What's to stop someone being labeled as a bad guy for not going to church, or not supporting the government, or not going along with whatever intrusion-of-the-day on your privacy?
Given that probably less than 1% of email actually has any encryption scheme at all used on it, I don't think it would be that onerous a task.
And yes, even if EVERYONE PGP'd all their email, it would take too long to decipher EVERY encrypted email, but if you can look at the headers and see that this guy is getting email from someone with known terrorist connections, and sending email to another guy with known terrorist connections, you can focus your decryption efforts on those messages only, and let the millions of e-mail forwards from Grandma and solicitations for H3e.rba1 V1@GARA pass right through.
I dream of the day when we have colonized all the habitable planets and moons in this solar system
You dream of today?
No other planets or moons in our solar system can be habitated -- at least, not with importing massive amounts of resources from Earth.
Yes, someday our sun will go supernova and the Earth as we know it will be gone. That will mark the end of humanity. It's rather selfish for Mankind to assume that the Universe owes us the gift of existence past that point, as if the entirety of Creation is there just for us to exploit it.
I mucked around with ROMs a while back. It was a pain in the ass finding them. Even bigger pain in the ass downloading them. If I wasn't entering pop-up hell (not so rough these days given modern browsers, etc...), I was being asked to vote for places in order to proceed.
Well, that's your mistake... you were looking for contraband on the WEB.
ROMs are plentiful and easy to acquire on most IRC systems, P2P networks, Usenet, etc... There are in fact parts of the internet that Google does not index for you. (Yet.)
For you, maybe -- I got sent to babysit our internet sites at the generator-backed colo facility, so my blackout was marked by bright fluorescent lights and the hum of 10,000 computers in a cavernous room.
Re:Beware Emissions Inspection
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The point of state emissions inspections is to check if your car is running cleanly EVERY DAY, not the one day of the year that you take it in for inspection.
If you're running your car with different settings on testing day than on the other 364 days of the year, you're cheating -- and it's the environment, and all the rest of us that DO behave honestly, that suffer.
Like your Driver's Ed teacher always said, operating a motor vehicle is not a RIGHT, it's a PRIVILEGE. Treat it like one. Respect your car, respect your fellow motorists, and respect the laws that govern what's allowed on public streets.
Okay, that explains why PNG is generally a good image format, but interface elements need to be scaleable to different sizes depending on the user's hardware and preferences, and PNGs are statically sized.
I think the facts that Gmail reads your incoming mail to choose which text ads it will show you is a very bad precedent.
I think the fact that my ISP reads (well, READS is a bad word choice; PARSES is more like it) my incoming mail to see if there's a virus payload in the attachments is a very bad precedent. I think the fact that my mail client (which was developed by a commercial software company OMG WTF) parses my incoming mail to decide which folder to save it into is a very bad precedent.
Wait, no I don't; I think those things are useful and important services, and I'll gladly let impartial automated processes scan over the messages I receive in order to reap the benefits of those services.
The people are MUCH smarter than you give them credit for. And are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves - and each other - voluntarily - when you and your minions aren't stealing their savings and spending $2.60 on yourselves for every $1.00 you spend giving them some "benefit" - usually not the one they need.
Can you explain why people living below the poverty line -- who have no tax liability due to our graduated tax system -- still cannot get by without government assistance? Would YOU voluntarily give them money to keep them on their feet? And if you wouldn't, why would anyone else?
I expect the customary "they are poor because they're lazy" response, but maybe I'll be surprised.
If you screw up your finances, you could still lose tons of money (FDIC only covers up to $100,000)
If you have $100 grand in the bank to lose, I don't want to hear about you "screwing up your finances". >90% of us will never reach that degree of liquidity.
it has been estimated that FDIC would cover seven cents on the dollar (no source to cite that, I received it from a friend who was subscribed to an e-mail list).
Do you think if everybody paid the taxes they owe that politicians would just lower the tax rate overall? The government will take all it can get.
Which government are you referring to? The one we have in the United States right now will gladly lower your taxes if it thinks it'll get them re-elected, regardless of how many billions of dollars over budget our spending is.
We have Democrats and Republicans, but no conservatives anymore.
just have the camera always on, but discarding anything over a minute or two. Then when something happens you want to keep press the button and the last two minutes are saved, plus what happens as you watch.
They could even put these things in taxis and police cars! Yeah, this is a pretty cool idea...!
If Leah Betts hadn't been on Ecstacy, she wouldn't have taken the foolish action of overdosing on water, would she?
This was as much a drug-related death as a drunk driver who rams a telephone pole, or a junkie who gets shot to death trying to break into someone's home. Media coverage of drug use may be somewhat more hysterical than it needs to be, but I'd rather have people think illicit drugs are more dangerous than they actually are than to have them think that a substance cooked up in some stranger's kitchen chemistry lab is SAFE to ingest.
Besides a lot of wealthy people and the option to own your own property, what is the real difference between the old Soviet empire and the Brave New World being built by our new jailors?
If you honestly can't see the differences, I feel sorry for you.
why not stick around here and fight for what you believe in? You can start by sending a few bucks to the EFF.
Pfft. Money is cheap, and the "bad guys" have more of it to throw around than we do.
Donating your TIME will have a greater impact. Write to your elected representatives -- schedule an in-person meeting with them if you can. Let them know that your liberties are extremely important to you and if they won't take steps to protect them, you'll work towards taking them out of office and putting in someone who will.
Democracy is not something that happens organically. You have to get involved if you want change.
"it's too much trouble to deal with you technology folks." They're willing to forgo robustness, auditing, data validation, etc. in order to escape the technology bureaucracy
Wouldn't it be nice if they could realize that the reason the "bureaucracy" exists is to enforce policies of robustness, auditability, data validation, etc.?
Slashdot Mirror
What's the big deal? I can recall feeding quarters to a similar machine that did this, like, twenty years ago!
What's to stop someone being labeled as a bad guy for not going to church, or not supporting the government, or not going along with whatever intrusion-of-the-day on your privacy?
Well, the Bill of Rights for one...
Suppose a shady character is driving a vanload of illegal explosives from Mexico, up through the US, to a destination in Canada.
A US law enforcement agency gets a tip about it. Should they be allowed to pursue the van and try to stop it before it reaches the Canadian border?
Given that probably less than 1% of email actually has any encryption scheme at all used on it, I don't think it would be that onerous a task.
And yes, even if EVERYONE PGP'd all their email, it would take too long to decipher EVERY encrypted email, but if you can look at the headers and see that this guy is getting email from someone with known terrorist connections, and sending email to another guy with known terrorist connections, you can focus your decryption efforts on those messages only, and let the millions of e-mail forwards from Grandma and solicitations for H3e.rba1 V1@GARA pass right through.
the REAL reason the first metroid game for Nintendo was so BADASS was because you didn't find out she was a girl until the end.
Either that, or your friend Justin Bailey spoiled the ending for you.
I dream of the day when we have colonized all the habitable planets and moons in this solar system
You dream of today?
No other planets or moons in our solar system can be habitated -- at least, not with importing massive amounts of resources from Earth.
Yes, someday our sun will go supernova and the Earth as we know it will be gone. That will mark the end of humanity. It's rather selfish for Mankind to assume that the Universe owes us the gift of existence past that point, as if the entirety of Creation is there just for us to exploit it.
I mucked around with ROMs a while back. It was a pain in the ass finding them. Even bigger pain in the ass downloading them. If I wasn't entering pop-up hell (not so rough these days given modern browsers, etc...), I was being asked to vote for places in order to proceed.
Well, that's your mistake... you were looking for contraband on the WEB.
ROMs are plentiful and easy to acquire on most IRC systems, P2P networks, Usenet, etc... There are in fact parts of the internet that Google does not index for you. (Yet.)
It was dark and there were no computers.
For you, maybe -- I got sent to babysit our internet sites at the generator-backed colo facility, so my blackout was marked by bright fluorescent lights and the hum of 10,000 computers in a cavernous room.
The point of state emissions inspections is to check if your car is running cleanly EVERY DAY, not the one day of the year that you take it in for inspection.
If you're running your car with different settings on testing day than on the other 364 days of the year, you're cheating -- and it's the environment, and all the rest of us that DO behave honestly, that suffer.
Like your Driver's Ed teacher always said, operating a motor vehicle is not a RIGHT, it's a PRIVILEGE. Treat it like one. Respect your car, respect your fellow motorists, and respect the laws that govern what's allowed on public streets.
Okay, that explains why PNG is generally a good image format, but interface elements need to be scaleable to different sizes depending on the user's hardware and preferences, and PNGs are statically sized.
I think the facts that Gmail reads your incoming mail to choose which text ads it will show you is a very bad precedent.
I think the fact that my ISP reads (well, READS is a bad word choice; PARSES is more like it) my incoming mail to see if there's a virus payload in the attachments is a very bad precedent. I think the fact that my mail client (which was developed by a commercial software company OMG WTF) parses my incoming mail to decide which folder to save it into is a very bad precedent.
Wait, no I don't; I think those things are useful and important services, and I'll gladly let impartial automated processes scan over the messages I receive in order to reap the benefits of those services.
If you're so big on encryption, why didn't you encrypt your post to Slashdot? Practice what you preach, or don't bother preaching.
Point is: most communications are not significant enough to warrant privacy protections.
You have a lot of ideas about what's wrong with government, and a lot of imperative statements about how to fix it.
My question is, what are you DOING about it, besides posting to Slashdot?
The people are MUCH smarter than you give them credit for. And are perfectly capable of taking care of themselves - and each other - voluntarily - when you and your minions aren't stealing their savings and spending $2.60 on yourselves for every $1.00 you spend giving them some "benefit" - usually not the one they need.
Can you explain why people living below the poverty line -- who have no tax liability due to our graduated tax system -- still cannot get by without government assistance? Would YOU voluntarily give them money to keep them on their feet? And if you wouldn't, why would anyone else?
I expect the customary "they are poor because they're lazy" response, but maybe I'll be surprised.
the largest military in the universe....
The Vogons do not share your opinion.
No, I'm pretty sure the United States has a larger military than the Vogons these days.
And U.S. military poetry is only slightly better.
If you screw up your finances, you could still lose tons of money (FDIC only covers up to $100,000)
If you have $100 grand in the bank to lose, I don't want to hear about you "screwing up your finances". >90% of us will never reach that degree of liquidity.
it has been estimated that FDIC would cover seven cents on the dollar (no source to cite that, I received it from a friend who was subscribed to an e-mail list).
Sounds like a credible source to me...
Do you think if everybody paid the taxes they owe that politicians would just lower the tax rate overall? The government will take all it can get.
Which government are you referring to? The one we have in the United States right now will gladly lower your taxes if it thinks it'll get them re-elected, regardless of how many billions of dollars over budget our spending is.
We have Democrats and Republicans, but no conservatives anymore.
just have the camera always on, but discarding anything over a minute or two. Then when something happens you want to keep press the button and the last two minutes are saved, plus what happens as you watch.
They could even put these things in taxis and police cars! Yeah, this is a pretty cool idea...!
He beautifully illustrated the results of 100 cups of coffee in one day in one of my favorite futurama episodes.
Really? Matt Groening did all that?
Then what's with all the "writer" and "animator" and "producer" credits I see on Futurama? Are they all fake?
If Leah Betts hadn't been on Ecstacy, she wouldn't have taken the foolish action of overdosing on water, would she?
This was as much a drug-related death as a drunk driver who rams a telephone pole, or a junkie who gets shot to death trying to break into someone's home. Media coverage of drug use may be somewhat more hysterical than it needs to be, but I'd rather have people think illicit drugs are more dangerous than they actually are than to have them think that a substance cooked up in some stranger's kitchen chemistry lab is SAFE to ingest.
Or you could write dates like most airlines do 01APR04 or in this case 11MAR04..
Oracle's default date format, na?
Besides a lot of wealthy people and the option to own your own property, what is the real difference between the old Soviet empire and the Brave New World being built by our new jailors?
If you honestly can't see the differences, I feel sorry for you.
why not stick around here and fight for what you believe in? You can start by sending a few bucks to the EFF.
Pfft. Money is cheap, and the "bad guys" have more of it to throw around than we do.
Donating your TIME will have a greater impact. Write to your elected representatives -- schedule an in-person meeting with them if you can. Let them know that your liberties are extremely important to you and if they won't take steps to protect them, you'll work towards taking them out of office and putting in someone who will.
Democracy is not something that happens organically. You have to get involved if you want change.
If there were a modchip that allowed me to play legal imports, but not backup games, I'd get it.
You could always buy an import console to put alongside your domestic model, and use THAT to play import games.
You won't so that? Why not?
"it's too much trouble to deal with you technology folks." They're willing to forgo robustness, auditing, data validation, etc. in order to escape the technology bureaucracy
Wouldn't it be nice if they could realize that the reason the "bureaucracy" exists is to enforce policies of robustness, auditability, data validation, etc.?