That's obvious, of course (when people do things it's usually because they have a need... duh) but it's true enough. I haven't had the time for some years now, but I used to play network games pretty heavily. Generally it was in my basement, I had a dozen machines down there at one point, and we'd play Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triad and Blood and others from dusk 'til dawn. And the psychological void those games filled, for me anyways, was the need to blow some of my best friends into tiny little bloody fragments until my fingers were numb. The evenings were filled with the usual sounds of network gameplay: "Son of a bitch!", "God DAMMIT!", "Yeah, yeah... fuck you man. No, really, fuck you man" and "Kill the bastard!" Great times all the way around.
Rather cathartic, in a way, although my girlfriend never understood the appeal. On game nights she'd usually find an excuse to go visit her sister.
ARPANET wasn't a government mandate, it was a military/scientific research project that happened to make good, and the private sector took it and ran with it. Bad example. Besides, for every such project that was a success, there have been a hundred failures. A more apropos example might be the systems upgrades that the FBI, FAA and IRS have all basically FAILED to achieve, and the disruption and cost overruns that were incurred because of those mandated projects. And I'm sure there are other organs of the Federal government that have screwed up just as significantly.
It's a stake through the heart for all non-comercial linux.
Not necessarily. You're assuming that this gigantic government-mandated undertaking is going to work. I think that is a mistake.
Ask yourself how many times such major overhauls have ever worked right, when the Feds are in charge. The FBI botched a big upgrade, the IRS is still botching theirs, the FAA botched theirs... and now we're talking about a critical change affecting hundreds of thousands of computers running everything from Windows to Unix to DOS, implemented across multiple bureaucracies and departments. My guess is that it's going to fail, fail on a massive scale, and that it's going to result in far more data loss and operational disruption than the people in charge of this impending train-wreck are willing to admit (or will ever be held accountable, which is just too bad.)
When all is said and done Linux. branded or otherwise, will be damned lucky not to be too heavily involved, and may come out looking pretty good.
Fortunately neither cable television or cellular phones are necessities for most people (although a lot of us seem convinced that they are) they're just luxuries that the human race lived without for a very long time. For that matter, over half of my life was spent without either. So, like any other product or service that I do not require for my own existence, I can simply choose to do without if said product or service becomes intolerable. Like I said, I got rid of cable, but I do have a cell phone. I'll tell you this: I'm already irritated with my provider for spamming me with text messages (and then charging me ten cents per message, when my plan supposedly has free text messaging!) and am already about *this* far from dumping it entirely. If they start the kind of crap the article is talking about, they can just go "bond" with somebody else. I have better uses for my money.
Yes... that ultimately is the issue and actually both camps have admitted this, that widespread use of physical media will come to an end and that they are only trying to squeeze the last drop of life from it. Well, okay, they didn't put it quite that way, but close.
They have to believe, else their entire worldview (and sense of self-worth, which should be close to zero but for some odd reason is usually inflated) would collapse.
since new US banknotes can be detected from distance.
All banknotes can be detected from a distance. A pair of eyes is all that is necessary in most cases. Unless nuking your wad will turn the bills invisible I don't see how it will help.
There's a difference between "fucked" (often a good, sometimes a great thing), "fucked over" (not a good thing at all, really) and plain "boned up the ass" which is what we're talking with cell phone ads. If I'm forced to view ad-supported Web sites on my cell phone while simultaneously providing additional revenue to my ad-supported cell phone provider that will end my relationship with that provider. Unless said carrier wants to give me my airtime free in exchange for ads or cut me in for a share of the placement fees... but I can't see that happening in a million years. And really, I can't stand advertising so I'd rather just pay for my minutes.
I don't have cable TV anymore, because I got disgusted with the amount of commercialism that had slowly crept into a paid service. Does anyone recall when cable was billed as being worth the money because it was "commercial free"? Does anyone recall when cable was worth the money? Arguably, it was never worth the money, but at one point it wasn't a complete ripoff.
Greed knows no bounds... the idea in our modern "service economy" is not to have a satisfied customer (after all, what good are they) but to have a paying customer that is making you even more revenue through the unauthorized use of his eyeballs (revenue which you refuse to share!) but is yet not quite dissatisified enough to go elsewhere. Finding that delicate balance is what all those MBAs have been doing for the past twenty years, and why I put MBAs in the same general category of social malefactor as lawyers. I'm not just talking about cell phones either: any business that sells the personal information of its customers to advertisers is doing the same thing only worse.
it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD.
If ever. This particular format war isn't being handled very well, it seems to me. Such conflicts are invariably bad for the consumer in the short run since we have to guess which tech will come out on top and whoever guesses wrong gets his fingers burnt. Why can't they all just get along? PICK ONE! I don't really care which at this point. Is it just that Sony is still smarting from the Betamax fiasco? If it turns out after all this hate and discontent that the consumer doesn't find a use for the next-generation of shiny plastic discs it'll be just too bad. Worse for them, sooner or later China is going to be able to foist their version of a next-gen SPD (Shiny Plastic Disc) on the world. They'd better just get with the program and give the consumer what he and she wants now. Period. Or they may find their own technologies irrelevant.
Never, ever, use that phrase when discussing the law, or legal issues.
Why not? This is Slashdot, not a courtroom or a law office. There is no ultimate arbiter of rightness or wrongness here (other than the mods, and we all know how half-baked they can be.) And believe me, I have enough lawyers in my family to know how precise a legal definition is and should be, and how irrational the law can appear to the layman (and often actually is, period.) But I was expressing a casual opinion, based upon no factual input whatsoever, and I prefaced it with "I would think" to distinguish it from anything resembling knowledgeable commentary. So my remark, right, wrong or irrelevant, was correctly stated in this context.
Oh, I know, and it's absolutely something that the Feds aren't going to want you to do so it doesn't really matter what the definition is... you can bet it's illegal to smash the chip. And if it isn't, it's just an oversight that will get corrected, particularly if chip-smashing becomes popular enough.
What do you find so amusing about "failure-prone, unproven technology"?
Oh, you mean the Feds providing well-trained, well-paid security forces. Yes, well, other nations have done very well along those lines... but I agree, there's not much chance of ours being able to pull it off. Not anymore.
... which makes me wonder why the government chose RFID over any other tagging technology...
Well, much has been made over the potential for these passports to be read by bad guys for some distance. It occurs to me that our government (and others) might like to have that same ability. It sure would be convenient for the cops if they could just stop anyone that they can't "ping". It would be a variation on usual "papers, please!" but no less invasive from a privacy perspective. Readers could be installed at any place where people have to pass (bus terminal, subway station, bank, restaurant, you-name-it.)
If law enforcement is looking for an individual they suspect is in a particular area, they could just dot the region with portable scanners. Heck, England will probably incorporate the technology into some future generation of their cameras. They already have speakers, why not an RFID reader? This would certainly make catching terrorists even more straightforward, it being common knowledge that terrorists can never obtain legitimate documentation while in a foreign country.
I understand that the current generation of RFID passport is being supplied with shielded covers to avoid remote polling, but that was only after enough people complained about it. It wasn't a concern until then, and the State Department was perfectly happy to dump them on us anyway, regardless of the risks.
Besides, this is just a pilot program, using the cover of anti-terrorism to get a bunch of people to walk around with RFID tags. If the technology works as well as they hope and expect, you can bet your bottom dollar that our up-and-coming RealID cards will incorporate RFID tags as well. It's just too tempting, and since that's something that everyone will be required to carry with them at all times (or, if not required, then strongly encouraged) we'll be even easier to track.
That's not the question. I don't think our Federal Government is as much concerned about "proving" things as it should be, not anymore. The real question is: what is the penalty for being accused of tampering with your passport.
I would think that "tampering" would be more along the lines of "falsification". Destroying the RFID is really more defacement than tampering. At worst that would make the tag useless, at best make it more secure, and only means the passport works the way passports have always worked, requiring visual identification. It doesn't give the holder a different ID or allow him to do anything he otherwise could not.
Well, it remains to be seen just how reliable (or otherwise) these things are... my feeling is that there's going to be a substantial failure rate. It's one thing to require RFID to speed the process of verifying an identity or to make it nominally more accurate. However, if you invalidate a passport because of a malfunctioning chip you're going to have BIG problems. People sit on things, they flex them, they drop things on them, they otherwise break them. It's what people do, whether they mean to or not.
Let's face it, you're gonna see a certain percentage of RFID passports that just don't work, for whatever reason. What do you do? Lock those people up? No, you just treat the passport like a traditional non-RFID-equipped passport. Well, if you're a properly-trained security person maybe you actually look at the traveler and make sure the picture matches. Maybe you do your job, because if the RFID isn't working you can't just doze through the interview and let the machine do the work. You should be on your toes anyway, because the one time you aren't is when the technology will let you down. And they (yes, they) know that.
And you can bet your boots that any (ahem!) undesirables will have properly-functioning RFIDs anyway. As always, it's us ordinary folk that will get busted for not dotting our I's and crossing our T's (not that most of us have any way to test the goddamn things anyway, except by trying to travel somewhere and seeing what happens.)
Personally, I think the Feds ought to focus more on people skills (i.e., well-trained, well-paid security forces with an effective organization to back them) and less on failure-prone, unproven technology.
Well, the TOS episode Is There in Truth No Beauty? had a race known as the Medusans, composed entirely of pure energy, who traveled in shield boxes because the mere sight of them would drive any ordinary humanoid insane.
Slashdot Mirror
My scratched itch became ringworm.
You know, you could have gone all week and not cut loose with that particular bit of personal info.
Next time feel like sharing, post something useful like your social and a couple of your credit card numbers.
Videogames Fill Psychological Needs for Players
... duh) but it's true enough. I haven't had the time for some years now, but I used to play network games pretty heavily. Generally it was in my basement, I had a dozen machines down there at one point, and we'd play Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triad and Blood and others from dusk 'til dawn. And the psychological void those games filled, for me anyways, was the need to blow some of my best friends into tiny little bloody fragments until my fingers were numb. The evenings were filled with the usual sounds of network gameplay: "Son of a bitch!", "God DAMMIT!", "Yeah, yeah ... fuck you man. No, really, fuck you man" and "Kill the bastard!" Great times all the way around.
That's obvious, of course (when people do things it's usually because they have a need
Rather cathartic, in a way, although my girlfriend never understood the appeal. On game nights she'd usually find an excuse to go visit her sister.
ARPANET wasn't a government mandate, it was a military/scientific research project that happened to make good, and the private sector took it and ran with it. Bad example. Besides, for every such project that was a success, there have been a hundred failures. A more apropos example might be the systems upgrades that the FBI, FAA and IRS have all basically FAILED to achieve, and the disruption and cost overruns that were incurred because of those mandated projects. And I'm sure there are other organs of the Federal government that have screwed up just as significantly.
It's a stake through the heart for all non-comercial linux.
... and now we're talking about a critical change affecting hundreds of thousands of computers running everything from Windows to Unix to DOS, implemented across multiple bureaucracies and departments. My guess is that it's going to fail, fail on a massive scale, and that it's going to result in far more data loss and operational disruption than the people in charge of this impending train-wreck are willing to admit (or will ever be held accountable, which is just too bad.)
Not necessarily. You're assuming that this gigantic government-mandated undertaking is going to work. I think that is a mistake.
Ask yourself how many times such major overhauls have ever worked right, when the Feds are in charge. The FBI botched a big upgrade, the IRS is still botching theirs, the FAA botched theirs
When all is said and done Linux. branded or otherwise, will be damned lucky not to be too heavily involved, and may come out looking pretty good.
Can't we just shoot them?
Well, I'm a charter member of PETA as well, the People for the Electronic Torture of Avatars.
It's much more fun.
No argument from me.
Fortunately neither cable television or cellular phones are necessities for most people (although a lot of us seem convinced that they are) they're just luxuries that the human race lived without for a very long time. For that matter, over half of my life was spent without either. So, like any other product or service that I do not require for my own existence, I can simply choose to do without if said product or service becomes intolerable. Like I said, I got rid of cable, but I do have a cell phone. I'll tell you this: I'm already irritated with my provider for spamming me with text messages (and then charging me ten cents per message, when my plan supposedly has free text messaging!) and am already about *this* far from dumping it entirely. If they start the kind of crap the article is talking about, they can just go "bond" with somebody else. I have better uses for my money.
Nope, I got it. I just thought it was funny and ran with it.
Yes ... that ultimately is the issue and actually both camps have admitted this, that widespread use of physical media will come to an end and that they are only trying to squeeze the last drop of life from it. Well, okay, they didn't put it quite that way, but close.
They have to believe, else their entire worldview (and sense of self-worth, which should be close to zero but for some odd reason is usually inflated) would collapse.
douchebag losers
Ah, I believe that's "douchbag loosers".
Which is kind of gross, actually.
since new US banknotes can be detected from distance.
All banknotes can be detected from a distance. A pair of eyes is all that is necessary in most cases. Unless nuking your wad will turn the bills invisible I don't see how it will help.
Let's see ... what other company has recently released an operating system for a hardware platform that doesn't quite exist yet?
There's a difference between "fucked" (often a good, sometimes a great thing), "fucked over" (not a good thing at all, really) and plain "boned up the ass" which is what we're talking with cell phone ads. If I'm forced to view ad-supported Web sites on my cell phone while simultaneously providing additional revenue to my ad-supported cell phone provider that will end my relationship with that provider. Unless said carrier wants to give me my airtime free in exchange for ads or cut me in for a share of the placement fees ... but I can't see that happening in a million years. And really, I can't stand advertising so I'd rather just pay for my minutes.
... the idea in our modern "service economy" is not to have a satisfied customer (after all, what good are they) but to have a paying customer that is making you even more revenue through the unauthorized use of his eyeballs (revenue which you refuse to share!) but is yet not quite dissatisified enough to go elsewhere. Finding that delicate balance is what all those MBAs have been doing for the past twenty years, and why I put MBAs in the same general category of social malefactor as lawyers. I'm not just talking about cell phones either: any business that sells the personal information of its customers to advertisers is doing the same thing only worse.
I don't have cable TV anymore, because I got disgusted with the amount of commercialism that had slowly crept into a paid service. Does anyone recall when cable was billed as being worth the money because it was "commercial free"? Does anyone recall when cable was worth the money? Arguably, it was never worth the money, but at one point it wasn't a complete ripoff.
Greed knows no bounds
Jackasses.
it will still be several more years before the victorious format supplants the DVD.
If ever. This particular format war isn't being handled very well, it seems to me. Such conflicts are invariably bad for the consumer in the short run since we have to guess which tech will come out on top and whoever guesses wrong gets his fingers burnt. Why can't they all just get along? PICK ONE! I don't really care which at this point. Is it just that Sony is still smarting from the Betamax fiasco? If it turns out after all this hate and discontent that the consumer doesn't find a use for the next-generation of shiny plastic discs it'll be just too bad. Worse for them, sooner or later China is going to be able to foist their version of a next-gen SPD (Shiny Plastic Disc) on the world. They'd better just get with the program and give the consumer what he and she wants now. Period. Or they may find their own technologies irrelevant.
If it can find you an "Eglish" menu I'll be impressed. Elvish, no problem, but I understand that Eglish is quite rare in those parts.
Never, ever, use that phrase when discussing the law, or legal issues.
Why not? This is Slashdot, not a courtroom or a law office. There is no ultimate arbiter of rightness or wrongness here (other than the mods, and we all know how half-baked they can be.) And believe me, I have enough lawyers in my family to know how precise a legal definition is and should be, and how irrational the law can appear to the layman (and often actually is, period.) But I was expressing a casual opinion, based upon no factual input whatsoever, and I prefaced it with "I would think" to distinguish it from anything resembling knowledgeable commentary. So my remark, right, wrong or irrelevant, was correctly stated in this context.
Oh, I know, and it's absolutely something that the Feds aren't going to want you to do so it doesn't really matter what the definition is ... you can bet it's illegal to smash the chip. And if it isn't, it's just an oversight that will get corrected, particularly if chip-smashing becomes popular enough.
What do you find so amusing about "failure-prone, unproven technology"?
... but I agree, there's not much chance of ours being able to pull it off. Not anymore.
Oh, you mean the Feds providing well-trained, well-paid security forces. Yes, well, other nations have done very well along those lines
... which makes me wonder why the government chose RFID over any other tagging technology ...
Well, much has been made over the potential for these passports to be read by bad guys for some distance. It occurs to me that our government (and others) might like to have that same ability. It sure would be convenient for the cops if they could just stop anyone that they can't "ping". It would be a variation on usual "papers, please!" but no less invasive from a privacy perspective. Readers could be installed at any place where people have to pass (bus terminal, subway station, bank, restaurant, you-name-it.)
If law enforcement is looking for an individual they suspect is in a particular area, they could just dot the region with portable scanners. Heck, England will probably incorporate the technology into some future generation of their cameras. They already have speakers, why not an RFID reader? This would certainly make catching terrorists even more straightforward, it being common knowledge that terrorists can never obtain legitimate documentation while in a foreign country.
I understand that the current generation of RFID passport is being supplied with shielded covers to avoid remote polling, but that was only after enough people complained about it. It wasn't a concern until then, and the State Department was perfectly happy to dump them on us anyway, regardless of the risks.
Besides, this is just a pilot program, using the cover of anti-terrorism to get a bunch of people to walk around with RFID tags. If the technology works as well as they hope and expect, you can bet your bottom dollar that our up-and-coming RealID cards will incorporate RFID tags as well. It's just too tempting, and since that's something that everyone will be required to carry with them at all times (or, if not required, then strongly encouraged) we'll be even easier to track.
That's not the question. I don't think our Federal Government is as much concerned about "proving" things as it should be, not anymore. The real question is: what is the penalty for being accused of tampering with your passport.
I would think that "tampering" would be more along the lines of "falsification". Destroying the RFID is really more defacement than tampering. At worst that would make the tag useless, at best make it more secure, and only means the passport works the way passports have always worked, requiring visual identification. It doesn't give the holder a different ID or allow him to do anything he otherwise could not.
Well, it remains to be seen just how reliable (or otherwise) these things are ... my feeling is that there's going to be a substantial failure rate. It's one thing to require RFID to speed the process of verifying an identity or to make it nominally more accurate. However, if you invalidate a passport because of a malfunctioning chip you're going to have BIG problems. People sit on things, they flex them, they drop things on them, they otherwise break them. It's what people do, whether they mean to or not.
Let's face it, you're gonna see a certain percentage of RFID passports that just don't work, for whatever reason. What do you do? Lock those people up? No, you just treat the passport like a traditional non-RFID-equipped passport. Well, if you're a properly-trained security person maybe you actually look at the traveler and make sure the picture matches. Maybe you do your job, because if the RFID isn't working you can't just doze through the interview and let the machine do the work. You should be on your toes anyway, because the one time you aren't is when the technology will let you down. And they (yes, they) know that.
And you can bet your boots that any (ahem!) undesirables will have properly-functioning RFIDs anyway. As always, it's us ordinary folk that will get busted for not dotting our I's and crossing our T's (not that most of us have any way to test the goddamn things anyway, except by trying to travel somewhere and seeing what happens.)
Personally, I think the Feds ought to focus more on people skills (i.e., well-trained, well-paid security forces with an effective organization to back them) and less on failure-prone, unproven technology.
Yes, I was really curious. And you forgot "fuckwit" and "fucktard", two of the more common Slashdotisms.
How do you pronounce Piquepaille?
Well, the TOS episode Is There in Truth No Beauty? had a race known as the Medusans, composed entirely of pure energy, who traveled in shield boxes because the mere sight of them would drive any ordinary humanoid insane.