The Taliban are more like Islamic Puritans (and just as big on "fun is evil"). The Christian Puritans fled England to escape religious persecution.
They initially went to the Netherlands, but didn't like too much religious freedom:)
When the Catholics came to the same colony for the same reason, the Puritans turned around and subjected them to the same persecution the Puritans had come here to escape.
Just because a group claims to be opressed does not mean that they are incapable of opressing others, given half a chance. It's easy to find historical examples of either "tit for tat" or where a group is deliberatly opressed with the intention of "protecting the public".
Changing US foreign policy might not change Bin Laden's mind at this late date, but it would slow down his recruitment and keep other Al Qaedas from being formed.
If order to be effective a rather drastic change would probably be needed. Including the slaughter of some "sacred cows".
But nope, we are going back to Iraq to repeat the same mistakes all over again.
Nor is the Middle East the only part of the world where the US has made itself enemies. Anyway this is a textbook example of repeating history by failing to learn from it.
If these guys were not such hypocrites, they would never be caught. The Taliban, etc want to take things back to the glory days of the pre-1000 A.D. Muslim empire, except when it is inconvenient (such as using technology like cell phones).
The irony being that this Muslim empire was highly technologically advanced.
In reality, a "democratic" government can and generally does do whatever it wants for the period in power, even when a majority of the people strongly oppose a policy. What we call democracy has an element of public representation, but the only choice the public gets in how they are ruled, is the difference in policies of the various candidates at election time.
You mean what they claim their policies will be once they are elected. They could easily lie or make impossible claims to try and persuade people to vote for them. They also choose which policies they want to be advertised. You also have the situation where there is no difference between the policies of different candidates/parties (or they are all acting on behalf of some third party). The fewer candiates stand the worst things are likely to be from the point of view of voter choice.
And now, since Mutual Assured Destruction is not that mutual anymore, madness is back. Farewell Irak, Iran, Siria, Lebanon. North Korea? mmm i don't know. They might have a couple of nukes, and since American government just doesn't mess with someone who can strike back...
One thing about weapons of mass destruction is that they allow MAD to be possible without parity of weapon numbers. North Korea can use a nuclear deterrent against the US. The rest of the list self evidently do not have any such weapons, if they did they would be saying "mess with us and one of your cities burns".
This way, the thugs can break into the tracking system and use it to know when you leave, and just walk in without the guns next time.
Assuming the thugs have to break in at all. If you have a society where you have some people who are only "watchers" and some people who are only "watched", it's very likely that organised mischief makers will want to be amongst the former than tha latter group. About the only way around the "who watches the watchers?" issue is the "transparent society" where anyone can be either watcher or watched.
If you're a professional athlete, or a politician, or yes, a terrorist, there SHOULD be a plethora of information about you available at the fingertips of those that need to know.
The problem is that it's often politicans and other public officials which want information about them keeping secret. Those who "need to know" very often does include the general public.
If you're an average person though, no one WANTS to dig through your dirty laundry. Don't kid yourself about how interesting you really are.
A corrupt politican or police officer may well want to do so. Especially if it distracts attention away from their own actions.
And as anyone who watches FOX TV (purveyors of fine car-crunching cop video mayhem since 1986!) knows, there are even video cameras in patrol cars that run all the time! The cops are video taping everyone! Oh, the horror!
Except, of course, where they might show a cop doing something wrong. Same way criminal cops don't like being videoed by members of the public.
in New Zealand sloppy wording of this kind of thing happens quite often.
They recently had an update to our liquer laws which essentially made it illegal to transport alchaol anywhere.
Hardly restricted to New Zealand. Best example IMHO involves US Congressmen getting upset by the implications of a bill they passed on campaign finance reform...
Unfortunately, the people that are engaging in illegal activities online know what they're doing is illegal. So they cover their tracks to make it sufficiently difficult to be tracked down.
How is this unique to "online crime"? If whatever is already illegal then the problem is with law enforcement not lack of statutes. Passing more laws won't help. Removing laws e.g. those concerning recreational drugs, might help. Since that would free up resources for law enforcement.
If when planning terrorist activities any carrier could be held liable then I'd save to say it's time to lock up every phone & cellular company - they're aiding and abetting terrorism!
Assuming you have room in the jails. Which would also be full of people from paper, pen and pencil making companies together with postal workers.
he DLLs are rarely hard locked. Most of the time, the installer can rename the DLL which is currently in use, queue the temp file to delete on the next reboot, place new DLL version into its intended place. The apps will continue using the temp file DLL until they are restarted, at which point they will pick up the updated DLL.
Maybe in the future Micosoft will make it possible to delete a file when it is in use and have its resources vanish when it is closed. Like unix has been able to do for ages:) Is it really that difficult to design libraries which are interchangable, e.g. using a jumptable or function index? The real problem is that Windows still carries a lot of single user assumptions in its design.
It's concurrent versioning, not just a resource tag. You still can only have one funkydll.dll in your system32 directory. You need either a name-based versioning (like linux and many 3rd pary libraries use), which would sadly break older apps, or you need to pull some funky tricks to allow older apps to still work (maybe) while allowing versioning as you go forward.
In practice you don't really need any funky tricks since it isn't actually a requirement that DLLs always be in c:\windows\system in the first place.
Absolute nonsense. All we need is a treaty that top level domains will be handled in a compatible fashion, so that folsk in.de can resolve domain names in.ru,.us, uk, etc. Those countries can then resolve disputes within their domains according to their own laws, without the heavy hand of ICANN and its injustice-for-money-your-way resolution approach.
Especially since the likes of trademarks are subject to national laws in the first place.
For international domains, such as.com,.org,.edu, etc. the body responsible for administering the treaty can be used.
How many top level international domains are actually needed? Especially were the DNS to be used as intended.
You want us to go straighten out Africa while we're waiting to finish off Iraq? Do you really think that and change that we would make would make a lasting improvement? Change comes from within.
Attempting to force things from outside is more likely to hamper change.
The best we can do is provide a supportive environment for people to come to the right decision.
What makes you think that the US and Europe (primarily Britain and France) are suddenly going to change their policies of repressing self determination. Iraq is as likely to be "sorted out" as Afganistan was.
Lets face it people, a train isn't glamerous technology, but it is a lot cheaper to keep running per mile than any other transportation technology out there. If you go to India or China, you don't see interstates or large fancy airports outside of the main cities. You do have rail going to any place with a post office, though.
Trains can be glamerous technology. Japan and France being the obvious examples.
Actually, this is a harsher penalty. They have to justify themselves in a public forum, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
This isn't a penalty, it's still a trial. A penalty would involve fines, freezing of assets, confiscation of property, etc.
Do you know how hard it is to prove your innocence? Think about it - if someone accuses you of a crime you didn't commit, and you have to prove your innocence, can you? In most cases, not likely.
So does this make RAMBUS part of the "axis of evil(tm)"?
This could really be something for high speed communications infrastructures. Take cities: digging is hard
It's also expensive, since you are likely to have to dig up paved surfaces and repave them after. (As well as avoiding all the other services which might be down there.) That's combined with having to get permission from several land owners to do the digging in the first place.
It sounds like a VERY nice system for short-range, non-critical communictaions, but personally, I can't think of any points I would want to communicate to where I have line-of-sight...
They give an example in the article. Where you need to communicate across a public road. (N.B. in New Zealand "motorway" means any surfaced road.) Indeed any case where you need to communicate between several buildings fairly close together. Digging a cable trench is very expensive.
If I could get an inexpensive device that could communicate for about 10 miles, I would certainly get several.
They estimate that it can do up to 11km. With a single repeater 16km sounds plausable.
If you live outside of the US, click here [ibm.com]. for a list of phone numbers to contact a repair center.
Strange how they list what looks like an international freephone number for Turkey. Unless Turkey, like North America, has a non standard numbering plan.
We started receiving reports of burnt out monitors from other stores and one day, as I walked by the sales counter, I noticed an acrid smell. I looked at the nearest POS terminal and sure enough, the monitor was smoking. We unplugged it and replaced it, but I never did hear of a recall of the monitors, and the retailer continued to sell the same monitors to customers.
Without either looking inside or checking a service manual you can't be sure that it was actually the same monitor. Far easier to quietly fix a design fault than issue a recall.
The article seemed to suggest that an ID number used by the power company would be used as a sort of "universal id", but didn't offer any details as to how this would work (and why it would offer any more protection than any other kind of identifier). What's to keep someone from digging through somebody's garbage to obtain their ID from their electric bill?
Currently if someone got hold of your electricity customer number they couldn't do that much and you'd only have to deal with one entity to get something done about it.
It seems to me that with all the nifty encryption technology now available, Big Brother attempts like this could do a better job of preventing fraud than just coming up with another global id scheme.
Encryption simply protects data in transit from interception and alteration. It dosn't verify the data being sent actually is the data it claims to be.
The only thing that would make this scheme different that current identification methods is the automatic notification (by email) any time the URU identity is used:
Not quite the idea is to have the same ID used for unconnected things. Which is a generally bad idea.
I suspect that someone's URU ID could be misused by someone else as easily as any other ID, but at least you would find out about such misuse before the cops/creditors come pounding on your door.
Unless they are able to also compromise the contact details. e.g. using the ID to get at your email.
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The Taliban are more like Islamic Puritans (and just as big on "fun is evil"). The Christian Puritans fled England to escape religious persecution.
:)
They initially went to the Netherlands, but didn't like too much religious freedom
When the Catholics came to the same colony for the same reason, the Puritans turned around and subjected them to the same persecution the Puritans had come here to escape.
Just because a group claims to be opressed does not mean that they are incapable of opressing others, given half a chance. It's easy to find historical examples of either "tit for tat" or where a group is deliberatly opressed with the intention of "protecting the public".
Changing US foreign policy might not change Bin Laden's mind at this late date, but it would slow down his recruitment and keep other Al Qaedas from being formed.
If order to be effective a rather drastic change would probably be needed. Including the slaughter of some "sacred cows".
But nope, we are going back to Iraq to repeat the same mistakes all over again.
Nor is the Middle East the only part of the world where the US has made itself enemies. Anyway this is a textbook example of repeating history by failing to learn from it.
If these guys were not such hypocrites, they would never be caught. The Taliban, etc want to take things back to the glory days of the pre-1000 A.D. Muslim empire, except when it is inconvenient (such as using technology like cell phones).
The irony being that this Muslim empire was highly technologically advanced.
There's one thing in the USA that overrides the Constitution - international treaties.
The US is quite notorious for breaking and ignoring treaties. But has it ever actually done so over a conflict with the US constitution?
In reality, a "democratic" government can and generally does do whatever it wants for the period in power, even when a majority of the people strongly oppose a policy. What we call democracy has an element of public representation, but the only choice the public gets in how they are ruled, is the difference in policies of the various candidates at election time.
You mean what they claim their policies will be once they are elected. They could easily lie or make impossible claims to try and persuade people to vote for them. They also choose which policies they want to be advertised. You also have the situation where there is no difference between the policies of different candidates/parties (or they are all acting on behalf of some third party).
The fewer candiates stand the worst things are likely to be from the point of view of voter choice.
And now, since Mutual Assured Destruction is not that mutual anymore, madness is back. Farewell Irak, Iran, Siria, Lebanon. North Korea? mmm i don't know. They might have a couple of nukes, and since American government just doesn't mess with someone who can strike back...
One thing about weapons of mass destruction is that they allow MAD to be possible without parity of weapon numbers. North Korea can use a nuclear deterrent against the US. The rest of the list self evidently do not have any such weapons, if they did they would be saying "mess with us and one of your cities burns".
This way, the thugs can break into the tracking system and use it to know when you leave, and just walk in without the guns next time.
Assuming the thugs have to break in at all. If you have a society where you have some people who are only "watchers" and some people who are only "watched", it's very likely that organised mischief makers will want to be amongst the former than tha latter group.
About the only way around the "who watches the watchers?" issue is the "transparent society" where anyone can be either watcher or watched.
If you're a professional athlete, or a politician, or yes, a terrorist, there SHOULD be a plethora of information about you available at the fingertips of those that need to know.
The problem is that it's often politicans and other public officials which want information about them keeping secret. Those who "need to know" very often does include the general public.
If you're an average person though, no one WANTS to dig through your dirty laundry. Don't kid yourself about how interesting you really are.
A corrupt politican or police officer may well want to do so. Especially if it distracts attention away from their own actions.
And as anyone who watches FOX TV (purveyors of fine car-crunching cop video mayhem since 1986!) knows, there are even video cameras in patrol cars that run all the time! The cops are video taping everyone! Oh, the horror!
Except, of course, where they might show a cop doing something wrong. Same way criminal cops don't like being videoed by members of the public.
in New Zealand sloppy wording of this kind of thing happens quite often.
They recently had an update to our liquer laws which essentially made it illegal to transport alchaol anywhere.
Hardly restricted to New Zealand. Best example IMHO involves US Congressmen getting upset by the implications of a bill they passed on campaign finance reform...
Unfortunately, the people that are engaging in illegal activities online know what they're doing is illegal. So they cover their tracks to make it sufficiently difficult to be tracked down.
How is this unique to "online crime"? If whatever is already illegal then the problem is with law enforcement not lack of statutes. Passing more laws won't help. Removing laws e.g. those concerning recreational drugs, might help. Since that would free up resources for law enforcement.
If when planning terrorist activities any carrier could be held liable then I'd save to say it's time to lock up every phone & cellular company - they're aiding and abetting terrorism!
Assuming you have room in the jails. Which would also be full of people from paper, pen and pencil making companies together with postal workers.
he DLLs are rarely hard locked. Most of the time, the installer can rename the DLL which is currently in use, queue the temp file to delete on the next reboot, place new DLL version into its intended place. The apps will continue using the temp file DLL until they are restarted, at which point they will pick up the updated DLL.
:) Is it really that difficult to design libraries which are interchangable, e.g. using a jumptable or function index?
Maybe in the future Micosoft will make it possible to delete a file when it is in use and have its resources vanish when it is closed. Like unix has been able to do for ages
The real problem is that Windows still carries a lot of single user assumptions in its design.
It's concurrent versioning, not just a resource tag. You still can only have one funkydll.dll in your system32 directory. You need either a name-based versioning (like linux and many 3rd pary libraries use), which would sadly break older apps, or you need to pull some funky tricks to allow older apps to still work (maybe) while allowing versioning as you go forward.
In practice you don't really need any funky tricks since it isn't actually a requirement that DLLs always be in c:\windows\system in the first place.
Absolute nonsense. All we need is a treaty that top level domains will be handled in a compatible fashion, so that folsk in .de can resolve domain names in .ru, .us, uk, etc. Those countries can then resolve disputes within their domains according to their own laws, without the heavy hand of ICANN and its injustice-for-money-your-way resolution approach.
.com, .org, .edu, etc. the body responsible for administering the treaty can be used.
Especially since the likes of trademarks are subject to national laws in the first place.
For international domains, such as
How many top level international domains are actually needed? Especially were the DNS to be used as intended.
You want us to go straighten out Africa while we're waiting to finish off Iraq? Do you really think that and change that we would make would make a lasting improvement? Change comes from within.
Attempting to force things from outside is more likely to hamper change.
The best we can do is provide a supportive environment for people to come to the right decision.
What makes you think that the US and Europe (primarily Britain and France) are suddenly going to change their policies of repressing self determination.
Iraq is as likely to be "sorted out" as Afganistan was.
Lets face it people, a train isn't glamerous technology, but it is a lot cheaper to keep running per mile than any other transportation technology out there. If you go to India or China, you don't see interstates or large fancy airports outside of the main cities. You do have rail going to any place with a post office, though.
Trains can be glamerous technology. Japan and France being the obvious examples.
Actually, this is a harsher penalty. They have to justify themselves in a public forum, no ifs, no ands, no buts.
This isn't a penalty, it's still a trial. A penalty would involve fines, freezing of assets, confiscation of property, etc.
Do you know how hard it is to prove your innocence? Think about it - if someone accuses you of a crime you didn't commit, and you have to prove your innocence, can you? In most cases, not likely.
So does this make RAMBUS part of the "axis of evil(tm)"?
This could really be something for high speed communications infrastructures. Take cities: digging is hard
It's also expensive, since you are likely to have to dig up paved surfaces and repave them after. (As well as avoiding all the other services which might be down there.) That's combined with having to get permission from several land owners to do the digging in the first place.
It sounds like a VERY nice system for short-range, non-critical communictaions, but personally, I can't think of any points I would want to communicate to where I have line-of-sight...
They give an example in the article. Where you need to communicate across a public road. (N.B. in New Zealand "motorway" means any surfaced road.)
Indeed any case where you need to communicate between several buildings fairly close together. Digging a cable trench is very expensive.
If I could get an inexpensive device that could communicate for about 10 miles, I would certainly get several.
They estimate that it can do up to 11km. With a single repeater 16km sounds plausable.
Some places do have ordinances against light pollution. I wonder how this would fit in.
Usually "light pollution" is considered to be lighting up the sky.
Also, will it come with a warning, such as "Do not look at transmitter with remaining good eye"?
The system uses LEDs not lasers.
A copyright is invalid if you do not enforce it.
No, you are confusing trademarks with copyrights here.
If you live outside of the US, click here [ibm.com]. for a list of phone numbers to contact a repair center.
Strange how they list what looks like an international freephone number for Turkey. Unless Turkey, like North America, has a non standard numbering plan.
We started receiving reports of burnt out monitors from other stores and one day, as I walked by the sales counter, I noticed an acrid smell. I looked at the nearest POS terminal and sure enough, the monitor was smoking. We unplugged it and replaced it, but I never did hear of a recall of the monitors, and the retailer continued to sell the same monitors to customers.
Without either looking inside or checking a service manual you can't be sure that it was actually the same monitor. Far easier to quietly fix a design fault than issue a recall.
The article seemed to suggest that an ID number used by the power company would be used as a sort of "universal id", but didn't offer any details as to how this would work (and why it would offer any more protection than any other kind of identifier). What's to keep someone from digging through somebody's garbage to obtain their ID from their electric bill?
Currently if someone got hold of your electricity customer number they couldn't do that much and you'd only have to deal with one entity to get something done about it.
It seems to me that with all the nifty encryption technology now available, Big Brother attempts like this could do a better job of preventing fraud than just coming up with another global id scheme.
Encryption simply protects data in transit from interception and alteration. It dosn't verify the data being sent actually is the data it claims to be.
The only thing that would make this scheme different that current identification methods is the automatic notification (by email) any time the URU identity is used:
Not quite the idea is to have the same ID used for unconnected things. Which is a generally bad idea.
I suspect that someone's URU ID could be misused by someone else as easily as any other ID, but at least you would find out about such misuse before the cops/creditors come pounding on your door.
Unless they are able to also compromise the contact details. e.g. using the ID to get at your email.