I find it hard to believe that not a single stolen car could be recovered, nor any perpetrators of theft/assaulted identified
Of course individual cases get solved in this way. But the studues that have been done show that the overall rate of crime does not decrease. The effect of surveillance is simply to move the problem around, not to reduce it.
Were any sensible objections raised, or was it just more Orwell quotes?
The trouble with this sort of argument is that it just doesn't take ordinary human preferences into account. For some reason, people don't like to be watched all the time. If a stranger followed you around all day, and made notes on everything you did, you would become annoyed. Indeed, such "stalking" behaviour is regarded as a crime. so there must be some "sensible objection" to being watched all the time: the fact that we don't have a word in English to express what the objection is, does not mean that the objection does not exist.
No, the camers don't stop people going about their lawful business.
On the other hand, Britain is (yet again) running out of space in its jails. So either the cameras are not having any effect on the crime rate, or else a lot of people are being imprisoned for trivial offences for which they would not have been imprisoned in the past. In the first case they are a waste of money, and in the second case they are having the effect of criminalizing a large proportion of the population.
To be fair, a google search result page doessn't use AJAX.
If it did, it would crucify the performance of the Google servers, wouldn't work on about 10% of browsers, and would require an army of programmers to maintain the arcane code written in a bizarre programming language, 90% of which would consist of workarounds for the quirks of 739 different browser versions.
Which is yet another example of how broken and retarded Java is. Individual application programs like the Java interpreter should not need to contain their own unique version of the timezone support code.
As computer power increases, everything will be inside your browser.
Yes, because of course we need to waste all that computer power on the desktop by just running a browser, and then sell hundreds of expensive mainframes^H^H^H servers to do the real processing.
Than, after a few years, someone will come up with the revolutionary idea of a "personal computer", and we'll go round the loop again.
But without the state, there would be no pensions, no contracts and no such thing as bankruptcy, because there would be no system of laws to define or enforce any of these things.
All such laws and regulations are a burden on business. It seems quite reasonable to many people that taxpayers might be willing to share some of the burden themselves in exchange for the enforcement of their will.
YMMV, but I find that throttling Bittorrent to 90% of its maximum upload speed makes the difference between "internet connection almost unusable" and "internet connection working almost normally".
If you're running linux you can do all of this with iptables (even simulating random packet loss). The command syntax is a bit complicated but once you've got the hang of it, it is extremely powerful.
If people had "inalienable natural rights" then they wouldn't be forever making a fuss about their rights. They wouldn't need to. The reason that we have to be so careful to preserve our rights is precisely because they are *not* inalienable.
All that happens "naturally" is that the person with the biggest gun wins.
So, given that the chips are actually a risk to security, it would be helpful to US border security if we all just fried our passports in the microwave oven. Right?
So what if the technology could have been made safe and secure? The whole problem is that it wasn't made secure, and now we're stuck with a spec for RFID passports that is reducing border security instead of increasing it.
federal law makes them liable for all fraudulent charges
Exactly. So if the bank can claim that no fraud has occurred, it is in the clear, isn't it?
In the UK (where consumer protection laws are much stronger than in the US) there was a spate of thefts from customer accounts using ATM machines a while back. The bank claimed that its technology was perfect, so it never had to compensate any of the victims. If they complained louder, the bank prosecuted the victims for attempted fraud. Only many years later was it discovered that the bank employees were stealing the money.
As far as the banks are concerned, a PIN chip completely eliminates fraud. If you've lost money from your account, it must be your fault (i.e. someone must have discovered your PIN). It's protection for the bank, NOT for the card holder.
Most professional Windows programmers that I've seen use the "Run" command all the time. Very often they use it to start up Explorer. I think it's because the other items in the start menu are often hidden in strange places, and it's quicker to type in a command then hunt through a muddled-up menu.
Customizing the menu is not really useful advice: people want to be able to walk up to a machine and start to use it straight away, without wasting time turning off idiotic GUI features first. Although, to be fair, the first thing that most professional Windows users do on a new XP machine seems to be to restore the "classic" look-and-feel.
It should be possible, so long as you can authenticate against a local server. Just clone the server.
It would certainly be difficult if Microsoft retained control of all the authentication servers. But then it would be impossible to install Windows on a machine not connected to the internet.
Re:If it seems to good to be true...
on
Donating Software?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If you've never opened the package then it would be hard to argue that you have consented to the EULA. Did the MS rep get you (or your employer) to enter into any other contract before he handed it to you?
But there are plenty of idiot would-be terrorists who have no hope of carrying out what they are planning, but who are more than willing to martyr themselves by pleading guilty when they are caught (here is an example).
If the police can keep up a steady trickle of arrests of people like this, the "war on terror" can be kept going indefinitely.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK I've noticed a number of articles in the popular press about the launch of Blu-ray and HD-DVD over the past few days, and I heard someone talking about it on a radio news program yesterday. I suppose the manufacturers are having a marketing blitz.
Every single article said "don't buy it". Everyone is being told that it is Betamax-versus-VHS all over again. If that's the message from the popular media (who usually just regurgitate marketing hype without thinking about it), then it's going to be a while before Sony sells many of these things over here.
The sendmail analogy is surely wrong. Nobody buys add-ons from McAffee or anyone else in order to make Solaris secure. It is secure out of the box, as supplied by Sun.
In the ideal world, if Windows were secure, there would be loads of competition for email software on Windows, but anti-virus software would just not exist at all.
I seriously doubt that nuclear power is even all that cheap anymore
It's always been extremely expensive. But the nuclear industry is expert at "externalizing" its costs, i.e. making someone else pay for them, so they they don't appear in the price of the product. And their PR is always expert at promising "jam tomorrow", so that no matter how dirty and dangerous the current technology, the next version (due out real soon now) is going to be safe and clean and cheap...
I work with machines that get abused like this a lot: naive users think that the way to fix a problem is to power cycle the machine. And I've seen a lot or ext3 file systems that are utterly screwed up beyond repair as a result. I've never had a similar problem with reiserfs.
That article says that an expensive RFID tagging system would allow the airport to open up more security checking lanes when the existing ones were busy.
Are airport operators really so stupid that they need to pay someone huge sums of money to tell them when there's a long queue of people at security? Are they blind?
Slashdot Mirror
I find it hard to believe that not a single stolen car could be recovered, nor any perpetrators of theft/assaulted identified
Of course individual cases get solved in this way. But the studues that have been done show that the overall rate of crime does not decrease. The effect of surveillance is simply to move the problem around, not to reduce it.
Were any sensible objections raised, or was it just more Orwell quotes?
The trouble with this sort of argument is that it just doesn't take ordinary human preferences into account. For some reason, people don't like to be watched all the time. If a stranger followed you around all day, and made notes on everything you did, you would become annoyed. Indeed, such "stalking" behaviour is regarded as a crime. so there must be some "sensible objection" to being watched all the time: the fact that we don't have a word in English to express what the objection is, does not mean that the objection does not exist.
No, the camers don't stop people going about their lawful business.
On the other hand, Britain is (yet again) running out of space in its jails. So either the cameras are not having any effect on the crime rate, or else a lot of people are being imprisoned for trivial offences for which they would not have been imprisoned in the past. In the first case they are a waste of money, and in the second case they are having the effect of criminalizing a large proportion of the population.
Are we sure this happened? As far as I can see, the only evidence is a page on Wikipedia, and everyone knows how reliable that is.
</sarcasm>
To be fair, a google search result page doessn't use AJAX.
If it did, it would crucify the performance of the Google servers, wouldn't work on about 10% of browsers, and would require an army of programmers to maintain the arcane code written in a bizarre programming language, 90% of which would consist of workarounds for the quirks of 739 different browser versions.
No, what I'm saying is that "web 2.0" is just a reinvention of the 3270 terminals I was using back in the 1970s, but with fancier graphics.
The hardware certainly changes. Every year it takes more processing power to do the same thing.
Which is yet another example of how broken and retarded Java is. Individual application programs like the Java interpreter should not need to contain their own unique version of the timezone support code.
As computer power increases, everything will be inside your browser.
Yes, because of course we need to waste all that computer power on the desktop by just running a browser, and then sell hundreds of expensive mainframes^H^H^H servers to do the real processing.
Than, after a few years, someone will come up with the revolutionary idea of a "personal computer", and we'll go round the loop again.
pension forgiveness, forced contract re-negotiations, bankruptcy protection
But without the state, there would be no pensions, no contracts and no such thing as bankruptcy, because there would be no system of laws to define or enforce any of these things.
All such laws and regulations are a burden on business. It seems quite reasonable to many people that taxpayers might be willing to share some of the burden themselves in exchange for the enforcement of their will.
YMMV, but I find that throttling Bittorrent to 90% of its maximum upload speed makes the difference between "internet connection almost unusable" and "internet connection working almost normally".
If you're running linux you can do all of this with iptables (even simulating random packet loss). The command syntax is a bit complicated but once you've got the hang of it, it is extremely powerful.
That's all it is... voodoo.
If people had "inalienable natural rights" then they wouldn't be forever making a fuss about their rights. They wouldn't need to. The reason that we have to be so careful to preserve our rights is precisely because they are *not* inalienable.
All that happens "naturally" is that the person with the biggest gun wins.
So, given that the chips are actually a risk to security, it would be helpful to US border security if we all just fried our passports in the microwave oven. Right?
So what if the technology could have been made safe and secure? The whole problem is that it wasn't made secure, and now we're stuck with a spec for RFID passports that is reducing border security instead of increasing it.
federal law makes them liable for all fraudulent charges
Exactly. So if the bank can claim that no fraud has occurred, it is in the clear, isn't it?
In the UK (where consumer protection laws are much stronger than in the US) there was a spate of thefts from customer accounts using ATM machines a while back. The bank claimed that its technology was perfect, so it never had to compensate any of the victims. If they complained louder, the bank prosecuted the victims for attempted fraud. Only many years later was it discovered that the bank employees were stealing the money.
As far as the banks are concerned, a PIN chip completely eliminates fraud. If you've lost money from your account, it must be your fault (i.e. someone must have discovered your PIN). It's protection for the bank, NOT for the card holder.
Most professional Windows programmers that I've seen use the "Run" command all the time. Very often they use it to start up Explorer. I think it's because the other items in the start menu are often hidden in strange places, and it's quicker to type in a command then hunt through a muddled-up menu.
Customizing the menu is not really useful advice: people want to be able to walk up to a machine and start to use it straight away, without wasting time turning off idiotic GUI features first. Although, to be fair, the first thing that most professional Windows users do on a new XP machine seems to be to restore the "classic" look-and-feel.
It should be possible, so long as you can authenticate against a local server. Just clone the server.
It would certainly be difficult if Microsoft retained control of all the authentication servers. But then it would be impossible to install Windows on a machine not connected to the internet.
If you've never opened the package then it would be hard to argue that you have consented to the EULA. Did the MS rep get you (or your employer) to enter into any other contract before he handed it to you?
But there are plenty of idiot would-be terrorists who have no hope of carrying out what they are planning, but who are more than willing to martyr themselves by pleading guilty when they are caught (here is an example).
If the police can keep up a steady trickle of arrests of people like this, the "war on terror" can be kept going indefinitely.
I don't know about the US, but here in the UK I've noticed a number of articles in the popular press about the launch of Blu-ray and HD-DVD over the past few days, and I heard someone talking about it on a radio news program yesterday. I suppose the manufacturers are having a marketing blitz.
Every single article said "don't buy it". Everyone is being told that it is Betamax-versus-VHS all over again. If that's the message from the popular media (who usually just regurgitate marketing hype without thinking about it), then it's going to be a while before Sony sells many of these things over here.
The sendmail analogy is surely wrong. Nobody buys add-ons from McAffee or anyone else in order to make Solaris secure. It is secure out of the box, as supplied by Sun.
In the ideal world, if Windows were secure, there would be loads of competition for email software on Windows, but anti-virus software would just not exist at all.
I seriously doubt that nuclear power is even all that cheap anymore
It's always been extremely expensive. But the nuclear industry is expert at "externalizing" its costs, i.e. making someone else pay for them, so they they don't appear in the price of the product. And their PR is always expert at promising "jam tomorrow", so that no matter how dirty and dangerous the current technology, the next version (due out real soon now) is going to be safe and clean and cheap...
I work with machines that get abused like this a lot: naive users think that the way to fix a problem is to power cycle the machine. And I've seen a lot or ext3 file systems that are utterly screwed up beyond repair as a result. I've never had a similar problem with reiserfs.
And you put up with this shit?
People wouldn't be treated like sheep, if they didn't behave like sheep.
That article says that an expensive RFID tagging system would allow the airport to open up more security checking lanes when the existing ones were busy.
Are airport operators really so stupid that they need to pay someone huge sums of money to tell them when there's a long queue of people at security? Are they blind?