Very minor illegal acts tend to get ignored; they could be pursued, but as a class often aren't.
No offense to you, but bullshit. I am a professional expert technology witness who works with criminal defense firms. Prosecutors care about one thing and one thing only - successful prosecutions. If there is some new law or new interpretation of an old law that creates enough low hanging fruit for them to grab, they will do it. They'll happily put hundreds in jail if they think that the criminal defense establishment doesn't know how to counter a new type of accusation.
Keep in mind that these prosecutors don't write the laws. They just enforce them. Your question would be better directed to a member of Congress.
There are two problems with that. One has to do with the sheer size of the bureacracy. To illustrate, here's how that conversation would go:
ME: Congressperson, who are these people and why do my taxes pay their salary?
CONGRESSPERSON: Thank you for writing my office. Due to the very large amount of correspondence, I cannot reply personally to every...
INFLUENTIAL type, such as industry lobbyist or special interest group: No really, what are they all about?
CONGRESSPERSON: Uh, okay, I'll hold hearings and ask them.
Why not avoid the middleman? This brings me to the second problem with asking congress. If anyone knows what these people are all about, they do. I've had some conversations with FBI types that would chill your blood, and I can promise that nothing told to me in those sorts of off-hand conversations would ever come out in a congressional hearing. I think the best likelyhood of truth is to directly ask them why I pay their salary.
Can you summarize the public good performed by your efforts that a taxpayer, who is neither a stockholder nor employee of the content industry, can realize and should support as a necessary function of the federal government?
God damn I hate giving up the ability to mod this discussion, but I gotta say something.
Well, given your opinions and the decision between modding and discussing, I respectfully suggest that you made the right decision.
Most of the kids I know who are "growing up" with computers know less than the regular users of yesterday
I'm sure something similar could be said of the driving community when it began to transition from a group of hobbyists to people who used cars every day. That a given member of the group at large may not know how to adjust their carburetor doesn't impact the social change the group as a whole may bring about.
They're not afraid of computers cause it is an everyday part of their life, not cause they know about them.
Since the issues at hand have much more to do with fear than with technology, how does that actually have any bearing?
Firebird crashes when there are maybe 40 instances, each with 3 to 5 tabs, and some tabs are closed.
Yeah, I had similar problems with my old '91 Sentra. When towing six elephants, there was serious buffetting at transonic speeds. They should really get some aero engineers to look at that.
They'll grow up knowing about computers just like kids in the sixties knew about cars.
This is one of the most brilliant comments I've seen all day. This is also why Linux itself gains ground, and why the article's story script requirement of a single good guy is flawed. It is because future generations will not be naturally afraid of computers. The monolithic ideal of the same software vendor for your OS, browser, etc. will lose value as time goes on, because Joe sixpack of tomorrow won't fear the complexity of choice.
As I'm sure you have seen, many people blindly go around asking questions without RTFM, so what makes you sure people will take the "testing" label seriously?
I think the idea of a beta test is to gather thoughts, ideas, comments and questions from a user community for the purpose of improving the product. It would therefore seem pointless for people to refrain from asking questions about the way a test kernel performed.
Now, if the question happens to be "I put the new test kernel on my 10,000 impressions/hour production commercial web server and it blew up my server", then that's a RTFM moment. I would suspect, however, that the nature of such production environments is such that mistakes like that are a self-correcting phenomenon. (How's that for a "you're fired" euphamism?:))
Linux is changing. The average Linux user of today doesn't recompile their kernel. What's wrong with Mandrake or Suse offering a clearly labelled "testing kernel"? One of the problems Linux development is having right now is that the testing community is so closed that they aren't getting a good cross section of production machines during testing. The end result is that the rubber doesn't really meet the road until the kernel goes "live".
Two questions, though:
Other than quarantine (which is a dubious use), what is the use of having the tags in a hospital?
Damn. That's a pretty good point.
How much power can these RFIDs put out? Enough (in large numbers, of course) to disrupt hospital equipment? I SERIOUSLY doubt it, but I don't know enough about RFIDs to answer honestly.
RFIDs draw their power via induction from the incoming challenge signal. Any power output is simply absorbed form the transmitter, so it is the power of the transmitter that would be at issue.
So, you are saying that a hospital wouldn't want to use identifiers in the tags that relate to certain conditions, such as say, resistant tuberculosis or sars?
Uh, I hate to sound like a "voice of reason" karma whore, but I don't see what was advertised in the PDF, or any other of the few materials that are surviving the slashdotting.
The PDF talks about consumer concerns, and talks about ways to address them, including oversight and disabling the tags. Where exactly is the cackling evil overlord?
I've been wondering if there would be HIPPA problems if this kind of technology ever is applied to healthcare.
That is a damned good point. The HIPAA regs require encryption of electronic patient information. This would mean that if RFID tags are used for normal hospital operations, the data must be encrypted or the hospital is criminally liable.
It's nice to see that at $20,000/pound, we're sending gozilla toys into orbit.
Okay, fine. When you go up for your six month shift, you'll only be allowed one carryon item.
My personal choice would be to take balloons up. Attach an inflated balloon to godzilla with a contrivance to open the balloon after a set time interval. (I'm sure a modified egg timer will work) Then send gozilla floating down a corridor perpendicular to the area my crewmates are sleeping in...
Although I'm not familiar with the case, I don't remember extermination camps being discussed as part of a remedy. The RIAA's efforts are punitive, vengeful, and certainly suicidal, but not genocidal.
I am very much against the RIAA in this affair, but ridiculous exaggeration like this severely damages our ability to make the case to Joe Sixpack.
I mean really - if I want secure transfer of information i'm not going to use e-mail. The effort wasted securing it is truly wasted effort, in my view, because of the lack of a trusted MTA.
Use GPG. Then you don't have to trust anything, except that you have a geniune key.
Wouldn't that make man-in-the-middle pretty much trivially easy? All I would need to do is haxor the name server to point you to my evil box. You'd get a dutfilly performed diffie-hellman exchange just before all your data came into my posession. Your plan has no way to verify identity of the endpoints.
No, just that a system that is/less likely/ to be compromised or subverted can in fact be designed.
Is a statement of belief, not fact. If we were going to analyze this problem according to scientific principle, it would rapidly become apparent that the technical efforts you subscribe to are more an exercise of fear management than controlling the behavior of terrorists.
A good parallel to this would be the problem of computer security. If someone were to recommend that a reasonable approach to computer security would be to eliminate professional human involvement and instead install what are promised to be "super-devices" that are "so reliable" that their behavior can be counted upon to circumvent the efforts of an IT staff, most of us would immediately conclude that they were being sold a bill of goods. The word "bullshit" wouldn't adequately approach the esteem most of us would have for such a ridiculous suggestion.
However, from an engineering (and safety) perspective, it is clear that a pilot IS NOT the be-all end-all of airline safety.
Your support for this point seems to be that a pilot's judgement can be compromised or otherwise subverted, and is therefore ineligible to be the final authority on the behavior of the vehicle. That suggests that you have an idea for something that cannot be compromised or subverted, or that your theory is hopelessly misguided. Shall we apply Occam's razor?
If you would RTFA you'd see that it is based on a GPS Positioning and a pre-built database of coordinates. Only if the GPS signal is blocked does it resort to Airport beacons. And if you had your beacon transmit 'New York City'
A) The FAA/FCC will come down on your ass severely.
B) Good luck trying to put one out there with nobody noticing (they're not that small).
The GPS sattelites are a long way off. So is Heahtrow's VOR/DME (if I'm setting up my evil rig in Dallas). It's not very challenging to overcome the radio transmissions of both devices with a small transmitter and make an incoming 767 think it's about to hit Big Ben.
And at the risk of biting on an obvious troll, how do you expect the FAA to plausibly deter setting up pirate navaids if you don't expect them to be able to govern the behavior of licensed pilots in controlled airspace?
What if I setup my own NDB/DME and get it to transmit an identifier saying "new york". Then put it at the end of a runway...
I am a pilot in training. This isn't funny. It's insightful. Faking a VOR is mind-numbingly simple, and an un-overrideable transmitter in the wrong place activated at the wrong time could be catastrophic. Placed at the end of a runway, it could be used to force an aircraft to immediately initiate an extremely hard bank in a situation where the airspeed and other factors make that maneuver basically instant death. There is also the problem that stuff goes wrong. (And yes, I do keep track of where the autopilot circuit breaker is) As a pilot, I simply cannot have a flight system that seizes control of the aircraft because of the possibility that it may go wrong. No one would begin to tolerate such a system if installed in an automobile. I would hate to think that we don't extend that thought to aircraft simply because so few of us are pilots.
Slashdot Mirror
"if you make a work of IP and someone steals it, we can help you fight them"
Fair enough. Follow up:
In the cases you handle, how many complainants are private individuals aggrieved by corporations, as opposed to the other way around?
CowboyMeal: How seriously do you take a question from someone named "stinky wizzleteats"?
From the slashdot FAQ:
I take myself a lot more seriously as a slashdotter today than I did when I chose that name. I'm not sure whether that's a bad thing or a good thing.
Very minor illegal acts tend to get ignored; they could be pursued, but as a class often aren't.
No offense to you, but bullshit. I am a professional expert technology witness who works with criminal defense firms. Prosecutors care about one thing and one thing only - successful prosecutions. If there is some new law or new interpretation of an old law that creates enough low hanging fruit for them to grab, they will do it. They'll happily put hundreds in jail if they think that the criminal defense establishment doesn't know how to counter a new type of accusation.
Keep in mind that these prosecutors don't write the laws. They just enforce them. Your question would be better directed to a member of Congress.
There are two problems with that. One has to do with the sheer size of the bureacracy. To illustrate, here's how that conversation would go:
ME: Congressperson, who are these people and why do my taxes pay their salary?
CONGRESSPERSON: Thank you for writing my office. Due to the very large amount of correspondence, I cannot reply personally to every...
INFLUENTIAL type, such as industry lobbyist or special interest group: No really, what are they all about?
CONGRESSPERSON: Uh, okay, I'll hold hearings and ask them.
Why not avoid the middleman? This brings me to the second problem with asking congress. If anyone knows what these people are all about, they do. I've had some conversations with FBI types that would chill your blood, and I can promise that nothing told to me in those sorts of off-hand conversations would ever come out in a congressional hearing. I think the best likelyhood of truth is to directly ask them why I pay their salary.
Can you summarize the public good performed by your efforts that a taxpayer, who is neither a stockholder nor employee of the content industry, can realize and should support as a necessary function of the federal government?
God damn I hate giving up the ability to mod this discussion, but I gotta say something.
Well, given your opinions and the decision between modding and discussing, I respectfully suggest that you made the right decision.
Most of the kids I know who are "growing up" with computers know less than the regular users of yesterday
I'm sure something similar could be said of the driving community when it began to transition from a group of hobbyists to people who used cars every day. That a given member of the group at large may not know how to adjust their carburetor doesn't impact the social change the group as a whole may bring about.
They're not afraid of computers cause it is an everyday part of their life, not cause they know about them.
Since the issues at hand have much more to do with fear than with technology, how does that actually have any bearing?
Firebird crashes when there are maybe 40 instances, each with 3 to 5 tabs, and some tabs are closed.
Yeah, I had similar problems with my old '91 Sentra. When towing six elephants, there was serious buffetting at transonic speeds. They should really get some aero engineers to look at that.
They'll grow up knowing about computers just like kids in the sixties knew about cars.
This is one of the most brilliant comments I've seen all day. This is also why Linux itself gains ground, and why the article's story script requirement of a single good guy is flawed. It is because future generations will not be naturally afraid of computers. The monolithic ideal of the same software vendor for your OS, browser, etc. will lose value as time goes on, because Joe sixpack of tomorrow won't fear the complexity of choice.
As I'm sure you have seen, many people blindly go around asking questions without RTFM, so what makes you sure people will take the "testing" label seriously?
I think the idea of a beta test is to gather thoughts, ideas, comments and questions from a user community for the purpose of improving the product. It would therefore seem pointless for people to refrain from asking questions about the way a test kernel performed.
Now, if the question happens to be "I put the new test kernel on my 10,000 impressions/hour production commercial web server and it blew up my server", then that's a RTFM moment. I would suspect, however, that the nature of such production environments is such that mistakes like that are a self-correcting phenomenon. (How's that for a "you're fired" euphamism? :))
All I see is badness coming from this.
Linux is changing. The average Linux user of today doesn't recompile their kernel. What's wrong with Mandrake or Suse offering a clearly labelled "testing kernel"? One of the problems Linux development is having right now is that the testing community is so closed that they aren't getting a good cross section of production machines during testing. The end result is that the rubber doesn't really meet the road until the kernel goes "live".
Two questions, though: Other than quarantine (which is a dubious use), what is the use of having the tags in a hospital?
Damn. That's a pretty good point.
How much power can these RFIDs put out? Enough (in large numbers, of course) to disrupt hospital equipment? I SERIOUSLY doubt it, but I don't know enough about RFIDs to answer honestly.
RFIDs draw their power via induction from the incoming challenge signal. Any power output is simply absorbed form the transmitter, so it is the power of the transmitter that would be at issue.
For when you get fragged:
Fucking stop camping or I'll call the cops on your ass!
So, you are saying that a hospital wouldn't want to use identifiers in the tags that relate to certain conditions, such as say, resistant tuberculosis or sars?
Uh, I hate to sound like a "voice of reason" karma whore, but I don't see what was advertised in the PDF, or any other of the few materials that are surviving the slashdotting.
The PDF talks about consumer concerns, and talks about ways to address them, including oversight and disabling the tags. Where exactly is the cackling evil overlord?
I've been wondering if there would be HIPPA problems if this kind of technology ever is applied to healthcare.
That is a damned good point. The HIPAA regs require encryption of electronic patient information. This would mean that if RFID tags are used for normal hospital operations, the data must be encrypted or the hospital is criminally liable.
It's nice to see that at $20,000/pound, we're sending gozilla toys into orbit.
Okay, fine. When you go up for your six month shift, you'll only be allowed one carryon item.
My personal choice would be to take balloons up. Attach an inflated balloon to godzilla with a contrivance to open the balloon after a set time interval. (I'm sure a modified egg timer will work) Then send gozilla floating down a corridor perpendicular to the area my crewmates are sleeping in...
even genocidal litigation can't stop file sharers
Although I'm not familiar with the case, I don't remember extermination camps being discussed as part of a remedy. The RIAA's efforts are punitive, vengeful, and certainly suicidal, but not genocidal.
I am very much against the RIAA in this affair, but ridiculous exaggeration like this severely damages our ability to make the case to Joe Sixpack.
I mean really - if I want secure transfer of information i'm not going to use e-mail. The effort wasted securing it is truly wasted effort, in my view, because of the lack of a trusted MTA.
Use GPG. Then you don't have to trust anything, except that you have a geniune key.
Wouldn't that make man-in-the-middle pretty much trivially easy? All I would need to do is haxor the name server to point you to my evil box. You'd get a dutfilly performed diffie-hellman exchange just before all your data came into my posession. Your plan has no way to verify identity of the endpoints.
Security vendor AirDefense set up two of its commercial 'AirDefense Guard' sensors
I guess they're terrorists. Guards, seize them!
That, I believe, is a true statement.
That statement directly contradicts itself. This:
No, just that a system that is /less likely/ to be compromised or subverted can in fact be designed.
Is a statement of belief, not fact. If we were going to analyze this problem according to scientific principle, it would rapidly become apparent that the technical efforts you subscribe to are more an exercise of fear management than controlling the behavior of terrorists.
A good parallel to this would be the problem of computer security. If someone were to recommend that a reasonable approach to computer security would be to eliminate professional human involvement and instead install what are promised to be "super-devices" that are "so reliable" that their behavior can be counted upon to circumvent the efforts of an IT staff, most of us would immediately conclude that they were being sold a bill of goods. The word "bullshit" wouldn't adequately approach the esteem most of us would have for such a ridiculous suggestion.
However, from an engineering (and safety) perspective, it is clear that a pilot IS NOT the be-all end-all of airline safety.
Your support for this point seems to be that a pilot's judgement can be compromised or otherwise subverted, and is therefore ineligible to be the final authority on the behavior of the vehicle. That suggests that you have an idea for something that cannot be compromised or subverted, or that your theory is hopelessly misguided. Shall we apply Occam's razor?
Please reply by brainwave transmission, as I don't read this forum much.
You are filled with an angry wave of disgust at how tinfoil hat jokes continue to get modded up.
If you would RTFA you'd see that it is based on a GPS Positioning and a pre-built database of coordinates. Only if the GPS signal is blocked does it resort to Airport beacons. And if you had your beacon transmit 'New York City' A) The FAA/FCC will come down on your ass severely. B) Good luck trying to put one out there with nobody noticing (they're not that small).
The GPS sattelites are a long way off. So is Heahtrow's VOR/DME (if I'm setting up my evil rig in Dallas). It's not very challenging to overcome the radio transmissions of both devices with a small transmitter and make an incoming 767 think it's about to hit Big Ben.
And at the risk of biting on an obvious troll, how do you expect the FAA to plausibly deter setting up pirate navaids if you don't expect them to be able to govern the behavior of licensed pilots in controlled airspace?
What if I setup my own NDB/DME and get it to transmit an identifier saying "new york". Then put it at the end of a runway...
I am a pilot in training. This isn't funny. It's insightful. Faking a VOR is mind-numbingly simple, and an un-overrideable transmitter in the wrong place activated at the wrong time could be catastrophic. Placed at the end of a runway, it could be used to force an aircraft to immediately initiate an extremely hard bank in a situation where the airspeed and other factors make that maneuver basically instant death. There is also the problem that stuff goes wrong. (And yes, I do keep track of where the autopilot circuit breaker is) As a pilot, I simply cannot have a flight system that seizes control of the aircraft because of the possibility that it may go wrong. No one would begin to tolerate such a system if installed in an automobile. I would hate to think that we don't extend that thought to aircraft simply because so few of us are pilots.