> Ahh the old "there's nothing to fear unless you're criminal" line. CCTV is a > monstrous intrusion into our right of privacy
You're never going to achieve privacy in the middle of a town center at pub throw out time, which is mainly what these cameras are for! How can a camera 30ft in the air screwed to the side of a building infringe on your privacy? It can't read your e-mail and steal your identity. It's just a camera. In fact you can barely tell it's even you unless you cause trouble and they zoom right in on you. They're not even high res - they're only about half a megapixel.
> almost completely ineffective at reducing crime.
No idea where you read that. They *are* effective at reducing crime, and more importantly - identifying and prosecuting offenders (if they weren't, they wouldn't keep putting them up - no-ones forcing them and they're expensive). Have you ever seen Crimewatch?!
> many drivers now roar along at over 100mph and just slam on the brakes when a camera comes into view
That won't be the case for much longer. They are trialling several systems which average your speed over the entire length of your journey. If you break the speed over a mile, then you must have been doing more than 70mph over the entire mile. If you're average speed exceeds 70 over the entire distance of the M1, then presumably you'll get a much bigger fine or a ban. I'm sure it won't be long before it's impossible to speed on the motorways.
I hope to god that they increase the speed limits on motorways to 80 or 90mph before these systems are in place however.
Compared to what?! It's lower than most other countries in Europe. Even under Labour! It may be charged in a different way to your country, but I doubt it's any higher.
> - Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
But allegedly better than many US private health care services.
> - Cameras everywhere..
You make that sound like a BAD thing?! What's your point?
> - A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan
Err, you have CNBC. Enough said.
> - Out of control, bureaucratic utilities (like the article states).
It's fully regulated by Oftel and the article quoted a single rare example. 99% of people will have a fast and reliable connection within a few days. This kind of service is not available in countries such as the US where vastly less than 97% are able to get ADSL.
> - Television licenses
At least we get some decent channels and a free 30 channel digital service in almost every house in the country.
> along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
You made that up. They are not entitled to enter your home without a warrant.
> - Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines
At least our speed limits are much higher than they are in some other countries (eg the US, where a lot of highways have a stupidly low 55 or 60mph limit). We also have very few police around with radars. It's almost always fixed cameras - so at least you know where they are. They don't try and "catch you out" and all cameras are now positioned in accident blackspots (where a certain number of deaths a year had occured before the camera was installed).
> - Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
You've said that already. And again, why is that a BAD thing? Most UK citizens want MORE cameras. I've never heard of anyone complaining about a camera being there! I guess you're a criminal of some sort who has something to fear from the cameras. No law abiding citizen could care less if they were on camera. Maybe in your gun-toting, very high crime society (compare the stats before calling me a liar) cameras are *somehow* regarded as a bad thing?!
The article was written by an American. The whole world knows what the geography of the average American is like. If they're not bombing it, they probably have no idea where it is. Apparently most of them don't even have a passport. How arrogant is it to think that it's not worth leaving your own country?
I wonder if this stuff could be used to make buildings more invulnerable to earthquakes. If the foundations and a couple of lower levels were flexible, maybe the building would just wobble rather than shaking itself to bits - the equivalent to putting suspension in a car?
What if google prefetches (for example) the advertiser sites which are linked to from it's own results pages? That would cause effective "click-thoughs" for sites which you haven't even clicked on, therefor causing them to waste their advertising budget on nothing more than a proxy. OK google has probably disabled this for it's own advert links, but what about everyone elses? And what about messing up the stats that the webmasters use? They might get the totally incorrect idea of what pages on their site are popular because Google has prefetched some links that people never normally click on, just because they're near the top or contain a certain keyword or something.
If usage of tools like Google Web Accellerator becomes widespread, I see many webmasters becoming particularly annoyed with them and possibly firewalling out requests from the Google Proxy.
Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?
You know, altavista.com, the one that worked for a few months and then got spammed into oblivion and has been fairly unusable ever since which is why everyone now uses Google?
I would never have described it as 'accurate'. The only reason it could possibly be seen to be accurate was because at one stage, there were no porn sites to spam the index with, so it *had* to return decent page by default - because that's all that was there.
It seems to be back now, but at the time I posted I couldn't see anything:
Tracing route to www.microsoft.com over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms neon.winchester.local [192.168.0.19] (blah)
7 259 ms 264 ms 251 ms ten7-2.paix-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.37.26]
8 484 ms 263 ms 371 ms ten8-3.bay-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.63.74]
9 259 ms 267 ms 256 ms po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138]
10 po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138] reports: Destination net unreachable.
I almost can't believe what I'm seeing.... Maybe it's just a coincidence but I can't currently connect to MSN Messenger (Trillian crashes) AND I can't see www.microsoft.com or use Windows Update from here in the UK!
I can't imagine that Microsoft.com could get slashdotted, so maybe they're having some severe teething issues.
This doesn't bode well for the future of 64bit Windows computing:)
Yes it would. A GPS aerial alone has a set minimum size as it has to receive weak signals from a satellite - you can't make them too small. A gps on a usb keyfob would be a pretty big device - at least matchbox sized going on the smallest ones I've seen. Even the tiny compact-flash ones designed to plug into iPaqs often have a chunky aerial sticking out.
You would stand better chance of building it into every laptop.
I've always thought it must be a fairly easy task to couple a GPS with a cell phone to produce a vehicle tracker that you can embed in your car. Since all you're really doing is forwarding one serial port to another (with a bit of fiddling in the middle) this could probably be done via a VERY basic computer (eg a PIC of some sort). I dont' really have the time or expertise to do this myself, but I'd love to know if anyone has posted plans or has made their own vehicle tracker and is willing to tell the world how they did it.
Currently in the UK, these devices are very expensive and also have expensive annual subscriptions.
> A clean analog signal looks better than an overcompressed digital signal, > true. But a truly "clean" analog signal doesn't exist.
Rubbish. Any vaguely decent signal looks noise free to the human eye. The noise has to get pretty bad before you can see it. I don't know where you live, but perhaps the analogue feed isn't that good. As long as you can't see the noise, it will look better than it's digital equivalent.
It's almost impossible for example, to get smooth gradients on a digital feed. The compression reduces the number of colours even in high bandwidth feeds so you get lots of banding. Analogue TV has infinite colours so you never get this problem.
My analogue terrestrial feed is decent thankyou. My analog NTL cable feed was also visually better than the digital feed I get now (although the sound was worse).
In most parts of the UK, you can get an analogue feed via a roof-aerial that's significantly better than the Freeview (DTTV) feed. The only drawback is that there's only room for 4-5 analogue channels.
A small amount of noise anything like as noticable as a small amount of compression artifacts. I can see no visible noise on my analogue feed at all - even if I freeze the picture and study it carefully.
Actually I *have* Sennheisers, but they're absolutely nothing compared to my hifi setup. The body is not designed to have the sound forcefully injected into your ear canal via a device millimeters from your eardrum. The music was not recorded and mixed with the infinite separation that you get from headphones. Some of the sound from the right ear is *meant* to reach the left ear as it would in real life. Unless you've got some VERY expensive headphones that correct for this (some do) then you can get some very odd sounding music indeed - especially if the sound was electonically produced.
The best headphones I've used are the ones that actually seal themselves into your ear so you can get bass response that rivals a decent hifi setup, but these are dangerous to use while on the move as they elimiate environmental noise so I don't use them...and they're still not as good as a decent speaker setup (if you think they are, then you don't have a *decent* speaker setup). And if you post back saying that you think your $500 Sony seperates system is anything other than a low-end mass produced system then I'll just laugh.
Who actually asked for higher resolution? Are they acting on customer demand or have they just decided that we should have it? The reason I say this is that I would rather have higher bandwidth channels than higher resolution ones. Compression artifacts annoy me much more than a low resolution picture does. They don't seem to be able to transmit TV in the current resolution without severely degrading the picture. Any "visualphile" will know that a decent analogue signal usually looks a lot better than it's digital equivalent (ref: I'm comparing Digital Terrestrial to Digital Satellite and Cable services available in the UK).
Perhaps I'm biassed because I'm in the UK and therefore have 625 lines instead of the appauling 480 line TVs the poor Americans have to put up with (no wonder they're screaming for HDTV!).
My worry is that even with MPEG 4 (which will probably be recompressed MPEG 2 sources anyway for quite a while) they may not have enough bandwith to send me a 1080 line picture without artifacts...
Maybe with Fiber To The Home we might actually get enough bandwidth to watch the channels we want at the resolution we want, without thinking that it looks like your TV has gone though 4 copes of RealPlayer...
> As long as you don't sell MP3 / Ogg files in 320kb - / very high quality however
Most people listen to MP3 files though headphones or in a car. The quality of the sound though headphones is so bad that it doesn't really matter if it's only 128K - you're never going to tell the difference anyway. Especially if you don't upgrade from the crappy white headphones that came with your iPod.
Please realise that this ad was not placed by eBay. It was placed by a random punter hoping to get some referral fees via eBays affiliate scheme. Hence the "aff" in the advert. Don't blame eBay for this unfortunate advert...
Slashdot Mirror
> Ahh the old "there's nothing to fear unless you're criminal" line. CCTV is a
> monstrous intrusion into our right of privacy
You're never going to achieve privacy in the middle of a town center at pub throw out time, which is mainly what these cameras are for! How can a camera 30ft in the air screwed to the side of a building infringe on your privacy? It can't read your e-mail and steal your identity. It's just a camera. In fact you can barely tell it's even you unless you cause trouble and they zoom right in on you. They're not even high res - they're only about half a megapixel.
> almost completely ineffective at reducing crime.
No idea where you read that. They *are* effective at reducing crime, and more importantly - identifying and prosecuting offenders (if they weren't, they wouldn't keep putting them up - no-ones forcing them and they're expensive). Have you ever seen Crimewatch?!
> many drivers now roar along at over 100mph and just slam on the brakes when a camera comes into view
That won't be the case for much longer. They are trialling several systems which average your speed over the entire length of your journey. If you break the speed over a mile, then you must have been doing more than 70mph over the entire mile. If you're average speed exceeds 70 over the entire distance of the M1, then presumably you'll get a much bigger fine or a ban. I'm sure it won't be long before it's impossible to speed on the motorways.
I hope to god that they increase the speed limits on motorways to 80 or 90mph before these systems are in place however.
Why do you need to link to mirrordot if the original is hosted at Stanford?!
..it would be much easier.
> - Huge taxation.
Compared to what?! It's lower than most other countries in Europe. Even under Labour! It may be charged in a different way to your country, but I doubt it's any higher.
> - Mandatory, expensive and mediocre health care.
But allegedly better than many US private health care services.
> - Cameras everywhere..
You make that sound like a BAD thing?! What's your point?
> - A sensationalistic press that makes Fox look bi-partisan
Err, you have CNBC. Enough said.
> - Out of control, bureaucratic utilities (like the article states).
It's fully regulated by Oftel and the article quoted a single rare example. 99% of people will have a fast and reliable connection within a few days. This kind of service is not available in countries such as the US where vastly less than 97% are able to get ADSL.
> - Television licenses
At least we get some decent channels and a free 30 channel digital service in almost every house in the country.
> along with warrant-less searches of homes suspected of running an unlicensed television.
You made that up. They are not entitled to enter your home without a warrant.
> - Speed traps everywhere, set to excessively low limits and with giant fines
At least our speed limits are much higher than they are in some other countries (eg the US, where a lot of highways have a stupidly low 55 or 60mph limit). We also have very few police around with radars. It's almost always fixed cameras - so at least you know where they are. They don't try and "catch you out" and all cameras are now positioned in accident blackspots (where a certain number of deaths a year had occured before the camera was installed).
> - Cameras monitoring every meaningful inch of public space.
You've said that already. And again, why is that a BAD thing? Most UK citizens want MORE cameras. I've never heard of anyone complaining about a camera being there! I guess you're a criminal of some sort who has something to fear from the cameras. No law abiding citizen could care less if they were on camera. Maybe in your gun-toting, very high crime society (compare the stats before calling me a liar) cameras are *somehow* regarded as a bad thing?!
That's because you haven't plugged the microfilters in in the correct places.
The article was written by an American. The whole world knows what the geography of the average American is like. If they're not bombing it, they probably have no idea where it is. Apparently most of them don't even have a passport. How arrogant is it to think that it's not worth leaving your own country?
I wonder if this stuff could be used to make buildings more invulnerable to earthquakes. If the foundations and a couple of lower levels were flexible, maybe the building would just wobble rather than shaking itself to bits - the equivalent to putting suspension in a car?
Isn't prefetching a little dangerous?
What if google prefetches (for example) the advertiser sites which are linked to from it's own results pages? That would cause effective "click-thoughs" for sites which you haven't even clicked on, therefor causing them to waste their advertising budget on nothing more than a proxy. OK google has probably disabled this for it's own advert links, but what about everyone elses? And what about messing up the stats that the webmasters use? They might get the totally incorrect idea of what pages on their site are popular because Google has prefetched some links that people never normally click on, just because they're near the top or contain a certain keyword or something.
If usage of tools like Google Web Accellerator becomes widespread, I see many webmasters becoming particularly annoyed with them and possibly firewalling out requests from the Google Proxy.
The same way they always do - they just asked her for her details in a popup:
I'd forgotten that it used to be altavista.digital.com... But I'm pretty sure back then (ooh 1996-1999ish) I never thought it was that good. Oh well.
Are you talking about the same Altavista the rest of us used?
You know, altavista.com, the one that worked for a few months and then got spammed into oblivion and has been fairly unusable ever since which is why everyone now uses Google?
I would never have described it as 'accurate'. The only reason it could possibly be seen to be accurate was because at one stage, there were no porn sites to spam the index with, so it *had* to return decent page by default - because that's all that was there.
For DNS and bandwidth yes, but not for their servers.
It seems to be back now, but at the time I posted I couldn't see anything:
Tracing route to www.microsoft.com
over a maximum of 30 hops:
1 1 ms 1 ms 1 ms neon.winchester.local [192.168.0.19]
(blah)
7 259 ms 264 ms 251 ms ten7-2.paix-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [207.46.37.26]
8 484 ms 263 ms 371 ms ten8-3.bay-osr-a.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.63.74]
9 259 ms 267 ms 256 ms po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138]
10 po2.bay-6nf-mcs-1b.ntwk.msn.net [64.4.62.138] reports: Destination net unreachable.
I almost can't believe what I'm seeing.... Maybe it's just a coincidence but I can't currently connect to MSN Messenger (Trillian crashes) AND I can't see www.microsoft.com or use Windows Update from here in the UK!
:)
I can't imagine that Microsoft.com could get slashdotted, so maybe they're having some severe teething issues.
This doesn't bode well for the future of 64bit Windows computing
Yes it would. A GPS aerial alone has a set minimum size as it has to receive weak signals from a satellite - you can't make them too small. A gps on a usb keyfob would be a pretty big device - at least matchbox sized going on the smallest ones I've seen. Even the tiny compact-flash ones designed to plug into iPaqs often have a chunky aerial sticking out.
You would stand better chance of building it into every laptop.
eg:
callto://echo123 - calls the "Echo test service"
> something like a URL that I could just send them to say "hey, skype me,
> skype://whateverwhatver"
You can do that already, it's: callto://skypeusername
> where the hell is the "A" in "Web Standards Project"?????
Web stAndardS Project.
I mean, duh!
I've always thought it must be a fairly easy task to couple a GPS with a cell phone to produce a vehicle tracker that you can embed in your car. Since all you're really doing is forwarding one serial port to another (with a bit of fiddling in the middle) this could probably be done via a VERY basic computer (eg a PIC of some sort). I dont' really have the time or expertise to do this myself, but I'd love to know if anyone has posted plans or has made their own vehicle tracker and is willing to tell the world how they did it.
Currently in the UK, these devices are very expensive and also have expensive annual subscriptions.
> A clean analog signal looks better than an overcompressed digital signal,
> true. But a truly "clean" analog signal doesn't exist.
Rubbish. Any vaguely decent signal looks noise free to the human eye. The noise has to get pretty bad before you can see it. I don't know where you live, but perhaps the analogue feed isn't that good. As long as you can't see the noise, it will look better than it's digital equivalent.
It's almost impossible for example, to get smooth gradients on a digital feed. The compression reduces the number of colours even in high bandwidth feeds so you get lots of banding. Analogue TV has infinite colours so you never get this problem.
My analogue terrestrial feed is decent thankyou. My analog NTL cable feed was also visually better than the digital feed I get now (although the sound was worse).
In most parts of the UK, you can get an analogue feed via a roof-aerial that's significantly better than the Freeview (DTTV) feed. The only drawback is that there's only room for 4-5 analogue channels.
A small amount of noise anything like as noticable as a small amount of compression artifacts. I can see no visible noise on my analogue feed at all - even if I freeze the picture and study it carefully.
Actually I *have* Sennheisers, but they're absolutely nothing compared to my hifi setup. The body is not designed to have the sound forcefully injected into your ear canal via a device millimeters from your eardrum. The music was not recorded and mixed with the infinite separation that you get from headphones. Some of the sound from the right ear is *meant* to reach the left ear as it would in real life. Unless you've got some VERY expensive headphones that correct for this (some do) then you can get some very odd sounding music indeed - especially if the sound was electonically produced.
..and they're still not as good as a decent speaker setup (if you think they are, then you don't have a *decent* speaker setup). And if you post back saying that you think your $500 Sony seperates system is anything other than a low-end mass produced system then I'll just laugh.
The best headphones I've used are the ones that actually seal themselves into your ear so you can get bass response that rivals a decent hifi setup, but these are dangerous to use while on the move as they elimiate environmental noise so I don't use them.
Who actually asked for higher resolution? Are they acting on customer demand or have they just decided that we should have it? The reason I say this is that I would rather have higher bandwidth channels than higher resolution ones. Compression artifacts annoy me much more than a low resolution picture does. They don't seem to be able to transmit TV in the current resolution without severely degrading the picture. Any "visualphile" will know that a decent analogue signal usually looks a lot better than it's digital equivalent (ref: I'm comparing Digital Terrestrial to Digital Satellite and Cable services available in the UK).
Perhaps I'm biassed because I'm in the UK and therefore have 625 lines instead of the appauling 480 line TVs the poor Americans have to put up with (no wonder they're screaming for HDTV!).
My worry is that even with MPEG 4 (which will probably be recompressed MPEG 2 sources anyway for quite a while) they may not have enough bandwith to send me a 1080 line picture without artifacts...
Maybe with Fiber To The Home we might actually get enough bandwidth to watch the channels we want at the resolution we want, without thinking that it looks like your TV has gone though 4 copes of RealPlayer...
> As long as you don't sell MP3 / Ogg files in 320kb - / very high quality however
Most people listen to MP3 files though headphones or in a car. The quality of the sound though headphones is so bad that it doesn't really matter if it's only 128K - you're never going to tell the difference anyway. Especially if you don't upgrade from the crappy white headphones that came with your iPod.
Please realise that this ad was not placed by eBay. It was placed by a random punter hoping to get some referral fees via eBays affiliate scheme. Hence the "aff" in the advert. Don't blame eBay for this unfortunate advert...