Sorry, wrong answer. You still have an economy, because you still have scarcity. There will be 2 (arguably 3) primary scarce resources in this future you envision...
1) Your time (as long as your life is finite, your time has value)
2) Land. Physical space is a limited resource. How do you pay for the land you want to put your duplicated house on? Where will you live?
3) I will assume our magical device still needs raw materials as input. You have to at least shovel in a load of dirt for it to use to make that copy of the HDTV set. See point 2 about how that is a scarce resource. And yes, with this discussion of "raw material" I can easily see people being forced to pay for air, because you can shove it through a compressor and use it as raw material for that device. (I'm a scuba diver, I'm used to paying for air...)
There will still be an economy, based on you providing the results of the use of your time. In other words, you'll still pay for stuff.
You mention something that is one of my pet peeves with Congressional voting.
Voice votes in Congress should be abolished. If your Representative/Senator doesn't feel comfortable having his name attached to that "yes" vote, he shouldn't be allowed to vote yes.
"Voting records" for Congresspeople are worthless as long as voice votes are allowed. The only way to hold these people accountable for the scummy laws they pass is to have accountability in who voted to pass the scummy law.
I suspect that turnitin has a reasonable check if a school is willing to stand behind it. Make no mistake about it no school would stand behind turnitin like this if if were not accurate to greater than 1 in a million cases.
"The computer said so, it must be right."
Don't think that attitude doesn't still exist in the world. Schools are an environment where "an authority figure said so" is reason enough.
What do you do about this? The same thing you do about any school policy... Any parent willing to expend enough effort can usually get the school to stop enforcing it against their child, and those kids whose parents will not or cannot make that effort are just SOL.
Do some looking into how long rechargable batteries last.
They aren't really rated in months or years, though that's how the warranties are written.
Rechargable batteries are rated in charge cycles. Charge cycle == discharge and recharge the battery, doesn't matter if it is a partial or a complete discharge.
NiCd batteries are rated for about 400-500 charge cycles. NiMH batteries are rated for about 400 charge cycles. Lithium and Lithium Ion batteries are rated for about 300 charge cycles.
Battery charge capacity falls off as a function of charge cycle lifetime. The closer to the end of your 400 charge cycles, the less capacity you'll see in your batteries.
How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?
Yes, the batteries in your digital camera will start sucking after about 250 or 300 charge cycles. Expect to have to buy new ones about that time. Or buy a new camera, which will come with new batteries, whichever.
First, Hollywood is in the business of selling you the same thing over and over and over again. Theatrical release, Original VHS Release, DVD Release, DVD with director's Comments, DVD with Never-Before-Seen Footage, DVD Remastered Specially for Progressive-Scan Output. Oh, and now DVD for HDTV. Probably in 3 different formats, too, released 6 months apart so you'll buy all 3 of them, 480p, 720p, and then 1080i.
Really, how many versions of Star Wars and E.T. do you have???
Second, (I'm taking this on faith, never having seen 1080i HDTV) the current standard is "ok" only by comparison to the crap that is VHS analog playback. Now, whether or not low-bitrate red-laser DVD will be at the quality of 25mbit/sec broadcast HDTV... I dunno. I can hope, but I'm not exactly optimistic.
Third, don't think for a minute that this won't have a whole new collection of Son-of-CSS encryption built-in to prevent unauthorized copying.
This is yet another point where your initial viewpoint influences the conclusion you arrive at.
Instead of "this will drive products to centrist crap" you can have a different perspective on this. One thing this will allow, is to provide a "guaranteed audience" for just about any genre you care to name. And provide a way to get access ot that audience.
You like movies about obscure topic X. Most movie companies don't bother making such movies, because the marketting costs involved in informing you that the movie exists are too high for the small size of the market. If, instead, you can simply send an email out to everyone that likes these movies, your marketting costs just dropped like a rock. Your audience is suddenly aware of your movie, and, one can hope, if it doesn't suck too much people will actually see/rent/buy it. But no one will see/rent/buy it if they don't know about it.
This *can* make it more economical to target smaller audiences by decreasing the costs of communicating with that audience.
Will it acutally be done that way? Well, that's where your initial preconceptions come into play.:)
I recently bought an IBM microdrive for a digital camera. The microdrive came with a pcmcia adapter. It lets you plug it into an laptop pcmcia port, and the drive instantly pops up as a 1gig disk. Copy to and from it just like any normal drive, at the speed of the pcmcia slot. (about 5MB/sec? Equivalent to firewire speeds.)
The microdrive and pcmcia adapter will easily fit in my wallet. Or loose in a back pocket. In my daytimer. For smokers, in a pack of cigarettes.
There are lots of ways to do removable large-capacity small-form-factor storage that companies don't look for.
This gets to a matter of access control, not searches. You don't necessarily search every visitor. You have visitors be accompanied by a company representative, if possible.
If that's not possible... The easier way to handle this is to have employees screenlock terminals any time they aren't in active use. No, this doesn't help for a store display demo machine, but it can work in office environments.
There are two different points in your "banning weapons" statement, and I think you are grouping them together improperly.
Banning contact weapons is silly. Just about anything can be made into a contact weapon, starting with the pencil I'm not writing this with, to the laptop I am writing this with, to the car I drove this morning.
But contact weapons usually include an element of personal danger on the user. If you get close enough to hit me with a laptop, I can hit you back.
Ranged weapons are a different matter. (Generally, guns and bows.) Yes, they are the great equalizer. God made men, Sam Colt made them all equal, and all that stuff. But there's a disconnect there. If only one party involved in a vigorous disagreement has a ranged weapon, you pretty much know the winner. This is part of why police (as a group, there are a lot of individual exceptions) want to be the only people allowed to have guns... it makes the police a lot safer. Unfortunately, in our imperfect society where criminals ignore the law and have guns too, it makes unarmed law-abiding citizens less safe. Ranged weapons are equalizers only in cases where all parties have them. This is part of why shall-issue concealed-carry laws are so nice.
But it isn't really correct, personally, to group contact weapons and ranged weapons together, from a practical standpoint. From a U.S. Constitutional standpoint, sure.
But "as a means of reigning in violence" contact weapons and ranged weapons are different matters.
Yep, you just described the perfect setup for the American consumer. No, there are no more American citizens, just consumers.
Now go out and spend some money to help get us out of our recession. It's your duty as an American.
My, but I hate getting cynical.
(Yes, this comment is obviously not meant for the sizeable number of non-American Slashdot readers... but don't worry, our government doesn't have a problem passing laws it thinks applies to you anyway.)
You've had good experiences with Discover when dealing with fraud charges and other problems? Hmm.
Discover is my primary credit card. But I didn't really think of them as a company that had really strong fraud protections. I've put some decidedly odd things on my Discover card over the years, way outside my "normal buying patterns" both in type and cost of stuff, and never had Discover show any wish for ID verification or anything like that.
Now, I've never had any fraud problems with my Discover card, so I haven't had to deal with their customer service people on that subject, but the lack of hassle in putting odd things on the card has made me think they wouldn't be as useful as other cards might be in case of fraud or other problems.
Of course, on the flip side, I had a problem with that on a VISA card, recurring fraudulent charges over several months, and that took *way* too much effort to resolve. (Is it so complicated to "cancel this account number, issue a new card on a new account number and DON'T ACCEPT NEW CHARGES ON THE OLD NUMBER" ??? They linked the old acct # to the new acct, and passed new fraudulent charges right along to the new account.)
You don't need lossless compression. You just need high-bitrate MPEG-2. And that's doable for this application.
Just as a comparison, 352x240 30fps YUV9 avi capture of NTSC runs about 2GBytes per 10 minutes (video and audio). Or, 352x240x3x30 = 7.6MBytes/sec for the video only. Converting that into vcd-compatible mpeg-1 drops it from 60MBits/sec to 1.15MBit/sec. 50x lossy compression.
DVD is about 5MBit/sec for the MPEG-2 stream, audio and video together. (Someone will doubtless drop in the exact bitrate range.) That's, for DVD, 720x480 at 30fps, or, about 31MBytes/sec (248MBits/sec) for video only. That's 50x compression, or thereabouts? For pretty decent quality video, lossy compression.
So your 176MBytes/sec for HDTV, at a 50x compression, gives about 3.5MBytes/sec. That gives a bandwidth requirement of about what I'd been told for HDTV, 25MBit/sec.
Not so unreasonable. You don't need lossless compression for video.
Something along the lines of "sending unencrypted email on the internet is the equivalent of sending a postcard in USPS" right?
Or at least, that's about right from a technical perspective. Legal perspective is of course another matter.
Intercepting in transit generally requires a wiretap warrant. Getting records after the fact requires a search warrant, but not wiretap. Answering machine messages are fair game with a simple search warrant, and that's about what email logs and icq logs are... answering machine messages.
You probably don't even get into issues of "one party notification" or "two party notification" for recording, because it is assumed by the method (email and icq) that both parties are aware of logging/record keeping, just like with answering machine recordings.
Really, the methods he mentions, my browser already blocks.
"Tell me when I am about to submit data in a form"
"Disable (or 'warn me about') active scripting/Javascript/Java/ActiveX"
Am I the only person that uses these setting as my standard configuration?
Yes, this doesn't apply to "Joe Home User" but that is a matter of installation defaults, and Microsoft already said they'd switch to "secure by default" settings. (I should have tried harder resisting that dig.)
But really, Javascript *is* blocked by 'paranoid' security settings in browsers. And so is submitting form data. Though I haven't yet seen anything that tells you *what* data the form is submitting, without having to view source.
Mickey Mouse is a very important piece of Disneys brand, and Disney is a brand based company, so it's essential to their survival.
No.
Laws should not be created to protect a business plan. When you start thinking like that, you have major problems. Outlaw the automobile, because it put a definite crimp in the business plans of companies selling horse carriages.
Any thought of "this company needs this law to survive" should set off warning bells, and force a serious rethink of the law under consideration. Don't fall into that mindset, please.
I really want to know where this attitude came from. We need to find the business schools that teach that the proper way to make profits is by screwing your customers, and close these schools.
Just why is everyone so willing to say and do this, anyway? "If we don't screw the cusotmer, we'll go out of business"??? I'd much rather it were the other way around.
You do NOT check your morals and ethics at the door when you go to work.
The orignal poster's point is well taken, though. Whichever companies provided the certification might consider examining their process.
I haven't read these books/standards, so feel free to ignore me.
But, before you complain about how these companies should examine their processes, consider that they might be doing exactly what is required by the standards.
Schneier was mostly complaining about buffer overflows in 9i. Before you go complaining about the security review process, check if these standards actually say "code should have no buffer overflows." If they do say that, check how they say it. No use no "known-insecure" functions? Bounds checking on all inputs? Only on user inputs? (Is there such a thing as a trusted input?)
I suspect you can pass these 5 standards completely, and still be insecure.
I can (with misgivings) accept a transparent society, with government and citizens having access to a large amount of information about citizens, government, and government processes.
But there is another requirement to this.
With transparency MUST come tolerance. And I worry that there is not sufficient tolerance in our society to allow transparency. There are too many "minority rights" issues still around for me to really believe that there is enough tolerance for transparency to work well.
I'd also say that this would require removing a lot of the so-called victimless crimes, drug use among them. But then, that's almost a completely separate (and loud, probably) argument.
If law enforcment can surveil the citizens, the citizens should be able to surveil law enforcment.
You're missing the point with your statement.
What you want here is not *just* global easy access to the surviellance feeds (realtime only? or archived also?) but ALSO you want to have government also under the camera's view.
So long as law enforcement gets to choose where the cameras go, it still isn't equal access.
What you want here is cameras that also cover every meeting place government representatives or employees meet. No more behind-closed-doors meetings. No more closed sessions of Congress. (For that matter, no more voice votes in Congress, if a Congressman doesn't support something enough to have his name attached to it, there is a problem with the vote.)
This could actually be a good thing for open government processes. Hey, Cheney's energy task force meetings might have been available for viewing.
If citizens are survielled in public, government needs to be under surviellance also. "If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't object to this" huh? That works both ways.
And yes, this would have all sorts of horrible consequences. "Classified for national security" would probably be much more common as an excuse to avoid the public eye. And suddenly "privacy rights" would be a wonderful thing too.
One of the problems I have with calculators is that it seems to be making people who *can't* do math in their heads. Even simple addition and subtraction.
And I can give a good example of this without any effort at all. How many stores have you been in where making change without the register is a major issue?
Bill for $7.27 and you hand over a $10, then say wait a sec and hand over 2 pennies. Do you ever get an expression of surprise from the clerk/cashier "Hey, that came out even, wow" when the change is 2 bucks and 3 quarters, and no pennies/nickels/dimes?
Yes, everyone here is much too superior to work in retail or fastfood (that was the impression I got from the article about tech unemployment) but it'd be nice if we actually taught things so that the 99% of society that doesn't program *also* doesn't blindly trust computers because they were never taught to figure things out on their own.
Plus, it's good protection for typos when using a calculator... Did you reverse two numbers? Was that 15 times 17, or 15 times 71? If you spend a lot of time doing it on paper or in your head, you'll eventually develop a feel for reasonable answers. Blindly trusting the calculator? "Umm, it told me it was this, so it must be right."
Blind trust is bad, whether in calculators or politicians.
Actually, in the U.S. at least, corporations are people. The U.S. Supreme Court said so in 1886, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, based on the 14th Amendment.
Which does raise some interesting questions, personally... corporations are legal persons, but not allowed to vote? That's just wrong.
I'd love to see some corporation (that was established more than 21 years ago, just to avoid that little detail) sue to be given voting rights.
The outcome of that case would be seriously interesting. Now, whether it would make things seriously bad, or fix 100 years of bad legal precedent, is a frightening thought.
Required resolution is all a matter of what you want to do with the image. It has very little to do with what kind of sensor you are capturing it with.
If you want on-screen display, anything larger than your monitor resolution is kinda wasted, unless you want to spend time cropping images. So that's, what, 1600x1200 as a working maximum necessary?
If you want to print an image, you want 300pixels per linear inch, as a working minimum for something you won't mind looking at from 14inches away. Do the math there, and you get your required image resolution...
For "normal" print sizes:
3"x5" = 900x1500 pixels (1.3MPixel)
4"x6" (standard 35mm print, now) = 1200x1800 pixels (2.1MP)
5"x7" = 1500x2100 pixels (3.1MP)
8"x10" = 2400x3000 pixels (7.2MP)
24"x36" (poster) = 7200x10800 pixels (77.7MP)
Okay, the poster resolution is mildly ridiculous, but that's less than what you get with a good 8x10 viewcamera.
Resolution still matters, depending on your use. It's still nice to have the benefits of this sensor for the other reasons mentioned, though.
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You'll live up to their expectations. Good for you...
You'll live down to their expectations too? How terribly sad.
*Bzzt*
Sorry, wrong answer. You still have an economy, because you still have scarcity. There will be 2 (arguably 3) primary scarce resources in this future you envision...
1) Your time (as long as your life is finite, your time has value)
2) Land. Physical space is a limited resource. How do you pay for the land you want to put your duplicated house on? Where will you live?
3) I will assume our magical device still needs raw materials as input. You have to at least shovel in a load of dirt for it to use to make that copy of the HDTV set. See point 2 about how that is a scarce resource. And yes, with this discussion of "raw material" I can easily see people being forced to pay for air, because you can shove it through a compressor and use it as raw material for that device. (I'm a scuba diver, I'm used to paying for air...)
There will still be an economy, based on you providing the results of the use of your time. In other words, you'll still pay for stuff.
You'd finally find out why Donald Duck never wears pants?
That's a scary thought.
You mention something that is one of my pet peeves with Congressional voting.
Voice votes in Congress should be abolished. If your Representative/Senator doesn't feel comfortable having his name attached to that "yes" vote, he shouldn't be allowed to vote yes.
"Voting records" for Congresspeople are worthless as long as voice votes are allowed. The only way to hold these people accountable for the scummy laws they pass is to have accountability in who voted to pass the scummy law.
"The computer said so, it must be right."
Don't think that attitude doesn't still exist in the world. Schools are an environment where "an authority figure said so" is reason enough.
What do you do about this? The same thing you do about any school policy... Any parent willing to expend enough effort can usually get the school to stop enforcing it against their child, and those kids whose parents will not or cannot make that effort are just SOL.
Do some looking into how long rechargable batteries last.
They aren't really rated in months or years, though that's how the warranties are written.
Rechargable batteries are rated in charge cycles. Charge cycle == discharge and recharge the battery, doesn't matter if it is a partial or a complete discharge.
NiCd batteries are rated for about 400-500 charge cycles.
NiMH batteries are rated for about 400 charge cycles.
Lithium and Lithium Ion batteries are rated for about 300 charge cycles.
Battery charge capacity falls off as a function of charge cycle lifetime. The closer to the end of your 400 charge cycles, the less capacity you'll see in your batteries.
How many times have you recharged the battery in your laptop? How many times in your digital camera?
Yes, the batteries in your digital camera will start sucking after about 250 or 300 charge cycles. Expect to have to buy new ones about that time. Or buy a new camera, which will come with new batteries, whichever.
First, Hollywood is in the business of selling you the same thing over and over and over again. Theatrical release, Original VHS Release, DVD Release, DVD with director's Comments, DVD with Never-Before-Seen Footage, DVD Remastered Specially for Progressive-Scan Output. Oh, and now DVD for HDTV. Probably in 3 different formats, too, released 6 months apart so you'll buy all 3 of them, 480p, 720p, and then 1080i.
Really, how many versions of Star Wars and E.T. do you have???
Second, (I'm taking this on faith, never having seen 1080i HDTV) the current standard is "ok" only by comparison to the crap that is VHS analog playback. Now, whether or not low-bitrate red-laser DVD will be at the quality of 25mbit/sec broadcast HDTV... I dunno. I can hope, but I'm not exactly optimistic.
Third, don't think for a minute that this won't have a whole new collection of Son-of-CSS encryption built-in to prevent unauthorized copying.
Reasons enough?
This is yet another point where your initial viewpoint influences the conclusion you arrive at.
:)
Instead of "this will drive products to centrist crap" you can have a different perspective on this. One thing this will allow, is to provide a "guaranteed audience" for just about any genre you care to name. And provide a way to get access ot that audience.
You like movies about obscure topic X. Most movie companies don't bother making such movies, because the marketting costs involved in informing you that the movie exists are too high for the small size of the market. If, instead, you can simply send an email out to everyone that likes these movies, your marketting costs just dropped like a rock. Your audience is suddenly aware of your movie, and, one can hope, if it doesn't suck too much people will actually see/rent/buy it. But no one will see/rent/buy it if they don't know about it.
This *can* make it more economical to target smaller audiences by decreasing the costs of communicating with that audience.
Will it acutally be done that way? Well, that's where your initial preconceptions come into play.
Not just keychains.
I recently bought an IBM microdrive for a digital camera. The microdrive came with a pcmcia adapter. It lets you plug it into an laptop pcmcia port, and the drive instantly pops up as a 1gig disk. Copy to and from it just like any normal drive, at the speed of the pcmcia slot. (about 5MB/sec? Equivalent to firewire speeds.)
The microdrive and pcmcia adapter will easily fit in my wallet. Or loose in a back pocket. In my daytimer. For smokers, in a pack of cigarettes.
There are lots of ways to do removable large-capacity small-form-factor storage that companies don't look for.
This gets to a matter of access control, not searches. You don't necessarily search every visitor. You have visitors be accompanied by a company representative, if possible.
If that's not possible... The easier way to handle this is to have employees screenlock terminals any time they aren't in active use. No, this doesn't help for a store display demo machine, but it can work in office environments.
There are two different points in your "banning weapons" statement, and I think you are grouping them together improperly.
Banning contact weapons is silly. Just about anything can be made into a contact weapon, starting with the pencil I'm not writing this with, to the laptop I am writing this with, to the car I drove this morning.
But contact weapons usually include an element of personal danger on the user. If you get close enough to hit me with a laptop, I can hit you back.
Ranged weapons are a different matter. (Generally, guns and bows.) Yes, they are the great equalizer. God made men, Sam Colt made them all equal, and all that stuff. But there's a disconnect there. If only one party involved in a vigorous disagreement has a ranged weapon, you pretty much know the winner. This is part of why police (as a group, there are a lot of individual exceptions) want to be the only people allowed to have guns... it makes the police a lot safer. Unfortunately, in our imperfect society where criminals ignore the law and have guns too, it makes unarmed law-abiding citizens less safe. Ranged weapons are equalizers only in cases where all parties have them. This is part of why shall-issue concealed-carry laws are so nice.
But it isn't really correct, personally, to group contact weapons and ranged weapons together, from a practical standpoint. From a U.S. Constitutional standpoint, sure.
But "as a means of reigning in violence" contact weapons and ranged weapons are different matters.
Yep, you just described the perfect setup for the American consumer. No, there are no more American citizens, just consumers.
Now go out and spend some money to help get us out of our recession. It's your duty as an American.
My, but I hate getting cynical.
(Yes, this comment is obviously not meant for the sizeable number of non-American Slashdot readers... but don't worry, our government doesn't have a problem passing laws it thinks applies to you anyway.)
You've had good experiences with Discover when dealing with fraud charges and other problems? Hmm.
Discover is my primary credit card. But I didn't really think of them as a company that had really strong fraud protections. I've put some decidedly odd things on my Discover card over the years, way outside my "normal buying patterns" both in type and cost of stuff, and never had Discover show any wish for ID verification or anything like that.
Now, I've never had any fraud problems with my Discover card, so I haven't had to deal with their customer service people on that subject, but the lack of hassle in putting odd things on the card has made me think they wouldn't be as useful as other cards might be in case of fraud or other problems.
Of course, on the flip side, I had a problem with that on a VISA card, recurring fraudulent charges over several months, and that took *way* too much effort to resolve. (Is it so complicated to "cancel this account number, issue a new card on a new account number and DON'T ACCEPT NEW CHARGES ON THE OLD NUMBER" ??? They linked the old acct # to the new acct, and passed new fraudulent charges right along to the new account.)
You don't need lossless compression. You just need high-bitrate MPEG-2. And that's doable for this application.
Just as a comparison, 352x240 30fps YUV9 avi capture of NTSC runs about 2GBytes per 10 minutes (video and audio). Or, 352x240x3x30 = 7.6MBytes/sec for the video only. Converting that into vcd-compatible mpeg-1 drops it from 60MBits/sec to 1.15MBit/sec. 50x lossy compression.
DVD is about 5MBit/sec for the MPEG-2 stream, audio and video together. (Someone will doubtless drop in the exact bitrate range.) That's, for DVD, 720x480 at 30fps, or, about 31MBytes/sec (248MBits/sec) for video only. That's 50x compression, or thereabouts? For pretty decent quality video, lossy compression.
So your 176MBytes/sec for HDTV, at a 50x compression, gives about 3.5MBytes/sec.
That gives a bandwidth requirement of about what I'd been told for HDTV, 25MBit/sec.
Not so unreasonable. You don't need lossless compression for video.
Something along the lines of "sending unencrypted email on the internet is the equivalent of sending a postcard in USPS" right?
Or at least, that's about right from a technical perspective. Legal perspective is of course another matter.
Intercepting in transit generally requires a wiretap warrant. Getting records after the fact requires a search warrant, but not wiretap. Answering machine messages are fair game with a simple search warrant, and that's about what email logs and icq logs are... answering machine messages.
You probably don't even get into issues of "one party notification" or "two party notification" for recording, because it is assumed by the method (email and icq) that both parties are aware of logging/record keeping, just like with answering machine recordings.
Really, the methods he mentions, my browser already blocks.
"Tell me when I am about to submit data in a form"
"Disable (or 'warn me about') active scripting/Javascript/Java/ActiveX"
Am I the only person that uses these setting as my standard configuration?
Yes, this doesn't apply to "Joe Home User" but that is a matter of installation defaults, and Microsoft already said they'd switch to "secure by default" settings. (I should have tried harder resisting that dig.)
But really, Javascript *is* blocked by 'paranoid' security settings in browsers. And so is submitting form data. Though I haven't yet seen anything that tells you *what* data the form is submitting, without having to view source.
No.
Laws should not be created to protect a business plan. When you start thinking like that, you have major problems. Outlaw the automobile, because it put a definite crimp in the business plans of companies selling horse carriages.
Any thought of "this company needs this law to survive" should set off warning bells, and force a serious rethink of the law under consideration. Don't fall into that mindset, please.
I really want to know where this attitude came from. We need to find the business schools that teach that the proper way to make profits is by screwing your customers, and close these schools.
Just why is everyone so willing to say and do this, anyway? "If we don't screw the cusotmer, we'll go out of business"??? I'd much rather it were the other way around.
You do NOT check your morals and ethics at the door when you go to work.
I haven't read these books/standards, so feel free to ignore me.
But, before you complain about how these companies should examine their processes, consider that they might be doing exactly what is required by the standards.
Schneier was mostly complaining about buffer overflows in 9i. Before you go complaining about the security review process, check if these standards actually say "code should have no buffer overflows." If they do say that, check how they say it. No use no "known-insecure" functions? Bounds checking on all inputs? Only on user inputs? (Is there such a thing as a trusted input?)
I suspect you can pass these 5 standards completely, and still be insecure.
I can (with misgivings) accept a transparent society, with government and citizens having access to a large amount of information about citizens, government, and government processes.
But there is another requirement to this.
With transparency MUST come tolerance. And I worry that there is not sufficient tolerance in our society to allow transparency. There are too many "minority rights" issues still around for me to really believe that there is enough tolerance for transparency to work well.
I'd also say that this would require removing a lot of the so-called victimless crimes, drug use among them. But then, that's almost a completely separate (and loud, probably) argument.
posted by "Anonymous Coward"
Thanks, I needed that laugh. :)
Really, you could have taken the time to create a throw-away account. :)
You didn't have privacy before 1975 either...
:)
It's just that then, only your neighbors cared enough to gossip about you.
Now your government cares about you too.
You're missing the point with your statement.
What you want here is not *just* global easy access to the surviellance feeds (realtime only? or archived also?) but ALSO you want to have government also under the camera's view.
So long as law enforcement gets to choose where the cameras go, it still isn't equal access.
What you want here is cameras that also cover every meeting place government representatives or employees meet. No more behind-closed-doors meetings. No more closed sessions of Congress. (For that matter, no more voice votes in Congress, if a Congressman doesn't support something enough to have his name attached to it, there is a problem with the vote.)
This could actually be a good thing for open government processes. Hey, Cheney's energy task force meetings might have been available for viewing.
If citizens are survielled in public, government needs to be under surviellance also. "If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn't object to this" huh? That works both ways.
And yes, this would have all sorts of horrible consequences. "Classified for national security" would probably be much more common as an excuse to avoid the public eye. And suddenly "privacy rights" would be a wonderful thing too.
One of the problems I have with calculators is that it seems to be making people who *can't* do math in their heads. Even simple addition and subtraction.
And I can give a good example of this without any effort at all. How many stores have you been in where making change without the register is a major issue?
Bill for $7.27 and you hand over a $10, then say wait a sec and hand over 2 pennies. Do you ever get an expression of surprise from the clerk/cashier "Hey, that came out even, wow" when the change is 2 bucks and 3 quarters, and no pennies/nickels/dimes?
Yes, everyone here is much too superior to work in retail or fastfood (that was the impression I got from the article about tech unemployment) but it'd be nice if we actually taught things so that the 99% of society that doesn't program *also* doesn't blindly trust computers because they were never taught to figure things out on their own.
Plus, it's good protection for typos when using a calculator... Did you reverse two numbers? Was that 15 times 17, or 15 times 71? If you spend a lot of time doing it on paper or in your head, you'll eventually develop a feel for reasonable answers. Blindly trusting the calculator? "Umm, it told me it was this, so it must be right."
Blind trust is bad, whether in calculators or politicians.
Actually, in the U.S. at least, corporations are people. The U.S. Supreme Court said so in 1886, Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad case, based on the 14th Amendment.
Which does raise some interesting questions, personally... corporations are legal persons, but not allowed to vote? That's just wrong.
I'd love to see some corporation (that was established more than 21 years ago, just to avoid that little detail) sue to be given voting rights.
The outcome of that case would be seriously interesting. Now, whether it would make things seriously bad, or fix 100 years of bad legal precedent, is a frightening thought.
Required resolution is all a matter of what you want to do with the image. It has very little to do with what kind of sensor you are capturing it with.
If you want on-screen display, anything larger than your monitor resolution is kinda wasted, unless you want to spend time cropping images. So that's, what, 1600x1200 as a working maximum necessary?
If you want to print an image, you want 300pixels per linear inch, as a working minimum for something you won't mind looking at from 14inches away. Do the math there, and you get your required image resolution...
For "normal" print sizes:
3"x5" = 900x1500 pixels (1.3MPixel)
4"x6" (standard 35mm print, now) = 1200x1800 pixels (2.1MP)
5"x7" = 1500x2100 pixels (3.1MP)
8"x10" = 2400x3000 pixels (7.2MP)
24"x36" (poster) = 7200x10800 pixels (77.7MP)
Okay, the poster resolution is mildly ridiculous, but that's less than what you get with a good 8x10 viewcamera.
Resolution still matters, depending on your use. It's still nice to have the benefits of this sensor for the other reasons mentioned, though.