Unfortunately for that theory, anyone trained as an anesthesiologist has also taken an oath to do no harm, so that eliminates everyone who has the skills from using them.
Why would anyone give SSN to AT&T? Do they also process your taxes? If not, they have no place asking or retaining this information.
When I first got my iPhone, the Apple Store reps could not figure out how (or wouldn't admit to knowing how) to sell an AT&T contract without a social security number. They sent me down the way to the AT&T store who also couldn't figure it out without calling in to a customer service line and escalating to a supervisor. It took over two hours to buy the damn phone without a SS#, but would have been five minutes if I had given it up. Eventually, they admitted that they have a placeholder number they can use instead of the SS# and we completed the transaction.
Granted, this was a few years ago, but I don't see why they'd be any more cooperative today.
So that's why people give it to them. Is it required? No. Do people have several hours to waste and the stubbornness to jump through the hoops? Not usually.
So it's basically Netflix, with the exact same shortcomings of Netflix.
One advantage over Netflix: Amazon streaming plays movies on non-Intel (well, G5) Macs, which Netflix won't do because the required version of Silverlight is Intel-only. It never hurts to have one more system that can stream movies, especially since I was paying for Prime anyway.
Of course, this is somewhat offset by the fact that Amazon can't stream through Wii as Netflix does. Oh well.
we upgraded the old G5 iMac to Leopard for the speed boost (which it did) but we weren't having crash issues. I for one won't be in a hurry to upgrade to Snow Leopard
Just so you know, the Snow Leopard specs say that an Intel processor is required, so no G5 support.
I have one G5 system and one Intel system, so they'll be out of sync for the first time after I upgrade to Snow Leopard (which I will do immediately after it arrives, since I do nightly backups and therefore upgrade without fear, or less fear, anyway). The speed increases and MS Exchange support are enough reason for me to try it, but my G5 will have to stay on Leopard forever, I guess.
When my cell phone was stolen as part of a neighborhood-wide crime spree, I contacted the police about using my phone, with my full permission and cooperation, to help track the criminal. Whenever I called my phone, the thief (or someone who did business with the thief) was answering. And yet the police declined to take me up on my offer, and never did recover my phone. If my privacy is (potentially) being compromised by how trackable my phone is, where's that "benefit to society" I keep hearing about?
I wonder if these could turn off those annoying TVs they have at supermarket checkout lines.
I tried this. Unfortunately, they all just jumped back on automatically.
In the same supermarket, I also turned off those infomercial TVs they had scattered about the store, attached to the ceilings. The TVBGone turned off the video, but left the audio running, so I assume the audio system was separately connected to their DVD player. Darn it.
Replying to my own post, I forgot about Places being enabled on the trunk. So yes, there are perfectly good reasons why it's probably not compatible. Don't know about any branch builds, though.
Just to save you the 15 seconds it takes to click the link, if you're running the nightly builds off the Firefox trunk, you can't (easily) install the extension... it asks whether to redirect you to the 1.5 download pages instead.
I suppose they restricted the extension to 1.5 to avoid potential conflicts, but I'd rather they said it's OK with 1.5 or later, and let users of nightly builds take their chances. But hey, to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they know of actual breakage, and disabled it to save us from ourselves...
Oh, please. There are major corporations and sports franchises that get a lot more from government welfare than NPR does:
About 2% of NPR's funding comes from bidding on government grants and programs (chiefly the Corporation for Public Broadcasting); the remainder comes from member station dues, foundation grants, and corporate underwriting.
Except that AAPL is actually zooming downwards at the moment. Something like -4% in less than an hour after the keynote ended.
Except that Apple's stock just about always goes down on the announcements. No idea why. It always frustrated me as I watched the stock over the years, but I learned to expect it. So any guesses as to which announcement made the stock drop are likely wrong.
One of my favorite golden rules for software development is: first make it work, then optimize. NEVER optimize your first shot.
The problem, of course, is that the usual sequence (for many, many software packages I've encountered) is first make it work, declare it golden master and ship it, then add new features, declare those golden master in a point release, and repeat. Fit optimizing into your copious spare time between releases.
Of course, there's no shareholder, end-user, or marketeer pressure on open source projects to ship too early, right? Um, right?
AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app, will be available via IMAP starting Thursday.
Just for the record, it's already available and I've been using it for a couple of weeks now. There's an unofficial Web site describing it at AdamKB's site.
There are a few quirks I've noticed... AOL auto-deletes older mail that you've read unless you move it into the Saved Mail folder (max. 20 MB, I believe). Unfortunately, users of AOL's Mac client or the Web mail interface don't have a Saved Mail folder... that's created by the AOL 9 for Windows software only. AOL's IMAP implementation doesn't allow creating folders, so I have to find a Windows machine with AOL 9 installed to create this.
Also, there are some people who have had problems sending through AOL's authenticated SMTP server using Apple's Mail.app client, but that's probably an Apple bug, not AOL.
This is definitely a great move... I've been using Claris Emailer for years because it was the only authorized third-party AOL mail client, so now I have alternatives. And I've had my AOL address since 1990, so I'm reluctant to give it up.
Tea has less caffeine than coffee, but it can still be significant, especially if you drink upwards of 5-6 pots a day. I get hideous caffeine withdrawal without it and tea is my only caffeine source.
Besides, even better than that Amazon link for good quality tea is Upton Tea Imports. They even have good gift sets and starter kits, just like any other good pusher...;-)
Yes, the accelerated video came back, but your Bronze G3 Powerbook (like mine) still has an unusable DVD player, so a major component that shipped with the laptop no longer works thanks to the "upgrade" from Mac OS 9
That said, I find OS X 10.2.x very usable on my Powerbook, and will continue to use it happily (without making a claim under this class-action suit). I credit the lawsuit, as you do, with restoring accelerated 2D video, but I also recognize that Apple could have done more.
Anybody know how the recent California law requiring companies to disclose when their data is compromised would apply to this case? If the primary victim in this case notifies its clients (call them secondary victims), are they then required (if they do biz in California) to notify the tertiary victims (their customers)?
2) Safari/IE. MS is killing IE for the Mac. Many sites currently don't look so hot, or don't even work, on non-IE browsers. How will this be addressed? Safari "giving in" to IE-style rendering?
That's really a non-issue, because IE for Mac was never compatible with the sites you're talking about... those sites are IE for Windows specific. IE for Mac was a surprisingly standards-compliant browser, one of the first to support really good CSS1 and a good chunk of CSS2, and it never supported most of the non-standard IE for Windows stuff.
On the VirtualPC front, I do think it would be nice if Apple were to throw its open-source development weight into enhancing Bochs to make it the best emulation out there, and then integrate it into OS X so you could have double-clickable Windows apps in an emulation layer such as Classic mode, but I haven't heard anything about that one way or another.
Wouldn't Microsoft want to release an end-user version for Linux for the exact same reason they ported it to Mac OS (and then again to OS X)?
And, um, by the way, does anyone know what that reason would that be?
Time to revive pgpfone?
on
Snooping on VOIP
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Won't people who value their privacy (which, sadly, may also include criminals) just revive a project like PGPfone? I don't think it's been updated in a while, but the source code is still there...
I have used various flavors of VNC (don't forget about RealVNC) to support friends and family across the country. (And one memorable experience talking a new Mac OS X user into enabling SSH so I could connect and figure out where all of her disk space had suddenly gone).
I have found that the most difficult part by far is talking them through opening a port in their plug-it-in-and-turn-it-on NAT router (Linksys, usually) for whatever connection I'm trying to establish. Especially when each router has a different UI.
So, I agree that remote connections are *the* way to go when helping family long-distance, I also wanted to point out that there are more steps than "just install it and I'll take it from there."
If Echelon is used fairly and honestly in these types of situations, then I will not complain one bit about the extraordinary secrecy of its network.
If it's being used "fairly and honestly," and it's truly an effective tool, why does it need to be extraordinarily secret? The world has known, contrary to the various participants' best efforts, that Echelon exists for several years now, and it still worked to catch this guy.
I worry more about extraordinary secrecy than surveillance... because I don't know that I can trust the people keeping the secrets "for our own good."
They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers, they cannot be barred from advertising on billboards, and they cannot be barred from posting in open forums. But spammers don't have these rights?
Of course they have those rights. Any time the spammers want to pay to post a billboard, place an ad, or take the time to post in open forums they can, just like everyone else. They're not allowed, however, to make me or my ISP pay for that, which they do when they bombard my e-mail accounts with crap.
You're free to stand up in a public forum and shout all manner of nonsense. You're not free to use my house for your podium. Your right to free speech isn't infringed simply because I won't let you stand on my property to shout. A spammer's right to speak isn't infringed by AOL saying "Speak all you want, but not on our servers." Why is this so hard to understand?
Paraphrase all you want. When they come for my right to make other people pay their time and money to read my message, they can take that "right" from me, you, Viagra salesmen, and anyone else as far as I'm concerned.
A spammer's right (and anyone else's right) to speak ends when he tries to make me foot the bill. And I defy you to show me where *that* right is guaranteed.
Would someone mod the parent up +1 Funny, please? Because the poster can't be serious. Let's look at a few of the more obvious problems with the post:
You capitalized "Freedom of Speech" being usurped, so I assume you mean the freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment, which you mention at the end. Sadly for your post, that Freedom and that amendment apply only to the Government. Private institutions can suppress (that is, fail to use their own money to allow) any speech they damn well please.
Nobody is taking away anyone's freedoms, because each and every AOL user whose spam was blocked paid AOL to do it. Those who don't want spam blocked are Free to change to another ISP. (Oh, quit it... AOL is too an ISP. Stay on topic, all right?)
Finally, tons and tons of CDs, unless they appear as ISO images in your mailbox, are Junk Mail, not spam.
Hope this clears up exactly which "rights" have been infringed here -- the rights of spammers to dump 1 billion pieces of mail into AOL users' mailboxes. And I just can't get too hot under the collar about their loss.
Now, once law enforcement decides to use retinal scans to ID criminals, my guess is you'll probably see a black market in retinal modifications (as well as a lot of blind former criminals).
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately for that theory, anyone trained as an anesthesiologist has also taken an oath to do no harm, so that eliminates everyone who has the skills from using them.
Oh well.
Why would anyone give SSN to AT&T? Do they also process your taxes? If not, they have no place asking or retaining this information.
When I first got my iPhone, the Apple Store reps could not figure out how (or wouldn't admit to knowing how) to sell an AT&T contract without a social security number. They sent me down the way to the AT&T store who also couldn't figure it out without calling in to a customer service line and escalating to a supervisor. It took over two hours to buy the damn phone without a SS#, but would have been five minutes if I had given it up. Eventually, they admitted that they have a placeholder number they can use instead of the SS# and we completed the transaction.
Granted, this was a few years ago, but I don't see why they'd be any more cooperative today.
So that's why people give it to them. Is it required? No. Do people have several hours to waste and the stubbornness to jump through the hoops? Not usually.
Hey, where did all of those people who say anonymity on the Internet isn't necessary run off to?
So it's basically Netflix, with the exact same shortcomings of Netflix.
One advantage over Netflix: Amazon streaming plays movies on non-Intel (well, G5) Macs, which Netflix won't do because the required version of Silverlight is Intel-only. It never hurts to have one more system that can stream movies, especially since I was paying for Prime anyway.
Of course, this is somewhat offset by the fact that Amazon can't stream through Wii as Netflix does. Oh well.
we upgraded the old G5 iMac to Leopard for the speed boost (which it did) but we weren't having crash issues. I for one won't be in a hurry to upgrade to Snow Leopard
Just so you know, the Snow Leopard specs say that an Intel processor is required, so no G5 support.
I have one G5 system and one Intel system, so they'll be out of sync for the first time after I upgrade to Snow Leopard (which I will do immediately after it arrives, since I do nightly backups and therefore upgrade without fear, or less fear, anyway). The speed increases and MS Exchange support are enough reason for me to try it, but my G5 will have to stay on Leopard forever, I guess.
When my cell phone was stolen as part of a neighborhood-wide crime spree, I contacted the police about using my phone, with my full permission and cooperation, to help track the criminal. Whenever I called my phone, the thief (or someone who did business with the thief) was answering. And yet the police declined to take me up on my offer, and never did recover my phone. If my privacy is (potentially) being compromised by how trackable my phone is, where's that "benefit to society" I keep hearing about?
I wonder if these could turn off those annoying TVs they have at supermarket checkout lines.
I tried this. Unfortunately, they all just jumped back on automatically.
In the same supermarket, I also turned off those infomercial TVs they had scattered about the store, attached to the ceilings. The TVBGone turned off the video, but left the audio running, so I assume the audio system was separately connected to their DVD player. Darn it.
Replying to my own post, I forgot about Places being enabled on the trunk. So yes, there are perfectly good reasons why it's probably not compatible. Don't know about any branch builds, though.
Just to save you the 15 seconds it takes to click the link, if you're running the nightly builds off the Firefox trunk, you can't (easily) install the extension... it asks whether to redirect you to the 1.5 download pages instead.
I suppose they restricted the extension to 1.5 to avoid potential conflicts, but I'd rather they said it's OK with 1.5 or later, and let users of nightly builds take their chances. But hey, to give them the benefit of the doubt, maybe they know of actual breakage, and disabled it to save us from ourselves...
Except that AAPL is actually zooming downwards at the moment. Something like -4% in less than an hour after the keynote ended.
Except that Apple's stock just about always goes down on the announcements. No idea why. It always frustrated me as I watched the stock over the years, but I learned to expect it. So any guesses as to which announcement made the stock drop are likely wrong.
One of my favorite golden rules for software development is: first make it work, then optimize. NEVER optimize your first shot.
The problem, of course, is that the usual sequence (for many, many software packages I've encountered) is first make it work, declare it golden master and ship it, then add new features, declare those golden master in a point release, and repeat. Fit optimizing into your copious spare time between releases.
Of course, there's no shareholder, end-user, or marketeer pressure on open source projects to ship too early, right? Um, right?
AOL's e-mail service, long accessible only via AOL's proprietary, monolithic app, will be available via IMAP starting Thursday.
Just for the record, it's already available and I've been using it for a couple of weeks now. There's an unofficial Web site describing it at AdamKB's site.
There are a few quirks I've noticed... AOL auto-deletes older mail that you've read unless you move it into the Saved Mail folder (max. 20 MB, I believe). Unfortunately, users of AOL's Mac client or the Web mail interface don't have a Saved Mail folder... that's created by the AOL 9 for Windows software only. AOL's IMAP implementation doesn't allow creating folders, so I have to find a Windows machine with AOL 9 installed to create this.
Also, there are some people who have had problems sending through AOL's authenticated SMTP server using Apple's Mail.app client, but that's probably an Apple bug, not AOL.
This is definitely a great move... I've been using Claris Emailer for years because it was the only authorized third-party AOL mail client, so now I have alternatives. And I've had my AOL address since 1990, so I'm reluctant to give it up.
Tea has less caffeine than coffee, but it can still be significant, especially if you drink upwards of 5-6 pots a day. I get hideous caffeine withdrawal without it and tea is my only caffeine source.
Besides, even better than that Amazon link for good quality tea is Upton Tea Imports. They even have good gift sets and starter kits, just like any other good pusher... ;-)
Yes, the accelerated video came back, but your Bronze G3 Powerbook (like mine) still has an unusable DVD player, so a major component that shipped with the laptop no longer works thanks to the "upgrade" from Mac OS 9
That said, I find OS X 10.2.x very usable on my Powerbook, and will continue to use it happily (without making a claim under this class-action suit). I credit the lawsuit, as you do, with restoring accelerated 2D video, but I also recognize that Apple could have done more.
Anybody know how the recent California law requiring companies to disclose when their data is compromised would apply to this case? If the primary victim in this case notifies its clients (call them secondary victims), are they then required (if they do biz in California) to notify the tertiary victims (their customers)?
Just wondering how all of this may play out...
2) Safari/IE. MS is killing IE for the Mac. Many sites currently don't look so hot, or don't even work, on non-IE browsers. How will this be addressed? Safari "giving in" to IE-style rendering?
That's really a non-issue, because IE for Mac was never compatible with the sites you're talking about... those sites are IE for Windows specific. IE for Mac was a surprisingly standards-compliant browser, one of the first to support really good CSS1 and a good chunk of CSS2, and it never supported most of the non-standard IE for Windows stuff.
On the VirtualPC front, I do think it would be nice if Apple were to throw its open-source development weight into enhancing Bochs to make it the best emulation out there, and then integrate it into OS X so you could have double-clickable Windows apps in an emulation layer such as Classic mode, but I haven't heard anything about that one way or another.
Wouldn't Microsoft want to release an end-user version for Linux for the exact same reason they ported it to Mac OS (and then again to OS X)?
And, um, by the way, does anyone know what that reason would that be?
Won't people who value their privacy (which, sadly, may also include criminals) just revive a project like PGPfone? I don't think it's been updated in a while, but the source code is still there...
I have used various flavors of VNC (don't forget about RealVNC) to support friends and family across the country. (And one memorable experience talking a new Mac OS X user into enabling SSH so I could connect and figure out where all of her disk space had suddenly gone).
I have found that the most difficult part by far is talking them through opening a port in their plug-it-in-and-turn-it-on NAT router (Linksys, usually) for whatever connection I'm trying to establish. Especially when each router has a different UI.
So, I agree that remote connections are *the* way to go when helping family long-distance, I also wanted to point out that there are more steps than "just install it and I'll take it from there."
If Echelon is used fairly and honestly in these types of situations, then I will not complain one bit about the extraordinary secrecy of its network.
If it's being used "fairly and honestly," and it's truly an effective tool, why does it need to be extraordinarily secret? The world has known, contrary to the various participants' best efforts, that Echelon exists for several years now, and it still worked to catch this guy.
I worry more about extraordinary secrecy than surveillance... because I don't know that I can trust the people keeping the secrets "for our own good."
They cannot be barred from advertising in newspapers, they cannot be barred from advertising on billboards, and they cannot be barred from posting in open forums. But spammers don't have these rights?
Of course they have those rights. Any time the spammers want to pay to post a billboard, place an ad, or take the time to post in open forums they can, just like everyone else. They're not allowed, however, to make me or my ISP pay for that, which they do when they bombard my e-mail accounts with crap.
You're free to stand up in a public forum and shout all manner of nonsense. You're not free to use my house for your podium. Your right to free speech isn't infringed simply because I won't let you stand on my property to shout. A spammer's right to speak isn't infringed by AOL saying "Speak all you want, but not on our servers." Why is this so hard to understand?
Paraphrase all you want. When they come for my right to make other people pay their time and money to read my message, they can take that "right" from me, you, Viagra salesmen, and anyone else as far as I'm concerned.
A spammer's right (and anyone else's right) to speak ends when he tries to make me foot the bill. And I defy you to show me where *that* right is guaranteed.
Would someone mod the parent up +1 Funny, please? Because the poster can't be serious. Let's look at a few of the more obvious problems with the post:
Hope this clears up exactly which "rights" have been infringed here -- the rights of spammers to dump 1 billion pieces of mail into AOL users' mailboxes. And I just can't get too hot under the collar about their loss.
How will the Lasik surgery effect my retina scans? Is the ATM going to think, I am another person?
LASIK surgery modifies your cornea, not your retina, so my guess it it just won't matter.
See Lasik Institute explanations for details (perhaps more details than one would like).
Now, once law enforcement decides to use retinal scans to ID criminals, my guess is you'll probably see a black market in retinal modifications (as well as a lot of blind former criminals).