According to this article from the BBC bullying also occurs via SMS messages, with 16% of 11 to 19 year-olds admitting receiving threatening text messages.
As this was from October 03 it wouldn't surprise me if this figure had risen
That's worse than IM harrasment since most phones don't provide an easy way to block an individual sending you SMS messages plus most cellular companies allow you to send an SMS message to one of their subscribers from their website.
Add in many plans have SMS messages costing you a few cents a message (or only so many free then they charge) and you have a major problem. On the bright side the kids sending the threatening messages will likely be violating several laws, local, state, and federal.
Can you imagine a bully in reform school telling his new peers that he was put in there for sending threatening messages? He'd be labeled a geek/nerd and learn what bullying felt like from the victim's side quickly.
Of course that would be poetic justice.:)
On a related note, kids seem to have really lost all common sense. We had an incident in the county I live in where the upperclassmen football players decided to haze the freshman (hazing is both against school policy and against state law here). How'd they decide to go about this? Oh they filled plastic baseball bats full of sand and beat the freshman with them. Some had to be put in the hospital. Most of the kids won't tell who did it because they're scared of retaliation. The parents are livid and the punishment the offenders received didn't help. They were given ten days of in school suspension and forced to set out half of one game.
Frankly I know that every generation will say things weren't as bad when they were kids but even in high school I (and my peers) were smart enough to know beating someone with a heavy blunt object wasn't a good idea.
To catch drug dealers, the government buys drugs from them, while videotaping the transaction. This doesn't mean the government partakes in illegal drug dealing. It's a perfectly legal means of law enforcement.
It's also not entrapment like a lot of people think. For it to be entrapment the undercover agent/officer causes an person who was not predispose to commit the crime to commit it. The classic case that defined it was during prohibition. (This is from memory, I can't find a site with the actual case at the moment.) The undercover agent repeatedly kept asking if the guy had any alcohol even after being told repeatedly that he didn't and even he did wouldn't sale it. Finally the guy got tired of the requests and went to get some alcohol to share with the agent and the other guest (who brought the agent along to setup this guy up). At that point he was arrested. The case made it to the supreme court and definied entrapment. The court found that the guy was not predisposed to commit the crime and that the federal agent had entrapped him by causing him to commit the crime.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on it. It's interesting to note the wording, it notes that entrapment is when the police induce a person to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't.
Not just to bad guys. Civil forfeiture laws are basically letters of marque, that let your local cops take your money and property, and make *you* prove your innocence to get them back.
I hope the people for www.freeipods.com get busted too.
To be fair it's not Gratis Internet doing the spamming but individuals who have signed up and can't grasp the concept of getting referrals in a non-spamming way. In fact Gratis has added a note to the bottom of all the pages on their site (when logged in, not sure about beforehand):
We encourage users to post their referral link online, but will not tolerate users who mass-post on the internet. Report referral abuse here.
The really sad thing is there's tons of Conga lines out there to help people get their referrals so spamming their link isn't necessary. Of course that just proves the point that those who spam aren't terribly bright.
I should also note that they're legit, they do send out the iPods. A recent article in Wired spoke with them and they consider it highly important to send them out since otherwise their benefit to their advertisers would be worthless. Those advertisers pay Gratis a bounty for each signup they send their way. (Which is what allows Gratis to pay for the free iPods.)
And finally a disclaimer, I help run one conga line but I'm not affiliated with Gratis in any way. I'm just helping others get a free iPod since others helped me get one.:)
What's the deal with the freeipods thing? I always figured it must be a scam, but never really bothered finding out what it was all about
It's a marketing thing. You have to sign up and complete a sponsered offer, then get 5 friends to sign up under you as referrals. (They neeed to complete an offer as well.) Then after they verify that everything's completed properly you can order a free iPod or iPod mini. They're apparently legit though, the company running it is Gratis Networks who also does a lof of other free sites (freevideogames, etc.). They don't encourage spamming though (although a lot of people think they do). This is posted on their site pages (after you're logged in at least):
We encourage users to post their referral link online, but will not tolerate users who mass-post on the internet. Report referral abuse here.
I know quite a few in the Cherynobe area who survived just fine. I even have some messed up film, somewhere:) Still sounds scary though.
Umm, yeah that's true but this guy was working at the plant the night it exploded and even saw the interior of what was left of the pile at one point. (Which is amazing to read about.) Most of those there that night died, in fact at one point he tells he went with 3 other guys who were ordered to manually lower the rods. He propped the door open for them to go in and see for themselves almost nothing was left. The three guys who went through the door all died very soon afterwards but he's still here. (He credits the door and wall for saving his life.)
You really should read this interview, it's both fascinating and scary as hell at the same time. I don't think I'll forget his description of the light from the ionized air above the reactor for a long time.
However, these means are the primary ways of detecting terrorist chatter. If an attack were to happen on US soil for which the planning occurred over VOIP lines, or email, or normal phone lines, and the CIA couldn't prevent it because they couldn't tap lines, then we would all be up in arms.
Two things, the first the most important. What's to stop the terrorists from using encryption and defeating the wiretaps? In fact I'd say it's a damn good bet they will, they're not stupid, nuts maybe, but not stupid.
Second point is perhaps a bit nit-picky but needs to be addressed. This will NOT help the CIA do anything. The FBI perhaps, but not the CIA. The FBI handles internal (inside the US in this case) stuff, the CIA the external. This would just give the FBI more power to abuse. Yes I said abuse, some links to just the stuff brought up on/. about them:
So tell me do you really trust them to not abuse the ability to tap VOIP?
I have a decent suggestion for funding this as well, why not take some of the funds seized after 9/11 of terrorist organizations and pay for it that way. If the real need for this is to combat terrorism that's a perfectly logical use of those funds. Personally I think we'll find it's not really needed to fight terrorism but to fight other petty crime (and copyright violations seeing as the DOJ seems to have been bought out by the RIAA/MPAA). We're seeing this now about the Patriot Act, it'll only be a matter of time before we see it about tapping VOIP as well.
What a sad day when even taking over someone's machine can be done point-and-click style. Seemed so much more personal when you just had a remote shell.
Those days have been gone for a while, script kiddies routinely point n' click to take over machines. They might have to *gasp* type something in an IRC channel to control their zombies but it's all highly idiot-proof. (Which is good I suppose since most script kiddies seem to be idiots.)
Better yet use someone else's finger! Seriously enough I saw an episode of that one show from last year (can't remember the name but it's a crime drama about national security) where this one terrorist killed a guy in another country, then came to the US with the guy's fingers in baggies strapped around his waist. He then boiled them to get the skin off, glued it to his fingers and used that to work on a bomb he was making. In that case his purpose was to try to make it look like the other guy did it and start a war between Israel and Palestine but I see no reason it wouldn't also work in general. Kill some innocent bystander, get their finger skin off and attach it to yours then put your bomb in a locker. If it's found or the database survives the blast the trace goes back to that person. Then the FBI wastes months trying to find the body the real terrorist disposed of while the real terrorist escapes the country.
Not to mention that a while back it was shown that you could defeat many biometric fingerprint scanners like this with silly putty, has that been fixed?
So anyone feel any safer with them using fingerprint scanners for those lockers? Even if they do run them against the FBI database automatically (not really confirmed or disproven so who knows) it isn't going to help against a dedicated terrorist. It's a lot like computer and network security. You can do a lot to make it harder for someone to break in and that'll deter all the casual attackers and the script kiddies. But if someone really wants in your system they'll get in unless you manage to trace their identity and get them arrested first. Unless the fingerprint scanner is referenced against the FBI database, the matches are made in milliseconds, heavily armed LE is dispacted in minutes AND the terrorist uses their real fingerprints (or actually uses a locker) then this is all for naught.
Of course the terrorists aren't expected to be stupid enough to use one of these lockers. The purpose is clearly to act as a deterrent. This theoretically will make it harder to plant a bomb at the statue, when before it would have been relatively easy to place one in a locker.
The problem with that theory is that Al Queda has proven itself to be rather creative in how it'll attack. I think it's fair to say they aren't considering "normal" expected methods (like bombs in a locker) primarily. They're going to be thinking of new ways we aren't/can't expect. So all this does is give us a false sense of security. Having a false sense of security is worse than realizing we don't have any/much security. At least in the latter case we stay extra vigilant. This just leads people to assume they're safe and they may not notice the signs that could prevent the next attack.
And I should note that I was mistaken, the prints aren't run against the database automatically. However I would not be surprised if they start in the future or are really doing it but trying to keep it quiet.
Now, if they DID happen to be stupid enough to use one even with the scanners, that's just a bonus!
Just like the FBI being told by some foreign intellligence agency where one of the 9/11 hijackers was prior to 9/11? Just like how the FBI and CIA overlooked many signs of odd behaivor (just why were those guys learning to take off a jet but didn't care about learning to land?) that could have led to arrests and stopping the 9/11 attacks? Sorry it might be a bonus but I remain rather unconvinced that the FBI and/or the CIA would act on it in time to do anything about it.
Most of the/. crowd will likely understand why this is bad and stupid to boot. You just have to love the irony though, orwellian tactics installed on lockers at one of the most enduring and prominent symbols of freedom in the world. What's next, required DNA samples if you want to buy a souvenier? (Wouldn't want those terrorists buying souveniers now would we?)
For those that don't get the stupid part of this let me explain. If you were a terrorist casing the statue of liberty for a future attack and noticed the lockers required fingerprint scans would you use one? Even if you didn't know they'd be checking them against the FBI database you'd have to be one seriously stupid terrorist to not realize the possibility exists and it could blow your cover. They'll probably find a random minor criminal or two and arrest them with some trumped up charges to make it sound/look like these are helping fight the war on terror.
Course the reality is they're not helping any, they're just further eroding what little privacy we have left and the terrorists will just avoid them. And yes I realize we're not guaranteed privacy in public places but running fingerprints without notice (on a regular basis, not just when you suspect someone of a crime) is a bit beyond the erosion of privacy we expect. It's just surreal, I don't think even Orwell thought things would get this silly.
This fits for a company that has gotten people to pay for beta CDs. Not to mention that most of the releases of Windows have felt like Betas anyway. So this is just business as usual, nothing seems to have changed. Makes you wonder if the whole security focus is just marketing fluff too doesn't it?
UK Company is doing this. I saw a presentation by one of the company at a meeting of the London Virtual Reality Group in 2001(?), in the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Ahh cool, nice to know some of my ideas aren't just hair-brained lunacy brought on by midday boredom.:) Thanks for the link and info.
The ball would go as fast as you could so you'd probably need some breaking mechanism in order to stop in any reasonable amount of time.
I suspect using rollers with a carefully calculated level of friction with the sphere would be able to stop it fairly quickly, especiallyl from a walking speed. Going from running to a full stop would likely cause more trobule.
I did think of that, but hey most consumers are glorified sheep anyway, might as well lower their expectations.;) Be sure to check out the other reponses to my post someone posted a link to a company that's actually MADE a system like I suggested!
I think one of the factors they're dealing with is size. The gerbil ball would take up tons of space (Especially in the Japanese perspective), even if not in use.
Doh, I should have thought of that, I've been to Japan and yeah it would take up way too much room, most of an apartment for most people. I was thinking more in a research sense I suppose, or exercise (at a gym, obviously this isn't somthing that'd be cheap).
Wouldn't it be simpler to use a sphere sitting on rollers so it would turn with the person inside it? It wouldn't have to be too large to keep the interior curve to a reasonable level (so the person inside didn't feel they were always walking uphill. It wouldn't have to have many electronics (no predicting where the user's walking, just move with them) and rough terrain could be handled with a sort of wallpaper like object attached to the interior.
These tiles are neat but it seems to be making the problem more difficult than necessary. Yes a sphere wouldn't allow doing a duck and roll but most applications would probably be walking/running anyway.
Second, since this only effects people who steal software, why should i care?
Because it's a sign of things to come. Today it only affects someone who stole some software, tomorrow it affects everyone with a particular model of phone, next month one may hit your phone and cause service disruption.
Just because it doesn't affect you this time doesn't mean you shouldn't care about what's happening.
If you had paid attention to this when we were all screaming at you 4 or 5 years ago this wouldn't be a problem now. Instead you opted for the head-in-the-sand technique and needed to be strongarmed by a computer hardware and software manufacturer.
This is something I've posted about too. People are still saying "vote with your wallet" but as far as the RIAA is concerned they don't listen! Sales are down, piracy is up, lawsuits from the RIAA against downloaders are rampant, downloading continue to rise. A freaking lobotomized baboon could figure out that people are voting with their wallets and the product (CDs) are overpriced. Yet the RIAA still whines how piracy is killing them and looks at things like thid DualDisc crap to charge even more. Will sales go up then? Nope, I'll bet they'll drop even more once they switch to all Dualdisc. They'll likely make sure all Dualdisc releases cost at least a couple of bucks higher than a CD would.
DVDs with music videos and stuff are available now, you can get them at Wal-mart. I worked in Electronics for a year at a local Wal-mart and we sold maybe 1-2 of those every quarter. People aren't that interested in concert footage, music videos (which are mostly just concert footage nowadays) and stuff. They want music and at a reasonable price. They want singles, they want to stop being ripped off. Dualdisc addresses absolutely none of the concerns and desires of customers and addresses all of the greed of the recording industry.
A few weeks later, I got the phone call from my friend talking about the other admin, "He came in here shouting and cussing about how that damn consultant had locked him out of his own systems, then took off without turning over the passwords. I new then that it was time to use the envelope."
I just want to know if this resulted in the idiot admin losing his job.:)
While legislation isn't the answer to spam, at least not wholely, if we start seeing people getting offensive voice mail spam the push on congress/FBI/etc. to put a stop to it will increase exponentially. You can always change E-mail addresses to avoid spam if it gets too offensive, but people aren't going to want to change their phone number and the spammers are far too greedy (and stupid) to realize they're crossing a line they shouldn't cross.
Look at it this way more people are likely to end up with VoIP phones in the future than are likely to really bother with E-mail. When John Doe Consumer starts getting racy, obscene and highly offensive voice mails inviting him to "gain 4 inches now" or "view barely legal teens" every day he's going to care a lot.
And yes spammers will try to set up operations overseas but many of the countries that tolerate the spammers now have less freedoms in general and sexual mores are more government enforced. They can ignore millions of porn E-mail spam easily, but when they have their citizens getting racy voice mail (even if they can't understand the words I'm sure the spammers will leave nothing to the imagination in tonal deliverance) or they end up with egg on their face for tolerating people sending things through them that would be illegal for their citizens they'll end up cutting off the easy access for spammers.
Frankly the only thing that'll end the reign of terror spammers have on the net at large today will be them shooting themselves in the foot by going too far. I can't wait for it to happen, but until then they can send all they want to my spam trap addresses, my Baysian filters love to be fed.:)
...but how does it make sense to sell the profitable part of a business and keep the unprofitable part? "Focussing" on the unprofitable part to try and fix it, yeah, I can see the sense in that, but getting rid of the bit that keeps the money coming in while you sort the problems out?
Not to accuse anyone of anything (in case predatory lawyes are lurking about) but perhaps to short the stock and rake in money from that? It's not often you can legally predict that a company is going to die a horrible flaming death.
Slashdot Mirror
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They'll look great next to the bean-bag chairs and the espresso bar.
For full effect you should put a disco ball on the ceiling of the conference room and have polyester fridays.-
According to this article from the BBC bullying also occurs via SMS messages, with 16% of 11 to 19 year-olds admitting receiving threatening text messages.
That's worse than IM harrasment since most phones don't provide an easy way to block an individual sending you SMS messages plus most cellular companies allow you to send an SMS message to one of their subscribers from their website.As this was from October 03 it wouldn't surprise me if this figure had risen
Add in many plans have SMS messages costing you a few cents a message (or only so many free then they charge) and you have a major problem. On the bright side the kids sending the threatening messages will likely be violating several laws, local, state, and federal.
Can you imagine a bully in reform school telling his new peers that he was put in there for sending threatening messages? He'd be labeled a geek/nerd and learn what bullying felt like from the victim's side quickly.
Of course that would be poetic justice. :)
On a related note, kids seem to have really lost all common sense. We had an incident in the county I live in where the upperclassmen football players decided to haze the freshman (hazing is both against school policy and against state law here). How'd they decide to go about this? Oh they filled plastic baseball bats full of sand and beat the freshman with them. Some had to be put in the hospital. Most of the kids won't tell who did it because they're scared of retaliation. The parents are livid and the punishment the offenders received didn't help. They were given ten days of in school suspension and forced to set out half of one game.
Frankly I know that every generation will say things weren't as bad when they were kids but even in high school I (and my peers) were smart enough to know beating someone with a heavy blunt object wasn't a good idea.
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To catch drug dealers, the government buys drugs from them, while videotaping the transaction. This doesn't mean the government partakes in illegal drug dealing. It's a perfectly legal means of law enforcement.
It's also not entrapment like a lot of people think. For it to be entrapment the undercover agent/officer causes an person who was not predispose to commit the crime to commit it. The classic case that defined it was during prohibition. (This is from memory, I can't find a site with the actual case at the moment.) The undercover agent repeatedly kept asking if the guy had any alcohol even after being told repeatedly that he didn't and even he did wouldn't sale it. Finally the guy got tired of the requests and went to get some alcohol to share with the agent and the other guest (who brought the agent along to setup this guy up). At that point he was arrested. The case made it to the supreme court and definied entrapment. The court found that the guy was not predisposed to commit the crime and that the federal agent had entrapped him by causing him to commit the crime.Here's the Wikipedia entry on it. It's interesting to note the wording, it notes that entrapment is when the police induce a person to commit a crime they otherwise wouldn't.
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Not just to bad guys. Civil forfeiture laws are basically letters of marque, that let your local cops take your money and property, and make *you* prove your innocence to get them back.
Better yet, here's the Wikipedia Entry about the incident.Do a google search for "forfeiture abuse".
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In addition, the company gets to keep the money generated by anybody who makes one to four sales and never completes the fifth one to claim the prize.
Also the odds are good people will end up with more than five completed referrals. I ended up with seven myself.-
I hope the people for www.freeipods.com get busted too.
To be fair it's not Gratis Internet doing the spamming but individuals who have signed up and can't grasp the concept of getting referrals in a non-spamming way. In fact Gratis has added a note to the bottom of all the pages on their site (when logged in, not sure about beforehand):-
We encourage users to post their referral link online, but will not tolerate users who mass-post on the internet. Report referral abuse here.
The really sad thing is there's tons of Conga lines out there to help people get their referrals so spamming their link isn't necessary. Of course that just proves the point that those who spam aren't terribly bright.I should also note that they're legit, they do send out the iPods. A recent article in Wired spoke with them and they consider it highly important to send them out since otherwise their benefit to their advertisers would be worthless. Those advertisers pay Gratis a bounty for each signup they send their way. (Which is what allows Gratis to pay for the free iPods.)
And finally a disclaimer, I help run one conga line but I'm not affiliated with Gratis in any way. I'm just helping others get a free iPod since others helped me get one. :)
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What's the deal with the freeipods thing? I always figured it must be a scam, but never really bothered finding out what it was all about
It's a marketing thing. You have to sign up and complete a sponsered offer, then get 5 friends to sign up under you as referrals. (They neeed to complete an offer as well.) Then after they verify that everything's completed properly you can order a free iPod or iPod mini. They're apparently legit though, the company running it is Gratis Networks who also does a lof of other free sites (freevideogames, etc.). They don't encourage spamming though (although a lot of people think they do). This is posted on their site pages (after you're logged in at least):-
I know quite a few in the Cherynobe area who survived just fine. I even have some messed up film, somewhere
:) Still sounds scary though.
Umm, yeah that's true but this guy was working at the plant the night it exploded and even saw the interior of what was left of the pile at one point. (Which is amazing to read about.) Most of those there that night died, in fact at one point he tells he went with 3 other guys who were ordered to manually lower the rods. He propped the door open for them to go in and see for themselves almost nothing was left. The three guys who went through the door all died very soon afterwards but he's still here. (He credits the door and wall for saving his life.)You really should read this interview, it's both fascinating and scary as hell at the same time. I don't think I'll forget his description of the light from the ionized air above the reactor for a long time.
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However, these means are the primary ways of detecting terrorist chatter. If an attack were to happen on US soil for which the planning occurred over VOIP lines, or email, or normal phone lines, and the CIA couldn't prevent it because they couldn't tap lines, then we would all be up in arms.
Two things, the first the most important. What's to stop the terrorists from using encryption and defeating the wiretaps? In fact I'd say it's a damn good bet they will, they're not stupid, nuts maybe, but not stupid.Second point is perhaps a bit nit-picky but needs to be addressed. This will NOT help the CIA do anything. The FBI perhaps, but not the CIA. The FBI handles internal (inside the US in this case) stuff, the CIA the external. This would just give the FBI more power to abuse. Yes I said abuse, some links to just the stuff brought up on /. about them:
- Patriot Act Used to Enforce Copyright Law?
- Circuit Boards + Soldering Iron == Terrorist?
- Area 51 Hackers Map Buried Surveillance Network
- FBI Investigates Open Records Request
- FBI Raids Arizona School District Over Copyright Infringement
So tell me do you really trust them to not abuse the ability to tap VOIP?I have a decent suggestion for funding this as well, why not take some of the funds seized after 9/11 of terrorist organizations and pay for it that way. If the real need for this is to combat terrorism that's a perfectly logical use of those funds. Personally I think we'll find it's not really needed to fight terrorism but to fight other petty crime (and copyright violations seeing as the DOJ seems to have been bought out by the RIAA/MPAA). We're seeing this now about the Patriot Act, it'll only be a matter of time before we see it about tapping VOIP as well.
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What a sad day when even taking over someone's machine can be done point-and-click style. Seemed so much more personal when you just had a remote shell.
Those days have been gone for a while, script kiddies routinely point n' click to take over machines. They might have to *gasp* type something in an IRC channel to control their zombies but it's all highly idiot-proof. (Which is good I suppose since most script kiddies seem to be idiots.)-
There's a relevant scene in Once Upon a Time in Mexico that really disturbed me.
Yeah I saw that too, disturbing doesn't beging to describe that scene. It almost made me sick.-
would any sufficiently swirly object work?
Better yet use someone else's finger! Seriously enough I saw an episode of that one show from last year (can't remember the name but it's a crime drama about national security) where this one terrorist killed a guy in another country, then came to the US with the guy's fingers in baggies strapped around his waist. He then boiled them to get the skin off, glued it to his fingers and used that to work on a bomb he was making. In that case his purpose was to try to make it look like the other guy did it and start a war between Israel and Palestine but I see no reason it wouldn't also work in general. Kill some innocent bystander, get their finger skin off and attach it to yours then put your bomb in a locker. If it's found or the database survives the blast the trace goes back to that person. Then the FBI wastes months trying to find the body the real terrorist disposed of while the real terrorist escapes the country.Not to mention that a while back it was shown that you could defeat many biometric fingerprint scanners like this with silly putty, has that been fixed?
So anyone feel any safer with them using fingerprint scanners for those lockers? Even if they do run them against the FBI database automatically (not really confirmed or disproven so who knows) it isn't going to help against a dedicated terrorist. It's a lot like computer and network security. You can do a lot to make it harder for someone to break in and that'll deter all the casual attackers and the script kiddies. But if someone really wants in your system they'll get in unless you manage to trace their identity and get them arrested first. Unless the fingerprint scanner is referenced against the FBI database, the matches are made in milliseconds, heavily armed LE is dispacted in minutes AND the terrorist uses their real fingerprints (or actually uses a locker) then this is all for naught.
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Of course the terrorists aren't expected to be stupid enough to use one of these lockers. The purpose is clearly to act as a deterrent. This theoretically will make it harder to plant a bomb at the statue, when before it would have been relatively easy to place one in a locker.
The problem with that theory is that Al Queda has proven itself to be rather creative in how it'll attack. I think it's fair to say they aren't considering "normal" expected methods (like bombs in a locker) primarily. They're going to be thinking of new ways we aren't/can't expect. So all this does is give us a false sense of security. Having a false sense of security is worse than realizing we don't have any/much security. At least in the latter case we stay extra vigilant. This just leads people to assume they're safe and they may not notice the signs that could prevent the next attack.And I should note that I was mistaken, the prints aren't run against the database automatically. However I would not be surprised if they start in the future or are really doing it but trying to keep it quiet.
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Now, if they DID happen to be stupid enough to use one even with the scanners, that's just a bonus!
Just like the FBI being told by some foreign intellligence agency where one of the 9/11 hijackers was prior to 9/11? Just like how the FBI and CIA overlooked many signs of odd behaivor (just why were those guys learning to take off a jet but didn't care about learning to land?) that could have led to arrests and stopping the 9/11 attacks? Sorry it might be a bonus but I remain rather unconvinced that the FBI and/or the CIA would act on it in time to do anything about it.Very well put, the quotes put it in perspective wonderfully. I wish I had mod points to mod you up!
For those that don't get the stupid part of this let me explain. If you were a terrorist casing the statue of liberty for a future attack and noticed the lockers required fingerprint scans would you use one? Even if you didn't know they'd be checking them against the FBI database you'd have to be one seriously stupid terrorist to not realize the possibility exists and it could blow your cover. They'll probably find a random minor criminal or two and arrest them with some trumped up charges to make it sound/look like these are helping fight the war on terror.
Course the reality is they're not helping any, they're just further eroding what little privacy we have left and the terrorists will just avoid them. And yes I realize we're not guaranteed privacy in public places but running fingerprints without notice (on a regular basis, not just when you suspect someone of a crime) is a bit beyond the erosion of privacy we expect. It's just surreal, I don't think even Orwell thought things would get this silly.
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Except that you're paying for it...
This fits for a company that has gotten people to pay for beta CDs. Not to mention that most of the releases of Windows have felt like Betas anyway. So this is just business as usual, nothing seems to have changed. Makes you wonder if the whole security focus is just marketing fluff too doesn't it?-
UK Company is doing this. I saw a presentation by one of the company at a meeting of the London Virtual Reality Group in 2001(?), in the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Ahh cool, nice to know some of my ideas aren't just hair-brained lunacy brought on by midday boredom.-
The ball would go as fast as you could so you'd probably need some breaking mechanism in order to stop in any reasonable amount of time.
I suspect using rollers with a carefully calculated level of friction with the sphere would be able to stop it fairly quickly, especiallyl from a walking speed. Going from running to a full stop would likely cause more trobule.-
A giant gerbil ball... For people. Nice.
I did think of that, but hey most consumers are glorified sheep anyway, might as well lower their expectations.-
I think one of the factors they're dealing with is size. The gerbil ball would take up tons of space (Especially in the Japanese perspective), even if not in use.
Doh, I should have thought of that, I've been to Japan and yeah it would take up way too much room, most of an apartment for most people. I was thinking more in a research sense I suppose, or exercise (at a gym, obviously this isn't somthing that'd be cheap).These tiles are neat but it seems to be making the problem more difficult than necessary. Yes a sphere wouldn't allow doing a duck and roll but most applications would probably be walking/running anyway.
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Second, since this only effects people who steal software, why should i care?
Because it's a sign of things to come. Today it only affects someone who stole some software, tomorrow it affects everyone with a particular model of phone, next month one may hit your phone and cause service disruption.Just because it doesn't affect you this time doesn't mean you shouldn't care about what's happening.
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If you had paid attention to this when we were all screaming at you 4 or 5 years ago this wouldn't be a problem now. Instead you opted for the head-in-the-sand technique and needed to be strongarmed by a computer hardware and software manufacturer.
This is something I've posted about too. People are still saying "vote with your wallet" but as far as the RIAA is concerned they don't listen! Sales are down, piracy is up, lawsuits from the RIAA against downloaders are rampant, downloading continue to rise. A freaking lobotomized baboon could figure out that people are voting with their wallets and the product (CDs) are overpriced. Yet the RIAA still whines how piracy is killing them and looks at things like thid DualDisc crap to charge even more. Will sales go up then? Nope, I'll bet they'll drop even more once they switch to all Dualdisc. They'll likely make sure all Dualdisc releases cost at least a couple of bucks higher than a CD would.DVDs with music videos and stuff are available now, you can get them at Wal-mart. I worked in Electronics for a year at a local Wal-mart and we sold maybe 1-2 of those every quarter. People aren't that interested in concert footage, music videos (which are mostly just concert footage nowadays) and stuff. They want music and at a reasonable price. They want singles, they want to stop being ripped off. Dualdisc addresses absolutely none of the concerns and desires of customers and addresses all of the greed of the recording industry.
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A few weeks later, I got the phone call from my friend talking about the other admin, "He came in here shouting and cussing about how that damn consultant had locked him out of his own systems, then took off without turning over the passwords. I new then that it was time to use the envelope."
I just want to know if this resulted in the idiot admin losing his job.Look at it this way more people are likely to end up with VoIP phones in the future than are likely to really bother with E-mail. When John Doe Consumer starts getting racy, obscene and highly offensive voice mails inviting him to "gain 4 inches now" or "view barely legal teens" every day he's going to care a lot.
And yes spammers will try to set up operations overseas but many of the countries that tolerate the spammers now have less freedoms in general and sexual mores are more government enforced. They can ignore millions of porn E-mail spam easily, but when they have their citizens getting racy voice mail (even if they can't understand the words I'm sure the spammers will leave nothing to the imagination in tonal deliverance) or they end up with egg on their face for tolerating people sending things through them that would be illegal for their citizens they'll end up cutting off the easy access for spammers.
Frankly the only thing that'll end the reign of terror spammers have on the net at large today will be them shooting themselves in the foot by going too far. I can't wait for it to happen, but until then they can send all they want to my spam trap addresses, my Baysian filters love to be fed. :)
...but how does it make sense to sell the profitable part of a business and keep the unprofitable part? "Focussing" on the unprofitable part to try and fix it, yeah, I can see the sense in that, but getting rid of the bit that keeps the money coming in while you sort the problems out?
Not to accuse anyone of anything (in case predatory lawyes are lurking about) but perhaps to short the stock and rake in money from that? It's not often you can legally predict that a company is going to die a horrible flaming death.