Indeed you might be at an information disadvantage, the key to handling this is not to pretend the technology does exist, because even if the government doesn't place it's own cameras everywhere, you know corporations will and they will be selling that information to anyone who wants to purchase it. So banning government from surveillance of publice areas, is just going to end up with government buying footage from private sources.
On the other hand, what you may need is some legal safeguards to protect the recordings from the obvious abuses. You'd probably want to officially seperate whoever "the watchers" are from the police, that prevents much of the basic abuse. You'd also want to make it a legal requirement that "the watchers" provide recording from cameras to any interested persons. You'd need to prevent law enforcement from taking the originals, and possibly include a penalties for those watchers who allow tapes to go missing or otherwise allow the system to be interfered with.
TIA is a huge boondoggle as anyone remotely cognizant with computer systems should have been able to warn you. All of those data sources are dirty as hell, it takes forever to clean up and integrate records even if they weren't constantly growing at a prodigious rate. It's not even theoretically possible to do the type of surveillance you're complaining about today. Twenty years from now? Maybe. It remains unclear whether we will ever be able to create a computer program capable of identifying people at a remote distance that works as well or better than a human eye. And until we do, this is all make-believe.
Actually, I'm not a big fan of public surveillance. I just don't like the scaremongering that's going on. The libertarian wing-nuts need to reel it in a little.
You can see where the camera is pointed and thus where's it's looking. The real officer can shake down people on the street for money. If you blind a real officer, you have a blind man who needs to be replaced and that's a lot more expensive than a camera. Police officers can and do go undercover. Eyewitness accounts are much easier to alter or forge than you think. Money and fear go a long way. A real officer needs bathroom breaks, a smart criminal would wait until the officer isn't present to commit a crime.
Because it's far easier to prove an actual crime (that you have videotape evidence of) and deliver the maximum punishment than faking something else. No risk of the frame-up being exposed, because there never was one; and people can shout "OH NOES CONSPIRACYORZ!!11" all they want, but can't argue with the video showing someone actually speeding, or drinking a beer on a public street, or littering, or whatever. That person is off the street for the time it takes to investigate and prosecute the "crime".
That's the point, in reality it's not easier to catch someone specific breaking the law on a public camera. You might get lucky, but you don't arrest people for littering, you give them a $50 ticket, ditto with speeding. People don't routinely commit crimes that would warrant arrest and incarceration. In general, you'd have to already know the person had comitted a crime and when and where they were at the times, or you'd have to know where they were all of the time and watch for them specifically in a crowd of people to try and catch them comitting some minor crime like jaywalking. There's a lot more effort involved in accomplishing this than there is in having one or two corrupt police officers plant drugs on the victim, and then claim he resisted arrest, or even just having him killed and faking the death scene to look like a suicide.
In the real world, you don't run through hoops for little benefit. Only someone fundamentally honest would care whether the charges were real or bogus. Once your coup is done you can kangaroo court the accused to make sure the allegations stick.
If you already control the people who control the cameras, those cameras aren't going to be recording your goons. Or, those tapes would never see the light of day. Once the dictator has rounded up the opposition, it's game over. There will be almost no one standing up to demand release of the tapes of goons grabbing people off of the street. The few who do will also disappear.
I don't think you understand my point, the cameras are superfluous and unnecessary. They neither inherently help nor hinder an attempted coup. Hypothetically, they'd make the coup more expensive and difficult to perpetrate because you also have to suborn the watchers in addition to the police and the military and the more people who know, the greater the chance that the plans get leaked before hand.
There's another interesting take on privacy and cameras in The Neanderthal Parallax. In the parallel world the characters have constant surveillance of their activities, everything they do is recorded remotely at all times (though it is not reviewable by others, except with the equivalent of a court order). The records can be used both as shield against false prosecution and evidence for actual crimes.
I just have a hard time seeing how the cameras actual aid or abet this type of punitive measure. It's far easier for the unethical to fake a serious crime, than to catch someone performing a minor crime and then punish them for it.
Overall video cameras in public places are decidedly neutral as long as they're implemented properly and the public has the right to access the recordings in addition to the government.
If you like Science Fiction, you might like to read David Brin's Kiln People, for a somewhat different take on how massive public surveillance might go. It's really only a minor theme in the novel, but I found it a little interesting.
Meh. Everyone has to budget their time, there's far to many papers that claim to be well researched to read them all, and gun control isn't even that interesting...
No thanks, I'm reasonably sure since you cited it, it'll be the usual pro-gun propoganda.
I'm reasonably certain that the availability of hand guns is a factor in the crime rate. They're one of the easiest lethal weapons to carry and use. Lowering the "barrier of entry" to murdering someone is almost certainly going to raise the crime rate. Of course, the question is merely how much it increases the rate. On the other hand, I think getting rid of hand guns probably won't have a huge impact on murder rate though.
There's always the question of whether the liberty of handgun ownership is worth the hypothetical 1500 lives a year that banning them might save (out of 30,000 firearm related murders).
Anyone who can answer that question quickly and definitively is probably not to be trusted. They either choose not to value liberty or the lives of their fellows, both extremes are exceptionally dangerous.
First, I fail to see how this different from the situation as it currently exists. Second, these are cameras in public locations, not cameras that follow you into your home and place of work. Third, once you've corrupted the police and the military, the cameras aren't going to be much help, especially when they capture your goons kidnapping people on camera.
Not with the government and technology that exists now. Using cameras as a way to enforce minor laws is too far, far too expensive. First you have to search the tapes for every possible type of infringement, then you need to identify the person and the crime, and then you need to notify the person of the crime, then you need to appear in court should the person wish to defend their actions, and if they do, you have to prove to the judge that you have the right person and what they did is in fact a crime worthy of punishment.
Maybe at some point in the future that will become affordable, but it'll probably require the development of real artifical intelligence first, and a quantom leap in image processing and recognition.
Would this process, particularly steps (A) and (D), be disruptive? You bet! But, that's the fault of the government baffoon that decided to subsidize the price of milk in the first place.
Actually, I'm pretty certain that a major reason for the subsidies of milk, has little to do with affordability or market conditions. It has a lot more to do with the economic viability of the locally grown food. You see, governments have to look to caring for their people, unlike corporations who care for their profits. No forward thinking government ever wants to be the country that doesn't have a healthy local food production system during a major famine. Because it'll be the food importers who go hungry first, and are the last to get food.
Farm subsidies appease agricultural producers, but also exist to secure the country against the potential for catastrophy. Of course, since it likely hasn't happened in your lifetime, you probably aren't very concerned about that possibility.
No, that's the next generation of legislators and politicians. This generation thinks the internet is made of tubes. And they'll be completely happy to make it illegal to send pictures or home videos of their children and grandchildren except by snail mail. After all, they don't use a computer so it can't be that important.
He's right though. The original intention of copyright law was to allow an artist to profit from his work, not to guarantee perpetual ownership of all art.
It's right there in the name. It's called copyright because it's the right to make copies of a work. It was a direct consequence of the invention of the printing press and the sudden ability to make cheap copies of books. Suddenly someone could spend years writing a book, and someone else could take that book and sell 100,000 copies for just over the cost of the book's materials. The author would get nothing from his suddenly popular book. Heck, the printer didn't even have to leave the author's name on the book.
The idea that ideas, images, and words could be actual property didn't come along until relatively recently, and the issue isn't resolved at all. It is still being determined (fought even) in legislation and litigation.
That could be because in any measurable way either the PS3 or the Wii is better than the 360. The only thing the 360 has going for it right now is "more games available, right now", and that's a short term benefit.
There are still people who insist that the Dreamcast was far more powerful than the PS2. I won't be surprised if people are insisting the same thing about the 360 a few years down the road. I walked into Best Buy the other day, they had a 360 and PS3 set up near one another. The PS3 made the 360 look like garbage. Maybe it was a bad 360 game, I don't know, but the 360 game definitely looked dated, if that's the demo game they're showing.
I also noted that one lone guy was playing the 360 game while there was a crowd around the PS2 demo and the PS3 demo. The Wii demo was broken.
Actually, I'm reasonably sure both golf club makers, baseball bat makers, and tennis racket makers* have been sued over injuries relating to the use of their products. The cynic in me says it's probably the reason why they all come with anti-slip measures and warnings that no one should be standing in front of you when you're swinging away. Broken windows don't count because you're not using the baseball in the approved environment (a baseball diamond).
* Actually, I vaguely remember a tennis racket lawsuit over the strings being too tight on certain rackets and being a hazard when a string broke.
That obviously can't be the temperature. If you're going to ridicule other people for being stupid for getting burned, you definitely shouldn't try to tell people that the maximum safe temperature for serving coffee is 88 degrees above the boiling point. Coffee can't be that temperature and still recognize it as coffee. Coffee boils at 100 degrees Celcius so it can't be Celcius either. And 300 degrees Kelvin would be pretty close to room temperature, so too cold.
Like he said how are you going to drink a hot cup of steam?
There's a problem with that one too. McDonalds still maintains that their food is healthy enough to be part of a regular diet. Unless it turns out the trucker was eating considerably more than is normal, you'd end up with the same type of marginal safety issue. If you are dishonest to your customers, you deserve to lose a lot of money.
If McDonalds had always maintained that their food was bad for you, and should only be eaten in moderation, the case would be different. I know, this type of thing should be common sense, but it stops being a matter of common sense when the person providing the service deliberate conceals the true dangers.
As far as the wii-mote goes, obviously the straps weren't strong enough. Whether or not they were "reasonably" strong is a matter for the courts.
Companies hire these shillers to get quotes into newspapers and television, the only possible way to deal with them is to not quote them, anything else is giving them what they want. Because you see each citation of a shill, gets added to the shill's resume so that he can get even more citations. That's how crazy people like Jack Thompson get publicity. He starts by showing how many times he's been cited in the past to show his credibility.
Given those facts, it's entirely right that all news media identify and systematically ignore these people. An opinion that is bought and paid for is less than worthless to any news media. They're parasites who consume the credibility of whatever they're quoted in for the benefit of their masters.
Fallout has a healthy selection of melee weapons... Like sledgehammers, knives, and powered sledgehammers! Heck, you might be able to play as a Deathclaw and then you can't even use guns. http://www.falloutvault.com/index.php?title=Deathc law
I have no concept of what the average person does or does not buy, I only know what people buy from my experience. My experience indicates that most people who buy the PS3 at launch will eventually end up with 30 or more games. You don't line up to buy (or hire others to line up to buy, or spend $$$ on ebay to buy) a console at launch with the intention of only playing Hockey games on it.
However, if you would like to provide some actual evidence to show why your opinion is more valid than mine or anyone elses, please do. Until then you need to temper your comments, to indicate that you merely think the "average" consomer won't buy 6 games a year for 5 years.
Really, most of us have fallen for the big lie. It doesn't matter whether or not Microsoft is innovative, everyone is innovative. It's inventive we should care about? I can rearrange the paperclips in my drawer and that qualifies as innovative. It's a work that means nothing. That's why Microsoft made it a key feature of their advertising campaigns, it's a technical sounding word that only requires that Microsoft copy other companies.
I'm pretty sure the planescape one is in there because he doesn't know anything about Planescape. For those that don't know, that's the protagonist, the "hero" (or "anti-hero" if you choose to play that way) of the story there, not one of the villains. He says he's not scary enough and looks kind of like he's homeless. Well, he is kind of is, he wakes up in a morgue with nothing, not even his memory, that's the start of the game. The rest of it is figuring out who he is and why people keep trying to kill you. Of course, I suppose the problem is that the ad doesn't exactly convey that. But the point is to grab some attention, which I think it does.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed you might be at an information disadvantage, the key to handling this is not to pretend the technology does exist, because even if the government doesn't place it's own cameras everywhere, you know corporations will and they will be selling that information to anyone who wants to purchase it. So banning government from surveillance of publice areas, is just going to end up with government buying footage from private sources.
On the other hand, what you may need is some legal safeguards to protect the recordings from the obvious abuses. You'd probably want to officially seperate whoever "the watchers" are from the police, that prevents much of the basic abuse. You'd also want to make it a legal requirement that "the watchers" provide recording from cameras to any interested persons. You'd need to prevent law enforcement from taking the originals, and possibly include a penalties for those watchers who allow tapes to go missing or otherwise allow the system to be interfered with.
TIA is a huge boondoggle as anyone remotely cognizant with computer systems should have been able to warn you. All of those data sources are dirty as hell, it takes forever to clean up and integrate records even if they weren't constantly growing at a prodigious rate. It's not even theoretically possible to do the type of surveillance you're complaining about today. Twenty years from now? Maybe. It remains unclear whether we will ever be able to create a computer program capable of identifying people at a remote distance that works as well or better than a human eye. And until we do, this is all make-believe.
Actually, I'm not a big fan of public surveillance. I just don't like the scaremongering that's going on. The libertarian wing-nuts need to reel it in a little.
You can see where the camera is pointed and thus where's it's looking.
The real officer can shake down people on the street for money.
If you blind a real officer, you have a blind man who needs to be replaced and that's a lot more expensive than a camera.
Police officers can and do go undercover.
Eyewitness accounts are much easier to alter or forge than you think. Money and fear go a long way.
A real officer needs bathroom breaks, a smart criminal would wait until the officer isn't present to commit a crime.
That's the point, in reality it's not easier to catch someone specific breaking the law on a public camera. You might get lucky, but you don't arrest people for littering, you give them a $50 ticket, ditto with speeding. People don't routinely commit crimes that would warrant arrest and incarceration. In general, you'd have to already know the person had comitted a crime and when and where they were at the times, or you'd have to know where they were all of the time and watch for them specifically in a crowd of people to try and catch them comitting some minor crime like jaywalking. There's a lot more effort involved in accomplishing this than there is in having one or two corrupt police officers plant drugs on the victim, and then claim he resisted arrest, or even just having him killed and faking the death scene to look like a suicide.
In the real world, you don't run through hoops for little benefit. Only someone fundamentally honest would care whether the charges were real or bogus. Once your coup is done you can kangaroo court the accused to make sure the allegations stick.
I don't think you understand my point, the cameras are superfluous and unnecessary. They neither inherently help nor hinder an attempted coup. Hypothetically, they'd make the coup more expensive and difficult to perpetrate because you also have to suborn the watchers in addition to the police and the military and the more people who know, the greater the chance that the plans get leaked before hand.
There's another interesting take on privacy and cameras in The Neanderthal Parallax. In the parallel world the characters have constant surveillance of their activities, everything they do is recorded remotely at all times (though it is not reviewable by others, except with the equivalent of a court order). The records can be used both as shield against false prosecution and evidence for actual crimes.
Public surveillance is a double-edged blade.
I just have a hard time seeing how the cameras actual aid or abet this type of punitive measure. It's far easier for the unethical to fake a serious crime, than to catch someone performing a minor crime and then punish them for it.
Overall video cameras in public places are decidedly neutral as long as they're implemented properly and the public has the right to access the recordings in addition to the government.
If you like Science Fiction, you might like to read David Brin's Kiln People, for a somewhat different take on how massive public surveillance might go. It's really only a minor theme in the novel, but I found it a little interesting.
Meh. Everyone has to budget their time, there's far to many papers that claim to be well researched to read them all, and gun control isn't even that interesting...
No thanks, I'm reasonably sure since you cited it, it'll be the usual pro-gun propoganda.
I'm reasonably certain that the availability of hand guns is a factor in the crime rate. They're one of the easiest lethal weapons to carry and use. Lowering the "barrier of entry" to murdering someone is almost certainly going to raise the crime rate. Of course, the question is merely how much it increases the rate. On the other hand, I think getting rid of hand guns probably won't have a huge impact on murder rate though.
There's always the question of whether the liberty of handgun ownership is worth the hypothetical 1500 lives a year that banning them might save (out of 30,000 firearm related murders).
Anyone who can answer that question quickly and definitively is probably not to be trusted. They either choose not to value liberty or the lives of their fellows, both extremes are exceptionally dangerous.
First, I fail to see how this different from the situation as it currently exists.
Second, these are cameras in public locations, not cameras that follow you into your home and place of work.
Third, once you've corrupted the police and the military, the cameras aren't going to be much help, especially when they capture your goons kidnapping people on camera.
Not with the government and technology that exists now. Using cameras as a way to enforce minor laws is too far, far too expensive. First you have to search the tapes for every possible type of infringement, then you need to identify the person and the crime, and then you need to notify the person of the crime, then you need to appear in court should the person wish to defend their actions, and if they do, you have to prove to the judge that you have the right person and what they did is in fact a crime worthy of punishment.
Maybe at some point in the future that will become affordable, but it'll probably require the development of real artifical intelligence first, and a quantom leap in image processing and recognition.
Actually, I'm pretty certain that a major reason for the subsidies of milk, has little to do with affordability or market conditions. It has a lot more to do with the economic viability of the locally grown food. You see, governments have to look to caring for their people, unlike corporations who care for their profits. No forward thinking government ever wants to be the country that doesn't have a healthy local food production system during a major famine. Because it'll be the food importers who go hungry first, and are the last to get food.
Farm subsidies appease agricultural producers, but also exist to secure the country against the potential for catastrophy. Of course, since it likely hasn't happened in your lifetime, you probably aren't very concerned about that possibility.
No, that's the next generation of legislators and politicians. This generation thinks the internet is made of tubes. And they'll be completely happy to make it illegal to send pictures or home videos of their children and grandchildren except by snail mail. After all, they don't use a computer so it can't be that important.
He's right though. The original intention of copyright law was to allow an artist to profit from his work, not to guarantee perpetual ownership of all art.
It's right there in the name. It's called copyright because it's the right to make copies of a work. It was a direct consequence of the invention of the printing press and the sudden ability to make cheap copies of books. Suddenly someone could spend years writing a book, and someone else could take that book and sell 100,000 copies for just over the cost of the book's materials. The author would get nothing from his suddenly popular book. Heck, the printer didn't even have to leave the author's name on the book.
The idea that ideas, images, and words could be actual property didn't come along until relatively recently, and the issue isn't resolved at all. It is still being determined (fought even) in legislation and litigation.
That could be because in any measurable way either the PS3 or the Wii is better than the 360. The only thing the 360 has going for it right now is "more games available, right now", and that's a short term benefit.
There are still people who insist that the Dreamcast was far more powerful than the PS2. I won't be surprised if people are insisting the same thing about the 360 a few years down the road. I walked into Best Buy the other day, they had a 360 and PS3 set up near one another. The PS3 made the 360 look like garbage. Maybe it was a bad 360 game, I don't know, but the 360 game definitely looked dated, if that's the demo game they're showing.
I also noted that one lone guy was playing the 360 game while there was a crowd around the PS2 demo and the PS3 demo. The Wii demo was broken.
Actually, I'm reasonably sure both golf club makers, baseball bat makers, and tennis racket makers* have been sued over injuries relating to the use of their products. The cynic in me says it's probably the reason why they all come with anti-slip measures and warnings that no one should be standing in front of you when you're swinging away. Broken windows don't count because you're not using the baseball in the approved environment (a baseball diamond).
* Actually, I vaguely remember a tennis racket lawsuit over the strings being too tight on certain rackets and being a hazard when a string broke.
That obviously can't be the temperature. If you're going to ridicule other people for being stupid for getting burned, you definitely shouldn't try to tell people that the maximum safe temperature for serving coffee is 88 degrees above the boiling point. Coffee can't be that temperature and still recognize it as coffee. Coffee boils at 100 degrees Celcius so it can't be Celcius either. And 300 degrees Kelvin would be pretty close to room temperature, so too cold.
Like he said how are you going to drink a hot cup of steam?
There's a problem with that one too. McDonalds still maintains that their food is healthy enough to be part of a regular diet. Unless it turns out the trucker was eating considerably more than is normal, you'd end up with the same type of marginal safety issue. If you are dishonest to your customers, you deserve to lose a lot of money.
If McDonalds had always maintained that their food was bad for you, and should only be eaten in moderation, the case would be different. I know, this type of thing should be common sense, but it stops being a matter of common sense when the person providing the service deliberate conceals the true dangers.
As far as the wii-mote goes, obviously the straps weren't strong enough. Whether or not they were "reasonably" strong is a matter for the courts.
The question is whether coffee needs to be hot enough to melt flesh or not. The court's decision was that, no, it doesn't.
I'm not really sympathetic to either side in the case, but the end result is safer coffee for everyone.
Sometimes a little censorship is a good thing.
Companies hire these shillers to get quotes into newspapers and television, the only possible way to deal with them is to not quote them, anything else is giving them what they want. Because you see each citation of a shill, gets added to the shill's resume so that he can get even more citations. That's how crazy people like Jack Thompson get publicity. He starts by showing how many times he's been cited in the past to show his credibility.
Given those facts, it's entirely right that all news media identify and systematically ignore these people. An opinion that is bought and paid for is less than worthless to any news media. They're parasites who consume the credibility of whatever they're quoted in for the benefit of their masters.
Leviticus? Isn't that the same book that condemns people to hell for eating cheeseburgers or shrimp?
Fallout has a healthy selection of melee weapons... Like sledgehammers, knives, and powered sledgehammers! Heck, you might be able to play as a Deathclaw and then you can't even use guns.c law
http://www.falloutvault.com/index.php?title=Death
Exactly, nobody havers like marketing!
And occasionally they have to put out, you know, stuff so that the people who hired them think they're actually working.
Actually, "they" don't "need" to talk it up. But, marketing people get bored too, you know.
I have no concept of what the average person does or does not buy, I only know what people buy from my experience. My experience indicates that most people who buy the PS3 at launch will eventually end up with 30 or more games. You don't line up to buy (or hire others to line up to buy, or spend $$$ on ebay to buy) a console at launch with the intention of only playing Hockey games on it.
However, if you would like to provide some actual evidence to show why your opinion is more valid than mine or anyone elses, please do. Until then you need to temper your comments, to indicate that you merely think the "average" consomer won't buy 6 games a year for 5 years.
Really, most of us have fallen for the big lie. It doesn't matter whether or not Microsoft is innovative, everyone is innovative. It's inventive we should care about? I can rearrange the paperclips in my drawer and that qualifies as innovative. It's a work that means nothing. That's why Microsoft made it a key feature of their advertising campaigns, it's a technical sounding word that only requires that Microsoft copy other companies.
I'm pretty sure the planescape one is in there because he doesn't know anything about Planescape. For those that don't know, that's the protagonist, the "hero" (or "anti-hero" if you choose to play that way) of the story there, not one of the villains. He says he's not scary enough and looks kind of like he's homeless. Well, he is kind of is, he wakes up in a morgue with nothing, not even his memory, that's the start of the game. The rest of it is figuring out who he is and why people keep trying to kill you. Of course, I suppose the problem is that the ad doesn't exactly convey that. But the point is to grab some attention, which I think it does.