2. Revival in religion. Yea I know this is Slashdot and a lot of the readers here are Atheists or against religion in one form or an other, but there has been a resurgence in religious people. Which teaches at least to stop people from doing unorganized violence.
4. Improved conditions for the poor. Sure the gap between the rich and the poor is growing however the poor now have a better standard of life then they did in the past.
The poor in the US have an income that's basically identical in real dollars to the income of the poor in 1970. For instance, this graph from data from the US census.
One possible alternative would be to go to the hosting company and say: "We have a warrant for the contents of this server for criminal investigation. Our techs will help you quickly set up a backup server so none of your other customers will be affected, and flip over everything but the bad guy's traffic to that server. We also have a warrant to wiretap the bad guy's traffic, so we're going to send the traffic to his website to this special box of ours for a while to collect evidence."
That's more expensive then just charging in and grabbing servers off the rack, but if there's a specific crime they're after, that would probably be a better approach - among other things, it would mean the suspect doesn't suspect anything's wrong.
He's started no wars, he's started a "kinetic military action". Similarly, George W Bush and Dick Cheney didn't lock up prisoners and tortured them, they "detained" "enemy combatants" and subjected them to "enhanced interrogation techniques".
When a politician (or businessperson, or anyone else who has a job that involves communicating with the public) takes a concept that has a perfectly good, short, clear word to describe it, and gives it a long convoluted phrase to mean the same thing, assume they're trying to hide something.
I know a lot of people disagree and think everything is easier for us, but it's not.
Here's why they disagree with you (assuming we're talking about the US): White men earn substantially more for the same work as either women or non-white men. They're much more likely to be hired and promoted than black or Hispanic men. Either that means white men as a group are substantially better at working than other groups of people, or there's some other factor helping them out, again as a group. In a similar vein, white men receive substantially lighter sentences than black men for committing the same crime, are more likely to be called in for job interviews than equally qualified black men, and are at far lower risk of police brutality.
There's a ton of research backing up each of these assertions. For instance, they sent out resumes for identically qualified candidates with names that sounded more white or more black (one report on it) and got significantly more interview requests for the white-sounding candidates.
It may not seem like you have it easier, but you do. You might not realize that you're taking advantage of your whiteness when you walk down the street in a nice neighborhood and a cop either ignores you or waves politely. You might not realize that you're taking advantage of your maleness when you convince your boss to give you a raise.
amiga3D's point, if you'll read it honestly, is that s/he's unhappy with those who claim to be Christians hating on atheists despite clear Christian doctrine that states that they shouldn't be doing that. It might not be your position, but GP is taking a logically consistent position on the issue, and one that encourages Christians to treat non-Christians decently. If you, as an atheist, want to pick a sort of Christianity to accept in the world, that's the kind you want, because they're your allies when the not-so-decent Christians start re-introducing the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects, of course).
Except the US and NATO don't "indiscriminately" kill as they please, they say they put a ton of planning into every strike and try to conduct operations with a minimal amount of civilian death and injuries.
Fixed that for you. We actually don't know how they decide on their targeting, because it's all done in secret.
What we do know is that the US definitely hits civilians. It's probably not intentional most of the time, the Pentagon doesn't like the bad press, but civilian casualties don't just happen. And we've also seen reporting of times when the US military decides that civilian casualties are acceptable of the advantages of attacking are too great - for instance, intelligence states that a terrorist is living in an apartment building, so the US military launches drone attacks at the building, knowing that they would also kill the suspected terrorist's neighbors.
I take it you've never worked in an organization that worked something like this:
Manager: "I need a perfect solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem - I just signed a 7-figure contract saying we'd provide that in 2 weeks." IT: "There's no way to do this, we've got lots of papers and well-known theory that proves that this is a problem the best mathematical and scientific minds that have ever existed in the last 50 years aren't able to solve." Manager: "Just get it done, ok? Look, there's a lot of money riding on this."
2 weeks later... Manager: "So where's that Traveling Salesman Problem solution I asked for?" IT: "It's not ready yet. As I previously mentioned, it's a virtual impossibility." Manager: "Keep at it - we can run over, it will penalize us in the contract a bit. Work overtime, stay in the office, do whatever else you need to do, until it's done."
4 weeks later... Manager: "So why isn't this Traveling Salesman Problem ready?" IT: "As I previously mentioned, there's no way to do this." Manager: "Your fired."
The White House stands opposed to changes in the subsidies or tariffs, so they will likely go untouched before they expire at the end of the year.
That 73-27 vote is way more than the 2/3 required to override a presidential veto. Even if Obama doesn't want to do this, Congress could force it on him.
What RMS was doing was exactly what most of the mathematical and scientific community was doing already, namely sharing ideas like crazy and giving everybody who knew what they were doing a way to contribute. And it had been what was going on in Unix-land before it became heavily commercial, most notably in BSD Unix.
As much as RMS is portrayed as a radical, the real radical position is the idea that software source code should be hidden from users and protected from prying user eyes for the purposes of profit.
It almost seems like it would be easier to maintain a list of which major payment systems haven't been breached (that we know of). Seriously, if this was as wide open as Citibank and Sony, then we have to assume that just about everybody will be this easy to pwn.
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
Yes, it's a piece of dystopian writing, but what makes that so scary is how plausible it all is.
You can, I've done it, but it's sure not pleasant. It depended on living in an area where rents are low and dropping, and good access to public transit. My monthly expenses at the time ran as follows: $535 - rent $50 - monthly bus pass $60 - electricity and gas $60 - cable and Internet (you can't get it that cheap now, but at the time I could) ~$150 - food $20 - clothing fund Total: ~$975 Furniture was acquired largely through scrounging, some from my folks and some from the curb.
In that area at least, that means that surviving as a single adult requires an after-tax income of about $12,000.
If you are authenticating a user, the user will be involved. That's the reality of it.
Any of the pure hardware solutions you describe suffer from the fatal flaw that they aren't authenticating that the user is who they say they are, they're authenticating that the user has access to a particular piece of hardware. If, for instance, it's built into Alice's cell phone, and Mallory steals Alice's cell phone, then as far as Bob knows he's talking to Alice rather than Mallory, and if Alice tries to talk to Bob to correct the situation then Bob won't recognize Alice's new hardware.
Yes, but if you're desperate enough, especially if the social safety net has been gutted like much of the US political leadership would like, you will take that wage. That's because in order to survive you need to somehow acquire food, clothing, housing, and probably some basic medical care, and to do that in the US you generally need to be able to pay for it (the charitable and government organizations that provide such basics are currently stretched way past their limit, which should tell you how many desperate people there are right now).
Also food for thought: approximately 1 out of every 3 American households live on less than that, and 1 out of every 6 live on less than half of that.
Funny you bring up Ricardo, because none other than Karl Marx based his arguments in part on Ricardo's work. Marx's attitude towards Ricardo appears to have been "Smart guy, got close to the truth, but then shied away from the implications of what he was saying that made capitalism not look ideal." And it's in precisely those areas that Ricardo kept away from that many modern economists have good reason to believe make a huge difference, like commons problems, information asymmetry, and non-rational economic behavior.
tend not to hire (or retain) them if they aren't entry level
Actually, that's not the whole story there. The ideal experience level for a new hire these days is 3 years of experience. That's because studies have shown that technical types make their big rookie mistakes in their first 3 years. That makes it extremely difficult for a new college grad too break into the market (I got past that particular hump many years ago, but it still definitely exists).
You're right about one thing though: This is about cost. When industry or a politician says "We don't have enough people in (profession)", read "Large employers are having to pay more than they'd like to people in (profession)" And how much they'd like to pay is somewhere around $13,000 for an entry level worker, and $30,000 for a seasoned veteran. The only way they're going to get workers to accept that is to create an environment where there are so many unemployed folks running around that they're desperate enough to take absolutely anything that comes their way.
The part of the story aardwolf64's not explaining: The reason he got the promotion was not because of the obvious security problem but because of the payment to whipsandhandcuffs.com he found on his manager's statement.
Without disclosure laws, there's a darn good chance that the recent Citibank and Sony breaches might never have become public. Are they perfect? No, but they're a heck of a lot better than no disclosure laws.
It should be pointed out that the FSP's success is also in large part due to a lot of New Hampshire Republicans being really libertarians and not so much the crony capitalists of the national Republican Party. They aren't interested in funneling large sums of public cash into their campaign contributor's pockets like many Republicans are nationwide. They've generally stayed true to what the GOP advertises itself to be economically: small government and low taxes. They've generally steered clear of the religious conservatives, and really distanced themselves from the nutcases.
Actually, New Hampshire Democrats have also pretty well stayed clear of the worst of their ilk too. There's not a lot of talk of corrupt union arrangements or unnecessary environmentalist hysteria (both parties pay close attention to legitimate environmentalist hysteria because it could be important for the tourist industry).
There's a lot about New Hampshire's government, both its people and its structure, that makes it very responsive to its citizens. It's one of the things I miss about living there.
It's never been proven that any of these searches (with the possible exception of dumpster diving) were legal without a warrant.
The searches being described here are the sort that many constitutional lawyers think would fail Fourth Amendment scrutiny because they involve the searching of a person . However, they've never been tested under the Fourth Amendment, because nobody can prove they were targeted for the search and thus any suits about this have been thrown out due to lack of standing.
Congress made special effort to preserve this situation to prevent court review, for instance immunizing AT&T from being sued for cooperating with law enforcement. The idea was to put a stop to the ACLU (and others) suing AT&T demanding to know whether they were being searched, because that would allow them to then sue the federal government for searching without showing probable cause to any sort of court (not even a FISA court, which is secret from the public).
For example we know W's GPA was actually comparable to Gore or Kerry's. Yet somehow Gore and Kerry are considered so super smart while W is universally ridiculed as an idiot.
GPA wasn't why Bush was and is considered pretty stupid. The reason he's considered stupid is that he's not really accomplished all that much - his military record was mediocre at best, most of his business ventures (which wouldn't have started without money from his dad's friends) flopped, and his political campaigns were also basically inheriting his dad's political apparatus. That and a speaking style which provoked unfavorable comparisons to Dan Quayle gave him a reputation of being rather stupid, deservedly or no. Basically, there's good reason to think that if he had started out in the same environment as Ronald Reagan did, he would have been a nobody.
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Sent from my physical implementation of Turing Machine.
Ok, I'm impressed - where do you keep your infinitely large memory tape?
But seriously, that guy was probably as much a part of the Allied victory as General Patton was, and proof that homophobia hurts all of us.
2. Revival in religion. Yea I know this is Slashdot and a lot of the readers here are Atheists or against religion in one form or an other, but there has been a resurgence in religious people. Which teaches at least to stop people from doing unorganized violence.
Unfortunately, there's at least one study that strongly suggests that atheists are less likely to commit crime than religious adherents.
4. Improved conditions for the poor. Sure the gap between the rich and the poor is growing however the poor now have a better standard of life then they did in the past.
The poor in the US have an income that's basically identical in real dollars to the income of the poor in 1970. For instance, this graph from data from the US census.
What's the FBIs alternative?
One possible alternative would be to go to the hosting company and say: "We have a warrant for the contents of this server for criminal investigation. Our techs will help you quickly set up a backup server so none of your other customers will be affected, and flip over everything but the bad guy's traffic to that server. We also have a warrant to wiretap the bad guy's traffic, so we're going to send the traffic to his website to this special box of ours for a while to collect evidence."
That's more expensive then just charging in and grabbing servers off the rack, but if there's a specific crime they're after, that would probably be a better approach - among other things, it would mean the suspect doesn't suspect anything's wrong.
He's started no wars, he's started a "kinetic military action". Similarly, George W Bush and Dick Cheney didn't lock up prisoners and tortured them, they "detained" "enemy combatants" and subjected them to "enhanced interrogation techniques".
When a politician (or businessperson, or anyone else who has a job that involves communicating with the public) takes a concept that has a perfectly good, short, clear word to describe it, and gives it a long convoluted phrase to mean the same thing, assume they're trying to hide something.
I know a lot of people disagree and think everything is easier for us, but it's not.
Here's why they disagree with you (assuming we're talking about the US): White men earn substantially more for the same work as either women or non-white men. They're much more likely to be hired and promoted than black or Hispanic men. Either that means white men as a group are substantially better at working than other groups of people, or there's some other factor helping them out, again as a group. In a similar vein, white men receive substantially lighter sentences than black men for committing the same crime, are more likely to be called in for job interviews than equally qualified black men, and are at far lower risk of police brutality.
There's a ton of research backing up each of these assertions. For instance, they sent out resumes for identically qualified candidates with names that sounded more white or more black (one report on it) and got significantly more interview requests for the white-sounding candidates.
It may not seem like you have it easier, but you do. You might not realize that you're taking advantage of your whiteness when you walk down the street in a nice neighborhood and a cop either ignores you or waves politely. You might not realize that you're taking advantage of your maleness when you convince your boss to give you a raise.
I don't know, but the Fresh Prince was jiggy with it, and Prince didn't have The Time to comment about it.
amiga3D's point, if you'll read it honestly, is that s/he's unhappy with those who claim to be Christians hating on atheists despite clear Christian doctrine that states that they shouldn't be doing that. It might not be your position, but GP is taking a logically consistent position on the issue, and one that encourages Christians to treat non-Christians decently. If you, as an atheist, want to pick a sort of Christianity to accept in the world, that's the kind you want, because they're your allies when the not-so-decent Christians start re-introducing the Spanish Inquisition (which nobody expects, of course).
Ah yes, the Alberto Gonzales Defense.
Except the US and NATO don't "indiscriminately" kill as they please, they say they put a ton of planning into every strike and try to conduct operations with a minimal amount of civilian death and injuries.
Fixed that for you. We actually don't know how they decide on their targeting, because it's all done in secret.
What we do know is that the US definitely hits civilians. It's probably not intentional most of the time, the Pentagon doesn't like the bad press, but civilian casualties don't just happen. And we've also seen reporting of times when the US military decides that civilian casualties are acceptable of the advantages of attacking are too great - for instance, intelligence states that a terrorist is living in an apartment building, so the US military launches drone attacks at the building, knowing that they would also kill the suspected terrorist's neighbors.
I take it you've never worked in an organization that worked something like this:
Manager: "I need a perfect solution to the Traveling Salesman Problem - I just signed a 7-figure contract saying we'd provide that in 2 weeks."
IT: "There's no way to do this, we've got lots of papers and well-known theory that proves that this is a problem the best mathematical and scientific minds that have ever existed in the last 50 years aren't able to solve."
Manager: "Just get it done, ok? Look, there's a lot of money riding on this."
2 weeks later ...
Manager: "So where's that Traveling Salesman Problem solution I asked for?"
IT: "It's not ready yet. As I previously mentioned, it's a virtual impossibility."
Manager: "Keep at it - we can run over, it will penalize us in the contract a bit. Work overtime, stay in the office, do whatever else you need to do, until it's done."
4 weeks later ...
Manager: "So why isn't this Traveling Salesman Problem ready?"
IT: "As I previously mentioned, there's no way to do this."
Manager: "Your fired."
The White House stands opposed to changes in the subsidies or tariffs, so they will likely go untouched before they expire at the end of the year.
That 73-27 vote is way more than the 2/3 required to override a presidential veto. Even if Obama doesn't want to do this, Congress could force it on him.
RMS doesn't exactly deserve that title either.
What RMS was doing was exactly what most of the mathematical and scientific community was doing already, namely sharing ideas like crazy and giving everybody who knew what they were doing a way to contribute. And it had been what was going on in Unix-land before it became heavily commercial, most notably in BSD Unix.
As much as RMS is portrayed as a radical, the real radical position is the idea that software source code should be hidden from users and protected from prying user eyes for the purposes of profit.
It almost seems like it would be easier to maintain a list of which major payment systems haven't been breached (that we know of). Seriously, if this was as wide open as Citibank and Sony, then we have to assume that just about everybody will be this easy to pwn.
As Richard Stallman put it in The Right to Read:
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool, and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be used only for class exercises.
Yes, it's a piece of dystopian writing, but what makes that so scary is how plausible it all is.
You can, I've done it, but it's sure not pleasant. It depended on living in an area where rents are low and dropping, and good access to public transit. My monthly expenses at the time ran as follows:
$535 - rent
$50 - monthly bus pass
$60 - electricity and gas
$60 - cable and Internet (you can't get it that cheap now, but at the time I could)
~$150 - food
$20 - clothing fund
Total: ~$975
Furniture was acquired largely through scrounging, some from my folks and some from the curb.
In that area at least, that means that surviving as a single adult requires an after-tax income of about $12,000.
If you are authenticating a user, the user will be involved. That's the reality of it.
Any of the pure hardware solutions you describe suffer from the fatal flaw that they aren't authenticating that the user is who they say they are, they're authenticating that the user has access to a particular piece of hardware. If, for instance, it's built into Alice's cell phone, and Mallory steals Alice's cell phone, then as far as Bob knows he's talking to Alice rather than Mallory, and if Alice tries to talk to Bob to correct the situation then Bob won't recognize Alice's new hardware.
There is no silver bullet in security.
Yes, but if you're desperate enough, especially if the social safety net has been gutted like much of the US political leadership would like, you will take that wage. That's because in order to survive you need to somehow acquire food, clothing, housing, and probably some basic medical care, and to do that in the US you generally need to be able to pay for it (the charitable and government organizations that provide such basics are currently stretched way past their limit, which should tell you how many desperate people there are right now).
Also food for thought: approximately 1 out of every 3 American households live on less than that, and 1 out of every 6 live on less than half of that.
Funny you bring up Ricardo, because none other than Karl Marx based his arguments in part on Ricardo's work. Marx's attitude towards Ricardo appears to have been "Smart guy, got close to the truth, but then shied away from the implications of what he was saying that made capitalism not look ideal." And it's in precisely those areas that Ricardo kept away from that many modern economists have good reason to believe make a huge difference, like commons problems, information asymmetry, and non-rational economic behavior.
tend not to hire (or retain) them if they aren't entry level
Actually, that's not the whole story there. The ideal experience level for a new hire these days is 3 years of experience. That's because studies have shown that technical types make their big rookie mistakes in their first 3 years. That makes it extremely difficult for a new college grad too break into the market (I got past that particular hump many years ago, but it still definitely exists).
You're right about one thing though: This is about cost. When industry or a politician says "We don't have enough people in (profession)", read "Large employers are having to pay more than they'd like to people in (profession)" And how much they'd like to pay is somewhere around $13,000 for an entry level worker, and $30,000 for a seasoned veteran. The only way they're going to get workers to accept that is to create an environment where there are so many unemployed folks running around that they're desperate enough to take absolutely anything that comes their way.
The part of the story aardwolf64's not explaining: The reason he got the promotion was not because of the obvious security problem but because of the payment to whipsandhandcuffs.com he found on his manager's statement.
Bruce Schneier has written about the effectiveness of this sort of legislation before:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/identitytheft_d.html
Without disclosure laws, there's a darn good chance that the recent Citibank and Sony breaches might never have become public. Are they perfect? No, but they're a heck of a lot better than no disclosure laws.
It should be pointed out that the FSP's success is also in large part due to a lot of New Hampshire Republicans being really libertarians and not so much the crony capitalists of the national Republican Party. They aren't interested in funneling large sums of public cash into their campaign contributor's pockets like many Republicans are nationwide. They've generally stayed true to what the GOP advertises itself to be economically: small government and low taxes. They've generally steered clear of the religious conservatives, and really distanced themselves from the nutcases.
Actually, New Hampshire Democrats have also pretty well stayed clear of the worst of their ilk too. There's not a lot of talk of corrupt union arrangements or unnecessary environmentalist hysteria (both parties pay close attention to legitimate environmentalist hysteria because it could be important for the tourist industry).
There's a lot about New Hampshire's government, both its people and its structure, that makes it very responsive to its citizens. It's one of the things I miss about living there.
within the law
It's never been proven that any of these searches (with the possible exception of dumpster diving) were legal without a warrant.
The searches being described here are the sort that many constitutional lawyers think would fail Fourth Amendment scrutiny because they involve the searching of a person . However, they've never been tested under the Fourth Amendment, because nobody can prove they were targeted for the search and thus any suits about this have been thrown out due to lack of standing.
Congress made special effort to preserve this situation to prevent court review, for instance immunizing AT&T from being sued for cooperating with law enforcement. The idea was to put a stop to the ACLU (and others) suing AT&T demanding to know whether they were being searched, because that would allow them to then sue the federal government for searching without showing probable cause to any sort of court (not even a FISA court, which is secret from the public).
Does it include an accordion? If so, that makes them awesome.
Some examples: TMBG, Weird Al, Moxy Fruvous (back when they were still together), MC Frontalot (listen to his backing tracks carefully, it's there).
For example we know W's GPA was actually comparable to Gore or Kerry's. Yet somehow Gore and Kerry are considered so super smart while W is universally ridiculed as an idiot.
GPA wasn't why Bush was and is considered pretty stupid. The reason he's considered stupid is that he's not really accomplished all that much - his military record was mediocre at best, most of his business ventures (which wouldn't have started without money from his dad's friends) flopped, and his political campaigns were also basically inheriting his dad's political apparatus. That and a speaking style which provoked unfavorable comparisons to Dan Quayle gave him a reputation of being rather stupid, deservedly or no. Basically, there's good reason to think that if he had started out in the same environment as Ronald Reagan did, he would have been a nobody.