I think it's good that we find out about Abu Ghraib.
I think it's terrible that most US news sources give the impression that only that one particular cell block in that one particular instritution had cases of "suspected abuse".
It has been going on for ages at every "anti-terror" camp around the world. The Red Cross has been bleeting on about this for over a year. Yet everyone thinks that the problem is solved.
All that has changed now is that cameras are banned at these sites. It's a bit like the whole rainforrest thing. As soon as it's no longer "news", the public thinks the problem has gone away and solved itself.
Yeah. I bet Al Qaida terrorists are slipping bugs into Windows...
Why the hell not? You could could do more economic damage than that done in human history by bringing every Windows PC down for an hour, and if you hit the embedded stuff you could kill a lot of people. Operational costs...none. Just find the right people to apply for jobs, and as long as they do a good job day-to-day, no one will ever know.
Oh, yeah, I'm forgetting. These people are all uneducated idiots living in caves. Sure. If anything, they probably have easier access to higher-education that most Americans. So drop the "intelectually superior" attidude. If you are basing your defence on their stupidity, then your own stupidity will be your undoing.
Ever noticed how the alkaline "lasts miles longer than any other* battery" always has:
*when compared to ordinary zinc-carbon batteries
Apples and oranges, or in this case, alkalines and outdated technology. It's like saying "Dell PCs are faster and any other PC" with a "other PCs need to be 20 years old" clause.
If they're anything like Sony, they don't inspect their products at all - the build process is so refined that it costs more to inspect the product than it does to deal with returns.
Bullshit, you have clearly never worked in electronic manufacture. About 10-25% of the product WILL NOT WORK on first build. There are a billion things that can go wrong, from faulty connections due to tolerence build-up, to plain and simple zapped components on the boards. You simply cannot manufacture electronics without testing.
Also, Aiwa is a brand of Sony that they use to shift their lower quality products. Sony is their flagship brand and reliability promotes future sales. People just don't buy brands they have had trouble with in the past.
That reminds me, I need to get that album, and a copy of wizard of oz...
Too much hastle, versions of The Wizard of Oz with a DSotM soundtrack are available for download on your favourite p2p program. It's much better, as you can fast-forward/rewind without losing sync.
Use e-mule or e-donkey or one of the clones. It's OSS and you can get clients for a variety of platforms. It also supports file hashing, so you can see links to validated downloads at sites such as this one.
I run it on Windows XP with the E-mule plus client. Very stable, the box is only rebooted after Windows Updates.
There are java versions available, so you should get it to run on anything. The protocol it uses is very clever. Say there is a file in three parts, A, B & C. If you have 10 sources available with only parts A & B, and connect to a host with all three parts, it will go for part C automatically. Which you then share with the other users looking for part C, giving you "credits" on their host, leading to you having a higher priority in their queue. Those who give something back get more.
Also, when you connect to someone also looking for the same file, you exchange the sources you both have for it.
It's also essentially serverless, though there is a branch with a new version that is literally serverless.
but all they get to do is piggy back on the Democrat's internet connection or target other machines on the untrusted network.
Exactly. That's a lot of unprotected targets with a high likelyhood of confidential and sensitive information sitting in a shared drive. I wonder what the Network Neighbourhood would look like...
Most non-techy users would query the "new" icon in the XP sys tray, figure out they have free internet, stop investigating and be happy. No firewall, nothing.
This is a major problem.
It's way too impractical to implement proper security, even for a ad-hoc wired network at a convention, most of these folk don't work within a thousand miles of each other. That's a sysadmin nightmare, installing firewalls, vpns/wep etc. Even wep does nothing though, the passphase will be available on post-it notes within minutes. Are you going to vet everyone that gets access to it?
The only way to do this is to pre-arrange authentication for each user in advance, or use a scratchcard like system. Give access only to those who already have it daily through the corporate network, and not to each other. Inter-party turf wars need to be considered.
There will be a major news story arising out of an incident like this, I can guarantee it. It's inevitable.
But hey, anything that leads to more use of encryption has to be a good thing. We may even see encrytion being the norm soon with all the untrusted networks out there nowadays.
With no new taxes to pay for the war, the cost has to come from existing programs. an unfortunate reality.
The cost should be paid for by the companies who stand to profit billions from this conquest. The sad thing is they are the government at the moment, and there is a one-way cash flow going on, taxes -> military -> business. I suppose just helping yourself to the taxes is way too obvious for even their media outlets to ignore.
How universal can any kind of "identity system" be before it gets scary and/or illegal? (Illegal in countries with data protection laws anyway.)
The Data Protection issue (I'm in the UK, we have these laws) can easilly be worked around. All they need is your consent to share the data, all it would take is some text stating that by logging in to a new companies site, you consent to sharing your details. Which is why you are logging-in in the first place.
The Data Protection stuff is going to be a big failure anyway soon, the internet does not respect borders. Once the data's out of your country, you have no control over it. Shame, because they are good laws.
The only thing I would like to see a specification for is labelling fields in HTML forms so that they can be auto-completed with information from my vCard.
Been done already, and most big commercial websites support it. It's a tag that goes on text entry fields denoting what they are, say "name", "e-mail", "phone" and so on.
Programs like Roboform, Google Toolbar and Gator (spit) use these to autofill your forms for you.
However, this misses the point; these identification are supposed to securely identify you. This identification may come with a list of addresses, so that when you sign up for a commercial service online, you can identify yourself in a way that they know you are a genuine person not scamming them with a dodgy credit-card number and drop address. Takes the validation responsibility away from the trader, which should reduce their costs and complexity of the initial setup.
My company gets around this by forcing you to forfeit your options and other vested financial incentives if you quit and move to a company that they label as a competitor.
Fine. Just line up a job at McDonalds starting one week before your real new job, and quit it after two days. You no longer left for a competator, unless your bank is in the habit of making people digest shit. Oh hang-on, banks *do* make you swallow heaps of bull, so maybe that's not all that good an idea...
Well, this is exactly why AT&T made VNC in the first place. They have some sort of RFID-like technology (using ultrasound) in your employee badge. When you sit at any computer on their site, it automatically gives you your own VNC desktop exactly as you left it. They used the same scheme to route incomming calls to the nearest phone to you, with a unique personal ring.
This was many years ago. You can read about it here and here
I downloaded the version that has Enter the Matrix intersperced with the second movie about a year ago from the usual places. It was quite interesting, definately worth a watch if you liked the film. It was just all the live action created for the game, which did intertwine well with the story. They were filmed at the same time with the same cast and crew.
In fact, that's the one thing I did like about the follow-ups. The Anamatrix tied in quite well with the story being fleshed out in the other parts as well as the game. None seemed to loose from this, you could watch any one and get a complete story, or them all to get a few "ah, yes..." moments as there is a cross-reference between them. It was well done, just a shame that the celuloid one was a bit of a let-down. As a package, I'd say it was worth a look just to see all the extra bits.
I'm quite interested in this version though. When I downloaded it, I thought it was just going to be like the Phantom Edit; an unofficial cut-up. Strange that it now gets a commercial release...
Exactly. The ideal solution would be improved baggage tags that had both systems. This works because:
It works at enabled and non-enabled airports
It can be taken off by the owner when they get there
This technology is a major improvement for baggage handling. Currently if a passenger disappears between checkin and departure, the plane cannot leave with their luggage on board. This proceedure predates recent security improvements. The baggage people have to dig through all of the bagage on the plane to find and remove that one bag. With a directional RFID detector, this is infinitely better. It will result in less delay and subsequently less cost to the passengers.
RFID is only a privacy concern if it used badly. The same applies to just about anything. A
My Ukrainian girlfriend, born in 1978, told me some of the horror stories about the West that were spread at school in the USSR. What they thought about the aggressive West is pretty much on par with our ideas about Ivan coming through the Iron curtain.
Funny that. And while the USSR missiles get names like "satan", the US goes with "patriot" and the like. The most scary thing about propaganda is that people always seem to think it's a thing of the past.
Re:How does this differ from other efforts?
on
Linux in Iraq
·
· Score: 1
It treats Iraqis like ignorant dogs who can only lift bricks and pour concrete.
However those beliefs were pivital to US war fever. Racism has a huge role to play in the numbers who believed the war was valid. The whole "we are better than them" brigade.
It comes from America, ironically. I've never heard a non-American make a reference to Brits have bad teeth. Kids get a lot of health education over here in schools, including dental health. I got taught how to floss in school, but I have to admit I rarely do it.
The fact of the matter is that it is just not true. Everyone in the UK gets free dental treatment until the age of 16, or as long as you remain in education, so there is really no excuse for bad teeth.
One thing that can be said is that we don't have the same facination with perfectly white, straight teeth, which is completely unnatural. I think it's a throwback from Hollywood, where perfect teeth are a requirement. Quite funny when the actor is playing a period piece, no one in ancient greece had good teeth!!
Of course, the fact that it is in the interest of US dentists do to extra (unnessesary) work has nothing to do with it. Some of the headgear I've seen your dentists give out are clearly just them trying to see how far they can take it!!
PS I have perfect teeth, one filing, none missing or coming out at wierd angles.
To do a test, you need to bin the whole PC part. Rip a CD track to uncompressed wav. Compress said wav file to mp3. Burn both to CD and compare on your standalone hi-fi. Chances are it's your sound hardware making the high end of the frequency range sound poor.
The blind tests I mentioned were done by a German hi-fi magazine with a large bunch of audiophiles. It was referenced on the r3mix website, which unfortunately has been domain-jacked now.
Also, that's the last time I deliberately mispell moron...;-)
You clearly missed the joke then. Moran's comes from some picture floating around on the net, where someone called the anti-war people "morans" in a home made placard. Basically a moran is someone even more stupid than a moron.
I did a google image search to try and find it, no joy tho...
Basically what the AC said. You could have two cups and a piece of string hooked up to a 24-bit card. Doesn't mean a thing. Your PC is full of high frequency noise and interference, and very little of the production costs go into providing quality sound. Cheapest bidder etc. Most folk won't ever go beyond desktop speakers, so it's not worth the cost to provide high quality audio components. It's fine for day-to-day use, but I wouldn't use it for sampling or master-generation.
Also, I'm not sure if resampling to 24-bit is a good idea, it might make your line-in copy better than a 16-bit version of your line in copy, but if you were doing a pure digital copy, you'd just be padding the eight least-significant bits with 0's. You are increasing the storage cost by 50% with little gain.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's terrible that most US news sources give the impression that only that one particular cell block in that one particular instritution had cases of "suspected abuse".
It has been going on for ages at every "anti-terror" camp around the world. The Red Cross has been bleeting on about this for over a year. Yet everyone thinks that the problem is solved.
All that has changed now is that cameras are banned at these sites. It's a bit like the whole rainforrest thing. As soon as it's no longer "news", the public thinks the problem has gone away and solved itself.
Why the hell not? You could could do more economic damage than that done in human history by bringing every Windows PC down for an hour, and if you hit the embedded stuff you could kill a lot of people. Operational costs...none. Just find the right people to apply for jobs, and as long as they do a good job day-to-day, no one will ever know.
Oh, yeah, I'm forgetting. These people are all uneducated idiots living in caves. Sure. If anything, they probably have easier access to higher-education that most Americans. So drop the "intelectually superior" attidude. If you are basing your defence on their stupidity, then your own stupidity will be your undoing.
*when compared to ordinary zinc-carbon batteries
Apples and oranges, or in this case, alkalines and outdated technology. It's like saying "Dell PCs are faster and any other PC" with a "other PCs need to be 20 years old" clause.
Bullshit, you have clearly never worked in electronic manufacture. About 10-25% of the product WILL NOT WORK on first build. There are a billion things that can go wrong, from faulty connections due to tolerence build-up, to plain and simple zapped components on the boards. You simply cannot manufacture electronics without testing.
Also, Aiwa is a brand of Sony that they use to shift their lower quality products. Sony is their flagship brand and reliability promotes future sales. People just don't buy brands they have had trouble with in the past.
I was a little concerned. What is a Nintendo fan doing using power tools? Children should not be let near dangerous tools!! :-)
Too much hastle, versions of The Wizard of Oz with a DSotM soundtrack are available for download on your favourite p2p program. It's much better, as you can fast-forward/rewind without losing sync.
I run it on Windows XP with the E-mule plus client. Very stable, the box is only rebooted after Windows Updates.
There are java versions available, so you should get it to run on anything. The protocol it uses is very clever. Say there is a file in three parts, A, B & C. If you have 10 sources available with only parts A & B, and connect to a host with all three parts, it will go for part C automatically. Which you then share with the other users looking for part C, giving you "credits" on their host, leading to you having a higher priority in their queue. Those who give something back get more.
Also, when you connect to someone also looking for the same file, you exchange the sources you both have for it.
It's also essentially serverless, though there is a branch with a new version that is literally serverless.
but all they get to do is piggy back on the Democrat's internet connection or target other machines on the untrusted network.
Exactly. That's a lot of unprotected targets with a high likelyhood of confidential and sensitive information sitting in a shared drive. I wonder what the Network Neighbourhood would look like...
Most non-techy users would query the "new" icon in the XP sys tray, figure out they have free internet, stop investigating and be happy. No firewall, nothing.
This is a major problem.
It's way too impractical to implement proper security, even for a ad-hoc wired network at a convention, most of these folk don't work within a thousand miles of each other. That's a sysadmin nightmare, installing firewalls, vpns/wep etc. Even wep does nothing though, the passphase will be available on post-it notes within minutes. Are you going to vet everyone that gets access to it?
The only way to do this is to pre-arrange authentication for each user in advance, or use a scratchcard like system. Give access only to those who already have it daily through the corporate network, and not to each other. Inter-party turf wars need to be considered.
There will be a major news story arising out of an incident like this, I can guarantee it. It's inevitable.
But hey, anything that leads to more use of encryption has to be a good thing. We may even see encrytion being the norm soon with all the untrusted networks out there nowadays.
The cost should be paid for by the companies who stand to profit billions from this conquest. The sad thing is they are the government at the moment, and there is a one-way cash flow going on, taxes -> military -> business. I suppose just helping yourself to the taxes is way too obvious for even their media outlets to ignore.
The Data Protection issue (I'm in the UK, we have these laws) can easilly be worked around. All they need is your consent to share the data, all it would take is some text stating that by logging in to a new companies site, you consent to sharing your details. Which is why you are logging-in in the first place.
The Data Protection stuff is going to be a big failure anyway soon, the internet does not respect borders. Once the data's out of your country, you have no control over it. Shame, because they are good laws.
Been done already, and most big commercial websites support it. It's a tag that goes on text entry fields denoting what they are, say "name", "e-mail", "phone" and so on.
Programs like Roboform, Google Toolbar and Gator (spit) use these to autofill your forms for you.
However, this misses the point; these identification are supposed to securely identify you. This identification may come with a list of addresses, so that when you sign up for a commercial service online, you can identify yourself in a way that they know you are a genuine person not scamming them with a dodgy credit-card number and drop address. Takes the validation responsibility away from the trader, which should reduce their costs and complexity of the initial setup.
Fine. Just line up a job at McDonalds starting one week before your real new job, and quit it after two days. You no longer left for a competator, unless your bank is in the habit of making people digest shit. Oh hang-on, banks *do* make you swallow heaps of bull, so maybe that's not all that good an idea...
This was many years ago. You can read about it here and here
In fact, that's the one thing I did like about the follow-ups. The Anamatrix tied in quite well with the story being fleshed out in the other parts as well as the game. None seemed to loose from this, you could watch any one and get a complete story, or them all to get a few "ah, yes..." moments as there is a cross-reference between them. It was well done, just a shame that the celuloid one was a bit of a let-down. As a package, I'd say it was worth a look just to see all the extra bits.
I'm quite interested in this version though. When I downloaded it, I thought it was just going to be like the Phantom Edit; an unofficial cut-up. Strange that it now gets a commercial release...
I couldn't care less for that personally. People who can only chat about what TV shows they watched are pretty dull IMHO.
Same old manure, more thinly spread...
This technology is a major improvement for baggage handling. Currently if a passenger disappears between checkin and departure, the plane cannot leave with their luggage on board. This proceedure predates recent security improvements. The baggage people have to dig through all of the bagage on the plane to find and remove that one bag. With a directional RFID detector, this is infinitely better. It will result in less delay and subsequently less cost to the passengers.
RFID is only a privacy concern if it used badly. The same applies to just about anything. A
Funny that. And while the USSR missiles get names like "satan", the US goes with "patriot" and the like. The most scary thing about propaganda is that people always seem to think it's a thing of the past.
However those beliefs were pivital to US war fever. Racism has a huge role to play in the numbers who believed the war was valid. The whole "we are better than them" brigade.
That was a different America. It's not America's ideals that we fear, it's the foreign policies of the past 40 years.
Yeah, but you can't take two cars, a bottle of wine and candles and make a whole load of minis from them...
It comes from America, ironically. I've never heard a non-American make a reference to Brits have bad teeth. Kids get a lot of health education over here in schools, including dental health. I got taught how to floss in school, but I have to admit I rarely do it.
The fact of the matter is that it is just not true. Everyone in the UK gets free dental treatment until the age of 16, or as long as you remain in education, so there is really no excuse for bad teeth.
One thing that can be said is that we don't have the same facination with perfectly white, straight teeth, which is completely unnatural. I think it's a throwback from Hollywood, where perfect teeth are a requirement. Quite funny when the actor is playing a period piece, no one in ancient greece had good teeth!!
Of course, the fact that it is in the interest of US dentists do to extra (unnessesary) work has nothing to do with it. Some of the headgear I've seen your dentists give out are clearly just them trying to see how far they can take it!!
PS I have perfect teeth, one filing, none missing or coming out at wierd angles.
The blind tests I mentioned were done by a German hi-fi magazine with a large bunch of audiophiles. It was referenced on the r3mix website, which unfortunately has been domain-jacked now.
Also, that's the last time I deliberately mispell moron... ;-)
I did a google image search to try and find it, no joy tho...
Also, I'm not sure if resampling to 24-bit is a good idea, it might make your line-in copy better than a 16-bit version of your line in copy, but if you were doing a pure digital copy, you'd just be padding the eight least-significant bits with 0's. You are increasing the storage cost by 50% with little gain.