You can't prevent suicide attacks with CCTV. The 7/7 murderers weren't already under surveillance (or they'd have been picked up long before the images became useful), so they were lost in the noise of a CCTV system that records 60 million people 300 times a day. They didn't care whether they could be identified after the fact by their video, because by then they were dead.
You prevent suicide attacks by investing in intelligence, which calls for targeted observations rather than mass surveillance, which simply increases the size of the haystack of data the authorities have to sieve through.
CCTV is not helping to deter or prevent terrorism. It's lining the pockets of private companies at the expense of the privacy standards we previously enjoyed, and with no compelling societal benefits in return. But that's OK, because it makes people "feel safe"...
Have you noticed a sudden increase in spam since 13 May, perhaps on previously spam-free addresses?
This might have affected you even if you're not a PlusNet customer. I use them as my ISP, but I host my email on a different server, so my details weren't compromised. Or so I thought. Turns out that address books and customer correspondence were stolen as well as PlusNet's email database, so if you've ever corresponded with someone@username.plus.com, your address could have been nicked along with theirs.
Now several of my previously spam-free addresses have started giving me investment and health advice. Not impressed >:o[
ISPs must be given an economic incentive to put their customers' privacy first if cases like this are to be prevented in future. I'll be voting with my wallet as soon as I can. I hope a large number of similarly affected people join me, and let this be remembered by all/.ers when next you consider a switch.
Microsoft wants to own the distribution channel for high-definition video, because they see that owning the distribution channel for music has made record labels a lot of money in the past. They've therefore offered Hollywood a veto on Vista support for any hardware not conforming to its stringent DRM specifications. In return, they hope that Hollywood will buy into the Vista DRM platform.
If AMD don't conform to the spec, then Hollywood won't approve their hardware designs, and Microsoft won't digitally sign their graphics card drivers for use with Windows Vista.
I predict we'll here lamentable stories of the same ilk from NVidia, Intel and all the other major players in the GFX hardware market before too long.
The speed camera that takes the most money in fines on UK roads is on the A610 - a road joining Nottingham city centre to the M1 motorway. Last time I checked it accounted for a third of all speeding fines in the country (Feb 05). It's a SPECS system that uses automatic number plate recognition to calculate the time taken to travel between two fixed cameras.
Incidentally, your GPS gadget already exists, more or less.
You pay the license fee for recieving the BBC services
I'm a UK resident, and I don't think this is entirely correct. Quoting from the TV Licensing Website: "If you use or install television receiving equipment to receive or record television programme services you are required by law to have a valid TV Licence."
In the UK, if you have equipment capable of receiving TV signals, you must pay the license fee even if you only watch commercial channels, or indeed even if you never actually turn the thing on. The fact that the money is used to fund the BBC has no bearing on your liability to pay.
The title of the patent in question (is: "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document".
Microsoft are proposing to change IE's behaviour to work around the patent. The new IE will prompt users before loading external embedded objects. This manual invocation circumvents the "automatic" specification in the patent, and thus IE no longer infringes.
The fact that this change will irritate the bejezus out of users has not gone unnoticed. A further clever exploitation of the patent wording is suggested to get around this. From the above link:
"You can prevent Internet Explorer from prompting the user by using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) to load ActiveX controls from script. "... "The control is blocked if the script that creates the control is in the same file as the HTML for the Web page. For the control to load without user input, the script must be defined in a function defined outside of the HTML file."
There's more detail, but I think the crux of it is that in order to not infringe, IE must avoid automatically loading external applications. A separate script file on the local server is not "external", so IE is compliant.
The good news is that if Eolas turn their patent spotlight onto the browser projects you mention, the browsers won't have to change much, just like IE hasn't. The bad news is that the onus of work will shift onto site authors. Anyone maintaining a site using embedded objects will have to either re-code or suffer a changed "user experience".
What if every vehicle was fitted with a traffic light beacon? If the transmitters were changed to send a unique code (like a MAC address or something), then the system could be adapted so that intersections are aware of the real-time traffic volume on each approach. They could then dynamically adjust the timing of the lights to maximise traffic flow through each junction. An extra dimension of usefulness could be added by allowing the intersections to return traffic flow data across a network. The data could be used to update a real-time map of a city showing traffic black spots; to drive roadside traffic information signs; or in longer term statistical analysis of the kind useful to town planners. Maybe junctions could talk to each other, which would be useful to expediate emergency vehicles through the network: "I've got a police car coming through my junction travelling south. It's probably headed your way. Change your North / South lights to green now."
This model assumes that every vehicle has a functioning beacon, which is unlikely because some will break and some will be deliberately broken (by those who fear Big Brother, perhaps). Also, someone with a modified beacon that transmits hundreds of different codes at the same time could spoof the system, or DoS it. It may also be a challenge to process the amount of data generated in real time, especially for IR receivers. Maybe radio tags similar to an RFID system would work better, except that the advantage of IR is that it can be made directional.
Of course this doesn't solve the emergency vehicle problem, but that's comprehensively discussed in other posts.
For those interested in information about actual incidents where Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) has caused failure or degradation in performance to aircraft systems, refer to the following paper:
Slashdot Mirror
I'll tag that troll.
You can't prevent suicide attacks with CCTV. The 7/7 murderers weren't already under surveillance (or they'd have been picked up long before the images became useful), so they were lost in the noise of a CCTV system that records 60 million people 300 times a day. They didn't care whether they could be identified after the fact by their video, because by then they were dead.
You prevent suicide attacks by investing in intelligence, which calls for targeted observations rather than mass surveillance, which simply increases the size of the haystack of data the authorities have to sieve through.
CCTV is not helping to deter or prevent terrorism. It's lining the pockets of private companies at the expense of the privacy standards we previously enjoyed, and with no compelling societal benefits in return. But that's OK, because it makes people "feel safe"...
Have you noticed a sudden increase in spam since 13 May, perhaps on previously spam-free addresses?
/.ers when next you consider a switch.
This might have affected you even if you're not a PlusNet customer. I use them as my ISP, but I host my email on a different server, so my details weren't compromised. Or so I thought. Turns out that address books and customer correspondence were stolen as well as PlusNet's email database, so if you've ever corresponded with someone@username.plus.com, your address could have been nicked along with theirs.
Now several of my previously spam-free addresses have started giving me investment and health advice. Not impressed >:o[
ISPs must be given an economic incentive to put their customers' privacy first if cases like this are to be prevented in future. I'll be voting with my wallet as soon as I can. I hope a large number of similarly affected people join me, and let this be remembered by all
(More details on my blog.)
"Having "In God We Trust" on our currency and "Under God" in our Pledge is not perfect freedom of religion."
Oh, I don't know. It doesn't say in *which* god you should trust ;-)
Microsoft wants to own the distribution channel for high-definition video, because they see that owning the distribution channel for music has made record labels a lot of money in the past. They've therefore offered Hollywood a veto on Vista support for any hardware not conforming to its stringent DRM specifications. In return, they hope that Hollywood will buy into the Vista DRM platform.
If AMD don't conform to the spec, then Hollywood won't approve their hardware designs, and Microsoft won't digitally sign their graphics card drivers for use with Windows Vista.
I predict we'll here lamentable stories of the same ilk from NVidia, Intel and all the other major players in the GFX hardware market before too long.
I wasn't aware that time was at an end...
The speed camera that takes the most money in fines on UK roads is on the A610 - a road joining Nottingham city centre to the M1 motorway. Last time I checked it accounted for a third of all speeding fines in the country (Feb 05). It's a SPECS system that uses automatic number plate recognition to calculate the time taken to travel between two fixed cameras.
Incidentally, your GPS gadget already exists, more or less.
You pay the license fee for recieving the BBC services
I'm a UK resident, and I don't think this is entirely correct. Quoting from the TV Licensing Website: "If you use or install television receiving equipment to receive or record television programme services you are required by law to have a valid TV Licence."
In the UK, if you have equipment capable of receiving TV signals, you must pay the license fee even if you only watch commercial channels, or indeed even if you never actually turn the thing on. The fact that the money is used to fund the BBC has no bearing on your liability to pay.
The title of the patent in question (is: "Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document".
... "The control is blocked if the script that creates the control is in the same file as the HTML for the Web page. For the control to load without user input, the script must be defined in a function defined outside of the HTML file."
Microsoft are proposing to change IE's behaviour to work around the patent. The new IE will prompt users before loading external embedded objects. This manual invocation circumvents the "automatic" specification in the patent, and thus IE no longer infringes.
The fact that this change will irritate the bejezus out of users has not gone unnoticed. A further clever exploitation of the patent wording is suggested to get around this. From the above link:
"You can prevent Internet Explorer from prompting the user by using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) to load ActiveX controls from script. "
There's more detail, but I think the crux of it is that in order to not infringe, IE must avoid automatically loading external applications. A separate script file on the local server is not "external", so IE is compliant.
The good news is that if Eolas turn their patent spotlight onto the browser projects you mention, the browsers won't have to change much, just like IE hasn't. The bad news is that the onus of work will shift onto site authors. Anyone maintaining a site using embedded objects will have to either re-code or suffer a changed "user experience".
Here's hoping the patent will be proved invalid.
What if every vehicle was fitted with a traffic light beacon? If the transmitters were changed to send a unique code (like a MAC address or something), then the system could be adapted so that intersections are aware of the real-time traffic volume on each approach. They could then dynamically adjust the timing of the lights to maximise traffic flow through each junction. An extra dimension of usefulness could be added by allowing the intersections to return traffic flow data across a network. The data could be used to update a real-time map of a city showing traffic black spots; to drive roadside traffic information signs; or in longer term statistical analysis of the kind useful to town planners. Maybe junctions could talk to each other, which would be useful to expediate emergency vehicles through the network: "I've got a police car coming through my junction travelling south. It's probably headed your way. Change your North / South lights to green now."
This model assumes that every vehicle has a functioning beacon, which is unlikely because some will break and some will be deliberately broken (by those who fear Big Brother, perhaps). Also, someone with a modified beacon that transmits hundreds of different codes at the same time could spoof the system, or DoS it. It may also be a challenge to process the amount of data generated in real time, especially for IR receivers. Maybe radio tags similar to an RFID system would work better, except that the advantage of IR is that it can be made directional.
Of course this doesn't solve the emergency vehicle problem, but that's comprehensively discussed in other posts.
For those interested in information about actual incidents where Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) has caused failure or degradation in performance to aircraft systems, refer to the following paper:
Electronic Systems Failures and Anomalies Attributed to Electromagnetic Interference
Section 2.3 - Aircraft passenger carry on devices - is relevant to the current discussion and can be found on page 11.