While this is something of a straw man argument, consider what the Holocaust would've been like if the leaders of the country could find every member of the Jewish community, hiding or not, because they were wearing tags?
No need to imagine. The Nazis used a low tech method of doing this - yes it did not have remote tracking, etc, but made it very obvious if someone was Jewish. The Nazis forced Jewish people to wear badges.
We could stop letting pedophiles, rapists and stalkers out of prison. Not with any unconstitutional "civil commitment" proceedings, just make the sentence a mandatory life without parole. Although then there is no disincentive to the criminal stopping him from killing the victim, unless we use the death penalty, which has its own problems.
Let's RFID tag the criminals, now there is an idea.
A virus writer could steal some content for a litigous company and anonymously spread a virus which distributes this content.
And sit back and watch from the shadows as the content company sues the victims of the virus for contributatory copyright infringements (their PC was an integral part of the infringement),
This reminds me of a story I heard as a kid... The Three Little Pigs. Sure you can build a straw house quickly, but is it a long-term solution?
Yes, if you can use the DMCA to have "huffing and puffing" to blow down a house declared an illegal act of circumvention of access controls. All you'd have to do is hide a copyrighted work in the house.:)
they're expecting to steal away customers from Staples and IBM,
Never mind good will. Just getting you in the door makes it likely you'll buy something while you are there. Such as their floppy disks, the insides of which make a good decoration for cubicle walls.:)
Vendors could even put in bugs that will only take effect years down the line, and make it illegal to fix those.
Then their product will have a good reputation because only those who "failed to upgrade in a timely manner" got hosed, and that is seen as acceptible.
They might not worry about making it fit in with that episode.
Remember the warp 10 = infinite speed episode (New Star Trek) (the one with Lt. Paris becoming a reptile) and the over warp 10 lets you travel back in time (Old Star Trek) episode where they slingshotted past the Sun?
Now remember the Old Start Trek episode where the warp engines go runaway and they hit warp 14 and they manage to shut it down before it explodes? And they were merely going really fast and there weren't any temporal effects?
After all the point of having a lot of different kinds of Major Histocompatibility Complex alleles in the population is that somebody in the population will have the right combination of MHC genes to be a responder to an arbitary infection and so survive to breed.
Certain HLA antigens are bad to have. Such as HLA B27 which makes one a sitting duck for autoimmune disease. People with that can get Reiter's syndrome (a form of autoimmune arthritis) from something as simple as food poisoning. As bad as HLA B27 sounds, it is likely to provide protection against something, much like sickle cell trait protects against malaria.
Biological diversity means there is less likelyhood of a large scale wipeout of the population, but also that there will be many people who get diseases due to things like having a bad HLA antigen (such as B27).
Any protection from viruses that HLA antigens could provide likely could be circumvented, as HLA antigens are not secret at all. They are use in diagnosing autoimmune disease, matching organ transplants, etc.
It is roughly equivalent to a computer virus writer having access to all the patterns that an anti-virus program is designed to detect.
Is this why (luckily) most virus that are very infective (e.g. a cold virus) are not very damaging and those that are very damaging are not very effective?
Things like the cold virus perhaps don't do much damage because perhaps their replication is very "lossy" - but that makes them much more infective.
Or I could be wrong about this, this is just a theory.
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act says you can tell them to stop calling and they have to, at least until they call to let you know you are being sued/your wages are being garnisheed/your car is being repossesed/your house is being foreclosed/someone's coming to break your kneecaps (just kidding about that last one - that would be an FDCPA violation too:).
Sprint Local ISDN in Las Vegas ignored what I set in my modem's settings for the number to send to the switch. It would always display the correct number on caller ID, even if I tried to spoof the other B channel on that very same line (which actually would have been a useful thing to be able to do).
Even with reliable caller ID, it is bad relying on it for authentication. Beige boxing would get you access to people's accounts, etc.
My cell phone provider (AT&T wireless) knows my number when I call, and if I call from my cell phone, it assumes it is me and about my phone. Makes it hard to use my cell phone to help out a friend having problems with their cell phone, even if they are right there, since they have to override the fact it is my account which shows up. There really should be an option to tell the system to not use the number it thinks you are calling from.
Which explains why the SimIndiana terms of service prohibit activities that are "illegal in Texas". It appears that they didn't even bother to change that when they did a cut-and-paste job to make SimIndiana.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Safer than storing it using Windows.
Many terrorists live seemingly normal lives until the day they attack.
So someone could take 2000 flights and only attack on the 2001st flight.
Seems to be typical driving in Las Vegas. Except it is 50 or 60 on the surface streets and 80+ on the freeways.
While this is something of a straw man argument, consider what the Holocaust would've been like if the leaders of the country could find every member of the Jewish community, hiding or not, because they were wearing tags?
No need to imagine. The Nazis used a low tech method of doing this - yes it did not have remote tracking, etc, but made it very obvious if someone was Jewish. The Nazis forced Jewish people to wear badges.
One solution:
We could stop letting pedophiles, rapists and stalkers out of prison. Not with any unconstitutional "civil commitment" proceedings, just make the sentence a mandatory life without parole. Although then there is no disincentive to the criminal stopping him from killing the victim, unless we use the death penalty, which has its own problems.
Let's RFID tag the criminals, now there is an idea.
A virus writer could steal some content for a litigous company and anonymously spread a virus which distributes this content.
And sit back and watch from the shadows as the content company sues the victims of the virus for contributatory copyright infringements (their PC was an integral part of the infringement),
This reminds me of a story I heard as a kid... The Three Little Pigs. Sure you can build a straw house quickly, but is it a long-term solution?
Yes, if you can use the DMCA to have "huffing and puffing" to blow down a house declared an illegal act of circumvention of access controls. All you'd have to do is hide a copyrighted work in the house. :)
they're expecting to steal away customers from Staples and IBM,
Never mind good will. Just getting you in the door makes it likely you'll buy something while you are there. Such as their floppy disks, the insides of which make a good decoration for cubicle walls. :)
So once the poles finish reversing, will I have to hack my GPS receiver and invert its display to make its compass point to the new "North" pole?
That would likely be a DMCA violation.
Unplug the network connection.
That is so ironic it almost defies belief.
:)
Considering that msn.com is Microsoft.
Vendors could even put in bugs that will only take effect years down the line, and make it illegal to fix those.
Then their product will have a good reputation because only those who "failed to upgrade in a timely manner" got hosed, and that is seen as acceptible.
They might not worry about making it fit in with that episode.
Remember the warp 10 = infinite speed episode (New Star Trek) (the one with Lt. Paris becoming a reptile) and the over warp 10 lets you travel back in time (Old Star Trek) episode where they slingshotted past the Sun?
Now remember the Old Start Trek episode where the warp engines go runaway and they hit warp 14 and they manage to shut it down before it explodes? And they were merely going really fast and there weren't any temporal effects?
After all the point of having a lot of different kinds of Major Histocompatibility Complex alleles in the population is that somebody in the population will have the right combination of MHC genes to be a responder to an arbitary infection and so survive to breed.
The flip side of this is that many people are prone to getting autoimmune disease as a consequence of getting certain infections. Crohn's disease is likely triggered by a bacteria.
Certain HLA antigens are bad to have. Such as HLA B27 which makes one a sitting duck for autoimmune disease. People with that can get Reiter's syndrome (a form of autoimmune arthritis) from something as simple as food poisoning. As bad as HLA B27 sounds, it is likely to provide protection against something, much like sickle cell trait protects against malaria.
Biological diversity means there is less likelyhood of a large scale wipeout of the population, but also that there will be many people who get diseases due to things like having a bad HLA antigen (such as B27).
Any protection from viruses that HLA antigens could provide likely could be circumvented, as HLA antigens are not secret at all. They are use in diagnosing autoimmune disease, matching organ transplants, etc.
It is roughly equivalent to a computer virus writer having access to all the patterns that an anti-virus program is designed to detect.
Is this why (luckily) most virus that are very infective (e.g. a cold virus) are not very damaging and those that are very damaging are not very effective?
Things like the cold virus perhaps don't do much damage because perhaps their replication is very "lossy" - but that makes them much more infective.
Or I could be wrong about this, this is just a theory.
The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act says you can tell them to stop calling and they have to, at least until they call to let you know you are being sued/your wages are being garnisheed/your car is being repossesed/your house is being foreclosed/someone's coming to break your kneecaps (just kidding about that last one - that would be an FDCPA violation too :).
Don't try that with anything in the 710 area code. ;)
Sprint Local ISDN in Las Vegas ignored what I set in my modem's settings for the number to send to the switch. It would always display the correct number on caller ID, even if I tried to spoof the other B channel on that very same line (which actually would have been a useful thing to be able to do).
Even with reliable caller ID, it is bad relying on it for authentication. Beige boxing would get you access to people's accounts, etc.
My cell phone provider (AT&T wireless) knows my number when I call, and if I call from my cell phone, it assumes it is me and about my phone. Makes it hard to use my cell phone to help out a friend having problems with their cell phone, even if they are right there, since they have to override the fact it is my account which shows up. There really should be an option to tell the system to not use the number it thinks you are calling from.
I'd be happy if AT&T wireless gave my anonymous call reject and unknown call screening (like Sprint Privacy Guard). That would be close enough.
If you won't identify yourself, my phone just won't ring.
Unfortunately that and selective call accept/reject aren't available on my cell.
I thought only Microsoft and the government knew how to use those secret spy features in MS products.
If one can make it as a telemarketer, one can make it as a debt collector. And that is a more honorable profession.
Ever notice when things explode in Star Trek you can hear the explosion even in deep space? Why is that?
Which explains why the SimIndiana terms of service prohibit activities that are "illegal in Texas". It appears that they didn't even bother to change that when they did a cut-and-paste job to make SimIndiana. :)
BTW: Indiana is an interesting state to visit.
Anyone remember Zkey?
I still have the brochure/hype for it. Makes for fun reading.