I've been saying this for awhile. Instead of having to plan and execute an attack Al Qaeda now basically has to say "We plan on blowing up planes via this method." Then they can sit back and watch the US government freak out and intrude on passengers' rights more just to "protect" against this. I'm waiting for the inevitable day when we'll have to hand over our clothes to the TSA agents and fly nude... you know, to protect passengers... in case someone's hidden a bomb somewhere. Of course, given how some people look, maybe they'll enforce it "randomly." "You there. Lady in the short skirt and large... um potential bomb hiding locations... you've been randomly selected to fly nude. Resist and you'll prove you're a terrorist."
Exactly. The WBC is like a lone mosquito buzzing about. Very annoying and might cause you some minor irritation, but in the long run nothing to put a ton of effort into catching. There are other groups out there that are much larger threats.
That said, there are times when the WBC makes it very hard to be a defender of Freedom of Speech.
I agree. Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 and 1955. According to current copyright law (assuming no extensions are passed, which is a huge assumption), the copyright will end in 2049/2050. It's been under copyright for about 56 years already and still has about 39 to go. I know the Tolkien estate profits off of Lord of the Rings, but I don't see how that encourages new works. Yes, we got the LoTR movies, but those could have been made if LoTR passed into the public domain. The only people who would lose out would be the children/grandchildren of JRR Tolkien.
Of course, even worse is Gone With The Wind. It was published in 1936 and is still considered to be under copyright protection 75 years later. We need to wait until 2031 until it enters the Public Domain. Meanwhile, the author, Margaret Mitchell, has been dead for 62 years. Her children (if she had any, I can't find any reference to kids) would be grown up by now with grandkids of their own. Copyright was not intended to be a paycheck for your great-grandkids.
A fair copyright term would be 20 years plus a one time 20 year renewal. (And I'm being generous as I think the ideal would be 14/14.) Under this, Lord of the Rings would have passed into the public domain in 1994/1995. In fact, under this copyright term length, anything published before 1971 would be in the public domain. How many works published prior to 1971 create substantial income for their authors (or their estates)? How many languish in obscurity because no publishing house wants to re-release them and small presses can't secure the rights to print them? How many derivative works could be made from stories that are over 40 years old (thus bringing the originals back into the public light)?
I would think they wouldn't have much of a choice. They'd be beyond the point of returning to Earth. Their only other option would be to alter course such that they wouldn't have a firm destination at all.
The two big problems are time and distance. For us to detect an alien civilization, they've had to have developed radio techology. They also need to have not progressed beyond radio. We're already moving to cabled systems instead of radio broadcasts. To an alien civilization trying to detect us, we'd be getting fainter and fainter. So there's a short window of time in which we could detect alien broadcasts.
In addition, space is big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy quote here.) If an alien civilization is 10,000 light years away from us and developed radio technology 5,000 years ago, we wouldn't detect their broadcasts for another 5,000 years. The radio waves would have a huge amount of space to cover before reaching us.
Finally, considering time on our side, we've only been listening for a short period of time. If that hypothetical alien civilization 10,000 light years away developed radio technology 12,000 years ago and moved past the technology 11,000 years ago, the last alien broadcasts would have moved past the Earth in the early 1900's. They would have swept right past us without us knowing at all.
Google is watching you for the government. So's Twitter, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo and every other site on the Internet. Tell your followers that the only safe thing to do is disconnect their computers, head into their basements and live off of canned foods until the Rapture arrives.
*waits as all the Glen Beck followers abandon the Internet*
Not the same teacher as mine (Mrs. Demperio, Branch Brook Elementary, Smithtown NY). It's sad to think of a teacher acting the way our 2nd grade teachers did to kids. Teachers should inspire and instill a love of learning. It's not an easy task by any means, but the right teacher can take a kid who hates school and turn them into someone who wants to learn more.
That was the first thing I thought of when I first heard about this teacher. How much did it cost him in medical bills to implant a camera in his head? I'm sure insurance didn't cover that. (If it did, what kind of plan is he on?!!) How much less would it have cost for him to take a $5 hat and install a camera in it? Then, when you inevitably needed to replace some camera part (or the entire camera for an upgrade), it would be relatively easy to do. Either remove/replace camera or just get a new hat. No additional surgery/recovery required!
Sometimes the super-cool sounding high tech approach isn't the best approach.
Did you have my second grade teacher by any chance? My second grade teacher, Mrs. D., hated kids, especially me. She would tell me I'd never succeed in life because I didn't cut or color within the lines. She made fun of me in front of the class. I was actually a 2nd grade dropout for a bit because I hated school so much. The principal refused to let me change rooms because she was his "best teacher."
Luckily, my 3rd grade teacher noticed that I aced the reading test and gave me the advanced test. When I did well on that one, she put me in the advanced reading group. That turned into honors classes which led to AP and college level courses. I credit my 3rd grade teacher for my successes in the 3rd-12th grades. A few years after leaving elementary school, I decided to rub it in Mrs. D's face that I was doing well. Wouldn't you know, she retired the previous year!
From what I've heard, it would be pretty dramatic. Right now, I can take the train from Albany to New York City. The trip takes 3 hours. There has been talk about putting in a high speed rail that would cut this time down to 1 hour. Suddenly, a day trip into New York City doesn't mean 6 hours of travel time, but only 2. This would be especially useful if, like me, you have little kids. Maximize time spent seeing the sights in NYC and minimize the time spent in transit.
With high speed rails, people could flock into NYC to shop/go to Broadway shows/see the sights/etc. In addition, people could go from the city to other areas for day trips with minimal travel time. (Of course, those areas would need some sort of public transportation to take those visitors around town, but that's the city/state's problem.) I could see this being a nice economic boost.
I took Amtrak last year (Albany to NYC) and had a great experience. We have considered using it for upcoming trips, but the length of the trip (going to Florida) and the cost made airlines the better option. (Even considering the "freedom grope".) I still want to take my oldest son on a NYC trip one of these days via Amtrak.
XP can autorun programs without any interaction. However, prior to this patch, you could set it to not autorun or to display a dialog box of the available options. The latter is what I use. I have a USB drive with a bunch of portable apps. When I plug it in, the Portable Apps menu system is one of the options to choose from. I select that and I'm good to go. If, for some reason, I didn't want to autorun anything, I could just click "cancel" and nothing will run. To me, this seems like the best option available. Yes, some malware authors could craft autorun options to trick users into running their programs, but that's a social hack more than an OS hack. You can only protect the user so far. Eventually, they need to take responsibility for their own actions.
Sony is demanding Twitter turn over all of the IP addresses of everyone who follows Kevin Butler. For good measure, they also want the IP addresses of all of *those* followers followers and the followers of the second batch as well.
Sony is also preparing a lawsuit against Google for making the RTs available to the world on Google RealTime: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=mbl%3A1&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1408&bih=851&q=%40TheKevinButler+Lemme+Guess&btnG=Search
Finally, Sony is also suing me for linking to the Google search which lets you see the tweets that let you see the PS3 Master Key.
On one hand, I wouldn't want my employer dictating what I can and can't say on Twitter or Facebook. (Well, provided that said speech doesn't violate laws like HIPAA or something. Saying "X was just here at Hospital Y for Procedure Z" is grounds for termination.) On the other hand, I wouldn't say anything on a public site like that that I wouldn't want my boss reading. He knows that I tweet, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't read it regularly. Still, I wouldn't be blasting him or complain about my job in my public Twitter feed just because I was angry. I might go home and complain about him to my wife, but the complaints wouldn't be public. (Granted, I really have little to gripe about. Overall, I love my job.)
My car was nearing empty so I put some spinach in my tank. The tires bulged up a lot and got some sort of battleship design on them. Then my car took off (luckily, I was able to jump inside) and I made my 30 minute morning commute in just 3 minutes. Of course, it was knocking cars off the road right and left. And I'm not sure how a corncob pipe got stuck in my car's grill.
Still, if a credit card company is requiring Mother's Maiden name as a security question and the applicant gets it wrong (and not just typo wrong but completely and totally wrong), why would they approve the application? You would think that would raise a fraud alert in their systems.
You would think they would. The credit card company my local police dealt with in my case just gave them the runaround though until we all gave up. They have more resources than local law enforcement and they know it. They might pay attention to the Feds, but the federal government's not going to open an investigation for each and every case of identity theft/fraud.
Maiden name's not really needed. A thief (and yes, I think of him/her as a thief) opened an account in my name using my name, address, SSN and date of birth. They got my mother's maiden name wrong, but the credit card company still approved the (online) application and sent them the card. Luckily, they used my address and then tried to update it and the card went to me instead of them. Otherwise, they would have activated it, maxed it out and stuck me with the bill.
I don't think it is that law enforcement is lazy. It's that they're (sadly) realistic. The officer I spoke with in my case told me that if we found out that the criminal in question was in another city or state, they would need to turn the case over to that precinct. That precinct would then have to track the criminal down, arrest him, try him (if you needed to testify, you'd have to travel there). Your local police department would have done some work but wouldn't see the outcome. They, unfortunately, think their resources are better devoted elsewhere.
There's also the problem of the address being for someone who has been duped into mailing the products back out to the real thieves who are in another country. Then you get some low-level flunky or some well-meaning-but-scammed person while the real "masterminds" continue their operations untouched.
When my identity was stolen and used to open a credit card, Capital One told me they couldn't give me the address because I might go there and shoot the person and then they'd be liable! So I referred the police to them. Then they gave the police the runaround as well. Eventually, we just gave up on finding the thieves and focused on securing our credit file.
The credit agencies have tons of cash to pay top notch lawyers to defend themselves and lobbyists to write laws in their favor. Even if a group of ID theft victims pooled their resources, I don't think they'd get much beyond a token settlement.
In my case, they got my SSN, name, DOB and address, but had my mother's maiden name wrong. The credit card company ("cough*Capital One*cough*) approved the card despite this and even let them change the address on the card before it was activated. Luckily for me, the thieves paid for rush shipment of the card and it went out before the address change took effect. So the card came to me and I was able to stop the damage from this incident before anything major took place.
Still, I now know that my private personal information is out there (from where I haven't a clue) and will need to guard my credit report for years to come. We've put a freeze on our credit files which means that nobody can open new credit lines without us first "thawing" the files. It costs some money to do and is a pain at times, but it's much better than getting a collection agency knocking down my door for nonpayment of a credit card that I never opened!
Slashdot Mirror
I've been saying this for awhile. Instead of having to plan and execute an attack Al Qaeda now basically has to say "We plan on blowing up planes via this method." Then they can sit back and watch the US government freak out and intrude on passengers' rights more just to "protect" against this. I'm waiting for the inevitable day when we'll have to hand over our clothes to the TSA agents and fly nude... you know, to protect passengers... in case someone's hidden a bomb somewhere. Of course, given how some people look, maybe they'll enforce it "randomly." "You there. Lady in the short skirt and large... um potential bomb hiding locations... you've been randomly selected to fly nude. Resist and you'll prove you're a terrorist."
Exactly. The WBC is like a lone mosquito buzzing about. Very annoying and might cause you some minor irritation, but in the long run nothing to put a ton of effort into catching. There are other groups out there that are much larger threats.
That said, there are times when the WBC makes it very hard to be a defender of Freedom of Speech.
I agree. Lord of the Rings was first published in 1954 and 1955. According to current copyright law (assuming no extensions are passed, which is a huge assumption), the copyright will end in 2049/2050. It's been under copyright for about 56 years already and still has about 39 to go. I know the Tolkien estate profits off of Lord of the Rings, but I don't see how that encourages new works. Yes, we got the LoTR movies, but those could have been made if LoTR passed into the public domain. The only people who would lose out would be the children/grandchildren of JRR Tolkien.
Of course, even worse is Gone With The Wind. It was published in 1936 and is still considered to be under copyright protection 75 years later. We need to wait until 2031 until it enters the Public Domain. Meanwhile, the author, Margaret Mitchell, has been dead for 62 years. Her children (if she had any, I can't find any reference to kids) would be grown up by now with grandkids of their own. Copyright was not intended to be a paycheck for your great-grandkids.
A fair copyright term would be 20 years plus a one time 20 year renewal. (And I'm being generous as I think the ideal would be 14/14.) Under this, Lord of the Rings would have passed into the public domain in 1994/1995. In fact, under this copyright term length, anything published before 1971 would be in the public domain. How many works published prior to 1971 create substantial income for their authors (or their estates)? How many languish in obscurity because no publishing house wants to re-release them and small presses can't secure the rights to print them? How many derivative works could be made from stories that are over 40 years old (thus bringing the originals back into the public light)?
I would think they wouldn't have much of a choice. They'd be beyond the point of returning to Earth. Their only other option would be to alter course such that they wouldn't have a firm destination at all.
The two big problems are time and distance. For us to detect an alien civilization, they've had to have developed radio techology. They also need to have not progressed beyond radio. We're already moving to cabled systems instead of radio broadcasts. To an alien civilization trying to detect us, we'd be getting fainter and fainter. So there's a short window of time in which we could detect alien broadcasts.
In addition, space is big. (Insert Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy quote here.) If an alien civilization is 10,000 light years away from us and developed radio technology 5,000 years ago, we wouldn't detect their broadcasts for another 5,000 years. The radio waves would have a huge amount of space to cover before reaching us.
Finally, considering time on our side, we've only been listening for a short period of time. If that hypothetical alien civilization 10,000 light years away developed radio technology 12,000 years ago and moved past the technology 11,000 years ago, the last alien broadcasts would have moved past the Earth in the early 1900's. They would have swept right past us without us knowing at all.
Google is watching you for the government. So's Twitter, Facebook, Bing, Yahoo and every other site on the Internet. Tell your followers that the only safe thing to do is disconnect their computers, head into their basements and live off of canned foods until the Rapture arrives.
*waits as all the Glen Beck followers abandon the Internet*
*pops a champagne bottle's cork*
PARTY TIME, EVERYONE!!!!
Don't worry. We can cure cancer by injecting you with this Gene Patch. Wait... why are you turning blue?
Not the same teacher as mine (Mrs. Demperio, Branch Brook Elementary, Smithtown NY). It's sad to think of a teacher acting the way our 2nd grade teachers did to kids. Teachers should inspire and instill a love of learning. It's not an easy task by any means, but the right teacher can take a kid who hates school and turn them into someone who wants to learn more.
That was the first thing I thought of when I first heard about this teacher. How much did it cost him in medical bills to implant a camera in his head? I'm sure insurance didn't cover that. (If it did, what kind of plan is he on?!!) How much less would it have cost for him to take a $5 hat and install a camera in it? Then, when you inevitably needed to replace some camera part (or the entire camera for an upgrade), it would be relatively easy to do. Either remove/replace camera or just get a new hat. No additional surgery/recovery required!
Sometimes the super-cool sounding high tech approach isn't the best approach.
Did you have my second grade teacher by any chance? My second grade teacher, Mrs. D., hated kids, especially me. She would tell me I'd never succeed in life because I didn't cut or color within the lines. She made fun of me in front of the class. I was actually a 2nd grade dropout for a bit because I hated school so much. The principal refused to let me change rooms because she was his "best teacher."
Luckily, my 3rd grade teacher noticed that I aced the reading test and gave me the advanced test. When I did well on that one, she put me in the advanced reading group. That turned into honors classes which led to AP and college level courses. I credit my 3rd grade teacher for my successes in the 3rd-12th grades. A few years after leaving elementary school, I decided to rub it in Mrs. D's face that I was doing well. Wouldn't you know, she retired the previous year!
From what I've heard, it would be pretty dramatic. Right now, I can take the train from Albany to New York City. The trip takes 3 hours. There has been talk about putting in a high speed rail that would cut this time down to 1 hour. Suddenly, a day trip into New York City doesn't mean 6 hours of travel time, but only 2. This would be especially useful if, like me, you have little kids. Maximize time spent seeing the sights in NYC and minimize the time spent in transit.
With high speed rails, people could flock into NYC to shop/go to Broadway shows/see the sights/etc. In addition, people could go from the city to other areas for day trips with minimal travel time. (Of course, those areas would need some sort of public transportation to take those visitors around town, but that's the city/state's problem.) I could see this being a nice economic boost.
I took Amtrak last year (Albany to NYC) and had a great experience. We have considered using it for upcoming trips, but the length of the trip (going to Florida) and the cost made airlines the better option. (Even considering the "freedom grope".) I still want to take my oldest son on a NYC trip one of these days via Amtrak.
XP can autorun programs without any interaction. However, prior to this patch, you could set it to not autorun or to display a dialog box of the available options. The latter is what I use. I have a USB drive with a bunch of portable apps. When I plug it in, the Portable Apps menu system is one of the options to choose from. I select that and I'm good to go. If, for some reason, I didn't want to autorun anything, I could just click "cancel" and nothing will run. To me, this seems like the best option available. Yes, some malware authors could craft autorun options to trick users into running their programs, but that's a social hack more than an OS hack. You can only protect the user so far. Eventually, they need to take responsibility for their own actions.
What the summary didn't mention is that the laser would be mounted on a selachimorpha...
Martian sharks with frickin' lasers!
First, they could type "Google" into Google: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrQUWUfmR_I
If that didn't work, they could just get The Internet out of Big Ben and smash it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDbyYGrswtg
Sony is demanding Twitter turn over all of the IP addresses of everyone who follows Kevin Butler. For good measure, they also want the IP addresses of all of *those* followers followers and the followers of the second batch as well.
Sony is also preparing a lawsuit against Google for making the RTs available to the world on Google RealTime: http://www.google.com/search?tbs=mbl%3A1&hl=en&source=hp&biw=1408&bih=851&q=%40TheKevinButler+Lemme+Guess&btnG=Search
Finally, Sony is also suing me for linking to the Google search which lets you see the tweets that let you see the PS3 Master Key.
On one hand, I wouldn't want my employer dictating what I can and can't say on Twitter or Facebook. (Well, provided that said speech doesn't violate laws like HIPAA or something. Saying "X was just here at Hospital Y for Procedure Z" is grounds for termination.) On the other hand, I wouldn't say anything on a public site like that that I wouldn't want my boss reading. He knows that I tweet, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't read it regularly. Still, I wouldn't be blasting him or complain about my job in my public Twitter feed just because I was angry. I might go home and complain about him to my wife, but the complaints wouldn't be public. (Granted, I really have little to gripe about. Overall, I love my job.)
My car was nearing empty so I put some spinach in my tank. The tires bulged up a lot and got some sort of battleship design on them. Then my car took off (luckily, I was able to jump inside) and I made my 30 minute morning commute in just 3 minutes. Of course, it was knocking cars off the road right and left. And I'm not sure how a corncob pipe got stuck in my car's grill.
Still, if a credit card company is requiring Mother's Maiden name as a security question and the applicant gets it wrong (and not just typo wrong but completely and totally wrong), why would they approve the application? You would think that would raise a fraud alert in their systems.
You would think they would. The credit card company my local police dealt with in my case just gave them the runaround though until we all gave up. They have more resources than local law enforcement and they know it. They might pay attention to the Feds, but the federal government's not going to open an investigation for each and every case of identity theft/fraud.
Maiden name's not really needed. A thief (and yes, I think of him/her as a thief) opened an account in my name using my name, address, SSN and date of birth. They got my mother's maiden name wrong, but the credit card company still approved the (online) application and sent them the card. Luckily, they used my address and then tried to update it and the card went to me instead of them. Otherwise, they would have activated it, maxed it out and stuck me with the bill.
I don't think it is that law enforcement is lazy. It's that they're (sadly) realistic. The officer I spoke with in my case told me that if we found out that the criminal in question was in another city or state, they would need to turn the case over to that precinct. That precinct would then have to track the criminal down, arrest him, try him (if you needed to testify, you'd have to travel there). Your local police department would have done some work but wouldn't see the outcome. They, unfortunately, think their resources are better devoted elsewhere.
There's also the problem of the address being for someone who has been duped into mailing the products back out to the real thieves who are in another country. Then you get some low-level flunky or some well-meaning-but-scammed person while the real "masterminds" continue their operations untouched.
When my identity was stolen and used to open a credit card, Capital One told me they couldn't give me the address because I might go there and shoot the person and then they'd be liable! So I referred the police to them. Then they gave the police the runaround as well. Eventually, we just gave up on finding the thieves and focused on securing our credit file.
The credit agencies have tons of cash to pay top notch lawyers to defend themselves and lobbyists to write laws in their favor. Even if a group of ID theft victims pooled their resources, I don't think they'd get much beyond a token settlement.
In my case, they got my SSN, name, DOB and address, but had my mother's maiden name wrong. The credit card company ("cough*Capital One*cough*) approved the card despite this and even let them change the address on the card before it was activated. Luckily for me, the thieves paid for rush shipment of the card and it went out before the address change took effect. So the card came to me and I was able to stop the damage from this incident before anything major took place.
Still, I now know that my private personal information is out there (from where I haven't a clue) and will need to guard my credit report for years to come. We've put a freeze on our credit files which means that nobody can open new credit lines without us first "thawing" the files. It costs some money to do and is a pain at times, but it's much better than getting a collection agency knocking down my door for nonpayment of a credit card that I never opened!