once it's widely known that these devices exist (and how to identify them) people will crack the case and either start sending false data back
No need to even check if one is on your car. Get yourself a very low-power GPS scrambler - with an effective range of only 10 feet or so, or even better, GPS spoofer, and just keep that in your car anytime you are up to no good. Probably illegal because of FCC restrictions, but at that low of a power level no one will ever know.
For anyone not familiar with this particular organization, shorten it to Stasi and think back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I like it.
After the wall came down all the stasi officers got jobs as taxi drivers. They were really good at it because you could get in one of their cabs, tell them your name and they already knew where you lived.
The most likely relationship is that people on the autistic spectrum tend to be attracted to video games. It is quite unlikely that the attraction to video games causes the ASD.
I suspect it would be a lot more accurate to say that ASD causes video gaming rather than video gaming causes ASD.
I was irresponsible in my early 20s, shaped up, aggressively monitored my scores (and demandedvalidation of any tradelines which seemed dubious) and was fine within a few years I was fine..
So, what you are saying is that you bent over and took it from the credit reporting agencies. I think you just proved my point.
That's your decision to make. Nobody's forcing anybody to buy a car or house they can't afford.
Perhaps not a house, but in many parts of this country owning a car is a practical requirement for stable employment. Furthermore its become quite common for landlords to pull credit reports on rental applicatins to try to reduce the risk of having to evict.
So, while one might argue that becoming homeless and and unemployed is better than taking on a loan, this one would laugh at the ridiculousness of such an argument.
Oh, well let's just bend over for the Royal Triumvirate of Credit Bureaus, while we're at it, huh?
Very few of us have the luxury of making large purchases like a house or a car with cash. Most of those bending over do so because they have little choice in the matter, not because they want to.
I've never heard of that happening to a credit union. I doubt the members would stand for it in most cases. Why would they want their cost of banking going up?
On the other hand, I've seen a couple of cases where CUs got big enough and started acting like banks. CEFCU (formerly the Caterpillar Credit Union) in IL is one of the biggest in the country and nearly 20 years ago they started doing that crap where they charged extra fees to people who only had small balances. It pissed me off enough that I closed my account with them, despite being way beyond the minimum balance requirements.
A few years later when debit cards were just starting to become popular, TexIns (formerly the Texas Instruments Credit Union) started pushing debit cards on all of their members via the combo ATM/Debit card trick - unless you kicked up a fuss your ATM card was automatically enabled for debit usage too. My understanding is that such pushes were actually widespread in the CU community and usually accompanied with a bunch of evil PR to convince members it was actually a good thing. Anyone who was paying attention knew that debit cards were a bad deal for practically everyone -- a big fee generator with far less consumer protections than credit cards.
So it isn't easy, in fact it may even be illegal to formally co-opt a CU in the way the GP described, but sometimes they do end up being managed by execs with a bankster mindset.
I know the commercial banks lobby pretty hard against credit unions. They hate them.
It's totally true and ironically a much more closer case of actual socialism since the banks are using the government to protect them rather than doing it themselves.
my most recent example was trying to search for information on the proper syntax for multiple entries in the linux.forward file, because there's no way to include the period in front of the file name, the information returned is all about forwarding things in linux, but not about the file I'm interested in
Funny thing about that - even though the search results don't know about it, the auto-complete does know about the leading period because when I type.forward all ten or so of the auto-complete suggestions are variations on the.forward file. I don't log into google nor even allow google to set cookies on my system either so it shouldn't be getting any sort of heuristic based on previous unixy searches either.
If you give your entire customer list to a third party you are just asking for it to be abused. No matter how strict their "policies" may be with respect to handling your data, all it takes is one disgruntled employee to grab a copy on their way out the door and that's the best case. It can only get worse from there.
There is only one way to guarantee that your data is not abused - don't give it to anyone else. All the rules and laws of man will never top the fact that fact you can't copy what you don't have.
FWIW I've seen this happen first-hand. E*Trade farmed their mailings for options trading out to some third party, and they dutifully sent them for six months to me at "etrade@ryel-industries.com" - the address I had on file with E*Trade. I was annoyed enough that E*Trade thought spamming me was a good idea that I remembered it. But a year later I started getting spam from Ameritrade or Schwab or whatever they are called now sent to "etrade@ryel-industries.com" and when I checked the Received: headers it was the same 3rd party as E*Trade had used.
Of course E*Trade couldn't even comprehend what I was talking about when I complained to them. I haven't really done much with my E*Trade account since. They obviously don't really give a damn about my privacy.
Try taking a classified military radio (in a properly marked courier bag with all the paperwork) through security.
I had a friend couriering a similar piece of equipment - he didn't have any problem at the airport because his security officer made the proper arrangements with whoever at the airport handles that stuff. In fact he got to short-cut all the TSA bullshit.
BUT, he was indian. American citizen, security clearance and all that, but very brown. Because the parcel was classified he had to keep it with him at all times. So every time he went to take a piss he had to bring it with him. The flight attendants made it quite obvious that they were not happy about a brown man taking a big box into the bathroom every couple of hours.
Sure, but if we didn't have scanners and it was fairly trivial to get through security, the number would skyrocket.
That's provably false.
No terrorist sees the security at airports and says, "Oh well, I'll just give up, go home and play xbox." Instead he looks for another target that is less well defended and hits that instead.
So why haven't the number of attacks on other targets - like movie theaters and shopping malls or even just sabotage on unguarded train tracks - skyrocketed? The number of such attacks in the last decade is so small that you can count them on one hand with fingers to spare.
That or they wouldn't accept the scanners because they don't work....
When the rate of true positives is practically nil, it doesn't make a difference to the public's perception. No terrorists attacks equals no reason to doubt the effectiveness of the security.
Netscape was no less grotesque in that environment.
I still have occasion to use it on an old Solaris box. It is one of the most painful parts of any day.
Disagree. I used Netscape on Solaris starting with the early pre-1.0 releases and thought it was roughly equivalent to the windows releases, sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse. The problem with using one of those old releases is that they are just plain old. Trying to use netscape 3.x on any OS is going to be a sucktacular experience nowadays,
I hate to admit it, but his crazy ideas start looking a little less crazy every day. I do respect him for sticking to his ideals but he takes a sledge hammer to things that really need a little more precision.
My impression is that he is well aware that he will not be elected president or even vice-president. Given that reality, when he runs for president what he is really doing is using the race as a way to inform the public about libertarianism in the hope that some of it will make its way into the general american consensus. If he were to take less of an absolutist position all it would do is dilute the end result even further.
As support for this belief consider his position on the Federal Reserve - that it should be abolished. He's now the chair of the Federal Reserve Oversight Committee and yet he hasn't killed the Federal Reserve because he realizes that doing so would be impractical, if not impossible, at this point in time. However he has been trying to reel it in, proposing bills to publicly audit it and make it more accountable - which sounds like the kind of precision versus sledge-hammer approach you are advocating.
Or for about a thousandth of the price, goggles for the pilots.
Absolutely. Given that these are lasers there are only a handful of specific wavelengths that need to be blocked. Last time I checked there was one really common green, two reds (a deeper red and an organish red) and a blue. Goggles, or even just light-weight plastic "safety glasses" with filters for those 4 most common frequencies should practically eliminate the problem. Perhaps I need to patent the idea...
If he was actually parking in handicapped spots because he felt the rules just don't apply to him he was an iDouche.
As CEO he would have his own designated spot in the parking lot.
From the article it sounds like he only did it at Apple - not everywhere. If that's the case, then I say it was actually better than getting his own designated parking place at each building. Think about it for a second - spots designated for the ceo would be in the exact same place as the handicapped spot and it would go unused whenever he wasn't there. He essentially made his ceo spot "dual-use" - ceo-parking when he was there and handicapped when he wasn't. That's actually better than ceo-only.
all that data will be used to compile an consumer profile on which companies will base their marketing and advertising. It's all very creepy and big brotherish.
What's worse is that it's extending beyond simply "marketing and advertising" - the personal data collectors are looking to extract value from all that personal information any way they can. "Targeted marketing" is just the first obvious idea that has occurred to them. The second obvious idea is to sell that data to governments to circumvent constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. Some companies are selling location data, especially current location, to companies and individuals for tracking/stalking purposes. It's going to keep getting worse - as in more risky and more costly to the people being profiled and to society as a whole - as the data collectors come up with new and innovative ways to sell all of that profiling information they've been collecting by the terabyte.
Right now people are essentially "selling" this personal information to these data collectors without even knowing the value of the information they are selling, it's almost like writing a blank check in exchange for a handful of bright and shiny baubles.
Not a snide comment but a serious question. In cases like this, you are effectively trading your privacy for access to content.
I say that advertising killed micropayments. Advertisements have effectively filled the market need for micropayments, except that unlike a robust micropayment system, advertising comes with all kinds of extra baggage as the ad networks try to extract more and more value out of their systems. If enough people could opt-out of the ad networks that would create new demand for micropayments and we might actually see some progress on that front.
Again, completely incorrect, and incongruous with well-known historical perspectives from both sides of the Revolution[. Read some history before you bother posting again.
While I tend to agree with your sentiment, proof by assertion is bullshit -- especially when you do it twice. Without useful citations your posts are just noise.
Thanks AC dude. It's kinda funny how the vocab nazis will get all hyper-focused on the definition of one word and while completely ignoring the definitions of all the other words in the very same sentence.
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once it's widely known that these devices exist (and how to identify them) people will crack the case and either start sending false data back
No need to even check if one is on your car. Get yourself a very low-power GPS scrambler - with an effective range of only 10 feet or so, or even better, GPS spoofer, and just keep that in your car anytime you are up to no good. Probably illegal because of FCC restrictions, but at that low of a power level no one will ever know.
For anyone not familiar with this particular organization, shorten it to Stasi and think back to before the fall of the Berlin Wall. I like it.
After the wall came down all the stasi officers got jobs as taxi drivers. They were really good at it because you could get in one of their cabs, tell them your name and they already knew where you lived.
Let's rename the war on terror to be more accurate too ...
Virtual strip-searches, ball-fondling, never-ending but ineffectual id checks, forcing women to drink their own breast-milk, arbitrary rule enforcement, making everyone go bare-foot, singling-out people by the clothes they wear, forcing people to remove nipple rings with pliers, torturing injured flyers, making people piss on themselves, the list is practically endless.
And yet the TSA hasn't caught a single terrorist.
But they sure are doing a bang-up job of destroying human dignity. Therefore I say we rename the War on Terror to The War on Dignity.
The most likely relationship is that people on the autistic spectrum tend to be attracted to video games. It is quite unlikely that the attraction to video games causes the ASD.
I suspect it would be a lot more accurate to say that ASD causes video gaming rather than video gaming causes ASD.
I was irresponsible in my early 20s, shaped up, aggressively monitored my scores (and demandedvalidation of any tradelines which seemed dubious) and was fine within a few years I was fine..
So, what you are saying is that you bent over and took it from the credit reporting agencies. I think you just proved my point.
That's your decision to make. Nobody's forcing anybody to buy a car or house they can't afford.
Perhaps not a house, but in many parts of this country owning a car is a practical requirement for stable employment. Furthermore its become quite common for landlords to pull credit reports on rental applicatins to try to reduce the risk of having to evict.
So, while one might argue that becoming homeless and and unemployed is better than taking on a loan, this one would laugh at the ridiculousness of such an argument.
Oh, well let's just bend over for the Royal Triumvirate of Credit Bureaus, while we're at it, huh?
Very few of us have the luxury of making large purchases like a house or a car with cash. Most of those bending over do so because they have little choice in the matter, not because they want to.
I've never heard of that happening to a credit union. I doubt the members would stand for it in most cases. Why would they want their cost of banking going up?
On the other hand, I've seen a couple of cases where CUs got big enough and started acting like banks. CEFCU (formerly the Caterpillar Credit Union) in IL is one of the biggest in the country and nearly 20 years ago they started doing that crap where they charged extra fees to people who only had small balances. It pissed me off enough that I closed my account with them, despite being way beyond the minimum balance requirements.
A few years later when debit cards were just starting to become popular, TexIns (formerly the Texas Instruments Credit Union) started pushing debit cards on all of their members via the combo ATM/Debit card trick - unless you kicked up a fuss your ATM card was automatically enabled for debit usage too. My understanding is that such pushes were actually widespread in the CU community and usually accompanied with a bunch of evil PR to convince members it was actually a good thing. Anyone who was paying attention knew that debit cards were a bad deal for practically everyone -- a big fee generator with far less consumer protections than credit cards.
So it isn't easy, in fact it may even be illegal to formally co-opt a CU in the way the GP described, but sometimes they do end up being managed by execs with a bankster mindset.
I know the commercial banks lobby pretty hard against credit unions. They hate them.
It's totally true and ironically a much more closer case of actual socialism since the banks are using the government to protect them rather than doing it themselves.
my most recent example was trying to search for information on the proper syntax for multiple entries in the linux .forward file, because there's no way to include the period in front of the file name, the information returned is all about forwarding things in linux, but not about the file I'm interested in
Funny thing about that - even though the search results don't know about it, the auto-complete does know about the leading period because when I type .forward all ten or so of the auto-complete suggestions are variations on the .forward file. I don't log into google nor even allow google to set cookies on my system either so it shouldn't be getting any sort of heuristic based on previous unixy searches either.
If you give your entire customer list to a third party you are just asking for it to be abused. No matter how strict their "policies" may be with respect to handling your data, all it takes is one disgruntled employee to grab a copy on their way out the door and that's the best case. It can only get worse from there.
There is only one way to guarantee that your data is not abused - don't give it to anyone else. All the rules and laws of man will never top the fact that fact you can't copy what you don't have.
FWIW I've seen this happen first-hand. E*Trade farmed their mailings for options trading out to some third party, and they dutifully sent them for six months to me at "etrade@ryel-industries.com" - the address I had on file with E*Trade. I was annoyed enough that E*Trade thought spamming me was a good idea that I remembered it. But a year later I started getting spam from Ameritrade or Schwab or whatever they are called now sent to "etrade@ryel-industries.com" and when I checked the Received: headers it was the same 3rd party as E*Trade had used.
Of course E*Trade couldn't even comprehend what I was talking about when I complained to them. I haven't really done much with my E*Trade account since. They obviously don't really give a damn about my privacy.
Try taking a classified military radio (in a properly marked courier bag with all the paperwork) through security.
I had a friend couriering a similar piece of equipment - he didn't have any problem at the airport because his security officer made the proper arrangements with whoever at the airport handles that stuff. In fact he got to short-cut all the TSA bullshit.
BUT, he was indian. American citizen, security clearance and all that, but very brown. Because the parcel was classified he had to keep it with him at all times. So every time he went to take a piss he had to bring it with him. The flight attendants made it quite obvious that they were not happy about a brown man taking a big box into the bathroom every couple of hours.
Sure, but if we didn't have scanners and it was fairly trivial to get through security, the number would skyrocket.
That's provably false.
No terrorist sees the security at airports and says, "Oh well, I'll just give up, go home and play xbox."
Instead he looks for another target that is less well defended and hits that instead.
So why haven't the number of attacks on other targets - like movie theaters and shopping malls or even just sabotage on unguarded train tracks - skyrocketed? The number of such attacks in the last decade is so small that you can count them on one hand with fingers to spare.
That or they wouldn't accept the scanners because they don't work....
When the rate of true positives is practically nil, it doesn't make a difference to the public's perception. No terrorists attacks equals no reason to doubt the effectiveness of the security.
Netscape was no less grotesque in that environment.
I still have occasion to use it on an old Solaris box. It is one of the most painful parts of any day.
Disagree. I used Netscape on Solaris starting with the early pre-1.0 releases and thought it was roughly equivalent to the windows releases, sometimes a little better, sometimes a little worse. The problem with using one of those old releases is that they are just plain old. Trying to use netscape 3.x on any OS is going to be a sucktacular experience nowadays,
I hate to admit it, but his crazy ideas start looking a little less crazy every day. I do respect him for sticking to his ideals but he takes a sledge hammer to things that really need a little more precision.
My impression is that he is well aware that he will not be elected president or even vice-president. Given that reality, when he runs for president what he is really doing is using the race as a way to inform the public about libertarianism in the hope that some of it will make its way into the general american consensus. If he were to take less of an absolutist position all it would do is dilute the end result even further.
As support for this belief consider his position on the Federal Reserve - that it should be abolished. He's now the chair of the Federal Reserve Oversight Committee and yet he hasn't killed the Federal Reserve because he realizes that doing so would be impractical, if not impossible, at this point in time. However he has been trying to reel it in, proposing bills to publicly audit it and make it more accountable - which sounds like the kind of precision versus sledge-hammer approach you are advocating.
Sadly I'm sure most people here will go on and on about how it's not FLAC, and whatever.
That's because once you go FLAC you never go back!
Or for about a thousandth of the price, goggles for the pilots.
Absolutely. Given that these are lasers there are only a handful of specific wavelengths that need to be blocked. Last time I checked there was one really common green, two reds (a deeper red and an organish red) and a blue. Goggles, or even just light-weight plastic "safety glasses" with filters for those 4 most common frequencies should practically eliminate the problem. Perhaps I need to patent the idea...
If he was actually parking in handicapped spots because he felt the rules just don't apply to him he was an iDouche.
As CEO he would have his own designated spot in the parking lot.
From the article it sounds like he only did it at Apple - not everywhere.
If that's the case, then I say it was actually better than getting his own designated parking place at each building.
Think about it for a second - spots designated for the ceo would be in the exact same place as the handicapped spot and it would go unused whenever he wasn't there. He essentially made his ceo spot "dual-use" - ceo-parking when he was there and handicapped when he wasn't. That's actually better than ceo-only.
Their goal was good (building schools in developing countries) but I refused to ever donate to them because I hated their acronym.
So, do you have any nose left or are you still angry at your face?
I don't want to be paying for every site I quickly glance at either.
You are now, you are just paying with your privacy instead of a tenth of a cent.
all that data will be used to compile an consumer profile on which companies will base their marketing and advertising. It's all very creepy and big brotherish.
What's worse is that it's extending beyond simply "marketing and advertising" - the personal data collectors are looking to extract value from all that personal information any way they can. "Targeted marketing" is just the first obvious idea that has occurred to them. The second obvious idea is to sell that data to governments to circumvent constitutional protections against unreasonable searches. Some companies are selling location data, especially current location, to companies and individuals for tracking/stalking purposes. It's going to keep getting worse - as in more risky and more costly to the people being profiled and to society as a whole - as the data collectors come up with new and innovative ways to sell all of that profiling information they've been collecting by the terabyte.
Right now people are essentially "selling" this personal information to these data collectors without even knowing the value of the information they are selling, it's almost like writing a blank check in exchange for a handful of bright and shiny baubles.
Not a snide comment but a serious question. In cases like this, you are effectively trading your privacy for access to content.
I say that advertising killed micropayments. Advertisements have effectively filled the market need for micropayments, except that unlike a robust micropayment system, advertising comes with all kinds of extra baggage as the ad networks try to extract more and more value out of their systems. If enough people could opt-out of the ad networks that would create new demand for micropayments and we might actually see some progress on that front.
At least a guy can hope.
Again, completely incorrect, and incongruous with well-known historical perspectives from both sides of the Revolution[. Read some history before you bother posting again.
While I tend to agree with your sentiment, proof by assertion is bullshit -- especially when you do it twice.
Without useful citations your posts are just noise.
No, but "for all practical purposes" does.
Thanks AC dude. It's kinda funny how the vocab nazis will get all hyper-focused on the definition of one word and while completely ignoring the definitions of all the other words in the very same sentence.