The Emancipation Proclamation was one of Lincoln's Executive Orders. Has it expired?
Yes.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 only affected states then in rebellion against the United States. Wherever the Union armies marched from then on, slavery would die.
The Proclamation exempted border states like Kentucky which did not join the Confederacy, cities like New Orleans which had fallen early in the war, and the 48 counties of western Virgina which would form the state of West Virgina.
The formal end to slavery came with the Thirteenth Amendment, adopted in December 1865.
The reality is biometrics never work like the movies.
In real life your Mission:Impossible team doesn't get the breaks you see in the movies or on home video. The tech is more sophisticated. Defenses are in layers.
You have to carry a player for that audio recording. The color print-out from your Nikon. The tripod to mount the photo in place. Each complication ups the risk of detection.
How easy is it to fool this thing? For instance, will holding a picture of the laptop's owner in front of the camera unlock the machine?
For this you need access to the laptop, a reasonable expectation of privacy, and an appropriate photo of the owner. This isn't a trick that would be particularly safe for the guy working the next cubicle - much less two flights down.
The simplest solution for a single camera might be to a take a second picture at some random time after you log in.
How long would you be willing to keep that photo mounted in place?
It must be a geek thing but I don't get what the problem is here.
Of course, it's a geek thing.
Wireless networking is sold as a mass market consumer product to users who are not comfortable with changing the factory defaults or straying one step beyond the automated set-up routine.
Wireless networking is sold to users who do not assume eavesdropping is a normal, everyday - morally acceptable - practice:
"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, do no evil."
They collected information which was publicly available from the street. Big deal.
Available - but only with high-tech monitoring gear.
Available - but only because wireless networking is new to most folks.
Available - because the default wireless set-up is insecure - and who do we have to blame for that if not the geek who programs these systems at the OEM level?
The issue is that proprietary software allows ridiculous profit margins (close to 100% since the software costs nothing to distribute
The cost of development - production - is never zero even in open source.
Service is labor-intensive. Supporting the IT pro in the enterprise can be profitable. But supporting the home and SOHO user? That's a much tougher proposition.
Not least because the apps themselves are often second-tier.
They don't have IBM or Google or Oracle to provide money, staffing and discipline.
People's ability to download movies, songs, books for free is devaluing the time and wages of the creators. The media companies won't completely disappear - they'll just earn 10-20% as much money as they did before 1999.
What really happens is that production shifts to other markets.
The P2P demographic is young adult male. Geek.
Which means no more $200 million budgets for films like Iron Man and The Dark Knight.
No more low-budget Sci-Fi in HD.
No more Dr. Who. Battlestar Galactica. Babylon 5. Firefly.
Disney and Pixar should make out just fine.
The Incredibles and Wall-E have impeccable geek-cred. But more importantly a cross-over appeal that reached male and female audiences of every age.
For the quick buck, Disney can always put out another "High School Musical."
XP is backwards compatible with many programs written for MSDOS, Win 3.1 and Win 9x.
But protecting the installed base of small business and enterprise applications written for XP is truly misssion-critical for Microsoft. The patch must not break these apps.
It would be lunatic to blindly trust a patch from a competitor -
and it is Microsoft - not Google - that has thirty years experience in its core markets. That knows which apps are likely to break and why.
Next time I see a commercial website that requires Flash, I'll call the vendor and explain why I can't use their website. Should help kill Flash once and for all.
The vendor collects internal stats and subscribes to Net Applications and other services.
He knows that you represent less than 1% of his target audience.
It's effectively true, because of all the subsidies the OEMs get for installing windows. Plus the perception of the average "consumer" is "I got windows free with my computer". So while the true cost of windows is huge, almost incalculably so, it's also "cheap", as in everyone gets it without any real effort and minimal up-front expense. Which actually, is exactly like Wal-Mart if you stop to think about it...
The cheapest 64 bit Win 7 Home Premium laptop at WalMart.com is $378. The cheapest Win 7 SE netbook a $228 Dell Inspiron.
That is getting perilously close to the price point of the as-yet-unseen ARM sub-netbook.
The OEM does not pay retail list for Windows.
There are even greater - truly enormous - economies of scale in building and marketing product for the OS with 90% of the market.
Product placement is simply the icing on the cake.
The plug-and-play OEM system install - the hardware and software bundle - sold under warranty - solves so many problems for the user, it is impossible to imagine an OS gaining significant market share without it.
Though it'd be nice to get some kind of slate for a cheap price - this should cut down the price by $100, if Ubuntu can get someone on board with it.
Simply an observation:
WalMart - the world's largest and most aggressive deep discount retailer - has never been able to consistently undercut OEM Windows by $100 - by $75 - by $50 - on systems with competitive, marketable, specs.
The guy would rather go to jail in the UK then one of your rape prisons for decades, what a surprise!
He may find the UK prison no safer:
British jails are failing to investigate serious allegations of male rape, according to the prisons ombudsman.
Stephen Shaw's concerns, which are expressed in a report into the alleged rape of a prisoner who had Asperger's syndrome and learning difficulties, are likely to place a new focus on a subject that is hardly ever discussed within the prison system.
His comments are made in an official report into the case of "Mark", a 21-year-old man with Asperger's syndrome, learning difficulties and a history of self-harm, who was remanded to Altcourse prison in Liverpool in 2007. It was recommended that Mark, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, be remanded into a psychiatric unit, but there were no places available.
Despite his vulnerable nature, he was placed on a wing with sex offenders and was allegedly raped by a cellmate who had attempted to assault him several weeks earlier. He attempted to throw himself off a prison landing shortly after the alleged incident and is now in a psychiatric unit.
Files relating to the case have gone missing, making the job of investigating the rape allegation an almost impossible task. Merseyside Police attempted a scientific examination after the incident but, according to Jane, her son's mattress and clothes were swapped within hours of the alleged assault having taken place.
Mark's case has been pursued by the Howard League which, following a two-year battle, believes it has won vital recognition of the issue from the ombudsman.
Experts say it is likely that incidents of rape in British prisons are heavily under-reported. According to figures released by the government in response to parliamentary questions, there were 119 allegations of sexual assault in prison in 2008, but only 33 were subject to a PSO1300 investigation.
"There are clear reasons why rape and sexual assault would go unreported in prison," [the assistant director of the Howard League] said. "Not only will it be difficult to prove in many instances, but telling a member of staff that you have been raped would see prisoners ostracised and vulnerable to bullying. We believe the 119 recorded incidents of sexual assault in prison are likely to be a serious underestimation of the problem. In that context, the fact that only 33 internal investigations were then commissioned seems a pitiful response from the authorities."
Is why many publishers would be happy to close all libraries if it were politically viable.
It's a false analogy.
Books aren't free to your public library.
They have to pay - which that you have to pay through taxes and donations - often for custom bindings or multiple copies that will stand the wear and tear of circulation.
Only one physical copy of a book or video can be in circulation at any moment - which can mean you may be weeks waiting for the most popular titles.
It means that any single copy can't have more than about fifty readers or viewers a year.
Not the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of copies to be downloaded off the P2P.nets.
Since at least some of his medical conditions could be considered mental illnesses, that will probably be his defense.
In the federal system, it's become a stiff uphill climb:
Congress passed revisions in the defense embodied in the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which reads:
"It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense."
The "irresistible impulse" is not a defense.
Under separate legislation, the burden of proof shifted to the defendant - to produce "clear and convincing evidence" of his incapacity and the expert witness is not permitted to lead the jury by expressing his own opinion. THE JOHN HINCKLEY TRIAL & ITS EFFECT ON THE INSANITY DEFENSE
1) From a PR perspective, I suppose jailing other countries crazy people is better than us bombing them
The only message the US gives a damn about is warning would-be hackers is that the hammer will come down if you break into its systems.
4) It makes his govt look like a US lapdog
When you are out of the government, defending McKinnon is easy. But the London tabloids won't be kind if the US refuses extradition of the UK's next highly politicized "fugitive."
He's not saying he should get off without charge; he's saying he should be tried in the UK for a criminal offense committed in the UK
I don't believe it is responsible to argue that a suspect should escape extradition for crimes committed by remote control across a state or international border.
The precedent it sets is simply too dangerous.
McKinnon was in the UK.
But the computers he broke into were in the US.
They could only be accessed except through commands that were executed in the US.
They get what they can get. They bring in a lot of money to the owners, why not charge that much?
The promoter has always known that the star attraction is his best guarantee of success at the box office. Mark Twain's satirical playbill for the Roman Coliseum didn't stray too far from the truth. The Innocents Abroad [1869, Chapter 26]
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like how everything he films with his camera will become covered under the MPEG-LA patents and thus forbidden to share?
What the hell are you talking about?
MPEG LA doesn't forbid sharing of anything.
MPEG LA collects royalties on the big green - large scale - for-profit - commercial sale and distribution.
2 cents per disk or download for the H.264 distribution of Toy Story 3.
The Emancipation Proclamation was one of Lincoln's Executive Orders. Has it expired?
Yes.
The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 only affected states then in rebellion against the United States. Wherever the Union armies marched from then on, slavery would die.
The Proclamation exempted border states like Kentucky which did not join the Confederacy, cities like New Orleans which had fallen early in the war, and the 48 counties of western Virgina which would form the state of West Virgina.
The formal end to slavery came with the Thirteenth Amendment, adopted in December 1865.
what..do they do with uncooperative respondents?
playing Mickey Mouse games with the examiner is likely to be more psychologically revealing - more dangerous - than answering his questions directly.
The reality is biometrics never work like the movies.
In real life your Mission:Impossible team doesn't get the breaks you see in the movies or on home video. The tech is more sophisticated. Defenses are in layers.
You have to carry a player for that audio recording. The color print-out from your Nikon. The tripod to mount the photo in place. Each complication ups the risk of detection.
How easy is it to fool this thing? For instance, will holding a picture of the laptop's owner in front of the camera unlock the machine?
For this you need access to the laptop, a reasonable expectation of privacy, and an appropriate photo of the owner. This isn't a trick that would be particularly safe for the guy working the next cubicle - much less two flights down.
The simplest solution for a single camera might be to a take a second picture at some random time after you log in.
How long would you be willing to keep that photo mounted in place?
I'm kind of sick of this sh!t.
consider it more ammunition for Nicholas Carr: A Battle of Wits On the Net's Effect On the Mind
For random web browsing on assorted sites, boot up from a Linux boot CD. Your entire OS will be in memory, nothing on your HD is touched.
Except perhaps your data files.
Damned right, if it was written today no one would be able to read it without paying some exorbitant price
What makes you think a printed copy of the Constitution was cheap in 1787?
Rag paper. Hand-set type.
Their best customers are the ones that are the least demanding, easiest and cheapest to service.
Mod me into oblivion, but I don't get how you can have a privacy interest in data that you are transmitting unencrypted.
The privacy of unencrypted private radio communication has been legally protected in the states for the better part of 100 years. [Radio Act Of 1927]
It must be a geek thing but I don't get what the problem is here.
Of course, it's a geek thing.
Wireless networking is sold as a mass market consumer product to users who are not comfortable with changing the factory defaults or straying one step beyond the automated set-up routine.
Wireless networking is sold to users who do not assume eavesdropping is a normal, everyday - morally acceptable - practice:
"See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, do no evil."
They collected information which was publicly available from the street. Big deal.
Available - but only with high-tech monitoring gear.
Available - but only because wireless networking is new to most folks.
Available - because the default wireless set-up is insecure - and who do we have to blame for that if not the geek who programs these systems at the OEM level?
The issue is that proprietary software allows ridiculous profit margins (close to 100% since the software costs nothing to distribute
The cost of development - production - is never zero even in open source.
Service is labor-intensive. Supporting the IT pro in the enterprise can be profitable. But supporting the home and SOHO user? That's a much tougher proposition.
Not least because the apps themselves are often second-tier.
They don't have IBM or Google or Oracle to provide money, staffing and discipline.
People's ability to download movies, songs, books for free is devaluing the time and wages of the creators. The media companies won't completely disappear - they'll just earn 10-20% as much money as they did before 1999.
What really happens is that production shifts to other markets.
The P2P demographic is young adult male. Geek.
Which means no more $200 million budgets for films like Iron Man and The Dark Knight.
No more low-budget Sci-Fi in HD.
No more Dr. Who. Battlestar Galactica. Babylon 5. Firefly.
Disney and Pixar should make out just fine.
The Incredibles and Wall-E have impeccable geek-cred. But more importantly a cross-over appeal that reached male and female audiences of every age.
For the quick buck, Disney can always put out another "High School Musical."
So... they told Microsoft 5 days ago AND GAVE THEM A FIX...
There are roughly 500 million users running XP.
63% of all PC users globally. Operating System Market Share, PCs In-Use Reached nearly 1.2B in 2008
XP is backwards compatible with many programs written for MSDOS, Win 3.1 and Win 9x.
But protecting the installed base of small business and enterprise applications written for XP is truly misssion-critical for Microsoft. The patch must not break these apps.
It would be lunatic to blindly trust a patch from a competitor -
and it is Microsoft - not Google - that has thirty years experience in its core markets. That knows which apps are likely to break and why.
Next time I see a commercial website that requires Flash, I'll call the vendor and explain why I can't use their website. Should help kill Flash once and for all.
The vendor collects internal stats and subscribes to Net Applications and other services.
He knows that you represent less than 1% of his target audience.
It's the New Coke thing again. In blind tasting, people preferred New Coke. When it was actually sold as something different, people hated it.
The mistake was in trying to kill off "Classic" Coke as both a product and a brand name. Rather than let New Coke find its own share of the market.
It's effectively true, because of all the subsidies the OEMs get for installing windows. Plus the perception of the average "consumer" is "I got windows free with my computer". So while the true cost of windows is huge, almost incalculably so, it's also "cheap", as in everyone gets it without any real effort and minimal up-front expense. Which actually, is exactly like Wal-Mart if you stop to think about it...
The cheapest 64 bit Win 7 Home Premium laptop at WalMart.com is $378. The cheapest Win 7 SE netbook a $228 Dell Inspiron.
That is getting perilously close to the price point of the as-yet-unseen ARM sub-netbook.
The OEM does not pay retail list for Windows.
There are even greater - truly enormous - economies of scale in building and marketing product for the OS with 90% of the market.
Product placement is simply the icing on the cake.
The plug-and-play OEM system install - the hardware and software bundle - sold under warranty - solves so many problems for the user, it is impossible to imagine an OS gaining significant market share without it.
I would point out that WalMart does undercut by hundreds of dollars on computers- they just do it by selling windows machines instead of macs.
For the better part of a decade, WalMart tried to make a go of OEM Linux.
With Slashdot's cheerleaders on the sidelines. The netbook was the chain's last big push. Nothing ever came of it.
Though it'd be nice to get some kind of slate for a cheap price - this should cut down the price by $100, if Ubuntu can get someone on board with it.
Simply an observation:
WalMart - the world's largest and most aggressive deep discount retailer - has never been able to consistently undercut OEM Windows by $100 - by $75 - by $50 - on systems with competitive, marketable, specs.
The guy would rather go to jail in the UK then one of your rape prisons for decades, what a surprise!
He may find the UK prison no safer:
British jails are failing to investigate serious allegations of male rape, according to the prisons ombudsman.
Stephen Shaw's concerns, which are expressed in a report into the alleged rape of a prisoner who had Asperger's syndrome and learning difficulties, are likely to place a new focus on a subject that is hardly ever discussed within the prison system.
His comments are made in an official report into the case of "Mark", a 21-year-old man with Asperger's syndrome, learning difficulties and a history of self-harm, who was remanded to Altcourse prison in Liverpool in 2007. It was recommended that Mark, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, be remanded into a psychiatric unit, but there were no places available.
Despite his vulnerable nature, he was placed on a wing with sex offenders and was allegedly raped by a cellmate who had attempted to assault him several weeks earlier. He attempted to throw himself off a prison landing shortly after the alleged incident and is now in a psychiatric unit.
Files relating to the case have gone missing, making the job of investigating the rape allegation an almost impossible task. Merseyside Police attempted a scientific examination after the incident but, according to Jane, her son's mattress and clothes were swapped within hours of the alleged assault having taken place.
Mark's case has been pursued by the Howard League which, following a two-year battle, believes it has won vital recognition of the issue from the ombudsman.
Experts say it is likely that incidents of rape in British prisons are heavily under-reported. According to figures released by the government in response to parliamentary questions, there were 119 allegations of sexual assault in prison in 2008, but only 33 were subject to a PSO1300 investigation.
"There are clear reasons why rape and sexual assault would go unreported in prison," [the assistant director of the Howard League] said. "Not only will it be difficult to prove in many instances, but telling a member of staff that you have been raped would see prisoners ostracised and vulnerable to bullying. We believe the 119 recorded incidents of sexual assault in prison are likely to be a serious underestimation of the problem. In that context, the fact that only 33 internal investigations were then commissioned seems a pitiful response from the authorities."
'My son was raped in jail - the crime was ignored' [May 2, 2010]
It's a false analogy.
Books aren't free to your public library.
They have to pay - which that you have to pay through taxes and donations - often for custom bindings or multiple copies that will stand the wear and tear of circulation.
Only one physical copy of a book or video can be in circulation at any moment - which can mean you may be weeks waiting for the most popular titles.
It means that any single copy can't have more than about fifty readers or viewers a year.
Not the thousands or tens or hundreds of thousands of copies to be downloaded off the P2P .nets.
Since at least some of his medical conditions could be considered mental illnesses, that will probably be his defense.
In the federal system, it's become a stiff uphill climb:
Congress passed revisions in the defense embodied in the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984, which reads:
"It is an affirmative defense to a prosecution under any federal statute that, at the time of the commission of the acts constituting the offense, the defendant as a result of a severe mental disease or defect, was unable to appreciate the nature and quality or the wrongfulness of his acts. Mental disease or defect does not otherwise constitute a defense."
The "irresistible impulse" is not a defense.
Under separate legislation, the burden of proof shifted to the defendant - to produce "clear and convincing evidence" of his incapacity and the expert witness is not permitted to lead the jury by expressing his own opinion. THE JOHN HINCKLEY TRIAL & ITS EFFECT ON THE INSANITY DEFENSE
1) From a PR perspective, I suppose jailing other countries crazy people is better than us bombing them
The only message the US gives a damn about is warning would-be hackers is that the hammer will come down if you break into its systems.
4) It makes his govt look like a US lapdog
When you are out of the government, defending McKinnon is easy. But the London tabloids won't be kind if the US refuses extradition of the UK's next highly politicized "fugitive."
He's not saying he should get off without charge; he's saying he should be tried in the UK for a criminal offense committed in the UK
I don't believe it is responsible to argue that a suspect should escape extradition for crimes committed by remote control across a state or international border.
The precedent it sets is simply too dangerous.
McKinnon was in the UK.
But the computers he broke into were in the US.
They could only be accessed except through commands that were executed in the US.
They get what they can get. They bring in a lot of money to the owners, why not charge that much?
The promoter has always known that the star attraction is his best guarantee of success at the box office. Mark Twain's satirical playbill for the Roman Coliseum didn't stray too far from the truth. The Innocents Abroad
[1869, Chapter 26]