Commissioners called for federal standards for driver's licenses and birth certificates, noting, "For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons." Eighteen of 19 terrorist hijackers obtained state IDs, some of them fraudulently, easing their movements inside the country.
Since when was a driver's license a "travel document"?
While Truecrypt is great software, it doesn't have the integration with the Windows administrative environment that Bitlocker does.
With Bitlocker you can set enterprise policies (via the group policy mechanisms) that control if encryption is required or not on workstations, fixed drives, removable media, etc. You can control centrally via policy how the encryption keys are protected (simple or complex PIN required; PIN manually entered, or required to be on a flash drive; TPM hardware required or not, etc.) Finally you can mandate key escrow in Active Directory (which allows you to be in legal compliance with various data discovery issues, should an employee "forget" his or her PIN.)
Granted that many environments and businesses do not need central policy management, but there are many that do. Windows 7 (and Visa) when combined with group policy and Bitlocker provide a pretty decent encryption solution when dealing with large laptop / workstation deployments. Do not underestimate the importance of key escrow when using encryption in the enterprise!
I asked the following question to REI via their website:
I read an article on the Internet about an indecent that occurred in one of your Seattle stores. The article can be found at http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/05/12/2239211&art_pos=1. It appears that a customer took a picture of an ATM machine being serviced and ended up being arrested. It also appears from the story that an REI employee was involved in the incident and that the customer was charged by REI of trespass and has been excluded from the store.
Is this story true? Is it the policy of REI to exclude people who take pictures? If so I would have serious reservations about continuing to be an REI customer.
I provided my name and my member number to REI (as I have been a customer for 20 plus years.) I got the following response:
Thank you for your email and the opportunity to explain the incident that occurred between one of our customers and a security company servicing an ATM in our Seattle store. It is unfortunate that the situation escalated to the point that the police were called by the ATM security officers and the customer was detained by the police. At no time did REI detain the individual and we did not request a trespass to be invoked. We do not intend to enforce the trespass issued by police, and the customer is free to visit our store in the future.
We appreciate people sharing their varied points of view about what should or should not have happened at the store. We regret that the matter couldn't be defused before the police became involved. One step we are taking is to discuss with the ATM security company ways to prevent the circumstances that led to this problem.
We value your membership in the co-op and hope to serve your outdoor needs in the future.
Megan Behrbaum
REI Public Affairs
The emphasis above is mine. Personally, the response I got satisfies me as far as REI is concerned, I will continue to be an REI customer. Now as far is Loomis is concerned, I will hold a strongly negative opinion of the company until they have either made a statement that the employees were not following policy, or that they have changed their policies about photography and treating "bystanders".
Back in 2003 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, where the early pieces of Vista (then Longhorn) were demoed and discussed, Microsoft said that they designed the OS for what they thought the average machine would be like at release time: A dual processor machine with 4GB ram, 1TB of disk, and a 3D accelerated graphics card. Note that this was the expected AVERAGE machine. Remember this was 2003. I remember the wave of shock that went through the audience when this statement was made. These where specifications for a dream machine at the time.
The designers got the specifications right, If you give that sort of machine to Vista, it runs okay. What they didn't get right was the schedule for when that sort of machine would be considered "average", which didn't really happen until this year.
Microsoft released Vista long before the hardware it was designed to run on was commonly available and has paid dearly for the stigma of "Vista is slow" because of it.
From the bill: "the term `electronic means' means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages."
Any equipment dependent on electrical power? Getting into a car (spark plugs use electrical power) and driving to a protest rally (an information service) would meet this definition.
Cats are property. Property cannot be "authorized", cannot "act", and cannot make decisions.
In a similar way software is property, but software *is* authorized, *does* act, and *can* make a decision. When software asks the user if he or she accepts the license agreement, software is, on the behalf of the owner and as a proxy, attempting to enter into a legal contract (EULA). The software makes the decision whether to install / run or not based on the users acceptance of the EULA.
While I personally question that EULAs are valid contracts, the owners of software obviously believe they are. If they have that belief and are willing to grant legal proxy to their software in order to enter into the contract, is it such a far stretch that a user couldn't use some similar proxy?
To have even more fun, would you be entitled to "face your accuser" and see the source code of the software licensing system in court? After all the only "witness" that you actually clicked on something would be the program that presented the button on the screen."
Actually if you modify the terms then it isn't legal because the originating party didn't mutually agree. Modifying the buttons would be meaningless as well since it is effectively saying "No, I don't Agree" and then still recieving the services which is an agreement to accept the terms that the services were offered under.
I disagree. The company has delegated authority to their software to present the agreement and await your response. If you respond in the affirmative, the software runs, if you do not, the software doesn't run. This authority to interpret your response to the agreement has been delegated to the software. Given this, if you alter the text of the agreement and then click "I agree" it is the responsibility of the software to detect these changes and decide if on the companies behalf, the changes are acceptable to the company and to make the decision as to if the software should run.
By this same theory, I always put a file on the root of my hard drive that I call my "Execution Environment License Agreement (EELA)". The text file simply states that "this computer belongs to me and any software running on this machine, by executing, agrees to this license..." it further states that all EULA presented by software in the future are null and void and are superseded by this license.
Would this hold up in court? maybe not, but it is an interesting though experiment. If a company authorizes its software engage in a contract with me (via an EULA), I don't see why that same software could not agree to a contract that I present to the software.
How about this link instead? It has the membership of the 111th congress, not the 110th (as is linked by the parent). You have to click on the "Membership" tab. If you didn't read the parent, this is who is on the committee; find out if your representative is on the list and contact them.
You are not going to be able to power 20,000 homes day and night all year round at (virtually) any location on the planet with a wind or solar installation that is the size of a garden shed. This technology claims to do so.
So when people purchase homes that are more than they can afford, the question of why they did that isn't as simple as "greed" there is a large mount of "need" int there as well.
Perhaps you don't "need" to live in NYC.
NYC is far and away the best paying play for the career my collage degree is in.
Best paying is only the best paying if you include salary AND the cost of living.
A positive outcome for this credit crisis will eventually be that credit will not be given to those who cannot afford it. When this happens, the cost of housing and cost of living will eventually come into balance. One of three things will happen: Economic conditions will lower the cost of living; companies will pay their people more; or companies will move operations to places that are more affordable for their employees to live.
A bank requires "six nines" of performance (i.e., right 99.9999% of the time) and probably wants even better than that.
Banks don't require "six nines"; banks require that no data (data being money), once committed, get lost. The "nines" rating refers to the percentage of time a system is online, working, and available to its users. It does not refer to the percentage of acceptable data loss. It is acceptable for bank systems to have downtime, scheduled maintenance, or "closing periods" -- all of these eat into a "nines" rating, none of which lead to data loss.
If you want something that you don't have to maintain, be sure to get something that is rugged and won't fall apart from being outside in the elements. I would suggest something like:
http://www.valuepointnet.com/products/ruggedap/550gia12.html
They are rugged and outdoor / marine rated, use POE, and have internal antennas that would easily span the distance you need. The antennas with these are about 120 degree coverage so alignment can easily be eyeballed.
Then it's just a matter of waiting for the active connections to terminate before the machine ends up in an idle state where you can safely apply patches offline.
This assumes that active connections will terminate in a timely fashion. I used to have internet service via an ISDN via a connection to my office. My ISDN calls would connected for a couple of months at a time. Yes, one connection lasting multiple months. There are other cases where a connection, context, or state between two systems would need to be maintained for extended periods of time. Many of these situations can not be solved by load balancing and would benefit greatly by the ability to make kernel changes without interrupting current work, or waiting for it to complete.
Clarify that one-sided EULA "contracts" where the purchaser has no opportunity to negotiate (or even access the text of) the agreement prior to purchase is not a legal contract.
It seems clear to me that you build a tiger exhibit in a way that doesn't require the tiger's continued good will to keep it inside.
Maybe not. All of our jails are not maximum security. We have minimum security faculties and even work release programs. Anything less then "maximum security" depends partly on the good will of the inmate. Animal enclosures are no different.
It is really an issue of risk management. You take the take the risk of an escape (likelihood of it happening and cost that occurs if it does) and compare it to the cost of mitigating the risk (building a better jail or animal enclosure) and make a business decision. In the SF Zoo case either the risk analysis wasn't done, or more likely it hadn't been updated and included the assumption that a zoo visitor would not deliberately encourage the tiger to get out (by taunting.)
It sounds to me like you decided there was no replacement for Exchange instead of actually looking at the other options on the market, especially Zimbra. Actually I have been using Exchange for over 10 years so yes, 10 years ago there were not other options on the market. Every couple of years I take a look and see if there is an alternative. So far there has not been.
A quick look at Zimbra seems to indicate that it has primarily a web based interface. Since I need off line access, I can't use a tool that is only web based. It wasn't clear to me that the back end of Zimbra fully supported enough Exchange emulation or similar functionality to keep Outlook as a client happy. I don't have to use Outlook as my client, but if I don't, the tool must provide off line, editable access to email, contacts, and my calendar.
I will spend more time looking at Zimbra and not just brush it off to a "quick look", but my first impression from the web site didn't seem to indicate it supported a method of synchronized offline access.
The point is that with the Microsoft solution I can have my calendar data on my home desktop, my office desktop, my laptop, and my smart phone. All of my appointments are synchronized across all devices. I can edit my calendar on any of those devices and the the information is synchronized immediately with all of the other devices (or is queued up for synchronization if something is off line.) I can edit my calendar and create or process meeting requests on any device without regard to if I am connected to the network or not. As soon as I am connected to the network, everything synchronizes. A copy of all the calendar data is stored on the Exchange server and gets backed up, so if I lose my phone, my laptop, and both my desktops, there is still backup copy of the data. If I get a new laptop or smart phone, all I have to do is point it at the Exchange server and the device get all of my current calendar information.
Note then when I talk about the cell phone device being on line, I don't mean docked with my PC, I mean having a GPRS connection. My smart phone is online any time I have data coverage.
In addition to calendar information, my address book and email gets the same synchronization and multi-master synchronization benefits.
Yes, you have to pay Microsoft lots of money to have integrated and synchronized calendar, contacts, and email with the ability to access and edit all information from any [supported] device when you are both online and offline. It is worth it.
Yes, device support is limited and it is not cross platform. I grudgingly give up cross platform support for the benefits I get.
Yes, I would love to have this functionality in the OSS world. Where is it?
Would you be happy to have that new airport (or its supporting systems) in your back yard? Do you want the the end of the runway, the flight path, the road system, or the rail line feeding the airport to go right by your house? I would like more airports as well but I don't want it in my back yard. You don't want it in your back yard, and pretty much all locations that could benefit by more airports are going to be in someone's back yard. While building a new airport is not impossible, it is very difficult politically.
Um... they are not running the Vista you think they are. From TFA:
Vista, Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, is the VA's system for maintaining electronic health records. It sounds like they are running something much older. Again from TFA:
According to Director Eric Raffin, members of the technical team were at the site with staffers from Hewlett-Packard Co. conducting a review of the center's HP AlphaServer system running on Virtual Memory System and testing its performance. "Virtual Memory System" on an Alpha would be "VMS" would it not?
Note the article only states that some folks were working on VMS at the same time when the Vista system (not the Microsoft OS) went down. It doesn't say that they were the same system, but you should consider that their environment is a bit more older and complicated that you make it out to be.
The article also states that the cause was a network configuration error. While in a perfect world you would have test and QA systems that are identical to production, it is rarely feasible. The cost to set up large parallel networks with exactly the same configuration in addition to software with the same configuration is generally cost prohibitive. By "same configuration" I mean same IP addresses, port assignments, routing rules, nationwide WAN links, etc.
Why force people to be revealed in the WHOIS listings just because they own a domain? This isn't like owning a firearm. There isn't a publicly viewable list matching vehicle license plates to owners is there? I'm not force to put my name, phone and email on my house am I
Because the Internet is a shared set of infrastructure. If you have a domain, you are part of that infrastructure. Your domain can have an impact on the infrastructure as a whole (in terms of being a source of spam, illegal activity, or operating in a manner that interferes with the rest of the network.) Since your domain can impact and cause damage on the rest of the network, it should be possible for people to contact you regarding problems with your domain.
No it is not like owning a firearm, with a firearm you can only impact those that are in range. With a problem domain you can impact anyone on the entire Internet.
For problem vehicles, there is a registry of license plates to names and addresses. It is called the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) If you have a legitimate complaint, the records are public.
Your house isn't going to impact others, but if it did I could look up your address in the public records to see who owns it.
Personally I would like to see less privacy on domain registrations, not more. I would like to see the elimination of "private" registrations and masking services. I feel that someone should be responsible for each domain. If you want to be anonymous, make a deal with someone who has a domain and is willing to maintain your anonymity.
I would like to require that annually the registrar 1) sends an email to the registered contacts, and 2) sends a postal letter to the registered mailing addresses, and 3) places a phone call to the registered contact phone numbers. If either the email, the postal mail, or the phone call goes unanswered after a couple of attempts, you forfeit the domain.
This would 1) make sure that WHOIS contact data leads to someone and 2) significantly reduce the amount of bogus registrations and cybersquatting because there would be a physical process cost in addition to a financial cost in hosting a domain.
Of course, people could supply bogus information, but at least the information would lead to someone that is willing to answer for the bogus name. I really don't care so much if someone uses an alias, but I want to make sure that I can contact a person about domain related issues.
To cover the cost of performing communication with the domain owner, the registrar would charge a couple of extra dollars per year. (It is not hard as there are plenty of existing automatic emailing engines, paper mailers, and auto dialers with IVR.)
Slashdot Mirror
Commissioners called for federal standards for driver's licenses and birth certificates, noting, "For terrorists, travel documents are as important as weapons." Eighteen of 19 terrorist hijackers obtained state IDs, some of them fraudulently, easing their movements inside the country.
Since when was a driver's license a "travel document"?
That's what they want you to believe, the original posters have all been deleted.
"original posters have been deleted" or "original posts have been deleted"?
Maybe both.
While Truecrypt is great software, it doesn't have the integration with the Windows administrative environment that Bitlocker does.
With Bitlocker you can set enterprise policies (via the group policy mechanisms) that control if encryption is required or not on workstations, fixed drives, removable media, etc. You can control centrally via policy how the encryption keys are protected (simple or complex PIN required; PIN manually entered, or required to be on a flash drive; TPM hardware required or not, etc.) Finally you can mandate key escrow in Active Directory (which allows you to be in legal compliance with various data discovery issues, should an employee "forget" his or her PIN.)
Granted that many environments and businesses do not need central policy management, but there are many that do. Windows 7 (and Visa) when combined with group policy and Bitlocker provide a pretty decent encryption solution when dealing with large laptop / workstation deployments. Do not underestimate the importance of key escrow when using encryption in the enterprise!
I provided my name and my member number to REI (as I have been a customer for 20 plus years.) I got the following response:
The emphasis above is mine. Personally, the response I got satisfies me as far as REI is concerned, I will continue to be an REI customer. Now as far is Loomis is concerned, I will hold a strongly negative opinion of the company until they have either made a statement that the employees were not following policy, or that they have changed their policies about photography and treating "bystanders".
Back in 2003 at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, where the early pieces of Vista (then Longhorn) were demoed and discussed, Microsoft said that they designed the OS for what they thought the average machine would be like at release time: A dual processor machine with 4GB ram, 1TB of disk, and a 3D accelerated graphics card. Note that this was the expected AVERAGE machine. Remember this was 2003. I remember the wave of shock that went through the audience when this statement was made. These where specifications for a dream machine at the time.
The designers got the specifications right, If you give that sort of machine to Vista, it runs okay. What they didn't get right was the schedule for when that sort of machine would be considered "average", which didn't really happen until this year.
Microsoft released Vista long before the hardware it was designed to run on was commonly available and has paid dearly for the stigma of "Vista is slow" because of it.
If we can skip through space and time, can we use this to skip commercials?
From the bill: "the term `electronic means' means any equipment dependent on electrical power to access an information service, including email, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones, and text messages."
Any equipment dependent on electrical power? Getting into a car (spark plugs use electrical power) and driving to a protest rally (an information service) would meet this definition.
Seems pretty broad to me.
Cats are property. Property cannot be "authorized", cannot "act", and cannot make decisions.
In a similar way software is property, but software *is* authorized, *does* act, and *can* make a decision. When software asks the user if he or she accepts the license agreement, software is, on the behalf of the owner and as a proxy, attempting to enter into a legal contract (EULA). The software makes the decision whether to install / run or not based on the users acceptance of the EULA.
While I personally question that EULAs are valid contracts, the owners of software obviously believe they are. If they have that belief and are willing to grant legal proxy to their software in order to enter into the contract, is it such a far stretch that a user couldn't use some similar proxy?
To have even more fun, would you be entitled to "face your accuser" and see the source code of the software licensing system in court? After all the only "witness" that you actually clicked on something would be the program that presented the button on the screen."
Actually if you modify the terms then it isn't legal because the originating party didn't mutually agree. Modifying the buttons would be meaningless as well since it is effectively saying "No, I don't Agree" and then still recieving the services which is an agreement to accept the terms that the services were offered under.
I disagree. The company has delegated authority to their software to present the agreement and await your response. If you respond in the affirmative, the software runs, if you do not, the software doesn't run. This authority to interpret your response to the agreement has been delegated to the software. Given this, if you alter the text of the agreement and then click "I agree" it is the responsibility of the software to detect these changes and decide if on the companies behalf, the changes are acceptable to the company and to make the decision as to if the software should run.
By this same theory, I always put a file on the root of my hard drive that I call my "Execution Environment License Agreement (EELA)". The text file simply states that "this computer belongs to me and any software running on this machine, by executing, agrees to this license..." it further states that all EULA presented by software in the future are null and void and are superseded by this license.
Would this hold up in court? maybe not, but it is an interesting though experiment. If a company authorizes its software engage in a contract with me (via an EULA), I don't see why that same software could not agree to a contract that I present to the software.
How about this link instead? It has the membership of the 111th congress, not the 110th (as is linked by the parent). You have to click on the "Membership" tab. If you didn't read the parent, this is who is on the committee; find out if your representative is on the list and contact them.
This can be achieved using solar and wind.
You are not going to be able to power 20,000 homes day and night all year round at (virtually) any location on the planet with a wind or solar installation that is the size of a garden shed. This technology claims to do so.
'nuff said
So when people purchase homes that are more than they can afford, the question of why they did that isn't as simple as "greed" there is a large mount of "need" int there as well.
Perhaps you don't "need" to live in NYC.
NYC is far and away the best paying play for the career my collage degree is in.
Best paying is only the best paying if you include salary AND the cost of living.
A positive outcome for this credit crisis will eventually be that credit will not be given to those who cannot afford it. When this happens, the cost of housing and cost of living will eventually come into balance. One of three things will happen: Economic conditions will lower the cost of living; companies will pay their people more; or companies will move operations to places that are more affordable for their employees to live.
I would use my camera phone if it took decent pictures. I don't care how many megapixels the device has, just give me a decent lens.
A bank requires "six nines" of performance (i.e., right 99.9999% of the time) and probably wants even better than that.
Banks don't require "six nines"; banks require that no data (data being money), once committed, get lost. The "nines" rating refers to the percentage of time a system is online, working, and available to its users. It does not refer to the percentage of acceptable data loss. It is acceptable for bank systems to have downtime, scheduled maintenance, or "closing periods" -- all of these eat into a "nines" rating, none of which lead to data loss.If you want something that you don't have to maintain, be sure to get something that is rugged and won't fall apart from being outside in the elements. I would suggest something like: http://www.valuepointnet.com/products/ruggedap/550gia12.html They are rugged and outdoor / marine rated, use POE, and have internal antennas that would easily span the distance you need. The antennas with these are about 120 degree coverage so alignment can easily be eyeballed.
This assumes that active connections will terminate in a timely fashion. I used to have internet service via an ISDN via a connection to my office. My ISDN calls would connected for a couple of months at a time. Yes, one connection lasting multiple months. There are other cases where a connection, context, or state between two systems would need to be maintained for extended periods of time. Many of these situations can not be solved by load balancing and would benefit greatly by the ability to make kernel changes without interrupting current work, or waiting for it to complete.
Clarify that one-sided EULA "contracts" where the purchaser has no opportunity to negotiate (or even access the text of) the agreement prior to purchase is not a legal contract.
Maybe not. All of our jails are not maximum security. We have minimum security faculties and even work release programs. Anything less then "maximum security" depends partly on the good will of the inmate. Animal enclosures are no different.
It is really an issue of risk management. You take the take the risk of an escape (likelihood of it happening and cost that occurs if it does) and compare it to the cost of mitigating the risk (building a better jail or animal enclosure) and make a business decision. In the SF Zoo case either the risk analysis wasn't done, or more likely it hadn't been updated and included the assumption that a zoo visitor would not deliberately encourage the tiger to get out (by taunting.)
A quick look at Zimbra seems to indicate that it has primarily a web based interface. Since I need off line access, I can't use a tool that is only web based. It wasn't clear to me that the back end of Zimbra fully supported enough Exchange emulation or similar functionality to keep Outlook as a client happy. I don't have to use Outlook as my client, but if I don't, the tool must provide off line, editable access to email, contacts, and my calendar.
I will spend more time looking at Zimbra and not just brush it off to a "quick look", but my first impression from the web site didn't seem to indicate it supported a method of synchronized offline access.
Note then when I talk about the cell phone device being on line, I don't mean docked with my PC, I mean having a GPRS connection. My smart phone is online any time I have data coverage.
In addition to calendar information, my address book and email gets the same synchronization and multi-master synchronization benefits.
Yes, you have to pay Microsoft lots of money to have integrated and synchronized calendar, contacts, and email with the ability to access and edit all information from any [supported] device when you are both online and offline. It is worth it.
Yes, device support is limited and it is not cross platform. I grudgingly give up cross platform support for the benefits I get.
Yes, I would love to have this functionality in the OSS world. Where is it?
Would you be happy to have that new airport (or its supporting systems) in your back yard? Do you want the the end of the runway, the flight path, the road system, or the rail line feeding the airport to go right by your house? I would like more airports as well but I don't want it in my back yard. You don't want it in your back yard, and pretty much all locations that could benefit by more airports are going to be in someone's back yard. While building a new airport is not impossible, it is very difficult politically.
The article also states that the cause was a network configuration error. While in a perfect world you would have test and QA systems that are identical to production, it is rarely feasible. The cost to set up large parallel networks with exactly the same configuration in addition to software with the same configuration is generally cost prohibitive. By "same configuration" I mean same IP addresses, port assignments, routing rules, nationwide WAN links, etc.
Why force people to be revealed in the WHOIS listings just because they own a domain? This isn't like owning a firearm. There isn't a publicly viewable list matching vehicle license plates to owners is there? I'm not force to put my name, phone and email on my house am I
Because the Internet is a shared set of infrastructure. If you have a domain, you are part of that infrastructure. Your domain can have an impact on the infrastructure as a whole (in terms of being a source of spam, illegal activity, or operating in a manner that interferes with the rest of the network.) Since your domain can impact and cause damage on the rest of the network, it should be possible for people to contact you regarding problems with your domain.
No it is not like owning a firearm, with a firearm you can only impact those that are in range. With a problem domain you can impact anyone on the entire Internet.
For problem vehicles, there is a registry of license plates to names and addresses. It is called the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) If you have a legitimate complaint, the records are public.
Your house isn't going to impact others, but if it did I could look up your address in the public records to see who owns it.
Personally I would like to see less privacy on domain registrations, not more. I would like to see the elimination of "private" registrations and masking services. I feel that someone should be responsible for each domain. If you want to be anonymous, make a deal with someone who has a domain and is willing to maintain your anonymity.
I would like to require that annually the registrar 1) sends an email to the registered contacts, and 2) sends a postal letter to the registered mailing addresses, and 3) places a phone call to the registered contact phone numbers. If either the email, the postal mail, or the phone call goes unanswered after a couple of attempts, you forfeit the domain.
This would 1) make sure that WHOIS contact data leads to someone and 2) significantly reduce the amount of bogus registrations and cybersquatting because there would be a physical process cost in addition to a financial cost in hosting a domain.
Of course, people could supply bogus information, but at least the information would lead to someone that is willing to answer for the bogus name. I really don't care so much if someone uses an alias, but I want to make sure that I can contact a person about domain related issues.
To cover the cost of performing communication with the domain owner, the registrar would charge a couple of extra dollars per year. (It is not hard as there are plenty of existing automatic emailing engines, paper mailers, and auto dialers with IVR.)
It's all my opinion, take it or leave it.