"There is no business case for making cars harder to steal for the auto industry."
There's also no human case for it. The harder cars are to steal, the more likely that somebody who wants one will hijack it, rather than steal it when it's left parked.
Given that most people would prefer to come out of work and find their car gone, compared to someone jumping out at them with a knife and demanding the immobiliser key, many manufacturers decided to limit the amount of security on a car.
"Can some one please explain to me what is evil about biometric identification?"
Because systems which cannot fail are more difficult to fix when they do fail.
Also, when somebody is identified for harassement by a system which is widely believed to be perfect and immune to failure, it's a lot harder for the victim to explain why it's the system, and not them, who is at fault.
"I'm sorry, sir, you are not allowed to travel. No, we cannot tell you why, that would be a violation of security; we can only tell you that you are not allowed to travel."
Why do you say next year? Surely you mean this year?
Midnight yesterday, 12-year-olds Emily Rone and Abigail Harding were arrested by police in fields outside their village, apparently building a town center close to a disused gold mine. Officers attending the scene were fired upon by watchtowers in the vicinity, and Officer Frank Peters sustained minor injuries from a crossbow bolt, apparently fired automatically. When questioned, the girls were cooperative and willing to explain the project; unfortunately no orcish interpreters could be provided by the Ohio police department. The girls have been taken into care, while police spent the rest of today dismantling orc burrows in the area.
See page 16 for our editorial on why kids should be banned from playing violent videogames, and page 18 for a reaction from the Enraged Coalition of Elvish Mothers.
"Google is a single point of failure, and the people running it seem determined to fail. We need a peer to peer search engine."
Surely all we need is an open-source Google that anybody can run on their server?
Admittedly, p2p data sharing would be useful for doing the indexing, rather than me getting 8 million hits per day from googlebots running in student dorms, but all it would take is a googol of googles, with a significant number of them in the free world.
"More importantly, do you avoid the 5 pound congestion road tax in London when you're driving on the Thames?"
Well yeah, you only get charged that if you drive past a camera.
Now, do they put C-cameras on the slipways, or do they leave them free to encourage use of the Thames. Are there too many slipways to do that, or few enough that you can't get out of the river in central london anyway? And do they cost more than 5 to use?
Interesting to see how Linkin Park have come so quickly to embrace crippled CDs, so soon after they became profitiable on the back of free downloads at MP3.com
Quite interesting to see which side Dell came down on. A totally irrelevant statement, but trying as best they can to dissuade people from buying Linux. Somebody explain to them the relevance of SCO_linux licensing on somebody who hasn't bought SCO linux, nor has any contract with SCO?
Note to Dell: I'll remember this very well when we replace our PCs at work. You want to insult the free software community? Well, we're no longer the ones who buy Dell computers at work.
"ms-word cant do automatic page numbering? huh? perhaps you meant the user was just too dumb to be using a computer"
Nice as it would be to dismiss computer users like that, the page-numbering error was actually a well-known bug in MS-Word. FAQ
Affected: Word 97, Word 2000, both in different ways, both have workarounds rather than fixes, and some only become apparent when you print a document, which could be an expensive mistake if you have something large to print, and only notice "page 351 of 1" too late.
"Beside attempting to do table formatting with strings of spaces, the author also had manually numbered the pages. "
You haven't come across diagrams annotated with " Button 1 -------->" and lots and lots of spaces yet?
Of course, manual page-numbering can be a mess, but some people were just trying to work-around the fact that MS-Word can't do automatic page numbering (1 of 1, 2 of 2, 3 of 3...)
"Yes, we should strive for 'perfect' interoperability."
Rather, MS-Word should strive for perfect interoperability. I have the most recent version of MS-Word (at work), and it neither reads nor writes SXW files. It'll need to get a lot better than that before I'd consider buying it for private use.
Slashdot Mirror
(l)user: Hello, I'm having problems with my PC
techsupport: okay...
(l)user: I'm running Windows XP...
techsupport: yes, you already said that
"There is no business case for making cars harder to steal for the auto industry."
There's also no human case for it. The harder cars are to steal, the more likely that somebody who wants one will hijack it, rather than steal it when it's left parked.
Given that most people would prefer to come out of work and find their car gone, compared to someone jumping out at them with a knife and demanding the immobiliser key, many manufacturers decided to limit the amount of security on a car.
"That's what is being patented: the fact that the pepper comes out of the dog's ass"
Seems strangely appropriate somehow.
Could I patent something with patent applications coming out of the dogs ass?
"Yep ... better to save those precision weapons for more lucrative civilian targets, like the Chinese embassy."
Or journalists' hotels and offices
"Can some one please explain to me what is evil about biometric identification?"
Because systems which cannot fail are more difficult to fix when they do fail.
Also, when somebody is identified for harassement by a system which is widely believed to be perfect and immune to failure, it's a lot harder for the victim to explain why it's the system, and not them, who is at fault.
"I'm sorry, sir, you are not allowed to travel. No, we cannot tell you why, that would be a violation of security; we can only tell you that you are not allowed to travel."
Why do you say next year? Surely you mean this year?
er.. they have plenty about China and many other countries if you followed the links
It's much easier than that:
Report by China on Human-Rights abuses in the United States
Similarly, no problem with replacing microsoft's opinions with "Bork Bork"...
Full list of articles
b.t.w. that PC-destruction article is as old as the hills.
Smalltown, OH. 9/18/2003. AP Reuters
Midnight yesterday, 12-year-olds Emily Rone and Abigail Harding were arrested by police in fields outside their village, apparently building a town center close to a disused gold mine. Officers attending the scene were fired upon by watchtowers in the vicinity, and Officer Frank Peters sustained minor injuries from a crossbow bolt, apparently fired automatically. When questioned, the girls were cooperative and willing to explain the project; unfortunately no orcish interpreters could be provided by the Ohio police department. The girls have been taken into care, while police spent the rest of today dismantling orc burrows in the area.
See page 16 for our editorial on why kids should be banned from playing violent videogames, and page 18 for a reaction from the Enraged Coalition of Elvish Mothers.
"Google is a single point of failure, and the people running it seem determined to fail. We need a peer to peer search engine."
Surely all we need is an open-source Google that anybody can run on their server?
Admittedly, p2p data sharing would be useful for doing the indexing, rather than me getting 8 million hits per day from googlebots running in student dorms, but all it would take is a googol of googles, with a significant number of them in the free world.
"a far more pressing issue for me is why doesn't google remove links for "kiddie porn" or "illegal porn" or "rape pics" or something?"
Because the list of people who do such searches is more useful than removing the search?
Because it would just le/\d 2 a speling modifikation w@r and massive keyword pollution when 'disney lyrics' becomes the keyword for searching porn?
'Cos being able to download full albums can't possibly be legal, right?
"so perhaps in a deade or so, Windows will be able to do what Be did back in '91"
Is that how long it takes for a patent to expire?
"Maybe Microsoft has started offering their developers $20 for each security fix..."
Or $2.56 for anybody who finds a bug?
Finally, an explanation of what the $60 billion is for
"More importantly, do you avoid the 5 pound congestion road tax in London when you're driving on the Thames?"
Well yeah, you only get charged that if you drive past a camera.
Now, do they put C-cameras on the slipways, or do they leave them free to encourage use of the Thames. Are there too many slipways to do that, or few enough that you can't get out of the river in central london anyway? And do they cost more than 5 to use?
Grass is still green, right?
..with tangerine trees and marmalade skies
"hence stopping its distribution is not a violation of freedom of speech."
But to stop its distribution, you'd need to remove freedom of speech, no?
You're free to speak, on all subjects except...
"I have reported you to the authorities for reverse engineering this. Please remain at your location; the SWAT team is on the way."
How awful that people post comments like this on something which is specifically allowed and encouraged by copyright law.
"Check out the list at Fat Chuck's"
Interesting to see how Linkin Park have come so quickly to embrace crippled CDs, so soon after they became profitiable on the back of free downloads at MP3.com
Quite interesting to see which side Dell came down on. A totally irrelevant statement, but trying as best they can to dissuade people from buying Linux. Somebody explain to them the relevance of SCO_linux licensing on somebody who hasn't bought SCO linux, nor has any contract with SCO?
Note to Dell: I'll remember this very well when we replace our PCs at work. You want to insult the free software community? Well, we're no longer the ones who buy Dell computers at work.
"That said, is there anyone left out there who doesn't think that SCO executives were all along trying to pull a pump-n-dump of their own stock?"
It seems that Gartner are the only ones still in denial.
Oh, and the corporate world.
"ms-word cant do automatic page numbering? huh? perhaps you meant the user was just too dumb to be using a computer"
Nice as it would be to dismiss computer users like that, the page-numbering error was actually a well-known bug in MS-Word. FAQ
Affected: Word 97, Word 2000, both in different ways, both have workarounds rather than fixes, and some only become apparent when you print a document, which could be an expensive mistake if you have something large to print, and only notice "page 351 of 1" too late.
"Beside attempting to do table formatting with strings of spaces, the author also had manually numbered the pages. "
You haven't come across diagrams annotated with " Button 1 -------->" and lots and lots of spaces yet?
Of course, manual page-numbering can be a mess, but some people were just trying to work-around the fact that MS-Word can't do automatic page numbering (1 of 1, 2 of 2, 3 of 3...)
"Yes, we should strive for 'perfect' interoperability."
Rather, MS-Word should strive for perfect interoperability. I have the most recent version of MS-Word (at work), and it neither reads nor writes SXW files. It'll need to get a lot better than that before I'd consider buying it for private use.