nobody3141592

If you think it was placed there by law enforcement and your intention is to cause maximum embarrassment- then you call the DHS/Fire/etc and assume that inter-agency cooperation is such that they wont have a note saying you are a surveillance target.

If you think that it's FBI/DHS device (ie if your skin color is between latte and espresso, or your name as an 'Al' at the front) then call local law.

The arguement is whether this is simply the same as reporting your position in public.

Or by tracking everywhere you go and correlating that with tracks of other known suspects and then extending that to tracking people that you travel near they are approaching "unreasonable search and invasion of privacy".

For example you can hardly object to the police office outside the bank seeing your car at the scene and radioing that in - but that's different to having a police officer follow you around 24x7 and asking the name and address of everyone you speak to.

Given my experience in dealing with military intelligence types - they probably have "PROPERTY OF FBI - SECRET UNDERCOVER OPERATIONS DEPT" printed on them along with an address and an orange flashing light.

The main implication would presumably be the discovery of an optimal travelling-salesman solution between all the donut shops in the city

I think the record is just under 1Billion hashes/sec on a couple of NVidia Tesla cards linked by SLI.

You need a fairly expensive SAN to pull 1Billion MD5 hashes/second just from the raw disk - nevermind the DB lookup.

Only if you have been stupid enough to disturb a potential car bomb to see whats inside.

Back when I worked for a defense company our cars were checked with mirrors on sticks everytime we went to work, we had special police numbers to call if we ever saw any suspicious activity around our cars or received a suspicious package at home.

Although they weren't very understanding when I was away on a trip and my wife opened a package containing a microcontroller I ordered - and started an alert!

There was a famous case in the UK in the 70s

The security services bugged the HQ of the Communist Party of Great Britain (because the UK doesn't have a bill of rights it's legal to be a commie there). The members found the bug and destroyed it. They were then prosecuted (succesfully) for destroying government property - even though the government denied planting the bug, and in those days even denied the existence of the security services.

Their case was that the defendants believed it was government property and therefore their intent was to destroy government property.

So if you have a reason to be tracked by the police then it would be a crime to destroy it. But if you have no reason to believe you have done anything wrong then it's more reasonable to believe it's a terrorist bomb and you should call the FBI/DHS/Army etc

Introduce various independent levels of city, county, state and federal police with special separate forces in charge of major crimes, terrorism, drugs, money laundering etc

Then they will spend all their time and effort fighting each other for funding jurisdiction and media spotlight that they leave the innocent bystanders alone.

Of course they wont catch any criminals - but no plan is perfect.

Yes it would be so much better if a government law officer had to also get a rubber stamp on a form from a government court officer before doing this.

That would remove any concern over civil liberties

Presumably if you discover a suspect package under your vehicle you would call the fire service and the bomb squad.

(Then quietly also call the local news service.)

So merely battering a piece of metal (that other cleverer people have spent 200 years designing the alloys of) into shape is craftsmanship.

While creating a piece of software - a functional machine out of pure thought - is somehow just grunt work?

It does rather rely on you being on the tip of a continent where the gulf stream goes past the front door.

Compared to the amount of oil burned around the world for all the computers reading HN I think you can ignore the bottles

The official ones seem pretty ineffective. A child went missing 300miles from here a month ago, the freeway signs were all announcing an amber alert. But the first thing the police in the next state - less than 10miles from his home - knew about it was when it reached the national news, apparently only federal crimes require contacting neighboring forces.

The worst offender is NVidia. They have half-a-dozen different developer logins for different bits of their site - and they all have different rules = your CUDA one must have a symbol but the parralel Nsight one must not etc

I for one welcome our self-replicating Teutonic arachoid robot overlords

You mean just like the natural pattern of storms and snow melt that the areas you build hydro in already have?

Hydro here have carefully regulated flows to reduce the natural variation in the river so that for example an optimal flow is created for the various salmon runs.

Moore's law is all about improvements in the fab process which drives down not only design rules but also defect rates to mean that putting more devices on a single wafer is more cost effective.

As you reduce the process costs then there is no reason that the cost of solar panels doesn't approach coated window glass.

I believe that with GPUs it's now faster to calculate possible MD5s on-the-fly than use rainbow tables.

Hence the current advice is to use "alongpassphraseasyourpassword" rather than "L33$Pa55wd"

They are like traditional floods but much faster access - although much much more expensive

It's part of the GSM spec to always allow a 112 call - even with no SIM or no account for the phone.

It's a bit of a problem in some countries - you get a lot of 'butt dialed' 112 calls - and the protocol in many jurisdictions if you have an emergency call and no voice is to assume the worst and send fire+police+medics

Typical solution would be to introduce a requirement that teaching materials had to meet some national standard- for the good of the children - the standard would of course be set by the major publishers and the certification wouldn't be available to anyone else.

Perhaps Texas only teaches addition, California only teach subtraction - they used to also include multiplication and division but the kids tested poorly on those and it was dragging the grades down.

Presumably Twitter as a private company has every right to reject accounts from certain people, Google has every right to remove them from their index and Facebook is bound to be able to find someway in which the politician violated their terms of service.

Nothing sinister in that - it's just like every financial institution in the world deciding simultaneously they won't deal with wikileaks donations

Not Russel Crowe - please not Russel Crowe

In the UK at least the library also pays a per-loan (a few *10c) to the author.

In patents 'a' is plural.

Just try and write a patent in Word - it grammar highlights the whole document!

And the same British government refused to extradite General Pinochet to Spain for war crimes because there wasn't enough evidence!

The courts are going to be very busy if months after every club 18-30 holiday you can regret a drunken 'romance' and have the other party extradited.

STEM students subsidize liberal arts by creating a world in which somebody whose only skill is art history can live without starving to death or dying of a childhood disease

If the problem is that large number of students enter STEM but drop out because they aren't equipped - then you have to prepare them better.

Two options - one is to make STEM degrees 6 or 8 years and teach 2-4 years of what should be high school physics at the start.

The other is to spend the time in high school teaching them the 'hard' stuff - when they don't have the option to drop out - rather than trying to 'interest them in science' by showing them only pretty/fun things.