I saw a recent stat that the British police were arresting 1000 people a month for posting unacceptable things on social media or private emails. Can technical innovation occur in a world with such repressive laws?
The headline is kind of sensationalist. There are networks of automated plate readers and they can be searched globally. It's pretty clear that any cop that uses these systems to track down anyone is using 89000 cameras. I would be surprised if they limited their use to abortion.
Look at it through this lens: the EFF is seeking to educate the public on the dangers of mass surveillance.
The HN crowd is disproportionately aware of how such systems operate and their implications, while the public has little understanding of it.
The headline summarizes the issue very succinctly. What is the issue? Installing massive networks of surveillance gear will eventually erode freedoms and impact people in ways that many people would disagree with. Regardless of how "standard" the described usage of the system might be, the fact remains that the mechanisms available to agencies now are pretty stunning in their scale and reach, and that much of the public is unaware, doesn't care because they don't know enough to care, or believes such a system would never be misused.
I think it's important to do so people, maybe the ones that reply to you, can pretend there's a particular importance to it and not focus on the surveillance technique itself. It's a "no bad tactics, only bad targets" situation for many partisan people.
They don't really care about massive surveillance or extremely concentrated power as long as it serves their interest. When it doesn't, the complain but rarely want to focus on the core of the problem.
That sure is a long list of people at the end of the article who "contributed." Yet, there are only a few first person anecdotes that make up the spine of the article. Odd.
Hah. Sort of. But the big difference is the railroad doesn't let anyone else use it. A regular road can support cars, trucks, truck convoys and maybe even bikes or pedestrians. A railroad can support trains.
Do they, pragmatically speaking? High-volume cargo traffic quickly wears down the asphalt and causes regular jams, a bike lane unseparated from cars is a safety hazard enough large enough to push many potential riders off the road, and most morning commutes would be better served by well-developed public transit.
One EMD SD70ACe locomotive moves over 10,000 tonnes of cargo using 1,300 L of diesel per 1,000 km. The equivalent 286 trucks would consume 107,250 L, while needing 55.8 km of a single-lane highway, compared to the 2.16 km freight train.
Similarly, the average US car has 1.5 passengers per ~30 m² of space, so 20 m² per person. An average bike is about 2 m² per person. A typical trolley car holds ~160 passengers per 200 square meters, so 1.25 m² per person. A tram reliably moves at 60–80 km/h on interurban routers, or 30 km/h in urban centers with frequent stops, a considerable improvement over San Francisco's 16 km/h by car for last mile.
the problem with rail is that it's hard to scale up (and down)
getting new tracks built takes waaay too long (because of NIMBY and simply because the road is usually already there)
there's no long-term thinking from politics, and no market forces converging to somehow over the years lead to some compounding (so the inefficiencies don't really translate to some big problem -- well, climate change and slower GDP growth)
I've had glitching problems with long term cold storage with flash SSDs. They just start losing a bit here or a bit there when they're off for a long time. I have been results with HDD.
Is there any reason to believe that these versions will be stable enough?
> They just start losing a bit here or a bit there when they're off for a long time.
Flash cells are capacitors. Like all capacitors they leak slowly over time. For long term storage on an SSD you should probably keep it powered and regularly scrub the filesystem like ZFS does.
I realize that students don't think this way, but they could do a few things before the end of the semester. They usually find the time to get drunk or go to Starbucks for a hit of caffeine.
Starbucks is a lot easier to swing by then trying to get boxes to haul things away. Also in my experience the dorms don't let you bring by rented trucks or vehicles in the loading zone unless it's your assigned move out time slot, so you can't really do that mid semester. you could carry things by hand slowly somewhere, but it's going to be much more cumbersome.
They're also studying for finals and working on end-of-semester projects. And yeah, they're still kids and time management is a thing you learn at this age. But the last 3 weeks of a semester go by incredibly fast.
I mean, you're looking at almost a month out or so given the extra stress of the end of the semester with finals and projects. And the semester is only five months or so to being with.
It's not really realistic to make this a moral issue, IMO.
