Raise taxes. Make public transportation absolutely free.
If only it were that simple. The London transit system is already at breaking point during peak hours, particularly the Underground, as is demonstrated by the overcrowding, and the ominous "signal failures". It is exhorbitantly expensive and yet people still have to use the Tube - imagine what would happen if you made it free in the condition that it is. I agree with you that public transport should be very very cheap (if not free) but they first need to demonstrate that the system can handle it.
Dear admins at CERN we closed the serious BUG which this page had so that it isn't transformed into a Dork and is defaced on a daily basis with the ramblings of every wannabe hacker.
Don't search for us... we'll find you... very soon!!!!
At this moment, an experiment is being attempted at CERN.
The reason we selected this page is in order to remind you of a few things. It hasn't been done because of some personal rivalry with the CERN admin team but purely based on the large amount of traffic that this particular web site will have in the next 24 hours because of the experiment.
A few details from the database: ...
The ** have been used so as not to compromise people we have nothing against:)
As we wrote in our introduction we do not intend to break the system or destroy the site... our purpose is to demonstrate our active reaction to many of the members of the "active???" GHS [Greek Hacker S...??] which has become very full of itself without contributing anything...
Pointless cliques form to merely squabble verbally or to ban from irc channels individuals which are not considered (by themselves and their lackeys) worthy of their knowledge and image.
Others... the "scene's" 1337 [leet], know only how to talk and chat and don't actually do anything since their leaning is towards gossip...but as far as "security" is concerned... what is this?? We are 2600... don't mess with us.
Ignorant and up themselves!
Stop blowing hot air up your asses and sucking up and take hold of a keyboard! But of course, criticizing is easy, especially when you are surrounded by 20year old silly skiddies [script kiddies?] twittering "2600" - "2600". Get stuck into insomnia.gr and start scorning us with your best scowls... simply know that even there you will find GST's tag.
We are everywhere... because unlike you, we don't spend our nights writing rhymes and rapping in the hood... nor do we make fun of that which we ourselves cannot achieve...
We are not making laughing stocks of you because we want to see you running around like headless chickens with your pants down looking for somewhere to hide but simply because we are not like you. You should have expected this response when you ridiculed things which you yourselves had not thought to do... but we've concerned ourselves far too long with a bunch of schoolkids who learnt hacking from Hollywood movies and the stupid American culture of the neo-geek who spends his time reading hacking magazines while trying to crack his girlfriend's email to see if she's cheating on him, and who's dual booting linux just to impress his friends who also read neo-hack-mania magazines..
The entire greek network has holes in it... some of the biggest government sites don't even know the definition of the word security... they get incompetent companies to do the design...
Satisfying political favours can't give you security
We are everywhere...
We salute the true amateurs and lovers of computer tech. A few of the old school who got sick and tired not of the art but of the egos of the "specialists" in the field! And the new generation who without saying much put their heads down to work because they are only concerned with gaining knowledge and nothing else!!
...it would take me 53 years to make a profit on my investment.
Given it's been 13 years (Nov-1995) since they last paid out a cash dividend it's going to take you a lot longer than that! They use the profit they make to re-invest and increase shareholder value. In the last 4 years alone the share-price has gone up by a factor of 10!
Seriously though, market valuations are very much based on market sentiment and prediction of future market sentiment based on projected company performance, i.e. how people "feel" and expect to "feel" about the company. It's messed up but its how the market seems to work.
It's better to look at relative performance of various companies to gauge whether prices are sane. Google's P/E (price/earnings) ratio (~30) is still high compared to other mature tech companies, which can be translated as meaning that Google is still expected to grow pretty quick, it's just that Apple (~35) is expected to grow slightly quicker.
Quoting the April Fools' article:
Wanting Duke Nukem Forever to run on all platforms... [it] has been rewritten as an Ajax application written using the Ruby on Rails framework. What it means is that Duke Nukem Forever has skipped a generation and is the first true Web 3.0 application, and it runs entirely in your web browser. Any web browser, on any platform... well almost. Or even:
Opera 8.5 was a bit glitchy, with some of the dialog being rendered in what sounded like a Scandinavian accent. Hilarious:)
What if you don't "store" everything you download. Many people, myself included, are prone to hoarding anything, even perhaps if we don't believe we will ever see it or need it again, however it is possible even now to download at full speed 24/7 and not worry about disc space so long as you delete everything you've used after having of course first shared/seeded to others (a revolutionary concept, I know!). In any case, found something you want to store, write it to any cheap media (i.e. DVD).
However, the most interesting idea is that once bandwidth is as you say at 100Mbps it will be possible to simply stream anything you want. Your storage will be the entire network. We could even apply the basic principle of torrents to streamed data to resolve any network bottlenecks. We do indeed live in very interesting times.
And there are also dual carriageways with more than 2 lanes in each direction! A great example in London (at least near to where I live) is the North Circular. As for the distinction with motorways, I think it also has to do with the width of the actual lanes as well as the width of the hard shoulder, not to mention that dual carriageways can have pavements for pedestrians!
The RFID chip makes it much more difficult to alter a stolen passport e.g. by replacing the picture, BUT if you have the resources to clone ALL of the security features and print your own passport, you can conceivably clone the passport without even having to see it. However, on top of the marginally increased cost of manufacturing cloned passports due to the inclusion of an RFID chip (and the possible scenario of having to perform the brute force attack) it is now necessary that the bearer of the fake passport resembles the image of the person stored with the data on the RFID chip. A question that remains unanswered is whether it is possible to create an entirely fake passport including an RFID chip with the "correct" fictional info and picture. If it was previously possible to do this, as I must assume it was, and the inclusion of the RFID chip does not make it "impossible" within current technical limitations, then nothing has been gained.
My non expert analysis of the situation is that the entire system of passport control (whether they be conventional, machine readable, RFID, etc.) depends on the ability of the people chekcing the passports. It is up to them to confirm whether the person presenting the passport is actually the person depicted in the picture as well as confirm the authenticity of the document itself. All these security features, or rather ANY security features that might be added will only serve to make it more difficult and expensive to acquire a fake passport that "works". These new security measures may not guarantee 100% the validity of the passport but it is a move in the right direction and better than nothing changing at all. Given the relatively strict time constraints placed by the US government I have to say that in my mind this particular technology is adequate for the time being. I must admit I have not seen or heard an alternative which might feasibly have been implemented within the same time frame on such a large scale. Do I believe that it is possible for a system to be devised that automatically confirms identity with 100% certainty? Possibly. Do I want that sort of security, no! The better these automatic systems become the easier they can be abused by people who are more concerned by their own pockets rather than my safety & privacy.
As a side note, the article refers to a study where supermarket checkout cashiers were shown to fair badly at the task of matching faces to photos, however I would like to believe that those working in passport control have not only been specifically trained for this task but are also naturally better at it.
The jist of the article is that they don't believe the security added by the RFID chip is worth what was paid for it not that it is inherently making the situation any worse.
Slashdot Mirror
Raise taxes. Make public transportation absolutely free.
If only it were that simple. The London transit system is already at breaking point during peak hours, particularly the Underground, as is demonstrated by the overcrowding, and the ominous "signal failures". It is exhorbitantly expensive and yet people still have to use the Tube - imagine what would happen if you made it free in the condition that it is. I agree with you that public transport should be very very cheap (if not free) but they first need to demonstrate that the system can handle it.
I just saw the last paragraph:
Dear admins at CERN we closed the serious BUG which this page had so that it isn't transformed into a Dork and is defaced on a daily basis with the ramblings of every wannabe hacker.
Don't search for us... we'll find you... very soon!!!!
Just to clarify I am not a part of any "hacker team" let alone GST. Just bored at 1am on a Friday night!
A quick translation (just for the record):
10/09/08 03:00
At this moment, an experiment is being attempted at CERN.
The reason we selected this page is in order to remind you of a few things. It hasn't been done because of some personal rivalry with the CERN admin team but purely based on the large amount of traffic that this particular web site will have in the next 24 hours because of the experiment.
A few details from the database:
... :)
The ** have been used so as not to compromise people we have nothing against
As we wrote in our introduction we do not intend to break the system or destroy the site... our purpose is to demonstrate our active reaction to many of the members of the "active???" GHS [Greek Hacker S...??] which has become very full of itself without contributing anything ...
Pointless cliques form to merely squabble verbally or to ban from irc channels individuals which are not considered (by themselves and their lackeys) worthy of their knowledge and image.
Others... the "scene's" 1337 [leet], know only how to talk and chat and don't actually do anything since their leaning is towards gossip...but as far as "security" is concerned... what is this?? We are 2600... don't mess with us.
Ignorant and up themselves!
Stop blowing hot air up your asses and sucking up and take hold of a keyboard! But of course, criticizing is easy, especially when you are surrounded by 20year old silly skiddies [script kiddies?] twittering "2600" - "2600". Get stuck into insomnia.gr and start scorning us with your best scowls... simply know that even there you will find GST's tag.
We are everywhere... because unlike you, we don't spend our nights writing rhymes and rapping in the hood... nor do we make fun of that which we ourselves cannot achieve...
We are not making laughing stocks of you because we want to see you running around like headless chickens with your pants down looking for somewhere to hide but simply because we are not like you. You should have expected this response when you ridiculed things which you yourselves had not thought to do... but we've concerned ourselves far too long with a bunch of schoolkids who learnt hacking from Hollywood movies and the stupid American culture of the neo-geek who spends his time reading hacking magazines while trying to crack his girlfriend's email to see if she's cheating on him, and who's dual booting linux just to impress his friends who also read neo-hack-mania magazines..
The entire greek network has holes in it... some of the biggest government sites don't even know the definition of the word security...
they get incompetent companies to do the design...
Satisfying political favours can't give you security
We are everywhere...
We salute the true amateurs and lovers of computer tech. A few of the old school who got sick and tired not of the art but of the egos of the "specialists" in the field! And the new generation who without saying much put their heads down to work because they are only concerned with gaining knowledge and nothing else!!
Greek Security Team
...it would take me 53 years to make a profit on my investment.
Given it's been 13 years (Nov-1995) since they last paid out a cash dividend it's going to take you a lot longer than that! They use the profit they make to re-invest and increase shareholder value. In the last 4 years alone the share-price has gone up by a factor of 10!
Seriously though, market valuations are very much based on market sentiment and prediction of future market sentiment based on projected company performance, i.e. how people "feel" and expect to "feel" about the company. It's messed up but its how the market seems to work.
It's better to look at relative performance of various companies to gauge whether prices are sane. Google's P/E (price/earnings) ratio (~30) is still high compared to other mature tech companies, which can be translated as meaning that Google is still expected to grow pretty quick, it's just that Apple (~35) is expected to grow slightly quicker.
I'm just trying the nunchuk and classic controller analog sticks and they look and feel identical to me. And they don't click either!
What if you don't "store" everything you download. Many people, myself included, are prone to hoarding anything, even perhaps if we don't believe we will ever see it or need it again, however it is possible even now to download at full speed 24/7 and not worry about disc space so long as you delete everything you've used after having of course first shared/seeded to others (a revolutionary concept, I know!). In any case, found something you want to store, write it to any cheap media (i.e. DVD). However, the most interesting idea is that once bandwidth is as you say at 100Mbps it will be possible to simply stream anything you want. Your storage will be the entire network. We could even apply the basic principle of torrents to streamed data to resolve any network bottlenecks. We do indeed live in very interesting times.
And there are also dual carriageways with more than 2 lanes in each direction! A great example in London (at least near to where I live) is the North Circular. As for the distinction with motorways, I think it also has to do with the width of the actual lanes as well as the width of the hard shoulder, not to mention that dual carriageways can have pavements for pedestrians!
My non expert analysis of the situation is that the entire system of passport control (whether they be conventional, machine readable, RFID, etc.) depends on the ability of the people chekcing the passports. It is up to them to confirm whether the person presenting the passport is actually the person depicted in the picture as well as confirm the authenticity of the document itself. All these security features, or rather ANY security features that might be added will only serve to make it more difficult and expensive to acquire a fake passport that "works". These new security measures may not guarantee 100% the validity of the passport but it is a move in the right direction and better than nothing changing at all. Given the relatively strict time constraints placed by the US government I have to say that in my mind this particular technology is adequate for the time being. I must admit I have not seen or heard an alternative which might feasibly have been implemented within the same time frame on such a large scale. Do I believe that it is possible for a system to be devised that automatically confirms identity with 100% certainty? Possibly. Do I want that sort of security, no! The better these automatic systems become the easier they can be abused by people who are more concerned by their own pockets rather than my safety & privacy.
As a side note, the article refers to a study where supermarket checkout cashiers were shown to fair badly at the task of matching faces to photos, however I would like to believe that those working in passport control have not only been specifically trained for this task but are also naturally better at it.
The jist of the article is that they don't believe the security added by the RFID chip is worth what was paid for it not that it is inherently making the situation any worse.