News to me. Though it depends what you mean by 'transition'.
My home DSL provider already does full native IPv6. It dishes out a IPv6/56 to me, and every machine in my house thus has a unique, globally addressable IPv6 IP. (Still behind a single IPv4 address and using NAT though, obviously.
I agree that it will be a long time before IPv4 is actually 'turned off' - we'll be running dual stack for decades I imagine. But that doesn't prevent the IPv6 rollout from occurring. And frankly, I'm liking it a lot - it's a return to the way the Internet was always supposed to be, with each device directly addressable end-to-end.
My Windows 7 already starts up in under 10 seconds anyway (SSD for the win). That's from the end of the BIOS to a fully responsive and usable desktop, too.
Needless to say I don't use hibernate (or even sleep). I just power off and back on. It's stupidly quick on SSDs and will get faster in the future. I think once rotating platter HDDs start going the way of the dodo on all PCs rather than just enthusiasts' ones (which will be quite a while yet, admittedly, as they still lag in price/GB and some would also argue reliability stakes), the whole 'slow booting' problem (and need to use things like hibernation) will go along with it.
They may only read the file once, but they read it a hell of a lot faster. The difference between using a traditional magnetic platter HDD and an SDD on a standard home PC with a typical 'home PC' usage pattern is like night and day. It's not so much in the raw 'time saved' launching a single program, but the ability to do two or three or four disk intensive things at once without having the PC grind to a halt. HDD is by far the biggest bottleneck in PC speed and responsiveness in most use cases.
Midnight is 00:00, (or 12am, if you prefer it that way), thus is the beginning of the day, not the end. Midnight, 1 September, means the time one second after 23:59:59, 31 August.
Interesting. I also hold passports for two (Western, developed) countries and my fingerprints were taken for neither of them. The only entity that has my fingerprints in the world is a foreign (US) government.
I've been to France and didn't have to provide my fingerprints to ~enter~ (even as a non-EU passport holder), but that's not the same as actually applying for a French passport obviously. Plus it was quite a few years ago (2004) so things may have changed since then.
I honestly think it's apathy. Those in the government pushing this agenda want it. Noone else does, and frankly most would object if they knew or cared.
But they don't know, and they don't care. They use the internet, but don't really know how it works. What they do know is that they hear the scare stories in the media about crime ON THE INTERNETS (omg) and thus anything directed at stopping that must be a good thing, right?
Which brings up the second thing they don't care/know about. The vast majority of people have no interest in law, politics, or the future direction of their society in general. The level of knowledge in most countries about how that country's political system even works is shockingly bad. The old bread and circuses applies quite well - keep people relatively happy and entertained and frankly they just don't care what the government does. Hell, in countries with non-compulsory voting (like the US), half the population doesn't even vote (and half those that do probably have no idea about the policies the people they are voting for actually have).
So yeah, I don't think anyone really 'defends' things like this. It's just that they don't care. Or in fact, they don't even know (think of the percentage of the population that doesn't even watch the nightly news, let alone tech/privacy/law-oriented articles in from more respectable sources).
Ditto with Australia - it's essentially the Westminster 'tradition' of good governance and accountability that keeps places like Canada and Australia free. Now to be fair, this is more than a mere tradition - it is essentially common law, and has as much strength as any other law. But you're right to say it's not formally written down in a document that is as strong or explicit as something like the US Constitution.
We enjoy the rights we do because the courts have traditionally recognised those rights, and formed hundreds of years of precedent that those rights exist. Government power in, say, the UK, is limited by Parliamentary tradition and protocol as much as it is limited by hard letter law... but those traditions and protocols essentially do form an unwritten Constitution of sorts. In Australia it's a little more formal - the Australian Constitution is essentially similar to the US Constitution, minus the Bill of Rights. Not sure about Canada to be honest... am I right in guessing it's probably somewhere in between the situation in Australia and the UK? (Yes I could Google it but I'm lazy...)
I wasn't saying I ~liked~ the idea of a country doing invasive searches etc. I was merely agreeing with the assertion made by the parent that the US (like any country) technically has the legal right to impose whatever entry requirements for non-citizens that it sees fit. Just as I am free not to travel to the US if I don't agree with their entry procedures. And just as the citizens of that country are free to get rid of those laws if they don't like them by voting the offending parties out (although in a de facto 2 party state like the US, both can be as bad as each other admittedly).
I don't agree either with the way the TSA is doing things these days (though it doesn't affect me much personally as I rarely travel to the US... in my home country thankfully there's no nudie scans or liquids-on-flights restrictions or taking off shoes or any of that other crap the US has introduced in the last 10 years).
Having said that, unless you are advocating a completely open border/borderless society, I don't think that simple identification procedures (e.g. passport) are overly onerous. Similarly with Xrays of baggage etc. - that's done in Australia though mostly due to quarantine rather than terrorism concerns (taking food/plant material into an island nation like Australia is a big no-no as we are free of many diseases and pests that exist in other countries, and would like to keep it that way).
Ok fair enough - not unique. I said "as far as I know", and I haven't been to Japan or Brazil. But of the ~15 or so countries I've entered, the US is the only that took fingerprints.
I agree that identification is obviously required and that a country has every right to search you or do anything they want, if you are seeking to cross their borders. No arguments there.
The difference is a cultural one. To Americans, the difference between presenting a passport and presenting your fingerprints is "just semantics", as you say. In fact Americans use fingerprints as an identifier in many contexts, and they don't give it a second thought. It's just the way it's done there.
BUT I think they don't understand that in most other countries, taking fingerprints is seen as something only ever done to criminals and is NOT used as a form of identification in any circumstances. As such, it carries a very different connotation. I'd submit to any amount of searching and identification through other means, and that would still 'feel' less invasive to me than taking my fingerprints. To you that may seem ridiculous, but if you grew up in a country where the only time you've ever heard of fingerprinting is in the context of someone being convicted and put in jail, you would understand.
A passport should be enough (especially with the modern electronic/RFID passports they have these days in most developed countries). Having said that, even though I don't like the fingerprinting, it's still within the US' right to require that. It's their border, as you say. Doesn't mean I have to like it though (and I can genuinely say a LOT of people here avoid travelling to the US and spending their tourist dollars there because of this very reason).
I'm pretty sure an iPad is no more 'hackable' than the paper manuals it's replacing in this case.
Mind you, United sucks anyway. Flew them a couple of years ago, SYD-SFO-SYD and it was awful. No video on demand, no seat-back monitors etc. I mean seriously, by that time, every other international airline had had that kind of stuff for a decade, and it's inexcusable on one of longest routes in the world (up to 15 hours westbound). Not to mention the crusty old seats that looked like they had last been reupholstered in 1986. And the nickel-and-diming you on domestic flights for everything (no free food, no free drinks, charging you for headsets... though admittedly I think ALL US domestic carriers are guilty of this stuff).
So yeah I wouldn't fly with them again either. But not because of the iPads.
The reason they tell you to power off electronic devices is less to do with worries about interference, and more to do with you not being distracted by a shiny electronic gadget in case there is a need to rapidly evacuate the aircraft. Which is most likely to happen on takeoff or landing.
Pretty sure United are only interested in their fuel savings from a cost perspective, not because of any perceived net reduction in fuel usage or carbon emissions globally.
Taking fingerprints in certain situations, for example if you are arrested, is indeed fairly common practice across the world. But we aren't talking about that - we are talking about taking all ten fingerprints of every single entrant to the country. As far as I'm aware that is, in fact, unique to the US (at least among developed countries).
Personally, I'd say that Australia has its flaws but I'd take it any day over a country that takes all 10 of your fingerprints on entry and has warrantless, industrial-scale monitoring of telephone calls etc.
I suppose it depends which particular freedoms are more or less important to you though. You win some and lose some in each of the countries being mentioned...
Hold on there... while I agree with your sentiment, this is far from being a done deal. It still has to get through the Senate, which in its current form it isn't likely to do.
We often see overreaction on Slashdot (some guy proposes something bad, and people talk about it on here like it's already a law). Conroy's internet filter springs to mind - it never had a hope of getting through Parliament and being enacted, but people on Slashdot talked about it like it was definitely going to happen (and some still seem to think that it DID happen). Slashdot headlines are always designed to be sensationalist, remember.
Introducing, or even passing, a Bill through one chamber of Parliament does not equal an enacted law. And the same applies here.
TFA provides some hope: "The Attorney General said today he was considering the report before the debate in the Senate. The Australian Greens look forward to working with both parties to fix this fundamentally flawed bill in the Senate, but we are greatly troubled by the fact that both the Labor Party and Coalition gave no indication in the House that they believed any of the flaws needed fixing. On the contrary, they had nothing but praise for the bill.
That's BS. I have an iPad 2 but I don't care about Apple. It could be made by Kellogg's for all I care. It just so happened that it was the best device in its class at the time I bought it.
Note that 'best', for me at least, doesn't necessarily mean raw specs, or openness of software. It means solid build quality, good battery life, stable software, and most importantly a UI that is smooth, fast and lag-free. Some of the Android tablets (and phones for that matter) look great on paper, but every single one of them I've ever tried using has UI lag. Random half-seconds of non-responsiveness in the middle of a task. Stuttering animations as you scroll/open/close things. That is really the primary reason I've avoided Android devices until this point, and something that the anti-Apple brigade don't seem to understand: it's the 'little' things like UI responsiveness and consistency that matter, not memory or CPU or expansion slots or blah blah. I have a desktop PC for 'serious', open computing - I don't desire these things on phones/tablets which I essentially consider to be appliances.
Not sure about this. I have an iPad and it gets used daily. My wife didn't use it much at first, but now she found a few apps she likes on it, she uses it more than I do. I love the thing because I travel a lot and it's much nicer to carry an iPad around than a heavy, power-hungry, laptop.
Interesting how YMMV. I see tablets (iPad 99% of the time) everywhere. Not so much in business/school situations (as you say a netbook/laptop is better for that), but definitely lots of tablets on the bus/train. Also they are becoming ubiquitous on flights (particularly in planes without seat-back IVRs... lotta people pull out their iPad to pass the time).
But most of all, I see more tablets than anywhere else in the hands of twenty-somethings using the free WiFi at cafes. 5 years ago you'd go into a cafe and see laptops everywhere. Now I'm seeing tablets outnumber laptops in such places. I'm in Australia, but they seem even more prevalent in some other areas of the world. Had a two-week business trip to Singapore last month and I'd say at least half the people sitting in any given Starbucks (or similar) was tapping away on an iPad.
Uh, mobile data plans are capped in MOST countries. This isn't just an Australian thing. It's the caps on wired (DSL, cable etc.) plans that are less common (although still not unique to Australia either - not that it really matters anyway given that there are caps available upwards of 1 TB/month now on major ISPs...)
Great. Yes it sucks having to put all my details on her tax return too when I have nothing to do with the US (also, US tax return websites/software cannot handle people without an SSN, I have to use 999-99-9999 as a dummy SSN).
I reckon the US government knows more about me than my own government sometimes. Another example: there is only one entity on earth that has my fingerprints. Yep the US government (because they fingerprint you on entry to the country. Now maybe I'm just overly paranoid, but it does seem odd that the government of a foreign country has all 10 of my fingerprints, when government and law enforcement in my own country have nothing. I think this is partially a cultural thing though: the US seems to rely on fingerprints as a generic identifier a lot more than other countries. In Australia, 99% of people have never been fingerprinted - the only time you would be is if you were arrested.
Slashdot Mirror
News to me. Though it depends what you mean by 'transition'.
My home DSL provider already does full native IPv6. It dishes out a IPv6 /56 to me, and every machine in my house thus has a unique, globally addressable IPv6 IP. (Still behind a single IPv4 address and using NAT though, obviously.
I agree that it will be a long time before IPv4 is actually 'turned off' - we'll be running dual stack for decades I imagine. But that doesn't prevent the IPv6 rollout from occurring. And frankly, I'm liking it a lot - it's a return to the way the Internet was always supposed to be, with each device directly addressable end-to-end.
Sounds slow...
My Windows 7 already starts up in under 10 seconds anyway (SSD for the win). That's from the end of the BIOS to a fully responsive and usable desktop, too.
Needless to say I don't use hibernate (or even sleep). I just power off and back on. It's stupidly quick on SSDs and will get faster in the future. I think once rotating platter HDDs start going the way of the dodo on all PCs rather than just enthusiasts' ones (which will be quite a while yet, admittedly, as they still lag in price/GB and some would also argue reliability stakes), the whole 'slow booting' problem (and need to use things like hibernation) will go along with it.
They may only read the file once, but they read it a hell of a lot faster. The difference between using a traditional magnetic platter HDD and an SDD on a standard home PC with a typical 'home PC' usage pattern is like night and day. It's not so much in the raw 'time saved' launching a single program, but the ability to do two or three or four disk intensive things at once without having the PC grind to a halt. HDD is by far the biggest bottleneck in PC speed and responsiveness in most use cases.
Ummm ... buy a router/gateway/access point that ISN'T completely broken, and actually allows you to secure your WiFi?
Torrents kinda suck anyway - just use Usenet/NNTP. No uploading required, fast, and unlikely to be monitored...
Midnight is 00:00, (or 12am, if you prefer it that way), thus is the beginning of the day, not the end. Midnight, 1 September, means the time one second after 23:59:59, 31 August.
Interesting. I also hold passports for two (Western, developed) countries and my fingerprints were taken for neither of them. The only entity that has my fingerprints in the world is a foreign (US) government.
I've been to France and didn't have to provide my fingerprints to ~enter~ (even as a non-EU passport holder), but that's not the same as actually applying for a French passport obviously. Plus it was quite a few years ago (2004) so things may have changed since then.
I honestly think it's apathy. Those in the government pushing this agenda want it. Noone else does, and frankly most would object if they knew or cared.
But they don't know, and they don't care. They use the internet, but don't really know how it works. What they do know is that they hear the scare stories in the media about crime ON THE INTERNETS (omg) and thus anything directed at stopping that must be a good thing, right?
Which brings up the second thing they don't care/know about. The vast majority of people have no interest in law, politics, or the future direction of their society in general. The level of knowledge in most countries about how that country's political system even works is shockingly bad. The old bread and circuses applies quite well - keep people relatively happy and entertained and frankly they just don't care what the government does. Hell, in countries with non-compulsory voting (like the US), half the population doesn't even vote (and half those that do probably have no idea about the policies the people they are voting for actually have).
So yeah, I don't think anyone really 'defends' things like this. It's just that they don't care. Or in fact, they don't even know (think of the percentage of the population that doesn't even watch the nightly news, let alone tech/privacy/law-oriented articles in from more respectable sources).
Ditto with Australia - it's essentially the Westminster 'tradition' of good governance and accountability that keeps places like Canada and Australia free. Now to be fair, this is more than a mere tradition - it is essentially common law, and has as much strength as any other law. But you're right to say it's not formally written down in a document that is as strong or explicit as something like the US Constitution.
We enjoy the rights we do because the courts have traditionally recognised those rights, and formed hundreds of years of precedent that those rights exist. Government power in, say, the UK, is limited by Parliamentary tradition and protocol as much as it is limited by hard letter law ... but those traditions and protocols essentially do form an unwritten Constitution of sorts. In Australia it's a little more formal - the Australian Constitution is essentially similar to the US Constitution, minus the Bill of Rights. Not sure about Canada to be honest ... am I right in guessing it's probably somewhere in between the situation in Australia and the UK? (Yes I could Google it but I'm lazy...)
I wasn't saying I ~liked~ the idea of a country doing invasive searches etc. I was merely agreeing with the assertion made by the parent that the US (like any country) technically has the legal right to impose whatever entry requirements for non-citizens that it sees fit. Just as I am free not to travel to the US if I don't agree with their entry procedures. And just as the citizens of that country are free to get rid of those laws if they don't like them by voting the offending parties out (although in a de facto 2 party state like the US, both can be as bad as each other admittedly).
I don't agree either with the way the TSA is doing things these days (though it doesn't affect me much personally as I rarely travel to the US ... in my home country thankfully there's no nudie scans or liquids-on-flights restrictions or taking off shoes or any of that other crap the US has introduced in the last 10 years).
Having said that, unless you are advocating a completely open border/borderless society, I don't think that simple identification procedures (e.g. passport) are overly onerous. Similarly with Xrays of baggage etc. - that's done in Australia though mostly due to quarantine rather than terrorism concerns (taking food/plant material into an island nation like Australia is a big no-no as we are free of many diseases and pests that exist in other countries, and would like to keep it that way).
Ok fair enough - not unique. I said "as far as I know", and I haven't been to Japan or Brazil. But of the ~15 or so countries I've entered, the US is the only that took fingerprints.
I agree that identification is obviously required and that a country has every right to search you or do anything they want, if you are seeking to cross their borders. No arguments there.
The difference is a cultural one. To Americans, the difference between presenting a passport and presenting your fingerprints is "just semantics", as you say. In fact Americans use fingerprints as an identifier in many contexts, and they don't give it a second thought. It's just the way it's done there.
BUT I think they don't understand that in most other countries, taking fingerprints is seen as something only ever done to criminals and is NOT used as a form of identification in any circumstances. As such, it carries a very different connotation. I'd submit to any amount of searching and identification through other means, and that would still 'feel' less invasive to me than taking my fingerprints. To you that may seem ridiculous, but if you grew up in a country where the only time you've ever heard of fingerprinting is in the context of someone being convicted and put in jail, you would understand.
A passport should be enough (especially with the modern electronic/RFID passports they have these days in most developed countries). Having said that, even though I don't like the fingerprinting, it's still within the US' right to require that. It's their border, as you say. Doesn't mean I have to like it though (and I can genuinely say a LOT of people here avoid travelling to the US and spending their tourist dollars there because of this very reason).
I'm pretty sure an iPad is no more 'hackable' than the paper manuals it's replacing in this case.
Mind you, United sucks anyway. Flew them a couple of years ago, SYD-SFO-SYD and it was awful. No video on demand, no seat-back monitors etc. I mean seriously, by that time, every other international airline had had that kind of stuff for a decade, and it's inexcusable on one of longest routes in the world (up to 15 hours westbound). Not to mention the crusty old seats that looked like they had last been reupholstered in 1986. And the nickel-and-diming you on domestic flights for everything (no free food, no free drinks, charging you for headsets ... though admittedly I think ALL US domestic carriers are guilty of this stuff).
So yeah I wouldn't fly with them again either. But not because of the iPads.
The reason they tell you to power off electronic devices is less to do with worries about interference, and more to do with you not being distracted by a shiny electronic gadget in case there is a need to rapidly evacuate the aircraft. Which is most likely to happen on takeoff or landing.
Pretty sure United are only interested in their fuel savings from a cost perspective, not because of any perceived net reduction in fuel usage or carbon emissions globally.
Taking fingerprints in certain situations, for example if you are arrested, is indeed fairly common practice across the world. But we aren't talking about that - we are talking about taking all ten fingerprints of every single entrant to the country. As far as I'm aware that is, in fact, unique to the US (at least among developed countries).
Personally, I'd say that Australia has its flaws but I'd take it any day over a country that takes all 10 of your fingerprints on entry and has warrantless, industrial-scale monitoring of telephone calls etc.
I suppose it depends which particular freedoms are more or less important to you though. You win some and lose some in each of the countries being mentioned...
Hold on there ... while I agree with your sentiment, this is far from being a done deal. It still has to get through the Senate, which in its current form it isn't likely to do.
We often see overreaction on Slashdot (some guy proposes something bad, and people talk about it on here like it's already a law). Conroy's internet filter springs to mind - it never had a hope of getting through Parliament and being enacted, but people on Slashdot talked about it like it was definitely going to happen (and some still seem to think that it DID happen). Slashdot headlines are always designed to be sensationalist, remember.
Introducing, or even passing, a Bill through one chamber of Parliament does not equal an enacted law. And the same applies here.
TFA provides some hope: "The Attorney General said today he was considering the report before the debate in the Senate. The Australian Greens look forward to working with both parties to fix this fundamentally flawed bill in the Senate, but we are greatly troubled by the fact that both the Labor Party and Coalition gave no indication in the House that they believed any of the flaws needed fixing. On the contrary, they had nothing but praise for the bill.
If you're a citizen of some other country, not many.
If you aren't though, er, where exactly do you propose to go then?
That's BS. I have an iPad 2 but I don't care about Apple. It could be made by Kellogg's for all I care. It just so happened that it was the best device in its class at the time I bought it.
Note that 'best', for me at least, doesn't necessarily mean raw specs, or openness of software. It means solid build quality, good battery life, stable software, and most importantly a UI that is smooth, fast and lag-free. Some of the Android tablets (and phones for that matter) look great on paper, but every single one of them I've ever tried using has UI lag. Random half-seconds of non-responsiveness in the middle of a task. Stuttering animations as you scroll/open/close things. That is really the primary reason I've avoided Android devices until this point, and something that the anti-Apple brigade don't seem to understand: it's the 'little' things like UI responsiveness and consistency that matter, not memory or CPU or expansion slots or blah blah. I have a desktop PC for 'serious', open computing - I don't desire these things on phones/tablets which I essentially consider to be appliances.
Not sure about this. I have an iPad and it gets used daily. My wife didn't use it much at first, but now she found a few apps she likes on it, she uses it more than I do. I love the thing because I travel a lot and it's much nicer to carry an iPad around than a heavy, power-hungry, laptop.
Interesting how YMMV. I see tablets (iPad 99% of the time) everywhere. Not so much in business/school situations (as you say a netbook/laptop is better for that), but definitely lots of tablets on the bus/train. Also they are becoming ubiquitous on flights (particularly in planes without seat-back IVRs ... lotta people pull out their iPad to pass the time).
But most of all, I see more tablets than anywhere else in the hands of twenty-somethings using the free WiFi at cafes. 5 years ago you'd go into a cafe and see laptops everywhere. Now I'm seeing tablets outnumber laptops in such places. I'm in Australia, but they seem even more prevalent in some other areas of the world. Had a two-week business trip to Singapore last month and I'd say at least half the people sitting in any given Starbucks (or similar) was tapping away on an iPad.
Uh, mobile data plans are capped in MOST countries. This isn't just an Australian thing. It's the caps on wired (DSL, cable etc.) plans that are less common (although still not unique to Australia either - not that it really matters anyway given that there are caps available upwards of 1 TB/month now on major ISPs...)
Great. Yes it sucks having to put all my details on her tax return too when I have nothing to do with the US (also, US tax return websites/software cannot handle people without an SSN, I have to use 999-99-9999 as a dummy SSN).
I reckon the US government knows more about me than my own government sometimes. Another example: there is only one entity on earth that has my fingerprints. Yep the US government (because they fingerprint you on entry to the country. Now maybe I'm just overly paranoid, but it does seem odd that the government of a foreign country has all 10 of my fingerprints, when government and law enforcement in my own country have nothing. I think this is partially a cultural thing though: the US seems to rely on fingerprints as a generic identifier a lot more than other countries. In Australia, 99% of people have never been fingerprinted - the only time you would be is if you were arrested.