I'd stay skeptical of such a claim until there is a peer-reviewed paper out
I think you're demanding the unreasonable. It's a pain in the ass to peer when you have lazy eye.
I'm not sure how long that will last
on
Facebook On The Block
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· Score: 5, Informative
I disagree with the idea that Facebook's registration system is its advantage because it closed--the advantage of the system is that it offers easy searching for people and arranges them in nifty, easy to understand hierarchies. Because Facebook requires registration from a college/high school email address the ease of searching and hierarchical arrangement is retained (whereas most people, I suspect, would default to signing up on Myspace with whatever aol.com or hotmail.com account they have.) This plus is a side-effect of the closedness, but I don't believe the closedness is an advantage all unto itself.
Some suggest that Facebook is somehow more safe for its participants. A surface examination may suggest that, but I think on a practical level it's not. As the security fears of Myspace die down (they're really just the normal internet dating fears that we've always heard except now brought down to 14 year olds plus the current hysteria regarding sexual offenders) I think that Facebook's closedness will be looked upon as a disadvantage.
After all, if you're going to spend $2 billion on Facebook, you'd want a pretty strong potential for growth, and Facebook will get maxed out too quickly, and the only new growth for it will be from new high schoolers who can add themselves in. The brand has to open up to create the value.
(I add, incidentally, that I've thought about this because Facebook, as it was originally designed, was a reasonable concept for a small college like Harvard. I go to Ohio State, where the idea of having so much information about you (until recently the default) presented to what is a mega-city sized student/alumni population is assinine. Though I've got a facebook account, I find the obscurity of myspace more convenient (though I don't post salacious pictures of myself doing stupid things that employers could discover later.)
I believe the biggest problem banks have is ordinary robberies. I can't say I've heard of any situation of someone using someone else's identity to wipe out their bank account.
Even in countries that do not have identification cards (and, after all, the english speaking world fell into this category until only fairly recently) I haven't heard anything to suggest banks are having/have had troubles identifying customer's correctly. (The identification collected when opening an account now is for Patriot Act purposes.) The lowly ATM with 4 digit pin is used successfully without identification (phishing is its main weakness.) Thanks to debit/credit cards, identification is now even less relevant to banking.
It sounds like you spent time in Massachusetts (based on the the word rotary, the cities you chose.)
Each state has its own convention for road signs and traffic systems (loosely based on federal standards.) Some states are downright awful (Massachusetts, New Jersey) and other states are really good. (My Ohio for instance goes out of its way to make road signage detailed and clear.)
I suspect a relatively weak governor (compared to the President) isn't all that uncommon.
According to a nifty pop up at that Texas politics site (click on "trying to lead" under the features area) the President is somewhere in the middle of power in comparison to his governors.
The peculiar thing is, while the UK government has a history of playing around with the Constitution (in particularly right now) you can make the argument that it and Canada (which also doesn't have a written Constitution, and only got a charter of rights in the early 80s) have stuck to their "unwritten" rules and precedents much more than the US has to its written Constitution.
I hypothesize the following to explain this: in the UK and Canada, parliament is the steward of the constitution, and have a duty and obligation to make sure that the customs set by that (physically fragile) constitution are retained, because it is through the maintainance of those customs that the constitution (and thereby, the state and government) endures.
On the other hand, there is no steward, per se, of the US Constitution. The document stands by itself, with its nifty and complex system of checks and balances which places three very powerful entities across from each other. No one branch is responsible for the Constitution, so the duty to uphold it is taken less seriously. In effect, people in any one branch will try whatever, with the knowledge that if they do something really bad, it will be caught by someone else in another branch.
Besides, some people see an advantage of separating the Head of State from the Head of Government.
As I recall, the Texas Constitution cleverly made the Lieutenant Governor more powerful than the Governor (on the day to the day basis.) I suspect they wanted a head of state to be different from the head of government, but also to distract people from where power really lies.
If you want a proper house of review (and you should) then you bloody well elect one.
Actually, the whole house of review concept was always meant to be a non-elected body.
One of the major checks and balances built into the US constitution was that the Senate was unelected. They founders thought it would be a huge error to have both houses elected--the point of the Senate was an unelected body that was separated from politics. (Which is why certain types of decisions pass through the Senate--such as the approval of judge appointments.)
All that became horribly messed up by the direct election of Senators. Since they are now directly elected, but still have powers that were granted to them based on the idea that they weren't directly elected, they've completely disbalanced the system. (The only thing that makes the Senate work as a house of review is the fact that the constituency borders, since they're states, cannot be artificially gerrymandered. It'd be cool if they were elected in a different system, a change I'm open to.)
None of these are to be controlled by the Federal government.
It's interesting that other federal countries decided not to go down the same path. For instance, Canada's basis for federal criminal laws is rooted in their concept of equal protection--that a Canadian should not be subject to a criminal law in on part of the country which is legal in another part of Canada.
Which is why things like crimes against person or property are standardized at the federal level.
I actually wouldn't want that for the US, but it's an interesting idea. I beileve there are some legal scholars who offer that the 14th amendment can be read to the same thing, and courts have been reluctant to enforce such a concept because of the tradition that criminal law is the domain of the state.
I suspect this might be visited sometime in the future.
This is pretty advanced. So why did Jordy have to wear that stupid visor?
While scientists are undoubtedly doing their "working for humanity" thing I could see how such technology could be appiled to aging/reversing aging. (Which brings up the question why anybody would have wrinkles.)
My expectation is that quite a lot of this tech will be used for cosmetic applications (in addition to helping the blind see and that sorta thing.) If the optimal look for attracting the opposite sex serves as a guide, women of the future will look permanently 17, and men will look permanently 24.
adding photos to those cards might actually be useful if done correctly.
What do you mean by done correctly? Adding (and counterfeiting) a photo is easy. Whereas adding anti-counterfeiting and counterfeit detection technologies isn't.
The photograph doesn't make the document any more difficult to counterfeit, but it does make it more likely to be counterfeited (since before you were just counterfeiting a credit card, now you're counterfeiting a credit card and ID. It's like hitting two birds with one stone.)
I don't know why they don't do the same everywhere.
It blows me away that banks still do it at all. Photo optional credit cards were originally designed to serve as a second form of identification, not to protect the credit card from fraud.
The credit card itself (the piece of plastic) is protected by being able to call the company and cancel the card. 85% of credit card fraud is committed by people who don't actually have the credit card in hand (but might have at some point in the past in order to read the stripe.) They might create their own cards (as done by the fraudsters in the article) or use the numbers another way.
If anything photo credit cards might cause more fraud because the photograph tricks the merchant and relaxes their other normal procedures. (I've written much about the "psychological confidence" that photo ID cards cause on people.)
Having said that, there is no particular upside for banks, or for the customer, and banks themselves are hesistant to enter into the "identification card" business which brings along its own unique liabilities. For this reason, at least in North America, fewer and fewer banks are issuing photo credit cards.
And one of the secrets to why that works so well is that you only mark one X for most elections.
The X on paper doesn't scale well if there's more X's. In a New England state like Connecticut it could work because people there may only vote for 5-8 items/offices in even the biggest elections.
In Franklin County, Ohio, during the 2004 election, we voted for 57 different offices, tax authorizations, city/county and state referenda. (Which is also why we had 3 hour lines to vote.) With nearly 600,000 ballots, the combinations and counting become very complex. There's no easy way of creating a hand count system for such a large ballot (whereas you can create a hand count system for a small ballot that scales up to the size of the ballots used.)
I would still be happier with a photo on the credit/debit card, Its a little more dificult to steal my face.
Your face is irrelevant to the way the fraud is being perpetrated. The article states that the criminals are printing up fresh cards with the stolen information. If they insist, they could print up a picture of their own damn faces and use that on your stolen card information.
The only type of fraud the photo can help with is card fraud with your own stolen/lost card (the least common form of credit card fraud, accounting for 15%> of transactions.) Assuming that you are as likely/as quick to call up the credit card company to cancel a stolen photo credit card as somone who has lost a non-photo credit card, the photograph is essentially irrelevant.
It's my growing belief that Christianity requires persecution to thrive, and modern western Christianity hasn't had enough.
Why is this? Anything unique (or not unique) about Christianity that causes this? How has modern western Christianity diverged?
I have a few quibbles about it mostly that I think God's will is more about reliance on him for bigger and smaller decisions as we face them, but that is a both very relaxing (in that should worry less about tomorrow) and very challenging (in that it includes a commission that requires a substantial amount of work).
Where does the work come from?
And the other question (for a friend):
Parse the quote "the love of money is the root of all evil". It bothers my friend for the obvious reason that it's held so severely.
Slashdot Mirror
But Diebold seems to figure out how to do it right when banks insist they do it right
As time has gone on, and the more I get to know the industry, I'm not convinced that banks are all that sophisticated with IT security issues.
I'd stay skeptical of such a claim until there is a peer-reviewed paper out
I think you're demanding the unreasonable. It's a pain in the ass to peer when you have lazy eye.
I disagree with the idea that Facebook's registration system is its advantage because it closed--the advantage of the system is that it offers easy searching for people and arranges them in nifty, easy to understand hierarchies. Because Facebook requires registration from a college/high school email address the ease of searching and hierarchical arrangement is retained (whereas most people, I suspect, would default to signing up on Myspace with whatever aol.com or hotmail.com account they have.) This plus is a side-effect of the closedness, but I don't believe the closedness is an advantage all unto itself.
Some suggest that Facebook is somehow more safe for its participants. A surface examination may suggest that, but I think on a practical level it's not. As the security fears of Myspace die down (they're really just the normal internet dating fears that we've always heard except now brought down to 14 year olds plus the current hysteria regarding sexual offenders) I think that Facebook's closedness will be looked upon as a disadvantage.
After all, if you're going to spend $2 billion on Facebook, you'd want a pretty strong potential for growth, and Facebook will get maxed out too quickly, and the only new growth for it will be from new high schoolers who can add themselves in. The brand has to open up to create the value.
(I add, incidentally, that I've thought about this because Facebook, as it was originally designed, was a reasonable concept for a small college like Harvard. I go to Ohio State, where the idea of having so much information about you (until recently the default) presented to what is a mega-city sized student/alumni population is assinine. Though I've got a facebook account, I find the obscurity of myspace more convenient (though I don't post salacious pictures of myself doing stupid things that employers could discover later.)
Ever heard of "identity theft"!?
Identity theft usually refers to the procuring of one's credit history identity. That doesn't affect the victim's bank account.
but it could also be used in banks
I believe the biggest problem banks have is ordinary robberies. I can't say I've heard of any situation of someone using someone else's identity to wipe out their bank account.
Even in countries that do not have identification cards (and, after all, the english speaking world fell into this category until only fairly recently) I haven't heard anything to suggest banks are having/have had troubles identifying customer's correctly. (The identification collected when opening an account now is for Patriot Act purposes.) The lowly ATM with 4 digit pin is used successfully without identification (phishing is its main weakness.) Thanks to debit/credit cards, identification is now even less relevant to banking.
Why's this crap always being pushed on banks?
I believe in school I learned dashes. I went to slashes later on.
It sounds like you spent time in Massachusetts (based on the the word rotary, the cities you chose.)
Each state has its own convention for road signs and traffic systems (loosely based on federal standards.) Some states are downright awful (Massachusetts, New Jersey) and other states are really good. (My Ohio for instance goes out of its way to make road signage detailed and clear.)
Depends where you go.
I suspect a relatively weak governor (compared to the President) isn't all that uncommon.
According to a nifty pop up at that Texas politics site (click on "trying to lead" under the features area) the President is somewhere in the middle of power in comparison to his governors.
You have to go deeper into it.
The Lieutenant Governor is the President of the Senate which is enormously powerful.
While the Texas Lieutenant Governor is powerful, the Governor has had many of the traditional roles sent to other executive offices.
It's like the Governor is the chairman of the board, but the Lt. Gov is actually the top shareholder.
I admit that, in the UK at least, it's fallen apart.
But the UK has no written constitution
The peculiar thing is, while the UK government has a history of playing around with the Constitution (in particularly right now) you can make the argument that it and Canada (which also doesn't have a written Constitution, and only got a charter of rights in the early 80s) have stuck to their "unwritten" rules and precedents much more than the US has to its written Constitution.
I hypothesize the following to explain this: in the UK and Canada, parliament is the steward of the constitution, and have a duty and obligation to make sure that the customs set by that (physically fragile) constitution are retained, because it is through the maintainance of those customs that the constitution (and thereby, the state and government) endures.
On the other hand, there is no steward, per se, of the US Constitution. The document stands by itself, with its nifty and complex system of checks and balances which places three very powerful entities across from each other. No one branch is responsible for the Constitution, so the duty to uphold it is taken less seriously. In effect, people in any one branch will try whatever, with the knowledge that if they do something really bad, it will be caught by someone else in another branch.
Besides, some people see an advantage of separating the Head of State from the Head of Government.
As I recall, the Texas Constitution cleverly made the Lieutenant Governor more powerful than the Governor (on the day to the day basis.) I suspect they wanted a head of state to be different from the head of government, but also to distract people from where power really lies.
If you want a proper house of review (and you should) then you bloody well elect one.
Actually, the whole house of review concept was always meant to be a non-elected body.
One of the major checks and balances built into the US constitution was that the Senate was unelected. They founders thought it would be a huge error to have both houses elected--the point of the Senate was an unelected body that was separated from politics. (Which is why certain types of decisions pass through the Senate--such as the approval of judge appointments.)
All that became horribly messed up by the direct election of Senators. Since they are now directly elected, but still have powers that were granted to them based on the idea that they weren't directly elected, they've completely disbalanced the system. (The only thing that makes the Senate work as a house of review is the fact that the constituency borders, since they're states, cannot be artificially gerrymandered. It'd be cool if they were elected in a different system, a change I'm open to.)
None of these are to be controlled by the Federal government.
It's interesting that other federal countries decided not to go down the same path. For instance, Canada's basis for federal criminal laws is rooted in their concept of equal protection--that a Canadian should not be subject to a criminal law in on part of the country which is legal in another part of Canada.
Which is why things like crimes against person or property are standardized at the federal level.
I actually wouldn't want that for the US, but it's an interesting idea. I beileve there are some legal scholars who offer that the 14th amendment can be read to the same thing, and courts have been reluctant to enforce such a concept because of the tradition that criminal law is the domain of the state.
I suspect this might be visited sometime in the future.
In the US you have to *PAY* to *RECEIVE* mobile phone calls!
A friend of mine just signed up with a new provider here in the US.
Unlimited calling (both receiving and making calls)
Unlimited SMS texting (both sending and receiving)
$47/month.
Does anything that cheap exist in Europe?
This is pretty advanced. So why did Jordy have to wear that stupid visor?
While scientists are undoubtedly doing their "working for humanity" thing I could see how such technology could be appiled to aging/reversing aging. (Which brings up the question why anybody would have wrinkles.)
My expectation is that quite a lot of this tech will be used for cosmetic applications (in addition to helping the blind see and that sorta thing.) If the optimal look for attracting the opposite sex serves as a guide, women of the future will look permanently 17, and men will look permanently 24.
adding photos to those cards might actually be useful if done correctly.
What do you mean by done correctly? Adding (and counterfeiting) a photo is easy. Whereas adding anti-counterfeiting and counterfeit detection technologies isn't.
The photograph doesn't make the document any more difficult to counterfeit, but it does make it more likely to be counterfeited (since before you were just counterfeiting a credit card, now you're counterfeiting a credit card and ID. It's like hitting two birds with one stone.)
I don't know why they don't do the same everywhere.
It blows me away that banks still do it at all. Photo optional credit cards were originally designed to serve as a second form of identification, not to protect the credit card from fraud.
The credit card itself (the piece of plastic) is protected by being able to call the company and cancel the card. 85% of credit card fraud is committed by people who don't actually have the credit card in hand (but might have at some point in the past in order to read the stripe.) They might create their own cards (as done by the fraudsters in the article) or use the numbers another way.
If anything photo credit cards might cause more fraud because the photograph tricks the merchant and relaxes their other normal procedures. (I've written much about the "psychological confidence" that photo ID cards cause on people.)
Having said that, there is no particular upside for banks, or for the customer, and banks themselves are hesistant to enter into the "identification card" business which brings along its own unique liabilities. For this reason, at least in North America, fewer and fewer banks are issuing photo credit cards.
Mark X on Paper.....
And one of the secrets to why that works so well is that you only mark one X for most elections.
The X on paper doesn't scale well if there's more X's. In a New England state like Connecticut it could work because people there may only vote for 5-8 items/offices in even the biggest elections.
In Franklin County, Ohio, during the 2004 election, we voted for 57 different offices, tax authorizations, city/county and state referenda. (Which is also why we had 3 hour lines to vote.) With nearly 600,000 ballots, the combinations and counting become very complex. There's no easy way of creating a hand count system for such a large ballot (whereas you can create a hand count system for a small ballot that scales up to the size of the ballots used.)
India is the world's largest democracy. They also use pencil and paper.
Actually, India votes on machine, since 2004.
I would still be happier with a photo on the credit/debit card, Its a little more dificult to steal my face.
Your face is irrelevant to the way the fraud is being perpetrated. The article states that the criminals are printing up fresh cards with the stolen information. If they insist, they could print up a picture of their own damn faces and use that on your stolen card information.
The only type of fraud the photo can help with is card fraud with your own stolen/lost card (the least common form of credit card fraud, accounting for 15%> of transactions.) Assuming that you are as likely/as quick to call up the credit card company to cancel a stolen photo credit card as somone who has lost a non-photo credit card, the photograph is essentially irrelevant.
do me a favor and email me, before this thread is closed...in case i have any more questions. :-)
It's my growing belief that Christianity requires persecution to thrive, and modern western Christianity hasn't had enough.
Why is this? Anything unique (or not unique) about Christianity that causes this? How has modern western Christianity diverged?
I have a few quibbles about it mostly that I think God's will is more about reliance on him for bigger and smaller decisions as we face them, but that is a both very relaxing (in that should worry less about tomorrow) and very challenging (in that it includes a commission that requires a substantial amount of work).
Where does the work come from?
And the other question (for a friend):
Parse the quote "the love of money is the root of all evil". It bothers my friend for the obvious reason that it's held so severely.
Thanks for your reply, I feel edified now.
Why do you think that Christians today gloss over these concepts?
I love discussions of finance and religion, as both are important to me professionally and personally.
I was wondering if you could discuss the biblical prohibition (found in Exodus) on holding a laborer's wages overnight.
I entertained inventing a Christian payroll processing firm--which paid a person a nightly direct deposit for one day's pay.