That seems like a much better argument for "legal but voluntary" than "illegal". The police in the US must waste so much time trying to stamp out something that is never, ever going to go away.
Agreed about the "legal but voluntary" part. As far as US police, I don't think that they try *that* hard. They may run an occasional sting operation in some cities to look like they're doing something or if the residents of the neighborhood complain, but the law isn't enforced all that severely.
I personally think these women needed help long before one dude started taking them out.
Agreed, but can you really help them if they don't want to go into drug treatment or maybe even don't think they have a problem? AFAIK, Britain has one of the best systems in this regard anyway, since they'll actively pay for drug treatment for addicts rather than just jailing them.
Yeah, illegal, except for "rural" Nevada. Enforced to various degrees depending on where you are, and there are always loopholes for people setting up brothels ("it's a massage parlor, dammit!"). As to why - probably due to religious taboos to a large extent. After all, the USA *was* founded by Puritans.
I hate to say it, but better illegal than legal *and* legally recognized by the State as a "normal" profession like in Germany. There was the recent case of an unemployed lady there who was refused continuing unemployment benefits because she didn't take a job as a "sex worker." (Cite: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/01/30/wgerm30.xml ) I'd be ok if it were legal for the purpose of harm reduction but not overtly encouraged by the State.
I am amazed that so few slashdotters (reading the first 10 posts or so) are unfamiliar with that term. (Do you all live under rocks or something?)
A lot of Slashdotters are American and the term isn't really used in the USA, probably since prostitution is illegal in most parts of the country (excepting Nevada but not Las Vegas city). So terms that "legitimize" it are less likely to be used.
If somebody wants to get into a nation, they will, regardless of whether or not they're carrying a (real or fake) passport.
No need to make it easier for them, though. By your logic, nations shouldn't even *try* to stop foreign criminals from entering their borders? Internal ID cards, etc, are a separate issue that isn't being discussed here, and good external security reduces the need for internal clampdowns.
Stop trying to trick people into wanting Linux. Either they'll accept it (and it's pretty hard to see why they'd do that) or they won't.
I don't know, Ubuntu Eft running on my laptop's HDD is pretty fast, works well, and took about 20 minutes to install, including OpenOffice, GIMP, and a whole bunch of other software I found useful. But, agreed, running from a CD is annoying and slow as all hell. A "live USB key" would be far better, though I don't really see the point of that either except as a recovery tool.
I think it's time someone cloned his passport and got busted importing drugs or weaponry or child porn or similar while on that passport.
Isn't that the point of the biometric data/electronic photo - to make cloning the passport more difficult since the data in the chip has to match the person. If the bio. data is encrypted with a private key, the forger would have to know that key before forging the passport. They could even use, say, 10,000 different private keys to encrypt depending on the value of a hash of birth year, eye color, height, name, etc, so that one private key leaking won't spoil security for everyone's passport.
Passports and other pieces of identification never bring a nation security or safety.
Ok, but the fact is that we *already* have a lot of pissed-off people wanting to fuck the "West" in any way they can. We do want to prevent them from entering our countries and doing harm. Far better to stop them at the borders rather than enacting Draconian *internal* security measures to protect against terrorism. And, BTW, there's already a database of passport data (at least in the US) - even in the 80s when I was traveling with my family as a kid, I remember seeing the passport inspectors at JFK keying passport numbers into a terminal.
From a privacy standpoint, a robust passport security system is at the very bottom of my list of worries, as long as the passport is only used as a legitimation for foreign travel.
3. Is it correct that forging RFID passports will be more difficult? Obviously, if you used to have to manufacture a passport or switch a picture, and you now need to _both_ do that _and_ insert or change an RFID chip, then that raises the bar. So the followups to this question are;
Not really. I'm sure RFID writers are cheap enough for those who "need" them anyway to afford them. The biometrics afford the security. You could have (say) a retinal scan or a point map of a face saved in the RFID chip and encrypted with a private/public key algorithm. The agency encodes it with a private key in a secure location. Then they decrypt it with a public key. Without knowing the private key, it'll be harder (nothing is impossible) to alter the bio. data. Also, keep the *same* data in a database. Not all border posts will have connection to the database, but with those which do, you can use the passport number to pull the database contents to see if the passport has a valid record backing it.
No one has shown that the RFID on the passport can be overwritten.
Of course it can be. All you'd need to do would be to somehow zap the old RFID and attach another one in an inconspicuous fashion - possibly somehow inject it into the edge or the paperboard cover. Either that, or have a transmitter (concealed in a cell phone?) that happens to transmit the correct data at higher power when the passport is swiped. To activate it, pretend to scratch your leg.
But, same as before, the passport # keys to a database of passport data, so (at least some) immigration inspectors will be able to verify the authenticity of the thing to some extent at least.
How is this different than Xeroxing a 2D barcode? Isn't that why there's biometric data on the passport and a digitally encoded photo - to render it useless even when cloned? Not to mention that the passport # *could* key to a database with the same data for verification purposes - the database should also contain records of passport #'s invalidated due to theft, cloning, or whatever. The data on the RFID chip is *meant* to be read. Rerecording the bitstream is a trivial exercise.
I've even applied for positions in Chicago because I have family thtere and hadn't had much luck.
Don't know if you can, but you might be better off renting something short-term there for a month or three or at least using a local address. Employers tend to be allergic to candidates that need to relo. unless they have some very specific skills that they need, and I'm sure that there are plenty of available *local* candidates.
Have you considered Minnesota (quite a bit of medical/biomed stuff + IBM has an HQ there) or Michigan (research businesses and UMich)?
*Yawn* - who cares, really? It may be a decent product, but there are plenty of *other* good security products out there that are more than happy to run on W2k, or even W98.
Honestly, it works and we already have an SBS2k3 license and an extra box, so it's no big deal to keep running it as is. When something breaks, then we'll fix it.
My local market is horrible. I graduated from college with a degree in IT last December, and I haven't had much luck finding any IT position.
Out of curiosity, are all the people talking about "awful" markets from California? Maybe there's just an overload of qualified people there and in some other places.
I knew someone who was an MIT PhD in computer engineering. He was working as an aide at a nursing home. The guy could design a CPU from scratch, but could only find work changing bed pans.
Was he looking in the right places, though? It's a common fallacy that if you can't find a job *exactly* in your field, you need to look for a shitty temporary job. With a degree from MIT, if he couldn't get a processor design job, don't tell me he couldn't have got something as a tech financial analyst, a network admin for a smaller company, a paralegal for a patent firm, or even an engineer doing stuff like programming microcontrollers for control systems. Also, the PhD may have actually counted *against* him since he was considered "overqualified" for a lot of jobs.
Methinks that he couldn't find a job doing exactly what he pictured himself doing, so he ended up wallowing in self pity.
Any major city has lots of wealthy people without time to DIY stuff, simple because they're better off spending their time making $300+/hr[1]. Also, a lot of IT people seem to be too concentrated on getting a "job" rather than simply finding ways to make money. Had your used-car guy gone out on his own, he'd likely have found work. Risky, "crunchy", but profitable nonetheless.
Go to health care or something--this is a warning to people considering this as a career.
Actually, I'm a mechanical engineer by background - I had trouble finding good work after college, so I went into this line of business for a few years. To be honest, I'm getting kind of bored with it now.
In addition to the tech business, I'm a compulsive designer and will have several patents pending in the near future. Nothing to do with IT, either. The future? I'm thinking of either going back to grad school for biomed. engineering or getting my 4 years under a professional engineer in and getting certified - probably would end up doing something in the construction/buildings industry and then going out on my own as consulting engineer after passing my P.E. exams.
you won't have any chance on the swiss job market.
Of course. But you can't just register as a corporation or self-proprietorship with a tax ID number and thus be self-employed? Possibly hire other techs as well. If you advertise and seem like you have a clue, people will use your services, at least in the US. Or is Switzerland that much more of a rigid society that that isn't a possibility?
Since most business still run Windows, you need to find people with enough skills to fix the same problems over and over.
But if you're running a support outsourcing business, you can make more money per hour supporting clients running non-standard platforms like OS X or Un*x. Or even getting into things like consulting for embedded systems (though if they're life-critical make sure to carry good insurance).
perhaps as a final interview otherwise your 1st's could each take 1-3 hours.
What about locking all the 1st's in a single room with a pile of PC equipment, a webcam, and the diktat that the one to come out with the greatest number of working PC's wins. The result would be amusing to watch, I suspect, though cleaning the bloodstains off the floor later may be a bit messy.
The market is horrible for anyone technical, and you'll have many very qualified technical people willing to work for near minimum wage.
Really? I have an SMB support business in NYC. Demand is high, word spreads by mouth to some extent so I need to advertise less and less, and I'm not charging my clients anything like minimum wage. More like more than an order of magnitude greater per hour.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed about the "legal but voluntary" part. As far as US police, I don't think that they try *that* hard. They may run an occasional sting operation in some cities to look like they're doing something or if the residents of the neighborhood complain, but the law isn't enforced all that severely.
-b.
Agreed, but can you really help them if they don't want to go into drug treatment or maybe even don't think they have a problem? AFAIK, Britain has one of the best systems in this regard anyway, since they'll actively pay for drug treatment for addicts rather than just jailing them.
-b.
Yeah, illegal, except for "rural" Nevada. Enforced to various degrees depending on where you are, and there are always loopholes for people setting up brothels ("it's a massage parlor, dammit!"). As to why - probably due to religious taboos to a large extent. After all, the USA *was* founded by Puritans.
I hate to say it, but better illegal than legal *and* legally recognized by the State as a "normal" profession like in Germany. There was the recent case of an unemployed lady there who was refused continuing unemployment benefits because she didn't take a job as a "sex worker." (Cite: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/ne ws/2005/01/30/wgerm30.xml ) I'd be ok if it were legal for the purpose of harm reduction but not overtly encouraged by the State.
-b.
A lot of Slashdotters are American and the term isn't really used in the USA, probably since prostitution is illegal in most parts of the country (excepting Nevada but not Las Vegas city). So terms that "legitimize" it are less likely to be used.
-b.
No need to make it easier for them, though. By your logic, nations shouldn't even *try* to stop foreign criminals from entering their borders? Internal ID cards, etc, are a separate issue that isn't being discussed here, and good external security reduces the need for internal clampdowns.
-b.
I don't know, Ubuntu Eft running on my laptop's HDD is pretty fast, works well, and took about 20 minutes to install, including OpenOffice, GIMP, and a whole bunch of other software I found useful. But, agreed, running from a CD is annoying and slow as all hell. A "live USB key" would be far better, though I don't really see the point of that either except as a recovery tool.
-b.
Isn't that the point of the biometric data/electronic photo - to make cloning the passport more difficult since the data in the chip has to match the person. If the bio. data is encrypted with a private key, the forger would have to know that key before forging the passport. They could even use, say, 10,000 different private keys to encrypt depending on the value of a hash of birth year, eye color, height, name, etc, so that one private key leaking won't spoil security for everyone's passport.
-b.
Ok, but the fact is that we *already* have a lot of pissed-off people wanting to fuck the "West" in any way they can. We do want to prevent them from entering our countries and doing harm. Far better to stop them at the borders rather than enacting Draconian *internal* security measures to protect against terrorism. And, BTW, there's already a database of passport data (at least in the US) - even in the 80s when I was traveling with my family as a kid, I remember seeing the passport inspectors at JFK keying passport numbers into a terminal.
From a privacy standpoint, a robust passport security system is at the very bottom of my list of worries, as long as the passport is only used as a legitimation for foreign travel.
-b.
With a skillful forgery or alteration, one could just insert a new chip, no?
-b.
Not really. I'm sure RFID writers are cheap enough for those who "need" them anyway to afford them. The biometrics afford the security. You could have (say) a retinal scan or a point map of a face saved in the RFID chip and encrypted with a private/public key algorithm. The agency encodes it with a private key in a secure location. Then they decrypt it with a public key. Without knowing the private key, it'll be harder (nothing is impossible) to alter the bio. data. Also, keep the *same* data in a database. Not all border posts will have connection to the database, but with those which do, you can use the passport number to pull the database contents to see if the passport has a valid record backing it.
-b.
Of course it can be. All you'd need to do would be to somehow zap the old RFID and attach another one in an inconspicuous fashion - possibly somehow inject it into the edge or the paperboard cover. Either that, or have a transmitter (concealed in a cell phone?) that happens to transmit the correct data at higher power when the passport is swiped. To activate it, pretend to scratch your leg.
But, same as before, the passport # keys to a database of passport data, so (at least some) immigration inspectors will be able to verify the authenticity of the thing to some extent at least.
-b.
Cheers,
-b.
Don't know if you can, but you might be better off renting something short-term there for a month or three or at least using a local address. Employers tend to be allergic to candidates that need to relo. unless they have some very specific skills that they need, and I'm sure that there are plenty of available *local* candidates.
Have you considered Minnesota (quite a bit of medical/biomed stuff + IBM has an HQ there) or Michigan (research businesses and UMich)?
-b.
-b.
Honestly, it works and we already have an SBS2k3 license and an extra box, so it's no big deal to keep running it as is. When something breaks, then we'll fix it.
-b.
Out of curiosity, are all the people talking about "awful" markets from California? Maybe there's just an overload of qualified people there and in some other places.
-b.
Was he looking in the right places, though? It's a common fallacy that if you can't find a job *exactly* in your field, you need to look for a shitty temporary job. With a degree from MIT, if he couldn't get a processor design job, don't tell me he couldn't have got something as a tech financial analyst, a network admin for a smaller company, a paralegal for a patent firm, or even an engineer doing stuff like programming microcontrollers for control systems. Also, the PhD may have actually counted *against* him since he was considered "overqualified" for a lot of jobs.
Methinks that he couldn't find a job doing exactly what he pictured himself doing, so he ended up wallowing in self pity.
-b.
Hell, no. But those who purport to take the moral high ground shouldn't resort to a same tactics...
-b.
-b.
Any major city has lots of wealthy people without time to DIY stuff, simple because they're better off spending their time making $300+/hr[1]. Also, a lot of IT people seem to be too concentrated on getting a "job" rather than simply finding ways to make money. Had your used-car guy gone out on his own, he'd likely have found work. Risky, "crunchy", but profitable nonetheless.
Go to health care or something--this is a warning to people considering this as a career.
Actually, I'm a mechanical engineer by background - I had trouble finding good work after college, so I went into this line of business for a few years. To be honest, I'm getting kind of bored with it now.
In addition to the tech business, I'm a compulsive designer and will have several patents pending in the near future. Nothing to do with IT, either. The future? I'm thinking of either going back to grad school for biomed. engineering or getting my 4 years under a professional engineer in and getting certified - probably would end up doing something in the construction/buildings industry and then going out on my own as consulting engineer after passing my P.E. exams.
Cheers,
-b.
[1]-> 1/5th of that "action" is still $60/hr...
We tried. It doesn't, unfortunately.
-b.
Of course. But you can't just register as a corporation or self-proprietorship with a tax ID number and thus be self-employed? Possibly hire other techs as well. If you advertise and seem like you have a clue, people will use your services, at least in the US. Or is Switzerland that much more of a rigid society that that isn't a possibility?
-b.
But if you're running a support outsourcing business, you can make more money per hour supporting clients running non-standard platforms like OS X or Un*x. Or even getting into things like consulting for embedded systems (though if they're life-critical make sure to carry good insurance).
-b.
What about locking all the 1st's in a single room with a pile of PC equipment, a webcam, and the diktat that the one to come out with the greatest number of working PC's wins. The result would be amusing to watch, I suspect, though cleaning the bloodstains off the floor later may be a bit messy.
-b.
Really? I have an SMB support business in NYC. Demand is high, word spreads by mouth to some extent so I need to advertise less and less, and I'm not charging my clients anything like minimum wage. More like more than an order of magnitude greater per hour.
-b.