another way to waste limited law enforcement resources.
Every one of these "errors" could have equalled a real terrorist getting away with murder. That's the real waste of law enforcement resources here.
Without accountability there is no reason to improve other than an inner desire to be better, and if the FBI had that, we wouldn't have various stories of agents abusing wiretap resources for insider trading purposes, and they might have taken the extra 15 seconds to confirm the phone number in each of these cases.
Re:This is just one more reason...
on
Sorry, Wrong Wiretap
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
Yeah, as long as it's the government itself, and not some human being listening in on you, there's no problem.
Blu-Ray probably won't succeed because HD-DVD is already here.
Err, Blu-Ray is not only already here, but in Japan you could have bought a blu-ray set-top burner (for a few thousand dollars, of course) years ago. Of course, it used its own proprietary format and not the standardized HD format that was recently created, but the technology for creating discs and the drives that read them is very old news, far from "unproven".
In this case, it's just Microsoft exploiting the fact that America is a technological backwater compared to the rest of the developed world to push a solution that benefits it.
The claim to ownership happens when the patent application is filed, long before the patent is granted and often before the value of the invention is known. This is not a secret, nor is the invention itself a secret. All patents, and many applications are available for public inspection.
And this is what's seriously killing innovation. Before I can do anything, I have to hire someone to search the hundreds of thousands of active patents to see if someone else has a claim on it. If the specs change, the search starts over. If they find something, I've just wasted a lot of time and money, something a small company can't afford. Maybe the company can license the patent on terms that won't bankrupt it, then again, maybe the holder will simply refuse to license it at all. What's worse is that the abstract and title often has little to do with the claims (see the "player piano" patent being used against Apple)... effectively making keyword searches useless, meaning that unless the team of people read every single patent individually there's still no guarantee I won't be sued.
I really don't see how a person owns the eletrons on a line once it leaves his or her property.
Do I stop owning the atoms in a piece of paper when the mail carrier picks it up? Does ownership have any bearing on the expected privacy of the content? Why should my message be any different whether I pay a mail carrier to pick it up and carry it to its destination, or a phone company, or an ISP?
The problem is that when extremists (religious or not) want to control the sheeple, they've discovered that big, complex words are just too hard for their feeble minds.
Seriously. Google stem-cell research and see how many big names out there on both sides of the issue "conveniently" igore that "embryonic" word. It's just too hard for them to pronounce or spell apparently, and when your throbbing masses can't figure out what you're saying, your message just doesn't have the impact it could have.
On a side note, does anyone know the command for apt-get / dpkg to verify all my installed binaries?
The "debsums" package does this, you can have it check against the.md5sums file that was installed when the package was installed, or (apparently) have it check against a.deb file.
In 2.6 you use the kernel capabilites to load the appropriate modules at boot time, then strip the kernel of the ability to load any others. Adds a little more work for getting that module loaded. Throw in more stuff (verifying the module list from read-only media before loading any modules) and you can get pretty well defended against this kind of thing.
Depends. There were 20 someodd dead in that bus that blew up while evacuating. Was that caused by Rita? The current "official" count (10, apparently) includes a family that died of carbon monoxide poisoning from running a generator indoors because Rita knocked out their power. Of course, we're arguing over some miniscule numbers, but you can see how the source of the numbers could vary wildly based on who's counting and how.
Actually, the average savings rate is now around zero, though whether that is a good or bad thing is left up to the armchair economists to apply their personal belief system to the numbers.
Abortion Protesters are not allowed within x feet of a clinic. Using the same logic could political protestors be kept a specific distance from a convention of political office holder?
Ah, and here's the difference. If an abortion protestor is not allowed within x feet of a clinic, they're free to locate a convenient place that obeys the law. There is no such ability with a "free speech zone". You may or may not agree that requiring people to meet at a certain location takes away their freedom to peacably assemble, to which I'd respond that in 2008, both of the major party's national convention free speech zones will be conveniently located on the south pole of Mars.
You may trust your government to behave, but for all I know, I'll show up at the "free speech zone" and be arrested the instant I break out the signs, because 30 minutes prior the police chief posted a notice in their basement saying that the free speech zone has moved across town.
And there you have "community standards". If it causes an outrage in the community, it violates community standards.
It doesn't have to cause an "outrage", all it has to do is make life inconvenient. If the community could care less, does that mean I'm not supposed to worry about the gun toting jesus-freak who wants to kill off all the perverts before the "eroto-toxin" death rays infect their children? Vigilanteism is bound to step up in a situation where some tiny minority of the community feels justice wasn't served.
don't whine.
Why shouldn't I? Isn't that the principle of freedom of speech, that the majority can do whatever it wants and the minority gets to whine about it? I'm writing to both of my senators and my representative to ask them to do whatever they can to rein in this stupidity. With the utter failure of the government to control drugs, terrorism, and natural disasters, it hasn't earned the respect I require of it to trust it with poking into my VHS tapes.
What if someone prefers light, consensual bondage like silk scarves and fur-lined handcuffs instead of scat or bestiality? At what point does it go from normal to kinky to deviant, and why should I trust the unelected, national FBI to make that choice for me and my local community?
Got any other fantasies to spin about my political positions
Your political position? If it helps you any, late at night I fantasize that you do it socialist doggy-style.
All I wanted to know is whether or not you believe the government has any responsibility for its actions by using a very related situation as an illustration.
The Taliban murdered people who didn't toe the puritanical line.
So, if the government put all these people up on the web with a picture, name, and address, just like the anti-abortionists do with abortion doctors, you're perfectly fine with that, not murder at all? Because thats all this is going to do is swell states' sex offender lists, where getting drunk and pissing in a parking lot is already up there with raping and killing children.
If you're fine with that, I think I'll go scream fire in a crowded theater a few times, see how the government reacts when its not them inciting crowds of people.
I suppose I can understand an anti-bestiality crackdown.
Thing is, bestiality porn and bestiality acts aren't illegal everywhere in the country.
This task force is almost certain to exist for the sole purpose of slandering people who the government doesn't like. They may never score a conviction, but they'll be more than happy to publicize how John Doe likes diaper porn or Susie Q does it with dogs. So much for constitutional protections of due process.
I'm afraid that even this Slashdot story might help those we don't want helped.
Even if you go so far as to think that nobody out there had any idea at all (*cough*carnivore*cough*) that the government was tapping Teh Intarweb, the information is of incredibly low utility, unless the terrorist happens to actually operate the ISP and revises its peering agreements to avoid undersea fibre. Otherwise, they wouldn't have any control over it, and probably wouldn't even know if their route crossed a fibre (much less a tapped one) unless traceroute gave it away on the router names.
they will never, EVER provide a product they cannot sell to stay in business.
Pfft, corporations have no such survival instinct. They will do whatever they can to make the most money as quickly as possible, even if it means cutting R&D to ensure they'll never have a competitive product again.
This kind of thing has been known for a long, long time now, though usually it's modified clients that simply lie about their stats, rather than some convoluted protocol sniffing thing. Many torrent sites that care about their ratios already check for obviously spoofed values.
utility != value. 'Interesting' has nothing to do with economics, unless 'interesting' has a perceived value.
Better put your sword away before you go about lopping off any other major economic philosophies. Utility IS value. I don't buy tampons, because they have no utility for me. I do buy computer upgrades because they are useful to me. 3d Poser-alike software is not useful to me, therefore even for $0, the exertion required to download it makes it too expensive.
If I create a program called "Competitive Advantage," like one that gives you the exact lotto numbers for the next drawing?
Hmm... it's not that FAYT is bad, it's just badly implemented. When you type "f" it should take you to the first f it finds. If you type "o" it should then go to the first "fo" it finds, and so on... the bad implementation part is that if you discover "foobar" doesn't exist, backspacing to just "f" doesn't return you to the first "f" you found, which it should. (see also the "incremental search" on vim, emacs, info, the "/" find as you type option in Mozilla, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
another way to waste limited law enforcement resources.
Every one of these "errors" could have equalled a real terrorist getting away with murder. That's the real waste of law enforcement resources here.
Without accountability there is no reason to improve other than an inner desire to be better, and if the FBI had that, we wouldn't have various stories of agents abusing wiretap resources for insider trading purposes, and they might have taken the extra 15 seconds to confirm the phone number in each of these cases.
Now, if individuals are doing wiretaps... could be different
Yeah, as long as it's the government itself, and not some human being listening in on you, there's no problem.
You forgot the most important reason of all:
Instant gratification.
Nothing like coming home the same day holding your shiny new whizbang in your hands.
Blu-Ray probably won't succeed because HD-DVD is already here.
Err, Blu-Ray is not only already here, but in Japan you could have bought a blu-ray set-top burner (for a few thousand dollars, of course) years ago. Of course, it used its own proprietary format and not the standardized HD format that was recently created, but the technology for creating discs and the drives that read them is very old news, far from "unproven".
In this case, it's just Microsoft exploiting the fact that America is a technological backwater compared to the rest of the developed world to push a solution that benefits it.
The claim to ownership happens when the patent application is filed, long before the patent is granted and often before the value of the invention is known. This is not a secret, nor is the invention itself a secret. All patents, and many applications are available for public inspection.
And this is what's seriously killing innovation. Before I can do anything, I have to hire someone to search the hundreds of thousands of active patents to see if someone else has a claim on it. If the specs change, the search starts over. If they find something, I've just wasted a lot of time and money, something a small company can't afford. Maybe the company can license the patent on terms that won't bankrupt it, then again, maybe the holder will simply refuse to license it at all. What's worse is that the abstract and title often has little to do with the claims (see the "player piano" patent being used against Apple)... effectively making keyword searches useless, meaning that unless the team of people read every single patent individually there's still no guarantee I won't be sued.
Well, it is legally relevant, but only so far as you get to pay more if you know about it.
I really don't see how a person owns the eletrons on a line once it leaves his or her property.
Do I stop owning the atoms in a piece of paper when the mail carrier picks it up? Does ownership have any bearing on the expected privacy of the content? Why should my message be any different whether I pay a mail carrier to pick it up and carry it to its destination, or a phone company, or an ISP?
The problem is that when extremists (religious or not) want to control the sheeple, they've discovered that big, complex words are just too hard for their feeble minds.
Seriously. Google stem-cell research and see how many big names out there on both sides of the issue "conveniently" igore that "embryonic" word. It's just too hard for them to pronounce or spell apparently, and when your throbbing masses can't figure out what you're saying, your message just doesn't have the impact it could have.
On a side note, does anyone know the command for apt-get / dpkg to verify all my installed binaries?
.md5sums file that was installed when the package was installed, or (apparently) have it check against a .deb file.
The "debsums" package does this, you can have it check against the
In 2.6 you use the kernel capabilites to load the appropriate modules at boot time, then strip the kernel of the ability to load any others. Adds a little more work for getting that module loaded. Throw in more stuff (verifying the module list from read-only media before loading any modules) and you can get pretty well defended against this kind of thing.
Depends. There were 20 someodd dead in that bus that blew up while evacuating. Was that caused by Rita? The current "official" count (10, apparently) includes a family that died of carbon monoxide poisoning from running a generator indoors because Rita knocked out their power. Of course, we're arguing over some miniscule numbers, but you can see how the source of the numbers could vary wildly based on who's counting and how.
Actually, the average savings rate is now around zero, though whether that is a good or bad thing is left up to the armchair economists to apply their personal belief system to the numbers.
Abortion Protesters are not allowed within x feet of a clinic. Using the same logic could political protestors be kept a specific distance from a convention of political office holder?
Ah, and here's the difference. If an abortion protestor is not allowed within x feet of a clinic, they're free to locate a convenient place that obeys the law. There is no such ability with a "free speech zone". You may or may not agree that requiring people to meet at a certain location takes away their freedom to peacably assemble, to which I'd respond that in 2008, both of the major party's national convention free speech zones will be conveniently located on the south pole of Mars.
You may trust your government to behave, but for all I know, I'll show up at the "free speech zone" and be arrested the instant I break out the signs, because 30 minutes prior the police chief posted a notice in their basement saying that the free speech zone has moved across town.
And there you have "community standards". If it causes an outrage in the community, it violates community standards.
It doesn't have to cause an "outrage", all it has to do is make life inconvenient. If the community could care less, does that mean I'm not supposed to worry about the gun toting jesus-freak who wants to kill off all the perverts before the "eroto-toxin" death rays infect their children? Vigilanteism is bound to step up in a situation where some tiny minority of the community feels justice wasn't served.
don't whine.
Why shouldn't I? Isn't that the principle of freedom of speech, that the majority can do whatever it wants and the minority gets to whine about it? I'm writing to both of my senators and my representative to ask them to do whatever they can to rein in this stupidity. With the utter failure of the government to control drugs, terrorism, and natural disasters, it hasn't earned the respect I require of it to trust it with poking into my VHS tapes.
What if someone prefers light, consensual bondage like silk scarves and fur-lined handcuffs instead of scat or bestiality? At what point does it go from normal to kinky to deviant, and why should I trust the unelected, national FBI to make that choice for me and my local community?
Got any other fantasies to spin about my political positions
Your political position? If it helps you any, late at night I fantasize that you do it socialist doggy-style.
All I wanted to know is whether or not you believe the government has any responsibility for its actions by using a very related situation as an illustration.
The Taliban murdered people who didn't toe the puritanical line.
So, if the government put all these people up on the web with a picture, name, and address, just like the anti-abortionists do with abortion doctors, you're perfectly fine with that, not murder at all? Because thats all this is going to do is swell states' sex offender lists, where getting drunk and pissing in a parking lot is already up there with raping and killing children.
If you're fine with that, I think I'll go scream fire in a crowded theater a few times, see how the government reacts when its not them inciting crowds of people.
Are all fetishes pathologies or just the ones you don't like? If a guy is turned on by nurse uniforms, is that a pathology? How about school uniforms?
let every man have his own wife
Awesome! So you're going to assign me a wife? Now I won't have to work on my social skills and can go back to playing WoW 20 hours a day!
I suppose I can understand an anti-bestiality crackdown.
Thing is, bestiality porn and bestiality acts aren't illegal everywhere in the country.
This task force is almost certain to exist for the sole purpose of slandering people who the government doesn't like. They may never score a conviction, but they'll be more than happy to publicize how John Doe likes diaper porn or Susie Q does it with dogs. So much for constitutional protections of due process.
I'm afraid that even this Slashdot story might help those we don't want helped.
Even if you go so far as to think that nobody out there had any idea at all (*cough*carnivore*cough*) that the government was tapping Teh Intarweb, the information is of incredibly low utility, unless the terrorist happens to actually operate the ISP and revises its peering agreements to avoid undersea fibre. Otherwise, they wouldn't have any control over it, and probably wouldn't even know if their route crossed a fibre (much less a tapped one) unless traceroute gave it away on the router names.
they will never, EVER provide a product they cannot sell to stay in business.
Pfft, corporations have no such survival instinct. They will do whatever they can to make the most money as quickly as possible, even if it means cutting R&D to ensure they'll never have a competitive product again.
This kind of thing has been known for a long, long time now, though usually it's modified clients that simply lie about their stats, rather than some convoluted protocol sniffing thing. Many torrent sites that care about their ratios already check for obviously spoofed values.
Because the people that elected them want legislation like this.
Thats funny, last time I voted, that spot on the ballot where you get to type in what you want your elected representatives to do didn't show up.
Damn you Diebold! This is all your fault!
utility != value. 'Interesting' has nothing to do with economics, unless 'interesting' has a perceived value.
Better put your sword away before you go about lopping off any other major economic philosophies. Utility IS value. I don't buy tampons, because they have no utility for me. I do buy computer upgrades because they are useful to me. 3d Poser-alike software is not useful to me, therefore even for $0, the exertion required to download it makes it too expensive.
If I create a program called "Competitive Advantage," like one that gives you the exact lotto numbers for the next drawing?
Hmm... it's not that FAYT is bad, it's just badly implemented. When you type "f" it should take you to the first f it finds. If you type "o" it should then go to the first "fo" it finds, and so on... the bad implementation part is that if you discover "foobar" doesn't exist, backspacing to just "f" doesn't return you to the first "f" you found, which it should. (see also the "incremental search" on vim, emacs, info, the "/" find as you type option in Mozilla, etc.)