Well you'd be wrong to throw out all available data just because of one poor result. Generally the Met Office do a reasonably accurate job (as accurate as possible where weather is concerned), so to ignore everything they say just because of one error is not the best approach, especially since that error enabled them to further improve their systems to ensure better accuracy in the future:
The Met Office conducted an internal inquiry, scrutinised by two independent assessors, and a number of recommendations were made. Chiefly, observational coverage of the atmosphere over the ocean to the south and west of the UK was improved by increasing the quality and quantity of observations from ships, aircraft, buoys and satellites. Continued refinements were made to the computer models used in forecasting, and changes were made in the training of forecasters. In addition, reforms in the way the Met Office reports warnings of severe weather were implemented, leading to substantially more warnings being issued in the future. Further deployment of improved tracking devices and improvements in the computer model simulations were supported by the purchase of an additional Cray supercomputer. Warnings for the Burns' Day storm three years later were accurate and on time.
The point is, with newspapers, radio and the TV it's much harder to "hack" that distribution channel, so while the information might not always be 100% accurate, you can at least be reasonably sure the information is coming from the correct source. Even a government-backed opt-in SMS delivery system would have been a more reasonable approach than Twitter - I'm sure cost savings were in no way a factor when deciding to go with the latter, of course...
What's to stop a fake link in the tweet? Besides, people already thought this was officially coming from the government. This isn't a failure of the people in relying on an insecure communication system, it's a failure of the government for jumping on the "trendy" bandwagon without thinking through all the implications. If they'd confined such reports to radio and television, for instance, it would have been a lot harder to spoof.
It's even worse than that where the absue is happening - the police can arbitrarily decide to ban the accused from the house, even if the alleged victim doesn't want to press charges. Do they think that throwing out an abusive husband is going to result in anything other than a severe increase in the number of abused wives who are beaten to death? How do they think these already abusive men are going to react in that situation! They already have severe issues and now they're going to see the person they take those out on as being responsible for putting them out of their home and potentially their jobs, etc. does anyone think they'll react with anything other than violence? The correct response is to give the abused person the support and help they need to get the abuser out of their lives, not to just drop a huge bomb on the situation then walk away and leave it to explode. Unless they're willing to leave 24/7 protection at the house, that's effectively what they'll be doing.
Scarily, as you point out, all the other things are already happening and the last point was trains to gas chambers, and just yesterday the government announced massive expenditure (in the middle of a global recession) on upgrading the train services.
Generally different departments deal with the things you listed, so it's not like one person is expected to have knowledge of the whole gamut. Additionally, when the people murdering children, forming mobs or planning terrorist atrocities are using technology to help with the logistics or to keep ahead of the authorities, it is absolutely the duty of said authorities to make themselves aware of how such technology works, or at least have a department of geeks responsible for doing so and filter all of your ideas through them to ensure technical feasibility.
You are correct - Google is already sort of doing this anyway, because a large number of people type not only the name but even the URL, of the site they want to visit directly into Google, rather than using the address bar (even though it means an extra step unless you use the search bar). If people linked to the site with the URL, i.e. www.google.com then it would probably top the search results for people trying to access it that way. So long as you set up the page titles correctly so the site's "name" is in the snippet returned in the search results, the average user wouldn't even notice they were viewing the site via an IP address.
That's pretty much the same everywhere, though - whether it's enshrined in a written constitution or not. Every country has their own limits on speech, that might mean you can't speak out against the government, or it might mean you're not allowed to incite religious hatred, or make sexist comments. The UK is pretty free in terms of being able to criticise the government (verbally, at least, let's not get into the stupid laws on public assembly, etc), but does have the other limits that are supposedly there to help us all live together in a varied society. By your definition, I challenge you to find any country in the whole world that has truly free speech.
Indeed, it's pretty much exactly the same here in the UK. I use my debit card for almost all my payments (some shops have a minimum payment amount, most don't care because of the sheer volume they're dealing with). It's just so much more convenient than having to remember to get cash - and if I ever do need cash, as you said, the methods of getting it using the card are ubiquitous. Doing all of this via the phone seems like it's adding an unecessary layer of complication (not to mention having to remember to charge the phone up, or the fact that my £500 smart phone is probably a more tempting prospect to a thief than my PIN locked debit card, etc).
Besides, the only place this is really useful is for micro-payments (if you're using it to purchase expensive goods or services you're really asking for trouble), and we're already coming up with better methods of doing that, both on cards and built directly into mobiles, so as a proof of concept it's a little late to the party.
Not so if you have a card that requires a pin and will not work without a pin.
Most cards have the fall back option of a signature (a lot of countries require this for disability discrimination reasons, not everyone can operate the keypads). Theoretically that should be reasonably secure, although anecdotally I've noticed these days they rarely check or care if the signature on the card matches the one you give them (I know this from personal experience as my own signature seems to look different every time I write it, they generally glance at it and process the payment anyway - I have been challenged on this precisely once in the almost 20 years that I've used a debit card).
I have a feeling the constraint here is the medium, not the benevolence of the people behind it. If it was as trivial to put such a system in place with books as it is with online games, I guarantee someone would already be doing it. There are unscrupulous people in all industries, but really if you get into a game like that knowing what's required and you lack the willpower to walk away, that's only partly the fault of the person who made the game.
And no reason to tie this down to entertainment, either. Marketeers in all walks use numerous psychological tricks to encourage people to part with their money. If one becomes addicted to these kinds of game and feels it is a detriment to their lives, they should seek help, just like someone who becomes addicted to shopping. For the vast majority of people it's not an issue - we all know the tricks and we largely live with them already. It's only because the medium is new to a lot of people that this is even news, if it was a story about how supermarkets use certain music or floor tile patterns to influence buying decisions nobody would even care.
Where's the defining line? How about classic cars - some people revere them as art even though they're just old machines. What about a desk? You can't get much more functional, but an antique desk will get a furnitue fanatic hot under the collar and can sell for a fortune. Really all of these things are just: their constituent parts + the arbitrary value people assign to them. When people start assigning the same arbitrary value to old computers that they do to old masters, how do you make the distinction?
Which two-part phase is a) first openly monitoring all internet traffic to "get a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist" (and making all encrypted traffic illegal unless it's with certified companies/agencies) and then 2) insisting that indoctrination through brainwashing on the internet is a valid attack vector so they now need to use the ubiquitous internet monitoring facilities that they promised were just for research purposes to start censoring certain discussions/pages that contain banned keywords?
Best guess is this is the real reason behind this. You'll never secure a train from a bomb, but you can catch a lot of people carrying guns, it's just that a lot of Americans seem to get a bit twitchy when you start talking about restricting what they can do with their guns, whereas terrorists are a nice big strawman target everyone can enjoy attacking.
Well I can't speak for the US, but over here (UK) the thing is, most people aren't contorting themselves in fear. The media does a fine job of convincing us we are, but seriously most people just get on with it. After the 7/7 bombings, there were rumours in the press that people would stay away from work, afraid to use the train or buses. In reality everyone just carried on as close to normal as possible. Hell, we were dealing with this crap before it was popular. I think a lot of people convince themselves security theatre is a good idea because the media and politicians are so busy telling us that's what everyone else believes, but in reality most people wouldn't care if security theatre disappeared tomorrow (they wouldn't be paralysed with terror but I'll bet their commute to work would be a little easier).
The worrying part is that it takes people several weeks to come to that conclusion. This should be self-evident. Seriously, how the hell did they ever expect to secure a train that runs along track, in largely open ground, by having a scanner at the start of the journey? Have we really reached a point where people blindly accept what the government tells them is for their safety? I'm loathe to use such an obvious cliché, but it's like the terrorists have already won. They don't have to lift a finger from now on and they already cost us a fortune every day and untold man hours (if you read Super Freakonomics they suggest the figures show that the shoe checks at airports alone have already cost more "lives" (in lost man hours) than 9/11, and that was a response to a failed attack - I'm not sure how valid their figures are but I wouldn't be hugely surprised if it was true).
There has never been even one single case of a terrorist boarding any train in the United States with the intent to cause it harm. There has never even been intelligence suggesting that this is a credible threat.
Even coming from a country where they did attack the trains (well, the subway system), it still sounds like a bad idea, for all of the other reasons you listed, plus, assuming you could ever make this 100% (or close enough) secure, what's next? Attacks at sporting events? Attacks on people in large offices? Schools? The terrorists don't have a playbook, they can make it up as they go along, trying to react to that is just going to cost a fortune and make everyone's lives hell.
I had a similar thought, a minesweeper in effect, but then I thought: these are people willing to throw their lives away for a cause. What's going to stop them ramming a truck into the train if they really want to? Besides, unless the trains are escorted, it won't even matter that they have to be on site. Pick a remote spot, wait for the sweeper to go past, back the truck onto the tracks and jump out into the waiting getaway vehicle. The people on the train certainly aren't going to be in any shape to stop you.
That's assuming that "damage" is the goal. If the goal is simply "disrupting commuter traffic and costing the country a small fortune while messing up the infrastructure at random intervals" they can achieve the same thing with no explosion and no derailing, just something that looks vaguely bomb-like.
The only answer is some kind of mobile scanner. I envisage a pole attached to every individual's back, from which hang the scanning arms, these set to rotate and continually scan said individual for threats. It's the only way we can be sure.
Seriously, though, when will the powers that be learn that there will never be a silver bullet solution. Whenever they come up with a new initiative, at the cost of billions, that wastes millions of man-hours holding commuters up, the terrorists will spend all of thirty seconds coming up with a brand new attack vector that bypasses all of the above. The reason this kind of warfare is so effective is that you can't plan for it, the best you can do is plan how you live despite it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well you'd be wrong to throw out all available data just because of one poor result. Generally the Met Office do a reasonably accurate job (as accurate as possible where weather is concerned), so to ignore everything they say just because of one error is not the best approach, especially since that error enabled them to further improve their systems to ensure better accuracy in the future:
The Met Office conducted an internal inquiry, scrutinised by two independent assessors, and a number of recommendations were made. Chiefly, observational coverage of the atmosphere over the ocean to the south and west of the UK was improved by increasing the quality and quantity of observations from ships, aircraft, buoys and satellites. Continued refinements were made to the computer models used in forecasting, and changes were made in the training of forecasters. In addition, reforms in the way the Met Office reports warnings of severe weather were implemented, leading to substantially more warnings being issued in the future. Further deployment of improved tracking devices and improvements in the computer model simulations were supported by the purchase of an additional Cray supercomputer. Warnings for the Burns' Day storm three years later were accurate and on time.
The point is, with newspapers, radio and the TV it's much harder to "hack" that distribution channel, so while the information might not always be 100% accurate, you can at least be reasonably sure the information is coming from the correct source. Even a government-backed opt-in SMS delivery system would have been a more reasonable approach than Twitter - I'm sure cost savings were in no way a factor when deciding to go with the latter, of course...
What's to stop a fake link in the tweet? Besides, people already thought this was officially coming from the government. This isn't a failure of the people in relying on an insecure communication system, it's a failure of the government for jumping on the "trendy" bandwagon without thinking through all the implications. If they'd confined such reports to radio and television, for instance, it would have been a lot harder to spoof.
It's even worse than that where the absue is happening - the police can arbitrarily decide to ban the accused from the house, even if the alleged victim doesn't want to press charges. Do they think that throwing out an abusive husband is going to result in anything other than a severe increase in the number of abused wives who are beaten to death? How do they think these already abusive men are going to react in that situation! They already have severe issues and now they're going to see the person they take those out on as being responsible for putting them out of their home and potentially their jobs, etc. does anyone think they'll react with anything other than violence? The correct response is to give the abused person the support and help they need to get the abuser out of their lives, not to just drop a huge bomb on the situation then walk away and leave it to explode. Unless they're willing to leave 24/7 protection at the house, that's effectively what they'll be doing.
Scarily, as you point out, all the other things are already happening and the last point was trains to gas chambers, and just yesterday the government announced massive expenditure (in the middle of a global recession) on upgrading the train services.
Generally different departments deal with the things you listed, so it's not like one person is expected to have knowledge of the whole gamut. Additionally, when the people murdering children, forming mobs or planning terrorist atrocities are using technology to help with the logistics or to keep ahead of the authorities, it is absolutely the duty of said authorities to make themselves aware of how such technology works, or at least have a department of geeks responsible for doing so and filter all of your ideas through them to ensure technical feasibility.
You are correct - Google is already sort of doing this anyway, because a large number of people type not only the name but even the URL, of the site they want to visit directly into Google, rather than using the address bar (even though it means an extra step unless you use the search bar). If people linked to the site with the URL, i.e. www.google.com then it would probably top the search results for people trying to access it that way. So long as you set up the page titles correctly so the site's "name" is in the snippet returned in the search results, the average user wouldn't even notice they were viewing the site via an IP address.
That's pretty much the same everywhere, though - whether it's enshrined in a written constitution or not. Every country has their own limits on speech, that might mean you can't speak out against the government, or it might mean you're not allowed to incite religious hatred, or make sexist comments. The UK is pretty free in terms of being able to criticise the government (verbally, at least, let's not get into the stupid laws on public assembly, etc), but does have the other limits that are supposedly there to help us all live together in a varied society. By your definition, I challenge you to find any country in the whole world that has truly free speech.
Indeed, it's pretty much exactly the same here in the UK. I use my debit card for almost all my payments (some shops have a minimum payment amount, most don't care because of the sheer volume they're dealing with). It's just so much more convenient than having to remember to get cash - and if I ever do need cash, as you said, the methods of getting it using the card are ubiquitous. Doing all of this via the phone seems like it's adding an unecessary layer of complication (not to mention having to remember to charge the phone up, or the fact that my £500 smart phone is probably a more tempting prospect to a thief than my PIN locked debit card, etc).
Besides, the only place this is really useful is for micro-payments (if you're using it to purchase expensive goods or services you're really asking for trouble), and we're already coming up with better methods of doing that, both on cards and built directly into mobiles, so as a proof of concept it's a little late to the party.
Gambling is a tax on people bad at math.
Whereas for those who are good at maths it can be quite lucrative.
Not so if you have a card that requires a pin and will not work without a pin.
Most cards have the fall back option of a signature (a lot of countries require this for disability discrimination reasons, not everyone can operate the keypads). Theoretically that should be reasonably secure, although anecdotally I've noticed these days they rarely check or care if the signature on the card matches the one you give them (I know this from personal experience as my own signature seems to look different every time I write it, they generally glance at it and process the payment anyway - I have been challenged on this precisely once in the almost 20 years that I've used a debit card).
He saved time by not signing in, though.
I have a feeling the constraint here is the medium, not the benevolence of the people behind it. If it was as trivial to put such a system in place with books as it is with online games, I guarantee someone would already be doing it. There are unscrupulous people in all industries, but really if you get into a game like that knowing what's required and you lack the willpower to walk away, that's only partly the fault of the person who made the game.
And no reason to tie this down to entertainment, either. Marketeers in all walks use numerous psychological tricks to encourage people to part with their money. If one becomes addicted to these kinds of game and feels it is a detriment to their lives, they should seek help, just like someone who becomes addicted to shopping. For the vast majority of people it's not an issue - we all know the tricks and we largely live with them already. It's only because the medium is new to a lot of people that this is even news, if it was a story about how supermarkets use certain music or floor tile patterns to influence buying decisions nobody would even care.
I don't understand - Apple already have a time machine, and it's a good bit cheaper than what he's shelled out here.
This constant misnomer that somehow apple has the lead on anything in relation to technology drives me crazy. It's all marketing.
Surely, if nothing else, that demonstrates that they lead on marketing in relation to technology :)
Where's the defining line? How about classic cars - some people revere them as art even though they're just old machines. What about a desk? You can't get much more functional, but an antique desk will get a furnitue fanatic hot under the collar and can sell for a fortune. Really all of these things are just: their constituent parts + the arbitrary value people assign to them. When people start assigning the same arbitrary value to old computers that they do to old masters, how do you make the distinction?
Which two-part phase is a) first openly monitoring all internet traffic to "get a better understanding of what causes someone to become a terrorist" (and making all encrypted traffic illegal unless it's with certified companies/agencies) and then 2) insisting that indoctrination through brainwashing on the internet is a valid attack vector so they now need to use the ubiquitous internet monitoring facilities that they promised were just for research purposes to start censoring certain discussions/pages that contain banned keywords?
Best guess is this is the real reason behind this. You'll never secure a train from a bomb, but you can catch a lot of people carrying guns, it's just that a lot of Americans seem to get a bit twitchy when you start talking about restricting what they can do with their guns, whereas terrorists are a nice big strawman target everyone can enjoy attacking.
Well I can't speak for the US, but over here (UK) the thing is, most people aren't contorting themselves in fear. The media does a fine job of convincing us we are, but seriously most people just get on with it. After the 7/7 bombings, there were rumours in the press that people would stay away from work, afraid to use the train or buses. In reality everyone just carried on as close to normal as possible. Hell, we were dealing with this crap before it was popular. I think a lot of people convince themselves security theatre is a good idea because the media and politicians are so busy telling us that's what everyone else believes, but in reality most people wouldn't care if security theatre disappeared tomorrow (they wouldn't be paralysed with terror but I'll bet their commute to work would be a little easier).
The worrying part is that it takes people several weeks to come to that conclusion. This should be self-evident. Seriously, how the hell did they ever expect to secure a train that runs along track, in largely open ground, by having a scanner at the start of the journey? Have we really reached a point where people blindly accept what the government tells them is for their safety? I'm loathe to use such an obvious cliché, but it's like the terrorists have already won. They don't have to lift a finger from now on and they already cost us a fortune every day and untold man hours (if you read Super Freakonomics they suggest the figures show that the shoe checks at airports alone have already cost more "lives" (in lost man hours) than 9/11, and that was a response to a failed attack - I'm not sure how valid their figures are but I wouldn't be hugely surprised if it was true).
Even coming from a country where they did attack the trains (well, the subway system), it still sounds like a bad idea, for all of the other reasons you listed, plus, assuming you could ever make this 100% (or close enough) secure, what's next? Attacks at sporting events? Attacks on people in large offices? Schools? The terrorists don't have a playbook, they can make it up as they go along, trying to react to that is just going to cost a fortune and make everyone's lives hell.
I had a similar thought, a minesweeper in effect, but then I thought: these are people willing to throw their lives away for a cause. What's going to stop them ramming a truck into the train if they really want to? Besides, unless the trains are escorted, it won't even matter that they have to be on site. Pick a remote spot, wait for the sweeper to go past, back the truck onto the tracks and jump out into the waiting getaway vehicle. The people on the train certainly aren't going to be in any shape to stop you.
That's assuming that "damage" is the goal. If the goal is simply "disrupting commuter traffic and costing the country a small fortune while messing up the infrastructure at random intervals" they can achieve the same thing with no explosion and no derailing, just something that looks vaguely bomb-like.
The only answer is some kind of mobile scanner. I envisage a pole attached to every individual's back, from which hang the scanning arms, these set to rotate and continually scan said individual for threats. It's the only way we can be sure.
Seriously, though, when will the powers that be learn that there will never be a silver bullet solution. Whenever they come up with a new initiative, at the cost of billions, that wastes millions of man-hours holding commuters up, the terrorists will spend all of thirty seconds coming up with a brand new attack vector that bypasses all of the above. The reason this kind of warfare is so effective is that you can't plan for it, the best you can do is plan how you live despite it.