The idiots here at Slashdot have modded you troll, but you are right.
Legally, what he did was wrong. And it doesn't require a degree in law to know that.
Second, what did he think was going to happen? It's one thing to state what everyone already knows: The security is a joke. But to demonstrate it in a way that makes the security easy to circumvent so that any idiot can do it is stupid. It serves no purpose. Consider the only three possible outcomes of this fiasco: 1) We can no longer print boarding passes at home, which really would annoy those of us who try to be as efficient as possible. 2) The security checkpoints would need scanners to scan the boarding passes to make sure they are real which is costly and just one more thing to slow down lines. 3) No change. It looks like we made it with #3, which was what I was hoping for myself.
And as a traveler, what he did was wrong. Yes, we know the security is worthless but the last thing I want is more security on planes. We have too much as it is. Make an effort to make sure no firearms, explosives, or unusually sharp objects are let into the secure area and call it done. I don't want more security, I want less. And drawing undue attention to the weakness of the current system only serves to increase the probability of them implementing real security that is going to make air travel so inconvenient as to be useless. Sorry, I don't want that.
So, basically, the guy that put up that boarding-pass generator is an idiot. Is he really a threat such that he should be on the no-fly list? No, of course not. But in this particular case, do I care? Nope. His little exercise had (and still has) the potential of making traveling less convenient for millions of people. So forgive me if I don't really care if his travel convenience is impacted.
My heart really does go out to those girls and their family. But if bomb disposal guys are on-site and some idiots are taking pot shots at them, damn straight they better expect an overwhelming response! Urban warfare sucks and if the terrorists had any concern for their civilian countrymen, they wouldn't be shooting at (I repeat) a bomb disposal unit from anywhere near non-combatants. But terrorists don't care. The problem here isn't the U.S. army response but the fact that those terrorist *ssholes make a point of putting non-combatants at risk. They did it in Lebanon, too. They count on one of two things happening: 1) The military not responding with overwhelming force, in which case they can effectively take pot shots and disappear. 2) The military will respond with overwhelming force and kill innocent people and get a bum rap from idiots like you.
I'm sorry, your response really pisses me off. A bomb disposal unit--trying to make the streets safer--is being shot at and you have a problem with overwhelming force being returned? It's the U.S. Army's fault? You know what? Go get a clue and come back when you've found it, or at least let us know when you've rejoined the real world. Really, I'm inclined to use much stronger words with you, but I will refrain. Human debris like you isn't even worth it.
Protests are a stupid waste of time. What, do you think that people are just driving down the road and then they run into a bunch of traffic trying to navigate a 100,000+ protest against Iraq and these people think, "Damn, I really supported the war in Iraq, but now that I've seen 100,000+ people in the streets and they've succeeded at turning my 15-minute commute into a 60-minute commute, well, dang it, they're right. I'm against the war now."
Protesting in the streets is a lazy man's solution to avoiding the proper legal and political process, and gives them a good excuse to kick back a few cold ones with 100,000 of their closest friends and make a mess. Society would be much better served if everyone just stayed home and just 1 out of 100 of the protesters participated in the political process with meaningful and substantive support for their position.
Actually, it probably will. Most people don't care enough about security. If you don't care about security, these central password systems are great ideas.
The same idiots that have bumper stickers that say "Question everything" tend to swallow what the news feeds them, at least when it is in their best interest? Human-induced climate change? Yeah, we believe it. Everything is bad in Iraq? Yeah, we believe it. The election indicated a major shift to the left on the part of the American electorate? Yeah, we believe it. Bush won twice because of election fraud? Yeah, we believe it. Chavez fairly won his election, a referendum, and another election? Yeah, we believe it. But start reporting anything that goes off the liberal reservation and all the sudden they think it's spin, Bushies, etc. It's really impressively sick.
So much media is just plain propaganda, and not right-wing like so many people here probably believe. Liberals are just so used to hearing what they want to hear from their own people that when some news comes along that doesn't walk in lockstep with their policies and beliefs, suddenly that news source is right-wing propaganda. If they could only see reality. It's frustrating.
Pretty much everyone's predictions for the 2006 Hurricane Season were wrong. There's so much we do not yet comprehend about our atmosphere. I wouldn't be at all surprised if everyone's human-induced global warming predictions are as far off the money as the 2006 Hurricane Season predictions.
I'm not going to even begin to evaluate whether there is any truth to your claims about comparative levels of health care. I just know that everyone I've talked to that's lived in a country with socialized medicine doesn't want it. And, of course, many in the US want it because they think the other system will work better. It won't. Socialism doesn't work and we know that. The only question is just how socialist an economy (or industry) can be before it completely breaks and becomes so inefficient that it is no longer productive, and how close to that point a given society wants to risk going in the interest of "compassion."
Everything in any economy comes down to a question of supply and demand. While we'd like everyone to have free, quality health care, the reality is that health care is subject to the exact same issues of supply and demand. We ignore that reality at our peril. And that peril is potentially both in regards to our economy and our health.
Yes, as scientists we should listen to them, but why on earth should this listening be done on the BBC? Is the BBC a scientific forum? Or are they going to provide a platform to bad scientists and people with a political agenda?
My understanding isn't that they want to act as a platform for bad science. They just want to investigate whether good scientists or their papers are being ignored by peer-reviewed literature. The BBC isn't the place to publish your scientific paper, but it is certainly news that BBC should report if good scientific papers are not being published when they should be.
Do you know of any good, legitimate scientists that go to the media first before publishing and waiting for review?
No, and it doesn't look like that's what the BBC is encouraging.
If the BBC was really interested in good science, they might consider giving money to a respected science organization to try to do a proper study to figure out if good scientists are being ignored or silenced.
Right... just like if I was really interested in whether organized crime is really organized, I'd pay the mafia to do the research. I would hope that BBC would be looking for scientists that feel their research has been inappropriately squelched to come forward, and their research would then presented to legitimate scientists for evaluation as to whether or not the research merits publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If there is a consensus that the research was legitimate and refused for publication, that indicates a problem that should be fixed. And, no, I'm not convinced that any organization or industry policing itself is always going to do the best job.
And the scaremongering has meandered from gloom and doom about the next ice age, to destructive global warming, to predictions that seem to have smaller and smaller significance as perceived "accuracy" is improved. I'm not impressed.
For example, if you believe that say, pollution is a bad thing, you are not a conservative.
No, but if you believe that a gas that makes up a large part of our atmosphere, is needed by plants, is created by humans and animals naturally, and is invisible, is not a pollutant, then obviously you're a right-wing uninformed idiot?
I'm 100% opposed to pollution, which used to be the brown cloud hanging over the city, coal deposits downwind, and dirty streams. When environmentalists start talking about pollution again, I'll be happy to support their efforts.
What bugs the hell out of me is that when people will try to present this research that, time and time again, is shown to be flawed or incomplete, but then fall back to the cop-out of, "Well even if we're wrong we should cut CO2 just in case." Hogwash! Do your homework like everyone else and get it right, and then present me with your case. If it takes 30 years, so be it. But I am not going to entertain alarmist scaremongering as serious political or scientific debate on which to take immediate action.
I might as well say, "Everyone, repent, be Christian because I have proof that the Bible is right. Do it now, just in case, while I work on the details of my proof." Yeah, that'd fly.
True. The comparison will be much more valid in about 70 years when I firmly believe the current chicken-with-its-head-cut-off scaremongering about human-induced climate change is going to look every bit as silly as KKK eugenics does now. The probability is nearly zero that we have a sufficient grasp on the global chaos that is our atmosphere in order to make the policy recommendations that some of these people advocate. I suspect that in 70 years (and probably only 20 or 30), we'll look back and laugh at the current nonsense much like we laugh at the "coming ice age" science of the 70's or eugenics of the 30's or drowning witches of a few centuries ago.
I'll get flamed, I'm sure, but it's amazing that some people go crazy about the freedoms we have supposedly lost under Bush but aren't even phased by the implications of some of the solutions proposed to deal with the global warming "threat." Absolutely amazing.
Both the dust and the el niño effect were likely caused by global warming
So on one side we have people saying that global warming is causing stronger and more frequent hurricanes, but then global warming is also supposedly creating the El Nino and dust effect which effectively subdued the hurricanes. Net effect? Sometimes we have more hurricanes, sometimes we have fewer. I'll leave calculating the average effect as an exercise for the reader.
It seems entirely probable that, more than global warming, hurricane intensity and frequency is more a function of the longer decade-long cycles. Just like "global warming" is more likely a function of a general rise in temperatures from the Little Ice Age than a function of trivial human activity on the planet.
When you're looking for every flimsy piece of evidence to support the theory that global warming is all the justification we need for global socialism, all the sudden everything looks like it's caused by global warming. These people need a lesson on the difference between correlations and relations.
I haven't watched the video, but if a library card is required to enter the library, why didn't he have it? And if he was asked to leave, why didn't he? It doesn't even have to be a cop asking you to leave... If the regulations say you must have your library card to be in the library and the librarian asks you to leave, you should.
Again, I haven't seen the video and I'm not justifying the actions of the cops since I'm not interested in watching it. But it sure seems that, lately, there is an absurdly large quantity of people in the world that think that it's their right to be assholes and yet have an expectation of being treated well. If you're an asshole to others, others will be assholes to you. While it is not unreasonable to hold police to a higher standard, it is NOT acceptable to be assholes to them in the first place.
Yep, I haven't used a PDA since I got my Treo. When I purchased my Treo, I had the option of a Windows or Palm-based system. I went with Palm. Having programmed both Windows and Palm apps, I knew which one to trust. I've heard people with horror stories of their Treo's constantly resetting. It's happened to me only once or twice in 11 months, and I'm 99% sure it's due to an aways-on IM program that I wish the author would fix. But other than that, zero problems.
Palm Treo's are excellent at what they do and don't make an unnecessary effort to do things they shouldn't. It's still a PDA-phone, not a laptop phone. I don't want Windows and its host of problems on my phone.
I agree. From 2002 to early 2006, I was using Linux exclusively on my laptop desktop. I got used to things not working. And although I am a geek, my goal in life is not to Google and investigate to see if I can tweak my OS to do what I want. This year I got a new laptop with XP on it. Everything just worked so I just stayed with that.
I still have my Linux laptop which I ironically use as a Linux server--something that Linux is good at.
This is more of a hardware design issue than software and, as I said, this entire voting project is a job for OS-less microcontrollers, not Linux or Windows.
The operating program would run on one microcontroller; this is the program that would drive the touch-screen, present options, etc. The electronic result of a vote would be sent via a serial bus to an 'encrypting microcontroller.' At that time, the operating program's microcontroller would be stopped (clock turned off) and the encrypting microcontroller would actually go out and read the entire program that is being run on the operational microcontroller and use that as the key to encrypt the vote data it just received. This encrypted data would then be sent to the database and also printed out in encrypted and English-readable form for the voter to verify.
To prevent fraud, the encrypting microcontroller would just be protected with that material you can put over ICs on a circuit board that makes it impossible to even see the IC and you can't get to the IC without totally destroying the material on top of it. That is to say, the encypting microcontroller could not even be seen (let alone changed) without completely mangling the circuit board.
The program running on the voting machine could be stored in flash memory and modified, but those modifications would be apparent to the encrypting microcontroller and all votes generated by the corrupt machine would not be decodable as a valid vote.
The MD5 of the binary being used must be somehow used as a key to encode the votes. The encrypted vote would be delivered to the election center and the voter would receive a printout with the same encrypted vote (along with plain-English if you'd like) and the voter could go home and, if he was so compelled, type in the monster-long encoded vote into the central election website to verify that the right version of the software was being used and also to verify his encrypted vote matches the English-printed version of his vote which he would presumably have verified against what he meant before he left the machine.
Also, any solution should not use an Operating System, be it Windows or Linux. There's way too much stuff in the OS that would also have to be verified in the same way; if the right binary is running but the wrong version of the OS, there's all kinds of opportunity for bad stuff there. Any voting system should be microcontroller-based and there's no reason why it couldn't be written in less than 64k with the entire program being in a single 64k flash/ROM. With microcontrollers with no OS, you are truly looking at ALL of the code. Any OS-based voting system is, in my opinion, far too complex to be trustworthy and far too easy to modify for fraud.
Slashdot Mirror
The idiots here at Slashdot have modded you troll, but you are right.
Legally, what he did was wrong. And it doesn't require a degree in law to know that.
Second, what did he think was going to happen? It's one thing to state what everyone already knows: The security is a joke. But to demonstrate it in a way that makes the security easy to circumvent so that any idiot can do it is stupid. It serves no purpose. Consider the only three possible outcomes of this fiasco: 1) We can no longer print boarding passes at home, which really would annoy those of us who try to be as efficient as possible. 2) The security checkpoints would need scanners to scan the boarding passes to make sure they are real which is costly and just one more thing to slow down lines. 3) No change. It looks like we made it with #3, which was what I was hoping for myself.
And as a traveler, what he did was wrong. Yes, we know the security is worthless but the last thing I want is more security on planes. We have too much as it is. Make an effort to make sure no firearms, explosives, or unusually sharp objects are let into the secure area and call it done. I don't want more security, I want less. And drawing undue attention to the weakness of the current system only serves to increase the probability of them implementing real security that is going to make air travel so inconvenient as to be useless. Sorry, I don't want that.
So, basically, the guy that put up that boarding-pass generator is an idiot. Is he really a threat such that he should be on the no-fly list? No, of course not. But in this particular case, do I care? Nope. His little exercise had (and still has) the potential of making traveling less convenient for millions of people. So forgive me if I don't really care if his travel convenience is impacted.
I always prefer to make my purchases with 1930 dollars. That way my $3000 flat-panel TV only costs $278. The police never seem to buy it, though.
Tom Lehrer?
That's because although liberals make no sense, at least they're inconsistent.
I agree. I would very much like to see an iPod combined with a good smart phone, but I'm not willing to switch to Mac to do it.
I'm sorry, your response really pisses me off. A bomb disposal unit--trying to make the streets safer--is being shot at and you have a problem with overwhelming force being returned? It's the U.S. Army's fault? You know what? Go get a clue and come back when you've found it, or at least let us know when you've rejoined the real world. Really, I'm inclined to use much stronger words with you, but I will refrain. Human debris like you isn't even worth it.
Given the stupidity of protests, I find it disturbing that such a thing as an "experienced" protester exists.
Protesting in the streets is a lazy man's solution to avoiding the proper legal and political process, and gives them a good excuse to kick back a few cold ones with 100,000 of their closest friends and make a mess. Society would be much better served if everyone just stayed home and just 1 out of 100 of the protesters participated in the political process with meaningful and substantive support for their position.
Actually, it probably will. Most people don't care enough about security. If you don't care about security, these central password systems are great ideas.
So much media is just plain propaganda, and not right-wing like so many people here probably believe. Liberals are just so used to hearing what they want to hear from their own people that when some news comes along that doesn't walk in lockstep with their policies and beliefs, suddenly that news source is right-wing propaganda. If they could only see reality. It's frustrating.
Pretty much everyone's predictions for the 2006 Hurricane Season were wrong. There's so much we do not yet comprehend about our atmosphere. I wouldn't be at all surprised if everyone's human-induced global warming predictions are as far off the money as the 2006 Hurricane Season predictions.
Everything in any economy comes down to a question of supply and demand. While we'd like everyone to have free, quality health care, the reality is that health care is subject to the exact same issues of supply and demand. We ignore that reality at our peril. And that peril is potentially both in regards to our economy and our health.
My understanding isn't that they want to act as a platform for bad science. They just want to investigate whether good scientists or their papers are being ignored by peer-reviewed literature. The BBC isn't the place to publish your scientific paper, but it is certainly news that BBC should report if good scientific papers are not being published when they should be.
Do you know of any good, legitimate scientists that go to the media first before publishing and waiting for review?
No, and it doesn't look like that's what the BBC is encouraging. If the BBC was really interested in good science, they might consider giving money to a respected science organization to try to do a proper study to figure out if good scientists are being ignored or silenced.
Right... just like if I was really interested in whether organized crime is really organized, I'd pay the mafia to do the research. I would hope that BBC would be looking for scientists that feel their research has been inappropriately squelched to come forward, and their research would then presented to legitimate scientists for evaluation as to whether or not the research merits publication in a peer-reviewed journal. If there is a consensus that the research was legitimate and refused for publication, that indicates a problem that should be fixed. And, no, I'm not convinced that any organization or industry policing itself is always going to do the best job.
And the scaremongering has meandered from gloom and doom about the next ice age, to destructive global warming, to predictions that seem to have smaller and smaller significance as perceived "accuracy" is improved. I'm not impressed.
No, but if you believe that a gas that makes up a large part of our atmosphere, is needed by plants, is created by humans and animals naturally, and is invisible, is not a pollutant, then obviously you're a right-wing uninformed idiot?
I'm 100% opposed to pollution, which used to be the brown cloud hanging over the city, coal deposits downwind, and dirty streams. When environmentalists start talking about pollution again, I'll be happy to support their efforts.
What bugs the hell out of me is that when people will try to present this research that, time and time again, is shown to be flawed or incomplete, but then fall back to the cop-out of, "Well even if we're wrong we should cut CO2 just in case." Hogwash! Do your homework like everyone else and get it right, and then present me with your case. If it takes 30 years, so be it. But I am not going to entertain alarmist scaremongering as serious political or scientific debate on which to take immediate action.
I might as well say, "Everyone, repent, be Christian because I have proof that the Bible is right. Do it now, just in case, while I work on the details of my proof." Yeah, that'd fly.
I'll get flamed, I'm sure, but it's amazing that some people go crazy about the freedoms we have supposedly lost under Bush but aren't even phased by the implications of some of the solutions proposed to deal with the global warming "threat." Absolutely amazing.
So on one side we have people saying that global warming is causing stronger and more frequent hurricanes, but then global warming is also supposedly creating the El Nino and dust effect which effectively subdued the hurricanes. Net effect? Sometimes we have more hurricanes, sometimes we have fewer. I'll leave calculating the average effect as an exercise for the reader.
It seems entirely probable that, more than global warming, hurricane intensity and frequency is more a function of the longer decade-long cycles. Just like "global warming" is more likely a function of a general rise in temperatures from the Little Ice Age than a function of trivial human activity on the planet.
When you're looking for every flimsy piece of evidence to support the theory that global warming is all the justification we need for global socialism, all the sudden everything looks like it's caused by global warming. These people need a lesson on the difference between correlations and relations.
Kind of like Al Gore.
Completely right. If CO2 is the 800-lb gorilla in climate change, water vapor is the 2000-lb gorilla.
Again, I haven't seen the video and I'm not justifying the actions of the cops since I'm not interested in watching it. But it sure seems that, lately, there is an absurdly large quantity of people in the world that think that it's their right to be assholes and yet have an expectation of being treated well. If you're an asshole to others, others will be assholes to you. While it is not unreasonable to hold police to a higher standard, it is NOT acceptable to be assholes to them in the first place.
Palm Treo's are excellent at what they do and don't make an unnecessary effort to do things they shouldn't. It's still a PDA-phone, not a laptop phone. I don't want Windows and its host of problems on my phone.
I still have my Linux laptop which I ironically use as a Linux server--something that Linux is good at.
The operating program would run on one microcontroller; this is the program that would drive the touch-screen, present options, etc. The electronic result of a vote would be sent via a serial bus to an 'encrypting microcontroller.' At that time, the operating program's microcontroller would be stopped (clock turned off) and the encrypting microcontroller would actually go out and read the entire program that is being run on the operational microcontroller and use that as the key to encrypt the vote data it just received. This encrypted data would then be sent to the database and also printed out in encrypted and English-readable form for the voter to verify.
To prevent fraud, the encrypting microcontroller would just be protected with that material you can put over ICs on a circuit board that makes it impossible to even see the IC and you can't get to the IC without totally destroying the material on top of it. That is to say, the encypting microcontroller could not even be seen (let alone changed) without completely mangling the circuit board.
The program running on the voting machine could be stored in flash memory and modified, but those modifications would be apparent to the encrypting microcontroller and all votes generated by the corrupt machine would not be decodable as a valid vote.
Also, any solution should not use an Operating System, be it Windows or Linux. There's way too much stuff in the OS that would also have to be verified in the same way; if the right binary is running but the wrong version of the OS, there's all kinds of opportunity for bad stuff there. Any voting system should be microcontroller-based and there's no reason why it couldn't be written in less than 64k with the entire program being in a single 64k flash/ROM. With microcontrollers with no OS, you are truly looking at ALL of the code. Any OS-based voting system is, in my opinion, far too complex to be trustworthy and far too easy to modify for fraud.