And Juniper Networks is pushing the idea that IPv6 is not on anybody's agenda because sell routers, NAT boxes and associated services.
I hope you are joking. Juniper would love to sell upgrades of their router's to all of their current customers to facilitate the jump to IPv6, but as they said, customers are just not very interested. I work for a company that sells network security devices and I can tell you IPv6 has been on the agenda for a long time, but most of the IPv6 support just keeps getting pushed back further and further, because no one really wants it from us. The only reason to include it is because some of the asian market is starting to ask for it. The U.S. as a rule is uninterested.
his ability to share the information without being detected or in our case the ability to dispose of evidence, then you'd better darn well believe that the prosecution has a right to bring in evidence that you did have that capability.
They presented no evidence (as far as any of us know) that he used encryption to hide the transmission of child pornography and you don't need PGP to delete files and overwrite them, only to encrypt them on your own system. As far as I could tell there was no mention of any encrypted files or transmissions anywhere, merely encryption tools.
I could see bringing this up is a defendant had a number of encrypted files that the police could not decode (maybe is is child porn) or even if the defendant transferred a large amount of data somewhere via an encrypted pipe. But as the case was presented neither of those things was mentioned in the case, merely encryption tools used to try to paint the defendant as some sort of sophisticated criminal, just because he has them.
From what was presented PGP has about as much to do with the case as a wood lathe in the house of someone accused of assault and battery. "The defendant has a lathe, much like the kind one would use to make a baseball bat to beat people with." It sounds like the judge knew what he was doing in this case and just made the decision to avoid having to have a fresh trial. This precedent is wrong and dangerous. Having or not having PGP on a computer is irrelevant to the case and was just an attempt to portray someone as a criminal through association with "subversive" technology. This is especially sad because this person probably is guilty of a very real crime and there seems to be plenty of real evidence to prove it.
As far as I could tell, no evidence was presented claiming that PGP was used to encrypt anything, or that there was any encrypted data that might be child porn. Here's a revision of your above analogy with that in mind:
You murder someone on the street with a knife. The state has proof you had the knife. The state has witnesses you ran home with the knife. Your defense rests on the fact that they couldn't find the knife in your home.
The state looks in your basement and discovers you have a perfectly safe machining toolset (work with me here). The state is justified in bringing into evidence the possibility that the reason they couldn't find the knife is because you had the capability building a lockbox and putting it in there. They did not, however, present any lock boxes into evidence that were found in your house, shipped from your house, or in any way connected to you.
Consider the following analogy: I murder someone on the street and flee in a red car. An eyewitness can't identify me but testifies that they saw a red car speeding away. The state introduces my auto title showing that my car was red.
Your analogy is flawed and I'll show you why this is a concern.
Consider the following analogy: I murder someone on the street and flee and I'm black. An eyewitness can't identify me but testifies that they saw a black man running away. The state points out that I'm black.
Is the fact that I am black relevant? Yes it is, but it is also possibly prejudicial since many people are prejudiced against blacks. Now in this particular case, no one saw a red car speeding away, or a black person, or any use of encryption to hide child pornography. This is a lot more like the following:
Consider the following analogy: I murder someone on the street and flee and I'm black. An eyewitness can't identify me and does not know the race of the person running away. The state points out that I'm black.
You're making the assumption that the food is western-vegetarian. Someone could be eating Asian food, which isn't don't really contain imitations of dairy or meat products.
Err, no. I was making an observation about vegetarian meals I see. You know a lot of asian food is fish which (unless you are catholic) is meat.
A vegetarian diet is tastier and better for you than what most people eat
Your point is well taken, but the "tastiness" of a vegetarian diet is very much a personal preference and the healthiness is a matter of your metabolism. A full 8% of the human race will slowly die without meat in their diet due to the lack of certain enzymes. As an aside, have you ever noticed how vegetarian meals often are imitations of meat or dairy products? I've seen vegetarian cheeseburgers and thought, "man, just buy the real thing already." As I said though, it's a a personal preference.
What you could do with the background images I'm not sure. Of course, you could use some sort of slideshow to read them, but that would have all the disadvantages of paper (e.g., no search), and all the disadvantages of electronic formats (e.g., have to read on screen).
You could OCR them and get readable text without having to manually scan each page or even buy the book. Of course you could just get a really fancy setup and scan library books and do the same thing. The point is not to make it impossible to copy (any DRM can be bypassed) it is just to make it sufficiently difficult so that Google cannot be prosecuted for copyright infringement.
I definitely refuse to concede that point. Several other cell devices have been mentioned on Slashdot before including (if I recall correctly) one of the world's fastest supercomputers. I also expect it to be showing up in other game consoles and general purpose computing devices.
Here is the explanation from Google's page. Apparently there are three levels of restriction depending upon the source of the work. The work you link to was "submitted by the publisher" and apparently the number of pages forward or back can be set by them, so either they specifically allow you to preview the whole work, you did not run into the restriction, or there is a bug Google's implementation.
Then switch banks. Wamu, Wells, and Citi all have zero problems with firefox. Call the bank and tell them why.
As I mentioned two of the banks do work with Firefox (and Safari my preferred browser) but none of them offer decent online security options such as are commonly offered in many parts of Europe. as for contacting them, I e-mailed two of the bank's feedback e-mail addresses and politely mentioned why I was going with a competitor. One did not even have an e-mail or working link just broken "contact us" javascripts. I gave up on them because this is not something I want to waste my time on. If you know a good bank, preferably one with physical locations I can get to, that has rotating PIN numbers or one time passwords for online transactions I'd love to hear about them. I did not, however, mention the banking problems to complain that I can't find a good bank, merely to point out that many banks are very incompetent, especially technologically.
Are you sure Google doesn't let you read a whole book?
Your search shows about 70 of the about 400 pages in the book. Try to perform a a search that will show you all of them. As I understand they also limit the number of pages you can actually view from an IP address as well as how many consecutive pages you can view from an IP address. At least that was what was claimed in the paper I read, I have not tried it personally.
This *will* hinder book sales. While some people might want the nice hardbound copy - most people will just settle for the digital copy which is just as good.
The digital "copy" offered by Google is certainly not "just as good" as a real copy. It is better in one way and worse in several others. First, it is better because you can find passages by searching. If I type "hemoglobin rupture" I can find a number of specific references. It is worse in that reading on a screen sucks, it hurts your eyes after a time and ties you to a screen and electricity. More importantly, Google is not allowing anyone to read a whole book, only a small passage from the book. In a few very specific cases (like a dictionary, or reference with very short entries) this might be as good, but for the most part it is not. Google has taken great care to limit this and design the service to help you find the name of the book you need, not to let you read it for free.
There are three real reasons scholarly publishers are against this. First dictionaries and references with very short passages are made obsolete (as I mentioned above). Second, many modern scholars do not really want to read a work, merely cite it to back up some point and these people would be better served by just using Google's service. Finally, it allows a researcher to read a short, relevant passage from a book which is often enough to know that a book is useless and prevent someone from buying a work that sounds useful, but is not.
FOr example, in my life, there are very few books that I have read in digital format that I have bought to have as a hard copy.
You seem to be under the impression that Google is just offering up books for free in digital format. That is not my understanding of the service at all.
They datamine that stuff and profile you. If you didn't know that, you are being naive. To a bank, knowing the customer is one of the most important things.
Just because the collect a lot of data on their own or buy it from outside sources does not mean it is accurate.
Sure, a transaction may be two days late (which can be very sucky for many clients), but it's only the transaction.
I've found two different banks each to have an incorrect balance for my account because once they charged me $400 in ATM fees when I did not have a ATM card at all (they said it was a "computer glitch") and once they completely lost a check I deposited (which they did not find a month after deposit until I quoted them the transaction number). I also had an ATM card PIN number disappear completely from the system making the card unusable until I could get a new one. My girlfriend has had yet another bank screw up her balance twice (once in each direction) by seemingly random amounts of money. This is Not accurate record keeping.
Also: I don't know if you realise, but banks with ebanking functionality (about all of them these days, and as I see many support Firefox and alternate browsers... at least my banks do) usually want to have an email functionality within.
Interesting you should mention that. I've been looking to open a new money market account. There are five banks within a few blocks of my house and I figured one of them would have decent online banking. Three of them will not even load the online banking in anything but IE, one you cannot even send them e-mail to ask a question in anything but IE (no e-mail address listed just broken javascript links), none of them offer rotating passwords or PIN numbers, and none of them offer one-time passwords for online transactions. I'd say the state of technological security for online banks in the U.S. is piss poor. You mention euros in your comment and I've heard that European banks have better security track records and have required audits in some countries. (Wasn't there just a Register article about how some security companies point out the same errors twice a year to the same banks because although audits are required by law, fixing the problems isn't.)
I'm completely unconvinced the average bank is not going to do something completely stupid like send e-mail asking me for information or providing (possibly spoofed) links to their website and ask me to provide them with some information. One of the reasons I'd prefer a bank close to home is so I can walk down and take care of these things in person. So sorry, you haven't really bolstered my opinion of banks accuracy and competence, nor that of other large businesses.
The X86 may not be pretty, but I'd prefer it over a closed architecture any day.
What an amusing assertion. You do realize that x86 was a completely proprietary architecture, with no open spec that was reverse engineered and now is mainly controlled by Intel, with AMD thus far maintaining compatibility for the most part, but with no guarantee of that in the future?
PowerPC on the other hand has an open and published spec and the architecture is implemented by both IBM and Motorola and the spec is managed by a consortium of industry players and built upon OpenFirmware with a completely open and published specification as well. There is nothing stopping anyone from building a macintosh compatible computer. Of course the OS X license forbids you to run it on anything not sold by Apple, but that has nothing to do with the hardware specifications. Windows is only available for the few architectures MS will build and sell it for. Linux or the BSDs can be run on anything and if you want a truly open system, is more "open" on powerpc than x86.
You bank is never going to ask you for your account number over email. They already have it!
Part of the reason this social engineering is successful is that companies, banks, large organizations are so lousy at keeping accurate records. Have you never had a bank screw up your name, or your balance, or some other company you do business with charge you for something you never ordered or fail to charge you for something you have ordered? I've had all these things happen, and it makes it completely unsurprising that a bank would lose your information or even have a policy of verifying your account password via e-mail. It is ridiculous and insecure and generally a really stupid idea, which is why it seems plausible that some lumbering bureaucracy would do it. Obviously, I would never give out sensitive information via e-mail, but I would actually not be surprised if some company requested it via that method. Just because it looks like phishing, does not mean it is, it could just be someone being really dumb. There is plenty of blame to go around here.
To be fair, though, the filter has not yet bothered my surfing, so I doubt anyone who wasn't looking for trouble would have a problem.
What filtering software are you using? Have you tried looking up sexual education resources, condoms, the gay and lesbian alliance, or the american civil liberties union? Those are all commonly blocked topics and all very valid things that could be very important for a young person to research.
If you'd read the article, you might know what you are talking about. They said they knew minors were being given access by older siblings and other adults. If they know this, they obviously know who those people are. If your scenario is true, and a child is stealing a card, thats, you know stealing, and already illegal. The kid should be dealt with just like any other minor who steals.
Librarians and technicians are obviously not guilty of anything as it is not their responsibility. I suspect you only mentioned them to try to gain sympathy for your very weak argument. The responsibility is clearly the parent's.
Scientists working with adult stem cells have already done this work with humans while as you quoted, embryonic research is still working with rats.
Please show me a reference to one repaired spinal column in humans using mature undifferentiated stem cells. My understanding is that some nerve damage has been repaired in humans using embryonic stem cells, but no spinal column repairs. Also, please use specific terms "adult stem cells" is not a term I've seen you define and not one used in any scientific journals I've read.
A simple Google search will provide you with all the evidence you need to justify it. My point is, why not go after the more promising research and be completely clear of any moral issues in ANYONES opinion?
Both lines of research are promising and if you had bothered to read the damn article you'd know that this research is from one of the few labs that actually has shown working repair to spinal column, right now, with results to back it up. This is working, and mature undifferentiated stem cell research currently is not for a number of reasons. I personally think we should explore as many lines of research as possible to try to heal damaged spinal cords, but maybe that is just because I know people who have been trapped in wheelchairs for the last 30 years. As a second point, no research is ever completely in the clear of any moral issues. Various religions object to using cow fetal fluid for growing cultures and others object to any medical procedures at all. What you really are saying is, why can't you stop doing this line of research that my particular religion objects to. To which I again reply, aside from your religious beliefs, why the hell should we, especially if this research has the potential to heal the sick? There was a lot of very uninformed debate about this, and legislation and funding for stem cell research in the U.S. lately. The conservative right basically said, we're restricting a lot of funding, but that's OK, because it will not stop the most "promising" research. Well, fast forward just a year and you see all the progress has been made in other countries, usually with a fraction of the research funding, while the U.S. scientific community tries to establish private funding and struggles to overcome technical problems imposed the restrictions of that legislation.
How stupid can you be to pass that up!?
This particular researcher and line of research has actually repaired spinal columns in rats, and is confident that it will work for people in within a reasonable period of time. How stupid do you have to be to stop researching this!?!
library officials discovered that many patrons logged onto library computers using library cards and passwords of friends or relatives... So there's the problem. Please include your personal counter suggestion with any criticisms.
If it is illegal for children to view the restricted materials, charge the person who gave them access with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. If it is not illegal, there is no reason to waste public funds trying to restrict minor's access to the material. Do they also prevent minors from looking at nude pictures in art books somehow?
Parents should not expect their children to be restricted unless they are present to enforce that restriction. There are always ways around these measures and many valid reasons to get around them. I have yet to see a filtering mechanism for the internet that does not block content that is both important for children to know and an unintended effect of the system.
These libraries should rethink their policy. Kids will still be able to bypass this with a gummi bear, a cd-rom, or a latex copy of their parent's fingerprint. Parents will be given the false impression that their children are safe on the internet, which they won't be since filtering never works properly and can be bypassed.
Here is the main problem with what the libraries are doing. They are asking patrons to trust them that the fingerprint data will not be saved or used against them. Even if all the patrons trust the people who work at the library now, this policy will sadly outlive them and they are being asked to trust all the people who will work at the library in future. Finally, they are being asked to trust that the federal government will not step in and start requiring this data at some point in the future. Basically, they are asking for a lot of people to entrust them and their technology and their policies to protect their freedom, all without a really really damn good reason to do so.
Quantifying societal harm is almost impossible because everyone has different value judgements they apply but does this then mean that all ethics are relative?
Ethics are defined rules of conduct. Morals are beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. Ethical behavior is behavior that adheres to your own ethical code, which is often modeled on your moral beliefs. Laws are ethical codes (yours or someone else's) that are theoretically enforced by police agents.
Basically, societal harm must be something that an overriding majority of the people feel is damaging enough that restricting free choice for all is necessary. Murder is a good example, because it is pretty universally believed that killing another human being, without mitigating circumstances is "wrong." Ethically that might be "killing is wrong," "killing sentient beings is wrong," "killing humans is wrong," or "killing humans without provocation is wrong." I suppose the sticking point is how much of society must agree that something is harmful to society. There is also the danger of a majority declaring something harmful to society, that does not actually effect society, or only effects the individual who is making that choice. It is human nature to try to impose your will upon others and it is ethics, not morals that usually stands in the way. Basic rhetorical method includes finding common ground, then building upon it to discover the root of a difference and trying to resolve that difference. If only that the aforementioned principal was applied to law making.
I've wander a bit from my main point here. Basically, once facts are agreed upon, it is not all that hard to get people to agree to common ethics. Facts can be scientifically determined with some level of certainty. The problems facing most public debates today is that each side is more interested in swaying the public and winning than in finding the facts and presenting them simply. Thus each individual must expend extra effort to look at not only two opposing views, but also all the assumptions upon which those views are founded and minority viewpoints. Many people do not have the time or energy required to properly research an issue. It is imperative that these people do not just make a guess, side with the current majority, or take a public figure's word for it. Find out the facts, or refrain from making assertions.
WHY NOT dump embryo research and head towards alternatives?
Because it is a promising and helpful line of research. I mean if you want to stop other people from researching something, I think the onus is on you to provide a scientific and proven reason why they should do it. Otherwise it is just your unscientific opinion against theirs and there is no reason to give your opinion about what someone else is doing more weight than their own.
We need some intelligent argument as to what makes cloning right...
What makes eating beans right? Maybe we should have a discussion about what reasons people might consider cloning to be unethical or immoral. Someone somewhere will probably consider any given act you can think of to be "wrong" for some reason. The question really boils down to two things:
How does cloning fit into my personal beliefs and life philosophy? Do I consider cloning to be ethical and should I consider it as a medical treatment?
How does cloning effect society? Is it damaging in some way that outweighs its benefits? Should cloning be made illegal because of damage it does to society?
In the first case if a person decides cloning is "wrong" well they can just not pay someone to clone them and not worry about it. Since ethical and moral decisions are personal, this can be a personal decision and there is no reason for any legal intervention.
In the second case, there must be a demonstrable detriment to society, in which case cloning should be restricted or banned by law. This is a harder to criteria to satisfy, but then again it is banning people from making their own moral choices, so it had better be a pretty well established and overriding concern.
Actually, no. I purchased the powerbook for about $400 less than the Thinkpad. But that does not really mean anything since I acquired the the Thinkpad several months earlier than the Powerbook.
Slashdot Mirror
And Juniper Networks is pushing the idea that IPv6 is not on anybody's agenda because sell routers, NAT boxes and associated services.
I hope you are joking. Juniper would love to sell upgrades of their router's to all of their current customers to facilitate the jump to IPv6, but as they said, customers are just not very interested. I work for a company that sells network security devices and I can tell you IPv6 has been on the agenda for a long time, but most of the IPv6 support just keeps getting pushed back further and further, because no one really wants it from us. The only reason to include it is because some of the asian market is starting to ask for it. The U.S. as a rule is uninterested.
his ability to share the information without being detected or in our case the ability to dispose of evidence, then you'd better darn well believe that the prosecution has a right to bring in evidence that you did have that capability.
They presented no evidence (as far as any of us know) that he used encryption to hide the transmission of child pornography and you don't need PGP to delete files and overwrite them, only to encrypt them on your own system. As far as I could tell there was no mention of any encrypted files or transmissions anywhere, merely encryption tools.
I could see bringing this up is a defendant had a number of encrypted files that the police could not decode (maybe is is child porn) or even if the defendant transferred a large amount of data somewhere via an encrypted pipe. But as the case was presented neither of those things was mentioned in the case, merely encryption tools used to try to paint the defendant as some sort of sophisticated criminal, just because he has them.
From what was presented PGP has about as much to do with the case as a wood lathe in the house of someone accused of assault and battery. "The defendant has a lathe, much like the kind one would use to make a baseball bat to beat people with." It sounds like the judge knew what he was doing in this case and just made the decision to avoid having to have a fresh trial. This precedent is wrong and dangerous. Having or not having PGP on a computer is irrelevant to the case and was just an attempt to portray someone as a criminal through association with "subversive" technology. This is especially sad because this person probably is guilty of a very real crime and there seems to be plenty of real evidence to prove it.
As far as I could tell, no evidence was presented claiming that PGP was used to encrypt anything, or that there was any encrypted data that might be child porn. Here's a revision of your above analogy with that in mind:
You murder someone on the street with a knife. The state has proof you had the knife. The state has witnesses you ran home with the knife. Your defense rests on the fact that they couldn't find the knife in your home.
The state looks in your basement and discovers you have a perfectly safe machining toolset (work with me here). The state is justified in bringing into evidence the possibility that the reason they couldn't find the knife is because you had the capability building a lockbox and putting it in there. They did not, however, present any lock boxes into evidence that were found in your house, shipped from your house, or in any way connected to you.
Consider the following analogy: I murder someone on the street and flee in a red car. An eyewitness can't identify me but testifies that they saw a red car speeding away. The state introduces my auto title showing that my car was red.
Your analogy is flawed and I'll show you why this is a concern.
Consider the following analogy: I murder someone on the street and flee and I'm black. An eyewitness can't identify me but testifies that they saw a black man running away. The state points out that I'm black.
Is the fact that I am black relevant? Yes it is, but it is also possibly prejudicial since many people are prejudiced against blacks. Now in this particular case, no one saw a red car speeding away, or a black person, or any use of encryption to hide child pornography. This is a lot more like the following:
Consider the following analogy: I murder someone on the street and flee and I'm black. An eyewitness can't identify me and does not know the race of the person running away. The state points out that I'm black.
You see where this is a problem?
You're making the assumption that the food is western-vegetarian. Someone could be eating Asian food, which isn't don't really contain imitations of dairy or meat products.
Err, no. I was making an observation about vegetarian meals I see. You know a lot of asian food is fish which (unless you are catholic) is meat.
A vegetarian diet is tastier and better for you than what most people eat
Your point is well taken, but the "tastiness" of a vegetarian diet is very much a personal preference and the healthiness is a matter of your metabolism. A full 8% of the human race will slowly die without meat in their diet due to the lack of certain enzymes. As an aside, have you ever noticed how vegetarian meals often are imitations of meat or dairy products? I've seen vegetarian cheeseburgers and thought, "man, just buy the real thing already." As I said though, it's a a personal preference.
What you could do with the background images I'm not sure. Of course, you could use some sort of slideshow to read them, but that would have all the disadvantages of paper (e.g., no search), and all the disadvantages of electronic formats (e.g., have to read on screen).
You could OCR them and get readable text without having to manually scan each page or even buy the book. Of course you could just get a really fancy setup and scan library books and do the same thing. The point is not to make it impossible to copy (any DRM can be bypassed) it is just to make it sufficiently difficult so that Google cannot be prosecuted for copyright infringement.
Given that the only cell device is the PS3...
I definitely refuse to concede that point. Several other cell devices have been mentioned on Slashdot before including (if I recall correctly) one of the world's fastest supercomputers. I also expect it to be showing up in other game consoles and general purpose computing devices.
Here is the explanation from Google's page. Apparently there are three levels of restriction depending upon the source of the work. The work you link to was "submitted by the publisher" and apparently the number of pages forward or back can be set by them, so either they specifically allow you to preview the whole work, you did not run into the restriction, or there is a bug Google's implementation.
Then switch banks. Wamu, Wells, and Citi all have zero problems with firefox. Call the bank and tell them why.
As I mentioned two of the banks do work with Firefox (and Safari my preferred browser) but none of them offer decent online security options such as are commonly offered in many parts of Europe. as for contacting them, I e-mailed two of the bank's feedback e-mail addresses and politely mentioned why I was going with a competitor. One did not even have an e-mail or working link just broken "contact us" javascripts. I gave up on them because this is not something I want to waste my time on. If you know a good bank, preferably one with physical locations I can get to, that has rotating PIN numbers or one time passwords for online transactions I'd love to hear about them. I did not, however, mention the banking problems to complain that I can't find a good bank, merely to point out that many banks are very incompetent, especially technologically.
Are you sure Google doesn't let you read a whole book?
Your search shows about 70 of the about 400 pages in the book. Try to perform a a search that will show you all of them. As I understand they also limit the number of pages you can actually view from an IP address as well as how many consecutive pages you can view from an IP address. At least that was what was claimed in the paper I read, I have not tried it personally.
This *will* hinder book sales. While some people might want the nice hardbound copy - most people will just settle for the digital copy which is just as good.
The digital "copy" offered by Google is certainly not "just as good" as a real copy. It is better in one way and worse in several others. First, it is better because you can find passages by searching. If I type "hemoglobin rupture" I can find a number of specific references. It is worse in that reading on a screen sucks, it hurts your eyes after a time and ties you to a screen and electricity. More importantly, Google is not allowing anyone to read a whole book, only a small passage from the book. In a few very specific cases (like a dictionary, or reference with very short entries) this might be as good, but for the most part it is not. Google has taken great care to limit this and design the service to help you find the name of the book you need, not to let you read it for free.
There are three real reasons scholarly publishers are against this. First dictionaries and references with very short passages are made obsolete (as I mentioned above). Second, many modern scholars do not really want to read a work, merely cite it to back up some point and these people would be better served by just using Google's service. Finally, it allows a researcher to read a short, relevant passage from a book which is often enough to know that a book is useless and prevent someone from buying a work that sounds useful, but is not.
FOr example, in my life, there are very few books that I have read in digital format that I have bought to have as a hard copy.
You seem to be under the impression that Google is just offering up books for free in digital format. That is not my understanding of the service at all.
They datamine that stuff and profile you. If you didn't know that, you are being naive. To a bank, knowing the customer is one of the most important things.
Just because the collect a lot of data on their own or buy it from outside sources does not mean it is accurate.
Sure, a transaction may be two days late (which can be very sucky for many clients), but it's only the transaction.
I've found two different banks each to have an incorrect balance for my account because once they charged me $400 in ATM fees when I did not have a ATM card at all (they said it was a "computer glitch") and once they completely lost a check I deposited (which they did not find a month after deposit until I quoted them the transaction number). I also had an ATM card PIN number disappear completely from the system making the card unusable until I could get a new one. My girlfriend has had yet another bank screw up her balance twice (once in each direction) by seemingly random amounts of money. This is Not accurate record keeping.
Also: I don't know if you realise, but banks with ebanking functionality (about all of them these days, and as I see many support Firefox and alternate browsers... at least my banks do) usually want to have an email functionality within.
Interesting you should mention that. I've been looking to open a new money market account. There are five banks within a few blocks of my house and I figured one of them would have decent online banking. Three of them will not even load the online banking in anything but IE, one you cannot even send them e-mail to ask a question in anything but IE (no e-mail address listed just broken javascript links), none of them offer rotating passwords or PIN numbers, and none of them offer one-time passwords for online transactions. I'd say the state of technological security for online banks in the U.S. is piss poor. You mention euros in your comment and I've heard that European banks have better security track records and have required audits in some countries. (Wasn't there just a Register article about how some security companies point out the same errors twice a year to the same banks because although audits are required by law, fixing the problems isn't.)
I'm completely unconvinced the average bank is not going to do something completely stupid like send e-mail asking me for information or providing (possibly spoofed) links to their website and ask me to provide them with some information. One of the reasons I'd prefer a bank close to home is so I can walk down and take care of these things in person. So sorry, you haven't really bolstered my opinion of banks accuracy and competence, nor that of other large businesses.
The X86 may not be pretty, but I'd prefer it over a closed architecture any day.
What an amusing assertion. You do realize that x86 was a completely proprietary architecture, with no open spec that was reverse engineered and now is mainly controlled by Intel, with AMD thus far maintaining compatibility for the most part, but with no guarantee of that in the future?
PowerPC on the other hand has an open and published spec and the architecture is implemented by both IBM and Motorola and the spec is managed by a consortium of industry players and built upon OpenFirmware with a completely open and published specification as well. There is nothing stopping anyone from building a macintosh compatible computer. Of course the OS X license forbids you to run it on anything not sold by Apple, but that has nothing to do with the hardware specifications. Windows is only available for the few architectures MS will build and sell it for. Linux or the BSDs can be run on anything and if you want a truly open system, is more "open" on powerpc than x86.
You bank is never going to ask you for your account number over email. They already have it!
Part of the reason this social engineering is successful is that companies, banks, large organizations are so lousy at keeping accurate records. Have you never had a bank screw up your name, or your balance, or some other company you do business with charge you for something you never ordered or fail to charge you for something you have ordered? I've had all these things happen, and it makes it completely unsurprising that a bank would lose your information or even have a policy of verifying your account password via e-mail. It is ridiculous and insecure and generally a really stupid idea, which is why it seems plausible that some lumbering bureaucracy would do it. Obviously, I would never give out sensitive information via e-mail, but I would actually not be surprised if some company requested it via that method. Just because it looks like phishing, does not mean it is, it could just be someone being really dumb. There is plenty of blame to go around here.
To be fair, though, the filter has not yet bothered my surfing, so I doubt anyone who wasn't looking for trouble would have a problem.
What filtering software are you using? Have you tried looking up sexual education resources, condoms, the gay and lesbian alliance, or the american civil liberties union? Those are all commonly blocked topics and all very valid things that could be very important for a young person to research.
Which person is that?
If you'd read the article, you might know what you are talking about. They said they knew minors were being given access by older siblings and other adults. If they know this, they obviously know who those people are. If your scenario is true, and a child is stealing a card, thats, you know stealing, and already illegal. The kid should be dealt with just like any other minor who steals.
Librarians and technicians are obviously not guilty of anything as it is not their responsibility. I suspect you only mentioned them to try to gain sympathy for your very weak argument. The responsibility is clearly the parent's.
Scientists working with adult stem cells have already done this work with humans while as you quoted, embryonic research is still working with rats.
Please show me a reference to one repaired spinal column in humans using mature undifferentiated stem cells. My understanding is that some nerve damage has been repaired in humans using embryonic stem cells, but no spinal column repairs. Also, please use specific terms "adult stem cells" is not a term I've seen you define and not one used in any scientific journals I've read.
A simple Google search will provide you with all the evidence you need to justify it. My point is, why not go after the more promising research and be completely clear of any moral issues in ANYONES opinion?
Both lines of research are promising and if you had bothered to read the damn article you'd know that this research is from one of the few labs that actually has shown working repair to spinal column, right now, with results to back it up. This is working, and mature undifferentiated stem cell research currently is not for a number of reasons. I personally think we should explore as many lines of research as possible to try to heal damaged spinal cords, but maybe that is just because I know people who have been trapped in wheelchairs for the last 30 years. As a second point, no research is ever completely in the clear of any moral issues. Various religions object to using cow fetal fluid for growing cultures and others object to any medical procedures at all. What you really are saying is, why can't you stop doing this line of research that my particular religion objects to. To which I again reply, aside from your religious beliefs, why the hell should we, especially if this research has the potential to heal the sick? There was a lot of very uninformed debate about this, and legislation and funding for stem cell research in the U.S. lately. The conservative right basically said, we're restricting a lot of funding, but that's OK, because it will not stop the most "promising" research. Well, fast forward just a year and you see all the progress has been made in other countries, usually with a fraction of the research funding, while the U.S. scientific community tries to establish private funding and struggles to overcome technical problems imposed the restrictions of that legislation.
How stupid can you be to pass that up!?
This particular researcher and line of research has actually repaired spinal columns in rats, and is confident that it will work for people in within a reasonable period of time. How stupid do you have to be to stop researching this!?!
library officials discovered that many patrons logged onto library computers using library cards and passwords of friends or relatives... So there's the problem. Please include your personal counter suggestion with any criticisms.
If it is illegal for children to view the restricted materials, charge the person who gave them access with contributing to the delinquency of a minor. If it is not illegal, there is no reason to waste public funds trying to restrict minor's access to the material. Do they also prevent minors from looking at nude pictures in art books somehow?
Parents should not expect their children to be restricted unless they are present to enforce that restriction. There are always ways around these measures and many valid reasons to get around them. I have yet to see a filtering mechanism for the internet that does not block content that is both important for children to know and an unintended effect of the system.
These libraries should rethink their policy. Kids will still be able to bypass this with a gummi bear, a cd-rom, or a latex copy of their parent's fingerprint. Parents will be given the false impression that their children are safe on the internet, which they won't be since filtering never works properly and can be bypassed.
Here is the main problem with what the libraries are doing. They are asking patrons to trust them that the fingerprint data will not be saved or used against them. Even if all the patrons trust the people who work at the library now, this policy will sadly outlive them and they are being asked to trust all the people who will work at the library in future. Finally, they are being asked to trust that the federal government will not step in and start requiring this data at some point in the future. Basically, they are asking for a lot of people to entrust them and their technology and their policies to protect their freedom, all without a really really damn good reason to do so.
Quantifying societal harm is almost impossible because everyone has different value judgements they apply but does this then mean that all ethics are relative?
Ethics are defined rules of conduct. Morals are beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. Ethical behavior is behavior that adheres to your own ethical code, which is often modeled on your moral beliefs. Laws are ethical codes (yours or someone else's) that are theoretically enforced by police agents.
Basically, societal harm must be something that an overriding majority of the people feel is damaging enough that restricting free choice for all is necessary. Murder is a good example, because it is pretty universally believed that killing another human being, without mitigating circumstances is "wrong." Ethically that might be "killing is wrong," "killing sentient beings is wrong," "killing humans is wrong," or "killing humans without provocation is wrong." I suppose the sticking point is how much of society must agree that something is harmful to society. There is also the danger of a majority declaring something harmful to society, that does not actually effect society, or only effects the individual who is making that choice. It is human nature to try to impose your will upon others and it is ethics, not morals that usually stands in the way. Basic rhetorical method includes finding common ground, then building upon it to discover the root of a difference and trying to resolve that difference. If only that the aforementioned principal was applied to law making.
I've wander a bit from my main point here. Basically, once facts are agreed upon, it is not all that hard to get people to agree to common ethics. Facts can be scientifically determined with some level of certainty. The problems facing most public debates today is that each side is more interested in swaying the public and winning than in finding the facts and presenting them simply. Thus each individual must expend extra effort to look at not only two opposing views, but also all the assumptions upon which those views are founded and minority viewpoints. Many people do not have the time or energy required to properly research an issue. It is imperative that these people do not just make a guess, side with the current majority, or take a public figure's word for it. Find out the facts, or refrain from making assertions.
WHY NOT dump embryo research and head towards alternatives?
Because it is a promising and helpful line of research. I mean if you want to stop other people from researching something, I think the onus is on you to provide a scientific and proven reason why they should do it. Otherwise it is just your unscientific opinion against theirs and there is no reason to give your opinion about what someone else is doing more weight than their own.
We need some intelligent argument as to what makes cloning right...
What makes eating beans right? Maybe we should have a discussion about what reasons people might consider cloning to be unethical or immoral. Someone somewhere will probably consider any given act you can think of to be "wrong" for some reason. The question really boils down to two things:
In the first case if a person decides cloning is "wrong" well they can just not pay someone to clone them and not worry about it. Since ethical and moral decisions are personal, this can be a personal decision and there is no reason for any legal intervention.
In the second case, there must be a demonstrable detriment to society, in which case cloning should be restricted or banned by law. This is a harder to criteria to satisfy, but then again it is banning people from making their own moral choices, so it had better be a pretty well established and overriding concern.
Ah, you must be from Slashdot!
You do that to Slashdot posts? And I thought overweight men in diapers was a weird fetish.
Actually, no. I purchased the powerbook for about $400 less than the Thinkpad. But that does not really mean anything since I acquired the the Thinkpad several months earlier than the Powerbook.