I read the fine documents Declan McCullagh referenced in his article. One was about a voluntary study that compared traditional data collection methods used for transporation planning with data collected automatically using GPS. Not surprisingly, the study found that people don't report their travels accurately, presumably because they don't remember things like running to get a video. Not a word about disabling cars.
Other links he referred to related to automated toll collection, which seems to be a very efficient way to pay for roads while keeping traffic moving. These systems are already in place throughout the U.S. Northeast using RFID chips that drivers willingly install in their cars. And yes, the information collected by automatic toll collection has been used in two criminal cases I know of.
Neither of the above is reason to panic. But it has been the case for a decade or so now that we have developed and implemented numerous technologies that can be used to track the movements of individuals, as well as just about everything else they do. I wouldn't get out the tar and feathers until I hear an official proposal from USDOT that they want to require GPS devices in private motor vehicles. Still, I think we all ought to be watching our legislators and policy makers very carefully, and to raise hell with them when we see a danger to our privacy. (There's nothing new about that.)
Unless the security staff saw him applying his bar code sticker to the package, I'm sort of surprised that he was caught on the second time. Store clerks often seem oblivious to the value of what they're scanning.
Je croix que les francaises sont hostile a quelques choses que ne sont pas francaises. (Je faire plaisanterie!)
Having just abused both the French and their language, I'll say that everytime I look for information on open source stuff, a good proportion of the useful results turn up from.fr domains, and most of it in better English than I see on/.. Whether the French government is hostile to open source, I don't know, but I appreciate contributions of the French people to open source as much as I appreciate their contributions to cuisine and viticulture, among quite a few other things.
Mais, vous pouvons tenir les andouillettes et les filetages francaises des velos. Salut!
The teenagers in my neck of the woods have these infernal car stereos that, when combined with their sound recordings (I can't in good conscience call it music), produces this loud bass thumpity-thump sound that can be heard indoors from the distance of a quarter-mile. So if they find a high-pitched whine annoying and leave, perhaps that's not such a bad thing.
Of course, I can remember the good old days when we had an 8-track or cassette player, a good amp and speakers, and my folks complaining about how loud the kids are "these days". And they didn't call The Who, Rolling Stones, etc., music, either.
Someone asked why adult Americans have it in for teenagers. It's because we all were teenagers ourselves, and we're sore about the fact that our parents' wish, "I hope your kids turn out to be just like you", came true. Either that, or we're jealous that we know what we'd do if we were their age, now that we're older and wiser.
If introverts have more brain activity, that would certainly make them not normal. I think it might be "wrong", too. Remember the Pythons: "He's that most dangerous of creatures, a clever sheep."
Find the fine manual for desktop settings. And when you do, please tell me where it is. I've been using the Gnome desktop for several years, and occasionally I'll stumble across a neat feature, set it, and then it'll get unset, and I can't find how I set it in the first place.
I've mentioned it before and I'll mention it again. I think we could use moderated stories. You could browse at +5 stories to cut out the crap or at 0: fark style. Moderate a story -1: dupe or +1: headline. Any reasons not to implement this?
The editorial process seems to work pretty well at weeding out the chaff. It's certainly weeded out all of my submissions so far!
Hmm. Maybe someone will figure out that Methuselah and all those other guys had this gene and that it has evolved out of us? (It could make for an interesting bit in the biblical-inerrancy/evolution flame wars, anyway.)
I noticed that, too. Microsoft's web site says they commissioned the study, and the PDF containing the study says Microsoft paid for the study. So far, the only reference to it as an independent study is the/. post. I would like to see less/. FUD and leave the fearmongering to Microsoft.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) was invented over 30 years ago. Even the French bought into it, and GMT has been irrelevant ever since. I think the fellow in the Earth Rotation Service is just afraid he'll be out of a job.
IMHO, they should keep making the adjustments to keep time in sync with the sun. What, should we go back to the chaotic days when there were multiple reference meridians (Cádiz, Paris, etc.)?
... that the people who write these articles about the mis-doings in Congress would include the bill number (S1234, HB4321, etc.), so that 1) I could easily find the bill and see for myself if it is as evil as they say and 2) when I write my congressman to raise hell about it, I can cite the bill by its number. My beef is not just with this author but with many, many others who shout "the sky is falling" without sharing the information needed to do something about it. I haven't yet mastered the search tools on the Congress' web sites, and I suspect most other citizens are in the same boat.
I can't afford to buy a new computer everytime a new version of the operating system comes out.
Windows scripting languages *suck*. (I don't usually use that word, but this is one of those times there is nothing else appropriate.)
Neat tools I keep finding to do things like create PDF from images/text, or nmap.
Viruses don't target Linux as much, so I don't have to worry about updating McNorton.
Better control over my networking.
Better documentation, believe it or not.
I keep finding restrictions on how I can use the software (whether or not it came from Microsoft) in the licensing agreements, like the "no benchmarking.NET" in something I installed for my wife recently.
Commercial software vendors think it's okay to stick ads or nosey bundled software in their products.
There may be more. The short answer is that I'd be an idiot not to switch.
A friend of mine actually quit Everquest over a forced name change. His name was Marilyn Hanson and while fighting something he was disconnected without warning.
It'll be a sad day when CmdrTaco is a celebrity name.
You didn't say it explicitly, but whatever the solution is, we should lobby our Congress critters, bureaucrats, and financial institutions to ensure that the solution is available to be ported to open source environments. One of my banks just barely got around to creating a website that doesn't tick off Mozilla/Firefox's JavaScript with non-standard function calls. I'd hate to go back to square zero again.
As far as collecting the digits on the credit card number goes, just hang around anywhere that people use credit cards a lot and routinely discard the receipts. Perhaps empty the trash at a service station.
For that matter, send the same last four digits in your phishing email:
XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-9713
Of a million recipients, there have to be some whose accounts will match, and of those, some will take the bait.
I think you are right-on. BB&T has a web-only email system as part of its online banking. They send nothing via SMTP. On the other hand, I was mad as heck at AT&T, who sent me unsigned, unsolicited email using the email address from my online accounts, and who shared that information with an airline (Delta, I think) in another incident. In the first incident, the email was just like a phishing email, and it originated not from a machine in an AT&T domain but from an outside contractor. When I called AT&T's customer service to verify before I raised a stink about it, their attitude was that it was no big deal. Habit is part of security. If people are accustomed to receiving official communications over an unsecure medium and it requires significant effort on their part to authenticate them, guess what? They will readily fall victim to phishing.
I know some will argue that postal mail is also an unsecure medium, but it costs a bit of money to fake bank stationery very well, and there is more of a trail.
Someone suggested PGP for signing bank emails, but I would even settle for the banks' using commercial signature methods that are automatically supported in Outlook and Netscape mail. (I haven't looked into it with Firefox or Mozilla yet.) This would be useful to the majority of customers, who IMHO are more susceptible to phishing and less able to take other measures to validate the source of an email.
I'm moving up to Canada, the worst they have there is stray polar bears. Who's coming with me?
From what little I've seen, the Canadians are just as messed up as we are, just in different ways. I recommend moving to Antarctica, where no government is allowed to claim jurisdiction.
Re:If it ain't broke, wait, it's broke
on
Palm's Mistakes
·
· Score: 1
My Palm i705 works fine with my Linux box running Jpilot. It meets my needs perfectly: Scheduling, remembering stuff (like the 100+ logins and passwords I have), and keeping track of phone numbers. Since it's not connected to any network, I don't really have to worry about viruses, and an add-on security package (Only Me) has taken care of any security worries I had. All of the shareware apps I bought work well enough.
Naturally, something this good and simple is doomed to failure. Palm doesn't stand to make any more money from me until my current Palm unit dies. But if I can't stay with PalmOS, I'll probably go back to paper. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, which ought to be within the next year, based on the i705's precessor's track record.
That said, remember how the ancient Greeks chose their leaders by lot from the available pool of citizens? Man, they had a lot more faith in their average citizen than we do.
Perhaps they did, but I think the average ancient Greek citizen was male, and perhaps a bit more homogeneous in other ways, too.
FWIW, I don't think voire dire in and of itself is a bad thing. I just don't like the notion of attorneys for either side making a determination about whether I am suitable for a jury based on (potential mis-)information they can get from outside the courtroom.
Sadly, I think THE POWERFUL TRAMPLE THE WEEK is an axiom in any legal system you care to devise.
Slashdot Mirror
I read the fine documents Declan McCullagh referenced in his article. One was about a voluntary study that compared traditional data collection methods used for transporation planning with data collected automatically using GPS. Not surprisingly, the study found that people don't report their travels accurately, presumably because they don't remember things like running to get a video. Not a word about disabling cars.
Other links he referred to related to automated toll collection, which seems to be a very efficient way to pay for roads while keeping traffic moving. These systems are already in place throughout the U.S. Northeast using RFID chips that drivers willingly install in their cars. And yes, the information collected by automatic toll collection has been used in two criminal cases I know of.
Neither of the above is reason to panic. But it has been the case for a decade or so now that we have developed and implemented numerous technologies that can be used to track the movements of individuals, as well as just about everything else they do. I wouldn't get out the tar and feathers until I hear an official proposal from USDOT that they want to require GPS devices in private motor vehicles. Still, I think we all ought to be watching our legislators and policy makers very carefully, and to raise hell with them when we see a danger to our privacy. (There's nothing new about that.)
Unless the security staff saw him applying his bar code sticker to the package, I'm sort of surprised that he was caught on the second time. Store clerks often seem oblivious to the value of what they're scanning.
Having just abused both the French and their language, I'll say that everytime I look for information on open source stuff, a good proportion of the useful results turn up from .fr domains, and most of it in better English than I see on /.. Whether the French government is hostile to open source, I don't know, but I appreciate contributions of the French people to open source as much as I appreciate their contributions to cuisine and viticulture, among quite a few other things.
Mais, vous pouvons tenir les andouillettes et les filetages francaises des velos. Salut!
Of course, I can remember the good old days when we had an 8-track or cassette player, a good amp and speakers, and my folks complaining about how loud the kids are "these days". And they didn't call The Who, Rolling Stones, etc., music, either.
Someone asked why adult Americans have it in for teenagers. It's because we all were teenagers ourselves, and we're sore about the fact that our parents' wish, "I hope your kids turn out to be just like you", came true. Either that, or we're jealous that we know what we'd do if we were their age, now that we're older and wiser.
If introverts have more brain activity, that would certainly make them not normal. I think it might be "wrong", too. Remember the Pythons: "He's that most dangerous of creatures, a clever sheep."
When I consider the parade of personages that have occupied the White House in my lifetime, Carter is the most principled and honorable of the lot.
Guinness is good for you. I know. I saw one of their signs that said so!
Find the fine manual for desktop settings. And when you do, please tell me where it is. I've been using the Gnome desktop for several years, and occasionally I'll stumble across a neat feature, set it, and then it'll get unset, and I can't find how I set it in the first place.
The editorial process seems to work pretty well at weeding out the chaff. It's certainly weeded out all of my submissions so far!
Hmm. Maybe someone will figure out that Methuselah and all those other guys had this gene and that it has evolved out of us? (It could make for an interesting bit in the biblical-inerrancy/evolution flame wars, anyway.)
I noticed that, too. Microsoft's web site says they commissioned the study, and the PDF containing the study says Microsoft paid for the study. So far, the only reference to it as an independent study is the /. post. I would like to see less /. FUD and leave the fearmongering to Microsoft.
IMHO, they should keep making the adjustments to keep time in sync with the sun. What, should we go back to the chaotic days when there were multiple reference meridians (Cádiz, Paris, etc.)?
The warnings on the download page talk about criminal court. Whatever they're paying the attorney that wrote it for them is too much.
I think I would find something better to do during the first moth (sic).
... that the people who write these articles about the mis-doings in Congress would include the bill number (S1234, HB4321, etc.), so that 1) I could easily find the bill and see for myself if it is as evil as they say and 2) when I write my congressman to raise hell about it, I can cite the bill by its number. My beef is not just with this author but with many, many others who shout "the sky is falling" without sharing the information needed to do something about it. I haven't yet mastered the search tools on the Congress' web sites, and I suspect most other citizens are in the same boat.
Um.... Elected a born-again Christian president who can't see the applicability of Matthew 7:3 to the policies he promotes or condones?
- I can't afford to buy a new computer everytime a new version of the operating system comes out.
- Windows scripting languages *suck*. (I don't usually use that word, but this is one of those times there is nothing else appropriate.)
- Neat tools I keep finding to do things like create PDF from images/text, or nmap.
- Viruses don't target Linux as much, so I don't have to worry about updating McNorton.
- Better control over my networking.
- Better documentation, believe it or not.
- I keep finding restrictions on how I can use the software (whether or not it came from Microsoft) in the licensing agreements, like the "no benchmarking
.NET" in something I installed for my wife recently.
- Commercial software vendors think it's okay to stick ads or nosey bundled software in their products.
There may be more. The short answer is that I'd be an idiot not to switch.It'll be a sad day when CmdrTaco is a celebrity name.
You didn't say it explicitly, but whatever the solution is, we should lobby our Congress critters, bureaucrats, and financial institutions to ensure that the solution is available to be ported to open source environments. One of my banks just barely got around to creating a website that doesn't tick off Mozilla/Firefox's JavaScript with non-standard function calls. I'd hate to go back to square zero again.
My dad installed a mute button in our television in 1964, just so we wouldn't have to listen to the commercials.
For that matter, send the same last four digits in your phishing email: XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-9713 Of a million recipients, there have to be some whose accounts will match, and of those, some will take the bait.
I know some will argue that postal mail is also an unsecure medium, but it costs a bit of money to fake bank stationery very well, and there is more of a trail.
Someone suggested PGP for signing bank emails, but I would even settle for the banks' using commercial signature methods that are automatically supported in Outlook and Netscape mail. (I haven't looked into it with Firefox or Mozilla yet.) This would be useful to the majority of customers, who IMHO are more susceptible to phishing and less able to take other measures to validate the source of an email.
From what little I've seen, the Canadians are just as messed up as we are, just in different ways. I recommend moving to Antarctica, where no government is allowed to claim jurisdiction.
Naturally, something this good and simple is doomed to failure. Palm doesn't stand to make any more money from me until my current Palm unit dies. But if I can't stay with PalmOS, I'll probably go back to paper. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, which ought to be within the next year, based on the i705's precessor's track record.
Perhaps they did, but I think the average ancient Greek citizen was male, and perhaps a bit more homogeneous in other ways, too.
FWIW, I don't think voire dire in and of itself is a bad thing. I just don't like the notion of attorneys for either side making a determination about whether I am suitable for a jury based on (potential mis-)information they can get from outside the courtroom.
Sadly, I think THE POWERFUL TRAMPLE THE WEEK is an axiom in any legal system you care to devise.