So, exactly how is that different from Kent State, almost exactly 34 years ago?
Four were killed and nine wounded at Kent State. An estimated 2600 were killed and over 7000 wounded in the Tiananmen Square massacre.
No serious researcher claims that the Ohio National Guardsmen were acting under orders when they fired on the students. No serious researcher doubts that the Chinese Army soldiers were acting under orders when they fired on the protestors.
The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on the Kent State students were indicted and prosecuted. (They were not convicted, and I won't dispute that the investigation and prosecution may have been half-hearted -- but they were indicted and prosecuted.) The Chinese Army soldiers who fired on the Tiananmen Square protestors were not.
And there is no caste or class system in the US, right?
That's correct. There are informal, de facto classes in the US, but there is no system that locks anybody into any class, and certainly no caste system. Many Americans and immigrants to the US start with nothing and become wealthy. And many others start out affluent, and through substance abuse or other destructive behaviors end up living in shelters or on the street.
No, I don't. I'm not talking about trying to defraud the merchant at point-of-sale. I'm talking about counteracting the after-sale tracking that people are concerned about.
I wonder if it's feasible to employ counter-measures. These RFID tags are supposed to be very cheap, some say as low as US$0.01 each, certainly no higher than US$0.10 each. So how about, instead of trying to remove or disable the RFID tag on some product, you mask it with a bunch of bogus tags? Would we be able to make it look like our pair of Dockers is a pack of gum? A truckload of VCRs?
I can see some problems with this approach, though. I doubt these tags are re-programmable, and it probably works like UPC, with the first several digits of the code identifying the manufacturer, and the rest denoting the SKU and individual unit. And if the technology is such that readers can scan entire pallets of merchandise all at once, as they're off-loaded from trucks at the loading dock, then counter-measures probably wouldn't be effective -- you'd show up as a pair of Dockers, a pack of gum, AND a truckload of VCRs.
Still, if enough people obfuscated enough product, such that after-sale tag scanning was known to be completely unreliable, the incentive to do it might be eliminated.
TI-99 BASIC didn't have WHILE. It didn't even have IF/THEN, only IF/GOTO and IF/GOSUB. I'm pretty sure it lacked ELSE as well, so you had to do stuff like:
And many (most?) late '70s/early '80s BASIC dialects didn't support indenting, so code listings were a real pain to read.
This was the time when magazines like COMPUTE! would publish code listings for "type-and-run" programs, often with a few hundred lines of POKE statements. (TI-99 BASIC didn't have POKE either, but that's another story.)
Re:Have you heard of the internet?
on
JOE Hits 3.0
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· Score: 1
As others have said, the 'Net may not be available (which may be the very problem you're trying to address). But beyond that, it frustrates me to have to put the original problem I need to solve into my mental "return stack" long enough to download and install another editor.
I used pico for my first three or four years on Linux, and I ran into that situation quite often (compounded by the fact that pico wasn't in its own package, but part of the pine package). I finally sat down for a half hour with vimtutor and learned it well enough to be able to do the basics.
Of course, I knew I'd forget how to use it if I didn't use it often, so I started using vim instead of pico for daily tasks, even though it took me a little longer at first. Once I was fluent in it, I found I had been seduced by it as well -- now I don't want to use anything else. I still get stung occasionally by the vim/vi differences (vi is ubiquitous -- vim isn't), but that's really a minor frustration -- I only have to use bare-bones vi when vim isn't available, and it's not different enough to cripple me, just to slow me down a little.
But I would agree that vi/vim is an admin's or programmer's tool. If you're strictly a user, then by all means use what you like. (Hell, if you're an admin or programmer, use what you like anyway -- what do I care?)
There are huge exhaust ports for what looks like three main engines and four auxiliary/steering engines, but they're all just stuck on the stern bulkhead. Where are the actual engines? Wouldn't you expect at least the mains to run about half the length of the ship?
Article VII. The ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the states so ratifying the same. (Emphasis mine)
Please note that Clay is stepping down because his views are not adopted by all of LULA. There are about 10 million people in the L.A. area -- we don't all think alike.
I'm a member of LULA, and I know Clay. While I don't agree with his stance on Iraq, or with his view that we should somehow try to keep Linux and other Free Software out of the hands of the military, I certainly defend his right to speak his mind. Clay makes his living selling and supporting Linux systems, and has been doing so for close to ten years. He as much as anyone has invested his money and career in Linux. I agree that his stance contradicts RMS and the GPL, but I wouldn't presume to tell him what he can or can't say.
Who is "we" anyway? Slashdot readers? Linux users? Linux advocates? Whatever "we" is, surely you're not suggesting that "we" have to toe a party line?
Liability? You have no reasonable expectation of privacy if you're sitting in a movie theater. It's a public place. People are allowed to look at you. You do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a bathroom stall, so it's a bogus comparison.
I think a year in jail is about right for taping a movie in a theater. The punishment for getting caught needs to be balanced against the financial incentive for doing it in the first place.
I went to the grocery store a couple days ago and they were giving away free chickens, but for some weird reason they wanted me to go through the hassle of cooking them myself. Now I could have opened up a cookbook, but I just felt lazy, and they didn't look THAT great through the plastic wrap, so I ended up trashing them.
My point? I was interested in poultry distribution and I ended up trashing two chickens because Foster Farms didn't bother to cook them for me. Because the chicken farmers didn't bother to fry up these birds in a tasty recipe with eleven herbs and spices for someone who still has to learn home economics.
I know, many people here will probably tell me that frying a chicken is as basic as heating up a pan full of oil. But as a chicken eater, I felt highly uninterested in learning the inner workings of my kitchen or the food they were giving away.
Indeed, when you travel to a foreign country, where you can't communicate using their language, you can still get such necessities as food by pointing at things (or at pictures of things).
The whole point of transubstantiation is that it's supposed to be hard to believe. It's one of the Great Mysteries of the faith. The dogma says that the bread and wine of the Eucharist, when consecrated, become "wholly and substantially" the body and blood of Christ -- but in every detail of outward appearance, they would seem to be bread and wine. If you put them under a microscope, or tested them with a spectrometer, they would appear to be just bread and wine. It's splitting hairs, and it seems goofy, but bottom line it's a simple act of faith. Is it really any harder to believe than the idea that Jesus rose from death and forty days later ascended into Heaven (wherever that is)?
So if I understand this correctly, a targetted attack that exploited the same vulnerability that, say, the Blaster worm exploits, and was mis-diagnosed by the Windows admin as a Blaster worm incident, would not be counted in this "study".
Basically, you're right. You can't sniff if you don't have access to the packets, which means being on the same ethernet. But you should be paranoid about what may already be on your network. Do you really know your router isn't sniffing and sending logs to somebody? How about your DNS server? How about that Windows box that UPS put in for the shipping dock? How about that webcam with the built-in web server?
As for getting SecurID authentication before giving access to the ethernet port, how are you going to do that? It has to authenticate to something, and if it can't use the network, what is it authenticating to? And how secure is that?
If he's tired of living in Boston, he should probably give up reporting Boston local news, and leave the job to somebody who likes Boston and lives in Boston. I wonder why the other radio stations in Boston aren't making a big deal about this. Maybe because they're doing it too? Or at least want to keep their options open?
Right. This whole scheme is to incentivize broadcasters to create and broadcast HDTV programming. How about this alternative: "Hey, you guys are licensed to serve the public interest remember? If you don't want to broadcast HDTV, we'll re-assign your licenses to somebody who will."
...and let the kids recite the Gettysburg Address. It's more stirring, it has a better pedigree, and it's not a Loyalty Oath. Oh, it's still got that "nation under God" phrase? Darn. How about just reciting the national motto, "In God we trust"? No good? Sing the national anthem? Well, the first verse is okay, since it's mostly about stuff getting blowed up, but suppose somebody notices that the later verses invoke the Almighty? Can't have that, can we? I know! Let's teach our kids what's really important in today's America, and have them recite the Microsft EULA. They should be able to get through it in time for lunch.
Careful there... a question like "how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights?" turns out to be not so easy. Everybody knows the answer is "ten", right? Wrong. Seventeen articles of amendment were passed by the House of Representatives in the First Congress, twelve of them were passed by the Senate, 10 were ratified by three-quarters of the States, and took effect in December of 1791, and one more of the twelve (pay raises for Congress cannot take effect until after an intervening election) was finally ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1992 and became the 27th Amendment. So depending on how you look at it, the answer could conceivably be 10, 11, or even 12 or 17.
First project -- when you deliver a sharp verbal "NO!" to your computer and smack it with a rolled-up newspaper, it should stop whatever it's doing, whimper, and try something else. The AI community hasn't made nearly enough progress in the rolled-up-newspaper-recognition field.
I'm usually not a "conspiracy theory" type, but my gut tells me that Microsoft is behind this, and that the whole idea is for SCO to lose. This gives Microsoft a poster boy for the fight against the Evil, Viral, IP-Corrupting GPL. "Look at poor SCO," they'll say. "They tried to work with the Open Source crowd, but those evil commies stole their IP and tricked them into giving it away, and as a result, they were destroyed." It doesn't matter that it's not true -- it'll look true enough to people.
ATM transactions are not secret. When I use an ATM, I get a receipt that shows the date and time, the account number (or at least enough of it to verify after the fact), the type and the amount of the transaction. The bank prints their own copy of this same information on a roll of paper inside the ATM, and records it at the bank's processing center. The bank knows who I am, and I know who they are. If there is an error, fraud, or some other foul play, the bank and I can go to our paper records and resolve any discrepancy. If necessary, we can take these paper records to court and resolve things there. I trust my bank to play it straight with me because 1) if they're cheating me, they're probably cheating a lot of other people and 2) somebody more fastidious than me is going to catch them at it.
Voting is entirely different. The voting system does not (must not!) record who I am along with who I voted for. The touch-screen voting systems I've read about provide no verification that a voter's choices have been accurately recorded and transmitted. They don't seem to provide printed backup either. That leaves the door wide open for foul play.
Let's say you added even a very rudimentary auditing procedure -- you count people as they enter the voting booth, then count the total number of ballots at the end of the day. If the number of ballots is equal to or lower than the number of voters (it's perfectly valid for a voter to enter the booth and then choose not to vote) then everything's okay. But what if the number of ballots is higher than the number of voters? What do you do? Invalidate all the ballots from that precinct? Have a state-wide re-vote? Anything you do is going to favor one candidate/party/position and disenfranchise others. If you have a system with paper backup -- a ballot box into which each voter drops one ballot under supervision -- then you have an option. Namely, you count the paper ballots by hand.
Slashdot Mirror
- Four were killed and nine wounded at Kent State. An estimated 2600 were killed and over 7000 wounded in the Tiananmen Square massacre.
- No serious researcher claims that the Ohio National Guardsmen were acting under orders when they fired on the students. No serious researcher doubts that the Chinese Army soldiers were acting under orders when they fired on the protestors.
- The Ohio National Guardsmen who fired on the Kent State students were indicted and prosecuted. (They were not convicted, and I won't dispute that the investigation and prosecution may have been half-hearted -- but they were indicted and prosecuted.) The Chinese Army soldiers who fired on the Tiananmen Square protestors were not.
And there is no caste or class system in the US, right?That's correct. There are informal, de facto classes in the US, but there is no system that locks anybody into any class, and certainly no caste system. Many Americans and immigrants to the US start with nothing and become wealthy. And many others start out affluent, and through substance abuse or other destructive behaviors end up living in shelters or on the street.
No, I don't. I'm not talking about trying to defraud the merchant at point-of-sale. I'm talking about counteracting the after-sale tracking that people are concerned about.
I wonder if it's feasible to employ counter-measures. These RFID tags are supposed to be very cheap, some say as low as US$0.01 each, certainly no higher than US$0.10 each. So how about, instead of trying to remove or disable the RFID tag on some product, you mask it with a bunch of bogus tags? Would we be able to make it look like our pair of Dockers is a pack of gum? A truckload of VCRs?
I can see some problems with this approach, though. I doubt these tags are re-programmable, and it probably works like UPC, with the first several digits of the code identifying the manufacturer, and the rest denoting the SKU and individual unit. And if the technology is such that readers can scan entire pallets of merchandise all at once, as they're off-loaded from trucks at the loading dock, then counter-measures probably wouldn't be effective -- you'd show up as a pair of Dockers, a pack of gum, AND a truckload of VCRs.
Still, if enough people obfuscated enough product, such that after-sale tag scanning was known to be completely unreliable, the incentive to do it might be eliminated.
TI-99 BASIC didn't have WHILE. It didn't even have IF/THEN, only IF/GOTO and IF/GOSUB. I'm pretty sure it lacked ELSE as well, so you had to do stuff like:
10 PRINT "Enter your choice (1/2/3)":
20 INPUT CHOICE
30 IF CHOICE = 1 GOSUB 100
40 IF CHOICE = 2 GOSUB 200
50 IF CHOICE <> 3 GOTO 80
60 GOSUB 300
70 GOTO 10
80 PRINT "Invalid response!"
90 GOTO 10
And many (most?) late '70s/early '80s BASIC dialects didn't support indenting, so code listings were a real pain to read.
This was the time when magazines like COMPUTE! would publish code listings for "type-and-run" programs, often with a few hundred lines of POKE statements. (TI-99 BASIC didn't have POKE either, but that's another story.)
As others have said, the 'Net may not be available (which may be the very problem you're trying to address). But beyond that, it frustrates me to have to put the original problem I need to solve into my mental "return stack" long enough to download and install another editor.
I used pico for my first three or four years on Linux, and I ran into that situation quite often (compounded by the fact that pico wasn't in its own package, but part of the pine package). I finally sat down for a half hour with vimtutor and learned it well enough to be able to do the basics.
Of course, I knew I'd forget how to use it if I didn't use it often, so I started using vim instead of pico for daily tasks, even though it took me a little longer at first. Once I was fluent in it, I found I had been seduced by it as well -- now I don't want to use anything else. I still get stung occasionally by the vim/vi differences (vi is ubiquitous -- vim isn't), but that's really a minor frustration -- I only have to use bare-bones vi when vim isn't available, and it's not different enough to cripple me, just to slow me down a little.
But I would agree that vi/vim is an admin's or programmer's tool. If you're strictly a user, then by all means use what you like. (Hell, if you're an admin or programmer, use what you like anyway -- what do I care?)
There are huge exhaust ports for what looks like three main engines and four auxiliary/steering engines, but they're all just stuck on the stern bulkhead. Where are the actual engines? Wouldn't you expect at least the mains to run about half the length of the ship?
Article VII. The ratification of the conventions of nine states, shall be sufficient for the establishment of this Constitution between the states so ratifying the same. (Emphasis mine)
Please note that Clay is stepping down because his views are not adopted by all of LULA. There are about 10 million people in the L.A. area -- we don't all think alike.
I'm a member of LULA, and I know Clay. While I don't agree with his stance on Iraq, or with his view that we should somehow try to keep Linux and other Free Software out of the hands of the military, I certainly defend his right to speak his mind. Clay makes his living selling and supporting Linux systems, and has been doing so for close to ten years. He as much as anyone has invested his money and career in Linux. I agree that his stance contradicts RMS and the GPL, but I wouldn't presume to tell him what he can or can't say.
Who is "we" anyway? Slashdot readers? Linux users? Linux advocates? Whatever "we" is, surely you're not suggesting that "we" have to toe a party line?
Liability? You have no reasonable expectation of privacy if you're sitting in a movie theater. It's a public place. People are allowed to look at you. You do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in a bathroom stall, so it's a bogus comparison.
I think a year in jail is about right for taping a movie in a theater. The punishment for getting caught needs to be balanced against the financial incentive for doing it in the first place.
I went to the grocery store a couple days ago and they were giving away free chickens, but for some weird reason they wanted me to go through the hassle of cooking them myself. Now I could have opened up a cookbook, but I just felt lazy, and they didn't look THAT great through the plastic wrap, so I ended up trashing them.
My point? I was interested in poultry distribution and I ended up trashing two chickens because Foster Farms didn't bother to cook them for me. Because the chicken farmers didn't bother to fry up these birds in a tasty recipe with eleven herbs and spices for someone who still has to learn home economics.
I know, many people here will probably tell me that frying a chicken is as basic as heating up a pan full of oil. But as a chicken eater, I felt highly uninterested in learning the inner workings of my kitchen or the food they were giving away.
Indeed, when you travel to a foreign country, where you can't communicate using their language, you can still get such necessities as food by pointing at things (or at pictures of things).
In case you haven't noticed, George W. Bush is already President. Enjoy the Great White North, eh?
The whole point of transubstantiation is that it's supposed to be hard to believe. It's one of the Great Mysteries of the faith. The dogma says that the bread and wine of the Eucharist, when consecrated, become "wholly and substantially" the body and blood of Christ -- but in every detail of outward appearance, they would seem to be bread and wine. If you put them under a microscope, or tested them with a spectrometer, they would appear to be just bread and wine. It's splitting hairs, and it seems goofy, but bottom line it's a simple act of faith. Is it really any harder to believe than the idea that Jesus rose from death and forty days later ascended into Heaven (wherever that is)?
So if I understand this correctly, a targetted attack that exploited the same vulnerability that, say, the Blaster worm exploits, and was mis-diagnosed by the Windows admin as a Blaster worm incident, would not be counted in this "study".
Basically, you're right. You can't sniff if you don't have access to the packets, which means being on the same ethernet. But you should be paranoid about what may already be on your network. Do you really know your router isn't sniffing and sending logs to somebody? How about your DNS server? How about that Windows box that UPS put in for the shipping dock? How about that webcam with the built-in web server?
As for getting SecurID authentication before giving access to the ethernet port, how are you going to do that? It has to authenticate to something, and if it can't use the network, what is it authenticating to? And how secure is that?
If he's tired of living in Boston, he should probably give up reporting Boston local news, and leave the job to somebody who likes Boston and lives in Boston. I wonder why the other radio stations in Boston aren't making a big deal about this. Maybe because they're doing it too? Or at least want to keep their options open?
Yeah, exactly, you think you'd ever find an Einstein working in a patent office?
Right. This whole scheme is to incentivize broadcasters to create and broadcast HDTV programming. How about this alternative: "Hey, you guys are licensed to serve the public interest remember? If you don't want to broadcast HDTV, we'll re-assign your licenses to somebody who will."
...and let the kids recite the Gettysburg Address. It's more stirring, it has a better pedigree, and it's not a Loyalty Oath. Oh, it's still got that "nation under God" phrase? Darn. How about just reciting the national motto, "In God we trust"? No good? Sing the national anthem? Well, the first verse is okay, since it's mostly about stuff getting blowed up, but suppose somebody notices that the later verses invoke the Almighty? Can't have that, can we? I know! Let's teach our kids what's really important in today's America, and have them recite the Microsft EULA. They should be able to get through it in time for lunch.
Careful there... a question like "how many amendments are in the Bill of Rights?" turns out to be not so easy. Everybody knows the answer is "ten", right? Wrong. Seventeen articles of amendment were passed by the House of Representatives in the First Congress, twelve of them were passed by the Senate, 10 were ratified by three-quarters of the States, and took effect in December of 1791, and one more of the twelve (pay raises for Congress cannot take effect until after an intervening election) was finally ratified by three-quarters of the states in 1992 and became the 27th Amendment. So depending on how you look at it, the answer could conceivably be 10, 11, or even 12 or 17.
I never knew that GM had a yeast division. Well, I'll tell you one thing: I want the Cadillac yeast, not any of that cheap Chevy yeast.
First project -- when you deliver a sharp verbal "NO!" to your computer and smack it with a rolled-up newspaper, it should stop whatever it's doing, whimper, and try something else. The AI community hasn't made nearly enough progress in the rolled-up-newspaper-recognition field.
I'm usually not a "conspiracy theory" type, but my gut tells me that Microsoft is behind this, and that the whole idea is for SCO to lose. This gives Microsoft a poster boy for the fight against the Evil, Viral, IP-Corrupting GPL. "Look at poor SCO," they'll say. "They tried to work with the Open Source crowd, but those evil commies stole their IP and tricked them into giving it away, and as a result, they were destroyed." It doesn't matter that it's not true -- it'll look true enough to people.
ATM transactions are not secret. When I use an ATM, I get a receipt that shows the date and time, the account number (or at least enough of it to verify after the fact), the type and the amount of the transaction. The bank prints their own copy of this same information on a roll of paper inside the ATM, and records it at the bank's processing center. The bank knows who I am, and I know who they are. If there is an error, fraud, or some other foul play, the bank and I can go to our paper records and resolve any discrepancy. If necessary, we can take these paper records to court and resolve things there. I trust my bank to play it straight with me because 1) if they're cheating me, they're probably cheating a lot of other people and 2) somebody more fastidious than me is going to catch them at it.
Voting is entirely different. The voting system does not (must not!) record who I am along with who I voted for. The touch-screen voting systems I've read about provide no verification that a voter's choices have been accurately recorded and transmitted. They don't seem to provide printed backup either. That leaves the door wide open for foul play.
Let's say you added even a very rudimentary auditing procedure -- you count people as they enter the voting booth, then count the total number of ballots at the end of the day. If the number of ballots is equal to or lower than the number of voters (it's perfectly valid for a voter to enter the booth and then choose not to vote) then everything's okay. But what if the number of ballots is higher than the number of voters? What do you do? Invalidate all the ballots from that precinct? Have a state-wide re-vote? Anything you do is going to favor one candidate/party/position and disenfranchise others. If you have a system with paper backup -- a ballot box into which each voter drops one ballot under supervision -- then you have an option. Namely, you count the paper ballots by hand.