While I see your point, I did not mean to imply that, just using common type references wrongly. The point being that condemning any particular direction of human sexual behaviors brings ALL of them into question, at which point you have to ask who has the golden list of acceptable behaviors.
Would you be willing to give up being attracted to big busted lithe and svelt blondes? (as an example) just because joe bloggs believes they are evil, or because mohammed believes they should show no skin of any kind in public other than their hands?
The point being that group-think or mob rule usually does not lend itself well to reasoned and compassionate results. Condemning all persons of a given nature WHETHER OR NOT they have harmed another is simply barbaric. In support of this idea, loose morals regarding nudity and exposure to nudity in public at lower ages than in North America has links to reduced violent sex crimes.
Religions as a whole TEND to rule out anyone that does not conform to the list of acceptable practices, including many human sexual orientation variants, and they do so without regard to cause or treatment never mind compassion or civility. This was the reason for the Catholicism comment.
To condemn all people in a given group when it is MORE than likely that your family tree contains one or more people who fall outside your own sense of morals is what I was calling into question, not necessarily glass houses etc. Linking back to the genetics comment, the person condemning them is likely genetically linked to someone guilty of the behaviors they despise. That is to say that genetic purity is not probable and condemnation of those whop are less pure is hardly the best way to make your point. That said, such is the way of humankind. I was just making the statement that it is wrong.
Additionally, sexual abuse of children or ANYONE is not a good thing but that does not rule out the possibility of beneficial aspects resulting from what we generally consider to be wrong because it's too much like something else that is disgusting.
It's okay for a rich octogenarian to court, wed, and live with an 18 year old, but a 27 year old with a 12 year old is wrong... and we generally say that without consideration of benefits or harm to either party. Harm is assumed to be happening, or assumed to have happened or to happen in the future.
Regarding someone who is viewing pederast material on the Internet... have they harmed someone? Perhaps it is argued that they contribute to harm if the material is created at the harmful expense of a child, but what if it is only written words? Written by another adult? What really is the harm? If the 'criminal' never touches a child, but enjoys reading such stories... where is the harm?
Actual harm should be proven before punitive reactions are taken. Thinking as some do, that any material at all or even just thinking that way is criminal, well, I just cannot fathom how that is anything but unjust and the foundations of bad things to come.
Remember, it could be your favorite sexual deviation that is next in the group-think mind. I do not support pedophilia, I just believe that society generally uses too big a brush to tar the bad people in the world.
Please tell me that the entirety of your family tree is full of people that have never deviated even once from the Catholicism decreed set of acceptable human sexual behaviors.
I won't fault you for personally believing that certain people should be punished in the burning pits of hell for ever and ever... but just wait till it's MY turn to judge you my friend. I won't be as kind to you as you are to those you deem to be deviants.
I would also suggest that you spend a few moments studying the dizzying amount of data that has been uncovered since we began decoding the human genome. You seem to be sorely under-educated in the subject.
Better than that, and no, I'm not posting AC... The basis of this business is to criminalize and excoriate one particular sexual proclivity.
Recent and mounting evidence showing genealogical links to sexual behaviors supports the theory that ALL human sexual deviations are simply part and parcel of the wide array of possible human sexual behaviors.
In civilized society, we generally deem pedophilia as abhorrent, aberrant, and evil but that does not mean those who practice it are necessarily evil. If indeed, there are genetic causations for such behaviors (namely ALL human sexual behaviors) then simply criminalizing it, and punishing those affected, and tarring all technologies involved with 'bad' labels is simply a head in the sand reaction to what is not understood, and consequently not tolerated.
I believe that some study of ancient Greek society will show that pederasts were respected men of society, and only thought poorly of if their interests in the children did not benefit the child in an acceptable manner.
So before we all start tarring people with the kristo-fascist brush, perhaps it is better to take a holistic approach to the problem. Punitive prohibition has not worked well for anything that I can think of.
I'm not saying that we should all accept pedophilia as just another part of life, but I AM saying that the point-n-persecute justice system is not the right way to handle things because along the way someone will blame it on the Internet, or full moons, or the use of aspartame or some other crap that the sheeple will believe and vote for.
God forbid that we should have to teach our children about society before they are 35....
the same thing that is wrong with the article's author, and many other people. They believe that the OS/kernel **IS** the whole thing. Many cannot differentiate applications from the Windows OS if they had to. They simply do not remember when Window was a DOS APPLICATION and not sold complete with an OS bundled inside it.
Linus speaks about the kernel, and well he should.
Now, go talk with the Gnome developers or KDE developers about their piece...
OS? Yes, all the stuff that lies between the desktop and the kernel...
Thanks to MS not many people can imagine having to install an OS, then a windowing system, then a browser, then a..... you get the picture
If the Chinese government has to support this case under the law, who do they fine? If Google is found guilty and forced to pay the guy, what recourse do they have for a whole barrage of such suits?
The world already knows that Chinese government forces Yahoo and Google to filter their content. Will the Chinese government support them in the legal actions, or simply disappear the guy bringing the litigation?
Interestingly, there is much ado about a similar issue in the USA. Should the government protect telecommunication companies that helped the government spy on citizens, or should those companies be left holding the bag for litigation of privacy violations?
Funny how the US Government and the Chinese Government seem to have so much in common?
would be able to do this without laughing loudly and falling off their chair... emphasis is mine
the RIAA lawyers attacked the blog 'Recording Industry vs. The People' for its criticism of the RIAA as seeking to 'abuse the American judicial system, distort copyright law, and frighten ordinary working people and their children' and then falsely claimed that the blog's author is an EFF attorney -- this despite the fact that they know that the blog's author (known on Slashdot as NewYorkCountryLawyer) is a partner in a New York law firm and not an EFF attorney. Judge Gertner apparently wasn't impressed, and granted the EFF's motion [CC], rejecting the RIAA's objections, since she felt amici curiae might 'shed light' on the 'copyright law' and 'computer technology' issues before her." The RIAA accused NewYorkCountryLawyer of using *THEIR* business model against them. Surely that is illegal? right?
I know that it sounds like MS is being pointedly stupid, but if you think about it, what circumstances would be necessary for this to make sense?
Well, one set of circumstances that I can think of is this: One way that the NSA/CIA/FBI/NewBrownShirts can spy on your internet usage and email is to put a back door in the browser. If the mail service you use forces you to use that browser they also get to look at your mail. The forced browser mode of operation ensures that the spyware also sees what else you do on the Internet. The basic idea is to try to make sure that you do not use OSS because the spyware only runs on windows.
The NSA has already tried to get permission to use such spyware. Having failed to get permission, the next best thing is to get the OS/Browser manufacturer to put it in for you.
Do I really believe that MS is complicit in such activities? Well, I have no reason to not believe they are, and that is the big rub.
Okay, you make a good argument. I do have one question for you. Why did they get reported? If a cable gets cut on the order of one cut every 3 days, or even once every two weeks, all the other 20+ cuts in the past year have not been reported. So why is there all this reporting?
I've got some theories, but you'd just call that a conspiracy nut thing.
In either case, it is **unusual** that so many would be reported in such a short length of time. I'm betting there is less 'real' evidence of what really happened in these cuts than the US had about WMD in Iraq in the end. The fact that they are reported raises questions.
Just as I'd be suspicious of the local news if they began to report suddenly on a common happening in the local area. Say people being drunk in the downtown area where the bars are, or accidents in a single location, or maybe family violence in a minority community.
A spike in the data means the data needs to be looked at, that's all I'm saying.
Well, if the traffic-shaping shoe fits? I'm willing to bet a couple of beverages that if all of comcast's customers were to stumble upon software that monitored their available bandwidth 24/7 for a few weeks, it would look a lot like evidence that could be used in a class action suit.
Yes, 5% is most likely based on customer churn related to bandwidth issues. They are reasonable to assume that this is the number of people that will actually complain about bandwidth limitations, forged packets, and traffic shaping that fosters a network usage favorable to Comcast.
Yes, all the right buzz words to arguably be trying to protect the unwashed masses of people that believe whatever the government, fox news, or their ISP tell them. I'm personally sorry that we didn't listen to Mr Orwell's nightmarish vision of the future. It's upon us now.
By way of interpretation: We're going to blame the 5% percent of our customers who actually use the amount of bandwidth that they purchased. We know that if you had paid us only 50% of what we robb^H^H^H^H charge you, you would be happy with 1.5 Mbs download speed, but it sounds so much better if we promise you 3Mbs even though 90+ percent of you will never use it. This way we look like a super broadband provider to most of you, and to protect that false image, we're going to punish the few people who actually thought they were getting what they paid for.
It's not that we, Comcast, think our customers are fucking idiots, it's just that we know the damned good money we paid our congressional lobbyists is going to go a lot further than the whiney complaints of less than 5% of our consumer base.
So, we at Comcast want to assure you we are protecting you from the people who want to rob you of bandwidth so they can have the actual bandwidth that they paid for. By protecting you from these greedy bastards you can rest assured that we are doing all we can to keep your cash falling into our pockets every month. Thank you for being a Comcast customer.
Whenever I see something that just does not make sense, I try to look at the situation from other perspectives, repeating this process until some part of it makes sense. The only thing that I can see going on here is that the **AA are delusionally thinking that no matter what they do, some significant portion of their consumer base (presumably those too young to make a principled stand rather than hunger for the latest fad music) will continue to want to consume, no matter what it means to their rights, pocketbook, or dignity.
From that perspective, as long as mass media continues to pour drivel onto the social grid of the uninformed the consumer base for the **AA will not shrink beyond a certain point. Face it, in the same way that a 5 year old NEEDS to see Shrek 14, so will their older sibling need to own the latest CD from the newest craptastic lipsync trio. One sticking point, birth rate is declining among non-minorities, but that is the **AA's problem.
If the **AA can get ridiculous draconian laws passed, it will take only one generation (if that) until all is forgotten, and people just grow up thinking that is how things are supposed to be. Most of their consumer base was not around for the JFK assassination, and they do not remember 8-tracks, cassettes, or vinyl albums either, nor Reagan being shot. Hell, most of their consumer base doesn't know that televisions will work without a DVD attached to them.
Their plan is to bully and outlast anyone who still gives a damn about fair use, rights to privacy etc. If they spend half as much on lobbying as they do on fscked up litigation, we are all fscked.
For awhile there, with the OOXML, and other things, I was afraid that the big bad wolf had fallen in 'friends' with the little pigs. I thought and thought about that, and just could not get my head around it. If there is no monopoly to fight, or evildoers to rail against, life is just too surreal to contemplate. What, with people working together and profitability made second class citizen to cooperation and interoperability. Just when I was beginning to think that consistency was vanishing from the face of the earth, MS^H^H the RIAA has come to my rescue and reassured me that they are evil, and always will be. ohhh, how nice it is to know somethings will never change... I can sleep again.
For awhile there, with the OOXML, and other things, I was afraid that the big bad wolf had fallen in 'friends' with the little pigs. I thought and thought about that, and just could not get my head around it. If there is no monopoly to fight, or evildoers to rail against, life is just too surreal to contemplate. What, with people working together and profitability made second class citizen to cooperation and interoperability. Just when I was beginning to think that consistency was vanishing from the face of the earth, MS has come to my rescue and reassured me that they are evil, and always will be. ohhh, how nice it is to know somethings will never change... I can sleep again.
I also don't see that universities need to cover for students engaging in copyright infringement. If you connect to a torrent of 'Heroes' or 'House' or whatever, your IP address gets recorded, and the copyright holders subpoena the university to know what user had that IP address at that time, why does the university need to 'take a stand against it'?
Now, I'd certainly agree that some stories on slashdot talk about inexplicably large fines being requested. And certainly innocent people who are wrongly accused should be entitled to reclaim reasonable costs for their defence. But to say students are being forced to buy record labels' music, or to say that universities have a responsibility to cover up lawbreaking by their students, doesn't really make sense to me.
I think there is an important 'other' side to this argument you pose. Lets look at how music has been sold for the last... well, since the invention of the record. Music labels decide who gets publicity and attention, then funnel your desire to hear more from them through their money making machinery. To argue that they are not trying to rob the public is fatally ignorant of the situation. There has never been a competitive alternative to the music labels. They have put smaller labels out of business, and used tactics that keep MS in court all over the world.
Radiohead and NIN are finally showing that there is an alternative, and having to butt heads with the major labels to get it to work. Is it in the public interest that such battle should be necessary? Have the record labels EVER made 50 years worth of music available to you at the ease with which it is now possible? Are they doing so now? NO, they are using every means possible to create and foster the never ending and voracious needs of music fans to buy whatever the music labels tell them is popular right now. If the music labels were so deserving of our business, why are the working so hard to fsck over their customers? Why are they not innovating?
The fact that they are suing customers in ALL countries is absurd, completely. People have always ignored copyrights when it comes to music, yet they made how much money? What's wrong here is that people are not taking it from them anymore, and the labels are not changing with the times. Instead, they intend to litigate everyone else in the world to become little zombies in the labels idea of the ideal world.
Get with the program, the labels are WRONG, and no amount of justification will excuse any of their behavior.
The schools act like ISPs for the most part, and should not be held accountable more than any other ISP. period. ever.
The current administration has been fixing numbers for 8 years. No child left behind was about numbers, not education. The death toll in Iraq was about numbers not the war. (Iraqi and mercenary deaths don't count) Just about everything this administration touched was about numbers to show the public. They were not planning on the housing crash catching them before they got out of office. There are miles and miles of dark fiber in the US that were paid for with tax dollars and higher service fees. Are they in use? If they are, it's not for joe bloggs ISP service.
In South Korea, the government mandated the tech revolution. In the US the government will not do so, leaving it to private companies who then leave out the little guys that are not profitable customers. This is the major difference. For some reason, after these guys pay off their government officials here in the US, they don't feel that bragging rights about how they provide the BEST service in the US bar none is necessary. Note, more bars != best service, and advertising should always be viewed with a healthy overdose of cynicism.
The current spin doctors know (at least 4 out of 5 of them) that it's the numbers, not actual service value that counts. Our government has shown them how this works. You can do anything, as long as you have a plausible story and numbers to show you are right. After all, the ONLY intelligence data that the rest of us knew about was that Saddam had WMD, and the NUMBER of concurring agencies and or countries was convincing... but I digress.
It's all about numbers. If you have money with large numbers on it, you can get the fiber to your house from any ISP. The problem is that there is no incentive for private businesses to provide superior service to your home if they can continue to rob your wallet every month for something that it a little better than dial up. Notice how the commercials try to convince you that their service is 'broadband', lightning fast, and other terms that intimate super fast speeds. They never talk about real data rates so again in this case it's about numbers. If they hide the numbers you are lead to believe it's all good. You will not see one US company compare their customers to the top three ranked countries in the world for Internet service. That would be using the numbers fairly and we in the US just won't stand for that kind of non-sense. It's just un-American.
Well, if you happen to have someone on site at ALL 4500 of your sites, yes, that would be a viable option. Of course that never happens. Imagine someone being on site at every cell tower and you begin to realize the magnitude of the problem.
The trouble with that thought is that there are companies that know a cable cut could hurt them, but there are no viable alternatives in the event of a cable cut. Does anyone remember when one of the comms satellites went missing? If they had bought dishes that can be pointed remotely, there was a standby bird, everyone else had to visit all their sites to repoint dishes.
In this case, say you are a large ISP, what do you do? Especially if your connection is provided by the government, and mandated by law? Even though it seems tin foil hattish, I'm with the people that don't think this is an accident.
I've been in a position to analyze various infrastructure systems for several large cities in my life, and I can tell you that they are not thinking this through correctly. The best cyber storm possible is one that you have not prepared for, nor thought of, and to even begin to contemplate them, like a chess playing program, you have to know ALL possible moves. As an example of what I'm hinting at, the recent cable cut that killed the Internet pipe to a large part of the middle east was NOT anticipated. Sure, there were re-routes, but every possible combination of data loss, connectivity loss, and possible system intrusion cannot have been prepared for.
You see, one big accident that allows in just the right trojan, followed by something akin to the butterfly effect, and in 47 days all kinds of Internet hell breaks loose. It might even take two such accidental outage events to place all the trojans where they need to be. Then when all is in place the silent enemy takes over what you have been protecting for so long.
Neither you nor I can determine with zero error exactly where a DDoS attack will overwhelm the right system resources to allow take-over of the desired systems. Yes, this spaghetti mess of events is something that cannot be fully prepared for, so saying that the test was successful and that you are safer now is absolutely head-up-your-ass stupid.
Until the test team knows ALL possible flaws, a full cyberwar test is not possible. Simulating real life systems in isolation removes those little annoying system weak spots that can be exploited. I dare say that there are NOT enough people in the NSA to create a test group large enough to handle even one large metropolitan area, never mind a full state, or say the tri-state area near NYC.
I'd like to see the data sets that they are using for the testing system simulations.
Church teaching certainly cannot and must not weigh in on every novelty of science, but it has the task to reiterate the great values which are on the line and to propose to faithful and all men of good will ethical-moral principles and direction for new, important questions,' Benedict said." Never mind his invisible super being, I'm one of those 'all men of good will' he is talking about, and personally, I'd like him to STFU already about what is right for the rest of us. If he want's to address only Catholics, that's find and dandy, but don't imply that I'm not a man of good will, for that is surely the quickest way to find the end of my good will.
The fact that his speech suggests that only evil-doers would have anything to do with genetics research that is not acceptable to an old man with special ties to an invisible friend, only makes him sound insane, intolerant, afraid, or all three.
rightfully, your comment was modded 'interesting' but may I say something here? If you are unable to get a good install with Ubentu, you might try using Ubuntu. Despite that, if you have trouble installing Ubuntu, you might want to review your entire involvement with computing. Ubuntu was the easiest installation I have done to date. I'm not saying I'm old or anything, but I have installed Windows 1.0 on a couple of machines.
Seriously, I've installed more than 6 different Linux distributions, and Ubuntu was the easiest install. period. ever.
Support for unsigned drivers was there, it just went easy. It was more difficult to load all the Firefox extensions that I use than it was to install Ubuntu. So, I just don't understand why you have never been able to get a good install with Ubuntu. ????
I don't think I'm a 2-bit nerd, but I can say this, watching MS languish in the mire that is Vista is somewhat satisfying. Not just because it's good to see goliath having a bad hair day, but because for every day that this continues, more people will begin to realize that F/OSS is not only usable, but valuable. Hopefully, gone are the days when windows defines home computing and the desktop experience.
If there is a way for the NSA or DHS to listen to your calls, then there is a way for a determined hacker to listen to them. period. no kidding. I mean it.
By creating a monitoring system, the US corru^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment legistlators will create the means necessary for other governments, nefarious organizations, and plain old criminals to listen to your phone calls, monitor your emails, track your Internet usage.
If there is a way, there will be a will... trust me on that.
On the bright side, forget archiving all those emails for SarbOx, if they wanted to see them, the government should have fscking archived them for themselves!!
Sadly, I'm not joking. If there is anyway to monitor the data, or mine through the aggregate resultant data, someone will, and I'll go ahead and wager that it will first show up in either the form of a letter from the **AA or a specialized targeted advertisement sent to you because they know you like Elvis, have a Tivo, just had your front door replaced, and can use the perfect holiday gift of monogrammed door mats for people who just happen to have the same names as all your immediate relatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Money for nothing and chips for free?
While I see your point, I did not mean to imply that, just using common type references wrongly. The point being that condemning any particular direction of human sexual behaviors brings ALL of them into question, at which point you have to ask who has the golden list of acceptable behaviors.
Would you be willing to give up being attracted to big busted lithe and svelt blondes? (as an example) just because joe bloggs believes they are evil, or because mohammed believes they should show no skin of any kind in public other than their hands?
The point being that group-think or mob rule usually does not lend itself well to reasoned and compassionate results. Condemning all persons of a given nature WHETHER OR NOT they have harmed another is simply barbaric. In support of this idea, loose morals regarding nudity and exposure to nudity in public at lower ages than in North America has links to reduced violent sex crimes.
Religions as a whole TEND to rule out anyone that does not conform to the list of acceptable practices, including many human sexual orientation variants, and they do so without regard to cause or treatment never mind compassion or civility. This was the reason for the Catholicism comment.
To condemn all people in a given group when it is MORE than likely that your family tree contains one or more people who fall outside your own sense of morals is what I was calling into question, not necessarily glass houses etc. Linking back to the genetics comment, the person condemning them is likely genetically linked to someone guilty of the behaviors they despise. That is to say that genetic purity is not probable and condemnation of those whop are less pure is hardly the best way to make your point. That said, such is the way of humankind. I was just making the statement that it is wrong.
Additionally, sexual abuse of children or ANYONE is not a good thing but that does not rule out the possibility of beneficial aspects resulting from what we generally consider to be wrong because it's too much like something else that is disgusting.
It's okay for a rich octogenarian to court, wed, and live with an 18 year old, but a 27 year old with a 12 year old is wrong... and we generally say that without consideration of benefits or harm to either party. Harm is assumed to be happening, or assumed to have happened or to happen in the future.
Regarding someone who is viewing pederast material on the Internet... have they harmed someone? Perhaps it is argued that they contribute to harm if the material is created at the harmful expense of a child, but what if it is only written words? Written by another adult? What really is the harm? If the 'criminal' never touches a child, but enjoys reading such stories... where is the harm?
Actual harm should be proven before punitive reactions are taken. Thinking as some do, that any material at all or even just thinking that way is criminal, well, I just cannot fathom how that is anything but unjust and the foundations of bad things to come.
Remember, it could be your favorite sexual deviation that is next in the group-think mind. I do not support pedophilia, I just believe that society generally uses too big a brush to tar the bad people in the world.
Please tell me that the entirety of your family tree is full of people that have never deviated even once from the Catholicism decreed set of acceptable human sexual behaviors.
I won't fault you for personally believing that certain people should be punished in the burning pits of hell for ever and ever... but just wait till it's MY turn to judge you my friend. I won't be as kind to you as you are to those you deem to be deviants.
I would also suggest that you spend a few moments studying the dizzying amount of data that has been uncovered since we began decoding the human genome. You seem to be sorely under-educated in the subject.
Better than that, and no, I'm not posting AC... The basis of this business is to criminalize and excoriate one particular sexual proclivity.
Recent and mounting evidence showing genealogical links to sexual behaviors supports the theory that ALL human sexual deviations are simply part and parcel of the wide array of possible human sexual behaviors.
In civilized society, we generally deem pedophilia as abhorrent, aberrant, and evil but that does not mean those who practice it are necessarily evil. If indeed, there are genetic causations for such behaviors (namely ALL human sexual behaviors) then simply criminalizing it, and punishing those affected, and tarring all technologies involved with 'bad' labels is simply a head in the sand reaction to what is not understood, and consequently not tolerated.
I believe that some study of ancient Greek society will show that pederasts were respected men of society, and only thought poorly of if their interests in the children did not benefit the child in an acceptable manner.
So before we all start tarring people with the kristo-fascist brush, perhaps it is better to take a holistic approach to the problem. Punitive prohibition has not worked well for anything that I can think of.
I'm not saying that we should all accept pedophilia as just another part of life, but I AM saying that the point-n-persecute justice system is not the right way to handle things because along the way someone will blame it on the Internet, or full moons, or the use of aspartame or some other crap that the sheeple will believe and vote for.
God forbid that we should have to teach our children about society before they are 35....
On the one hand, your car should come with an engine and four wheels
but on the other hand is a glove...
no, seriously.. on the other hand
You should be able to rebuild the engine without having to change the wheels or seats
and if you want different wheels, go for it...
Not knowing you can change the seats or wheels is just fucking stupid... right?
the same thing that is wrong with the article's author, and many other people. They believe that the OS/kernel **IS** the whole thing. Many cannot differentiate applications from the Windows OS if they had to. They simply do not remember when Window was a DOS APPLICATION and not sold complete with an OS bundled inside it.
..... you get the picture
Linus speaks about the kernel, and well he should.
Now, go talk with the Gnome developers or KDE developers about their piece...
OS? Yes, all the stuff that lies between the desktop and the kernel...
Thanks to MS not many people can imagine having to install an OS, then a windowing system, then a browser, then a
the unintended consequences of the law?
If the Chinese government has to support this case under the law, who do they fine? If Google is found guilty and forced to pay the guy, what recourse do they have for a whole barrage of such suits?
The world already knows that Chinese government forces Yahoo and Google to filter their content. Will the Chinese government support them in the legal actions, or simply disappear the guy bringing the litigation?
Interestingly, there is much ado about a similar issue in the USA. Should the government protect telecommunication companies that helped the government spy on citizens, or should those companies be left holding the bag for litigation of privacy violations?
Funny how the US Government and the Chinese Government seem to have so much in common?
I know that it sounds like MS is being pointedly stupid, but if you think about it, what circumstances would be necessary for this to make sense?
Well, one set of circumstances that I can think of is this: One way that the NSA/CIA/FBI/NewBrownShirts can spy on your internet usage and email is to put a back door in the browser. If the mail service you use forces you to use that browser they also get to look at your mail. The forced browser mode of operation ensures that the spyware also sees what else you do on the Internet. The basic idea is to try to make sure that you do not use OSS because the spyware only runs on windows.
The NSA has already tried to get permission to use such spyware. Having failed to get permission, the next best thing is to get the OS/Browser manufacturer to put it in for you.
Do I really believe that MS is complicit in such activities? Well, I have no reason to not believe they are, and that is the big rub.
Okay, you make a good argument. I do have one question for you. Why did they get reported? If a cable gets cut on the order of one cut every 3 days, or even once every two weeks, all the other 20+ cuts in the past year have not been reported. So why is there all this reporting?
I've got some theories, but you'd just call that a conspiracy nut thing.
In either case, it is **unusual** that so many would be reported in such a short length of time. I'm betting there is less 'real' evidence of what really happened in these cuts than the US had about WMD in Iraq in the end. The fact that they are reported raises questions.
Just as I'd be suspicious of the local news if they began to report suddenly on a common happening in the local area. Say people being drunk in the downtown area where the bars are, or accidents in a single location, or maybe family violence in a minority community.
A spike in the data means the data needs to be looked at, that's all I'm saying.
Well, if the traffic-shaping shoe fits? I'm willing to bet a couple of beverages that if all of comcast's customers were to stumble upon software that monitored their available bandwidth 24/7 for a few weeks, it would look a lot like evidence that could be used in a class action suit.
Yes, 5% is most likely based on customer churn related to bandwidth issues. They are reasonable to assume that this is the number of people that will actually complain about bandwidth limitations, forged packets, and traffic shaping that fosters a network usage favorable to Comcast.
Yes, all the right buzz words to arguably be trying to protect the unwashed masses of people that believe whatever the government, fox news, or their ISP tell them. I'm personally sorry that we didn't listen to Mr Orwell's nightmarish vision of the future. It's upon us now.
By way of interpretation: We're going to blame the 5% percent of our customers who actually use the amount of bandwidth that they purchased. We know that if you had paid us only 50% of what we robb^H^H^H^H charge you, you would be happy with 1.5 Mbs download speed, but it sounds so much better if we promise you 3Mbs even though 90+ percent of you will never use it. This way we look like a super broadband provider to most of you, and to protect that false image, we're going to punish the few people who actually thought they were getting what they paid for.
It's not that we, Comcast, think our customers are fucking idiots, it's just that we know the damned good money we paid our congressional lobbyists is going to go a lot further than the whiney complaints of less than 5% of our consumer base.
So, we at Comcast want to assure you we are protecting you from the people who want to rob you of bandwidth so they can have the actual bandwidth that they paid for. By protecting you from these greedy bastards you can rest assured that we are doing all we can to keep your cash falling into our pockets every month. Thank you for being a Comcast customer.
Whenever I see something that just does not make sense, I try to look at the situation from other perspectives, repeating this process until some part of it makes sense. The only thing that I can see going on here is that the **AA are delusionally thinking that no matter what they do, some significant portion of their consumer base (presumably those too young to make a principled stand rather than hunger for the latest fad music) will continue to want to consume, no matter what it means to their rights, pocketbook, or dignity.
From that perspective, as long as mass media continues to pour drivel onto the social grid of the uninformed the consumer base for the **AA will not shrink beyond a certain point. Face it, in the same way that a 5 year old NEEDS to see Shrek 14, so will their older sibling need to own the latest CD from the newest craptastic lipsync trio. One sticking point, birth rate is declining among non-minorities, but that is the **AA's problem.
If the **AA can get ridiculous draconian laws passed, it will take only one generation (if that) until all is forgotten, and people just grow up thinking that is how things are supposed to be. Most of their consumer base was not around for the JFK assassination, and they do not remember 8-tracks, cassettes, or vinyl albums either, nor Reagan being shot. Hell, most of their consumer base doesn't know that televisions will work without a DVD attached to them.
Their plan is to bully and outlast anyone who still gives a damn about fair use, rights to privacy etc. If they spend half as much on lobbying as they do on fscked up litigation, we are all fscked.
For awhile there, with the OOXML, and other things, I was afraid that the big bad wolf had fallen in 'friends' with the little pigs. I thought and thought about that, and just could not get my head around it. If there is no monopoly to fight, or evildoers to rail against, life is just too surreal to contemplate. What, with people working together and profitability made second class citizen to cooperation and interoperability. Just when I was beginning to think that consistency was vanishing from the face of the earth, MS^H^H the RIAA has come to my rescue and reassured me that they are evil, and always will be. ohhh, how nice it is to know somethings will never change... I can sleep again.
quoting myself http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=442010&cid=22301682
For awhile there, with the OOXML, and other things, I was afraid that the big bad wolf had fallen in 'friends' with the little pigs. I thought and thought about that, and just could not get my head around it. If there is no monopoly to fight, or evildoers to rail against, life is just too surreal to contemplate. What, with people working together and profitability made second class citizen to cooperation and interoperability. Just when I was beginning to think that consistency was vanishing from the face of the earth, MS has come to my rescue and reassured me that they are evil, and always will be. ohhh, how nice it is to know somethings will never change... I can sleep again.
have missed something.
The current administration has been fixing numbers for 8 years. No child left behind was about numbers, not education. The death toll in Iraq was about numbers not the war. (Iraqi and mercenary deaths don't count) Just about everything this administration touched was about numbers to show the public. They were not planning on the housing crash catching them before they got out of office. There are miles and miles of dark fiber in the US that were paid for with tax dollars and higher service fees. Are they in use? If they are, it's not for joe bloggs ISP service.
In South Korea, the government mandated the tech revolution. In the US the government will not do so, leaving it to private companies who then leave out the little guys that are not profitable customers. This is the major difference. For some reason, after these guys pay off their government officials here in the US, they don't feel that bragging rights about how they provide the BEST service in the US bar none is necessary. Note, more bars != best service, and advertising should always be viewed with a healthy overdose of cynicism.
The current spin doctors know (at least 4 out of 5 of them) that it's the numbers, not actual service value that counts. Our government has shown them how this works. You can do anything, as long as you have a plausible story and numbers to show you are right. After all, the ONLY intelligence data that the rest of us knew about was that Saddam had WMD, and the NUMBER of concurring agencies and or countries was convincing... but I digress.
It's all about numbers. If you have money with large numbers on it, you can get the fiber to your house from any ISP. The problem is that there is no incentive for private businesses to provide superior service to your home if they can continue to rob your wallet every month for something that it a little better than dial up. Notice how the commercials try to convince you that their service is 'broadband', lightning fast, and other terms that intimate super fast speeds. They never talk about real data rates so again in this case it's about numbers. If they hide the numbers you are lead to believe it's all good. You will not see one US company compare their customers to the top three ranked countries in the world for Internet service. That would be using the numbers fairly and we in the US just won't stand for that kind of non-sense. It's just un-American.
Well, if you happen to have someone on site at ALL 4500 of your sites, yes, that would be a viable option. Of course that never happens. Imagine someone being on site at every cell tower and you begin to realize the magnitude of the problem.
The trouble with that thought is that there are companies that know a cable cut could hurt them, but there are no viable alternatives in the event of a cable cut. Does anyone remember when one of the comms satellites went missing? If they had bought dishes that can be pointed remotely, there was a standby bird, everyone else had to visit all their sites to repoint dishes.
In this case, say you are a large ISP, what do you do? Especially if your connection is provided by the government, and mandated by law? Even though it seems tin foil hattish, I'm with the people that don't think this is an accident.
I've been in a position to analyze various infrastructure systems for several large cities in my life, and I can tell you that they are not thinking this through correctly. The best cyber storm possible is one that you have not prepared for, nor thought of, and to even begin to contemplate them, like a chess playing program, you have to know ALL possible moves. As an example of what I'm hinting at, the recent cable cut that killed the Internet pipe to a large part of the middle east was NOT anticipated. Sure, there were re-routes, but every possible combination of data loss, connectivity loss, and possible system intrusion cannot have been prepared for.
You see, one big accident that allows in just the right trojan, followed by something akin to the butterfly effect, and in 47 days all kinds of Internet hell breaks loose. It might even take two such accidental outage events to place all the trojans where they need to be. Then when all is in place the silent enemy takes over what you have been protecting for so long.
Neither you nor I can determine with zero error exactly where a DDoS attack will overwhelm the right system resources to allow take-over of the desired systems. Yes, this spaghetti mess of events is something that cannot be fully prepared for, so saying that the test was successful and that you are safer now is absolutely head-up-your-ass stupid.
Until the test team knows ALL possible flaws, a full cyberwar test is not possible. Simulating real life systems in isolation removes those little annoying system weak spots that can be exploited. I dare say that there are NOT enough people in the NSA to create a test group large enough to handle even one large metropolitan area, never mind a full state, or say the tri-state area near NYC.
I'd like to see the data sets that they are using for the testing system simulations.
sigh
The fact that his speech suggests that only evil-doers would have anything to do with genetics research that is not acceptable to an old man with special ties to an invisible friend, only makes him sound insane, intolerant, afraid, or all three.
rightfully, your comment was modded 'interesting' but may I say something here? If you are unable to get a good install with Ubentu, you might try using Ubuntu. Despite that, if you have trouble installing Ubuntu, you might want to review your entire involvement with computing. Ubuntu was the easiest installation I have done to date. I'm not saying I'm old or anything, but I have installed Windows 1.0 on a couple of machines.
Seriously, I've installed more than 6 different Linux distributions, and Ubuntu was the easiest install. period. ever.
Support for unsigned drivers was there, it just went easy. It was more difficult to load all the Firefox extensions that I use than it was to install Ubuntu. So, I just don't understand why you have never been able to get a good install with Ubuntu. ????
I don't think I'm a 2-bit nerd, but I can say this, watching MS languish in the mire that is Vista is somewhat satisfying. Not just because it's good to see goliath having a bad hair day, but because for every day that this continues, more people will begin to realize that F/OSS is not only usable, but valuable. Hopefully, gone are the days when windows defines home computing and the desktop experience.
If there is a way for the NSA or DHS to listen to your calls, then there is a way for a determined hacker to listen to them. period. no kidding. I mean it.
By creating a monitoring system, the US corru^H^H^H^H^Hgovernment legistlators will create the means necessary for other governments, nefarious organizations, and plain old criminals to listen to your phone calls, monitor your emails, track your Internet usage.
If there is a way, there will be a will... trust me on that.
On the bright side, forget archiving all those emails for SarbOx, if they wanted to see them, the government should have fscking archived them for themselves!!
Sadly, I'm not joking. If there is anyway to monitor the data, or mine through the aggregate resultant data, someone will, and I'll go ahead and wager that it will first show up in either the form of a letter from the **AA or a specialized targeted advertisement sent to you because they know you like Elvis, have a Tivo, just had your front door replaced, and can use the perfect holiday gift of monogrammed door mats for people who just happen to have the same names as all your immediate relatives.