...the serial number, well, they could as well write it down--that's what the lady at the local mall does when I pay my groceries with a check...
Does that count as one of the 5 times you've had to use your ID?
...someone who wants to impersonate me for something official needs to be able to fake an ID card--it's plastic now, hence he needs professional equipment for that--,
Something that can print on a plastic card? These devices are available commercially.
...and to get hold of the card's number...
You just handed your name, address, signature, and ID card number to the nice lady at the supermarket, above (assuming that your cheques have your address printed on them).
It's through concern over forgery that we get to the best argument in favour of RFID chips. Harder to forge one of those. Don't want to be tracked every time you step through a doorway? Sorry, if we don't have an RFID, the magic will leak out of the card and the Terrorists Will Win.
The tinfoil wallet is sounding better and better.
You would think after all these times, if people were really against this, they would have voted for someone else (or maybe seceded), wouldn't they ?
The "government is evil" people usually take a pretty dim view of the general electorate as well. They would argue that the people happily voting for the evil government are the same sort of people who install spyware on their computers so that their cursors will look like a monkey.
If you tend to have to flash various kinds of ID to do anything in your daily life, rationalizing your wallet down to one handy card makes sense. Most people don't need identification most of the time, which makes it more likely that the cost of a universal ID card will outweigh its benefit. Even if you do need ID to do various daily things, it makes good security sense to compartmentalize.
But no supporter of these cards will be giving much time to rational arguments. These cards, with RFIDs chirping merrily, will Stop Terrorism.
Just because someone disagrees with homosexuality on principle, doesn't mean they hate anyone.
What principle would that be? The principle of meddling in others' affairs? The principle that two men can't be romantically involved because oh gross which one's the girl!?
Now the homosexuals are saying they are the "good" and that Christians are evil.
Here's a deal: you can both be good. I'll let you out of wearing the shoe on the other foot, being as I'm a soft touch.
All the major religions that sanction marriage (not to mention the fact that one of them invented it)...
Modern marriage is a civil instituion with an optional religious component. If you insist that the religious component is essential, then please consider that some churches are actually in favour of same-sex marriage. Here's a random Christian supporting it.
If this is truly about benefits, then I say eliminate all marriage benefits granted by the government.
Ah, the "toy-throwing" response.
It is really about social acceptance, forced at that.
You're not forced to like anybody: take a pill. Do you get this exercised about inter-racial marriage?
...and should have known the copyrighted work had not been commercially released...
Among other people, this bears on someone distributing incriminating internal documents -- whether memos from a crooked business or the "secret scriptures" of the Cult of Scientology.
Windows doesn't use a single filesystem root, so the concept of "chroot" doesn't apply.
The broader concept is that of putting processes in little restricted-filesystem "jails," which is perfectly applicable to Windows. A process could think that it's dealing with C:\blah when it's actually in C:\Program Files\Applications\Thing\blah. Expanding on the idea, you could expose a CD drive, but keep the DVD burner hidden, and so on. Perhaps you could even hide your Internet connection from a less-than-totally-trusted process that shouldn't need it.
Because then you'd have kids going to school in the dark. As soon as one is hit by a car that's the end of that.
That traffic accidents increase slightly in the week after the switch to summer time was in the news around here.
In terms of health and safety, it might make most sense to avoid making people change when they get up and go to sleep arbitrarily. I, for one, have been feeling like hell this week: "spring forward" sucks.
[irony:] reading "B: UNIX is the only one unrecognizable in its current state." on a green-screen serial terminal via lynx, attached to a UNIX machine.
You are me, and the terminal is a dusty VT220 in your university's library.
its not the same thing at all; html is an open format
The format is irrelevant; the point is that you're sending something that's not plain text. As the person to whom you responded points out, this is only okay "...if you absolutely know how your recipient is going to read the message...".
More specifically related to Gmail:
The HTML produced by the Gmail editor is rather hard to read, especially since it lacks whitespace.
It may also be more likely to trigger anti-spam rules, just by nature of being HTML.
The next obvious step is adding a new CA with the malware. So, https://www.bankofamerica.com would work just fine, with NO evidence whatsoever of any wrongdoing.
The little padlock has always been a rather weak bit of UI thinking. From the start, EVIL.COM could get a certificate confirming that they were EVIL.COM, and then put up a fake bank login screen. Look, a padlock! You must be safe.
Then it turned out that Verisign would happily issue certificates to THEB4NK.COM, or even less noticeable internationalized domain look-alikes. An untrustworthy CA is trusted.
If as you suggest it is possible to add trusted CAs to the browser's list (and in the case of Windows, this could go for the whole OS), actually verifying a certificate is going to be beyond the capacity of most regular users.
Does the address bar seem to show the right URL?
Is the padlock closed?
Do the certificate details seem to describe the correct organization?
Does the CA seem legitimate (and of course, by analogy with the URL-faking tricks we're looking for in step 1, it could be "VERlSlGN" or "CLICK YES")?
Three quarters of those questions ask if something "seems" correct -- there's a great deal of subjective judgement involved in verifying this sort of thing, and we all know how terrible many users are at making these sorts of judgements.
And it's not even a complete list.
Of course, if you're going through all that trouble, just install a keylogger and be done with it.
Don't forget to sign it with a certificate from your spurious CA: you've told Windows to trust your evil CA for code signing, surely?
Your interpretation of history in light of Paperclip is interesting, and reminds us of the depths which spy types are willing to plumb, but this list of plane crashes is silly. You're one paranoid step away from claiming that Bush hired bin Laden to rub out John O'Neill (whoever he is).
And I don't know what the "family tree" is meant to demonstrate in this context, beyond your willingness to stretch a point all the way to invisibility. Since The Conspiracy is everywhere, everything is evidence of The Conspiracy? Surely we can work the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in here, somehow.
Now that is remarkably weak and stupid. Parliament should be able to make up its own mind, and if it believes the bill is unconstitutional or simply stupid, simply reject it.
It's more a matter of wanting to ensure that the proposed law won't be struck down as unconstitutional shortly after it's passed.
After all, parliament is supposed to be the democratically elected and legitimated law making institution.
The courts are responsible for interpreting the law and determining if it violates the constitution, should anyone challenge a law on that basis.
Humankind will not terminate their economic development for the sake of a hypothesis.
How is polluting less, or at least differently, going to "terminate their economic development"? Isn't rising to a technical challenge something that our brilliant global economy is supposed to be able to manage, what with Innovation and Freedom and all that?
This reassuring statement of academic credentials appears in the article:
Researchers from Princeton -- where Einstein spent much of his career...
Well, then, they must be geniuses. In a way, the whole project is an exercise in name-dropping. "I was consulting my random data just the other day, concerning $FAMOUS_THING...".
I wonder if they check to make sure that there is a significant absence of spikes during periods of time that do not correspond to "major events". It seems to me that we're hearing about half an experiment...
... Zack's entire message is bounced back within the following email:
From: Autoresponder@domain.com
To: Zack@anotherdomain.com ...
Don't you see? Spammers forge sender addresses all the time. If you get your autoresponder to write to this forged address, you're just spamming an innnocent third party.
This is exactly like those damned "helpful" virus warnings that talk about you sending a virus you don't have to a person you don't know from a DSL IP in Brazil.
Plus the usual challenge-response objections. The flame-form posted above has it right.
The basic assertion here is that there will be a rise of the Application Service Provider that will take the responsibility for application and OS purchase decisions away from the individual and give it to the ASP.
The company, we are to assume, is going to be smarter than the individual and will avoid Microsoft products. But this assumption is silly. Large organizations have already rushed into the arms of Microsoft, buying in to Windows, Office, Active Directory, Exchange, and IIS.
Centralizing the market for applications and operating systems may lead to fewer sales, but each will be thousands of times more lucrative. While this will surely attract plenty of vendors, we have no grounds yet to assume that Microsoft won't come out on top -- if only by buying out whoever seems to be leading out of the gate.
Koyaanisqatsi (1983) is really groovy. There's plenty of beautiful time-lapse and slow-motion landscape and cityscape stuff. The score is by Philip Glass -- decide how you feel about that, and that'll determine whether you'll want to watch these movies.
Powaqqatsi (1988) is basically more of the same. There are more people in it. Not quite so novel, so less compelling, maybe. Also scored by Philip Glass.
Naqoyqatsi (2002) is crap. It's a bunch of stock footage that we've seen before interspersed with some uninteresting computer imagery. Glass's score is utterly pedestrian.
I can't express enough how much of a half-assed disappointment Naqoyqatsi is. The supposed theme of all three movies is Good Nature vs. Evil Inhuman Technology. You don't really notice in the first two; the third beats you over the head with it.
I do endorse Koyaanisqatsi: it's majestic and absorbing. The others are not "must-see" material.
Finally, the interface leaves a lot to be desired. The layout is cluttered and junky now whereas it was clean and simple before.
Indeed. Their "pretty parsing" is buggy, and, even if it did work properly, what's wrong with reading a Usenet post in fixed-column text the way God intended?
As it is, even basic, well-formatted posts look bad.
Threading seems to be worse than ever
In the default view, it's completely broken. It's obvious that they're just using the Gmail presentation model without any understanding of how complicated Usenet threads can be.
There are exactly two implementations of threading with which I am entirely comfortable. There's the method used by trn, which I believe actually involved References:, and there's the "nested" format here on Slashdot.
I am picky about the look and feel of threading, but the Groups Beta is just terrible.
Re:Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
(it was too stressful with the thread of aids)
News from the future: incidence of all other STDs skyrockets.
Of course, seeing as language is driven by usage, is it really that much of a deal?
Dangling participles are not a purely stylistic problem: they cause a sentence to have a different meaning than the one that the author intended. Consider: "Strung out on speed, the police officer repeatedly tazered the suspect." Who's on drugs, the cops or the robbers?
Slashdot Mirror
Does that count as one of the 5 times you've had to use your ID?
Something that can print on a plastic card? These devices are available commercially.
You just handed your name, address, signature, and ID card number to the nice lady at the supermarket, above (assuming that your cheques have your address printed on them).
It's through concern over forgery that we get to the best argument in favour of RFID chips. Harder to forge one of those. Don't want to be tracked every time you step through a doorway? Sorry, if we don't have an RFID, the magic will leak out of the card and the Terrorists Will Win.
The tinfoil wallet is sounding better and better.
The "government is evil" people usually take a pretty dim view of the general electorate as well. They would argue that the people happily voting for the evil government are the same sort of people who install spyware on their computers so that their cursors will look like a monkey.
If you tend to have to flash various kinds of ID to do anything in your daily life, rationalizing your wallet down to one handy card makes sense. Most people don't need identification most of the time, which makes it more likely that the cost of a universal ID card will outweigh its benefit. Even if you do need ID to do various daily things, it makes good security sense to compartmentalize.
But no supporter of these cards will be giving much time to rational arguments. These cards, with RFIDs chirping merrily, will Stop Terrorism.
Because terrorists aren't named "Bob".
Ah, but the eccentric rich are an economic factor in business. QED.
Delicious. I moderate your comment as "+1 Papal".
What principle would that be? The principle of meddling in others' affairs? The principle that two men can't be romantically involved because oh gross which one's the girl! ?
Here's a deal: you can both be good. I'll let you out of wearing the shoe on the other foot, being as I'm a soft touch.
Modern marriage is a civil instituion with an optional religious component. If you insist that the religious component is essential, then please consider that some churches are actually in favour of same-sex marriage. Here's a random Christian supporting it.
Ah, the "toy-throwing" response.
You're not forced to like anybody: take a pill. Do you get this exercised about inter-racial marriage?
Among other people, this bears on someone distributing incriminating internal documents -- whether memos from a crooked business or the "secret scriptures" of the Cult of Scientology.
The broader concept is that of putting processes in little restricted-filesystem "jails," which is perfectly applicable to Windows. A process could think that it's dealing with C:\blah when it's actually in C:\Program Files\Applications\Thing\blah. Expanding on the idea, you could expose a CD drive, but keep the DVD burner hidden, and so on. Perhaps you could even hide your Internet connection from a less-than-totally-trusted process that shouldn't need it.
That traffic accidents increase slightly in the week after the switch to summer time was in the news around here.
In terms of health and safety, it might make most sense to avoid making people change when they get up and go to sleep arbitrarily. I, for one, have been feeling like hell this week: "spring forward" sucks.
You are me, and the terminal is a dusty VT220 in your university's library.
How did you get here from 1997?
The format is irrelevant; the point is that you're sending something that's not plain text. As the person to whom you responded points out, this is only okay "...if you absolutely know how your recipient is going to read the message...".
More specifically related to Gmail:
The little padlock has always been a rather weak bit of UI thinking. From the start, EVIL.COM could get a certificate confirming that they were EVIL.COM, and then put up a fake bank login screen. Look, a padlock! You must be safe.
Then it turned out that Verisign would happily issue certificates to THEB4NK.COM, or even less noticeable internationalized domain look-alikes. An untrustworthy CA is trusted.
If as you suggest it is possible to add trusted CAs to the browser's list (and in the case of Windows, this could go for the whole OS), actually verifying a certificate is going to be beyond the capacity of most regular users.
Three quarters of those questions ask if something "seems" correct -- there's a great deal of subjective judgement involved in verifying this sort of thing, and we all know how terrible many users are at making these sorts of judgements.
And it's not even a complete list.
Don't forget to sign it with a certificate from your spurious CA: you've told Windows to trust your evil CA for code signing, surely?
Your interpretation of history in light of Paperclip is interesting, and reminds us of the depths which spy types are willing to plumb, but this list of plane crashes is silly. You're one paranoid step away from claiming that Bush hired bin Laden to rub out John O'Neill (whoever he is).
And I don't know what the "family tree" is meant to demonstrate in this context, beyond your willingness to stretch a point all the way to invisibility. Since The Conspiracy is everywhere, everything is evidence of The Conspiracy? Surely we can work the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in here, somehow.
It's more a matter of wanting to ensure that the proposed law won't be struck down as unconstitutional shortly after it's passed.
The courts are responsible for interpreting the law and determining if it violates the constitution, should anyone challenge a law on that basis.
How is polluting less, or at least differently, going to "terminate their economic development"? Isn't rising to a technical challenge something that our brilliant global economy is supposed to be able to manage, what with Innovation and Freedom and all that?
This reassuring statement of academic credentials appears in the article:
Well, then, they must be geniuses. In a way, the whole project is an exercise in name-dropping. "I was consulting my random data just the other day, concerning $FAMOUS_THING...".
I wonder if they check to make sure that there is a significant absence of spikes during periods of time that do not correspond to "major events". It seems to me that we're hearing about half an experiment...
Oh, for pity's sake, don't implement this:
Don't you see? Spammers forge sender addresses all the time. If you get your autoresponder to write to this forged address, you're just spamming an innnocent third party.
This is exactly like those damned "helpful" virus warnings that talk about you sending a virus you don't have to a person you don't know from a DSL IP in Brazil.
Plus the usual challenge-response objections. The flame-form posted above has it right.
Neither is BPL, so why build that when there are less Rube-Goldberg-esque solutions that don't jam radio?
That is a political motive in the general sense. Politics encompasses more than squabbling between political parties.
I'd call them mentally ill, inasmuch as their behaviour is irrational and interally motivated.
The basic assertion here is that there will be a rise of the Application Service Provider that will take the responsibility for application and OS purchase decisions away from the individual and give it to the ASP.
The company, we are to assume, is going to be smarter than the individual and will avoid Microsoft products. But this assumption is silly. Large organizations have already rushed into the arms of Microsoft, buying in to Windows, Office, Active Directory, Exchange, and IIS.
Centralizing the market for applications and operating systems may lead to fewer sales, but each will be thousands of times more lucrative. While this will surely attract plenty of vendors, we have no grounds yet to assume that Microsoft won't come out on top -- if only by buying out whoever seems to be leading out of the gate.
...and will do no good. Brita filters, as anyone who's read the label knows, are only good for water that is already safe to drink.
Which goes to the point under discussion: send money to those who know what to do with it.
Christ, no, that would hurt their feelings.
If I littered the neighbourhood with my household garbage, the argument that my housekeeping is very efficient wouldn't excuse me, would it?
In my opinion:
I can't express enough how much of a half-assed disappointment Naqoyqatsi is. The supposed theme of all three movies is Good Nature vs. Evil Inhuman Technology. You don't really notice in the first two; the third beats you over the head with it.
I do endorse Koyaanisqatsi: it's majestic and absorbing. The others are not "must-see" material.
Indeed. Their "pretty parsing" is buggy, and, even if it did work properly, what's wrong with reading a Usenet post in fixed-column text the way God intended?
As it is, even basic, well-formatted posts look bad.
In the default view, it's completely broken. It's obvious that they're just using the Gmail presentation model without any understanding of how complicated Usenet threads can be.
There are exactly two implementations of threading with which I am entirely comfortable. There's the method used by trn, which I believe actually involved References:, and there's the "nested" format here on Slashdot.
I am picky about the look and feel of threading, but the Groups Beta is just terrible.
News from the future: incidence of all other STDs skyrockets.
Sigh.
Dangling participles are not a purely stylistic problem: they cause a sentence to have a different meaning than the one that the author intended. Consider: "Strung out on speed, the police officer repeatedly tazered the suspect." Who's on drugs, the cops or the robbers?