The Government has no, zero, nada right to conduct surveillance of me!
I'm calling "Bullshit" here. Nationally, you (we) have elected legislators, executors, and they have appointed judges who have crafted, enforced, and interpeted laws. All such laws allow "surveillance" of you in some fashion.
Dont' think "Patriot Act"--think of traffic laws with radar, laser, and breathalizers.
Or think of another basic example: You're robbing a bank. Say there's a police officer present. He sees/hears (surveys) your behavior and arrests you.
And did the government survey how much you earned again last month? Me too.
Before you accuse me of missing the point, taking words out of context, or any other nonsense, let me point out your phrase "no, zero, nada..." You scoped the discussion, not me.
Surveillance is not just wiretapping, packet-sniffing, home/auto searching and the like. It's information gathering, and you--as all of us--do much that is relatively visible in some way.
Finally, don't file me under "apologist" either. I'm as worried as the next guy that the Pat. Act is too invasive--and I'm all for voting for folks who value personal freedoms.
without a hell of a lot of packet sniffing how do you tell that the traffic is VoIP at all.
Call data records generated by the call controllers/softswitches. Just because you don't necessarily bill per minute doesn't mean you don't track (log) usage of your network.
On the other hand, taxing it at the VoIP - PSTN gateway end (bear in mind most current and short-term-future VoIP use will ultimately need to break out onto a PSTN network eventually) would probably be easier to implemnet
Why? One, that would not track all your VoIP (as you point out); two, you seem to trust PSTN CDRs more than IP CDRs. Again, why? Any record can be altered by dishonest carriers...
Okay. Here's the deal: No one is trying to tax your UT, or your *meeting calls. At least not yet.
Currently, "VoIP" in the government's eyes is carrier-class packet telephony implemented to replace PSTN services for consumers and business. There are companies out there, like mine, who are gaining traction delivering this type of service. Multisite companies love not paying LD charges between LATAs/states...
This really means PSTN-quality audio, without the regulated tarriffs, origination fees, and termination fees.
Which makes the telco lobby jumpy--and what makes powerful industry lobbies jumpy eventually makes congress jump.
Banks are private (apart from FDIC insurance) entities with a vested interest in accurate bookkeeping. They will lose customers or get sued into the Stoneage if money is blatantly lost or mishandled. There is also strict, verifiable and specific identification of customers and accounts.
On the otherhand, elections are public, with anonymity and accuracy being in the public interest. However, as others have also posted, this anonymity and accuracy is not always in the candidate's interest. Voter identification faciliates voter intimidation and skewing results in an large electoral college state can alter a large election.
And if a privately-owned company, with a history making campaign contributions backing a single ideology/party/candidate, is the company contracted to develop your "secure" voting application, will you be confident of a fair count?
"Developer Friendly" is a very limited definition of better. What about stability, security, ease-of-use, performance, functionality, networkability, efficiency, and...ad nauseum?
And while "business info systems" are obviously a key software class, let's not forget that during the exact era you're referring to the most popular WYSIWYG word processing (MS Word), graphics processing (Adobe PS/Ill/Premiere), page design (Aldus/Quark), and even spreadsheets/databases (MS Excel/FMP/Great Plains) were all either Mac-centric or fully Mac-compatible.
Still to this day, developers can whip out business info systems for Windows faster than on Linux, Mac, etc.
Nope. You can get source and/or full API info for Mac OS X and *nix variants. The difference is not ease of development, it's in the amount of developer resources (headcount) applied. And that's a direct function of the breadth of the deployed base, nothing more.
Your sculptures and mine would fetch different prices based on quality of 'art'.
Is that a compliment, or an insult?:^)
I understand where you're coming from but...
Art, as any product, is priced by market demand, not by quality; Linux and Windows is a good example, no?
That quality and demand frequently coincide is not surprising, but not at all manditory. An artist who demands a premium price for his/her work does so on the popularity of the work, which to some degree implies a higher quality--or not, in the case of Ms. Spears.
If a CD is popular, it may stay at full price longer than one that isn't selling
Exactly. Market demand drives markets, of which recorded music is one.
the music industry is definately not selling music as 'art' but as a standard 'product'.
This is different than any other art how? The galleries where I live don't give paintings and sculpture away. I still pay for movies, plays, musicals, poetry, fiction and any other art consume. Also, I would bet the musicians would disagree with your evaluation.
Hm. I don't remember an RIAA gun to my head when I bought my first CD player. Or the next dozen since then...And I'm not at all sure what became of all my old tapes.
With CDs, people were, and are, more than willing to trade money for improved performance over cassettes and vinyl. DVDs are another great example of this. But that's not always the case; look at Betamax vs. VHS or the sluggish adoption of SACD/DVD-A.
I did mention "market demand", right? It has a much larger effect on product pricing than artistic merit and delivery medium have. Yes, I know the argument for P2P sharing is that it is a great pricing protest, but that's moot. Enough consumers still buy CDs at current prices that the recording industry makes more money by selling to them while suing the P2P crowd, so the protest value is nil.
And note the (slight) incremental decrease in CD pricing recently--a clear market demand response.
since not enough people are dumb enough to pay full (inflated) prices for the material
And can someone explain to me why recorded music is valued by the medium it's delivered on and not on its artistic merit or market demand?
I haven't heard the argument that book prices are "inflated", because ink and paper are cheap technology. How many folks are OCR'ing a $25 hardcover of the latest King novel and throwing a text file up on P2P?
Is a Monet only worth the paint and canvas? If so, I wonder why museums have so much security?
What was the $45 I just spent on a live concert for? I mean, sound waves are free--aren't they?
You don't know. But it's not really your network is it?
You just use it, so you can not now, nor could you ever, 100% vouch for the integrity of any data you access, or provide, via that network.
"Man-in-the-middle" is not a new networking concept; perhaps this system will help the surfing public understand what MitM is and how visible they are on the internet. I really doubt it though.
I'm not acquiesing on my argument (which contained synonyms, not analogies), BUT for the record:
I apologize for my "don't be dense" comment. I was immature and rude. It turns out that our little debate on this topic is not unique:^) See: unique and read the usage notes, if you're interested.
Since more practiced writers than me are arguing about it, I'm just going to lay down my saber here.
'...immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'
She's right--if she's discussing her website. I'm sure "The Onion" editorial staff would say something similar, if asked. On the other hand, I would hope to hear differently from cnn.com and nyt.com staff.
Don't be dense. How's that for concise and unambigous?
In this context "unique" is synonymous with "different." While "different" is also a distinct boolean property, no one seems to mind measuring the degree to which things are different. For example, "the difference between 3 and 5 is 2; the difference between 1 and 2 is 1," are very concise and unambiguous statements that measure difference.
Sometimes it's useful to avoid complete precision or to estimate difference, such as the statement, "PI and 3.1415 are somewhat different." No one knows exactly how different they are, but we know they're not as different as PI and 3.0000.
Let's switch the discussion to "sets" and talk about degrees of unique. A Venn diagram with two sets sharing no common elements can be drawn by two non-intersecting circles. Another Venn diagram with two sets that share all but one element can be drawn several ways--concentric circles of almost the same diameter, or two almost entirely intersecting circles just a hair offset from each other. (Note the phrases "almost the same" and "a hair offset" both describe relative degrees of difference. Sorry for my "lazy" use of language.)
Now, are the sets in the second diagram unique? Of course. But are they as unique as the first sets? Of course not. One pair of sets has almost all common elements, while the other has no common elements.
Using your limited understanding of language, there would be no linguistic method for expressing relativity between entities. The English language has *always* relied on modifiers of absolutes to describe degrees of difference. It's not bastardization or destruction, it's normal communication.
"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology. We have the capability to make the worlds first Bionic Man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster."
I second this. When I admin'ed in a windows/mac lab during college, rebooting every morning with a clean disk image was the only sanity there was on that job.
We were very explicit with users about the "no parking overnight" file saving rules, and they were mostly fine with it. At our most generous, we provided a heavily quarantined/policed "lost+found" directory near the end of my time there.
I disagree. For example, the inability of some to understand how one can creatively use a literally defined word in a less literally defined phrase is "somewhat unique" to digital-thinking geeks.
Shouldn't the end user decide how much to charge per hour of CPU time. What I would do is price the use of my CPU so high that the cost of doing business for the spammer would be detrimental to his operation, effectively shutting him down.
Um, in your world, what happens when the spammer just says, "No." then looks down the row to the next greedy dipwad and yells, "NEXT!"
consider that 99% of security problems would be evaporated in one swift move
And new ones would pop up. Changing OS's to one that's (currently) not under every blackhat's electron microscope is a nice, impractical temporary fix.
As much as I *love* my Mac's (I have two), and as secure as the default install is, I must swing the reality stick here.
Much of Mac OS X's advantage is obscurity. And "security through obscurity" won't last if one OS is the defacto monopoly in the world.
The problem is not end users. The problem is not the people writing the virii. The problem is so easy to see and so vanilla that most people have such a hard time seeing something so simple.
Windows is shit.
This is so wrongheaded--Not windows eval, but the rest.
Yes, OS X is a great, infinitely more secure, OS. Yes, Linux is cool too.
And YES, the problem is too End Users, and Operators, and Developers, and Blackhats, and well...Us.
Windows sucks, and it deserves criticism for its security implementation, if such a thing exists, anyway. BUT, this "root of all computing evil" mentality is simpleminded tripe.
ALL software has bugs, and some software has "features" that deter security policies. There is no immune OS. An unpatched, poorly admin'ed Linux box is as exploitable as any Windows machine.
Just ask me. I set up my first Linux hobby box several years ago, using zero Linux clue, and it got owned in a day. (I took it down, developed clue, and redeployed successfully soon after, but I digress..)
End users with passwords on monitors/under keyboards, operators who telnet to infrastructure over sniffable networks, developers who ignore security, CEOs who don't invest in security hardware/software/training, and virus writers ALL deserve a slice of the blame pie.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this title evoke Douglas Adams memory for anyone else?
The Government has no, zero, nada right to conduct surveillance of me!
I'm calling "Bullshit" here. Nationally, you (we) have elected legislators, executors, and they have appointed judges who have crafted, enforced, and interpeted laws. All such laws allow "surveillance" of you in some fashion.
Dont' think "Patriot Act"--think of traffic laws with radar, laser, and breathalizers.
Or think of another basic example: You're robbing a bank. Say there's a police officer present. He sees/hears (surveys) your behavior and arrests you.
And did the government survey how much you earned again last month? Me too.
Before you accuse me of missing the point, taking words out of context, or any other nonsense, let me point out your phrase "no, zero, nada..." You scoped the discussion, not me.
Surveillance is not just wiretapping, packet-sniffing, home/auto searching and the like. It's information gathering, and you--as all of us--do much that is relatively visible in some way.
Finally, don't file me under "apologist" either. I'm as worried as the next guy that the Pat. Act is too invasive--and I'm all for voting for folks who value personal freedoms.
without a hell of a lot of packet sniffing how do you tell that the traffic is VoIP at all.
Call data records generated by the call controllers/softswitches. Just because you don't necessarily bill per minute doesn't mean you don't track (log) usage of your network.
On the other hand, taxing it at the VoIP - PSTN gateway end (bear in mind most current and short-term-future VoIP use will ultimately need to break out onto a PSTN network eventually) would probably be easier to implemnet
Why? One, that would not track all your VoIP (as you point out); two, you seem to trust PSTN CDRs more than IP CDRs. Again, why? Any record can be altered by dishonest carriers...
Okay. Here's the deal: No one is trying to tax your UT, or your *meeting calls. At least not yet.
Currently, "VoIP" in the government's eyes is carrier-class packet telephony implemented to replace PSTN services for consumers and business. There are companies out there, like mine, who are gaining traction delivering this type of service. Multisite companies love not paying LD charges between LATAs/states...
This really means PSTN-quality audio, without the regulated tarriffs, origination fees, and termination fees.
Which makes the telco lobby jumpy--and what makes powerful industry lobbies jumpy eventually makes congress jump.
Banks are private (apart from FDIC insurance) entities with a vested interest in accurate bookkeeping. They will lose customers or get sued into the Stoneage if money is blatantly lost or mishandled. There is also strict, verifiable and specific identification of customers and accounts.
On the otherhand, elections are public, with anonymity and accuracy being in the public interest. However, as others have also posted, this anonymity and accuracy is not always in the candidate's interest. Voter identification faciliates voter intimidation and skewing results in an large electoral college state can alter a large election.
And if a privately-owned company, with a history making campaign contributions backing a single ideology/party/candidate, is the company contracted to develop your "secure" voting application, will you be confident of a fair count?
Heh.
We fully agree. The italized (quoted) sentence was the great-grandparent's sentiment, not mine.
"Developer Friendly" is a very limited definition of better. What about stability, security, ease-of-use, performance, functionality, networkability, efficiency, and...ad nauseum?
And while "business info systems" are obviously a key software class, let's not forget that during the exact era you're referring to the most popular WYSIWYG word processing (MS Word), graphics processing (Adobe PS/Ill/Premiere), page design (Aldus/Quark), and even spreadsheets/databases (MS Excel/FMP/Great Plains) were all either Mac-centric or fully Mac-compatible.
Still to this day, developers can whip out business info systems for Windows faster than on Linux, Mac, etc.
Nope. You can get source and/or full API info for Mac OS X and *nix variants. The difference is not ease of development, it's in the amount of developer resources (headcount) applied. And that's a direct function of the breadth of the deployed base, nothing more.
Your sculptures and mine would fetch different prices based on quality of 'art'.
:^)
Is that a compliment, or an insult?
I understand where you're coming from but...
Art, as any product, is priced by market demand, not by quality; Linux and Windows is a good example, no?
That quality and demand frequently coincide is not surprising, but not at all manditory. An artist who demands a premium price for his/her work does so on the popularity of the work, which to some degree implies a higher quality--or not, in the case of Ms. Spears.
Well, according to Einstein, it's relatively grave, eh?
If a CD is popular, it may stay at full price longer than one that isn't selling
Exactly. Market demand drives markets, of which recorded music is one.
the music industry is definately not selling music as 'art' but as a standard 'product'.
This is different than any other art how? The galleries where I live don't give paintings and sculpture away. I still pay for movies, plays, musicals, poetry, fiction and any other art consume. Also, I would bet the musicians would disagree with your evaluation.
Hm. I don't remember an RIAA gun to my head when I bought my first CD player. Or the next dozen since then...And I'm not at all sure what became of all my old tapes.
With CDs, people were, and are, more than willing to trade money for improved performance over cassettes and vinyl. DVDs are another great example of this. But that's not always the case; look at Betamax vs. VHS or the sluggish adoption of SACD/DVD-A.
I did mention "market demand", right? It has a much larger effect on product pricing than artistic merit and delivery medium have. Yes, I know the argument for P2P sharing is that it is a great pricing protest, but that's moot. Enough consumers still buy CDs at current prices that the recording industry makes more money by selling to them while suing the P2P crowd, so the protest value is nil.
And note the (slight) incremental decrease in CD pricing recently--a clear market demand response.
since not enough people are dumb enough to pay full (inflated) prices for the material
And can someone explain to me why recorded music is valued by the medium it's delivered on and not on its artistic merit or market demand?
I haven't heard the argument that book prices are "inflated", because ink and paper are cheap technology. How many folks are OCR'ing a $25 hardcover of the latest King novel and throwing a text file up on P2P?
Is a Monet only worth the paint and canvas? If so, I wonder why museums have so much security?
What was the $45 I just spent on a live concert for? I mean, sound waves are free--aren't they?
You don't know. But it's not really your network is it?
You just use it, so you can not now, nor could you ever, 100% vouch for the integrity of any data you access, or provide, via that network.
"Man-in-the-middle" is not a new networking concept; perhaps this system will help the surfing public understand what MitM is and how visible they are on the internet. I really doubt it though.
I'm not acquiesing on my argument (which contained synonyms, not analogies), BUT for the record:
:^) See: unique and read the usage notes, if you're interested.
I apologize for my "don't be dense" comment. I was immature and rude. It turns out that our little debate on this topic is not unique
Since more practiced writers than me are arguing about it, I'm just going to lay down my saber here.
'...immediacy is more important than accuracy, and humor is more important than accuracy.'
She's right--if she's discussing her website. I'm sure "The Onion" editorial staff would say something similar, if asked. On the other hand, I would hope to hear differently from cnn.com and nyt.com staff.
Don't be dense. How's that for concise and unambigous?
In this context "unique" is synonymous with "different." While "different" is also a distinct boolean property, no one seems to mind measuring the degree to which things are different. For example, "the difference between 3 and 5 is 2; the difference between 1 and 2 is 1," are very concise and unambiguous statements that measure difference.
Sometimes it's useful to avoid complete precision or to estimate difference, such as the statement, "PI and 3.1415 are somewhat different." No one knows exactly how different they are, but we know they're not as different as PI and 3.0000.
Let's switch the discussion to "sets" and talk about degrees of unique. A Venn diagram with two sets sharing no common elements can be drawn by two non-intersecting circles. Another Venn diagram with two sets that share all but one element can be drawn several ways--concentric circles of almost the same diameter, or two almost entirely intersecting circles just a hair offset from each other. (Note the phrases "almost the same" and "a hair offset" both describe relative degrees of difference. Sorry for my "lazy" use of language.)
Now, are the sets in the second diagram unique? Of course. But are they as unique as the first sets? Of course not. One pair of sets has almost all common elements, while the other has no common elements.
Using your limited understanding of language, there would be no linguistic method for expressing relativity between entities. The English language has *always* relied on modifiers of absolutes to describe degrees of difference. It's not bastardization or destruction, it's normal communication.
"Gentlemen, we can rebuild him, we have the technology. We have the capability to make the worlds first Bionic Man. Steve Austin will be that man. Better than he was before. Better. Stronger. Faster."
Had to be said...
I second this. When I admin'ed in a windows/mac lab during college, rebooting every morning with a clean disk image was the only sanity there was on that job.
We were very explicit with users about the "no parking overnight" file saving rules, and they were mostly fine with it. At our most generous, we provided a heavily quarantined/policed "lost+found" directory near the end of my time there.
I disagree. For example, the inability of some to understand how one can creatively use a literally defined word in a less literally defined phrase is "somewhat unique" to digital-thinking geeks.
Shouldn't the end user decide how much to charge per hour of CPU time. What I would do is price the use of my CPU so high that the cost of doing business for the spammer would be detrimental to his operation, effectively shutting him down.
Um, in your world, what happens when the spammer just says, "No." then looks down the row to the next greedy dipwad and yells, "NEXT!"
Parse the parent's CRLFs on periods.
Lawyers loom, free speech threatened. Comic's mind--way too sharp. Satire protected always.
The policy isn't "security through obscurity" though.
The obscurity may, or may not, be intended, but that doesn't matter in the end. Mac OS X is obscure by definition of low market share.
And the great thing about OS X is that it's a great modern OS, and it's suitable for my parents. *nix is still "getting there" in that regard...
consider that 99% of security problems would be evaporated in one swift move
And new ones would pop up. Changing OS's to one that's (currently) not under every blackhat's electron microscope is a nice, impractical temporary fix.
As much as I *love* my Mac's (I have two), and as secure as the default install is, I must swing the reality stick here.
Much of Mac OS X's advantage is obscurity. And "security through obscurity" won't last if one OS is the defacto monopoly in the world.
Monopolies MicroSuck.
The problem is not end users. The problem is not the people writing the virii. The problem is so easy to see and so vanilla that most people have such a hard time seeing something so simple.
Windows is shit.
This is so wrongheaded--Not windows eval, but the rest.
Yes, OS X is a great, infinitely more secure, OS. Yes, Linux is cool too.
And YES, the problem is too End Users, and Operators, and Developers, and Blackhats, and well...Us.
Windows sucks, and it deserves criticism for its security implementation, if such a thing exists, anyway. BUT, this "root of all computing evil" mentality is simpleminded tripe.
ALL software has bugs, and some software has "features" that deter security policies. There is no immune OS. An unpatched, poorly admin'ed Linux box is as exploitable as any Windows machine.
Just ask me. I set up my first Linux hobby box several years ago, using zero Linux clue, and it got owned in a day. (I took it down, developed clue, and redeployed successfully soon after, but I digress..)
End users with passwords on monitors/under keyboards, operators who telnet to infrastructure over sniffable networks, developers who ignore security, CEOs who don't invest in security hardware/software/training, and virus writers ALL deserve a slice of the blame pie.