I think it is inevitable that GPS devices will be required in new cars at some point, and it will become a criminal offense to not have one. Hey, "If you've not done anything wrong, why should you care if the police can track where you are 24 hours a day?"...
The toll road folks have already made it clear to the public that EZ-Pass and similar systems are just a step down the road to a toll road system without toll booths - where you just have money extracted from your bank account each time you pass by a sensor that reads your car going by.
If you watch the video on their web site, it makes a big deal of blaming you if you installed spyware and didn't read every word of the EULA before you installed the software - and actually gave them permission.
I'm curious what % of people read the EULA agreement for the antispyware program?
3 of things it reported on my system are software used by radio stations to push ads at you when you access their streaming audio feeds. The description of course says that if you want the service and the software is required to use it, don't worry about it. Does Microsoft offer a competing streaming software solution? Hmmm...
While Giant might have gotten away with calling some program "infections", I think Microsoft is inviting big time legal problems if they label competitor's software as an "infection".
Or perhaps the anti-spyware program only looks for cookies in the folder that MSIE uses. After all, if you used a non-MSIE browser, Microsoft isn't going to actually protect you from the risks that introduces, are they?
An important thing it did on one of my issues - was it detected a copy inside a recovery point - and went into the recovery point and cleaned it up there as well. Most of the instructions from virus companies tell you to turn off and turn back on restore points (which deletes the existing recovery points). If it truly can clean up the "sacred" areas that mere non-Microsoft programs can't touch, that's an interesting feature.
The first time I ran several.bat files, it freezed the execution and asked me to confirm that I really was trying to run a script and understood the risks.
It also pays attention to the hosts file, one of the insidiious ways some recent stuff facilitiates phishing attacks.
It looks pretty good - the FAQ mentions that the -beta- software is free - however, the software itself says it expires in 6 months.
Is it only the beta that is free or will it remain free? Or will that depend on whether people will pay for it?
I'm trying to figure out what exactly an "infected cookie" is...
I could see a cookie that is indicates a possible related infection, but is there anything remotely resembling a virus or worm that spreads using cookies? Next thing someone will say that you can infect a computer with a JPEG file.
People in New Jersey not only can't pay at the pump, they can't pump.
It is illegal to run a self-service gas station in New Jersey. All gas stations are full service. Curiously, the prices in New Jersey are generally lower than the rest of the New York City area.
Libya tried that with the Gulf of Sidra, where they claimed part of the Mediterranean as internal waters, by drawing a line between the two points on shore that jut out the farthest into the sea.
The Santy worm -is- a perl script that exploits the hole found in the phpBB software. It copies files to/tmp (Windows doesn't have a/tmp directory, does it?) and then proceeded to spread to other *nix servers using Google to find likely targets - and destroy the contents of the *nix web server. Estimates are that 40,000 *nix servers were infected.
Even in the unlikely event a Windows web server had perl installed and and was running the phpBB bulletin board software, there is no wget command in Windows, and no/tmp directory.
Now this was motivated in part by Evil Republican tax changes to treat dividends as subject to a maximum rate of 15%.
Bill Gates is giving the $3 Billion that he'll receive to the Gates Foundation, which is primarily focused on addressing the inequality of health care in the developing world, with a focus on HIV treatment and prevention in Africa.
For a good example of how the Soviet Union protected the environemnt for the benefit of the people, google on "Aral Sea". Formerly the world's 4th largest inland sea, it is now a salt water desert which no longer supports life.
If you don't like that example, consider the Trabant in East Germany. A car with a two stroke engine that spewed smoke and no pollution control technology at all up until the fall of the Berlin Wall... the car body was made primarily from a non-recycleable resin called Duraplast which continues to be an environmental nightmare..
http://digilander.libero.it/cuoccimix/ENGLISH-au to motorusse9-I(Trabant).htm
An important issue that comes up recently for me is that there is a scope problem with Wikipedia. Not everything that is a fact or a data point is appropriate for an encyclopedia. Atlases and Almanacs exist because they are more appropriate organizations of information. Every new "fact" that is added to Wikipedia increases the cost to maintain the integrity of the "truth" it contains.
Specifically, because of a project I'm working on, I'm now running into Google'd copies of Wikipedia entries concerning radio stations in the United States.
Here is a fictionaly entry - exaggerated to make the point, I hope:
Radio station W??? is licensed by the FCC to operate on 1310 khz. It operates with licensed power of 10,000 watts daytime, 1000 watts night time using 3 towers that are 821 feet high, arranged in an equilateral triangle oriented to 23.5 degrees, and located at 87.35 degrees longitude and 135.35 degress west latitutde. The station is located in Sprinfield, Indiana, operated by Bart Simpson Incorporated, and currently operates with the
"hot" adult contemporary format. Bart Simpson and Homer Simpson host a highly popular evening sports talk show. Lisa Simpson hosts a late night jazz hour featuring rarely heard saxaphone selections.
The above is basically just a recitiation of data from the FCC license database with some extra data that is highly subject to future change (and the potential that it won't be updated and become wrong). While there are facts stated, most of the facts have no real cultural or historical significance, except perhaps to the 5 people that work at that station.
It needs to be impressed on people that encyclopedias are recording historical facts, not current state information. An encyclopedia is not a newspaper.
Ask yourself "Is this still going to be true in 5 years?" - if not, it doesn't belong in an Encyclopedia, it belongs in a database. And it should really shy away from future knowledge - "it is widely believed that within the next twenty years, there will be a major earthquake in California"...
Before you get too carried away with this notion, back in the early days of Wal-Mart in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton served on the Board of Directors for six years - the Village Voice is about the only media outlet willing to make that connection and ask questions.
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0021/harkavy. ph p
All of the specific examples in the article are clear to state that the tracking was while people were "on the clock".
The only statement about 24x7 tracking was from the advocacy group - National Workrights Institute - who "cited examples" where this happens, but that article does not mention any of the cited examples.
Since all cell phones are soon going to be E911 enabled, pretty much anyone required to have a cell phone by their employer will theoretically be trackable. What your rant lacks is any connection to an abuse by the employer...
Tell me an example where an employer fires someone because they went to the "wrong" church on Sunday and then you'll get my attention.
By "Can we stop this?", I mean - can we (and people in the media or talking to the media) stop giving advice to people who want to kill us - by telling them what they're doing wrong or how they could do it better or more effectively?
Self censorship is much more preferable than the alternative.
Why are people assuming that software written in 1989 was written in C? Or that memory prices for a PC in 1989 are releveant? (mainframe memory was orders of magnitude more expensive)
The computers I worked on in that era (Tandem) used a language (TAL) that did not have an unsigned data type... that's because the underlying hardware instruction set in earlier chips did not support unsigned integers. The only way to actually support a 16 bit unsigned integer would have been to either add instructions in software around every arithemetic opcode to check for potential overflow conditions... cpu cycles were also much more finite and expensive in 1989...
Even if you solved that problem, you could not use that unsigned integer in a key in the database, because it would consider 32769 to be smaller than 32767, and all your database searches would fail...
I"m not implying that the software ran on Tandem (which was based on HP-3000 technology), but rather that people open up their minds to realize that there is a lot of software out there not written in C.
The purpose of the software is FAA compliance for pilot time. Requirements for flight attendents are much less restrictive than pilots (# hrs/day, #/month, sleep breaks, qualified to fly on specific aircraft) The prior thread (dup?) on this topic had some posts with more detail from someone who knows the rules and complications and what it takes to implement in software.
The only real complication for flight attendents is they sleep overnight in a different city than they planned - but the airlines have large blocks of hotel rooms on permanent availability for just that reason.
>>Despite the fact that fewer people can afford a car than can afford a train ticket
Proof of that statement, please?
A train ticket is a one time purchase - the average car and truck on the road is 9 years old http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/line3.htm which would point to an average life expectancy approaching 20 years...
The total number of registered vehicles in the United States of 2002 was 225 million http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/ If a car was so unafforable, there would not be one for almost every person in the country... (Actually more than 1:1 if you only count people 16 and over)
The biggest social cost in the US is probably the 42,000 people per year killed in car crashes, but on the other hand that's money that won't have to be withdrawn from the Social Security "Lock Box" in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is inevitable that GPS devices will be required in new cars at some point, and it will become a criminal offense to not have one. Hey, "If you've not done anything wrong, why should you care if the police can track where you are 24 hours a day?"...
The toll road folks have already made it clear to the public that EZ-Pass and similar systems are just a step down the road to a toll road system without toll booths - where you just have money extracted from your bank account each time you pass by a sensor that reads your car going by.
And so it goes...
It's a good thing that Microsoft wasn't stupid enough to indicate in the User Agent String for MSIE whether the computer has SP2 installed.
Oh, hold on a second.... never mind.
If you watch the video on their web site, it makes a big deal of blaming you if you installed spyware and didn't read every word of the EULA before you installed the software - and actually gave them permission.
I'm curious what % of people read the EULA agreement for the antispyware program?
3 of things it reported on my system are software used by radio stations to push ads at you when you access their streaming audio feeds. The description of course says that if you want the service and the software is required to use it, don't worry about it. Does Microsoft offer a competing streaming software solution? Hmmm...
While Giant might have gotten away with calling some program "infections", I think Microsoft is inviting big time legal problems if they label competitor's software as an "infection".
Or perhaps the anti-spyware program only looks for cookies in the folder that MSIE uses. After all, if you used a non-MSIE browser, Microsoft isn't going to actually protect you from the risks that introduces, are they?
An important thing it did on one of my issues - was it detected a copy inside a recovery point - and went into the recovery point and cleaned it up there as well. Most of the instructions from virus companies tell you to turn off and turn back on restore points (which deletes the existing recovery points). If it truly can clean up the "sacred" areas that mere non-Microsoft programs can't touch, that's an interesting feature.
The first time I ran several .bat files, it freezed the execution and asked me to confirm that I really was trying to run a script and understood the risks.
It also pays attention to the hosts file, one of the insidiious ways some recent stuff facilitiates phishing attacks.
It looks pretty good - the FAQ mentions that the -beta- software is free - however, the software itself says it expires in 6 months.
Is it only the beta that is free or will it remain free? Or will that depend on whether people will pay for it?
I'm trying to figure out what exactly an "infected cookie" is...
I could see a cookie that is indicates a possible related infection, but is there anything remotely resembling a virus or worm that spreads using cookies? Next thing someone will say that you can infect a computer with a JPEG file.
People in New Jersey not only can't pay at the pump, they can't pump.
It is illegal to run a self-service gas station in New Jersey. All gas stations are full service. Curiously, the prices in New Jersey are generally lower than the rest of the New York City area.
I'll make a wager that the big rock we call Earth is here and has plentiful and abundant life forms on it long after we are gone.
Libya tried that with the Gulf of Sidra, where they claimed part of the Mediterranean as internal waters, by drawing a line between the two points on shore that jut out the farthest into the sea.
a .h tm
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/sidr
19 Aug 1981, Ronald Reagan corrected Libya's misunderstanding of international law.
Is Manhatten under water yet?
On vacation Christmast week?
/tmp (Windows doesn't have a /tmp directory, does it?) and then proceeded to spread to other *nix servers using Google to find likely targets - and destroy the contents of the *nix web server. Estimates are that 40,000 *nix servers were infected.
/tmp directory.
The Santy worm -is- a perl script that exploits the hole found in the phpBB software. It copies files to
Even in the unlikely event a Windows web server had perl installed and and was running the phpBB bulletin board software, there is no wget command in Windows, and no
Much more relevant is the recent one time cash dividend of $3 a share - giving a total of $32 Billion (with a B) in cash back to the stockholders.
8 79
http://www.komotv.com/microsoft/story.asp?ID=33
Now this was motivated in part by Evil Republican tax changes to treat dividends as subject to a maximum rate of 15%.
Bill Gates is giving the $3 Billion that he'll receive to the Gates Foundation, which is primarily focused on addressing the inequality of health care in the developing world, with a focus on HIV treatment and prevention in Africa.
Evil American Capitalist Bill Gates. For Shame.
Especially if you become aware that the bulk of Gate's personal political contributions are to Democrats.
Microsoft is widely credited in the United States for paving the way for granting equal benefit status to same sex domestic partners in 1993.
"They" say a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged. Has Gates found religion?
For a good example of how the Soviet Union protected the environemnt for the benefit of the people, google on "Aral Sea". Formerly the world's 4th largest inland sea, it is now a salt water desert which no longer supports life.
u to motorusse9-I(Trabant).htm
If you don't like that example, consider the Trabant in East Germany. A car with a two stroke engine that spewed smoke and no pollution control technology at all up until the fall of the Berlin Wall... the car body was made primarily from a non-recycleable resin called Duraplast which continues to be an environmental nightmare..
http://digilander.libero.it/cuoccimix/ENGLISH-a
Specifically, because of a project I'm working on, I'm now running into Google'd copies of Wikipedia entries concerning radio stations in the United States.
Here is a fictionaly entry - exaggerated to make the point, I hope:
Radio station W??? is licensed by the FCC to operate on 1310 khz. It operates with licensed power of 10,000 watts daytime, 1000 watts night time using 3 towers that are 821 feet high, arranged in an equilateral triangle oriented to 23.5 degrees, and located at 87.35 degrees longitude and 135.35 degress west latitutde. The station is located in Sprinfield, Indiana, operated by Bart Simpson Incorporated, and currently operates with the "hot" adult contemporary format. Bart Simpson and Homer Simpson host a highly popular evening sports talk show. Lisa Simpson hosts a late night jazz hour featuring rarely heard saxaphone selections.
The above is basically just a recitiation of data from the FCC license database with some extra data that is highly subject to future change (and the potential that it won't be updated and become wrong). While there are facts stated, most of the facts have no real cultural or historical significance, except perhaps to the 5 people that work at that station.
It needs to be impressed on people that encyclopedias are recording historical facts, not current state information. An encyclopedia is not a newspaper.
Ask yourself "Is this still going to be true in 5 years?" - if not, it doesn't belong in an Encyclopedia, it belongs in a database. And it should really shy away from future knowledge - "it is widely believed that within the next twenty years, there will be a major earthquake in California"...
Before you get too carried away with this notion, back in the early days of Wal-Mart in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton served on the Board of Directors for six years - the Village Voice is about the only media outlet willing to make that connection and ask questions.
. ph p
r e_ we_stand/health_care_reform/walmart.cfm
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0021/harkavy
Do wal-mart employees get paid health insurance?
http://www.ufcw.org/worker_political_agenda/whe
Bzzzt...
All of the specific examples in the article are clear to state that the tracking was while people were "on the clock".
The only statement about 24x7 tracking was from the advocacy group - National Workrights Institute - who "cited examples" where this happens, but that article does not mention any of the cited examples.
Since all cell phones are soon going to be E911 enabled, pretty much anyone required to have a cell phone by their employer will theoretically be trackable. What your rant lacks is any connection to an abuse by the employer...
Tell me an example where an employer fires someone because they went to the "wrong" church on Sunday and then you'll get my attention.
By "Can we stop this?", I mean - can we (and people in the media or talking to the media) stop giving advice to people who want to kill us - by telling them what they're doing wrong or how they could do it better or more effectively?
Self censorship is much more preferable than the alternative.
Not to worry - US Air and Delta are about to reap the benefits of this activity - unless of course, the Federal Govt steps in again to reward failure.
Why are people assuming that software written in 1989 was written in C? Or that memory prices for a PC in 1989 are releveant? (mainframe memory was orders of magnitude more expensive)
The computers I worked on in that era (Tandem) used a language (TAL) that did not have an unsigned data type... that's because the underlying hardware instruction set in earlier chips did not support unsigned integers. The only way to actually support a 16 bit unsigned integer would have been to either add instructions in software around every arithemetic opcode to check for potential overflow conditions... cpu cycles were also much more finite and expensive in 1989...
Even if you solved that problem, you could not use that unsigned integer in a key in the database, because it would consider 32769 to be smaller than 32767, and all your database searches would fail...
I"m not implying that the software ran on Tandem (which was based on HP-3000 technology), but rather that people open up their minds to realize that there is a lot of software out there not written in C.
The purpose of the software is FAA compliance for pilot time. Requirements for flight attendents are much less restrictive than pilots (# hrs/day, #/month, sleep breaks, qualified to fly on specific aircraft) The prior thread (dup?) on this topic had some posts with more detail from someone who knows the rules and complications and what it takes to implement in software.
The only real complication for flight attendents is they sleep overnight in a different city than they planned - but the airlines have large blocks of hotel rooms on permanent availability for just that reason.
>>Despite the fact that fewer people can afford a car than can afford a train ticket
Proof of that statement, please?
A train ticket is a one time purchase - the average car and truck on the road is 9 years old
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/line3.htm
which would point to an average life expectancy approaching 20 years...
The total number of registered vehicles in the United States of 2002 was 225 million
http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/
If a car was so unafforable, there would not be one for almost every person in the country... (Actually more than 1:1 if you only count people 16 and over)
The biggest social cost in the US is probably the 42,000 people per year killed in car crashes, but on the other hand that's money that won't have to be withdrawn from the Social Security "Lock Box" in the future.
If you wander into his daily weblog reports, on 12/27, the Firefox browser was 40.32% of all requests.
./ readers lemmings or what?
Are
</rhetorical-question>
and no need to worry about Social Security funding any more.