A mate's Toyota has got that, but its more for pulling the car out of really blind entrances onto a road. You can see sideways from the very from of the car so that you can see if anything is coming, even when it may be impossible to tell from the cabin. It is not a system to let you see round corners!
In a society where heroin is legal, there would probably be less stigma associated with its use, and so getting help for a heroin addiction would be easier. There would probably be less restrictions on methadone too, which is used to ween people off heroin. And of course in a society where all drugs are legal, its very likely that the population would be more educated about the different drugs so make the sensible choice on their own.
But you don't have to take heroin, even if its legal. There's lots of people who don't drink at all, or smoke, or consume caffeine in the current world, and theres lots of people who do some illegal drugs without others. IIRC nicotine is getting on for as addictive as heroin, but the withdrawal symptoms aren't as bad.
Well, I got the idea from some comment said here on slashdot, but I've thought about the practicalities of making a system like this. I've even tried some of the basics in VMWare.
The chance for accidental brickage is high, so you'd need stable machines in the first place, and probably two UPSs. You'd have to be very regimented with yourself when it comes to working on the machines, to avoid cat-type incidents, but I think it'd be manageable. In theory, you'd be able to have backed up copies of the keys for emergencies, but then you'd fall foul of the law..... so keep their existance really quiet!;)
... so if you're in that situation, the next step is Europe and getting the law tested against human rights laws, or something?
Obviously I haven't read the legislation (and if I did I wouldn't understand it: it's written in legalese), but if there is no right to appeal and the law essentially assumes guilt, I'm sure the ECHR wouldn't take kindly to it.
In a past discussion like this one, here on slashdot, I saw talk of a system that might potentially bypass this kind of law.
You have 2 computers, A and B. The HDD's in both are encrypted, the two systems network boot off each other, with the encryption key stored on the other machine. i.e. A's key is on B, and B's key is on A. You'd obviously need a third computer whilst building this system, but once built, as long as A and B aren't powered off at the same time you would have 2 fully encrypted servers without direct access to the keys. You could have a panic button too, to cut the power to both, essentially bricking the computers and making it impossible for law enforcement to acquire evidence. If the police got a warrant and removed the computers, well, they'd probably power them all down to move them, destroying any evidence themselves.
Can anyone remember anything else about this? Or have seen it done, or have done similar themselves?
I think Alteris' product(s) can do multicast. An ex-employer used alteris bootworks to image workstations, but they were too unprofessional to have it set up to be used efficiently. Once an image was deployed, there was still lots of manual patching, installing of apps and fiddling to be done: about as long as it would have taken to install from an XP CD, FFS!
The virus writers might not pay out of their wallets, but they may use compromised Paypal accounts...
I'm not a coder myself, but maybe someone could say if the following would work. If you're a malware writer, could you not produce 2 non-malware applications, and get them both approved by whoever. But in each app you have half of your malware (a keylogger for arguments sake). When the approvers sign off your legal app they might notice parts of your malware, but it wouldn't be complete and they might just dismiss it as some kind of redundant code. If you can convince the user to run your 2 apps at once most of the time (make your apps sit in the Windows systray for example), then would it be possible that the malware could work, essentially bypassing a whitelist?
<?xml version="1.0"?> <posting> <message mood="compliment" level="jovial">.... and I thought the guy making the joke that journalists count from 1 was a geeky joke, but your post takes the biscuit <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)"/> </message> </posting>
Fuck, and I wasted my last mod point in another discussion. I've have modded your post up as +1 ranty and paranoid but insightful. There are a lot of people who benefit from the way the world works, the status quo, and the I feel that the effect of all these people "not rocking the boat" is that the poor are kept poor, education inequalities etc.. There are also no doubt individuals pushing for more authoritarian/facist governments, just as there are those doing the opposite.
I used my last point modding some troll who was making claims along the lines that Christians doing X is OK, but for others to do X it is wrong. I marked it funny, hoping it undermines his argument if he was being serious, and pre-emptively quenching any flames;)
You connect the remote to the web via the USB port, it sends the data back. A day later, you get an email saying, we've figured out how to make your oddball whizbang device work, connect up, and we'll fix it. And they do. And that service will still be available in twenty years? Or ten? Or three? Or when the current product has been superceded? PingXao was right to return it, and I hope he returned it such that it couldn't easily be resold. That way, the message is much more likely to get back to manufacturer that the business model is bullshit!
Since the change in director general at the BBC, I feel that the BBC has seriously degraded. They seem to be very much less questioning of the state these days, and very much more pro-authority.
Since the BBC's involvment with the David Kelly case, the major shit-storms that would have happened in the BBC in the aftermath has lead to changes. Its now either policy to be more authoritarian (set by the new director general?), or the employees have become "lazier", and the attitude is a side-effect. By lazier, I mean that if the government say XYZ, the reporters report XYZ, instead of doing real journalism and digging into why the government say XYZ. Real journalism potential leads to your source "killing himself" and the inevitable enquiry.
I think that this laziness is starting to manifest itself elsewhere too. The BBC coverage of the climate protests at Heathrow airport recently were reported such that the protesters were the major problem, not the fact that x thousand people feel they need to do something about climate change, and how maybe those people have a point. They seemed to really focus on how the police were being restrained and not using force.... they seemed to be implying praise of the police.
And that biker who was shot on the M40. The general attitude I felt the BBC was giving out initially was that it happened because he was at a biker festival. I heard mention yesterday that the police have had a lot of calls from the public about the shooting, but nothing from the Hells Angels that it is alleged that the biker was a member of. The way the Beeb phrased it it was like "even his so called friends in the gang don't want to help".
So yeah, the BBC writing long articles about Google Earth..... they don't have to even leave the computer, let alone the office to write that article.
How much can you really camouflage a satellite? Even if they make use of stealth technology, I would think they'd still be optically visible. With the cost it takes to build one and put it up in the sky, they are built for long-term use, which generally means great big solar panels, which are hard to hide. I saw a TV programme about spy sats, and the US one(s) that can't be seen keeps its narrow edge towards the earth at all times, I understand. From what I remember, it could be seen being unloaded from the shuttle, but then vanished shortly afterwards.
The ability to colapse a whole thread appeared on this slashdot 2.0 ajax interface thing for a while. It didn't seem to be the best implementation (IIRC), but it kinda worked.
Did you used to be a usenetter by any chance? Thats where I picked up a desire to be able to kill a whole thread. Laugh all you like, but I used to like Netscape 4's news reader, and like a lot of usenet clients it could ignore threads. If a thread turned into a flame fest (that you've seen before), or just wasn't interesting, OT etc., you could just ignore the whole thread, and new messages in that thread would be marked as read.
The ability to ignore a whole thread, or from a point downwards would be nice on slashdot. Once you've been here for a while you start to notice that a lot of discussions are very similar: they follow the same patterns of posts and ideas that have been talked about a million times. If whole threads could be ignored more easily by/. users, it might mean that mod points get used more towards the end of discussions (which often have insightful gems of comments that get overlooked because either a mod has run out of points by the time they get to the end of the page, or they've moved on to a newer article).
And as for download limits, they claim to be unlimited, although this isn't strictly true, but apparently no user's ever actually hit their limits, so they must be pretty high. That is exactly the issue I don't like: vague limits. Having a quick look at Be's T&C, the Be Lite account clearly has a limit, but the unlimited doesn't appear to. But that may mean the limit is there, but ultra weasely worded, if what you're saying is true.:(
Back in the day, with the Scalectrix that I had, I had a couple of circular "mechanical computers" that looked alarmingly like that navigational aid from TFA. They were speed calculators, from what I remember, but they were simply a circular slide rule, of sorts.
Basic, but functional. Even if the power went off you could work out how fast the cars might go;)
The landlord gave us a verbal "OK" Moral: Get it in writing. I know that now;)
but that sum wouldn't get you fuck-all work out of a solicitor Don't they have small-claims court in the UK?
They certainly do, but the landlord was being exploitative of two people who were admittedly very naive. It was the first place me and the GF had rented on our own, and we were just too trusting, I guess. The landlord seemed so nice and friendly.... <- how naive does that sound?!
But for the amount he ripped us off for it was barely worth the effort to go to court. I do appreciate that small claims is very geared to the small guy, but still, it would have meant time off from work at a time when we were more interested in buying and moving into a property. Neither of us had great jobs at the time either, so we had long hours with not the best pay etc..
If it happened these days, I'd have no hesitation in legally ripping him a new one. My sister is going out with a barrister, so if I was definately gonna win I'd go in with the big guns straight away, just so that they have to pick up a huge legal bill!
You want that fancy new twice-as-fast pipe we are rolling out just in time for Christmas? Fine, give up your all-you-can-eat contract.
That is exactly what the shit ISP[1] Zen in the UK has done. I am currently on an ADSL line from Zen, 512K down and 256K up, but otherwise unlimited, and its costing about £30/month (also 8 IPs, rDNS). This account is not available to new customers anymore, they get the choice of:
The up and down speeds are theoretical maximums, I understand in the real world you'll get half those numbers. If my dirty maths are right, I can download 1283gig in a month (and upload ~600) for £30. I'd hate to think what that'd cost on the "better" packages!
But this business model only exists because BT still own most of the infrastructure in the UK, and they charge other ISPs by the byte transferred. ISPs can put their own equipment in some telephone exchanges to bypass BTs bullshit, but they then play by their own bullshit rules because everyone else in the industry does (see Sky's broadband offering: shite considering they are using LLU'd exchanges!).
[1] I know/. will add a norel or something to that link stopping the search engines from cataloging Zen under "shit ISP", but it makes me feel better.
i have ran 100+ ft of cat5 through holes in my rented house before (ghetto method) and, most recently, left wall plates in my basement for future tenants/owners. as long as your walls look normal when you move out, you won't get charged. YMMV
Damn right other people's milage may vary. About 6 years ago I lived in a rented place and ended up getting a bit burned. The landlord gave us a verbal "OK" to drill through the side of a kitchen cabinet so hoses could be run to/from a washing machine (not just over the phone, we asked when he came round and showed him exactly what we planned to do). When we moved out, that "damage" was one of the justifications he came up with for keeping the most of the deposit! Between me and an ex we lost about 200UKP, but that sum wouldn't get you fuck-all work out of a solicitor, and legal action was the only thing left we could have done:( . If I ever rent again, I'll refuse to pay the last month's rent and tell the landlord to keep the deposit.
But of course most humans are humane: if you don't fuck the place up, they'll be cool with subtle modifications. Well added features in a property (LAN wall points, hose points for domestic appliances, decent decorations etc.) would increase the value of a property anyway.
You can hide those inline ads with some CSS tricks in Firefox. I made a journal post when an awful Intel sponsorship thing appeared on slashdot with details of how to hide that. Here's what I currently have in my userContent.css file, and this will also hide the services crud on the left, and the related links cruft on the right:
I remember the jam incident, though not too clearly. Did they not gunge up a CD with jammy fingerprints (pretty much simulating a child), and actually play it like that? The quality of the CDs were so high, presumably, that the laser could still "see" enough pits on the CD through the jam for the player's error correction to be able to do its job?
...BT don't give out unlimited lines to the ISP's, so naturally they don't give out unlimited lines to the consumer. Cable (and rare satellite) may be unlimited but simply here in the UK we have paid for so many GB download per month and it seems the ISPs are refusing to even honour that.
Blueyonder cable was unlimited (in that they didn't QOS or throttle), but since they have been bought out by Virgin Media, the (only?) cable provider in the UK now does exactly the same as nearly all the DSL providers, and that's to throttle transfers. Its very clear that Blueyonder was bought out to make money for the buyers, and one of the first things they did was to impose transfer limits after making very high profile announcements about speed increases.
Admittedly, on ADSL, generally if you go over the transfer limit the ISP will start charging you more, Virgin Media only halves the speed of your net connection until the end of the day. But I still find it totally unacceptable (but you have to accept it, because otherwise you pretty much have no choice but to deal with BT).
Slashdot Mirror
A mate's Toyota has got that, but its more for pulling the car out of really blind entrances onto a road. You can see sideways from the very from of the car so that you can see if anything is coming, even when it may be impossible to tell from the cabin. It is not a system to let you see round corners!
In a society where heroin is legal, there would probably be less stigma associated with its use, and so getting help for a heroin addiction would be easier. There would probably be less restrictions on methadone too, which is used to ween people off heroin. And of course in a society where all drugs are legal, its very likely that the population would be more educated about the different drugs so make the sensible choice on their own.
But you don't have to take heroin, even if its legal. There's lots of people who don't drink at all, or smoke, or consume caffeine in the current world, and theres lots of people who do some illegal drugs without others. IIRC nicotine is getting on for as addictive as heroin, but the withdrawal symptoms aren't as bad.
Well, I got the idea from some comment said here on slashdot, but I've thought about the practicalities of making a system like this. I've even tried some of the basics in VMWare.
;)
The chance for accidental brickage is high, so you'd need stable machines in the first place, and probably two UPSs. You'd have to be very regimented with yourself when it comes to working on the machines, to avoid cat-type incidents, but I think it'd be manageable. In theory, you'd be able to have backed up copies of the keys for emergencies, but then you'd fall foul of the law..... so keep their existance really quiet!
... so if you're in that situation, the next step is Europe and getting the law tested against human rights laws, or something?
Obviously I haven't read the legislation (and if I did I wouldn't understand it: it's written in legalese), but if there is no right to appeal and the law essentially assumes guilt, I'm sure the ECHR wouldn't take kindly to it.
In a past discussion like this one, here on slashdot, I saw talk of a system that might potentially bypass this kind of law.
You have 2 computers, A and B. The HDD's in both are encrypted, the two systems network boot off each other, with the encryption key stored on the other machine. i.e. A's key is on B, and B's key is on A. You'd obviously need a third computer whilst building this system, but once built, as long as A and B aren't powered off at the same time you would have 2 fully encrypted servers without direct access to the keys. You could have a panic button too, to cut the power to both, essentially bricking the computers and making it impossible for law enforcement to acquire evidence. If the police got a warrant and removed the computers, well, they'd probably power them all down to move them, destroying any evidence themselves.
Can anyone remember anything else about this? Or have seen it done, or have done similar themselves?
If you click into your browser's URL bar and enter an "s", is the first site in the drop down list slashdot.org?
I also do not have a need for any shortcuts/bookmarks etc. to slashdot...
I think Alteris' product(s) can do multicast. An ex-employer used alteris bootworks to image workstations, but they were too unprofessional to have it set up to be used efficiently. Once an image was deployed, there was still lots of manual patching, installing of apps and fiddling to be done: about as long as it would have taken to install from an XP CD, FFS!
The virus writers might not pay out of their wallets, but they may use compromised Paypal accounts...
I'm not a coder myself, but maybe someone could say if the following would work. If you're a malware writer, could you not produce 2 non-malware applications, and get them both approved by whoever. But in each app you have half of your malware (a keylogger for arguments sake). When the approvers sign off your legal app they might notice parts of your malware, but it wouldn't be complete and they might just dismiss it as some kind of redundant code. If you can convince the user to run your 2 apps at once most of the time (make your apps sit in the Windows systray for example), then would it be possible that the malware could work, essentially bypassing a whitelist?
<?xml version="1.0"?> .... and I thought the guy making the joke that journalists count from 1 was a geeky joke, but your post takes the biscuit <smiley deprecated="yes" symbol=";-)" />
<posting>
<message mood="compliment" level="jovial">
</message>
</posting>
Fuck, and I wasted my last mod point in another discussion. I've have modded your post up as +1 ranty and paranoid but insightful. There are a lot of people who benefit from the way the world works, the status quo, and the I feel that the effect of all these people "not rocking the boat" is that the poor are kept poor, education inequalities etc.. There are also no doubt individuals pushing for more authoritarian/facist governments, just as there are those doing the opposite.
I used my last point modding some troll who was making claims along the lines that Christians doing X is OK, but for others to do X it is wrong. I marked it funny, hoping it undermines his argument if he was being serious, and pre-emptively quenching any flames ;)
And in History 3 years before then! Things have gone downhill ;(
Since the change in director general at the BBC, I feel that the BBC has seriously degraded. They seem to be very much less questioning of the state these days, and very much more pro-authority.
Since the BBC's involvment with the David Kelly case, the major shit-storms that would have happened in the BBC in the aftermath has lead to changes. Its now either policy to be more authoritarian (set by the new director general?), or the employees have become "lazier", and the attitude is a side-effect. By lazier, I mean that if the government say XYZ, the reporters report XYZ, instead of doing real journalism and digging into why the government say XYZ. Real journalism potential leads to your source "killing himself" and the inevitable enquiry.
I think that this laziness is starting to manifest itself elsewhere too. The BBC coverage of the climate protests at Heathrow airport recently were reported such that the protesters were the major problem, not the fact that x thousand people feel they need to do something about climate change, and how maybe those people have a point. They seemed to really focus on how the police were being restrained and not using force.... they seemed to be implying praise of the police.
And that biker who was shot on the M40. The general attitude I felt the BBC was giving out initially was that it happened because he was at a biker festival. I heard mention yesterday that the police have had a lot of calls from the public about the shooting, but nothing from the Hells Angels that it is alleged that the biker was a member of. The way the Beeb phrased it it was like "even his so called friends in the gang don't want to help".
So yeah, the BBC writing long articles about Google Earth..... they don't have to even leave the computer, let alone the office to write that article.
The ability to colapse a whole thread appeared on this slashdot 2.0 ajax interface thing for a while. It didn't seem to be the best implementation (IIRC), but it kinda worked.
Did you used to be a usenetter by any chance? Thats where I picked up a desire to be able to kill a whole thread. Laugh all you like, but I used to like Netscape 4's news reader, and like a lot of usenet clients it could ignore threads. If a thread turned into a flame fest (that you've seen before), or just wasn't interesting, OT etc., you could just ignore the whole thread, and new messages in that thread would be marked as read.
The ability to ignore a whole thread, or from a point downwards would be nice on slashdot. Once you've been here for a while you start to notice that a lot of discussions are very similar: they follow the same patterns of posts and ideas that have been talked about a million times. If whole threads could be ignored more easily by /. users, it might mean that mod points get used more towards the end of discussions (which often have insightful gems of comments that get overlooked because either a mod has run out of points by the time they get to the end of the page, or they've moved on to a newer article).
Back in the day, with the Scalectrix that I had, I had a couple of circular "mechanical computers" that looked alarmingly like that navigational aid from TFA. They were speed calculators, from what I remember, but they were simply a circular slide rule, of sorts.
Basic, but functional. Even if the power went off you could work out how fast the cars might go ;)
They certainly do, but the landlord was being exploitative of two people who were admittedly very naive. It was the first place me and the GF had rented on our own, and we were just too trusting, I guess. The landlord seemed so nice and friendly.... <- how naive does that sound?!
But for the amount he ripped us off for it was barely worth the effort to go to court. I do appreciate that small claims is very geared to the small guy, but still, it would have meant time off from work at a time when we were more interested in buying and moving into a property. Neither of us had great jobs at the time either, so we had long hours with not the best pay etc..
If it happened these days, I'd have no hesitation in legally ripping him a new one. My sister is going out with a barrister, so if I was definately gonna win I'd go in with the big guns straight away, just so that they have to pick up a huge legal bill!
That is exactly what the shit ISP[1] Zen in the UK has done. I am currently on an ADSL line from Zen, 512K down and 256K up, but otherwise unlimited, and its costing about £30/month (also 8 IPs, rDNS). This account is not available to new customers anymore, they get the choice of:
8meg down, 448K up, 50gig/month, £34.99
8meg down, 448K up, 20gig/month, £24.99
8meg down, 448K up, 2gig/month, £17.99
The up and down speeds are theoretical maximums, I understand in the real world you'll get half those numbers. If my dirty maths are right, I can download 1283gig in a month (and upload ~600) for £30. I'd hate to think what that'd cost on the "better" packages!
But this business model only exists because BT still own most of the infrastructure in the UK, and they charge other ISPs by the byte transferred. ISPs can put their own equipment in some telephone exchanges to bypass BTs bullshit, but they then play by their own bullshit rules because everyone else in the industry does (see Sky's broadband offering: shite considering they are using LLU'd exchanges!).
[1] I knowDamn right other people's milage may vary. About 6 years ago I lived in a rented place and ended up getting a bit burned. The landlord gave us a verbal "OK" to drill through the side of a kitchen cabinet so hoses could be run to/from a washing machine (not just over the phone, we asked when he came round and showed him exactly what we planned to do). When we moved out, that "damage" was one of the justifications he came up with for keeping the most of the deposit! Between me and an ex we lost about 200UKP, but that sum wouldn't get you fuck-all work out of a solicitor, and legal action was the only thing left we could have done :( . If I ever rent again, I'll refuse to pay the last month's rent and tell the landlord to keep the deposit.
But of course most humans are humane: if you don't fuck the place up, they'll be cool with subtle modifications. Well added features in a property (LAN wall points, hose points for domestic appliances, decent decorations etc.) would increase the value of a property anyway.
You can hide those inline ads with some CSS tricks in Firefox. I made a journal post when an awful Intel sponsorship thing appeared on slashdot with details of how to hide that. Here's what I currently have in my userContent.css file, and this will also hide the services crud on the left, and the related links cruft on the right:
I remember the jam incident, though not too clearly. Did they not gunge up a CD with jammy fingerprints (pretty much simulating a child), and actually play it like that? The quality of the CDs were so high, presumably, that the laser could still "see" enough pits on the CD through the jam for the player's error correction to be able to do its job?
...BT don't give out unlimited lines to the ISP's, so naturally they don't give out unlimited lines to the consumer. Cable (and rare satellite) may be unlimited but simply here in the UK we have paid for so many GB download per month and it seems the ISPs are refusing to even honour that.Blueyonder cable was unlimited (in that they didn't QOS or throttle), but since they have been bought out by Virgin Media, the (only?) cable provider in the UK now does exactly the same as nearly all the DSL providers, and that's to throttle transfers. Its very clear that Blueyonder was bought out to make money for the buyers, and one of the first things they did was to impose transfer limits after making very high profile announcements about speed increases.
Admittedly, on ADSL, generally if you go over the transfer limit the ISP will start charging you more, Virgin Media only halves the speed of your net connection until the end of the day. But I still find it totally unacceptable (but you have to accept it, because otherwise you pretty much have no choice but to deal with BT).