My younger brother got a new touchscreen phone the other day and was complaining about how the camera button was in a horrible spot, and was hard to use without pressing other buttons. I picked it up and held it sideways like a camera and none of my fingers came close to touching any buttons, except for the camera button that was under my right index finger right where the shutter button should be.
Me: Seems fine to me. Him: Why would anyone want to hold it like *that*?
I still can't convince him to to not hold it like you would when taking a picture with a flip-phone.
I just reread your link. In it DJB explicitly advises against running authentication on port 25. In fact, for security reasons, he wrote two separate programs, qmail-smptd and ofmipd, to keep the tasks of relaying authenticated email and accepting mail for local delivery as removed from one another as possible.
He defends the idea of separating these two tasks, not only to separate ports but separate programs, on this thread on the IETF-SUBMIT mailing list.
So, yeah, his complaint against port 587 was simply that if you can't implement the SUBMIT standard correctly (which according to him noone can), you should use a different port then the one specified in that standard. The rest of the world doesn't care, because it sees all the various authentication methods (including SUBMIT) as extensions to SMTP, and not as a different protocol (OFMIP as DJB calls them collectively), and have no qualms running a standard (non-SUBMIT compliant) SMTP server on port 587.
It is useful because it allows ISPs to block port 25 for customers who do not run their own mail server (the vast majority of them). This makes it impossible for zombied machines to send mail directly , instead having to go through a relay. Open relays are much easier to filter against / get shutdown for abuse, than a whole swath of zombie computers. Mail going through authenticated relays is also easier to monitor for abuse, plus once the mailhosts relaying the authenticated mail are affected by zombie generated SPAM, they then have an incentive to do something about it.
In short it forces zombie SPAM to be channeled through choke points where it can be more easily identified and shutdown.
As for DJB, IIRC, his complaints against SUBMIT were entirely restricted to the fact that it will be yet another case where everyone implements defacto behavior, rather than following the standard to the letter, because the standard has some flaws in the way it is written. I agree that this is annoying for new implementers, as they have to look beyond the standard to "conventional wisdom" to figure out how to be interoperable. But this is true of every single network protocol in existence to varying degrees. I don't think he had any complaints about the idea of authenticated relays happening on a different port than mailhost-to-mailhost delivery. But, I can't find anything more detailed than what you posted so I can't say for sure.
This is one of those things that is obvious, but took a while to actually sink in. I was brought up to never just throw something out, because you might find some use for it in the future. It took me a long time to realize keeping something in the closet unused is just as wasteful as discarding it, especially if it is something that depletes in value (as in usefulness not just money) over time.
It is much better to find someone who will use it now, even if that takes a little more work on your part. And you might even get a little money back for your effort.
Windows 7 will be an abysmal failure, causing users to exodus from the grips of Microsoft's tyranny. Their stock will plummet and the company will be on the verge of collapse. It is at that point that they will come to their senses and release a new OS based on Linux. And they will call it Windows 8.
It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely.
Does this really matter to MS though? I've worked at two types of companies. The small ones, handled licensing on a computer by computer basis, and tried to keep it all documentation manually. These folks never had any problems with forced upgrades, as they new to buy computers without the OS, and also didn't have large enough IT needs to bother with virtualisation.
The larger ones found this to be too cumbersome and risky and instead have site licenses with Microsoft, and the amount that MS gets paid has absolutely nothing to do with which computers are running which version of Windows or Word - heck at my current company even OS X, Linux and Sun machines are included in the count of computers for the license. So given that does Microsoft really care whether folks are running older versions of windows, as long as all the VM instances are being counted?
And even if they could solve all the engineering problems, there is no way it will ever be economically viable to use prime real estate in the middle of Manhattan for farming. It will always cost more to farm in a sky scraper than on the ground, so they won't be able to compete in the global market against traditional farms. Furthermore, using it locally won't matter either. New York is a major shipping hub, and has more fresh food passing through it than the vast majority of the country, and as a consequence has lower grocery prices than many parts of the country.
The only point at which something like this would make sense is if we've transformed the vast majority of the planet into a giant city, like Tantor.
My favorite thing about that story is thinking about what sort of world these creatures came from. The fact that they know what meat is means that they have seen it (or something close to what we call meat), and obviously anything that is similar enough to be recognizable as meat, would be living tissue of sort. But the fact that they are repulsed by the fact that a sentient life form is made of this stuff, would make me think that they have never seen it in any sort of animate life whatsoever
So on their world muscle tissue must be some sort of inanimate life form like plants, or coral. This is somewhat weird as the whole purpose of muscle tissue is to move. Most of the inanimate life forms that we know on earth are designed to (more or less) passively absorb what they need to survive from the environment through photosynthesis and mineral absorption, whereas meat-based animals can rarely passively absorb what they need and rely on hunting to survive. Furthermore, meat required more nutrients and energy to support than the tissues needed for passive energy collection. But apparently the meat they have seen in the past has been "dumb" or passive enough that they were surprised when they saw it in something that they recognized as life.
So what would this alien meat be moving? Maybe it is more like heart or lung muscle than limb muscle and was pumping surrounding liquid into itself so it could absorb all the nutrients and then spit it back out - might be more efficient than passively collecting whatever liquid happened to flow near it. What would be controlling the meat - most of the muscle-bound creatures I can think of have a central nervous system to control them, but these must be more like a simple pacemaker or very simple chemical sensor/response mechanism.
And more importantly where can I get this amorphous meat to put into my garden/aquarium/floating gas clouds:)
It is unlikely that the person licensing the software is their sole customer, or that they paid for all or even a majority of the software development. When you are a small company who has any interest in building some "equity" from the work you get, you will be constantly be operating in a mode that is neither simply selling shrink-wrapped software or being paid to write software as work-for-hire but a mix of the two. I've never been directly involved in this sort of work, but from what I've seen on the outside, the terms and rights appear to be handled more through contracts than licenses.
What is the theft rate of laptops in private companies? With almost 10k employees, 13 computers a year doesn't sound that high, especially considering that Los Alamos would likely be more targeted for theft than a normal company. Note - these computers were not being used to process classified information, so there was no reason to protect them at a higher level than a normal company would protect Proprietary or Personnel information.
It ended up with ACCESS. I don't think they have any plans for it whatsoever. It was bought to make the next PalmOS, Colbalt, which ACCESS canceled in favor of their ACCESS Linux Platform. The only action I have heard about is that ACCESS shutdown YellowTab (a proprietary fork of BeOS by ZETA software), while they have been accepting and minimally supporting of Haiku (an open source reimplementation of BeOS).
Am I going to be able to use the WebOS when there's no wireless data connectivity?
Yes, it runs applications on the device, not on a remote server.
Can Palm ensure the security of my data while using WebOS?
Yes, it stores your data on the device, and only supplements it with existing data from remote servers when you want. Just like outlook has a local address book, but can also plug into the corporate-wide LDAP directory.
What happened to the rumored port of PalmOS to Linux? Are they going to open source it?
Palm does not own Palm OS. They split off into PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software) years ago. PalmSource was bought by ACCESS 4 years ago. They have the full rights to the PalmOS, and may choose to go forward with their linux port (ACCESS Linux Platform). However Palm (the hardware manufacturer) has no plans to use it.
I wish I hadn't posted in this thread already so I could mod you up. As a techie who isn't a professional network engineer, I find reading different peoples stories about problems they've had and how they fixed them to be really interesting. I don't care one bit whether they are the same problem as the one slashdot is facing right now.
So that's why it takes 30 seconds to request a DHCP address. As a lowly programmer (who docks and undocks his laptop constantly) I have never understood why something so simple should take so long. You learn something everyday. Thanks.
Look, do I really care to know the second a new program is released, a new patch? Look, why can't you just tell me the next time I reboot? Or hell, just run the updater when I execute the specific program and piss off when finished.
Actually, I hate it when an application checks for updates at start-up (like firefox does). When I'm starting up an application it's usually because I have something I want to do right now, and then the application decides that's a great and break my train of thought. So I always say no, and then forget about it till the next time I start the application and am annoyed again:) The system tray is much less distracting.
And reboot is no good either because I never reboot my laptop. But I agree with your first suggestion. It would really be nice if there was a single system updater on windows which checked for critical security updates daily and other updates weekly, rather than a half-dozen updaters all using system resources and behaving differently.
Seagate sells drives that do that today. If you are concerned about theft, and your motherboard supports it, that would absolutely be my first recommendation.
If you are also concerned about back doors, or just don't trust that the drive manufactures implemented their encyption correctly, then TrueCrypt is the best cross-platform software encryption method available. I wouldn't recommend using it for whole disk encryption though - it's just too slow. Use hardware for your first line of defense, and then use a TrueCrypt partition to store all the known sensitive files.
Ironkey has good hardware encryption for USB flash drives. There are others that do as well, but be careful because there are a lot of crappy flashdrives whose encryption is a complete joke. TrueCrypt is also a good choose for flash drives.
I haven't found an ideal solution for large external harddrives. AFAIK, sticking one of those hardware-encrypted drives into a USB caddy doesn't work because there is no mechanism for providing the password to the drive. eSata might work if your computer supports it. Otherwise you are stuck with software encryption.
You can encrypt your key with a password (I'm sure truecrypt supports this) but then you might as well just have used a password in the first place instead of encryption.
WTF? If someone steals a computer and puts a drive in another computer the windows/BIOS password won't do shit, encryption will.
What you do is store sensitive material on secure servers and have people check out copies of material that they have access to. I'm sure keeping sensitive data off local hard drives would be easier than actually protecting all those hard drives.
No it won't. If they need to use the data then it will be cached on their computer whether it is stored centrally or not. And if they weren't using the data then it wouldn't have been on the computer to begin with. Centralization will only help if you move from thick-client to a thin-client-like processing of data. That will limit the amount of distribution of sensitive manner - "checking data out" won't.
Oops this link didn't make it into my last post - must have messed up the HTML. Basically, a Microsoft representative is claiming that any edition of Windows 7 will be lightweight enough to run on a netbook (read: we are really canceling XP this time), however they will be marketing Starter Edition to the OEMs worldwide that want a low cost alternative.
The reason that Vista Starter Edition was never seen in US/Europe was because Microsoft would only license it for computers sold in developing countries. However, from what I've read, this time around Home Basic is going to be for developing countries only, while Starter Edition is going to be available to OEMs worldwide. The rational being that Windows (including Home Basic) is too expensive for small computers like netbooks, so Starter Edition will be the inexpensive alternative.
That said, I think it would be idiotic for anyone to sell a computer with Starter Edition on it, even a netbook, but Microsoft is making it an option this time, and business world doesn't have any shortage of idiots when it comes to cutting costs on products.
If it weren't for the fact that this announcement has been denied, I'd almost be willing to believe it. Sony now has a history of going for bizarre architectures in the hope that they will be revolutionary, but in the end require far more work from the developer, and eventually after several years of optimization end up with only slightly better performance than the other consoles.
I mean this is coming from the same company that claimed the PS3 will not have a GPU because the Cell processors will do everything, only to go crying to Nvidia at the last minute when that didn't work out. Now we have Intel here claiming to have an architecture (Larrabee) that does exactly what Sony wanted Cell to be to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't learned their lesson yet.
Subscribers get to see articles before they are posted on the main site (but they can't comment on them till they go live). To make it obvious that these were stories that havn't gone live yet, they are displayed with a red title. At some point in the transition to the new firehose-integrated index page, this code was broken and now sometimes live stories will be displayed with the red title. It's been like this for months, however, it appears that the slashdot team would rather spend time ruining the profile pages than fixing bugs in the (otherwise promising) index page.
Our mayor would just as soon shutdown all the bars in the city if it weren't for the tax revenue they generate. He is constantly grumbling about the problems that the downtown bars cause and blaming it on the mixing of alcohol and underage kids despite the fact that nearly all of the problems are occurring at underage clubs that serve no alcohol, while the all-ages music venues that he hates so much (because they have drinking and non-drinking sections in the same venue), are the source of very little crime.
Anyway, all that is to say that they keep bumping the requirements and liabilities that bar tenders have to verify their patrons' ages. They have been known to send barely under-age moles around to bars with fake ID's and fine bars if the bouncers didn't notice that the ID was fake. They also made it against the law to serve alcohol to people with vertical licenses (under-age folks have their licenses printed vertically rather than horizontally in NM), even if it says that they are over 21. Makes celebrating your 21st birthday at a bar difficult.
A while back a friend of mine was playing a show at a bar I hadn't been to before. I got to the door and the bouncer asked for my ID, so I handed it to him like normal. Before I even noticed what he was doing he swiped it through some machine mounted on the other side of the wall. I was pissed. If I'd known he was going to do that I would have turned around and left. Seeing as how the damage was already done I stayed for the show, but I told the bouncer that I would never be returning to this bar again. I didn't think to ask for the manager, I should have.
Anyway, given the pressure on them by the city, I can understand why the bars would want to protect themselves by doing this, but I don't know what that machines is doing with my information. It could just be reading the magstripe and displaying the info on it (nevermind that magstripes are easier and cheaper to fake that the visual aspects of the license), but it could also very well be checking with some database to verify that the license is valid, especially being mounted on the wall where you can't see if there is a telephone wire running to it. I'm not going to submit to that garbage.
They started with cigarettes and alcohol -- next it will be soda or fast food.
Amen. I already hear folks using the argument that people with bad diets harm them by increasing emergency room visits that they have to pay for. This sort of reasoning will only get worse when we are paying for healthcare directly. I'm sorry liberals, but I don't want your charity if you think it entitles you to dictate the way I live my life.
Slashdot Mirror
My younger brother got a new touchscreen phone the other day and was complaining about how the camera button was in a horrible spot, and was hard to use without pressing other buttons. I picked it up and held it sideways like a camera and none of my fingers came close to touching any buttons, except for the camera button that was under my right index finger right where the shutter button should be.
Me: Seems fine to me.
Him: Why would anyone want to hold it like *that*?
I still can't convince him to to not hold it like you would when taking a picture with a flip-phone.
I just reread your link. In it DJB explicitly advises against running authentication on port 25. In fact, for security reasons, he wrote two separate programs, qmail-smptd and ofmipd, to keep the tasks of relaying authenticated email and accepting mail for local delivery as removed from one another as possible.
He defends the idea of separating these two tasks, not only to separate ports but separate programs, on this thread on the IETF-SUBMIT mailing list.
So, yeah, his complaint against port 587 was simply that if you can't implement the SUBMIT standard correctly (which according to him noone can), you should use a different port then the one specified in that standard. The rest of the world doesn't care, because it sees all the various authentication methods (including SUBMIT) as extensions to SMTP, and not as a different protocol (OFMIP as DJB calls them collectively), and have no qualms running a standard (non-SUBMIT compliant) SMTP server on port 587.
It is useful because it allows ISPs to block port 25 for customers who do not run their own mail server (the vast majority of them). This makes it impossible for zombied machines to send mail directly , instead having to go through a relay. Open relays are much easier to filter against / get shutdown for abuse, than a whole swath of zombie computers. Mail going through authenticated relays is also easier to monitor for abuse, plus once the mailhosts relaying the authenticated mail are affected by zombie generated SPAM, they then have an incentive to do something about it.
In short it forces zombie SPAM to be channeled through choke points where it can be more easily identified and shutdown.
As for DJB, IIRC, his complaints against SUBMIT were entirely restricted to the fact that it will be yet another case where everyone implements defacto behavior, rather than following the standard to the letter, because the standard has some flaws in the way it is written. I agree that this is annoying for new implementers, as they have to look beyond the standard to "conventional wisdom" to figure out how to be interoperable. But this is true of every single network protocol in existence to varying degrees. I don't think he had any complaints about the idea of authenticated relays happening on a different port than mailhost-to-mailhost delivery. But, I can't find anything more detailed than what you posted so I can't say for sure.
This is one of those things that is obvious, but took a while to actually sink in. I was brought up to never just throw something out, because you might find some use for it in the future. It took me a long time to realize keeping something in the closet unused is just as wasteful as discarding it, especially if it is something that depletes in value (as in usefulness not just money) over time.
It is much better to find someone who will use it now, even if that takes a little more work on your part. And you might even get a little money back for your effort.
Windows 7 will be an abysmal failure, causing users to exodus from the grips of Microsoft's tyranny. Their stock will plummet and the company will be on the verge of collapse. It is at that point that they will come to their senses and release a new OS based on Linux. And they will call it Windows 8.
</delusional>
It gets people off the hardware and upgrade churn, whilst sill upgrading their real hardware, and allows people to run previous versions of Windows and applications pretty much indefinitely.
Does this really matter to MS though? I've worked at two types of companies. The small ones, handled licensing on a computer by computer basis, and tried to keep it all documentation manually. These folks never had any problems with forced upgrades, as they new to buy computers without the OS, and also didn't have large enough IT needs to bother with virtualisation.
The larger ones found this to be too cumbersome and risky and instead have site licenses with Microsoft, and the amount that MS gets paid has absolutely nothing to do with which computers are running which version of Windows or Word - heck at my current company even OS X, Linux and Sun machines are included in the count of computers for the license. So given that does Microsoft really care whether folks are running older versions of windows, as long as all the VM instances are being counted?
And even if they could solve all the engineering problems, there is no way it will ever be economically viable to use prime real estate in the middle of Manhattan for farming. It will always cost more to farm in a sky scraper than on the ground, so they won't be able to compete in the global market against traditional farms. Furthermore, using it locally won't matter either. New York is a major shipping hub, and has more fresh food passing through it than the vast majority of the country, and as a consequence has lower grocery prices than many parts of the country.
The only point at which something like this would make sense is if we've transformed the vast majority of the planet into a giant city, like Tantor.
My favorite thing about that story is thinking about what sort of world these creatures came from. The fact that they know what meat is means that they have seen it (or something close to what we call meat), and obviously anything that is similar enough to be recognizable as meat, would be living tissue of sort. But the fact that they are repulsed by the fact that a sentient life form is made of this stuff, would make me think that they have never seen it in any sort of animate life whatsoever
So on their world muscle tissue must be some sort of inanimate life form like plants, or coral. This is somewhat weird as the whole purpose of muscle tissue is to move. Most of the inanimate life forms that we know on earth are designed to (more or less) passively absorb what they need to survive from the environment through photosynthesis and mineral absorption, whereas meat-based animals can rarely passively absorb what they need and rely on hunting to survive. Furthermore, meat required more nutrients and energy to support than the tissues needed for passive energy collection. But apparently the meat they have seen in the past has been "dumb" or passive enough that they were surprised when they saw it in something that they recognized as life.
So what would this alien meat be moving? Maybe it is more like heart or lung muscle than limb muscle and was pumping surrounding liquid into itself so it could absorb all the nutrients and then spit it back out - might be more efficient than passively collecting whatever liquid happened to flow near it. What would be controlling the meat - most of the muscle-bound creatures I can think of have a central nervous system to control them, but these must be more like a simple pacemaker or very simple chemical sensor/response mechanism.
And more importantly where can I get this amorphous meat to put into my garden/aquarium/floating gas clouds :)
It is unlikely that the person licensing the software is their sole customer, or that they paid for all or even a majority of the software development. When you are a small company who has any interest in building some "equity" from the work you get, you will be constantly be operating in a mode that is neither simply selling shrink-wrapped software or being paid to write software as work-for-hire but a mix of the two. I've never been directly involved in this sort of work, but from what I've seen on the outside, the terms and rights appear to be handled more through contracts than licenses.
What is the theft rate of laptops in private companies? With almost 10k employees, 13 computers a year doesn't sound that high, especially considering that Los Alamos would likely be more targeted for theft than a normal company. Note - these computers were not being used to process classified information, so there was no reason to protect them at a higher level than a normal company would protect Proprietary or Personnel information.
It ended up with ACCESS. I don't think they have any plans for it whatsoever. It was bought to make the next PalmOS, Colbalt, which ACCESS canceled in favor of their ACCESS Linux Platform. The only action I have heard about is that ACCESS shutdown YellowTab (a proprietary fork of BeOS by ZETA software), while they have been accepting and minimally supporting of Haiku (an open source reimplementation of BeOS).
Am I going to be able to use the WebOS when there's no wireless data connectivity?
Yes, it runs applications on the device, not on a remote server.
Can Palm ensure the security of my data while using WebOS?
Yes, it stores your data on the device, and only supplements it with existing data from remote servers when you want. Just like outlook has a local address book, but can also plug into the corporate-wide LDAP directory.
What happened to the rumored port of PalmOS to Linux? Are they going to open source it?
Palm does not own Palm OS. They split off into PalmOne (hardware) and PalmSource (software) years ago. PalmSource was bought by ACCESS 4 years ago. They have the full rights to the PalmOS, and may choose to go forward with their linux port (ACCESS Linux Platform). However Palm (the hardware manufacturer) has no plans to use it.
I wish I hadn't posted in this thread already so I could mod you up. As a techie who isn't a professional network engineer, I find reading different peoples stories about problems they've had and how they fixed them to be really interesting. I don't care one bit whether they are the same problem as the one slashdot is facing right now.
So that's why it takes 30 seconds to request a DHCP address. As a lowly programmer (who docks and undocks his laptop constantly) I have never understood why something so simple should take so long. You learn something everyday. Thanks.
At $199, these netbooks won't cost you and arm and a leg...
Just two hands damaged from having to use that keyboard :)
Look, do I really care to know the second a new program is released, a new patch? Look, why can't you just tell me the next time I reboot? Or hell, just run the updater when I execute the specific program and piss off when finished.
Actually, I hate it when an application checks for updates at start-up (like firefox does). When I'm starting up an application it's usually because I have something I want to do right now, and then the application decides that's a great and break my train of thought. So I always say no, and then forget about it till the next time I start the application and am annoyed again :) The system tray is much less distracting.
And reboot is no good either because I never reboot my laptop. But I agree with your first suggestion. It would really be nice if there was a single system updater on windows which checked for critical security updates daily and other updates weekly, rather than a half-dozen updaters all using system resources and behaving differently.
Seagate sells drives that do that today. If you are concerned about theft, and your motherboard supports it, that would absolutely be my first recommendation.
If you are also concerned about back doors, or just don't trust that the drive manufactures implemented their encyption correctly, then TrueCrypt is the best cross-platform software encryption method available. I wouldn't recommend using it for whole disk encryption though - it's just too slow. Use hardware for your first line of defense, and then use a TrueCrypt partition to store all the known sensitive files.
Ironkey has good hardware encryption for USB flash drives. There are others that do as well, but be careful because there are a lot of crappy flashdrives whose encryption is a complete joke. TrueCrypt is also a good choose for flash drives.
I haven't found an ideal solution for large external harddrives. AFAIK, sticking one of those hardware-encrypted drives into a USB caddy doesn't work because there is no mechanism for providing the password to the drive. eSata might work if your computer supports it. Otherwise you are stuck with software encryption.
You can encrypt your key with a password (I'm sure truecrypt supports this) but then you might as well just have used a password in the first place instead of encryption.
WTF? If someone steals a computer and puts a drive in another computer the windows/BIOS password won't do shit, encryption will.
What you do is store sensitive material on secure servers and have people check out copies of material that they have access to. I'm sure keeping sensitive data off local hard drives would be easier than actually protecting all those hard drives.
No it won't. If they need to use the data then it will be cached on their computer whether it is stored centrally or not. And if they weren't using the data then it wouldn't have been on the computer to begin with. Centralization will only help if you move from thick-client to a thin-client-like processing of data. That will limit the amount of distribution of sensitive manner - "checking data out" won't.
Oops this link didn't make it into my last post - must have messed up the HTML. Basically, a Microsoft representative is claiming that any edition of Windows 7 will be lightweight enough to run on a netbook (read: we are really canceling XP this time), however they will be marketing Starter Edition to the OEMs worldwide that want a low cost alternative.
The reason that Vista Starter Edition was never seen in US/Europe was because Microsoft would only license it for computers sold in developing countries. However, from what I've read, this time around Home Basic is going to be for developing countries only, while Starter Edition is going to be available to OEMs worldwide. The rational being that Windows (including Home Basic) is too expensive for small computers like netbooks, so Starter Edition will be the inexpensive alternative.
That said, I think it would be idiotic for anyone to sell a computer with Starter Edition on it, even a netbook, but Microsoft is making it an option this time, and business world doesn't have any shortage of idiots when it comes to cutting costs on products.
If it weren't for the fact that this announcement has been denied, I'd almost be willing to believe it. Sony now has a history of going for bizarre architectures in the hope that they will be revolutionary, but in the end require far more work from the developer, and eventually after several years of optimization end up with only slightly better performance than the other consoles.
I mean this is coming from the same company that claimed the PS3 will not have a GPU because the Cell processors will do everything, only to go crying to Nvidia at the last minute when that didn't work out. Now we have Intel here claiming to have an architecture (Larrabee) that does exactly what Sony wanted Cell to be to begin with. I wouldn't be surprised if they hadn't learned their lesson yet.
Subscribers get to see articles before they are posted on the main site (but they can't comment on them till they go live). To make it obvious that these were stories that havn't gone live yet, they are displayed with a red title. At some point in the transition to the new firehose-integrated index page, this code was broken and now sometimes live stories will be displayed with the red title. It's been like this for months, however, it appears that the slashdot team would rather spend time ruining the profile pages than fixing bugs in the (otherwise promising) index page.
Our mayor would just as soon shutdown all the bars in the city if it weren't for the tax revenue they generate. He is constantly grumbling about the problems that the downtown bars cause and blaming it on the mixing of alcohol and underage kids despite the fact that nearly all of the problems are occurring at underage clubs that serve no alcohol, while the all-ages music venues that he hates so much (because they have drinking and non-drinking sections in the same venue), are the source of very little crime.
Anyway, all that is to say that they keep bumping the requirements and liabilities that bar tenders have to verify their patrons' ages. They have been known to send barely under-age moles around to bars with fake ID's and fine bars if the bouncers didn't notice that the ID was fake. They also made it against the law to serve alcohol to people with vertical licenses (under-age folks have their licenses printed vertically rather than horizontally in NM), even if it says that they are over 21. Makes celebrating your 21st birthday at a bar difficult.
A while back a friend of mine was playing a show at a bar I hadn't been to before. I got to the door and the bouncer asked for my ID, so I handed it to him like normal. Before I even noticed what he was doing he swiped it through some machine mounted on the other side of the wall. I was pissed. If I'd known he was going to do that I would have turned around and left. Seeing as how the damage was already done I stayed for the show, but I told the bouncer that I would never be returning to this bar again. I didn't think to ask for the manager, I should have.
Anyway, given the pressure on them by the city, I can understand why the bars would want to protect themselves by doing this, but I don't know what that machines is doing with my information. It could just be reading the magstripe and displaying the info on it (nevermind that magstripes are easier and cheaper to fake that the visual aspects of the license), but it could also very well be checking with some database to verify that the license is valid, especially being mounted on the wall where you can't see if there is a telephone wire running to it. I'm not going to submit to that garbage.
They started with cigarettes and alcohol -- next it will be soda or fast food.
Amen. I already hear folks using the argument that people with bad diets harm them by increasing emergency room visits that they have to pay for. This sort of reasoning will only get worse when we are paying for healthcare directly. I'm sorry liberals, but I don't want your charity if you think it entitles you to dictate the way I live my life.
I don't believe it :P