maybe this will force these idiots to upgrade their infrastructures and take network security seriously. That would probably help all of us in the long run.
DNA testing will just be another way to make it more "fair" and "rational.'
That is, profitable.
I see some people from Europe and Canada posting here about how wonderful their respective medical systems are, and how America should move towards a socialized approach for our health care.
Might as well try to institute such a system in Mexico, or any other nation with thoroughly corrupt government and private sectors (like the U.S.) I mean, hell, we've been throwing money at the education system for years (sixty percent of my property tax dollars go to "education") and for all that we're near the bottom of the education heap. Why does anyone believe that throwing vast sums of Federal money at the medical system, thereby subjecting all of us to even more government scrutiny, will have a positive outcome? When will we understand that these people can't be trusted with the power they already have? Yes, I know that countries like Germany have a fine socialized medical system... but that means nothing here. Our bureacracies are very different: their's works very well and has a much higher degree of trustworthiness than ours ever will.
Besides, people forget that we've already had socialized medicine in the U.S. for decades: it's called Medicare. Do want more of that? Yes, it's only for older people, or those of any age who have specific conditions (such as total renal failure) but it can hardly be pointed to as a successful operation from a cost-benefit perspective. Any national health-care system as proposed by some of our Presidential candidates would, in effect, expand the Medicare tax base to theoretically include everyone. Given the fraud and malfeasance and gross inefficiency of the current Medicare system, I simply don't believe that our government (or our health care providers) can be trusted with even more power than they already have. The way they handled Medicare has conclusively demonstrated that they are incapable of acting honestly and in good faith when it comes to health care.
I'm not saying they'd just make Medicare bigger: they'd probably establish an entirely new bureaucratic organization to handle a national medical system. What I am saying is that any such organization will be just as efficient and trustworthy as the DHS, the TSA or FEMA. It can't help but be anything else, given how our government works today. Furthermore, given the propensity for certain three-letter agencies to ignore their charters and lie to Congress, you can bet that socialized medicine would be a privacy disaster.
We'd probably be better off getting the food lobbies out of Congress and spending some serious money on public education, to teach people how to eat. Hell, if we just got a significant number of people to lay off the fast food it would cut the number of new diabetes and cancer cases. In the long run, if we became a healthier nation overall, we'd have less dependence upon advanced medical services.
You're quibbling. The fact is that this particular software isn't legal to traffic in, in the USA. You can thank the DMCA for that one. I think that's ridiculous, personally, and wish they'd repeal that particular bit of Congressional rubbish... but there it is.
Why should a law license and a retainer let these bullies litter the land with their C&D letters that get enforced with just the threat of intimidation, but which don't have a legal leg to stand on (or ever have to demonstrate they do)?
The problem is, in the United States they often do have a legal leg to stand on, in the form of the DMCA. That doesn't make it right, or just, or even good business... but there it is.
I disagree. Personally, I think the people that use Rain-X and then complain simply didn't apply it properly. It does take some effort. I say this as someone that doesn't like driving at night because of the glare of oncoming headlights, but I've never noticed any problem with glare using Rain-X. The thing is, you absolutely have to buff it thoroughly and well after you first apply it. Put some elbow grease into it!
Therefore, it is ordered that you shall show cause on or before March 5, 2008, why this Court should not find that you have abused the legal system process and impose upon you a sanction for abusing the legal system
He's not the only one deserving of this treatment, he's not the only one abusing the legal process. The music and movie industries need to be taken down a notch too... of course, they aren't simply off the deep end like Mr. Thompson, they're just bloodsucking leeches.
Huh... well, maybe there's not so much difference after all.
Yes, and if it were true that this guy is a physicist, I'd say "hey Dick (that is your name, isn't it, Dick?) this is Slashdot, not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Lighten up." But I don't know that he is, so I wouldn't say that. Regardless, no matter how well-informed or knowledgeable you may be on a given subject, if you're an ass about it you'll get crisped anyway. That's the other nice thing about Slashdot.
So no, you shouldn't feel secure if you have important data on that machine.
And any way you slice it, feeling secure has little to do with being secure (TSA, are you listening?) although I have noticed that people who feel secure are generally at the most risk. Mainly, I suppose, because they don't have the knowledge to properly assess the risks they are accepting. Because if they did... they wouldn't feel so secure.
If you want to be as secure as you possibly can, start with the assumption that you're not.
Some years ago a radio station (down in Texas, I believe) put in a brand new transmitter. To advertise this fact, they installed a billboard that said, "500,000 watts. More power than God!" This really shouldn't been anything but a blip on the news radar, if that. However, a religious organization made a huge deal over the sign, and it ended up on the evening news across the country. Of course, that meant that now the entire nation was seeing this billboard, which was probably not the intended effect of the protest. Apparently it was good for that station's ratings though: the manager said he was surprised by all the attention, and that it was just a joke anyway.
Moral of the story, sometimes it's best to just keep your mouth shut and wait for something to blow over.
It may or may not make something well-known, but it pretty much guarantees that copies will be made of everything, and spread over the entire planet. Good luck trying to hide your skeletons then. Furthermore, in this case the mistake was not in trying to get Wikileaks to remove the material: it was the attempt to have the site shut down. This wasn't just some blogger's site... this was a site dedicated to publicizing whistleblower activity. Worse yet, it was a site which took precautions against such an attack, and whose multinational infrastructure was specifically designed to make it hard to eliminate.
The bank screwed up, pure and simple. Now, the next question will be (and I'm sure there are those who are evaluating the possibility right now) how would you quickly and effectively take an organization like Wikileaks completely offline?
They won't be missed. Kill your kids first, then yourselves.
Now you know why the average major religion has a prohibition on suicide. Everyone that had bought fully into the fantasy and truly believed, and was in a state of abject misery (like most of the world's population throughout history) would immediately off themselves. They'd want to get to that "better place" right now. I mean, heck, why wait?
The problem is, such behavior would cause a precipitous drop in the number of suffering followers who give up their hard-earned money to support their religious leaders. That would hit the Church (any church) right in the pocketbook, so it's not to be tolerated. I mean, how can you build giant cathedrals if your flock has killed itself? Take someone else's life and you may be in trouble in the afterlife, but kill yourself and you go straight to Hell. Pretty blatantly manipulative.
Science and education tend to have a similar impact on the quantity of believers, only without the requirement of mass suicide. That makes them a threat to religious leaders of all stripes, and explains to a large degree why they are attacking the education system. This is not accidental, not a simple disagreement of principle... it's an orchestrated attempt to sway the minds of our youth away from science, away from true understanding, away from the ability to see many of our religious leaders for what they really are.
The tragedy is that this is happening at a time when America cannot afford to have a significant fraction of the next generation living in ignorance.
All kidding aside, this wouldn't surprise me too much. Comcast (and probably all other providers) are advertising this super-mega-intarweb speed as "up to x mbps."
This bottle of fruit juice I'm drinking says it contains "Up to 10% real fruit juice!", which means it probably has none at all.
You know, there are certain professions that are illegal in most parts of the U.S. The oldest one, prostitution, for example. I'm inclined to think that "marketing person" should be placed in much the same category.
But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.
Not exactly. A simple DOS attack is a matter of using your fatter pipe to swamp someone else's not-so-fat pipe. A DDOS is, as you say, using multiple machines to take down a target. Comcast was doing neither. What they were doing is essentially a Man in the Middle attack (and you can bet it was distributed... I'm sure there are multiple Sandvine boxes involved.)
But it's more expensive, too, and we paid for it in myriad ways (check out the $200 Billion Ripoff for example)
I tend to agree with you, but that 200 xtra-large was pretty much all you had to mention. They have the funds, or did (I'd very much like to know where they went, that's a metric fuckton of money), they just don't want to spend them on us. Of course, that's pretty much what you get with the likes of Brian "You can squeeze blood from a stone!" Robertson and Edward J. "Those are my pipes!" Whitacre. Humanoid leeches, that's what they are.
Obviously, throwing vast quantities of taxpayer dollars at big societal problems doesn't work with people like this running the show (just look at the education system in the U.S., it's in equally sad shape, and for much the same reason.) I'm not really sure where we go from here: it's hard to legislate ethics. In the past, the Feds tightly regulated telecommunications in order to assure quality of service, etc. The problem is, the Feds can no longer be trusted to make good decisions in that regard, any more the telecom providers themselves can.
It's a bad situation, all the way around. I don't see any way out, frankly, other than the government passing some laws to encourage municipal broadband or otherwise get competition moving again. The odds of a corrupt Congress or FCC ever doing that are remote.
Well, if Ebay is willing to give one group of sociopaths access to their auctions, odds are there'll be other groups of people with axes to grind that will be clamoring for a similar level of control. This is a goddamned stupid thing for Ebay to do... I can't think of a single legitimate reason for it. The only possibility that comes to mind is that there are some highly-placed Scientologists at that company. That actually wouldn't surprise me: those bastards are truly insidious.
Hey, dumbass, did you know that a patent MUST include all sufficient information for an invention to work? Otherwise it isn't a valid patent.
Hey, Fucktard... did you know that a hell of a lot of patents don't describe anything that could actually be built, and that the patent office doesn't care? Furthermore, I don't recall saying that people had to show up at the patent office with their inventions: you just made that up or assumed it, asshole. However, there's a huge difference between submitting a patent and being able to say, "Yes, we built this, it works and we'd like to protect our invention so we can profit from the manufacture and sale of it" and "I have this idea that I think people might someday use, and I'd like a submarine patent, please." Jerkoff.
You'll get a lot farther on Slashdot if you keep the name-calling to yourself. You're welcome to disagree, but don't expect me to remain polite if you open your reply with "hey, dumbass". You're also completely ignorant on this subject, as demonstrated by your off-base commentary. Read up, then grow up.
Don't bother replying to this post... I'm not interested in anything else you have to say.
Isn't the patent system supposed to be about providing a limited-term monopoly for those who come up with ideas
No, and I don't know where you got that from. It's the root of the problem: the patent system was intended to protect implementations of ideas. Got a great new idea for a product? Fine. Make it work first. In fact, until fairly recently in U.S. history a working prototype was required for issuance of a patent. I believe it was a huge mistake to eliminate that requirement.
Put it this way: if you can't show that your idea can be realized in the physical world then it's just that... an idea. Fact is, almost all potentially-patentable ideas are either obvious or worthless. Hell, pretty much all ideas are worthless: they're a disposable commodity and very, very few are deserving of patent protection. The system was supposed to be more selective that it is now, and a patent was meant to protect, and more importantly preserve, implementations that were valuable to society. Whether they were valuable to the inventor was a secondary proposition, and it was up to him to make of it what he could in the time allotted.
Please, read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings on this subject: he was not directly responsible for the patent system, but he was very influential. He expresses the intent of the patent system a lot better than I ever could.
Had we just stuck with the original system as laid down by the Founders, we wouldn't have found ourselves in this mess. Once again, we find that the Founding Fathers did the job right: it took our modern politicians to corrupt it into the legal, financial and economic disaster that it is today.
Seems like they've been repeating that scenario rather frequently lately. We've become a nation of falling intellectual and moral fiber being governed by people that have already reached bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
maybe this will force these idiots to upgrade their infrastructures and take network security seriously. That would probably help all of us in the long run.
DNA testing will just be another way to make it more "fair" and "rational.'
... but that means nothing here. Our bureacracies are very different: their's works very well and has a much higher degree of trustworthiness than ours ever will.
That is, profitable.
I see some people from Europe and Canada posting here about how wonderful their respective medical systems are, and how America should move towards a socialized approach for our health care.
Might as well try to institute such a system in Mexico, or any other nation with thoroughly corrupt government and private sectors (like the U.S.) I mean, hell, we've been throwing money at the education system for years (sixty percent of my property tax dollars go to "education") and for all that we're near the bottom of the education heap. Why does anyone believe that throwing vast sums of Federal money at the medical system, thereby subjecting all of us to even more government scrutiny, will have a positive outcome? When will we understand that these people can't be trusted with the power they already have? Yes, I know that countries like Germany have a fine socialized medical system
Besides, people forget that we've already had socialized medicine in the U.S. for decades: it's called Medicare. Do want more of that? Yes, it's only for older people, or those of any age who have specific conditions (such as total renal failure) but it can hardly be pointed to as a successful operation from a cost-benefit perspective. Any national health-care system as proposed by some of our Presidential candidates would, in effect, expand the Medicare tax base to theoretically include everyone. Given the fraud and malfeasance and gross inefficiency of the current Medicare system, I simply don't believe that our government (or our health care providers) can be trusted with even more power than they already have. The way they handled Medicare has conclusively demonstrated that they are incapable of acting honestly and in good faith when it comes to health care.
I'm not saying they'd just make Medicare bigger: they'd probably establish an entirely new bureaucratic organization to handle a national medical system. What I am saying is that any such organization will be just as efficient and trustworthy as the DHS, the TSA or FEMA. It can't help but be anything else, given how our government works today. Furthermore, given the propensity for certain three-letter agencies to ignore their charters and lie to Congress, you can bet that socialized medicine would be a privacy disaster.
We'd probably be better off getting the food lobbies out of Congress and spending some serious money on public education, to teach people how to eat. Hell, if we just got a significant number of people to lay off the fast food it would cut the number of new diabetes and cancer cases. In the long run, if we became a healthier nation overall, we'd have less dependence upon advanced medical services.
You're quibbling. The fact is that this particular software isn't legal to traffic in, in the USA. You can thank the DMCA for that one. I think that's ridiculous, personally, and wish they'd repeal that particular bit of Congressional rubbish ... but there it is.
Well, given that this product is a tool specifically intended to "circumvent an anti-piracy device" I'd say the leg is there.
Why should a law license and a retainer let these bullies litter the land with their C&D letters that get enforced with just the threat of intimidation, but which don't have a legal leg to stand on (or ever have to demonstrate they do)?
... but there it is.
The problem is, in the United States they often do have a legal leg to stand on, in the form of the DMCA. That doesn't make it right, or just, or even good business
I disagree. Personally, I think the people that use Rain-X and then complain simply didn't apply it properly. It does take some effort. I say this as someone that doesn't like driving at night because of the glare of oncoming headlights, but I've never noticed any problem with glare using Rain-X. The thing is, you absolutely have to buff it thoroughly and well after you first apply it. Put some elbow grease into it!
Workers' union ?
A couple of off-duty cops would probably be just as effective, and cheaper too.
Therefore, it is ordered that you shall show cause on or before March 5, 2008, why this Court should not find that you have abused the legal system process and impose upon you a sanction for abusing the legal system
... of course, they aren't simply off the deep end like Mr. Thompson, they're just bloodsucking leeches.
... well, maybe there's not so much difference after all.
He's not the only one deserving of this treatment, he's not the only one abusing the legal process. The music and movie industries need to be taken down a notch too
Huh
Lewis rebutes
... a combination of rebuts and refutes. I'm not sure it's in the dictionary though.
That's a cool word
Yes, and if it were true that this guy is a physicist, I'd say "hey Dick (that is your name, isn't it, Dick?) this is Slashdot, not a peer-reviewed scientific journal. Lighten up." But I don't know that he is, so I wouldn't say that. Regardless, no matter how well-informed or knowledgeable you may be on a given subject, if you're an ass about it you'll get crisped anyway. That's the other nice thing about Slashdot.
So no, you shouldn't feel secure if you have important data on that machine.
... they wouldn't feel so secure.
And any way you slice it, feeling secure has little to do with being secure (TSA, are you listening?) although I have noticed that people who feel secure are generally at the most risk. Mainly, I suppose, because they don't have the knowledge to properly assess the risks they are accepting. Because if they did
If you want to be as secure as you possibly can, start with the assumption that you're not.
Hey, how about Ray Beckerman? He's at the forefront of the whole RIAA mess, and that's a subject near and dear to the technic crowd.
Some years ago a radio station (down in Texas, I believe) put in a brand new transmitter. To advertise this fact, they installed a billboard that said, "500,000 watts. More power than God!" This really shouldn't been anything but a blip on the news radar, if that. However, a religious organization made a huge deal over the sign, and it ended up on the evening news across the country. Of course, that meant that now the entire nation was seeing this billboard, which was probably not the intended effect of the protest. Apparently it was good for that station's ratings though: the manager said he was surprised by all the attention, and that it was just a joke anyway.
Moral of the story, sometimes it's best to just keep your mouth shut and wait for something to blow over.
It may or may not make something well-known, but it pretty much guarantees that copies will be made of everything, and spread over the entire planet. Good luck trying to hide your skeletons then. Furthermore, in this case the mistake was not in trying to get Wikileaks to remove the material: it was the attempt to have the site shut down. This wasn't just some blogger's site ... this was a site dedicated to publicizing whistleblower activity. Worse yet, it was a site which took precautions against such an attack, and whose multinational infrastructure was specifically designed to make it hard to eliminate.
The bank screwed up, pure and simple. Now, the next question will be (and I'm sure there are those who are evaluating the possibility right now) how would you quickly and effectively take an organization like Wikileaks completely offline?
They won't be missed. Kill your kids first, then yourselves.
Now you know why the average major religion has a prohibition on suicide. Everyone that had bought fully into the fantasy and truly believed, and was in a state of abject misery (like most of the world's population throughout history) would immediately off themselves. They'd want to get to that "better place" right now. I mean, heck, why wait?
The problem is, such behavior would cause a precipitous drop in the number of suffering followers who give up their hard-earned money to support their religious leaders. That would hit the Church (any church) right in the pocketbook, so it's not to be tolerated. I mean, how can you build giant cathedrals if your flock has killed itself? Take someone else's life and you may be in trouble in the afterlife, but kill yourself and you go straight to Hell. Pretty blatantly manipulative.
Science and education tend to have a similar impact on the quantity of believers, only without the requirement of mass suicide. That makes them a threat to religious leaders of all stripes, and explains to a large degree why they are attacking the education system. This is not accidental, not a simple disagreement of principle... it's an orchestrated attempt to sway the minds of our youth away from science, away from true understanding, away from the ability to see many of our religious leaders for what they really are.
The tragedy is that this is happening at a time when America cannot afford to have a significant fraction of the next generation living in ignorance.
All kidding aside, this wouldn't surprise me too much. Comcast (and probably all other providers) are advertising this super-mega-intarweb speed as "up to x mbps."
This bottle of fruit juice I'm drinking says it contains "Up to 10% real fruit juice!", which means it probably has none at all.
You know, there are certain professions that are illegal in most parts of the U.S. The oldest one, prostitution, for example. I'm inclined to think that "marketing person" should be placed in much the same category.
But Gates said giving away Microsoft software isn't intended to turn students against open source software entirely. Rather, he hopes it will just add one more tool to their belt.
Lying dog.
Thus it is a plain old DoS attack.
... I'm sure there are multiple Sandvine boxes involved.)
Not exactly. A simple DOS attack is a matter of using your fatter pipe to swamp someone else's not-so-fat pipe. A DDOS is, as you say, using multiple machines to take down a target. Comcast was doing neither. What they were doing is essentially a Man in the Middle attack (and you can bet it was distributed
But it's more expensive, too, and we paid for it in myriad ways (check out the $200 Billion Ripoff for example)
I tend to agree with you, but that 200 xtra-large was pretty much all you had to mention. They have the funds, or did (I'd very much like to know where they went, that's a metric fuckton of money), they just don't want to spend them on us. Of course, that's pretty much what you get with the likes of Brian "You can squeeze blood from a stone!" Robertson and Edward J. "Those are my pipes!" Whitacre. Humanoid leeches, that's what they are.
Obviously, throwing vast quantities of taxpayer dollars at big societal problems doesn't work with people like this running the show (just look at the education system in the U.S., it's in equally sad shape, and for much the same reason.) I'm not really sure where we go from here: it's hard to legislate ethics. In the past, the Feds tightly regulated telecommunications in order to assure quality of service, etc. The problem is, the Feds can no longer be trusted to make good decisions in that regard, any more the telecom providers themselves can.
It's a bad situation, all the way around. I don't see any way out, frankly, other than the government passing some laws to encourage municipal broadband or otherwise get competition moving again. The odds of a corrupt Congress or FCC ever doing that are remote.
Until Malamud's site does this it's not true competition to the subscription sites.
Then again, I don't get the impression that that is what Mr. Malamud is trying to be.
Don't worry ... the Google spider will crawl his site eventually, if it hasn't already.
Well, if Ebay is willing to give one group of sociopaths access to their auctions, odds are there'll be other groups of people with axes to grind that will be clamoring for a similar level of control. This is a goddamned stupid thing for Ebay to do ... I can't think of a single legitimate reason for it. The only possibility that comes to mind is that there are some highly-placed Scientologists at that company. That actually wouldn't surprise me: those bastards are truly insidious.
Hey, dumbass, did you know that a patent MUST include all sufficient information for an invention to work? Otherwise it isn't a valid patent.
... did you know that a hell of a lot of patents don't describe anything that could actually be built, and that the patent office doesn't care? Furthermore, I don't recall saying that people had to show up at the patent office with their inventions: you just made that up or assumed it, asshole. However, there's a huge difference between submitting a patent and being able to say, "Yes, we built this, it works and we'd like to protect our invention so we can profit from the manufacture and sale of it" and "I have this idea that I think people might someday use, and I'd like a submarine patent, please." Jerkoff.
... I'm not interested in anything else you have to say.
Hey, Fucktard
You'll get a lot farther on Slashdot if you keep the name-calling to yourself. You're welcome to disagree, but don't expect me to remain polite if you open your reply with "hey, dumbass". You're also completely ignorant on this subject, as demonstrated by your off-base commentary. Read up, then grow up.
Don't bother replying to this post
Fuckwit.
This is a cash grab, and a waste of everyones time, except a bunch of east Texas Lawyers.
Yeah, well. Texas. Enough said.
Isn't the patent system supposed to be about providing a limited-term monopoly for those who come up with ideas
... an idea. Fact is, almost all potentially-patentable ideas are either obvious or worthless. Hell, pretty much all ideas are worthless: they're a disposable commodity and very, very few are deserving of patent protection. The system was supposed to be more selective that it is now, and a patent was meant to protect, and more importantly preserve, implementations that were valuable to society. Whether they were valuable to the inventor was a secondary proposition, and it was up to him to make of it what he could in the time allotted.
No, and I don't know where you got that from. It's the root of the problem: the patent system was intended to protect implementations of ideas. Got a great new idea for a product? Fine. Make it work first. In fact, until fairly recently in U.S. history a working prototype was required for issuance of a patent. I believe it was a huge mistake to eliminate that requirement.
Put it this way: if you can't show that your idea can be realized in the physical world then it's just that
Please, read some of Thomas Jefferson's writings on this subject: he was not directly responsible for the patent system, but he was very influential. He expresses the intent of the patent system a lot better than I ever could.
Had we just stuck with the original system as laid down by the Founders, we wouldn't have found ourselves in this mess. Once again, we find that the Founding Fathers did the job right: it took our modern politicians to corrupt it into the legal, financial and economic disaster that it is today.
Seems like they've been repeating that scenario rather frequently lately. We've become a nation of falling intellectual and moral fiber being governed by people that have already reached bottom.
Depressing, really.