When 400 phones show up in a club with a capacity rating of 350, can cops and fire marshals be far behind?
This system is claimed to have a 300-foot resolution. Not real useful in telling which building exactly people are in, nor if they're inside or standing outside having a smoke.
It's like those radio traffic alerts on I-78, US-1/9 and other routes into NYC...as soon as people here there is a jam on 78, all the cars are on 1/9 and you create another traffic jam. It's an unstable routing algorithm. The real answer came to me in a dream. We need MORE roads, LESS cars, and another tunnel into Manhattan.
There's a lot of room for improvement without pushing more roads through. For example, the approaches to the Holland Tunnel could be converted into either an elevated or a depressed freeway. As they are right now, the traffic lights slow traffic down a lot. Secondly, either eliminate tolls entirely and replace them with an increased fuel tax or make electronic collection of tolls mandatory. Electronic tolls have privacy implications, but no more so than normal cash tolls if implemented correctly. By "correctly", I mean selling pre-paid RFID cards with a set cash value at every corner store for cash. When they're empty, they can be returned to be refilled. No ID required, no questions asked. Sure, they could use license plate cameras to correlate the card with the car, but they could also just use plate recognition cameras at cash toll points or on highway signs as it is.
Also, the railroad system needs to be improved. The "heavy" passenger trains into NYC are, for the most part, using heavy locomotive-hauled rolling stock straight out of the 1940s. Slow to accelerate, slow to brake. We need state, federal, and union regulations changed to allow the use of lighter multiple-unit trains that accelerate and brake much faster than their American counterparts and can be split and coupled together at station stops, rather than taking 15-30 min to split or reconnect cars.
There are lots other uses, and abuses of such technology, such as finding where tonight's big party is located, which local watering hole is over-capacity, how much traffic the local liquour store (or street corner dealer) is getting.
If you're worried, turn off your cell phone. If you're *really* worried, remove the phone's battery. I keep mine off while driving anyway because I tend not to want to be disturbed nor tempted into picking up a call *now*. If they need to, clients can leave a voicemail, and I check every hour or so. Out of all of the systems that destroy privacy in this world - and there are quite a lot of them - this is one of the lowest priorities on my list. Cell phones can be turned off if the user doesn't wish to be tracked. Simple as that. It's an opt-in system. Now, if the government mandated locating transponders on all cars, I'd be pretty pissed. But this is just using an existing technology to make people's lives a bit easier and save time.
Automated speeding tickets will show up on your cell phone bill.
How do you differentiate between the cell phone of a driver, a car passenger, and a bus passenger? Besides, EZ-Pass has had this capability for years, yet they aren't using it because people would refuse to use the system. (The only exception is that they ticket for speeding through the toll plazas themselves, presumably because workers could get hit.)
It's not that we're discounting the possibility of global warming, we're just skeptical of the idea of man-made global warming. Especially when it's elevated to the status of a pseudo-religion.
As I've said before, the use of fossil fuels carries enough other problems with it (air pollution, spills, wars over oil, etc) that their elimination would be a net gain for society even if they're not a culprit in global warming.
Besides, what is Bush supposed to do? Tax gasoline up to $20 a gallon?
Over a decade or two, this might not be a bad idea while we transition to most sustainable modes of transportation i.e. electric vehicles, electrified freight railroads, and perhaps a bit more walking and/or biking. The energy can come from nuclear, wind, hydro, solar - there are plenty of viable sources other than fossil fuels.
To the naysayers that say that global warming hasn't been proven to be a problem:
(a) do we really want to find out the hard way?... and...
(b) use of fossil fuels leads to other problems. Air pollution at ground level. Spills into the oceans and groundwater. Wars over oil-producing lands. Etc and so forth.
The court he was tried in has no legal standing over crimes that were perpetuated before the court was created.
The US Federal as well as most state constitutions forbid ex post facto laws. The constitutions of many other countries do not share the same prohibition. Besides, who's to say that this is an ex post facto case? Presumably murder, either by overt act or by conspiracy, was illegal in Iraq during Hussein's rule as well. The court may be just applying the laws that existed at the time to someone who previously thought himself above the law...
The installer did not provide an option for local (versus UTC) timezone, forcing the system to UTC which was off by 5 hours. I had to edit a file in/etc to correct this. Most PCs default to local time.
That's a bad thing? UTC is the way to go - just change your hardware clock. Why is UTC hardware clock good? Because the hardware clock never has to change with Daylight Savings Time, switching time zones, etc. Changing the internal time reference of the system backwards could conceivable bork some software.
smartcard for public transport that sends your usage data into a database
You can still buy them with cash. Same with NYC and Wash, DC metro cards in the US. Why not ban paying with cash? Too many immigrants without credit cards or really any papers at all. Rights groups would protest, at least in the USA they would. One of the benefits of illegal immigration is that there's still a subculture of anonymity and no-questions-asked catering to the immigrants.
Sell them the hardware for power plants and then in a very monitored way sell them the fuel as well. If we give them what they need (and they truly do as potable water is expected to be a major source of conflict in the 21st century) and monitor the fuel usage then, I think, there would be less of a risk of repurposing the fuel to weapons.
We (the USA) have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. We also have the tendency to invade countries and meddle in their internal affairs. So far, we haven't used our nukes, but neither has anyone else simply because the consequences would be too large to make it practical in warfare. Isn't our "preventing proliferation" just a case of the pot calling the kettle black?!
You might choose to skip down the street for fun, knowing there is noone else around to chatise you for silly behaviour.
If there is a camera on the street (which you can never know is in use or not), or even if you think there might be a camera on the street, you won't do it.
Right, I wouldn't skip down the street. I'd skip down the street towards the camera then break dance while wearing a giant latex penis on my head with a sign on my back - To The Watchers: This Is You... When the cameras are present, by all means perform for them. That's what they're there for.
You're running Groupwise? GWAVA is overrated and is mainly useful for integrating spam filtering into Groupwise's Internet Agent. Nothing that SpamAssassing + ClamAV + ProxSMTPd won't do for you. And that combination is available as part of a package for an IPCop firewall box called CopFilter. The only downside is that CopFilter isn't as configurable as it should be via the Web interface. But for a free product, it's pretty darn good.
The blacklists also reject dynamic ip addresses, which are all virus infected home computers.
*All*? I run a mail, gaming, and web server off of a dynamic IP. Forwards out through a smarthost, so blacklisting isn't a problem, but it isn't infected with viruses nor am I using it for illegit purposes (ok, well it probably does violate my ISP's TOS, but fuck'em).
And most likely with roaring cheers from an ebullient crowd.
Sadly, yes. Fortunately, those same crowds will be cheering in another 20 years when we string up the dictators by their pinkie toes and set 'em on fire.
Sure, it's ironic given that the brits wrote 1984,
No: one Brit - George Orwell/Eric Blair - wrote 1984. Perhaps he knew his countrymen all too well and realized that a surveillance society was a possibility or inevitability in Britain.
Cameras merely make a record so that it is possible that the criminal may be identified later.
It's the record that is the problem. How long is it kept? If you're running for office 20 years down the line or applying for a job, would you want it to come out that you were speeding at 100mph/kissing a person of the wrong race or gender/talking to someone who ended up being arrested for terrorist 5 years later/etc? If there's a sunset law on the footage, that anything not involved in a criminal investigation is subject to mandatory destruction after three months, I'd have less of a problem with CCTV cameras. And no recording of voice - that's a bit too intrusive and creepy and isn't needed to detect crimes of violence for the most part.
Democracies do surveillance, perhaps more than they should or need.
Dictatorships do censorship, political prosecution and incarceration, banning, executions opponents etc.
So if you are being surveyed you can think of yourself as lucky.
No. Dictatorships do both. The STASI, for example, had some of the most extensive files on E. Germany's citizens of any agency. Secondly, a surveillance society sets up a framework and a culture (we're used to being spied upon) that can easily and quickly be abused by a dictatorship if it should come into power.
Lastly, there are different kinds of dictatorships. There's the hard kind that'll shoot you for any deviation from the rules. And there's the softly creeping matriarchal kind that will simply hit you with fines, send you to sensitivity training, and ban anything dangerous and exciting for your own good, of course. Governments learn from past mistakes, too, and the next dictatorship won't be like previous ones. It may even be gradually put in place with the best of intentions.
I have now had to replace Ubuntu twice, and both times for the same reason. An automatic update screwed X and I was not able to recover it.
Rare case. Such things happen with Windows, too. i.e. an automatically installed security update on a client's Win 2k3 Small Business Server box rendered the thing unbootable so their e-mail went down after the box did the mandatory reboot after installation. Fortunately, booting in safe mode, I was able to remove it.
As far as your update that screwed X, at least it didn't screw the whole system. And updates are removable from the command line via the Debian/Ubuntu APT utilities.
I would like an easy way to set up partitions to hold my email and database so I can reinstall without having to backup and restore data.
Assuming that you keep all of your data in the/home directory, just create two Linux partitions and mount one as / (your main file system) and mount the other one as/home. It's actually easier to ask Linux to do that upon install than it is Windows, since the "typical" Windows user has only one partition, mounted as C: .
As a developer, in the last few years I am beginning to feel that MS is finally getting things right.
Fine, if they're getting things right, more power to them. Let them compete on the basis of the merits of their products. There's no need for them to resort to underhanded tactics like frivolous lawsuits made to drive competitors out of business. M$ is acting like a bunch of gangsters and thugs, not a reputable corporation. There's room enough for more than one player in this game. The fact that Microsoft wants to maintain an almost complete monopoly at all costs is, in my book, unacceptable. And, ultimately, a monopoly will hurt innovation since monopolists tend to get soft and complaisant.
I remember when I was a kid, there were highway checkpoints at the Florida border, everyone had to submit to a mandatory search to make sure they weren't carrying fruit, for fear of carrying disease.
Same thing on the Calif./Ariz. border, or actually about 10 miles west of it. Produce and illegal immigrants...
Who says we wouldn't be in the same or a worse mess if Gore was elected? The groundwork for our current mess was laid under previous presidents.
As far as voting Libertarian, if everyone feels that way about a less-known but optimal candidate or party, then we're bound to get stuck with suboptimal representatives! Ultimately, the solution to this problem is election reform. Give each voter more than one vote in a given election, allow them to rank candidates in order of preference, or go with approval voting. With approval voting, voters can say that the either "approve" "disapprove" or "abstain" on a given candidate. Then points are assigned to each rating. Approved is +1 point, abstention counts for 0, and disapproval counts for -1. In the end, the candidate with the most points wins (or maybe there can be a runoff if there isn't a clear margin of victory).
Approval voting avoids the problem of the wasted vote - voters can vote for *both* Gore and the Libertarian (say) and not run into the problem of wasting their single votes.
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This system is claimed to have a 300-foot resolution. Not real useful in telling which building exactly people are in, nor if they're inside or standing outside having a smoke.
-b.
There's a lot of room for improvement without pushing more roads through. For example, the approaches to the Holland Tunnel could be converted into either an elevated or a depressed freeway. As they are right now, the traffic lights slow traffic down a lot. Secondly, either eliminate tolls entirely and replace them with an increased fuel tax or make electronic collection of tolls mandatory. Electronic tolls have privacy implications, but no more so than normal cash tolls if implemented correctly. By "correctly", I mean selling pre-paid RFID cards with a set cash value at every corner store for cash. When they're empty, they can be returned to be refilled. No ID required, no questions asked. Sure, they could use license plate cameras to correlate the card with the car, but they could also just use plate recognition cameras at cash toll points or on highway signs as it is.
Also, the railroad system needs to be improved. The "heavy" passenger trains into NYC are, for the most part, using heavy locomotive-hauled rolling stock straight out of the 1940s. Slow to accelerate, slow to brake. We need state, federal, and union regulations changed to allow the use of lighter multiple-unit trains that accelerate and brake much faster than their American counterparts and can be split and coupled together at station stops, rather than taking 15-30 min to split or reconnect cars.
-b.
If you're worried, turn off your cell phone. If you're *really* worried, remove the phone's battery. I keep mine off while driving anyway because I tend not to want to be disturbed nor tempted into picking up a call *now*. If they need to, clients can leave a voicemail, and I check every hour or so. Out of all of the systems that destroy privacy in this world - and there are quite a lot of them - this is one of the lowest priorities on my list. Cell phones can be turned off if the user doesn't wish to be tracked. Simple as that. It's an opt-in system. Now, if the government mandated locating transponders on all cars, I'd be pretty pissed. But this is just using an existing technology to make people's lives a bit easier and save time.
-b.
How do you differentiate between the cell phone of a driver, a car passenger, and a bus passenger? Besides, EZ-Pass has had this capability for years, yet they aren't using it because people would refuse to use the system. (The only exception is that they ticket for speeding through the toll plazas themselves, presumably because workers could get hit.)
-b.
As I've said before, the use of fossil fuels carries enough other problems with it (air pollution, spills, wars over oil, etc) that their elimination would be a net gain for society even if they're not a culprit in global warming.
-b.
Over a decade or two, this might not be a bad idea while we transition to most sustainable modes of transportation i.e. electric vehicles, electrified freight railroads, and perhaps a bit more walking and/or biking. The energy can come from nuclear, wind, hydro, solar - there are plenty of viable sources other than fossil fuels.
To the naysayers that say that global warming hasn't been proven to be a problem:
(a) do we really want to find out the hard way? ... and ...
(b) use of fossil fuels leads to other problems. Air pollution at ground level. Spills into the oceans and groundwater. Wars over oil-producing lands. Etc and so forth.
-b.
The US Federal as well as most state constitutions forbid ex post facto laws. The constitutions of many other countries do not share the same prohibition. Besides, who's to say that this is an ex post facto case? Presumably murder, either by overt act or by conspiracy, was illegal in Iraq during Hussein's rule as well. The court may be just applying the laws that existed at the time to someone who previously thought himself above the law...
-b.
That's a bad thing? UTC is the way to go - just change your hardware clock. Why is UTC hardware clock good? Because the hardware clock never has to change with Daylight Savings Time, switching time zones, etc. Changing the internal time reference of the system backwards could conceivable bork some software.
-b.
"used our nukes" best be qualified with "after WW II"
-b.
You can still buy them with cash. Same with NYC and Wash, DC metro cards in the US. Why not ban paying with cash? Too many immigrants without credit cards or really any papers at all. Rights groups would protest, at least in the USA they would. One of the benefits of illegal immigration is that there's still a subculture of anonymity and no-questions-asked catering to the immigrants.
-b.
Hear! Hear!
We (the USA) have the largest nuclear arsenal in the world. We also have the tendency to invade countries and meddle in their internal affairs. So far, we haven't used our nukes, but neither has anyone else simply because the consequences would be too large to make it practical in warfare. Isn't our "preventing proliferation" just a case of the pot calling the kettle black?!
-b.
So the OPEC countries will start reprocessing fuel and using breeder reactors to make more fuel.
-b.
If there is a camera on the street (which you can never know is in use or not), or even if you think there might be a camera on the street, you won't do it.
Right, I wouldn't skip down the street. I'd skip down the street towards the camera then break dance while wearing a giant latex penis on my head with a sign on my back - To The Watchers: This Is You... When the cameras are present, by all means perform for them. That's what they're there for.
-b.
You're running Groupwise? GWAVA is overrated and is mainly useful for integrating spam filtering into Groupwise's Internet Agent. Nothing that SpamAssassing + ClamAV + ProxSMTPd won't do for you. And that combination is available as part of a package for an IPCop firewall box called CopFilter. The only downside is that CopFilter isn't as configurable as it should be via the Web interface. But for a free product, it's pretty darn good.
-b.
*All*? I run a mail, gaming, and web server off of a dynamic IP. Forwards out through a smarthost, so blacklisting isn't a problem, but it isn't infected with viruses nor am I using it for illegit purposes (ok, well it probably does violate my ISP's TOS, but fuck'em).
-b.
Sadly, yes. Fortunately, those same crowds will be cheering in another 20 years when we string up the dictators by their pinkie toes and set 'em on fire.
-b.
(first post)
No: one Brit - George Orwell/Eric Blair - wrote 1984. Perhaps he knew his countrymen all too well and realized that a surveillance society was a possibility or inevitability in Britain.
-b.
It's the record that is the problem. How long is it kept? If you're running for office 20 years down the line or applying for a job, would you want it to come out that you were speeding at 100mph/kissing a person of the wrong race or gender/talking to someone who ended up being arrested for terrorist 5 years later/etc? If there's a sunset law on the footage, that anything not involved in a criminal investigation is subject to mandatory destruction after three months, I'd have less of a problem with CCTV cameras. And no recording of voice - that's a bit too intrusive and creepy and isn't needed to detect crimes of violence for the most part.
-b.
Dictatorships do censorship, political prosecution and incarceration, banning, executions opponents etc.
So if you are being surveyed you can think of yourself as lucky.
No. Dictatorships do both. The STASI, for example, had some of the most extensive files on E. Germany's citizens of any agency. Secondly, a surveillance society sets up a framework and a culture (we're used to being spied upon) that can easily and quickly be abused by a dictatorship if it should come into power.
Lastly, there are different kinds of dictatorships. There's the hard kind that'll shoot you for any deviation from the rules. And there's the softly creeping matriarchal kind that will simply hit you with fines, send you to sensitivity training, and ban anything dangerous and exciting for your own good, of course. Governments learn from past mistakes, too, and the next dictatorship won't be like previous ones. It may even be gradually put in place with the best of intentions.
Cheers,
-b.
Ah yes, Guy (aka Guido) Fawkes, the only honest man to set foot in the Houses of Parliament... (He tried to blow them up in 1606.)
-b.
Rare case. Such things happen with Windows, too. i.e. an automatically installed security update on a client's Win 2k3 Small Business Server box rendered the thing unbootable so their e-mail went down after the box did the mandatory reboot after installation. Fortunately, booting in safe mode, I was able to remove it.
As far as your update that screwed X, at least it didn't screw the whole system. And updates are removable from the command line via the Debian/Ubuntu APT utilities.
I would like an easy way to set up partitions to hold my email and database so I can reinstall without having to backup and restore data.
Assuming that you keep all of your data in the /home directory, just create two Linux partitions and mount one as / (your main file system) and mount the other one as /home. It's actually easier to ask Linux to do that upon install than it is Windows, since the "typical" Windows user has only one partition, mounted as C: .
As a developer, in the last few years I am beginning to feel that MS is finally getting things right.
Fine, if they're getting things right, more power to them. Let them compete on the basis of the merits of their products. There's no need for them to resort to underhanded tactics like frivolous lawsuits made to drive competitors out of business. M$ is acting like a bunch of gangsters and thugs, not a reputable corporation. There's room enough for more than one player in this game. The fact that Microsoft wants to maintain an almost complete monopoly at all costs is, in my book, unacceptable. And, ultimately, a monopoly will hurt innovation since monopolists tend to get soft and complaisant.
-b.
Same thing on the Calif./Ariz. border, or actually about 10 miles west of it. Produce and illegal immigrants...
-b.
As far as voting Libertarian, if everyone feels that way about a less-known but optimal candidate or party, then we're bound to get stuck with suboptimal representatives! Ultimately, the solution to this problem is election reform. Give each voter more than one vote in a given election, allow them to rank candidates in order of preference, or go with approval voting. With approval voting, voters can say that the either "approve" "disapprove" or "abstain" on a given candidate. Then points are assigned to each rating. Approved is +1 point, abstention counts for 0, and disapproval counts for -1. In the end, the candidate with the most points wins (or maybe there can be a runoff if there isn't a clear margin of victory).
Approval voting avoids the problem of the wasted vote - voters can vote for *both* Gore and the Libertarian (say) and not run into the problem of wasting their single votes.
-b.