(...)That's okay, a lot of people do, says George Spyrou, president of Airship Management Services, whose blimps are leased to the likes of Fuji Film and have been used as air surveillance and security platforms by the New York Police Department, the U.S. Secret Service and the Athens police during last year's summer Olympic Games.
(...)At the closely guarded Republican National Convention, even the Fujifilm Blimp has a role in security. Fuji Photo Film USA Inc., the Valhalla, N.Y.-based U.S. arm of the Japanese film maker, is allowing the New York Police Department use of the blimp to bolster aerial patrols above Madison Square Garden.
Caracas is no HappyLand. It has a high crime rate, just like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (that by the way has its own surveillance blimp too). Surveillance is necessary, no, condition sine qua non to allow common people to live their lives without fear to be shot by a pair of Nike shoes (happens a lot in some Brazilian cities, just so you know). That's the situation is most Latin America.
Now, is not it hypocritical that 1) this is BBC reporting, coming straight from the country with the most ubiquitous surveillance system in the world 2) people are so desperate to find something to nail Hugo Chavez for that they need to resort to such FUD because they got nothing else. This is a move by the City of Caracas, not the country of Venezuela, just like the blimps on U.S. are a move from the NYPD, not the Federal Government.
Now stop talking about things you guys don't know about, and quit spreading fud. Come on, "keeping tab on the population".
Yeah, symbiosis. Just not the kind that this word use to imply. Let's see what symbiosis really mean:
Symbiosis: (Gr. syn, with + bios, life) [A] close association between two different types of organisms in a community. It can be defined as (...) [t]he living together in permanent or prolonged close association of members of usually two different species, with beneficial or deleterious consequences for at least one of the parties.
On this case, the class of this symbiosis has a name. Parasitism. And guess who is the receiving end of the deleterious consequence on this relationship?
I can tell you in advance, without charge, where this will lead. Just like a disease vector, these machines will continue to be used by the botnet masters to infect other machines, spread SPAM, steal the very machine owner personal data and, in general, obfuscate illegal activities.
I don't know from where people commenting this article got the idea that having only one "infection" that don't totally destroy the machine is a good thing, even for the machine owner. Actually, it is very worse, because if people don't notice any different behavior they will not worry to fix the machine, even if they know about the infection. And in the end of the day, they will be the first to lose their money in some scam that they inadvertently help to spread.
People don't infect machines nowadays on the evilness of their hearts, only to wreak havoc or for bragging rights, not anymore. Now they do it for profit, it is organized crime that is happening there. Have no illusions about it.
I use Thunderbird to download my POP3 email and my Webmail at home. I have multiple POP3 accounts from my ISP, and a couple of GMail ones too, and my wife have one from Hotmail, one from Yahoo and one from her job. I shared the thunderbird profile between my Linux partition and her Windows partition so, no matter what partition we booted on, our email is all there. This is a way to save time and get all email with a One Click (tm) without having to surf through several ad-infected pages to read a couple of messages. All props to thunderbird, for providing this useful piece of software for free (as in speech and as in beer).
That's one of the most used fallacies I'm used to hear when it concerns to rationalizations for war technology. Comparing WWII Germany (the most advanced war machine of its time) to Gulf War I and II Iraq is like comparing attacking Mike Tyson when he was the peak of his training to punching some bully in the face back in high school.
If U.S. ever gets into a war with any sizable adversary (let's say, Russia) there will be no "precision strike", no "intelligent bombs", no nothing except lots (millions) of casualties for both sides. The current technology is "intelligent" only against countries that cannot defend themselves against it, in the event of a real war, it is all back to "nuke them all and let god sort the good ones".
War, since the first Gulf one, is becoming a big Live Action video game. Us vs. them, real time coverage, lots of gadgets, wireless, unmanned, "intelligent" weapons. That helps a lot to detach people from the reality of the war, canceling the natural effect that would naturally arise, now that it is possible to show the war in all its ugliness, all its gore.
People, including we tech people, should not fall for the siren song that is military technology. It is all advanced, "cool", state of the art but, no matter what is the justification (or rationalization), killing people is never beautiful, and, as opposed to video games, real people have families, sometimes are innocent and never respawn.
Now, when governments begin to create super-cool gadgets that actively save lives, it is something worth. Better body armor, a force shield, not getting involved with foreign countries for fun and profit, etc. And by "actively", I mean something different than saving lives by getting enemies to be identified and "neutralized" before they can act. Because, as most occupations in the past and present centuries shows, sometimes the simpler and less detectable device (be it a grenade bobby trap in the jungle or a roadside bomb on Iraq) can be the deadliest.
1) But "internet communication based/reliant crimes" is longer to say
2) "internet communication based/reliant crimes" does not really useful for narrowing the subject down
It's not semantics. I'm not discussing how this "category of crime" (Internet crime vs. internet communication based/reliant crimes) should be called. What I'm saying is that there is no way to narrow down all these crimes using the fact of the Internet being involved in some way. This information simply has no correlation with the crimes. It is as relevant for narrowing down the subject as "crimes perpetrated by people speaking a second language" or, for short, "bilingual people crimes". It gives no useful information alone. A much better statistic would be, for instance, "auction fraud offline vs. online", or "Confidence Fraud offline vs. online". Then you would have 2 important informations: 1) The absolute number of crimes of such kind 2) The percentage of those crimes that occurs online. If it is big enough to be relevant, the it is a matter of public concern. If not, well, it's not.
3) It gives idiots who are overly picky about pointless semantics something to bitch about so they can't do any real harm to themselves and others - it's a community service kinda thing.
There is no such thing as "Internet Crime", and the data presented by this article, according to themselves, is not significant. From TFA:
The feds caution that these figures don't represent a scientific sample of just how much Net crime is out there. They note, for example, that the high number of auction fraud complaints is due, in part, to eBay and other big E-commerce outfits offering customers direct links to the IC3 website. And it's tough to measure what may be the Web's biggest scourge, child porn, simply by complaints.
Just take a look at the Top 10 list:
2006 Top 10 IC3 Complaint Categories (Percent of Total Complaints Received)
Auction Fraud (44.9%)
Non-delivery (19.0%)
Check Fraud (4.9%)
Credit/Debit Card Fraud (4.8%)
Computer Fraud (2.8%)
Confidence Fraud (2.2%)
Financial Institutions Fraud (1.6%)
Identity Theft (1.6%)
Investment Fraud (1.3%)
Child Pornography (1.0%)
Internet is only the communication channel used by the crooks, all the crimes depicted there are good old fashioned real life crimes. Being perpetrated via Internet is only a detail that should be irrelevant when categorizing crimes. What I would really like to see is the ratio of these same crimes perpetrated in real life vs. via internet. That would really be insightful and newsworthy.
Come on, this is Slashdot, speak adequately. It is safe to say they will announce Silverlight for Linux in time for the Duke Nukem Forever II teaser trailer.
Since when AT&T is (or was) the sole controller of the Internet? I thought you were talking about the telephone. That would make sense. Anyway, never underestimate the power of simpler "inventions", like tap water, antibiotics or sewage system. If we are able to sustain a 6 billion people population, thank it to the simpler inventions. Internet is a mere communication channel, like telephone, telegraph, snail mail or smoke sign. It is faster and more pervasive, but still a communication channel. Think about that.
Well, to help to elucidate your question, just think: how many people out there are clicking SPAM links and buying their stuff, or getting scammed via shady mass email business? A lot, isn't it? Now think, what is more likely to be bigger, the marketing share and success rate of SPAM and mail scams or of the regular business advertisement, even obnoxious animated gifs and pop over flash, as long it is from reputable business like, for instance, IBM, who is kindly displaying a big ad right now over my comment?
This was news when first submitted to Slashdot, as it could be read on the Firehose, the license link was really other than GPL. But now this link is back showing GPL 2 (although in a bad html), and it seems like they moved back to the original license. That's what happens when they take 4 days to accept a story.
ED-209: PLEASE PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON. YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
Dick Jones: I think you'd better do what he says, Mr. Kinney.
[Alarmed, Kinney quickly tosses the gun away. ED-209 growls menacingly.]
ED-209: YOU NOW HAVE 15 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
How having an human killed by a robot is any worse than an human killed by another human? I think this would be more "feel good" legislation than anything. Rationalizing a kill doesn't make it any better. Countries and their stupid war games. The future (and in some ammounts the present) of the war is exactly this one, unmanned drones and bombers, robotic infantry, intercontinental ballistic missiles operated by automatic systems, thousands of killings based on button pushing. Rationalizing it will not make it go away, people should be more honest about the means and reasons of the wars, that would only make them quicker and less bloody.
Disclaimer: I'm completely opposed to any kind of war of aggression, defending one country within its borders is the only kind of "acceptable" war IMHO.
"(and am using BitTorrent right now at 25K download rate)"
OMG! So it is you that is clogging the tubes. 25 K is too much, and if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet.
Like most CE products, the audio performance levels of PC-based products run the gamut, starting with basic devices like standard desktop or laptop PCs with sound that could be compared to commodity CE A/V gear such as compact systems or portable radios.M
Come on! Didn't some editor read it before posting it to Slashdot front page? This is nothing but advertisement for their A/V product line, and their summary is ridiculous. I will spare you people the trouble to read it in TFA:
- Pay attention to available connections
- Consider the effects of bass management
- Analog offers the highest performance soundtracks
- Digital connections generally work best set to Dolby Digital Live or DTS Connect
- Choose High Quality ripping settings
And, look at this pearl:
Lossless CODECs preserve all of the detail of the original media. For example, the WMA lossless CODEC is recommended for storing music which will be played back on a hi-fidelity home audio system.
I rest my case. Anyone advocating WMA lossless codec (specially to Slashdot target audience) is not worth your time. Nothing to see here, move along.
Well, it takes money to make money. And it is not as he was out there, spending his money on flimsy things like space travels, or something like that. Oh, wait!, he already did that. But, with a name like Shuttle worth, I would too, just for the sake of the pun.
Parent is not trolling, that's a real issue. The real newsworthy information here is NASA opening up a communication channel with the general tech public. Second Life is becoming the new "teleconference" fad from late eighties, or the videoconferencing fad from late nineties, people getting all excited with a "new" technology that does exactly the same as the previous one, but with animated avatars. And, to be sincere, I'm yet to find anyone (IRL or on internet corners, whatever) that uses or even know what Second Life is.
This is nothing but paid advertisement, or worse, the universally hated viral marketing campaign that gullible people (like the ones that submitted it to Slashdot) accepts and propagates.
But, to Perens, the fact that Microsoft is currently giving to customers coupons that can be redeemed for a copy of SUSE Linux indicates that these coupons are intended to be redeemed for a copy of the copyrighted GPL 2 software.
"So, Microsoft is actively participating in distribution of the GPL2 software today, and must have assented to GPL 2 to do that, because any distribution without assent to GPL2 would be infringement. Under GPL 2, they have already given away the rights to use Microsoft patents that are applied in the Novell distribution, for any use in any GPL software, by anyone, forever," Perens said.
Giving away coupons doesn't equate to distribution but to promotion. Giving away coupons makes Microsoft a distributor of GPL2 software as much as giving away free BigMac coupons makes a radio station a BigMac distributor. That's promotion, not distribution.
Anyway, I think GPL3 is very welcome to stop people to circumvent and thus negate the very 4 freedoms that are meant to passed along with any distribution of GPL'd software and derivative works.
Slashdot Mirror
But there is more:
Caracas is no HappyLand. It has a high crime rate, just like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (that by the way has its own surveillance blimp too). Surveillance is necessary, no, condition sine qua non to allow common people to live their lives without fear to be shot by a pair of Nike shoes (happens a lot in some Brazilian cities, just so you know). That's the situation is most Latin America.
Now, is not it hypocritical that 1) this is BBC reporting, coming straight from the country with the most ubiquitous surveillance system in the world 2) people are so desperate to find something to nail Hugo Chavez for that they need to resort to such FUD because they got nothing else. This is a move by the City of Caracas, not the country of Venezuela, just like the blimps on U.S. are a move from the NYPD, not the Federal Government.
Now stop talking about things you guys don't know about, and quit spreading fud. Come on, "keeping tab on the population".
On this case, the class of this symbiosis has a name. Parasitism. And guess who is the receiving end of the deleterious consequence on this relationship?
I can tell you in advance, without charge, where this will lead. Just like a disease vector, these machines will continue to be used by the botnet masters to infect other machines, spread SPAM, steal the very machine owner personal data and, in general, obfuscate illegal activities.
I don't know from where people commenting this article got the idea that having only one "infection" that don't totally destroy the machine is a good thing, even for the machine owner. Actually, it is very worse, because if people don't notice any different behavior they will not worry to fix the machine, even if they know about the infection. And in the end of the day, they will be the first to lose their money in some scam that they inadvertently help to spread.
People don't infect machines nowadays on the evilness of their hearts, only to wreak havoc or for bragging rights, not anymore. Now they do it for profit, it is organized crime that is happening there. Have no illusions about it.
I use Thunderbird to download my POP3 email and my Webmail at home. I have multiple POP3 accounts from my ISP, and a couple of GMail ones too, and my wife have one from Hotmail, one from Yahoo and one from her job. I shared the thunderbird profile between my Linux partition and her Windows partition so, no matter what partition we booted on, our email is all there. This is a way to save time and get all email with a One Click (tm) without having to surf through several ad-infected pages to read a couple of messages. All props to thunderbird, for providing this useful piece of software for free (as in speech and as in beer).
I, for one, am not contributing to the fulfillment of this prediction by viewing this page or contributing to this thread. Oh, wait ...!
That's one of the most used fallacies I'm used to hear when it concerns to rationalizations for war technology. Comparing WWII Germany (the most advanced war machine of its time) to Gulf War I and II Iraq is like comparing attacking Mike Tyson when he was the peak of his training to punching some bully in the face back in high school.
If U.S. ever gets into a war with any sizable adversary (let's say, Russia) there will be no "precision strike", no "intelligent bombs", no nothing except lots (millions) of casualties for both sides. The current technology is "intelligent" only against countries that cannot defend themselves against it, in the event of a real war, it is all back to "nuke them all and let god sort the good ones".
War, since the first Gulf one, is becoming a big Live Action video game. Us vs. them, real time coverage, lots of gadgets, wireless, unmanned, "intelligent" weapons. That helps a lot to detach people from the reality of the war, canceling the natural effect that would naturally arise, now that it is possible to show the war in all its ugliness, all its gore.
People, including we tech people, should not fall for the siren song that is military technology. It is all advanced, "cool", state of the art but, no matter what is the justification (or rationalization), killing people is never beautiful, and, as opposed to video games, real people have families, sometimes are innocent and never respawn.
Now, when governments begin to create super-cool gadgets that actively save lives, it is something worth. Better body armor, a force shield, not getting involved with foreign countries for fun and profit, etc. And by "actively", I mean something different than saving lives by getting enemies to be identified and "neutralized" before they can act. Because, as most occupations in the past and present centuries shows, sometimes the simpler and less detectable device (be it a grenade bobby trap in the jungle or a roadside bomb on Iraq) can be the deadliest.
It's not semantics. I'm not discussing how this "category of crime" (Internet crime vs. internet communication based/reliant crimes) should be called. What I'm saying is that there is no way to narrow down all these crimes using the fact of the Internet being involved in some way. This information simply has no correlation with the crimes. It is as relevant for narrowing down the subject as "crimes perpetrated by people speaking a second language" or, for short, "bilingual people crimes". It gives no useful information alone. A much better statistic would be, for instance, "auction fraud offline vs. online", or "Confidence Fraud offline vs. online". Then you would have 2 important informations: 1) The absolute number of crimes of such kind 2) The percentage of those crimes that occurs online. If it is big enough to be relevant, the it is a matter of public concern. If not, well, it's not.
WTF?! Talk about "accusations in a mirror".
Just take a look at the Top 10 list:
Internet is only the communication channel used by the crooks, all the crimes depicted there are good old fashioned real life crimes. Being perpetrated via Internet is only a detail that should be irrelevant when categorizing crimes. What I would really like to see is the ratio of these same crimes perpetrated in real life vs. via internet. That would really be insightful and newsworthy.
Come on, this is Slashdot, speak adequately. It is safe to say they will announce Silverlight for Linux in time for the Duke Nukem Forever II teaser trailer.
Since when AT&T is (or was) the sole controller of the Internet? I thought you were talking about the telephone. That would make sense. Anyway, never underestimate the power of simpler "inventions", like tap water, antibiotics or sewage system. If we are able to sustain a 6 billion people population, thank it to the simpler inventions. Internet is a mere communication channel, like telephone, telegraph, snail mail or smoke sign. It is faster and more pervasive, but still a communication channel. Think about that.
but the sole controller of the greatest invention mankind ever had since sliced bread
There, corrected it for you. If we are going to make extreme generalizations, at least let's do it right,
Well, to help to elucidate your question, just think: how many people out there are clicking SPAM links and buying their stuff, or getting scammed via shady mass email business? A lot, isn't it? Now think, what is more likely to be bigger, the marketing share and success rate of SPAM and mail scams or of the regular business advertisement, even obnoxious animated gifs and pop over flash, as long it is from reputable business like, for instance, IBM, who is kindly displaying a big ad right now over my comment?
This was news when first submitted to Slashdot, as it could be read on the Firehose, the license link was really other than GPL. But now this link is back showing GPL 2 (although in a bad html), and it seems like they moved back to the original license. That's what happens when they take 4 days to accept a story.
So, it is not a Mac penalty, it is a VMWare penalty.
How having an human killed by a robot is any worse than an human killed by another human? I think this would be more "feel good" legislation than anything. Rationalizing a kill doesn't make it any better. Countries and their stupid war games. The future (and in some ammounts the present) of the war is exactly this one, unmanned drones and bombers, robotic infantry, intercontinental ballistic missiles operated by automatic systems, thousands of killings based on button pushing. Rationalizing it will not make it go away, people should be more honest about the means and reasons of the wars, that would only make them quicker and less bloody.
Disclaimer: I'm completely opposed to any kind of war of aggression, defending one country within its borders is the only kind of "acceptable" war IMHO.
OMG! So it is you that is clogging the tubes. 25 K is too much, and if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material. I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet.
Come on! Didn't some editor read it before posting it to Slashdot front page? This is nothing but advertisement for their A/V product line, and their summary is ridiculous. I will spare you people the trouble to read it in TFA:
And, look at this pearl:
I rest my case. Anyone advocating WMA lossless codec (specially to Slashdot target audience) is not worth your time. Nothing to see here, move along.
Well, it takes money to make money. And it is not as he was out there, spending his money on flimsy things like space travels, or something like that. Oh, wait!, he already did that. But, with a name like Shuttle worth, I would too, just for the sake of the pun.
Anyway, if he believes that he will eventually make Canonical profitable, it is money well spent.
OMG, pirates!! I'm sooo calling the BSA.
But this is nothing. This would be news if they had put an Internet Router ... in space!!! Oh, wait...!
But you don't get it. This is news because it is a new way to Patch Defective Hardware ... in space!!!
Parent is not trolling, that's a real issue. The real newsworthy information here is NASA opening up a communication channel with the general tech public. Second Life is becoming the new "teleconference" fad from late eighties, or the videoconferencing fad from late nineties, people getting all excited with a "new" technology that does exactly the same as the previous one, but with animated avatars. And, to be sincere, I'm yet to find anyone (IRL or on internet corners, whatever) that uses or even know what Second Life is.
This is nothing but paid advertisement, or worse, the universally hated viral marketing campaign that gullible people (like the ones that submitted it to Slashdot) accepts and propagates.
Giving away coupons doesn't equate to distribution but to promotion. Giving away coupons makes Microsoft a distributor of GPL2 software as much as giving away free BigMac coupons makes a radio station a BigMac distributor. That's promotion, not distribution.
Anyway, I think GPL3 is very welcome to stop people to circumvent and thus negate the very 4 freedoms that are meant to passed along with any distribution of GPL'd software and derivative works.