This is already pretty much in place, number plate recognition is already being used in conjunction with CCTV in loads of places and only a month ago it was used to find a get away car within days, of police shooting suspects who went from Bradford to London. This seems like a combination of special interests: The police obviously want more speeding revenue (who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to have the police make money directly from the crimes they solve?), anti-terrorism agencies want to know who blew something up, intelligence agencies probably want to find whistle blowers and people they 'dont like' and im sure car insurance companies want to use this for their pay-as-you-drive services. If it wasn't for the data protection act im sure a nice collection of companies would to see too.
Of course the system could potentially be used for good - I mean considering its coverage I would hope, no, expect, no, demand, that within a month of it being turned on, car theft will have dropped to a fraction and recovery rates for stolen vehicles will be almost 100%. If this isnt the case then I would like to know why?
This is just one of many creeping surveillance systems, people over here have given up caring anymore, I just assume im always on some sort of camera as soon as I leave my house, im probably right. We have bigger issues to deal with at the moment - such as the parliament protest-without-notice ban, Guantanamo bay, 30 day arrests, trials without juries, shoot to kill polices and the drain on our military by wasting its time in Iraq etc.
I will support this law only if the owner of the VIEL patent agrees, indefinitely, to not only waive all royalties but to in-fact pay manufactures a royalty for every single unit they have to produce with this system in it.
This is bullshit, what did it take - all of 3 minutes to come up with? Is this the best Microsoft can do, some bullshit instant messenger system that just locates users by phone, big fucking deal. The technology to track phones is already commercial, Google and the major IM players will have cornered this in a couple of years anyway. It might be a nice feature but its hardly the revolution
That is until everyone realises and starts making plain adverts, then when they are all plain a few 'cutting edge' advertisers will make flashy adverts again, etc..
I have to say the launch was a real let down. The first episodes were great, the flying around the north sea for hours, the Russian base complete with guards and Russian bureaucracy it was absolutely brilliant and the attention to detail was awe inspiring. It just went down hill from there, its like they ran out of money and so everything else is a load of crap. Its a shame because they really could have pulled it off, when they came off that plane and were escorted to the base they were totally convinced they were in the middle of Russia.
Why dont they cut the marketing crap and give it to me already, I want coffee coke! give it to me NOW! damnit this is London why is France getting it first? Don't they understand how much I want coffee flavoured coke? ive been waiting years for something that gives you the buzz of a good line with the after taste of a good coffee damnit! Seriously the one new fad I actually like the sound of and they dont even want to sell it to me TAKE MY MONEY PLEASE!
I remember a few years back in the dial-up days trying to get net access in Italy, it took a whole lot of documents and bureaucracy, we had to get a friend who was a real resident to put it under his name. I don't think you can do anything in that country without atleast having some kind of passport or ID photocopied and stamped.
For anyone who didn't RTFA and had the same first thought as me: yes it does have some kind of motorisation and weighting to keep it up-right and allow mobility.
Yeah sure, lets go and replace all the male game heroes and Hollywood actors with pale, thin geeks instead of bulky, muscular chick magnets, because surely that's sexist too?
oh come on, that whole show was comedy genius, anyone who's spent 5 minutes in the 'new media' scene or around these kinds of people will say its spot on. The attention to detail was brilliant - an entire model of phone built just to illustrate the character! (ok so its a prop but they even went as far as to create the little wasp animation). The cat with the scissors in its head just topped the whole thing off.
When will people understand that _nothing_ matters except.com To most people,.com is the Internet and.org or.net or.co.ck mean nothing. There are 100's of TLD's but.com always has and always will be the one that matters, most other TLD's are just there to persuade people to buy them to protect the.com name they already own!
Why would you want any pesky provisions in place to stop tracking without a court order? That wouldn't be very useful now would it? These damn liberals seem to think that law enforcement agencies can just dilly-dally around waiting for 'judges' to let them just find out where a car is (and has been for the last 3 months).
The scary thing is, people are so used to hearing about 'government tracking devices' from crack-pots, if you even mention the word 9 out of 10 times the person you're talking to will immediately think "oh there goes another one, just nod and smile". When we finally do get government tracking devices people will either not believe it or just shrug and say "i thought so all along - you mean they only _just_ started tracking us?"
Maybe im missing something, but surely when you edit a wiki, some admin/moderator/registered-user somewhere is alerted that the page has been changed and is given a summary of the changes and original content with some kind of button to approve or flag the change for further scrutiny?
Why not have a unique id for each product and price combination - every time the price of the product was changed it would have a new id in the database, that way you wouldn't be able to just set a random price for any given product, you would only be able to set a price that had previously been issued for that product (and you could assume the number of items issued would be counted too) and any guessed id would have to at-least match the product sitting in-front of the cashier.
I think the story was about regulation not deregulation? Its pretty obvious that most companies will the bare legal minimum to make money. You think passengers would care enough to demand extra safety procedures on their own? Think again, passengers are worse than airlines all they care about are cheap flights, the plane can have one engine working for all they care as long as it flies.
So wait, if someone wrote a virus which contained a copyrighted work by the author, somehow protected by a DRM system, somehow embedded right in the virus itself in a way that meant you couldn't analyse the virus without violating the DRM, would that virus be protected under the DMCA? even from the US government? What if Microsoft, for example, decided one day to submit updates to all the worlds Windows machines which locked them down completely and locked everyone out of their own system bringing half the world to a stand-still and demanded that no-one attempt to fix their system without paying Microsoft a 'reactivation' fee? Would their system be protected under the DMCA, what if it encoded a copyrighted bit of text just for good measure? How can we use and abuse the DMCA in such a way as to disrupt it and show it as the retarded legislation it is?
Since no-one has actually come up with an argument against this I can only assume the powers that be are retarded or hiding something. I think they are probably hiding the fact that all they really want to do is to force all porn into one place where it can be easily exterminated. The fundies are probably only 'pretending' to be against.xxx just to enrage the porn industry to be more for it, once.xxx is set up its only one more step to start forcing it.
Hell with.kids you don't even need to set up a TLD, filtering software should only _allow_ particular sites instead of blocking sites. If its all about 'the children' then surely the 100's of new objectionable sites that pop up every day just cant be added to the filter in time and it would be far better to just keep adding new good sites to the allowed list! But no, they obviously have another agenda
Of course I've yet to hear a valid argument explaining why.xxx is better than.safe.safe domains would only be issued to people who could prove their website met and maintained certain requirements, parents could only allow access to.safe and could even restrict by country.
It would take years to force all sites to move to.xxx and 1000's of appeals and hearings around the world by people who are quite rightly pissed off that they are being forced to move for no real reason, or forced to move their non-porn site into the.xxx TLD. What about sites dealing with sexual health etc? Its completely rediculous to propose that people should be forced to move TLDs. Meanwhile the system would be useless until everyone had crossed over, you couldnt just block.xxx and hope for the best until every site had been re-located. Unless you _do_ force people to adhere to this system, the entire system is totally useless and only serves as yet-another TLD, in which case who even cares? why is there even a debate? if you don't like.xxx dont go there!
The only reason bridges, planes etc are built properly is because of the strict legal requirements. If you can just slap a EULA on a box relieving you of any responsibility then project managers are likely to want to cut corners. You can't blame them really. Engineers, designers etc often have a close connection with their project, its their creation and they don't want to spoil or rush it, this can get in the way of the real goal of the project: money. If money is your bottom line then you will always cut corners, if money isn't your bottom line then you will never make any, finding the balance between these is the difference between a con-man and an obsessive engineer.
Never once have I had a virus from an email. 10 times i've had a virus for sitting online with an unfirewalled windows installation for a couple of minutes but never from an email. Im not even careful about opening attachments or downloading crap from dodgy sites and still nothing - am i doing something wrong?
No-one likes patching, that's why. When you release a product its highly likely that the night before the deadline you performed any number of quick hacks and workarounds just to make the shipping date, by that time you were probably sick of the product, sick of the way it failed to meet goals and bored of its flawed internal structure. You breathe a sigh of relief when you can finally hand off your project (and this goes for anything - software, design, art, literature etc) and get some sleep, ready to start the much more exciting next version with some great new design ideas that completely solve the previous problems. Then, a week later you're forced to stop working on your new project and go back to the old-and-busted project to fix some pointless flaws which you consider totally below you because you have already made them redundant in the new, as-yet unready version. Whats more these bugs are completely mundane and irritating to fix, there's no creativity going on and your most likely coming up with another set of hacks just to make it work and get it out of the way. Who wants to work on something like that?
"Our system is built on code from so many people we wouldn't even be able to name half of them, let alone verify their competence, integrity or motivation. Hell, we can't even see what they actually wrote in the code! Even with countless cases of faulty software in the past, were trusting our system solely on the base of Microsoft so we can use their widget set, networking stack, memory management and device support - all of which are vital components to our system."
Slashdot Mirror
This is already pretty much in place, number plate recognition is already being used in conjunction with CCTV in loads of places and only a month ago it was used to find a get away car within days, of police shooting suspects who went from Bradford to London. This seems like a combination of special interests: The police obviously want more speeding revenue (who the fuck thought it would be a good idea to have the police make money directly from the crimes they solve?), anti-terrorism agencies want to know who blew something up, intelligence agencies probably want to find whistle blowers and people they 'dont like' and im sure car insurance companies want to use this for their pay-as-you-drive services. If it wasn't for the data protection act im sure a nice collection of companies would to see too.
Of course the system could potentially be used for good - I mean considering its coverage I would hope, no, expect, no, demand, that within a month of it being turned on, car theft will have dropped to a fraction and recovery rates for stolen vehicles will be almost 100%. If this isnt the case then I would like to know why?
This is just one of many creeping surveillance systems, people over here have given up caring anymore, I just assume im always on some sort of camera as soon as I leave my house, im probably right. We have bigger issues to deal with at the moment - such as the parliament protest-without-notice ban, Guantanamo bay, 30 day arrests, trials without juries, shoot to kill polices and the drain on our military by wasting its time in Iraq etc.
You hit the nail on the head.
I will support this law only if the owner of the VIEL patent agrees, indefinitely, to not only waive all royalties but to in-fact pay manufactures a royalty for every single unit they have to produce with this system in it.
Sounds fair right?
This is bullshit, what did it take - all of 3 minutes to come up with? Is this the best Microsoft can do, some bullshit instant messenger system that just locates users by phone, big fucking deal. The technology to track phones is already commercial, Google and the major IM players will have cornered this in a couple of years anyway. It might be a nice feature but its hardly the revolution
That is until everyone realises and starts making plain adverts, then when they are all plain a few 'cutting edge' advertisers will make flashy adverts again, etc..
I have to say the launch was a real let down. The first episodes were great, the flying around the north sea for hours, the Russian base complete with guards and Russian bureaucracy it was absolutely brilliant and the attention to detail was awe inspiring. It just went down hill from there, its like they ran out of money and so everything else is a load of crap. Its a shame because they really could have pulled it off, when they came off that plane and were escorted to the base they were totally convinced they were in the middle of Russia.
Sorry I just realised, this is just bloody coffee and coke, I can just make it myself, whats all the fuss about? - good idea tho
Why dont they cut the marketing crap and give it to me already, I want coffee coke! give it to me NOW! damnit this is London why is France getting it first? Don't they understand how much I want coffee flavoured coke? ive been waiting years for something that gives you the buzz of a good line with the after taste of a good coffee damnit! Seriously the one new fad I actually like the sound of and they dont even want to sell it to me TAKE MY MONEY PLEASE!
I remember a few years back in the dial-up days trying to get net access in Italy, it took a whole lot of documents and bureaucracy, we had to get a friend who was a real resident to put it under his name. I don't think you can do anything in that country without atleast having some kind of passport or ID photocopied and stamped.
For anyone who didn't RTFA and had the same first thought as me: yes it does have some kind of motorisation and weighting to keep it up-right and allow mobility.
Yes, this is a concept that appears throughout the world known as 'capitalism'.
Yeah sure, lets go and replace all the male game heroes and Hollywood actors with pale, thin geeks instead of bulky, muscular chick magnets, because surely that's sexist too?
oh come on, that whole show was comedy genius, anyone who's spent 5 minutes in the 'new media' scene or around these kinds of people will say its spot on. The attention to detail was brilliant - an entire model of phone built just to illustrate the character! (ok so its a prop but they even went as far as to create the little wasp animation). The cat with the scissors in its head just topped the whole thing off.
When will people understand that _nothing_ matters except .com .com is the Internet and .org or .net or .co.ck mean nothing. There are 100's of TLD's but .com always has and always will be the one that matters, most other TLD's are just there to persuade people to buy them to protect the .com name they already own!
To most people,
Why would you want any pesky provisions in place to stop tracking without a court order? That wouldn't be very useful now would it? These damn liberals seem to think that law enforcement agencies can just dilly-dally around waiting for 'judges' to let them just find out where a car is (and has been for the last 3 months).
The scary thing is, people are so used to hearing about 'government tracking devices' from crack-pots, if you even mention the word 9 out of 10 times the person you're talking to will immediately think "oh there goes another one, just nod and smile". When we finally do get government tracking devices people will either not believe it or just shrug and say "i thought so all along - you mean they only _just_ started tracking us?"
Maybe im missing something, but surely when you edit a wiki, some admin/moderator/registered-user somewhere is alerted that the page has been changed and is given a summary of the changes and original content with some kind of button to approve or flag the change for further scrutiny?
Why not have a unique id for each product and price combination - every time the price of the product was changed it would have a new id in the database, that way you wouldn't be able to just set a random price for any given product, you would only be able to set a price that had previously been issued for that product (and you could assume the number of items issued would be counted too) and any guessed id would have to at-least match the product sitting in-front of the cashier.
I think the story was about regulation not deregulation? Its pretty obvious that most companies will the bare legal minimum to make money. You think passengers would care enough to demand extra safety procedures on their own? Think again, passengers are worse than airlines all they care about are cheap flights, the plane can have one engine working for all they care as long as it flies.
So now you can sell any games to minors but you can't say fuck or show boobies on American terrestrial television?
So wait, if someone wrote a virus which contained a copyrighted work by the author, somehow protected by a DRM system, somehow embedded right in the virus itself in a way that meant you couldn't analyse the virus without violating the DRM, would that virus be protected under the DMCA? even from the US government? What if Microsoft, for example, decided one day to submit updates to all the worlds Windows machines which locked them down completely and locked everyone out of their own system bringing half the world to a stand-still and demanded that no-one attempt to fix their system without paying Microsoft a 'reactivation' fee? Would their system be protected under the DMCA, what if it encoded a copyrighted bit of text just for good measure? How can we use and abuse the DMCA in such a way as to disrupt it and show it as the retarded legislation it is?
Since no-one has actually come up with an argument against this I can only assume the powers that be are retarded or hiding something. I think they are probably hiding the fact that all they really want to do is to force all porn into one place where it can be easily exterminated. The fundies are probably only 'pretending' to be against .xxx just to enrage the porn industry to be more for it, once .xxx is set up its only one more step to start forcing it.
.kids you don't even need to set up a TLD, filtering software should only _allow_ particular sites instead of blocking sites. If its all about 'the children' then surely the 100's of new objectionable sites that pop up every day just cant be added to the filter in time and it would be far better to just keep adding new good sites to the allowed list! But no, they obviously have another agenda
Hell with
Of course I've yet to hear a valid argument explaining why .xxx is better than .safe .safe domains would only be issued to people who could prove their website met and maintained certain requirements, parents could only allow access to .safe and could even restrict by country.
.xxx and 1000's of appeals and hearings around the world by people who are quite rightly pissed off that they are being forced to move for no real reason, or forced to move their non-porn site into the .xxx TLD. What about sites dealing with sexual health etc? Its completely rediculous to propose that people should be forced to move TLDs. Meanwhile the system would be useless until everyone had crossed over, you couldnt just block .xxx and hope for the best until every site had been re-located. Unless you _do_ force people to adhere to this system, the entire system is totally useless and only serves as yet-another TLD, in which case who even cares? why is there even a debate? if you don't like .xxx dont go there!
It would take years to force all sites to move to
The only reason bridges, planes etc are built properly is because of the strict legal requirements. If you can just slap a EULA on a box relieving you of any responsibility then project managers are likely to want to cut corners. You can't blame them really. Engineers, designers etc often have a close connection with their project, its their creation and they don't want to spoil or rush it, this can get in the way of the real goal of the project: money. If money is your bottom line then you will always cut corners, if money isn't your bottom line then you will never make any, finding the balance between these is the difference between a con-man and an obsessive engineer.
Never once have I had a virus from an email. 10 times i've had a virus for sitting online with an unfirewalled windows installation for a couple of minutes but never from an email. Im not even careful about opening attachments or downloading crap from dodgy sites and still nothing - am i doing something wrong?
No-one likes patching, that's why. When you release a product its highly likely that the night before the deadline you performed any number of quick hacks and workarounds just to make the shipping date, by that time you were probably sick of the product, sick of the way it failed to meet goals and bored of its flawed internal structure. You breathe a sigh of relief when you can finally hand off your project (and this goes for anything - software, design, art, literature etc) and get some sleep, ready to start the much more exciting next version with some great new design ideas that completely solve the previous problems. Then, a week later you're forced to stop working on your new project and go back to the old-and-busted project to fix some pointless flaws which you consider totally below you because you have already made them redundant in the new, as-yet unready version. Whats more these bugs are completely mundane and irritating to fix, there's no creativity going on and your most likely coming up with another set of hacks just to make it work and get it out of the way. Who wants to work on something like that?
"Our system is built on code from so many people we wouldn't even be able to name half of them, let alone verify their competence, integrity or motivation. Hell, we can't even see what they actually wrote in the code! Even with countless cases of faulty software in the past, were trusting our system solely on the base of Microsoft so we can use their widget set, networking stack, memory management and device support - all of which are vital components to our system."