When the executive who just signed on with plans to leave in 6 months needs short-term productivity gains to pad his paycheck. Don't worry, though. The next guy will drop the last 10%.
With a rational, intelligent species, greed-driven and profit-driven may indeed be independent things. But, let's be honest here. With humanity, they are the same thing. As soon as you inject money into any human-based endeavor, greed perverts the whole thing. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, but it happens without fail.
That's a cute way to ignore that the surveillance is completely bipartisan. This is neither strictly Obama's fault nor any meaningful change from the last administration. Were McCain elected, we would not be any better off in this regard. Should Romney be elected, we will be no better off. Both parties want this desperately, because it is a springboard to consolidating even more power in their hands.
Let's face it: we now live in a surveillance society.
Only because the majority of the voters want it that way.
Do not mistake apathy for intent. We have insufficient data to suggest that people want it this way. They just don't care enough to enforce change with political action. I caught myself before saying votes, though, as there are no candidates which have any meaningful chance to affect change in this regard whom anyone could vote for. The only hope at this point is for a new, grass-roots party to form and win elections by landslides.
Even if you as an attacker know that the user chose 2 arbitrary words out of the English language as their password (or that only two mattered), and you knew there was a space between them, and you knew the login was case-insensitive, you still have to deal with the (minimum) 29,403,847,100 possible password phrases (171,476 common-use words times 171,475 unique second words, if we ignore word duplication and obsolete words). This also assumes, of course, that the password used correct spelling and did not in any way try to obfuscate the words with replacement schemes like l33t speak.
Tell me again why it is terrible advice to use phrases?
The assumption is easy to make because corruption always occurs when there is money involved. If it's still mostly legitimate now, it is only a matter of time before it descends into payment for changing articles to omit negative facts and insert lies which are positive to the client. The problem with waiting until it becomes a problem (assuming it isn't one already) is by that point it is usually too late.
Unfortunately, that will never happen. The reason for this is that our anti-terrorist watchdog gets more money and more power whenever it can convince the public at large that there is a terrorist around every corner willing to hurt or kill us. The DHS doesn't even have to ask for it - the public throws money at them and willingly sacrifices freedoms, all while screaming out "please keep us safe!"
Generally, yes. But the prospect of having an "objective" computer giving out false positives all the time to keep the terror alive is the fulfillment of at least part of the DHS mission statement.
OTOH, I am quite confident that I was treated to 25+ year old food during camping trips when I was younger. You could tell by how the labels looked that it was ancient. The most frequent example was peanut butter.
Your point is valid, however. Buying non-perishable food for emergencies and ignoring that it usually will go bad eventually is a mistake.
Tomatoes were grown in two groups, one using pesticides, the other group without pesticides. Then the tomatoes were tested for a few nutrients.
Sort of like painting your car a different color and testing for gas mileage. Or like testing a blue Pontiac and a yellow Ford to see which color gives the best gas mileage. Just a stupid, flawed study.
When the paint vendors claim that their red paint makes your car faster and more efficient, it becomes valid to test paint color versus gas mileage and top speed, if only to refute the claim.
So my question is, why was this study designed that way, and why did anyone even bother to fund such a stupid study? I'm sure it cost a lot of somebody's money. And why did it get broadcast in popular newspapers? Was this study just done for headline value?
It was done because a popular claim by organic growers is that the food is more nutritious. The organic movement has become larger and larger each year. I don't see the problem with the study.
If they want to test for nutrient value, then test growing conditions, like using "organic" or "sustainable" growing practices, how the soil is fertilized, etc.
Nutrient value of the food is defined as the vitamins/minerals present in the food. If I can grow food in a dozen different ways and end up with chemically identical end results, then the manner in which it was grown is irrelevant. All that matters is the end result from a nutrition standpoint. You cannot redefine what nutrient value means just because you don't like what the study came up with.
If they want to test for toxin residues, then test pesticide use, hormones, GM that makes the plant produce pesticides, etc.
The more useful test would be to determine level of toxins found in subjects after years of ingesting organic versus conventional food. This was done. The study found trace amounts of pesticides left over in those who ate conventional food, but it also found significantly higher levels of phosphorous in those who ate organic food. It would be interesting to see this focused on a little further, but the data so far suggests that there isn't significant enough difference either way to matter.
So if this new study is rehashing old useless studies like I just mentioned, then my response is, "Who Cares?". It would be just another stupid headline study that would fall apart if you actually read how they did the study.
People who eat organic food, sometimes spending 2-4x as much, may be doing so merely because of a promise that the food is more nutritious. They deserve to know this claim is provably false. If someone is instead purchasing organic food for environmental reasons, then this study shouldn't matter to them. I fail to see this indignation over the study, except possibly in cases where people are upset they have been duped and do not want to accept they have been.
At a high level, my cell phone transmits calls no differently than my computer transmits emails - in both cases, the contents of the communication is sent unencrypted through multiple routers I do not control. Anyone with the equipment and the know-how could intercept both. However, somehow one form is protected and the other is not.
I always found it odd that this "expectation of privacy" that allows the government to snoop on certain communications is defined by whether or not the government is already known for widespread snooping of the medium. We don't expect email has any privacy because it has been known for some time that there is widespread government interception of email, not because they are post cards. Somehow, cell phones got grandfathered in under the umbrella of land-line phones.
The post card comparison is disingenuous because it ignores the fact that you are sending it through a government network (the post office) in addition to the contents being visible to handlers. You know beforehand that the government is handling your mail and may see the message. If the government was single-handedly hosting the telephone network and the internet as a whole, then the comparison would be valid.
As the government is not hosting even a single cell tower, I would not normally expect them to intercept my calls. As it does not host any of the major internet links, I would not normally expect them to intercept my email. As they are not hosting wireless hot spots, I would not normally expect them to be listening to my wireless communication, either. It takes deliberate effort to intercept communication in any of these media, so it is reasonable for the average person to assume that such interception does not normally occur. That it *does* occur on a regular basis on every one of the above media should be a subject of far more outrage than we see.
There's a feedback loop keeping prices high in developed countries. We make more money, so prices are higher. Prices are higher, so we need to make more money.
If I could work for $250 a month and still expect to have food/shelter and a little bit of comfort, I wouldn't have as much trouble with competing with the Chinese. The reality is that if I were paid only $250 a month, I could feed myself and pay for the occasional change of clothes, but I would be living in a homeless shelter. My shelter would also have to be close to work, because few places in the US have any meaningful public transportation.
People are free to submit articles about China compelling people to assemble HTC, Samsung, Nokia, Acer, et al devices. You are likely to see just as much outrage.
In all likelihood, you are seeing these fall on Apple each time because Apple's demand is large enough and spiky enough to trigger these kinds of things, while the business from other companies is more steady due to a more diversified product line. It does not excuse the other companies' involvement. It just makes Apple more visible.
That's kinda where the "licensing agreements and threat of lawsuits" comes in. You can bet Apple has patents on this proprietary connector and will use the courts to block any large-scale import of 3rd party connectors in the immediate future. Milking out extra money by controlling initial production and sales of the connector is largely why they aren't using something like mini/micro USB. It has proven so with the Samsung lawsuit that Apple would rather deal with judges than competitors.
Yes, that seems like the larger issue here. What purpose does the FBI Cyber Action team have with 12M Apple UUIDs (from TFA: of which only 1M was leaked so far)?
This actually seems like a care of actual well-meaning hacktivism, as the purpose here is to inform users they are being tracked. It is only a matter of time before the remaining UUIDs are released. Unfortunately, most people have little more tech savvy than a newborn, so it is unlikely many people will even know how to compare their device to the list even if they care to do so.
The best we can hope for is that more of them wake up to the large-scale surveillance being undertaken and the abuse of power it represents. I wish I could be optimistic, but I know better by now.
Ethics relates to a generalized concept of fairness and honesty, and you would be hard pressed to say that it is remotely honest to take advantage of an obvious bug hundreds if not thousands of times to make yourself rich. It is possible, it may very well be legal, and depending upon your upbringing and religion, it may even be moral to do so, but it is clearly unethical.
Because many people play video games to escape the obvious flaws in real life. It is tragically amusing that the negative elements of society in games are much better handled than out in the real world.
Having a close-up picture of a building's front door (detailed enough to identify the lock type) does not have much bearing on whether or not you can get in. Leaving the key underneath the welcome mat, on the other hand...
You seem to forget that the US government has instilled dictators in multiple countries (some of which had representative governments!), and that the US supported Saddam for years. In fact, here's a YouTube video of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand. The "fighting oppression" and "liberation" lines the US has used over the years is just PR bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
"Never get in a patent dispute with IBM" is on par with "never get involved in a land war in Asia."
When the executive who just signed on with plans to leave in 6 months needs short-term productivity gains to pad his paycheck. Don't worry, though. The next guy will drop the last 10%.
With a rational, intelligent species, greed-driven and profit-driven may indeed be independent things. But, let's be honest here. With humanity, they are the same thing. As soon as you inject money into any human-based endeavor, greed perverts the whole thing. Sometimes it takes longer than other times, but it happens without fail.
That's a cute way to ignore that the surveillance is completely bipartisan. This is neither strictly Obama's fault nor any meaningful change from the last administration. Were McCain elected, we would not be any better off in this regard. Should Romney be elected, we will be no better off. Both parties want this desperately, because it is a springboard to consolidating even more power in their hands.
Let's face it: we now live in a surveillance society.
Only because the majority of the voters want it that way.
Do not mistake apathy for intent. We have insufficient data to suggest that people want it this way. They just don't care enough to enforce change with political action. I caught myself before saying votes, though, as there are no candidates which have any meaningful chance to affect change in this regard whom anyone could vote for. The only hope at this point is for a new, grass-roots party to form and win elections by landslides.
Even if you as an attacker know that the user chose 2 arbitrary words out of the English language as their password (or that only two mattered), and you knew there was a space between them, and you knew the login was case-insensitive, you still have to deal with the (minimum) 29,403,847,100 possible password phrases (171,476 common-use words times 171,475 unique second words, if we ignore word duplication and obsolete words). This also assumes, of course, that the password used correct spelling and did not in any way try to obfuscate the words with replacement schemes like l33t speak.
Tell me again why it is terrible advice to use phrases?
The assumption is easy to make because corruption always occurs when there is money involved. If it's still mostly legitimate now, it is only a matter of time before it descends into payment for changing articles to omit negative facts and insert lies which are positive to the client. The problem with waiting until it becomes a problem (assuming it isn't one already) is by that point it is usually too late.
Unfortunately, that will never happen. The reason for this is that our anti-terrorist watchdog gets more money and more power whenever it can convince the public at large that there is a terrorist around every corner willing to hurt or kill us. The DHS doesn't even have to ask for it - the public throws money at them and willingly sacrifices freedoms, all while screaming out "please keep us safe!"
Generally, yes. But the prospect of having an "objective" computer giving out false positives all the time to keep the terror alive is the fulfillment of at least part of the DHS mission statement.
OTOH, I am quite confident that I was treated to 25+ year old food during camping trips when I was younger. You could tell by how the labels looked that it was ancient. The most frequent example was peanut butter.
Your point is valid, however. Buying non-perishable food for emergencies and ignoring that it usually will go bad eventually is a mistake.
Tomatoes were grown in two groups, one using pesticides, the other group without pesticides. Then the tomatoes were tested for a few nutrients. Sort of like painting your car a different color and testing for gas mileage. Or like testing a blue Pontiac and a yellow Ford to see which color gives the best gas mileage. Just a stupid, flawed study.
When the paint vendors claim that their red paint makes your car faster and more efficient, it becomes valid to test paint color versus gas mileage and top speed, if only to refute the claim.
So my question is, why was this study designed that way, and why did anyone even bother to fund such a stupid study? I'm sure it cost a lot of somebody's money. And why did it get broadcast in popular newspapers? Was this study just done for headline value?
It was done because a popular claim by organic growers is that the food is more nutritious. The organic movement has become larger and larger each year. I don't see the problem with the study.
If they want to test for nutrient value, then test growing conditions, like using "organic" or "sustainable" growing practices, how the soil is fertilized, etc.
Nutrient value of the food is defined as the vitamins/minerals present in the food. If I can grow food in a dozen different ways and end up with chemically identical end results, then the manner in which it was grown is irrelevant. All that matters is the end result from a nutrition standpoint. You cannot redefine what nutrient value means just because you don't like what the study came up with.
If they want to test for toxin residues, then test pesticide use, hormones, GM that makes the plant produce pesticides, etc.
The more useful test would be to determine level of toxins found in subjects after years of ingesting organic versus conventional food. This was done. The study found trace amounts of pesticides left over in those who ate conventional food, but it also found significantly higher levels of phosphorous in those who ate organic food. It would be interesting to see this focused on a little further, but the data so far suggests that there isn't significant enough difference either way to matter.
So if this new study is rehashing old useless studies like I just mentioned, then my response is, "Who Cares?". It would be just another stupid headline study that would fall apart if you actually read how they did the study.
People who eat organic food, sometimes spending 2-4x as much, may be doing so merely because of a promise that the food is more nutritious. They deserve to know this claim is provably false. If someone is instead purchasing organic food for environmental reasons, then this study shouldn't matter to them. I fail to see this indignation over the study, except possibly in cases where people are upset they have been duped and do not want to accept they have been.
At a high level, my cell phone transmits calls no differently than my computer transmits emails - in both cases, the contents of the communication is sent unencrypted through multiple routers I do not control. Anyone with the equipment and the know-how could intercept both. However, somehow one form is protected and the other is not.
I always found it odd that this "expectation of privacy" that allows the government to snoop on certain communications is defined by whether or not the government is already known for widespread snooping of the medium. We don't expect email has any privacy because it has been known for some time that there is widespread government interception of email, not because they are post cards. Somehow, cell phones got grandfathered in under the umbrella of land-line phones.
The post card comparison is disingenuous because it ignores the fact that you are sending it through a government network (the post office) in addition to the contents being visible to handlers. You know beforehand that the government is handling your mail and may see the message. If the government was single-handedly hosting the telephone network and the internet as a whole, then the comparison would be valid.
As the government is not hosting even a single cell tower, I would not normally expect them to intercept my calls. As it does not host any of the major internet links, I would not normally expect them to intercept my email. As they are not hosting wireless hot spots, I would not normally expect them to be listening to my wireless communication, either. It takes deliberate effort to intercept communication in any of these media, so it is reasonable for the average person to assume that such interception does not normally occur. That it *does* occur on a regular basis on every one of the above media should be a subject of far more outrage than we see.
There's a feedback loop keeping prices high in developed countries. We make more money, so prices are higher. Prices are higher, so we need to make more money.
If I could work for $250 a month and still expect to have food/shelter and a little bit of comfort, I wouldn't have as much trouble with competing with the Chinese. The reality is that if I were paid only $250 a month, I could feed myself and pay for the occasional change of clothes, but I would be living in a homeless shelter. My shelter would also have to be close to work, because few places in the US have any meaningful public transportation.
People are free to submit articles about China compelling people to assemble HTC, Samsung, Nokia, Acer, et al devices. You are likely to see just as much outrage.
In all likelihood, you are seeing these fall on Apple each time because Apple's demand is large enough and spiky enough to trigger these kinds of things, while the business from other companies is more steady due to a more diversified product line. It does not excuse the other companies' involvement. It just makes Apple more visible.
That's kinda where the "licensing agreements and threat of lawsuits" comes in. You can bet Apple has patents on this proprietary connector and will use the courts to block any large-scale import of 3rd party connectors in the immediate future. Milking out extra money by controlling initial production and sales of the connector is largely why they aren't using something like mini/micro USB. It has proven so with the Samsung lawsuit that Apple would rather deal with judges than competitors.
Yes, that seems like the larger issue here. What purpose does the FBI Cyber Action team have with 12M Apple UUIDs (from TFA: of which only 1M was leaked so far)?
This actually seems like a care of actual well-meaning hacktivism, as the purpose here is to inform users they are being tracked. It is only a matter of time before the remaining UUIDs are released. Unfortunately, most people have little more tech savvy than a newborn, so it is unlikely many people will even know how to compare their device to the list even if they care to do so.
The best we can hope for is that more of them wake up to the large-scale surveillance being undertaken and the abuse of power it represents. I wish I could be optimistic, but I know better by now.
...up until you repeat the process 9999 more times, so the vendor loses $149,800.
You are confusing ethics with morals. Ethics aren't relative to an individual.
See the following.
Ethics relates to a generalized concept of fairness and honesty, and you would be hard pressed to say that it is remotely honest to take advantage of an obvious bug hundreds if not thousands of times to make yourself rich. It is possible, it may very well be legal, and depending upon your upbringing and religion, it may even be moral to do so, but it is clearly unethical.
Because many people play video games to escape the obvious flaws in real life. It is tragically amusing that the negative elements of society in games are much better handled than out in the real world.
Having a close-up picture of a building's front door (detailed enough to identify the lock type) does not have much bearing on whether or not you can get in. Leaving the key underneath the welcome mat, on the other hand...
Don't forget New York City's wonderful stop and frisk policy.
What's closer to reality is that such a technology would exist, but only the super-rich would ever have access to it.
So we take that 700 billion dollars saved in Medicare and build a really big rocket...
What's the difference?
The iPhone is just an iPod Touch that can make calls.
The iPad is just an iPod Touch that's bigger.
You seem to forget that the US government has instilled dictators in multiple countries (some of which had representative governments!), and that the US supported Saddam for years. In fact, here's a YouTube video of Rumsfeld shaking Saddam's hand. The "fighting oppression" and "liberation" lines the US has used over the years is just PR bullshit.