One alternative is to abolish fines, and send people to jail for an amount of time relative to the infraction. Everyone gets about 22,000 days [source: The Moody Blues] so the punishment would be equal regardless of income, right?

I have an evil-genius 2-step plan on how to fight this.

first, you need to have a small a/v player. hey, smart phones can play audio and video! now, we need a reducer so that we can 'pipe' the video into the camera, optically, to create the illusion that the car is empty (or in any state we want). easy to pipe in audio, simply by putting the phone spkr near the mic.

2nd part of the plan is to edit the contract (adding a section) that says you may, at your option, provide 'performance art' inside the car. something to that effect.

now that you've set it up, have some fun! what could you record that would be great for playback, for them to see? fake a murder? fake a corporate take-over? fake a plot of some kind? some other kind of intentional mis-direction?

you already covered yourself by the performance-art clause. you can laugh it off when you sign their contract and just make a joke about the camera. if done properly, they won't know what you have in mind.

the rest, as they say: 'hillarity will ensue'.

and unless its illegal (its not) to pipe in any video stream you want in front of a spycam, you can do this and mess with their data collection while having some well-earned laughs at their expense.

they said 'no CURRENT plans'.

isn't that enough wiggle room to create NEW plans, later?

what this will mean is that the 'field test' shows we are not passive enough to accept this surveillance. they'll try again in n+1 units of time and see if we've become more passive and are willing to tolerate it.

if that fails, there's always hiding mics and cameras inside the dash. I'm sure they have spent some time in boardrooms discussing exactly that, too.

As others have said, every person is different in their abilities and limits. And I know nothing about your friend's situation, so I can only tell you about the situation I've worked with.

My aunt was born with cerebral palsy, and she has always had much better control over her feet than her hands. Her solution was to place an ordinary trackball under her desk, (the large kind, not the marble sized one) and she uses her bare foot to control it.

Because it's foot operated and she can't really clean it effectively, it gets dirty much faster than a desktop trackball, and so she ends up replacing it more often than you would a mouse. But overall it's been a pretty cheap investment, and one that works for her.

cops are stupid. they'll just double-down on the derp (using the parlance of our times..)

they don't care anymore if they have our respect. they now have our FEAR and they love that even more.

look, you have to have a thug mentality to be an american cop. its not about justice, its about beating people up and getting away with it. there's a famous 'cartoon' where this phrase is used and its very commonly brought out each time a cop goes out of control and it reaches the news.

it reminds me of the clockwork orange movie. alex's 'droogs' end up being cops when they grow up. thugs as teens become thugs as cops; they just get 'permission' to knock heads and they get their victims from car radio calls.

I wonder if all countries are having the problems with local cops that the US now has? is this an US phenom or is this a problem that is being seen world-wide? the violence in the US social system (we glorify it, sadly) seems to encourage cops to be brutal and violent. is this culture the same in other countries? I suspect its worse here, at least in terms of 1st and 2nd world countries.

yes! publish their IP net space and show the logs of them editing their own pages to create a spin of bullshit propaganda. then lock that fucking page!

enough is enough. its time they learn that they are not the ultimate masters of us all.

the thugs are great at physical violence; but they are not thinkers; and they will not win this kind of war against the people. as dumb as people generally are, they are - on average - smarter than the average cop.

and yes, you have to fail an IQ test (so to speak) to be a cop. search on the CT guy who tried to apply to the police academy and was turned down because he scored too high on the test:

http://abcnews.go.com/US/court...

here, we see how truly STUPID cops are. they didn't even know about hiding behind 7 proxies...

seriously, though; way to stand for justice, guys.

your day is over, cops. no one under 40 trusts you. we are all afraid of you - you are out of control - and only fellow authoriarians like you and associate with you. you are not part of the people, anymore and you have lost all our trust.

the war on citizenry has no winners. sadly, they don't understand enough to even SEE this, much less care.

It'd be pretty easy to do, really. Create a quarantine VLAN, and if someone's spewing bad packets, flip them into it. Once inside, there could be all kinds of safety rails. All DNS requests would be hijacked and rerouted to the ISP's special quarantine DNS server. Packets would only be allowed to destinations where a valid DNS request was previously made. No routing would be allowed through the network: all packets must either have a source or destination address within the VLAN. SMTP traffic would be restricted to a few per day, with only a few recipients per day. Some destination ports could be closed, such as IRC. If they were DDoSing a site, perhaps with the LOIC, the address for that site would be completely unreachable from within the VLAN. The account holder would get warning SMS and Email messages, and all port 80 web traffic would be silently proxied and injected with scripted pop-up banners. They would say something like "Some computer on your home network is attempting to damage other computers on the internet. This is likely due to a computer virus or other computer infection. In order to restore service, and avoid falling trap to an online scam, please telephone us immediately using the phone number printed on your most recent billing statement from BigISPco. Your internet connection will remain severely limited until after you have your computers repaired and cleaned, you call us to restore service, and we verify that your computer is no longer attempting to attack other computers."

Long time ago I had a co-worker who made a mistake where he lost a lot of un-recoverable data. He went in to our boss to offer his resignation. My boss said "Hell no! I just paid $100,000 for you to learn that lesson, so now I need you to make sure that kind of thing can't happen again."

I hear they want snowmen back to apologize

the snowmen are now melted; its spring time.

can we send in rudolph the red nosed reindeer, in place of the snowmen?

"lets grab some of his dna and plant it various places"

yeah, this is an akbar. ie, a trap.

meet with her behind sealed glass, if you must. don't shake hands, don't go near her or any of her party.

and, in fact, I see no reason why this can't be done REMOTELY. if all they want to do is 'talk', we could have handled this years ago with wires. if no wires, then wet string and 2 paper cups.

you also need more than 'cheap' gps. most cheap ones don't include hardware PPS line outputs.

I have a stratum1 ntp server running (on a rasp pi, of all things) but it took some special versions of gpsd, ntpd and kernel mods for kernel PPS support. and on the pi, some hardware mods to intercept the pps led and drive a logic line for that signal.

this isn't rocket science but its NOT trivial, either.

do not give them this power!

they can then 'schwartz you' if they want.

I would not be surprised if they defined 'botnet' as any automated network job or task. which means anything we do that has any automation to it would be 'against the law'.

way too much power, here!

botnets suck but legal means is NOT the way to stop them!

each time we give the government more legal means to punish, its almost always the wrong 'bad guys' that get punished, like aaron.

JUST SAY NO to more US laws. we have too many laws already. why they think that adding MORE laws is a good idea, I'll never undertstand. (well, I do understand, but I'll never LIKE it)

this law, like PATRIOT would be misused eventually. better to not have any law than one that will obviously be misused and probably won't take very long to misuse it, either.

I'm at the point now where "if you want it, I want you to NOT have it" - meaning, laws that politicians want. if you wanted that, that's enough to show me you don't really deserve it.

I think your advice is valid in both hemispheres.

Solar still works just fine in urban spaces too, it does not scale as well there due to population densities, obviously, but urban spaces take up a tiny proportion of available land. I will give you that solar does not work for the minority use case of nighttime industrial solar, but given the tiny portion of the energy market that represents I don't see it being a major issue. As solar power continues to drop, nighttime industrial may simply vanish as solar continues to drop in price. I don't see the point of arguing this, solar will be cheaper than coal by the end of the decade even without subsidies. You will need nighttime generation capacity but long term the writing is already on the wall, business will opt for the cheaper solution.