Just the word "profiling" is offensive to African-Americans because of their extensive history in being "profiled" in the past. For example, the Florida State Police were prevented from such "profiling" back in the 1980's. They had identified a trend that expensive cars being driven at high speeds by African-Americans had a strong correlation to there being significant quantities of drugs in the car. This was viewed as completely unethical and such profiling was ended.
Regardless of the practicalities of the situation, profiling isn't going to fly in the US.
And, as an aside to the folks saying not all terrorists are Muslims, the problem is today that the overwhelming number of people that have a religious duty to kill Westerners happen to be Muslim. And, the Muslim folks are the ones pushing the envelope, as proven by the imam's little ritual going to Phoenix.
And, if we didn't have to worry about Muslim and their religious duty, we might actually be able to focus on keeping the small number of other wackos off airplanes.
This is not a Christians against, rational people for type argument.
This is 99% of the people don't understand the argument.
Embryonic stem cell treatment needs to be genotype specific. This means that your DNA has to be used to create some stem cells so they can be used to treat you. This implies there is a way to take your DNA and make a new human even if you never let it develop.
Therefore, the foundation of this is human cloning on a fairly reliable scale. Not one or two "experiemnts" a year but every day, all over the world. How long do you think it will be before someone lets one of these develop?
How much would Bill Gates pay for a copy? Do you think everyone on the entire planet will turn that kind of money down? What would Saddam Hussein have paid, when he could? We are talking about creating human cloning for treatment purposes with the potential for the "wink, wink, nod, nod, OF COURSE we would never let one develop..."
Personhood should only be granted to an individual after they can prove that they are sentient. Failure to prove this, such as watching endless Wheel of Fortune reruns, means they are immediately eligible as an organ doner.
Debit card? What the heck are you using something like that for anyway? You give it to a waiter in a resturant and they can take all your money with no recourse.
Credit card? Dispute the charge. Period. No liability. Not even the $50 that they claim might be your maximum liability. I've never heard of anyone losing anything on a credit card dispute when it is filed within the time limit.
Do you think the card has your locker combination at the gym on it? Or maybe it has your gmail password? Maybe it might have your mother's Swiss bank account number? No, it has your account number and damn little else.
And again, with a credit card, who cares? The credit card company doesn't - they expect fraud and refund it.
I seriously doubt there have been any real studies about the "harm" that pornography does to children. But, studies of addiction in adults are common and porn is clearly addictive to some percentage of the population.
The real question is how exactly would you like to answer questions from your children after their viewing a collection of still images from a hardcore porn movie dealing with rape and/or bondage? Is this something that you would be comfortable with? As many younger children do, would you be comfortable with them acting out a scene from such a movie with friends or siblings? Do you believe that sexual relationships based on self-gratification are a positive or negative for the participants?
Also, if you found your 16-year-old son had "discovered" porn and was clearly one of the percentage of the population that responds to this with addictive behavior would you be comfortable with this? Would you deal with this by confinment, behavior modification or counseling? Or nothing at all considering that it was just a period in his life that he would outgrow?
This has nothing to do with morality and religion. It has everything to do with personality and how people interact with others. If, in response to viewing pornography, you treat sexual partners as objects to be used for self-gratification, you aren't behaving as society - any society - would like. If you "use" pornography and self-gratification to such an extent that it overshadows other parts of your life, you have a problem. It is clear from many sources that some percentage of humans do exactly that when exposed to certain types of pornography. Why do we want to expose children to this and then have to deal with the consequences of it?
Please explain in 100 words or less how lots of organic farmers can possibly supply the food requirements for a population of 300,000,000 people.
Like most "sustainable" types, you haven't realized that "sustainable" is a codeword for genocide. Yes, the US could operate with little more than subsistance farming on a grand scale. But, we would first have to reduce the population to where it was in 1850 or so. This would have the minor side effect of virtually eliminating pollution problems and urban sprawl.
That is, it would if you could work up the guts to tell 295,000,000 people that in order for this to be a sustainable country they had to die. Tomorrow.
I believe we will have a popular movement, perhaps religious in its base, that will propose and begin to execute a plan based on exactly this. Imagine if every one of the members of a cult could go a kill 1,000 people. The goal of reducing the population, pollution and most other problems like crime begins to sound not so far off. If you had 300,000 members in the cult your goal would be achievable in a week or less.
Unfortunately, the Saudis will have a large population of folks that have been heavily trained in Islamic ways and Sharia. This does not bode well for their being able to be assimlated into Western socities. It also provides a pool of folks to recruit for jihadi activities.
After all, if "life" is so much better after you die and what you have now absolutely sucks, why not go blow something up?
If the music folks wanted to sue everyone that downloaded music, they would need to file against the entire country. Not going to happen.
Instead, they are being fiendishly clever in suing the people that are the suppliers for the downloaders. If you redistribute, you might get sued. Might. About a 1,000 in 300,000,000 chance, or 1 in 300,000. Most criminals take far worse odds in sticking up the neighborhood liquor store.
Problem is showing a clip from David Letterman isn't an advertisement, it is the content itself. Now, if the video consisted of someone exhorting the viewer to watch David Letterman's show, without showing any David Letterman content, that would be an advertisement. But that isn't what is happening.
The other part of this is that the content is being removed from its context with the advertisements that it was shown with originally. Now, if you had a 5-minute video with some ads in it and some David Letterman content as well, that might not be so bad. At least there would be the possibility that this would increase the value of the advertisements which is the whole reason there is a David Letterman show to begin with.
But instead what is happening is the original advertisements are separated from the content and new, different advertisements are substituted in the web context. So, basically you are taking the "value" of the David Letterman content for free and substituting your own (or someone else's) advertising.
In a lot of Western countries it is assumed that there can be found a jury of people that haven't yet formed an opinion on some matter. Whether it is civil or criminal doesn't really matter, the issue is that whatever it is, they haven't heard about it.
What publishing cell phone camera photos and movies does is virtually eliminate the possiblity of finding anyone that hasn't been exposed to every possible detail, no matter what.
Another aspect of this is when an "eyewitness" account differs from the rather narrow view of the event presented by a camera. Which would be more likely to be believed? I suspect most people under 30 would unquestingly accept the camera view and people over 30 far more likely to give them equal weight if not be more likely to favor the human. Yes, human memory isn't perfect but neither is the interpretation presented by the cameraman.
And, it is very difficult to tell the difference in the "Internet Age" between something faked and the real thing in a photo when the time between it is taken and when it is old news is like 10 minutes. You either publish it immediately or it has zero value - because everyone else already put it on their web pages. The wire services, AP & Reuters, are having some pretty serious issues with this now, and it is likely just the beginning.
Wrong. Google exists to make money from selling ad space. Period. Anything beyond that is an accident.
Specifically, Google does not exist to help users, but to use them as fertile farmland for harvesting profits. If, by some chance your use of Google provides both profit to Google and benefits to you in some way, you have a truely wonderful experience.
Most of the time, however, you click on a link which goes to some automated page that is a front for another Google search and displays some ads. In this case, you lose but everyone else wins.
No, this doesn't belong in the hands of government.
However, most people aren't all that interested in Britney's cooch. How about some standards? So it isn't considered to publish anything that might bring in a nickle regardless of the effect it might have?
Let's assume your mother was in an accident where an extremely gory scene resulted. Of course, anyone with a camera could instantly win $10,000 for handing in a picture of the bloody mess that resulted. And of course, no newspaper, Internet site or TV news program would be without such a key photograph, so it is splashed all over everything in the hopes of dragging a few more dollars out of consumers pockets because of the ads. And, because of where we are with the Internet today, this picture is now permanent and nothing can ever be done to get rid of it.
So, your three year old child, devastated at the loss of their mother, will get to see this picture when they are twelve.
How about some standards and not just "if it bleeds, it leads!" How about thinking about where this is all going and how people, not machines, are going to deal with the fallout of publishing this sort of stuff.
Are laws the answer? Hell no! But the publishers need to exercise some self control, and since in the Internet Age every man is a publisher, that means we all need to use some common sense.
I used to work for NavTeq (or NavTech). They were working on the same kind of project and it is probably live now. You can automate the collection of street-level data for driving directions with such a van, DGPS and some software to recognize street signs, house addresses and the like.
This beats the pants off of having two people driving around and one taking notes while the other drives the car.
And it is light-years ahead of the previous technique of digitizing aerial photographs and trying to figure out the one-way streets later.
No, they aren't collecting photographic data for display on the web. Yes, they are going to cover every single street in the US. No, they probably aren't going to do Canada because the Canadian government has a copyright on the street maps and defends it vigorously.
of glorifying such stunts and of the FBI refusing to even consider something for which there isn't at least $25,000 worth of damages.
Glorifying such fool pranks I would consider the same as glorifying cutting brake lines on school buses. Really quite funny when the bus driver tries to stop. How could it possibly hurt anyone because any bus driver is going to notice what is wrong long before the first child sets foot on the bus. Right. Keep thinking that way. Of course, what these folks did was just for fun and it didn't really hurt anyone, now did it?
The FBI putting a dollar floor on damages ensures that nothing is ever done when these kids do something minor. Rather than someone identifying them and giving them a warning nothing happens. When you were 16 if you were never, ever caught shoplifting would your escapades advance to other, higher-price objects? Of course. Which is exactly what is happening here.
ISPs refuse to identify or even forward communication from people complaining about attacks. So your only choices are to either wait for $25,000 in damages to bring in the FBI (who is the only possible law enforcement agency with jursidiction) or you decide to spend lots of your own money to file suit against some 16 year olds to "teach them a lesson". Of course, you end up with the "lesson" because they will be laughing at you when you find out you can't sue a kid in Romainia.
Build yourself a copy of the radio that was on the Titanic. With careful construction, you too can have a spark-gap transmitter that will block all communication on all frequencies, well into UHF and probably prevent Bluetooth and WiFi as well.
No, there isn't a good way to shape the field such that it doesn't interfere with your neighbors. However, it will likely have no effect on cable TV while wiping out DirecTV and Dish Network. The cable company will be your friend. They might even pay you to run such a device.
Essentially all you need is a rectifier, a coil, an antenna and something to break the circuit. An old Ford distributor using the points would work and then you wouldn't have to key it by hand. Old-style spark-gap transmitters were completely free of tubes, transistors or integrated circuits so they are also immune to EMP effects.
Just think of it as your own experimental ultra-wide broadband transmitter.
Agreed that not all extremists would be found by some kind of profiling. Certainly just going after Middle Eastern looking men would be foolish.
However, it would be doing something. Today, we are doing nothing at all except making air travel more difficult for everyone. It would be trivial to circumvent the TSA folks to bring banned items onto a plane. Carbon-fiber knives are not caught by the TSA. Neither is anything that is in a "shielding" container. So, you put your grenade in a can.
We pretty much know that El Al style passenger screening isn't going to fly in the US. Too many people and nobody wants a 2-4 hour delay before boarding. So what are we going to do? Many have proposed just letting it drop and considering the next 9/11 bunch of casualties to be "acceptable", like credit card companies consider some level of fraud to be "acceptable". Realistically, there are a few options. TSA feel-good security is going to fall apart at some point when enough people realize it is just a nusiance and isn't real "security" at all.
So, do we focus our attention and maybe still let 10% of potential terrorists get through while blocking 90%, or do we do nothing and just write off 2-3,000 people every few years?
Showing any sign that in a guerilla fight that the West will cower in fear under Islamic militants is an incredibly stupid idea. They will of course take this to mean that they can spread their ways further and faster.
Last year, schoolgirls were beheaded in Indonesia as "trophies" for Ramadan. Nobody has been arrested, tried or punished in any manner. Indonesia has a majority Muslim population. How long before such trophies are taken in London or Melbourne? How about New York or Detroit?
If we let these people believe they can win in the Middle East, they will. In the face of a pullout Iraq (or at least a good portion of it) will certainly be annexed by Iran. Is this a good thing?
Better think about converting. The choice is coming and it will be conversion or death.
OK, so all IP is free for use. Why would anyone spend the resources (hours, dollars, whatever) to come up with something new knowing that anyone else can take their design (IP) and make the product somewhere else?
Today, mostly the only thing of value is the research or knowledge behind the product. If you can bypass that and steal the design or knowledge or process then you can make the product in parallel with the original designer. Of course, since it cost nothing to develop the design or process then you can sell it much, much cheaper. In any reasonable economy, the first designer loses everything - they are selling the same product for 10x the cost.
So, in your view pretty much the economic foundation of the Western world is going to come crashing down? This is about the only result I can see of people spending R&D dollars without any hope of recouping them - they will stop spending that money. Nobody will invest in a startup where the unlimited piracy of the IP that they are investing in is invitable.
So, do you have any ideas on how one "prepares" for this? Do we hope that we elect wise leaders that just take over the idea of funding R&D in the future with tax money? Or, are we all just working for the State with the knowledge that they are going to take care of us?
What are you, fourteen? You must have been asleep during the 1990's.
Y2K was two things: an awful lot of hype from doomsayers that thought elevator controllers knew what year it was, and a disaster for most businesses that had been around since 1980.
Let's see here, in 1980 your average company put everything on 100MB reels of tape. A lot of companies entire "database" was on tape and disk was used for holding transactions against the tape. This had a huge impact on how things were done and had an effect on how records were arranged and sized. It is important to keep this in mind because the difference between a 2-digit year and a 4-digit year in a record could mean the difference between the "master tape" being one reel or two. Operationally, this made a huge difference. And so, everyone in programming in 1980 knew they were making a tradeoff for the next 20 years but did it anyway. So, 2-digit years were in everything.
Now, your average company isn't interested in spending a lot of money until the last possible second. So, when the subject of "the year 2000" came up in 1992 everyone said that they knew about it but it wasn't necessary to fix the problem yet. And so, the fix was postponed until later.
Later meant 1999 and suddenly there were no staff members that had six months to do nothing but change 2 digit years into 4 digit years. Hence lots and lots of consultants got brought in and millions upon millions of dollars were spent.
Yes, nothing happened on January 1st. Except if you had a credit card that expired in 02 it didn't work very well in March of 1999. Lots of little stories like that. Yes, it was fixed but don't think for a minute that there wasn't a huge problem. Mostly of our own making.
No, nobody died because a computer crashed. However, if some important projects had failed or been really, really late government checks would have ground to a halt by February or March of 2000. And then the riots would have started.
The problem is that we have this wonderful idea that there should be a "social safety net" whereby people can choose to be supported by taxpayers so they can spend all their time in a stupor.
If the people that chose this life were left to fend for themselves and starve, that would be fine with me. Telling me that I need to pay to feed, clothe, house and buy drugs for these people is a bit much, don't you think?
Unfortunately, I am very much in the minority. You can retire from life in the US and live off welfare, SSI and other state-funded programs.
Law enforcement? How? What law might you be considering?
"Malware" isn't illegal. I know of no reasonable law that defines what this might be. Certainly lots of people are inconvenienced by it, but that is hardly justification for making writing software some kind of criminal offence. And any law that purports to make "malware" illegal is utterly unenforcable - do you really believe that some teenager in Romainia is going to be dragged into court in California for a single offence of this type?
Leaking confidential information has some laws surrounding it, but again the application is unlikely to really occur. If we were serious about this kind of thing it would be a criminal act to use an outsourcing company to process medical records outside of the jurisdiction where disclosing those records is a crime. You see, every day medical records are processed in third-world countries where there are no laws about privacy of those records.
While it might be nice if the FBI investigated every malware incident, it doesn't happen. Nor would you really want it to. And while "malware" isn't really illegal, by the time the FBI gets involved, the will find some law that has been broken if they can arrest someone.
Most people nowadays believe it is quasi-legal to download and "share" music with the rest of the Internet-using world. If they aren't on a dialup connection, they may have downloaded a movie or two as well.
Of course, all of this was illegal. Have these people been arrested? How is "Legal" supposed to be enforced? Trust? Yeah, right. Nobody since about 1830 relies on "trust" to stay in business. And I think that guy went bankrupt like he deserved.
And "trust buy verify" isn't going to work either. No, there isn't any "trust your customers" left anymore - it is easier to take, take, take and take some more. If a company produces a product where it is easy to give a copy to all your friends on the Internet then they deserve to sell one copy in Albania and never any more ever again.
Except relying on what is printed on the card is pointless. Any 16-year-old can purchase a special printer and card stock which is used for drivers's licenses. And then make thousands of dollars making fake licenses for their friends. Fake licenses that are indistinguishable from the real thing has been possible since mid-1990's and most of the states in the US have been faced with either trying to make their licenses somehow use materials that are impossible for the 16-year-old to obtain or to put other stuff on the license that not be easily duplicated.
The magnetic stripe is somewhat harder to duplicate and is much more reliable than anything printed on the face of the license. The 2-dimensional bar code is even harder. Adding any level of encryption to this would make it still harder.
This is all about keeping the 16-year-olds out of the bars and clubs. Again, this is all about entering a regulated zone where state and local regulations (often not laws, but conditions on granting the license to serve liquor) are in force. Don't like it? Don't enter a regulated zone.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but it would offend some people.
Just the word "profiling" is offensive to African-Americans because of their extensive history in being "profiled" in the past. For example, the Florida State Police were prevented from such "profiling" back in the 1980's. They had identified a trend that expensive cars being driven at high speeds by African-Americans had a strong correlation to there being significant quantities of drugs in the car. This was viewed as completely unethical and such profiling was ended.
Regardless of the practicalities of the situation, profiling isn't going to fly in the US.
And, as an aside to the folks saying not all terrorists are Muslims, the problem is today that the overwhelming number of people that have a religious duty to kill Westerners happen to be Muslim. And, the Muslim folks are the ones pushing the envelope, as proven by the imam's little ritual going to Phoenix.
And, if we didn't have to worry about Muslim and their religious duty, we might actually be able to focus on keeping the small number of other wackos off airplanes.
This is not a Christians against, rational people for type argument.
This is 99% of the people don't understand the argument.
Embryonic stem cell treatment needs to be genotype specific. This means that your DNA has to be used to create some stem cells so they can be used to treat you. This implies there is a way to take your DNA and make a new human even if you never let it develop.
Therefore, the foundation of this is human cloning on a fairly reliable scale. Not one or two "experiemnts" a year but every day, all over the world. How long do you think it will be before someone lets one of these develop?
How much would Bill Gates pay for a copy? Do you think everyone on the entire planet will turn that kind of money down? What would Saddam Hussein have paid, when he could? We are talking about creating human cloning for treatment purposes with the potential for the "wink, wink, nod, nod, OF COURSE we would never let one develop..."
Personhood should only be granted to an individual after they can prove that they are sentient. Failure to prove this, such as watching endless Wheel of Fortune reruns, means they are immediately eligible as an organ doner.
OK, the question is "So what?"
Debit card? What the heck are you using something like that for anyway? You give it to a waiter in a resturant and they can take all your money with no recourse.
Credit card? Dispute the charge. Period. No liability. Not even the $50 that they claim might be your maximum liability. I've never heard of anyone losing anything on a credit card dispute when it is filed within the time limit.
Do you think the card has your locker combination at the gym on it? Or maybe it has your gmail password? Maybe it might have your mother's Swiss bank account number? No, it has your account number and damn little else.
And again, with a credit card, who cares? The credit card company doesn't - they expect fraud and refund it.
I seriously doubt there have been any real studies about the "harm" that pornography does to children. But, studies of addiction in adults are common and porn is clearly addictive to some percentage of the population.
The real question is how exactly would you like to answer questions from your children after their viewing a collection of still images from a hardcore porn movie dealing with rape and/or bondage? Is this something that you would be comfortable with? As many younger children do, would you be comfortable with them acting out a scene from such a movie with friends or siblings? Do you believe that sexual relationships based on self-gratification are a positive or negative for the participants?
Also, if you found your 16-year-old son had "discovered" porn and was clearly one of the percentage of the population that responds to this with addictive behavior would you be comfortable with this? Would you deal with this by confinment, behavior modification or counseling? Or nothing at all considering that it was just a period in his life that he would outgrow?
This has nothing to do with morality and religion. It has everything to do with personality and how people interact with others. If, in response to viewing pornography, you treat sexual partners as objects to be used for self-gratification, you aren't behaving as society - any society - would like. If you "use" pornography and self-gratification to such an extent that it overshadows other parts of your life, you have a problem. It is clear from many sources that some percentage of humans do exactly that when exposed to certain types of pornography. Why do we want to expose children to this and then have to deal with the consequences of it?
Please explain in 100 words or less how lots of organic farmers can possibly supply the food requirements for a population of 300,000,000 people.
Like most "sustainable" types, you haven't realized that "sustainable" is a codeword for genocide. Yes, the US could operate with little more than subsistance farming on a grand scale. But, we would first have to reduce the population to where it was in 1850 or so. This would have the minor side effect of virtually eliminating pollution problems and urban sprawl.
That is, it would if you could work up the guts to tell 295,000,000 people that in order for this to be a sustainable country they had to die. Tomorrow.
I believe we will have a popular movement, perhaps religious in its base, that will propose and begin to execute a plan based on exactly this. Imagine if every one of the members of a cult could go a kill 1,000 people. The goal of reducing the population, pollution and most other problems like crime begins to sound not so far off. If you had 300,000 members in the cult your goal would be achievable in a week or less.
Unfortunately, the Saudis will have a large population of folks that have been heavily trained in Islamic ways and Sharia. This does not bode well for their being able to be assimlated into Western socities. It also provides a pool of folks to recruit for jihadi activities.
After all, if "life" is so much better after you die and what you have now absolutely sucks, why not go blow something up?
If the music folks wanted to sue everyone that downloaded music, they would need to file against the entire country. Not going to happen.
Instead, they are being fiendishly clever in suing the people that are the suppliers for the downloaders. If you redistribute, you might get sued. Might. About a 1,000 in 300,000,000 chance, or 1 in 300,000. Most criminals take far worse odds in sticking up the neighborhood liquor store.
Problem is showing a clip from David Letterman isn't an advertisement, it is the content itself. Now, if the video consisted of someone exhorting the viewer to watch David Letterman's show, without showing any David Letterman content, that would be an advertisement. But that isn't what is happening.
The other part of this is that the content is being removed from its context with the advertisements that it was shown with originally. Now, if you had a 5-minute video with some ads in it and some David Letterman content as well, that might not be so bad. At least there would be the possibility that this would increase the value of the advertisements which is the whole reason there is a David Letterman show to begin with.
But instead what is happening is the original advertisements are separated from the content and new, different advertisements are substituted in the web context. So, basically you are taking the "value" of the David Letterman content for free and substituting your own (or someone else's) advertising.
How can they possibly let that stand?
In a lot of Western countries it is assumed that there can be found a jury of people that haven't yet formed an opinion on some matter. Whether it is civil or criminal doesn't really matter, the issue is that whatever it is, they haven't heard about it.
What publishing cell phone camera photos and movies does is virtually eliminate the possiblity of finding anyone that hasn't been exposed to every possible detail, no matter what.
Another aspect of this is when an "eyewitness" account differs from the rather narrow view of the event presented by a camera. Which would be more likely to be believed? I suspect most people under 30 would unquestingly accept the camera view and people over 30 far more likely to give them equal weight if not be more likely to favor the human. Yes, human memory isn't perfect but neither is the interpretation presented by the cameraman.
And, it is very difficult to tell the difference in the "Internet Age" between something faked and the real thing in a photo when the time between it is taken and when it is old news is like 10 minutes. You either publish it immediately or it has zero value - because everyone else already put it on their web pages. The wire services, AP & Reuters, are having some pretty serious issues with this now, and it is likely just the beginning.
Wrong. Google exists to make money from selling ad space. Period. Anything beyond that is an accident.
Specifically, Google does not exist to help users, but to use them as fertile farmland for harvesting profits. If, by some chance your use of Google provides both profit to Google and benefits to you in some way, you have a truely wonderful experience.
Most of the time, however, you click on a link which goes to some automated page that is a front for another Google search and displays some ads. In this case, you lose but everyone else wins.
No, this doesn't belong in the hands of government.
However, most people aren't all that interested in Britney's cooch. How about some standards? So it isn't considered to publish anything that might bring in a nickle regardless of the effect it might have?
Let's assume your mother was in an accident where an extremely gory scene resulted. Of course, anyone with a camera could instantly win $10,000 for handing in a picture of the bloody mess that resulted. And of course, no newspaper, Internet site or TV news program would be without such a key photograph, so it is splashed all over everything in the hopes of dragging a few more dollars out of consumers pockets because of the ads. And, because of where we are with the Internet today, this picture is now permanent and nothing can ever be done to get rid of it.
So, your three year old child, devastated at the loss of their mother, will get to see this picture when they are twelve.
How about some standards and not just "if it bleeds, it leads!" How about thinking about where this is all going and how people, not machines, are going to deal with the fallout of publishing this sort of stuff.
Are laws the answer? Hell no! But the publishers need to exercise some self control, and since in the Internet Age every man is a publisher, that means we all need to use some common sense.
I used to work for NavTeq (or NavTech). They were working on the same kind of project and it is probably live now. You can automate the collection of street-level data for driving directions with such a van, DGPS and some software to recognize street signs, house addresses and the like.
This beats the pants off of having two people driving around and one taking notes while the other drives the car.
And it is light-years ahead of the previous technique of digitizing aerial photographs and trying to figure out the one-way streets later.
No, they aren't collecting photographic data for display on the web. Yes, they are going to cover every single street in the US. No, they probably aren't going to do Canada because the Canadian government has a copyright on the street maps and defends it vigorously.
of glorifying such stunts and of the FBI refusing to even consider something for which there isn't at least $25,000 worth of damages.
Glorifying such fool pranks I would consider the same as glorifying cutting brake lines on school buses. Really quite funny when the bus driver tries to stop. How could it possibly hurt anyone because any bus driver is going to notice what is wrong long before the first child sets foot on the bus. Right. Keep thinking that way. Of course, what these folks did was just for fun and it didn't really hurt anyone, now did it?
The FBI putting a dollar floor on damages ensures that nothing is ever done when these kids do something minor. Rather than someone identifying them and giving them a warning nothing happens. When you were 16 if you were never, ever caught shoplifting would your escapades advance to other, higher-price objects? Of course. Which is exactly what is happening here.
ISPs refuse to identify or even forward communication from people complaining about attacks. So your only choices are to either wait for $25,000 in damages to bring in the FBI (who is the only possible law enforcement agency with jursidiction) or you decide to spend lots of your own money to file suit against some 16 year olds to "teach them a lesson". Of course, you end up with the "lesson" because they will be laughing at you when you find out you can't sue a kid in Romainia.
Build yourself a copy of the radio that was on the Titanic. With careful construction, you too can have a spark-gap transmitter that will block all communication on all frequencies, well into UHF and probably prevent Bluetooth and WiFi as well.
No, there isn't a good way to shape the field such that it doesn't interfere with your neighbors. However, it will likely have no effect on cable TV while wiping out DirecTV and Dish Network. The cable company will be your friend. They might even pay you to run such a device.
Essentially all you need is a rectifier, a coil, an antenna and something to break the circuit. An old Ford distributor using the points would work and then you wouldn't have to key it by hand. Old-style spark-gap transmitters were completely free of tubes, transistors or integrated circuits so they are also immune to EMP effects.
Just think of it as your own experimental ultra-wide broadband transmitter.
Agreed that not all extremists would be found by some kind of profiling. Certainly just going after Middle Eastern looking men would be foolish.
However, it would be doing something. Today, we are doing nothing at all except making air travel more difficult for everyone. It would be trivial to circumvent the TSA folks to bring banned items onto a plane. Carbon-fiber knives are not caught by the TSA. Neither is anything that is in a "shielding" container. So, you put your grenade in a can.
We pretty much know that El Al style passenger screening isn't going to fly in the US. Too many people and nobody wants a 2-4 hour delay before boarding. So what are we going to do? Many have proposed just letting it drop and considering the next 9/11 bunch of casualties to be "acceptable", like credit card companies consider some level of fraud to be "acceptable". Realistically, there are a few options. TSA feel-good security is going to fall apart at some point when enough people realize it is just a nusiance and isn't real "security" at all.
So, do we focus our attention and maybe still let 10% of potential terrorists get through while blocking 90%, or do we do nothing and just write off 2-3,000 people every few years?
Showing any sign that in a guerilla fight that the West will cower in fear under Islamic militants is an incredibly stupid idea. They will of course take this to mean that they can spread their ways further and faster.
Last year, schoolgirls were beheaded in Indonesia as "trophies" for Ramadan. Nobody has been arrested, tried or punished in any manner. Indonesia has a majority Muslim population. How long before such trophies are taken in London or Melbourne? How about New York or Detroit?
If we let these people believe they can win in the Middle East, they will. In the face of a pullout Iraq (or at least a good portion of it) will certainly be annexed by Iran. Is this a good thing?
Better think about converting. The choice is coming and it will be conversion or death.
Uhhh, no.
Crater impacts in millions of years:
Yucatan - 65,000,000
Nordlingen, Germany - 5,000,000
Barringer, Arizona - 0.05
Yeah, there are a bunch of others out there but the spread is a lot more than you seem to think.
OK, so all IP is free for use. Why would anyone spend the resources (hours, dollars, whatever) to come up with something new knowing that anyone else can take their design (IP) and make the product somewhere else?
Today, mostly the only thing of value is the research or knowledge behind the product. If you can bypass that and steal the design or knowledge or process then you can make the product in parallel with the original designer. Of course, since it cost nothing to develop the design or process then you can sell it much, much cheaper. In any reasonable economy, the first designer loses everything - they are selling the same product for 10x the cost.
So, in your view pretty much the economic foundation of the Western world is going to come crashing down? This is about the only result I can see of people spending R&D dollars without any hope of recouping them - they will stop spending that money. Nobody will invest in a startup where the unlimited piracy of the IP that they are investing in is invitable.
So, do you have any ideas on how one "prepares" for this? Do we hope that we elect wise leaders that just take over the idea of funding R&D in the future with tax money? Or, are we all just working for the State with the knowledge that they are going to take care of us?
Y2K was two things: an awful lot of hype from doomsayers that thought elevator controllers knew what year it was, and a disaster for most businesses that had been around since 1980.
Let's see here, in 1980 your average company put everything on 100MB reels of tape. A lot of companies entire "database" was on tape and disk was used for holding transactions against the tape. This had a huge impact on how things were done and had an effect on how records were arranged and sized. It is important to keep this in mind because the difference between a 2-digit year and a 4-digit year in a record could mean the difference between the "master tape" being one reel or two. Operationally, this made a huge difference. And so, everyone in programming in 1980 knew they were making a tradeoff for the next 20 years but did it anyway. So, 2-digit years were in everything.
Now, your average company isn't interested in spending a lot of money until the last possible second. So, when the subject of "the year 2000" came up in 1992 everyone said that they knew about it but it wasn't necessary to fix the problem yet. And so, the fix was postponed until later.
Later meant 1999 and suddenly there were no staff members that had six months to do nothing but change 2 digit years into 4 digit years. Hence lots and lots of consultants got brought in and millions upon millions of dollars were spent.
Yes, nothing happened on January 1st. Except if you had a credit card that expired in 02 it didn't work very well in March of 1999. Lots of little stories like that. Yes, it was fixed but don't think for a minute that there wasn't a huge problem. Mostly of our own making.
No, nobody died because a computer crashed. However, if some important projects had failed or been really, really late government checks would have ground to a halt by February or March of 2000. And then the riots would have started.
The problem is that we have this wonderful idea that there should be a "social safety net" whereby people can choose to be supported by taxpayers so they can spend all their time in a stupor.
If the people that chose this life were left to fend for themselves and starve, that would be fine with me. Telling me that I need to pay to feed, clothe, house and buy drugs for these people is a bit much, don't you think?
Unfortunately, I am very much in the minority. You can retire from life in the US and live off welfare, SSI and other state-funded programs.
Law enforcement? How? What law might you be considering?
"Malware" isn't illegal. I know of no reasonable law that defines what this might be. Certainly lots of people are inconvenienced by it, but that is hardly justification for making writing software some kind of criminal offence. And any law that purports to make "malware" illegal is utterly unenforcable - do you really believe that some teenager in Romainia is going to be dragged into court in California for a single offence of this type?
Leaking confidential information has some laws surrounding it, but again the application is unlikely to really occur. If we were serious about this kind of thing it would be a criminal act to use an outsourcing company to process medical records outside of the jurisdiction where disclosing those records is a crime. You see, every day medical records are processed in third-world countries where there are no laws about privacy of those records.
While it might be nice if the FBI investigated every malware incident, it doesn't happen. Nor would you really want it to. And while "malware" isn't really illegal, by the time the FBI gets involved, the will find some law that has been broken if they can arrest someone.
Problem is who gets to define what "legal" is?
Most people nowadays believe it is quasi-legal to download and "share" music with the rest of the Internet-using world. If they aren't on a dialup connection, they may have downloaded a movie or two as well.
Of course, all of this was illegal. Have these people been arrested? How is "Legal" supposed to be enforced? Trust? Yeah, right. Nobody since about 1830 relies on "trust" to stay in business. And I think that guy went bankrupt like he deserved.
And "trust buy verify" isn't going to work either. No, there isn't any "trust your customers" left anymore - it is easier to take, take, take and take some more. If a company produces a product where it is easy to give a copy to all your friends on the Internet then they deserve to sell one copy in Albania and never any more ever again.
Except relying on what is printed on the card is pointless. Any 16-year-old can purchase a special printer and card stock which is used for drivers's licenses. And then make thousands of dollars making fake licenses for their friends. Fake licenses that are indistinguishable from the real thing has been possible since mid-1990's and most of the states in the US have been faced with either trying to make their licenses somehow use materials that are impossible for the 16-year-old to obtain or to put other stuff on the license that not be easily duplicated.
The magnetic stripe is somewhat harder to duplicate and is much more reliable than anything printed on the face of the license. The 2-dimensional bar code is even harder. Adding any level of encryption to this would make it still harder.
This is all about keeping the 16-year-olds out of the bars and clubs. Again, this is all about entering a regulated zone where state and local regulations (often not laws, but conditions on granting the license to serve liquor) are in force. Don't like it? Don't enter a regulated zone.