I used to leave a 150 MB FAT16 partition on my HD to store data for flashing the BIOS etc. I'm not sure if I could have booted from it, though I probably could have. Instead I just put the new BIOS image there and booted from a standard DOS boot CD and accessed the FAT16 partition within DOS. Worked fine. Alternatively you can just write a new CD with the right image, obviously, with the downside that you can't easily backup the current image. Finally, these days I'd just boot from a USB memory stick, which is the spiritual heir of the floppy in any event. Oh and you can flash the BIOS from within Windows, although that gives me the creeps, too.
I would like to say that Germany is, but hell, I'm not sure. FWIW, even though we've had a national ID for a long time, you're not required to have it with you at all times. (Some people here think you are; they're wrong.) I'm not sure what the exact procedures are when being charged with some sort of misdemeanor -- I'd assume you'd be taken to the station, or maybe home to produce your ID, I'd certainly hope you'd not be handcuffed...
6 to 8 weeks?! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to rig a closed-source election software so that you can change the votes without anybody noticing? Come to think about it, yeah, 6 to 8 weeks seems about right...
CSS2 already has the capability to add page breaks which most browsers seem to support, and I'm sure the positioning is also there, at least in theory. CSS3 will increase the feature-set even further, although of course application support will take a while--not as long as before though, I'd think.
Biodiesel is not only easier to store than electricity, it's also easier to come up with. Solar cells are inefficient and expensive; on the other hand, everybody knows how to plant rapeseed and get oil from it. It's not an end all replacement, but there's no such thing. It can be part of a solution, though.
As far as I know, writes to USB mass storage are not cached by default in Windows. Optimised for quick removal is the term the hardware control panel uses, as opposed to optimised for speed. The only remaining issue is that when removing the usb stick or drive you're invalidating the remaining file handles, which some programs might be opposed to; still, I basically never use the safe removal feature.
Meanwhile, other people still use IM as a means of communication. I don't think it's the second coming or whatever, but Meebo has been a nice thing to have in the past weeks on third-party computers I just didn't want to clutter with Miranda or Trillian. Like at work, I can just log into Meebo when I need to talk to an acquaintance. The alternative is ICQ2Go (or whatever it's called), but Meebo is just more lightweight and elegant.
Right, and for 5 cents less, you could get a banana, which would be tasty and satiating. Of course, some people might just buy bananas, comedy audiobook^H^H^H^Hpodcasts and music.
Ah, national privacy commissioner. We have that in Germany, too. That's just got to be one fucked-up job. Sisyphus got nothing on him. Or maybe they're in on the whole thing, and just there to give it a positive face: see, the government does know privacy infractions are bad, even if it doesn't seem to care about it in its legislation.
You want another example? Well, I don't know which country you're from, but here's one from where I live. Some time ago, Germany installed a toll system for freight trucks driving on the autobahn. It's moderately high tech -- and duely suffered from many problems in its first weeks and months--: the trucks have on-board systems, and their routes are recorded automatically. Now, when the system was installed, a number of privacy concerns were raised, but quickly silences because the system "would never be used for that" and in fact they wrote much the same thing into the laws dealing with the system to appease everyone who cared (ie. not many people as it were). Of course, now they're considering using it for law enforcement, for all the right reasons (think of the children! think of the jobs!). But it's against the law! We'll just have to change that then. Oops. They're also considering widening the observation grid to the next lower tier of national roads, with the absolutely reasonable argument that lorry drivers are now using those roads to avoid paying the toll (surprise surprise). And I'm sure that in a few years we'll be tolling private cars, too, and it'll be very reasonable and most people will agree with it, and the few critics will be silenced because of course it won't be used for observation, in fact there some very convincing technical reason why it can never be used for that purpose. Right, eh?
Now for the record, I'm not an expert on the whole thing. And also, as far as I'm aware, it isn't used by LEAs yet, and maybe I'm wrong and it never will be. But I doubt it, it's just way too tantalising to some types. I think other countries have other systems in place, in fact I think I recall a Slashdot story that the UK police at this point has the ability to pinpoint most vehicles positions for most moments in time from their records -- not sure if they make use of that ability - but again, I'm sure they will.
Bullshit. Menu Format - Page - Orientation. Three clicks, including the one on the okay button, for what it's worth. Maybe you were using Open Office 1.x?
I don't have a whole lot of experience with OS X, but I'd guess that executables are marked as such in their file info dialogue. Apart from that, executables are either folder bundles with the (hidden?).app extension or any other file set to be executable via the standard Unix/Posix way.
On a sidenote, standard Windows configuration hides known file extension - including.exe. Also,.exe is far from the only way executable code may be started, there's also the old.bat, and.cmd and a number of scripting files which are executed on a double click. As far as I know, all of these are hidden by default. An easy way to determine what will happen on a double click without having to be aware of the extension is right-clicking the file and checking for the bold entry in the context menu. If it says something like "execute script", well, you figure it out.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats (x) Jurisdictional problems (x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (x) Extreme profitability of spam (x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo (x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (x) Sending email should be free (x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome (x) I don't want the government reading my email (x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Slashdot Mirror
I used to leave a 150 MB FAT16 partition on my HD to store data for flashing the BIOS etc. I'm not sure if I could have booted from it, though I probably could have. Instead I just put the new BIOS image there and booted from a standard DOS boot CD and accessed the FAT16 partition within DOS. Worked fine. Alternatively you can just write a new CD with the right image, obviously, with the downside that you can't easily backup the current image. Finally, these days I'd just boot from a USB memory stick, which is the spiritual heir of the floppy in any event. Oh and you can flash the BIOS from within Windows, although that gives me the creeps, too.
Straw man, false dichotomy and so and so on.
I would like to say that Germany is, but hell, I'm not sure. FWIW, even though we've had a national ID for a long time, you're not required to have it with you at all times. (Some people here think you are; they're wrong.) I'm not sure what the exact procedures are when being charged with some sort of misdemeanor -- I'd assume you'd be taken to the station, or maybe home to produce your ID, I'd certainly hope you'd not be handcuffed...
6 to 8 weeks?! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to rig a closed-source election software so that you can change the votes without anybody noticing? Come to think about it, yeah, 6 to 8 weeks seems about right...
Are you insane? Of course not. (NB - I love Latex.)
Latex presentations rock. Not really more work than Powerpoint, and they look beautiful. And it makes the good stuff easy and the bad stuff hard.
Ehh. I played B&W2 (briefly) on a 1800+ with a GF4 Ti4200. Low graphics settings, sure, but it ran fine.
Sounds like you could earn a lot of money with that...
CSS2 already has the capability to add page breaks which most browsers seem to support, and I'm sure the positioning is also there, at least in theory. CSS3 will increase the feature-set even further, although of course application support will take a while--not as long as before though, I'd think.
Biodiesel is not only easier to store than electricity, it's also easier to come up with. Solar cells are inefficient and expensive; on the other hand, everybody knows how to plant rapeseed and get oil from it. It's not an end all replacement, but there's no such thing. It can be part of a solution, though.
Those sound fairly reasonable. The world would be a much better place if more people had those priorities over the ones they have now.
As far as I know, writes to USB mass storage are not cached by default in Windows. Optimised for quick removal is the term the hardware control panel uses, as opposed to optimised for speed. The only remaining issue is that when removing the usb stick or drive you're invalidating the remaining file handles, which some programs might be opposed to; still, I basically never use the safe removal feature.
Holy cow! It creates a rippled pattern on the wall!
Huh. Doesn't that need a laser to work properly?
Meanwhile, other people still use IM as a means of communication. I don't think it's the second coming or whatever, but Meebo has been a nice thing to have in the past weeks on third-party computers I just didn't want to clutter with Miranda or Trillian. Like at work, I can just log into Meebo when I need to talk to an acquaintance. The alternative is ICQ2Go (or whatever it's called), but Meebo is just more lightweight and elegant.
So are perls...
Right, and for 5 cents less, you could get a banana, which would be tasty and satiating. Of course, some people might just buy bananas, comedy audiobook^H^H^H^Hpodcasts and music.
Ah, national privacy commissioner. We have that in Germany, too. That's just got to be one fucked-up job. Sisyphus got nothing on him. Or maybe they're in on the whole thing, and just there to give it a positive face: see, the government does know privacy infractions are bad, even if it doesn't seem to care about it in its legislation.
Just tell the lady next time she calls, that unless she's going to press charges, they aren't going to show up.
I would assume that's not an option. They have to show up. If you want that changed (I wouldn't), you write to your congressman.
That's right, who cares if piracy is stealing, Bob McArtist was asleep when I downloaded those MP3s, and I go home freeee!
You want another example? Well, I don't know which country you're from, but here's one from where I live. Some time ago, Germany installed a toll system for freight trucks driving on the autobahn. It's moderately high tech -- and duely suffered from many problems in its first weeks and months--: the trucks have on-board systems, and their routes are recorded automatically. Now, when the system was installed, a number of privacy concerns were raised, but quickly silences because the system "would never be used for that" and in fact they wrote much the same thing into the laws dealing with the system to appease everyone who cared (ie. not many people as it were).
Of course, now they're considering using it for law enforcement, for all the right reasons (think of the children! think of the jobs!). But it's against the law! We'll just have to change that then. Oops. They're also considering widening the observation grid to the next lower tier of national roads, with the absolutely reasonable argument that lorry drivers are now using those roads to avoid paying the toll (surprise surprise). And I'm sure that in a few years we'll be tolling private cars, too, and it'll be very reasonable and most people will agree with it, and the few critics will be silenced because of course it won't be used for observation, in fact there some very convincing technical reason why it can never be used for that purpose. Right, eh?
Now for the record, I'm not an expert on the whole thing. And also, as far as I'm aware, it isn't used by LEAs yet, and maybe I'm wrong and it never will be. But I doubt it, it's just way too tantalising to some types. I think other countries have other systems in place, in fact I think I recall a Slashdot story that the UK police at this point has the ability to pinpoint most vehicles positions for most moments in time from their records -- not sure if they make use of that ability - but again, I'm sure they will.
Man, that must have been one heck of a day.
Bullshit. Menu Format - Page - Orientation. Three clicks, including the one on the okay button, for what it's worth. Maybe you were using Open Office 1.x?
I stand corrected. Thanks.
I don't have a whole lot of experience with OS X, but I'd guess that executables are marked as such in their file info dialogue. Apart from that, executables are either folder bundles with the (hidden?) .app extension or any other file set to be executable via the standard Unix/Posix way.
.exe. Also, .exe is far from the only way executable code may be started, there's also the old .bat, and .cmd and a number of scripting files which are executed on a double click. As far as I know, all of these are hidden by default. An easy way to determine what will happen on a double click without having to be aware of the extension is right-clicking the file and checking for the bold entry in the context menu. If it says something like "execute script", well, you figure it out.
On a sidenote, standard Windows configuration hides known file extension - including
You Personally advocate a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Microsoft
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with Yahoo
(x) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
(x) I don't want the government reading my email
(x) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a fascist for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!