Wiretapping is impractical. There are several reasons for this:
uneconomical
uneconomical
uneconomical
:^) Get my point? It's not economical because you would need to tap several thousand points around the internet in order to get a good 'sample' - and if somebody routes using a backbone or connection that isn't tapped... oh well. And mind you no sysadmin is going to let the feds anywhere near his hardware without making a big fuss over it - likely the whole 'net will know exactly which ISPs, routes, backbones, and servers are 'bugged'. Even then.. just use an 'untapped' route as a proxy - just like telnet proxying that many crackers employ.
The second reason it's uneconomical is because it's alot easier to place a hardware bug into current systems (plug in a system board, replace the network card with a lookalike and a transmitter, tempest, etc) than to tap the upstream site(s) they will be using.
The third and final reason it's uneconomical is because this all assumes the would-be criminal isn't using encryption - and if he's savvy he likely is. So what's the point? They wouldn't be able to spy on the criminals anyway - just the average american who thinks IE and outlook express are the greatest programs ever.
Soooo... my take on it? The feds want to monitor domestic communications, because anything else is impractical - too expensive even for the Big Three.
Either way, it's going to result in polarization between the 'haves' and the 'have-nots'. Inevitably when you polarize people like that you get agression, resentment, and hate. Witness the Holocaust, slavery in the US, or taiwan v. china. In all of these cases either a natural or artificial barrier came between the two groups.. and as a result animosity, hate, and resentment nearly instantly came to the surface.
Genetic manipulation will herald a new era of bigotry and a more refined form of racism - now people can say "I REALLY AM better than you!" This is really going to work wonders in our culture - I can invision the entire econo-political system breaking down over the course of 50 years and various factions emerging to vi for power. Oh... what interesting times we'll live in indeed...
I agree. The SPOF point you made really hits home - under the current system there are hundreds, if not thousands of banks operating under dozens of francises. It's unlikely that even a complete failure of any one of them, or a small group of them, would have any impact on the market.
But, what if you disabled electronic transfers between them - no bank could xfer funds to another. In very short order you would have pure chaos! Especially after everybody realized their money wasn't instantly available and rushed to get it out "before everybody else does".
Yeesh... I can see the headlines now - "Microsoft's Crashing OS Crashes Global Economy - film at 11".
Well, usually there is the self-correcting mechanism in genetics - if you have undesirable traits you're less likely to reproduce. Unfortunately that feature has been disabled in current versions of Society. As a result, bad genes will continue to be propagated. Normally if, for example, intelligence was the most preferred trait.. you'd eventually start getting intelligent people. But now that we can control genetics... maybe there will be a glut of football players instead of intelligent people.. bypassing the darwinian method of selection.
End result? Stupid people keep getting stupider, and smart people keep getting smarter.. instead of the other way around - ie, stupid people get smarter with each generation, along with the "already" smart ones.
If you've seen the movie, that's all I need to say to get my point across. For those that haven't, go see it right now - it was one of those pivotal sci fi movies you should have seen.:) The plot of the movie is basically fast forwarded n years to the future where we now control the genes of every person. Right from birth, your destiny is controlled by your genes - you can work some places, but not others.. and the world is basically divided up by "how good your genes are", and by extension - how useful you are. Think if it as the ultimate in racism. There is a very real possiblity of this happening - I don't believe this society (or any society in existance right now) is fully prepared to start meddling with genetics. It's an all-too-real possiblity that we'll create a world up with the "genetically superhuman", and the "normals" who are by definition, inferior.. and then it's only a short step to an all out war. This is something you'll read about over and over again - it's a well-used plot in science fiction. Heed their warnings.
Just wanted to give you the heads up on something - pgsql lets you pop in your own custom functions, so you can do things that are simply impossible to do client-side due to the limitations of SQL. The other thing is that you can define your own user data types. The last feature that I've been wondering about is the ability to retrieve data in n dimensional - I have no idea what they're talking about, but it sounds alittle like using vectors in C++ to return objects. Might be useful, might not be - I don't know.
Excellent. Maybe this will help curb the "Redhat is going to take over the market and become the next Microsoft!!!!" hysteria amongst the slashdot readership. It's also a somewhat unusual move - maybe Intel is hedging it's bets. Kinda agrees with the idea that Redhat != Linux. Or maybe Intel believes that different distributions have different customers, and want to appeal to the broadest possible market.
No, they're merely as uneducated as everybody else in quantum theory. Anyway, it does seem alittle strange that people keep thinking that a bunch of physicists are going to blow up the world. I'd trust a physicist over a politician claiming the 'end of the world' any day. Besides, it's the politician that's going to cause WWIII, not the physicist. . .
Who cares about the big bang? What I want to know is what happens when they smash clueons and bogons together? What do you get - the element MadScientistium?
If you want my opinion - wearable computing won't happen until two things come true: the system is made as unobtrusive as a walkman, and they find some way to make a stylish eyepiece (instead of making you look like the Borg).
Even then, as with anything technology, it will be adopted out of necessity. Some of the early markets right now are surveyors - who need mobile computing to call up blueprints, do some trig/other math. I can see how mobile computing might be useful for law enforcement. You could switch to infra-red, or ultraviolet while in pursuit of a suspect. You could call up a 3d "overhead-map" of the nearby neighborhood, and see the location of other squad cars relative to your location (and the location of the suspect). Alittle too 'cheezy' perhaps, but I can see it happening. Alot of officers literally work in the dark. People who drive for a living, like truck drivers or bus drivers, who could use augmented reality to see, for example, warnings of an accident ahead, and arrows pointing to an alternate route, or maybe overlay the route they should take.
But for some things, it's obviously pointless - home computing, for example. The eyepiece may allow a much bigger 'virtual screen', but I suspect when people get home, they'd rather not be wearing a dozen peripherals.:) That's my $0.02
This 11 fellow is already violating at least one of the rules that he sees every time he posts: "use a clear subject that describes what your message is about." Hardly a role-model for the community.
Unless I'm off-topic (in which case I'll promptly be moderated out of everybody's way), the subject line is always on topic. Would you prefer I put in a different meaningless filler line instead? How about for this one "G3 CPU" instead of "..." ? "..." is easier. Unless I'm going off-topic, I really don't even see the need to include a subject line - slash already breaks this down for you.
people will learn that character is one's greatest asset, that hurting others is wrong, and that there's no "i" in "Slashdot Comment System"
... Funny how just before this you run off and say I'm an arrogant bastard hell-bent on some kind of popularity contest... and then turn around and post a few lines of mean-nothing text, which is essentially a personal slam and get moderated up 2 points! Oh, the twisted irony...
Anyway, I find it just laughably funny that anyone would believe that I'm here to 'be popular'. Yeah.. right. Online? With a bunch of anonymous people I'll never meet? Just think about that alittle. I'm not sure whether you're the same person, or another, but alot of ACs have complained that my posts are "meaningless". I've even had a few moderators mark down perfectly good comments lately. Does this bother me? Not really. It's a curiosity, but little more. The only reason I mention it is because so many of you find it interesting.
Bottom line: If you disagree with me, fine. If you think my posts suck, fine. But the majority of people here don't believe that, and this is just a fact you are going to have to live with, unpleasant though it may be. If you really feel strongly about it, e-mail this guy and let him know how you feel. While you're at it, how about suggesting an alternative moderation system.. maybe one that's more fair to people like you?
My e-mail address is, as always, attached to any post I make. Contact me off slashdot if you have some constructive criticism.
Enlightenment is cool, it's pretty fast.. and I've found that after 2 releases, any feature is debugged well enough to be used in production. On the other hand, I wish gnome would get it's act together - those original 1.0 rpms were 100% eeeeviiill, and the new ones, while fixing ALOT of those bugs still has a ways to go yet. My biggest complaint is a kind of temporary-lockup when resizing a window for the first time after starting gnome.:\
He's suffering from karma-envy. It happens after you pass about 100kp - people start getting jealous and moderate you down, or start claiming your post sucks (despite your high score and proven record of posting insightful / interesting / funny things).
Unfortunately even if he DID moderate me down, I've inked a deal similar to the one Bruce Perens has with Rob to have some code changed in slashdot. Namely:
This doesn't strike me as odd - it hasn't shipped yet (right?), and they're planning on fixing it (unlike a certain well-known software company). I'm not that suprised either - CPU design has largely been focused around symetric processing, timing signals, and other such things to keep the processor 'in sync'. From what I've read, new processor designs (like the G4) are trying to become asymetrical, parallel, and generally doing alot of things that haven't been done before - things that up until now had alot of timing issues.
What suprises me is that they haven't had more problems!
Oh, it's funny alright.:^) I am just alittle annoyed that/. posted something like this - haven't we had enough "Hey look over there - it's another clueless journalist trying to write about us! Hahahhahahahaha!" stories in the last month?
d00d u r s0 l335! I'm a really l335 d00d because I can download warez and pr0n for free!! d00d, I am l335! Now I'm on MTV, and wow, I get to talk with all these, like, totally l335 d00ds. But I'm not gonna tell them anything, because they might have been sent from The Man.
Let me guess, they're interviewing some kid that has probably just recently figured out his johnson can be used for more than utilitarian purposes? Comeon people... first, it's "cracker", not "hacker", and secondly crackers by their very nature are going to be difficult to find. Do 'ya really think some 13 year old kid appearing on MTV is a national threat blah blah blah invasion of privacy blah blah credit card blah blah info-criminal blah blah. Give me a break. Throwing stuff like this up on slashdot is a slap in the face - it offends our understanding of how this culture works. The fact that today's media is willing to believe anything a "hacker" says to be true without doing alittle fact-checking is disheartening to say the least. If I called up Channel 4 right now and said I just launched a tactical nuke at washington DC, what would the response be? Probably laughter. Now, if I say I *could* do that, all of the sudden they take me seriously. Go figure.
If you want me to 'grade' you, I'd say you got BIOS, squeaked by on EIDE, missed SMB (it's windows filesharing), and guestimated on toothpick - I *really did* mean the kind you use to clean your teeth with.
I have a friend that is more of a SW than HW guy, so no biggie.. but if you really want to be a geek, you gotta know both. And about your ignorance - hrmph. Most people can't fake it more than a few minutes at most.. and if there's ever any doubt, I wing a couple random acronyms by them and see what happens. Since you have a sw background, I'd probably throw GUI, API, OLE and FAT at you.:)
On your excuses part, formal education probably won't do you much good until college -- it's just a given. Best bets are to find semi-current books ( less than 3 years old ), and track down a few local gurus to help you out on the grey areas. QBASIC isn't programming *g*, and it's quite obvious you're a high school student... I'd guess frosh/sophomore. You're in the ballpark as far as your computer knowledge, I wouldn't fault yourself too much.. it sounds like you live somewhere that's still in the technological dark ages...
As for me having a touch of 'elitism', you're probably right. I have a strong aversion to stupid people - esp. ones that ask you the same questions over and over again instead of asking you once, clearing up any ambiguities they may have about the answer, and moving on. I don't like people who waste my time - I only got 24 hours each day to do something productive, and spending a couple hours of it helping some retard figure out which side up to put the floppy into the drive doesn't fit that definition.
Eh, let's all start a campaign to print slashdot out on our laserjets, dot matrix printers, and post it all over the office (just like those UF comics I know you have hanging in your cube). "not in print" my arse. It's just that the news happens so quickly there's no point to printing it - it's not that we can't...:)
Anyway, back to the issue of IT shortage - yeah.. right. I don't know about you, but I spent alot (and I mean *alot*) of time doing tech support. The vast majority of people may eventually become computer literate enough to send e-mail and browse the internet without having to call us someday.. but I can guarantee you there will always be the same percentage of people who actually enjoy testing the limits of computers. And 'geek posers' are very easy to see through.. just ask them what BIOS, EIDE, or PLL means. If you really want to be mean, go into 'raw Data mode' and start throwing out random tech terms like so:
Well, after I reconfigure SMB on a VAX to use my 8.4 Gb HDD instead of my old SCSI, I'm going to restart all the daemons, and then check for network connectivity using vi and a toothpick.:) If networkweek was still running bofh weekly's, I'd suggest the excuse-of-the-day as well.
Anyway, my point is that while lots of people will flock to the money to get into computers, it really won't affect those of us who *really know the technology, and enjoy working with it*. The wannabes will compete with themselves...
Well, a distributed-processing form of this to increase the 'noise level' to such an extent that the monitoring is rendered useless is a good idea - but these hacktivists seem to want to organize their 30 seconds of fame, and then end the project, rather than excerting the effort required for a long-term viable political movement.
Slashdot Mirror
The second reason it's uneconomical is because it's alot easier to place a hardware bug into current systems (plug in a system board, replace the network card with a lookalike and a transmitter, tempest, etc) than to tap the upstream site(s) they will be using.
The third and final reason it's uneconomical is because this all assumes the would-be criminal isn't using encryption - and if he's savvy he likely is. So what's the point? They wouldn't be able to spy on the criminals anyway - just the average american who thinks IE and outlook express are the greatest programs ever.
Soooo... my take on it? The feds want to monitor domestic communications, because anything else is impractical - too expensive even for the Big Three.
--
Genetic manipulation will herald a new era of bigotry and a more refined form of racism - now people can say "I REALLY AM better than you!" This is really going to work wonders in our culture - I can invision the entire econo-political system breaking down over the course of 50 years and various factions emerging to vi for power. Oh... what interesting times we'll live in indeed...
--
But, what if you disabled electronic transfers between them - no bank could xfer funds to another. In very short order you would have pure chaos! Especially after everybody realized their money wasn't instantly available and rushed to get it out "before everybody else does".
Yeesh... I can see the headlines now - "Microsoft's Crashing OS Crashes Global Economy - film at 11".
--
It's "GATTACA" not "GATTAGA" as another reader pointed out. Sorry!
--
End result? Stupid people keep getting stupider, and smart people keep getting smarter.. instead of the other way around - ie, stupid people get smarter with each generation, along with the "already" smart ones.
Wonderful.. talk about THE crisis of mankind...
--
GATTAGA
:) The plot of the movie is basically fast forwarded n years to the future where we now control the genes of every person. Right from birth, your destiny is controlled by your genes - you can work some places, but not others.. and the world is basically divided up by "how good your genes are", and by extension - how useful you are. Think if it as the ultimate in racism. There is a very real possiblity of this happening - I don't believe this society (or any society in existance right now) is fully prepared to start meddling with genetics. It's an all-too-real possiblity that we'll create a world up with the "genetically superhuman", and the "normals" who are by definition, inferior.. and then it's only a short step to an all out war. This is something you'll read about over and over again - it's a well-used plot in science fiction. Heed their warnings.
If you've seen the movie, that's all I need to say to get my point across. For those that haven't, go see it right now - it was one of those pivotal sci fi movies you should have seen.
--
"This is where you will go today."
--
Just wanted to give you the heads up on something - pgsql lets you pop in your own custom functions, so you can do things that are simply impossible to do client-side due to the limitations of SQL. The other thing is that you can define your own user data types. The last feature that I've been wondering about is the ability to retrieve data in n dimensional - I have no idea what they're talking about, but it sounds alittle like using vectors in C++ to return objects. Might be useful, might not be - I don't know.
--
Excellent. Maybe this will help curb the "Redhat is going to take over the market and become the next Microsoft!!!!" hysteria amongst the slashdot readership. It's also a somewhat unusual move - maybe Intel is hedging it's bets. Kinda agrees with the idea that Redhat != Linux. Or maybe Intel believes that different distributions have different customers, and want to appeal to the broadest possible market.
--
No, they're merely as uneducated as everybody else in quantum theory. Anyway, it does seem alittle strange that people keep thinking that a bunch of physicists are going to blow up the world. I'd trust a physicist over a politician claiming the 'end of the world' any day. Besides, it's the politician that's going to cause WWIII, not the physicist. . .
--
Who cares about the big bang? What I want to know is what happens when they smash clueons and bogons together? What do you get - the element MadScientistium?
--
Even then, as with anything technology, it will be adopted out of necessity. Some of the early markets right now are surveyors - who need mobile computing to call up blueprints, do some trig/other math. I can see how mobile computing might be useful for law enforcement. You could switch to infra-red, or ultraviolet while in pursuit of a suspect. You could call up a 3d "overhead-map" of the nearby neighborhood, and see the location of other squad cars relative to your location (and the location of the suspect). Alittle too 'cheezy' perhaps, but I can see it happening. Alot of officers literally work in the dark. People who drive for a living, like truck drivers or bus drivers, who could use augmented reality to see, for example, warnings of an accident ahead, and arrows pointing to an alternate route, or maybe overlay the route they should take.
But for some things, it's obviously pointless - home computing, for example. The eyepiece may allow a much bigger 'virtual screen', but I suspect when people get home, they'd rather not be wearing a dozen peripherals. :) That's my $0.02
--
Unless I'm off-topic (in which case I'll promptly be moderated out of everybody's way), the subject line is always on topic. Would you prefer I put in a different meaningless filler line instead? How about for this one "G3 CPU" instead of "..." ? "..." is easier. Unless I'm going off-topic, I really don't even see the need to include a subject line - slash already breaks this down for you.
people will learn that character is one's greatest asset, that hurting others is wrong, and that there's no "i" in "Slashdot Comment System"
... Funny how just before this you run off and say I'm an arrogant bastard hell-bent on some kind of popularity contest... and then turn around and post a few lines of mean-nothing text, which is essentially a personal slam and get moderated up 2 points! Oh, the twisted irony...
Anyway, I find it just laughably funny that anyone would believe that I'm here to 'be popular'. Yeah.. right. Online? With a bunch of anonymous people I'll never meet? Just think about that alittle. I'm not sure whether you're the same person, or another, but alot of ACs have complained that my posts are "meaningless". I've even had a few moderators mark down perfectly good comments lately. Does this bother me? Not really. It's a curiosity, but little more. The only reason I mention it is because so many of you find it interesting.
Bottom line: If you disagree with me, fine. If you think my posts suck, fine. But the majority of people here don't believe that, and this is just a fact you are going to have to live with, unpleasant though it may be. If you really feel strongly about it, e-mail this guy and let him know how you feel. While you're at it, how about suggesting an alternative moderation system.. maybe one that's more fair to people like you?
My e-mail address is, as always, attached to any post I make. Contact me off slashdot if you have some constructive criticism.
--
Enlightenment is cool, it's pretty fast.. and I've found that after 2 releases, any feature is debugged well enough to be used in production. On the other hand, I wish gnome would get it's act together - those original 1.0 rpms were 100% eeeeviiill, and the new ones, while fixing ALOT of those bugs still has a ways to go yet. My biggest complaint is a kind of temporary-lockup when resizing a window for the first time after starting gnome. :\
--
Unfortunately even if he DID moderate me down, I've inked a deal similar to the one Bruce Perens has with Rob to have some code changed in slashdot. Namely:
if(strcmp(poster->name,"Signal 11") == 0 || strcmp(poster->name,"Bruce Perens) == 0){
poster->karma++;
}
:^) Yup, and I would have gotten away with it too had it not been for these meddling ACs!
--
What suprises me is that they haven't had more problems!
--
Oh, it's funny alright. :^) I am just alittle annoyed that /. posted something like this - haven't we had enough "Hey look over there - it's another clueless journalist trying to write about us! Hahahhahahahaha!" stories in the last month?
--
... well, ancedotal evidence supports the theory that one codes better when wearing only your underwear.
--
Let me guess, they're interviewing some kid that has probably just recently figured out his johnson can be used for more than utilitarian purposes? Comeon people... first, it's "cracker", not "hacker", and secondly crackers by their very nature are going to be difficult to find. Do 'ya really think some 13 year old kid appearing on MTV is a national threat blah blah blah invasion of privacy blah blah credit card blah blah info-criminal blah blah. Give me a break. Throwing stuff like this up on slashdot is a slap in the face - it offends our understanding of how this culture works. The fact that today's media is willing to believe anything a "hacker" says to be true without doing alittle fact-checking is disheartening to say the least. If I called up Channel 4 right now and said I just launched a tactical nuke at washington DC, what would the response be? Probably laughter. Now, if I say I *could* do that, all of the sudden they take me seriously. Go figure.
Solution: *click* *click* *delete*
--
I have a friend that is more of a SW than HW guy, so no biggie.. but if you really want to be a geek, you gotta know both. And about your ignorance - hrmph. Most people can't fake it more than a few minutes at most.. and if there's ever any doubt, I wing a couple random acronyms by them and see what happens. Since you have a sw background, I'd probably throw GUI, API, OLE and FAT at you. :)
On your excuses part, formal education probably won't do you much good until college -- it's just a given. Best bets are to find semi-current books ( less than 3 years old ), and track down a few local gurus to help you out on the grey areas. QBASIC isn't programming *g*, and it's quite obvious you're a high school student... I'd guess frosh/sophomore. You're in the ballpark as far as your computer knowledge, I wouldn't fault yourself too much.. it sounds like you live somewhere that's still in the technological dark ages...
As for me having a touch of 'elitism', you're probably right. I have a strong aversion to stupid people - esp. ones that ask you the same questions over and over again instead of asking you once, clearing up any ambiguities they may have about the answer, and moving on. I don't like people who waste my time - I only got 24 hours each day to do something productive, and spending a couple hours of it helping some retard figure out which side up to put the floppy into the drive doesn't fit that definition.
--
I just got done explaining that people who are only in it for the money will wind up competing with themselves - not people like you and I!!!
--
Democracy, n: Election of the corrupt few by the ignorant many.
--
Anyway, back to the issue of IT shortage - yeah.. right. I don't know about you, but I spent alot (and I mean *alot*) of time doing tech support. The vast majority of people may eventually become computer literate enough to send e-mail and browse the internet without having to call us someday.. but I can guarantee you there will always be the same percentage of people who actually enjoy testing the limits of computers. And 'geek posers' are very easy to see through.. just ask them what BIOS, EIDE, or PLL means. If you really want to be mean, go into 'raw Data mode' and start throwing out random tech terms like so:
Well, after I reconfigure SMB on a VAX to use my 8.4 Gb HDD instead of my old SCSI, I'm going to restart all the daemons, and then check for network connectivity using vi and a toothpick. :) If networkweek was still running bofh weekly's, I'd suggest the excuse-of-the-day as well.
Anyway, my point is that while lots of people will flock to the money to get into computers, it really won't affect those of us who *really know the technology, and enjoy working with it*. The wannabes will compete with themselves...
--
Well, a distributed-processing form of this to increase the 'noise level' to such an extent that the monitoring is rendered useless is a good idea - but these hacktivists seem to want to organize their 30 seconds of fame, and then end the project, rather than excerting the effort required for a long-term viable political movement.
--
Alien visitors - if you lived here, you'd be home by now!
--