Basically yes. CIA ran a forum that the terrorist were using to communicate. The DOD decided it was a security risk and shut it down.
Given the former's history of supporting terrorism the latter could probbaly say they made an "honest mistake". It's easy to suspect the intentions of a "poacher turned gamekeeper" when they still behave like a "poacher" at times:)
The military intelligence guys say "what do you mean doing no good, we have dozens of people here talking about extremist acts, and we only lose track of a quarter of them!", totally missing the point that they now have a dozen untracked extremists, and three dozen who are currently tracked whereas without the site they would have had half a dozen untracked ones!
It's quite possible that without the "site" you'd have at least four dozen untracked ones. Since it's not like this honey pot is the only place they could be discussing whatever...
You have to specifically apply for them, can choose which bank/credit card issuer you like and if the card is lost or stolen it dosn't expose lots of personal information.
And travel cards like the Oyster card?
This also has one specific purpose, paying for travel. If you lose it all someone who finds it can do is travel, at least until you cancel it.
Seriously, it would actually be quite useful to have one standardised, secure card that could be used to authenticate with banks etc.
From a security POV it is actually better to have each bank use their own method of authenticating their customers (and if needs be their customers authenticating the bank). The latter being something many banks have difficulty with. Resulting in banks telephoning their customers then sounding like "phishers".
The security arrangements at the moment are woefully inadequate, and a physical token will add another layer of security.
A multi-function "ID card" isn't an especially useful way to do this. Such an item is only useful as an "identifier" when an account number is far more useful in this context.
"no intelligent businessman would operate such a money-losing enterprise"
I wouldn't call a $1 Billion profit a loss...
The point is that it wasn't at the end of the 18th century. Took rather a while to generate any kind of profit. Also considering the size and turnover of the "business" isn't exactly "high profit" over two hundred years later.
"We're the electric company. We don't HAVE to." Amerin is only beholden to its stockholders, since their customers have no other choice for electricity. OTOH if CWLP's service is bad, the Mayor loses his job; the customers/citizens own CWKP.
In the latter case the "stockholders" and the "customers" are mainly the same people. It's also likely to be rather easier to contact the Mayor than Amerin's CEO.
Exactly, it should be the LOCAL governments that do this. If the local city/county wanted to pass a bond or even a sales tax increase to pay for it, I would vote for it. Especially since it's a lot easier to vote that lot out of office if they don't deliver than it is the people inside the Beltway.
Probably easier to get rid of than your State government too. Government, like many other things, appears to have an optimal size. Those who created federal nations appear to have understood this.
Yes let's Prohibit gun ownership.
It ought to work as well as the Prohibition
of marijuana and alcohol worked.
The obvious difference is that the "war on drugs" dosn't involve administering the drugs in question to police officers. Whereas it's hard to see how a "ban on guns" would also result in disarming "cops".
Where I live electricity is not a monopoly. I have the choice of about 10 different companies, and it works great. We have the cheapest electricity in the U.S. at only 8.9 cents per KWH.
I suspect you mean you have 10 different resellers not that you have 10 different supply cables you can connect to...
In parts of the U.S. the electrical (and other) utilities are operated by a government entity, a "public utility district" or P.U.D. In other places, the electrical utilities, at least, are run by profiteers. Guess which system works better? And by better, we mean cheaper, more reliable, and of higher quality. That's right, all of the above. The reason for this is simple - accountability. In a marketplace that defines a natural monopoly, the mythical "invisible hand" of market economics is, de facto, not in play. Consumers can't shop for a better deal and, not being share holders, have no other influence on the provider. The P.U.D. customer, on the other hand, has the equivalent of share holder status. He/she has a vote that will elect the officials who will run the "company". The officials' jobs are tied to the customers' satisfaction above all else. And guess what? It works.
However there appears to be a maximum size for a public company to work effectivly. Try to make such a company "too big" and you end up with something accountable to nobody. Whilst a national public company might work for Iceland or The Netherlands it is unlikely to work in The UK, France, Germany, etc. In the US even some of the States might well be too large in area/population.
I agree that sanctioned monopolies are bad, competition universally brings lower prices and better service.
Public utilities generally fall into the catagory of "natural monopolies". There's only so much physical space to run cables and pipes to wherever they are needed. You also probably don't want a flood whilst a dozen different water companies argue over who's pipes are leaking or a gas explosion because nobody knows which one out of 10 supplies needs to be isolated.
On the other hand, I can't think of any broadband provider who does not have easements to steal the use of property, a government granted monopoly to sell in a market, or use the public's wireless spectrum for private profit, or simply sponge off/resell someone else whom does so.
Then you even get to the daft situation of telecomms companies taking legal action to prevent city governments providing data networks which the telecomms companies don't want to provide.
Broadband is not a free market by any means so its pointless to pretend that it is. Take Take Take from the public, the least the public should ask for is universal service
Indeed having the right to run cables over/under just about anyone's land only really makes sense together with an obligation to provide service to anyone who wants it.
The government has already cost us $200-$300 billion in "telecommunications fees" for this very service, high-speed broadband, during the 1990s. That plan cost us dearly, but never materialized. We shouldn't be paying for it again
Especially if there's no way to be sure that the same thing won't happen again... Those who really should be paying are the "people" who took the money and didn't deliver the goods in the first place. Either by providing what was paid for themselves or finding whoever is prepared to do the job with the money (including the interest on it for 10 plus years). This kind of enforcement being exactly the kind of thing governments get paid to do.
Well, the cancellation page says:
"WARNING: Cancelling your MySpace account will permanently remove all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photos, comments, blog entries, videos, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register your current email address after cancelling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch. "
Which seems to suggest that they will delete your data - assuming you're prepared to believe anything spewing from the many fetid mouths of the Murdochian Empire.
It only says that you can't get it back (in the original form) it says nothing about what the company may still be able to do with it. Even if they were actually telling lies what's likely to happen to them?
I don't think deleting your Myspace account will do anything. They already have your data and you already agreed to allow them to redistribute it, just because you delete your account doesn't mean they have to delete your data.
Might be better to somehow "pollute" the data first...
The movie industry OTOH seems to still be trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Witness the way blu-ray has far more competently designed protection than DVD and the fact that they are going to ban new player designs and then later any new players from having HD analog outputs and they have the ability to bar movies from playing in HD over unprotected channels on older players.
With out those involved realising that DRM actually encourages piracy.
Pirating is not free. Everybody takes a risk by pirating of being sued or wasting our time downloading malware, something of bad quality, or bogus files.
Most of those risks apply to paid for software. Even paying for software does not always protect you from lawsuits if the vendor has infringed patents or pirated themselves.
However, money can't buy the BBC Formula 1 television coverage over here in Canada, and the TSN excerpts are abysmal.
At least not without having to physically travel. In which case your money would go to the airline and hotel industries.
North American Formula 1 fans NEED torrents to get what the people of Great Britain get as a matter of course.
And to you wonderful people who record the BBC coverage and upload the torrents, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
No doubt F1 fans all over the world appreciate such torrents. There's clearly an untapped market for global distribution of television. The "industry" is shooting itself in the foot through having regional and staggered distribution models. Some "staggering" would make sense due to timezone differences, but this is measured in hours rather than days, weeks, months (even years).
In the UK at least, for the BBC you have *already* paid for it via the Licence Fee.
Note that in the UK a drama series will generally be at least nearly complete before a single episode is shown. The kind of "mid season cancellation" which occurs in North American Productions due to poor ratings of the first few episodes thus can't happen.
And no, here are some differences between cults and religions. These include the cult tendency to focus around a single, charismatic leader whose word is absolute law, and their tendency to conceal their genuine inner beliefs in layers that each must be struggled through by new initiates, and each is further divorced from the beliefs taught at the outer layers. This is part of what helps separate the cult inner core from the outer world, and helps bind them together among others who have learned to share those new increasingly bizarre core beliefs.
Note also that cults need not be in any way "religious".
There used to be a pretty good organization for publishing information about cults and helping people get the facts and support from former members, called "Cult Awareness Network", but they got sued to bankruptcy and their assets taken over by Scientology, so now they're a pro-cult organization.
More likely they are pro Scientology. Cults tend to be highly "anti-social" when it comes other cults.
Sorry, but the (I think 2006) credit card rules revisions do not allow the credit card company to cancel subscription billing. Nor can they cancel the card to stop the charges. The only way out is to get the company that is making them terminate the subscription billing.
This being the same company which asked for the card details as part of a standard one time transaction then used the same details for a "subscription"?
And even more important - the bug may be a combination of software and hardware. Just ask what may happen if the code suddenly jumps to the wrong address. Do they use ECC memories in the electronics? What about a voltage spike? Driver has wrong socks/pants causing a spark that jumps to the OBD-II connector and messes up the CAN bus?
Other questions would be "What kind of transducer is measuring the input?"; "How many transducers are there?" and "What output do you get in the case of a failure?" Note that there are applications where an unknown throttle setting resulting in full power being applied is the right thing to do. Maybe Toyota through they were building a light aircraft rather than a car...
One of these days, I'm going to write an economics paper on what I call convergopolies. These are markets where the players converge to offering very similar products, targeted at identical segments at similar pricing. UK supermarkets are a great example - I don't know if US ones are the same, but here we have several supermarkets who offer almost identical product ranges, with similar segmentation (premium/standard/value) and fairly close pricing. The effect of a convergopoly is that the players believe they are competing with each other, but in fact they aren't.
More likely they know full we they arn't competing. It's not as if supermarket prices can be kept secret and if would be rather expensive to attempt to bar customers who worked for a rival supermarket...
It is a medical device which means that it is subject to insane levels of litigation. Mostly you are probably paying for insurance.
But that dosn't really explain the $13000 price difference between the 4 and 12 band EQ. The other part of the equation is that a digital device can be mass produced. It's not as if anyone needs to design and build an electronic circuit to fit an audiologist's prescription. Instead the device can be programmed. The only likely custom part is a casing to fit someone's ear.
AuMatar seemed to be suggesting that Christian fundamentalists overwhelmingly favor lower taxes for the purpose of reducing government, despite relying heavily on government programs, services, and pork.
Given that these people often stress the Old Testament over the New you'd expect them to be against pork:)
Slashdot Mirror
Basically yes. CIA ran a forum that the terrorist were using to communicate. The DOD decided it was a security risk and shut it down.
:)
Given the former's history of supporting terrorism the latter could probbaly say they made an "honest mistake".
It's easy to suspect the intentions of a "poacher turned gamekeeper" when they still behave like a "poacher" at times
The military intelligence guys say "what do you mean doing no good, we have dozens of people here talking about extremist acts, and we only lose track of a quarter of them!", totally missing the point that they now have a dozen untracked extremists, and three dozen who are currently tracked whereas without the site they would have had half a dozen untracked ones!
It's quite possible that without the "site" you'd have at least four dozen untracked ones. Since it's not like this honey pot is the only place they could be discussing whatever...
How is this different to debit and credit cards?
You have to specifically apply for them, can choose which bank/credit card issuer you like and if the card is lost or stolen it dosn't expose lots of personal information.
And travel cards like the Oyster card?
This also has one specific purpose, paying for travel. If you lose it all someone who finds it can do is travel, at least until you cancel it.
Seriously, it would actually be quite useful to have one standardised, secure card that could be used to authenticate with banks etc.
From a security POV it is actually better to have each bank use their own method of authenticating their customers (and if needs be their customers authenticating the bank). The latter being something many banks have difficulty with. Resulting in banks telephoning their customers then sounding like "phishers".
The security arrangements at the moment are woefully inadequate, and a physical token will add another layer of security.
A multi-function "ID card" isn't an especially useful way to do this. Such an item is only useful as an "identifier" when an account number is far more useful in this context.
"no intelligent businessman would operate such a money-losing enterprise"
I wouldn't call a $1 Billion profit a loss...
The point is that it wasn't at the end of the 18th century. Took rather a while to generate any kind of profit. Also considering the size and turnover of the "business" isn't exactly "high profit" over two hundred years later.
"We're the electric company. We don't HAVE to." Amerin is only beholden to its stockholders, since their customers have no other choice for electricity. OTOH if CWLP's service is bad, the Mayor loses his job; the customers/citizens own CWKP.
In the latter case the "stockholders" and the "customers" are mainly the same people. It's also likely to be rather easier to contact the Mayor than Amerin's CEO.
Exactly, it should be the LOCAL governments that do this. If the local city/county wanted to pass a bond or even a sales tax increase to pay for it, I would vote for it. Especially since it's a lot easier to vote that lot out of office if they don't deliver than it is the people inside the Beltway.
Probably easier to get rid of than your State government too.
Government, like many other things, appears to have an optimal size. Those who created federal nations appear to have understood this.
Yes let's Prohibit gun ownership.
It ought to work as well as the Prohibition of marijuana and alcohol worked.
The obvious difference is that the "war on drugs" dosn't involve administering the drugs in question to police officers. Whereas it's hard to see how a "ban on guns" would also result in disarming "cops".
Where I live electricity is not a monopoly. I have the choice of about 10 different companies, and it works great. We have the cheapest electricity in the U.S. at only 8.9 cents per KWH.
I suspect you mean you have 10 different resellers not that you have 10 different supply cables you can connect to...
In parts of the U.S. the electrical (and other) utilities are operated by a government entity, a "public utility district" or P.U.D. In other places, the electrical utilities, at least, are run by profiteers. Guess which system works better? And by better, we mean cheaper, more reliable, and of higher quality. That's right, all of the above. The reason for this is simple - accountability. In a marketplace that defines a natural monopoly, the mythical "invisible hand" of market economics is, de facto, not in play. Consumers can't shop for a better deal and, not being share holders, have no other influence on the provider. The P.U.D. customer, on the other hand, has the equivalent of share holder status. He/she has a vote that will elect the officials who will run the "company". The officials' jobs are tied to the customers' satisfaction above all else. And guess what? It works.
However there appears to be a maximum size for a public company to work effectivly. Try to make such a company "too big" and you end up with something accountable to nobody. Whilst a national public company might work for Iceland or The Netherlands it is unlikely to work in The UK, France, Germany, etc. In the US even some of the States might well be too large in area/population.
I agree that sanctioned monopolies are bad, competition universally brings lower prices and better service.
Public utilities generally fall into the catagory of "natural monopolies". There's only so much physical space to run cables and pipes to wherever they are needed. You also probably don't want a flood whilst a dozen different water companies argue over who's pipes are leaking or a gas explosion because nobody knows which one out of 10 supplies needs to be isolated.
On the other hand, I can't think of any broadband provider who does not have easements to steal the use of property, a government granted monopoly to sell in a market, or use the public's wireless spectrum for private profit, or simply sponge off/resell someone else whom does so.
Then you even get to the daft situation of telecomms companies taking legal action to prevent city governments providing data networks which the telecomms companies don't want to provide.
Broadband is not a free market by any means so its pointless to pretend that it is. Take Take Take from the public, the least the public should ask for is universal service
Indeed having the right to run cables over/under just about anyone's land only really makes sense together with an obligation to provide service to anyone who wants it.
The government has already cost us $200-$300 billion in "telecommunications fees" for this very service, high-speed broadband, during the 1990s.
That plan cost us dearly, but never materialized. We shouldn't be paying for it again
Especially if there's no way to be sure that the same thing won't happen again...
Those who really should be paying are the "people" who took the money and didn't deliver the goods in the first place. Either by providing what was paid for themselves or finding whoever is prepared to do the job with the money (including the interest on it for 10 plus years).
This kind of enforcement being exactly the kind of thing governments get paid to do.
Well, the cancellation page says:
"WARNING: Cancelling your MySpace account will permanently remove all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photos, comments, blog entries, videos, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register your current email address after cancelling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch. "
Which seems to suggest that they will delete your data - assuming you're prepared to believe anything spewing from the many fetid mouths of the Murdochian Empire.
It only says that you can't get it back (in the original form) it says nothing about what the company may still be able to do with it. Even if they were actually telling lies what's likely to happen to them?
I don't think deleting your Myspace account will do anything. They already have your data and you already agreed to allow them to redistribute it, just because you delete your account doesn't mean they have to delete your data.
Might be better to somehow "pollute" the data first...
The movie industry OTOH seems to still be trying to put the genie back in the bottle. Witness the way blu-ray has far more competently designed protection than DVD and the fact that they are going to ban new player designs and then later any new players from having HD analog outputs and they have the ability to bar movies from playing in HD over unprotected channels on older players.
With out those involved realising that DRM actually encourages piracy.
Pirating is not free. Everybody takes a risk by pirating of being sued or wasting our time downloading malware, something of bad quality, or bogus files.
Most of those risks apply to paid for software. Even paying for software does not always protect you from lawsuits if the vendor has infringed patents or pirated themselves.
However, money can't buy the BBC Formula 1 television coverage over here in Canada, and the TSN excerpts are abysmal.
At least not without having to physically travel. In which case your money would go to the airline and hotel industries.
North American Formula 1 fans NEED torrents to get what the people of Great Britain get as a matter of course.
And to you wonderful people who record the BBC coverage and upload the torrents, thank you, thank you, THANK YOU!
No doubt F1 fans all over the world appreciate such torrents. There's clearly an untapped market for global distribution of television. The "industry" is shooting itself in the foot through having regional and staggered distribution models. Some "staggering" would make sense due to timezone differences, but this is measured in hours rather than days, weeks, months (even years).
In the UK at least, for the BBC you have *already* paid for it via the Licence Fee.
Note that in the UK a drama series will generally be at least nearly complete before a single episode is shown. The kind of "mid season cancellation" which occurs in North American Productions due to poor ratings of the first few episodes thus can't happen.
And no, here are some differences between cults and religions. These include the cult tendency to focus around a single, charismatic leader whose word is absolute law, and their tendency to conceal their genuine inner beliefs in layers that each must be struggled through by new initiates, and each is further divorced from the beliefs taught at the outer layers. This is part of what helps separate the cult inner core from the outer world, and helps bind them together among others who have learned to share those new increasingly bizarre core beliefs.
Note also that cults need not be in any way "religious".
There used to be a pretty good organization for publishing information about cults and helping people get the facts and support from former members, called "Cult Awareness Network", but they got sued to bankruptcy and their assets taken over by Scientology, so now they're a pro-cult organization.
More likely they are pro Scientology. Cults tend to be highly "anti-social" when it comes other cults.
Sorry, but the (I think 2006) credit card rules revisions do not allow the credit card company to cancel subscription billing. Nor can they cancel the card to stop the charges. The only way out is to get the company that is making them terminate the subscription billing.
This being the same company which asked for the card details as part of a standard one time transaction then used the same details for a "subscription"?
And even more important - the bug may be a combination of software and hardware. Just ask what may happen if the code suddenly jumps to the wrong address. Do they use ECC memories in the electronics? What about a voltage spike? Driver has wrong socks/pants causing a spark that jumps to the OBD-II connector and messes up the CAN bus?
Other questions would be "What kind of transducer is measuring the input?"; "How many transducers are there?" and "What output do you get in the case of a failure?"
Note that there are applications where an unknown throttle setting resulting in full power being applied is the right thing to do. Maybe Toyota through they were building a light aircraft rather than a car...
One of these days, I'm going to write an economics paper on what I call convergopolies. These are markets where the players converge to offering very similar products, targeted at identical segments at similar pricing. UK supermarkets are a great example - I don't know if US ones are the same, but here we have several supermarkets who offer almost identical product ranges, with similar segmentation (premium/standard/value) and fairly close pricing. The effect of a convergopoly is that the players believe they are competing with each other, but in fact they aren't.
More likely they know full we they arn't competing. It's not as if supermarket prices can be kept secret and if would be rather expensive to attempt to bar customers who worked for a rival supermarket...
It is a medical device which means that it is subject to insane levels of litigation. Mostly you are probably paying for insurance.
But that dosn't really explain the $13000 price difference between the 4 and 12 band EQ. The other part of the equation is that a digital device can be mass produced. It's not as if anyone needs to design and build an electronic circuit to fit an audiologist's prescription. Instead the device can be programmed. The only likely custom part is a casing to fit someone's ear.
AuMatar seemed to be suggesting that Christian fundamentalists overwhelmingly favor lower taxes for the purpose of reducing government, despite relying heavily on government programs, services, and pork.
:)
Given that these people often stress the Old Testament over the New you'd expect them to be against pork
Sure, but think of the next elections! You look at the ad poster and know not a single face because everyone you remotely knew is busy in courtrooms.
That would be a bad thing how exactly?