Most of these businesses tell their users that they NEVER ever request any private information in any e-mail.
If everyone was sensible they wouldn't get a response even if they did.
If any do send e-mail, they use my full name, not something generic like Dear **** user or other generic messages which is what the phishers use.
Rather the name on the account in question which may or may not be your "full name". There's also the factor of did you actually give your bank that email address.
Recently, there was an "employment agency" that sent out paper forms to applicants which were to be filled out and mailed in with a $20 cheque for a processing fee. The forms included sections for the Social Insurance Number, Driver's License number, DOB, mother's Maiden name, and other information not normally used by employers.
Their intent was to obtain credit cards from banks with the applicant's personal information - hence, they used four different company names. The good news was that they were raided.
The ironic thing is that it actually makes rather more sense for an employment agency to ask for than a bank. e.g. it would be stupid to offer a driving job to someone who dosn't drive, but completly unreasonable for a bank to deny a credit card depending on what kinds of vehicles their customers can and cannot drive on the public roads.
The real way to avoid being stung by phishing scams is to know that emails from anyone asking for personal or private information, passwords, credit card numbers etc. are almost certainly fake.
A simple metric would be that the party initiating the communication has to prove that they are who they say they are.
Europe doesn't tend to have the same vast cost of election campaigns that you have in the US, which makes the campaign cotribution issue much less important.
The EU is a lot more politically diverse than the US too. It would probably cost a fair bit to bribe every political party within the EU...
Most likely thing that would happen is that the EU would stop recognizing MS intellectual property and void all NDAs. At that point windows would pretty much be open source and MS would get the shaft.
It would only be open source if Microsoft couldn't remove/destroy all copies before they left.
Their only recourse would be to bribe enough politicians to wage war on europe. I am pretty sure Rumsfeld would salivate to wage war on "old europe" but I don't think that even the biggest war pig in washington would take on that cause.
Even with the US having military bases in Europe this wouldn't be the kind of pushover that Afghanistan and Iraq were.
Microsoft was attempting to use US Courts to get what they couldn't get in European Courts. The best analogy would be having your Mom tell you can't get into the cookie jar so you turn around and ask Dad
More like Mom's third cousin than Dad in this case:)
Now DVDs: Any TV. Composite input or better, even RF coax for some players. $50 player. $15ish media or $4 rentals. Benefits over VHS: hugely higher picture quality, interactive menus, digital surround sound, media which doesn't deteriorate over time, smaller media,
In many cases the "better picture quality" is only likely to be an issue with pause. The display being more of a limiting factor than the media. You also get multiple sound tracks and subtitles, both of which you can use when you want to as well as random access to the content.
After you discover that your purchased product is inferior to the pirated version, will you continue to purchase the crippled legal version?
Remembering that "inferior" can easily include such factors as when something is available and ability to "space shift". These can easily be more important than technical quality. Even price might be the most important factor. Especially where the choice is between having the "pirate version" now or waiting years for the "legal version". At some point the industry needs to realise that they need to "globalize" and that DRM mixed with malware drastically lowers the value of their product.
They already do that watermark stuff with screeners. Those people remove the watermarks from the screens already too.
It's not as if "screeners" are created for anyone's benefit except the studios'. Including allowing movies to be nominated for awards before they even been released.
Part of why they recompress (and strip out extras and other stuff) is because most DVDs are dual layer. Its significantly cheaper for the priate to recompress it to fit on a single layer blank than it is to produce a bit-for-bit copy on a dual layer disk.
One thing which often gets overlooked by the "industry" (and associated press) is that to the majority of viewers "quality" comes a long way behind availability. There are plenty of people who will quite happily watch a VHS recording full of dropout recorded from poor quality broadcast.
Some other standards efforts they have participated in include SVG and iCal, which are noteworthy for the exceedingly long time it took to ratify them. And wouldn't you know, in the meantime Microsoft was working on proprietary alternatives!
And/or plagurising the open standards for ideas they liked.
If they enforce the patent it would be a different story,
Unenforced (and occasionally enforced) patents are the business equivalent of land mines from old wars.
but sometimes companies have to take out patents just to protect themselves. It seems the trend is if you don't patent every possible idea in the world, some bullshit company will and then they will sue you.
It's perfectly possible for the company with a "protective patent" to become one of these parasites. e.g. if their primary business fails in some way (which could even happen because they have spent too much money on a patent "arms race"...) or they are taken over. The solution is getting rid of these kind of patents
You think the USA would benefit from being more isolationist?!
How is the US currently "isolationist" in any meaningful sense of the word? An isolationist US would hardly need military bases all over the planet (including in places where they are most unwelcome by the locals), nor would they need to be occupying several other countries, nor push so called "free trade agreements" which are nothing of the sort. Then you have the "petrodoller", Guam having North American telephone number, etc.
No, Mexico is part of a Spanish-language speaking region, and not part of the particular English-language region the US belongs to.
If your criteria were simply native language you could easily find quite a far parts of the US belong in the "Spanish North America Region" (which also includes Cuba). Then you've got the issue as to if the the rest of the US is it's own region or if it can be put with most of Canada and Belize as "English North America".
There are also problems with the amount of data needed to transmit IRV ballots for central counting; it's easier to physically ship all the ballots to a central location for counting
In most parts of the world transporting ballot boxes for counting isn't a problem. Even if the counting procedure is complex in most US elections it really shouldn't matter becuase there can be several months before the results take effect.
People nowadays seem to have a very limited concept of Democracy, literally "The common people rule". There is more to democracy than elections.
There are plenty of examples of elections existing without democracy. It's probably actually possible to have a system of government which is democratic without any elections at all. e.g. Ancient Athens randomly selected "juries" carried out legislative and executive functions. Somehow the idea of democracy equating to elections has become popular.
In a democracy with an elected government, The common people as a whole don't rule, an elected few do. Therefore it is important to make sure that the elected represent the common people. In order for that to happen, it is important for all of the common people's viewpoints be equally represented.
Part of this is addressed by the last part of The First Ammendment to the US Constitution. "... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." One big practical problem is how to ensure that the voice of the common person can be heard over that of corporate and political lobby groups. Which tends to mean that not only do viewpoints of ordinary people go unrepresented there are also viewpoints which ordinary people have little or no interest in being represented.
Another related thought on this is how the government knows that the translations are accurate?
This is just as much (if not more) of a problem with governments (who invariably have political leanings) doing the translations. Consider the "Bin Laden Tapes", where other people found the translation put out by the US Government to be at best misleading. Where you have the possibility of many translators you'd need a vast conspiracy to ensure consistent mistranslation. The larger the number of people involved in a conspiracy the greater the risk someone will make a "mistake" or "defect".
What I think is up with those documents is that they got filtered, anything important taken out beforehand, and these are the scraps given to the public.
Possibly other things have been added. Especially if the deletions would otherwise be too obvious.
Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6.
Not exactly a useful metric. Would you estimate the number of people literate in English by the number of English PhDs or Spanish according to the number of Spanish PhDs? It would make more sense to look at the number of Americans who are Arabs (especially those who have relatives in countries where Arabic is language most people use) or who are Muslim, since it's rather hard to read the Quran without understanding Arabic.
you think the usa government would release all of these docs out into the wild without knowing what was in them?
Probably more important what wasn't in them.
the last thing they'd want is some more proof of weapon sales to iraq from the 80's. these docs have all been examined already by the government and were determined worthless.
They may or may not be worthless. But they certainly will be non-harmful to anyone the US Government currently cares about. Assuming they (all) are actual Iraqi documents and not "cooked up" by the CIA.
If the Bush Administration doesn't destroy their records of the decisions that led up to the war,
They may just classify them for a long time and hope they rot...
it'll be real interesting to some future researchers to find out what really happened and when.
Historians have more chance of getting hold of documents involving Tony Blair and co. AFAIK the US has nothing functionaly equivalent to the "Thirty Year Act".
There's so much evidence that they were planning for the war from the first few weeks after Bush took office, but it wasn't until after 9/11 that they had a story they could successfully sell to the public. They're doing the best they can to lock up records and intimidate leakers, but at least reasonable shards of the truth will gradually leak out.
It takes quite a bit of "leakage" before things will not just get dismissed as "wild Conspiracy Theory". Even though history shows that menbers of governments enguage in all sorts of questionable behaviour somehow most people manage to maintain faith that the people "now" are somehow better than those "then".
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these businesses tell their users that they NEVER ever request any private information in any e-mail.
If everyone was sensible they wouldn't get a response even if they did.
If any do send e-mail, they use my full name, not something generic like Dear **** user or other generic messages which is what the phishers use.
Rather the name on the account in question which may or may not be your "full name". There's also the factor of did you actually give your bank that email address.
Recently, there was an "employment agency" that sent out paper forms to applicants which were to be filled out and mailed in with a $20 cheque for a processing fee. The forms included sections for the Social Insurance Number, Driver's License number, DOB, mother's Maiden name, and other information not normally used by employers.
Their intent was to obtain credit cards from banks with the applicant's personal information - hence, they used four different company names. The good news was that they were raided.
The ironic thing is that it actually makes rather more sense for an employment agency to ask for than a bank. e.g. it would be stupid to offer a driving job to someone who dosn't drive, but completly unreasonable for a bank to deny a credit card depending on what kinds of vehicles their customers can and cannot drive on the public roads.
The real way to avoid being stung by phishing scams is to know that emails from anyone asking for personal or private information, passwords, credit card numbers etc. are almost certainly fake.
A simple metric would be that the party initiating the communication has to prove that they are who they say they are.
Europe doesn't tend to have the same vast cost of election campaigns that you have in the US, which makes the campaign cotribution issue much less important.
The EU is a lot more politically diverse than the US too. It would probably cost a fair bit to bribe every political party within the EU...
Most likely thing that would happen is that the EU would stop recognizing MS intellectual property and void all NDAs. At that point windows would pretty much be open source and MS would get the shaft.
It would only be open source if Microsoft couldn't remove/destroy all copies before they left.
Their only recourse would be to bribe enough politicians to wage war on europe. I am pretty sure Rumsfeld would salivate to wage war on "old europe" but I don't think that even the biggest war pig in washington would take on that cause.
Even with the US having military bases in Europe this wouldn't be the kind of pushover that Afghanistan and Iraq were.
Microsoft was attempting to use US Courts to get what they couldn't get in European Courts. The best analogy would be having your Mom tell you can't get into the cookie jar so you turn around and ask Dad
:)
More like Mom's third cousin than Dad in this case
Now DVDs: Any TV. Composite input or better, even RF coax for some players. $50 player. $15ish media or $4 rentals. Benefits over VHS: hugely higher picture quality, interactive menus, digital surround sound, media which doesn't deteriorate over time, smaller media,
In many cases the "better picture quality" is only likely to be an issue with pause. The display being more of a limiting factor than the media. You also get multiple sound tracks and subtitles, both of which you can use when you want to as well as random access to the content.
After you discover that your purchased product is inferior to the pirated version, will you continue to purchase the crippled legal version?
Remembering that "inferior" can easily include such factors as when something is available and ability to "space shift". These can easily be more important than technical quality. Even price might be the most important factor. Especially where the choice is between having the "pirate version" now or waiting years for the "legal version".
At some point the industry needs to realise that they need to "globalize" and that DRM mixed with malware drastically lowers the value of their product.
They already do that watermark stuff with screeners. Those people remove the watermarks from the screens already too.
It's not as if "screeners" are created for anyone's benefit except the studios'. Including allowing movies to be nominated for awards before they even been released.
Part of why they recompress (and strip out extras and other stuff) is because most DVDs are dual layer. Its significantly cheaper for the priate to recompress it to fit on a single layer blank than it is to produce a bit-for-bit copy on a dual layer disk.
One thing which often gets overlooked by the "industry" (and associated press) is that to the majority of viewers "quality" comes a long way behind availability. There are plenty of people who will quite happily watch a VHS recording full of dropout recorded from poor quality broadcast.
Some other standards efforts they have participated in include SVG and iCal, which are noteworthy for the exceedingly long time it took to ratify them. And wouldn't you know, in the meantime Microsoft was working on proprietary alternatives!
And/or plagurising the open standards for ideas they liked.
Microsoft never have had much to do with standards, other than to completely ignore them and create their own stuff regardless.
You missed out "break them". Especually the classing "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"...
If they enforce the patent it would be a different story,
Unenforced (and occasionally enforced) patents are the business equivalent of land mines from old wars.
but sometimes companies have to take out patents just to protect themselves. It seems the trend is if you don't patent every possible idea in the world, some bullshit company will and then they will sue you.
It's perfectly possible for the company with a "protective patent" to become one of these parasites. e.g. if their primary business fails in some way (which could even happen because they have spent too much money on a patent "arms race"...) or they are taken over.
The solution is getting rid of these kind of patents
You think the USA would benefit from being more isolationist?!
How is the US currently "isolationist" in any meaningful sense of the word? An isolationist US would hardly need military bases all over the planet (including in places where they are most unwelcome by the locals), nor would they need to be occupying several other countries, nor push so called "free trade agreements" which are nothing of the sort. Then you have the "petrodoller", Guam having North American telephone number, etc.
Although on second thoughts, do I also have to be cut off from every other country or is it just a USA vs Rest of the World divide? :-)
The latter would hardly qualify as "news"...
No, Mexico is part of a Spanish-language speaking region, and not part of the particular English-language region the US belongs to.
If your criteria were simply native language you could easily find quite a far parts of the US belong in the "Spanish North America Region" (which also includes Cuba). Then you've got the issue as to if the the rest of the US is it's own region or if it can be put with most of Canada and Belize as "English North America".
There are also problems with the amount of data needed to transmit IRV ballots for central counting; it's easier to physically ship all the ballots to a central location for counting
In most parts of the world transporting ballot boxes for counting isn't a problem. Even if the counting procedure is complex in most US elections it really shouldn't matter becuase there can be several months before the results take effect.
People nowadays seem to have a very limited concept of Democracy, literally "The common people rule". There is more to democracy than elections.
There are plenty of examples of elections existing without democracy. It's probably actually possible to have a system of government which is democratic without any elections at all. e.g. Ancient Athens randomly selected "juries" carried out legislative and executive functions. Somehow the idea of democracy equating to elections has become popular.
In a democracy with an elected government, The common people as a whole don't rule, an elected few do. Therefore it is important to make sure that the elected represent the common people. In order for that to happen, it is important for all of the common people's viewpoints be equally represented.
Part of this is addressed by the last part of The First Ammendment to the US Constitution. "... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." One big practical problem is how to ensure that the voice of the common person can be heard over that of corporate and political lobby groups.
Which tends to mean that not only do viewpoints of ordinary people go unrepresented there are also viewpoints which ordinary people have little or no interest in being represented.
Another related thought on this is how the government knows that the translations are accurate?
This is just as much (if not more) of a problem with governments (who invariably have political leanings) doing the translations. Consider the "Bin Laden Tapes", where other people found the translation put out by the US Government to be at best misleading.
Where you have the possibility of many translators you'd need a vast conspiracy to ensure consistent mistranslation. The larger the number of people involved in a conspiracy the greater the risk someone will make a "mistake" or "defect".
What I think is up with those documents is that they got filtered, anything important taken out beforehand, and these are the scraps given to the public.
Possibly other things have been added. Especially if the deletions would otherwise be too obvious.
Another thing you are underestimating - how many good arabic speakers do you think there are in the US? I heard this statistic a while back - in the US, a country of 300 million people - how many PhDs were awarded in 2004 for Arabic? 10,000? 1,000? No - 6.
Not exactly a useful metric. Would you estimate the number of people literate in English by the number of English PhDs or Spanish according to the number of Spanish PhDs?
It would make more sense to look at the number of Americans who are Arabs (especially those who have relatives in countries where Arabic is language most people use) or who are Muslim, since it's rather hard to read the Quran without understanding Arabic.
you think the usa government would release all of these docs out into the wild without knowing what was in them?
Probably more important what wasn't in them.
the last thing they'd want is some more proof of weapon sales to iraq from the 80's. these docs have all been examined already by the government and were determined worthless.
They may or may not be worthless. But they certainly will be non-harmful to anyone the US Government currently cares about.
Assuming they (all) are actual Iraqi documents and not "cooked up" by the CIA.
If the Bush Administration doesn't destroy their records of the decisions that led up to the war,
They may just classify them for a long time and hope they rot...
it'll be real interesting to some future researchers to find out what really happened and when.
Historians have more chance of getting hold of documents involving Tony Blair and co. AFAIK the US has nothing functionaly equivalent to the "Thirty Year Act".
There's so much evidence that they were planning for the war from the first few weeks after Bush took office, but it wasn't until after 9/11 that they had a story they could successfully sell to the public. They're doing the best they can to lock up records and intimidate leakers, but at least reasonable shards of the truth will gradually leak out.
It takes quite a bit of "leakage" before things will not just get dismissed as "wild Conspiracy Theory". Even though history shows that menbers of governments enguage in all sorts of questionable behaviour somehow most people manage to maintain faith that the people "now" are somehow better than those "then".
I'm interested. If you think there were no weapons of mass destruction why do you suppose Saddam kept stalling the UN inspectors over all those years?
Some of one lot were caught spying. Plenty of the stalling came from places other than Iraq anyway.
Recall that Clinton bombed Iraq in '98 for not letting the UN inspectors in.
When was the US not bombing Iraq? It's rather hard to find weapons inspectors who actually want to go somewhere which is being bombed.
This is no test of "open government" or any such claptrap.
:)
Wasn't this on Slashdot last week anyway
This is pablum that lets right wing folks cloud the air with cries of "...but...but...tomorrow document X comes out, and it'll PROVE we're right!"
Or rather "In the future the evidence to prove our conspiracy theory correct will be found. Because currently we have no evidence at all."