It's not "abuse" to want to see exactly what people are recording about you.
Perhaps you should improve the technology so actually retrieving information from the system more efficient? It seems to me that this is exactly the same type of operation the owner of the CCTV systems will need to do to track down theft, so that seems like a good idea in any case.
Unless the point is to just scare people with cameras, which means you can simply turn them off and tell the people invoking the DPA that there is no video at all.:)
AIUI, BMI was never intended to be used on individuals but rather to measure the obesity of populations.
The beginning of the Wikipedia article reads thusly:
"The body mass index (BMI), or Quetelet index, is a statistical measure of the weight of a person scaled according to height. As such, it is useful as a population measure only, and is not appropriate for diagnosing individuals. It was invented between 1830 and 1850 by the Belgian polymath Adolphe Quetelet during the course of developing "social physics".
And this is coming from a fairly right-wing kinda guy.
Of course, right-wing guys in the Netherlands may very well support legalized drugs, gay marriage, euthanasia, universal health care, and so on. Just sayin'.:)
The only good reason to worry about where our electricity comes from is for environmental reasons. There is absolutely nothing economically wrong with burning coal for another hundred years or so.
Well, this plan doesn't posit 100% solar until 2100 or so - and that's starting now.
But yes, you're right. The US has plenty of coal, all inside US borders.
In the olden days (like 10+ years ago), if someone wrote a check in someone else's name, it was called "fraud". It is, in fact, a crime where someone steals money from the bank.
At some point, someone changed the vocabulary, and now we call this "identify theft", and so we make the crime against the person who's name was forged. In fact, this person has nothing to do with this crime, and is an innocent bystander. The bank is charged with protecting my assets, and if they fail to do so, they should be liable, just as much as if someone walked into the bank with a gun and took it!
By convincing society at large that the crime is "identity theft" and not "fraud", the corporations, while not solving the problem of fraud, has made it someone else's problem; namely their customers. And the customers accept this, and direct their ire against the criminals, instead of against the company. (Admittedly the criminals are Bad People, so they do deserve to be feared and hated.)
In some ways, it is a stroke of genius by the corporate world. But not one that we should celebrate.:(
Believe it or not, the "huge media coverage" that I've noticed of this thing has only been on Slashdot. Other than that, it's a big name manufacturer, in our world it's huge news.
Really? I just saw it in one of the big Dutch newspapers Saturday:
Looking at Google News shows it in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Independent, the New Zealand Herald, and so on. Googling for specific newspapers shows articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, the Sun, and so on. It's referenced in an article in the Wall Street Journal. This is all outside of the IT press, mind you!
Indeed. I bought my apartment a couple years ago and have been replacing the incandescents with CFL when they burn out. I haven't had a single CFL need replacement yet.
Normally I use OpenOffice.org Writer to edit documents. But I decided to try KWord from KOffice, since it is much faster.
But KWord can't export to PDF (it can use KDE's "print to PDF" option, but my printing is kind of broken when I'm not at home). So I saved in OpenDocument format, and imported into Writer. No love - the formatting is totally broken! I tried to load into AbiWord, but it doesn't understand OpenDocument format at all.
In the end, I saved it as Microsoft Word document - which all 3 programs load and save more-or-less accurately.
Yeah! Or like when Carter lowered the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, and now it's 40 miles per hour! Or like when Linux started using Bitkeeper, and now almost all open-source products use it! Or like how in the Netherlands they tolerate marijuana, and now the entire country is addicted to crack cocaine...
There is a huge difference between the government recording and watching everything you do and a company that you volunteer to use their services if they can watch how you surf their webpages.
In theory, you're right. In practice, you're wrong.
Markets are complicated things, and the choices available to consumers (and to companies) are not simple yes/no decisions about a single aspect of a product or service. In fact, often there is no choice at all other than not using a particular type of product or service at all.
Consider that the power relation between a company and a consumer is not equal. Google has hundreds of millions of customers; they can afford to lose your business. There are not that many companies that provide the same kinds of web services (Yahoo!, Microsoft, surely some others), and by and large they offer similar treatment to users.
In the end, you have more power over the government than over a corporation, at least in the western world, because the government ultimately answers to the people. In many countries the government honestly tries to meet the needs of the people. Companies maximize shareholder interests - usually making money.
The term "intellectual property" also leads to simplistic thinking. - Richard Stallman
We should resist terms like "stealing" when talking about music. The word has a lot of connotation from thousands of years of usage, but it has only been possible to record music for less than two centuries. (You can see RMS's article about intellectual property for more than just the sound-bite).
Another thought, from a recent blog entry I found on Digg:
The purpose of property is to better manage the allocation of scarce resources. Since the resource is limited and not everyone can have it, property rights and property law make complete sense for a civilized society, allowing those with rights to the property to buy, sell and exchange their property. This allows for resources to be efficiently allocated through commerce and the laws of supply and demand. It's a sensible system for the best allocation of scarce resources. However, when it comes to infinite resources, there's simply no need to worry about efficient allocation -- since anyone can have a copy.
Regardless of your thoughts about the value of copyright for music, using the word "stealing" to describe copying music is fundamentally dishonest.
As long as the banks make all members pay for successful phishing, rather than the individual careless customer, it will be a problem.
Individual customers are much less well equipped to stop fraud than banks.
Thankfully many governments realize this. For instance, if your credit card is stolen in the US, your liability is limited by law.
Because of this, banks have come up with fairly effective systems for handling stolen credit cards. If the liability was the customers', these systems would not exist.
"Individual responsibility" sounds good in conservative elections, but it doesn't usually yield the best solutions.
While this may be true, but it still drains the limited energy supply of the planet.
There is a lot of useful coal energy left. I admit 150 to 600 years isn't "forever", but if we can harness it without turning the Earth into Venus it might be worthwhile.
I don't know who will be elected President in '08, but he will be a corrupt (Democrat or Republican) and we'll pay more taxes and lose more freedom.
Paying more taxes would be a good thing. Bush decreased income and massively increased spending. Both of these trends have to be reversed.
Americans have a shitload of money, and way more consumer goods than most places (okay Japan might be an exception), and still complain about their taxes, even though these taxes are significantly less than they need to be for a sustainable government.
If you had read the fucking article, you would have seen that there are IT systems already set up at the White House which do exactly what you describe as so hard: archive all e-mails.
Officials in the Bush administration used other e-mail accounts for official business, either accidentally or intentionally violating White House policy, and not unimportantly, the law.
Addressing the way your post reads, I have noticed "well Clinton was really bad" as a frequent refrain whenever the Bush administration is criticized. I thought Republicans claimed to be better than Democrats? If they're exactly the same, why do Republicans deserve our support? Are you really saying it's okay to destroy official records, because "everybody does it"?
I think the reason this works is that regular people, the people who vote, have no way to know directly whether something is true or not.
If only there was a way to make government more transparent. Perhaps if we could have an archive of the internal communication at the white house, and review it later...
Slashdot Mirror
It's not "abuse" to want to see exactly what people are recording about you.
:)
Perhaps you should improve the technology so actually retrieving information from the system more efficient? It seems to me that this is exactly the same type of operation the owner of the CCTV systems will need to do to track down theft, so that seems like a good idea in any case.
Unless the point is to just scare people with cameras, which means you can simply turn them off and tell the people invoking the DPA that there is no video at all.
Too bad Apple does not believe in DHCPv6.
But really, why not simply use auto-configured addresses?
The beginning of the Wikipedia article reads thusly:
And this is coming from a fairly right-wing kinda guy.
:)
Of course, right-wing guys in the Netherlands may very well support legalized drugs, gay marriage, euthanasia, universal health care, and so on. Just sayin'.
I second this recommendation. I put Debian on mine and now it's totally intuitive. :)
Look at the blog, it seems to be the same photo:
http://www.sweetney.com/001944.html
Or go straight to the photo on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetney/2131448895/
The only good reason to worry about where our electricity comes from is for environmental reasons. There is absolutely nothing economically wrong with burning coal for another hundred years or so.
Well, this plan doesn't posit 100% solar until 2100 or so - and that's starting now.
But yes, you're right. The US has plenty of coal, all inside US borders.
In the olden days (like 10+ years ago), if someone wrote a check in someone else's name, it was called "fraud". It is, in fact, a crime where someone steals money from the bank.
:(
At some point, someone changed the vocabulary, and now we call this "identify theft", and so we make the crime against the person who's name was forged. In fact, this person has nothing to do with this crime, and is an innocent bystander. The bank is charged with protecting my assets, and if they fail to do so, they should be liable, just as much as if someone walked into the bank with a gun and took it!
By convincing society at large that the crime is "identity theft" and not "fraud", the corporations, while not solving the problem of fraud, has made it someone else's problem; namely their customers. And the customers accept this, and direct their ire against the criminals, instead of against the company. (Admittedly the criminals are Bad People, so they do deserve to be feared and hated.)
In some ways, it is a stroke of genius by the corporate world. But not one that we should celebrate.
Believe it or not, the "huge media coverage" that I've noticed of this thing has only been on Slashdot. Other than that, it's a big name manufacturer, in our world it's huge news.
Really? I just saw it in one of the big Dutch newspapers Saturday:
http://www.parool.nl/media/2007/DEC/122907-eeepc.html
Looking at Google News shows it in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Independent, the New Zealand Herald, and so on. Googling for specific newspapers shows articles in the Washington Post, New York Times, the Sun, and so on. It's referenced in an article in the Wall Street Journal. This is all outside of the IT press, mind you!
Indeed. I bought my apartment a couple years ago and have been replacing the incandescents with CFL when they burn out. I haven't had a single CFL need replacement yet.
Who cares how /low/ one's UID is. All that matters was if it was created on the Multia or not
:(
Easy for those of you with a low UID to say.
Lucky bastard...
Normally I use OpenOffice.org Writer to edit documents. But I decided to try KWord from KOffice, since it is much faster.
But KWord can't export to PDF (it can use KDE's "print to PDF" option, but my printing is kind of broken when I'm not at home). So I saved in OpenDocument format, and imported into Writer. No love - the formatting is totally broken! I tried to load into AbiWord, but it doesn't understand OpenDocument format at all.
In the end, I saved it as Microsoft Word document - which all 3 programs load and save more-or-less accurately.
Note that the idea of using fingerprints as forensic evidence is not without problems.
Yeah! Or like when Carter lowered the speed limit to 55 miles per hour, and now it's 40 miles per hour! Or like when Linux started using Bitkeeper, and now almost all open-source products use it! Or like how in the Netherlands they tolerate marijuana, and now the entire country is addicted to crack cocaine...
I think he was joking about the long-established /. karma system, Mr 7-digit ID.
Don't be too hard on him. The humor of us old-timers is often missed on you kids today.
I remember reading about this several years ago. It was an active area of work in the 2001 to 2003 timeframe.
. html
s log-sign-22.txt
You can read an article about it here:
http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200112/log_protection
There is also a draft in the IETF on how to do this in a standard way:
http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-sy
Good stuff.
Run 2.6.16 and quit complaining.
Or, just use whatever your favorite distribution publishes for you.
There is a huge difference between the government recording and watching everything you do and a company that you volunteer to use their services if they can watch how you surf their webpages.
In theory, you're right. In practice, you're wrong.
Markets are complicated things, and the choices available to consumers (and to companies) are not simple yes/no decisions about a single aspect of a product or service. In fact, often there is no choice at all other than not using a particular type of product or service at all.
Consider that the power relation between a company and a consumer is not equal. Google has hundreds of millions of customers; they can afford to lose your business. There are not that many companies that provide the same kinds of web services (Yahoo!, Microsoft, surely some others), and by and large they offer similar treatment to users.
In the end, you have more power over the government than over a corporation, at least in the western world, because the government ultimately answers to the people. In many countries the government honestly tries to meet the needs of the people. Companies maximize shareholder interests - usually making money.
- Richard Stallman
We should resist terms like "stealing" when talking about music. The word has a lot of connotation from thousands of years of usage, but it has only been possible to record music for less than two centuries. (You can see RMS's article about intellectual property for more than just the sound-bite).
Another thought, from a recent blog entry I found on Digg:
Regardless of your thoughts about the value of copyright for music, using the word "stealing" to describe copying music is fundamentally dishonest.As long as the banks make all members pay for successful phishing, rather than the individual careless customer, it will be a problem.
Individual customers are much less well equipped to stop fraud than banks.
Thankfully many governments realize this. For instance, if your credit card is stolen in the US, your liability is limited by law.
Because of this, banks have come up with fairly effective systems for handling stolen credit cards. If the liability was the customers', these systems would not exist.
"Individual responsibility" sounds good in conservative elections, but it doesn't usually yield the best solutions.
As for me being a troll: When does debate end and trolling begin?
Good question.
I was simply pointing out that this "smelled" much like Time Machine, albeit a clumsy, wholly unintuitive version of the underlying technology.
Here, for instance, the trolling begins at the word "clumsy".
While this may be true, but it still drains the limited energy supply of the planet.
There is a lot of useful coal energy left. I admit 150 to 600 years isn't "forever", but if we can harness it without turning the Earth into Venus it might be worthwhile.
I don't know who will be elected President in '08, but he will be a corrupt (Democrat or Republican) and we'll pay more taxes and lose more freedom.
Paying more taxes would be a good thing. Bush decreased income and massively increased spending. Both of these trends have to be reversed.
Americans have a shitload of money, and way more consumer goods than most places (okay Japan might be an exception), and still complain about their taxes, even though these taxes are significantly less than they need to be for a sustainable government.
If you had read the fucking article, you would have seen that there are IT systems already set up at the White House which do exactly what you describe as so hard: archive all e-mails.
Officials in the Bush administration used other e-mail accounts for official business, either accidentally or intentionally violating White House policy, and not unimportantly, the law.
Addressing the way your post reads, I have noticed "well Clinton was really bad" as a frequent refrain whenever the Bush administration is criticized. I thought Republicans claimed to be better than Democrats? If they're exactly the same, why do Republicans deserve our support? Are you really saying it's okay to destroy official records, because "everybody does it"?
I think the reason this works is that regular people, the people who vote, have no way to know directly whether something is true or not.
If only there was a way to make government more transparent. Perhaps if we could have an archive of the internal communication at the white house, and review it later...