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NSA Applies for Patent for ID'ing Physical Location of Web Surfers

Written by TParker

Sunday, 25 September 2005

NSA Applies for Patent for ID'ing Physical Location of Web Surfers

The National Security Agency has been granted a patent on technology they have developed that will allow them to physically locate on a map the location of someone on the Internet. The technology uses the latency of internet communication based on certain pre-determined points on the internet. Latency is the time it takes for data to travel from one point on the internet to another point. Regardless of your actual connection speed, there are lag times due to things like traffic load and time of day.

The NSA has not stated what exactly this technology will be used for... but, I'm sure you can guess. The NSA has been criticized in the past for spying on American citizens. They were caught spying on Jane Fonda in the 1970s. She is a real bitch, in my opinion, but deserves privacy from over-zealous government agencies like everyone else. A law was passed in 1978 that bans such spying on American citizens because of the actions of the NSA.

Click here to read the article over at World Net Daily.

Click here to read CNet's take on the matter.

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Last Updated ( Sunday, 25 September 2005 )

Studio Jargon

Equal Temperament

A system for dividing an octave into 12 pitch steps, each of 100 cents. This has the effect of making all semitones equal in size. This became necessary once keyboard and fretted instruments became popular. It should be understood that the note A which appears in F# minor should have a slightly different frequency from the note A which appears in C major (this fine distinction is one of the reasons that pitch and frequency are not quite synonymous). This would normally be dealt with automatically by a proficient player on an instrument with continuous pitching such as a violin. A keyboard instrument would properly have to be tuned to a particular key, if music was then played in a different key, some or many of the intervals sounded would be flat or sharp. However since it was not convenient to retune these types of instruments correctly whenever a new key was required, various compromises were attempted. Equal temperament was one such compromise whereby the error was distributed equally between all the notes. This made the performance of music in different keys possible on the same instrument without retuning, in celebration of which J. S. Bach wrote not one, but two books, each of 24 preludes and fugues (a prelude and fugue in both the major and minor forms of 12 keys).

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