Open Notepad (or whatever text editor you wish) using administrative privileges (right click, Run as Administrator). This will require a UAC prompt. Once the editor is open, then use it to open the Hosts file. You should now have write access.
StartSSL.com certificates are free and trusted by Firefox and Safari, among others. They just underwent WebTrust certification and are hoping to be added to the IE/Windows keychain soon. If so, certificates would remain free. Their paid verification services are available for ID-validated certs and EV certs.
GoDaddy certs (trusted by all browsers I've ever tested) are a whopping $15/year (the official price is higher, but they've been running ads on Google and elsewhere for quite some time now). Hardly unaffordable, even for a small site.
If the only choices were VeriSign/Thawte who charged hundreds of dollars, you'd have a point. But when widely-trusted certificates are available for free or a nominal cost, your argument loses a bit of its strength.
While we're on the topic of DNS, could someone please tell the DNS folks at Cox Cable that it's really rude to arbitrarily rewrite all TTLs to 30 seconds.
There's a reason why some people set their TTLs to higher than 30 seconds. Fortunately, I have my DD-WRT box set to use OpenDNS' resolvers, which work well.
All of my attempts to inform Cox of their TTL issue have met with responses like "We've received your email regarding your difficulties in configuring your wireless router at home. Here's some instructions for configuring your wireless router..." even when I don't mention anything about a wireless network.
Apparantly the vast majority of the people use MS and are happy about it.
Perhaps it's just that they don't know there's any option, with the exception of the Mac?
Most people wouldn't know what a "web browser" was if it came up and bit them. Similarly, I'd posit that most people don't really know what "Windows" is or that it's possible to change operating systems -- they buy their computer and think that Windows is just part of that computer.
Whether or not they're happy with this arrangement, I don't know. But most people don't really know about any of the alternatives for browsers, let alone operating systems.
Not so. I've often had this issue come up in Vista.
Oftentimes it's programs being hard-coded to use IE, rather than open the default browser.
Other programs use the IE rendering engine for in-program functions. Steam, for example, uses the IE engine. If I don't have Flash installed in IE, Steam gets annoyed and prompts me to install it by opening IE.
Dealers in items like silencers and machine guns in the US require a "Class III Special Occupational Tax".
However, individual owners do not require any sort of license. It's a common misconception.
Most commonly, private owners must pay a $200 tax to the ATF, get fingerprinted, have local police approval, ATF approval, and then receive an ATF Form 4, which contains a physical postage-stamp-like "tax stamp" which indicates they have paid the required tax for the item.
It's just a tax receipt, not a license, and one must be prepared to present a copy of it to police upon request.
The long guns in my safe are kept unloaded, with ammo either in magazines or its original boxes nearby (usually either in ammo cans in the safe, or on a shelf immediately outside the safe).
My bedside pistol, however, is kept loaded with a round chambered (the Springfield XD-45, like most pistols, this is perfectly safe to do, so long as one does not disengage the safeties and pull the trigger). This gun sits in my bedside table drawer and is kept in a holster to prevent accidental actuation of the trigger. In the event of an emergency -- particularly late at night when I'd be disoriented -- it's far easier to grab the grip of the pistol with one hand and grab the holster with the other and pull the two apart than it would be to grab a magazine, ensure it's facing the right way, and insert it into the gun.
Leaving the slide open is just asking for an accident -- having a slide close on your finger hurts a lot, and could easily interfere with a self-defense scenario.
In many home defense scenarios, time is of the utmost importance. While in a non-stressed situation, you or I could think clearly enough to insert the magazines, close the slide, and make the gun ready to fire without any trouble, it's much more difficult in a stressful, dark situation where one might have just been awakened. Keeping things simple is key.
Also, note that many homes that have children and guns may very well have children who are properly trained in the safe use of guns, and won't handle them without adult supervision. For some families, it may be more prudent to have a lockable gun box next to the bed or in the closet to keep their kids from accessing the guns (particularly useful with very young children), but for others it might not be necessary. Remember that "children" is often defined as those under 18 -- I know several people who have teenage offspring who are mature, educated, and better trained in firearms than most people. It's not these people you need to worry about.
Remember that the iPod can play other formats of music (including MP3 and AAC audio, which can be ripped and encoded by any number of encoders) in addition to the Apple DRM'ed stuff.
If one uses iTunes Music Store, one is constrained to using iTunes or an iPod to play music.
But if one has an iPod, one is not constrained to using iTunes to get music.
There are numerous other contributing factors than the presence or absence of a certain type weapon.
Criminals have no problem acquiring and importing vast quantities of drugs and other contraband. If firearms were somehow officially banned, I suspect that criminals would still be able to acquire them with relative ease.
Or they could commit crimes with knives, clubs, pointed sticks, fists, chains, tire irons, lead weights, swords, noxious chemicals, or any number of dangerous items commonly found in modern society. Several can be quite a bit more dangerous than a gun.
It would be interesting to map out where various crimes take place, and what parties are involved. From the brief amount of research that I've done on the topic (and by no means exhaustive or error-free, I'm sure), it would seem that a majority of crimes committed with guns in the US involve inner-city, low-income, black males that a) are involved with drug trafficking/sales, b) members of criminal gangs, or c) both. Not surprisingly, most of their victims fit into the same categories. Many of those committing gun-related crimes are already convicted criminals, and it's already illegal for them to own or possess firearms.
Your average law-abiding Joe Sixpack is not, statistically speaking, a danger to himself or others when it comes to firearms. There's something like 90 million gun owners in the United States, with about 500 million privately owned firearms. Only the tiniest fraction of these guns are used by criminals.
It would seem that the most obvious and effective method of dealing with this issue would be to a) stop people from becoming criminals, and b) punish those who do become criminals. "a" is a bit difficult, with prior-restraint laws and other various freedoms (which I fully support). As for "b", that's for people more well-versed in law enforcment and the justice system to figure out -- all I know is that something isn't right when people charged with assault, armed robbery, and so forth get the revolving-door treatment, while people convicted of non-violent offenses frequently serve longer sentences.
I think the grandparent is referring to "Before So Many Things From China Started Being Imported".
I have an older (but still working) television downstairs that was made in the US. I have electrical appliances (lamps, ovens, etc.) that were made in the US. My car (which has now been totalled) was made in Germany (Mercedes), and now my new 2006 Toyota Camry is made in the US (Kentucky, to be precise). I also have some Sears Craftsman hand tools that were all made in the US.
While some modern products are almost exclusively made in China, I generally am willing to spend a bit more money to purchase US-made products, particularly when it comes to important things, or things that must be made well, last a long time, and and be of high quality. Jumper cables for a diesel-powered car, for example, must be capable of carrying substantial amperage...the el-cheapo Made In China ones simply weren't enough. Fortunately, for about $10 more, there was some beefy US-made cables that were satisfactory.
Yes, there's quite a bit of stuff where it's difficult to avoid buying things made in China, but if one is willing to put forth some effort (and usually a small bit more money), one is able to find quality goods made in the US, Europe, or other such places...and I'm usually happy to spend that extra money to support an American (or European) country. Still, I buy my $12 blue jeans at Wal-Mart (made in El Salvador or some such) and use them for painting and other dirty work. My actual work jeans are made in the US, and are quite a bit more durable.
Isn't that precisely why public-key encryption was designed? Sure, they can intercept the exchange of public keys (using Diffie-Hellman exchange will reduce this, and generally make such key-exchange secure), but without the private keys they cannot decrypt the content with even the most powerful of computers in any sort of reasonable amount of time.
It's not perfect, but it's far better than nothing.
If the government is after you, they can just arrest you and detain you until you provide the information they want. Even traffic analysis of unreadable content may provide additional useful information...perhaps more useful than the data itself.
But various studies[1] like this one[2] have indicated that speed limits have little effect on the frequency or number of accidents. In fact, in some cases, raising the speed limit actually lessens the risk of accidents.
Yes, speed is a contributing factor to the severity of the accident, but not to whether or not the accident actually occurs. Look at the Autobahn in Germany. Accidents are not nearly as common as they are on American freeways (I don't know anything about Canadian freeways and their accident rates), yet the speeds tend to be substantially higher.
Personally, I think the speed limits are mostly for police to engage in revenue collection. Yes, keeping speeds around 55-60mph usually results in fuel savings for most vehicles, but people should be free to move at any safe rate of speed, within appropriate limits for that particular roadway (and most people naturally drive at a safe speed for the road, even if it is higher than the posted limit), and have that choice be their own. If I choose to drive at 55 to save fuel, you'll find me in the slow lane with the semi trucks. If I choose to drive 85 because I'm late for an appointment, I'll be in the fast lane with other similarly-rapid vehicles.
I would posit that if one were to remove all speed limit signs, except for those around inherently dangerous sections of roadway (i.e. an upcoming sharp turn that requires a lower rate of speed), most people would drive slightly faster (maybe 70-80mph) than they do presently, but would still drive in a safe manner. I doubt that many would suddenly start going 140mph just because there's no signs.
Assuming you pick a real city, a computer wouldn't know that as a fake address or not. Even your average phone-activation person probably wouldn't pick up on it.
I think the people trying to "censor" blogs do have a legitimate point: you can bet that everyone who is campaigning for something will set up blogs, pretending to be independant, that sing their praises. That's harder to do with "real" publications because they cost money to set up and run, and their ownership is public record.
Perhaps, but who would read them?
I certainly don't peruse the net in search of new blogs. Sure, I searched around for a few, but generally read ones belonging to my friends (and I certainly make no political judgement based on their blogs), or to well-established posters who have been mentioned by people I know and trust.
If a politician sets up a blog, how are they going to promote it? With campaign money? Doubtful -- that'd draw a connection between the candidate and this "stealth" blog, which is precisely what they wish to avoid. Who would find out about it? Wouldn't it be just slightly suspicious if a new blog pops up just when the candidate is running and happens to only have highly-praising (or highly derogatory) things about a particular candidate?
I doubt that politician-run blogs will have anywhere near the effect that people claim.
Even if they do create such a thing, so what? Free speech. They're welcome to say whatever they want...at least according to the Constitution they are.
With GoDaddy and a few of the other registrars I've used in the last few years, updating DNS servers and whois contact information is trivial. I had far more trouble with Network Solutions' Update By Email That Must Be Precisely Formatted system for a single domain than I ever have with GoDaddy and the six or seven domains I presently have.
My experiences with registrars and the DNS system in general have been nothing but positive recently, particularly after they changed the root zone to update much more frequently than every 12 hours (what is it now, like 5 minutes?). That makes brining new domains online much faster.
I understand your point, but there are many, many more less-deserving people who are actually making an honest living who get worse treatment by the authorities.
There are several local firearms dealers who run upright, legal stores in my area. Every single one of them is exceedingly careful, complies with all local, state, and federal laws, frequently turn down sales to potentially shady individuals (even people who are otherwise upstanding citizens, but just ask some of the wrong questions), etc. Not once have they broken the law, any regulations, etc. -- they all comply fully with the "spirit" and "letter" of the law.
Yet they're frequently hassled by the ATF, California Department of Justice, etc. The ATF doesn't hassle them nearly as much as the CADOJ does. Without being accused of or guilty of any crime, they lose maybe a week or two's worth of business every year due to inspections, questions, and so forth. That's a fair bit of business, but you never see anyone complaining about them.
I will be the first to defend Ralsky's rights under the law, even though I loathe the man, his business tactics, etc. If the FBI had probable cause that he had been breaking the law, documented this, presented it to a judge, were issued a warrant, and executed their search and seizure within the bounds of the warrant and the law. If it turns out that they exceeded the law, I will gladly complain loudly.
And, after much public outrage, ceased the operation of SiteFinder.
IMHO, if VeriSign wants to have any role in the DNS architecture, they should stick to running the registry under contract to ICANN, and not have any sort of role in the actual content of the registry (i.e. adding the *.com wildcard). They certainly should not exceed the bounds of their contract/mandate, and should not attempt to influence the DNS architecture to their own profit.
I'd like to see a well-run non-profit handle the root registry. Any government or quasi-governmental body should not be let within fifty miles of any of the root servers, let alone be given any sort of administrative control.
We can't even bring ourselves to do the right thing when it's only JUST as convenient as doing the wrong thing.
Define "right thing".
My Honda Insight was indeed a very efficient, low-polluting car (rated as "SULEV" by California). It met my needs for quite some time, but eventually my needs required a four-door, durable, reliable car with a large trunk. Thus, I bought my diesel-powered Mercedes and run it on biodiesel and dino-diesel, depending on what's cheaper. Buying diesel fuel, although slightly more expensive, with my Discover credit card (which gives me 5% off) is actually less expensive than buying gasoline cash-only at the el-cheapo station around here.
Also, I loathe the fact that modern cars are made out of thin sheet metal and plastic. Low-speed fender-benders become very expensive. My Mercedes is made from durable materials that, even after 13 years, still look almost new.
Finally, Ford now has a PZEV-rated 130hp engine in their 2005 Focus cars. That's right, a gas-only engine that emits less pollutants than hybrids. And it gets about 35mpg. Not bad at all.
To summarize: There's no such thing as a "right thing" for all people. That's why there's no one-size-fits all vehicle. People have different needs, and different cars meet those needs.
Well considering that AFAICT all the currently available gas/electric hybrids on the market get considerably worse mileage on the freeway than they do in stop and go traffic
Not so in my experience.
My 2003 Honda Insight hybrid got about 30-45mpg in the city, and 50-90mpg on the freeway, depending on road conditions, speed, and whether or not I was drafting off a semi.
The sticker said it should get 56/55 (city/highway), which I found to be highly inaccurate. My city mileage was significantly less than my highway mileage. Either way, I sold the car (new cars have really flimsy body panels that are a pain when involved in low-speed fender benders, and I was concerned about long-term maintenance), bought 1992 diesel Mercedes (now *that*'s a durable car!), and run it on biodiesel. It's about the same price as regular gasoline (diesel here in California tends to be more expensive, oddly enough), cleaner, etc. It also seems to be pretty stable in terms of price.
so why some of you think it is more important to question the motivations of western authorities and not criticize terrorist's motivations instead is beyond me. do i trust the autorities with my freedoms? no. but i know they aren't the threat to me right now. i simply don't understand people who see more menace in western authorities than in terrorist's actions. and judging by who bears the brunt of the criticism after a terrorist action, you know exactly what i am talking about. how about criticizing the terrorists? i know, strange concept.
One must consider some statistics here. Now, I don't have any precise numbers here, so bear with me.
In the United States, how many major terrorist actions have taken place in the last ten years? I count two: the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, and the September 11th attacks in 2001. If you go back a couple more years, you get one more -- the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. How many people did these affect directly (being killed or injured, or having family killed or injured)? Let's be quite generous and say 10,000, ok?
That's out of 295,000,000 people. That works out to be about 0.003% of the total population.
Now, how many false arrests/detentions are there in the entire United States in a single year? Probably quite a bit more than 10,000 per year, I'd imagine.
Without knowing actual numbers of false arrests, I would hazard a Wild Ass Guess that my chances of being falsely arrested by the police are several orders of magnitude higher than of me being directly affected by a terrorist act.
The odds of a terrorist striking my relatively small town (a suburb of San Francisco and San Jose, California) is quite small, particularly when compared to my odds of being hassled by the police. The chances of me being hassled by the police are additionally raised by the fact that I own several firearms (of which they have records associated with me), and frequently travel to and from a variety of ranges in the Bay Area.
Thus, I am more worried about falsely being arrested or detained by the police than I am about a terrorist attack. I'm also far more worried about being struck by lightning or by being broadsided by a bus. I'm also very worried about the increasing amount of money, resources, and authority being given to law enforcement agencies/officers to deal with an incredibly unlikely threat...particularly when it takes them 15-20 minutes to show up to my house after my burglar alarm goes off. I'd rather the police show up promptly to a burglar alarm than have them spend billions trying to prepare for a statistically unlikely event that would only affect a very, very small percentage of Americans.
Indeed, and one can buy easily-replaceable toner (which is much easier to replace than refilling ink cartridges) from various stores, eBay, or even buy remanufactured cartridges from local stores.
I have the starter cart, a second cart, and enough toner to refill those two for up to 20,000 pages worth. I'm pretty much set until the laser printer explodes.
I disagree about your analysis of the danger of NAT.
NAT in a corporate or home environment makes a lot of sense; why waste lots of perfectly good public IP addresses for internal networks? It also adds a layer of security between the LAN and the Great Screaming Hordes, which is quite helpful.
Most internet users today are consumers of information, not creators. Sure, they write emails, post to blogs, and chat on messaging services...and those purposes are generally not affected by NAT.
Many universities provide hosting services for students and faculty, thus removing the need for user-level servers hosted on individual computers, at least for academic purposes. Having some sort of security layer between students and the internet to protect them from inbound malicious traffic (university students are notoriously bad at maintaining security on their PCs, and frequently get zombied) makes a lot of sense these days. Obviously, no form of actual content-based filtering on user-initiated connections should be instituted -- academic freedom and all.
In many cases, NAT makes excellent sense for universities and other academic institutions. I certainly wouldn't mind using my computer on a university NAT'ed network, so long as there was no form of censorship.
The only possible conflict that I can see is with various client-level programs requiring open network ports, like networked computer games. I'm not fully up to date on plug-and-play type solutions, but I wonder if it would be possible to have client machines automatically and transparently request and be granted opened ports from a gateway?
In short: Using NAT in academic institutions could, so long as they are not used as excuses for censorship, be beneficial in terms of reduced costs (less IP space required, opens the availability of traffic-shaping to prevent a few BitTorrent users from saturating the entire pipe, etc.), easier administration, security, and other reasons. Most students would never notice NAT, and those that had some sort of reason for having a publicly-accessible IP for academic/compelling reasons could be granted such access.
I'm completely against censorship, and don't condone it in any form. Using NAT only for technical/security purposes makes sense to me on the present-day internet.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. - UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19.
I believe that Australia is a signatory to the United Nations, and thus this applies.
Either way, I believe the parent was suggesting that freedom of speech is not a right granted to an individual by any particular government or legal system, but rather that freedom of speech is an inherent right present in all humans (and presumably all living beings capable of communication), regardless of their government.
Just because a government restricts the freedom of speech does not take away that inherent right. In such a situation, the government would be "wrong" in an ethical sense, even if they crafted laws to legally justify what they were doing.
Ironically enough, the captcha below this posting box is displaying the word "despots".
Slashdot Mirror
Open Notepad (or whatever text editor you wish) using administrative privileges (right click, Run as Administrator). This will require a UAC prompt. Once the editor is open, then use it to open the Hosts file. You should now have write access.
StartSSL.com certificates are free and trusted by Firefox and Safari, among others. They just underwent WebTrust certification and are hoping to be added to the IE/Windows keychain soon. If so, certificates would remain free. Their paid verification services are available for ID-validated certs and EV certs.
GoDaddy certs (trusted by all browsers I've ever tested) are a whopping $15/year (the official price is higher, but they've been running ads on Google and elsewhere for quite some time now). Hardly unaffordable, even for a small site.
If the only choices were VeriSign/Thawte who charged hundreds of dollars, you'd have a point. But when widely-trusted certificates are available for free or a nominal cost, your argument loses a bit of its strength.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TCP_and_UDP_port
While we're on the topic of DNS, could someone please tell the DNS folks at Cox Cable that it's really rude to arbitrarily rewrite all TTLs to 30 seconds.
There's a reason why some people set their TTLs to higher than 30 seconds. Fortunately, I have my DD-WRT box set to use OpenDNS' resolvers, which work well.
All of my attempts to inform Cox of their TTL issue have met with responses like "We've received your email regarding your difficulties in configuring your wireless router at home. Here's some instructions for configuring your wireless router..." even when I don't mention anything about a wireless network.
Apparantly the vast majority of the people use MS and are happy about it.
Perhaps it's just that they don't know there's any option, with the exception of the Mac?
Most people wouldn't know what a "web browser" was if it came up and bit them. Similarly, I'd posit that most people don't really know what "Windows" is or that it's possible to change operating systems -- they buy their computer and think that Windows is just part of that computer.
Whether or not they're happy with this arrangement, I don't know. But most people don't really know about any of the alternatives for browsers, let alone operating systems.
Not so. I've often had this issue come up in Vista.
Oftentimes it's programs being hard-coded to use IE, rather than open the default browser.
Other programs use the IE rendering engine for in-program functions. Steam, for example, uses the IE engine. If I don't have Flash installed in IE, Steam gets annoyed and prompts me to install it by opening IE.
Dealers in items like silencers and machine guns in the US require a "Class III Special Occupational Tax".
However, individual owners do not require any sort of license. It's a common misconception.
Most commonly, private owners must pay a $200 tax to the ATF, get fingerprinted, have local police approval, ATF approval, and then receive an ATF Form 4, which contains a physical postage-stamp-like "tax stamp" which indicates they have paid the required tax for the item.
It's just a tax receipt, not a license, and one must be prepared to present a copy of it to police upon request.
The long guns in my safe are kept unloaded, with ammo either in magazines or its original boxes nearby (usually either in ammo cans in the safe, or on a shelf immediately outside the safe).
My bedside pistol, however, is kept loaded with a round chambered (the Springfield XD-45, like most pistols, this is perfectly safe to do, so long as one does not disengage the safeties and pull the trigger). This gun sits in my bedside table drawer and is kept in a holster to prevent accidental actuation of the trigger. In the event of an emergency -- particularly late at night when I'd be disoriented -- it's far easier to grab the grip of the pistol with one hand and grab the holster with the other and pull the two apart than it would be to grab a magazine, ensure it's facing the right way, and insert it into the gun.
Leaving the slide open is just asking for an accident -- having a slide close on your finger hurts a lot, and could easily interfere with a self-defense scenario.
In many home defense scenarios, time is of the utmost importance. While in a non-stressed situation, you or I could think clearly enough to insert the magazines, close the slide, and make the gun ready to fire without any trouble, it's much more difficult in a stressful, dark situation where one might have just been awakened. Keeping things simple is key.
Also, note that many homes that have children and guns may very well have children who are properly trained in the safe use of guns, and won't handle them without adult supervision. For some families, it may be more prudent to have a lockable gun box next to the bed or in the closet to keep their kids from accessing the guns (particularly useful with very young children), but for others it might not be necessary. Remember that "children" is often defined as those under 18 -- I know several people who have teenage offspring who are mature, educated, and better trained in firearms than most people. It's not these people you need to worry about.
Just my $0.02.
Remember that the iPod can play other formats of music (including MP3 and AAC audio, which can be ripped and encoded by any number of encoders) in addition to the Apple DRM'ed stuff.
If one uses iTunes Music Store, one is constrained to using iTunes or an iPod to play music.
But if one has an iPod, one is not constrained to using iTunes to get music.
There are numerous other contributing factors than the presence or absence of a certain type weapon.
Criminals have no problem acquiring and importing vast quantities of drugs and other contraband. If firearms were somehow officially banned, I suspect that criminals would still be able to acquire them with relative ease.
Or they could commit crimes with knives, clubs, pointed sticks, fists, chains, tire irons, lead weights, swords, noxious chemicals, or any number of dangerous items commonly found in modern society. Several can be quite a bit more dangerous than a gun.
It would be interesting to map out where various crimes take place, and what parties are involved. From the brief amount of research that I've done on the topic (and by no means exhaustive or error-free, I'm sure), it would seem that a majority of crimes committed with guns in the US involve inner-city, low-income, black males that a) are involved with drug trafficking/sales, b) members of criminal gangs, or c) both. Not surprisingly, most of their victims fit into the same categories. Many of those committing gun-related crimes are already convicted criminals, and it's already illegal for them to own or possess firearms.
Your average law-abiding Joe Sixpack is not, statistically speaking, a danger to himself or others when it comes to firearms. There's something like 90 million gun owners in the United States, with about 500 million privately owned firearms. Only the tiniest fraction of these guns are used by criminals.
It would seem that the most obvious and effective method of dealing with this issue would be to a) stop people from becoming criminals, and b) punish those who do become criminals. "a" is a bit difficult, with prior-restraint laws and other various freedoms (which I fully support). As for "b", that's for people more well-versed in law enforcment and the justice system to figure out -- all I know is that something isn't right when people charged with assault, armed robbery, and so forth get the revolving-door treatment, while people convicted of non-violent offenses frequently serve longer sentences.
I think the grandparent is referring to "Before So Many Things From China Started Being Imported".
I have an older (but still working) television downstairs that was made in the US. I have electrical appliances (lamps, ovens, etc.) that were made in the US. My car (which has now been totalled) was made in Germany (Mercedes), and now my new 2006 Toyota Camry is made in the US (Kentucky, to be precise). I also have some Sears Craftsman hand tools that were all made in the US.
While some modern products are almost exclusively made in China, I generally am willing to spend a bit more money to purchase US-made products, particularly when it comes to important things, or things that must be made well, last a long time, and and be of high quality. Jumper cables for a diesel-powered car, for example, must be capable of carrying substantial amperage...the el-cheapo Made In China ones simply weren't enough. Fortunately, for about $10 more, there was some beefy US-made cables that were satisfactory.
Yes, there's quite a bit of stuff where it's difficult to avoid buying things made in China, but if one is willing to put forth some effort (and usually a small bit more money), one is able to find quality goods made in the US, Europe, or other such places...and I'm usually happy to spend that extra money to support an American (or European) country. Still, I buy my $12 blue jeans at Wal-Mart (made in El Salvador or some such) and use them for painting and other dirty work. My actual work jeans are made in the US, and are quite a bit more durable.
Isn't that precisely why public-key encryption was designed? Sure, they can intercept the exchange of public keys (using Diffie-Hellman exchange will reduce this, and generally make such key-exchange secure), but without the private keys they cannot decrypt the content with even the most powerful of computers in any sort of reasonable amount of time.
It's not perfect, but it's far better than nothing.
If the government is after you, they can just arrest you and detain you until you provide the information they want. Even traffic analysis of unreadable content may provide additional useful information...perhaps more useful than the data itself.
But various studies[1] like this one[2] have indicated that speed limits have little effect on the frequency or number of accidents. In fact, in some cases, raising the speed limit actually lessens the risk of accidents.
Yes, speed is a contributing factor to the severity of the accident, but not to whether or not the accident actually occurs. Look at the Autobahn in Germany. Accidents are not nearly as common as they are on American freeways (I don't know anything about Canadian freeways and their accident rates), yet the speeds tend to be substantially higher.
Personally, I think the speed limits are mostly for police to engage in revenue collection. Yes, keeping speeds around 55-60mph usually results in fuel savings for most vehicles, but people should be free to move at any safe rate of speed, within appropriate limits for that particular roadway (and most people naturally drive at a safe speed for the road, even if it is higher than the posted limit), and have that choice be their own. If I choose to drive at 55 to save fuel, you'll find me in the slow lane with the semi trucks. If I choose to drive 85 because I'm late for an appointment, I'll be in the fast lane with other similarly-rapid vehicles.
I would posit that if one were to remove all speed limit signs, except for those around inherently dangerous sections of roadway (i.e. an upcoming sharp turn that requires a lower rate of speed), most people would drive slightly faster (maybe 70-80mph) than they do presently, but would still drive in a safe manner. I doubt that many would suddenly start going 140mph just because there's no signs.
[1] http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/p-sl.html
[2] http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
What prevents you from giving false information?
"Ben Franklin, 1026 Lightning Kite Way, Somewhere, Pennsylvania"
Assuming you pick a real city, a computer wouldn't know that as a fake address or not. Even your average phone-activation person probably wouldn't pick up on it.
I think the people trying to "censor" blogs do have a legitimate point: you can bet that everyone who is campaigning for something will set up blogs, pretending to be independant, that sing their praises. That's harder to do with "real" publications because they cost money to set up and run, and their ownership is public record.
Perhaps, but who would read them?
I certainly don't peruse the net in search of new blogs. Sure, I searched around for a few, but generally read ones belonging to my friends (and I certainly make no political judgement based on their blogs), or to well-established posters who have been mentioned by people I know and trust.
If a politician sets up a blog, how are they going to promote it? With campaign money? Doubtful -- that'd draw a connection between the candidate and this "stealth" blog, which is precisely what they wish to avoid. Who would find out about it? Wouldn't it be just slightly suspicious if a new blog pops up just when the candidate is running and happens to only have highly-praising (or highly derogatory) things about a particular candidate?
I doubt that politician-run blogs will have anywhere near the effect that people claim.
Even if they do create such a thing, so what? Free speech. They're welcome to say whatever they want...at least according to the Constitution they are.
13 hoops? Dare I ask what registrar you have?
With GoDaddy and a few of the other registrars I've used in the last few years, updating DNS servers and whois contact information is trivial. I had far more trouble with Network Solutions' Update By Email That Must Be Precisely Formatted system for a single domain than I ever have with GoDaddy and the six or seven domains I presently have.
My experiences with registrars and the DNS system in general have been nothing but positive recently, particularly after they changed the root zone to update much more frequently than every 12 hours (what is it now, like 5 minutes?). That makes brining new domains online much faster.
I understand your point, but there are many, many more less-deserving people who are actually making an honest living who get worse treatment by the authorities.
There are several local firearms dealers who run upright, legal stores in my area. Every single one of them is exceedingly careful, complies with all local, state, and federal laws, frequently turn down sales to potentially shady individuals (even people who are otherwise upstanding citizens, but just ask some of the wrong questions), etc. Not once have they broken the law, any regulations, etc. -- they all comply fully with the "spirit" and "letter" of the law.
Yet they're frequently hassled by the ATF, California Department of Justice, etc. The ATF doesn't hassle them nearly as much as the CADOJ does. Without being accused of or guilty of any crime, they lose maybe a week or two's worth of business every year due to inspections, questions, and so forth. That's a fair bit of business, but you never see anyone complaining about them.
I will be the first to defend Ralsky's rights under the law, even though I loathe the man, his business tactics, etc. If the FBI had probable cause that he had been breaking the law, documented this, presented it to a judge, were issued a warrant, and executed their search and seizure within the bounds of the warrant and the law. If it turns out that they exceeded the law, I will gladly complain loudly.
And, after much public outrage, ceased the operation of SiteFinder.
IMHO, if VeriSign wants to have any role in the DNS architecture, they should stick to running the registry under contract to ICANN, and not have any sort of role in the actual content of the registry (i.e. adding the *.com wildcard). They certainly should not exceed the bounds of their contract/mandate, and should not attempt to influence the DNS architecture to their own profit.
I'd like to see a well-run non-profit handle the root registry. Any government or quasi-governmental body should not be let within fifty miles of any of the root servers, let alone be given any sort of administrative control.
We can't even bring ourselves to do the right thing when it's only JUST as convenient as doing the wrong thing.
Define "right thing".
My Honda Insight was indeed a very efficient, low-polluting car (rated as "SULEV" by California). It met my needs for quite some time, but eventually my needs required a four-door, durable, reliable car with a large trunk. Thus, I bought my diesel-powered Mercedes and run it on biodiesel and dino-diesel, depending on what's cheaper. Buying diesel fuel, although slightly more expensive, with my Discover credit card (which gives me 5% off) is actually less expensive than buying gasoline cash-only at the el-cheapo station around here.
Also, I loathe the fact that modern cars are made out of thin sheet metal and plastic. Low-speed fender-benders become very expensive. My Mercedes is made from durable materials that, even after 13 years, still look almost new.
Finally, Ford now has a PZEV-rated 130hp engine in their 2005 Focus cars. That's right, a gas-only engine that emits less pollutants than hybrids. And it gets about 35mpg. Not bad at all.
To summarize: There's no such thing as a "right thing" for all people. That's why there's no one-size-fits all vehicle. People have different needs, and different cars meet those needs.
Well considering that AFAICT all the currently available gas/electric hybrids on the market get considerably worse mileage on the freeway than they do in stop and go traffic
Not so in my experience.
My 2003 Honda Insight hybrid got about 30-45mpg in the city, and 50-90mpg on the freeway, depending on road conditions, speed, and whether or not I was drafting off a semi.
The sticker said it should get 56/55 (city/highway), which I found to be highly inaccurate. My city mileage was significantly less than my highway mileage.
Either way, I sold the car (new cars have really flimsy body panels that are a pain when involved in low-speed fender benders, and I was concerned about long-term maintenance), bought 1992 diesel Mercedes (now *that*'s a durable car!), and run it on biodiesel. It's about the same price as regular gasoline (diesel here in California tends to be more expensive, oddly enough), cleaner, etc. It also seems to be pretty stable in terms of price.
PGPDisk?
so why some of you think it is more important to question the motivations of western authorities and not criticize terrorist's motivations instead is beyond me. do i trust the autorities with my freedoms? no. but i know they aren't the threat to me right now. i simply don't understand people who see more menace in western authorities than in terrorist's actions. and judging by who bears the brunt of the criticism after a terrorist action, you know exactly what i am talking about. how about criticizing the terrorists? i know, strange concept.
One must consider some statistics here. Now, I don't have any precise numbers here, so bear with me.
In the United States, how many major terrorist actions have taken place in the last ten years? I count two: the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1995, and the September 11th attacks in 2001. If you go back a couple more years, you get one more -- the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. How many people did these affect directly (being killed or injured, or having family killed or injured)? Let's be quite generous and say 10,000, ok?
That's out of 295,000,000 people. That works out to be about 0.003% of the total population.
Now, how many false arrests/detentions are there in the entire United States in a single year? Probably quite a bit more than 10,000 per year, I'd imagine.
Without knowing actual numbers of false arrests, I would hazard a Wild Ass Guess that my chances of being falsely arrested by the police are several orders of magnitude higher than of me being directly affected by a terrorist act.
The odds of a terrorist striking my relatively small town (a suburb of San Francisco and San Jose, California) is quite small, particularly when compared to my odds of being hassled by the police. The chances of me being hassled by the police are additionally raised by the fact that I own several firearms (of which they have records associated with me), and frequently travel to and from a variety of ranges in the Bay Area.
Thus, I am more worried about falsely being arrested or detained by the police than I am about a terrorist attack. I'm also far more worried about being struck by lightning or by being broadsided by a bus. I'm also very worried about the increasing amount of money, resources, and authority being given to law enforcement agencies/officers to deal with an incredibly unlikely threat...particularly when it takes them 15-20 minutes to show up to my house after my burglar alarm goes off. I'd rather the police show up promptly to a burglar alarm than have them spend billions trying to prepare for a statistically unlikely event that would only affect a very, very small percentage of Americans.
Indeed, and one can buy easily-replaceable toner (which is much easier to replace than refilling ink cartridges) from various stores, eBay, or even buy remanufactured cartridges from local stores.
I have the starter cart, a second cart, and enough toner to refill those two for up to 20,000 pages worth. I'm pretty much set until the laser printer explodes.
I disagree about your analysis of the danger of NAT.
NAT in a corporate or home environment makes a lot of sense; why waste lots of perfectly good public IP addresses for internal networks? It also adds a layer of security between the LAN and the Great Screaming Hordes, which is quite helpful.
Most internet users today are consumers of information, not creators. Sure, they write emails, post to blogs, and chat on messaging services...and those purposes are generally not affected by NAT.
Many universities provide hosting services for students and faculty, thus removing the need for user-level servers hosted on individual computers, at least for academic purposes. Having some sort of security layer between students and the internet to protect them from inbound malicious traffic (university students are notoriously bad at maintaining security on their PCs, and frequently get zombied) makes a lot of sense these days. Obviously, no form of actual content-based filtering on user-initiated connections should be instituted -- academic freedom and all.
In many cases, NAT makes excellent sense for universities and other academic institutions. I certainly wouldn't mind using my computer on a university NAT'ed network, so long as there was no form of censorship.
The only possible conflict that I can see is with various client-level programs requiring open network ports, like networked computer games. I'm not fully up to date on plug-and-play type solutions, but I wonder if it would be possible to have client machines automatically and transparently request and be granted opened ports from a gateway?
In short: Using NAT in academic institutions could, so long as they are not used as excuses for censorship, be beneficial in terms of reduced costs (less IP space required, opens the availability of traffic-shaping to prevent a few BitTorrent users from saturating the entire pipe, etc.), easier administration, security, and other reasons. Most students would never notice NAT, and those that had some sort of reason for having a publicly-accessible IP for academic/compelling reasons could be granted such access.
I'm completely against censorship, and don't condone it in any form. Using NAT only for technical/security purposes makes sense to me on the present-day internet.
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. - UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19.
I believe that Australia is a signatory to the United Nations, and thus this applies.
Either way, I believe the parent was suggesting that freedom of speech is not a right granted to an individual by any particular government or legal system, but rather that freedom of speech is an inherent right present in all humans (and presumably all living beings capable of communication), regardless of their government.
Just because a government restricts the freedom of speech does not take away that inherent right. In such a situation, the government would be "wrong" in an ethical sense, even if they crafted laws to legally justify what they were doing.
Ironically enough, the captcha below this posting box is displaying the word "despots".