Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: Just the most recent police abuse (Score 2) 165

The proper question is why should you be required to answer such a question if it's not related to a traffic stop. Your response is riddled with assumptions that first, the officer is investigating another crime, in which case indeed they may have questions to ask. A robbery? Do they have a description of the vehicle? Does it match yours, even minimally? If not, they really don't have any evidence on which to base a further expansion of the stop. Nonetheless, if you go to trial, you're not going to be required to say yes, that was my car. Let them prove it was your car. And in this case at the stop, all of what you're describing is more or less entirely inadequate for detention. Innocent until proven guilty is part of this. If they have reasonable suspicion, of course they can expand on the stop. If they're just fishing around, where you're coming from, where you're going, no.

Comment Just the most recent police abuse (Score 4, Interesting) 165

Consider:

Traffic stop. Officer is making 'small talk'. "Where ya goin?". Where ya comin from?".

These are generally not 'small talk'. They are fishing questions, cop asking for info that could lead to suspicion, and detention while they dig for more.

And these sorts of questions can generally be answered by, simply, "None of your business, officer".

Every subsequent question, such as "I'm just making small talk", or "Hey, no big deal", or "What's the problem, you have something to hide?" are all just follow up fishing questions. And deserve no answer.

During a traffic stop, Flock gives officers information they would normally be lawfully denied, like "Where ya coming from?". Flock sidesteps your right to constitutionally refuse such information (and in the absence of reasonably articulable suspicion or other evidence, during a traffic stop, denies the officer the right to demand such information) and as such is a blight on constitutional protections. Flock must be better controlled, or abandoned.

And officers using Flock to look up the plates of their ex, former landlord, or the random guy who gave them a dirty look at a stop light are plainly violating these individuals' rights, and must be sanctioned. And the supervision of the abuses systems similarly sanctioned. Meaningful sanctions, every incident.

The Government rarely surrenders access to information. They seek power at every opportunity. In America, only the Constitution, and adherence to law, can nominally restrict this.

Comment Copper (Score 1) 59

As someone who just had FTTP (yep, to the premises) installed in their rural home, the way they did it was thus:

- They went to the local cabinet (which is already fibre-backed to the local exchange many km's away), strung a fibre out of it.
- They got up the telegraph pole in my streets, strung a new fibre off it.
- They used the old copper line that's been there since the 60's to slide the new fibre reel down.
- They put a second hook on my eaves, and hooked the fibre from there, and then wired the fibre direct into my house.
- They didn't remove a damn thing.

Took about 20 minutes, judging by the CCTV.

It would take about the same time just to pull down the copper from my house safely (the above did not require closing or working in the road, for instance), then isolating that from the dozens of others in the road on the pole, then removing that all the way back to the cabinet. Which I know goes underground because when I first moved in a few years ago, the BT guy had to remove that cable from, basically, a huge puddle which was cutting my DSL speed from 75Mbps to 20Mbps (DSL is amazing, though, that it still worked!).

Until everything's fibre, you can't remove those old lines, it's just not practical. And then are you really going to mobilise a bunch of people to remove a small run of copper from every street?

I once did some maths and the IT at the school I work in has something like tens of thousands of km+ of copper wiring that's unused. One room can have 30+ runs of nearly-100m. That's 3km for one room, from where a building was previously wired to have an IT suite, but then changed purpose, etc. We could, in theory, take that pure-copper cable out and recycle it. That one school likely has more copper in it than my entire village.

The fact is that it's just not worth the effort. There are huge thick bundles of it, and while it wouldn't take that long to pull it all out (much easier than putting it in because you can largely just cut and pull the entire bundle), it's not worth doing so in terms of the cost of the raw copper. We know that because honestly much of the time, rather than re-use the old copper runs which we know to be Cat5e, we just run a new Cat6a run alongside them if we do need to wire something. And Cat5e has far more metal in it than old telephone line.

I cut something like 200 cables this summer alone. And I mean I cut the last 2 metres of them because they were in my way in the cabinets. The actual RUN of cable is still in the walls and going all over the building, 50, 60, 70m runs all over the place.

I bet that a single office or school demolition recovers more copper (and steel and other stuff) than an entire village of old telephone lines, and while it may be a factor on the demolition companies finances, it's not a huge one. Scrap metal, which you have to de-sheath, transport, etc. isn't as valuable as people make out. It's why nobody arranges a regular scrap-metal collection at my local council to come and just grab anything of value that they could. No. They do that for paper. They don't do it for metal unless you arrange it with them. There's not much money in it. The only people making money are the guys lobbing some bits of lead, steel and alumium on the back of their van until they have enough to get a couple-of-hundred-quid free personal backhander as part of their work when it's all been moved at the expense of their company's fuel expense account.

Comment Re: Some ideas: (Score 1) 72

If they build it they will use it. But do they want to use it? Hydro seems so very easy and simple, but impoundment caused problems in many places. Out west drought has lowered water levels almost to the point where generation must stop. Similar problems in Europe. Pumped storage needs a water source to pump. The engineering has to be done. Somehow nuclear seems to be overlooked too often. SMR, anyone?

Slashdot Top Deals

Contemptuous lights flashed flashed across the computer's console. -- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Working...