We need to fix the domain name system such that it's a technical issue rather than a legal issue. Decentralize it.
Like trademarks, several items in the Internet require uniqueness. Domain names are one, IP addresses another, protocol numbers are a third, autonomous system numbers for Border Gateway Protocol are a fourth, and I could go on.
SOMEthing has to make a decision, to avoid collisions, and in some cases (such as protocol numbers) the namespace is small and should not be assigned lightly.
Doing this any way other than by a decision making authority is difficult. While there are some computational approaches for doing it algorithmically, they aren't easy - and you're left with the issue of which network of servers is authoritative for a given name space, i.e. how do the operators of a set of servers claim to be more authoritative for THEIR namespace than someone else claiming the same space? Trademark? Bang: Back to the "authority assigned/approved the assignment of a name" solution.
I'd love to see a non-authority-based solution developed and deployed. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
I think just having them be a lot more efficient and aimed properly (designed for proper light dispersion only where it is needed) would do what we need to save tons of energy while generating less glare and light pollution. Also, I don't think they really need to be anywhere near as bright as they typically are... and if they were a proper color, that might help things too (that horrible, sick, orange color of sodium lights and anemic green/blue of mercury vapor lights really doesn't help).
The new LED streetlights are more efficient, better aimed, and a decent "white". They're also cheap enough that a lot of jurisdictions are replacing the older ones, even before they die. (Around here it looks like: When a lamp dies and they have to roll a truck anyway to replace the bulb and/or ballast, they'll replace the fixture - or a cluster of 'em - with LED versions instead of relamping the old fixture(s).)
"The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" - John Gilmore
And in a competitive marketplace, failure to provide a desired service doesn't permanently suppress the service. Instead it provides a market opportunity for competition.
So Facebook and YouTube start censoring certain viewpoints? Suddenly there's a customer base for their (current or potential) competition: people with those viewpoints, people who want to see those viewpoints, and people who want to be able to post or view without censorship and/or distortion from its built-in biases.
Institutional and/or governmental suppression just creates a "forbidden fruit" attraction - especially for adolescents in the "Young Warrior" age group, THE primary target for anti-establishment military recruitment.
Alcohol prohibition created a generation of drunks and organized crime to supply them, drug prohibition (and the "drug war") has done the same for at least THREE generations of drug users, McCarthyist anti-Communism created a backlash that has become institutionalized. I could go on - at least as far back as Rome and the Christians.
These all show that attempts to directly suppress ideas and social movements tend to be counter-productive. Why should a Facebook / Israel government attempt to suppress Palestinians, ISIS, or other groups they dislike be any more effective?
It clearly presents full-blown world-wide Internetworking, Virtual Reality, A.I. agents, hacker/cracker cabals, cyberwarfare, and a number of other important concepts (one of which I won't mention to avoid a major spoiler) - as the fundamental and necessary background for a rollicking good story.
Published in 1981!
Vinge, considered a seminal work of the cyberpunk genre. It is one of the earliest stories to present a fully fleshed-out concept of cyberspace, which would later be central to cyberpunk. The story also contains elements of transhumanism, anarchism, and even hints about The Singularity.
True Names first brought Vinge to prominence as a science fiction writer. It also inspired many real-life hackers and computer scientists; a 2001 book about the novella, True Names: And the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier, included essays by Danny Hillis, Marvin Minsky, Mark Pesce, Richard Stallman and others.[1] It was awarded the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award in 2007.
So (much like Star Trek communicators inspiring the clamshell cellphone), True Names may have actually inspired and/or helped define the form of some of the key components of today's information technology.
This ruling should have had the caveat that if a user wants a different OS Pre-installed, Sony should have to offer a "Linux option"
WHICH "Linux Option"? RedHat? Ubuntu? Gentoo? Slackware? Android? SteamOS? ChromeOS?...
Why stop with a "Linux Option"? What's special about Linux that the legal system should force it to be offered and not others? How about FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD? ReactOS? Redox OS?
Why stop at open source OSes? (Have to go do other things or I'd list a bunch of these, too.)
And all of those are just a sampling of their categories. Here's a list of OSes, a substantial number of which could be made to run on the platform.
Even if there were some legal doctrine by which forcing Windows alternatives on ready-to-run computer manufacturers might make sense, applying it opens the issue of selecting what alternatives to force. That open, not a can, but a 55-galon drum of worms.
Most IoT developer are in races to get their product through their particular niche's window of opportunity. First gadget-X through the window gets the bulk of the market share, and the biggest chance of being the 900-pound-gorilla after the niche's evcentual shakeout.
Doing security right is extra effort and time consuming. So the Invisible Hand is giving a back-pat to those who get to market earlier by ignoring it or doing a slap-dash job and spanking those who take time to do it well up front.
Later, when the vulnerabilities are exploited, it MAY apply a big chopping axe to the limbs or necks of those whose backs it previously patted. Or they may, once they have the market share, also have the time, and the will, to improve the situation - with fixes, retrofits, field upgrades, rearchitected newer models, etc. But for now many PHBs are focused on getting through the first stage, so their company is alive to work on the second.
January 21 will begin with GOP members attempting to initiate impeachment hearings... People who like the government to not get any meaningful work done should be able to rest easy.
People who like the government to not get any meaningful work done are terrified of a Clinton presidency. The scenario goes like this:
In addition to increasing the current horde of left-wing judges at lower levels, with Souter dead and Thomas expected to retire after the election she gets to replace two conservative justices with her own appointees. This is expected to turn the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for progressive policies.
Then she just needs to continue, and expand, the ignore-the-constitution, ignore-the-congress, rule-by-executive-order approach of the Obama administration (which is similar to things that were done on a much smaller scale during Bill's presidency).
Without the courts to call her on it, this could turn the country's infrastructure into a Soviet-style People's Republic. And by importing and/or legalizing additional hordes of Democratic voters she can lock it in for the foreseeable future. The result would be, within eight years, either such a conversion, or (when she gets to the "disarm the potential opposition with gun bans" stage), a second civil war (depending on how serious gun owners are about the "from my cold dead hands" rhetoric.)
A new pro-Trump campaign slogan is starting to show up: "It's the Supreme Court, stupid!", while the Trump campaign is pushing a "This is the country's last chance." The above concern (along with Trump's brilliant move of publishing HIS short-list of Supreme Court candidates - all strict constitutionalists) is why a lot of people who might otherwise stay home or vote Libertarian plan to hold their noses and vote for Trump.
As far as I understand it, none of those went back to prior tax years.
But they went back to decisions and transactions already made, and money already transferred, under the previous rules, changing the tax on "taxable events" after the event. Don't you think that is ex-post-facto, even if it only goes back a few months? (I sure do. But the supreme court, sometimes unanimously, apparently doesn't.)
This is going back to prior years, and requiring a SINGLE company to pay back taxes.
Because it's a legal ruling APPLYING a law to a single company's case,.
Apple is not the only incorporated entity in Ireland that was subject to the lower taxes, so why are they being singled out? It is because they have the huge cash reserve which has been previously reported.
It is called "setting a precedent". If this succeeds against Apple, with all its lawyers (paid out of those same deep pockets) fighting tooth-and-nail against it, count on them to go after all the other guys. With both Apple's better-lawyered failure to show that they'd have to fight EVEN HARDER (or find something Apple's lawyer-swarm missed) to win, and the decision gaveled into legal history, you can also count on everybody else to knuckle under.
Of course, Apple's deep pockets also mean that, if the tax men win, they get a considerable chunk of change to justify the money and effort they spent going after it, just from the one case.
Pretty much silly reasoning given the number of Linux servers around the world. Almost every large corporate is depending on Linux for something.
What good does that do if hardware and OS manufacturers collude to only support each other's current products, and the hardware manufacturers (remaining after the latest round of shakeouts) stop shipping chips that aren't locked down against anything else?
Yes, it would be, in our opinions, a stupid move for AMD and Intel. But both are private companies and get to do what they want, within the limits of the law.
The "invisible hand" doesn't force businesses to do or not do anything. It just pats them on the back (and stuffs money into their wallets) if they do some things, and spanks them on the butt (and pulls money out of their wallets) if they do others. If it spanks them hard enough, they die. But they get to be suicidally stupid.
Meanwhile, the law is effectively "how the law is currently enforced". If this is something that would be, say, an antitrust violation, it really doesn't matter unless the government functionaries are willing to take them to court.
A better analogy would be the US retroactively eliminating deductions (standard or itemized) retroactively and asking you for back taxes and interest.
The US already did something like that, several times:
* In August 1993, President Clinton signed a law raising tax rates on high-income earners and estates. The new rates applied back to the beginning of 1993, and although disgruntled taxpayers went to federal court seeking to have the retroactive application of the rules invalidated, those arguments proved fruitless.
* In 1987, Congress passed laws retroactively repealing an estate-tax provision, a repeal which cost one taxpayer $2.5 million. The Supreme Court ruled that taxpayers have no right to rely on tax legislation being permanent, with the majority arguing that as long as lawmakers act with "a legitimate legislative purpose," retroactive application is constitutional. Even though one Supreme Court justice argued that the government had used "bait and switch taxation," he nevertheless concurred with the unanimous holding of the Court.
* A 1976 tax-law change affected homeowners' ability to shelter capital gains from the sale of a home from taxation. One homeowner took advantage of rules that allowed half of all gains to be free of tax, but six months later, President Ford signed a law retroactively limiting the taxable amount. Just as it did more than a decade later, the Supreme Court upheld the law as being constitutional.
we need people actively looking into making those new type of batteries instead of just researching them and never do anything with the research
You haven't been paying attention.
Like photovoltaic solar panels (which can now be had for under a dollar a watt WITHOUT subsidies, more than an order of magnitude improvement over the last decade or so), DEPLOYED battery technology has been improving, drastically.
Of course most of the breakthroughs don't get deployed. That's usually because better breakthroughs come along before they get that far.
Also: They're handy for watching movies or collections of old TV shows from DVDs - especially at my ranch (where Internet is 32k-ish dialup if I didn't bring a cellphone modem from work) or on the road in the travel trailer.
Mostly because they're a more convenient (and better supported than USB sticks) way to build a system onto a fresh(ly wiped) machine.
Also because they're an easy way to insure I didn't accidentally carry over any data from the pre-wipe configuration or the machine I used to download, or got hit with a "catch the machine before it updates" attack while net-loading or updating from the distribution version to the latest bugfixes. (I go to the net for the initial update through an external firewall machine with tight reach-out-only rules.)
Yes, it's not a defence against some of the NSA or "remote-administration feature" style of attacks, through the BIOS, drive firmware, CPU-vendor silicon "management engines", persistent threat malware on the download machine, etc. But it's a start. (Also: If those are any good they keep hiding, so at least they stay out of my way while I'm trying to get some work done. B-b )
Don't forget to take the platter out and smash it up whichever way you want. If the NSA can get the data off a drive that's being zeroed several times and platter smashed up, they deserve a trophy.
Grind it into dust.
Smashing the platter helps some. But taking it out of the drive just saves them a step.
When a surface has been overwritten a couple times you're not going to have much luck trying to read it with the ordinary heads, even with tweaked signal and head-positioning electronics.
But a scanning magnetic-force microscope makes the last several layers of writing visible to the naked eye (observing the false-color image on a monitor or printed page).
Hillary did do something wrong but the punishment for it would never be jail time. People keep focusing on this shouting lock her up. The worst she would have endured if she was a normal member of the state department would be a removal from her job and revocation of any security clearance.
And revocation of retirement benefits. And a felony conviction, with the resulting future denial of a number of civil rights (such as the right to posses a gun) and - yes - federal prison time.
Are you saying that the government would never enforce some of the more severe portions of the law? They seem to enforce it just fine when dealing with low-level functionaries (or even high-level officials who happen to be conservative.)
There is entirely too much corruption throughout our government.
Yep.
We need to fix campaign finance in a big way.
Yes - by completely repealing any campaign finance legislation at any level.
Buying advertisement is political speech. That, even more than any other forms of speech, is precisely one of the rights that is recognized and protected by the First Amendment. (It just happens purchasing advertisements enables the "speaker" to talk to more people than he can by standing on a soapbox in the park.)
Campaign financing laws are bait-and-switch. They claim to level the playing field, blocking the deep-pocket guys and the incumbents from having an advantage over the ordinary citizens and upstart challengers. But they actually penalize the grass-roots organizers and challengers by imposing complex red tape and arcane limits and requirements with draconian penalties for non-compliance (which incumbents' and professional lobbying organizations already know how to handle - or have the financial backing to challenge in court).
They're incumbent protection laws. Which is exactly what you should expect them to be. They were written by incumbents.
(a) Statement. Each Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service licensee is required to submit to the Commission a Statement describing its network security plans and related information,...
So the applicant has to publish his whole security architecture in order to get a license.
On one hand this conforms to the best practices recommendations of the security community: Expose the algorithm to analysis and keep the security in the keying secrets.
On the other hand this gives the government the opportunity to pick-and-chose only those systems it can break.
Latest phone supported is the international version of the Galaxy S III (I9300)... Note: The U.S. version of Galaxy S III is a different motherboard and chip - the same model number on a different device.
The same model NAME on a different device. Model number is different, which is how you tell for sure you got the right one.
Android. Fork of Cyannogen Mod that is fully Open source. Even the drivers and firmware. Latest phone supported is the international version of the Galaxy S III (I9300) (2G and 3G but no 4G LTE). (Note: The U.S. version of Galaxy S III is a different motherboard and chip - the same model number on a different device.)
Stable release is a couple years old (4.2) due to thinning of the development crew. But the project got new blood (post-Snowden) and a 6.0 port (for the 19300 so far) is in alpha.
Some devices (WiFI, Bluetooth, user-facing camera) require closed firmware, which you can load separately. (It's supported but not distributed with the base distribution.
Some (3-D graphics acceleration, GPS) are just not supported. (Use 2-D graphics and, if you really want your phone to know where you are, a plugin GPS device based on a different chip.) GPS is not supported because the phone's GPS chip also requires a proprietary CPU-land driver, which is an open-source no-no.
Sigh, I remember when Slashdot used to be a news place for Nerds and not this stupid political bull crap of pointing fingers at one another.
I remember farther back. (Note that I have two fewer digits in my I.D.)
It's always been like this. We may have a few more professional grass-roots trolls now that we have a couple orders of magnitude more eyeballs. But come politics season people's political leanings come out.
Face it: Politics IS "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters".
Candidates have some limits, but PACs lost those restrictions in the suprime court ruling known as Citizens United.
And ordinary citizens shouldn't have limits for the same reasons - but didn't have the big pockets to argue that in court like the organized lobbyists do.
Campaign spending limits are a bait-and-switch. They pretend to level the playing field by cutting down the big spenders' power. But instead they block the grass-roots' influence - individually or when organizing - while leaving the rich able to circumvent them, and (by building a complex paperwork maze to navigate) give incumbent politicians a further massive advantage against upstart challengers.
What they're really about is helping those currently in power STAY in power.
I don't claim to know any political internals, but $70,000 to get legislation that you basically write yourself passed sounds extremely low.
Part of the POINT of government corruption is that the cost is low compared to the benefits.
If using the money to actually build something consumers wanted to buy had a better return - and politicians didn't gate-keep and demand ransom ("rent-seeking behavior"), businesses wouldn't spend a dime bribing politicians - or at least those that did would be out-competed and driven out of business by those that didn't.
Politicians know this, and set their prices accordingly.
The more that ISPs seek to rewrite the rules in their favor, the more likely it is that the citizens will ignore those rules.
I give up. How do we ignore those rules?
Start our own ISPs - and get everything seized by the government for failing to play by their rules?
Hack the infrastructure - and get busted for "stealing service" or "unauthorized access to a computer system" - and get everything seized by the government, plus a felony conviction and the resulting revocation of constitutional rights for the rest of our lives?
Did you have something else in mind? I'm really confused about what you mean.
Slashdot Mirror
We need to fix the domain name system such that it's a technical issue rather than a legal issue. Decentralize it.
Like trademarks, several items in the Internet require uniqueness. Domain names are one, IP addresses another, protocol numbers are a third, autonomous system numbers for Border Gateway Protocol are a fourth, and I could go on.
SOMEthing has to make a decision, to avoid collisions, and in some cases (such as protocol numbers) the namespace is small and should not be assigned lightly.
Doing this any way other than by a decision making authority is difficult. While there are some computational approaches for doing it algorithmically, they aren't easy - and you're left with the issue of which network of servers is authoritative for a given name space, i.e. how do the operators of a set of servers claim to be more authoritative for THEIR namespace than someone else claiming the same space? Trademark? Bang: Back to the "authority assigned/approved the assignment of a name" solution.
I'd love to see a non-authority-based solution developed and deployed. But I'm not holding my breath waiting for it.
I think just having them be a lot more efficient and aimed properly (designed for proper light dispersion only where it is needed) would do what we need to save tons of energy while generating less glare and light pollution. Also, I don't think they really need to be anywhere near as bright as they typically are... and if they were a proper color, that might help things too (that horrible, sick, orange color of sodium lights and anemic green/blue of mercury vapor lights really doesn't help).
The new LED streetlights are more efficient, better aimed, and a decent "white". They're also cheap enough that a lot of jurisdictions are replacing the older ones, even before they die. (Around here it looks like: When a lamp dies and they have to roll a truck anyway to replace the bulb and/or ballast, they'll replace the fixture - or a cluster of 'em - with LED versions instead of relamping the old fixture(s).)
And in a competitive marketplace, failure to provide a desired service doesn't permanently suppress the service. Instead it provides a market opportunity for competition.
So Facebook and YouTube start censoring certain viewpoints? Suddenly there's a customer base for their (current or potential) competition: people with those viewpoints, people who want to see those viewpoints, and people who want to be able to post or view without censorship and/or distortion from its built-in biases.
Institutional and/or governmental suppression just creates a "forbidden fruit" attraction - especially for adolescents in the "Young Warrior" age group, THE primary target for anti-establishment military recruitment.
Alcohol prohibition created a generation of drunks and organized crime to supply them, drug prohibition (and the "drug war") has done the same for at least THREE generations of drug users, McCarthyist anti-Communism created a backlash that has become institutionalized. I could go on - at least as far back as Rome and the Christians.
These all show that attempts to directly suppress ideas and social movements tend to be counter-productive. Why should a Facebook / Israel government attempt to suppress Palestinians, ISIS, or other groups they dislike be any more effective?
True Names is an amazingly prescient work.
It clearly presents full-blown world-wide Internetworking, Virtual Reality, A.I. agents, hacker/cracker cabals, cyberwarfare, and a number of other important concepts (one of which I won't mention to avoid a major spoiler) - as the fundamental and necessary background for a rollicking good story.
Published in 1981!
So (much like Star Trek communicators inspiring the clamshell cellphone), True Names may have actually inspired and/or helped define the form of some of the key components of today's information technology.
That is called, "Slander of Title."
As I understand it (IANAL), getting a judgement of Slander of Title generally requires showing malice.
Maybe you could construe gross negligence to qualify?
New York Country Lawyer: Where are you?
This ruling should have had the caveat that if a user wants a different OS Pre-installed, Sony should have to offer a "Linux option"
WHICH "Linux Option"? RedHat? Ubuntu? Gentoo? Slackware? Android? SteamOS? ChromeOS? ...
Why stop with a "Linux Option"? What's special about Linux that the legal system should force it to be offered and not others? How about FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD? ReactOS? Redox OS?
Why stop at open source OSes? (Have to go do other things or I'd list a bunch of these, too.)
And all of those are just a sampling of their categories. Here's a list of OSes, a substantial number of which could be made to run on the platform.
Even if there were some legal doctrine by which forcing Windows alternatives on ready-to-run computer manufacturers might make sense, applying it opens the issue of selecting what alternatives to force. That open, not a can, but a 55-galon drum of worms.
Most IoT developer are in races to get their product through their particular niche's window of opportunity. First gadget-X through the window gets the bulk of the market share, and the biggest chance of being the 900-pound-gorilla after the niche's evcentual shakeout.
Doing security right is extra effort and time consuming. So the Invisible Hand is giving a back-pat to those who get to market earlier by ignoring it or doing a slap-dash job and spanking those who take time to do it well up front.
Later, when the vulnerabilities are exploited, it MAY apply a big chopping axe to the limbs or necks of those whose backs it previously patted. Or they may, once they have the market share, also have the time, and the will, to improve the situation - with fixes, retrofits, field upgrades, rearchitected newer models, etc. But for now many PHBs are focused on getting through the first stage, so their company is alive to work on the second.
January 21 will begin with GOP members attempting to initiate impeachment hearings ... People who like the government to not get any meaningful work done should be able to rest easy.
People who like the government to not get any meaningful work done are terrified of a Clinton presidency. The scenario goes like this:
In addition to increasing the current horde of left-wing judges at lower levels, with Souter dead and Thomas expected to retire after the election she gets to replace two conservative justices with her own appointees. This is expected to turn the Supreme Court into a rubber stamp for progressive policies.
Then she just needs to continue, and expand, the ignore-the-constitution, ignore-the-congress, rule-by-executive-order approach of the Obama administration (which is similar to things that were done on a much smaller scale during Bill's presidency).
Without the courts to call her on it, this could turn the country's infrastructure into a Soviet-style People's Republic. And by importing and/or legalizing additional hordes of Democratic voters she can lock it in for the foreseeable future. The result would be, within eight years, either such a conversion, or (when she gets to the "disarm the potential opposition with gun bans" stage), a second civil war (depending on how serious gun owners are about the "from my cold dead hands" rhetoric.)
A new pro-Trump campaign slogan is starting to show up: "It's the Supreme Court, stupid!", while the Trump campaign is pushing a "This is the country's last chance." The above concern (along with Trump's brilliant move of publishing HIS short-list of Supreme Court candidates - all strict constitutionalists) is why a lot of people who might otherwise stay home or vote Libertarian plan to hold their noses and vote for Trump.
As far as I understand it, none of those went back to prior tax years.
But they went back to decisions and transactions already made, and money already transferred, under the previous rules, changing the tax on "taxable events" after the event. Don't you think that is ex-post-facto, even if it only goes back a few months? (I sure do. But the supreme court, sometimes unanimously, apparently doesn't.)
This is going back to prior years, and requiring a SINGLE company to pay back taxes.
Because it's a legal ruling APPLYING a law to a single company's case,.
Apple is not the only incorporated entity in Ireland that was subject to the lower taxes, so why are they being singled out? It is because they have the huge cash reserve which has been previously reported.
It is called "setting a precedent". If this succeeds against Apple, with all its lawyers (paid out of those same deep pockets) fighting tooth-and-nail against it, count on them to go after all the other guys. With both Apple's better-lawyered failure to show that they'd have to fight EVEN HARDER (or find something Apple's lawyer-swarm missed) to win, and the decision gaveled into legal history, you can also count on everybody else to knuckle under.
Of course, Apple's deep pockets also mean that, if the tax men win, they get a considerable chunk of change to justify the money and effort they spent going after it, just from the one case.
Pretty much silly reasoning given the number of Linux servers around the world. Almost every large corporate is depending on Linux for something.
What good does that do if hardware and OS manufacturers collude to only support each other's current products, and the hardware manufacturers (remaining after the latest round of shakeouts) stop shipping chips that aren't locked down against anything else?
Yes, it would be, in our opinions, a stupid move for AMD and Intel. But both are private companies and get to do what they want, within the limits of the law.
The "invisible hand" doesn't force businesses to do or not do anything. It just pats them on the back (and stuffs money into their wallets) if they do some things, and spanks them on the butt (and pulls money out of their wallets) if they do others. If it spanks them hard enough, they die. But they get to be suicidally stupid.
Meanwhile, the law is effectively "how the law is currently enforced". If this is something that would be, say, an antitrust violation, it really doesn't matter unless the government functionaries are willing to take them to court.
A better analogy would be the US retroactively eliminating deductions (standard or itemized) retroactively and asking you for back taxes and interest.
The US already did something like that, several times:
we need people actively looking into making those new type of batteries instead of just researching them and never do anything with the research
You haven't been paying attention.
Like photovoltaic solar panels (which can now be had for under a dollar a watt WITHOUT subsidies, more than an order of magnitude improvement over the last decade or so), DEPLOYED battery technology has been improving, drastically.
Of course most of the breakthroughs don't get deployed. That's usually because better breakthroughs come along before they get that far.
Make that "yellow hot". Red might be a bit below the relevant material's curie point.
Cut it into quarters with a friggin' oxy torch. Jeez, the lack of votech training nowadays.
If you've got a torch, don't bother cutting it. Just heat it red hot.
Once it's over the curie temperature of the recording medium, all the stored magnetic fields go away.
I use optical media for installs, too.
Also: They're handy for watching movies or collections of old TV shows from DVDs - especially at my ranch (where Internet is 32k-ish dialup if I didn't bring a cellphone modem from work) or on the road in the travel trailer.
I use optical media for installs, too.
Mostly because they're a more convenient (and better supported than USB sticks) way to build a system onto a fresh(ly wiped) machine.
Also because they're an easy way to insure I didn't accidentally carry over any data from the pre-wipe configuration or the machine I used to download, or got hit with a "catch the machine before it updates" attack while net-loading or updating from the distribution version to the latest bugfixes. (I go to the net for the initial update through an external firewall machine with tight reach-out-only rules.)
Yes, it's not a defence against some of the NSA or "remote-administration feature" style of attacks, through the BIOS, drive firmware, CPU-vendor silicon "management engines", persistent threat malware on the download machine, etc. But it's a start. (Also: If those are any good they keep hiding, so at least they stay out of my way while I'm trying to get some work done. B-b )
Don't forget to take the platter out and smash it up whichever way you want. If the NSA can get the data off a drive that's being zeroed several times and platter smashed up, they deserve a trophy.
Grind it into dust.
Smashing the platter helps some. But taking it out of the drive just saves them a step.
When a surface has been overwritten a couple times you're not going to have much luck trying to read it with the ordinary heads, even with tweaked signal and head-positioning electronics.
But a scanning magnetic-force microscope makes the last several layers of writing visible to the naked eye (observing the false-color image on a monitor or printed page).
Hillary did do something wrong but the punishment for it would never be jail time. People keep focusing on this shouting lock her up. The worst she would have endured if she was a normal member of the state department would be a removal from her job and revocation of any security clearance.
And revocation of retirement benefits. And a felony conviction, with the resulting future denial of a number of civil rights (such as the right to posses a gun) and - yes - federal prison time.
Are you saying that the government would never enforce some of the more severe portions of the law? They seem to enforce it just fine when dealing with low-level functionaries (or even high-level officials who happen to be conservative.)
There is entirely too much corruption throughout our government.
Yep.
We need to fix campaign finance in a big way.
Yes - by completely repealing any campaign finance legislation at any level.
Buying advertisement is political speech. That, even more than any other forms of speech, is precisely one of the rights that is recognized and protected by the First Amendment. (It just happens purchasing advertisements enables the "speaker" to talk to more people than he can by standing on a soapbox in the park.)
Campaign financing laws are bait-and-switch. They claim to level the playing field, blocking the deep-pocket guys and the incumbents from having an advantage over the ordinary citizens and upstart challengers. But they actually penalize the grass-roots organizers and challengers by imposing complex red tape and arcane limits and requirements with draconian penalties for non-compliance (which incumbents' and professional lobbying organizations already know how to handle - or have the financial backing to challenge in court).
They're incumbent protection laws. Which is exactly what you should expect them to be. They were written by incumbents.
30.8 5G Provider Cybersecurity Statement Requirements.
(a) Statement. Each Upper Microwave Flexible Use Service licensee is required to submit to the Commission a Statement describing its network security plans and related information, ...
So the applicant has to publish his whole security architecture in order to get a license.
On one hand this conforms to the best practices recommendations of the security community: Expose the algorithm to analysis and keep the security in the keying secrets.
On the other hand this gives the government the opportunity to pick-and-chose only those systems it can break.
Oh, gee. Which way will it work?
Latest phone supported is the international version of the Galaxy S III (I9300) ... Note: The U.S. version of Galaxy S III is a different motherboard and chip - the same model number on a different device.
The same model NAME on a different device. Model number is different, which is how you tell for sure you got the right one.
Replicant
Android. Fork of Cyannogen Mod that is fully Open source. Even the drivers and firmware. Latest phone supported is the international version of the Galaxy S III (I9300) (2G and 3G but no 4G LTE). (Note: The U.S. version of Galaxy S III is a different motherboard and chip - the same model number on a different device.)
Stable release is a couple years old (4.2) due to thinning of the development crew. But the project got new blood (post-Snowden) and a 6.0 port (for the 19300 so far) is in alpha.
Some devices (WiFI, Bluetooth, user-facing camera) require closed firmware, which you can load separately. (It's supported but not distributed with the base distribution.
Some (3-D graphics acceleration, GPS) are just not supported. (Use 2-D graphics and, if you really want your phone to know where you are, a plugin GPS device based on a different chip.) GPS is not supported because the phone's GPS chip also requires a proprietary CPU-land driver, which is an open-source no-no.
Sigh, I remember when Slashdot used to be a news place for Nerds and not this stupid political bull crap of pointing fingers at one another.
I remember farther back. (Note that I have two fewer digits in my I.D.)
It's always been like this. We may have a few more professional grass-roots trolls now that we have a couple orders of magnitude more eyeballs. But come politics season people's political leanings come out.
Face it: Politics IS "news for nerds" and "stuff that matters".
Candidates have some limits, but PACs lost those restrictions in the suprime court ruling known as Citizens United.
And ordinary citizens shouldn't have limits for the same reasons - but didn't have the big pockets to argue that in court like the organized lobbyists do.
Campaign spending limits are a bait-and-switch. They pretend to level the playing field by cutting down the big spenders' power. But instead they block the grass-roots' influence - individually or when organizing - while leaving the rich able to circumvent them, and (by building a complex paperwork maze to navigate) give incumbent politicians a further massive advantage against upstart challengers.
What they're really about is helping those currently in power STAY in power.
I don't claim to know any political internals, but $70,000 to get legislation that you basically write yourself passed sounds extremely low.
Part of the POINT of government corruption is that the cost is low compared to the benefits.
If using the money to actually build something consumers wanted to buy had a better return - and politicians didn't gate-keep and demand ransom ("rent-seeking behavior"), businesses wouldn't spend a dime bribing politicians - or at least those that did would be out-competed and driven out of business by those that didn't.
Politicians know this, and set their prices accordingly.
The more that ISPs seek to rewrite the rules in their favor, the more likely it is that the citizens will ignore those rules.
I give up. How do we ignore those rules?
Start our own ISPs - and get everything seized by the government for failing to play by their rules?
Hack the infrastructure - and get busted for "stealing service" or "unauthorized access to a computer system" - and get everything seized by the government, plus a felony conviction and the resulting revocation of constitutional rights for the rest of our lives?
Did you have something else in mind? I'm really confused about what you mean.