I would be happy to have EVERYTHING advertiser-free (including the street full of annoying billboards near my house,
If you live in california, you might just be in luck. There was a recent article in the LA Times (I think, I ran across it in google news) about just how poorly billboard codes are enforced and how a bunch of regular citizens have had to take up the slack to get illegal billboards taken down. So it may well be that some of those annoying billboards really are illegal and all it takes is bitching loud enough to get them removed.
Or, you could move to Hawaii where no billboards are allowed anywhere.
if people need this investment for valuable investment, why don't they choose a free alternative?
Arguments like that are a dime a dozen. They all have one critical flaw - they assume the world and the markets in the world are all static and working at optimum efficiency. (A) The world is not static (B) no market is perfect and to answer your question directly (C) inertia.
The fat cat middlemen that you speak of are the people that buy microsoft products
Those might be the fat cat middlemen that you speak of, but not the ones I am speaking of. I refer to distributors, marketing/advertising PR people, tariff and bribe collectors, etc, everybody who gets a piece of the pie as the money goes up the chain to MS and those who also get a cut of the pie as it comes back down the chain in the form of "aid" dollars.
Don't you think it seems like you get a lot of charity bang for your windows buck?
No. Anyone can cherry pick statistics of dubious merit. Why haven't you taken into account the efficiency of that spending? Do you honestly think that a command-control allocation system from the nearest thing there is to a monopoly in the business of "global development aid" is anywhere near as effective as local development spending by people with a vested interest in both the dollars spent and the community in which they are spent?
You don't see too many of them using email to SMS gateways to get out of paying for texts do you?
I dunno anyone with an iphone. But I know a few non-tech girls who have regular phones with basic internet functionality who have practically stopped texting in favor of IMing each other.
That's simply not enough to provide a significant number of people with broadband internet, at least not with the kind of network topography this band is proposed for.
I bet it will kill the market for text messages with 1000x markups though.
Usually these things are applied retroactively. As in there is so such law on the books when the guy commits the crime, there is no such law on the books when the guy is convicted and sentenced and no such law when he is released. But then some politician bent on proving that he is tough on crime decides to write a new law and apply it retroactively to anyone classified as a sex offender.
Imagine if they did that to people for other types of crimes. Former jay-walker? Not allowed within 50 feet of a street intersection.
Never mind all the social problems with such a plan - they could save a ton of money by simply recording odometer readings with each safety inspection (presuming oregon has safety inspections) and then taxing the owner based on that. Sure, you'd still be taxed for out of state driving but big deal - if those states inact driving taxes they won't be double-dipping since you only get a safety inspection in your home state.
Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.
FWIW, that's an honor that Iraq was in competition for, back before the embargoes.
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Sounds good on the face of it doesn't it? But look a little closer. The entire vaccination program is about intellectual property - countries have to forgo local pharma factories that produce medicine without paying royalties - despite it being perfectly legal to do so since most of those countries do not recognize foreign patents anyway.
But if someone asked me "who did more good, the guy who saved x-hundred-thousand kids or the guy who donated an improved scheduler algorithm to the Linux core?" there's only one way a human being could answer that question.
If you are going to cherry pick the question, then of course the outcome is predetermined. But what about taking into account the source of all that money in the first place? How much of the world's GDP has microsoft skimmed off the top? Money that would have been re-invested into the domestic economies all around the world, resulting in improved economic and living conditions without having to go through all the fat-cat middlemen, each taking their cut of that money before it eventually comes back around in the form of a "charity?"
That wasn't a military site, that was a laboratory site with intellectual property they were concerned about.
WTF??!?
but don't assume that all Pentagon systems are strictly managed or "classified".
This specific case referenced in the RISKS digest is solely about classified systems on a classified internet, no scare quotes needed. The event and the DoD response are clearly documented in RISKS, and to start dragging unclassified, even non-DoD systems as justification for why disabling USB ports on classified systems is "frankly nonsense" is, well, frankly nonsense.
Servers really are not an issue since the people who need media access on them will have the privileges to do it anyway, You seem to be ignoring my oft repeated point that specific needs are handled on a case by case basis.
However, ain't no way I believe this though -- "to find that the group tended to use their Ipods to listen to music on their good headphones through their computers, which had been an accepted use for years." Not even the sloppiest of sites is going to allow users to connect unclassified ipods to classified systems and then continue to treat those ipods as unclassified.
...was that its manufacture directly hurt children (the ones portrayed in it, not some abstract concept).
Scope creep or slippery slope, depends on how you look at it. Thew NEW argument is that simulated child porn can possibly be used to entice children into making actual child porn through desensitization or just plain old persuasiveness.
Next thing you know, they are going to ban toastmasters.
Even more strange, what if the perpetrator is the 'victim'?
I'm too lazy to dig up the articles on it, but a few years back there was a case of a teenage boy making gay-oriented child porn of himself and selling it on his own website. I seem to recall that he made a lot of money until the feds busted him.
It's also difficult to oppose a law against child pornography without sounding like you're endorsing child abuse,
Which, on the face of it, is retarded. Nobody who is even semi-rational is going to endorse child abuse, yet people are so easily convinced of such things when the topic comes up. Rather than consider that someone has a sophisticated opinion on the subject, too many people are all too willing to jump on the "why do you hate children?" bandwagon.
They may have created the image, or they may have filtered the image in PhotoShop to remove any digital signatures from the camera that took the image. Okay, Solomon, how do we settle this one?
That's frankly nonsense about disabling USB ports. The military uses USB sticks extensively to transmit bulky data in the field relatively securely, without relying on vulnerable network connectivity or complex intervening VPN or unreliable transfer technologies. And far too many peripheral devices, from mice to graphics plotters to speakers, are now USB, so you can't simply plug that port or disable them in the BIOS.
I speak from personal experience. The sites I am familiar with software disable USB ports on all systems except a select few which are specifically designated as data transfer workstations. Furthermore, mice and keyboards are still widely available with PS/2 ports on them and almost all other peripherals are unnecessary on the majority of systems, specific needs are handled on a case by case basis.
Funnily enough, there's a rumour going around that USB sticks were used to hack into the Pentagon:
I saw that in RISKS when it first came out and I'm surprised it hasn't been disputed yet. The reasons being that
(a) Dropping a bunch of infected media in the parking lot of the target is an old urban legend / joke among security pros
(b) The "hack" being referenced was of classified systems - and most secure sites disable the USB ports (and other media loaders like floppies and DVD drives) on all but a handful of reduced access machines plus their security officers should be beating their users over the head about the process for bringing data onto the secure systems - anti-virus scanning, even of COTS media and media the user creates himself, should be de rigueur.
(c) An attack like that is hard to target - so you got malware onto a classified network, other DoS, you can't really expect to get much out of it - it isn't terribly feasible to retrieve any data such malware might acquire.
So, while certainly possible, I think the rumor is unlikely to be true in that particular case.
and tell me mr Coward what have you deducted from you pile of information
So what if he has never done one useful thing with it? People like that provide a public service, its people like that which enabled DejaNews and now Google Groups to reconstruct much of the historical usenet. If his hobby is data hording, then let him horde. It doesn't cost you a dime, but one day it might possibly be of great benefit.
Oligopoly means minimal competition. You assume that CBS has figured out that the game has changed enough that the RIAA membership is no longer an effective monopoly. Given the goose-egg of evidence to support that theory, I sincerely doubt they have.
CBS certainly thinks so -- they bought the company for £140 (~$200) million last year.
Which is why whatever comes of them, at best it will be evolutionary. CBS is part of the old guard RIAA corps, they are just one of the faces of Viacom - all controlled by Summer Redstone. They may have brought some money to the table, but they brought a whole ton of baggage with them too. Enough baggage to make this privacy freak decide they couldn't be trusted with all that data they've been collecting (for example, if they can track down a stolen laptop, they can track down someone playing an MP3 from an illegally leaked pre-release album).
Slashdot Mirror
I would be happy to have EVERYTHING advertiser-free (including the street full of annoying billboards near my house,
If you live in california, you might just be in luck. There was a recent article in the LA Times (I think, I ran across it in google news) about just how poorly billboard codes are enforced and how a bunch of regular citizens have had to take up the slack to get illegal billboards taken down. So it may well be that some of those annoying billboards really are illegal and all it takes is bitching loud enough to get them removed.
Or, you could move to Hawaii where no billboards are allowed anywhere.
I think the word you are looking for is authoritarians.
You are all right to quote the principle "innocent until proven guilty" if you feel it is being threatened.
It isn't the principle that is being threatened, it is the freedom which that principle is designed to protect that is being threatened.
if people need this investment for valuable investment, why don't they choose a free alternative?
Arguments like that are a dime a dozen. They all have one critical flaw - they assume the world and the markets in the world are all static and working at optimum efficiency. (A) The world is not static (B) no market is perfect and to answer your question directly (C) inertia.
The fat cat middlemen that you speak of are the people that buy microsoft products
Those might be the fat cat middlemen that you speak of, but not the ones I am speaking of. I refer to distributors, marketing/advertising PR people, tariff and bribe collectors, etc, everybody who gets a piece of the pie as the money goes up the chain to MS and those who also get a cut of the pie as it comes back down the chain in the form of "aid" dollars.
Don't you think it seems like you get a lot of charity bang for your windows buck?
No. Anyone can cherry pick statistics of dubious merit. Why haven't you taken into account the efficiency of that spending? Do you honestly think that a command-control allocation system from the nearest thing there is to a monopoly in the business of "global development aid" is anywhere near as effective as local development spending by people with a vested interest in both the dollars spent and the community in which they are spent?
You don't see too many of them using email to SMS gateways to get out of paying for texts do you?
I dunno anyone with an iphone. But I know a few non-tech girls who have regular phones with basic internet functionality who have practically stopped texting in favor of IMing each other.
"The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering the prisons."
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
That's simply not enough to provide a significant number of people with broadband internet, at least not with the kind of network topography this band is proposed for.
I bet it will kill the market for text messages with 1000x markups though.
Usually these things are applied retroactively. As in there is so such law on the books when the guy commits the crime, there is no such law on the books when the guy is convicted and sentenced and no such law when he is released. But then some politician bent on proving that he is tough on crime decides to write a new law and apply it retroactively to anyone classified as a sex offender.
Imagine if they did that to people for other types of crimes. Former jay-walker? Not allowed within 50 feet of a street intersection.
Sounds like pork for some GPS manufacturer to me.
Never mind all the social problems with such a plan - they could save a ton of money by simply recording odometer readings with each safety inspection (presuming oregon has safety inspections) and then taxing the owner based on that. Sure, you'd still be taxed for out of state driving but big deal - if those states inact driving taxes they won't be double-dipping since you only get a safety inspection in your home state.
Don't think Iran is anything like Afghanistan or Iraq. It is among the most developed countries in the Middle-East and Central Asia, and definitely the one with the best-educated population.
FWIW, that's an honor that Iraq was in competition for, back before the embargoes.
I never bookmarked where I originally read about it, but here is one paper discussing the issue within the larger context of TRIPS:
http://www.aids-freeworld.org/content/view/162/71/
Here's reporting on the "chilling effect" of the foundation's funding:
http://www.aegis.com/news/wsj/2002/WJ020509.html
Implied impact on canadian proxy manufacturing:
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/node/3731
We all joke about his billions of dollars, but to see them put to use attempting to vaccinate an entire continent, I gotta tell ya that is a pretty damned impressive thing to do.
Sounds good on the face of it doesn't it? But look a little closer. The entire vaccination program is about intellectual property - countries have to forgo local pharma factories that produce medicine without paying royalties - despite it being perfectly legal to do so since most of those countries do not recognize foreign patents anyway.
But if someone asked me "who did more good, the guy who saved x-hundred-thousand kids or the guy who donated an improved scheduler algorithm to the Linux core?" there's only one way a human being could answer that question.
If you are going to cherry pick the question, then of course the outcome is predetermined. But what about taking into account the source of all that money in the first place? How much of the world's GDP has microsoft skimmed off the top? Money that would have been re-invested into the domestic economies all around the world, resulting in improved economic and living conditions without having to go through all the fat-cat middlemen, each taking their cut of that money before it eventually comes back around in the form of a "charity?"
Nobody who is even semi-rational is going to endorse child abuse
...which is why it never happens, right?
Endorsing it and doing it are two very different things.
Who endorses smoking?
Who endorses over-eating?
Who endorses drunk driving?
Who endorses using crystal meth?
But thanks for proving my point about favoring irrational conclusions over intelligent thought.
That wasn't a military site, that was a laboratory site with intellectual property they were concerned about.
WTF??!?
but don't assume that all Pentagon systems are strictly managed or "classified".
This specific case referenced in the RISKS digest is solely about classified systems on a classified internet, no scare quotes needed. The event and the DoD response are clearly documented in RISKS, and to start dragging unclassified, even non-DoD systems as justification for why disabling USB ports on classified systems is "frankly nonsense" is, well, frankly nonsense.
Servers really are not an issue since the people who need media access on them will have the privileges to do it anyway,
You seem to be ignoring my oft repeated point that specific needs are handled on a case by case basis.
However, ain't no way I believe this though -- "to find that the group tended to use their Ipods to listen to music on their good headphones through their computers, which had been an accepted use for years." Not even the sloppiest of sites is going to allow users to connect unclassified ipods to classified systems and then continue to treat those ipods as unclassified.
...was that its manufacture directly hurt children (the ones portrayed in it, not some abstract concept).
Scope creep or slippery slope, depends on how you look at it. Thew NEW argument is that simulated child porn can possibly be used to entice children into making actual child porn through desensitization or just plain old persuasiveness.
Next thing you know, they are going to ban toastmasters.
Even more strange, what if the perpetrator is the 'victim'?
I'm too lazy to dig up the articles on it, but a few years back there was a case of a teenage boy making gay-oriented child porn of himself and selling it on his own website. I seem to recall that he made a lot of money until the feds busted him.
It's also difficult to oppose a law against child pornography without sounding like you're endorsing child abuse,
Which, on the face of it, is retarded. Nobody who is even semi-rational is going to endorse child abuse, yet people are so easily convinced of such things when the topic comes up. Rather than consider that someone has a sophisticated opinion on the subject, too many people are all too willing to jump on the "why do you hate children?" bandwagon.
They may have created the image, or they may have filtered the image in PhotoShop to remove any digital signatures from the camera that took the image. Okay, Solomon, how do we settle this one?
Uh, innocent until proven guilty?
Most (real) child porn of today comes from the former east bloc and far east asia.
And here I thought that most child porn came from the FBI trolling as jailbait online.
That's frankly nonsense about disabling USB ports. The military uses USB sticks extensively to transmit bulky data in the field relatively securely, without relying on vulnerable network connectivity or complex intervening VPN or unreliable transfer technologies. And far too many peripheral devices, from mice to graphics plotters to speakers, are now USB, so you can't simply plug that port or disable them in the BIOS.
I speak from personal experience. The sites I am familiar with software disable USB ports on all systems except a select few which are specifically designated as data transfer workstations. Furthermore, mice and keyboards are still widely available with PS/2 ports on them and almost all other peripherals are unnecessary on the majority of systems, specific needs are handled on a case by case basis.
Funnily enough, there's a rumour going around that USB sticks were used to hack into the Pentagon:
I saw that in RISKS when it first came out and I'm surprised it hasn't been disputed yet. The reasons being that
(a) Dropping a bunch of infected media in the parking lot of the target is an old urban legend / joke among security pros
(b) The "hack" being referenced was of classified systems - and most secure sites disable the USB ports (and other media loaders like floppies and DVD drives) on all but a handful of reduced access machines plus their security officers should be beating their users over the head about the process for bringing data onto the secure systems - anti-virus scanning, even of COTS media and media the user creates himself, should be de rigueur.
(c) An attack like that is hard to target - so you got malware onto a classified network, other DoS, you can't really expect to get much out of it - it isn't terribly feasible to retrieve any data such malware might acquire.
So, while certainly possible, I think the rumor is unlikely to be true in that particular case.
and tell me mr Coward what have you deducted from you pile of information
So what if he has never done one useful thing with it? People like that provide a public service, its people like that which enabled DejaNews and now Google Groups to reconstruct much of the historical usenet. If his hobby is data hording, then let him horde. It doesn't cost you a dime, but one day it might possibly be of great benefit.
Oligopoly means minimal competition. You assume that CBS has figured out that the game has changed enough that the RIAA membership is no longer an effective monopoly. Given the goose-egg of evidence to support that theory, I sincerely doubt they have.
CBS certainly thinks so -- they bought the company for £140 (~$200) million last year.
Which is why whatever comes of them, at best it will be evolutionary. CBS is part of the old guard RIAA corps, they are just one of the faces of Viacom - all controlled by Summer Redstone. They may have brought some money to the table, but they brought a whole ton of baggage with them too. Enough baggage to make this privacy freak decide they couldn't be trusted with all that data they've been collecting (for example, if they can track down a stolen laptop, they can track down someone playing an MP3 from an illegally leaked pre-release album).