And yet none of those methods of travel were restricted in the constitution either.
The US Constitution doesn't restrict an individuals rights to ANYTHING. The US Constitution says nothing about murder, rape, selling drugs, bank robbery, forgery, underage drinking, etc. but they're all illegal. The US Constitution also says nothing about requiring passports or visas to travel to foreign countries or to let foreigners travel here either, but they're required by federal law.
The US Constitution as originally written outlined the three branches of government, the power and limitations granted to individual states, the process for ratifying amendments, etc. In other words, the US Constitution defines the federal and state governments, and gives them the power to pass the laws that we currently have that make murder, rape, etc. illegal and the laws that require passports, visas, and even drivers licenses.
The 27 amendments further define the responsibilities of the government and the rights of American citizens. The first 10, the Bill of Rights, specifically cover well known issues like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection against unwarranted search/seizure, guarantee of speedy trials, forbidding excessive bail, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment, etc. The ONLY amendment to the US Constitution that introduced any restrictions to US citizens was the 18th (prohibition) which was repealed by the 21st amendment. In other words, the amendments further define the responsibilities and duties of the state & federal government bodies and also ensure further rights of individuals that the government can not take away. Because of the First Amendment (Freedom of speech) the government can not pass any laws that restrict the speech of US citizens, restrict their practice of religion, etc. That's how the US Constitution works. There aren't any amendments to the US Constitution that make driving a right because the legislature has never seen driving as a right. They recognize that driving is a privilege to be managed by individual states (with direction from federal legislation) and not a right that needs to be granted to all US citizens.
You might want to go learn a little more about how the government and laws work before you make baseless statements regarding the US Constitution. You still haven't provided anything that backs up your claim that driving is a right and not a privilege.
Will someone please explain to me how operating a device I own, on infrastructure that I am required to pay for, is a privilege?
You're driving on public roads, which means you have to obey all public laws, regulations, etc. Those laws stipulate that you must have a drivers license, carry insurance, have your car inspected, etc. If you're unwilling to accept those requirements then stay off the road.
Of course if you don't want to abide by those laws you can always buy your own private roads and do whatever the hell you want on them.
You might want to go read my post again. I clearly stated that it wouldn't be difficult to archive the license plates that are read. I also said that the article I read about this technology a few years ago indicated the accuracy wasn't 100% and relied on the police officer in the car to verify a potential match. If the data being collected is that inaccurate then it makes no sense at all to collect it. Any attempt to use it for any legal reasons would get laughed out of court because of the inaccuracy.
You most likely can't. But the police can. They have access to that sort of data. Mostly they have databases containing the license plates of known stolen cars, etc. Since many police cars now have laptop computers in them it's an easy enough process for a police department to upload a database of known stolen car license plates to each officers car, then let the cameras do their thing. As the cop is driving down a street the laptop just pops up an alert if he passes a car with the plate.
As long as technology like this is used only for identifying stolen cars, cars with expired registrations, insurance, etc. I'm perfectly fine with it. I like the idea of making sure cars are properly registered, insured, inspected, etc. because I'm the only safe driver out there and everybody else is a terrible driver! Seriously, though, driving is a privilege, and if you want that privilege then you need to make sure your car is safe (inspected) and insured in the event of an accident with another drive.
Where I get concerned is if, as the submission mentions, is if the police, feds, etc. decide to start using this to track people randomly. I recall reading an article about this technology a few years ago and it indicated that license plate data wasn't archived in any way. The camera just snaps a picture of the plate, uses image recognition to determine the numbers & letters, then does a quick database search to see if it's stolen, etc. then discards the data if no match is found. One issue I recall in the article I read was that it wasn't 100% accurate, so if a potential match was found it would display it for the officer in the car to make the final determination. If the technology still isn't 100% accurate then simply storing results wouldn't be all that useful since you couldn't rely on it. But if they've improved the accuracy then it certainly wouldn't be too difficult to start doing that...
Having said all that, if you're concerned about this then you might as well just stay locked in your home for the rest of your life. The growing use of security cameras means many people are caught on video numerous times a day. Cameras are being used more and more to help deal with traffic congestion in major cities, so they can already track cars that way. And most toll roads now let you use transponders to pay without stopping, and all that data can easily track you as well. Add to all that the fact that cellular phones can be tracked if you have your phone on, GPS units in cars may cache data that can be recovered, etc.
So if you don't want to be tracked then don't ever use a cell phone, gps, drive on toll roads, or drive through any cities or other areas where traffic cameras are used....
Does Phoenix have the ability to detect the building blocks of life in the water samples it's apparently found? Will it be able to detect the presence of complex molecules or even microbes within the water?
Yeah, but if the recording says "this call may be recorded" it seems to me that both parties are aware. The company I'm calling has given stated it may be recorded and I understand that it may be recorded. So both parties have been informed.
I've often wondered about this... Whenever I call my credit card company, utility companies, etc. the first thing you hear on the call is "this call may be recorded...." Does that give me implicit permission to record the call without notifying whoever I end up talking to? It doesn't say "this call may be recorded by Acme corporation for training purposes but you do not have permission to record this call".
I wonder if such an assumption can be made when it comes to getting pulled over by the police, etc. It seems to be common knowledge that a lot of police cars are now equipped with cameras, so is there any reason I, as a private citizen, couldn't hook up a similar video camera to my dashboard that records video & sound just like a cop car, and not even bother to tell an officer who happens to pull me over.
I'm on T-Mobile; SMS messages to or from them are free for me. This is the case for most cell carriers, AFAIK.
Unfortunately the carriers are all starting to move to pay models for SMS. They're starting with smartphones like the iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. and will likely move entirely to them for all their plans eventually. Go take a look at the smartphone plans on most carriers and you'll see that SMS is an additional feature. I just checked AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and T-Mobile looks like they're currently the only one of those three who doesn't charge extra for SMS on their BlackBerry plans...
Unfortunately there are still a lot of legit uses for SMS. Many IT departments use SMS for contacting on-call staff. When I'm on call (one week out of every six) I have the option of getting paged via SMS's to my cell phone or carrying around a Skytel pager. A lot of folks I know prefer the SMS route since it means one less gadget they have to carry around.
Bank of America has recently rolled out a new security feature for their on-line banking that relies on SMS that they call SafePass. You register your mobile phone number with your account and when you want to log into your account they send you an SMS with a random 6-digit code. You then have to enter that along with your PIN to log in. It provides additional security since phishers can't easily get that random code off of your mobile phone, and each code expires after 15 minutes. It wouldn't surprise me if you start seeing more on-line systems using something like this to enhance security. It's basically a poor-mans RSA SecurID since most people have mobile phones these days.
This sort of thing would be a godsend for spammers & phishers. It'd make it so much easier for them to forge websites to try to scam people. Just imagine creating a TLD that's something like "comm" instead of "com" or "C0M" (zero instead of oh), etc. It'll create a security nightmare out of what is already a major pain in the @ss.
About 10 years ago I started having problems with pains in one of my wrists. I was a software engineer and I'm now a sysadmin so keyboards are critical to my work. When I first started getting the pains I got one of those wrist braces and it would help for a while but when I stopped wearing it the soreness would eventually return. I knew a guy around that time who was a professional chef, and apparently they get RSI injures quite a bit due to the repetitive motions used in food preperation. He also managed the openings of some restaurants and used a computer quite a bit for that as well as to manage recipes, menus, etc. He ended up having surgery on both wrists but also got one of the first generations ergonomic keyboards from Microsoft. I tried that keyboard out myself and I've been using them religiously ever since. I find the layout of the keys & the shape of the keyboard much more natural to the way my hands naturally rest on it compared with "straight" keyboards. Now any time I have to use a regular keyboard it makes me feel like my hands are crowded and in a forced unnatural position. I haven't felt any problems in my wrists or had to wear a wrist brace in close to a decade thanks to switching almost exclusively to the ergonomic keyboards. I'm not saying that the MS keyboards will work for everybody but if you do a lot of computer work you should try out various ergonomic keyboards and find one that feels comfortable to you. It can make a HUGE difference.
There's already been a tv show made about the book. It's titled the same thing and came out a few years ago. It was done by A&E though, not PBS. You can get a DVD of it here: http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=70724
I believe that Ballard was looking specifically for the nuclear reactors on board the two subs. The Navy hired him to locate them to ensure they weren't leaking anything radioactive. So he had to do more than just locate the hull of the subs but search the entire debris field of each sub. According to an interview I heard with him just the other day he used what he learned searching those debris fields to locate the Titanic.
There's a lot of controversy about exactly what was recovered. It's now public knowledge that the remains of some of the Soviet crew was recovered. It's also believed that multiple missiles were recovered, as you indicated. But how could they successfully recover missiles from inside the sub as well as human remains but not recover much of the actual sub itself? The public story that the claw used to grab the sub broke and thereby caused the sub to also break in half seems a bit far fetched given what was recovered.
You're correct. They actually performed a burial at sea for the remains of the Soviet sailors that were recovered. In the 1980's during a trip to the Soviet Union, President Regan provided a copy of the video taken during the ceremony. This fact wasn't made public until almost 15 years later though. A short snippet of the video has been shown on a tv show about the Glomar Explorer & it's true mission. It was on one of the tv channels like Discovery or History Channel.
And here's a bit more trivia. Know why it was called "Project Jennifer"? Jennnifer was the name of the daughter of the guy who conceived of the idea.
I remember seeing a series of photos on a website a few years ago showing the remains of a transformer outside a commercial office building that housed another datacenter. Unfortunately I forget which company it was (I want to say Hurricane Electric but I'm not 100% sure). Those photos were pretty impressive. After the fire department put the fire out there wasn't much of anything left on the concrete slab where the transformer once was...
True, but so are places like Dallas, San Diego, etc. and they all have huge datacenters. Beside, Vegas as a lot of relative cheap electricity thanks to the likes of the Hoover Dam, etc. That's the main reason why Vegas is so big and always lit up like a friggin' Christmas Tree on steroids. Prior to the power plant at Hoover Dam coming on-line the city was pretty much like any other city in the USA.
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And yet none of those methods of travel were restricted in the constitution either.
The US Constitution doesn't restrict an individuals rights to ANYTHING. The US Constitution says nothing about murder, rape, selling drugs, bank robbery, forgery, underage drinking, etc. but they're all illegal. The US Constitution also says nothing about requiring passports or visas to travel to foreign countries or to let foreigners travel here either, but they're required by federal law.
The US Constitution as originally written outlined the three branches of government, the power and limitations granted to individual states, the process for ratifying amendments, etc. In other words, the US Constitution defines the federal and state governments, and gives them the power to pass the laws that we currently have that make murder, rape, etc. illegal and the laws that require passports, visas, and even drivers licenses.
The 27 amendments further define the responsibilities of the government and the rights of American citizens. The first 10, the Bill of Rights , specifically cover well known issues like freedom of speech, freedom of religion, protection against unwarranted search/seizure, guarantee of speedy trials, forbidding excessive bail, forbidding cruel and unusual punishment, etc. The ONLY amendment to the US Constitution that introduced any restrictions to US citizens was the 18th (prohibition) which was repealed by the 21st amendment. In other words, the amendments further define the responsibilities and duties of the state & federal government bodies and also ensure further rights of individuals that the government can not take away. Because of the First Amendment (Freedom of speech) the government can not pass any laws that restrict the speech of US citizens, restrict their practice of religion, etc. That's how the US Constitution works. There aren't any amendments to the US Constitution that make driving a right because the legislature has never seen driving as a right. They recognize that driving is a privilege to be managed by individual states (with direction from federal legislation) and not a right that needs to be granted to all US citizens.
You might want to go learn a little more about how the government and laws work before you make baseless statements regarding the US Constitution. You still haven't provided anything that backs up your claim that driving is a right and not a privilege.
Will someone please explain to me how operating a device I own, on infrastructure that I am required to pay for, is a privilege?
You're driving on public roads, which means you have to obey all public laws, regulations, etc. Those laws stipulate that you must have a drivers license, carry insurance, have your car inspected, etc. If you're unwilling to accept those requirements then stay off the road.
Of course if you don't want to abide by those laws you can always buy your own private roads and do whatever the hell you want on them.
You might want to go read my post again. I clearly stated that it wouldn't be difficult to archive the license plates that are read. I also said that the article I read about this technology a few years ago indicated the accuracy wasn't 100% and relied on the police officer in the car to verify a potential match. If the data being collected is that inaccurate then it makes no sense at all to collect it. Any attempt to use it for any legal reasons would get laughed out of court because of the inaccuracy.
You most likely can't. But the police can. They have access to that sort of data. Mostly they have databases containing the license plates of known stolen cars, etc. Since many police cars now have laptop computers in them it's an easy enough process for a police department to upload a database of known stolen car license plates to each officers car, then let the cameras do their thing. As the cop is driving down a street the laptop just pops up an alert if he passes a car with the plate.
As long as technology like this is used only for identifying stolen cars, cars with expired registrations, insurance, etc. I'm perfectly fine with it. I like the idea of making sure cars are properly registered, insured, inspected, etc. because I'm the only safe driver out there and everybody else is a terrible driver! Seriously, though, driving is a privilege, and if you want that privilege then you need to make sure your car is safe (inspected) and insured in the event of an accident with another drive.
Where I get concerned is if, as the submission mentions, is if the police, feds, etc. decide to start using this to track people randomly. I recall reading an article about this technology a few years ago and it indicated that license plate data wasn't archived in any way. The camera just snaps a picture of the plate, uses image recognition to determine the numbers & letters, then does a quick database search to see if it's stolen, etc. then discards the data if no match is found. One issue I recall in the article I read was that it wasn't 100% accurate, so if a potential match was found it would display it for the officer in the car to make the final determination. If the technology still isn't 100% accurate then simply storing results wouldn't be all that useful since you couldn't rely on it. But if they've improved the accuracy then it certainly wouldn't be too difficult to start doing that...
Having said all that, if you're concerned about this then you might as well just stay locked in your home for the rest of your life. The growing use of security cameras means many people are caught on video numerous times a day. Cameras are being used more and more to help deal with traffic congestion in major cities, so they can already track cars that way. And most toll roads now let you use transponders to pay without stopping, and all that data can easily track you as well. Add to all that the fact that cellular phones can be tracked if you have your phone on, GPS units in cars may cache data that can be recovered, etc.
So if you don't want to be tracked then don't ever use a cell phone, gps, drive on toll roads, or drive through any cities or other areas where traffic cameras are used....
Does Phoenix have the ability to detect the building blocks of life in the water samples it's apparently found? Will it be able to detect the presence of complex molecules or even microbes within the water?
Yeah, but if the recording says "this call may be recorded" it seems to me that both parties are aware. The company I'm calling has given stated it may be recorded and I understand that it may be recorded. So both parties have been informed.
I've often wondered about this... Whenever I call my credit card company, utility companies, etc. the first thing you hear on the call is "this call may be recorded...." Does that give me implicit permission to record the call without notifying whoever I end up talking to? It doesn't say "this call may be recorded by Acme corporation for training purposes but you do not have permission to record this call".
I wonder if such an assumption can be made when it comes to getting pulled over by the police, etc. It seems to be common knowledge that a lot of police cars are now equipped with cameras, so is there any reason I, as a private citizen, couldn't hook up a similar video camera to my dashboard that records video & sound just like a cop car, and not even bother to tell an officer who happens to pull me over.
Probably?
P2P is vile and evil. The RIAA and MPAA told me so.
I'm on T-Mobile; SMS messages to or from them are free for me. This is the case for most cell carriers, AFAIK.
Unfortunately the carriers are all starting to move to pay models for SMS. They're starting with smartphones like the iPhone, BlackBerry, etc. and will likely move entirely to them for all their plans eventually. Go take a look at the smartphone plans on most carriers and you'll see that SMS is an additional feature. I just checked AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile, and T-Mobile looks like they're currently the only one of those three who doesn't charge extra for SMS on their BlackBerry plans...
Unfortunately there are still a lot of legit uses for SMS. Many IT departments use SMS for contacting on-call staff. When I'm on call (one week out of every six) I have the option of getting paged via SMS's to my cell phone or carrying around a Skytel pager. A lot of folks I know prefer the SMS route since it means one less gadget they have to carry around.
Bank of America has recently rolled out a new security feature for their on-line banking that relies on SMS that they call SafePass. You register your mobile phone number with your account and when you want to log into your account they send you an SMS with a random 6-digit code. You then have to enter that along with your PIN to log in. It provides additional security since phishers can't easily get that random code off of your mobile phone, and each code expires after 15 minutes. It wouldn't surprise me if you start seeing more on-line systems using something like this to enhance security. It's basically a poor-mans RSA SecurID since most people have mobile phones these days.
This sort of thing would be a godsend for spammers & phishers. It'd make it so much easier for them to forge websites to try to scam people. Just imagine creating a TLD that's something like "comm" instead of "com" or "C0M" (zero instead of oh), etc. It'll create a security nightmare out of what is already a major pain in the @ss.
About 10 years ago I started having problems with pains in one of my wrists. I was a software engineer and I'm now a sysadmin so keyboards are critical to my work. When I first started getting the pains I got one of those wrist braces and it would help for a while but when I stopped wearing it the soreness would eventually return. I knew a guy around that time who was a professional chef, and apparently they get RSI injures quite a bit due to the repetitive motions used in food preperation. He also managed the openings of some restaurants and used a computer quite a bit for that as well as to manage recipes, menus, etc. He ended up having surgery on both wrists but also got one of the first generations ergonomic keyboards from Microsoft. I tried that keyboard out myself and I've been using them religiously ever since. I find the layout of the keys & the shape of the keyboard much more natural to the way my hands naturally rest on it compared with "straight" keyboards. Now any time I have to use a regular keyboard it makes me feel like my hands are crowded and in a forced unnatural position. I haven't felt any problems in my wrists or had to wear a wrist brace in close to a decade thanks to switching almost exclusively to the ergonomic keyboards. I'm not saying that the MS keyboards will work for everybody but if you do a lot of computer work you should try out various ergonomic keyboards and find one that feels comfortable to you. It can make a HUGE difference.
K-129 was the sub that was targeted by the Glomar Explorer (Project Jennifer). See all the other posts here that mention those two.
My bad. There is audio.
And in fact here's the video in question: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=9135890926136363372
No audio, just a 15 minute video showing the service.
There's already been a tv show made about the book. It's titled the same thing and came out a few years ago. It was done by A&E though, not PBS. You can get a DVD of it here: http://store.aetv.com/html/product/index.jhtml?id=70724
I believe that Ballard was looking specifically for the nuclear reactors on board the two subs. The Navy hired him to locate them to ensure they weren't leaking anything radioactive. So he had to do more than just locate the hull of the subs but search the entire debris field of each sub. According to an interview I heard with him just the other day he used what he learned searching those debris fields to locate the Titanic.
It was called the Glomar Explorer. It's discussed earlier in this thread.
There's a lot of controversy about exactly what was recovered. It's now public knowledge that the remains of some of the Soviet crew was recovered. It's also believed that multiple missiles were recovered, as you indicated. But how could they successfully recover missiles from inside the sub as well as human remains but not recover much of the actual sub itself? The public story that the claw used to grab the sub broke and thereby caused the sub to also break in half seems a bit far fetched given what was recovered.
You're correct. They actually performed a burial at sea for the remains of the Soviet sailors that were recovered. In the 1980's during a trip to the Soviet Union, President Regan provided a copy of the video taken during the ceremony. This fact wasn't made public until almost 15 years later though. A short snippet of the video has been shown on a tv show about the Glomar Explorer & it's true mission. It was on one of the tv channels like Discovery or History Channel.
And here's a bit more trivia. Know why it was called "Project Jennifer"? Jennnifer was the name of the daughter of the guy who conceived of the idea.
I remember seeing a series of photos on a website a few years ago showing the remains of a transformer outside a commercial office building that housed another datacenter. Unfortunately I forget which company it was (I want to say Hurricane Electric but I'm not 100% sure). Those photos were pretty impressive. After the fire department put the fire out there wasn't much of anything left on the concrete slab where the transformer once was...
RIM is stating they have no means to decrypt, no master key, and no back door to allow the government to access email.
<tinfoil_hat scarcasm_mode=high>
Sure, that's what they say to the public...
</tinfoil_hat>
True, but so are places like Dallas, San Diego, etc. and they all have huge datacenters. Beside, Vegas as a lot of relative cheap electricity thanks to the likes of the Hoover Dam, etc. That's the main reason why Vegas is so big and always lit up like a friggin' Christmas Tree on steroids. Prior to the power plant at Hoover Dam coming on-line the city was pretty much like any other city in the USA.