Not really. Talking about the UK system here, which is being touted as the ultimate terrorist deterrent, I really can't see how they expect it to work. Nobody can be naive enough to honestly think the cards can't be cloned, but hey, they're biometric - as soon as you get someone's card they can fingerprint you and find out it's not yours. Except that this means that if the prints match up they will be taken as gospel, so when Mr. Well Funded Terrorist takes Mr. Average Guy's card, copies the name, serial number, address etc. onto a new card containing his photo and biometric details what do you do then?
Yeah, travel is strictly limited. I also visited China (Hangzhou) on a student exchange program with about 10 others a few years back. We toured around the local sights with our guides for a few weeks, saw the bits of China deemed safe to show to western students and generally took in the culture. The idea was that the same time a year later the Chinese students we were partnered with would come back to the UK and see the sights around our area. Out of a group of 11 16-19 year olds 4 were not allowed to come for 'undisclosed reasons' even with a year's notice and planning.
It works for the same reason spam works. Ads are more expensive than spam, obviously, but still not too pricey alot of the time. They're almost certainly cheap enough that one purchase per hits is enough. All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap - the easiest way to hit alot of morons is to saturate the web, you'll piss off millions, but still hit thousands willing to give you money.
Quite right - I could've been writing that post myself. The unfortunate point is that most people are too fucking stupid to realise. People are morons who don't think past what they are told - relise it, deal with it, use it to your advantage.
Not saying I agree with the grandparent in any way, but I don't see why the rich or poor would have any advantage or disadvantage in those questions. Would you care to elaborate on why?
Just what I was thinking. People really have fallen for the FUD hook, line and sinker here.
Help prevent illegal immigration? You mean like passports are supposed to do?
Catch criminals? WTF? 'Excuse me sir, you appear to have mugged someone and taken their wallet containing their ID card. Can I see your ID card please?'
How is forging/stealing one, universal card that everyone carries going to be harder for identity theives than forging a stack of documents that most people leave locked up at home?
Prevention of terrorism also warrants the response of WTF? - Why on earth do these people believe that a highly funded terrorist organisation couldn't simply pickpocket a few people and take their cards, or even fake their own or find a corrupt officer to issue them?
I think I may have to move to a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, it might protect me from death by swarm of morons.
But if it isn't dangerous you don't need prints. If it is then they would be very helpful, but you can't have humans approaching a package for forensics if a bot has already designated it a probable bomb.
It beats out some midrange PDAs, so I would think it's a little excessive for a single function device, yes. Having said that, it could add the capability to expand (ads to cover the setup cost, maybe?). It's always better to have more than you need rather than spend double later upgrading.
Why has nobody realised yet that it doesn't say 1/3 of email recieved is spam, but that 1/3 of email sent in the US is spam. I'm not suprised at that in the slightest - most spammers don't want to bother with the legal risks involved in sending spam inside the US. Just send it through some open relay wherever you find one or operate from Russia, it's far easier.
Despite the fact that the article is intended as a stab at the geek community, the fact stands that people who don't know what they're buying get ripped off. If I got AOL broadband I'd be paying over 100GBP/Year more for the same service I have now. Comparing the prices in PC world to the computer I just built for a friend it was almost 500GBP less, for the sake of under an hour of work.
Why settle for an inferior product at a higher price?
Just what I was thinking. I've installed Mandrake on a fair few machines without issue - it happily picks up even the obscure onboard soundcards on cheap motherboards during the install with no extra drivers needed, which is a much better than Win95 or even 98 - they don't even like certain soundblasters without tweaking.
Is there any news available about if or when there are going to be G5 based laptops released?
I'm looking to get an Apple notebook in about 6 months but I don't want to have a big jump like the G4 to G5 be released a few months later when I could've gone without it for a little longer and then got the G5.
So you think a serial killer who tortured countless people deserves to just fall asleep and never wake up? Doesn't sound like much retribution for what they have done.
Can I report a blatant violation if my mailserver is in the US despite the fact I'm in the UK? I've got a pretty good bit of evidence if ever there was one.
I get on average 150+ spam mails per day to my main email account since it's been posted on a few sites. I also own the domain that the account is on, so I have access to the catch-all (primarily needed for friends who mistype my address) which gets only 1-2 messages a day. A mail hit the catch-all account with the headers clearly showing it had been aimed at a random string of numbers @mydomain.com - there is clearly no way I have ever opted into anything using an address like that and yet the email actually said at the bottom that it was opt-in mail and stated its compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.
Since it was sent to a nonexistant address I clearly did not opt in to recieving it, and they are claiming that the comply when this means they don't. Is that enough proof? If so how can I report them? Can I even report them since I'm not in the US (although my server is)?
No, a few people think there should be more time than that. I think anything more than a year for spamming is stupid - hefty fines (and I mean really slam them, don't let them do a Microsoft) would be better suited to the crime anyway. Prison time should be reserved for violent crimes or repeat offenders.
Scare off spammers, fraudsters etc. by making it financially crippling to get caught. Most people will see it as a stupid gamble looking at risk/reward. Those who do it and get caught then go near bankruptcy and don't do it again. The real weasles try one more time, get bankrupted and give up. Anyone stupid enough to get themselves fined like that 4 times or more gets put in prison.
Someone who holds up a store at gunpoint gets a few years for endangering the safety of others as well as theft. Someone who actually shoots the shopkeeper and steals the money gets a long time because they fsking well shot someone.
It'd be a license to do anything you want for anyone who doesn't believe in an afterlife. Spend your time doing whatever you like and then when you die *poof* your brain stops functioning, your personality ceases to be and as such there is no punishment - you have no mind left therefore you aren't thinking, if you aren't thinking then obviously you don't even know you're dead.
This is also my main argument against the death penalty in practise - if someone does something truly terrible then death is not punishment since they are not around to suffer. Life imprisonment, however, leaves you spending your remaining years being punished - much harsher in my book.
Out of interest, does the Google toolbar track usage? Fair enough if it does, but if it doesn't I would think Amazon would want to put themselves on even or better ground than Google and giving the user less privacy than your competitor is not the way to do that IMO. Seems to me like a possible case of bad marketing if nothing else.
On the gmail front, I quite agree. You're getting something for nothing and its not as if they even do anything with personal information, it's just all collated into a 'user profile' thing.
Re:Maybe it is because we are skeptical...
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
10% of zero hours of sunshine is still zero hours:-P
Slashdot Mirror
Great for catching terroists
Not really. Talking about the UK system here, which is being touted as the ultimate terrorist deterrent, I really can't see how they expect it to work. Nobody can be naive enough to honestly think the cards can't be cloned, but hey, they're biometric - as soon as you get someone's card they can fingerprint you and find out it's not yours. Except that this means that if the prints match up they will be taken as gospel, so when Mr. Well Funded Terrorist takes Mr. Average Guy's card, copies the name, serial number, address etc. onto a new card containing his photo and biometric details what do you do then?
Yeah, travel is strictly limited. I also visited China (Hangzhou) on a student exchange program with about 10 others a few years back. We toured around the local sights with our guides for a few weeks, saw the bits of China deemed safe to show to western students and generally took in the culture. The idea was that the same time a year later the Chinese students we were partnered with would come back to the UK and see the sights around our area. Out of a group of 11 16-19 year olds 4 were not allowed to come for 'undisclosed reasons' even with a year's notice and planning.
You can kinda see where the train of thought went in order to get it to this:
Web Log -> __b log -> blog -> mobile blog -> mob___ blog -> moblog
Should've said: ...one purchase per <insane number here> hits is enough...
It works for the same reason spam works. Ads are more expensive than spam, obviously, but still not too pricey alot of the time. They're almost certainly cheap enough that one purchase per hits is enough. All it takes to get rich without making anything good is to track down those stupid enough to buy your crap - the easiest way to hit alot of morons is to saturate the web, you'll piss off millions, but still hit thousands willing to give you money.
Quite right - I could've been writing that post myself. The unfortunate point is that most people are too fucking stupid to realise. People are morons who don't think past what they are told - relise it, deal with it, use it to your advantage.
Not saying I agree with the grandparent in any way, but I don't see why the rich or poor would have any advantage or disadvantage in those questions. Would you care to elaborate on why?
Just what I was thinking. People really have fallen for the FUD hook, line and sinker here.
Help prevent illegal immigration? You mean like passports are supposed to do?
Catch criminals? WTF? 'Excuse me sir, you appear to have mugged someone and taken their wallet containing their ID card. Can I see your ID card please?'
How is forging/stealing one, universal card that everyone carries going to be harder for identity theives than forging a stack of documents that most people leave locked up at home?
Prevention of terrorism also warrants the response of WTF? - Why on earth do these people believe that a highly funded terrorist organisation couldn't simply pickpocket a few people and take their cards, or even fake their own or find a corrupt officer to issue them?
I think I may have to move to a deserted island in the middle of the ocean, it might protect me from death by swarm of morons.
Does it make me geekier than the average /.er that my first thought was to set it to something like 'Picard delta 3'
It's always nice to find a place where true geeks are still going strong. That brightened my day :-D
I kept eating the replacement fingerprints that the lab made from melted down gummi bears, and the acid was on special offer...
But if it isn't dangerous you don't need prints. If it is then they would be very helpful, but you can't have humans approaching a package for forensics if a bot has already designated it a probable bomb.
It beats out some midrange PDAs, so I would think it's a little excessive for a single function device, yes. Having said that, it could add the capability to expand (ads to cover the setup cost, maybe?). It's always better to have more than you need rather than spend double later upgrading.
Why has nobody realised yet that it doesn't say 1/3 of email recieved is spam, but that 1/3 of email sent in the US is spam. I'm not suprised at that in the slightest - most spammers don't want to bother with the legal risks involved in sending spam inside the US. Just send it through some open relay wherever you find one or operate from Russia, it's far easier.
Despite the fact that the article is intended as a stab at the geek community, the fact stands that people who don't know what they're buying get ripped off. If I got AOL broadband I'd be paying over 100GBP/Year more for the same service I have now. Comparing the prices in PC world to the computer I just built for a friend it was almost 500GBP less, for the sake of under an hour of work.
Why settle for an inferior product at a higher price?
Just what I was thinking. I've installed Mandrake on a fair few machines without issue - it happily picks up even the obscure onboard soundcards on cheap motherboards during the install with no extra drivers needed, which is a much better than Win95 or even 98 - they don't even like certain soundblasters without tweaking.
What about a mechwarrior style exoskeleton with the controls hooked into your brain. The days of geeks being beaten up would finally be over >:-)
Is there any news available about if or when there are going to be G5 based laptops released?
I'm looking to get an Apple notebook in about 6 months but I don't want to have a big jump like the G4 to G5 be released a few months later when I could've gone without it for a little longer and then got the G5.
So you think a serial killer who tortured countless people deserves to just fall asleep and never wake up? Doesn't sound like much retribution for what they have done.
No, I wouldn't want them to be executed, I'd like life in prison to do what it says on the tin.
Can I report a blatant violation if my mailserver is in the US despite the fact I'm in the UK? I've got a pretty good bit of evidence if ever there was one.
I get on average 150+ spam mails per day to my main email account since it's been posted on a few sites. I also own the domain that the account is on, so I have access to the catch-all (primarily needed for friends who mistype my address) which gets only 1-2 messages a day. A mail hit the catch-all account with the headers clearly showing it had been aimed at a random string of numbers @mydomain.com - there is clearly no way I have ever opted into anything using an address like that and yet the email actually said at the bottom that it was opt-in mail and stated its compliance with the CAN-SPAM act.
Since it was sent to a nonexistant address I clearly did not opt in to recieving it, and they are claiming that the comply when this means they don't. Is that enough proof? If so how can I report them? Can I even report them since I'm not in the US (although my server is)?
No, a few people think there should be more time than that. I think anything more than a year for spamming is stupid - hefty fines (and I mean really slam them, don't let them do a Microsoft) would be better suited to the crime anyway. Prison time should be reserved for violent crimes or repeat offenders.
Scare off spammers, fraudsters etc. by making it financially crippling to get caught. Most people will see it as a stupid gamble looking at risk/reward. Those who do it and get caught then go near bankruptcy and don't do it again. The real weasles try one more time, get bankrupted and give up. Anyone stupid enough to get themselves fined like that 4 times or more gets put in prison.
Someone who holds up a store at gunpoint gets a few years for endangering the safety of others as well as theft. Someone who actually shoots the shopkeeper and steals the money gets a long time because they fsking well shot someone.
It'd be a license to do anything you want for anyone who doesn't believe in an afterlife. Spend your time doing whatever you like and then when you die *poof* your brain stops functioning, your personality ceases to be and as such there is no punishment - you have no mind left therefore you aren't thinking, if you aren't thinking then obviously you don't even know you're dead.
This is also my main argument against the death penalty in practise - if someone does something truly terrible then death is not punishment since they are not around to suffer. Life imprisonment, however, leaves you spending your remaining years being punished - much harsher in my book.
Out of interest, does the Google toolbar track usage? Fair enough if it does, but if it doesn't I would think Amazon would want to put themselves on even or better ground than Google and giving the user less privacy than your competitor is not the way to do that IMO. Seems to me like a possible case of bad marketing if nothing else.
On the gmail front, I quite agree. You're getting something for nothing and its not as if they even do anything with personal information, it's just all collated into a 'user profile' thing.
10% of zero hours of sunshine is still zero hours :-P