But that does not mean the corporation (as a group) should be allowed to directly influence the democratic process
...
The employees can vote in the interest of the company, and if these votes aren't enough, the company can (pay to) raise public awareness about the cause
These two ideas are mutually exclusive. If I and ten other people incorporate (for all of the sound reasons that people do such things) and run a company, and we feel (as a company!) that we have a vested interest in the company raising some issue in front of the legislators or executives that impact our industry - then we, as a corporate group, can and should do just that. If it costs money to run an ad, or costs money to have someone set up shop in the state (or nation's) capitol in order to make that communication happen regularly and with the right people, then so be it. It's the same thing that civic organizations, labor unions, teachers groups, wildlife conservationists, ham radio enthusiasts, and every other organization does. By supporting such groups (or such companies - and by choosing to work with, or invest in one, you do), your own political interests (and votes!) are going to be enhanced through whatever persuasion those voices can cause. This includes speaking to politicians and to other voters.
I guess what it boils down to is, I have a big problem with the fact that the system allows entities with large amounts of cash at their disposal to essentially buy governmental decisions, because I think such decisions should be made by as pure a democratic process as possible.
But such entities are made up of me, and you, and our fellow citizens. If they want to run ads, or contribute to campaigns, or hire someone to camp out in Washington and grab people for lunch to talk to them, that's free speech. If you're suggesting that there's outright bribery going on, then you should point out your examples, because people caught doing that are felons, and usually pay a very steep price.
Wow, you sure are anxious to not get the point, and to be blind to how the insurgents (many/most from outside of Iraq, all funded from outside) operate. That is to say, hiding out in civic structures such mosques, storing weapons in buildings next to schools, and so on. Plenty of people in Iraq are eager to provide intelligence on where these guys are, and where they meet. Of course, most of your references are to events at the height of hotter combat, so your commentary is no doubt intended to be taken out of context. Of course, your entire world view sounds like it lacks context, so never mind.
t's not beyond the realms of possibility that it was sabotaged by those with an interest in the continued used of fossil fuels
Well, then it's also not beyond the realms of possibility that there was no launch, and that they faked the whole thing so they could say that it was sabotaged by those with an interest in the continued use of fossil fuels.
but that they're actively spending huge amounts of money to influence the Government of my country in ways that directly benefit them
Does it every occur to you that Microsoft is thousands of people and millions of investors? Grandmothers, pension funds, yuppies, and plenty of Google and Novel investors also own their piece of MS. MS is people, just like Google is, GM is, and the mom and pop coffee shop down the street is. Why on earth would a company that has so much at stake, with hundreds of millions of customers around the world, not want to look out for itself within the context of how the government that's regulating the economy frames things? I wouldn't want to invest in, or base my business operations around products built/serviced by a company that doesn't care what the business climate looks like, or is willing to be steamrolled by the noisiest person that doesn't like them.
Hiring lobyists is clearly the kind of thing they had to do to placate shareholders, who only care about money and would see nothing wrong if Google elected a president to do nothing but take money from poor people and give it to Google.
"Clearly?" Is that really, really clear to you? And out of curiosity, how does a president go about taking money from poor people? Does he have pictures of all of the congressional reps and senators with goats or something? The president can't take money from anybody. He can't write tax law, he can't appropriate money. The only thing he can, within narrow bounds, direct cabinet officials to work within the framework established by congress to spend, or not spend as much, on certain domestic things. Not putting as much money into some specialized entitlement give-away is not the same as taking money "from" poor people.
Regardless: our current form of government would be pointless without a functioning economy. The economy completely depends upon employment and productivity. Those companies (like Google) that have a major role to play in productivity can and should make sure that they're heard by people who are working on laws and regulations that impact how they, their employees, their users, and industry do what they do. It's not "buying" government to make yourself heard or to make sure that people with a rational clue about what you do are responsible for the legal framework within which it's done. Doing nothing about it - the opposite of the employees and owners/investors in a company "buying" that voice - is the positve act of giving away that voice to someone else. You know, like to someone who thinks the internet is nothing but a porn vehicle and should be shut down, etc. Would you rather than Google stay at arm's length from politics and give up ground to crazies? I wouldn't.
So it's not only diculous, it's re-diculous? That's twice as diculous!
Not to ridicule your spelling or anything, since your larger point feels about right. Plain HTML and simple images seem so much more sensible, and platform agnostic. But then, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I don't like
tags, either.
No. This just proves that Microsoft is paying Dell to jack up the price on systems without Windows on it. There are few other explanations.
Dell should want to make money, selling the box for *more* when it does *not* have the Windows tax doesn't make much sense.
Don't you realize what Dell is really selling? Support. People buy those machines because when something gets stupid on it, they'll take care of it. The spend most of their time talking dumb users through un-screwing personal settings, removing software they just put on, fixing TWAIN drivers for their scanners... that sort of stuff. To that end, they've got thousands of people trained exhaustively in XP support. There's an economy of scale in it, they're rigged up for remote admin of the machines, and have a huge infrastructure already built up to deal with it economically. Now, take a machine with Distro X on it, firewalled in some unconventional way, running some oddball... what? rootkit? Who knows. If a Dell tech (at a corporate cost of $Plenty per hour) has to stew about how to determine if the onboard video hardware they provided is faulty, or it's some distro's slightly broken compile of something... any and all margin they've made on selling that box is now gone (along with the cross marketing they can do with AOL, or MSN, or any other stuff that many of their end users end up buying).
It's not a "Windows tax" - it's simply the thing they most often (by overwhelming numbers) provide to their customers, and it's what they're rigged up - logistically and contractually - to support. Ask a typical network support tech what he's likely to end up charging to deal with a PC that for some reason isn't spooling print jobs correctly - and then mention to him (since he's already assumed you're talking about Windows, and he knows which of three or four things to look for) that it's Linux machine. Maybe Mandriva, maybe Fedora. Maybe SuSE. Which version? Not sure. Etc. Completely different set of skills, different overhead needed. All of that has to be taken into account when Dell puts a price, in advance, on the machine.
The only thing I'd add to this: if you love to write code or build cool, complex systems, know that you will soon learn to actually dislike the work. It will be polluted by the running of the business. This isn't a bad thing, it's just reality. You will quickly feel small pockets of PHB-ness as you fall behind on cutting-edge stuff.
If you don't really want to run a business, work for a consulting company. That way you get to be exposed to all sorts of different projects, you still get the regular paycheck, and someone else does all the beancounting, etc. That's sometimes a better bridge between being a dedicated single-customer IT worker and a solo consultant.
The idea that the cops would care about the car theft is simply false. There may be a few police out there who would care, but none in my experience.
Where do you live, New Orleans? It's a shame you can't get your fellow voters to hold your city/county responsible for hiring decent LEOs.
I have interacted with police on the most trivial of stuff (neighborhood vandalism, cars broken into, etc) and on serious stuff (assault, business burglaries, financial fraud, etc) and have never found a single person I dealt with to be less that courteous, engaged, and dedicated to solving the problem. I've seen the vandals arrested, the car B&E asses arrested, the fraudsters arrested (and pushed up to the feds) and so on. I've dealt with beat cops, motor cops, detectives, administrators, even clerical assistants - all at the city, county, and state levels, in jurisdictions across multiple states. I have never experienced anything like what you're describing. So, if you have shitty local law enforcement, that's a shame - but it's your local culture, not "police" as a class of public servants that you should be bitching about.
I don't know what you mean by 'the military'. The National Guard is supposed to be the people providing martial law in the US, and the posse comitatus law doesn't talk about them.
Right, but it's the governor of the state that deals with that state's Guards, unless they've actively handed control over to the feds. This, of course, did not happen when/how it needed to in New Orleans.
FEMA does, in fact, have Congressional authorization to call in the military.
But that doesn't mean doodly until the governor of the state acts correctly to let that happen. Separation of those powers and obligations is very, very clear (and a good thing, too!).
And it doesn't matter anyway, because 'protecting FEMA personal' isn't 'law enforcement', anymore than protecting military bases is.
Assume you mean "personnel." Regardless, if those FEMA employees are civilians working off of the federal turf, then it's exactly a law enforcement issue if those people are threatened within our borders. If, though, actual martial law has been declared (rare!), then it's still law enforcement, but it's the military enforcing the law. Force protection on a military base is an entirely different thing, and not relevent unless FEMA happens to be working out of one.
True... (meaning, sometimes, crackers can appear innocent if they are quick enough to offer another explanation for what they're doing)
We have no need of, or room for, thought police in civilized society
True... (in the sense that things like "hate" crimes carry stiffer penalties not for what someone does, but for what they were supposed to be thinking as they did it... i.e., if you beat me up because you think I'm an ass and hate me, you get a certain penalty, but if you beat me up because you hate the fact that I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of Allah, etc., you, incredibly, get a different penalty)
it just seems wrong to convict without evidence of harm
But we see all sorts of convictions, all the time, for failed attempts at crimes. Or where the criminal is caught in the act, before completing the crime. Conspiracy to commit murder is certainly a crime, though there is no "evidence of harm." Conspiracy to commit fraud - same thing. Attempted (but failed) robbery or burglary - same thing. Failure to crack into a computer system doesn't mean you're innocent of having tried. That means that "harm" or "damage" can't be the standard - it has to be attempt and intent. And intent can often be determined by other evidence, very often including things like lying to the police (as this guy did). In your example of rattling the door of the jewlery store... would that seem different to anyone if they heard the police asking you why you were rattling the door, and you instead of saying, "I was wondering if they're open," you said something obviously false? That changes how the police will (and should) evaluate everything else that you say. Then when they find out you've got safe cracking tools back at the house, don't you think they'd draw a completely different set of conclusions?
Banks don't keep their cash funds out on the sidewalk for a reason. If they did, and it went missing, what exactly would the courts say?
Other than that being a poor example, what about when someone steals the umbrella from a sidewalk table in front of a restaurant? It's not chained down, there's no sign saying "don't take this"... how is that different? Theft is theft, cracking is cracking, and lying to the cops about what you've been up to and why makes it a lot harder to help them see your side of the story.
Additionally, it doesn't seem to ring true that a 'security expert' would leave such a trail as to be caught if he was truly trying to break into the system?
But I meet all sorts of experts that get personally sloppy about stuff like that. I know accountants that have fallen victim to phishing schemes (IT pros, too), and there's a reason that old expression "the cobbler's son has no shoes" usually applies. This sounds more like questionable poking and prodding, made worse by lying to the cops, and then having the law work as expected (which, again, an expert would know and understand).
By the way - I've got merchant clients running e-commerce sites that frequently see modest-sized normal-looking transactions in advance of hack attempts from the same IP addresses and networks. I notice they didn't mention this in the story, but it's not a uncommon way to get the site to "trust" you, and something the cops would probably be taking into account.
If I take a block of cheese without paying, are there fewer blocks of cheese on the shelf for the next customer? Now, if I download a TV show without paying, are there fewer copies of that TV show online for the next guy?
Indirectly, yes. Because the more people who take the content without paying for, the less demand there is for the creator's services, and the less revenue they can command. Less revenue means less capacity for producing great content (in HBO's case, things like Deadwood, Rome, The Sopranos - all great shows). Erode the incentive for people to actually subscribe to their service, and you erode their ability (and incentive) to provide that service. Yes: devaluing the product does impact the supply, sometimes terminally.
When a freemail provider is responsible for all its client actions unless it can refer to the actual person that is the client that has setup that mailbox, the problem effectively has ended
Because... free e-mail providers will have an army of full-time background check people making sure that the user isn't lying about who they are? What's going to stop someone from using stolen ID info to set up a convincing-looking user account? This is like holding the owner of a 7-11's payphone responsible for the losses incurred by some little old lady that, called from that phone, falls for old-style phone phishing. Don't blame the tool, blame the tool-user. And in the case of end users with their own bank account information, blame them for being stupid. We just don't have a culture yet (experience plus inertia) to make people savvy enough to see that some of these phishing schemes are just like being approached on the street or called on the phone. Once people wake up to that, they'll be more careful.
But holding a mail provider responsible for all of its anonymous users' actions? Would that include losses due to terrorism? Mammoth drug dealing operations? Where do you draw the line?
The victims have all of the power they need to stop this already - it's called Critical Thinking. It's a shame that's only taught in about one school out of a hundred, but that's the solution to a whole raft of our societal problems.
To actually have a reasonable conversation about this. I'll help, by clearing the deck of:
1) 1,000 monkeys typing = Shakespeare, yadda yadda
2) Broken clock right twice a day, blah blah
3) Every other thing that's always said about buying innovation rather than... what, mining it? Every employee that works there is "bought" every week when they get paid, and sometimes they're bought in a group from somewhere else. Same as anyplace else with a lot of irons in the fire.
But - surely people aren't going to pretend that Excel doesn't exist, or that Active Directory isn't actually pretty damn effective. And Visual Studio actually has its moments (me: old timey VB6 fan, but what do I know).
If you actually work with MS's server products all day long, you'll find that there really is a sum of the parts that actually scratches quite a few itches. And don't forget their hardware... given my choice of a anything from Logitech, MS, or several others (especially for the money), for some uses I'd probably reach for the MS stuff more often. Strictly on touchy-feely-reliability merit, no brand loyalty whatsoever in that area. Unfortunately, they don't make the asbestos products I'll need for this comment.
There was a time when contact management (or, in a more sophisticated form, CRM - customer relationship management) was a desktop app like Act or similar products. Enter SalesForce.com. You could say the same thing about what used to be the province of QuickBooks Pro, or lighter-weight implementations of accounting apps like Solomon or Great Plains, and look instead at NetLedger.com. These are complete migrations from desktop business apps to subscription-based web apps. Likewise with newer versions of tax prep software, etc. This is not new.
That being said, I don't want to have to be internet-connected in order to work on a word processor document.
it is more likely that Bush and co. might try to do something as nasty as this instead of a muslim guerilla would want to
Oh, please. In the US, the operators of wireless telecomm services (such as mobile phones) are already prepared, at a moment's notice, to take a call from the state or federal government and clamp down on services. That can be done if it's suspected that some imminent threat is going to rely on those services (like for bomb detonation), or can be done to prevent overuse (and thus crippling) of the system in an emergency when other traffic may need the bandwidth in carrying out their tasks (rescue, etc.).
You don't need to dream up some tin-foil-lined, black-helicopter-populated world for that to happen, that capability and legal authority are deliberately built into the system.
The article we're talking about, here, relates to people who should not have that capability still being able to stop the system in its tracks. There is no constructive use for that ability - it's a vulnerability.
And... "muslim guerilla"? Is that what they call people who blow up innocent civilians dining in restaurants these days? Gosh, it sounds so noble. Just like Che! I just have to have the t-shirt. What do you call it when they're blowing up other Muslims in mosques? Would those be "Sunni Guerillas" fighting the good fight against those evil Shia and Kurds? I guess the Sunnis were only the bad guys when Saddam was running a murderous minority thug-ocracy composed of them, and killing the other flavor of Muslims by the hundreds of thousands. Then, since he was deposed, the Sunnis are now the Noble Guerillas, just like the proud Destroyers Of Restaurants in Bali?
suspension of habeas corpus (Guantanamo Bay)
Well, since you're such a student of US law, I guess you're just making a joke. Otherwise you'd know that habeas corpus scarcely applies to someone who's caught shooting at US troops or rigging up roadside explosives in Afghanistan. Or, you know, a rich kid jihaddi adventurer from Syria, Jordan, or Yemen with his parent's cash in his pocket, looking to slaughter Polish or Italian troops protecting, say, a brand new water pumping station near a school in Bagdhad. These aren't US citizens that can point to their ownership of the US constitution (remember: "Democracy Is Evil and Un-Islamic!" - this according to the head "Muslim guerilla" and Bin Laden Boy in Iraq, Zarqawi), and they're not uniformed troops subject to the Geneva Convention. They're terrorists, plain and simple. They've got cash from families in Saudi Arabia, weapons and explosives obtained from Iran, and absolutely no respect for any rule of law except that which they'd like to see established by the great Pan-Arab caliphate that their movement seeks to establish across the world. When we lay hands on one of these clowns, someone who spits on anything resembling the Geneva conventions, but who also knows who is contacts and financial/technical sponsors are... what, attorney/client privilege? They're combatants. Their buddies are still out there busily killing civilians (you know - like crowds of police cadets or school kids - nice!), and anyone with a vested interest in democracy in that part of the world has to see the merit in getting them out of circulation, and under the sort of leverage that lets us learn things. Like, where they get their cash. Who builds their backpack bombs, how they're communicating with their connections in Iran and Syria. What buildings are being used to store weapons. There's a big difference between domestic criminals, uniformed troops, and free-lance border-traversing terrorist jihaddis.
If you think 2 to 4 simultaneous telephone calls will take down a cellular network, the thing would have stopped working a long time ago.
But... I think it's not the vox bandwidth - it's that part of the system that manages the call overhead (per the summary, the part of the system that "sets up" the calls). I believe that housekeeping does indeed take place in a smaller, and separate piece of the spectrum and the network's plumbing. Of course, IANATE (I am not a telecommunications engineer). Text messaging piggy-backs on the data that keeps the system and the phones aware of each other - long before a call (and the related bandwidth) is actually assigned to an user that dials/answers. This would be when someone who works for Verizon or Spring would anonymously chime. We can hear you now, good.
You could send 165 text messages a second OR you could keep calling the phone you want to disrupt!
Except this isn't about disrupting one phone - this is about disrupting the entire regional network. Just the sort thing a criminal or terrorist might want to do during or in the wake of some mal-behavior. So it costs a bunch to send those messages? So what? Bad guys can have some real (or fraudulant) financial resources when that's part of their plan.
If you can endless circumstances where an uninhibited gun is necessary, I am also sure that you can think of several situations where a Smart gun could save somebodies life.
And if you re-read my comment, you'll see that it's not the technology I'm opposed to, it's the mandatory use of it. We could save lives by not allowing cars to be driven by anyone that's tired, either. I'm sure we could come up with some technology requiring an IQ and Reaction-Time test before your keys would work. Or a mechanism that, despite insisting on seeing only your fingerprints on the steering wheel, will still let you somehow authorize the car to be used by a co-worker in an emergency. But wouldn't you want the choice?
What if you have no kids? Would you still want to have to prove to your car that you're not a minor, every time you drive? Or not be able to start your car because your bracelet's batteries are low, or you have gloves on? Cars are more lethal than guns, especially in the hands of teenagers and the elderly, so aren't these reasonable questions?
But again: it's about choice. If I was a cop, I'd probably only want my gun to work for myself and that day's partner. Though I can also imagine a hold-up scene where I take my police-issue shotgun out of my cruiser's trunk and want to be able to hand it to a federal agent, or an off-duty officer from another jurisiction... I'm sure cops would want choice about how such tech was deployed, as well. But for private citizens, any mechanism that prevents a gun from working is welcome, if you want to use it. That's why I have a gun safe, that's why I generally keep my ammo locked away elsewhere, and that's what trigger locks and locking portable cases are for when I'm traveling to a hunt or shooting event.
I'm a range officer: I've seen every sort of stupid person you can imagine mis-handle a gun, and I'm glad that I've still got my head on. But I know that those same people are the ones that end up in chainsaw accidents, running red lights, and taking the wrong medication, too. For the rest of us, choice in how our tools work is essential - both in practice, and philosophically. On a practical note, there are roughly 100,000,000 guns out there without such tech, and with absolutely no prospect of ever having them retrofitted in a meaningful, reliable (to the extent it even CAN be reliable) way. Criminals are going to be able to work with their choice of stolen, low-tech guns for the next several decades, even if not another one is ever made. And of course, there are plenty of countries around the world that will make anything for which there's a market (underground or not).
When you say "save lives," what do you mean, incidentally? I'm really curious. The actual statistics would probably play out in such a minor way that it would be lost in the noise, but at the unbearable price of further government encroachment on personal liberty. Meanwhile, all of the other (vastly more numerous) ways that people accidentally kill or main themselves will still be humming along. The states that are attempting to force this "smart gun" tech on all future gun sales are doing so strictly out of ignorance, and out of an urge to make the gun control crowd feel good, even as the legislators say, "don't worry, you've still got your gun available to you, see?"
Did you know that violent crime, this year, is at a 30-year low? You'd never know that listening to the news. But any murder is unacceptable, of course. But the blossoming local gang problem in my county seems to be entirely enabled (violence/murder-wise) by knives and machetes. It's a cultural, not a technical problem, and (unreliably) reducing choices for law-abiding people does nothing to solve the problems that actually result in most lethal violence. Why bother with smart guns at all? Just take them all away. They did that in Australia, where they are now enjoying a giant leap in violent crime, including stabbings, beatings, and (when guns are involve
The anti-sniper robot may help save a few lives on the ground, but their practical usefulness will ultimately be limited by the ingenuity, and the lack of 'rules of engagement', of the enemy.
But those limitations are already present. If we take out a structure because a human observer saw a muzzle flash, we still run the same risks of killing innocents when we are dealing with the killer. The difference is that with the new tech, there's a better chance of pinpointing the source and reducing deaths from ongoing sniping.
We do have some pretty cool thermal imaging tools to help avoid shooting up the wrong balcony, etc. But probably the main advantage to instantaneously locating a sniper is the resulting increase in the odds that he can be captured through quick follow-up action.
His comparison implies facts not in evidence, and associates people into capriciously (and spuriously) labled groups with no basis in reality. His tone attempts to paint a patronizingly simple-minded portrait of people who own and use firearms, and presumes a foregone conclusion about an ill-conceived technology and an even more ill-conceived political atmosphere that attempts to deploy it as a feel-good measure.
No, I'm worried that they're going to make another Mario Bros / Mortal Kombat Annihilation / Doom (It's gonna suck folks) movie. That I will inexorably be drawn to it because it's a franchise I know, and that I will hate myself for 2 days for falling for that trap.
OK, I'll buy that. There's very little that's more annoying than the sense of being betrayed by a talented person's treatment of some other work that you enjoy. I'm reminded of some early attempts at dealing with Tolkien, for example - that sort of stuff just leaves a really bad taste in your mouth. You know, like Dolf Lundgren doing He-Man. Oh wait, sometimes it's crap to start with, actually. But I get your point.
"The Feminist Left." Oh God, that's classic. I'll have to remember that. Just like The Racist, Homophobic Right. Good old strawmen. They're such fun, aren't they?
Um... except there is a feminist left, and there is racist, homophobic right. Which not to say that all feminists, or all leftists, or all racists, or all right-wingers are entirely in one camp or the other. But the GP makes a good point... where were the people who screamed about Clarance Thomas alleged office sexuality when someone who could be SHOWN to have done things worse than what Anita Hill said happened was lying about it in front of a judge? That is moral relativism, plain and simple.
"Hey, that guy's dead... but we know where the guy who killed him is!"
Isn't that better than "Hey, that guy's dead... and so is another guy! And another guy! And me... I'm dead, too!"
Just because I sniper rolls away from a window in some abandoned building doesn't mean we have to let that floor of the building continue to exist. And we nice things like predators to look down and watch for anyone leaving the building. Sometimes it is worth trying to catch someone like that, too - they usually are part of a larger, more organized effort.
Slashdot Mirror
But that does not mean the corporation (as a group) should be allowed to directly influence the democratic process
...
The employees can vote in the interest of the company, and if these votes aren't enough, the company can (pay to) raise public awareness about the cause
These two ideas are mutually exclusive. If I and ten other people incorporate (for all of the sound reasons that people do such things) and run a company, and we feel (as a company!) that we have a vested interest in the company raising some issue in front of the legislators or executives that impact our industry - then we, as a corporate group, can and should do just that. If it costs money to run an ad, or costs money to have someone set up shop in the state (or nation's) capitol in order to make that communication happen regularly and with the right people, then so be it. It's the same thing that civic organizations, labor unions, teachers groups, wildlife conservationists, ham radio enthusiasts, and every other organization does. By supporting such groups (or such companies - and by choosing to work with, or invest in one, you do), your own political interests (and votes!) are going to be enhanced through whatever persuasion those voices can cause. This includes speaking to politicians and to other voters.
I guess what it boils down to is, I have a big problem with the fact that the system allows entities with large amounts of cash at their disposal to essentially buy governmental decisions, because I think such decisions should be made by as pure a democratic process as possible.
But such entities are made up of me, and you, and our fellow citizens. If they want to run ads, or contribute to campaigns, or hire someone to camp out in Washington and grab people for lunch to talk to them, that's free speech. If you're suggesting that there's outright bribery going on, then you should point out your examples, because people caught doing that are felons, and usually pay a very steep price.
Wow, you sure are anxious to not get the point, and to be blind to how the insurgents (many/most from outside of Iraq, all funded from outside) operate. That is to say, hiding out in civic structures such mosques, storing weapons in buildings next to schools, and so on. Plenty of people in Iraq are eager to provide intelligence on where these guys are, and where they meet. Of course, most of your references are to events at the height of hotter combat, so your commentary is no doubt intended to be taken out of context. Of course, your entire world view sounds like it lacks context, so never mind.
I'm not sure what this means about Russians and Vodka, but it explains the regular launches, I think.
t's not beyond the realms of possibility that it was sabotaged by those with an interest in the continued used of fossil fuels
Well, then it's also not beyond the realms of possibility that there was no launch, and that they faked the whole thing so they could say that it was sabotaged by those with an interest in the continued use of fossil fuels.
You know, like the people that make rocket fuel.
but that they're actively spending huge amounts of money to influence the Government of my country in ways that directly benefit them
Does it every occur to you that Microsoft is thousands of people and millions of investors? Grandmothers, pension funds, yuppies, and plenty of Google and Novel investors also own their piece of MS. MS is people, just like Google is, GM is, and the mom and pop coffee shop down the street is. Why on earth would a company that has so much at stake, with hundreds of millions of customers around the world, not want to look out for itself within the context of how the government that's regulating the economy frames things? I wouldn't want to invest in, or base my business operations around products built/serviced by a company that doesn't care what the business climate looks like, or is willing to be steamrolled by the noisiest person that doesn't like them.
Hiring lobyists is clearly the kind of thing they had to do to placate shareholders, who only care about money and would see nothing wrong if Google elected a president to do nothing but take money from poor people and give it to Google.
"Clearly?" Is that really, really clear to you? And out of curiosity, how does a president go about taking money from poor people? Does he have pictures of all of the congressional reps and senators with goats or something? The president can't take money from anybody. He can't write tax law, he can't appropriate money. The only thing he can, within narrow bounds, direct cabinet officials to work within the framework established by congress to spend, or not spend as much, on certain domestic things. Not putting as much money into some specialized entitlement give-away is not the same as taking money "from" poor people.
Regardless: our current form of government would be pointless without a functioning economy. The economy completely depends upon employment and productivity. Those companies (like Google) that have a major role to play in productivity can and should make sure that they're heard by people who are working on laws and regulations that impact how they, their employees, their users, and industry do what they do. It's not "buying" government to make yourself heard or to make sure that people with a rational clue about what you do are responsible for the legal framework within which it's done. Doing nothing about it - the opposite of the employees and owners/investors in a company "buying" that voice - is the positve act of giving away that voice to someone else. You know, like to someone who thinks the internet is nothing but a porn vehicle and should be shut down, etc. Would you rather than Google stay at arm's length from politics and give up ground to crazies? I wouldn't.
rediculous
So it's not only diculous, it's re-diculous? That's twice as diculous!
Not to ridicule your spelling or anything, since your larger point feels about right. Plain HTML and simple images seem so much more sensible, and platform agnostic. But then, I'm an old-fashioned guy. I don't like tags, either.
No. This just proves that Microsoft is paying Dell to jack up the price on systems without Windows on it. There are few other explanations.
Dell should want to make money, selling the box for *more* when it does *not* have the Windows tax doesn't make much sense.
Don't you realize what Dell is really selling? Support. People buy those machines because when something gets stupid on it, they'll take care of it. The spend most of their time talking dumb users through un-screwing personal settings, removing software they just put on, fixing TWAIN drivers for their scanners... that sort of stuff. To that end, they've got thousands of people trained exhaustively in XP support. There's an economy of scale in it, they're rigged up for remote admin of the machines, and have a huge infrastructure already built up to deal with it economically. Now, take a machine with Distro X on it, firewalled in some unconventional way, running some oddball... what? rootkit? Who knows. If a Dell tech (at a corporate cost of $Plenty per hour) has to stew about how to determine if the onboard video hardware they provided is faulty, or it's some distro's slightly broken compile of something... any and all margin they've made on selling that box is now gone (along with the cross marketing they can do with AOL, or MSN, or any other stuff that many of their end users end up buying).
It's not a "Windows tax" - it's simply the thing they most often (by overwhelming numbers) provide to their customers, and it's what they're rigged up - logistically and contractually - to support. Ask a typical network support tech what he's likely to end up charging to deal with a PC that for some reason isn't spooling print jobs correctly - and then mention to him (since he's already assumed you're talking about Windows, and he knows which of three or four things to look for) that it's Linux machine. Maybe Mandriva, maybe Fedora. Maybe SuSE. Which version? Not sure. Etc. Completely different set of skills, different overhead needed. All of that has to be taken into account when Dell puts a price, in advance, on the machine.
Nice.
The only thing I'd add to this: if you love to write code or build cool, complex systems, know that you will soon learn to actually dislike the work. It will be polluted by the running of the business. This isn't a bad thing, it's just reality. You will quickly feel small pockets of PHB-ness as you fall behind on cutting-edge stuff.
If you don't really want to run a business, work for a consulting company. That way you get to be exposed to all sorts of different projects, you still get the regular paycheck, and someone else does all the beancounting, etc. That's sometimes a better bridge between being a dedicated single-customer IT worker and a solo consultant.
The idea that the cops would care about the car theft is simply false. There may be a few police out there who would care, but none in my experience.
Where do you live, New Orleans? It's a shame you can't get your fellow voters to hold your city/county responsible for hiring decent LEOs.
I have interacted with police on the most trivial of stuff (neighborhood vandalism, cars broken into, etc) and on serious stuff (assault, business burglaries, financial fraud, etc) and have never found a single person I dealt with to be less that courteous, engaged, and dedicated to solving the problem. I've seen the vandals arrested, the car B&E asses arrested, the fraudsters arrested (and pushed up to the feds) and so on. I've dealt with beat cops, motor cops, detectives, administrators, even clerical assistants - all at the city, county, and state levels, in jurisdictions across multiple states. I have never experienced anything like what you're describing. So, if you have shitty local law enforcement, that's a shame - but it's your local culture, not "police" as a class of public servants that you should be bitching about.
I don't know what you mean by 'the military'. The National Guard is supposed to be the people providing martial law in the US, and the posse comitatus law doesn't talk about them.
Right, but it's the governor of the state that deals with that state's Guards, unless they've actively handed control over to the feds. This, of course, did not happen when/how it needed to in New Orleans.
FEMA does, in fact, have Congressional authorization to call in the military.
But that doesn't mean doodly until the governor of the state acts correctly to let that happen. Separation of those powers and obligations is very, very clear (and a good thing, too!).
And it doesn't matter anyway, because 'protecting FEMA personal' isn't 'law enforcement', anymore than protecting military bases is.
Assume you mean "personnel." Regardless, if those FEMA employees are civilians working off of the federal turf, then it's exactly a law enforcement issue if those people are threatened within our borders. If, though, actual martial law has been declared (rare!), then it's still law enforcement, but it's the military enforcing the law. Force protection on a military base is an entirely different thing, and not relevent unless FEMA happens to be working out of one.
Things are not always as they appear
... how is that different? Theft is theft, cracking is cracking, and lying to the cops about what you've been up to and why makes it a lot harder to help them see your side of the story.
True... (meaning, sometimes, crackers can appear innocent if they are quick enough to offer another explanation for what they're doing)
We have no need of, or room for, thought police in civilized society
True... (in the sense that things like "hate" crimes carry stiffer penalties not for what someone does, but for what they were supposed to be thinking as they did it... i.e., if you beat me up because you think I'm an ass and hate me, you get a certain penalty, but if you beat me up because you hate the fact that I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster instead of Allah, etc., you, incredibly, get a different penalty)
it just seems wrong to convict without evidence of harm
But we see all sorts of convictions, all the time, for failed attempts at crimes. Or where the criminal is caught in the act, before completing the crime. Conspiracy to commit murder is certainly a crime, though there is no "evidence of harm." Conspiracy to commit fraud - same thing. Attempted (but failed) robbery or burglary - same thing. Failure to crack into a computer system doesn't mean you're innocent of having tried. That means that "harm" or "damage" can't be the standard - it has to be attempt and intent. And intent can often be determined by other evidence, very often including things like lying to the police (as this guy did). In your example of rattling the door of the jewlery store... would that seem different to anyone if they heard the police asking you why you were rattling the door, and you instead of saying, "I was wondering if they're open," you said something obviously false? That changes how the police will (and should) evaluate everything else that you say. Then when they find out you've got safe cracking tools back at the house, don't you think they'd draw a completely different set of conclusions?
Banks don't keep their cash funds out on the sidewalk for a reason. If they did, and it went missing, what exactly would the courts say?
Other than that being a poor example, what about when someone steals the umbrella from a sidewalk table in front of a restaurant? It's not chained down, there's no sign saying "don't take this"
Additionally, it doesn't seem to ring true that a 'security expert' would leave such a trail as to be caught if he was truly trying to break into the system?
But I meet all sorts of experts that get personally sloppy about stuff like that. I know accountants that have fallen victim to phishing schemes (IT pros, too), and there's a reason that old expression "the cobbler's son has no shoes" usually applies. This sounds more like questionable poking and prodding, made worse by lying to the cops, and then having the law work as expected (which, again, an expert would know and understand).
By the way - I've got merchant clients running e-commerce sites that frequently see modest-sized normal-looking transactions in advance of hack attempts from the same IP addresses and networks. I notice they didn't mention this in the story, but it's not a uncommon way to get the site to "trust" you, and something the cops would probably be taking into account.
If I take a block of cheese without paying, are there fewer blocks of cheese on the shelf for the next customer? Now, if I download a TV show without paying, are there fewer copies of that TV show online for the next guy?
Indirectly, yes. Because the more people who take the content without paying for, the less demand there is for the creator's services, and the less revenue they can command. Less revenue means less capacity for producing great content (in HBO's case, things like Deadwood, Rome, The Sopranos - all great shows). Erode the incentive for people to actually subscribe to their service, and you erode their ability (and incentive) to provide that service. Yes: devaluing the product does impact the supply, sometimes terminally.
When a freemail provider is responsible for all its client actions unless it can refer to the actual person that is the client that has setup that mailbox, the problem effectively has ended
Because... free e-mail providers will have an army of full-time background check people making sure that the user isn't lying about who they are? What's going to stop someone from using stolen ID info to set up a convincing-looking user account? This is like holding the owner of a 7-11's payphone responsible for the losses incurred by some little old lady that, called from that phone, falls for old-style phone phishing. Don't blame the tool, blame the tool-user. And in the case of end users with their own bank account information, blame them for being stupid. We just don't have a culture yet (experience plus inertia) to make people savvy enough to see that some of these phishing schemes are just like being approached on the street or called on the phone. Once people wake up to that, they'll be more careful.
But holding a mail provider responsible for all of its anonymous users' actions? Would that include losses due to terrorism? Mammoth drug dealing operations? Where do you draw the line?
The victims have all of the power they need to stop this already - it's called Critical Thinking. It's a shame that's only taught in about one school out of a hundred, but that's the solution to a whole raft of our societal problems.
To actually have a reasonable conversation about this. I'll help, by clearing the deck of:
1) 1,000 monkeys typing = Shakespeare, yadda yadda
2) Broken clock right twice a day, blah blah
3) Every other thing that's always said about buying innovation rather than... what, mining it? Every employee that works there is "bought" every week when they get paid, and sometimes they're bought in a group from somewhere else. Same as anyplace else with a lot of irons in the fire.
But - surely people aren't going to pretend that Excel doesn't exist, or that Active Directory isn't actually pretty damn effective. And Visual Studio actually has its moments (me: old timey VB6 fan, but what do I know).
If you actually work with MS's server products all day long, you'll find that there really is a sum of the parts that actually scratches quite a few itches. And don't forget their hardware... given my choice of a anything from Logitech, MS, or several others (especially for the money), for some uses I'd probably reach for the MS stuff more often. Strictly on touchy-feely-reliability merit, no brand loyalty whatsoever in that area. Unfortunately, they don't make the asbestos products I'll need for this comment.
There was a time when contact management (or, in a more sophisticated form, CRM - customer relationship management) was a desktop app like Act or similar products. Enter SalesForce.com. You could say the same thing about what used to be the province of QuickBooks Pro, or lighter-weight implementations of accounting apps like Solomon or Great Plains, and look instead at NetLedger.com. These are complete migrations from desktop business apps to subscription-based web apps. Likewise with newer versions of tax prep software, etc. This is not new.
That being said, I don't want to have to be internet-connected in order to work on a word processor document.
it is more likely that Bush and co. might try to do something as nasty as this instead of a muslim guerilla would want to
Oh, please. In the US, the operators of wireless telecomm services (such as mobile phones) are already prepared, at a moment's notice, to take a call from the state or federal government and clamp down on services. That can be done if it's suspected that some imminent threat is going to rely on those services (like for bomb detonation), or can be done to prevent overuse (and thus crippling) of the system in an emergency when other traffic may need the bandwidth in carrying out their tasks (rescue, etc.).
You don't need to dream up some tin-foil-lined, black-helicopter-populated world for that to happen, that capability and legal authority are deliberately built into the system.
The article we're talking about, here, relates to people who should not have that capability still being able to stop the system in its tracks. There is no constructive use for that ability - it's a vulnerability.
And... "muslim guerilla"? Is that what they call people who blow up innocent civilians dining in restaurants these days? Gosh, it sounds so noble. Just like Che! I just have to have the t-shirt. What do you call it when they're blowing up other Muslims in mosques? Would those be "Sunni Guerillas" fighting the good fight against those evil Shia and Kurds? I guess the Sunnis were only the bad guys when Saddam was running a murderous minority thug-ocracy composed of them, and killing the other flavor of Muslims by the hundreds of thousands. Then, since he was deposed, the Sunnis are now the Noble Guerillas, just like the proud Destroyers Of Restaurants in Bali?
suspension of habeas corpus (Guantanamo Bay)
Well, since you're such a student of US law, I guess you're just making a joke. Otherwise you'd know that habeas corpus scarcely applies to someone who's caught shooting at US troops or rigging up roadside explosives in Afghanistan. Or, you know, a rich kid jihaddi adventurer from Syria, Jordan, or Yemen with his parent's cash in his pocket, looking to slaughter Polish or Italian troops protecting, say, a brand new water pumping station near a school in Bagdhad. These aren't US citizens that can point to their ownership of the US constitution (remember: "Democracy Is Evil and Un-Islamic!" - this according to the head "Muslim guerilla" and Bin Laden Boy in Iraq, Zarqawi), and they're not uniformed troops subject to the Geneva Convention. They're terrorists, plain and simple. They've got cash from families in Saudi Arabia, weapons and explosives obtained from Iran, and absolutely no respect for any rule of law except that which they'd like to see established by the great Pan-Arab caliphate that their movement seeks to establish across the world. When we lay hands on one of these clowns, someone who spits on anything resembling the Geneva conventions, but who also knows who is contacts and financial/technical sponsors are... what, attorney/client privilege? They're combatants. Their buddies are still out there busily killing civilians (you know - like crowds of police cadets or school kids - nice!), and anyone with a vested interest in democracy in that part of the world has to see the merit in getting them out of circulation, and under the sort of leverage that lets us learn things. Like, where they get their cash. Who builds their backpack bombs, how they're communicating with their connections in Iran and Syria. What buildings are being used to store weapons. There's a big difference between domestic criminals, uniformed troops, and free-lance border-traversing terrorist jihaddis.
If you think 2 to 4 simultaneous telephone calls will take down a cellular network, the thing would have stopped working a long time ago.
But... I think it's not the vox bandwidth - it's that part of the system that manages the call overhead (per the summary, the part of the system that "sets up" the calls). I believe that housekeeping does indeed take place in a smaller, and separate piece of the spectrum and the network's plumbing. Of course, IANATE (I am not a telecommunications engineer). Text messaging piggy-backs on the data that keeps the system and the phones aware of each other - long before a call (and the related bandwidth) is actually assigned to an user that dials/answers. This would be when someone who works for Verizon or Spring would anonymously chime. We can hear you now, good.
6) Profit?
Don't you mean "Prophet?"
You could send 165 text messages a second OR you could keep calling the phone you want to disrupt!
Except this isn't about disrupting one phone - this is about disrupting the entire regional network. Just the sort thing a criminal or terrorist might want to do during or in the wake of some mal-behavior. So it costs a bunch to send those messages? So what? Bad guys can have some real (or fraudulant) financial resources when that's part of their plan.
If you can endless circumstances where an uninhibited gun is necessary, I am also sure that you can think of several situations where a Smart gun could save somebodies life.
And if you re-read my comment, you'll see that it's not the technology I'm opposed to, it's the mandatory use of it. We could save lives by not allowing cars to be driven by anyone that's tired, either. I'm sure we could come up with some technology requiring an IQ and Reaction-Time test before your keys would work. Or a mechanism that, despite insisting on seeing only your fingerprints on the steering wheel, will still let you somehow authorize the car to be used by a co-worker in an emergency. But wouldn't you want the choice?
What if you have no kids? Would you still want to have to prove to your car that you're not a minor, every time you drive? Or not be able to start your car because your bracelet's batteries are low, or you have gloves on? Cars are more lethal than guns, especially in the hands of teenagers and the elderly, so aren't these reasonable questions?
But again: it's about choice. If I was a cop, I'd probably only want my gun to work for myself and that day's partner. Though I can also imagine a hold-up scene where I take my police-issue shotgun out of my cruiser's trunk and want to be able to hand it to a federal agent, or an off-duty officer from another jurisiction... I'm sure cops would want choice about how such tech was deployed, as well. But for private citizens, any mechanism that prevents a gun from working is welcome, if you want to use it. That's why I have a gun safe, that's why I generally keep my ammo locked away elsewhere, and that's what trigger locks and locking portable cases are for when I'm traveling to a hunt or shooting event.
I'm a range officer: I've seen every sort of stupid person you can imagine mis-handle a gun, and I'm glad that I've still got my head on. But I know that those same people are the ones that end up in chainsaw accidents, running red lights, and taking the wrong medication, too. For the rest of us, choice in how our tools work is essential - both in practice, and philosophically. On a practical note, there are roughly 100,000,000 guns out there without such tech, and with absolutely no prospect of ever having them retrofitted in a meaningful, reliable (to the extent it even CAN be reliable) way. Criminals are going to be able to work with their choice of stolen, low-tech guns for the next several decades, even if not another one is ever made. And of course, there are plenty of countries around the world that will make anything for which there's a market (underground or not).
When you say "save lives," what do you mean, incidentally? I'm really curious. The actual statistics would probably play out in such a minor way that it would be lost in the noise, but at the unbearable price of further government encroachment on personal liberty. Meanwhile, all of the other (vastly more numerous) ways that people accidentally kill or main themselves will still be humming along. The states that are attempting to force this "smart gun" tech on all future gun sales are doing so strictly out of ignorance, and out of an urge to make the gun control crowd feel good, even as the legislators say, "don't worry, you've still got your gun available to you, see?"
Did you know that violent crime, this year, is at a 30-year low? You'd never know that listening to the news. But any murder is unacceptable, of course. But the blossoming local gang problem in my county seems to be entirely enabled (violence/murder-wise) by knives and machetes. It's a cultural, not a technical problem, and (unreliably) reducing choices for law-abiding people does nothing to solve the problems that actually result in most lethal violence. Why bother with smart guns at all? Just take them all away. They did that in Australia, where they are now enjoying a giant leap in violent crime, including stabbings, beatings, and (when guns are involve
The anti-sniper robot may help save a few lives on the ground, but their practical usefulness will ultimately be limited by the ingenuity, and the lack of 'rules of engagement', of the enemy.
But those limitations are already present. If we take out a structure because a human observer saw a muzzle flash, we still run the same risks of killing innocents when we are dealing with the killer. The difference is that with the new tech, there's a better chance of pinpointing the source and reducing deaths from ongoing sniping.
We do have some pretty cool thermal imaging tools to help avoid shooting up the wrong balcony, etc. But probably the main advantage to instantaneously locating a sniper is the resulting increase in the odds that he can be captured through quick follow-up action.
So.... he was right, then.
His comparison implies facts not in evidence, and associates people into capriciously (and spuriously) labled groups with no basis in reality. His tone attempts to paint a patronizingly simple-minded portrait of people who own and use firearms, and presumes a foregone conclusion about an ill-conceived technology and an even more ill-conceived political atmosphere that attempts to deploy it as a feel-good measure.
So, no... he's not right. On so many levels.
No, I'm worried that they're going to make another Mario Bros / Mortal Kombat Annihilation / Doom (It's gonna suck folks) movie. That I will inexorably be drawn to it because it's a franchise I know, and that I will hate myself for 2 days for falling for that trap.
OK, I'll buy that. There's very little that's more annoying than the sense of being betrayed by a talented person's treatment of some other work that you enjoy. I'm reminded of some early attempts at dealing with Tolkien, for example - that sort of stuff just leaves a really bad taste in your mouth. You know, like Dolf Lundgren doing He-Man. Oh wait, sometimes it's crap to start with, actually. But I get your point.
"The Feminist Left." Oh God, that's classic. I'll have to remember that. Just like The Racist, Homophobic Right. Good old strawmen. They're such fun, aren't they?
Um... except there is a feminist left, and there is racist, homophobic right. Which not to say that all feminists, or all leftists, or all racists, or all right-wingers are entirely in one camp or the other. But the GP makes a good point... where were the people who screamed about Clarance Thomas alleged office sexuality when someone who could be SHOWN to have done things worse than what Anita Hill said happened was lying about it in front of a judge? That is moral relativism, plain and simple.
"Hey, that guy's dead... but we know where the guy who killed him is!"
Isn't that better than "Hey, that guy's dead... and so is another guy! And another guy! And me... I'm dead, too!"
Just because I sniper rolls away from a window in some abandoned building doesn't mean we have to let that floor of the building continue to exist. And we nice things like predators to look down and watch for anyone leaving the building. Sometimes it is worth trying to catch someone like that, too - they usually are part of a larger, more organized effort.