(explaining why Khan recognized Chekov on Ceti Alpha V)
Go back and watch "Space Seed" some time and the answer is the easily plausible: Chekov was on board ship and Khan, including all the other stuff he read, went through the crew manifest. And yea, I know the whole thing is said in jest (like Koenig's suggest that Khan saw Chekov in the lower levels (and was angry Chekov held up the line to the bathroom, IIRC)), but it sort of boils down to not bothering to rewatch "Space Seed" (which also makes one wonder about, well, just about everything in Star Trek II, but that's another story).
Back to on-topic, I think the whole show just sounds really bad. It sounds like it has most of the same flaws Voyager did--trying to be morally ambiguous, often through the very act of flip-flopping on what is exactly the issue to even have moral reservations about* while throwing technology at the problem (while ignoring things like the laws of thermodynamics) of the week because the problem was just an excuse to setup a moral dilemma regardless of how asinine that dilemma is. It's really hard to stomach that, after a while. Oh, that and how "renegade crew" == Maquis which (except for a few random later episodes) went no where because it fundamentally goes against the hierarchical command structure of Starfleet and is therefore outside the scope of consideration in writing, I think. I mean, in the end, Star Trek was founded on the idea that Kirk was the Captain and the Captain was God. That Picard, Sisko, or Janeway should give more leeway to a select few or not bitchslap someone down right away doesn't equate the anarchy of a true, renegade crew. Yea, yea, sorry for rambling.
*Prime directive means no interference...except to save the Ocampa but it's okay to ignore the local laws..sometimes..maybe..or not ever because they remind us of us. *sigh* Yea, the sliding scale of episodic moral relativism.
The notion was that traits like glyphosate resistance bear a certain cost which would be why they haven't arisen naturally and been preserved.
Yes, glyphosate resistance bears a certain cost. But what causes a gene to be preserved generally are (a) that cost not having significant enough impact to not be selected against and/or (b) there being enough regular pressure to retain that gene to be selected for. The major reason, presumably, for the lack of a widespread naturally occurring resistance to glyphosate probably has a lot more to do with (b), such that the few plants that by random mutation obtained that resistance would have no particular advantage and statistically die off (which also implies the trait has likely evolved numerous times in the past). I don't think (a) really even enters much into it given just how much crap DNA produces all the time.
This can be seen in antibiotic resistance in bacteria, though even there it takes many, many generations for this to sort itself out.
Or cross-breeding/gene transfer can make it go much faster.
So, if genes cross into wild plants, the idea was that they'd cause the "contaminated" wild plants to be losers, which would self-limit the propagation of such genes in the wild.
That's just wishful thinking, actually. The largest way I could see there being a disadvantage would seem most likely to be the transgenic method of incorporating that gene being something like a retrovirus and that action incorporating enough retrovirus DNA to cause the plants to be more prone to cancers. But given the life span of the plants in question, I don't think even that would be much of a selective pressure.
Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be the case: the genes that cause glyphosate resistance are actually a win-win for the plants receiving them, meaning that they'll have a competitive advantage even without glyphosate artificially putting selection pressure on them, which means the genes will actively spread in wild plants due to natural selection.
Yea, well, it'd seem bloody obvious that the should have done actual testing. If they had, they wouldn't have done simple hand waving upon a presumption of costs involved. Of course, it's always possible that the issue has to do with wild rice in particular or a specific subspecies/batch of wild rice, of which the latter might make it very difficult to test. Regardless, cross-breeding should have been reason enough to deeply consider whether it was worth it to grant domesticated plants herbicide resistance; it can almost be presumed that given enough time wild plants would eventually evolve resistance as well, but that tends to take decades (based on the scale of many, many generations).
The quote: 'How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?' sounds like Manning took the prosecution's argument and rephrased it in the first person. It sounds improbable with respect to sincerity.
What US President/Congress wants, US President/Congress gets, damn whether it's good for the US people, legal, or for the better for anyone. The only way to effect change is to become a US President. The trick, then, is figuring out how to become elected when so many people support policy that's not good for the US people, is illegal, and hurts nearly everyone. The system is rigged, of course. But it's not so rigged to explain how we are where we are now. There's a pervasive complicity and apathy in the US people. And it's unlikely a junior analyst could change the world or the US people.
I'd say his statement is of sincere bitterness precisely because he has watched how the situation has unfolded--he's yet to be pardoned, for one thing. And if he's caught wind at all of the whole NSA thing and how we're reacting to it... Really, how would you feel?
Clearly, the joke is on them. Why? Because virtual keyboards on touch screens outright suck to a degree even higher than really bad laptop keyboards. But, if MS *had* actually put in the effort to do a really decent port of MS Office for Android and iOS and their Surface RT/Pro, I have little doubt that the ones with a keyboard would win hands down.
Now, I guess they could fear that people would just attach keyboards to their Android/iOS phone/tablet and the reviewers would show it's the cheaper route. But, honestly, if the iPad can sell at a premium for the value-added consistency or whatever, I'm certain a decently powered Surface Pro with a decent screen and a decent keyboard as a guarantee would sell as well. Of course, once that happened, I could actually see a port of Apps to the Surface Pro.
Which further goes to show how the Surface RT is a joke and how MS has forgotten its own history. Oh, and it also shows that pushing a Metro UI was just a bad idea because it should have been used just like the DX library to extend what could be done in Windows instead of trying to supplant Window as some sort of synergistic strategy to own the Arm phone/tablet market. But, when all you have is a [monopoly] hammer...
Recommend switching away from windows, a few will do so and a lot more will just not bother - and so the pool of people using Tor (and other encryption privacy "enhancing" services) shrinks just a little bit more.
Which is probably a good thing given the horrible consequences people can suffer in places like China--land of the not-quite-as-high-prison-count-because-of-summary-executions.
If the whistleblower Snowden revelations have taught us nothing else, it is that if you are one of the few that use encryption/VPN/privacy enhancing solutions then you attract extra unwanted attention to yourself. For everyone to enjoy privacy, security professionals need to be coding solutions and encouraging more people, including Windows users, to adopt always on default encryption - not the opposite.
All the encryption in the world is useless if every message you send includes the decryption. All the anonymizing web browsing software in the world is (potentially) useless if the web browser hands over your IP, MAC, and/or geolocation. The simple fact is that while this exploit specifically targetted Windows and other OS users could have been made just as vulnerable, Windows itself is inherently unverifable--except by the very governments which Tor tries to protect against and some universities which are too limited in scope to deal with all potential threats (consider Wikipedia vs the various attempts to make an Expert-only wiki encyclopedia) and cannot ever be considered safe. And given the potential consequences of using Tor, it's wholly reasonable to recommend to not use Windows. Taken further, I'd say Tor on an openbsd vm image would likely be best as recommendations.
Yet, clearly they're still offering Tor for Windows and still using a bundle with Firefox even though Firefox is/was the main culpurate this time. Because the honest truth is that Tor developers aren't Firefox or Linux or Windows or whatever developers and are beholden to them to fix problems preemptive to actual attacks. But at least with Firefox or Linux (or OpenBSD), if they become aware of an attack vector they could potentially fix it even if such is not their forte.
Are they really that clueless?
Life and death decisions. A non-revocable action that leaves you discovered. A very binary point that lies outside the control of security experts. What would you recommend? What would you provide? Do you recognize the difference?
Oh come on youve got people (even a load of people on this site) that can barely manage without a "start menu" on their computers and you actually think they will have any idea whatsoever what javascript is, that it is different to java and whether or not they should be enabling/disabling it?
No more than I think the average person knows much of anything about most things. But full disclosure increases the odds that the "local expert" in the field actually hears about the security vulnerability and can do something to help those who know no better. You could argue the answer is responsible disclosure to *just* the "local expert[s]", but the "local expert" could also be an expert black hat as well and really there's no way to determine who is or isn't a "local expert" even with some sort of licensing board. Trying to limit the information to just the people who can fix the problem doesn't work because (a) Firefox is open source, (b) too many parties/vendors are involved and may well drag their feet on a fix for years, (c) it doesn't sound like there's necessarily any inherent way to fix the problem, and (d) companies like MS seem on the take of three letter agencies and we have recent history that demonstrates we can't trust those. Finally, your glib remark about 'can barely manage without a "start menu"' rather misses the point of exactly why people here complain about the removal of a functional feature purely for marketing reasons (that is, to try to artificially inflate demand on Metro, which is, btw, the reason the Windows 8.1 "start menu" fix is bogus), which rather undercuts your comment precisely because it comes across as an ad hominem.
I mean, your whole argue sort of devolves into "people are idiots so don't tell them stuff". That's an obviously bogus argument because if such is true, it's irrelevant if you tell people or not--said people who are too stupid to use the information to their own defense are just as probable to be too stupid to use the information as an offense. Hence, there would be no real argument against full disclosure except as a pure personal preference. Meanwhile, I recognize that enough people aren't idiots--they're just specialized in different fields--and full disclosure is the best method of ensuring as many specialists in a field as possible learn of something as soon as possible and are able to disseminate their own help to people that rely upon them.
Having said that, the anti-specialists may try to take advantage in the interim and there's no magic cure for that once the genie is out of the bottle. After all, if three letter government agencies didn't have an official channel into MS or Firefox or whatever, do you think it likely they could keep out a mole? And what of all sorts of other governments or organizations? There may be some luck in that, but too few organizations are structured to reasonable resist those sorts of threats, so it makes more sense, IMNSHO, to minimize the delay on making such threats no longer a secret. Now, how long and for what degree of threat should encourage what sort of delay, I recognize room for debate. But, that's a matter of degree, not of kind.:)
Really? No other options, like, oh, pestering a lot of web site owners to stop using so much damn javascript that sites "need" it?
I tried that a couple of times and I couldn't do any banking, use my brokerage account, use any financial sites, all other content would not show correctly.
Well, there's your problem. What part of sanity is there in using the same session/cache/whatever for banking, your brokerage account, your financial sites, etc and "all other content"? Even if javascript wasn't shown to be exploitable, browsers are such leaky messes (no offense intended to the developers, but it's a pretty honest truth) that as much as using a VM just for your financial stuff sounds extreme, it's not really unreasonable. So, like, keep your financial stuff separate (use Firefox/Chrome for business and the other for everything else), preferably on an encrypted volume and you can keep your javascript on since there won't be anything "worth" stealing (or use three or use private browsing or disable javascript except for those few financial sites and clear the cache before/after and restart the browser before/after using those sites).
Unfortunately, JavaScript has become a necessity for the Web.
No. Fortunately, lots of websites have offered a very convenient filter where I can ask myself, "is it worth it to me to enable javascript to view their content" *before* I potentially get exploited. Because that's basically the situation now.
I can't think of any website that actually worked without it.
You can count Slashdot heavily in that. Technically it works, but it doesn't work well without javascript enabled.
As an aside: Tthis is why full disclosure is so damn important. The sooner the public is told, the sooner they can take action. It's only a few clicks to disable javascript, and now I can leave it off until either (a) the article is shown to be overly reactionary, (b) fixes are introduced, or (c) I decide to otherwise mitigate the risk (selective use manually or through an add-on, disabling parts that make me more vulnerable, etc). For all your talk about how much the web needs javascript, the truth is plenty of people (maybe not you) can actually live well enough without it most or all the time. Of course, I think some people (the GP might be one) just have it in for javascript because (a) it's a bad idea to have a turing complete language running from every website, (b) javascript causes all sorts of messes with web readers, different/limited browsers, and (c) situations like this make there appear to be so much lock-in to javascript that it's more of a pain to deal with. But, I think as reactionary as the GP's comment is (when the author was clearly speaking of fixing Javascript in the context of the vulnerabilities, not of per se fixing the javascript concept), I think your response is on the same scale. The second you see as javascript as a need instead of a useful too, javascript is clearly being used too badly to be accepted as is. That's why I mentioned complaining to website owners because that's where you have to start.
Of course, these two little games aren't nearly enough to sell a system, or completely validate the concept... but it's a start. We need developers to actually utilize this technology to make new, interesting games.
Gamecube/GBA connectivity called. They want their idea back. Nah, seriously, beyond the whole "need [more] developers to actually utilize this technology", the simple fact is that (a) party games aren't the basis to sell a video game system and (b) party games have a very limited scope of sell-ability.
*This holds true for many reasons. You never really "finish" a party game (beyond unlocking all the extras), so there's a limit to how many games in a party game series you can sell or really how many games a person will buy. It's one party game vs 3+ individual game purchases (and trying to sell people on all having to buy their own copy doesn't work--unless it's Pokemon). You can only really have fun if 3+ people are there to play. The game has to be short to maintain interest (actually a big plus, content wise), but that also equates to an expectation of a much lower price. And finally, this is all competing against, oh, board games.:) Yea, there's a lot of concepts that are a lot harder to do on a board game and for which a computer doing most the work is better--*cough*Electronic Monopoly*couch*. But board games are relatively cheap, highly portable, don't require much power (batteries for some), and they tend to offer enough diversity when one's imagination is used. Really, if Hasbro were to, oh, offer half their board game catalog in one disc...oh wait, Family Game Night (beyond the butchered versions of games).
Sorry, but most of what you're saying is the same sort of hand waving that's done every time very long instruction sets are brought up. Sure, in theory they're great at offering superb performance through high pipeline-ability and workflow. But, they virtually always fall flat on their face because static compilers suck at scheduling everything that well . And the dynamic ones (like Transmeta's) are too fiendishly complex to write to ever live up to the hype--beyond a demo of pico-java and x86...yea, nothing very tangible.
I believe he's right but for the wrong reasons. He effectively points out that a tyrannical government could circumvent all sorts of encryption while making people feel safer. He ignores that in such a system with more encryption can not make the situation any worse as far as tyrannical government snooping goes--without encryption they definitely will snoop and with encryption they only may snoop. Yet, the elephant in the room is the premise of the tyrannical government. To that point, the solution is not to accept the tyrannical government and bury oneself deeper in encryption. The solution is to change the tyrannical government. But, then, I'm afraid perhaps he and others believe that's quite impossible short of advocating a civil war which, me included, would rather not see.:(
PS - This goes for anywhere in the world with a tyrannical government, as much as the US's nastiness has been in the news. Wars are almost a very bloody, horrible thing that last much longer than anyone thought when they started and become near unbearable every day longer that they last. Yet, obviously, countries like the US would almost certainly not exist with the Revolutionary [Civil] War.
Again, you seem to be missing the point. It's irrelevant if it's "my" papers" or "your" papers. It's "the people"'s papers. Hence a warrant is necessary, regardless of who actually holds them.
The only other point is what is an "unreasonable" search. But the problem is the courts have repeatedly taken the bottom up approach to justify about everything. That is, even though they know the NSA, police, or whoever are going to commit unreasonable searches enmass to whittle down a suspect list (instead of the other way around, to use a warrant to confirm a suspect), the NSA, police, or whoever will use very individual examples and argue those few, isolated incidents aren't unreasonable and hence a warrant isn't necessary. But that's the same logic that if a sign said, "Free cookies, but take a reasonable amount" and pointing at the free cookies part and how most people only take one or two and then taking 100. Clearly, trying to pin it all as a binary reasonable/unreasonable is just wrong thinking. And to err on the side of "people secure in their..." should just demand a warrant with a possibility of the courts giving the clear after the fact that, if a warrant wasn't used, it would still be admissible evidence. That'd almost entirely pin most law enforcement to get a warrant regardless just because the risk of losing the case would be so great trying to argue on each individual case on why it was justifiable this one time.
A 'business record' whether held by an individual or a corporation (person or otherwise) is a '3rd party' record and as such isn't protected by YOUR 4th Amendment rights. It would be no different if you paid your neighbor to record your movements and they asked them for your data.
Except that makes no sense (not surprisingly). Again, the text of the 4th Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Notice how the wording consistently uses plurals or groups? The idea that by dividing the people effected you can get around the 4th Amendment is about as preposterous as stating that because the 4th Amendment constantly uses plurality that no individual is protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. Clearly that's not how the wording is being used.
Another big canary that's often missed is no part of the 4th Amendment gives exception just because the government otherwise demanded, required, or paid that information be turned over. Ie, the wording of the 4th Amendment seems pretty clear that even *if* by some twisted logic they compelled or bribed your neighbor to hand over your data, they'd *still* need a warrant to search it. The government, after all, is not a person and all those inherent truths--like what you legally possess you can legally search--don't inherently hold true. And the 4th Amendment clearly spells out that if there's a valid reason to do a search, the government can clearly get a warrant to do a search and follow that path. The whole idea that by compelling or paying people/businesses to get around that exception is absurd on the face of it, as clearly the intent of the 4th Amendment was precisely that ordinary, average people should be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". But, then, courts just love illogical loopholes.
The point of notification is to give them an opportunity to fix it. The problem with cars is that 'fixing' it may not be possible, or may be astronomically expensive.
No, the "problem" is that you're making excuses for why a potential security flaw in a car should be any treated any different than, say, a security flaw in a door. In both cases, if the flaw is of the fundamental kind, the manufacturer deserves the egg on their face. And in any case, making it "astronomically expensive" to fix/replace is a sign of bad design and the manufacturer really should bare the cost of it.
Volkswagon wanted them to publish a redacted version of the paper, that explained how they did the hack but not the actual key (codes) they discovered, and they refused. That seems kind of dickish on the researchers parts honestly. It depends on the details of what exactly was to be redacted, so I'll withhold too much judgment, but with things that aren't connected to the internet there's a big problem in trying to actually roll out fixes. Of course there's no point in publishing a paper if you can't say anything about your method used, and if anything interesting about that was redacted it's basically a non starter.
The only way it's "dickish" is that it leaves VW customers in a [now-aware] potentially bad spot. But, then, if there is no means to mitigate the issue (like disabling the whole key fob or whatever the vulnerability is), then really VW should be promptly offering to either recall the effected units or offer some sort of assurance to cover any thefts. And if there are ways to mitigate the issue, VW should be promptly telling its customers about it without trying to gag anyone.
As we embed computers into more things this is going to be a bigger problem going forward. Are we going to need to replace 100 dollar car FOB starters every time there's a security hack? I suppose it might come to that, it's not like physical car locks are all that secure either. But if the hack requires 100 000 dollars in equipment and professional security expert time that puts the barrier to common criminals high.
And why are they 100 dollar car FOB starters? But, yea, I agree that physical car locks don't do much to really stop people--except that a "universal fob" would make it trivial to casually steal a car in broad daylight, although I imagine more experienced crooks can pry a door open and hot wire a car quickly enough to make the difference moot (and serial numbers mean whatever damage is done is also likely moot since they won't be able to simple resell the thing whole anyways). So, in the end, why is VW even bothering to push to quiet the researchers? Right, to protect their "good name".
The researchers main point seems to be that they aren't saying anything that isn't already public just from a different method. In that case sure, I suppose they could have just published and the situation wouldn't be much different. But I'm not sure how true their claim is.
And the other shoe drops. You see, researchers have to show their proof. Otherwise, VW will play the smeared-in-name victim and people, like you, will be undecided on the veracity of the claim. Instead, the truth is that VW's actions now make them look even worse. Downplaying the risk not only in PR but, again, in assurance on covering theft costs would put VW in a better light. Shutting someone up because it make them look bad or because they're afraid it could do a lot of real harm to their brand (and, indirectly cause a lot of thefts of cars) really gives a good perspective on just who VW thinks they are.:/
David Cameron: protecting your children and their innocence* since 2013. Yes, Virginia, there really is a David Cameron. And he's one creepy, mofo. He knows when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He know when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
*May not be protecting your children. Innocence may be robbed by realization government is monitoring their activities through fascist actions through Chinese based censorship firm. "Family-Friendly Filter" may be ironic named alternative to "Communist China-Endorsed Censorship". Freedom void in UK.
"The consequence of the Amash Amendment would be to prevent the collection and analysis of ALL bulk data in America — not just the data of American citizens. This would protect the data of terrorists who are operating sleeper cells in this country and make us vulnerable to future terrorist attacks."
Perhaps Culberson hasn't heard of the 4th Amendment? Or the whole, "NSA's domestic surveillance activities are limited by the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; however, these protections do not apply to non-U.S. persons located outside of U.S. borders, so the NSA's foreign surveillance efforts are subject to far fewer limitations under U.S. law."? It appears Culberson is under the impression that the Constitution doesn't apply to non-citizens on US soil? Last I checked, the Constitution supposedly minimally applies to all people on US soil and US citizens on foreign soil (at least in the scope of where the US Government has any force of law--and why drone attacks on US citizens in other countries during "war" time when arrest is possible is rather questionable). But, going ruther:
"The Amash amendment would do nothing to reform the NSA surveillance program and would do nothing to ensure that the privacy of American citizens is protected."
Let's examine these two claims. On the first, Culberson seems to make it clear that even if the NSA was defunded, they'd *still* continue their surveillance program. If that's true, that's clear malfeasance on the part of the NSA. That's a very serious charge to make, actually. On the second, it sounds like Culberson knows enough about what the NSA collects that even without the whole bulk collection in the US, they'd still be violating the privacy of US citizens--perhaps with intel swapping with other foreign intel in exchange for intel on their own citizens. That directly contradicts the "protect the data of terrorists" claim as clearly the program isn't needed if they'll get the data anyways. Meanwhile, the whole discussion undermines the idea that the Pompeo Amendment would have any effect as, already noted, the NSA would effectively ignore it under malfeasance.
No, I think the truth is closer to the point that defunding the project *would* have an effect and Culberson knows it. Instead of voting for the Amash Amendment *and* the Pompeo Amendment (or some variation of it that included the same nature of privacy protections), he chose the one with no real teeth.
And, just to play devil's advocate, at what age did you start using the internet? Were you already old enough to have some context, or still quite young?
No one alive is old enough to have enough context to truly understand all the weirdness that is the human species. And I doubt many people dead people are old enough either.
The argument seems to hinge on the fact that quite young kids are accessing this, and growing up with a very distorted view of sexuality -- google for "Rainbow Parties" as an example. I believe one of the things often cited is that younger boys don't get the boundaries on what defines rape and consent.
What does "Rainbow Parties" have to do with porn? And at what point in history was it the case that "younger boys *do* get the boundaries on what defines rape and consent" as a universal truth? Really, non-sequitors.
But if 11 year olds are growing up thinking bukkake, gang bangs and fisting are just part of 'normal'(*) sexuality and what's expected from them, they might be somewhat at risk for risky behavior or never learning how to date and hang out.
And if 11 year olds are growing up thinking that they can fly and are invulnerable to bullets, they might be somewhat at risk for risky behavior or never learning how to fly planes or to obey the law. Golly fun stuff when you make wild-ass presumptions on what 11 year olds are growing up to think. Now, do you have anything that remotely hints that, short of isolated incidences--which, btw, are a common fact throughout history--there are *any* 11 year olds that have willfully attempted bukkake, gang bangs, or fisting? The only examples I can think of are unwilful, adult-guided acts or perhaps incidences where an elder family member (not necessarily an adult) is specifically engaged in related acts and doesn't do enough to shield the child (or indirectly encourages them). But, none of that has anything to do with being online or pornography. Oddly enough, children look to *adults they know and trust* for more guidance than anything, so the only way I can see a child even beginning down the path you suggest would be if the parents/guardians/teachers/whoever are so overly repressive about giving out *any* information on "normal" sexuality that the child seeks other council and after exhausting all adults and elder children has to eventually turn to online porn as a guide.
I don't agree that the censorship is a good idea, but I can see how people growing up on the weird stuff you see on the internet can lead to a very messed up outlook and set of expectations about later in life.
Weird stuff like dead bodies from war? Or people starving and dying of illness? Or because some people like being paddled? Again, back to my first point, can you really say anyone doesn't have a very messed up outlook on life for seeing some raw reality? You seem to disagree that censorship is a good idea, but really at some point you have to be exposed to raw reality to deal with it. And isolating yourself from reality while forming a fixed outlook on life seems obviously wrong--you end up being indoctrinated into whatever your elders demand of you. But more the point, the only way to allow that sort of indoctrination is to ban all outside communication. The whole point of filtering the internet then is to create the appearance that you are, in fact, allowing outside communication while simultaneously indoctrinating them a warped view of reality. Meanwhile, if a parent/guardian/whoever was actually there to guide you, you'd know you weren't being given free reign. And if you "stumbled" on a "bad" site, the parent/guardian/whoever could tell you its bad (possibly with a reason why) and quickly direct you away. That's a radically different thing than to hide "bad" sites entirely.
(*) You decide on your own normal, what two or more consenting adults do is the
One of McAfee's clients, the Department of Defense, has used the $1 trillion estimate to argue for an expansion of cybersecurity, including 13 new teams dedicated to cyberwarfare.
Clearly the DoD, when its job would clearly seen to be Defense, should march first towards cyberwarfare. I mean, who cares that the US Government's handling of cybersecurity is a joke? Nah, we need to attack those Chinese hackers now and hard. Because surely we can use highly paid, low in number hackers in the US--but only those that can hold onto a security clearance, not do drugs, and stomach actually working for "the man"--against a population 3x the size and with salaries a fraction of the cost per hacker with clearly a regime more interested in getting things done and looking the other way than simply finding yet another excuse to bloat the departments budget--presumably because that's handle different in China (ie, political and personal maneuvering to get funds with little focus on "reports"--although on second thought, that sounds awfully familiar).
But, then, I guess maybe the DoD is just really stupid? They think they can defend US computers with cyber-soldiers and cyber-tanks? They don't understand that a well constructed computer [fire]wall or access [panel] is basically indestructible (although there's always DDoS attacks)?Nah, it's hard to believe they're that stupid.
So, um, randomize the locations of each number (and not always on a small 4x4 grid) and possibly use captcha-like effects to frustrate OCRing the display? Of course even better might be to do something like MS research suggested, using pictures. But instead of mere pictures, use a whole host of pictures. So, your password could be cat, dog, cat, fish, airplane, or whatever (not unlike some knew captchas). I'd imagine that'd also encourage longer passwords, as every login is a new chance to see even more cute kittens, or whatever.:)
Is Slashdot REALLY the place you think you'll get the best advice on this topic? I expect you're mostly going to hear from people who expect everything available for free.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. The general issue is not recognizing the situation you're asking about. Let me go through the submission to show you what I mean.
"I work for a technical magazine that has been available in print for over 40 years."
"We have a long standing, but still quite a niche, print magazine."
"Moving to providing an alternative subscription available online has been hard;.."
"We've found that the easy-copy, easy-distribute, no-print, and relatively cheap equipment online subscription model isn't working out as we hoped. This is in part because our current subscribers who switch to online expect a vastly cheaper version, ignoring how niche the product is and how much the costs are into the actual production of the content of the magazine. However..."
"... the electronic version is quickly pirated and easily available around the world each month.
", on the bright side we're seeing the easy-copy, easy-distribution of the electronic version in action. Unfortunately, this isn't translating into a lot more subscribers (ie, the people involved have only a passing interest and have little loyalty to pay), so we're not able to downgrade the subscription cost per person as we hoped which is starting to tick-off the print->online subscribers."
"We are a small company, and our survival depends not only on advertising but on the subscription fees."
"So, while we have ads, we're always been heavily dependent on subscription fees on our base readers."
"Do any slashdotters have experience of delivering electronic magazines via a subscription service in a way that is cost effective and secure?""
"We don't think we can get enough revenue from ads to offset the costs--we have little bargaining power with our advertisers even though we can definitively show a multi-fold increase in effective readers. So, um, can we make that whole easy-copy, easy-distribute model we're working on not quite so easy-copy or easy-distribute--at least, not for the priates?"
And then you can answer, "Sure, it's possible to make it harder. But if there's one devote hacker pirate, he'll crack whatever method you use and distribute easy-distribute copies, so you'll still see pretty high piracy rates. You'll probably only delay the time of those pirate releases by a few days or weeks. That may make it worth it to you if (a) few of your current subscribers are so inconvenienced to unsubscribe and (b) it nudges a few of the borderline pirates (who may have previous been a print subscriber) to actually subscribe. But, for (a) you might well piss off your small, niche market by effectively treating them as pirates--as they're the ones who have to suffer under your new scheme. And (b) probably doesn't add up to a lot of added sales, and it's those sales that are paying for the new scheme--anything out of current subscribers is just a loss. So, maybe you should really consider alternatives? Something like (a) posting back issues for free (with ads) like lwn.net, (b) offering a lite version for free (again, with ads), or (c) pushing harder for your ad sponsers to pay more and offer the full version online (with an option subscription model to not see ads). In short, perhaps you're looking for the wrong solution to your problem?"
The point is that slashdotters know pragmatically that the question seems to be searching for an impossible answer. And about every solution will invariably be about trying to get money out of the pirates, even if it's only indirectly through ads, which seems like pandering to the pirates and wanting st
Ok, say you are right. What happens when the next major development in computing is a breakthrough that gives us a practial way around those limits?
Ie, I'm not right.:) Seriously, the next major development in computing as a breakthrough is precisely how we got here. Here is just simply amazing. But I don't think we're anywhere near the sort of development to seeing the equivalent of the whole world's computational power being in one system on one person's desk. Imagine trying to cool the thing.:)
PS - Yea, I can see hints of the "only five computers in the world" in what I say. But, there's clearly a difference in scale being discussed as we're already starting to reach actual physical, quantum limits in the construction of CPUs. So, the ability to shrink in size and power usage would seem to actually start to be bounded.
Except I think you're ignoring thermodynamics. Specifically, while performance has gone up exponentially, processing power/watt hasn't faired nearly as well--that is, it's on a much shallower line. Consider that today, the whole world's computing power combined isn't capable of cracking something like AES-128--a source from 2011 indicates the computational power of the world then at ~6.4*10^18 operations/second or ~2^63 ops/second which, even exceptionally optimistically, would mean ~2^64 (128-1-63) seconds to brute force a key.or ~585 years.
To get that figure down to under a year would require ~10 doublings. That'd take ~18 years, but performance/watt would only have doubled ~6.2 times. So, total power usage would have to go up 16 fold. And of course, that's all insanely optimistic given the truth that (a) most computers aren't replaced every time performance doubles, (b) not all those computers are under control of one organization, (c) even if they were, that'd mean 100% usage (GPUs too) devoted to the one task of cracking *one* key, and (d) actually cracking a key is probably at least two orders of magnitude off from what I'm figuring.
But I think all of what you're saying sort of proves the point. To make a comparison, Microsoft was just like CP/M. Sure, they were the king of their time, but they didn't have the vision or ability to see it through to what PCs would be. Now, part of that obvious was a matter of the technology that was available. But as you state, WinMo "sucked for making actual phone calls". But, that's the primary function *of* a phone, smart or not. It's the same reason PalmOS stumbled, as it too focused first on what it knew (PDAs) and was unwilling to seemingly jump ship and piss off its established base. But, sometimes that's precisely what you've got to do to create a new market, which is exactly what smart phones are. Of course, the best thing to do is to keep supporting both products and try to gracefully push people to the new product line. You'd think with the Win 9x/NT consumer merging, they'd know this simple fact. Of course the other catch is sometimes you have to keep supporting a product of some sort of the original line because it's still popular.:)
People already carry around a lot of data on their phones and, more to the point, they already carry around a device as large as a phone. Current gen SSDs are about that big. It won't be much to get people to either carry around a second, similarly sized device, or for the technology to just adapt to allow your phone to store terabytes.
Well, that should be the cloud, then.:) No, seriously, it'd be pretty useful if your smartphone behaved as a portable HD with auto-syncing software when you're near a trusted computer for when you're not around. The obvious hurdles are issues of bandwidth, setting up the trust network (especially as you'd want to have different revocable keys for different people/groups for different content on your phone), and having a useful enough interface to resolving sync inconsistencies. In any case, you're rather spot on to the point that (relatively) easily transported, local storage beats out remote bandwidth.
Sometimes I hear this criticism, and I don't get it. That's the point of art. If it doesn't have a message, what's the point?
Beauty? Seriously, though, not all art has a deeper meaning. More to the point, art that has a deeper meaning is repugnant is not something I want to, you know, spend money on.
Your objection is that it has a message you disagree with. In that sense, I agree with Card. It is intolerance. And closed-mindedness. If you refuse to listen to any argument against what you believe in, you must believe in a lot of things that aren't true.
You'd have a valid point if the movie were free. But your argument degenerates into the KKK holding a rally and demanding $1 million per person who shows up (except clan members) with the claim that those who don't attend are intolerant. That's simply absurd. No, we all can hear Card's morality for free from critiques. We hear him quite clearly. We even have nice critique[s] of Ender's Game that leave plenty of reason to not bother watching the movie. Your argument would make a lot more sense if you were arguing, of course, that it's intolerant to specifically not shop at a store because the owner was a KKK clan member. To that, I'd tend to more agree.
Now, I'm completely against him on the gay marriage issue (and on most issues, really), but why the hell would I have a problem with him voicing his opinions? That's how we get rid of bad ideas. We listen to the arguments, and we refute them.
Which is precisely what's happening. In the mean time, I personally don't think Ender's Game is worth the money to watch.
The best way of making a point against racism, for example, is letting the KKK talk and make asses of themselves. We only stop them when they move beyond talking.
That doesn't mean we dedicate, for free, 2 solid hours a day to the KKK on TV. It doesn't mean we go out of our way to fund KKK rallies. It means the KKK, if it can manage to find the funds, can hold a rally. That we choose to not give them money is in part because and in part to show how irrelevant they are. You're too much conflating the negative actions upon another's free speech vs the lack of a positive action to support every stupid fucker's ability to spout off beyond to their limited means and people's willingness to search out for their message.
So, I'd have to say in that way it is a show of intolerance towards Orson Scott Card and those like him. Just like people are intolerant of and speak out against heavy metal heads, fornication, etc.
If by "we" you mean insurance companies, it's because the government has setup regulatory limits on just how much they can charge people for health care. To accommodate that, they've put in all sorts of provisions based upon charging up to some percentage more of one group over another. Without any regulations, the health insurance companies would likely charge even higher rates for smokers (as they're a good punching bag to dump higher prices on while giving "healthy" people lower rates). With strict regulations not allowing price differentiation, health insurance would devolve into little more than a flat-rate proxy single payer system, which apparently Congress was unwilling to pass.
I thought smoking was an addiction and we are supposed to offer health care regardless of pre-existing condition?
You're comparing apples and oranges. You cannot be denied because of pre-existing conditions. That doesn't mean you can't be charged more because of said pre-existing conditions. Hence, again, the need for a cap so that health insurance companies can't set arbitrary rates to effective block those people with pre-existing conditions. That people may still be unable to afford health insurance even with those caps, well, that's what what you get when you don't use a progressive, tax-based health care system.
...(A list of examples about insurance companies charging more for "risky" behavior.)...
Having not read through all the rules in AHCAA, I can't speak to specifics. But, it'd stands to reason that (a) yes, insurance companies can charge more for risky behavior and (b) there are caps on just how much more than can charge relative to other similar age/gender/etc.
And how do we enforce this? If we catch you smoking and we cancel your health insurance? Put you in jail?
That's absurd, of course. Yes, if you commit gross abuse of your health insurance, you could be charged with health insurance fraud just like you can now. And if they catch you smoking, they can likely jack up your rates and demand some lump sum to cover your previous fraudulent statements (under a contract you signed to get said insurance) or cancel your policy and leave you to getting the highest possible rates (due to caps) from some other insurance company.
Are the authorities going to stick a OBD-II dongle in your car to make sure you aren't driving too fast?
Why would they? They're not the ones providing the health care. Besides, you're mixing up auto insurance and health insurance, unless you're making some vague claim that in the future health insurance companies will want to charge more for "risky" drivers because some data mining hints there's a correlation between that risky behavior and greater health care costs. Of course, to that end, it's up to you to shop around for a company if you want to avoid that because, you know, no matter how you slice it if there's an inkling of evidence that there's a correlation between the two, heatlh insurance companies (without or without AHCAA) or governments (through social health care) will try to mandate such things and the only thing that could hypothetically save you is (a) finding the one health insurance company who'll just take the extra premium without the dongle, (b) opting out entire of health insurance (and possibly having to pay a fine), or (c) having to rally against government intrusion on your privacy (which at least may get you somewhere, if only after decades of fighting).
Seriously, dude, I just wish I knew what you were ranting against. Just about everything you mention could occur right nor or decades ago. The only major change is the viability of opting out of health insurance. But, honestly, without handing over control of health care to government (which would undoubtedly ex
Slashdot Mirror
Go back and watch "Space Seed" some time and the answer is the easily plausible: Chekov was on board ship and Khan, including all the other stuff he read, went through the crew manifest. And yea, I know the whole thing is said in jest (like Koenig's suggest that Khan saw Chekov in the lower levels (and was angry Chekov held up the line to the bathroom, IIRC)), but it sort of boils down to not bothering to rewatch "Space Seed" (which also makes one wonder about, well, just about everything in Star Trek II, but that's another story).
Back to on-topic, I think the whole show just sounds really bad. It sounds like it has most of the same flaws Voyager did--trying to be morally ambiguous, often through the very act of flip-flopping on what is exactly the issue to even have moral reservations about* while throwing technology at the problem (while ignoring things like the laws of thermodynamics) of the week because the problem was just an excuse to setup a moral dilemma regardless of how asinine that dilemma is. It's really hard to stomach that, after a while. Oh, that and how "renegade crew" == Maquis which (except for a few random later episodes) went no where because it fundamentally goes against the hierarchical command structure of Starfleet and is therefore outside the scope of consideration in writing, I think. I mean, in the end, Star Trek was founded on the idea that Kirk was the Captain and the Captain was God. That Picard, Sisko, or Janeway should give more leeway to a select few or not bitchslap someone down right away doesn't equate the anarchy of a true, renegade crew. Yea, yea, sorry for rambling.
*Prime directive means no interference...except to save the Ocampa but it's okay to ignore the local laws..sometimes..maybe..or not ever because they remind us of us. *sigh* Yea, the sliding scale of episodic moral relativism.
Yes, glyphosate resistance bears a certain cost. But what causes a gene to be preserved generally are (a) that cost not having significant enough impact to not be selected against and/or (b) there being enough regular pressure to retain that gene to be selected for. The major reason, presumably, for the lack of a widespread naturally occurring resistance to glyphosate probably has a lot more to do with (b), such that the few plants that by random mutation obtained that resistance would have no particular advantage and statistically die off (which also implies the trait has likely evolved numerous times in the past). I don't think (a) really even enters much into it given just how much crap DNA produces all the time.
Or cross-breeding/gene transfer can make it go much faster.
That's just wishful thinking, actually. The largest way I could see there being a disadvantage would seem most likely to be the transgenic method of incorporating that gene being something like a retrovirus and that action incorporating enough retrovirus DNA to cause the plants to be more prone to cancers. But given the life span of the plants in question, I don't think even that would be much of a selective pressure.
Yea, well, it'd seem bloody obvious that the should have done actual testing. If they had, they wouldn't have done simple hand waving upon a presumption of costs involved. Of course, it's always possible that the issue has to do with wild rice in particular or a specific subspecies/batch of wild rice, of which the latter might make it very difficult to test. Regardless, cross-breeding should have been reason enough to deeply consider whether it was worth it to grant domesticated plants herbicide resistance; it can almost be presumed that given enough time wild plants would eventually evolve resistance as well, but that tends to take decades (based on the scale of many, many generations).
What US President/Congress wants, US President/Congress gets, damn whether it's good for the US people, legal, or for the better for anyone. The only way to effect change is to become a US President. The trick, then, is figuring out how to become elected when so many people support policy that's not good for the US people, is illegal, and hurts nearly everyone. The system is rigged, of course. But it's not so rigged to explain how we are where we are now. There's a pervasive complicity and apathy in the US people. And it's unlikely a junior analyst could change the world or the US people.
I'd say his statement is of sincere bitterness precisely because he has watched how the situation has unfolded--he's yet to be pardoned, for one thing. And if he's caught wind at all of the whole NSA thing and how we're reacting to it... Really, how would you feel?
Clearly, the joke is on them. Why? Because virtual keyboards on touch screens outright suck to a degree even higher than really bad laptop keyboards. But, if MS *had* actually put in the effort to do a really decent port of MS Office for Android and iOS and their Surface RT/Pro, I have little doubt that the ones with a keyboard would win hands down.
Now, I guess they could fear that people would just attach keyboards to their Android/iOS phone/tablet and the reviewers would show it's the cheaper route. But, honestly, if the iPad can sell at a premium for the value-added consistency or whatever, I'm certain a decently powered Surface Pro with a decent screen and a decent keyboard as a guarantee would sell as well. Of course, once that happened, I could actually see a port of Apps to the Surface Pro.
Which further goes to show how the Surface RT is a joke and how MS has forgotten its own history. Oh, and it also shows that pushing a Metro UI was just a bad idea because it should have been used just like the DX library to extend what could be done in Windows instead of trying to supplant Window as some sort of synergistic strategy to own the Arm phone/tablet market. But, when all you have is a [monopoly] hammer...
Which is probably a good thing given the horrible consequences people can suffer in places like China--land of the not-quite-as-high-prison-count-because-of-summary-executions.
All the encryption in the world is useless if every message you send includes the decryption. All the anonymizing web browsing software in the world is (potentially) useless if the web browser hands over your IP, MAC, and/or geolocation. The simple fact is that while this exploit specifically targetted Windows and other OS users could have been made just as vulnerable, Windows itself is inherently unverifable--except by the very governments which Tor tries to protect against and some universities which are too limited in scope to deal with all potential threats (consider Wikipedia vs the various attempts to make an Expert-only wiki encyclopedia) and cannot ever be considered safe. And given the potential consequences of using Tor, it's wholly reasonable to recommend to not use Windows. Taken further, I'd say Tor on an openbsd vm image would likely be best as recommendations.
Yet, clearly they're still offering Tor for Windows and still using a bundle with Firefox even though Firefox is/was the main culpurate this time. Because the honest truth is that Tor developers aren't Firefox or Linux or Windows or whatever developers and are beholden to them to fix problems preemptive to actual attacks. But at least with Firefox or Linux (or OpenBSD), if they become aware of an attack vector they could potentially fix it even if such is not their forte.
Life and death decisions. A non-revocable action that leaves you discovered. A very binary point that lies outside the control of security experts. What would you recommend? What would you provide? Do you recognize the difference?
No more than I think the average person knows much of anything about most things. But full disclosure increases the odds that the "local expert" in the field actually hears about the security vulnerability and can do something to help those who know no better. You could argue the answer is responsible disclosure to *just* the "local expert[s]", but the "local expert" could also be an expert black hat as well and really there's no way to determine who is or isn't a "local expert" even with some sort of licensing board. Trying to limit the information to just the people who can fix the problem doesn't work because (a) Firefox is open source, (b) too many parties/vendors are involved and may well drag their feet on a fix for years, (c) it doesn't sound like there's necessarily any inherent way to fix the problem, and (d) companies like MS seem on the take of three letter agencies and we have recent history that demonstrates we can't trust those. Finally, your glib remark about 'can barely manage without a "start menu"' rather misses the point of exactly why people here complain about the removal of a functional feature purely for marketing reasons (that is, to try to artificially inflate demand on Metro, which is, btw, the reason the Windows 8.1 "start menu" fix is bogus), which rather undercuts your comment precisely because it comes across as an ad hominem.
I mean, your whole argue sort of devolves into "people are idiots so don't tell them stuff". That's an obviously bogus argument because if such is true, it's irrelevant if you tell people or not--said people who are too stupid to use the information to their own defense are just as probable to be too stupid to use the information as an offense. Hence, there would be no real argument against full disclosure except as a pure personal preference. Meanwhile, I recognize that enough people aren't idiots--they're just specialized in different fields--and full disclosure is the best method of ensuring as many specialists in a field as possible learn of something as soon as possible and are able to disseminate their own help to people that rely upon them.
Having said that, the anti-specialists may try to take advantage in the interim and there's no magic cure for that once the genie is out of the bottle. After all, if three letter government agencies didn't have an official channel into MS or Firefox or whatever, do you think it likely they could keep out a mole? And what of all sorts of other governments or organizations? There may be some luck in that, but too few organizations are structured to reasonable resist those sorts of threats, so it makes more sense, IMNSHO, to minimize the delay on making such threats no longer a secret. Now, how long and for what degree of threat should encourage what sort of delay, I recognize room for debate. But, that's a matter of degree, not of kind. :)
Really? No other options, like, oh, pestering a lot of web site owners to stop using so much damn javascript that sites "need" it?
Well, there's your problem. What part of sanity is there in using the same session/cache/whatever for banking, your brokerage account, your financial sites, etc and "all other content"? Even if javascript wasn't shown to be exploitable, browsers are such leaky messes (no offense intended to the developers, but it's a pretty honest truth) that as much as using a VM just for your financial stuff sounds extreme, it's not really unreasonable. So, like, keep your financial stuff separate (use Firefox/Chrome for business and the other for everything else), preferably on an encrypted volume and you can keep your javascript on since there won't be anything "worth" stealing (or use three or use private browsing or disable javascript except for those few financial sites and clear the cache before/after and restart the browser before/after using those sites).
No. Fortunately, lots of websites have offered a very convenient filter where I can ask myself, "is it worth it to me to enable javascript to view their content" *before* I potentially get exploited. Because that's basically the situation now.
You can count Slashdot heavily in that. Technically it works, but it doesn't work well without javascript enabled.
As an aside: Tthis is why full disclosure is so damn important. The sooner the public is told, the sooner they can take action. It's only a few clicks to disable javascript, and now I can leave it off until either (a) the article is shown to be overly reactionary, (b) fixes are introduced, or (c) I decide to otherwise mitigate the risk (selective use manually or through an add-on, disabling parts that make me more vulnerable, etc). For all your talk about how much the web needs javascript, the truth is plenty of people (maybe not you) can actually live well enough without it most or all the time. Of course, I think some people (the GP might be one) just have it in for javascript because (a) it's a bad idea to have a turing complete language running from every website, (b) javascript causes all sorts of messes with web readers, different/limited browsers, and (c) situations like this make there appear to be so much lock-in to javascript that it's more of a pain to deal with. But, I think as reactionary as the GP's comment is (when the author was clearly speaking of fixing Javascript in the context of the vulnerabilities, not of per se fixing the javascript concept), I think your response is on the same scale. The second you see as javascript as a need instead of a useful too, javascript is clearly being used too badly to be accepted as is. That's why I mentioned complaining to website owners because that's where you have to start.
Gamecube/GBA connectivity called. They want their idea back. Nah, seriously, beyond the whole "need [more] developers to actually utilize this technology", the simple fact is that (a) party games aren't the basis to sell a video game system and (b) party games have a very limited scope of sell-ability.
*This holds true for many reasons. You never really "finish" a party game (beyond unlocking all the extras), so there's a limit to how many games in a party game series you can sell or really how many games a person will buy. It's one party game vs 3+ individual game purchases (and trying to sell people on all having to buy their own copy doesn't work--unless it's Pokemon). You can only really have fun if 3+ people are there to play. The game has to be short to maintain interest (actually a big plus, content wise), but that also equates to an expectation of a much lower price. And finally, this is all competing against, oh, board games. :) Yea, there's a lot of concepts that are a lot harder to do on a board game and for which a computer doing most the work is better--*cough*Electronic Monopoly*couch*. But board games are relatively cheap, highly portable, don't require much power (batteries for some), and they tend to offer enough diversity when one's imagination is used. Really, if Hasbro were to, oh, offer half their board game catalog in one disc...oh wait, Family Game Night (beyond the butchered versions of games).
Sorry, but most of what you're saying is the same sort of hand waving that's done every time very long instruction sets are brought up. Sure, in theory they're great at offering superb performance through high pipeline-ability and workflow. But, they virtually always fall flat on their face because static compilers suck at scheduling everything that well . And the dynamic ones (like Transmeta's) are too fiendishly complex to write to ever live up to the hype--beyond a demo of pico-java and x86...yea, nothing very tangible.
I believe he's right but for the wrong reasons. He effectively points out that a tyrannical government could circumvent all sorts of encryption while making people feel safer. He ignores that in such a system with more encryption can not make the situation any worse as far as tyrannical government snooping goes--without encryption they definitely will snoop and with encryption they only may snoop. Yet, the elephant in the room is the premise of the tyrannical government. To that point, the solution is not to accept the tyrannical government and bury oneself deeper in encryption. The solution is to change the tyrannical government. But, then, I'm afraid perhaps he and others believe that's quite impossible short of advocating a civil war which, me included, would rather not see. :(
PS - This goes for anywhere in the world with a tyrannical government, as much as the US's nastiness has been in the news. Wars are almost a very bloody, horrible thing that last much longer than anyone thought when they started and become near unbearable every day longer that they last. Yet, obviously, countries like the US would almost certainly not exist with the Revolutionary [Civil] War.
Again, you seem to be missing the point. It's irrelevant if it's "my" papers" or "your" papers. It's "the people"'s papers. Hence a warrant is necessary, regardless of who actually holds them.
The only other point is what is an "unreasonable" search. But the problem is the courts have repeatedly taken the bottom up approach to justify about everything. That is, even though they know the NSA, police, or whoever are going to commit unreasonable searches enmass to whittle down a suspect list (instead of the other way around, to use a warrant to confirm a suspect), the NSA, police, or whoever will use very individual examples and argue those few, isolated incidents aren't unreasonable and hence a warrant isn't necessary. But that's the same logic that if a sign said, "Free cookies, but take a reasonable amount" and pointing at the free cookies part and how most people only take one or two and then taking 100. Clearly, trying to pin it all as a binary reasonable/unreasonable is just wrong thinking. And to err on the side of "people secure in their ..." should just demand a warrant with a possibility of the courts giving the clear after the fact that, if a warrant wasn't used, it would still be admissible evidence. That'd almost entirely pin most law enforcement to get a warrant regardless just because the risk of losing the case would be so great trying to argue on each individual case on why it was justifiable this one time.
Except that makes no sense (not surprisingly). Again, the text of the 4th Amendment: "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." Notice how the wording consistently uses plurals or groups? The idea that by dividing the people effected you can get around the 4th Amendment is about as preposterous as stating that because the 4th Amendment constantly uses plurality that no individual is protected from unreasonable searches and seizures. Clearly that's not how the wording is being used.
Another big canary that's often missed is no part of the 4th Amendment gives exception just because the government otherwise demanded, required, or paid that information be turned over. Ie, the wording of the 4th Amendment seems pretty clear that even *if* by some twisted logic they compelled or bribed your neighbor to hand over your data, they'd *still* need a warrant to search it. The government, after all, is not a person and all those inherent truths--like what you legally possess you can legally search--don't inherently hold true. And the 4th Amendment clearly spells out that if there's a valid reason to do a search, the government can clearly get a warrant to do a search and follow that path. The whole idea that by compelling or paying people/businesses to get around that exception is absurd on the face of it, as clearly the intent of the 4th Amendment was precisely that ordinary, average people should be "secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures". But, then, courts just love illogical loopholes.
No, the "problem" is that you're making excuses for why a potential security flaw in a car should be any treated any different than, say, a security flaw in a door. In both cases, if the flaw is of the fundamental kind, the manufacturer deserves the egg on their face. And in any case, making it "astronomically expensive" to fix/replace is a sign of bad design and the manufacturer really should bare the cost of it.
The only way it's "dickish" is that it leaves VW customers in a [now-aware] potentially bad spot. But, then, if there is no means to mitigate the issue (like disabling the whole key fob or whatever the vulnerability is), then really VW should be promptly offering to either recall the effected units or offer some sort of assurance to cover any thefts. And if there are ways to mitigate the issue, VW should be promptly telling its customers about it without trying to gag anyone.
And why are they 100 dollar car FOB starters? But, yea, I agree that physical car locks don't do much to really stop people--except that a "universal fob" would make it trivial to casually steal a car in broad daylight, although I imagine more experienced crooks can pry a door open and hot wire a car quickly enough to make the difference moot (and serial numbers mean whatever damage is done is also likely moot since they won't be able to simple resell the thing whole anyways). So, in the end, why is VW even bothering to push to quiet the researchers? Right, to protect their "good name".
And the other shoe drops. You see, researchers have to show their proof. Otherwise, VW will play the smeared-in-name victim and people, like you, will be undecided on the veracity of the claim. Instead, the truth is that VW's actions now make them look even worse. Downplaying the risk not only in PR but, again, in assurance on covering theft costs would put VW in a better light. Shutting someone up because it make them look bad or because they're afraid it could do a lot of real harm to their brand (and, indirectly cause a lot of thefts of cars) really gives a good perspective on just who VW thinks they are. :/
You better not shout
You better not cry
You better not pout
I'm telling you why
David Cameron is coming to your ISP
David Cameron: protecting your children and their innocence* since 2013. Yes, Virginia, there really is a David Cameron. And he's one creepy, mofo. He knows when you're sleeping. He knows when you're awake. He know when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake.
*May not be protecting your children. Innocence may be robbed by realization government is monitoring their activities through fascist actions through Chinese based censorship firm. "Family-Friendly Filter" may be ironic named alternative to "Communist China-Endorsed Censorship". Freedom void in UK.
Funn this:
Perhaps Culberson hasn't heard of the 4th Amendment? Or the whole, "NSA's domestic surveillance activities are limited by the requirements imposed by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; however, these protections do not apply to non-U.S. persons located outside of U.S. borders, so the NSA's foreign surveillance efforts are subject to far fewer limitations under U.S. law."? It appears Culberson is under the impression that the Constitution doesn't apply to non-citizens on US soil? Last I checked, the Constitution supposedly minimally applies to all people on US soil and US citizens on foreign soil (at least in the scope of where the US Government has any force of law--and why drone attacks on US citizens in other countries during "war" time when arrest is possible is rather questionable). But, going ruther:
Let's examine these two claims. On the first, Culberson seems to make it clear that even if the NSA was defunded, they'd *still* continue their surveillance program. If that's true, that's clear malfeasance on the part of the NSA. That's a very serious charge to make, actually. On the second, it sounds like Culberson knows enough about what the NSA collects that even without the whole bulk collection in the US, they'd still be violating the privacy of US citizens--perhaps with intel swapping with other foreign intel in exchange for intel on their own citizens. That directly contradicts the "protect the data of terrorists" claim as clearly the program isn't needed if they'll get the data anyways. Meanwhile, the whole discussion undermines the idea that the Pompeo Amendment would have any effect as, already noted, the NSA would effectively ignore it under malfeasance.
No, I think the truth is closer to the point that defunding the project *would* have an effect and Culberson knows it. Instead of voting for the Amash Amendment *and* the Pompeo Amendment (or some variation of it that included the same nature of privacy protections), he chose the one with no real teeth.
No one alive is old enough to have enough context to truly understand all the weirdness that is the human species. And I doubt many people dead people are old enough either.
What does "Rainbow Parties" have to do with porn? And at what point in history was it the case that "younger boys *do* get the boundaries on what defines rape and consent" as a universal truth? Really, non-sequitors.
And if 11 year olds are growing up thinking that they can fly and are invulnerable to bullets, they might be somewhat at risk for risky behavior or never learning how to fly planes or to obey the law. Golly fun stuff when you make wild-ass presumptions on what 11 year olds are growing up to think. Now, do you have anything that remotely hints that, short of isolated incidences--which, btw, are a common fact throughout history--there are *any* 11 year olds that have willfully attempted bukkake, gang bangs, or fisting? The only examples I can think of are unwilful, adult-guided acts or perhaps incidences where an elder family member (not necessarily an adult) is specifically engaged in related acts and doesn't do enough to shield the child (or indirectly encourages them). But, none of that has anything to do with being online or pornography. Oddly enough, children look to *adults they know and trust* for more guidance than anything, so the only way I can see a child even beginning down the path you suggest would be if the parents/guardians/teachers/whoever are so overly repressive about giving out *any* information on "normal" sexuality that the child seeks other council and after exhausting all adults and elder children has to eventually turn to online porn as a guide.
Weird stuff like dead bodies from war? Or people starving and dying of illness? Or because some people like being paddled? Again, back to my first point, can you really say anyone doesn't have a very messed up outlook on life for seeing some raw reality? You seem to disagree that censorship is a good idea, but really at some point you have to be exposed to raw reality to deal with it. And isolating yourself from reality while forming a fixed outlook on life seems obviously wrong--you end up being indoctrinated into whatever your elders demand of you. But more the point, the only way to allow that sort of indoctrination is to ban all outside communication. The whole point of filtering the internet then is to create the appearance that you are, in fact, allowing outside communication while simultaneously indoctrinating them a warped view of reality. Meanwhile, if a parent/guardian/whoever was actually there to guide you, you'd know you weren't being given free reign. And if you "stumbled" on a "bad" site, the parent/guardian/whoever could tell you its bad (possibly with a reason why) and quickly direct you away. That's a radically different thing than to hide "bad" sites entirely.
Clearly the DoD, when its job would clearly seen to be Defense, should march first towards cyberwarfare. I mean, who cares that the US Government's handling of cybersecurity is a joke? Nah, we need to attack those Chinese hackers now and hard. Because surely we can use highly paid, low in number hackers in the US--but only those that can hold onto a security clearance, not do drugs, and stomach actually working for "the man"--against a population 3x the size and with salaries a fraction of the cost per hacker with clearly a regime more interested in getting things done and looking the other way than simply finding yet another excuse to bloat the departments budget--presumably because that's handle different in China (ie, political and personal maneuvering to get funds with little focus on "reports"--although on second thought, that sounds awfully familiar).
But, then, I guess maybe the DoD is just really stupid? They think they can defend US computers with cyber-soldiers and cyber-tanks? They don't understand that a well constructed computer [fire]wall or access [panel] is basically indestructible (although there's always DDoS attacks)?Nah, it's hard to believe they're that stupid.
So, um, randomize the locations of each number (and not always on a small 4x4 grid) and possibly use captcha-like effects to frustrate OCRing the display? Of course even better might be to do something like MS research suggested, using pictures. But instead of mere pictures, use a whole host of pictures. So, your password could be cat, dog, cat, fish, airplane, or whatever (not unlike some knew captchas). I'd imagine that'd also encourage longer passwords, as every login is a new chance to see even more cute kittens, or whatever. :)
I don't think that's a fair assessment. The general issue is not recognizing the situation you're asking about. Let me go through the submission to show you what I mean.
"We have a long standing, but still quite a niche, print magazine."
"We've found that the easy-copy, easy-distribute, no-print, and relatively cheap equipment online subscription model isn't working out as we hoped. This is in part because our current subscribers who switch to online expect a vastly cheaper version, ignoring how niche the product is and how much the costs are into the actual production of the content of the magazine. However ..."
", on the bright side we're seeing the easy-copy, easy-distribution of the electronic version in action. Unfortunately, this isn't translating into a lot more subscribers (ie, the people involved have only a passing interest and have little loyalty to pay), so we're not able to downgrade the subscription cost per person as we hoped which is starting to tick-off the print->online subscribers."
"So, while we have ads, we're always been heavily dependent on subscription fees on our base readers."
"We don't think we can get enough revenue from ads to offset the costs--we have little bargaining power with our advertisers even though we can definitively show a multi-fold increase in effective readers. So, um, can we make that whole easy-copy, easy-distribute model we're working on not quite so easy-copy or easy-distribute--at least, not for the priates?"
And then you can answer, "Sure, it's possible to make it harder. But if there's one devote hacker pirate, he'll crack whatever method you use and distribute easy-distribute copies, so you'll still see pretty high piracy rates. You'll probably only delay the time of those pirate releases by a few days or weeks. That may make it worth it to you if (a) few of your current subscribers are so inconvenienced to unsubscribe and (b) it nudges a few of the borderline pirates (who may have previous been a print subscriber) to actually subscribe. But, for (a) you might well piss off your small, niche market by effectively treating them as pirates--as they're the ones who have to suffer under your new scheme. And (b) probably doesn't add up to a lot of added sales, and it's those sales that are paying for the new scheme--anything out of current subscribers is just a loss. So, maybe you should really consider alternatives? Something like (a) posting back issues for free (with ads) like lwn.net, (b) offering a lite version for free (again, with ads), or (c) pushing harder for your ad sponsers to pay more and offer the full version online (with an option subscription model to not see ads). In short, perhaps you're looking for the wrong solution to your problem?"
The point is that slashdotters know pragmatically that the question seems to be searching for an impossible answer. And about every solution will invariably be about trying to get money out of the pirates, even if it's only indirectly through ads, which seems like pandering to the pirates and wanting st
Ie, I'm not right. :) Seriously, the next major development in computing as a breakthrough is precisely how we got here. Here is just simply amazing. But I don't think we're anywhere near the sort of development to seeing the equivalent of the whole world's computational power being in one system on one person's desk. Imagine trying to cool the thing. :)
PS - Yea, I can see hints of the "only five computers in the world" in what I say. But, there's clearly a difference in scale being discussed as we're already starting to reach actual physical, quantum limits in the construction of CPUs. So, the ability to shrink in size and power usage would seem to actually start to be bounded.
Except I think you're ignoring thermodynamics. Specifically, while performance has gone up exponentially, processing power/watt hasn't faired nearly as well--that is, it's on a much shallower line. Consider that today, the whole world's computing power combined isn't capable of cracking something like AES-128--a source from 2011 indicates the computational power of the world then at ~6.4*10^18 operations/second or ~2^63 ops/second which, even exceptionally optimistically, would mean ~2^64 (128-1-63) seconds to brute force a key.or ~585 years.
To get that figure down to under a year would require ~10 doublings. That'd take ~18 years, but performance/watt would only have doubled ~6.2 times. So, total power usage would have to go up 16 fold. And of course, that's all insanely optimistic given the truth that (a) most computers aren't replaced every time performance doubles, (b) not all those computers are under control of one organization, (c) even if they were, that'd mean 100% usage (GPUs too) devoted to the one task of cracking *one* key, and (d) actually cracking a key is probably at least two orders of magnitude off from what I'm figuring.
PS - This is all based on Server Trends and an Arstechnica article on world storage/computation power, so take from it what you will.
But I think all of what you're saying sort of proves the point. To make a comparison, Microsoft was just like CP/M. Sure, they were the king of their time, but they didn't have the vision or ability to see it through to what PCs would be. Now, part of that obvious was a matter of the technology that was available. But as you state, WinMo "sucked for making actual phone calls". But, that's the primary function *of* a phone, smart or not. It's the same reason PalmOS stumbled, as it too focused first on what it knew (PDAs) and was unwilling to seemingly jump ship and piss off its established base. But, sometimes that's precisely what you've got to do to create a new market, which is exactly what smart phones are. Of course, the best thing to do is to keep supporting both products and try to gracefully push people to the new product line. You'd think with the Win 9x/NT consumer merging, they'd know this simple fact. Of course the other catch is sometimes you have to keep supporting a product of some sort of the original line because it's still popular. :)
Well, that should be the cloud, then. :) No, seriously, it'd be pretty useful if your smartphone behaved as a portable HD with auto-syncing software when you're near a trusted computer for when you're not around. The obvious hurdles are issues of bandwidth, setting up the trust network (especially as you'd want to have different revocable keys for different people/groups for different content on your phone), and having a useful enough interface to resolving sync inconsistencies. In any case, you're rather spot on to the point that (relatively) easily transported, local storage beats out remote bandwidth.
Engage in massive, illegal surveillance then hold a secret court to decide their "guilty".
Beauty? Seriously, though, not all art has a deeper meaning. More to the point, art that has a deeper meaning is repugnant is not something I want to, you know, spend money on.
You'd have a valid point if the movie were free. But your argument degenerates into the KKK holding a rally and demanding $1 million per person who shows up (except clan members) with the claim that those who don't attend are intolerant. That's simply absurd. No, we all can hear Card's morality for free from critiques. We hear him quite clearly. We even have nice critique[s] of Ender's Game that leave plenty of reason to not bother watching the movie. Your argument would make a lot more sense if you were arguing, of course, that it's intolerant to specifically not shop at a store because the owner was a KKK clan member. To that, I'd tend to more agree.
Which is precisely what's happening. In the mean time, I personally don't think Ender's Game is worth the money to watch.
That doesn't mean we dedicate, for free, 2 solid hours a day to the KKK on TV. It doesn't mean we go out of our way to fund KKK rallies. It means the KKK, if it can manage to find the funds, can hold a rally. That we choose to not give them money is in part because and in part to show how irrelevant they are. You're too much conflating the negative actions upon another's free speech vs the lack of a positive action to support every stupid fucker's ability to spout off beyond to their limited means and people's willingness to search out for their message.
So, I'd have to say in that way it is a show of intolerance towards Orson Scott Card and those like him. Just like people are intolerant of and speak out against heavy metal heads, fornication, etc.
If by "we" you mean insurance companies, it's because the government has setup regulatory limits on just how much they can charge people for health care. To accommodate that, they've put in all sorts of provisions based upon charging up to some percentage more of one group over another. Without any regulations, the health insurance companies would likely charge even higher rates for smokers (as they're a good punching bag to dump higher prices on while giving "healthy" people lower rates). With strict regulations not allowing price differentiation, health insurance would devolve into little more than a flat-rate proxy single payer system, which apparently Congress was unwilling to pass.
You're comparing apples and oranges. You cannot be denied because of pre-existing conditions. That doesn't mean you can't be charged more because of said pre-existing conditions. Hence, again, the need for a cap so that health insurance companies can't set arbitrary rates to effective block those people with pre-existing conditions. That people may still be unable to afford health insurance even with those caps, well, that's what what you get when you don't use a progressive, tax-based health care system.
Having not read through all the rules in AHCAA, I can't speak to specifics. But, it'd stands to reason that (a) yes, insurance companies can charge more for risky behavior and (b) there are caps on just how much more than can charge relative to other similar age/gender/etc.
That's absurd, of course. Yes, if you commit gross abuse of your health insurance, you could be charged with health insurance fraud just like you can now. And if they catch you smoking, they can likely jack up your rates and demand some lump sum to cover your previous fraudulent statements (under a contract you signed to get said insurance) or cancel your policy and leave you to getting the highest possible rates (due to caps) from some other insurance company.
Why would they? They're not the ones providing the health care. Besides, you're mixing up auto insurance and health insurance, unless you're making some vague claim that in the future health insurance companies will want to charge more for "risky" drivers because some data mining hints there's a correlation between that risky behavior and greater health care costs. Of course, to that end, it's up to you to shop around for a company if you want to avoid that because, you know, no matter how you slice it if there's an inkling of evidence that there's a correlation between the two, heatlh insurance companies (without or without AHCAA) or governments (through social health care) will try to mandate such things and the only thing that could hypothetically save you is (a) finding the one health insurance company who'll just take the extra premium without the dongle, (b) opting out entire of health insurance (and possibly having to pay a fine), or (c) having to rally against government intrusion on your privacy (which at least may get you somewhere, if only after decades of fighting).
Seriously, dude, I just wish I knew what you were ranting against. Just about everything you mention could occur right nor or decades ago. The only major change is the viability of opting out of health insurance. But, honestly, without handing over control of health care to government (which would undoubtedly ex