This was not a formal declaration of war, it was a specific authorization to use necessary force.
I'm not sure if you followed the public debate that occurred when Congress authorized the use of force. But I did. And at no time during that debate was it suggested that this action would give the president full war-time powers with respect to domestic spying (or other domestic action for that matter). Don't you think the American people should have understood that issue when they advised their members of Congress on how to vote?
In fact, drafts that included language that could possibly, under some circumstances, give the president more domestic powers were explicitly cut from the final bill, because the Congress did not have the intent to give Bush those powers.
One thing we do agree on is that "robust intelligence operations" are important to combat the threat of terrorism. But it needs to be done within the law.
Personally, [...] I hope that the EFF does lose this suit, thus bolstering Bush's case for Executive freedom of action in military matters during wartime (subject to initial Legislative approval, of course).
[bold added.]
So you honestly believe that Bush had legislative approval to conduct the NSA taps? That sounds like a purely partisan position rather than a sincere reading of Congressional intent in their authorization of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to me.
I noticed that Fedora (at least early releases) sets the default ntp server to a.redhat.com server, and I believe Ubuntu sets the default to an ubuntu project server.
Does anyone know if these distros use traffic to their servers to track installed base? Or are they just being extra friendly?
My off-topic question that sort of remains on-topic is this: [...] does anyone know of good websites where I can upload my photographs and let others "compete" openly to making them look better?
Sounds like a use for amazon's mechanical turk. I'm betting some form of this labor-exchange over the internet is gonna be huge. (I mean aside from wipro et al.)
The idea is you submit tasks and assign a bounty. People with skills for your task can then do the work and submit a response. You pay them. It's tricky in a case where the results may be difficult to measure, but it could work, especially if there is a rating system for quality of work.
But if you must, at least don't do KDE vs. Gnome. What's the best possible outcome of that? ("So in summary, Gnome tended to be less confusing for newbies, but power users preferred the configurability of KDE...")
Instead compare either or both against Windows or Macintosh for tasks that your _specific target userbase_ would do. [If you haven't defined one or more use cases you've already lost.] This would be much more valuable.
Better yet, switch your topic to focus exclusively on accessibility (a11y). Every DE out there needs some accessibility love.
5. Postal agencies retain sender information for all mail received at physical addresses (bulk mail excepted).
6. Wireless companies retain GPS location information for all customers.
and the grand finale,
7. Under the equivalent of the US PATRIOT Act's National Security Letter, the western "democracies" allow their equivalent of Total Information Awareness to gather *all* of the above information from all customers in order to search for patterns.
If you've been paying attention, you can bet #7 is happening in the US with some subset of data available from commercial entities.
Wow, this is a stupid error. They are blowing (or at least, reducing the impact of) one of their biggest advantages over Blu-Ray: that they were ready to go to market. All for one of the most useless features in the spec.
Sure they could put the player out. But what major movie distributor is going to release content for it without DRM?
That is pretty interesting. But I think the RIAA may have read it too:
The real problem with piracy is that it takes only a small fraction of users who are capable of dissociating licenses from content to make managed content available to a significant fraction of users in unmanaged form.
Haven't they effectively addressed that by putting the fear of god in the mass of downloaders? By suing a just-large-enough sampling of mothers of adolescent p2p-ers, now all of us are afraid of getting caught downloading content that has been "dissociated" from it license.
Granted, that approach may backfire on them over time, just like this rootkit PR disaster.
Banning hate speech is about as ridiculous as USA republicans wanting to ban anti-war speech.
In the US we don't ban hate speech through laws (that pesky First Amendment, don't you know). Instead we ban it through commerce. Anyone can just complain to the ISP hosting your website. Many ISPs will point to your TOS and then cut you off.
I'm not big on hate, but I sure wouldn't like to see this approach used on anti-war speech or other forms of political dissent.
Neither. And nice try for the smackdown. (A tad immature tho.)
I can tell you that the first time I fired up ethereal on my IPv6-enabled Linux distro, I was pissed to see my MAC address hanging in the breeze. Fortunately, my ISP is not IPv6 enabled. But for now, IPv6 is disabled on my boxen.
The fact is, you don't know how the configuration is going to end up for the great mass of users who buy the next version of Windows and connect to the internet via god-knows-what ISP, maybe using a NAT-ing router and maybe not. Broadcasting MAC by default is a privacy risk, period.
And if you don't need it (MAC address), and it doesn't matter, then why use it by default in the first place? [Insufficient-techno-nerd answer: because it's too hard to come up with a random number guaranteed unique for a given subnet otherwise. Hogwash.]
You make it sound reassuringly no worse than the existing situation. But that's going to be misleading to the hordes of./ers who aren't well-versed in the details.
Most people won't even realize they are leaking a globally unique cookie that can be tied to their personal identification, and is broadcast to every server they contact on the web.
Fiddling with your MAC address is like tweaking what shows on a Caller-ID display. The question is: should you have to?
It would be better if society would just have a debate over whether netizens should have anonymity or privacy instead of waiting until after the horse has left the barn.
Are we ready to surrender anonymity on the net?
on
IPv6 Still Hotly Debated
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What's the deal with including your MAC address as part of your IP address?
Yeah this looks like a serious privacy issue that most people haven't woken up to yet.
A MAC address is (usually) a globally unique identifier. How long before someone big builds a database relating MAC to user identity (Microsoft, your ISP, law enforcement, whoever).
At that point, no matter where you connect your laptop from, your traffic can be identified as yours. Be it for the purpose of advertising, tracing communication, or other data mining.
So the question is, are we ready and willing to surrender anonymity on the net?
Yep, and I'm sure they understand that any proposed privacy law would get turned into an industry-friendly facsimile before it passed, thus protecting them from any harsher state laws in perpetuity.
Microsoft has shown itself to be US-gov't savvy ever since the antitrust case, where Judge Jackson's ruling was pushed aside after they spent lots of bucks in Washington.
I know a lesbian couple who could register in California for Domestic Partnership, which would entitle them to certain benefits from their employers. One of them refuses to be registered because she remembers what happened in the Third Reich. I'm not making this up.
People have a right to be suspicious of government power. In fact, the Bill of Rights largely validates that suspicion.
People who say "you have nothing to fear" are ignorant of history, including US history.
It's a good strategy to keep you home. She knows where you are, and you can't be out hitting on waitresses (or WoW succubi) when you're busy winning the Space Race.
In fact in the last few years with commander kuku bananas in charge theyve made it even more prevailent.
In other news... George Bush received notice today from a GM that his World of Warcraft nickname violates Blizzard policy. We have been unable to reach the GM for comment.
In possibly related news, black helicopters were seen hovering near a Blizzard facility, and later a private Gulfstream jet registered to Premier Executive Transport Services was seen departing for for Egypt.
Slashdot Mirror
Plus 3) The nanotube blockers are activated only while continuously exposed to the Nokia ring tone.
This was not a formal declaration of war, it was a specific authorization to use necessary force.
I'm not sure if you followed the public debate that occurred when Congress authorized the use of force. But I did. And at no time during that debate was it suggested that this action would give the president full war-time powers with respect to domestic spying (or other domestic action for that matter). Don't you think the American people should have understood that issue when they advised their members of Congress on how to vote?
In fact, drafts that included language that could possibly, under some circumstances, give the president more domestic powers were explicitly cut from the final bill, because the Congress did not have the intent to give Bush those powers.
One thing we do agree on is that "robust intelligence operations" are important to combat the threat of terrorism. But it needs to be done within the law.
[bold added.]
So you honestly believe that Bush had legislative approval to conduct the NSA taps? That sounds like a purely partisan position rather than a sincere reading of Congressional intent in their authorization of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to me.
I noticed that Fedora (at least early releases) sets the default ntp server to a .redhat.com server, and I believe Ubuntu sets the default to an ubuntu project server.
Does anyone know if these distros use traffic to their servers to track installed base? Or are they just being extra friendly?
Sounds like a use for amazon's mechanical turk . I'm betting some form of this labor-exchange over the internet is gonna be huge. (I mean aside from wipro et al.)
The idea is you submit tasks and assign a bounty. People with skills for your task can then do the work and submit a response. You pay them. It's tricky in a case where the results may be difficult to measure, but it could work, especially if there is a rating system for quality of work.
Plus, from the picture they put the power supply and hard disk outside of the case, which is not conducive to portability or quietude.
If they were gonna do that, they should have built a much smaller case. (Unless you need that much oil for temperature stability.)
1. Build a Dirty Bomb the Al Quaeda Way
2. Map of the New York Subway
3. Sleeper Cells for Dummies
Thank you folks, I'll be here all ni--+*@#!#@$_@#$_#X(&^@~.}}}}}
But if you must, at least don't do KDE vs. Gnome. What's the best possible outcome of that? ("So in summary, Gnome tended to be less confusing for newbies, but power users preferred the configurability of KDE...")
Instead compare either or both against Windows or Macintosh for tasks that your _specific target userbase_ would do. [If you haven't defined one or more use cases you've already lost.] This would be much more valuable.
Better yet, switch your topic to focus exclusively on accessibility (a11y). Every DE out there needs some accessibility love.
5. Postal agencies retain sender information for all mail received at physical addresses (bulk mail excepted).
6. Wireless companies retain GPS location information for all customers.
and the grand finale,
7. Under the equivalent of the US PATRIOT Act's National Security Letter, the western "democracies" allow their equivalent of Total Information Awareness to gather *all* of the above information from all customers in order to search for patterns.
If you've been paying attention, you can bet #7 is happening in the US with some subset of data available from commercial entities.
Sure they could put the player out. But what major movie distributor is going to release content for it without DRM?
Haven't they effectively addressed that by putting the fear of god in the mass of downloaders? By suing a just-large-enough sampling of mothers of adolescent p2p-ers, now all of us are afraid of getting caught downloading content that has been "dissociated" from it license.
Granted, that approach may backfire on them over time, just like this rootkit PR disaster.
"Actually, I just work for ."
Maybe you need this thingy. When you turn your computer off, it turns off the bottom outlet (for all your peripherals).
In the US we don't ban hate speech through laws (that pesky First Amendment, don't you know). Instead we ban it through commerce. Anyone can just complain to the ISP hosting your website. Many ISPs will point to your TOS and then cut you off.
I'm not big on hate, but I sure wouldn't like to see this approach used on anti-war speech or other forms of political dissent.
Neither. And nice try for the smackdown. (A tad immature tho.)
I can tell you that the first time I fired up ethereal on my IPv6-enabled Linux distro, I was pissed to see my MAC address hanging in the breeze. Fortunately, my ISP is not IPv6 enabled.
But for now, IPv6 is disabled on my boxen.
The fact is, you don't know how the configuration is going to end up for the great mass of users who buy the next version of Windows and connect to the internet via god-knows-what ISP, maybe using a NAT-ing router and maybe not. Broadcasting MAC by default is a privacy risk, period.
And if you don't need it (MAC address), and it doesn't matter, then why use it by default in the first place? [Insufficient-techno-nerd answer: because it's too hard to come up with a random number guaranteed unique for a given subnet otherwise. Hogwash.]
Not in the RFID future.
Exactly. They get sent to everybody you connect with.
Yeah? How about changing it every time you give out personal information? Get real.
You make it sound reassuringly no worse than the existing situation. But that's going to be misleading to the hordes of ./ers who aren't well-versed in the details.
Most people won't even realize they are leaking a globally unique cookie that can be tied to their personal identification, and is broadcast to every server they contact on the web.
Fiddling with your MAC address is like tweaking what shows on a Caller-ID display. The question is: should you have to?
It would be better if society would just have a debate over whether netizens should have anonymity or privacy instead of waiting until after the horse has left the barn.
Yeah this looks like a serious privacy issue that most people haven't woken up to yet.
A MAC address is (usually) a globally unique identifier. How long before someone big builds a database relating MAC to user identity (Microsoft, your ISP, law enforcement, whoever).
At that point, no matter where you connect your laptop from, your traffic can be identified as yours. Be it for the purpose of advertising, tracing communication, or other data mining.
So the question is, are we ready and willing to surrender anonymity on the net?
Yep, and I'm sure they understand that any proposed privacy law would get turned into an industry-friendly facsimile before it passed, thus protecting them from any harsher state laws in perpetuity.
Microsoft has shown itself to be US-gov't savvy ever since the antitrust case, where Judge Jackson's ruling was pushed aside after they spent lots of bucks in Washington.
Damn dude, even that squeeze ball thingy is ghetto'ed up with duct tape. You should definitely post over in hardocp's ghetto mod pics thread.
[apologies-in-advance to anyone offended by my cultural insensitivity.]
I know a lesbian couple who could register in California for Domestic Partnership, which would entitle them to certain benefits from their employers. One of them refuses to be registered because she remembers what happened in the Third Reich. I'm not making this up.
People have a right to be suspicious of government power. In fact, the Bill of Rights largely validates that suspicion.
People who say "you have nothing to fear" are ignorant of history, including US history.
It's a good strategy to keep you home. She knows where you are, and you can't be out hitting on waitresses (or WoW succubi) when you're busy winning the Space Race.
In other news...
George Bush received notice today from a GM that his World of Warcraft nickname violates Blizzard policy. We have been unable to reach the GM for comment.
In possibly related news, black helicopters were seen hovering near a Blizzard facility, and later a private Gulfstream jet registered to Premier Executive Transport Services was seen departing for for Egypt.
I like it. Exchange-traded-CPU-fund, anyone?