That as intelligence-gathering techniques became cheaper and easier and more accessible to the general public, that the government would pay less attention to intel-gathering activities?
That's exactly what I would expect. Intel-gathering, as you call it, is no longer an identifying characteristic of a threatening person. Innocent people are likely to be openly engaged in photographing public places, while the real terrorists are able to gather their photos using completely hidden cameras. So I would expect a reasonable government to focus their limited resources on more fruitful activities, such as identifying, hiding, or hardening important targets. Instead, they're effectively reducing the number of watchful eyes around some targets (like photographers--and the guards being distracted by the photographers--near chemical plants), and creating brand-new, very attractive targets (like long lines at security checkpoints, or mandatory backdoors in IT systems).
Or they might dare to complain about the 95dBa "whup whup whup" sound it makes when the wind is blowing in a certain direction. Or about the bird-pieces that are landing on their car. Or about the blade that flew through their bedroom window.
Visually? I'd love to have one in the neighborhood.
For a recent and slightly geekier article on some of this technology (gathering information on social networks so the "terrorist leaders" can be, er, "removed from the picture"), see http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep06/4424/4.
AutoMap spits out the network in a form of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and passes the data on to another program written by Carley's group, the Organizational Risk Analyzer. It uses statistics to examine a network to discover more about particular agents and how they interact with each other and influence group dynamics. Based on network theory, social psychology, operations research, and management theory, the software identifies the most important agents in a terrorist network.
Before identifying key individuals, however, first you have to find the covert network, which is by definition working hard to stay hidden. Here the Fuzzy Overlapping Grouping (FOG) algorithm, developed by Carley's grad student George B. Davis, provides something like an X-ray view of a society.
So...
Usefull against an insurgency.
Not usefull if invading the swiss.
Such a gadget might actually be pretty useful against the Swiss and others with very accurate weapons. Weapon goes straight for the center of mass...and passes right through!
I see that Motorola is introducing a phone with an E Ink display, but ONLY in third-world markets. An industry representative says "EPD technology is not appropriate for cell phones in any other market" because it' monochrome and too slow for video. [EE Times, August 14, 2006] The display is thin, high-contrast, low-power, and visible in bright light. A Motorola rep says "emerging markets [have] a lot of sun." Hello Motorola. I think I've seen just a wee bit of sunshine in Arizona and Texas.
It's amazing the evidence of untapped markets which the cell phone industry ignores:
Jitterbug. It'll be interesting to see how the Jitterbug phone does when it is released this fall. It's the "grandparent" phone everybody's been clamoring for, though with a rather expensive calling plan. Apparently they've been flooded with an immense number of pre-orders.
In-store conversations. Hanging out in a Verizon store, I noticed family after family coming in, looking at the phones, mumbling something about "these are all too complicated", then leaving.
Rural parking lots. Take a look around a parking lot in any rural town in Eastern Colorado, Nebraska, etc. You'll see that many of the farmers still have 5W Motorola bag phones with external antennas. I bet they'd love to replace them with something more portable and more capable, but the digital signals just don't reach "out there."
HR 5319 is an unnecessary knee-jerk which opens the door to all kinds of abuse, but the bill doesn't necessarily restrict sites like Slashdot or Amazon. It's clearly aimed at MySpace and real-time chatrooms, and merely opens the possibility for the FCC to make a broader definition.
(J) COMMERCIAL SOCIAL NETWORKING WEBSITES; CHAT ROOMS- Within 120 days after the date of enactment of the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006, the Commission shall by rule define the terms `social networking website' and `chat room' for purposes of this subsection. In determining the definition of a social networking website, the Commission shall take into consideration the extent to which a website-- (i) is offered by a commercial entity; (ii) permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information; (iii) permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users; (iv) elicits highly-personalized information from users; and (v) enables communication among users.
The vote against ratifying the Kyoto treaty in the Senate was 98-0.
That's strange, since the protocol has never been submitted to the Senate for ratification. The 98-0 vote may refer to a non-binding vote on a resolution relating to how the negotionations were to take place (see http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/akyotoqa.asp).
If you already have 3500 books, you're probably a collector, not a "tosser" at heart. You need to consider how your system will accommodate future expansion to possibly tens of thousands of books. In no particular order:
Will your system be so much work to implement that you eventually give up on it?
Will any data you collect migrate to whatever bibliographic/catalogging software you might decide to use in 10, 20, 40 years?
How will you handle overflow, when there's a bookcase in front of each wall?
Do you need to protect your library from silverfish or other book-destroying pests?
Is your house sturdy enough to support all that weight?
Here are a couple specific strategies that have helped me and my wife:
We organize books by rough subject headings. We subdivide once a category gets too big to find what we need.
We catalog the books we have read using Endnote (www.endnote.com). We only record the books we've read, to avoid the overwhelming task of dealing with our whole library at once. We use Endnote because it can import info from the Library of Congress (among other places) and because it can export the database in literally thousands of formats, so "the software that comes next" is a non-issue.
Overflow goes into boxes. Since we're usually in a hurry when this boxing happens, a good solution has been to take a digital photo of what's in each box; everything isn't catalogged, but it's way quicker to glance through a bunch of pictures than to unstack and open boxes. We invest in super-heavy-duty bankers boxes (available from many online office supply stores)--not the flimsy ones in stock at your typical neighborhood office store.
We keep our eyes open for good homes for books we no longer need. I'd rather ship a box of books to, say, a school in a third-world country than to give 'em to the local Friends of the Library, where book dealers will cherry-pick the best ones, then send the rest to either a book sale or a landfill.
How might the world be different if the major wireless router makers
provided, by default, a way for users to share their bandwidth riches, without compromising their own access or security?
A good default setup might include features like:
Allow others to use my wireless connection.
Disable the "promiscuous mode" when I'm online.
Limit the amount of bandwitdth consumed by any one "foreign" IP.
This wouldn't cost the manufacturer much (a few man-months of firmware development?). And under the current pricing model, it wouldn't cost me anything. But it would encourage free access by all, and by making it easier for me to endorse sharing of my bandwidth, it would remove some of the present ambiguity regarding "is this connection intentionally open, or am I in fact stealing this guy's bandwitdth?"
My 77-year-old mother only uses her computer once or twice a week. She doesn't surf the web, and is afraid to open pictures from her Juno email. But her modem stays busy for hours and hours downloading the latest Windows updates and the latest virus definition files. She may need to get broadband so that she can just turn on her computer and USE it.
For many non-techies, the biggest driver for getting broadband is because Mr. Bill's software won't work well without it.
And where do you get repair materials, when the roof is punctured (by hail, or space debris, or whatever)?
Sounds like geodesic domes, hyperbolic parabaloid roofs, etc. These structures work okay in places like Antarctica, but for typical residential use they fail three important tests: 1) Will my local building inspector--who only understands sticks-n-stones construction--approve the thing without a ton of paperwork and appeals? 2) Will my rectangular furniture fit? and 3) Can I repair it when it breaks?
Slashdot Mirror
Like this:
"EPD [e-ink] technology is not appropriate for cell phones in any other market."
or this:
"[only] emerging markets [have] a lot of sun."
[EE Times, August 14, 2006]
That's exactly what I would expect. Intel-gathering, as you call it, is no longer an identifying characteristic of a threatening person. Innocent people are likely to be openly engaged in photographing public places, while the real terrorists are able to gather their photos using completely hidden cameras. So I would expect a reasonable government to focus their limited resources on more fruitful activities, such as identifying, hiding, or hardening important targets. Instead, they're effectively reducing the number of watchful eyes around some targets (like photographers--and the guards being distracted by the photographers--near chemical plants), and creating brand-new, very attractive targets (like long lines at security checkpoints, or mandatory backdoors in IT systems).
Visually? I'd love to have one in the neighborhood.
Usefull against an insurgency.
Not usefull if invading the swiss.
Such a gadget might actually be pretty useful against the Swiss and others with very accurate weapons. Weapon goes straight for the center of mass...and passes right through!
It's amazing the evidence of untapped markets which the cell phone industry ignores:
Jitterbug. It'll be interesting to see how the Jitterbug phone does when it is released this fall. It's the "grandparent" phone everybody's been clamoring for, though with a rather expensive calling plan. Apparently they've been flooded with an immense number of pre-orders.
In-store conversations. Hanging out in a Verizon store, I noticed family after family coming in, looking at the phones, mumbling something about "these are all too complicated", then leaving.
Rural parking lots. Take a look around a parking lot in any rural town in Eastern Colorado, Nebraska, etc. You'll see that many of the farmers still have 5W Motorola bag phones with external antennas. I bet they'd love to replace them with something more portable and more capable, but the digital signals just don't reach "out there."
From the bill as it passed the house (http://thomas.loc.gov/)...note the and:
That's strange, since the protocol has never been submitted to the Senate for ratification. The 98-0 vote may refer to a non-binding vote on a resolution relating to how the negotionations were to take place (see http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/akyotoqa.asp).
If you already have 3500 books, you're probably a collector, not a "tosser" at heart. You need to consider how your system will accommodate future expansion to possibly tens of thousands of books. In no particular order:
Here are a couple specific strategies that have helped me and my wife:
How might the world be different if the major wireless router makers provided, by default, a way for users to share their bandwidth riches, without compromising their own access or security?
A good default setup might include features like:
This wouldn't cost the manufacturer much (a few man-months of firmware development?). And under the current pricing model, it wouldn't cost me anything. But it would encourage free access by all, and by making it easier for me to endorse sharing of my bandwidth, it would remove some of the present ambiguity regarding "is this connection intentionally open, or am I in fact stealing this guy's bandwitdth?"
My 77-year-old mother only uses her computer once or twice a week. She doesn't surf the web, and is afraid to open pictures from her Juno email. But her modem stays busy for hours and hours downloading the latest Windows updates and the latest virus definition files. She may need to get broadband so that she can just turn on her computer and USE it.
For many non-techies, the biggest driver for getting broadband is because Mr. Bill's software won't work well without it.
And where do you get repair materials, when the roof is punctured (by hail, or space debris, or whatever)?
Sounds like geodesic domes, hyperbolic parabaloid roofs, etc. These structures work okay in places like Antarctica, but for typical residential use they fail three important tests: 1) Will my local building inspector--who only understands sticks-n-stones construction--approve the thing without a ton of paperwork and appeals? 2) Will my rectangular furniture fit? and 3) Can I repair it when it breaks?