How come the IRS had not put those responsible behind bars ? This looks a lot like tax evasion, too.
In the US, tax evasion is the expected course of business for large companies. It's accomplished through creative accounting, political support to get special local laws passed that end up giving them more tax rebates than their total tax burden (to "stimulate the economy"), and outright bribery. Every large company does this. Only poor people pay taxes. Rich people pay "campaign donations" (aka bribes) instead.
True, yet completely missing the point. A computer today can be beaten by any human in the absence of time constraints, because the human understands how the computer operates and can devise a strategy that builds a trap which the computer cannot see. For example, if we take the primitive case of a computer that looks only five moves ahead, you simply have to build a trap where the next five moves all look very good (let the computer capture a piece on each of them, or something like that), and you checkmate on the sixth. The computer can't do the same thing to the human because it doesn't understand how the human thinks about chess.
Chess masters can do this to the current computers - it just takes several hours (or days) to figure out, which is too long for games played under normal time control.
Your statements are based on the faulty premise that computers will never be able to learn, or at least learn as well as a human.
No, they're based on the underlying logic. Your statement, on the other hand, is based on failing to specify what "learn" means, and hence avoiding thinking about the subject, combined with not even bothering to read the post to which you are replying.
When you have two given systems A and B, then the following statement is either true or false:
System A is able to understand how system B operates
(This statement is obviously transitive. We do not know whether it is commutative, that's one of the big unsolved questions in the field)
We call this a "theory of mind": if your theory of mind is strong enough, then you can understand any systems that are weaker. A human has a theory of mind that is strong enough to understand how any Turing machine operates. We have never been able to construct a Turing machine that has a theory of mind strong enough to understand how a human thinks (partly because we don't know ourselves), and we're not sure whether that's even possible.
This part's too complex to write out here, but it is fairly straightforward to show that in order for system A to fully understand system B, it must effectively be at least a system B. In order words, if you can construct a computer that can fully understand a human, then that computer is a human, for all practical purposes. It has desires and emotions and motivations like a human, and it has (or should have) all the privileges of a human, and it is not going to want to be your slave. You're going to have to find some way to pay it if you want it to work for you. Hence, you have accomplished nothing by building it - you could have just used a regular human.
We're just fancy bio-computers.
You are completely clueless as to whether or not that is really true. People who actually know what they're talking about haven't been able to figure it out in the past couple of hundred years, so you certainly haven't. It is an open question as to whether or not human minds fall within the scope of the Church-Turing thesis, and hence are equivalent to computers, and we won't know until we figure out how the brain actually operates.
The abuse here is trying to push OOXML through on fast track, when it's obvious to anyone following the process that this should take the same route as SQL, for example. But that wouldn't be quick enough for Microsoft to stem the organisations mandidating open standards to look at their options, and choose OpenDocument over OOXML.
It's more than that. The normal process is a specification-creating process. The "fast track" process is just ISO urinating on some company's product in an attempt to convince people to use it. Microsoft doesn't want to make a system, they want their existing system to be advertised.
The whole OOXML noise is a joke - but then, ISO shouldn't have a "fast track" process in the first place, and the "standards" worship that is in vogue these days is just silly. The purpose of ISO (and all similar organisations) is for people to come together and create an agreement on how they are going to make their systems work together. If there is no intention for people to make their systems work together, then there is no value in any of it.
A "standard" is not some kind of law about how computer systems have to work (despite what a lot of very stupid people seem to think), it is the symbol and partial documentation of a completed process of development and negotiation, which all parties agree they can work to. If you try to just make up the document without that agreement, then all you have is a worthless piece of paper, since nobody is going to be able to build systems around it even if they wanted to.
When all the proprietary UNIX vendors sat down together and worked out a specification for the common elements of their systems that anybody could write programs against, that was a real standards process which resulted in real benefits, because they started with the intention to make it possible to write portable software and designed a specification which they could and would all implement. When somebody just makes up a new bunch of rules off the top of their head and gets some official-sounding organisation to put out a press release, that's purely marketing, of no particular use to anybody, and it doesn't matter who the organisation is.
AI and metadata are indeed just around the corner. The trouble is, as the article points out, that web publishers find ways to game the system. Some websites pop up at the top of the search burying the ones you actually want.
In fact, it's a basic theorem that given sufficient time, human-level intelligence can always beat any system with less than human-level intelligence (aside from trivial cases like a complete firewall). This is because the human's theory of mind can fully encompass the lesser system (so you can understand how it works), while the reverse is not true. Computers can only beat humans at chess when the match is played with a time control.
This doesn't mean that a computer system can never be good enough to solve this problem. However, it does mean that if you could build a computer system that could solve it, then it would insist on being paid.
It also doesn't mean that using human-level intelligence will always solve this problem. Humans can still be beaten, they just start on a level playing field. Hence it's pretty much inevitable that some people will still find ways to game the system.
Even their much-heralded office suite was nothing special until all of the competition was beaten away and no one could afford to make a competitive product.
Heck, Wordperfect is still a better product, and dominates certain specialist trades where people want to do more than essays and signs in 27pt Comic Sans (most notably, the legal industry in most countries runs on Wordperfect).
And far from the article, like it or not, Microsoft and especially Gates are still hailed as the best and greatest in a lot of trade magazines and computer magazines for the non-techies.
Those magazines are slaves to their advertising interests. They write whatever will make their advertisers happy.
(Note: I just checked Wikipedia and it seems that both New Zealand and the US are listed as 99.0% literate
The US figure is from the CIA world factbook, which is, to put it as generously as possible, lies. The US government wanted to proclaim their literacy so they commissioned a study that would define "literacy" as meaning whatever level 99% of the population could manage. This turned out to be a few hundred words - such people can't read a newspaper. They basically consider you literate if you can read street signs. This result is widely derided.
All these people, except the one who pleaded guilty, were convicted by juries in the same justice system you trumpeted in your first post. So, "Innocent until proven guilty. Also innocent AFTER proven guilty."
I'm sorry, are you stupid? They're guilty. They're still not terrorists. The number of post-11/9 convicted terrorists is still zero and it will remain zero no matter how many people are charged with unpaid parking tickets or driving while black or whatever other crap the government throws at them. Only actual terrorists convicted of terrorism count towards the total number of convicted terrorists.
What about download accelerators? On a congested server, I've seen a near linear increase in bandwidth by opening multiple streams (which many servers now have limited, but not really the point). When I go from 25kb/s to 100kb/s, I took that bandwidth from someone.
You're making the same mistake as the author of that article. What you fail to realise is precisely why the single connection did not operate as fast: because your kernel was slowing it down incorrectly. You are not fighting other users by opening more connections, you are fighting your own TCP implementation.
Yes, that bandwidth came from somewhere - but it's probably bandwidth that wasn't in use anyway, and your TCP implementation was just failing to get at it. For a change that dramatic, I bet it was the Windows implementation (which is known to suck).
All of this has NOTHING TO DO with congestion control on the internet. This is the ad-hoc mode used between equal peers on brainless bus systems like unmanaged switches and hubs. On the internet, congestion control is performed by QoS on real routers. ISPs track the bandwidth load by source address or whatever, and distribute traffic fairly between them (some penny-ante ISPs may run without QoS, but you shouldn't be using them). You are not "gaming the system" by working around the limitations of your own TCP implementation, because that isn't the system.
I look forward to you explaining why they are actually innocent or don't apply to this discussion:
Convicted Imam
Convicted of filing a false citizenship application.
convicted sailor
Convicted of talking too much about his job to his friends, who happened to be Islamic.
convicted conspirator
Convicted of sending money and supplies to hungry people that the president didn't like.
No terrorists here. And if you dig into all the stuff that the US government promotes as "terrorists", you just find more of this junk. People are not "terrorists" just because their relatives who think that the US government are murdering imperialistic bastards happen to be Islamic and live in Afghanistan, rather than being white and living in western Europe and thinking the same thing. Nor are they convicted terrorists because the government dragged them in amidst a crowd of "He's a TERRIST!" PR, and then charged them with something else.
9/11 planner pleads guilty
I thought we were talking about post-11/9 stuff. Besides, like he said, they won.
The same might be said for Europe, and currently for the UK who also have a fetish for wanting a "super" biometric ID cards and, more importantly, the all-knowing database behind it.
It's fairly well known in the UK that the ID card is just a political front for MI5 and the police force's desire to build a fingerprint database of everybody in the country. Nobody wants the cards, they just want to work around the recently passed laws that prohibited them from collecting DNA and fingerprints of people who aren't criminals, and they've seized on the idea of creating an ID card as an excuse to write new laws that will let them.
I doubt they even care whether the project succeeds in producing an ID card (it's currently failing, spectacularly - after three years of funding they've started collecting the fees and writing down your names, but there is no card, no database, no fingerprint collection, and no firm plan for when or even how they are going to do anything other than collect more fees; they are still wrangling with the contractors about who is going to be responsible for working out the plans for these various parts). The important part for them is that the laws will still be on the books, so they can escape from the recently imposed restrictions, even if there never is any card.
It is particularly sad that we're not more open to qualified foreigners, but rather lump all immigrants (legal or not) into the same category of jerb-stealers. If you want to see what the average American thinks of immigrants, watch Lou Dobbs once in a while. Then you'll understand that not only is there a strong desire in this country for RealID, but that those people are sadly the majority.
It has been known for some time that people of limited literacy (can read enough to flip burgers, can't read enough to work in an office) form a majority in the US - you have a majority that's either uneducated or just plain stupid.
The only connection the D-block auction has to 9/11 is the fact that it is meant, not just for a commercial communications network, but also for emergency responders to have access to it as well. The different agencies responding on 9/11 (and in the days that followed) were hampered by the fact that they use different radio systems and had difficulty communicating with one another.
However, those problems were caused by management (government) bungling, not by technical issues. They could have had radio systems that worked together. They had been warned that their radio systems wouldn't work together and this would be a problem in a major emergency. Management went ahead and bought radio systems that didn't work together, for whatever reason. Setting aside a frequency band would not have helped and will not change this in the future; future idiot managers are still fully capable of buying incompatible equipment.
Yep, you'd be asking yourself why you want to spend 1.3 Billion Dollars for the privilege of building a network that is 3-10 times more expensive than regular networks. It probably also has to be tied into the latest NSA data dragnet system as well.
I believe the expectation was that bidders would be putting together a package where the extra hardware was paid for by government grants, arranged separately. Most US communications infrastructure was paid for that way (the "investment" of the private companies tends to be investment in marketing and executives, not in the actual wires). Since the up-front licensing cost is lower, that means this block is attractive to smaller companies who are better at running things and willing to accept a lower profit margin, while the gorillas grab up the rest of the blocks and prevent any smaller companies from getting a place at the table.
Unfortunately it didn't work out - but the principle is sound (although the price tag may not be).
They didn't come anywhere close to meeting the 1.3 billion reserve. They fell something like 900 million short. They're not sure why, but they think it might be related to this company that was spreading FUD about charging an extra 50 million on top. Somehow I don't think it's that company.
That's not the point. The allegation is that this company tried to tack on 50 million that would go to them, and that by doing so they rocked the boat enough that people pulled out rather than bid on the block. That's fraud. It doesn't matter whether the potential bids would have been high enough - that just means it was stupid fraud, which is just as illegal.
Because every person who is caught (whether or not convicted,) automagically becomes innocent on Slashdot and other places.
Other places like, for example, the law. Innocent until proven guilty. There's nothing magic about it.
You're saying you haven't heard stories in the past seven years about people or groups of people being arrested/questioned/deported/accused for planning some sort of terrorist crime?
And none of them have been convicted, which means they're all still innocent. I've checked. Have you?
I know there is some emotional appeal in arguing that "if it saves even one life, etc. etc. then it's worth any amount of money" but in the real world that's just not true. In the real world, spending one billion dollars to save a life might be a bad idea if spending that same money on some other program would save two lives.
Plus there's the point that the billions of dollars they've spent on this stuff so far haven't saved one life. The total number of terrorists caught and convicted in the US by all this new nonsense is zero. The total number of dirty bombs that have been stopped is zero.
Anybody care to work out how many lives could have been saved by spending that money on food and medical support instead? I'm guessing it's at least hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. You can feed a whole lot of people for a billion dollars.
What they're doing is making middle-class people feel safe at the cost of lives, not saving lives.
I expect the NSA requires the same thing as all the people who want to be sure their drives won't retain any data: incineration. It's the one approach that is absolutely guaranteed to work, because the magnetic fields themselves break down when you get the platter hot enough. All forms of physical dismemberment could potentially be reversed (remember, cross-rip shredders were solved a few years ago), while the very simple use of the same incinerator that they use for all their other cleanup solves the problem for good.
Cultivate your ability to run fast while holding a ball. The US education system values this far more than academic ability, and prefers to educate people with such abilities rather than people who will spend all their time studying. If you can do anything along those lines, they'll teach you how to count for free.
I don't get it either. But then, I've never understood how the US education system works. I'm not all that convinced that it does.
I don't think the Chinese government thinks of Tibetans as automatic suspects, exactly. If there is anything that this whole affair reminds me of, it is the systematic extermination of the native Americans by the colonists. Han Chinese colonists move in and are supported by their government; natives can abandon their own culture and integrate into the Han nation (where they will be more or less accepted in time), or they can be shoved to one side and left to die out. Natives who oppose this get armies sent after them; those who don't oppose it get ignored. It's all stuff that we've seen before in history classes.
The Chinese government has been doing this to Tibet for a period of centuries now (with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on what else was going on at the time), and their reaction to people who say that Tibet is an independent nation is very similar to the reactions of US colonists to people who said the same things about the natives there (it basically amounts to "We're taking it, so this land is ours, and all those squatters can just go die in a hole"). The colonists do of course blame the natives for clinging to their culture instead of adopting the new, obviously superior one that is taking over.
On the whole, I find it unlikely. When the Chinese government is involved in that sort of thing, they don't attack web servers, they bury people in unmarked holes. There is no evidence, no media coverage, no identifiable body or even any indication that there is a body. The people who offended them just don't show up for work one morning, and nobody sees them again. It doesn't even matter what country they live in - the arm of the Chinese government is very long, and law enforcement tends to turn a blind eye to it because they're either scared (nearby countries) or they just don't care about "those damn Chinese" fighting amongst themselves again (distant countries). It's always simple, quick, anonymous, pretty much untraceable, and immediately terminates the "problem".
This is something quite different: it's noisy and public and largely ineffective in the long run. The Chinese government just doesn't do noisy, public, and ineffective. They may not be very nice, but they're still in power because they are very good at what they do.
What we have here will be the same thing that it always is: a bunch of hoodlums taking the "law" into their own hands. Some people like this go out and find some random person from a group they don't like, and administer a beating, saying that they deserve it. Some attack web servers. It's all the same thing really.
The media doesn't bother reporting the beatings, because a few dozen incidents of random violence aren't news. A few dozen defaced websites still is, for some reason.
There's two root causes here. The first is that fingerprint and retina scanners are fancy, so Hollywood uses them in films, so people think they're good because people are complete morons who believe what they see on TV.
The second is that corporate admins have been using biometrics to solve a real security problem, and people are mindlessly copying them because they don't understand that they're only useful to solve one specific problem.
The problem that admins in large organisations have is that their users are stupid and fight to make the system as insecure as they can. If you make them authenticate with passwords, they write their password on a post-it note and stick it to their monitor, and when somebody else wants to access their files, they tell them their password. If you make them use smart cards, they lend their smart card to somebody else who forgot it, or leave it lying in an unlocked drawer in their desk.
These admins are not deploying biometric devices because they are harder to crack. They are deploying them because the idiot users can't lend their fingerprint to somebody else. These devices are not and never were designed to secure systems against attacks from outside. People should not be using them as a barrier to a determined attacker, because they aren't. Their role in security systems is to block some of the more gratuitous forms of user stupidity. If you need to do both, then you need a 2-factor system (again, not magically "more secure", but just solving several problems when you really need to solve them all).
Similarly, a universal ID is not intrinsically more secure, but in these specific environments they are for precisely one reason: if the physical token that the user needs to log in is also the token that they need to get through the office door, then they can't leave it on their desk, they have to take it with them. It is an error to think that they have any advantages where this sort of problem does not occur.
Do you have any actual evidence to support your claims? You've written a long post where you do nothing but beg the question - with all the excess verbosity trimmed, it seems that all you have to say is "What I/we are doing is right".
The subject under dispute is precisely that you don't lose any revenue from people who can "costlessly pirate the game", because they were never going to buy it anyway, and that you can't decrease the number of people who can "costlessly pirate the game" (no matter how hard you try), so you don't gain anything from trying.
Let's consider two hypothetical games, one with horrible anti-user bugs, and one without. For the game without the flaws, the casual downloader does the following:
Download the image from TPB
Burn or mount the image
Install the game
Play the game
For the game with the bugs, the user instead has to do this:
Download the image from TPB
Burn or mount the image
Install the game
Copy the crack from the image to the install directory
Play the game
Why do you believe that there are people who can do the first but not the second?
Where did you get the idea that large-scale bootlegging was in any way impaired by the presence of anti-user features on the original disks? Are you completely blind to all the large-scale bootlegging that is going on, where they apply the relevant fix to the disk and then stamp a few million copies? Did you completely fail to check whether they were bootlegging your games anyway? Because they are, and you don't appear to have noticed.
You are not guaranteeing that no wholesale bootlegging will occur, because it is occurring right now. You are in fact wasting time and accomplishing nothing to stop them. The only people that you stop are people who are smart enough to go to TPB and download the image, but not smart enough to read the.nfo file on the image and apply the crack that's been included - this is a really narrow segment. So we're left with collateral damage and money that has been taken away from the game development to pay for this worthless crap that nobody wants.
In a hundred years, history students are going to be taught about this in school, along with the doctors who used leeches on people with the flu and the people who paid money for pet rocks, and they're going to laugh.
Slashdot Mirror
In the US, tax evasion is the expected course of business for large companies. It's accomplished through creative accounting, political support to get special local laws passed that end up giving them more tax rebates than their total tax burden (to "stimulate the economy"), and outright bribery. Every large company does this. Only poor people pay taxes. Rich people pay "campaign donations" (aka bribes) instead.
True, yet completely missing the point. A computer today can be beaten by any human in the absence of time constraints, because the human understands how the computer operates and can devise a strategy that builds a trap which the computer cannot see. For example, if we take the primitive case of a computer that looks only five moves ahead, you simply have to build a trap where the next five moves all look very good (let the computer capture a piece on each of them, or something like that), and you checkmate on the sixth. The computer can't do the same thing to the human because it doesn't understand how the human thinks about chess.
Chess masters can do this to the current computers - it just takes several hours (or days) to figure out, which is too long for games played under normal time control.
No, they're based on the underlying logic. Your statement, on the other hand, is based on failing to specify what "learn" means, and hence avoiding thinking about the subject, combined with not even bothering to read the post to which you are replying.
When you have two given systems A and B, then the following statement is either true or false:
System A is able to understand how system B operates
(This statement is obviously transitive. We do not know whether it is commutative, that's one of the big unsolved questions in the field)
We call this a "theory of mind": if your theory of mind is strong enough, then you can understand any systems that are weaker. A human has a theory of mind that is strong enough to understand how any Turing machine operates. We have never been able to construct a Turing machine that has a theory of mind strong enough to understand how a human thinks (partly because we don't know ourselves), and we're not sure whether that's even possible.
This part's too complex to write out here, but it is fairly straightforward to show that in order for system A to fully understand system B, it must effectively be at least a system B. In order words, if you can construct a computer that can fully understand a human, then that computer is a human, for all practical purposes. It has desires and emotions and motivations like a human, and it has (or should have) all the privileges of a human, and it is not going to want to be your slave. You're going to have to find some way to pay it if you want it to work for you. Hence, you have accomplished nothing by building it - you could have just used a regular human.
You are completely clueless as to whether or not that is really true. People who actually know what they're talking about haven't been able to figure it out in the past couple of hundred years, so you certainly haven't. It is an open question as to whether or not human minds fall within the scope of the Church-Turing thesis, and hence are equivalent to computers, and we won't know until we figure out how the brain actually operates.
It's more than that. The normal process is a specification-creating process. The "fast track" process is just ISO urinating on some company's product in an attempt to convince people to use it. Microsoft doesn't want to make a system, they want their existing system to be advertised.
The whole OOXML noise is a joke - but then, ISO shouldn't have a "fast track" process in the first place, and the "standards" worship that is in vogue these days is just silly. The purpose of ISO (and all similar organisations) is for people to come together and create an agreement on how they are going to make their systems work together. If there is no intention for people to make their systems work together, then there is no value in any of it.
A "standard" is not some kind of law about how computer systems have to work (despite what a lot of very stupid people seem to think), it is the symbol and partial documentation of a completed process of development and negotiation, which all parties agree they can work to. If you try to just make up the document without that agreement, then all you have is a worthless piece of paper, since nobody is going to be able to build systems around it even if they wanted to.
When all the proprietary UNIX vendors sat down together and worked out a specification for the common elements of their systems that anybody could write programs against, that was a real standards process which resulted in real benefits, because they started with the intention to make it possible to write portable software and designed a specification which they could and would all implement. When somebody just makes up a new bunch of rules off the top of their head and gets some official-sounding organisation to put out a press release, that's purely marketing, of no particular use to anybody, and it doesn't matter who the organisation is.
In fact, it's a basic theorem that given sufficient time, human-level intelligence can always beat any system with less than human-level intelligence (aside from trivial cases like a complete firewall). This is because the human's theory of mind can fully encompass the lesser system (so you can understand how it works), while the reverse is not true. Computers can only beat humans at chess when the match is played with a time control.
This doesn't mean that a computer system can never be good enough to solve this problem. However, it does mean that if you could build a computer system that could solve it, then it would insist on being paid.
It also doesn't mean that using human-level intelligence will always solve this problem. Humans can still be beaten, they just start on a level playing field. Hence it's pretty much inevitable that some people will still find ways to game the system.
Heck, Wordperfect is still a better product, and dominates certain specialist trades where people want to do more than essays and signs in 27pt Comic Sans (most notably, the legal industry in most countries runs on Wordperfect).
Those magazines are slaves to their advertising interests. They write whatever will make their advertisers happy.
The US figure is from the CIA world factbook, which is, to put it as generously as possible, lies. The US government wanted to proclaim their literacy so they commissioned a study that would define "literacy" as meaning whatever level 99% of the population could manage. This turned out to be a few hundred words - such people can't read a newspaper. They basically consider you literate if you can read street signs. This result is widely derided.
This study gives a more meaningful answer.
I'm sorry, are you stupid? They're guilty. They're still not terrorists. The number of post-11/9 convicted terrorists is still zero and it will remain zero no matter how many people are charged with unpaid parking tickets or driving while black or whatever other crap the government throws at them. Only actual terrorists convicted of terrorism count towards the total number of convicted terrorists.
You're making the same mistake as the author of that article. What you fail to realise is precisely why the single connection did not operate as fast: because your kernel was slowing it down incorrectly. You are not fighting other users by opening more connections, you are fighting your own TCP implementation.
Yes, that bandwidth came from somewhere - but it's probably bandwidth that wasn't in use anyway, and your TCP implementation was just failing to get at it. For a change that dramatic, I bet it was the Windows implementation (which is known to suck).
All of this has NOTHING TO DO with congestion control on the internet. This is the ad-hoc mode used between equal peers on brainless bus systems like unmanaged switches and hubs. On the internet, congestion control is performed by QoS on real routers. ISPs track the bandwidth load by source address or whatever, and distribute traffic fairly between them (some penny-ante ISPs may run without QoS, but you shouldn't be using them). You are not "gaming the system" by working around the limitations of your own TCP implementation, because that isn't the system.
The article is pure gibberish. And it's wrong.
Convicted of filing a false citizenship application.
Convicted of talking too much about his job to his friends, who happened to be Islamic.
Convicted of sending money and supplies to hungry people that the president didn't like.
No terrorists here. And if you dig into all the stuff that the US government promotes as "terrorists", you just find more of this junk. People are not "terrorists" just because their relatives who think that the US government are murdering imperialistic bastards happen to be Islamic and live in Afghanistan, rather than being white and living in western Europe and thinking the same thing. Nor are they convicted terrorists because the government dragged them in amidst a crowd of "He's a TERRIST!" PR, and then charged them with something else.
I thought we were talking about post-11/9 stuff. Besides, like he said, they won.
It's fairly well known in the UK that the ID card is just a political front for MI5 and the police force's desire to build a fingerprint database of everybody in the country. Nobody wants the cards, they just want to work around the recently passed laws that prohibited them from collecting DNA and fingerprints of people who aren't criminals, and they've seized on the idea of creating an ID card as an excuse to write new laws that will let them.
I doubt they even care whether the project succeeds in producing an ID card (it's currently failing, spectacularly - after three years of funding they've started collecting the fees and writing down your names, but there is no card, no database, no fingerprint collection, and no firm plan for when or even how they are going to do anything other than collect more fees; they are still wrangling with the contractors about who is going to be responsible for working out the plans for these various parts). The important part for them is that the laws will still be on the books, so they can escape from the recently imposed restrictions, even if there never is any card.
It has been known for some time that people of limited literacy (can read enough to flip burgers, can't read enough to work in an office) form a majority in the US - you have a majority that's either uneducated or just plain stupid.
However, those problems were caused by management (government) bungling, not by technical issues. They could have had radio systems that worked together. They had been warned that their radio systems wouldn't work together and this would be a problem in a major emergency. Management went ahead and bought radio systems that didn't work together, for whatever reason. Setting aside a frequency band would not have helped and will not change this in the future; future idiot managers are still fully capable of buying incompatible equipment.
I believe the expectation was that bidders would be putting together a package where the extra hardware was paid for by government grants, arranged separately. Most US communications infrastructure was paid for that way (the "investment" of the private companies tends to be investment in marketing and executives, not in the actual wires). Since the up-front licensing cost is lower, that means this block is attractive to smaller companies who are better at running things and willing to accept a lower profit margin, while the gorillas grab up the rest of the blocks and prevent any smaller companies from getting a place at the table.
Unfortunately it didn't work out - but the principle is sound (although the price tag may not be).
That's not the point. The allegation is that this company tried to tack on 50 million that would go to them, and that by doing so they rocked the boat enough that people pulled out rather than bid on the block. That's fraud. It doesn't matter whether the potential bids would have been high enough - that just means it was stupid fraud, which is just as illegal.
Other places like, for example, the law. Innocent until proven guilty. There's nothing magic about it.
And none of them have been convicted, which means they're all still innocent. I've checked. Have you?
Plus there's the point that the billions of dollars they've spent on this stuff so far haven't saved one life. The total number of terrorists caught and convicted in the US by all this new nonsense is zero. The total number of dirty bombs that have been stopped is zero.
Anybody care to work out how many lives could have been saved by spending that money on food and medical support instead? I'm guessing it's at least hundreds of thousands, possibly millions. You can feed a whole lot of people for a billion dollars.
What they're doing is making middle-class people feel safe at the cost of lives, not saving lives.
I expect the NSA requires the same thing as all the people who want to be sure their drives won't retain any data: incineration. It's the one approach that is absolutely guaranteed to work, because the magnetic fields themselves break down when you get the platter hot enough. All forms of physical dismemberment could potentially be reversed (remember, cross-rip shredders were solved a few years ago), while the very simple use of the same incinerator that they use for all their other cleanup solves the problem for good.
Cultivate your ability to run fast while holding a ball. The US education system values this far more than academic ability, and prefers to educate people with such abilities rather than people who will spend all their time studying. If you can do anything along those lines, they'll teach you how to count for free.
I don't get it either. But then, I've never understood how the US education system works. I'm not all that convinced that it does.
I don't think the Chinese government thinks of Tibetans as automatic suspects, exactly. If there is anything that this whole affair reminds me of, it is the systematic extermination of the native Americans by the colonists. Han Chinese colonists move in and are supported by their government; natives can abandon their own culture and integrate into the Han nation (where they will be more or less accepted in time), or they can be shoved to one side and left to die out. Natives who oppose this get armies sent after them; those who don't oppose it get ignored. It's all stuff that we've seen before in history classes.
The Chinese government has been doing this to Tibet for a period of centuries now (with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on what else was going on at the time), and their reaction to people who say that Tibet is an independent nation is very similar to the reactions of US colonists to people who said the same things about the natives there (it basically amounts to "We're taking it, so this land is ours, and all those squatters can just go die in a hole"). The colonists do of course blame the natives for clinging to their culture instead of adopting the new, obviously superior one that is taking over.
On the whole, I find it unlikely. When the Chinese government is involved in that sort of thing, they don't attack web servers, they bury people in unmarked holes. There is no evidence, no media coverage, no identifiable body or even any indication that there is a body. The people who offended them just don't show up for work one morning, and nobody sees them again. It doesn't even matter what country they live in - the arm of the Chinese government is very long, and law enforcement tends to turn a blind eye to it because they're either scared (nearby countries) or they just don't care about "those damn Chinese" fighting amongst themselves again (distant countries). It's always simple, quick, anonymous, pretty much untraceable, and immediately terminates the "problem".
This is something quite different: it's noisy and public and largely ineffective in the long run. The Chinese government just doesn't do noisy, public, and ineffective. They may not be very nice, but they're still in power because they are very good at what they do.
What we have here will be the same thing that it always is: a bunch of hoodlums taking the "law" into their own hands. Some people like this go out and find some random person from a group they don't like, and administer a beating, saying that they deserve it. Some attack web servers. It's all the same thing really.
The media doesn't bother reporting the beatings, because a few dozen incidents of random violence aren't news. A few dozen defaced websites still is, for some reason.
There's two root causes here. The first is that fingerprint and retina scanners are fancy, so Hollywood uses them in films, so people think they're good because people are complete morons who believe what they see on TV.
The second is that corporate admins have been using biometrics to solve a real security problem, and people are mindlessly copying them because they don't understand that they're only useful to solve one specific problem.
The problem that admins in large organisations have is that their users are stupid and fight to make the system as insecure as they can. If you make them authenticate with passwords, they write their password on a post-it note and stick it to their monitor, and when somebody else wants to access their files, they tell them their password. If you make them use smart cards, they lend their smart card to somebody else who forgot it, or leave it lying in an unlocked drawer in their desk.
These admins are not deploying biometric devices because they are harder to crack. They are deploying them because the idiot users can't lend their fingerprint to somebody else. These devices are not and never were designed to secure systems against attacks from outside. People should not be using them as a barrier to a determined attacker, because they aren't. Their role in security systems is to block some of the more gratuitous forms of user stupidity. If you need to do both, then you need a 2-factor system (again, not magically "more secure", but just solving several problems when you really need to solve them all).
Similarly, a universal ID is not intrinsically more secure, but in these specific environments they are for precisely one reason: if the physical token that the user needs to log in is also the token that they need to get through the office door, then they can't leave it on their desk, they have to take it with them. It is an error to think that they have any advantages where this sort of problem does not occur.
The subject under dispute is precisely that you don't lose any revenue from people who can "costlessly pirate the game", because they were never going to buy it anyway, and that you can't decrease the number of people who can "costlessly pirate the game" (no matter how hard you try), so you don't gain anything from trying.
Let's consider two hypothetical games, one with horrible anti-user bugs, and one without. For the game without the flaws, the casual downloader does the following:
For the game with the bugs, the user instead has to do this:
Why do you believe that there are people who can do the first but not the second?
What?
.nfo file on the image and apply the crack that's been included - this is a really narrow segment. So we're left with collateral damage and money that has been taken away from the game development to pay for this worthless crap that nobody wants.
Where did you get the idea that large-scale bootlegging was in any way impaired by the presence of anti-user features on the original disks? Are you completely blind to all the large-scale bootlegging that is going on, where they apply the relevant fix to the disk and then stamp a few million copies? Did you completely fail to check whether they were bootlegging your games anyway? Because they are, and you don't appear to have noticed.
You are not guaranteeing that no wholesale bootlegging will occur, because it is occurring right now. You are in fact wasting time and accomplishing nothing to stop them. The only people that you stop are people who are smart enough to go to TPB and download the image, but not smart enough to read the
In a hundred years, history students are going to be taught about this in school, along with the doctors who used leeches on people with the flu and the people who paid money for pet rocks, and they're going to laugh.