Being serious for a moment, is there really any demand from the public for this?
This is Big Brother. They will try to sell it to you in a thousand different ways, safety, security, convenience... but make no mistake, the government will be able to record, monitor, and control at any time that they choose.
Of course, even at this point it may well take a long time for the existing effects to reverse, but we can rest easy in our graves.
Erm... who says it will reverse? Perhaps it is growing warmer regardless and humans are merely accelerating it?
Or... consider this: Perhaps it is supposed to be going back into an ice age with all of the landmasses covered with glaciers. Perhaps a small amount of human caused global warming is a good thing and we are just overdoing it right now.
Regardless of any of this, we need to stop polluting. I like breathing clean air and I like drinking clean water and I like walking in clean environments.
If ever there was a time for massive civil disobedience, this is it.... Regards, Anonymous Coward
I will be right there next to you... erm, maybe. I will be right there next to someone anyways.
It is kind of pointless to say, "rah rah rah! go civil disobedience" and then hide behind Anonymous Coward. I am sure the NSA already knows that strikethree is me.
But yeah. You go with your bad self. Stand up (well, hide behind a keyboard and a hundred proxies) and tell The Man, "No more! I (whoever I might be) will not stand for this!"
You just gotta love it. I could not even invent this shit.
"I don't care if you live or die" is fundamentally different than "I won't try to force my perception of healthy living on you".
Yes. So... what?
Do you really expect everyone to care about everyone? Yes, we should all treat each other decently; however, I (and nobody else that I know) could possibly care for someone they have not met. Millions of people are suffering incredibly or dying all of the time. I would be a spiritual and emotional mess if I were to actually care directly.
Otherwise, they are not fundamentally different. "I do not care" directly translates to "I will not try to force".
Basically, the legal reasoning is that the entity doesn't own anything, it merely possesses things on the behalf of the member entities. This is also why it doesn't file tax returns.
Funny. I tried the same thing with the IRS for a "business" that I run. Well, it is really a group of shareholders. They actually own everything.
The IRS still taxed my personal income and still taxed each of the individual entities in proportion to what they owned vs the income of this "strange" new legal entity.
You can not just shrug off your responsibilities by saying that there is no law concerning this new type of entity that you created. Each individual organization, department, or whatever, is responsible in the ratio of their ownership in the absence of existing laws to cover this unique entity.
On the subject of the FOIA requests being made here, all of the entities are clearly subject to FOIA requests. Creating an entity between them that performs work for all of them does not negate any of the FOIA requirements placed upon the original entities.
This violates the letter and the spirit of the law at the same time. The person authorized to make the statement that they are not subject to FOIA should be subject to the full penalties of the law as well as the individual entities (police departments) which "own" or created the entity (SWAT) under discussion.
What is it with all of this bizarre new "legal theory" bullshit that is being thrown about relatively recently to try and break the letter and/or spirit of the law? I strongly suspect that it is emanating from the highest levels of government. Possibly from seeing Dick Cheney and friends using the Department of Justice to get away with it in the run-up to the Iraq war. Regardless, this kind of bullshit needs to be stamped out and HARD. If not, we will soon see anarchy again.
This is not an entertainment device so an E-Ink display would be great. Can they be made touchscreen? Another reason for the E-Ink display would be great battery life.
I want one of the models to be fairly large; almost like strapping a Nexus 5 to my wrist. It must be thin. The batteries can be in the wrist strap (which should allow for very long batter life (24 hours minimum)). The wrist strap must not absorb anything, must not be coated with hard metal, and must let my skin breathe.
Applications that I would use/need: GPS/Maps (navigation is not needed! I am perfectly capable of finding my own way, just show me where I am.) Time (of course) Text messaging (possibly with a removable handheld keyboard type thing for when having long conversations via Hangouts or whatever). Phone capabilities with a hardwired earpiece that can be pulled from the device and automatically retracted. Speakerphone optional. Built in microphone and camera with LEDs hardwired (can not be surreptitiously turned on in software!) to show if they are active. May as well have an LED to show if the earpiece is active as well.
If other neat things like body and air sensors can be implemented, then great. Air pressure, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, sugar levels, body temp, air temp, etc etc. Magnetic compass. You get the idea about sensors. Ability to turn them individually and as a group.
A hardware switch that turns off all data collection and transmission (making it essentially a digital watch for the duration) that can not be bypassed by software.
I would pay large sums of money for such a device. I would be afraid to have such a device without the hardware switches described.
Honestly, to me, it seems that all of those are really algorithms. Granted, a lot of human activities can be considered algorithmic, but activities are not central to human nature. They are the results of human nature.
"If a computer can understand the spoken word, it's intelligent." "No, that's just a big pattern matching program."
Be careful with that one. Words like "understand" mean a lot more than you seem to be implying with your glib repartee. Algorithmically determining the "proper" response to a series of words is not in any way a form of "understanding"; however, it is a prerequisite.
Ultimately, truly defining the Turing Test appears to be impossible with our current level of understanding of consciousness. Am I a human or an AI? It would seem to me that an AI is nowhere near the level that can respond to you like I have.
This is the bar that people expect an AI to pass. It is not merely fancy behaviors. I do believe those fancy behaviors are going to be useful to AI so I am not belittling them in any way. Some very amazing things have been achieved.
How does spacetime know how fast something is going through it? If there is nothing else other than spacetime and a single photon, what regulates the photon's speed? What is the speed relative to?
This. If I didn't have to worry about people torrenting movies or downloading kiddie porn, I'd be happy to share some bandwidth. Unfortunately, the real world dictates I not even consider this.
Hm. For several years in Colorado Springs, I shared out my internet access to any and all. The SSID was PublicDontAbuse (just in case anyone here on Slashdot saw it.) I did not monitor or log anything that happened on it.
Normally, I would notice police cars and real estate agents parked on the street behind my house for a half hour or so. I felt good knowing that I was helping random people and making their lives just a bit better.
It has been a few years now since I have done it (long story) so I am sure if there were to be any negative repercussions, I would have seen them by now. Honestly, if anything had happened, my only plan was to look at the judge and say, "The police tore apart everything I owned and found no evidence that I personally did anything of the things I am accused of. It has been established that I left my access point wide open to anyone. If you feel that the State is improved by penalizing me, then so be it. We both know I am not actually guilty of anything other than kindness to my fellow man."
Would that stop me from going to jail? Not bloody likely... but possible. I just don't care. I have lived a good life. While I do not relish dying in prison, fear can fuck right off. I am doing what I will.
Administration is "control". There is a severe control freak fetish going on right now. Ultimately, it is a losing proposition. It is impossible to control every last bit of everything. People need to learn to relax and observe rather try to force the outcome.
I suspect that one of the pillars of this control freakery is fear. I am unsure how many pillars there are or what the others may be, but there is surely more than just fear at play. Perhaps one of the other pillars is linked with our need to make sense of the world.
Younger programmers are nearly always more up to date on the latest technologies and trends and have an innate ability to "churn out" fairly good quality code at a lightning fast rate.
How useful is that lightning fast coding going to be when you do not know where you are going?
...and make a lot of what I would call "elementary mistakes" when it comes to architecture.
You were saying?
Then, you went to:
Ideal teams have a healthy mix of both young fresh employees and older seasoned ones.
Yes, you do want to mix the more experienced people with the less experienced people. There are other attributes you will want to mix on as well; however..
Your stereotypes are inaccurate. I have seen a 24 year old (recently) wipe the floor with a bunch of older "more experienced" people in cleaning up and restoring the network that their supposed better experience created.
I have, again recently, seen an older person come in to a project that was a product of a younger, faster, fresh person and do more in a month than the younger person did in a year.
It is all about the people. Perhaps the older person appears to be slower because they are actually thinking instead of just slinging code. Perhaps the younger person appears to be making mistakes because you are not seeing the whole picture, just shims to hold up what the final architecture will look like. Not everyone thinks the same. There are lots of valid solutions to a problem, not just the one solution that you see.
But what I do know is its horses for courses - younger people are (generally) better at thinking up new ideas/paradigms and novel ways to do things , older people are (generally) better at the detailed implementation of a system as they'll have encountered a lot if not most of the problems before and have X number of years experience
Wow. That has not been my experience at all. New ideas and paradigms come from people who can think and are not fearful. Sure, some young people have less fear due to inexperience but that does not align along the axis of intelligence. There may even be a negative correlation there.
In short, you are not being insightful in any way. You are... stereotyping. Stereotyping is the basis of incompetent and ultimately destructive discrimination.
In the world that I have seen, you have to actually look at a person to be able to ascertain their qualities. Discrimination based on surface attributes can be useful if there is too much data to parse through, but you risk missing the real gems.
it could A.Allow the bad guys to figure out how to detect these devices (and therefore not do anything incriminating over their phones when they detect one or possibly even find ways to avoid the monitoring all together by e.g. switching carriers for their throwaway phones)
All of the real bad guys already practice signals discipline. This only catches the lazy and the petty criminals.
What my prior statement implies is that there is no compelling reason to violate the constitution with these devices.
STFU until you are willing to call out someone on your side of the political fence.
Never STFU. Ideally, people should be calling shit out on both sides of the fence, but I would rather people be calling shit out on only one side of the fence than no sides of the fence. STFU is NOT useful here.
OpenSSL is the swiss army knife of encryption technologies.
It can encrypt data with whatever cipher floats your boat. It can do hashing with whatever algorithm floats your boat. It can do SSL negotiations, it can examine, manipulate, and create X.509 certificates and containers like PKCS etc. Hell, it has all of the tools necessary to build an entire PKI up to and including creating Root Certificate Authorities, managing Certificate Revocation Lists, etc.
There may be vulnerabilities in it, but Oh My God can it do a whole hell of a lot. OpenSSL is up there with the Linux Kernel and GCC for usefulness and importance. As a security guy and as a privacy freak, I have been using OpenSSL code since before it was called OpenSSL. It was SSLeay prior to being OpenSSL.
That is a personal citation, but the facts are irrefutable.
I am unsure if you have ever seen footage from a military drone in Afghanistan. I have, and I can guarantee you that there is zero chance of a bullet being fired at one and it getting hit. The missiles and such are fired from a mile or more away usually. The targets have absolutely no idea at all what is about to hit them. One second, the target is driving around thinking about how to murder people in the next village and the next second, they are pieces of meat. Occasionally, a missile will not hit close enough and the target can try to escape, but they have absolutely no idea which direction is safe to move as they have no idea where the original explosion came from. The second missile ALWAYS gets them.
You are NOT going to be hitting military drones with gunfire. Perhaps law enforcement drones will be different, but in theory, they will only have cameras on them so they have even less need to get close... and a mile away is NOT close.
Rampant capitalism is NOT the answer to every need, and Sweden proves it. By treating internet access as a piece of necessary national infrastructure, instead of just letting "the market" fight it out, you arrive at a far better end point far sooner.
While your screed against capitalism has some interesting talking points embedded in it, I would like to point out that there is no "market fighting it out" concerning network communications in America. In a few markets, there may be more than one provider but they are NOT competitors. Capitalism is definitely not a word that is associated with communications in America.
This isn't to prevent theft of the phone. It's to protect theft of the information stored on the phone, which is generally far more valuable than the phone itself.
Close. Very close. The information on the phone might very well be valuable... but to who? Are you at a protest and taking pictures of an officer beating the shit out of an innocent bystander? That information is indeed valuable in the sense that the government (at all levels) wants to destroy it. This is not going to end well.
It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.
Do you know what would be as good of a solution and not give the government the ability to make our phones useless lumps of material? An IMEI blacklist. Gee. Why didn't they just implement that? Because they wanted to be able to stop the use of the phone as a recording device. They can already silence you but they did not have the ability, until now, to stop the phone from being a recording device.
What we really need is to remove the gasoline tax and replace it with a mileage tax.
No. We really do not. First, what kind of Orwellian nightmare will be introduced by the government monitoring our mileage? If you think they will merely be checking the odometer, you are outrageously naive.
A gas tax is a good enough substitute for the amount of wear and tear a vehicle puts on the infrastructure. Heavier vehicles do more damage than lighter vehicles. Heavier vehicles use more gas to go the same distance as lighter vehicle. No problem.
As someone that moved to the US a couple of years ago but have previously lived in Europe, Japan and Australia - you guys do have very cheap fuel compared to virtually any other developed country you care to name.
Okay, I just have to break everyone's heart here...
The price of gas in Kuwait is 65 fils per liter.
How does that compare? 1,000 fils make 1 Kuwaiti Dinar. 1 Kuwaiti Dinar is worth 3 dollars and 67 cents at current exchange rates (real, not theoretical).
So one dinar buys roughly 15 liters of fuel. That is almost 4 gallons of fuel for $3.67. Ah yes. Less than a dollar a gallon.:)
There's a reason I don't have 13 desks in my office, and a reason I have a three-wide monitor configuration. I want to see everything at once, not have to sift or "wander" through some 3D space to find what I'm looking for.
That is the interesting thing about the Rift. You can have 3 monitors side by side by side in virtual space. You could surround yourself in an entire sphere of giant monitor. You do not have to walk down the hallway to another virtual office to access another virtual monitor. Just because someone else likes it that way, that does not mean it has to be that way for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Being serious for a moment, is there really any demand from the public for this?
This is Big Brother. They will try to sell it to you in a thousand different ways, safety, security, convenience... but make no mistake, the government will be able to record, monitor, and control at any time that they choose.
Of course, even at this point it may well take a long time for the existing effects to reverse, but we can rest easy in our graves.
Erm... who says it will reverse? Perhaps it is growing warmer regardless and humans are merely accelerating it?
Or... consider this: Perhaps it is supposed to be going back into an ice age with all of the landmasses covered with glaciers. Perhaps a small amount of human caused global warming is a good thing and we are just overdoing it right now.
Regardless of any of this, we need to stop polluting. I like breathing clean air and I like drinking clean water and I like walking in clean environments.
ROFLMAO
If ever there was a time for massive civil disobedience, this is it.... Regards, Anonymous Coward
I will be right there next to you... erm, maybe. I will be right there next to someone anyways.
It is kind of pointless to say, "rah rah rah! go civil disobedience" and then hide behind Anonymous Coward. I am sure the NSA already knows that strikethree is me.
But yeah. You go with your bad self. Stand up (well, hide behind a keyboard and a hundred proxies) and tell The Man, "No more! I (whoever I might be) will not stand for this!"
You just gotta love it. I could not even invent this shit.
"I don't care if you live or die" is fundamentally different than "I won't try to force my perception of healthy living on you".
Yes. So... what?
Do you really expect everyone to care about everyone? Yes, we should all treat each other decently; however, I (and nobody else that I know) could possibly care for someone they have not met. Millions of people are suffering incredibly or dying all of the time. I would be a spiritual and emotional mess if I were to actually care directly.
Otherwise, they are not fundamentally different. "I do not care" directly translates to "I will not try to force".
Once every couple of years, I see a post that needs to be +6 or higher. This was one of them.
Your words are calm, clear, rational, logical, and point out the real issue.
Thank you for sharing.
Basically, the legal reasoning is that the entity doesn't own anything, it merely possesses things on the behalf of the member entities. This is also why it doesn't file tax returns.
Funny. I tried the same thing with the IRS for a "business" that I run. Well, it is really a group of shareholders. They actually own everything.
The IRS still taxed my personal income and still taxed each of the individual entities in proportion to what they owned vs the income of this "strange" new legal entity.
You can not just shrug off your responsibilities by saying that there is no law concerning this new type of entity that you created. Each individual organization, department, or whatever, is responsible in the ratio of their ownership in the absence of existing laws to cover this unique entity.
On the subject of the FOIA requests being made here, all of the entities are clearly subject to FOIA requests. Creating an entity between them that performs work for all of them does not negate any of the FOIA requirements placed upon the original entities.
This violates the letter and the spirit of the law at the same time. The person authorized to make the statement that they are not subject to FOIA should be subject to the full penalties of the law as well as the individual entities (police departments) which "own" or created the entity (SWAT) under discussion.
What is it with all of this bizarre new "legal theory" bullshit that is being thrown about relatively recently to try and break the letter and/or spirit of the law? I strongly suspect that it is emanating from the highest levels of government. Possibly from seeing Dick Cheney and friends using the Department of Justice to get away with it in the run-up to the Iraq war. Regardless, this kind of bullshit needs to be stamped out and HARD. If not, we will soon see anarchy again.
This is not an entertainment device so an E-Ink display would be great. Can they be made touchscreen?
Another reason for the E-Ink display would be great battery life.
I want one of the models to be fairly large; almost like strapping a Nexus 5 to my wrist.
It must be thin. The batteries can be in the wrist strap (which should allow for very long batter life (24 hours minimum)).
The wrist strap must not absorb anything, must not be coated with hard metal, and must let my skin breathe.
Applications that I would use/need:
GPS/Maps (navigation is not needed! I am perfectly capable of finding my own way, just show me where I am.)
Time (of course)
Text messaging (possibly with a removable handheld keyboard type thing for when having long conversations via Hangouts or whatever).
Phone capabilities with a hardwired earpiece that can be pulled from the device and automatically retracted. Speakerphone optional.
Built in microphone and camera with LEDs hardwired (can not be surreptitiously turned on in software!) to show if they are active. May as well have an LED to show if the earpiece is active as well.
If other neat things like body and air sensors can be implemented, then great. Air pressure, blood pressure, blood oxygenation levels, sugar levels, body temp, air temp, etc etc. Magnetic compass. You get the idea about sensors. Ability to turn them individually and as a group.
A hardware switch that turns off all data collection and transmission (making it essentially a digital watch for the duration) that can not be bypassed by software.
I would pay large sums of money for such a device. I would be afraid to have such a device without the hardware switches described.
Honestly, to me, it seems that all of those are really algorithms. Granted, a lot of human activities can be considered algorithmic, but activities are not central to human nature. They are the results of human nature.
"If a computer can understand the spoken word, it's intelligent."
"No, that's just a big pattern matching program."
Be careful with that one. Words like "understand" mean a lot more than you seem to be implying with your glib repartee. Algorithmically determining the "proper" response to a series of words is not in any way a form of "understanding"; however, it is a prerequisite.
Ultimately, truly defining the Turing Test appears to be impossible with our current level of understanding of consciousness. Am I a human or an AI? It would seem to me that an AI is nowhere near the level that can respond to you like I have.
This is the bar that people expect an AI to pass. It is not merely fancy behaviors. I do believe those fancy behaviors are going to be useful to AI so I am not belittling them in any way. Some very amazing things have been achieved.
How does spacetime know how fast something is going through it? If there is nothing else other than spacetime and a single photon, what regulates the photon's speed? What is the speed relative to?
This. If I didn't have to worry about people torrenting movies or downloading kiddie porn, I'd be happy to share some bandwidth. Unfortunately, the real world dictates I not even consider this.
Hm. For several years in Colorado Springs, I shared out my internet access to any and all. The SSID was PublicDontAbuse (just in case anyone here on Slashdot saw it.) I did not monitor or log anything that happened on it.
Normally, I would notice police cars and real estate agents parked on the street behind my house for a half hour or so. I felt good knowing that I was helping random people and making their lives just a bit better.
It has been a few years now since I have done it (long story) so I am sure if there were to be any negative repercussions, I would have seen them by now. Honestly, if anything had happened, my only plan was to look at the judge and say, "The police tore apart everything I owned and found no evidence that I personally did anything of the things I am accused of. It has been established that I left my access point wide open to anyone. If you feel that the State is improved by penalizing me, then so be it. We both know I am not actually guilty of anything other than kindness to my fellow man."
Would that stop me from going to jail? Not bloody likely... but possible. I just don't care. I have lived a good life. While I do not relish dying in prison, fear can fuck right off. I am doing what I will.
Because negative facts dominate?
Administration is "control". There is a severe control freak fetish going on right now. Ultimately, it is a losing proposition. It is impossible to control every last bit of everything. People need to learn to relax and observe rather try to force the outcome.
I suspect that one of the pillars of this control freakery is fear. I am unsure how many pillars there are or what the others may be, but there is surely more than just fear at play. Perhaps one of the other pillars is linked with our need to make sense of the world.
Younger programmers are nearly always more up to date on the latest technologies and trends and have an innate ability to "churn out" fairly good quality code at a lightning fast rate.
How useful is that lightning fast coding going to be when you do not know where you are going?
...and make a lot of what I would call "elementary mistakes" when it comes to architecture.
You were saying?
Then, you went to:
Ideal teams have a healthy mix of both young fresh employees and older seasoned ones.
Yes, you do want to mix the more experienced people with the less experienced people. There are other attributes you will want to mix on as well; however..
Your stereotypes are inaccurate. I have seen a 24 year old (recently) wipe the floor with a bunch of older "more experienced" people in cleaning up and restoring the network that their supposed better experience created.
I have, again recently, seen an older person come in to a project that was a product of a younger, faster, fresh person and do more in a month than the younger person did in a year.
It is all about the people. Perhaps the older person appears to be slower because they are actually thinking instead of just slinging code. Perhaps the younger person appears to be making mistakes because you are not seeing the whole picture, just shims to hold up what the final architecture will look like. Not everyone thinks the same. There are lots of valid solutions to a problem, not just the one solution that you see.
But what I do know is its horses for courses - younger people are (generally) better at thinking up new ideas/paradigms and novel ways to do things , older people are (generally) better at the detailed implementation of a system as they'll have encountered a lot if not most of the problems before and have X number of years experience
Wow. That has not been my experience at all. New ideas and paradigms come from people who can think and are not fearful. Sure, some young people have less fear due to inexperience but that does not align along the axis of intelligence. There may even be a negative correlation there.
In short, you are not being insightful in any way. You are... stereotyping. Stereotyping is the basis of incompetent and ultimately destructive discrimination.
In the world that I have seen, you have to actually look at a person to be able to ascertain their qualities. Discrimination based on surface attributes can be useful if there is too much data to parse through, but you risk missing the real gems.
it could A.Allow the bad guys to figure out how to detect these devices (and therefore not do anything incriminating over their phones when they detect one or possibly even find ways to avoid the monitoring all together by e.g. switching carriers for their throwaway phones)
All of the real bad guys already practice signals discipline. This only catches the lazy and the petty criminals.
What my prior statement implies is that there is no compelling reason to violate the constitution with these devices.
STFU until you are willing to call out someone on your side of the political fence.
Never STFU. Ideally, people should be calling shit out on both sides of the fence, but I would rather people be calling shit out on only one side of the fence than no sides of the fence. STFU is NOT useful here.
OpenSSL is the swiss army knife of encryption technologies.
It can encrypt data with whatever cipher floats your boat. It can do hashing with whatever algorithm floats your boat. It can do SSL negotiations, it can examine, manipulate, and create X.509 certificates and containers like PKCS etc. Hell, it has all of the tools necessary to build an entire PKI up to and including creating Root Certificate Authorities, managing Certificate Revocation Lists, etc.
There may be vulnerabilities in it, but Oh My God can it do a whole hell of a lot. OpenSSL is up there with the Linux Kernel and GCC for usefulness and importance. As a security guy and as a privacy freak, I have been using OpenSSL code since before it was called OpenSSL. It was SSLeay prior to being OpenSSL.
That is a personal citation, but the facts are irrefutable.
At first, I laughed and thought your post was funny, witty, and a good reference. On second reading, it was disturbingly insightful. Good catch.
I am unsure if you have ever seen footage from a military drone in Afghanistan. I have, and I can guarantee you that there is zero chance of a bullet being fired at one and it getting hit. The missiles and such are fired from a mile or more away usually. The targets have absolutely no idea at all what is about to hit them. One second, the target is driving around thinking about how to murder people in the next village and the next second, they are pieces of meat. Occasionally, a missile will not hit close enough and the target can try to escape, but they have absolutely no idea which direction is safe to move as they have no idea where the original explosion came from. The second missile ALWAYS gets them.
You are NOT going to be hitting military drones with gunfire. Perhaps law enforcement drones will be different, but in theory, they will only have cameras on them so they have even less need to get close... and a mile away is NOT close.
Rampant capitalism is NOT the answer to every need, and Sweden proves it. By treating internet access as a piece of necessary national infrastructure, instead of just letting "the market" fight it out, you arrive at a far better end point far sooner.
While your screed against capitalism has some interesting talking points embedded in it, I would like to point out that there is no "market fighting it out" concerning network communications in America. In a few markets, there may be more than one provider but they are NOT competitors. Capitalism is definitely not a word that is associated with communications in America.
This isn't to prevent theft of the phone. It's to protect theft of the information stored on the phone, which is generally far more valuable than the phone itself.
Close. Very close. The information on the phone might very well be valuable... but to who? Are you at a protest and taking pictures of an officer beating the shit out of an innocent bystander? That information is indeed valuable in the sense that the government (at all levels) wants to destroy it. This is not going to end well.
It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.
Do you know what would be as good of a solution and not give the government the ability to make our phones useless lumps of material? An IMEI blacklist. Gee. Why didn't they just implement that? Because they wanted to be able to stop the use of the phone as a recording device. They can already silence you but they did not have the ability, until now, to stop the phone from being a recording device.
What we really need is to remove the gasoline tax and replace it with a mileage tax.
No. We really do not. First, what kind of Orwellian nightmare will be introduced by the government monitoring our mileage? If you think they will merely be checking the odometer, you are outrageously naive.
A gas tax is a good enough substitute for the amount of wear and tear a vehicle puts on the infrastructure. Heavier vehicles do more damage than lighter vehicles. Heavier vehicles use more gas to go the same distance as lighter vehicle. No problem.
As someone that moved to the US a couple of years ago but have previously lived in Europe, Japan and Australia - you guys do have very cheap fuel compared to virtually any other developed country you care to name.
Okay, I just have to break everyone's heart here...
The price of gas in Kuwait is 65 fils per liter.
How does that compare? 1,000 fils make 1 Kuwaiti Dinar. 1 Kuwaiti Dinar is worth 3 dollars and 67 cents at current exchange rates (real, not theoretical).
So one dinar buys roughly 15 liters of fuel. That is almost 4 gallons of fuel for $3.67. Ah yes. Less than a dollar a gallon. :)
There's a reason I don't have 13 desks in my office, and a reason I have a three-wide monitor configuration. I want to see everything at once, not have to sift or "wander" through some 3D space to find what I'm looking for.
That is the interesting thing about the Rift. You can have 3 monitors side by side by side in virtual space. You could surround yourself in an entire sphere of giant monitor. You do not have to walk down the hallway to another virtual office to access another virtual monitor. Just because someone else likes it that way, that does not mean it has to be that way for you.