Wireless Street Lamps for Traffic Monitoring
Posted by michael on Thursday January 15, @10:48AM
from the one-big-hotspot dept.
RMH101 writes “The Register has a story about a UK initiative to create a country-wide wireless data network using street lamps. It’s come to pass through a government initiative to monitor all cars’ speed and location, all the time, everywhere. The company involved, Last Mile, are proposing an intelligent mesh of smart street lamps embedded with storage and wireless networking to create 200MBit network access across the UK, including remote areas not reachable by conventional broadband. Work is due to start this year.”
http://slashdot.org/articles/04/01/15/1410253.shtml?tid=137&tid=158&tid=193&tid=99
(more…)
Operation
To start the program, type screen. Screen then creates a single window with a shell in it. You now have the ability to detach and reattach, turn output logging on, etc. But mostly screen stays out of your way. You work as you normally would.
-a is the default key used to send a command to the screen window manager. To create a new window, type -a, and then c. Now you have two windows.
To switch from window to window you can type -a n, to go to the next window, -a p, to go to the previous window, or -a and the window number. For example, -a 7 would switch you to screen number 7. How do you detach? -a d, to detach. If you’re viewing screen number 7 when you detach, screen number 7 will reappear when you reattach. To reattach the next time you log in, start screen with the -r flag
…
Also see
http://www.freebsddiary.org/screen.php
http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=1255/sam9910b/9910b.htm
The Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications (2002/58/EC)
directive_on_privacy_electronic_communications
Summary of Changes
The new Directive:
replaces existing definitions for telecommunications services and networks with new definitions for electronic communications and services to ensure technological neutrality and clarify the position of e-mail and use of the internet;
enables the provision of value added services based on location and traffic data, subject to the consent of subscribers (for example, location based advertising to mobile phone users);
removes the possibility for a subscriber to be charged for exercising the right not to appear in public directories;
introduces new information and consent requirements on entries in publicly available directories, including a requirement that subscribers are informed of all the usage possibilities of publicly available directories - e.g. reverse searching from a telephone number in order to obtain a name and address;
extends controls on unsolicited direct marketing to all forms of electronic communications including unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE or Spam) and SMS to mobile telephones; UCE and
SMS will be subject to a prior consent requirement, so the receiver is required to agree to it in advance, except in the context of an existing customer relationship, where companies may continue to email or SMS to market their own similar products on an ‘opt-out’ basis;
specifies that Member States may introduce provisions on the retention of traffic and location data for law enforcement purposes;
introduces controls on the use of cookies on websites. Cookies and similar tracking devices will be subject to a new transparency requirement - anyone that employs these kinds of devices must provide information on them and allow subscribers or users to refuse to accept them if they wish.
http://www.l3xicon.com/
WordNet® is an online lexical reference system whose design is inspired by current psycholinguistic theories of human lexical memory. English nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are organized into synonym sets, each representing one underlying lexical concept. Different relations link the synonym sets.
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~wn/index.shtml
Jan. 13, 2004—EPCglobal, the organization that is commercializing Electronic Product Code technology, has awarded Internet and telecommunications infrastructure services provider VeriSign a contract to manage the directory for looking up EPC numbers on the Internet.
…
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/735/1/1/
…
Asian treasuries pull US strings
The levers of power may, in any case, lie outside the hands of the US authorities. The worry is that many of those Treasury bonds - equivalent to gilts - that the federal government has been selling to underwrite its spending have ended up with Asian countries whose exporters have been enjoying the fruits of US demand. But this build-up of US assets in Asia has been rising much faster than America’s trade deficit with that part of the world.
According to the investment banking arm of HSBC, Japan’s trade imbalance at $48bn in the first nine months of the year is roughly the same as in 2002. However, the increase in its foreign currency reserves has been $133bn, some $84bn more than the trade deficit with the US. On a smaller scale, this pattern is repeated across most of the region. So far this year there has been a build-up assets totalling $153bn more than the trading imbalance would warrant. Little wonder that foreign investors now own 46% of the US Treasury bond market.
This was all very well when the dollar was appreciating and bond prices rose. Those T-bonds were an increasingly valuable asset. But since the dollar peaked in 2002 and yields on bonds started to rise this summer, that happy combination no longer applies. Asian investors are sitting on depreciating assets.
…
http://www.hemscott.com/hstoday/focus2003/dollar_3112_2003.htm
January 2004
(This essay is about heresy: how to think forbidden thoughts, and what to do with them. The latter was till recently something only a small elite had to think about. Now we all have to, because the Web has made us all publishers.)
Have you ever seen an old photo of yourself and been embarrassed at the way you looked? Did we actually dress like that? We did. And we had no idea how silly we looked. It’s the nature of fashion to be invisible, in the same way the movement of the earth is invisible to all of us riding on it.
What scares me is that there are moral fashions too. They’re just as arbitrary, and just as invisible to most people. But they’re much more dangerous. Fashion is mistaken for good design; moral fashion is mistaken for good. Dressing oddly gets you laughed at. Violating moral fashions can get you fired, ostracized, imprisoned, or even killed. (more…)