Found by way of a note on Tech Dirt Wireless, C|Net has a good article on a judicial ruling that allows police to drop a GPS transmitter on someone's car without a court order.

A federal judge in New York ruled last week that police did not need court authorization when tracking Moran from afar. "Law enforcement personnel could have conducted a visual surveillance of the vehicle as it traveled on the public highways," U.S. District Judge David Hurd wrote. "Moran had no expectation of privacy in the whereabouts of his vehicle on a public roadway."

Kudos to Declan McCullagh for a very even-handed article. Not falling for typical hysteria -- on either side of the fence -- that GPS technology is the slippery slope to a technology totalitarianism, or that GPS or location-aware technology is the *next*big*thing. Declan covers the many positive uses of GPS for business, for crime fighting, etc., and notes that the ruling will probably hold up in court, as according to Dan Solove, a law professor at George Washington University, "The court has a very narrow and crabbed understanding of privacy. If something's not totally secret, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy."

The article goes on to cover GM's OnStar system, which has a built in GPS system as well as on-board communications. Reminds me of the Tony Soprano comment about "ripping OnStar out" of his truck (so the Feds couldn't track him), or his use of coins on the Garden State Parkway in the opening (no EZPass, also trackable).

From Steven Garrity at Acts of Volition, The Sound of Data, where he takes data and pipes it out to an audio output -- just to, uh, you know, to hear what it sounds like:

Spurred on by a recent weekend full of hot-tub induced dehydration, beer, and lack of sleep, some friends of mine discovered an interesting (I think, I at least) capability of the command line computer interface. Prepare to be really geeked-out.

As I wrote briefly about last year, on the Linux command line, you can pass the output of one program into another by joining them together with | (the "pipe" character).

...

It occurred to one of us, in our sleep-deprived state, that you might be able to pipe the output of the random number generator into an audio player, and hear random noise. So, we tried this:

cat /dev/urandom | aplay

Most of it is much as expected -- white noise from random data, the self simularity and repetition of file systems. The coolest example, tho', is the American flag -- which sounds like a strange techno-dance thing. A faint, frantic pulse under a dial-tone like high pitch, and a field of ascendent scales.

In the best interest of both reminding myself of stupid mistakes, and getting a googled answer out there for the world to also avoid said mistakes, here are two stupid errors I've encountered in developing with the RIM Java Development Environment and the Blackberry Simulator:

1) If you're using the Blackberry simulator and connecting to the internet, turn on the MDS Simulator. This seems straightforward, once you realize the issue, but if you're getting your feet wet with using a connected Blackberry by developing for it, you may not realize the need for a Mobile Data Server, nor the need for running the MDS simulator when running the device simulator.

2) VerifyError: If you call a primitive that is not a part of the MIDP package (such as double or float), the app will compile fine in the development environment, but it won't verify and won't run in the simulator. Basically, if you run into verify errors with your Blackberry app, check to see that you're in compliance with any libraries or primitives you may be using. In my case, I was running into a problem with a graph that was looking funky because of overzealous int rounding, so I changed 100 to 100.0. Duh! After a lot of fuss trying to find the problem, including cleaning up my project and workspace, etc., I figured it out through a post on the Blackberry developers message boards (not google-able).

From the venerable eyebeam reblog, a unique project called "Crossroads" as covered at turbulance.org.

In this project music is generated from the colours of cars which meet on the crossroad. As cars pass by they create impulses which carry the basic informations equal to music like tone and interval, rhytm, structure. This information is used as the source code for the music composition created in realtime.

I then tweaked it to read the color yellow, hoped to base it off taxi traffic going down 5th avenue. I found my cable was too short, and that was the end of that project. (boy, of all the half-ass excuses to abandon a project)

867-5309, as the song from Tommy Tutone and a phone number, is put to the test by Dan of DanTheMan, by calling every area code (using his free nights and weekends on his cell) to hear the response. It's awesome to see this breakdown -- mostly not in service, but a few messages worthy of Tutone fame.

I once called someone who's number was written on the wall. First year of college, K3, Dakin Hall, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. His name was Jeff, I think. The conversation went like this (I'm in italics):

Hello?
Hey Jeff
Hey
What's up
Not much
What are you doing today
Eh. Just hanging
(sounding a bit irritated) You gonna swing by or what?
Yeah, yeah. Sure.
Alright
Uh. (pause) Who is this?
Heh. Funny, dude.
(pause) No, seriously, who is this?
Nobody. Just got your name off a wall next to a phone.
Then take my name off of there.
It's carved in a wall, Jeff. That ain't my job.
No, just scratch it off, and don't call me.
I ain't gonna do it. (pause) I suppose you are gonna come by, then?
-click-


This is the same phone I called "Dave's Soda and Pet Food City" to sing them my version of "Suffragette City" which used their name, as a suggestion for a jingle. He hung up on me too. (413) 786-WOOF.

Philistines.