Actually giving a shit about Rush Whatsisname's idiot opinions has the unfortunate effect of causing people to repeat those opinions in forums other than the US AM radio spectrum, if only to refute them, which means far far more people hear Rush's moronic ideas than would have otherwise been the case. If you want Rush to go away, don't listen to him and certainly don't *ever* repeat anything he said in another forum.
I also remember being surprised by how thoroughly backwards the US is about a lot of stuff when moving here from Aus a few years ago. Retail banking is like stepping back to 1974. It's bizzare.
..however according to the bbc version of the article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6284214 .stm), the very last mammoths died out only about 5,000 years ago - ones from Wrangel Island, north east of Russia
Yeah, I mean, we can't have people openly mocking this trend to pathologize almost any behavior that's somehow seen as undesirable. It'd open the whole process up to scrutiny and we wouldn't want that now..
using a computer is an exercise in thinking in a particular way.
if you learn to program in a high-level language, you find day-to-day use of the computer much easier. your mum and gamer friends start to call you because you seem to be able to 'just work it out' even on an unfamiliar system / OS (alright, except windows. but windows was written by marketing droids, not programmers. that thing is the work of the devil). learning to program taught you something about how other programmers think, so working out what might be going wrong on your mum's computer gets easier because you have some sense of what the possibilities / constraints are.
if you learn to program in assembly, you find programming in high level languages gets much easier. your mum calls you to help work out what's wrong with her latest php code, even though it's not a language you're super familiar with (your gamer friends are still useless morons though). learning assembly taught you something about the building blocks of high level languages, and you have some sense of the underlying structure and constraints associated with any high-level language.
assembly is an exercise in thinking in a particular way. it's a way of thinking that facilitates anything 'higher level' with computers, be it programming or simply using one as a tool.
.. not merely making it usable for the last few thousand people in rural [country] still on 33k dialup, but more to the point fixing the *real* mainstream problem google apps currently has - the huge proportion of people who use computers for daily work who use laptops and who are intermittently connected. nice - thanks for the link.
"it represents an integrated, comprehensive application environment for our students to embrace from home, campus, or the Australian outback."
I visited my parents recently. They live in the Australia outback. Their internet connection was 33k dialup, and that's all that was commercially available to them. Believe me, even checking a gmail account was slow and painful, let alone writing replies in an environment where you lose everything if the connection dropped (which it did with annoying regularity). I can't imagine trying to be productive on a web-based wordprocessor or spreadsheet.
That *is* the law in California, if you're in a non-salary position. If you get paid hourly, and document (ie keep your timestamped emails, keep a diary of phone calls etc) time spent outside of your regular paid work you can easily make a claim for unpaid work. The onus is on your manager to notice that you're replying to emails outside of your paid work hours and instruct you not to do so (or tell you to remember to put it on your timesheet).
I keep waiting for Google to respond to one of these idiotic 'copyright' cases by simply removing service to IP address space associated with the country as an object lesson.
I can't imagine the Belgian public putting up for long with completely losing access to Google simply because their copyright laws were written in another century..
My comment was intended more cynically - if what the article suggests is true (cloning a passport is trivial) then someone should demonstrate the utility of such an act.
Having said that, from the article: "Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip. Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes. When the cloned ePassport is read and compared to the original one it behaves exactly the same.... RFID chips can be read at a short distance and tracked without their owner's knowledge, while the key to unlocking the passport's chip consists of details actually printed on the passport itself."
It's not exactly a high-tech article, and the reporter definitely sounds a bit credulous, but as I recall the original argument was that duplicating the rfid was essentially impossible due to the kind of reasons you suggest. The article suggests that this argument is a nonsense, and that there may be other security holes as well ("the key to unlocking the passport's chip consists of details actually printed on the passport itself") which may weaken or invalidate other core aspects of the putative security model.
"It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip."
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. Hell, he's probably got a diplomatic passport == no search. Pure gold to anyone wanting to move anything *really* profitable.
spotlight is amazing for finding files in your home directory but close to useless for finding system files (one of the OP's main complaints). as a simple example, try finding where apple has put the 'whoami' bin using spotlight. on my machine, spotlight finds 41 files (mostly random.h files) but not the executable itself. locate happily spits out:
there's a useful sociology term for this: co-constitutive.
the average joe's ideas about what (for example) gunfire sounds like come largely from hollywood; hollywood's ideas about what gunfire should sound like come largely from that fact that most of hollywood consists of average joes (ie laypeople with respect to the technical subject in question). they feed each other.
I think it's great that so many people are being directly exposed to a device with such excessive DRM. It'll make it easier to explain to the general public why current copyright trends are so bad if lots of people have been burned badly by it (or know someone who has). What's the quote - the US withdrew from Vietnam only after every adult in the US knew someone who'd been killed there..
When one cop is arresting you, and two other cops are standing around scratching themselves (as they are in the second half of the video), your friend can indeed ask them for their names and badge numbers. Although if you drive off while he's doing so, you'll be evading arrest, and in *way* more shit than you were when you first got pulled over.
However, this aside, the Supreme Court has ruled that bystanders have a first amendment right to observe arrests (Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229 (1963). Other State-level rulings (eg 148 F.3d 719 (7th Cir. 1998) Humphrey v. Staszak) which have not been overturned by SCOTUS give bystanders the right to demand badge numbers even from undercover police, and to assume that they are not in fact police if they refuse to do so (giving both the arrestee and bystanders the legitimate right to physically intervene). ie given that the UCPD cops refused to provide badge numbers and names, the bystanders in the library could have chosen to intervene by physically restraining the UCPD cops until the LAPD arrived, in the same way that they could have if the assailants weren't wearing uniforms and claiming to be police.
Regardless of whether the cops were responding appropriately by tasering him or not (and, as you point out, we're missing the first half of the interaction), the fact the cops refused to provide names and badge numbers to onlookers on request tells you either a) the cops believed they were doing something wrong; or b) the cops believed they did not need to be accountable. Either of those is a huge problem, independent of the justifiability of the initial tasering.
As a number of posters have pointed out, installing windows is a bitch too. However, it's kind of irrelevant - most non-geeks don't install either; they rely on people like us to do it for them. Installation is a one-time thing - it's the day-to-day user experience that matters.
My gf is a case in point - she got sick of bad windows behavior, and agreed to let me install suse on her laptop to see if that'd work for her. She liked a lot of things about it (no endless popups and second-guessing by the OS, mainly). However, her real frustration was the file structure and application naming conventions. Case in point: she fires up firefox and clicks on a.doc link. It asks her to locate the application to open it with, and wants a file path to the application. She rummages around the file tree for a while before giving up in disgust - she didn't know she needed to look in/opt/OpenOffice.org/program/, and that what she was looking for was called 'swriter'. Weirdly enough. Sure, I can change preferences in firefox for her to fix this particular problem, but being asked what application you want to open a file in is a normal, day to day part of using an OS. I even sat down one day and walked her through the whole/usr,/usr/local/bin,/usr/bin,/sbin, and/opt trees to her, so she'd at least have a rough idea *where* she might find the relevant application next time it happened. Which helped a bit, but it really doesn't help that linux apps are often named differently from what you'd expect - who'd know that acrobat is called acroread without being told, for example?
She's since moved to a mac, and is delighted to be able to concentrate on her work, instead of wrestling with inanity (windows) or struggling with obtuseness (linux). When she clicks on a link or file and it wants to know what application to open it with , it usually suggests a list of apps, instead of demanding a path. If she really had to go hunting, she knows applications are in/Applications, not scattered across 4 or 5 different parts of the file tree with unintuitive names.
It's this basic usability stuff which makes linux hard to use for the general public, not the installation process.
"Human life is a continuum from conception to death".
What's with the obsession with 'conception'? Conception is one of a long, long, long list of biological processes that *must* occur, and *must* occur in the right sequence for a birth to occur. It's hardly the first step in the process, nor is it the last. The obsession of the American Right with 'conception' is really just an extension of their general obsession with sex, and their desire to control other people's understanding of when and under what conditions sex is appropriate.
And, I say this with all due consideration of the term I'm about to use, you can all go fuck yourselves before I'll accept your divine right to dictate the terms of everyone's sex life. I don't care what third-rate, unscientific, sex-obsessed justifications you want to use.
The last time the rifles people had in the closet were a technological match to the military firepower of the day was the Boer war. The Boers still lost, eventually. The American 2nd amendment is useless unless it grants you the ability to own something that can shoot down a B52.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually giving a shit about Rush Whatsisname's idiot opinions has the unfortunate effect of causing people to repeat those opinions in forums other than the US AM radio spectrum, if only to refute them, which means far far more people hear Rush's moronic ideas than would have otherwise been the case. If you want Rush to go away, don't listen to him and certainly don't *ever* repeat anything he said in another forum.
I also remember being surprised by how thoroughly backwards the US is about a lot of stuff when moving here from Aus a few years ago. Retail banking is like stepping back to 1974. It's bizzare.
..however according to the bbc version of the article (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6284214 .stm), the very last mammoths died out only about 5,000 years ago - ones from Wrangel Island, north east of Russia
Yeah, I mean, we can't have people openly mocking this trend to pathologize almost any behavior that's somehow seen as undesirable. It'd open the whole process up to scrutiny and we wouldn't want that now..
using a computer is an exercise in thinking in a particular way.
if you learn to program in a high-level language, you find day-to-day use of the computer much easier. your mum and gamer friends start to call you because you seem to be able to 'just work it out' even on an unfamiliar system / OS (alright, except windows. but windows was written by marketing droids, not programmers. that thing is the work of the devil). learning to program taught you something about how other programmers think, so working out what might be going wrong on your mum's computer gets easier because you have some sense of what the possibilities / constraints are.
if you learn to program in assembly, you find programming in high level languages gets much easier. your mum calls you to help work out what's wrong with her latest php code, even though it's not a language you're super familiar with (your gamer friends are still useless morons though). learning assembly taught you something about the building blocks of high level languages, and you have some sense of the underlying structure and constraints associated with any high-level language.
assembly is an exercise in thinking in a particular way. it's a way of thinking that facilitates anything 'higher level' with computers, be it programming or simply using one as a tool.
and it's fun.
.. and then he never lists any actual pdf tools.
My favorite is PDFLab - lets you extract, merge, add, delete, reorder pages. It's freeware.
http://www.iconus.ch/fabien/pdflab/
The same group also do cocoabooklet, an app for turning a pdf'd document into booklets (link on the page above).
.. not merely making it usable for the last few thousand people in rural [country] still on 33k dialup, but more to the point fixing the *real* mainstream problem google apps currently has - the huge proportion of people who use computers for daily work who use laptops and who are intermittently connected. nice - thanks for the link.
"it represents an integrated, comprehensive application environment for our students to embrace from home, campus, or the Australian outback."
I visited my parents recently. They live in the Australia outback. Their internet connection was 33k dialup, and that's all that was commercially available to them. Believe me, even checking a gmail account was slow and painful, let alone writing replies in an environment where you lose everything if the connection dropped (which it did with annoying regularity). I can't imagine trying to be productive on a web-based wordprocessor or spreadsheet.
That *is* the law in California, if you're in a non-salary position. If you get paid hourly, and document (ie keep your timestamped emails, keep a diary of phone calls etc) time spent outside of your regular paid work you can easily make a claim for unpaid work. The onus is on your manager to notice that you're replying to emails outside of your paid work hours and instruct you not to do so (or tell you to remember to put it on your timesheet).
I keep waiting for Google to respond to one of these idiotic 'copyright' cases by simply removing service to IP address space associated with the country as an object lesson.
I can't imagine the Belgian public putting up for long with completely losing access to Google simply because their copyright laws were written in another century..
Since July 2006.
0 7/content_346332.htm
http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/gyzg/t141754.htm
With tougher-yet standards coming in 2008:
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-07/
My comment was intended more cynically - if what the article suggests is true (cloning a passport is trivial) then someone should demonstrate the utility of such an act.
... RFID chips can be read at a short distance and tracked without their owner's knowledge, while the key to unlocking the passport's chip consists of details actually printed on the passport itself."
Having said that, from the article: "Now for the clever bit. Thanks to a software he himself has developed, called RFdump, he downloads the passport's data onto his computer and then onto a blank chip. Using a standard off-the-shelf component you can just buy at a component store you can have a cloned ePassport in less than five minutes. When the cloned ePassport is read and compared to the original one it behaves exactly the same.
It's not exactly a high-tech article, and the reporter definitely sounds a bit credulous, but as I recall the original argument was that duplicating the rfid was essentially impossible due to the kind of reasons you suggest. The article suggests that this argument is a nonsense, and that there may be other security holes as well ("the key to unlocking the passport's chip consists of details actually printed on the passport itself") which may weaken or invalidate other core aspects of the putative security model.
"It is hard to see why anyone would want to access the information on the chip."
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. Hell, he's probably got a diplomatic passport == no search. Pure gold to anyone wanting to move anything *really* profitable.
spotlight is amazing for finding files in your home directory but close to useless for finding system files (one of the OP's main complaints). as a simple example, try finding where apple has put the 'whoami' bin using spotlight. on my machine, spotlight finds 41 files (mostly random .h files) but not the executable itself. locate happily spits out:
/usr/bin/ldapwhoami /usr/bin/whoami /usr/sbin/bpwhoami /usr/share/man/man1/bpwhoami.1 /usr/share/man/man1/ldapwhoami.1 /usr/share/man/man1/whoami.1
172:~ pete$ locate whoami
172:~ pete$
I love spotlight, but I'd love it even more if I knew how to tell it to index the whole machine..
there's a useful sociology term for this: co-constitutive.
the average joe's ideas about what (for example) gunfire sounds like come largely from hollywood; hollywood's ideas about what gunfire should sound like come largely from that fact that most of hollywood consists of average joes (ie laypeople with respect to the technical subject in question). they feed each other.
all are 'd'.
I think it's great that so many people are being directly exposed to a device with such excessive DRM. It'll make it easier to explain to the general public why current copyright trends are so bad if lots of people have been burned badly by it (or know someone who has). What's the quote - the US withdrew from Vietnam only after every adult in the US knew someone who'd been killed there..
When one cop is arresting you, and two other cops are standing around scratching themselves (as they are in the second half of the video), your friend can indeed ask them for their names and badge numbers. Although if you drive off while he's doing so, you'll be evading arrest, and in *way* more shit than you were when you first got pulled over.
However, this aside, the Supreme Court has ruled that bystanders have a first amendment right to observe arrests (Edwards v. South Carolina, 372 U.S. 229 (1963). Other State-level rulings (eg 148 F.3d 719 (7th Cir. 1998) Humphrey v. Staszak) which have not been overturned by SCOTUS give bystanders the right to demand badge numbers even from undercover police, and to assume that they are not in fact police if they refuse to do so (giving both the arrestee and bystanders the legitimate right to physically intervene). ie given that the UCPD cops refused to provide badge numbers and names, the bystanders in the library could have chosen to intervene by physically restraining the UCPD cops until the LAPD arrived, in the same way that they could have if the assailants weren't wearing uniforms and claiming to be police.
Regardless of whether the cops were responding appropriately by tasering him or not (and, as you point out, we're missing the first half of the interaction), the fact the cops refused to provide names and badge numbers to onlookers on request tells you either a) the cops believed they were doing something wrong; or b) the cops believed they did not need to be accountable. Either of those is a huge problem, independent of the justifiability of the initial tasering.
You and yr idiot friend are meeting to get drunk. Your friend isn't real familiar with your town:
You: "Where are you?"
Friend: "I don't know - I'm beside a blue building near some traffic lights"
You: "Never mind, my phone says you're a block away. Stay there and I'll come meet you".
At least if one earlier press release is true (service gives direction and distance, not just distance).
But yeah, opt in on a case by case basis seems like it'd be a much much better default.
the oxford english dictionary gives it as:
irregardless, a. and adv.
Chiefly N. Amer.
[Prob. blend of irrespective and regardless.]
In non-standard or humorous use: regardless.
Does that make it 'real', or do we need a wikipedia article to solidify it?
As a number of posters have pointed out, installing windows is a bitch too. However, it's kind of irrelevant - most non-geeks don't install either; they rely on people like us to do it for them. Installation is a one-time thing - it's the day-to-day user experience that matters.
.doc link. It asks her to locate the application to open it with, and wants a file path to the application. She rummages around the file tree for a while before giving up in disgust - she didn't know she needed to look in /opt/OpenOffice.org/program/, and that what she was looking for was called 'swriter'. Weirdly enough. Sure, I can change preferences in firefox for her to fix this particular problem, but being asked what application you want to open a file in is a normal, day to day part of using an OS. I even sat down one day and walked her through the whole /usr, /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, and /opt trees to her, so she'd at least have a rough idea *where* she might find the relevant application next time it happened. Which helped a bit, but it really doesn't help that linux apps are often named differently from what you'd expect - who'd know that acrobat is called acroread without being told, for example?
/Applications, not scattered across 4 or 5 different parts of the file tree with unintuitive names.
My gf is a case in point - she got sick of bad windows behavior, and agreed to let me install suse on her laptop to see if that'd work for her. She liked a lot of things about it (no endless popups and second-guessing by the OS, mainly). However, her real frustration was the file structure and application naming conventions. Case in point: she fires up firefox and clicks on a
She's since moved to a mac, and is delighted to be able to concentrate on her work, instead of wrestling with inanity (windows) or struggling with obtuseness (linux). When she clicks on a link or file and it wants to know what application to open it with , it usually suggests a list of apps, instead of demanding a path. If she really had to go hunting, she knows applications are in
It's this basic usability stuff which makes linux hard to use for the general public, not the installation process.
{grin} you have a point.
"Human life is a continuum from conception to death".
What's with the obsession with 'conception'? Conception is one of a long, long, long list of biological processes that *must* occur, and *must* occur in the right sequence for a birth to occur. It's hardly the first step in the process, nor is it the last. The obsession of the American Right with 'conception' is really just an extension of their general obsession with sex, and their desire to control other people's understanding of when and under what conditions sex is appropriate.
And, I say this with all due consideration of the term I'm about to use, you can all go fuck yourselves before I'll accept your divine right to dictate the terms of everyone's sex life. I don't care what third-rate, unscientific, sex-obsessed justifications you want to use.
The last time the rifles people had in the closet were a technological match to the military firepower of the day was the Boer war. The Boers still lost, eventually. The American 2nd amendment is useless unless it grants you the ability to own something that can shoot down a B52.