More than that, this is potentially a good thing if it is being done in the right way. It would make it much easier, for example, to detect somebody currently off the grid who decides to buy the materials needed to make a bomb. As long as the tracking is being done in a non-prejudicial way, as long as the banks work together to create a unique cardholder ID to mask the identity of the person in question (but with that ID shared across all cards that the person holds from all banks), as long as the card company only reports purchases of specific materials of significant concern, and as long as the identity of the person in question remains masked by the card companies until such time as the spooks do obtain a warrant to unmask the suspicious person, I'm all for it.
If, on the other hand, as I suspect, none of those safeguards are in place, and it is being used to see what random ex-cons are buying just to be nosy, then it's a bad thing. There's a right way and a wrong way to do this sort of thing, and sadly, our government has a tendency to do it the easy way, which is almost invariably the wrong way.
LOL. Yes, they should have been awarded lawyers' fees, unless the lawyer was working on contingency, in which case the judgment is exactly right in that regard, too. No reason for the lawyer to get a payday, either.:-D
Yes, I know that the frog thing is dubious. It's just an expression.
Regarding your smoking analogy, I think you're missing a few very important reasons for smoking cessation in that theory:
Smoking causes lung cancer, emphysema, and contributes significantly to heart attack and stroke risk. A lot of the people who quit smoking did so because they want to live.
Cigarettes are disproportionately bought by the poor, so sales are affected more by small increases in price. Gasoline is bought disproportionately by the middle class (the poor are less likely to have a car, and the rich are less likely to have to drive to work on a daily basis), so sales are not significantly affected by price.
You don't have to smoke a cigarette to get to work.
That last one is the most important reason why driving habits won't change much. The vast majority of driving is not voluntary. Thus, short of either moving to a house closer to work (which isn't always feasible in two-earner households) or quitting your job and getting a closer job (which isn't always feasible, either), you pretty much have to drive when you have to drive.
Another problematic theory is that higher gas prices will encourage carpooling. Most people don't want to carpool with strangers, so carpooling really only works if you happen to know someone who not only works near your work, but also lives near your house. Frankly, most people for whom carpooling would be convenient have already started carpooling, and most of the other people on the roads (again, with the possible exception of the working poor) are unlikely to start regardless of gas prices.
And lest you suggest public transportation, practical considerations make that unlikely. I live one town over from my workplace in a major metropolitan area. The nearest bus stop is about two long blocks from my house, and at the other end, two blocks from my workplace. It takes about 12 minutes to drive to work. On a bad day, it's 15 minutes door-to-door. By bus, it takes up to an hour and a half, with a third of your travel time on foot. That's approaching eight times as long. In fact, according to Google, it would only take two hours to walk, and that's free. It just doesn't make sense to take mass transit except for long trips, and even then, only on routes with limited stops.
And no matter how much gas prices go up, mass transit will never be dramatically cheaper. That's a $4.00 bus route versus approximately $1.50 in gasoline. Yes, once you factor in wear and tear on the car, it's a little more expensive, but only about a dollar more than the cost of the bus. There's simply no way for public transit in most places to be more than about 20-25% cheaper than an individual vehicle with a single rider, nor for it to be even remotely comparable in terms of speed.
Thus, at basically any feasible price, it does not make sense unless it is your only option (that is to say, you don't own a car or don't have a license). Even for the poor, it doesn't make sense because a $500 beater car probably costs about two bucks less for that same trip even after factoring in wear and tear....
Thus, gasoline prices are unlikely to have any significant impact on individual driving habits beyond possibly reducing leisure travel, and at most, that will only shave off a few percentage points. It will, however, result in greater reduction of small businesses; the big box retailers will find ways to be more efficient at trucking products from place to place, thus compounding the benefits of having large networks of stores.
Won't happen. You're boiling a frog. Increases occur incrementally, so people just learn to deal with the new normal. If you saw gas prices double overnight, it would change driving habits (and would make the cost of food, clothing, and pretty much everything else go way up, too), but that's not likely to happen. Gradual change? It changes car buying habits far more than driving habits, and even then, only if the increase is fairly rapid as it was during most of the second Bush administration.
I'm pretty sure no national carrier currently provides or has ever provided unlimited cellular data for computers at any price (at least in the United States).
A six-year-old probably thought it would be funny to steal the superglue out of the drawer and glue a toy somewhere. Kids glue things to other things all the time. They seem to think it's funny. Admittedly, most kids don't glue things to parts of an underpass, but the spot in question is only about a foot off the ground, judging from the picture, so it's quite possible. Why would you assume that there was malicious intent behind something that at first glance seems so likely to be harmless?
You see, this is why we say that the terrorists have already won. Every time somebody sees something the least bit out of the ordinary, they assume the billion-to-one long shot that it might be dangerous instead of the near certainty that it is harmless. You can either live your life in fear and terror (which is what the terrorists WANT you to do) or you can live your life like a sane person. Those really are your only two options. People who see terrorists around every corner are delusional, and such extreme paranoia is harmful to the proper functioning of a civilized society.
More to the point, excessive fear of terrorism can lead to the terrorists actually being around every corner. People flee areas where they fear for their lives, and hysteria only contributes to that perception. This drives the cost of housing down in those area, which leads to the poor becoming overly concentrated in those areas (and rich people becoming completely absent) instead of being more evenly distributed, which leads to lower local tax revenue, which leads to lower quality of education, which leads to people who feel they have nothing to lose. As such, we as a nation are in danger of a downhill slide to chaos, tyranny, and yes, terrorism, because we cower in fear and shout, "Oh no! It might be a bomb!" every time we see a child's toy glued to a piece of concrete somewhere. (Helpful hint: planting bombs doesn't generally involve any form of glue.)
It's time to take a step back---to stop cowering in fear, for as FDR said, "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself---nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance". Fear---terror---is the real enemy---not foreign powers, not Al Qaeda, not the Democrats or the Republicans, not any single individual or group of individuals. That is what makes it painfully ironic that the so-called war on terror has caused more terror than any act by any terrorist organization. Remember, every time you ask yourself if something harmless could be a bomb, those who would have us fear win another round. Do not let them win the war.
I'm pretty sure no carrier currently provides or has ever provided unlimited cellular data for computers at any price (at least in the United States). This is a computer plan we're talking about, not a cell phone plan. For that matter, even the unlimited smart phone plans are being phased out rather rapidly in favor of capped plans, but that's another issue.
I would agree, had the pictures shown a clearly private place (e.g. if the street view cameras were taking pictures over the top of privacy fences). However, that wasn't the situation in this case (as far as I could tell). Although it is technically trespassing to drive into someone's driveway if they've posted a "No Trespassing" sign, you'd be hard pressed to show a significant loss of privacy given that:
Anyone could have walked up or driven up and seen the same thing.
The homeowners didn't feel their privacy was important enough to put up a fence with a locked gate.
Chances are, anyone could have gotten fairly similar pictures by using a long zoom without trespassing.
So in this case, the judge probably made the right call. It's more technical trespassing than any substantive invasion of privacy in this case. That said, given some of the other details (for example, the Google cars not allowing the drivers to delete anything), I still would have spanked them with some hefty punitive damages; I merely would not have awarded those damages to the homeowner---maybe five million dollars donated to the privacy advocacy charity of their choice or some such.
Except that there are only an estimated few thousand members of Al Qaeda (and other terrorist organizations have similar numbers), so there's on the order of a million times better chance that it was put there by somebody's kid than by a terrorist.
I think that's way too "good enough for now" a view for my taste. Computers moved across the board to LBA48 nearly a decade ago (2002). LBA48 can support up to a 144 petabyte (128 pebibytes) drive capacity. Even if disk space continues to increase at the current pace without slowing, that was almost three decades of expansion room when it first came out. Yet in the consumer space, we're still stuck with ridiculous limits because the camera manufacturers would rather design obsolescence into their gear. So when you buy a piece of camera gear, it supports the current standard of flash card. In about two years, that standard will hit a capacity wall, and a new standard will be created. Within two to three years after that, it becomes significantly more expensive in cost-per-gig to buy flash cards that still work with the old cameras because the price-performance curve has shifted to larger flash cards that aren't compatible. That's a pretty sad compatibility story.
I'm firmly of the opinion that the $1,000 DSLR camera you buy now should be compatible with any new media that comes out for at least a decade or two. That shouldn't be much of a stretch. Just STOP tweaking the standard a tiny bit at a time. It's way past time for camera makers to bite the bullet and design a real, extensible standard now that will continue to work in the long term. We should never have had an SDHC standard or an SDXC standard. We should have had a single SD48 or even SD64 standard. Similarly, they should be working on CF48, not CF32. Adding four bits worth of capacity at a time is a copout. It's not like it takes that much extra work to toss around one extra data word per block number.
First, as others have pointed out, that's an unusually secure network. Second, in the worst case, you can sniff everything that gets sent to the printer, write it to flash, firmware-timebomb the printer so that it fails after a couple of weeks, then recover the sniffer itself when they call you to come repair the printer. This assumes, of course, that you work for a company providing printers to the business. It's much harder to do that otherwise, but then again, it's much harder to get the printer in there in the first place otherwise.
Way too hard. Tap the +12V or +5V output of the power supply and DC-DC it to whatever voltages you need. Then you don't have to find room for another full size power supply inside the machine.
Here's what I don't get. An extra power cable? If you're inside the printer anyway, why not just tap its power supply. It's not like the printer is right at the edge of what its power supply can put out, and if it is, you could always build a bigger power supply. Likewise, tap the printer's Ethernet connection---slice the traces to the printer guts itself, and embed a small passive Ethernet hub that provides a connection to both to the sliced traces on the board and to your sniffer. Done, and done. Unless your network admins are very clever, it's undetectable.
In a recent survey, 40% of the American public said they would vote for her in a race against Obama. Apparently, the message that she's a quitter hasn't reached those folks. Wonder why.
The rectal bomb option has been tried, unsuccessfully I might add, using solid explosives.
It was only unsuccessful because the circumstances made it impossible to remove the explosives from the person's backside before detonation, and the human ribcage would tend to deflect such a blast straight down. Unlike the location of the failed assassination of the Saudi prince, airports have bathrooms inside security, thus making your argument rather specious.
...there's an excellent chance you'd need more than one person to smuggle a sufficient quantity of explosives aboard.
And that would be a problem for the terrorists because? Remember that on 9/11, there were 19 terrorists. You're not trying to tell me that people would be suspicious of a group of people swapping off luggage and entering a bathroom with it, are you? It's not even slightly challenging to come up with ways to pull off something like that. People don't pay nearly enough attention to what's going on around them to catch such things, statistically speaking. That's why everything the TSA does to make us feel safer without actually making us safer is doing us a disservice---people don't pay as much attention as they should because they feel safe.
Ah. I didn't see that this was ancient history. Is this within a two month period after the patent was issued, or did they miss the window for public comment, too?
The open source project should file their own patent. Because patents in the U.S. are on a first-to-invent basis, and because they can clearly demonstrate having invented it first, their patent will effectively invalidate the other patent. Then sue the other company for violating the patent, win, and use this to fund many decades of x264 development.
I would be shocked. The security holes are glaringly obvious to someone with even a modicum of intellect, and they've been talked about on every major TV network for weeks, if not months. So in order for such a situation to occur, that would mean that not one terrorist was intelligent, and not one terrorist ever watched TV news, nor read Slashdot or pretty much any other Internet forum over the last several months. Given that there was a story just a few months ago that said that terrorist cells recruit heavily from engineering organizations, which are generally not known to be filled with complete idiots, nor filled with technophobes, that either completely disproves the initial assumption or it means that their recruiting has been completely unsuccessful.
So it's possible, but it's about as likely as somebody getting struck by lightning while getting hit by a car and miraculously surviving because the lightning strike caused his/her muscles to tense up, making him/her jump ten feet into the air and miss the car entirely.
Not at all true. The majority of travelers care. They just have a choice between two wholly unacceptable alternatives, and the majority decided that somebody seeing them naked was slightly less objectionable than getting groped. That's NOT the same thing as not caring.
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More than that, this is potentially a good thing if it is being done in the right way. It would make it much easier, for example, to detect somebody currently off the grid who decides to buy the materials needed to make a bomb. As long as the tracking is being done in a non-prejudicial way, as long as the banks work together to create a unique cardholder ID to mask the identity of the person in question (but with that ID shared across all cards that the person holds from all banks), as long as the card company only reports purchases of specific materials of significant concern, and as long as the identity of the person in question remains masked by the card companies until such time as the spooks do obtain a warrant to unmask the suspicious person, I'm all for it.
If, on the other hand, as I suspect, none of those safeguards are in place, and it is being used to see what random ex-cons are buying just to be nosy, then it's a bad thing. There's a right way and a wrong way to do this sort of thing, and sadly, our government has a tendency to do it the easy way, which is almost invariably the wrong way.
LOL. Yes, they should have been awarded lawyers' fees, unless the lawyer was working on contingency, in which case the judgment is exactly right in that regard, too. No reason for the lawyer to get a payday, either. :-D
Good to know. Wish they provided static IPs. I'd love to multihome my house.
Yes, I know that the frog thing is dubious. It's just an expression.
Regarding your smoking analogy, I think you're missing a few very important reasons for smoking cessation in that theory:
That last one is the most important reason why driving habits won't change much. The vast majority of driving is not voluntary. Thus, short of either moving to a house closer to work (which isn't always feasible in two-earner households) or quitting your job and getting a closer job (which isn't always feasible, either), you pretty much have to drive when you have to drive.
Another problematic theory is that higher gas prices will encourage carpooling. Most people don't want to carpool with strangers, so carpooling really only works if you happen to know someone who not only works near your work, but also lives near your house. Frankly, most people for whom carpooling would be convenient have already started carpooling, and most of the other people on the roads (again, with the possible exception of the working poor) are unlikely to start regardless of gas prices.
And lest you suggest public transportation, practical considerations make that unlikely. I live one town over from my workplace in a major metropolitan area. The nearest bus stop is about two long blocks from my house, and at the other end, two blocks from my workplace. It takes about 12 minutes to drive to work. On a bad day, it's 15 minutes door-to-door. By bus, it takes up to an hour and a half, with a third of your travel time on foot. That's approaching eight times as long. In fact, according to Google, it would only take two hours to walk, and that's free. It just doesn't make sense to take mass transit except for long trips, and even then, only on routes with limited stops.
And no matter how much gas prices go up, mass transit will never be dramatically cheaper. That's a $4.00 bus route versus approximately $1.50 in gasoline. Yes, once you factor in wear and tear on the car, it's a little more expensive, but only about a dollar more than the cost of the bus. There's simply no way for public transit in most places to be more than about 20-25% cheaper than an individual vehicle with a single rider, nor for it to be even remotely comparable in terms of speed.
Thus, at basically any feasible price, it does not make sense unless it is your only option (that is to say, you don't own a car or don't have a license). Even for the poor, it doesn't make sense because a $500 beater car probably costs about two bucks less for that same trip even after factoring in wear and tear....
Thus, gasoline prices are unlikely to have any significant impact on individual driving habits beyond possibly reducing leisure travel, and at most, that will only shave off a few percentage points. It will, however, result in greater reduction of small businesses; the big box retailers will find ways to be more efficient at trucking products from place to place, thus compounding the benefits of having large networks of stores.
Won't happen. You're boiling a frog. Increases occur incrementally, so people just learn to deal with the new normal. If you saw gas prices double overnight, it would change driving habits (and would make the cost of food, clothing, and pretty much everything else go way up, too), but that's not likely to happen. Gradual change? It changes car buying habits far more than driving habits, and even then, only if the increase is fairly rapid as it was during most of the second Bush administration.
Fair enough. Let me amend that slightly.
I'm pretty sure no national carrier currently provides or has ever provided unlimited cellular data for computers at any price (at least in the United States).
A six-year-old probably thought it would be funny to steal the superglue out of the drawer and glue a toy somewhere. Kids glue things to other things all the time. They seem to think it's funny. Admittedly, most kids don't glue things to parts of an underpass, but the spot in question is only about a foot off the ground, judging from the picture, so it's quite possible. Why would you assume that there was malicious intent behind something that at first glance seems so likely to be harmless?
You see, this is why we say that the terrorists have already won. Every time somebody sees something the least bit out of the ordinary, they assume the billion-to-one long shot that it might be dangerous instead of the near certainty that it is harmless. You can either live your life in fear and terror (which is what the terrorists WANT you to do) or you can live your life like a sane person. Those really are your only two options. People who see terrorists around every corner are delusional, and such extreme paranoia is harmful to the proper functioning of a civilized society.
More to the point, excessive fear of terrorism can lead to the terrorists actually being around every corner. People flee areas where they fear for their lives, and hysteria only contributes to that perception. This drives the cost of housing down in those area, which leads to the poor becoming overly concentrated in those areas (and rich people becoming completely absent) instead of being more evenly distributed, which leads to lower local tax revenue, which leads to lower quality of education, which leads to people who feel they have nothing to lose. As such, we as a nation are in danger of a downhill slide to chaos, tyranny, and yes, terrorism, because we cower in fear and shout, "Oh no! It might be a bomb!" every time we see a child's toy glued to a piece of concrete somewhere. (Helpful hint: planting bombs doesn't generally involve any form of glue.)
It's time to take a step back---to stop cowering in fear, for as FDR said, "...the only thing we have to fear is fear itself---nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance". Fear---terror---is the real enemy---not foreign powers, not Al Qaeda, not the Democrats or the Republicans, not any single individual or group of individuals. That is what makes it painfully ironic that the so-called war on terror has caused more terror than any act by any terrorist organization. Remember, every time you ask yourself if something harmless could be a bomb, those who would have us fear win another round. Do not let them win the war.
I'm pretty sure no carrier currently provides or has ever provided unlimited cellular data for computers at any price (at least in the United States). This is a computer plan we're talking about, not a cell phone plan. For that matter, even the unlimited smart phone plans are being phased out rather rapidly in favor of capped plans, but that's another issue.
I would agree, had the pictures shown a clearly private place (e.g. if the street view cameras were taking pictures over the top of privacy fences). However, that wasn't the situation in this case (as far as I could tell). Although it is technically trespassing to drive into someone's driveway if they've posted a "No Trespassing" sign, you'd be hard pressed to show a significant loss of privacy given that:
So in this case, the judge probably made the right call. It's more technical trespassing than any substantive invasion of privacy in this case. That said, given some of the other details (for example, the Google cars not allowing the drivers to delete anything), I still would have spanked them with some hefty punitive damages; I merely would not have awarded those damages to the homeowner---maybe five million dollars donated to the privacy advocacy charity of their choice or some such.
Except that there are only an estimated few thousand members of Al Qaeda (and other terrorist organizations have similar numbers), so there's on the order of a million times better chance that it was put there by somebody's kid than by a terrorist.
I think that's way too "good enough for now" a view for my taste. Computers moved across the board to LBA48 nearly a decade ago (2002). LBA48 can support up to a 144 petabyte (128 pebibytes) drive capacity. Even if disk space continues to increase at the current pace without slowing, that was almost three decades of expansion room when it first came out. Yet in the consumer space, we're still stuck with ridiculous limits because the camera manufacturers would rather design obsolescence into their gear. So when you buy a piece of camera gear, it supports the current standard of flash card. In about two years, that standard will hit a capacity wall, and a new standard will be created. Within two to three years after that, it becomes significantly more expensive in cost-per-gig to buy flash cards that still work with the old cameras because the price-performance curve has shifted to larger flash cards that aren't compatible. That's a pretty sad compatibility story.
I'm firmly of the opinion that the $1,000 DSLR camera you buy now should be compatible with any new media that comes out for at least a decade or two. That shouldn't be much of a stretch. Just STOP tweaking the standard a tiny bit at a time. It's way past time for camera makers to bite the bullet and design a real, extensible standard now that will continue to work in the long term. We should never have had an SDHC standard or an SDXC standard. We should have had a single SD48 or even SD64 standard. Similarly, they should be working on CF48, not CF32. Adding four bits worth of capacity at a time is a copout. It's not like it takes that much extra work to toss around one extra data word per block number.
No, spelled that way, it's more likely an adult book/movie rental house. Different kind of "congress".
First, as others have pointed out, that's an unusually secure network. Second, in the worst case, you can sniff everything that gets sent to the printer, write it to flash, firmware-timebomb the printer so that it fails after a couple of weeks, then recover the sniffer itself when they call you to come repair the printer. This assumes, of course, that you work for a company providing printers to the business. It's much harder to do that otherwise, but then again, it's much harder to get the printer in there in the first place otherwise.
Way too hard. Tap the +12V or +5V output of the power supply and DC-DC it to whatever voltages you need. Then you don't have to find room for another full size power supply inside the machine.
Here's what I don't get. An extra power cable? If you're inside the printer anyway, why not just tap its power supply. It's not like the printer is right at the edge of what its power supply can put out, and if it is, you could always build a bigger power supply. Likewise, tap the printer's Ethernet connection---slice the traces to the printer guts itself, and embed a small passive Ethernet hub that provides a connection to both to the sliced traces on the board and to your sniffer. Done, and done. Unless your network admins are very clever, it's undetectable.
Palin is an alien? Who knew. :-D
In a recent survey, 40% of the American public said they would vote for her in a race against Obama. Apparently, the message that she's a quitter hasn't reached those folks. Wonder why.
Oh, a sarcasm detector. That's a real (sic) useful invention.
--Comic Book Guy
Lincoln said it best: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt."
No, I missed that part. Sadly, your comment, despite being meant as tongue in cheek, so closely mirrors what I've heard from lots of people....
It was only unsuccessful because the circumstances made it impossible to remove the explosives from the person's backside before detonation, and the human ribcage would tend to deflect such a blast straight down. Unlike the location of the failed assassination of the Saudi prince, airports have bathrooms inside security, thus making your argument rather specious.
And that would be a problem for the terrorists because? Remember that on 9/11, there were 19 terrorists. You're not trying to tell me that people would be suspicious of a group of people swapping off luggage and entering a bathroom with it, are you? It's not even slightly challenging to come up with ways to pull off something like that. People don't pay nearly enough attention to what's going on around them to catch such things, statistically speaking. That's why everything the TSA does to make us feel safer without actually making us safer is doing us a disservice---people don't pay as much attention as they should because they feel safe.
Ah. I didn't see that this was ancient history. Is this within a two month period after the patent was issued, or did they miss the window for public comment, too?
The open source project should file their own patent. Because patents in the U.S. are on a first-to-invent basis, and because they can clearly demonstrate having invented it first, their patent will effectively invalidate the other patent. Then sue the other company for violating the patent, win, and use this to fund many decades of x264 development.
I would be shocked. The security holes are glaringly obvious to someone with even a modicum of intellect, and they've been talked about on every major TV network for weeks, if not months. So in order for such a situation to occur, that would mean that not one terrorist was intelligent, and not one terrorist ever watched TV news, nor read Slashdot or pretty much any other Internet forum over the last several months. Given that there was a story just a few months ago that said that terrorist cells recruit heavily from engineering organizations, which are generally not known to be filled with complete idiots, nor filled with technophobes, that either completely disproves the initial assumption or it means that their recruiting has been completely unsuccessful.
So it's possible, but it's about as likely as somebody getting struck by lightning while getting hit by a car and miraculously surviving because the lightning strike caused his/her muscles to tense up, making him/her jump ten feet into the air and miss the car entirely.
Not at all true. The majority of travelers care. They just have a choice between two wholly unacceptable alternatives, and the majority decided that somebody seeing them naked was slightly less objectionable than getting groped. That's NOT the same thing as not caring.