Of course on the bright side, I give it less than a year before some technology clueless law enforcement officer mis-types a DELETE FROM and wipes out a huge portion of data across multiple agency databases. Carnivore could only work because back end access could be controlled inside a single agency. With multiple agencies all admin'ng small chunks of a massively interconnected database, the possibility of large scale data corruption or loss is almost inevitable. Add to that the fact that it will be impossible to impose a strict backup regime, and I think that in the long run this will hurt law enforcement far more than help it.
In my part of the country in addition to just elected positions, we tend to have a large number of ballot issues that need to be voted on. Thus you need to be able to read the description to know if you are voting on allowing a state income tax vs increasing the number of dog catchers allowed to communities under 5,000 population. It is required by law that we have at least english and spanish. In California, IIRC, by law they have a large number of languages that must be accomodated, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. When they have to add State Constitutional questions, this can lead to very long and large ballots, with associated high printing costs. This is an issue that is addressed perfectly by electronic balloting. In addition, your solution of somebody helping the person disenfranchises anybody that really wants to cast a secret ballot. This is one of the big reasons that the disabled groups are so in favor of e-voting. Now a blind person can truly cast a secret ballot, and verify that the vote cast is what they intended. With traditional voting methods the disabled and those who only read (notice not speak) a foreign language are at the mercy of whoever is "assisting" them.
I forget who said it originally, but one of the ideas I have always found to be a truism is that to save any endangered species, just make it economically useful to humans. It helps if it is easy to breed in captivity. The only reason whales are endangered is because a whale ranch would cost more than you could usefully produce from it. Mink are one of the nastiest, most vicious variety of weasel, but make their fur popular, and they are in no danger of being wiped out.
Re:From the next-article-please dept.
on
Rio Karma User Review
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
How well do you find the iPod works while you're on the motorcycle?
I bought a CD/MP3 player with the longest skip protection I could find for listening to through my intercom receiver, but the vibrations of the bike at 50+ mph was too much for it. That was with it in my tank bag, as it was too large to fit comfortably in a jacket pocket. It just wouldn't play at freeway speeds.
I replaced it with a SanDisk Cruzer 256 Mb USB key, with the Cruzer MP3 player. (Cost about $110 total, but I get a combination 256 MB true-keychain USB drive and flash based MP3 player that is instantly upgradable.) So far this has worked fine, both in the tank bag or it easily fits into a jaket pocket, but 256 Mb is still a bit limited for what I would like to carry around with me. Actually I should probably submit an actual review of it...
But the arguement isn't about latency vs throughput. The arguement is about my packets being more important than your packets, so on a congested link, who gets priority? Your analysis is correct if you are the only user on that network. If, however, both links are running over 50% capacity, and you want your VOIP/Streaming Video/Internet Radio and I want my Bittorrent, who is gonna win? With QOS set it depends on who's packets are labelled as higher priority. Now you are right that I can set my torrent to be low priority, and not affect your streams, but I can also set mine for low latency, and compete with you for the terrestrial link, or I can set for high priority on both, and compete with you for both data paths. The routers in the middle have no idea what is in the packets they are transferring, they just know what to do with QOS labelled packets.
First off, for most of the major changes, there is no way to determine exactly how long the change took, other than the fact that geologically speaking they happened incredibly fast, faster than the geological record could keep up in most instances. The drop at the end of the Ordovician by 10 C and subsequent rise happened over a fairly short time. The rapid rise at the end of the Permian was also very quick.
And you conveniently decide to ignore the first link in my post. Here I will quote it for you so you don't strain your mouse finger:
Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.
The review, carried out by a team from Harvard University, examined the findings of studies of so-called "temperature proxies" such as tree rings, ice cores and historical accounts which allow scientists to estimate temperatures prevailing at sites around the world.
The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today.
They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again - but has still to reach the balmy temperatures of the Middle Ages.
Sorry, to get in the way of your own personal factiods.
Perhaps most of the people in this discussion should do more research and get a better handle on reality and the past climate of the earth.
During the last 2 billion years the Earth's climate has alternated between a frigid "Ice House", like today's world, and a steaming "Hot House", like the world of the dinosaurs.
For the approximately 600 million years that we can reconstruct climatological data, approximately 80 million of those, or 16%, has been at a mean global temerature comparable to today's levels. Another 80 million, or 16%, has been spent at temperatures averaging 5 C higher than current levels, and about 330 million years, or 67%, have been spent a full 10 C higher than current levels. These three "stable" points show great consistancy over the course of millions of years. The remaining 20% falls outside of these three points, but almost completely above the current global mean.
Global warming is occurring... but it has very little to do with Human presence, and would still continue even if we all killed ourselves off this afternoon. This may be distressing to those living in low lying areas, however eliminating global human emissions of greenhouse gases isn't going to change the fact.
Ever seen what a fox, or weasel, or even a racoon, will do in a hen house? They will all kill every single chicken in the coop, then only eat the best parts from one or two. If you don't clean the mess up, they might return for one or two nights to partially eat from other carcasses, but they leave the vast majority to spoil and rot. If that's not genocide, I don't know what is.
While this may be acceptable in the UK, I am telling you people would be rioting in the streets here in the US. In a country with 280 million people, and 280 million handguns, I don't think this type of enforcement would last long, and I am not exaggerating the point. The last time someone mentioned requiring registering GUNS (rather than TVs) the public went crazy and was protesting that this was an invasion of their Rights and privacy. I don't feel that registering TVs would be any more popular here. I would have to agree with the majority on both issues.
I think you are wrong here. The people who protested the registering of guns, were already those people to whom individual rights are very important. The vast majority of whom also keep up with current events and news. Unfortunately, of the huge number of people who own TVs, most would have no idea, not only why they were being required to pay this new tax, but also how to effectively protest it, or that protest was even possible.
I don't know how this tax is collected in the various European countries (a monthly bill, a yearly add-on to income tax, etc.), but if it were implemented properly here in the U.S., we have been conditioned to constantly rising prices and hidden taxes. When people complain about, but pay $2+ per gallon of gasoline, but 90% fail to realize that $0.40 of that is government taxes, I can easily see them falling in line for a TV tax.
But once again, if it is only useful in very close proximity (inches), what advantage would it have over a magstrip or barcode, both of which are much cheaper to implement, and both of which are in place already?
You see the threat as being blown out of proportion, I am asking some very simple, logical questions, the only answers to which that I can find are very disturbing. I.e.:
1) There are already cheap, effective, short range solutions in place to make casual counterfeiting of identity cards more difficult. It seems illogical to push a more expensive, and no more secure method unless it provides some advantage the other methods do not.
2) RFID tags that are only readable at very short range are certainly possible. Although I would tend to submit that range has far more to do with the scanning gear than with the RFID tag. The most commonly used, and therefor the least expensive, can easily be scanned by parallel columns set across doorways, a la almost every store you go into these days. The government requirement may refer to an advanced tag that can only be measured at short range (See point #1), however I find it much more likely that that they would be planning to use common, commodity tags which can be easily read from a distance of 2-3 feet, if not further.
The point is that all of those are activities that where I can make a decision whether to give that information or not. I walk into a place for a job application that looks shady... I just walk right back out and they don't get my info. With an RFID tag broadcasting my info, you remove that choice from me. Not only that, but you enable the covert theft of identity to an absurd degree. It's bad enough that to use my credit card at a restaurant I have to let the waitress take the card out of my site, but to now allow anyone with the sklill to build/buy a remote sniffer to gather the information necessary to apply for new cards in my name....
But taking your two posts together, why do they need to bother with RFID in the first place?
My last two driver's licenses have had magnetic strips and barcodes on them for swiping or laser scanning. Whether these have all my information on them (due to the short length of the barcode, I doubt it) or just a "200 digit number" all of the information for a legal, observable verification of my identity is already on the card. What reason, other than scanning from a distance, could there be to include RFID in a peice of identification?
You obviously live in some remote part of the world where you rarely have to interact with other drivers.
Personally, I see the very real problem at least twice a day on my way to and from work. The idiot doing twice the speed limit past a line of cars that are going the speed limit. The idiot slowing down one lane of a 4 lane freeway by doing 5 miles under the speed limit, when the rest of the cars are doing 5-10 over. The idiot who pulls out to make a left turn through too small a gap. The idiot who...
And you know what's even worse? Sometimes I'm that idiot. No one can be a perfect driver all the time under every condition. With over 6.3 Million auto crashes in the U.S. each year, and over 38,000 fatalities in crashes per year (that's 14.66 fatalities per 100,000 population), I'd say it's a problem begging for an answer.
There are only three ways to fix the problem:
1) Reduce the number of vehicles on the road/vehicle miles travelled. While this is a nice eco-friendly sounding, PC and Public Transit approved message, it just won't work. Reality shows that people find personal, flexible, cheap transportation too convenient to give up. Not to mention the fact that the entire U.S. economy is based on fast, flexible individual travel, and anything that restricts it could cause the whole house of cards to collapse.
2) Increase driver training and knowledge and capability testing. This doesn't work for two reasons. First, if you restrict driving to only those who can pass a rigorous test that will disenfranchise a large part of the population (see point #1). Second, even if I can pass the test today, that doesn't mean I'm safe behind the wheel after a night at the bar, doesn't mean I'm safe driving to work at 2 a.m. in response to my beeper after only 3 hours of sleep, doesn't mean I'm safe driving to get to the meeting "I'm just barely going to make if I go a little faster than normal and try to squeak through all the Yellow lights."
3) Take the highly variable and erratic human out of the equation. If every car handled its own speed, lane changing, etc. in a well designed fail-to-safe system not only would higher speeds be easy to achieve, but traffic signal control, traffic route optimization, and parking optimization becomes a breeze.
Seriously, other than the speed freaks, the ricers, and the "therapy through driving agressive" people, I don't see why anyone is against this. The prices will come down, and the systems will become more reliable and better integrated. This probably won't be widespread until my grandchildren's time, but just think:
I would love to check with my car before leaving to see how long today's commute was going to take (getting a response that was accurate to within 2 minutes), walk out and get in, have the car take me by the fastest route safely, and with no hassles or worries about other idiot drivers, while I read the paper, talk on the phone, eat breakfast, shave, or all of these at once. Get to work and have the car drop me off at the front door, then go park itself. Pick me up at the front door when I'm ready to leave and take me home in the same manner. This would give me an extra 2-3 useful hours per day, and reduce my daily stress level by a huge margin.
A well designed system would allow for much faster travel, much shorter and more consistant trip times, and infinately safer travel than what we have now. Yes, the initial cost will increase, and it will take time for the costs to drop so that this is standard in every car, but the same was said about seat belts, and airbags, and radios, and anti-lock brakes, etc.
This system would even make it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, by making sure vehicles were never weaving in the lane, vehicles were always checking for obstacles, instantaneous reaction to events, etc. this would make walking or biking to work safer and far more comfortable and enjoyable, so more people might do it.
Actually, at this precise moment and for the forseeable future, NASA can't do it. Russia, on the other hand doesn't seem to have a problem. And they probably need the money even more than NASA.
Actually in general it doesn't. If you happen to be watching 480i in digital on a high definition television, well... should be obvious. Greater pixel density, smaller pitch and all that.
But you are talking HDTV. That is most definately not what this transition is about. It is about requiring over the air analog to change to over the air compressed digital which by definition will be of inferior quality. In a certain amount of bandwidth you can transmit a finite amount of information. When they start digitizing 480 line analog signals, to send the equivalent of 3 channels in the same bandwidth, the quality will suffer.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course on the bright side, I give it less than a year before some technology clueless law enforcement officer mis-types a DELETE FROM and wipes out a huge portion of data across multiple agency databases. Carnivore could only work because back end access could be controlled inside a single agency. With multiple agencies all admin'ng small chunks of a massively interconnected database, the possibility of large scale data corruption or loss is almost inevitable. Add to that the fact that it will be impossible to impose a strict backup regime, and I think that in the long run this will hurt law enforcement far more than help it.
In my part of the country in addition to just elected positions, we tend to have a large number of ballot issues that need to be voted on. Thus you need to be able to read the description to know if you are voting on allowing a state income tax vs increasing the number of dog catchers allowed to communities under 5,000 population. It is required by law that we have at least english and spanish. In California, IIRC, by law they have a large number of languages that must be accomodated, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. When they have to add State Constitutional questions, this can lead to very long and large ballots, with associated high printing costs. This is an issue that is addressed perfectly by electronic balloting. In addition, your solution of somebody helping the person disenfranchises anybody that really wants to cast a secret ballot. This is one of the big reasons that the disabled groups are so in favor of e-voting. Now a blind person can truly cast a secret ballot, and verify that the vote cast is what they intended. With traditional voting methods the disabled and those who only read (notice not speak) a foreign language are at the mercy of whoever is "assisting" them.
You forgot the obligatory
h) Profit!!!
I forget who said it originally, but one of the ideas I have always found to be a truism is that to save any endangered species, just make it economically useful to humans. It helps if it is easy to breed in captivity. The only reason whales are endangered is because a whale ranch would cost more than you could usefully produce from it. Mink are one of the nastiest, most vicious variety of weasel, but make their fur popular, and they are in no danger of being wiped out.
How well do you find the iPod works while you're on the motorcycle?
I bought a CD/MP3 player with the longest skip protection I could find for listening to through my intercom receiver, but the vibrations of the bike at 50+ mph was too much for it. That was with it in my tank bag, as it was too large to fit comfortably in a jacket pocket. It just wouldn't play at freeway speeds.
I replaced it with a SanDisk Cruzer 256 Mb USB key, with the Cruzer MP3 player. (Cost about $110 total, but I get a combination 256 MB true-keychain USB drive and flash based MP3 player that is instantly upgradable.) So far this has worked fine, both in the tank bag or it easily fits into a jaket pocket, but 256 Mb is still a bit limited for what I would like to carry around with me. Actually I should probably submit an actual review of it...
But the arguement isn't about latency vs throughput. The arguement is about my packets being more important than your packets, so on a congested link, who gets priority? Your analysis is correct if you are the only user on that network. If, however, both links are running over 50% capacity, and you want your VOIP/Streaming Video/Internet Radio and I want my Bittorrent, who is gonna win? With QOS set it depends on who's packets are labelled as higher priority. Now you are right that I can set my torrent to be low priority, and not affect your streams, but I can also set mine for low latency, and compete with you for the terrestrial link, or I can set for high priority on both, and compete with you for both data paths. The routers in the middle have no idea what is in the packets they are transferring, they just know what to do with QOS labelled packets.
First off, for most of the major changes, there is no way to determine exactly how long the change took, other than the fact that geologically speaking they happened incredibly fast, faster than the geological record could keep up in most instances. The drop at the end of the Ordovician by 10 C and subsequent rise happened over a fairly short time. The rapid rise at the end of the Permian was also very quick.
And you conveniently decide to ignore the first link in my post. Here I will quote it for you so you don't strain your mouse finger:
Sorry, to get in the way of your own personal factiods.
Perhaps most of the people in this discussion should do more research and get a better handle on reality and the past climate of the earth.
For the approximately 600 million years that we can reconstruct climatological data, approximately 80 million of those, or 16%, has been at a mean global temerature comparable to today's levels. Another 80 million, or 16%, has been spent at temperatures averaging 5 C higher than current levels, and about 330 million years, or 67%, have been spent a full 10 C higher than current levels. These three "stable" points show great consistancy over the course of millions of years. The remaining 20% falls outside of these three points, but almost completely above the current global mean.
Global warming is occurring... but it has very little to do with Human presence, and would still continue even if we all killed ourselves off this afternoon. This may be distressing to those living in low lying areas, however eliminating global human emissions of greenhouse gases isn't going to change the fact.
You must be a city person.
Ever seen what a fox, or weasel, or even a racoon, will do in a hen house? They will all kill every single chicken in the coop, then only eat the best parts from one or two. If you don't clean the mess up, they might return for one or two nights to partially eat from other carcasses, but they leave the vast majority to spoil and rot. If that's not genocide, I don't know what is.
I think you are wrong here. The people who protested the registering of guns, were already those people to whom individual rights are very important. The vast majority of whom also keep up with current events and news. Unfortunately, of the huge number of people who own TVs, most would have no idea, not only why they were being required to pay this new tax, but also how to effectively protest it, or that protest was even possible.
I don't know how this tax is collected in the various European countries (a monthly bill, a yearly add-on to income tax, etc.), but if it were implemented properly here in the U.S., we have been conditioned to constantly rising prices and hidden taxes. When people complain about, but pay $2+ per gallon of gasoline, but 90% fail to realize that $0.40 of that is government taxes, I can easily see them falling in line for a TV tax.
I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition!
Thanks for providing the author of that quote. It has long been one of my favorites, but I never knew where it had come from, or who the author was.
"No publicity is bad publicity" ~~ P.T. Barnum
But once again, if it is only useful in very close proximity (inches), what advantage would it have over a magstrip or barcode, both of which are much cheaper to implement, and both of which are in place already?
You see the threat as being blown out of proportion, I am asking some very simple, logical questions, the only answers to which that I can find are very disturbing. I.e.:
1) There are already cheap, effective, short range solutions in place to make casual counterfeiting of identity cards more difficult. It seems illogical to push a more expensive, and no more secure method unless it provides some advantage the other methods do not.
2) RFID tags that are only readable at very short range are certainly possible. Although I would tend to submit that range has far more to do with the scanning gear than with the RFID tag. The most commonly used, and therefor the least expensive, can easily be scanned by parallel columns set across doorways, a la almost every store you go into these days. The government requirement may refer to an advanced tag that can only be measured at short range (See point #1), however I find it much more likely that that they would be planning to use common, commodity tags which can be easily read from a distance of 2-3 feet, if not further.
Hmmm... many of the people I share the morning commute with seem to have the thought, "I drive, therefore I am." They certainly aren't thinking.
The point is that all of those are activities that where I can make a decision whether to give that information or not. I walk into a place for a job application that looks shady... I just walk right back out and they don't get my info. With an RFID tag broadcasting my info, you remove that choice from me. Not only that, but you enable the covert theft of identity to an absurd degree. It's bad enough that to use my credit card at a restaurant I have to let the waitress take the card out of my site, but to now allow anyone with the sklill to build/buy a remote sniffer to gather the information necessary to apply for new cards in my name....
But taking your two posts together, why do they need to bother with RFID in the first place?
My last two driver's licenses have had magnetic strips and barcodes on them for swiping or laser scanning. Whether these have all my information on them (due to the short length of the barcode, I doubt it) or just a "200 digit number" all of the information for a legal, observable verification of my identity is already on the card. What reason, other than scanning from a distance, could there be to include RFID in a peice of identification?
You obviously live in some remote part of the world where you rarely have to interact with other drivers.
Personally, I see the very real problem at least twice a day on my way to and from work. The idiot doing twice the speed limit past a line of cars that are going the speed limit. The idiot slowing down one lane of a 4 lane freeway by doing 5 miles under the speed limit, when the rest of the cars are doing 5-10 over. The idiot who pulls out to make a left turn through too small a gap. The idiot who...
And you know what's even worse? Sometimes I'm that idiot. No one can be a perfect driver all the time under every condition. With over 6.3 Million auto crashes in the U.S. each year, and over 38,000 fatalities in crashes per year (that's 14.66 fatalities per 100,000 population), I'd say it's a problem begging for an answer.
There are only three ways to fix the problem:
1) Reduce the number of vehicles on the road/vehicle miles travelled. While this is a nice eco-friendly sounding, PC and Public Transit approved message, it just won't work. Reality shows that people find personal, flexible, cheap transportation too convenient to give up. Not to mention the fact that the entire U.S. economy is based on fast, flexible individual travel, and anything that restricts it could cause the whole house of cards to collapse.
2) Increase driver training and knowledge and capability testing. This doesn't work for two reasons. First, if you restrict driving to only those who can pass a rigorous test that will disenfranchise a large part of the population (see point #1). Second, even if I can pass the test today, that doesn't mean I'm safe behind the wheel after a night at the bar, doesn't mean I'm safe driving to work at 2 a.m. in response to my beeper after only 3 hours of sleep, doesn't mean I'm safe driving to get to the meeting "I'm just barely going to make if I go a little faster than normal and try to squeak through all the Yellow lights."
3) Take the highly variable and erratic human out of the equation. If every car handled its own speed, lane changing, etc. in a well designed fail-to-safe system not only would higher speeds be easy to achieve, but traffic signal control, traffic route optimization, and parking optimization becomes a breeze.
Seriously, other than the speed freaks, the ricers, and the "therapy through driving agressive" people, I don't see why anyone is against this. The prices will come down, and the systems will become more reliable and better integrated. This probably won't be widespread until my grandchildren's time, but just think:
I would love to check with my car before leaving to see how long today's commute was going to take (getting a response that was accurate to within 2 minutes), walk out and get in, have the car take me by the fastest route safely, and with no hassles or worries about other idiot drivers, while I read the paper, talk on the phone, eat breakfast, shave, or all of these at once. Get to work and have the car drop me off at the front door, then go park itself. Pick me up at the front door when I'm ready to leave and take me home in the same manner. This would give me an extra 2-3 useful hours per day, and reduce my daily stress level by a huge margin.
A well designed system would allow for much faster travel, much shorter and more consistant trip times, and infinately safer travel than what we have now. Yes, the initial cost will increase, and it will take time for the costs to drop so that this is standard in every car, but the same was said about seat belts, and airbags, and radios, and anti-lock brakes, etc.
This system would even make it safer for pedestrians and bicyclists, by making sure vehicles were never weaving in the lane, vehicles were always checking for obstacles, instantaneous reaction to events, etc. this would make walking or biking to work safer and far more comfortable and enjoyable, so more people might do it.
Win-Win situation.
Talk about irony... lecturing about classes on English and Creative Writing in a slash thread.
Actually, at this precise moment and for the forseeable future, NASA can't do it. Russia, on the other hand doesn't seem to have a problem. And they probably need the money even more than NASA.
Actually in general it doesn't. If you happen to be watching 480i in digital on a high definition television, well... should be obvious. Greater pixel density, smaller pitch and all that.
But you are talking HDTV. That is most definately not what this transition is about. It is about requiring over the air analog to change to over the air compressed digital which by definition will be of inferior quality. In a certain amount of bandwidth you can transmit a finite amount of information. When they start digitizing 480 line analog signals, to send the equivalent of 3 channels in the same bandwidth, the quality will suffer.
We can't get them to RTFA. what makes you think they'll RTFC?
Of course, if they had any sense, they wouldn't have been out busting up mailboxes in the first place...