I think it is fairly obvious what approach the Obama DoJ is going to take. In return for coming down hard on those that distribute pirated content (it is indeed a crime, if not one that deserves much punishment), the DoJ is going to make sure it is only going after actual pirates instead of consumers trying to use content they have already paid for.
While this is not an ideal situation (there are a LOT of things the DoJ could be doing other than chasing after torrent trackers), it's better the previous situation, where the xxAA gets whatever they ask for.
Yes, under load, a server that can handle twice the work for the same power is twice as efficient, but very few servers outside of Bazillion $ supercomputer clusters spend all their time under full load.
Also, either a machine is EnergyStar stickered or it isn't. How do you decide on a standard load? Some boxes are I/O monsters, others have crappy I/O, but have fast CPUs. How do you decide which workload the EnergyStar cert is based on?
Yes, it would be nice if the standard could work in performance somehow, but I wouldn't call it "worthless" because it doesn't.
Speccing by idle power consumption was a great idea. How exactly was the EPA supposed to grade servers based on CPU "efficiency" when each CPU differs so much? Which of the bazillion CPU benchmarks out there do you choose? This would be a short trip into an epic flame war between vendors, meaning that the spec would never get passed. "Politics is the art of the possible"
Given that most servers spend almost all their time idle anyway, this could certainly be a big money and energy saver. If you ever stroll through an actual large datacenter, you can see, via HDD ligts, that most of that gear just sits there all day long, doing little actual work. Certainly there are some servers lit up constantly, and virtualization will help to clean some of the idle servers up, but many shops don't do much virtualizing yet.
While the spy satellites are indeed owned by the military, no military troops are being deployed to meet up with the smugglers. While I haven't exactly read the act lately, I thought it just prohibited the active deployment of troops... I was not under the impression it prohibited cooperation between the military and DoJ.
The GPS system is owned by the military too, but nobody argues that the use of GPS isn't permissible because merely because it's owned by the DoD.
1) They quote Rob Enderele. A "I know something about everything" 'IT consultant'. Also known for rendering his expert opinion on topics such as "Open Source and the Fools Who Use It". Thought the SCO Group had an open and shut case. 2) Okay, a few example projects for the SmartGrid stuff. However, modulating electric use during peak periods is several decades old. 3) Blogs! Chat! Wikis! Buzzword-driven crap. We already have things like Newspapers! Telephones! Websites!... the "Web 2.0-ish" stuff is hardly a revolution. 4) For a high-tech city, San Jose sure does have a primitive airport. You get to board a jetliner using a set of roller-stairs after passing through the '50s area terminal. I think a child with an Erector Set could have built their new Terminal faster. 5) We quote a product manager at Intel for information on how great WiMax is. Gee, there's an impartial source. Too bad WiMax has yet to get significant traction in the market. Clearwire is badly struggling and isn't very good. 6) After more worthless jabber from Enderele... A data center w/ backup batteries! A technological miracle! If needed, they can run the data center off the diesel generators! Morons... small diesel generators are so damn expensive to run, it would rarely, if ever, make sense to crank them except during a power outage. 7) More quotes from another Buzzword Generator, the Yankee Group. How do I become an "IT Consultant" of this type?
The biggest issue with widespread adoption (even if we had viable H2 cars) is the problem of generating all the electricity to crack and compress the H2. Both the cracking and compression are extremely inefficient processes. Combine that inefficiency with the waste heat as part of the "burning" (or whatever it is a fuel cell does), and I have a feeling you don't end up with anything more energy efficient than the existing setup with petroleum.
I am firmly of the belief that H2 cars are, and will remain, a research toy until we can generate fantastic amounts of electricity. Given limited research dollars, I'd go with electrical generation over H2 burning any day of the week. The benefits of environmentally friendly electrical generation also have a far more immediate payoff than impractical H2 cars. (As in, a nifty new tide-powered setup could help out (if not cure) pollution in say, the NY area NOW, without the complete infrastructure overhaul either electrical or H2 cars would require.)
Believe it or not, I'm not arguing for completely unrestricted use. I just believe that the location of a motor vehicle as it traverses public roadways is not the kind of evidence that should require a warrant to collect.
All I'm saying in regards to the cost is that it should not a factor when deciding what restrictions are required on police power. If there are no restrictions on more "old-fashioned" methods of surveillance (tails or 'copters), then there should not be on GPS collection. To rule otherwise leads to situations such as this one, where it is a big surprise to the cops that collecting information they gathered before is now thrown out because it was collected in a new way.
I'm of the opinion that this kind of data collection falls squarely under the "reasonable suspicion" standard (the same used for stop-n-frisks, or traffic stops with no moving violation.) I just don't think the "probable cause" threshold needed to obtain a warrant is necessary.
Your trust of the cops, and the ability of them to abuse their authority has absolutely nothing to do with the constitutionality of a particular tracking method.
My argument is about the legality of the methods, not how creepy they make people feel. Either you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to the location of your vehicle on public roads or you don't.
To address your second point: Are you saying that if the GPS receiver cost a billion bucks, required a PhD to interpret, and required a platoon of cops to monitor (factors that would tend to decrease its use) it would magically become just fine, even though it would produce the same information from the same method? An evidence-gathering method does not become less legal just because it is cheap and easy.
There is a large difference between the two situations. On the phone, if nobody is physically nearby to listen, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On the road, I have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to the location of my vehicle, as anybody with a pair of eyes can track my car.
Either the chalk is a "modification" to your vehicle or it isn't. I don't see how the end use of the chalk (parking space tracking vs. movement tracking) changes that.
In the end, I just don't see how tracking the movement of your vehicle on public roads via a 'copter is fine, but tracking you with a satellite receiver isn't. Both methods have the same result, neither method involves entering your vehicle (which would be an unallowed search); one method is just far easier and cheaper.
That Honda you linked to... just as I suspected. It has no trunk. (11.5 cubic feet of cargo capacity is not a trunk suitable for anybody that actually wants to use all four seats of a car on a regular basis. 11.5 cubes is 1st Mini Cooper or first-gen Prius territory.)
Forget the fuel cell itself (which is where the research dollars were going)... when they can make a prototype car that can put a 300-mile H2 charge in a mid-size vehicle in a space that doesn't reduce cargo or passenger room beyond that of a good, ol' fashioned dino-juice vehicle, AND the other energy projects exist to generate the massive amounts of electricity required to generate and compress the Hydrogen, THEN spend my tax money researching cheap cells to burn that H2.
H2-based personal transportation projects are all about energy density. Beating the density of Gasoline is unglamorous, and HARD. (What budding auto engineer wants to be stuck on a project to design the tank?) Dumping money into fuel-cell research is like pouring all the money for electric cars into the motor. The motor isn't the problem, it's the battery. Electric car companies realize this, so why is all the high-profile and funding H2 research in the cell instead of the tank?
SirWired
P.S. That Mazda has a H2 range of a puny 60 miles. It's just a gas/H2 Hybrid; a research toy. Oh, and "the first two RX-8 hydrogen cars [were purchased in] lease deals coming in at under $10,000 per month" Ouch.
Yes, a chopper would be unlikely to peer in your windows. So would a GPS. Yes, I suppose evidence about precisely where in a garage your car was located would be excluded (if the GPS managed to pull in a signal there), but I'm having a hard time figuring out how that would be a problem for any criminal case.
I'm also not buying your argument about sticking on a tracking device as a "modification." Meter maids use chalk to mark car tires all the time to track how long a car has been parked; is that a "modification" of your tires?
In this case "transport" refers to moving it around as an energy source for your car. It's more difficult than it sounds, as a usable size supply of Hydrogen must be compressed to far higher pressures than CNG to perform the same task. (CNG has far higher energy densities, even if a ICE is less efficient than an electric motor.)
Hydrogen-powered cells for autos are a pointless waste of time with out a LOT of pre-requisite technologies. Generating the Hydrogen is an energy-wasting PITA or involves oil. Storing it in a form that even comes close to the energy density of gasoline is extremely difficult. Compressing the Hydrogen is energy-intensive. (CNG gets a LOT more energy out of the same volume of compressed gas at an identical pressure, so NG actually makes sense to compress.)
There are a LOT of things we can do to reduce pollution before we have so much spare electricity lying around that we can crack and store Hydrogen in amounts large enough to feasibly power a car.
Sticking a tracking device on a car is hardly "damage." (I'm making the bold, and possibly unwarranted, assumption they just used a magnetic unit.)
Also, if the police follow your car in a chopper, they most certainly can track your vehicle's whereabouts on private property.
I would file this kind of surveillance under the "reasonable suspicion" (no warrant needed) standard (used for traffic stops, stop-n-frisks, etc.) vs. the "probable cause" standard (warrant required). This would preclude the ability of placing a tracking device on the car of every citizen.
If following somebody in an unmarked car without a warrant is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why an electronic device that accomplishes the same thing through satellite tracking would not be.
For the same reason some people take Philosophy, Ancient Literature, Paleontology, etc. Because they think the subject is cool, and aren't necessarily at school to learn a trade. (Indeed, Engineering students that are paying attention also discover they aren't directly being taught a trade either. Or at least they aren't in any Engineering college worthy of the name.)
They want to become an actuary. This is a fairly well-paid job that is also rather difficult to do, and even harder to do well.
They want to become math teachers; a valuable and much-needed profession. Math is a useful tool in teaching students how to think. We certainly don't torture legions of high school students with the details of conic sections because anybody is under the impression this is a directly practical skill for most citizens to have. Nor are hundreds of thousands of college students subjected to the horrors of calculus because of some kind of employment program for math post-docs.
They are double-majors in a field in which math is extremely important (physics, astronomy, computer science, every type of engineering, linguistics, medicine, biology, etc. Pretty much every field outside the humanities. Oh, and some of the humanities make extensive use of math too.)
Have you ever known anyone with "Restless Leg?" It is real. It sucks. It existed (and I have known people with it) long before a drug company thought of a catchy name for it to market a drug to treat it. A close relative called it her "jumpy leg" problem. Twenty years ago. it caused many problems with getting a full night's sleep.
Why do many people pick on Restless Leg Syndrome as some kind of fake disease made up by drug companies to sell us shit? For folks that have it, it most certainly isn't fake or "designer."
This is not an instance of "cultural arrogance." It has absolutely nothing to do with the modern exportation of democracy. Instead, it is the exportation of the Rule of Law (at least, in instances where it is in our best economic and political interests.)
Corruption by government officials has been a problem as long as there has been government. There are certainly many countries in which bribery of the bureaucracy is endemic and pragmatically accepted as a fact of life, but I know of none where it is considered harmless. I know of no government, period, that does not have a law against domestic bribery of the bureaucracy.
Unstable and corruption-ridden foreign government makes international trade very difficult and expensive for both parties.
I worked in a highly classified facility once. The wipe "standard" was to hire a lowly intern (such as myself), remove the platters from the case, take them out back, and sandblast them. The agencies scientists had decided degaussing wasn't good enough.
To all the posters that are horrified that I want to maximize tax revenue: I don't. I was merely pointing out that the right-wing assumption that reducing tax rates usually leads to a net tax revenue increase is quite likely to be incorrect, especially at current tax rates.
I will say that when a govt. is trying to reduce a deficit incurred in the past, increasing tax revenue is often preferred to decreasing it. This is recognized on both sides of the aisle. The GOP has just been going about it in a way that has not, in fact, worked.
It is not the case that "usually" lowing taxes increases revenue. It hasn't seemed to work too well for the last several rounds of tax cuts. Certainly there is a point where lowering taxes reduces total revenue. That point is a tax rate somewhere between 0 and 100%; where? That's up for debate.
Many economists would argue we passed that point some time ago.
Prior to Social Security, there were a great many elderly people who most certainly DID starve to death. In much of the world, people die of hunger every day, why would it be any different here if you remove the safety net SS (and much-maligned welfare programs) provide?
So you want to live in a society in which the government restricts none of the freedoms which you, personally, think you are entitled to, and takes no money that you, personally, don't think is going to to a worthy cause? It sounds like that is what you are saying.
I suggest immigrating to Somalia; I hear it's a lovely place. The "central government" controls an area of several city blocks. Outside of that zone, you can do whatever the hell you want, assuming a warlord doesn't shoot you.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is fairly obvious what approach the Obama DoJ is going to take. In return for coming down hard on those that distribute pirated content (it is indeed a crime, if not one that deserves much punishment), the DoJ is going to make sure it is only going after actual pirates instead of consumers trying to use content they have already paid for.
While this is not an ideal situation (there are a LOT of things the DoJ could be doing other than chasing after torrent trackers), it's better the previous situation, where the xxAA gets whatever they ask for.
SirWired
Yes, under load, a server that can handle twice the work for the same power is twice as efficient, but very few servers outside of Bazillion $ supercomputer clusters spend all their time under full load.
Also, either a machine is EnergyStar stickered or it isn't. How do you decide on a standard load? Some boxes are I/O monsters, others have crappy I/O, but have fast CPUs. How do you decide which workload the EnergyStar cert is based on?
Yes, it would be nice if the standard could work in performance somehow, but I wouldn't call it "worthless" because it doesn't.
SirWired
Speccing by idle power consumption was a great idea. How exactly was the EPA supposed to grade servers based on CPU "efficiency" when each CPU differs so much? Which of the bazillion CPU benchmarks out there do you choose? This would be a short trip into an epic flame war between vendors, meaning that the spec would never get passed. "Politics is the art of the possible"
Given that most servers spend almost all their time idle anyway, this could certainly be a big money and energy saver. If you ever stroll through an actual large datacenter, you can see, via HDD ligts, that most of that gear just sits there all day long, doing little actual work. Certainly there are some servers lit up constantly, and virtualization will help to clean some of the idle servers up, but many shops don't do much virtualizing yet.
SiWired
While the spy satellites are indeed owned by the military, no military troops are being deployed to meet up with the smugglers. While I haven't exactly read the act lately, I thought it just prohibited the active deployment of troops... I was not under the impression it prohibited cooperation between the military and DoJ.
The GPS system is owned by the military too, but nobody argues that the use of GPS isn't permissible because merely because it's owned by the DoD.
SirWired
Lets take it from the top:
1) They quote Rob Enderele. A "I know something about everything" 'IT consultant'. Also known for rendering his expert opinion on topics such as "Open Source and the Fools Who Use It". Thought the SCO Group had an open and shut case.
2) Okay, a few example projects for the SmartGrid stuff. However, modulating electric use during peak periods is several decades old.
3) Blogs! Chat! Wikis! Buzzword-driven crap. We already have things like Newspapers! Telephones! Websites!... the "Web 2.0-ish" stuff is hardly a revolution.
4) For a high-tech city, San Jose sure does have a primitive airport. You get to board a jetliner using a set of roller-stairs after passing through the '50s area terminal. I think a child with an Erector Set could have built their new Terminal faster.
5) We quote a product manager at Intel for information on how great WiMax is. Gee, there's an impartial source. Too bad WiMax has yet to get significant traction in the market. Clearwire is badly struggling and isn't very good.
6) After more worthless jabber from Enderele... A data center w/ backup batteries! A technological miracle! If needed, they can run the data center off the diesel generators! Morons... small diesel generators are so damn expensive to run, it would rarely, if ever, make sense to crank them except during a power outage.
7) More quotes from another Buzzword Generator, the Yankee Group. How do I become an "IT Consultant" of this type?
SirWired
The biggest issue with widespread adoption (even if we had viable H2 cars) is the problem of generating all the electricity to crack and compress the H2. Both the cracking and compression are extremely inefficient processes. Combine that inefficiency with the waste heat as part of the "burning" (or whatever it is a fuel cell does), and I have a feeling you don't end up with anything more energy efficient than the existing setup with petroleum.
I am firmly of the belief that H2 cars are, and will remain, a research toy until we can generate fantastic amounts of electricity. Given limited research dollars, I'd go with electrical generation over H2 burning any day of the week. The benefits of environmentally friendly electrical generation also have a far more immediate payoff than impractical H2 cars. (As in, a nifty new tide-powered setup could help out (if not cure) pollution in say, the NY area NOW, without the complete infrastructure overhaul either electrical or H2 cars would require.)
SirWired
Believe it or not, I'm not arguing for completely unrestricted use. I just believe that the location of a motor vehicle as it traverses public roadways is not the kind of evidence that should require a warrant to collect.
All I'm saying in regards to the cost is that it should not a factor when deciding what restrictions are required on police power. If there are no restrictions on more "old-fashioned" methods of surveillance (tails or 'copters), then there should not be on GPS collection. To rule otherwise leads to situations such as this one, where it is a big surprise to the cops that collecting information they gathered before is now thrown out because it was collected in a new way.
I'm of the opinion that this kind of data collection falls squarely under the "reasonable suspicion" standard (the same used for stop-n-frisks, or traffic stops with no moving violation.) I just don't think the "probable cause" threshold needed to obtain a warrant is necessary.
SirWired
Your trust of the cops, and the ability of them to abuse their authority has absolutely nothing to do with the constitutionality of a particular tracking method.
My argument is about the legality of the methods, not how creepy they make people feel. Either you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in regards to the location of your vehicle on public roads or you don't.
To address your second point: Are you saying that if the GPS receiver cost a billion bucks, required a PhD to interpret, and required a platoon of cops to monitor (factors that would tend to decrease its use) it would magically become just fine, even though it would produce the same information from the same method? An evidence-gathering method does not become less legal just because it is cheap and easy.
SirWired
I assume you are being sarcastic...
There is a large difference between the two situations. On the phone, if nobody is physically nearby to listen, I have a reasonable expectation of privacy. On the road, I have no reasonable expectation of privacy when it comes to the location of my vehicle, as anybody with a pair of eyes can track my car.
SirWired
Either the chalk is a "modification" to your vehicle or it isn't. I don't see how the end use of the chalk (parking space tracking vs. movement tracking) changes that.
In the end, I just don't see how tracking the movement of your vehicle on public roads via a 'copter is fine, but tracking you with a satellite receiver isn't. Both methods have the same result, neither method involves entering your vehicle (which would be an unallowed search); one method is just far easier and cheaper.
SirWired
That Honda you linked to... just as I suspected. It has no trunk. (11.5 cubic feet of cargo capacity is not a trunk suitable for anybody that actually wants to use all four seats of a car on a regular basis. 11.5 cubes is 1st Mini Cooper or first-gen Prius territory.)
Forget the fuel cell itself (which is where the research dollars were going)... when they can make a prototype car that can put a 300-mile H2 charge in a mid-size vehicle in a space that doesn't reduce cargo or passenger room beyond that of a good, ol' fashioned dino-juice vehicle, AND the other energy projects exist to generate the massive amounts of electricity required to generate and compress the Hydrogen, THEN spend my tax money researching cheap cells to burn that H2.
H2-based personal transportation projects are all about energy density. Beating the density of Gasoline is unglamorous, and HARD. (What budding auto engineer wants to be stuck on a project to design the tank?) Dumping money into fuel-cell research is like pouring all the money for electric cars into the motor. The motor isn't the problem, it's the battery. Electric car companies realize this, so why is all the high-profile and funding H2 research in the cell instead of the tank?
SirWired
P.S. That Mazda has a H2 range of a puny 60 miles. It's just a gas/H2 Hybrid; a research toy. Oh, and "the first two RX-8 hydrogen cars [were purchased in] lease deals coming in at under $10,000 per month" Ouch.
Yes, a chopper would be unlikely to peer in your windows. So would a GPS. Yes, I suppose evidence about precisely where in a garage your car was located would be excluded (if the GPS managed to pull in a signal there), but I'm having a hard time figuring out how that would be a problem for any criminal case.
I'm also not buying your argument about sticking on a tracking device as a "modification." Meter maids use chalk to mark car tires all the time to track how long a car has been parked; is that a "modification" of your tires?
SirWired
Okay, you've now generated a bazillion liters of H2 at the gas station next door. How do you plan to haul it around in your car?
SirWired
In this case "transport" refers to moving it around as an energy source for your car. It's more difficult than it sounds, as a usable size supply of Hydrogen must be compressed to far higher pressures than CNG to perform the same task. (CNG has far higher energy densities, even if a ICE is less efficient than an electric motor.)
SirWired
Hydrogen-powered cells for autos are a pointless waste of time with out a LOT of pre-requisite technologies. Generating the Hydrogen is an energy-wasting PITA or involves oil. Storing it in a form that even comes close to the energy density of gasoline is extremely difficult. Compressing the Hydrogen is energy-intensive. (CNG gets a LOT more energy out of the same volume of compressed gas at an identical pressure, so NG actually makes sense to compress.)
There are a LOT of things we can do to reduce pollution before we have so much spare electricity lying around that we can crack and store Hydrogen in amounts large enough to feasibly power a car.
SirWired
Sticking a tracking device on a car is hardly "damage." (I'm making the bold, and possibly unwarranted, assumption they just used a magnetic unit.)
Also, if the police follow your car in a chopper, they most certainly can track your vehicle's whereabouts on private property.
I would file this kind of surveillance under the "reasonable suspicion" (no warrant needed) standard (used for traffic stops, stop-n-frisks, etc.) vs. the "probable cause" standard (warrant required). This would preclude the ability of placing a tracking device on the car of every citizen.
SirWired
If following somebody in an unmarked car without a warrant is legal (and it is), I'm not sure why an electronic device that accomplishes the same thing through satellite tracking would not be.
SirWired
A few examples:
For the same reason some people take Philosophy, Ancient Literature, Paleontology, etc. Because they think the subject is cool, and aren't necessarily at school to learn a trade. (Indeed, Engineering students that are paying attention also discover they aren't directly being taught a trade either. Or at least they aren't in any Engineering college worthy of the name.)
They want to become an actuary. This is a fairly well-paid job that is also rather difficult to do, and even harder to do well.
They want to become math teachers; a valuable and much-needed profession. Math is a useful tool in teaching students how to think. We certainly don't torture legions of high school students with the details of conic sections because anybody is under the impression this is a directly practical skill for most citizens to have. Nor are hundreds of thousands of college students subjected to the horrors of calculus because of some kind of employment program for math post-docs.
They are double-majors in a field in which math is extremely important (physics, astronomy, computer science, every type of engineering, linguistics, medicine, biology, etc. Pretty much every field outside the humanities. Oh, and some of the humanities make extensive use of math too.)
SirWired
Have you ever known anyone with "Restless Leg?" It is real. It sucks. It existed (and I have known people with it) long before a drug company thought of a catchy name for it to market a drug to treat it. A close relative called it her "jumpy leg" problem. Twenty years ago. it caused many problems with getting a full night's sleep.
Why do many people pick on Restless Leg Syndrome as some kind of fake disease made up by drug companies to sell us shit? For folks that have it, it most certainly isn't fake or "designer."
SirWired
This is not an instance of "cultural arrogance." It has absolutely nothing to do with the modern exportation of democracy. Instead, it is the exportation of the Rule of Law (at least, in instances where it is in our best economic and political interests.)
Corruption by government officials has been a problem as long as there has been government. There are certainly many countries in which bribery of the bureaucracy is endemic and pragmatically accepted as a fact of life, but I know of none where it is considered harmless. I know of no government, period, that does not have a law against domestic bribery of the bureaucracy.
Unstable and corruption-ridden foreign government makes international trade very difficult and expensive for both parties.
I worked in a highly classified facility once. The wipe "standard" was to hire a lowly intern (such as myself), remove the platters from the case, take them out back, and sandblast them. The agencies scientists had decided degaussing wasn't good enough.
SirWired
To all the posters that are horrified that I want to maximize tax revenue: I don't. I was merely pointing out that the right-wing assumption that reducing tax rates usually leads to a net tax revenue increase is quite likely to be incorrect, especially at current tax rates.
I will say that when a govt. is trying to reduce a deficit incurred in the past, increasing tax revenue is often preferred to decreasing it. This is recognized on both sides of the aisle. The GOP has just been going about it in a way that has not, in fact, worked.
SirWired
It is not the case that "usually" lowing taxes increases revenue. It hasn't seemed to work too well for the last several rounds of tax cuts. Certainly there is a point where lowering taxes reduces total revenue. That point is a tax rate somewhere between 0 and 100%; where? That's up for debate.
Many economists would argue we passed that point some time ago.
SirWired
Prior to Social Security, there were a great many elderly people who most certainly DID starve to death. In much of the world, people die of hunger every day, why would it be any different here if you remove the safety net SS (and much-maligned welfare programs) provide?
SirWired
So you want to live in a society in which the government restricts none of the freedoms which you, personally, think you are entitled to, and takes no money that you, personally, don't think is going to to a worthy cause? It sounds like that is what you are saying.
I suggest immigrating to Somalia; I hear it's a lovely place. The "central government" controls an area of several city blocks. Outside of that zone, you can do whatever the hell you want, assuming a warlord doesn't shoot you.
SirWired