I for one am hoping this gets pushed back by the Lords.
How often does this happen that the Lords send a law back to Commons?
(No sarcasm intended, I honestly do not know.) Rather less than it used to since Tony Blair replaced most of the Lords with hand-picked cronies and then decided he could use a law which dated from the Second World War to overturn the Lords if they disagreed with him.
but that would leave the BSA people jobless. how crewl and and uncaring is that Doubt it. It's more likely to turn the BSA into a government agency, being funded by the taxpayer rather than by the commercial software companies that currently fund it.
How about this. You force people to walk more, and you solve two problems at the same time:) Depending on where you are in the US, this may require significant building work.
"Significant" meaning "Redesign lots of towns more or less from the ground up".
So its not all bad... Granted, but TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse aren't exactly renowned for being the easiest ISP to deal with.
So you either wind up with an account with an ISP where you get to speak to tech support marginally (OK, only marginally) more helpful than a potplant with a service which tends to stay up - but they reserve the right to disconnect you on the say so of some little shit in the BPI - or you have an account with an ISP which is almost impossible to work with but they won't disconnect you just because the BPI says they should.
Now I understand why I always enjoyed programming and computing but didn't like maths. Programming still expects you to think of the solution to a problem yourself rather than just apply a bunch of rules in order.
For example: there's an expensive, commercial ARM compiler despite the existence of GCC. People buy it because it generates code that's ~20% smaller and faster. Generating code that's 20% smaller and faster has real value when more or less all modern ARM development is embedded - so 20% smaller is a real bonus.
Such a benefit is rather less noticeable on a modern PC.
Now who exactly are they expecting to exclude based on that question? If you have or are planning to do any of those, are you honestly going answer truthfully? Maybe it catches really dumb terrorists?
They're not expecting to catch anyone. The idea is that you make lying on the form an offence, and that way you can keep anyone you don't like out simply by asking "Are you one of these (insert list of potentially offensive) people?" without having to pass specific legislation.
The person says "Yes", you deny their visa indefinitely for no apparent reason. Person says "No" and is later found out to have lied, deport first and ask questions later.
After all, not one of the 9/11 hijackers had validly issued ID in their own names. Right?
Yeah. Maybe the next president will do something to fix the utterly idiotic "security" games the TSA insists on playing with airline travel. I'm not putting money on it, though. You've got to remember that the government is full of politicians who, corporate "donations" aside, would be out of a job tomorrow if they seemed to be ignoring issues that matter.
I strongly doubt the US public would have considered "Let's hold talks with the Arab world to find out what their problems are and try and reach a mutually agreeable solution" an appropriate reaction to 9/11.
It's not like Cletus the Rent-a-Cop is going to scrutinize every little detail, call three different unrelated people to check references, and actually care. For IDs issued in the US, at least, Cletus will scan the ID into a computer which may or may not have the facility to check that the ID isn't listed as being stolen and that an ID with that particular number was issued and who it was issued to.
"Computer says no" : "I'm sorry Sir, I'm going to have to detain you". "Computer says yes" : "Have a nice day, sir".
That, I believe, is the ultimate plan, regardless of how practical it would be today.
I've always wondered about why people don't seem to get that fake IDs can be used for more than just getting into bars. Bars are unlikely to have the resources to check the veracity of the ID that's presented.
The safest form of fake ID in an airport would be a genuine one which was issued to someone else.
That's if you want the iPhone as a phone. But the iPhone without a contract is the same as a Touch, but a hundred bucks less. Unless Apple is imposing a restriction that you can't buy the new iPhone without signing up for a contract. The $100 less probably comes from the network subsidising the phone. (What, you thought those "free phones" you saw advertised were free to manufacture?)
And if the network is subsidising the phone, there's no way you're walking out the store without the contract set up and the phone registered to it.
iPhone + jailbreak = iPod touch with GPS at $100 discount. Except that in order to offer the subsidy, they'll register the phone (thus nailing you to the contract) before you walk out the store with it.
Well, that's one way to increase broadband access. Drive everyone to lease their own T1s instead of putting up with this kind of crap. You haven't looked at the price of a leased line in the UK recently, have you?
(Hint: You can take the price of a residential broadband connection and multiply it by at least 10, probably 20 or 30).
Branson has sold and re-sold the Virgin identity many times. Just because a company is called Virgin and uses the distinctive logo, you shouldn't assume it's got anything to do with anything else in the group.
(You've got to admire that approach to democracy out of sheer morbid fascination, really, haven't you. It amounts to "You're not doing anything illegal, but if you don't stop doing it we'll make it illegal!")
Virgin Media haven't really got any choice here, and I think we'll see similar announcements regarding other ISPs within the next 6-12 months.
It's true that a person can't back to normal life after 25 years of prison time, but what do you purpose we do with murderers? When is a killer ready to go back to streets? Which is all well and good, but statistics suggest that most murders (Note: Not all. There is a proportion of the criminal world who have no problem with adding "murder" to their CV) are:
- One-off crimes committed in moments of madness OR
- Premeditated by someone who's got a history of being the victim of violent abuse, generally going right back to childhood.
Now, do these people need to be taken off the street for 25 years or do they need help? Or both?
The whole trial sounds like bullshit. No body, little blotches of blood that can't be accurately dated, no murder weapon, the victim's boyfriend admits to killing several other people but not her, and was once friend's with the accused.
It's like they're making a fake murder case.
I'm almost convinced that they are. The man who killed several people made that claim but neglected to check one minor detail. Specifically, he forgot to ensure that the people he claimed to have murdered were actually dead.
And regarding the lack of a body - that hasn't been needed for a conviction for many years, simply because there are so many ways to dispose of a body such that there is no way anyone on Earth will ever find it again.
Looking at the facts, Reiser's estranged wife disappeared off the face of the earth without even attempting to contact her own children, and shortly afterwards he's found to have removed a seat from his car, hosed down the inside and taken a book called "How to get away with murder" out of the local library. He'd have needed a pretty good alibi to shoehorn reasonable doubt into those facts.
It sounds like they're in discussions about it. Presumably the DA wouldn't leak something about a deal of that nature unless he's really bad at his job. I would think that kind of publicity from the DA could earn him some censure, at he very least. But there's no hint as to what direction those discussions are taking. Right now, for all we know the discussions are along the lines of:
Prosecutor: Come on, you've been found guilty. Your only hope of improving your situation even slightly is to admit you did it and tell us where the body is. Reiser: Didn't do it. (lather, rinse and repeat)
The solution is to replace credit cards with smart cards that use public-key cryptography. That means that your credit card contains a number which you can use to sign transactions and prove that you are authorized to make payments, but you don't have to give every employee of every merchant you buy from the power to impersonate you........ Fixing this mess will cost the banks a lot of money, but they made this mess and it's their responsibility to clean it up. Stop right there. You're taking the classic/. argument which says "It is technically possible to solve this problem, therefore the solution must be implemented".
Thing is, it's been technically possible to solve this problem for years. Go back in time 50 years or so (when people actually had to go into their bank to do anything) and they could have solved it simply by taking fingerprints and keeping someone onsite who was an expert in fingerprint analysis.
The reason that these technical solutions are seldom adopted is because the banks are in business, and the first rule of any business decision is to ask yourself "what is the benefit to the business?".
So (taking numbers out of thin air), if it costs $100 million for a bank to implement a PKI-based smartcard system but this system will only save them from $5 million worth of fraud, then it's not going to happen.
In your particular example, all you're doing is eliminating credit card fraud. Well, all the banks in the UK introduced chips on the cards a couple of years ago and you now need your PIN to authorise a card transaction. Hasn't eliminated fraud at all, it's just made the criminals more sophisticated.
I would also add that if laws/regs forced the onus of losses on the financial institutions themselves (rather than allowing them to write losses off as a cost of business), said firms would rapidly implement better security mechanisms. Such losses tend to be borne ultimately by the customers rather than the institution. The only way to negate that is to enforce fines so large that passing them onto the customer would actually wind up more expensive in terms of lost custom than simply obeying the law.
1. The terrorists are idiots and can't do this kind of attack because they lack knowledge.
2. There are no terrorists willing to hijack planes and kill civilians in modern countries just for the fun of it. Considering that in the UK we've had a bunch of failed attacks like this:
Neither of which have caused any significant damage (and the second one was never particularly likely to cause damage, seeing as even if they'd tampered with the safety valves the cylinders they were carrying were big objects which would have taken some time to warm up to anything approaching a dangerous temperature, and airports have an onsite fire control team).
I'd say it's probably a bit of both. Anyone who's smart enough to blow up a plane is probably smart enough to find a solution to whatever problems they think they face without blowing up a large number of people.
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I for one am hoping this gets pushed back by the Lords.
How often does this happen that the Lords send a law back to Commons?(No sarcasm intended, I honestly do not know.) Rather less than it used to since Tony Blair replaced most of the Lords with hand-picked cronies and then decided he could use a law which dated from the Second World War to overturn the Lords if they disagreed with him.
I don't even backup to the same country!
how crewl and and uncaring is that Doubt it. It's more likely to turn the BSA into a government agency, being funded by the taxpayer rather than by the commercial software companies that currently fund it.
"Significant" meaning "Redesign lots of towns more or less from the ground up".
So its not all bad... Granted, but TalkTalk/Carphone Warehouse aren't exactly renowned for being the easiest ISP to deal with.
So you either wind up with an account with an ISP where you get to speak to tech support marginally (OK, only marginally) more helpful than a potplant with a service which tends to stay up - but they reserve the right to disconnect you on the say so of some little shit in the BPI - or you have an account with an ISP which is almost impossible to work with but they won't disconnect you just because the BPI says they should.
What a lovely choice.
http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf Beautiful. Thank you.
Now I understand why I always enjoyed programming and computing but didn't like maths. Programming still expects you to think of the solution to a problem yourself rather than just apply a bunch of rules in order.
Such a benefit is rather less noticeable on a modern PC.
Now who exactly are they expecting to exclude based on that question? If you have or are planning to do any of those, are you honestly going answer truthfully? Maybe it catches really dumb terrorists?
They're not expecting to catch anyone. The idea is that you make lying on the form an offence, and that way you can keep anyone you don't like out simply by asking "Are you one of these (insert list of potentially offensive) people?" without having to pass specific legislation.The person says "Yes", you deny their visa indefinitely for no apparent reason. Person says "No" and is later found out to have lied, deport first and ask questions later.
Yeah. Maybe the next president will do something to fix the utterly idiotic "security" games the TSA insists on playing with airline travel. I'm not putting money on it, though. You've got to remember that the government is full of politicians who, corporate "donations" aside, would be out of a job tomorrow if they seemed to be ignoring issues that matter.
I strongly doubt the US public would have considered "Let's hold talks with the Arab world to find out what their problems are and try and reach a mutually agreeable solution" an appropriate reaction to 9/11.
"Computer says no" : "I'm sorry Sir, I'm going to have to detain you".
"Computer says yes" : "Have a nice day, sir".
That, I believe, is the ultimate plan, regardless of how practical it would be today.
The safest form of fake ID in an airport would be a genuine one which was issued to someone else.
This is Ikea we're talking about. Nothing will make one of their products indestructable.Fantastic!
And if the network is subsidising the phone, there's no way you're walking out the store without the contract set up and the phone registered to it.
(Hint: You can take the price of a residential broadband connection and multiply it by at least 10, probably 20 or 30).
Branson has sold and re-sold the Virgin identity many times. Just because a company is called Virgin and uses the distinctive logo, you shouldn't assume it's got anything to do with anything else in the group.
The UK government has already said to ISPs "Stop your users downloading illegally or we'll pass legislation forcing you to":
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/communications/0,1000000085,39290371,00.htm
http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2008/02/25/uk-isp%E2%80%99s-must-stop-illegal-downloads/
(You've got to admire that approach to democracy out of sheer morbid fascination, really, haven't you. It amounts to "You're not doing anything illegal, but if you don't stop doing it we'll make it illegal!")
Virgin Media haven't really got any choice here, and I think we'll see similar announcements regarding other ISPs within the next 6-12 months.
- One-off crimes committed in moments of madness
OR
- Premeditated by someone who's got a history of being the victim of violent abuse, generally going right back to childhood.
Now, do these people need to be taken off the street for 25 years or do they need help? Or both?
It's like they're making a fake murder case.
I'm almost convinced that they are. The man who killed several people made that claim but neglected to check one minor detail. Specifically, he forgot to ensure that the people he claimed to have murdered were actually dead.
And regarding the lack of a body - that hasn't been needed for a conviction for many years, simply because there are so many ways to dispose of a body such that there is no way anyone on Earth will ever find it again.
Looking at the facts, Reiser's estranged wife disappeared off the face of the earth without even attempting to contact her own children, and shortly afterwards he's found to have removed a seat from his car, hosed down the inside and taken a book called "How to get away with murder" out of the local library. He'd have needed a pretty good alibi to shoehorn reasonable doubt into those facts.
Prosecutor: Come on, you've been found guilty. Your only hope of improving your situation even slightly is to admit you did it and tell us where the body is.
Reiser: Didn't do it.
(lather, rinse and repeat)
Fixing this mess will cost the banks a lot of money, but they made this mess and it's their responsibility to clean it up. Stop right there. You're taking the classic
Thing is, it's been technically possible to solve this problem for years. Go back in time 50 years or so (when people actually had to go into their bank to do anything) and they could have solved it simply by taking fingerprints and keeping someone onsite who was an expert in fingerprint analysis.
The reason that these technical solutions are seldom adopted is because the banks are in business, and the first rule of any business decision is to ask yourself "what is the benefit to the business?".
So (taking numbers out of thin air), if it costs $100 million for a bank to implement a PKI-based smartcard system but this system will only save them from $5 million worth of fraud, then it's not going to happen.
In your particular example, all you're doing is eliminating credit card fraud. Well, all the banks in the UK introduced chips on the cards a couple of years ago and you now need your PIN to authorise a card transaction. Hasn't eliminated fraud at all, it's just made the criminals more sophisticated.
2. There are no terrorists willing to hijack planes and kill civilians in modern countries just for the fun of it. Considering that in the UK we've had a bunch of failed attacks like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_bombings
And this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Glasgow_International_Airport_attack
Neither of which have caused any significant damage (and the second one was never particularly likely to cause damage, seeing as even if they'd tampered with the safety valves the cylinders they were carrying were big objects which would have taken some time to warm up to anything approaching a dangerous temperature, and airports have an onsite fire control team).
I'd say it's probably a bit of both. Anyone who's smart enough to blow up a plane is probably smart enough to find a solution to whatever problems they think they face without blowing up a large number of people.