Ah. That would make sense. I stand corrected.
I do stand by my point, however, that if surveillance was the aim, RFID would not be a significant advantage.
I suppose that's actually a bad thing, having thought about it, because it means that the situation is already quite bad, and just doesn't get that much worse with the introduction of RFID plates...
I take your point, but really, the technology to automatically read number plates has been around for years, and is in use at the moment. (For example, the Clyde Tunnel near my house has cameras which are able to tell if your tax disc has run out, and that's just a four inch wide disc on your windscreen. Don't quote me on that, but a friend of mine got nabbed, and claimed he was picked up going through said tunnel).
If surveilance was the aim, I imagine the cost of installing a network of RFID readers (with their inherant short range) would be comparable to the cost of installing cameras all over the place which could read a lot more plates at a greater distance.
My point here is that the technology is fairly limited (in this case) and so the risk to civil liberty is negligible.
If they were asking for GPS systems in every car, *then* I would certainly be worried.
Uh huh.
Have you ever actually been to England (incidentally, if you're going to refer to the UK, then don't refer to it as 'England') lately? Name one thing that you are free to do in America that I am not free to do in Scotland.
I find it very amusing that the 'right to self defense' as you put it is the only thing that ensures the American public actually need a Right to bear arms. (I assume that's what you mean when you say the right to self defense. You have every right to defend yourself in the UK, you just don't have the automatic right to have guns).
We might not have a bill of rights, but we have a legal system which ensures (usually) our rights are upheld, and upheld in a way which doesn't rely unduely on texts written in a completely different political and social climate.
This proposed scheme seems fine to me. RFID is fairly short range, and just ensures that your registration can be read when it can't be seen. You'll be argueing next that car registrations should be banned, because they allow the authorities to track you. (UK registrations are (relatively) unique strings, so you can be tracked by your registration anyway)
Jesus. If you're breaking the law, then you should expect to be caught. If you're not, then you have nothing to fear from RFID tags that you shouldn't fear from your car registration plates in the first place.
The artists signed the contracts. If they didn't like the terms, then they shouldn't have signed. In return for not recieving that much money, they get their records distributed for them, and don't have to do any donkey work getting their music into shops and advertised. In short they get the fame, and the men in grey suits get the fortune. If the artists are getting such a raw deal, then perhaps someone could put up the money and time to distribute / advertise / PR / organise tours for the artists and not accept any renumeration. That way you could give them money they are due. No takers? Interesting. Besides, I'm sure the artists would rather have the 20-50 cents than nothing. Wouldn't you?
His case is good, I'll give him that, but his website sucks. Ass. Through a short straw.
The page linked from the/. front page breaks the back button (why? why? ?), and his case mods page linked from the bottom of the article has a message asking you to change your screen resolution. Nice.
Just when you thought you'd escaped this madness by closing your browser window, a Javascript message comes up to inform you how long you spent on his site! Why the funk would I want to know this information?
Holy crap. All it's missing is a 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer' tag. Jakob Nielsen would have a field day.
Disclaimer: My website's also rubbish, but at least I don't care what resolution you're running at.
Sounds to me like they just embed a simgle pixel gif in the message, and monitor when they recieve the request for it.
How they monitor the length of time the mail stays open is a bit of a mystery.
Turn off 'Download images' and I'd imagine their system becomes useless.
Wasn't there a scare about spam merchants doing this once?
Good article.
I went through three years of maths courses at University (linear, calculus, number theory / cryptography...) and it was all very much relevant tomy computing degree.
I would go so far as to say that anyone who hasn't got a good grounding in maths couldn't possibly be effective in a computing degree. Or anything else computer related - try calculating subnet masks without being able to convery decimal to other number systems.
The University I went to (Glasgow) is, I believe, now demanding that *all* Comp. Sci. entrants have a decent grade in maths from their secondary (high) school.
About time too.
The frequency response curves on all those headphones is absolutely horrific!
Do yourselves a favour - buy the cheapest player and get a pair of headphones for $30. It'll sound way better than anything with the supplied headphones.
I think I'll be sticking with my 'old school' MiniDisc Walkman (and yes it is a Sony, so yes I can call it a Walkman) and my Grado SR60s. Mmmm. Expensive.
I'm sorry, but that's officially the most rubbish 'invetion' I've ever seen.
Basically, this guy's put a big weight on his camera. This does not a steadycam make.
There was me thinking steadycams were sprung and damped systems that the user attached to his/ser body so they don't have to carry the weight of the camera with their arms for extended periods. No? Oh well.
If I strap a five pound weight to my mouse, does that make it a 'steadymouse'?
(Quoting from Rob Mensching's blog)
First of all, I would say that the WiX toolset is pretty close to Beta2 quality........the documentation leaves much to be desired.
Yup. Sounds like most open source projects I know!
What is going on at/. these days?
It seems to me that about 25% of the front page articles are either reposts or just plain wrong.
Have there been some changes to the editorial staff?
I see no mention of the GEM desktop for the Atari ST.
Now there was a desktop worth using.
IIRC you could only have 30 windows open at any time, the sick green desktop background couldn't be changed (not that any changes would have been saved with the OS in ROM...) and you had to wait somewhere in the region of a minute while all the drives were checked before it appeared.
Ahh, yes. Them were the days. Us Atari users were too busy drooling over the Amiga's sound chips to notice.
Are these speed / size / page-load figures accurate for the binaries with the debugging code still in?
If so then these performance gains will be even better once the debugging stuff's taken out for production. Will they not?
Hmmm.
I've seem bank machines in Glasgow which definitely run Windows (I know, because I've seen one with an error message saying something along the lines of "IP address expired" which was in an NT4 dialogue box).
It's all very well that the banks servers, desktops and cash ATMs are secure, but if an ATM which is running Windows can connect to their systems, what difference does it really make?
Slashdot Mirror
Ah. That would make sense. I stand corrected.
I do stand by my point, however, that if surveillance was the aim, RFID would not be a significant advantage.
I suppose that's actually a bad thing, having thought about it, because it means that the situation is already quite bad, and just doesn't get that much worse with the introduction of RFID plates...
I take your point, but really, the technology to automatically read number plates has been around for years, and is in use at the moment. (For example, the Clyde Tunnel near my house has cameras which are able to tell if your tax disc has run out, and that's just a four inch wide disc on your windscreen. Don't quote me on that, but a friend of mine got nabbed, and claimed he was picked up going through said tunnel).
If surveilance was the aim, I imagine the cost of installing a network of RFID readers (with their inherant short range) would be comparable to the cost of installing cameras all over the place which could read a lot more plates at a greater distance.
My point here is that the technology is fairly limited (in this case) and so the risk to civil liberty is negligible.
If they were asking for GPS systems in every car, *then* I would certainly be worried.
Have you ever actually been to England (incidentally, if you're going to refer to the UK, then don't refer to it as 'England') lately? Name one thing that you are free to do in America that I am not free to do in Scotland.
I find it very amusing that the 'right to self defense' as you put it is the only thing that ensures the American public actually need a Right to bear arms. (I assume that's what you mean when you say the right to self defense. You have every right to defend yourself in the UK, you just don't have the automatic right to have guns).
We might not have a bill of rights, but we have a legal system which ensures (usually) our rights are upheld, and upheld in a way which doesn't rely unduely on texts written in a completely different political and social climate.
This proposed scheme seems fine to me. RFID is fairly short range, and just ensures that your registration can be read when it can't be seen. You'll be argueing next that car registrations should be banned, because they allow the authorities to track you. (UK registrations are (relatively) unique strings, so you can be tracked by your registration anyway)
Jesus. If you're breaking the law, then you should expect to be caught. If you're not, then you have nothing to fear from RFID tags that you shouldn't fear from your car registration plates in the first place.
So the 'R' is redundant then?
The artists signed the contracts. If they didn't like the terms, then they shouldn't have signed.
In return for not recieving that much money, they get their records distributed for them, and don't have to do any donkey work getting their music into shops and advertised. In short they get the fame, and the men in grey suits get the fortune.
If the artists are getting such a raw deal, then perhaps someone could put up the money and time to distribute / advertise / PR / organise tours for the artists and not accept any renumeration. That way you could give them money they are due. No takers? Interesting.
Besides, I'm sure the artists would rather have the 20-50 cents than nothing. Wouldn't you?
The page linked from the
Just when you thought you'd escaped this madness by closing your browser window, a Javascript message comes up to inform you how long you spent on his site! Why the funk would I want to know this information?
Holy crap. All it's missing is a 'Best viewed with Internet Explorer' tag. Jakob Nielsen would have a field day.
Disclaimer: My website's also rubbish, but at least I don't care what resolution you're running at.
Yup.
At the bottom of the mail is:
Oh well. Should prove very effective against those without the sense to turn off images anyway. Lets hear it for making money from people's ignorance!
Sounds to me like they just embed a simgle pixel gif in the message, and monitor when they recieve the request for it.
How they monitor the length of time the mail stays open is a bit of a mystery.
Turn off 'Download images' and I'd imagine their system becomes useless.
Wasn't there a scare about spam merchants doing this once?
Why do video devices / encoders always have problems with red (as mentioned in the Futurama page of the article)?
Good article.
I went through three years of maths courses at University (linear, calculus, number theory / cryptography...) and it was all very much relevant tomy computing degree.
I would go so far as to say that anyone who hasn't got a good grounding in maths couldn't possibly be effective in a computing degree. Or anything else computer related - try calculating subnet masks without being able to convery decimal to other number systems.
The University I went to (Glasgow) is, I believe, now demanding that *all* Comp. Sci. entrants have a decent grade in maths from their secondary (high) school.
About time too.
Well, the icon's nice, anyway.
Sounds like a dodgy source to me. Unless the source was actually hinting at how long it's really going to take for Longhorn to be released....
The frequency response curves on all those headphones is absolutely horrific!
Do yourselves a favour - buy the cheapest player and get a pair of headphones for $30. It'll sound way better than anything with the supplied headphones.
I think I'll be sticking with my 'old school' MiniDisc Walkman (and yes it is a Sony, so yes I can call it a Walkman) and my Grado SR60s. Mmmm. Expensive.
Basically, this guy's put a big weight on his camera. This does not a steadycam make.
There was me thinking steadycams were sprung and damped systems that the user attached to his/ser body so they don't have to carry the weight of the camera with their arms for extended periods. No? Oh well.
If I strap a five pound weight to my mouse, does that make it a 'steadymouse'?
Let's hear it for slow news days!
(Quoting from Rob Mensching's blog) ....the documentation leaves much to be desired.
First of all, I would say that the WiX toolset is pretty close to Beta2 quality....
Yup. Sounds like most open source projects I know!
Yup. You're right enough.
Just tried it with an old project of mine.
As it's in Java, if you took out the jar file, the game would continue untill it tried to load a class.
That's the boring answer, anyway.
Hmmm. Good point - well made.
Seriously, though; the amount of dupes seems to have suddenly shot up recently.
You get what you pay for I suppose....
What is going on at /. these days?
It seems to me that about 25% of the front page articles are either reposts or just plain wrong.
Have there been some changes to the editorial staff?
Nope.
I see no mention of the GEM desktop for the Atari ST.
Now there was a desktop worth using.
IIRC you could only have 30 windows open at any time, the sick green desktop background couldn't be changed (not that any changes would have been saved with the OS in ROM...) and you had to wait somewhere in the region of a minute while all the drives were checked before it appeared.
Ahh, yes. Them were the days. Us Atari users were too busy drooling over the Amiga's sound chips to notice.
Are these speed / size / page-load figures accurate for the binaries with the debugging code still in?
If so then these performance gains will be even better once the debugging stuff's taken out for production. Will they not?
Hmmm.
I've seem bank machines in Glasgow which definitely run Windows (I know, because I've seen one with an error message saying something along the lines of "IP address expired" which was in an NT4 dialogue box).
It's all very well that the banks servers, desktops and cash ATMs are secure, but if an ATM which is running Windows can connect to their systems, what difference does it really make?