Somehow I imagine someone very evil having a 'fingerchain' instead of a keychain. This one's for car, this one for the safe, this one for the airplane, this one for to spice up Wendy's chilli....
But yeah I thought of that too. Any biometrics out there that work only when the person is alive?
Your measure is just about the same as requiring fingerprints or some constant biometrics check that the person flying the aircraft is indeed the pilot. That will do exaclty what the separate hull would, it would make sure that only the pilots fly the craft, but they are still can be manipulated by someone holding hostages a child or something like that.
So I think just a periodic biometric scan of the pilot's fingerprints, or iris, might be a good idea, if the scan failed the plane control gets transfered to the ground and autopilot kicks in. The ground would be able to view a video feed of the inside of the plane and would be able to operate the aircraft remotely. That might be cheaper then rebuilding all the planes from scratch.
Well do you want to be the first one who jumps up on top of the guy with a gun? You might have 90% chance of getting killed or would you rather stay put hoping that someone else would that instead and then you might have perhaps %50 chance of getting killed.
What if you are the guy with the gun end up killing a child when you miss and perhaps shoot ome holes through the hull endangering everybody's lifes even more than they already are. Chances are the terrorists are much better at shooting then the ordinary citizens with guns even the ones who are "trained."
Yeah it was Cincinnati, a fairly large hub. Back in the day I knew of a couple of individuals who barely finished highschool and got security positions at the airport. Also hey've had a guard fall alseep on the job there once and had to re-screen everyone from a large terminal. I know that there are different kinds of people on the job, but judging from the experiences I've had, I've only met the bad ones I guess.
Except you just gave your plan away. The government is already tapping your phone.
Seriosly though, one of my friends talked about how it would be possible to assasinate the prezid3nt on kuri5hin and the next thing he knows is the secret service coming to his work wanting to talk to him. It was a similar discussion to this about national security and such and he theorized about a possible weakness in the system and posted it during his lunch hour at work. The secret service people wipe thier butts with the first ammendment and liberties. They came and searched his house and questioned his wife and daughters. That happened before sept. 11 , now they'd probably lock him up without an explanation, all of that because of discussing in very general and vague details a possible security problem.
The problem is that I don't think they do. I would show my naked X-Ray to a slashdot nerd before I would show it to fat creepy security guard.
The last time I had to deal with them at the aiport I was dropping my parents off at the airport to go back to their home country, they spoke very little English and the idiots at the security check point made fun of them and were blurting all kinds of derrogatory comments about them, while my poor mom and dad where trying to understand what they are saying and were getting upset. I tried to find a manager and complain but I was getting the "you must be a terrorist if you want to complain about the integrity of our fine and professional security staff" vibe, so I just gave up.
These people are highschool drop-outs, or old fat cops that are so stuffed with doughnuts that they cannot run anymore and all they do all day is sit on their ass at the airport pretending to be important.
Before I would let those people see my naked body I think I would take my slim change of being blown up on a plane. Driving is already riskier by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Considering what idiots and wierdos they have working at those security check points makes me worried.
Now I don't have a problem showing any of my private parts to doctors because:
1) I know who they are,
2)I know they are qualified
3)I can go to a different doctor if I choose to.
4)I trust that they are doing something to help me.
And there is a big difference between that and the security guards at the airport, who probably hardly managed to finish highschool and are just overweight cops stuffed with doughnuts. Most of them creep my out already and I don't think they are doing something to help me. I would rather take my slim one in a million chances of being blown up rather then having to show myself naked to every security guard at every airport I fly through.
How about 10 terrorists posing as peace officers can have a shooting "contest" 50 thousand feet in the air with maybe 5 or 6 actual peace officers to see who can outgun each other. All this while there are hundreds of other passengers onboard. Now that's what I call 'safety'
I don't think the car analogy works. The car would be in your driveway, while the laptop would be in a public place. If you had sensitive information there, say you worked for CIA or FBI, that someone could steal, then I think you,the owner of the laptop, should be partially liable. The homework is somewhere in between. You shouldn't expect total privacy at the university but homework is also not quite a top secret and classified document.
I did have my backpack stolen in the library of my university when I fell asleep. I really felt stupid telling the police that I left it open beside my desk couple of feet away from where I dozed off. I blame the thief but I also blame myself for not taking care of my stuff better.
Well I was thinking that the distributors can always be rewarded by increasing thier download speed ratio or something similar (which as you say will also tend to create aggregation of large amounts of files on few hosts). Here is a little more detail explanation of what I was thinking
A 1Gig file F is split into 200 5mb file segements (chunks) f0,f2,...,f199. The original distributor D0 will advertize that it has a part (or parts) of the file F. Say it has file segments f0 and f199 for example. If there is demand everone will start downloading those segments. Those who downloaded it also become distributors but advertize different chunks, like one has f0 and other has f199 (determined at random, or by looking at some global availability and demand), so that uniformly eventually all the segments are present in the network. Then D0 will advertize other chunks and those will spread out through the network.
Eventually each distributor Di will have a whole file F in some private directory but will continue to advertize just some parts of it (but never all of them in a short time frame).
If the file is in high demand then even some nodes that do not actively want to download file F will be rewarded (by more bandwith or more search visibility) to host some chunks of it. Or maybe that could be a requirement, but nobody would want be any bit liable, so it probably won't work.
*AA will see that their file is available, they might even figure out that at a particular time a certain 200 different hosts (distributors) will together have their file. They can go for all those individuals. Or *AA with enough manpower can focus on a certain IP address and "watch" it with the help of the ISP. When they download all the segements of file F they get "visited" by the police with a warrant to seize their computer.
If they don't have the record that the person has eventually downloaded all 200 f0...f199 files, but that they only have some 5Mb chunk of file F, it might be harder for them to sue that person and demand $3000 in damages for only.5% of the content.
Obviously you are ultimately right, *AA will get suspicious and if they want they can get a search warrant and if one downloads enought parts of illegal to distribute files they will probably have just enough fully downloaded files on their 300Gb hard drive to land them in jail or have to sell their house to pay back the damages.
OpenGL acceleration for Swing stuff _can_ be slower than the software version. The software version is mature robust and optimized while the OpenGL/DirectX support still can encounter bottlenecks. I developped a data acquisition app in Swing and with X11 on Linux there are really good graphic speed improvement with the latest jdk versionn but not running with opengl. I tried the
-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true
option and that made it run slower under linux (I have a nvidia drivers and FX57000). Most speed imporovement came from optimizing the regular (non-opengl) graphics pipeline like adding the use of DGA, keeping some images (pixmaps) in the local display evironment and so on. Now under Linux with the software (regular) rendering, the graphics refresh cycle of my app is 10x faster than it is on windows. Never figured exacltly why, but suits me fine, my app is tied to linux for now anyway.
For those wanting to experiment with some of the graphics option in 5.0 here
is the page.
I brought up this argument in the discussion about Bush signing a law that would jail someone distributing even a single pre-release. My suggestion was that if someone would want to distribute pre-releases but not distribute any one single file, then they should distribute parts of it. Obviously the original distributor will have to distribute the whole file to bootstrap the process, but then the file is divided into smaller pieces and nobody makes available to the public the whole file, just a segment of it. The smallest segment is 1 bit and the largest is the whole file without 1 bit. I was wondering if there is segment size in between that is still feasable and yet not large enough for anyone to say that you are sharing such and such file and are guilty.
I know they already use nuclear batteries on satelites, but not as much the betavolatic effect batteries as the thermal (peltier) effect, where a nuclear source would heat up one side of thermocouple and the other would be exposed to the cold. Those batteries are pretty radioactive and would be dangerous here on earth.
I did a small research project on sensor networks and there the biggest problem is the power source it has to be small and has to last long. They have a whole series of algorithms that optimize the power consumption. If these new betavoltaic nuclear batteries will be small and lasting, all that area of research might become less interesting.
As an Orthodox Christian I would like to repsond to some of your comments. This is certainly not a common Slashdot article, and I am sorry for breaking into the discussion and for making my comment a little too long.
Your write:...what about the spirit of socialism that is extremely obvious in Acts? How is this reflected in the Orthodox church today?
Well,there was no "socialism" back then. See "socialsm" here
If you mean sharing and helping one another and the whole community, then that is true of Orthodox Christians, as it is true of any main Christian denomination. Or perhaps you mean living in poverty and having a common "pot", well there are large monastic comunities that do exaclty that. But what you missed is that the original poster meant that the core doctrine or the core beliefs are what have remained unchainged while some secondary practices have evolved. Just because some people today want to wash some poor hobo's feet in front of everyone or want to all live in a common house and have just one bank account it doesn't mean they have the "spirit" of the original church, they are just selctively copying some of the actions they read about in the Bible.
On the topic of icons,you write:
HOWEVER, if it is truly *veneration* and not worship. and also There was one Incarnation, not many; when Jesus left, God's physical incarnation on earth left.
I'll say first that you are right about the worship vs. veneration. We do not worship the "holy paint" or "holy wood.", we worship only God, not even the saints or Mary, the Mother of Christ. The link with the incarnation that the original poster made, was that if Christ became incarnate, and showed Himself to us, then we can surely have his image painted (if there were photos back then we would have had a photo). Now imagine that you have images of your wife and children in your wallet, and of course you love them dearly and miss them when they are not with you, wouldn't you not want to kiss them? I'd kiss my wife's picture and talk to her if I couldn't see her in person, I'd put it on my desk at work and I would look at it often. Well, now imagine that the dear person that you love is God. We don't have an exact image, and that is why the icons don't look like photographs they are symbolic images that point to God or other persons or events from the life of the Church. Also, before many could read, they served a great educational purpose too. Also note, that there have been found images, symbols and engravings of Christ and saints in the Catacombs where the early (apostolic era) Christians met and celebrated "the Breaking of the Bread".
On the same topic you write In my little Protestant mind, I find it difficult to understand why people need to use images in order to focus on worshipping God.
Actually you don't seem to have a little mind at all, you inquire and are interested that is why I wanted to share some what I know. But to get back to you comment - we certainly don't need images to focus on worshipping God. If I am driving or I don't have any icons around, I surely can pray and worship God. But I also find it much easier probably to pray and focus on Christ if I have his icon in front of me instead of a bare white wall.
You can look at this another way. If you are a Christian (I assume you are) you know that the human person consists of a body and a soul. So when the person is worshipping it only makes sense to fully engage a person's body and soul. The icons engage the visual senses, the incense engages the sense of smell, the hymns (songs) the auditory senses, the venerating of the icons - the tactile. Thus when I walk into an Orthodox Church I can easier focus on worship, as my whole body is worshipping not just my soul and mind. I will say again though that it is certainly possible to pray without having an icon.
As for the Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr: you're using non-canonic
Actually what ended up happening in one of the Crusades the "glorious knights" decided to stab their fellow Christians from East in the back. They sacked and burned Constantinopol. After that it never recovered fully and thus, it could not resist the Muslim invadors for long. To this day, Roman Catholics are not too welcome in Greece or other Eastern Orthodox countries. Granted, the late Pope John Paul II did go to Greece and appologized, which was very nice, and perhaps a small step towards unification.
That's great. A child's imagination can be richer than any movie that can be produced. We certainly lose that imagination capacity as we get older. I remember I could play for hours with my toy soldiers and some blocks of wood could be spaceships.
I can't wait to have children, I'll get to experience it all over.
I like Qualcomm, they are the guys who succesfully implemented CDMA when other companies (especially from Europe) thought it was too challenging. I am glad to see they are considering Linux. I hope, by addopting linux, they will also give back to the Open Source community some applications or some interesting code for embedded devices.
When Sharp was releasing their Zaurus with Linux on it, I got a developer's version (SL-5000D) and played with it. It was great to log into it and have a full Linux OS in your pocket. Perhaps I can do that with my cellphone now.
Having lived through a couple of major earthquakes I can share you excitement. I doubt though the buildings well be able to shift and bend like rubber, in other words it might not be obvious visibly but as long as they don't crack that'll help. I wonder though if the flexible concrete has a wider range of resonant frequencies, because if the earthquake or a strong wind hits one of those frequencies then the structure will easily fail.
And if it wasn't for ze Russians the Europe would have been the 3rd Reich today. Its amazing how much the West underestimates that Russians went all the way to Berlin to Hitler's bunker. I guess with the Cold War, the Russians just had to be evil, and while the Soviets defintely sugar-coated the history in their favor, I would not have expected that the "free" and "democtratic" US would also do it.
Yeah I know, the Americans helped plenty,they gave the Ruskies Jeeps and other vehicles. But the still it those the Russians that died from Hiltler's and Stalin's hand.
I agree with the post. "Tag things" sounds good, but what kind of things? Most "things", "widgets", "stuff" and so on is meant to be used by people. Let's say we tag cars, well, most cars are driven by their owner so tracking the car is pretty much tracking the person. How about inventory in a store? That sounds good, put RFIDs in shoes, but then everytime you come back to the store the store will know you are back, where you walk in the store, how often you've been there and so on. So then we tag guns, well if the owners keep the guns in the car or carry it with them we tag the people too. Do we really want the law enforcement to have this much power? Then all the criminals will just become dirty cops (I've seen it happen in other country).
You are right, there are historical references in it and many historical facts but it should not be viewed primarily as a history text book I think. For example a lot of lineages (so and so begot so an so) are important as they establish a link between a patriarch and a descendant or for example it establishes that legally Jesus was of the house of David. It doesn't give exact dates though and it doesn't give details and other additional support. For example many say that Job never existed. The claim there is that a man of such riches that would have so much happen to him would have probably be recorded some place by someone else. But nothing has been found to support his existence. That means that he might not have existed as an actual person (I don't know if I personally believe that but that's what I've heard), so the story might have been a parable. The story about Job might not have necessary historical support but has a lot to say about faith, adversity and in general about God's relation with humanity, and that is why it is a part of the Bible.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow I imagine someone very evil having a 'fingerchain' instead of a keychain. This one's for car, this one for the safe, this one for the airplane, this one for to spice up Wendy's chilli.... But yeah I thought of that too. Any biometrics out there that work only when the person is alive?
Well, heck then it seems like old lady would be almost be justified to give a little payback, wouldn't you think?
Your measure is just about the same as requiring fingerprints or some constant biometrics check that the person flying the aircraft is indeed the pilot. That will do exaclty what the separate hull would, it would make sure that only the pilots fly the craft, but they are still can be manipulated by someone holding hostages a child or something like that. So I think just a periodic biometric scan of the pilot's fingerprints, or iris, might be a good idea, if the scan failed the plane control gets transfered to the ground and autopilot kicks in. The ground would be able to view a video feed of the inside of the plane and would be able to operate the aircraft remotely. That might be cheaper then rebuilding all the planes from scratch.
What if you are the guy with the gun end up killing a child when you miss and perhaps shoot ome holes through the hull endangering everybody's lifes even more than they already are. Chances are the terrorists are much better at shooting then the ordinary citizens with guns even the ones who are "trained."
Yeah it was Cincinnati, a fairly large hub. Back in the day I knew of a couple of individuals who barely finished highschool and got security positions at the airport. Also hey've had a guard fall alseep on the job there once and had to re-screen everyone from a large terminal. I know that there are different kinds of people on the job, but judging from the experiences I've had, I've only met the bad ones I guess.
that line was a joke, the rest wasn't
Seriosly though, one of my friends talked about how it would be possible to assasinate the prezid3nt on kuri5hin and the next thing he knows is the secret service coming to his work wanting to talk to him. It was a similar discussion to this about national security and such and he theorized about a possible weakness in the system and posted it during his lunch hour at work. The secret service people wipe thier butts with the first ammendment and liberties. They came and searched his house and questioned his wife and daughters. That happened before sept. 11 , now they'd probably lock him up without an explanation, all of that because of discussing in very general and vague details a possible security problem.
The last time I had to deal with them at the aiport I was dropping my parents off at the airport to go back to their home country, they spoke very little English and the idiots at the security check point made fun of them and were blurting all kinds of derrogatory comments about them, while my poor mom and dad where trying to understand what they are saying and were getting upset. I tried to find a manager and complain but I was getting the "you must be a terrorist if you want to complain about the integrity of our fine and professional security staff" vibe, so I just gave up.
These people are highschool drop-outs, or old fat cops that are so stuffed with doughnuts that they cannot run anymore and all they do all day is sit on their ass at the airport pretending to be important.
Before I would let those people see my naked body I think I would take my slim change of being blown up on a plane. Driving is already riskier by a couple of orders of magnitude.
Now I don't have a problem showing any of my private parts to doctors because:
1) I know who they are,
2)I know they are qualified
3)I can go to a different doctor if I choose to.
4)I trust that they are doing something to help me. And there is a big difference between that and the security guards at the airport, who probably hardly managed to finish highschool and are just overweight cops stuffed with doughnuts. Most of them creep my out already and I don't think they are doing something to help me. I would rather take my slim one in a million chances of being blown up rather then having to show myself naked to every security guard at every airport I fly through.
How about 10 terrorists posing as peace officers can have a shooting "contest" 50 thousand feet in the air with maybe 5 or 6 actual peace officers to see who can outgun each other. All this while there are hundreds of other passengers onboard. Now that's what I call 'safety'
I don't think the car analogy works. The car would be in your driveway, while the laptop would be in a public place. If you had sensitive information there, say you worked for CIA or FBI, that someone could steal, then I think you,the owner of the laptop, should be partially liable. The homework is somewhere in between. You shouldn't expect total privacy at the university but homework is also not quite a top secret and classified document. I did have my backpack stolen in the library of my university when I fell asleep. I really felt stupid telling the police that I left it open beside my desk couple of feet away from where I dozed off. I blame the thief but I also blame myself for not taking care of my stuff better.
Given that your username has the word "quantum" in it, I hope you didn't mean you post to be serious...
With all that time you could have become a doctor, lawyer or real estate agent...
A 1Gig file F is split into 200 5mb file segements (chunks) f0,f2,...,f199. The original distributor D0 will advertize that it has a part (or parts) of the file F. Say it has file segments f0 and f199 for example. If there is demand everone will start downloading those segments. Those who downloaded it also become distributors but advertize different chunks, like one has f0 and other has f199 (determined at random, or by looking at some global availability and demand), so that uniformly eventually all the segments are present in the network. Then D0 will advertize other chunks and those will spread out through the network.
Eventually each distributor Di will have a whole file F in some private directory but will continue to advertize just some parts of it (but never all of them in a short time frame).
If the file is in high demand then even some nodes that do not actively want to download file F will be rewarded (by more bandwith or more search visibility) to host some chunks of it. Or maybe that could be a requirement, but nobody would want be any bit liable, so it probably won't work.
*AA will see that their file is available, they might even figure out that at a particular time a certain 200 different hosts (distributors) will together have their file. They can go for all those individuals. Or *AA with enough manpower can focus on a certain IP address and "watch" it with the help of the ISP. When they download all the segements of file F they get "visited" by the police with a warrant to seize their computer.
If they don't have the record that the person has eventually downloaded all 200 f0...f199 files, but that they only have some 5Mb chunk of file F, it might be harder for them to sue that person and demand $3000 in damages for only .5% of the content.
Obviously you are ultimately right, *AA will get suspicious and if they want they can get a search warrant and if one downloads enought parts of illegal to distribute files they will probably have just enough fully downloaded files on their 300Gb hard drive to land them in jail or have to sell their house to pay back the damages.
-Dsun.java2d.opengl=true
option and that made it run slower under linux (I have a nvidia drivers and FX57000). Most speed imporovement came from optimizing the regular (non-opengl) graphics pipeline like adding the use of DGA, keeping some images (pixmaps) in the local display evironment and so on. Now under Linux with the software (regular) rendering, the graphics refresh cycle of my app is 10x faster than it is on windows. Never figured exacltly why, but suits me fine, my app is tied to linux for now anyway.
For those wanting to experiment with some of the graphics option in 5.0 here is the page.
I did a small research project on sensor networks and there the biggest problem is the power source it has to be small and has to last long. They have a whole series of algorithms that optimize the power consumption. If these new betavoltaic nuclear batteries will be small and lasting, all that area of research might become less interesting.
Your write: ...what about the spirit of socialism that is extremely obvious in Acts? How is this reflected in the Orthodox church today?
Well,there was no "socialism" back then. See "socialsm" here If you mean sharing and helping one another and the whole community, then that is true of Orthodox Christians, as it is true of any main Christian denomination. Or perhaps you mean living in poverty and having a common "pot", well there are large monastic comunities that do exaclty that. But what you missed is that the original poster meant that the core doctrine or the core beliefs are what have remained unchainged while some secondary practices have evolved. Just because some people today want to wash some poor hobo's feet in front of everyone or want to all live in a common house and have just one bank account it doesn't mean they have the "spirit" of the original church, they are just selctively copying some of the actions they read about in the Bible.
On the topic of icons,you write: HOWEVER, if it is truly *veneration* and not worship. and also There was one Incarnation, not many; when Jesus left, God's physical incarnation on earth left.
I'll say first that you are right about the worship vs. veneration. We do not worship the "holy paint" or "holy wood.", we worship only God, not even the saints or Mary, the Mother of Christ. The link with the incarnation that the original poster made, was that if Christ became incarnate, and showed Himself to us, then we can surely have his image painted (if there were photos back then we would have had a photo). Now imagine that you have images of your wife and children in your wallet, and of course you love them dearly and miss them when they are not with you, wouldn't you not want to kiss them? I'd kiss my wife's picture and talk to her if I couldn't see her in person, I'd put it on my desk at work and I would look at it often. Well, now imagine that the dear person that you love is God. We don't have an exact image, and that is why the icons don't look like photographs they are symbolic images that point to God or other persons or events from the life of the Church. Also, before many could read, they served a great educational purpose too. Also note, that there have been found images, symbols and engravings of Christ and saints in the Catacombs where the early (apostolic era) Christians met and celebrated "the Breaking of the Bread".
On the same topic you write In my little Protestant mind, I find it difficult to understand why people need to use images in order to focus on worshipping God.
Actually you don't seem to have a little mind at all, you inquire and are interested that is why I wanted to share some what I know. But to get back to you comment - we certainly don't need images to focus on worshipping God. If I am driving or I don't have any icons around, I surely can pray and worship God. But I also find it much easier probably to pray and focus on Christ if I have his icon in front of me instead of a bare white wall. You can look at this another way. If you are a Christian (I assume you are) you know that the human person consists of a body and a soul. So when the person is worshipping it only makes sense to fully engage a person's body and soul. The icons engage the visual senses, the incense engages the sense of smell, the hymns (songs) the auditory senses, the venerating of the icons - the tactile. Thus when I walk into an Orthodox Church I can easier focus on worship, as my whole body is worshipping not just my soul and mind. I will say again though that it is certainly possible to pray without having an icon.
As for the Apostolic Fathers and Justin Martyr: you're using non-canonic
Actually what ended up happening in one of the Crusades the "glorious knights" decided to stab their fellow Christians from East in the back. They sacked and burned Constantinopol. After that it never recovered fully and thus, it could not resist the Muslim invadors for long. To this day, Roman Catholics are not too welcome in Greece or other Eastern Orthodox countries. Granted, the late Pope John Paul II did go to Greece and appologized, which was very nice, and perhaps a small step towards unification.
I can't wait to have children, I'll get to experience it all over.
I like Qualcomm, they are the guys who succesfully implemented CDMA when other companies (especially from Europe) thought it was too challenging. I am glad to see they are considering Linux. I hope, by addopting linux, they will also give back to the Open Source community some applications or some interesting code for embedded devices. When Sharp was releasing their Zaurus with Linux on it, I got a developer's version (SL-5000D) and played with it. It was great to log into it and have a full Linux OS in your pocket. Perhaps I can do that with my cellphone now.
Having lived through a couple of major earthquakes I can share you excitement. I doubt though the buildings well be able to shift and bend like rubber, in other words it might not be obvious visibly but as long as they don't crack that'll help. I wonder though if the flexible concrete has a wider range of resonant frequencies, because if the earthquake or a strong wind hits one of those frequencies then the structure will easily fail.
And if it wasn't for ze Russians the Europe would have been the 3rd Reich today. Its amazing how much the West underestimates that Russians went all the way to Berlin to Hitler's bunker. I guess with the Cold War, the Russians just had to be evil, and while the Soviets defintely sugar-coated the history in their favor, I would not have expected that the "free" and "democtratic" US would also do it. Yeah I know, the Americans helped plenty,they gave the Ruskies Jeeps and other vehicles. But the still it those the Russians that died from Hiltler's and Stalin's hand.
I agree with the post. "Tag things" sounds good, but what kind of things? Most "things", "widgets", "stuff" and so on is meant to be used by people. Let's say we tag cars, well, most cars are driven by their owner so tracking the car is pretty much tracking the person. How about inventory in a store? That sounds good, put RFIDs in shoes, but then everytime you come back to the store the store will know you are back, where you walk in the store, how often you've been there and so on. So then we tag guns, well if the owners keep the guns in the car or carry it with them we tag the people too. Do we really want the law enforcement to have this much power? Then all the criminals will just become dirty cops (I've seen it happen in other country).
You are right, there are historical references in it and many historical facts but it should not be viewed primarily as a history text book I think. For example a lot of lineages (so and so begot so an so) are important as they establish a link between a patriarch and a descendant or for example it establishes that legally Jesus was of the house of David. It doesn't give exact dates though and it doesn't give details and other additional support. For example many say that Job never existed. The claim there is that a man of such riches that would have so much happen to him would have probably be recorded some place by someone else. But nothing has been found to support his existence. That means that he might not have existed as an actual person (I don't know if I personally believe that but that's what I've heard), so the story might have been a parable. The story about Job might not have necessary historical support but has a lot to say about faith, adversity and in general about God's relation with humanity, and that is why it is a part of the Bible.