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While this doesn't help your SQL problem, there are some really nice Network/Security posters by Javvin. I have their Network Protocols map up in my office and I was considering getting the network Security poster as well.

While it is true that architecture has a great deal to do with security and that architecture still poses a problem for Microsoft, it is also still true that over 80% of security problems are a direct result of bad coding practices dealing with input data. Stuff that we learned how to do 30 years ago is still the bane of our existence. (Ref. CERT ).

Hi, I did an interview with Ben Horst for Mad Penguin. You can read the interview here, if you would like more info about Ben's effort to start this grassroots OOo ad campaign:

http://http//madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=7036/

Yes, the AIDS pandemic in Africa is all to do with those swarthy Africans and their ravenous sexual appetites...

Of course, according to a UNAIDS overview there are two million children in sub-Saharan africa living with HIV or AIDS; The "vast majority of children who are infected with HIV" are infected via Mother-to-child transmission or through contact with infected blood or unsterilised needles. The WHO estimates that unsafe blood transfusions result in around 5-10% of new HIV infections, and according to Safe Blood for Africa around half of the 6,000,000 blood transfusions which take place in sub-Saharan Africa every year use blood not tested for infectious diseases. Are we to also disregard rape victims? According to estimates from the United Nations Population Fund, around two-thirds of the 60,000 women raped during the course of the Rwandan genocide may have been infected by AIDS. As per the previously cited article, the use of rape as a weapon of war is becoming more common and resources to help reduce infection rates in the immediate onset of rape are stretched.

Public education projects will consistently fail unless accompanied by a systematic response to institutional weaknesses: Efforts to improve transfusion safety, the state of hygiene and nutrition and, yes, medication. A leaflet on abstinence will not save children infected through mother-to-child transmission, but antiretroviral drugs can help treat their disease and prevent the ravages of AIDS from carrying on from generation to generation.

Yes, the AIDS pandemic in Africa is all to do with those swarthy Africans and their ravenous sexual appetites...

Of course, according to a UNAIDS overview there are two million children in sub-Saharan africa living with HIV or AIDS; The "vast majority of children who are infected with HIV" are infected via Mother-to-child transmission or through contact with infected blood or unsterilised needles. The WHO estimates that unsafe blood transfusions result in around 5-10% of new HIV infections, and according to Safe Blood for Africa around half of the 6,000,000 blood transfusions which take place in sub-Saharan Africa every year use blood not tested for infectious diseases. Are we to also disregard rape victims? According to estimates from the United Nations Population Fund, around two-thirds of the 60,000 women raped during the course of the Rwandan genocide may have been infected by AIDS. As per the previously cited article, the use of rape as a weapon of war is becoming more common and resources to help reduce infection rates in the immediate onset of rape are stretched.

Public education projects will consistently fail unless accompanied by a systematic response to institutional weaknesses: Efforts to improve transfusion safety, the state of hygiene and nutrition and, yes, medication. A leaflet on abstinence will not save children infected through mother-to-child transmission, but antiretroviral drugs can help treat their disease and prevent the ravages of AIDS from carrying on from generation to generation.

Umm...

Right-click. "Save As".

Oh, that's easy if you have maybe 10-50 images in Flickr. Try that with... oh, I guess I only have 200 photos in there. I guess this is why people have the paid accounts. Otherwise, Gallery seems to work okay, even if it misses most of the Flickr features.

This a notebook that was designed specifically for one task. That task is to be a high performance luxury desktop notebook replacement. The choice to use 2 harddrives in performance mode (obvious power drainer) should further cement what market they were targetting with it. Sure there will be some people who try to use this as a mobile notebook, just like there are people who will drive a hummer cross country.


--------- http://http//akurl.com/5a9cba/ - Unlike The department of health, Akurl has a solution for Fattties

How much better off would children be, in general, if the resources that went into making these cheap laptops were instead used to design and build inexpensive, village sized solar water distillation units?

After all, what's the leading cause of death in the world?

It's not a cheap laptop deficiency:

http://http//www.voanews.com/english/archive/2005- 03/2005-03-17-voa34.cfm

The World Health Organization says that every year more than 3.4 million people die as a result of water related diseases, making it the leading cause of disease and death around the world. Most of the victims are young children, the vast majority of whom die of illnesses caused by organisms that thrive in water sources contaminated by raw sewage. VOA's Jessica Berman has more on the story. A report published recently in the medical journal The Lancet concluded that poor water sanitation and a lack of safe drinking water take a greater human toll than war, terrorism and weapons of mass destruction combined. According to an assessment commissioned by the United Nations, 4,000 children die each day as a result of diseases caused by ingestion of filthy water. The report says four out of every 10 people in the world, particularly those in Africa and Asia, do not have clean water to drink.

Gotcha! They're also monitoring your web surfing.

That is telling the person to be a serf. While there may be the occasional wealthy person that can walk or ride a bike/bus to work, the only reason that those people can do it is because very few people try. The number of well paying jobs that can be maintained withour a car are very few.

You are not required to buy insurance to drive.

If people had refused to buy the first cell phones, saying, "oh, I'm going to wait until it is small enough to fit in my pocket," they would have waited, what, two decades?

Actually, yes. Most people did wait about two decades before buying cellphones.

Similarly, the Apple Newton was not a commercial success -- it took technology time to reach the level of the Palm for that to happen.

Like many others here, I had known about the Pepperpad's technical specifications beforehand. What I found disturbing about the review was the hyperbole: at one point you say that pressing a button on the text software is easier than turning a page, implying that it's better than a book. Of course, I don't plug my books into walls, nor do I strain my eyes to read them.

But the reason why I brought up the iRex (which probably will not be a success either, at least not in its current incarnation), mp3 players and the rest: there's a core problem with this design, and, for that matter, with Origami. It's a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. You bring up video editing. What kind of video editing would you want to do on a device like this that couldn't better be done at a proper workstation? Wireless: it's got a 802.11b card. Obviously something that costs around 800 Euros can't have at least b/g.

And ultimately there's a philosophical and religious difference underlying the positions. As I see it, the position you express here, and to a lesser degree in the article, is permeated by a Tux-Millenarianism, and you're reading the pepper pad as part of a larger eschatological scheme of unseating the thousand-year reign of the Antichrist. Pepperpad -- well, I wouldn't mind one if I received it in the mail for free -- is not messiah.

Let me clarify that, using baseball.

The last time the Yankees won the World Series was October 2000. Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001. 2 days later, the Yankees played the Diamondbacks in the World series and lost.
The San Francisco Giants are known for Barry Bonds, a player who, if one believes reports, got upset with seeing others hit a bunch of home runs, so he took a lot of steroids, according to many violating the spirit of athletic competition.

So your analogy has four problems:
1) The Yankees haven't been performing well ever since Windows XP came out.
2) The Yankees may buy the best talent, but that alone doesn't guarantee them victory.
3) Microsoft is known noto for buying the best talent, but the second-best, and using its market position to impose mediocrity on the world.
4) Being a Giants fan in those conditions implies that the only way to beat Microsoft is to play their game, but cheat.

Now, had you picked the Oakland Athletics under the General Management of Billy Beane, you could have proposed a different model: We don't have the economic resources of the Yankees, but by careful selection of our teams, and aiming for specific goals, we can be competitive.

Right now, the brilliance of linux isn't that it's going to replace Windows on the desktop anytime soon. If anyone can afford a huge professional team to make a desktop computer with billions of potential configurations work, it's Microsoft. And signs are appearing that even they are now having trouble. Welcome to the myth of convergence:
1) the more complicated the system, the more likely it is to fail.
2) While convergence fans like to argue that , if their device performs tasks A, B, and C, then putting them in one device gives you: A*B*C, in fact the equation is more like (A+B+C)/(limitations of A+B+C).
So, yeah, Pepper or Origami, you can't type on it because it's got a lousy keyboard. 2 hours battery life makes watching video, listening to MP3 or doing much of a chore. Slow processor speed makes it the wrong choice for editing video. TFT screen does not make it a replacement

I don't care what they say. It is not a public place. It is a private place with an open invitation for people to come in and spend money. They can kick anyone out for any reason. Please read my article on the matter.

"Wrong thinking" is not the correct words. The words your looking for is ThoughtCrime

Am I the only one who is noticing the trend of NewSpeak being used lately? Maybe not by definition, but definately by purpose.

It's amusing to see the few other women on here getting so uptight about this... Admittedly, my only other post was about how cute apple was, but I think this is quite a funny april fool's joke. After I stopped having a heart attack, and the nausea, that is. (nausea brought about by mistyping the url due to pre-coffee attention span as http://http//slashdot.com)

Microsoft bought the internet, remember? You can visit their new site at http://http/

Microsoft bought the internet, remember? You can visit their new site at http://http/

http://http// takes you to microsoft.com...

Mac OS X can boot from any FW HD, so connect your mammoth HD using Firewire, use http://http//www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html Carbon Copy Cloner to move your System folder over, and watch your Mini guzzle NOX.

Also, its a shame that they don't offer a bare-bones setup with no HD. I'd rather just pull the 160 giger out of my windows box and have the mini take over file serving. Alas.

It's also worth asking if the pricing makes a lot of sense. Pay $500 for the mini, then another $99 for a ram upgrade, plus $150 or so for the hub. As cool as it is, it's not the most economical venture. And I'm taking for granted a spare USB Keyboard and mouse.

• The systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause or of information reflecting the views and interests of those advocating such a doctrine or cause.
• Material disseminated by the advocates or opponents of a doctrine or cause: wartime propaganda.
• Propaganda (Roman Catholic Church). A division of the Roman Curia that has authority in the matter of preaching the gospel, of establishing the Church in non-Christian countries, and of administering Church missions in territories where there is no properly organized hierarchy
• 
  There is a big difference between what a PR firm does for a "cause" such as "Cover the Uninsured Week and what Leni Riefenstahl did for the Nazis.

Case in point, Fiona Apple finished an album almost 2 years ago that Sony has decided not to release because of its lack of radio singles. http://http//www.freefiona.com/

In the last month or so, the entire album as been posted as MP3 in various sites. If this album wasn't intentionally released by Sony as a marketing gimmick, then someone involved with the artist did release it. This album should not be buried. Would Sony invoke this law and end up chilling artist's creativity? Why must the major media companies only offer Bowdlerized, homogenized, non-threatening material. I don't want the FCC, MPAA, RIAA tell me what I can or cannot listen too!

Security analyst, Kevin Beaver: All that's needed is just basic security policies, procedures, and common sense safeguards. This is a level of security that far too many organizations have trouble attaining - if the average organization could just implement the basics, that is, reasonable security measures proportionate to the importance of the data and its associated risks - that's often more than enough.

While this is good news and all, there still have not been studies for the long term use of immusupressents. Being diabetic for over 30 years I keep up with this type of information. Dr Faustman, was the first to cure diabetes in long term non-obese mice. Type 1 diabetes is an auto immune disease. What Dr. Faustman did was to stop the auto immune disease and retrain the immune system. After the treatment, the insulin cells reproduce themselves and no more medication of any kind was needed. It's a two step process. She's now trying to raise 11 million for the first phase 1 trial on humans with the help of Lee Iaccoca (of Chrysler fame). Unfortunately, her process uses drugs who's patent has expired and hence not a lot money potential on something that already costs the United States over 100 Billion. Lee Iaccoca who has already donated over 20 million on diabetes research is spearheading raising money for this by going to the people. You can find out more information and donate (I have) at http://http//www.joinleenow.org

Ok, to quote the laws:

http://http//caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/casecode/uscod es/47/chapters/5/subchapters/ii/parts/i/sections/s ection_230.html

As soon as they start filtering the content, they will be considered a publisher, at which time their protections disappear. And you were right on lose, vs. loose, sorry for typing in a response fast and not proofreading it. BTW, maybe if you don't post as AC, we can see what you have posted?

MIT has really gone down hill on this front since the late 80s (link). I caught the tail end before that Krueger kid drank himself to death in '98. Since then, the administration has leveraged the event to change the student landscape: more "well-rounded" admittees, tighter alcohol controls, and less housing choice -- a more Ivy League-like model. I think it's a shame ... you can fix the problems (e.g., real-world competence) without making MIT less distinctive and fun. As a prelude to my graduate education, MIT was perfect.

As for the women, those at MIT were fit, sharp, non-skanky, and often quite beautiful -- no other campus I've visited/attended matches up. (De gustibus non disputandum, etc.)

Here is a corrected link to the Fluendo press release...

Why ? Because GStreamer was designed *from the start* to be pluggable. The whole patent issue is one of the main reasons why GStreamer is designed the way it is. Sure, it took a lot longer to get to a point where stuff starts to Just Work, because we wanted to make sure we would be around when the shit hits the fan.

So while a lot of other projects chose to ignore the whole patent problem, and a lot of projects used the GPL as a license (which indeed is not compatible with patents), making it possible for any distro to ship them, we had the focus of making sure that the GStreamer platform is pluggable to the point where the libraries can be put in or taken out without breaking the applications. It's also one of the reasons why GStreamer, from the start, has been LGPL - because that allows distributors to ship a complete stack of GStreamer applications legally in places where software patents apply (like, say, the whole US). Fighting software patents is a great idea. Waving the problem away as if it's not there is not.

Also, with the arrival of Fluendo, a company building stuff on top of GStreamer, (and also a company I happily work for :)), people will be able to get codecs for the patented formats in a legal way, if they chose not to run the risk, or if they want to be legally safe.

What does this mean in the end ?

• Distributions can finally ship a multimedia platform in a legal way; see the up-take on Totem and RhythmBox for example. Flumotion, Fluendo's streaming server with support for royalty-free codecs, is a new project and already it is gaining quite an uptake.

  Very few distros have taken the risk to ship one of the other projects, for legal reasons. (Apparently the mighty Debian ships Xine, and while on any other non-free subject lots of noise is made, this one seems to be left alone because it's a big deal).

  It is no coincidence that projects like mplayer, vlc, and xine do not get shipped by most distributions. In fact, coincidentally, Fluendo did a press release on this very issue yesterday.

• Source does not have to be "crippled" to be shippable. Other projects get their tarball mangled to remove all questionable code, causing lots of bug reports, ... Take XMMS in Fedora as an example - people complained loudly about the removal of MP3. Actually, Red Hat had the guts to make a stand and decide "we can't legally ship this, and we should stop pretending it's not a problem."
• GStreamer had some discussions with the FSF (here's the result. In a nutshell, it is vital for a complete framework (ie, all parts of its stack) to not be GPL (or GPL, with an exception clause for GStreamer - see our licensing advisory for more info). The GPL is not compatible with patents. A distro can not risk shipping a stack of libs/plugins/applications where one of these is GPL.
• "For sale" distributions will finally be able to ship proprietary plugins for these patented codecs, as well as playback applications, and DVD playback, *and it will finally be legal* on Linux.
• Apart from Sorenson (who outright refuse - or are not allowed - to license code to anyone but Apple), codec companies are turning around, taking note of Linux, and Fluendo is stepping up to make sure that those who really want these proprietary codecs can buy them.
• Here is what you can do. People need to realize that, jus

the First news post on the subjecthttp://www.pinballnews.com/news/bally.html

Followed by Gary Stern's Reply http://www.pinballnews.com/news/bally2.html


As well as some pictures http://http//www.pinballnews.com/news/australia6.h tml of the whitewood Wayne is working on

I'm approaching this from the other side, I'm a biologist not a coder.
What I'm working on right now is alignments of RNA secondary structures. Since this is a relatively new idea there is no really polished software to this yet.
Some of the stuff I experinced in the last days:
RSMatch:
http://http//aria.njit.edu/rnacenter/RSmatch/ Chokes on lower case letters in the sequnce files. Most amusingly it does that when it encounters one, meaning it will happily do seed alignments for 45 minutes then find a 'g' in the ninth out of ten seqs and die.. No problem if you know but it took me some time to figure that one out
Dart:
http://dart.sourceforge.net/
Eats memory like nothing else I have ever seen. I have a Dual G5 with 4 Gigs of RAM here and Dart really manages to fill the whole 4 Gigs with 4000 bytes of data (20 RNAs with 200 bases..)
Don't get me wrong, I really like what I do and I'm really glad there is people out there writing this kind of software and making it available but sometimes it is a bit frustrating ;-)

http://http//korgwal.com/gl-mirror/stories/story.2 0041022011952564.html

Another good science based magazine is New Scientist http://http//www.newscientist.com/home.ns.

It's a weekly magazine, with about 72 pages in each issue. It costs 51$ for a US subscription, they also deliver in the UK and Canada.

I get New Scientist and Scientific American. But I prefer New Scientist and will probably not be renewing my Scientific American subscription. The reason is Scientific American will devote an entire monthly issue to a single "theme". If you don't like that theme - for example, if your just not interested in Geology and the theme is on that subject, then there is nothing to read in that issue of Scientific American that is interesting.

New Scientist on the other hand, is a random sampling of "what's new" in science. For example, I'm holding the March 26th issue in my hands, and there are articles on Robotics, Liquid Intelligence, Drugs and Schizophrenia, US flu vaccines, and Zombie PCs. And other stories. There are advertisments, but not as much as in Scientific American. There's also a "hot jobs" section for employers to advertise in. I especially like the last page, which is called The Last Word, in which readers submit science oriented questions and they get answered by experts.

It's perfect bathroom reading, as the articles are short, interesting, and vary.

From the shred manpage:

CAUTION: Note that shred relies on a very important assumption: that
the filesystem overwrites data in place. This is the traditional way
to do things, but many modern filesystem designs do not satisfy this
assumption. The following are examples of filesystems on which shred
is not effective:

* log-structured or journaled filesystems, such as those supplied with

AIX and Solaris (and JFS, ReiserFS, XFS, Ext3, etc.)

Ie, shred is useless. Also of note is someone's idea to write /dev/null to /dev/hd? is also useless for this same reason.

Also of note is that this applies to Windows users (NTFS) as well!

For more information check http://http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/F ile_Wipe

The basic idea is summarized here:

There are several ways to securely wipe files when using journaling filesystems:

1. Store data that needs to be wiped on a partition (slice, volume, or drive) that uses a non-journaling filesystem. For example, users of Windows can use a Z: drive formatted with FAT32, and users of GNU/Linux can use a partition formatted with Ext2.
2. Store data that needs to be wiped on a partition that is encrypted using Hard Disk Encryption. This eliminates the need to use a secure wiping mechanism for individual files.
3. Store data on a temporary partition using any journaling or non-journaling filesystem. When it is time to wipe all files, use a tool such as Eraser or Wipe to securely wipe the entire partition.
4. Physically destroy the hard drive after use by melting the hard drive. (Passing a magnet over the hard drive will not work.)

Ie... There is no method for proper undelete protection of journalled drives. Better have your thermite ready!!

Boing Boing reports that File Sharing has a statistically negligable effect on CD sales.

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/24/record_sales_ up_p2p_.html

if you read the serious academic study http://http//www.p2pnet.net/zero/FileSharing_March 2004.pdf (i.e. facts and figures not industry lies and bleating) you see that it CLEARLY demonstrates that filesharing doesn't harm Music Sales
and
for very popular music it may even benefit those sales.

Seriously though how is it any different from Radio Play which also doesn't pay the Record companies but the original composers of the songs not the recording artists.

Radio boosts sales and directs entertainment $ or £ to CD sales.

So does File Sharing.

The only difference is Radio has a sensible compulsory liscensing scheme in place and they **AA have invested heavily in controlling Radio Playlists to exclude non Big-5 Label Music.

In the UK File sharing is widely attributed with revitalising the CD Single market and keeping CD sales high.

If anyone is to blame for poor sales it is likely the lack of a competitive market - without P2P to liven things up the Industry Bosses would have sat on their Monopoloistic Cartel Asses and killed music and their own markets dead.

Monopolistic Cartels ALWAYS lead to stagnation, that is what happened.

C'mon all you piracy is theft trolls, get real, the labels abuse their market leverage to not pay artists, to control artists output, to keep prices artificially high, to restrict the variety of music available.

Do they encourage young bands with funding, resources, college courses, mentoring? NO - they do not plant trees, they just fell timber.

Sharing is naturally intuitively good.
Any industry that wants to be a success in the future will do well to leverage community support.

The nature of publishing is changing - if society can avoid kneejerk cash grabs then maybe the industry of culture flourish.

Here is an excellent text which has many examples of how incumbent industries destroy their very lifeblood in a luddite fashion.
http://kembrew.com/books/
E.G. how exhorbitant liscense fees for tiny samples cripple Modern Music.
It is clear from such that a lot of music hasn't been made and has been diminished by greed.

then use a Hosts file, that combined with adblock and eDexter means i havent seen an advert/banner on yahoo in months !

The Brazilian Government is doing this to do the Digital Inclusion that the citizens need, only fews people here in Brazil has access to a computer and Internet connection.
Bill Gates tryed to do a meeting with our president Lula but by the way it don't happened.

Why think small?

We know that the distribution of galaxies is in thin sheets surrounding large voids.

Now, how do we get the voids?
Intelligence capable of creating a breakdown in fundamental physical constants must arise, if only rarely and randomly distributed across the universe; say once per million galaxies per billion years.

What happens when they build a device capable of varying some of the physical constants that create the universe as we know it?

Perhaps a new large empty void in the universe?

How would the universe look, if that's been happening? Like this?

http://http//www2.aao.gov.au/2dFGRS/

Think big!

If you search for "HTTP", you get as first choice the Microsoft Website, which is a bit of an irony. The proper result should be http://www.w3.org/

Why this matters?

Because when you just type "http" in the address bar of Firefox and press enter, it takes you directly to Microsoft!

In addition, if a URL is malformed, such as "http://http://www.slashdot.org/", it tries to resolv "http" and takes you to Microsoft. Try with Slashdot.org.

They already have legislation that dictates what free speech is and isn't (veiled as 'hate speech' legislation).
http://http//fromthemorning.blogspot.com

I've also found that it's hard to find side by side comparisons. I've used just about every major NLE out there, and I've come to the conclusion that the reason behind you not being able to find comparisons is that they're all pretty much the same. Aside from a few UI nuances, they all work the same and do the same thing and have the same types of bugs and problems with hardware (as in capture devices). One of the easiest to work with (once you get used to it) is cinelerra. Don't count it out until you've tried it. I've never used it with HD, but it's supposed play nice.

No, I mean original inventions that were later improvised by the West that once used industrial espionage to obtain one of these inventions themselves.
http://http//www.silk-road.com/artl/silkhistory.sh tml

Your assumption is mistaken. Of course they aren't under any such obligation, but the fact that they're targeting users of WINE is indicative of violating antitrust laws (since they're a convicted illegal monopolist, a bad thing) when it comes to interoperability.

You can find information here: http://http//www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&c2cof f=1&q=microsoft+antitrust+ruling+interoperability& btnG=Search/

Oh, and just to rebut before you retort with anything regarding using their "dll" downloads or pirating MS-Windows OS's for use under WINE to make it functional; Microsoft has allowed downloading of libraries or platforms (ala .NET) without having to use WU service. You can use their DLL's in systems like Linux privately but you can't redistribute. Not only that, but you get no support from them. In the case of binaries/dll's that come only with one of their Windows OS's, it would be a good idea not to pirate. Period.

But a move to block users from an update service simply because of their choice to use an API translator for Win32 software is ludicrous

Hey, Visa, if you think your RFID system is so secure, publish all the nice technical details on how it works, so we can be confident of its security.

They're all published and available.

The basic chip and communications specifications are contained in ISO 14443. It will cost you a few dollars to buy a copy. You purchase your copy from your national standards organization; if you live in the USA, that's ANSI and they charge $18 for each of the four parts. The fee isn't to keep this stuff out of your hands, by the way, *all* ISO standards are copyrighted and cost money to obtain. That's how they fund the standardization and publication processes.

Above that basic level, most of these cards will be Java Cards. You can get the specifications for Java Card from Sun. They're free.

Moving up, most of these cards are also Global Platform cards. GP defines an extra set of features above Java Card, mostly to specify security-related characteristics. The specifications are found at the Global Platform web site.

In Visa's case, their recommended smart card platform is the IBM JCOP. You can find the details of IBM's implementation of Java Card and Global Platform here.

Note that not all issuing banks will use Java Card, or even a programmable card. Visa's recommended non-Java platform is the IBM MFC card operating system. I don't think the MFC team has a web site.

Finally, the actual payment application, and the component that matters most from a security perspective, is EMV. You can find complete EMV specifications at the EMVCO web site. The specs are mostly written towards contact smart cards, not contactless, but good smart card protocol designers *always* assume an attacker can get between card and reader, whether it's directly connected via a contact plate, or whether it's over RF, so the contact-oriented security does just as good a job in contactless mode.

Regarding signatures or no, it's not clear yet how that is going to be handled. EMV provides for several modes of operation, the best being "chip and PIN", which is what's being deployed in the UK right now (with contact cards, not RF). In that mode, you provide your PIN to the card reader through a PIN pad, and that unlocks your card to perform the transaction.

EMV also allows chip and signature and chip-only (as well as providing for fall-back modes that don't use the chip and rely on the magnetic stripe or even on getting a carbon copy of the embossed card number). The decisions about which mode to require will be made by individual banks issuing cards.

There is a lot to EMV... so you've got a few weeks worth of serious work cut out for you if you really want to understand it all, but the information is public and peer-reviewed. The countries that have deployed EMV have seen card skimming fraud drop to zero. That's right, so far, there has been no known case of an EMV card being faked or duplicated, and as far as I know, no one has deployed cards with DDA (dynamic data authentication) enabled. They're all SDA (static data authentication), which carry digitially-signed but static data on the chip which is read out every time. The US banks are talking about doing DDA, which involves a cryptographic challenge-response protocol and is vastly harder to duplicate.

At, say, $24 each, in a large crowd, you could amass quite a bit of money, and many people would never know it happened.

LOL. Dude, think about what you're saying. Credit card transactions are completely auditable. When dozens of people complain that they didn't authorize those $24 transactions, the issuing banks are going to go back to the merchant who performed them, and his acquirer is going to notice the extraordinarily high level of complaints, *and* that they're all for sub-$25 transactions. The theif will be in prison very shortl

The reason for the good connectivity in Sweden is that it has been a priority - seen as a infrastructure investment - from the goverments point of view.
Swedes generally believe that some things are better handeled communualy instead of privately, as I've been reading on /. has been stopping communual WiFi blanket projects for some US states (cities?)http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/02/ 19/0126204&tid=193&tid=1. You could simply say that here the goverment steps in sometimes (seldom) to ensure that the infrastructure is done (and right) and that it is provided in a well mannered way.
(for 3g access that manifests itself as requiring a minimum accessability - areawise and sevicewise - for the privately run operator to fulfill)

Comparing privatism vs. communally doing things is actually quite intresting - there is not always higher efficiency of doing it privately.
My example is the swedish post system (wich was privatized quite recently):
Before there was one post (thus one postman doing his rounds). Today, there are 2 players (at least in rural areas), the original old post and a new uppstart primarily doing rural areas.
This has the following effect on society: First, someone has to pay someone TWICE (total cost for soceity) for delivering to the same adresses in rural areas. Since its privatised it has to be profitable, something we customers have to pay in increased tariffs (porto). Also, since the original post has to compete in the lucurative rural areas and loose buisness to the competition, nobody wants to deliver post to the geograpcal areas sparsely populated (since that delivery is done at a loss), thus crippling the total service overall.

this is only one of many examples I could put fourth (look at the US mobilephone companies for example)

sorry for the spelling misstakes - my swenglish sometimes shows through!

No, these are built like tanks: http://http//www.panasonic.com/computer/toughbook/ video2.asp?videoname=ThisIsToughbook

APB on the Atari Lynx:http://http//www.atarilynx.com/pages/apb.shtm l

That was a superb game, in a lot of ways a precursor to GTA 1.

Ian

They are recording the output, en route to the speakers. This is called the analog hole. (If you can hear it, you can record it.)

There is a strong effort by content companies to close the analog hole. How? By controlling access to analog-to-digital conversion hardware through new laws.

That's right, it may one day be illegal to use a D/A converter any way you want.

Read the top article here.

The mag might be a dinosour, the writer a hack but history has a habit of repeating (Tragedy of the Commons., Garrett Hardin, 1968.). Especially in the face of plunderers.

Go to Wikipedia's Forking FAQ. There are directions for creating your own Wikipedia clone. The software. The settings. The content. It's all there: Free, open, legal.

Now reconcile that with your Tragedy of the Commons & Plunderer insinuations.

Nope, doesn't hold.

I have seen WYSIWYG editors consistently muck up URLs, such as http://http//google.com. Can anyone tell me why this redirects to microsoft.com?

You can't assume anything from the results. The people who responded were self-selected.

See this for some details: http://http//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias/

Wow, thanks for taking the time to define that word for us stupid slashdolters so that we may better understand your pun. I humbly appreciate your kind gesture.

Result, 4 february 2005

Google: 0 hits
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=britney%20spe ars%20nude%20goat%20dildo%20sparcstation

MSN: 7 hits
http://http//search.msn.fr/results.aspx?q=britney+ spears+nude+goat+dildo+sparcstation&FORM=QBHP

Ouch.