However, there are rules. You can't copyright a recipe (which, IMNSHO is where software should have been categorized, given that its just sets of instructions... but thats a whole different can of worms). You may be able to copyright a book of recipes in the form that its in. However, the individual recipes within it are not protected themselves. (at least thats my understanding)
Now, wouldn't that seem to cover a contract? What is a contract but a list (however it is actually formed) of terms and conditions to define the form of an agreement. Thats much closer to a recipe than it is to a novel or text book. Its just that it says "employee must be at work by 9 am" rather than "place in a dutch oven and bake at 350 degrees for an hour and a half"
My take, it shouldn't be subject to copyright. However, the fact that they attempt to claim copyright is pretty damning. Much like, as the Scientologists found out: If you claim copyright on documents about Xenu, then everybody is going to know you really wrote that crap. I think we should call it the Xenu Corollary of the Streisand Effect.
Kind of like the treaty that the South Vietnamese violated by refusing to hold elections, because they knew that the communists would win the election; the violation that prompted the US to back the South in the war? Or are we forgetting that VietNam was the war where we sided against democracy from the start?
From Wiki:
Vietnam was temporarily partitioned at the 17th parallel, and under the terms of the Geneva Convention, civilians were to be given the opportunity to freely move between the two provisional states. Elections throughout the country were to be held, according to the Geneva accords, but were blocked by the South Vietnamese president, who feared a communist victory.[43]
No, a guerrilla army still has a command and control structure. While an individual botnet, or individual criminal enterprise would have such a structure, "botnets" don't. Its more like crime fighting. Anyone could choose to commit a crime at any time. Most wont (mostly) and some will. Some criminals you will put a stop to, some you wont.
You are never going to win a war against "crime" any more than the war against "botnets". The best you can ever hope to do is raise the perception of how hard it is to create, maintain, and control botnets higher than the percieved value of doing so. The same way the cost and probability of getting caught shoplifting in a store with cameras stops a certain number of people who might otherwise shoplift.
Is the separate float switch for a second pump? I seem to remember the pumps themselves are not so expensive (compared to the batteries and rest of the setup). If the second float for the battery activation is on a second pump then it also helps if A) water is comming in fast enough to overwhelm the first pump (shouldn't happen generally anyway) and B) if the first pump fails
Of course, if you lose a pump AND have more water comming in than one can handle, then, your pretty screwed anyway.
That sounds reasonable. In fact, as a man in an open relationship... I notice a similar effect. As time has gone on, we have a lot less sex than we used to. Its just, over time, become easy to do other things and forget about it...its not a powerful driving force like it was when we first met.
However, on those rare occasions (sorry to ruin anyones dreams of all the sex people in open relationships have) that I do sleep with someone else, it does seem to raise my overall sex drive for a while.
I tend to feel the same way. Of course, I realized that was a possibility a long time ago, which is why my wife and I have had an open relationship from the start (its actually one of the first things that we ever talked about). I never felt comfortable saying to someone "Hey, you have to be limited by my sex drive", certainly not someone that I actually cared about.
Of course, something new and less "guaranteed" has a certain appeal to it. So being free to occasionally go out and date someone new lets me get excited about something once in a while and not feel trapped... yet doesn't seem to diminish our relationship at all, just gives us some occasional time apart (which seems to be very healthy for our relationship too)
But hey, look at cheating stats and its pretty clear to see that a life long monogamous relationship is far more fantasy than reality anyway. You can't always expect both parties to equally desire sex at all times. Does it make sense to ask the person that you love to suffer for something that you don't even want from them (at least right now, or, for a while)?
As the Mahareeshi Hashish Yogi once said "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw orgies".
Personally, I have no issue with people who want to tell others what to do. I can tune them out, call them names, etc. No problem. Also, some people like being told what to do. Its a lot easier to tell who those people are when you are in places where its acceptable to make them wear collars and leashes. (Usually also not done in glass houses)
Its the people who want to tell people what to do, and think that its ok to raise a force of thugs with guns to enforce their opinion as to what people should do. Those people I have some fundamental problems with.
I seriously think I would be busting a gut laughing no matter who came out with it.
So... lets just forget all about HPAA or whatever other health record privacy regulations you may be subject to. Lets just assume they can get around all that in a reasonable way.... and figure out how to get all the data that they want from health records....
So now, I can diet all I want, but my avatar wont get skinnier until I go in for a checkup? Will my insurance be expected to cover extra checkups to keep my avatar current?
Wouldn't people who are overweight, just.... not play the game. It seems a lot easier. Especially since, there are many other games that wont force them into a suck gaming experience.
This smacks to me of the drug war. "Look kids, drugs are bad, because if you do them, we will throw you in jail". That doesn't make drugs bad, it makes you a dick. Its "I don't approve of your condition and the negative impacts that it has on your life, so I am goin gto impose new negative impacts to help you".
Its exactly the sort of attitude that you resent when your friends and family take it with you... and you expect anyone is going to put up with it from Sony?
Actually, that sounds exactly like my idea of a good time.
MADD is definitely part of the problem. I mean, they had a point originally. Drunk driving laws are probably not a bad concept. They do give the state a way to reign in people who are actually endangering the lives of others. However, I putting people who are NOT endangering the lives of others in the same group doesn't benefit anyone..08 is ridiculous! I was just talking to another friend about this, how do you even find a local MADD meeting? Are you in boston? I bet I could get at least one or two other people interested.
You are as right as a woman who is raped and decides that ALL men are scumbags because of it. Yes, trauma fucks people up, it fucks them up bad. Your daughter being hit by a teenage driver may make you want to raise the driving age, or put more restrictions on younger drivers. That doesn't mean its a good idea, it just means that personal tragedy has effected your judgment. It means your judgment might not be a sound basis for public policy.
The whole point of a civil government and police force, in my eyes, is to put a sober and jaundiced eye to public policy and make sure that calmer heads, not hot heads in the middle of personal tragedy, are the ones who set public policy. Of course, they utterly fail at this task, just like they did in this particular case, but that is part of their point.
Agreed, except... she didn't make any threats. She blew off some steam on facebook.
Thus they found out about nothing, and had no duty to act on that nothing.
Irrational fear should not be allowed to have its way. People who act based on irrational fear deserve to have their judgment questioned, hopefully leading to them seeking therapy for their inability to judge appropriate risk which is obviously hindering their ability to do their job... which is educating people.
Its really time to start calling fear mongers what they are and to ridicule them as they deserve.
I am pretty unconvinced that the cost, in terms of both money, loss of liberty, etc. of running a criminal justice system is far greater than the value of such institutions, especially the way they are run now, and the reasons for which they are run now.
The few legitimately evil people that they keep off the streets, had they been allowed to run amok, would do less damage than the system does. Its like calling in an elephant to stomp out the ant hill in your flower garden.
Ethical principles don't just apply to the government. When you take on the responsibility of doling out punishment (and not being allowed to return to school is a punishment), you take responsibility for doing it right. She paid them for an education, if they are going to consider revoking her access to that education, it behooves them to be as sure as possible that they are doing the right thing to the right person.
Its not like they wont ask the state via the police to enforce their ban of her from campus. The threat of force is very much involved here. Force used to prevent her from access to something which she is paying for, which she planned her life around having access to. This sort of force may sometimes be justified, but I think its pretty clear that, in this case, it isn't.
I just don't see it. None of her statements express any sort of intent to me except the intention of blowing off steam. Not once does she refer to use of an implement on a person.
I think the problem, the real problem here is that hindsight is, as they say, "hindsight is always 20/20". Once someone has gone off and killed...its easy to go back and say "oh look here, he said this". There is just too much temptation to take her statements, and connect them to statements that real killers made.
Its also easy to forget how abnormal these things aren't. I have heard PLENTY of statements by pissed off people that were WAY more threatening than those statements, and more direct, and still contained no real intent. When people are upset, they vent. The only thing new here is that there is a public record that we can all sit back and criticize.
When placed up against real statements that real people make when they are upset (especially over a messy breakup), this is mundane stuff.
I guess my position is this... when you take on the responsibility of judgement and punishment, you take on the responsibility of doing it right. The facts that I have seen so far, are not even close to living up to that responsibility. It is even more disturbing that the police did the same.
This is definitely muddied by the lawsuits as you mention, and possible liability for not nipping a problem in the bud. I think my stance on those should be obvious... it is simply an unreasonable expectation that ANYONE would notice and stop such things from happening, as they are so rare and so incredibly unpredictable. Assigning liability in hindsight for something that a person couldn't possibly be expected to predict is, itself, irresponsible.
Thats not relevant. Yes, these sorts of statements do, sometimes, precede deadly attacks. Deadly attacks are also preceded by everything from filling up gas tanks, to eating food. The fact that one person made statements, and then killed someone, says absolutely nothing about other people who make similar statements.
As much of a tragedy as those incidents are, irrational fear of rare events is just that. Irrational fear doesn't give you the right to harass people just to make you feel better, and especially doesn't give the state an actual interest in helping you harass people, because they made statements that reminded you of some news story where some guy said something.
Frankly, if your talking about the guy I think you are, I READ his "statements". He didn't just make statements, he had a huge log of his feelings and statements that went on for several years worth of entries of his constant emotional disturbance. He didn't make an angry or hurt facebook post about wishing he could kill someone.
Yet still, even in his case, even after reading pages upon pages of his ranting and raving. It wasn't clear that he planned to do what he did.
Sometimes, the bad guy does his bad thing, and thats just that. It doesn't mean anyone fucked up. It doesn't mean the police made a mistake. It just means that shit happens, and life goes on.
I wholeheartedly reject the concept that a few unrelated tragedies is a sound basis for fundamental changes in issues of public policy.
You draw the line at the moment that student picks up a dangerous instrument and makes a threatening movement in the direction of the professor...and NOT EVER before.
Its as simple as that. Unless there was an actual threat, and actual statement of intent to actually drive a real implement into a real person, then the state has no reason to be involved. The reason is that we are talking about the use of force against a person (thats what law is). Force should be reserved for a last resort.
If there is even a question that it may be used against an innocent person, we should ALWAYS err on the side of letting the guilty go free because punishing the innocent is so abhorrent as to make the state no better than the criminals which is claims to protect us from.
Frankly, I think the value statement of "It is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man" is too lenient on the use of power. Its better to let any number of the guilty go free, than to convict one innocent man.
Actually, you barely need the shame. I bet if you had just left a copy of the flyer on your own door, he would have seen it and never come back.
Punishment is less of a deterrent to crime than simply the threat of being caught in the first place. Most criminals risk analysis doesn't really go beyond the likelyhood of being caught in the first place. Nobody commits a crime thinking "Well, I will only get arrested and a court date". They do it thinking "Most likely I wont even get caught".
Thats why lojack is a good thing. There was no increase at all in punishment, but the chance of being caught went up. It was estimated that a small 1% increase in the likelyhood of getting caught due to lojack installations correlated to an overall decrease of 20% in car theft rates. ("More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven E. Landsburg)
Do they have to be? The basic functions are pretty similar. You may want things like event logging from sensors, automatic start and stop recording based on events (motion sensors, heat sensors, vibration sensors) etc. Though, in the end, its just video recording and management.
I would bet that if you were going to put together something and wanted a base to start from, MythTV wouldn't be a bad place to start.
In the case of you, or I, maybe. Actually, I am more likely to come from several IPs, due to occasional use of tor or other proxies. However, in the vast majority of cases, one person, one one computer, runs one web browser, with NO attempt made to block anything.
As such, assuming that different sessions (that is different cookies etc) comming from the same IP would tend to indicate multiple people using the same connection more often than one person with multiple browsers.
Data mine to find out all the people working in SIGINT, send them pink slips, offer retraining into another field.
The pitfall is thinking that they should be doing this in the first place, or that its going to turn up anything mildly useful. I figure you have too many issues. The first is the false positive rate, the second is the false negative rate. Its worst than needle in a haystack. Its... find the specific gauge of sewing needle in the stack of hay AND assorted needles.
So for every real terrorist that turns up, your going to have a number of random people doing things that got flagged, and you will have to correctly sort them so that you both leave the normal people alone AND catch the terrorist. Your chances of doing either correctly are slim at best.
In the end, you MIGHT catch a terrorist or two. However, whats to say those aren't the ones who would have given up and moved on long before they did anything real? Whats to say they wouldn't have been caught in their plan, or their plan would have even worked?
Its a ridiculous proposition that you can set out to find them and do it. EVERY person working on it is a waste of a salary.
> We know what failure looks like (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) but what does success look like? How and why do certain intelligence- > gathering systems actually work, when they do work?
I think the problem here is that few want to admit the simple truth: Success looks no different than it ever did.
9/11 was no "failure of intelligence" it was just a tragedy. A tragedy engineered by human beings solving technical problems. The BEST you can ever hope to do, is change their plans. That's it really. You can change their target by making a target hard to hit. This makes protecting the vast majority of targets absolutely pointless. Does it matter if 200 people die on a plane or in an explosion on a subway? Dead is dead. Tragedy is Tragedy.
Then maybe, maybe, you can catch them sometimes. That is, if they are unlucky and you are lucky. If they do something stupid, and you happen to be watching. The vast majority of terrorist cases cracked were cracked either A) because the terrorists made mistakes or B) Good old fashioned police work turned something up.
In the end, terrorism is so incredibly rare that, ANY money or time that you spend on it is wasted. Its like spending time and money on a special batch of polio vaccine for yourself. Sure, it will protect you from polio. what were the chances that you were ever going to run into polio? Its an utter waste. Waste of time, waste of money.
Maybe a better analogy would be the lottery. Yes someone is going to hit. However, you shouldn't spend any time or money on preparing for what you will do when you hit the big one. Chances are, its not even going to happen to someone that you know. It makes just as little sense for the rest of the economy to make preparations aimed at selling you things once you win. The amount will be a pittance, even compared against a fairly local economy, AND chances are you wont even win anyway.
Unless you live in a place with an active conflict like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Isreal, THEN MAYBE it makes sense to take some precautions. Even then, it probably doesn't make any sense to take precautions, because you STILL are unlikely to ever be even marginally effected.
Its all just smoke and mirrors, and guess who is footing the bill?
Slashdot Mirror
However, there are rules. You can't copyright a recipe (which, IMNSHO is where software should have been categorized, given that its just sets of instructions... but thats a whole different can of worms). You may be able to copyright a book of recipes in the form that its in. However, the individual recipes within it are not protected themselves. (at least thats my understanding)
Now, wouldn't that seem to cover a contract? What is a contract but a list (however it is actually formed) of terms and conditions to define the form of an agreement. Thats much closer to a recipe than it is to a novel or text book. Its just that it says "employee must be at work by 9 am" rather than "place in a dutch oven and bake at 350 degrees for an hour and a half"
My take, it shouldn't be subject to copyright. However, the fact that they attempt to claim copyright is pretty damning. Much like, as the Scientologists found out: If you claim copyright on documents about Xenu, then everybody is going to know you really wrote that crap. I think we should call it the Xenu Corollary of the Streisand Effect.
-Steve
Kind of like the treaty that the South Vietnamese violated by refusing to hold elections, because they knew that the communists would win the election; the violation that prompted the US to back the South in the war? Or are we forgetting that VietNam was the war where we sided against democracy from the start?
From Wiki:
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Nam_War )
No, a guerrilla army still has a command and control structure. While an individual botnet, or individual criminal enterprise would have such a structure, "botnets" don't. Its more like crime fighting. Anyone could choose to commit a crime at any time. Most wont (mostly) and some will. Some criminals you will put a stop to, some you wont.
You are never going to win a war against "crime" any more than the war against "botnets". The best you can ever hope to do is raise the perception of how hard it is to create, maintain, and control botnets higher than the percieved value of doing so. The same way the cost and probability of getting caught shoplifting in a store with cameras stops a certain number of people who might otherwise shoplift.
-Steve
Is the separate float switch for a second pump? I seem to remember the pumps themselves are not so expensive (compared to the batteries and rest of the setup). If the second float for the battery activation is on a second pump then it also helps if A) water is comming in fast enough to overwhelm the first pump (shouldn't happen generally anyway) and B) if the first pump fails
Of course, if you lose a pump AND have more water comming in than one can handle, then, your pretty screwed anyway.
That sounds reasonable. In fact, as a man in an open relationship... I notice a similar effect. As time has gone on, we have a lot less sex than we used to. Its just, over time, become easy to do other things and forget about it...its not a powerful driving force like it was when we first met.
However, on those rare occasions (sorry to ruin anyones dreams of all the sex people in open relationships have) that I do sleep with someone else, it does seem to raise my overall sex drive for a while.
I tend to feel the same way. Of course, I realized that was a possibility a long time ago, which is why my wife and I have had an open relationship from the start (its actually one of the first things that we ever talked about). I never felt comfortable saying to someone "Hey, you have to be limited by my sex drive", certainly not someone that I actually cared about.
Of course, something new and less "guaranteed" has a certain appeal to it. So being free to occasionally go out and date someone new lets me get excited about something once in a while and not feel trapped... yet doesn't seem to diminish our relationship at all, just gives us some occasional time apart (which seems to be very healthy for our relationship too)
But hey, look at cheating stats and its pretty clear to see that a life long monogamous relationship is far more fantasy than reality anyway. You can't always expect both parties to equally desire sex at all times. Does it make sense to ask the person that you love to suffer for something that you don't even want from them (at least right now, or, for a while)?
Dude, put down the bong for a second, you are on slashdot.
Erm, you missed the comment that I was replying to who claimed nobody would complain if it were Sony.
As the Mahareeshi Hashish Yogi once said "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw orgies".
Personally, I have no issue with people who want to tell others what to do. I can tune them out, call them names, etc. No problem.
Also, some people like being told what to do. Its a lot easier to tell who those people are when you are in places where its acceptable to make them wear collars and leashes. (Usually also not done in glass houses)
Its the people who want to tell people what to do, and think that its ok to raise a force of thugs with guns to enforce their opinion as to what people should do. Those people I have some fundamental problems with.
-Steve
I seriously think I would be busting a gut laughing no matter who came out with it.
So... lets just forget all about HPAA or whatever other health record privacy regulations you may be subject to. Lets just assume they can get around all that in a reasonable way.... and figure out how to get all the data that they want from health records....
So now, I can diet all I want, but my avatar wont get skinnier until I go in for a checkup? Will my insurance be expected to cover extra checkups to keep my avatar current?
Wouldn't people who are overweight, just.... not play the game. It seems a lot easier. Especially since, there are many other games that wont force them into a suck gaming experience.
This smacks to me of the drug war. "Look kids, drugs are bad, because if you do them, we will throw you in jail". That doesn't make drugs bad, it makes you a dick. Its "I don't approve of your condition and the negative impacts that it has on your life, so I am goin gto impose new negative impacts to help you".
Its exactly the sort of attitude that you resent when your friends and family take it with you... and you expect anyone is going to put up with it from Sony?
Actually, that sounds exactly like my idea of a good time.
MADD is definitely part of the problem. I mean, they had a point originally. Drunk driving laws are probably not a bad concept. They do give the state a way to reign in people who are actually endangering the lives of others. However, I putting people who are NOT endangering the lives of others in the same group doesn't benefit anyone. .08 is ridiculous! I was just talking to another friend about this, how do you even find a local MADD meeting? Are you in boston? I bet I could get at least one or two other people interested.
-Steve
You might be right.
You are as right as a woman who is raped and decides that ALL men are scumbags because of it. Yes, trauma fucks people up, it fucks them up bad. Your daughter being hit by a teenage driver may make you want to raise the driving age, or put more restrictions on younger drivers. That doesn't mean its a good idea, it just means that personal tragedy has effected your judgment. It means your judgment might not be a sound basis for public policy.
The whole point of a civil government and police force, in my eyes, is to put a sober and jaundiced eye to public policy and make sure that calmer heads, not hot heads in the middle of personal tragedy, are the ones who set public policy. Of course, they utterly fail at this task, just like they did in this particular case, but that is part of their point.
Agreed, except... she didn't make any threats. She blew off some steam on facebook.
Thus they found out about nothing, and had no duty to act on that nothing.
Irrational fear should not be allowed to have its way. People who act based on irrational fear deserve to have their judgment questioned, hopefully leading to them seeking therapy for their inability to judge appropriate risk which is obviously hindering their ability to do their job... which is educating people.
Its really time to start calling fear mongers what they are and to ridicule them as they deserve.
Not desireable by whom?
I am pretty unconvinced that the cost, in terms of both money, loss of liberty, etc. of running a criminal justice system is far greater than the value of such institutions, especially the way they are run now, and the reasons for which they are run now.
The few legitimately evil people that they keep off the streets, had they been allowed to run amok, would do less damage than the system does. Its like calling in an elephant to stomp out the ant hill in your flower garden.
-Steve
Ethical principles don't just apply to the government. When you take on the responsibility of doling out punishment (and not being allowed to return to school is a punishment), you take responsibility for doing it right. She paid them for an education, if they are going to consider revoking her access to that education, it behooves them to be as sure as possible that they are doing the right thing to the right person.
Its not like they wont ask the state via the police to enforce their ban of her from campus. The threat of force is very much involved here. Force used to prevent her from access to something which she is paying for, which she planned her life around having access to. This sort of force may sometimes be justified, but I think its pretty clear that, in this case, it isn't.
I just don't see it. None of her statements express any sort of intent to me except the intention of blowing off steam. Not once does she refer to use of an implement on a person.
I think the problem, the real problem here is that hindsight is, as they say, "hindsight is always 20/20". Once someone has gone off and killed...its easy to go back and say "oh look here, he said this". There is just too much temptation to take her statements, and connect them to statements that real killers made.
Its also easy to forget how abnormal these things aren't. I have heard PLENTY of statements by pissed off people that were WAY more threatening than those statements, and more direct, and still contained no real intent. When people are upset, they vent. The only thing new here is that there is a public record that we can all sit back and criticize.
When placed up against real statements that real people make when they are upset (especially over a messy breakup), this is mundane stuff.
I guess my position is this... when you take on the responsibility of judgement and punishment, you take on the responsibility of doing it right. The facts that I have seen so far, are not even close to living up to that responsibility. It is even more disturbing that the police did the same.
This is definitely muddied by the lawsuits as you mention, and possible liability for not nipping a problem in the bud. I think my stance on those should be obvious... it is simply an unreasonable expectation that ANYONE would notice and stop such things from happening, as they are so rare and so incredibly unpredictable. Assigning liability in hindsight for something that a person couldn't possibly be expected to predict is, itself, irresponsible.
Thats not relevant. Yes, these sorts of statements do, sometimes, precede deadly attacks. Deadly attacks are also preceded by everything from filling up gas tanks, to eating food. The fact that one person made statements, and then killed someone, says absolutely nothing about other people who make similar statements.
As much of a tragedy as those incidents are, irrational fear of rare events is just that. Irrational fear doesn't give you the right to harass people just to make you feel better, and especially doesn't give the state an actual interest in helping you harass people, because they made statements that reminded you of some news story where some guy said something.
Frankly, if your talking about the guy I think you are, I READ his "statements". He didn't just make statements, he had a huge log of his feelings and statements that went on for several years worth of entries of his constant emotional disturbance. He didn't make an angry or hurt facebook post about wishing he could kill someone.
Yet still, even in his case, even after reading pages upon pages of his ranting and raving. It wasn't clear that he planned to do what he did.
Sometimes, the bad guy does his bad thing, and thats just that. It doesn't mean anyone fucked up. It doesn't mean the police made a mistake. It just means that shit happens, and life goes on.
I wholeheartedly reject the concept that a few unrelated tragedies is a sound basis for fundamental changes in issues of public policy.
You draw the line at the moment that student picks up a dangerous instrument and makes a threatening movement in the direction of the professor...and NOT EVER before.
Its as simple as that. Unless there was an actual threat, and actual statement of intent to actually drive a real implement into a real person, then the state has no reason to be involved. The reason is that we are talking about the use of force against a person (thats what law is). Force should be reserved for a last resort.
If there is even a question that it may be used against an innocent person, we should ALWAYS err on the side of letting the guilty go free because punishing the innocent is so abhorrent as to make the state no better than the criminals which is claims to protect us from.
Frankly, I think the value statement of "It is better to let 10 guilty men go free than to convict one innocent man" is too lenient on the use of power. Its better to let any number of the guilty go free, than to convict one innocent man.
Actually, you barely need the shame. I bet if you had just left a copy of the flyer on your own door, he would have seen it and never come back.
Punishment is less of a deterrent to crime than simply the threat of being caught in the first place. Most criminals risk analysis doesn't really go beyond the likelyhood of being caught in the first place. Nobody commits a crime thinking "Well, I will only get arrested and a court date". They do it thinking "Most likely I wont even get caught".
Thats why lojack is a good thing. There was no increase at all in punishment, but the chance of being caught went up. It was estimated that a small 1% increase in the likelyhood of getting caught due to lojack installations correlated to an overall decrease of 20% in car theft rates. ("More Sex is Safer Sex" by Steven E. Landsburg)
That said, the shame seems well deserved.
-Steve
Which is not to be confused with Octopussy, which have only been seen grabbing jewlery and Faberge Eggs.
Albatross!
Do they have to be? The basic functions are pretty similar. You may want things like event logging from sensors, automatic start and stop recording based on events (motion sensors, heat sensors, vibration sensors) etc. Though, in the end, its just video recording and management.
I would bet that if you were going to put together something and wanted a base to start from, MythTV wouldn't be a bad place to start.
-Steve
In the case of you, or I, maybe. Actually, I am more likely to come from several IPs, due to occasional use of tor or other proxies. However, in the vast majority of cases, one person, one one computer, runs one web browser, with NO attempt made to block anything.
As such, assuming that different sessions (that is different cookies etc) comming from the same IP would tend to indicate multiple people using the same connection more often than one person with multiple browsers.
-Steve
I have a better how it should work.
Data mine to find out all the people working in SIGINT, send them pink slips, offer retraining into another field.
The pitfall is thinking that they should be doing this in the first place, or that its going to turn up anything mildly useful. I figure you have too many issues. The first is the false positive rate, the second is the false negative rate. Its worst than needle in a haystack. Its... find the specific gauge of sewing needle in the stack of hay AND assorted needles.
So for every real terrorist that turns up, your going to have a number of random people doing things that got flagged, and you will have to correctly sort them so that you both leave the normal people alone AND catch the terrorist. Your chances of doing either correctly are slim at best.
In the end, you MIGHT catch a terrorist or two. However, whats to say those aren't the ones who would have given up and moved on long before they did anything real? Whats to say they wouldn't have been caught in their plan, or their plan would have even worked?
Its a ridiculous proposition that you can set out to find them and do it. EVERY person working on it is a waste of a salary.
-Steve
> We know what failure looks like (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) but what does success look like? How and why do certain intelligence-
> gathering systems actually work, when they do work?
I think the problem here is that few want to admit the simple truth: Success looks no different than it ever did.
9/11 was no "failure of intelligence" it was just a tragedy. A tragedy engineered by human beings solving technical problems. The BEST you can ever hope to do, is change their plans. That's it really. You can change their target by making a target hard to hit. This makes protecting the vast majority of targets absolutely pointless. Does it matter if 200 people die on a plane or in an explosion on a subway? Dead is dead. Tragedy is Tragedy.
Then maybe, maybe, you can catch them sometimes. That is, if they are unlucky and you are lucky. If they do something stupid, and you happen to be watching. The vast majority of terrorist cases cracked were cracked either A) because the terrorists made mistakes or B) Good old fashioned police work turned something up.
In the end, terrorism is so incredibly rare that, ANY money or time that you spend on it is wasted. Its like spending time and money on a special batch of polio vaccine for yourself. Sure, it will protect you from polio. what were the chances that you were ever going to run into polio? Its an utter waste. Waste of time, waste of money.
Maybe a better analogy would be the lottery. Yes someone is going to hit. However, you shouldn't spend any time or money on preparing for what you will do when you hit the big one. Chances are, its not even going to happen to someone that you know. It makes just as little sense for the rest of the economy to make preparations aimed at selling you things once you win. The amount will be a pittance, even compared against a fairly local economy, AND chances are you wont even win anyway.
Unless you live in a place with an active conflict like Iraq, Afghanistan, or Isreal, THEN MAYBE it makes sense to take some precautions. Even then, it probably doesn't make any sense to take precautions, because you STILL are unlikely to ever be even marginally effected.
Its all just smoke and mirrors, and guess who is footing the bill?
-Steve