I think that the natural resources are a big part of the solution, but it's not just figuring out to how exploit them and looking at the overall national GDP that many seem to have latch onto; the really telling numbers are when you compare the GDP ranking for the country as a whole with the per-capita rating - there's a serious problem with the human side of the equation too. The country as a whole is right up there with the EU's big three (6th in the world, according to Wikipedia's 2014 estimate), but is languishing down in 58th per capita, on a par with second world countries (which is what Russia really is these days) and/or countries that have massive over population and subsistence employment issues. Ultimately, there's a fundamental problem with the distribution of wealth in Russia (Occupy Wall Street has nothing to complain about in the light of a hypothetical "Occupy Red Square"), and stunts like this are not going to help fix the problem, especially since those that have the money also have the all the power and are not afraid to use the latter to keep them both. At this point, perhaps the only option left might be for the people of Russia to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution with another one...
This kind of rampant corruption and cronyism is also the same reason why, despite an abundance of available resources and labour, Russia can't drag its economy out of the doldrums and up to a level that it ought to be capable of achieving. Russia's GDP is on a par with the that of countries like the UK, Germany and France - realistically it ought to be at least an order of magnitude above that. Ultimately though this is mostly an asset grab - you watch as control over Energia is transferred to Putin's supporters over the next few months - and probably an attempt to try and recoup funds lost through the latest round of sanctions imposed over Ukraine.
Chris Roberts and other CIG developers clarified this when the rumours about Crytek first started getting discussed on the forums. They have a full license to the CryTek engine source code, so even if Crytek were to completely collapse they still have everything they need to get the game finished. At this point they have already customised the engine so far that it's now pretty much a dedicated SC-specific engine anyway, so the worst case is that they will lose any future development into new core engine features that might have come out of Crytek and have to do all the future development in house. That's almost certainly time and money they didn't expect to need, but at least they are not likely to have too many problems getting hold of ex-Crytek employeess looking for work who can work on it.
The Act protects against distributing digital audio recording devices whose primary purpose is to rip copyrighted material.
So, the primary purpose of the CD system is ripping CDs is it? Not, for instance, listening to the radio, playing CDs, or even listening to the music I have previously ripped from CDs using the system AARC is complaining about? According to their argument that would have to be the case, even to the extent of ripping a CD and then only playing it back once, to meet the "primary purpose" claim. Or is the AARC expecting to convince a jury that owners of vehicles with these devices are ripping CDs onto a hard drive in a device that they will then probably need to dismantle in order to remove and attach the drive to some other system in order to play back the ripped music somewhere other than in the car?
AARC's greedy lawyers are greedy. Music (ripped in-car, naturally) at eleven!
No one confuses Rapidshare for BMG's official site.
No one should confuse The City of London police for an actual police force as most people imagine them, either. They are a territorial force responsible for a tiny area of Greater London as a whole that measuring a little over square mile and consists of mostly financial institutions and only a few thousand actual residents. Still, owing to their location in The City, they have developed quite a reputation for fraud investigations and also incorporate a division dealing with Intellectual Property, so other than the jurisdictional issues of interfering with websites (or at least the ads displayed on them) that are most likely hosted outside The City they actually do have the means and backing to look into this kind of thing.
Since he's currently spending a year dead for tax reasons I doubt that would be the case, but in any event since it's only totally black and not totally frictionless as well I don't think it would be suitable for crashing into a star at the climax of the next Disaster Area concert anyway.
I did say "almost all", and it was in reference to smart watches that are "phone enhancements" like the Samsung and I expect Apple's effort to be, or pair up to a tablet as you suggest, rather than those that are more standalone devices. Those that are from non-phone vendors, e.g. the Pebble and the Kairos I linked to, are obviously going to have to be as vendor neutral as possible to get any reasonable marketshare, and I'm fairly sure that Google will standardise an Android API to make things much more vendor neutral soon enough.
And yes, I've seen the Steel. I think it's fugly, although admittedly that's because I'm a fan of classic analogue chronograph designs from before the current fad for coaster-sized monstrosities came in; if my watch is going to be interpreted as a fashion statement then I want that statement to be "elegant", not "bling". That, I think, will be the biggest stumbling block to my getting a smartwatch; to borrow a line from Douglas Adams I no longer "think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea", and haven't worn one since the early '90s. Realistically, I think that is going to leave me SoL for quite some time, but at least there's a good chance there will be some killer feature(s) by the time that the old-school Swiss watchmakers have a decent range of smart watches.
Same situation here. I can see how they *might* be useful, but none of the currently available models have a killer feature or, better yet, a set of killer features, that make me want to get one. Not even slightly. On the flipside of that, the one feature that they almost all seem to have that I most definitely don't want is that they are tied to a specific phone, or at least to a specific vendor. Maybe Apple can come up with somethings for them to do that everyone else can rip off for the whichever generation of Android-phone linked watches finally become interoperable...
Still, at least they don't have to look as ugly as sin (another common failing), a particulary important consideration for those of us that don't like/suit chunky watches; give me slim and elegant over the most of the current watch designs any day! I'd get something like this in a heartbeat if only the vendor in question could make it do something my current chronograph couldn't that I found useful - if it were about half as thick.
Typically you would be waiting for your flight and doing your web surfing in the departures area of the terminal, e.g. on the far side of security, would you not? Apart from really long multiple hop trips where I've had to go through security again in-between flights for whatever reason (in which case I would have a way to top up the charges in my bag anyway), I don't think I've ever arrived at security without my phone/tablet's batteries being near maxed out ready for use in the lounge and on the plane.
You're just not thinking outside the box enough. *Finally* we have a way of getting rid of all all of our broken electronics without having to pay those exhorbitant recycling fees or sneaking out in the dead of night to dump it at some ad-hoc "landfill" site!
"Sorry, officer, I must have forgotten to charge that one too... here you go! Shall we try this... um..." *wipes dust off logo*...Compaq now, or just move on to the next crate?"
Fact is, the court that issued this ruling screwed up big time. Perhaps, if Google can find a few more egregious deletions to make, the European Parliament will correct the error.
Fact is, the European Parliament passed a law that was so full of holes that it was inevitably going to be abused before it was passed and, despite this being pointed out frequently, they went ahead and passed the law anyway instead of maybe taking a bit of time to plug some of the holes and clarifing under what circumstances is could and, more importantly, could not be used. At least it's starting to look like some members of the EC are starting to realise that the EP messed up, but somehow I doubt that they are going to be able to convince their colleagues to do anything about it because that would entail them effectively admitting that they messed up.
Worthless is right. It's supposedly to prevent terrorism (at least that's how the proponents of wholesale data capture usually justify it), which would typically be a small cell of individuals looking to strike a handful of small high value targets. Yet despite having access to every single phone call in Iraq plus, no doubt, a whole array of other sources of intelligence the NSA appears to have been caught completely unaware by a major military offensive involving thousands that has effectively overrun about a third of the major towns and cities in the country. Missing the odd needle in the haystack would perhaps be excusable, but they pretty much overlooked the entire hayfield on that one.
Even so, I'm betting they'll use that as an excuse to justify collecting more than just metadata, which is now demonstrably not up to the job, rather than scrapping the whole expensive business and working out what sources of methods might actually give tangible results and using those instead.
The requests from nasty people will be publicised because that is the most effective way to give the appearance that these laws are harmful, even though the majority of people have a legitimate, reasonable right to have their private lives kept private.
I'm curious whether Google is planning on posting a summary of this to Chilling Effects, just like they do for other takedown requests - something that I expect they will do at some point. No need to violate individual privacy requests, but a simple breakdown of what kind of information is being removed, in what kind of quantities and for what kind of reason/excuse should be sufficient to let people see whether or not this is being abused in any way. And for certain elements of the media to express their outrage over it, of course.
And there-in lies the problem, "just stripped down and a lot of stuff removed" means that you almost certainly won't be getting patches for the stuff that has been removed, which is just as likely (if not more so) to be the parts that really need patching when the next 0-day comes along. Also, unless all the system files present truly are identical, then replacing random system files on a desktop XP system for a "stripped down" version might, and probably will, cause some functions to stop working. I can see two not necessarily mutually exclusive outcomes from this; people who deploy this are going to end up with a very false sense of security and a lot of systems are going to get hosed because of an update that isn't compatible with desktop XP.
In fact, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to "accidentally" push out bad patches to deter this behaviour. I'm pretty sure they'd rather XP just cease to exist at this point given all the bad security press it's got them, and any opportunity to ram another nail into the coffin isn't exactly going to be unwelcome.
Even the older Slashdotters have a blinkered view of culture it seems. The original reference is from George Orwell's "1984", only it was fingers and not lights.
Yeah, lots of things could impact efficiency, car condition and driving style being the main two. I keep my tire pressures up, use decent fuel, check the oil regularly, don't keep a load of junk in the car, don't accellerate too quickly, decellerate by anticipating traffic and lifting off as much as possible, try to time journeys to avoid heavy traffic, and, most importantly, keep the speed down to something more realistic (without being a mobile chicane) than those who drive as fast as they think they can get away with. That all gives me about 40% better mileage than what I'm apparently supposed to, which at my mileage and EU fuel prices adds to a saving well in excess of what I'm supposed to be losing according to TFA, although that does drop significantly if I drive more aggressively. Did they take that kind of stuff into account with their tests, or just get a bunch of random drivers who quite possibly don't have a very efficient driving style to drive a precribed route and then submit fuel usage figures? They don't say, just "experienced engineers, who drive test vehicles over a variety of real roads, including motorways, 'A' and 'B' roads and through towns and villages", which says nothing about the car itself.
Another of those things where you need to be proactive take responsibility for your own safety on-line. The marketing companies have done nothing to help combat malicious advertisements and will quite happily farm as much information as they can whether people want them to or not, so fsck 'em. ABP, NoScript et. all, combined with hosting my own DNS zone for the domains of the larger ad/tracking firms and mapping all their hosts to 127.0.0.1 have ensured I haven't seen a single third party ad, malicious or otherwise, in years and I'm going to do whatever I have to do in order to keep it that way.
Not sure they are claiming that a desire to exercise is the motive so much that it's the end result of the activity - the wording could definitely be clearer on that point. Presumably the creatures are getting something out it it (unless they get stuck on the wheel and don't realise what's going on, which seems likely in some cases). Jumping to the conclusion it's out of a desire to exercise is definitely a stretch though; as you note, it could just as easily be some kind of game like a dog chasing its tail or a cat with a ball or yarn, for instance.
Actually, I suspect it was named by someone who possibly knew quite well what a camel and a leopard looked like, but only had a crude description or sketch from someone who had been one of the first Europeans to travel far enough into Africa to see a giraffe first hand. The name is ancient, not part of modern taxonomy, and other than the length of the neck and lack of a hump, it's actually not too far off visually, especially if you've seen both up close; a camel (long legs, quite tall, with a fairly long neck) combined a leopard's skin patterning.
Not just that, but by ignoring any bacteria that might have survived the trip from Earth to Mars aboard Curiosity (and presumably earlier probes all the way back to Viking) they could potentially be ruling out other strains of the same bacteria that may have made the trip by means such as impact ejecta. They are demonstrably up to the task in the lab, so potentially this could eliminate some of the most likely candidates for successful pan-spermia. If Mars is teaming with bacteria strain "foo" as a result of an earlier impact event, and "foo" just happens to have been detected on a Curiousity swab I hope there is also some plan to determine how likely it was that Curiousity was indeed responsible.
For those that don't RTFA it seems like the rate of shrinkage has dramatically accelerated in the last few years - the extent of this being something that probably ought to be included in the summary. It was ~23,500km across when the Voyager probes imaged it in 1979/1980 and is down to ~16,500km in the latest Hubble image, yet the current rate of shrinkage is quoted at almost 1,000km/year since 2012. That makes me think it's behaving like many Terrestial storms and it's going to blow over and dissipate quite quickly, which could mean that it could be gone entirely before the end of the decade. While it was never going to be around indefinitely I'm still somewhat stunned at the notion that I'm probably going to outlive something that has always seemed like a permanent fixture and a defining feature of Jupiter akin to Saturn's rings.
"Monitoring" is an awfully loose term. Could this, for instance, apply to such things as the persistant port scanning (e.g. "monitoring" which ports a user has open on a given IP) and thus have implications for operations like Shodan HQ, or even the periodic scans of the entire Internet done by the likes of H.D. Moore and other companies or universities conducting research?
Not that I'd be upset about seeing all that crap removed from my log files, mind you...
Being able to turn it off is fine; running a video camera continuously will eat batteries for the sake of recordings that will mostly be useless. The trick is to make sure that the camera is switched on when it is required, and it the heat of the moment I would imagine it would be very easy to genuinely forget to turn the thing on. Perhaps a very noticeable "recording light", similar to that on Google Glass, so that people interacting with the police will both be aware they are being recorded and be in a position to insist the interaction be recorded if it's currently turned off. The whole "my client alleges that he was abused during the arrest, you *do* have the recording, right?" issue should make sure the police want the cameras on as much as possible.
The real trick will be making sure the camera is switched on for spur of the moment stuff, like where an incident happens when the officer is actually present, so perhaps some kind of automatic activation based on feedback from accelerometers and similar activity detectors is also required. If the sensors detect that the officer has started to run, there is a jolt to the camera, or some other abnormal activity, then start recording until the camera is manually disabled again.
This notion kind of cropped up in last weekend's episode of "Continuum" where a next of kin was informed of a crash by an actuary in terms of write downs, compensation, loss adjustments and so on. Given the way insurers tend to operate and how in bed they are with the legal profession I can see that's exactly how this would go in the long run; an evaluation designed to produce the lowest price tag for those that ultimately get to pay the financial/legal bill. Looking at the problem another way, that means the structural integrity of the two cars in the example is probably moot; if the more structurally sound car is an expensive vehicle with a lone occupant owning a huge life insurance policy and the other is a decrepit bus full of uninsured kids, then it's probably not a good day to be one of the kids... or the driver of the car that crashes into them.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that the natural resources are a big part of the solution, but it's not just figuring out to how exploit them and looking at the overall national GDP that many seem to have latch onto; the really telling numbers are when you compare the GDP ranking for the country as a whole with the per-capita rating - there's a serious problem with the human side of the equation too. The country as a whole is right up there with the EU's big three (6th in the world, according to Wikipedia's 2014 estimate), but is languishing down in 58th per capita, on a par with second world countries (which is what Russia really is these days) and/or countries that have massive over population and subsistence employment issues. Ultimately, there's a fundamental problem with the distribution of wealth in Russia (Occupy Wall Street has nothing to complain about in the light of a hypothetical "Occupy Red Square"), and stunts like this are not going to help fix the problem, especially since those that have the money also have the all the power and are not afraid to use the latter to keep them both. At this point, perhaps the only option left might be for the people of Russia to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution with another one...
Yes, it does, the Moscow Exchange, or MICEX.
This kind of rampant corruption and cronyism is also the same reason why, despite an abundance of available resources and labour, Russia can't drag its economy out of the doldrums and up to a level that it ought to be capable of achieving. Russia's GDP is on a par with the that of countries like the UK, Germany and France - realistically it ought to be at least an order of magnitude above that. Ultimately though this is mostly an asset grab - you watch as control over Energia is transferred to Putin's supporters over the next few months - and probably an attempt to try and recoup funds lost through the latest round of sanctions imposed over Ukraine.
Chris Roberts and other CIG developers clarified this when the rumours about Crytek first started getting discussed on the forums. They have a full license to the CryTek engine source code, so even if Crytek were to completely collapse they still have everything they need to get the game finished. At this point they have already customised the engine so far that it's now pretty much a dedicated SC-specific engine anyway, so the worst case is that they will lose any future development into new core engine features that might have come out of Crytek and have to do all the future development in house. That's almost certainly time and money they didn't expect to need, but at least they are not likely to have too many problems getting hold of ex-Crytek employeess looking for work who can work on it.
So, the primary purpose of the CD system is ripping CDs is it? Not, for instance, listening to the radio, playing CDs, or even listening to the music I have previously ripped from CDs using the system AARC is complaining about? According to their argument that would have to be the case, even to the extent of ripping a CD and then only playing it back once, to meet the "primary purpose" claim. Or is the AARC expecting to convince a jury that owners of vehicles with these devices are ripping CDs onto a hard drive in a device that they will then probably need to dismantle in order to remove and attach the drive to some other system in order to play back the ripped music somewhere other than in the car?
AARC's greedy lawyers are greedy. Music (ripped in-car, naturally) at eleven!
No one should confuse The City of London police for an actual police force as most people imagine them, either. They are a territorial force responsible for a tiny area of Greater London as a whole that measuring a little over square mile and consists of mostly financial institutions and only a few thousand actual residents. Still, owing to their location in The City, they have developed quite a reputation for fraud investigations and also incorporate a division dealing with Intellectual Property, so other than the jurisdictional issues of interfering with websites (or at least the ads displayed on them) that are most likely hosted outside The City they actually do have the means and backing to look into this kind of thing.
Since he's currently spending a year dead for tax reasons I doubt that would be the case, but in any event since it's only totally black and not totally frictionless as well I don't think it would be suitable for crashing into a star at the climax of the next Disaster Area concert anyway.
I did say "almost all", and it was in reference to smart watches that are "phone enhancements" like the Samsung and I expect Apple's effort to be, or pair up to a tablet as you suggest, rather than those that are more standalone devices. Those that are from non-phone vendors, e.g. the Pebble and the Kairos I linked to, are obviously going to have to be as vendor neutral as possible to get any reasonable marketshare, and I'm fairly sure that Google will standardise an Android API to make things much more vendor neutral soon enough.
And yes, I've seen the Steel. I think it's fugly, although admittedly that's because I'm a fan of classic analogue chronograph designs from before the current fad for coaster-sized monstrosities came in; if my watch is going to be interpreted as a fashion statement then I want that statement to be "elegant", not "bling". That, I think, will be the biggest stumbling block to my getting a smartwatch; to borrow a line from Douglas Adams I no longer "think that digital watches are a pretty neat idea", and haven't worn one since the early '90s. Realistically, I think that is going to leave me SoL for quite some time, but at least there's a good chance there will be some killer feature(s) by the time that the old-school Swiss watchmakers have a decent range of smart watches.
Same situation here. I can see how they *might* be useful, but none of the currently available models have a killer feature or, better yet, a set of killer features, that make me want to get one. Not even slightly. On the flipside of that, the one feature that they almost all seem to have that I most definitely don't want is that they are tied to a specific phone, or at least to a specific vendor. Maybe Apple can come up with somethings for them to do that everyone else can rip off for the whichever generation of Android-phone linked watches finally become interoperable...
Still, at least they don't have to look as ugly as sin (another common failing), a particulary important consideration for those of us that don't like/suit chunky watches; give me slim and elegant over the most of the current watch designs any day! I'd get something like this in a heartbeat if only the vendor in question could make it do something my current chronograph couldn't that I found useful - if it were about half as thick.
Typically you would be waiting for your flight and doing your web surfing in the departures area of the terminal, e.g. on the far side of security, would you not? Apart from really long multiple hop trips where I've had to go through security again in-between flights for whatever reason (in which case I would have a way to top up the charges in my bag anyway), I don't think I've ever arrived at security without my phone/tablet's batteries being near maxed out ready for use in the lounge and on the plane.
You're just not thinking outside the box enough. *Finally* we have a way of getting rid of all all of our broken electronics without having to pay those exhorbitant recycling fees or sneaking out in the dead of night to dump it at some ad-hoc "landfill" site!
...Compaq now, or just move on to the next crate?"
"Sorry, officer, I must have forgotten to charge that one too... here you go! Shall we try this... um..." *wipes dust off logo*
Fact is, the European Parliament passed a law that was so full of holes that it was inevitably going to be abused before it was passed and, despite this being pointed out frequently, they went ahead and passed the law anyway instead of maybe taking a bit of time to plug some of the holes and clarifing under what circumstances is could and, more importantly, could not be used. At least it's starting to look like some members of the EC are starting to realise that the EP messed up, but somehow I doubt that they are going to be able to convince their colleagues to do anything about it because that would entail them effectively admitting that they messed up.
Worthless is right. It's supposedly to prevent terrorism (at least that's how the proponents of wholesale data capture usually justify it), which would typically be a small cell of individuals looking to strike a handful of small high value targets. Yet despite having access to every single phone call in Iraq plus, no doubt, a whole array of other sources of intelligence the NSA appears to have been caught completely unaware by a major military offensive involving thousands that has effectively overrun about a third of the major towns and cities in the country. Missing the odd needle in the haystack would perhaps be excusable, but they pretty much overlooked the entire hayfield on that one.
Even so, I'm betting they'll use that as an excuse to justify collecting more than just metadata, which is now demonstrably not up to the job, rather than scrapping the whole expensive business and working out what sources of methods might actually give tangible results and using those instead.
I'm curious whether Google is planning on posting a summary of this to Chilling Effects, just like they do for other takedown requests - something that I expect they will do at some point. No need to violate individual privacy requests, but a simple breakdown of what kind of information is being removed, in what kind of quantities and for what kind of reason/excuse should be sufficient to let people see whether or not this is being abused in any way. And for certain elements of the media to express their outrage over it, of course.
I've heard that they are fast enough to make it seem like Greedo shot first.
And there-in lies the problem, "just stripped down and a lot of stuff removed" means that you almost certainly won't be getting patches for the stuff that has been removed, which is just as likely (if not more so) to be the parts that really need patching when the next 0-day comes along. Also, unless all the system files present truly are identical, then replacing random system files on a desktop XP system for a "stripped down" version might, and probably will, cause some functions to stop working. I can see two not necessarily mutually exclusive outcomes from this; people who deploy this are going to end up with a very false sense of security and a lot of systems are going to get hosed because of an update that isn't compatible with desktop XP.
In fact, I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to "accidentally" push out bad patches to deter this behaviour. I'm pretty sure they'd rather XP just cease to exist at this point given all the bad security press it's got them, and any opportunity to ram another nail into the coffin isn't exactly going to be unwelcome.
Even the older Slashdotters have a blinkered view of culture it seems. The original reference is from George Orwell's "1984", only it was fingers and not lights.
Yeah, lots of things could impact efficiency, car condition and driving style being the main two. I keep my tire pressures up, use decent fuel, check the oil regularly, don't keep a load of junk in the car, don't accellerate too quickly, decellerate by anticipating traffic and lifting off as much as possible, try to time journeys to avoid heavy traffic, and, most importantly, keep the speed down to something more realistic (without being a mobile chicane) than those who drive as fast as they think they can get away with. That all gives me about 40% better mileage than what I'm apparently supposed to, which at my mileage and EU fuel prices adds to a saving well in excess of what I'm supposed to be losing according to TFA, although that does drop significantly if I drive more aggressively. Did they take that kind of stuff into account with their tests, or just get a bunch of random drivers who quite possibly don't have a very efficient driving style to drive a precribed route and then submit fuel usage figures? They don't say, just "experienced engineers, who drive test vehicles over a variety of real roads, including motorways, 'A' and 'B' roads and through towns and villages", which says nothing about the car itself.
Another of those things where you need to be proactive take responsibility for your own safety on-line. The marketing companies have done nothing to help combat malicious advertisements and will quite happily farm as much information as they can whether people want them to or not, so fsck 'em. ABP, NoScript et. all, combined with hosting my own DNS zone for the domains of the larger ad/tracking firms and mapping all their hosts to 127.0.0.1 have ensured I haven't seen a single third party ad, malicious or otherwise, in years and I'm going to do whatever I have to do in order to keep it that way.
Not sure they are claiming that a desire to exercise is the motive so much that it's the end result of the activity - the wording could definitely be clearer on that point. Presumably the creatures are getting something out it it (unless they get stuck on the wheel and don't realise what's going on, which seems likely in some cases). Jumping to the conclusion it's out of a desire to exercise is definitely a stretch though; as you note, it could just as easily be some kind of game like a dog chasing its tail or a cat with a ball or yarn, for instance.
Actually, I suspect it was named by someone who possibly knew quite well what a camel and a leopard looked like, but only had a crude description or sketch from someone who had been one of the first Europeans to travel far enough into Africa to see a giraffe first hand. The name is ancient, not part of modern taxonomy, and other than the length of the neck and lack of a hump, it's actually not too far off visually, especially if you've seen both up close; a camel (long legs, quite tall, with a fairly long neck) combined a leopard's skin patterning.
Not just that, but by ignoring any bacteria that might have survived the trip from Earth to Mars aboard Curiosity (and presumably earlier probes all the way back to Viking) they could potentially be ruling out other strains of the same bacteria that may have made the trip by means such as impact ejecta. They are demonstrably up to the task in the lab, so potentially this could eliminate some of the most likely candidates for successful pan-spermia. If Mars is teaming with bacteria strain "foo" as a result of an earlier impact event, and "foo" just happens to have been detected on a Curiousity swab I hope there is also some plan to determine how likely it was that Curiousity was indeed responsible.
For those that don't RTFA it seems like the rate of shrinkage has dramatically accelerated in the last few years - the extent of this being something that probably ought to be included in the summary. It was ~23,500km across when the Voyager probes imaged it in 1979/1980 and is down to ~16,500km in the latest Hubble image, yet the current rate of shrinkage is quoted at almost 1,000km/year since 2012. That makes me think it's behaving like many Terrestial storms and it's going to blow over and dissipate quite quickly, which could mean that it could be gone entirely before the end of the decade. While it was never going to be around indefinitely I'm still somewhat stunned at the notion that I'm probably going to outlive something that has always seemed like a permanent fixture and a defining feature of Jupiter akin to Saturn's rings.
"Monitoring" is an awfully loose term. Could this, for instance, apply to such things as the persistant port scanning (e.g. "monitoring" which ports a user has open on a given IP) and thus have implications for operations like Shodan HQ, or even the periodic scans of the entire Internet done by the likes of H.D. Moore and other companies or universities conducting research?
Not that I'd be upset about seeing all that crap removed from my log files, mind you...
Being able to turn it off is fine; running a video camera continuously will eat batteries for the sake of recordings that will mostly be useless. The trick is to make sure that the camera is switched on when it is required, and it the heat of the moment I would imagine it would be very easy to genuinely forget to turn the thing on. Perhaps a very noticeable "recording light", similar to that on Google Glass, so that people interacting with the police will both be aware they are being recorded and be in a position to insist the interaction be recorded if it's currently turned off. The whole "my client alleges that he was abused during the arrest, you *do* have the recording, right?" issue should make sure the police want the cameras on as much as possible.
The real trick will be making sure the camera is switched on for spur of the moment stuff, like where an incident happens when the officer is actually present, so perhaps some kind of automatic activation based on feedback from accelerometers and similar activity detectors is also required. If the sensors detect that the officer has started to run, there is a jolt to the camera, or some other abnormal activity, then start recording until the camera is manually disabled again.
This notion kind of cropped up in last weekend's episode of "Continuum" where a next of kin was informed of a crash by an actuary in terms of write downs, compensation, loss adjustments and so on. Given the way insurers tend to operate and how in bed they are with the legal profession I can see that's exactly how this would go in the long run; an evaluation designed to produce the lowest price tag for those that ultimately get to pay the financial/legal bill. Looking at the problem another way, that means the structural integrity of the two cars in the example is probably moot; if the more structurally sound car is an expensive vehicle with a lone occupant owning a huge life insurance policy and the other is a decrepit bus full of uninsured kids, then it's probably not a good day to be one of the kids... or the driver of the car that crashes into them.