And sadly, that's quite easy. All you have to do to fool the news media is fool one semi-reputable source (in this case Reuters). Soon enough all the other newspapers will pick it up like you're living in an echo chamber.
This guy's making money by selling laptops and cell phones online. He's a fence.
There's an article in the SFGate that says he posted an ad on craigslist for laptops. If true at the very least he's not a fence that you see in movies where there's an established and re-occouring relationship between the thief and the fence.
I guess I don't see enough evidence in what's come out so far to establish that the guys a fence. I think he must have thought there was something up with the laptop from it being sold at such an incredibly low price ($300, worth $1200). But I'm not sure that a low-low-price alone is enough to establish that something is stolen. If the police search his place and find tons of stolen property, that'd be convincing evidence for me.
I'd hope you need actual evidence to prove intent. Likely what would happen is the police would raid his house/apartment and confiscate anything that might be stolen (big stacks of electronics sitting around unused for instance). They'd then try to find out if any of this stuff was stolen. If most of the things he's selling can be shown to have been stolen, I'd guess the courts can get a conviction on that.
Secondly, the target audience which I'm referring to are people who already endure the stigma of either mental illness, chemical dependencies or physical challenges; the word "gimp" is a direct insult to at least two of those people.
This is just pure PC nonsense. The name isn't trying to offend anyone and the program has no association with . Why does anyone that has something wrong with them get instead credibility and the ultimate sin is upsetting these peoples supposedy thin skins? The name isn't insulting to anyone. Thin skinned people (or more likely PC crusaders such as yourself) just want something to whine about.
This is exactly PCism where everyone is afraid they might offend someone. The offendy is always right, and the person who said the "insensitive" remark is always wrong. It doesn't matter just how crazy the offendy is, because they're part of an oppressed group, and opressed people are right.
With that said, I do think the name is stupid and only hurts the adoption of the software. But I would like to emphasize that it's peoples imaginations and prejucices at work here, not actually justifiable beliefs.
Eclipse has a huge future. Many IDE makers are abandoning their own IDEs and making Eclipse plugins. There's already good free plugins for C/C++, excellent inexpensive JSP plugins, and tons of others that I've seen but not used. I have to believe there's some good XML plugins as well. Since Eclipse is cross platform, you don't have to worry about being stuck to one OS. Stick with Eclipse unless you have some special need that Eclipse doesn't do.
This is the same kind of logic that people use to claim air bags don't make people safer. The argument is that people will drive more dangerously if they know they have an airbag to save them.
The problem of course in both these cases is that no one is adding up the benefit of both protection schemes. Of course if you don't also look at the added security that an IT department provides, and only look at potential problems it's going to look like "IT departments are a security risk". Shame on Information Week (and mostly Slashdot for the dumb headline) for making this dishonest claim.
Don't you understand that everything on slashdot has to fit into only a few narrowly defined topics? Anytime there's ever a story involving the law it's filed under "your rights online". It doesn't matter if it involves the internet, anyones rights, or neither of the two. The story could be about someone caught stealing an ipod in Zimbabwe, but since it involves something electronic and theft, it's "your rights online".
And I think it's a bad slippery slope arugment. Slippery slope arguments rely on there being no hard distinctions between points on the slope. In this case there's a big distinction. uk.com is a private domain space, and the owner of it should be able to do whatever they want with it..com is a public space and therefore should be treated as such with public scrutiny.
I'd say its beyond the scope of high school physics, which IMO puts it out of remedial range.
Alpha and Beta radiation is beyond the scope of high school physics? I don't know where you went to school, but I was taught about different kinds of radiation in 9th grade physical science. This wasn't some fancy prep school either but a public school (though it was a fairly decent public school). If they didn't cover basic stuff like radioactive decay in high school the education system in the US is far worse than I imagined.
Funny, I've always felt that manual transmissions were far less safe than automatic. This is for the sole reason that in an accident the transmission is just one more thing to worry about during that moment of stress. Perhaps there's perfect drivers out there that the manual transmission will help them in times of emergency. I'm fairly certain I'm not one of those drivers. Too many distractions only cause less focus on steering, braking, and paying attention to whats around me. how many morons will be talking on there phones checking there hair in the mirror when they have to shift. Manual requires much more attection not only to shifts but feet too and the road!
The problem isn't automatic transmission, it's distracted drivers. A bad driver is a bad driver no matter what. People make the same arguments against ABS, saying it causes people to think ABS is going to save them (and so they follow closely and drive like maniacs in the rain). They say the same thing about airbags because it makes people think they can drive crazy and still be saved by the airbags.
I think this is a different question than the question most people want answered. The most people want is "Am I safer with air-bags, ABS, automatic transmission, etc?" not "Do these innovations make everyone in general safer?" The first question is a subjective one, and can only be answered by people who know their own driving habbits and how this new feature will affect them. The second question can only be answered by actual studies comparing equivalent people who have and don't have the afformentioned functions. It can't be answered by people making idle speculations.
I'll race you. The race consists of 10 gallons of gas and freeway rush hour conditions. Last one out of gas wins.
I'll take you up on that, with one added stipulation. We both start with no car and an equal amount of money. With the money we have to buy both a new car and the gas to run it in the race. You buy the Prius and I'll buy a reliable econo-box. First one out of gas loses.
Increased gas mileage is great, but when it doesn't pay for itself economically you only get the intangibles of feeling better for using less gas. Personally I'll buy the inexpensive car that gets good mileage every time over the expensive hybrid. Someday after more mass-marketing the hybrids might make more economic sense, but they don't really right now.
I think the problems just have shifted. In the past a lot of those cars were made by hand so the tolerances were rather big, these days pretty much all the mechanical parts are put together by machines with very very slight tolerances.
Maybe the problems have shifted, but they aren't equivalent. It used to be a car with 90 thousand miles on it was next in line for the junkyard. Nowadays a car with 90 thousand miles on it usually will go another 50 thousand miles at least. That's what I'm talking about with reliability.
The wealth of the parent of your post wasn't the guy's point. He was saying that, for people who do get cars with these features, it makes them worse drivers than if they had never used those features at all.
I think it was a bit more than that. He said he preferred old cars to new cars. Not cars without all the crazy features to cars with them. My point is that those features are fairly rare.
By the way, what 2001 model car do you have that doesn't have power steering?
Chevy metro. Surprisingly the only thing that's difficult is parallel parking.
Because there's still a lot of new cars out there that don't have ABS. I can't even imagine that you think on board display screens and backup sensors are anywhere near standard equipment. I guess if you can afford cars with all those fancy features, but I just don't see to many people with them. Hell, my car doesn't even have power steering (and it's a 2001).
The point is that all this fancy crap is likely never going to be standard equipment on all cars. The reason GM is putting Onstar onto all its cars is simply that Onstar is an added revenue stream for them. They figure they can make another $200 a year for each car a year and all they have to do is put a cheap computer and cell phone hooked in to the onboard diagnostics that already has to exist. I beleive in the older cars being better. Easy to fix, built more soild, and you had to acutally drive them.
And you had to fix them a hell of a lot more often. It's a documented fact that in general cars made today are far more reliable than the cars made in the 70s and 80s.
Light is usually defined as visible light. If you start using the term light to refer to radio waves, you'll only sound very confused.
As someone else already pointed out there is such a thing as alpha and beta radiation. I'd suggest some remedial physics classes before you discuss physics with anyone again.
Does it really matter? In three-five years most users will want a new iPod anyway, to make use of the new features, smaller size, and/or higher capacity.
Do the vast majority of people really need more than 20 gigs of music storage to carry around with them? What are the magical new features that people are going to want enough to spend another three hundred dollars? It's not as if these things are dirt cheap.
Unlike a computer an Ipod is a dedicated device to do one thing, play music. I doubt if the thing didn't break people would be buying a new one every 3-5 years. Look at something like a CD player, DVD player, or even a portable cassette player. Unless they break, most people feel no need to buy a new one.
A door that's not there can never break off, can never be opened by rambunctious 8-year-olds (and they'll open anything that is openable, and many things that aren't), can never be lost, jammed, or broken.
Right.. and a battery that can't be replaced will eventually wear out. It's literally built to eventually be thrown away, and the user buys another Ipod.
Think about it for a while, if it were possible to store 'old' data on the drive, HDD manufacturers would be using the technique to store more data a long time ago.
They would only do so if it were both reliable, and inexpensive to do so. If it only works 25% of the time, or costs 10 times as much to implement this increased method of storage, HDD manufacturers would just rely on the same advances they have been for the last 20 years.
I'm not saying it is or isn't possible to recover data, only that your logic is faulty
I've heard the persistant rumour that un-erasing data from wiped hard drives is possible. This seems to fuel the "wipe it N times or else you can recover it!" theories, with N increasing depending on how paranoid people are. I've also heard from people like you who claim it's never been done, is a load of BS, etc. Of course I've never heard of anyone actually being able to do it. The rumors all seem to assume the secret labs of the NSA and CIA do this every day, but obviously don't tell anyone about it.
Since you've researched the topic, can you provide any referenced articles about the subject? The only thing I've read about data recovery after a wipe seems to be peoples idle speculation. Surely someone (university researcher, etc) has published something about this?
DBAN doesn't -- last I checked -- have SCSI or RAID drivers, so it is only viable if you're on a plain vanilla IDE system. I dont' know about SATA.
According to the website, "DBAN has all available SCSI disk drivers". As of Dec 2004 DBAN has SATA drivers. I'd think RAID wiping should be done on each individual drive rather than across the entire RAID array.
I think what the poster was talking about is that it's functionally identical in this case. All you really care about is making analysis of any not-completely erased bits on the hard drive unrecoverable. A pseudo-random number generator is fine for this as I doubt you're going to need more than say 128 bits of entropy to make such low level analysis next to impossible.
I have no doubt that the average person can simply read a chart that has little checks next to "features" and decide which of the 7 they want.
Then you haven't dealt with many average consumers when it comes to operating systems. You assume it's all a matter of smartness. It's not. I know very smart people, and they wind up picking the wrong version of windows even now because they lack knowledge of what each feature means. And this is with only what, 3 or 4 different versions available?
No, this offering of 7 different versions of Windows IS going to confuse consumers who are already confused right now. It might just confuse and frustrate them enough that they'll want a simpler option, like getting a computer pre-installed with fully featured linux, or just buy a Mac.
You seem to have this underlying assumption that more options is always better. That consumers have perfect knowledge of what will suit them best, and what each feature means. This is a very poor assumption.
And that has nothing to do with the point I was trying (but apparently failed) to make. The same thing is true for Islam as well.
There's also extremist wackos in Islam that advocate killing people, just like their are in christianity. I even heard an American Mullah issued a Fatwa calling for the murder of the president of Venezuela. That Mullah has his own church called The 700 Club, and I believe his name is Pat Roberson.
You can say that "Robertson isn't a real christian" but that's all a matter of perception now isn't it? The point I'm again (perhaps pointlessly) trying to make is that religion has nothing to do with creating moral people. I find your original conclusion to be obviously wrong. If you go about and pick the christian people you find moral to be the "real" christians, then it's a self fullfilling prophecy. Of course the people you find moral are moral. Similarly if you just assume anyone advocating immoral beliefs in an atheist, you've just self selected your own outcome. That kind of thinking has to be some definition of self delusion.
Umm.. George Bush is a christian, and I seem to recall a certain pre-emptive strike the US launched against a certain country that starts with an I and ends in raq. Why are only atheists capable of doing things morally wrong? I also seem to recall a christian man named Eric Rudolph who killed many innocent people by blowing up clinics. Don't try to tell me that christians are more moral than atheists or non-christians, because that's just obviously wrong. From what I've seen religion (or lack thereof) seems to have nothing to do with how moral or "good" a person is.
The only use for this is in refrigerators and keeping food fresh.
Which is a major advance of civilization. It's not as if all areas that lack electricity are equal. Some already have clean water, but a lack of refrigeration would allow more local storage of perishable food for one thing. I'm sure there's many other benefits to the economy I'm not aware of.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's a hoax, it's fooled a lot of people.
And sadly, that's quite easy. All you have to do to fool the news media is fool one semi-reputable source (in this case Reuters). Soon enough all the other newspapers will pick it up like you're living in an echo chamber.
This guy's making money by selling laptops and cell phones online. He's a fence.
There's an article in the SFGate that says he posted an ad on craigslist for laptops. If true at the very least he's not a fence that you see in movies where there's an established and re-occouring relationship between the thief and the fence.
I guess I don't see enough evidence in what's come out so far to establish that the guys a fence. I think he must have thought there was something up with the laptop from it being sold at such an incredibly low price ($300, worth $1200). But I'm not sure that a low-low-price alone is enough to establish that something is stolen. If the police search his place and find tons of stolen property, that'd be convincing evidence for me.
I'd hope you need actual evidence to prove intent. Likely what would happen is the police would raid his house/apartment and confiscate anything that might be stolen (big stacks of electronics sitting around unused for instance). They'd then try to find out if any of this stuff was stolen. If most of the things he's selling can be shown to have been stolen, I'd guess the courts can get a conviction on that.
Secondly, the target audience which I'm referring to are people who already endure the stigma of either mental illness, chemical dependencies or physical challenges; the word "gimp" is a direct insult to at least two of those people.
This is just pure PC nonsense. The name isn't trying to offend anyone and the program has no association with . Why does anyone that has something wrong with them get instead credibility and the ultimate sin is upsetting these peoples supposedy thin skins? The name isn't insulting to anyone. Thin skinned people (or more likely PC crusaders such as yourself) just want something to whine about.
This is exactly PCism where everyone is afraid they might offend someone. The offendy is always right, and the person who said the "insensitive" remark is always wrong. It doesn't matter just how crazy the offendy is, because they're part of an oppressed group, and opressed people are right.
With that said, I do think the name is stupid and only hurts the adoption of the software. But I would like to emphasize that it's peoples imaginations and prejucices at work here, not actually justifiable beliefs.
Eclipse has a huge future. Many IDE makers are abandoning their own IDEs and making Eclipse plugins. There's already good free plugins for C/C++, excellent inexpensive JSP plugins, and tons of others that I've seen but not used. I have to believe there's some good XML plugins as well. Since Eclipse is cross platform, you don't have to worry about being stuck to one OS. Stick with Eclipse unless you have some special need that Eclipse doesn't do.
This is the same kind of logic that people use to claim air bags don't make people safer. The argument is that people will drive more dangerously if they know they have an airbag to save them.
The problem of course in both these cases is that no one is adding up the benefit of both protection schemes. Of course if you don't also look at the added security that an IT department provides, and only look at potential problems it's going to look like "IT departments are a security risk". Shame on Information Week (and mostly Slashdot for the dumb headline) for making this dishonest claim.
Don't you understand that everything on slashdot has to fit into only a few narrowly defined topics? Anytime there's ever a story involving the law it's filed under "your rights online". It doesn't matter if it involves the internet, anyones rights, or neither of the two. The story could be about someone caught stealing an ipod in Zimbabwe, but since it involves something electronic and theft, it's "your rights online".
Yeah, it's a slippery-slope argument
And I think it's a bad slippery slope arugment. Slippery slope arguments rely on there being no hard distinctions between points on the slope. In this case there's a big distinction. uk.com is a private domain space, and the owner of it should be able to do whatever they want with it.
I'd say its beyond the scope of high school physics, which IMO puts it out of remedial range.
Alpha and Beta radiation is beyond the scope of high school physics? I don't know where you went to school, but I was taught about different kinds of radiation in 9th grade physical science. This wasn't some fancy prep school either but a public school (though it was a fairly decent public school). If they didn't cover basic stuff like radioactive decay in high school the education system in the US is far worse than I imagined.
I do think automatic transmissions are a bad idea
Funny, I've always felt that manual transmissions were far less safe than automatic. This is for the sole reason that in an accident the transmission is just one more thing to worry about during that moment of stress. Perhaps there's perfect drivers out there that the manual transmission will help them in times of emergency. I'm fairly certain I'm not one of those drivers. Too many distractions only cause less focus on steering, braking, and paying attention to whats around me.
how many morons will be talking on there phones checking there hair in the mirror when they have to shift. Manual requires much more attection not only to shifts but feet too and the road!
The problem isn't automatic transmission, it's distracted drivers. A bad driver is a bad driver no matter what. People make the same arguments against ABS, saying it causes people to think ABS is going to save them (and so they follow closely and drive like maniacs in the rain). They say the same thing about airbags because it makes people think they can drive crazy and still be saved by the airbags.
I think this is a different question than the question most people want answered. The most people want is "Am I safer with air-bags, ABS, automatic transmission, etc?" not "Do these innovations make everyone in general safer?" The first question is a subjective one, and can only be answered by people who know their own driving habbits and how this new feature will affect them. The second question can only be answered by actual studies comparing equivalent people who have and don't have the afformentioned functions. It can't be answered by people making idle speculations.
I'll race you. The race consists of 10 gallons of gas and freeway rush hour conditions. Last one out of gas wins.
I'll take you up on that, with one added stipulation. We both start with no car and an equal amount of money. With the money we have to buy both a new car and the gas to run it in the race. You buy the Prius and I'll buy a reliable econo-box. First one out of gas loses.
Increased gas mileage is great, but when it doesn't pay for itself economically you only get the intangibles of feeling better for using less gas. Personally I'll buy the inexpensive car that gets good mileage every time over the expensive hybrid. Someday after more mass-marketing the hybrids might make more economic sense, but they don't really right now.
I think the problems just have shifted. In the past a lot of those cars were made by hand so the tolerances were rather big, these days pretty much all the mechanical parts are put together by machines with very very slight tolerances.
Maybe the problems have shifted, but they aren't equivalent. It used to be a car with 90 thousand miles on it was next in line for the junkyard. Nowadays a car with 90 thousand miles on it usually will go another 50 thousand miles at least. That's what I'm talking about with reliability.
The wealth of the parent of your post wasn't the guy's point. He was saying that, for people who do get cars with these features, it makes them worse drivers than if they had never used those features at all.
I think it was a bit more than that. He said he preferred old cars to new cars. Not cars without all the crazy features to cars with them. My point is that those features are fairly rare.
By the way, what 2001 model car do you have that doesn't have power steering?
Chevy metro. Surprisingly the only thing that's difficult is parallel parking.
Because there's still a lot of new cars out there that don't have ABS. I can't even imagine that you think on board display screens and backup sensors are anywhere near standard equipment. I guess if you can afford cars with all those fancy features, but I just don't see to many people with them. Hell, my car doesn't even have power steering (and it's a 2001).
The point is that all this fancy crap is likely never going to be standard equipment on all cars. The reason GM is putting Onstar onto all its cars is simply that Onstar is an added revenue stream for them. They figure they can make another $200 a year for each car a year and all they have to do is put a cheap computer and cell phone hooked in to the onboard diagnostics that already has to exist.
I beleive in the older cars being better. Easy to fix, built more soild, and you had to acutally drive them.
And you had to fix them a hell of a lot more often. It's a documented fact that in general cars made today are far more reliable than the cars made in the 70s and 80s.
Light is usually defined as visible light. If you start using the term light to refer to radio waves, you'll only sound very confused.
As someone else already pointed out there is such a thing as alpha and beta radiation. I'd suggest some remedial physics classes before you discuss physics with anyone again.
Does it really matter? In three-five years most users will want a new iPod anyway, to make use of the new features, smaller size, and/or higher capacity.
Do the vast majority of people really need more than 20 gigs of music storage to carry around with them? What are the magical new features that people are going to want enough to spend another three hundred dollars? It's not as if these things are dirt cheap.
Unlike a computer an Ipod is a dedicated device to do one thing, play music. I doubt if the thing didn't break people would be buying a new one every 3-5 years. Look at something like a CD player, DVD player, or even a portable cassette player. Unless they break, most people feel no need to buy a new one.
A door that's not there can never break off, can never be opened by rambunctious 8-year-olds (and they'll open anything that is openable, and many things that aren't), can never be lost, jammed, or broken.
Right.. and a battery that can't be replaced will eventually wear out. It's literally built to eventually be thrown away, and the user buys another Ipod.
Think about it for a while, if it were possible to store 'old' data on the drive, HDD manufacturers would be using the technique to store more data a long time ago.
They would only do so if it were both reliable, and inexpensive to do so. If it only works 25% of the time, or costs 10 times as much to implement this increased method of storage, HDD manufacturers would just rely on the same advances they have been for the last 20 years.
I'm not saying it is or isn't possible to recover data, only that your logic is faulty
I've heard the persistant rumour that un-erasing data from wiped hard drives is possible. This seems to fuel the "wipe it N times or else you can recover it!" theories, with N increasing depending on how paranoid people are. I've also heard from people like you who claim it's never been done, is a load of BS, etc. Of course I've never heard of anyone actually being able to do it. The rumors all seem to assume the secret labs of the NSA and CIA do this every day, but obviously don't tell anyone about it.
Since you've researched the topic, can you provide any referenced articles about the subject? The only thing I've read about data recovery after a wipe seems to be peoples idle speculation. Surely someone (university researcher, etc) has published something about this?
DBAN doesn't -- last I checked -- have SCSI or RAID drivers, so it is only viable if you're on a plain vanilla IDE system. I dont' know about SATA.
According to the website, "DBAN has all available SCSI disk drivers". As of Dec 2004 DBAN has SATA drivers. I'd think RAID wiping should be done on each individual drive rather than across the entire RAID array.
I think what the poster was talking about is that it's functionally identical in this case. All you really care about is making analysis of any not-completely erased bits on the hard drive unrecoverable. A pseudo-random number generator is fine for this as I doubt you're going to need more than say 128 bits of entropy to make such low level analysis next to impossible.
I have no doubt that the average person can simply read a chart that has little checks next to "features" and decide which of the 7 they want.
Then you haven't dealt with many average consumers when it comes to operating systems. You assume it's all a matter of smartness. It's not. I know very smart people, and they wind up picking the wrong version of windows even now because they lack knowledge of what each feature means. And this is with only what, 3 or 4 different versions available?
No, this offering of 7 different versions of Windows IS going to confuse consumers who are already confused right now. It might just confuse and frustrate them enough that they'll want a simpler option, like getting a computer pre-installed with fully featured linux, or just buy a Mac.
You seem to have this underlying assumption that more options is always better. That consumers have perfect knowledge of what will suit them best, and what each feature means. This is a very poor assumption.
And that has nothing to do with the point I was trying (but apparently failed) to make. The same thing is true for Islam as well.
There's also extremist wackos in Islam that advocate killing people, just like their are in christianity. I even heard an American Mullah issued a Fatwa calling for the murder of the president of Venezuela. That Mullah has his own church called The 700 Club, and I believe his name is Pat Roberson.
You can say that "Robertson isn't a real christian" but that's all a matter of perception now isn't it? The point I'm again (perhaps pointlessly) trying to make is that religion has nothing to do with creating moral people. I find your original conclusion to be obviously wrong. If you go about and pick the christian people you find moral to be the "real" christians, then it's a self fullfilling prophecy. Of course the people you find moral are moral. Similarly if you just assume anyone advocating immoral beliefs in an atheist, you've just self selected your own outcome. That kind of thinking has to be some definition of self delusion.
and abhor the idea of preemtive strikes.
Umm.. George Bush is a christian, and I seem to recall a certain pre-emptive strike the US launched against a certain country that starts with an I and ends in raq. Why are only atheists capable of doing things morally wrong? I also seem to recall a christian man named Eric Rudolph who killed many innocent people by blowing up clinics. Don't try to tell me that christians are more moral than atheists or non-christians, because that's just obviously wrong. From what I've seen religion (or lack thereof) seems to have nothing to do with how moral or "good" a person is.
The only use for this is in refrigerators and keeping food fresh.
Which is a major advance of civilization. It's not as if all areas that lack electricity are equal. Some already have clean water, but a lack of refrigeration would allow more local storage of perishable food for one thing. I'm sure there's many other benefits to the economy I'm not aware of.