This isn't even about successfully pulling your weapon when the time comes, its about the bad guy knowing you are likely to have a gun and having to decide if your wallet is worth getting shot for.
Firstly, is it legal to carry a concealed weapon in public where you are? If it is not the whole point of your post with regard to your wallet is irrelevant since without the ability to concealed carry in public the potential thief does not have to worry about you having a gun assuming you look like a law abiding citizen. If you do not look like a law abiding citizen the local laws with regard to gun control are irrelevant anyway.
It is also about you deciding if the contents of your wallet are worth fighting for, and whether fighting would help you hold on to it.
Most muggers on the street will try and jump you so you do not see them coming. Ideally we would always walk around paying 100% attention to our surroundings and never put ourselves in position where someone could get that close, but in a city this is not always an option. Think how many stairwells or blind corners you walk past on a daily basis. In this situation even a pistol will not help you fight off multiple opponents. If you have a gun on you, it will probably just end up in their hands to be used on their next victim.
What will help more is a sound knowledge of martial arts but even this may not be of assistance unless you have spent many years practising engaging multiple opponents and can be sure your response will be truly autonomic. If this is the case you will prossibly find yourself standing in the midst of a collection of seriously injured assailants if you succeed. This made you several enemies and meant they may come looking for you or your family / friends in future. Their friends are probably nastier than yours. If you did not succeed you are probably dead and they took your wallet anyway.
I know of a martial arts instructor who, when put in this situation chose to let them take his wallet as it was a lot easier than the alternative.
After living in Moss Side (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moss_Side) since the late 1990s I reckon I have a unique perspective on Gun and Knife crime. One of the reasons I am very glad that firearms are illegal in this country is it makes it a lot easier for the police to arrest people who wave them around.
A few years ago I had one pointed at me while I walked down the road. The guy wielding it had just attempted to mug someone and had been disturbed by a large group of people. He felt intimidated enough to jump into a car and bail and I was walking up the road paying too much attention to his car as it sped off. This particular gang of thugs had been very active in my area and had already appeared on the police radar. The police watched them, then waited until they were all together one evening in someones house and paid them a visit. All of the people present in that house then got a mandatory 5 year sentence for the revolver, automatic pistol and submachine gun that was found in the middle of the table they were all sat around.
If possessing a firearm in a private residence was legal this would be much harder as you would have to catch them in process of committing a crime. Even if you could you may not have enough evidence to convict them all if some were just keeping a look out for potential victims. The fact is that there is no reason to own a firearm in an inner city area except to use on other people and the courts here take a very dim view of this, even iff you try and argue self defence.
Even if I chose to carry a weapon (illegally) for my own protection there is a high likelyhood I would not get a chance to use it. I have only been mugged once in Moss Side and I did not see it coming at all. The first I knew was when I got punched to the back of the head and was jumped by 3 people. In this situation a firearm would have been useless since all 3 were at close range.
The fact is that having a large number of untrained people with guns is not useful for society. The US has a much higher murder rate then the UK even though they allow private firearm ownership. Look at the page linked below and compare the US with other countries that have a much more restrictive policy on gun ownership like those in Europe. I know the US doesnt top this list, but it does come a lot higher that other countries with a similar economic and political status.
Go the web site. Look at the list on the right labeled "top searches".
I am sure if you looked at googles top searches you would find porn came out very highly, but nobody actually thinks google are pornographers. All isohunt do is spider for bittorrent trackers then query them for results. If you closed down all the trackers that specialise in pirate content, then isohunt would not show you pirated content.
While your point may have been valid if we were talking about many other torrent sites, a torrent search engine can hardly be found liable for content that an automated search finds while trawling the web. If it could be held liable, all the web search engines we rely on would be required to filter their results for copyrighted content. I could see google image search being held liable for any copyrighted images it returned under the same law. While google MAY be able to come up with a technical solution to this, a great many other search engines would not and would be forced out of business.
Dude, he broke into military computer systems. He admits it.
Some of these systems had blank Admin passwords. If I did that where I work I would be sacked for incompetence.
The real problem is that by exposing how lax the securit was he has caused the US government considerable embarrassment, for this they will make him rot in prison for a very long while.
Also, as a British citizen I do object to an extradition treaty that only works in one direction. Ideally we should refuse all future extraditions until the US agrees to the same provisions we have, but since the US would never do that it is a moot point really. I would rather that every American criminal could not just come over here to escape prosecution since that certainly does not help anyone.
It shows you the status of every site you visit in the bottom right hand corner of firefox. Although it defaults to a different validator you can make it use the W3C one instead. I find it the most useful Firefox plugin I have come across.
It would be just like years sgo in the days before DSL when a virus would hijack your PC and route all your internet through a premium rate phone number in jamaica or somewhere. You only found out when you got the phone bill. Usually the phone company made you pay it regardless.
While I personally might like to do some of things you mention above I do not make my own choices at work. Instead I develop according to guidelines laid down by management.
Also note that I went to slaphack.com (your site) and it fails validation due to lack of doctype. Try practising what you preach in future with regard to standards. BTW - our site is developed to standards which is why I have validation built into my browser.
You DO know you can push out ActiveX plugins to IE users when they visit your site, right?
No, you cant rely on that either.
Most of the development I do in my current job is aimed at government bodies, large companies, schools, etc. In these environments it is usual for the user of the PC to have zero privileges to install any new software. Occasionally the user is only allowed to go access to web through a proxy that has a list of allowed sites they can visit.
We then create a tool for the local admins to use so they can quickly test all the features we need on the local PC (flash, popups, Javascript, allowed sites, etc). In order to use this plugin we would have to contact every single client and walk them through the process of installing the software and explain why this was needed. The explanation of why is very important since it would require some of their time which would have to be costed for. They might try and take those costs out of next renewal.
Many companies also require a security risk assessment of all software that needs to be installed on their local network. Since this often an expensive process we have to demonstrate a real need for any additional software we would wish them to install. It it a lot easier to demonstrate a need for software such as flash (make things look really pretty) than it would be demonstrate a need for a piece of software that would result very little change for the user.
Remember these people are our customers so we cannot force change upon them. We have to convince their own highly skilled IT staff that they need to do this work and they need to justify it to their management.
It allows web developers to take advantage of this feature, but still have their sites be accessible by people using IE (out of ignorance or otherwise). Right now no web-developer can really target features not available on IE unless they want to alienate a large percentage of their user base.
As a professional web developer I can say that is complete rubbish. We can not rely on most IE users to have this plugin so we can not take advantage of any new features. The fact is that while IE is as prevalent as it currently still is we have to develop primarily for that platform. In the corporate world a great many people still use IE6 so we have to test under that very thoroughly too.
You do seem to give Mr Twitter the benifit of the doubt Mr Ash, in your above decrption of Twitter you missed out one important fact... Twitter and his sockpuppets all talk to eachother agreeing with eachother in a (poor) attempt to make it seem like people agree with him. Its not uncommon to see users such as Twitter, Erris, InTheLoo to all be conversing with eachother agreeing with eachother.
I left that out because I have never seen it happen. If you have a link to the slashdot discussions where this has happened please post them so we can all see. That would be far more useful to slashdot that the silly mod him down hate campaign that currently exists as it would allow us to make an informed choice about whether we read his posts.
Twitter thrives on the facts that not everyone knows all of his sockpuppets (he has plenty of sockpuppets with very high karma that he uses to mod himself up) and when people are falely accused of being his sockpuppets. Caution
Since the original poster has replied but completely ignored your question I will answer for him. No doubt my reply is going to start a colossal flamewar since I very much doubt my opinion of Twitter matches with his judging by the tone of his original post and his entirely useless reply.
Twitter is a user of slashdot who has been here for a great while longer than many of his detractors. He has a habit of posting inflammatory anti-microsoft rants. He has become the victim of a concerted campaign to drive him off slashdot for good. This campaign has mainly consisted of people systematically modding his posts down without reading them but there are also some who reply to his posts with offtopic rants.
Since slashdot has the karma system and his ended up in the toilet it did not take long for him to open another account with neutral karma. Unfortunately his posting style is fairly recognisable so these accounts are usually spotted pretty quickly and they are then attacked as well. These other accounts are often called Twitter sockpuppets. To his credit Twitter has stood his ground and still posts on slashdot, now mostly under his original account it seems.
A link to twitters slashdot page is below. You can read some of his previous posts here and make up your own mind about him: http://slashdot.org/~twitter/
Since your account ID is fairly old I am surprised you have not heard of him. You may well be a sock puppet yourself but who cares. If you read this Twitter, remember that some of us value your contribution to a debate and hope you do not give in to the people who wish to censor you to oblivion.
To his detractors please remember that slashdot comes as a package. There are bound to be people here you do not like and who annoy you but you have to take the rough with the smooth in all walks of life.
Its not offtopic and you are wrong. The issue is not with 'early versions of RealPlayer' the issue is with the horrific and unnecessary baggage which traditionally comes with any RealPlayer install to date. If you don't understand then go and educate yourself.
Your comment about baggage with all RealPlayer installs only applies to Windows, they do a damn decent client for Linux that just installs a basic media player.
People like you should not be allowed to post to slashdot. Why confuse all the pointless speculation and mindless insults of people doing a damn good job some actual facts:)
For the record I am very glad this has been handled the way it has. Although I as a sysadmin would like more information regarding what this exploit is I understand this is a double edged sword and that if I had that then so would a great many people I would not like to have it.
I will watch your webcast with some eagerness but in the meantime have patched all my systems as best I can with the information available.
I spent a bit of time studying Nanotech at uni while reading Physics. I am hopelessly out of date now and I would probably barely understand it, especially as this involves the intersection of Physics with Biology.
I am fairly astounded you can be as arrogant as to dismiss on going research by various universities as "pointless worrying" just because they have not finished it yet. Research is often fairly talked about in academic circles long before it is published.
This also reminds me of asbestos. It was known to be potentially harmful for a great many years in academic circles long before it was proved to be harmful. Since I know of people who died of asbestosis I have a little more time for this sort of research being discussed long before a link has been thoroughly proven beyond all scientific doubt.
I can quite easily see how another extremely fine particle similar to asbestos fibre that has never existed naturally in any quantity could have the potential for serious harm if inhaled, swallowed or placed in contact with the skin. The scale of nanotech particles means they could quite easily become airborne if not handled carefully.
That being the main problem with this entire topic: He has not provided enough information about what his company does for us to come up with a sensible answer.
I can think of some cases where forcing everyone to use the same tools would be ridiculous. I can also think of some cases where it would make sense. Without knowing how big his company is or having any idea about the longevity of each project or how different each project is we have no idea what makes more sense for them.
As far as we know he is talking about two teams of 3 developers who interchange between similar projects on the same web application. He also might be talking about a company of 1000 developers for hire work in long term projects where each team develops an entirely different application. In the latter standardising on a single language would probably be impossible.
Why on earth has this been modded insightful? You people obviously have no idea.
The main feature of Gentoo is that it is a bleeding edge release. Because everything is build from source you generally have the most recent version of all the software you chose to install.
Slackware have only just recently adopted the 2.6 Kernel. It has a tradition of old stable software. They are both "geeky" releases but they approach it from a very different mindset.
I am not attempting to say which is better (although I prefer Gentoo) I am just saying they are very different.
You can use MS Office and not use Outlook as your mail client. Myself and many other people use Thunderbird or some other mail client exactly to avoid this issue. We can still use Office, but random emails I receive from untrusted parties can not execute an embedded macro file without my consent.
I have not used antivirus software in about 5 years. In that time I have never had a virus. This is because I delete emails from people I do not know. I also do not open unknown email attachments. I will never ask someone to send me an executable attachment, so I do not expect to receive them.
I used to use AVG then I decided to test it with a known virus. It failed. The virus was still able to infect my system and I had to remove it manually. Since then I have realised that the illusion of security is far worse knowing your system is insecure and modifying your behaviour accordingly.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't even about successfully pulling your weapon when the time comes, its about the bad guy knowing you are likely to have a gun and having to decide if your wallet is worth getting shot for.
Firstly, is it legal to carry a concealed weapon in public where you are? If it is not the whole point of your post with regard to your wallet is irrelevant since without the ability to concealed carry in public the potential thief does not have to worry about you having a gun assuming you look like a law abiding citizen. If you do not look like a law abiding citizen the local laws with regard to gun control are irrelevant anyway.
It is also about you deciding if the contents of your wallet are worth fighting for, and whether fighting would help you hold on to it.
Most muggers on the street will try and jump you so you do not see them coming. Ideally we would always walk around paying 100% attention to our surroundings and never put ourselves in position where someone could get that close, but in a city this is not always an option. Think how many stairwells or blind corners you walk past on a daily basis. In this situation even a pistol will not help you fight off multiple opponents. If you have a gun on you, it will probably just end up in their hands to be used on their next victim.
What will help more is a sound knowledge of martial arts but even this may not be of assistance unless you have spent many years practising engaging multiple opponents and can be sure your response will be truly autonomic. If this is the case you will prossibly find yourself standing in the midst of a collection of seriously injured assailants if you succeed. This made you several enemies and meant they may come looking for you or your family / friends in future. Their friends are probably nastier than yours. If you did not succeed you are probably dead and they took your wallet anyway.
I know of a martial arts instructor who, when put in this situation chose to let them take his wallet as it was a lot easier than the alternative.
After living in Moss Side (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moss_Side) since the late 1990s I reckon I have a unique perspective on Gun and Knife crime.
One of the reasons I am very glad that firearms are illegal in this country is it makes it a lot easier for the police to arrest people who wave them around.
A few years ago I had one pointed at me while I walked down the road. The guy wielding it had just attempted to mug someone and had been disturbed by a large group of people. He felt intimidated enough to jump into a car and bail and I was walking up the road paying too much attention to his car as it sped off. This particular gang of thugs had been very active in my area and had already appeared on the police radar. The police watched them, then waited until they were all together one evening in someones house and paid them a visit. All of the people present in that house then got a mandatory 5 year sentence for the revolver, automatic pistol and submachine gun that was found in the middle of the table they were all sat around.
If possessing a firearm in a private residence was legal this would be much harder as you would have to catch them in process of committing a crime. Even if you could you may not have enough evidence to convict them all if some were just keeping a look out for potential victims. The fact is that there is no reason to own a firearm in an inner city area except to use on other people and the courts here take a very dim view of this, even iff you try and argue self defence.
Even if I chose to carry a weapon (illegally) for my own protection there is a high likelyhood I would not get a chance to use it. I have only been mugged once in Moss Side and I did not see it coming at all. The first I knew was when I got punched to the back of the head and was jumped by 3 people. In this situation a firearm would have been useless since all 3 were at close range.
The fact is that having a large number of untrained people with guns is not useful for society. The US has a much higher murder rate then the UK even though they allow private firearm ownership. Look at the page linked below and compare the US with other countries that have a much more restrictive policy on gun ownership like those in Europe. I know the US doesnt top this list, but it does come a lot higher that other countries with a similar economic and political status.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_murder_rate
For some reason they do not list Slashdot in the list of sites to choose from where you heard about the job on the Application form. Strange.
Then there's the upcoming Touch HD, 800x480 touchscreen phone.
Cheers, my Kaiser is getting a bit old now so I might look at this depending on what Android phones are available in December / January.
What I'm interested in, is which device does it best, and I think it's pretty damn obvious which the winner is.
Good point, the Kaiser rocks.
Go the web site. Look at the list on the right labeled "top searches".
I am sure if you looked at googles top searches you would find porn came out very highly, but nobody actually thinks google are pornographers. All isohunt do is spider for bittorrent trackers then query them for results. If you closed down all the trackers that specialise in pirate content, then isohunt would not show you pirated content.
While your point may have been valid if we were talking about many other torrent sites, a torrent search engine can hardly be found liable for content that an automated search finds while trawling the web. If it could be held liable, all the web search engines we rely on would be required to filter their results for copyrighted content. I could see google image search being held liable for any copyrighted images it returned under the same law. While google MAY be able to come up with a technical solution to this, a great many other search engines would not and would be forced out of business.
Dude, he broke into military computer systems. He admits it.
Some of these systems had blank Admin passwords. If I did that where I work I would be sacked for incompetence.
The real problem is that by exposing how lax the securit was he has caused the US government considerable embarrassment, for this they will make him rot in prison for a very long while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_McKinnon
Also, as a British citizen I do object to an extradition treaty that only works in one direction. Ideally we should refuse all future extraditions until the US agrees to the same provisions we have, but since the US would never do that it is a moot point really. I would rather that every American criminal could not just come over here to escape prosecution since that certainly does not help anyone.
If you want make sure stuff you produce always validates, you might find this useful:
http://users.skynet.be/mgueury/mozilla/
It shows you the status of every site you visit in the bottom right hand corner of firefox. Although it defaults to a different validator you can make it use the W3C one instead. I find it the most useful Firefox plugin I have come across.
It would be just like years sgo in the days before DSL when a virus would hijack your PC and route all your internet through a premium rate phone number in jamaica or somewhere. You only found out when you got the phone bill. Usually the phone company made you pay it regardless.
While I personally might like to do some of things you mention above I do not make my own choices at work. Instead I develop according to guidelines laid down by management.
Also note that I went to slaphack.com (your site) and it fails validation due to lack of doctype. Try practising what you preach in future with regard to standards. BTW - our site is developed to standards which is why I have validation built into my browser.
You DO know you can push out ActiveX plugins to IE users when they visit your site, right?
No, you cant rely on that either.
Most of the development I do in my current job is aimed at government bodies, large companies, schools, etc. In these environments it is usual for the user of the PC to have zero privileges to install any new software. Occasionally the user is only allowed to go access to web through a proxy that has a list of allowed sites they can visit.
We then create a tool for the local admins to use so they can quickly test all the features we need on the local PC (flash, popups, Javascript, allowed sites, etc). In order to use this plugin we would have to contact every single client and walk them through the process of installing the software and explain why this was needed. The explanation of why is very important since it would require some of their time which would have to be costed for. They might try and take those costs out of next renewal.
Many companies also require a security risk assessment of all software that needs to be installed on their local network. Since this often an expensive process we have to demonstrate a real need for any additional software we would wish them to install. It it a lot easier to demonstrate a need for software such as flash (make things look really pretty) than it would be demonstrate a need for a piece of software that would result very little change for the user.
Remember these people are our customers so we cannot force change upon them. We have to convince their own highly skilled IT staff that they need to do this work and they need to justify it to their management.
It allows web developers to take advantage of this feature, but still have their sites be accessible by people using IE (out of ignorance or otherwise). Right now no web-developer can really target features not available on IE unless they want to alienate a large percentage of their user base.
As a professional web developer I can say that is complete rubbish. We can not rely on most IE users to have this plugin so we can not take advantage of any new features. The fact is that while IE is as prevalent as it currently still is we have to develop primarily for that platform. In the corporate world a great many people still use IE6 so we have to test under that very thoroughly too.
I suggest glasses. I just read the whole lot without having any problems.
You do seem to give Mr Twitter the benifit of the doubt Mr Ash, in your above decrption of Twitter you missed out one important fact... Twitter and his sockpuppets all talk to eachother agreeing with eachother in a (poor) attempt to make it seem like people agree with him. Its not uncommon to see users such as Twitter, Erris, InTheLoo to all be conversing with eachother agreeing with eachother.
I left that out because I have never seen it happen. If you have a link to the slashdot discussions where this has happened please post them so we can all see. That would be far more useful to slashdot that the silly mod him down hate campaign that currently exists as it would allow us to make an informed choice about whether we read his posts.
Twitter thrives on the facts that not everyone knows all of his sockpuppets (he has plenty of sockpuppets with very high karma that he uses to mod himself up) and when people are falely accused of being his sockpuppets. Caution
Sounds like paranoia too me :)
What does that mean, twitter sockpuppet?
Since the original poster has replied but completely ignored your question I will answer for him. No doubt my reply is going to start a colossal flamewar since I very much doubt my opinion of Twitter matches with his judging by the tone of his original post and his entirely useless reply.
Twitter is a user of slashdot who has been here for a great while longer than many of his detractors. He has a habit of posting inflammatory anti-microsoft rants. He has become the victim of a concerted campaign to drive him off slashdot for good. This campaign has mainly consisted of people systematically modding his posts down without reading them but there are also some who reply to his posts with offtopic rants.
Since slashdot has the karma system and his ended up in the toilet it did not take long for him to open another account with neutral karma. Unfortunately his posting style is fairly recognisable so these accounts are usually spotted pretty quickly and they are then attacked as well. These other accounts are often called Twitter sockpuppets. To his credit Twitter has stood his ground and still posts on slashdot, now mostly under his original account it seems.
A link to twitters slashdot page is below. You can read some of his previous posts here and make up your own mind about him:
http://slashdot.org/~twitter/
Since your account ID is fairly old I am surprised you have not heard of him. You may well be a sock puppet yourself but who cares. If you read this Twitter, remember that some of us value your contribution to a debate and hope you do not give in to the people who wish to censor you to oblivion.
To his detractors please remember that slashdot comes as a package. There are bound to be people here you do not like and who annoy you but you have to take the rough with the smooth in all walks of life.
Or maybe the current government could remember it was their country originally that the white man stole from them and cut them some slack.
Which app? I find certain RealMedia files can only be played with the RealPlayer client.
Its not offtopic and you are wrong. The issue is not with 'early versions of RealPlayer' the issue is with the horrific and unnecessary baggage which traditionally comes with any RealPlayer install to date. If you don't understand then go and educate yourself.
Your comment about baggage with all RealPlayer installs only applies to Windows, they do a damn decent client for Linux that just installs a basic media player.
People like you should not be allowed to post to slashdot. Why confuse all the pointless speculation and mindless insults of people doing a damn good job some actual facts :)
For the record I am very glad this has been handled the way it has. Although I as a sysadmin would like more information regarding what this exploit is I understand this is a double edged sword and that if I had that then so would a great many people I would not like to have it.
I will watch your webcast with some eagerness but in the meantime have patched all my systems as best I can with the information available.
Show me some research.
Would you understand it?
I spent a bit of time studying Nanotech at uni while reading Physics. I am hopelessly out of date now and I would probably barely understand it, especially as this involves the intersection of Physics with Biology.
I am fairly astounded you can be as arrogant as to dismiss on going research by various universities as "pointless worrying" just because they have not finished it yet. Research is often fairly talked about in academic circles long before it is published.
This also reminds me of asbestos. It was known to be potentially harmful for a great many years in academic circles long before it was proved to be harmful. Since I know of people who died of asbestosis I have a little more time for this sort of research being discussed long before a link has been thoroughly proven beyond all scientific doubt.
I can quite easily see how another extremely fine particle similar to asbestos fibre that has never existed naturally in any quantity could have the potential for serious harm if inhaled, swallowed or placed in contact with the skin. The scale of nanotech particles means they could quite easily become airborne if not handled carefully.
I wish I had mod points for this.
I just finished rebuilding my gentoo box that had a few "emerge -u world" issues :)
My first guess is ......
That being the main problem with this entire topic: He has not provided enough information about what his company does for us to come up with a sensible answer.
I can think of some cases where forcing everyone to use the same tools would be ridiculous. I can also think of some cases where it would make sense. Without knowing how big his company is or having any idea about the longevity of each project or how different each project is we have no idea what makes more sense for them.
As far as we know he is talking about two teams of 3 developers who interchange between similar projects on the same web application. He also might be talking about a company of 1000 developers for hire work in long term projects where each team develops an entirely different application. In the latter standardising on a single language would probably be impossible.
Why on earth has this been modded insightful? You people obviously have no idea.
The main feature of Gentoo is that it is a bleeding edge release. Because everything is build from source you generally have the most recent version of all the software you chose to install.
Slackware have only just recently adopted the 2.6 Kernel. It has a tradition of old stable software. They are both "geeky" releases but they approach it from a very different mindset.
I am not attempting to say which is better (although I prefer Gentoo) I am just saying they are very different.
You can use MS Office and not use Outlook as your mail client. Myself and many other people use Thunderbird or some other mail client exactly to avoid this issue. We can still use Office, but random emails I receive from untrusted parties can not execute an embedded macro file without my consent.
I have not used antivirus software in about 5 years. In that time I have never had a virus. This is because I delete emails from people I do not know. I also do not open unknown email attachments. I will never ask someone to send me an executable attachment, so I do not expect to receive them.
I used to use AVG then I decided to test it with a known virus. It failed. The virus was still able to infect my system and I had to remove it manually. Since then I have realised that the illusion of security is far worse knowing your system is insecure and modifying your behaviour accordingly.