If the EFF have a problem with a technology which was designed to prevent counterfeiting, do they also have a problem with serial numbers on genuine currency?
This technology doesn't prevent counterfeiting; it makes it easier to track who made a particular document. Every document printed is watermarked, with no notice to the user. The possibilities of abuse are huge. At least knowing this exists if one does need anonymity one can avoid this technology.
Sorry, but if that's all you've got, I call bullshit. Too much doesn't add up.
RTFA, the one at the EFF. They have lists of printers they've tested; almost all colour lasers have been found to have these dots. They have blown up images of patterns, which are spread all over the sheet. What they're trying to do is work out what these encode, so they're asking for test printouts along with printer data.
I've been thinking of some possible countermeasures to protect you in the occasional episode of civil disobedience
Use a B/W laser. Thy don't have this tracking, (if you're paranoid, get an old one; mine is 1992 vintage and still cranking pages out at 600 dpi). If you need colour, use an inkjet. I haven't heard any suggestion that these are tracked, but anyway just buy with cash and throw away after. They're virtually disposable now.
. If what somebody has to say isn't worth the cost of a $10-$15 monthly bill, then I'm not interested.
I have many, many bookmarks to free sites where some enthusiast has his free software that does exactly what I need, technical guide to some obscure hardware, old TV show, author, etc, etc. If they had to pay to keep it online, most couldn't justify it, or would have to load it up with even more banners, popup etc (though the return on these for a low traffic site won't cover the costs these days).
"The finest radio drama of the 1930's was The Mercury Theatre on the Air, a show featuring the acclaimed New York drama company founded by Orson Welles and John Houseman". -- There are over 60 episodes, including the famous 1938 War of the Worlds, here. There a lots of other "Old Time Radio" sites with dowloads, see eg here for links.
More current: Hour 25 has interviews with SF authors, all downloadable as MP3. Prairie Home Companion, in Real format.
Also, posting whiny criticisms about the articles accomplishes exactly nothing. An well thought out critical email to one of the editors will do more, to info@ostg.com or info@vasoftware, probably more, and to Slashdot's principal advertisers, probably most of all.
I doubt it. I frequently email the editors pointing out blatant errors; most of them ignore it; Tim sometimes takes notice; Cowboy Neal's usually bounce. I used to think it was the old guard, Taco, et al, who were jaded and couldn't give a fuck any more, but the newer guys, like Samzenpus, are even worse; totally careless of language and correctness. This place is popular because it's popular; it has a critical mass of readers who contribute. The lack of quality in editing will eventually poison the discussions more and more, but for the moment it's the only game in town.
Personally, I don't know Einstein's beliefs in origins, but I don't think they would have hindered one way or the other his development of the theory of relativity,
Why did he come to the US? Fear of religious persecution by the Nazis. The US fundamentalists don't like Jews that much either. As for "origins"; how does the Big Bang fit in with that? No study of cosmology can begin if you're trying to reconcile it with a literal biblical interpretation. More practically, the bans on stem-cell research, prompted by the same mindset, will kill off any chance of getting a lead in medical sciences.
. So while the cost to duplicate software is nearly free, the cost to build and track an extra SKU that is only purchased by a small number of people is not free and so we have the extra price for the special order. It seems that Dell values this extra work at somewhere around $20.
Dell lets you choose several hardware options. It seems to me this would be rather more copmlex to organise that which OS to image onto the hard disk. In any case, they already have a system for tracking individually built PCs, so adding another field to track the OS should be no extra cost than tracking which keyboard, RAM, video card, etc was included.
Sorry to put it to you, but democracies (for instance india or the philipines) can be several orders of magnitude more corrupt.
First, democracy is necessary to fight corruption (once the clean fire of revolution wears off, all one-part states descend to cronyism or worse), but unfortunately not sufficient. I maintain that China is much more corrupt than any democratic country. In India and the Philippines we hear about the corruption because they have a fairly free press, in China the press is certainly bolder than before, but still very wary to criticise the government or CP; they are subject to reprisals if they irritate. When you hear of CP members being charged with corruption it means they've lost out in some internal power-struggle, not that crusading reporters or judiciary have uncovered them.
Or if they shifted to a democracy from thier current political enviroment. Theyd choke and corupt and become nothing
The current Party leadership is very corrupt. The only hope to clean that up is democracy, which is why they fear it; ideologically they're hardly communist at all now.
How are you going to organise an election with half a billion people voting... the USA can barely manage a fair election with 250 million or so
I think so, but it's an oversimplfication.
If we pulled out of Saudi Arabia and Iraq today, I believe they'd find something else to justify their actions -- something like less defined like "cultural imperialism".
I reallly doubt that. Choosing to become a suicide bomber needs a much stronger motivation than disliking Mcdonalds or Levi jeans.
This is the "they hate us becasue we're free" claim I heard after 9/11."
No, it isn't. It is saying that due to their success at causing even greater and more permanent social damage
They only care about "social damage" in the US as it affects foreign policy. Terrorism is a means to an end (i.e. Islamic governments throughout the Middle East and Central Asia), not an end in itself.
Why not? Make a third door where the WCs are, the room does not have to be big. It may be inferior, but it's still better than a complete smoking ban.
"Better", for the smokers. Not the non-smokers, who are supposed to enter and exit via a back alley next to the toilet. It certainly fails to give equal access to any entertainment (band, etc), and probably the bar. It seems perverse to have separate and inferior facilities for what is statistically the majority.
The second point has no relation with the first, you can ban smoking in some places and not others, there is no need for a prohibition.
I meant, in that context, that trying to ban smoking from part of a restaurant or bar fails to give clean air to non-smokers.
As for "some places": trying to legislate to force only some bars/restaurants (say, randomly selected) to be smoke-free would be vigorously resisted by the owners, who would rightly fear losing custom. The problem is that in any group of several friends you're likely to have at least one smoker, in deference to who the whole group will patronise a "smoking" establishment. If smoking wasn't a lethal, costly habit (it killed my mother) I might be more concerned with the "choice" aspect, but marginalising smoking when and wherever possible is one "nanny state" provision I'm behind.
What about an optional smoking room? Either no smoking at all or smoking just in a designated room.
That doesn't work in bars or most resturants with one single space. And if they do have the space, it's always going to be inferior to the "normal" = smoking area.
Usualy the only parties that are involved are radical anti-smokers (who want to force their views on everyone) and heavy smokers (who can't go 10 minutes without a cigarete).
Unfortunately, it only takes one heavy smoker to effectively convert any room to "smoking", and many seem to chain smoke when they drink. Given that smokers are addicted and are compelled to light up in the sure knowledge it's killing them, anything less than complete prohibition is ineffective.
I choose neither if the choice is between 100% smoking or 100% non-smoking.
So what alternative is there? In practice, "leaving it up to the restaurant" means "100% smoking". Even legislating to make a certain area of a restaurant or bar "smoke free" generally means "one table next to the toilet".
Doubleclick et al fucked it up for people like you. Who wants to let some creepy marketer track you from site to site and correlate it with personal information?
Unless you go to the hassle of carefully monitoring your cookies, which you probably need a third-party app to do, it's simpler just to deny or frequently delete them all. Personally I block most and allow a handful, mostly logging me into forums like this one.
leave it up to the property owners. I wouldn't be against legislation bolstering property-owners' right to enforce their own private smoking bans, but I don't agree with the legislative "class" bans saying "nobody can smoke in restaurants, even if the restauranteur wants it".
The problem (well, my problem) with this is that you can have, say 40% of the adult population smokers, but virtually 100% of bars and restaurants (aside from McDonalds) as "smoking", because the owners know that some smokers will boycott them if they go non-smoking, but non-smokers have nowhere to go. So given that smoking kills people, even second-hand, not least the staff working in these bars and restaurants, I'm very happy for governments to mandate the situation be reversed and make 100% of bars and resturants non-smoking. Let the smokers be forced to breath fresh air for a change.
[terrorists are] out there watching our government's reaction, gloating, and planning their next wave of attacks to see what sort of reactionary fascism they can goad our government into next.
This is the "they hate us becasue we're free" claim I heard after 9/11. Really, do you believe al Qaeda suicide bombers are giving their lives because they want to remove your freedoms? They may well find your lifestyle repugnant, but what they want to change is US foreign policy; support of the Saudi royal family, Israel, etc. They are probably quite pleased with the occupation of Iraq for reasons which are obvious. But what the US does within its own borders is of no importance to them.
there is a book coming out that kids and their parents have been waiting to read together, without spoilers, for two years. would it kill you to shut up just long enough to let them enjoy it?
Darth is Luke's father! Rosebud is a sleigh! The Martians are killed by bacteria! The psychiatrist in 6th Sense is a ghost!... sorry
Not giving spoilers a matter of politeness; legislating for that is hopeless. And in any case minutes after the book was officially released, assholes started posting "XXX is killed by YYY" (see, I have some sensitivity) spoilers all over, like goatse links, before 99% of readers would have the book. People who had bought a book legally were being threatened if they discussed it before the publisher wanted them to. That's far more disturbing than some spoilers.
...demonstrating that you cannot comprehend the concept of "indirect reference". (With that in mind, I hope you don't intend to take up C programming.)
How could I have missed the obvious assignment
"They have a swing set" = *"Let's rape their children";
Slashdot Mirror
So do I
This technology doesn't prevent counterfeiting; it makes it easier to track who made a particular document. Every document printed is watermarked, with no notice to the user. The possibilities of abuse are huge. At least knowing this exists if one does need anonymity one can avoid this technology.
RTFA, the one at the EFF. They have lists of printers they've tested; almost all colour lasers have been found to have these dots. They have blown up images of patterns, which are spread all over the sheet. What they're trying to do is work out what these encode, so they're asking for test printouts along with printer data.
Use a B/W laser. Thy don't have this tracking, (if you're paranoid, get an old one; mine is 1992 vintage and still cranking pages out at 600 dpi). If you need colour, use an inkjet. I haven't heard any suggestion that these are tracked, but anyway just buy with cash and throw away after. They're virtually disposable now.
I have many, many bookmarks to free sites where some enthusiast has his free software that does exactly what I need, technical guide to some obscure hardware, old TV show, author, etc, etc. If they had to pay to keep it online, most couldn't justify it, or would have to load it up with even more banners, popup etc (though the return on these for a low traffic site won't cover the costs these days).
More current:
Hour 25 has interviews with SF authors, all downloadable as MP3.
Prairie Home Companion, in Real format.
I doubt it. I frequently email the editors pointing out blatant errors; most of them ignore it; Tim sometimes takes notice; Cowboy Neal's usually bounce. I used to think it was the old guard, Taco, et al, who were jaded and couldn't give a fuck any more, but the newer guys, like Samzenpus, are even worse; totally careless of language and correctness. This place is popular because it's popular; it has a critical mass of readers who contribute. The lack of quality in editing will eventually poison the discussions more and more, but for the moment it's the only game in town.
Why did he come to the US? Fear of religious persecution by the Nazis. The US fundamentalists don't like Jews that much either. As for "origins"; how does the Big Bang fit in with that? No study of cosmology can begin if you're trying to reconcile it with a literal biblical interpretation. More practically, the bans on stem-cell research, prompted by the same mindset, will kill off any chance of getting a lead in medical sciences.
Dell lets you choose several hardware options. It seems to me this would be rather more copmlex to organise that which OS to image onto the hard disk. In any case, they already have a system for tracking individually built PCs, so adding another field to track the OS should be no extra cost than tracking which keyboard, RAM, video card, etc was included.
Don't complain it costs $20 for a CD. Try hiring the Rolling Stones to play in your living room.
I live in China and have visited the Phillipines a few times. So I'll just ignore you now.
First, democracy is necessary to fight corruption (once the clean fire of revolution wears off, all one-part states descend to cronyism or worse), but unfortunately not sufficient. I maintain that China is much more corrupt than any democratic country. In India and the Philippines we hear about the corruption because they have a fairly free press, in China the press is certainly bolder than before, but still very wary to criticise the government or CP; they are subject to reprisals if they irritate. When you hear of CP members being charged with corruption it means they've lost out in some internal power-struggle, not that crusading reporters or judiciary have uncovered them.
The current Party leadership is very corrupt. The only hope to clean that up is democracy, which is why they fear it; ideologically they're hardly communist at all now.
How are you going to organise an election with half a billion people voting... the USA can barely manage a fair election with 250 million or so
India manages.
I reallly doubt that. Choosing to become a suicide bomber needs a much stronger motivation than disliking Mcdonalds or Levi jeans.
There are a few hacks like Gmail Drive and Gmail filesystem that make GMail act like a single file system.
No, it isn't. It is saying that due to their success at causing even greater and more permanent social damage
They only care about "social damage" in the US as it affects foreign policy. Terrorism is a means to an end (i.e. Islamic governments throughout the Middle East and Central Asia), not an end in itself.
"Better", for the smokers. Not the non-smokers, who are supposed to enter and exit via a back alley next to the toilet. It certainly fails to give equal access to any entertainment (band, etc), and probably the bar. It seems perverse to have separate and inferior facilities for what is statistically the majority.
The second point has no relation with the first, you can ban smoking in some places and not others, there is no need for a prohibition.
I meant, in that context, that trying to ban smoking from part of a restaurant or bar fails to give clean air to non-smokers.
As for "some places": trying to legislate to force only some bars/restaurants (say, randomly selected) to be smoke-free would be vigorously resisted by the owners, who would rightly fear losing custom. The problem is that in any group of several friends you're likely to have at least one smoker, in deference to who the whole group will patronise a "smoking" establishment. If smoking wasn't a lethal, costly habit (it killed my mother) I might be more concerned with the "choice" aspect, but marginalising smoking when and wherever possible is one "nanny state" provision I'm behind.
That doesn't work in bars or most resturants with one single space. And if they do have the space, it's always going to be inferior to the "normal" = smoking area.
Usualy the only parties that are involved are radical anti-smokers (who want to force their views on everyone) and heavy smokers (who can't go 10 minutes without a cigarete).
Unfortunately, it only takes one heavy smoker to effectively convert any room to "smoking", and many seem to chain smoke when they drink. Given that smokers are addicted and are compelled to light up in the sure knowledge it's killing them, anything less than complete prohibition is ineffective.
So what alternative is there? In practice, "leaving it up to the restaurant" means "100% smoking". Even legislating to make a certain area of a restaurant or bar "smoke free" generally means "one table next to the toilet".
Doubleclick et al fucked it up for people like you. Who wants to let some creepy marketer track you from site to site and correlate it with personal information?
Unless you go to the hassle of carefully monitoring your cookies, which you probably need a third-party app to do, it's simpler just to deny or frequently delete them all. Personally I block most and allow a handful, mostly logging me into forums like this one.
The problem (well, my problem) with this is that you can have, say 40% of the adult population smokers, but virtually 100% of bars and restaurants (aside from McDonalds) as "smoking", because the owners know that some smokers will boycott them if they go non-smoking, but non-smokers have nowhere to go. So given that smoking kills people, even second-hand, not least the staff working in these bars and restaurants, I'm very happy for governments to mandate the situation be reversed and make 100% of bars and resturants non-smoking. Let the smokers be forced to breath fresh air for a change.
This is the "they hate us becasue we're free" claim I heard after 9/11. Really, do you believe al Qaeda suicide bombers are giving their lives because they want to remove your freedoms? They may well find your lifestyle repugnant, but what they want to change is US foreign policy; support of the Saudi royal family, Israel, etc. They are probably quite pleased with the occupation of Iraq for reasons which are obvious. But what the US does within its own borders is of no importance to them.
Darth is Luke's father! Rosebud is a sleigh! The Martians are killed by bacteria! The psychiatrist in 6th Sense is a ghost! ... sorry
Not giving spoilers a matter of politeness; legislating for that is hopeless. And in any case minutes after the book was officially released, assholes started posting "XXX is killed by YYY" (see, I have some sensitivity) spoilers all over, like goatse links, before 99% of readers would have the book. People who had bought a book legally were being threatened if they discussed it before the publisher wanted them to. That's far more disturbing than some spoilers.
Those less concerned with foreplay just unzip. Also makes for a faster getaway.
How could I have missed the obvious assignment
"They have a swing set" = *"Let's rape their children";