Does that mean that the Transmeta Crusoe wasn't anything special?

Short of real-time sending the data to a remote location not under control of the local police department you can't realy eliminate the problem. I think that would take too much mobile bandwidth.

The problem could be minimized through procedure or even law. Standard procedure should be that the data never gets manually erased. (Actually, don't even put controls on there to do so). Let it roll over. If no-one complains about the officer within a week the week old data deletes itself to make room. If the officer delete's his/her own footage, that should be a punishable offense all by itself. If it lines up with a time when the officer was acused of something... the fact the officer deleted something itself becomes evidence. It's also a case for a destruction of evidence charge.

"What if the police got to the scene of a crime after..."

The same point could be made against the officer giving any testimony of what he saw.

"but it would still require a massive database and supporting infrastructure"

If this happens I don't know how it will actually be implemented. Maybe lawmakers will mandate some huge infrastructure. I don't think that is necessary though.

  I think the camera should probably send it's data wirelessly to a box in the police car. That box should be made from heavy gauge steel with a lock the officer does not get a key for. Any tampering would be a federal offense punishable by jailtime. Inside is a computer that stores the data and automatically deletes anything older than some arbitrary age (How about a week?). So long as nothing funny happens that's as far as the data needs to go.

For a little more robust of a system the car could sync it's stored footage with a computer at the police station. This would happen wirelessly and automatically. The syncing process would NOT delete anything from the car's own box.

I don't mind seeing some advertising. I would rather not block the ads so that the people who are providing me with whatever I do want to see can get something out of it. But.. then there's those damn video ads, flash monstrosities which make the browser slow to a crawl and those horrible things that 'cover up' the content you want to see until a timer goes off or you press a tiny little X or something...

Those kinds of things make me switch on the ad blocking software. Unfortunately then the 'nice advertisers' suffer too.

Yes. It would be easier to crack a gramatically correct sentence than a nonsense one because grammer rules would narrow down the possiblities. Who today is using whole nonsense sentences as their passwords? I assume a nonsense sentence is a collection of words right? Currently most people are using nonsense words, a collection of characters. So, tell me there aren't more possible permutations of 6-9 word gramatically correct sentences than there are 6-9 charcter collections of nonsense words...

This example gets trumpeted out in every discussion on patents. First of all, I think most of us here are interested in software patents and maybe to a lesser extent patents on electronic or mechanical devices.

Second... WHY does it take so much money to develop a drug. Is it really necessary? Or is this just the result of the system which people in industry and government have created? This is an industry where the customer MUST buy the product. To not do so is to be sick or maybe dead. That hardly gives the companies involved a lot of incentive to save money. Likewise having seen drugs taken off the market which had been helping me with my own issues better than any other just becasue 1 in 300k people had a bad reaction I suspect regulators are doing little to help matters.

I have a friend who is a nurse, he argues adamantly for the drug companies any time this subject comes up. He talks about multii-million dollar lab equipment he has seen during his schooling which are somehow used in drug research. I wonder why any piece of equipment is so expensive. Is it the materials? Our TVs and cellphones are full of rare earth minerals. Is it the labor? Look at all the labor that goes into all sorts of consumer products. I suspect it's the fact that it is only large drug corporations and universities ever buy such equipment. They expect it to be expensive. they only trust expensive equipment. They have deep pockets. Not many companies make such things and the manufacturers know all of this. I am not a part of the health industry and I don't claim to be an expert in these matters. I only have my suspicions and I freely admit I could be wrong. The more I read about DIY biologists and the lab equipment they make however the more I think I might be right.

From what I have heard all you have to do is claim it wasn't you driving your car and that you don't know who it was. I haven't tried it. I was told that works though.

Are you sure you didn't sign it over to dice when you posted here? No, I am not willing to go wade through the Slashdot TOS to check right now.

"They can be, but it would be incredibly stupid to use something like that. A dictionary attack would crack that password in seconds"

Really? How?

First off, I would expect that a password cracking script's dictionary would include variations of single words and maybe combinations of 2. There are 11 words in that sentence. Anyone with such a password is such an outlier I can't believe any reasonable script today would be written to even try that!

So, what if everyone used passwords like that? No doubt cracking scripts would change. But how is a dictionary attack going to work? They can't possibly put every parsable sentence of a language into a dictionary! The example sentence was 11 words. Even if we treated that as a limit, how many sentences can be made out of 11 or fewer words? Certainly there are far more possible 11-word sentences than there are 11 character passwords.

And then there is punctuation. See the two commas?

That is dead to this crowd. 1/2 of them were probably in diapers in 2002!

AFTER 2001? I think I remember thinking about that ON 9/11.

I think this is another example where the collective will of corporate marketers is leading society and telling people what to want. The customer may be always right but it's the marketers that are telling the cutomers what to think to be 'right' about! Most eat it up so it works for them. I'm guessing Amazon's Turk people probably are in the minority by actually thinking about things and having opinions beyond what are fed to them.

The industry has been trying to get rid of keyboards for a long time. I think it's more than just they stopped making them. They dropped the quality bit by bit for several generations of devices before they just stopped offering them. I long considered myself a keyboard diehard, even considering trying to piece together my own phone (beagleboard, lcd, plus other modules). I finally gave up and bought a phone with no keyboard. By that time I found I wasn't using the keyboard on my last phone much anyway because even though I hate the on-screen one the physical keys sucked even more!

I hope they have the same for the executive branch!

Let's leave the "well and bucket" approach in the past please. I don't think having your water supply in an open-air hole is the most sanitary way to do it. All you really need is to push a point down into the water table and attach a hand pump. Just don't forget to always keep an extra jug of water on hand in case you need it to prime the pump.

I suppose you don't age then? You will keep working until the day you die?