You cannot really compare the Taser (finished product) with this portable lightning unit. It is a prototype that is proving a simple working concept, that it can be done. It is not even a working setup such that it does what it says it does, as I read. As such, it will need to be refined further before it is ready to be marketed and sold as a finished product.
I wonder, though. Those that have foresight certainly will manage to survive an emergency. However, there are those that cannot stockpile their own emergency supplies (no room, no money, etc) or have their emergency supplies destroyed (or looted, or lost, etc). Is survival through a disaster to be about who has the most money? Is greed in this country so bad that helping each other out when times are bad by providing what they need at what they can afford is unthinkable?
While you talk about basic supply and demand, more should be considered than just money.
I imagine a Taser refers to one of the types of non-lethal weapons used to render people unconsious, but think I can still address this.
One type of 'taser' requires being within arms reach to use. If you're not well trained in hand-to-hand combat, or catch someone by suprise, you may find this variant difficult to use effectively. To add to that, it is difficult to use on multiple people (or would seem to be, in my opinion).
The other type fires out contact points on wires to first strike the victim, then deliver the charge. While this can be great if you're pacifying one person, I don't think this kind of weapon is a 'quick reload' to handle a crowd. Additionally, the wires give a definate range to the device, and both contact points need to strike for the weapon to be effective.
Using a weapon that fires a pulse of electricity down a column of ionized air means it is a good ranged weapon. Being as the method of contact isn't expendable, it can be turned to another target while the first one drops. And, depending on how it's designed, if it has some kind of 'pulse' feature, it might be able to allow the wielder to strafe the point across multiple targets like a sword and drop several at once.
Like all things, just because something that we have now works doesn't mean it cannot be improved upon.
I've never had issue spotting the bright (and I do mean BRIGHT) flashing white light above the traffic lights, day or night. You're supposed to glance at that bank of signals ANYWAYS to know whether you can go or not, and whether it is still allowing you to go. If you can see the signal lights, you can easily see the bright Opticom light. I often notice the Opticom light before I see the 'big red fire truck' coming my way, or even before I hear it.
Here's the thing. You cannot sue someone under the DMCA unless they're violating DIGITAL copyrights, most notably circumvention of a device to protect against illegal copying (or legal copying, frankly. Another debate for later).
So, what legal leg does FedEx hope to stand on? They offered to send these boxes to people for free. Yes, they were intended for shipping, but there was no agreement made that says "You must ship with us with these supplies." End result? FedEx is going to lose this one. They offered free supplies, and someone took'm.
They have a nice little system that, in my opinion, they should impliment in other cities. It's called Opticom or something like that. Special transponders on the top of emergency vehicles send a light signal to traffic signals ahead of them. Once this signal is received, the traffic signal CHANGES to all red lights, with the exception of the direction the vehicle is coming. Additionally, a bright white light above the traffic signals goes off. Either solid for "Active" or blinking for "Active and the vehicle is coming from your direction". This makes it trivial to comprehend when an emergency vehicle is coming.
That said, I wouldn't run a red light myself. However, a lot of the stupidity they do with red lights is just that, stupid. Seperate left turn signals (can't turn if YOUR signal is red, even if the street is empty, and the straight through has a green), "no turn on red" signs. Sadly, it's the mentality of "Someone was too stupid to make this turn safely, so you are all to be treated as too stupid to make it." It's insulting, a waste of time, and frustrates people when it shouldn't.
I have an IM client that is the core of my communications management system. It handles communication between IM systems, it pulls news feeds of various sites and mail systems that I want to monitor, it tracks shipments that I might want to be aware of, and it tracks weather for not only myself but for friends that I have on the IM services.
ForecastFox pulls the same information (from AccuWeather, I believe) that my IM plugin does, but my IM plugin does it with more versitility and more relevance in terms of my friends. When I open a browser, I want to browse for information on the web. That is primarily its function for me, and I would like to keep it light like that.
I have also done this, stopped to see how much a season of a show costs, only to try to regain my composure and not choke to death. There are quite a number of series that I would buy IF it were not so expensive.
Frankly, I don't understand the problem. Did they not make sufficient money on the on-air viewing that they need to recoup all their costs on the DVD sales? Perhaps 'royalties' to the actors (or studios more likely) toned down a bit. I honestly don't see any reason why it should cost more than $75 for a season of a show gone past, with $60 definately being a 'why not get it now' price. As it is, they come off to me as greedy pigs, and frankly, I just don't need to support that.
Actually, I know people that use iTunes that strip out the DRM from their music files. There were also several hacks to pull an unencrypted audio stream before the DRM was applied and the stream compressed.
Seems to me like the DRM on iTunes files is not unbreakable, and the popularity of the service cannot be viewed as an acceptance of DRM (since it can be removed).
That's what it should be about. Fixing social problems. Unfortunately, some people see it as a tool to get what they want, regardless of the social impact.
You know what? I'm not a historian, I know some history. I'm not a politician, though I know the basics of politics. However, I'm not so stupid as to think that we were total innocents with the terrorists overseas. Had I more time in my life to devote to learning about problems overseas, I'd probably be able to tell you.
I bring up the WWII example as an example of an alternative to what you implied by the statement "There's no reasoning with someone willing to blow themselves up." The formost image that brings to my mind is killing each and every person that fits that criteria that is dead set on hurting us. Genocide. That is an awful major thing to set off to do, and one I'd rather avoid.
You are correct in noting that there are still costs, even for alternative methods of fighting. You imply that you're unwilling to even consider withdraw as a valid tactic, that you want to see is stay in there, deep in the action, and refuse to give them any satisfaction at all. In fact, you all but say that the only option open to us is to kill them off. Are you willing to look at alternatives, or is this the only way you think?
I'm not sure where the note about 'obsession' with security came in. However, this day and age sees thousands upon thousands of viruses, scripted attacks, and other nasties out on the Internet on a daily basis. When the average time to live of a standard, freshly installed from source machine is down to 12 minutes (Windows), you have to scrutinize security a lot more than you used to.
There is also a difference between recognizing a tradeoff between security and practicality as you mention, and simply being blind to the security problems inherant with a particular implimentation. To make a choice about the tradeoff you are making, you have to know the concerns, and for all practical purposes, that means knowing all ways in which your implimentation could break. Perhaps they knew that when implimenting the ICMP protocol, perhaps not. It's hard to tell that now.
And, I wouldn't say that ICMP had no practical exploits. Ping flooding has been around for a while, as well as reflected attacks using ICMP (ping a broadcast address with the victim as the source, and the victim gets a swarm of packets to deal with that it didn't request). Simply because they aren't often used doesn't mean that they were not known about or used.
We were attacked first? Really? So there were no events prior to the WTC bombings that might've been a cause to motivate them? And really, "We were not over there at all"? Don't you mean our military wasn't occupying their country, because I'm sure that we had some presence or another diplomatically, or at least economically, overseas at the time.
It sickens me to think that we Americans are so often blind to what our country does overseas to believe that, when we get attacked via terrorist attacks, that we honestly believe they were unprovoked attacks. I don't suppose anyone really needs to pay attention to what goes on outside our borders, since I'm sure that none of that truely matters. Yet, too often we try to convert other countries and people to 'our' way of thinking, religiously, economically, and politically. You never know, perhaps something like telling these people that what they believe in so deeply is completely wrong for so long just happens to be sufficient provocation?
You are likely correct, that there is no reasoning with a person willing to blow themselves up for their cause. What would you do, shoot them all? Commit genocide in order to protect your way of life? Maybe there's another way.
I'm reminded of the Soviets vs. Germany in WWII. They didn't really fight them on a head on fight to start with, they let the Germans come across the border. Only, rather than give them good land, they burned it, made it useless in the short term. And yet, with all the retreats by the Soviets, the Germans lost. How could this be? Is it possibly that there was another way to fight than in a direct head-on struggle?
I'm sure it was meant to have punctuation. Something like:
On the other hand, you realize that a Linux fish is essentially a mobile insult against their religious expression, which is their right to express, as is your mockery.
Something akin to the statement 'They have a right to express their religion. You have a right to express your mockery of their religion.' It doesn't include anything about vandalism.
Biometrics is not an end-all, be-all solution. Any electronic data can be compromised. ANY. Digitally encoded biometric data, hardened database, etc. can all be broken or circumvented. It seems stupid to me why people push 'passwords' that you cannot change and/or change themselves over time (biometrics). If this information is ever compromised, and odds are it will eventually, then you will not have an option to set it to something that hasn't been.
Consider this. Fingerprint biometrics. Someone manages to steal a record of your 10 fingerprints, and is capable of reproducing them to fool a biometric sensor. You can no longer be assured that anyone using fingerprint identification is truely you, and what would you change your authentication credentials to after that, your footprint?
Vein biometrics (hand, as per previously recorded on Slashdot) change based on what you're doing, over time, with vascular problems, etc.
Fingerprints are unchangable, but you have a limited quantity (10) and after that, you have little recourse.
Voice prints may be able to be mimiced sufficiently with recorders, or worse, you could be denied access one day because you had a cold.
Biometrics may be used to help such a system, but they could never take the place of any aspect that may need to be changed at random, such as a password.
Fusion plants based on similar techniques as the sun (magnetic bottle, high temp fusion) is likely to produce radioactive materials even still. Depending on the fuel that is used, free neutrons are generated from various fusion processes. Those neutrons may wind up as catalysts to further the reaction (via breeding tritium from lithium), or they may wind up escaping the magnetic bottle and striking the insulating walls of the reactor core.
The flip side of this is that what radioactive materials are produced is controllable, to an extent.
You mistake something. AMD can count it's sales per chip to whomever, OEM or home builder, just like Intel can. It doesn't matter to whom the chips go. When you talk about 'per unit' sales, for Intel and AMD, they're talking about 'processors' as the unit, not OEM PCs.
The rest of the blame would still be there even if there were no hackers to break into computer systems. Think of it this way, if there was noone out there that poked and prodded and broke into things by obsessive determination, would you notice the glaring hole that some innocent person might stumble upon in the future? Or how about that hole that, by some quirk of programming skill, winds up sending out important things like credit card info, etc.
While yes, hackers deserve to hang for their part in computer crimes, they serve as a very important and sharp reason that security should be one of the first and foremost design considerations in software development. Without that impetus, it has been proven apparent that there is no "need" to secure the software, there is no desire (it cuts into the bottom line, if there is no need to do so), and we get the shoddy crap that breaks at a sideways glance.
As long as you fill out the metadata in your files,...
That's really the issue at hand. Will the unorganized person fill out metadata in order to make their system become organized via search? Does the organized person need a method to search for information that, odds are, he or she has already sorted into appropriate groupings?
A search tool is useless if you have to add the search terms this file should be found by. It will be the one file that you did not tag that you will need to find.
It was my understanding that, to do it, you needed to have a bit of software or a bit of hardware (such as a PBX) that is capable of sending out that data. Most home lines can't do it, as, when you pick up the phone, the switch you are connected to is performing the job of sending the Caller ID information for you.
However, as a disclaimer, I have not ever done nor researched all that was necessary to spoof Caller ID tags. I just know it can be done, and that it is routinely done with call centers, such as telemarketers.
While I have not actually ever used it, I believe iptables for the Linux kernel has a module that can basically turn the firewall into a mirror, swapping the source and destination fields in the IP header and bouncing it back to the originator. It doesn't do any special tasks such as port scanning or anything. However, it is not recommended to use this particular module as it simply increases the flood of packets that you wind up sending down your line. It also makes your firewall far more useful as a reflector for a distributed attack on someone else, without even needing to break into your machine to do it.
Re:I see their point, but...
on
Phishing for Credit
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Just to be known, if you have the proper equipment, you can indeed send out a spoofed Caller ID tag. The Caller ID tag is not guaronteed to be the exact number that the person is calling from. Large companies often mask their internal numbers with one main one that anyone receiving a call could use to reach the main operator. To do so for more nefarious purposes could be done, but the trick is that, in order to truely fool a person, they have to mimic a voice as well. This is what would typically trip up someone seeking to do phishing on that level, even though it is still done to acquire username/password information if you act official enough.
Here's the thing. Where I file my state taxes, the revenue service for that state runs the site directly, themselves. This ensures that your data is sent straight to them and not via some other method. Filing via third party makes me wonder whether or not those third-party agents are doing something they shouldn't with your tax information. This is not really an issue when you deal directly, as whether you file by paper or electronically, need that information for a valid reason.
If you own property, your address is a matter of public record (the government has always made public record who owns what piece of land).
However, those that rent or live with another and do not own property, their address (ie: denoting that they live there) is not a matter of public record.
Steam is not simply about downloading the software. If it were, this debate would not exist.
Steam is about downloading software, constant updates, decrypting data files before First Use, downloading executable files before First Use (the product you buy in stores is incomplete. How's that for smart). Steam is about them having the ability to revoke your right to play just because they feel you did something wrong, regardless of the truth of the matter.
You know what Steam doesn't do? It doesn't even stop in-game cheating. It doesn't stop hacking. It doesn't even make game playing any better. It doesn't even let you play at all if the servers crash or start feeding bad data to your client. Advanced, my ass.
Sadly, I did enjoy playing Half Life 2, even though I found it to be somewhat short and the ending abrupt and far easier than Half Life 1. I do enjoy playing Counter Strike: Source, except for physics issues (I manage to, according to my client, move fully out of the field of view, yet someone shooting at me with high ping times still "sees" me and gets the shot) and except when cheaters get online (Where exactally are those mystical 'secure' servers that Steam is capable of providing?). Only reason why I play those two games? They were a gift.
Steam is not simply a distribution method. Sony Online Entertainment does simple online distribution of expansions for Everquest. Steam is far nastier a beast.
Slashdot Mirror
You cannot really compare the Taser (finished product) with this portable lightning unit. It is a prototype that is proving a simple working concept, that it can be done. It is not even a working setup such that it does what it says it does, as I read. As such, it will need to be refined further before it is ready to be marketed and sold as a finished product.
I wonder, though. Those that have foresight certainly will manage to survive an emergency. However, there are those that cannot stockpile their own emergency supplies (no room, no money, etc) or have their emergency supplies destroyed (or looted, or lost, etc). Is survival through a disaster to be about who has the most money? Is greed in this country so bad that helping each other out when times are bad by providing what they need at what they can afford is unthinkable?
While you talk about basic supply and demand, more should be considered than just money.
I imagine a Taser refers to one of the types of non-lethal weapons used to render people unconsious, but think I can still address this.
One type of 'taser' requires being within arms reach to use. If you're not well trained in hand-to-hand combat, or catch someone by suprise, you may find this variant difficult to use effectively. To add to that, it is difficult to use on multiple people (or would seem to be, in my opinion).
The other type fires out contact points on wires to first strike the victim, then deliver the charge. While this can be great if you're pacifying one person, I don't think this kind of weapon is a 'quick reload' to handle a crowd. Additionally, the wires give a definate range to the device, and both contact points need to strike for the weapon to be effective.
Using a weapon that fires a pulse of electricity down a column of ionized air means it is a good ranged weapon. Being as the method of contact isn't expendable, it can be turned to another target while the first one drops. And, depending on how it's designed, if it has some kind of 'pulse' feature, it might be able to allow the wielder to strafe the point across multiple targets like a sword and drop several at once.
Like all things, just because something that we have now works doesn't mean it cannot be improved upon.
I've never had issue spotting the bright (and I do mean BRIGHT) flashing white light above the traffic lights, day or night. You're supposed to glance at that bank of signals ANYWAYS to know whether you can go or not, and whether it is still allowing you to go. If you can see the signal lights, you can easily see the bright Opticom light. I often notice the Opticom light before I see the 'big red fire truck' coming my way, or even before I hear it.
Here's the thing. You cannot sue someone under the DMCA unless they're violating DIGITAL copyrights, most notably circumvention of a device to protect against illegal copying (or legal copying, frankly. Another debate for later).
So, what legal leg does FedEx hope to stand on? They offered to send these boxes to people for free. Yes, they were intended for shipping, but there was no agreement made that says "You must ship with us with these supplies." End result? FedEx is going to lose this one. They offered free supplies, and someone took'm.
They have a nice little system that, in my opinion, they should impliment in other cities. It's called Opticom or something like that. Special transponders on the top of emergency vehicles send a light signal to traffic signals ahead of them. Once this signal is received, the traffic signal CHANGES to all red lights, with the exception of the direction the vehicle is coming. Additionally, a bright white light above the traffic signals goes off. Either solid for "Active" or blinking for "Active and the vehicle is coming from your direction". This makes it trivial to comprehend when an emergency vehicle is coming.
That said, I wouldn't run a red light myself. However, a lot of the stupidity they do with red lights is just that, stupid. Seperate left turn signals (can't turn if YOUR signal is red, even if the street is empty, and the straight through has a green), "no turn on red" signs. Sadly, it's the mentality of "Someone was too stupid to make this turn safely, so you are all to be treated as too stupid to make it." It's insulting, a waste of time, and frustrates people when it shouldn't.
Myself, my reasoning is this.
I have an IM client that is the core of my communications management system. It handles communication between IM systems, it pulls news feeds of various sites and mail systems that I want to monitor, it tracks shipments that I might want to be aware of, and it tracks weather for not only myself but for friends that I have on the IM services.
ForecastFox pulls the same information (from AccuWeather, I believe) that my IM plugin does, but my IM plugin does it with more versitility and more relevance in terms of my friends. When I open a browser, I want to browse for information on the web. That is primarily its function for me, and I would like to keep it light like that.
I have also done this, stopped to see how much a season of a show costs, only to try to regain my composure and not choke to death. There are quite a number of series that I would buy IF it were not so expensive.
Frankly, I don't understand the problem. Did they not make sufficient money on the on-air viewing that they need to recoup all their costs on the DVD sales? Perhaps 'royalties' to the actors (or studios more likely) toned down a bit. I honestly don't see any reason why it should cost more than $75 for a season of a show gone past, with $60 definately being a 'why not get it now' price. As it is, they come off to me as greedy pigs, and frankly, I just don't need to support that.
Actually, I know people that use iTunes that strip out the DRM from their music files. There were also several hacks to pull an unencrypted audio stream before the DRM was applied and the stream compressed.
Seems to me like the DRM on iTunes files is not unbreakable, and the popularity of the service cannot be viewed as an acceptance of DRM (since it can be removed).
That's what it should be about. Fixing social problems. Unfortunately, some people see it as a tool to get what they want, regardless of the social impact.
You know what? I'm not a historian, I know some history. I'm not a politician, though I know the basics of politics. However, I'm not so stupid as to think that we were total innocents with the terrorists overseas. Had I more time in my life to devote to learning about problems overseas, I'd probably be able to tell you.
I bring up the WWII example as an example of an alternative to what you implied by the statement "There's no reasoning with someone willing to blow themselves up." The formost image that brings to my mind is killing each and every person that fits that criteria that is dead set on hurting us. Genocide. That is an awful major thing to set off to do, and one I'd rather avoid.
You are correct in noting that there are still costs, even for alternative methods of fighting. You imply that you're unwilling to even consider withdraw as a valid tactic, that you want to see is stay in there, deep in the action, and refuse to give them any satisfaction at all. In fact, you all but say that the only option open to us is to kill them off. Are you willing to look at alternatives, or is this the only way you think?
I'm not sure where the note about 'obsession' with security came in. However, this day and age sees thousands upon thousands of viruses, scripted attacks, and other nasties out on the Internet on a daily basis. When the average time to live of a standard, freshly installed from source machine is down to 12 minutes (Windows), you have to scrutinize security a lot more than you used to.
There is also a difference between recognizing a tradeoff between security and practicality as you mention, and simply being blind to the security problems inherant with a particular implimentation. To make a choice about the tradeoff you are making, you have to know the concerns, and for all practical purposes, that means knowing all ways in which your implimentation could break. Perhaps they knew that when implimenting the ICMP protocol, perhaps not. It's hard to tell that now.
And, I wouldn't say that ICMP had no practical exploits. Ping flooding has been around for a while, as well as reflected attacks using ICMP (ping a broadcast address with the victim as the source, and the victim gets a swarm of packets to deal with that it didn't request). Simply because they aren't often used doesn't mean that they were not known about or used.
We were attacked first? Really? So there were no events prior to the WTC bombings that might've been a cause to motivate them? And really, "We were not over there at all"? Don't you mean our military wasn't occupying their country, because I'm sure that we had some presence or another diplomatically, or at least economically, overseas at the time.
It sickens me to think that we Americans are so often blind to what our country does overseas to believe that, when we get attacked via terrorist attacks, that we honestly believe they were unprovoked attacks. I don't suppose anyone really needs to pay attention to what goes on outside our borders, since I'm sure that none of that truely matters. Yet, too often we try to convert other countries and people to 'our' way of thinking, religiously, economically, and politically. You never know, perhaps something like telling these people that what they believe in so deeply is completely wrong for so long just happens to be sufficient provocation?
You are likely correct, that there is no reasoning with a person willing to blow themselves up for their cause. What would you do, shoot them all? Commit genocide in order to protect your way of life? Maybe there's another way.
I'm reminded of the Soviets vs. Germany in WWII. They didn't really fight them on a head on fight to start with, they let the Germans come across the border. Only, rather than give them good land, they burned it, made it useless in the short term. And yet, with all the retreats by the Soviets, the Germans lost. How could this be? Is it possibly that there was another way to fight than in a direct head-on struggle?
Food for thought.
I'm sure it was meant to have punctuation. Something like:
On the other hand, you realize that a Linux fish is essentially a mobile insult against their religious expression, which is their right to express, as is your mockery.
Something akin to the statement 'They have a right to express their religion. You have a right to express your mockery of their religion.' It doesn't include anything about vandalism.
Biometrics is not an end-all, be-all solution. Any electronic data can be compromised. ANY. Digitally encoded biometric data, hardened database, etc. can all be broken or circumvented. It seems stupid to me why people push 'passwords' that you cannot change and/or change themselves over time (biometrics). If this information is ever compromised, and odds are it will eventually, then you will not have an option to set it to something that hasn't been.
Consider this. Fingerprint biometrics. Someone manages to steal a record of your 10 fingerprints, and is capable of reproducing them to fool a biometric sensor. You can no longer be assured that anyone using fingerprint identification is truely you, and what would you change your authentication credentials to after that, your footprint?
Vein biometrics (hand, as per previously recorded on Slashdot) change based on what you're doing, over time, with vascular problems, etc.
Fingerprints are unchangable, but you have a limited quantity (10) and after that, you have little recourse.
Voice prints may be able to be mimiced sufficiently with recorders, or worse, you could be denied access one day because you had a cold.
Biometrics may be used to help such a system, but they could never take the place of any aspect that may need to be changed at random, such as a password.
Fusion plants based on similar techniques as the sun (magnetic bottle, high temp fusion) is likely to produce radioactive materials even still. Depending on the fuel that is used, free neutrons are generated from various fusion processes. Those neutrons may wind up as catalysts to further the reaction (via breeding tritium from lithium), or they may wind up escaping the magnetic bottle and striking the insulating walls of the reactor core.
The flip side of this is that what radioactive materials are produced is controllable, to an extent.
You mistake something. AMD can count it's sales per chip to whomever, OEM or home builder, just like Intel can. It doesn't matter to whom the chips go. When you talk about 'per unit' sales, for Intel and AMD, they're talking about 'processors' as the unit, not OEM PCs.
The rest of the blame would still be there even if there were no hackers to break into computer systems. Think of it this way, if there was noone out there that poked and prodded and broke into things by obsessive determination, would you notice the glaring hole that some innocent person might stumble upon in the future? Or how about that hole that, by some quirk of programming skill, winds up sending out important things like credit card info, etc.
While yes, hackers deserve to hang for their part in computer crimes, they serve as a very important and sharp reason that security should be one of the first and foremost design considerations in software development. Without that impetus, it has been proven apparent that there is no "need" to secure the software, there is no desire (it cuts into the bottom line, if there is no need to do so), and we get the shoddy crap that breaks at a sideways glance.
As long as you fill out the metadata in your files, ...
That's really the issue at hand. Will the unorganized person fill out metadata in order to make their system become organized via search? Does the organized person need a method to search for information that, odds are, he or she has already sorted into appropriate groupings?
A search tool is useless if you have to add the search terms this file should be found by. It will be the one file that you did not tag that you will need to find.
It was my understanding that, to do it, you needed to have a bit of software or a bit of hardware (such as a PBX) that is capable of sending out that data. Most home lines can't do it, as, when you pick up the phone, the switch you are connected to is performing the job of sending the Caller ID information for you.
However, as a disclaimer, I have not ever done nor researched all that was necessary to spoof Caller ID tags. I just know it can be done, and that it is routinely done with call centers, such as telemarketers.
While I have not actually ever used it, I believe iptables for the Linux kernel has a module that can basically turn the firewall into a mirror, swapping the source and destination fields in the IP header and bouncing it back to the originator. It doesn't do any special tasks such as port scanning or anything. However, it is not recommended to use this particular module as it simply increases the flood of packets that you wind up sending down your line. It also makes your firewall far more useful as a reflector for a distributed attack on someone else, without even needing to break into your machine to do it.
Just to be known, if you have the proper equipment, you can indeed send out a spoofed Caller ID tag. The Caller ID tag is not guaronteed to be the exact number that the person is calling from. Large companies often mask their internal numbers with one main one that anyone receiving a call could use to reach the main operator. To do so for more nefarious purposes could be done, but the trick is that, in order to truely fool a person, they have to mimic a voice as well. This is what would typically trip up someone seeking to do phishing on that level, even though it is still done to acquire username/password information if you act official enough.
Here's the thing. Where I file my state taxes, the revenue service for that state runs the site directly, themselves. This ensures that your data is sent straight to them and not via some other method. Filing via third party makes me wonder whether or not those third-party agents are doing something they shouldn't with your tax information. This is not really an issue when you deal directly, as whether you file by paper or electronically, need that information for a valid reason.
If you own property, your address is a matter of public record (the government has always made public record who owns what piece of land).
However, those that rent or live with another and do not own property, their address (ie: denoting that they live there) is not a matter of public record.
Steam is not simply about downloading the software. If it were, this debate would not exist.
Steam is about downloading software, constant updates, decrypting data files before First Use, downloading executable files before First Use (the product you buy in stores is incomplete. How's that for smart). Steam is about them having the ability to revoke your right to play just because they feel you did something wrong, regardless of the truth of the matter.
You know what Steam doesn't do? It doesn't even stop in-game cheating. It doesn't stop hacking. It doesn't even make game playing any better. It doesn't even let you play at all if the servers crash or start feeding bad data to your client. Advanced, my ass.
Sadly, I did enjoy playing Half Life 2, even though I found it to be somewhat short and the ending abrupt and far easier than Half Life 1. I do enjoy playing Counter Strike: Source, except for physics issues (I manage to, according to my client, move fully out of the field of view, yet someone shooting at me with high ping times still "sees" me and gets the shot) and except when cheaters get online (Where exactally are those mystical 'secure' servers that Steam is capable of providing?). Only reason why I play those two games? They were a gift.
Steam is not simply a distribution method. Sony Online Entertainment does simple online distribution of expansions for Everquest. Steam is far nastier a beast.