Face it, complete DNA sampling of the population is inevitable.
Mind you, I have to ask - if they are so worried about a 5 year old turning into a criminal, why not spend the money sorting the kid out while there 5 rather than dealing with their adult crime?
I was reading the The Death of High Fidelity article earlier and I'm wondering about a potential parallel here.
If we ignore the bullshit like DRM the real push seems to be about picture quality. From my admittedly anecdotal experiences a hell of a lot of people seem pretty happy to put up with poorer image quality by sourcing their films through downloads (legal or otherwise). They seem happy to put up with a loss of quality if it brings convenience (ignoring the "free" aspect for the present). As with arguably superior audio formats like SACD I could see that many people could not care less about the technically better hi-def formats. The want something they can rip and shove onto their iPods - not better images.
Then again, storage grows and CPUs get faster - maybe it's just too early. When we can easily rip Blueray and HD-DVD disks onto out 5TB iPods it may all be a moot discussion anyway.
I think you missed the privacy problem of public records - the issue is not whether such records are public or not but why they were made public. It was never intended that public records would be harvested by information brokers and marketers and data mined but that it exactly what will happen once easy access is provided to such data.
I don't mind (most) requirements for public records being public but what I do mind is when that data is then used for purposes other than for which it was intended. This is where we need privacy laws. I have no problem for example with having my name, address and phone number in the phone book for public use but I do have a problem when this information is abused by using it in ways that were not intended.
I had an interesting discussion the other day with some colleagues and we came to a consensus that many Microsoft products were and still are, or at least inherit, a design philosophy similar to that of the Internet when it was first created. The Internet was built on a basis of implied trust and as we have seen in present times, particularly with e-mail and the SMTP protocol, this model of design is a poor foundation. To counter these issues we need to design more and cleverer countermeasures in an escalating war with miscreants; a parallel we also see in Microsoft products with never ending cycle of Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware updates and patches required to deal with both programming flaws are poor design choices that assumed trust (recall the ILOVEYOU debacle). The real kicker is that you could argue that many of the problems we now face on the Internet are largely due to poor design in Microsoft software which as I noted parallels an original design methodology of the Internet. We've had several articles earlier in the week pushing a view that the Internet needed to be re-architected due to its flawed security design (although I think it's more about commerce and control but I won't go there for now) - is it not also time to re-architect Microsoft and their approach to developing products? Would we even have these problems if not for Microsoft? My two cents.
I wondered how long it would take before the topic of re-designing the Internet started making general rounds.
No one really owns it, and governments can't really control it. How long did we think that would last? I'm sure there are plenty of true benefits that would emerge, but we all know what we will really end up with is a DRM infested wiretap paradise that only serves the financial interests of corporations and the control aims of governments. Mind you, whether its an incremental upgrade or a complete replacement I think these aspects of the Internet will become inevitable - it's just a question of how long it will take.
I don't think they mean to replace the "blackbox" as most people understand it. It is accurately described in TFA as a Personal Flight Recorder. As a (recreational) pilot I can imagine a number of situations where it would be useful to be able to record basic flight data such as altitidue, speed, ground track etc. to look at after a flight.
They did care, but the physical aspect of tape trading and the cost to make tapes limited potential damage. It was also constrained to the physical borders of the country of origin. The other significant issue is that it is near impossible to police this type of trading activity. The Internet changes this - the impact is huge because the reach is orders of magnitude greater, it extends well beyond physical country boundaries and duplication costs are near zero. Policing is where changes are the largest; this is addressed through technologies such as DRM, AACS and law (argue all you like for or against these). I would imagine that ultimately when governments control Internet access within a country border (you know it's going to happen eventually) the media companies will get the level of control they want.
As much as I hate copyright, DRM and all the crap that goes with trying to access to media I want, I do see some point to media companies concerns. Ultimately they see a worse case where they release a film song or whatever which almost no one pays to use because everyone watches a copy of it. Obviously this is not sustainable but I don't know what the solution is.
Why is it that people feel they have a right to do the work of or intefere with the work of their IT departments? It is my responsibility, not yours to run IT. I don't go around other peoples desks mucking about with their jobs because I know a bit about finance, or sales or whatever.
I see a few examples of people proudly demonstrating how they have circumvented what they perceive as some form of restrictive IT policy - it my opinion you should be sacked. The most common problem I have seen of late is wireless APs. A company bans wireless for legitimate reasons, smart arse users install a "secret" AP, company gets owned. I also cannot count the number of times I have had to respond to a problem that has been caused by users who are otherwise very IT competent but don't understand how their little change or improvement affects the big picture.
Many complaints about IT are of course completely legitimate as are complaints about any other area of business. If there is a problem with your IT groups or you need some tool or change to IT operating practices then use the right channels. Talk to your IT group and your management team. We are also annoyed by limitations with IT systems but we have budgets and responsibilities to the company just like users do and can't always make things work the way they should.
I've seen untwisted coat hangers covered in electrical tape and twisted together used to supply AC between two buildings in tropical weather in PNG. The wiring to the main building was bad enough but using coat hangers to supply power to the small hut that housed the computer equipment was priceless. I should also point out that they did not have power outlets for the computers either. They just cut the plugs off, stripped the wires, twisted them together and covered it in electrical tape.
I noted that one of the computers running GEMS (don't know if it was an actual tally machine) seemed to have Bear-Share installed so I assume it was connected to that "series of tubes". Nice; a Windows box running something as monumentally critical as voting connected to the web and probably used for general computing as well - there's a system I would have faith in. I'm also amazed at how stupid this piece of software was. You modify the MS access database (or maybe it was a plain JET database) which has seems to have no protection whatsoever and the stupid software doesn't even notice - "its ok, it has a password". Diebold made much about encryption but it seemd bogus if you can modidy databases and memory cards and not have the software notice.
The worst part is the election officials presented all seemed to blindly accept that all was OK. I'm we use paper in my country.
Even if they do win, it wont make any difference to data retention practices though. No one would ever rule against that because of potential use as evidence; especially with the push to mandated retention policies.
Patches are one thing but if people just used a firewall (even the built in one in Windows XP) or even just turned off the Server service (most home users don't need it) most of these worms would not have anywhere to go.
I'm amazed at the number of PCs that are are still blindly connected to the Internet with no firewall. Crank up NMap and run it over your ISPs dyanmic address range and have a look.
Fanboy is not really true but it conveys the introductory point I wanted. Microsoft do some things right, but they do so much more that is wrong, or more accurately fail to do anything when they know its wrong. Internet Explorer is a good example. There are so many bugs and failures to comply to standards that IE should be terminated (I can't speak for IE7 but I'm not expecting a revolution). The economic and market reality however is that Microsoft owns the browser market, so why should they care? I understand this but it is reprehensible, and face it - most people still don't care, only propellor heads like us do. Unfortunately, neither Linux or OSX are a serious threat to Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market (yet). I truly pray for the day when they are as it is only this sort of economic threat threat that I feel will make Microsoft take serious stock of what they are delivering to market (or not delivering as is the case with Vista).
I'm a bit of a Microsoft fanboy but personally I think they should just give up on Vista. It's a trainwreck of a project and I can see another Windows ME in the making. I can't see many compelling reasons to deploy this in an existing environment. It's (for the most part) just a Windows XP clone with a few new features with a pretty UI and steep hardware requirements.
Microsoft should take all the half decent features out of Vista, back port them to Windows XP and call it Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Windows XP R2 then site down and have a good long think before they try this again.
It's about time Microsoft seriously thought about re-architecting their operating system from the ground up. If we can get Windows applications running under Linux with WINE, then surely Microsoft can get Windows applications running under some new operating system thus satisfying the backwards compatibility requirements. There are far too many issues with Windows appearing that are grounded in its architecture such as reduced privileges which is difficult to make work because Windows is not truly multi-user etc. etc. etc.
There are so many KDE 4 screenshot archives about at the moment and none of the seem to share much similarity, so I'm not inclined to believe any of them are the real deal. Personally I think KDE still suffers from bloat (particularly options bloat) and could it please drop the K-this and K-that names - it's childish and unprofessional.
When I read "conspiracy" it usually means there were elaborate attempts made to conceal or otherwise ensure the continued success of the associated "crime".
Mind you, it seems to generally get applied by the law when the associated crime penalties are not (in their opinion) harsh another, so you tack on a conspiracy charge to make the punishment worse hence a better deterrent (well maybe).
Nah, let's have a book burning - the Nazi's seemed to think it was a good idea. While we're at it I know some witches we could toast or maybe they were just commie sympathisers. Quick, dig Ronald up, the red's are coming!
I'm going to say this very clearly... because I am getting so very tired of "solutions" based on the "won't someone please think of the children" excuse (followed closely by the terrorism excuse) for every perceived I'll in our world.
BE A FUCKING PARENT TO YOUR CHILDREN AND STOP TRYING TO BLAME EVERYONE ELSE! IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.
It's that simple. Spend time with them, listen to them and stop the mindless quest for wealth and possessions.
We have probably all done it at some stage (piracy that is), and flame wars aside about ethics and monopolies, it's really time for people to pull their heads out of their collective butts and accept that it is stealing (and no I don't want an argument about definitions. I know nothing physical was taken, but under current law it's still stealing. Don't like it? Get the laws changed).
This doesn't mean I'm against pushing for change in the software industry, and moving to OpenSource (where it makes sense) but people have got to accept that it's not right, no matter what your politics, views or anything else are.
Guys (and the few but very welcome gals), before we all start flaming about how hard it is to set up OpenBSD/FreeBSD and a firewall for a newbie, please take a look at the m0n0wall site.
m0n0wall is completely self contained and is very easy to set up. It is completely web interface driven and is managed in much the same way as a consumer broadband router is.
m0n0wall is, in my humble opinion having used it for a number of years and loveing it, and excellent firewall product and is very capable.
If you have not seen it, grab a copy and have a look.
Cheers,
Tim.
Slashdot Mirror
Face it, complete DNA sampling of the population is inevitable.
Mind you, I have to ask - if they are so worried about a 5 year old turning into a criminal, why not spend the money sorting the kid out while there 5 rather than dealing with their adult crime?
I was reading the The Death of High Fidelity article earlier and I'm wondering about a potential parallel here.
If we ignore the bullshit like DRM the real push seems to be about picture quality. From my admittedly anecdotal experiences a hell of a lot of people seem pretty happy to put up with poorer image quality by sourcing their films through downloads (legal or otherwise). They seem happy to put up with a loss of quality if it brings convenience (ignoring the "free" aspect for the present). As with arguably superior audio formats like SACD I could see that many people could not care less about the technically better hi-def formats. The want something they can rip and shove onto their iPods - not better images.
Then again, storage grows and CPUs get faster - maybe it's just too early. When we can easily rip Blueray and HD-DVD disks onto out 5TB iPods it may all be a moot discussion anyway.
I think you missed the privacy problem of public records - the issue is not whether such records are public or not but why they were made public. It was never intended that public records would be harvested by information brokers and marketers and data mined but that it exactly what will happen once easy access is provided to such data.
I don't mind (most) requirements for public records being public but what I do mind is when that data is then used for purposes other than for which it was intended. This is where we need privacy laws. I have no problem for example with having my name, address and phone number in the phone book for public use but I do have a problem when this information is abused by using it in ways that were not intended.
I had an interesting discussion the other day with some colleagues and we came to a consensus that many Microsoft products were and still are, or at least inherit, a design philosophy similar to that of the Internet when it was first created. The Internet was built on a basis of implied trust and as we have seen in present times, particularly with e-mail and the SMTP protocol, this model of design is a poor foundation. To counter these issues we need to design more and cleverer countermeasures in an escalating war with miscreants; a parallel we also see in Microsoft products with never ending cycle of Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware updates and patches required to deal with both programming flaws are poor design choices that assumed trust (recall the ILOVEYOU debacle). The real kicker is that you could argue that many of the problems we now face on the Internet are largely due to poor design in Microsoft software which as I noted parallels an original design methodology of the Internet. We've had several articles earlier in the week pushing a view that the Internet needed to be re-architected due to its flawed security design (although I think it's more about commerce and control but I won't go there for now) - is it not also time to re-architect Microsoft and their approach to developing products? Would we even have these problems if not for Microsoft? My two cents.
I wondered how long it would take before the topic of re-designing the Internet started making general rounds.
No one really owns it, and governments can't really control it. How long did we think that would last? I'm sure there are plenty of true benefits that would emerge, but we all know what we will really end up with is a DRM infested wiretap paradise that only serves the financial interests of corporations and the control aims of governments. Mind you, whether its an incremental upgrade or a complete replacement I think these aspects of the Internet will become inevitable - it's just a question of how long it will take.
I don't think they mean to replace the "blackbox" as most people understand it. It is accurately described in TFA as a Personal Flight Recorder. As a (recreational) pilot I can imagine a number of situations where it would be useful to be able to record basic flight data such as altitidue, speed, ground track etc. to look at after a flight.
They did care, but the physical aspect of tape trading and the cost to make tapes limited potential damage. It was also constrained to the physical borders of the country of origin. The other significant issue is that it is near impossible to police this type of trading activity. The Internet changes this - the impact is huge because the reach is orders of magnitude greater, it extends well beyond physical country boundaries and duplication costs are near zero. Policing is where changes are the largest; this is addressed through technologies such as DRM, AACS and law (argue all you like for or against these). I would imagine that ultimately when governments control Internet access within a country border (you know it's going to happen eventually) the media companies will get the level of control they want.
As much as I hate copyright, DRM and all the crap that goes with trying to access to media I want, I do see some point to media companies concerns. Ultimately they see a worse case where they release a film song or whatever which almost no one pays to use because everyone watches a copy of it. Obviously this is not sustainable but I don't know what the solution is.
Why is it that people feel they have a right to do the work of or intefere with the work of their IT departments? It is my responsibility, not yours to run IT. I don't go around other peoples desks mucking about with their jobs because I know a bit about finance, or sales or whatever.
I see a few examples of people proudly demonstrating how they have circumvented what they perceive as some form of restrictive IT policy - it my opinion you should be sacked. The most common problem I have seen of late is wireless APs. A company bans wireless for legitimate reasons, smart arse users install a "secret" AP, company gets owned. I also cannot count the number of times I have had to respond to a problem that has been caused by users who are otherwise very IT competent but don't understand how their little change or improvement affects the big picture.
Many complaints about IT are of course completely legitimate as are complaints about any other area of business. If there is a problem with your IT groups or you need some tool or change to IT operating practices then use the right channels. Talk to your IT group and your management team. We are also annoyed by limitations with IT systems but we have budgets and responsibilities to the company just like users do and can't always make things work the way they should.
I find many people don't even know what CS is anyway. Most people I meet seem to lump anything do with computers under the CS banner.
I've seen untwisted coat hangers covered in electrical tape and twisted together used to supply AC between two buildings in tropical weather in PNG. The wiring to the main building was bad enough but using coat hangers to supply power to the small hut that housed the computer equipment was priceless. I should also point out that they did not have power outlets for the computers either. They just cut the plugs off, stripped the wires, twisted them together and covered it in electrical tape.
All your Base (Stations) are belong to Oz.
I don't know what direction was required for the art, but the samples have that "ooohhh shiny" web 2.0 feel to them so they just must be better :p
Meeehhh, it will all change again anyway when everyone jumps on the Web 3.0 graphic design bandwagon or whatever the next hot trend will be.
I noted that one of the computers running GEMS (don't know if it was an actual tally machine) seemed to have Bear-Share installed so I assume it was connected to that "series of tubes". Nice; a Windows box running something as monumentally critical as voting connected to the web and probably used for general computing as well - there's a system I would have faith in. I'm also amazed at how stupid this piece of software was. You modify the MS access database (or maybe it was a plain JET database) which has seems to have no protection whatsoever and the stupid software doesn't even notice - "its ok, it has a password". Diebold made much about encryption but it seemd bogus if you can modidy databases and memory cards and not have the software notice. The worst part is the election officials presented all seemed to blindly accept that all was OK. I'm we use paper in my country.
Even if they do win, it wont make any difference to data retention practices though. No one would ever rule against that because of potential use as evidence; especially with the push to mandated retention policies.
Patches are one thing but if people just used a firewall (even the built in one in Windows XP) or even just turned off the Server service (most home users don't need it) most of these worms would not have anywhere to go.
I'm amazed at the number of PCs that are are still blindly connected to the Internet with no firewall. Crank up NMap and run it over your ISPs dyanmic address range and have a look.
Yeah, I'll bite back.
Fanboy is not really true but it conveys the introductory point I wanted. Microsoft do some things right, but they do so much more that is wrong, or more accurately fail to do anything when they know its wrong. Internet Explorer is a good example. There are so many bugs and failures to comply to standards that IE should be terminated (I can't speak for IE7 but I'm not expecting a revolution). The economic and market reality however is that Microsoft owns the browser market, so why should they care? I understand this but it is reprehensible, and face it - most people still don't care, only propellor heads like us do. Unfortunately, neither Linux or OSX are a serious threat to Microsoft's dominance in the desktop market (yet). I truly pray for the day when they are as it is only this sort of economic threat threat that I feel will make Microsoft take serious stock of what they are delivering to market (or not delivering as is the case with Vista).
I'm a bit of a Microsoft fanboy but personally I think they should just give up on Vista. It's a trainwreck of a project and I can see another Windows ME in the making. I can't see many compelling reasons to deploy this in an existing environment. It's (for the most part) just a Windows XP clone with a few new features with a pretty UI and steep hardware requirements.
Microsoft should take all the half decent features out of Vista, back port them to Windows XP and call it Windows XP Service Pack 3 or Windows XP R2 then site down and have a good long think before they try this again.
It's about time Microsoft seriously thought about re-architecting their operating system from the ground up. If we can get Windows applications running under Linux with WINE, then surely Microsoft can get Windows applications running under some new operating system thus satisfying the backwards compatibility requirements. There are far too many issues with Windows appearing that are grounded in its architecture such as reduced privileges which is difficult to make work because Windows is not truly multi-user etc. etc. etc.
Give it up, start again and do it properly.
There are so many KDE 4 screenshot archives about at the moment and none of the seem to share much similarity, so I'm not inclined to believe any of them are the real deal. Personally I think KDE still suffers from bloat (particularly options bloat) and could it please drop the K-this and K-that names - it's childish and unprofessional.
When I read "conspiracy" it usually means there were elaborate attempts made to conceal or otherwise ensure the continued success of the associated "crime". Mind you, it seems to generally get applied by the law when the associated crime penalties are not (in their opinion) harsh another, so you tack on a conspiracy charge to make the punishment worse hence a better deterrent (well maybe).
Nah, let's have a book burning - the Nazi's seemed to think it was a good idea. While we're at it I know some witches we could toast or maybe they were just commie sympathisers. Quick, dig Ronald up, the red's are coming!
I'm going to say this very clearly... because I am getting so very tired of "solutions" based on the "won't someone please think of the children" excuse (followed closely by the terrorism excuse) for every perceived I'll in our world. BE A FUCKING PARENT TO YOUR CHILDREN AND STOP TRYING TO BLAME EVERYONE ELSE! IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. It's that simple. Spend time with them, listen to them and stop the mindless quest for wealth and possessions.
As long as they don't use any Mars artifacts for teleportaion experiments and open a gateway to hell this sounds like a great plan...
Actualy Win95 would work. It would crash so much that there would be no risk of anyone ever being able to get anything useful out of it...
We have probably all done it at some stage (piracy that is), and flame wars aside about ethics and monopolies, it's really time for people to pull their heads out of their collective butts and accept that it is stealing (and no I don't want an argument about definitions. I know nothing physical was taken, but under current law it's still stealing. Don't like it? Get the laws changed).
This doesn't mean I'm against pushing for change in the software industry, and moving to OpenSource (where it makes sense) but people have got to accept that it's not right, no matter what your politics, views or anything else are.
Guys (and the few but very welcome gals), before we all start flaming about how hard it is to set up OpenBSD/FreeBSD and a firewall for a newbie, please take a look at the m0n0wall site. m0n0wall is completely self contained and is very easy to set up. It is completely web interface driven and is managed in much the same way as a consumer broadband router is. m0n0wall is, in my humble opinion having used it for a number of years and loveing it, and excellent firewall product and is very capable. If you have not seen it, grab a copy and have a look. Cheers, Tim.