Diving to 30+ meters? Probably air. And I'm guessing it's probably not a good idea to work divers to exhaustion.

They still use dot matrix printers in some rental car agencies -- if you're getting nostalgic.

As for the old rotary phones they were quite ingenious. The technology didn't exist to have out-of-band signaling between the terminal (phone) and the central office switch. Instead as he dial unwound it would interrupt the circuit between the phone and the switching station, essentially hanging up very briefly. Each of these brief pulses in the circuit current would rotate a series of servos at the switching office by certain amounts. What that meant was that you could dial a phone buy tapping the receiver cradle at a certain speed. When I say "you could" I mean in the same sense as "you can pick a lock with a piece of bent wire and a thin lever." In other words your mileage may vary.

When I was an MIT student a club I was in had a lock on their phone's dial to prevent people making unauthorized calls (long distance call used to cost lots of money. The lock was next to useless because so many people knew how to dial phones by tapping the number out on the receiver cradle.

Your approach requires billions to willingly agree to put my head in the sand in order to work. This simply isn't going to happen.

My approach involves giving people greater intel systematically. This can happen, and if it does happen, it will make everyone stronger and able to make better informed decisions.

Yes, the inside of my head is a strange place. "Gifted", "Genius", "Freak", "Monster", "Idiot", take your pick, I've heard it all.

I'm being stalked right now, by people who don't like the shit I write. They don't do anything, they just follow me around because they're bored.

Do I wish I'd self-censored myself? No. Do I wish I could look at my phone and have the conclusive evidence I need to confront the guy face to face and use physical measures to make him stop? Damn right I do.

And, frankly, the more information everyone has, the better I can trust them to participate in a democracy with me. If you're inclined to willfully stick your head in the sand, why would I want to participate in a consensus style system of decision making with the likes of you? That's like having the car break down with 3 toddlers in the back seat and having a vote on what we ought to do... no thanks.

You're totally ignoring the fact that they already can. You don't need technology to stalk someone.

If someone wants to stalk me, all they need is a car. If I want to catch them, and be warned soon enough to stay safe, I need to be constantly vigilant.

Allowing technology to be vigilant for me makes me safer, even if it makes finding me easier.

They looked at the radiation coming out of the sample to find evidence of Am-241, an impurity that would be formed if the sample were created in a cyclotron but not if it were created in a reactor. This test doesn't require the sample even to be touched.

OK, I read it, and I wasn't impressed.

The reason is that your definition is circular:

That's fine as an operational definition of what a society *treats* as privacy, but it does no good in telling us what those boundaries should be.

Here's a gem from Poettering, where he dismisses basic security (why would you not implicitly trust unauthenticated packets from some random internet server?), as well as displays his total lack of awareness of the capabilities of the existing software he's bent on replacing (super-NIH syndrome... writing a simplistic replacement to ntpd and chronyd without even knowing what they currently do).

Yikes.

Wow, that thread is really depressing. So the decision path for what ships with Fedora has been simplified to: what package isn't broken by systemd? Suitability for a task and technical merits aren't even a consideration any more...

I worked in an engineering lab at MIT when Mount Saint Helens erupted in 1980, and we'd developed one of the first digital field seismometers, and we used a similar technique. Seismometers that were left in the field for weeks were designed to start recording on to mag tape when an event started, but the problem was you'd lose the crucial minutes *before* where interesting things might be happening. Memory was fabulously expensive, so we fed the data off the A/D converter into an array of discrete flip-flops that functioned as a shift register. When recording was triggered, the mag tape would start recording the seismic reading from thirty seconds ago.

The thing is, memory is *not* fabulously expensive anymore. You can find 128 GB USB flash drives for under $20 retail, so the memory chips must be tiny fraction of that. It should be feasible to record an officer's entire shift -- even a double shift -- from an affordable device. I think it's much more practical just to load up on memory than to try to wire up an patrolman with cables and switches. And as with a volcano exploding, the seconds, even minutes leading up to an event are crucial to understanding it.

Worked out in this case

I took a course on computer privacy law a few years ago, and one of the big questions is "what is privacy"? After looking at all the various philosophical and legal definitions, I came away with this definition: privacy is autotomy -- the right to conduct your affairs without unreasonable and uninvited interference.

So I would define online harassment as deliberate and uninvited interference. Unpleasantness is simply one *means* by which the interference is accomplished, but it is not in and of itself harassment.

Example 1: you make the mistake of delving into Youtube comments. That's like crossing a Norwegian footbridge with a sack of goats. You have chosen to dive into a pool of nastiness, and unpleasant feelings are an unfortunate but non-actionable consequence of that decision.

Example 2: you decide to block some of the more obnoxious trolls. One of them figures this out and creates a new account so he can continue harassing you. Now that's harassment, because you have explicitly un-invited that interaction. He is interfering with your right to ignore him.

Example 3: one of the trolls doxes you and follows you to another website. That's harassment too because his *intent* is to interfere with your enjoyment of that website.

Example 4: You are on a website and someone violates the site's "harassment" policy. This is a matter for the site admins, not the police or courts, unless the person is cyber-stalking you. A reasonable person doesn't expect site policies to be strictly and swiftly enforced -- it almost never happens. By choosing to use any website you choose to expose yourself to obnoxious people.

Well, what if we made it so things were even more transparent, and we were able to bring pressure against the "doxer".

I had someone engage in character assassination against me based on a wilful misinterpretation of what I said. Rather than taking my post down, I left it for all to judge for themselves.

Apparently ordinary people who saw what this person did, under their real name, and started sending threats. Or so I overheard when i was recognized, prompting a conversation I could overhear.

More transparency fixes most objections to problems with transparency.

Example: Woman is being stalked. Wants to keep her privacy because shes scared. Solution: He sees her movements by expending effort. She doesn't want to make that effort to track his movements, it makes her a prisoner. So, make it easy for her to see her stalker as he moves around, and move to safety, and prove to the rest of us that it's going on.

Transparency. Just add more.

citation needed.

Back when people rode horses relatively few people did it. In the 1870s US, the cost to keep a horse in stable would cost almost a third of a typical laborer's daily wage ($0.50 out of $1.75), most of which was already spoken for.

You mean like this one (text available here)? Or this one? Or this one? Or this one?

The problem is that people who demand Muslims condemn violence actually don't care what Muslims have to say. It's just posturing.