111–120 of 191 posts
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Most plate cameras rely in part on the reflectiveness of the plate. You can definitely modify a plate to be mostly illegible to these cameras but easily human readable.
Which would result in getting instantly pulled over then?
I said this before, and i will say it again. Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means. Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse. Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.
I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.
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IIRC there's an episode of Jay Leno's Garage that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun. What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.
In Saskatchewan, Canada, they no longer require yearly insurance stickers on plates because the information is automatically checked by plate scanners on cop cars (to the best of my knowledge). The officer will still require proof of registration when pulled over.
I wouldn't be surprised if the data about the scans goes the other way too.
Proof of registration was made electronic in 2016 and again checked on the computer.
Driving a car isn't a right but a privilege so I'm on with this.
ICE is starting to act like Trump's little gestapo
One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit…
Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization. In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today'…
one lesson can be drawn from Solzhenitsyn'a Gulag Archipelago. he talks about how the number of people to be dealt with vastly outnumbers the police state's employees. Therefore if everyone fights back when "they" come for you, the outcome for society is positive, even if hopeless for individuals. The insane gun ownership in this country could be a benefit. Sure, you're not going to beat the army, but if every 10 peo…
I'm sorry, it's hard not to be a little snarky here. Yes, the guys who wrote the original rules for the country considered gun ownership so essential that they placed it second only to the freedom of expression. I don't like guns, but they represent a failsafe that we hopefully never have to use.
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While I agree this is horrible, mandatory ethics would have zero effect because: 1. Some people will need jobs. 2. Ethics are subjective. 3. Some people won't care. The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. Americans haven't done a very good job of that over the last century.
> The correct solution would be in trying to vote in less authoritarian politicians. That requires a system where people actually have a meaningful vote... e.g. it's impossible in China, and for what its worth Chinese ethics are way, way different than typical Western-sourced ethics. In the US, the ability of people to have a meaningful vote has been largely dismantled by a number of bad factors: 1) gerrymandering le…
For gerrymandering, there are plenty of proposals around requiring districts conform to some set of geometric rules.
The electoral college issue gets a lot of attention, but the more fundamental problem is first-past-the-post voting. What we really need is approval-based voting (i.e. I approve of candidates A and B; whoever has the most approvals wins). Such would eliminate the incentive to solely vote for the lesser of two evils. The electoral college has a bigger influence than when the Constitution was written due to the even higher concentrations of people in urban centers -- the idea makes sense though, perhaps with some math we can find a compromise. Regardless, FPTP is much more serious.
Easy to pass any legislation that changes voting and threatens all the incumbents? Not without a HUGE push, which I don't see happening anytime soon but why not try?
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> One is that without immigration, the population of the US would decrease based on birth / death rates. If the population of the US decreases, social security and other social programs become insolvent. In other words, our social programs are based off the current working generation paying for the current retired generation, and has since their inception. Which is a fine argument for granting citizenship to skilled…
Won't those unskilled workers return if there is no work, just like we've had seasonal migration of farm workers in the past? Farm automation will probably take care of a lot of those jobs.
It depends - if there is no work in the US then there is probably no work where they have come from.
One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this. For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit…
then why does it take so long to find kidnapped kids when we know the car the perp is in?