There's a good satirical movie called fittingly enough, 'The Man Who Sued God'
which is based entirely on the insurance exclusion 'Acts of God'.
Billy Connolly (Scottish stand-up, I compare him to George Carlin) is in it.
BP is one of the main funding providers for this research. I would not think for a second that this technology will quickly convert to cheap solar for the masses any time soon.
Who says that these lesson plans are produced *at* government public schools? The last I checked, the average overtime a teacher spends dwarfs many other occupations. If a teacher spends that additional time so they can cookie-cut and streamline the information so there is more time for productive feedback and scoring of a student's ability then great.
But.. if teachers use this alongside equally cookie-cut tests (multi-choice) then yeah... I'd start to ask what the hell is it they're doing with our tax dollars.
"I believe that proper real-time monitoring of the system could have prevented most of the attack..."
As someone who has worked in the Card Fraud industry, I can assure you that it is a requirement for every card processor to use real time monitoring software for the prevention of fraud. Visa/Mastercard/etc demand it if you want their logo on the card. The amount of money prevented from fraudulent activity over the past 10 years has dropped very, very significantly. $9 mill on this would be a drop in the bucket in the 90s for some banks. Interestingly this is something that can be worked in to financial institution's budgets as a type of expense/liability.
Here's the problem with realtime monitoring in its current breadth and depth. It can only process and monitor suspect transaction where either the card issuer (the bank of the card user) or acquirer (the bank of the place making the transaction). issuer approvals happen in near-realtime. They have to, otherwise we'd all be waiting at a checkout for hours/days to get approval on the payment. Where banks can fall short, is they are all very much to themselves with their data. Rightly so, this also really, really slows up the ability to share data. Factor in each various country's data protection laws, and this is simply unattainable for some (the UK for example, does not share data just because it'd be nice to do so).
On top of that, there is a bit of a schizm as to whether neural networks or rule-based (human-created manual rules for detection) are the 'best' approach to catch and prevent fraud.
A more recent push, for PCI-DSS enforces encryption of certain data, and to verify that it's done. So I ask you the question, is it the fraud monitoring here, or the security failure and weak encryption allowing this group to legitimize the transactions? It goes back to your original statement that secure design and implementation are the solution.. I'd like to add one-time passwords on to that list.
Lastly, for 'proper' realtime monitoring is a bit of a throw away comment. Take the amount of credit card transaction a day (let's say 3 million) and 1% of those are fradulant (how do we do this properly again?) which means we have to find 30,000 transactions that could cost us money. For 50 people at say, $40,000 a year to find 30,000 fradulent transactions a day would cost say... $2 million annually. So if they caught 'every' fraudulent transaction, then that is a $1 million saving. But realistically, is 50 people enough? how about 500? Now lets make this operation 24 hours, plus office space, equipment, etcetera. At the end of it all, there has to be a line where money spent preventing fraud has a return on its investment (within reason).
Pluto Home
This is pretty good stuff. The core is linux, but if you want those essential extras (DVD recording/playback) then you'll need to either add your own packages to the system, or purchase the canned solution they offer.
The thought of shouting abuse at a burgler/stalker/milkman through my home stereo system while watching him on my mobile is oh so exciting! There might be a world's funniest video hidden in there..
I couldn't agree more!
Also, the question begs to be asked: What about all those sub-groups that are morally-ethically detested like say k3dd1e pr3n, or murder? How do these groups or 'hits' flag up? If this type of system had 'hits' crop up with these areas, then what happens? Should that just go on un-noticed because company charters have no legal requirement to have ethics/morals that maintain society? Is it any different than witnessing something like the above in person and ignoring it? Franklin's quote is dated when considering our current society.
On the other hand... like the parent says, how far down does that rabbit-hole go when politics, corruption, and social manipulation come in to it. Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? Depends on the viewpoint. Justified or Illegal.. etcetera.
Lastly, is this kind of data going to be of any use? Schnier has a good article about false-positives and the sheer amount of datamining being a mathmatical mountain. Just because we know that subGroupA is slagging off companyB - is that enough to change somebody's actions? Who decides that is a good idea? does subGroupC get special upper-class opinion status?
Psi have a fairly solid multi-platform secure jabber client. There are some experimental features that can be enabled under the hood, and security/encryption is addressed. This is not trivial when it comes to group chat, and the last time I looked it is still being worked on as a new feature.
Also, the head developer has contributed to the xmpp protocol.
Sorry not to be a flamebait and off-topic, but this is the same EU that allows its member countries to censor facts of World War II based on what? There are many reputed 'facts' that are of a political boilerplate in Europe. I just want to stress that the EU is not nearly the model of freedom of speech that America is. After all, America is the only western country with an explicit constitution stating such.
Don't tase me bro, but this is because they have no encouraged cability to think for themselves. China wants to use the tried and true method of 'if you throw enough resources at something, we'll get a result'. This is counter to the Communist rule in which they exist. To a certain degree, it is very similar to the notion that it is OK for an American to not be patriotic, or even speak out against his government in modern-day without being labled negatively or face real-life harm because of exercising ones right (ie, believe in God or you can't be a good American).
There have been a number of projects that I have worked on in IT with Chinese consultants based in China. The shocking (and most often shocking) revelation I have had is the persistance for step by step instructions to almost everything. I sometimes find myself wondering what it is exactly (other than a recently over-changed government policy that now embraces MS) they actually utilize, but more importantly contribute, the usefulness of OSS because of the amount of outside thinking and experimentation that is needed to become comfortable using such systems.
Anecdote is this: China constultants assists in co-coding a massive project that involves originally western-sourced code. Upon being provided an API and an approach-based guidline to expand on the source, they insist on step by step instructions and 'scripts' for things as simple as using a copy command. Now being well-versed in J2EE projects, I would expect more than 'step 72 gives this error, everything is broke'. Eventually when you find out that step 72 broke because the pre-requisites and steps 13-20 were ommitted, you can't help but wonder how to teach the taught, 'thought' and encouraging different approaches to a solution.
Here comes the ass-hole portion which the luddites enjoy being kissed:
Water is as essential as much as you pay for it. Internet is not (yet?) deemed an essential utility. What? You mean it's not relied on as much as power!? Our very conversation right HERE is a mere spit in the wind flying with pidgeon shit!? Why yes... it is... The slashdot dot effect? Why son, what on earth is a slashdot and what kind of effect are you on about?
Once the rest of the world that gets shit upon by us catches up, then I really hope we can entertain ideas of NEEDS the internet. Until then, pragmatically as the parent puts it. What is your life worth over mine or anyone elses? Nothing. Same as shock and awe campaign here folks. It rumbles and tumbles, then people forget about what they don't want to see.
I cringe, at you, yeah you thinking, "We should really invest in water...".. capitalist scum...:-D Oh wait, I forget, I can think free but not talk about acting on that freedom...
God I get sick of these posts and articles from people crying for ways to convince management to choose technology x instead of or over technology y. It is simple business, and everybody has a vested interest in their decision. Whether that decision is selfish or selfless is another story..
The 6 laws of persusuasion (negotiation or not, consider it office grooming) is getting teased in your approach here.
See: Global Knowledge
The doctor may not recommend drug x over y, but only becuase drug y had their reps in the other day giving a free lunch. Yeah it happens all the time. As a network admin for a group of clinics I rarely had to buy my lunch.
Fair trial by a jury of his peers depends on where you're from - despite being a novel, A Time to Kill comes to mind. Think surreptitious here, much like ones approach to persuasion should be.
With regards to getting with the times, some of the best things are products of the past. Most importantly, you are hard-pressed to find a unique thought lately except for this guy: Ludwig Wittgenstein
To the parent, the only way to convince management or anyone in 'business' for that matter is to give them business numbers. Get together some analysis to back up your opinion (be prepared to be wrong as well) by looking at man work hours for a given technology, the cost of converting to a new technology in this case, the cost of employee moral because of technology devotion, and plug those in with various sub-points.. run a magical spreadsheet that proves why moving to tech y isntead of staying with tech x is a bad business decision
From the article it would seem that more defensive shutdown sequence can cause a slowdown with the extra checks on each service it performs, rather than madly slashing down services at will. Ho hum, any publicity is still just that...
There are various fraud prevention software solutions that every bank (merchant(acquiring) or issuer financial institution) must use if they want to use the Visa/Mastercard/Insert Name here brands. If they do not, there are heavy fines (These have just went up at the end of June 2007).
These peices of software have so many adjustable 'rules' that responding to these sort of behavioral fraud trends is a few mouse clicks and real-time. It is up to the users of the software to adjust to these trends. Financial institutions hire people that watch these potentially fraudulant activities as their full-time job, and they do quite well at it.
In most cases it's the Issuing bank (The bank where the card came from) responsibility to catch fraud. The way the guidelines set by Visa et al. are is that the Merchant bank (the bank that accepted the charges) MUST refund fraud. This is why it is to the benefit to use a card for a lot of transactions (If you open a dispute not just for fraud but faulty goods, you have much more disputing 'power' because the Acquiring bank has already agreed to visa et al that they will refund disputes while in progress).
Remember, when you sign up to PayPal or any other online payment clearing house, you are agreeing to their terms. If you do not like it, shop around! There are other LOTS of places out there like nochex, secpay, authorize.net, 2checkout... find one whose terms you agree with. Your other option, complain to Visa, American Express, Mastercard, etcetera! If enough people complain about a Merchant/Issuers practices and they will respond!
With regards to Charities and OSS being stuffed out of pocket because of the practices of PayPal or some other institution, there are ways to protect yourself. You simply need to verify these donations before you actually charge them.
I would highly doubt everyone in *any* country is happy to be tagged with such an all-inclusive grasp of information. While for these past decades Spain has had ID cards, you may not have noticed anything out of the ordinary, but quite possibly others' have.
For example, if one were to be an active member of Eta (or any group out of the common), would anyone in Eta want to be acknowledged somewhere on a database (that is controlled by Eta's opposition) as being a supporter/pacifist/activist (lets say this database can add attributes ad-hoc similar to the UK database) *without* their explicit consent? I highly doubt it. Why does this matter? Because the feasible possibility of a new government or reform of the current one becomes seriously at risk, thus everybody suffers.
I know I did not like it when I could tell my international phonecalls to my family were being monitored. This was before the/our US government admitted to monitoring us US citizens' phonecalls without a warrant. I still don't like it, but because some morons behind closed doors felt it best to not just secretely monitor foreign nationals, but everyday american citizens as well, we all suffer invasion of privacy. Just decades ago this paragraph would be considered nonsense, because 'that just doesn't happen in America'... my how a few conflicts/wars and some good propoganda can change all that is acceptable.
Protect peoples' privacy from whom? Companies? They come and go. How about governments? Which ones?
Good thing there is no such thing as having video surveillance seized by UK government, or the ID card scheme that will potentially tie-in seemless ability to quickly pull all purchases, where you drive and how fast, whether or not you prefer regular or free-range eggs...
http://www.privacy.org/pi/activities/idcard/uk/uk- idcard-faq.html
In particular, note the legal protections to limit the use of any information. As a yank living in the UK for a number of years now, I don't see much difference in the information gathering capabilities between US/UK. I see the UK as more bold in their actions because the citizens here do not have an underpinning constitution. This is important as laws can change much more quickly than with a constitution.
This does make me question just how solid a move Germany has made with this log deal, and if it can't be over-ruled by a higher court.
I would move to Iceland. I'm an American living in the U.K. and find it tolerable. There's things I'll never get used to like having speed cameras, fines in the post/mail for having garbage out on the wrong day, oh yeah and GETTING FINGER-PRINTED JUST TO GET IN TO A PUB!. As recently posted on/. and the register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/pub_finger prints/
I live near this part of the country in the UK but have yet to experience. I personally will stop frequenting pubs when this happens UK-wide.
Iceland has some of the best overall education, best health, and geographically is sat on top of 'free' electric and gas. A population of 300,000 might take some getting used to, but the Icelandic people I have met are wonderful. Their alcoholic drink (I can't recall the name) might take some getting used to.
The only downside I can see is that it's an island state and only so much room.
It's not as easy to go there though if you are not an EU citizen...
who counts as an employee? A contractor? The cleaning lady? Do businesses over the limit get grandfathered in? What if they merge with another company? A simple 'hack', especially for those who employ tens of thousands, is to get the patent under the people who had no use except they counted as an employee. I fear that if some sort of tiered system were setup much like how businesses pay employees differ based on their size, then the system would still get manipulated through lobbying.
I say slow the whole system down. Shorten the length of patents dramatically. Take away patents that involve algorithms, business process. As it is, it is a grid-locked cesspool of lawsuits, and any changes won't help short term.
I won't touch the spreadsheat again until I know that I don't have to "manually" insert rows beyond 100. One should simply be able to choose the size of a new spreadsheet. One should aslo be able to insert more than one row/column without selecting the number you want to add first.
I was able to import a 250 row csv, and 7000 lines of Hello took about 3 minutes. Perhaps it doesn't like spaces/special characters, which, in either case is not good.
That is one scary story! I worked at an online dating service about 5 years ago, or before the ability to have a photo on your profile was mainstream. Relationship networks was the company and they marketed towards "jewish" personals which is a whole nother story. The business model was good. Set up online, ok, want to upload a photo? You have to send it by post as an original. You also got pushed in to the telepersonals side of it. All of which was verified by a person one-by-one.
All in all, the only problem with online dating imho is that it is easy enough to verify accounts, it's that businesses don't want to waste administrative man-hours doing so properly! After working in the industry, my advice is to not use online dating! If you do, don't just sign up at any old place, consider one that requires a face-to-face meeting. If one is too shy for that, u have more than just date problems.
I call bullshit, except for users being the weakest security link.
Since Windows 95 you are able to lock down suitably for the average user by using either poledit (Only run allowed Windows applications) or local group policy on 2k/xp (Home Edition has no option). So, your major reconfiguration is nothing more than what you would do with overhauling your ideal network of Damn Small Linux (I like DSL) read-only boxes or of the like.
Users are also the only reason you have a job, and when the help desk gets inundated by the "stupid" users who can't save files where they are used to, its your ass who is responsible train them to use your custom solution. On the other hand, you can use folder redirection to *any* type of server.
As for security, it doesn't stop with having a locked down workstation. It should be layered with a good firewell, good physical network topology for the proxy/gateway, and good user training.
Slashdot Mirror
There's a good satirical movie called fittingly enough, 'The Man Who Sued God'
which is based entirely on the insurance exclusion 'Acts of God'.
Billy Connolly (Scottish stand-up, I compare him to George Carlin) is in it.
I've always thought of "zero tolerance" as newspeak for "intolerance"
Maybe we'll see solar-powered oil drills!
Who says that these lesson plans are produced *at* government public schools? The last I checked, the average overtime a teacher spends dwarfs many other occupations. If a teacher spends that additional time so they can cookie-cut and streamline the information so there is more time for productive feedback and scoring of a student's ability then great.
But.. if teachers use this alongside equally cookie-cut tests (multi-choice) then yeah... I'd start to ask what the hell is it they're doing with our tax dollars.
"I believe that proper real-time monitoring of the system could have prevented most of the attack..."
As someone who has worked in the Card Fraud industry, I can assure you that it is a requirement for every card processor to use real time monitoring software for the prevention of fraud. Visa/Mastercard/etc demand it if you want their logo on the card. The amount of money prevented from fraudulent activity over the past 10 years has dropped very, very significantly. $9 mill on this would be a drop in the bucket in the 90s for some banks. Interestingly this is something that can be worked in to financial institution's budgets as a type of expense/liability.
Here's the problem with realtime monitoring in its current breadth and depth. It can only process and monitor suspect transaction where either the card issuer (the bank of the card user) or acquirer (the bank of the place making the transaction). issuer approvals happen in near-realtime. They have to, otherwise we'd all be waiting at a checkout for hours/days to get approval on the payment. Where banks can fall short, is they are all very much to themselves with their data. Rightly so, this also really, really slows up the ability to share data. Factor in each various country's data protection laws, and this is simply unattainable for some (the UK for example, does not share data just because it'd be nice to do so).
On top of that, there is a bit of a schizm as to whether neural networks or rule-based (human-created manual rules for detection) are the 'best' approach to catch and prevent fraud.
A more recent push, for PCI-DSS enforces encryption of certain data, and to verify that it's done. So I ask you the question, is it the fraud monitoring here, or the security failure and weak encryption allowing this group to legitimize the transactions? It goes back to your original statement that secure design and implementation are the solution.. I'd like to add one-time passwords on to that list.
Lastly, for 'proper' realtime monitoring is a bit of a throw away comment. Take the amount of credit card transaction a day (let's say 3 million) and 1% of those are fradulant (how do we do this properly again?) which means we have to find 30,000 transactions that could cost us money. For 50 people at say, $40,000 a year to find 30,000 fradulent transactions a day would cost say... $2 million annually. So if they caught 'every' fraudulent transaction, then that is a $1 million saving. But realistically, is 50 people enough? how about 500? Now lets make this operation 24 hours, plus office space, equipment, etcetera. At the end of it all, there has to be a line where money spent preventing fraud has a return on its investment (within reason).
Pluto Home This is pretty good stuff. The core is linux, but if you want those essential extras (DVD recording/playback) then you'll need to either add your own packages to the system, or purchase the canned solution they offer.
The thought of shouting abuse at a burgler/stalker/milkman through my home stereo system while watching him on my mobile is oh so exciting! There might be a world's funniest video hidden in there..
I couldn't agree more!
Also, the question begs to be asked: What about all those sub-groups that are morally-ethically detested like say k3dd1e pr3n, or murder? How do these groups or 'hits' flag up? If this type of system had 'hits' crop up with these areas, then what happens? Should that just go on un-noticed because company charters have no legal requirement to have ethics/morals that maintain society? Is it any different than witnessing something like the above in person and ignoring it? Franklin's quote is dated when considering our current society.
On the other hand... like the parent says, how far down does that rabbit-hole go when politics, corruption, and social manipulation come in to it. Terrorist or Freedom Fighter? Depends on the viewpoint. Justified or Illegal.. etcetera.
Lastly, is this kind of data going to be of any use? Schnier has a good article about false-positives and the sheer amount of datamining being a mathmatical mountain. Just because we know that subGroupA is slagging off companyB - is that enough to change somebody's actions? Who decides that is a good idea? does subGroupC get special upper-class opinion status?
This is not much different than what Descartes did with his mechanical recreation of his daughter.
Not all jabber clients are created equal!
Psi have a fairly solid multi-platform secure jabber client. There are some experimental features that can be enabled under the hood, and security/encryption is addressed. This is not trivial when it comes to group chat, and the last time I looked it is still being worked on as a new feature.
Also, the head developer has contributed to the xmpp protocol.
http://psi-im.org/
A yank living in Europe
Somebody I know put this rather contritely:
Everybody (infer every entity) has an agenda, the only matter is transparency.
There have been a number of projects that I have worked on in IT with Chinese consultants based in China. The shocking (and most often shocking) revelation I have had is the persistance for step by step instructions to almost everything. I sometimes find myself wondering what it is exactly (other than a recently over-changed government policy that now embraces MS) they actually utilize, but more importantly contribute, the usefulness of OSS because of the amount of outside thinking and experimentation that is needed to become comfortable using such systems.
Anecdote is this: China constultants assists in co-coding a massive project that involves originally western-sourced code. Upon being provided an API and an approach-based guidline to expand on the source, they insist on step by step instructions and 'scripts' for things as simple as using a copy command. Now being well-versed in J2EE projects, I would expect more than 'step 72 gives this error, everything is broke'. Eventually when you find out that step 72 broke because the pre-requisites and steps 13-20 were ommitted, you can't help but wonder how to teach the taught, 'thought' and encouraging different approaches to a solution.
So what would your solution be before comapany C has to brave the 'shitstorm erupt'?
What is the ideal solution to make everyone play happy? Is there a better alternative to capitalism?
I agree with the luddite portion.
d -to-become-essential-just-like-water-and-power/
:-D Oh wait, I forget, I can think free but not talk about acting on that freedom...
Here comes the ass-hole portion which the luddites enjoy being kissed:
Water is as essential as much as you pay for it. Internet is not (yet?) deemed an essential utility. What? You mean it's not relied on as much as power!? Our very conversation right HERE is a mere spit in the wind flying with pidgeon shit!? Why yes... it is... The slashdot dot effect? Why son, what on earth is a slashdot and what kind of effect are you on about?
Food for thought: http://geekspin.wordpress.com/2006/06/29/broadban
Once the rest of the world that gets shit upon by us catches up, then I really hope we can entertain ideas of NEEDS the internet. Until then, pragmatically as the parent puts it. What is your life worth over mine or anyone elses? Nothing. Same as shock and awe campaign here folks. It rumbles and tumbles, then people forget about what they don't want to see.
I cringe, at you, yeah you thinking, "We should really invest in water...".. capitalist scum...
Wow dude(ette) parent! You've been branded Troll! You have to be like in the top 5 posts these days on /. to get that title! Consider yourself adorned!
It brings a sniff (a sniff?) to my eye when like, 1 in 5 were branded Trolls like the parasitic technophiles we are.
The 6 laws of persusuasion (negotiation or not, consider it office grooming) is getting teased in your approach here.
See: Global Knowledge
The doctor may not recommend drug x over y, but only becuase drug y had their reps in the other day giving a free lunch. Yeah it happens all the time. As a network admin for a group of clinics I rarely had to buy my lunch.
Fair trial by a jury of his peers depends on where you're from - despite being a novel, A Time to Kill comes to mind. Think surreptitious here, much like ones approach to persuasion should be.
With regards to getting with the times, some of the best things are products of the past. Most importantly, you are hard-pressed to find a unique thought lately except for this guy: Ludwig Wittgenstein
To the parent, the only way to convince management or anyone in 'business' for that matter is to give them business numbers. Get together some analysis to back up your opinion (be prepared to be wrong as well) by looking at man work hours for a given technology, the cost of converting to a new technology in this case, the cost of employee moral because of technology devotion, and plug those in with various sub-points.. run a magical spreadsheet that proves why moving to tech y isntead of staying with tech x is a bad business decision
This article answers the question as to why the shutdown can take longer:
s /2007/03/VistaKernel/default.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/technetmag/issue
From the article it would seem that more defensive shutdown sequence can cause a slowdown with the extra checks on each service it performs, rather than madly slashing down services at will. Ho hum, any publicity is still just that...
There are various fraud prevention software solutions that every bank (merchant(acquiring) or issuer financial institution) must use if they want to use the Visa/Mastercard/Insert Name here brands. If they do not, there are heavy fines (These have just went up at the end of June 2007).
a ud-management/
i d=23&pid=164
These peices of software have so many adjustable 'rules' that responding to these sort of behavioral fraud trends is a few mouse clicks and real-time. It is up to the users of the software to adjust to these trends. Financial institutions hire people that watch these potentially fraudulant activities as their full-time job, and they do quite well at it.
In most cases it's the Issuing bank (The bank where the card came from) responsibility to catch fraud. The way the guidelines set by Visa et al. are is that the Merchant bank (the bank that accepted the charges) MUST refund fraud. This is why it is to the benefit to use a card for a lot of transactions (If you open a dispute not just for fraud but faulty goods, you have much more disputing 'power' because the Acquiring bank has already agreed to visa et al that they will refund disputes while in progress).
Remember, when you sign up to PayPal or any other online payment clearing house, you are agreeing to their terms. If you do not like it, shop around! There are other LOTS of places out there like nochex, secpay, authorize.net, 2checkout... find one whose terms you agree with. Your other option, complain to Visa, American Express, Mastercard, etcetera! If enough people complain about a Merchant/Issuers practices and they will respond!
With regards to Charities and OSS being stuffed out of pocket because of the practices of PayPal or some other institution, there are ways to protect yourself. You simply need to verify these donations before you actually charge them.
Here are some places that do just that:
http://www.aicorporation.com/smartauth.asp
http://www.fairisaac.com/fic/en/business-needs/fr
http://www.redplc.com/red209.asp
http://www.shift4.com/best_practices.htm
http://www.cardwatch.org.uk/retailers.asp?section
I would highly doubt everyone in *any* country is happy to be tagged with such an all-inclusive grasp of information. While for these past decades Spain has had ID cards, you may not have noticed anything out of the ordinary, but quite possibly others' have.
For example, if one were to be an active member of Eta (or any group out of the common), would anyone in Eta want to be acknowledged somewhere on a database (that is controlled by Eta's opposition) as being a supporter/pacifist/activist (lets say this database can add attributes ad-hoc similar to the UK database) *without* their explicit consent? I highly doubt it. Why does this matter? Because the feasible possibility of a new government or reform of the current one becomes seriously at risk, thus everybody suffers.
I know I did not like it when I could tell my international phonecalls to my family were being monitored. This was before the/our US government admitted to monitoring us US citizens' phonecalls without a warrant. I still don't like it, but because some morons behind closed doors felt it best to not just secretely monitor foreign nationals, but everyday american citizens as well, we all suffer invasion of privacy. Just decades ago this paragraph would be considered nonsense, because 'that just doesn't happen in America'... my how a few conflicts/wars and some good propoganda can change all that is acceptable.
Protect peoples' privacy from whom? Companies? They come and go. How about governments? Which ones?- idcard-faq.html
Good thing there is no such thing as having video surveillance seized by UK government, or the ID card scheme that will potentially tie-in seemless ability to quickly pull all purchases, where you drive and how fast, whether or not you prefer regular or free-range eggs...
http://www.privacy.org/pi/activities/idcard/uk/uk
In particular, note the legal protections to limit the use of any information. As a yank living in the UK for a number of years now, I don't see much difference in the information gathering capabilities between US/UK. I see the UK as more bold in their actions because the citizens here do not have an underpinning constitution. This is important as laws can change much more quickly than with a constitution.
This does make me question just how solid a move Germany has made with this log deal, and if it can't be over-ruled by a higher court.
I would move to Iceland. I'm an American living in the U.K. and find it tolerable. There's things I'll never get used to like having speed cameras, fines in the post/mail for having garbage out on the wrong day, oh yeah and GETTING FINGER-PRINTED JUST TO GET IN TO A PUB!. As recently posted on /. and the register http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/10/20/pub_finger prints/
I live near this part of the country in the UK but have yet to experience. I personally will stop frequenting pubs when this happens UK-wide.
Iceland has some of the best overall education, best health, and geographically is sat on top of 'free' electric and gas. A population of 300,000 might take some getting used to, but the Icelandic people I have met are wonderful. Their alcoholic drink (I can't recall the name) might take some getting used to.
The only downside I can see is that it's an island state and only so much room.
It's not as easy to go there though if you are not an EU citizen...
I say slow the whole system down. Shorten the length of patents dramatically. Take away patents that involve algorithms, business process. As it is, it is a grid-locked cesspool of lawsuits, and any changes won't help short term.
I won't touch the spreadsheat again until I know that I don't have to "manually" insert rows beyond 100. One should simply be able to choose the size of a new spreadsheet. One should aslo be able to insert more than one row/column without selecting the number you want to add first.
I was able to import a 250 row csv, and 7000 lines of Hello took about 3 minutes. Perhaps it doesn't like spaces/special characters, which, in either case is not good.
All in all, the only problem with online dating imho is that it is easy enough to verify accounts, it's that businesses don't want to waste administrative man-hours doing so properly! After working in the industry, my advice is to not use online dating! If you do, don't just sign up at any old place, consider one that requires a face-to-face meeting. If one is too shy for that, u have more than just date problems.
Since Windows 95 you are able to lock down suitably for the average user by using either poledit (Only run allowed Windows applications) or local group policy on 2k/xp (Home Edition has no option). So, your major reconfiguration is nothing more than what you would do with overhauling your ideal network of Damn Small Linux (I like DSL) read-only boxes or of the like.
Users are also the only reason you have a job, and when the help desk gets inundated by the "stupid" users who can't save files where they are used to, its your ass who is responsible train them to use your custom solution. On the other hand, you can use folder redirection to *any* type of server.
As for security, it doesn't stop with having a locked down workstation. It should be layered with a good firewell, good physical network topology for the proxy/gateway, and good user training.