You're kidding, right? Car designs are already covered heavily by trademarks and patents. Auto companies sue each other over something as trivial as the approximate shape of the headlights.
They are called "enzymes". They are built from stuff, mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, that is ideally suited to doing this sort of thing. And they have been optimized over a billion years by "genetic algorithms" for doing this thing. It seems pretty doubtful that one can design a better toolkit for "molecular assemblers" than what molecular biology already gives us. We'll be able to build different tools out of that toolkit, but nothing of the sort as described by Drexler or in Stephenson's novels.
I don't think so. There have been terrorist attacks on trains (e.g., Carlos the Jackal's bombing in 1983). They just haven't been very successful and haven't led to cumbersome security measures.
From a terrorist point of view, I suspect that a building is a better target than a train: easier to get to, easier to get away from, and more likely to kill lots of people.
In fact, even when it comes to airline security, Americans seem to be going from one extreme to another without ever getting it right: prior to 9/11, airlines just didn't want to inconvenience passengers even though even simple measures could have prevented 9/11. Post 9/11, US airlines seem to be working hard to make their passengers' lives as miserable as possible (without necessarily improving security much).
I think the Japanese must have failed to appreciate both the connotations that that name has in English, as well as the fact that that line became extinct very early on in the evolution of animals. In different words, not a good name for a vehicle...
Most windows machines came with a JVM. XP initially came with it, then didnt then didnt again. And most large manufactures who sell XP preinstalled have it on their images, the Sun JVM that is.
None of my Windows machines have come with Java preinstalled.
Java is far from dead.
Of course, Java isn't dead. Even client-side Java and Swing aren't "dead". But Java started out promising to revolutionize application delivery, and that dream is dead. Client-side Java is a niche product now. And Sun's claims that their Java desktop is what Linux has been waiting for are bogus.
And why shouldn't sun do this. Take the best of the OSS community and embrace and extend, that is what it is all about.
And you say that with a straight face? Embrace and extend is Microsoft's traditional strategy for creating proprietary platforms and monopolies.
Why shouldn't they call it the "Java Desktop"? Because it's mostly written in C and mostly written by people not working for Sun, that's all. Calling it the "Java Desktop" just isn't honest.
Of course, as far as Gnome is concerned, this doesn't matter much either way. But it tells you where Sun and Java stand.
And solaris, does it really need a desktop?
Like a lame horse, Solaris needs a bullet to put it out of its misery as far as I'm concerned. But traditionally, Sun workstations actually sat on desks and were used by people, so that's why Sun probably still has some nostalgia about the desktop.
Sorry--something happened during editing, so that didn't come out quite right. What I was referring to was that Macintosh doesn't rely on Java for any important desktop applications.
But, yes, the Macintosh does come preinstalled with Java. It's, in fact, probably the easiest way these days to get a machine running Java and it is well integrated with the OS.
But there are almost no Java applications for Macintosh: almost everything written for OS X seems to be written either using Cocoa and Objective-C or using Carbon (usually with some C++ wrapper).
So, it's basically a RedHat derivative with a Gnome-only desktop, a flaky installer, and Java preinstalled.
Why is Sun doing this? They need a new desktop for Solaris anyway, since what they have is obsolete. But Sun has been unable to hack together a Java-based desktop. So, they took Gnome, added a JVM, and called it a "Java desktop", never mind that almost all of it is written in C. And they ship it for both Solaris and their variant of Linux because that's what they are trying to sell.
None of this is a great advance, it's an act of desparation on the part of Sun. None of the major Linux distributions rely on Java for any desktop applications; in fact, most don't even bother installing it by default. Neither does Macintosh or Windows.
MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and MIT.
The US has done the same for EU contries in the past.
Yes, the US has, in many ways, become a mercenary force for the West. It is high time that Europe take responsibility for its own defense. Running its own GPS system under European control is a good start.
Before any of you high and mighty Euros get on your high horse just rember that the UK considered attacking a US war ship and blaming it on the Germans to get the US into WWII.
And you consider that some kind of recommendation for the US? Pretty much the only war in the 20th century where they US was completely justified in intervening, it knowingly accepted the internment and slaughter of millions before finally acting.
Making it a fair fight???? Not on your freaking life.
Yes, and all I'm saying is that Europe should take responsibility for its own defense, both in terms of expense and governance. Given that Europe has become a federation of more than twice as many people as the US, it is time that its political and military power reflect that.
You suspect wrong. Modula-3 and C# have the same low-level constructs that C has: pointers, unchecked array accesses, bitwise conversions, etc. The difference is that they are clearly marked in Modula-3 and C#, while in C/C++, you just can't tell and you can't encapsulate unsafe constructs into unsafe modules.
I hate to break it to you but that runtime saftey isn't magic, it's implemented by an unsafe runtime somewhere.
You're on the right track. Now, if you think a little further along the same lines, you'll see that you are much better off implementing safety once, in a single place in the runtime, rather than trying to implement it in user code in 6 million lines of kernel code. It's called "reuse", "abstraction" and "encapsulation", and it's as important for safety as it is for anything else.
In some situations runtime saftey can cause a serious performance hit that at a kernel level will significantly slow the entire system.
You're missing the point. Modula-3 and C# don't force you to write safe code everywhere, they give you the option to choose. (Not that it is relevant to this discussion, but the overhead of enforcing runtime safety strictly is also small.)
Safe runtimes are great for high level apps but they aren't a magic bullet.
That's why languages like Modula-3 and C# offer both safe and unsafe constructs. The problem with C and C++ is not that they have unsafe constructs, which systems programming languages need, but that they don't separate unsafe and safe constructs.
You're quite right. But as you yourself probably realize, VisualBasic has other problems for these kinds of applications.
However, our choices aren't limited to C, C++, and VisualBasic. Fortunately, there are alternatives. Languages like Modula-3 and C# are well-suited to writing kernels: they give you runtime safety and well-defined semantics while still letting you get at the machine level when you need to.
While OpenBSD has not shared in the commercial success of Linux, it does have one area of technical superiority: its security review process has yet to permit a remote root compromise in a standard install.
Any kernel that is written in C or C++ is going to provide programmers opportunities to create security problems almost every line in every single source file. No amount of reviewing is going to help you with that. Whether BSD is a little less bad than Linux or not is academic.
The only way to build a kernel that can be trusted is to develop it in languages and using runtimes that make it easy to reason about runtime safety and security.
What does "defining the Hayes command set" have to do with the dial-up revolution? The invention and development of the modem seems like the key part, not any particular command set. See here for a brief history of the modem. Of course, Hayes's company drove down prices, but they would have come down anyway.
I did NOT specifically talk about Bush. I did NOT say that "the US was already firmly in the grip of fascists and fundamentalists". I said that there were "fascist and religious fundamentalist currents in US politics".
Whether the US will become a rogue nation remains to be seen; it's not the most likely outcome, but it has become probable enough that other nations shouldn't blindly trust the US. Politically moderate, bumbling wimps like Bush are probably not the biggest threat to US democracy; right wing members of Congress are much more dangerous. But the biggest threat to US democracy is people like you, people who are perfectly willing to sacrifice democracy for temporary safety and national pride. It has all happened before.
It's popular because it was first to market. It was first to market because it was cheap.
It wasn't first to market. There were several devices like it on the market before. The fact that it made it in the market where others failed is a combination of excellent marketing, fortuitous timing, and, mostly, dumb luck.
It was cheap because it made a load of design compromises.
It would have been even cheaper to develop the system if they had reused existing APIs or bought a better third party kernel.
And the reason why it remains incompatible and obscure today is because it is profitable for Palm to keep it incompatible and obscure. Palm could have easily switched to a POSIX or even Linux kernel for PalmOS 5 (and run the existing emulator on top of it). But Palm doesn't want to be compatible because they see incompatibility as a strategic advantage.
It made a load of design compromises so it's a bitch to program.
It's a bitch to program because the people who wrote it didn't give a damn about system architectures and because they keep getting rewarded through the mechanisms that I mentioned. Systems-that-suck technically really do make good business--if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Basically, the USA wants to make sure that only first-world nations can fight using high-tech weapons. They don't want two-bit dictators to have the same capabilities.
No, the USA wants to make sure that the USA has control over all high tech weapons. With the current fascist and religious fundementalist currents in US politics, this is something that should have the world really worried.
Instead, they're giving the EU the option to design it to play nice so that there are more options in a war than just shooting it down or letting the enemy use it.
Then the EU should have the option of disabling the system at the EU's choice. If the US decides to shoot the system down against the wishes of the EU, that would be an act of war by the US against the EU. Shooting down another democracy's satellites for domestic US political or military purposes and against the wishes of that democracy would be a useful indicator of when the US really has crossed the line to being a rogue nation.
Open source developers often scratch the same itch'
He seems to be confusing open source with Communism or Microsoft. Communism or Microsoft perform central planning and avoid implementing similar products multiple times. Open source is a market force: people are going to start similar projects multiple times, they are going to compete with those projects for users and developers, and the better projects survive. Open source is based on the principles of good-ol' American free markets. Unlike Communism or Microsoft, that is.
and 'Open Source developers love a good feud.'
And companies aren't? Has this guy ever been in business? Just some examples from the very top: McNealy has some sort of Microsoft size envy (and gets infuriated by the fact that Gates probably doesn't even notice), Jobs is a vicious primadonna, and Ballmer likes hopping around on stage talking about crushing competitors. In contrast, open source 'fights' seem positively high-brow: at least they often involve important issues like licenses, legal agreements, and technical standards.
Yeah, open source developers 'often scratch the same itch' and they 'love a good feud'. The industry would be a whole lot better off if software companies were a bit more like open source developers instead of the mindless monopolies, personality cults, and PR machines that they are.
No, I think you're missing an important point here. Those "Bad OS's" generally have to run on weaker hardware. Linux can't run on hardware as weak as the Palm's, and can barely run on Windows CE grade handhelds
Given the history of UNIX and Linux, that is just an idiotic statement. Both UNIX and Linux run comfortably on hardware that is slower than the original 68k Palm, including X11 even; that's what workstation vendors used to ship.
The current PalmOS 5 handhelds have 175MHz to 400MHz RISC processors and between 16M and 64M of RAM--more than high-end workstations of not too long ago.
(I've tried it, it's painful).
Well, I don't know what you "tried", but you either picked a bad Linux installation or a bad platform. If you tried QPE, for example, it is quite heavyweight compared to X11 and includes several extremely bloated apps. But that tells you nothing about Linux or X11.
As operating systems go, WindowsCE and PalmOS have no advantages over Linux/X11 in terms of resource usage or performance. If Palm created a toolkit similar to what they are using on top of Linux/X11, it would run more than comfortably on current Palm hardware. In fact, it would probably run much better than the current PalmOS-based implementations.
PocketPC: significant (lots of API limitations relative to XP)
PalmOS: extreme (can't write all-native apps, memory limits, no file system, no resizeable windows, no layout manager, no multitasking, no standard APIs).
Ironic, isn't it, that popularity is inversely proportional to difficulty of software development? Of course, that's a pretty general rule.
Now, why is that? Well, look at this news item. When someone ports a Commodore 64 emulator to a Linux/X11 handheld, it's not news because it's so trivial. When someone ports it to PalmOS, it's big news. I once ported a web browser to a Linux/X11 handheld, and that wasn't news either. You still can't get anything of comparable quality for PalmOS, and so every junky PalmOS web browser is a news item.
Bad OS platforms make for good press, lots of business opportunities, and lots of PR. Programmers feel proud when they have mastered a bad platform and managed to create the tiniest app for a bad platform. That's why PalmOS and Windows XP keep winning in the market. What to do about it, I don't know.
What the hell is the 'IMAGE' tag?
on
Web 'Rules' Changing?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
'IMAGE' is not an element in HTML 4 (check for yourself). Maybe it should be. Maybe it should stand for inline, base64 encoded images. But it doesn't.
Makes you wonder when the submitter of the article last wrote a page of HTML...
Trouble is: you have no control over cell tower based tracking. If it's offered as a service that you can easily enable/disable, it means that the infrastructure is in place for anybody to take advantage of it with little more than a click or a phone call.
In any case, I'm not saying that this should or shouldn't be done. I'm just saying that the argument "it saves lives" is, by itself, a bad one. Lots of policies "save lives" but that doesn't make them good ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
College
-------
Dutied:
-- do problem set
-- clean room
Procrastination:
-- post on Slashdot
-- get drunk
-- pick a fun but impossible final project for the engineering class
-- pick fight with roommate
White House
-----------
Duties:
-- balance budget and trade
-- develop healthcare program
Procrastination:
-- have Condolezza put out a flaming press release
-- get drunk
-- announce new space program
-- pick a fight with Saddam
Not all that different.
There have been several services before Apple selling music on-line, both with DRM and without DRM. So, no, Apple didn't come up with this either.
Ferraris are not IP, so you could copy it freely.
You're kidding, right? Car designs are already covered heavily by trademarks and patents. Auto companies sue each other over something as trivial as the approximate shape of the headlights.
They are called "enzymes". They are built from stuff, mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen, that is ideally suited to doing this sort of thing. And they have been optimized over a billion years by "genetic algorithms" for doing this thing. It seems pretty doubtful that one can design a better toolkit for "molecular assemblers" than what molecular biology already gives us. We'll be able to build different tools out of that toolkit, but nothing of the sort as described by Drexler or in Stephenson's novels.
I don't think so. There have been terrorist attacks on trains (e.g., Carlos the Jackal's bombing in 1983). They just haven't been very successful and haven't led to cumbersome security measures.
From a terrorist point of view, I suspect that a building is a better target than a train: easier to get to, easier to get away from, and more likely to kill lots of people.
In fact, even when it comes to airline security, Americans seem to be going from one extreme to another without ever getting it right: prior to 9/11, airlines just didn't want to inconvenience passengers even though even simple measures could have prevented 9/11. Post 9/11, US airlines seem to be working hard to make their passengers' lives as miserable as possible (without necessarily improving security much).
I think the Japanese must have failed to appreciate both the connotations that that name has in English, as well as the fact that that line became extinct very early on in the evolution of animals. In different words, not a good name for a vehicle...
Most windows machines came with a JVM. XP initially came with it, then didnt then didnt again. And most large manufactures who sell XP preinstalled have it on their images, the Sun JVM that is.
None of my Windows machines have come with Java preinstalled.
Java is far from dead.
Of course, Java isn't dead. Even client-side Java and Swing aren't "dead". But Java started out promising to revolutionize application delivery, and that dream is dead. Client-side Java is a niche product now. And Sun's claims that their Java desktop is what Linux has been waiting for are bogus.
And why shouldn't sun do this. Take the best of the OSS community and embrace and extend, that is what it is all about.
And you say that with a straight face? Embrace and extend is Microsoft's traditional strategy for creating proprietary platforms and monopolies.
Why shouldn't they call it the "Java Desktop"? Because it's mostly written in C and mostly written by people not working for Sun, that's all. Calling it the "Java Desktop" just isn't honest.
Of course, as far as Gnome is concerned, this doesn't matter much either way. But it tells you where Sun and Java stand.
And solaris, does it really need a desktop?
Like a lame horse, Solaris needs a bullet to put it out of its misery as far as I'm concerned. But traditionally, Sun workstations actually sat on desks and were used by people, so that's why Sun probably still has some nostalgia about the desktop.
Sorry--something happened during editing, so that didn't come out quite right. What I was referring to was that Macintosh doesn't rely on Java for any important desktop applications.
But, yes, the Macintosh does come preinstalled with Java. It's, in fact, probably the easiest way these days to get a machine running Java and it is well integrated with the OS.
But there are almost no Java applications for Macintosh: almost everything written for OS X seems to be written either using Cocoa and Objective-C or using Carbon (usually with some C++ wrapper).
So, it's basically a RedHat derivative with a Gnome-only desktop, a flaky installer, and Java preinstalled.
Why is Sun doing this? They need a new desktop for Solaris anyway, since what they have is obsolete. But Sun has been unable to hack together a Java-based desktop. So, they took Gnome, added a JVM, and called it a "Java desktop", never mind that almost all of it is written in C. And they ship it for both Solaris and their variant of Linux because that's what they are trying to sell.
None of this is a great advance, it's an act of desparation on the part of Sun. None of the major Linux distributions rely on Java for any desktop applications; in fact, most don't even bother installing it by default. Neither does Macintosh or Windows.
That's even though Microsoft has been trying to get into MIT.
The US has done the same for EU contries in the past.
Yes, the US has, in many ways, become a mercenary force for the West. It is high time that Europe take responsibility for its own defense. Running its own GPS system under European control is a good start.
Before any of you high and mighty Euros get on your high horse just rember that the UK considered attacking a US war ship and blaming it on the Germans to get the US into WWII.
And you consider that some kind of recommendation for the US? Pretty much the only war in the 20th century where they US was completely justified in intervening, it knowingly accepted the internment and slaughter of millions before finally acting.
Making it a fair fight???? Not on your freaking life.
Yes, and all I'm saying is that Europe should take responsibility for its own defense, both in terms of expense and governance. Given that Europe has become a federation of more than twice as many people as the US, it is time that its political and military power reflect that.
You suspect wrong. Modula-3 and C# have the same low-level constructs that C has: pointers, unchecked array accesses, bitwise conversions, etc. The difference is that they are clearly marked in Modula-3 and C#, while in C/C++, you just can't tell and you can't encapsulate unsafe constructs into unsafe modules.
I hate to break it to you but that runtime saftey isn't magic, it's implemented by an unsafe runtime somewhere.
You're on the right track. Now, if you think a little further along the same lines, you'll see that you are much better off implementing safety once, in a single place in the runtime, rather than trying to implement it in user code in 6 million lines of kernel code. It's called "reuse", "abstraction" and "encapsulation", and it's as important for safety as it is for anything else.
In some situations runtime saftey can cause a serious performance hit that at a kernel level will significantly slow the entire system.
You're missing the point. Modula-3 and C# don't force you to write safe code everywhere, they give you the option to choose. (Not that it is relevant to this discussion, but the overhead of enforcing runtime safety strictly is also small.)
Safe runtimes are great for high level apps but they aren't a magic bullet.
That's why languages like Modula-3 and C# offer both safe and unsafe constructs. The problem with C and C++ is not that they have unsafe constructs, which systems programming languages need, but that they don't separate unsafe and safe constructs.
You're quite right. But as you yourself probably realize, VisualBasic has other problems for these kinds of applications.
However, our choices aren't limited to C, C++, and VisualBasic. Fortunately, there are alternatives. Languages like Modula-3 and C# are well-suited to writing kernels: they give you runtime safety and well-defined semantics while still letting you get at the machine level when you need to.
While OpenBSD has not shared in the commercial success of Linux, it does have one area of technical superiority: its security review process has yet to permit a remote root compromise in a standard install.
Any kernel that is written in C or C++ is going to provide programmers opportunities to create security problems almost every line in every single source file. No amount of reviewing is going to help you with that. Whether BSD is a little less bad than Linux or not is academic.
The only way to build a kernel that can be trusted is to develop it in languages and using runtimes that make it easy to reason about runtime safety and security.
What does "defining the Hayes command set" have to do with the dial-up revolution? The invention and development of the modem seems like the key part, not any particular command set. See here for a brief history of the modem. Of course, Hayes's company drove down prices, but they would have come down anyway.
I did NOT specifically talk about Bush. I did NOT say that "the US was already firmly in the grip of fascists and fundamentalists". I said that there were "fascist and religious fundamentalist currents in US politics".
Whether the US will become a rogue nation remains to be seen; it's not the most likely outcome, but it has become probable enough that other nations shouldn't blindly trust the US. Politically moderate, bumbling wimps like Bush are probably not the biggest threat to US democracy; right wing members of Congress are much more dangerous. But the biggest threat to US democracy is people like you, people who are perfectly willing to sacrifice democracy for temporary safety and national pride. It has all happened before.
It's popular because it was first to market. It was first to market because it was cheap.
It wasn't first to market. There were several devices like it on the market before. The fact that it made it in the market where others failed is a combination of excellent marketing, fortuitous timing, and, mostly, dumb luck.
It was cheap because it made a load of design compromises.
It would have been even cheaper to develop the system if they had reused existing APIs or bought a better third party kernel.
And the reason why it remains incompatible and obscure today is because it is profitable for Palm to keep it incompatible and obscure. Palm could have easily switched to a POSIX or even Linux kernel for PalmOS 5 (and run the existing emulator on top of it). But Palm doesn't want to be compatible because they see incompatibility as a strategic advantage.
It made a load of design compromises so it's a bitch to program.
It's a bitch to program because the people who wrote it didn't give a damn about system architectures and because they keep getting rewarded through the mechanisms that I mentioned. Systems-that-suck technically really do make good business--if you happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Basically, the USA wants to make sure that only first-world nations can fight using high-tech weapons. They don't want two-bit dictators to have the same capabilities.
No, the USA wants to make sure that the USA has control over all high tech weapons. With the current fascist and religious fundementalist currents in US politics, this is something that should have the world really worried.
Instead, they're giving the EU the option to design it to play nice so that there are more options in a war than just shooting it down or letting the enemy use it.
Then the EU should have the option of disabling the system at the EU's choice. If the US decides to shoot the system down against the wishes of the EU, that would be an act of war by the US against the EU. Shooting down another democracy's satellites for domestic US political or military purposes and against the wishes of that democracy would be a useful indicator of when the US really has crossed the line to being a rogue nation.
Open source developers often scratch the same itch'
He seems to be confusing open source with Communism or Microsoft. Communism or Microsoft perform central planning and avoid implementing similar products multiple times. Open source is a market force: people are going to start similar projects multiple times, they are going to compete with those projects for users and developers, and the better projects survive. Open source is based on the principles of good-ol' American free markets. Unlike Communism or Microsoft, that is.
and 'Open Source developers love a good feud.'
And companies aren't? Has this guy ever been in business? Just some examples from the very top: McNealy has some sort of Microsoft size envy (and gets infuriated by the fact that Gates probably doesn't even notice), Jobs is a vicious primadonna, and Ballmer likes hopping around on stage talking about crushing competitors. In contrast, open source 'fights' seem positively high-brow: at least they often involve important issues like licenses, legal agreements, and technical standards.
Yeah, open source developers 'often scratch the same itch' and they 'love a good feud'. The industry would be a whole lot better off if software companies were a bit more like open source developers instead of the mindless monopolies, personality cults, and PR machines that they are.
No, I think you're missing an important point here. Those "Bad OS's" generally have to run on weaker hardware. Linux can't run on hardware as weak as the Palm's, and can barely run on Windows CE grade handhelds
Given the history of UNIX and Linux, that is just an idiotic statement. Both UNIX and Linux run comfortably on hardware that is slower than the original 68k Palm, including X11 even; that's what workstation vendors used to ship.
The current PalmOS 5 handhelds have 175MHz to 400MHz RISC processors and between 16M and 64M of RAM--more than high-end workstations of not too long ago.
(I've tried it, it's painful).
Well, I don't know what you "tried", but you either picked a bad Linux installation or a bad platform. If you tried QPE, for example, it is quite heavyweight compared to X11 and includes several extremely bloated apps. But that tells you nothing about Linux or X11.
As operating systems go, WindowsCE and PalmOS have no advantages over Linux/X11 in terms of resource usage or performance. If Palm created a toolkit similar to what they are using on top of Linux/X11, it would run more than comfortably on current Palm hardware. In fact, it would probably run much better than the current PalmOS-based implementations.
Let's make a table:
Handheld Platform: Porting Effort
Linux/X11 (handhelds.org, Yopy): trivial (some layout changes)
Linux-QPE (Zaurus): modest (reuse libraries, rewrite GUI)
PocketPC: significant (lots of API limitations relative to XP)
PalmOS: extreme (can't write all-native apps, memory limits, no file system, no resizeable windows, no layout manager, no multitasking, no standard APIs).
Ironic, isn't it, that popularity is inversely proportional to difficulty of software development? Of course, that's a pretty general rule.
Now, why is that? Well, look at this news item. When someone ports a Commodore 64 emulator to a Linux/X11 handheld, it's not news because it's so trivial. When someone ports it to PalmOS, it's big news. I once ported a web browser to a Linux/X11 handheld, and that wasn't news either. You still can't get anything of comparable quality for PalmOS, and so every junky PalmOS web browser is a news item.
Bad OS platforms make for good press, lots of business opportunities, and lots of PR. Programmers feel proud when they have mastered a bad platform and managed to create the tiniest app for a bad platform. That's why PalmOS and Windows XP keep winning in the market. What to do about it, I don't know.
'IMAGE' is not an element in HTML 4 (check for yourself). Maybe it should be. Maybe it should stand for inline, base64 encoded images. But it doesn't.
Makes you wonder when the submitter of the article last wrote a page of HTML...
We can already tell at the embryonal stage.
(For the clueless: the story is a dupe.)
Trouble is: you have no control over cell tower based tracking. If it's offered as a service that you can easily enable/disable, it means that the infrastructure is in place for anybody to take advantage of it with little more than a click or a phone call.
In any case, I'm not saying that this should or shouldn't be done. I'm just saying that the argument "it saves lives" is, by itself, a bad one. Lots of policies "save lives" but that doesn't make them good ideas.