Over the years I've filed several rebates through Best Buy for fairly small amounts. I've never recieved a check or gift card from them (or communication that I didn't file for it correctly). Because of this, I don't buy much at Best Buy and will never allow a rebate to drive my decision to buy anything.
I honestly don't know if this is Best Buy's fault, the mails fault, my fault, or some crook stealing stuff from me (although that last possibility seems really remote).
I couldn't agree with you much more! I'm still a bit concerned about terrorisim anywhere on the planet though.
One of the things that I have noticed is that the conservitives always claim they are for a smaller government and for more individual freedoms yet they almost always advocate for things that restrict liberties in some obtuse way. It is almost like "as long as it doesn't directly affect me, I am fine with it."
I don't think the government has enough manpower to randomly sample enough conversations to make this kind of wiretapping productive. This means that they probably identify individuals based on some criteria that they develp and monitor them. Much of this criteria is probably logical to some degree (country of origin, date of entry into the US and so on) but it does not mean that they have risen to the standard of "probable cause." If probable cause existed they could go to the "secret court" and obtain a warrant for the monitoring (which is an issue for a different post).
Are there enemy agents in the United States? The answer is undoubtably yes. Is it fair for our government to try to identify and nuteralize them? Again, the answer is undoubtably yes. Is it right to consider someone suspect simply because of their race or religious beliefs? Probably no. Is it likely that some people from certain places who are of a certain faith more likely to be enemy agents? Yes.
This last answer is at the crux of the problem. How can we investigate people when we do not have probable cause to get a warrant to gather the evidence? How do we get past the profiling question? Is this just a risk that a free, democratic, and open society has to take? How do you draw the line so that people's rights aren't infringed yet our society can be protected from terrorists?
These are hard questions that deserve answers. Like most people I want to feel safe and enjoy the freedoms that this country offers. Yet I also see the risk in our government using the tools that they are developing to combat terror against normal everyday people. Is the Iraqi convenience store clerk a part of a sleeper cell or is he someone who left a terrible place to try to make a better life for himself and his family someplace better? Does he deserve to have his privacy invaded so that we can learn what he is? What if we learn that his political leanings are a little extreme -- if he has views that don't jibe with what the government wants to hear: should he be imprisioned or deported? In America, aren't we entitled to our own opinions and beliefs? I think we are even, or perhaps especially if they upset the status quo.
Warrantless wire-taps are a slippery slope. They are a tool that can be easily abused and they do very little to protect our rights or our safety. Terrorists are criminals and they should be investigated using the same tools that we have used against criminals for all these years. There are limits to police powers. These limits are set for a reason; to protect people's rights and freedom.
While it may seem easy to say that an enemy of the state does not have the same rights, it is just as right to say that here in this country, people are innocent until proven guilty. We have to make sure that our government does not overstep it's bounds and turn the tables and say that some people are guilty until proven innocent! Why? Because from there it is only a series of short steps to a totalitarian regime that doesn't care about rights, privacy, or freedom.
Brazil has the answer - they have already converted to an ethanol economy and are rapidly leaving the petroleum based economy behind! All cars (and many trucks) sold in Brazil are "multi-fuelers" that are able to run on gas or ethanol or any combination thereof! All gas stations are required to carry both gas and ethanol (and most also carry diesel). This way older gas-only powered cars can remain on the road although the vast majority of people run ethanol for their every day use.
This has made an amazing change in the Brazilian economy. It has put people to work growing sugar cane and other products to make into alcohol. The salaries paid to these people stay in the country and are recycled within their country so, the economy is stimulated even more. With oil, the money leaves the country and is never seen again.
Alcohol is actually a cleaner burning fuel than gasoline so some people say that this makes it more environmentally friendly although I suspect that the comparison may actually be flawed. Pollution is generated when the product is grown, harvested, and manufactured (probably to a greater degree than oil). Still, the transportation of oil from overseas probably results in a lot pollution too.
What puzzles me is if Brazil, a poor nation can do this, why can't countries like the U.S.A. and Canada do it too? We certainly have the wealth, knowledge, and resources.
I think cellulitis is a sort of "generic" term (like Bronchitis) that descirbes the effect of the infection on the body but it has a cause (bacteria) and figuring out the kind of bacteria is what makes treating this so hard. Frankly, they take a sort of "shotgun" approach, using broad-spectrum antibiotics that kill lots of different bacterias.
If I made it sound like I was cured within a short time, then I made it sound wrong. I had a longer recovery than that but I was no longer worried about my leg splitting open within a few hours and you could see that things were working (the swelling was on its way down).
A few years ago I was working in my garden and my leg started itching, there was a small red dot mid-calf and minor swelling around it. I figured it was a bug bite. Within an hour the entire calf had turned red and was warm to the touch. I made a trip to Urgent Care and the doctor perscribed an anti-biotic and told me to go home and soak the leg in the hottest water I could stand. The next day I went into see my own doctor, by now my calf looked like an over-cooked hot dog and I was afraid the skin was litterally going to split open.
They drew blood and attempted to locate some pus to drain but found that it was not in sacks but more or less distributed though the leg (so the attempt to lance did not result in much drainage). I was given another kind of anti-biotic and was told to continue with the frequent hot water soaks. This time the anti-biotic seemed to help because the swelling started to reduce but soon enough, the swelling started up again and I found myself back in the clinic. This time my leg had started to lose it's pulse and my foot was grayish. They ran an anti-biotic in through an IV and had me elevate my leg for a few hours in the clinic. I was given another perscription and sent home with instructions to keep my leg elevated and to give it more hot soaks. I was told to come in to be checked the following day and to cancel any plans that I had for the weekend. These last anti-biotics worked and the swelling in my leg stayed down. The following day, I dutifully returned to the doctor and was told that had the swelling not shown such dramatic improvment, I would have lost my leg.
Through all of this, I never ended up in the hospital. I was treated with a barage of very powerful anti-biotics (the same exact ones that they use for "flesh eating bacteria") and my doctor told me that the bug I had was very closely related to that bug, he said that it was soil-borne and probably entered the skin though a bug bite.
I was even able to keep my weekend plans but I did not walk much and had to keep the leg up a lot (I went camping but not too far away). It took well over a year for my leg to return to it's normal color and I lost some tissue below the skin, these "things" are still with me (the best that I can describe it is it is like a scar underneath the skin, you can see some roughness in the skin and there is a different texture to the area but all the muscles and everything seem just fine.
I think my experience brings out the best and the worst of the HMO style medical system. I'm pretty confident that had I had a regular kind of insurance, I would have been in the hospital. On the other hand, the clinic was well staffed and had access to the right lab equipment and drugs to treat me. I'm glad it came out like it did and I really have to credit my doctors for everything that they did. They saved my leg.
The cost is much higher than the 67bn that the FBI says. Their "more realistic" estimate of twenty percent is way below the mark. Also, every machine that I find infected with spyware costs at least two hours of repair time - these costs should realistically include the user's down time, my time, "overhead and burden" and the other costs associated with having a computer out of service. These costs could realistically be hundreds of dollars per incident. All of this comes before the cost of the crime associated with spyware (which can include identity theft and corporate espionage). You really also need to add to these costs the price of defense, the anti-virus software, the anti-spy software, proxies, firewalls and all the other security softwares out there. Plus the man-hours that it takes to coordinate and administer all of this stuff.
It will only get worse before it gets better. Currently it is simply way too difficult to prosecute these criminals and their structure makes it even harder to bust the higher-ups in the organization. Their ability to disappear and hide make the mafia look like rank armatures. The borderless society of the internet and the fact that everything operates at near-light-speed means that the crooks can be in Amsterdam, Moscow, New York or Cuba and function just as effectively. This makes capture and prosecution terribly difficult and very expensive. For these reasons, along with the relative ease of commission, cyber-crime is and will remain a growth industry.
Apple has a multitude of reasons for switching to Intel. Most decisions made in the business world are this way. If it was "just" power consumption or "just" performance, or "just" price it probably would not make enough sense for the company to switch horses in mid-stream. Their decision-makers had to conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty that switching to Intel was going to in the long run be a wise business decision. They had to listen to engineers, marketing, accounting, and many others and then weigh everything they learned. Once they did this, they had to conclude that it was better to go with Intel than it was to stay with IBM or go to AMD.
These upper-level managers at Apple are staking their careers on this move. They are confident that their long-range decision will be profitable for the company and that this move will help them gain market share and growth. The timing is far from an accident; they are riding high on the iPod sales and know that they can translate some of these new converts into Apple computer users. Going with the Intel platform has to help with this too. Saying that the processor is an Intel processor is going to make a potential customer a lot more comfortable.
I'm not an Apple fanatic, never used one of their computers and don't own an iPod but, I can see that as a company, they are doing all of the right things.
How many times has Apple been on the mat and down for what seemed like the last time only to rise up and start fighting again? I don't know but it seems like a lot. I'm only familiar with Apple products in passing, I've never owned one and never had to do any real work on on so I'm obviously not an Apple fan but, I have a very real and healty respect for them.
It really looks like Apple is making all the right moves. Their iPod product line has a lot going for it and their new computers sound really sweet too.
Frankly I'm wondering what took them so long to join forces with Intel, from a marketing standpoint this sounds like a slam-dunk. In a short time I think we can see a lot more software running on the Apple platform (you can read this as Apple will emulate the Windows platform or actually run Windows or whatever you want). With more software availability, they will find a home in more business environments.
For Apple, the business world isn't where it is all at. They seem to market to consumers, especially younger consumers very well. This means more Apple products in homes and dorm rooms too. In some ways, the iPod product line is a "taste" of the Apple world and since they like the taste, it isn't such a big step to move up to bigger products. This is especially true if the marketing mavens at Apple make sure their products work better with the iPods than Windows machines do -- this means that Apple will maybe offer very easy to use software for their computers to interface with the iPod as a standard feature. I would at least.
Apple is posied for some great things to happen in the next few years. Steve Jobs is the right guy and this is the right time. I think it is pretty easy to say "Apple is back and here to stay."
Thank you for the information. I does answer the question I asked and offers an explaination that shows that this was probably not subversive. I'm buying it (but can you sell it to everyone?).
Honestly, I'm not really a conspiracy theorist. Quite frankly when you are someone on the outside looking in, a lot of things can smack of conspiracy when they aren't. Honest intentions can appear very dishonest when looked at from a different angle without all of the information. I've been stung by that before myself. It hurts. Worse than if you get caught doing something that is truly dishonest.
In some ways, I really feel for Microsoft. I don't think they are bad people working for a bad company who's only motive is profit. I think that they are trying to offer a good product unfortunately, their product (like so many others) is flawed and requires a lot of after-the-sale support. The fact that they are responsible enough to throw money, time, and manpower at something that has already been sold (and in many cases discontinued) speaks well of them. Where the "evil" of Microsoft comes in, if it exists at all, is in the profit margin and in the monopoly status that they actually have. They litterally do charge what the market will bear, even if they could offer it cheaper. Products like Office (high profit) do help to support products like IE and Media Player (free) though. Still, I don't like the fact that I can't afford MicrosSoft Office on my home computer yet I can go out and buy Word Perfect's office suite or Lotus SmartSuite at reasonable cost.
1) This one is easy: Apple will eventually announce all the products they were supposed to have announced at this week's MacWorld show, but didn't, including a bunch of media content deals, a huge expansion of.Mac to one TERABYTE per month of download capacity per user, a new version of the Front Row DVR application, and two new Intel Macs with huge plasma displays, but with keyboards and mice as options -- literally big-screen TVs that just happen to be computers, too.
Agree but this doesn't really count. There has been so much talk of this on the rumor sites that it is just a "gimme."
2) The reason Apple changed its MacWorld announcements at the last minute was because the company sued little Burst.com a few days before, trying to invalidate the Burst patents. But since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong. Suing Burst was an enormous mistake for Apple, casting a pall on their video strategy and potentially costing the company strategic alliances with networks and movie studios. Apple realizes this now and is struggling internally to find a way to change course and put a positive spin on the course correction. Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything, since time is critical in staking out Internet video turf. I predict that Apple will eventually take a license from Burst, that is UNLESS SOME OTHER COMPANY (Google? Real? Yahoo?) doesn't snatch up Burst first.
Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents. Because Burst is three guys in an office in Santa Rosa, companies like Microsoft and Apple tend not to take them seriously. They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP, and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen. Unless someone buys the company first, Burst is going to win this and eventually license the world. They are in the right, for one thing, and in practical terms they now have as much money for legal bills as any of their opponents. Apple can't win this one.
Agree. Courts seem to be understanding that more money for more lawyers does not make a large company more right than the little guy. Patent defense by little guys will become a growth industry.
3) But Apple WILL make some inroads against Microsoft. The new Intel Macs will run Windows XP unofficially, and Apple Support acknowledges that they are only days from running XP officially, too. So Apple finally has a solid argument why Windows-centric companies and homes should consider trying a Mac. The best case, though, says that Apple sells an additional million units, which aren't enough for Steve Jobs, so I see him going into a kind of stealth competition with Microsoft.
Here's how I believe it will work. Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales.
This is a creative idea, but does not smell like a typical Apple/Jobs move. I'll disagree.
4) Enough about Apple. Google will continue to roll out new products and service
I don't want this to sound like I am too "Pro-Microsoft" (I'm not). If Microsoft intentionally put the vunerability into their product then there must be a reason why. That is the question that I would like someone to answer because it does make all the difference. The question goes straight to motive.
If the vunerability was an accident it was stupid and it needs to be fixed. I don't necessarily buy Gibson's reasoning but, I can see how he got there and that is enough to be troubling to me.
Did some rouge programmer think "This is a cool idea? and against the rules just stuck it in there? I can't believe that Microsoft gives anyone that kind of autonomy. They have to have far better code review policies than that. That is harder for me to believe than anything else!
Did some group think that this backdoor coupled with some other software could be used for some acceptable purpose in the future? Did someone say "Hey, with some code off of the Genuine Advantage web site we can use this to disable some features on computers that are running pirated software. This is only an example but I hope you get my point. I can see how something like this may be considered and discussed. I'm not so sure it would make it past the lawyers though. Maybe it was started, aborted, and this was a trace that was forgotten about and slipped bye? This sounds a little far-fetched but I have seen useless bits of code left behind in other coding projects. I'd buy something like this even though it sounds like something out of a bad movie.
Did the NSA or some other agency approach Microsoft and ask to have something like this put in their code? We know that they have asked for encryption code before so that they could examine it so maybe this kind of idea isn't so strange? An exploit that the government knows about could give them a significant advantage in cyber-war. Frankly, this sounds like a Tom Clancy wannabe's plot for a novel. But it could happen.
Honestly though all of this stuff sounds like conspiracy-theory stuff to me. My guess is that it is more innocent than all of that. I'd guess the exploit is a leaving. Something that got left behind from some piece of code that simply didn't make the final cut.
I'd just like Microsoft to explain themselves this one time. Completely, thouroughly, honestly. Then they can tell us what they will do to ensure it won't happen again.
My experience is that aged cheap CDs don't last forever. I haven't seen it often but I have had a couple of these that looked perfect and worked before but don't any longer. My storage conditions aren't perfect but are okay (they are in my house so the temp doesn't fluctuate that much). I use paper labels and test them after burning and then put them in a paper envelope before putting them in a plastic CD case.
My experience isn't significant to prove things one way or another but I would guess that two or three percent of the writable CD's that I've stored over a year or two have died when I went back to them. Until I read this, I always felt that incompatibility between drives was probably to blame. A lot of the disks were written on a Win95 machine that had a 4x burner in it. I now have a XP machine that has a 56 x burner. The last time I probably accessed these disks was when I had a Win 98 machine with a 16 x drive.
They are just JPGs and I can get to them other ways but I have to say, I'd really be bothered if ten years from now my archive was just dust. These are treasures that my kids and grand-kids will probably enjoy (just like I enjoyed my parents and grandparents photos). The problem is I am not sure that mag-tape is going to be easily accessible half a decade from now either. Just try finding someone who has an 8mm projector to look at those old family movies.
Using data mining to catch criminals is nothing new and there is nothing wrong with it. Many white-collar criminals have be caught "cooking the books" using this kind of process. Having said that, I also have to say that there is a point where this practice can go too far. It can become an invasion of privacy that could cast the shadow of suspicion on to ordinary, law-abiding people.
Suppose you were a person who likes surfing the net to read things like "The Anarchist's Cookbook" (an entertaining read) who is also curious about Muslim Extremisim (because it is so often in the news) and is planning a car trip with your family to New York City and Washington D.C. Perhaps you have downloaded maps and driving directions to the Capital, the White House and the United Nations Building from MapQuest. Maybe you have visited EBay and bought some reloading equipment (because you are a sport-clay shooter).
Now imagine some data mining application at fbi.gov puts all of this information together and concludes that you are an extremist who is about to embark on a trip where you plan on bombing the United Nations building in New York City and the Capitol and the White House in Washington DC!
Seperate and disparite pieces of data aren't always able to fit nicely into a simple formula. This is where the danger of this kind of information comes in. Taken seperately and considered without an adequate foundation, these "facts" tend to support a totally erronious conclusion. Next thing you know, someone is quietly asking questions about you abd you have no idea why.
These kinds of things have happend to innocent people before. Someone I know faced scrutiny years ago shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing. There was no real reason for his being suspect and it took a long time to figure out why they looked at him. The FBI questioned his neighbors, they followed him, photographed his home, and in general made life uncomfortable for him.
It took time to figure it out but, we finally concluded that there were reasons why he came to their attention. They were:
- He was a gun collector
- He bought gunpowder by the pound (he was a re-loader)
- He worked at a facility where he may possibly have had access to amonium nitrate
- He lived alone
- He lived in the wrong place (outside of town in an area linked to suspects)
- He had several 55 galon oil drums on his property
- He was a member of the NRA
To the FBI all this information seemed to indicate that he could possibly be linked as the third man in the Oklahoma City bombing. Nothing could have been further from the truth but for a few tense weeks, he was the focus of enough attention so that he felt like he could not visit friends, go target practicing, or do much of anything. He got paranoid and asked us to not call him because he thought he may be wiretapped. It really ate him up inside and he had done nothing wrong. The truth of the matter is that he is one of the most law-abiding people around. He had not done one illegal thing to draw this suspiscion on him. Litterally, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is just a kind of quiet guy who likes to keep to himself.
I don't think that data mining brought this investigation on him. I think his name simply popped up on too many lists (which is in a way, a form of manual data mining). Still with computers and access to hundreds or thousands of different data sources, the possibilities have compounded themselves making this kind of process likely to impact too many poeole. Innocent people.
For some reason I feel like I should have seen something like this coming. Frankly the criminal justice system in the United States is absolutly ill-equiped to deal with technology crime. In general, it is a system that has morphed into a plea-bargain machine that charges people with the most henious crime they can make fit and then work on reaching a "equitable sentence" through a plea-bargain. Ultimately the student will be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge (it this case, probably a misdemenor).
There are a few things about this system that are GROSSLY UNJUST!
First, there are no rules that allow both sides to play the game evenly. The prosicutor makes them up as he goes along and changes them when and if he wants.
If you can't afford an attorney (and what eighteen year-old high school student can?) you will probably be appointed a public defender who is over-worked, under-paid and probably only a couple years out of law-school. He (or she) will consider it a victory if they can get the plea-bargain down to a misdemenor (even if no crime was committed).
If the kid's parents can afford a (good) private-practice lawyer they will have to pay thousands if not tens of thousands for the defense. There are a couple of reasons for this, one is that the lawyer knows they can get that kind of money from those kinds of people. Another reason is that the lawyer will have to hire experts that can educate him about the technology just so he can get an idea of what the charges really are about. Finally, if it makes it to court, there will have to be money to pay the experts to come in to court and testify. Naturally, the lawyer will want all of this money up front.
On the other side of the table, you may be facing a lawyer who wants to make a name for himself. He is aware of the failures of the system and knows how to exploit them to achieve his goals (personal or political). If the defendant gets a public defender he knows to prey on the over-worked defender and will offer a bad-deal that is just good enough to make the public defender sell it to the defendant. He also knows that the public defender has very little money for expert witnesses. If he faces a private practice lawyer, he will fight a delaying action, not offering much of a deal knowing that the cost-to-fight will soon bankrupt most people. He too can play the expert-game, only he has a county IS geek as a professional witness (so it costs him very little).
Don't forget, the state's attorney is graded on his conviction rate (not on if justice was served). His raises and promotions depend on a good record with a high conviction rate.
This is a system that is so broken it deserves to be tore completely down and rebuilt. You don't have to be an innocent man on death row to feel the injustice. Criminal Justice deserves two sides that are equally capable, equally funded, and fair for people of every income level. A CEO of a Fortune 500 company deserves the exact same treatment that a homeless windo deserves. Justice needs to be blind to status, race, gender, faith, orientation, or anything else (other than justice). It is the United States greatest failure as a country (although the health care system comes damned close).
Windows and Linux are today's operating systems. Who knows what will come along tomorrow. Look at the differences in Windows and Linux from five or ten years ago. They are entirely different than when they first cam on market! The trouble is that they are added on to and asked to do things that were not originally envisioned when they were first developed. The fact that they are doing what they are doing today is a testament to their versatility (and, their good foundation).
There will come a time when something else will come along - the evolution will happen like it has happened in every other industry. Ford quit making Model T's a long time ago and some day, Windows and Linux will be seen as out-dated operating systems that was loaded into primitive personal computers. In my mind's eye, I can see a computing future where computers interact with us in everyday life helping us with almost every task we do. Do any of us doubt that this marriage of technology and life won't continue to grow?
Look how far we have gone in the past few years and think of what could be done in the next ten or twenty and you can start to understand why someone would think that these operating systems may begin to sag under the weight of new and additional features. In a sense, the operating system is middleware. It sits between hardware and applications. Both sides aren't remaining static, the hardware gets new features and is faster and more powerful, the applications do more, do new and sometimes unthought of things. The o/s is in a tug-of-war between these two entities and tries very hard to make everything work. When the current part of the operating system that handles say video is being stretched to its limit by the demands of either the hardware or the software it is either patched or replaced. Over time, these fixes make the operating system like a house that has been remodeled too many times. It may become inefficient although it remains functional - when this happens, it may be best to tear the whole thing down and start all over again.
Please note that I am not saying that either Windows or Linux have reached the point where they ought to be scrapped but a realistic look forward has to consider that as a possibility. Tomorrow's hardware and tomorrow's applications are bound to place heavy demands on whatever operating system there is. We live in interesting times and it is hard to predict what the future will look like ten years from now. Are we going to have windowed interfaces or is something else going to come along? Where will speech recognition be? Will the keyboard continue to exist? Part of me wants to think that at some point we will communicate with our digital servants almost like we communicate with our human counterparts, through speech, body movements, and eye contact. But like the rocket-cars envisioned in the fifties, that may be a long way off track because I do not have a crystal ball that works.
There are bad guys, they aren't like Santa Claus and they aren't like Robin Hood (they are infact robbin-in-the-hood). There are people who make their living by crime and their are others who will prey at any good opportunity. This is why convenience store clerk has become such a dangerous job. Look at crime in any big city and you will discover that a small percentage of the residents are responsible for a high percentage of the crime. These people do deserve to be caught, convicted, sentenced, and punnished.
Unfortunately, this small percentage of people make all of us live under a cloud of suspicion. Cameras are thus far the most cost-effective deterant that shop-owners have found to protect themselves from losses.
Having suffered a few small losses over the years, I can sympathise with them. For every item stolen, they have to sell a lot of items to make up for the loss. Since it is unlikely that they will increase their sales because something was stolen, they are in essence simply out of the money!
Crime does pay. It pays well enough so that the threat of prison doesn't stop the thief. Ip pays well enough to employ private and public security, police officers, and everyone else in the criminal justice field.
To say that bad people don't exist aren't a threat or aren't real is a fantasy.
There has been a real explosion of survellence cameras over the past several years near where I live (Minneapolis, MN, USA). They are in nearly every business I go in, they monitor stoplights, traffic and I've even seen a few on top of streetlights in residential neighborhoods. A few of my neighbors even have them outside of their homes.
For the most part, I think these things are beneficial and can be used to catch bad guys. Crime costs all of us money. Shoplifting and other crimes against business help drive up costs and if a shopkeeper wants to install a camera to help stop some of it good for him.
If putting cameras on top of streetlights helps to reduce crime or increase the effectivness of police, I really don't have too much of a problem either. Crime hurts people and if we can use cameras to put a few bad guys away, good.
Traffic cameras on freeways help keep traffic flowing and can be used to quickly dispatch highway patrol or highway helpers to the scene quickly. Again, I have few problems with this. It makes my commute better.
Recently the city has installed photo-cop cameras on a few traffic lights through the city. The primary purpose of these cameras is to issue tickets to people running red lights. It helps to generate revenue and it makes these select locations a little safer (they are posted). While I understand the benefits, I have a problem with this. Not so much because I may get caught but because these cameras are kind of turning things around. It is a new revenue stream for the city, one that depends on petty crime to survive. Since it has shown early success there is an excellent chance that it will be expanded providing even more money for the system. A city needs money in much the same manner as an addict needs a fix. They will stoop to deep levels to get the cash. The photo-enforcment is one example of a good idea taken in a bad direction that will ultimately go too far. Soon, any light likely of providing a revenue stream will be guarded by a photo cop. Yet I doubt that this will reduce taxes at all.
These photo enforcement cameras are very unlikely to do anything for any serious crime. They are only activated when someone runs the light. I'd feel better if the tickets issued did not directly benefit anyone. Perhaps the money could be put into a fund that would not go to the city but rather into a fund that is used for something that the city does not directly control. That way, they would only have good motives for sticking the cameras up and I would feel better about them. These photo-cop fines are a form of unequal taxation that must be stopped!
Did you read my post before you replied? I'm wondering because I specifically talked to that very issue. Yes, I know Sony/BMG is a different company than Sony Electronics - but they are in the same "family" and just like when you do something it can (and often does) reflect on the entire family.
By saying "buy nothing from the entire Sony family" it puts Sony/BMG's corporate brothers and sisters in the position of calling on their sibling telling them to "get your act together, your behavior is hurting us too."
Please remember what Sony/BMG did with the rootkit. It was unethical to say the least. When I learned of this, I resolved to "vote with my money" and will no longer buy anything Sony. I know Sony Electronics aren't exactly the same as Sony music but (or should I say BUT) they have the same roots and and my refusal to do business with Sony anything is bound to make them think about things - but not if I am a lone voice in the woods.
Like-minded Geeks unite! Boycot those Sony scumbags who thought a rootkit was a good idea! Only the bottom line matters to them. Affect it!
This article assumes that the phisher/thief is the one who is going to use the information. This is an incorrect assumption. They are only one piece of a criminal enterprise. They sell the information to thugs who put it to use. This creates a layer of insulation from the source of the information to the street level criminal who actually puts it to use. There may even be another layer, the scammer who takes the info from the thief and uses it to obtain the credit card or whatever may then actually sell it to someone who will use it. One thief can support many scammers who take a different risk than the original thief.
Up here in mosquito infested Minnesota, we will try just about anything to reduce the hordes of the buzzy little buggers that make our life miserable. In untreated areas of the state it is not too uncommon for people to stay inside on nice summer evenings because the mosquitos are horrible. Because I love the outdoors and cherrish my time out of the city, I'd try and do just about anything to deal with the buggers. I fog, I spray, I light those citronella candles and burn those coils, I apply repellent and I'll still get chased inside about twilight!
This is because Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes AND 100,000 swamps, we get enough rain so low spots become puddles. We are prime mosquito breeding territory! What makes life so wonderful for us here is also perfect for mosquitos.
Those propane burning things work but only in small areas and only in still weather when their exhaust can placidly spread out far enough to attract mosquitos. A gentle breeze will render the machine utterly ineffective. How often is the air still in a summer environment when mosquitos are most active? As the heat of the day disipates, gentle breezes almost always kick in, sometimes becoming not so gentle breezes. I'd put my money on these machines being truly effective perhaps ten percent of the time when you really, really need them (which is only about 10% of the day so,.10 x.10 =.01 or more simply, about one percent of the time!)
In the daylight, or after dark the mosquitos are pretty dispersed. It is only in the evening hours that they get really bad. These mosquito magnets have been around for a few years, they are expensive and they burn propane which isn't cheap! Now this company wants to build a network of them? Perhaps a network large enough to cover a community? Wouldn't it be cheaper, more effective, and more environmentally friendly to issue everyone bottles of repellent? I like the stuff in the yellow and green can from 3M but 100% DEET works pretty well too.
In my opinion, this concept of a computer controlled, propane powered mosquitio magnet net is the dream-child of some marketing exec. It is false science of the worst kind, sold as being believable and effective. It is snake-oil being sold by modern day snake oil salesmen!
All you can do is laugh. P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute.
Lets call this what it is - spin by an agency that is well known for its ability to spin just about anything. Think of how many of their cash-cows (err, artists) have stepped in various drug abuse problems, affairs and other tawdery sex acts. Somehow the RIAA actually manages to get them taken care of.
Sony, and the programmers that wrote the root kit should have known they were wrong. If they didn't, then they must have missed more than one or two ethics classes along the way. Of course, their argument would be that piracy too is unethical (at that point I'd ask how two wrongs make a right).
Sony spends a lot of money on the RIAA and since even the worst criminals of them all deserve representation and someone in their corner, I guess that the RIAA is stepping up to the plate for their client. This is one thing that I can say is right in this whole story, the RIAA should be solidly in their client's corner. Unfortunately, their ethics are showing a little more than a slight tarnish.
In the long run, all of this is going to hurt the major labels in their battle for DRM but only a little. The next time around, they will have learned a lesson or two and the next effort will be a bit more proper and ethical but still just as hard to live with.
I understand the problem - I am just saying that if the EULA is worded so that spyware makers can't determine if it is spyware then they will assume it is. If the company wants out of that quagmire, they have to do something about it.
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Over the years I've filed several rebates through Best Buy for fairly small amounts. I've never recieved a check or gift card from them (or communication that I didn't file for it correctly). Because of this, I don't buy much at Best Buy and will never allow a rebate to drive my decision to buy anything.
I honestly don't know if this is Best Buy's fault, the mails fault, my fault, or some crook stealing stuff from me (although that last possibility seems really remote).
Maybe this new process will improve things?
I couldn't agree with you much more! I'm still a bit concerned about terrorisim anywhere on the planet though.
One of the things that I have noticed is that the conservitives always claim they are for a smaller government and for more individual freedoms yet they almost always advocate for things that restrict liberties in some obtuse way. It is almost like "as long as it doesn't directly affect me, I am fine with it."
I don't think the government has enough manpower to randomly sample enough conversations to make this kind of wiretapping productive. This means that they probably identify individuals based on some criteria that they develp and monitor them. Much of this criteria is probably logical to some degree (country of origin, date of entry into the US and so on) but it does not mean that they have risen to the standard of "probable cause." If probable cause existed they could go to the "secret court" and obtain a warrant for the monitoring (which is an issue for a different post).
Are there enemy agents in the United States? The answer is undoubtably yes. Is it fair for our government to try to identify and nuteralize them? Again, the answer is undoubtably yes. Is it right to consider someone suspect simply because of their race or religious beliefs? Probably no. Is it likely that some people from certain places who are of a certain faith more likely to be enemy agents? Yes.
This last answer is at the crux of the problem. How can we investigate people when we do not have probable cause to get a warrant to gather the evidence? How do we get past the profiling question? Is this just a risk that a free, democratic, and open society has to take? How do you draw the line so that people's rights aren't infringed yet our society can be protected from terrorists?
These are hard questions that deserve answers. Like most people I want to feel safe and enjoy the freedoms that this country offers. Yet I also see the risk in our government using the tools that they are developing to combat terror against normal everyday people. Is the Iraqi convenience store clerk a part of a sleeper cell or is he someone who left a terrible place to try to make a better life for himself and his family someplace better? Does he deserve to have his privacy invaded so that we can learn what he is? What if we learn that his political leanings are a little extreme -- if he has views that don't jibe with what the government wants to hear: should he be imprisioned or deported? In America, aren't we entitled to our own opinions and beliefs? I think we are even, or perhaps especially if they upset the status quo.
Warrantless wire-taps are a slippery slope. They are a tool that can be easily abused and they do very little to protect our rights or our safety. Terrorists are criminals and they should be investigated using the same tools that we have used against criminals for all these years. There are limits to police powers. These limits are set for a reason; to protect people's rights and freedom.
While it may seem easy to say that an enemy of the state does not have the same rights, it is just as right to say that here in this country, people are innocent until proven guilty. We have to make sure that our government does not overstep it's bounds and turn the tables and say that some people are guilty until proven innocent! Why? Because from there it is only a series of short steps to a totalitarian regime that doesn't care about rights, privacy, or freedom.
Brazil has the answer - they have already converted to an ethanol economy and are rapidly leaving the petroleum based economy behind! All cars (and many trucks) sold in Brazil are "multi-fuelers" that are able to run on gas or ethanol or any combination thereof! All gas stations are required to carry both gas and ethanol (and most also carry diesel). This way older gas-only powered cars can remain on the road although the vast majority of people run ethanol for their every day use.
This has made an amazing change in the Brazilian economy. It has put people to work growing sugar cane and other products to make into alcohol. The salaries paid to these people stay in the country and are recycled within their country so, the economy is stimulated even more. With oil, the money leaves the country and is never seen again.
Alcohol is actually a cleaner burning fuel than gasoline so some people say that this makes it more environmentally friendly although I suspect that the comparison may actually be flawed. Pollution is generated when the product is grown, harvested, and manufactured (probably to a greater degree than oil). Still, the transportation of oil from overseas probably results in a lot pollution too.
What puzzles me is if Brazil, a poor nation can do this, why can't countries like the U.S.A. and Canada do it too? We certainly have the wealth, knowledge, and resources.
Thank you.
I think cellulitis is a sort of "generic" term (like Bronchitis) that descirbes the effect of the infection on the body but it has a cause (bacteria) and figuring out the kind of bacteria is what makes treating this so hard. Frankly, they take a sort of "shotgun" approach, using broad-spectrum antibiotics that kill lots of different bacterias.
If I made it sound like I was cured within a short time, then I made it sound wrong. I had a longer recovery than that but I was no longer worried about my leg splitting open within a few hours and you could see that things were working (the swelling was on its way down).
They gave me the name of the bacteria that was infecting me but I really don't remember it, hell I can't even remember the names of the anti-biotics.
o ld=0&commentsort=1&mode=thread&pid=14530573#145317 55 and you will see I am not the only one with this experience.
But see another reply http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174668&thresh
When you finally get the right anti-biotic they can work remarkably fast.
A few years ago I was working in my garden and my leg started itching, there was a small red dot mid-calf and minor swelling around it. I figured it was a bug bite. Within an hour the entire calf had turned red and was warm to the touch. I made a trip to Urgent Care and the doctor perscribed an anti-biotic and told me to go home and soak the leg in the hottest water I could stand. The next day I went into see my own doctor, by now my calf looked like an over-cooked hot dog and I was afraid the skin was litterally going to split open.
They drew blood and attempted to locate some pus to drain but found that it was not in sacks but more or less distributed though the leg (so the attempt to lance did not result in much drainage). I was given another kind of anti-biotic and was told to continue with the frequent hot water soaks. This time the anti-biotic seemed to help because the swelling started to reduce but soon enough, the swelling started up again and I found myself back in the clinic. This time my leg had started to lose it's pulse and my foot was grayish. They ran an anti-biotic in through an IV and had me elevate my leg for a few hours in the clinic. I was given another perscription and sent home with instructions to keep my leg elevated and to give it more hot soaks. I was told to come in to be checked the following day and to cancel any plans that I had for the weekend. These last anti-biotics worked and the swelling in my leg stayed down. The following day, I dutifully returned to the doctor and was told that had the swelling not shown such dramatic improvment, I would have lost my leg.
Through all of this, I never ended up in the hospital. I was treated with a barage of very powerful anti-biotics (the same exact ones that they use for "flesh eating bacteria") and my doctor told me that the bug I had was very closely related to that bug, he said that it was soil-borne and probably entered the skin though a bug bite.
I was even able to keep my weekend plans but I did not walk much and had to keep the leg up a lot (I went camping but not too far away). It took well over a year for my leg to return to it's normal color and I lost some tissue below the skin, these "things" are still with me (the best that I can describe it is it is like a scar underneath the skin, you can see some roughness in the skin and there is a different texture to the area but all the muscles and everything seem just fine.
I think my experience brings out the best and the worst of the HMO style medical system. I'm pretty confident that had I had a regular kind of insurance, I would have been in the hospital. On the other hand, the clinic was well staffed and had access to the right lab equipment and drugs to treat me. I'm glad it came out like it did and I really have to credit my doctors for everything that they did. They saved my leg.
The cost is much higher than the 67bn that the FBI says. Their "more realistic" estimate of twenty percent is way below the mark. Also, every machine that I find infected with spyware costs at least two hours of repair time - these costs should realistically include the user's down time, my time, "overhead and burden" and the other costs associated with having a computer out of service. These costs could realistically be hundreds of dollars per incident. All of this comes before the cost of the crime associated with spyware (which can include identity theft and corporate espionage). You really also need to add to these costs the price of defense, the anti-virus software, the anti-spy software, proxies, firewalls and all the other security softwares out there. Plus the man-hours that it takes to coordinate and administer all of this stuff.
It will only get worse before it gets better. Currently it is simply way too difficult to prosecute these criminals and their structure makes it even harder to bust the higher-ups in the organization. Their ability to disappear and hide make the mafia look like rank armatures. The borderless society of the internet and the fact that everything operates at near-light-speed means that the crooks can be in Amsterdam, Moscow, New York or Cuba and function just as effectively. This makes capture and prosecution terribly difficult and very expensive. For these reasons, along with the relative ease of commission, cyber-crime is and will remain a growth industry.
Apple has a multitude of reasons for switching to Intel. Most decisions made in the business world are this way. If it was "just" power consumption or "just" performance, or "just" price it probably would not make enough sense for the company to switch horses in mid-stream. Their decision-makers had to conclude with a reasonable degree of certainty that switching to Intel was going to in the long run be a wise business decision. They had to listen to engineers, marketing, accounting, and many others and then weigh everything they learned. Once they did this, they had to conclude that it was better to go with Intel than it was to stay with IBM or go to AMD.
These upper-level managers at Apple are staking their careers on this move. They are confident that their long-range decision will be profitable for the company and that this move will help them gain market share and growth. The timing is far from an accident; they are riding high on the iPod sales and know that they can translate some of these new converts into Apple computer users. Going with the Intel platform has to help with this too. Saying that the processor is an Intel processor is going to make a potential customer a lot more comfortable.
I'm not an Apple fanatic, never used one of their computers and don't own an iPod but, I can see that as a company, they are doing all of the right things.
How many times has Apple been on the mat and down for what seemed like the last time only to rise up and start fighting again? I don't know but it seems like a lot. I'm only familiar with Apple products in passing, I've never owned one and never had to do any real work on on so I'm obviously not an Apple fan but, I have a very real and healty respect for them.
It really looks like Apple is making all the right moves. Their iPod product line has a lot going for it and their new computers sound really sweet too.
Frankly I'm wondering what took them so long to join forces with Intel, from a marketing standpoint this sounds like a slam-dunk. In a short time I think we can see a lot more software running on the Apple platform (you can read this as Apple will emulate the Windows platform or actually run Windows or whatever you want). With more software availability, they will find a home in more business environments.
For Apple, the business world isn't where it is all at. They seem to market to consumers, especially younger consumers very well. This means more Apple products in homes and dorm rooms too. In some ways, the iPod product line is a "taste" of the Apple world and since they like the taste, it isn't such a big step to move up to bigger products. This is especially true if the marketing mavens at Apple make sure their products work better with the iPods than Windows machines do -- this means that Apple will maybe offer very easy to use software for their computers to interface with the iPod as a standard feature. I would at least.
Apple is posied for some great things to happen in the next few years. Steve Jobs is the right guy and this is the right time. I think it is pretty easy to say "Apple is back and here to stay."
Thank you for the information. I does answer the question I asked and offers an explaination that shows that this was probably not subversive. I'm buying it (but can you sell it to everyone?).
Honestly, I'm not really a conspiracy theorist. Quite frankly when you are someone on the outside looking in, a lot of things can smack of conspiracy when they aren't. Honest intentions can appear very dishonest when looked at from a different angle without all of the information. I've been stung by that before myself. It hurts. Worse than if you get caught doing something that is truly dishonest.
In some ways, I really feel for Microsoft. I don't think they are bad people working for a bad company who's only motive is profit. I think that they are trying to offer a good product unfortunately, their product (like so many others) is flawed and requires a lot of after-the-sale support. The fact that they are responsible enough to throw money, time, and manpower at something that has already been sold (and in many cases discontinued) speaks well of them. Where the "evil" of Microsoft comes in, if it exists at all, is in the profit margin and in the monopoly status that they actually have. They litterally do charge what the market will bear, even if they could offer it cheaper. Products like Office (high profit) do help to support products like IE and Media Player (free) though. Still, I don't like the fact that I can't afford MicrosSoft Office on my home computer yet I can go out and buy Word Perfect's office suite or Lotus SmartSuite at reasonable cost.
Agree but this doesn't really count. There has been so much talk of this on the rumor sites that it is just a "gimme."
2) The reason Apple changed its MacWorld announcements at the last minute was because the company sued little Burst.com a few days before, trying to invalidate the Burst patents. But since Apple sued Burst, Burst shares have gone UP by 30 percent. The market is rarely wrong. Suing Burst was an enormous mistake for Apple, casting a pall on their video strategy and potentially costing the company strategic alliances with networks and movie studios. Apple realizes this now and is struggling internally to find a way to change course and put a positive spin on the course correction. Apple will lose and Burst will win, and Apple won't be able to afford to wait for the courts to decide anything, since time is critical in staking out Internet video turf. I predict that Apple will eventually take a license from Burst, that is UNLESS SOME OTHER COMPANY (Google? Real? Yahoo?) doesn't snatch up Burst first. Here's something I've noticed lately: Big companies believe in patents as long as they are talking about THEIR patents. Because Burst is three guys in an office in Santa Rosa, companies like Microsoft and Apple tend not to take them seriously. They forget that Burst spent 21 years and $66 million developing that IP, and the company has code that is still better than anything else on the market -- code not even Microsoft has seen. Unless someone buys the company first, Burst is going to win this and eventually license the world. They are in the right, for one thing, and in practical terms they now have as much money for legal bills as any of their opponents. Apple can't win this one.
Agree. Courts seem to be understanding that more money for more lawyers does not make a large company more right than the little guy. Patent defense by little guys will become a growth industry.
3) But Apple WILL make some inroads against Microsoft. The new Intel Macs will run Windows XP unofficially, and Apple Support acknowledges that they are only days from running XP officially, too. So Apple finally has a solid argument why Windows-centric companies and homes should consider trying a Mac. The best case, though, says that Apple sells an additional million units, which aren't enough for Steve Jobs, so I see him going into a kind of stealth competition with Microsoft. Here's how I believe it will work. Apple won't offer versions of OS X for generic Intel hardware because the drivers and the support obligation would be too huge. But just as you can buy a shrink-wrapped copy of 10.4 for your iMac, they'll gladly sell you a shrink-wrapped Intel version intended for an Intel Mac, but of course YOU CAN PUT IT ON ANY MACHINE YOU LIKE. The key here is to offer no guarantees and only limited support, patterned on the kind you get for most Open Source packages -- a web site, forums, download section. and a wiki. Apple will help users help themselves. With two to three engineers and some outreach to hackers and hardware makers, Apple could put together an unofficial program that could easily attract two to three million Windows users per year to migrate their old machines to the new OS. Imagine the profit margins of three engineers effectively generating $300-plus million per year in sales.
This is a creative idea, but does not smell like a typical Apple/Jobs move. I'll disagree.
4) Enough about Apple. Google will continue to roll out new products and service
I don't want this to sound like I am too "Pro-Microsoft" (I'm not). If Microsoft intentionally put the vunerability into their product then there must be a reason why. That is the question that I would like someone to answer because it does make all the difference. The question goes straight to motive.
If the vunerability was an accident it was stupid and it needs to be fixed. I don't necessarily buy Gibson's reasoning but, I can see how he got there and that is enough to be troubling to me.
Did some rouge programmer think "This is a cool idea? and against the rules just stuck it in there? I can't believe that Microsoft gives anyone that kind of autonomy. They have to have far better code review policies than that. That is harder for me to believe than anything else!
Did some group think that this backdoor coupled with some other software could be used for some acceptable purpose in the future? Did someone say "Hey, with some code off of the Genuine Advantage web site we can use this to disable some features on computers that are running pirated software. This is only an example but I hope you get my point. I can see how something like this may be considered and discussed. I'm not so sure it would make it past the lawyers though. Maybe it was started, aborted, and this was a trace that was forgotten about and slipped bye? This sounds a little far-fetched but I have seen useless bits of code left behind in other coding projects. I'd buy something like this even though it sounds like something out of a bad movie.
Did the NSA or some other agency approach Microsoft and ask to have something like this put in their code? We know that they have asked for encryption code before so that they could examine it so maybe this kind of idea isn't so strange? An exploit that the government knows about could give them a significant advantage in cyber-war. Frankly, this sounds like a Tom Clancy wannabe's plot for a novel. But it could happen.
Honestly though all of this stuff sounds like conspiracy-theory stuff to me. My guess is that it is more innocent than all of that. I'd guess the exploit is a leaving. Something that got left behind from some piece of code that simply didn't make the final cut.
I'd just like Microsoft to explain themselves this one time. Completely, thouroughly, honestly. Then they can tell us what they will do to ensure it won't happen again.
My experience is that aged cheap CDs don't last forever. I haven't seen it often but I have had a couple of these that looked perfect and worked before but don't any longer. My storage conditions aren't perfect but are okay (they are in my house so the temp doesn't fluctuate that much). I use paper labels and test them after burning and then put them in a paper envelope before putting them in a plastic CD case.
My experience isn't significant to prove things one way or another but I would guess that two or three percent of the writable CD's that I've stored over a year or two have died when I went back to them. Until I read this, I always felt that incompatibility between drives was probably to blame. A lot of the disks were written on a Win95 machine that had a 4x burner in it. I now have a XP machine that has a 56 x burner. The last time I probably accessed these disks was when I had a Win 98 machine with a 16 x drive.
They are just JPGs and I can get to them other ways but I have to say, I'd really be bothered if ten years from now my archive was just dust. These are treasures that my kids and grand-kids will probably enjoy (just like I enjoyed my parents and grandparents photos). The problem is I am not sure that mag-tape is going to be easily accessible half a decade from now either. Just try finding someone who has an 8mm projector to look at those old family movies.
Using data mining to catch criminals is nothing new and there is nothing wrong with it. Many white-collar criminals have be caught "cooking the books" using this kind of process. Having said that, I also have to say that there is a point where this practice can go too far. It can become an invasion of privacy that could cast the shadow of suspicion on to ordinary, law-abiding people.
Suppose you were a person who likes surfing the net to read things like "The Anarchist's Cookbook" (an entertaining read) who is also curious about Muslim Extremisim (because it is so often in the news) and is planning a car trip with your family to New York City and Washington D.C. Perhaps you have downloaded maps and driving directions to the Capital, the White House and the United Nations Building from MapQuest. Maybe you have visited EBay and bought some reloading equipment (because you are a sport-clay shooter).
Now imagine some data mining application at fbi.gov puts all of this information together and concludes that you are an extremist who is about to embark on a trip where you plan on bombing the United Nations building in New York City and the Capitol and the White House in Washington DC!
Seperate and disparite pieces of data aren't always able to fit nicely into a simple formula. This is where the danger of this kind of information comes in. Taken seperately and considered without an adequate foundation, these "facts" tend to support a totally erronious conclusion. Next thing you know, someone is quietly asking questions about you abd you have no idea why.
These kinds of things have happend to innocent people before. Someone I know faced scrutiny years ago shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing. There was no real reason for his being suspect and it took a long time to figure out why they looked at him. The FBI questioned his neighbors, they followed him, photographed his home, and in general made life uncomfortable for him.
It took time to figure it out but, we finally concluded that there were reasons why he came to their attention. They were:
- He was a gun collector
- He bought gunpowder by the pound (he was a re-loader)
- He worked at a facility where he may possibly have had access to amonium nitrate
- He lived alone
- He lived in the wrong place (outside of town in an area linked to suspects)
- He had several 55 galon oil drums on his property
- He was a member of the NRA
To the FBI all this information seemed to indicate that he could possibly be linked as the third man in the Oklahoma City bombing. Nothing could have been further from the truth but for a few tense weeks, he was the focus of enough attention so that he felt like he could not visit friends, go target practicing, or do much of anything. He got paranoid and asked us to not call him because he thought he may be wiretapped. It really ate him up inside and he had done nothing wrong. The truth of the matter is that he is one of the most law-abiding people around. He had not done one illegal thing to draw this suspiscion on him. Litterally, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. He is just a kind of quiet guy who likes to keep to himself.
I don't think that data mining brought this investigation on him. I think his name simply popped up on too many lists (which is in a way, a form of manual data mining). Still with computers and access to hundreds or thousands of different data sources, the possibilities have compounded themselves making this kind of process likely to impact too many poeole. Innocent people.
Caution liberal/liberitarian/green content (rant) ahead!
For some reason I feel like I should have seen something like this coming. Frankly the criminal justice system in the United States is absolutly ill-equiped to deal with technology crime. In general, it is a system that has morphed into a plea-bargain machine that charges people with the most henious crime they can make fit and then work on reaching a "equitable sentence" through a plea-bargain. Ultimately the student will be allowed to plead guilty to a lesser charge (it this case, probably a misdemenor).
There are a few things about this system that are GROSSLY UNJUST!
First, there are no rules that allow both sides to play the game evenly. The prosicutor makes them up as he goes along and changes them when and if he wants.
If you can't afford an attorney (and what eighteen year-old high school student can?) you will probably be appointed a public defender who is over-worked, under-paid and probably only a couple years out of law-school. He (or she) will consider it a victory if they can get the plea-bargain down to a misdemenor (even if no crime was committed).
If the kid's parents can afford a (good) private-practice lawyer they will have to pay thousands if not tens of thousands for the defense. There are a couple of reasons for this, one is that the lawyer knows they can get that kind of money from those kinds of people. Another reason is that the lawyer will have to hire experts that can educate him about the technology just so he can get an idea of what the charges really are about. Finally, if it makes it to court, there will have to be money to pay the experts to come in to court and testify. Naturally, the lawyer will want all of this money up front.
On the other side of the table, you may be facing a lawyer who wants to make a name for himself. He is aware of the failures of the system and knows how to exploit them to achieve his goals (personal or political). If the defendant gets a public defender he knows to prey on the over-worked defender and will offer a bad-deal that is just good enough to make the public defender sell it to the defendant. He also knows that the public defender has very little money for expert witnesses. If he faces a private practice lawyer, he will fight a delaying action, not offering much of a deal knowing that the cost-to-fight will soon bankrupt most people. He too can play the expert-game, only he has a county IS geek as a professional witness (so it costs him very little).
Don't forget, the state's attorney is graded on his conviction rate (not on if justice was served). His raises and promotions depend on a good record with a high conviction rate.
This is a system that is so broken it deserves to be tore completely down and rebuilt. You don't have to be an innocent man on death row to feel the injustice. Criminal Justice deserves two sides that are equally capable, equally funded, and fair for people of every income level. A CEO of a Fortune 500 company deserves the exact same treatment that a homeless windo deserves. Justice needs to be blind to status, race, gender, faith, orientation, or anything else (other than justice). It is the United States greatest failure as a country (although the health care system comes damned close).
Windows and Linux are today's operating systems. Who knows what will come along tomorrow. Look at the differences in Windows and Linux from five or ten years ago. They are entirely different than when they first cam on market! The trouble is that they are added on to and asked to do things that were not originally envisioned when they were first developed. The fact that they are doing what they are doing today is a testament to their versatility (and, their good foundation).
There will come a time when something else will come along - the evolution will happen like it has happened in every other industry. Ford quit making Model T's a long time ago and some day, Windows and Linux will be seen as out-dated operating systems that was loaded into primitive personal computers. In my mind's eye, I can see a computing future where computers interact with us in everyday life helping us with almost every task we do. Do any of us doubt that this marriage of technology and life won't continue to grow?
Look how far we have gone in the past few years and think of what could be done in the next ten or twenty and you can start to understand why someone would think that these operating systems may begin to sag under the weight of new and additional features. In a sense, the operating system is middleware. It sits between hardware and applications. Both sides aren't remaining static, the hardware gets new features and is faster and more powerful, the applications do more, do new and sometimes unthought of things. The o/s is in a tug-of-war between these two entities and tries very hard to make everything work. When the current part of the operating system that handles say video is being stretched to its limit by the demands of either the hardware or the software it is either patched or replaced. Over time, these fixes make the operating system like a house that has been remodeled too many times. It may become inefficient although it remains functional - when this happens, it may be best to tear the whole thing down and start all over again.
Please note that I am not saying that either Windows or Linux have reached the point where they ought to be scrapped but a realistic look forward has to consider that as a possibility. Tomorrow's hardware and tomorrow's applications are bound to place heavy demands on whatever operating system there is. We live in interesting times and it is hard to predict what the future will look like ten years from now. Are we going to have windowed interfaces or is something else going to come along? Where will speech recognition be? Will the keyboard continue to exist? Part of me wants to think that at some point we will communicate with our digital servants almost like we communicate with our human counterparts, through speech, body movements, and eye contact. But like the rocket-cars envisioned in the fifties, that may be a long way off track because I do not have a crystal ball that works.
There are bad guys, they aren't like Santa Claus and they aren't like Robin Hood (they are infact robbin-in-the-hood). There are people who make their living by crime and their are others who will prey at any good opportunity. This is why convenience store clerk has become such a dangerous job. Look at crime in any big city and you will discover that a small percentage of the residents are responsible for a high percentage of the crime. These people do deserve to be caught, convicted, sentenced, and punnished.
Unfortunately, this small percentage of people make all of us live under a cloud of suspicion. Cameras are thus far the most cost-effective deterant that shop-owners have found to protect themselves from losses.
Having suffered a few small losses over the years, I can sympathise with them. For every item stolen, they have to sell a lot of items to make up for the loss. Since it is unlikely that they will increase their sales because something was stolen, they are in essence simply out of the money!
Crime does pay. It pays well enough so that the threat of prison doesn't stop the thief. Ip pays well enough to employ private and public security, police officers, and everyone else in the criminal justice field.
To say that bad people don't exist aren't a threat or aren't real is a fantasy.
There has been a real explosion of survellence cameras over the past several years near where I live (Minneapolis, MN, USA). They are in nearly every business I go in, they monitor stoplights, traffic and I've even seen a few on top of streetlights in residential neighborhoods. A few of my neighbors even have them outside of their homes.
For the most part, I think these things are beneficial and can be used to catch bad guys. Crime costs all of us money. Shoplifting and other crimes against business help drive up costs and if a shopkeeper wants to install a camera to help stop some of it good for him.
If putting cameras on top of streetlights helps to reduce crime or increase the effectivness of police, I really don't have too much of a problem either. Crime hurts people and if we can use cameras to put a few bad guys away, good.
Traffic cameras on freeways help keep traffic flowing and can be used to quickly dispatch highway patrol or highway helpers to the scene quickly. Again, I have few problems with this. It makes my commute better.
Recently the city has installed photo-cop cameras on a few traffic lights through the city. The primary purpose of these cameras is to issue tickets to people running red lights. It helps to generate revenue and it makes these select locations a little safer (they are posted). While I understand the benefits, I have a problem with this. Not so much because I may get caught but because these cameras are kind of turning things around. It is a new revenue stream for the city, one that depends on petty crime to survive. Since it has shown early success there is an excellent chance that it will be expanded providing even more money for the system. A city needs money in much the same manner as an addict needs a fix. They will stoop to deep levels to get the cash. The photo-enforcment is one example of a good idea taken in a bad direction that will ultimately go too far. Soon, any light likely of providing a revenue stream will be guarded by a photo cop. Yet I doubt that this will reduce taxes at all.
These photo enforcement cameras are very unlikely to do anything for any serious crime. They are only activated when someone runs the light. I'd feel better if the tickets issued did not directly benefit anyone. Perhaps the money could be put into a fund that would not go to the city but rather into a fund that is used for something that the city does not directly control. That way, they would only have good motives for sticking the cameras up and I would feel better about them. These photo-cop fines are a form of unequal taxation that must be stopped!
Those PDP-11's were pretty capable machines but more than once I heard them called F**kers! So maybe...
There were digital computers over a hundred years ago. One example was the card loom.
Did you read my post before you replied? I'm wondering because I specifically talked to that very issue. Yes, I know Sony/BMG is a different company than Sony Electronics - but they are in the same "family" and just like when you do something it can (and often does) reflect on the entire family.
By saying "buy nothing from the entire Sony family" it puts Sony/BMG's corporate brothers and sisters in the position of calling on their sibling telling them to "get your act together, your behavior is hurting us too."
Please remember what Sony/BMG did with the rootkit. It was unethical to say the least. When I learned of this, I resolved to "vote with my money" and will no longer buy anything Sony. I know Sony Electronics aren't exactly the same as Sony music but (or should I say BUT) they have the same roots and and my refusal to do business with Sony anything is bound to make them think about things - but not if I am a lone voice in the woods.
Like-minded Geeks unite! Boycot those Sony scumbags who thought a rootkit was a good idea! Only the bottom line matters to them. Affect it!
This article assumes that the phisher/thief is the one who is going to use the information. This is an incorrect assumption. They are only one piece of a criminal enterprise. They sell the information to thugs who put it to use. This creates a layer of insulation from the source of the information to the street level criminal who actually puts it to use. There may even be another layer, the scammer who takes the info from the thief and uses it to obtain the credit card or whatever may then actually sell it to someone who will use it. One thief can support many scammers who take a different risk than the original thief.
Up here in mosquito infested Minnesota, we will try just about anything to reduce the hordes of the buzzy little buggers that make our life miserable. In untreated areas of the state it is not too uncommon for people to stay inside on nice summer evenings because the mosquitos are horrible. Because I love the outdoors and cherrish my time out of the city, I'd try and do just about anything to deal with the buggers. I fog, I spray, I light those citronella candles and burn those coils, I apply repellent and I'll still get chased inside about twilight!
.10 x.10 =.01 or more simply, about one percent of the time!)
This is because Minnesota is the land of 10,000 lakes AND 100,000 swamps, we get enough rain so low spots become puddles. We are prime mosquito breeding territory! What makes life so wonderful for us here is also perfect for mosquitos.
Those propane burning things work but only in small areas and only in still weather when their exhaust can placidly spread out far enough to attract mosquitos. A gentle breeze will render the machine utterly ineffective. How often is the air still in a summer environment when mosquitos are most active? As the heat of the day disipates, gentle breezes almost always kick in, sometimes becoming not so gentle breezes. I'd put my money on these machines being truly effective perhaps ten percent of the time when you really, really need them (which is only about 10% of the day so,
In the daylight, or after dark the mosquitos are pretty dispersed. It is only in the evening hours that they get really bad. These mosquito magnets have been around for a few years, they are expensive and they burn propane which isn't cheap! Now this company wants to build a network of them? Perhaps a network large enough to cover a community? Wouldn't it be cheaper, more effective, and more environmentally friendly to issue everyone bottles of repellent? I like the stuff in the yellow and green can from 3M but 100% DEET works pretty well too.
In my opinion, this concept of a computer controlled, propane powered mosquitio magnet net is the dream-child of some marketing exec. It is false science of the worst kind, sold as being believable and effective. It is snake-oil being sold by modern day snake oil salesmen!
All you can do is laugh. P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute.
Lets call this what it is - spin by an agency that is well known for its ability to spin just about anything. Think of how many of their cash-cows (err, artists) have stepped in various drug abuse problems, affairs and other tawdery sex acts. Somehow the RIAA actually manages to get them taken care of.
Sony, and the programmers that wrote the root kit should have known they were wrong. If they didn't, then they must have missed more than one or two ethics classes along the way. Of course, their argument would be that piracy too is unethical (at that point I'd ask how two wrongs make a right).
Sony spends a lot of money on the RIAA and since even the worst criminals of them all deserve representation and someone in their corner, I guess that the RIAA is stepping up to the plate for their client. This is one thing that I can say is right in this whole story, the RIAA should be solidly in their client's corner. Unfortunately, their ethics are showing a little more than a slight tarnish.
In the long run, all of this is going to hurt the major labels in their battle for DRM but only a little. The next time around, they will have learned a lesson or two and the next effort will be a bit more proper and ethical but still just as hard to live with.
I understand the problem - I am just saying that if the EULA is worded so that spyware makers can't determine if it is spyware then they will assume it is. If the company wants out of that quagmire, they have to do something about it.