Sadly "your view" is not the sole factor. What about the hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants used in putting that expensive shiny satelite in space? What about the pollution released when all these people have to commute to work instead of telecommute?
Don't get me wrong, if I was in your shoes, and had a big tower pop up in the middle of my fabulous hillside view, I'd be unhappy too.
But if there's only one 100 foot tower in every 400 square miles, I figure it's MORE than worth it.
I strongly disagree. Deurabnization would be a great thing.
The software company I work for needs to be located in the expensive heart of the biggest city in Canada like we all need a hole in our head. But because of the "perceived need", all of the employees either have to pay a HUGE amount of money for a SMALL place to live, or they have to spend 1-3 hours a day commuting.
Do you have any idea what 1-3 hours of commuting creates in terms of pollution? Do you have any idea of what a huge drain on the economy all these grossly inefficient highly expensive cities and concrete towers cost? Don't attribute to "economic necessity" that which can be easily explained by social dellusion.
Now I appreciate your concern about having all of North America covered by one big suburb. So where's the right middle ground?
Currently the US and Canada are 75% urban, 25% rural. (see here) If all the small towns in the country were tripled in size (which means taking people from the city cores AND the suburbs, which are counted as part of the urban megopolis'), what would it look like? I think that the country would not look like one massive suburbia. My little tiny home town would simply be a little bigger, still surrounded by massive amounts of nature. (Currently 1000 people in a couple square miles in the middle of 400 square miles of countryside).
The suburbs are PART of urban areas. When people talk about deurbanization, they are talking about taking the people in those 100 square miles of suburbia and spreading them out.
Changing the icon is way harder and is a way more annoying thing in windows.
Especially if you use your "open with" shortcut. Windows does not properly create the registry entries, and so your new "file type" does not appear in the "File Types" listing, so you CAN NOT set the icon. Or do any other customization.
Ages ago I learned to stay away from that damn half assed "open with" dialog.
BTW: I finally got my browsers to open wav files with Sound Recorder. Instantaneous lightweight playback without taking me away from the source page, Sound Recorder closing itself afterwards. What a total Fscking NIGHTMARE that was! I live in fear of something like Quicktime seizing my browser audio associations, because I know it will take an HOUR OR TWO to rediscover the magic configuration that does the job.
To begin with, the user would very rarely want to change one of these file type mappings;
Bullshit! This is something I do REGULARLY, because applications continue to successfully go under the radar and seize them!
My non-techie friends would LOVE to control their computers, but they DON'T because it's too inconvenient to do. See the earlier post by ConceptJunkie about how impossibly hard it was (WinNT and Win9x, not sure about Win2k) to figure out which damn entry in the list is the file you want to change the association for.
it is a lot easier to change these file-types than he portrays
Bullshit. I'm a Power User, a software engineer with a MSc in Physics, and you can not do it with a right click. You have to use Shift-right-click, and even then Win98 SCREWS UP the association, so you can not find this association in the folder options in order to customize if further (aka assign an icon). I learned AGES AGO to bloody well avoid this "open with" dialog!! If you want it done right, you have to do it manaully, the hard way.
virtually every application released in the past five years will check the Windows registry to determine file mappings when it is launched and offer
That's 50% of the entire problem!!! Every f'cking time. And 50% of the programs DON'T ASK, they just seize control. Even THIS YEAR's of LView Pro screws you over. If you hit CANCEL in it's "file type association" dialog, it STILL SEIZES THE FILE TYPES!! The only "correct" answer is to de-select all the checkboxes and only then hit cancel. Cancel doesn't mean cancel? WTF
You have NO IDEA just how many people CURSE the file type nightmare Microsoft created.
You sir, are an oddity. (no offence:)
I would agree with one of the previous posters,
that it might not be a conspiracy so much as it is Microsoft's general incompetence at doing anything right the first time. But I'm CERTAIN MS won't be making any changes that relinquish control over file type associations without a fight. If they do ANYTHING right, it will because of some engineers and honourable people within Micorosft raising hell with their pointy haired bosses over "what is right".
We can only hope that they are capable of giving Balmer hell without blanching.
until recently, you couldn't search or sort the filename extensions access through "Folder Options" by extension name.
Huh? View, Details, then click on "Type".
You had to know what they are called
Oooh, I understand. You mean inside View, Folder Options, File Types.
YES!!! God that's one of their worst mistakes.
The quickest way is to open the registry and the very first entries in the first folder (HKR) are the file extensions. Find the one you want, and note what it's "Default" is. Look for that further down immediately below the file extensions in HKR, and see what it's "Defaut" is. That's the description you look for inside the File Types listing.
For example for.doc it's "Word.Document.8", and the "Default" value is "Microsoft Word Document", and that's what it's listed under in the File Types listing.
You know, it just occurred to me, it wouldn't be hard at all to put together a little tool that would sweep through the filetypes and re-name them to the extensions themselves!!! (Bloody hell, I can't believe I only just now thought of that!!! Could have used it years ago!)
Anyone know anything about US Nuclear deep-penetration weapons, the type that would have been designed to take out the Soviet version of Cheyene Mountain and Soviet missile silos/command centers?
We could use a few of those real soon now to crumble those massive 2 mile long underground caves that Osama supposedly favours.
> A true pacifist is willing to die before hitting back.
In ALL likelyhood, the person is not a true pacifict..
> * And why would anyone take advice and learn lessons from an asshole who punches peaceful people in the face?
..like most humans, even if they're peeved and angry at that instant in time and refuse to "give in", if you truly win your argument, eventually, as the event is turned over and over in their mind in the following year, you can usually find the person has quite a different viewpoint 12 months later.
So, have a go at it, expect them to refuse to agree with you, then wait 12 months and see what they've "learned" from you.
Works every time. Just remember, they're going to hate your guts for a minimum of 6-12 months, and if you aren't truly right, all bets are off.
The CNN version you quote looks like a literal translation of what their on-air translator said (or whoever did it "live" the first time).
CNN probably just hasn't bothered getting it re-done properly. CBC has.
You're right, it's a big difference, and quite appaling. The third time I saw it on TV I was wondering "when the heck are they going to get a good translation done, this one is choppy as hell!"
Have the Afghani King return, and draft a Constitution based on a broad based democratic government
I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I love the democracy part, but I don't want ANYONE with the power to subvert the country again. No Kings. No Mullahs. No Military.
I love the "Marshal Plan for Afghanistan" idea. One thing that would help things go over much better would be to send in SOLELY Muslim Americans to implement and supervise the economic and political implementation of said Marshal Plan.
Imagine, a completely democratic muslim country built from the ground up by the West. Is it even possible?
they might as well have hit Toronto because it feels the same.
I work at a tower 6km North of the downtown core in Toronto, and every 10 minutes during the entire morning, I was looking over my shoulder to see if 1st Canadian Place was still standing.
I kid you not.
BTW: 1st Canadian is taller than the perspective in that shot leads you to believe. The camera is a lot closer to the CN tower than the downtown core.
NO, it will happen again
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· Score: 2, Interesting
What happened yesterday is totally without precedent and it would be unwise to make such a drastic policy and procedural change
NO, there is ample precident!!! The alternative is to suffer through the development of TOMBSTONE TECHNOLOGY.
It's been clear for some time now that it would only be a matter of time before an air-rage incident with an unarmed intruder resulted in 4-500 people dying as an airliner went straight into the ground. And yet no government agency even considered forcing airlines to "reduce profits" by adding a 1000 lb titanium/aluminum door to seperate the pilots from the passenters, even though the idea of a 'stronger door' is the first thing that strikes EVERYONE.
It's a known fact, by those in the know, that most of what "humanity" and "society" does is Tombstone Technology. Everything that has happened could have been prevented if decisions were made on the side of safety instead of economics. If people didn't simply refuse to deal with complexities by glossing over them with black and white pictures. The phrase "tombstone technology" does not describe "what must be", but describes what goes on now because of the "stupid short-sighted decisions human beings currently make." The way in which organizations, businesses, governments, and masses of human beings makes decisions MUST CHANGE.
If the FAA isn't relieved of it's air-safety responsibilities, I will be sickened. It's been known for 10-15 years now that the NTSB should be in charge. The conflict of interest of the FAA in promoting air travel and the profits of the airlines has already killed so many due to not implementing NTSB recommendations.
If all they do is "beef up" boarding security, I will be sickened. We've known for 10-15 years that current security precautions are totally inadequate. I have never EVER heard of a "test" of the boarding security precautions which didn't report a 40-60% success rate at getting serious weapons aboard.
Airplanes have been siezed before by people bluffing that they have bombs. Knives do not need to be made out of metal. And yet we've got some idiot on TV spouting off how it's so impossible to prevent someone from hijacking an airplane and doing this, seeing as they don't actually need a weapon. If there was a bulkhead and they had no weapon, all they could do is bluff and negotiate when back on the ground.
No, you can't stop someone from blowing up an airplane in-flight. But you can stop someone from crashing a fully loaded super-liner (like the new ones on the drawing boards from Boeing and Airbus) from being crashed into the Superdome and suffocating 100,000 people, or bringing down the Sears tower.
You're simply refusing to work through the complexities of the real world. That's what got us into this fucking mess!!! We can handle complexities of this nature, if those capable of making analytic decisions are given the chance, and not mucked with by those who can't think past their nose.
BTW: With respect to depressurization: the pilots simply need to do a crash dive down to 5000 feet and slow to 150-200mph, at which point there will not be a pressurization difference and aerodynamic stresses will be minimized. Then a few bullet holes will be just fine.
I just want you to know that there are many more people out there, myself included, whose stomachs got sick when we saw our first documentary about what happened in Chile, and the fact that the CIA engineered it because they thought the democratically elected government was leaning "too far to the left". To think of all the people who died at the hands of the Military Junta that took over afterwards...
If our admin's hadn't spent 2-12 man weeks dealing with MS related security upgrades and crap over the past year, they might have gotten a VPN up and running, which would have meant the 120 odd employees could have put in a dozen or so extra hours of work from home, and those that dialed in without the VPN would have been able to use the VPN and work more effectively.
Lessee, 120 employees times 20 hours over the past year times $60 CDN per hour per employee, that's $144,000 just for the medium sized IT shop I work at.
Of course that's mostly opportunity cost. Not too much of it would have been billed directly to clients, but we would have produced better software with fewer bugs and more features. (Not to downplay the term opportunity cost, it is valid to worry about such things...)
Re:Let me see if I understand correctly...
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Make Your Own DSL
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How about this. It's rural right? Each landowner owns a square mile of property or more, right? (At least that's the way it is in Saskatchewan.) So it's not infeasable for your family to go visit their 10 intervening neighbours and work out a right of way issue. Whether you lay an extra line for them (they pay material costs) or share a line you're laying, or what not.
How much would it cost per mile for copper wire so we can get out the old backhoe and lay it ourselves?
I swear it's going to come down to this in the cities for the last mile! I can see a bunch of me's forming a co-op/non-profit, negotiating deals with the landlords to get right of way to lay extra new copper to the apartments, and then re-sell it.
Notice how the Chicago Tribune refers to Dmitri
as a "Russian Graduate Student", as opposed to what we see at CNN and all the other 3l33t media organizations calling him, the "Russian hacker"?
Sure, you and I may know that we're all "hackers" (people having fun writing code and solving problems), but to everyone else in the world, it's the colloquial form of "online criminal" who steals their credit card numbers and attack people's computers.
The long-standing uncorrected issue with the Media's use of the term "hacker" is causing a real world problem, preventing the common people from getting an unbiased view.
If this law so clearly violates our "Fair Use" rights, why won't it be simple to get it declared invalid and struck down?
And how many different Constitutional approaches are there to having this declared unconstitutional?
Personally I was supprised at the EFF's approach to some of it's previous cases, focusing so much on "code is speech", and ignoring the "it's necessary to excercise fair use" approach.
I guess "fair use" isn't a direct constitutional right. Also I'm too close to the issue. I can't see why anyone could NOT find something wrong with these laws and rule against them.
Ok, I've got an idea that's not as illegal as what he was suggesting, but should get more attention than a tiny blue ribbon on the side of one page of my homepage.
My personal website gets 10 unique visitors a day, because I have some modestly interesting stuff there. I propose tearing my entire site down, and replacing it with a main page and a 404 page that is all black, with just the blue ribbon at the top, and a headline saying "these pages will remain unavailable until we are free again", plus one of those 3 paragraph explanations of the issue and Dimitry, plus links to all the relevant sites.
That's 10 people a day that'll get to hear about the issue. That's 300 people a month. (Until google re-visits my site, and the hits stop coming in. Guess I should set up some software that redirects Google to the 'normal' pages:)
What specific circumstances does "changing passwords regularly" protect against?
Assume that my passwords are all "very strong", they are not written down anywhere, and they're never transmitted in the clear over an un-secure network.
The only circumstance I can forsee this "helping" with (besides idiotic ones like people loosing the pices of paper they have their passwords written on), is where it's already in the hands of a "criminal". But AFAIK if someone already has a single user account, further user accounts (existing and specially-created) and the root account isn't far behind.
Can anyone point me to a scholarly analysis of the exact merits of regular password changing?
Why? Because I don't do it. If I were, with 20 different passwords and all of them of the "Strong" type, I'd be forced to write them down, or spend hours and hours figuring out 'mind games' to try and remember them, and even worse it would (and did in past years) result in an ever increasing number of "confused and forgotten" passwords. (Frequently occurs within 1-2 weeks of a change, when you just happened to not use that account, and so now you're mind is groping in among not only all your current passwords but the previous 1-3 rounds of passwords, and suddenly you're screwed. No fun.)
i was actually wondering why they didnt simply talk to him and his guys on how it might be fixed..?
Yeah, at one point I wondered about that too.
Then I took a look at their financial profile. Notice that they have a 10 Billion dollar market capitalization, revenues of around 1.5 billion dollars a year, and CEO's and directors that make 3-50 million dollars a year.
Adobe isn't a small little tech company run the the techies it was founded by. It's just another mammoth headless corporation run by 50-70 year old MBA/corporate-execs who've been floating around in the top of the corporate jungle for ages.
Now their actions make perfect sense to me:\
(BTW: runestar's lockpick analogy is better than my hammer one.)
Ok - now i may be missing the point on this one so please dont flame me if im wrong - just give me an explanation.
Good thing I read that twice. Otherwise I'd be flaming you. (honest)
Is he not the sort of person who gives 'hackers' a bad name?
No he is not.
This is the problem with the media and even politicians, using the words 'hacker' and 'cracker' indescriminately, not having the simplest understanding of the issues involved. The very sentence you used, "he sells passwords and cracks" is a distortion of the facts, if I were to interpret it with a script-kiddy vocabulary.
Dmitri is not breaking into houses. He makes hammers. Tools. Making hammers and tools shouldn't be illegal, because it prevents us from doing lawful things that we are/should be allowed to do, like building houses. Using hammers and tools to commit crimes should be illegal.
Hammers isn't the best analogy, because 99.99% of hammer use is legal. But the vast majority of people outside the media/corporate-blockhead world, once they're made aware of the circumstances, believe that making the tools that he makes and distributing the information that he distributes should not be illegal.
The media-industry wants to make the manufacturing of certain tool-types illegal, while most of us believe that creating these tools should not be illegal, because although they can be used for illegal means, they are often used for legal means. We believe that you should have the right to have access to these tools in order to excercise your lawful rights to do certain things. Case law and previous judicial findings back us up. Unfortunately the industry has deep pockets and managed to ram through some laws (which are likely unconstitutional, we just haven't had a solid case to run through the courts yet), which make it illegal to make and sell these hammers and tools for profit, and make it illegal and dangerous to even disclose how to make a hammer to build your house or discuss how the industry makes it's own houses.
i mean the average man in the street (you know the one with Win on his computer) would consider the guy a criminal
No they would not. Not if someone competent (aka not the media or the industry) were to properly inform them of all the issues and the appropriate analogies.
The average guy on the street should have the right to use the tools that this guy makes. The average guy on the street deserves to have people like this guy force companies like Adobe create useful half-decent products, that also do not violate the average-guy's rights.
he broke the law didnt he ?
You've probably broken the very SAME laws doing things that you thought you should be allowed to do. Ever heard of "Fair Use"? The DMCA (the unconstitutional law) has provisions which effectively revoke your rights of "Fair Use" through technological means. They're not just attacking him, they're attacking your rights by preventing this guy from writing software tools for you. Not only that, but they're preventing you from being told that Adobe software is really really crappy and why.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. The fugure is coming, and only us techies see it. It is NOT pretty. Bend over. YOU are next.
Actually, I've *never* heard it called by that term outside of Canada. That is until very very recently. Thus it wouldn't supprise me in the slightest if no average person outside of Canada knew that the arms were made in Canada.
I was actually supprised to hear a Nasa commentator use the term "Canadarm" (wrt the shuttle arm) a short while ago, and I figure it's a recent change due to the clear prominence of the fact that the station arm is also made in Canada. I always wondered if they avoided the term in ages past for semi-political reasons, and now I'll wonder if they started using it recently for new semi-pollitical reasons. Of course maybe in ages past they were simply being technically accurate, using the formal technical term, and recently simply being enthusiastic about the International aspect of the endeavour.
Slashdot Mirror
Sadly "your view" is not the sole factor. What about the hundreds of thousands of tons of pollutants used in putting that expensive shiny satelite in space? What about the pollution released when all these people have to commute to work instead of telecommute?
Don't get me wrong, if I was in your shoes, and had a big tower pop up in the middle of my fabulous hillside view, I'd be unhappy too.
But if there's only one 100 foot tower in every 400 square miles, I figure it's MORE than worth it.
I strongly disagree. Deurabnization would be a great thing.
The software company I work for needs to be located in the expensive heart of the biggest city in Canada like we all need a hole in our head. But because of the "perceived need", all of the employees either have to pay a HUGE amount of money for a SMALL place to live, or they have to spend 1-3 hours a day commuting.
Do you have any idea what 1-3 hours of commuting creates in terms of pollution? Do you have any idea of what a huge drain on the economy all these grossly inefficient highly expensive cities and concrete towers cost? Don't attribute to "economic necessity" that which can be easily explained by social dellusion.
Now I appreciate your concern about having all of North America covered by one big suburb. So where's the right middle ground?
Currently the US and Canada are 75% urban, 25% rural. (see here) If all the small towns in the country were tripled in size (which means taking people from the city cores AND the suburbs, which are counted as part of the urban megopolis'), what would it look like? I think that the country would not look like one massive suburbia. My little tiny home town would simply be a little bigger, still surrounded by massive amounts of nature. (Currently 1000 people in a couple square miles in the middle of 400 square miles of countryside).
The suburbs are PART of urban areas. When people talk about deurbanization, they are talking about taking the people in those 100 square miles of suburbia and spreading them out.
I'm 100% behind deurbanization.
Changing the icon is way harder and is a way more annoying thing in windows.
Especially if you use your "open with" shortcut. Windows does not properly create the registry entries, and so your new "file type" does not appear in the "File Types" listing, so you CAN NOT set the icon. Or do any other customization.
Ages ago I learned to stay away from that damn half assed "open with" dialog.
BTW: I finally got my browsers to open wav files with Sound Recorder. Instantaneous lightweight playback without taking me away from the source page, Sound Recorder closing itself afterwards. What a total Fscking NIGHTMARE that was! I live in fear of something like Quicktime seizing my browser audio associations, because I know it will take an HOUR OR TWO to rediscover the magic configuration that does the job.
To begin with, the user would very rarely want to change one of these file type mappings;
Bullshit! This is something I do REGULARLY, because applications continue to successfully go under the radar and seize them!
My non-techie friends would LOVE to control their computers, but they DON'T because it's too inconvenient to do. See the earlier post by ConceptJunkie about how impossibly hard it was (WinNT and Win9x, not sure about Win2k) to figure out which damn entry in the list is the file you want to change the association for.
it is a lot easier to change these file-types than he portrays
Bullshit. I'm a Power User, a software engineer with a MSc in Physics, and you can not do it with a right click. You have to use Shift-right-click, and even then Win98 SCREWS UP the association, so you can not find this association in the folder options in order to customize if further (aka assign an icon). I learned AGES AGO to bloody well avoid this "open with" dialog!! If you want it done right, you have to do it manaully, the hard way.
virtually every application released in the past five years will check the Windows registry to determine file mappings when it is launched and offer
That's 50% of the entire problem!!! Every f'cking time. And 50% of the programs DON'T ASK, they just seize control. Even THIS YEAR's of LView Pro screws you over. If you hit CANCEL in it's "file type association" dialog, it STILL SEIZES THE FILE TYPES!! The only "correct" answer is to de-select all the checkboxes and only then hit cancel. Cancel doesn't mean cancel? WTF
You have NO IDEA just how many people CURSE the file type nightmare Microsoft created.
You sir, are an oddity. (no offence
I would agree with one of the previous posters,
that it might not be a conspiracy so much as it is Microsoft's general incompetence at doing anything right the first time. But I'm CERTAIN MS won't be making any changes that relinquish control over file type associations without a fight. If they do ANYTHING right, it will because of some engineers and honourable people within Micorosft raising hell with their pointy haired bosses over "what is right".
We can only hope that they are capable of giving Balmer hell without blanching.
until recently, you couldn't search or sort the filename extensions access through "Folder Options" by extension name.
Huh? View, Details, then click on "Type".
You had to know what they are called
Oooh, I understand. You mean inside View, Folder Options, File Types.
YES!!! God that's one of their worst mistakes.
The quickest way is to open the registry and the very first entries in the first folder (HKR) are the file extensions. Find the one you want, and note what it's "Default" is. Look for that further down immediately below the file extensions in HKR, and see what it's "Defaut" is. That's the description you look for inside the File Types listing.
For example for
You know, it just occurred to me, it wouldn't be hard at all to put together a little tool that would sweep through the filetypes and re-name them to the extensions themselves!!! (Bloody hell, I can't believe I only just now thought of that!!! Could have used it years ago!)
I was wandering about the bookstore today, and guess what I came across?
A book written two years ago,
...by the director of the US Senate Standing Committee on Terrorism,
...it's last paragraph was utterly prophetic;
http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0761535810.01.L
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0761535810
Anyone know anything about US Nuclear deep-penetration weapons, the type that would have been designed to take out the Soviet version of Cheyene Mountain and Soviet missile silos/command centers?
We could use a few of those real soon now to crumble those massive 2 mile long underground caves that Osama supposedly favours.
> A true pacifist is willing to die before hitting back.
In ALL likelyhood, the person is not a true pacifict..
> * And why would anyone take advice and learn lessons from an asshole who punches peaceful people in the face?
..like most humans, even if they're peeved and angry at that instant in time and refuse to "give in", if you truly win your argument, eventually, as the event is turned over and over in their mind in the following year, you can usually find the person has quite a different viewpoint 12 months later.
So, have a go at it, expect them to refuse to agree with you, then wait 12 months and see what they've "learned" from you.
Works every time. Just remember, they're going to hate your guts for a minimum of 6-12 months, and if you aren't truly right, all bets are off.
B2's may possibly be flying all the way from the US, like they did for the Kosovo strikes.
All the way around the world and back. Wouldn't want to be those pilots. Hell of a long trip at subsonic speeds.
The CNN version you quote looks like a literal translation of what their on-air translator said (or whoever did it "live" the first time).
CNN probably just hasn't bothered getting it re-done properly. CBC has.
You're right, it's a big difference, and quite appaling. The third time I saw it on TV I was wondering "when the heck are they going to get a good translation done, this one is choppy as hell!"
Have the Afghani King return, and draft a Constitution based on a broad based democratic government
I'm not so sure that's a good idea. I love the democracy part, but I don't want ANYONE with the power to subvert the country again. No Kings. No Mullahs. No Military.
I love the "Marshal Plan for Afghanistan" idea. One thing that would help things go over much better would be to send in SOLELY Muslim Americans to implement and supervise the economic and political implementation of said Marshal Plan.
Imagine, a completely democratic muslim country built from the ground up by the West. Is it even possible?
they might as well have hit Toronto because it feels the same.
I work at a tower 6km North of the downtown core in Toronto, and every 10 minutes during the entire morning, I was looking over my shoulder to see if 1st Canadian Place was still standing.
I kid you not.
BTW: 1st Canadian is taller than the perspective in that shot leads you to believe. The camera is a lot closer to the CN tower than the downtown core.
NO, there is ample precident!!! The alternative is to suffer through the development of TOMBSTONE TECHNOLOGY.
It's been clear for some time now that it would only be a matter of time before an air-rage incident with an unarmed intruder resulted in 4-500 people dying as an airliner went straight into the ground. And yet no government agency even considered forcing airlines to "reduce profits" by adding a 1000 lb titanium/aluminum door to seperate the pilots from the passenters, even though the idea of a 'stronger door' is the first thing that strikes EVERYONE.
It's a known fact, by those in the know, that most of what "humanity" and "society" does is Tombstone Technology. Everything that has happened could have been prevented if decisions were made on the side of safety instead of economics. If people didn't simply refuse to deal with complexities by glossing over them with black and white pictures. The phrase "tombstone technology" does not describe "what must be", but describes what goes on now because of the "stupid short-sighted decisions human beings currently make." The way in which organizations, businesses, governments, and masses of human beings makes decisions MUST CHANGE.
If the FAA isn't relieved of it's air-safety responsibilities, I will be sickened. It's been known for 10-15 years now that the NTSB should be in charge. The conflict of interest of the FAA in promoting air travel and the profits of the airlines has already killed so many due to not implementing NTSB recommendations.
If all they do is "beef up" boarding security, I will be sickened. We've known for 10-15 years that current security precautions are totally inadequate. I have never EVER heard of a "test" of the boarding security precautions which didn't report a 40-60% success rate at getting serious weapons aboard.
Airplanes have been siezed before by people bluffing that they have bombs. Knives do not need to be made out of metal. And yet we've got some idiot on TV spouting off how it's so impossible to prevent someone from hijacking an airplane and doing this, seeing as they don't actually need a weapon. If there was a bulkhead and they had no weapon, all they could do is bluff and negotiate when back on the ground.
No, you can't stop someone from blowing up an airplane in-flight. But you can stop someone from crashing a fully loaded super-liner (like the new ones on the drawing boards from Boeing and Airbus) from being crashed into the Superdome and suffocating 100,000 people, or bringing down the Sears tower.
You're simply refusing to work through the complexities of the real world. That's what got us into this fucking mess!!! We can handle complexities of this nature, if those capable of making analytic decisions are given the chance, and not mucked with by those who can't think past their nose.
BTW: With respect to depressurization: the pilots simply need to do a crash dive down to 5000 feet and slow to 150-200mph, at which point there will not be a pressurization difference and aerodynamic stresses will be minimized. Then a few bullet holes will be just fine.
I just want you to know that there are many more people out there, myself included, whose stomachs got sick when we saw our first documentary about what happened in Chile, and the fact that the CIA engineered it because they thought the democratically elected government was leaning "too far to the left". To think of all the people who died at the hands of the Military Junta that took over afterwards...
If our admin's hadn't spent 2-12 man weeks dealing with MS related security upgrades and crap over the past year, they might have gotten a VPN up and running, which would have meant the 120 odd employees could have put in a dozen or so extra hours of work from home, and those that dialed in without the VPN would have been able to use the VPN and work more effectively.
Lessee, 120 employees times 20 hours over the past year times $60 CDN per hour per employee, that's $144,000 just for the medium sized IT shop I work at.
Of course that's mostly opportunity cost. Not too much of it would have been billed directly to clients, but we would have produced better software with fewer bugs and more features. (Not to downplay the term opportunity cost, it is valid to worry about such things...)
How about this. It's rural right? Each landowner owns a square mile of property or more, right? (At least that's the way it is in Saskatchewan.) So it's not infeasable for your family to go visit their 10 intervening neighbours and work out a right of way issue. Whether you lay an extra line for them (they pay material costs) or share a line you're laying, or what not.
How much would it cost per mile for copper wire so we can get out the old backhoe and lay it ourselves?
I swear it's going to come down to this in the cities for the last mile! I can see a bunch of me's forming a co-op/non-profit, negotiating deals with the landlords to get right of way to lay extra new copper to the apartments, and then re-sell it.
Yeah yeah, the devil's in the details
Notice how the Chicago Tribune refers to Dmitri as a "Russian Graduate Student", as opposed to what we see at CNN and all the other 3l33t media organizations calling him, the "Russian hacker"?
Sure, you and I may know that we're all "hackers" (people having fun writing code and solving problems), but to everyone else in the world, it's the colloquial form of "online criminal" who steals their credit card numbers and attack people's computers.
The long-standing uncorrected issue with the Media's use of the term "hacker" is causing a real world problem, preventing the common people from getting an unbiased view.
I keep thinking "Attack of the Clowns"
Because that would in fact be a temptation for him to flee and thus screw Adobe over for 50 grand!
I've got a question.
If this law so clearly violates our "Fair Use" rights, why won't it be simple to get it declared invalid and struck down?
And how many different Constitutional approaches are there to having this declared unconstitutional?
Personally I was supprised at the EFF's approach to some of it's previous cases, focusing so much on "code is speech", and ignoring the "it's necessary to excercise fair use" approach.
I guess "fair use" isn't a direct constitutional right. Also I'm too close to the issue. I can't see why anyone could NOT find something wrong with these laws and rule against them.
Get me on that jury!!
Ok, I've got an idea that's not as illegal as what he was suggesting, but should get more attention than a tiny blue ribbon on the side of one page of my homepage.
My personal website gets 10 unique visitors a day, because I have some modestly interesting stuff there. I propose tearing my entire site down, and replacing it with a main page and a 404 page that is all black, with just the blue ribbon at the top, and a headline saying "these pages will remain unavailable until we are free again", plus one of those 3 paragraph explanations of the issue and Dimitry, plus links to all the relevant sites.
That's 10 people a day that'll get to hear about the issue. That's 300 people a month. (Until google re-visits my site, and the hits stop coming in. Guess I should set up some software that redirects Google to the 'normal' pages :)
Allright, I'll bite.
What specific circumstances does "changing passwords regularly" protect against?
Assume that my passwords are all "very strong", they are not written down anywhere, and they're never transmitted in the clear over an un-secure network.
The only circumstance I can forsee this "helping" with (besides idiotic ones like people loosing the pices of paper they have their passwords written on), is where it's already in the hands of a "criminal". But AFAIK if someone already has a single user account, further user accounts (existing and specially-created) and the root account isn't far behind.
Can anyone point me to a scholarly analysis of the exact merits of regular password changing?
Why? Because I don't do it. If I were, with 20 different passwords and all of them of the "Strong" type, I'd be forced to write them down, or spend hours and hours figuring out 'mind games' to try and remember them, and even worse it would (and did in past years) result in an ever increasing number of "confused and forgotten" passwords. (Frequently occurs within 1-2 weeks of a change, when you just happened to not use that account, and so now you're mind is groping in among not only all your current passwords but the previous 1-3 rounds of passwords, and suddenly you're screwed. No fun.)
Yeah, at one point I wondered about that too.
Then I took a look at their financial profile. Notice that they have a 10 Billion dollar market capitalization, revenues of around 1.5 billion dollars a year, and CEO's and directors that make 3-50 million dollars a year.
Adobe isn't a small little tech company run the the techies it was founded by. It's just another mammoth headless corporation run by 50-70 year old MBA/corporate-execs who've been floating around in the top of the corporate jungle for ages.
Now their actions make perfect sense to me :\
(BTW: runestar's lockpick analogy is better than my hammer one.)
Good thing I read that twice. Otherwise I'd be flaming you. (honest) No he is not.
This is the problem with the media and even politicians, using the words 'hacker' and 'cracker' indescriminately, not having the simplest understanding of the issues involved. The very sentence you used, "he sells passwords and cracks" is a distortion of the facts, if I were to interpret it with a script-kiddy vocabulary.
Dmitri is not breaking into houses. He makes hammers. Tools. Making hammers and tools shouldn't be illegal, because it prevents us from doing lawful things that we are/should be allowed to do, like building houses. Using hammers and tools to commit crimes should be illegal.
Hammers isn't the best analogy, because 99.99% of hammer use is legal. But the vast majority of people outside the media/corporate-blockhead world, once they're made aware of the circumstances, believe that making the tools that he makes and distributing the information that he distributes should not be illegal.
The media-industry wants to make the manufacturing of certain tool-types illegal, while most of us believe that creating these tools should not be illegal, because although they can be used for illegal means, they are often used for legal means. We believe that you should have the right to have access to these tools in order to excercise your lawful rights to do certain things. Case law and previous judicial findings back us up. Unfortunately the industry has deep pockets and managed to ram through some laws (which are likely unconstitutional, we just haven't had a solid case to run through the courts yet), which make it illegal to make and sell these hammers and tools for profit, and make it illegal and dangerous to even disclose how to make a hammer to build your house or discuss how the industry makes it's own houses.
No they would not. Not if someone competent (aka not the media or the industry) were to properly inform them of all the issues and the appropriate analogies.The average guy on the street should have the right to use the tools that this guy makes. The average guy on the street deserves to have people like this guy force companies like Adobe create useful half-decent products, that also do not violate the average-guy's rights.
You've probably broken the very SAME laws doing things that you thought you should be allowed to do. Ever heard of "Fair Use"? The DMCA (the unconstitutional law) has provisions which effectively revoke your rights of "Fair Use" through technological means. They're not just attacking him, they're attacking your rights by preventing this guy from writing software tools for you. Not only that, but they're preventing you from being told that Adobe software is really really crappy and why.This is only the tip of the iceberg. The fugure is coming, and only us techies see it. It is NOT pretty. Bend over. YOU are next.
> You know, the Canadarm?
Actually, I've *never* heard it called by that term outside of Canada. That is until very very recently. Thus it wouldn't supprise me in the slightest if no average person outside of Canada knew that the arms were made in Canada.
I was actually supprised to hear a Nasa commentator use the term "Canadarm" (wrt the shuttle arm) a short while ago, and I figure it's a recent change due to the clear prominence of the fact that the station arm is also made in Canada. I always wondered if they avoided the term in ages past for semi-political reasons, and now I'll wonder if they started using it recently for new semi-pollitical reasons. Of course maybe in ages past they were simply being technically accurate, using the formal technical term, and recently simply being enthusiastic about the International aspect of the endeavour.