A few sensors, some triangulation... could easily locate a phone with sub-meter precision to determine if it's inside prison walls or not. Expensive, though.
My mod points appear to have expired, otherwise you'd be on the recieving end by now. This seems like a fairly good idea. Even if the equipment builders hugely overcharge (And, on a government contract, they will) it's still cheaper than hireing more guards or renovating buildings with EM shielding.
As with any other open-source project. Code is cheap, and needs only a few people to write it. So long as it runs off-the-shelf, common, affordable hardware. Might see a lot of interest from pirates, eager to escape transfer quotas.
legal "phone" kill-switch = the "internet people" can disobey orders = The police come around, arrest the internet people for disobeying the order and physically pull every cable they can find.
illegal "phone" kill-switch = the "internet people" should disobey orders. = The police come around, beat the internet people, throw them in jail without charge and physically pull every cable they can find.
I have given some thought to this in the past. My current thoughts are towards some sort of shared-storage for blocks, exchanged wirelessly. Everything from PCs to mobile phones could take part then. Want a file? Maybe your neighbour has a piece, or your co-workers, or the person you pass in the street with the software on their mobile phone. A moment of contact, and the pieces are transfered. Latency would be pathetic, but it's an interesting concept for things where time isn't a factor. It might function something like the Freenet protocol.
Go for it. All you need is a bit of money for a server and colocation, and some free porn. Bandwidth shouldn't be a major issue, with such a small number of people able to access IPv6.
I'm still unable to access the freeipv6porn.com page via ipv6, though I can verify some ipv6 functionality by ping6ing ipv6.google.com. I was, however, able to access http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/ - which doesn't have any porn, merely the test-file http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/Gv6QIHiL33k.flv. It seems that the IPv6 network remains somewhat unreliable, and will remain so until there is enough demand for serious investment to take place.
I wouldn't be surprised if they asked lots of engineers until they found one who said stop lights were not needed, then hired him. Selective hireing of experts isn't an unusual practice. It's very common in legal matters - whenever you see the words 'expert witness' then this may well have gone on first. Same for experts appearing on TV. The producers ask lots of experts, then just hire the ones with the most ratings-inspiring opinions to share.
This is true. H264 has basically won, due both to it's big-player support and it's technical merit. Patents and politics aside, it remains simply the best general-purpose lossy video codec there is. Still, MS would like to make sure it stays winning, particually with HTML5 coming and the resulting mass of websites abandoning the old flash-based video and possibly scared away from h264 by fees or the threat of fees in future.
On their own products, yes. You just need to take network effects into account. If Microsoft supporting h264 results in it becoming the dominant codec on the internet (The only one you can be sure the world's most popular browser, IE, supports out the box), then that's a great many commercial sites using h264. It means video editing software that is made to work with it, portable cameras that record it, portable players that play it. All of which pay a royalty, a small part of which goes to Microsoft. A small part of a big pie.
I would not be at all surprised if, some point in the next fifteen years, an extension is passed to lengthen the term. It's already happened with coopyright, many times over - taking it from a 14 year term right up to 95 years, and with another increase quite possible. When there is this money money at stake, no lobbyist is too expensive.
It is now. Theora was actually one of the most sophisticated and capable video codecs around... a few years ago. Technology moved on. It missed the window. If it had caught on when the time was right, it could have become the video MP3 - a format that is techologically inferor, but remains in common use due to widespread support.
Because, although it supports the codec, it does not support the container. Audible's.AA files are propritary, and undocumented. They also use DRM measures, though I don't know how sophisticated these are.
There is a very good reason Microsoft is supporting h264. It holds a good chunk of the patents needed, and stands to make a great deal of money of licencing fees. The more popular h264 gets, the more money they make. Apple is another major patent-holder. Google is not. They don't make anything off h264. Sometimes, it just comes down to 'follow the money.'
There is no such comparison, because those differences mean the relative performance is dependant upon workload. Some calculations just give one architecture or the other a clear advantage. In general ARM performs substantially worse than any modern x86 at the same clock speed, but does so at such a tiny fraction of the power requirements the loss of performance is easily justified.
Actually, this could produce all the optics for a holodeck. Build a room with computed holographic displays in every wall, hook it up to the type of supercomputer that the NSA would be envious of, and you've got a holodeck. Walk around in it, see whatever the computer wants you to, indistinguishable from reality aside from a slightly lower color definition due to the need to use rapidly-changing laser wavelengths. The only part it wouldn't get you is the physical interaction. And, naturally, it would be very expensive. Consider it the twenty-years-from-now evolution of the CAVE system, only with the ability for multible people to occupy it, no eyestrain and no headwear.
This is just the very first. For a basis of comparison, the first ever LCD display looked like this: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~mgu/pictures/rca_lcd.JPG - and it took 40 years to go from that to your modern computer screen. So think of this hologram as the equivilent of the display in that photo, and imagine the same improvements.
"What's hard to explain is why the press is willing to play useful idiot. "
That's easy. There's hardly any money to be made in investigative journalism, and a lot to be made in populist rubbish that tells people what they want to hear.
I think that some states actually do have a TV kill switch, though that is not it's intended purpose. Emergency Broadcast Systems allow for an immediate government override of TV broadcasts, for use in the event of extreme emergencies ("Chemical plant exploded, acid cloud spreading, evacuate."). There is no reason it couldn't be used to shut down TV for a time, though any prolonged use would result in at the very least legal action from the broadcasters, and possibly just some engineer being sent to the transmitter with a screwdriver and instructions to override the EBS by physically bypassing it.
I assume he was referring to the practice of 'free speech zones.' They were used extensively by W. Bush, but he was by no means the first. They started out as a safety measure - confining protesters to designated areas in case of any violent incidents should they get carried away. It just didn't take long to realise that it's really not good for the approval ratings for a presidential event to have scores of people holding protest signs, and so the free speech zones were moved. Usually a few blocks away, around a corner, and into a secluded alley. That way the people can protest, but they are kept out of view of the media, and the president gets to gon on TV in front of an adoring crowd with not a protester in sight.
Heavy breeders are poorer. It's simple mathematics. Inheritence is divided by the number of offspring (Or just male offspring in some cultures). One child gets a full inheritence, two children get half, and so on. Constant growth in population means no chance to accumulate wealth down the generations.
The early advocates of birth control believed that they could go a long way towards eliminating poverty if they could get the birth rate of the low-income down, for exactly this reason. Sanger was espicially enthusiastic about the idea. Stop the poor having six children per couple, get it down to just one, and they'd be able to invest all their time and money into just the one - thus providing the education and capital needed to lift the family from poverty.
The women have more time. No religion I know of actually encourages women to get an education and enter the workplace, and many disapprove of that to greatly varying extents. Some outright forbid them to work, others merely frown upon the practive.
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A few sensors, some triangulation... could easily locate a phone with sub-meter precision to determine if it's inside prison walls or not. Expensive, though.
My mod points appear to have expired, otherwise you'd be on the recieving end by now. This seems like a fairly good idea. Even if the equipment builders hugely overcharge (And, on a government contract, they will) it's still cheaper than hireing more guards or renovating buildings with EM shielding.
As with any other open-source project. Code is cheap, and needs only a few people to write it. So long as it runs off-the-shelf, common, affordable hardware. Might see a lot of interest from pirates, eager to escape transfer quotas.
legal "phone" kill-switch = the "internet people" can disobey orders = The police come around, arrest the internet people for disobeying the order and physically pull every cable they can find.
illegal "phone" kill-switch = the "internet people" should disobey orders. = The police come around, beat the internet people, throw them in jail without charge and physically pull every cable they can find.
I have given some thought to this in the past. My current thoughts are towards some sort of shared-storage for blocks, exchanged wirelessly. Everything from PCs to mobile phones could take part then. Want a file? Maybe your neighbour has a piece, or your co-workers, or the person you pass in the street with the software on their mobile phone. A moment of contact, and the pieces are transfered. Latency would be pathetic, but it's an interesting concept for things where time isn't a factor. It might function something like the Freenet protocol.
"If the US government called Sprint and Comcast and told them "cut the power OR ELSE!" they wouldn't do it?"
I imagine they would, for a time. But with the amount of lost revenue, they wouldn't comply for long unless legally compelled.
And who would pay for all this? Technology could be a big help, but it's going to take something more sophisticated than that.
furaffinity.net works for me.
Go for it. All you need is a bit of money for a server and colocation, and some free porn. Bandwidth shouldn't be a major issue, with such a small number of people able to access IPv6.
I'm still unable to access the freeipv6porn.com page via ipv6, though I can verify some ipv6 functionality by ping6ing ipv6.google.com. I was, however, able to access http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/ - which doesn't have any porn, merely the test-file http://www.ipv6porn.co.nz/Gv6QIHiL33k.flv. It seems that the IPv6 network remains somewhat unreliable, and will remain so until there is enough demand for serious investment to take place.
I wouldn't be surprised if they asked lots of engineers until they found one who said stop lights were not needed, then hired him. Selective hireing of experts isn't an unusual practice. It's very common in legal matters - whenever you see the words 'expert witness' then this may well have gone on first. Same for experts appearing on TV. The producers ask lots of experts, then just hire the ones with the most ratings-inspiring opinions to share.
This is true. H264 has basically won, due both to it's big-player support and it's technical merit. Patents and politics aside, it remains simply the best general-purpose lossy video codec there is. Still, MS would like to make sure it stays winning, particually with HTML5 coming and the resulting mass of websites abandoning the old flash-based video and possibly scared away from h264 by fees or the threat of fees in future.
On their own products, yes. You just need to take network effects into account. If Microsoft supporting h264 results in it becoming the dominant codec on the internet (The only one you can be sure the world's most popular browser, IE, supports out the box), then that's a great many commercial sites using h264. It means video editing software that is made to work with it, portable cameras that record it, portable players that play it. All of which pay a royalty, a small part of which goes to Microsoft. A small part of a big pie.
Sure, but you might take a few seconds per frame.
I would not be at all surprised if, some point in the next fifteen years, an extension is passed to lengthen the term. It's already happened with coopyright, many times over - taking it from a 14 year term right up to 95 years, and with another increase quite possible. When there is this money money at stake, no lobbyist is too expensive.
It is now. Theora was actually one of the most sophisticated and capable video codecs around... a few years ago. Technology moved on. It missed the window. If it had caught on when the time was right, it could have become the video MP3 - a format that is techologically inferor, but remains in common use due to widespread support.
Because, although it supports the codec, it does not support the container. Audible's .AA files are propritary, and undocumented. They also use DRM measures, though I don't know how sophisticated these are.
There is a very good reason Microsoft is supporting h264. It holds a good chunk of the patents needed, and stands to make a great deal of money of licencing fees. The more popular h264 gets, the more money they make. Apple is another major patent-holder. Google is not. They don't make anything off h264. Sometimes, it just comes down to 'follow the money.'
There is no such comparison, because those differences mean the relative performance is dependant upon workload. Some calculations just give one architecture or the other a clear advantage. In general ARM performs substantially worse than any modern x86 at the same clock speed, but does so at such a tiny fraction of the power requirements the loss of performance is easily justified.
Actually, this could produce all the optics for a holodeck. Build a room with computed holographic displays in every wall, hook it up to the type of supercomputer that the NSA would be envious of, and you've got a holodeck. Walk around in it, see whatever the computer wants you to, indistinguishable from reality aside from a slightly lower color definition due to the need to use rapidly-changing laser wavelengths. The only part it wouldn't get you is the physical interaction. And, naturally, it would be very expensive. Consider it the twenty-years-from-now evolution of the CAVE system, only with the ability for multible people to occupy it, no eyestrain and no headwear.
This is just the very first. For a basis of comparison, the first ever LCD display looked like this: http://www.personal.kent.edu/~mgu/pictures/rca_lcd.JPG - and it took 40 years to go from that to your modern computer screen. So think of this hologram as the equivilent of the display in that photo, and imagine the same improvements.
"What's hard to explain is why the press is willing to play useful idiot. "
That's easy. There's hardly any money to be made in investigative journalism, and a lot to be made in populist rubbish that tells people what they want to hear.
I think that some states actually do have a TV kill switch, though that is not it's intended purpose. Emergency Broadcast Systems allow for an immediate government override of TV broadcasts, for use in the event of extreme emergencies ("Chemical plant exploded, acid cloud spreading, evacuate."). There is no reason it couldn't be used to shut down TV for a time, though any prolonged use would result in at the very least legal action from the broadcasters, and possibly just some engineer being sent to the transmitter with a screwdriver and instructions to override the EBS by physically bypassing it.
I assume he was referring to the practice of 'free speech zones.' They were used extensively by W. Bush, but he was by no means the first. They started out as a safety measure - confining protesters to designated areas in case of any violent incidents should they get carried away. It just didn't take long to realise that it's really not good for the approval ratings for a presidential event to have scores of people holding protest signs, and so the free speech zones were moved. Usually a few blocks away, around a corner, and into a secluded alley. That way the people can protest, but they are kept out of view of the media, and the president gets to gon on TV in front of an adoring crowd with not a protester in sight.
Heavy breeders are poorer. It's simple mathematics. Inheritence is divided by the number of offspring (Or just male offspring in some cultures). One child gets a full inheritence, two children get half, and so on. Constant growth in population means no chance to accumulate wealth down the generations.
The early advocates of birth control believed that they could go a long way towards eliminating poverty if they could get the birth rate of the low-income down, for exactly this reason. Sanger was espicially enthusiastic about the idea. Stop the poor having six children per couple, get it down to just one, and they'd be able to invest all their time and money into just the one - thus providing the education and capital needed to lift the family from poverty.
I wonder how many mild pro-lifers would be tempted by the possibility of using PGD to make sure they have a straight child.
The women have more time. No religion I know of actually encourages women to get an education and enter the workplace, and many disapprove of that to greatly varying extents. Some outright forbid them to work, others merely frown upon the practive.