True. Terrorism works best when you don't attack the same way twice, and Al Qaeda is a prime example of this. They never attack a similar target twice and don't use the same method of attack twice.
Instead of spending billions on securing something that just needed tweaking they should be spending the money identifying weaknesses as seen through the eyes of a terrorist.
The next attack probably won't be on American soil. The next attack won't be using a plane.
The IRA in Ireland used these methods for years. If you attack using a car bomb once, next time use a mortar. Time after that call in a bomb hoax - don't need to do anything, but everything gets closed down anyway. Time after that drop a bomb in a litter bin. Time after that use a sniper. Each time security gets changed they attacked a different way.
"The very idea of seeking elected office should be the main reason for impeaching most politicians"
Can't remember who said it now...
Re:good example of advantage of extended copyright
on
Beyond Eldred v. Ashcroft
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There will always be a market for this even without copyright. Sure, you could have shared the films over the internet (people do that right now anyway).
How you market it does matter. Shakespeares works are still selling well. If Harold Lloyds family restored and digitized his films then sold them as a DVD set with new material to encourage fans to buy the set, they would sell, with or without copyright.
What's at stake here is money.
Without copyright, the right to sell those films at a premium is lost, and essentially the only money made is on the new work (eg a book about the films, documentary about his stunts, family films etc). Sure, Joe Blow can sell the films but he would have to offer something extra that film fans would want to buy; Buy the familys package with all the goodies, or Joe Blows without any goodies? Sure Joes sells for $5 but you don't get the book/history/behind the scenes that the $30 version gives you.
With the copyright extension those films can be sold at a premium, and they don't even have to try to make new material that would encourage sales because they know they are the only one that can produce these. There is no incentive to actually try to make these appeal to people, plus now they can sell the set for $100 because they can.
As with almost anything where congress gets involved, just follow the money, then you will find out where the real interest lies.
The upgrade process on a tivo has been mainstreamed enough that upgrading your tivo drive is a pretty easy job.
The main difference between MCE and Tivo is that on MCE a 93gb disk gets you 5 hours and change of recording at best. A 40gb Tivo gets you the same amount of time, so until Micro$oft stops using a bloated encoding system you're not getting value for your disk space.
Personally, I still wouldn't trust MCE as my primary PVR. I don't want something that can be that flaky when recording stuff I want to watch.
My Tivo does a wonderful job for that, and in 3 years my Tivo has never crashed. This is where you want to spend money: Linux is designed to remain up for infinite periods of time, and that has always been an issue that Microsoft has been weak on. You can make MS platforms reliable if you are willing to take the time and devote energy to it. I know, I manage a large mix of MS and Linux platforms. My linux platforms have always been "install and mostly forget" servers. All I do it keep them updated and tidy up sometimes. My MS platforms need babying, they are always finding a different way to require attention, and when MS needs attention *everything* stops until you fix it.
Look at the lengths they went to on 9/11 - Getting into the country, learning to fly 747's, checking out security at airports, dry runs, co-ordinating the simultaneous hijacking of planes. It's much easier to mortar somewhere. The IRA mortared 10 Downing Street in London in the middle of the day during the last Gulf war, using home made mortars. Later they mortared Heathrow airport. Twice. And then had to phone the police to tell them that the police had missed a third set of mortars that didn't go off.
If someone is determined enough, they will find a way to commit acts of terrorism.
My problem with this system is that it not addressing the problem. It will gather information on people who don't even matter, and the people that DO matter won't be flagged because the system cannot recognise them.
The whole TIA is a way to give money to GOP friendly businesses while making the public think that Bush is hard on terrorism. The system itself is a distraction from the fact that regular people no longer have any civil rights.
Also as far as I can make out there are no checks and balances to ensure that the system will not be abused.
Exactly. Think Fed-Ex. They know where every package is in thier system. If a package ever go into thier system without being tagged, it would never be found.
Once the government believes it has Total Information Awareness they will start using it in lieu of actual fieldwork. Where was John Doe last week (lets look up the database - emailed Jane Smith to say he was going to meet her at the bar, credit card bill showing he spend $67.34 at the bar. Phone call from his cell saying he would be late home (had car trouble). Next day he has a mechanics bill for a bashed up fender. Lets pick him up on DUI - database says so)
If you are not in the system it will actually be easier to move around because you are not being tracked.
This database thats been proposed relies on certain common identifers to be able to track people. Ask anyone who has ever worked on a large database - with out a common id tracking system, you can never find anything.
I'm guessing that there will be two different id tracking methods: Social Security Number and Alien Registration ID.
This is why this database is not about tracking terrorists. Terrorists, you see, don't like to be tracked. They can sneak into the country off a container ship thats passing near the coast. They can sneak in via the Mexico or Canada borders.
Terrorists don't like leaving paper trails especially if something they are planning will take an age to achieve, so they pay with everything in cash (either stolen or given to them by fine upstanding, but sympathetic citizens).
ID theft is so easy in the US these days it's not even funny, and nobody has taken any steps to correct it. If the current administration was serious about clamping down on terrorists they would first make the current system so foolproof that ID theft was impossible - then track people.
Take this example:
John Q Nobody is a foreign terrorist whose goal is to attack the US Capitol Building
He sneaks off a ship somewhere off the coast of California and meets up on shore with Peter D Alias, second generation immigrant who feels strongly about US intrests. He'd recieved a call from a mentor to meet someone on the beach, and give him a package because he had to be out of town that weekend. Peter meets him and gives him package containing a stolen SSN and papers that identify John as Jack Y American. Peter also gives him a large sum of cash and a legally registered car to use.
John/Jack uses the money to buy several batches of chemicals in different states. After 2 weeks he meets up with Joe P Somebody, a disaffected American who one vistied the country that John/Jack comes from and hates the fact that the US bombed it into the stoneage several years ago. He's been talking with a friend from that country who sends him a parcel that another friend will pick up. He meets John/Jack and given him the parcel containing the stolen SSN and a birth certificate of a dead infant. John/Jack assumes the identity of the dead infant and is becomes William Stonewall of Minnesota.
As John/William he now buys several more batches of chemicals in a few more states, and drives to DC. There he combines the chemicals sticks it in some plumbing supplies bought at Lowes and mortars the US Capitol building.
He then meets up in DC with a contact from an embassy and recieves a passport made up with a valid identity. He drives to Canada and flies off to his home country.
The OHS starts investigating, and finds that a gang of 3-4 people were involved and worked as a team to do this, little realising it was one guy and he's long since left. After several months they find that the ID's were stolen.
All that will be left is some grainy security tape footage of some guy that was never in the system in the first place.
Whats sad is that because ID's were stolen it was never flagged that this attack was being planned...
Then again in the 1980's recession in the UK I was worked for a company whose timeline went like this:
December 1: All directors get new company cars - Top line Saabs, and Jaguars December 5: Same directors annouce that the company is short on cash, won't be issuing christmas bonuses, no wage rises in the new year. (Notice who probably got thier bonus)
I was an operations manager for a large hospital for several years, and planning for this such as that should be a number one goal for IT staff.
The first rule in anything to do with hospitals is to ensure that they have disaster plans in place and that these are tested on a regular basis. The disaster plans should include scenarios such as total power outage, failures of vital equipment etc.
The second rule I used was to ensure that in critical areas there was a second independant network path that if needed could be isolated from the rest of the network. Usually this mean putting in a run of fibre that bypassed buildings etc.
The third rule is to ensure that vital equipment can be run without need for a network. Nothing should be so dependant on networking that if there is a failure it will stop it from working. If networking is a requirement (eg Medical Imaging) that network should be independant from the main network.
The fourth rule is to ensure that there is a secondary method of accessing electronic patient records in the event of an extended downtime. I wrote an application that would dump the most needed patient information and leave it available on PC's in critical areas in query only mode. This allowed access to most of the patient details for using the patient forms.
Get a good legal footing and make sure everything is ironclad. It's the only way.
A company I worked for used this method. Source code was available on the clients servers. If the client wanted to modify the code we gave them guidelines that essentially said "Make a copy, don't kill anything thats live, and it's your fault if it screws up and eats your database".
Some clients never cared that they had the source. Others had large teams of programmers that contributed code back to use and helped fix bugs pre-emptively.
It's a good solution, but again get iron-clad legal binding agreements. We had one client that decided that they could start marketing a modified version of our system to other potential clients. We pointed out that even modified versions included some code that still belonged to us. Either 1) pay us a heavy license fee for its use (as stipulated in the contract) or 2) stop selling it.
You know, I have never, in 43 years, heard an American use "stone". That's a Brit thing.
I once used that with my wifes family, and had to explain to them what 1 stone equals 14lbs. Later that same day I told we'd be back again in a fortnight. That really confused them. They'd never heard someone describing 2 weeks as a fortnight.
That day I came to realise the truth of the quote that described the UK and the US as two countries seperated by a common language.
In work I use a Windows 2000 box because thats what management want to use as a standard. The servers I administer are almost all linux.
At home I have a dual boot Windows ME/Redhat PC and a Dedicatred Redhat PC. I use windows there for some architect software and games. Development is mostly done under linux (with recompiles under windows to test)
There are many strains of antibiotic resitant bugs out there.
I used to work in a hospital and we had a lot of patients with MRSA (Multiple Resistance to Strains of Antibiotics) related issues. These patients were kept isolated and treated until the MRSA infection was cleared then they could be operated on.
Quite often these bugs not dangerous until a person gets sick then they can be fatal.
This is why people should not use antibiotics for viral infections (such as the common cold) and why if you do have to use anti-biotics you should take all the pills as prescribed until they are done.
I've already stopped buying new cd's. In the last year, I've bought 2 new CD's. One was from a guy busking on the street in Dublin, and the other was a comedy collection from a radio station I listen to.
I did this because I've become disgusted with the way the music industry is treating both customers and muscians
1. CD's get copy protected 2. People can't play these CD's and stop buying new CD's 3. The music business sees the drop in sale and assumes more piracy 4. They encrypt CD's differently 5. Goto 2
'Mr. Simonyi has left Microsoft with the right to use the intellectual property he developed and patented while working there.'
Charles S.: I'm leaving to go my own stuff
Bill G.: Charles, you'll have to give up your rights to all the stuff you've developed over the years
Charlies S.: Did I metion that I still have a copy of those memos that the government never saw?
Bill G.: Well when you put it like that, I'll give you the rights to all your stuff. Need any cash? No? Here have some anyway. Anything else I can do? Anything at all? Coffee, Water? Sure..?
In one job I had I ended up having to do internal support for the PCs in the office.
One Monday I get a call from the CEO saying that his mouse isn't working. I go down to his office, and check out the mouse.
It's in about 15 pieces. I notice there's a mouse shaped dent in the plaster on the opposite side of the office.
I ask him what happened. He tells me that he was trying to use Excel when the pointer stopped moving and he just couldn't make it work anymore. I say "ok" and go get another mouse.
I plug it in and reboot the laptop, and suddenly the begins to work again.
Want to make football a worthwhile watch, get rid of all of that penalty shit and just give them some leather helmets and some basic elbow/shin/knee guards and a jockstrap and throw'em on the field. Tell them to get the ball to the opponents end of the field, and let them loose. No freakin penalties, no freakin fouls, and unless somebody goes unconscious NO FREAKING STOPPING THE GAME.
Now that'd be a sport worth watching.
You've just about described Australian Rules Football. Definetly worth watching if you can find it on cable
The problem is that lately the comedy channel seemed to be trying to turn the show into a vehicle for Carmen Electra and the hosts and only having breaks from this for actual robot fighting.
While Carmen is nice eye candy, having commentators that are making more inane comments than Dennis Miller ever did is too annoying for most people, and this probably caused the kill off.
Slashdot Mirror
True. Terrorism works best when you don't attack the same way twice, and Al Qaeda is a prime example of this. They never attack a similar target twice and don't use the same method of attack twice.
Instead of spending billions on securing something that just needed tweaking they should be spending the money identifying weaknesses as seen through the eyes of a terrorist.
The next attack probably won't be on American soil. The next attack won't be using a plane.
The IRA in Ireland used these methods for years. If you attack using a car bomb once, next time use a mortar. Time after that call in a bomb hoax - don't need to do anything, but everything gets closed down anyway. Time after that drop a bomb in a litter bin. Time after that use a sniper. Each time security gets changed they attacked a different way.
I once heard a statement to that effect. It went:
"The very idea of seeking elected office should be the main reason for impeaching most politicians"
Can't remember who said it now...
There will always be a market for this even without copyright. Sure, you could have shared the films over the internet (people do that right now anyway).
How you market it does matter. Shakespeares works are still selling well. If Harold Lloyds family restored and digitized his films then sold them as a DVD set with new material to encourage fans to buy the set, they would sell, with or without copyright.
What's at stake here is money.
Without copyright, the right to sell those films at a premium is lost, and essentially the only money made is on the new work (eg a book about the films, documentary about his stunts, family films etc). Sure, Joe Blow can sell the films but he would have to offer something extra that film fans would want to buy; Buy the familys package with all the goodies, or Joe Blows without any goodies? Sure Joes sells for $5 but you don't get the book/history/behind the scenes that the $30 version gives you.
With the copyright extension those films can be sold at a premium, and they don't even have to try to make new material that would encourage sales because they know they are the only one that can produce these. There is no incentive to actually try to make these appeal to people, plus now they can sell the set for $100 because they can.
As with almost anything where congress gets involved, just follow the money, then you will find out where the real interest lies.
Actually you can now hold four drives in a tivo:
http://www.9thtee.com/tivoquaddrive.htm
The upgrade process on a tivo has been mainstreamed enough that upgrading your tivo drive is a pretty easy job.
The main difference between MCE and Tivo is that on MCE a 93gb disk gets you 5 hours and change of recording at best. A 40gb Tivo gets you the same amount of time, so until Micro$oft stops using a bloated encoding system you're not getting value for your disk space.
Personally, I still wouldn't trust MCE as my primary PVR. I don't want something that can be that flaky when recording stuff I want to watch.
My Tivo does a wonderful job for that, and in 3 years my Tivo has never crashed. This is where you want to spend money: Linux is designed to remain up for infinite periods of time, and that has always been an issue that Microsoft has been weak on. You can make MS platforms reliable if you are willing to take the time and devote energy to it. I know, I manage a large mix of MS and Linux platforms. My linux platforms have always been "install and mostly forget" servers. All I do it keep them updated and tidy up sometimes. My MS platforms need babying, they are always finding a different way to require attention, and when MS needs attention *everything* stops until you fix it.
It's been around since before PC's were invented.
Look at the lengths they went to on 9/11 - Getting into the country, learning to fly 747's, checking out security at airports, dry runs, co-ordinating the simultaneous hijacking of planes. It's much easier to mortar somewhere. The IRA mortared 10 Downing Street in London in the middle of the day during the last Gulf war, using home made mortars. Later they mortared Heathrow airport. Twice. And then had to phone the police to tell them that the police had missed a third set of mortars that didn't go off.
If someone is determined enough, they will find a way to commit acts of terrorism.
My problem with this system is that it not addressing the problem. It will gather information on people who don't even matter, and the people that DO matter won't be flagged because the system cannot recognise them.
The whole TIA is a way to give money to GOP friendly businesses while making the public think that Bush is hard on terrorism. The system itself is a distraction from the fact that regular people no longer have any civil rights.
Also as far as I can make out there are no checks and balances to ensure that the system will not be abused.
Exactly. Think Fed-Ex. They know where every package is in thier system. If a package ever go into thier system without being tagged, it would never be found.
Once the government believes it has Total Information Awareness they will start using it in lieu of actual fieldwork. Where was John Doe last week (lets look up the database - emailed Jane Smith to say he was going to meet her at the bar, credit card bill showing he spend $67.34 at the bar. Phone call from his cell saying he would be late home (had car trouble). Next day he has a mechanics bill for a bashed up fender. Lets pick him up on DUI - database says so)
If you are not in the system it will actually be easier to move around because you are not being tracked.
This database thats been proposed relies on certain common identifers to be able to track people. Ask anyone who has ever worked on a large database - with out a common id tracking system, you can never find anything.
I'm guessing that there will be two different id tracking methods: Social Security Number and Alien Registration ID.
This is why this database is not about tracking terrorists. Terrorists, you see, don't like to be tracked. They can sneak into the country off a container ship thats passing near the coast. They can sneak in via the Mexico or Canada borders.
Terrorists don't like leaving paper trails especially if something they are planning will take an age to achieve, so they pay with everything in cash (either stolen or given to them by fine upstanding, but sympathetic citizens).
ID theft is so easy in the US these days it's not even funny, and nobody has taken any steps to correct it. If the current administration was serious about clamping down on terrorists they would first make the current system so foolproof that ID theft was impossible - then track people.
Take this example:
John Q Nobody is a foreign terrorist whose goal is to attack the US Capitol Building
He sneaks off a ship somewhere off the coast of California and meets up on shore with Peter D Alias, second generation immigrant who feels strongly about US intrests. He'd recieved a call from a mentor to meet someone on the beach, and give him a package because he had to be out of town that weekend. Peter meets him and gives him package containing a stolen SSN and papers that identify John as Jack Y American. Peter also gives him a large sum of cash and a legally registered car to use.
John/Jack uses the money to buy several batches of chemicals in different states. After 2 weeks he meets up with Joe P Somebody, a disaffected American who one vistied the country that John/Jack comes from and hates the fact that the US bombed it into the stoneage several years ago. He's been talking with a friend from that country who sends him a parcel that another friend will pick up. He meets John/Jack and given him the parcel containing the stolen SSN and a birth certificate of a dead infant. John/Jack assumes the identity of the dead infant and is becomes William Stonewall of Minnesota.
As John/William he now buys several more batches of chemicals in a few more states, and drives to DC. There he combines the chemicals sticks it in some plumbing supplies bought at Lowes and mortars the US Capitol building.
He then meets up in DC with a contact from an embassy and recieves a passport made up with a valid identity. He drives to Canada and flies off to his home country.
The OHS starts investigating, and finds that a gang of 3-4 people were involved and worked as a team to do this, little realising it was one guy and he's long since left. After several months they find that the ID's were stolen.
All that will be left is some grainy security tape footage of some guy that was never in the system in the first place.
Whats sad is that because ID's were stolen it was never flagged that this attack was being planned...
Then again in the 1980's recession in the UK I was worked for a company whose timeline went like this:
December 1: All directors get new company cars - Top line Saabs, and Jaguars
December 5: Same directors annouce that the company is short on cash, won't be issuing christmas bonuses, no wage rises in the new year. (Notice who probably got thier bonus)
Maybe it's powered by Schroedinger's webserver?
No bets there. The whole domain probably turn into one large toy advert.
I'm imagining there won't be much of a take up on it and it will die off after a bit (probably after the next election).
As long as you don't uninstall 1.2 or 1.2.1 it will be fine. The problem is caused by the uninstall, bot the install
I was an operations manager for a large hospital for several years, and planning for this such as that should be a number one goal for IT staff.
The first rule in anything to do with hospitals is to ensure that they have disaster plans in place and that these are tested on a regular basis. The disaster plans should include scenarios such as total power outage, failures of vital equipment etc.
The second rule I used was to ensure that in critical areas there was a second independant network path that if needed could be isolated from the rest of the network. Usually this mean putting in a run of fibre that bypassed buildings etc.
The third rule is to ensure that vital equipment can be run without need for a network. Nothing should be so dependant on networking that if there is a failure it will stop it from working. If networking is a requirement (eg Medical Imaging) that network should be independant from the main network.
The fourth rule is to ensure that there is a secondary method of accessing electronic patient records in the event of an extended downtime. I wrote an application that would dump the most needed patient information and leave it available on PC's in critical areas in query only mode. This allowed access to most of the patient details for using the patient forms.
Get a good legal footing and make sure everything is ironclad. It's the only way.
A company I worked for used this method. Source code was available on the clients servers. If the client wanted to modify the code we gave them guidelines that essentially said "Make a copy, don't kill anything thats live, and it's your fault if it screws up and eats your database".
Some clients never cared that they had the source. Others had large teams of programmers that contributed code back to use and helped fix bugs pre-emptively.
It's a good solution, but again get iron-clad legal binding agreements. We had one client that decided that they could start marketing a modified version of our system to other potential clients. We pointed out that even modified versions included some code that still belonged to us. Either 1) pay us a heavy license fee for its use (as stipulated in the contract) or 2) stop selling it.
They stopped trying to sell it.
You know, I have never, in 43 years, heard an American use "stone". That's a Brit thing.
I once used that with my wifes family, and had to explain to them what 1 stone equals 14lbs. Later that same day I told we'd be back again in a fortnight. That really confused them. They'd never heard someone describing 2 weeks as a fortnight.
That day I came to realise the truth of the quote that described the UK and the US as two countries seperated by a common language.
In work I use a Windows 2000 box because thats what management want to use as a standard. The servers I administer are almost all linux.
At home I have a dual boot Windows ME/Redhat PC and a Dedicatred Redhat PC. I use windows there for some architect software and games. Development is mostly done under linux (with recompiles under windows to test)
There are many strains of antibiotic resitant bugs out there.
I used to work in a hospital and we had a lot of patients with MRSA (Multiple Resistance to Strains of Antibiotics) related issues. These patients were kept isolated and treated until the MRSA infection was cleared then they could be operated on.
Quite often these bugs not dangerous until a person gets sick then they can be fatal.
This is why people should not use antibiotics for viral infections (such as the common cold) and why if you do have to use anti-biotics you should take all the pills as prescribed until they are done.
Nope, it was Navan Man from the Irish radio station Today FM
I've already stopped buying new cd's. In the last year, I've bought 2 new CD's. One was from a guy busking on the street in Dublin, and the other was a comedy collection from a radio station I listen to.
I did this because I've become disgusted with the way the music industry is treating both customers and muscians
1. CD's get copy protected
2. People can't play these CD's and stop buying new CD's
3. The music business sees the drop in sale and assumes more piracy
4. They encrypt CD's differently
5. Goto 2
It's a vicious circle....
Slow-0(zero)-Record-Thumbs Up
This will give you an option on your now playing list for sorting by date, show and expiration date.
I'm not sure if you to have the backdoor mode enabled for it. More details are at: Tivonews backdoors
Charles S.: I'm leaving to go my own stuff
Bill G.: Charles, you'll have to give up your rights to all the stuff you've developed over the years
Charlies S.: Did I metion that I still have a copy of those memos that the government never saw?
Bill G.: Well when you put it like that, I'll give you the rights to all your stuff. Need any cash? No? Here have some anyway. Anything else I can do? Anything at all? Coffee, Water? Sure..?
In one job I had I ended up having to do internal support for the PCs in the office.
One Monday I get a call from the CEO saying that his mouse isn't working. I go down to his office, and check out the mouse.
It's in about 15 pieces. I notice there's a mouse shaped dent in the plaster on the opposite side of the office.
I ask him what happened. He tells me that he was trying to use Excel when the pointer stopped moving and he just couldn't make it work anymore. I say "ok" and go get another mouse.
I plug it in and reboot the laptop, and suddenly the begins to work again.
Silly CEO.
Now that'd be a sport worth watching.
You've just about described Australian Rules Football. Definetly worth watching if you can find it on cable
The problem is that lately the comedy channel seemed to be trying to turn the show into a vehicle for Carmen Electra and the hosts and only having breaks from this for actual robot fighting.
While Carmen is nice eye candy, having commentators that are making more inane comments than Dennis Miller ever did is too annoying for most people, and this probably caused the kill off.