Well, if they followed proper procedures, this wouldn't be a problem.
Walk around the exhibits at any forensic conference and you will see a variety of devices for making sure this does not happen. You can use any of them - they all work. Anything from the Paraben "tent" to the HTCI "glove box". The idea is that you put the phone into a shielded container where you can operate on it to collect evidence.
When the phone is collected you have the choice: either remove the battery or put the phone into a shielded bag. No special shielded bags handy? Then you have to remove power and hope the phone doesn't lock itself. Don't want to deal with a locked phone? Get some shielded bags then.
This isn't a real problem with phones, it is a real problem with having the right knowledge and procedures. It shouldn't even be a matter of training anymore.
While the goal is an admirable one, there are just too many variables to even begin to consider really doing this.
First off, you aren't working with a stable environment. There are changes being made to the cellular infrastructure all the time. Changes to settings in the towers, changes to the tower equipment and addition of new towers. You will not be informed about any of this making your information out of date almost immediately.
Next there is the problem that most throughput problems are going to be caused by overcommitment of resources, not lack of radio coverage. You will find that there are patterns to this, but again this sort of thing changes over time.
Essentially, what is wrong with the carrier coverage maps is they aren't detailed enough and do not account for throughput problems. You are going to have the same problem, only perhaps worse. In short, I would expect any data gathered in this manner to be extremely unreliable because you don't even know what variables you are missing.
Too bad we closed nearly all of the "insane asylums" in the 1970's as being impossibly sadistic and cruel. The people were dumped out on the streets and became the homeless population. But we stopped being so sadistic and cruel as to have these people confined against their will.
Yeah, I am not a big fan of closing those places. We now have mostly nice hospitals with Occupational Therapy making pots and collages for bored housewives with depression. The number of places where you can put someone like John Hinkley today is pretty much less than 10. The number of slots is extremely limited.
I believe the reason the scope of possible treatment for really mentally ill people in prison is so limited is to prevent the reoccurence of any sort of state hospital system as existed before the 1970's. There were plenty of places then, and plenty of people filling these places up. What happened to all of these people? Well, they are in regular prisons and they are on the streets today. There is nowhere else.
The will of the people decided this matter back in the 1970s and nobody seems to want to change the state of things now.
How about paying for it? You know, ordering a package of videos from someone who makes them?
How about making it? Going out and paying 12-year-olds to have sex on camera. Or, using your own relatives as sort of a home-based business and selling the results?
There are a number of different things that fall into "kiddie porn". Looking is just beginning to scratch the surface of the problem. It is the people making it with coercion (not paying 12-year-olds) that is really bad news. But if people are willing to pay for it, actively purchase such materials and support the people making it - with coercion - how do we stop that?
Drying up the market seems to be working to some degree. There are a lot fewer ads for the stuff that is real today. You really gotta dig for it.
Dangerous? Maybe. The problem is that no elected official wants to be the one standing in front of the camera justifying why some guy with a known history of raping and killing little girls (or boys) was let out of jail and given the opportunity to do it again.
Elected officials are a little concerned about making such an appearance, because the news media is going to go after them and bring it out come election time. This pretty much means that letting someone like this out ends the career of some politician, somewhere.
Remember Polly Klass? This is pretty much where this is coming from, where the known offender was released and one night kidnapped, raped and killed Polly Klass from her bedroom. Her father made a big deal about how this was allowed to happen.
If you actually believe these people should be set free, start figuring out how to explain it to Polly Klass's father. If you can successfully convince him that these people deserve to be free after their sentance is over, then you have a winner.
Of course, you can't convince him and neither can anyone else. Which is why keeping these people locked up forever is the only solution that exists right now. Why these folks were not given a life sentance to begin with somewhat mystifies me as that would seem to be the "right" solution. But for now with quite a number of child-endangering folks coming up for release I don't see freedom as a possibility. Out of jail on somewhere like Pitcarne Island, maybe but it seems that Pitcarne Island already has plenty of child-raping folks there. Who knows, maybe they would fit right in.
Sorry, but the COTS battle started in the 80s and has been over for a while. Nobody builds when they can buy anymore. If you believe your business is utterly unique and needs custom-written software... well, you are wrong. And nobody outside of a few folks just emerging from college really believe that way.
Would it be better if the government (and businesses) paid for software development rather than paying for packaged software? Maybe, but it would cost more - it certainly did in the 70s and 80s. The difference for nearly everyone today is they are buying a package for $500 instead of paying a year or two salary for a programmer. Sure, when the project was done there would be something else to do - this is a basic maxim that work expands to fill available staff. But today just about everyone has figured out that COTS is the only way to go. The buyer is isolated from personality quirks of the developers and isolated from the development process itself. The buyer also never has to worry about being held hostage by some lone wolf developer.
Yes, there can be the dreaded upgrade cycle where support for really old creaky software is discontinued no matter what the desires of the customers. And it does mean that the package you bought in 1993 for Windows 3.1 absolutely does not work on Windows 7 x64. But the world does not stand still and there generally needs to be some movement on the upgrade front.
The scarcity is not the product, but the person/creativity/talent behind the product.
Darwin Reedy is probably the best known example of how far lack of talent can get you. A bit more scarcity would have been good in this case.
The problem is, once the product is made today it is worthless. Just because it cost tens of millions to make Iron Man 2 doesn't mean I can't download it for free now. So why should I pay for it if it is being offered? Respect? Bah, there is no respect outside of the streetcorner thugs.
Until we have a good answer for this there is no possibility of revenue from digital goods. We are training schoolchildren to take whatever is offered without any thought of payment. These children will grow up and utterly destroy whatever revenue model is left for digital stuff.
Personally, I think the end is coming like a freight train.
According to some, we are right now on the brink of a long-term change that will potentially make the planet far less hospitable to humans. If we do not do something soon, we may reach a "tipping point" after which nothing can be done. If no changes are made right now, millions if not billions of people may die.
OK, fine. What I want to see is the dedicated individuals that believe this taking action. There hasn't been any. There has been a lot of talk about plans which will enrich a few and make life a lot more expensive in the US and Western Europe. But so far nobody has done anything.
Every day millions of cars spew more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. It is easily within the power of a few dedicated individuals to make it far more difficult to drive into NYC, Chicago or Los Angeles. This would have an immediate effect on CO2 emissions. Nobody has done this. Sure, such actions would be labelled as "terrorism" but they would be in the interest of decreasing the likelyhood that millions if not billions of poeple will die soon. Would it not be justified?
Similarly, destroying one airliner would have an effect. 10 people destroying 10 airliners (empty, on the ground) would not only have an immediate effect but it would send a message to the world. Yes, all 10 might go to jail for a while, but action always has its risks.
Instead what we see is a lot of talk about how we must enact plans which will make certain people - Al Gore being one of them - extremely wealthy and increase the cost of virtually every product on store shelves today. If there is an impending catastrophe we need to DO SOMETHING rather than sitting around talking. If there isn't such a catastrophe pending then maybe we need to not change the economy of every first-world nation in favor of a few carbon moguls.
Assuming an ISP has some sort of measurement tools in place which identifies high-use users, one would think they would notice that the user at 24.0.23.191 is blasting out a million emails a day. The fact that no ISP is shutting such users off says they are much more interested in the user's accounts being kept current than they are in eliminating problems like this.
Yes, we now have ISPs that require email to go through their smarthost. Great. Except we are still drowning in US-originated spam making up 90% of email today. So this smarthost solution isn't working very well, is it?
I do not believe there is any US ISP that has any interest in policing their customers. Most would recoil from the idea that they are invading their customer's privacy. Nearly all of them would suggest that doing any policing whatsoever would make their customers leave. So there is no policing done.
Yes, it might save them some money. But it might also make them lose customers. I doubt the government even has the power to potentially drive an ISP out of business because of "interfering with their customer's privacy."
Abuse reports are a waste of time, for both the sender and the recipient.
US ISPs simply do not have the time to respond or do anything. They are not going to jepardize their customer relations with a bunch of whiney abuse reports no matter what. It isn't their problem, or so they believe.
Non-US entities tend to respond with comments like "SO WHAT?" to abuse reports from the US. It seems to be a badge of honor that a customer is suitably annoying someone in the US.
For a home user blocking huge swaths of the IP address space is a reasonable choice. For a commercial entity with customers in China and Brazil it isn't really possible.
And no, I do not believe most brute-force attacks are coming from compromised machines. A good number of them have a diabolical user sitting there looking for some good results. And nobody anywhere is going to do anything about it. Just better hope they don't get in, as the result will be posted so hundreds of vandals will have the news within minutes.
Sounds faintly Kirkish the way you put it. You know, "We are killers but we can choose that we aren't going to kill today."
However, I will say that you are missing a very key concept. Most of the general public does not need a flexible, general-purpose computing device that they can program. This is not something they are capable of using effectively and because it is programmable by the end user, has horrible security flaws which are in many ways necessary to preserve that programmability.
Instead, what probably 90% of the population needs is a email-and-web appliance that cannot have malware introduced on it no matter what the user does. There have been previous attempts at this, but they have pretty much failed. We now have a new entrant into this field and it seems like it might be pretty popular: the iPad. It is clearly an "appliance" and not general-purpose computing platform. Apple has it pretty well locked down. Has anyone seen malware for an iPhone yet? I suspect the answer will always be no. Same thing probably goes for an iPad.
This is all 90% of the world needs. No, it will never run Linux, but it doesn't need to. It needs to do what the owner needs and never, ever be able to be subverted.
Sounds pretty secure, huh? Maybe this is how the battle is won.
I have never seen a router since maybe 2005 that will accept an incoming connection from the "WAN" port without being configured to do so.
So who cares what the password is? You can't do anything with the router from the Internet. If they are already in the network, you have other problems besides accessing the router. It pretty much means someone is sitting outside your house connected up wirelessly.
They are trespassing. I suggest a sign so it is posted and then such trespassers can have deadly force used against them.
You must be thinking of an area where there are very few people.
Wireless has no ability to handle multiple users at high speed and large amounts of data. For example, you mention HD IPTV - maybe requiring 5Mb/sec. There are wide-area wireless technologies that can operate at even 100Mb/sec... BUT THIS IS FOR ALL USERS. That means you get 100Mb/sec for a short time and then someone else gets 100Mb/sec. Twenty users sharing that for 5 minutes averages out at 20Mb/sec even though they are getting the full 100Mb/sec when they "own" the connection.
The problem with wireless is that it is great for short bursts but has a real problem with any sustained traffic. The effect of this can easily be seen when comparing a home WiFi connection with that in a cheap hotel. The home WiFi connection gives you 54Mb/sec almost dedicated on a 802.11g connection which is way past most people's Internet connection so it is almost equivalent to a wired connection. Moving to the cheap hotel you often get a 54Mb/sec "rated" connection but you are sharing it with 100 other guests. Your real transfer speed is incredibly slow, usually just barely usable in the evening. Sure the radio link is 54Mb/sec but your ability to use it is limited by sharing the connection.
You can relieve this somewhat with multiple channels, but the basic problem is that once you have a lot of users on a wireless link the aggregate transfer rate to the users drops to the point of being unusable. This is "solved" with cell phones by using micro and pico cell structures where you just have more and more stations and segregating the users geographically. This doesn't work for situations where you want to put one radio up on a tower and service lots of users over a wide area.
Basically, wireless is a short-term solution that works wonderfully for early adopters. Ask one and you will find they are very happy. Any area where it has moved past the early-adopter stage has problems. Ask any AT&T customer about their cell phone service for an example of this.
I would contend that nearly all software is in fact free. Perhaps not Free and certainly not Open, but if you can get it for zero cost from www.piratebay.com then it is in fact "free".
Likely what Comcast is saying is that someone is going to be paying for increasing capacity. They would much rather send a bill to Google than all their customers, but if the government cuts off Google subsidizing Comcast in this manner then the customers are going to get the bill.
You do not really believe they are going to increase capacity without increased revenue from somewhere, do you? Now, you may believe that they should have been doing this all along and should have used government money for this in the past. Sadly, it didn't turn out that way. So here we are. Trust me, they are not going to do what is required without getting paid from somewhere.
The choices are high-traffic providers making tons of money from that traffic or their customers. Well, in truth it will be the customers... or the customers. The customers are going to pay in the end no matter what. If Google is paying the ISPs, then Google's customers - advertisers - are going to pay more for ads. This means the products they are advertising cost more and guess what? The consumer pays.
So no matter how this works out, Joe Sixpack is going to be paying for a faster, higher capacity Internet.
General-purpose "openly" programmable machines may be owned by the purchasor for a short while, but quickly become used for other's nefarious purposes.
An appliance, like your toaster, will always be nothing more than a toaster and will never turn against you. It might burn your toast once in a while, but it isn't capable of stealing all the money in your bank account. Your general-purpose computer can do this.
The mission, as much as you might not like it, is to move the general population away from things they cannot and will never program and give them appliances which cannot harm them - or anyone else. WebTV and the Mail Station were attempts at this which failed. The iPhone is one which apparently succeeding.
Remember, when people have passed through the most school systems on the planet post-1995 they know and love "unauthorized copying". The folks that went to school pre-1995 don't get it for the most part and are still paying.
I don't know anyone that pays for music. I don't think I know anyone that hasn't downloaded a movie or two or seventeen. Software? Some folks pay, most just are trying before buying and never seem to get around to actually buying.
The old fogies are going to die off and they are the only ones paying. Anyone else, unless they have unlimited wealth, is going to choose "free" when faced with a real choice between paying or not paying. It is simply a matter of knowledge and culture today - and the culture of unauthorized copying has become pervasive from first grade on up. Even the teachers are copying stuff for their classrooms handing the children a really good lesson.
In not too many years nobody will be paying and there will be free software, old software and nothing else. Free music, old music, and nothing else. Oh, I suppose there will be the stuff that people know they cannot allow the human race to exist without experiencing. You know, the stuff from people with such immense talent that they are shunned by the media companies today because they would so completely outshine everyone else. The sort of folks that keep showing up at American Idol tryouts and keep getting rejected and say it was because they were too good.
Let us assume for a moment that the USA is pushing the world towards a climate catastrophe at an ever-increasing pace. Millions of people will die if nothing is done to stop this. We are getting ever closer to some "tipping point" where doing anything will be impossible and we just get to stay on the ride until the very end.
Sounds dire, right?
OK, so now we have this oil well accident that some want to call an ecological disaster of unimaginable proprotions. That this accident illustrates how incredibly stupid it is to drill for oil, and even worse to do so in some ecologically sensitive area.
Fine. Let's stop. How about if we give people a chance here to explore alternatives. We should stop all oil imports, all oil refining and just say it is over. The Oil Age has ended. This sort of alternative action would actually do something and be quite different than a lot of hand-wringing and people protesting without any real effect. Sure, there would be some immediate impact and people would die - perhaps fewer than are killed each day on highways.
I'd say after six months of this we might be able to carry on an intelligent debate on the real issues. Right now, I'm not seeing a lot of that. There is plenty of hand-wringing and plenty of pontificating on how bad things might be in the future.
The problem is that the PDF specification was created at a point in time when you had a reasonable expectation that software would not do bad things to your computer intentionally.
A method to invoke an external program was put there for flexibility I am sure and it did offer a reasonable way to extend the functionality of the PDF document structure. The same thing is in WinHelp, for exactly the same reason. It allows a "tutortial" document that by clicking on active parts would invoke external programs to do things.
Now we have a situation where virtually nothing can be trusted to do what it is claiming to do. If you get an email with a file with any sort of active content in it you can assume that it will do something bad.
Where 15 years ago "active content" was something to be desired and provided extensability, today "active content" is a way to compromise computers and steal from people. A significant problem for Adobe (and plenty of others) is how to eliminate the possibility of bad things happening with active content while retaining the functionality? Today, I would say active content has to go, period. Anyone that is using and relying this needs to change their methods.
It is a pity that we have to give up flexibility and extensability because of criminals that we cannot or will not police.
Well, just exactly who are these privileged students that can do well without attending class? Who gets to decide that they should be superior to other students that have to attend class? Why would you promote class distinctions, racial disharmony and unfairly awarding privileges to some students and not others?
All the students deserve to be equal. Haven't you been paying attention?
Attendance is required for a lot of reasons but two that I can think of immediately are:
Student loans administered by the government. If the student isn't going to class then the regulators in charge of administering the loan program are going to have the impression that their money is being wasted.
Huge usually remedial classes for freshman - which is what the summary mentions - are a filter for the rest of the student's time at the college. If they can't bother to attend, they are going to eventually fail anyway. So why not cut the process short and waste as little of everyone's time and money as possible?
The main point of the first year in most state schools is to get rid of the students that do not belong there and are attending at state expense. Most states have a school like that where 25% of the freshman class isn't there after the first semester. I do not know what NAU is like, but it wouldn't surprise me that it is Arizona's version of Carbondale in Illinois where more like 33% of the freshmen don't come back.
This is not a "blue state" problem as one of the worst places for this is California.
Without some major regulatory changes, very little that can be seen from any home or highway is ever going to be built today. There are a million reasons to block projects, and most of them are being actively worked.
Try to find out when the last large-scale power plant (coal, nuclear, hydro - anything except a natural gas fired "peaker" plant) and you will see it has been a long time. When was the last high voltage transmission line put in? Today, they are looking at putting one in underwater because people can't see it there - it would never be approved if it was visible.
The only sort of government financing I want to see is where the government pays for all of a candidate's expenses for the duration of the election. This would enable anyone to be a candidate.
Even better, I could run for President every four years and the House on the off years. I could live as a perpetual canadidate without ever having to actually subject people to my (likely) bad representation. So could thousands if not millions of others. We could have elections with a million Presidential candidates.
This would be another way to end what is left of welfare in the US. No more money unless you are running for some elected office.
Yes, I would be all for complete government financing of candidates.
The essential point of piracy is the destruction of revenue from digital goods. If someone can sell it, then it can be redistributed for free making the original seller give up on selling it. You can't compete with free.
This has already happened in China with music - officially there is no more music sold in China. It is very soon to happen in the US. Sure iTunes sells millions of songs a year - but they have maybe 2% of the overall download marketplace with the rest being free and usually pirated. iTunes will be operating as long as there are iPods, though, because for the older generation that doesn't know how to use P2P software iTunes is the only thing they can use.
Looking at it from a perspective of entertainment time vs. cost, movies are already free. You can stream an unlimited amount of content from Netflix for $8 a month. Saving it is perhaps somewhat more difficult, but not impossible. Why buy the Avatar DVD when you can watch it as many times as you want (probably once) for no (additional) cost?
The end is coming very soon for anyone selling digital goods. The pirates have pretty much won this battle. The result will be the end of music promotion and most movie production and what is left will remind you of AM radio with non-stop product placement.
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Well, if they followed proper procedures, this wouldn't be a problem.
Walk around the exhibits at any forensic conference and you will see a variety of devices for making sure this does not happen. You can use any of them - they all work. Anything from the Paraben "tent" to the HTCI "glove box". The idea is that you put the phone into a shielded container where you can operate on it to collect evidence.
When the phone is collected you have the choice: either remove the battery or put the phone into a shielded bag. No special shielded bags handy? Then you have to remove power and hope the phone doesn't lock itself. Don't want to deal with a locked phone? Get some shielded bags then.
This isn't a real problem with phones, it is a real problem with having the right knowledge and procedures. It shouldn't even be a matter of training anymore.
While the goal is an admirable one, there are just too many variables to even begin to consider really doing this.
First off, you aren't working with a stable environment. There are changes being made to the cellular infrastructure all the time. Changes to settings in the towers, changes to the tower equipment and addition of new towers. You will not be informed about any of this making your information out of date almost immediately.
Next there is the problem that most throughput problems are going to be caused by overcommitment of resources, not lack of radio coverage. You will find that there are patterns to this, but again this sort of thing changes over time.
Essentially, what is wrong with the carrier coverage maps is they aren't detailed enough and do not account for throughput problems. You are going to have the same problem, only perhaps worse. In short, I would expect any data gathered in this manner to be extremely unreliable because you don't even know what variables you are missing.
Too bad we closed nearly all of the "insane asylums" in the 1970's as being impossibly sadistic and cruel. The people were dumped out on the streets and became the homeless population. But we stopped being so sadistic and cruel as to have these people confined against their will.
Yeah, I am not a big fan of closing those places. We now have mostly nice hospitals with Occupational Therapy making pots and collages for bored housewives with depression. The number of places where you can put someone like John Hinkley today is pretty much less than 10. The number of slots is extremely limited.
I believe the reason the scope of possible treatment for really mentally ill people in prison is so limited is to prevent the reoccurence of any sort of state hospital system as existed before the 1970's. There were plenty of places then, and plenty of people filling these places up. What happened to all of these people? Well, they are in regular prisons and they are on the streets today. There is nowhere else.
The will of the people decided this matter back in the 1970s and nobody seems to want to change the state of things now.
Oh, you mean looking at it.
How about paying for it? You know, ordering a package of videos from someone who makes them?
How about making it? Going out and paying 12-year-olds to have sex on camera. Or, using your own relatives as sort of a home-based business and selling the results?
There are a number of different things that fall into "kiddie porn". Looking is just beginning to scratch the surface of the problem. It is the people making it with coercion (not paying 12-year-olds) that is really bad news. But if people are willing to pay for it, actively purchase such materials and support the people making it - with coercion - how do we stop that?
Drying up the market seems to be working to some degree. There are a lot fewer ads for the stuff that is real today. You really gotta dig for it.
Dangerous? Maybe. The problem is that no elected official wants to be the one standing in front of the camera justifying why some guy with a known history of raping and killing little girls (or boys) was let out of jail and given the opportunity to do it again.
Elected officials are a little concerned about making such an appearance, because the news media is going to go after them and bring it out come election time. This pretty much means that letting someone like this out ends the career of some politician, somewhere.
Remember Polly Klass? This is pretty much where this is coming from, where the known offender was released and one night kidnapped, raped and killed Polly Klass from her bedroom. Her father made a big deal about how this was allowed to happen.
If you actually believe these people should be set free, start figuring out how to explain it to Polly Klass's father. If you can successfully convince him that these people deserve to be free after their sentance is over, then you have a winner.
Of course, you can't convince him and neither can anyone else. Which is why keeping these people locked up forever is the only solution that exists right now. Why these folks were not given a life sentance to begin with somewhat mystifies me as that would seem to be the "right" solution. But for now with quite a number of child-endangering folks coming up for release I don't see freedom as a possibility. Out of jail on somewhere like Pitcarne Island, maybe but it seems that Pitcarne Island already has plenty of child-raping folks there. Who knows, maybe they would fit right in.
Sorry, but the COTS battle started in the 80s and has been over for a while. Nobody builds when they can buy anymore. If you believe your business is utterly unique and needs custom-written software... well, you are wrong. And nobody outside of a few folks just emerging from college really believe that way.
Would it be better if the government (and businesses) paid for software development rather than paying for packaged software? Maybe, but it would cost more - it certainly did in the 70s and 80s. The difference for nearly everyone today is they are buying a package for $500 instead of paying a year or two salary for a programmer. Sure, when the project was done there would be something else to do - this is a basic maxim that work expands to fill available staff. But today just about everyone has figured out that COTS is the only way to go. The buyer is isolated from personality quirks of the developers and isolated from the development process itself. The buyer also never has to worry about being held hostage by some lone wolf developer.
Yes, there can be the dreaded upgrade cycle where support for really old creaky software is discontinued no matter what the desires of the customers. And it does mean that the package you bought in 1993 for Windows 3.1 absolutely does not work on Windows 7 x64. But the world does not stand still and there generally needs to be some movement on the upgrade front.
The scarcity is not the product, but the person/creativity/talent behind the product.
Darwin Reedy is probably the best known example of how far lack of talent can get you. A bit more scarcity would have been good in this case.
The problem is, once the product is made today it is worthless. Just because it cost tens of millions to make Iron Man 2 doesn't mean I can't download it for free now. So why should I pay for it if it is being offered? Respect? Bah, there is no respect outside of the streetcorner thugs.
Until we have a good answer for this there is no possibility of revenue from digital goods. We are training schoolchildren to take whatever is offered without any thought of payment. These children will grow up and utterly destroy whatever revenue model is left for digital stuff.
Personally, I think the end is coming like a freight train.
According to some, we are right now on the brink of a long-term change that will potentially make the planet far less hospitable to humans. If we do not do something soon, we may reach a "tipping point" after which nothing can be done. If no changes are made right now, millions if not billions of people may die.
OK, fine. What I want to see is the dedicated individuals that believe this taking action. There hasn't been any. There has been a lot of talk about plans which will enrich a few and make life a lot more expensive in the US and Western Europe. But so far nobody has done anything.
Every day millions of cars spew more and more CO2 into the atmosphere. It is easily within the power of a few dedicated individuals to make it far more difficult to drive into NYC, Chicago or Los Angeles. This would have an immediate effect on CO2 emissions. Nobody has done this. Sure, such actions would be labelled as "terrorism" but they would be in the interest of decreasing the likelyhood that millions if not billions of poeple will die soon. Would it not be justified?
Similarly, destroying one airliner would have an effect. 10 people destroying 10 airliners (empty, on the ground) would not only have an immediate effect but it would send a message to the world. Yes, all 10 might go to jail for a while, but action always has its risks.
Instead what we see is a lot of talk about how we must enact plans which will make certain people - Al Gore being one of them - extremely wealthy and increase the cost of virtually every product on store shelves today. If there is an impending catastrophe we need to DO SOMETHING rather than sitting around talking. If there isn't such a catastrophe pending then maybe we need to not change the economy of every first-world nation in favor of a few carbon moguls.
Assuming an ISP has some sort of measurement tools in place which identifies high-use users, one would think they would notice that the user at 24.0.23.191 is blasting out a million emails a day. The fact that no ISP is shutting such users off says they are much more interested in the user's accounts being kept current than they are in eliminating problems like this.
Yes, we now have ISPs that require email to go through their smarthost. Great. Except we are still drowning in US-originated spam making up 90% of email today. So this smarthost solution isn't working very well, is it?
I do not believe there is any US ISP that has any interest in policing their customers. Most would recoil from the idea that they are invading their customer's privacy. Nearly all of them would suggest that doing any policing whatsoever would make their customers leave. So there is no policing done.
Yes, it might save them some money. But it might also make them lose customers. I doubt the government even has the power to potentially drive an ISP out of business because of "interfering with their customer's privacy."
Abuse reports are a waste of time, for both the sender and the recipient.
US ISPs simply do not have the time to respond or do anything. They are not going to jepardize their customer relations with a bunch of whiney abuse reports no matter what. It isn't their problem, or so they believe.
Non-US entities tend to respond with comments like "SO WHAT?" to abuse reports from the US. It seems to be a badge of honor that a customer is suitably annoying someone in the US.
For a home user blocking huge swaths of the IP address space is a reasonable choice. For a commercial entity with customers in China and Brazil it isn't really possible.
And no, I do not believe most brute-force attacks are coming from compromised machines. A good number of them have a diabolical user sitting there looking for some good results. And nobody anywhere is going to do anything about it. Just better hope they don't get in, as the result will be posted so hundreds of vandals will have the news within minutes.
Sounds faintly Kirkish the way you put it. You know, "We are killers but we can choose that we aren't going to kill today."
However, I will say that you are missing a very key concept. Most of the general public does not need a flexible, general-purpose computing device that they can program. This is not something they are capable of using effectively and because it is programmable by the end user, has horrible security flaws which are in many ways necessary to preserve that programmability.
Instead, what probably 90% of the population needs is a email-and-web appliance that cannot have malware introduced on it no matter what the user does. There have been previous attempts at this, but they have pretty much failed. We now have a new entrant into this field and it seems like it might be pretty popular: the iPad. It is clearly an "appliance" and not general-purpose computing platform. Apple has it pretty well locked down. Has anyone seen malware for an iPhone yet? I suspect the answer will always be no. Same thing probably goes for an iPad.
This is all 90% of the world needs. No, it will never run Linux, but it doesn't need to. It needs to do what the owner needs and never, ever be able to be subverted.
Sounds pretty secure, huh? Maybe this is how the battle is won.
I have never seen a router since maybe 2005 that will accept an incoming connection from the "WAN" port without being configured to do so.
So who cares what the password is? You can't do anything with the router from the Internet. If they are already in the network, you have other problems besides accessing the router. It pretty much means someone is sitting outside your house connected up wirelessly.
They are trespassing. I suggest a sign so it is posted and then such trespassers can have deadly force used against them.
You must be thinking of an area where there are very few people.
Wireless has no ability to handle multiple users at high speed and large amounts of data. For example, you mention HD IPTV - maybe requiring 5Mb/sec. There are wide-area wireless technologies that can operate at even 100Mb/sec... BUT THIS IS FOR ALL USERS. That means you get 100Mb/sec for a short time and then someone else gets 100Mb/sec. Twenty users sharing that for 5 minutes averages out at 20Mb/sec even though they are getting the full 100Mb/sec when they "own" the connection.
The problem with wireless is that it is great for short bursts but has a real problem with any sustained traffic. The effect of this can easily be seen when comparing a home WiFi connection with that in a cheap hotel. The home WiFi connection gives you 54Mb/sec almost dedicated on a 802.11g connection which is way past most people's Internet connection so it is almost equivalent to a wired connection. Moving to the cheap hotel you often get a 54Mb/sec "rated" connection but you are sharing it with 100 other guests. Your real transfer speed is incredibly slow, usually just barely usable in the evening. Sure the radio link is 54Mb/sec but your ability to use it is limited by sharing the connection.
You can relieve this somewhat with multiple channels, but the basic problem is that once you have a lot of users on a wireless link the aggregate transfer rate to the users drops to the point of being unusable. This is "solved" with cell phones by using micro and pico cell structures where you just have more and more stations and segregating the users geographically. This doesn't work for situations where you want to put one radio up on a tower and service lots of users over a wide area.
Basically, wireless is a short-term solution that works wonderfully for early adopters. Ask one and you will find they are very happy. Any area where it has moved past the early-adopter stage has problems. Ask any AT&T customer about their cell phone service for an example of this.
I would contend that nearly all software is in fact free. Perhaps not Free and certainly not Open, but if you can get it for zero cost from www.piratebay.com then it is in fact "free".
Likely what Comcast is saying is that someone is going to be paying for increasing capacity. They would much rather send a bill to Google than all their customers, but if the government cuts off Google subsidizing Comcast in this manner then the customers are going to get the bill.
You do not really believe they are going to increase capacity without increased revenue from somewhere, do you? Now, you may believe that they should have been doing this all along and should have used government money for this in the past. Sadly, it didn't turn out that way. So here we are. Trust me, they are not going to do what is required without getting paid from somewhere.
The choices are high-traffic providers making tons of money from that traffic or their customers. Well, in truth it will be the customers ... or the customers. The customers are going to pay in the end no matter what. If Google is paying the ISPs, then Google's customers - advertisers - are going to pay more for ads. This means the products they are advertising cost more and guess what? The consumer pays.
So no matter how this works out, Joe Sixpack is going to be paying for a faster, higher capacity Internet.
General-purpose "openly" programmable machines may be owned by the purchasor for a short while, but quickly become used for other's nefarious purposes.
An appliance, like your toaster, will always be nothing more than a toaster and will never turn against you. It might burn your toast once in a while, but it isn't capable of stealing all the money in your bank account. Your general-purpose computer can do this.
The mission, as much as you might not like it, is to move the general population away from things they cannot and will never program and give them appliances which cannot harm them - or anyone else. WebTV and the Mail Station were attempts at this which failed. The iPhone is one which apparently succeeding.
Remember, when people have passed through the most school systems on the planet post-1995 they know and love "unauthorized copying". The folks that went to school pre-1995 don't get it for the most part and are still paying.
I don't know anyone that pays for music. I don't think I know anyone that hasn't downloaded a movie or two or seventeen. Software? Some folks pay, most just are trying before buying and never seem to get around to actually buying.
The old fogies are going to die off and they are the only ones paying. Anyone else, unless they have unlimited wealth, is going to choose "free" when faced with a real choice between paying or not paying. It is simply a matter of knowledge and culture today - and the culture of unauthorized copying has become pervasive from first grade on up. Even the teachers are copying stuff for their classrooms handing the children a really good lesson.
In not too many years nobody will be paying and there will be free software, old software and nothing else. Free music, old music, and nothing else. Oh, I suppose there will be the stuff that people know they cannot allow the human race to exist without experiencing. You know, the stuff from people with such immense talent that they are shunned by the media companies today because they would so completely outshine everyone else. The sort of folks that keep showing up at American Idol tryouts and keep getting rejected and say it was because they were too good.
Let us assume for a moment that the USA is pushing the world towards a climate catastrophe at an ever-increasing pace. Millions of people will die if nothing is done to stop this. We are getting ever closer to some "tipping point" where doing anything will be impossible and we just get to stay on the ride until the very end.
Sounds dire, right?
OK, so now we have this oil well accident that some want to call an ecological disaster of unimaginable proprotions. That this accident illustrates how incredibly stupid it is to drill for oil, and even worse to do so in some ecologically sensitive area.
Fine. Let's stop. How about if we give people a chance here to explore alternatives. We should stop all oil imports, all oil refining and just say it is over. The Oil Age has ended. This sort of alternative action would actually do something and be quite different than a lot of hand-wringing and people protesting without any real effect. Sure, there would be some immediate impact and people would die - perhaps fewer than are killed each day on highways.
I'd say after six months of this we might be able to carry on an intelligent debate on the real issues. Right now, I'm not seeing a lot of that. There is plenty of hand-wringing and plenty of pontificating on how bad things might be in the future.
The problem is that the PDF specification was created at a point in time when you had a reasonable expectation that software would not do bad things to your computer intentionally.
A method to invoke an external program was put there for flexibility I am sure and it did offer a reasonable way to extend the functionality of the PDF document structure. The same thing is in WinHelp, for exactly the same reason. It allows a "tutortial" document that by clicking on active parts would invoke external programs to do things.
Now we have a situation where virtually nothing can be trusted to do what it is claiming to do. If you get an email with a file with any sort of active content in it you can assume that it will do something bad.
Where 15 years ago "active content" was something to be desired and provided extensability, today "active content" is a way to compromise computers and steal from people. A significant problem for Adobe (and plenty of others) is how to eliminate the possibility of bad things happening with active content while retaining the functionality? Today, I would say active content has to go, period. Anyone that is using and relying this needs to change their methods.
It is a pity that we have to give up flexibility and extensability because of criminals that we cannot or will not police.
Well, just exactly who are these privileged students that can do well without attending class? Who gets to decide that they should be superior to other students that have to attend class? Why would you promote class distinctions, racial disharmony and unfairly awarding privileges to some students and not others?
All the students deserve to be equal. Haven't you been paying attention?
Attendance is required for a lot of reasons but two that I can think of immediately are:
The main point of the first year in most state schools is to get rid of the students that do not belong there and are attending at state expense. Most states have a school like that where 25% of the freshman class isn't there after the first semester. I do not know what NAU is like, but it wouldn't surprise me that it is Arizona's version of Carbondale in Illinois where more like 33% of the freshmen don't come back.
This is not a "blue state" problem as one of the worst places for this is California.
Without some major regulatory changes, very little that can be seen from any home or highway is ever going to be built today. There are a million reasons to block projects, and most of them are being actively worked.
Try to find out when the last large-scale power plant (coal, nuclear, hydro - anything except a natural gas fired "peaker" plant) and you will see it has been a long time. When was the last high voltage transmission line put in? Today, they are looking at putting one in underwater because people can't see it there - it would never be approved if it was visible.
Where is the formula for Coke on WikiLeaks?
Oh, yeah... that guy. Well, his wife give him a really nice funeral after they were done with him.
The only sort of government financing I want to see is where the government pays for all of a candidate's expenses for the duration of the election. This would enable anyone to be a candidate.
Even better, I could run for President every four years and the House on the off years. I could live as a perpetual canadidate without ever having to actually subject people to my (likely) bad representation. So could thousands if not millions of others. We could have elections with a million Presidential candidates.
This would be another way to end what is left of welfare in the US. No more money unless you are running for some elected office.
Yes, I would be all for complete government financing of candidates.
The essential point of piracy is the destruction of revenue from digital goods. If someone can sell it, then it can be redistributed for free making the original seller give up on selling it. You can't compete with free.
This has already happened in China with music - officially there is no more music sold in China. It is very soon to happen in the US. Sure iTunes sells millions of songs a year - but they have maybe 2% of the overall download marketplace with the rest being free and usually pirated. iTunes will be operating as long as there are iPods, though, because for the older generation that doesn't know how to use P2P software iTunes is the only thing they can use.
Looking at it from a perspective of entertainment time vs. cost, movies are already free. You can stream an unlimited amount of content from Netflix for $8 a month. Saving it is perhaps somewhat more difficult, but not impossible. Why buy the Avatar DVD when you can watch it as many times as you want (probably once) for no (additional) cost?
The end is coming very soon for anyone selling digital goods. The pirates have pretty much won this battle. The result will be the end of music promotion and most movie production and what is left will remind you of AM radio with non-stop product placement.