Firstly would such an ID card have prevented the McVeigh bombings? If so, then how?
Secondly, how do you deal with false ID's from another country. I mean, legitimite ones? I doubt that there would have been any problems in getting the taliban, or pakistan, or many other countries from issuing legitimite ID's. Not to mention good fakes.
Authentication is only as good as those who certify it. If you use public key cryptography, but the private key has been obtained by stealth/corruption, how do you know. (Alot of 3rd world countries are quite corrupt - how do you prevent some official from selling the codes? You can't even be sure that Ex-USSR scientists arent' selling bombs to Iraq, and they are just unemployed).
If a countries ID becomes compromised, do you make everyone in the country get a new ID with new encryption?
Most importantly, facial recognition (and particularly iris recognition) is about to happen. We will have widespread tracking of individuals shortly, whether or not they get an ID chip implanted. The question is how this is managed (legally) in terms of what rights you have. Because it will happen. In fact, it already has been used to identify people on occasions (in the UK at football matches IIRC)
Satellite has been cheaper in Australia than any other form of bandwidth for some time.
Why? Because its not controlled by the main Australian teleco's (Telstra/Optus, particularly Telstra).
In fact, most satellite stuff routes through the US and gives faster access to there than to Oz.
Interestingly, Telstra believes that bandwidth sould retail at 18 cents/MB (thats about 10 cents/Mb US) - an amount that most people would consider prohibitive and also unrelated to the actual cost of delivering services.
Michael
P.S. Cheers, have a good christmas & new year everyone.
Imagine being able to "turn around" with mouse or similar (headmounted?) device in order to look around; to be able to "zoom" into and past separate windows and work areas (workspaces) with mouse wheel or cursor keys.
Imagine getting nauseated and throwing up from trying to find some file you stored "somewhere near - I'm sure that document is somewhere near here!"
3D doesn't work for everyone - virtual reality, real nausea.
Which, btw, was my point. OS revisions that cost significant amounts of your local currancy should include features that warrant the upgrade. 95, 98 and ME didn't
The big upgrade was from 95a to 95b, which was totally unannounced. There were in fact at least 4 windows 95: 95, 95a, 95b and the short lived 95c.
95b introduced the fat32 file system which broke the 2G hard disk drive limit.
It was a critical update, and the biggest change in OS function over most of the windows history. Also, IIRC, from 95b onwards you could add in USB support. It was the next generation of the 9x OS. 98 and ME in particular added nothing much over this - Active desktop is retained more as legacy (junk) code these days, despite the hype at the time.
Point being, marketing drove the OS "upgrades" The technicians worked on a rather different timescales (such as when the HDD grew too big for the file system).
Not only the lack of oxygen, but also the amount of CO2 required to keep mars warm might be rather higher than that on earth.
This could lead to alot of problems - high CO2 levels are quite toxic. For the uninitiated, I suggest you see Apollo 13 from your local video store. Just having oxygen alone won't keep you alive.
Population densities are very low in the US, to there day there are many miles where there is no coverage on any system. (Unless there is a satalite system now)
Australia uses multiple systems, but now supports mainly CDMA and GSM. Which is more popular? CDMA is better for covering distance - and please (unless you are posting from antartica) don't underestimate the issues faced in Australia. We have a land mass 2/3 the size of the US, but with a population of 18 million.
GSM is locked in by design to a 35 Km radius around the base station. Not an issue in say, NY, London or Europe for that matter. A big issue in Oz where your neighbour might be further away than that. Telstra (the major teleco in Australia) have modified GSM transmitters to provide a second 35-70 Km ring of coveravge from a base station. In outback Australia, you can easily get 70 km line of sight to a tower.
Despite all these limitations, GSM still wins hands down. The biggest reason? Competition I think. Being able to change service provider with a change of SIM card, rather than handset.
Plus the provision of enough features above and beyond phone - SMS messaging. Although primitive, it was flexible enough to make your phone a pager and message service in one.
In hindsight, the bandwidth limitations (9600 baud) and absence of packet radio (always on rather than dial in) features weren't enough of a liability to hold back its initial rollout.
You might call it the microsoft or VHS solution - near enough, good enough without actually being the best.
They MUST virgously defend these things or they are doing a disservice to their stockholders
That is so untrue. The MUST bit. You don't HAVE to defend them if they benefit the company overall.
The best case in point is microsoft itself. It became the defacto office software manufacturer by not copy protecting its stuff. (I'm talking about the pre-monopoly days). Everyone who was going to pirate software used microsoft stuff - it was easier and more convenient than the competitors with dongles, etc. Amongst the legitimate users, initially the purchasing was split, but the larger base of microsoft use (amongst pirated copies) eventually won over the userbase. This was even before the software was superior (which didn't happen until version 3 or higher usually).
The point is, when you are a market leader, you will benefit your shareholders to enforce protection, as the user will probably cough up the money if he/she has to. If you are a minnow in a big pond, you don't want to annoy everyone that does or might support you.
Interestingly, microsoft remains well aware of this point, and gives away software such messenger, windows media player, and even internet explorer (for now) because it does not have overwhelming superiority in the fields. It persues violations of windows and office relentlessly, knowing that people will buy it if forced as there isn't alot of alternative.
I'm still left wondering why someone thought that my previous post was flamebait? Oh well, them's the breaks.
Michael
Previous Post:
Like alot of things, there is a difference between doing somthing because you can do it, compared with doing something because it should be done.
Alpha transperancy is a good thing, used wisely. Like the nice shadow on the mouse in win2k
Makeing whole windows transparent has limited usefulness to my mind.
Can anyone see a real use for transparent windows?
Well, the US military is clearly planet wide in scope, so I don't see a problem with a TLD here.
Maybe China might get upset, but really who else is going to host a website covering what parts of the world are worth invading? Examples such a the British invasion of the Faulkland islands or even Indonesia little invasion of East Timor really wouldn't warrant a TLD, and really belong in a subdomain such as enemies.mi.uk, for example.
With terroists.location.mil its pretty clear we are talking about Afganistan.
Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?
Actually, you don't need to fake them. None of those involved in the sept 11 bombings would have had any trouble getting a real id card - they were all in the country legally. And that isn't likely to stop. Unless you get a fortress America and stop all those foreigners from visiting under tourist visas. Then they would have to choose to emigrate to the US to get a green card, and surely they don't plan that far ahead now?:(
Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?
Actually, there are much better reasons to get rid of guns, or at least lock them down a little more, but none of them have anything to do with terrorism. Mostly to do with the high likelyhood of shooting people you know in a fit of anger.
Every first world democracy has criminals with guns and police with guns - sometimes it can be hard to tell the two apart. But only the US has the huge rate of personal injury from the guns, mostly used in defence or anger on people known to the person who uses them.
I'm not trying to do flamebait here, I'd agree with you totally about banning guns to reduce terrorism being a stupid idea.
Inbreeding is really only a problem when you either can't really do culling (like with people) or breeding isn't controlled and the damaged offspring can continue to breed.
That is true enough to a fair extent. However, if you only have 3 or so members of the species, it will be almost impossible to get any offspring that is viable within a few generations. They will "cull" themselves out to extinction most likely.
I do take your point that a population of a few hundred could get by with an aggressive program.
I think that to make 3 or so members survive you would need to actively repair their genetic defects - which wouldn't be apparent immediately given our current knowledge of gene technology. I'm not an expert on this (actually nobody has ever done this for real to my knowledge) so I'm open to feedback if you think I have really missed the mark here.
Another possibility would be to continually clone and release members to breed with their offspring, which might eventually select out those with few defects. It would sure lead to a narrow gene pool, however.
So if someone is a worm victim, they either unthinkingly opened an attachment or didn't keep their machines up to date. Either way it was preventable.
Actually, microsoft has created alot of reluctance amongst more experienced users to keep up to date.
Many service packs have actually broken systems in the past - making people who know what they are doing reluctant to apply a service pack until they are sure that it really works.
Also, many security updates depend on these service packs. In fact, some of microsofts own update reporting system will not see the patches until they are running on an up to date service pack.
It becomes a catch 22 - either way, you are dammed (well, you certainly would have been in the past). Maybe microsoft will not make these sort of errors again. Hmmm, did I just say that?;)
So, I'm not sure its totally preventable on MS software.
To maintain genetic diversity, you need probably 1000+ members of a species. You could get by with a few hundred, but it would be hard.
The problem is that each animal carries multiple recessive genes that are lethal (as do most humans, about 8 per person). Once you get serious inbreeding a few generations down the track, you get seriously high numbers of these recessives coming back to bite you.
Three won't work. Not in the long run, unless you keep on cloning them.
That's not true unless you lack cable television (I'm assuming you're in the USA).
Sorry to interject on this one, but the USA doesn't have a monopoly on cable (and certainly not on Satellite!), so I don't quite get the association of those two statements.
Re:And what about...
on
Mapping Gravity
·
· Score: 2, Informative
We say that time is a fourth dimension. Now picture this: No matter what's happening, you're ALWAYS moving through the 4 axes (the three "space" dimensions and the one "time" dimension) at exactly the speed of light. It's just that you're splitting that speed (the speed of light) across some combination of the 4 dimensions. You're doing one of the following:
Yes, yes, its all true. We all move through space time at a constant speed (Except when I'm waking up in the morning).
But these effects are relavistic. You have to be travelling at near light speed to have an appreciable effect on mass or gravity. They do apply to high speed subatomic particles, but these are pretty few and far between on the planet in terms of total mass.
I think that the variations in gravity relate to variations in mass density of the earth more than anything else.
Could it be reasonable to attack the "enter you details here to unsubscribe" sites? These sites (usually) add you to a spam list. Its easy to test - just unsubscribe an address and see what spam turns up there.
Then having identified such sites, start filling them up with multiple false unsubscriptions, until their mail sender groans under the weight of thousands (nay, millions) of false eMail addresses.
The joy of this approach is that I can't see how it would hit and certainly how hit would hurt a legitimite unsubscribe site.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to fake it.
Firstly would such an ID card have prevented the McVeigh bombings? If so, then how?
Secondly, how do you deal with false ID's from another country. I mean, legitimite ones? I doubt that there would have been any problems in getting the taliban, or pakistan, or many other countries from issuing legitimite ID's. Not to mention good fakes.
Authentication is only as good as those who certify it. If you use public key cryptography, but the private key has been obtained by stealth/corruption, how do you know. (Alot of 3rd world countries are quite corrupt - how do you prevent some official from selling the codes? You can't even be sure that Ex-USSR scientists arent' selling bombs to Iraq, and they are just unemployed).
If a countries ID becomes compromised, do you make everyone in the country get a new ID with new encryption?
Most importantly, facial recognition (and particularly iris recognition) is about to happen. We will have widespread tracking of individuals shortly, whether or not they get an ID chip implanted. The question is how this is managed (legally) in terms of what rights you have. Because it will happen. In fact, it already has been used to identify people on occasions (in the UK at football matches IIRC)
Food for thought.
Michael
Yes, but Telstra is charging 0.18 dollars /Mb excess. That is $180 per Gigabyte ($95 in US dollars).
A little different to your free lunch (TANSTAAFL).
I would happily pay $3 per GB, even probably $3 US per GB.
Telstra (the major Australian Teleco)has never been accused of giving out too many free lunches
Satellite has been cheaper in Australia than any other form of bandwidth for some time.
Why? Because its not controlled by the main Australian teleco's (Telstra/Optus, particularly Telstra).
In fact, most satellite stuff routes through the US and gives faster access to there than to Oz.
Interestingly, Telstra believes that bandwidth sould retail at 18 cents/MB (thats about 10 cents/Mb US) - an amount that most people would consider prohibitive and also unrelated to the actual cost of delivering services.
Michael
P.S. Cheers, have a good christmas & new year everyone.
The issue here is not whether or not it can be blocked, but the extra workload to do so.
As it is a base install, every firm that is worried about this will have to install a policy against it. Undoubtedly, some will forget.
Michael
Imagine being able to "turn around" with mouse or similar (headmounted?) device in order to look around; to be able to "zoom" into and past separate windows and work areas (workspaces) with mouse wheel or cursor keys.
Imagine getting nauseated and throwing up from trying to find some file you stored "somewhere near - I'm sure that document is somewhere near here!"
3D doesn't work for everyone - virtual reality, real nausea.
Michael
Which, btw, was my point. OS revisions that cost significant amounts of your local currancy should include features that warrant the upgrade. 95, 98 and ME didn't
The big upgrade was from 95a to 95b, which was totally unannounced. There were in fact at least 4 windows 95: 95, 95a, 95b and the short lived 95c.
95b introduced the fat32 file system which broke the 2G hard disk drive limit.
It was a critical update, and the biggest change in OS function over most of the windows history. Also, IIRC, from 95b onwards you could add in USB support. It was the next generation of the 9x OS. 98 and ME in particular added nothing much over this - Active desktop is retained more as legacy (junk) code these days, despite the hype at the time.
Point being, marketing drove the OS "upgrades" The technicians worked on a rather different timescales (such as when the HDD grew too big for the file system).
Michael
I see alot of problems.
Not only the lack of oxygen, but also the amount of CO2 required to keep mars warm might be rather higher than that on earth.
This could lead to alot of problems - high CO2 levels are quite toxic. For the uninitiated, I suggest you see Apollo 13 from your local video store. Just having oxygen alone won't keep you alive.
Michael
There is a huge difference. USB approximately 1.2 Mb/sec, USB 2.0 approx 50 Mb/sec IIRC.
It doesn't say, so its probably not USB 2.0. You would say it if it had it.
That means it will be slow to transfer the files, but not a disaster to do so.
Michael
Population densities are very low in the US, to there day there are many miles where there is no coverage on any system. (Unless there is a satalite system now)
Australia uses multiple systems, but now supports mainly CDMA and GSM. Which is more popular? CDMA is better for covering distance - and please (unless you are posting from antartica) don't underestimate the issues faced in Australia. We have a land mass 2/3 the size of the US, but with a population of 18 million.
GSM is locked in by design to a 35 Km radius around the base station. Not an issue in say, NY, London or Europe for that matter. A big issue in Oz where your neighbour might be further away than that. Telstra (the major teleco in Australia) have modified GSM transmitters to provide a second 35-70 Km ring of coveravge from a base station. In outback Australia, you can easily get 70 km line of sight to a tower.
Despite all these limitations, GSM still wins hands down. The biggest reason? Competition I think. Being able to change service provider with a change of SIM card, rather than handset.
Plus the provision of enough features above and beyond phone - SMS messaging. Although primitive, it was flexible enough to make your phone a pager and message service in one.
In hindsight, the bandwidth limitations (9600 baud) and absence of packet radio (always on rather than dial in) features weren't enough of a liability to hold back its initial rollout.
You might call it the microsoft or VHS solution - near enough, good enough without actually being the best.
MIchael
They MUST virgously defend these things or they are doing a disservice to their stockholders
That is so untrue. The MUST bit. You don't HAVE to defend them if they benefit the company overall.
The best case in point is microsoft itself. It became the defacto office software manufacturer by not copy protecting its stuff. (I'm talking about the pre-monopoly days). Everyone who was going to pirate software used microsoft stuff - it was easier and more convenient than the competitors with dongles, etc. Amongst the legitimate users, initially the purchasing was split, but the larger base of microsoft use (amongst pirated copies) eventually won over the userbase. This was even before the software was superior (which didn't happen until version 3 or higher usually).
The point is, when you are a market leader, you will benefit your shareholders to enforce protection, as the user will probably cough up the money if he/she has to. If you are a minnow in a big pond, you don't want to annoy everyone that does or might support you.
Interestingly, microsoft remains well aware of this point, and gives away software such messenger, windows media player, and even internet explorer (for now) because it does not have overwhelming superiority in the fields. It persues violations of windows and office relentlessly, knowing that people will buy it if forced as there isn't alot of alternative.
Michael
You have to love the moderation system here.
I'm still left wondering why someone thought that my previous post was flamebait? Oh well, them's the breaks.
Michael
Previous Post:
Like alot of things, there is a difference between doing somthing because you can do it, compared with doing something because it should be done.
Alpha transperancy is a good thing, used wisely. Like the nice shadow on the mouse in win2k
Makeing whole windows transparent has limited usefulness to my mind.
Can anyone see a real use for transparent windows?
Like alot of things, there is a difference between doing somthing because you can do it, compared with doing something because it should be done.
Alpha transperancy is a good thing, used wisely. Like the nice shadow on the mouse in win2k
Makeing whole windows transparent has limited usefulness to my mind.
Can anyone see a real use for transparent windows?
Michael
The UK tended to use 2 letter domains, and in fact sometimes quite a bit more than expected:
.org and .net (beats .og.uk !)
Oxford university is www.ox.ac.uk
(ac = academic).
I don't know why, and I think that they gave in with
Although as a country they do seem to like short sharp categorisations for most things.
MIchael
Well, the US military is clearly planet wide in scope, so I don't see a problem with a TLD here.
Maybe China might get upset, but really who else is going to host a website covering what parts of the world are worth invading? Examples such a the British invasion of the Faulkland islands or even Indonesia little invasion of East Timor really wouldn't warrant a TLD, and really belong in a subdomain such as enemies.mi.uk, for example.
With terroists.location.mil its pretty clear we are talking about Afganistan.
Michael
Michael
Mandatory ID cards. As if terrorists with millions of dollars can't fake them?
:(
Actually, you don't need to fake them. None of those involved in the sept 11 bombings would have had any trouble getting a real id card - they were all in the country legally. And that isn't likely to stop. Unless you get a fortress America and stop all those foreigners from visiting under tourist visas. Then they would have to choose to emigrate to the US to get a green card, and surely they don't plan that far ahead now?
Taking guns away. As if street criminals don't already buy them on the black market?
Actually, there are much better reasons to get rid of guns, or at least lock them down a little more, but none of them have anything to do with terrorism. Mostly to do with the high likelyhood of shooting people you know in a fit of anger.
Every first world democracy has criminals with guns and police with guns - sometimes it can be hard to tell the two apart. But only the US has the huge rate of personal injury from the guns, mostly used in defence or anger on people known to the person who uses them.
I'm not trying to do flamebait here, I'd agree with you totally about banning guns to reduce terrorism being a stupid idea.
Michael
Inbreeding is really only a problem when you either can't really do culling (like with people) or breeding isn't controlled and the damaged offspring can continue to breed.
That is true enough to a fair extent. However, if you only have 3 or so members of the species, it will be almost impossible to get any offspring that is viable within a few generations. They will "cull" themselves out to extinction most likely.
I do take your point that a population of a few hundred could get by with an aggressive program.
I think that to make 3 or so members survive you would need to actively repair their genetic defects - which wouldn't be apparent immediately given our current knowledge of gene technology. I'm not an expert on this (actually nobody has ever done this for real to my knowledge) so I'm open to feedback if you think I have really missed the mark here.
Another possibility would be to continually clone and release members to breed with their offspring, which might eventually select out those with few defects. It would sure lead to a narrow gene pool, however.
Michael
So if someone is a worm victim, they either unthinkingly opened an attachment or didn't keep their machines up to date. Either way it was preventable.
;)
Actually, microsoft has created alot of reluctance amongst more experienced users to keep up to date.
Many service packs have actually broken systems in the past - making people who know what they are doing reluctant to apply a service pack until they are sure that it really works.
Also, many security updates depend on these service packs. In fact, some of microsofts own update reporting system will not see the patches until they are running on an up to date service pack.
It becomes a catch 22 - either way, you are dammed (well, you certainly would have been in the past). Maybe microsoft will not make these sort of errors again. Hmmm, did I just say that?
So, I'm not sure its totally preventable on MS software.
How about making these cards transmit an "I'm here" signal every few seconds, so that the government knows when you're in the area?
True - that would be a problem.
Trouble is, iris recognition is on its way in. It appears to work and can be done from much greater distance than most biometric id's.
I don't think that we will have much privacy soon anyway. Whether or not we get active smart cards.
After all, the government doesn't really expect a terrorist to carry a tracking device at the critical time, does it?
Michael
That isn't nearly enough.
To maintain genetic diversity, you need probably 1000+ members of a species. You could get by with a few hundred, but it would be hard.
The problem is that each animal carries multiple recessive genes that are lethal (as do most humans, about 8 per person). Once you get serious inbreeding a few generations down the track, you get seriously high numbers of these recessives coming back to bite you.
Three won't work. Not in the long run, unless you keep on cloning them.
Michael
Its probably that someone else approved the first story. I doubt that the same editor would post twice.
Michael
The idea can be valid irrespective of its source.
Michael
That's not true unless you lack cable television (I'm assuming you're in the USA).
Sorry to interject on this one, but the USA doesn't have a monopoly on cable (and certainly not on Satellite!), so I don't quite get the association of those two statements.
We say that time is a fourth dimension. Now picture this: No matter what's happening, you're ALWAYS moving through the 4 axes (the three "space" dimensions and the one "time" dimension) at exactly the speed of light. It's just that you're splitting that speed (the speed of light) across some combination of the 4 dimensions. You're doing one of the following:
Yes, yes, its all true. We all move through space time at a constant speed (Except when I'm waking up in the morning).
But these effects are relavistic. You have to be travelling at near light speed to have an appreciable effect on mass or gravity. They do apply to high speed subatomic particles, but these are pretty few and far between on the planet in terms of total mass.
I think that the variations in gravity relate to variations in mass density of the earth more than anything else.
Michael
Possibly not.
Shipping things at ground level is alot cheaper than launching things.
There are alot of issues in getting a maximum usable payload.
But other things are probably more important, such as the rotational forces from being near the equator, etc.
Michael
Could it be reasonable to attack the "enter you details here to unsubscribe" sites? These sites (usually) add you to a spam list. Its easy to test - just unsubscribe an address and see what spam turns up there.
Then having identified such sites, start filling them up with multiple false unsubscriptions, until their mail sender groans under the weight of thousands (nay, millions) of false eMail addresses.
The joy of this approach is that I can't see how it would hit and certainly how hit would hurt a legitimite unsubscribe site.
Michael