if I needed to dial 911, I'd use my mobile phone rather than the POTS/VoIP one, because it's in my pocket all the time, I'd be able to get the call made faster.
Unless you need to dial 911 due to a general local emergency (earthquake, flooding, etc), becuase the cells rapidly get overwhelmed by the number of calls. The attacks on NYC and the Pentagon brought that out in sharp relief: The cell phone system in Manhattan basically shut down from the flood of calls and so on.
It's not clear what sort of emergency would knock out cell phone 911 yet leave the authorities unaware, however.
It shouldn't be hard to find the author, he obviously works at Microsoft.
It's often said, by closed-source vendors, that having open source would lead to superviruses, because anyone could look at the source and design a virus. Run logically the other way, that seems to imply that viruses are written by people with access to the source code -- and, for Windows, who has access?...
No, I don't really believe it, either. But it's fun.:)
Of course, the cost of space missions hasn't gone down like computer hardware did, but still one wonders if a better and more advanced space telescope couldn't be built at the same price a maintenance mission to Hubble would cost.
Since most of the expense is in the launch -- and that would be comparable for a new satellite -- the answer is No. But more importantly, there is a replacement for the Hubble in the pipeline (the James Webb Telescope) but it is not scheduled for launch until 2011. Given the precariousness of NASA's launch capability, politicals will, and funding, one has to regard that as a soft date.
Meanwhile, if they don't service Hubble, it will have to be de-orbited. (Note that even just deorbiting the thing will cost about $300 million, which is around 60% of the cost of the proposed service mission -- not counting any hypothetical replacement.) Unserviced, Hubble will fail in 2007 or 2008. That leaves at least 3 years where there will not be an orbiting telescope with the breadth and coverage afforded by Hubble.
(What's three years? Well, for one thing, we might miss a supernova in the Milky Way. They should happen around once a century but none have been seen in the Milky Way since 1600 or so. It would be almost criminal to have such an event happen during a window when we couldn't observe it from orbit. We could have to wait another few centuries for the next chance.)
OOOOOHHHHH... A whole 8 years of inflation... That could be 1/100th of 1% more in todays dollars...
OK, I'm a child of the late 1970s, so I hear you when you scoff at recent rates of inflation. But according to the inflation calculator, something that cost $1 in 1996 would cost about $1.21 right now. That's not really negligible.
I haven't yet read the 9th circuit ruling that you quoted from, but based on your quote, it seems that the appeals court got it right.
Oh, let's not go nuts. They go on to reason that somehow the Stored Communications Act doesn't apply, either, apparently because the messages are "electronic". So: It's not in transit so Wiretap doesn't apply. And it's electronic, so Stored Communication doesn't apply. Ergo, we're hosed.
When I mail a letter to a friend, at some point it is stored in a bin in the post office and is not actually being moved from my apartment to my friend's.
Indeed. Of course, no one in the world would say that the Wiretap Act gives the government authority to look at your mail while it sits in the Post Office bin. (There exists a Stored Communications Act, which I believe is analogous for postal pieces.) So your real issue is with the application of the Wiretap Act to these messages.
Indeed, even the Appeals Court of the 9th Circuit recognizes the issue:
... In the present case, the difficulty is compounded by the fact that the ECPA was written prior to the advent of the Internet and the World Wide Web. As a result, the existing statutory framework is ill-suited to address modern forms of communication like Konop's secure website."
(as quoted at the Tech Law Journal The Wiretap Act, superseded by the ECPA, is the wrong tool here. The judges saw that. Not only is there a need for Congress to create the right tool, they've already done it.
Just because we don't like a ruling, doesn't mean the ruling is wrong, misapplied, or evil. And it doesn't mean the judges are idiots, Luddites, or puppets. Law evolves. Use your high dudgeon to help it evolve in the right direction.
As far as I know, BMW doesnt give out their car/engine specs to other car repairs other than their own.
Yes. But if you reverse-engineer the specs, you can open up a BMW-servicing shop. Under the DMCA, if they encode any bit of the info, you could be sued. That's the issue here: Not that the company has to help you figure out what to do; it's that you're not allowed to discover it on your own.
plus the recent ruling that the Wiretap Act does not apply to email because email isn't just transmitted=, it's stored on servers
We hear a lot about this case on slashdot, appropriately given its dire implications. But you're being unfair. In a properly functioning system, judges don't make the law; they interpret it. The wiretap law targets intercepted transmissions. Email sitting on a server isn't being transmitted.
A bizarre loophole? Yes. Clearly outside the general conception of surveilliance? Sure. But a bad ruling? No. The ruling is correct -- the law is broken. And judges don't make law.
The people who dropped the ball -- as has so often been the case in high tech -- are the people's representatives. You want your email to be safe? Get Congress to pass an updated "wiretap" law.
Don't let our fancy toys convince you that people are much wiser than our ancestors.
We're not a lot wiser, perhaps, but we are much more capable.
On the other hand: slavery is now universally illegal. (It's not gone, but it's gone underground, and that's still progress.) Maybe we are wiser after all.
The way that Notes allowed everything to be kept in different stacks was something that I haven't seen in a messaging/collaboration system since.
I've never used Notes and don't know what the stack system was. But I've found that the Nelson Email Organizer has done wonders for my ability to keep up with incoming email and to search for old emails. It cross-links all messages and auto-sorts them by sender or other criteria.
Do you resent the taxes you pay that maintain ghetto fire departments, or schools?
Are you kidding? This is slashdot, where we're all wide-swinging libertarians. What the heck is the repressive government doing in the ghettos, anyway? Why shouldn't the inhabitants have the right to burn whatever they want? And if conditions are bad, well, they should have chosen better when selecting their parents.
In case it isn't obvious: {SARCASM} {/SARCASM} tags should be inserted.
They didn't get antiasteroid defense, and neither will we.
Um, they didn't get an antiasteroid defense because, well, they had neither a functioning and comprehensive understanding of celestial mechanics, nor a history of remote sensing, nor a well-developed rocket industry, nor nuclear weapons, nor...
To say that the ancients were duped and that we are being duped in the same way is just simply silly. No matter what the evil overlords of religion had said 3Kyears ago, they could not have delivered an antiasteroid defense. We are not them -- so many people seem to forget that we live in an epoch without parallel in human history. There has never been a scientific, technological, industrial society in human history; don't oversell what you can judge from past capabilities.
If it can't use Iexplore.exe, it creates it's own window.
Not trying to be noodge here, but are you sure it's not using IE? In other words, how many of the problems with IE are in iexplore.exe and how many are buried in the "integrated" code? If Windows Update creates its own window, is this any more secure than using IE?
And if it was the Democrats that were the majority and they had chosen to keep the vote open for an extra 15 minutes would Slashdot care?
I can't speak for this mythical 'Slashdot' person, but I would care, even though I'm pretty strongly a Democrat supporter. I was disgusted with the shenanigans over Torricelli's seat in 2002, for example. But in the past four years -- and I think the trend has been sharply accelerated -- the Republicans have become the party of untrammeled power. From arbitrary mid-census redistricting, to having Homeland Security track state senators, to threatening retaliation over publication of the true Medicare numbers, to outing a CIA operative as an act of political revenge -- the people at the top of the Republican party have shown themselves to have no regard for the rule of law or the play of politics.
I don't think most Republicans feel this way. I suspect in fact that many are dismayed. But just as the leadership of the Democrats fell out of touch with their constituencies in the 1970s, the leadership of the Republicans have dived off into their own planet.
It will likely cost them -- if not this cycle, probably next.
They probably dont have access to a lawyer for fear of communication with their buddies.
The "why" doesn't matter. (BTW, you're wrong. They were denied lawyers because that might give them hope and hope makes the job of the interrogator harder -- the Army said so explicitly.) The detentions are automatically illegitimate because these people had no recourse to any independent authority to challenge their detentions.
Since this combatants arent citizens of an established government they dont have native laws to adhere to.
I'm sure the United Kingdom is glad to hear that it is no longer "an established government". I mean, sure, the royals have gotten out of hand in the press from time to time, but I don't think Britian is "a country in chaos that is under marshal [sic] law".
The way I look at it, if they didnt support terrorist or Saddam (taking innocent lives and depriving basic human rights), they would not be in this situation.
How could you possibly know? They haven't had a hearing or a chance to challenge their detention. If the government has evidence, try them -- that's what free societies do. Free societies don't lock people up without hearings, without lawyers, without communication, and without limit. Only totalitarian societies do that.
If they do turn out to not be affiliated with terror or Saddam, then their [sic] should be hell to pay.
Hmmm. You mean like the five British citizens transferred to the UK and almost immediately released because they were determined to have been innocent bystanders? Yes, I have been truly impressed with the rage and fury of our President that his underlings held innocent people incommunicado for two years... oh, wait, no. He hasn't expressed any such feelings. He's just griped that Blair made him give up these "detainees".
The US started releasing detainees almost immediately
Huh what? It's been more than 2.5 years for most of the detainees (who still number nearly 600). And the US started releasing prisoners only under pressure from allies. In fact, the military began a review process only under the hammer blows of the United States Supreme Court -- one of the most deferential courts in recent history. Thank God that the US military, unlike its commander-in-chief, still believes in civilian control and the rule of law.
I would assume they were sending the innocents home.
And that's the problem: You'd assume it because we all like to think the US plays fair. But the facts don't seem to support that nice faith. We'll leave aside, again, the issue of how do you know they're not "innocent" if they've never had a hearing before competent authority.
This isn't about "them". It isn't about some "foreigners". It's about us. Do we stick with three centuries of the rule of law, that has seen us through crisis external and domestic, that has established a society once revered the world round for its evenhandedness, fair play, justice and freedom? Or do we throw all of that away? Do we abandon the core principles of our civic faith -- checks and balances, the rights of the accused, the reliance on an independent judiciary? Most importantly, do we abandon the rule of law to the whim of one man, no matter how well-intentioned?
Guatanamo shines a harsh light on our commitment to human freedom and the basic beliefs of our society.
While I'll admit that many (even most) fundimentalists you'll meet are drooling morons, there are plenty of ones who are very intelligent and well educated
Making them, in this respect, indistinguishable from the general population.
it's different from $MANAGEMENT_FAD. It's not a fad to understand how time, features, and resources interact.
The surest sign something is $MANAGEMENT_FAD, is a forecful declaration that it isn't, followed by a statement that the fad in question pays attention to, well, what every technique pays attention to.
Um, revenue is distinct from profit. It doesn't help to revenue of $500M is your costs are $750M. After a year of those "good" quarterly numbers, you'd be one billion dollars in the hole.
I couldn't find the report you mention, so maybe it's really profits. But I don't think so -- almost every business story indicates that Xbox is at best a loss-leader.
Ah, the Borg. The greatest disappointment in the Star Trek universe -- and that's saying a lot.
When they first appeared, the Borg were kick-ass. They were the first genuinely alien race encountered by Our Heroes: Not just non-human but with truly unfathomable methods and motivations. And remember that, early on, there was none of this cliche "hive mind" and "alien queen" junk. It was "a collective", yes. But not the dumb 1950s sci fi kind.
Indeed, if you simply assume that the Borg had a very rapid communication protocol, in "Best of Both Worlds" there was nothing to say that they weren't operating "democratically". Maybe the collective had individual minds that consulted nearly-instantaneously, then came to a consensus, which became the position of the collective as a whole.
It's still scary -- but it's creepier than the bug analogy.
Then came Hugh and it all went hell. Then came First Contact and the Borg were ruined for all time. Fie on you, Berman and Piller!
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you need to dial 911 due to a general local emergency (earthquake, flooding, etc), becuase the cells rapidly get overwhelmed by the number of calls. The attacks on NYC and the Pentagon brought that out in sharp relief: The cell phone system in Manhattan basically shut down from the flood of calls and so on.
It's not clear what sort of emergency would knock out cell phone 911 yet leave the authorities unaware, however.
It's often said, by closed-source vendors, that having open source would lead to superviruses, because anyone could look at the source and design a virus. Run logically the other way, that seems to imply that viruses are written by people with access to the source code -- and, for Windows, who has access?...
No, I don't really believe it, either. But it's fun.
Since most of the expense is in the launch -- and that would be comparable for a new satellite -- the answer is No. But more importantly, there is a replacement for the Hubble in the pipeline (the James Webb Telescope) but it is not scheduled for launch until 2011. Given the precariousness of NASA's launch capability, politicals will, and funding, one has to regard that as a soft date.
Meanwhile, if they don't service Hubble, it will have to be de-orbited. (Note that even just deorbiting the thing will cost about $300 million, which is around 60% of the cost of the proposed service mission -- not counting any hypothetical replacement.) Unserviced, Hubble will fail in 2007 or 2008. That leaves at least 3 years where there will not be an orbiting telescope with the breadth and coverage afforded by Hubble.
(What's three years? Well, for one thing, we might miss a supernova in the Milky Way. They should happen around once a century but none have been seen in the Milky Way since 1600 or so. It would be almost criminal to have such an event happen during a window when we couldn't observe it from orbit. We could have to wait another few centuries for the next chance.)
OK, I'm a child of the late 1970s, so I hear you when you scoff at recent rates of inflation. But according to the inflation calculator, something that cost $1 in 1996 would cost about $1.21 right now. That's not really negligible.
OK, I'll admit my cluelessness. How does this show it's fake?
Oh, let's not go nuts. They go on to reason that somehow the Stored Communications Act doesn't apply, either, apparently because the messages are "electronic". So: It's not in transit so Wiretap doesn't apply. And it's electronic, so Stored Communication doesn't apply. Ergo, we're hosed.
But I might be misreading the ruling.
Indeed. Of course, no one in the world would say that the Wiretap Act gives the government authority to look at your mail while it sits in the Post Office bin. (There exists a Stored Communications Act, which I believe is analogous for postal pieces.) So your real issue is with the application of the Wiretap Act to these messages.
Indeed, even the Appeals Court of the 9th Circuit recognizes the issue:
(as quoted at the Tech Law Journal
The Wiretap Act, superseded by the ECPA, is the wrong tool here. The judges saw that. Not only is there a need for Congress to create the right tool, they've already done it.
Just because we don't like a ruling, doesn't mean the ruling is wrong, misapplied, or evil. And it doesn't mean the judges are idiots, Luddites, or puppets. Law evolves. Use your high dudgeon to help it evolve in the right direction.
Yes. But if you reverse-engineer the specs, you can open up a BMW-servicing shop. Under the DMCA, if they encode any bit of the info, you could be sued. That's the issue here: Not that the company has to help you figure out what to do; it's that you're not allowed to discover it on your own.
We hear a lot about this case on slashdot, appropriately given its dire implications. But you're being unfair. In a properly functioning system, judges don't make the law; they interpret it. The wiretap law targets intercepted transmissions. Email sitting on a server isn't being transmitted.
A bizarre loophole? Yes. Clearly outside the general conception of surveilliance? Sure. But a bad ruling? No. The ruling is correct -- the law is broken. And judges don't make law.
The people who dropped the ball -- as has so often been the case in high tech -- are the people's representatives. You want your email to be safe? Get Congress to pass an updated "wiretap" law.
Shouldn't the cost fall upon the company that sought the illegitimate patent? And I mean real cash damages, not just lost potential revenue.
For the same reason people insist on making annoying PowerPoint presentations: Because they can.
We're not a lot wiser, perhaps, but we are much more capable.
On the other hand: slavery is now universally illegal. (It's not gone, but it's gone underground, and that's still progress.) Maybe we are wiser after all.
I realize that I'm old and I don't "get" IM, but I have to tell you: You look pretty silly saying it that way here, too.
I've never used Notes and don't know what the stack system was. But I've found that the Nelson Email Organizer has done wonders for my ability to keep up with incoming email and to search for old emails. It cross-links all messages and auto-sorts them by sender or other criteria.
Are you kidding? This is slashdot, where we're all wide-swinging libertarians. What the heck is the repressive government doing in the ghettos, anyway? Why shouldn't the inhabitants have the right to burn whatever they want? And if conditions are bad, well, they should have chosen better when selecting their parents.
In case it isn't obvious: {SARCASM} {/SARCASM} tags should be inserted.
Um, they didn't get an antiasteroid defense because, well, they had neither a functioning and comprehensive understanding of celestial mechanics, nor a history of remote sensing, nor a well-developed rocket industry, nor nuclear weapons, nor...
To say that the ancients were duped and that we are being duped in the same way is just simply silly. No matter what the evil overlords of religion had said 3Kyears ago, they could not have delivered an antiasteroid defense. We are not them -- so many people seem to forget that we live in an epoch without parallel in human history. There has never been a scientific, technological, industrial society in human history; don't oversell what you can judge from past capabilities.
Not trying to be noodge here, but are you sure it's not using IE? In other words, how many of the problems with IE are in iexplore.exe and how many are buried in the "integrated" code? If Windows Update creates its own window, is this any more secure than using IE?
I can't speak for this mythical 'Slashdot' person, but I would care, even though I'm pretty strongly a Democrat supporter. I was disgusted with the shenanigans over Torricelli's seat in 2002, for example. But in the past four years -- and I think the trend has been sharply accelerated -- the Republicans have become the party of untrammeled power. From arbitrary mid-census redistricting, to having Homeland Security track state senators, to threatening retaliation over publication of the true Medicare numbers, to outing a CIA operative as an act of political revenge -- the people at the top of the Republican party have shown themselves to have no regard for the rule of law or the play of politics.
I don't think most Republicans feel this way. I suspect in fact that many are dismayed. But just as the leadership of the Democrats fell out of touch with their constituencies in the 1970s, the leadership of the Republicans have dived off into their own planet.
It will likely cost them -- if not this cycle, probably next.
The "why" doesn't matter. (BTW, you're wrong. They were denied lawyers because that might give them hope and hope makes the job of the interrogator harder -- the Army said so explicitly.) The detentions are automatically illegitimate because these people had no recourse to any independent authority to challenge their detentions.
I'm sure the United Kingdom is glad to hear that it is no longer "an established government". I mean, sure, the royals have gotten out of hand in the press from time to time, but I don't think Britian is "a country in chaos that is under marshal [sic] law".
How could you possibly know? They haven't had a hearing or a chance to challenge their detention. If the government has evidence, try them -- that's what free societies do. Free societies don't lock people up without hearings, without lawyers, without communication, and without limit. Only totalitarian societies do that.
Hmmm. You mean like the five British citizens transferred to the UK and almost immediately released because they were determined to have been innocent bystanders? Yes, I have been truly impressed with the rage and fury of our President that his underlings held innocent people incommunicado for two years... oh, wait, no. He hasn't expressed any such feelings. He's just griped that Blair made him give up these "detainees".
Huh what? It's been more than 2.5 years for most of the detainees (who still number nearly 600). And the US started releasing prisoners only under pressure from allies. In fact, the military began a review process only under the hammer blows of the United States Supreme Court -- one of the most deferential courts in recent history. Thank God that the US military, unlike its commander-in-chief, still believes in civilian control and the rule of law.
And that's the problem: You'd assume it because we all like to think the US plays fair. But the facts don't seem to support that nice faith. We'll leave aside, again, the issue of how do you know they're not "innocent" if they've never had a hearing before competent authority.
This isn't about "them". It isn't about some "foreigners". It's about us. Do we stick with three centuries of the rule of law, that has seen us through crisis external and domestic, that has established a society once revered the world round for its evenhandedness, fair play, justice and freedom? Or do we throw all of that away? Do we abandon the core principles of our civic faith -- checks and balances, the rights of the accused, the reliance on an independent judiciary? Most importantly, do we abandon the rule of law to the whim of one man, no matter how well-intentioned?
Guatanamo shines a harsh light on our commitment to human freedom and the basic beliefs of our society.
Making them, in this respect, indistinguishable from the general population.
which are, remember, twice the printed rent of the color group. Unless you build houses or hotels.
The surest sign something is $MANAGEMENT_FAD, is a forecful declaration that it isn't, followed by a statement that the fad in question pays attention to, well, what every technique pays attention to.
Um, revenue is distinct from profit. It doesn't help to revenue of $500M is your costs are $750M. After a year of those "good" quarterly numbers, you'd be one billion dollars in the hole.
I couldn't find the report you mention, so maybe it's really profits. But I don't think so -- almost every business story indicates that Xbox is at best a loss-leader.
If the only evidence refuting me is testimony from Deanna "Blindingly Obvious" Troi, I am on firmer ground than I'd thought.
Ah, the Borg. The greatest disappointment in the Star Trek universe -- and that's saying a lot.
When they first appeared, the Borg were kick-ass. They were the first genuinely alien race encountered by Our Heroes: Not just non-human but with truly unfathomable methods and motivations. And remember that, early on, there was none of this cliche "hive mind" and "alien queen" junk. It was "a collective", yes. But not the dumb 1950s sci fi kind.
Indeed, if you simply assume that the Borg had a very rapid communication protocol, in "Best of Both Worlds" there was nothing to say that they weren't operating "democratically". Maybe the collective had individual minds that consulted nearly-instantaneously, then came to a consensus, which became the position of the collective as a whole.
It's still scary -- but it's creepier than the bug analogy.
Then came Hugh and it all went hell. Then came First Contact and the Borg were ruined for all time. Fie on you, Berman and Piller!