People sending emails in response to a public call to action, to express their own views, is "hacking" and "denial of service".
Whereas setting up a captive SMTP server in a hosting farm to blast-transmit emails by the millions to people who had the misfortune to have their email addresses added to a spam list.. that's totally fine and dandy.
You *can* code reasonably secure web apps in PHP, however. It just takes a certain amount of diligence to making sure that user input never gets through to your backend without going through at least one layer of regex filtering to strip out or outright ignore crafted SQL (and other query) exploits, and paying careful attention to which route information is taking to get into your code. (There are separate pseudo-arrays for GET, POST, COOKIE, SESSION, and SERVER. I use those to prevent malicious injection through GET into parameters I'm expecting to come in through POST, etc, as well as to handle flow control through what may be a remote throw/catch into a subpage that needs some initialization parameters of its own, for example. There's also a pseudo-array that gathers all of these into one big list so it's not possible to tell which one came in where. I don't use that one at all.)
I'm not as comfortable with JavaScript because I've had to deal with too many broken JS engine implementations in too many browsers.
Not saying either of them doesn't utterly nauseate me, but it's possible to do things well in both, and when you're stuck with whatever your hosting provider decided to implement (which you pretty much are, if you're not running your own colo server and dealing with a whole *different* range of security vulnerabilities), you know they're there and can be made to work..
"loudness" is subjective, and there's a lot of money invested in processing audio signals to not exceed a certain dB level but sound "louder" anyway. Some of this processing is quite sophisticated and dynamic, and high-end processors can have fairly noticeable effects on songs that both average exactly the same on signal meters.
My suspicion is that what will happen as a result of this is simply an arms race between processing gear used by music producers and the de-emphasis and normalization algorithms used by the cloud. There's just too much profit-making incentive at stake for the producers to give up quietly on this.
(and yes, some of the processing some of those cowboys inflict on perfectly good music turns my stomach..)
I see people trying this all the time, and there's one unavoidable bump in that road: connecting from two totally different public IP's in two totally different IP blocks that are native to two totally different DNS domains. DNS can be worked around to some extent by going to a common DNS server that's outside, and visible from, both domains, like Google or OpenDNS, but that runs into issues resolving in-network hostnames because a lot of ISP's provide different IP's for in-network vs out-of-network services, which can impact email and some streaming services to third party set-top devices pretty heavily. And the in-network services you're connecting to may not know how to handle you if you connect to an externally resolved IP from an in-network address block.
It's *possible* you could hack a home server/router combo to provide split DNS that will resolve properly to in-network services on both connections properly, but that configuration (and routing appropriately to separate WAN's on separate networks) is *very* non-trivial and will be squirrelly as hell if it's not tuned just right, and possibly just squirrelly as hell, period.
Honestly, I'd set up your local router/WAP for a network that's separate from your neighborhood wifi's SSID and just switch networks as needed..
If I'm ever married to someone who doesn't have any moral or ethical problems with putting a GPS tracker on my vehicle just to get dirt on me, and they want a divorce.. they can have it with my blessings.
But just to play the devil's advocate, should a government employee be expected to give up all rights to individual privacy just because they work for the government?
If they're interacting with the public in an official capacity, particularly in the adversarial way cops tend to interact with people in the course of doing their jobs, yes. Sorry, but anyone whose job includes the ability to detain and arrest citizens, go armed in public in places where they are the only ones who can do so (yes, NYC, Chicago, and most if not all of Hawaii, I'm talking to you), and even legally kill people who appear to pose a defensibly "legitimate" threat, should in fact have absolutely zero expectation of privacy. None. Period.
And they already are being recorded under such circumstances,in most departments. Most if not all police vehicles have onboard video recording capability that is required to be active whenever an incident is in progress -- it's activated by turning on the lights. Most PD's take an extremely dim view of turning off the lights during an incident to turn off the video, especially if someone gets shot or physically assaulted during the incident when there's no video of it, and very uncomfortable questions get asked and cops have been known to end up driving a desk or even losing their job in such circumstances.
Now that's not a level of scrutiny anyone likes, and cops are no exception -- and it's not like they haven't been known to bend the law pretty severely, including aggressive intimidation tactics, in cases where they really just don't want civilians recording what they're doing. But no, they don't have any expectation of privacy, nor do they have the right to confiscate property (phones or cameras) that isn't legally contraband. They do it, all too often, but it's not legal.
Would you say the same of an office worker who found out they were being secretly recorded by their boss?
No, because an office worker isn't out on the streets carrying a gun with the power to detain or arrest people, or otherwise empowered to do things that might have serious consequences to those around them if they decide to abuse their official authority. Now, if the boss wants to record what they're doing, it's entirely another matter if it's disclosed beforehand in such a way that they're being recorded with their knowledge. I might make exceptions for people in intel or national security jobs, whose decisions can have pretty far-reaching consequences with little or no accountability otherwise, but still, disclosure is a big part of those ethics.
But a cop on the street should expect to be photographed and/or videoed during incidents. They do it enough in the other direction (particularly NYPD TARU) that it's just pot calling the kettle black if they squawk about civilians doing it to them right back. Sorry, just no sympathy here.
This assumes that the FBI has some clue of what they're looking for, or that they know enough to be able to get a copy of just the directory tree containing that particular client's content. I don't think that's a safe assumption in most cases.:p
That being said, if it were any hosting service I were running, there'd be enough offsite hardware and data backups to be able to get my clients' sites back up at least to a recent and consistent state, if not the current state..
"One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.
He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.'"
Really? They were passing a credit card account number in the clear through a GET parameter, without validating it against which session the page load was authenticated on, and that was "hard to prepare for"? Really?
I could have done it better than that. So I guess that makes me an expert, right? (Hint: No. It makes the "expert" a flaming idiot.)
I disagree. Neither formal education nor the acquisition of degrees correlate exactly with either intellectualism or geek-nature. (Some, including myself, might argue that the correlation isn't even all that close.)
I might dare to suggest that the academic environment can in some cases do more to kill geek-nature than it does to nurture it. There are exceptions, but a lot of institutions actively discourage geekery in favor of rote "learning" models that work great for turning out corporate-ladder fodder than they do for instilling any sense of creativity. And geekery is a creative enterprise from the foundations on up.
I don't know how true this is for anyone else, but for me, the feeling is definitely anti-academia and not anti-intellectual. The fact that I'm self-educated does not negate the fact that I'm very much an intellectual.
.. have they figured out how to install it without asking an admin user for permission?
Until that happens, it's not really a security issue, it's still a social engineering hack. And no platform is immune to social engineering hacks because there are always end users dumb enough to unlock the front door for whatever puts on a good show and let it walk right in and take over.
If someone figures out a way to bypass Installer and run unsigned code without at least throwing a warning, then I'll worry..
"10 times safer than the current [now obsolete] space shuttle" is probably barely safe enough.. the "current space shuttle" has a record of 2 actual LOVC's in flight, which is 2 more than anything else we've ever flown in space. (The only LOVC the Apollo program suffered was the Apollo 1 fire, and Apollo 13 survived a catastrophic LOX tank failure late in the lunar transit.)
4 crew for a mission time of 21 days isn't that big an advance over 3 crew for 10-14 (?) days, which is what the CSM was capable of around the time of 17 and ASTP. If it still has solar power, and has the ability to be shut down on-orbit while docked to ISS, then that's an improvement over the CSM whose fuel cells couldn't be shut down and safely restarted, but those are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Is this really the future of manned spaceflight? China has this level of tech..:/
"Consequences" and "intrinsically harmful effects" aren't always the same thing.
"Consequences" can include (possibly completely inappropriate) legal repercussions for exercising freedom of speech that should by all rights be unrestricted. (And I've heard it conflated that way, sometimes deliberately, with the result that people think breaking any law, even a patently unjust one, is itself wrong and deserving of "consequences".)
"Intrinsically harmful effects" is a good description of what can happen with some (admittedly protected) exercises of freedom of speech. Shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater could trigger a panic stampede for the exits and a lot of people could get hurt or even killed when everyone tries to get out the door at once. That's not a result of anything being legal or illegal, it's a result of emergent behavior that's directly triggered by the action, and a behavior that's reasonable to expect under the circumstances.
I will readily agree that most people who apply that standard don't really understand it on that level.. and many who otherwise would are creative about misusing it to posit an equivalence between legality and morality that doesn't actually exist..
It seems to me the critical corner that was cut was the emergency electrical power to the plant. If the tsunami hadn't knocked out the backup generators and left units 1-3 without post-shutdown power to run the cooling pumps, they'd have had a safe scram and we wouldn't have even heard of Fukushima. Everything else that's happened at that plant is indirectly related in one way or another to that critical failure.
And Japan should know better. They've lived with a major seismically active subduction trench just offshore for long enough, and *they gave us the word for tsunami*, that they should have been expecting a large magnitude quake with a closely following tsunami at that site. Why they even built a nuclear plant on the eastern seashore is beyond me, but since they did, they should have planned for tsunami-resistant uninterruptible backup power. Anyone with half a brain can tell you the grid is going to go down in a major quake like that. Whatever other faults the BWR Mk I may have, this at the very least should have been handled better.
I'd be ecstatic if the USA developed a decently implemented high-speed rail system integrated with local urban mass transit, and I had a chance to get hold of an inexpensive EV that would handle at least my daily commute and a few side trips.
So far, we don't have a decently implemented high-speed rail system, and with a few exceptions in our largest cities, urban mass transit mostly sucks scissors for a variety of reasons. And Chevron/Cobasys have made damn sure I can't buy an inexpensive EV anytime soon, because the only battery technology anyone can use without getting sued for infringement on that patent is Li+, which may or may not get the 100k+ mile lifetime of the NiMH's that were on the road before the Big Three locked it all down and GM crushed all the EV1's. In those two aspects at least, we've been very good at talking and not doing, and even moving backwards..
"The person on the other end of the cellphone is not aware of the driving environment and people will keep up the conversation even when dangerous to do so."
Then the person on the other end of the cellphone needs to be *made* aware of the driving environment, if they're demanding too much of the driver's attention. This is a basic management skill. If the person on the phone is rude enough to demand more immediate attention than the environment allows (and make no mistake, behaving this way to someone you know is driving while they're talking to you is rude in the extreme!), then it's easily fixed: "Sorry, I have to concentrate on driving right now, I'll call you later" -- *click*!
1) Drivers' attention budgets vary widely, by up to several sigmas. Some are able to multitask while driving in any number of ways, safely. Others are barely capable of keeping the car between the bar ditches if they have both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.
2) Most drivers with any sense recognize when they're using too much bandwidth on a non-driving related task to the point where it's interfering with their concentration on driving, and recognize that it's perfectly acceptable to tell the person on the other end of the call that they need to focus on a tricky bit of the road coming up, or wait until they can pull over into a parking lot to respond to that last text message.
3) The ones who see other people talking on cellphones or responding to an occasional text message while in sparse traffic and relatively stable traffic flow situations, and take that as a signal that it's OK to drive with the phone glued to their ear or with their eyes fixed on the text chat they're madly typing on, with no regard to how little attention they're paying to actual driving related tasks. These are rare if egregious exceptions.
4) Penalizing the drivers who are too clueless to realize they don't have enough attention budget to spare for multitasking, or even the ability to multitask safely, penalizes the people who *do* know how to manage their attention safely (the majority, IMHO) just to make examples of the people whose behavior is already breaking existing laws. The only people who really benefit from such laws are the politicians who get to grandstand and look like they're "tough on crime" and "promoting public safety" when the laws themselves are the moral equivalent of trying to swat flies with RPG's.
5) Most of this will be ignored or, at best, glossed over by the people who refuse to admit that some people are better drivers than others and insist on micromanaging everyone's cockpit management skills down to the least common denominator...
(Incidentally, the interface scizophrenia isn't limited just to the Mac OS; you also see this behavior in some of the major Apple apps [e.g. iTunes] -- every time there's a whole-number version increase, some part of the interface gets changed, apparently for the sake of changing it. It's as if they realize that some people won't believe that anything is different unless the widgets change, so they scramble everything around periodically, just to keep everyone on their toes.)
I'm still not sure I like the changes that were made to iMovie to make it prettier.. the iMovie GUI actually appears to have dropped a feature I happened to find very useful, which was the "timeline" method of editing with keyframed audio level changes. The new GUI looks a lot spiffier, but I can't do keyframed audio fade ins and outs and I'm stuck with the canned transition audio effects. There are a lot of editing tricks that aren't possible after the change, and it kind of pisses me off that I'm probably going to need to move up to Final Cut Express to keep doing the NLE that I was doing in iMovie. Sometimes the "scrambling around" drops critical stuff, and even worse, hides what's dropped behind gee-whiz whistles and bells that look fancy so most people don't notice. And iMovie used to be a pretty good NLE suite, good enough that I didn't have to use Final Cut [Pro|Express].. feh..
Passports are the same throughout the states, license plates are the same.. social security numbers are the same... What's the big deal? Who is it hurting? Basically immigrants and those who don't want to be followed by "the man".
The biggest problem I see is it makes data mining, profiling, and related invasions of privacy several orders of magnitude easier. (Oh, no, the government wouldn't tell us that it won't use the data for that and then turn around and do it anyway without telling us!.. Yeah, right. I got a bridge to sell ya, kid.) The danger is not in the data actually stored in the database, it's in the accessibility of the data for indexing and pattern detection, and other methods of data extraction that are impractical now but become feasible if it's all centralized and standardized. There's such a thing as making personal information *too* easy to search through.. I'd kind of prefer to leave mine in the control of my own state. Some of my opinions aren't real popular with the current administration, and I'd kind of like to remain free to express those opinions..
Rumor has it that a couple of IP's at SixApart and LJ themselves got hit with some, been seeing reports of port 1122 and 1121 hits on firewall logs in some places from those IP's. To be taken with a grain of salt, but keep your wits about you and check your firewall logs if you have a firewall or NAT router that does logging..
Actually, if you count all possible binary combinations of Shift, Ctrl, Option, and ? (which few if any apps outside of maybe Adobe really do anything with, but still), Apple mice have the logical equivalent of *16* buttons. So there!:D
(Not sure if there's a way to get Fn+click to do anything distinctive, but if so, that's 32..)
I want a card with my driver's license, my grocery store card, my debit card, my work ID, my AAA card, and every other damn thing cluttering my account all on one card. And I want an electronic device, too, that has my cell phone, my garage door opener, my car remote, my mp3 player, and any other little bullshit electronic device on it.
So you can lose them both and be *really* screwed?:D
Slashdot Mirror
People sending emails in response to a public call to action, to express their own views, is "hacking" and "denial of service".
.. that's totally fine and dandy.
Whereas setting up a captive SMTP server in a hosting farm to blast-transmit emails by the millions to people who had the misfortune to have their email addresses added to a spam list
"It's like they're *daring* us to revolt!"
You *can* code reasonably secure web apps in PHP, however. It just takes a certain amount of diligence to making sure that user input never gets through to your backend without going through at least one layer of regex filtering to strip out or outright ignore crafted SQL (and other query) exploits, and paying careful attention to which route information is taking to get into your code. (There are separate pseudo-arrays for GET, POST, COOKIE, SESSION, and SERVER. I use those to prevent malicious injection through GET into parameters I'm expecting to come in through POST, etc, as well as to handle flow control through what may be a remote throw/catch into a subpage that needs some initialization parameters of its own, for example. There's also a pseudo-array that gathers all of these into one big list so it's not possible to tell which one came in where. I don't use that one at all.)
..
I'm not as comfortable with JavaScript because I've had to deal with too many broken JS engine implementations in too many browsers.
Not saying either of them doesn't utterly nauseate me, but it's possible to do things well in both, and when you're stuck with whatever your hosting provider decided to implement (which you pretty much are, if you're not running your own colo server and dealing with a whole *different* range of security vulnerabilities), you know they're there and can be made to work
"loudness" is subjective, and there's a lot of money invested in processing audio signals to not exceed a certain dB level but sound "louder" anyway. Some of this processing is quite sophisticated and dynamic, and high-end processors can have fairly noticeable effects on songs that both average exactly the same on signal meters.
My suspicion is that what will happen as a result of this is simply an arms race between processing gear used by music producers and the de-emphasis and normalization algorithms used by the cloud. There's just too much profit-making incentive at stake for the producers to give up quietly on this.
(and yes, some of the processing some of those cowboys inflict on perfectly good music turns my stomach..)
I see people trying this all the time, and there's one unavoidable bump in that road: connecting from two totally different public IP's in two totally different IP blocks that are native to two totally different DNS domains. DNS can be worked around to some extent by going to a common DNS server that's outside, and visible from, both domains, like Google or OpenDNS, but that runs into issues resolving in-network hostnames because a lot of ISP's provide different IP's for in-network vs out-of-network services, which can impact email and some streaming services to third party set-top devices pretty heavily. And the in-network services you're connecting to may not know how to handle you if you connect to an externally resolved IP from an in-network address block.
It's *possible* you could hack a home server/router combo to provide split DNS that will resolve properly to in-network services on both connections properly, but that configuration (and routing appropriately to separate WAN's on separate networks) is *very* non-trivial and will be squirrelly as hell if it's not tuned just right, and possibly just squirrelly as hell, period.
Honestly, I'd set up your local router/WAP for a network that's separate from your neighborhood wifi's SSID and just switch networks as needed..
If I'm ever married to someone who doesn't have any moral or ethical problems with putting a GPS tracker on my vehicle just to get dirt on me, and they want a divorce .. they can have it with my blessings.
;)
Not that they're hard to find or disable if you know what you're looking for. (Or if you, say, "accidentally" lose it on the highway somewhere.) (And it's not like we need that many excuses to crawl under our vehicles looking for interesting things to see..
But just to play the devil's advocate, should a government employee be expected to give up all rights to individual privacy just because they work for the government?
If they're interacting with the public in an official capacity, particularly in the adversarial way cops tend to interact with people in the course of doing their jobs, yes. Sorry, but anyone whose job includes the ability to detain and arrest citizens, go armed in public in places where they are the only ones who can do so (yes, NYC, Chicago, and most if not all of Hawaii, I'm talking to you), and even legally kill people who appear to pose a defensibly "legitimate" threat, should in fact have absolutely zero expectation of privacy. None. Period.
And they already are being recorded under such circumstances,in most departments. Most if not all police vehicles have onboard video recording capability that is required to be active whenever an incident is in progress -- it's activated by turning on the lights. Most PD's take an extremely dim view of turning off the lights during an incident to turn off the video, especially if someone gets shot or physically assaulted during the incident when there's no video of it, and very uncomfortable questions get asked and cops have been known to end up driving a desk or even losing their job in such circumstances.
Now that's not a level of scrutiny anyone likes, and cops are no exception -- and it's not like they haven't been known to bend the law pretty severely, including aggressive intimidation tactics, in cases where they really just don't want civilians recording what they're doing. But no, they don't have any expectation of privacy, nor do they have the right to confiscate property (phones or cameras) that isn't legally contraband. They do it, all too often, but it's not legal.
Would you say the same of an office worker who found out they were being secretly recorded by their boss?
No, because an office worker isn't out on the streets carrying a gun with the power to detain or arrest people, or otherwise empowered to do things that might have serious consequences to those around them if they decide to abuse their official authority. Now, if the boss wants to record what they're doing, it's entirely another matter if it's disclosed beforehand in such a way that they're being recorded with their knowledge. I might make exceptions for people in intel or national security jobs, whose decisions can have pretty far-reaching consequences with little or no accountability otherwise, but still, disclosure is a big part of those ethics.
But a cop on the street should expect to be photographed and/or videoed during incidents. They do it enough in the other direction (particularly NYPD TARU) that it's just pot calling the kettle black if they squawk about civilians doing it to them right back. Sorry, just no sympathy here.
This assumes that the FBI has some clue of what they're looking for, or that they know enough to be able to get a copy of just the directory tree containing that particular client's content. I don't think that's a safe assumption in most cases. :p
..
That being said, if it were any hosting service I were running, there'd be enough offsite hardware and data backups to be able to get my clients' sites back up at least to a recent and consistent state, if not the current state
"One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.
He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.'"
Really? They were passing a credit card account number in the clear through a GET parameter, without validating it against which session the page load was authenticated on, and that was "hard to prepare for"? Really?
I could have done it better than that. So I guess that makes me an expert, right? (Hint: No. It makes the "expert" a flaming idiot.)
.. still not quite sure, reading the article. :p
I disagree. Neither formal education nor the acquisition of degrees correlate exactly with either intellectualism or geek-nature. (Some, including myself, might argue that the correlation isn't even all that close.)
I might dare to suggest that the academic environment can in some cases do more to kill geek-nature than it does to nurture it. There are exceptions, but a lot of institutions actively discourage geekery in favor of rote "learning" models that work great for turning out corporate-ladder fodder than they do for instilling any sense of creativity. And geekery is a creative enterprise from the foundations on up.
I don't know how true this is for anyone else, but for me, the feeling is definitely anti-academia and not anti-intellectual. The fact that I'm self-educated does not negate the fact that I'm very much an intellectual.
(p.s. by the way, it's "premise"..)
There's only a bit of difference between upper and lower case.
(at least in ISO-Latin-1) *rimshot*
.. have they figured out how to install it without asking an admin user for permission?
..
Until that happens, it's not really a security issue, it's still a social engineering hack. And no platform is immune to social engineering hacks because there are always end users dumb enough to unlock the front door for whatever puts on a good show and let it walk right in and take over.
If someone figures out a way to bypass Installer and run unsigned code without at least throwing a warning, then I'll worry
Why would a moon the size of ours be a requirement? That never made sense to me.
..
Kind of helps to have an active geodynamo and the resulting magnetosphere though
"10 times safer than the current [now obsolete] space shuttle" is probably barely safe enough .. the "current space shuttle" has a record of 2 actual LOVC's in flight, which is 2 more than anything else we've ever flown in space. (The only LOVC the Apollo program suffered was the Apollo 1 fire, and Apollo 13 survived a catastrophic LOX tank failure late in the lunar transit.)
.. :/
4 crew for a mission time of 21 days isn't that big an advance over 3 crew for 10-14 (?) days, which is what the CSM was capable of around the time of 17 and ASTP. If it still has solar power, and has the ability to be shut down on-orbit while docked to ISS, then that's an improvement over the CSM whose fuel cells couldn't be shut down and safely restarted, but those are evolutionary, not revolutionary.
Is this really the future of manned spaceflight? China has this level of tech
"Consequences" and "intrinsically harmful effects" aren't always the same thing.
.. and many who otherwise would are creative about misusing it to posit an equivalence between legality and morality that doesn't actually exist ..
"Consequences" can include (possibly completely inappropriate) legal repercussions for exercising freedom of speech that should by all rights be unrestricted. (And I've heard it conflated that way, sometimes deliberately, with the result that people think breaking any law, even a patently unjust one, is itself wrong and deserving of "consequences".)
"Intrinsically harmful effects" is a good description of what can happen with some (admittedly protected) exercises of freedom of speech. Shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater could trigger a panic stampede for the exits and a lot of people could get hurt or even killed when everyone tries to get out the door at once. That's not a result of anything being legal or illegal, it's a result of emergent behavior that's directly triggered by the action, and a behavior that's reasonable to expect under the circumstances.
I will readily agree that most people who apply that standard don't really understand it on that level
It seems to me the critical corner that was cut was the emergency electrical power to the plant. If the tsunami hadn't knocked out the backup generators and left units 1-3 without post-shutdown power to run the cooling pumps, they'd have had a safe scram and we wouldn't have even heard of Fukushima. Everything else that's happened at that plant is indirectly related in one way or another to that critical failure.
And Japan should know better. They've lived with a major seismically active subduction trench just offshore for long enough, and *they gave us the word for tsunami*, that they should have been expecting a large magnitude quake with a closely following tsunami at that site. Why they even built a nuclear plant on the eastern seashore is beyond me, but since they did, they should have planned for tsunami-resistant uninterruptible backup power. Anyone with half a brain can tell you the grid is going to go down in a major quake like that. Whatever other faults the BWR Mk I may have, this at the very least should have been handled better.
I'd be ecstatic if the USA developed a decently implemented high-speed rail system integrated with local urban mass transit, and I had a chance to get hold of an inexpensive EV that would handle at least my daily commute and a few side trips.
..
So far, we don't have a decently implemented high-speed rail system, and with a few exceptions in our largest cities, urban mass transit mostly sucks scissors for a variety of reasons. And Chevron/Cobasys have made damn sure I can't buy an inexpensive EV anytime soon, because the only battery technology anyone can use without getting sued for infringement on that patent is Li+, which may or may not get the 100k+ mile lifetime of the NiMH's that were on the road before the Big Three locked it all down and GM crushed all the EV1's. In those two aspects at least, we've been very good at talking and not doing, and even moving backwards
"The person on the other end of the cellphone is not aware of the driving environment and people will keep up the conversation even when dangerous to do so."
Then the person on the other end of the cellphone needs to be *made* aware of the driving environment, if they're demanding too much of the driver's attention. This is a basic management skill. If the person on the phone is rude enough to demand more immediate attention than the environment allows (and make no mistake, behaving this way to someone you know is driving while they're talking to you is rude in the extreme!), then it's easily fixed: "Sorry, I have to concentrate on driving right now, I'll call you later" -- *click*!
1) Drivers' attention budgets vary widely, by up to several sigmas. Some are able to multitask while driving in any number of ways, safely. Others are barely capable of keeping the car between the bar ditches if they have both hands on the wheel and both eyes on the road.
...
2) Most drivers with any sense recognize when they're using too much bandwidth on a non-driving related task to the point where it's interfering with their concentration on driving, and recognize that it's perfectly acceptable to tell the person on the other end of the call that they need to focus on a tricky bit of the road coming up, or wait until they can pull over into a parking lot to respond to that last text message.
3) The ones who see other people talking on cellphones or responding to an occasional text message while in sparse traffic and relatively stable traffic flow situations, and take that as a signal that it's OK to drive with the phone glued to their ear or with their eyes fixed on the text chat they're madly typing on, with no regard to how little attention they're paying to actual driving related tasks. These are rare if egregious exceptions.
4) Penalizing the drivers who are too clueless to realize they don't have enough attention budget to spare for multitasking, or even the ability to multitask safely, penalizes the people who *do* know how to manage their attention safely (the majority, IMHO) just to make examples of the people whose behavior is already breaking existing laws. The only people who really benefit from such laws are the politicians who get to grandstand and look like they're "tough on crime" and "promoting public safety" when the laws themselves are the moral equivalent of trying to swat flies with RPG's.
5) Most of this will be ignored or, at best, glossed over by the people who refuse to admit that some people are better drivers than others and insist on micromanaging everyone's cockpit management skills down to the least common denominator
(Incidentally, the interface scizophrenia isn't limited just to the Mac OS; you also see this behavior in some of the major Apple apps [e.g. iTunes] -- every time there's a whole-number version increase, some part of the interface gets changed, apparently for the sake of changing it. It's as if they realize that some people won't believe that anything is different unless the widgets change, so they scramble everything around periodically, just to keep everyone on their toes.)
.. the iMovie GUI actually appears to have dropped a feature I happened to find very useful, which was the "timeline" method of editing with keyframed audio level changes. The new GUI looks a lot spiffier, but I can't do keyframed audio fade ins and outs and I'm stuck with the canned transition audio effects. There are a lot of editing tricks that aren't possible after the change, and it kind of pisses me off that I'm probably going to need to move up to Final Cut Express to keep doing the NLE that I was doing in iMovie. Sometimes the "scrambling around" drops critical stuff, and even worse, hides what's dropped behind gee-whiz whistles and bells that look fancy so most people don't notice. And iMovie used to be a pretty good NLE suite, good enough that I didn't have to use Final Cut [Pro|Express] .. feh ..
I'm still not sure I like the changes that were made to iMovie to make it prettier
Passports are the same throughout the states, license plates are the same.. social security numbers are the same... What's the big deal? Who is it hurting? Basically immigrants and those who don't want to be followed by "the man".
.. Yeah, right. I got a bridge to sell ya, kid.) The danger is not in the data actually stored in the database, it's in the accessibility of the data for indexing and pattern detection, and other methods of data extraction that are impractical now but become feasible if it's all centralized and standardized. There's such a thing as making personal information *too* easy to search through .. I'd kind of prefer to leave mine in the control of my own state. Some of my opinions aren't real popular with the current administration, and I'd kind of like to remain free to express those opinions ..
The biggest problem I see is it makes data mining, profiling, and related invasions of privacy several orders of magnitude easier. (Oh, no, the government wouldn't tell us that it won't use the data for that and then turn around and do it anyway without telling us!
Rumor has it that a couple of IP's at SixApart and LJ themselves got hit with some, been seeing reports of port 1122 and 1121 hits on firewall logs in some places from those IP's. To be taken with a grain of salt, but keep your wits about you and check your firewall logs if you have a firewall or NAT router that does logging ..
Always thought 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c1 was a little odd that way ..
Actually, if you count all possible binary combinations of Shift, Ctrl, Option, and ? (which few if any apps outside of maybe Adobe really do anything with, but still), Apple mice have the logical equivalent of *16* buttons. So there! :D
..)
(Not sure if there's a way to get Fn+click to do anything distinctive, but if so, that's 32
I want a card with my driver's license, my grocery store card, my debit card, my work ID, my AAA card, and every other damn thing cluttering my account all on one card. And I want an electronic device, too, that has my cell phone, my garage door opener, my car remote, my mp3 player, and any other little bullshit electronic device on it.
:D
So you can lose them both and be *really* screwed?