If you give them Linux boxes, Ubuntu has a package called 'timeoutd' which allows you to enforce pretty flexible time-based limitations. I limit my kids to 90 minutes per day each on the computer (if they're doing schoolwork I can give them some more) and lock them out during hours they should be sleeping, etc. It's all configurable per-account, so you can easily lock one or more of them out of the computer completely for a period of time (grounding).
I've found that by putting per-user time limits on each of the kids, I actually don't have too much trouble with them fighting over the one shared machine, either. No one can hog the computer all day because timeoutd will kick them off when they hit their time limit. As a side-benefit, they've all learned the value of creating a good password and keeping it secret;-)
Other precautions I take are putting their computer in a public area of the house and installing the DansGuardian filter. I also pay attention to what they're doing, though I obviously can't supervise them all the time.
But really why does Disney need this? Walt is dead and can't benefit from his creation. Surely Disney, as a huge corporation can come up with one new idea to milk for a few more decades rather than leeching from the dead.
No argument, philosophically. As a practical matter, if allowing them to keep Mickey forever will get most of everything else into the public domain, it's a good trade. As of now, what we have is that copyrights are perpetually extended so that nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
All that would do is give Disney and large corporations copyright in perpetuity.
I'd be okay with that if it stopped them from pushing for ever-longer copyright terms on everything. With requirements of periodic renewal and continuous distribution to maintain copyright, most stuff would fall into the public domain fairly quickly.
And it couldn't actually be perpetual. Not in the US, anyway. Copyright must be for a limited time per the Constitution. However, we could fix the maximum number of renewals at 100 or something, which would make it limited but long enough even for Disney.
Seems sensible to me. I'm no fan of drug abuse -- I don't even drink alcohol -- but prohibition is a failed policy. Americans in the 30s were smart enough to recognize this and take action. Hopefully we'll be as wise in the 2010s, but I'm not holding my breath.
I think you underestimate how difficult it is to get a handgun in the UK. So what about enthusiasts? They're a small number of nut-jobs, and gun possession isn't a divine right.
I think you overestimate how difficult it is to get a handgun in the UK. Google for "handgun violence UK" and spend some time reading what comes up.
As for the enthusiasts, why should their freedom be restricted to no purpose? Perhaps we should take your hobby away, too, just because we feel like it? Free societies don't arbitrarily restrict their members without compelling reason, and no real research has shown gun control to have a significant positive impact on violent crime, anywhere in the world.
Oh, and I disagree that gun possession isn't a natural right. But I'm sure we'll just have to agree to disagree on that point.
The handgun ban is irrelevance, as before the ban hardly anyone had a handgun other than enthusiasts. It's not like the entire population was walking around like John Wayne.
But the whole point of the ban was to reduce the availability of handguns to criminals... If the ban was irrelevant and ineffective, then why limit the freedom of the law-abiding enthusiast?
You'll find that socio-economic factors have more to do with crime than anything else, and they can't be solved by yet more expensive technology.
On that we certainly agree. It's the motivation to do violence that's the primary issue, not the availability of tools with which to do it (especially since there's no eliminating them), nor the means used to identify, apprehend and punish the doers.
Why do you only count firearms murders? It's pretty reasonable to assume that people who want to kill someone and have access to a gun will often use a gun, but if guns are hard to get, they'll choose the weapons that are at hand.
If you look at all homicides, the US has a much higher rate than Australia, of course. 4.8 times higher. In fact, the rate of non-firearm homicides in the US is greater than the rate of ALL homicides in Australia. Clearly there's something at work besides the guns.
Most firearm incidents are accidents &/or acts of compulsion/impulse.
Cite?
According to the CDC, firearms accidents account for only a very small percentage of overall firearms deaths. From 1999 to 2006, 2.5% of firearms deaths were unintentional. Another 0.8% were of undetermined intent. If we count all those as unintentional, that raises the total to 3.3%.
MOST firearm deaths are suicides. 56.4% of them, in fact, according to CDC figures from the above range of years. Another 1.1% are "legal interventions", meaning people killed by police and 5.1% are justifiable homicides by civilians. The remaining 34.1% of firearms deaths are criminal homicides -- I don't know how many of those are pre-meditated vs. how many are impulsive.
What we need is a national ban on guns, across the board. Then we may start seeing some improvement.
The UK has this, and the advantage that it's an island nation, near a continent whose nations also have strong gun control. And yet violent crime has risen since the UK banned handguns. In fact, violent crime using handguns has risen since the ban was enacted. I'm not saying that the increased violence is a result of the ban; cause and effect are very hard to tease out given the large number of factors that affect crime rates.
Meanwhile, many US states have liberalized carry laws, and a greater percentage of Americans carry a handgun daily today than any time in the last hundred years, and the US has seen a decline in violence, and a greater decline in areas where carry has increased the most. Of course, the American rate of violence is still higher than the UK rate, and again I can't say that increased carry is the cause of the decreased crime rate -- but at the very least these data points argue that there is no reason to expect that a nationwide ban would provide any improvement.
Meanwhile, it would certainly infringe the rights of law-abiding citizens, a right that is codified in our Bill of Rights, as well as in the constitutions of the majority of the US states.
Personally, while we're speculating on ways to reduce violence, I think that ending the War on Drugs would do a lot more to reduce the violence. Much of the violence is gang-related and it's drugs that fund the gangs.
In the interest of full disclosure: I do believe that citizen carry reduces violence. Whether or not it reduces overall rates, it reduces the number of law-abiding folks who are victims of violence. I believe this strongly enough that I've gotten certified as a concealed carry permit instructor so that I can work in my spare time to increase the number of people who carry every day.
Luckily, it's extremely likely that the Supreme Court with incorporate the second amendment against the states (if you read the oral argument transcript, the whole discussion was basically about which way to incorporate it). I won't be surprised if it's a 9-0 ruling, actually.
What is the motivation for 40 attempted murders in one week in the city? Is anyone looking into that?
There really isn't any need to "look into it". Everyone knows that the motivation for 39.5 of those attempted murders is drugs. The War on Drugs is the root cause of most of our crime and nearly all of our violence (domestic disputes accounting for nearly all of the remainder).
That's because they're properly trained to use the guns while they do national service. You can hardly compare mass ex-military gun control to what we have where they're nothing more than penis extensions for morons and cowards.
Bah.
Like most people who hold "training" in such high regard and believe that it's the difference between someone who can be trusted with a dangerous weapon and someone who cannot, I'm sure you've never had any.
Training teaches some useful things, certainly. One very important thing that it teaches is how to safely handle a weapon. But that portion of the training only takes about 30 minutes (though many hours of practice help to ingrain the safe-handling habits). Beyond that, all of the training that soldiers and police receive with their firearms is primarily about marksmanship and tactics. The difference between cover and concealment and how to make use of them. Shooting accurately from cover, with either hand. Shooting accurately while moving. Tactics for building clearing. Tactics for assaulting various sorts of prepared positions. That sort of thing. Police also spend a lot of time on the legalities of shooting, on defending their firearms from gun-grab attempts, etc.
With that understood, can you tell me, please, just what aspect of all of that training it is that makes the difference between a person who can store a fully-automatic main battle rifle in their closet for decades and never harm a soul and someone who likes to wave his pistol around and cap anyone who offends him?
I'll answer my own question: NOTHING. The difference between those two is their social responsibility and emotional stability, not their training. Criminals rarely shoot people accidentally -- they shoot people because they want to, because it gives them power over people. It especially gives them power over unarmed people.
Firearms training doesn't change what you do with a gun, it just changes how effectively you do it. The fact that all those Swiss gun owners have been trained is not what keeps them from shooting up their neighborhoods.
Maybe is because I'm European and the concept of self-defence is so alien to us, but the idea of police forces not being liable for leave you in the cold with no protection whatsoever, more so when an alert call has been made... it's frightening.
Really? Whether the police are liable or not, the fact is that they usually can't arrive until it's too late to do much more than gather evidence. It doesn't matter where you live, the police can hardly ever arrive within less than a few minutes, and if you can't defend yourself, a lot of very bad stuff can happen in a few minutes.
Every second you linger in the target area is a chance to be killed
By what? Your aircraft spontaneously exploding? You're flying far too high for man-portable anti-aircraft missiles to reach you, and the opposition has no larger ground-based AA and no air-to-air capability.
Given the low speed, limited maneuverability and lack of missile defense of these UAVs, if the opposition had any anti-aircraft capability, they'd be swatted out of the skies.
We did not choose it? You might want to do a little studying about the "peace" conditions imposed on Germany after World War 1.
And you might also study the US input into the Treat of Versailles. From the US perspective, we were dragged into WWI, helped to end it, tried to keep our allies from making the German reparations too onerous, lost that argument, and as a result were dragged into WWII -- and helped to end that.
IMO, we held such moral high ground in those conflicts that the American people learned to believe that our military actions were inherently moral -- which paved the way for a lot of immoral action in subsequent decades.
I actually agree with the opportunistic encryption approach. I've posted numerous times on/. about how browsers should silently accept and use self-signed certs, and just not show the lock icon. It's important, though, to understand that opportunistic encryption of that sort is effective only against passive eavesdroppers. Anyone able to mount a MITM attack can defeat it, and the attack doesn't need to be targeted. Indeed attackers with sufficient access and capability can still "throw their nets far and wide".
Still, with the limitations understood, opportunistic encryption is a good thing, and we should be doing it everywhere possible. Perhaps coupling it with key change detection similar to what SSH does could help a bit, too, though it would have to be implemented with a great deal of care to avoid false positives that would reduce its value to nil. Of course, any site that is normally "secure" (meaning it has a real certificate) that presents a self-signed cert should get flagged in a major, scary way.
things would be much easier for both administrators and security guys (is there a proper name for them?) if the concepts of data encryption on the wire and authentication of the other party were separated both in protocol and implementation
They're not separable. How can you have any assurance that your communications are secret if you don't know who you're talking to?
Authentication can exist just fine without encryption, but if you want privacy you must have both authentication and encryption.
Their "120GB" drives are 121.60 GB, and I assume they're actually the same size as other companies' 128GB drives.
Now if everyone would just use the correct prefixes, you wouldn't have to guess. A 128 GiB drive would hold 128 * 1024^3 bytes and a 120 gB drive would hold 120 * 10^9 bytes -- or pretty close to it, anyway. Actual drive sizes are never exactly the advertised sizes. Manufacturers of spinning-disk media generally round down to the nearest gB, which they then misspell as GB.
For example, the 500 gig drive I have in my desktop holds 500.107862016 gB. Other disks nearby are 120.034123776 gB, 200.049647616 gB, 203.928109056 gB, 251.000190324 gB, and 320.072933376 gB (advertised as 120 GB, 200 GB, 200 GB, 250 GB and 320 GB, respectively). Oh, and I have an old drive in the MythTV frontend that is 27.325218816 gB, which was sold to me as a 27 GB drive. I should replace that with a 4 GiB SSD before it dies. Either that or netboot it.
The kibi prefix was introduced in 2000. A vast amount of material - both software and documentation - was using KB to mean 1024 bytes in the 40 years preceding that.
The 20 years before that, anyway. In the 60s and 70s a lot of computer memory sizes were measured in kilowords, with different word sizes and 'kilo' meaning 1000.
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If you give them Linux boxes, Ubuntu has a package called 'timeoutd' which allows you to enforce pretty flexible time-based limitations. I limit my kids to 90 minutes per day each on the computer (if they're doing schoolwork I can give them some more) and lock them out during hours they should be sleeping, etc. It's all configurable per-account, so you can easily lock one or more of them out of the computer completely for a period of time (grounding).
I've found that by putting per-user time limits on each of the kids, I actually don't have too much trouble with them fighting over the one shared machine, either. No one can hog the computer all day because timeoutd will kick them off when they hit their time limit. As a side-benefit, they've all learned the value of creating a good password and keeping it secret ;-)
Other precautions I take are putting their computer in a public area of the house and installing the DansGuardian filter. I also pay attention to what they're doing, though I obviously can't supervise them all the time.
But really why does Disney need this? Walt is dead and can't benefit from his creation. Surely Disney, as a huge corporation can come up with one new idea to milk for a few more decades rather than leeching from the dead.
No argument, philosophically. As a practical matter, if allowing them to keep Mickey forever will get most of everything else into the public domain, it's a good trade. As of now, what we have is that copyrights are perpetually extended so that nothing will ever enter the public domain again.
All that would do is give Disney and large corporations copyright in perpetuity.
I'd be okay with that if it stopped them from pushing for ever-longer copyright terms on everything. With requirements of periodic renewal and continuous distribution to maintain copyright, most stuff would fall into the public domain fairly quickly.
And it couldn't actually be perpetual. Not in the US, anyway. Copyright must be for a limited time per the Constitution. However, we could fix the maximum number of renewals at 100 or something, which would make it limited but long enough even for Disney.
The precise details of your unsubstantiated assertion don't change its unsubstantiated nature.
Granted that many injuries to not lead to death, but I dispute that most firearms injuries are "accidental", either. Can you support your claim?
Seems sensible to me. I'm no fan of drug abuse -- I don't even drink alcohol -- but prohibition is a failed policy. Americans in the 30s were smart enough to recognize this and take action. Hopefully we'll be as wise in the 2010s, but I'm not holding my breath.
I think you underestimate how difficult it is to get a handgun in the UK. So what about enthusiasts? They're a small number of nut-jobs, and gun possession isn't a divine right.
I think you overestimate how difficult it is to get a handgun in the UK. Google for "handgun violence UK" and spend some time reading what comes up.
As for the enthusiasts, why should their freedom be restricted to no purpose? Perhaps we should take your hobby away, too, just because we feel like it? Free societies don't arbitrarily restrict their members without compelling reason, and no real research has shown gun control to have a significant positive impact on violent crime, anywhere in the world.
Oh, and I disagree that gun possession isn't a natural right. But I'm sure we'll just have to agree to disagree on that point.
Violent crime, and murders are on a long term decline in the UK.
Are you sure about that?
The handgun ban is irrelevance, as before the ban hardly anyone had a handgun other than enthusiasts. It's not like the entire population was walking around like John Wayne.
But the whole point of the ban was to reduce the availability of handguns to criminals... If the ban was irrelevant and ineffective, then why limit the freedom of the law-abiding enthusiast?
You'll find that socio-economic factors have more to do with crime than anything else, and they can't be solved by yet more expensive technology.
On that we certainly agree. It's the motivation to do violence that's the primary issue, not the availability of tools with which to do it (especially since there's no eliminating them), nor the means used to identify, apprehend and punish the doers.
Why do you only count firearms murders? It's pretty reasonable to assume that people who want to kill someone and have access to a gun will often use a gun, but if guns are hard to get, they'll choose the weapons that are at hand.
If you look at all homicides, the US has a much higher rate than Australia, of course. 4.8 times higher. In fact, the rate of non-firearm homicides in the US is greater than the rate of ALL homicides in Australia. Clearly there's something at work besides the guns.
Most firearm incidents are accidents &/or acts of compulsion/impulse.
Cite?
According to the CDC, firearms accidents account for only a very small percentage of overall firearms deaths. From 1999 to 2006, 2.5% of firearms deaths were unintentional. Another 0.8% were of undetermined intent. If we count all those as unintentional, that raises the total to 3.3%.
MOST firearm deaths are suicides. 56.4% of them, in fact, according to CDC figures from the above range of years. Another 1.1% are "legal interventions", meaning people killed by police and 5.1% are justifiable homicides by civilians. The remaining 34.1% of firearms deaths are criminal homicides -- I don't know how many of those are pre-meditated vs. how many are impulsive.
What we need is a national ban on guns, across the board. Then we may start seeing some improvement.
The UK has this, and the advantage that it's an island nation, near a continent whose nations also have strong gun control. And yet violent crime has risen since the UK banned handguns. In fact, violent crime using handguns has risen since the ban was enacted. I'm not saying that the increased violence is a result of the ban; cause and effect are very hard to tease out given the large number of factors that affect crime rates.
Meanwhile, many US states have liberalized carry laws, and a greater percentage of Americans carry a handgun daily today than any time in the last hundred years, and the US has seen a decline in violence, and a greater decline in areas where carry has increased the most. Of course, the American rate of violence is still higher than the UK rate, and again I can't say that increased carry is the cause of the decreased crime rate -- but at the very least these data points argue that there is no reason to expect that a nationwide ban would provide any improvement.
Meanwhile, it would certainly infringe the rights of law-abiding citizens, a right that is codified in our Bill of Rights, as well as in the constitutions of the majority of the US states.
Personally, while we're speculating on ways to reduce violence, I think that ending the War on Drugs would do a lot more to reduce the violence. Much of the violence is gang-related and it's drugs that fund the gangs.
In the interest of full disclosure: I do believe that citizen carry reduces violence. Whether or not it reduces overall rates, it reduces the number of law-abiding folks who are victims of violence. I believe this strongly enough that I've gotten certified as a concealed carry permit instructor so that I can work in my spare time to increase the number of people who carry every day.
Luckily, it's extremely likely that the Supreme Court with incorporate the second amendment against the states (if you read the oral argument transcript, the whole discussion was basically about which way to incorporate it). I won't be surprised if it's a 9-0 ruling, actually.
What is the motivation for 40 attempted murders in one week in the city? Is anyone looking into that?
There really isn't any need to "look into it". Everyone knows that the motivation for 39.5 of those attempted murders is drugs. The War on Drugs is the root cause of most of our crime and nearly all of our violence (domestic disputes accounting for nearly all of the remainder).
Contrast and compare to Switzerland
That's because they're properly trained to use the guns while they do national service. You can hardly compare mass ex-military gun control to what we have where they're nothing more than penis extensions for morons and cowards.
Bah.
Like most people who hold "training" in such high regard and believe that it's the difference between someone who can be trusted with a dangerous weapon and someone who cannot, I'm sure you've never had any.
Training teaches some useful things, certainly. One very important thing that it teaches is how to safely handle a weapon. But that portion of the training only takes about 30 minutes (though many hours of practice help to ingrain the safe-handling habits). Beyond that, all of the training that soldiers and police receive with their firearms is primarily about marksmanship and tactics. The difference between cover and concealment and how to make use of them. Shooting accurately from cover, with either hand. Shooting accurately while moving. Tactics for building clearing. Tactics for assaulting various sorts of prepared positions. That sort of thing. Police also spend a lot of time on the legalities of shooting, on defending their firearms from gun-grab attempts, etc.
With that understood, can you tell me, please, just what aspect of all of that training it is that makes the difference between a person who can store a fully-automatic main battle rifle in their closet for decades and never harm a soul and someone who likes to wave his pistol around and cap anyone who offends him?
I'll answer my own question: NOTHING. The difference between those two is their social responsibility and emotional stability, not their training. Criminals rarely shoot people accidentally -- they shoot people because they want to, because it gives them power over people. It especially gives them power over unarmed people.
Firearms training doesn't change what you do with a gun, it just changes how effectively you do it. The fact that all those Swiss gun owners have been trained is not what keeps them from shooting up their neighborhoods.
I'm... I'm shocked, really.
Maybe is because I'm European and the concept of self-defence is so alien to us, but the idea of police forces not being liable for leave you in the cold with no protection whatsoever, more so when an alert call has been made... it's frightening.
Really? Whether the police are liable or not, the fact is that they usually can't arrive until it's too late to do much more than gather evidence. It doesn't matter where you live, the police can hardly ever arrive within less than a few minutes, and if you can't defend yourself, a lot of very bad stuff can happen in a few minutes.
I was of course referring to an aircraft in a conventional warfare situation - not in a "peacekeeping/cleanup" role.
Or a conventional warfare situation where one side has total air superiority.
I think this is the real power of the UAV - it can be run by a team, and not merely by a pilot.
Good point.
This was all predicted over 17 years ago -- Toys.
And by numerous science fiction stories and novels decades before that.
Every second you linger in the target area is a chance to be killed
By what? Your aircraft spontaneously exploding? You're flying far too high for man-portable anti-aircraft missiles to reach you, and the opposition has no larger ground-based AA and no air-to-air capability.
Given the low speed, limited maneuverability and lack of missile defense of these UAVs, if the opposition had any anti-aircraft capability, they'd be swatted out of the skies.
We did not choose it? You might want to do a little studying about the "peace" conditions imposed on Germany after World War 1.
And you might also study the US input into the Treat of Versailles. From the US perspective, we were dragged into WWI, helped to end it, tried to keep our allies from making the German reparations too onerous, lost that argument, and as a result were dragged into WWII -- and helped to end that.
IMO, we held such moral high ground in those conflicts that the American people learned to believe that our military actions were inherently moral -- which paved the way for a lot of immoral action in subsequent decades.
I actually agree with the opportunistic encryption approach. I've posted numerous times on /. about how browsers should silently accept and use self-signed certs, and just not show the lock icon. It's important, though, to understand that opportunistic encryption of that sort is effective only against passive eavesdroppers. Anyone able to mount a MITM attack can defeat it, and the attack doesn't need to be targeted. Indeed attackers with sufficient access and capability can still "throw their nets far and wide".
Still, with the limitations understood, opportunistic encryption is a good thing, and we should be doing it everywhere possible. Perhaps coupling it with key change detection similar to what SSH does could help a bit, too, though it would have to be implemented with a great deal of care to avoid false positives that would reduce its value to nil. Of course, any site that is normally "secure" (meaning it has a real certificate) that presents a self-signed cert should get flagged in a major, scary way.
things would be much easier for both administrators and security guys (is there a proper name for them?) if the concepts of data encryption on the wire and authentication of the other party were separated both in protocol and implementation
They're not separable. How can you have any assurance that your communications are secret if you don't know who you're talking to?
Authentication can exist just fine without encryption, but if you want privacy you must have both authentication and encryption.
Their "120GB" drives are 121.60 GB, and I assume they're actually the same size as other companies' 128GB drives.
Now if everyone would just use the correct prefixes, you wouldn't have to guess. A 128 GiB drive would hold 128 * 1024^3 bytes and a 120 gB drive would hold 120 * 10^9 bytes -- or pretty close to it, anyway. Actual drive sizes are never exactly the advertised sizes. Manufacturers of spinning-disk media generally round down to the nearest gB, which they then misspell as GB.
For example, the 500 gig drive I have in my desktop holds 500.107862016 gB. Other disks nearby are 120.034123776 gB, 200.049647616 gB, 203.928109056 gB, 251.000190324 gB, and 320.072933376 gB (advertised as 120 GB, 200 GB, 200 GB, 250 GB and 320 GB, respectively). Oh, and I have an old drive in the MythTV frontend that is 27.325218816 gB, which was sold to me as a 27 GB drive. I should replace that with a 4 GiB SSD before it dies. Either that or netboot it.
I can't believe I never noticed those DNS servers in the tunnel info. I just went to google.com at the address 2001:4860:8002::69. Nifty!
So until the guardians of the English language change .... 1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes. Finished.
Except when it isn't.
The kibi prefix was introduced in 2000. A vast amount of material - both software and documentation - was using KB to mean 1024 bytes in the 40 years preceding that.
The 20 years before that, anyway. In the 60s and 70s a lot of computer memory sizes were measured in kilowords, with different word sizes and 'kilo' meaning 1000.