The large-print bandwidth you advertise for a service must be a guaranteed minimum. Obviously the ISP can't guarantee that a website run from behind a 2400-baud modem will keep up, but the ISP itself must never throttle any traffic below that limit without explicit consent from the end user. Traffic management may allow some traffic to go faster, and such provisions may be guaranteed and advertised as such, but they cannot be more conspicuous than the absolute minimum.
What you are asking for is dedicated bandwidth rather than bursting. Sorry, it isn't going to happen.
The Internet works today for the average consumer because access is sold on a bursting basis. You get up to some upper limit depending on what is available at the time. You might get really fast access one minute and really slow access the next all depending on the shared load of the system.
For dedicated bandwidth to work there would have to be sufficient capacity to deal with what is guaranteed from end to end. Right now for most people that is probably around 100Kbps when 20Mbps is being advertised as a bursting speed. The network capacity doesn't exist and the way it is connected in a star configuration to neighborhood nodes (cable) and DSLAMs (DSL) there is utterly no possibility of it working the way you would like. The physical link from the neighborhood node or DSLAM to the head end is the limiting factor.
Could we have dedicated bandwidth? Sure. You would first need to run an independent connection (probably fiber) from the head end to each house individually. You want 20Mbit dedicated? Fine, you pay some per-foot charge to run the fiber. Done in bulk it probably wouldn't be more than $1 a foot even including digging up streets and such. Your bill would reflect this, probably amoritized over 10 years or so with a 10 year contract to back it up. And this is exclusive of the bandwidth/access charges there would be on top of that. These days a T1 goes for around $400 a month and a good portion of that is 1.5Mbit dedicated access charge. This should put things in perspective.
You see, the star configuration enabled them to be really, really cheap about putting the system together. With DSL the drops were already in place as they were (pretty much) with cable. All they needed to do for cable was run a single fiber connection to the neighborhood node and pay for that to service 1000 customers from that node. The fact that the fiber connection to the node could handle maybe 500Mbit meant that all services digital could be handled easily - but if you divide a fully maxed out 1Gbps fiber by 1000 you have only 1Mbps per home. Subtract out overhead for the VOIP service and cable TV that is sharing the same fiber and you are only going to have maybe 100Kbps left per home. This works fine today because with a bursting model and current usage of web surfing and email very few are even approaching using everything that is available.
Of course, if IPTV instead of broadcast became the norm the entire system would collapse. But the costs of building the system the other way are just so excessive that nobody is going to do it. FIOS is built in a star pattern also you can be assured and they are selling bursting speeds not dedicated. They might be able to deliver a bit more - like running two 1GBps fibers to each node - but it is still nowhere near enough to offer dedicated bandwidth to each and every customer.
Maybe some people don't understand this, but in general the pipeline from an ISP to the rest of the world just isn't big enough to handle user traffic to a lot of very popular sites. Take CNN for example. When you type in www.cnn.com what do you think happens? Do think your request goes to a server owned by CNN in Atlanta?
Well, if you did you would be wrong. It goes to a server probably in the same building as your ISP (if it is big enough) that is owned by Akami. See, if you have enough traffic it is almost cheaper to pay Akami to cache the content on its servers which are co-located in pretty much every major ISP's facility. If you want high speed access to your content for all users then absolutely you want that content coming from a locally caching server.
Now, if you don't have a lot of money then Akami's fees are way out of line for you. And so you get way, way slower performance on requests.
See, pay-for-performance is here already and has been for a really long time.
For aircraft is isn't a big deal to have to cope with maybe two generations of four different airlines black boxes. Nobody is looking at the data in the field - they send the box back to the lab. Needing eight or even sixteen different interfaces to connect to a digital system is no big deal.
Needing to establish a regulatory authority with committees and the like for black boxes is absurd. You don't think that would be required? Ha. The FAA has their interested, the manufacturers theirs and let us not forget the NTSB. Then there are the requirements of the military - they are a significant purchasor of civilian aircraft as well and have their own accident investigation division.
With cars if black box technology ever made any inroads into accident investigation there might be a need for a standardized interface to the box. However, for the most part it is no mystery what happens in a car crash and there is no real need to look at any sort of "black box" data. Now if the car was equipped with in-car video to record what the driver and passengers were doing constantly it might be a lot more interesting - because a lot of crashes involve distractions to the driver. So then everyone could see that the driver was fussing with the radio or texting just before the accident.
With aircraft having information about the engines might be the most important information available. With cars having the driver monitored would certainly be far more valuable. So who's going to buy a car with a camera pointed at the driver? Right. Nobody. Ever. I don't see any sort of black-box data being all that useful for car accidents.
It might have something to do with the the fact that the US has virtually no restriction on movement or where you can live. This brings people with little motivation in close proximity with highly motivated people that are successful. In a lot of other places in the world there are severe restrictions on this kind of mixing, either legally or simply done through social customs.
The end result is in the US there are a lot of people that would like to have a nice car, nice house, fine clothes and such but simply can't drag themselves to do more than the bare minimum at a job where they don't have to think. Envy is the first result and the second is thinking that these people with all the stuff they want aren't really any different, just luckier. They got all the good breaks in life.
Obviously, the right think to do then is either take some of the good stuff that they clearly deserve - if only these other people hadn't gotten there first, or to engage in some risky scheme because obviously the only difference is luck.
This kind of thinking is extremely common but seems to really take root in the US more than other places.
So you have people responding to the Nigerian scams because who knows, it might be true. You have people seeing the lifestyle of drug dealers and decide since the guy they knew didn't get busted they probably won't either. Or that it is OK to go down the street and rob someone's house because they don't deserve all that stuff anymore than they themselves do. Of course, the end result is predictable.
Unfortunately, that isn't how this has worked out historically. Non-violent offenders are not generally housed today with violent offenders anyway, so this would have no effect. What is highly likely is that problem prisoners that are difficult to manage within a prison environment get pushed out the door with monitoring so they are no longer a problem.
The immediate effect is that we are once again pushing mentally disturbed folks out on the street. In the 1970s we closed the hospitals and pushed the people that were confined there out. They were supposed to go to halfway houses and residential treatment centers. But in large measure they walked away from those and became the first wave of homeless. A lot of them ended up in prison, where today they get little or no treatment and are very difficult to manage in a prison environment.
This would be an absolutely wonderful outcome for all of those prison wardens who wake up every day wondering what they are going to do. They do not have the staff to control these people and they don't have the tools to do it either. So of course you have all sorts of unmanageable behavior - everything from inmates peeing in the hallway to attacking each other. Yes, wonderful idea to push them back out onto the streets with some tracking so they can easily be found. Home? Well, that might be a problem as these folks don't have homes. Or a family that can manage them.
The mistake was dumping these people out of the hospitals where they had the staff and tools to manage these people. It was viewed as cruel and inhumane to keep them locked up. A bunch of made-for-TV movies exploited the concept of nice people locked away for no reason at all. There was this small side effect - the state hospitals cost a fortune to run and by closing them the states saved all this money. Of course it was an attractive idea to release these people and probably as many as 50% of them did OK.
We are still reeling from the impact of the other 50%. And it continues on today.
Let's say you have a brother that is "developmentally challenged" and has violent temper tantrums. A six year-old in a man's body with all of the self-control and judgement of a six year-old. You might try caring for him in your house but after a few violent incidents it quickly becomes either a lifelong committment without including the rest of the family or pushing the brother into a home of some sort. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to foot the bill (which is pretty darn high) almost nobody will take someone like that. There are no more treatment facilities. There are no more hospitals or "sanitariums". What exactly do you do?
For far too many of these types of people there is the "Fourth and Main" approach which is only slightly different than letting the undesired and unwanted dog out on at the rest stop and driving away. It quickly becomes someone else's problem and the only folks around with any ability to do anything are the police. Trust me, they don't want it. But all it takes is one violent outburst in public and the police have little choice in the matter. As does the judge. So it becomes a Department of Corrections problem. And this is where a good part of the problem in prisons can be pointed at.
So of course they want to push the problem somewhere else - back on the street. Just like in the 1970s.
First we have to ask ourselves, how many people can our planet sustain? 10 billion? 15 billion?
Realize that if the idiots have their way the right answer is 250 million. If you want to lock down the Earth and treat it as a closed system, this is probably a reasonable limit.
The first step is to make sure the idiots do not succeed. Probably part A of that plan is making sure that space exploration isn't pushed aside for "solving Earthbound problems first" because that is the same as "never".
NASA can have all the plans they want, but the current administration seems to be focused on cutting them off at the knees. Private companies are fine and a welcome addition - as long as FAA and EPA are on board with the plan. Currently you need a license to launch just about anything bigger than a model with an Estes engine and these agencies are not known for generosity or understanding. It is also my understanding that licenses are exceedingly tough to get and a good part of the reason we haven't seen private companies launching stuff into orbit from the US.
How about a Mexican launch facility? Launching out over the Gulf? Ben Bova wrote a number of books describing a laser launching facility just over the border in different parts of Mexico - partly because I think he understands the licensing problems. The question is, what would Mexico say and how much cash would it take to make them change their mind?
I would think we could have nearly weekly launches of LEO satellites and work up to geosynchrous. There is plenty of money to be had just launching satellites and if it could be done cheap enough with low enough cost it would be a way to get things rolling.
Well, today there are many cases in law where this is decided quite differently.
If I pay someone to kill you I can be charged with murder if they succeed. Even if they fail, I can be charged with attempted murder.
Similarly, if you pay someone to deliver to you a nice young girl for whatever purposes you might have with her, you can be charged with kidnapping even though you had no part in the abduction.
I believe there are many similar situations that you are ignoring.
From my understanding, embryonic stem cell treatments are going to be genotype specific. This means that you need a tissue match in order to make use of such a treatment, i.e., if not your stem cells then someone who is very close genetically.
So what? Well, if you want production-line embryonic stem cell treatments then you are going to need a way to produce an embryo with the same DNA as the patient you are treating. Not impossible today but moderately difficult. It also opens the door to something that we have so far managed to avoid and has all sorts of nasty side issues - human cloning. You see, if you can manufacture embryonic stem cells to order, then you can manufacture embryos to order as well. And that means you have successful, viable human cloning.
Do we really honestly want to go down that road? Do we need an everlasting supply of Bill Gateses? Because I can assure you that if the process is there and it works some ultra-rich people are going to take advantage of it. Maybe not Bill G., but how about Kim Jong Il?
Yes, I think it is probably a good question about when exactly it is reasonably to kill off a developing (potential) human life. We had a judicially established value (24 weeks) for a while but it is way, way too far along for current medical techniques. At conception turns the switch off on nearly all reasonable and reliable birth control methods. We need something that people can at least agree on even if it isn't a perfect answer.
But embryonic stem cell treatments are not dependent on this decision. I'd say anything that requires human cloning to be able to be effectively used needs to have the human cloning issue decided long before we should be going down the road of even researching embryonic stem cell treatments.
"How can a 10 year old process rape, murder, etc?"
Gross! I looked through a pornography book at seven, and I just thought it was nasty at the time. People (yes, kids) aren't going to go insane so easily. Ugh.
I suggest that you are taking an extremely sexist, male-centric view of rape. I'd say a 10 year-old girl that fully understands the action in a rape video is going to have nightmares for a while. Possibly for the rest of her life and make a normal sexual relationship just about impossible.
This is obviously a recursive transformation that can be applied as many times as necessary to effectively lose the reader in the dust. Or should that be loose. Or maybe loooooooooose.
In some cases you can be sure that the writings of "experts" and "authorities" are very likely to be untrue.
This is after all the foundation of the concept of Wikipedia - there are no experts and everyone's opinion is equally valid on everything. In theory, your writings on high energy particle physics would be just as valid as mine on the sex lives of prehistoric men. That someone who has studied these matters all their lives might not agree with us is immaterial - the Wiki philosophy is that there are no experts, only different and yet equally valid opinions.
This does mean that an article about spontanous generation would have a place in Wikipedia, especially considering there are plenty of references (off net) to cite.
Well, that is after all the intent of Wikipedia, isn't it? Eliminating the idea of there being one "truth" apart from the opinion of the masses?
While this might have some noble intent, you can't very well be surprised when those in authority reject the entire concept. The idea that people might actually take a crowdsourced knowledgebase and present it as "truth" in matters of law is laughable because this use is diametrically opposed to the intent of the founders and maintainers of Wikipedia. The very idea that there might be an "expert" in the world that knows more or has a firmer grasp of anything compared to the knowledge of the great unwashed masses is abhorrent to the concept of Wikipedia.
What this means is that Wikipedia is "The People's Encyclopedia", created by "the people" for "the people." Fine, as long as its use is confined to "the people" it is probably suitable. But it does mean that using it as a reference in school, at law, science, government or any place where people actually believe in the concept of "truth" apart from the knowledge of crowds is forbidden.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Law and government are very interested in "truth" as a concept and it is presupposed that there are in fact experts that know what this truth is. Wikipedia is built on the idea that there is no one truth at all and that all truths are equal. Hence the continual editing of articles because over time what is considered to be the truth changes with the whim of the crowd.
If we want to treat the Earth as a closed system, we need to step up to the plate about population problems. The first step is probably to get the population down below 500 million, probably more like 200 million people in as short a time as possible. This could be done with some untreated and fatal disease, war or just encouraging people to volunteer. The best course of action is probably to actively make things as awful as possible to life on the planet until people decide to (a) not have children and (b) kill themselves.
We are just at the beginning of this "Hell on Earth" campaign, but the good news is that the suicide rate is up. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is that in the face of adversity much of the third world response by having more children. This may not be working out as well as was originally intended.
As for the resource consumption levels in the West, we have pretty much given up on the idea of obtaining resources from anywhere else off-planet as being too expensive and too risky. The environmental movement has firmly discounted any possible benefits to off-planet exploration ensuring that the trap is sealed. If they cannot convince (by pestilence, war or mass suicide) the world that the population level is unsustainable while having successfully convinced people that stagnation on Earth is the only solution the human race is doomed. Possibly within 50 to 100 years.
Remember that every time you use the word "sustainable" you are referencing an environment where there are 200 million people on the planet living at level of around 1750 or so. Anything beyond that is "unsustainable" over a long term.
I'm not sure, but we may have passed the turning point for the West doing any off-planet anything. The Chinese might have a chance still as their form of government isn't really bothered about environmentists and junk-science believers. Likely as not, the first base on the moon will have an unpronouceable Chinese name.
Like nearly all corporations today, 99% of the stock is in either the current board of directors or institutional hands. What little is out there in private hands is meaningless. Not sure when this trend started, but every IPO I have ever heard of is all about selling to institutional investors such as pension and mutual funds.
If you are using a Blackberry without a corporate email connection, by all means drop it. However, be aware that the only customers RIM cares a hoot about are the corporate clients that simply mandate what their employees will be using and pass out the phones by the hundreds.
For example, I know the FBI is 100% Blackberry. Every agent, office worker, whatever, down to the level of janitorial supervisors. How many phones do you think that is? 10,000? 20,000? Virtually the entire Fortune 500 are going to be 100% Blackberry so you can multiply that by 500 and start to get an idea of who exactly RIM cares about. Yes, that is at least 10 million phones. The individual users are a rounding error.
Now, when upper management goes to India for a business meeting with the folks they outsourced the entire IT department to and they are told by the corporate security folks they have to leave their phones at home that might actually cause a stir. Now this would be blatently untrue - that isn't the sort of connection that the Indian government could monitor, but it would be a great scare tactic. After a couple of people hear "the Indian government is listening in" it might not take much to switch the entire company to Blackjack phones or something else like that. Now that RIM would notice.
The only people this would affect are those with email accounts accessed through their phone carrier. RIM is fully in control of the encryption there. Corporate systems using their own Blackberry server can't be affected because RIM isn't in control of the encryption at all.
What is a review that isn't "fake" or paid for? Where do you find such a thing? Certainly not on the Internet.
There are two reasons for anyone to write something: they personally feel so strongly that they have to tell other people and they are getting paid to do it. The former is pretty much restricted to people with negative comments. So I guess that means any review that is positive is paid for.
Similarly, negative reviews about your competition are an extremely powerful tool if you assume that people are still reading fake, misleading reviews about anything. So that means a good portion of the negative reviews can be assumed to be put their by people trying to make their competition look bad.
So why would anyone believe a review on the Internet? Near as I can tell they are all fake or paid for.
China has a culture that is thousands of years old and has survives cultural attacks throughout that time. China is currently the economic superior of every other nation on Earth. China has almost more people than the rest of the planet put together.
Now who's culture do you think is going to be dominant?
I'd plan on having your children learn Chinese like in the early 20th Century technical people learned German because there was so much coming out from Germany that you needed to read the original. Chinese will likely be the new dominant language that everyone will have to conform to.
Inefficient? Sure. But that doesn't really matter because these things are not decided by logic and reason. They are decided based on economics and military. China is already there economically, and it may not matter who has the biggest army if bigger armies are controlled by people that believe using the army is wrong.
Once it is out there, the free version will pretty much take over. There are so few people that are interested in paying - even if it means better quality - that it is best to just think about moving on.
Fighting the pirates is pointless. They have access to better tools for promotion than legitimate small businesses do, so the free version is going to almost always come up first on searches. It will be linked to by every hacker/wares forum that exists. Anyone asking "where can I get something that does X" will be responded to with a link to the pirate version, or the words "use the google".
Once our consumer software got hit by thieves we saw retail sales drop sharply. In this case "thieves" is the only think to call people that purchase the software with stolen credit cards so it can be posted on free download sites.
Face it, people want stuff for free and there are plenty of people out there that agree with that mindset. All software should be free and we should all be supported by the government so we don't have to beg for money or work as slaves. Food should be free. Houses should be free - what possible right does someone have to deny people a place to live?
If you don't think piracy is political, you haven't thought about it long enough.
If you are resisting arrest they can pretty much use as much force as needed to subdue you. This means as much force as you are using plus a wee bit more. Rodney King found out exactly how much "a wee bit more" is in the eyes of some officers and the trial of the officers was OK with that definition. The conviction occurred only because Rodney was African American and the entire justice system can be perverted in the name of protecting a protected class. You do know that the entire concept of "double jeopardy" was thrown out, don't you? The way it works today they can just keep trying you until a conviction is scored.
They also do not use the cell phone radio all the time but check in perhaps once an hour to upload accumulated data. Battery requirements are minimal, on the order of a standard 9V battery being good for several weeks.
If the police are interested, they will certainly set up their own video surveillance on your property. From a willing neighbor or from a point that you do not control, such as a utility easement. If you are believed to be worth watching, you will be watched.
They do not need a warrant to get a neighbor to let them camp out and set up cameras to watch you. So unless you have something akin to an Australian sheep station for property, you don't have any privacy to commit crimes, as much as you would like to.
What do you think you would detect? The sort of tracking device that simply records in flash memory locations doesn't transmit anything at all. And the cell modem ones only transmit periodically. You might have to wait for a long, long time before it fired up the radio.
The only thing you can count on is that these devices need to have a fairly clear view of the sky to be able to receive GPS signals. Putting on way under the car isn't going to work. Putting one in the engine compartment isn't going to work either. Wheelwells and bumpers are the usual suggested locations.
There are two kinds: recording and cell modem. The recording ones have no connection to the outside world other than receiving GPS signals. The cell modem ones call in periodically (adjustable? I don't know.) to upload information. Both are relatively cheap, $500 or less.
Your best bet would be to have something that blotted out GPS reception. Yes, GPS jammers are sold but are likely illegal to possess. There isn't anything else to do with a recording type tracking device. You might be able to jam the cell modem connection on one that reports in every so often, but that would mean disabling cell phones in the area of your car, probably for hundreds of feet. Again, a jammer like that is easy to get but illegal to possess.
Personally, I think you are much better off cutting off the handle of a broom, painting it black and running around the shopping mall going "Bang-Bang". Whatever you might have done that you were worried about you will likely just get a nice stay in the nearest head-ward instead. Some of them are much nicer than jail and co-ed as an added benefit.
I don't believe there is any implication of "surveillance" in the 4th Amendment where the matter of a search warrant comes up. Nowhere else in police procedure is a "warrant" needed except in some cases an arrest warrant. Certainly police surveillance does not require any sort of a warrant.
Search warrants are needed for wiretapping but broad exceptions are made for connecting what is commonly known as a pen register or for collecting billing records.
In order to get a search warrant probable cause is needed, which pretty much means that there is ample reason to believe a crime has been committed. Having someone followed by the police - with or without technological assistance - doesn't require a warrant, doesn't require probable cause and often the target of such surveillance isn't suspected of having committed a crime but is instead leading the police to the location of someone that is.
There are plenty of other scenarios where there is no probable cause to get a search warrant for someone being watched, followed or tracked. While it might be nice to think of situations where merely asking for a warrant would result in getting permission for the police to search someone's home it doesn't work this way at all. Without probable cause - with the definition is pretty much left up to the judge - no warrant. And in some cases the bar for a search warrant is extremely high, so high that the police will resort to all sorts of things to avoid having to get a search warrant. Often asking the suspect for permission with the attached threat of "and don't make me get a warrant" works fine.
There is a company that goes to the same conferences we do... BackBone Security. The sell products that detect steganography. The commercial and freeware products today do most certainly leave traces. Now, if the message encoded into a photograph or executable file is encrypted these tools will not be able to tell you want the original message was, but will certainly tell you there is something there.
Then it is just a matter of extracting the message and seeing what you can do with it, possibly using a Rainbow table system to decrypt it.
What this does is make the likelyhood of decrypting the message even less probable. But as has been pointed out, if you can be traced as the source or recipient of a message fragment that may be all that is required. Certainly in the US something more might be needed, unless it related to child porn, marijuana, meth, terrorism, shoplifting, plural marriage or... well, crime. Then it would be convincing evidence.
You just need to have the machine provide the proper reference to someone that can fix it. Imagine if millions of computers all over the world suddenly cried out for Jacob's Computer Consulting with his worldwide army of computer-fixers.
Wouldn't you like to be Jacob? Probably has the apartment penthouse next to the folks running the botnet in St. Petersburg or Bucharest.
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The large-print bandwidth you advertise for a service must be a guaranteed minimum. Obviously the ISP can't guarantee that a website run from behind a 2400-baud modem will keep up, but the ISP itself must never throttle any traffic below that limit without explicit consent from the end user. Traffic management may allow some traffic to go faster, and such provisions may be guaranteed and advertised as such, but they cannot be more conspicuous than the absolute minimum.
What you are asking for is dedicated bandwidth rather than bursting. Sorry, it isn't going to happen.
The Internet works today for the average consumer because access is sold on a bursting basis. You get up to some upper limit depending on what is available at the time. You might get really fast access one minute and really slow access the next all depending on the shared load of the system.
For dedicated bandwidth to work there would have to be sufficient capacity to deal with what is guaranteed from end to end. Right now for most people that is probably around 100Kbps when 20Mbps is being advertised as a bursting speed. The network capacity doesn't exist and the way it is connected in a star configuration to neighborhood nodes (cable) and DSLAMs (DSL) there is utterly no possibility of it working the way you would like. The physical link from the neighborhood node or DSLAM to the head end is the limiting factor.
Could we have dedicated bandwidth? Sure. You would first need to run an independent connection (probably fiber) from the head end to each house individually. You want 20Mbit dedicated? Fine, you pay some per-foot charge to run the fiber. Done in bulk it probably wouldn't be more than $1 a foot even including digging up streets and such. Your bill would reflect this, probably amoritized over 10 years or so with a 10 year contract to back it up. And this is exclusive of the bandwidth/access charges there would be on top of that. These days a T1 goes for around $400 a month and a good portion of that is 1.5Mbit dedicated access charge. This should put things in perspective.
You see, the star configuration enabled them to be really, really cheap about putting the system together. With DSL the drops were already in place as they were (pretty much) with cable. All they needed to do for cable was run a single fiber connection to the neighborhood node and pay for that to service 1000 customers from that node. The fact that the fiber connection to the node could handle maybe 500Mbit meant that all services digital could be handled easily - but if you divide a fully maxed out 1Gbps fiber by 1000 you have only 1Mbps per home. Subtract out overhead for the VOIP service and cable TV that is sharing the same fiber and you are only going to have maybe 100Kbps left per home. This works fine today because with a bursting model and current usage of web surfing and email very few are even approaching using everything that is available.
Of course, if IPTV instead of broadcast became the norm the entire system would collapse. But the costs of building the system the other way are just so excessive that nobody is going to do it. FIOS is built in a star pattern also you can be assured and they are selling bursting speeds not dedicated. They might be able to deliver a bit more - like running two 1GBps fibers to each node - but it is still nowhere near enough to offer dedicated bandwidth to each and every customer.
Maybe some people don't understand this, but in general the pipeline from an ISP to the rest of the world just isn't big enough to handle user traffic to a lot of very popular sites. Take CNN for example. When you type in www.cnn.com what do you think happens? Do think your request goes to a server owned by CNN in Atlanta?
Well, if you did you would be wrong. It goes to a server probably in the same building as your ISP (if it is big enough) that is owned by Akami. See, if you have enough traffic it is almost cheaper to pay Akami to cache the content on its servers which are co-located in pretty much every major ISP's facility. If you want high speed access to your content for all users then absolutely you want that content coming from a locally caching server.
Now, if you don't have a lot of money then Akami's fees are way out of line for you. And so you get way, way slower performance on requests.
See, pay-for-performance is here already and has been for a really long time.
For aircraft is isn't a big deal to have to cope with maybe two generations of four different airlines black boxes. Nobody is looking at the data in the field - they send the box back to the lab. Needing eight or even sixteen different interfaces to connect to a digital system is no big deal.
Needing to establish a regulatory authority with committees and the like for black boxes is absurd. You don't think that would be required? Ha. The FAA has their interested, the manufacturers theirs and let us not forget the NTSB. Then there are the requirements of the military - they are a significant purchasor of civilian aircraft as well and have their own accident investigation division.
With cars if black box technology ever made any inroads into accident investigation there might be a need for a standardized interface to the box. However, for the most part it is no mystery what happens in a car crash and there is no real need to look at any sort of "black box" data. Now if the car was equipped with in-car video to record what the driver and passengers were doing constantly it might be a lot more interesting - because a lot of crashes involve distractions to the driver. So then everyone could see that the driver was fussing with the radio or texting just before the accident.
With aircraft having information about the engines might be the most important information available. With cars having the driver monitored would certainly be far more valuable. So who's going to buy a car with a camera pointed at the driver? Right. Nobody. Ever. I don't see any sort of black-box data being all that useful for car accidents.
It might have something to do with the the fact that the US has virtually no restriction on movement or where you can live. This brings people with little motivation in close proximity with highly motivated people that are successful. In a lot of other places in the world there are severe restrictions on this kind of mixing, either legally or simply done through social customs.
The end result is in the US there are a lot of people that would like to have a nice car, nice house, fine clothes and such but simply can't drag themselves to do more than the bare minimum at a job where they don't have to think. Envy is the first result and the second is thinking that these people with all the stuff they want aren't really any different, just luckier. They got all the good breaks in life.
Obviously, the right think to do then is either take some of the good stuff that they clearly deserve - if only these other people hadn't gotten there first, or to engage in some risky scheme because obviously the only difference is luck.
This kind of thinking is extremely common but seems to really take root in the US more than other places.
So you have people responding to the Nigerian scams because who knows, it might be true. You have people seeing the lifestyle of drug dealers and decide since the guy they knew didn't get busted they probably won't either. Or that it is OK to go down the street and rob someone's house because they don't deserve all that stuff anymore than they themselves do. Of course, the end result is predictable.
Unfortunately, that isn't how this has worked out historically. Non-violent offenders are not generally housed today with violent offenders anyway, so this would have no effect. What is highly likely is that problem prisoners that are difficult to manage within a prison environment get pushed out the door with monitoring so they are no longer a problem.
The immediate effect is that we are once again pushing mentally disturbed folks out on the street. In the 1970s we closed the hospitals and pushed the people that were confined there out. They were supposed to go to halfway houses and residential treatment centers. But in large measure they walked away from those and became the first wave of homeless. A lot of them ended up in prison, where today they get little or no treatment and are very difficult to manage in a prison environment.
This would be an absolutely wonderful outcome for all of those prison wardens who wake up every day wondering what they are going to do. They do not have the staff to control these people and they don't have the tools to do it either. So of course you have all sorts of unmanageable behavior - everything from inmates peeing in the hallway to attacking each other. Yes, wonderful idea to push them back out onto the streets with some tracking so they can easily be found. Home? Well, that might be a problem as these folks don't have homes. Or a family that can manage them.
The mistake was dumping these people out of the hospitals where they had the staff and tools to manage these people. It was viewed as cruel and inhumane to keep them locked up. A bunch of made-for-TV movies exploited the concept of nice people locked away for no reason at all. There was this small side effect - the state hospitals cost a fortune to run and by closing them the states saved all this money. Of course it was an attractive idea to release these people and probably as many as 50% of them did OK.
We are still reeling from the impact of the other 50%. And it continues on today.
Let's say you have a brother that is "developmentally challenged" and has violent temper tantrums. A six year-old in a man's body with all of the self-control and judgement of a six year-old. You might try caring for him in your house but after a few violent incidents it quickly becomes either a lifelong committment without including the rest of the family or pushing the brother into a home of some sort. Unfortunately, unless you are willing to foot the bill (which is pretty darn high) almost nobody will take someone like that. There are no more treatment facilities. There are no more hospitals or "sanitariums". What exactly do you do?
For far too many of these types of people there is the "Fourth and Main" approach which is only slightly different than letting the undesired and unwanted dog out on at the rest stop and driving away. It quickly becomes someone else's problem and the only folks around with any ability to do anything are the police. Trust me, they don't want it. But all it takes is one violent outburst in public and the police have little choice in the matter. As does the judge. So it becomes a Department of Corrections problem. And this is where a good part of the problem in prisons can be pointed at.
So of course they want to push the problem somewhere else - back on the street. Just like in the 1970s.
First we have to ask ourselves, how many people can our planet sustain? 10 billion? 15 billion?
Realize that if the idiots have their way the right answer is 250 million. If you want to lock down the Earth and treat it as a closed system, this is probably a reasonable limit.
The first step is to make sure the idiots do not succeed. Probably part A of that plan is making sure that space exploration isn't pushed aside for "solving Earthbound problems first" because that is the same as "never".
NASA can have all the plans they want, but the current administration seems to be focused on cutting them off at the knees. Private companies are fine and a welcome addition - as long as FAA and EPA are on board with the plan. Currently you need a license to launch just about anything bigger than a model with an Estes engine and these agencies are not known for generosity or understanding. It is also my understanding that licenses are exceedingly tough to get and a good part of the reason we haven't seen private companies launching stuff into orbit from the US.
How about a Mexican launch facility? Launching out over the Gulf? Ben Bova wrote a number of books describing a laser launching facility just over the border in different parts of Mexico - partly because I think he understands the licensing problems. The question is, what would Mexico say and how much cash would it take to make them change their mind?
I would think we could have nearly weekly launches of LEO satellites and work up to geosynchrous. There is plenty of money to be had just launching satellites and if it could be done cheap enough with low enough cost it would be a way to get things rolling.
Well, today there are many cases in law where this is decided quite differently.
If I pay someone to kill you I can be charged with murder if they succeed. Even if they fail, I can be charged with attempted murder.
Similarly, if you pay someone to deliver to you a nice young girl for whatever purposes you might have with her, you can be charged with kidnapping even though you had no part in the abduction.
I believe there are many similar situations that you are ignoring.
From my understanding, embryonic stem cell treatments are going to be genotype specific. This means that you need a tissue match in order to make use of such a treatment, i.e., if not your stem cells then someone who is very close genetically.
So what? Well, if you want production-line embryonic stem cell treatments then you are going to need a way to produce an embryo with the same DNA as the patient you are treating. Not impossible today but moderately difficult. It also opens the door to something that we have so far managed to avoid and has all sorts of nasty side issues - human cloning. You see, if you can manufacture embryonic stem cells to order, then you can manufacture embryos to order as well. And that means you have successful, viable human cloning.
Do we really honestly want to go down that road? Do we need an everlasting supply of Bill Gateses? Because I can assure you that if the process is there and it works some ultra-rich people are going to take advantage of it. Maybe not Bill G., but how about Kim Jong Il?
Yes, I think it is probably a good question about when exactly it is reasonably to kill off a developing (potential) human life. We had a judicially established value (24 weeks) for a while but it is way, way too far along for current medical techniques. At conception turns the switch off on nearly all reasonable and reliable birth control methods. We need something that people can at least agree on even if it isn't a perfect answer.
But embryonic stem cell treatments are not dependent on this decision. I'd say anything that requires human cloning to be able to be effectively used needs to have the human cloning issue decided long before we should be going down the road of even researching embryonic stem cell treatments.
"How can a 10 year old process rape, murder, etc?"
Gross! I looked through a pornography book at seven, and I just thought it was nasty at the time. People (yes, kids) aren't going to go insane so easily. Ugh.
I suggest that you are taking an extremely sexist, male-centric view of rape. I'd say a 10 year-old girl that fully understands the action in a rape video is going to have nightmares for a while. Possibly for the rest of her life and make a normal sexual relationship just about impossible.
I suggest a new standard:
Std. English "lose" : New Slashdotese: "loose"
Std. English "loose" : New Slashdotese: "looose"
This is obviously a recursive transformation that can be applied as many times as necessary to effectively lose the reader in the dust. Or should that be loose. Or maybe loooooooooose.
In some cases you can be sure that the writings of "experts" and "authorities" are very likely to be untrue.
This is after all the foundation of the concept of Wikipedia - there are no experts and everyone's opinion is equally valid on everything. In theory, your writings on high energy particle physics would be just as valid as mine on the sex lives of prehistoric men. That someone who has studied these matters all their lives might not agree with us is immaterial - the Wiki philosophy is that there are no experts, only different and yet equally valid opinions.
This does mean that an article about spontanous generation would have a place in Wikipedia, especially considering there are plenty of references (off net) to cite.
Well, that is after all the intent of Wikipedia, isn't it? Eliminating the idea of there being one "truth" apart from the opinion of the masses?
While this might have some noble intent, you can't very well be surprised when those in authority reject the entire concept. The idea that people might actually take a crowdsourced knowledgebase and present it as "truth" in matters of law is laughable because this use is diametrically opposed to the intent of the founders and maintainers of Wikipedia. The very idea that there might be an "expert" in the world that knows more or has a firmer grasp of anything compared to the knowledge of the great unwashed masses is abhorrent to the concept of Wikipedia.
What this means is that Wikipedia is "The People's Encyclopedia", created by "the people" for "the people." Fine, as long as its use is confined to "the people" it is probably suitable. But it does mean that using it as a reference in school, at law, science, government or any place where people actually believe in the concept of "truth" apart from the knowledge of crowds is forbidden.
Sorry, you can't have it both ways. Law and government are very interested in "truth" as a concept and it is presupposed that there are in fact experts that know what this truth is. Wikipedia is built on the idea that there is no one truth at all and that all truths are equal. Hence the continual editing of articles because over time what is considered to be the truth changes with the whim of the crowd.
If we want to treat the Earth as a closed system, we need to step up to the plate about population problems. The first step is probably to get the population down below 500 million, probably more like 200 million people in as short a time as possible. This could be done with some untreated and fatal disease, war or just encouraging people to volunteer. The best course of action is probably to actively make things as awful as possible to life on the planet until people decide to (a) not have children and (b) kill themselves.
We are just at the beginning of this "Hell on Earth" campaign, but the good news is that the suicide rate is up. Unfortunately, what we are seeing is that in the face of adversity much of the third world response by having more children. This may not be working out as well as was originally intended.
As for the resource consumption levels in the West, we have pretty much given up on the idea of obtaining resources from anywhere else off-planet as being too expensive and too risky. The environmental movement has firmly discounted any possible benefits to off-planet exploration ensuring that the trap is sealed. If they cannot convince (by pestilence, war or mass suicide) the world that the population level is unsustainable while having successfully convinced people that stagnation on Earth is the only solution the human race is doomed. Possibly within 50 to 100 years.
Remember that every time you use the word "sustainable" you are referencing an environment where there are 200 million people on the planet living at level of around 1750 or so. Anything beyond that is "unsustainable" over a long term.
I'm not sure, but we may have passed the turning point for the West doing any off-planet anything. The Chinese might have a chance still as their form of government isn't really bothered about environmentists and junk-science believers. Likely as not, the first base on the moon will have an unpronouceable Chinese name.
Like nearly all corporations today, 99% of the stock is in either the current board of directors or institutional hands. What little is out there in private hands is meaningless. Not sure when this trend started, but every IPO I have ever heard of is all about selling to institutional investors such as pension and mutual funds.
If you are using a Blackberry without a corporate email connection, by all means drop it. However, be aware that the only customers RIM cares a hoot about are the corporate clients that simply mandate what their employees will be using and pass out the phones by the hundreds.
For example, I know the FBI is 100% Blackberry. Every agent, office worker, whatever, down to the level of janitorial supervisors. How many phones do you think that is? 10,000? 20,000? Virtually the entire Fortune 500 are going to be 100% Blackberry so you can multiply that by 500 and start to get an idea of who exactly RIM cares about. Yes, that is at least 10 million phones. The individual users are a rounding error.
Now, when upper management goes to India for a business meeting with the folks they outsourced the entire IT department to and they are told by the corporate security folks they have to leave their phones at home that might actually cause a stir. Now this would be blatently untrue - that isn't the sort of connection that the Indian government could monitor, but it would be a great scare tactic. After a couple of people hear "the Indian government is listening in" it might not take much to switch the entire company to Blackjack phones or something else like that. Now that RIM would notice.
The only people this would affect are those with email accounts accessed through their phone carrier. RIM is fully in control of the encryption there. Corporate systems using their own Blackberry server can't be affected because RIM isn't in control of the encryption at all.
What is a review that isn't "fake" or paid for? Where do you find such a thing? Certainly not on the Internet.
There are two reasons for anyone to write something: they personally feel so strongly that they have to tell other people and they are getting paid to do it. The former is pretty much restricted to people with negative comments. So I guess that means any review that is positive is paid for.
Similarly, negative reviews about your competition are an extremely powerful tool if you assume that people are still reading fake, misleading reviews about anything. So that means a good portion of the negative reviews can be assumed to be put their by people trying to make their competition look bad.
So why would anyone believe a review on the Internet? Near as I can tell they are all fake or paid for.
China has a culture that is thousands of years old and has survives cultural attacks throughout that time. China is currently the economic superior of every other nation on Earth. China has almost more people than the rest of the planet put together.
Now who's culture do you think is going to be dominant?
I'd plan on having your children learn Chinese like in the early 20th Century technical people learned German because there was so much coming out from Germany that you needed to read the original. Chinese will likely be the new dominant language that everyone will have to conform to.
Inefficient? Sure. But that doesn't really matter because these things are not decided by logic and reason. They are decided based on economics and military. China is already there economically, and it may not matter who has the biggest army if bigger armies are controlled by people that believe using the army is wrong.
Once it is out there, the free version will pretty much take over. There are so few people that are interested in paying - even if it means better quality - that it is best to just think about moving on.
Fighting the pirates is pointless. They have access to better tools for promotion than legitimate small businesses do, so the free version is going to almost always come up first on searches. It will be linked to by every hacker/wares forum that exists. Anyone asking "where can I get something that does X" will be responded to with a link to the pirate version, or the words "use the google".
Once our consumer software got hit by thieves we saw retail sales drop sharply. In this case "thieves" is the only think to call people that purchase the software with stolen credit cards so it can be posted on free download sites.
Face it, people want stuff for free and there are plenty of people out there that agree with that mindset. All software should be free and we should all be supported by the government so we don't have to beg for money or work as slaves. Food should be free. Houses should be free - what possible right does someone have to deny people a place to live?
If you don't think piracy is political, you haven't thought about it long enough.
If you are resisting arrest they can pretty much use as much force as needed to subdue you. This means as much force as you are using plus a wee bit more. Rodney King found out exactly how much "a wee bit more" is in the eyes of some officers and the trial of the officers was OK with that definition. The conviction occurred only because Rodney was African American and the entire justice system can be perverted in the name of protecting a protected class. You do know that the entire concept of "double jeopardy" was thrown out, don't you? The way it works today they can just keep trying you until a conviction is scored.
They also do not use the cell phone radio all the time but check in perhaps once an hour to upload accumulated data. Battery requirements are minimal, on the order of a standard 9V battery being good for several weeks.
If the police are interested, they will certainly set up their own video surveillance on your property. From a willing neighbor or from a point that you do not control, such as a utility easement. If you are believed to be worth watching, you will be watched.
They do not need a warrant to get a neighbor to let them camp out and set up cameras to watch you. So unless you have something akin to an Australian sheep station for property, you don't have any privacy to commit crimes, as much as you would like to.
What do you think you would detect? The sort of tracking device that simply records in flash memory locations doesn't transmit anything at all. And the cell modem ones only transmit periodically. You might have to wait for a long, long time before it fired up the radio.
The only thing you can count on is that these devices need to have a fairly clear view of the sky to be able to receive GPS signals. Putting on way under the car isn't going to work. Putting one in the engine compartment isn't going to work either. Wheelwells and bumpers are the usual suggested locations.
There are two kinds: recording and cell modem. The recording ones have no connection to the outside world other than receiving GPS signals. The cell modem ones call in periodically (adjustable? I don't know.) to upload information. Both are relatively cheap, $500 or less.
Your best bet would be to have something that blotted out GPS reception. Yes, GPS jammers are sold but are likely illegal to possess. There isn't anything else to do with a recording type tracking device. You might be able to jam the cell modem connection on one that reports in every so often, but that would mean disabling cell phones in the area of your car, probably for hundreds of feet. Again, a jammer like that is easy to get but illegal to possess.
Personally, I think you are much better off cutting off the handle of a broom, painting it black and running around the shopping mall going "Bang-Bang". Whatever you might have done that you were worried about you will likely just get a nice stay in the nearest head-ward instead. Some of them are much nicer than jail and co-ed as an added benefit.
I don't believe there is any implication of "surveillance" in the 4th Amendment where the matter of a search warrant comes up. Nowhere else in police procedure is a "warrant" needed except in some cases an arrest warrant. Certainly police surveillance does not require any sort of a warrant.
Search warrants are needed for wiretapping but broad exceptions are made for connecting what is commonly known as a pen register or for collecting billing records.
In order to get a search warrant probable cause is needed, which pretty much means that there is ample reason to believe a crime has been committed. Having someone followed by the police - with or without technological assistance - doesn't require a warrant, doesn't require probable cause and often the target of such surveillance isn't suspected of having committed a crime but is instead leading the police to the location of someone that is.
There are plenty of other scenarios where there is no probable cause to get a search warrant for someone being watched, followed or tracked. While it might be nice to think of situations where merely asking for a warrant would result in getting permission for the police to search someone's home it doesn't work this way at all. Without probable cause - with the definition is pretty much left up to the judge - no warrant. And in some cases the bar for a search warrant is extremely high, so high that the police will resort to all sorts of things to avoid having to get a search warrant. Often asking the suspect for permission with the attached threat of "and don't make me get a warrant" works fine.
There is a company that goes to the same conferences we do ... BackBone Security. The sell products that detect steganography. The commercial and freeware products today do most certainly leave traces. Now, if the message encoded into a photograph or executable file is encrypted these tools will not be able to tell you want the original message was, but will certainly tell you there is something there.
Then it is just a matter of extracting the message and seeing what you can do with it, possibly using a Rainbow table system to decrypt it.
What this does is make the likelyhood of decrypting the message even less probable. But as has been pointed out, if you can be traced as the source or recipient of a message fragment that may be all that is required. Certainly in the US something more might be needed, unless it related to child porn, marijuana, meth, terrorism, shoplifting, plural marriage or ... well, crime. Then it would be convincing evidence.
You just need to have the machine provide the proper reference to someone that can fix it. Imagine if millions of computers all over the world suddenly cried out for Jacob's Computer Consulting with his worldwide army of computer-fixers.
Wouldn't you like to be Jacob? Probably has the apartment penthouse next to the folks running the botnet in St. Petersburg or Bucharest.