I think people forget that 9/11 wasn't caused by terrorists with bombs. It was caused by hijackers. We've fixed the hijacking problem. A bomber can't do nearly the damage that the 9/11 hijackers did. So instead, airport security should focus on what is important: hijackings. If once every 10 years, a plane explodes from an underwear bomb, then we have succeeded. We lose more people due to car crashes or swimming pools or tripping over a loaf of bread.
...how much capital did they take out of the US and world economy?
True, but most of the capital was spent in the knee-jerk aftermath, by our own leaders. No by the terrorists.
Sitting on our hands saying "It's not safe and there's nothing we can do about it" is *not* an option.
Agreed, but overreacting is just as dangerous. Perhaps more dangerous.
Because THIS type political murder can cause my kids and yours to starve.
Ironically, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is doing more to cause us to starve than the loss from 9/11. If we starve, it will be our own fault, not the terrorists. There are countries with faaar worse terrorism than we have, and they can feed their people.
What these "experts" refuse to acknowledge is that there is ALWAYS a way to get by, if you are willing to go to extremes. This guy was willing to burn his private parts off to hide his bomb. What's next? Surgically building a bomb-storage cavity in your chest? What if a female terrorist stucks a bomb in her uterus? At what point do we decide "yeah, we just can't prevent that" and live with it.
Every security measure has a price. If the price for stopping the uterus bomber is that all women must be vaginally searched, then that's okay -- I'd rather take the risk, or just never fly. So... where will we draw this line? Because of the underpants bomber, that line has moved closer to the absurd. All to stop a minimal bomb threat that didn't actually work.
I saw we draw the line now. No more. If I die by the uterus bomber on my next flight, so be it. It was the price I paid for freedom.
1) Most of the time people aren't doing forms submissions. It's somewhat of an obsolete concept. We use HTML for that. We use PDF when we want to print something. (Which we do a lot less often than we used to)
2) You can have Javascript that can do form validations without giving it commands like "open this file, write to it, then execute it" Adobe's Javascript security is stuck in 1998, back in the days of ActiveX controls that could trivially to break out of the sandbox.
First thing I do with a retail computer is delete all the crud. Trials, stuff that runs at startup unnecessarily, etc. Sometimes you can just reinstall the OS from the restore disk and start from there. Then there is the icon cleanup, which can take forever.
The article says that Best Buy did cleanup the desktop. Hopefully, this will create an awareness of just how much manufacturers are screwing over their customers. They include all this junk, then the end-user pays someone to clean it off. There's many times I thought about actually writing a program that does this.
If Best Buy offered a service to do this without screwing up the laptops or lying to customers, then it might actually be a good thing.
Can someone post a link to all these super patents that make infinite batteries and cars that get 500 miles per gallon? I always hear about these patents - which are public - but I never see them. I'm also amazed that countries that don't subscribe to patent law don't build these devices. Or why the patent holders don't drop decide to start licensing those patents for absurd amounts of money and get rich while solving all the worlds ills.
Or wait.... could you really be saying that those magical patents don't actually exist?
They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle.
Why not? Most of the world handles the waste by storing it in water tanks until it is safe to bury. If you are afraid of burying it remember: the fuel came from the ground. And it is better than the place we put the radioactive by-products of coal burning - we dump that into the atmosphere.
And it uses still a extremely limited resource. We will eat up the reserves in no time.
If you read through the comments, they point out that we actually are not running out of uranium, and thorium is even more plentiful. And we have nuclear reactors that are 50 times more efficient than our old ones due to fuel recycling. So... no end in sight. Plus: we obviously have limited supplies of coal.
We want a decentralized energy production
That will be nice when it happens. I think that will come with things like solar and wind. But for now they aren't enough.
Do people forget coal disasters because they are so common? Perhaps we need more nuclear disasters, so that they all blend together in people's minds and they treat them as common place.
Granted, there is always risk. But make sure that we are clear on which is safer: more people have died from coal mining and coal-related disasters than have died from nuclear disasters. Consider: collapsing mines, cancer, explosions, smog, acid rain, suffocation, poisoning... coal is really really dangerous stuff. Even if we scaled our nuclear production to match our coal production, nuclear would still be far safer than coal.
The Indiana sherrif's action is the Internet equivalent of walking through a neighborhood with a mug shot, asking shopkeepers "have you seen this guy?"
Not really. Giving someone's billing information is different from asking "have you seen this guy?"
Ultimately, the decision to reveal the information should be in the hands of a judge. Blizzard should wait for the warrant. How does Blizzard know the request was legitimate? How do they know that it wasn't a corrupt officer who was angry at this individual for personal reasons? This is why we have a checks and balances.
If corporations decide to cooperate with police too much, then they give the police a way to get around their constitutional limitations.
Consumers, he said, were chafing against the restrictions that using a netbook imposed on them.
That's been the situation since portable computers were invented.
What made netbooks seem like something new is not the hardware. Cheap low-end laptops have been around for deaces. The shift occurred because that a cheap laptop now serves 90% of computing needs - the internet. Yes, consumers will chafe against the 10% of things they can't do on a netbook (games, video) but that doesn't mean that they won't keep buying netbooks. That's like saying that because people don't like the pick-up in low-end cars, all cars will suddenly become high-end cars. That's silly.
If not, you saying that that a rover that survived for 8 years, that was supposed to only survive 90 days - was poorly designed. Oh, and NASA should have known about this problem (based on all the other rovers we've sent over the years) and added a complicated jacking mechanism and bigger wheels. And I guess, if in 20 years it gets attacked by aliens someone will post "oh, and they should have seen this coming and added laser defenses."
Actually, I suspect this will happen a lot. I know many DVDs are really VHS upscaled. This was/is most common in Anime. I always find it _really_ weird when I see anime DVDs encoded in interlaced mode. Interlacing makes no sense on something that was drawn or digitally generated.
Developers must be local administrators to: - Manage local services (Ex: SQL server, COM+, etc.) - Register/unregister COM objects; Add/remove objects from the GAC; change the strong-naming settings,... - Attach the debugger to a process - Change IE security settings
You can actually attach a debugger if you are in the "Debugger users" group but there's no sense in removing local Administrator rights from a debugger user because the debugger can be used to execute privilege escalation attacks. So all you do is make it harder for the developer, without buying you any security.
I agree that defining "neutral" is not easy in this case. Perhaps you are right, that bribery and fraud laws are sufficient to cover this.
While the original article was foolish, the discussion does point out that we are becoming a search monoculture. (Well, duoculture actually: Bing! and Google). That is a dangerous situation because while Yahoo never hid the fact that they tweaked results based on who paid them, we assume Google does not do this. Which means if they do then they can taint our perceptions of the internet. That's a very powerful and very dangerous position to be in. I'd like to avoid that. I'm just not sure how. "Neutral" providers sounds good, but it might be too hard to define.
Slashdot Mirror
I think people forget that 9/11 wasn't caused by terrorists with bombs. It was caused by hijackers. We've fixed the hijacking problem. A bomber can't do nearly the damage that the 9/11 hijackers did. So instead, airport security should focus on what is important: hijackings. If once every 10 years, a plane explodes from an underwear bomb, then we have succeeded. We lose more people due to car crashes or swimming pools or tripping over a loaf of bread.
...how much capital did they take out of the US and world economy?
True, but most of the capital was spent in the knee-jerk aftermath, by our own leaders. No by the terrorists.
Sitting on our hands saying "It's not safe and there's nothing we can do about it" is *not* an option.
Agreed, but overreacting is just as dangerous. Perhaps more dangerous.
Because THIS type political murder can cause my kids and yours to starve.
Ironically, the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is doing more to cause us to starve than the loss from 9/11. If we starve, it will be our own fault, not the terrorists. There are countries with faaar worse terrorism than we have, and they can feed their people.
This isn't funny. This is inevitable.
What these "experts" refuse to acknowledge is that there is ALWAYS a way to get by, if you are willing to go to extremes. This guy was willing to burn his private parts off to hide his bomb. What's next? Surgically building a bomb-storage cavity in your chest? What if a female terrorist stucks a bomb in her uterus? At what point do we decide "yeah, we just can't prevent that" and live with it.
Every security measure has a price. If the price for stopping the uterus bomber is that all women must be vaginally searched, then that's okay -- I'd rather take the risk, or just never fly. So... where will we draw this line? Because of the underpants bomber, that line has moved closer to the absurd. All to stop a minimal bomb threat that didn't actually work.
I saw we draw the line now. No more. If I die by the uterus bomber on my next flight, so be it. It was the price I paid for freedom.
His point is sound, but it dodges the real issue:
1) Most of the time people aren't doing forms submissions. It's somewhat of an obsolete concept. We use HTML for that. We use PDF when we want to print something. (Which we do a lot less often than we used to)
2) You can have Javascript that can do form validations without giving it commands like "open this file, write to it, then execute it" Adobe's Javascript security is stuck in 1998, back in the days of ActiveX controls that could trivially to break out of the sandbox.
I'm not saying they did a good job of it. Just that the concept is good.
I'm hoping that there is fallout from this not only for Best Buy, but for the manufacturers who are preloading all this cruft.
First thing I do with a retail computer is delete all the crud. Trials, stuff that runs at startup unnecessarily, etc. Sometimes you can just reinstall the OS from the restore disk and start from there. Then there is the icon cleanup, which can take forever.
"Bob's Software Company\Tax Pro\Tax Pro.lnk" becomes "Tax Pro"
"Adobe\Adobe Acrobate Reader.lnk" becomes "Junk\Acrobat Reader.lnk"
The article says that Best Buy did cleanup the desktop. Hopefully, this will create an awareness of just how much manufacturers are screwing over their customers. They include all this junk, then the end-user pays someone to clean it off. There's many times I thought about actually writing a program that does this.
If Best Buy offered a service to do this without screwing up the laptops or lying to customers, then it might actually be a good thing.
Nevermind, I RTFA'd, and I see why. Holy moly!
why not?
Can someone post a link to all these super patents that make infinite batteries and cars that get 500 miles per gallon? I always hear about these patents - which are public - but I never see them. I'm also amazed that countries that don't subscribe to patent law don't build these devices. Or why the patent holders don't drop decide to start licensing those patents for absurd amounts of money and get rich while solving all the worlds ills.
Or wait.... could you really be saying that those magical patents don't actually exist?
They still produce radioactive waste, which we cannot handle.
Why not? Most of the world handles the waste by storing it in water tanks until it is safe to bury. If you are afraid of burying it remember: the fuel came from the ground. And it is better than the place we put the radioactive by-products of coal burning - we dump that into the atmosphere.
And it uses still a extremely limited resource. We will eat up the reserves in no time.
If you read through the comments, they point out that we actually are not running out of uranium, and thorium is even more plentiful. And we have nuclear reactors that are 50 times more efficient than our old ones due to fuel recycling. So... no end in sight. Plus: we obviously have limited supplies of coal.
We want a decentralized energy production
That will be nice when it happens. I think that will come with things like solar and wind. But for now they aren't enough.
Do people forget coal disasters because they are so common? Perhaps we need more nuclear disasters, so that they all blend together in people's minds and they treat them as common place.
Granted, there is always risk. But make sure that we are clear on which is safer: more people have died from coal mining and coal-related disasters than have died from nuclear disasters. Consider: collapsing mines, cancer, explosions, smog, acid rain, suffocation, poisoning ... coal is really really dangerous stuff. Even if we scaled our nuclear production to match our coal production, nuclear would still be far safer than coal.
well, we're gonna need to hire some extra judges.
So be it.
The Indiana sherrif's action is the Internet equivalent of walking through a neighborhood with a mug shot, asking shopkeepers "have you seen this guy?"
Not really. Giving someone's billing information is different from asking "have you seen this guy?"
Ultimately, the decision to reveal the information should be in the hands of a judge. Blizzard should wait for the warrant. How does Blizzard know the request was legitimate? How do they know that it wasn't a corrupt officer who was angry at this individual for personal reasons? This is why we have a checks and balances.
If corporations decide to cooperate with police too much, then they give the police a way to get around their constitutional limitations.
Does the existence of dirt and dusk means there must be sand traps?
Interlaced DVDs have nothing really to do with VHS.
I never said they did. I was making two separate points.
You don't know what you think you know.
Thanks for the clarification. I'll remember that.
Consumers, he said, were chafing against the restrictions that using a netbook imposed on them.
That's been the situation since portable computers were invented.
What made netbooks seem like something new is not the hardware. Cheap low-end laptops have been around for deaces. The shift occurred because that a cheap laptop now serves 90% of computing needs - the internet. Yes, consumers will chafe against the 10% of things they can't do on a netbook (games, video) but that doesn't mean that they won't keep buying netbooks. That's like saying that because people don't like the pick-up in low-end cars, all cars will suddenly become high-end cars. That's silly.
I really hope you are joking.
If not, you saying that that a rover that survived for 8 years, that was supposed to only survive 90 days - was poorly designed. Oh, and NASA should have known about this problem (based on all the other rovers we've sent over the years) and added a complicated jacking mechanism and bigger wheels. And I guess, if in 20 years it gets attacked by aliens someone will post "oh, and they should have seen this coming and added laser defenses."
you have a likeliness of damaging the CPU if all you run are intensive tasks under Linux.
[citation needed]
What about the special drivers that let you set the volume, screen brightness, etc?
What's the statute of limitations on this? It was 20 years ago.
Actually, I suspect this will happen a lot. I know many DVDs are really VHS upscaled. This was/is most common in Anime. I always find it _really_ weird when I see anime DVDs encoded in interlaced mode. Interlacing makes no sense on something that was drawn or digitally generated.
Nobody mentioned anything about production machines.
Developers must be local administrators to: ...
- Manage local services (Ex: SQL server, COM+, etc.)
- Register/unregister COM objects; Add/remove objects from the GAC; change the strong-naming settings,
- Attach the debugger to a process
- Change IE security settings
You can actually attach a debugger if you are in the "Debugger users" group but there's no sense in removing local Administrator rights from a debugger user because the debugger can be used to execute privilege escalation attacks. So all you do is make it harder for the developer, without buying you any security.
I agree that defining "neutral" is not easy in this case. Perhaps you are right, that bribery and fraud laws are sufficient to cover this.
While the original article was foolish, the discussion does point out that we are becoming a search monoculture. (Well, duoculture actually: Bing! and Google). That is a dangerous situation because while Yahoo never hid the fact that they tweaked results based on who paid them, we assume Google does not do this. Which means if they do then they can taint our perceptions of the internet. That's a very powerful and very dangerous position to be in. I'd like to avoid that. I'm just not sure how. "Neutral" providers sounds good, but it might be too hard to define.
I'd like to hear other approaches too.