Half the people will vote from their web browsers at work, more if the boss makes an announcement: "Hey, take a few minutes after lunch and be sure to log on and vote today."
Our company machines give us a warning every time we sign in: "This machine may be monitored at any time, and all activity may be logged. Don't assume anything you do on company equipment is private." I know that not only do they have such monitoring and logging capability, but it extends to https: surfing as well. It would be a small matter of log correlation to determine which employees voted in a way that agrees with the boss.
Would they? At my place of employment, I expect that while my management probably sees issues differently than I do, they do pride themselves on their ethical practices. I do trust they would not do something as blatantly illegal as attempt to improperly coerce people to vote for a certain candidate. However, where my wife works, let's just say that if if her boss thought he could get away with strong arming them all into voting some way so he could get his taxes cut, he'd set up a voting PC and have everyone gather around to watch each other vote.
Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.
This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it.
My company has made similar incorrect assumptions about coders being "cogs in the machine", and a couple years ago the CIO reorganized our entire shop around the concept of cogs, instead of around products. Software now costs roughly four times to produce than what it cost before, takes roughly four times as long to produce, is of overall much lower quality, and the only thing that keeps any little bits of it afloat are those of us who were effective before the re-org. (Needless to say, that re-org drove a large number of the highly qualified people out.) It's so bad now that the business people are starting to ask "why the hell should we ask you for software? If we really wanted software this crappy, we could save your salaries and just hire a bunch of incompetent contractors ourselves."
All we can do is hang on and hope there's still a few jobs left once the board has figured out what's happened and fires the CIO for gross incompetence. But of course that's highly unlikely, as the CIO has a PhD in Political Maneuvering; that job certainly wasn't granted on the basis of competence of understanding computer systems.
Allowing non-secret voting creates the conditions under which coercion can take place.
How do we know Tony Soprano hasn't threatened everyone in the neighborhood to vote for his candidate? Let's say one of Tony's associates is at the polling place, "observing" the election as his right. If he is watching you vote, he can be sure you voted his way. If you have the "choice" of a secret ballot or a non-secret ballot, he could tell you up front "don't be choosing the secret ballot, I need to see your vote. Or else."
If the voter is not given the choice of non-secrecy, that vote can't be subverted. In a secret ballot, the voter can always make their own free-will choice. And only through enforcing ballot secrecy can the election judges be certain that the vote was impartial.
The reporter is obviously confused about the meaning of 'freedom'. The real problems with online voting have less to do with the technology and more to do with the integrity of the process.
Even if an online system worked perfectly, how do you know that when Joe cast his vote that Frank wasn't standing behind him with a gun in one hand and $100 in the other? You don't.
Now, that's a problem with absentee ballots as well, you might say, and you would be right. But the effective difference is the difficulty of scaling fraud up in the physical world as opposed to scaling up fraud in an online world. I might be a rich gangster and hire 10 thugs to influence 10 votes. But as a crooked employer, I could monitor the voting of thousands of employees, and I'd know exactly who is on the short list to be promoted.
Preventing coercion requires the act of moving a voter into a secluded voting booth, with a truly secret ballot.
The GP makes a pretty strong case for why we shouldn't have government programs to take care of the mentally deficient and provide them with internet access. Eventually some of those morons find their way off Facebook and end up here.
Some insurance policies have specific suicide language in them, barring a claim for a suicide for a policy in force for less than a year, for example. That prevents someone from buying a million dollar policy today and killing themselves tomorrow so their family can pay off their debts.
In a way, I suppose it's like a waiting period for guns: it interferes with you doing something regrettable in a heated response to a bad situation.
Apparently I wasn't clear. I meant how do you hide the damage sustained by the Karma's
This is like any other car-totaling event. You can either sell the scorched bits to a scrap dealer, or perform a complete rebuild.
The friend who got the salvage title on his bike was telling me another tale (FOAFOAF, I know) about a guy who bought a Ferrari that was completely destroyed in a garage fire. There was nothing left of the original car but some seriously fire-damaged frame parts. He paid some large amount ($2000 or so) for the remainders of the frame in order to get the serial number. He then incorporated those damaged bits into a complete rebuild of the car from parts. Because of the serial number and the original frame parts, he was able to sell it as a repaired genuine Ferrari instead of as a kit car, and he got a much higher price for it.
The reason it was notable is that he was investigated by the police when he paid for the salvage title. According to FOAF, the primary buyers of salvage titles on totaled out high-end car frames are chop shops, as they can somehow swap out the serial numbers for those on stolen vehicles to make them appear legitimate. Apparently it's common enough that the insurance agent gave the police photographs of the twisted metal, who also didn't believe that he was actually planning to restore the car.
So in 50 years, if and when (but mostly if) these become "classic" cars, there could be a market for a rebuilt '12. Owning the twisted remains of one of these would allow you to legitimately restore one. But that's assuming there's a future market for rebuilt Karmas, of course, and that's a really big assumption. I suspect all of these will end up going for scrap.
A salvage title, and a LOT of work. A friend of mine just sold a flood-damaged Harley Davidson he rebuilt from the frame up. You can tell from the paperwork that it was destroyed in a flood, but you can no longer tell just from looking at the bike.
And he was committing no fraud: he was very proud of the whole summer's worth of work he put into that bike.
Resistive touch screens work by using pressure to close a thin gap between two transparent membranes, and work regardless of whether you're pressing them with fingers, gloves, pencil erasers, or sausages.
Membrane keys would work and are certainly able to be sealed, but are opaque, fixed, and require their own separate area. A touch screen can reduce the overall size of a device by allowing the buttons to occupy the same area as the display.
But most importantly, a touch screen can easily redefine the buttons to exactly match the current state. Rather than mapping all controls to a generic set of "up / down / select / cancel" buttons, you can match the controls to the type of input. For example, you might use a slider between "loudest beep" and "silent" when in the beep volume state, but a 10 key pad for entering an exact dosage. On a medical device, clarity of meaning may be the most important attribute of the user interface - if it's confusing, or hard to read, or hard to enter, someone could make a mistake and get the dosage wrong.
Agreed. Phone thickness is not the dimension I have a problem with. Length, width, and mass are my most important constraints. The iPhone 3 and 4 is about my ideal size - the iPhone 5 is a bit too long for convenience and comfort. However, the iPhone 4 would certainly benefit from a larger viewable screen area - thinner borders, and using more screen area near the earpiece and home button.
What I'd really rather have than a more massive phone would be a replaceable battery. I'd happily keep a spare battery in a dock at home, another in a dock at work, and a third battery in my backpack. Running low on charge? Change it out, wherever I am. If Apple is so damn concerned about sealing their phones so only Apple dealers can change out the batteries, how about instead providing a suite of expensive accessories I'd happily buy?
If there are enough jurors who don't mind serving, the judge will dismiss those who express the desire to not serve. But if everyone wanted off the case (say it was promising to be a lengthy civil suit that would have kept you all in the courtroom for two months,) he probably wouldn't have let them go so easily.
I like the current logo too, but a temporary change like this is just good fun.
Should it be a Google doodle every single day, or on holidays, or on every/. editor's birthday? No, because that's a different style. Leave that to Google. But once in a great while to celebrate a special occasion (or meaningless milestone), it's fine.
No, the signed keys used in the stuxnet attack were believed to have been stolen by an actual break-it at the factories that made the motor controllers.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around on this one. From the top to the bottom, these guys were thoroughly incompetent. A good admin stepping into the job would have pressed for effective security policies, and balked if they weren't implemented. A competent CISO would have started with them. A competent CEO / CIO should have known they needed a CISO, being a security company after all.
You think "focus testing" would have improved the movies? Jar Jar may have been awful to some people (he never riled me up the way he seemed to bother other people) but I can't think of a better way to make a movie worse than to have a committee of slashdotters approve it. We'd get into year long arguments about whether or not battle droidekars are self balancing, and do they really require legs for stability if they can control their mass distribution for transportation, One author, one vision, make the movie.
I think the problem so many fans had with the prequels is that they forget they were children when they saw the original movies for the first time. Some of us saw them in theaters as younger adults or teenagers, but most saw them on video as younger kids. What was appealing to a 10 year old boy is different than what appeals to a 25 year old man, yet Lucas made all of his movies with that 10 year old boy audience in mind. He didn't "damage the franchise"; you just grew up.
For 35 years, George Lucas has permitted derivative fan-based works to thrive. He's a kid at heart who gains great personal pleasure from seeing so many people embrace his movies and characters.
Disney, on the other hand, is one of the ringleaders of the MPAA, pushing for crap like the DMCA and most noticeably the insane copyright extensions. They're infamous for cracking down on anyone who so much as fingerpaints mouse-ears on a poster of Obama without first licensing said use of mouse-ears. Under a Disney regime, I expect to see any post that so much as mentions a "light saber" as takedown fodder.
As far as extending the franchise, do you really want to watch "The Littlest Sith" or "Sleeping Jedi", or some other straight-to-DVD animated dreck?
You only "suspect" your privacy is at stake? Dude, you should "know" your privacy is completely lost in the cloud. It's in the use agreements you checked "yes" to.
And just in case you doubt it, try a little test. A friend of mine was writing a short story that for some odd reason included a character eating "Spaghetti-O's". My friend is not normally partial to Spaghetti-O's, he does not eat Spaghetti-O's, he does not frequent the Spaghetti-O forums, and as a matter of fact has never really contemplated Spaghetti-O's in any way since childhood. Yet the day after tucking his Word document away in dropbox, he began seeing banner ads for - you guessed it - Spaghetti-O's. So pick a product, any product you don't normally buy, search for, or see ads for, and put it in a Word document in dropbox. See if your advertising shifts. Spaghetti-O's is random enough that it might be a good choice for you, too; or you could try mentioning gender-specific products designed for the opposite gender.
If Chef-Boy-R-Dee can buy a Google Adword for Spaghetti-O's, and can get notifications from "private" documents in the cloud, I suspect the DEA can buy adwords for illicit product names they're interested in. They could even open an on-line store and use adwords to entice people to visit their honeypot.
Earlier this year I asked an FBI agent if technology has made investigating easier or harder, and she immediately said "much easier!" All she has to do is look someone up on Facebook, and it's an up-to-date listing of known associates, complete with photographs. She can find stuff out in seconds that used to take them months of surveillance to piece together, and it doesn't even take a warrant or paperwork. It takes a mouse.
Note that these people did not have any privacy taken away from them. They voluntarily post this info online. It's not really Facebook's fault if the FBI reads the Facebook pages of dumb criminals.
Let's assume for the moment that the study had any scientific basis. (Which is hard to do in this case, where a sample size of two and conclusions that equate to phrenology don't exactly inspire confidence.) It would not be uncommon to publish a gross generalization of the condition in order to not disturb the reader with those particular details. How is it that the details of the abuse would be relevant to your understanding? Would you understand better knowing if the baby had 20 cigarette burns or 50? Cigarette burns or crack pipe burns? Bruises from punching? Broken bones? That's sensationalism, not science, and while it might help sell copies of newspapers to a certain sick segment of our population, it really has no place in the discussion.
Look at it this way: if they claim Extreme Neglect, I expect that the child's medical data is available for someone who needs and can confirm that info, but I would trust that it consists of details I would find disturbing, and that I don't need to know.
I think the real reason to not have an SD card would be that that Google is subtly trying to push consumers into the cloud. Flash drives don't make them extra money. But Google Drives do.
In the USA, all carrier-discounted phones are locked to that carrier, meaning you technically can't use the same phone on a different carrier's network. The phone will complain if it sees the wrong company's SIM card. Supposedly some carriers will unlock your phone once you have met the terms of their contract, but that doesn't seem to be universally true, nor easy to get.
I don't think any of the major US wireless carriers offer discounted monthly rates for buying your phone outright.
I've never been able to get a discount for bringing my own phone to the party. But they do have one advantage. I still have a decent unlocked GSM phone that I carry overseas, and I can buy local SIM cards for much less than the extortionate rates charged by my US carrier for roaming.
You might as well reap the price of discounted phones if your bill is the same rate
Absolutely. I think the value of the discount seems to be in the $200-400 range, so there's a chance this new Nexus will be one of the "free" phone options with a two year contract. If you're the kind of person who always pays your bills on time, and has been with the same carrier for several years, your carrier will probably give you one of these at little-to-no out-of-pocket cost.
And the further simplistic (but still dumb and vulnerable) solution for you might be "two laptops". Only the red laptop connects to the equipment. The other laptop connects to the Internet and lets you read the manuals, docs, slashdot, etc. If you need to download a file, you format a flash drive in the red laptop, insert it into the black laptop and copy the file, then read it back in the red laptop. It's cheap enough, and adds another layer of difficulty. It might not have stopped Stuxnet, but it would have stopped everything else.
But I get that the network connections make these systems far more valuable than isolated systems. If you are working on a municipal water system, having you sit at a desk and remotely connecting in to monitor valves and pumps around the city means you can be effective in dozens of places at once. If you are working in a manufacturing plant, your manufacturing systems can tell your warehouse systems that productivity means you're filling 100 pallets of product per hour today, and your shipping system can schedule the right number of drivers and trucks. Disconnecting is no longer an option in 2012.
The best solution would be to create a test platform that everyone trusts is effective. Prove that you can test security upgrades and guarantee that they won't be bringing the factory down. Get the CEO to sign off on the plan that says "we will test every security patch in this new test system, and install every patch in production within one month." And have billion dollar lawsuits hanging over the vendor's contracts.
It's all very expensive. But how expensive are the vulnerabilities if an attacker does get in?
Even if they could do it, very few ICS admins would switch to it. Most people there are responsible for stability as their most important attribute - and that means running a solution that has proven itself over and over and over again. Related to this concern is downtime: often times these plants are running 24x365 schedules, controlling furnaces that keep ovens full of molten iron from freezing solid, which could destroy the oven. Shutting down a production line takes time and planning to prevent damage, and every minute that line is down, they are not making money.
When there is a credible threat, they look at addressing the threat on an individual basis. Firewalls between the controller and the LAN. Epoxy in the USB ports. A locking cabinet around the CD-ROM drive. But replacing the core of the factory, on an unproven software package, just "in case" a hacker might target them? Not terribly likely.
Slashdot Mirror
"Stuff that matters" has never been more true! I applaud your nerve in innovating with this prosthetic device, as well as your accomplishment!
And I have to ask: when you were climbing, did your leg make the ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta sound like Steve Austin's did in the 6 Million Dollar Man show? :-)
Half the people will vote from their web browsers at work, more if the boss makes an announcement: "Hey, take a few minutes after lunch and be sure to log on and vote today."
Our company machines give us a warning every time we sign in: "This machine may be monitored at any time, and all activity may be logged. Don't assume anything you do on company equipment is private." I know that not only do they have such monitoring and logging capability, but it extends to https: surfing as well. It would be a small matter of log correlation to determine which employees voted in a way that agrees with the boss.
Would they? At my place of employment, I expect that while my management probably sees issues differently than I do, they do pride themselves on their ethical practices. I do trust they would not do something as blatantly illegal as attempt to improperly coerce people to vote for a certain candidate. However, where my wife works, let's just say that if if her boss thought he could get away with strong arming them all into voting some way so he could get his taxes cut, he'd set up a voting PC and have everyone gather around to watch each other vote.
Turns out they really needed somebody around who knows how the systems work. And who better than the ones who wrote them. The serious downside to this is that all the shortsightedness and 'people as widgets' thinking is leaving behind no next generation to take over where I leave off.
This stupidity will not end until people stop being rewarded for it.
My company has made similar incorrect assumptions about coders being "cogs in the machine", and a couple years ago the CIO reorganized our entire shop around the concept of cogs, instead of around products. Software now costs roughly four times to produce than what it cost before, takes roughly four times as long to produce, is of overall much lower quality, and the only thing that keeps any little bits of it afloat are those of us who were effective before the re-org. (Needless to say, that re-org drove a large number of the highly qualified people out.) It's so bad now that the business people are starting to ask "why the hell should we ask you for software? If we really wanted software this crappy, we could save your salaries and just hire a bunch of incompetent contractors ourselves."
All we can do is hang on and hope there's still a few jobs left once the board has figured out what's happened and fires the CIO for gross incompetence. But of course that's highly unlikely, as the CIO has a PhD in Political Maneuvering; that job certainly wasn't granted on the basis of competence of understanding computer systems.
Allowing non-secret voting creates the conditions under which coercion can take place.
How do we know Tony Soprano hasn't threatened everyone in the neighborhood to vote for his candidate? Let's say one of Tony's associates is at the polling place, "observing" the election as his right. If he is watching you vote, he can be sure you voted his way. If you have the "choice" of a secret ballot or a non-secret ballot, he could tell you up front "don't be choosing the secret ballot, I need to see your vote. Or else."
If the voter is not given the choice of non-secrecy, that vote can't be subverted. In a secret ballot, the voter can always make their own free-will choice. And only through enforcing ballot secrecy can the election judges be certain that the vote was impartial.
The reporter is obviously confused about the meaning of 'freedom'. The real problems with online voting have less to do with the technology and more to do with the integrity of the process.
Even if an online system worked perfectly, how do you know that when Joe cast his vote that Frank wasn't standing behind him with a gun in one hand and $100 in the other? You don't.
Now, that's a problem with absentee ballots as well, you might say, and you would be right. But the effective difference is the difficulty of scaling fraud up in the physical world as opposed to scaling up fraud in an online world. I might be a rich gangster and hire 10 thugs to influence 10 votes. But as a crooked employer, I could monitor the voting of thousands of employees, and I'd know exactly who is on the short list to be promoted.
Preventing coercion requires the act of moving a voter into a secluded voting booth, with a truly secret ballot.
Don't feed the troll.
The GP makes a pretty strong case for why we shouldn't have government programs to take care of the mentally deficient and provide them with internet access. Eventually some of those morons find their way off Facebook and end up here.
Do terminally ill witches get to die with dignity too now or do they still get hanged?
No, they are given the dignity of a funeral pyre. It's just that they get preferential seating at the event.
Some insurance policies have specific suicide language in them, barring a claim for a suicide for a policy in force for less than a year, for example. That prevents someone from buying a million dollar policy today and killing themselves tomorrow so their family can pay off their debts.
In a way, I suppose it's like a waiting period for guns: it interferes with you doing something regrettable in a heated response to a bad situation.
Apparently I wasn't clear. I meant how do you hide the damage sustained by the Karma's
This is like any other car-totaling event. You can either sell the scorched bits to a scrap dealer, or perform a complete rebuild.
The friend who got the salvage title on his bike was telling me another tale (FOAFOAF, I know) about a guy who bought a Ferrari that was completely destroyed in a garage fire. There was nothing left of the original car but some seriously fire-damaged frame parts. He paid some large amount ($2000 or so) for the remainders of the frame in order to get the serial number. He then incorporated those damaged bits into a complete rebuild of the car from parts. Because of the serial number and the original frame parts, he was able to sell it as a repaired genuine Ferrari instead of as a kit car, and he got a much higher price for it.
The reason it was notable is that he was investigated by the police when he paid for the salvage title. According to FOAF, the primary buyers of salvage titles on totaled out high-end car frames are chop shops, as they can somehow swap out the serial numbers for those on stolen vehicles to make them appear legitimate. Apparently it's common enough that the insurance agent gave the police photographs of the twisted metal, who also didn't believe that he was actually planning to restore the car.
So in 50 years, if and when (but mostly if) these become "classic" cars, there could be a market for a rebuilt '12. Owning the twisted remains of one of these would allow you to legitimately restore one. But that's assuming there's a future market for rebuilt Karmas, of course, and that's a really big assumption. I suspect all of these will end up going for scrap.
How do you 'hide' the damage these cars have? ;-)
A salvage title, and a LOT of work. A friend of mine just sold a flood-damaged Harley Davidson he rebuilt from the frame up. You can tell from the paperwork that it was destroyed in a flood, but you can no longer tell just from looking at the bike.
And he was committing no fraud: he was very proud of the whole summer's worth of work he put into that bike.
Resistive touch screens work by using pressure to close a thin gap between two transparent membranes, and work regardless of whether you're pressing them with fingers, gloves, pencil erasers, or sausages.
Membrane keys would work and are certainly able to be sealed, but are opaque, fixed, and require their own separate area. A touch screen can reduce the overall size of a device by allowing the buttons to occupy the same area as the display.
But most importantly, a touch screen can easily redefine the buttons to exactly match the current state. Rather than mapping all controls to a generic set of "up / down / select / cancel" buttons, you can match the controls to the type of input. For example, you might use a slider between "loudest beep" and "silent" when in the beep volume state, but a 10 key pad for entering an exact dosage. On a medical device, clarity of meaning may be the most important attribute of the user interface - if it's confusing, or hard to read, or hard to enter, someone could make a mistake and get the dosage wrong.
Agreed. Phone thickness is not the dimension I have a problem with. Length, width, and mass are my most important constraints. The iPhone 3 and 4 is about my ideal size - the iPhone 5 is a bit too long for convenience and comfort. However, the iPhone 4 would certainly benefit from a larger viewable screen area - thinner borders, and using more screen area near the earpiece and home button.
What I'd really rather have than a more massive phone would be a replaceable battery. I'd happily keep a spare battery in a dock at home, another in a dock at work, and a third battery in my backpack. Running low on charge? Change it out, wherever I am. If Apple is so damn concerned about sealing their phones so only Apple dealers can change out the batteries, how about instead providing a suite of expensive accessories I'd happily buy?
If there are enough jurors who don't mind serving, the judge will dismiss those who express the desire to not serve. But if everyone wanted off the case (say it was promising to be a lengthy civil suit that would have kept you all in the courtroom for two months,) he probably wouldn't have let them go so easily.
I like the current logo too, but a temporary change like this is just good fun.
Should it be a Google doodle every single day, or on holidays, or on every /. editor's birthday? No, because that's a different style. Leave that to Google. But once in a great while to celebrate a special occasion (or meaningless milestone), it's fine.
No, the signed keys used in the stuxnet attack were believed to have been stolen by an actual break-it at the factories that made the motor controllers.
I think there's plenty of blame to go around on this one. From the top to the bottom, these guys were thoroughly incompetent. A good admin stepping into the job would have pressed for effective security policies, and balked if they weren't implemented. A competent CISO would have started with them. A competent CEO / CIO should have known they needed a CISO, being a security company after all.
You think "focus testing" would have improved the movies? Jar Jar may have been awful to some people (he never riled me up the way he seemed to bother other people) but I can't think of a better way to make a movie worse than to have a committee of slashdotters approve it. We'd get into year long arguments about whether or not battle droidekars are self balancing, and do they really require legs for stability if they can control their mass distribution for transportation, One author, one vision, make the movie.
I think the problem so many fans had with the prequels is that they forget they were children when they saw the original movies for the first time. Some of us saw them in theaters as younger adults or teenagers, but most saw them on video as younger kids. What was appealing to a 10 year old boy is different than what appeals to a 25 year old man, yet Lucas made all of his movies with that 10 year old boy audience in mind. He didn't "damage the franchise"; you just grew up.
For 35 years, George Lucas has permitted derivative fan-based works to thrive. He's a kid at heart who gains great personal pleasure from seeing so many people embrace his movies and characters.
Disney, on the other hand, is one of the ringleaders of the MPAA, pushing for crap like the DMCA and most noticeably the insane copyright extensions. They're infamous for cracking down on anyone who so much as fingerpaints mouse-ears on a poster of Obama without first licensing said use of mouse-ears. Under a Disney regime, I expect to see any post that so much as mentions a "light saber" as takedown fodder.
As far as extending the franchise, do you really want to watch "The Littlest Sith" or "Sleeping Jedi", or some other straight-to-DVD animated dreck?
You only "suspect" your privacy is at stake? Dude, you should "know" your privacy is completely lost in the cloud. It's in the use agreements you checked "yes" to.
And just in case you doubt it, try a little test. A friend of mine was writing a short story that for some odd reason included a character eating "Spaghetti-O's". My friend is not normally partial to Spaghetti-O's, he does not eat Spaghetti-O's, he does not frequent the Spaghetti-O forums, and as a matter of fact has never really contemplated Spaghetti-O's in any way since childhood. Yet the day after tucking his Word document away in dropbox, he began seeing banner ads for - you guessed it - Spaghetti-O's. So pick a product, any product you don't normally buy, search for, or see ads for, and put it in a Word document in dropbox. See if your advertising shifts. Spaghetti-O's is random enough that it might be a good choice for you, too; or you could try mentioning gender-specific products designed for the opposite gender.
If Chef-Boy-R-Dee can buy a Google Adword for Spaghetti-O's, and can get notifications from "private" documents in the cloud, I suspect the DEA can buy adwords for illicit product names they're interested in. They could even open an on-line store and use adwords to entice people to visit their honeypot.
Earlier this year I asked an FBI agent if technology has made investigating easier or harder, and she immediately said "much easier!" All she has to do is look someone up on Facebook, and it's an up-to-date listing of known associates, complete with photographs. She can find stuff out in seconds that used to take them months of surveillance to piece together, and it doesn't even take a warrant or paperwork. It takes a mouse.
Note that these people did not have any privacy taken away from them. They voluntarily post this info online. It's not really Facebook's fault if the FBI reads the Facebook pages of dumb criminals.
Let's assume for the moment that the study had any scientific basis. (Which is hard to do in this case, where a sample size of two and conclusions that equate to phrenology don't exactly inspire confidence.) It would not be uncommon to publish a gross generalization of the condition in order to not disturb the reader with those particular details. How is it that the details of the abuse would be relevant to your understanding? Would you understand better knowing if the baby had 20 cigarette burns or 50? Cigarette burns or crack pipe burns? Bruises from punching? Broken bones? That's sensationalism, not science, and while it might help sell copies of newspapers to a certain sick segment of our population, it really has no place in the discussion.
Look at it this way: if they claim Extreme Neglect, I expect that the child's medical data is available for someone who needs and can confirm that info, but I would trust that it consists of details I would find disturbing, and that I don't need to know.
I think the real reason to not have an SD card would be that that Google is subtly trying to push consumers into the cloud. Flash drives don't make them extra money. But Google Drives do.
In the USA, all carrier-discounted phones are locked to that carrier, meaning you technically can't use the same phone on a different carrier's network. The phone will complain if it sees the wrong company's SIM card. Supposedly some carriers will unlock your phone once you have met the terms of their contract, but that doesn't seem to be universally true, nor easy to get.
I don't think any of the major US wireless carriers offer discounted monthly rates for buying your phone outright.
I've never been able to get a discount for bringing my own phone to the party. But they do have one advantage. I still have a decent unlocked GSM phone that I carry overseas, and I can buy local SIM cards for much less than the extortionate rates charged by my US carrier for roaming.
You might as well reap the price of discounted phones if your bill is the same rate
Absolutely. I think the value of the discount seems to be in the $200-400 range, so there's a chance this new Nexus will be one of the "free" phone options with a two year contract. If you're the kind of person who always pays your bills on time, and has been with the same carrier for several years, your carrier will probably give you one of these at little-to-no out-of-pocket cost.
And the further simplistic (but still dumb and vulnerable) solution for you might be "two laptops". Only the red laptop connects to the equipment. The other laptop connects to the Internet and lets you read the manuals, docs, slashdot, etc. If you need to download a file, you format a flash drive in the red laptop, insert it into the black laptop and copy the file, then read it back in the red laptop. It's cheap enough, and adds another layer of difficulty. It might not have stopped Stuxnet, but it would have stopped everything else.
But I get that the network connections make these systems far more valuable than isolated systems. If you are working on a municipal water system, having you sit at a desk and remotely connecting in to monitor valves and pumps around the city means you can be effective in dozens of places at once. If you are working in a manufacturing plant, your manufacturing systems can tell your warehouse systems that productivity means you're filling 100 pallets of product per hour today, and your shipping system can schedule the right number of drivers and trucks. Disconnecting is no longer an option in 2012.
The best solution would be to create a test platform that everyone trusts is effective. Prove that you can test security upgrades and guarantee that they won't be bringing the factory down. Get the CEO to sign off on the plan that says "we will test every security patch in this new test system, and install every patch in production within one month." And have billion dollar lawsuits hanging over the vendor's contracts.
It's all very expensive. But how expensive are the vulnerabilities if an attacker does get in?
Even if they could do it, very few ICS admins would switch to it. Most people there are responsible for stability as their most important attribute - and that means running a solution that has proven itself over and over and over again. Related to this concern is downtime: often times these plants are running 24x365 schedules, controlling furnaces that keep ovens full of molten iron from freezing solid, which could destroy the oven. Shutting down a production line takes time and planning to prevent damage, and every minute that line is down, they are not making money.
When there is a credible threat, they look at addressing the threat on an individual basis. Firewalls between the controller and the LAN. Epoxy in the USB ports. A locking cabinet around the CD-ROM drive. But replacing the core of the factory, on an unproven software package, just "in case" a hacker might target them? Not terribly likely.
A lawyer, a priest, a rabbi, and a Nexus 4 prototype walked into a San Francisco bar ....
Stop! I've heard this one before.