It is conceivable that fewer corners were cut back in the day...
Not very likely. Back in the earliest days of ATMS (or nearly - when I was younger, my dad had one that was essentially just a punch-card) we used to make our own ATM cards out of cardboard and 800BPI (I think) mag tape encoded with a "999 99..." test pattern that worked beautifully for a while.
We didn't repeat the experiment many times (or withdraw large amounts), it was more for the challenge, such as it was at the time.
...and if your bank insists on a PIN of only 4 digits, maybe it would be worth considering a different bank. I can't say all, but many banks here in Australia use 6-digit PINs. Of course, that doesn't take into account the advantages of a thermorectal cryptanalysis approach to accessing your funds, but what can?
Yeah, ALWAYS lean right in and cover the PIN pad with your other hand.
I have a more effective approach: I use a large-ish "clutch" wallet that, when held above my "key" hand, not only effectively obscures it, but also shades it to the extent that most cameras would struggle to make a successful exposure. The size of wallet isn't a problem, since it's easier to secure it in a single bag than in one of many pockets in your clothing.
Debit and credit cards are OK so long as you are a bit careful about not where you use them and not letting them out of your sight (in order to to skim them), and check your accounts reasonably frequently. They are certainly better than cheques.
Banks will often not even look at a signature on a cheque, let alone make any attempt to verify it. As an example, I once accidentally grabbed my wife's chequebook and used it (signing my own name) to purchase goods. I realised my mistake a couple of days later and attempted to go into the shop to replace my presumably dodgy cheque with cash, but the bank had already paid up on it. Now in this case, it was an honest enough mistake, but it has made me a lot more careful about where we store our chequebooks since.
At least with credit cards, there is always the option of a chargeback.
You can communicate with your friends without exposing your personal information to Facebook:
Yep. I don't have a Facebook account, primarily because I don't care for the way it seems to swallow up the lives of its users. However, I and most of my friends use Skype, which works elegantly as a combination of IM and VOIP. Skype makes it clear when one is or is not available to be contacted, so no-one has to get huffy about whether or not you've seen such-and-such a Facebook message or email.
I'm not about to apologise for such an old-school approach - but it does help me define clearly how much I'm ready to let the internet intrude in my life..
...is why the hell some outfits feel the need to collect that much information about you just to sell you some food. After all, it doesn't make them a single extra sale. If you're not hungry, you're not going to buy a pizza.
Any shop that tries to get that kind of information out of me gets a flat refusal. Likewise, any venue that tries to take my fingerprints or iris scan.
Meanwhile, Better Privacy routinely deletes all the asshattery of flash cookies that she didn't specifically authorize on her machine, and everyone is happy. Except the asshats, of course.
This, folks, is the important bit. Better Privacy is as essential as adblock and flashblock.
and if you gave them a really pimped-out liquid-cooled overclocked single-core 32-bit machine. they would be enthusiastic. [...] AND most of their software would run faster.
Agreed. Being able to address more RAM than you can afford all at once is great if you actually need to do that. But unless you are doing heavy-duty CPU and RAM-intensive number-crunching, all you are really doing is feeding the marketroids.
When I'm not doing molecular modelling, I manage to work perfectly productively on a 10-year-old box running Linux on a 1GHz Athlon single-core machine that is well-matched with its Asus motherboard and 512MB RAM.
the same type of people who look at Mac OS X as a friendly Unix that can run Matlab AND Photoshop, probably heavy on the Matlab.
Well, it might be nice to have more power, but it wouldn't be for PhotoShop. I learned to use the GIMP first, PS later, and I find GIMP is every bit as good for what I do. (And to get this out of the way before some fanboy bleats about CMYK: GIMP handles this just fine if you really insist on squandering dead trees.)
I don't mind admitting that OS X is a friendly Unix, though whether I would actually pay money for it when my freebie MacBook dies is another matter. I'll probably end up sticking with Linux.
Hmmm. That's a point I hadn't considered. However, charging the motorist under an inappropriate law would only have the effect of drawing attention to the officer in question - otherwise the case (including the footage being advertised by Slashdot) would have been buried under the weight of more critical issues, and the officer's cover would not be that much less obscure than otherwise.
I don't think they were forced to (I believe the only case that IBM lost with the DOJ was in 1956, long before 'software' entered the picture).
I can't dispute that, since I don't really know enough about it.
Here's what Wikipedia says:.
"Amdahl owed some of its success to antitrust settlements between IBM and the U.S. Department of Justice, which assured that Amdahl's customers could license IBM's mainframe software under reasonable terms." I never said anything about a free ride - I do recall that Amdahl (and I imagine Fujitsu, among others) used IBM's software, but at IIRC at a price. But as I mentioned earlier, that was the way the world wagged. In those days there was no expectation of being able to use someone's mainframe software free of charge.
Abstract thinking not being your strong suit, and all.
Why complicate things unnecessarily? Sure, the subsequent police action was creepy, as was whatever judge or DA authorised their actions.
But getting back to the original incident: if I, one of many who live in countries where people do not routinely carry firearms, don't see the original action as particularly over-the-top (especially given the pains your TV shows take to show your police in a vastly more aggressive light), then why should anyone else?
Anyway, getting back to the point, (and to save everybody some time) the guy in question shows headcam footage of him doing wheelies on his motorcycle, speeding up to 127mph, and overtaking a cop at 82mph.
The cop pulls him over, pulls a gun out of his belt, waves it around for a second or two, then puts it back in his belt. Sure, the gun was unnecessary, but if anybody was being a danger to anyone else, it was the motorcyclist. Can't say I'm overly sympathetic.
the right to force IBM to license their software for use on other hardware.
I believe there is at least one precedent for this. IIRC, Amdahl won an antitrust case against with the US DOJ (I think in the late '70s) that allowed Amdahl's customers to licence IBM's software on some sort of reasonable terms.
i hope IBM loses just because they're royal shits.
In the days when there was a variety of mainframe manufacturers, those of us who carved out a living by working with them were pretty much divided into the IBM and the non-IBM crowd. Those of us who fell into the latter category often had to learn the intricacies of lots of platforms (each with its own proprietary OS).
In my case they were Burroughs, Honeywell, Sperry/UNIVAC, Prime, Data General, Tandem, CDC Cyber and probably a few others I've forgotten. It was a way to keep life interesting, and avoid becoming an IBM drone.
Well, they certainly took their time about it. Back when I first started working with computers (in the late '70s, when all computers that I ever knew of were mainframes), if I had said to anyone that I wanted my operating system to be open-source, I would have been laughed at.
All operating systems were proprietary, and it never occurred to us that anything could ever be otherwise. If you paid tens or hundreds of thousand dollars for a mainframe computer, you wouldn't expect to be able to run an off-the-peg third-party operating system on it.
...leading to a purely theological fallback position ("it's just made to look that way by God!") which is unfalsifiable.
Of course, God might be joking. Actually, if the bible gave any indication that God had a sense of humour and wasn't such a sadistic shit, I might be more tempted to believe in that stuff.
After all, it would be somewhat refreshing if DNA had it right, that God's last message to Mankind was "We apologise for the inconvenience"...
Slashdot Mirror
It is conceivable that fewer corners were cut back in the day...
Not very likely. Back in the earliest days of ATMS (or nearly - when I was younger, my dad had one that was essentially just a punch-card) we used to make our own ATM cards out of cardboard and 800BPI (I think) mag tape encoded with a "999 99..." test pattern that worked beautifully for a while.
We didn't repeat the experiment many times (or withdraw large amounts), it was more for the challenge, such as it was at the time.
For 4 digit PINs...
...and if your bank insists on a PIN of only 4 digits, maybe it would be worth considering a different bank. I can't say all, but many banks here in Australia use 6-digit PINs. Of course, that doesn't take into account the advantages of a thermorectal cryptanalysis approach to accessing your funds, but what can?
Yeah, ALWAYS lean right in and cover the PIN pad with your other hand.
I have a more effective approach: I use a large-ish "clutch" wallet that, when held above my "key" hand, not only effectively obscures it, but also shades it to the extent that most cameras would struggle to make a successful exposure. The size of wallet isn't a problem, since it's easier to secure it in a single bag than in one of many pockets in your clothing.
Debit and credit cards are OK so long as you are a bit careful about not where you use them and not letting them out of your sight (in order to to skim them), and check your accounts reasonably frequently. They are certainly better than cheques.
Banks will often not even look at a signature on a cheque, let alone make any attempt to verify it. As an example, I once accidentally grabbed my wife's chequebook and used it (signing my own name) to purchase goods. I realised my mistake a couple of days later and attempted to go into the shop to replace my presumably dodgy cheque with cash, but the bank had already paid up on it. Now in this case, it was an honest enough mistake, but it has made me a lot more careful about where we store our chequebooks since.
At least with credit cards, there is always the option of a chargeback.
You can communicate with your friends without exposing your personal information to Facebook:
Yep. I don't have a Facebook account, primarily because I don't care for the way it seems to swallow up the lives of its users. However, I and most of my friends use Skype, which works elegantly as a combination of IM and VOIP. Skype makes it clear when one is or is not available to be contacted, so no-one has to get huffy about whether or not you've seen such-and-such a Facebook message or email.
I'm not about to apologise for such an old-school approach - but it does help me define clearly how much I'm ready to let the internet intrude in my life..
but if they know my favourite pizza the worst case scenario is they send me one
How about if they use your credit card to send your favourite pizza to every man, woman and child in the country?
and I just don't have words for people who think the security of their computer systems isn't important.
I do. Lots of them.
you'd think the British hate their own lives so badly they simply create these people out of thin air just to have someone else to talk about!
Isn't that how Susan Boyle was spawned?
...is why the hell some outfits feel the need to collect that much information about you just to sell you some food. After all, it doesn't make them a single extra sale. If you're not hungry, you're not going to buy a pizza.
Any shop that tries to get that kind of information out of me gets a flat refusal. Likewise, any venue that tries to take my fingerprints or iris scan.
Meanwhile, Better Privacy routinely deletes all the asshattery of flash cookies that she didn't specifically authorize on her machine, and everyone is happy. Except the asshats, of course.
This, folks, is the important bit. Better Privacy is as essential as adblock and flashblock.
and if you gave them a really pimped-out liquid-cooled overclocked single-core 32-bit machine. they would be enthusiastic. [...] AND most of their software would run faster.
Agreed. Being able to address more RAM than you can afford all at once is great if you actually need to do that. But unless you are doing heavy-duty CPU and RAM-intensive number-crunching, all you are really doing is feeding the marketroids.
When I'm not doing molecular modelling, I manage to work perfectly productively on a 10-year-old box running Linux on a 1GHz Athlon single-core machine that is well-matched with its Asus motherboard and 512MB RAM.
the same type of people who look at Mac OS X as a friendly Unix that can run Matlab AND Photoshop, probably heavy on the Matlab.
Well, it might be nice to have more power, but it wouldn't be for PhotoShop. I learned to use the GIMP first, PS later, and I find GIMP is every bit as good for what I do. (And to get this out of the way before some fanboy bleats about CMYK: GIMP handles this just fine if you really insist on squandering dead trees.)
I don't mind admitting that OS X is a friendly Unix, though whether I would actually pay money for it when my freebie MacBook dies is another matter. I'll probably end up sticking with Linux.
Hmmm. That's a point I hadn't considered. However, charging the motorist under an inappropriate law would only have the effect of drawing attention to the officer in question - otherwise the case (including the footage being advertised by Slashdot) would have been buried under the weight of more critical issues, and the officer's cover would not be that much less obscure than otherwise.
I don't think they were forced to (I believe the only case that IBM lost with the DOJ was in 1956, long before 'software' entered the picture).
I can't dispute that, since I don't really know enough about it. Here's what Wikipedia says:. "Amdahl owed some of its success to antitrust settlements between IBM and the U.S. Department of Justice, which assured that Amdahl's customers could license IBM's mainframe software under reasonable terms." I never said anything about a free ride - I do recall that Amdahl (and I imagine Fujitsu, among others) used IBM's software, but at IIRC at a price. But as I mentioned earlier, that was the way the world wagged. In those days there was no expectation of being able to use someone's mainframe software free of charge.
Abstract thinking not being your strong suit, and all.
Why complicate things unnecessarily? Sure, the subsequent police action was creepy, as was whatever judge or DA authorised their actions.
But getting back to the original incident: if I, one of many who live in countries where people do not routinely carry firearms, don't see the original action as particularly over-the-top (especially given the pains your TV shows take to show your police in a vastly more aggressive light), then why should anyone else?
Anyway, getting back to the point, (and to save everybody some time) the guy in question shows headcam footage of him doing wheelies on his motorcycle, speeding up to 127mph, and overtaking a cop at 82mph.
The cop pulls him over, pulls a gun out of his belt, waves it around for a second or two, then puts it back in his belt. Sure, the gun was unnecessary, but if anybody was being a danger to anyone else, it was the motorcyclist. Can't say I'm overly sympathetic.
the right to force IBM to license their software for use on other hardware.
I believe there is at least one precedent for this. IIRC, Amdahl won an antitrust case against with the US DOJ (I think in the late '70s) that allowed Amdahl's customers to licence IBM's software on some sort of reasonable terms.
i hope IBM loses just because they're royal shits.
In the days when there was a variety of mainframe manufacturers, those of us who carved out a living by working with them were pretty much divided into the IBM and the non-IBM crowd. Those of us who fell into the latter category often had to learn the intricacies of lots of platforms (each with its own proprietary OS).
In my case they were Burroughs, Honeywell, Sperry/UNIVAC, Prime, Data General, Tandem, CDC Cyber and probably a few others I've forgotten. It was a way to keep life interesting, and avoid becoming an IBM drone.
You are tooting your own horn.
;-)
/. preferences to keep his posts out of sight.
Well, I guess no-one else is going to toot it for him. Just don't let anyone give him a vuvuzela.
If you care enough to not want to read what he says, just use your
Well, they certainly took their time about it. Back when I first started working with computers (in the late '70s, when all computers that I ever knew of were mainframes), if I had said to anyone that I wanted my operating system to be open-source, I would have been laughed at.
All operating systems were proprietary, and it never occurred to us that anything could ever be otherwise. If you paid tens or hundreds of thousand dollars for a mainframe computer, you wouldn't expect to be able to run an off-the-peg third-party operating system on it.
Good. I still don't want an iPhone.
Wait a sec, doesn't everyone use a rubber band to hold the phone to their head nowadays?
No, most people I know use Tarzan-Grip.
However, his place on the Disney board might be of more influence.
I might be tempted to add that perhaps his influence might be better spent on impressionable children.
Oh wait...
Maybe they need to get out of that Faraday cage. Then they might find out whether or not their products actually work.
...leading to a purely theological fallback position ("it's just made to look that way by God!") which is unfalsifiable.
Of course, God might be joking. Actually, if the bible gave any indication that God had a sense of humour and wasn't such a sadistic shit, I might be more tempted to believe in that stuff.
After all, it would be somewhat refreshing if DNA had it right, that God's last message to Mankind was "We apologise for the inconvenience"...