LOL! you're kidding right? dude, the deactivation/re-activation hassles are for paying customers only. If you pirate it then you use an activation crack.
Because USB is insecure. (assuming XP) When you plug in your USB key to login to your banking website it reads the signed key/password/whatever and signs you in. Great. Meanwhile... your screen-saver and the 'search bar' you installed also read your key and upload it to Mr. Nasty.
What you would need is a USB key with a processor to do the signing/challenge response internally.
And with as much as 1.5 Gb of onboard video memory Not knowing the difference between a bit and a byte == Fail.
ElcomSoft has discovered and filed for a US patent on a breakthrough technology... harnessed the combined power of a PC's Central Processing Unit and its video card's Graphics Processing Unit. The resulting hardware/software powerhouse will... Referring to the (obvious) use of a new library/sdk from NVIDIA to improve performance of an existing application as the "discovery of a breakthrough technology" == Fail.
...allow cryptology professionals to build affordable PCs that will work like supercomputers when recovering lost passwords. Cut and pasted from "How to write with spin for dummies" Fail.
...will be incorporating this patent-pending technology into their entire family of enterprise password recovery applications. Corporate press release copy and paste == Fail.
So when is this guy gonna start blogging about what happens to American soldiers captured alive by Islamists? Ya, and just this morning the local paper was going on and on about how this one woman was kidnapped and murdered in my home town.
Don't they know that women are being kidnapped and murdered in other countries too? I mean jeez! why don't they write about that instead?
[re: diversity] I disagree. Those minor differences may seem major to other people. But we very uniformly agree on the goals. In Canada we argue constantly about the mechanics of implementing a system but we almost entirely agree on the core ideals: That every person in the country should have access to quality medical care. period, no exceptions for things like how much money you have or whether you area 'good' or 'bad' person. If that core ideal is not shared by the vast majority of the population then I agree that would be a significant problem.
However, I didn't think our judiciary was elected, at least not directly. It seems to be a mix. There are appointments, there are appointments by commission and there are elections. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mics_6.htm
The lifetime appointments of the supreme court judges seem to have worked fairly well. I think most people would agree that that court has a very good record of producing rational judgements.
Appointments are tricky, it is a selection method that is ripe for abuse. To work well it relies on the appointers acting in good faith and making their selections based primarily on merit. There needs to be a strong negative stigma attached to making appointments in a partisan way. I don't think that stigma exists in the US anymore. It appears to be widely considered normal/acceptable for appointments to be made based on partisan strategic interest rather than merit.
The system of appointments and elections of judicial-branch senior staff that is operating in the US right now has some serious problems. It seems to me that the independence of the judicial branch has been compromised. The executive has been using their ability to hire and fire senior staff (prosecutors, AGs) to influence the activities of the judicial system. I think this is reason why the judiciary has been unwilling/unable to prosecute flagrant violations of the law carried out by the executive.
Homogeneous countries have a big advantage because people agree with each other far more than in a diverse country like the USA, and don't expend as much effort fighting each other. Umm, Canada? Canada has a more diverse population and a great public healthcare system. Furthermore, what does diversity have to do with healthcare? Everyone wants the same things from their healthcare system with only very minor differences.
That being said, I would agree that public healthcare in the USA probably won't work. I would suggest that the reason it would not work is that your system of government is broken.
The british government showed us the key to long-term good government: a strong, meritocratic, technocratic bureaucracy. (I don't mean to suggest that those qualities are now or have ever been expressed perfectly in the UK bureaucracy) The US government gives comparatively more power to politicians (who hold a job for a few years at a time). It is the marginalization of career bureaucrats that is at the heart of the 'competence deficit' in the US government. Your elected judiciary is a clear example of the politicisation of what (I've concluded) aught to be a bureaucratic system. Policy is the domain of politicians. Everything else should be run by bureaucrats.
I just downloaded Alien Arena to check it out and it seems to want to install some sort of web browser toolbar and make something called "crawler" my default search provider...
What kind of BS is this? According to their privacy policy they want to assign me a UID and record the date/time/browser/ip/content of all my web searches on their servers in florida.
...whereas only good can come from giving starving people food. nonsense. what if hitler were starving and you gave him food? hunh? hunh? what then eh?;) In any large enough group of people there will be some who will commit crimes, rape, murder and such. By preventing the starvation of the group you have given these rapists the power to continue raping.
It is the same thing. the heart of the parent's post was that because the recipients of these laptops are poor they will be more likely to commit crimes than would be rich western kids.
hehe... ya, what I meant was that the text of the act makes it clear that the agencies in question have the right to demand the data. My second point was that giving them access to the servers directly would only be an operational/administrative detail not a shocking breach of privacy/security. I mean, who cares if MS services the requests by snail-mail and DVDs or with software over a network? (except the person responsible for controlling costs at MS)
and? your argument seems to be that people should be kept ignorant and powerless because some people will use knowledge and power for evil. I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through...
(I think I'll just bite my tongue on the porn issue for the moment)
There is no argument on this subject that I am aware of. The administration is actually proud of it. They think it is a good thing.
I have not heard about MS allowing backdoor access to some data but that would be nothing more than an administrative efficiency which I would have assumed they would have implemented by now. The 'right' of the CIA/SS/FBI/DHS/NSA to access the data is laid out in the patriot act.
I am assuming that since it is a Microsoft system that it will be hosted in the USA. It therefore cannot lawfully be made secure.
Any information in any computer system operated by an american company must be made available (secretly, MS will not be allowed to notify you) upon request from an american government agency like homeland security or the CIA.
This is a total non-starter for citizens of other nations like for example Canada. In fact, I doubt this service would even be compliant with Canadian or European privacy laws.
All that being said; I do like the idea. We just need it to be an open source system that can be deployed and operated by more trustworthy organisations.
So light up a couple more fiber strands and upgrade from gig to 10gig equipment. (then from 10gig to 100gig) But noooo, there's no money for that because the telecomms have spent all their infrastructure money on "QoS" and spying equipment. Instead of upgrading the capacity they buy hugely powerful equipment to analyse these vast data flows and selectively reduce the quality of service.
The problem with the Internet is the big telecom companies making selfish business decisions instead of the correct technical decisions. (see Bell Canada peering)
11-13% is high efficiency now? Regular commercially available solar cells are usually 17% and the various other 'gonna be available real-soon-now' technologies are claiming 40%.
I understand that these are cheap to build and may be a good deal overall but they are not high-efficiency. You can't take the lowest available efficiency and call it high.
We would have to know more about your property and your neighbours. String a cable up the hillside and mount a dish up there. Work out a deal with whomever owns that property so that you can put a dish up on their land and share the Internet access.
1- Women who speak to me for more then a minute must want to date me. date? I think you meant 'have sex with'. Trust me, guys don't fantasize about dating.
2- If I know more then you in X I must be better then you in every way. I think you meant '...better than you in every way.' This is perfectly natural behaviour for a man. I will assume that I am superior and will take charge right away. Any evidence that corroborates this assumption will quickly solidify my position. If you disagree then it is up to you to challenge me.
3- Flavor X of utility type Y is the best ever. All else is heresy. ...and? I use vim; see item 2.
4- 512 gigs of porn is a reasonable item to leave on the public network drive. I like boobies... what what the question again?
5- 80h work weeks is both sane and healthy. 6- Failure to do 80h works weeks is a sign of insufficient work ethic. No matter how much more you actually do during your piddly 40h week. It has nothing to do with my (the figurative me) opinion of your work ethic. Work ethics are for suits and grunts. The problem is that you are failing to show that you are obsessed with computers. You may even be subtly challenging my supremacy by hinting that you have a life outside of IT while I do not. I secretly wish I had that life and will therefore attack you for bringing attention to this.
7- coding skills is directly proportional to Penis size. Penis size is directly proportional to Geek pedantry skills. full implications in both directions. no no no, coding skills and penis size are both accepted metrics for determining our ranking. Fortunately for women working in IT coding skills are the primary metric so you actually have a chance of competing effectively.
8- FPS skills are integral for all IT work. First person shooters are just one of many ways to measure your computer skills. In this case we are only measuring your skill at operating the tools. Knowing what to do with the tools is most important (see item 7) however an adeptness at handling the tools is also a consideration.
9- Periods induce insanity. There are a great many things in this life that may induce insanity. Yes, menstruation is one of them. Fortunately women only menstruate approximately once per month. Us poor men are saddled with more constant insanity inducing biological quirks. For example, simply catching a glimpse of a well-formed pair of breasts can instantly wipe our short-term memory and cause a temporary double-digit drop in our IQ plus all sorts of almost random insanity.
10- If a male manager/supervisor is mad at me I must have screwed up. If a female manager is mad at me it's PMS. No, if a male manager is mad at me then he is an asshole. If a female manager is mad at me it is PMS. This has nothing at all to do with the 'real world'. I am going to defend my position in the pecking order whether or not I have any valid arguments.
...no, I am not being serious.
Now; it is 8pm on a friday night so I am going to play some LAN games then reboot into linux and then get back to work. (seriously) I now declare myself winnar of this thread!! Bow down before your geeky overlord!
Because their government, as awful as it is, stands between them and the enemies of their people. It just so happens that they know for a fact that the US and its imperialist buddy the UK have proven beyond the shadow of a doubt to be enemies of the people of Iran: I totally agree. The most effective thing we can do to help Iran move towards liberal democracy is to stop attacking them. I realize this is going waaay too far the current US administration but a commitment to adhere to international law in our dealings with Iran would be a good first step. That alone would rule-out "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes; something Bush has so far been unwilling to do.
hey should grow some balls and try standing up for themselves. Yeah, that works. So, we'll see some guy with his grocery bags standing in front of a Russian or Chinese supplied tank, stopping the entire Iranian Army from running down protesters that "grew some balls". I get the feeling neither of you know much about recent Iranian history.
The Iranians are quite capable of overthrowing a government. They did so relatively recently (1979ish) when they overthrew the CIA-coup-installed US-backed douche Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (aka the "Shah"). Sadly the revolutionary forces had too many religious wackos and too few young liberal students and the poor bastards got stuck with a theocracy/democracy/republic. Kinda like the USA but with a different(worse; ya, i said it**) religion.
There is of course very little chance of another revolution soon because no sane person would overthrow their own government while it is under imminent threat of invasion/pre-emptive nuclear attack. In fact, there is nothing quite like an irrational, powerful and belligerent enemy to strengthen the position of a bad government.
** just to be clear, all religions suck-ass and have no business anywhere near a government.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL! you're kidding right?
dude, the deactivation/re-activation hassles are for paying customers only.
If you pirate it then you use an activation crack.
Because USB is insecure.
(assuming XP) When you plug in your USB key to login to your banking website it reads the signed key/password/whatever and signs you in. Great. Meanwhile... your screen-saver and the 'search bar' you installed also read your key and upload it to Mr. Nasty.
What you would need is a USB key with a processor to do the signing/challenge response internally.
Fail.
...allow cryptology professionals to build affordable PCs that will work like supercomputers when recovering lost passwords. Cut and pasted from "How to write with spin for dummies"Fail.
...will be incorporating this patent-pending technology into their entire family of enterprise password recovery applications. Corporate press release copy and paste == Fail.Numerous grammatical errors == Fail.
Don't they know that women are being kidnapped and murdered in other countries too? I mean jeez! why don't they write about that instead?
There are appointments, there are appointments by commission and there are elections.
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/mics_6.htm
The lifetime appointments of the supreme court judges seem to have worked fairly well. I think most people would agree that that court has a very good record of producing rational judgements.
Appointments are tricky, it is a selection method that is ripe for abuse. To work well it relies on the appointers acting in good faith and making their selections based primarily on merit. There needs to be a strong negative stigma attached to making appointments in a partisan way.
I don't think that stigma exists in the US anymore. It appears to be widely considered normal/acceptable for appointments to be made based on partisan strategic interest rather than merit.
The system of appointments and elections of judicial-branch senior staff that is operating in the US right now has some serious problems. It seems to me that the independence of the judicial branch has been compromised. The executive has been using their ability to hire and fire senior staff (prosecutors, AGs) to influence the activities of the judicial system. I think this is reason why the judiciary has been unwilling/unable to prosecute flagrant violations of the law carried out by the executive.
Canada has a more diverse population and a great public healthcare system.
Furthermore, what does diversity have to do with healthcare? Everyone wants the same things from their healthcare system with only very minor differences.
That being said, I would agree that public healthcare in the USA probably won't work.
I would suggest that the reason it would not work is that your system of government is broken.
The british government showed us the key to long-term good government: a strong, meritocratic, technocratic bureaucracy.
(I don't mean to suggest that those qualities are now or have ever been expressed perfectly in the UK bureaucracy)
The US government gives comparatively more power to politicians (who hold a job for a few years at a time). It is the marginalization of career bureaucrats that is at the heart of the 'competence deficit' in the US government.
Your elected judiciary is a clear example of the politicisation of what (I've concluded) aught to be a bureaucratic system.
Policy is the domain of politicians. Everything else should be run by bureaucrats.
oops... this is rather off topic...
I just downloaded Alien Arena to check it out and it seems to want to install some sort of web browser toolbar and make something called "crawler" my default search provider...
What kind of BS is this?
According to their privacy policy they want to assign me a UID and record the date/time/browser/ip/content of all my web searches on their servers in florida.
I guess my sarcasm didn't come through in that last post.
I was mocking the original post by elrous0 by taking his point to an extreme.
...whereas only good can come from giving starving people food. nonsense.what if hitler were starving and you gave him food? hunh? hunh? what then eh?
In any large enough group of people there will be some who will commit crimes, rape, murder and such.
By preventing the starvation of the group you have given these rapists the power to continue raping.
It is the same thing.
the heart of the parent's post was that because the recipients of these laptops are poor they will be more likely to commit crimes than would be rich western kids.
hehe...
ya, what I meant was that the text of the act makes it clear that the agencies in question have the right to demand the data. My second point was that giving them access to the servers directly would only be an operational/administrative detail not a shocking breach of privacy/security. I mean, who cares if MS services the requests by snail-mail and DVDs or with software over a network? (except the person responsible for controlling costs at MS)
It will be for sale in the US for a limited time.
Here is a better URL:
http://www.xogiving.org/
In fact you will be able to buy them in the US.
Your purchase will also subsidize the free ones for poor countries.
google for 'purchase olpc'
I got to see one in person at the Ottawa Linux Symposium and I'm planning on buying one.
and? your argument seems to be that people should be kept ignorant and powerless because some people will use knowledge and power for evil.
I don't think you've thought your cunning plan all the way through...
(I think I'll just bite my tongue on the porn issue for the moment)
Paranoia? tin-foil hats?
when an agency does something a few times you consider it paranoia to suspect that they might do it again?
proof?
There is no disputing it, you can read it yourself if like:
http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html
There is no argument on this subject that I am aware of.
The administration is actually proud of it. They think it is a good thing.
I have not heard about MS allowing backdoor access to some data but that would be nothing more than an administrative efficiency which I would have assumed they would have implemented by now. The 'right' of the CIA/SS/FBI/DHS/NSA to access the data is laid out in the patriot act.
I am assuming that since it is a Microsoft system that it will be hosted in the USA.
It therefore cannot lawfully be made secure.
Any information in any computer system operated by an american company must be made available (secretly, MS will not be allowed to notify you) upon request from an american government agency like homeland security or the CIA.
This is a total non-starter for citizens of other nations like for example Canada.
In fact, I doubt this service would even be compliant with Canadian or European privacy laws.
All that being said; I do like the idea. We just need it to be an open source system that can be deployed and operated by more trustworthy organisations.
So light up a couple more fiber strands and upgrade from gig to 10gig equipment. (then from 10gig to 100gig)
But noooo, there's no money for that because the telecomms have spent all their infrastructure money on "QoS" and spying equipment.
Instead of upgrading the capacity they buy hugely powerful equipment to analyse these vast data flows and selectively reduce the quality of service.
The problem with the Internet is the big telecom companies making selfish business decisions instead of the correct technical decisions. (see Bell Canada peering)
I say we buy up the fiber for a new network and run it publicly like the roads.
Customer owned fiber is the way to go.
http://www.canarie.ca/canet4/library/customer.html
11-13% is high efficiency now?
Regular commercially available solar cells are usually 17% and the various other 'gonna be available real-soon-now' technologies are claiming 40%.
I understand that these are cheap to build and may be a good deal overall but they are not high-efficiency.
You can't take the lowest available efficiency and call it high.
We would have to know more about your property and your neighbours.
String a cable up the hillside and mount a dish up there.
Work out a deal with whomever owns that property so that you can put a dish up on their land and share the Internet access.
This is perfectly natural behaviour for a man. I will assume that I am superior and will take charge right away. Any evidence that corroborates this assumption will quickly solidify my position. If you disagree then it is up to you to challenge me. 3- Flavor X of utility type Y is the best ever. All else is heresy. ...and?
I use vim; see item 2. 4- 512 gigs of porn is a reasonable item to leave on the public network drive. I like boobies... what what the question again? 5- 80h work weeks is both sane and healthy.
6- Failure to do 80h works weeks is a sign of insufficient work ethic. No matter how much more you actually do during your piddly 40h week. It has nothing to do with my (the figurative me) opinion of your work ethic. Work ethics are for suits and grunts. The problem is that you are failing to show that you are obsessed with computers. You may even be subtly challenging my supremacy by hinting that you have a life outside of IT while I do not.
I secretly wish I had that life and will therefore attack you for bringing attention to this. 7- coding skills is directly proportional to Penis size. Penis size is directly proportional to Geek pedantry skills. full implications in both directions. no no no, coding skills and penis size are both accepted metrics for determining our ranking. Fortunately for women working in IT coding skills are the primary metric so you actually have a chance of competing effectively. 8- FPS skills are integral for all IT work. First person shooters are just one of many ways to measure your computer skills. In this case we are only measuring your skill at operating the tools. Knowing what to do with the tools is most important (see item 7) however an adeptness at handling the tools is also a consideration. 9- Periods induce insanity. There are a great many things in this life that may induce insanity. Yes, menstruation is one of them.
Fortunately women only menstruate approximately once per month. Us poor men are saddled with more constant insanity inducing biological quirks. For example, simply catching a glimpse of a well-formed pair of breasts can instantly wipe our short-term memory and cause a temporary double-digit drop in our IQ plus all sorts of almost random insanity. 10- If a male manager/supervisor is mad at me I must have screwed up. If a female manager is mad at me it's PMS. No, if a male manager is mad at me then he is an asshole. If a female manager is mad at me it is PMS.
This has nothing at all to do with the 'real world'. I am going to defend my position in the pecking order whether or not I have any valid arguments.
Now; it is 8pm on a friday night so I am going to play some LAN games then reboot into linux and then get back to work. (seriously)
I now declare myself winnar of this thread!!
Bow down before your geeky overlord!
The end of Moore's law! New solar panels with double efficiency! Flying cars now only 5 years away!!!!
Are these articles being generated by a script or what?
I realize this is going waaay too far the current US administration but a commitment to adhere to international law in our dealings with Iran would be a good first step.
That alone would rule-out "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes; something Bush has so far been unwilling to do.
supplied tank, stopping the entire Iranian Army from running down protesters that "grew some balls". I get the feeling neither of you know much about recent Iranian history.
The Iranians are quite capable of overthrowing a government. They did so relatively recently (1979ish) when they overthrew the CIA-coup-installed US-backed douche Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (aka the "Shah").
Sadly the revolutionary forces had too many religious wackos and too few young liberal students and the poor bastards got stuck with a theocracy/democracy/republic. Kinda like the USA but with a different(worse; ya, i said it**) religion.
There is of course very little chance of another revolution soon because no sane person would overthrow their own government while it is under imminent threat of invasion/pre-emptive nuclear attack.
In fact, there is nothing quite like an irrational, powerful and belligerent enemy to strengthen the position of a bad government.
** just to be clear, all religions suck-ass and have no business anywhere near a government.
No.
thank you.