I don't have a picture phone, but I do carry a digital camera with me a lot. Once you have the ability to take a photo to illustrate something, rather than trying to describe it, you find all sorts of uses. Maybe not every single day, but certainly often enough to be useful.
SMS was just a novelty in the US for a long time, just like picture phones are now. Why type something in on that silly little keypad when I can just talk to them directly? I use it all the time now, but I had an SMS-capable phone for almost a year before I ever even tried the feature. I think photo capability is another means of communication that will also find its niche once it becomes commonplace and cheap.
No, it's more like "They're your guests, but you won't give them your house keys and let them babysit the kids unless you know them really, really well." Which is pretty reasonable, actually.
They weren't automatically excluding anyone. They're just inisting on screening foreign nationals (those guests) before giving them free run. You know, like people criticized the administration for not doing back in September 2001.
You can be quite sure that no one in law enforcement has "forgotten" McVeigh and similar domestic terrorists, and you can bet that they won't be shy about screening anyone who they feel is suspicious (as they should). But the current major threat is from outside the country, and screening foreign nationals makes more sense right now, both politically and as the best way to utilize the resources available.
I'm an EMT and I see alot of car crashes. I can tell you that this would be just about useless to us in the field. The simple fact is we don't have time to analyze the data and the computer couldn't tell us anything that can't be seen by looking at the crashed cars themselves.
You wouldn't have to analyze the data before treating the patient or taking them to the hospital.
The patient could be packaged and transported while the data is automatically transferred to the recieving hospital (and the medevac crew in the case of a flyout), much the same way EMTs do en-route hospital consults and notifications now.
Of course, the data would also be useful to police doing accident reconstruction to see how and why the accident happened in the first place.
And don't forget the personal aspect, as well. My father and grandmother were killed in a car accident on a rainy morning five years ago; my mother was flown to a shock-trauma facility with a head injury and has no memory of the accident. For many accident survivors and their families knowing what happened in those final moments may provide some comfort.
Your instructor was an ass. If he allowed you to use a calculator on your exam then he should have made it clear that it was to be used for checking your answers and not as a substitute for writing out your work by hand. As you tell it, he blindsided you just for the hell of it.
As to whether calculators are a good thing or not, I think it comes down to a matter of teaching philosophy. In the real world, very few people who need to do math on a regular basis choose to do it all by hand or in their heads. They use calculators, analysis programs, spreadsheets, etc. Back before calculators people used precompiled printed tables and slide rules for the same purpose.
IMHO, general education students should be taught the basic concepts and then allowed to use a calculator whenever they want. They should have enough basic understanding to do a sanity check on their answers and to understand what the answer means, but making them do everything by hand is just a way for poor teachers to waste time that could better be used for real teaching.
Amen. Move to the country, where, for example, you can buy a nice house with a mortgage payment that's likely to be less than your current rent.
There are lots of small tech and non-tech businesses who'd love to have skilled people come and work for them. I make less than what some formerly employeed people made in Silicon Valley, but my cost of living is far more reasonable. Plus I don't have to put up with city traffic.
Wow, it must be an especially slow day for such an obvious troll to make the front page. I'll humor you: The patent describes their usual recommendations system (which works pretty well, generally.) The apparel "recommendations", like "clean underwear" were a tongue-in-cheek means of introducing a brand new store to their customers. The two concepts are not mutally exclusive.
But an onscreen touch keyboard would really suck for real typing. Seems a pity to have a system with this potential saddled with a "keyboard" worse than an old Sinclair ZX-81 or Atari 400.
Yep, you're right. I was just about to make a similar post myself.
The temperature differential thing is new and neat, but other types of self-winding mechanical watches have been around for more than fifty years.
I have a handsome "Clipper Automatic" watch that my father used to wear all the time. Like most self-winding watches it's kept wound by movement of the arm and wrist. The mechanism still works even after years of sitting forgotten in a drawer.
Yes, because signing a contract with Microsoft allowing schools and students to buy useful software at prices they can afford is exactly the same as making a (non existent) deal with a genocidal dictator. Right-o.
Nonsense. And the fact that your post was moderated up only serves to demonstrate the sad lack of perspective in the Slashdot community when anything related to Microsoft is mentioned. Consider, if the schools had signed a similar deal with Red Hat, Sun, or Apple (and I bet some of them have) would this even be an issue?
I am going off the assumption that this story is true, but the fact remains that things like this have happened in other areas of science as well. RESEARCH allows scientists to innovate and come up with new techniques/treatments/solutions. Imagine that stem cell research had been stopped in the beginning because of "ethical" objections.
I don't know why you feel the need to use scare quotes around the word "ethical". There are of course ethical issues that must be considered in any medical research. We may not agree on exactly what limits are correct, but, not living in a technocratic dictatorship, those decisions are not always ours to make.
OTOH, if fetal stem-cell research had been allowed to continue with no restrictions whatsoever, the potential of this bone marrow technique may not have been discovered until much later. Necessity is the mother of invention.
I think the same scenario can be applied to the tech world - if you stifle research, you stifle innovation. You stop someone from investigating digital security (DMCA) and you prevent security from progressing.
A flawed analogy. The objections were never to stem-cell research in general, only the source of those particular stem-cells. There's a big difference.
But all principles are not necessarily of equal importance. Out of principle, I don't lie to people. Out of principle, I protect my loved ones from harm.
But if telling a lie would prevent the death of a loved one ("no, I'm the only person in the house") then I know which principle I'd choose to compromise.
That's right. The kind of enhancement they're talking about is apparently just a bit of unsharp masking and contrast adjustment. The same sort of stuff many digital photographers do routinely. And if they were doing it in a darkroom with a film negative no one would even raise the issue.
Of course there is the opportunity for abuse or falsification, but that's the case with any kind of evidence. Unless the defense is claiming some kind of deliberate tampering with the fingerprints then they're just taking advantage of people's ignorance.
WTF?? The first is grounds for arrest and deportation in and of itself;
Yes, if your goal is to simply arrest and deport individuals who violate visa restrictions then that's enough. However, lots of non-terrorists violate visa restrictions every day, and investigating, arresting and deporting all of them is unlikely to be practical or popular.
the second is grounds to start an investigation (which will turn up further causes for suspicion if the target is indeed up to something, eventually firming up into grounds for arrest and prosecution).
I agree that an investigation is warranted if there's actually reason for suspicion, but the hard part is determining what reports are valid and which are not.
The existence of this sort of database would allow investigators to better assess each individual instance prior to beginning a full-scale investigation. It also means less time wasted investigating people who are unlikely to be real threats.
The advantage of keeping the data dispersed is that it raises the bar high enough to discourage casual and illegal snooping. If a Fed has to make a few visits and involve a few other people (some of them outside the government) every time he wants to put together a dossier on a target, he's less likely to do it without legitimate reason than he would if he could just pull it up from the comfort and privacy of his office.
That's a good point, but I think there's also a legitimate need for a rapid response to certain types of threats. If we want to prohibit casual and illegal snooping then we should put technical, procedural, and legal measures in place explictly designed to prevent and punish that sort of abuse. If someone is about to poison the water supply or shoot the governor then it's the wrong time to deliberately hobble the people sworn to stop it.
But you're missing the point... As technology becomes ever more integrated with our lives, the option of "just turn it off" becomes increasingly less possible. No, not from a technical perspective, but from a *social* perspective.
I think you're correct, this is not really a technological issue, it's a social one. A lot of the "privacy" and anonymity we imagine we have is an artifact of years of impersonal service and crude automation.
Three or four decades ago, all of the functions you name were handled by people. If you wanted to make a long-distance phone call you talked to an operator who took your information and connected you with the remote number. If you bought something, you usually dealt with a person across the counter, and if you lived in a small town or frequented the same shops that person probably recognized you, knew your family, your social standing, and what you liked to buy.
Now things are swinging back in that direction again. That kind of personal knowledge, since lost in the underflow of automation, is being extracted again by the current providers of those services. Is this a bad thing? Maybe, not not necessarily. I can't help but think that part of the reason that most people don't get too upset about losing thier pseudo-anonymity is because they never really cared that much to begin with.
I mean the horrendous events of Sept 11th didn't slip past the security services because there wasn't enough information available, they slipped past because none of the analysts connected the dots between known associates of terrorists in the USA + money being sent to these people from Saudi + lots of odd(*) people wanting to learn how to fly jets = big friqin problem.
Yes, and connecting the dots like that is exactly what this program is trying to do. Gathering data that's already available and gleaning patterns of suspicious behavior like the ones that were missed prior to September 11th. There's too much raw data spread among too many mutually uncommunciative beuracracies and and not enough analysis. This is an attempt at analysis.
Increasing the amount of detail that the analysts have to deal with would not solve any of the problems that allowed Sept. 11th to happen, but would make the governments job of cracking down on US dissidents easier.
But the details are precisely what's important. It does no good to know that someone, somewhere violated their visa restrictions, or that someone else though that a certain person was acting in a suspicious manner or asking odd questions. But knowing that someone from a certain country did so, and that they subsequently met with a known member of a terrorist organization, and that they then bought a large amount of fuel oil from a heating company and a big load of chemical fertilizer from an agricultural supply company. Perhaps it's all perfectly innocent, but it's worth looking into. Those disconnected little bits of information are the sorts of things that catch criminals all the time, but someone has to be looking for them.
TIA focuses on compiling publically available information. Anyone who wants to search that information has access to it right now, and probably has for years.
Regardless of whether you personally trust a particular set of law enforcement officials or not, you have to acknolwedge that there's a huge difference between trawling public databases for internal investigative use, and the posting that same information to the web with the express purpose of encouraging people to harass someone with whom you have a disagreement.
This is not a coherent political statement or a protest against The Man. It's just the mindless online equivalent of toilet papering someone's front yard.
This is by far the worst idea I've ever heard. The Windows Registry is one of the worst parts of windows. Registry got corrupted? Reinstall!
Weird. I've never had a corrupted registry on my systems or any of the Windows systems I used to maintain. I don't doubt that it happens, but it's hardly a common occurance.
One thing I hate the most -- reinstall the OS, it clobbers your registry, and then you have to reinstall all of your apps, too.
Not really. In fact, I generally prefer to do clean installs to get rid of accumulated stuff that reinstallations don't touch. If an app works prior to the reinstall, and if it's compatible with whatever version of Windows you're installing, then it'll stay working.
That's odd, I don't see Americans rioting and killing each other over a beauty pageant, or stoning women for violating dress codes, or even getting all that worked up about the existence of porn in general.
Also, as long as I'm typing, the Puritans were English, and after getting themselves into trouble attempting to reform what they saw as a moribund and corrupt Church of England they came to America to escape persecution. The name "Puritan" was coined as a derisive term by their opponents in England. Puritans enjoyed drinking (lots of drinking) and feasting, and apparently had very pragmatic views on sex. They were not narrow minded witch-burning caricatures:
Gee, maybe because they're professionals who actually take the NDAs they've signed seriously, and not lusers who think it's cool to break a business contract and pretend that they're saving the world?
Einstein's work was also instrumental, of course, in giving the US an early lead on the development of atomic weapons. Had history gone differently that advantage may have belonged to Germany, the USSR, or even Japan. Given the balance of power and the regimes in charge at the time that would have been rather unhealthy for the world as a whole.
Look at the NRA. Do you think everyone in the NRA went to the library, carefully and thoughtfully evaluated the statistics, then reluctantly decided to support gun ownership because the facts supported it? No! They decided to support gun ownership because they love guns. Facts, if any, were found afterward to reinforce the position they already had regardless of them.
I'd wager that most NRA members don't "love" guns any more than you "love" your screwdriver or your car, or your favorite network analysis tool. It's a tool for accomplishing a task, and one that they strongly believe they have a right to use in a responsible way. If used carelessly or maliciously they can cause harm, like any other tool.
Yes, there are exceptions. Just as there are folks on the other side who passionately hate firearms, no matter how they're used. Folks on the extremes cannot be reasoned with, but when given the choice between restricting someone's actions or not, "not" is generally the right choice.
Each of the examples you note is a well known shareware application. The intent of the nag screens is to get you to pay for the app after the trial period has expired. If you buy them, the nag screens go away. If you don't want to buy them and are offended by nag screens then use freeware alternatives instead. (Or, in the case of WinZip, just use the basic functionality built into XP.) Don't install shareware and then get upset because it's shareware.
Fine, except that in this case no one is doing that. The draft policy the article links to makes it clear that terrorist threats are only one of many potential problems with insecure networks.
The Department of Homeland Security is largely a merger of a bunch of formerly seperate agencies that were crippled by their inability to coordinate. The dept has responsibility for a whole bunch of stuff beyond threats of terrorism.
If someone cripples the 911 system in a large city because of poor security at the call center's computers, then it doesn't matter if it's a terrorist or a script kiddie. It's just as bad.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't have a picture phone, but I do carry a digital camera with me a lot. Once you have the ability to take a photo to illustrate something, rather than trying to describe it, you find all sorts of uses. Maybe not every single day, but certainly often enough to be useful.
SMS was just a novelty in the US for a long time, just like picture phones are now. Why type something in on that silly little keypad when I can just talk to them directly? I use it all the time now, but I had an SMS-capable phone for almost a year before I ever even tried the feature. I think photo capability is another means of communication that will also find its niche once it becomes commonplace and cheap.
No, it's more like "They're your guests, but you won't give them your house keys and let them babysit the kids unless you know them really, really well." Which is pretty reasonable, actually.
They weren't automatically excluding anyone. They're just inisting on screening foreign nationals (those guests) before giving them free run. You know, like people criticized the administration for not doing back in September 2001.
You can be quite sure that no one in law enforcement has "forgotten" McVeigh and similar domestic terrorists, and you can bet that they won't be shy about screening anyone who they feel is suspicious (as they should). But the current major threat is from outside the country, and screening foreign nationals makes more sense right now, both politically and as the best way to utilize the resources available.
I'm an EMT and I see alot of car crashes. I can tell you that this would be just about useless to us in the field. The simple fact is we don't have time to analyze the data and the computer couldn't tell us anything that can't be seen by looking at the crashed cars themselves.
You wouldn't have to analyze the data before treating the patient or taking them to the hospital.
The patient could be packaged and transported while the data is automatically transferred to the recieving hospital (and the medevac crew in the case of a flyout), much the same way EMTs do en-route hospital consults and notifications now.
Of course, the data would also be useful to police doing accident reconstruction to see how and why the accident happened in the first place.
And don't forget the personal aspect, as well. My father and grandmother were killed in a car accident on a rainy morning five years ago; my mother was flown to a shock-trauma facility with a head injury and has no memory of the accident. For many accident survivors and their families knowing what happened in those final moments may provide some comfort.
Your instructor was an ass. If he allowed you to use a calculator on your exam then he should have made it clear that it was to be used for checking your answers and not as a substitute for writing out your work by hand. As you tell it, he blindsided you just for the hell of it.
As to whether calculators are a good thing or not, I think it comes down to a matter of teaching philosophy. In the real world, very few people who need to do math on a regular basis choose to do it all by hand or in their heads. They use calculators, analysis programs, spreadsheets, etc. Back before calculators people used precompiled printed tables and slide rules for the same purpose.
IMHO, general education students should be taught the basic concepts and then allowed to use a calculator whenever they want. They should have enough basic understanding to do a sanity check on their answers and to understand what the answer means, but making them do everything by hand is just a way for poor teachers to waste time that could better be used for real teaching.
Amen. Move to the country, where, for example, you can buy a nice house with a mortgage payment that's likely to be less than your current rent.
There are lots of small tech and non-tech businesses who'd love to have skilled people come and work for them. I make less than what some formerly employeed people made in Silicon Valley, but my cost of living is far more reasonable. Plus I don't have to put up with city traffic.
Wow, it must be an especially slow day for such an obvious troll to make the front page. I'll humor you: The patent describes their usual recommendations system (which works pretty well, generally.) The apparel "recommendations", like "clean underwear" were a tongue-in-cheek means of introducing a brand new store to their customers. The two concepts are not mutally exclusive.
But an onscreen touch keyboard would really suck for real typing. Seems a pity to have a system with this potential saddled with a "keyboard" worse than an old Sinclair ZX-81 or Atari 400.
Yep, you're right. I was just about to make a similar post myself.
The temperature differential thing is new and neat, but other types of self-winding mechanical watches have been around for more than fifty years.
I have a handsome "Clipper Automatic" watch that my father used to wear all the time. Like most self-winding watches it's kept wound by movement of the arm and wrist. The mechanism still works even after years of sitting forgotten in a drawer.
Yes, because signing a contract with Microsoft allowing schools and students to buy useful software at prices they can afford is exactly the same as making a (non existent) deal with a genocidal dictator. Right-o.
Nonsense. And the fact that your post was moderated up only serves to demonstrate the sad lack of perspective in the Slashdot community when anything related to Microsoft is mentioned. Consider, if the schools had signed a similar deal with Red Hat, Sun, or Apple (and I bet some of them have) would this even be an issue?
Site maps are a poor subsitute for properly designing the navigation in the first place.
I am going off the assumption that this story is true, but the fact remains that things like this have happened in other areas of science as well. RESEARCH allows scientists to innovate and come up with new techniques/treatments/solutions. Imagine that stem cell research had been stopped in the beginning because of "ethical" objections.
I don't know why you feel the need to use scare quotes around the word "ethical". There are of course ethical issues that must be considered in any medical research. We may not agree on exactly what limits are correct, but, not living in a technocratic dictatorship, those decisions are not always ours to make.
OTOH, if fetal stem-cell research had been allowed to continue with no restrictions whatsoever, the potential of this bone marrow technique may not have been discovered until much later. Necessity is the mother of invention.
I think the same scenario can be applied to the tech world - if you stifle research, you stifle innovation. You stop someone from investigating digital security (DMCA) and you prevent security from progressing.
A flawed analogy. The objections were never to stem-cell research in general, only the source of those particular stem-cells. There's a big difference.
But all principles are not necessarily of equal importance. Out of principle, I don't lie to people. Out of principle, I protect my loved ones from harm.
But if telling a lie would prevent the death of a loved one ("no, I'm the only person in the house") then I know which principle I'd choose to compromise.
That's right. The kind of enhancement they're talking about is apparently just a bit of unsharp masking and contrast adjustment. The same sort of stuff many digital photographers do routinely. And if they were doing it in a darkroom with a film negative no one would even raise the issue.
Of course there is the opportunity for abuse or falsification, but that's the case with any kind of evidence. Unless the defense is claiming some kind of deliberate tampering with the fingerprints then they're just taking advantage of people's ignorance.
WTF?? The first is grounds for arrest and deportation in and of itself;
Yes, if your goal is to simply arrest and deport individuals who violate visa restrictions then that's enough. However, lots of non-terrorists violate visa restrictions every day, and investigating, arresting and deporting all of them is unlikely to be practical or popular.
the second is grounds to start an investigation (which will turn up further causes for suspicion if the target is indeed up to something, eventually firming up into grounds for arrest and prosecution).
I agree that an investigation is warranted if there's actually reason for suspicion, but the hard part is determining what reports are valid and which are not.
The existence of this sort of database would allow investigators to better assess each individual instance prior to beginning a full-scale investigation. It also means less time wasted investigating people who are unlikely to be real threats.
The advantage of keeping the data dispersed is that it raises the bar high enough to discourage casual and illegal snooping. If a Fed has to make a few visits and involve a few other people (some of them outside the government) every time he wants to put together a dossier on a target, he's less likely to do it without legitimate reason than he would if he could just pull it up from the comfort and privacy of his office.
That's a good point, but I think there's also a legitimate need for a rapid response to certain types of threats. If we want to prohibit casual and illegal snooping then we should put technical, procedural, and legal measures in place explictly designed to prevent and punish that sort of abuse. If someone is about to poison the water supply or shoot the governor then it's the wrong time to deliberately hobble the people sworn to stop it.
But you're missing the point... As technology becomes ever more integrated with our lives, the option of "just turn it off" becomes increasingly less possible. No, not from a technical perspective, but from a *social* perspective.
I think you're correct, this is not really a technological issue, it's a social one. A lot of the "privacy" and anonymity we imagine we have is an artifact of years of impersonal service and crude automation.
Three or four decades ago, all of the functions you name were handled by people. If you wanted to make a long-distance phone call you talked to an operator who took your information and connected you with the remote number. If you bought something, you usually dealt with a person across the counter, and if you lived in a small town or frequented the same shops that person probably recognized you, knew your family, your social standing, and what you liked to buy.
Now things are swinging back in that direction again. That kind of personal knowledge, since lost in the underflow of automation, is being extracted again by the current providers of those services. Is this a bad thing? Maybe, not not necessarily. I can't help but think that part of the reason that most people don't get too upset about losing thier pseudo-anonymity is because they never really cared that much to begin with.
I mean the horrendous events of Sept 11th didn't slip past the security services because there wasn't enough information available, they slipped past because none of the analysts connected the dots between known associates of terrorists in the USA + money being sent to these people from Saudi + lots of odd(*) people wanting to learn how to fly jets = big friqin problem.
Yes, and connecting the dots like that is exactly what this program is trying to do. Gathering data that's already available and gleaning patterns of suspicious behavior like the ones that were missed prior to September 11th. There's too much raw data spread among too many mutually uncommunciative beuracracies and and not enough analysis. This is an attempt at analysis.
Increasing the amount of detail that the analysts have to deal with would not solve any of the problems that allowed Sept. 11th to happen, but would make the governments job of cracking down on US dissidents easier.
But the details are precisely what's important. It does no good to know that someone, somewhere violated their visa restrictions, or that someone else though that a certain person was acting in a suspicious manner or asking odd questions. But knowing that someone from a certain country did so, and that they subsequently met with a known member of a terrorist organization, and that they then bought a large amount of fuel oil from a heating company and a big load of chemical fertilizer from an agricultural supply company. Perhaps it's all perfectly innocent, but it's worth looking into. Those disconnected little bits of information are the sorts of things that catch criminals all the time, but someone has to be looking for them.
TIA focuses on compiling publically available information. Anyone who wants to search that information has access to it right now, and probably has for years.
Regardless of whether you personally trust a particular set of law enforcement officials or not, you have to acknolwedge that there's a huge difference between trawling public databases for internal investigative use, and the posting that same information to the web with the express purpose of encouraging people to harass someone with whom you have a disagreement.
This is not a coherent political statement or a protest against The Man. It's just the mindless online equivalent of toilet papering someone's front yard.
This is by far the worst idea I've ever heard. The Windows Registry is one of the worst parts of windows. Registry got corrupted? Reinstall!
Weird. I've never had a corrupted registry on my systems or any of the Windows systems I used to maintain. I don't doubt that it happens, but it's hardly a common occurance.
One thing I hate the most -- reinstall the OS, it clobbers your registry, and then you have to reinstall all of your apps, too.
Not really. In fact, I generally prefer to do clean installs to get rid of accumulated stuff that reinstallations don't touch. If an app works prior to the reinstall, and if it's compatible with whatever version of Windows you're installing, then it'll stay working.
That's odd, I don't see Americans rioting and killing each other over a beauty pageant, or stoning women for violating dress codes, or even getting all that worked up about the existence of porn in general.
0 44 72&t=Nation+%2F+World&c=26,1004472
Also, as long as I'm typing, the Puritans were English, and after getting themselves into trouble attempting to reform what they saw as a moribund and corrupt Church of England they came to America to escape persecution. The name "Puritan" was coined as a derisive term by their opponents in England. Puritans enjoyed drinking (lots of drinking) and feasting, and apparently had very pragmatic views on sex. They were not narrow minded witch-burning caricatures:
http://www.qctimes.com/internal.php?story_id=10
Why are you offended? Give the natives some credit for their ability to make rational choices. They aren't museum exhibits or zoo specimens.
Gee, maybe because they're professionals who actually take the NDAs they've signed seriously, and not lusers who think it's cool to break a business contract and pretend that they're saving the world?
Good post.
Einstein's work was also instrumental, of course, in giving the US an early lead on the development of atomic weapons. Had history gone differently that advantage may have belonged to Germany, the USSR, or even Japan. Given the balance of power and the regimes in charge at the time that would have been rather unhealthy for the world as a whole.
Look at the NRA. Do you think everyone in the NRA went to the library, carefully and thoughtfully evaluated the statistics, then reluctantly decided to support gun ownership because the facts supported it? No! They decided to support gun ownership because they love guns. Facts, if any, were found afterward to reinforce the position they already had regardless of them.
I'd wager that most NRA members don't "love" guns any more than you "love" your screwdriver or your car, or your favorite network analysis tool. It's a tool for accomplishing a task, and one that they strongly believe they have a right to use in a responsible way. If used carelessly or maliciously they can cause harm, like any other tool.
Yes, there are exceptions. Just as there are folks on the other side who passionately hate firearms, no matter how they're used. Folks on the extremes cannot be reasoned with, but when given the choice between restricting someone's actions or not, "not" is generally the right choice.
Each of the examples you note is a well known shareware application. The intent of the nag screens is to get you to pay for the app after the trial period has expired. If you buy them, the nag screens go away. If you don't want to buy them and are offended by nag screens then use freeware alternatives instead. (Or, in the case of WinZip, just use the basic functionality built into XP.) Don't install shareware and then get upset because it's shareware.
Fine, except that in this case no one is doing that. The draft policy the article links to makes it clear that terrorist threats are only one of many potential problems with insecure networks.
The Department of Homeland Security is largely a merger of a bunch of formerly seperate agencies that were crippled by their inability to coordinate. The dept has responsibility for a whole bunch of stuff beyond threats of terrorism.
If someone cripples the 911 system in a large city because of poor security at the call center's computers, then it doesn't matter if it's a terrorist or a script kiddie. It's just as bad.