Now if only the broadcasters would use the HD stream to carry HD content we might have some net gain out of the process. The little 1080i material is generally upscaled SD and/or crippled by a low bit rate to accommodate yet another SD TV shopping/trash TV stream. ABC News 24 is 720p, SBS HD is upscaled SD simulcast, Gem is upscaled reruns and shopping, 7Mate is trash TV for "blokes", One HD is M*A*S*H and Get Smart reruns in glorious 1080i
Brisbane's version of this is called Go Card. Budgeted at a mere AUD 134M it came with the long tail for Cubic who get to operate it for, presumably, a healthy slice (undisclosed) of each ticket. Especially healthy... every year since introduction in 2008 the trip price has risen 15%, more than swallowing the small price drop used to entice people on to the system. They also take 24 hours or more to credit accounts with electronic funds paid in, and operate a completely unaccountable system for penalising those not recorded as "touching off."
Brisbane is a couple of hundred thousand smaller than Chicago's population. Perhaps the Chicago price is because the city did not want to give Cubic the endless commission.
The company said it has no plans to sell any information collected through a cloud service connected to the devices, but to only share it with stakeholders
They are not going to do this for the insurance companies out of the goodness of their hearts. So the stated business model is do precisely what they claim not to do, selling information gathered this way to "stakeholders."
Governments, police forces and the NSA are stakeholders too (whether or not LoJack want them to be). How long before the location data is married to traffic light changes resulting in infringements issued on the basis that your car passed a red light: no camera deployments required and no defence. Or speed information and speeding infringements... Or proximity to an unrelated crime... Or the location of political opponents... Or journalists... Or whistleblowers... Ubiquitous tracking will be abused.
In the unlikely event that Mr Assange gets himself out of the Ecuadoran embassy and to the United States without being arrested by UK police, and the US border authorities did not immediately detain him, and US did not indict him on some charge of their own, then he would still be arrested shortly afterward. The Swedish authorities would have started extradition proceedings with the US the moment they got wind of Assange leaving the UK.
It strikes me that the young and (self-professed) cool crowd are only interested in shiny buttons on cloud-hosted web services. Unless you can port the Linux kernel to Javascript...
No, he certainly did not mean "electrocuting" (to kill by electricity) any more than "executing" (to murder; assassinate). Both words mean death although the former is more specific about the cause of death. The Milgram experiment involved the use of electric shocks, not electrocution.
Collecting taxes to direct an economy is obviously less efficient than letting the economy spend its own earnings.
Obviously?
It axiomatic to certain dominant schools of economic/financial thought and therefore beyond question to those subscribing. You are unlikely to change these entrenched belief systems by force of reason.
... which is precisely why I excluded requests subject to national security suppression orders. Apple state they have never received such an order under PATRIOT Act in any case. There is no national security impact when the FBI/Police/court executes a warrant for access to information to locate a stolen phone, track down an individual wanted for minor theft offences, or release of email content for a court proceeding. Nonetheless, Apple and friends are reporting all US law enforcement requests as if they were subject to NSL action or there was some law preventing actual numbers from being disclosed. I would merely like to see the US law imposing this restriction.
These companies keep saying they can only legally report the numbers in these very coarse terms. I smell weasel words and voluntary censorship. Can someone identify the US law that prohibits reporting of precise numbers, not the details of targets etc., of requests that are not subject to national security suppression orders?
No, geostationary orbits are ~42160 kilometres (~26200 mi) from the centre of the Earth, i.e. at a distance of ~35,790 kilometres (~22,240 mi) above equatorial sea level.
It's what a sensible country does. Your state based tax system is pretty brain damaged...
It might be sensible from some perspectives but not others. The Australian Federal Govt. collects the GST but the total take must be returned to the States and Territories (part of a deal for notionally retiring a bunch of State taxes, duties etc.). Australia has just six States and two Territories but still manages a serious pile of bullshit, petty squabbles when dividing up the GST take. States have still managed to hold onto some of the so-called retired taxes and introduce new ones as well. Using the Federal Govt. means the GST rate must be uniform across States but the GST itself is full of exceptions, e.g. fresh food is exempt but processed is not, education courses and medical services are exempt, the rate is higher for wine imports and luxury cars, some businesses cannot claim inputs as an offset against sales etc. Take that arrangement and explode it to 50 States and maybe some of the external territories and see how quickly it descends into farce and pork-barrelling... and that's before they can agree on the taxation regime. It might work in the US to make the rate nationally uniform but the States collect and keep it in return for retiring their other State, county, city, street corner taxes... but don't hold your breath.... the players cannot even agree on the day of the week.
There's precedent that is currently being ripped asunder by the more right-wing crowd that won the Federal election in September. So far they have promised to switch from fibre-to-the-home to fibre-to-the-node, drop the speeds, and remove the competition restrictions. They have already sacked the board, installed former telco monopoly executives, and started cosy-ing up to the effective telco monopoly because they now need their copper last mile. NBN == Notional Broadband Network by the time these clowns are done.
I don't know... they built a substantial client-side Java app some years ago, it still works, and they don't feel the urge to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. E*Trade Australia still uses client-side Java.
The car's idea of the speed limit on the road no longer matches the recently introduced, lower limit. The car did not "see" a temporary reduced speed limit for road works, high wind or ice conditions. The limit is vague, like a 40 km/h school zone that only operates a between 7-9AM and 2-4 PM on school days (whatever they are) or the unsigned 50 km/h limit in "residential" streets. (Australian examples but I am sure you can find USian ones)
If it were, why would you be liable?
If the car has a mechanism for you to manually lower the speed and you did not then I am sure liability will be asserted. Minimises the attractiveness of a "self-driving" car if you constantly have to monitor it.
So, you post a link to one of these less than savoury videos... how long before the NSA tap has sucked out your details, processed it, pulled out every other post or utterance you ever made, connected you to organized crime however tenuously, and notified the FBI? Anal probe in 5 4 3...
I scanned the summary as "data flow programming" and had flashbacks to university research projects around data flow computing... in the mid-1980's (probably before many of the 'hip' programmers were born). Alas, it was not to be the resurgence of programming in SISAL... just a another programming-by-drawing rehash. Imagine my disappointment.
And vaccines: Vaccine vial monitor. There are also logging devices to go with larger collections of vaccines to record their temperature exposure (e.g. to isolate weaknesses in the cold chain). If these disposable tags record a history I guess they might replace the larger logging devices.
The object was weighed suspended from a scale clearly visible at 00:36 in the linked BBC video. The video does not show if the failure was the scale mechanism itself or the collapse of the A-frame/pulley it was suspended from.
So, I pick up a thingy after being offered a discount on thingies by the All-Seeing-Eye(tm). How is that discount connected to the bar code on the my particular thingy so that the correct price is charged at the checkout? The article says, "custom coupons can be displayed" which is not overly useful at the checkout. The only mechanism I can see is printing a paper docket with an alternate code... and these printers are doomed to fail routinely, need paper and dilute profits any additional sale.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only the broadcasters would use the HD stream to carry HD content we might have some net gain out of the process. The little 1080i material is generally upscaled SD and/or crippled by a low bit rate to accommodate yet another SD TV shopping/trash TV stream. ABC News 24 is 720p, SBS HD is upscaled SD simulcast, Gem is upscaled reruns and shopping, 7Mate is trash TV for "blokes", One HD is M*A*S*H and Get Smart reruns in glorious 1080i
Disposable credit cards purchased with cash
No such beast in Australia AFAICT. You can pay cash for the card but you have to activate it online with the usual intrusive questioning.
Brisbane's version of this is called Go Card. Budgeted at a mere AUD 134M it came with the long tail for Cubic who get to operate it for, presumably, a healthy slice (undisclosed) of each ticket. Especially healthy... every year since introduction in 2008 the trip price has risen 15%, more than swallowing the small price drop used to entice people on to the system. They also take 24 hours or more to credit accounts with electronic funds paid in, and operate a completely unaccountable system for penalising those not recorded as "touching off."
Brisbane is a couple of hundred thousand smaller than Chicago's population. Perhaps the Chicago price is because the city did not want to give Cubic the endless commission.
The company said it has no plans to sell any information collected through a cloud service connected to the devices, but to only share it with stakeholders
They are not going to do this for the insurance companies out of the goodness of their hearts. So the stated business model is do precisely what they claim not to do, selling information gathered this way to "stakeholders."
Governments, police forces and the NSA are stakeholders too (whether or not LoJack want them to be). How long before the location data is married to traffic light changes resulting in infringements issued on the basis that your car passed a red light: no camera deployments required and no defence. Or speed information and speeding infringements... Or proximity to an unrelated crime... Or the location of political opponents... Or journalists... Or whistleblowers... Ubiquitous tracking will be abused.
... or just part of the legal costs already sunk on trying to put this particular genie back in the bottle
In the unlikely event that Mr Assange gets himself out of the Ecuadoran embassy and to the United States without being arrested by UK police, and the US border authorities did not immediately detain him, and US did not indict him on some charge of their own, then he would still be arrested shortly afterward. The Swedish authorities would have started extradition proceedings with the US the moment they got wind of Assange leaving the UK.
A recent skydiving accident story with a more cheerful outcome: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2487761/Wisconsin-skydivers-survived-mid-air-collision-said-extreme-sport.html
It strikes me that the young and (self-professed) cool crowd are only interested in shiny buttons on cloud-hosted web services. Unless you can port the Linux kernel to Javascript...
No, he certainly did not mean "electrocuting" (to kill by electricity) any more than "executing" (to murder; assassinate). Both words mean death although the former is more specific about the cause of death. The Milgram experiment involved the use of electric shocks, not electrocution.
Collecting taxes to direct an economy is obviously less efficient than letting the economy spend its own earnings.
Obviously?
It axiomatic to certain dominant schools of economic/financial thought and therefore beyond question to those subscribing. You are unlikely to change these entrenched belief systems by force of reason.
... which is precisely why I excluded requests subject to national security suppression orders. Apple state they have never received such an order under PATRIOT Act in any case. There is no national security impact when the FBI/Police/court executes a warrant for access to information to locate a stolen phone, track down an individual wanted for minor theft offences, or release of email content for a court proceeding. Nonetheless, Apple and friends are reporting all US law enforcement requests as if they were subject to NSL action or there was some law preventing actual numbers from being disclosed. I would merely like to see the US law imposing this restriction.
These companies keep saying they can only legally report the numbers in these very coarse terms. I smell weasel words and voluntary censorship. Can someone identify the US law that prohibits reporting of precise numbers, not the details of targets etc., of requests that are not subject to national security suppression orders?
No, geostationary orbits are ~42160 kilometres (~26200 mi) from the centre of the Earth, i.e. at a distance of ~35,790 kilometres (~22,240 mi) above equatorial sea level.
It's what a sensible country does. Your state based tax system is pretty brain damaged...
It might be sensible from some perspectives but not others. The Australian Federal Govt. collects the GST but the total take must be returned to the States and Territories (part of a deal for notionally retiring a bunch of State taxes, duties etc.). Australia has just six States and two Territories but still manages a serious pile of bullshit, petty squabbles when dividing up the GST take. States have still managed to hold onto some of the so-called retired taxes and introduce new ones as well. Using the Federal Govt. means the GST rate must be uniform across States but the GST itself is full of exceptions, e.g. fresh food is exempt but processed is not, education courses and medical services are exempt, the rate is higher for wine imports and luxury cars, some businesses cannot claim inputs as an offset against sales etc. Take that arrangement and explode it to 50 States and maybe some of the external territories and see how quickly it descends into farce and pork-barrelling... and that's before they can agree on the taxation regime. It might work in the US to make the rate nationally uniform but the States collect and keep it in return for retiring their other State, county, city, street corner taxes... but don't hold your breath.... the players cannot even agree on the day of the week.
WTF is a "beach tag"?
There's precedent that is currently being ripped asunder by the more right-wing crowd that won the Federal election in September. So far they have promised to switch from fibre-to-the-home to fibre-to-the-node, drop the speeds, and remove the competition restrictions. They have already sacked the board, installed former telco monopoly executives, and started cosy-ing up to the effective telco monopoly because they now need their copper last mile. NBN == Notional Broadband Network by the time these clowns are done.
I don't know, but you will have to bypass that last remaining 50c switch or no boom-boom: http://www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/sep/20/goldsboro-revisited-declassified-document
I don't know... they built a substantial client-side Java app some years ago, it still works, and they don't feel the urge to reinvent a perfectly good wheel. E*Trade Australia still uses client-side Java.
Why would a self-driving car be speeding?
The car's idea of the speed limit on the road no longer matches the recently introduced, lower limit. The car did not "see" a temporary reduced speed limit for road works, high wind or ice conditions. The limit is vague, like a 40 km/h school zone that only operates a between 7-9AM and 2-4 PM on school days (whatever they are) or the unsigned 50 km/h limit in "residential" streets. (Australian examples but I am sure you can find USian ones)
If it were, why would you be liable?
If the car has a mechanism for you to manually lower the speed and you did not then I am sure liability will be asserted. Minimises the attractiveness of a "self-driving" car if you constantly have to monitor it.
So, you post a link to one of these less than savoury videos... how long before the NSA tap has sucked out your details, processed it, pulled out every other post or utterance you ever made, connected you to organized crime however tenuously, and notified the FBI? Anal probe in 5 4 3 ...
I scanned the summary as "data flow programming" and had flashbacks to university research projects around data flow computing... in the mid-1980's (probably before many of the 'hip' programmers were born). Alas, it was not to be the resurgence of programming in SISAL... just a another programming-by-drawing rehash. Imagine my disappointment.
And vaccines: Vaccine vial monitor. There are also logging devices to go with larger collections of vaccines to record their temperature exposure (e.g. to isolate weaknesses in the cold chain). If these disposable tags record a history I guess they might replace the larger logging devices.
The object was weighed suspended from a scale clearly visible at 00:36 in the linked BBC video. The video does not show if the failure was the scale mechanism itself or the collapse of the A-frame/pulley it was suspended from.
So, I pick up a thingy after being offered a discount on thingies by the All-Seeing-Eye(tm). How is that discount connected to the bar code on the my particular thingy so that the correct price is charged at the checkout? The article says, "custom coupons can be displayed" which is not overly useful at the checkout. The only mechanism I can see is printing a paper docket with an alternate code... and these printers are doomed to fail routinely, need paper and dilute profits any additional sale.
... and when they remove your access to a book you have already paid for? How does voting with one's wallet work then?