What "security" would it need? It just needs to not do something stupid like accept and trust connections from anywhere on the planet. That's not too hard, surely?
So, I want to control my toaster from my bedroom and from my smartphone. And my kitchen. How do I tell the toaster what addresses to accept connections from? How do I teach mom and pop how to determine what addresses they will be connecting from using that smart phone app they just downloaded? How do I teach it what addresses are in the house and should be trusted implicitely, and which are transient in the house and should not?
Just don't open any ports that you don't need. If you do need it, then you'd need to port forward with a NAT too, so no security gain there.
This statement makes no sense. Why would I need to port forward an IPv6-addressable toaster? Isn't that the point of IPv6 and an essentially infinite number of addresses? I connect it to the net and bingo, it's on the net! Unless the default security is so tight that nobody can connect to it (the only reasonable default that will protect everyone), and then I need to know how to configure it. Not an easy task for some people.
But like I said, you can rant about what you think a perfect world would look like, or accept the fact that it won't be like that and learn from history.
If you hang out on the IETF v6ops list, which representatives of all the world's major ISPs do, you will see that none of them have any intention of offering customers a single/128.
Oh?
For directly connected CPE, we will allocate an individual IPv6 address (/128), since we know that only a single device is connecting, with no additional need to subnet.
You can rant about how things would work in a perfect world, or you can be pragmatic and deal with the way things will be done. Mom and Pop won't pay for a toaster that contains all the network security they need but don' t know about. They'll buy a cheaper toaster with the network features but no security. If the toaster has too much inherent security by default, and it doesn't work out of the box, or they can't figure out how to set it up, they'll take it back. That manufacturer loses.
I'll take addresses and phone numbers for all of my homes and phones, without having to use post-it notes and pseudo-addresses to make everything reachable.
Is there a difference between having a post-it note reminding you of the IPv6 address for your toaster compared to a post-it that reminds you of the address and port?
Particularly if having those addresses affords me the same level of security as doing without.
It doesn't. Securing an address that exists requires proper configuration of a firewall and some reasonable assumption that the firewall itself doesn't have security issues. Securing an address that doesn't exist requires nothing. You cannot break into a toaster that doesn't have an internet connection.
After all, nothing about being able to address all your devices precludes the use of proper firewalling, just as you do now.
Botnets thrive because mom and pop computer users don't know better. Your "just as you do now" doesn't apply to the vast majority of home network users, because "just as you do now" for them means "do nothing". Assuming that giving every mom and pop a toaster with an IPv6 address will result in better security instead of worse is ignoring history.
YOU may know how to configure a modern firewall properly, but mom and pop won't, and they'll have their toaster on the wild and wooly IPv6 internet.
And what I expect will be a more serious problem will be all the people who know how to configure a firewall but who will wind up with equipment behind that firewall that doesn't work unless the firewall is open. Anecdotal evidence? My fancy new smartphone has an SMB app so I can get files from my Windows and Linux desktops. It uses a kind of authentication that neither of my desktops understands, so I need to leave both of them open if I want access from my phone. I know better than to open the ports on my NAT/router/firewall so the public can get to them, but mom and pop won't, and someone who really really wants to access his systems from his phone while outside the internal network may either open the firewall, or at best rely on the firewall to be configured properly and have no security holes that makes his home network swiss cheese.
What this means is that even if ISPs were incredibly wasteful and basically trashed 99.9% of the address space due to bad practices, you'd still have millions of addresses for every person in the world.
And yet, according to the Comcast announcement, if you are paying for just one device, you get just one IPv6 address. They call it "directly connected CPE". Yes, on my home network, I have one directly connected device -- the NAT router.
I'm also confused by their statement that the device must understand "stateful DHCP6". Why? The cable modem gets assigned one IPv6 address on the cable side, and it serves one IPvX address via DHCP to the CPE. What changes? Why not make the cable modem the IPv6 to IPv4 gate and simply use good old DHCP on the CPE side?
Recording my movements to use against me in court is very much a search.
Uhhh, no it isn't. You wouldn't consider it a search if they followed you around, would you? That's recording your movements, and they can certainly use that record in court. The courts have spent a great deal of time discussing what is and isn't a search under the fourth, and "recording someone's movements" isn't.
Installing equipment on my vehicle for the purpose of said recording also constitutes a search.
Only if they had to open the trunk or hood to install it. If they simply walked by and stuck it on with a magnet, there is no search. They saw nothing and went nowhere that wasn't public.
Of course, so long as "intellectuals" continue to wax philosophic in regards as to what constitutes a search and what does not,
I'm sure your insults are an attempt at convincing the rest of us that you are right, but it doesn't have that effect. The Fourth Amendment talks about searches and seizures. If every criminal could claim "that was a search" and everyone else said "well, we can't be intellectual and discuss whether it was or not" the criminal justice system would collapse. "Hey, you recorded my movements, that's a search, and you didn't have a warrant! Let me GO!" Sorry, don't need one.
The difference is that we, as a society, consented to the low-grade surveillance of police officers driving around personally observing us... but the latter approach, with its many technological and informational advances, is a level of surveillance that we did not consent to, and WOULD NOT have consented to when we originally consented to the low-tech approach.
Ummm, just when did this consent happen? Do you have my signature on a form somewhere? I don't think so. I was never asked. Schneier is making it up as he goes along. There was no "consent" required for the former, and there is no evidence we wouldn't have consented to the latter at that time because the original question wasn't ever asked.
The latter situation is exactly what happens in some parking enforcement divisions. You ought to watch "Parking Wars" (IIRC) sometime. They drive around with a camera doing automatic plate lookups on parked cars, and every so often they get a "ping" from a match. They drive back around the block and then boot the car. NOBODY argues that they are doing something wrong by using this system. It isn't a secret.
Would you argue that parking on the street is implicit consent to this automated lookup? Then why isn't driving on the street just as much a consent?
A good reason to withhold consent is that the collected information is not universally accessible. The information is kept by law enforcement for their own use.
Two problems with this argument. One, you don't get the option to withhold consent to a cop looking up your license plate, either manually (which you erroniously call "at random") or automatically.
Second, the cops keep lots of information that isn't "univerally accessible". It is standard practice for the cops to "create a card" recording the activity and identity of something and someone suspicious. This is their institutional memory for keeping track of bad guys.
I have a right to be "secure in [my] person, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
Where is the search or seizure here? They aren't looking into your car, nor are they depriving you of its use.
Sheesh, we live in a country where civil forfeiture is legal -- the idea that taking a car away from a DUII suspect is not a fine or a punishment for him, but is a punishment for the car! But somehow simply attaching something to your car is supposed to be a seizure of the car...
If we take your argument at face value, why not install these devices on all cars during the inspection? or when sold?
You do realize there are serious proposals to install GPS devices in every car so that the gas tax can be calculated based on which roads you use and when you use them, don't you? Not just how much gas you use or even how many miles you've driven, but surcharges for using busy roads during peak hours.
The governments that are proposing this (Oregon, at least) deny there is any privacy issue or that the GPS devices will be used to track people. Even after being reminded that the GPS must record where and when the car is driven so the tax can be computed.
I wish you wouldn't think like that. Because, you know, the government that you elect makes decisions which directly and indirectly affect how the rest of us live in other countries, so is the power that it wields.
And? I'm sorry, but government by the people means us people, not the entire world telling us how we ought to live. You have the same right to self government in your country, so trying to tell me that I shouldn't is, well, ridiculous.
So, you might not care about what Germans think of the US, but the rest of the world does care about what Americans think.
That's ok. If you want to, you can.
And let me tell you, the rest of us don't think much of what you people seem to think
Ok.
Maybe precisely because of that attitude you seem to be displaying.
I see. Because I don't think you ought to have a say in how this country is run, you don't like my opinion. That's fine. I don't have any say in how your country is run, and I don't expect to have a say. If you think you should have a say here, then I don't think much of your attitude, either.
The "I don't give a shit" attitude.
That's not what I said. "You don't get a say in our government" is not "I don't give a shit".
Perhaps the day will come when you'll also be forced to give a shit about what some other country thinks about yours. Let's hope they're not going to think like you.
Which is just another way of saying that yes, the student has something to do with it. Unlike the assinine claim that the student has nothing to do with it.
Honest people will be honest. Dishonest people will be dishonest. The environment may push a few over the line, but to claim that the person himself has nothing to do with it is just absurd.
Then you kiss goodbye the concept of government of, by, and for the people. You create a mommy-government, where mommy knows best and we do things "because I say so".
Experts tend to be hopelessly myopic when it comes to solving global or regional problems. Experts would say the solution to AGW is to immediately stop producing greenhouse gasses. What that does to the economy and life as we know it, well, I think that's something important to consider. Experts said the best thing to do for the salmon populations in the west was to blow up the dams. Flood control is a foreign concept to anyone who hasn't lived through one -- and once the dams were put in place most people stopped seeing them, at least in the west. They became a problem for other people in other parts of the world.
As to the larger question, would such a concept work, I hope it never happens. Direct democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting what's for dinner. Consensus is three wolves and a sheep deciding to eat only half the sheep for dinner. I happily admit that I stole that from someone else. And I happily admit that deTocqueville was there first.
And I happily stand firm on the platform that the government of the US is solely beholden to the people of the US and nobody else. I don't care what people in Germany think of the US, just as I don't expect them to care what I think about how Germany is run. I wish our current occupent of the whitehouse felt the same.
It has nothing to do with the students, and everything to do with the environment.
That statement is absurd.
Were it true, you would see 100% of the students in a class cheating or 0% of them. You would never see one or ten out of a class doing it.
Your claim is just an example of the lack of individual responsibility common today. "It wasn't my fault, it was the ENVIRONMENT made me do it! Fix my environment and I'll stop being a cheater and follow the rules. Yes, I swear it. You can trust me."
Professional armies that use AK rifles - and specifically, Soviet army, which introduced it - have always trained soldiers to fire single shots or short bursts.
Recalling perhaps hazy memories of my old US army ROTC basic camps, I seem to remember that the existing doctrine for infantry squads was that the M16 was to be fired in single shot mode by everyone except the designated automatic rifleman. He got to use full auto but was supposed to limit to 3 round bursts. This was specifically because of the recoil causing aiming problems.
The only time we were all allowed to use full auto was when we were firing off unexpended blanks after an exercise. Of course, the smart folks fired only during the exercise enough to get credit for being there and then threw all the unexpended rounds into the bushes (or gave them to the morons who wanted to fire them off.) They knew that it was easier to clean a weapon that had fired no rounds.
Why would I want a touchscreen when I have a keyboard? How long do you think I'm going to sit at a desk prodding my monitor screen with a finger before I say 'who the hell thought this was a good idea' and go back to the keyboard and mouse?
I would imagine that it depends on the software interface you are using.
If you've got something written well for a touchscreen, a touchscreen is intuitive, simple, and fast.
If you've got something written for a keyboard and mouse, a touchscreen sucks.
I can't imagine playing Angry Birds on a laptop with just a keyboard/mouse. I find most drawing programs that are mouse-based to be annoying and hard to use. Simple web browsing where everything is linked well, a touchscreen is good. "Go THERE".
But I'd never want a touchscreen for editing documents where there's a lot of words and characters involved. Rearranging an existing document to put pictures here and words over there, yeah, a touchscreen would be reasonable. Creating the words, give me a keyboard. And when I need to enter a URL by hand, touchscreens fail.
Although, I am reasonably impressed with my Android touch-keyboard, which appears to adapt to the kind of stuff I'm entering. Like when / and : appear on main keys for entering URLs, and @ and . for email addresses.
And just to give slashdot readers a simple way to exercise this right: never allow yourself to be searched when you exit Fry's.... Our rights are disappearing because people either don't know what they are, or don't care.
Our local greek system got the bright idea recently to team up with the fire department to deliver pizzas for a commercial pizza company. They (frat boy/girl and fireman) showed up at the door and people would get the pizza for free... if they could prove that they had the required number of functioning smoke detectors in their home.
In other words, people were agreeing to a government search of their homes in exchange for the price of a pizza. The pizza company got taxpayer funded delivery service. The greeks got credit for a public service event.
The local paper gaves this operation a "rose" in their weekly "roses and raspberries" editorial.
Ahh, I see my mistake. What I meant to say was checking ID's and boarding passes while at the gate.
I know what you meant to say. That's why I replied with comments about checking boarding passes at the gate.
I don't see the point of having my boarding pass and ID checked at security to then again have it checked at gate. It's pointless.
No, it isn't pointless. Like I already pointed out, it keeps people from getting on the wrong plane, either accidentally or deliberately. Like I also already pointed out, it has been done FOREVER. Save your indignation for something more serious than this triviality. It isn't an illegal search by any stretch of the imagination.
The reason I brought up my service was not to have a big dick contest.
You were trying to prove how much you care for the constitution. You brought it up and then wanted to know what I have done, as if it mattered. I won't play that game with you, it is stupid and insulting and meaningless.
You clearly have the biggest dick because you say so. I won't tell you how many times I've had to take the oath for different federal and state positions (because it truly is irrelevant to this dicussion), so you win.
You have heard of the underwear bomber, right? He failed miserably,and he even entered onto the plane where there is probably negligible security. Oh yeah, and he failed.
Yes, I've heard of quite a lot of failures in every field of human endeavour. That doesn't mean the next person won't succeed. "If God had wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings, Mr. Wright.".
(no need to be a troll with quoting my 'like' phrase)
I wasn't trolling. "Like" is a very nebulous word and it can be a comparison between many different things. I don't know if you mean "like" as in "exactly identical to", or as in "shares some properties of". An ice cube is like a glacier in that both are frozen water; an ice cube is not exactly identical to a glacier. I agreed with you -- it is unlikely that an attack exactly like 9/11 will happen again, simply because there is too long a period of time between the act of hijacking and the final result. But I strongly disagree that an attack "like" 9/11 is unlikely. It is almost a given, given enough time and enough nutjobs. The fact that the shoe bomber was incompetent doesn't mean the next one will be, too. Claiming that "it isn't going to happen exactly the same way" and using that as a reason to disband TSA is just, well, ridiculous.
I already did it once while I was in the Navy...
Thank you for your service, but I'm not going to get into a "who has the bigger dick" kind of contest with you as a way of proving who is right and wrong in this discussion. Let's just say that you aren't the only person who was in the service in this discussion and get back to dealing with the issue, ok?
Being pissed off because someone was looking at BOARDING PASSES when people are getting on the plane is just stupid. You haven't flown for two years and haven't seen it before; I've flown for decades and it has happened EVERY TIME I get on a plane. In almost every country I've been in. And rightly so. Reserve your pissed off nature for the true problems that TSA creates. Checking a boarding pass is a ridiculous reason to be pissed. Some day you may wander onto the wrong plane by accident and be glad that someone looked at your pass and stopped you.
The pattern is clear, both major parties care little about personal liberty.
No, it's simpler than that. Most people, of either party, are concerned about looking like they don't care about the safety of the public so they "do something", even if it is a bad something. The "experts" say "do this, it will keep people safe", so they do.
The desire not to be viewed as the cause or reason for another aircraft full of people rammed into a major office building, or another Lockerbie, is a strong motive, and it really has nothing to do with caring about personal liberty. It has a lot to do with the adversarial nature of partisan politics and the fodder that voting against a "keep people safe" measure would give to the opponent if anything happened.
And you know what? The fact that the vast majority of people still fly is a sign to them that they did something and it wasn't that bad. Actions speak louder than words, and a few screaming activitists complaining about "personal liberty" are a lot fewer "actions" than the lines of people who still fly.
However, this time they did something that I had never seen before, and that was that they randomly checked people's boarding pass as they were getting on the plane. All I could think to myself was 'WTF?'. Was not the circus that I just went through enough for me to get on the plane? I was pissed off.
Wow. You weren't pissed off because you got patted down or microwaved, which you didn't, you were pissed off because they checked boarding passes as people got on the plane?
You may not have seen them doing this before because you haven't been flying for two years. I have, and someone has checked my boarding pass before I've gotten on every flight I've taken. I've even had TSA people pull me out of line for a random research of my bag. I guess I should be really pissed, huh?
I've even almost gotten on the wrong plane, once, which was prevented because someone else looked at my boarding pass before I did. So, no, simply getting through TSA main security isn't enough to get on the plane, and it never has been.
An attack like 9/11 will not occur again, plain and simple.
If by "like" you mean exactly like, you are probably right. It will be very hard for 19 people to hijack four or five major aircraft and run them into things.
If by "like" you mean "an attack by foreign terrorists", you are patently and amazingly wrong. At some point in time, it is almost certain that some group of nutjobs will take things into their own hands and punish "the great Satan" or whatever they are calling the US then, and they'll try something.
I am, frankly, quite surprised that the body cavity bomb hasn't been tried yet. Give it time. Your planeload of vigilante passengers won't have time to stop him; he'll walk into the lavatory and detonate and evereyone else will be going "WTF, asshole, come back out here where we can whip your ass before you blow us all up." Except they'll not be saying it out loud, they'll be dead.
Now, you are probably reading this and seeing it as a justification for TSA goonery, which means only that you are assuming things that I didn't say. I'm mostly laughing at your decision to be pissed because someone looked at your boarding pass before you got in the plane, and contradicting your claim that an attack will never happen again.
"Compact Car Only" is an excuse to stuff an extra dozen parking spots. Nothing more.
I suspect that it is a legal issue only in that zoning laws require specific sizes for parking spaces, and smaller ones may require that label to meet zoning laws. It isn't anywhere near the legal status of handicapped spaces.
The ones I've seen that are "compact only" are usually too short, not too narrow, and are in a lane where full length spaces on both sides would limit the driving lane.
As the driver of a compact SUV, I feel no hesitation to park in any legal space that my vehicle fits in. If you feel some reason not to park there and want to walk, good on ya. Just don't act superior because of your own limitations.
As for TFA, I found no justification from the author on how Jobs could park in handicapped spaces legally. He found a rich-man's loophole in the license plate law, but apparently only the asshole loophole in the handicapped parking law. I wonder if the booting or towing laws would have allowed booting or towing an unlicensed vehicle in such a space?
See what's happening with the recent power regression bug: a large fraction of all motherboard / notebook manufacturers began shipping defective firmware that causes Linux to consume much more power than Windows, there was a lot of outrage in the Linux community, and then nothing happened.
I suspect that most people running linux desktops never consider how much power their system consumes and don't know about this problem at all. This bug is invisible to them. On the other hand, not being able to install linux AT ALL will definitely be noticable to anyone who cannot do it.
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Can you quote a single time I said that the person had nothing to do with it? I quoted what I replied to, can you?
s/nothing/everything/
Just as to claim that the person has everything to do with it is absurd.
Did you see me make any such claim?
Can you please be a little more mature?
I assume you think it is mature to put up an obvious straw man and knock him so you can feel superior?
Can you quote a single time I said that the person had nothing to do with it? I quoted what I replied to, can you?
What "security" would it need? It just needs to not do something stupid like accept and trust connections from anywhere on the planet. That's not too hard, surely?
So, I want to control my toaster from my bedroom and from my smartphone. And my kitchen. How do I tell the toaster what addresses to accept connections from? How do I teach mom and pop how to determine what addresses they will be connecting from using that smart phone app they just downloaded? How do I teach it what addresses are in the house and should be trusted implicitely, and which are transient in the house and should not?
Just don't open any ports that you don't need. If you do need it, then you'd need to port forward with a NAT too, so no security gain there.
This statement makes no sense. Why would I need to port forward an IPv6-addressable toaster? Isn't that the point of IPv6 and an essentially infinite number of addresses? I connect it to the net and bingo, it's on the net! Unless the default security is so tight that nobody can connect to it (the only reasonable default that will protect everyone), and then I need to know how to configure it. Not an easy task for some people.
But like I said, you can rant about what you think a perfect world would look like, or accept the fact that it won't be like that and learn from history.
If you hang out on the IETF v6ops list, which representatives of all the world's major ISPs do, you will see that none of them have any intention of offering customers a single /128.
Oh?
For directly connected CPE, we will allocate an individual IPv6 address (/128), since we know that only a single device is connecting, with no additional need to subnet.
-- from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
Then perhaps it's about time ...
You can rant about how things would work in a perfect world, or you can be pragmatic and deal with the way things will be done. Mom and Pop won't pay for a toaster that contains all the network security they need but don' t know about. They'll buy a cheaper toaster with the network features but no security. If the toaster has too much inherent security by default, and it doesn't work out of the box, or they can't figure out how to set it up, they'll take it back. That manufacturer loses.
I'll take addresses and phone numbers for all of my homes and phones, without having to use post-it notes and pseudo-addresses to make everything reachable.
Is there a difference between having a post-it note reminding you of the IPv6 address for your toaster compared to a post-it that reminds you of the address and port?
Particularly if having those addresses affords me the same level of security as doing without.
It doesn't. Securing an address that exists requires proper configuration of a firewall and some reasonable assumption that the firewall itself doesn't have security issues. Securing an address that doesn't exist requires nothing. You cannot break into a toaster that doesn't have an internet connection.
After all, nothing about being able to address all your devices precludes the use of proper firewalling, just as you do now.
Botnets thrive because mom and pop computer users don't know better. Your "just as you do now" doesn't apply to the vast majority of home network users, because "just as you do now" for them means "do nothing". Assuming that giving every mom and pop a toaster with an IPv6 address will result in better security instead of worse is ignoring history.
YOU may know how to configure a modern firewall properly, but mom and pop won't, and they'll have their toaster on the wild and wooly IPv6 internet.
And what I expect will be a more serious problem will be all the people who know how to configure a firewall but who will wind up with equipment behind that firewall that doesn't work unless the firewall is open. Anecdotal evidence? My fancy new smartphone has an SMB app so I can get files from my Windows and Linux desktops. It uses a kind of authentication that neither of my desktops understands, so I need to leave both of them open if I want access from my phone. I know better than to open the ports on my NAT/router/firewall so the public can get to them, but mom and pop won't, and someone who really really wants to access his systems from his phone while outside the internal network may either open the firewall, or at best rely on the firewall to be configured properly and have no security holes that makes his home network swiss cheese.
What this means is that even if ISPs were incredibly wasteful and basically trashed 99.9% of the address space due to bad practices, you'd still have millions of addresses for every person in the world.
And yet, according to the Comcast announcement, if you are paying for just one device, you get just one IPv6 address. They call it "directly connected CPE". Yes, on my home network, I have one directly connected device -- the NAT router.
I'm also confused by their statement that the device must understand "stateful DHCP6". Why? The cable modem gets assigned one IPv6 address on the cable side, and it serves one IPvX address via DHCP to the CPE. What changes? Why not make the cable modem the IPv6 to IPv4 gate and simply use good old DHCP on the CPE side?
Recording my movements to use against me in court is very much a search.
Uhhh, no it isn't. You wouldn't consider it a search if they followed you around, would you? That's recording your movements, and they can certainly use that record in court. The courts have spent a great deal of time discussing what is and isn't a search under the fourth, and "recording someone's movements" isn't.
Installing equipment on my vehicle for the purpose of said recording also constitutes a search.
Only if they had to open the trunk or hood to install it. If they simply walked by and stuck it on with a magnet, there is no search. They saw nothing and went nowhere that wasn't public.
Of course, so long as "intellectuals" continue to wax philosophic in regards as to what constitutes a search and what does not,
I'm sure your insults are an attempt at convincing the rest of us that you are right, but it doesn't have that effect. The Fourth Amendment talks about searches and seizures. If every criminal could claim "that was a search" and everyone else said "well, we can't be intellectual and discuss whether it was or not" the criminal justice system would collapse. "Hey, you recorded my movements, that's a search, and you didn't have a warrant! Let me GO!" Sorry, don't need one.
The difference is that we, as a society, consented to the low-grade surveillance of police officers driving around personally observing us... but the latter approach, with its many technological and informational advances, is a level of surveillance that we did not consent to, and WOULD NOT have consented to when we originally consented to the low-tech approach.
Ummm, just when did this consent happen? Do you have my signature on a form somewhere? I don't think so. I was never asked. Schneier is making it up as he goes along. There was no "consent" required for the former, and there is no evidence we wouldn't have consented to the latter at that time because the original question wasn't ever asked.
The latter situation is exactly what happens in some parking enforcement divisions. You ought to watch "Parking Wars" (IIRC) sometime. They drive around with a camera doing automatic plate lookups on parked cars, and every so often they get a "ping" from a match. They drive back around the block and then boot the car. NOBODY argues that they are doing something wrong by using this system. It isn't a secret.
Would you argue that parking on the street is implicit consent to this automated lookup? Then why isn't driving on the street just as much a consent?
A good reason to withhold consent is that the collected information is not universally accessible. The information is kept by law enforcement for their own use.
Two problems with this argument. One, you don't get the option to withhold consent to a cop looking up your license plate, either manually (which you erroniously call "at random") or automatically.
Second, the cops keep lots of information that isn't "univerally accessible". It is standard practice for the cops to "create a card" recording the activity and identity of something and someone suspicious. This is their institutional memory for keeping track of bad guys.
I have a right to be "secure in [my] person, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures,
Where is the search or seizure here? They aren't looking into your car, nor are they depriving you of its use.
Sheesh, we live in a country where civil forfeiture is legal -- the idea that taking a car away from a DUII suspect is not a fine or a punishment for him, but is a punishment for the car! But somehow simply attaching something to your car is supposed to be a seizure of the car...
If we take your argument at face value, why not install these devices on all cars during the inspection? or when sold?
You do realize there are serious proposals to install GPS devices in every car so that the gas tax can be calculated based on which roads you use and when you use them, don't you? Not just how much gas you use or even how many miles you've driven, but surcharges for using busy roads during peak hours.
The governments that are proposing this (Oregon, at least) deny there is any privacy issue or that the GPS devices will be used to track people. Even after being reminded that the GPS must record where and when the car is driven so the tax can be computed.
I wish you wouldn't think like that. Because, you know, the government that you elect makes decisions which directly and indirectly affect how the rest of us live in other countries, so is the power that it wields.
And? I'm sorry, but government by the people means us people, not the entire world telling us how we ought to live. You have the same right to self government in your country, so trying to tell me that I shouldn't is, well, ridiculous.
So, you might not care about what Germans think of the US, but the rest of the world does care about what Americans think.
That's ok. If you want to, you can.
And let me tell you, the rest of us don't think much of what you people seem to think
Ok.
Maybe precisely because of that attitude you seem to be displaying.
I see. Because I don't think you ought to have a say in how this country is run, you don't like my opinion. That's fine. I don't have any say in how your country is run, and I don't expect to have a say. If you think you should have a say here, then I don't think much of your attitude, either.
The "I don't give a shit" attitude.
That's not what I said. "You don't get a say in our government" is not "I don't give a shit".
Perhaps the day will come when you'll also be forced to give a shit about what some other country thinks about yours. Let's hope they're not going to think like you.
They already do. You aren't paying attention.
And apparently you've not heard of psychology?
Which is just another way of saying that yes, the student has something to do with it. Unlike the assinine claim that the student has nothing to do with it.
Honest people will be honest. Dishonest people will be dishonest. The environment may push a few over the line, but to claim that the person himself has nothing to do with it is just absurd.
Complex issues need to be decided by experts.
Then you kiss goodbye the concept of government of, by, and for the people. You create a mommy-government, where mommy knows best and we do things "because I say so".
Experts tend to be hopelessly myopic when it comes to solving global or regional problems. Experts would say the solution to AGW is to immediately stop producing greenhouse gasses. What that does to the economy and life as we know it, well, I think that's something important to consider. Experts said the best thing to do for the salmon populations in the west was to blow up the dams. Flood control is a foreign concept to anyone who hasn't lived through one -- and once the dams were put in place most people stopped seeing them, at least in the west. They became a problem for other people in other parts of the world.
As to the larger question, would such a concept work, I hope it never happens. Direct democracy is three wolves and a sheep voting what's for dinner. Consensus is three wolves and a sheep deciding to eat only half the sheep for dinner. I happily admit that I stole that from someone else. And I happily admit that deTocqueville was there first.
And I happily stand firm on the platform that the government of the US is solely beholden to the people of the US and nobody else. I don't care what people in Germany think of the US, just as I don't expect them to care what I think about how Germany is run. I wish our current occupent of the whitehouse felt the same.
It has nothing to do with the students, and everything to do with the environment.
That statement is absurd.
Were it true, you would see 100% of the students in a class cheating or 0% of them. You would never see one or ten out of a class doing it.
Your claim is just an example of the lack of individual responsibility common today. "It wasn't my fault, it was the ENVIRONMENT made me do it! Fix my environment and I'll stop being a cheater and follow the rules. Yes, I swear it. You can trust me."
No, no. It's the integral of e to the x power is a function of u to the n'th power.
Professional armies that use AK rifles - and specifically, Soviet army, which introduced it - have always trained soldiers to fire single shots or short bursts.
Recalling perhaps hazy memories of my old US army ROTC basic camps, I seem to remember that the existing doctrine for infantry squads was that the M16 was to be fired in single shot mode by everyone except the designated automatic rifleman. He got to use full auto but was supposed to limit to 3 round bursts. This was specifically because of the recoil causing aiming problems.
The only time we were all allowed to use full auto was when we were firing off unexpended blanks after an exercise. Of course, the smart folks fired only during the exercise enough to get credit for being there and then threw all the unexpended rounds into the bushes (or gave them to the morons who wanted to fire them off.) They knew that it was easier to clean a weapon that had fired no rounds.
Why would I want a touchscreen when I have a keyboard? How long do you think I'm going to sit at a desk prodding my monitor screen with a finger before I say 'who the hell thought this was a good idea' and go back to the keyboard and mouse?
I would imagine that it depends on the software interface you are using.
If you've got something written well for a touchscreen, a touchscreen is intuitive, simple, and fast.
If you've got something written for a keyboard and mouse, a touchscreen sucks.
I can't imagine playing Angry Birds on a laptop with just a keyboard/mouse. I find most drawing programs that are mouse-based to be annoying and hard to use. Simple web browsing where everything is linked well, a touchscreen is good. "Go THERE".
But I'd never want a touchscreen for editing documents where there's a lot of words and characters involved. Rearranging an existing document to put pictures here and words over there, yeah, a touchscreen would be reasonable. Creating the words, give me a keyboard. And when I need to enter a URL by hand, touchscreens fail.
Although, I am reasonably impressed with my Android touch-keyboard, which appears to adapt to the kind of stuff I'm entering. Like when / and : appear on main keys for entering URLs, and @ and . for email addresses.
And just to give slashdot readers a simple way to exercise this right: never allow yourself to be searched when you exit Fry's. ... Our rights are disappearing because people either don't know what they are, or don't care.
Our local greek system got the bright idea recently to team up with the fire department to deliver pizzas for a commercial pizza company. They (frat boy/girl and fireman) showed up at the door and people would get the pizza for free ... if they could prove that they had the required number of functioning smoke detectors in their home.
In other words, people were agreeing to a government search of their homes in exchange for the price of a pizza. The pizza company got taxpayer funded delivery service. The greeks got credit for a public service event.
The local paper gaves this operation a "rose" in their weekly "roses and raspberries" editorial.
Ahh, I see my mistake. What I meant to say was checking ID's and boarding passes while at the gate.
I know what you meant to say. That's why I replied with comments about checking boarding passes at the gate.
I don't see the point of having my boarding pass and ID checked at security to then again have it checked at gate. It's pointless.
No, it isn't pointless. Like I already pointed out, it keeps people from getting on the wrong plane, either accidentally or deliberately. Like I also already pointed out, it has been done FOREVER. Save your indignation for something more serious than this triviality. It isn't an illegal search by any stretch of the imagination.
The reason I brought up my service was not to have a big dick contest.
You were trying to prove how much you care for the constitution. You brought it up and then wanted to know what I have done, as if it mattered. I won't play that game with you, it is stupid and insulting and meaningless.
You clearly have the biggest dick because you say so. I won't tell you how many times I've had to take the oath for different federal and state positions (because it truly is irrelevant to this dicussion), so you win.
You have heard of the underwear bomber, right? He failed miserably,and he even entered onto the plane where there is probably negligible security. Oh yeah, and he failed.
Yes, I've heard of quite a lot of failures in every field of human endeavour. That doesn't mean the next person won't succeed. "If God had wanted us to fly, he'd have given us wings, Mr. Wright.".
(no need to be a troll with quoting my 'like' phrase)
I wasn't trolling. "Like" is a very nebulous word and it can be a comparison between many different things. I don't know if you mean "like" as in "exactly identical to", or as in "shares some properties of". An ice cube is like a glacier in that both are frozen water; an ice cube is not exactly identical to a glacier. I agreed with you -- it is unlikely that an attack exactly like 9/11 will happen again, simply because there is too long a period of time between the act of hijacking and the final result. But I strongly disagree that an attack "like" 9/11 is unlikely. It is almost a given, given enough time and enough nutjobs. The fact that the shoe bomber was incompetent doesn't mean the next one will be, too. Claiming that "it isn't going to happen exactly the same way" and using that as a reason to disband TSA is just, well, ridiculous.
I already did it once while I was in the Navy...
Thank you for your service, but I'm not going to get into a "who has the bigger dick" kind of contest with you as a way of proving who is right and wrong in this discussion. Let's just say that you aren't the only person who was in the service in this discussion and get back to dealing with the issue, ok?
Being pissed off because someone was looking at BOARDING PASSES when people are getting on the plane is just stupid. You haven't flown for two years and haven't seen it before; I've flown for decades and it has happened EVERY TIME I get on a plane. In almost every country I've been in. And rightly so. Reserve your pissed off nature for the true problems that TSA creates. Checking a boarding pass is a ridiculous reason to be pissed. Some day you may wander onto the wrong plane by accident and be glad that someone looked at your pass and stopped you.
The pattern is clear, both major parties care little about personal liberty.
No, it's simpler than that. Most people, of either party, are concerned about looking like they don't care about the safety of the public so they "do something", even if it is a bad something. The "experts" say "do this, it will keep people safe", so they do.
The desire not to be viewed as the cause or reason for another aircraft full of people rammed into a major office building, or another Lockerbie, is a strong motive, and it really has nothing to do with caring about personal liberty. It has a lot to do with the adversarial nature of partisan politics and the fodder that voting against a "keep people safe" measure would give to the opponent if anything happened.
And you know what? The fact that the vast majority of people still fly is a sign to them that they did something and it wasn't that bad. Actions speak louder than words, and a few screaming activitists complaining about "personal liberty" are a lot fewer "actions" than the lines of people who still fly.
However, this time they did something that I had never seen before, and that was that they randomly checked people's boarding pass as they were getting on the plane. All I could think to myself was 'WTF?'. Was not the circus that I just went through enough for me to get on the plane? I was pissed off.
Wow. You weren't pissed off because you got patted down or microwaved, which you didn't, you were pissed off because they checked boarding passes as people got on the plane?
You may not have seen them doing this before because you haven't been flying for two years. I have, and someone has checked my boarding pass before I've gotten on every flight I've taken. I've even had TSA people pull me out of line for a random research of my bag. I guess I should be really pissed, huh?
I've even almost gotten on the wrong plane, once, which was prevented because someone else looked at my boarding pass before I did. So, no, simply getting through TSA main security isn't enough to get on the plane, and it never has been.
An attack like 9/11 will not occur again, plain and simple.
If by "like" you mean exactly like, you are probably right. It will be very hard for 19 people to hijack four or five major aircraft and run them into things.
If by "like" you mean "an attack by foreign terrorists", you are patently and amazingly wrong. At some point in time, it is almost certain that some group of nutjobs will take things into their own hands and punish "the great Satan" or whatever they are calling the US then, and they'll try something.
I am, frankly, quite surprised that the body cavity bomb hasn't been tried yet. Give it time. Your planeload of vigilante passengers won't have time to stop him; he'll walk into the lavatory and detonate and evereyone else will be going "WTF, asshole, come back out here where we can whip your ass before you blow us all up." Except they'll not be saying it out loud, they'll be dead.
Now, you are probably reading this and seeing it as a justification for TSA goonery, which means only that you are assuming things that I didn't say. I'm mostly laughing at your decision to be pissed because someone looked at your boarding pass before you got in the plane, and contradicting your claim that an attack will never happen again.
"Compact Car Only" is an excuse to stuff an extra dozen parking spots. Nothing more.
I suspect that it is a legal issue only in that zoning laws require specific sizes for parking spaces, and smaller ones may require that label to meet zoning laws. It isn't anywhere near the legal status of handicapped spaces.
The ones I've seen that are "compact only" are usually too short, not too narrow, and are in a lane where full length spaces on both sides would limit the driving lane.
As the driver of a compact SUV, I feel no hesitation to park in any legal space that my vehicle fits in. If you feel some reason not to park there and want to walk, good on ya. Just don't act superior because of your own limitations.
As for TFA, I found no justification from the author on how Jobs could park in handicapped spaces legally. He found a rich-man's loophole in the license plate law, but apparently only the asshole loophole in the handicapped parking law. I wonder if the booting or towing laws would have allowed booting or towing an unlicensed vehicle in such a space?
See what's happening with the recent power regression bug: a large fraction of all motherboard / notebook manufacturers began shipping defective firmware that causes Linux to consume much more power than Windows, there was a lot of outrage in the Linux community, and then nothing happened.
I suspect that most people running linux desktops never consider how much power their system consumes and don't know about this problem at all. This bug is invisible to them. On the other hand, not being able to install linux AT ALL will definitely be noticable to anyone who cannot do it.