The range of the tags varies, but is typically between a few inches to six feet or so. Notice the "Checkpoint" gates you walk through when you enter or leave a store? Those are the transmitting and receiving antennas that "talk" to the RFID tags, and the distances you see in the stores pretty well defines the range of the tags they're sensing.
The tags work by retransmitting energy that they receive. In simpler terms, I'm saying "the tags don't have batteries." They have an antenna that is energized by the transmitters at the gates. They modulate the signal with the data contents of the chip, and rebroadcast it (typically at double the frequency of the received signal.) Since the strength of the signal fades with the cube of the distance, in order to read from a greater distance you have to transmit exponentially more power to read it from further and further away. Don't forget to double the distance measurement, because your transmitter has to send enough RF energy to power the chip circuit, which has to turn that into enough power to make it all the way back to your reciever. And no matter how much power you pump into these little chips, they're not capable of retransmitting more than a few milliwatts, which means that as the distance increases your receiver needs a bigger and bigger antenna.
The concern for privacy isn't that the guys with satellites are watching your every move from 90 miles up. They don't need to. They simply need to subpoena the store's RFID log to see who's been coming and going, and when. It's much cheaper.
Actually, skins are valuable to a large number of people with disabilities. Some people have a hard time seeing contrast with the default shades of grey. Some people need black and white color schemes; some need to have many default colors adjusted before some of these pages are viewable to them. And some mobility-impaired people need extremely large buttons to make it easier to click on the important ones.
Personally, I like the "pinball" skin because it makes the buttons smaller, leaving more pixels available for the web page itself. The fact that it does it with style doesn't displease me, either. But I know I could do perfectly well without the skins. Sometimes it's hard to remember the people who can't.
A friend of mine just solved the exact same problem. Only a 1/2 mile separation, but trees and hills intervened. He purchased a WISP bridging setup, I'm guessing it's this one. He said it has a 12 mile range, and does not require line of sight.
But perhaps this is having precisely the intended effect.
Perhaps their goal wasn't to really sell their services, but to end web-bugged email. Maybe all they wanted was for the big on-line webmail services like Yahoo & Hotmail to receive an outcry from outraged users demanding a "stop to this privacy invasion." Maybe their focus all along was to get these mailhausen to start blocking all web bugs by default to render useless the old spammer's trick for the majority of spam victims?
Or maybe they're just stupid.
Either way, it won't ever have affected me since I've blocked email images ever since learning about web bugs years ago.
I don't see why people who watch "good" programs will automatically shun being polled.
Because some of us are / were absolutely fed up with unsolicited phone calls.
After too damn many "wanna buy duct cleaning?" "wanna buy long distance?" calls, I was ready to strangle the telemarketers via proxy. I stopped discriminating my screening spiel. I didn't care if it was a siding company or a survey company was calling regarding what question. As soon as I determined that a caller wasn't friend nor family, I told them "Please add this number to your do-not-call list and never call this number again." Most telemarketers politely said "OK" before hanging up. Some asked me to repeat it. Some just hung up. And a few tried to fucking ARGUE with me. It's a good thing for both of us that they were a long-distance phone call away and not at baseball bat length, or I'd be writing this IN PRISON.
A buddy who was in the army was busted for showing up drunk, and they made him take antabuse. According to him, when you're taking it drinking even the smallest amount of alcohol makes you puke puke puke.
I dunno, I think some of the most useful utility programs come from lazy (but not too lazy) programmers.
A drone will repeat the same task over and over because that's "what they do." A very lazy programmer will get sick of the task after about two iterations and say, "I could replace this stupidity with a small program." A lazy programmer actually writes the code. Of course, some of us spend more hours developing code than will ever actually be saved by using the shortcut, but hey, the risk goes with the task.
And if it's really cool, you share it with friends who all say "ooo, ahh, cool." And then your friends say "hey, can you make it do X, too?" and "hey, neat, can it do Y?" So you improve it.
And then it becomes Mozilla, and you end up splitting off the browser function as a standalone app because Mozilla does too much X and Y...
Sure, the black hats will be all over this like flies on p00p.
But so will the white hats, and the gray hats.
For both the white and gray hats, finding a weakness is their ticket to 15 minutes of fame. "Slightly shady" companies like eEye or @stake got their starts as hacker groups that found profit in promoting their l33t ski11z by discovering and announcing vulnerabilities. They found that while hacking for bragging rights is really fun, turning that newfound glory into IPOs was really, really a great way to make some serious cash.
The thing is, security by obscurity may work; or, it may not. Obscurity obscures both ways. If there's a bad-guy ring who discovered a Cisco weakness two years ago and has been using it to rob on-line banks (or whatever,) who knows? Their exploit might be so slick that it leaves no traces. But now with the code open the race to find these bugs is on. And if the racers discover a flaw that bad guys have been exploiting in the past, well, that hole is plugged because the obscurity is gone.
A leak of this magnitude is sure to attract eyeballs like crazy. And at least a few of those eyeballs will be coming from underneath white hat brims. Sure, they'll be outnumbered, but they'll be there; and it takes only one good guy to ruin the bad guys fun.
darkonc is right. I'm too lazy to dig up the references right now but I've read in Scientific American that vacuum cleaner bags are frequently filled with enough insect poisons to qualify them as high-level hazardous waste.
People who regularly use insect sprays have the worst problems. The dried chemicals land on the fibers in the carpeting, and as they or their pets walk on the carpet their feet flick the toxic dust right back up into the air and into their lungs. Indoor air is now frequently more polluted than outdoor air.
Of course, you had a special case. You had a really, really stupid flea-infested roommate, and you used a flea-bomb one time to solve the problem. If it happens again, a good vacuuming immediately after the bombing and tossing out the bag when done would go a long way towards keeping your house healthy.
It sounds like you are believing that path dependence is a completely bad thing, chaining us down and preventing us from achieving the loftiest goals of bug-free programming. I think you're confusing "technical merit above all else" with "the real world."
In the real world, decisions such as 'choice of language' are not made in a vacuum. To create a ficticious example, let's say that an expert in the field might recognize that perl would be the ideal language for feature X because of the existence of a perlmod that already performs complex operation Y. Path depencence simply means there are many, many considerations to weigh. First, do I already have more than one perl expert on my development staff? Do I have support teams that can read perl? If not, do I have the budget to give to the support manager enough money for perl training? Will they be competent enough to figure out what might be going wrong at a remote site? Do my developers and support staff have all the perl development tools they need? Do all my developers and support people even have access to the same version of perl? Are there already perl environments established on my target platforms? Are there licensing restrictions preventing our usage or deployment of that perlmod?
Real people in the real world have to produce code that other people can maintain. This code has to run on a platform that exists (or one that can be set up for a reasonable cost.)
As you have no doubt already guessed, I'm approaching this from a large organization's viewpoint. We already have tens of thousands of machines spread around thousands of diverse geographic locations. Our users do not maintain their own machines, we do it all remotely. So if someone comes along and says "hey, I can do this in one line of perl" we may have to pack up an awful lot of baggage just to get that one camel to take that one step.
Or, we can decide to use the existing infrastructure and tools to write it in ten lines of C++.
Does that mean we would never consider a perl solution? Not at all -- we make these sorts of decisions frequently. But we already know we're an elephant, unable to turn on a dime. That means we know we can only walk down elephant-sized paths. If a mouse says "run over this piece of rope with me and you will quickly get to the other side of the gorge," well, we're still an elephant. We're not running anywhere, much less over a piece of rope. Decisions like these are just much bigger than simply perl vs. C++.
Because it's a test for Computer Science, and not a test for "assembler coders".
People above were whining that the language shouldn't matter. Well, UML is an implementation-neutral language, which would solve their complaints. Sure, it relies on OO features, but why not? They're testing OO concepts. And since that's where both acadamia and industry are leading today's students, why not teach it to them first?
Quite frankly, if you can get the concepts down in UML you've done the hard part. Making the transition from UML to code is then the job of a code generator.
There's a real question: why don't the Intro to Comp Sci type courses teach in UML? Get kids thinking in objects, rather than struggle with hairy syntax issues.
If your theory is true (and I think it's a very wise observation) don't you think it would have been true for the first of ANY random overvalued dot-com to cash in? Sure, Case is the guy who did it using AOL, but I don't think you can blanket blame him personally for the collapse. I think that any of the financially significant dot-coms of the era could have raided any random brick-and-mortar megacorp and caused the same fallout.
Perhaps the bubble would have collapsed more slowly if it had been a series of smaller companies acquiring other smaller firms. But I think it was going to collapse regardless -- it's just a matter of who saw it coming first, and who could best take advantage of the situation.
I also don't think that at a tech school "low" scores would have the same effect.
Don't be too sure. Managers seem to always end up acting like managers, regardless of whether they're administering a school or running a car dealership. Like programmers, there are good ones and bad ones. And like programming, bad managers blindly follow management trends -- firing the bottom 10% because it worked for Jack at GM; giving attaboy awards makes up for a total lack of cash bonuses, etc.
Just be thankful your professors didn't beg you to give them a 7 at the end of the semester, or hand you a pathetic "if you feel you can't give me a seven, please come talk to me about it before you turn in your survey."
I asked for the ability to rate the person who mandated the "oh-please-give-me-a-10-out-of-10" survey that the local Ford dealer had me fill out. I almost gave him a 5 just for putting up with his pathetic begging.
Anyway, I think they assigned the winner of the Hades Ice Scuplture competition to get back to me. But I hear he's busy working as a coach for one of the stunt-pig teams...
Have one "real looking" password (especially PIN) that you can give out if somebody demands it at gun or knife point (you get the idea). If used, it immediately notifies the authorities (silently) and shuts down the account/card in say 1/2 hour (presumably enough time for you to get away). For the would-be mugger etc there's no way to tell if they got the "real" or the honeypot password.
The common name for this is the "duress code". Most alarm systems provide for a code that triggers a silent alarm while appearing to deactivate.
And before you run out to patent this, I learned about them in the early 1980s, so the patents have probably already expired.
So THAT'S what CCR's been singing all these years! Thanks, dude!
Y'know, that implies that the most secure password of all has got to be the original lyrics to "Louie, Louie". Nobody's been able to guess them for over forty years, and it's not for lack of trying.
There are several important distinctions to be made between something you "have" vs something you "are".
Here are some points to ponder regarding something you "are":
Your biometric data must be digitized before a computer system can make use of it.
Your biometric data is not secret.
Your biometric data is unchangeable.
Your biometric data cannot respond uniquely to every request made of it.
It may be difficult or impossible for the user to validate that they are being "read" by a legitimate scanner.
And here are some points regarding something you can have - a smart card:
A smart card has an internal digital processor plus some data.
A smart card responds uniquely to every challenge made.
A smart card's contents cannot be casually read without sophisticated equipment.
A smart card can be deactivated or disposed of and replaced in the event of compromise.
What do these points mean? Biometric information can be copied at many levels, and presented as "real" data at many points in the security perimeter. A fake fingerprint can be made for under $20 and almost no skill is required. Mallory can hold up a photo in front of an unattended camera to convince a system that Alice is at the reader. A "fake" retinal scanner could be placed in front of a "real" retinal scanner at the bank's Eye-ATM machine ('retinal skimming' just sounds evil.) Or, the thumbprint reader at the Bada Bing's cash register might actually be a thumbprint/DNA recorder manned by Tony Soprano. You, the biometric holder, have no way of validating every reader. And in every case, a compromised biometric is of negative value to the owner. If your thumbprint data is stolen, copies of it can be made forever and you can never get it back. Your own thumbprint is now a liability, not an asset.
In contrast, a smart card does not divulge its secrets willingly. Smart cards do not require trust in the card reader nor in the merchant. The merchant issues a challenge to the card, collects the response, and ships both the challenge and response to the bank. The bank records the challenge, validates that the challenge was never authorized before, and then validates that the response matched the challenge according to the secret rules the bank placed inside the card at the time of issuance. If a card is lost, the bank marks it lost/stolen and never authorizes it again. If a duplicate challenge is made, the merchant presenting the duplicate can be immediately suspected of fraud.
A smart card is good security, but poor authentication. But a biometric datum is poor security, and not necessarily good authentication.
Vendor history is always a valid consideration. I almost didn't buy my Radeon 9800 because of my experiences with ATI's RAGE chipset a few years back. Plus, my motherboard came with an nForce chipset, and I've been happy with it, I already was using an nVidia, so I was all set to go nVidia last fall.
Except for one little thing: their cards were sucking hind tit in performance to ATI's. Every review showed the Radeons were outshining the nVidia cards in virtually every respect. The people I spoke to had no problems with them. So I bought one, and I've been extrememly happy with it. So happy I bought a second for my son's computer.
nVidia may have the name, they may have the history, but they didn't have the hardware when it came time to buy. And ATI has come a very, very long way in both product and support.
So, now I consider the market to be what it should be: a commodity market, with healthy competition between two strong contenders. And I think that's the best possible market in which to be a consumer.
Except the problem keeps changing. Advertisers have long feared the advent of automated "click-to-pay" scripts, and have developed schemes to both frustrate script-writers and to perform human confirmations.
Your scripts would have to be so smart that they would not give away their presense even when the advertiser's humanconf scheme changes. If they change their advertising, say from "Click the logo of your sports team" to "click the picture of the prettiest cheerleader" but the script keeps clicking the same location (now occupied by a black zone, or of a referee or something that is obviously not a pretty cheerleader) then they'll disallow any pending payments to the web page host claiming that a bot is doing the clicking. They might even bring up "lawyers...mumble...fraud" or send a Cease and Desist letter.
Scripts would have to be smart enough to not make those mistakes, or at least they'd have to be monitored by a human to prevent them from giving themselves away. At that point, why not invest a couple of rupees and let someone else foot the electric bills and bandwidth charges?
I'm surprised and more than a little disturbed by her answers in this area. It's not so much about self-awareness, because frankly I don't care what a robot thinks of what I ask it to do. The thing is psychiatry really only has meaning in the context of a society. And while she's studied the human->robot side of the equation, she doesn't seem to have considered too deeply the robot's interactions with the humans. Look at this quote of hers:
[I] just don't see them with the innate human emotions that drive a lot of the above `rights' such as the desire for greed, power, freedom, control, etc.
I believe that as AIs become more and more sophisticated that they will start to exhibit what we would consider "anti-social" behavior. Think about it. The most sophisticated AIs we use today are based on neural networks and/or genetic algorithms. The amazing thing about them is they are absolutely goal driven -- a human specifies inputs and a goal, and they "evolve" until they've maximized the goal. The results are frequently surprising. Sometimes, the circuits produced "cheat" -- they've been known to use parasitic capacitance on a chip as the primary capacitor in an oscillator, for example. They don't care if they're not "supposed" to use these stray effects, they just cycle over and over until they achieve their goal.
Humans describe other humans expressing these traits with the words "desire" and "greed". A human focused absolutely 100% on maximizing a goal, without regard to side effects, would be described as sociopathic. Picture such a person being told to drive a car across a desert. They won't care if they drive across rare flowers. They won't stop just because they knocked over a cactus. A normal human would recognize tents or campfires or a clothesline as evidence of habitation, and recognizing it as a campsite they would give it wide berth. A psychopath might derive sick humor from revving his engine as he passes within an inch of the tent. But a sociopath wouldn't even recognize the campsite for what it was, and would simply drive through it. Perhaps if a human was camped out in a camo sleeping bag in tall grasses, they might even drive right over them.
Without education and experience, I think a 100% goal oriented robot would act the same way. I don't see how someone could claim it's not sociopathic behavior just because it came from a robot. So, if education and experience fail to deliver a perfect robot every time, we will actually need robopsychiatrists to diagnose and repair these sociopathic robots. And I really think someone claiming to be a "robopsychiatrist" would have thought through these sorts of situations a bit more carefully.
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The tags work by retransmitting energy that they receive. In simpler terms, I'm saying "the tags don't have batteries." They have an antenna that is energized by the transmitters at the gates. They modulate the signal with the data contents of the chip, and rebroadcast it (typically at double the frequency of the received signal.) Since the strength of the signal fades with the cube of the distance, in order to read from a greater distance you have to transmit exponentially more power to read it from further and further away. Don't forget to double the distance measurement, because your transmitter has to send enough RF energy to power the chip circuit, which has to turn that into enough power to make it all the way back to your reciever. And no matter how much power you pump into these little chips, they're not capable of retransmitting more than a few milliwatts, which means that as the distance increases your receiver needs a bigger and bigger antenna.
The concern for privacy isn't that the guys with satellites are watching your every move from 90 miles up. They don't need to. They simply need to subpoena the store's RFID log to see who's been coming and going, and when. It's much cheaper.
Personally, I like the "pinball" skin because it makes the buttons smaller, leaving more pixels available for the web page itself. The fact that it does it with style doesn't displease me, either. But I know I could do perfectly well without the skins. Sometimes it's hard to remember the people who can't.
I hope you have $2K laying around...
Perhaps their goal wasn't to really sell their services, but to end web-bugged email. Maybe all they wanted was for the big on-line webmail services like Yahoo & Hotmail to receive an outcry from outraged users demanding a "stop to this privacy invasion." Maybe their focus all along was to get these mailhausen to start blocking all web bugs by default to render useless the old spammer's trick for the majority of spam victims?
Or maybe they're just stupid.
Either way, it won't ever have affected me since I've blocked email images ever since learning about web bugs years ago.
Thank you, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Great idea.
Because some of us are / were absolutely fed up with unsolicited phone calls.
After too damn many "wanna buy duct cleaning?" "wanna buy long distance?" calls, I was ready to strangle the telemarketers via proxy. I stopped discriminating my screening spiel. I didn't care if it was a siding company or a survey company was calling regarding what question. As soon as I determined that a caller wasn't friend nor family, I told them "Please add this number to your do-not-call list and never call this number again." Most telemarketers politely said "OK" before hanging up. Some asked me to repeat it. Some just hung up. And a few tried to fucking ARGUE with me. It's a good thing for both of us that they were a long-distance phone call away and not at baseball bat length, or I'd be writing this IN PRISON.
A buddy who was in the army was busted for showing up drunk, and they made him take antabuse. According to him, when you're taking it drinking even the smallest amount of alcohol makes you puke puke puke.
A drone will repeat the same task over and over because that's "what they do." A very lazy programmer will get sick of the task after about two iterations and say, "I could replace this stupidity with a small program." A lazy programmer actually writes the code. Of course, some of us spend more hours developing code than will ever actually be saved by using the shortcut, but hey, the risk goes with the task.
And if it's really cool, you share it with friends who all say "ooo, ahh, cool." And then your friends say "hey, can you make it do X, too?" and "hey, neat, can it do Y?" So you improve it.
And then it becomes Mozilla, and you end up splitting off the browser function as a standalone app because Mozilla does too much X and Y...
But so will the white hats, and the gray hats.
For both the white and gray hats, finding a weakness is their ticket to 15 minutes of fame. "Slightly shady" companies like eEye or @stake got their starts as hacker groups that found profit in promoting their l33t ski11z by discovering and announcing vulnerabilities. They found that while hacking for bragging rights is really fun, turning that newfound glory into IPOs was really, really a great way to make some serious cash.
The thing is, security by obscurity may work; or, it may not. Obscurity obscures both ways. If there's a bad-guy ring who discovered a Cisco weakness two years ago and has been using it to rob on-line banks (or whatever,) who knows? Their exploit might be so slick that it leaves no traces. But now with the code open the race to find these bugs is on. And if the racers discover a flaw that bad guys have been exploiting in the past, well, that hole is plugged because the obscurity is gone.
A leak of this magnitude is sure to attract eyeballs like crazy. And at least a few of those eyeballs will be coming from underneath white hat brims. Sure, they'll be outnumbered, but they'll be there; and it takes only one good guy to ruin the bad guys fun.
(Sorry if this was kind of rambling.)
People who regularly use insect sprays have the worst problems. The dried chemicals land on the fibers in the carpeting, and as they or their pets walk on the carpet their feet flick the toxic dust right back up into the air and into their lungs. Indoor air is now frequently more polluted than outdoor air.
Of course, you had a special case. You had a really, really stupid flea-infested roommate, and you used a flea-bomb one time to solve the problem. If it happens again, a good vacuuming immediately after the bombing and tossing out the bag when done would go a long way towards keeping your house healthy.
In the real world, decisions such as 'choice of language' are not made in a vacuum. To create a ficticious example, let's say that an expert in the field might recognize that perl would be the ideal language for feature X because of the existence of a perlmod that already performs complex operation Y. Path depencence simply means there are many, many considerations to weigh. First, do I already have more than one perl expert on my development staff? Do I have support teams that can read perl? If not, do I have the budget to give to the support manager enough money for perl training? Will they be competent enough to figure out what might be going wrong at a remote site? Do my developers and support staff have all the perl development tools they need? Do all my developers and support people even have access to the same version of perl? Are there already perl environments established on my target platforms? Are there licensing restrictions preventing our usage or deployment of that perlmod?
Real people in the real world have to produce code that other people can maintain. This code has to run on a platform that exists (or one that can be set up for a reasonable cost.)
As you have no doubt already guessed, I'm approaching this from a large organization's viewpoint. We already have tens of thousands of machines spread around thousands of diverse geographic locations. Our users do not maintain their own machines, we do it all remotely. So if someone comes along and says "hey, I can do this in one line of perl" we may have to pack up an awful lot of baggage just to get that one camel to take that one step.
Or, we can decide to use the existing infrastructure and tools to write it in ten lines of C++.
Does that mean we would never consider a perl solution? Not at all -- we make these sorts of decisions frequently. But we already know we're an elephant, unable to turn on a dime. That means we know we can only walk down elephant-sized paths. If a mouse says "run over this piece of rope with me and you will quickly get to the other side of the gorge," well, we're still an elephant. We're not running anywhere, much less over a piece of rope. Decisions like these are just much bigger than simply perl vs. C++.
People above were whining that the language shouldn't matter. Well, UML is an implementation-neutral language, which would solve their complaints. Sure, it relies on OO features, but why not? They're testing OO concepts. And since that's where both acadamia and industry are leading today's students, why not teach it to them first?
Quite frankly, if you can get the concepts down in UML you've done the hard part. Making the transition from UML to code is then the job of a code generator.
There's a real question: why don't the Intro to Comp Sci type courses teach in UML? Get kids thinking in objects, rather than struggle with hairy syntax issues.
I suppose that had something to do with my score then...
#include <disclaimer> // that was a joke!
Perhaps the bubble would have collapsed more slowly if it had been a series of smaller companies acquiring other smaller firms. But I think it was going to collapse regardless -- it's just a matter of who saw it coming first, and who could best take advantage of the situation.
Don't anthropomorphize your food. It doesn't like it.
Don't be too sure. Managers seem to always end up acting like managers, regardless of whether they're administering a school or running a car dealership. Like programmers, there are good ones and bad ones. And like programming, bad managers blindly follow management trends -- firing the bottom 10% because it worked for Jack at GM; giving attaboy awards makes up for a total lack of cash bonuses, etc.
Just be thankful your professors didn't beg you to give them a 7 at the end of the semester, or hand you a pathetic "if you feel you can't give me a seven, please come talk to me about it before you turn in your survey."
Anyway, I think they assigned the winner of the Hades Ice Scuplture competition to get back to me. But I hear he's busy working as a coach for one of the stunt-pig teams...
The common name for this is the "duress code". Most alarm systems provide for a code that triggers a silent alarm while appearing to deactivate.
And before you run out to patent this, I learned about them in the early 1980s, so the patents have probably already expired.
So THAT'S what CCR's been singing all these years! Thanks, dude!
Y'know, that implies that the most secure password of all has got to be the original lyrics to "Louie, Louie". Nobody's been able to guess them for over forty years, and it's not for lack of trying.
Here are some points to ponder regarding something you "are":
And here are some points regarding something you can have - a smart card:
What do these points mean? Biometric information can be copied at many levels, and presented as "real" data at many points in the security perimeter. A fake fingerprint can be made for under $20 and almost no skill is required. Mallory can hold up a photo in front of an unattended camera to convince a system that Alice is at the reader. A "fake" retinal scanner could be placed in front of a "real" retinal scanner at the bank's Eye-ATM machine ('retinal skimming' just sounds evil.) Or, the thumbprint reader at the Bada Bing's cash register might actually be a thumbprint/DNA recorder manned by Tony Soprano. You, the biometric holder, have no way of validating every reader. And in every case, a compromised biometric is of negative value to the owner. If your thumbprint data is stolen, copies of it can be made forever and you can never get it back. Your own thumbprint is now a liability, not an asset.
In contrast, a smart card does not divulge its secrets willingly. Smart cards do not require trust in the card reader nor in the merchant. The merchant issues a challenge to the card, collects the response, and ships both the challenge and response to the bank. The bank records the challenge, validates that the challenge was never authorized before, and then validates that the response matched the challenge according to the secret rules the bank placed inside the card at the time of issuance. If a card is lost, the bank marks it lost/stolen and never authorizes it again. If a duplicate challenge is made, the merchant presenting the duplicate can be immediately suspected of fraud.
A smart card is good security, but poor authentication. But a biometric datum is poor security, and not necessarily good authentication.
Except for one little thing: their cards were sucking hind tit in performance to ATI's. Every review showed the Radeons were outshining the nVidia cards in virtually every respect. The people I spoke to had no problems with them. So I bought one, and I've been extrememly happy with it. So happy I bought a second for my son's computer.
nVidia may have the name, they may have the history, but they didn't have the hardware when it came time to buy. And ATI has come a very, very long way in both product and support.
So, now I consider the market to be what it should be: a commodity market, with healthy competition between two strong contenders. And I think that's the best possible market in which to be a consumer.
Your scripts would have to be so smart that they would not give away their presense even when the advertiser's humanconf scheme changes. If they change their advertising, say from "Click the logo of your sports team" to "click the picture of the prettiest cheerleader" but the script keeps clicking the same location (now occupied by a black zone, or of a referee or something that is obviously not a pretty cheerleader) then they'll disallow any pending payments to the web page host claiming that a bot is doing the clicking. They might even bring up "lawyers...mumble...fraud" or send a Cease and Desist letter.
Scripts would have to be smart enough to not make those mistakes, or at least they'd have to be monitored by a human to prevent them from giving themselves away. At that point, why not invest a couple of rupees and let someone else foot the electric bills and bandwidth charges?
This is going to be the best prom ever!"
[I] just don't see them with the innate human emotions that drive a lot of the above `rights' such as the desire for greed, power, freedom, control, etc.
I believe that as AIs become more and more sophisticated that they will start to exhibit what we would consider "anti-social" behavior. Think about it. The most sophisticated AIs we use today are based on neural networks and/or genetic algorithms. The amazing thing about them is they are absolutely goal driven -- a human specifies inputs and a goal, and they "evolve" until they've maximized the goal. The results are frequently surprising. Sometimes, the circuits produced "cheat" -- they've been known to use parasitic capacitance on a chip as the primary capacitor in an oscillator, for example. They don't care if they're not "supposed" to use these stray effects, they just cycle over and over until they achieve their goal.
Humans describe other humans expressing these traits with the words "desire" and "greed". A human focused absolutely 100% on maximizing a goal, without regard to side effects, would be described as sociopathic. Picture such a person being told to drive a car across a desert. They won't care if they drive across rare flowers. They won't stop just because they knocked over a cactus. A normal human would recognize tents or campfires or a clothesline as evidence of habitation, and recognizing it as a campsite they would give it wide berth. A psychopath might derive sick humor from revving his engine as he passes within an inch of the tent. But a sociopath wouldn't even recognize the campsite for what it was, and would simply drive through it. Perhaps if a human was camped out in a camo sleeping bag in tall grasses, they might even drive right over them.
Without education and experience, I think a 100% goal oriented robot would act the same way. I don't see how someone could claim it's not sociopathic behavior just because it came from a robot. So, if education and experience fail to deliver a perfect robot every time, we will actually need robopsychiatrists to diagnose and repair these sociopathic robots. And I really think someone claiming to be a "robopsychiatrist" would have thought through these sorts of situations a bit more carefully.