Maybe this shows how sick I am, but I've been giving some thought to those. Not into buying one, but rather, how you'd go about improving one.
The site says something about heating them in hot water, and that they'd retain that heat for awhile. But what about giving it a pulse *and* body heat at the same time? A small water pump, putting heated liquid, thermostat controlled, throughout the thing? Just wondering how you'd get even a rudimentary circulation system in it.
Also wondering if you could make it breath. Would be interesting to see that, even if some say it would be a bit creepy. That one seems a bit simpler, but has more possibilities. The rate of "breathing" could be controlled for "out of breath" type scenarios. And of course, some type of speaker in the throat/head that would sound natural.
I don't think anyone has ever suggested permanently disabling the CCDs, which may not be possible with non-dangerous lasers. What if you miss while fine tuning your aim with binoculars, and blind a baby? Even I wouldn't do that. Rather, disable it temporarily with an eye-safe laser, but leave the damn thing bolted there with the correct aim.
This means: 1) No chance of accidentally blinding someone, yourself included. 2) No chance of damaging the camera permanently, which is probably more illegal than blinding it. 3) They don't replace it tomorrow, when you're not there to blind it again.
They'll readily agree to it, as soon as software is advanced enough to render them doing something innocuous in realtime. Reciprocal surveillance isn't possible, the technology isn't mature enough.
And when it is, they'll still have the tools to ignore it. But I respect your lazy third-hand thinking anyway.
Gee. Let's see. A 0.0001% chance that these cameras can be used to catch a criminal, who won't pay me for the damage, that will only ransack my house once in my entire lifetime, and will never see any fair justice, one way or the other.
Vs.
A 99.9999% chance that (I'm 29) within my own lifetime some grabass lowlife politician or other "authority" will abuse this system affecting me at least indirectly, and in a serious, lasting manner.
Then again, I was taught math in public skool, so I'm not sure how to finish the equation. I change my mind, bring in the cameras!
Copyright. My own image, meaning that of my face and body, are my own and are extremely valuable to me and select customers. I've spent a great amount of time, money and effort cultivating my unique look, and the government doing this is an illegal invasion of my valuable intellectual property.
More seriously, my rights include those not expressly forbidden or reserved for the government. Ask whether the government has the right to put them up.
I'm not suprised by your question, it's the obvious one, but it's also the wrong question.
Unlike some questionable things, which were vulnerable to abuse, the abuses these cameras will encourage are inevitable and can't be managed.
20 years later:
Running for city council? Great, the Democrats managed to dig up that footage of you picking your nose on 8th and main, and since it would be bad form to show it themselves, it was submitted anonymously to the local tabloid.
Pissed off Jeb? Guess what, the "new" facial recognition software was doing routine scans of archived footage, and managed to match your old cheek/jawline with a bank robber that killed 3 guards. Remember where you were 18 years ago on the day of Sept 5th, 2002?
There are more, and probably better examples, but these are what come to mind. Sure, if I went out in public 50 years ago, I had no guarantee I wouldn't be watched, and no recourse if I was. But with cameras, you are *always* watched. It is guaranteed. And when software catches up, this will literally be true. Nothing will be missed.
Stumble and fall on your ass into the mud puddle? Gee, wouldn't you be embarrassed if you thought someone got it on America's Funniest Home videos? Well, now the guard will set the software to look for that, every night when he gets bored. Doesn't matter if he wasn't watching while it happened... he'll never miss it now. And it won't be objectionable enough that people will be outraged either. Even though they should. Some low-level bureaucrat shredding your dignity for his personal amusement. You'll walk by him at the subway station, he'll recognize you even though there's no way you would know him, and he'll smirk. Or maybe wink.
You should be asking yourself if the government is entitled to putting all-seeing, never-forgetting electronic eyes everywhere. Are they? What could possibly justify it?
If you don't ask that, one day there will be one mounted somewhere on the street, with clear aim at your windows, your doorstep.
I'm just waiting for some "patriot" who has line of sight to the lens to aim a laser pointer at it, and leave it there. Some cameras won't be vulnerable to this, but at least a few will be across the street from someone that has a condo with a balcony, wouldn't they?
Lord knows that if I owned a small business or home near one, they'd never see shit out of it.
Rock sold out in the late 60s, early 70s. Definitely before 1975. Alternative sold out in 1991 I think, or was it earlier? Rap sold out, then sold out again, and has reached the magic "100,000 sellouts" number. Snoop Dog was on an AOL commercial, just when you thought it couldn't sell out any more. Country sold out, but no one bought. Is selling out a bad thing? Yes, but then I never much liked those genres anyway, so maybe it's good after all.
What little I've been able to dig up suggests that there aren't linux drivers for this card. However, many people seem to have no trouble with ndiswrapper, which is what I use. It's a simple "configure; make; make install" sort of package, but I'm sure there are RPMs and debian packages for those that prefer those distros.
Installing ndiswrapper will mean you need a newer 2.4 kernel or 2.6. No kernel patches are necessary, and it may throw a few warnings, but should still compile. After installing, do "ndiswrapper -i/path/to/inf-file", the.inf file being the windows driver for this card. What I've read suggests that you use the driver that comes on the CD with the card, and not the driver dowloaded from broadcom's site.
Then, "modprobe ndiswrapper". At this point, the activity light on my own shitty card starts blinking, I would expect yours to do so also. Then comes the iwconfig setup, which I imagine varies quite a bit. Others have told me that "iwconfig wlan0 essid MyWAP" should be enough, but my machine just acts goofy without getting a link. I always have to do "iwconfig wlan0 channel 10" first.
Also, a caveat. As soon as the ndiswrapper module is loaded, my machine will be slow to respond, taking as much as 15 seconds to see a keystroke. It behaves like this until I get my link, after which it starts acting normally again. So that it doesn't take forever (did I just fatfinger wlan0 again?), I usually type it in as one big command line, like so:
I was so worried, at first, that my shitty walmart clearance bin ($15) iBlitzz card was never going to work. Just took a little patience.
Off-topic: Another thing I'd like to point out. If you are like me, you have a dedicated linux server that has acted as your home router for years. Adding wifi to your house should be as simple as a few lines in rc.ipmasq to do NAT for a new segment, and maybe a 3rd ethernet card (ok, so maybe you already have that quad port, I did!). Well, access points cost $70-100... far more expensive than those shitty wifi routers that are always on sale and rebate. But you don't want switch over to the hardware router, or worse, daisy-chain this thing behind the linux router, where it will try to double NAT every single packet. It's also almost impossible to find specs on the things, if it can be turned off in the config. And don't even bother asking that salesmen at Circuit City (*cowlike stare* "Uh, yeh, they can all be turned off"). If the cheap router offers a 4 port switch (though I'm sure it routes/NATs these too) it's been my luck that using one of these ports to plug into the linux server does the trick. Plugging the linux server into the WAN port did some crazy shit, but on the LAN ports, it just assumed it was connecting 2 local machines, exactly like I wanted it. While I can only say this with certainly about the iBlittz router turd that I have, I'm pretty sure it would be the case with all such routers that have a builtin 4port switch. Hope I've helped someone.
You're either asking me if all the wizards I've seen are bad (they are) or if wizards *could be* good, if done right by the right people (*shrug* yeh, I suppose they could).
As it always should be. If you think that software installation isn't something that any user but the most clueful should ever be allowed to do, you're begging for trouble. The receptionist up front, who is always installing shareware games, elf-bowling and shit, check out her computer sometime. Norton has probably nailed most of the actual viruses, but there is almost certainly dozens of spyware applets installed.
My favorite is "I thought we switched to Mozilla to get rid of popups". Walk over, and as she surfs, little IE windows keep popping up. It was amazing. The damn spyware app was intercepting Mozillas browser traffic, and opening up IE popunders. I wanted to cry.
Open up 1 text file that will always be in the same place, that will never pop up the "this is C:\Program Files, do you really want to see the files?". Find the line in this text file marked "This is for the blahblah sound card". Delete the # in front of that line, and only the #.
Type startx, hit enter. If that doesn't work, type xf86config, hit enter. Answer all the questions it asks, and if unsure of the answer, it will usually tell you about a good generic answer. If you think you need to configure a video card, but you don't know the name of it, go shoot yourself.
Those *do not* look like rocket science instructions to me, but maybe I'm biased. It's all intimidating if you haven't learned anything yet, right? Except this isn't all that much to learn, is incredibly valuable (at least in my own unimportant opinion), and can't be faked with some asshat GUI wizard.
What's the alternative, mandrake with some GUI installer, which has a 45% of making it work auto-magically if its a stock Dell or IBM, and a 10% chance if you've installed even one PCI card on your own? There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it? And it is at least as many steps, isn't easily reversed, and provides a false sense of security.
Which wireless card? Having struggled to get my own working just recently (I certainly can't imagine it being easier with mandrake), I feel qualified to at least point you in the right direction.
I would also like to point out that this isn't a slackware issue, it's usually a linux kernel issue. Finding the right driver, having a kernel version that driver accepts, these are problems most will face. Will it be any easier on redhat? Sure, if the cute little gui wizard handles this, and happens to work for you correctly the first time.
Getting sound to work amounts to uncommenting the correct chipset in rc.modules. Getting X to work, if it doesn't by default, amounts to running xf86config and picking the correct options (of which there are few) out of menus.
It doesn't get any easier or friendlier, but it can treat you like a retard with all sorts of fancy auto-config wizards that may or may not work. And when things get more complicated, you'll be up a creek. Kudzu refusing to see that second ethernet card? Oops. On slackware, you'd already have learned how to do it manually with modprobe and ifconfig, and you'd have had no trouble adding those few lines to rc.inet1.
Tex Bigballs would have something to say about a localroger asskissing this blatant, but I don't think he reads assdot.
Metamorphosis is indeed good scifi, though. And it does illustrate some problems with the 3 laws... should the robot be omnipotent in a supernatural way!
Next time, use that shriveled little turd anatomists would call a "brain".
Yes, when I'm trying to teach people who have only ever used Windows (and likely only since after an autoexec.bat was long dead), I like to toss them in the SysV init deep end, and just let them drown.
Of course eventually they will need to learn SysV, but that can wait a few months(or even a few years). Slackware style init is superior for single user desktops, and even the dullest person can be taught to work with it well enough to not screw it up.
But go ahead, let's start the init flamewars again.
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Maybe this shows how sick I am, but I've been giving some thought to those. Not into buying one, but rather, how you'd go about improving one.
The site says something about heating them in hot water, and that they'd retain that heat for awhile. But what about giving it a pulse *and* body heat at the same time? A small water pump, putting heated liquid, thermostat controlled, throughout the thing? Just wondering how you'd get even a rudimentary circulation system in it.
Also wondering if you could make it breath. Would be interesting to see that, even if some say it would be a bit creepy. That one seems a bit simpler, but has more possibilities. The rate of "breathing" could be controlled for "out of breath" type scenarios. And of course, some type of speaker in the throat/head that would sound natural.
Actually, I believe you are correct. Commercially available, relatively cheap red and green lasers are available though. No idea about blue.
I don't think anyone has ever suggested permanently disabling the CCDs, which may not be possible with non-dangerous lasers. What if you miss while fine tuning your aim with binoculars, and blind a baby? Even I wouldn't do that. Rather, disable it temporarily with an eye-safe laser, but leave the damn thing bolted there with the correct aim.
This means:
1) No chance of accidentally blinding someone, yourself included.
2) No chance of damaging the camera permanently, which is probably more illegal than blinding it.
3) They don't replace it tomorrow, when you're not there to blind it again.
Sorry my own humor was so subtle then. ;)
The laser pointer thing was serious. Wouldn't you blind the guv, given a chance?
This shrill scream of "1984" all time just weakens it's real meaning.
You'd rather we wait until the very end, where it's undeniably 1984, and then complain?
I'd sell myself into indentured servitude to go somewhere else. Oh well. The man did I have some good ideas, I suppose.
They'll readily agree to it, as soon as software is advanced enough to render them doing something innocuous in realtime. Reciprocal surveillance isn't possible, the technology isn't mature enough.
And when it is, they'll still have the tools to ignore it. But I respect your lazy third-hand thinking anyway.
Gee. Let's see. A 0.0001% chance that these cameras can be used to catch a criminal, who won't pay me for the damage, that will only ransack my house once in my entire lifetime, and will never see any fair justice, one way or the other.
Vs.
A 99.9999% chance that (I'm 29) within my own lifetime some grabass lowlife politician or other "authority" will abuse this system affecting me at least indirectly, and in a serious, lasting manner.
Then again, I was taught math in public skool, so I'm not sure how to finish the equation. I change my mind, bring in the cameras!
Copyright. My own image, meaning that of my face and body, are my own and are extremely valuable to me and select customers. I've spent a great amount of time, money and effort cultivating my unique look, and the government doing this is an illegal invasion of my valuable intellectual property.
More seriously, my rights include those not expressly forbidden or reserved for the government. Ask whether the government has the right to put them up.
I'm not suprised by your question, it's the obvious one, but it's also the wrong question.
Unlike some questionable things, which were vulnerable to abuse, the abuses these cameras will encourage are inevitable and can't be managed.
20 years later:
Running for city council? Great, the Democrats managed to dig up that footage of you picking your nose on 8th and main, and since it would be bad form to show it themselves, it was submitted anonymously to the local tabloid.
Pissed off Jeb? Guess what, the "new" facial recognition software was doing routine scans of archived footage, and managed to match your old cheek/jawline with a bank robber that killed 3 guards. Remember where you were 18 years ago on the day of Sept 5th, 2002?
There are more, and probably better examples, but these are what come to mind. Sure, if I went out in public 50 years ago, I had no guarantee I wouldn't be watched, and no recourse if I was. But with cameras, you are *always* watched. It is guaranteed. And when software catches up, this will literally be true. Nothing will be missed.
Stumble and fall on your ass into the mud puddle? Gee, wouldn't you be embarrassed if you thought someone got it on America's Funniest Home videos? Well, now the guard will set the software to look for that, every night when he gets bored. Doesn't matter if he wasn't watching while it happened... he'll never miss it now. And it won't be objectionable enough that people will be outraged either. Even though they should. Some low-level bureaucrat shredding your dignity for his personal amusement. You'll walk by him at the subway station, he'll recognize you even though there's no way you would know him, and he'll smirk. Or maybe wink.
You should be asking yourself if the government is entitled to putting all-seeing, never-forgetting electronic eyes everywhere. Are they? What could possibly justify it?
If you don't ask that, one day there will be one mounted somewhere on the street, with clear aim at your windows, your doorstep.
I'm just waiting for some "patriot" who has line of sight to the lens to aim a laser pointer at it, and leave it there. Some cameras won't be vulnerable to this, but at least a few will be across the street from someone that has a condo with a balcony, wouldn't they?
Lord knows that if I owned a small business or home near one, they'd never see shit out of it.
Screw that, it was always the pussy weapon. I want a bigger chainsaw this time though...
Check out my own network, brazillian friendly!
Rock sold out in the late 60s, early 70s. Definitely before 1975. Alternative sold out in 1991 I think, or was it earlier? Rap sold out, then sold out again, and has reached the magic "100,000 sellouts" number. Snoop Dog was on an AOL commercial, just when you thought it couldn't sell out any more. Country sold out, but no one bought. Is selling out a bad thing? Yes, but then I never much liked those genres anyway, so maybe it's good after all.
What little I've been able to dig up suggests that there aren't linux drivers for this card. However, many people seem to have no trouble with ndiswrapper, which is what I use. It's a simple "configure; make; make install" sort of package, but I'm sure there are RPMs and debian packages for those that prefer those distros.
/path/to/inf-file", the .inf file being the windows driver for this card. What I've read suggests that you use the driver that comes on the CD with the card, and not the driver dowloaded from broadcom's site.
Installing ndiswrapper will mean you need a newer 2.4 kernel or 2.6. No kernel patches are necessary, and it may throw a few warnings, but should still compile. After installing, do "ndiswrapper -i
Then, "modprobe ndiswrapper". At this point, the activity light on my own shitty card starts blinking, I would expect yours to do so also. Then comes the iwconfig setup, which I imagine varies quite a bit. Others have told me that "iwconfig wlan0 essid MyWAP" should be enough, but my machine just acts goofy without getting a link. I always have to do "iwconfig wlan0 channel 10" first.
Also, a caveat. As soon as the ndiswrapper module is loaded, my machine will be slow to respond, taking as much as 15 seconds to see a keystroke. It behaves like this until I get my link, after which it starts acting normally again. So that it doesn't take forever (did I just fatfinger wlan0 again?), I usually type it in as one big command line, like so:
modprobe ndiswrapper; iwconfig wlan0 channel 10; iwconfig wlan0 essid Ansible; dhcpcd wlan0
I was so worried, at first, that my shitty walmart clearance bin ($15) iBlitzz card was never going to work. Just took a little patience.
Off-topic: Another thing I'd like to point out. If you are like me, you have a dedicated linux server that has acted as your home router for years. Adding wifi to your house should be as simple as a few lines in rc.ipmasq to do NAT for a new segment, and maybe a 3rd ethernet card (ok, so maybe you already have that quad port, I did!). Well, access points cost $70-100... far more expensive than those shitty wifi routers that are always on sale and rebate. But you don't want switch over to the hardware router, or worse, daisy-chain this thing behind the linux router, where it will try to double NAT every single packet. It's also almost impossible to find specs on the things, if it can be turned off in the config. And don't even bother asking that salesmen at Circuit City (*cowlike stare* "Uh, yeh, they can all be turned off"). If the cheap router offers a 4 port switch (though I'm sure it routes/NATs these too) it's been my luck that using one of these ports to plug into the linux server does the trick. Plugging the linux server into the WAN port did some crazy shit, but on the LAN ports, it just assumed it was connecting 2 local machines, exactly like I wanted it. While I can only say this with certainly about the iBlittz router turd that I have, I'm pretty sure it would be the case with all such routers that have a builtin 4port switch. Hope I've helped someone.
You're either asking me if all the wizards I've seen are bad (they are) or if wizards *could be* good, if done right by the right people (*shrug* yeh, I suppose they could).
As it always should be. If you think that software installation isn't something that any user but the most clueful should ever be allowed to do, you're begging for trouble. The receptionist up front, who is always installing shareware games, elf-bowling and shit, check out her computer sometime. Norton has probably nailed most of the actual viruses, but there is almost certainly dozens of spyware applets installed.
My favorite is "I thought we switched to Mozilla to get rid of popups". Walk over, and as she surfs, little IE windows keep popping up. It was amazing. The damn spyware app was intercepting Mozillas browser traffic, and opening up IE popunders. I wanted to cry.
Not that I blame you for the mistake, but I don't think he is a troll. Nor do I see that he is denying your conclusion.
That said, follow the statement to its logical conclusion!
Open up 1 text file that will always be in the same place, that will never pop up the "this is C:\Program Files, do you really want to see the files?". Find the line in this text file marked "This is for the blahblah sound card". Delete the # in front of that line, and only the #.
Type startx, hit enter. If that doesn't work, type xf86config, hit enter. Answer all the questions it asks, and if unsure of the answer, it will usually tell you about a good generic answer. If you think you need to configure a video card, but you don't know the name of it, go shoot yourself.
Those *do not* look like rocket science instructions to me, but maybe I'm biased. It's all intimidating if you haven't learned anything yet, right? Except this isn't all that much to learn, is incredibly valuable (at least in my own unimportant opinion), and can't be faked with some asshat GUI wizard.
What's the alternative, mandrake with some GUI installer, which has a 45% of making it work auto-magically if its a stock Dell or IBM, and a 10% chance if you've installed even one PCI card on your own? There will be 4 or 5 different screens of the wizard, often worded ambiguously, that if you click on the wrong one, it may ot may not allow you to go back and fix it? And it is at least as many steps, isn't easily reversed, and provides a false sense of security.
I just don't see that as an improvement.
Which wireless card? Having struggled to get my own working just recently (I certainly can't imagine it being easier with mandrake), I feel qualified to at least point you in the right direction.
I would also like to point out that this isn't a slackware issue, it's usually a linux kernel issue. Finding the right driver, having a kernel version that driver accepts, these are problems most will face. Will it be any easier on redhat? Sure, if the cute little gui wizard handles this, and happens to work for you correctly the first time.
Nice troll.
Getting sound to work amounts to uncommenting the correct chipset in rc.modules. Getting X to work, if it doesn't by default, amounts to running xf86config and picking the correct options (of which there are few) out of menus.
It doesn't get any easier or friendlier, but it can treat you like a retard with all sorts of fancy auto-config wizards that may or may not work. And when things get more complicated, you'll be up a creek. Kudzu refusing to see that second ethernet card? Oops. On slackware, you'd already have learned how to do it manually with modprobe and ifconfig, and you'd have had no trouble adding those few lines to rc.inet1.
Not very interactive in the "go get me a beer" way, but still 95% there. Check it out.
Tex Bigballs would have something to say about a localroger asskissing this blatant, but I don't think he reads assdot.
Metamorphosis is indeed good scifi, though. And it does illustrate some problems with the 3 laws... should the robot be omnipotent in a supernatural way!
Next time, use that shriveled little turd anatomists would call a "brain".
Read his post again. It's that bloated turd called Gnome. But if he needs Abiword, I guess I shouldn't belittle him for it.
WindowMaker forever!
Yes, when I'm trying to teach people who have only ever used Windows (and likely only since after an autoexec.bat was long dead), I like to toss them in the SysV init deep end, and just let them drown.
Of course eventually they will need to learn SysV, but that can wait a few months(or even a few years). Slackware style init is superior for single user desktops, and even the dullest person can be taught to work with it well enough to not screw it up.
But go ahead, let's start the init flamewars again.