I think it more likely that it would be tested far away from a place where it might be discovered accidently for whatever reasn, and then very publicly made known about.
No point in having a spy that the enemy knows about...
Now, maybe they've gone past a testing stage, and are actively deployed. In that case, they are just being *used*, and that is a whole 'nother thing...
Or, maybe they've done initial testing, but want to test them out in a "friendly" unpredictable environment, where if someone discovers them, it won't be a group that is trying to kill those using the devices. At such a rally, they'd have people on the ground as well to observe the crowd and retrieve any malfunctioning robots/talk to the "discoverers".
However, it's more likely that the object in question WAS a dragonfly.
If these things are truly modeled on the dragonfly, there are a few other issues to take into account:
1. A dragonfly has 350 degrees of vision -- a 10 degree blind spot is directly behind its tail. 2. (1), along with some neat nervous-system wiring enables dragonflies to "disappear" in plain sight -- they track eye movements of their prey, and stay in the prey's "blind spot".
The result is that prefocus tricks don't work all that well on dragonflies.
Now, a camera doesn't have a blind spot, so using a camera to track the dragonfly should allow you to see it (it will try to stay in the center of the lens if it is trying to hide from it, which will help you out a lot). However, trying to track by eye is extremely difficult, and as the parent states, using wide-angle or telephoto to track will be difficult due to FOV issues.
All of this information is likely useless however, as the "larger than a dragonfly flying machine" likely only has two photosensors and none of the neural circuitry the dragonfly uses to hunt/hide.
Even Apple themselves (until recently) would not support or even officially allow Windows to run on their PCs (and they still do not allow their OS to run on IBM-compatible PCs, anything not made by Apple won't run it).
I was assuming you were being accurate in your statements until I hit this -- considering that 1) I know people who (against the license) run OS X on Dell laptops, and 2) Until recently, Windows was INCOMPATIBLE at a hardware level with Macintosh hardware, I think I'm going to avoid believing things you say in the future unless you back them up with references.
I thought your argument was going to develop into "You buy the phone and the service... you don't really want to have to pay full price for the phone do you?" which would have made sense to me. Instead, you meandered into sometimes incorrect generalizations about markets and/. users.
Just so you know, civil disobedience is a very good way to change laws in the US, as long as you can get a following and don't mind suffering the immediate consequences of your civil disobedience. It's MUCH easier than becoming rich/connected enough to get into congress.
Lucky for him, he wants to develop it to use it in his company, not to sell it and make a business out of it. This is something a LOT of larger small businesses could get behind, if promoted correctly.
That said, there isn't much difference between this and the browser-based kiosk solutions that are also available.
If you can grab data based on various criteria (age, hospital, hair color, disease, time period, etc.) you can re-assemble this data after pulling the queries and often narrow the field back down to a single individual again. These techniques are already used by insurance companies; they cross-compile aggregate data from a number of sources, and are able to find, if not specifics about individuals, strong trends correlated to small groups of individuals. This can actually be MORE damaging, as your profile might slot you into a group in which you are way outside the standard deviation on the one statistic being sought.
This sounds like a horrible idea to me from other standpoints too:
1) Medical professionals never like patients to have full access to their records, as if a patient misunderstands something on their file, their life could be at stake based on the decisions they make.
2) The US has this thing called the PATRIOT act, and MS has agreements with some agencies allowing back-door access to data they host. Let's just say that I highly doubt this information will be protected from people working for US "security" agencies.
3) The system appears to be designed so that MS can sell aggregated data to drug companies and insurance companies. Seems to me though that even with aggregated data, you could reverse-mine it to have a reasonable suspicion regarding individuals (you'd know trends, which would help in searching for more specific details)
Anyway, the whole thing could be really useful if used correctly, but there are so many ways it could be misused even if the system doesn't have a major security breach that I for one would never use it.
Re:business and government are run by aliens?
on
GAO Report Slams FCC
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· Score: 1
"Lobbyist" is just a short way to say "a representative of a group of citizens who all have some common interest and pool their money to hire someone to let elected officials know how they feel (and will vote)."
In the real world, when in context of this thread, you have to replace "citizens" with "corporations". See, the problem is that this ISN'T about individuals forming groups which then lobby the government. It is about corporations -- which are answerable to a faceless group of shareholders (who have no responsibility for the actions of the company) to increase their margins -- forming groups which then hire professional lobbying firms to get their business model protected by the government.
Sure, some of the high-paid individuals and top investors for the companies involved might share the same common interest; it's not them joining the groups and doing the lobbying however. It is the unaccountable companies they work for. Because of the situation where non-living but legally protected entities can band together to lobby, there are certain oversight requirements built in to the system to allow those CITIZENS with less lobbying power the same chance at the information as the multibillion-dollar corporations, thus levelling the playing field. What has happened in this case is that a government body has flouted the oversight rules and given the advantage to the corporations.
When people complain about lobbyists, they're generally complaining about corporate lobbyists (unless, of course, they're profiting from corporate lobbying, in which case they complain about citizen lobby groups like the ACLU and PETA). Remember: context is (almost) everything.
For the most part, organic crops use "heirloom" sources, and are becoming more and more popular these days, even showing up as a full shelf item in regular grocery stores. Organic products are slightly more expensive due to the higher failure/damage ratio, but on the other hand, they generally have more actual nutrients then you get in industrial-scale food crops.
Sure, you pay more, but you get what you pay for. Just compare organic bananas or tomatoes to the general junk sold as those items in most grocery stores. The organic stuff isn't too far off from what you grow yourself; the other stuff looks and tastes more like plastic (and is only slightly more nutritious).
Then again: even if you live in an apartment: grow your own tomatoes. It is worth it.
The AHRA also provides for a royalty tax of up to $8 per new digital recording machine and 3 percent of the price of all digital audiotapes or discs. This tax is paid by the manufacturers of digital media devices and distributed to the copyright owners whose music is presumably being copied. In consideration of this tax, copyright owners agree to forever waive the right to claim copyright infringement against consumers using audio recording devices in their homes.
This is why they're calling it stealing instead of copyright infringement now:)
Do you really think any IP-related law firm would use an old-fashioned fax machine with toner? Faxes get routed through a central server and disseminated via their electronic mail system. The worst thing you'd be doing would be tying up the line.
As far as causing inconvenience, it would be much better to find a way to dynamically create B&W TIFFs of/dev/random and send it to their fax machine through an asterisk server.
Of course, there are severe penalties for 1) attacking someone's fax machine and 2) forging fax headers. As this is an IP lawyer you're attacking, expect this sort of activity to land you in court.
Hospital I can understand, but Britain has laws protecting the privacy of people visiting brothels?!
Yes. You see, Britain has effective privacy laws. The laws are about protecting people's privacy and reputation; this applies to people seen around brothels and prisons as well as anywhere else.
The idea here is that a person's privacy is a person's privacy. There are no special exemptions. This doesn't mean that such a photo couldn't be used for criminal prosecution, just that it can't be published unless permission has been given.
IIRC, these privacy rules were partly added as a response to the British tabloids, which find very creative ways of taking compromising photos that tell stories very distantly related to actual events.
The iPhone has the potential to be the next Newton, but Apple has locked it down so that it is a content-feeding device, not a content-creating device. It also doesn't support third party apps and requires a cellphone subscription.
That being said, the final (working) version of Newton text recognition was bundled into OS X, which is what the iPhone runs on. So it wouldn't be too difficult to add it back in and use it (just use a stylus instead of a finger).
For that matter, you can install KDE or GNOME on top of Aqua if you prefer. If you'd rather not have the default gui, you can always go in and reconfigure things so you boot to a terminal or X instead of aqua. If you know your way around FreeBSD, OS X isn't too hard to figure out.
However, I use my Mac like an appliance and my PC as a hacking tool; I don't really care what's inside the Mac as long as it runs my GUI apps correctly and doesn't require a bunch of configuration.
The one thing I constantly keep hearing about is all those police officers who show up to work day after day with nothing to actually do. This system will help those cops fill up the massive gaps in their daily schedules...
I assume you had your tongue firmly in your cheek...
I can see a number of positive uses for this tech. 1. Dispatch will find using the cameras much easier, as they now will have "early warning" hotspots to look at. 2. Aggregating data will both improve the accuracy, and give the stations more of a feel for how crimes progress. 3. Time won't need to be wasted combing through all the useless video footage, which means less invasion of privacy using the system. 4. Police will spend less time being dispatched to locations for patrol where there is less activity. 5. Police will possibly arrive at the scene earlier, meaning more drive-bys and fewer interventions. This means less paperwork, which will free up massive amounts of their time to do more patrolling, meaning they can be in more places at the right time.
Now, as with the earlier/. article on the database to find criminal patterns, this is far from perfect. However, it will be interesting to see how effective a years' worth of using this system will be. The worst thing that could happen is that the stations don't embrace it, and it just ends up being one more thing to deal with, causing more of a strain on manpower.
How does this solve anything? The crax0r just logs in with the default, changes it to whatever he/she wants, then re-logs with the new password.
It solves anything by preventing the equipment from being deployed with a default password. Without the password changed, the equipment is only useful as a paperweight with blinking lights.
Simple solution for ALL hardware: Default password requires you to have a local connection, or anything besides changing the password cannot be done using the default password. Using EITHER of these rules solves the default password problem. Anything that connects to a network should have one of these rules as part of the firmware. After all, it is common knowledge that around 80% of all hardware devices that contain a default password will never have it changed. Get your hands on a manual for the device, and you can gain access to 80% of the devices deployed.
GPLv1 and v2 look at free software being sidetracked or misused by private interests who want to subvert it to their own goals.
What GPLv3 has done is tackled the opposite problem... private interests attempting to subvert GPL'd code by contributing code to a GPL project which has other non-copyright restrictions attached to it (eg, patents). The idea here is that someone can contribute a key piece of code and have a submarine patent on the algorithm. The entire project becomes popular, things are modified over time, and then bam! Patent holder comes out asking everyone who uses that entire codebase for patent fees based on the algorithm they added. Often that bit of code can be replaced, but that's no so easy to do when you're dealing with embedded software already packaged or out in the real world.
Due to a previous legal settlement they can't become a music label as the label Apple corp already exists. There was a lawsuit before and it was settled with an agreement for Apple computers to not enter a mostly music content venture to respect apple corps trademark. Apple computers won the case with iTunes as it's content isn't Apple computers but instead the major labels. But going in as a indie label may be venturing too far into Apple corps space.
Actually, there have been further negotiations since the iTMS lawsuit by Apple Corp. I believe the two companies might have finally come to some sort of an agreement other than A.Corp continually suing A.Comp, but the details of that agreement were never disclosed AFAIK.
Actually, it works well. We still have them. So we have one final defense.
Hmm. Wasn't the right to bear arms set up so that the individuals and militias of the US could defend themselves from corrupt government and anyone else with a gun?
And yet, if you look more closely, Americans only have the right to bear (some) arms*.
*as long as they aren't arms that can compete with the arms used by organized crime or the US military.
For that matter... ever tried carrying a full-length sword down a busy street? Even weapons that are officially allowed aren't really allowed due to other legislation.
sorry but the idea that you pay someone for products has been around longer than 3 weeks.
...as are the laws that protect both the purchaser and the seller of said products. However, a group event is not a product. If a proprieter of an establishment doesn't like what someone is doing in their establishment, they have the right to ask them to leave. Just imagine if you could be thrown in jail for writing down the cost of items in your favorite store... currently, the most they can do is kick you out and ask that you never come back. If you return, that's trespassing. Same thing applies to movie theatres.
Of course, the theatre already paid the MPAA for the product, so nothing has been stolen anyway. This is why there are different rules for public performance vs private viewing -- public performance implies a large group of people will be able to duplicate the information (either in their heads, or on some personal media).
Now if you want to argue for the MPAA (not the theatres, who don't actually own the films) and their right to control their intellectual property and recoup their costs (and make some profit), you might have a bit of a point... except that copyright law already exists too. If they catch someone distributing their IP, they can sue.
Not to mention that dictionary.com contains a mix of British English, Australian English, and US English, and fails to include a number of Canadian English words, spellings and meanings. When in doubt, go with the British English usage as it is probably closer to Canadian English than the US English definitions most commonly found in dictionary.com.
...Java development environment to Mac OS X that provides a more consistent and easier to develop cross-platform experience...
This is supposed to be a PLUS on MacOS X?
If you want a consistent cross-platform experience, use NetBeans. If you want something that actually functions as expected on OS X and is consistent with the Mac UI, use xCode.
The only plus I can see is that people who regularly use Eclipse can now use it on OS X. But wait... they've been able to do that already for years.
Figure I might as well reply here... look at the context of what I wrote; the "fire" example was assuming that those reading what I wrote would assume shouting "fire" when there was none, just as the subject at hand didn't actually have any explosives.
The point being made isn't about freedom of speech/expression, or about limiting people's actions, it is that causing mass panic/riots is a crime, even if it isn't intentional.
Listeners must digest and reflect on what they hear and if any of them choose to act on that basis, then the consequences are, individually, theirs to bear.
Tell that to the person trampled to death because they took a bit longer to reflect on what they heard than the mass of people who blindly panicked and fled for the nearest exit. THIS is what the police are trying to prevent. Figures of authority pulling firearms in a public place tends to reassure the majority of people and keep almost everyone on good behaviour in most places.
That said, this subthread has got way out of hand; the real situation is probably that the girl just threw on her hoodie to go to the airport, couldn't find the airplane she was looking for on the posting board, so asked someone, and figured the question they asked was to someone other than her, as she wasn't hiding anything; just wearing her regular clothes and holding some playdoh in her hands. The overly alarmed ticket person then called the police, telling them there was someone wearing some explosive-looking device wandering around the airport. The police responded appropriately to this call, only to find out it was just some girl in a blinking hoodie. They then took her in for questioning for wasting their time, and pressed charges because the situation had already got so far out of hand with so much publicity by this point that they felt they had to do something to make an example and prevent similar things from happening in the future other than just letting her go with a warning.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, maybe they've done initial testing, but want to test them out in a "friendly" unpredictable environment, where if someone discovers them, it won't be a group that is trying to kill those using the devices. At such a rally, they'd have people on the ground as well to observe the crowd and retrieve any malfunctioning robots/talk to the "discoverers".
However, it's more likely that the object in question WAS a dragonfly.
If these things are truly modeled on the dragonfly, there are a few other issues to take into account:
1. A dragonfly has 350 degrees of vision -- a 10 degree blind spot is directly behind its tail.
2. (1), along with some neat nervous-system wiring enables dragonflies to "disappear" in plain sight -- they track eye movements of their prey, and stay in the prey's "blind spot".
The result is that prefocus tricks don't work all that well on dragonflies.
Now, a camera doesn't have a blind spot, so using a camera to track the dragonfly should allow you to see it (it will try to stay in the center of the lens if it is trying to hide from it, which will help you out a lot). However, trying to track by eye is extremely difficult, and as the parent states, using wide-angle or telephoto to track will be difficult due to FOV issues.
All of this information is likely useless however, as the "larger than a dragonfly flying machine" likely only has two photosensors and none of the neural circuitry the dragonfly uses to hunt/hide.
I was assuming you were being accurate in your statements until I hit this -- considering that 1) I know people who (against the license) run OS X on Dell laptops, and 2) Until recently, Windows was INCOMPATIBLE at a hardware level with Macintosh hardware, I think I'm going to avoid believing things you say in the future unless you back them up with references.
I thought your argument was going to develop into "You buy the phone and the service... you don't really want to have to pay full price for the phone do you?" which would have made sense to me. Instead, you meandered into sometimes incorrect generalizations about markets and
Just so you know, civil disobedience is a very good way to change laws in the US, as long as you can get a following and don't mind suffering the immediate consequences of your civil disobedience. It's MUCH easier than becoming rich/connected enough to get into congress.
Lucky for him, he wants to develop it to use it in his company, not to sell it and make a business out of it. This is something a LOT of larger small businesses could get behind, if promoted correctly.
That said, there isn't much difference between this and the browser-based kiosk solutions that are also available.
If you can grab data based on various criteria (age, hospital, hair color, disease, time period, etc.) you can re-assemble this data after pulling the queries and often narrow the field back down to a single individual again. These techniques are already used by insurance companies; they cross-compile aggregate data from a number of sources, and are able to find, if not specifics about individuals, strong trends correlated to small groups of individuals. This can actually be MORE damaging, as your profile might slot you into a group in which you are way outside the standard deviation on the one statistic being sought.
This sounds like a horrible idea to me from other standpoints too:
1) Medical professionals never like patients to have full access to their records, as if a patient misunderstands something on their file, their life could be at stake based on the decisions they make.
2) The US has this thing called the PATRIOT act, and MS has agreements with some agencies allowing back-door access to data they host. Let's just say that I highly doubt this information will be protected from people working for US "security" agencies.
3) The system appears to be designed so that MS can sell aggregated data to drug companies and insurance companies. Seems to me though that even with aggregated data, you could reverse-mine it to have a reasonable suspicion regarding individuals (you'd know trends, which would help in searching for more specific details)
Anyway, the whole thing could be really useful if used correctly, but there are so many ways it could be misused even if the system doesn't have a major security breach that I for one would never use it.
In the real world, when in context of this thread, you have to replace "citizens" with "corporations". See, the problem is that this ISN'T about individuals forming groups which then lobby the government. It is about corporations -- which are answerable to a faceless group of shareholders (who have no responsibility for the actions of the company) to increase their margins -- forming groups which then hire professional lobbying firms to get their business model protected by the government.
Sure, some of the high-paid individuals and top investors for the companies involved might share the same common interest; it's not them joining the groups and doing the lobbying however. It is the unaccountable companies they work for. Because of the situation where non-living but legally protected entities can band together to lobby, there are certain oversight requirements built in to the system to allow those CITIZENS with less lobbying power the same chance at the information as the multibillion-dollar corporations, thus levelling the playing field. What has happened in this case is that a government body has flouted the oversight rules and given the advantage to the corporations.
When people complain about lobbyists, they're generally complaining about corporate lobbyists (unless, of course, they're profiting from corporate lobbying, in which case they complain about citizen lobby groups like the ACLU and PETA). Remember: context is (almost) everything.
For the most part, organic crops use "heirloom" sources, and are becoming more and more popular these days, even showing up as a full shelf item in regular grocery stores. Organic products are slightly more expensive due to the higher failure/damage ratio, but on the other hand, they generally have more actual nutrients then you get in industrial-scale food crops.
Sure, you pay more, but you get what you pay for. Just compare organic bananas or tomatoes to the general junk sold as those items in most grocery stores. The organic stuff isn't too far off from what you grow yourself; the other stuff looks and tastes more like plastic (and is only slightly more nutritious).
Then again: even if you live in an apartment: grow your own tomatoes. It is worth it.
This is why they're calling it stealing instead of copyright infringement now
Do you really think any IP-related law firm would use an old-fashioned fax machine with toner? Faxes get routed through a central server and disseminated via their electronic mail system. The worst thing you'd be doing would be tying up the line.
/dev/random and send it to their fax machine through an asterisk server.
As far as causing inconvenience, it would be much better to find a way to dynamically create B&W TIFFs of
Of course, there are severe penalties for 1) attacking someone's fax machine and 2) forging fax headers. As this is an IP lawyer you're attacking, expect this sort of activity to land you in court.
Yes. You see, Britain has effective privacy laws. The laws are about protecting people's privacy and reputation; this applies to people seen around brothels and prisons as well as anywhere else.
The idea here is that a person's privacy is a person's privacy. There are no special exemptions. This doesn't mean that such a photo couldn't be used for criminal prosecution, just that it can't be published unless permission has been given.
IIRC, these privacy rules were partly added as a response to the British tabloids, which find very creative ways of taking compromising photos that tell stories very distantly related to actual events.
Sounds like my Palm TX (although the flash player isn't integrated and only runs Flash 5 and earlier).
No :)
The iPhone has the potential to be the next Newton, but Apple has locked it down so that it is a content-feeding device, not a content-creating device. It also doesn't support third party apps and requires a cellphone subscription.
That being said, the final (working) version of Newton text recognition was bundled into OS X, which is what the iPhone runs on. So it wouldn't be too difficult to add it back in and use it (just use a stylus instead of a finger).
You forgot 1b) It was released too early (needed another 1-2 years for consumer acceptance to catch up).
The Newton was just starting to become a decent device when it was Steved.
For that matter, you can install KDE or GNOME on top of Aqua if you prefer. If you'd rather not have the default gui, you can always go in and reconfigure things so you boot to a terminal or X instead of aqua. If you know your way around FreeBSD, OS X isn't too hard to figure out.
However, I use my Mac like an appliance and my PC as a hacking tool; I don't really care what's inside the Mac as long as it runs my GUI apps correctly and doesn't require a bunch of configuration.
I assume you had your tongue firmly in your cheek...
I can see a number of positive uses for this tech.
1. Dispatch will find using the cameras much easier, as they now will have "early warning" hotspots to look at.
2. Aggregating data will both improve the accuracy, and give the stations more of a feel for how crimes progress.
3. Time won't need to be wasted combing through all the useless video footage, which means less invasion of privacy using the system.
4. Police will spend less time being dispatched to locations for patrol where there is less activity.
5. Police will possibly arrive at the scene earlier, meaning more drive-bys and fewer interventions. This means less paperwork, which will free up massive amounts of their time to do more patrolling, meaning they can be in more places at the right time.
Now, as with the earlier
Simple solution for ALL hardware: Default password requires you to have a local connection, or anything besides changing the password cannot be done using the default password. Using EITHER of these rules solves the default password problem. Anything that connects to a network should have one of these rules as part of the firmware. After all, it is common knowledge that around 80% of all hardware devices that contain a default password will never have it changed. Get your hands on a manual for the device, and you can gain access to 80% of the devices deployed.
GPLv1 and v2 look at free software being sidetracked or misused by private interests who want to subvert it to their own goals. What GPLv3 has done is tackled the opposite problem... private interests attempting to subvert GPL'd code by contributing code to a GPL project which has other non-copyright restrictions attached to it (eg, patents). The idea here is that someone can contribute a key piece of code and have a submarine patent on the algorithm. The entire project becomes popular, things are modified over time, and then bam! Patent holder comes out asking everyone who uses that entire codebase for patent fees based on the algorithm they added. Often that bit of code can be replaced, but that's no so easy to do when you're dealing with embedded software already packaged or out in the real world.
And yet, if you look more closely, Americans only have the right to bear (some) arms*.
*as long as they aren't arms that can compete with the arms used by organized crime or the US military.
For that matter... ever tried carrying a full-length sword down a busy street? Even weapons that are officially allowed aren't really allowed due to other legislation.
Not to mention that dictionary.com contains a mix of British English, Australian English, and US English, and fails to include a number of Canadian English words, spellings and meanings. When in doubt, go with the British English usage as it is probably closer to Canadian English than the US English definitions most commonly found in dictionary.com.
The point being made isn't about freedom of speech/expression, or about limiting people's actions, it is that causing mass panic/riots is a crime, even if it isn't intentional.
Tell that to the person trampled to death because they took a bit longer to reflect on what they heard than the mass of people who blindly panicked and fled for the nearest exit. THIS is what the police are trying to prevent. Figures of authority pulling firearms in a public place tends to reassure the majority of people and keep almost everyone on good behaviour in most places.
That said, this subthread has got way out of hand; the real situation is probably that the girl just threw on her hoodie to go to the airport, couldn't find the airplane she was looking for on the posting board, so asked someone, and figured the question they asked was to someone other than her, as she wasn't hiding anything; just wearing her regular clothes and holding some playdoh in her hands. The overly alarmed ticket person then called the police, telling them there was someone wearing some explosive-looking device wandering around the airport. The police responded appropriately to this call, only to find out it was just some girl in a blinking hoodie. They then took her in for questioning for wasting their time, and pressed charges because the situation had already got so far out of hand with so much publicity by this point that they felt they had to do something to make an example and prevent similar things from happening in the future other than just letting her go with a warning.