I hate to break it to you, but the government already has far greater powers than this law provides. In certain situations, I've heard that they're even allowed to kill people.
Just because governments are starting to extend into the online world some of the powers they already possess in the real one does not mean they are suddenly becoming totalitarian states. Greater control and legislation of the Internet is probably not even a bad thing. For as much as anarchy is romanticized in westerns and wuxia as a time when men were free, in reality the only people who truly benefited were the powerful. Whenever a government does not intervene and regulate, power vacuums are quickly filled by mustachioed land barons, cruel warlords, or large corporations, none of which have any concern for "laws" or "unalienable rights".
Slashdotters, I love you, but I hope you never have to endure governments as powerless as you desire them to be.
Ever use a Windows Mobile device? Background tasks on mobile hardware should be avoided whenever possible. Not because it's hard to multi-task, mind you—it's just hard to enjoy a smartphone when you have to constantly hunt for random process that are killing your battery life and/or slowing your phone to a crawl.
Oh, and editors: If I wanted idle speculation on the next Apple product, I'd go to MacRumors or any of a dozen other sites. Can we focus a bit more on stuff that... matters?
You know that pilots, on the whole, don't bother landing their planes at ground zero and examining the carnage first hand, right? They scoot on back to their aircraft carrier or their air force base in the next country and have a cold beer. They rarely even set foot in the land they're fighting. War has been impersonal for a lot longer than UAVs have been around.
And it hasn't been a bad thing. In the days of swords and spears, massacres were the rule and not the exception. Warriors filled with the rage of battle would avenge comrades they'd seen cut down around them by razing entire towns and slaughtering every inhabitant they could find. Besiegers would happily watch entire cities perish from starvation and disease, and would often speed up the matter by flinging flaming objects and infected corpses over the walls. Fighters simply became numb to any notions of decency or morality; it was the only way to survive, both physically and mentally. If you truly think that wars were somehow more compassionate in days gone by, consider the Gesta Francorum, which chronicles another time the west decided to involve themselves in the affairs of the middle east. Indeed, read any direct account of war from any past era. Don't let yourself be fooled by later romanticizations.
The advance of military technology has slowly moved armies further and further from each other, and in the process, given them more and more opportunities to plan and consider their actions. Advances in communication have allowed everyone to witness wars being fought, and even to catch glimpses of life behind enemy lines. We've begun to notice that our enemies are people who live like us, think like us, and dream like us, and not just foes rushing at us with swords unsheathed. Not long ago, murdering or driving out an entire nation would have been hailed as a glorious victory and proof of divine providence. If the nation was not Catholic even the Pope would have praised it. Now, killing every tenth man in a country would guarantee denouncement and ostracism from the world stage, and would very likely end in a war crimes tribunal. "Civilized" countries are expected to hold back the majority of their raw strength and refrain from using the most effective elements of their arsenals. While war is still a bloody business, it is handled with a delicacy today that our ancestors never imagined.
People have been saying that since roughly the invention of the thrown rock. Do you honestly think that the bombardier looking out a glass window miles over the battlefield has any human connection with the targets below or "verification" of who he kills?
If anything, being physically separated from the battlefield makes it harder to indiscriminately kill, as you have all the self-doubt and remorse but none of the adrenaline and self-preservation instincts. Killing becomes a lot easier—and you become a lot less discriminate—when you know somebody is actively trying to kill you.
To use the Packet Forensics box, a law enforcement or intelligence agency would have to install it inside an ISP, and persuade one of the Certificate Authorities — using money, blackmail or legal process — to issue a fake certificate for the targeted website. Then they could capture your username and password, and be able to see whatever transactions you make online.
Granted, TFA states that a hacker could potentially circumvent the more difficult parts by using social engineering—registering a certificate that looks like it matches a particular web site and hoping surfers will manually accept it. But that's again a problem with the certificate authority and/or user, not SSL itself.
All the article really boils down to is that SSL is useless if the client and server can't trust the certificate authority. Which should be freaking obvious.
Wait, I thought the whole story was about someone getting a bunch of grant money to make a starfield without any context with blotches of colour randomly scattered over it.
Right now, consoles are behind PC gaming and derided by some as antiquated and holding back progress.
And then, in a year or two, the next generation of consoles will slightly leapfrog the average gaming PC, the death of PC gaming will be predicted, and the new commoditized hardware will sell like crazy.
The sales surge will fund ATI and nVidia's development of the next generation of GPUs, PC gamers will provide an eager market to test the next generation hardware, and the cycle will repeat itself.
"Would you like ultra-wide spectrum super-HD eyes with 60x optical zoom, Internet-connected HUD and complimentary laser cannons, just like everyone else has?"
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I was getting at. Wikipedia is, for the most part, very accurate. Like any other source, it's not completely accurate. Wikipedia's proponents make it clear that it isn't completely accurate. And that, unfortunately, is Wikipedia's undoing.
Most people don't believe things because they're true. They believe things because they were told they were true by a convincing authority. When confronted with conflicting information, regardless of its merit, their first instinct is to reject the new idea in favor of their pre-existing notions. The knowledge that not everything on Wikipedia is correct provides people with a perfect avenue for denial. They cherry-pick only the statements that agree with their sense of "truthiness", and attribute any dissenting information to Wikipedia's self-acknowledged flaws.
The sad thing is that many other sources avoid this effect to some degree through another fallacy touched on in the last paragraph—argument from authority. If a source is sufficiently well-known and well-regarded*, like the Encyclopedia Britannica or even the New York Times, it is attributed a sense of nigh-infallibility. If someone is presented a "fact" by someone sufficiently convincing and authoritative, the person will often accept that fact in the absence of any corroborating information. They may even "forget" their previous opinions and convince themselves this new belief was theirs all along. (Aren't fallacies grand?) This—not reasoned debate, scientific study, or rational analysis of the facts—is how most people "learn".
Simply put, regardless of how accurate or even obvious your information is, the only way to convince most people is to establish in their minds that you are perfect and incapable of error. Wikipedia fails at this.
Even more simply put, most people won't even believe the truth unless it's cloaked in a lie.
* Of course, not everyone regards the same source equally. As an extreme example, one person may have learned from their earliest authority figures that the Encyclopedia Britannica is the only place to look whenever one is in doubt, while another may have learned from their earliest authority figures that the same volumes are works of the Devil. The end result is that sources that seem obscenely biased to one person may be taken as absolute truth by another.
"But I tell them it's an online source of knowledge that just has some information that might be questionable, but that doesn't mean you have to dismiss all of [its content],'"
That's very true. In fact, Wikipedia has made it very easy for me simply dismiss only those facts I happen to disagree with. In that regard it's a great tool for anyone who wishes to be out of touch with reality.
Godwin's Law itself can be abused, as a distraction, diversion or even censorship, that fallaciously miscasts an opponent's argument as hyperbole, especially if the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. A 2005 Reason magazine article[citation needed] argued that Godwin's Law is often misused to ridicule even valid comparisons.
I thought that "Operation Aurora" proved that the Chinese government wasn't satisfied with censorship; they want to use every company as a means of tracking down undesirable members of society. Microsoft, through their recent statements, seems to be implicitly accepting China's methods and goals.
Oh, and IBM didn't build gas chambers. They (quoting Wikipedia, quoting "IBM and the Holocaust", by Edwin Black) "[helped] the Nazis organize and coordinate their efforts toward gathering and organizing all available information about their victims." They built the infrastructure the Third Reich wanted, capable of tracking millions of people, and as a result were quite instrumental in the ensuing holocaust.
rude adjective 1 offensively impolite or ill-mannered : she had been rude to her boss | [with infinitive ] it's rude to ask a lady her age. referring to a taboo subject such as sex in a way considered improper and offensive : he made a rude gesture.
[ attrib. ] having a startling abruptness : the war came as a very rude awakening. 2 roughly made or done; lacking subtlety or sophistication : a rude coffin.
[ archaic ] ignorant and uneducated : the new religion was first promulgated by rude men.
Loading Ubuntu could be easy, but have you ever tried teaching someone over the phone how to use their BIOS?
Methinks the set of people who are clueless about security doesn't overlap much with the set who know how to boot their machine to an alternate device and log in to their wireless network in Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
So by traditional open source versioning... they should be... almost to 1.0 by now?
I hate to break it to you, but the government already has far greater powers than this law provides. In certain situations, I've heard that they're even allowed to kill people.
Just because governments are starting to extend into the online world some of the powers they already possess in the real one does not mean they are suddenly becoming totalitarian states. Greater control and legislation of the Internet is probably not even a bad thing. For as much as anarchy is romanticized in westerns and wuxia as a time when men were free, in reality the only people who truly benefited were the powerful. Whenever a government does not intervene and regulate, power vacuums are quickly filled by mustachioed land barons, cruel warlords, or large corporations, none of which have any concern for "laws" or "unalienable rights".
Slashdotters, I love you, but I hope you never have to endure governments as powerless as you desire them to be.
Ever use a Windows Mobile device? Background tasks on mobile hardware should be avoided whenever possible. Not because it's hard to multi-task, mind you—it's just hard to enjoy a smartphone when you have to constantly hunt for random process that are killing your battery life and/or slowing your phone to a crawl.
...we can hope that this will set a precedent. (Though it will probably just be dismissed.)
I don't think they'd remove the other camera.
Oh, and editors: If I wanted idle speculation on the next Apple product, I'd go to MacRumors or any of a dozen other sites. Can we focus a bit more on stuff that... matters?
You know that pilots, on the whole, don't bother landing their planes at ground zero and examining the carnage first hand, right? They scoot on back to their aircraft carrier or their air force base in the next country and have a cold beer. They rarely even set foot in the land they're fighting. War has been impersonal for a lot longer than UAVs have been around.
And it hasn't been a bad thing. In the days of swords and spears, massacres were the rule and not the exception. Warriors filled with the rage of battle would avenge comrades they'd seen cut down around them by razing entire towns and slaughtering every inhabitant they could find. Besiegers would happily watch entire cities perish from starvation and disease, and would often speed up the matter by flinging flaming objects and infected corpses over the walls. Fighters simply became numb to any notions of decency or morality; it was the only way to survive, both physically and mentally. If you truly think that wars were somehow more compassionate in days gone by, consider the Gesta Francorum, which chronicles another time the west decided to involve themselves in the affairs of the middle east. Indeed, read any direct account of war from any past era. Don't let yourself be fooled by later romanticizations.
The advance of military technology has slowly moved armies further and further from each other, and in the process, given them more and more opportunities to plan and consider their actions. Advances in communication have allowed everyone to witness wars being fought, and even to catch glimpses of life behind enemy lines. We've begun to notice that our enemies are people who live like us, think like us, and dream like us, and not just foes rushing at us with swords unsheathed. Not long ago, murdering or driving out an entire nation would have been hailed as a glorious victory and proof of divine providence. If the nation was not Catholic even the Pope would have praised it. Now, killing every tenth man in a country would guarantee denouncement and ostracism from the world stage, and would very likely end in a war crimes tribunal. "Civilized" countries are expected to hold back the majority of their raw strength and refrain from using the most effective elements of their arsenals. While war is still a bloody business, it is handled with a delicacy today that our ancestors never imagined.
These thing remove the human element to much
People have been saying that since roughly the invention of the thrown rock. Do you honestly think that the bombardier looking out a glass window miles over the battlefield has any human connection with the targets below or "verification" of who he kills?
If anything, being physically separated from the battlefield makes it harder to indiscriminately kill, as you have all the self-doubt and remorse but none of the adrenaline and self-preservation instincts. Killing becomes a lot easier—and you become a lot less discriminate—when you know somebody is actively trying to kill you.
To use the Packet Forensics box, a law enforcement or intelligence agency would have to install it inside an ISP, and persuade one of the Certificate Authorities — using money, blackmail or legal process — to issue a fake certificate for the targeted website. Then they could capture your username and password, and be able to see whatever transactions you make online.
Granted, TFA states that a hacker could potentially circumvent the more difficult parts by using social engineering—registering a certificate that looks like it matches a particular web site and hoping surfers will manually accept it. But that's again a problem with the certificate authority and/or user, not SSL itself.
All the article really boils down to is that SSL is useless if the client and server can't trust the certificate authority. Which should be freaking obvious.
Meh. I never run version 1.0 of anything.
Wait, I thought the whole story was about someone getting a bunch of grant money to make a starfield without any context with blotches of colour randomly scattered over it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-ionizing_radiation
Granted, an unshielded circuit can be vulnerable to any EM field, but gamma rays affect electronics in a completely different way than microwaves do.
Right now, consoles are behind PC gaming and derided by some as antiquated and holding back progress.
And then, in a year or two, the next generation of consoles will slightly leapfrog the average gaming PC, the death of PC gaming will be predicted, and the new commoditized hardware will sell like crazy.
The sales surge will fund ATI and nVidia's development of the next generation of GPUs, PC gamers will provide an eager market to test the next generation hardware, and the cycle will repeat itself.
Ah, but where does it end?
"Would you like ultra-wide spectrum super-HD eyes with 60x optical zoom, Internet-connected HUD and complimentary laser cannons, just like everyone else has?"
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but that's exactly what I was getting at. Wikipedia is, for the most part, very accurate. Like any other source, it's not completely accurate. Wikipedia's proponents make it clear that it isn't completely accurate. And that, unfortunately, is Wikipedia's undoing.
Most people don't believe things because they're true. They believe things because they were told they were true by a convincing authority. When confronted with conflicting information, regardless of its merit, their first instinct is to reject the new idea in favor of their pre-existing notions. The knowledge that not everything on Wikipedia is correct provides people with a perfect avenue for denial. They cherry-pick only the statements that agree with their sense of "truthiness", and attribute any dissenting information to Wikipedia's self-acknowledged flaws.
The sad thing is that many other sources avoid this effect to some degree through another fallacy touched on in the last paragraph—argument from authority. If a source is sufficiently well-known and well-regarded*, like the Encyclopedia Britannica or even the New York Times, it is attributed a sense of nigh-infallibility. If someone is presented a "fact" by someone sufficiently convincing and authoritative, the person will often accept that fact in the absence of any corroborating information. They may even "forget" their previous opinions and convince themselves this new belief was theirs all along. (Aren't fallacies grand?) This—not reasoned debate, scientific study, or rational analysis of the facts—is how most people "learn".
Simply put, regardless of how accurate or even obvious your information is, the only way to convince most people is to establish in their minds that you are perfect and incapable of error. Wikipedia fails at this.
Even more simply put, most people won't even believe the truth unless it's cloaked in a lie.
* Of course, not everyone regards the same source equally. As an extreme example, one person may have learned from their earliest authority figures that the Encyclopedia Britannica is the only place to look whenever one is in doubt, while another may have learned from their earliest authority figures that the same volumes are works of the Devil. The end result is that sources that seem obscenely biased to one person may be taken as absolute truth by another.
"But I tell them it's an online source of knowledge that just has some information that might be questionable, but that doesn't mean you have to dismiss all of [its content],'"
That's very true. In fact, Wikipedia has made it very easy for me simply dismiss only those facts I happen to disagree with. In that regard it's a great tool for anyone who wishes to be out of touch with reality.
Godwin's Law itself can be abused, as a distraction, diversion or even censorship, that fallaciously miscasts an opponent's argument as hyperbole, especially if the comparisons made by the argument are actually appropriate. A 2005 Reason magazine article[citation needed] argued that Godwin's Law is often misused to ridicule even valid comparisons.
That's what you were referring to, right? /*grins*
Why rejected? I mean, you can already control vans.
I thought that "Operation Aurora" proved that the Chinese government wasn't satisfied with censorship; they want to use every company as a means of tracking down undesirable members of society. Microsoft, through their recent statements, seems to be implicitly accepting China's methods and goals.
Oh, and IBM didn't build gas chambers. They (quoting Wikipedia, quoting "IBM and the Holocaust", by Edwin Black) "[helped] the Nazis organize and coordinate their efforts toward gathering and organizing all available information about their victims." They built the infrastructure the Third Reich wanted, capable of tracking millions of people, and as a result were quite instrumental in the ensuing holocaust.
You can read more about the book here and here.
It's always nice to see companies following local laws.
rude
adjective
1 offensively impolite or ill-mannered : she had been rude to her boss | [with infinitive ] it's rude to ask a lady her age.
referring to a taboo subject such as sex in a way considered improper and offensive : he made a rude gesture.
[ attrib. ] having a startling abruptness : the war came as a very rude awakening.
2 roughly made or done; lacking subtlety or sophistication : a rude coffin.
[ archaic ] ignorant and uneducated : the new religion was first promulgated by rude men.
It's kind of a Swiss-army-insult, really.
Loading Ubuntu could be easy, but have you ever tried teaching someone over the phone how to use their BIOS?
Methinks the set of people who are clueless about security doesn't overlap much with the set who know how to boot their machine to an alternate device and log in to their wireless network in Linux.
So you're saying... in a hundred years we'll all have earthquake lasers?
Considering the last article was submitted by superapecommando, I can't blame them.
MacUpdate Desktop sounds like what you're looking for.
It would be nice if it was free, but $20 annually for up to five computers shouldn't break the bank.
TFA summarized: "If people from your country attack us, and you won't do anything about it, we won't trade with you so much."
How horribly fascist.