Wish I could mod this up. This is _the_ problem that needs to be dealt with. Taking the "Easy" way out.

I think what the parent means to say is that, in a war created by politicians, it should be fought by politicians. My Prime minister doesn't like your president. Ok. Grudge match! Stick em both in a ring and let them fight it out. First blood, till death, whatever. Doesn't matter. Or perhaps a forfeiture of that leader's assets should be on the line. Hit em where it hurts. You lose, you retire and lose the entirety of your assets to the victor.

Point being... leave the rest of us out of it.

Actually, with the invention of the NATO round, bullets are designed to maim instead of kill. This way, one bullet can take out 2 or 3 people from the immediate "action". One to get shot, and up to two to carry the wounded solider to safety.

I think the suggestion was that by blocking the calls, the people had to concentrate on driving, thereby preventing the accidents from happening in the first place, which negates the need to make those 911 calls that might have been blocked.

Wow, that was confusing to type.

Well, I would think that this is mostly to do with publicity. Once someone calls your software into question in a very public light, you will be more willing to go through your project with a fine toothed comb and clean up all that old cruft you've been meaning to clear out.

This is not a sign of inherent insecurity, but one of obvious house cleaning.

Wait, what? So if a mother miscarries, we should toss her in prison for murder?

Not the 1920s but that was a short story by Azimov called "Old Fashioned" published in 1976 I believe.

This is what I was thinking. Have the cameras doing the scanning, no problem. The camera scans a plate, then does a search for specific violations such as: Is the vehicle reported stolen, Has the vehicle been flagged as having received more than N parking or traffic violations, etc. Only a few select items to scan for. If it's a positive match, flag it and track it and notify an officer. If it's not, immedielty purge the record and move on to the next one.

To me, that does not sound wholy unreasonable.

the iphone is a non player here in japan. a good estimation based on what i see on the train is one in ten. the rest are a split between android and flip phones, which still offer more features than an iphone. things like saifu keitai, one seg, etc.. are considered necissary features here. the iphone just cannot compete.

Ahh, but say the ballast asteroid cut loose, or the cable was severed above the center of mass, the remainder of the cable would still be attached to the earth. The rotation of the earth would impart some lateral velocity to what was left. The end of the cable would immediately begin to accelerate and would either burn up in the atmosphere (which shouldn't happen at the strengths of materials needed to build such a cable) or hit the ground at hyper velocity speeds devastating anything within kilometers around the line of impact. On the positive side, we would get a nice line on the equator, kinda like what we have on maps now :)

Site doesn't seem to be accepting any connections to download this so here's a magnet uri:

Magnet Link

There's this program called bitsync: http://getsync.com/ which you each have a client on your computers. Share hashes with each other, and you get a distributed, synced in real time copy on each client running the software. It's free, secure, and no servers required. You each have a copy locally, and any modifications are replicated to each client.

Along the same lines, how about the "metadata" is put up on a public website immediately. For example, as soon as one of the police cameras start recording, there would be a log entry on a public website which would show activation time, officer who activated the camera, and termination time, plus a checksum for the newly completed video. That way, when evidence is needed, we can tell if the video has been edited/altered, and there is also a public record of who and when the camera was used. Then the officer can't simply say "we weren't recording during the altercation" or whatnot. You would also be able to see if the camera was activated while approaching someone, then switched off for 5 minutes, and then reactivated and now there is a guy bleeding on the ground. Any arrest made without a complete record, could be tossed out.