My question: If you find the device on the car, are you allowed to remove it? Or would it be illegal somehow (tampering with investigation of some sort)?
Now suppose they just put these devices on everyone's car, and used them to send remote speeding tickets and other such nonsense...
If you throw enough computing power / bandwidth at it, message overhead and efficiency aren't as much of a problem - particularly for sending boring data packets that can tolerate a little latency and lossiness. We've made huge strides in the past 15 years.
The part I'm trying to figure out is, "why put them in a car?" It's not like the car is a major consumer or producer of data. Is this really going to change all that much? If not, and if non-car-things are to be using this mesh, it seems that you'd be massively overprovisioning dense urban areas and massively underprovisioning rural areas.
I don't see how the mobility of a motor vehicle brings anything valuable into the picture.
I guess when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a car...
We've already had our "in America, living patterns and mass transit mostly don't work out that great" discussion this week. What new points are we possibly going to be able to bring up this time?
The "Smart Grid" is the concept that you can make electricity use (and distribution) more efficient by building in "smart" power-meters. These "smart" power-meters are networked , which lets them do.... things, some of which may be useful (remote meter-reading? charging you different time-of-day rates? and actually letting you know what those rates are so they can turn them up on a very hot summer day when everyone's AC is on and encourage people thereby to use less power so you don't need as many expensive peaker plants running?) It's not an entirely bad idea, though it is a trifle hyped beyond its usefulness, I think. Which means we'll probably spend too much money on something dubious, just you watch. Really, though, the stuff at the power-substation and major-power-line-level does need somewhat of an overhaul, and that's probably worthwhile.
I guess the "electric-car" angle comes because if you're charging an electric car overnight, you probably want to charge it when it's cheapest, or something to that effect. And I can see the merit of some sort of open standard here, so you can make a chip which plugs into whatever-and-the-power-line and make that sort of decision. But that's not quite what he's suggesting; he's suggesting turning that device into a wireless mesh node.
Now, I know a guy who worked at IBM and was really big into this sort of "pervasive computing" stuff. I think some of it sounds neat; I was at a park the other day where one of the water fountains was not working, and I thought, "some day, there will be a little cheap chip in there which will let them know that the fountain isn't working, and they might actually fix it within hours or days instead of months or years. And they will have one in every streetlight, too. Everything. Because it will be so ridiculously cheap. Oh, and they will use IPv6."
Someday. But today, that sort of equipment will probably cost you a couple hundred dollars per installation. And why you'd mount it on a car, I'm not sure: the car itself doesn't have too much data to transmit, and we have pretty good cellular coverage in most urban areas, and the car density is relatively limited in most other places. Why would anyone with a useful packet to send want to go through this mess of a moving mesh when you can do a quick point-to-point link is beyond me. His "in Iraq, everything is mesh" in fact highlights this - in Iraq, there is not all that much infrastructure, and you probably have a bunch of high-power tanks and jeeps and such with high-power long-range antennas on private frequencies. They can sling data a few dozen miles, and probably have to.
Oh. His "without spending a dollar more" is total BS, too. Of course it would cost money. A half-decent wireless mesh node these days will run you a couple hundred each. That's coming down all the time, sure, but the alternative is already fairly cheap.
I'm not a huge fan of the "air gap!!!!1" solution. Sure, it's simple, but for things like air traffic control, you need to have systems which aren't right next to each other, talk to each other, sooner or later, and that means networking. And if the stuff is spread out, sooner or later it can be compromised. And when that happens you still need real security measures behind it. (Including OS security updates, which non-internetted machines have a nasty habit of missing.)
To be fair, you can rent cars or use taxis for many of those purposes. The cost and/or convenience of those measures may vary wildly, but in some places it's quite effective.
Riding a bicycle in the rain is substantially dangerous. Oh, sure, if you're caught somewhere unprepared it beats walking your bike, but it's not the sort of risk I'd prefer to build into my every-other-day routine. Especially if I have to bike on busy streets.
A specific application? I can think of two applications that would interest Oracle. A database, and the things that use the database (mostly Java). So ask yourself: For the database - do Sun SPARC servers meet requirements like: high-performance I/O, multi-processing, reliability, clustering, and... say, having massive amounts of RAM? And: does Java run well on SPARC?
You're allowed to stack the parking lots on top of each other in a structure called a "parking garage". You can even install these parking garages underground and put a regular office building on top. If you're already spending the big bucks building for density, that is.
Most places in the US don't bother to build for density, though, because it's cheaper to build out than to build up -- that, and some people like single-family homes with yards and gardens and trees and nice things like that, and a modicum of quiet and privacy... There were a couple acres of woods behind my parent's house in North Carolina that I got to play in as a child. You want tree-hugging? I'll show you some trees.
You bring the bike on the bus. Many cities provide a rack on the bus with a capacity of about 2 bikes. Other cities let you take the bike on a so-called "light rail vehicle". Still more would let you pack up a folding bike.
Obama showed us what he thinks of cronyism when he decided he wanted to give his friends the UAW 50 cents on the dollar of unsecured GM debt and the secured bondholders (who legally have the first grab at the money) 33 cents on the dollar. Oh, but the unions need it for their pensions! (not that there are any GM bonds worth mentioning in anyone's pension funds, noooo....) We've yet to see see how well that plan plays out in bankruptcy court, anyway. At least the union might have some incentive not to drag down the business any more....
See? The government can be open and transparent! They should just let us all know what's going on with ACTA so we can shout down their opponents as being hateful, racist, greedy, and anti-American. (Oh, wait, but maybe some of the other countries party to the treaty will catch on and not sign up.)
The question then becomes, why do we want tax revenues to be as high as possible? To what extent is the government better at spending that money than the-people-they-took-it-from are?
A lot of that answer is depending on who's measuring "better", obviously. But there's a lot of little effects that are hard to measure in reality, even decades after the fact.
The capacity for a filibuster by Republicans will be destroyed (assuming the Franken debacle does indeed go to Franken, which is perfectly consistent with every decision on the margin that the court has been making) and that is something of value. The ability of the minority to prevent a majority from running amok completely unchecked is an important part of our country's checks-and-balances in politics.
Prepare for some extremely Democratic legislation. (In the party sense, not the democracy sense).
You raise some points, but I think your logic off a little with regards to the "club cards" angle. Sure, if Big Brother is looking for his next victim, yes, being "not normal" is a red flag. But if it's just Safeway that has your grocery data, they're interested in turning a profit, not having fun analyzing a puzzle.... they want a promotional deal that 13% of their customers will care about, instead of a promotion that 0.000013% of their customers will care about. You're not worth the effort to analyze in detail on your own.
Well, when a nongovernmental corporation does something stupid, theoretically it's supposed to be the owners who suffer, not the taxpayers (TARP-et-cetera notwitstanding). Theoretically, the governmental corporation could use its proximity to the government to gain a variety of unfair business advantages, quashing competition and ultimately harming the public by perpetuating market inefficiencies.
But in practice, the private entity seems adequately inefficient so as to do harm to the public as well.
Now we need a robotic shark....
on
Robotic Penguins
·
· Score: 5, Funny
My game is reading the Drudge Report. Except, I think of it as "The Drug Report." Let's check it out right now!
Latin american leaders (railing against the USA) are on drugs.
5 Houston children dead in swamped car, driver may have been on the cell phone (or on drugs)
Iran convicts US journalist of spying (Iran's justice system, on drugs)
Airplane passenger charged with a felony because he needed to use the restroom (Delta Airlines is on drugs, but I knew that already)
Milbank: Why is the left so angry? (cuz they're on drugs)
As you can see, some parts are clearly funnier than others, and that's the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Now suppose they just put these devices on everyone's car, and used them to send remote speeding tickets and other such nonsense...
If you throw enough computing power / bandwidth at it, message overhead and efficiency aren't as much of a problem - particularly for sending boring data packets that can tolerate a little latency and lossiness. We've made huge strides in the past 15 years.
The part I'm trying to figure out is, "why put them in a car?" It's not like the car is a major consumer or producer of data. Is this really going to change all that much? If not, and if non-car-things are to be using this mesh, it seems that you'd be massively overprovisioning dense urban areas and massively underprovisioning rural areas.
I don't see how the mobility of a motor vehicle brings anything valuable into the picture. I guess when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a car...
We've already had our "in America, living patterns and mass transit mostly don't work out that great" discussion this week. What new points are we possibly going to be able to bring up this time?
I guess the "electric-car" angle comes because if you're charging an electric car overnight, you probably want to charge it when it's cheapest, or something to that effect. And I can see the merit of some sort of open standard here, so you can make a chip which plugs into whatever-and-the-power-line and make that sort of decision. But that's not quite what he's suggesting; he's suggesting turning that device into a wireless mesh node.
Now, I know a guy who worked at IBM and was really big into this sort of "pervasive computing" stuff. I think some of it sounds neat; I was at a park the other day where one of the water fountains was not working, and I thought, "some day, there will be a little cheap chip in there which will let them know that the fountain isn't working, and they might actually fix it within hours or days instead of months or years. And they will have one in every streetlight, too. Everything. Because it will be so ridiculously cheap. Oh, and they will use IPv6."
Someday. But today, that sort of equipment will probably cost you a couple hundred dollars per installation. And why you'd mount it on a car, I'm not sure: the car itself doesn't have too much data to transmit, and we have pretty good cellular coverage in most urban areas, and the car density is relatively limited in most other places. Why would anyone with a useful packet to send want to go through this mess of a moving mesh when you can do a quick point-to-point link is beyond me. His "in Iraq, everything is mesh" in fact highlights this - in Iraq, there is not all that much infrastructure, and you probably have a bunch of high-power tanks and jeeps and such with high-power long-range antennas on private frequencies. They can sling data a few dozen miles, and probably have to.
Oh. His "without spending a dollar more" is total BS, too. Of course it would cost money. A half-decent wireless mesh node these days will run you a couple hundred each. That's coming down all the time, sure, but the alternative is already fairly cheap.
I'm not a huge fan of the "air gap!!!!1" solution. Sure, it's simple, but for things like air traffic control, you need to have systems which aren't right next to each other, talk to each other, sooner or later, and that means networking. And if the stuff is spread out, sooner or later it can be compromised. And when that happens you still need real security measures behind it. (Including OS security updates, which non-internetted machines have a nasty habit of missing.)
To be fair, you can rent cars or use taxis for many of those purposes. The cost and/or convenience of those measures may vary wildly, but in some places it's quite effective.
Riding a bicycle in the rain is substantially dangerous. Oh, sure, if you're caught somewhere unprepared it beats walking your bike, but it's not the sort of risk I'd prefer to build into my every-other-day routine. Especially if I have to bike on busy streets.
Most places in the US don't bother to build for density, though, because it's cheaper to build out than to build up -- that, and some people like single-family homes with yards and gardens and trees and nice things like that, and a modicum of quiet and privacy... There were a couple acres of woods behind my parent's house in North Carolina that I got to play in as a child. You want tree-hugging? I'll show you some trees.
You bring the bike on the bus. Many cities provide a rack on the bus with a capacity of about 2 bikes. Other cities let you take the bike on a so-called "light rail vehicle". Still more would let you pack up a folding bike.
No word on your mortar yet, but you can keep your overlords kthxbye.
See? The government can be open and transparent! They should just let us all know what's going on with ACTA so we can shout down their opponents as being hateful, racist, greedy, and anti-American. (Oh, wait, but maybe some of the other countries party to the treaty will catch on and not sign up.)
A lot of that answer is depending on who's measuring "better", obviously. But there's a lot of little effects that are hard to measure in reality, even decades after the fact.
var params = { allowscriptaccess: "always", allowfullscreen: "true", wmode:"transparent"}; swfobject.embedSWF("http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/04Jh_rNFxEU&hl;=en&fs;=1&showinfo;=0&showsearch;=0", "flashcontent", "480", "295", "8", null, {}, params); Viewing this video requires Adobe Flash...
(for srsly, that was on the facebook one)
(Hey, it worked for Inconvenient Truth. :P)
Prepare for some extremely Democratic legislation. (In the party sense, not the democracy sense).
You raise some points, but I think your logic off a little with regards to the "club cards" angle. Sure, if Big Brother is looking for his next victim, yes, being "not normal" is a red flag. But if it's just Safeway that has your grocery data, they're interested in turning a profit, not having fun analyzing a puzzle.... they want a promotional deal that 13% of their customers will care about, instead of a promotion that 0.000013% of their customers will care about. You're not worth the effort to analyze in detail on your own.
There's also the flu wiki. (Insert joke here about doing amateur genetic engineering on H1N1).
Something like this.
But in practice, the private entity seems adequately inefficient so as to do harm to the public as well.
(frickin' laser sold separately).
Not to mention the wombat poo paper!
And because it's ridiculously impractical?
Sarah P? Drew Carey said it first!!!
Latin american leaders (railing against the USA) are on drugs.
5 Houston children dead in swamped car, driver may have been on the cell phone (or on drugs)
Iran convicts US journalist of spying (Iran's justice system, on drugs)
Airplane passenger charged with a felony because he needed to use the restroom (Delta Airlines is on drugs, but I knew that already)
Milbank: Why is the left so angry? (cuz they're on drugs)
As you can see, some parts are clearly funnier than others, and that's the game.