> They are planning to
work with states to have "smarter" IDs. Frankly, I don't mind having my picture taken for the card, but a
fingerprint or a retinal scan? Yer effing kidding right?
Why not?
If you agree that an image of your face is a good thing to attach to a document that is, after all, supposed to identify you, why not a retinal scan or a thumbprint?
Frankly, I'd like to see retinal scans and thumbprints added to primary ID documents. Hellaciously harder to fake.
> The neat thing is that you don't have to be a citizen to have a driver's license, and --as far as i know--
it's not even legal for them to ask for that information when you apply for one.
I believe that varies from state to state. Some states require proof of legal status in order to get a driver's license.
In any case, there's an easy solution to the "state-by-state" problem, namely a Federal law withholding highway funds to states that don't require presentation of government-issued ID to get a driver's license.
If the ID presented is proof of US citizenship, then the driver's license (or state ID, if the user merely wants an ID without driving privileges) is issued with the usual expiry date.
If the ID presented does not prove US citizenship, then proof of legal status in the US should be required. As this legal status may have an expiry date (e.g. TN or H-1B or student visa holders), then the ID or license should be issued with an expiry date no later than the expiry of the alien's status.
Next, if it's OK for Social Security cards to be issued to aliens with "Not valid for work without INS authorization", I see no reason why driver's licenses (or state IDs) issued to aliens should not also carry a notation that, at the time of issue, the bearer was not a citizen. (Again, this could be made part of the "If your state don't wanna play ball, no highway funding!" law)
And finally, as aliens (immigrants and nonimmigrants alike) are required to carry proof of legal status at all times (whether or not driving), officers could be trained to ask for proof of legal status upon detection of alien-issued driver's licenses.
Hell, that law is already on the books (it's a misdemeanor punishable by a small fine) - what's missing is that we haven't trained our cops to look for violations. If a cop could, upon sight of a driver's license (much as an employer can, upon seeing "Not valid for work..." on a Social Security card), conclude that the posessor of the card is an alien, then we solve that problem too.
> The "Making of the Atomic Bomb" was written by
Richard (not David) Rhodes, for which he won a
Pulitzer Prize. Doesn't exactly inspire great
confidence in the NYT's QA program...
Ah, but you forget -- Dave Rhodes was involved. His idea is essential to the workings of the Bomb:
"Just send five neutrons to every fissionable nucleus on this list!"
> How are they certain Heisenberg was in Copenhagen AND he was there in 1941 at the same time?
Bohr observed Heisenberg to be there, collapsing the wave function and placing Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. He just had no idea how to define the exact point at which this happened. At least, that's how he interpreted it;-)
*rimshot*
> [the original poster] may be right -- maybe Steve Ballmer loped up and down the corridors, jumping like a monkey and
screaming "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR.NET OR LOSE YOUR JOBS!" > >I may be right --
maybe some employees read the "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR.NET" e-mail, and, having
nothing better to do, went a little overboard.
But if the original poster was right, for God's sake, show us the video!
> Like a regular sequence of on/off that just can't be missed (your "start bits" that get noticed:-), and then raster images
of what they want to communicate, repeating over and over.
Yup, that's exactly what they did. (Which makes sense - at least to a being that thinks in two dimensions and represents thought with two-dimensional symbols. The goal is, after all, to make it easy to figure out, even with noise.)
Assuming http://www.huntthepickle.org/~dan/decoded.txt is the decoded version (Yeah, you didn't read the article, and I was too lazy to download Perl for this old Windoze box;-)...
"Hmph. Frame 8. Stupid Earthlings haven't even realized that the outermost body in their system is actually two bodies rotating about a common center of mass, not one."
Of course, any extraterrestrial recipient of this signal that had interferometers good enough to call us out on this point would know who we were anyways. I mean, something has to be replenishing the third planet's atmosphere's huge stockpile of molecular oxygen!;-)
The only thing I don't get is how the aliens are supposed to figure out what the figures in Frame 9 are. They might conclude they're lifeforms (by the chemistry below them), and assume they're the senders of the message, but it'd still be a wild-ass guess.
(The projection of the planet's geography was pretty neat, though.)
> Sleep well, sweet Doubleclick -
we barely knew thee.
>
Okay, I'm over it now - when's the fire sale auction?
Yeah. I wanna buy a server from Doubelick, just so I can open it up, remove one platter from one drive for a headstone, and bury the rest of the server six feet underground.
Then I'll grab my trusty Dremel and engrave the following:
"Posterity will ne'er survey,
A nobler grave than this;
Here lie the bones of a Doubleclick server,
Stop, traveler, and piss."
> I don't care how innovative your flash banner, pop-under, or mouse trailer is, it's not going to make me
more inclined to purchase your products. > >
True, it may build brand recognition, and increase word-of-mouth talk about a particular company or item,
but where's the proof in the pudding?
Hey, you were in the ad biz. You know as well as I do that an ad agent is a con man whose job it is to con his customers into thinking he can con his customers' customers.
As a marketroid once told a friend of mine, "If the customer leaves your site, having bought exactly what he wanted to buy, you haven't sold anything".
As I wish I'd been there to tell the marketroid - "Get the fsck out of my office.";-)
> When you look at the beatings that broadband providers are taking, it seems like the only thing keeping the whole
broadband "revolution" going is the mindless optimism of marketing droids, based on the mythical "average user"
spending all of their time (and disposable income) sucking down advert laden pay-per-stream postage stamp
sized Britney Spears videos from the provider's portal. It's insane (gee, do I pay-per-view for a postage stamp,
or do I pay-per-view to the same provider down the same cable, but have it go to the big widescreen TV on the
other side of the splitter?) but it seems to be the only thing keeping the rollouts going.
Or do you pay-nothing (apart from a flat monthly fee for the pipe) to download the full-screen DiVX, VCD, or MPEG-2 video once, and keep it on your hard drive, burn to CD-ROM or DVD-Whatever, and play on your widescreen at will?
I agree it was the mindlessly-optimistic marketroids who got the rollout started. I just happen to think that the providers finally realized that due to the third option (pay nothing and get pretty-damn-good multimedia from copyright infringers) the marketroids were wrong, and as a result, the rollout has stopped.
As you put it:
> Those of us who already have
it know exactly why we want it: we want a fat and unmetered pipe to go find and create our own content with.
Absolutely. And also, as you correctly point out, if that's the future, it's gonna get expensive, because it costs the ISP serious money to haul those kinds of quantities of data around without the advertiser dollars originally envisioned by the postage-stamp-video-portal business model.
> 4 Incremental need, People are not making quantum shifts in usage, it grows over time.. that is unless some
person finds usenet / IRC for software / MP3s / video / anime / P2P usage.
(Umm, you forgot pr0n;-) And that is why there's a lack of demand.
While copyright infringement may be the "killer app" for broadband, it's not the content industry that's killing broadband. It's the fact that the ISPs can't profit from these users.
From the ISP's point of view, transiting hundreds gigabytes of data per month per user costs money. Your $50/month broadband connection doesn't cover the ISP's transit costs if you keep the pipe saturated. Until the ISP can find a way to make you pay for the transit cost of the data, the ISP will not want you to keep your pipe full.
(Side note: I believe this to be a defence of USENET -- it may well be cheaper for an ISP to transit in 300GB per day once, and then all your multimedia downloaders can l33ch from your NNTP server, which is on your local network, than to l33ch from P2P users that may not be on your local network.)
The original business plan ("Gee, our market research shows we have users interested in online music and video!") was for the ISP to sell you streaming audio/video subscription services. As we all know, the content offered was, and is, laughably inadequate, copy-controlled, and more than often, both. (No, Mr. Eisner, I don't want a copy-crippled.WMV or.RM stream of whatever ABC deems "must-see TV" this season. I just want my fscking DiVXs of Futurama and Babylon 5!)
Since there's no money in giving customers what they want, that leaves the not-for-pay "killer apps", for which the ISP receive no revenue.
None of this changes the fact that Messrs. Rosen and Valenti would love to kill broadband outright. I merely dispute that they're the ones at fault in this particular instance.
> You already have trust relationships with many companies and organizations: your employer, your bank, your credit card company, your lawyer, cpa, realtor, insurance agent, the IRS, etc. The list is long. > > All of these people/companies/whatever have some of your sensitive personal information. You trust them with it. It's in their best interest to use it to serve you better, in ways that do not annoy you, or betray your trust.
Hmm. There must be some strange organization named "IRS" of which I've been previously unaware.
> I have this weird feeling that a lot of sales/CSR tactics are designed with "older" people in mind; these are the
types of people who most value and favour personal interaction with someone while performing some sort of
transaction.
"Have a nice day!"
"Yeah yeah.... Will ya gimme my fuckin change, please?"
- George Carlin
(Seriously, I've noticed this too. Whenever I get a phone call - if I haven't already detected the brief gap caused by the predictive dialer - I respond to any cheery, perky voice that uses my full name with "Place this number on your do-not-call list". I've never had a false positive yet, though I have had a few surprised telemarketers who asked me how I knew.)
> > His Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is also announcing a name change, to Moxi Digital Inc. from Rearden Steel Technologies. > >
Looks like an Ayn Rand fan.
As many have said "due to licensing restrictions, remote DVD playback is not available in homes using wireless networking".
Looks to me like then he's been beaten by the parasites at MPAA. While there are no doubt other reasons for the renaming, I'd say "consistency" is one of 'em.
When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce,
you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who
deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and
your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you- when you see corruption being
rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice- you may know that your society is doomed."
- Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
Rearden would have built it, and told MPAA to go fsck themselves.
In light of this, I applaud Perlman's decision to rename his company, as I'd have to grit my teeth every time I saw Rearden's name attached to a company with a cool idea, but who paid tribute to the parasites in the MPAA.
> Also, notice when you're not uploading or downloading, but kazaa is running.. your drive burps every 5 seconds....
I'm still trying to figure out why.. it doesn't stop even after an hour.. it's not "windows-typical" drive burping.
I don't use spyware, so I never installed Kazaa, so I can't help you. But I'm curious, too. (I hate advertisers, and anything that threatens to kick over the rocks under which they grow is k00l by me;)
So try a utility like this one: Sysinternals' filemon.exe
Could be as innocent as your swap file, 'cuz some Windoze proggies leak memory like sieves. Could be something less-than-innocent. Let us know!
> Why is it that this hasn't come up before, and does anyone know how this act affects MP3's? Should they be considered legal as long as you burn them to media on which you have paid the royalty tax?
The Canadian law, IIRC, applied to both Data and Audio CD-Rs.
Worse, it was a pennies-per-minute charge, that varied according to media type (cheap for crappy analog tape, expensive for perfectly-reproducible CDDA).
I can see the RIAA if they get their hands on that notion. "Well, because music can be compressed to 128kbps and 10 hours placed on a CD, and the Audio-CD tax is $0.50 for a 74-minute CD, we believe we should now collect $4.50 for every data CD."
Mercifully, if Ms. Rosen tried it, I think even Congresscritters who don't get it would tell her to eat shit.
> I'm reminded of a court case a few years ago. A man was videotaping his sexual escapades without the
knowledge of the women involved. To their embarassment, he showed the tapes to his friends. There
wasn't a law that specifically addressed his actions. So he was prosecuted for illegal wiretapping,
AFTER the courts ruled that sexual intercourse is a form of communication.
Well, at least that means "Fuck you, spammer" is protected by the First Amendment...;-)
> At what point, when the technology is capable of functioning better than this one has, do we say enough is enough? When do
we shut down the system that says you are guilty until proven innocent?
Who said anything about that?
Indeed, the more accurate the technology gets, the less likely the software is to make a false positive.
And supposing you are flagged by a false positive -- the cop who walks up to you and eyeballs you is likely to say "No, the software's wrong", and let you move on.
And finally, suppose the cop also makes the same mistake. (Suppose, in the worst case, that you have a twin brother...) Well, sucks to be you. But then your lawyer subpoenas the various agencies to check the audit trail of your movements (security camera footage, face-idents, cell phone logs, IP addresses from Carnivore's logs of your/. postings), which demonstrate pretty conclusively that you were in East Bumfuck, Wisconsin at the time the crime took place in Los Angeles, California, and you're off the hook, with charges dropped.
> And how many times have you compiled a program the first time with no errors? First runs aren't perfect, never have been,
never will be.
An excellent point.
Consider that there's a reason why the INS requires "immigration-style" (3/4 portrait, ear showing) photographs, as opposed to "driver's-license-style" (full-face, straight-on) photographs.
While the technique of using video cameras (NTSC shitty resolution, possibly at long range) in Ybor City doesn't work when your database is full of crappy photos, the technique of using high-resolution still-image cameras, at close range, at centralized locations, such as airport security checkpoints, and cross-referencing those photographs with photographs taken at a known distance and angle, is probably eminently workable.
Indeed, I'd say a good first step would be to change the procedures for a driver's license photo, to include both photos. The traditional "face-on" one could remain in use by the cop on the street, and the non-traditional 3/4 portrait for entry into a faceprint database, for automated pattern-matching software.
Finally, consider that replacing the Ybor City model of omnipresent (yet still inaccurate to the point of uselessness) cameras ogling the world, with a system whereby only a few (yet highly more accurate) cameras are required at points whereby identification is required in the first place (such as aircraft jetways, or border crossings), is likely to be both less invasive to privacy and far more effective at nabbing Bad Guys.
> True enough, but is the CSS "computer" in the DVDROM drive mine to hack?
...does anything cross state lines when you do?
There's two things going on. Thing 1 - the DMCA violation, to which you may be able to use interoperability as a defence (and that defence is indeed strengthened by your use of libdvdcss.so, as opposed to the Windows executables used in DVD-rippers), and Thing 2 - the "terrorism" of "unauthorized access to a federal interest computer", which ain't happening, because: (a) you own the "computer" in question, so even if your use thereof violates the DMCA, it's authorized tampering. (b) nothing is crossing state lines when you h4x0r the firmware, nor is any interstate commerce being performed on the DVD-ROM drive, which means that the drive isn't a "federal interest computer" even under the most generous reading of the law.
So, should someone piss in Jack Valenti's Metamucil tomorrow morning, you could be charged with a DMCA violation like Sklyarov, but there's nothing you've done that could be construed as violating the new antiterrorism measures. In short, you probably have pretty much the same rights as any citizen when it comes to being a DMCA test case.
> [held for 7 days w/o reason] Yes. Whether that is constitutional is questionable, but I accept it as given. IANAL, either.
Agreed. If it's unconstitutional, the Supreme Court will ultimately say so.
Also, IIRC, it was 48 hours' detention before the PATRIOT Act, so the change to "7 days" is merely an extension of a time limit that was already in law. This is IMHO sensible, given the fact that what aliens were detained for prior to 9/11 was pretty simple stuff - 2 days was enough to see if their paperwork was in order. The extra 5 days appears to have been added with the intent of allowing additional background checks (i.e. outside of INS) to be performed.
> Didn't the Patriot Act, or one of the copy-cat Acts, make hacking a computer system to break security an act of treason?
I believe it was h4x0r1ng someone else's box that was the problem. The language was about "unauthorized" access to a "federal interest computer", and while "federal interest computer" could be read to extend to any computer involved in interstate commerce, it's still pretty hard for you to crack stuff on your own box without your authorization.
(Maybe you could get plastered one night and wake up the next morning, hung over, and the string "cat/dev/zero >/dev/hd0" on your terminal, and charge yourself?;-)
> [does the law against resisting unlawful arrest] apply in extremis?
Ultimately, it'd have to be decided, on a case-by-case basis, in court. It probably comes down to whatever standards the cop in question was trained with. If he's trained to beat the living hell outa everyone he meets for parking violations, well, the citizens of his county will likely vote in a new Sheriff next time around. (Or not, as is their right if they're feeling masochistic, in which case, perhaps you should move to another county when you get out of hospital;-)
More seriously, if you really believe the arresting officer was breaking the law (e.g. started firing on your grandmother for a parking ticket), you (or your next-of-kin) turn around and either sue in civil court or press charges.
Sometimes that doesn't work. (Rodney King I). Sometimes it does. (Rodney King II). Ultimately, the judicial system comes down to "You pays your lawyer and you takes your chances".
Thanks for a reasoned response to a reasoned nibble on the troll;)
Slashdot Mirror
Why not?
If you agree that an image of your face is a good thing to attach to a document that is, after all, supposed to identify you, why not a retinal scan or a thumbprint?
Frankly, I'd like to see retinal scans and thumbprints added to primary ID documents. Hellaciously harder to fake.
I believe that varies from state to state. Some states require proof of legal status in order to get a driver's license.
In any case, there's an easy solution to the "state-by-state" problem, namely a Federal law withholding highway funds to states that don't require presentation of government-issued ID to get a driver's license.
If the ID presented is proof of US citizenship, then the driver's license (or state ID, if the user merely wants an ID without driving privileges) is issued with the usual expiry date.
If the ID presented does not prove US citizenship, then proof of legal status in the US should be required. As this legal status may have an expiry date (e.g. TN or H-1B or student visa holders), then the ID or license should be issued with an expiry date no later than the expiry of the alien's status.
Next, if it's OK for Social Security cards to be issued to aliens with "Not valid for work without INS authorization", I see no reason why driver's licenses (or state IDs) issued to aliens should not also carry a notation that, at the time of issue, the bearer was not a citizen. (Again, this could be made part of the "If your state don't wanna play ball, no highway funding!" law)
And finally, as aliens (immigrants and nonimmigrants alike) are required to carry proof of legal status at all times (whether or not driving), officers could be trained to ask for proof of legal status upon detection of alien-issued driver's licenses.
Hell, that law is already on the books (it's a misdemeanor punishable by a small fine) - what's missing is that we haven't trained our cops to look for violations. If a cop could, upon sight of a driver's license (much as an employer can, upon seeing "Not valid for work..." on a Social Security card), conclude that the posessor of the card is an alien, then we solve that problem too.
Ah, but you forget -- Dave Rhodes was involved. His idea is essential to the workings of the Bomb:
"Just send five neutrons to every fissionable nucleus on this list!"
Bohr observed Heisenberg to be there, collapsing the wave function and placing Heisenberg in Copenhagen in 1941. He just had no idea how to define the exact point at which this happened. At least, that's how he interpreted it ;-)
*rimshot*
>
>I may be right -- maybe some employees read the "PLEASE STOP AND VOTE FOR
But if the original poster was right, for God's sake, show us the video!
When I asked "What do you get if you cross the Cult of $cientology with Steve Ballmer?", I was being rhetorical! I didn't want to find out!
Yup, that's exactly what they did. (Which makes sense - at least to a being that thinks in two dimensions and represents thought with two-dimensional symbols. The goal is, after all, to make it easy to figure out, even with noise.)
Assuming http://www.huntthepickle.org/~dan/decoded.txt is the decoded version (Yeah, you didn't read the article, and I was too lazy to download Perl for this old Windoze box ;-)...
"Hmph. Frame 8. Stupid Earthlings haven't even realized that the outermost body in their system is actually two bodies rotating about a common center of mass, not one."
Of course, any extraterrestrial recipient of this signal that had interferometers good enough to call us out on this point would know who we were anyways. I mean, something has to be replenishing the third planet's atmosphere's huge stockpile of molecular oxygen! ;-)
The only thing I don't get is how the aliens are supposed to figure out what the figures in Frame 9 are. They might conclude they're lifeforms (by the chemistry below them), and assume they're the senders of the message, but it'd still be a wild-ass guess.
(The projection of the planet's geography was pretty neat, though.)
> Okay, I'm over it now - when's the fire sale auction?
Yeah. I wanna buy a server from Doubelick, just so I can open it up, remove one platter from one drive for a headstone, and bury the rest of the server six feet underground.
Then I'll grab my trusty Dremel and engrave the following:
"Posterity will ne'er survey,
A nobler grave than this;
Here lie the bones of a Doubleclick server,
Stop, traveler, and piss."
(With apologies to Lord Byron)
>
> True, it may build brand recognition, and increase word-of-mouth talk about a particular company or item, but where's the proof in the pudding?
Hey, you were in the ad biz. You know as well as I do that an ad agent is a con man whose job it is to con his customers into thinking he can con his customers' customers.
As a marketroid once told a friend of mine, "If the customer leaves your site, having bought exactly what he wanted to buy, you haven't sold anything".
As I wish I'd been there to tell the marketroid - "Get the fsck out of my office." ;-)
Or do you pay-nothing (apart from a flat monthly fee for the pipe) to download the full-screen DiVX, VCD, or MPEG-2 video once, and keep it on your hard drive, burn to CD-ROM or DVD-Whatever, and play on your widescreen at will?
I agree it was the mindlessly-optimistic marketroids who got the rollout started. I just happen to think that the providers finally realized that due to the third option (pay nothing and get pretty-damn-good multimedia from copyright infringers) the marketroids were wrong, and as a result, the rollout has stopped.
As you put it:
> Those of us who already have it know exactly why we want it: we want a fat and unmetered pipe to go find and create our own content with.
Absolutely. And also, as you correctly point out, if that's the future, it's gonna get expensive, because it costs the ISP serious money to haul those kinds of quantities of data around without the advertiser dollars originally envisioned by the postage-stamp-video-portal business model.
(Umm, you forgot pr0n ;-) And that is why there's a lack of demand.
While copyright infringement may be the "killer app" for broadband, it's not the content industry that's killing broadband. It's the fact that the ISPs can't profit from these users.
From the ISP's point of view, transiting hundreds gigabytes of data per month per user costs money. Your $50/month broadband connection doesn't cover the ISP's transit costs if you keep the pipe saturated. Until the ISP can find a way to make you pay for the transit cost of the data, the ISP will not want you to keep your pipe full.
(Side note: I believe this to be a defence of USENET -- it may well be cheaper for an ISP to transit in 300GB per day once, and then all your multimedia downloaders can l33ch from your NNTP server, which is on your local network, than to l33ch from P2P users that may not be on your local network.)
The original business plan ("Gee, our market research shows we have users interested in online music and video!") was for the ISP to sell you streaming audio/video subscription services. As we all know, the content offered was, and is, laughably inadequate, copy-controlled, and more than often, both. (No, Mr. Eisner, I don't want a copy-crippled .WMV or .RM stream of whatever ABC deems "must-see TV" this season. I just want my fscking DiVXs of Futurama and Babylon 5!)
Since there's no money in giving customers what they want, that leaves the not-for-pay "killer apps", for which the ISP receive no revenue.
None of this changes the fact that Messrs. Rosen and Valenti would love to kill broadband outright. I merely dispute that they're the ones at fault in this particular instance.
>
> All of these people/companies/whatever have some of your sensitive personal information. You trust them with it. It's in their best interest to use it to serve you better, in ways that do not annoy you, or betray your trust.
Hmm. There must be some strange organization named "IRS" of which I've been previously unaware.
"Have a nice day!"
"Yeah yeah.... Will ya gimme my fuckin change, please?"
- George Carlin
(Seriously, I've noticed this too. Whenever I get a phone call - if I haven't already detected the brief gap caused by the predictive dialer - I respond to any cheery, perky voice that uses my full name with "Place this number on your do-not-call list". I've never had a false positive yet, though I have had a few surprised telemarketers who asked me how I knew.)
>
> Looks like an Ayn Rand fan.
As many have said "due to licensing restrictions, remote DVD playback is not available in homes using wireless networking".
Looks to me like then he's been beaten by the parasites at MPAA. While there are no doubt other reasons for the renaming, I'd say "consistency" is one of 'em.
Rearden would have built it, and told MPAA to go fsck themselves.
In light of this, I applaud Perlman's decision to rename his company, as I'd have to grit my teeth every time I saw Rearden's name attached to a company with a cool idea, but who paid tribute to the parasites in the MPAA.
Which reminds me...
I
predict
that
by
2003,
Tom's
Hardware
articles
will
have
only
one
word
of
text
per
pageview.
You Know You've Been Working In The Computer Industry Too Long When:
I don't use spyware, so I never installed Kazaa, so I can't help you. But I'm curious, too. (I hate advertisers, and anything that threatens to kick over the rocks under which they grow is k00l by me ;)
So try a utility like this one: Sysinternals' filemon.exe
Could be as innocent as your swap file, 'cuz some Windoze proggies leak memory like sieves. Could be something less-than-innocent. Let us know!
The Canadian law, IIRC, applied to both Data and Audio CD-Rs.
Worse, it was a pennies-per-minute charge, that varied according to media type (cheap for crappy analog tape, expensive for perfectly-reproducible CDDA).
I can see the RIAA if they get their hands on that notion. "Well, because music can be compressed to 128kbps and 10 hours placed on a CD, and the Audio-CD tax is $0.50 for a 74-minute CD, we believe we should now collect $4.50 for every data CD."
Mercifully, if Ms. Rosen tried it, I think even Congresscritters who don't get it would tell her to eat shit.
Y'know, I'm at the point where I'd move to VA just to be able to someday vote for him ;-)
Well, at least that means "Fuck you, spammer" is protected by the First Amendment... ;-)
Who said anything about that?
Indeed, the more accurate the technology gets, the less likely the software is to make a false positive.
And supposing you are flagged by a false positive -- the cop who walks up to you and eyeballs you is likely to say "No, the software's wrong", and let you move on.
And finally, suppose the cop also makes the same mistake. (Suppose, in the worst case, that you have a twin brother...) Well, sucks to be you. But then your lawyer subpoenas the various agencies to check the audit trail of your movements (security camera footage, face-idents, cell phone logs, IP addresses from Carnivore's logs of your /. postings), which demonstrate pretty conclusively that you were in East Bumfuck, Wisconsin at the time the crime took place in Los Angeles, California, and you're off the hook, with charges dropped.
An excellent point.
Consider that there's a reason why the INS requires "immigration-style" (3/4 portrait, ear showing) photographs, as opposed to "driver's-license-style" (full-face, straight-on) photographs.
While the technique of using video cameras (NTSC shitty resolution, possibly at long range) in Ybor City doesn't work when your database is full of crappy photos, the technique of using high-resolution still-image cameras, at close range, at centralized locations, such as airport security checkpoints, and cross-referencing those photographs with photographs taken at a known distance and angle, is probably eminently workable.
Indeed, I'd say a good first step would be to change the procedures for a driver's license photo, to include both photos. The traditional "face-on" one could remain in use by the cop on the street, and the non-traditional 3/4 portrait for entry into a faceprint database, for automated pattern-matching software.
Finally, consider that replacing the Ybor City model of omnipresent (yet still inaccurate to the point of uselessness) cameras ogling the world, with a system whereby only a few (yet highly more accurate) cameras are required at points whereby identification is required in the first place (such as aircraft jetways, or border crossings), is likely to be both less invasive to privacy and far more effective at nabbing Bad Guys.
> face.is_terrorist = TRUE;
> police.arrest(face.parent);
> police.beat(face.parent);
> police.eatDonuts();
Wait a minute, if they beat your face in well enough the first time you get falsely-identified, you won't be recognized the second time.
I'd say this tech will stop police face-beatings, not encourage 'em ;-)
There's two things going on. Thing 1 - the DMCA violation, to which you may be able to use interoperability as a defence (and that defence is indeed strengthened by your use of libdvdcss.so, as opposed to the Windows executables used in DVD-rippers), and Thing 2 - the "terrorism" of "unauthorized access to a federal interest computer", which ain't happening, because: (a) you own the "computer" in question, so even if your use thereof violates the DMCA, it's authorized tampering. (b) nothing is crossing state lines when you h4x0r the firmware, nor is any interstate commerce being performed on the DVD-ROM drive, which means that the drive isn't a "federal interest computer" even under the most generous reading of the law.
So, should someone piss in Jack Valenti's Metamucil tomorrow morning, you could be charged with a DMCA violation like Sklyarov, but there's nothing you've done that could be construed as violating the new antiterrorism measures. In short, you probably have pretty much the same rights as any citizen when it comes to being a DMCA test case.
Agreed. If it's unconstitutional, the Supreme Court will ultimately say so.
Also, IIRC, it was 48 hours' detention before the PATRIOT Act, so the change to "7 days" is merely an extension of a time limit that was already in law. This is IMHO sensible, given the fact that what aliens were detained for prior to 9/11 was pretty simple stuff - 2 days was enough to see if their paperwork was in order. The extra 5 days appears to have been added with the intent of allowing additional background checks (i.e. outside of INS) to be performed.
> Didn't the Patriot Act, or one of the copy-cat Acts, make hacking a computer system to break security an act of treason?
I believe it was h4x0r1ng someone else's box that was the problem. The language was about "unauthorized" access to a "federal interest computer", and while "federal interest computer" could be read to extend to any computer involved in interstate commerce, it's still pretty hard for you to crack stuff on your own box without your authorization.
(Maybe you could get plastered one night and wake up the next morning, hung over, and the string "cat /dev/zero > /dev/hd0" on your terminal, and charge yourself? ;-)
> [does the law against resisting unlawful arrest] apply in extremis?
Ultimately, it'd have to be decided, on a case-by-case basis, in court. It probably comes down to whatever standards the cop in question was trained with. If he's trained to beat the living hell outa everyone he meets for parking violations, well, the citizens of his county will likely vote in a new Sheriff next time around. (Or not, as is their right if they're feeling masochistic, in which case, perhaps you should move to another county when you get out of hospital ;-)
More seriously, if you really believe the arresting officer was breaking the law (e.g. started firing on your grandmother for a parking ticket), you (or your next-of-kin) turn around and either sue in civil court or press charges.
Sometimes that doesn't work. (Rodney King I). Sometimes it does. (Rodney King II). Ultimately, the judicial system comes down to "You pays your lawyer and you takes your chances".
Thanks for a reasoned response to a reasoned nibble on the troll ;)