...I just don't see the need for this system. When essential public services like the CTA can't get the funding they need, why is money being spent on these damn cameras?
At first the cameras were deployed in the "bad" areas of town. Along streets like Roosevelt where the area was not developed, where public housing was available and where open air drug markets were allowed to operate. Then cameras started springing up at major intersections and now I'm starting to see these surveillance cameras in very affluent neighborhoods. I am definitely starting to get the feeling that our movements are being more closely tracked and recorded as each day goes by. For example, the CTA has been pushing people to register for the Chicago Plus Card which allows their travel on the public transit system to be recorded and monitored. The State of Illinois has been pushing people to register for the I-Pass tolling system which allows their travel on the Illinois highway system to be recorded and monitored.
I grew up in a small town near Peoria, Illinois, moved to Chicago for college and have now lived in the city for just over eleven years. I used to catch the el across from the Rockwell Gardens projects and I can honestly say that I feel completely safe walking around most areas of the city at any time of day or night. Public safety seems to be a dubious reason for the cameras; people generally don't fsck with you unless there's a reason.
I suspect that these cameras are going to be used to monitor certain neighborhoods, groups of people (blacks, hispanics, peace activists) and to make it easier to issue citations for things like jaywalking, speeding, illegal parking, etc. I just don't see them as being effective at deterring violent crime. How is it in my best interests for city officials to be able to track my movements from home to work and back again? If you want to hire more police officers, fantastic, but I have a problem when you want to record my movements in public for later analysis.
I hate to say it, but I think the surveillance state has already come to Chicago. How long will it take for the police state to follow?
I'd just rather deal with the girl's end of politicking which I understand, rather than the (to me, and in my sole opinion) whacko weird unusual confusing, and irrational system.
What's your rapport with the other people you work with? I'm wondering if the other female you referred to makes an effort to be "one of the guys" and is thus accepted into the group more than you perhaps are.
Part of being a male is abusing your male companions. We punch each other in the shoulder, use obscene names and belittle for the silliest reasons. We think it's funny when someone gets (mildly) hurt. Men tolerate this from their friends because it's part of belonging to the group; they do not tolerate the same actions from other men that are not in the group.
You can either accept this fact, or fight against it. Imagine a man trying to hang out with a group of girls, if he doesn't make some accomodations for them he probably won't be welcomed. I'm just wondering if the other female's aggressiveness is accepted by the men because she's seen as a member of their group, while the same behavior from you is seen as some girl (outsider) being bitchy. I can understand someone not liking to have to do this, but if you're trying to fit in with a certain group of people that are different from yourself, then you're going to need to make some changes to your own behavior for them.
I suppose I qualify as an old school hacker. I started programming back in 1980 when I was in first grade and have continued ever since then. I was one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do for a living since they were very, very young. The idea of people coming to college not knowing what to major in just blew me away as I assumed I was the norm (clearly not the case).
To be honest, I don't even know what geek culture means today. I'm picturing some thirteen year-old Linux fanboy sitting in a dark basement at his parents' house sipping Mountain Dew, screwing with his iPod, committing copyright infringement by downloading files from BitTorrent and boasting on IRC how elite he is because he compiled a kernel. The guy's also possibly overweight, pasty-faced, dresses like a slob and couldn't approach an attractive female to save his own life.
Back in the day it meant that you had a computer, were active on some BBS's and hacked into various systems for fun; my favorite was the telephone network and, later, my school's UNIX systems.
I think what's happened is that computers have become so prevalent that the average person can fool themsleves in thinking they know what they're talking about. These days it seems that you don't get geek cred. by knowing or creating something, but by simply owning a certain number and type of electronic devices. Instead of the word geek referring to a certain mindset and work-ethic, it's turned into just another image or lifestyle that people can choose to have.
If you're hiring someone that's going to be responsible for ensuring servers are available 24/7 and who's going to get a call some Saturday morning at 3:30 AM to deal with an outage, they better damn well be someone you can count on to bang their head against the problem until it's solved.
Many technical jobs do not require people to be on-call 24/7, but I'd wager that almost all of them expect the employee to keep working until the problem's solved in certain situations. Some jobs have a lot of those situations, some have very few (if any).
It's obvious to anyone with any sort of electronics background that she was wearing a breadboard with some LEDs and a 9-volt battery.
Maybe it's not such a good idea to hire high school dropouts to handle security? I can't help but to wonder what kind of training, if any, personnel are receiving.
Sorry, by "usually set to" I meant that's what I recall from my courses in Operating System design. I'm a UNIX guy and use Solaris and *BSD; I've only played with the Linux distributions briefly.
You're thinking of the term "time slice"; it's the amount of time that the scheduler will allow a process to run before being preempted and put back on the run queue. IIRC, it's usually set to something like 100 ms.
I also thought that simply being up for three days straight causing a death seemed dubious. I've been up for well over two days before and haven't experienced any physical problems other than being really tired and hallucinating a little.
I wonder if this guy who died never left his chair to even walk around a little bit.
Now we're being told that there are restrictions on what you can do with the code.
No, you're not now just being told this; it's been written at the top of every BSD licensed file. Maybe you're just now reading the terms of the license?
Here's the boilerplate from/etc/rc.subr on my FreeBSD workstation:
# $NetBSD: rc.subr,v 1.66 2006/04/01 10:05:50 he Exp $ # $FreeBSD: src/etc/rc.subr,v 1.34.2.15 2006/08/24 10:32:40 yar Exp $ # # Copyright (c) 1997-2002 The NetBSD Foundation, Inc. # All rights reserved. # # This code is derived from software contributed to The NetBSD Foundation # by Luke Mewburn. # # Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without # modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions # are met: # 1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright # notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer. # 2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright # notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the # documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution. # 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this software # must display the following acknowledgement: # This product includes software developed by the NetBSD # Foundation, Inc. and its contributors. # 4. Neither the name of The NetBSD Foundation nor the names of its # contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived # from this software without specific prior written permission. # # THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE NETBSD FOUNDATION, INC. AND CONTRIBUTORS # ``AS IS'' AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED # TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR # PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE FOUNDATION OR CONTRIBUTORS # BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR # CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF # SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS # INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN # CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) # ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE # POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.
It's pretty clear to me that you're not allowed to replace the BSD boilerplate with the GPL's.
Parking meters, as the writer did note, are designed not to collect a little revenue, but to keep parking turning over quickly so more people can share fewer parking spots.
I keep hearing this repeated, but it seems like a dubious explanation to me. Maybe it's because I live in a big city (Chicago)?
Here's how metered parking works here. Office workers that must park on metered streets during the weekday have someone in the office designated as the meter feeder. This person is responsible for paying the meters for all of the other people every two hours (or whatever the max meter time is). The city does not fine people for doing this. For people that live in really congested areas like Lincoln Park and Lakeview, it's the same deal except that people are parking their cars for the evening. Again, people returning to their cars multiple times to add money to the meter is the norm. On some streets, like Diversey, if you don't get back home before five at night you're not going to find a spot on the street. There are only metered spots and they have already been filled for the evening. If you are lucky enough to find someone leaving their spot, be prepared to make illegal u-turns, cut people off and run pedestrians down in order to claim it. People will kill for a space in some neighborhoods.
I would argue that the purpose of parking meters is to allow for tickets to be issued for unpaid meters. The city has dispatched parking enforcement workers that march up and down the street waiting to ticket people; they also time their patrols to coincide with metered zone start and end times. In some neighborhoods the city has actually eliminated free parking spaces on residential streets and added meters on the nearby streets that people are now forced to use. For example, while I was living in Little Italy the city decided to add a median in the middle of my street that eliminated about a dozen parking spots.
If the city intended to get parking to turn over more frequently, then they would simply start putting up 15 minute parking zones and not metered spots. High traffic areas like the gallery district actually have areas where the entire street is meter-less 15 minute parking. I would really love to have a few of those in the residential areas since you're currently forced to park illegally in order to run up to a friend's place for a few minutes. Two or three short-term parking spots in front of large apartment buildings would be a godsend, but I don't see it happening. The city isn't worried about people being able to park, they're worried about revenue.
*shudder* The scary think about television is that you can actually feel it putting you in a zombie state.
I hardly watch any network television these days, instead opting to invest in a large DVD collection. When I do watch something like a news broadcast, I find that I sometimes don't notice a commercial break has started and will actually listen to the first one or two commercials before realizing what's going on and either switching the channel or hitting mute.
...is a learned skill as well. Everyone that's worked in a cubicle or "open landscape", learn how to tune out most (if not all of it).
Having worked in such an environment, I must disagree. You learn to deal with the noise, but you cannot simply tune it out; it will always have some impact on you. Personally, I cannot stand it and I start getting terribly irritated by the noise makers. Since I'm not allowed to scream at them to STFU, I either have to wear ear protection or work someplace else. It's unfortunate that management typically doesn't care that the noise level in the office is affecting workers. I've tried suggesting solutions like installing sound dampening materials, but management isn't interested as they don't think noise is a problem.
Do some searching and you'll find many studies discussing noisy workplaces and their negative effects on employees and productivity.
These vehicles are heavily subsidized by the states where you may sell them, and they're interested in getting their investment back. California lays out wads of cash for some cleaner vehicles, so California wants them driven in California (for example; there are several other states involved). The automakers are not allowed to sell them anywhere else. It's that simple.
What about the used car market? If these vehicles were in demand outside of California and New York, I'd assume there would be plenty available; just not directly from a dealer.
The company I work for uses True Image for our Windows deployments. The disk images save us a _ton_ of time when we need to do things like build twenty identical systems or create a new variant of an existing system. When we deploy new systems I can have the hardware shipped to our datacenter and the disks shipped to the office. I restore the Acronis image to each disk and then just ship the disks out. I've also got images prepared that contain a minimal Windows OS install as a starting point. This saves a few hours of work when it comes time to prepare a new type of server. We also ship external USB drives containing Acronis images to each datacenter so that the local tech can rebuild systems on-site.
The two major problems we've had with True Image are related to unsupported NICs (no driver on the boot CD) and interaction with on-board RAID controllers. Acronis has a very active message board and they are very good about addressing any problems their customers may encounter.
I've been meaning to look into frisbee, but simply haven't made the time. Frisbee's attractive because it's OS independent and supports multicast installs. There's a research paper on Emulab's site that claims near constant install times even as the number of simultaneous installs grows.
I heard about this many years ago (probably on Slashdot). I believe the article was called something like "the cd that was too loud", but I can't be certain. I know the author was complaining about the mastering of some Rush album.
Aha! Here we are; the article's from 2002. There are some pretty charts demonstrating the problem.
From the article, "the department is working to develop a new reporting system to replace TALON, but in the interim, all information concerning force protection threats will go to the FBI's Guardian reporting system".
Sorry, the parent was buried when I read through the comments. I was replying to the statement about people favoring brick and mortar stores versus on-line stores because of poor download speeds.
Not true. For a game to be successful, it has to hit the shelves. Since NOBODY carries AO games (the rating reserved for porno and GTA:SA), you have to be careful to avoid that scarlet letter.
Why don't the publishers simply not have their game reviewed by the ESRB and instead label them unrated? I know the big national chains have no problem carrying unrated movie titles.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it is, the police office doesn't have a video camera and the video he shoots isn't stored for later analysis.
I live in Chicago, there's no public need for this damn surveillance system.
At first the cameras were deployed in the "bad" areas of town. Along streets like Roosevelt where the area was not developed, where public housing was available and where open air drug markets were allowed to operate. Then cameras started springing up at major intersections and now I'm starting to see these surveillance cameras in very affluent neighborhoods. I am definitely starting to get the feeling that our movements are being more closely tracked and recorded as each day goes by. For example, the CTA has been pushing people to register for the Chicago Plus Card which allows their travel on the public transit system to be recorded and monitored. The State of Illinois has been pushing people to register for the I-Pass tolling system which allows their travel on the Illinois highway system to be recorded and monitored.
I grew up in a small town near Peoria, Illinois, moved to Chicago for college and have now lived in the city for just over eleven years. I used to catch the el across from the Rockwell Gardens projects and I can honestly say that I feel completely safe walking around most areas of the city at any time of day or night. Public safety seems to be a dubious reason for the cameras; people generally don't fsck with you unless there's a reason.
I suspect that these cameras are going to be used to monitor certain neighborhoods, groups of people (blacks, hispanics, peace activists) and to make it easier to issue citations for things like jaywalking, speeding, illegal parking, etc. I just don't see them as being effective at deterring violent crime. How is it in my best interests for city officials to be able to track my movements from home to work and back again? If you want to hire more police officers, fantastic, but I have a problem when you want to record my movements in public for later analysis.
I hate to say it, but I think the surveillance state has already come to Chicago. How long will it take for the police state to follow?
Believe me, we (men) feel the same way :)
What's your rapport with the other people you work with? I'm wondering if the other female you referred to makes an effort to be "one of the guys" and is thus accepted into the group more than you perhaps are.
Part of being a male is abusing your male companions. We punch each other in the shoulder, use obscene names and belittle for the silliest reasons. We think it's funny when someone gets (mildly) hurt. Men tolerate this from their friends because it's part of belonging to the group; they do not tolerate the same actions from other men that are not in the group.
You can either accept this fact, or fight against it. Imagine a man trying to hang out with a group of girls, if he doesn't make some accomodations for them he probably won't be welcomed. I'm just wondering if the other female's aggressiveness is accepted by the men because she's seen as a member of their group, while the same behavior from you is seen as some girl (outsider) being bitchy. I can understand someone not liking to have to do this, but if you're trying to fit in with a certain group of people that are different from yourself, then you're going to need to make some changes to your own behavior for them.
I suppose I qualify as an old school hacker. I started programming back in 1980 when I was in first grade and have continued ever since then. I was one of those people who knew exactly what they wanted to do for a living since they were very, very young. The idea of people coming to college not knowing what to major in just blew me away as I assumed I was the norm (clearly not the case).
To be honest, I don't even know what geek culture means today. I'm picturing some thirteen year-old Linux fanboy sitting in a dark basement at his parents' house sipping Mountain Dew, screwing with his iPod, committing copyright infringement by downloading files from BitTorrent and boasting on IRC how elite he is because he compiled a kernel. The guy's also possibly overweight, pasty-faced, dresses like a slob and couldn't approach an attractive female to save his own life.
Back in the day it meant that you had a computer, were active on some BBS's and hacked into various systems for fun; my favorite was the telephone network and, later, my school's UNIX systems.
I think what's happened is that computers have become so prevalent that the average person can fool themsleves in thinking they know what they're talking about. These days it seems that you don't get geek cred. by knowing or creating something, but by simply owning a certain number and type of electronic devices. Instead of the word geek referring to a certain mindset and work-ethic, it's turned into just another image or lifestyle that people can choose to have.
Forget capitalism, how about the word production.
If you're hiring someone that's going to be responsible for ensuring servers are available 24/7 and who's going to get a call some Saturday morning at 3:30 AM to deal with an outage, they better damn well be someone you can count on to bang their head against the problem until it's solved.
Many technical jobs do not require people to be on-call 24/7, but I'd wager that almost all of them expect the employee to keep working until the problem's solved in certain situations. Some jobs have a lot of those situations, some have very few (if any).
It's obvious to anyone with any sort of electronics background that she was wearing a breadboard with some LEDs and a 9-volt battery.
Maybe it's not such a good idea to hire high school dropouts to handle security? I can't help but to wonder what kind of training, if any, personnel are receiving.
Sorry, by "usually set to" I meant that's what I recall from my courses in Operating System design. I'm a UNIX guy and use Solaris and *BSD; I've only played with the Linux distributions briefly.
You're thinking of the term "time slice"; it's the amount of time that the scheduler will allow a process to run before being preempted and put back on the run queue. IIRC, it's usually set to something like 100 ms.
I also thought that simply being up for three days straight causing a death seemed dubious. I've been up for well over two days before and haven't experienced any physical problems other than being really tired and hallucinating a little.
Good point. Is it possible that the man died from deep vein thrombosis?
No, the files I'm thinking of (the etc directory in c:\WINDOWS\system32?) were all plain-text.
I don't know where you came up with "essentially no restrictions" as the restrictions are explicitly spelled out in the BSD license boilerplate.
It's easy. If you want to use/copy the code then follow the terms of the license.
I'm not positive about this, but I believe that Microsoft retained the copyright notice in the files you're referring to.
No, you're not now just being told this; it's been written at the top of every BSD licensed file. Maybe you're just now reading the terms of the license?
Here's the boilerplate from /etc/rc.subr on my FreeBSD workstation:
It's pretty clear to me that you're not allowed to replace the BSD boilerplate with the GPL's.
I keep hearing this repeated, but it seems like a dubious explanation to me. Maybe it's because I live in a big city (Chicago)?
Here's how metered parking works here. Office workers that must park on metered streets during the weekday have someone in the office designated as the meter feeder. This person is responsible for paying the meters for all of the other people every two hours (or whatever the max meter time is). The city does not fine people for doing this. For people that live in really congested areas like Lincoln Park and Lakeview, it's the same deal except that people are parking their cars for the evening. Again, people returning to their cars multiple times to add money to the meter is the norm. On some streets, like Diversey, if you don't get back home before five at night you're not going to find a spot on the street. There are only metered spots and they have already been filled for the evening. If you are lucky enough to find someone leaving their spot, be prepared to make illegal u-turns, cut people off and run pedestrians down in order to claim it. People will kill for a space in some neighborhoods.
I would argue that the purpose of parking meters is to allow for tickets to be issued for unpaid meters. The city has dispatched parking enforcement workers that march up and down the street waiting to ticket people; they also time their patrols to coincide with metered zone start and end times. In some neighborhoods the city has actually eliminated free parking spaces on residential streets and added meters on the nearby streets that people are now forced to use. For example, while I was living in Little Italy the city decided to add a median in the middle of my street that eliminated about a dozen parking spots.
If the city intended to get parking to turn over more frequently, then they would simply start putting up 15 minute parking zones and not metered spots. High traffic areas like the gallery district actually have areas where the entire street is meter-less 15 minute parking. I would really love to have a few of those in the residential areas since you're currently forced to park illegally in order to run up to a friend's place for a few minutes. Two or three short-term parking spots in front of large apartment buildings would be a godsend, but I don't see it happening. The city isn't worried about people being able to park, they're worried about revenue.
*shudder* The scary think about television is that you can actually feel it putting you in a zombie state.
I hardly watch any network television these days, instead opting to invest in a large DVD collection. When I do watch something like a news broadcast, I find that I sometimes don't notice a commercial break has started and will actually listen to the first one or two commercials before realizing what's going on and either switching the channel or hitting mute.
Lobotomy box indeed.
Having worked in such an environment, I must disagree. You learn to deal with the noise, but you cannot simply tune it out; it will always have some impact on you. Personally, I cannot stand it and I start getting terribly irritated by the noise makers. Since I'm not allowed to scream at them to STFU, I either have to wear ear protection or work someplace else. It's unfortunate that management typically doesn't care that the noise level in the office is affecting workers. I've tried suggesting solutions like installing sound dampening materials, but management isn't interested as they don't think noise is a problem.
Do some searching and you'll find many studies discussing noisy workplaces and their negative effects on employees and productivity.
Aha! How silly of me to think to simply move the PS3 to another room.
What about the used car market? If these vehicles were in demand outside of California and New York, I'd assume there would be plenty available; just not directly from a dealer.
The company I work for uses True Image for our Windows deployments. The disk images save us a _ton_ of time when we need to do things like build twenty identical systems or create a new variant of an existing system. When we deploy new systems I can have the hardware shipped to our datacenter and the disks shipped to the office. I restore the Acronis image to each disk and then just ship the disks out. I've also got images prepared that contain a minimal Windows OS install as a starting point. This saves a few hours of work when it comes time to prepare a new type of server. We also ship external USB drives containing Acronis images to each datacenter so that the local tech can rebuild systems on-site.
The two major problems we've had with True Image are related to unsupported NICs (no driver on the boot CD) and interaction with on-board RAID controllers. Acronis has a very active message board and they are very good about addressing any problems their customers may encounter.
I've been meaning to look into frisbee, but simply haven't made the time. Frisbee's attractive because it's OS independent and supports multicast installs. There's a research paper on Emulab's site that claims near constant install times even as the number of simultaneous installs grows.
I heard about this many years ago (probably on Slashdot). I believe the article was called something like "the cd that was too loud", but I can't be certain. I know the author was complaining about the mastering of some Rush album.
Aha! Here we are; the article's from 2002. There are some pretty charts demonstrating the problem.
I just can't resist posting a link to the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. IIRC, Chuck Norris, Xena and Buffy all make an appearance.
From the article, "the department is working to develop a new reporting system to replace TALON, but in the interim, all information concerning force protection threats will go to the FBI's Guardian reporting system".
Sorry, the parent was buried when I read through the comments. I was replying to the statement about people favoring brick and mortar stores versus on-line stores because of poor download speeds.
So you're telling me that if I buy a car on eBay, I can download it instead of driving to pick it up or having it shipped to me?
E-commerce doesn't mean download only.
Why don't the publishers simply not have their game reviewed by the ESRB and instead label them unrated? I know the big national chains have no problem carrying unrated movie titles.