I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The site had been slashdotted, complete with a link to the ftp in the story itself, and I DL'ed the Mozilla installer at over 100KB/s. That's a solid megabit, with zero hiccups.
Who's their CIO? I wanna run the iron they're running.
This guy spent a couple of kilobytes using valuation judgments to justify the failure to put adequate security in his network specification.
But how the hell does he know what I'm going to be sending over the network?
Even if I have crypto in every other layer of my stack, I would still want good security from the airlink box. But here it's not even a standardized option.
He had a chance to do something immutable and wise, and he blew it.
Ever since Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement invented the American Campus Protest in the mid-60s, universities have been displaying their hypocrisy in the battle of expression and curiosity vs. presentation and mind-control.
But they're in a bind. They've taken enormous money from ten thousand loudmouthed societal newbies, and see it as an expensive proposition to have to compete with them for public-relations on a level playing field. They don't want to have to present the counterargument to every argument the kiddies devise. So they resort to the muzzle. And then justify it in strange, hypocritical ways that make you wonder if they missed the last 250 years of the history of political freedom.
Mario got that. He worked via enlightened negotiation. The protest culture that followed didn't get it. They just saw the struggle as a big party and wanted it to continue. Bitching is fun. Solving society's problems is work. Divisiveness is self-empowering. Not everyone takes the time to respect your rights. Four dead in O-hi-o.
The moral: Emotional acts, fameseeking, and pavlovian drives are barriers to progress in conflict resolution.
There's little that sells better when bundled with a computer than a printer.
Airlines don't compete with email and the web, they uses them to provide efficiencies in customer interfacing. Then they send you an electronic ticket. Which you print out.
And nobody here needs to be reminded that bricks and mortar have all but defeated online mercantilism in the past year.
Light, flexible, creasable, non-serviceable, broken, expensive to replace.
E-books are not the perfect application of e-paper. E-books need something unbreakable, or at least tolerant to severe mechanical stresses such that the utility is not reduced. E-paper would have to be sealed in polycarbonate to survive the use cases for a book. Which defeats its purpose somewhat. Unsealed, it's better suited to static applications requiring confomant wrapping plus moving pictures. But not to rough handling.
In their feedback they explain that spammimic isn't super secure because your foe might just take your message and paste it to spammimic's decode box.
Well, duh.
The FBI/CIA/NSA/NRO/HUD can just filter spam into a spammimic pipe and use spammimic's own cpu to circumvent spammimic's value.
Imagine how useful it will be when a terabyte a minute is being pumped into the decode box. Then they get free help spying on your messages and a DoS against spammimic.
You could overcome this by changing the selector pads but then you'd have to have sender and receiver sync on the pad in use, which would have to be sent by some other encryption or channel, which brings back the original problem of not having a super-convenient shrouding method.
--Blair
"This is not a crypto for money transaction."
Napster, as it's designed, isn't designed to track which files are licensed from the record company and which aren't.
This is an opportunity for someone to build a new, better tool/protocol that trades peer-peer and validates licensing.
Two things keep me from doing it instead of PDing the idea:
1. I ain't got the time. Which ordinarily wouldn't stop me from doing something that would make me rich and famous, but:
2. Napster already has a license from BMG; likely it's got an exclusivity clause in it. So BMG-owned files may only trade through Napster. So the new tool would be missing a huge subset of the set of all copyrighted music. Which lowers the cieling on the rich and famous I could get out of this.
Napster's got a leg up on its own sellout, the savvy bastards.
If you're jonesing for Texas bobbercue, and you can afford a couple of hours, cruise south to one of the many Armadillo Willy's locations from San Jose to San Mateo.
If you're from Texas, you won't be impressed, but if it's been a while since your last trip to Sonny Bryan's, Sammy's, or Railhead, this'll do ya. (And no, don't flame me for not mentioning North Main; I just never got around to going; next time I'm in Dallas, we'll see...)
The Sunnyvale location is the best; more volume means better chance of getting bones fresh out of the smoker.
I have had a Ricochet for a couple of months, and I'm liking it more and more, for these reasons:
1. Real customer service.
I've had two major problems dealt with by People Who Know in the past three weeks. Metricom might be on the skids, as always (I thought they had died years ago) but the channel operators who front the service for them are balls-out serious about tuning this thing until it hums. Reminds me of SpeedChoice before Spr*nt bought it and paid for it by eliminating customer service.
2. It's faster than dialup, *and* it's mobile.
I got mine because I'm on an assignment where the client's network is firewalled to prohibit all TCP other than HTTP. No POP, no FTP, no telnet, no IRC, nothing. And the hotel's wires are '70s-era corrosion-modulated links. I found out Ricochet did 128-kbit wireless mobile (up to 70 mph, though I haven't tested that), and fell. $75/mo made me pause, but:
3. It's worth the $75/month.
Currently, I'm paying $20/mo for one national dialup with crappy connection metrics, $20 for one Arizona-only dialup that only hosts my personal webpage, $5 for a legacy dialup that only works in New England but forwards a few things, $45 for a SpeedChoice ("Spr*ntBBD" be damned) 10-mbit LOS link to my house, and $75 for the wwc.com Ricochet interface. Yeah, that's more than most people would spend, but they all compensate, whether by redundancy, sentimentality, raw speed, or mobility. Geek points never un-sold me either. The only thing better would be if they'd had the PCMCIA modems available when I bought mine.
Would I have got this if there was an alternative for my specific need? No. Will I give this up just because that situation goes away? No, I'll probably look for another niche in which this helps me compete. Right now, I could consult effectively while living and working in a van down by the river.
If Metricom goes under it won't be because of the product. It will be because they got out-maneuvered in the high-speed mobile market (not likely at this stage of the spectrum wars) or because they suck at financial management (but you'd think they'd learned something from their lower-speed debacles).
(Sorry for replying to an invisible article; I'll slash my dot this afternoon as penance; moderate me 0 for this or I won't respect you in the morning).
And we return to my point.
Randal should not even have been fired for these things he did. He was employed by Intel at a time when network hacker cowboys did things like maintentance backdoors and idle crypto noodling as a part of their job, which they were basically making up as they went along. Then Randal pissed off the wrong guys and those guys realized they could throw the book at Randal.
And Intel didn't just succumb to the intervention of the police. They encouraged it. They inflated the estimated cost of "repairing" the systems Randal was accused of debilitating. You know the drill. Haxx0r X pings Yahoo.Com and Yahoo.Com claims it cost them $Umpty million in downtime and scour to find the heat signature of the ICMP packet.
When your doctor removes your appendix as a prophylaxis during a laparotomy, do you charge him with assault? If the police intervene, do you encourage them?
So, again, metaphors intact: Intel put Randal Schwartz in jail for doing his job.
Intel chased Randal down the hall because of back-doors he'd installed in the Intel network (to make it easier to fix the many broken things when he was physically off-site). His diddling with DES/whatever cracks on ora.com's password files was clearly recreational at a time when anyone who knew how crypt() worked had done it (including me, and I'm as anti-wrongful-entry as any computer user can get; but playing with numbers and benchmarking entry holes doesn't equate to B&E any more than whittling equates to mayhem).
All the Intel brass had to do was tell the Oregon cops that it wasn't a big deal. They didn't. They supported the polizei's efforts to cruel and unusual all over Randal. The rest is ugly, brainless history.
--Blair
brucespringsteen.com also not forced to move
on
Is It OK To Sucks?
·
· Score: 1
AP just came out with a story from the WIPO kangaroo courts saying that www.brucespringsteen.com has been left in the hands of a "fan" who registered the domain name.
As evinced by the site's own message board, most other fans think this guy is a loser and a jerk, while some think Bruce is being a stuck-up sellout.
Well, many of us knew Bruce was a stuck-up sellout when he started writing about the horrors of being rich ("57 Channels and Nothing On", awwwww...). Personally I think a man's name is a man's name, unless it's another man's name in which case anyone named McDonald or Bruce Springsteen should get no flack.
But what's telling is that WIPO today is doing a lot of out-of-norm rulings. This is a very unsettling thing for the "rule of law" form of behavior control that keeps much of this planet from going Columbine on each other. The Supreme Court may have opened a cultural can of worms by ignoring the right thing in favor of its political gain in the election ruling. Bench activism will become the social norm for courts as they decide that they know better than 1500 years of Justice.
We all know this, but sometimes forget, so bear with me here. Hacking didn't used to have anything specific to do with security. Now it's all about security and how to circumvent it. Trying to call it "cracking" will never work. CNN has bigger disinformation pipes than the original hacker community, which has a "tiny urethra" of a PR pipe, and nobody wants to talk about that.
Mafiaboy is nonetheless the fall-guy for a worldwide Society Of Loners who will get the message just in time for their little sisters to find the crack pipe behind the auth server.
Meanwhile, national ISPs like WWC.Com and Frontier.Net can't keep their billion-dollar networks running for a week without a major outage. MSN hires gorillas who don't know Cisco from Crisco. Go.Com is its own worst enemy rather than the cyberjewel of the most widely held corporation on Earth. And Intel jailed Randal Schwartz for doing his job.
Cracking is relatively about as debilitating to the net as keying Vint Cerf's car. But I don't want to be associated with that, either.
--Blair
"My tan is the color of a television tuned to a dead channel."
IfThere Is A God, and ifGod Created Everything, thenGod Has The Patent On Everything, and sincePatents Run Out After 17 Years, thenThe Patents On Everything Ran Out oo-17 Years Ago.
So invisibility belts, two-way neural communicator implants, and The Transporter, would all be public domain by now.
Iron Chef Leftovers was already done, by the actual Iron Chef.
A year or so ago, when the Iron Chef show went to New York so Bobby Flay could prove once and for all what an utter dick he is, they made a few detours at Food Network's behest.
One of them sent one of the the ICs off with Gordon Elliot (not to be confused with Gordon Bennett, who IMO would make a better houseguest) to film an episode of the FN show where FN knocks on an unsuspecting victim's front door and insists on cooking dinner with whatever is in the house.
Of course, they don't go to the Bronx. They go to some gated community in the 'burbs where the steel-clad fridge is loaded with goodies. But the Iron Chef did do the deed on their leftovers. Looked pretty good, too.
I can see how we'd have some neurons that fire when we observe someone else doing something. But when we do something, are those neurons firing because we are doing it? Or are they firing because we observe ourselves doing it?
If the former, then these neurons are probably parts of our ability to learn by mimicry. If the latter, then perhaps they are also the crux of self-awareness.
Most animals can learn by mimicry. Evolution would take advantage of such a thing. But if this neural system is involved in mimicry and self-awareness, then perhaps we sorely underestimate the self-awareness of most of the animal kingdom.
Baseball is also a non-zero sum game, potentially infinite sum, its duration and state history limited only by skill, chance and the stamina of the players (although team size, substitution rules, and the economics of having enough equipment affect this as zero-sum components).
Its basic premise is to perform a skill in a chancy situation to create chaos and take athletic advantage before the other team can restore order, if necessary by terminating your participation.
It has an obvious athletic component, a less obvious tactical component, and an underlying strategic component. It imbues the participant's muscle memory with the concepts of probability and mechanics.
And it invented Sports Heroes, the Superstar, and the Insane Salary, thus expanding its gamesmanship beyond the field and the rules.
--Blair
Re:This technology doesn't work and can't work
on
The Unblinking Eye
·
· Score: 1
I figure this tech will last until the first bona fide innocent tourist is roughed up by cops who are convinced he is a big-time felon...
It happened before the cameras, no reason the cameras will increase its frequency.
Cops traditionally rely on people recognizing other people. And the way people recognize people sucks. Ask any famous person who's been mistaken for another, much more famous person, of whom they're already thoroughly jealous. (I get "Hey! Look! It's Jesus Christ!" all the time. Burns my shorts, it does. Then I get Enquirer hacks camped out on my lawn, Hispanic people hocking me for my autograph, and then the Pope reams me out for being a fraud...you do not want that.)
The cameras are a way for cops to detect near matches in a much larger and more thorough manner than they already can, and with putatively less manpower (although I'm reminded that every labor-saving device ever invented has created more crummy jobs than it eliminated). They still have to make a positive ID before they can show probable cause.
But tell that to the undercover Oakland cop who got whacked by a couple of uniforms while he was holding a gun on a car thief.
Slashdot Mirror
I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The site had been slashdotted, complete with a link to the ftp in the story itself, and I DL'ed the Mozilla installer at over 100KB/s. That's a solid megabit, with zero hiccups.
Who's their CIO? I wanna run the iron they're running.
--Blair
Y'know, it's starting to burn my butt.
This guy spent a couple of kilobytes using valuation judgments to justify the failure to put adequate security in his network specification.
But how the hell does he know what I'm going to be sending over the network?
Even if I have crypto in every other layer of my stack, I would still want good security from the airlink box. But here it's not even a standardized option.
He had a chance to do something immutable and wise, and he blew it.
--Blair
"We have no fuel on board, plus or minus 8 kilograms."
And ideal for neologizing:
"The President has no IQ, plus or minus 90 points."
"Alex Rodriguez is destitute, plus or minus $0.25B"
"Windows is not an operating system, plus or minus DOS."
--Blair
One word:
Ricochet.
--Blair
"Boxy, but good."
Or did this guy just prove mathematically that Napster has efficient control over everything that flows through it?
Not that that hasn't been mooted already...
--Blair
Ever since Mario Savio and the Free Speech Movement invented the American Campus Protest in the mid-60s, universities have been displaying their hypocrisy in the battle of expression and curiosity vs. presentation and mind-control.
But they're in a bind. They've taken enormous money from ten thousand loudmouthed societal newbies, and see it as an expensive proposition to have to compete with them for public-relations on a level playing field. They don't want to have to present the counterargument to every argument the kiddies devise. So they resort to the muzzle. And then justify it in strange, hypocritical ways that make you wonder if they missed the last 250 years of the history of political freedom.
Mario got that. He worked via enlightened negotiation. The protest culture that followed didn't get it. They just saw the struggle as a big party and wanted it to continue. Bitching is fun. Solving society's problems is work. Divisiveness is self-empowering. Not everyone takes the time to respect your rights. Four dead in O-hi-o.
The moral: Emotional acts, fameseeking, and pavlovian drives are barriers to progress in conflict resolution.
--Blair
There's little that sells better when bundled with a computer than a printer.
Airlines don't compete with email and the web, they uses them to provide efficiencies in customer interfacing. Then they send you an electronic ticket. Which you print out.
And nobody here needs to be reminded that bricks and mortar have all but defeated online mercantilism in the past year.
--Blair
Light, flexible, creasable, non-serviceable, broken, expensive to replace.
E-books are not the perfect application of e-paper. E-books need something unbreakable, or at least tolerant to severe mechanical stresses such that the utility is not reduced. E-paper would have to be sealed in polycarbonate to survive the use cases for a book. Which defeats its purpose somewhat. Unsealed, it's better suited to static applications requiring confomant wrapping plus moving pictures. But not to rough handling.
--Blair
In their feedback they explain that spammimic isn't super secure because your foe might just take your message and paste it to spammimic's decode box.
Well, duh.
The FBI/CIA/NSA/NRO/HUD can just filter spam into a spammimic pipe and use spammimic's own cpu to circumvent spammimic's value.
Imagine how useful it will be when a terabyte a minute is being pumped into the decode box. Then they get free help spying on your messages and a DoS against spammimic.
You could overcome this by changing the selector pads but then you'd have to have sender and receiver sync on the pad in use, which would have to be sent by some other encryption or channel, which brings back the original problem of not having a super-convenient shrouding method.
--Blair
"This is not a crypto for money transaction."
Napster, as it's designed, isn't designed to track which files are licensed from the record company and which aren't.
This is an opportunity for someone to build a new, better tool/protocol that trades peer-peer and validates licensing.
Two things keep me from doing it instead of PDing the idea:
1. I ain't got the time. Which ordinarily wouldn't stop me from doing something that would make me rich and famous, but:
2. Napster already has a license from BMG; likely it's got an exclusivity clause in it. So BMG-owned files may only trade through Napster. So the new tool would be missing a huge subset of the set of all copyrighted music. Which lowers the cieling on the rich and famous I could get out of this.
Napster's got a leg up on its own sellout, the savvy bastards.
--Blair
The feeling you've seen this before...
10^100 times...
--Blair
Sorry if this is redundant.
If you're jonesing for Texas bobbercue, and you can afford a couple of hours, cruise south to one of the many Armadillo Willy's locations from San Jose to San Mateo.
If you're from Texas, you won't be impressed, but if it's been a while since your last trip to Sonny Bryan's, Sammy's, or Railhead, this'll do ya. (And no, don't flame me for not mentioning North Main; I just never got around to going; next time I'm in Dallas, we'll see...)
The Sunnyvale location is the best; more volume means better chance of getting bones fresh out of the smoker.
--Blair
I have had a Ricochet for a couple of months, and I'm liking it more and more, for these reasons:
1. Real customer service.
I've had two major problems dealt with by People Who Know in the past three weeks. Metricom might be on the skids, as always (I thought they had died years ago) but the channel operators who front the service for them are balls-out serious about tuning this thing until it hums. Reminds me of SpeedChoice before Spr*nt bought it and paid for it by eliminating customer service.
2. It's faster than dialup, *and* it's mobile.
I got mine because I'm on an assignment where the client's network is firewalled to prohibit all TCP other than HTTP. No POP, no FTP, no telnet, no IRC, nothing. And the hotel's wires are '70s-era corrosion-modulated links. I found out Ricochet did 128-kbit wireless mobile (up to 70 mph, though I haven't tested that), and fell. $75/mo made me pause, but:
3. It's worth the $75/month.
Currently, I'm paying $20/mo for one national dialup with crappy connection metrics, $20 for one Arizona-only dialup that only hosts my personal webpage, $5 for a legacy dialup that only works in New England but forwards a few things, $45 for a SpeedChoice ("Spr*ntBBD" be damned) 10-mbit LOS link to my house, and $75 for the wwc.com Ricochet interface. Yeah, that's more than most people would spend, but they all compensate, whether by redundancy, sentimentality, raw speed, or mobility. Geek points never un-sold me either. The only thing better would be if they'd had the PCMCIA modems available when I bought mine.
Would I have got this if there was an alternative for my specific need? No. Will I give this up just because that situation goes away? No, I'll probably look for another niche in which this helps me compete. Right now, I could consult effectively while living and working in a van down by the river.
If Metricom goes under it won't be because of the product. It will be because they got out-maneuvered in the high-speed mobile market (not likely at this stage of the spectrum wars) or because they suck at financial management (but you'd think they'd learned something from their lower-speed debacles).
--Blair
(Sorry for replying to an invisible article; I'll slash my dot this afternoon as penance; moderate me 0 for this or I won't respect you in the morning).
And we return to my point.
Randal should not even have been fired for these things he did. He was employed by Intel at a time when network hacker cowboys did things like maintentance backdoors and idle crypto noodling as a part of their job, which they were basically making up as they went along. Then Randal pissed off the wrong guys and those guys realized they could throw the book at Randal.
And Intel didn't just succumb to the intervention of the police. They encouraged it. They inflated the estimated cost of "repairing" the systems Randal was accused of debilitating. You know the drill. Haxx0r X pings Yahoo.Com and Yahoo.Com claims it cost them $Umpty million in downtime and scour to find the heat signature of the ICMP packet.
When your doctor removes your appendix as a prophylaxis during a laparotomy, do you charge him with assault? If the police intervene, do you encourage them?
So, again, metaphors intact: Intel put Randal Schwartz in jail for doing his job.
--Blair
Intel chased Randal down the hall because of back-doors he'd installed in the Intel network (to make it easier to fix the many broken things when he was physically off-site). His diddling with DES/whatever cracks on ora.com's password files was clearly recreational at a time when anyone who knew how crypt() worked had done it (including me, and I'm as anti-wrongful-entry as any computer user can get; but playing with numbers and benchmarking entry holes doesn't equate to B&E any more than whittling equates to mayhem).
All the Intel brass had to do was tell the Oregon cops that it wasn't a big deal. They didn't. They supported the polizei's efforts to cruel and unusual all over Randal. The rest is ugly, brainless history.
--Blair
AP just came out with a story from the WIPO kangaroo courts saying that www.brucespringsteen.com has been left in the hands of a "fan" who registered the domain name.
As evinced by the site's own message board, most other fans think this guy is a loser and a jerk, while some think Bruce is being a stuck-up sellout.
Well, many of us knew Bruce was a stuck-up sellout when he started writing about the horrors of being rich ("57 Channels and Nothing On", awwwww...). Personally I think a man's name is a man's name, unless it's another man's name in which case anyone named McDonald or Bruce Springsteen should get no flack.
But what's telling is that WIPO today is doing a lot of out-of-norm rulings. This is a very unsettling thing for the "rule of law" form of behavior control that keeps much of this planet from going Columbine on each other. The Supreme Court may have opened a cultural can of worms by ignoring the right thing in favor of its political gain in the election ruling. Bench activism will become the social norm for courts as they decide that they know better than 1500 years of Justice.
--Blair
"1.3 billion websites and nothing on."
If they use the trademark on different types of products, and the logos are different in style, then they can both use the same name.
The letter X alone is trademarked by dozens of companies.
--Blair
"The pompatus of moot."
We all know this, but sometimes forget, so bear with me here. Hacking didn't used to have anything specific to do with security. Now it's all about security and how to circumvent it. Trying to call it "cracking" will never work. CNN has bigger disinformation pipes than the original hacker community, which has a "tiny urethra" of a PR pipe, and nobody wants to talk about that.
Mafiaboy is nonetheless the fall-guy for a worldwide Society Of Loners who will get the message just in time for their little sisters to find the crack pipe behind the auth server.
Meanwhile, national ISPs like WWC.Com and Frontier.Net can't keep their billion-dollar networks running for a week without a major outage. MSN hires gorillas who don't know Cisco from Crisco. Go.Com is its own worst enemy rather than the cyberjewel of the most widely held corporation on Earth. And Intel jailed Randal Schwartz for doing his job.
Cracking is relatively about as debilitating to the net as keying Vint Cerf's car. But I don't want to be associated with that, either.
--Blair
"My tan is the color of a television tuned to a dead channel."
Perhaps the byte article explains Tux's recent behavior, as reported here:
Wayward Penguin Treated for Depression
--Blair
You might have something here.
If There Is A God, and if God Created Everything, then God Has The Patent On Everything, and since Patents Run Out After 17 Years, then The Patents On Everything Ran Out oo-17 Years Ago.
So invisibility belts, two-way neural communicator implants, and The Transporter, would all be public domain by now.
If I wasn't an Atheist.
--Blair
I liked the one with the 5000-yen a pound beef.
I was transfixed by the one with the $200-a-pound bean sprouts
--Blair
"This is absolutely true." - Dave Barry
Iron Chef Leftovers was already done, by the actual Iron Chef.
A year or so ago, when the Iron Chef show went to New York so Bobby Flay could prove once and for all what an utter dick he is, they made a few detours at Food Network's behest.
One of them sent one of the the ICs off with Gordon Elliot (not to be confused with Gordon Bennett, who IMO would make a better houseguest) to film an episode of the FN show where FN knocks on an unsuspecting victim's front door and insists on cooking dinner with whatever is in the house.
Of course, they don't go to the Bronx. They go to some gated community in the 'burbs where the steel-clad fridge is loaded with goodies. But the Iron Chef did do the deed on their leftovers. Looked pretty good, too.
--Blair
I can see how we'd have some neurons that fire when we observe someone else doing something. But when we do something, are those neurons firing because we are doing it? Or are they firing because we observe ourselves doing it?
If the former, then these neurons are probably parts of our ability to learn by mimicry. If the latter, then perhaps they are also the crux of self-awareness.
Most animals can learn by mimicry. Evolution would take advantage of such a thing. But if this neural system is involved in mimicry and self-awareness, then perhaps we sorely underestimate the self-awareness of most of the animal kingdom.
--Blair
Baseball is also a non-zero sum game, potentially infinite sum, its duration and state history limited only by skill, chance and the stamina of the players (although team size, substitution rules, and the economics of having enough equipment affect this as zero-sum components).
Its basic premise is to perform a skill in a chancy situation to create chaos and take athletic advantage before the other team can restore order, if necessary by terminating your participation.
It has an obvious athletic component, a less obvious tactical component, and an underlying strategic component. It imbues the participant's muscle memory with the concepts of probability and mechanics.
And it invented Sports Heroes, the Superstar, and the Insane Salary, thus expanding its gamesmanship beyond the field and the rules.
--Blair
I figure this tech will last until the first bona fide innocent tourist is roughed up by cops who are convinced he is a big-time felon...
It happened before the cameras, no reason the cameras will increase its frequency.
Cops traditionally rely on people recognizing other people. And the way people recognize people sucks. Ask any famous person who's been mistaken for another, much more famous person, of whom they're already thoroughly jealous. (I get "Hey! Look! It's Jesus Christ!" all the time. Burns my shorts, it does. Then I get Enquirer hacks camped out on my lawn, Hispanic people hocking me for my autograph, and then the Pope reams me out for being a fraud...you do not want that.)
The cameras are a way for cops to detect near matches in a much larger and more thorough manner than they already can, and with putatively less manpower (although I'm reminded that every labor-saving device ever invented has created more crummy jobs than it eliminated). They still have to make a positive ID before they can show probable cause.
But tell that to the undercover Oakland cop who got whacked by a couple of uniforms while he was holding a gun on a car thief.
--Blair