I didn't see anywhere in his post where he was implying that there was some "super intelligent group of people controlling the world." Your response was a non sequitur.
The point is that if a government has been trying systemically to put one over on its citizens for as long as a generation or more -- as I think the US Government clearly has -- it's very difficult to ever know when you've uncovered everything they're hiding. Obviously it's the most boneheaded schemes that get discovered first, followed by the more subtle ones, but there's always a significant chance that there's some internal spying going on that is just less-sloppily done than the stuff we've found out about so far.
I think that's a pretty good point; I think it's likely to the point of near necessity that we haven't heard the last of the government's internal surveillance efforts. Considering how the ones we know about today were made public, it's clear that more tightly-managed (and perhaps more narrow in scope) projects probably would have remained hidden.
I think you need to check how tight your tinfoil hat is; I have yet to see the news accuse something of being the work of "Islamic terrorists" when there wasn't good reason for that to be true.
And, quite frankly, given recent history, if a major terrorist attack were to happen in the US tomorrow, I'd say they're probably within the realm of justified speculation to ask whether it was 'Islamic' terrorists. You know, with 9/11, Madrid, London...it's not some huge conspiratorial leap.
It's one thing to not accuse groups of people out-of-hand without evidence, but it's quite another to delude oneself about the nature of a particular enemy because you're seemingly uncomfortable with it. There are many Muslims in the world who are not strapping on explosive vests and buying plane tickets for the US; I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. However, a rather sizable number of recent terrorist attacks have come from groups motivated by a violent religious ideology, and we'd be fools to just ignore that.
As other people have pointed out, I think your estimates of the data that's actually being sent 'down the wire' from the eye to the brain is probably very high.
This came up in another discussion a while back, but I suspect that even an average digital camera with a good, wide-angle lens probably captures in a single frame more raw information than the human eye does from the same vantage point in a single glance.
You only think that your eye is a really good camera. In reality, it might be pretty bad -- I suspect that if you could watch the "raw feed" from a human eye on a TV screen, you might find it rather disappointing without all the postprocessing done in the brain's visual cortex. Only a small part of it near the center would be high resolution; only the center region would be color, and the periphery would be just good enough to detect movement, not much else.
I guess in a way you could call this "compression," but in reality it's more a credit to the brain and the way the 'receiver' is designed, to create the feeling of a huge, high-refresh-rate, 180-degree, full color, 3-D panorama, from not particularly impressive source imagery.
Basically, the human visual system makes up for the limitations of its cameras (the eyes) in post. In the synthetic machine world, we do not currently have the processing power nor the software necessary to do the kind of synthesization that the brain does, so instead we give the machines better 'eyes,' because building cameras is something we do know how to do.
A while ago, I heard someone who was involved in machine vision talk about something called the 'picket fence problem.' A person can pretty easily assemble a good idea of the scene on the other side of a picket fence, or a board with a few holes in it, by moving their head back and forth and then re-assembling the narrow-angle views into something more comprehensive, all in real time. I'm not sure whether machine-vision is there yet today (this was quite a while back), but it's a pretty non-trivial process, or so I was led to understand.
More interesting than the 'bitrate equivalence' of the optic nerve, would be some sort of estimation of the "processing power" done by an average person's visual cortex while doing some basic visual activity. I suspect that the result might be surprisingly high, maybe bordering on what would be supercomputer levels right now, solved using current methods.
It's closer than you think; many public transit systems already have the capability.
The only thing stopping them from doing it right now is allowing people to purchase with cash. Cash is a problem, because it's harder to trace cash than it is to trace credit cards.
I'll use for example the metro system near where I live, in Washington DC. It's an admittedly sophisticated system compared to a lot of other places, but it's nothing that futuristic. You can pay to use the metro (including buses) in one of two ways: you use either a credit card or cash, and you put the amount onto either a semi-reusable cardboard mag-stripe card, or a reusable RFID card. The RFID cards aren't (I don't think) stored value; they just chirp a serial number. So if you use one of those, it's fairly trivial to track you throughout the system, particularly if you load it with a credit card. Find the transaction where you added money to it, get the serial number of the card you put money on, and then follow that serial number around as you use it.
With cash the problem becomes one of identification. You can still track someone around the system using their stored-value mag-stripe card, but identifying someone as they come into the system if they pay with cash is still a significant problem. The way to get around this would be either by requiring everyone to use some non-anonymous form of payment to get in (which might mean scanning a government photo ID when paying with cash) or automated face recognition. Since most public transport is filled with cameras as is, the latter might be the way to go.
Of course none of this keeps you from buying a ticket (RFID or regular) and handing it to another person, so it wouldn't be foolproof, but I would be surprised if the police haven't used the electronic ticketing systems to figure out where suspects under pursuit enter and leave already. It's such an obvious use of the technology I can't imagine that they haven't, especially given the very high-crime areas that public-transport systems tend to run through.
Personally, I feel that it won't be very long in the future when using cash is the mark of someone suspicious. (It already is, in large quantities and in certain places -- bought an airline ticket with cash lately?) That is, anyone using cash to purchase anything from food to movie tickets will be forced through additional scrutiny, not to mention odd looks from "honest" people (using their Visa cards as God intended).
What's most amusing about that is the number of fake 'verification' sites that it will lead to, loaded with ActiveX controls that actually are disguised rootkits... grab some large company's key, and then you could pose as them and -- since users would be used to just running ActiveX controls from that company -- nab their computers during the "security sweep."
I love the irony. Use a technology probably responsible for more zombiefied machines than any other... in order to ostensibly secure them.
Record using Audio Hijack, but also put a splitter on the line out jack and run it into a tape recorder / DAT / MD / whatever. That way you have a backup -- if I was doing some interview over Skype that I was really concerned about getting a recording of, I'd make damn sure I was recording it in more than one way.
(Actually I probably wouldn't use Skype in the first place for anything that important, I'd just use a copper POTS line since I think it's more reliable and there are fewer failure points... but that's a separate issue.)
If you grab the line out from the computer via a tape recorder, you won't get the whole conversation; at most you'll get the other party's responses at full volume and then your own at some very reduced volume (by design, the sound of your own voice from the mic is suppressed in the output to the headphones), but what they're saying is the most important thing to record. You can always re-record your questions, if you're doing a Q&A style interview. Actually this is basically SOP in the commercial radio/TV world: you concentrate on recording the guest during the actual interview, and then you go back and re-record the questions if any of them were muddled, etc. It can get into ethical gray areas at times (I've seen it go way beyond 'gray'...), but it's how it's done. When you see an interview on 60 Minutes, those shots of Dan Rather looking all interested and concerned, shown while the other guy is talking, are likely as not probably just some B-roll they took when the guest wasn't even in the room.
Your best bet when doing an interview, just as a general technique point, is to get the guest to repeat back the question as part of their response, and put it as a statement. So instead of this: You: "Why do you like foo?" Them: "Well, because of bar and baz, of course." You have it go like this: You: "Why do you like foo?" Them: "I like foo, mostly because of bar and baz..." The advantage of the latter is that you can easily cut your question and only play their response to the audience, whether video or audio, saving a lot of time. And, in the case of the whole Skype/VOIP recording, it only requires a record of the incoming half of the call.
It's probably not legal, but is that really any different than "space shifting" using a VCR and a tape, and then giving the tape to a friend to watch afterwards?
I used to do a TON of analog taping -- and still do, truth be told (although programming a VCR is a bitch, I've found that most decent VHS VCRs have better TV tuners in them than any PC accessory, which are mainly built only to deal with the strong signals of cable TV) -- and I really don't get the hubbub. Okay, so there's the whole ease-of-use thing: it's easier to "space shift" using video-over-IP than it was using tapes, and it's easier to share; two people in two different places can't watch the same tape at the same time without time-consuming copying and quality degradation.
But I don't think it's really any sort of fundamental question: it seems like the old BetaMax issues all over again, except the media companies are hoping we'll all forget history and let them win this time.
What's ironic is that the "victory" that the media companies seek -- like the 'victory' Jack Valenti almost got over taping -- will really only hurt them in the long run. By trying to impede consumer choice at every opportunity, they only make themselves less relevant.
There's a reason it's called "the long tail" and not "the long club-foot." The tail tapers out -- it's not very big, in terms of sales volume per item. It just goes on for a while (hence, long).
Right now, the tail is chopped off because of the costs of maintaining a huge physical inventory. It's only economical to keep the stuff in stock which generates a certain number of sales per week, because it costs a significant amount of money to keep it there. Digital distribution reduces this cost -- it doesn't eliminate it -- so that it's now practical to keep a lot of stuff 'on the shelf' that wouldn't be there otherwise.
As a result of this, these "tail" items will probably get more sales than before, when they got zero exposure, but I don't think anyone's saying that they'll suddenly grow to the point of being bigger than the "body."
The point is just this: as the marginal cost of stocking an additional item approaches zero, the number of items you can keep in stock approaches infinity. (Note 'approaches,' which doesn't mean 'equals.') Or in other words, there's money to be made, and if you can keep your costs low by using new technology, you can make it.
I think people are hyping this a bit out of proportion. It's analogous to the changes that happened to retail when mail-order companies first appeared at the beginning of the last century. Suddenly you weren't restricted to buying the one model of stove that your local general store had on display -- because of centralization and transportation, it was now practical for Sears & Roebuck to stock 10 or 20 different models of stove in a single warehouse somewhere, and ship you whichever one you wanted via Rail Freight. Digital distribution takes this one step further, by making the warehousing and transportation even cheaper.
The only thing that makes digital distribution startling is just how much cheaper it makes selling the "one more copy." While the difference in costs between a general store and a centralized warehouse might mean the difference between stocking one model stove and stocking 20, digital distribution means that an online music store can have millions of titles for roughly the same cost as a physical store with a few thousand.
But take away the orders of magnitude difference in costs, and the overall change is very similar to what we've seen in other industries before.
I think you're factually correct, but your conclusions are wrong. The long tail doesn't really help content creators who can't develop a large market for their work. Period. You can't make $200,000 a year, if you only sell $100,000 worth of stuff. "New media," or "the long tail," or any other buzzwords are not going to help you. (Creative accounting might, but not for very long.)
Where I think you're off-base is to somehow imply that the situation that your hypothetical band faces is any worse than the situation they have right now. At least in this model we're discussing, they have the possibility of making a few bucks from their music alone -- perhaps enough to make simply recording music a pleasant hobby, if not a day job. It might be enough for a garage band who previously played only for themselves to justify buying some better equipment, or justify it instead of some other way of spending their free time.
The band who is not going to make a professional career out of the "long tail" music scene, certainly wouldn't be able to do it in a purely corporate, hit-driven model, where your odds of success are comparable to what you'd find by playing the Lottery (and the effect roughly the same -- for every person who strikes it rich, dozens if not hundreds of other bands go bankrupt).
If you were a band that could have done well under the old hit model, then you can still do well today; the 'hit effect' still abounds, and by cutting out the middle man, a band today or tomorrow could conceivably make more money selling less songs, but cutting out the labels' overhead.
Furthermore, in your calculations you're leaving out the band's income due to non-music sales: concert tickets, merchandise, endorsements, etc. Those make up the bulk of a popular band's revenue today, under the studio-centric model, and that probably wouldn't change immediately. People are still going to want to go and see a band they like in person, wear that band's t-shirt, and companies trying too hard to be hip are always going to be willing to pony up dough to artists willing to promote their schwag. It's a mistake to assume that a band's main source of income must come from iTunes. In reality, a smart band would treat the iTunes income as a "bonus," and use it in ways that help to increase their real revenue sources.
Nobody ever said that being a musician should be easy: that you should be able to just make music and then wait for the money to roll in. Succeeding in that business is like any other, it takes a lot of hard work; under a 'long tail' model, the most successful bands would probably be the ones that stay endlessly on tour, working venues small and large, selling high-markup merchandise, and using their music essentially as an advertising vehicle for self-promotion and to establish a fanbase. If the Internet allows them to derive income from their music directly instead of having to pay radio stations to pay it (as the studios basically used to do), all the better.
An excellent point -- there might not seem to be any way to advertise the other 90% of apparent "non hits," but that's only when you consider advertising in the traditional, fixed billboard and shelf-end type of way.
Advertising can take a lot of different forms, and I think Amazon is just scratching the surface with their recommendations. As advertising companies become less obsessed with just shotgunning a "message" out to as many eyes and ears as they can, and hoping they hit the right audience in the process, and instead catch on that you can get a lot more bang for your buck when you don't try to sell the same product to everyone, I think the "recommendation engines" type of ad-delivery will play a bigger role. (Because, when you get right down to it, the difference between a "recommendation" and an "advertisement" is just the context.)
There are always going to be hits, because people always want new stuff. Even if everyone had access to the entire back catalog of human civilization, for free and on demand, there would still be 'new hits.' Not as big, probably, because right now there are a lot of people who only listen to hits because they can't find the stuff from the back catalog that they want, but they would still happen.
What has to happen is that the music/movie companies have to realize that "hey, we make just as much money if you buy a song from 1994 than if you buy a song from 2006." That's the key thing that I don't think they've really understood yet, as evidenced by their seeming refusal to advertise anything but the newest stuff. A sale is a sale -- particularly when selling a back-catalog song doesn't mean that it's been sitting in a warehouse for 10 years, doing nothing but tying up capital.
What I see happening is more individually-targeted advertising that takes into account consumer preferences and offers up stuff from the catalogs for them to buy. Once you've accepted that it doesn't matter whether the consumer buys "MI:3" or "Dr. No," as long as they're both your products, you can advertise whichever one they're more likely to buy. In fact, it's stupid not to advertise whichever one you think they'll buy, because to do otherwise risks losing a possible sale. It just makes good marketing sense.
This requires that you have a lot of information on the purchasing patterns and preferences of each customer, but that's not hard to get (and a lot of people will give that up freely, if it means they get good recommendations).
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
The rural telecom subsidies apply to POTS lines, but I don't think they have much of an effect either way on data service. None of the money you're paying for your cable modem is going to fund some guy's cable modem in East Dogpatch, Nebraska; there's nothing stopping the telcos from deploying much faster (South-Korea-style) broadband in parts of the country with high population density and crappy 1mb service (or less) to rural parts.
So really there's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to get the same type of high-speed service in Manhattan as you can in Seoul; there's no 'forced averaging' going on by law in broadband. The only "universal service" is analog voice.
Is it just me, or has the Optimus been coming out "end of this year" for several years now? Those photos look suspiciously like ones that I'm sure I've seen before, and not recently either.
I just hope it comes out with a predefined keymap for Duke Nukem Forever...
Since they've never (at least that I've ever heard) disclosed how their encryption scheme works, so nobody outside of Skype really knows how secure it is, or if there are any backdoors. Sure, they say it doesn't have any backdoors, but they're not exactly an unbiased source.
And they never claim not to hold keys in escrow for "lawful requests from relevant authorities," as the Skype head of security puts it, in the article you linked to.
Basically, Skype is probably (okay, almost certainly) better than just using an enencrypted landline, but nobody knows by exactly how much.
I have not used anything from this company at all, but I just was reading their web site after seeing it further up in the thread, and thought maybe it was what you're looking for.
The PCI 1000 series consists of WAN adapters that can be used in Industrial Series routers or OEM products running Linux. The 1000 series includes high-performance ATM adapters with one DS3/E3/J2, OC3, or OC12 interface. 1000 series cards comply with ATM Forum specification UNI 3.1 and TM 4.0. The adapters are based on advanced ATM segmentation and reassembly controllers (SARs) that are designed to optimize PCI bus utilization for increased performance with small packets. 1000 series adapters segment and reassemble AAL0, AAL3/4 and AAL5, and the cards manage and transmit raw cells, AAL1 and AAL2.
This company makes a whole line of Linux-based routers, and as such has a bunch of PCI based cards for them, for a variety of backhaul protocols. I can't tell whether they're getting them from somebody and rebranding them, or if they're actually custom jobs and they've written their own drivers.
At any rate, since their main product is Linux-based, they have to have Linux drivers for the cards somewhere, either with the cards or distributed with the routers you're supposed to put them in -- how easy it would be to take one of their cards and work it into your DIY solution, I have no idea. (They say it will work as part of an "OEM" product...convince them to send you a 'demo'?)
Maybe if you called them up and sounded potentially interested in one of their big enterprise routers, but said that right now you couldn't afford it, and just wanted to get one of their ATM PCI cards for your existing Linux solution... (insert sob story here) they'd help you, make sure you got the right drivers, etc.
I'm pretty sure the $45 Linksys routers (and they're more like $70 now, for the ones you can flash the firmware on and have a significant amount of RAM: the "54GL") don't have GigE on the LAN side; I think they top out at 100BT. So if you just want an uplink router, they're probably fine once you get them patched up to your liking, but if you want your local net to be fast, they're not going to cut it.
A router with GigE on the LAN switch and a reasonably fast uplink, and configurable software (not a braindead web interface) is going to put you into the low end of 'real routers' I think, or at least on the very high end of consumer plastic-boxes.
While I think the guy in the article was engaging in a certain amount of hubris when he compared their "softrouter" to something like the Cisco 7200-series, I do think there's a potential market in between the upper end of the current SOHO routers and switches, and the bottom end of the enterprise market. A powerful, fast router that was easy to use (for someone coming from SOHO boxes) but which offered expandability and the ability to grow with a not-so-small-anymore business, could find a healthy niche.
What about the rule where the most tan person gets his assets frozen by the bank and moved directly to Jail at some random point, chosen by the player with the most money after the third round?
For some reason nobody ever wants to play with me anymore...
Actually, it seems to me that compound interest works for you when you use a credit card, because if you buy something on the first of the month but don't actually pay for it until the 30th, that's 29 days of interest on the money which you would not otherwise have received. As long as you pay your balance on time, the CC Co. is giving you a zero-interest loan during the purchase month, plus the grace period.
This is even more true when you consider that paying with cash requires you to take out money ahead of time (and unless you like going to the ATM daily, usually about a week ahead of time), so you're losing even more interest that way.
This of course assumes that you're accruing interest on your checking account, which seems pretty common these days.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, but by being more responsible than the average consumer (which is not hard) you can come pretty close.
Well actually, this might be the ideal way to teach kids about money.
As far as they'll probably be concerned during their lifetimes, money will be nothing but an abstract concept -- represented by the digits of a bank balance on an ATM screen or computer monitor. To a lesser extent, it's the numbers you write on a check or see in a bankbook, but both of those things will probably go the way of the dodo during your kids' tenures on this planet.
Very little money these days actually passes through someone's hands during a transaction. It probably makes sense to teach kids about money with simulated electronic instruments, because that's how they're going to deal with it. The more comfortable they get with the idea that those numbers on the screen have real value, and are eqivalent to actual stuff, here in the physical world, the more successful they'll probably be.
Likewise, you're probably better getting your kid a passbook savings account with no minimum balance than a piggy bank: the idea of making regular deposits and watching the balance grow due to interest will probably be a better learning experience than collecting coins in a jar would be.
The credit card industry makes its money off of people who run balances, and consequently pay them interest. (To a much lesser extent they make money off of merchant fees, but that's a different issue.) It is quite possible, if you are responsible, to use a credit card and never pay the card-company a cent. If you play the cashback games, you can even come out slightly ahead.
If you do not run a balance, and pay your bill at the end of the month (effectively using your "credit" card as a charge card -- or better yet, by just having a charge card), then credit cards are merely a convenient form of payment, complete with a nice itemized receipt at the end of the month.
I use them in lieu of cash because I don't like carrying around change. I don't like going to an ATM to get cash, and I like carrying around loads of small bills and coins even less. Plastic's more convenient, and it provides a nice way to keep track of what I spent my money on (by dumping the data into Quicken at the end of the month, I can tell you where every penny of my outflows went over the past several years; unless you have an absolutely stunning memory or collect register receipts obsessively, you can't do that with cash).
If you are spending more money than you are taking in, then you have a problem -- period. This is regardless of whether you are using a credit card, or writing checks to take advantage of the "float," or borrowing from your uncle. Sometimes it can be advantageous to borrow money (buying a house/car, etc.), but it should be carefully done, and credit cards are rarely the way to do it.
A lot of people, myself included, don't like debit cards. I refuse to use them; I like the idea of having the credit company's money on the line if they fuck up, instead of mine; not to mention what might happen if I lose the card -- debit cards almost always have shorter reporting deadlines. (Personally, I prefer charge cards with a defined limit to either credit cards or debit cards, and they're what I use almost exclusively.)
The only reason not to have a credit card is if you think you can't deal with the temptation caused by having the ability to spend beyond your means. However, in my opinion that's not a problem due to the credit card, it's a problem due to you.
I think I have heard about the case you're mentioning. Although I can't find it right now, I don't think that case is as broad as you're thinking it is. IIRC (and I thought it was in Indiana, but maybe not) the violation was not a privacy-rights one but had to do with election law, and the prohibitions against interfering with an election. If they had just been copying down the license plates of people going into a grocery store, I'm not sure the same thing would have applied.
If you can find details on the case I'd be interested in reading the opinion, but I'm pretty sure that there was something about it being an election and possible interference with that election that made it special. There are quite a few things which are normally OK in a lot of situations which become verboten in the context of an election and particularly people going to vote -- heck, your whole first Amendment rights get abridged right around polling places; they are rather severe special cases.
I don't think your GPS tracker comparisons are apt, either. It's more like security camera footage. If I have a convenience store, and in it I have a security camera, I have a record of who came into my store. If I keep the video footage forever (which seems a little farfetched, but isn't outside the realm of possibility), then I go back to any particular time and see who was in my store. It's not particularly well-indexed -- it's difficult just from a video file to type in "John Doe" and figure out when he was in my store, but with really good facial recognition software you could probably do it. In a small town, with a limited number of customers, it would be easy to do even manually. What seems to be bothering you is not the retention, it's the indexing; the searchability.
At any rate, I think this argument is basically a pointless one to have. The future will be indexed, and it will be searchable. There are too many technologies working towards this point; the law is ultimately going to be a speed bump over which society will go regardless. You have video cameras and automatic facial recognition, license plate recognition, store-specific tracking systems, credit-card and financial-transaction systems, and the existing databases owned and sold by the consumer-information companies. Not to mention the steadily decreasing price of computer power and storage -- cross-referencing that was impractical 20 years ago is trivial today, and stuff that's equally impractical today will be likewise trivial in another two decades. Any place you have something that can be used as a unique identifier, somebody is going to put it into a database; eventually somebody is going to join those databases if they can find something in common between them.
Claiming an unenumerated right to anonymity in public -- when we don't even have an enumerated right to privacy at the Constitutional level at all -- probably isn't going to fly very far. It might work in particular special cases, because of the "pneumbra" of other rights (I could see areas of anonymity carved out around polling places and churches, and the admissibility of such data severely limited in court based on circumstance), but I think you're deluding yourself if you think it'll have any measurable effect on whether the data gets collected and indexed in the first place.
I would support making them work to pay full restitution for their crime. With interest.
And they couldn't pay this out of existing assets -- this is to keep rich folks from simply walking -- it would have to be paid out of money earned by labor after the crime, in some industry chosen by the judge. And this would be after recouping the State for their imprisonment.
They could take some of those jobs the politicians keep saying that we need illegal immigrants for, because "Americans won't do them." After a few weeks in an 8x8, even scouring the inside of a sewage-treatment holding tank somewhere, sweating your ass off tarring roofs, or picking strawberries from dawn till dusk, probably seems positively fascinating.
Obviously, violators who are security risks and can't be let out into society would have to be given your basic in-prison license-plate stamping jobs, but there are probably a lot of non-violent, low-security inmates who could be let out during the day with some sort of GPS collar on to work and come back at night. If they didn't return, you could have a standard reward for bringing them back and have bounty hunters to it (and add that to their tab, naturally).
It's ridiculous that we have people just sitting around in prison, essentially doing nothing but being a cost to society after they've already been a cost to society (doing whatever it was that landed them in prison in the first place). At the very least, prison should be a break-even proposition. There's more than enough crappy manual labor to be done, particularly in the agricultural industries; we might as well put our prisoners to work, especially since the jobs are just going to illegal immigrants anyway -- the old argument that they'd be taking the jobs from legitimate industry doesn't apply.
I was thinking more of getting a reflective, stick-on mailbox number, and pasting it somewhere on the back of your car about level with the license plate. I'm not sure how 'smart' the cameras are, but maybe it only reads the first 6 or 7 digits? So if you had
(on left bumper:) XG (on plate:) PXW 123
then the system would read "XGP XW1" and throw away the rest of the information.
At the very least you might confuse it, and you could always come up with some excuse as to why the numbers were there (say, fleet vehicle identification, etc.). I guess it would all depend how good the camera systems are at identifying the boundaries of the plates. Given that the plates are of known dimensions, this might not work. Be interesting to find out, though.
I see this moreso being used by places like McDonalds. They could track who buys what when going through the drive thru. Then they could see you ordering and using your past history target you on foods you've ordered before and may be more likely to order again.
Yeah, like maybe they could remember that I speak English and try to have someone on the other end of the intercom who likewise speaks English, to avoid my usual drive-around-to-the-window-and-make-hand-gestures method of ordering.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you outsourced the intercom-voice-person (say, to India, over VoIP -- which they already have experimented with), this could actually make a certain amount of sense. You drive up in your car, it connects you to an operator in your language, and displays the order to the kitchen staff in theirs.
And if there were someone hanging out in a public place, making notes of what vehicles he sees, that would be one thing. Someone would be sure to call the cops to report a "possible terrorist" who is casing the place.
I think the real problem here is that a person who is doing an entirely lawful, harmless activity -- sitting in a parking lot and writing down license-plate numbers, is today accused of being a terrorist, for no good reason at all.
That -- and even worse, the casual acceptance of it -- should frighten you a whole lot more than anything related to these license-plate readers do.
I think you'd need an additional level of security for people to use a system of that.
Here's how it would work: if you wanted to participate in the tagging system, you'd get a sticker with an extra two alphanumeric digits, which you'd paste somewhere onto the back of your car. These numbers would ONLY be on the back of your car (i.e., the DMV would not know them). The system would then ID your car through the hash of the concatenation of your plate number and the randomly-assigned characters. The randomly-assigned characters would just serve to make the hashed values not equal to anything that the DMV would have on file, so that they couldn't just run all of their plates against the database, and send people tickets en masse.
Over time, the DMV with help from the police would be able to create their own database of stickers on cars, and thus access your record... but they'd have to visually inspect your car (or read it using one of the plate readers) in order to do this, and store it in the database.
The idea is basically thus: you want to make the key to the database something that's easy for somebody who's looking at your car to recover, but hard for someone who's only has the DMV records to recover. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it, but there's probably a way.
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I didn't see anywhere in his post where he was implying that there was some "super intelligent group of people controlling the world." Your response was a non sequitur.
The point is that if a government has been trying systemically to put one over on its citizens for as long as a generation or more -- as I think the US Government clearly has -- it's very difficult to ever know when you've uncovered everything they're hiding. Obviously it's the most boneheaded schemes that get discovered first, followed by the more subtle ones, but there's always a significant chance that there's some internal spying going on that is just less-sloppily done than the stuff we've found out about so far.
I think that's a pretty good point; I think it's likely to the point of near necessity that we haven't heard the last of the government's internal surveillance efforts. Considering how the ones we know about today were made public, it's clear that more tightly-managed (and perhaps more narrow in scope) projects probably would have remained hidden.
I think you need to check how tight your tinfoil hat is; I have yet to see the news accuse something of being the work of "Islamic terrorists" when there wasn't good reason for that to be true.
And, quite frankly, given recent history, if a major terrorist attack were to happen in the US tomorrow, I'd say they're probably within the realm of justified speculation to ask whether it was 'Islamic' terrorists. You know, with 9/11, Madrid, London...it's not some huge conspiratorial leap.
It's one thing to not accuse groups of people out-of-hand without evidence, but it's quite another to delude oneself about the nature of a particular enemy because you're seemingly uncomfortable with it. There are many Muslims in the world who are not strapping on explosive vests and buying plane tickets for the US; I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. However, a rather sizable number of recent terrorist attacks have come from groups motivated by a violent religious ideology, and we'd be fools to just ignore that.
As other people have pointed out, I think your estimates of the data that's actually being sent 'down the wire' from the eye to the brain is probably very high.
This came up in another discussion a while back, but I suspect that even an average digital camera with a good, wide-angle lens probably captures in a single frame more raw information than the human eye does from the same vantage point in a single glance.
You only think that your eye is a really good camera. In reality, it might be pretty bad -- I suspect that if you could watch the "raw feed" from a human eye on a TV screen, you might find it rather disappointing without all the postprocessing done in the brain's visual cortex. Only a small part of it near the center would be high resolution; only the center region would be color, and the periphery would be just good enough to detect movement, not much else.
I guess in a way you could call this "compression," but in reality it's more a credit to the brain and the way the 'receiver' is designed, to create the feeling of a huge, high-refresh-rate, 180-degree, full color, 3-D panorama, from not particularly impressive source imagery.
Basically, the human visual system makes up for the limitations of its cameras (the eyes) in post. In the synthetic machine world, we do not currently have the processing power nor the software necessary to do the kind of synthesization that the brain does, so instead we give the machines better 'eyes,' because building cameras is something we do know how to do.
A while ago, I heard someone who was involved in machine vision talk about something called the 'picket fence problem.' A person can pretty easily assemble a good idea of the scene on the other side of a picket fence, or a board with a few holes in it, by moving their head back and forth and then re-assembling the narrow-angle views into something more comprehensive, all in real time. I'm not sure whether machine-vision is there yet today (this was quite a while back), but it's a pretty non-trivial process, or so I was led to understand.
More interesting than the 'bitrate equivalence' of the optic nerve, would be some sort of estimation of the "processing power" done by an average person's visual cortex while doing some basic visual activity. I suspect that the result might be surprisingly high, maybe bordering on what would be supercomputer levels right now, solved using current methods.
It's closer than you think; many public transit systems already have the capability.
The only thing stopping them from doing it right now is allowing people to purchase with cash. Cash is a problem, because it's harder to trace cash than it is to trace credit cards.
I'll use for example the metro system near where I live, in Washington DC. It's an admittedly sophisticated system compared to a lot of other places, but it's nothing that futuristic. You can pay to use the metro (including buses) in one of two ways: you use either a credit card or cash, and you put the amount onto either a semi-reusable cardboard mag-stripe card, or a reusable RFID card. The RFID cards aren't (I don't think) stored value; they just chirp a serial number. So if you use one of those, it's fairly trivial to track you throughout the system, particularly if you load it with a credit card. Find the transaction where you added money to it, get the serial number of the card you put money on, and then follow that serial number around as you use it.
With cash the problem becomes one of identification. You can still track someone around the system using their stored-value mag-stripe card, but identifying someone as they come into the system if they pay with cash is still a significant problem. The way to get around this would be either by requiring everyone to use some non-anonymous form of payment to get in (which might mean scanning a government photo ID when paying with cash) or automated face recognition. Since most public transport is filled with cameras as is, the latter might be the way to go.
Of course none of this keeps you from buying a ticket (RFID or regular) and handing it to another person, so it wouldn't be foolproof, but I would be surprised if the police haven't used the electronic ticketing systems to figure out where suspects under pursuit enter and leave already. It's such an obvious use of the technology I can't imagine that they haven't, especially given the very high-crime areas that public-transport systems tend to run through.
Personally, I feel that it won't be very long in the future when using cash is the mark of someone suspicious. (It already is, in large quantities and in certain places -- bought an airline ticket with cash lately?) That is, anyone using cash to purchase anything from food to movie tickets will be forced through additional scrutiny, not to mention odd looks from "honest" people (using their Visa cards as God intended).
What's most amusing about that is the number of fake 'verification' sites that it will lead to, loaded with ActiveX controls that actually are disguised rootkits ... grab some large company's key, and then you could pose as them and -- since users would be used to just running ActiveX controls from that company -- nab their computers during the "security sweep."
... in order to ostensibly secure them.
I love the irony. Use a technology probably responsible for more zombiefied machines than any other
Somewhere, a minor god is laughing at us.
Why not do both?
... but that's a separate issue.)
Record using Audio Hijack, but also put a splitter on the line out jack and run it into a tape recorder / DAT / MD / whatever. That way you have a backup -- if I was doing some interview over Skype that I was really concerned about getting a recording of, I'd make damn sure I was recording it in more than one way.
(Actually I probably wouldn't use Skype in the first place for anything that important, I'd just use a copper POTS line since I think it's more reliable and there are fewer failure points
If you grab the line out from the computer via a tape recorder, you won't get the whole conversation; at most you'll get the other party's responses at full volume and then your own at some very reduced volume (by design, the sound of your own voice from the mic is suppressed in the output to the headphones), but what they're saying is the most important thing to record. You can always re-record your questions, if you're doing a Q&A style interview. Actually this is basically SOP in the commercial radio/TV world: you concentrate on recording the guest during the actual interview, and then you go back and re-record the questions if any of them were muddled, etc. It can get into ethical gray areas at times (I've seen it go way beyond 'gray'...), but it's how it's done. When you see an interview on 60 Minutes, those shots of Dan Rather looking all interested and concerned, shown while the other guy is talking, are likely as not probably just some B-roll they took when the guest wasn't even in the room.
Your best bet when doing an interview, just as a general technique point, is to get the guest to repeat back the question as part of their response, and put it as a statement. So instead of this:
You: "Why do you like foo?"
Them: "Well, because of bar and baz, of course."
You have it go like this:
You: "Why do you like foo?"
Them: "I like foo, mostly because of bar and baz..."
The advantage of the latter is that you can easily cut your question and only play their response to the audience, whether video or audio, saving a lot of time. And, in the case of the whole Skype/VOIP recording, it only requires a record of the incoming half of the call.
/me scratches head ...
It's probably not legal, but is that really any different than "space shifting" using a VCR and a tape, and then giving the tape to a friend to watch afterwards?
I used to do a TON of analog taping -- and still do, truth be told (although programming a VCR is a bitch, I've found that most decent VHS VCRs have better TV tuners in them than any PC accessory, which are mainly built only to deal with the strong signals of cable TV) -- and I really don't get the hubbub. Okay, so there's the whole ease-of-use thing: it's easier to "space shift" using video-over-IP than it was using tapes, and it's easier to share; two people in two different places can't watch the same tape at the same time without time-consuming copying and quality degradation.
But I don't think it's really any sort of fundamental question: it seems like the old BetaMax issues all over again, except the media companies are hoping we'll all forget history and let them win this time.
What's ironic is that the "victory" that the media companies seek -- like the 'victory' Jack Valenti almost got over taping -- will really only hurt them in the long run. By trying to impede consumer choice at every opportunity, they only make themselves less relevant.
I'm glad somebody pointed that out.
There's a reason it's called "the long tail" and not "the long club-foot." The tail tapers out -- it's not very big, in terms of sales volume per item. It just goes on for a while (hence, long).
Right now, the tail is chopped off because of the costs of maintaining a huge physical inventory. It's only economical to keep the stuff in stock which generates a certain number of sales per week, because it costs a significant amount of money to keep it there. Digital distribution reduces this cost -- it doesn't eliminate it -- so that it's now practical to keep a lot of stuff 'on the shelf' that wouldn't be there otherwise.
As a result of this, these "tail" items will probably get more sales than before, when they got zero exposure, but I don't think anyone's saying that they'll suddenly grow to the point of being bigger than the "body."
The point is just this: as the marginal cost of stocking an additional item approaches zero, the number of items you can keep in stock approaches infinity. (Note 'approaches,' which doesn't mean 'equals.') Or in other words, there's money to be made, and if you can keep your costs low by using new technology, you can make it.
I think people are hyping this a bit out of proportion. It's analogous to the changes that happened to retail when mail-order companies first appeared at the beginning of the last century. Suddenly you weren't restricted to buying the one model of stove that your local general store had on display -- because of centralization and transportation, it was now practical for Sears & Roebuck to stock 10 or 20 different models of stove in a single warehouse somewhere, and ship you whichever one you wanted via Rail Freight. Digital distribution takes this one step further, by making the warehousing and transportation even cheaper.
The only thing that makes digital distribution startling is just how much cheaper it makes selling the "one more copy." While the difference in costs between a general store and a centralized warehouse might mean the difference between stocking one model stove and stocking 20, digital distribution means that an online music store can have millions of titles for roughly the same cost as a physical store with a few thousand.
But take away the orders of magnitude difference in costs, and the overall change is very similar to what we've seen in other industries before.
I think you're factually correct, but your conclusions are wrong. The long tail doesn't really help content creators who can't develop a large market for their work. Period. You can't make $200,000 a year, if you only sell $100,000 worth of stuff. "New media," or "the long tail," or any other buzzwords are not going to help you. (Creative accounting might, but not for very long.)
Where I think you're off-base is to somehow imply that the situation that your hypothetical band faces is any worse than the situation they have right now. At least in this model we're discussing, they have the possibility of making a few bucks from their music alone -- perhaps enough to make simply recording music a pleasant hobby, if not a day job. It might be enough for a garage band who previously played only for themselves to justify buying some better equipment, or justify it instead of some other way of spending their free time.
The band who is not going to make a professional career out of the "long tail" music scene, certainly wouldn't be able to do it in a purely corporate, hit-driven model, where your odds of success are comparable to what you'd find by playing the Lottery (and the effect roughly the same -- for every person who strikes it rich, dozens if not hundreds of other bands go bankrupt).
If you were a band that could have done well under the old hit model, then you can still do well today; the 'hit effect' still abounds, and by cutting out the middle man, a band today or tomorrow could conceivably make more money selling less songs, but cutting out the labels' overhead.
Furthermore, in your calculations you're leaving out the band's income due to non-music sales: concert tickets, merchandise, endorsements, etc. Those make up the bulk of a popular band's revenue today, under the studio-centric model, and that probably wouldn't change immediately. People are still going to want to go and see a band they like in person, wear that band's t-shirt, and companies trying too hard to be hip are always going to be willing to pony up dough to artists willing to promote their schwag. It's a mistake to assume that a band's main source of income must come from iTunes. In reality, a smart band would treat the iTunes income as a "bonus," and use it in ways that help to increase their real revenue sources.
Nobody ever said that being a musician should be easy: that you should be able to just make music and then wait for the money to roll in. Succeeding in that business is like any other, it takes a lot of hard work; under a 'long tail' model, the most successful bands would probably be the ones that stay endlessly on tour, working venues small and large, selling high-markup merchandise, and using their music essentially as an advertising vehicle for self-promotion and to establish a fanbase. If the Internet allows them to derive income from their music directly instead of having to pay radio stations to pay it (as the studios basically used to do), all the better.
An excellent point -- there might not seem to be any way to advertise the other 90% of apparent "non hits," but that's only when you consider advertising in the traditional, fixed billboard and shelf-end type of way.
Advertising can take a lot of different forms, and I think Amazon is just scratching the surface with their recommendations. As advertising companies become less obsessed with just shotgunning a "message" out to as many eyes and ears as they can, and hoping they hit the right audience in the process, and instead catch on that you can get a lot more bang for your buck when you don't try to sell the same product to everyone, I think the "recommendation engines" type of ad-delivery will play a bigger role. (Because, when you get right down to it, the difference between a "recommendation" and an "advertisement" is just the context.)
There are always going to be hits, because people always want new stuff. Even if everyone had access to the entire back catalog of human civilization, for free and on demand, there would still be 'new hits.' Not as big, probably, because right now there are a lot of people who only listen to hits because they can't find the stuff from the back catalog that they want, but they would still happen.
What has to happen is that the music/movie companies have to realize that "hey, we make just as much money if you buy a song from 1994 than if you buy a song from 2006." That's the key thing that I don't think they've really understood yet, as evidenced by their seeming refusal to advertise anything but the newest stuff. A sale is a sale -- particularly when selling a back-catalog song doesn't mean that it's been sitting in a warehouse for 10 years, doing nothing but tying up capital.
What I see happening is more individually-targeted advertising that takes into account consumer preferences and offers up stuff from the catalogs for them to buy. Once you've accepted that it doesn't matter whether the consumer buys "MI:3" or "Dr. No," as long as they're both your products, you can advertise whichever one they're more likely to buy. In fact, it's stupid not to advertise whichever one you think they'll buy, because to do otherwise risks losing a possible sale. It just makes good marketing sense.
This requires that you have a lot of information on the purchasing patterns and preferences of each customer, but that's not hard to get (and a lot of people will give that up freely, if it means they get good recommendations).
As to why you see high prices even in cities - The U.S. has laws mandating rural telecom subsidies, effectively averaging the population density across the country as far as telecom prices are concerned.
The rural telecom subsidies apply to POTS lines, but I don't think they have much of an effect either way on data service. None of the money you're paying for your cable modem is going to fund some guy's cable modem in East Dogpatch, Nebraska; there's nothing stopping the telcos from deploying much faster (South-Korea-style) broadband in parts of the country with high population density and crappy 1mb service (or less) to rural parts.
So really there's no good reason why you shouldn't be able to get the same type of high-speed service in Manhattan as you can in Seoul; there's no 'forced averaging' going on by law in broadband. The only "universal service" is analog voice.
Is it just me, or has the Optimus been coming out "end of this year" for several years now? Those photos look suspiciously like ones that I'm sure I've seen before, and not recently either.
I just hope it comes out with a predefined keymap for Duke Nukem Forever...
Since they've never (at least that I've ever heard) disclosed how their encryption scheme works, so nobody outside of Skype really knows how secure it is, or if there are any backdoors. Sure, they say it doesn't have any backdoors, but they're not exactly an unbiased source.
And they never claim not to hold keys in escrow for "lawful requests from relevant authorities," as the Skype head of security puts it, in the article you linked to.
Basically, Skype is probably (okay, almost certainly) better than just using an enencrypted landline, but nobody knows by exactly how much.
Check out:
http://www.imagestream.com/PCI_1000.html This company makes a whole line of Linux-based routers, and as such has a bunch of PCI based cards for them, for a variety of backhaul protocols. I can't tell whether they're getting them from somebody and rebranding them, or if they're actually custom jobs and they've written their own drivers.
At any rate, since their main product is Linux-based, they have to have Linux drivers for the cards somewhere, either with the cards or distributed with the routers you're supposed to put them in -- how easy it would be to take one of their cards and work it into your DIY solution, I have no idea. (They say it will work as part of an "OEM" product...convince them to send you a 'demo'?)
Maybe if you called them up and sounded potentially interested in one of their big enterprise routers, but said that right now you couldn't afford it, and just wanted to get one of their ATM PCI cards for your existing Linux solution
Hey, it's worth a try, right?
I'm pretty sure the $45 Linksys routers (and they're more like $70 now, for the ones you can flash the firmware on and have a significant amount of RAM: the "54GL") don't have GigE on the LAN side; I think they top out at 100BT. So if you just want an uplink router, they're probably fine once you get them patched up to your liking, but if you want your local net to be fast, they're not going to cut it.
A router with GigE on the LAN switch and a reasonably fast uplink, and configurable software (not a braindead web interface) is going to put you into the low end of 'real routers' I think, or at least on the very high end of consumer plastic-boxes.
While I think the guy in the article was engaging in a certain amount of hubris when he compared their "softrouter" to something like the Cisco 7200-series, I do think there's a potential market in between the upper end of the current SOHO routers and switches, and the bottom end of the enterprise market. A powerful, fast router that was easy to use (for someone coming from SOHO boxes) but which offered expandability and the ability to grow with a not-so-small-anymore business, could find a healthy niche.
What about the rule where the most tan person gets his assets frozen by the bank and moved directly to Jail at some random point, chosen by the player with the most money after the third round?
For some reason nobody ever wants to play with me anymore...
Actually, it seems to me that compound interest works for you when you use a credit card, because if you buy something on the first of the month but don't actually pay for it until the 30th, that's 29 days of interest on the money which you would not otherwise have received. As long as you pay your balance on time, the CC Co. is giving you a zero-interest loan during the purchase month, plus the grace period.
This is even more true when you consider that paying with cash requires you to take out money ahead of time (and unless you like going to the ATM daily, usually about a week ahead of time), so you're losing even more interest that way.
This of course assumes that you're accruing interest on your checking account, which seems pretty common these days.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, but by being more responsible than the average consumer (which is not hard) you can come pretty close.
Well actually, this might be the ideal way to teach kids about money.
As far as they'll probably be concerned during their lifetimes, money will be nothing but an abstract concept -- represented by the digits of a bank balance on an ATM screen or computer monitor. To a lesser extent, it's the numbers you write on a check or see in a bankbook, but both of those things will probably go the way of the dodo during your kids' tenures on this planet.
Very little money these days actually passes through someone's hands during a transaction. It probably makes sense to teach kids about money with simulated electronic instruments, because that's how they're going to deal with it. The more comfortable they get with the idea that those numbers on the screen have real value, and are eqivalent to actual stuff, here in the physical world, the more successful they'll probably be.
Likewise, you're probably better getting your kid a passbook savings account with no minimum balance than a piggy bank: the idea of making regular deposits and watching the balance grow due to interest will probably be a better learning experience than collecting coins in a jar would be.
Now I think you're being a little ridiculous.
The credit card industry makes its money off of people who run balances, and consequently pay them interest. (To a much lesser extent they make money off of merchant fees, but that's a different issue.) It is quite possible, if you are responsible, to use a credit card and never pay the card-company a cent. If you play the cashback games, you can even come out slightly ahead.
If you do not run a balance, and pay your bill at the end of the month (effectively using your "credit" card as a charge card -- or better yet, by just having a charge card), then credit cards are merely a convenient form of payment, complete with a nice itemized receipt at the end of the month.
I use them in lieu of cash because I don't like carrying around change. I don't like going to an ATM to get cash, and I like carrying around loads of small bills and coins even less. Plastic's more convenient, and it provides a nice way to keep track of what I spent my money on (by dumping the data into Quicken at the end of the month, I can tell you where every penny of my outflows went over the past several years; unless you have an absolutely stunning memory or collect register receipts obsessively, you can't do that with cash).
If you are spending more money than you are taking in, then you have a problem -- period. This is regardless of whether you are using a credit card, or writing checks to take advantage of the "float," or borrowing from your uncle. Sometimes it can be advantageous to borrow money (buying a house/car, etc.), but it should be carefully done, and credit cards are rarely the way to do it.
A lot of people, myself included, don't like debit cards. I refuse to use them; I like the idea of having the credit company's money on the line if they fuck up, instead of mine; not to mention what might happen if I lose the card -- debit cards almost always have shorter reporting deadlines. (Personally, I prefer charge cards with a defined limit to either credit cards or debit cards, and they're what I use almost exclusively.)
The only reason not to have a credit card is if you think you can't deal with the temptation caused by having the ability to spend beyond your means. However, in my opinion that's not a problem due to the credit card, it's a problem due to you.
I think I have heard about the case you're mentioning. Although I can't find it right now, I don't think that case is as broad as you're thinking it is. IIRC (and I thought it was in Indiana, but maybe not) the violation was not a privacy-rights one but had to do with election law, and the prohibitions against interfering with an election. If they had just been copying down the license plates of people going into a grocery store, I'm not sure the same thing would have applied.
If you can find details on the case I'd be interested in reading the opinion, but I'm pretty sure that there was something about it being an election and possible interference with that election that made it special. There are quite a few things which are normally OK in a lot of situations which become verboten in the context of an election and particularly people going to vote -- heck, your whole first Amendment rights get abridged right around polling places; they are rather severe special cases.
I don't think your GPS tracker comparisons are apt, either. It's more like security camera footage. If I have a convenience store, and in it I have a security camera, I have a record of who came into my store. If I keep the video footage forever (which seems a little farfetched, but isn't outside the realm of possibility), then I go back to any particular time and see who was in my store. It's not particularly well-indexed -- it's difficult just from a video file to type in "John Doe" and figure out when he was in my store, but with really good facial recognition software you could probably do it. In a small town, with a limited number of customers, it would be easy to do even manually. What seems to be bothering you is not the retention, it's the indexing; the searchability.
At any rate, I think this argument is basically a pointless one to have. The future will be indexed, and it will be searchable. There are too many technologies working towards this point; the law is ultimately going to be a speed bump over which society will go regardless. You have video cameras and automatic facial recognition, license plate recognition, store-specific tracking systems, credit-card and financial-transaction systems, and the existing databases owned and sold by the consumer-information companies. Not to mention the steadily decreasing price of computer power and storage -- cross-referencing that was impractical 20 years ago is trivial today, and stuff that's equally impractical today will be likewise trivial in another two decades. Any place you have something that can be used as a unique identifier, somebody is going to put it into a database; eventually somebody is going to join those databases if they can find something in common between them.
Claiming an unenumerated right to anonymity in public -- when we don't even have an enumerated right to privacy at the Constitutional level at all -- probably isn't going to fly very far. It might work in particular special cases, because of the "pneumbra" of other rights (I could see areas of anonymity carved out around polling places and churches, and the admissibility of such data severely limited in court based on circumstance), but I think you're deluding yourself if you think it'll have any measurable effect on whether the data gets collected and indexed in the first place.
I would support making them work to pay full restitution for their crime. With interest.
And they couldn't pay this out of existing assets -- this is to keep rich folks from simply walking -- it would have to be paid out of money earned by labor after the crime, in some industry chosen by the judge. And this would be after recouping the State for their imprisonment.
They could take some of those jobs the politicians keep saying that we need illegal immigrants for, because "Americans won't do them." After a few weeks in an 8x8, even scouring the inside of a sewage-treatment holding tank somewhere, sweating your ass off tarring roofs, or picking strawberries from dawn till dusk, probably seems positively fascinating.
Obviously, violators who are security risks and can't be let out into society would have to be given your basic in-prison license-plate stamping jobs, but there are probably a lot of non-violent, low-security inmates who could be let out during the day with some sort of GPS collar on to work and come back at night. If they didn't return, you could have a standard reward for bringing them back and have bounty hunters to it (and add that to their tab, naturally).
It's ridiculous that we have people just sitting around in prison, essentially doing nothing but being a cost to society after they've already been a cost to society (doing whatever it was that landed them in prison in the first place). At the very least, prison should be a break-even proposition. There's more than enough crappy manual labor to be done, particularly in the agricultural industries; we might as well put our prisoners to work, especially since the jobs are just going to illegal immigrants anyway -- the old argument that they'd be taking the jobs from legitimate industry doesn't apply.
I was thinking more of getting a reflective, stick-on mailbox number, and pasting it somewhere on the back of your car about level with the license plate. I'm not sure how 'smart' the cameras are, but maybe it only reads the first 6 or 7 digits? So if you had
(on left bumper:) XG (on plate:) PXW 123
then the system would read "XGP XW1" and throw away the rest of the information.
At the very least you might confuse it, and you could always come up with some excuse as to why the numbers were there (say, fleet vehicle identification, etc.). I guess it would all depend how good the camera systems are at identifying the boundaries of the plates. Given that the plates are of known dimensions, this might not work. Be interesting to find out, though.
I see this moreso being used by places like McDonalds. They could track who buys what when going through the drive thru. Then they could see you ordering and using your past history target you on foods you've ordered before and may be more likely to order again.
Yeah, like maybe they could remember that I speak English and try to have someone on the other end of the intercom who likewise speaks English, to avoid my usual drive-around-to-the-window-and-make-hand-gestures method of ordering.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you outsourced the intercom-voice-person (say, to India, over VoIP -- which they already have experimented with), this could actually make a certain amount of sense. You drive up in your car, it connects you to an operator in your language, and displays the order to the kitchen staff in theirs.
And if there were someone hanging out in a public place, making notes of what vehicles he sees, that would be one thing. Someone would be sure to call the cops to report a "possible terrorist" who is casing the place.
I think the real problem here is that a person who is doing an entirely lawful, harmless activity -- sitting in a parking lot and writing down license-plate numbers, is today accused of being a terrorist, for no good reason at all.
That -- and even worse, the casual acceptance of it -- should frighten you a whole lot more than anything related to these license-plate readers do.
I think you'd need an additional level of security for people to use a system of that.
... but they'd have to visually inspect your car (or read it using one of the plate readers) in order to do this, and store it in the database.
Here's how it would work: if you wanted to participate in the tagging system, you'd get a sticker with an extra two alphanumeric digits, which you'd paste somewhere onto the back of your car. These numbers would ONLY be on the back of your car (i.e., the DMV would not know them). The system would then ID your car through the hash of the concatenation of your plate number and the randomly-assigned characters. The randomly-assigned characters would just serve to make the hashed values not equal to anything that the DMV would have on file, so that they couldn't just run all of their plates against the database, and send people tickets en masse.
Over time, the DMV with help from the police would be able to create their own database of stickers on cars, and thus access your record
The idea is basically thus: you want to make the key to the database something that's easy for somebody who's looking at your car to recover, but hard for someone who's only has the DMV records to recover. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it, but there's probably a way.