I'd be interested in similar graphs charting family size vs. wealth, and family size vs. education. The wealth-gap is, in my opinion, a direct result of larger families (less money available for education and health care per child) vs. small families (the inverse). The question then becomes "why large families in the face of poverty" (cultural factors, education of women or lack thereof, children seen as support for people when they are old, child survival rate greater now than in the past but family behavior lagging behind)... and what can be done about it.
It costs billions of dollars to create a satellite constellation.
It costs hundreds of millions per year to maintain a satellite constellation.
Most people are far better served by cellular.
The phones themselves are bulky, and the power output necessary would induce (more) RF-hysteria in (more) idiots.
There is a vapor-trail of bankrupt sat-phone companies which have taught the lesson to potential investors.
In other words, the cost people are willing to pay is far less than what it costs to provide the service, SO YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY. Come back when you and a bunch of other people are willing to pay what it actually costs. Until then, don't ask the rest of us to subsidize you, and don't blame investors for not being foolish enough to be the next billion-dollar satellite phone bankruptcy case. It's not the duty of any cell-phone user or telco to pay for Joe NatureShowHost's phone in Outer Mongolia.
In the Dim Times, my company had a couple of hard drives (those newfangled 3.5" Scuzzy drives) that wouldn't spin up and had critical data on them. My solution:
1. Find a long internal-type SCSI cable (about 30"). 2. Hold the drive in my fingertips (so the platters were parallel with my palm) 3. Power on the computer, then "snap" the drive with a twist parallel to the platters, relying upon inertia to break the stiction. 4. Recover data from now-spun-up drives. 5. Power down, then physically destroy the interface pins on the drive to ensure nobody tried to use it again.
Since then, I've used that trick several times on dead/dying hard drives. As long as the heads are trying to move (indicating electrical life), it's worked every time.
Don't use webmail or web-enabled mail clients like Outlook. Mutt and Alpine and similar mail clients that don't interpret HTML are immune to this particular form of jackassery.
You know that axiom about how security and convenience are inversely proportional? It's true. You have to set the slider where you choose to, and unless you're willing to write the perfect HTML-interpreting-except-for-web-bugs-which-are-differentiated-from-other-objects-somehow-but-is-still-Exchange-compatible mail client yourself (in which case you get rich), that's the hand you're dealt. There are some alternatives like "it should be illegal to attach tracking bugs to email content", but that assumes people would actually obey the law (ha!).
I've got an Extra ham license myself. Haven't done much with it (ham radio is a pit into which you shovel money, and I have too many money-pits already), but dang I'm good at taking tests.
What I was trying to accomplish was to state why a cell tower has a finite capacity, and why there is a saturation point beyond which more cell towers won't help. There is a lot of misinformation out there about how wireless providers need to "upgrade their networks", when the network isn't the problem. Unfortunately, there is a highly overloaded word - "bandwidth" - that means two different things. One is the radio concept of bandwidth, the other the networking concept of bandwidth. I went out of my way to use "spectrum" and "frequency" instead of "bandwidth in radio context" to avoid confusion. Perhaps that effort made the explanation I wrote a bit more murky than it could have been.
The basic summary to take home (which you already know) is that due to limitations at the radio step of the chain a cell tower can only deliver X MBits/sec regardless of how fat a wired pipe lies behind the cell tower, that there is a saturation point at which adding more cell towers to an area doesn't result in the ability to serve more customers simultaneously, and that there has to be some sort of throttling mechanism. When a cell phone provider says they can't do much to improve things in high density areas with a given technology, it's not BS (though the kneejerk corp-haters will never accept that, any more than a count-the-begats creationist will accept science), and that there really is a choice to be made.
Slow, reliable, data-rate-capped service (sucks for tethering) or fast, expensive, escalating-cost sometimes-flaky service (sucks for your wallet). "Fast, reliable, cheap, suitable for tethering" just aren't on the table as far as cellular data is concerned, and it's not because of cellular provider BS. (And there's no shortage of cell provider BS in other aspects, they're still evil, just for other reasons!)
Hey, it's an underserved demographic. People who completely ignore science, hard evidence, and rational thought need entertainment too, and what the heck! They have money (somehow).
The real bottleneck that wireless carriers worry about is not their network. It's the capacity of a single cell tower to carry a finite number of simultaneous connections.
Have a look at the info about LTE frequency assignments. OK, all you hams out there, how many MHz of the frequency band to carry a data rate of 21MHz at the various assigned frequencies? How much frequency spectrum is available? Divide X by Y and you get the number of simultaneous full-speed downloads. Exceed that, and you have to start some sort of time-sharing scheme in which individual users grab a few milliseconds of exclusive ownership of each channel at a time. (Token Ring, anyone?)
Because of the way radio works, you can only get so much network bandwidth out of a particular frequency spectrum. You can do phasing tricks and subcarrier acrobatics to squeeze more out, but there will be a point at which you can't handle more devices per cell tower, no matter how much (wired/fiber) network there is behind it. And putting two cell phone towers right next to each other doesn't double the number of connections that can be handled; a phone connecting at 2410MHz to one cell phone tower will be putting out radio noise that a second tower right next to it will pick up. This is why AT&T is getting hammered in places like San Francisco and New York where there is a very high density of 3G users; they just can't add more cell towers. They're saturated; it's not because they're cheap bastards (they are), it's physics. That's how radio works.
Think of it this way: your FM radio has channels from 88.1MHz to 107.9MHz in 200KHz steps. Once all 101 channels are allocated, just "adding more towers" doesn't get you anything.
Smart phones differ from traditional cell phones in that they are "on the air" more than voice-only phones (insert teenage-girl joke here). A voice call might need 50kbit/sec for the duration of the call, and thus consume very little radio spectrum during that call (a handful of KHz). But a data session is a steady high-bitrate stream that can consume several MHz. Yes, interlacing occurs, but it really comes down to this: the limitation is how many MBits per second an allocated frequency spectrum can carry, divided by the number of simultaneous users of that frequency and their data demands. Once it's all in use, there ain't no more. Users get timesliced to slower and slower connections, until the granularity demanded by timeslicing and channel-juggling among X-thousand users of a single tower is so small that you can't even get a voice call through.
So yeah, I understand why wireless carriers would want to cap data usage. It sucks, but physics doesn't care how angry a consumer is, you can't sue to force 1000MHz of in-use spectrum to fit into 200MHz of allocated spectrum, and carriers can't throw money at physics until it goes away. Radio spectrum is a finite resource, data at a given rate requires a specific portion of that spectrum, and that's it. Something has to be capped. Data rate or data cap; something has to throttle usage, because there's not enough to go around for everyone to max it at once.
And that's why I think the judge returned the judgment as such.
If Google can get away with driving into your driveway and taking pictures of your house, can Operation Rescue do that do a gynecologist? Can the Aryan Nation do that to an executive of the Anti-Defamation League? And could they point at this as precedent? (Almost as important: would they do it because they thought this was legal precedent, whether it actually is or isn't?) If Google gets away with trespassing for the purposes of photographing a private home, why not everybody?
The minimal damages were also correct. The award to the plaintiff, even if it was a penny, is the message "No, you can't do this without consequences. Now go forth and do no evil, like you say you don't." There is a difference between public property and private, and the judge clearly felt Google needed to be reminded of that while not putting it into people's heads that a payday awaited.
But since American law operates as much upon precedent as statute, this has significance.
Google (and others) now know it's not okay to come on to private property for photogathering without permission, and can't play dumb next time. Google wasn't trespassing "innocently" or "by mistake"; they were engaged in commercial activity and did what they did intentionally. The judge in the decision also laid out the circumstances under which the trespass would have higher costs. If Google does this to someone who DOES value their privacy, the cost would be higher, and if Google is caught doing this repeatedly then they are sooner or later going to run into a "You don't learn, do ya, boy?" judge. Remember also that trespassing is a criminal charge, and in many places the property owner could call the police or even make a citizen's arrest on the van with the funny thing on top.
I'd be interested in seeing how Google would react if someone drove into their parking lot, hauled out a camera and started photographing their campus, their employees and their employees' cars, then claimed they weren't doing anything that Google wasn't themselves doing. I'm going to guess the answer would involve the Mountain View police and potentially DHS, (given that it's a high-value economic target to anti-capitalists).
I'd say... no. Canadian police aren't very good at stopping crime, nor particularly well-behaved (especially the Quebec Provincial Police, who have a pretty bad human rights record). Plus there's the matter of Constable Adam Josephs, a.k.a. "Officer Bubbles", a Toronto paragon of virtue who will sue you for a million dollars if you dare say a single word against him.
The bit about Canadians being less violent than Americans is pure myth.
A little incendiary in tone, but not without relevance.
It most certainly is true that one factor that has emboldened terrorists is that the US and Europe ("the West") hold back. The West does not respond with our full capability, and the belief is that the West does not have the willpower to do so. Nuclear deterrence, for instance, means nothing if your opponent doesn't believe you would use it against them.
The concept of "measured response" applies in conventional warfare; the mistake being made is that it also applies in an asymmetric war involving terrorism. It's not surprising that this mistake is being made, as the entire Western military and intelligence-gathering structure is still primarily a Cold War era construct. Military thinking is, to this day, bound in doctrines of state-vs-state warfare. That's changing, but slowly. Much too slowly. The fact that there still are state-level threats, both militarily and covertly, isn't helping; conventional armies and state-level intelligence services are still needed. There are now two rulesets operating in parallel, and the West is still not set up to address both simultaneously.
Even the force the West does bring to bear is used in a very restrained manner. Idiotic protesters aside, the West has expended a huge amount of effort to avoid civilian casualties. It would be so much easier, cheaper and faster to drop a few fuel-air "gifts" on troublesome areas that are known to harbor terrorist training camps and sympathizers, but that's not on the table.
And, of course, there's the issue that it's a card you can only play once. A glowing crater in Mecca may be very satisfying... but what about afterward? The game isn't over at that point.
No easy answers. In my opinion, we do need to take off the velvet gloves and worry less about offending "host" countries. We need to make this a true war of assassins, and not be squeamish about it turning into a dirty war... it already is. We, the West, should play it to win. The only thing worse than winning a dirty war is losing ANY war.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing.
Armed societies aren't necessarily polite. But there is an immediacy of consequence when the impolite turn violent. When ordinary citizens are armed, there is a built-in limit as to how far a violent criminal act can go unchecked.
The problem, in a dense area, is that sometimes you miss, and then there's something behind whatever you missed
Which also is an argument against police carrying guns; cops miss too.
We've decided as a society that the possibility of a missed shot against a deadly criminal act is acceptable risk, thus urban police are armed. The thing is, the threat that cops face is identical to the threat that ordinary citizens face. The response to that threat against ordinary citizens should come with the same acceptance of risk whether the defense comes from a cop's gun or a citizen's.
(And don't get me started on "cops are trained marksmen"; they're not. They suck. The pistol range I frequent is right next to the police headquarters of the city it is in, and I can say with certainty I can outshoot every cop I have ever seen in there shooting. I'm also not an expert shot, and it dismays me that someone whose job depends upon marksmanship is not better than me, for whom it is primarily a hobby.)
A friend of mine (retired sheriff deputy and Air Force reservist) explained it to me, and I've also heard this from my neighbor, who is a city police officer.
Most police who are on the beat, actually out there in contact with the public heavily favor private gun ownership and "must-issue" CCW laws. Most police chiefs (politicians) are against private ownership of firearms. When you hear talk about proposed ordinances, etc., listen to exactly who is doing the endorsing. If it's a police CHIEFS organization, they want you under their heel. If it's a police OFFICERS association, they want you guarding their backs. In my friend's words, "an armed citizen is a police officer's guardian angel".
Police chiefs absolutely DO NOT speak for the positions of the rank-and-file, and are usually dead opposite on civil rights issues. They claim otherwise, but they lie (and if a cop says "Hey, he doesn't speak for me", guess who's not getting a promotion that year). It's not Officer Friendly who wants a GPS transceiver in your ass and handcuffs on you any time you step out of your house. It's Chief Political Ambition, the one who thinks he's going to be Governor someday, and his hand-picked SWAT elite (who have as bad an attitude about ordinary cops as they have about ordinary citizens).
And the Hubble is based on a KH12 spy satellite, just pointed in the opposite direction. In fact, it's so close in design that it shared the same optical flaw as an early KH12 design. The NSA and NRO (who knew about the defect because they'd already had problems with it with their own satellites) debated on whether to tell NASA; if they did they'd be essentially publishing the specs of the KH12 to the world (NASA is incapable of keeping a secret), but if they didn't then NASA would have a defective instrument. They chose the latter, and were thoroughly roasted for it (the repairs to the Hubble were a billion-dollar proposition and a public embarrassment), though of course revealing exact intelligence-gathering capability is never a good idea.
Repurposing and shared-mission SIGINT satellites for scientific use is as old as space flight itself.
Such firms include utilities, communications providers and financial institutions.
Thus giving DHS full regulatory authority to, though that "enforce" word, monitor your ISP and your bank real-time (something the NSA was never allowed to do legally).
And once again Big Brother's tendrils are set to grow.
Since in the name of safety there once again is a presumption of guilt, why not include breathalyzer locks in all cars? The tech exists and is used at court order already, and alcohol-related auto deaths are more numerous than phone-related auto deaths. Surely that would save more lives?
How about driving while tired? That's unquestionably a killer, and a common one. EEGs can detect when someone is sleepy. Why not an interlock for the headband you'd be required to wear?
How about driving into neighborhoods in which prostitution and illegal drug activity is rampant? GPS tracker + ignition kill-switch, easy. Heck, you could also use this for enforcing restraining orders and RSO exclusion-zones. Y'know. For the children. Think of the children.
Are we sure this is the Secretary of Transportation? Sounds a lot more like TSA to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd be interested in similar graphs charting family size vs. wealth, and family size vs. education. The wealth-gap is, in my opinion, a direct result of larger families (less money available for education and health care per child) vs. small families (the inverse). The question then becomes "why large families in the face of poverty" (cultural factors, education of women or lack thereof, children seen as support for people when they are old, child survival rate greater now than in the past but family behavior lagging behind)... and what can be done about it.
It costs billions of dollars to create a satellite constellation.
It costs hundreds of millions per year to maintain a satellite constellation.
Most people are far better served by cellular.
The phones themselves are bulky, and the power output necessary would induce (more) RF-hysteria in (more) idiots.
There is a vapor-trail of bankrupt sat-phone companies which have taught the lesson to potential investors.
In other words, the cost people are willing to pay is far less than what it costs to provide the service, SO YOU CAN'T HAVE ANY. Come back when you and a bunch of other people are willing to pay what it actually costs. Until then, don't ask the rest of us to subsidize you, and don't blame investors for not being foolish enough to be the next billion-dollar satellite phone bankruptcy case. It's not the duty of any cell-phone user or telco to pay for Joe NatureShowHost's phone in Outer Mongolia.
Shit ain't free, yo.
In the Dim Times, my company had a couple of hard drives (those newfangled 3.5" Scuzzy drives) that wouldn't spin up and had critical data on them. My solution:
2. Hold the drive in my fingertips (so the platters were parallel with my palm)
3. Power on the computer, then "snap" the drive with a twist parallel to the platters, relying upon inertia to break the stiction.
4. Recover data from now-spun-up drives.
5. Power down, then physically destroy the interface pins on the drive to ensure nobody tried to use it again.
Since then, I've used that trick several times on dead/dying hard drives. As long as the heads are trying to move (indicating electrical life), it's worked every time.
It's not that "file sharers" aren't in it for the money.
They're in it because they don't HAVE money.
This isn't about altruism or ideals or "striking a blow against the establishment". It's about "I want free stuff".
At least one solution is out there:
Don't use webmail or web-enabled mail clients like Outlook. Mutt and Alpine and similar mail clients that don't interpret HTML are immune to this particular form of jackassery.
You know that axiom about how security and convenience are inversely proportional? It's true. You have to set the slider where you choose to, and unless you're willing to write the perfect HTML-interpreting-except-for-web-bugs-which-are-differentiated-from-other-objects-somehow-but-is-still-Exchange-compatible mail client yourself (in which case you get rich), that's the hand you're dealt. There are some alternatives like "it should be illegal to attach tracking bugs to email content", but that assumes people would actually obey the law (ha!).
I've got an Extra ham license myself. Haven't done much with it (ham radio is a pit into which you shovel money, and I have too many money-pits already), but dang I'm good at taking tests.
What I was trying to accomplish was to state why a cell tower has a finite capacity, and why there is a saturation point beyond which more cell towers won't help. There is a lot of misinformation out there about how wireless providers need to "upgrade their networks", when the network isn't the problem. Unfortunately, there is a highly overloaded word - "bandwidth" - that means two different things. One is the radio concept of bandwidth, the other the networking concept of bandwidth. I went out of my way to use "spectrum" and "frequency" instead of "bandwidth in radio context" to avoid confusion. Perhaps that effort made the explanation I wrote a bit more murky than it could have been.
The basic summary to take home (which you already know) is that due to limitations at the radio step of the chain a cell tower can only deliver X MBits/sec regardless of how fat a wired pipe lies behind the cell tower, that there is a saturation point at which adding more cell towers to an area doesn't result in the ability to serve more customers simultaneously, and that there has to be some sort of throttling mechanism. When a cell phone provider says they can't do much to improve things in high density areas with a given technology, it's not BS (though the kneejerk corp-haters will never accept that, any more than a count-the-begats creationist will accept science), and that there really is a choice to be made.
Slow, reliable, data-rate-capped service (sucks for tethering) or fast, expensive, escalating-cost sometimes-flaky service (sucks for your wallet). "Fast, reliable, cheap, suitable for tethering" just aren't on the table as far as cellular data is concerned, and it's not because of cellular provider BS. (And there's no shortage of cell provider BS in other aspects, they're still evil, just for other reasons!)
Hey, it's an underserved demographic. People who completely ignore science, hard evidence, and rational thought need entertainment too, and what the heck! They have money (somehow).
The real bottleneck that wireless carriers worry about is not their network. It's the capacity of a single cell tower to carry a finite number of simultaneous connections.
Have a look at the info about LTE frequency assignments. OK, all you hams out there, how many MHz of the frequency band to carry a data rate of 21MHz at the various assigned frequencies? How much frequency spectrum is available? Divide X by Y and you get the number of simultaneous full-speed downloads. Exceed that, and you have to start some sort of time-sharing scheme in which individual users grab a few milliseconds of exclusive ownership of each channel at a time. (Token Ring, anyone?)
Because of the way radio works, you can only get so much network bandwidth out of a particular frequency spectrum. You can do phasing tricks and subcarrier acrobatics to squeeze more out, but there will be a point at which you can't handle more devices per cell tower, no matter how much (wired/fiber) network there is behind it. And putting two cell phone towers right next to each other doesn't double the number of connections that can be handled; a phone connecting at 2410MHz to one cell phone tower will be putting out radio noise that a second tower right next to it will pick up. This is why AT&T is getting hammered in places like San Francisco and New York where there is a very high density of 3G users; they just can't add more cell towers. They're saturated; it's not because they're cheap bastards (they are), it's physics. That's how radio works.
Think of it this way: your FM radio has channels from 88.1MHz to 107.9MHz in 200KHz steps. Once all 101 channels are allocated, just "adding more towers" doesn't get you anything.
Smart phones differ from traditional cell phones in that they are "on the air" more than voice-only phones (insert teenage-girl joke here). A voice call might need 50kbit/sec for the duration of the call, and thus consume very little radio spectrum during that call (a handful of KHz). But a data session is a steady high-bitrate stream that can consume several MHz. Yes, interlacing occurs, but it really comes down to this: the limitation is how many MBits per second an allocated frequency spectrum can carry, divided by the number of simultaneous users of that frequency and their data demands. Once it's all in use, there ain't no more. Users get timesliced to slower and slower connections, until the granularity demanded by timeslicing and channel-juggling among X-thousand users of a single tower is so small that you can't even get a voice call through.
So yeah, I understand why wireless carriers would want to cap data usage. It sucks, but physics doesn't care how angry a consumer is, you can't sue to force 1000MHz of in-use spectrum to fit into 200MHz of allocated spectrum, and carriers can't throw money at physics until it goes away. Radio spectrum is a finite resource, data at a given rate requires a specific portion of that spectrum, and that's it. Something has to be capped. Data rate or data cap; something has to throttle usage, because there's not enough to go around for everyone to max it at once.
And that's why I think the judge returned the judgment as such.
If Google can get away with driving into your driveway and taking pictures of your house, can Operation Rescue do that do a gynecologist? Can the Aryan Nation do that to an executive of the Anti-Defamation League? And could they point at this as precedent? (Almost as important: would they do it because they thought this was legal precedent, whether it actually is or isn't?) If Google gets away with trespassing for the purposes of photographing a private home, why not everybody?
The minimal damages were also correct. The award to the plaintiff, even if it was a penny, is the message "No, you can't do this without consequences. Now go forth and do no evil, like you say you don't." There is a difference between public property and private, and the judge clearly felt Google needed to be reminded of that while not putting it into people's heads that a payday awaited.
But since American law operates as much upon precedent as statute, this has significance.
Google (and others) now know it's not okay to come on to private property for photogathering without permission, and can't play dumb next time. Google wasn't trespassing "innocently" or "by mistake"; they were engaged in commercial activity and did what they did intentionally. The judge in the decision also laid out the circumstances under which the trespass would have higher costs. If Google does this to someone who DOES value their privacy, the cost would be higher, and if Google is caught doing this repeatedly then they are sooner or later going to run into a "You don't learn, do ya, boy?" judge. Remember also that trespassing is a criminal charge, and in many places the property owner could call the police or even make a citizen's arrest on the van with the funny thing on top.
I'd be interested in seeing how Google would react if someone drove into their parking lot, hauled out a camera and started photographing their campus, their employees and their employees' cars, then claimed they weren't doing anything that Google wasn't themselves doing. I'm going to guess the answer would involve the Mountain View police and potentially DHS, (given that it's a high-value economic target to anti-capitalists).
Go Sharks!
Go to the playoffs!
Go to the second round!
Go home!
OUR FINNS CAN BEAT UP YOUR FINNS
Well, given that Canada has twice the violent crime rate of the United States in all major categories except murder...
I'd say... no. Canadian police aren't very good at stopping crime, nor particularly well-behaved (especially the Quebec Provincial Police, who have a pretty bad human rights record). Plus there's the matter of Constable Adam Josephs, a.k.a. "Officer Bubbles", a Toronto paragon of virtue who will sue you for a million dollars if you dare say a single word against him.
The bit about Canadians being less violent than Americans is pure myth.
How to circumvent the above business model:
1. Don't download movies you haven't paid for.
They found Fwiffo on Pluto.
A little incendiary in tone, but not without relevance.
It most certainly is true that one factor that has emboldened terrorists is that the US and Europe ("the West") hold back. The West does not respond with our full capability, and the belief is that the West does not have the willpower to do so. Nuclear deterrence, for instance, means nothing if your opponent doesn't believe you would use it against them.
The concept of "measured response" applies in conventional warfare; the mistake being made is that it also applies in an asymmetric war involving terrorism. It's not surprising that this mistake is being made, as the entire Western military and intelligence-gathering structure is still primarily a Cold War era construct. Military thinking is, to this day, bound in doctrines of state-vs-state warfare. That's changing, but slowly. Much too slowly. The fact that there still are state-level threats, both militarily and covertly, isn't helping; conventional armies and state-level intelligence services are still needed. There are now two rulesets operating in parallel, and the West is still not set up to address both simultaneously.
Even the force the West does bring to bear is used in a very restrained manner. Idiotic protesters aside, the West has expended a huge amount of effort to avoid civilian casualties. It would be so much easier, cheaper and faster to drop a few fuel-air "gifts" on troublesome areas that are known to harbor terrorist training camps and sympathizers, but that's not on the table.
And, of course, there's the issue that it's a card you can only play once. A glowing crater in Mecca may be very satisfying... but what about afterward? The game isn't over at that point.
No easy answers. In my opinion, we do need to take off the velvet gloves and worry less about offending "host" countries. We need to make this a true war of assassins, and not be squeamish about it turning into a dirty war... it already is. We, the West, should play it to win. The only thing worse than winning a dirty war is losing ANY war.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing.
Armed societies aren't necessarily polite. But there is an immediacy of consequence when the impolite turn violent. When ordinary citizens are armed, there is a built-in limit as to how far a violent criminal act can go unchecked.
The problem, in a dense area, is that sometimes you miss, and then there's something behind whatever you missed
Which also is an argument against police carrying guns; cops miss too.
We've decided as a society that the possibility of a missed shot against a deadly criminal act is acceptable risk, thus urban police are armed. The thing is, the threat that cops face is identical to the threat that ordinary citizens face. The response to that threat against ordinary citizens should come with the same acceptance of risk whether the defense comes from a cop's gun or a citizen's.
(And don't get me started on "cops are trained marksmen"; they're not. They suck. The pistol range I frequent is right next to the police headquarters of the city it is in, and I can say with certainty I can outshoot every cop I have ever seen in there shooting. I'm also not an expert shot, and it dismays me that someone whose job depends upon marksmanship is not better than me, for whom it is primarily a hobby.)
... with no consultation of the people, and by an institution that many of us already consider to be nowhere near democratically accountable enough.
Do they expect us to follow it?
Cops have guns that say you will. Don't think it will come to that? Look at what can happen to people who have a nickel bag.
If this becomes law, it will be abused, as all laws which are pretexts for invasive searches are.
A friend of mine (retired sheriff deputy and Air Force reservist) explained it to me, and I've also heard this from my neighbor, who is a city police officer.
Most police who are on the beat, actually out there in contact with the public heavily favor private gun ownership and "must-issue" CCW laws. Most police chiefs (politicians) are against private ownership of firearms. When you hear talk about proposed ordinances, etc., listen to exactly who is doing the endorsing. If it's a police CHIEFS organization, they want you under their heel. If it's a police OFFICERS association, they want you guarding their backs. In my friend's words, "an armed citizen is a police officer's guardian angel".
Police chiefs absolutely DO NOT speak for the positions of the rank-and-file, and are usually dead opposite on civil rights issues. They claim otherwise, but they lie (and if a cop says "Hey, he doesn't speak for me", guess who's not getting a promotion that year). It's not Officer Friendly who wants a GPS transceiver in your ass and handcuffs on you any time you step out of your house. It's Chief Political Ambition, the one who thinks he's going to be Governor someday, and his hand-picked SWAT elite (who have as bad an attitude about ordinary cops as they have about ordinary citizens).
And the Hubble is based on a KH12 spy satellite, just pointed in the opposite direction. In fact, it's so close in design that it shared the same optical flaw as an early KH12 design. The NSA and NRO (who knew about the defect because they'd already had problems with it with their own satellites) debated on whether to tell NASA; if they did they'd be essentially publishing the specs of the KH12 to the world (NASA is incapable of keeping a secret), but if they didn't then NASA would have a defective instrument. They chose the latter, and were thoroughly roasted for it (the repairs to the Hubble were a billion-dollar proposition and a public embarrassment), though of course revealing exact intelligence-gathering capability is never a good idea.
Repurposing and shared-mission SIGINT satellites for scientific use is as old as space flight itself.
He's a marked mad.
Such firms include utilities, communications providers and financial institutions.
Thus giving DHS full regulatory authority to, though that "enforce" word, monitor your ISP and your bank real-time (something the NSA was never allowed to do legally).
And once again Big Brother's tendrils are set to grow.
So here's a question. Does the takedown happen before, or after, a trial before a jury of my peers?
Court order, my millimeter-wave-imaged ass.
So what's this "or dangerous" bit? Ammunition? Websites promoting cults? Websites attacking cults? Websites selling material that promotes anything that senators don't like, like free thought, opposing political positions, naked bodies that they can't grope for themselves?
This ain't about piracy, people.
Yay! Government bureau pissfight!
Since in the name of safety there once again is a presumption of guilt, why not include breathalyzer locks in all cars? The tech exists and is used at court order already, and alcohol-related auto deaths are more numerous than phone-related auto deaths. Surely that would save more lives?
How about driving while tired? That's unquestionably a killer, and a common one. EEGs can detect when someone is sleepy. Why not an interlock for the headband you'd be required to wear?
How about driving into neighborhoods in which prostitution and illegal drug activity is rampant? GPS tracker + ignition kill-switch, easy. Heck, you could also use this for enforcing restraining orders and RSO exclusion-zones. Y'know. For the children. Think of the children.
Are we sure this is the Secretary of Transportation? Sounds a lot more like TSA to me.