Consider that most local news stations pick up their regional/national/international news from a wire service and feed it to a talking head, so that news is pretty much the same wherever you go.
Now consider that if your local news station can't compete in its market against some station from New York, you aren't going to get local news. A station in Ass End, AK isn't going to be able to compete with a station in NYC, because not much happens in Ass End, the national news is all the same, and the WNYC has tons of money to throw around because of the size of its market... so Ass End's station eventually goes out of business. What then, when Ass End has a mayoral election?
Seriously, though, it seems a little unfair to impugn the United States, as though people winning such stupid law suits is common. It's not; that's why it's news when one is even filed.
There's a woman in North Carolina who has a stream I listen to very frequently... The reason is simple: No local station plays the music she does, and she has fantastic taste. I've bought ten albums based on what I heard on her stream alone, in the past few months.
Face it, the overhead, the competition, and the general state of the recording industry make airwave radio suck.
Gravity has NOTHING to do with mass, anyone who took high school physics should be able to tell you that.
Huh? F = ma, yo. Gravity provides a and is therefore pretty much constant. If you can vary m, you therefore can vary F, which means you can vary the amount of energy needed to counteract a. That's his whole point.
Have you read CNN.com? Trust me, bad spelling is not an indicator that you're somewhere else. Nor are extremely ambiguous headlines, broken grammar, astounding insensitivity or carelessness of diction, etc.
CNN.com is my primary news source on the web because they cover the same stuff everyone else does, but they're funnier.
Amusing CNN.com lines I've noted recently:
Lawmakers summon lay
"Montana, long known as a refuge for anti-government activists..."
"... flies over the navel base at Guantanamo Bay."
It just doesn't get any better. (To be fair, the first one probably couldn't be avoided; it's still amusing.)
Similarly, more people have probably been helped in the name of god than for any other reason.
The name of god gets a lot done.
(actually, I'd like to point out the extremely high probability that more people have died fighting for their bands, tribes, states, etc. than "in the name of god".)
We all knew this, because it's the very first thing Knuth said in his lecture.
And my guess is they excluded religion and politics because any attempt to discuss them in large, mixed company is doomed. You'll end up either heatedly debating uninteresting details that have already been covered by greater philosophers or statesmen than are in your classrooom, or sitting around agreeing with each other about how mysterious or complicated it all is. This is assuming you have a room full of reasonably intelligent, polite people, and either way you get nowhere.
I was one of those hardcore kids, in middle school.
I wouldn't say "hours", but I sure knew how to make a good wasp. There were difference sizes for different occasions (range, wind if you were outdoors, allowable noise level)... rubber bands and wasps had to be concealed, because the teachers really didn't like them.
It was fun, though. Nobody ever got more than a sting, as there were certain rules. Paper ammo only, not even foil. If you inked your wasp, you were really gonna get it. No firing if it would get you or your target busted. No face shots, for the love of God no face shots! No firing at close range. No firing on declared noncombatants. There was no rulebook, but we weren't complete assholes, so those were all understood.
And it was constant warfare. In the halls, in class, on the bus... the only time a truce was implicitly understood to be in effect was at lunch or during tests.
Yep, wasps thoroughly kicked pencil-fighting's ass.
No, the reason illegal wiretapping is not much of a problem is a combination of legal disincentives, physical difficulty, and the unlikelihood of obtaining information worth the risk and effort.
Not so if you tie large amounts of personal data to a single card that is presented to many people; there is little physical difficulty aside from obtaining the necessary private keys, you are certain to obtain the information you seek, and the reward for such criminal enterprise could be very high.
I suggest you inform yourself more about PKI technologies. If your argument is that PKI is insecure, fine, that's another story. But you seem to be simply implying that there's no (theoretical) way to protect information on a card conditionally, which is plain wrong. The fingerprint could be signed with a private key that only a certain government agency holds, and access to which requires search-warrant-type authorization by law inforcement. Furthermore, this access could be on a one-time basis, using some mechanism that ensures that law enforcement cannot store this key for future unauthorized use.
I'm well versed in PKI technologies, thanks.:) My point was that in a PKI system, your data is only as secure as your private key. When you say the government will hold your private key, well, I'm not convinced that's much better than wearing it on a t-shirt. We have a very large government that is designed to be open whenever possible; it can keep some secrets, but probably not yours.
The problem with PKI on this magnitude is one of keeping the private keys private, when everyone and his sister needs access to them to get the data the whole system is supposed to convey in the first place.
This is a nonsequitur/slippery slope fallacy. The US government already has reasonably easy access to pictures of most of its citizens, but hasn't performed the abuses you described. Just because a government theoretically can do a thing doesn't mean that it does.
Can, will, and has. Lest you forget, the Constitution of the United States was written on the presumption that there's no such thing as a theoretical government ability-- and with good reason.
If fingerprints were put in such a card, I'd want some safeguards put in place so that identities would be protected during police proceedings such as you mentioned. Still, the technology side isn't necessarily evil -- why is it so wrong if your fingerprint identifies you as being at the scene of a crime? An eye-witness could do that as well. Maybe we should eliminate eye-witnesses as a matter of course to protect privacy?
Now who's succumbing to logical fallacies? What "safeguards" could you possibly put into place here? If data is available via the card, it's available. It's not like the card can ask if you're a police officer or a street vendor. And obviously nobody has a problem with your thumbprint identifying you at the scene of a crime. The problem is when my thumbprint identifies me as buying a stack of pr0n and a bottle of lube. Not that anyone would care, you rejoin... unless of course you have some public standing, or aspire to some public standing, or maybe they just don't like you much.
Why should I, as a health non-AIDS getter be punished for living a healthy lifestyle? Smokers often have to pay higher insurance premiums because they're a greater risk. Why is AIDS any different?
Because, in this age of enlightenment, whether or not you are insured can determine whether you live or die. Smoking is a risk factor you initiate yourself; AIDS not necessarily so. This is true for most diseases. You would sentence someone to death-- when medicine could keep them alive-- because it's "not fair" that they don't have to pay extra for their insurance because of their higher "risk"? That's a sad commentary on your character, man.
As to the genetic identification, I have high hopes that by the time that we get sophisticated to easily sequence everyone's DNA, we'll also have good methods for fixing problems in our DNA.
Oh. Well, okay then. If you're pretty sure we'll all be able to turn into perfectly healthy supermen by the time someone figures out what genes determine disposition to Alzheimer's... Oh, wait.
But right now, things are worse. Those bozos at my bank give people access to my bank accounts if they can recite my social security number and mother's maiden name! It's all about raising the bar, and putting my secret information encrypted with my PIN on a hard-to-compromise smart card would be a step in the right direction.
I have a friend who was robbed in just such a manner. Guy walked into a bank, claimed to be him, and withdrew a couple thousand dollars. I'd like to point out a few things: (1) he got his money back pretty rapidly, (2) the bank was after the guy like you wouldn't believe, (3) the bank already had a photo of my friend on file... they could have just used it, and (4) this is the only occurrance of this type of which I am aware among everyone I know. This is not the sort of story that makes me particularly inclined to centralize a great deal of personal information, or even submit to a compulsory, incontrovertible identification scheme.
Furthermore, what's the point of encryption if everyone has the key? And this is not a small system; anyone who wants the key will, eventually, have it.
Yeah, that's generally true. But if someone sits down and makes optimizations for Altivec, then obviously it would no longer be true. This is what Red Hat seems to be planning to do.
That's not a business model. That's barely a product.
Look, let's say I'm starting a company that's going to offer air-dropped frozen bananas anywhere in the world. Let's further say that I'm going to do it using some logistics software called Bananywhere, and that some of that software is going to be GPLed and some of it was going to be kept closed and sold to similar companies to support the revenue from my banana-dropping business.
Would you say I had a business model just because I'm going to try to sell Bananywhere Gold?
Not if you were sane, and especially not if my last business venture was Linuxcare.
No corporation in the world gives a damn what happens to its "project" if the corporation takes a nosedive. The whole point of the "project" is to make the corporation some money and prevent the nosedive.
Technically, the GPL only obliges a distributor to provide source if asked by someone who has received binaries from him.
Did anyone download the binaries and ask for a copy of the source before they started screaming?
Re:...Unless you are on the receiving end of it
on
iWarez
·
· Score: 2
(If you don't know the answer, just admit you're "not sure" and offer to go find out!)
Careful... take that one too far and you end up with Fry's. I did a Linux demo day at Fry's once (ok, twice, but I had to). In one of the back rooms they had a huge poster explaining the company policy of "Team Knowledge".
Basically, Team Knowledge has one rule: You never say "I don't know" to the customer, you instead go find someone who does know.
Problem is, nobody knows. Anything. You will literally cycle through half the staff in the store (who, incidentally, drag their feet every step of the way because they know it's a hopeless endeavour), one person asking the next, until you get back to the first employee you asked. At this point, the original employee will mutter something about "the back" and vanish forever. *poof*
So you can't justify the price. That doesn't mean other people can't either.
Apples are too expensive for you. I can't justify the cost of a BMW for myself, but I don't run around acting as though BMW is clueless and whining about how much I'd like to buy a BMW if only the price were lower.
If a Wintellish PC gives you all the bang you need for the buck you want to spend, it's all good.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider that most local news stations pick up their regional/national/international news from a wire service and feed it to a talking head, so that news is pretty much the same wherever you go.
Now consider that if your local news station can't compete in its market against some station from New York, you aren't going to get local news. A station in Ass End, AK isn't going to be able to compete with a station in NYC, because not much happens in Ass End, the national news is all the same, and the WNYC has tons of money to throw around because of the size of its market... so Ass End's station eventually goes out of business. What then, when Ass End has a mayoral election?
HOT coffee. DO NOT INHALE
Seriously, though, it seems a little unfair to impugn the United States, as though people winning such stupid law suits is common. It's not; that's why it's news when one is even filed.
If I'm the sort of guy who abuses the patent system, why on earth would I release anything under your "DFSL"?
Face it, the overhead, the competition, and the general state of the recording industry make airwave radio suck.
COPPA
The original poster's interpretation of the COPPA seems to be badly off.
A guy who takes a hostage is always a nutjob, regardless of his "reasons".
Huh? F = ma, yo. Gravity provides a and is therefore pretty much constant. If you can vary m, you therefore can vary F, which means you can vary the amount of energy needed to counteract a. That's his whole point.
Crap, that was in my high school physics course.
To a lesser degree, it's nice if the system runs Rez and Virtua Fighter 4... but really, it's a GTA3 box.
Are you sure? That sounds like the sort of thinking that gets people deselected to me...
CNN.com is my primary news source on the web because they cover the same stuff everyone else does, but they're funnier.
Amusing CNN.com lines I've noted recently:
It just doesn't get any better. (To be fair, the first one probably couldn't be avoided; it's still amusing.)
The name of god gets a lot done.
(actually, I'd like to point out the extremely high probability that more people have died fighting for their bands, tribes, states, etc. than "in the name of god".)
And my guess is they excluded religion and politics because any attempt to discuss them in large, mixed company is doomed. You'll end up either heatedly debating uninteresting details that have already been covered by greater philosophers or statesmen than are in your classrooom, or sitting around agreeing with each other about how mysterious or complicated it all is. This is assuming you have a room full of reasonably intelligent, polite people, and either way you get nowhere.
Fixable.
Not even hard. I'll give it a shot this afternoon.
I wouldn't say "hours", but I sure knew how to make a good wasp. There were difference sizes for different occasions (range, wind if you were outdoors, allowable noise level)... rubber bands and wasps had to be concealed, because the teachers really didn't like them.
It was fun, though. Nobody ever got more than a sting, as there were certain rules. Paper ammo only, not even foil. If you inked your wasp, you were really gonna get it. No firing if it would get you or your target busted. No face shots, for the love of God no face shots! No firing at close range. No firing on declared noncombatants. There was no rulebook, but we weren't complete assholes, so those were all understood.
And it was constant warfare. In the halls, in class, on the bus... the only time a truce was implicitly understood to be in effect was at lunch or during tests.
Yep, wasps thoroughly kicked pencil-fighting's ass.
Not so if you tie large amounts of personal data to a single card that is presented to many people; there is little physical difficulty aside from obtaining the necessary private keys, you are certain to obtain the information you seek, and the reward for such criminal enterprise could be very high.
I suggest you inform yourself more about PKI technologies. If your argument is that PKI is insecure, fine, that's another story. But you seem to be simply implying that there's no (theoretical) way to protect information on a card conditionally, which is plain wrong. The fingerprint could be signed with a private key that only a certain government agency holds, and access to which requires search-warrant-type authorization by law inforcement. Furthermore, this access could be on a one-time basis, using some mechanism that ensures that law enforcement cannot store this key for future unauthorized use.
I'm well versed in PKI technologies, thanks. :) My point was that in a PKI system, your data is only as secure as your private key. When you say the government will hold your private key, well, I'm not convinced that's much better than wearing it on a t-shirt. We have a very large government that is designed to be open whenever possible; it can keep some secrets, but probably not yours.
The problem with PKI on this magnitude is one of keeping the private keys private, when everyone and his sister needs access to them to get the data the whole system is supposed to convey in the first place.
Can, will, and has. Lest you forget, the Constitution of the United States was written on the presumption that there's no such thing as a theoretical government ability-- and with good reason.
If fingerprints were put in such a card, I'd want some safeguards put in place so that identities would be protected during police proceedings such as you mentioned. Still, the technology side isn't necessarily evil -- why is it so wrong if your fingerprint identifies you as being at the scene of a crime? An eye-witness could do that as well. Maybe we should eliminate eye-witnesses as a matter of course to protect privacy?
Now who's succumbing to logical fallacies? What "safeguards" could you possibly put into place here? If data is available via the card, it's available. It's not like the card can ask if you're a police officer or a street vendor. And obviously nobody has a problem with your thumbprint identifying you at the scene of a crime. The problem is when my thumbprint identifies me as buying a stack of pr0n and a bottle of lube. Not that anyone would care, you rejoin... unless of course you have some public standing, or aspire to some public standing, or maybe they just don't like you much.
Why should I, as a health non-AIDS getter be punished for living a healthy lifestyle? Smokers often have to pay higher insurance premiums because they're a greater risk. Why is AIDS any different?
Because, in this age of enlightenment, whether or not you are insured can determine whether you live or die. Smoking is a risk factor you initiate yourself; AIDS not necessarily so. This is true for most diseases. You would sentence someone to death-- when medicine could keep them alive-- because it's "not fair" that they don't have to pay extra for their insurance because of their higher "risk"? That's a sad commentary on your character, man.
As to the genetic identification, I have high hopes that by the time that we get sophisticated to easily sequence everyone's DNA, we'll also have good methods for fixing problems in our DNA.
Oh. Well, okay then. If you're pretty sure we'll all be able to turn into perfectly healthy supermen by the time someone figures out what genes determine disposition to Alzheimer's... Oh, wait.
But right now, things are worse. Those bozos at my bank give people access to my bank accounts if they can recite my social security number and mother's maiden name! It's all about raising the bar, and putting my secret information encrypted with my PIN on a hard-to-compromise smart card would be a step in the right direction.
I have a friend who was robbed in just such a manner. Guy walked into a bank, claimed to be him, and withdrew a couple thousand dollars. I'd like to point out a few things: (1) he got his money back pretty rapidly, (2) the bank was after the guy like you wouldn't believe, (3) the bank already had a photo of my friend on file... they could have just used it, and (4) this is the only occurrance of this type of which I am aware among everyone I know. This is not the sort of story that makes me particularly inclined to centralize a great deal of personal information, or even submit to a compulsory, incontrovertible identification scheme.
Furthermore, what's the point of encryption if everyone has the key? And this is not a small system; anyone who wants the key will, eventually, have it.
The startup time has improved tremendously over 0.9.8's, and the UI seems generally much snappier.
Yeah, that's generally true. But if someone sits down and makes optimizations for Altivec, then obviously it would no longer be true. This is what Red Hat seems to be planning to do.
Look, let's say I'm starting a company that's going to offer air-dropped frozen bananas anywhere in the world. Let's further say that I'm going to do it using some logistics software called Bananywhere, and that some of that software is going to be GPLed and some of it was going to be kept closed and sold to similar companies to support the revenue from my banana-dropping business.
Would you say I had a business model just because I'm going to try to sell Bananywhere Gold?
Not if you were sane, and especially not if my last business venture was Linuxcare.
No corporation in the world gives a damn what happens to its "project" if the corporation takes a nosedive. The whole point of the "project" is to make the corporation some money and prevent the nosedive.
Did anyone download the binaries and ask for a copy of the source before they started screaming?
Careful... take that one too far and you end up with Fry's. I did a Linux demo day at Fry's once (ok, twice, but I had to). In one of the back rooms they had a huge poster explaining the company policy of "Team Knowledge".
Basically, Team Knowledge has one rule: You never say "I don't know" to the customer, you instead go find someone who does know.
Problem is, nobody knows. Anything. You will literally cycle through half the staff in the store (who, incidentally, drag their feet every step of the way because they know it's a hopeless endeavour), one person asking the next, until you get back to the first employee you asked. At this point, the original employee will mutter something about "the back" and vanish forever. *poof*
Apples are too expensive for you. I can't justify the cost of a BMW for myself, but I don't run around acting as though BMW is clueless and whining about how much I'd like to buy a BMW if only the price were lower.
If a Wintellish PC gives you all the bang you need for the buck you want to spend, it's all good.
You got it. "Trust" is now in my Netflix queue.