Forget it folks. If this was your typical leet h4k0r attack, they wouldn't be able to resist announcing it to the world or sneaking their little "greets and shouts" lines into their source code.
No, it sounds like these puppies were real pros. If I was running a master criminal organization, stealing source to Microsoft code would be the best way to evaluate weaknesses in their code and use that quietly to hack into the world's biggest companies and banks undetected and run off with billions. Or how about hacking into foreign government intranets to get their secrets? Remember that this code has not received a critical eye looking at it with the intent to covertly break into it.
There are real risks to the world going to 100% Microsoft solutions. It's like royal families inbreeding in medieval times. It ain't good and it's getting worse.
Just think, your entire company may be Microsoft on the desktop, but at least the back ends are still something else. But soon no more. To leverage those nifty Active Directory benefits you need to move your DNS, LDAP, and Kerberos services to Windows 2000. Then you'll start to see the real benefits of moving that web server to IIS and e-mail to Exchange 2000.
The real thing to fear here is what's going to happen behind closed doors outside of Redmond...
I just don't understand the logic in trusting corporate and often national security interests running software you are unable to audit written by a private company whose only concern is maximizing their revenue and market share.
The biggest thing about EMC I didn't like was the fact that they won't let you near the box. You have absolutely no access to the configuration of it. Need to rebind your disks into different RAID sets? Gotta call EMC to come down and do it (and a hefty cost too).
An alternate solution is their Data General division, which makes the
Clar iio n disk arrays and SAN. We actually bought one of these puppies and it should be delivered sometime next week (at which time no one will ever read this thread again since/. threads have a half-life of about two hours so me following up with status is useless...)
For those pointing out exceptions, the 4-year rule hasn't always been the case. Example, the 2-year college where I work at has dtcc.edu -- it's a community college.
The rules were changed after we got our domain (1993). If we tried to register now, it'd be dtcc.co.de.us
It's actually a good thing. It's the one non-polluted domain left. Every two-bit fly-by-night "earn your MCSC cert in two days" school would be wanting a.edu. It also prevents a company like ucsc.com suing ucsc.edu for trademark infringement!:)
Bugs hitting you at 80MPH can't be very safe or friendly (I don't know how bikers do it).
It can be quite painful. Protective gear is very helpful but even if there is a little space of skin visible, bugs tend to get in there and smack you. It's only the biggest ones that hurt. Now birds, I've had one hit my helmut before and almost knock me off my bike. I've riden over 100,000 miles and this has only happened once. Running over cats and dogs is a larger concern, which I don't think would be a problem with a personal air craft!:)
Believe it or not, rain hurts the most at higher speeds.
This is a bit ridiculous. People are just assuming that Microsoft is so big they will never go away.
Remember in the late 80s when Microsoft and IBM pushed OS/2 as the successor to Windows? Who would have thought that an OS backed by such heavyweights as IBM and Microsoft would just be abandoned?
We just (last year) reformatted our last OS/2 install in our libraries here. It was required by some software to manage libraries. Some companies made some huge investments in OS/2 development to just be abandoned. At least if OS/2 was free-sourced, development could have continued.
This ad should be read as that you should trust it all to Microsoft and if their business needs and plans change, you MUST change with them or else be left behind (at a reasonable upgrade fee of course...)
Thanks for replying. btw, I went to your home page and your link to nai.com about DNS security is broken...
Anyway, what I meant by spoofing was in the sense that if I ran bind 9 and wanted to allow MS clients to use DDNS, I couldn't use MSes security procedure so I'd have to rely on authentication by IP address range only, which someone could spoof and cause wrongful updates to my DNS server... not a pretty thing to think about...
Actually, yes it does. And I might buy that man was created 6000 years ago based on the assumption that there were humanoids existing before then and that the definition of "man" is a humanoid with a soul and spirit.
What bothers me is the belief that the Bible is 100% accurate and the word of God literally. The Bible could have, and most likely was, buggered up by the humans writing it, influenced by personal beliefs, etc...
This chance is explained away by the idea that God would just not simply let that happen. But this can be disproven by buggering up the current Bible and see if God stops you. All you need to do is to point to where something has been inaccurately translated or interpreted incorrectly to prove that as well.
For example, apparently the commandment "Thou shall not kill" was not translated accurately. Going back to original scrolls and even later Hebrew translations, it originally (or at some point) said "Thou shall not murder." That's actually a big difference. It implies that in some cases that killing is justifiable just as in today's law, not all "kills" are murders.
Damn it, I can't find the reference, but I remember reading that Windows 2000 DNS servers implement the security aspects differently than DNSSEC so they are incompatible with each other.
So how can the net itself adopt this when it isn't supported by Microsoft? It's going to be a non-issue like Microsoft not yet supporting ipv6 so therefore it's not going anywhere...
This isn't a troll, it's just the real world. Microsoft effectively is controling it all and me jumping up and down screaming that "it ain't right" or "it's not standard" isn't going to help. If, for example, I'm forced to support Active Directory down the line, I'm also going to be forced to migrate DNS to Win2k DNS servers because the authentication used by MS clients for DDNS updates is incompatible with DNSSEC and it's either go with a Microsoft solution or losen security on my DNS servers and then anyone can spoof an update into my DNS server and make dynamic updates.:(
This is a decision only a non-imformed administrative council could love. I'm sure the pitch was something along the lines of: We can stop buying computers for labs since every student will have their own computer. We won't have to buy expensive servers to store student files since they will have their own storage. We won't have to back up their data since they will be responsible for their own data.
This seems to me like a giant step backwards. The idea of physically carting around your data in a bulky laptop from dorm to class to lab is ridiculous... Data like this should be accessible from anywhere from any machine as long as the correct security credentials are supplied...
This also means that all students will have to purchase licenses for each software package they ever want to learn. What if I want to go to a lab and try my hand at AutoCAD 2000? In a typical university, just go to the CAD lab and try it out. Now you'd have to go out and buy a copy for your own laptop.
The support logistics also seem like a nightmare. For example, where will a student turn when they attempt to install a parallel-port zip drive to their laptop and it blue-screens during the next boot, making all of their data inaccessible? (We had a real problem where I work with that. For some reason, external parallel-port zip drives and NT 4 just don't get along very well... Loads of BSOD problems after a reboot after an install. We finally had to ban the things...)
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? :
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
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· Score: 2
Oh just great. I read bug 41057 and didn't much like the comments. It doesn't seem to be getting taken very seriously. Someone even tried to compare it to mod_perl install of apache requiring root or something. Huh? mod_perl is part of a service running on a box that shouldn't be installed by anyone but an administrator. A browser is an APPLICATION.
And this is NOT just a linux/unix issue. System Administrators of NT/W2K boxen also expect that programs don't write into the program directories...
This one is a real killer. Years of work and because of this, those of us that deploy desktops that number in the thousands (in my case) will decide it's not worth it and not bother... Too many risks, too many hassles...
Re:Why does it need to write to the program dir? :
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
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· Score: 2
...it is possible to have O97 running without giving students access to your system directories.
I tried too, but things fail in weird ways. You may not see it right away. For example, Access Wizards required write access to a few files in the office directory.
There's a Microsoft KB article about what needs write access on C: for Office 97. It's a disgrace...
Office 2000 is a lot better. NT and NTFS came out a helluva long time ago (when, like 94ish?). It's a shame that several years later, Microsoft Apps still don't behave well in R/O environments (and now Mozilla gets to continue the tradition...)
Programmers, no matter what system they write for, should never ever assume they can scribble to files and directories in any place other than a defined temp directory,a user-defined directory, or some directory configured by the systems admin in some global preferences location.
The same kind of thing could be said for the Windows registry. Programs should never assume they can write to HKLM keys. Stuff in HKLM should be defined during install time or via system policies. Any user data and settings should be recorded to HKCU only...
Why does it need to write to the program dir? :(
on
Send Some Mo' Zilla
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· Score: 4
From the release notes:
Make sure the directory is writeable, Mozilla requires that the person who runs the application have write permission to the directory where Mozilla is installed.
Why? This is a big problem in the Windows world, and now this just perpetuates it.
It's a very bad idea to require this. It prevents secure multi-user access. For example, student computer labs that I am responsible for have NT Workstation installed with feeble attempts at tough ACLS to prevent deliberate or malicious damage to C: drive. So many programs require full access to the program drive. Worse, a lot (like office 97) require the ROOT directory to be writable and then there's NT itself which requires %systemroot% (basically/bin) to be writable.
I don't buy this "you can't secure a computer you have physical access to" routine. Maybe not 100%, but getting close to that sure saves a lot of support costs over leaving a lab machine wide open...
One would wonder though, why you looked to Compaq for the HBAs when there are plenty of other HBAs out there.
Good point. The problem is that by its nature, the SAN and storage unit becomes the mission critical piece. All of your eggs go into that basket and when in a business, you really want a service contract on that stuff. Even though there's lots of redundancy set in, if something fails, I want it repaired that day. For Compaq to provide that level of service, they want nothing but HBAs, and driver kits that they have certified...
I gotta tell you, I was really disappointed at my experience in dealing with sales reps from Compaq and other vendors like EMC. You mention Linux and they do their best to talk you out of it. Now I know that Linux is currently lacking in areas that commercial UNIXes have, like LVMs and journaled file systems, but the point of a SAN is for me to be able to hook up various boxen running various OSes to the SAN's storage. Some of those I want to be Linux based due to application needs.
p.s. I know there is now some level of LVM and JFS support in newer linux kernels. But other vendors have had this stuff in their OSes for several years now. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be on the bleeding edge when your butt is on the line...
Earlier this year, with $250,000 to spend, I was looking at a nice StorageWorks SAN from Compaq. One of my conditions was that it would work with Linux, be it on Alpha or Intel. The sales rep initially took the attitude "why would you want to do that for?" and then pushed an Intel/NT solution. After insisting, they said they could let me in on a secret that Fibre Channel HBA support would be announced in April. Well that came and went, and nothing. Finally in summer they said "Yeah, we support Linux in the SAN, but only when in an arbitrated loop (which sucks since the entire SAN is like a hub not a switch).
I ended up looking elsewhere...
My impression was Compaq was giving lip service to Linux support. Maybe that's not the case in the very few months since then. I'd like to know... I saw a freshmeat announcement of drivers for a Compaq HBA for fibre channel since then but after that point it was too late...
First off, thanks for being polite in your response. Unfortunately, it was hard to read even though it looks like you took the time to quote and respond. The evils of HTML and lack of P tags strike again...
Government cannot grant rights, they can only grant privileges. All the rights enumerated by the Constitution you already possess with or without the actual paper
Sorry, but I don't buy it. Who says I am born with any rights. It's a philosophy and morality only, and requires something to back it up. Why do I have any more rights than a feed cow? Society grants me those rights because it's in the best interest for that society for that to happen. We also learn morals while growing and that helps perpetuate the idea (thank God) that we are born with rights.
As far as the government being self-supporting, I don't buy that either. When the U.S. constitution was written, the U.S. and the world was mainly an agrarian society. Things are a bit more complicated now. Back then, if you didn't have a job, you could work a bit of soil and at least feed yourself. Not possible these days. Back then an invading force had to basically fight their way in a foot at a time, today you can eliminate an entire city with a small-yield nuke. Back then you only had dirt roads between towns and very little travel between them. Today it takes 30 million U.S. dollars to build a bridge over a congested intersection so people don't collide into each other heading to the shopping mall and a billion dollars and 10 years to build a 60-mile limited access highway to move people up and down a small state (actual figures from my state).
As for my example of drug lords in Colombia (thanks AC for the spelling correction), that was just an example. Without government and police, it could well be someone trafficing in 13 year old girls on a slave market.
Weave's things to ponder:
We are animals
Humans are evil by nature and require a controlling force to keep them in line and a traditional of moral upbringing to implant a conscience.
Government is a necessary evil
Societies where government collapses quickly turn into a lawless anarchy until some other form of government takes power and stabilizes it again
And as for the U.S. two-party system...
The Democrats exist to legislate what you do!
The Republicans exist to legislate what you think!
Moderators are a trip. How was my previous note "off topic?" Just cause the last "notices" were? The main comment I wrote was certainly on topic and added a comment which someone hadn't already wrote. It's a shame I can't rate some moderators down as "no fucking sense of humor." Read "notice #6"
Now here's a clue, THIS post is off topic and/or a troll. Rate this one as such, not the previous one. And, to make it easier for budding moderators, I'm leaving my post score as +1 so it "sticks out" and BEGS to be moderated down.
What a load of rubbish. Without government, you'd have NO freedoms. Your existence would be defined by the one stronger than you. Government enforces the law. The law is defined by government. That can be a good thing or bad thing. In some countries where government has defined laws where its citizens have no freedoms, obviously er duh they don't.
Fortunately for many democratic countries, their governments have been set up to give its citizens freedoms which they deserve, back it up with law, and back that up with more law (common law, constitution, whatever) that says you can't take those freedoms away...
If you want lack of government meddling in your lives, I suggest you move to a country that has horrible ineffective government, like Columbia. Then your "freedoms" would be defined by the closest drug lord...
Also, guess what, government takes money to run it, and that comes from taxation. You enjoy benefits from the government like 1) protecting you 2) defining a stable currency 3) providing infrastructure. That comes with an obligation to pay for that stuff. I always love those people who whine about their taxes with the mantra "It's my money, it's my money." Er yeah, it *was* your money. Somehow if I walk into a grocery store and attempt to buy food and then cry to the cashier "You can't have my money, it's my money, I earned it." I don't think it would get me too far!
True, too much government is bad, but too little government is also bad. As everything else in life, a balance is needed.
But the idea of trusting a business more than a government is scarey. A business has only one obligation, to maximize the earnings of its owners. They couldn't care less about the customer beyond retaining them as one, and that's the way THAT should be...
The cable companies have sunk a helluva lot of cost into running and maintaining that wire that comes into your house. Having the government come in and force them to open it up to their competitors and then dictate the terms of that seems similar to the government nationalizing an industry for the "good of the citizens."
On the other hand, it's horribly inefficient for every company to trench and run their own cable into homes. How many do you need anyway?
I don't know, it just seems like certain things like telecom, power grids, natural gas lines, roads, rivers, and canals should be considered critical national infrastructure and provided by the government and then available to use to any company, organization, or individual through user fees.
Yes, you have to pay for incoming calls, but the person calling you doesn't pay a thing. In the UK if I remember correctly, "mobiles" are in their own area codes and are charged a higher rate than local calls, so the person calling the cell phone is in effect paying for that air time.
Calling party paying for air time in the US is a bit more difficult due to the nature of all of the different telcos, regional area codes, and the fact that local landline calls here are for the most part untimed and uncharged.
For example, would such effort have been put into finding holes in DreamCast's ability if it were not spearheaded by Microsoft?
Well, it's to be expected, isn't it. Microsoft is currently the biggest maker of micro-computer software and with that comes pros (they get to play the FUD game) and cons (they get to be scrutinized more than others).
Feeling sorry for them is like feeling sorry for movie stars that whine that they can't ever go out in public without being hounded to death by fans.
Too damn bad. It goes with the territory...
And if you think it's just anti-microsoft, I've seen a horrible amount of flames and criticisms leveraged toward the #1 Linux distro too...
I saw the story on TV (forget which news station) and it showed some guy signing a form with a digitizing pad using a standard signature, and another guy "signing" by putting his thumb against a thumbprint reader.
The one commentator said "If someone steals your credit card, you get a new one. What do you do if someone steals your thumbprint? Get a new thumb?"
That's the gist of it. Once my signature is digitized, it can be reproduced and sent along with anything.
The only way I can see this working is if it is some sort of secret that is known only to me, and it is revocable. I somehow doubt that that digitizing tablet and thumbprint reader on TV was using the data to unlock an internal secret key and using THAT to sign the data. No, I'm sure it was just digitizing the actual sig or print and sending THAT along.
I also get very nervous signing credit card slips using digitizing tablets at stores now, even though I'm fairly sure it doesn't record stroke and weight. All you need to do is sign once some tablet that DOES do that, and then anyone can print out perfect stroke and weight sigs using a plotter and a pen. (In these cases, I alter my sig by signing the name of the store across my sig on the table...)
I'd be more comfortable with a smart-card idea like the America Express Blue Card than what I've seen so far. At least it's something only issued to you and it can be revoked.
Yeah, things like PGP signatures could be used to do this, but I can't imagine the average person managing that correctly. I could easily, for example, go to someone's office at work and ask them to type in their PGP sig so I can debug their computer, then go back to my office and scarf their private key file. But I would have far less success going into their office and asking to borrow their smart-card for a while..
If I was this guy, I'd be scared shitless to do "the right thing" and quietly tell these banks that they were vulnerable and how.
What if they turned around and had him arrested for "hacking?" What would his defense be?
Nah, by going straight to the press, the FBI, and his local police up front, it guaranteed that it'd get enough publicity that there's no way the banks could get away with attempting to prosecute and if they even tried, he'd have a good defense beyond his word that he was doing it to disclose their security flaws.
Remember what the common person these days thinks about "hackers" and the bad press hackers get these days.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it sounds like these puppies were real pros. If I was running a master criminal organization, stealing source to Microsoft code would be the best way to evaluate weaknesses in their code and use that quietly to hack into the world's biggest companies and banks undetected and run off with billions. Or how about hacking into foreign government intranets to get their secrets? Remember that this code has not received a critical eye looking at it with the intent to covertly break into it.
There are real risks to the world going to 100% Microsoft solutions. It's like royal families inbreeding in medieval times. It ain't good and it's getting worse.
Just think, your entire company may be Microsoft on the desktop, but at least the back ends are still something else. But soon no more. To leverage those nifty Active Directory benefits you need to move your DNS, LDAP, and Kerberos services to Windows 2000. Then you'll start to see the real benefits of moving that web server to IIS and e-mail to Exchange 2000.
The real thing to fear here is what's going to happen behind closed doors outside of Redmond...
I just don't understand the logic in trusting corporate and often national security interests running software you are unable to audit written by a private company whose only concern is maximizing their revenue and market share.
An alternate solution is their Data General division, which makes the Clar iio n disk arrays and SAN. We actually bought one of these puppies and it should be delivered sometime next week (at which time no one will ever read this thread again since /. threads have a half-life of about two hours so me following up with status is useless...)
The rules were changed after we got our domain (1993). If we tried to register now, it'd be dtcc.co.de.us
It's actually a good thing. It's the one non-polluted domain left. Every two-bit fly-by-night "earn your MCSC cert in two days" school would be wanting a .edu. It also prevents a company like ucsc.com suing ucsc.edu for trademark infringement! :)
It can be quite painful. Protective gear is very helpful but even if there is a little space of skin visible, bugs tend to get in there and smack you. It's only the biggest ones that hurt. Now birds, I've had one hit my helmut before and almost knock me off my bike. I've riden over 100,000 miles and this has only happened once. Running over cats and dogs is a larger concern, which I don't think would be a problem with a personal air craft! :)
Believe it or not, rain hurts the most at higher speeds.
Remember in the late 80s when Microsoft and IBM pushed OS/2 as the successor to Windows? Who would have thought that an OS backed by such heavyweights as IBM and Microsoft would just be abandoned?
We just (last year) reformatted our last OS/2 install in our libraries here. It was required by some software to manage libraries. Some companies made some huge investments in OS/2 development to just be abandoned. At least if OS/2 was free-sourced, development could have continued.
This ad should be read as that you should trust it all to Microsoft and if their business needs and plans change, you MUST change with them or else be left behind (at a reasonable upgrade fee of course...)
Anyway, what I meant by spoofing was in the sense that if I ran bind 9 and wanted to allow MS clients to use DDNS, I couldn't use MSes security procedure so I'd have to rely on authentication by IP address range only, which someone could spoof and cause wrongful updates to my DNS server... not a pretty thing to think about...
What bothers me is the belief that the Bible is 100% accurate and the word of God literally. The Bible could have, and most likely was, buggered up by the humans writing it, influenced by personal beliefs, etc...
This chance is explained away by the idea that God would just not simply let that happen. But this can be disproven by buggering up the current Bible and see if God stops you. All you need to do is to point to where something has been inaccurately translated or interpreted incorrectly to prove that as well.
For example, apparently the commandment "Thou shall not kill" was not translated accurately. Going back to original scrolls and even later Hebrew translations, it originally (or at some point) said "Thou shall not murder." That's actually a big difference. It implies that in some cases that killing is justifiable just as in today's law, not all "kills" are murders.
So how can the net itself adopt this when it isn't supported by Microsoft? It's going to be a non-issue like Microsoft not yet supporting ipv6 so therefore it's not going anywhere...
This isn't a troll, it's just the real world. Microsoft effectively is controling it all and me jumping up and down screaming that "it ain't right" or "it's not standard" isn't going to help. If, for example, I'm forced to support Active Directory down the line, I'm also going to be forced to migrate DNS to Win2k DNS servers because the authentication used by MS clients for DDNS updates is incompatible with DNSSEC and it's either go with a Microsoft solution or losen security on my DNS servers and then anyone can spoof an update into my DNS server and make dynamic updates. :(
sigh... why do i never catch typos until after I hit submit and never during preview? s/imformed/informed/
This seems to me like a giant step backwards. The idea of physically carting around your data in a bulky laptop from dorm to class to lab is ridiculous... Data like this should be accessible from anywhere from any machine as long as the correct security credentials are supplied...
This also means that all students will have to purchase licenses for each software package they ever want to learn. What if I want to go to a lab and try my hand at AutoCAD 2000? In a typical university, just go to the CAD lab and try it out. Now you'd have to go out and buy a copy for your own laptop.
The support logistics also seem like a nightmare. For example, where will a student turn when they attempt to install a parallel-port zip drive to their laptop and it blue-screens during the next boot, making all of their data inaccessible? (We had a real problem where I work with that. For some reason, external parallel-port zip drives and NT 4 just don't get along very well... Loads of BSOD problems after a reboot after an install. We finally had to ban the things...)
And this is NOT just a linux/unix issue. System Administrators of NT/W2K boxen also expect that programs don't write into the program directories...
This one is a real killer. Years of work and because of this, those of us that deploy desktops that number in the thousands (in my case) will decide it's not worth it and not bother... Too many risks, too many hassles...
I tried too, but things fail in weird ways. You may not see it right away. For example, Access Wizards required write access to a few files in the office directory.
There's a Microsoft KB article about what needs write access on C: for Office 97. It's a disgrace...
q169387
Office 2000 is a lot better. NT and NTFS came out a helluva long time ago (when, like 94ish?). It's a shame that several years later, Microsoft Apps still don't behave well in R/O environments (and now Mozilla gets to continue the tradition...)
Programmers, no matter what system they write for, should never ever assume they can scribble to files and directories in any place other than a defined temp directory,a user-defined directory, or some directory configured by the systems admin in some global preferences location.
The same kind of thing could be said for the Windows registry. Programs should never assume they can write to HKLM keys. Stuff in HKLM should be defined during install time or via system policies. Any user data and settings should be recorded to HKCU only...
Why? This is a big problem in the Windows world, and now this just perpetuates it.
It's a very bad idea to require this. It prevents secure multi-user access. For example, student computer labs that I am responsible for have NT Workstation installed with feeble attempts at tough ACLS to prevent deliberate or malicious damage to C: drive. So many programs require full access to the program drive. Worse, a lot (like office 97) require the ROOT directory to be writable and then there's NT itself which requires %systemroot% (basically /bin) to be writable.
I don't buy this "you can't secure a computer you have physical access to" routine. Maybe not 100%, but getting close to that sure saves a lot of support costs over leaving a lab machine wide open...
Good point. The problem is that by its nature, the SAN and storage unit becomes the mission critical piece. All of your eggs go into that basket and when in a business, you really want a service contract on that stuff. Even though there's lots of redundancy set in, if something fails, I want it repaired that day. For Compaq to provide that level of service, they want nothing but HBAs, and driver kits that they have certified...
I gotta tell you, I was really disappointed at my experience in dealing with sales reps from Compaq and other vendors like EMC. You mention Linux and they do their best to talk you out of it. Now I know that Linux is currently lacking in areas that commercial UNIXes have, like LVMs and journaled file systems, but the point of a SAN is for me to be able to hook up various boxen running various OSes to the SAN's storage. Some of those I want to be Linux based due to application needs.
p.s. I know there is now some level of LVM and JFS support in newer linux kernels. But other vendors have had this stuff in their OSes for several years now. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be on the bleeding edge when your butt is on the line...
I ended up looking elsewhere...
My impression was Compaq was giving lip service to Linux support. Maybe that's not the case in the very few months since then. I'd like to know... I saw a freshmeat announcement of drivers for a Compaq HBA for fibre channel since then but after that point it was too late...
Sorry, but I don't buy it. Who says I am born with any rights. It's a philosophy and morality only, and requires something to back it up. Why do I have any more rights than a feed cow? Society grants me those rights because it's in the best interest for that society for that to happen. We also learn morals while growing and that helps perpetuate the idea (thank God) that we are born with rights.
As far as the government being self-supporting, I don't buy that either. When the U.S. constitution was written, the U.S. and the world was mainly an agrarian society. Things are a bit more complicated now. Back then, if you didn't have a job, you could work a bit of soil and at least feed yourself. Not possible these days. Back then an invading force had to basically fight their way in a foot at a time, today you can eliminate an entire city with a small-yield nuke. Back then you only had dirt roads between towns and very little travel between them. Today it takes 30 million U.S. dollars to build a bridge over a congested intersection so people don't collide into each other heading to the shopping mall and a billion dollars and 10 years to build a 60-mile limited access highway to move people up and down a small state (actual figures from my state).
As for my example of drug lords in Colombia (thanks AC for the spelling correction), that was just an example. Without government and police, it could well be someone trafficing in 13 year old girls on a slave market.
Weave's things to ponder:
Have a nice day! :)
Now here's a clue, THIS post is off topic and/or a troll. Rate this one as such, not the previous one. And, to make it easier for budding moderators, I'm leaving my post score as +1 so it "sticks out" and BEGS to be moderated down.
Bloody wankers... :-(
What a load of rubbish. Without government, you'd have NO freedoms. Your existence would be defined by the one stronger than you. Government enforces the law. The law is defined by government. That can be a good thing or bad thing. In some countries where government has defined laws where its citizens have no freedoms, obviously er duh they don't.
Fortunately for many democratic countries, their governments have been set up to give its citizens freedoms which they deserve, back it up with law, and back that up with more law (common law, constitution, whatever) that says you can't take those freedoms away...
If you want lack of government meddling in your lives, I suggest you move to a country that has horrible ineffective government, like Columbia. Then your "freedoms" would be defined by the closest drug lord...
Also, guess what, government takes money to run it, and that comes from taxation. You enjoy benefits from the government like 1) protecting you 2) defining a stable currency 3) providing infrastructure. That comes with an obligation to pay for that stuff. I always love those people who whine about their taxes with the mantra "It's my money, it's my money." Er yeah, it *was* your money. Somehow if I walk into a grocery store and attempt to buy food and then cry to the cashier "You can't have my money, it's my money, I earned it." I don't think it would get me too far!
True, too much government is bad, but too little government is also bad. As everything else in life, a balance is needed.
But the idea of trusting a business more than a government is scarey. A business has only one obligation, to maximize the earnings of its owners. They couldn't care less about the customer beyond retaining them as one, and that's the way THAT should be...
On the other hand, it's horribly inefficient for every company to trench and run their own cable into homes. How many do you need anyway?
I don't know, it just seems like certain things like telecom, power grids, natural gas lines, roads, rivers, and canals should be considered critical national infrastructure and provided by the government and then available to use to any company, organization, or individual through user fees.
Calling party paying for air time in the US is a bit more difficult due to the nature of all of the different telcos, regional area codes, and the fact that local landline calls here are for the most part untimed and uncharged.
Well, it's to be expected, isn't it. Microsoft is currently the biggest maker of micro-computer software and with that comes pros (they get to play the FUD game) and cons (they get to be scrutinized more than others).
Feeling sorry for them is like feeling sorry for movie stars that whine that they can't ever go out in public without being hounded to death by fans.
Too damn bad. It goes with the territory...
And if you think it's just anti-microsoft, I've seen a horrible amount of flames and criticisms leveraged toward the #1 Linux distro too...
The one commentator said "If someone steals your credit card, you get a new one. What do you do if someone steals your thumbprint? Get a new thumb?"
That's the gist of it. Once my signature is digitized, it can be reproduced and sent along with anything.
The only way I can see this working is if it is some sort of secret that is known only to me, and it is revocable. I somehow doubt that that digitizing tablet and thumbprint reader on TV was using the data to unlock an internal secret key and using THAT to sign the data. No, I'm sure it was just digitizing the actual sig or print and sending THAT along.
I also get very nervous signing credit card slips using digitizing tablets at stores now, even though I'm fairly sure it doesn't record stroke and weight. All you need to do is sign once some tablet that DOES do that, and then anyone can print out perfect stroke and weight sigs using a plotter and a pen. (In these cases, I alter my sig by signing the name of the store across my sig on the table...)
I'd be more comfortable with a smart-card idea like the America Express Blue Card than what I've seen so far. At least it's something only issued to you and it can be revoked.
Yeah, things like PGP signatures could be used to do this, but I can't imagine the average person managing that correctly. I could easily, for example, go to someone's office at work and ask them to type in their PGP sig so I can debug their computer, then go back to my office and scarf their private key file. But I would have far less success going into their office and asking to borrow their smart-card for a while..
I'm confused, non-funny lines don't even exist in Holy Grail! :-)
And I'll have you know that the castle scene filled with the young maidens lended itself to many a lonely night's fantasy in my early teen years.
(Rate: -1 for being silly...)
I prefer to use flock() myself...
What if they turned around and had him arrested for "hacking?" What would his defense be?
Nah, by going straight to the press, the FBI, and his local police up front, it guaranteed that it'd get enough publicity that there's no way the banks could get away with attempting to prosecute and if they even tried, he'd have a good defense beyond his word that he was doing it to disclose their security flaws.
Remember what the common person these days thinks about "hackers" and the bad press hackers get these days.