Text delivery is not gauranteed. Nor is timeliness of such a transaction guaranteed. SMS is not a disaster-scenario tool. Nor is email. Nor are cellular phones as currently implemented.
I note they say that there is no 'cut off hand' tactic viable with this.
They don't mention how incredibly viable the 'pistol resting against the temple' tactic is. That one will still work. you can pull the trigger after they unlock the laptop.
And what happens if your hand gets mashed? It does happen. It's rare, but I'll bet that messes up the capillaries something fierce. Then... is there a way around this? Do you enroll both hands? (One assumes, just like you enroll multiple fingers)
And who can come along and perhaps hack the stored biometric data? Hmmm...... N....S.....ah they wouldn't do that would they?.....A.....
Most of the people I know who shoot (who are not military or police) hunt for food. I do not know a single trophy hunter. I do know people who, for a reasonable expense, bring home a fair value of food to their table. They would not dream of shooting an animal just for the fun or some wierd killing joy. It's all about putting food on the table, just like fishing.
There are probably instances where an animal brought down for food could yield a trophy antler rack or some skin or fur, but that's more in 'whole use' than 'hunting just for the trophy' thinking.
I suspect you've never hunted nor know many hunters personally.
OTOH, if you behave like a jerk, that's not exactly on their head either. Yes, they left themselves open, but it still took you being a jerk as part of the equation before it was a problem.
Companies treat you as cattle, 'tis true. If you work for a company knowing that, it is either carrying on under false pretenses or accepting that. If it is the former, then you're not deserving of any better conduct from your employer really. if it is the latter, then striking back later when you knew the score when you signed up is just some bitter jerkish behaviour.
Try maybe to have a bit more class than the employer.
If an employer doesn't want me, I don't want to be there. If they want me but can't keep me due to overall economics (it happens in contracting regularly), then you just smile, thank them, and move on and you may well be back working there again later sometime.
Revenge is not only infantile, its often criminal. Is it really worth getting your @$$ kicked and fined or jailed? Don't think so.
Never burn your bridges, even if the other side are unmitigated jerks. You can be the bigger man. Even if you get the short end of the stick, somebody will probably notice your conduct and recognize it for the right way to behave. Sometimes you might end up working for them 5 years down the line.
Case in point:
Final year of college (software engineering) in city A, I did a project with well known embedded POSIX compliant OS vendor in city B. I met some of their staff.
After completing the year, I had a bunch of interviews in city B at a different company. On arriving, I recognized one of the guys I'd be working with/for. It took us most of the time there to twig to what it was. I'd met him in City C at COMDEX working for the POSIX OS company from city B. He was now working for another company (whom I went to work for as well).
I'd met him months before at a computer show in another city entirely and only coincidentally happened to be doing a project for the company he worked for, then we met at an interview for the company I was actually interested in working for and there he was.
If I'd been a jerk beforehand, he'd have remembered. As it was, he remembered me favourably. The interview was good enough I got hung with a fun nickname even before I was officially hired!
Beware the bridge you burn, it might be the one you need to advance across later.
HR people at a lot of companies move around between those companies and have HR contacts elsewhere.
There's the official statement a company you used to work for might make ("yes, X was employed here." "what were they like as an employee?" "yes, X was employed here." "I see....") and then there's what happens when the HR people talk to each other and you don't get the job, but for other reasons than the ones that were the actual reason (that they talked to a friend and found out you are a problematic person to employ).
Most people talk about how to deal with potentially disgruntled workers... I found the best way is to treat them reasonably (as a company). It cuts your odds of a problem a lot. You still have to be cautious and restrict access, but your odds of a nasty scenario are much lower that way. Some companies get this.
There have been companies I worked for where I was billing overtime on the Friday night of my last day because I was still doing clean up and knowledge transfer. I've only once had the escorted out thing and that's because they were doing a mass dot-com-crash layoff and everyone had to be treated the same.
Frankly, its usually to the company's benefit to let me do handover, code base cleanup, project wind down, etc. and they usually understand that.
But really, if you have a volatile guy in a top slot who is likely to screw you over, the best HR process is a parking lot accident.... just sayin'.
This sort of law is the inevitable response to the G8/G20 and the student riots in Quebec as well as various recents sports-related riots.
Average folk in the business community, working folk, plus of course the cops, the firemen, the EMS guys, politicians, bankers, and students who don't want their ability to go to school impeded are all demanding the government deal with these violent protests.
Yes, free speech is a right. Impeding me going places is debatable and the more people use that sort of approach (and threaten me if I cross a picket line), the more likely I am likely to vote for a law that makes that sort of crap harder for the ***clowns involved.
Just because somebody has the right to speak freely to me does not mean I'm obliged to listen nor does it give them the right to impede my passage or cost me money by impeding my right to an education.
So, these sorts of issues, which go with all the recent protests and riots, will (if the riots and protests get worse) continue to be passed into law with broad support.
And in the long run, if the protesters push hard enough, they will find out the state cannot allow itself to be dictated to by pressure groups. I don't want to see that day come because their will be blood spilled if that happens. But if the protesters can't recognize when they have exceeded the boundaries of general public toleration, they'll find out what happens the hard way.
I think the Quebec students can protest as they want to and the G20 crowd to up until it impedes my ability to do what I want to. What gives them the right to impact my activities? Does that give me a reciprocal right to resist their impact on my activites? That's not the kind of scenario we want playing out because that just gets into mob clashes.
Your right to do whatever you want extends until it enters my personal space (generally). Many protesters at G8/G20 and at the Quebec protests violated this.
Also, the destruction of property is a criminal act. This includes the injury of police (which costs taxpayers money) and the destruction of government behicles. These things all requrie law enforcement to gear up their ability to pursue, capture, and prosecute offenders successfully.
The right to protest is not the right to commit crimes. Crimes against property or the government are not victimless crimes.
The government is the only place I can think of where the people who spend the money are the same people who can arbitarily decide how much to take from their customers (taxpayers) without any recourse.
Of course, in such a system, such abuses are going to transpire regularly.
A more interesting question I haven't seen asked: Is it possible DHS asked for more pricey equipment and that the schools complied because the higher-end units implement more of the latest monitoring and security support? CALEA and other such measures.
Some of the cheaper units may not allow DHS to tap or to disable systems as easily or quickly. Each newer generation seems to add more of this sort of capability to the switches.
(I can't speak authoritatively to broadband switches, but I can speak to cellphone networks and their policy enforcement and AAA services, where this sort of thing is definitely always getting more capable without much public fanfare).
I do agree that intelligence personel (I know a few in military intelligence and some who were in federal police agencies' intelligence arms) tend to have better things to worry about than average citizens doing average things.
On the other hand, I've never met an authority figure who couldn't find a use for more power of surveillance if given it. There are also a lot of people in the apparatus who think that those of us not of in the government (or their agency) need watched for our own good at a fairly detailed level.
Citizens may disagree.
The fact that no government, even those like the current one that ran on getting rid of exceptional powers of surveillance, search, seizure, etc., have acutally removed the various secret wiretap and surveillance powers once in place means one of two things:
a) They got a briefing from the national security adviser and the heads of the agencies that scared them into keeping the power
b) They recognized that giving up this sort of power means giving up some convenience and some security
I find the men I know in the intelligence community generally don't think we need privacy if we're not up to anything dodgy. They seem to be of the opinion that they can make the judgement on what's dodgy and they seem to overlook the potential for abuse.
Even police datasystems that can query national databases can be abused. Officers have been arrested doing things like running background checks for landlords who are friends or who pay them. Imagine the sorts of abuses that the more broad data surveillance the intelligence agencies conduct could generate.
And it would be harder to catch. The police databases have some oversight and there are public police complaints entities that can raise the question in a way that gets answers. Who would perform this sort of citizen protection function within the intelligence community for individual incidents? Who would listen to individual concerns from citizens?
I think the answer is pretty much no-one.
So despite the fact there are real threats out there, despite the fact that our intel guys are mostly good guys, and despite the fact some bad stuff might be prevented by these sorts of powers, I can't support them. The potential for unchecked and even unseen abuse is so great and potent that its likelihood is probably 100%.
I choose to have some additional privacy, which is really a form of liberty, instead of a further veneer of security. I am willing to live with greater risks in today's world in order to retain some of my privacy. And I am willing to vote with this as one of my primary voting issues.
If Google's record on Google Docs and Gmail is any indication, they tend to update on *their* schedule (vs. any organization's schedule) and they freely delete key features (TOC in Google Docs comes to mind!).
Not sure why anyone in government would choose to have software they don't control the key feature set for.
In MS software, at least I could not update and not get the new misery until I felt like it. In Google's world, you get it when they tell you you'll get it and the changes they make, you'll just have to live with.
How anyone at Google could imagine a Docs rev without TOC (and it actually reformats old docs if you let it to remove existing TOCs) made sense, I can't imagine. But this is what you get if you let someone else control release schedules and inflict their current idea of feature set and UI on them on their timelines.
The cloud is a good way to store things (encrypted by yourself before storage) but is only one part of a broader data security and integrity effort.
Where I am, in an apartment, I'm immune to a flood (but not a burst waterpipe). I'm defended against surges of moderate scope by UPSes and surge suppressors. I have a reasonable degree of data replication to protect my data from hardware failures and I have limited off-site replication of data to protect me from catastrophic events like fire, serious water pipe issues, earthquake, etc.
But these sorts of strategies have a cost-benefit issue; You pay for offiste storage generally and if you want to store tens or hundreds of gigs of data, that gets pricey.
Offsite storage also puts your data into the hands of others. Even encrypted, you have to assess there is a degree of security risk in having your data store externally.
Security and data protection has to be scaled to the need and you have to think about both the threats and the costs involved in any plan you choose.
Still, it is nice there are more options now than there used to be and Amazon and other cloud storage options are handy.
I have a buddy who has to travel to the US but with the later-day border issues, doesn't like to take a laptop. So he stores an encrypted version of his code repo in the cloud and just rents a laptop while in the US, unpacks his repo, does his thing, cleans and wipes the laptop, and returns it when he's headed home. That sort of capability avoids DHS taking a copy of his work. His concern isn't them reading it, so much as them having piss-poor data security of their own and not being able to know where it might end up.
The problem in the real-world is that a lot of 'science' is funded by people who HAVE an interest in the outcome. Studies with inconvenient conclusions are frequently submarined by corporations (and governments).
Scientists are no more or less human than anyone else. Some of them enjoy the success that a prominent work evokes and the attention it can generate. Ego can be involved here just like it is in other areas of endeavor.
Beyond that, scientists have to eat. And scientists can be as encumbered by legal impedimenta as anyone else once they sign on the dotted line to do some work for a corporation or government.
I'm not trying to vilify scientists; I believe generally they have good intentions and are mostly hard working, curious folk who understand that science is about discovering fact rather than about supporting a preconceived notion. But they are not immune to the pressures of the real world nor to the occasional failure of character just like people in any other career.
Yes, but there are imaging technologies out there that can image things like facial structure and sub-surface capillary maps. Those things are not easily disguised (as far as I am aware) because they are penetrative imaging and they map sub-surface features.
If this kind of thing can be made to operate all over the place (high CC camera density) and married to a highly capable data sifting system, it will be very hard to fool (or seems so at present). Face makeup and even prosthesis or fake hair won't cut it.
Furthermore, such a system could likely tell that you had on fake hair, etc. (potentially)
This system by itself isn't a horror, but as another step along the path to the government keeping you under the microscope at all times (when of course the heads of government will live in microscopeless gated communities). That's not so cool, IMO.
* Release the virus because there are too many humans to be environmentally healthy for the Earth
That's one heck of a green solution. Reduce the population by a factor of ten and it'll take a few generations to get back up to where it is now (maybe 50-75 years?). Reduce the population by a factor of 100 and it might be twice that. And if some societies collapse, maybe some industrialized activity will slowdown too.
(Okay, that's some pretty whacked out thought, but if you happened to believe humans were killing the planet....)
On the other hand, when peole talk about not being able to write portable code, that's generally only true with some particular portions.
For the most part, the sorts of interactions available on touchscreen devices are similar. If your code accomodates that in a sensible fashion, the details of the particular language or smartphone API particulars should only constitute a limited portion of your app which is truly distinct from OS to OS.
If this isn't the case, you are making some architectural mistakes.
I'd also like to say apps that don't follow platform UI guidelines should be scorned. It's okay if the platforms eventually lean towards one another (much like OpenGL and DirectX did) but whatever standards a device supports should be implemented. Doing something different just because you can or its easier for the coder is a pretty crappy way to write software.
James T. Kirk was part of the reason I went into a technical discipline. Of course, Scotty was a big inspiration, but Kirk was 'the Captain' and brought a fair bit of humour, humanity, courage and compassion to the show. And of course, both you and James have been great Canadians by virtue of how you have carried your celebrity (and in James' case, his wartime service to Canada during WWII). And you broke a few barriers kissing Ms. Nichols (but then, who wouldn't have?).
So my question:
What was your greatest memory of Canada and what sort of future do you hope to see for Canada?
I might never get a chance to say this again, but thanks for putting the magic in my formative years. It's still with me.
The Netherlands (I believe) is running a pilot project that solves this problem.
Infrastructure: - Small stations with a couple of pumps deployed all over the place (a farm can be a gas station) - The small station can be fed by wind or solar or off the grid - The station charges 'chargeable fluid' to a certain level of energy - The fluid is some sort of suspension with a high energy capacity (probably involves metallic salts) - Generating power and selling charged fluid is supposed to be decentralized and help farmers and others make a few bucks (in rural areas) - All of these pumping stations are part of a larger data network
Use - Car is driving around and its tank of chargeable fluid is having its charge depleted by use - Driver hits computer screen and it polls nearby stations for location, open/closed state, and price of fluid - Driver pulls in, grabs the hose, sticks it in his tank - System pulls out charged fluid, measures charge, pumps in freshly charged fluid, and bills the user for the charge difference - Whole changeover happens in a few minutes (5?) and then you have a fresh tank of fuel - Driver leaves with a fully charged car - Pumping station begins to recharge the partially discharged fluid (or recycle it)
This (to me) promises to be the holy grail of electric cars if: a) The whole thing is as technically feasible as it sounded b) There isn't a cost benefit to buy charged fluid and harvest the salts out of it for cash (so they can't manufacture super expensive charged fluids) c) It isn't easy to have idiots substitute 'home made' charged fluids that might contaminate the pool
It offers both the benefit of fast-change electrical power (as well as the ability to carry spare fuel!) and it offers revenue to farms and other places for an up front investment (presumably partially sponsored by the state) and encourages some degree of competition in pricing.
If this works out, hopefully it can be adapted to other countries. I think Canadian mineral resources could make us a big exporter of charged fluid materials and help insure a domestic supply.
The one issue is what happens in very cold Canadian winters? If the charge on fluid is low, will it freeze solid? That wouldn't be helpful.
Um, have you ever seen a decent quality thermal system's output?
It can see the residual heat from a car's engine or a human's breathing.
It will have no trouble distinguishing the heat output of a tank from the exhaust. Sure, you can choose which side to channel it out (the back), but once it is a hot gas in the air, it's going to be detectable. And an 'empty spot' with a hot exhaust is just a slightly harder to aim at target....
And if you try to cool that exhaust before outgassing, where do you put that heat?
This is why it will be quite hard to hide space vehicles against the background IR of space. You can only soak up heat and store internally for so long. Then you have to vent it.
Energy (and heat counts) does not just magically vanish.
I think this is someone selling the next 'wazoo tech' to somebody at MoD.
So, tell me, how does it work when walked on regularly? Or sand blasted? Or covered in dust, grime, or outright mud?
At best, a very short duration camo. That might have some tactical uses, but it isn't a game changer.
It might be hazardous in winter too. I've seen uneven ice conditions quite commonly in Ottawa and I've had friends driving things like Corollas complain about them not being able to crush the ice to follow the path the car should legally follow (buying a heavier Cronos solved that apparently). Myself, I drove my Mustang GT through the winters and found it heavy enough (3600 lbs) to be safe on the roads, but I pity anyone in one of these 'Smart Cars' when the road gets frozen ice ridges... those cars will be at the mercy of the road conditions moreso than most larger vehicles. I've also heard local firefighters talk about some of the nasty cleanup at some of the Smart Car crashes. I understand the theory on the safety of these cars, but the firefighters I've talked to said they wouldn't let anyone they knew buy one.
My SUV gets about 31 MPG (Cdn gallon, 27 US). That's not as good as I'd like to see it, but I despair of ever seeing an SUV manage 200 mpg (well... unless you have a large uncounted electricity input....).
Although I will give you that there was some though as to the importance of ties from economics and culture and the spread of ideas, I will also have to chide you for expropriation and egocentrism.
"Freedom", "Democracy" and "Social Mobility" are hardly uniquely American values. In fact, the modern American body politic would have you think that Freedom had been deleted from the list of American values and that Democracy wasn't too important either. Social mobility, the statisticians tell us, is way down and is the middle class is fading away as the disparities between the really rich and 'everybody else' continues to grow.
So, you have claimed as "American" the values that America doesn't seem to champion as much as it once did, while grandly ignoring the elder democracies of the world. I'm pretty sure Democracy is a Greek word originally (or from a Greek root). I'm fairly certain Britain had a parliament long before the US came into existence. I'm also reasonably certain there are about 15-20 European countries that could lay claim to believing in the values you claim as American. If one looks at the Dutch outlook on soft drugs or the German outlook on personal privacy or various European systems that do better at representing the popular vote than the US system, one might conclude much of Europe may actually be at least as interested in those values as modern day America.
Beyond that, there's a little country to the North of America that happens to be reasonably good at Democracy, Freedom and Social Mobility. It often gets forgotten, getting the limelight only when the US free market system is busy crashing and burning (printing money like the supply of rag or digital bits was unlimited).
Oh, and while I'm mentioning others who might just have as much claim to those values, let's add New Zealand and Australia. And that's only the places I'm really comfortable with putting on the list - there are some other candidates that are at least aspiring to that list of attributes.
How about we call them what they rightly are: Western Values? They are common in most countries of the West.
I know that America prides itself on these being its core values, even if they are more honoured in the breech than the observance of late. Canadians have similar misconceptions about themselves where it comes to our role in Peacekeeping and UN participation (formerly quite large, but nearly non-existent the last decade or so). People tend to think of themselves as embodying a value as a people because that's what they're taught in school - and that's because it used to be that way, so then it becomes school curriculum, regardless of what the current facts on the ground may indicate.
All complaint aside, your post had a solid thesis IMO.
The problem with 'the right to bear arms' as most Americans imagine it is that they imagine it is an effective check on tyrannical practices from their own government.
Sure, the average American can own a pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, AM rifle, even an AR or SMG in some cases. The Army has all of those plus vehiclular armour, air support, artillery, scadloads of training in group combat operations, etc. In any matchup between the US military (even reserves) and an angry band of civilians (even assuming some leavening of that band by ex-military personnel), the citizen-rebels would come off the worst. The military has better recce gear, communications, airborne and satellite intel, and piles of airborne manned and unmanned weapons platforms.
Arms simply mean that there would be asymetric hazards to a government attempt to apply tyrannical power in particular localities. But you will notice that the US Army seems more than capable of continuing operations despite a mounting death and injury toll in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the American populace resorted to suicide bombing and other wonderful tactics, the Army could sustain operations against a hostile civilian fringe element. The most civilians could do is make it expensive (which is the root of asymetric warfare in truth).
Bearing arms in America might help protect your home from an intruder. It might help protect your farm animals or pets from a marauding mountain lion, bear, wolves or the like. It won't do much to stop the world's biggest, best trained, best equipped military force.
The only thing that would win that battle is convincing large parts of the US Army not to heed dictatorial orders. Fortunately for everyone, the US Army is a strong defender of the US Constitution. That's the greatest secret to domestic democracy in the US.
And note that in other places in the world, if you could convince the hostile army or police to not support despotic orders, the same result would ensue. Arms borne by the citizens are at most a peripheral issue here.
Note that places like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq have a very large % of the populace having access to firearms. That has not made them historically safe from despotism and arming the citizenry has not been the path to glorious democracy and peace. Similarly, an armed populace in the US is not half as important as a vigilant populace willing to lay down their lives in the belief that they should be free. At most, arming them makes them more of a thorn. The attitude itself is what keeps America free.
Arms by themselves don't solve the problem. Attitude and a willingness to die for the right things helps keep tyrants in check. Arms are just one tool and not the most important one.
Slashdot Mirror
Text delivery is not gauranteed. Nor is timeliness of such a transaction guaranteed. SMS is not a disaster-scenario tool. Nor is email. Nor are cellular phones as currently implemented.
I note they say that there is no 'cut off hand' tactic viable with this.
They don't mention how incredibly viable the 'pistol resting against the temple' tactic is. That one will still work. you can pull the trigger after they unlock the laptop.
And what happens if your hand gets mashed? It does happen. It's rare, but I'll bet that messes up the capillaries something fierce. Then... is there a way around this? Do you enroll both hands? (One assumes, just like you enroll multiple fingers)
And who can come along and perhaps hack the stored biometric data? Hmmm...... N....S.....ah they wouldn't do that would they?.....A.....
My tinfoil hat helps keep me warm in winter.
Most of the people I know who shoot (who are not military or police) hunt for food. I do not know a single trophy hunter. I do know people who, for a reasonable expense, bring home a fair value of food to their table. They would not dream of shooting an animal just for the fun or some wierd killing joy. It's all about putting food on the table, just like fishing.
There are probably instances where an animal brought down for food could yield a trophy antler rack or some skin or fur, but that's more in 'whole use' than 'hunting just for the trophy' thinking.
I suspect you've never hunted nor know many hunters personally.
Apparently even more effective: The primers used in modern ammunition. They are even harder to manufacture than good, clean gunpowder.
These politicos don't read the classics. You can't stuff Pandora (or William Shatner) into the box again....
Companies should protect themselves.
OTOH, if you behave like a jerk, that's not exactly on their head either. Yes, they left themselves open, but it still took you being a jerk as part of the equation before it was a problem.
Companies treat you as cattle, 'tis true. If you work for a company knowing that, it is either carrying on under false pretenses or accepting that. If it is the former, then you're not deserving of any better conduct from your employer really. if it is the latter, then striking back later when you knew the score when you signed up is just some bitter jerkish behaviour.
Try maybe to have a bit more class than the employer.
The last sentence is the real secret.
If an employer doesn't want me, I don't want to be there. If they want me but can't keep me due to overall economics (it happens in contracting regularly), then you just smile, thank them, and move on and you may well be back working there again later sometime.
Revenge is not only infantile, its often criminal. Is it really worth getting your @$$ kicked and fined or jailed? Don't think so.
Never burn your bridges, even if the other side are unmitigated jerks. You can be the bigger man. Even if you get the short end of the stick, somebody will probably notice your conduct and recognize it for the right way to behave. Sometimes you might end up working for them 5 years down the line.
Case in point:
Final year of college (software engineering) in city A, I did a project with well known embedded POSIX compliant OS vendor in city B. I met some of their staff.
After completing the year, I had a bunch of interviews in city B at a different company. On arriving, I recognized one of the guys I'd be working with/for. It took us most of the time there to twig to what it was. I'd met him in City C at COMDEX working for the POSIX OS company from city B. He was now working for another company (whom I went to work for as well).
I'd met him months before at a computer show in another city entirely and only coincidentally happened to be doing a project for the company he worked for, then we met at an interview for the company I was actually interested in working for and there he was.
If I'd been a jerk beforehand, he'd have remembered. As it was, he remembered me favourably. The interview was good enough I got hung with a fun nickname even before I was officially hired!
Beware the bridge you burn, it might be the one you need to advance across later.
HR people at a lot of companies move around between those companies and have HR contacts elsewhere.
There's the official statement a company you used to work for might make ("yes, X was employed here." "what were they like as an employee?" "yes, X was employed here." "I see....") and then there's what happens when the HR people talk to each other and you don't get the job, but for other reasons than the ones that were the actual reason (that they talked to a friend and found out you are a problematic person to employ).
Most people talk about how to deal with potentially disgruntled workers... I found the best way is to treat them reasonably (as a company). It cuts your odds of a problem a lot. You still have to be cautious and restrict access, but your odds of a nasty scenario are much lower that way. Some companies get this.
There have been companies I worked for where I was billing overtime on the Friday night of my last day because I was still doing clean up and knowledge transfer. I've only once had the escorted out thing and that's because they were doing a mass dot-com-crash layoff and everyone had to be treated the same.
Frankly, its usually to the company's benefit to let me do handover, code base cleanup, project wind down, etc. and they usually understand that.
But really, if you have a volatile guy in a top slot who is likely to screw you over, the best HR process is a parking lot accident.... just sayin'.
Narcissism is optional.
This sort of law is the inevitable response to the G8/G20 and the student riots in Quebec as well as various recents sports-related riots.
Average folk in the business community, working folk, plus of course the cops, the firemen, the EMS guys, politicians, bankers, and students who don't want their ability to go to school impeded are all demanding the government deal with these violent protests.
Yes, free speech is a right. Impeding me going places is debatable and the more people use that sort of approach (and threaten me if I cross a picket line), the more likely I am likely to vote for a law that makes that sort of crap harder for the ***clowns involved.
Just because somebody has the right to speak freely to me does not mean I'm obliged to listen nor does it give them the right to impede my passage or cost me money by impeding my right to an education.
So, these sorts of issues, which go with all the recent protests and riots, will (if the riots and protests get worse) continue to be passed into law with broad support.
And in the long run, if the protesters push hard enough, they will find out the state cannot allow itself to be dictated to by pressure groups. I don't want to see that day come because their will be blood spilled if that happens. But if the protesters can't recognize when they have exceeded the boundaries of general public toleration, they'll find out what happens the hard way.
I think the Quebec students can protest as they want to and the G20 crowd to up until it impedes my ability to do what I want to. What gives them the right to impact my activities? Does that give me a reciprocal right to resist their impact on my activites? That's not the kind of scenario we want playing out because that just gets into mob clashes.
Your right to do whatever you want extends until it enters my personal space (generally). Many protesters at G8/G20 and at the Quebec protests violated this.
Also, the destruction of property is a criminal act. This includes the injury of police (which costs taxpayers money) and the destruction of government behicles. These things all requrie law enforcement to gear up their ability to pursue, capture, and prosecute offenders successfully.
The right to protest is not the right to commit crimes. Crimes against property or the government are not victimless crimes.
The government is the only place I can think of where the people who spend the money are the same people who can arbitarily decide how much to take from their customers (taxpayers) without any recourse.
Of course, in such a system, such abuses are going to transpire regularly.
A more interesting question I haven't seen asked: Is it possible DHS asked for more pricey equipment and that the schools complied because the higher-end units implement more of the latest monitoring and security support? CALEA and other such measures.
Some of the cheaper units may not allow DHS to tap or to disable systems as easily or quickly. Each newer generation seems to add more of this sort of capability to the switches.
(I can't speak authoritatively to broadband switches, but I can speak to cellphone networks and their policy enforcement and AAA services, where this sort of thing is definitely always getting more capable without much public fanfare).
Your position seems a bit simplistic.
I do agree that intelligence personel (I know a few in military intelligence and some who were in federal police agencies' intelligence arms) tend to have better things to worry about than average citizens doing average things.
On the other hand, I've never met an authority figure who couldn't find a use for more power of surveillance if given it. There are also a lot of people in the apparatus who think that those of us not of in the government (or their agency) need watched for our own good at a fairly detailed level.
Citizens may disagree.
The fact that no government, even those like the current one that ran on getting rid of exceptional powers of surveillance, search, seizure, etc., have acutally removed the various secret wiretap and surveillance powers once in place means one of two things:
a) They got a briefing from the national security adviser and the heads of the agencies that scared them into keeping the power
b) They recognized that giving up this sort of power means giving up some convenience and some security
I find the men I know in the intelligence community generally don't think we need privacy if we're not up to anything dodgy. They seem to be of the opinion that they can make the judgement on what's dodgy and they seem to overlook the potential for abuse.
Even police datasystems that can query national databases can be abused. Officers have been arrested doing things like running background checks for landlords who are friends or who pay them. Imagine the sorts of abuses that the more broad data surveillance the intelligence agencies conduct could generate.
And it would be harder to catch. The police databases have some oversight and there are public police complaints entities that can raise the question in a way that gets answers. Who would perform this sort of citizen protection function within the intelligence community for individual incidents? Who would listen to individual concerns from citizens?
I think the answer is pretty much no-one.
So despite the fact there are real threats out there, despite the fact that our intel guys are mostly good guys, and despite the fact some bad stuff might be prevented by these sorts of powers, I can't support them. The potential for unchecked and even unseen abuse is so great and potent that its likelihood is probably 100%.
I choose to have some additional privacy, which is really a form of liberty, instead of a further veneer of security. I am willing to live with greater risks in today's world in order to retain some of my privacy. And I am willing to vote with this as one of my primary voting issues.
Darn. Where do I get my cheque? I'm missing out!
If Google's record on Google Docs and Gmail is any indication, they tend to update on *their* schedule (vs. any organization's schedule) and they freely delete key features (TOC in Google Docs comes to mind!).
Not sure why anyone in government would choose to have software they don't control the key feature set for.
In MS software, at least I could not update and not get the new misery until I felt like it. In Google's world, you get it when they tell you you'll get it and the changes they make, you'll just have to live with.
How anyone at Google could imagine a Docs rev without TOC (and it actually reformats old docs if you let it to remove existing TOCs) made sense, I can't imagine. But this is what you get if you let someone else control release schedules and inflict their current idea of feature set and UI on them on their timelines.
The cloud is a good way to store things (encrypted by yourself before storage) but is only one part of a broader data security and integrity effort.
Where I am, in an apartment, I'm immune to a flood (but not a burst waterpipe). I'm defended against surges of moderate scope by UPSes and surge suppressors. I have a reasonable degree of data replication to protect my data from hardware failures and I have limited off-site replication of data to protect me from catastrophic events like fire, serious water pipe issues, earthquake, etc.
But these sorts of strategies have a cost-benefit issue; You pay for offiste storage generally and if you want to store tens or hundreds of gigs of data, that gets pricey.
Offsite storage also puts your data into the hands of others. Even encrypted, you have to assess there is a degree of security risk in having your data store externally.
Security and data protection has to be scaled to the need and you have to think about both the threats and the costs involved in any plan you choose.
Still, it is nice there are more options now than there used to be and Amazon and other cloud storage options are handy.
I have a buddy who has to travel to the US but with the later-day border issues, doesn't like to take a laptop. So he stores an encrypted version of his code repo in the cloud and just rents a laptop while in the US, unpacks his repo, does his thing, cleans and wipes the laptop, and returns it when he's headed home. That sort of capability avoids DHS taking a copy of his work. His concern isn't them reading it, so much as them having piss-poor data security of their own and not being able to know where it might end up.
The problem in the real-world is that a lot of 'science' is funded by people who HAVE an interest in the outcome. Studies with inconvenient conclusions are frequently submarined by corporations (and governments).
Scientists are no more or less human than anyone else. Some of them enjoy the success that a prominent work evokes and the attention it can generate. Ego can be involved here just like it is in other areas of endeavor.
Beyond that, scientists have to eat. And scientists can be as encumbered by legal impedimenta as anyone else once they sign on the dotted line to do some work for a corporation or government.
I'm not trying to vilify scientists; I believe generally they have good intentions and are mostly hard working, curious folk who understand that science is about discovering fact rather than about supporting a preconceived notion. But they are not immune to the pressures of the real world nor to the occasional failure of character just like people in any other career.
Yes, but there are imaging technologies out there that can image things like facial structure and sub-surface capillary maps. Those things are not easily disguised (as far as I am aware) because they are penetrative imaging and they map sub-surface features.
If this kind of thing can be made to operate all over the place (high CC camera density) and married to a highly capable data sifting system, it will be very hard to fool (or seems so at present). Face makeup and even prosthesis or fake hair won't cut it.
Furthermore, such a system could likely tell that you had on fake hair, etc. (potentially)
This system by itself isn't a horror, but as another step along the path to the government keeping you under the microscope at all times (when of course the heads of government will live in microscopeless gated communities). That's not so cool, IMO.
Me, I was just *hoping* GITS and other such forward looking shows weren't predicting our future.
But I really knew better since I work to develop software that enables this at times (like CALEA/lawful intercept stuff for cell nets).
You forgot my personal favourite:
* Release the virus because there are too many humans to be environmentally healthy for the Earth
That's one heck of a green solution. Reduce the population by a factor of ten and it'll take a few generations to get back up to where it is now (maybe 50-75 years?). Reduce the population by a factor of 100 and it might be twice that. And if some societies collapse, maybe some industrialized activity will slowdown too.
(Okay, that's some pretty whacked out thought, but if you happened to believe humans were killing the planet....)
Yes, there are some key differences.
On the other hand, when peole talk about not being able to write portable code, that's generally only true with some particular portions.
For the most part, the sorts of interactions available on touchscreen devices are similar. If your code accomodates that in a sensible fashion, the details of the particular language or smartphone API particulars should only constitute a limited portion of your app which is truly distinct from OS to OS.
If this isn't the case, you are making some architectural mistakes.
I'd also like to say apps that don't follow platform UI guidelines should be scorned. It's okay if the platforms eventually lean towards one another (much like OpenGL and DirectX did) but whatever standards a device supports should be implemented. Doing something different just because you can or its easier for the coder is a pretty crappy way to write software.
Mr. Shatner,
James T. Kirk was part of the reason I went into a technical discipline. Of course, Scotty was a big inspiration, but Kirk was 'the Captain' and brought a fair bit of humour, humanity, courage and compassion to the show. And of course, both you and James have been great Canadians by virtue of how you have carried your celebrity (and in James' case, his wartime service to Canada during WWII). And you broke a few barriers kissing Ms. Nichols (but then, who wouldn't have?).
So my question:
What was your greatest memory of Canada and what sort of future do you hope to see for Canada?
I might never get a chance to say this again, but thanks for putting the magic in my formative years. It's still with me.
The Netherlands (I believe) is running a pilot project that solves this problem.
Infrastructure:
- Small stations with a couple of pumps deployed all over the place (a farm can be a gas station)
- The small station can be fed by wind or solar or off the grid
- The station charges 'chargeable fluid' to a certain level of energy
- The fluid is some sort of suspension with a high energy capacity (probably involves metallic salts)
- Generating power and selling charged fluid is supposed to be decentralized and help farmers and others
make a few bucks (in rural areas)
- All of these pumping stations are part of a larger data network
Use
- Car is driving around and its tank of chargeable fluid is having its charge depleted by use
- Driver hits computer screen and it polls nearby stations for location, open/closed state, and price of fluid
- Driver pulls in, grabs the hose, sticks it in his tank
- System pulls out charged fluid, measures charge, pumps in freshly charged fluid, and bills the user for the charge difference
- Whole changeover happens in a few minutes (5?) and then you have a fresh tank of fuel
- Driver leaves with a fully charged car
- Pumping station begins to recharge the partially discharged fluid (or recycle it)
This (to me) promises to be the holy grail of electric cars if:
a) The whole thing is as technically feasible as it sounded
b) There isn't a cost benefit to buy charged fluid and harvest the salts out of it for cash (so they can't manufacture super expensive charged fluids)
c) It isn't easy to have idiots substitute 'home made' charged fluids that might contaminate the pool
It offers both the benefit of fast-change electrical power (as well as the ability to carry spare fuel!) and it offers revenue to farms and other places for an up front investment (presumably partially sponsored by the state) and encourages some degree of competition in pricing.
If this works out, hopefully it can be adapted to other countries. I think Canadian mineral resources could make us a big exporter of charged fluid materials and help insure a domestic supply.
The one issue is what happens in very cold Canadian winters? If the charge on fluid is low, will it freeze solid? That wouldn't be helpful.
Still, best attempt at a solution I've seen yet.
Um, have you ever seen a decent quality thermal system's output?
It can see the residual heat from a car's engine or a human's breathing.
It will have no trouble distinguishing the heat output of a tank from the exhaust. Sure, you can choose which side to channel it out (the back), but once it is a hot gas in the air, it's going to be detectable. And an 'empty spot' with a hot exhaust is just a slightly harder to aim at target....
And if you try to cool that exhaust before outgassing, where do you put that heat?
This is why it will be quite hard to hide space vehicles against the background IR of space. You can only soak up heat and store internally for so long. Then you have to vent it.
Energy (and heat counts) does not just magically vanish.
I think this is someone selling the next 'wazoo tech' to somebody at MoD.
So, tell me, how does it work when walked on regularly? Or sand blasted? Or covered in dust, grime, or outright mud?
At best, a very short duration camo. That might have some tactical uses, but it isn't a game changer.
It might be hazardous in winter too. I've seen uneven ice conditions quite commonly in Ottawa and I've had friends driving things like Corollas complain about them not being able to crush the ice to follow the path the car should legally follow (buying a heavier Cronos solved that apparently). Myself, I drove my Mustang GT through the winters and found it heavy enough (3600 lbs) to be safe on the roads, but I pity anyone in one of these 'Smart Cars' when the road gets frozen ice ridges... those cars will be at the mercy of the road conditions moreso than most larger vehicles. I've also heard local firefighters talk about some of the nasty cleanup at some of the Smart Car crashes. I understand the theory on the safety of these cars, but the firefighters I've talked to said they wouldn't let anyone they knew buy one.
My SUV gets about 31 MPG (Cdn gallon, 27 US). That's not as good as I'd like to see it, but I despair of ever seeing an SUV manage 200 mpg (well... unless you have a large uncounted electricity input....).
Although I will give you that there was some though as to the importance of ties from economics and culture and the spread of ideas, I will also have to chide you for expropriation and egocentrism.
"Freedom", "Democracy" and "Social Mobility" are hardly uniquely American values. In fact, the modern American body politic would have you think that Freedom had been deleted from the list of American values and that Democracy wasn't too important either. Social mobility, the statisticians tell us, is way down and is the middle class is fading away as the disparities between the really rich and 'everybody else' continues to grow.
So, you have claimed as "American" the values that America doesn't seem to champion as much as it once did, while grandly ignoring the elder democracies of the world. I'm pretty sure Democracy is a Greek word originally (or from a Greek root). I'm fairly certain Britain had a parliament long before the US came into existence. I'm also reasonably certain there are about 15-20 European countries that could lay claim to believing in the values you claim as American. If one looks at the Dutch outlook on soft drugs or the German outlook on personal privacy or various European systems that do better at representing the popular vote than the US system, one might conclude much of Europe may actually be at least as interested in those values as modern day America.
Beyond that, there's a little country to the North of America that happens to be reasonably good at Democracy, Freedom and Social Mobility. It often gets forgotten, getting the limelight only when the US free market system is busy crashing and burning (printing money like the supply of rag or digital bits was unlimited).
Oh, and while I'm mentioning others who might just have as much claim to those values, let's add New Zealand and Australia. And that's only the places I'm really comfortable with putting on the list - there are some other candidates that are at least aspiring to that list of attributes.
How about we call them what they rightly are: Western Values? They are common in most countries of the West.
I know that America prides itself on these being its core values, even if they are more honoured in the breech than the observance of late. Canadians have similar misconceptions about themselves where it comes to our role in Peacekeeping and UN participation (formerly quite large, but nearly non-existent the last decade or so). People tend to think of themselves as embodying a value as a people because that's what they're taught in school - and that's because it used to be that way, so then it becomes school curriculum, regardless of what the current facts on the ground may indicate.
All complaint aside, your post had a solid thesis IMO.
The problem with 'the right to bear arms' as most Americans imagine it is that they imagine it is an effective check on tyrannical practices from their own government.
Sure, the average American can own a pistol, shotgun, sniper rifle, AM rifle, even an AR or SMG in some cases. The Army has all of those plus vehiclular armour, air support, artillery, scadloads of training in group combat operations, etc. In any matchup between the US military (even reserves) and an angry band of civilians (even assuming some leavening of that band by ex-military personnel), the citizen-rebels would come off the worst. The military has better recce gear, communications, airborne and satellite intel, and piles of airborne manned and unmanned weapons platforms.
Arms simply mean that there would be asymetric hazards to a government attempt to apply tyrannical power in particular localities. But you will notice that the US Army seems more than capable of continuing operations despite a mounting death and injury toll in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if the American populace resorted to suicide bombing and other wonderful tactics, the Army could sustain operations against a hostile civilian fringe element. The most civilians could do is make it expensive (which is the root of asymetric warfare in truth).
Bearing arms in America might help protect your home from an intruder. It might help protect your farm animals or pets from a marauding mountain lion, bear, wolves or the like. It won't do much to stop the world's biggest, best trained, best equipped military force.
The only thing that would win that battle is convincing large parts of the US Army not to heed dictatorial orders. Fortunately for everyone, the US Army is a strong defender of the US Constitution. That's the greatest secret to domestic democracy in the US.
And note that in other places in the world, if you could convince the hostile army or police to not support despotic orders, the same result would ensue. Arms borne by the citizens are at most a peripheral issue here.
Note that places like Afghanistan, Somalia, and Iraq have a very large % of the populace having access to firearms. That has not made them historically safe from despotism and arming the citizenry has not been the path to glorious democracy and peace. Similarly, an armed populace in the US is not half as important as a vigilant populace willing to lay down their lives in the belief that they should be free. At most, arming them makes them more of a thorn. The attitude itself is what keeps America free.
Arms by themselves don't solve the problem. Attitude and a willingness to die for the right things helps keep tyrants in check. Arms are just one tool and not the most important one.