"If British drivers don't want to be seen by the cameras, why can't they just engage their cloaking devices?"
They do. From what I've been told, in some areas (typically Chav-towns), 50% or more of cars either have fake plates or are unregistered, or are registered abroad... that instantly 'cloaks' them from speed cameras, and they can drive as badly as they want.
That's fine if you're a chav who's probably in and out of jail anyway; what more do you have to lose? But when you're one of the middle class workers who pay the taxes that keep the government running, you can't risk sticking fake plates on your car to avoid losing your license for driving perfectly safely on a motorway at 80mph.
"As a regular cyclist who has almost been killed on numerous occasions by speeding, reckless, and/or irresponsible drivers, I fully support the use of any and all technology (surveillance or otherwise) to FORCE people to drive safely and within the law."
Thanks to speed cameras, you can drive as recklessly or irresponsibly as you want provided you do so below the speed limit, as there are very few traffic police left on the roads. And if you get fake plates, or don't register your car, you can do those at any speed you want, because the speed cameras can't touch you.
"Speeding is reckless behavior"
No it's not; otherwise they'd be charged with 'reckless driving', not speeding. The only reason speeding laws exist is so that the police can punish true reckless drivers on a technicality rather than having to prove reckless driving, which is much harder; they were never intended to be applied universally because that would be absurdly stupid.
"Speed limits exist for a reason."
Yes, to give the police a means to punish people when they can't readily prove reckless driving in court.
Speed limits in the UK are regularly set wrong, often for political reasons. I used to live on a long, wide, mostly straight road where everyone had off-road parking... the speed limit was 40mph. Turn off that onto one of the narrow roads with parked cars on both sides, and the speed limit _INCREASED_ to 60mph. Needless to say, people regularly drove at 60mph through the 40 limit because it was f-ing stupid.
Worse than that, we had two speed cameras in the village where I lived. Both were on safe straight sections of road, both hidden behind trees or road signs in order to raise money rather than discourage people from driving fast. The most dangerous place in the village was a poorly designed pedestrian crossing where going faster than the 30mph speed limit meant you might not be able to stop if a pedestrian was crossing because you couldn't see far enough ahead; so why weren't the speed cameras there, with flashing lights and signs saying 'don't speed and we mean it'?
Ah, because they wouldn't have brought in any money.
And I'm always amused to see cyclists lecturing people on the need to obey road laws when I almost never saw a cyclist in the UK stop at a red light or a pedestrian crossing, and death rates per mile from cycling are similar to death rates per mile from driving; I was almost knocked flying myself last year by a cyclist racing through a 'pedestrianised' area.
When, for example, will Britain see compulsory insurance for bikes, along with compulsory registration and number plates so they can be caught and punished for breaking traffic laws? Ah, when Hell freezes over.
"The cameras don't snap you the moment you slip over the limit briefly, they only catch drivers who are breaking the law by a significant amount."
Dunno where you lived, but plenty of people in the UK have been fined for driving a few miles per hour over the limit, on a safe straight road in good conditions, where the limit has already been reduced to an absurd level. Caught four times and you lose your driving license, and quite possibly your job and your house.
Speed cameras have done nothing to improve road safety, they exist purely to screw over motorists and suck out money which goes to the government's mates running the speed cameras. I've never met anyone in the UK who drives (the majority of the adult population) and supports speed cameras; yet the country has been plastered with them. You may have missed it, but Britain is supposed to be a democracy, and when the majority are seeing something they don't want pushed on them by an authoritarian government, it should be no surprise that a minority decide to take things into their own hands.
Speed cameras have done more than any other single cause to destroy respect for the law among the general public in the UK over the last decade. If the government had any sense, they'd rip them all out tomorrow.
"I think you're right that Linux is no more secure against trojans than Windows"
Most Windows users (at least on XP) run as root. Most linux users don't run as root. That's a heck of a lot more secure, at least in terms of losing control over your computer rather than just losing your files.
Of course this would be a non-issue if Windows didn't automatically run software when you put a CD in the drive; this is just another reason why auto-run is an insanely bad idea.
"Screwing this administration isn't worth, to my mind, screwing the long-term credibility of our country."
Any 'long-term credibility' that America had has been swallowed by the sands of Iraq. Only Americans seem to believe that the rest of the world regards them as anything other than a 'rogue state' that will kidnap and torture foreigners at will and, despite most of the world's military spending, can't even control a third-rate desert shit-hole.
"Having an iPod-optimized version of the movie available on the DVD is an added value."
Not when it's wasting a gigabyte of space that is of no use to anyone who doesn't have an iPod. I'd rather have better picture quality with all those extra bits, or more extras.
In any case, DVD 'copy protection' is history; why charge people more for something they can already do for free?
These days I find most things on the web by searching, not by following links. If these people want to cut themselves off from the world by refusing to allow search engines to catalog them, why not? People whose work is inaccessible to most because their publishers refuse to let it be on search engines will soon decide that they no longer need a publisher.
The difference is that a company which failed as badly and as often as the average government would be bankrupt in a few quarters. Governments, on the other hand, just keep on going... even when the people decide to 'vote the bastards out', 99% of the bastards keep their jobs.
"So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms."
Murder rates in the UK and USA were roughly equal a century ago when 'every loony and criminal' could buy any gun they wanted over the counter in Britain with no questions asked (though they did have to pay a $2 tax if they wanted to legally carry it in public). Armed crime rates with guns are much higher today in the UK than when 'every loony and criminal' could buy any gun they wanted over the counter with no questions asked, and while the British murder rate hasn't risen much since then the murder rate in America is far higher than it was; murders exploded as Prohibition increased the power of organised crime and, while it's dropped since, rates never returned to earlier levels.
Britons just don't kill each other much; per-capita, Americans kill each other more with knives than Britons kill each other by any means. Meanwhile, gun crime in Britain is growing rapidly as criminals have few problems getting hold of guns to prey on a disarmed population.
Is that there's apparently no way to simply disable a plugin in Firefox. In order to completely disable Quacktime I've had to go through various plugin directories physically deleting the files, and next time I have to update it all the bloody plugins will be back again.
Why can't about:plugins just have a 'disable' box on each plugin? Or, better yet, a standard preferences menu list which just lets me disable them there and then?
"What do they mean by clear the memory? Because when I malloc() (and not calloc()) I seem to get whatever was there before.."
But you don't get anything from another process. When malloc() runs out of memory and asks for a new chunk from the operating system, a modern system will usually zero the block that it returns, whereas some older operating systems (e.g. MS-DOS, I think?) would just give a pointer to a chunk of free memory which could still contain any data that the previous user had left in it; that could be any program which had previously run on the machine.
When you free something and call malloc() again afterwards, you may well get a block with old data from your program. But in most cases you won't get a block with old data from a different program.
The same applies to disk files; with some operating systems in the past you could open a file, write a byte a megabyte into the file and then read a megabyte of old data preceding it in free blocks which had been allocated to you and not cleared. That was obviously a big potential security hole, so most modern operating systems will zero all the data in the file instead (more precisely, they'll probably allocate a sparse file which will return zeros from areas which haven't been written to).
One of the 'Elite' sequels was shipped with a swap file on the CD-ROM. Opening that swap file with a text editor showed it included much of the C code for the game, which presumably must have been swapped out while they were compiling at some point and then copied to the CD by mistake.
From what I remember the installer copied the swap file to the hard disk, but the first patch either deleted it or zeroed it:).
"If Negreponte's goal is to get cheap laptops in the hands of poor children, why would he be angry?"
If Microsoft and Intel put Negreponte out of 'business' by selling subsidised low-cost PCs, how long do you think they'll continue to sell them afterwards?
They're not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, they're doing it because they see a competitor they want to eliminate.
"If I don't shut down Firefox when I leave work for the day my system will be at a dead crawl in the morning - it shouldn't do this."
Let me guess: your company runs virus scans or similar on your PCs overnight, so Windows swaps out all your applications to cache the files the scanner has just finished scanning?
That's why I found that quitting and restarting Firefox was much faster than leaving it running overnight. It's not Mozilla's fault that the Windows disk cache was designed by a retard.
Ditto. Like many people I bought the Orange Box, so I started Episode 2, but then got distracted by Portal and TF2, and then the free Sam and Max episode that was available on Steam... I'll get around to finishing Episode 2 sometime in the next few months:).
That's like IRC, right? I'm always amused to see articles by journalists who know nothing about the history of technology... yeah, this generation invented 'instant messaging' and information sharing, in the bad old days we only had email, or, if we were lucky, tin cans and bits of string.
Personally I think there's another more important division growing up; between those who are available to be instantly pestered by anyone and those who aren't. I love email because it just sits there until I respond to it, I have more important things to do with my time than deal with any old crap people choose to send me at any moment. I suspect that as these kids grow up, they'll start to understand the benefits of not being accessible 'instantly'... particularly if they're forced to be on call 24 hours a day at work.
"I don't see why encrypted files should be any different than hardcopy or anything else that could be seized under sub poena."
The police already _have_ the files. They're free to try to crack the encryption on those files.
While I intensely dislike the animal rights nutters, this is a stupid and oppressive law which should never have been passed. And I can quite believe that the police she was raided by are 'thugs'; ask that guy they shot eight times in the head a while back if that's a good description... oops, you can't, he's dead.
"People just don't have a real use for a very crappy PC."
Most people I know use their PC for web browsing and word processing; this system would be plenty good enough for that, so long as they had a monitor to go with it.
Heck, if I can install more hard disks in there I'm tempted to buy one myself and stick it in the basement to replace my desktop system as our file-server... it's got to burn less power than a 3GHz Pentium.
Why oh why does Microsoft still automatically run software off any disk that's inserted into your PC? Surely decades of floppy-carried virii should have convinced them of what a frigging stupid idea that is?
"If everyone knows what everyone is doing and becomes accustomed to it then everyone can freely do as they will without fear of punitive judgement, as long as they don't break any laws... which is another discussion (see recommendations above)."
Indeed. Jews in Nazi Germany in the 30s were free to do what they wanted without fear, so long as they didn't break any laws.
Of course walking around with a Star of David on your clothes kind of sucked later on when being a Jew became a capital offence.
As opposed to go into dungeon, kill 100 rats, level, go into another dungeon, kill 100 larger rats and level... all so you can get to level 1000 in order to go into the Dungeon Of Fat Loot with 50 other people to kill the Uber Rat Of Doom?
"Most of the rest of the world already uses similar ID cards in one form or another and I've seen no issues."
Tell that to the Jews in Nazi Germany.
I had no ID card in the UK (though the NuLabour fascists are trying to impose them), and I have no ID card here in Canada. Why should Americans want ID cards? What benefit will they provide to Americans, as opposed to authoritarian American governments?
Let's suppose, for example, that Bush declares martial law and decides to declare all Muslims 'enemy combatants' who can then be shipped off to be tortured and/or executed; do you really think they'll be better off if the government can find them all through the ID card database?
"I'm a lot more concerned about the trend I see with our government trying to control every aspect of our lives, for the so-called good of the people."
Since you support ID cards, which will make such control vastly easier, you either haven't thought things through very well or are just lying. Free people don't carry pieces of plastic to prove their identity to their government.
Slashdot Mirror
"If British drivers don't want to be seen by the cameras, why can't they just engage their cloaking devices?"
They do. From what I've been told, in some areas (typically Chav-towns), 50% or more of cars either have fake plates or are unregistered, or are registered abroad... that instantly 'cloaks' them from speed cameras, and they can drive as badly as they want.
That's fine if you're a chav who's probably in and out of jail anyway; what more do you have to lose? But when you're one of the middle class workers who pay the taxes that keep the government running, you can't risk sticking fake plates on your car to avoid losing your license for driving perfectly safely on a motorway at 80mph.
"As a regular cyclist who has almost been killed on numerous occasions by speeding, reckless, and/or irresponsible drivers, I fully support the use of any and all technology (surveillance or otherwise) to FORCE people to drive safely and within the law."
Thanks to speed cameras, you can drive as recklessly or irresponsibly as you want provided you do so below the speed limit, as there are very few traffic police left on the roads. And if you get fake plates, or don't register your car, you can do those at any speed you want, because the speed cameras can't touch you.
"Speeding is reckless behavior"
No it's not; otherwise they'd be charged with 'reckless driving', not speeding. The only reason speeding laws exist is so that the police can punish true reckless drivers on a technicality rather than having to prove reckless driving, which is much harder; they were never intended to be applied universally because that would be absurdly stupid.
"Speed limits exist for a reason."
Yes, to give the police a means to punish people when they can't readily prove reckless driving in court.
Speed limits in the UK are regularly set wrong, often for political reasons. I used to live on a long, wide, mostly straight road where everyone had off-road parking... the speed limit was 40mph. Turn off that onto one of the narrow roads with parked cars on both sides, and the speed limit _INCREASED_ to 60mph. Needless to say, people regularly drove at 60mph through the 40 limit because it was f-ing stupid.
Worse than that, we had two speed cameras in the village where I lived. Both were on safe straight sections of road, both hidden behind trees or road signs in order to raise money rather than discourage people from driving fast. The most dangerous place in the village was a poorly designed pedestrian crossing where going faster than the 30mph speed limit meant you might not be able to stop if a pedestrian was crossing because you couldn't see far enough ahead; so why weren't the speed cameras there, with flashing lights and signs saying 'don't speed and we mean it'?
Ah, because they wouldn't have brought in any money.
And I'm always amused to see cyclists lecturing people on the need to obey road laws when I almost never saw a cyclist in the UK stop at a red light or a pedestrian crossing, and death rates per mile from cycling are similar to death rates per mile from driving; I was almost knocked flying myself last year by a cyclist racing through a 'pedestrianised' area.
When, for example, will Britain see compulsory insurance for bikes, along with compulsory registration and number plates so they can be caught and punished for breaking traffic laws? Ah, when Hell freezes over.
"The cameras don't snap you the moment you slip over the limit briefly, they only catch drivers who are breaking the law by a significant amount."
Dunno where you lived, but plenty of people in the UK have been fined for driving a few miles per hour over the limit, on a safe straight road in good conditions, where the limit has already been reduced to an absurd level. Caught four times and you lose your driving license, and quite possibly your job and your house.
Speed cameras have done nothing to improve road safety, they exist purely to screw over motorists and suck out money which goes to the government's mates running the speed cameras. I've never met anyone in the UK who drives (the majority of the adult population) and supports speed cameras; yet the country has been plastered with them. You may have missed it, but Britain is supposed to be a democracy, and when the majority are seeing something they don't want pushed on them by an authoritarian government, it should be no surprise that a minority decide to take things into their own hands.
Speed cameras have done more than any other single cause to destroy respect for the law among the general public in the UK over the last decade. If the government had any sense, they'd rip them all out tomorrow.
"I think you're right that Linux is no more secure against trojans than Windows"
Most Windows users (at least on XP) run as root. Most linux users don't run as root. That's a heck of a lot more secure, at least in terms of losing control over your computer rather than just losing your files.
Of course this would be a non-issue if Windows didn't automatically run software when you put a CD in the drive; this is just another reason why auto-run is an insanely bad idea.
"Screwing this administration isn't worth, to my mind, screwing the long-term credibility of our country."
Any 'long-term credibility' that America had has been swallowed by the sands of Iraq. Only Americans seem to believe that the rest of the world regards them as anything other than a 'rogue state' that will kidnap and torture foreigners at will and, despite most of the world's military spending, can't even control a third-rate desert shit-hole.
"Having an iPod-optimized version of the movie available on the DVD is an added value."
Not when it's wasting a gigabyte of space that is of no use to anyone who doesn't have an iPod. I'd rather have better picture quality with all those extra bits, or more extras.
In any case, DVD 'copy protection' is history; why charge people more for something they can already do for free?
These days I find most things on the web by searching, not by following links. If these people want to cut themselves off from the world by refusing to allow search engines to catalog them, why not? People whose work is inaccessible to most because their publishers refuse to let it be on search engines will soon decide that they no longer need a publisher.
The difference is that a company which failed as badly and as often as the average government would be bankrupt in a few quarters. Governments, on the other hand, just keep on going... even when the people decide to 'vote the bastards out', 99% of the bastards keep their jobs.
"So let us imagine what the difference between the UK and the US could be. Oh yes the fact that you let every loony and criminal arm themselves to the teeth with cheap firearms."
Murder rates in the UK and USA were roughly equal a century ago when 'every loony and criminal' could buy any gun they wanted over the counter in Britain with no questions asked (though they did have to pay a $2 tax if they wanted to legally carry it in public). Armed crime rates with guns are much higher today in the UK than when 'every loony and criminal' could buy any gun they wanted over the counter with no questions asked, and while the British murder rate hasn't risen much since then the murder rate in America is far higher than it was; murders exploded as Prohibition increased the power of organised crime and, while it's dropped since, rates never returned to earlier levels.
Britons just don't kill each other much; per-capita, Americans kill each other more with knives than Britons kill each other by any means. Meanwhile, gun crime in Britain is growing rapidly as criminals have few problems getting hold of guns to prey on a disarmed population.
Thanks for the info; sounds like they've noticed the problem themselves!
Is that there's apparently no way to simply disable a plugin in Firefox. In order to completely disable Quacktime I've had to go through various plugin directories physically deleting the files, and next time I have to update it all the bloody plugins will be back again.
Why can't about:plugins just have a 'disable' box on each plugin? Or, better yet, a standard preferences menu list which just lets me disable them there and then?
"What do they mean by clear the memory? Because when I malloc() (and not calloc()) I seem to get whatever was there before.."
But you don't get anything from another process. When malloc() runs out of memory and asks for a new chunk from the operating system, a modern system will usually zero the block that it returns, whereas some older operating systems (e.g. MS-DOS, I think?) would just give a pointer to a chunk of free memory which could still contain any data that the previous user had left in it; that could be any program which had previously run on the machine.
When you free something and call malloc() again afterwards, you may well get a block with old data from your program. But in most cases you won't get a block with old data from a different program.
The same applies to disk files; with some operating systems in the past you could open a file, write a byte a megabyte into the file and then read a megabyte of old data preceding it in free blocks which had been allocated to you and not cleared. That was obviously a big potential security hole, so most modern operating systems will zero all the data in the file instead (more precisely, they'll probably allocate a sparse file which will return zeros from areas which haven't been written to).
One of the 'Elite' sequels was shipped with a swap file on the CD-ROM. Opening that swap file with a text editor showed it included much of the C code for the game, which presumably must have been swapped out while they were compiling at some point and then copied to the CD by mistake.
:).
From what I remember the installer copied the swap file to the hard disk, but the first patch either deleted it or zeroed it
"If Negreponte's goal is to get cheap laptops in the hands of poor children, why would he be angry?"
If Microsoft and Intel put Negreponte out of 'business' by selling subsidised low-cost PCs, how long do you think they'll continue to sell them afterwards?
They're not doing this out of the kindness of their hearts, they're doing it because they see a competitor they want to eliminate.
"If I don't shut down Firefox when I leave work for the day my system will be at a dead crawl in the morning - it shouldn't do this."
Let me guess: your company runs virus scans or similar on your PCs overnight, so Windows swaps out all your applications to cache the files the scanner has just finished scanning?
That's why I found that quitting and restarting Firefox was much faster than leaving it running overnight. It's not Mozilla's fault that the Windows disk cache was designed by a retard.
Ditto. Like many people I bought the Orange Box, so I started Episode 2, but then got distracted by Portal and TF2, and then the free Sam and Max episode that was available on Steam... I'll get around to finishing Episode 2 sometime in the next few months :).
That's like IRC, right? I'm always amused to see articles by journalists who know nothing about the history of technology... yeah, this generation invented 'instant messaging' and information sharing, in the bad old days we only had email, or, if we were lucky, tin cans and bits of string.
Personally I think there's another more important division growing up; between those who are available to be instantly pestered by anyone and those who aren't. I love email because it just sits there until I respond to it, I have more important things to do with my time than deal with any old crap people choose to send me at any moment. I suspect that as these kids grow up, they'll start to understand the benefits of not being accessible 'instantly'... particularly if they're forced to be on call 24 hours a day at work.
"I don't see why encrypted files should be any different than hardcopy or anything else that could be seized under sub poena."
The police already _have_ the files. They're free to try to crack the encryption on those files.
While I intensely dislike the animal rights nutters, this is a stupid and oppressive law which should never have been passed. And I can quite believe that the police she was raided by are 'thugs'; ask that guy they shot eight times in the head a while back if that's a good description... oops, you can't, he's dead.
Cool, thanks for the info; sounds like a pretty good deal for a basic server box.
"People just don't have a real use for a very crappy PC."
Most people I know use their PC for web browsing and word processing; this system would be plenty good enough for that, so long as they had a monitor to go with it.
Heck, if I can install more hard disks in there I'm tempted to buy one myself and stick it in the basement to replace my desktop system as our file-server... it's got to burn less power than a 3GHz Pentium.
Why oh why does Microsoft still automatically run software off any disk that's inserted into your PC? Surely decades of floppy-carried virii should have convinced them of what a frigging stupid idea that is?
"If everyone knows what everyone is doing and becomes accustomed to it then everyone can freely do as they will without fear of punitive judgement, as long as they don't break any laws... which is another discussion (see recommendations above)."
Indeed. Jews in Nazi Germany in the 30s were free to do what they wanted without fear, so long as they didn't break any laws.
Of course walking around with a Star of David on your clothes kind of sucked later on when being a Jew became a capital offence.
As opposed to go into dungeon, kill 100 rats, level, go into another dungeon, kill 100 larger rats and level... all so you can get to level 1000 in order to go into the Dungeon Of Fat Loot with 50 other people to kill the Uber Rat Of Doom?
:).
This is a MMOG we're talking about here
"Most of the rest of the world already uses similar ID cards in one form or another and I've seen no issues."
Tell that to the Jews in Nazi Germany.
I had no ID card in the UK (though the NuLabour fascists are trying to impose them), and I have no ID card here in Canada. Why should Americans want ID cards? What benefit will they provide to Americans, as opposed to authoritarian American governments?
Let's suppose, for example, that Bush declares martial law and decides to declare all Muslims 'enemy combatants' who can then be shipped off to be tortured and/or executed; do you really think they'll be better off if the government can find them all through the ID card database?
"I'm a lot more concerned about the trend I see with our government trying to control every aspect of our lives, for the so-called good of the people."
Since you support ID cards, which will make such control vastly easier, you either haven't thought things through very well or are just lying. Free people don't carry pieces of plastic to prove their identity to their government.