So, if it has to read "machine readable data" from in the passport before it can "unlock" the data on the rfid chip, what is the point?
Why not just read the machine readable data like they do now and skip all the security / privacy implications of RFID tags that might be secure now, and might be insecure tomorrow.
I'm sorry, you still don't know why the government wants a passport that is readable from a distance?
Not true. The system is based on Fat Binaries. These allow an executable package to contain code for multiple platforms. Theoretically, you could put versions of the same application for NextStep MC68K, OpenStep, OSX 32, OSX 64, Darwin x86 and several others in the same package and have it look like one program. Too big for you? Run lipo to remove versions you don't need. The whole system is based around this concept, allowing the OS to be fully 64bit on 64bit systems and fully 32bit on 32bit systems. Even XCode allows people on 32bit machines to design and compile applications for both platforms and release the compiled application in fat binary format.
Thats really insensitive of Apple. We live in an age where we still have to call things fat? I think we should rally for them to change this technology to 'ObeseBinary Format'.
such as auto-defragmenting in the background, - I think that was HPFS (OS/2)
the ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously, - Ah, a feature from Unix (hard links)
and the new ad campaign Microsoft is running to get people excited about Windows. - Yes. This is why I use a computer. Not because of Word Processor X, or Graphic Program Y. Its because my freaking OS tells me its sorry it crashed, and will, at my click, send a bug report to the authors. Yes. That is why I use a computer. When will people realize that its not really the OS that makes a computer appealing to someone - its what they can do with it. And making pretty borders around your windows is not productive. I've yet to see a "tricked out" Windows XP system at ANY company. Users just don't bother with that crap. Its a waste of disk space, a waste of IO, and a waste of user time.
Guess you haven't been to Ecuador. Here, where the US dollar is the official currency, you get golden dollar coins as change at least as often as the $1 bills, probably more.
I'm glad our government found somewhere to ship those damn coins. We hate em.
IMO, if they would just come out with a nice thick and chunky coin like the British 1 pound coin, one that has a nice feel when you plop it down on a bar and *looks* like it's worth more than other coins, then there would be no problem getting the public to use it. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to actually happen, though.
I don't know about everyone else, but I hate coins. Coins are a waste of pocket space. They jingle, they weigh down the front of your trousers, and they're heavy. Why would I want to get rid of dollar bills and carry a bunch of blasted coins around?
Better yet, change the standard Business work day in the US to 4-10's instead of the current 5-8's. Having 50 or so days of commuting removed from most of the working stiffs yearly schedules would more significantly reduce energy demands.
Not to mention, we'd have a lot less people on anti-depressants because people could do more of their own thing, with an extra day of their life given back to them.
I remember reading that in the case of "first world" countries, America had the smallest number of vacation days per year on average, and the most people with depression and addiction issues. Hmm.. Correlation there?
(1) the automated vehicle registration and certificate of title system established by the Texas Department of Transportation; and
What does that contain? Right now, there is no way for a would be theif, stalker, or elsewise to walk up to a car, look at your license plate, and read your name, and home address. If they are storing your title info in the thing, then someone with an RFID reader could find out where you live.
Ah, cut me off in traffic huh? (scan....) Mr. Jones, I know where to find you now...
Absolutely. Open source drivers would be a beautiful gift, in this case it's actually more than what is being asked for. Adaptec is asked to release specs on their raid controllers, they chose not to.
I have to jump in here because this is a sore subject for me and the company I work for:
Our move to the 2.6 kernel has been hampered on the fact that a lot of our servers are running Adaptec i2o RAID cards (all of their ZCR stuff is i2o). BUT, its not quite i2o - if it were, it'd work with the i2oblock driver. No, its a Microsoft-i2o type of card - take a standard and tweak it just a little bit. Well, thats great, except the damn thing doesn't work.
The linux i2o driver developers have made progress, but under extremely high loads our test box would still panic.
It is unfortunate that Adaptec doesn't bother making this right - there is so much Linux on the market now that they are hurting themselves finanically because of this. All new servers we implement are Adaptec RAID free. And we're not talking our datacenter - we are an impementor - we sell lots of servers. (you listening there Adaptec??.... Lots...Ouch, that hurts the pocket book huh?)
Which, of course, it doesn't because 600,000 man days of work are now being 'lost' by the employees switching to instead. That 600,000 days was an illusion - the productivity was never there to be had, in some jobs it's impossible for people to work as if they were machines. I including programming in this by the way.
That is a very good arguement. I work for a company that realises this: Most of our staff doesn't take coffee breaks, or real lunchtimes. Instead, we prefer to sit spend half of our lunch hour eating and the other half shooting eachother in video games.
Productivity is higher than if we simply ate our food and went back to work - our minds are refreshed because we took a moment away from critical thinking (IT/Programming job, BTW).
I'm glad I work for a company like that now, and I wish other companies would realize that as well.
There'd be a lot less depressed people in the world if more companies treated employees like humans, rather than bottom lines.
Has everyone completely ignored the whole "double taxation" thing our country's Founders were against? We're getting taxes on INCOME that is being spent and taxed AGAIN. That is double taxation.
Does this sound like exactly the sort of wingnut I'm seeing in Minnesota? I mean, this is a guy who says his law "might apply to anyone who sells a lot" and "If someone buys and sells on eBay on a regular basis as a type of business, then there is a need for regulation." "As a type of business"? No ambiguity there, is there?
I completely disagree with that. If you are selling used items on eBay, the government has already collected taxes on that item at one time. I do not believe in double taxation. I think its a bunch of bull.
This is exactly what the founders of this nation were against - all these freaking taxes! Now, we just roll over and tell the government "Oh, go ahead. Rub my belly and tell me its good for me."
Why should the government be able to tax you repeatedly on the same item? Ever buy a used car? Thats not tax - its extortion!
"D. Reed Freeman, the "Chief Privacy Officer" of Claria Networks (formerly Gator), the creators of the pervasive spyware package GAIN, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee"."
Ahh, good ole' Cronyism. You sure wouldn't want to appoint someone with a legimate, moral background to a government agency.
By that standard, the Justice Department (or almost any other part of government you want to use as an example) is a "special interest" body, and not a political organization.
Most parts of the US government are exactly that - whoever has the most money gets the laws they want. Perfect example: DMCA.
I agree that the UN is the wrong body for this, because the UN is an international political body, and control over any essential element of the Internet on a global scale should be as far removed from political control as possible.
Its not a political body - its a special interest body. If it was a political body, the UN represenatives would be up for election, like their country bound brethern. They're not. They are appointed.
The UN would do well to take over the duties of the IANA and the ICANN. And again this is because it would give poorer nations more just representation in these policies.
For far too long the poorer countries of the world have reaped the benefits from the US in research and development. We've spent more money on R&D in tech and biomed than most countries put together. Representation is not equal unless you're putting in equal contributions. Lets not make the world one big happy communist party by assuming everyone has equal representation. Contribute something, and we'll recognize.
I know someone who got a speeding ticket in the mail but was never pulled over; it turned out that his Fast Lane reciever had signalled that he was speeding.
Then the states really need to come clean and stop lying. "yes, traffic tickets do NOTHING to make the roads safer, all they do Mr. Citizen is give us a way to make more money". And really, I spend more time looking out for cops then I do looking at the damn road because of that crap.
I understand that California needs tax money to keep the roads in good condition, and it makes sense that the people who drive on them should have to pay for them.
What is California's tax? I live in the midwest, where we have winters that FREEZE the ground, crack the pavement, and on top of that we use SALT on the roads. So, we have multiple problems that can happen to the roads because of the environment, not to mention the cost of SALT being sprayed all of the time, plows, etc, and my freaking sales tax is 6%. My County tax is 1%, and my state tax is 3.4% Thats dirt cheap. Guaranteed California is way more expensive to live in. And they're complaining about money problems? Sounds like Enron accounting to me.
A gallon of milk costs me $2.75. Just to give you an idea how cheap it is to live here, and our roads are kept up.
There is no perfect distro. If you rely on the vendor to make sure your box is up to date, then you're not doing your job as an admin. You should be proactive in that.
What is the box used for? Ahh, a database server with connects over ssl? Well, then upgrade your db, upgrade ssl, and upgrade ssh (gotta have some way to admin it). webserver? Same thing applies...
If you're not proactive in upgrading packages from source yourself, you need to find another career. How can a company put faith in you, if all you do is wait for another company to do that work for you? If you're going to do that, you may as well be a Windows admin.
Where did you get the money angle?!? I never once inferred that money or personal gain was a measurement of success. I suspect you have a preconceived notion that management = business ethics, which is confusing the issue.
You're right. I think my preconceived notion of how we're supposed to view success intermingled with yours words when I read them. =)
I've worked for so many people that think their net worth is success, I think my hatred towards that kind of thinking clouded my judgement of your post.
If you want to focus on the pure math or physical sciences then yeah sure, stay a 'geek'. Me, I'd rather have the skills necessary to achieve true greatness and success. "Management" is no more evil or insidious than "fluid dynamics".
Ah, another one who defines greatness and success as a monetary achievement. Thats BS.
I think what the original poster was trying to say, is that he was forced into this role, but would prefer to spend his days "geeking out" to the stuff that got him into the field in the first place.
Yeah, we all want more money, but lets face it. That is not greatness, success or happiness. Happiness is not something your environment can control - ask some surviving POWs. Ask some former slaves. There have been happy individuals in both cases, while in those situations. Happiness is the ability to be content with your station in life. If you constantly want more, you'll never be happy. You'll always want more, and if your "stuff" gets taken away - you're an unhappy person.
We need to focus on meaningful things in life - not materialistic things.
Could you please explain what censorship is taking place here? Other than the obvious removal of illegally distributed content.
If this was to be implemented I don't see why it would only affect corporations and business entities. It would provide extra protection for GPL'd software copyright holders in the event of their copyright being infringed amongst others.
Without trying to get too windy, the reason this infringes on anyone's right, is because copyright was never meant to be like this. Copyright is there to protect the authors from someone else selling their re-produced works for profit. That is not what is currently happening. What is currently happening is our Fair Use rights are being taken away.
We need to look at the larger picture here, rather than just music and videos. This affects all forms of publication. Free access to information is what spawns innovation. It is what drives people to do more, to build upon someone else's idea and make it better.
You need to read Stallman's The Right to Read. Far fetched? Maybe. Possible? Most definitely.
Your pissant little 4000 users total is what significant PHP sites handle each minute! Oooh 14T:) That's only 14000 of the millions of email accounts significant sites handle.
I see you were brave enough to actually post with anonymous coward. Thats nice.
No, PHP would crumble when even 100 of the 4000 users simultaenously click on a scheduling form that produces OVER 500 queries to the database.
I've worked in enterprise healthcare for many years. I've seen quad Xeon boxes running other EMR suites that can't handle 30 users at once.
If you think PHP can't handle your dinky little requirements, you know very little about scaling systems. What, you think the guy's going to run the whole thing on yor mom's Pentium II?
Thats funny. Really. Considering the mutlitudes of clustered machines that are necessary to host that kind of volume does not speak well its scaling ability. It speaks well of a company willing to throw tons of money at something in hardware to make it work.
How many boxes does Hotmail use? Last I heard, it was in excess of 600! Thats not efficient.
When you actually have some gall to post as a real user, AND some credentials to back up your weak ass claims, talk. Until then, enjoy your mom's free room and board.
I had to reply, considering all of the responses I saw around PHP.
Not to slam PHP, it most definitely has its place, but enterprise healthcare is NOT where it belongs.
We provide an ASP model for our clients - approximately 4000 users total. We generate 4-7 Gigs a day of electronic medical records - radiology scans, dictation, transcription, faxes, documents, charts, etc. I for one would NOT trust PHP to that kind of role. We currently have close to 14T of data online for our clients.
Our software suite is entirely web based, hosted on linux based servers. Its not PHP, its not ASP, its not java. I can't speak for java directly, but I know that PHP could not scale that well to serve 4000+ users.
Its a hard market to get into, and if you're on Slashdot asking for advice for this, you really need to do more research - and not on Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
So, if it has to read "machine readable data" from in the passport before it can "unlock" the data on the rfid chip, what is the point?
Why not just read the machine readable data like they do now and skip all the security / privacy implications of RFID tags that might be secure now, and might be insecure tomorrow.
I'm sorry, you still don't know why the government wants a passport that is readable from a distance?
Not true. The system is based on Fat Binaries. These allow an executable package to contain code for multiple platforms. Theoretically, you could put versions of the same application for NextStep MC68K, OpenStep, OSX 32, OSX 64, Darwin x86 and several others in the same package and have it look like one program. Too big for you? Run lipo to remove versions you don't need. The whole system is based around this concept, allowing the OS to be fully 64bit on 64bit systems and fully 32bit on 32bit systems. Even XCode allows people on 32bit machines to design and compile applications for both platforms and release the compiled application in fat binary format.
Thats really insensitive of Apple. We live in an age where we still have to call things fat? I think we should rally for them to change this technology to 'ObeseBinary Format'.
such as auto-defragmenting in the background, - I think that was HPFS (OS/2)
the ability to have files in more than one folder simultaneously, - Ah, a feature from Unix (hard links)
and the new ad campaign Microsoft is running to get people excited about Windows. - Yes. This is why I use a computer. Not because of Word Processor X, or Graphic Program Y. Its because my freaking OS tells me its sorry it crashed, and will, at my click, send a bug report to the authors. Yes. That is why I use a computer. When will people realize that its not really the OS that makes a computer appealing to someone - its what they can do with it. And making pretty borders around your windows is not productive. I've yet to see a "tricked out" Windows XP system at ANY company. Users just don't bother with that crap. Its a waste of disk space, a waste of IO, and a waste of user time.
Guess you haven't been to Ecuador. Here, where the US dollar is the official currency, you get golden dollar coins as change at least as often as the $1 bills, probably more.
I'm glad our government found somewhere to ship those damn coins. We hate em.
IMO, if they would just come out with a nice thick and chunky coin like the British 1 pound coin, one that has a nice feel when you plop it down on a bar and *looks* like it's worth more than other coins, then there would be no problem getting the public to use it. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to actually happen, though.
I don't know about everyone else, but I hate coins. Coins are a waste of pocket space. They jingle, they weigh down the front of your trousers, and they're heavy. Why would I want to get rid of dollar bills and carry a bunch of blasted coins around?
Better yet, change the standard Business work day in the US to 4-10's instead of the current 5-8's.
Having 50 or so days of commuting removed from most of the working stiffs yearly schedules would more significantly reduce energy demands.
Not to mention, we'd have a lot less people on anti-depressants because people could do more of their own thing, with an extra day of their life given back to them.
I remember reading that in the case of "first world" countries, America had the smallest number of vacation days per year on average, and the most people with depression and addiction issues. Hmm.. Correlation there?
This is what worries me:
(1) the automated vehicle registration and certificate of title system established by the Texas Department of Transportation; and
What does that contain? Right now, there is no way for a would be theif, stalker, or elsewise to walk up to a car, look at your license plate, and read your name, and home address. If they are storing your title info in the thing, then someone with an RFID reader could find out where you live.
Ah, cut me off in traffic huh? (scan....) Mr. Jones, I know where to find you now...
Thats the scary situation.
Absolutely. Open source drivers would be a beautiful gift, in this case it's actually more than what is being asked for. Adaptec is asked to release specs on their raid controllers, they chose not to.
I have to jump in here because this is a sore subject for me and the company I work for:
Our move to the 2.6 kernel has been hampered on the fact that a lot of our servers are running Adaptec i2o RAID cards (all of their ZCR stuff is i2o). BUT, its not quite i2o - if it were, it'd work with the i2oblock driver. No, its a Microsoft-i2o type of card - take a standard and tweak it just a little bit. Well, thats great, except the damn thing doesn't work.
The linux i2o driver developers have made progress, but under extremely high loads our test box would still panic.
It is unfortunate that Adaptec doesn't bother making this right - there is so much Linux on the market now that they are hurting themselves finanically because of this. All new servers we implement are Adaptec RAID free. And we're not talking our datacenter - we are an impementor - we sell lots of servers. (you listening there Adaptec??.... Lots...Ouch, that hurts the pocket book huh?)
Which, of course, it doesn't because 600,000 man days of work are now being 'lost' by the employees switching to instead. That 600,000 days was an illusion - the productivity was never there to be had, in some jobs it's impossible for people to work as if they were machines. I including programming in this by the way.
That is a very good arguement. I work for a company that realises this: Most of our staff doesn't take coffee breaks, or real lunchtimes. Instead, we prefer to sit spend half of our lunch hour eating and the other half shooting eachother in video games.
Productivity is higher than if we simply ate our food and went back to work - our minds are refreshed because we took a moment away from critical thinking (IT/Programming job, BTW).
I'm glad I work for a company like that now, and I wish other companies would realize that as well.
There'd be a lot less depressed people in the world if more companies treated employees like humans, rather than bottom lines.
Has everyone completely ignored the whole "double taxation" thing our country's Founders were against? We're getting taxes on INCOME that is being spent and taxed AGAIN. That is double taxation.
Its time for a political uprising.
Does this sound like exactly the sort of wingnut I'm seeing in Minnesota? I mean, this is a guy who says his law "might apply to anyone who sells a lot" and "If someone buys and sells on eBay on a regular basis as a type of business, then there is a need for regulation." "As a type of business"? No ambiguity there, is there?
I completely disagree with that. If you are selling used items on eBay, the government has already collected taxes on that item at one time. I do not believe in double taxation. I think its a bunch of bull.
Taxes
income tax
sales tax
property tax
wheel tax
tobacco tax
alcohol tax
This is exactly what the founders of this nation were against - all these freaking taxes! Now, we just roll over and tell the government "Oh, go ahead. Rub my belly and tell me its good for me."
Why should the government be able to tax you repeatedly on the same item? Ever buy a used car? Thats not tax - its extortion!
"D. Reed Freeman, the "Chief Privacy Officer" of Claria Networks (formerly Gator), the creators of the pervasive spyware package GAIN, has been appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's "Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee"."
Ahh, good ole' Cronyism. You sure wouldn't want to appoint someone with a legimate, moral background to a government agency.
Great, now Microsoft has just read about it, and is currently talking to the Mexican president to outlaw Linux from the country.
By that standard, the Justice Department (or almost any other part of government you want to use as an example) is a "special interest" body, and not a political organization.
Most parts of the US government are exactly that - whoever has the most money gets the laws they want. Perfect example: DMCA.
I agree that the UN is the wrong body for this, because the UN is an international political body, and control over any essential element of the Internet on a global scale should be as far removed from political control as possible.
Its not a political body - its a special interest body. If it was a political body, the UN represenatives would be up for election, like their country bound brethern. They're not. They are appointed.
The UN would do well to take over the duties of the IANA and the ICANN. And again this is because it would give poorer nations more just representation in these policies.
For far too long the poorer countries of the world have reaped the benefits from the US in research and development. We've spent more money on R&D in tech and biomed than most countries put together. Representation is not equal unless you're putting in equal contributions. Lets not make the world one big happy communist party by assuming everyone has equal representation. Contribute something, and we'll recognize.
Ah, perhaps with the UN running this, they can move the new ITU-ICANN division to some US government funded building on US soil, paid for by US taxes.
Yeah, just what we need - one more thing the UN gets for free from the US.
I know someone who got a speeding ticket in the mail but was never pulled over; it turned out that his Fast Lane reciever had signalled that he was speeding.
Then the states really need to come clean and stop lying. "yes, traffic tickets do NOTHING to make the roads safer, all they do Mr. Citizen is give us a way to make more money". And really, I spend more time looking out for cops then I do looking at the damn road because of that crap.
I understand that California needs tax money to keep the roads in good condition, and it makes sense that the people who drive on them should have to pay for them.
What is California's tax? I live in the midwest, where we have winters that FREEZE the ground, crack the pavement, and on top of that we use SALT on the roads.
So, we have multiple problems that can happen to the roads because of the environment, not to mention the cost of SALT being sprayed all of the time, plows, etc, and my freaking sales tax is 6%. My County tax is 1%, and my state tax is 3.4% Thats dirt cheap. Guaranteed California is way more expensive to live in. And they're complaining about money problems? Sounds like Enron accounting to me.
A gallon of milk costs me $2.75. Just to give you an idea how cheap it is to live here, and our roads are kept up.
There is no perfect distro. If you rely on the vendor to make sure your box is up to date, then you're not doing your job as an admin. You should be proactive in that.
What is the box used for? Ahh, a database server with connects over ssl? Well, then upgrade your db, upgrade ssl, and upgrade ssh (gotta have some way to admin it). webserver? Same thing applies...
If you're not proactive in upgrading packages from source yourself, you need to find another career. How can a company put faith in you, if all you do is wait for another company to do that work for you? If you're going to do that, you may as well be a Windows admin.
Where did you get the money angle?!? I never once inferred that money or personal gain was a measurement of success. I suspect you have a preconceived notion that management = business ethics, which is confusing the issue.
You're right. I think my preconceived notion of how we're supposed to view success intermingled with yours words when I read them. =)
I've worked for so many people that think their net worth is success, I think my hatred towards that kind of thinking clouded my judgement of your post.
With apologies... J.
If you want to focus on the pure math or physical sciences then yeah sure, stay a 'geek'. Me, I'd rather have the skills necessary to achieve true greatness and success. "Management" is no more evil or insidious than "fluid dynamics".
Ah, another one who defines greatness and success as a monetary achievement. Thats BS.
I think what the original poster was trying to say, is that he was forced into this role, but would prefer to spend his days "geeking out" to the stuff that got him into the field in the first place.
Yeah, we all want more money, but lets face it. That is not greatness, success or happiness. Happiness is not something your environment can control - ask some surviving POWs. Ask some former slaves. There have been happy individuals in both cases, while in those situations. Happiness is the ability to be content with your station in life. If you constantly want more, you'll never be happy. You'll always want more, and if your "stuff" gets taken away - you're an unhappy person.
We need to focus on meaningful things in life - not materialistic things.
What the @#&^@! do these people do for an income? If he's drawing unemployment, I think we should all go down there and kick his ass.
Could you please explain what censorship is taking place here? Other than the obvious removal of illegally distributed content.
If this was to be implemented I don't see why it would only affect corporations and business entities. It would provide extra protection for GPL'd software copyright holders in the event of their copyright being infringed amongst others.
Without trying to get too windy, the reason this infringes on anyone's right, is because copyright was never meant to be like this. Copyright is there to protect the authors from someone else selling their re-produced works for profit. That is not what is currently happening. What is currently happening is our Fair Use rights are being taken away.
We need to look at the larger picture here, rather than just music and videos. This affects all forms of publication. Free access to information is what spawns innovation. It is what drives people to do more, to build upon someone else's idea and make it better.
You need to read Stallman's The Right to Read. Far fetched? Maybe. Possible? Most definitely.
Your pissant little 4000 users total is what significant PHP sites handle each minute! Oooh 14T :) That's only 14000 of the millions of email accounts significant sites handle.
I see you were brave enough to actually post with anonymous coward. Thats nice.
No, PHP would crumble when even 100 of the 4000 users simultaenously click on a scheduling form that produces OVER 500 queries to the database.
I've worked in enterprise healthcare for many years. I've seen quad Xeon boxes running other EMR suites that can't handle 30 users at once.
If you think PHP can't handle your dinky little requirements, you know very little about scaling systems. What, you think the guy's going to run the whole thing on yor mom's Pentium II?
Thats funny. Really. Considering the mutlitudes of clustered machines that are necessary to host that kind of volume does not speak well its scaling ability. It speaks well of a company willing to throw tons of money at something in hardware to make it work.
How many boxes does Hotmail use? Last I heard, it was in excess of 600! Thats not efficient.
When you actually have some gall to post as a real user, AND some credentials to back up your weak ass claims, talk. Until then, enjoy your mom's free room and board.
I had to reply, considering all of the responses I saw around PHP.
Not to slam PHP, it most definitely has its place, but enterprise healthcare is NOT where it belongs.
We provide an ASP model for our clients - approximately 4000 users total. We generate 4-7 Gigs a day of electronic medical records - radiology scans, dictation, transcription, faxes, documents, charts, etc. I for one would NOT trust PHP to that kind of role. We currently have close to 14T of data online for our clients.
Our software suite is entirely web based, hosted on linux based servers. Its not PHP, its not ASP, its not java. I can't speak for java directly, but I know that PHP could not scale that well to serve 4000+ users.
Its a hard market to get into, and if you're on Slashdot asking for advice for this, you really need to do more research - and not on Slashdot.