I'm from the Boston area, and recently there was a big exposé regarding Big Dig officials and workers drinking on the job, and taking entire days to go shopping all on the company's (and the taxpayers) dime. Had there been GPS tracking of these people, monitoring officials would have known right away what these people were doing, and we wouldn't be billions of dollars over budget on this hog of a project (Well, we probably would still be, but it wouldn't be nearly as much as it is).
It seems that whenever someone talks about using technology to track someone's movements or communications, immediately the civil rights people have to jump on it and scream about how its a violation of people's civil rights. If you're on the job, your boss has every right to know where you are during regular business hours. Don't want to be tracked after hours? Don't use your company phone after hours for personal use.
Maybe the porn industry should follow suit, and create their own TLD so kids would be less likely to stumble into their sites. That way, parents could just block everything from that TLD, and save the hassle.
I vote that we create the new TLD of.cum for porn sites.
After reading this rediculous article, I decided to contact the L.A. County ISD with the following response:
"I recently read an article which references your organization, and how it has recently issued a statement requesting that all computer hardware manufacturers remove the term "Master/Slave" from their documentation and other materials.
The term Master/Slave to describe the primary and secondary drives has been around for years, almost since the creation of the PC itself. The term holds no derogatory meaning, and does not degrade any human being in any way.
What your proposed "solution" does, however, is set a precedence to increase the cost of computer equipment, forcing hardware manufacturers to rewrite not only manuals, but web sites, labels that are affixed to hard drives, and quite possibly having dies used to cast the casings for hard drives retooled.
I am not writing this because I am promoting racism, Sado-masochism, or anything other than a simple sanity check. It is in my opinion as an American and a human being that you have crossed the line of political correctness, and do so at the expense of the computer hardware industry, and the american public as a result.
My company currently owns 41 domain names, and not a single one of them is registered through Verisign/NetSol. I say, with all the low-cost registrars out there, hit verisign where it hurts, and send a message that we don't want their silly ads every time we make a typo.
I fail to understand how people think sometimes. If my employer went out every day and put up roadblocks in every route that I took to work, after a while I'd get the hint that maybe my services weren't wanted anymore. Take the hint, Veri$ign, and let it die.
I've always had a problem with this type of discussion. I go to the movies to be entertained, not to study science or physics. Bruce Banner grows 10 times his normal size. So? It's entertainment. Nothing more.
I attribute this mentality to the declining sales of movie tickets in the Sci-fi department. Everyone seems to think that in order to be science fiction or fantasy, there has to be some basis in reality. Imagine if the original writers of shows like Buck Rogers, even earlier "B" rated movies thought this way? These people, as humourous as their movies are to us today, paved the way for today's science fiction.
I think it's time we all got a little less geeky in the movie theatre, and just sit back and enjoy the show.
How about this? Why don't they come out with a "Windows XP Complete Idiot" edition, where it only allows the most basic ports available for web browsing, email, and IM, and no NetBIOS or other networking capabilities, and make all the people who are too ignorant to update their hotfixes purchase it.
It sounds a bit like minority report to me. They're persecuting the guilty before they're even guilty.
Like it's been stated in many posts, people use these smart card devices for legit. reasons. What about the aspiring robotics designer trying to pioneer a new smart robot that changes its configuration based on what card is input (If someone uses that idea, I want credit dammit), and they happen to also be a DTV customer?
There are many legal uses for smart cards that have nothing to do with DirecTV. I actually used to be a Dish network subscriber, and even though the picture was nice, it was a LOT more money in the end (boxes for the 6 TV's in my house, special LNB for all those boxes, blah blah), the quality was only marginally better than our cable system (and that's not saying much). And if it rained/snowed/got cloudy/the cat walked by the TV, out goes the signal.
My advice to everyone who has DTV, dump it. Read a book, its more stimulating. Once you've tried both cable and satellite, you quickly find out the benefits of satellite TV are few.
(Note to DirecTV big-wigs: I'm not, never have been, and will NEVER be a subscriber. I never have bought a smart card reader, and I don't even download MP3's or use Kazaa. Piss off.)
The recording industry is floundering, partially because they are upset because they didn't invent the online music services that are now in place, and partially because they're seeing a portion of their otherwise HUGE profits being given away. Sure, there are people out there who hoarde hundreds and thousands of MP3 music files, and first-run movie in MPG format, but I think you'll find that many of the "file traders" out there are like me - Grab the occasional song, or if I have a few hours to kill in front of my computer, perhaps grab a movie (Honestly, I think I've downloaded 3 movies in my whole life). Arrest me. Then question me, ask me how many of those MP3 files I've downloaded have lead me to go out and buy the artist's CD. Ask me if I went to the movies to see the film I downloaded so I could watch it "on the big screen". Better yet, come to my house, take a look at my collection of hundreds of CD's, VHS and DVD movies, all legitimately purchased from retail stores.
The MPAA and the RIAA don't want to take it to this level. Doing so would make them realize that most "file traders" are in fact just as law-abiding as they are, and probably more so. If a recording artist sold their CD's online, I'd buy the songs that I like directly from them, and cut out the recording industry gluttons completely.
Has anyone ever thought of the security implications of allowing someone to have silent access to the rest of the world on an airplane? Let's set up the scenario: Some nutbag with a portable GPS device on his laptop is able to provide real-time coordinates to someone on the ground via AOL Instant messenger or some other chat program. With the elevated threat of surface to air shoulder-mounted rockets on the news lately, isn't this giving terrorists a new way to track planes?
Call me paranoid, but as cool as it would be to be able to get an IRC fix at 40,000 feet, I just don't think its a very wise idea in these troubled times.
This is my big question - Would Chevy shut me down if I made a mod kit to put a Ford engine in my Camaro? (This is hypothetical, of course, what nutbag would ever do that?)
Perhaps, MAYBE, I can see them being a little upset at mods that allow you to run illegally copied games, but a lot of the MOD chips I've seen are so you can run other region's discs, and/or run an OS like linux. Why is this a crime? Maybe I'm just reading too superficially into the whole thing. It just irks me.
However, this does create a problem for those of us who write small shareware apps. I do it mostly for fun, but I do enjoy the little bit of cash it brings in. If I have to pay any amount to be part of M$'s Elite Software Force then I'm basically out of the shareware business. What am I gonna do otherwise, tell everyone that downloads my software to "turn off" their "security option"? Ya right.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems that whenever someone talks about using technology to track someone's movements or communications, immediately the civil rights people have to jump on it and scream about how its a violation of people's civil rights. If you're on the job, your boss has every right to know where you are during regular business hours. Don't want to be tracked after hours? Don't use your company phone after hours for personal use.
Maybe the porn industry should follow suit, and create their own TLD so kids would be less likely to stumble into their sites. That way, parents could just block everything from that TLD, and save the hassle.
.cum for porn sites.
I vote that we create the new TLD of
"I recently read an article which references your organization, and how it has recently issued a statement requesting that all computer hardware manufacturers remove the term "Master/Slave" from their documentation and other materials.
The term Master/Slave to describe the primary and secondary drives has been around for years, almost since the creation of the PC itself. The term holds no derogatory meaning, and does not degrade any human being in any way.
What your proposed "solution" does, however, is set a precedence to increase the cost of computer equipment, forcing hardware manufacturers to rewrite not only manuals, but web sites, labels that are affixed to hard drives, and quite possibly having dies used to cast the casings for hard drives retooled.
I am not writing this because I am promoting racism, Sado-masochism, or anything other than a simple sanity check. It is in my opinion as an American and a human being that you have crossed the line of political correctness, and do so at the expense of the computer hardware industry, and the american public as a result.
My company currently owns 41 domain names, and not a single one of them is registered through Verisign/NetSol. I say, with all the low-cost registrars out there, hit verisign where it hurts, and send a message that we don't want their silly ads every time we make a typo.
I fail to understand how people think sometimes. If my employer went out every day and put up roadblocks in every route that I took to work, after a while I'd get the hint that maybe my services weren't wanted anymore. Take the hint, Veri$ign, and let it die.
I've always had a problem with this type of discussion. I go to the movies to be entertained, not to study science or physics. Bruce Banner grows 10 times his normal size. So? It's entertainment. Nothing more.
I attribute this mentality to the declining sales of movie tickets in the Sci-fi department. Everyone seems to think that in order to be science fiction or fantasy, there has to be some basis in reality. Imagine if the original writers of shows like Buck Rogers, even earlier "B" rated movies thought this way? These people, as humourous as their movies are to us today, paved the way for today's science fiction.
I think it's time we all got a little less geeky in the movie theatre, and just sit back and enjoy the show.
How about this? Why don't they come out with a "Windows XP Complete Idiot" edition, where it only allows the most basic ports available for web browsing, email, and IM, and no NetBIOS or other networking capabilities, and make all the people who are too ignorant to update their hotfixes purchase it.
Like it's been stated in many posts, people use these smart card devices for legit. reasons. What about the aspiring robotics designer trying to pioneer a new smart robot that changes its configuration based on what card is input (If someone uses that idea, I want credit dammit), and they happen to also be a DTV customer?
There are many legal uses for smart cards that have nothing to do with DirecTV. I actually used to be a Dish network subscriber, and even though the picture was nice, it was a LOT more money in the end (boxes for the 6 TV's in my house, special LNB for all those boxes, blah blah), the quality was only marginally better than our cable system (and that's not saying much). And if it rained/snowed/got cloudy/the cat walked by the TV, out goes the signal.
My advice to everyone who has DTV, dump it. Read a book, its more stimulating. Once you've tried both cable and satellite, you quickly find out the benefits of satellite TV are few.
(Note to DirecTV big-wigs: I'm not, never have been, and will NEVER be a subscriber. I never have bought a smart card reader, and I don't even download MP3's or use Kazaa. Piss off.)
The recording industry is floundering, partially because they are upset because they didn't invent the online music services that are now in place, and partially because they're seeing a portion of their otherwise HUGE profits being given away. Sure, there are people out there who hoarde hundreds and thousands of MP3 music files, and first-run movie in MPG format, but I think you'll find that many of the "file traders" out there are like me - Grab the occasional song, or if I have a few hours to kill in front of my computer, perhaps grab a movie (Honestly, I think I've downloaded 3 movies in my whole life). Arrest me. Then question me, ask me how many of those MP3 files I've downloaded have lead me to go out and buy the artist's CD. Ask me if I went to the movies to see the film I downloaded so I could watch it "on the big screen". Better yet, come to my house, take a look at my collection of hundreds of CD's, VHS and DVD movies, all legitimately purchased from retail stores.
The MPAA and the RIAA don't want to take it to this level. Doing so would make them realize that most "file traders" are in fact just as law-abiding as they are, and probably more so. If a recording artist sold their CD's online, I'd buy the songs that I like directly from them, and cut out the recording industry gluttons completely.
Has anyone ever thought of the security implications of allowing someone to have silent access to the rest of the world on an airplane? Let's set up the scenario: Some nutbag with a portable GPS device on his laptop is able to provide real-time coordinates to someone on the ground via AOL Instant messenger or some other chat program. With the elevated threat of surface to air shoulder-mounted rockets on the news lately, isn't this giving terrorists a new way to track planes? Call me paranoid, but as cool as it would be to be able to get an IRC fix at 40,000 feet, I just don't think its a very wise idea in these troubled times.
This is my big question - Would Chevy shut me down if I made a mod kit to put a Ford engine in my Camaro? (This is hypothetical, of course, what nutbag would ever do that?)
Perhaps, MAYBE, I can see them being a little upset at mods that allow you to run illegally copied games, but a lot of the MOD chips I've seen are so you can run other region's discs, and/or run an OS like linux. Why is this a crime? Maybe I'm just reading too superficially into the whole thing. It just irks me.
However, this does create a problem for those of us who write small shareware apps. I do it mostly for fun, but I do enjoy the little bit of cash it brings in. If I have to pay any amount to be part of M$'s Elite Software Force then I'm basically out of the shareware business. What am I gonna do otherwise, tell everyone that downloads my software to "turn off" their "security option"? Ya right.