Useful things can frequently be used in ways that are not useful at all. Technology is not over-hyped in education. After all, a pencil is certainly a piece of technology. As are the lights, heating system, and clocks. Can computers be useful? Of course they can. Just as a pencil can. Will they help education if they are used poorly? Of course not. Just as pencil that is used strictly for playing tic-tac-toe will not help in education.
Wait until your are done explaining it to her, and some smart ass comes behind you and point out to her that, since marketers are using her username from different sites to link them and track them as the same person, ANYONE could create an account on any porn site on the internet, and user her AOL/MSN name for their account, thus linking her to any activity they do on the porn site. They could be extra helpful by explaining to her that the only way to stop them from using her username on those sites is for her to register it first.
Just wait until you get the call from her explaining that she made a typo, and wants you to help correct her username on 'iwantmyhorseporn.com'.
The problem I always see in those math formulas is that they leave out the stop lights as well as the odds of getting behind someone driving 30 miles per hour. The best, the slower drive can accomplish is keeping up if they are lucky. The faster driver on the other hand, has a chance at every light they hit to gain a couple of minutes over the slower driver. 8 miles is also very short difference. If you are only going 8 miles, it looks just as bad comparing 65 to 35. To get it right, one must also factor it over thousands of cars. Why? Because traffic doesn't scale linearly. The move from 55 to 65 for freeway speed limits has saved a lot more time than what DudeTheMath's signature would imply.
Sorry, I miss spoke. I should not have said "at all". I meant that if you could authorize the volume, you would not need the dialog AFTER that. I was agreeing with you.
I don't particularly agree with your statement as a whole, but calling him "paranoid" is just plain bizarre. The guy has multiple world powers out to get him. It isn't that he THINKS they are out to get him, they are publicly stating that they are. Thinking that governments are out to get you when they publicly say so isn't exactly what I would call 'paranoid'.
I wouldn't count too heavily on Amnesty International as evidence. Amnesty International and the Ford and Toyota. Technically they are adversary, but they are adversaries in the same game. Neither of them want a third party showing up that changes all the rules.
Well, that is an entirely different kettle of fish though. As it stands, it is not trivial for the state to collect all of the taxes even when everying is happens in a brick an mortar store. Tax evasion is certainly a common problem, and it difficult to prevent no matter where the transaction takes place. The most difficult task would probably be trying to determine who the taxing authority even is. Is it the sellers address, the shipping address, or the billing address? Is it really even legal to collect taxes from other states residents? The reason that taxes tend to only get collected now is that it is clear they should be paid if both the buyer and the seller are in your state.
Maybe. It would solve taxing at the state level completely. Local municipalities are going to be much less likely to cause the trouble that states have been. Remember that it isn't that there are different tax rates for different cities. It is that cities often have their own sales tax that is also charged in addition to the state taxes that are the same no matter where in the state you live.
This means that the above system would work just fine to determine states sales taxes. Of course, individual cities could use the same scheme for their taxing but have it as instead of . By making it the responsibility of the taxing authority to supply the rates for an address, it would be up to those taxing authorities as to whether they want to ignore collection of those taxes, implement the query system, or simplify their taxing. It places the burden of complexity on the entity that creates the complexity.
As far as the retailer is concerned, they would do a lookup for state tax, then a lookup for local tax.
Being able to permanently authorize a volume would make it 99.9% as convenient as not having the dialog box at all, and would give 100% of the security.
You are being pedantic about the definition of 'Autorun'. By your definition, the report earlier of an Autorun exploits on Linux was completely wrong because if it is running on Linux, and is not executing arbitrary code specified in autorun.ini. You are using a different definition of Autorun than pretty much everyone else. Autorun is being used as a generic description of having stuff happen on your computer automatically when you insert a disk. Even differentiating between Autorun and Autoplay is just pointing to different shades of gray, as Autoplaying a DVD does launch code, as virtually every single commercial DVD has code in it, and 'autoplay' launches that code.
If you take a step back and look at what is trying to be accomplished by autorun, it can easily be tweaked to to offer 99.9 % of the functionality, while removing all of the security risks that don't already exist in your web browser.
You are wrong also wrong about your definition of loading code. If putting a inserting removable media into your computer makes code load, then inserting media into your computer is loading code. Just as putting a DVD into an XBox is 'loading the game'. So, my statement still stands that you are loading code either way. And, even if loading a web page IS loading code and putting in media isn't, it only points out how lame it is to complain about the existance of autorun when you are running code implemented by unknown sources on your computer every day.
It actually doesn't need to be that hard. You are talking about interstate commerce, so it is something that the Feds have an honest to goodness right to point at the Interstate Commerce Clause for, and put in some regulation. That being established, the Feds could simply require any municipality that wants to collect sales tax publish the zip codes tax rate at a standardized web address like 90210.taxrate.ca.gov. and have it just return a number that is the taxrate. This would allow anyone from the biggest to the largest to lookup up tax rates for any address that they are selling to.
If they wanted to get fancy, they could make it an XML document that gets returned that has tags for . This would be both human readable, and easily parsed by software. The effective date would also allow for caching of the rate to reduce load and handle outages. It would also allow for known future rate changes to be broadcast before the change without breaking the current lookups.
The burden on the taxing authorities would be trivial, yet it would reduce the burden on the stores dramatically. It really isn't too much to ask of a taxing authority to publish their tax rates in a standardized format.
If supplying your system with text and graphics is going to cause a User32.dll buffer overflow, then you should stop reading Slashdot, as I just put text into your system. Since you are reading this, you clearly believe that third party text can be delivered to your system without it being a serious threat to you.
Since your web browser is dramatically more complex than any of that, your point is like pissing in the ocean. If you had any real concern that supplying text and graphics was a serious threat, you would not have been able to read this message, as you have allowed me and thousands of other Slashdot users to feed text into your system that could trigger a buffer overflow. "as is displaying a custom icon' is redundant to supplying graphics, as an icon IS a graphic.
So, no. Supplying text and graphic is not 'problematic'. It is only problematic if it poorly implemented. If MS really decides that text and graphic really are problematic and should not be allowed, Windows simply will cease to exist, as you won't have a PC anymore, you will have a radio.
Not true. Auto run does NOT have to be 'insering a cd' =='do what ever is instructed on it'. That is the discription of badly implemented autorun. Autorun doesn't have to be any more dangerous than surfing the web. In fact in all ways, a system that takes equal care in security will always be more vulnerable via the web.
Autorun done right would still play music and video automatically. If there is a security hole in the audio or video codecs, you are already screwed by having a web browser, as that is a dramatically easier way to deliver those payloads. For executibles, instead of blindly running any executable on the disk, OS should supply the splash screen/menu that virtually all legitimate software has. By having the OS supply the splash menu and only use text and graphics from the removable media, again are no more at risk that being on the internet. You are dramatically safer, as the splash menu can be dramatically simpler than a web browser, and thus has less surface to have attack vectors. The splash menu can checksum the and with the users permission allow all future attempts to run without user intervention. Since the user was asked if they want to run the full executable, you are in no greater risk than if the user launches the executable by hand.
When you opened this page, code was Autorun on your system. Autorun from removable media does not have to be any more dangerous that reading Slashdot.
Are you really taking the position that "fraud by entire industries" doesn't happen, or is even unusual? Really? Did you not see the fraud in the housing bubble? Do you not see the fraud that happens as SOP in real estate now? Do you think that the accounting practices in the Movie industry is on the up and up? How about how the ratings are assigned? The music? You don't see fraud as SOP there? Throwing out the 'C' word doesn't make your right. Conspiracies happen all the time. You know that. I know that. The legal system that convicts people of it knows it. Or do you think that the legal system charging people with conspiracy is just some conspiracy to make people believe that there really are conspiracies when they don't really exist?
You clearly understand how the chicken pox vaccine increases risk to individuals, yet it is almost universally recommended. To believe that the chicken pox vaccine increases risk to individuals, while it being universally recommended requires that you believe there is industry wide conspiracy, or the industry wide incompetence in the medical industry.
Autorun as not a bad idea. It was a very good idea that was badly implemented. For any media, there is no reason that the autorun needed to run an executable. It could have very easily have used an OS supplied splash screen that used an ini to supply text, a graphic and a few launch buttons. That is all most autoruns do anyway. By using the OS's executable, it would have made it as secure as any other application that could display a graphic and text. Since IE was in the OS and could do both, the OS supplied autolauncher would not make the system any less secure than not having it at all.
For writable media, the OS should let you generate an encrypted key that gets written to the media authorizing it to autolaunch an actual executable.
Commuter trains and airlines are not and never will be in competition with one another. Cross country trains and airlines would be, and that won't have any impact on commuter traffic or commuters at all.
You should invest in a Kill-A-Watt, or at least borrow one. That P4 may be costing you a lot more than the price of a brand new machine. The P4s were notorious power hogs. I know that my quad core Core 2 averages 50 watts, while my Athlon X2 averaged 180 watts. The current system runs rings around the old Athlon 2. It took approximately 10 months for the electricity savings to pay for the cost of the computer, and everything after that was money in my pocket. I live in CA, so the electricity savings are ~$0.38 kwh. I you live in a place with sane electricity prices, and you don't use your computer much anyway, an upgrade might not save you money, but for many, a buying a new computer is less expensive than using the old one they already have.
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I suggest they do the exact same thing that book publishers have done since the creation of the first public library.
Useful things can frequently be used in ways that are not useful at all. Technology is not over-hyped in education. After all, a pencil is certainly a piece of technology. As are the lights, heating system, and clocks. Can computers be useful? Of course they can. Just as a pencil can. Will they help education if they are used poorly? Of course not. Just as pencil that is used strictly for playing tic-tac-toe will not help in education.
Wait until your are done explaining it to her, and some smart ass comes behind you and point out to her that, since marketers are using her username from different sites to link them and track them as the same person, ANYONE could create an account on any porn site on the internet, and user her AOL/MSN name for their account, thus linking her to any activity they do on the porn site. They could be extra helpful by explaining to her that the only way to stop them from using her username on those sites is for her to register it first.
Just wait until you get the call from her explaining that she made a typo, and wants you to help correct her username on 'iwantmyhorseporn.com'.
The problem I always see in those math formulas is that they leave out the stop lights as well as the odds of getting behind someone driving 30 miles per hour. The best, the slower drive can accomplish is keeping up if they are lucky. The faster driver on the other hand, has a chance at every light they hit to gain a couple of minutes over the slower driver. 8 miles is also very short difference. If you are only going 8 miles, it looks just as bad comparing 65 to 35. To get it right, one must also factor it over thousands of cars. Why? Because traffic doesn't scale linearly. The move from 55 to 65 for freeway speed limits has saved a lot more time than what DudeTheMath's signature would imply.
Funny, my atari 2600 would disagree with you, so would my DVD playing software.
Sorry, I miss spoke. I should not have said "at all". I meant that if you could authorize the volume, you would not need the dialog AFTER that. I was agreeing with you.
One of the many many ironic scenes in Star Wars. The irony of course being that Obi-Wan Kanobi was revealing that he was actually a Sith Lord.
I don't particularly agree with your statement as a whole, but calling him "paranoid" is just plain bizarre. The guy has multiple world powers out to get him. It isn't that he THINKS they are out to get him, they are publicly stating that they are. Thinking that governments are out to get you when they publicly say so isn't exactly what I would call 'paranoid'.
I wouldn't count too heavily on Amnesty International as evidence. Amnesty International and the Ford and Toyota. Technically they are adversary, but they are adversaries in the same game. Neither of them want a third party showing up that changes all the rules.
Well, that is an entirely different kettle of fish though. As it stands, it is not trivial for the state to collect all of the taxes even when everying is happens in a brick an mortar store. Tax evasion is certainly a common problem, and it difficult to prevent no matter where the transaction takes place. The most difficult task would probably be trying to determine who the taxing authority even is. Is it the sellers address, the shipping address, or the billing address? Is it really even legal to collect taxes from other states residents? The reason that taxes tend to only get collected now is that it is clear they should be paid if both the buyer and the seller are in your state.
Maybe. It would solve taxing at the state level completely. Local municipalities are going to be much less likely to cause the trouble that states have been. Remember that it isn't that there are different tax rates for different cities. It is that cities often have their own sales tax that is also charged in addition to the state taxes that are the same no matter where in the state you live.
This means that the above system would work just fine to determine states sales taxes. Of course, individual cities could use the same scheme for their taxing but have it as instead of . By making it the responsibility of the taxing authority to supply the rates for an address, it would be up to those taxing authorities as to whether they want to ignore collection of those taxes, implement the query system, or simplify their taxing. It places the burden of complexity on the entity that creates the complexity.
As far as the retailer is concerned, they would do a lookup for state tax, then a lookup for local tax.
Being able to permanently authorize a volume would make it 99.9% as convenient as not having the dialog box at all, and would give 100% of the security.
You are wrong. Autorun is used on every single console ever released that has removable media. Every single one.
You are being pedantic about the definition of 'Autorun'. By your definition, the report earlier of an Autorun exploits on Linux was completely wrong because if it is running on Linux, and is not executing arbitrary code specified in autorun.ini. You are using a different definition of Autorun than pretty much everyone else. Autorun is being used as a generic description of having stuff happen on your computer automatically when you insert a disk. Even differentiating between Autorun and Autoplay is just pointing to different shades of gray, as Autoplaying a DVD does launch code, as virtually every single commercial DVD has code in it, and 'autoplay' launches that code.
If you take a step back and look at what is trying to be accomplished by autorun, it can easily be tweaked to to offer 99.9 % of the functionality, while removing all of the security risks that don't already exist in your web browser.
You are wrong also wrong about your definition of loading code. If putting a inserting removable media into your computer makes code load, then inserting media into your computer is loading code. Just as putting a DVD into an XBox is 'loading the game'. So, my statement still stands that you are loading code either way. And, even if loading a web page IS loading code and putting in media isn't, it only points out how lame it is to complain about the existance of autorun when you are running code implemented by unknown sources on your computer every day.
It actually doesn't need to be that hard. You are talking about interstate commerce, so it is something that the Feds have an honest to goodness right to point at the Interstate Commerce Clause for, and put in some regulation. That being established, the Feds could simply require any municipality that wants to collect sales tax publish the zip codes tax rate at a standardized web address like 90210.taxrate.ca.gov. and have it just return a number that is the taxrate. This would allow anyone from the biggest to the largest to lookup up tax rates for any address that they are selling to.
If they wanted to get fancy, they could make it an XML document that gets returned that has tags for . This would be both human readable, and easily parsed by software. The effective date would also allow for caching of the rate to reduce load and handle outages. It would also allow for known future rate changes to be broadcast before the change without breaking the current lookups.
The burden on the taxing authorities would be trivial, yet it would reduce the burden on the stores dramatically. It really isn't too much to ask of a taxing authority to publish their tax rates in a standardized format.
If supplying your system with text and graphics is going to cause a User32.dll buffer overflow, then you should stop reading Slashdot, as I just put text into your system. Since you are reading this, you clearly believe that third party text can be delivered to your system without it being a serious threat to you.
Since your web browser is dramatically more complex than any of that, your point is like pissing in the ocean. If you had any real concern that supplying text and graphics was a serious threat, you would not have been able to read this message, as you have allowed me and thousands of other Slashdot users to feed text into your system that could trigger a buffer overflow. "as is displaying a custom icon' is redundant to supplying graphics, as an icon IS a graphic.
So, no. Supplying text and graphic is not 'problematic'. It is only problematic if it poorly implemented. If MS really decides that text and graphic really are problematic and should not be allowed, Windows simply will cease to exist, as you won't have a PC anymore, you will have a radio.
Not true. Auto run does NOT have to be 'insering a cd' =='do what ever is instructed on it'. That is the discription of badly implemented autorun. Autorun doesn't have to be any more dangerous than surfing the web. In fact in all ways, a system that takes equal care in security will always be more vulnerable via the web.
Autorun done right would still play music and video automatically. If there is a security hole in the audio or video codecs, you are already screwed by having a web browser, as that is a dramatically easier way to deliver those payloads. For executibles, instead of blindly running any executable on the disk, OS should supply the splash screen/menu that virtually all legitimate software has. By having the OS supply the splash menu and only use text and graphics from the removable media, again are no more at risk that being on the internet. You are dramatically safer, as the splash menu can be dramatically simpler than a web browser, and thus has less surface to have attack vectors. The splash menu can checksum the and with the users permission allow all future attempts to run without user intervention. Since the user was asked if they want to run the full executable, you are in no greater risk than if the user launches the executable by hand.
When you opened this page, code was Autorun on your system. Autorun from removable media does not have to be any more dangerous that reading Slashdot.
Are you really taking the position that "fraud by entire industries" doesn't happen, or is even unusual? Really? Did you not see the fraud in the housing bubble? Do you not see the fraud that happens as SOP in real estate now? Do you think that the accounting practices in the Movie industry is on the up and up? How about how the ratings are assigned? The music? You don't see fraud as SOP there? Throwing out the 'C' word doesn't make your right. Conspiracies happen all the time. You know that. I know that. The legal system that convicts people of it knows it. Or do you think that the legal system charging people with conspiracy is just some conspiracy to make people believe that there really are conspiracies when they don't really exist?
You clearly understand how the chicken pox vaccine increases risk to individuals, yet it is almost universally recommended. To believe that the chicken pox vaccine increases risk to individuals, while it being universally recommended requires that you believe there is industry wide conspiracy, or the industry wide incompetence in the medical industry.
I'd give you that if I thought for a second we would see it in 7 or 8.
Autorun as not a bad idea. It was a very good idea that was badly implemented. For any media, there is no reason that the autorun needed to run an executable. It could have very easily have used an OS supplied splash screen that used an ini to supply text, a graphic and a few launch buttons. That is all most autoruns do anyway. By using the OS's executable, it would have made it as secure as any other application that could display a graphic and text. Since IE was in the OS and could do both, the OS supplied autolauncher would not make the system any less secure than not having it at all. For writable media, the OS should let you generate an encrypted key that gets written to the media authorizing it to autolaunch an actual executable.
Autorun is not a bad idea. It has just been badly implemented. MS obviously found it easier to just disable it than to make it secure.
Commuter trains and airlines are not and never will be in competition with one another. Cross country trains and airlines would be, and that won't have any impact on commuter traffic or commuters at all.
You should invest in a Kill-A-Watt, or at least borrow one. That P4 may be costing you a lot more than the price of a brand new machine. The P4s were notorious power hogs. I know that my quad core Core 2 averages 50 watts, while my Athlon X2 averaged 180 watts. The current system runs rings around the old Athlon 2. It took approximately 10 months for the electricity savings to pay for the cost of the computer, and everything after that was money in my pocket. I live in CA, so the electricity savings are ~$0.38 kwh. I you live in a place with sane electricity prices, and you don't use your computer much anyway, an upgrade might not save you money, but for many, a buying a new computer is less expensive than using the old one they already have.
That is what malicious people want you to think.