which are only reaffirmed in the first ten amendments to the US constitution.
Remember your First Amendment's rights only exist if you have your Second, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Amendments' rights.
Not really. It just moves the crime away from the cameras.
So the logical conclusion is cameras don't work? Hmm I add a camera and the crime relocates out of the view of the camera. What if you keep adding camera coverage? The crimes have fewer areas to occur unimpeded. Larger areas enjoy fewer crimes and more honest citizens traffic in those protected areas since they are safer. Since fewer dispatchers can monitor larger areas you can concentrate the law enforcement officers on the beat in the unmonitored areas and arrest more crooks.
You remind me of the people that say mandatory sentencing doesn't work. Funny thing is now we have mandatory sentencing guidelines and put criminals in prison and leave them there, there are people who whine about the rising prison population. No one seems to notice that the crime rates across the US are uniformly decreasing as the criminals are taken off the street for longer periods of time. The cameras work that way too. People like you want a direct effect that is the total solution not a series of indirect consequences that mitigate an essentially us solvable problem.
You have no right to privacy on a public street or in a public place.
In Tampa they had a full time officer using the system who could have been out on the streets in the community that he is trying to protect understanding and interacting with that community.
While the software is a failure, having a single full time officer watching the cameras is a good way to 'patrol' a larger area. Examine the case of having six cameras that scan six widely separated areas in a downtown neighborhood. It would take six full time officers to monitor the area as thoroughly as that one officer and six cameras could. This frees up five officers for use as a response team or to walk beats in areas that are not amenable to camera surveillance.
I dislike the use of "officer" to describe the person monitoring the cameras. Why does the individual have to be a certified law officer? A "dispatcher" would be a better description. They would dispatch the "highly trained" certified law officers in the patrol area to the site of the problems.
My WAG from around twenty-five years of observation is: 90% of wanted criminals at large the police do arrest are discovered in random encounters like traffic stops or from someone that knows the criminal tipping off the law.
You also have a misconception. The police in the United State are under no obligation to protect you. They are there to deter crime and enforce laws. If you are in the process of being assaulted and call 911, you cannot hold the police responsible failing to protect you when they show up 20 minutes to an hour after the perpetrator has fled the scene leaving you in a pool of your own blood. The courts have repeatedly held this to be true. Regardless of what the TV tries to tell you and what some departments paint of the side of their patrol cars, the police have no legal duty to protect you. They only have a duty to enforce the laws by issuance of citations or arrest of criminals. Even their powers of arrest are limited by the risk to by standers. Police cannot arrest a criminal if the attempt to apprehend would pose a danger to the public at large.
was still disable how could you download the new patch to fix the issue? Many home users ran into this Catch-22 of needing a network interface to get the patch but couldn't because the previous one broke the interface. You remembered System Restore. You were lucky.
What happens when this kind of problem occurs auto-magically installing a patch without notification to the user?
So, If someone is jamming the control frequency you just tell the real live human sky cops who have authority to use lethal force to wake up and go drive the perimeter road looking for someone jumping the fence.
Plus if they are using even the 1980's SINCGARS
radio technology the signal will be hard to jam and the jamming will be easy to triangulate back to a source. They are more likely to be using one of the newer frequency agile radio technologies that are even more resistant to jamming. They probably have provision for connecting a landline data link to robots that are 'standing watch' and only move through a limited area mitigating the man in the middle attack vulnerability. The robots that climb on walls and ceilings look like they are intended for use to scout an interior area for intruders. They may be semi-autonomous and only transmit back the base station if they spot something. Given the state of machine object recognition there will have to be an operator evaluating the senor data from this type of stuff for a long time to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Politburo, your choice of a handle speaks volumes about your politics.
The soldiers say in their own words that...
So because Private Snuffy, the article 15 king, said it, that makes it official SOP for every swinging d*ck in country? What part of 'cherry picking' do you not understand? Go talk to enough stupid straight legs just out of AIT and you'll find one that will tell you they are not simply authorized to but are fscking required to cut off enemy KIA's nut sacks to keep as souvenirs.
We were trained to drive vehicles slowly with out revving the engines to minimize our sound signature. To move purposely and quietly with out talking on the march. When we practiced manned a defensive perimeter or were in an ambush position we stayed for hours alert and silent in our fighting positions.
It is bad enough that we had to dress up all funny and wear a distinctive marking to suit LOAC. So the bad guys can recognize us at a distance. Make extra noise is a bad thing. Prior to moving out we'd jump around and make sure our gear didn't rattle. Nothing made noise. You could get you and your buddies killed because your canteen sloshed as you walked.
Listening to loud music on a mission would distract you from your assigned task, alert the enemy of your approach and could prevent you from hearing inter unit communications.
So universal involuntary service would be better? Maybe a 4 year tour between high school and college? Oh if they get a paycheck they are still mercenaries? So lets have four years of unpaid involuntary service then...so now aren't they slaves?
The volunteers that served in the civil war like my mom's great grandfather in one of the Delaware Regiments killed people to free the slaves and he got paid. So now you seem to think serving for pay is wrong? My Dad's older cousin fought in North Africa and died on D-day+5 in Normandy. He got a pay check too. My father was in Korea and Vietnam. He collected a check 'til the day he died. My older brother was in Vietnam. He got a pay check for that too. I was lucky my term of service occurred when the only shooting people on a regular basis for government pay was in Columbia and South America and I got paid for that.
Every one of you needs to think back over what a mostly volunteer military has done for you over the last 100 years. And you need to wonder if the current batch of people in Iraq are there for the paycheck or if they are there because they think people that would kill random folks out in our streets are wrong.
The same people that sent 19 highjackers to the US want to bring shira law to the US. Under shira law the establishment of a religion is required of the government. Remeber they invented the janissary.
Pay in our blood up front to stay free or, pay in your dhimmis blood to be slaves.
Aim? Who needs aim? They invented automatic weapons for people like me that don't feel like aiming. :)
(Got your joke. For the rest of you fully automatic weapons don't 'aim themselves'.)
Firing full auto isn't even remotely like what you see in the movies. Depending on the weapons rate of fire and design, recoil can be very difficult to control. HK MP5's are used by many LEO's because their slow rate of fire (600 rounds per minute "rpm") and ergonomics make them very easy to shoot accurately. The MAC M11/9 is the same caliber (9X19mm) but is much harder to control because of its high cyclic rate (1300 rpm) and a very shooter unfriendly design. Using the M11/9's suppressor as a front grip only works for the first magazine. After that you fry your hands. Holding the trigger down and 'hosing bullets' only makes sure your weapon is black and you're in the process of reloading when the bad guys pop out of cover and make you dead. Bursts of two or three aimed rounds are more effective than hosing it. Even the pig gunners shoot bursts to conserve ammo and prevent overheating their barrels. The M16 rifle has a built in 'burst limiter'. You can only fire a three round burst then you have to lift your finger and pull the trigger again. This is to aid in fire control and annoy people with good trigger disciple since the burst unit doesn't reset when you release the trigger in the middle of a brust.
Battle field noise, the smell of power smoke and the mechanics of aiming and firing your weapon are all part of military training. The training areas are wired with artillery simulators, smoke pots and other training aids. At a minimum you have to develop situational awareness, team work and an understanding of the right tactic to use. After 3-4 days of 20 to 22 hour days in the field staggering around in the night with 40-50 pounds of gear through knee deep mud and closely grown vegetation just remembering which hand is your left hand is difficult.
Things you don't experience often in training are picking up your buddy's body parts and dropping them in the body bag with the rest of him. Going through his pockets and putting his stuff in the personal effects bag. You don't often smell the combination of puke-feces smell of ruptured intestines or the smell of rotting blood in your fighting hole Some people die in training accidents and the DoD makes the use of them to teach you how not to get dead.
The games train tactics. They are not the only training being done. They can't simulate the physical demands of combat or the muscle memory involved in most basic solders tasks. The combat simulators for infantrymen make use of wrap-around panoramic displays and simulate firing special weapons like the javelin missile or the stinger. They train how to use a specific weapon.
Games like the FPS developed by the army are intended to get the recruit trained in maneuver and fire. The games teach them to use cover and concealment to move and shoot. The games teach them not to get too focused on what is in front of them and be aware of what is behind them.
Correction:
Since the United States decided that the conventions don't apply to "illegal enemy combatants" does that mean they also don't worry about using these special "less lethal" bullets anymore?
Get it right if you are not wearing a uniform or a symbol that is recognizable at a distance you are an illegal combatant and the Geneva Conventions expressly do not apply. Under LOAC such combatants are spies and subject to summary trial and execution on the field of battle.
Yup just longer and easier to remember.
I've always used a 'pass phrase'. You just pull the first letter from the first position in the first word, second letter from the second position in the second word and so forth. Use a non-l334 substitution for some vowels e.g. 'a is 7', 'e is %' and some arbiter rule for sticking in a wild-card character in the middle.
You end up with a less guessable password that is easier to remember.
And you have very low reading comprehension. I said "USED THE INTERNET". You read "GOT MY SLASHDOT UID". Are you not a native English speaker or just a product of a post 1970 high school?
I'm amazed you can use the keyboard with reading skills like that! It is no wonder you're such a skeptic since you can't read what is written; you can't believe anything you've tried to read.
Some of us are from the '60's and have children older than you. The technology discussed in the article was just so much fiction only twenty-five years ago. Many sub 20k Slashdot userids welcome the fact our life expectancy and quality of life has increased significantly due to technology. I first used the internet over a teletype terminal and the six million dollar man was still in production.
LOL! Kids these days
LA Times has an article on a California bill that would require all cars to have a GPS and wireless connection for downloading the miles driven.Newsmax has some interesting observations on the motivations for the idea.
Finding correlations is meaningless. Homicides correlate with summer weather. Summer weather is correlated with an increase in chicks in bikinis. Ergo Chicks in bikinis cause homicides
some time early this year. Most like to get ready to confiscate them.
Punishment for non-compliance is stiff. The project was supposed to cost $10 million. Current cost is over a billion and rising. extimated 80% of people are just ignoring the law.
I guess it's true outlaw guns and only criminals will have them.
Like the RCMP says "You have no need to defend yourself. Just get on the radio and call us and we will hunt across the entire NW territories to catch who ever it was that just murdered you."
We don't want to have to pay someone to tally all the votes.
If your vote is so important to why don't volunteers count the votes? Several states, Texas example, require a human readable ballot. Smaller cities may use hand counts. Most large cities use a machine/human readable "scantron" type ballots. They mark the ballots with a permanent ink marker. Marking more than one selection for the same race invalidates only the section of the ballot for that race. IF you notice you made a mistake you can get a fresh ballot. The spoiled ballot is destroyed while you watch. Observers from all parties can watch the election judges (the people that issue the ballots, destroy the miss-marked ballots and watch you put your ballot in the box).
In Europe and Canada most countries require a paper ballot. They limit the number of voters assigned to each polling place so the votes can be counted and certified within a few hours of the close of the polls. Usually they have next day official results. It does require lots of people to complete the process but most are volunteers.
The last recession started in the last year of Clinton's administration with the 'dot com' bomb and ended in January 2003. It was the mildest recession ever according to Alan Greespan. So how did the Mr. Bush's policy choices impact the US economy? Looks more like he stopped a slide into recession cause by a stock market bubble created by the previous administration's eight years of mismanagement of the economy
That graduated from one of the most prestigious universities in the United States. Where did you go to school and what is your GPA? What does a nurse call the man that graduates last in his class from medical school? I believe the correct form of address is 'Doctor'.
I love how the socialist-democrats like to attack the person with unsupported ambiguous statements negative statements or 'Have you stopped beating you wide yet' type rhetoric. The next phase when confronted with facts is for the liberals to refuse you your 1st amendment rights by any means possible because as we all know 'the end justifies the means'.
...but it is certainly not hard to pretend to be someone who died 50 years ago. This has happened before. If they could make a secure E-voting machine...
Yes, a secure voting machine that depends on the motor voter registration system so all the non-resident and undocumented aliens can vote along with all the dead people. You'd most likely jump up and down with glee if they web enabled the registration and voting systems because Secure e-Voting (TM) has to be better. Right?
From what you say you seem to think someone stands in line and votes the graveyard. The Chicago method is to get control of the voter registration rolls for a district and 'add' the graveyard. Then the 'impartial' volunteer election judge checks off the extra names and stuffs the ballot box after the polls close.
Any voting system without a 100% human readable audit trail that is accessible to the voter at the time they place the vote and without a 100% reliable method of matching a ballot to the registration list is vulnerable. What plagues the voting system in the US is we are too cheap to devote the required resources to the system. The UK and many European countries have next day election results using paper hand counted ballots. They however don't try to have only 17 polling places in a city of five hundred thousand, as is the case in so many US cities.
Buy a standard vehicle and have it converted to use propane, butane or liquid natural gas. Cheap easy to find fuel and good for the enviroment.
Do you know how many bacteria, yeast, and fungus are on the floor? Your really eating foot-fungus when you eat something that just fell on the floor. Yuck yuck yuck.
Did you know the floor has fewer bacteria, yeasts and fungi than the inside of your mouth?
Did you know urine from a healthy human has less bacteria, yeasts and fungi than the inside of your mouth?
Did you know urine from a healthy human has antibiotic and antifungal properties and can be used to cure foot fungus?
Did you know one of the causes of dermatitis (bacterial infection of the skin) is too frequent washing with harsh chemical cleaners like alcohol gels?
Did you know that per square inch the floor in most households have fewer bacteria, yeasts and fungi than raw vegetables, fruits and nuts?
Did you know most food contains tiny amounts of deadly neurotoxins created by bacterial growth?
Did you know you should to look at where organic food comes from and exactly what 'organic fertilizer' means?
Did you know you are being bombarded by k, l and m X-ray radiation streaming out of your monitor at this very second?
Did you know more people are irrationally afraid of bacteria that is very unlikely to harm them than are afraid of cars that are more likely kill them?
I think that solar panels are net energy gainers after about 2 years. And you can put 'em on top of buildings
From a quick Google the average solar energy in North Americas is about 600 watts per meter square. So over a 12 hour day one receives:
12 hours x 600 watts per sq. m = 7200 watt-hours per sq. m which equals 4.8 kilowatt hours per sq. m.
This is equivalent to 0.19 gallons of gasoline.
For 1000 square feet of horizontal area (typical roof area single family two story home) this is equivalent to 18 gallons of gas or about 675 KWH.
Hmm... My last electric bill was for several times that and I have a natural gas water heater. The math only gets worse and worse for multi-family/multi-story buildings like any high-density area. I could get my vehicle fuel needs from my roof (if my home owners association would allow such a thing), but the majority of people/and businesses would be hard pressed to do so.
We'd still have to build solar farms and transmission/collection infrastructure to get the energy we need just for vehicles. You very quickly run into the NIMBY problems for alternative energy projects. Look at the resistance to building a wind generation pilot plant off the Massachusetts coast as an example. The majority of the resistance is from a group of in word only greens. They are trying to kill the project because it is in their back yard. Environmentalism is okay if they don't have to have their view of the ocean at their summer house blocked by the project.
Multiply the number of projects needed to fill the requirement by several thousand, since most places near enough to a location that needs the power are going to suffer from the NIMBY issue you have to increase the total cost of the project to include a collection network. Just because the solar panel is a net energy gainer after two years does not mean the collection, distribution, legal and maintenance costs will be amortized in two years. Who will sweep the dust off the panels every few hours to keep the efficiency up?
Hmm... Where will we get the hydrogen for all those green hydrogen fueled cars? Nuclear power plants? Coal fired powered power plants? Those solutions for generating hydrogen are potentially worse than the continued use of diesel or gasoline fuels.
Wind power? Just look at the problems getting a pilot test done on the coast off Massachusetts. The Kennedy's are saying NIMBY to a commercial wind power generation project. Yes you can build them in the middle of the desert but then you have to build a power transmission line to get the product to the consumer. Due to the low density of the power the cost of building and maintaining the transmission lines needed to "add" windmill farms to the grid approaches the market value of the power generated.
Same NIMBY and transmission issues with solar generation projects.
Aqueous alcohol fuel cells look to be more realistic solution. You don't have to use as dry (water free) an alcohol as in direct combustion of the alcohol. Use of biomass generated methane gas and direct solar heating to power the grain fermentation units and distillation units would increase the energy density of the fuel. You flush a nice bit of biomass down your toilet every day so every major city has a ready supply. Plus recovery of the biomass from waste water via a closed loop tertiary water treatment system will provide additional drinking water for the city. Don't gag about drinking the treated sewage idea most likely if you like on a major river system and get your drinking water from that river you all ready do. You just have a lot less control over the quality of the water at the intake than you would with a closed system.
Calling the police often gets the victim arrested.
Lifted from an ad for a POLICE / FIRE COMMUNICATIONS SPECIALIST
THE POSITION
Under supervision, receives and dispatches emergency and routine calls for police and fire service; operates a variety of communications equipment including public safety radio, telephones and recorders; determines nature, priority and disposition of calls using a computer aided dispatch (CAD) system; maintains radio communications and status of police and fire field units; and does other work as required.
The Combined Communications Center is a 24-hour facility located at the Police Department. Incumbents must be available to work weekends, holidays, call back, standby, and rotating shifts. The current shifts are: Day Shift 6:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.; Evening Shift 4:00 p.m. to 2:30 a.m.; and Night Shift 9:00 p.m. to 7:30 a.m. Shifts are rotated every 12 weeks (from day shift, to evening shift, to night shift); there are no exceptions to shift work.
EMPLOYMENT STANDARDS
Ability to: Follow oral and written instructions; learn police and fire radio operations and procedures, local streets, police beats, fire districts, the classifications of crimes and recognition of common police and fire codes in order to obtain information from the public, initiate a response, and accurately record information; remember instructions and information; clearly and tactfully communicate factual information to citizens; question callers while simultaneously typing information into a computer terminal.
Skill in: Operating a computer terminal; listening and speaking clearly and responding quickly and accurately to emergency and routine requests for assistance.
Desirable Qualifications: Spanish-speaking skills; experience/training as an emergency communications operator, dispatcher or similar position requiring knowledge of emergency medical or public safety operations; coursework in criminal justice or communications; prior computer-aided dispatch (CAD) experience.
Typing Certification of 30 net w.p.m. is required. You must submit a copy of a typing certificate of 30 net w.p.m. (gross words-per-minute minus errors) with your application. The typing certificate must have been obtained within the last twelve months. The City does not give typing tests.
EDUCATION REQUIREMENTS
High school graduate or equivalent (myemphasis)
Lifted from an ad for a UNIVERSITY POLICE OFFICER TRAINEE
REQUIRMENTS
University Police Officers meet the highest police standards in New York State.
To become a University Officer, a person must:
be 21 years of age
be a New York State Resident
have completed 60 college credit hours(my emphasis)
possess a valid New York State drivers license
pass a written Civil Service examination
pass a medical examination
have binocular acuity of 20/20 corrected or uncorrected, and no less than 20/100 uncorrected
pass a physical agility test (includes testing for cardiovascular and muscular endurance, strength, and flexibility)
pass a psychological examination
pass an extensive background investigation
pass 16 weeks of basic training administered by SUNY at the New York State Police Academy in Albany.
complete a probationary period of employment.
Median Police Salary $ 36964
Median Dispatcher Salary $24299
By duty I was referring to what they are supposed to do not what they actually do.
You know from the bill of rights.
Unfortunately most citizens are trading their intrinsic human rights for a false feeling of safety and only seem to want to protect some of the rights inherent in the human condition which are only reaffirmed in the first ten amendments to the US constitution.
Remember your First Amendment's rights only exist if you have your Second, Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Ninth Amendments' rights.Not really. It just moves the crime away from the cameras.
So the logical conclusion is cameras don't work? Hmm I add a camera and the crime relocates out of the view of the camera. What if you keep adding camera coverage? The crimes have fewer areas to occur unimpeded. Larger areas enjoy fewer crimes and more honest citizens traffic in those protected areas since they are safer. Since fewer dispatchers can monitor larger areas you can concentrate the law enforcement officers on the beat in the unmonitored areas and arrest more crooks.
You remind me of the people that say mandatory sentencing doesn't work. Funny thing is now we have mandatory sentencing guidelines and put criminals in prison and leave them there, there are people who whine about the rising prison population. No one seems to notice that the crime rates across the US are uniformly decreasing as the criminals are taken off the street for longer periods of time. The cameras work that way too. People like you want a direct effect that is the total solution not a series of indirect consequences that mitigate an essentially us solvable problem.
If you ignore the privacy worries for a minute...
You have no right to privacy on a public street or in a public place.
In Tampa they had a full time officer using the system who could have been out on the streets
in the community that he is trying to protect understanding and interacting with that community.
While the software is a failure, having a single full time officer watching the cameras is a good way to 'patrol' a larger area. Examine the case of having six cameras that scan six widely separated areas in a downtown neighborhood. It would take six full time officers to monitor the area as thoroughly as that one officer and six cameras could. This frees up five officers for use as a response team or to walk beats in areas that are not amenable to camera surveillance.
I dislike the use of "officer" to describe the person monitoring the cameras. Why does the individual have to be a certified law officer? A "dispatcher" would be a better description. They would dispatch the "highly trained" certified law officers in the patrol area to the site of the problems.
My WAG from around twenty-five years of observation is: 90% of wanted criminals at large the police do arrest are discovered in random encounters like traffic stops or from someone that knows the criminal tipping off the law.
You also have a misconception. The police in the United State are under no obligation to protect you. They are there to deter crime and enforce laws. If you are in the process of being assaulted and call 911, you cannot hold the police responsible failing to protect you when they show up 20 minutes to an hour after the perpetrator has fled the scene leaving you in a pool of your own blood. The courts have repeatedly held this to be true. Regardless of what the TV tries to tell you and what some departments paint of the side of their patrol cars, the police have no legal duty to protect you. They only have a duty to enforce the laws by issuance of citations or arrest of criminals. Even their powers of arrest are limited by the risk to by standers. Police cannot arrest a criminal if the attempt to apprehend would pose a danger to the public at large.
was still disable how could you download the new patch to fix the issue? Many home users ran into this Catch-22 of needing a network interface to get the patch but couldn't because the previous one broke the interface. You remembered System Restore. You were lucky.
What happens when this kind of problem occurs auto-magically installing a patch without notification to the user?
So, If someone is jamming the control frequency you just tell the real live human sky cops who have authority to use lethal force to wake up and go drive the perimeter road looking for someone jumping the fence. Plus if they are using even the 1980's SINCGARS radio technology the signal will be hard to jam and the jamming will be easy to triangulate back to a source. They are more likely to be using one of the newer frequency agile radio technologies that are even more resistant to jamming. They probably have provision for connecting a landline data link to robots that are 'standing watch' and only move through a limited area mitigating the man in the middle attack vulnerability. The robots that climb on walls and ceilings look like they are intended for use to scout an interior area for intruders. They may be semi-autonomous and only transmit back the base station if they spot something. Given the state of machine object recognition there will have to be an operator evaluating the senor data from this type of stuff for a long time to come.