Exactly. From now on, having a personality trait not listed on the card will be completely forbidden. Do not try to change your personality either, that'll be considered forgery.
Will you get a fucking clue and stop your uninformed fear-mongering? ID cards contain your identity, nothing more.
Are you actually afraid that somebody will beat you, steal your card, and afterwards know what you look like and when you were born?
The reason why you have to worry about your birthdate becoming known is because it's being used as part of your identification. It's a really poor choice for that. In countries with good ID card systems, people don't worry about disclosing their date of birth because there's nothing anybody can do with it.
So, you're saying my identity should be all contained in a card?
Quite to the contrary: these id cards contain the minimum amount of identity; they contain less information than your electric bill. But they are much better at guaranteeing that the small amount of identity information they contain is actually correct.
I'm going to let someone mark me as a troll while you think about that.
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
Right now, everything is "tied" to your name. The problem is that for many people the name isn't unique. That's why a unique number is a good idea.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card.
Huh? An id card merely says "John Smith (23984211038) was born on 4/1/1981, is a US citizen, looks like this, has this signature, and resides here." The cards are hard to forge. Such cards aren't used to replace ATM cards or anything else. They are used when you go to the bank in person and interact with a teller, in which case they are no worse than a driver's license. In the future, these cards are going to have more biometric identifiers (in addition to face and signature), meaning that they are even harder to forge and for people to pretend that they are you.
Id cards are reasonable protection against identity theft. They are used when you need to identify yourself uniquely to another person, and for that purpose, they are a whole lot better than the alternatives (driver's licenses, birth certificates, utility bills, etc.). And if security is really important, people can require those alternative in addition.
Now, there are some civil liberties arguments that one should not be able to identify people uniquely with ease. But those arguments are the opposite of yours: you want sound identification, you simply misunderstand how id cards provide it.
Because with terrorism, the entire planet is a battlefield, not a designated area.
Terrorism has been around for as long as there has been government and it's never going to go away. It is also an insignificant cause of death. Even 9/11 was an insignificant blip in terms of total preventable deaths in the US in 2001, and the trillions of dollars spent in response to it have not made us any safer--quite to the contrary.
The 9/11 terrorists have been successful because of fear mongers who try to get us to abandon our civil liberties and institute totalitarian government.
I can just say it again: if our military bases require obscurity in order to be secure, our military isn't doing its job, either in defending themselves or defending the rest of the country.
We just discussed how it's radically more efficient, unused bandwidth can now be used at every level.
There is no such thing as "unused bandwidth". Even if data isn't being transmitted, the fact that the bandwidth is available immediately for peak demand is important.
This matters even for home users: if you clog my cable connection 24/7 with P2P traffic, my web browsing experience is badly degraded.
You can't generalize from Norway to the rest of the world. Norway is oil-rich, and a lot of infrastructure costs are simply paid indirectly by the government.
If everybody does this, home Internet connections need to be upgraded or we're going to get volume pricing again. Either way, end users are going to pay for this.
But a large reason for why Java never became what sun promised was the two competing standards during the heyday when it still had buzzword appeal
I was there. At the time Java came out, the UNIX desktop was in shambles and Sun had an excellent opportunity. That's why people supported them. The reason Java didn't catch on on the desktop was that Java's GUI toolkits sucked, that the platform was slow, and that it lacked desktop integration.
but the largest reason for Java being nothing more than a quick way to build a frontend.. falls directly at M$'s feet.
No, the largest reason for Java's failure is that Sun screwed up. Technically, their platform sucked. And by trying to control every API on the Java platform and keeping the platform proprietary, they made it impossible for other people to help them.
If Sun had either open sourced Java or encouraged and supported third party implementations in the late 90's, Gnome and KDE would be written in Java, and Java would have taken over Windows.
Sun's incompetence and greed killed Java on the desktop. Instead, we're getting.NET, Adobe Air, and Silverlight.
'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'
You, as in old media like Newsweek, have built nothing; Newsweek is just yearning for the good old days where people just believed whatever shit you published.
Sure, there will be "expert" content on the web, but people will use it as just another data source; "the pendulum" isn't going to swing back. A Stanford professor writing on insomnia gives a different perspective, but he won't automatically be more trusted because people have figured out that many experts have their own biases and prejudices, not to mention lucrative corporate contracts.
It's kind of telling that Newsweek thinks that Larry Summers is a recommendation for "expert content"; given his history at Harvard, he has no credibility selecting expert content.
Linux matters, because if Microsoft had succeeded in taking over the server market, all those startups wouldn't have happened. Google wouldn't have happened.
And the reason why people are moving to Web 2.0 is not because the technology is necessarily better than doing stuff on the desktop, it's because Microsoft's desktop dominance has caused the desktop to stagnate and their monopolistic practices have kept innovators out of the market (it's also because Sun screwed up the one promising alternative model).
We still need Linux to run all those servers. We need Linux to run handheld devices. We need Linux for scientific workstations. And we need Linux for Web 2.0 desktops, desktops that provide standards compliant browsers, RSS software, HTML editors, E-mail clients, backup, P2P, etc. at a combined hardware+software cost lower than a Microsoft Vista license.
Surprise and deception are powerful weapons; just read Sun Tzu.
What do photographs of US military bases in the US have to do with "surprise and deception" on the battlefield?
Oh, I fully agree. Thing is, pictures on Google Maps aren't going to help the people with finding those particular things out.
Google Maps are about the most carefully scrutinized and screened photographs available. If Google isn't permitted to publish street view, then those other things are not going to happen either.
Because military folks are paranoid, often rightfully so.
We need to change that. Paranoia has no place in our military.
Never let an enemy know more than he has to. Feed him shit and keep him in the dark.
However, the US military operates in a democracy, not a military dictatorship. The people have a right to know what the military is doing, how they are treating their recruits, how they behave in battle. And that necessitates disclosure, not secrecy.
Allowing them to scout the territory before they make thier attempt will make it all the easier for them to target either large numbers of poeple or important people.
So what? My street can be scouted by terrorists and there are no armed military guards stationed there to defend it. If it's good enough for my street, why shouldn't it be good enough for a US military installation?
Look at the Oklahoma City bombing, two guys with a crapload of fertilizer and a uHual. How exactly are the gaurds soposed to stop a truck that rams it's way through the gates, drives up to the commanders mess and blows itself up; all in about 15 seconds.
Exactly. You can't. And that's just life in a free society. There is no perfect safety. If you want perfect safety, you have to move to a totalitarian state.
The public has a compelling interest in knowing how its military operates. That means that we should be getting a lot of images and videos from military bases and battlefields (with a moderate time delay in the latter case). And given that military bases are just about the best defended installations in the nation, the additional risk from making this information available is negligible.
Arguments like Brins don't come out of the blue; it's not a question of whether we decide to eliminate privacy or maintain it; we already have lost our privacy selectively and irretrievably--to the government and corporations--the question is what we're going to do about it. Demanding "mutual disclosure" doesn't mean that I give up any more than I'm already forced to give up anyway, it means that people who currently use their power to prevent giving me information about themselves now have to.
Schneier also ignores third parties. Right now, the government has much more information on my neighbor than just about anybody else. The government might use that information to compel my neighbor to do something (like testify falsely against me), but I can't. This power imbalance results from an information imbalance. If everybody's information becomes shared and public, the information imbalance between the government and me is reduced. There are still other reasons why the government has more power, but overall, it's an improvement.
The only thing Sun is "getting" about open source is that it is killing their business.
And Sun's support of open source is pretty similar to Microsoft's "embrace and extend": they are trying to use open source as leverage for creating proprietary software businesses again. Fortunately, they are as inept at doing that as they were at selling proprietary software.
It already got integrated in few systems. Open source != GPL. Free software != GPL.
No, but Linux==GPL. Sun could release ZFS under a Linux-compatible license without affecting anything else (they could triple-license it).
The only reason Sun isn't releasing ZFS under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license is to prevent Linux from using it. And that tells you that Sun is lying when they are saying that they are supporting Linux; they are trying to hurt Linux and replace it with their shit.
I don't see any reason why these images shouldn't be available. US military installations ought to be some of the best-defended institutions in the world; if they need to hide images "for security reasons", then there's something seriously wrong with their security.
Seriously, the courts see it no different to requiring you to hand over the keys to a filing cabinet
Seriously, they do.
As well they should. If a court doesn't get the keys to a file cabinet, they can break it open, settle the issue, and send you a bill. With encryption, if the keys are actually lost, there's no way to "force open" the file cabinet, and you'd be put in jail for not complying with a court order that it would be impossible to comply with.
You are typing to someone who just registered for the iPhone SDK, to develop some free and some paid application.
Apple approves every single application and you have to connect to their servers to install anything. What that means is that Apple can program your phone, you cannot.
By not backing the quickest possible path to Apple's total control of Video DRM
You think Apple is going to give up on DRM once they control it? How naive can you be? Apple is evil; they have shown that time and again.
Right, because your love and support of DRM is so sensible.
Get real. The iPhone is both DRM-infested and non-programmable, and I reject it for both reasons. Apple is one of the biggest purveyors of DRM-infested shit.
Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price.
It implicitly refers to transistor density at a given price. You've been to get $200 computers for many years, and Moore's law means that you can now get $200 laptops capable of running Linux and a GUI.
Apple just gives you an easy path to get paid content. But nothing stops others from delivering paid content to you - as long as they are willing to remove the DRM.
Exactly. And that is the problem: Apple is the only company that's able to put DRM on the iPhone.
Now why isn't everyone, including yourself, cheering this model?
I listen to audio podcasts and watch videos directly through the Safari browser. Any website can provide such files without having Apple as a proxy.
You're missing the point entirely. Whether the iPhone can browse YouTube or whether you can listen to some free podcasts isn't all that important. What matters to Apple is whether they control commercial for-pay content delivery. If they let companies write applications for the iPhone, they lose that control. If they commit to having Flash on the iPhone, they lose that control as well.
So in truth, the "performance standard" you mock is a reality.
Flash and other players can take advantage of H.264 decoding hardware.
And trying to argue that for Apple to decide what goes on your iPhone or not is good for you is just plain stupid.
That's a euphemism for "if we let Flash on the iPhone, we (Apple) don't completely control the video and content delivery on the iPhone anymore".
That's also the real reason Jobs has been so slow on the iPhone SDK: the last thing they want is other companies creating audio and video delivery apps for Apple's iPods and iPhones.
Getting humans into space will require not just one way trips and lots of risk, it will likely require genetic modifications, controlled breeding, lots of nuclear power and radiation exposure, stem cell research, and lots of implantable technology. This is not going to happen in societies where a report that cell phones may raise the cancer risk by 50% cause debates lasting months, or where people are willing to sacrifice civil liberties because there is a one in a million chance that a child predator or terrorist might harm them or their family, or where people spend a large fraction of their disposable income on mostly useless health insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. From now on, having a personality trait not listed on the card will be completely forbidden. Do not try to change your personality either, that'll be considered forgery.
Will you get a fucking clue and stop your uninformed fear-mongering? ID cards contain your identity, nothing more.
Are you actually afraid that somebody will beat you, steal your card, and afterwards know what you look like and when you were born?
The reason why you have to worry about your birthdate becoming known is because it's being used as part of your identification. It's a really poor choice for that. In countries with good ID card systems, people don't worry about disclosing their date of birth because there's nothing anybody can do with it.
So, you're saying my identity should be all contained in a card?
Quite to the contrary: these id cards contain the minimum amount of identity; they contain less information than your electric bill. But they are much better at guaranteeing that the small amount of identity information they contain is actually correct.
I'm going to let someone mark me as a troll while you think about that.
You're merely stupid.
You have the wrong idea of how this works.
It's my understanding that they want to tie bank accounts, driver's license, social insurance / security (I'm Canadian), passport etc. to one single card.
Right now, everything is "tied" to your name. The problem is that for many people the name isn't unique. That's why a unique number is a good idea.
If you lose this card you are completely fsck'd. And if someone wants to steal your identity all they have to do is either steal or forge your card.
Huh? An id card merely says "John Smith (23984211038) was born on 4/1/1981, is a US citizen, looks like this, has this signature, and resides here." The cards are hard to forge. Such cards aren't used to replace ATM cards or anything else. They are used when you go to the bank in person and interact with a teller, in which case they are no worse than a driver's license. In the future, these cards are going to have more biometric identifiers (in addition to face and signature), meaning that they are even harder to forge and for people to pretend that they are you.
Id cards are reasonable protection against identity theft. They are used when you need to identify yourself uniquely to another person, and for that purpose, they are a whole lot better than the alternatives (driver's licenses, birth certificates, utility bills, etc.). And if security is really important, people can require those alternative in addition.
Now, there are some civil liberties arguments that one should not be able to identify people uniquely with ease. But those arguments are the opposite of yours: you want sound identification, you simply misunderstand how id cards provide it.
Because with terrorism, the entire planet is a battlefield, not a designated area.
Terrorism has been around for as long as there has been government and it's never going to go away. It is also an insignificant cause of death. Even 9/11 was an insignificant blip in terms of total preventable deaths in the US in 2001, and the trillions of dollars spent in response to it have not made us any safer--quite to the contrary.
The 9/11 terrorists have been successful because of fear mongers who try to get us to abandon our civil liberties and institute totalitarian government.
I can just say it again: if our military bases require obscurity in order to be secure, our military isn't doing its job, either in defending themselves or defending the rest of the country.
We just discussed how it's radically more efficient, unused bandwidth can now be used at every level.
There is no such thing as "unused bandwidth". Even if data isn't being transmitted, the fact that the bandwidth is available immediately for peak demand is important.
This matters even for home users: if you clog my cable connection 24/7 with P2P traffic, my web browsing experience is badly degraded.
You can't generalize from Norway to the rest of the world. Norway is oil-rich, and a lot of infrastructure costs are simply paid indirectly by the government.
If everybody does this, home Internet connections need to be upgraded or we're going to get volume pricing again. Either way, end users are going to pay for this.
But a large reason for why Java never became what sun promised was the two competing standards during the heyday when it still had buzzword appeal
.NET, Adobe Air, and Silverlight.
I was there. At the time Java came out, the UNIX desktop was in shambles and Sun had an excellent opportunity. That's why people supported them. The reason Java didn't catch on on the desktop was that Java's GUI toolkits sucked, that the platform was slow, and that it lacked desktop integration.
but the largest reason for Java being nothing more than a quick way to build a frontend.. falls directly at M$'s feet.
No, the largest reason for Java's failure is that Sun screwed up. Technically, their platform sucked. And by trying to control every API on the Java platform and keeping the platform proprietary, they made it impossible for other people to help them.
If Sun had either open sourced Java or encouraged and supported third party implementations in the late 90's, Gnome and KDE would be written in Java, and Java would have taken over Windows.
Sun's incompetence and greed killed Java on the desktop. Instead, we're getting
'Web 3.0 is taking what we've built in Web 2.0--the wisdom of the crowds--and putting an editorial layer on it of truly talented, compensated people to make the product more trusted and refined.'
You, as in old media like Newsweek, have built nothing; Newsweek is just yearning for the good old days where people just believed whatever shit you published.
Sure, there will be "expert" content on the web, but people will use it as just another data source; "the pendulum" isn't going to swing back. A Stanford professor writing on insomnia gives a different perspective, but he won't automatically be more trusted because people have figured out that many experts have their own biases and prejudices, not to mention lucrative corporate contracts.
It's kind of telling that Newsweek thinks that Larry Summers is a recommendation for "expert content"; given his history at Harvard, he has no credibility selecting expert content.
Linux matters, because if Microsoft had succeeded in taking over the server market, all those startups wouldn't have happened. Google wouldn't have happened.
And the reason why people are moving to Web 2.0 is not because the technology is necessarily better than doing stuff on the desktop, it's because Microsoft's desktop dominance has caused the desktop to stagnate and their monopolistic practices have kept innovators out of the market (it's also because Sun screwed up the one promising alternative model).
We still need Linux to run all those servers. We need Linux to run handheld devices. We need Linux for scientific workstations. And we need Linux for Web 2.0 desktops, desktops that provide standards compliant browsers, RSS software, HTML editors, E-mail clients, backup, P2P, etc. at a combined hardware+software cost lower than a Microsoft Vista license.
Surprise and deception are powerful weapons; just read Sun Tzu.
What do photographs of US military bases in the US have to do with "surprise and deception" on the battlefield?
Oh, I fully agree. Thing is, pictures on Google Maps aren't going to help the people with finding those particular things out.
Google Maps are about the most carefully scrutinized and screened photographs available. If Google isn't permitted to publish street view, then those other things are not going to happen either.
Because military folks are paranoid, often rightfully so.
We need to change that. Paranoia has no place in our military.
Never let an enemy know more than he has to. Feed him shit and keep him in the dark.
However, the US military operates in a democracy, not a military dictatorship. The people have a right to know what the military is doing, how they are treating their recruits, how they behave in battle. And that necessitates disclosure, not secrecy.
Allowing them to scout the territory before they make thier attempt will make it all the easier for them to target either large numbers of poeple or important people.
So what? My street can be scouted by terrorists and there are no armed military guards stationed there to defend it. If it's good enough for my street, why shouldn't it be good enough for a US military installation?
Look at the Oklahoma City bombing, two guys with a crapload of fertilizer and a uHual. How exactly are the gaurds soposed to stop a truck that rams it's way through the gates, drives up to the commanders mess and blows itself up; all in about 15 seconds.
Exactly. You can't. And that's just life in a free society. There is no perfect safety. If you want perfect safety, you have to move to a totalitarian state.
The public has a compelling interest in knowing how its military operates. That means that we should be getting a lot of images and videos from military bases and battlefields (with a moderate time delay in the latter case). And given that military bases are just about the best defended installations in the nation, the additional risk from making this information available is negligible.
Arguments like Brins don't come out of the blue; it's not a question of whether we decide to eliminate privacy or maintain it; we already have lost our privacy selectively and irretrievably--to the government and corporations--the question is what we're going to do about it. Demanding "mutual disclosure" doesn't mean that I give up any more than I'm already forced to give up anyway, it means that people who currently use their power to prevent giving me information about themselves now have to.
Schneier also ignores third parties. Right now, the government has much more information on my neighbor than just about anybody else. The government might use that information to compel my neighbor to do something (like testify falsely against me), but I can't. This power imbalance results from an information imbalance. If everybody's information becomes shared and public, the information imbalance between the government and me is reduced. There are still other reasons why the government has more power, but overall, it's an improvement.
The only thing Sun is "getting" about open source is that it is killing their business.
And Sun's support of open source is pretty similar to Microsoft's "embrace and extend": they are trying to use open source as leverage for creating proprietary software businesses again. Fortunately, they are as inept at doing that as they were at selling proprietary software.
It already got integrated in few systems. Open source != GPL. Free software != GPL.
No, but Linux==GPL. Sun could release ZFS under a Linux-compatible license without affecting anything else (they could triple-license it).
The only reason Sun isn't releasing ZFS under the GPL or a GPL-compatible license is to prevent Linux from using it. And that tells you that Sun is lying when they are saying that they are supporting Linux; they are trying to hurt Linux and replace it with their shit.
I don't see any reason why these images shouldn't be available. US military installations ought to be some of the best-defended institutions in the world; if they need to hide images "for security reasons", then there's something seriously wrong with their security.
Seriously, the courts see it no different to requiring you to hand over the keys to a filing cabinet
Seriously, they do.
As well they should. If a court doesn't get the keys to a file cabinet, they can break it open, settle the issue, and send you a bill. With encryption, if the keys are actually lost, there's no way to "force open" the file cabinet, and you'd be put in jail for not complying with a court order that it would be impossible to comply with.
You are typing to someone who just registered for the iPhone SDK, to develop some free and some paid application.
Apple approves every single application and you have to connect to their servers to install anything. What that means is that Apple can program your phone, you cannot.
By not backing the quickest possible path to Apple's total control of Video DRM
You think Apple is going to give up on DRM once they control it? How naive can you be? Apple is evil; they have shown that time and again.
Right, because your love and support of DRM is so sensible.
Get real. The iPhone is both DRM-infested and non-programmable, and I reject it for both reasons. Apple is one of the biggest purveyors of DRM-infested shit.
Moore's law pertains to transistor density, not price.
It implicitly refers to transistor density at a given price. You've been to get $200 computers for many years, and Moore's law means that you can now get $200 laptops capable of running Linux and a GUI.
Apple just gives you an easy path to get paid content. But nothing stops others from delivering paid content to you - as long as they are willing to remove the DRM.
Exactly. And that is the problem: Apple is the only company that's able to put DRM on the iPhone.
Now why isn't everyone, including yourself, cheering this model?
Because I'm not stupid. You apparently are.
I listen to audio podcasts and watch videos directly through the Safari browser. Any website can provide such files without having Apple as a proxy.
You're missing the point entirely. Whether the iPhone can browse YouTube or whether you can listen to some free podcasts isn't all that important. What matters to Apple is whether they control commercial for-pay content delivery. If they let companies write applications for the iPhone, they lose that control. If they commit to having Flash on the iPhone, they lose that control as well.
So in truth, the "performance standard" you mock is a reality.
Flash and other players can take advantage of H.264 decoding hardware.
And trying to argue that for Apple to decide what goes on your iPhone or not is good for you is just plain stupid.
That's a euphemism for "if we let Flash on the iPhone, we (Apple) don't completely control the video and content delivery on the iPhone anymore".
That's also the real reason Jobs has been so slow on the iPhone SDK: the last thing they want is other companies creating audio and video delivery apps for Apple's iPods and iPhones.
Getting humans into space will require not just one way trips and lots of risk, it will likely require genetic modifications, controlled breeding, lots of nuclear power and radiation exposure, stem cell research, and lots of implantable technology. This is not going to happen in societies where a report that cell phones may raise the cancer risk by 50% cause debates lasting months, or where people are willing to sacrifice civil liberties because there is a one in a million chance that a child predator or terrorist might harm them or their family, or where people spend a large fraction of their disposable income on mostly useless health insurance.