Want to tell my why they can't find the shits that broke into 20 cars in my neighborhood Sat night(and stole my GPS ironically enough)?
I said they have the ability, not necessarily the inclination. If they wanted to devote the resources to it, they'd have a good chance of solving your crime. Perhaps you should have donated some campaign cash to local politicians so that you'd rate higher.
After so much time arguing these sorts of issues on the internet, I don't know why I'm still surprised by those who so readily bend the knee to these proposals. If it catches criminals or furthers the interests of the State, it's automatically good, is your argument. Bull. I'm not ready to hand the government, however beneficient it might presently be, a tool that can be used for oppression or just plain harrassment. Government has the ability to detect crime and apprehend criminals without having to have access to my every movement. My private data (like my whereabouts) belongs to me, and yes, I would deny them access to it.
As to the "What's to prevent someone from removing their box and driving for free?" argument: If they collect it at the fuel station, it would be hard to get fuel with an illegally modded car.
I preduct a thriving industry in GPS spoofers if this thing passes. It wouldn't be that difficult to generate signals that overwhelm the real GPS and make it look like the car is hardly moving. No mods to the in-car system needed.
Seems like a bad idea on many fronts, but most importantly that of privacy. I note that they won't "real time track" you, but what do you want to bet that the data regarding where you've been will be downloaded along with the miles driven? My first suggestion is to require that all Oregon elected officials have to make their GPS data publicly available if this system is instituted. That ought to kill it.
You know, sometimes I read these wonderful stories on slashdot and just have to ask WHY DO YOU MAKE UP SUCH LIES???
Everything I wrote was the truth. Note that I didn't say whether I believed what they told me was accurate or not, I just said that that's what I was told. In the end, it was easier to go throught the lugubrious AOL cancellation process rather than drag it out. 45 minutes on the phone is a better deal than arguing with the card company. As for you: Believe the tale. Or don't. Doesn't much matter either way.
Of course, you admit you are an AOL user, so perhaps you aren't the brightest star in the sky.
Admit? No, I say it. I aver it. I PROCLAIM it: I am a former AOL user. I once designed web sites and had to have an account to make sure that the 60+% of the people who viewed it via AOL actually could. I could cite all my Linux boxxen, EE/CS degrees, 25 years on the internet, yada yada yada, but you know what? I don't have to establish my tech cred with some faceless sorehead who pops off on SlashDot.
150,000 people gave Microsoft their credit card number and agreed to be billed a to-be-decided amount indefinitely, until they figure out how to cancel it [snip]
Does this worry anybody else?
It would me. I remember the conversation I had with my credit card company when I couldn't get through to AOL to cancel my account. They told me that even if I switched card numbers AOL would automatically be transferred with it and continue to bill me. If I cancelled the card, I'd still be liable for ongoing charges due to my 'agreement' with AOL. I finally had to wait on hold for 45 minutes to get through to AOL in person. It's like having the mafia after you. One guess whether MSFT will follow the same model.
The consortium plans to approach the movie industry soon and hopes to complete the standardization of its copy protection code by March, next year, Hioki said.
In other words, "we're still working out how to cripple it in a Hollywood-approved way with DRM."
There is no safe career to be had in any profession today.
I think working for the federal govenment is about as safe as you can get. Sometimes there are 'reductions in force,' but you're elegible for another job in the federal government if you're willing to move. Of course, you have to have a strong stomache for working with incompetents who make just as much as you do but will never be fired. I spend 6 years with the feds before getting fed (no pun intended) up and going out to private industry. I've never regretted it, nor have I suffered for it.
I've been at it for 30+ years now. I'm still doing interesting and innovative work designing custom hardware and writing real-time and communications code for (horrors!) the Windows operating system. I haven't become technically obsolete, ever been laid off (I've quit a few jobs), or had a pay cut. I can't imagine a profession that I'd have liked better.
My one piece of advice for younger people is to save your money and keep current on technology. Ok, that's two pieces. Save your money, keep current on technology, and be on the lookout for new opportunities. Oops, that's three pieces. Save your money, keep current...
Ok, Pythonesque humor aside, do save and invest your money to the maximum extent possible. There's nothing like having a big wad of available money backing you up to give you the courage to take an employment risk or tell your current boss to shove that piece of crap project he wants you to work on. And learn to write well. There are a lot of nearly-incoherent folks in this business, and you'll stand out if you can communicate.
Well eventually one of these times they'll be right. At some point you hit the subatomic level and you're not creating what could be termed transistors any more. Which is not to say that processing power might not keep on doubling at Moore rates, just that Moore's law, which deals with numbers of transistors, comes to an end. Or at the least has to be revised to deal with some other measureable quality.
The melange of a futuristic society with Old West paraphernalia and situations was just too much to allow the suspension of disbelief. I watched 3 episodes and have the rest on my Tivo; I can't bring myself to watch them.
Actually I don't buy Preparation H -- that was just for humor. I wouldn't be ashamed if I did,, but I'd still want someone else getting all the crap mail that you get as soon as you get on someone's radar screen as being interested in a particular type of product. I bought a mail order pellet gun once, and I'm still getting catalogs offering me tracer bullets, blowguns, ninja throwing darts, literature on how to dispose of dead bodies, videos on how to build a.50 caliber machine gun in my garage, etc. My postman must think he's delivering to the head of the Montana Militia.
If you're too psychologically fragile to just turn them down when they ask, just make something up. That's what I've done for all those grocery store discount cards. I picked a name (Smedley Cuthbertson for one) and the address of someone who I dislike (so he can get all the proctologist ads when I buy Preparation H) and that's all it took. I get my discount, that jerk gets the Drug Enforcement Administration wondering why he's buying all that cough syrup, and everybody (except him) is happy.
I'm developing an application that will let people in the field use laser range finding binoculars to determine the position of things of interest. The PDA will receive the binocular readings and GPS data and calculate the position from that. It'll then transmit the location plus some other data back to a central location. The PDA makes a lot more sense than humping several pounds of fragile laptop around in the bush, especially given all the other stuff they have to carry.
Re:Viro when did you lose your way?
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 2
The major problem with these "opt-in" marketing programs is that you might agree to signing up to one list, and then they automatically sell your information to illegal spammers, who pound you with email and won't quit.
Speaking of this, I have an account at Silicon Investor, for which I created an email address known only to them and never revealed on the message boards. I've lately started getting spam sent to that address. Clearly those bastards sold my address. Guess the tech crash has made sellouts of a lot of desperate businesses.
Interesting, and thanks for the info. One thing I keep hoping to hear is that some effort has started to just replace all of the Tivo code with a user-written open-source version containing all the spiffy features that people have been wanting. Don't know how likely that is, but it makes a good fantasy.
I'm not knowledgeable in these areas so perhaps this is off-base, but wouldn't it be possible to disassemble the code that accepts the password and patch it to just accept whatever you enter? That seems like a more fruitful line of attack than attempting to brute-force a password of unknown character set, unknown length, and unknown encoding.
Yeah, I used Kenyatta's name as the starting point, and made a small alteration. Given how young most SlashDotters are and how long ago Kenyatta's name was in the public eye, I thought I'd get away with it. That'll teach me.
Perhaps Microsoft got wind of the hundreds of millions in locked-up foreign exchange that I'm helping a Mr. Jomo Kenwatta get out of the country (for a modest few mill thrown my way for my trouble, of course.) If the Namibians have that kind of dough lying around, they shouldn't be grousing about a few bucks for licenses.
I bought a case with a built-in 400-watt power supply that swamped a nearby AM radio with a buzzsaw noise. Replacing it got rid of the problem. Power supplies aren't that expensive, so save yourself some headaches and buy a good one.
And yet Social Security privatization is bad?
on
Generation Wrecked
·
· Score: 2
Throughout the article, Social Security is described in pessimistic terms, and yet many people continue to resist its privatization. Think how much better off you'd be if the 15% of your wages going there were instead deposited into your 401(k). Not only would you have a better retirement that SS will ever pay you, but you'd have a nest egg to pass to your descendants.
And here is the counter to the obvious objection: The recent stock market plunge shows how risky relying on business to provide retirement income is. Where do you think government is going to get the money to pay you? From those very same businesses through taxation. If business tanks, so does government revenue. And while government can use deficit spending for a while to prop things up, there is no free lunch: ultimately benefits would have to be cut or inflation allowed to erode the real value of the payout. Besides which, we're talking about a very long term accumulation of capital here, so short-term fluctuations in the market are not a threat to the long-term health of a privatized retirement plan. The California Public Employee Retirement System (CALPERS) relies on investment to pay out a generous (several times that of SS) pension to its employees who are exempt from participation in the Social Security system, by the way. Many other states have comparable plans based on investment. If it's good enough for a bunch of state bureaucrats, why isn't it good enough for you?
Sure the ADA has some good effects. But it's also being used as a tool of extortion against small businesses. An attorney will team up with a disabled person (typically someone wheelchair bound) who will go into a business and find something that doesn't accomodate his disability. The attorney then slaps the business with an ADA suit. Under the ADA, the attorney can bill $275 the moment the suit is filed. Most small businesses can't afford to defend themselves and pay up. Offers to remedy the problem are spurned; only cash will do. Clint Eastwood had this happen to him.
Things like this are why there's hostility toward the ADA and those pushing it. It's also why there's a move afoot to amend the ADA to allow businesses 90 days to bring themselves into compliance when there's a complaint, before a suit can be filed. Naturally, the plaintiff's bar thinks this is a bad idea.
Granted, ham radio buffs are a thing of the past (I bet those same geeks were the first people on the internet and the early online services like compuserve in the late 80s)
There are a few of us left. And yes, I was early on the internet. Like about 1975, when it wasn't much more than a few networked university and DoD computers. And I was early on Compuserve as well. I fit your profile to an uncanny degree.
what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else?
One thing is vigilante justice. When someone makes himself an obnoxious ass on a ham band it isn't difficult to find him (transmitter hunting is something some hams do for amusement). Retaliation can range from putting a pin through his coax to more drastic measures.
Slashdot Mirror
I said they have the ability, not necessarily the inclination. If they wanted to devote the resources to it, they'd have a good chance of solving your crime. Perhaps you should have donated some campaign cash to local politicians so that you'd rate higher.
After so much time arguing these sorts of issues on the internet, I don't know why I'm still surprised by those who so readily bend the knee to these proposals. If it catches criminals or furthers the interests of the State, it's automatically good, is your argument. Bull. I'm not ready to hand the government, however beneficient it might presently be, a tool that can be used for oppression or just plain harrassment. Government has the ability to detect crime and apprehend criminals without having to have access to my every movement. My private data (like my whereabouts) belongs to me, and yes, I would deny them access to it.
As to the "What's to prevent someone from removing their box and driving for free?" argument: If they collect it at the fuel station, it would be hard to get fuel with an illegally modded car.
I preduct a thriving industry in GPS spoofers if this thing passes. It wouldn't be that difficult to generate signals that overwhelm the real GPS and make it look like the car is hardly moving. No mods to the in-car system needed.
Seems like a bad idea on many fronts, but most importantly that of privacy. I note that they won't "real time track" you, but what do you want to bet that the data regarding where you've been will be downloaded along with the miles driven? My first suggestion is to require that all Oregon elected officials have to make their GPS data publicly available if this system is instituted. That ought to kill it.
You know, sometimes I read these wonderful stories on slashdot and just have to ask WHY DO YOU MAKE UP SUCH LIES???
Everything I wrote was the truth. Note that I didn't say whether I believed what they told me was accurate or not, I just said that that's what I was told. In the end, it was easier to go throught the lugubrious AOL cancellation process rather than drag it out. 45 minutes on the phone is a better deal than arguing with the card company. As for you: Believe the tale. Or don't. Doesn't much matter either way.
Of course, you admit you are an AOL user, so perhaps you aren't the brightest star in the sky.
Admit? No, I say it. I aver it. I PROCLAIM it: I am a former AOL user. I once designed web sites and had to have an account to make sure that the 60+% of the people who viewed it via AOL actually could. I could cite all my Linux boxxen, EE/CS degrees, 25 years on the internet, yada yada yada, but you know what? I don't have to establish my tech cred with some faceless sorehead who pops off on SlashDot.
On a side note, they are working here in my area to make it legal and acceptable to fire someone beacuse they smoke on OFF hours..
Hmmm. I'd like to see the reaction to a bill that would allow the firing of anyone engaging in unsafe sex in their off hours.
Does this worry anybody else?
It would me. I remember the conversation I had with my credit card company when I couldn't get through to AOL to cancel my account. They told me that even if I switched card numbers AOL would automatically be transferred with it and continue to bill me. If I cancelled the card, I'd still be liable for ongoing charges due to my 'agreement' with AOL. I finally had to wait on hold for 45 minutes to get through to AOL in person. It's like having the mafia after you. One guess whether MSFT will follow the same model.
In other words, "we're still working out how to cripple it in a Hollywood-approved way with DRM."
I think working for the federal govenment is about as safe as you can get. Sometimes there are 'reductions in force,' but you're elegible for another job in the federal government if you're willing to move. Of course, you have to have a strong stomache for working with incompetents who make just as much as you do but will never be fired. I spend 6 years with the feds before getting fed (no pun intended) up and going out to private industry. I've never regretted it, nor have I suffered for it.
My one piece of advice for younger people is to save your money and keep current on technology. Ok, that's two pieces. Save your money, keep current on technology, and be on the lookout for new opportunities. Oops, that's three pieces. Save your money, keep current ...
Ok, Pythonesque humor aside, do save and invest your money to the maximum extent possible. There's nothing like having a big wad of available money backing you up to give you the courage to take an employment risk or tell your current boss to shove that piece of crap project he wants you to work on. And learn to write well. There are a lot of nearly-incoherent folks in this business, and you'll stand out if you can communicate.
Well eventually one of these times they'll be right. At some point you hit the subatomic level and you're not creating what could be termed transistors any more. Which is not to say that processing power might not keep on doubling at Moore rates, just that Moore's law, which deals with numbers of transistors, comes to an end. Or at the least has to be revised to deal with some other measureable quality.
The melange of a futuristic society with Old West paraphernalia and situations was just too much to allow the suspension of disbelief. I watched 3 episodes and have the rest on my Tivo; I can't bring myself to watch them.
Actually I don't buy Preparation H -- that was just for humor. I wouldn't be ashamed if I did,, but I'd still want someone else getting all the crap mail that you get as soon as you get on someone's radar screen as being interested in a particular type of product. I bought a mail order pellet gun once, and I'm still getting catalogs offering me tracer bullets, blowguns, ninja throwing darts, literature on how to dispose of dead bodies, videos on how to build a .50 caliber machine gun in my garage, etc. My postman must think he's delivering to the head of the Montana Militia.
If you're too psychologically fragile to just turn them down when they ask, just make something up. That's what I've done for all those grocery store discount cards. I picked a name (Smedley Cuthbertson for one) and the address of someone who I dislike (so he can get all the proctologist ads when I buy Preparation H) and that's all it took. I get my discount, that jerk gets the Drug Enforcement Administration wondering why he's buying all that cough syrup, and everybody (except him) is happy.
I'm developing an application that will let people in the field use laser range finding binoculars to determine the position of things of interest. The PDA will receive the binocular readings and GPS data and calculate the position from that. It'll then transmit the location plus some other data back to a central location. The PDA makes a lot more sense than humping several pounds of fragile laptop around in the bush, especially given all the other stuff they have to carry.
Speaking of this, I have an account at Silicon Investor, for which I created an email address known only to them and never revealed on the message boards. I've lately started getting spam sent to that address. Clearly those bastards sold my address. Guess the tech crash has made sellouts of a lot of desperate businesses.
Interesting, and thanks for the info. One thing I keep hoping to hear is that some effort has started to just replace all of the Tivo code with a user-written open-source version containing all the spiffy features that people have been wanting. Don't know how likely that is, but it makes a good fantasy.
I'm not knowledgeable in these areas so perhaps this is off-base, but wouldn't it be possible to disassemble the code that accepts the password and patch it to just accept whatever you enter? That seems like a more fruitful line of attack than attempting to brute-force a password of unknown character set, unknown length, and unknown encoding.
Yeah, I used Kenyatta's name as the starting point, and made a small alteration. Given how young most SlashDotters are and how long ago Kenyatta's name was in the public eye, I thought I'd get away with it. That'll teach me.
Perhaps Microsoft got wind of the hundreds of millions in locked-up foreign exchange that I'm helping a Mr. Jomo Kenwatta get out of the country (for a modest few mill thrown my way for my trouble, of course.) If the Namibians have that kind of dough lying around, they shouldn't be grousing about a few bucks for licenses.
I bought a case with a built-in 400-watt power supply that swamped a nearby AM radio with a buzzsaw noise. Replacing it got rid of the problem. Power supplies aren't that expensive, so save yourself some headaches and buy a good one.
Throughout the article, Social Security is described in pessimistic terms, and yet many people continue to resist its privatization. Think how much better off you'd be if the 15% of your wages going there were instead deposited into your 401(k). Not only would you have a better retirement that SS will ever pay you, but you'd have a nest egg to pass to your descendants.
And here is the counter to the obvious objection:
The recent stock market plunge shows how risky relying on business to provide retirement income is. Where do you think government is going to get the money to pay you? From those very same businesses through taxation. If business tanks, so does government revenue. And while government can use deficit spending for a while to prop things up, there is no free lunch: ultimately benefits would have to be cut or inflation allowed to erode the real value of the payout. Besides which, we're talking about a very long term accumulation of capital here, so short-term fluctuations in the market are not a threat to the long-term health of a privatized retirement plan. The California Public Employee Retirement System (CALPERS) relies on investment to pay out a generous (several times that of SS) pension to its employees who are exempt from participation in the Social Security system, by the way. Many other states have comparable plans based on investment. If it's good enough for a bunch of state bureaucrats, why isn't it good enough for you?
Things like this are why there's hostility toward the ADA and those pushing it. It's also why there's a move afoot to amend the ADA to allow businesses 90 days to bring themselves into compliance when there's a complaint, before a suit can be filed. Naturally, the plaintiff's bar thinks this is a bad idea.
There are a few of us left. And yes, I was early on the internet. Like about 1975, when it wasn't much more than a few networked university and DoD computers. And I was early on Compuserve as well. I fit your profile to an uncanny degree.
what stops an unscrupulous person from spamming it and making it unusable to everyone else?
One thing is vigilante justice. When someone makes himself an obnoxious ass on a ham band it isn't difficult to find him (transmitter hunting is something some hams do for amusement). Retaliation can range from putting a pin through his coax to more drastic measures.