I'm of the opinion that the best option is physical destruction. So...
Take your drives down to the local rifle range. Arrange as desired, and work on your marksmanship.
Once done, clean up the junk and dispose of properly.
So, the nose of the camel is already in the tent, so there is no point trying to stop it now? If anything we need to start the push the other direction and start trying to wake people up to the problems of 24/7 monitoring, before it becomes a reality.
Pull your heads out of your asses you fucking Yanks.
Yup, us Yanks have done a pretty good job of planting our heads up our collective asses recently. Sometime back after WWII we just sort of gave up on personal responsibility, we gave up on taking care of ourselves, we gave up on trying to keep our republic. And look where it has gotten us. We decided that we didn't want to be responsible for ourselves anymore, and we asked the government to do it for us. And, as is its nature, the government was willing to do anything to allow itself to expand.
It has been a death spiral ever since. The more bad things which happen, the more we run to the government to fix it; the government expands to try and do so, and fails because the solutions for most of our problems can only come from the people themselves taking responsibility for themselves and their communities. Undeterred by the continuous failure of government to actually solve social problems, the people keep running back to it and screaming, "fix it!" And the government continues to grow. Eventually, this will come back to haunt us. Eventually, the next step in government growth will be a police state and actual tyranny, and the US people will cheer its coming. It will be to later generations to suffer and die to throw it off again, but at least those with their heads up their asses will have a few brief days of serenity, believing that they are safe. Until the jackbooted thugs show up at their door in the night for thinking the wrong things.
We have a chance to stop this, and the time is now. It will be far easier to stop the growth of a police state, and deflate the government and put it back in its little box before it reaches the critical mass of tyranny. Right now, we still have some dregs of liberty left. We can still dissent, we can still speak our minds and we can still try and change things without the jackbooted thugs arriving in the night. How much longer that will last no one rightly knows; but, the time to fight is not when the boot is on your neck, the time to fight is when you are still on your feet and have a chance.
RealID is not, by itself, much of a threat. It is, though, a small piece in a much larger puzzle of out of control government tyranny. We don't resist it, deride it and try to stop it just because of itself. We do so because we can step back and see the much larger picture which is coming together, and it scares us. Stopping RealID won't stop that picture altogether either, but it will make it harder, it will create a disruption and that is good. Keeping our republic is not a matter of winning any one fight, it is a matter of a continuous struggle against anything which threatens any small piece of it. It is exhausting and will only end when we give up and let our republic die.
"Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic if you can keep it." --- Benjamin Franklin
What currently stops your boss from ordering you to come to his office and swear a solemn oath with God as your witness, that you voted as he told you to?
Swear what to which god? No problem.
One hand on the Bible, one hand on the Koran, scrotum on the Torah, sitting on the I Ching; invoke the god of your choice and I can still claim anything I want to, and you're stuck either believing me or not. But if there's a paper trail linking me to my votes, I'm an easy target for discrimination. It may not be legal, but that is only a minor impediment to some. In the end a secret ballot, with only you knowing the real truth of it is the only way to allow people to vote as they wish. Any link from you to your ballot is asking for corruption.
Actually, they could just run a cleaning program. Have a holo-person wipe up and scrub the deck, then deposit the cleaning material in some sort of matter de-constructor (inverse replicator). The idea of having bits beamed out is just funny to me at this point in the day.
Heck, do it right and this might even be able to sell access to the program.
Oh good, I'm not the only person to think of that.
I'm going with beamed away, but that could cause some interesting issues if the program ended early and anything inside the hologram got beamed out.
Well, no. I meant to say really, -both- parties have failed. That's the point.
Then let me retract my comment on that. In reading your post, it seemed to be yet another: the government is screwed up and its all the Democrats' fault. I truly feel that it is important that the people start to ignore the partisan bickering coming from the major parties. We need to realize that the problem is the overgrown government, and that we are all culpable in its creation. We either need to kill the hydra that is the Republican-Democrat majority or we are going to face some rough times in the future.
You come so close, but: FAIL!
If you had stopped at the second paragraph, you'd have been fine; but. you just had to turn it into an anti-democrat rant.
The problem isn't the Republicans it isn't the Democrats; the problem is that we the people have let our federal government grow out of control. Yes, much of it can be traced back to the New Deal and a the push for socialization which started at that point, but the cause has been taken up by both sides of the aisle ever since. Seriously, try and pick out a president since FDR who worked to slim down or weaken the federal government. Heck, you could probably push this all the way back to Lincoln, but I'm not sure enough of that time period to make that leap.
As you stated, the problem is more the machine, and less the operator. We have allowed ourselves to be coerced and cajoled into a police state, and most of the people in the US are OK with that. When privacy is destroyed they fall back on, "if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear." A truly asinine position which assumes that information collected now will never be abused later, and that privacy serves no useful purpose. When our government engages in torture, these same people will justify it by arguing moral equivalence with the people we are fighting. Never mind that the US puts itself forth as a paragon of justice and human rights. The real test of one's convictions are not how you keep them up when they are easy, but when they are hard; and, of course, the government is always right and would never use torture on US citizens to coerce false confessions...whoops.
Complaining that the current state of our government is the fault of the left-wing, the right-wing, or the chicken-wing is a pointless exercise in stupidity. It is the fault of the people for allowing it to happen, and going along with it as it did. The two major parties simply use this as a tool in their war against the other side. When the Democrats are in power, the Republicans will sit on the sidelines and snipe at them about growing the government and proudly proclaim that they will stop this if elected. And the people buy it and elect the Republicans. Then the Republicans go about growing the government, in different directions mind you, and never actually shrinking it anywhere. Then the Democrats sit on the sidelines and snipe at the Republicans for growing the government and proudly proclaim that they will stop this if elected. And the people buy it and elect the Democrats. then the Democrats go about growing the government, in the directions they had previously, but not in the same direction which the Republicans did.
And it goes back and forth, endlessly. The problem is, both sides want an overgrown federal government, and they both do everything they can while in power to grow it they way they want it. But neither side ever shrinks or undoes the growth by either their own or the other side. Because in the end, both sides want the federal government as large and powerful as possible. It is much easier to wield massive power if it is centralized, so both sides aim to increase federal power and never shrink it. The Republicans, the Democrats, the left-wing, the right-wing; all of them are heads on the same damned hydra. As long as we the people keep letting ourselves believe that any one head is different from the other, our country will be in peril. No matter which head says the things you like to hear, you will still end up in the same stomach of the police state. The only way out is for us to abandon the failed plan of an expansive federal government and return to a federalist system of decentralized government, with a central federal government to keep the states from becoming tyranny's themselves.
Had the same thought. I recently played through Metroid Prime 3, and loved it. Half of the mechanics for this type of game are already there, and work quite well with the WiiMote.
Unlike Slashdot, such a list is going to require some sort of vetting of information. Just imagine DDoS'ing a site by sending out a spam with a link to it. Want to dick with someone? Spam out an email with a link to their site which matches the standard phishing format (e.g. Your bank needs your social security number verified), and watch their site get blacklisted until someone picks up on it from the company and works to get it corrected. I will agree that an online database would get the update faster than a local copy, but it's still not going to be fast enough to stop the first few victims.
Even a centralized database is going to suffer from the time problem. Either way, the site has to be discovered, and an entry created. If the lifetime of a phishing site is measured only in hours, it is not likely that it will get into the database before it goes offline.
Well, this will probably just get me labeled as a "tin-foil hatter" but here goes.
The main point of maintaining my privacy, in regard to what I read, is simply the fact that I have no way to know what may later be deemed "undesirable". Do I think that "they" are out to get me? No. But I have read enough history to realize that, if we are ever unlucky enough to have a government, or persons within our government who were interested in suppressing a particular group or point of view, that they will quickly access any data which has been collected and use it to suppress said group or opinion. It's happened in the US in the past, and we don't really have any guarantee that it won't happen again. (See: Japaneese internment camps, McCarthyism)
The desire for privacy is not about hiding crimes or indiscretions, it is about freedom of thought. If every thought, every question you ever consider will be aired publicly, you will automatically avoid certain subjects. Just consider the current US environment. If I publicly were to ask the question, "Does Al Queda have a valid point and the US people deserve to be attacked?" In many areas of the country, I would probably be lynched or at the very least treated horribly, just for asking a question. But this is a question I should be able to ask and research, without fear of reprisal. But, because of the current social environment, it is important that I keep such queries and the associated research private. Part of this means that I can engage in research, without the fear of ending up on some list which will create problems for me in the future. Imagine ending up on the TSA "no-fly" list, just because you wanted to see the Al'Jazeera take on the world?
Will such things necessarily happen? No, but they could, and there is no mechanism in place to prevent such abuses from occurring. Therefore, it is reasonable to take precautions to guard against such abuses. Sure, in the end, my taking the time to maintain a little bit of my privacy may be wasted. But that is a small thing when compared to what could happen if a lack of privacy were to be abused.
ANY anti-phishing tool that checks to see if a page is a phishing site is going to have to send it SOMEWHERE... or did you think that they were just going to be able to magically download a tiny file on your computer that would just 'know' all the phishing sites?
Um, downloading a definition file isn't exactly magic. Anti-virus companies have been doing it for years. So yes, actually, I would have expect that every few days my browser runs off and gets the latest phishing definition file (maybe every time on launch, probably best to have it configurable). Then, when I am browsing every URL I go to is hashed and checked against the local hash table. The advantage is that the bandwidth for checking the online database is front loaded, and I am not waiting for each check to make a round trip to Google's servers, nor am I providing some third party with my entire browsing history.
The good thing is that this is off by default, but I wonder if this remote browsing history "feature" is pointed out to the user when they turn on the anti-phishing feature.
Actually, I do agree that the guy was being an asshat by not letting his receipt be looked at. I hadn't really read into the story fully, and was just reacting to the arrest over ID, and the post which I was responding to. On the flip-side, the manager could have handled it better. If he did think that the guy was stealing, place him under citizen arrest, and inform him of this fact, and call the police. It might be argued that this is what he did, and I'd be OK with that view of it; granted, I'm not sure if he ever stated this as his intent, nor was he the one to call the police.
I would be careful about how much leeway a store is given in searching someone as they exit. Would you agree to a strip-search every time you leave? Would a store asking for or expecting one even be reasonable? I don't think so (I know, slippery slope, but I am stating the extreme to make a point). Like most places where laws are needed this is one of those places where differing rights conflict a bit. The store owner does retain his property rights, but my entering the store is not carte blanch to violate my rights either. I still remain a free individual, despite being on someone else's property (assuming I am there with their permission). So how far do we go? I can see agreeing to a review of receipt and a review of the contents of the bag in which my items were placed. I can see them asking me to leave a backpack outside, or storing it in a secure place. I would not agree to them searching my personal bag, it is my property and the contents are private. If they would rather I did not bring it onto the premises, that's fine. While I'm not much for new laws, this does seem one good place to have one, so that we can define the line of what is allowed and what isn't. Somehow I doubt that we'll ever see one here though.
Mickey Mouse.
From the looks of things, the '08 Presidential race will be between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guliani. While I would love to see Ron Paul win the Republican nomination, and I even registered Republican this time so that I could vote in the primary, I don't expect a conservative to win the nomination in a party run by fascists.
My personal rule of thumb for dealing with the Vista GUI has been, expect to have to dig through one more layer than normal to get anything done. If you haven't yet, try changing folder permissions in Vista. I have a bad habit of doing the following:
Open Properties, go to security tab, click edit, click allow on the UAC pop-up, try to make a change and realize that the permission is inherited, close the edit box, click advanced, click allow on the UAC pop-up, uncheck inherit, click copy, close the advanced box because I really do just want to add modify and not all of the sub-permissions directly, click edit, click allow on the UAC pop-up, and finally, make my change.
In XP, there is no edit button to make changes, and the need to exit the edit dialog, go the advanced dialog and then come back to the edit dialog; is gone. Sure, if I picked up on the fact that the check boxes were greyed and so inerited, I'd save myself the headache; I don't see why it's necessary in the first place. Let me do my edits and ask me to allow admin rights when I attempt to write them back.
I like my games, and Linux just doesn't do that well.
I'd be careful on Vista as well, then. My personal addiction has been World of Warcraft for some time, and when I upgraded to Vista on my home system, my frame-rates tanked. My system is not top of the line, nor close even. But it was able to run WoW on OK graphics settings, and get playable frame-rates anywhere but the worst of places, while I was running XP. After a few months of dealing with the performance hit, I downgraded to XP. My frame-rates are back to reasonable, at higher graphics settings than I had been using in Vista (which I had lowered to make the game playable) and higher frame-rates.
Now, this probably has more to do with the drivers for my graphics card (6600GT) than the OS itself, but it is an issue which will keep me from upgrading.
I can see that there is a fine distinction there, but I do think the intention is to remove the inference of guilt based on silence, while realizing that the juror may still do it anyway. The problem being that there really is no possible way to completely remove any such inference from the mind of the jury, even though it is not something which they should take into consideration.
The police are there to investigate crimes after they happen, arrest those responsible and turn them over to the courts to be tried for breaking the law. They cannot, and do not protect individuals. It borders on insanity to believe that they can. The police do not have the resources to have an officer everywhere at once, always ready to stop every crime. There is no way to do so unless you deputize half of society to watch the other half, and then never let them sleep. There will will be times in every normal person's life where they are outside of the direct protection of the police. At these time, such a person must be responsible for their own well being.
While I believe that I am responsible for protecting myself and my family, it is quite possible that I will fail. Moreover, if I shoot someone and claim self-defense, who is to say that I am not lying? The crime (presumably either an assault on me, or a murder and lie on my part) needs to be investigated. If I am lying, I need to be arrested and held to account for the murder. This is where the police come in. They are there to pick up the pieces afterward and determine whether or not they fit together. This is the reason we give them the power to question people, to arrest suspects and to search private property under the oversight of the courts, it would be impossible to investigate crimes otherwise.
A large part of the problem is that we, as a society, are starting to expect the police to prevent crime. They cannot reasonably do this, but they try. The problem is that, in order to do so, they are engaging in behaviors which run counter to a free society. The current case being just one example. This is why it is important for us free citizens to accept the responsibility of living in a free society, and the dangers which come with it. We need to let the police do their real job, investigating crimes, and quit trying to get them to be our personal bodyguards.
The goal is not anarchy, it is a society and government which respects the liberty of each individual. And there is a place for the police, it is just not as protectors, but investigators.
If it's a hard and thankless job and it doesn't pay well, Who the hell is going to take jobs like these? It would only be people who couldn't work any where else. Do we want to give these people power and authority? You can't just underpay cops, punish them at any hint of wrong doing, and expect to have qualified individuals protecting and serving. Why don't you just admit that you don't like and don't want cops. That's all fine and dandy, you just better be ready for a society without police officers (make sure you buy a nice gun, and know how to use it).
I would not ever advocate a society without a police force, but thank you for putting words in my mouth. I was merely pointing out the current condition of being an officer. Actually, what I would like to see is better pay for the police, better training and good oversight. Part of the problem with the police we do have is that it is underpaid and very non-glamorous. While the latter is probably a lost cause, the former could be fixed quite easily. The end result of the current state of affairs is that we get what was seen, police officers acting irresponsibly with the powers they are given.
As for punishing them, this is a must. Certainly, there is going to need to be a review of each case and an appropriate punishment to any infraction. I wouldn't want to see the officer, in this case, thrown off the force for doing what he did. He should not, however, be let go with no repercussions. At the very least, he should spend some time in training on what the rights of a person are, and where his powers end.
Do I have to remind people we are talking about a guy who refused to show his receipt and identification? This isn't the American Revolutionary War. Nor is this part of some civil right movement. Give me a fucking break.
The point wasn't about fighting and dieing over showing ID or not. If your read the previous paragraph, you will notice that I was talking about dealing with criminals and taking responsibility for your own protection against them, rather than ceding your liberty to a government. It is quite possible that, in the US, some criminal will abuse their rights and kill you. Rather than running in fear to the waiting arms of a police state, we must each be willing to stand and fight, and possibly die, to protect ourselves and preserve our liberty. We must each be willing to accept that its a dangerous world out there, and that the safety offered by giving up our liberty to a government, is a dangerous illusion.
The point is that we should not have to justify ourselves to anyone, period. The police are not our masters, the government is not our master. We are each, our own master; this is what Liberty means. By requiring us to present any sort of papers or justification for us to be somewhere where we are allowed to be (especially a public place), the government and specifically the police are attempting to proclaim superiority over us. This is absolutely wrong. I applaud Michael Righi for taking a stand and saying, "no." It is sad that he has been dragged through this ordeal. It is sad that, in order to defend his rights as a human being, he was forced to pay out a considerable sum and that his family was so put upon; but this is the price of freedom.
I find it sad that we have become so timid, in this country, that we are willing to tolerate this type of activity by the police. While the officer in question might have thought himself justified in making such a demand, and then enforced his wrongheaded belief with the authority we have granted him , he was wrong and should be called to account for it. We have given the police special powers, because it is necessary for them to do their job. I realize it is a very hard and thankless job; it does not pay well, and is often looked upon with scorn. But, that is something which must be accepted when a person chooses to become a police officer. Along with that, there must come an added level of responsibility to use the powers granted by the people, in an appropriate fashion. Any abuse of those powers, no matter how slight, must be punished. This is were we, as a society, are failing to uphold our rights, and will lose them eventually; we not only allow abuses such as these to go unpunished, we have people who encourage it. The AC who posted the idiocy of, "Why not cooperate?" is complicit is the destruction of our rights. He would give over his personal sovereignty to the police because it is easier. Freedom and Liberty are not easy, they are hard, but they are worth the constant struggle. He may think that having the police rule his life will make him safer, but time and again history has shown us that this is not the case. Governments given absolute sovereignty over their citizens do not long remain benign, and usually lead to tyranny and abuses far greater than the constant annoyance of crime.
Liberty requires that each of us take responsibility for ourselves. This includes accepting a certain level of risk from criminals who may abuse their freedom. This means that you will be responsible for protecting and caring for yourself. In then end, you must ask yourself whether it is better to die on your feet or live on your knees.
Patrick Henry said it best: I know not what course others make take, but as for me: give me Liberty, or give me death.
Either you or your friend missed out on the better parts of AJAX or you were one of those people doing it before it became formalized. The biggest advantage with AJAX is the asynchronous communication via XMLHTTPRequest. With your ASP/Perlscript pages, you are probably relying on postbacks to update pages. This works, and quite well for many things, but if you are dealing with big pages it can get annoying; not to mention having the whole page "blink" every time you need to update something on it is less than ideal for the user.I agree that AJAX has been hyped like the next snake oil, but the ability to communicate back and forth between the browser and the server, with just the changes, can make for a much better user experience.
As for why IT departments are slow to adopt Web 2.0, it's partly the realization that it's mostly hype; and I think a large part is the fact that this is yet another set of technologies which they need to get comfortable with before they consider supporting them. Also, they probably want to wait a bit and see what problems shake out. New technology is fun, having to implement and support new technology is scary, god only knows what is going to break and what is going to let in the next Nimda. Lastly, there is that whole support problem of, "I uploaded my video to my blog and it's not working. It's IT's fault and they had better fix it!" Thank you, no.
While I do generally agree that laws should be restricted, as much as possible, to actual harm; I think this is one of the few places where deviation is a good thing. The potential for harm is fairly high, and the harm done is usually pretty drastic. If the only person who might be hurt by drunk driving was the drunk driver himself, I'd be all for decriminalizing it; however, that is not the case. By driving drunk a person is directly creating a dangerous situation to others, and without a good cause, that should not be happening.
Now, one could argue on the point at which someone is "drunk" and/or truly impaired, but this is just a line drawing fallacy. A testable line will need to be drawn somewhere, for the moment, it is what it is in various states. Is it the best place to put it? Who knows, but it will be set somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm of the opinion that the best option is physical destruction. So...
Take your drives down to the local rifle range. Arrange as desired, and work on your marksmanship.
Once done, clean up the junk and dispose of properly.
So, the nose of the camel is already in the tent, so there is no point trying to stop it now? If anything we need to start the push the other direction and start trying to wake people up to the problems of 24/7 monitoring, before it becomes a reality.
Pull your heads out of your asses you fucking Yanks.
Yup, us Yanks have done a pretty good job of planting our heads up our collective asses recently. Sometime back after WWII we just sort of gave up on personal responsibility, we gave up on taking care of ourselves, we gave up on trying to keep our republic. And look where it has gotten us. We decided that we didn't want to be responsible for ourselves anymore, and we asked the government to do it for us. And, as is its nature, the government was willing to do anything to allow itself to expand.
It has been a death spiral ever since. The more bad things which happen, the more we run to the government to fix it; the government expands to try and do so, and fails because the solutions for most of our problems can only come from the people themselves taking responsibility for themselves and their communities. Undeterred by the continuous failure of government to actually solve social problems, the people keep running back to it and screaming, "fix it!" And the government continues to grow. Eventually, this will come back to haunt us. Eventually, the next step in government growth will be a police state and actual tyranny, and the US people will cheer its coming. It will be to later generations to suffer and die to throw it off again, but at least those with their heads up their asses will have a few brief days of serenity, believing that they are safe. Until the jackbooted thugs show up at their door in the night for thinking the wrong things.
We have a chance to stop this, and the time is now. It will be far easier to stop the growth of a police state, and deflate the government and put it back in its little box before it reaches the critical mass of tyranny. Right now, we still have some dregs of liberty left. We can still dissent, we can still speak our minds and we can still try and change things without the jackbooted thugs arriving in the night. How much longer that will last no one rightly knows; but, the time to fight is not when the boot is on your neck, the time to fight is when you are still on your feet and have a chance.
RealID is not, by itself, much of a threat. It is, though, a small piece in a much larger puzzle of out of control government tyranny. We don't resist it, deride it and try to stop it just because of itself. We do so because we can step back and see the much larger picture which is coming together, and it scares us. Stopping RealID won't stop that picture altogether either, but it will make it harder, it will create a disruption and that is good. Keeping our republic is not a matter of winning any one fight, it is a matter of a continuous struggle against anything which threatens any small piece of it. It is exhausting and will only end when we give up and let our republic die.
"Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?"
"A republic if you can keep it." --- Benjamin Franklin
Great article, thank you for the link.
What currently stops your boss from ordering you to come to his office and swear a solemn oath with God as your witness, that you voted as he told you to?
Swear what to which god? No problem.
One hand on the Bible, one hand on the Koran, scrotum on the Torah, sitting on the I Ching; invoke the god of your choice and I can still claim anything I want to, and you're stuck either believing me or not. But if there's a paper trail linking me to my votes, I'm an easy target for discrimination. It may not be legal, but that is only a minor impediment to some. In the end a secret ballot, with only you knowing the real truth of it is the only way to allow people to vote as they wish. Any link from you to your ballot is asking for corruption.
Actually, they could just run a cleaning program. Have a holo-person wipe up and scrub the deck, then deposit the cleaning material in some sort of matter de-constructor (inverse replicator). The idea of having bits beamed out is just funny to me at this point in the day.
Heck, do it right and this might even be able to sell access to the program.
Oh good, I'm not the only person to think of that. I'm going with beamed away, but that could cause some interesting issues if the program ended early and anything inside the hologram got beamed out.
Well, no. I meant to say really, -both- parties have failed. That's the point.
Then let me retract my comment on that. In reading your post, it seemed to be yet another: the government is screwed up and its all the Democrats' fault. I truly feel that it is important that the people start to ignore the partisan bickering coming from the major parties. We need to realize that the problem is the overgrown government, and that we are all culpable in its creation. We either need to kill the hydra that is the Republican-Democrat majority or we are going to face some rough times in the future.
You come so close, but: FAIL!
If you had stopped at the second paragraph, you'd have been fine; but. you just had to turn it into an anti-democrat rant.
The problem isn't the Republicans it isn't the Democrats; the problem is that we the people have let our federal government grow out of control. Yes, much of it can be traced back to the New Deal and a the push for socialization which started at that point, but the cause has been taken up by both sides of the aisle ever since. Seriously, try and pick out a president since FDR who worked to slim down or weaken the federal government. Heck, you could probably push this all the way back to Lincoln, but I'm not sure enough of that time period to make that leap.
As you stated, the problem is more the machine, and less the operator. We have allowed ourselves to be coerced and cajoled into a police state, and most of the people in the US are OK with that. When privacy is destroyed they fall back on, "if you don't have anything to hide, you have nothing to fear." A truly asinine position which assumes that information collected now will never be abused later, and that privacy serves no useful purpose. When our government engages in torture, these same people will justify it by arguing moral equivalence with the people we are fighting. Never mind that the US puts itself forth as a paragon of justice and human rights. The real test of one's convictions are not how you keep them up when they are easy, but when they are hard; and, of course, the government is always right and would never use torture on US citizens to coerce false confessions...whoops.
Complaining that the current state of our government is the fault of the left-wing, the right-wing, or the chicken-wing is a pointless exercise in stupidity. It is the fault of the people for allowing it to happen, and going along with it as it did. The two major parties simply use this as a tool in their war against the other side. When the Democrats are in power, the Republicans will sit on the sidelines and snipe at them about growing the government and proudly proclaim that they will stop this if elected. And the people buy it and elect the Republicans. Then the Republicans go about growing the government, in different directions mind you, and never actually shrinking it anywhere. Then the Democrats sit on the sidelines and snipe at the Republicans for growing the government and proudly proclaim that they will stop this if elected. And the people buy it and elect the Democrats. then the Democrats go about growing the government, in the directions they had previously, but not in the same direction which the Republicans did.
And it goes back and forth, endlessly. The problem is, both sides want an overgrown federal government, and they both do everything they can while in power to grow it they way they want it. But neither side ever shrinks or undoes the growth by either their own or the other side. Because in the end, both sides want the federal government as large and powerful as possible. It is much easier to wield massive power if it is centralized, so both sides aim to increase federal power and never shrink it. The Republicans, the Democrats, the left-wing, the right-wing; all of them are heads on the same damned hydra. As long as we the people keep letting ourselves believe that any one head is different from the other, our country will be in peril. No matter which head says the things you like to hear, you will still end up in the same stomach of the police state. The only way out is for us to abandon the failed plan of an expansive federal government and return to a federalist system of decentralized government, with a central federal government to keep the states from becoming tyranny's themselves.
Had the same thought. I recently played through Metroid Prime 3, and loved it. Half of the mechanics for this type of game are already there, and work quite well with the WiiMote.
Unlike Slashdot, such a list is going to require some sort of vetting of information. Just imagine DDoS'ing a site by sending out a spam with a link to it. Want to dick with someone? Spam out an email with a link to their site which matches the standard phishing format (e.g. Your bank needs your social security number verified), and watch their site get blacklisted until someone picks up on it from the company and works to get it corrected. I will agree that an online database would get the update faster than a local copy, but it's still not going to be fast enough to stop the first few victims.
Even a centralized database is going to suffer from the time problem. Either way, the site has to be discovered, and an entry created. If the lifetime of a phishing site is measured only in hours, it is not likely that it will get into the database before it goes offline.
Well, this will probably just get me labeled as a "tin-foil hatter" but here goes.
The main point of maintaining my privacy, in regard to what I read, is simply the fact that I have no way to know what may later be deemed "undesirable". Do I think that "they" are out to get me? No. But I have read enough history to realize that, if we are ever unlucky enough to have a government, or persons within our government who were interested in suppressing a particular group or point of view, that they will quickly access any data which has been collected and use it to suppress said group or opinion. It's happened in the US in the past, and we don't really have any guarantee that it won't happen again. (See: Japaneese internment camps, McCarthyism)
The desire for privacy is not about hiding crimes or indiscretions, it is about freedom of thought. If every thought, every question you ever consider will be aired publicly, you will automatically avoid certain subjects. Just consider the current US environment. If I publicly were to ask the question, "Does Al Queda have a valid point and the US people deserve to be attacked?" In many areas of the country, I would probably be lynched or at the very least treated horribly, just for asking a question. But this is a question I should be able to ask and research, without fear of reprisal. But, because of the current social environment, it is important that I keep such queries and the associated research private. Part of this means that I can engage in research, without the fear of ending up on some list which will create problems for me in the future. Imagine ending up on the TSA "no-fly" list, just because you wanted to see the Al'Jazeera take on the world?
Will such things necessarily happen? No, but they could, and there is no mechanism in place to prevent such abuses from occurring. Therefore, it is reasonable to take precautions to guard against such abuses. Sure, in the end, my taking the time to maintain a little bit of my privacy may be wasted. But that is a small thing when compared to what could happen if a lack of privacy were to be abused.
ANY anti-phishing tool that checks to see if a page is a phishing site is going to have to send it SOMEWHERE... or did you think that they were just going to be able to magically download a tiny file on your computer that would just 'know' all the phishing sites?
Um, downloading a definition file isn't exactly magic. Anti-virus companies have been doing it for years. So yes, actually, I would have expect that every few days my browser runs off and gets the latest phishing definition file (maybe every time on launch, probably best to have it configurable). Then, when I am browsing every URL I go to is hashed and checked against the local hash table. The advantage is that the bandwidth for checking the online database is front loaded, and I am not waiting for each check to make a round trip to Google's servers, nor am I providing some third party with my entire browsing history.
The good thing is that this is off by default, but I wonder if this remote browsing history "feature" is pointed out to the user when they turn on the anti-phishing feature.
Actually, I do agree that the guy was being an asshat by not letting his receipt be looked at. I hadn't really read into the story fully, and was just reacting to the arrest over ID, and the post which I was responding to. On the flip-side, the manager could have handled it better. If he did think that the guy was stealing, place him under citizen arrest, and inform him of this fact, and call the police. It might be argued that this is what he did, and I'd be OK with that view of it; granted, I'm not sure if he ever stated this as his intent, nor was he the one to call the police.
I would be careful about how much leeway a store is given in searching someone as they exit. Would you agree to a strip-search every time you leave? Would a store asking for or expecting one even be reasonable? I don't think so (I know, slippery slope, but I am stating the extreme to make a point). Like most places where laws are needed this is one of those places where differing rights conflict a bit. The store owner does retain his property rights, but my entering the store is not carte blanch to violate my rights either. I still remain a free individual, despite being on someone else's property (assuming I am there with their permission). So how far do we go? I can see agreeing to a review of receipt and a review of the contents of the bag in which my items were placed. I can see them asking me to leave a backpack outside, or storing it in a secure place. I would not agree to them searching my personal bag, it is my property and the contents are private. If they would rather I did not bring it onto the premises, that's fine. While I'm not much for new laws, this does seem one good place to have one, so that we can define the line of what is allowed and what isn't. Somehow I doubt that we'll ever see one here though.
Can I guess who you are going to vote for? ;-)
Mickey Mouse.
From the looks of things, the '08 Presidential race will be between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Guliani. While I would love to see Ron Paul win the Republican nomination, and I even registered Republican this time so that I could vote in the primary, I don't expect a conservative to win the nomination in a party run by fascists.
er, thanks, I think....
What is Reddit?
My personal rule of thumb for dealing with the Vista GUI has been, expect to have to dig through one more layer than normal to get anything done. If you haven't yet, try changing folder permissions in Vista. I have a bad habit of doing the following:
Open Properties, go to security tab, click edit, click allow on the UAC pop-up, try to make a change and realize that the permission is inherited, close the edit box, click advanced, click allow on the UAC pop-up, uncheck inherit, click copy, close the advanced box because I really do just want to add modify and not all of the sub-permissions directly, click edit, click allow on the UAC pop-up, and finally, make my change.
In XP, there is no edit button to make changes, and the need to exit the edit dialog, go the advanced dialog and then come back to the edit dialog; is gone. Sure, if I picked up on the fact that the check boxes were greyed and so inerited, I'd save myself the headache; I don't see why it's necessary in the first place. Let me do my edits and ask me to allow admin rights when I attempt to write them back.
I like my games, and Linux just doesn't do that well.
I'd be careful on Vista as well, then. My personal addiction has been World of Warcraft for some time, and when I upgraded to Vista on my home system, my frame-rates tanked. My system is not top of the line, nor close even. But it was able to run WoW on OK graphics settings, and get playable frame-rates anywhere but the worst of places, while I was running XP. After a few months of dealing with the performance hit, I downgraded to XP. My frame-rates are back to reasonable, at higher graphics settings than I had been using in Vista (which I had lowered to make the game playable) and higher frame-rates.
Now, this probably has more to do with the drivers for my graphics card (6600GT) than the OS itself, but it is an issue which will keep me from upgrading.
I can see that there is a fine distinction there, but I do think the intention is to remove the inference of guilt based on silence, while realizing that the juror may still do it anyway. The problem being that there really is no possible way to completely remove any such inference from the mind of the jury, even though it is not something which they should take into consideration.
The US Supreme Court disagrees with you:
Carter v. Kentucky
The police are there to investigate crimes after they happen, arrest those responsible and turn them over to the courts to be tried for breaking the law. They cannot, and do not protect individuals. It borders on insanity to believe that they can. The police do not have the resources to have an officer everywhere at once, always ready to stop every crime. There is no way to do so unless you deputize half of society to watch the other half, and then never let them sleep. There will will be times in every normal person's life where they are outside of the direct protection of the police. At these time, such a person must be responsible for their own well being.
While I believe that I am responsible for protecting myself and my family, it is quite possible that I will fail. Moreover, if I shoot someone and claim self-defense, who is to say that I am not lying? The crime (presumably either an assault on me, or a murder and lie on my part) needs to be investigated. If I am lying, I need to be arrested and held to account for the murder. This is where the police come in. They are there to pick up the pieces afterward and determine whether or not they fit together. This is the reason we give them the power to question people, to arrest suspects and to search private property under the oversight of the courts, it would be impossible to investigate crimes otherwise.
A large part of the problem is that we, as a society, are starting to expect the police to prevent crime. They cannot reasonably do this, but they try. The problem is that, in order to do so, they are engaging in behaviors which run counter to a free society. The current case being just one example. This is why it is important for us free citizens to accept the responsibility of living in a free society, and the dangers which come with it. We need to let the police do their real job, investigating crimes, and quit trying to get them to be our personal bodyguards.
The goal is not anarchy, it is a society and government which respects the liberty of each individual. And there is a place for the police, it is just not as protectors, but investigators.
If it's a hard and thankless job and it doesn't pay well, Who the hell is going to take jobs like these? It would only be people who couldn't work any where else. Do we want to give these people power and authority? You can't just underpay cops, punish them at any hint of wrong doing, and expect to have qualified individuals protecting and serving. Why don't you just admit that you don't like and don't want cops. That's all fine and dandy, you just better be ready for a society without police officers (make sure you buy a nice gun, and know how to use it).
I would not ever advocate a society without a police force, but thank you for putting words in my mouth. I was merely pointing out the current condition of being an officer. Actually, what I would like to see is better pay for the police, better training and good oversight. Part of the problem with the police we do have is that it is underpaid and very non-glamorous. While the latter is probably a lost cause, the former could be fixed quite easily. The end result of the current state of affairs is that we get what was seen, police officers acting irresponsibly with the powers they are given.
As for punishing them, this is a must. Certainly, there is going to need to be a review of each case and an appropriate punishment to any infraction. I wouldn't want to see the officer, in this case, thrown off the force for doing what he did. He should not, however, be let go with no repercussions. At the very least, he should spend some time in training on what the rights of a person are, and where his powers end.
Do I have to remind people we are talking about a guy who refused to show his receipt and identification? This isn't the American Revolutionary War. Nor is this part of some civil right movement. Give me a fucking break.
The point wasn't about fighting and dieing over showing ID or not. If your read the previous paragraph, you will notice that I was talking about dealing with criminals and taking responsibility for your own protection against them, rather than ceding your liberty to a government. It is quite possible that, in the US, some criminal will abuse their rights and kill you. Rather than running in fear to the waiting arms of a police state, we must each be willing to stand and fight, and possibly die, to protect ourselves and preserve our liberty. We must each be willing to accept that its a dangerous world out there, and that the safety offered by giving up our liberty to a government, is a dangerous illusion.
The point is that we should not have to justify ourselves to anyone, period. The police are not our masters, the government is not our master. We are each, our own master; this is what Liberty means. By requiring us to present any sort of papers or justification for us to be somewhere where we are allowed to be (especially a public place), the government and specifically the police are attempting to proclaim superiority over us. This is absolutely wrong. I applaud Michael Righi for taking a stand and saying, "no." It is sad that he has been dragged through this ordeal. It is sad that, in order to defend his rights as a human being, he was forced to pay out a considerable sum and that his family was so put upon; but this is the price of freedom.
I find it sad that we have become so timid, in this country, that we are willing to tolerate this type of activity by the police. While the officer in question might have thought himself justified in making such a demand, and then enforced his wrongheaded belief with the authority we have granted him , he was wrong and should be called to account for it. We have given the police special powers, because it is necessary for them to do their job. I realize it is a very hard and thankless job; it does not pay well, and is often looked upon with scorn. But, that is something which must be accepted when a person chooses to become a police officer. Along with that, there must come an added level of responsibility to use the powers granted by the people, in an appropriate fashion. Any abuse of those powers, no matter how slight, must be punished. This is were we, as a society, are failing to uphold our rights, and will lose them eventually; we not only allow abuses such as these to go unpunished, we have people who encourage it. The AC who posted the idiocy of, "Why not cooperate?" is complicit is the destruction of our rights. He would give over his personal sovereignty to the police because it is easier. Freedom and Liberty are not easy, they are hard, but they are worth the constant struggle. He may think that having the police rule his life will make him safer, but time and again history has shown us that this is not the case. Governments given absolute sovereignty over their citizens do not long remain benign, and usually lead to tyranny and abuses far greater than the constant annoyance of crime.
Liberty requires that each of us take responsibility for ourselves. This includes accepting a certain level of risk from criminals who may abuse their freedom. This means that you will be responsible for protecting and caring for yourself. In then end, you must ask yourself whether it is better to die on your feet or live on your knees.
Patrick Henry said it best:
I know not what course others make take, but as for me: give me Liberty, or give me death.
Either you or your friend missed out on the better parts of AJAX or you were one of those people doing it before it became formalized. The biggest advantage with AJAX is the asynchronous communication via XMLHTTPRequest. With your ASP/Perlscript pages, you are probably relying on postbacks to update pages. This works, and quite well for many things, but if you are dealing with big pages it can get annoying; not to mention having the whole page "blink" every time you need to update something on it is less than ideal for the user.I agree that AJAX has been hyped like the next snake oil, but the ability to communicate back and forth between the browser and the server, with just the changes, can make for a much better user experience.
As for why IT departments are slow to adopt Web 2.0, it's partly the realization that it's mostly hype; and I think a large part is the fact that this is yet another set of technologies which they need to get comfortable with before they consider supporting them. Also, they probably want to wait a bit and see what problems shake out. New technology is fun, having to implement and support new technology is scary, god only knows what is going to break and what is going to let in the next Nimda. Lastly, there is that whole support problem of, "I uploaded my video to my blog and it's not working. It's IT's fault and they had better fix it!" Thank you, no.
While I do generally agree that laws should be restricted, as much as possible, to actual harm; I think this is one of the few places where deviation is a good thing. The potential for harm is fairly high, and the harm done is usually pretty drastic. If the only person who might be hurt by drunk driving was the drunk driver himself, I'd be all for decriminalizing it; however, that is not the case. By driving drunk a person is directly creating a dangerous situation to others, and without a good cause, that should not be happening.
Now, one could argue on the point at which someone is "drunk" and/or truly impaired, but this is just a line drawing fallacy. A testable line will need to be drawn somewhere, for the moment, it is what it is in various states. Is it the best place to put it? Who knows, but it will be set somewhere.