It all comes down to what 'religious' means legally. It's hardly a new problem. There are many people now who still hold to some religious belief but openly reject organised religion, and many more who are a member of a group most would call religious but refuse to consider themselves as such. There's even a group within Christianity who refuse to call themselves 'Christian' as they believe the term has become broadened to the point of losing all meaning, and instead call themselves 'Christ-followers.' These things really screw with survey attempts.
It's tricky trying to pin down in law something that is in the process of rapid change.
The 'cheaper' is the issue. A 'copter is expensive: The police aren't going to get that out unless they have a specific need for it, like a search-and-rescue operation or wanting aerial coverage of a SWAT raid on an armed suspect. Drones are cheaper, which means it becomes practical for them to go trawling for easy arrests - looking for speeding vehicles, fly-tippers, illegal water butts, violation of water usage laws, etc. While it can be a good thing that enforcing the law becomes easier (all those things are illegal for reasons, even if the water butts one is a very unpopular law), it also makes it much easier for the police to abuse: Eg, someone upsets a police officer or local government official in some manner, and for the next week a drone makes occasional passes over their house in the hope that maybe they'll use the lawn sprinklers during a drought or failed to maintain the minimum seperation between their garden tree and the neighouring house seperated by fire codes. The state of police varies greatly even within a single state, but stories abound of police departments and individual officers willing to abuse their power for often quite petty reasons.
This drone is a fully-remote thing, so GPS wouldn't do it. If you jammed the control signal - which shouldn't be hard at all - then it'd probably crash into the ground or go flying off crazily until it hits something. At least it'll just go into hover mode, drifting slowly. This would certainly be illegal though: Even if it runs in an unlicensed spectrum, you'd need more power than you can legally transmit.
It's a mistake I won't make in future. I gather that hebrew and aramaic are somewhat similar - I'm sure a little wiki-checking after work will tell me exactly how they relate.
If I were in charge of surpressing dissent, I'd add 3. Mandate all computers be sold with a government-approved antivirus program. As well as being a functioning (though hardly world-leading) antivirus, it also has a hash index of known subversive content. Upon detecting this, it immediately informs the government. Obviously this only works on internet-connected computers so it can download updates and report back violators, but those are also the ones you want to catch the most - people who can not only take part in the sneakernet, but also add new material or transfer incriminating files out of the country to a global audience.
I'm a school IT tech. We had to ban USB sticks because of the amount of illegal mp3s and games that were appearing in user folders. I'm sure they still run the school pirate network (good for them!), but it's no longer on our server now and thus Not My Problem.
A bit silly, in a way... I've seen people devote huge effort to arguing over exactly what it was Jesus said or meant, analysing small details of phrasing in the greek, but they seem almost ashamed to admit that the greek text they have is itsself a translation. Jesus would have spoken in hebrew, but the words he said are long lost now.
I've got a rented VM for mail, hosting my website showcasing all my failures to change the world, transfering files, running IRC bots for some friends, things like that. Works well. Aside from my being very uncreative when picking a domain name, so now I get asked why I have everything at birds-are-nice.me.
The light socket was a standardised power source, for a time. The first electric appliance to make it into the home was the electric light - and no others were anticipated, so there were no sockets. This meant that for a time the light bulb socket was the only available source of electricity for appliances in many homes, and became a de facto standard. If you look at many early appliances, such as the first electric vacuum cleaners and toasters, their power cords terminate in an Edison screw* connector to fit a light bulb socket. The user would take the bulb out, plug the cleaner into the ceiling, and swap back when done.
Two reasons for the heatsink. Firstly, they can get pretty toasty, yes. Secondly, high temperatures greatly shorten the lifespan of a LED. Incandescents or CFLs can take the heat, LEDs can't, so even if the heat dissipated isn't that great they still need large heatsinks.
Dark areas, and motion blur - you can see that clearly in the final seconds. It's a binary mask. The solution to this, I feel, is in physics rather than any change to the algorithm: Just set up a couple of those cheap 100W DIY worklights. No more near-0,0,0 blacks, and the motion blur reduced as the camera automatically reduces shutter'* speed.
* That term is going to be with us long after the physical shutter is gone. It's easier than saying 'CCD sampling interval duration.'
Very noisy camera. I was trying to best replicate the conditions typical of a zero-budget production: No proper backdrop, a too-small studio (thus shadows cast behind the actor), no professional lighting, a cheap consumer camera. I ran the video through virtualdub's temporal smooth, that took the worst off. The only places the filter really struggles are the very dark regions - those near-black folds in the trousers, the shadows under the arms - where noise overwhelms the color component. There's a lot of filtering of the mask involved too. I played around a lot with morphological operations before eventually abandoning that approach in favor of iterative refinement: Generate mask, then blur and use the resulting values as 'hints' in generating the mask for the next iteration. That works far better. Runs at a little under 1fps, but it's only a single-threaded test filter, so I could make it much faster if I had reason.
The photobooth trick is called a 'difference matte' or 'difference key.' It's found in most high-end video editing software, though not always by the same name. I wrote one myself too - http://birds-are-nice.me/video/bluescreen.shtml
As you can see from my effort, it isn't as easy as you'd think to get good results.
To argue there there is no 'magic algorithm' to what the S4 does. I'm no programming genius, just a dabbler who can knock out a few functions in C. If I can do it, it isn't hard.
Successive approximation dejitter followed by temporal mode filter. I could throw that together in twenty minutes. Making it run on mobile phone hardware is rather more difficult.
Reposting. The list of VPNs can be sent via email, IM, public forums, be spammed in comments on popular sites*, read over the telephone, or passed on paper between friends. Updates spread in a similar way. Censors would be hard-pressed to keep up. It could be done, but it'd be expensive and the need for haste would inevitably lead to mistakes which could block legitimate sites and inspire public dislike of the censor system.
I've had to do that on more than a few occasions too. Some of the things we've needed are so specialised they can't be obtained from the 'approved suppliers' list. A few of them are only readily available through ebay stores.
Slashdot Mirror
You make them sound like hippies.
It all comes down to what 'religious' means legally. It's hardly a new problem. There are many people now who still hold to some religious belief but openly reject organised religion, and many more who are a member of a group most would call religious but refuse to consider themselves as such. There's even a group within Christianity who refuse to call themselves 'Christian' as they believe the term has become broadened to the point of losing all meaning, and instead call themselves 'Christ-followers.' These things really screw with survey attempts.
It's tricky trying to pin down in law something that is in the process of rapid change.
The 'cheaper' is the issue. A 'copter is expensive: The police aren't going to get that out unless they have a specific need for it, like a search-and-rescue operation or wanting aerial coverage of a SWAT raid on an armed suspect. Drones are cheaper, which means it becomes practical for them to go trawling for easy arrests - looking for speeding vehicles, fly-tippers, illegal water butts, violation of water usage laws, etc. While it can be a good thing that enforcing the law becomes easier (all those things are illegal for reasons, even if the water butts one is a very unpopular law), it also makes it much easier for the police to abuse: Eg, someone upsets a police officer or local government official in some manner, and for the next week a drone makes occasional passes over their house in the hope that maybe they'll use the lawn sprinklers during a drought or failed to maintain the minimum seperation between their garden tree and the neighouring house seperated by fire codes. The state of police varies greatly even within a single state, but stories abound of police departments and individual officers willing to abuse their power for often quite petty reasons.
This drone is a fully-remote thing, so GPS wouldn't do it. If you jammed the control signal - which shouldn't be hard at all - then it'd probably crash into the ground or go flying off crazily until it hits something. At least it'll just go into hover mode, drifting slowly. This would certainly be illegal though: Even if it runs in an unlicensed spectrum, you'd need more power than you can legally transmit.
Maybe if you had it drop steel wire streamers? Those should jam the drone props.
And even then, there's always the old 'oh, it broke yesterday, I just hadn't filed the maintaince request yet.'
It's a mistake I won't make in future. I gather that hebrew and aramaic are somewhat similar - I'm sure a little wiki-checking after work will tell me exactly how they relate.
Noted. But it still wasn't greek, so the point remains.
Which one?
If I were in charge of surpressing dissent, I'd add 3. Mandate all computers be sold with a government-approved antivirus program. As well as being a functioning (though hardly world-leading) antivirus, it also has a hash index of known subversive content. Upon detecting this, it immediately informs the government. Obviously this only works on internet-connected computers so it can download updates and report back violators, but those are also the ones you want to catch the most - people who can not only take part in the sneakernet, but also add new material or transfer incriminating files out of the country to a global audience.
I'm a school IT tech. We had to ban USB sticks because of the amount of illegal mp3s and games that were appearing in user folders. I'm sure they still run the school pirate network (good for them!), but it's no longer on our server now and thus Not My Problem.
A bit silly, in a way... I've seen people devote huge effort to arguing over exactly what it was Jesus said or meant, analysing small details of phrasing in the greek, but they seem almost ashamed to admit that the greek text they have is itsself a translation. Jesus would have spoken in hebrew, but the words he said are long lost now.
I don't care what it looks like, I'm calling it Cambot.
Or inheret an IP address that was abused.
I've got a rented VM for mail, hosting my website showcasing all my failures to change the world, transfering files, running IRC bots for some friends, things like that. Works well. Aside from my being very uncreative when picking a domain name, so now I get asked why I have everything at birds-are-nice.me.
The light socket was a standardised power source, for a time. The first electric appliance to make it into the home was the electric light - and no others were anticipated, so there were no sockets. This meant that for a time the light bulb socket was the only available source of electricity for appliances in many homes, and became a de facto standard. If you look at many early appliances, such as the first electric vacuum cleaners and toasters, their power cords terminate in an Edison screw* connector to fit a light bulb socket. The user would take the bulb out, plug the cleaner into the ceiling, and swap back when done.
*Guess who invented it.
Two reasons for the heatsink. Firstly, they can get pretty toasty, yes. Secondly, high temperatures greatly shorten the lifespan of a LED. Incandescents or CFLs can take the heat, LEDs can't, so even if the heat dissipated isn't that great they still need large heatsinks.
Dark areas, and motion blur - you can see that clearly in the final seconds. It's a binary mask. The solution to this, I feel, is in physics rather than any change to the algorithm: Just set up a couple of those cheap 100W DIY worklights. No more near-0,0,0 blacks, and the motion blur reduced as the camera automatically reduces shutter'* speed.
* That term is going to be with us long after the physical shutter is gone. It's easier than saying 'CCD sampling interval duration.'
Just blame it on a virus. With biology, that's probably right half the time.
Very noisy camera. I was trying to best replicate the conditions typical of a zero-budget production: No proper backdrop, a too-small studio (thus shadows cast behind the actor), no professional lighting, a cheap consumer camera. I ran the video through virtualdub's temporal smooth, that took the worst off. The only places the filter really struggles are the very dark regions - those near-black folds in the trousers, the shadows under the arms - where noise overwhelms the color component. There's a lot of filtering of the mask involved too. I played around a lot with morphological operations before eventually abandoning that approach in favor of iterative refinement: Generate mask, then blur and use the resulting values as 'hints' in generating the mask for the next iteration. That works far better. Runs at a little under 1fps, but it's only a single-threaded test filter, so I could make it much faster if I had reason.
The photobooth trick is called a 'difference matte' or 'difference key.' It's found in most high-end video editing software, though not always by the same name. I wrote one myself too - http://birds-are-nice.me/video/bluescreen.shtml
As you can see from my effort, it isn't as easy as you'd think to get good results.
To argue there there is no 'magic algorithm' to what the S4 does. I'm no programming genius, just a dabbler who can knock out a few functions in C. If I can do it, it isn't hard.
Successive approximation dejitter followed by temporal mode filter. I could throw that together in twenty minutes. Making it run on mobile phone hardware is rather more difficult.
He probably paid for high-bandwidth unlimited hosting for a few months in advance.
Reposting. The list of VPNs can be sent via email, IM, public forums, be spammed in comments on popular sites*, read over the telephone, or passed on paper between friends. Updates spread in a similar way. Censors would be hard-pressed to keep up. It could be done, but it'd be expensive and the need for haste would inevitably lead to mistakes which could block legitimate sites and inspire public dislike of the censor system.
*Irony points if state-sponsored media.
I've had to do that on more than a few occasions too. Some of the things we've needed are so specialised they can't be obtained from the 'approved suppliers' list. A few of them are only readily available through ebay stores.