Every one of the 9/11 terrorists fit a profile that should have sounded alarm bells at the border.
Finding guys like that is easy if you are looking and it doesn't require reading every grandmothers email, or recording
every phone call or feeling every crotch.
It was more than should have sounded alarms, they did get noticed, they did sound alarms. The flight school learning-to-fly but not learning-to-land was seen and not properly acted upon. Their casing the airports and dress rehearsals were observed and some even commented on them.
Subsequent terror attacks against the US were not thwarted by high technology, even with all of the high technology and invasiveness that has followed. Those that were detected in advance were done so because someone in the public reported it, those that were tried and failed did so because of problems of the terrorists' makings, and those that succeeded (like Boston) happened in part because high technology failed to do its job and find those who would do us ill.
High tech solutions have failed. Failed. It's a shame that the weary nature of our current culture isn't causing something more to be done about it. Halting the government because of health care that affects a fairly small portion of the populace? That's stupid compared to what we're not caring about.
I ask because I don't have a problem with birth certificates and death certificates. As vital records are the basis for proof of identity and are really the only true line that prevents someone from establishing an ironclad new identity and abandoning an old one and whatever obligations they've piled on themselves on that identity, I don't see another option.
Quoting Jefferson about privacy and safety two hundred years after the fact isn't exactly relevant to today's world, which is riddled with 1) destructive technology and 2) religious fundamentalists
Destructive technology already existed in Jefferson's time (and besides, it was Benjamin Franklin who said it, almost twenty years before the United States of America declared its independence), and religious fundamentalists have existed since the dawn of religion.
As I see it, the biggest problem is that no matter how soft and simple lawmakers make it for the government to pursue avenues of investigation with legal checks-and-balances (ie, FISA court) those investigating are unwilling to follow those rules. It doesn't matter that FISA laws have provisions that allow investigators to follow phone or data traces or call routing and still obtain a legal warrant after the fact if they never bother to get that warrant, let alone get them in advance.
Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules that are supposed to guarantee people rights to privacy in their persons, papers, and effects without due-process. I am not a judge, but if I were, I'd interpret that to mean that the government isn't allowed to maintain anything more than basic vital records or basic direct-interaction records with people unless there's a reason. Investigating crime is a reason, but simply having a huge database to analyze after-the-fact is not.
Not only that but it also assumes you can't tamper with the serial and doesn't address what happens if somebody starts to spam the DB.
I think it's worse than that. This'll only work if it's compulsory and if access is controlled through an otherwise-disinterested third party. Do you want to have to deal with the equivalent of a motor-vehicle-department in order to register a purchase of a bike and to notify on sale or theft?
This isn't like cell phones, where having only a handful of companies denying a reported-stolen phone access to their networks could effectively end phone theft, there are no small points of access to make for that sort of thing.
One can attempt to protect one's self by recording serial numbers in files, adding one's own identifying stamped-in marks to the bike, locking up the bike to make it less desirable of a target in the first place, and when possible, not leaving it where it's out-in-public when not being ridden.
You and I clearly have not worked in the same companies. I find that it's more true, not less, and that all sorts of things like absenteeism, tardiness, and behavior are directly tied to it.
Even the most professional of workplaces that I've been in generally limit the required dresscode for outerwear to long-sleeve, button-up-the-front, collared shirts, dark or neutral slacks, dark shoes without logos on them, and ties. Most places forego ties or make them optional during certain seasons, and a few allow clean, new-condition black or grey demim pants in place of slacks.
A suit wouldn't do well for me in my professional environment, but a long-sleeve dress shirt and slacks work fine. I don't wear a tie, but if I had to I could make it work with a minimum of fuss.
Off work I wear mostly printed t-shirts and denim shorts or jeans.
You know, there are different thicknesses of fabric available for pants, right? You can get pants made of something as thin as seersucker or of something as thick and warm that British Northerners would envy. Denim didn't exist until the late 1800s and wasn't socially acceptable until the fifties, there are plenty of options, all machine-washable.
You can also buy collared shirts that are actually sized for you at the neck and then either tie a necktie appropriately to fit the collar, rather than the neck, or you could look at various clip-on ties. Given the nature of technology sometimes a clip-on is safer if one works around higher voltage or spinny or shreddy things. Or you could wear a banded-collared shirt, that doesn't have a folding collar and instead has a more jewelled topmost button.
I have the opposite problem of you apparently, it's very hot here much of the time. I have a very, very thin button-up shirt and very thin yet durable slacks. I also have found that dress shoes support my feet much better than sneakers.
There are lots of options besides n00bs suxx0rs printed t-shirts, and many of those options will give you a better shot at promotions.
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as one may treat one's free time. Given how many people spend their free time particularly passively, this can be a problem.
Wearing attire different for the time when one works for someone else than one wears for one's self can help reiterate to the person that professional time is just that, professional.
Certainly there are examples of this not holding true, as there are individuals that will act professionally in casual attire, and there are individuals that will act casually in professional attire, but it seems to hold that more people are professional when in professional attire than are professional when in casual attire.
This is a bad idea, as one can change a compromised password as many times and necessary or desired.
Assuming a print from a single digit is enough, you're limited to ten total passwords without starting to leave the realm of social acceptability. On top of that, this uses only a public, nonsecret method. It's not combining something that you have with something that you know, preferably something known only to you, and since it's from a read-only source, once it is compromised you're screwed.
If some biometric system is used in concert with a strong user-selected bit of information, like a password, passphrase, or numeric string, then maybe it'll be okay, especially if the system does not indicate to the user where the failure in authentication happens (ie, confirm that one has the right fingerprint before rejecting the password). If the fingerprint is used as an analog for the user id, and the password is still one's personal secret, that may work.
If the issue is PINs being commonly four digits long, people have demonstrated an ability to remember ten-digit numbers as many markets now have ten-digit dialing for local calls with several area codes. I don't think that it would be an undue burden to use PINs longer than four digits in this age on account of that. What would be best is for there to be a minimum length that's greater than four or five, but a max possible length that would be well larger than most users would need, so those who do want longer credentials can use them, and with all of the number of places in between also being supported.
Heh. At one point I actually had a second monitor turned portrait, and had it not had issues with full-motion video (it rendered it incorrectly for some reason) I may have kept it with that. Thing is though, if the width isn't fixed, the browser is supposed to be able to size it to the window size on its own, if the designer is smart enough to design it to do that.
Girls can't always control if someone takes a picture of them. Pictures can be taken with hidden cameras or while they are sleeping or drunk...
That's a load of crap. Most involuntary pictures would be of such low quality as to make their use for prurient interests difficult, so long as the subject takes enough care to avoid putting themselves into the few circumstances that would allow for a good picture, like covering up the webcam or not undressing where one is exposed to others.
As for voluntary pictures, people have been showing the naked pictures of their significant others that they've had since the dawn of photography. In my view, it's expected that naked pictures will be shown, not expected that they won't be. Everyone should assume this.
Because that's about as funny as helping people install Windows 95 over the phone, and reciting those various feature-splash-screens, roughly as they appeared on the user's screen, from memory...
Unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to disagree with you.
When there wasn't an unlimited amount of screen or an unlimited amount of graphics capability, interface designers had to be very diligent in how they used what they had. With only eighty columns and twenty-five rows, or if you were lucky, one-hundred-thirty-two columns and forty-four rows, there wasn't a lot of room for waste or poor design.
Modern web designers have embraced the ooh-shiny parts of modern HTML specifications but haven't held on to the basic purpose, to efficiently convey information. Beta is an example, embracing eye-candy at the expense of that which the site's purpose is for, to convey information that's mostly text-based.
I also used to use Lynx/links/elinks as testing for what I wrote. I haven't written HTML in a big way in some time, but I imagine that most pages will fail the text-mode test.
Yeah, I kind of like the classic, large-icon image on the corner of some stories, if anything is included at all. I don't see a need for pictures for the bulk of stories, it's like the use of stock footage on the evening news when they have something that's important but not visual.
the news.google.com site looks loads better than this new thing.
Come to think of it, news.google.com looks a lot like the current Slashdot main page. A narrow, plain nav column on the left, a large body column in the middle, and a 25%ish column on the right.
I opened it. Unlike the current design, it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen with a narrower horizontal resolution than many modern widescreen "high definition" displays, then this is a bad thing.
Additionally there was less content on the initial screen than there is on the current design. Much of the time I skim the headlines, if I find one I find relevant I immediately read the blurb. If the blurb appeals then I follow the link(s) or read the comments. This new layout doesn't offer as much content on a given screen, and one thing I learned in design in general, if you don't grab your audience with little more than a glimpse, then you've lost your audience.
I did design for some ads for some fandom events, and within the form factor of the ad I had to answer who/what why, and when, and to a lesser extent, where. I had to name the event, give the viewer a reason to go to the event, give the date for the event, and for events that weren't in the normal venues or where the venue itself was an advantage, name the venue. All of this information needed to be conveyed in little-more than a snapshot.
While Slashdot or any bulletin board system is not the same as an ad, it is important to present the frame of the discussion in a format that allows the casual browser to see the important stuff pop out instantly. The current layout, with different presentations, reverse colors for somethings, etc, works to do that. The new format didn't give me the impression of being well organized in that regard. One needs the headline to convey the important "grabber' in a way that actually commands attention. The new system didn't do that for me.
Yeah, but generally that kind of screwing has a strongly anticipated immediate short-term benefit, even with the long-term ramifications. I don't see such euphoria in the original case...
I'm pretty sure that it always had been an ideal, but it seems to not be an ideal anymore, to at least a significant portion of the population.
It's one thing to sing praises of true achievements that go beyond what an average person reaches; that doesn't bother me too much if it's done with reason. I do object when mediocrity is celebrated, or when things of shock value are celebrated when they're actually poorly done. The entertainment industry is an example of the celebration of mediocrity, when we're told this is popular in order to make it popular, or when no-talent hacks are so worked or massaged or modified to make them talented that there is very little of the original underneath.
I guess that we're now living in the Age of Autotune. Instead of embracing raw talent, we manufacture it, and look down on some that are naturally talented when they're compared to the manufactured nature of others.
I'm starting to wonder if they're just trolling us. Facebook's policies and very reason for existence runs contrary to what I was taught as a child, which was anti-narcissism (ie, any sort of notoriety based on achievement, not simple vanity), speaking when one only has something to say and keeping one's personal life personal (as opposed to, "look at me with this drink in my hand! Look at me with this puppy! Look at me with these whores!"), and now, keeping one's finances close to one's chest. The Internet age with the ability to own a domain name and effectively vanity-publish has changed some of that, but "Social Media" has made it extremely simple to talk-at people without necessarily talking-to people.
I never signed up for Facebook in the first place. I'd had my own domain for a time, and ran my own web log, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort and that what I was willing to share with the rest of humanity wasn't something that the rest of humanity was interested in. When I've seen others using Facebook I continue to get that vibe. I don't know what I'd do in your shoes, but having never had an account and seeing all of the BS makes me happy that I never did have an account in the first place.
What's going to happen is that some pissed off outgoing network admin is going to write blank configurations over all of the saved configs on their network switches and routers, but not reboot them. They'll run fine for awhile until maintenance or power issues cause them to reload, then they'll be about as useful for network routing as the racks they're bolted into.
They should include option of enabling this but as long as its not the default most people will not use it.
Yeah! Chord-middle is much better! I don't ever have to worry about accidentally scrolling while middle-clicking that way...
Seriously, I use one of those four-button-plus-scroll-wheel trackballs. Taking functionality away is pretty low on my list of good things. Letting it be customizable, sure, but removing the option? Annoying to say the least...
Slashdot Mirror
It was more than should have sounded alarms, they did get noticed, they did sound alarms. The flight school learning-to-fly but not learning-to-land was seen and not properly acted upon. Their casing the airports and dress rehearsals were observed and some even commented on them.
Subsequent terror attacks against the US were not thwarted by high technology, even with all of the high technology and invasiveness that has followed. Those that were detected in advance were done so because someone in the public reported it, those that were tried and failed did so because of problems of the terrorists' makings, and those that succeeded (like Boston) happened in part because high technology failed to do its job and find those who would do us ill.
High tech solutions have failed. Failed. It's a shame that the weary nature of our current culture isn't causing something more to be done about it. Halting the government because of health care that affects a fairly small portion of the populace? That's stupid compared to what we're not caring about.
Like birth certificates and death certificates?
I ask because I don't have a problem with birth certificates and death certificates. As vital records are the basis for proof of identity and are really the only true line that prevents someone from establishing an ironclad new identity and abandoning an old one and whatever obligations they've piled on themselves on that identity, I don't see another option.
Destructive technology already existed in Jefferson's time (and besides, it was Benjamin Franklin who said it, almost twenty years before the United States of America declared its independence), and religious fundamentalists have existed since the dawn of religion.
As I see it, the biggest problem is that no matter how soft and simple lawmakers make it for the government to pursue avenues of investigation with legal checks-and-balances (ie, FISA court) those investigating are unwilling to follow those rules. It doesn't matter that FISA laws have provisions that allow investigators to follow phone or data traces or call routing and still obtain a legal warrant after the fact if they never bother to get that warrant, let alone get them in advance.
Blanket surveillance of everyone seems to me to violate rules that are supposed to guarantee people rights to privacy in their persons, papers, and effects without due-process. I am not a judge, but if I were, I'd interpret that to mean that the government isn't allowed to maintain anything more than basic vital records or basic direct-interaction records with people unless there's a reason. Investigating crime is a reason, but simply having a huge database to analyze after-the-fact is not.
I think it's worse than that. This'll only work if it's compulsory and if access is controlled through an otherwise-disinterested third party. Do you want to have to deal with the equivalent of a motor-vehicle-department in order to register a purchase of a bike and to notify on sale or theft?
This isn't like cell phones, where having only a handful of companies denying a reported-stolen phone access to their networks could effectively end phone theft, there are no small points of access to make for that sort of thing.
One can attempt to protect one's self by recording serial numbers in files, adding one's own identifying stamped-in marks to the bike, locking up the bike to make it less desirable of a target in the first place, and when possible, not leaving it where it's out-in-public when not being ridden.
You and I clearly have not worked in the same companies. I find that it's more true, not less, and that all sorts of things like absenteeism, tardiness, and behavior are directly tied to it.
Where did I say suits?
Even the most professional of workplaces that I've been in generally limit the required dresscode for outerwear to long-sleeve, button-up-the-front, collared shirts, dark or neutral slacks, dark shoes without logos on them, and ties. Most places forego ties or make them optional during certain seasons, and a few allow clean, new-condition black or grey demim pants in place of slacks.
A suit wouldn't do well for me in my professional environment, but a long-sleeve dress shirt and slacks work fine. I don't wear a tie, but if I had to I could make it work with a minimum of fuss.
Off work I wear mostly printed t-shirts and denim shorts or jeans.
You know, there are different thicknesses of fabric available for pants, right? You can get pants made of something as thin as seersucker or of something as thick and warm that British Northerners would envy. Denim didn't exist until the late 1800s and wasn't socially acceptable until the fifties, there are plenty of options, all machine-washable.
You can also buy collared shirts that are actually sized for you at the neck and then either tie a necktie appropriately to fit the collar, rather than the neck, or you could look at various clip-on ties. Given the nature of technology sometimes a clip-on is safer if one works around higher voltage or spinny or shreddy things. Or you could wear a banded-collared shirt, that doesn't have a folding collar and instead has a more jewelled topmost button.
I have the opposite problem of you apparently, it's very hot here much of the time. I have a very, very thin button-up shirt and very thin yet durable slacks. I also have found that dress shoes support my feet much better than sneakers.
There are lots of options besides n00bs suxx0rs printed t-shirts, and many of those options will give you a better shot at promotions.
At least the EPA and HP could have negotiated a superfund site cleanup agreement like Motorola did with so many of their polluted sites...
It's my experience that for many people, excessive casualness at work leads to treating work as casually as one may treat one's free time. Given how many people spend their free time particularly passively, this can be a problem.
Wearing attire different for the time when one works for someone else than one wears for one's self can help reiterate to the person that professional time is just that, professional.
Certainly there are examples of this not holding true, as there are individuals that will act professionally in casual attire, and there are individuals that will act casually in professional attire, but it seems to hold that more people are professional when in professional attire than are professional when in casual attire.
PEDIGREE, n. The known part of the route from an arboreal ancestor with a swim bladder to an urban descendant with a cigarette.
--Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
This is a bad idea, as one can change a compromised password as many times and necessary or desired.
Assuming a print from a single digit is enough, you're limited to ten total passwords without starting to leave the realm of social acceptability. On top of that, this uses only a public, nonsecret method. It's not combining something that you have with something that you know, preferably something known only to you, and since it's from a read-only source, once it is compromised you're screwed.
If some biometric system is used in concert with a strong user-selected bit of information, like a password, passphrase, or numeric string, then maybe it'll be okay, especially if the system does not indicate to the user where the failure in authentication happens (ie, confirm that one has the right fingerprint before rejecting the password). If the fingerprint is used as an analog for the user id, and the password is still one's personal secret, that may work.
If the issue is PINs being commonly four digits long, people have demonstrated an ability to remember ten-digit numbers as many markets now have ten-digit dialing for local calls with several area codes. I don't think that it would be an undue burden to use PINs longer than four digits in this age on account of that. What would be best is for there to be a minimum length that's greater than four or five, but a max possible length that would be well larger than most users would need, so those who do want longer credentials can use them, and with all of the number of places in between also being supported.
Heh. At one point I actually had a second monitor turned portrait, and had it not had issues with full-motion video (it rendered it incorrectly for some reason) I may have kept it with that. Thing is though, if the width isn't fixed, the browser is supposed to be able to size it to the window size on its own, if the designer is smart enough to design it to do that.
That's a load of crap. Most involuntary pictures would be of such low quality as to make their use for prurient interests difficult, so long as the subject takes enough care to avoid putting themselves into the few circumstances that would allow for a good picture, like covering up the webcam or not undressing where one is exposed to others.
As for voluntary pictures, people have been showing the naked pictures of their significant others that they've had since the dawn of photography. In my view, it's expected that naked pictures will be shown, not expected that they won't be. Everyone should assume this.
Because that's about as funny as helping people install Windows 95 over the phone, and reciting those various feature-splash-screens, roughly as they appeared on the user's screen, from memory...
I'm not proud of this, mind you...
Unfortunately I'm finding it difficult to disagree with you.
When there wasn't an unlimited amount of screen or an unlimited amount of graphics capability, interface designers had to be very diligent in how they used what they had. With only eighty columns and twenty-five rows, or if you were lucky, one-hundred-thirty-two columns and forty-four rows, there wasn't a lot of room for waste or poor design.
Modern web designers have embraced the ooh-shiny parts of modern HTML specifications but haven't held on to the basic purpose, to efficiently convey information. Beta is an example, embracing eye-candy at the expense of that which the site's purpose is for, to convey information that's mostly text-based.
I also used to use Lynx/links/elinks as testing for what I wrote. I haven't written HTML in a big way in some time, but I imagine that most pages will fail the text-mode test.
Yeah, I kind of like the classic, large-icon image on the corner of some stories, if anything is included at all. I don't see a need for pictures for the bulk of stories, it's like the use of stock footage on the evening news when they have something that's important but not visual.
the news.google.com site looks loads better than this new thing.
Come to think of it, news.google.com looks a lot like the current Slashdot main page. A narrow, plain nav column on the left, a large body column in the middle, and a 25%ish column on the right.
I opened it. Unlike the current design, it did not scale to fit my 1400x1050 screen, leaving large whitespace borders on both edges. If that's what it does on a 4:3 screen with a narrower horizontal resolution than many modern widescreen "high definition" displays, then this is a bad thing.
Additionally there was less content on the initial screen than there is on the current design. Much of the time I skim the headlines, if I find one I find relevant I immediately read the blurb. If the blurb appeals then I follow the link(s) or read the comments. This new layout doesn't offer as much content on a given screen, and one thing I learned in design in general, if you don't grab your audience with little more than a glimpse, then you've lost your audience.
I did design for some ads for some fandom events, and within the form factor of the ad I had to answer who/what why, and when, and to a lesser extent, where. I had to name the event, give the viewer a reason to go to the event, give the date for the event, and for events that weren't in the normal venues or where the venue itself was an advantage, name the venue. All of this information needed to be conveyed in little-more than a snapshot.
While Slashdot or any bulletin board system is not the same as an ad, it is important to present the frame of the discussion in a format that allows the casual browser to see the important stuff pop out instantly. The current layout, with different presentations, reverse colors for somethings, etc, works to do that. The new format didn't give me the impression of being well organized in that regard. One needs the headline to convey the important "grabber' in a way that actually commands attention. The new system didn't do that for me.
Anyone else getting tired of zombies? They're starting to appear in bad corporate cell-phone ads now.
It was cute for awhile, but there seem to be people taking it seriously enough that they're changing their lifestyles based on the idea. It's silly.
And Apple is dying...
Yeah, but generally that kind of screwing has a strongly anticipated immediate short-term benefit, even with the long-term ramifications. I don't see such euphoria in the original case...
I'm pretty sure that it always had been an ideal, but it seems to not be an ideal anymore, to at least a significant portion of the population.
It's one thing to sing praises of true achievements that go beyond what an average person reaches; that doesn't bother me too much if it's done with reason. I do object when mediocrity is celebrated, or when things of shock value are celebrated when they're actually poorly done. The entertainment industry is an example of the celebration of mediocrity, when we're told this is popular in order to make it popular, or when no-talent hacks are so worked or massaged or modified to make them talented that there is very little of the original underneath.
I guess that we're now living in the Age of Autotune. Instead of embracing raw talent, we manufacture it, and look down on some that are naturally talented when they're compared to the manufactured nature of others.
I'm starting to wonder if they're just trolling us. Facebook's policies and very reason for existence runs contrary to what I was taught as a child, which was anti-narcissism (ie, any sort of notoriety based on achievement, not simple vanity), speaking when one only has something to say and keeping one's personal life personal (as opposed to, "look at me with this drink in my hand! Look at me with this puppy! Look at me with these whores!"), and now, keeping one's finances close to one's chest. The Internet age with the ability to own a domain name and effectively vanity-publish has changed some of that, but "Social Media" has made it extremely simple to talk-at people without necessarily talking-to people.
I never signed up for Facebook in the first place. I'd had my own domain for a time, and ran my own web log, but decided that it wasn't worth the effort and that what I was willing to share with the rest of humanity wasn't something that the rest of humanity was interested in. When I've seen others using Facebook I continue to get that vibe. I don't know what I'd do in your shoes, but having never had an account and seeing all of the BS makes me happy that I never did have an account in the first place.
What's going to happen is that some pissed off outgoing network admin is going to write blank configurations over all of the saved configs on their network switches and routers, but not reboot them. They'll run fine for awhile until maintenance or power issues cause them to reload, then they'll be about as useful for network routing as the racks they're bolted into.
Yeah! Chord-middle is much better! I don't ever have to worry about accidentally scrolling while middle-clicking that way...
Seriously, I use one of those four-button-plus-scroll-wheel trackballs. Taking functionality away is pretty low on my list of good things. Letting it be customizable, sure, but removing the option? Annoying to say the least...