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Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

based on the SC and the EFF, it seems as if i would be well within my rights to set up some cameras to OCR plates myself than correct? I could even crowd source it, and post little trackers on particular cars when they pass the citizen cameras showing the routes and routines of anyone I want as well? Cops, federal employees, if i got down to chappaqua and set some up i could even monitor the clintons, all legally correct?? Hey if thats how they want it than i got to start writing a new android/iphone app

You can likely do some of that, though some of what you describe (following specific people) would fall under anti-stalking laws. As noted elsewhere in this thread, repo companies are already doing this and businesses have cameras set up on their property and within the store recording your every move. Get writing! You only need a bunch of people willing to do this and a lot of license plate reading equipment.

Im not against reasonable retention laws, 30-60 days is well within reason for the numbers not being watched on some list, any longer is too much (I feel the same way about internet logs and phone records, 30-60 days without a court order and it should be purged)

Seems reasonable to me.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

The supreme court and EFF disagree with you. While you have the right to travel freely, you have no right of privacy when in public and collecting information about you and your travels does not impede you traveling. You also have the option of not traveling by your own car - you can rent a car, borrow one from a friend, walk, bike, or take public transit.

As for your last statement I completely agree that collected data should be deleted after some period of time - enough time that if it's needed as evidence it can be used, but not so long that your entire travel history is available for perusal at any time by any person.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

What constitutional right? Privacy? Let's see what the EFF says about that:

https://ssd.eff.org/your-compu...

That means the police can follow you around in public and observe your activities, see what you are carrying or to whom you are talking, sit next to you or behind you and listen to your conversations — all without a warrant.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

Why?

I mean, from a privacy sense, you're in a public place and therefore have no reasonable sense of privacy. Do you chase down people that are taking photographs where you or your car are in the background?

If you want to talk about what's done with that data after it's been collected that's a different story and not what is being asked for in this case. But you're just as entitled to set up your own license plate tracking system just like the police are.

Also think of this as a lead in to having police carry cameras and record every interaction with the public. Should that data get dumped immediately if the person is not accused of a crime? Michael Brown was accused of a crime, but there wasn't time for Wilson to know that, so under your rules, the events leading up to his shooting would be expunged.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

Methodology is different from what is collected. Methodology is "every police vehicle has a model ZRX-9000 plate scanner which is always in operation with results sent in real time to a central server where the data is held for 30 days unless a court orders it to be held longer as part of an ongoing investigation/trial". We should absolutely have that information. But just like I don't need to see your tax records, I don't need to see where you've been for the past week.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 108

"What are you collecting" is different from "What did you collect" and "What privacy should be applied to what is collected".

EFF/ACLU is asking for B which is the wrong question. A and C are far more important without knowing exactly what is collected.

Here's a scenario:

You're interviewing for a new job. You drive to the company to interview on site. While you're on your way, the police tag your car in various spots along your trip including the parking lot of the site. Now under normal circumstances, that data would be private and not released without court order (yes, fantasy land, but bear with me) so your trip remains private and after some period of time those records are expunged.

Now say that the EFF and ACLU get their way and have all that data released. All your movements are now considered public record available for review by anyone. Do you want your boss pouring through your movements?

Comment Re:Patent on this new feature (Score 3, Informative) 88

No idea. I don't know if the instructions for computing PC-relative addresses in an ISA without an architectural PC are patentable. They also exist in RISC V (not sure which came first), so if they do then it's going to be a problem for Kriste et al. Nothing else in there is especially novel: like ARMv8, it's a nicely designed compilation target, but it doesn't do anything that's especially exciting.

I didn't look at the floating point stuff in much detail, so there may be something there, although the biggest changes in recent versions of the MIPS specs have been that they're more closely aligned with the IEEE floating point standards, so it's hard to imagine anything there.

The biggest difference between MIPS64r6 and ARMv8 is that the MIPS spec explicitly reserves some of the opcode space for vendor-specific extensions (we use this space, although our core predates the current spec - it's largely codifying existing opcode use). This allows, for example, Cavium to add custom instructions that are useful for network switches but not very useful for other things. ARMv8, in contrast, expects that any non-standard extensions are in the form of accelerator cores with a completely different ISA. This means that any code compiled for one ARMv8 core should run on any ARMv8 implementation, which is a big advantage. With MIPS, anything compiled for the core ISA should run everywhere, but people using custom variants (e.g. Cisco and Juniper, who use the Cavium parts in some of their products) will ship code that won't run on another vendors' chips.

Historically, this has been a problem for the MIPS ecosystem because each MIPS vendor has forked GCC and GNU binutils, hacked it up to support their extensions, but done so in a way that makes it impossible to merge the code upstream (because they've broken every other MIPS chip in the process) and left their customers with an ageing toolchain to deal with. I've been working with the Imagination guys to try to make sure that the code in LLVM is arranged in such a way that it's relatively easy to add vendor-specific extensions without breaking everything else.

Imagination doesn't currently have any 64-bit cores to license, but I expect that they will quite soon...

Comment Re:no price? (Score 4, Informative) 88

Wouldn't it be just a matter of re-compiling your code though?

Assuming that your code doesn't do anything that is vaguely MIPS specific. If it is, then there is little benefit in using MIPS32r2 now - ARMv7 is likely to be closer than MIPS32r2 to MIPS32r6 in terms of compatibility with C (or higher-level language) source code compatibility.

I love MIPS and, that is the case in large part, because of its current instruction set. It seems like a bad idea to mess with the current instruction set and break backward compatibility. Why did they decide to do that?

Basically, because the MIPS ISA sucks as a compiler target. Delay slots are annoying and provide little benefit with modern microarchitectures. The only way to do PC-relative addressing is an ugly hack in the ABI, requiring that every call uses jalr with $t9 in the call, which means that you can't use bal for short calls. The lwl / lwr instructions for unaligned loads are just horrible and introduce nasty pipeline dependencies. The branch likely instructions are almost always misused, but as they're the only way of doing a branch without a delay slot there's often no alternative.

Comment Good (Score 1, Insightful) 108

Information about the collection techniques (what gets captured, how long are they held, when and how are they destroyed, etc.) is fine. The actual videos themselves may contain enough information to track vehicles over a period of time. We don't really like it when cops do it, why should we let everyone else have this data?

I don't necessarily like knowing cops have this information but so long as there's rules over the collection (see above) I'm okay with this. If the EFF and ACLU (whom I normally support) wants the actual data, they can get their own OCR license plate cameras and drive around.

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