``How often do you see a photographer holding their dedicated-to-photography camera vertically?''

All the time if they're at, say, a sporting even and they know anything at all about composition. I've been doing sports photography since the '70s and have taken many tens of thousands of photos and the vast majority of my work is in the vertical format -- I specialize in track and field and other running events but I do hit the occasional high school foot/basket/baseball game. Yes... you can crop on the computer but, IMNSHO, it's a waste of pixels.

I once worked on the camera portion of a semi-autonomous weapon which, once a target was designated, would continually analyze the live image to maintain, track and intercept that target. A key part of the system was a human in the loop abort, which would cause the system to veer off target before impact should the operator see something he or she didn't like: not the intended target, high probability of collateral damage, etc.

The point is, all judgements about selecting the target and aborting the mission or changing targets were in the hands of a human. The automated parts were vehicle operations, corrections for terrain and weather, tracking an operator-designated object, etc. — all things that required no risk assessment, moral judgment, ethical considerations, etc.

That's the difference between autonomous and semi-autonomous: A human identifies the target, and monitors the system to issue a stand down order as new information becomes available.

(It's also the only weapon system I ever worked on, and it caused me great conflict. Though the intended use had merit, the possible unintended uses made me very uncomfortable. No, I can't be more specific.)

``Romans knew to let there be games, to keep the masses busy from free thinking.''

Yep. We have our reality TV, March Madness, the Super Bowl, the World Series (heck, professional sports in general), lotteries, celebrity worship, and so on and so on. There are already plenty of distractions to keep the American public from concentrating on, or even learning about, how their freedom has been taken away from them.

We'll see.

It's absolutely wrong that I am proposing a 'stealable' ID. No, it's not that at all. Like NFC (ApplePay and others) you don't send out your ID, your bracelet will engage in a two-way conversation that uses generates unique identifiers every time that prove that it's you without giving the system communicating with you the ability to impersonate you. It's not hard at all; we should have been doing this years ago. This is described in Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography twenty-fucking-years ago. Chapter 21(Identification Schemes) describes "zero-knowledge proof of identity". Curiously, researchers Feige, Fiat, and Shamir submitted a patent application in 1986 for this, but the Patent Office responded "the disclosure or publication of the subject matter ... would be detrimental to the national security..." The authors were ordered to notify all Americans to whom the research had been disclosed that unauthorized disclosure could lead to two years' imprisonment, a $10,000 fine, or both. Somewhat hilarious, as the work was all done at Weizmann Institute in Israel.

That said, I do think that groups like the NSA and FBI have been quite successful in keeping people (like Jeff4747) remarkably uneducated. Banks, credit card companies, and groups like Google that make gigabucks tracking people have held back from doing things right as well -- and they're paying for it today.

To say again. It is easy to build a system that would securely verify that you have authority to do something, without giving the ability for somebody else to impersonate you. It's somewhat more challenging than printing number in plastic on a credit card, but only a tiny bit more challenging.

This will happen. Once it does people will wonder why it took so long.

This is like charging someone with felony burglary for watching a neighbor hide his key under his doormat, then using it to gain entry and re-arrange the potted plants.

Considering all the possibilities of what he *could* have changed it to, I think he showed admirable restraint...

The problem with phones is that you can lose them or break them or have them stolen. I agree that it's a good place to start, though.

I believe that the RFID tag that Coren22 suggests don't have, and can't have, the processing power required to do this right. You don't want to say "Yes, I'm 132132123123", that would be *way* too easy to fake. You want to have a back-and-forth communication that shows that you are who you are, without giving away your ID.

I think the bracelet would become a status symbol -- the status being "yeah, I care about security." I'm actually not kidding.

At some point, and my guess is pretty darn soon, reasonable people are going to have a very secure cryptobracelet that they never take off, or if you take it off it will never work again.

The bracelet would work like the NFC chip in current phones, it would create unique identifiers for each transaction, so you can be verified that you are who you are without ever broadcasting your identity.

Then, all email and every other communication can easily be encrypted, securely, and without adding complication. You won't have to worry about remembering a hundred passwords, or about what happens when the store you bought things from is hacked, or that a library of 100 millions passwords will find yours.

I grant that some will protest that this is not natural (I don't want to wear something on my wrist!) but people do a hundred other unnatural things every day (brush their teeth, use deodorant, wear glasses, live longer than fifty years...) The benefits will be enormous, the changes minimal, and this will be led, I believe, by thought leaders.

There are people/companies that are trying as hard as they can to turn it into something similar to broadcast media or, even worse, cable. It's something they understand. IMHO, it's similar to the way the Web changed once magazine designers started dictating what constituted good web page design -- squinty/headache-inducing text that can't be enlarged, horrible color schemes (including my newest least favorite: gray text on white background.). It wasn't ways pretty for the web user but it's something the designers understood.

The red flag for me about this article is that it's on Reason's web site. That alone is enough for me to back up a dump truck with a giant grain of salt.

``You can call it "to the bottom" if you think you somehow benefit from high taxes.''

I, personally, rather enjoy having things like running water, roads that can actually be driven on, bridges that don't fall down, food that's been inspected, and some other things that government provides. How are those things provided if we set up corporate-friendly tax regimes that wind up starving government? The private sector? Puhleez...

``Instead they write a job description which is impossible, or geared to bringing in a specific foreign worker.''

It'd be interesting to see the actual duties being performed by the H1-B worker who is hired to fill those jobs. I suspect that some of these hires aren't actually doing everything that was listed in the job description that disqualified American workers.

I doubt a home-built phased array radar will ever be considered "in general public use."

Besides, these devices only see thru walls built inside a garage, which would generally require a search warrant to see either side of...

No. Any electrons that can be "bumped" around by EM radiation with wavelengths longer than UV are already in the conduction band. In other words, the ionization already happened and any induced current occurs in "loose" electrons... or, more likely, existing ions in solution.

It's called non-ionizing radiation for a reason.