My question has always been what is to stop the government (or anyone else for that matter) from going to the public key server and getting your key to decrypt your email?
Seems to me, unless I physically hand a copy of my key to the people I email, my public key is unsecure and pgp/gpg is pointless.
Excuse me? I'm a high school teacher, and fall well into the "gifted" category. My biggest problem is trying to take things that are quite obvious to me and explain them to students who are not gifted (or, I suppose, as gifted.) And I only teach AP classes.
Most people only remember their worst teachers from high school. Many, many teachers I work with welcome and encourage creative, brilliant solutions, and reward them accordingly. I certainly do.
The problem is not that we teachers can not spot the bright ones. The problem is that we are not allowed to do much about it. I am hamstrung by NCLB and the political pressure it puts on me to try and get the less intelligent children to pass the government mandated standard tests. The number who pass is of far more political importance than the number who get commended. As a result, I am practically forced to do as the study shows and pay more attention to lower achievers.
Putting the blame on teachers is the politicians' scapegoat. We didn't write the laws, they did. As long as we are forced to play the NCLB game don't expect us to produce geniuses. When our jobs and our school funding depends on us producing a whole bunch of average students, that is what you are going to get.
I have to agree with you here. Much of the bitterness of a bad cup of coffee comes from improperly cleaned equipment. I'd run into this all the time in the army, where they'd let the oils build up in the pot until a decent cup was impossible.
I spent a year working intelligence for a helicopter unit. The pilots would come in to my ops center in the field, and were always amazed that the coffee was not only drinkable, it was good (relativity here, "good" for field coffee.) When they'd ask me how I managed it, I simply told them, "I washed the pot." Of course this meant we couldn't use the coffee for it's other military purposes such as stripping polish off boots or corrosion of tanks, but I always felt it was worth the trade off.
Running through several batches without washing is good for conditioning new pots. Brand new pots still have metal dust in them from manufacture and the result is that nasty metallic taste. After that wash the pot regularly to remove rancid oil residues that turn the coffee bitter.
Nah, it will be like online pet medications. The testing company will hire a doctor who will get paid to authorize every test. Business as usual, except they have to hire an extra employee.
Once upon a time in the US you were forced to lease your landline phone from the phone company. Now, however, by law, the hardware at the user end is not tied to the carrier. I can go buy a phone everywhere, plug it in to the wall, and it will work with whoever provides my landline service. I'm sure the law works the other way as well, a phone manufacturer can't sell you a phone that can only be used on Sprint or Bell, or whatever.
As the US telecom laws are horribly out-dated, I would think this same law would apply to cell phones. A cell phone company can not force me to use their brand of phone, and a phone manufacturer can not force me to use a particular carrier.
I'm not asking about the technical aspects of CDMA vs. GSM, just about the legal aspects.
I completely agree. The US has never quite gotten over its puritanical roots, and they spring back up every so often when the populace feels threatened. Seems to me when the terrorists claim that God is punishing America probably a quarter of the population secretly believes it.
We also have the neotribalism effect here. In an uncertain world people are retreating to basic social structures, the "tribe". These tribes coalesce around core social structures and charismatic leaders, both of which are found readily in the local church. As the church leaders pick candidates based on outdated (IMHO) religious idealogies the candidate's religion plays a major factor in how the "tribe" votes.
Maintenance is a poor excuse for charging more for long distance. They'd have to maintain the exact same infrastructure if no one ever called long distance again.
The reason post offices charge you 32 cents (or whatever it is these days) to mail a letter, whether it is going across town or across the country, is because it was mathematically proven (by a Brit in the 1800's I believe) that the cost is identical for both letters once the infrastructure was already in place. The same mathematics has been applied, and proven, for telecommunications. The costs are identical for a call next door or across the country. I'll try to find an online source for you.
As for this rate charge, they are not talking about charging you for bandwidth, they are talking about charging for traffic. It makes no sense to charge for bits transmitted/received per month.
The company is capable of supporting X bits per second. Every second. If I'm allowed Z bits per month, and I use them all up in one second, I have in no way changed the fact that the very next second they have X bits. If they are worried about clogged bandwidth, they need to limit my speed, not the total amount of data. The total amount doesn't matter, what matters is how much of that X bits per second I am tying up.
I have no problem paying less or more for lower/higher bandwidth. What I have a problem with, and why I will change my service if they institute this in my area, is the fact that me downloading a distro or movie or whatever has no impact on the company's ability to provide service. How FAST I download it does, and that should be the only thing on the table.
You've been watching too many BigPharm propoganda pieces.
1. Your taxes in the form of government subsidies to drug companies and university research labs pay a large part of the development costs. Yes, the overall cost of development is high, but BigPharm is lying to you when they claim they bare all the costs.
2. You can't claim that the patents are being ripped off by Canada and Europe. Doing so claims that they accept a lower standard of quality than the United States does, which is highly insulting to nations which are at least as advanced as the U.S. Canada and Western Europe obtain their medications from the exact same factories as the U.S. does. The difference is that they do not let the corporations profiteer. This has been emphasized on every news story citing the differences in the costs between America and the rest of the world. The profit margins from US drug sales are huge, because our current corporate owned government passes laws that allow them to get away with murder. The entire ban on less expensive prescription drugs from Canada is based on maintaining those profit margins.
3. If drugs existed to cure "awful, obscure diseases" they'd be known and marketed, at a huge cost to whoever needed them. The corps would recoup their development costs any way they could, even if it meant producing 10 doses and selling them for $100k each. They simply would not mass produce them to drive costs down.
Unfortunately I have to agree. I even heard a quote by McCain on the radio yesterday talking about how "Obama does not have the experience necessary to lead" (paraphrased). The Republicans want Clinton to win the Democratic nomination, because they are sure they can beat her. They may be right.
Personally I don't see a lot of difference between Clinton and the Republicans. She is certainly never going to relinquish the power that Dubya has consolidated into the Executive branch, and as such I would foresee a continued degradation of the Constitution with her (or McCain) in the Presidency.
Obama may not have "experience", but IMHO he's the best bet towards regaining some of the freedoms we've let be taken away from us during the last 8 years. The other two set the path towards a rebellion within 12 years.
I live in Texas and use Time-Warner. They don't charge you for zombie traffic, they disconnect you.
My WinXP (kept for gaming only, Linux for everything else) got infected with a spambot (hazards of having children), and I came home one day to find my service shut off. Several hours of calling around to various departments later they informed me that I would have to get my computer "professionally cleaned" before they would reconnect me. Like the "professionals" wouldn't do exactly the same things I did to fix the problem. A bit of social engineering, and accusing them of scanning my system without permission (they didn't, they were monitoring the quantity of outgoing emails) and I convinced them to turn it back on.
That being said, the US is horribly backwards in telcom because they corps know the average citizen has no idea how much they are being screwed. Paying for cell minutes and long distance, when it costs the company no more to route my call across the country than it does to the house next door? And now extra for bandwidth, when only 5% of their customers are using anywhere near the max? [quote from the radio on the way to work this morning]
If Time-Warner tries to implement this in my area, I'm finding another provider. I really don't feel like explaining to my son that he can't play Xbox Live because we "went over our minutes".
It's time Americans woke up and insisted that we stop being ripped off. Flat rates for phone service, flat rates for internet, and at reasonable prices. Either that, or stop claiming we are "more technologically advanced" than the rest of the world, because nonsense like this is proving on a daily basis that we are being left behind.
"We need these people to be just who they are, unchanged, for our own understanding of ourselves."
But to achieve that understanding we would have to study them, which means coming in to contact with them, etc. etc.
These aren't wildebeests you can study secretly from a hidden blind. They're humans. You try to watch them in secret they are going to figure it out and find you.
5 years on the bomb squad, 3 of those doing counterterrorist work, and I never once saw a "mechanical" bomb. They all used a chemical explosive. The trigger might be mechanical or electrical, but not the explosive. I'm not even sure how you would get "electricity" to explode.
About the only mechanical explosion I can think of would be compressed gas, and you are gonna have a hard time explaining to Security why you are toting those big compressed gas tanks onto a plane.
This is useless against perchlorates, which, contrary to what the media and popular fiction tells you, are the primary explosives of terrorists, due to the ease of acquiring them and the ability to tailor them to specific situations.
Yes, if you want to take down a building you use nitrates. If you want to drop a plane perchlorates are easier, and no one asks when you buy gallons of insect killer...
It has to do with identity theft. Given 2 or 3 pieces of information, of which your SSN is a critical piece, an identity thief can apply for credit cards in your name. They then run up huge debts, and you are left trying to prove it wasn't you. Good luck with that, the credit companies don't like to admit they screwed up.
That SSN opens up your credit history, your government records, medical records, the time in grade school when you were suspended for throwing a rock on the playground, etc. So we tend to be a bit paranoid about them getting into the wrong hands.
No such thing as "worthless" data. Such data can not only be used to determine hidden revenues, it can be used to determine where discretionary income is going. Is it going to cigarettes? Increase the tobacco tax. Alcohol? Increase the booze tax. Cheetos? Institute a cheesy poof tax.
In other words, a government which is $3 trillion dollars in debt can use data like this to not only eek out every last cent of income tax, it can use it to decide where to most effectively institute new taxes.
Then, as a teacher, I can claim residuals on the income of every student who has ever sat in my classroom. I mean hey, they wouldn't be where they are now if not for me! I deserve a percentage of their success! Where did I leave that number for my union rep?
By that reasoning all new ideas and development should stop immediately till we come up with one perfect distro. Why don't we just dump everything but Debian/Fedora/FreeBSD/whatever, for the good of the community of course! One distro to rule them all, etc. etc.
The guy wants to experiment with a new init system and a new packaging system. He's put this out as a "distro" so that anyone else who wants to can help out, make suggestions, whatever.
His work might end up "half-assed half-finished", or it might get incorporated into something larger which changes the way all the current big name distros work.
If we are truly championing OSS, we should rather wish this guy well. He's doing exactly what everyone is always talking about, changing the source to suit himself and trying to learn how it is all put together.
Maser and Taser are already taken. One by microwave lasers (lasers with light in the microwave bands), the other by the Texas police. They're a bit taze happy here in Texas:)
Slashdot Mirror
Seems to me, unless I physically hand a copy of my key to the people I email, my public key is unsecure and pgp/gpg is pointless.
Most people only remember their worst teachers from high school. Many, many teachers I work with welcome and encourage creative, brilliant solutions, and reward them accordingly. I certainly do.
The problem is not that we teachers can not spot the bright ones. The problem is that we are not allowed to do much about it. I am hamstrung by NCLB and the political pressure it puts on me to try and get the less intelligent children to pass the government mandated standard tests. The number who pass is of far more political importance than the number who get commended. As a result, I am practically forced to do as the study shows and pay more attention to lower achievers.
Putting the blame on teachers is the politicians' scapegoat. We didn't write the laws, they did. As long as we are forced to play the NCLB game don't expect us to produce geniuses. When our jobs and our school funding depends on us producing a whole bunch of average students, that is what you are going to get.
I spent a year working intelligence for a helicopter unit. The pilots would come in to my ops center in the field, and were always amazed that the coffee was not only drinkable, it was good (relativity here, "good" for field coffee.) When they'd ask me how I managed it, I simply told them, "I washed the pot." Of course this meant we couldn't use the coffee for it's other military purposes such as stripping polish off boots or corrosion of tanks, but I always felt it was worth the trade off.
Running through several batches without washing is good for conditioning new pots. Brand new pots still have metal dust in them from manufacture and the result is that nasty metallic taste. After that wash the pot regularly to remove rancid oil residues that turn the coffee bitter.
Nah, it will be like online pet medications. The testing company will hire a doctor who will get paid to authorize every test. Business as usual, except they have to hire an extra employee.
As the US telecom laws are horribly out-dated, I would think this same law would apply to cell phones. A cell phone company can not force me to use their brand of phone, and a phone manufacturer can not force me to use a particular carrier.
I'm not asking about the technical aspects of CDMA vs. GSM, just about the legal aspects.
We also have the neotribalism effect here. In an uncertain world people are retreating to basic social structures, the "tribe". These tribes coalesce around core social structures and charismatic leaders, both of which are found readily in the local church. As the church leaders pick candidates based on outdated (IMHO) religious idealogies the candidate's religion plays a major factor in how the "tribe" votes.
The reason post offices charge you 32 cents (or whatever it is these days) to mail a letter, whether it is going across town or across the country, is because it was mathematically proven (by a Brit in the 1800's I believe) that the cost is identical for both letters once the infrastructure was already in place. The same mathematics has been applied, and proven, for telecommunications. The costs are identical for a call next door or across the country. I'll try to find an online source for you.
As for this rate charge, they are not talking about charging you for bandwidth, they are talking about charging for traffic. It makes no sense to charge for bits transmitted/received per month.
The company is capable of supporting X bits per second. Every second. If I'm allowed Z bits per month, and I use them all up in one second, I have in no way changed the fact that the very next second they have X bits. If they are worried about clogged bandwidth, they need to limit my speed, not the total amount of data. The total amount doesn't matter, what matters is how much of that X bits per second I am tying up.
I have no problem paying less or more for lower/higher bandwidth. What I have a problem with, and why I will change my service if they institute this in my area, is the fact that me downloading a distro or movie or whatever has no impact on the company's ability to provide service. How FAST I download it does, and that should be the only thing on the table.
1. Your taxes in the form of government subsidies to drug companies and university research labs pay a large part of the development costs. Yes, the overall cost of development is high, but BigPharm is lying to you when they claim they bare all the costs.
2. You can't claim that the patents are being ripped off by Canada and Europe. Doing so claims that they accept a lower standard of quality than the United States does, which is highly insulting to nations which are at least as advanced as the U.S. Canada and Western Europe obtain their medications from the exact same factories as the U.S. does. The difference is that they do not let the corporations profiteer. This has been emphasized on every news story citing the differences in the costs between America and the rest of the world. The profit margins from US drug sales are huge, because our current corporate owned government passes laws that allow them to get away with murder. The entire ban on less expensive prescription drugs from Canada is based on maintaining those profit margins.
3. If drugs existed to cure "awful, obscure diseases" they'd be known and marketed, at a huge cost to whoever needed them. The corps would recoup their development costs any way they could, even if it meant producing 10 doses and selling them for $100k each. They simply would not mass produce them to drive costs down.
Personally I don't see a lot of difference between Clinton and the Republicans. She is certainly never going to relinquish the power that Dubya has consolidated into the Executive branch, and as such I would foresee a continued degradation of the Constitution with her (or McCain) in the Presidency.
Obama may not have "experience", but IMHO he's the best bet towards regaining some of the freedoms we've let be taken away from us during the last 8 years. The other two set the path towards a rebellion within 12 years.
My WinXP (kept for gaming only, Linux for everything else) got infected with a spambot (hazards of having children), and I came home one day to find my service shut off. Several hours of calling around to various departments later they informed me that I would have to get my computer "professionally cleaned" before they would reconnect me. Like the "professionals" wouldn't do exactly the same things I did to fix the problem. A bit of social engineering, and accusing them of scanning my system without permission (they didn't, they were monitoring the quantity of outgoing emails) and I convinced them to turn it back on.
That being said, the US is horribly backwards in telcom because they corps know the average citizen has no idea how much they are being screwed. Paying for cell minutes and long distance, when it costs the company no more to route my call across the country than it does to the house next door? And now extra for bandwidth, when only 5% of their customers are using anywhere near the max? [quote from the radio on the way to work this morning]
If Time-Warner tries to implement this in my area, I'm finding another provider. I really don't feel like explaining to my son that he can't play Xbox Live because we "went over our minutes".
It's time Americans woke up and insisted that we stop being ripped off. Flat rates for phone service, flat rates for internet, and at reasonable prices. Either that, or stop claiming we are "more technologically advanced" than the rest of the world, because nonsense like this is proving on a daily basis that we are being left behind.
Women require time. Time is money. Money is the root of all evil. Therefore, by the the transitive property:
W=T=M=E
Proving that Women are Evil.
But to achieve that understanding we would have to study them, which means coming in to contact with them, etc. etc.
These aren't wildebeests you can study secretly from a hidden blind. They're humans. You try to watch them in secret they are going to figure it out and find you.
Nope, that's a picture of my backyard during the "Conquistador Fetish Ball".
Um, the last 8 years have not reflected well on the fitness of the rulers to rule....
About the only mechanical explosion I can think of would be compressed gas, and you are gonna have a hard time explaining to Security why you are toting those big compressed gas tanks onto a plane.
This is useless against perchlorates, which, contrary to what the media and popular fiction tells you, are the primary explosives of terrorists, due to the ease of acquiring them and the ability to tailor them to specific situations. Yes, if you want to take down a building you use nitrates. If you want to drop a plane perchlorates are easier, and no one asks when you buy gallons of insect killer...
It has to do with identity theft. Given 2 or 3 pieces of information, of which your SSN is a critical piece, an identity thief can apply for credit cards in your name. They then run up huge debts, and you are left trying to prove it wasn't you. Good luck with that, the credit companies don't like to admit they screwed up. That SSN opens up your credit history, your government records, medical records, the time in grade school when you were suspended for throwing a rock on the playground, etc. So we tend to be a bit paranoid about them getting into the wrong hands.
No such thing as "worthless" data. Such data can not only be used to determine hidden revenues, it can be used to determine where discretionary income is going. Is it going to cigarettes? Increase the tobacco tax. Alcohol? Increase the booze tax. Cheetos? Institute a cheesy poof tax. In other words, a government which is $3 trillion dollars in debt can use data like this to not only eek out every last cent of income tax, it can use it to decide where to most effectively institute new taxes.
Isn't Shuttleworth South African? More likely he is getting to the politicos first in order to keep Ubuntu growing.
Then, as a teacher, I can claim residuals on the income of every student who has ever sat in my classroom. I mean hey, they wouldn't be where they are now if not for me! I deserve a percentage of their success! Where did I leave that number for my union rep?
The guy wants to experiment with a new init system and a new packaging system. He's put this out as a "distro" so that anyone else who wants to can help out, make suggestions, whatever.
His work might end up "half-assed half-finished", or it might get incorporated into something larger which changes the way all the current big name distros work. If we are truly championing OSS, we should rather wish this guy well. He's doing exactly what everyone is always talking about, changing the source to suit himself and trying to learn how it is all put together.
Maser and Taser are already taken. One by microwave lasers (lasers with light in the microwave bands), the other by the Texas police. They're a bit taze happy here in Texas :)
And of course said script will be the first thing shared P2P...
Of course, then the DA is going to charge you with "listening to Kimya Dawson"....
Oh, so you live in Texas too?