The only potential problem I see is that if they can put something up moments after a crime is committed, sooner or later you're going to end up with surveillance video of some poor slob who walked in or out of Wal-Mart right before or after an actual child molester did. Whether this will happen more or less than other forms of false accusation, we won't know until they do it.
That's really the problem with speed and ease of use -- it's much easier to accidentally put the wrong face on a digital billboard than it is to put the wrong face on the back of a milk carton or on a poster or flier. The latter takes time and has several stages at which errors can be caught. Whether this problem is worth foregoing the advantages of it, I don't know. Probably not.
Around here (Chicago area) we've had message boards over the highways for years -- they give traffic times, alternate routes, and occasionally are used for Amber Alerts (descriptions of cars or people suspected of child abduction). So the same concept, albeit in a non-graphic form, has been used with great success for some time. They got a kid back from a bad guy just recently using this technique. But I will say that I idly worry that I (big hairy stranger-danger-lookin' guy) in our very common (Honda Accord) car with my daughter in the back will someday experience the harsh hand of the law of averages. I guess I'd still rather have to deal with straightening out that type of confusion once in my life if it means that more actual bad guys get caught.
Oh, and another problem is aesthetic -- the world will rapidly become a lit-up, post-apocalyptic place full of advertising and scrolling messages from the authorities. But that's kind of a matter of taste -- I think they amount of visual noise we live with is already numbing. Add more and it further reduces the impact of any given piece of it.
... but that "Merry Christmas" at the end has a decidedly ominous vibe to it. Maybe a little more time out socializing and less time plucking at one's graphics card...
Seriously, though, yet another interesting holiday re-use of equipment. My sarcastic comments aside, Merry Christmas back to him.
Hm. I wonder... I think you're right. Perhaps it was for the Gore/Lieberman Democratic convention? I know it's true that they chose it after the Monica mess, so it's got to be that if Monica broke during the second term.
Now I'm intrigued and embarrassed -- I'll go look this up (like I should have in the first place).
[insert intermission music here]
Hi, I'm back. According to this CNN article, it was the 2000 Democratic convention that used Mambo No. 5. The 1996 convention used The Macarena, which, while dumb in its own way, doesn't rub wrong the way Mambo No. 5 does.
So noted -- I'll accede to pretty much everything you've said. I share your opinions to varying degrees, but I can't find anything wrong with your logic throughout (and your deeper knowledge of the security side of Mac ownership than I have). One thing, though:
I don't run AV software either. (a) there are no known viruses/malware out in the wild to detect, (b) why should I waste my processor cycles protecting people that choose Windows? They chose that system, they can take the processor hit of the constant vigilance required by the reality of malware there.
I see your point. However, I do think that typical users (not you, as you are very well-versed in what's going on) should be encouraged to blow a few cycles on the common good. You wouldn't forward a message with an executable attachment, but the typical user might (you know, with a message something like "I can't open this on my Mac, but I got it from my sister and it looks like fun!"). And while ideally the pervasive malware on the Windows side would make users more cautious, that's just not happening yet. Windows is easier to buy than pot, so to speak, and therefore almost everyone has it. OSX is going after the average, I-don't-want-to-think user ("I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC"), so there's a good chance those users won't be savvy enough to know not to forward something they don't recognize.
And while I'd like to think that this will, over time, increase self-education (after all of one's friends get burned by his or her dumb attachment), that seems optimistic to me. Moreover, from a practical standpoint, malware that sends mail or vomits personal information back to a server in Russia creates quite a bit of traffic that ultimately affects us all.
So a few cycles here and there seems like a small price to pay. And again, it's not a big deal now -- I just wonder how much more relevant it will become as Macs gain popularity in arenas other than their traditional stomping grounds. A little caution might not be a bad thing.
I agree -- perhaps obscurity isn't quite the right term. By obscurity I meant end users, not availability of information about OS X. And really, I have been impressed with the patching system -- it's like Windows Update except that it doesn't suck. Still, by its very nature it is largely reactionary. All systems like that have to be, which means that vulnerabilities have to be noticed (often through their exploitation) before they can be patched. That's not Apple's fault, but they've lived in relative peace for years because of their smaller and more focused user base.
Currently Macs are more prevalent in academic and artistic (graphics, music, video, etc.) circles. There's simply not as much information worth stealing there as there is with Windows (financial, corporate, and so on). But if you have a stack of Macs (pardon the rhyme) out there with guvmint secrets on them, it will become worth a Bad Guy's time to break in, and the methods to do so will begin to appear quickly. And then the average Mac users will start to get hit more regularly Honestly, I don't know why people aren't trying to crack into Macs more often -- there aren't as many of them but the average Mac owner can generally be counted on to have a bit more money, music, gadgets, toys, gear, etc.
Most Mac users I know don't run AV software, for example -- it's not personally relevant to them (though I try to convince them that they can pass along the ick to others -- I'm generally not too successful there, though). All I meant by my previous post is that I expect that soon Macs will be much more vulnerable because of this.
I quite like my Mac -- I run a Mac (10.4), an XP/Kubuntu dual boot, and a W2K/Kubuntu dual boot. I ran Vista for a while, but it made my teeth itch. The Mac is by far the most "responsible" in its self-maintenance. But it still enjoys more security simply because it's not as common as Windows. Crank up the value of the data on a subset of Macs to international levels, though, and that may well change. That's all I'm saying. And while I think all of this nefarious behavior is shitty and wrong, maybe it's time that average Joe Mac users had a little shot across the bow about security.
I love how the guy bemoaning the evils of pirating and its association with organized crime is standing in front of a huge portrait of Frank Sinatra, one of the most "connected" artists in American history. That ranks up there with when the (Bill) Clinton reelection campaign chose Mambo #5 ("a little bit of Monica in my life") as its theme song for the convention. It doesn't take a downtown PR firm to figure this crap out.
Seems to me that because the Mac is largely secure through obscurity (as this was already tagged), the military is just increasing the incentive to crack the Mac for the Bad Guys. Three years from now (or who am I kidding, three DAYS from now) when then exploits begin to be released into the wild, I think their reasoning will be found to be faulty. While there still won't be as many Macs out there, there will be a select few with wildly valuable data, and therefore it will become more lucrative to crack them.
All of that is true. But Apple has this whole "I'm a Mac" ad campaign that touts the ease of use of Macs for the average joe out there, but then does something like this where you need to know fairly deeply what's going on internally to keep yourself safe. To the typical user, if it's not on-screen, it's gone. They understand "log out," but won't understand that there are still scrids of their session left on a public computer even if the browser is closed.
Moreover, look at even the phrasing of the examples you give. Firefox is "clear private data" -- pretty straightforward, and you know what you're doing. "Reset Safari" is pretty cryptic by comparison -- it's fewer words (something Apple strives for, often rightly so), but it's far less descriptive of what's going on. Kind of a semantic version of the one-button mouse -- interestingly simple in theory, but it falls apart in practice.
But all of that phrasing business is almost beside the point -- what average MyMom user at a library computer is going to know to clear the browser's history and cache to log out of iDisk? One doesn't seem to have to do with the other. In this case, there simply needs to be a button to log out. I'm sure the Apple interface designers shudder at the thought of the added clutter, but so be it.
Yes, if you take into account the first half of that post. During a police investigation, lying to the police is a crime in and of itself. It's often left to the discretion of the officer (immediately) or the judge (eventually) whether to worry about it, but they can run you in for lying to them when they're investigating a crime.
No, of course I don't want to be raped. And thank you for informing me that men are raped, too -- you are a veritable font of information. I don't get out of my Hobbit hole very often.
Come on, man. If you think there should be mandatory life without parole for these guys, great. Lobby for that. But when the current group of freed sex offenders was convicted, that was not the case. They were sentenced under the current laws of the time, and they served their time. Are they dirtbags? Sure, most of them are. But they did the crime, they did the time, and under our system of laws (I get it, we MAKE the LAWS) they are done except for registering with their local police when they move and (in the case of child molestation) restricted in where they can live relative to a school or park.
I SAY AGAIN (for someone who talks so much about us making the laws, you seem to have completely missed the part where I talked about this), if you want to add the online register to the sentencing guidelines for future cases, FINE. Lobby for that. Write your congressthings. But when a lot of these guys were convicted, there was no Internet. And now, years later, they're on it along with all the information necessary to ostracize them. Sure, some are recurrent bastards. Others, as has been pointed out around here, were 18 with a 17-year-old girlfriend who had a pissed off father. They receive no different treatment than the guy who drops out of trees onto coeds, even though there are miles of difference between their crimes.
This guy wasn't even a child molester -- he was on the wrong list. He was a sex offender, sure. But the guy who killed him did so to protect his children, indicating that he likely wouldn't have done it if the offense was known to be on an adult.
Which brings us to another point -- if these holier-than-thou, will-no-one-think-of-the-children "moralists" who react to things before thinking about the consequences or even the practical aspects of the execution are going to do this kind of thing, they'd at least be damned fucking sure that they're getting the data right. This was a murder (and obviously the father who did it was not right in the head) that was made possible by the wrong information being on the list. But think about all the rest of the stuff that can go wrong. Two guys named John Smith live at 123 Main Street, Anytown (not entirely unlikely, given the size of apartment buildings these days). John Smith on the fourth floor applies for a job in Someothertown, so the people he's applying to have never seen him. John Smith on the eighth floor is a registered sex offender. A quick Internet search affords fourth floor John Smith the same delightful discrimination as eighth floor John.
My point is that tossing around information like this is a dangerous business. It hurts both innocent and guilty people. Obviously you don't give a crap about the way our judicial system works as related to the guilty people, but I certainly give a crap about these new initiatives that open fire on innocent people because of false positives. And really, our penal system is based (at least in theory, though not in practice) on the idea that people can be rehabilitated. Maybe not the actually depraved child molesters, but certainly the people caught up in he-said-she-said, "was it consensual" situations. You would have the latter treated the same as the former. Let's hope for your sake that whoever you're having sex with never changes her/his mind. Or gets mad at you about something and decides to screw you (figuratively). You could end up on the list with Chester Molester.
Another example: I used to work for a company where we were told one day that we had to run a list of teenaged applicants against the DHS watch list. The watch list was poorly constructed and full of very common names. It was assumed that we should just run the list and "let the government sort out the positives." So fourteen-year-old Mohammad Atta from suburban Detroit (I'm making that up, I don't know if there is one) gets fl
The way it works here in Illinois, as far as I know, is that you have to register with the police. Residents can go to the police station and ask them who the registered sex offenders are in their area.
Which is where my problem with this law comes in. Being able to sidle into my den with a cup of coffee, turn on the computer, and find out who in my neighborhood is registered is a very different level of commitment than going to the police station. And it makes it possible for a whack job like this guy to find out that information without alerting police. No leads, then, when he kills the guy.
But that's not the full extent of my issue with it. My main problem is that you can't add things to someone's sentence after the fact. If you want to tell every sex offender from now on that they'll be on this list, that's fine. But to add someone who was convicted in, say, 1975 and spent ten years in prison is ethically wrong and quite possibly unconstitutional (under the 5th and/or the 14th amendments, perhaps). From a practical standpoint, it adds punishment after time served and could be argued to deny the convict of life (in this case), liberty, and even property (given that it's probably pretty much impossible to get a job if you're on the website).
There are a lot of dirtbags out there who are listed on the websites, and I do worry about them not only in general for society but for the safety of my own daughter. But dirtbags or not, you can't just tack more on to a sentence after they get out (sometimes years after they get out) because their crime is more repellent than most.
And I know, there is a higher chance of recidivism among sex offenders. So again, make it part of the sentence now. Eventually, all sex offenders will be on the website. Not a perfect solution if you're scared that you live near an offender, but if we start making exceptions to the law for hot-button issues, the entire concept of liberty is sunk anyway (for all of us, not just the sex offenders).
You also can't complain that a company has built a product that you don't like -- you don't have to use it, and you don't have to care. It's their product, and their service, and their business. If you don't like it, you're welcome to build your own product any day of the week.
With all due respect, this has to be the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a while. No web developer can stop supporting IE. I personally lost about five hours this week alone wrestling with its various dumb CSS problems (a fairly standard percentage from one week to the next), but that doesn't change the fact that most users still use it. Can I tell a client (say, a hair salon) that IE stinks and therefore I won't support 80% of the people who will come to her site? She doesn't give a shit about CSS standards, she cuts hair. And she sure won't be pleased if I build something that doesn't work for 80% of her visitors.
Microsoft fought hard to corner the browser market. They chose to be the gold standard, did what they had to do get there, and with such a choice comes some responsibility to not break everything. If not a professional responsibility (which is arguable), certainly an ethical responsibility. And really, it IS a professional responsibility -- they're slipping now in the browser arena because of their arrogant disregard for standards. Firefox is not gaining popularity based solely on the stellar business acumen exhibited by the Mozilla Foundation. It owes its success as much to IE being increasingly unusable as it does to its own features.
But you don't have to. You can build your own browser. You can stop supporting browsers that you don't like. Hey, I did. I don't support Safari, I just don't like it. I don't support Opera either. Until this year, I didn't support FF, and I still don't support FF for backend components. That's my right, it's my business.
This is possibly a decent idea (except for the business about building your own browser -- I'm going to just ignore that part) -- you're covering that 80% fairly well. But unless you're building very simple sites that don't call for a lot of JS or CSS, it simply won't work for much longer (if it's still working at all for you). A Safari user calls your client and says the client's website isn't displaying properly and they can't buy a gift card. (First of all, they'll probably not call and will simply shop somewhere else, but let's do it this way for sake of argument.) When the client calls you, do you honestly think that "well, I don't support Safari. Tough noogies." will be an acceptable answer to them? Friend, you have some big brass ones. YOU work for THEM, remember? I'm all for being assertive with clients, but good heavens!
And to my parenthetical point above, people who simply go away are basically invisible to the client (unless they read their stats and know how to interpret them, but let's remember that most clients hire and trust YOU to do that for them). So even though you're producing buggy behavior for a segment of their customer base and driving them away from the client's website, you never get into any hot water for it. The client simply doesn't know they could be missing out on as much as 25% more traffic or sales, but you do. At best, that's comically bad customer service -- at worst, it's negligence and certainly within the realm of things that can (and maybe should) get you fired.
I don't mean to get off on such a rant, and generally I'll defend Microsoft's right to do what they want. But they really have gorked up the profession of web development. Starting with shoddy support for CSS standards and Javascript, and moving on to buggy, proprietary Frontpage extensions that set clients' expectations unreasonably high, I would guess that 20-25% of the time I spend talking to a new client about what their site can do is spent trying to explain in simple terms why the thing on their wife's/brother's/company's business website won't work on all browsers and therefore is a bad idea to implement for their site. And that can be directly attributed to Microsoft's business practices in this arena.
Yeah, I was thinking if the shirt was strong enough it would contain the blast and fire it back at him, but I didn't think of the hoop stress idea. I still can't imagine a cell phone battery having enough pop to do all of that, but I'm going solely on my own hunches, not actual knowledge of the widowmaker capabilities of them.
Oh, I know -- don't worry. I mentioned the Mythbusters more as evidence of my lack of full understanding of things.
I suppose if he was already lying on the ground (or pressed up against the wall of the quarry, but that seems unlikely), that would contain the blast and fire it back into him. And as mentioned in another response to my hackneyed theory, there is distance to think about, too.
I am certainly no physicist (I took a year of high school physics and watch a lot of Mythbusters -- that's the extent of my education in this area), but it seems to me that he would have had to be wearing a suit of armor. Let's assume (wrongly, but for sake of argument) that the phone could blow up with enough force to break his spine from the front. If I understand how it all works (and again, see my credentials above and add grain of salt), he'd either have to be wearing a suit of armor to contain the blast or the phone would have to be heavier than him to not just blow out the front of his shirt. Am I right? Then again, a suicide bomber isn't wearing 180 pounds of explosives... maybe I'm wrong.
Anyhow, this is only one of a hundred things wrong with this story (starting with the title), but it still seems like the phone might scorch you and maybe even break a rib but it would basically propel itself away from you like a rocket. Now if it suddenly got very hot and made you start dancing about frantically in, say, a quarry, I can see (as can others around here) how that might cause a combination of injuries that would sound like what they have. But Kim Hoon, the doctor credited in the article with this innovative conclusion, has no future in forensics (hopefully).
Well, hell's bells. You know, as I typed that, I knew someone would add the end zones. But then I figured Slashdot wasn't a haven of American/Canadian football minutia, and in the interest of brevity I left out the distinction. But you, sir, are correct. Depending on what you consider the active field (and indeed, the end zones would arguably be part of the field), it could be considered to be larger. I think generally people think of "a football field" as 100 yards, but you're right -- it could be seen either way.
Which only adds to my argument, if I may be so brash as to point out.:)
Really, we're all geeky adults here. Can't we use real units? And moreover, we're not all in the U.S. (I happen to be, but still).
When it docks in the U.S., it's 100 yards long by 160 feet wide. Apparently when the ship docks in a Canadian port the sail will expand to 100 meters long and 59.4 meters wide. When it docks anywhere in the rest of the world, it will expand to anywhere from 100 to 110 meters wide to 64 to 75 meters wide. I guess it'll fold out or something.
And when it docks in Australia, it will run about 165 meters long by 135 meters wide (and while it will be hard to figure out how it works or what it's doing, it will be brutally violent).
Can we find anything more ambiguous to compare it to? How many loaves of bread long is it?
Lucas took a painfully simple view of human nature. Anakin would have had to have been dumber than a bag of hammers to not get the hustle that was played on him.
As we all probably know (we being the types who would have this information much more readily than, say, the cover charge at the closest dance club), Lucas took a view of human nature as filtered through the Hero Myth. The first released movie (episode IV) was almost a point-for-point example of the Hero Myth as spelled out by Joseph Campbell (with whom Lucas spent a lot of time).
So while it was painfully simple, I think another way of looking at it is that it was pared down to the very basics, the embodiment of human nature, the essence of good versus evil. Both in the world and within the human soul (what better example of that is Darth Vader?). When he strayed away from that and got all soap opera is when everything started to stink. And I wrote a letter after I saw Episode I (something I typically reserve for my government representatives) -- I don't typically get too sensitive about racial stereotyping, but there were a couple of pretty creepy (and irrelevant) stereotypes in Episode I.
But I digress -- in your example (filtered through the hero myth), Anakin is good. 100%, down to his nougat-center good. He is also sheltered and inexperienced in the ways of the real world (as must often be the case in the hero myth concept for the altruism to form in Our Hero). So it would follow that the scourge of the world (whatever that world may be) would catch him with his pants (or knickers, or whatever those are) down.
But all that aside, Episode IV is really a great modernized example of the hero myth ("long time ago" business notwithstanding). Something about it speaks to some hardwired part of our brains. And Episode V was a continuation of that to a large degree. After that it goes a little Greek for my taste (killing your father, kissing your sister -- eeesh). But the first two films stayed fairly true to the essence of the reluctant hero concept, and Lucas seemed to be trying in some half-assed way to retain elements of that in the later films. It didn't work because he screwed around with it instead of leaving it as pure as it needs to be to work.
Wow, when I get going like this I feel like Foreman on "That 70's Show." I expect my dad to appear behind me and call me a dumbass and tell me to drop all the "What Would Luke Do?" nonsense.
Hm, a woman alone on vacant property with the suspicion that there are bad people there? Yeah, you're right, there's no potential for emergency there. Honestly, sometimes I wish Slashdot didn't allow AC posts. It would solve a lot of hot wind problems like this one.
I have had several police officers in several different municipalities (even Chicago, which is quite understaffed and full of very real crime) tell me when I call the non-emergency line to call 911. They say that they would much rather respond quickly to even what seems like a minor problem so it doesn't become a major problem.
If I had mod points I'd mod you troll. I hardly ever do that, but really, you're just picking a dumb fight.
Just because prepress departments can convert RGB to CMYK during preflight doesn't mean it's okay to use RGB. The color shifts a bit. Moreover, if a client specs something as precise as a Pantone color to be used within a 4-color piece, the conversion of that color to 4-color print process has to be exactly right. Conversion to CMYK does this much more precisely than conversion to RGB, in my experience.
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The only potential problem I see is that if they can put something up moments after a crime is committed, sooner or later you're going to end up with surveillance video of some poor slob who walked in or out of Wal-Mart right before or after an actual child molester did. Whether this will happen more or less than other forms of false accusation, we won't know until they do it.
That's really the problem with speed and ease of use -- it's much easier to accidentally put the wrong face on a digital billboard than it is to put the wrong face on the back of a milk carton or on a poster or flier. The latter takes time and has several stages at which errors can be caught. Whether this problem is worth foregoing the advantages of it, I don't know. Probably not.
Around here (Chicago area) we've had message boards over the highways for years -- they give traffic times, alternate routes, and occasionally are used for Amber Alerts (descriptions of cars or people suspected of child abduction). So the same concept, albeit in a non-graphic form, has been used with great success for some time. They got a kid back from a bad guy just recently using this technique. But I will say that I idly worry that I (big hairy stranger-danger-lookin' guy) in our very common (Honda Accord) car with my daughter in the back will someday experience the harsh hand of the law of averages. I guess I'd still rather have to deal with straightening out that type of confusion once in my life if it means that more actual bad guys get caught.
Oh, and another problem is aesthetic -- the world will rapidly become a lit-up, post-apocalyptic place full of advertising and scrolling messages from the authorities. But that's kind of a matter of taste -- I think they amount of visual noise we live with is already numbing. Add more and it further reduces the impact of any given piece of it.
... but that "Merry Christmas" at the end has a decidedly ominous vibe to it. Maybe a little more time out socializing and less time plucking at one's graphics card ...
Seriously, though, yet another interesting holiday re-use of equipment. My sarcastic comments aside, Merry Christmas back to him.
Hm. I wonder ... I think you're right. Perhaps it was for the Gore/Lieberman Democratic convention? I know it's true that they chose it after the Monica mess, so it's got to be that if Monica broke during the second term.
Now I'm intrigued and embarrassed -- I'll go look this up (like I should have in the first place).
[insert intermission music here]
Hi, I'm back. According to this CNN article, it was the 2000 Democratic convention that used Mambo No. 5. The 1996 convention used The Macarena, which, while dumb in its own way, doesn't rub wrong the way Mambo No. 5 does.
I stand corrected!
I see your point. However, I do think that typical users (not you, as you are very well-versed in what's going on) should be encouraged to blow a few cycles on the common good. You wouldn't forward a message with an executable attachment, but the typical user might (you know, with a message something like "I can't open this on my Mac, but I got it from my sister and it looks like fun!"). And while ideally the pervasive malware on the Windows side would make users more cautious, that's just not happening yet. Windows is easier to buy than pot, so to speak, and therefore almost everyone has it. OSX is going after the average, I-don't-want-to-think user ("I'm a Mac
And while I'd like to think that this will, over time, increase self-education (after all of one's friends get burned by his or her dumb attachment), that seems optimistic to me. Moreover, from a practical standpoint, malware that sends mail or vomits personal information back to a server in Russia creates quite a bit of traffic that ultimately affects us all.
So a few cycles here and there seems like a small price to pay. And again, it's not a big deal now -- I just wonder how much more relevant it will become as Macs gain popularity in arenas other than their traditional stomping grounds. A little caution might not be a bad thing.
I agree -- perhaps obscurity isn't quite the right term. By obscurity I meant end users, not availability of information about OS X. And really, I have been impressed with the patching system -- it's like Windows Update except that it doesn't suck. Still, by its very nature it is largely reactionary. All systems like that have to be, which means that vulnerabilities have to be noticed (often through their exploitation) before they can be patched. That's not Apple's fault, but they've lived in relative peace for years because of their smaller and more focused user base.
Currently Macs are more prevalent in academic and artistic (graphics, music, video, etc.) circles. There's simply not as much information worth stealing there as there is with Windows (financial, corporate, and so on). But if you have a stack of Macs (pardon the rhyme) out there with guvmint secrets on them, it will become worth a Bad Guy's time to break in, and the methods to do so will begin to appear quickly. And then the average Mac users will start to get hit more regularly Honestly, I don't know why people aren't trying to crack into Macs more often -- there aren't as many of them but the average Mac owner can generally be counted on to have a bit more money, music, gadgets, toys, gear, etc.
Most Mac users I know don't run AV software, for example -- it's not personally relevant to them (though I try to convince them that they can pass along the ick to others -- I'm generally not too successful there, though). All I meant by my previous post is that I expect that soon Macs will be much more vulnerable because of this.
I quite like my Mac -- I run a Mac (10.4), an XP/Kubuntu dual boot, and a W2K/Kubuntu dual boot. I ran Vista for a while, but it made my teeth itch. The Mac is by far the most "responsible" in its self-maintenance. But it still enjoys more security simply because it's not as common as Windows. Crank up the value of the data on a subset of Macs to international levels, though, and that may well change. That's all I'm saying. And while I think all of this nefarious behavior is shitty and wrong, maybe it's time that average Joe Mac users had a little shot across the bow about security.
I love how the guy bemoaning the evils of pirating and its association with organized crime is standing in front of a huge portrait of Frank Sinatra, one of the most "connected" artists in American history. That ranks up there with when the (Bill) Clinton reelection campaign chose Mambo #5 ("a little bit of Monica in my life") as its theme song for the convention. It doesn't take a downtown PR firm to figure this crap out.
Seems to me that because the Mac is largely secure through obscurity (as this was already tagged), the military is just increasing the incentive to crack the Mac for the Bad Guys. Three years from now (or who am I kidding, three DAYS from now) when then exploits begin to be released into the wild, I think their reasoning will be found to be faulty. While there still won't be as many Macs out there, there will be a select few with wildly valuable data, and therefore it will become more lucrative to crack them.
All of that is true. But Apple has this whole "I'm a Mac" ad campaign that touts the ease of use of Macs for the average joe out there, but then does something like this where you need to know fairly deeply what's going on internally to keep yourself safe. To the typical user, if it's not on-screen, it's gone. They understand "log out," but won't understand that there are still scrids of their session left on a public computer even if the browser is closed.
Moreover, look at even the phrasing of the examples you give. Firefox is "clear private data" -- pretty straightforward, and you know what you're doing. "Reset Safari" is pretty cryptic by comparison -- it's fewer words (something Apple strives for, often rightly so), but it's far less descriptive of what's going on. Kind of a semantic version of the one-button mouse -- interestingly simple in theory, but it falls apart in practice.
But all of that phrasing business is almost beside the point -- what average MyMom user at a library computer is going to know to clear the browser's history and cache to log out of iDisk? One doesn't seem to have to do with the other. In this case, there simply needs to be a button to log out. I'm sure the Apple interface designers shudder at the thought of the added clutter, but so be it.
Yes, if you take into account the first half of that post. During a police investigation, lying to the police is a crime in and of itself. It's often left to the discretion of the officer (immediately) or the judge (eventually) whether to worry about it, but they can run you in for lying to them when they're investigating a crime.
THANK YOU. Ex post facto was the phrase I was trying to remember. And the rest of your post is right on the money (as far as I'm concerned), too.
No, of course I don't want to be raped. And thank you for informing me that men are raped, too -- you are a veritable font of information. I don't get out of my Hobbit hole very often.
Come on, man. If you think there should be mandatory life without parole for these guys, great. Lobby for that. But when the current group of freed sex offenders was convicted, that was not the case. They were sentenced under the current laws of the time, and they served their time. Are they dirtbags? Sure, most of them are. But they did the crime, they did the time, and under our system of laws (I get it, we MAKE the LAWS) they are done except for registering with their local police when they move and (in the case of child molestation) restricted in where they can live relative to a school or park.
I SAY AGAIN (for someone who talks so much about us making the laws, you seem to have completely missed the part where I talked about this), if you want to add the online register to the sentencing guidelines for future cases, FINE. Lobby for that. Write your congressthings. But when a lot of these guys were convicted, there was no Internet. And now, years later, they're on it along with all the information necessary to ostracize them. Sure, some are recurrent bastards. Others, as has been pointed out around here, were 18 with a 17-year-old girlfriend who had a pissed off father. They receive no different treatment than the guy who drops out of trees onto coeds, even though there are miles of difference between their crimes.
This guy wasn't even a child molester -- he was on the wrong list. He was a sex offender, sure. But the guy who killed him did so to protect his children, indicating that he likely wouldn't have done it if the offense was known to be on an adult.
Which brings us to another point -- if these holier-than-thou, will-no-one-think-of-the-children "moralists" who react to things before thinking about the consequences or even the practical aspects of the execution are going to do this kind of thing, they'd at least be damned fucking sure that they're getting the data right. This was a murder (and obviously the father who did it was not right in the head) that was made possible by the wrong information being on the list. But think about all the rest of the stuff that can go wrong. Two guys named John Smith live at 123 Main Street, Anytown (not entirely unlikely, given the size of apartment buildings these days). John Smith on the fourth floor applies for a job in Someothertown, so the people he's applying to have never seen him. John Smith on the eighth floor is a registered sex offender. A quick Internet search affords fourth floor John Smith the same delightful discrimination as eighth floor John.
My point is that tossing around information like this is a dangerous business. It hurts both innocent and guilty people. Obviously you don't give a crap about the way our judicial system works as related to the guilty people, but I certainly give a crap about these new initiatives that open fire on innocent people because of false positives. And really, our penal system is based (at least in theory, though not in practice) on the idea that people can be rehabilitated. Maybe not the actually depraved child molesters, but certainly the people caught up in he-said-she-said, "was it consensual" situations. You would have the latter treated the same as the former. Let's hope for your sake that whoever you're having sex with never changes her/his mind. Or gets mad at you about something and decides to screw you (figuratively). You could end up on the list with Chester Molester.
Another example: I used to work for a company where we were told one day that we had to run a list of teenaged applicants against the DHS watch list. The watch list was poorly constructed and full of very common names. It was assumed that we should just run the list and "let the government sort out the positives." So fourteen-year-old Mohammad Atta from suburban Detroit (I'm making that up, I don't know if there is one) gets fl
The way it works here in Illinois, as far as I know, is that you have to register with the police. Residents can go to the police station and ask them who the registered sex offenders are in their area.
Which is where my problem with this law comes in. Being able to sidle into my den with a cup of coffee, turn on the computer, and find out who in my neighborhood is registered is a very different level of commitment than going to the police station. And it makes it possible for a whack job like this guy to find out that information without alerting police. No leads, then, when he kills the guy.
But that's not the full extent of my issue with it. My main problem is that you can't add things to someone's sentence after the fact. If you want to tell every sex offender from now on that they'll be on this list, that's fine. But to add someone who was convicted in, say, 1975 and spent ten years in prison is ethically wrong and quite possibly unconstitutional (under the 5th and/or the 14th amendments, perhaps). From a practical standpoint, it adds punishment after time served and could be argued to deny the convict of life (in this case), liberty, and even property (given that it's probably pretty much impossible to get a job if you're on the website).
There are a lot of dirtbags out there who are listed on the websites, and I do worry about them not only in general for society but for the safety of my own daughter. But dirtbags or not, you can't just tack more on to a sentence after they get out (sometimes years after they get out) because their crime is more repellent than most.
And I know, there is a higher chance of recidivism among sex offenders. So again, make it part of the sentence now. Eventually, all sex offenders will be on the website. Not a perfect solution if you're scared that you live near an offender, but if we start making exceptions to the law for hot-button issues, the entire concept of liberty is sunk anyway (for all of us, not just the sex offenders).
With all due respect, this has to be the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a while. No web developer can stop supporting IE. I personally lost about five hours this week alone wrestling with its various dumb CSS problems (a fairly standard percentage from one week to the next), but that doesn't change the fact that most users still use it. Can I tell a client (say, a hair salon) that IE stinks and therefore I won't support 80% of the people who will come to her site? She doesn't give a shit about CSS standards, she cuts hair. And she sure won't be pleased if I build something that doesn't work for 80% of her visitors.
Microsoft fought hard to corner the browser market. They chose to be the gold standard, did what they had to do get there, and with such a choice comes some responsibility to not break everything. If not a professional responsibility (which is arguable), certainly an ethical responsibility. And really, it IS a professional responsibility -- they're slipping now in the browser arena because of their arrogant disregard for standards. Firefox is not gaining popularity based solely on the stellar business acumen exhibited by the Mozilla Foundation. It owes its success as much to IE being increasingly unusable as it does to its own features.
This is possibly a decent idea (except for the business about building your own browser -- I'm going to just ignore that part) -- you're covering that 80% fairly well. But unless you're building very simple sites that don't call for a lot of JS or CSS, it simply won't work for much longer (if it's still working at all for you). A Safari user calls your client and says the client's website isn't displaying properly and they can't buy a gift card. (First of all, they'll probably not call and will simply shop somewhere else, but let's do it this way for sake of argument.) When the client calls you, do you honestly think that "well, I don't support Safari. Tough noogies." will be an acceptable answer to them? Friend, you have some big brass ones. YOU work for THEM, remember? I'm all for being assertive with clients, but good heavens!
And to my parenthetical point above, people who simply go away are basically invisible to the client (unless they read their stats and know how to interpret them, but let's remember that most clients hire and trust YOU to do that for them). So even though you're producing buggy behavior for a segment of their customer base and driving them away from the client's website, you never get into any hot water for it. The client simply doesn't know they could be missing out on as much as 25% more traffic or sales, but you do. At best, that's comically bad customer service -- at worst, it's negligence and certainly within the realm of things that can (and maybe should) get you fired.
I don't mean to get off on such a rant, and generally I'll defend Microsoft's right to do what they want. But they really have gorked up the profession of web development. Starting with shoddy support for CSS standards and Javascript, and moving on to buggy, proprietary Frontpage extensions that set clients' expectations unreasonably high, I would guess that 20-25% of the time I spend talking to a new client about what their site can do is spent trying to explain in simple terms why the thing on their wife's/brother's/company's business website won't work on all browsers and therefore is a bad idea to implement for their site. And that can be directly attributed to Microsoft's business practices in this arena.
Good points, and well described. Thanks.
Yeah, I was thinking if the shirt was strong enough it would contain the blast and fire it back at him, but I didn't think of the hoop stress idea. I still can't imagine a cell phone battery having enough pop to do all of that, but I'm going solely on my own hunches, not actual knowledge of the widowmaker capabilities of them.
Oh, I know -- don't worry. I mentioned the Mythbusters more as evidence of my lack of full understanding of things.
I suppose if he was already lying on the ground (or pressed up against the wall of the quarry, but that seems unlikely), that would contain the blast and fire it back into him. And as mentioned in another response to my hackneyed theory, there is distance to think about, too.
I am certainly no physicist (I took a year of high school physics and watch a lot of Mythbusters -- that's the extent of my education in this area), but it seems to me that he would have had to be wearing a suit of armor. Let's assume (wrongly, but for sake of argument) that the phone could blow up with enough force to break his spine from the front. If I understand how it all works (and again, see my credentials above and add grain of salt), he'd either have to be wearing a suit of armor to contain the blast or the phone would have to be heavier than him to not just blow out the front of his shirt. Am I right? Then again, a suicide bomber isn't wearing 180 pounds of explosives ... maybe I'm wrong.
Anyhow, this is only one of a hundred things wrong with this story (starting with the title), but it still seems like the phone might scorch you and maybe even break a rib but it would basically propel itself away from you like a rocket. Now if it suddenly got very hot and made you start dancing about frantically in, say, a quarry, I can see (as can others around here) how that might cause a combination of injuries that would sound like what they have. But Kim Hoon, the doctor credited in the article with this innovative conclusion, has no future in forensics (hopefully).
Well, hell's bells. You know, as I typed that, I knew someone would add the end zones. But then I figured Slashdot wasn't a haven of American/Canadian football minutia, and in the interest of brevity I left out the distinction. But you, sir, are correct. Depending on what you consider the active field (and indeed, the end zones would arguably be part of the field), it could be considered to be larger. I think generally people think of "a football field" as 100 yards, but you're right -- it could be seen either way.
:)
Which only adds to my argument, if I may be so brash as to point out.
But how many bowling balls does it weigh?
Really, we're all geeky adults here. Can't we use real units? And moreover, we're not all in the U.S. (I happen to be, but still).
When it docks in the U.S., it's 100 yards long by 160 feet wide. Apparently when the ship docks in a Canadian port the sail will expand to 100 meters long and 59.4 meters wide. When it docks anywhere in the rest of the world, it will expand to anywhere from 100 to 110 meters wide to 64 to 75 meters wide. I guess it'll fold out or something.
And when it docks in Australia, it will run about 165 meters long by 135 meters wide (and while it will be hard to figure out how it works or what it's doing, it will be brutally violent).
Can we find anything more ambiguous to compare it to? How many loaves of bread long is it?
As we all probably know (we being the types who would have this information much more readily than, say, the cover charge at the closest dance club), Lucas took a view of human nature as filtered through the Hero Myth. The first released movie (episode IV) was almost a point-for-point example of the Hero Myth as spelled out by Joseph Campbell (with whom Lucas spent a lot of time).
So while it was painfully simple, I think another way of looking at it is that it was pared down to the very basics, the embodiment of human nature, the essence of good versus evil. Both in the world and within the human soul (what better example of that is Darth Vader?). When he strayed away from that and got all soap opera is when everything started to stink. And I wrote a letter after I saw Episode I (something I typically reserve for my government representatives) -- I don't typically get too sensitive about racial stereotyping, but there were a couple of pretty creepy (and irrelevant) stereotypes in Episode I.
But I digress -- in your example (filtered through the hero myth), Anakin is good. 100%, down to his nougat-center good. He is also sheltered and inexperienced in the ways of the real world (as must often be the case in the hero myth concept for the altruism to form in Our Hero). So it would follow that the scourge of the world (whatever that world may be) would catch him with his pants (or knickers, or whatever those are) down.
But all that aside, Episode IV is really a great modernized example of the hero myth ("long time ago" business notwithstanding). Something about it speaks to some hardwired part of our brains. And Episode V was a continuation of that to a large degree. After that it goes a little Greek for my taste (killing your father, kissing your sister -- eeesh). But the first two films stayed fairly true to the essence of the reluctant hero concept, and Lucas seemed to be trying in some half-assed way to retain elements of that in the later films. It didn't work because he screwed around with it instead of leaving it as pure as it needs to be to work.
Wow, when I get going like this I feel like Foreman on "That 70's Show." I expect my dad to appear behind me and call me a dumbass and tell me to drop all the "What Would Luke Do?" nonsense.
Yeah, I know -- good point. It just gets to me sometimes.
Hm, a woman alone on vacant property with the suspicion that there are bad people there? Yeah, you're right, there's no potential for emergency there. Honestly, sometimes I wish Slashdot didn't allow AC posts. It would solve a lot of hot wind problems like this one.
...
I have had several police officers in several different municipalities (even Chicago, which is quite understaffed and full of very real crime) tell me when I call the non-emergency line to call 911. They say that they would much rather respond quickly to even what seems like a minor problem so it doesn't become a major problem.
If I had mod points I'd mod you troll. I hardly ever do that, but really, you're just picking a dumb fight.
Of course, I'm the putz who bit on it
Just use your phone in a Faraday cage, and they can't track you at all.
... beside myself at the thought that this might happen.
I can see it now ...
...
hnad, tyep psot on Slasdoth.
hnad, teyp tosp no lSadhost.
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
Just because prepress departments can convert RGB to CMYK during preflight doesn't mean it's okay to use RGB. The color shifts a bit. Moreover, if a client specs something as precise as a Pantone color to be used within a 4-color piece, the conversion of that color to 4-color print process has to be exactly right. Conversion to CMYK does this much more precisely than conversion to RGB, in my experience.