Frankly, I'm in favor of as little rules-and-regulation as possible: IMHO, the rules-and-regulations should merely declare that the content be available in a form that is readily useable by a third party after a pre-determined delay, and that the third party bear the responsibility for making it usable by the public.
So while I feel that the information should be readily available to any taxpayer, I don't necessarily want to burden the agency with the possibility of being mandated to serve (potentially) every taxpayer an individual TCP stream (at taxpayer expense).
I want less red tape, not more. (I'm a capitalist and Linux zealot - go figure)
Ideally, in an IPV6 world, it'd just be multicast from the source at near-zero cost, and done -- finished. These modern digital radios transmit at a bitrate of, at most, 9600bps, which isn't even worth keeping track of when tabulating the usage on the city's T1...
Our local PD (in our small town of ~40k heads) decided to encrypt all of their radio traffic a couple of years ago. I wrote a (scathing, factual, naming-names) letter to the editor of the local news rag about that time, pronouncing that the concept was stupid and that all of their reasons for the concept were also stupid. (I'd link to my published letter and/or provide more details, but I like the aura of anonymity here, and my name isn't really Adolf Osborne.)
I have even been encouraged by a sergeant at the local sheriff's office to request recordings, as often as I feel like, under the FOIA, just to make it a pain in PD's ass. (The SO has encryption available to them, but they do not use it unless it is important that the things being discussed remain secret...unlike the PD, who does it 24x7. Further, the PD refuses to share their encryption key with the SO, rendering moot any chance that the two overlapping agencies might be able to help eachother out efficiently.)
I nearly lost my job over that letter, since I'm one of the guys responsible for actually programming the radios and I have the requisite encryption keys on my thumb drive and can (pretty much literally) do whatever I want to make things work/fuck up the system.
BUT: I never thought of a delay. 15 minutes is perfect. It allows the people to know what's going on with their paid and well-armed uniformed thugs, while also preventing active criminals from understanding the goings-on of the police department.
Scanner-land wins, paranoid public entity wins, and active criminals still lose. Sign me up. (Hell, sign everyone up.)
But here's what I want (for my own valid reasons): Instant updates. Push can do this, while pull cannot (well, without hammering things to the extent that even a selfish bastard like myself would begin to realize that I'm placing undue strain on things while really standing out in someone else's logfile).
As a consumer, I don't give a flying fuck about security. I've got enough holes by simply connecting my machines with a wide-open egress firewall -- one little inbound connection means nothing to me.
YMMV.
(I thought this sort of tech was going to become the new hotness in the middle 90's sometime, but I guess not.)
Piracy is one of the greatest forms of advertising. In some businesses, it's called "word of mouth". Growing up, many of the products I was introduced to, and subsequently became loyal customers of, was thanks to "piracy" of one sort or another. Back then, nobody saw it as a bad thing. The rule of thumb was copy all that you want as long as you don't try to make a profit from it or pass it off as your own.
Indeed. Way, way back when, I had a pirated copy of Aldus Photostyler. I liked it a lot, and when Adobe bought Aldus and folded (some of) the features of Photostyler into Photoshop, I pirated that instead.
Today, I still pirate Photoshop.
This, clearly, is good for Adobe. (Unless, more likely, it's not...)
Well, apparently the surface tension trick didn't work, because it fell off anyway.:) I kind of figured that being even slightly jostled would ruin the process, so I worked and stepped lightly, and instructed others in the house to stay away.
I've got a proper iron with a real thermostat and a nice sharp tip, but I could barely even see the capacitor: When I said it was flea-sized I wasn't exaggerating. I've dealt a bit with SMD parts and had fine luck with them, but this cap was perhaps 1/15th the size that I'm comfortable handling.
The skillet method involves using nuts and bolts in the mounting holes of the board to act as spacers, and targeted application of a heat gun topside. It'd probably work better with a good infrared thermometer, which I don't have.
The guy is describing a process that actually produces things that work.
He should just stick with that, adjusting as he goes and keeping an open mind. If a more complex process is needed to get a reliable and working result, it will avail itself.
My BMW is a bit older, but it's easy to get to the electronics.
There's (literally) a rack behind the glovebox which houses most of it on cute little plastic slide-in shelves, which can be gotten to in less than 10 minutes. The one for the HVAC sits under center console, which can be accessed without tools at all in a few seconds. There is exactly one module behind the driver's side knee panel. And the ECU sits in the engine compartment, just behind an access panel on the firewall, which is secured with a couple of screws.
And the connectors are a lovely lever-lock design that are very slick to put together and disassemble.
I tried to reflow an Xbox once, using the electric skillet and heat gun method. Things were looking good, and then I heard the world's quietest -clink- as a tiny, flea-sized capacitor fell off of the bottom of the board I was working on.
I've got a steady hand, but there was no way I was ever going to get that cap reinstalled without it disappearing in a puff of smoke.
How to successfully and predictably accomplish the task of melting solder on only one side of a board with components on both sides is a mystery to me.
Check out the difference between an acronym and an initialism. Do you also say "YOO-suh" (USA) or "SEE-oh" (CEO)? The examples you gave are easily (and obviously) pronounced, and most style guides will say that you can spell them with lower case letters.
I pronounce "USA" the same as I do "Uma". In doing so, I haven't confused anyone yet: "Oh look, it's made in ooh-suh!"
I also got sick of saying V-O-I-P, so I pronounce that too. Along with SAN, NAS, and a bunch of other things. The database hackers I know personally all pronounce SQL as "sequel," but it might be a regional thing.
"ar-fid" isn't a bad pronunciation. Time will tell if it catches on.
If the antenna can't receive, it also can't transmit. The system (where "system" is an antenna wrapped in aluminum foil, or inside of a Faraday cage, or whatever) does not behave as an antenna, because it can't do either thing. The system therefore is not an antenna, although it may contain one.
(In other news, a resistor or capacitor or inductor or whatever with a wire shorting it no longer behaves as a resistor or capacitor or inductor or whatever, and mules are neither donkeys nor horses although they're made from one of each.)
Meanwhile, here's what happens to RF energy as it attempts to pass through a Faraday cage: All of it, to the limit of the efficiency of the cage itself (which itself is ultimately limited by the conductivity of the material), is eventually converted to heat. Whether it is converted to heat rather directly (in a manner just like any other short circuit), or somewhat indirectly (nobody said a Faraday cage does not have reflectance: things can/do bounce inside/off of it), it still turns into heat.
As to microwave ovens in particular, some of the energy is absorbed by the interior surfaces and the Faraday cage itself and converted to heat. Much of it finds its way back to the magnetron and associated kit, where it also gets converted to heat. (And obviously nothing is lost, because nothing can be lost. It's the law.)
Yes, this can be hard on things, and yes, microwave ovens tend to survive it OK anyway.
(This, incidentally, is why it's a good idea to have a bit of water in the microwave when doing fun things like making plasma balls, nuking light bulbs, punishing CDs, and otherwise playing with things that deal with 2.4GHz RF inefficiently: The water helps convert and store excess energy in the form of heat, which saves the guts of the microwave the pain and suffering of doing that itself.)
It's not complicated -- it's just a simple, passive component called a Faraday cage.
My local bookstore has a good deli serving a variety of food, sells wonderful freshly-packed herbs and spices for very little money, has semi-comfortable seating, employees who remember my name and my order when I come in, and excellent inexpensive coffee with a grand selection of different beans to select from (from a burnt French Roast to a delicate and slightly sweet Ethiopian).
It's a nice place to hang out. And despite being reasonably busy almost all of the time it is never too loud to focus on a laptop or a book or whatever, yet there's enough background noise that a normal conversation is unlikely to disturb others.
Yeah, it's never thrown a code about anything -- ever. Not even in stomp-test mode. The 6-cyl E36 series was all ODB-I until '96, and then it got an updated six-cylinder engine and became ODB-II...along with less engine output and a change in model numbers (325i became 323i, 330i became 328i, even though displacement was the same).
I fed it six new Bosch coils a couple of years ago, since the economical choices at that particular point were either Bosch or random generic (or house brand) Chinese shit. The new coils are put together differently than the OEM Bosch ones that came on the '95, or the ones I'd been using from a '93 donor car. They've been working perfectly and I think will work fine for a long while, but time will tell...
It's a whitespace technology. In this instance, it uses the gaps between TV channels to transmit and receive data.
Whether those channels are analog or digital is of little importance: For this purpose the RF spectrum does not care about modulation technique, but only bandwidth-per-channel and the quiet space surrounding it.
I get interested in things from time to time, stuff that most folks (at least apart from/.) would find weird, and then I study the hell out of them. I've found that keeping notes makes it easier to keep track of, so I often do that too.
Sometimes it's just a fleeting drunken tangent, and sometimes it spurs off into some serious long-term research and thought.
Often it's very mundane (I spent a whole week last summer learning about light bulbs, for instance, and awhile back I was studying transgenders), but also I've studied conventional explosives and atomic weapons. Lately, I've been very interested in long arms and ammunition, especially with regards to combinations of them that might allow me to kill or severely dissuade people both efficiently and reliably, and pricing is an important part of that.
And though I dread the nightmarish prospect of having to do so, I also have some very firm views about personal liberty which I'm perfectly willing to back up with violence if it becomes necessary.
I don't believe that any knowledge or thought process is inherently forbidden.
So, to be clear: I don't build explosives. And I'm not trying to be the kid from The Manhattan Project. And I'm not building an arsenal of long arms. And though I have taken some small steps to keep others from harming me and my family, I harbor no intention of harming others if I have a choice about it.
Should I be jailed for the confluence of my sometimes obsessive curiosity, my pile of digital notes about variously weird stuff, and my resolute political views?
Brilliant: Automatic copyright protection requiring explicit renewal after a reasonable period.
It's not perfect (mostly because of the fact that someone has to pay for this additional paperwork, which nobody will be happy with), but it really ought to be good enough for most purposes.
I have used it on my 1995 (ODB-I, so it's reluctant to throw a code for anything, ever -- even if it's barely running) BMW while doing early troubleshooting on a couple of issues, and it didn't do anything at all. (Which makes sense, because it wasn't a MAF problem anyway -- it was intermittent weirdness from one or more ignition coils.)
Glad to hear that it will work in instances where the MAF is actually being difficult, and that the product does have merit. MAFs are ridiculously simple things, with a ridiculously-high price tag.
From TFA: "The county was able to make a quick transition in using the spectrum for a mobile data network because it was the first to successfully transition from analog to digital television."
It was at this point that I stopped reading.
(In other news: The orange harvest was great this year because of our success with the apple harvest of a few years ago.)
I'm late to the party by a few days and just stumbled upon it as I was closing some tabs, but your comment brings to mind a concept which is (literally) very close to home for me:
Adverse possession.
I'll let you google the term yourself if you're not familiar with it already, but I think a lot that is wrong with copyright can be fixed by incorporating a similar concept: If people openly copy something for 21 years (just to pick a number), and nobody tells them to stop, then after those 21 years nobody can tell them to stop.
I think the question isn't so much "would the police be legally allowed to do it" as "how would a policeman actually go about doing it"?
Will the car be programmed to watch for lights and a siren and pull itself over when it 'sees' them? Or would the policeman need to send a special "pull over" signal on a remote control? Etc.
If all else fails, why can't the occupant push the "Computer, please stop at the earliest safe location" button?
(Such a function will be present, as it will fit right in next to the array of "I have to piss/puke/shit IMMEDIATELY" button(s).)
The designer of the car broke the law, the vehicle is defective breaking traffic laws and needs to be impounded and the builder fined for endangering the public.
How?
Is there a database of traffic laws? Who provides the data? Is the data correct?
Does the vehicle read road signs? Are the signs correct? Are they transiently obscured by a parked vehicle or a pedestrian?
Computers, even with perfect design and implementation, are still able to do the wrong thing. Garbage in, garbage out. (I can't fucking believe I have to write this on/. of all places.)
Of course police can pull over an "autonomous" car, for a myriad of perfectly valid reasons both related to traffic safety and not.
And if the driver is asleep, and the car fails to stop on its own, someone gets a "fleeing and evading" citation/arrest/jail sentence like they would in any other road-going vehicle that fails to stop.
I don't understand why "can police stop an autonomous car" is even a fucking question. Seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
radioreference.com does much of that, already.
Frankly, I'm in favor of as little rules-and-regulation as possible: IMHO, the rules-and-regulations should merely declare that the content be available in a form that is readily useable by a third party after a pre-determined delay, and that the third party bear the responsibility for making it usable by the public.
So while I feel that the information should be readily available to any taxpayer, I don't necessarily want to burden the agency with the possibility of being mandated to serve (potentially) every taxpayer an individual TCP stream (at taxpayer expense).
I want less red tape, not more. (I'm a capitalist and Linux zealot - go figure)
Ideally, in an IPV6 world, it'd just be multicast from the source at near-zero cost, and done -- finished. These modern digital radios transmit at a bitrate of, at most, 9600bps, which isn't even worth keeping track of when tabulating the usage on the city's T1...
But we're not there yet. Hopefully soon.
This. I hope you're modded +10, Insightful.
Our local PD (in our small town of ~40k heads) decided to encrypt all of their radio traffic a couple of years ago. I wrote a (scathing, factual, naming-names) letter to the editor of the local news rag about that time, pronouncing that the concept was stupid and that all of their reasons for the concept were also stupid. (I'd link to my published letter and/or provide more details, but I like the aura of anonymity here, and my name isn't really Adolf Osborne.)
I have even been encouraged by a sergeant at the local sheriff's office to request recordings, as often as I feel like, under the FOIA, just to make it a pain in PD's ass. (The SO has encryption available to them, but they do not use it unless it is important that the things being discussed remain secret...unlike the PD, who does it 24x7. Further, the PD refuses to share their encryption key with the SO, rendering moot any chance that the two overlapping agencies might be able to help eachother out efficiently.)
I nearly lost my job over that letter, since I'm one of the guys responsible for actually programming the radios and I have the requisite encryption keys on my thumb drive and can (pretty much literally) do whatever I want to make things work/fuck up the system.
BUT: I never thought of a delay. 15 minutes is perfect. It allows the people to know what's going on with their paid and well-armed uniformed thugs, while also preventing active criminals from understanding the goings-on of the police department.
Scanner-land wins, paranoid public entity wins, and active criminals still lose. Sign me up. (Hell, sign everyone up.)
Your outlook is not unreasonable.
But here's what I want (for my own valid reasons): Instant updates. Push can do this, while pull cannot (well, without hammering things to the extent that even a selfish bastard like myself would begin to realize that I'm placing undue strain on things while really standing out in someone else's logfile).
As a consumer, I don't give a flying fuck about security. I've got enough holes by simply connecting my machines with a wide-open egress firewall -- one little inbound connection means nothing to me.
YMMV.
(I thought this sort of tech was going to become the new hotness in the middle 90's sometime, but I guess not.)
But the question stated in TFS started with "is," not "has."
Who said I was a home user?
Indeed. Way, way back when, I had a pirated copy of Aldus Photostyler. I liked it a lot, and when Adobe bought Aldus and folded (some of) the features of Photostyler into Photoshop, I pirated that instead.
Today, I still pirate Photoshop.
This, clearly, is good for Adobe. (Unless, more likely, it's not...)
Well, apparently the surface tension trick didn't work, because it fell off anyway. :) I kind of figured that being even slightly jostled would ruin the process, so I worked and stepped lightly, and instructed others in the house to stay away.
I've got a proper iron with a real thermostat and a nice sharp tip, but I could barely even see the capacitor: When I said it was flea-sized I wasn't exaggerating. I've dealt a bit with SMD parts and had fine luck with them, but this cap was perhaps 1/15th the size that I'm comfortable handling.
The skillet method involves using nuts and bolts in the mounting holes of the board to act as spacers, and targeted application of a heat gun topside. It'd probably work better with a good infrared thermometer, which I don't have.
Meh.
Which came first, the engineer or the engineering degree?
This.
The guy is describing a process that actually produces things that work.
He should just stick with that, adjusting as he goes and keeping an open mind. If a more complex process is needed to get a reliable and working result, it will avail itself.
My BMW is a bit older, but it's easy to get to the electronics.
There's (literally) a rack behind the glovebox which houses most of it on cute little plastic slide-in shelves, which can be gotten to in less than 10 minutes. The one for the HVAC sits under center console, which can be accessed without tools at all in a few seconds. There is exactly one module behind the driver's side knee panel. And the ECU sits in the engine compartment, just behind an access panel on the firewall, which is secured with a couple of screws.
And the connectors are a lovely lever-lock design that are very slick to put together and disassemble.
No big deal, really.
I tried to reflow an Xbox once, using the electric skillet and heat gun method. Things were looking good, and then I heard the world's quietest -clink- as a tiny, flea-sized capacitor fell off of the bottom of the board I was working on.
I've got a steady hand, but there was no way I was ever going to get that cap reinstalled without it disappearing in a puff of smoke.
How to successfully and predictably accomplish the task of melting solder on only one side of a board with components on both sides is a mystery to me.
I pronounce "USA" the same as I do "Uma". In doing so, I haven't confused anyone yet: "Oh look, it's made in ooh-suh!"
I also got sick of saying V-O-I-P, so I pronounce that too. Along with SAN, NAS, and a bunch of other things. The database hackers I know personally all pronounce SQL as "sequel," but it might be a regional thing.
"ar-fid" isn't a bad pronunciation. Time will tell if it catches on.
If the antenna can't receive, it also can't transmit. The system (where "system" is an antenna wrapped in aluminum foil, or inside of a Faraday cage, or whatever) does not behave as an antenna, because it can't do either thing. The system therefore is not an antenna, although it may contain one.
(In other news, a resistor or capacitor or inductor or whatever with a wire shorting it no longer behaves as a resistor or capacitor or inductor or whatever, and mules are neither donkeys nor horses although they're made from one of each.)
Meanwhile, here's what happens to RF energy as it attempts to pass through a Faraday cage: All of it, to the limit of the efficiency of the cage itself (which itself is ultimately limited by the conductivity of the material), is eventually converted to heat. Whether it is converted to heat rather directly (in a manner just like any other short circuit), or somewhat indirectly (nobody said a Faraday cage does not have reflectance: things can/do bounce inside/off of it), it still turns into heat.
As to microwave ovens in particular, some of the energy is absorbed by the interior surfaces and the Faraday cage itself and converted to heat. Much of it finds its way back to the magnetron and associated kit, where it also gets converted to heat. (And obviously nothing is lost, because nothing can be lost. It's the law.)
Yes, this can be hard on things, and yes, microwave ovens tend to survive it OK anyway.
(This, incidentally, is why it's a good idea to have a bit of water in the microwave when doing fun things like making plasma balls, nuking light bulbs, punishing CDs, and otherwise playing with things that deal with 2.4GHz RF inefficiently: The water helps convert and store excess energy in the form of heat, which saves the guts of the microwave the pain and suffering of doing that itself.)
It's not complicated -- it's just a simple, passive component called a Faraday cage.
Weird.
My local bookstore has a good deli serving a variety of food, sells wonderful freshly-packed herbs and spices for very little money, has semi-comfortable seating, employees who remember my name and my order when I come in, and excellent inexpensive coffee with a grand selection of different beans to select from (from a burnt French Roast to a delicate and slightly sweet Ethiopian).
It's a nice place to hang out. And despite being reasonably busy almost all of the time it is never too loud to focus on a laptop or a book or whatever, yet there's enough background noise that a normal conversation is unlikely to disturb others.
Perhaps you simply need better bookstores.
Yeah, it's never thrown a code about anything -- ever. Not even in stomp-test mode. The 6-cyl E36 series was all ODB-I until '96, and then it got an updated six-cylinder engine and became ODB-II...along with less engine output and a change in model numbers (325i became 323i, 330i became 328i, even though displacement was the same).
I fed it six new Bosch coils a couple of years ago, since the economical choices at that particular point were either Bosch or random generic (or house brand) Chinese shit. The new coils are put together differently than the OEM Bosch ones that came on the '95, or the ones I'd been using from a '93 donor car. They've been working perfectly and I think will work fine for a long while, but time will tell...
It's a whitespace technology. In this instance, it uses the gaps between TV channels to transmit and receive data.
Whether those channels are analog or digital is of little importance: For this purpose the RF spectrum does not care about modulation technique, but only bandwidth-per-channel and the quiet space surrounding it.
You know what?
I get interested in things from time to time, stuff that most folks (at least apart from /.) would find weird, and then I study the hell out of them. I've found that keeping notes makes it easier to keep track of, so I often do that too.
Sometimes it's just a fleeting drunken tangent, and sometimes it spurs off into some serious long-term research and thought.
Often it's very mundane (I spent a whole week last summer learning about light bulbs, for instance, and awhile back I was studying transgenders), but also I've studied conventional explosives and atomic weapons. Lately, I've been very interested in long arms and ammunition, especially with regards to combinations of them that might allow me to kill or severely dissuade people both efficiently and reliably, and pricing is an important part of that.
And though I dread the nightmarish prospect of having to do so, I also have some very firm views about personal liberty which I'm perfectly willing to back up with violence if it becomes necessary.
I don't believe that any knowledge or thought process is inherently forbidden.
So, to be clear: I don't build explosives. And I'm not trying to be the kid from The Manhattan Project. And I'm not building an arsenal of long arms. And though I have taken some small steps to keep others from harming me and my family, I harbor no intention of harming others if I have a choice about it.
Should I be jailed for the confluence of my sometimes obsessive curiosity, my pile of digital notes about variously weird stuff, and my resolute political views?
Why, or why not?
Brilliant: Automatic copyright protection requiring explicit renewal after a reasonable period.
It's not perfect (mostly because of the fact that someone has to pay for this additional paperwork, which nobody will be happy with), but it really ought to be good enough for most purposes.
Sign me up.
Cool enough.
I have used it on my 1995 (ODB-I, so it's reluctant to throw a code for anything, ever -- even if it's barely running) BMW while doing early troubleshooting on a couple of issues, and it didn't do anything at all. (Which makes sense, because it wasn't a MAF problem anyway -- it was intermittent weirdness from one or more ignition coils.)
Glad to hear that it will work in instances where the MAF is actually being difficult, and that the product does have merit. MAFs are ridiculously simple things, with a ridiculously-high price tag.
Did you try cleaning the MAF? CRC makes a spray-goo just for that.
(And obviously it doesn't matter for you now, but I'd simply like to know for my own reference in the future.)
From TFA: "The county was able to make a quick transition in using the spectrum for a mobile data network because it was the first to successfully transition from analog to digital television."
It was at this point that I stopped reading.
(In other news: The orange harvest was great this year because of our success with the apple harvest of a few years ago.)
I'm late to the party by a few days and just stumbled upon it as I was closing some tabs, but your comment brings to mind a concept which is (literally) very close to home for me:
Adverse possession.
I'll let you google the term yourself if you're not familiar with it already, but I think a lot that is wrong with copyright can be fixed by incorporating a similar concept: If people openly copy something for 21 years (just to pick a number), and nobody tells them to stop, then after those 21 years nobody can tell them to stop.
If all else fails, why can't the occupant push the "Computer, please stop at the earliest safe location" button?
(Such a function will be present, as it will fit right in next to the array of "I have to piss/puke/shit IMMEDIATELY" button(s).)
How?
Is there a database of traffic laws? Who provides the data? Is the data correct?
Does the vehicle read road signs? Are the signs correct? Are they transiently obscured by a parked vehicle or a pedestrian?
Computers, even with perfect design and implementation, are still able to do the wrong thing. Garbage in, garbage out. (I can't fucking believe I have to write this on /. of all places.)
Of course police can pull over an "autonomous" car, for a myriad of perfectly valid reasons both related to traffic safety and not.
And if the driver is asleep, and the car fails to stop on its own, someone gets a "fleeing and evading" citation/arrest/jail sentence like they would in any other road-going vehicle that fails to stop.
I don't understand why "can police stop an autonomous car" is even a fucking question. Seriously.