It would also be a drop in spurious complaints which have no merit. If there is recorded evidence, and the potential complainant knows that exists, then they are less likely to make things up.
Many of the people who deal with police on a frequent basis are skilled liars. They know how to stymie investigations by tying the officers up in paperwork. Having video evidence would prevent spurious complaints.
It will also make people less stressed when dealing with cops (as they know the cop will behave well), and it will discourage people from resisting arrest / attacking the police, because they know they'll be caught on camera.
Because I can still make a lot of money as an employee, participate in the company stock purchase plan (shares that have an actual $ value), take advantage of the generous medical/dental benefits package and work on my own business on evenings and weekends. Mmmm. Having cake and eating it. Or maybe I'm wrong and the only way to be successful these days is to be self employed? I mean absolutely no disrespect to entrepreneurs, it certainly is an awesome path to success, but it's not the only one.
Taken in isolation this could sound scary, but as zalew says here[1] it's needed for them to operate. Seriously, think about what would happen if google suddenly started publishing your (private) content. They'd lose all trust from the wider population. For them to publish or publicly display your content in a way that would violate your privacy would be an absolutely stupid move. Google hasn't gotten to where they are now by being absolutely stupid. [1]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3582421
It looks pretty standard to me. Tech companies have their IP stolen and (imho) it's hard to not be inspired in your private works by the job you're doing 40+ hours per week.
If you don't like it talk with them. It's not set in stone. Sometimes people can be reasonable =) Just don't sign it if you're not certain you'll abide by it.
Sorry, just re-read your post. Did you already sign this? I don't know if anyone else has another experience, but I'd say your 2 choices are abide by it, or look for another job. Read the contracts before you sign them.
It actually sounds pretty reasonable. The article says they've been operating since 2009, have 300 programmers paying $100 per month and the city wants them to have a fire alarm, sprinklers and compliant washrooms. There are pretty good reasons for these codes to exist and for them to be enforced.
I saw this earlier and thought it was pretty cool. I like the idea of sending stuff into the atmosphere. I'm curious as to what the repercussions of something like this are though. I'd guess that there are laws or international conventions on controlling air traffic.
Lawrence Richard Walters, nicknamed "Lawnchair Larry", was an American truck driver who took flight on July 2, 1982 in a homemade airship. Dubbed Inspiration I, the "flying machine" consisted of an ordinary patio chair with 45 helium-filled weather balloons attached to it. Walters rose to an altitude of over 15,000 feet. After 45 minutes in the sky, he shot several balloons and descended slowly, until the balloons' dangling cables got caught in a power line. Walters was able to climb to the ground. He was immediately arrested by waiting members of the Long Beach Police Department. "We know he broke some part of the Federal Aviation Act, and as soon as we decide which part it is, some type of charge will be filed. If he had a pilot's license, we'd suspend that. But he doesn't."
"If the FAA was around when the Wright Brothers were testing their aircraft, they would never have been able to make their first flight at Kitty Hawk." Walters committed suicide at the age of 44 by shooting himself in the heart.
To be fair, legal and unlicensed powered paragliders are able to reach those heights[1]. I only know about airspace classes by way of Wikipedia, but it seems like anything below 18,000 feet and far enough away from an airport in the US is fine.
Indeed the problem was that he didn't establish two-way communication with air traffic control. Historically, VFR flights inadvertently straying into a terminal control area have actually killed a few hundred people, so it was reasonable for the FAA to fine him.
Does the article write realize how silly it is to say "If the FAA was around when the Wright Brothers were testing their aircraft". So what came first the plane or the regulations?
In the United States, these kinds of things are governed by FAR 101. It's reasonably straight forward to become exempt from _most_ of the rules by following the criteria outlined in section 101.1(4)[1].
Roughly, these regulations correspond to making sure that if a plane were to hit your unmanned balloon on the way up or on the way down that the plane will survive and that your package won't be dragged along; and, that the package itself won't be hazardous to folks on the ground.
(IANAL) Conformance with the rules means that no single payload is more than 6lbs, that the side-wall density of your payload does not exceed 3oz/sq in on the smallest side, and that the cabling you use will break with an impact force of 50lbs. We could debate about how you measure impact force, but most folks in this hobby read it to mean "tensile" strength. For 6lbs payloads, to meet the density requirement, you want a box about 1x1x1ft, which is often why most of the pictures of payloads that people send up in the sky look about the same size and shape.
Last, you need to conform with the safety regulations in FAR 101.7. The gist here is that you need to make sure that your payload isn't a danger to others on the ground, and not a danger to those in the air. Compliance here is more subjective, but a parachute and padding box go a long way to making others on the ground safe.
It's relatively easy to file a Notice To Airmen (NOTAM) that indicates you'll be launching a balloon. A courtesy call to your local Air Traffic Control office wouldn't hurt either. If you don't have a local ATC, the nearest airport is good place to start.
My familiarity with these regs comes from actually launching several helium-lifted payloads to near-space a few years ago and talking through the regs with the FAA and ATC to make sure we didn't need an official waiver (we didn't). My group had a slightly higher budget, but we went higher, longer and farther than these young Canadians, making two launches within an hour and sending the first balloon about 2000 miles over 34 hours starting at around 80,000ft, and sending the second balloon + payload to 123,000ft with about 3 hours of flight time.
Like many enthusiasts, our project used amateur radio frequencies to communicate, which qualified us to be listed on the Amateur High Altitude Radio Balloon (ARHAB) website for our achievements, we're listed as PBH-9 and PBH-10, for the duration and distance records.[2]
Out of curiosity, how far downrange did each of your balloons end up coming down after reaching such high altitudes? How far was this distance from what you anticipated?
We figured PBH-10 would make it about 2500 miles, it actually went about 2000. Prediction is pretty hard because it depends on a bunch of physical properties that are hard to measure.
We had a pretty intense model that we ran with some probabilistic ambiguity and live weather data; it's written in C and unfortunately locked behind a proprietary wall from my previous employer. The physics in the sim were mostly described by Rodger Farley (IMO he's the world expert on the subject), the short version of his paper is available here[1] (we contacted him directly to get the full version from NASA). The model also reads live weather data, which helps with figuring out direction.
The hard part to measure is heating effect from the sun and indirect heating effect from ground and cloud albedo. You can get pretty close, but IR sensors would probably have done the trick.
One cool thing about our flights were that they had 2-way comms; we could actually instruct the payload from over 1000 miles away by sending Morse Code to it. Morse Code might seem like an odd choice for a protocol, but we were required to use it so that other amateurs could communicate with the payload to cut it down if we were in a signaling dead-spot. Another fun fact is that it used a custom-designed Morse decoder that performed pretty near 0dB SNR.
Here is the original article, which has slightly more info:
They "checked to make sure the flight wouldn’t be dangerous or illegal", and they used forecasts from "a website that calculates a weather balloon’s estimated landing spot based on input launch coordinates, prevailing winds, and balloon specs" to time the launch so that the balloon would land in Canada in the US.
This is an awesome step. Is it perfect? No. Not all of the 3000 languages spoken in Africa are represented in the wikipedia. There are probably some challenges with the ones that are whistled or drummed. But 75% of Africans speak 12 languages.
I've never edited a wikipedia article, yet I've found enormous benefit in reading the articles. I'm glad this step is opening up access to so many people that would not have been able to afford it otherwise.
Please don't learn to speak a second language. It can be hard and even with tools like Rosetta stone, Berlitz et al, many people just don't have the passion to learn these sort of things.
Or...
You could try and see if you like it. Awesome tools exist nowadays to enable us to try many different disciplines. Many of these are over-simplified and will only get you so far, but maybe you get a taste for a new hobby or a second career.
I get what the article is trying to say, in places. However, I really believe in the try it and fail approach. You can discover talents and passions you never knew you had. That is unless you don't try to learn...
I would love to see some statistics on the % of people who use Rosetta Stone, etc. and actually achieve their goal. It's hard.
The general population loves the idea of speaking another language. That's why they buy the tapes. But in reality is so incredibly hard.
But Rosetta Stone will happily sell you on the idea that "You too can start speaking French in 2 months because our methods make it super easy!" All they have to do is sell you on the dream to bank their cash.
In reality, it doesn't work because it's hard. And people, in general, don't do hard things.
Agree, I'm sure that the stats would fully back you up on that. Even the people that achieve their first goals, how many still go on to become competent, or abandon the idea, because it's too hard? I agree with you that people don't do hard things, or at least don't commit and stick to them.
But =)
I still think people should try if it tickles their interest. Because some people succeed. My theory is try 10 things and fail at 9 of them. IMHO the failures were worthwhile in search of the 1 success. And you have to learn something from 9 failures, right? But, I recognise, this is just my opinion. I'm sure a lot of people would not be happy with a 9:1 ratio.
So, what are people using as alternatives these days? I use gmail, google talk and google.com exclusively for email, chat and search. If (for arguments sake) I wanted to switch what is there of similar quality that still be around and relevant in 3 or 4 years?
http://duckduckgo.com is an excellent search engine that takes user privacy seriously.
For me it tends to fail on very specific queries and then I use it's Google Bang to just have it redirect me to Google. But it's as good as Google for my typical queries.
Google Talk is plain vanilla XMPP (except the audio/video extensions), and any XMPP server can chat to any Google Talk user. The Google Talk client itself is shit and hasn't been updated in years, you won't be missing out on anything there.
I use Mail.app w/ GMail over IMAP and have no problems. I could switch to any other provider of course, but see no reason to do so as accessing GMail over IMAP doesn't have any of this social crap associated with it. Unfortunately, on Windows I'm forced to use gmail.com as no desktop client comes even close to Mail.app's fully integrated and optimized IMAP support. Outlook's IMAP support is STILL blocking/synchronous for most operations, hanging the entire software while it syncs headers or sends items to be erased. Thunderbird is as clunky as ever.
Google is the only one left, then. I used DDG for a while, but I think they need to step up their game with regards to simplifying the UI (i.e. remove the attempts at finding the info you're looking for for you or at least provide an option to disable this) and speed up both page serves and queries, w/ geodistributed caching, etc.
Or you could just use Google SSL, but disable all cookies for that domain.
I agree with the google talk. The most replaceable item on the list. It's just so easy though with it being there next to my email...
I'll give ddg a go. See what's up there.
I think fastmail.fm provides[1] email as well as xmpp. I have been considering a switch from gmail to fastmail (also looking at rackspace email), and planning to use my own domain again.
I had previously self hosted (a pain), and then used google apps with my own domain. That was when google apps had no google groups or other integration at all, and it was cumbersome to have two google accounts (no multiple login then either). So I switched to plain gmail. Certainly less work and the bonus of being able to tell people 'blah blah at gmail dot com' and not having to spell it out every time someone asked for it cannot be understated.
My needs have changed a bit though, and being able to retain my email/domain should I choose to change providers again has become more important. In addition, I no longer use the gmail web interface, opting instead to use sparrow over imap. An unlikely shift back to client centric computing even while more and more of my other services are shifting away!
My impression is that Bing is getting better and better. I WILL switch to it IF they provide date filtering for all searches. (For example it's impossible for me to use Bing for searching on HN because I get out of date results, while on Google I just apply the "last 24 hrs" filter).
I know. I'm not a hater.. really =) I just can't seem to make myself go back to MS stuff. I guess it's an old prejudice, I'm stubborn to my own detriment?
I went back to hosting my own email and chat on VPS. Check out iRedMail for a nice easily-configured FOSS mail package and ejabberd for a nice XMPP server. XMPP federates with google talk, so I can still chat with @gmail.com friends.
Google talk is pretty replaceable with many other jabber based servers, and clients, and enough variance that you can generally find a solution that works best for you. afaict, Jabber messages can cross from and too the standard google talk jabber domains.
Search, I still find myself using google from time to time, but my default search is duckduckgo, this is greatly helped due to the fact that it's simple to search from google instead by simply adding !g to the search, additionally, you can do similar things for !gmaps !gimages !bing, this feature alone makes ddg a trivially better google replacement for default search.
Now, a decent replacement for the gmail client, I haven't been able to find something satisfactory web-based, or even as a desktop app. I use thunderbird for work emails, but it seems to be a little... lacking.
yeah, I can deal with the jabber client, I'll try ddg, but gmail is kinda sticky =) Maybe I'll roll my own or something. I guess I know what I like, right?
Windows Live Calendar nowadays is very similar to Google Calendar.
It should be possible to sync it e.g. with Android via ActiceSync. Some time ago I managed to do this with Android 2.3. I don't have this setup any more, so if you need details try searching for "windows live activesync" or something similar.
