If you disagree with recording DNA there's no reason why recording fingerprints before conviction should be acceptable either.
There are a lot of reasons to be concerned.
1) It's easier to plant DNA evidence than it is to plant fingerprints (though it's easier to recreate a fingerprint from a sample than it is to recreate DNA.)
2) DNA gets leaked everywhere. A hair falls out? Some skin cells scrape off? Urine or feces in the toilet? Not only are samples of your DNA everywhere, but this means that thousands of people could be implicated at a crime scene.
3) Because of (2) above, this technology can be used to track anyone in the database. That said, we may not know the path they've taken (unless we're eventually able to date DNA samples in a similar manner to radioactive dating.)
Finally, I thought about statistics. We always here in cases how the DNA evidence shows a 99.9% chance that the person is the guilty party.
The fact that people think like this is a huge problem. Neither DNA nor fingerprints prove guilt. For non-rape cases, at best, they prove that a person was at the scene at some point in their lives. In rape cases, they can prove that the person was party to intercourse, but not whether or not it was consensual.
Ah, let me just say that if 95% of other distros outside of Redmond can manage to perform common tasks (like run their own damn office software) without the use of elevated rights
Thousands of managed systems users who run Office every day think that you're being disingenuous, here.
I'd genuinely like to hear ideas for a fix that Microsoft could provide. How should Microsoft cope with software developers doing bad things like trying to dump files in %SYSTEMROOT%, writing to privileged areas of the registry, or wanting to do privileged things in the process space?
Well, I'd call those families rather than chipsets. There are enough differences in the actual chipsets (within a given family) that the same driver may not be suitable for any two given chipsets.
There are other societal issues to deal with, though. You have to worry about what your kids will say to their teachers, around other people's children, etc.
For example, I don't think that any words should be "bad." Why is "poop" ok to say, but not "shit?" It's asinine. But I'm not about to cuss in front of my kids, because they'll get into trouble if they repeat the words in school. They're not going to watch porn, either, not because I think that sexuality is something to be hidden, but because if they go to a teacher and say, "I saw a pepe on TV!" that teacher's going to call CPS.
The hardware I wanted didn't come with a Linux option. When I can get a laptop with a graphics card capable of gaming and a 1920x1200 resolution screen, then I'll buy a Linux laptop.
Every release of Windows has supported more and more hardware by default, but they're not perfect yet. Relatively recent hardware is probably not going to be supported. Neither the wireless nor the gigabit ethernet on my laptop were supported out of the box--both were supported out of the box by Linux. Vista doesn't support accelerated 3D graphics for my graphics card (nvidia) out of the box (neither does Linux). It was easier to switch to a higher resolution in Windows, incidentally. The integrated webcam, bluetooth, and drivers for the integrated SD card reader go to Linux, as well. I can't think of anything else that was missing in Windows, or that Windows supported better.
Networking is kind of a biggie, though. If your networking isn't supported out of the box, it's going to require even more steps to get finished with your OS install.
You didn't have to go through this ritual. Rather than spend a little time with the right [nirsoft.net] tools [microsoft.com], you decide to scrap it all and start from scratch, only to dump all that and move to Linux?
It's fair to say that I haven't taken quite as much time to learn the inner workings of Windows as I have to learn the inner workings of Linux. Several years ago, I worked tech support and I knew my way around Windows reasonably well, though (a lot of that knowledge has escaped my brain due to lack of use). Firewall software like Symantec and Zone Alarm (the two we had the most trouble with) never seemed to fully uninstall. Symantec at least acknowledges this and provides a separate removal tool which does a decent job. I never found a good way to get rid of everything that Zone Alarm left around. We could reproduce the issues and made bug reports, but never got any responses.
And they were apparently hooks into the networking stack. We could take a clean install of Windows, install Zone Alarm, reboot, apply some specific patches, uninstall Zone Alarm, reboot, and Windows Networking would be completely hosed. Quite frankly, I've not trusted many third-party firewalling solutions since. Unfortunately, Dell bundled some in.
There's also a matter of trust. Any number of hands touched the computer on its way to me. Trojans have come bundled with hardware before, and while it's possible that they also made its way onto the pressed disc, it's less likely.
And all of that belies the ultimate issue--reinstalling shouldn't be this hard, and isn't this hard on Linux, which brings me to...
Something about this story doesn't add up, and I'm quite sure you omitted any problems you've ever had with Linux, both in terms of it's configuration and problem solving, but that's a whole other fish.
Any problems I've "ever had"? That's disingenuous. We're talking about a snapshot of the OS world right now.
Furthermore, I'm talking about a very specific instance of hardware, but generalizing it (since to the best of my knowledge, Windows will not support most new hardware natively). There was a time when Linux hardware detection effectively didn't exist. You had to know your hardware and compile a kernel for it, if you were lucky enough to have (or had enough forethought to purchase) compatible hardware.
Now we have autodetection. I bought hardware known to work with Linux, so when I popped the CD in, almost everything I needed worked right away. I went ahead and used Ubuntu. Wireless worked out of the box (though that's new in 8.10 for this card.) My graphics card required three clicks and my password to get working with Nvidia's drivers, and that method was found with a quick Google search. It didn't require going to Dell's website, searching for my notebook model, downloading the drivers manually, and running the setup program. Remember, I'm talking about ease of setup and use here. I had to download many drivers for Windows--with Ubuntu Linux, I had to download 1, and the OS did most of the work for me at that.
Like it or not, if your solution to any windows problem is "Format and Reinstall", you really don't know what you're doing. Given that your move to Linux was so easy, you were quite capable of learning, you just wanted to blame the OS rather than make the effort.
I don't know that I'm throwing around blame--I'm comparing the experiences. Linux gave a better experience when installing from scratch.
I haven't had crapware on my last two laptops--I buy from Dell's Vostro line, which is their small/medium business line, and they don't put crapware on there.
Good for you. There was unwanted stuff on my computer, and uninstalling never seems to get rid of all of it.
I also think you're full of shit about drivers.
Wow. Really? Full of shit? You can disagree with someone on Slashdot without being a complete ass. I guess the fact that our experiences were different means that I'm "full of shit."
I typed in my service tag. I got 10 different options for Networking, including options for Dell Wireless (which I didn't get) and three different options for Intel Wireless (one of which I did get.) Looking carefully, 6/10 of the downloads apply to me, when you include the useless applications. Under "communication" (strangely separate from Networking) it includes modem drivers and broadband card drivers, neither of which I got with my notebook.
Under chipset, it includes multiple drivers which "apply to" the same device (and they don't appear to be different versions.)
Their driver site may be giving me options only related to my model, but it's definitely giving me options that aren't related to my specific computer.
I just bought a new laptop. I usually keep Windows around for the smattering of programs that won't work in Linux, and for which there is no alternative. Since the new laptop came with Vista, I decided that I'd try it out once and for all and see how bad it was.
To my surprise, I kinda enjoyed it. There were a few glitches, and performance seemed lower than I would have expected (mouse stuttering when the hard drive is spinning, etc.) but overall, it wasn't awful. Frankly, I SSH to other machines to get real work done anyway, and you can SSH from just about any OS.
Then I went through The Ritual.
The Ritual is getting rid of crapware. In the past, I've done this by reinstalling the OS and drivers. And that's when I realized how spoiled I was with Linux. Because while Linux supports the drivers out of the box, with Windows, I had to go out and get them. I had to figure out which drivers were appropriate for my machine (Dell often names them similarly, and you have to have intimate knowledge of the hardware and what it does (including controllers, etc.) to find the appropriate driver on their website.) I then had to install them, one at a time, and each one wanted to reboot afterwards (though I chose not to.)
After a while, I got fed up. I installed Linux on the thing and was done with it. And you know what? The user experience was fantastic. Everything felt smoother and faster in Linux. And I realized once again why I stopped using Windows as my primary OS years ago.
More on topic, though, there seem to be two camps in the Linux world: those who want to make the best OS possible, and those who want to topple Microsoft. A unified Linux seems necessary for the latter, but would probably make the former goal impossible.
It seems like we should be trying for more point-to-point communications, as well as shielding the rest of the universe from our broadcasts. We certainly don't want alien races invading, do we?
It's for the the same reason that we need laws against texting while driving--because idiots don't think about the fact that they're being reckless and think that if there's not a specific law against it, that they can do it.
And that's why analogies fail on Slashdot--everyone tears them apart not for the reasons that they are similar, but for the reasons they are different.
The point is that for some reason, we let software companies get away with remotely disabling the products that they sell to us. We'd never put up with that from other industries. It doesn't matter that software can be perfectly copied--that's not a justification for the behavior.
A particularly clever virus or trojan could even go forth and re-write the BIOS to disable the "security freeze" function you speak of.
A particularly clever virus could encrypt your data secretly, anyway. In fact, it's already been done.
Well-written encryption at the firmware level is a good thing. Unfortunately, I don't agree with a design that doesn't let you perform a low-level format of the drive if you forget the password. My guess, though, is that the eBay comment is not accurate. It probably comes from the fact that people have sold drives containing sensitive information on eBay in the past--with this type of encryption, that will no longer be a problem.
jargon82 set you straight on the purpose of.mobi, so I don't need to address that.
Regarding resolving the names, that's absurd. Everywhere I've found resolves.mobi. Even Verizon does. It's their mailservers which have whitelisted certain TLDs.
For example, I can try to send mail to any address @asdfas8dfajsdfaskdjf.com. This domain currently does not exist. The mail makes it through the SMTP transaction just fine. When I try to send mail to my.mobi address, the SMTP transaction halts with the error that it's invalid. I can do a lookup on that domain name from Verizon's servers and it returns the correct address and MX records. They're doing something bad with their mailservers--something that generally speaking shouldn't be done. There's rarely a good reason to block sending to a domain.
And frankly, I'd block SMTP to it altogether on the grounds that people shouldn't be runnig mail servers
Assumption is what got us into this mess, and the fact that things change and people fail to keep up was kinda my point. Originally,.org was intended exclusively for non-profit organizations,.com was intended exclusively for commercial businesses, and.net was intended exclusively for ISPs. That has, since, changed. Other things change, too, and tying your service (in my case) or the traffic you whitelist (in the example which is relevant to this thread) means that somewhere down the road, you'll start irritating your customers when the rules change.
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I didn't read the entire article, but I did skim it. Did I miss the part where the US would be printing/minting currency under a penny?
I did. They agreed with my statement.
(note that I didn't say that it was the smallest possible pricing amount.)
Cutting off at the cents place isn't arbitrary--it's done because the cent is the smallest unit of currency produced by the US.
You, too!
It seems like a lot of people share similar experiences.
I'll defer to your wisdom in this one.
Yeah, but they stopped handing the bots out around UID 400,000.
But really, my guess is that you only pay attention to UIDs to it when someone mentions them in a comment.
If you disagree with recording DNA there's no reason why recording fingerprints before conviction should be acceptable either.
There are a lot of reasons to be concerned.
1) It's easier to plant DNA evidence than it is to plant fingerprints (though it's easier to recreate a fingerprint from a sample than it is to recreate DNA.)
2) DNA gets leaked everywhere. A hair falls out? Some skin cells scrape off? Urine or feces in the toilet? Not only are samples of your DNA everywhere, but this means that thousands of people could be implicated at a crime scene.
3) Because of (2) above, this technology can be used to track anyone in the database. That said, we may not know the path they've taken (unless we're eventually able to date DNA samples in a similar manner to radioactive dating.)
4) (the biggie) DNA is known to change during one's lifetime. For example: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090116/hl_afp/healthaustraliageneticssugar;_ylt=At8juaZrV2AoHEmOvom1Hj4PLBIF Right now, we just don't know enough about it to guarantee a high accuracy.
Finally, I thought about statistics. We always here in cases how the DNA evidence shows a 99.9% chance that the person is the guilty party.
The fact that people think like this is a huge problem. Neither DNA nor fingerprints prove guilt. For non-rape cases, at best, they prove that a person was at the scene at some point in their lives. In rape cases, they can prove that the person was party to intercourse, but not whether or not it was consensual.
What's a "NO CARRIER" joke?
Ah, let me just say that if 95% of other distros outside of Redmond can manage to perform common tasks (like run their own damn office software) without the use of elevated rights
Thousands of managed systems users who run Office every day think that you're being disingenuous, here.
I'd genuinely like to hear ideas for a fix that Microsoft could provide. How should Microsoft cope with software developers doing bad things like trying to dump files in %SYSTEMROOT%, writing to privileged areas of the registry, or wanting to do privileged things in the process space?
Well, I'd call those families rather than chipsets. There are enough differences in the actual chipsets (within a given family) that the same driver may not be suitable for any two given chipsets.
There are other societal issues to deal with, though. You have to worry about what your kids will say to their teachers, around other people's children, etc.
For example, I don't think that any words should be "bad." Why is "poop" ok to say, but not "shit?" It's asinine. But I'm not about to cuss in front of my kids, because they'll get into trouble if they repeat the words in school. They're not going to watch porn, either, not because I think that sexuality is something to be hidden, but because if they go to a teacher and say, "I saw a pepe on TV!" that teacher's going to call CPS.
The hardware I wanted didn't come with a Linux option. When I can get a laptop with a graphics card capable of gaming and a 1920x1200 resolution screen, then I'll buy a Linux laptop.
Every release of Windows has supported more and more hardware by default, but they're not perfect yet. Relatively recent hardware is probably not going to be supported. Neither the wireless nor the gigabit ethernet on my laptop were supported out of the box--both were supported out of the box by Linux. Vista doesn't support accelerated 3D graphics for my graphics card (nvidia) out of the box (neither does Linux). It was easier to switch to a higher resolution in Windows, incidentally. The integrated webcam, bluetooth, and drivers for the integrated SD card reader go to Linux, as well. I can't think of anything else that was missing in Windows, or that Windows supported better.
Networking is kind of a biggie, though. If your networking isn't supported out of the box, it's going to require even more steps to get finished with your OS install.
You didn't have to go through this ritual. Rather than spend a little time with the right [nirsoft.net] tools [microsoft.com], you decide to scrap it all and start from scratch, only to dump all that and move to Linux?
It's fair to say that I haven't taken quite as much time to learn the inner workings of Windows as I have to learn the inner workings of Linux. Several years ago, I worked tech support and I knew my way around Windows reasonably well, though (a lot of that knowledge has escaped my brain due to lack of use). Firewall software like Symantec and Zone Alarm (the two we had the most trouble with) never seemed to fully uninstall. Symantec at least acknowledges this and provides a separate removal tool which does a decent job. I never found a good way to get rid of everything that Zone Alarm left around. We could reproduce the issues and made bug reports, but never got any responses.
And they were apparently hooks into the networking stack. We could take a clean install of Windows, install Zone Alarm, reboot, apply some specific patches, uninstall Zone Alarm, reboot, and Windows Networking would be completely hosed. Quite frankly, I've not trusted many third-party firewalling solutions since. Unfortunately, Dell bundled some in.
There's also a matter of trust. Any number of hands touched the computer on its way to me. Trojans have come bundled with hardware before, and while it's possible that they also made its way onto the pressed disc, it's less likely.
And all of that belies the ultimate issue--reinstalling shouldn't be this hard, and isn't this hard on Linux, which brings me to...
Something about this story doesn't add up, and I'm quite sure you omitted any problems you've ever had with Linux, both in terms of it's configuration and problem solving, but that's a whole other fish.
Any problems I've "ever had"? That's disingenuous. We're talking about a snapshot of the OS world right now.
Furthermore, I'm talking about a very specific instance of hardware, but generalizing it (since to the best of my knowledge, Windows will not support most new hardware natively). There was a time when Linux hardware detection effectively didn't exist. You had to know your hardware and compile a kernel for it, if you were lucky enough to have (or had enough forethought to purchase) compatible hardware.
Now we have autodetection. I bought hardware known to work with Linux, so when I popped the CD in, almost everything I needed worked right away. I went ahead and used Ubuntu. Wireless worked out of the box (though that's new in 8.10 for this card.) My graphics card required three clicks and my password to get working with Nvidia's drivers, and that method was found with a quick Google search. It didn't require going to Dell's website, searching for my notebook model, downloading the drivers manually, and running the setup program. Remember, I'm talking about ease of setup and use here. I had to download many drivers for Windows--with Ubuntu Linux, I had to download 1, and the OS did most of the work for me at that.
Like it or not, if your solution to any windows problem is "Format and Reinstall", you really don't know what you're doing. Given that your move to Linux was so easy, you were quite capable of learning, you just wanted to blame the OS rather than make the effort.
I don't know that I'm throwing around blame--I'm comparing the experiences. Linux gave a better experience when installing from scratch.
I haven't had crapware on my last two laptops--I buy from Dell's Vostro line, which is their small/medium business line, and they don't put crapware on there.
Good for you. There was unwanted stuff on my computer, and uninstalling never seems to get rid of all of it.
I also think you're full of shit about drivers.
Wow. Really? Full of shit? You can disagree with someone on Slashdot without being a complete ass. I guess the fact that our experiences were different means that I'm "full of shit."
I typed in my service tag. I got 10 different options for Networking, including options for Dell Wireless (which I didn't get) and three different options for Intel Wireless (one of which I did get.) Looking carefully, 6/10 of the downloads apply to me, when you include the useless applications. Under "communication" (strangely separate from Networking) it includes modem drivers and broadband card drivers, neither of which I got with my notebook.
Under chipset, it includes multiple drivers which "apply to" the same device (and they don't appear to be different versions.)
Their driver site may be giving me options only related to my model, but it's definitely giving me options that aren't related to my specific computer.
It was an anecdote, and if you'll notice, I ended up liking Linux more for the very reasons that the person to whom I replied suggested.
Not a troll, sir.
Hell no!
I just bought a new laptop. I usually keep Windows around for the smattering of programs that won't work in Linux, and for which there is no alternative. Since the new laptop came with Vista, I decided that I'd try it out once and for all and see how bad it was.
To my surprise, I kinda enjoyed it. There were a few glitches, and performance seemed lower than I would have expected (mouse stuttering when the hard drive is spinning, etc.) but overall, it wasn't awful. Frankly, I SSH to other machines to get real work done anyway, and you can SSH from just about any OS.
Then I went through The Ritual.
The Ritual is getting rid of crapware. In the past, I've done this by reinstalling the OS and drivers. And that's when I realized how spoiled I was with Linux. Because while Linux supports the drivers out of the box, with Windows, I had to go out and get them. I had to figure out which drivers were appropriate for my machine (Dell often names them similarly, and you have to have intimate knowledge of the hardware and what it does (including controllers, etc.) to find the appropriate driver on their website.) I then had to install them, one at a time, and each one wanted to reboot afterwards (though I chose not to.)
After a while, I got fed up. I installed Linux on the thing and was done with it. And you know what? The user experience was fantastic. Everything felt smoother and faster in Linux. And I realized once again why I stopped using Windows as my primary OS years ago.
More on topic, though, there seem to be two camps in the Linux world: those who want to make the best OS possible, and those who want to topple Microsoft. A unified Linux seems necessary for the latter, but would probably make the former goal impossible.
It seems like we should be trying for more point-to-point communications, as well as shielding the rest of the universe from our broadcasts. We certainly don't want alien races invading, do we?
Laws like this tend to make the news, though. That publicity helps.
It's for the the same reason that we need laws against texting while driving--because idiots don't think about the fact that they're being reckless and think that if there's not a specific law against it, that they can do it.
I'm always concerned with getting trojans from pirated games.
And that's why analogies fail on Slashdot--everyone tears them apart not for the reasons that they are similar, but for the reasons they are different.
The point is that for some reason, we let software companies get away with remotely disabling the products that they sell to us. We'd never put up with that from other industries. It doesn't matter that software can be perfectly copied--that's not a justification for the behavior.
A particularly clever virus or trojan could even go forth and re-write the BIOS to disable the "security freeze" function you speak of.
A particularly clever virus could encrypt your data secretly, anyway. In fact, it's already been done.
Well-written encryption at the firmware level is a good thing. Unfortunately, I don't agree with a design that doesn't let you perform a low-level format of the drive if you forget the password. My guess, though, is that the eBay comment is not accurate. It probably comes from the fact that people have sold drives containing sensitive information on eBay in the past--with this type of encryption, that will no longer be a problem.
jargon82 set you straight on the purpose of .mobi, so I don't need to address that.
Regarding resolving the names, that's absurd. Everywhere I've found resolves .mobi. Even Verizon does. It's their mailservers which have whitelisted certain TLDs.
For example, I can try to send mail to any address @asdfas8dfajsdfaskdjf.com. This domain currently does not exist. The mail makes it through the SMTP transaction just fine. When I try to send mail to my .mobi address, the SMTP transaction halts with the error that it's invalid. I can do a lookup on that domain name from Verizon's servers and it returns the correct address and MX records. They're doing something bad with their mailservers--something that generally speaking shouldn't be done. There's rarely a good reason to block sending to a domain.
And frankly, I'd block SMTP to it altogether on the grounds that people shouldn't be runnig mail servers
Assumption is what got us into this mess, and the fact that things change and people fail to keep up was kinda my point. Originally, .org was intended exclusively for non-profit organizations, .com was intended exclusively for commercial businesses, and .net was intended exclusively for ISPs. That has, since, changed. Other things change, too, and tying your service (in my case) or the traffic you whitelist (in the example which is relevant to this thread) means that somewhere down the road, you'll start irritating your customers when the rules change.